Category Archives: Cloud Computing
An introduction to cloud computing – BestTechie
Youve probably heard about cloud computing, but maybe youre not sure about how it works or whether it is something you need to become more familiar with. If you run a business, cloud computing could be something that you could greatly benefit from, so if you need to get a better idea of what cloud computing involves, here is a quick introduction.
In a very basic summary, cloud computing refers to the process where the internet is used for services such as storage, servers and applications. So whereby many businesses have storage set up on their PCs hard drives (local storage), cloud computing means that the infrastructure is shared and can be accessed from other places via the internet. So, in essence cloud really just means through the internet.
There are lots of ways that you can use cloud based storage for your business. You will have seen companies such as Dropbox providing services for people to store files. One of the really useful parts is that it makes it exceptionally easy to share files with other people. When emailing files, you can run into the problem of file sizes, but services like Dropbox enables you to share quickly and easily without such problems. Most companies offer a certain amount of storage for free, but then you will need to pay a fee if you reach the storage limit. Cloud storage can be a good way of backing up files so they dont get lost. For example, a PC can break or a laptop could be stolen and you wouldnt be able to get to the files. If you have saved them using cloud storage, you will still be able to access them.
Cloud storage options.
The Cloud is all about easy collaboration. Other services that you will also have heard of are Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive which operate through the same principle. You can share and edit files with people much easier than if you had to keep sharing via email for example.
Container orchestration is required to make it easy to turn apps on and off and is a service most providers cater for. If you are looking for IT support, then most cloud service companies will be able to help you through any technical jargon if youre not familiar with any of the terms.
Security is a major concern with any area of file storage, whether cloud based or not, so to protect your business it is advisable to go with a company that comes with a high reputation and good security features. Different companies provide various packages and you will generally have to pay a lot more to get really good security features, but it will be worthwhile if it means you dont have data stolen.
If you are not making the most of cloud computing for your business, then it is probably time to look into it. If you have people working remotely or your business operates from multiple locations, internet based infrastructure will make life a lot easier. It also makes it easier working with other suppliers or customers if you need to share files with them.
The infographic below pretty much sums it all up:
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An introduction to cloud computing - BestTechie
Microsoft and NVIDIA tackle AI cloud computing with HGX-1 – SDTimes.com
Microsoft and NVIDIA want to accelerate artificial intelligence computing in the next generation of cloud technology. The companies announced the HGX-1, an open standard hyperscale GPU accelerator, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit today.
AI is a new computing model that requires a new architecture, said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator will do for AI cloud computing what the ATX standard did to make PCs pervasive today. It will enable cloud-service providers to easily adopt NVIDIA GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing.
(Related: How the landscape is changing in the cloud wars)
The HGX-1 was designed alongside Microsofts Project Olympus to provide hyperscale data centers with a fast path for AI. Project Olympus is Microsofts next-generation hyperscale cloud hardware design that was announced last November. Since then, the company has introduced a new hardware development model for Project Olympus, and has released the first OCP server design.
The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast-growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing data centers around the world, wrote Kushagra Vaid, general manager and distinguished engineer for Azure hardware infrastructure at Microsoft, in a blog post.
Microsoft hopes Project Olympus can help provide a blueprint for future hardware development and collaboration.
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Microsoft and NVIDIA tackle AI cloud computing with HGX-1 - SDTimes.com
Three reasons 2017 will be the year of the hybrid cloud – Cloud Tech
The enterprise will increasingly live in a hybrid IT world in 2017, split between on-premises solutions and cloud environments. Recent reports have revealed that many organisations have already started to split their cloud budgets between public and private deployments, creating demand for hybrid cloud strategies that give businesses greater flexibility as well as more workload deployment options.
Its easy to see why hybrid strategies are on the rise. Hybrid cloud enables workloads to exist on either a vendor-run public cloud or a customer-run private cloud. This means that IT teams are able to harness the security and control of a private cloud as well as the flexibility of public cloud services - thus, getting the best of both worlds. The most mature IT teams are reviewing their workloads often in consultation with a cloud services provider to determine which are most suited to a public or private cloud environment and adapting their workload placement accordingly across hybrid cloud options.
Here are the three key benefits often associated with implementing a hybrid cloud solution:
Demand will wax and wane. Organisations requirements rarely run in a horizontal line and public cloud solutions are particularly valuable for dynamic or highly changeable workloads. When traffic surges, a hybrid environment allows for quick scalability in order to meet the needs of the moment. When the surge dies off the cloud resources consumed can be scaled back to avoid over-provisioning and keep costs under control. With a hybrid cloud strategy, IT has the option to burst workloads into the public cloud when required to maintain performance during periods of increased demand.
Public cloud is fast and inexpensive to scale out and does not require the up-front investment in infrastructure of private cloud. The great thing about a hybrid approach is that it brings long-term savings. It is no longer a case of trying to determine the maximum load, reserving what is needed for that maximum load and paying for it all whether it is used or not. A hybrid solution allows for location and reallocation to meet changing workload needs as and when required which can have a significant impact on the IT bottom line.
While the perception that the cloud is not as secure as on-premises infrastructure is a persistent one, there is increasing evidence that public cloud environments actually suffer from fewer attacks such as ransomware and viruses than traditional IT environments. Cloud service providers like iland now offer levels of security and compliance reporting that is very difficult for medium to small enterprise businesses to match in their own IT infrastructure. Despite this, there may still be reasons why certain apps - particularly those running on legacy systems - may need to stay on-premises and a hybrid cloud strategy enables that dual approach.
Despite all the opportunities and related benefits provided by a hybrid cloud strategy, there is a key challenge that businesses must overcome - having visibility into and control of their cloud workloads and resources. All too often, organisations looking to adopt hybrid cloud as a means to increase agility within their IT operation get stuck in the implementation stage. They are left fighting for control of their environment because the majority of cloud providers dont offer the same level of visibility teams are accustomed to from their on premise resources. They also struggle to maintain consistent network and security policies meaning that migration becomes a far bigger headache than initially expected. As companies make cloud computing a more strategic part of their overall strategy, having that visibility and management control over areas such as performance, billing, security and compliance reporting, is more important than ever.
At iland, we find that while customers continue to value and leverage our support teams, they increasingly want to take a more strategic and self-sufficient approach to cloud management in order to fully leverage all of its benefits. This means having the capability to perform data analytics, adjust resources, do DR testing on-demand, generate security reports and manage networking. And, increasingly, customers are using our APIs to link essential data about their cloud resources and workloads to their own IT systems which is invaluable in managing both public and private on-premises cloud environments in a holistic way.
As adoption of hybrid cloud increases, IT teams will need cloud service providers to provide the visibility and end-to-end cloud management tools that will help them approach and manage cloud in a more strategic way. The need for agility continues to be one of the biggest drivers of cloud adoption and with more complex hybrid cloud environments becoming the norm, management is key.
You can find out more about how customers leverage the iland cloud management console here.
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Three reasons 2017 will be the year of the hybrid cloud - Cloud Tech
Google touts new cloud computing clients; analysts skeptical – Reuters
Alphabet Inc's Google is making progress in taking on cloud computing leaders Amazon.com Incand Microsoft Corp, executives said on Wednesday, as the search engine company stakes more of its future on the cloud as a new source of growth.
At a conference in San Francisco, Google cloud computing chief Diane Greene ticked off a host of new clients, including HSBC, Colgate, Verizon and eBay.
The company also announced it had acquired Kaggle, a popular platform for data scientists that could boost Google's edge in the crowded field of artificial intelligence.
Despite the announcements, analysts said Google remains a distant third in the market for cloud computing, the increasingly popular practice of using remote internet servers to store, manage and process data.
The big challenge Google faces is that, for all the names it announced today, its still miles behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of scale, said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. It has a long way to go, and a few more client announcements arent going to close the gap.
Those at the event were more impressed with Google's growing prowess in artificial intelligence (AI), long a strength of the company. The audience cheered when Google announced that it would release software tools to identify objects in videos using AI.
Kaggle, which will keep operating as an independent brand, reflects Googles interest in marketplaces for data, said Fei-Fei Li, Google Clouds chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Kaggle allows companies and researchers to post data and uses crowdsourcing competitions among experts to produce usable models.
What Kaggle has contributed to the community is the democratization of data, she said.
While analysts expressed caution about Google as a competitor in cloud computing, company executives insisted they are making brisk progress in the market.
Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt cited the recent initial public offering of Snap, a Google Cloud client, to illustrate the power of the companys services.
We put $30 billion into this platform, he said. I know because I approved it. Its real.
Greene said the company has been successful closing deals, hinting many more client announcements are in the offing.
Already we are winning more than half our deals, she said.
(Reporting by Julia Love; Editing by David Gregorio)
SAN FRANCISCO With the broad release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in full swing, with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc , Microsoft Corp and now Alphabet Inc's Google all offering electronic assistants to take your commands.
NEW YORK/TOKYO U.S. nuclear firm Westinghouse Electric Co LLC has hired bankruptcy attorneys, in a sign that owner Toshiba Corp is more seriously weighing a Chapter 11 filing as an option to help it rein in a multibillion dollar financial maelstrom.
HONG KONG China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said on Thursday it is opposed to the United States sanctioning Chinese firms under its domestic laws, and that it hoped that country would handle ZTE Corp's $892 million settlement case "appropriately".
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Google touts new cloud computing clients; analysts skeptical - Reuters
Is the Cloud Right for You? The Trade-Offs of Cloud Computing – MSPmentor
Is the cloud the solution to all of your problems, a major liability that should be avoided or something in between? If you're in the managed services business, the answer depends on exactly what you hope to get out of the cloud and which types of risks you can tolerate -- as last week's AWS outage reminded everyone.
The AWS crash was a stark reminder of the risks that come with moving workloads to the cloud. When the cloud infrastructure on which your business relies goes down, your business operations also go down -- and unless you prepared a back-up plan ahead of time, there is not much you can do about it besides wait around on your cloud host to resolve the problem.
But that doesn't mean the cloud is not worth risks like these -- or that keeping your workloads on-premise is a guarantee that your systems will never go down and your data will never be lost. To decide whether migrating to the cloud is right for you, you have to weigh the following questions:
Keep in mind, too, that cloud computing and on-premise computing are not an either/or proposition. There's nothing stopping you from using the cloud to power your main workloads but running backup systems on-premise, or vice-versa. Strategies like that can help mitigate the impact of problems like the AWS outage that happened last week.
Running workloads on multiple clouds is another strategy for achieving this. For example, if you use AWS as your main cloud provider but also keep some resources on Azure as a back-up option, then you probably would have come through the AWS crash relatively unscathed.
Of course, maintaining workloads on two clouds at once also entails extra overhead. Everything's a trade-off.
And that's the key lesson for MSPs to understand when evaluating their cloud options. Finding the right fit boils down to figuring out how much risk associated with the cloud you can tolerate and comparing it to how many benefits you can derive from migrating to the cloud.
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Is the Cloud Right for You? The Trade-Offs of Cloud Computing - MSPmentor
6 cloud computing savings you may be missing out on – Network World
As more organizations deploy applications in the cloud to meet demand spikes, cost is a major consideration. Often, businesses start comparing service charges and the cost of renting or buying nodes, making a list of all of the things that matter to each option: computing in the cloud, renting compute capacity for some amount of time, or adding servers to the permanent arsenal. While these contributing factors may seem obvious and the math relatively straightforward, those who have taken the leap into the cloud have often cited that crucial cost considerations are easily overlooked.
If you are faced with the financial justification of moving some computing to the cloud, be sure to look past the obvious cost-saving measurements. Sometimes value goes beyond the price tag of hardware and can only be truly understood through working in an environment without capacity and performance obstacles.Scott Jeschonek, director of cloud solutions at Avere Systems, lists a few of the top things your organization should keep in mind.
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6 cloud computing savings you may be missing out on - Network World
The Morning Download: One VC Says Cloud Computing May Soon Dissipate – Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog)
The Morning Download: One VC Says Cloud Computing May Soon Dissipate Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog) Sign up here for The Morning Download, and get the most important news in business technology emailed to you each weekday morning. Good morning. Cloud computing may seem ascendant. One venture capitalist thinks this current architecture is nearing ... |
Microsoft And NVIDIA Announce HGX-1 Platform Standard For AI/ML Cloud Computing – Forbes
Network World | Microsoft And NVIDIA Announce HGX-1 Platform Standard For AI/ML Cloud Computing Forbes NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn) announced today their plans for HGX-1, a hyperscale GPU accelerator for AI and cloud computing. This open-source design is being released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus ... NVIDIA and Microsoft Boost AI Cloud Computing with Launch of Industry-Standard Hyperscale GPU Accelerator Microsoft and NVIDIA partner to bring GPUs to the public cloud Nvidia, Microsoft introduce hyperscale GPU accelerator blueprint |
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Microsoft And NVIDIA Announce HGX-1 Platform Standard For AI/ML Cloud Computing - Forbes
Google, a Cloud Computing Upstart, Seeks Credibility – Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Yahoo Finance | Google, a Cloud Computing Upstart, Seeks Credibility Wall Street Journal (subscription) Google is pitching potential corporate customers on its vast network of computers and artificial-intelligence tools, and often undercutting the prices of the two incumbents that dwarf it, cloud-computing pioneer Amazon.com Inc. and corporate-tech ... Google CEO Sundar Pichai explains how important cloud computing is to the company's future Google Cloud touts customer wins and reliability in wake of Amazon Web Services outage Watch Google Cloud Next developer conference live right here |
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Google, a Cloud Computing Upstart, Seeks Credibility - Wall Street Journal (subscription)
IBM and Salesforce Partner to Expand AI and Cloud Computing Platforms – Zacks.com
Salesforce.com, Inc. (CRM - Free Report) and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM - Free Report) on Monday announced a new partnership that will help advance both companies through the integration of Salesforces new artificial intelligence technology with IBMs Watson AI.
Following the announcement yesterday, Salesforce stock is up 0.87% to $83.22 per share through early afternoon trading on Tuesday. Salesforce is currently a Zacks Rank #3 (HOLD). IBM stock is currently up 0.02% to $180.52 per share and is a Zacks Rank #3 (HOLD).
San Francisco-based Salesforce, one of the largest customer relationship management companies in the world, has been at the forefront of cloud computing for years. And it recently announced its new Einstein AI is now available to all of its customers across sales, service, marketing and commerce as well as others.
AI Partnership
Salesforce will use its Einstein AI in its next generation of CRM apps. Einstein is designed to analyze and understand information and data collected from Salesforce customers.
The CRM giant also announced a new set of APIs called Einstein Vision that will allow less tech-savvy developers the ability to build AI-powered apps quickly. "With Einstein, we are democratizing AI, enabling everyone to achieve new levels of productivity and accelerate growth, directly within the products they use every day," Alex Dayon, President and Chief Product Officer of Salesforce, said in a press release.
Salesforce helps manage its customers relationship with their clients to drive sales growth, so Einstein is sales-oriented AI. IBMs Watson AI utilizes human-like conversation skills and hyper learning capabilities to help clients understand, reason, learn and interact.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was interviewed by CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Monday about the new IBM partnership. Benioff gave an example of how a Salesforce client that makes elevators and escalators could be helped by the new Einstein and Watson partnership. Einstein and Watson would work collaboratively to help the customers.
Watson would be able to determine if maintenance was required on an elevator. Then, Einstein would be able to quickly send the companys maintenance team to the location in a seamless transition of workflow.
Looking Forward
IBM has been at the forefront of the computer industry since its inception. And its stock made its first massive jump in the 1990s. It then dipped in the 2000s. After a down turn in the mid 2000s, IBM stock went from roughly $84 per share in 2008 to an all-time high of $213 per share in March 2013. One of the biggest gains came after IBM first introduced its Watson AI to the world.
Watson first beat two long-time Jeopardy champions in 2011. Since then, much of IBMs business has been focused on the promotion of cloud computing and its AI technology. Many companies in health care, financial services and the automobile industry utilize Watson.
IBM and Salesforce did not enter into a revenue sharing partnership. By working together, the deal hopes to increase the power, scope and consumer reach for both Watson and Einstein separately.
As of May 2016, Salesforce had a market capitalization of roughly $52 billion. The company recently acquired some companies as it continues to try to grow and expand its reach. But the company doesnt have any new acquisitions on its horizon. "We picked up some great companies last year because the acquisition window was really open," Benioff told CNBC on Monday.
"But the reality is, because the market is roaring, the acquisition window is really narrowed, and I just don't see any acquisitions in the short-term."
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IBM and Salesforce Partner to Expand AI and Cloud Computing Platforms - Zacks.com