Category Archives: Cloud Hosting
Credit Suisse Bullish on Microsoft Cloud Business – Investopedia
Investopedia | Credit Suisse Bullish on Microsoft Cloud Business Investopedia The way analyst Michael Nemeroff sees it, Microsoft will see big earnings growth and earnings power over the course of the next few years thanks to growth in its commercial cloud computing business and higher gross margins for the unit. The analyst ... |
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Credit Suisse Bullish on Microsoft Cloud Business - Investopedia
Serverless computing might finally deliver on the promise of the … – GeekWire
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels discusses serverless computing at the AWS Summit in April. (Credit: Amazon)
The original promise of cloud computing was simple: no longer would you need to buy, configure, and maintain racks and racks of servers in hopes of growing a tech business into that capacity. All you needed to get up and running was a credit card and some code; if you started slow, you were only on the hook for the resources you consumed, and those resources were limitless.
As with most technology advances, the reality turned out to be a bit more complicated.
A current customer of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platforms infrastructure-as-a-service products still needs to do quite a bit of work to provision servers, monitor performance, and make sure their costs arent running out of control. And customers running legacy applications that would like to move to the cloud have to do even more work to ensure nothing breaks in the transition.
But serverless computing might just be the technology that delivers on that original promise. Serverless technologies allow application developers and technology organizations to account for unpredictable spikes in demand without having to specify the resources theyll need from their cloud provider.
Serverless is thelatest in a long line of confusing tech marketing terms. Put another way: the servers are still there, but youll never know it.
Last year, people were looking to explore. This year will be the year of great maturity, said Sam Kroonenburg of A Cloud Guru, who will be hosting the Serverless Conference today in Austin, Texas, where 450 serverless enthusiasts will hear presentations from all the major cloud providers on their approaches.
Serverless computing is relatively old as a concept inside forward-thinking elite technology companies, but its only been about three years since it has started to gain traction.
The spark behind this movement was the preview release of AWS Lambda in 2014, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recently called the last crucial piece in the promise of the cloud. Lambda became generally available almost exactly two years ago.
Lambda really brought to life a managed computing environment, where you no longer need to think about managing instances, or managing servers or managing any type of infrastructure: you could just write code and deploy it, Vogels said at the AWS Summit in San Francisco last week.
Almost all cloud providers now offer serverless capabilities for their cloud customers. Lambda is probably the gold standard, thanks to its early debut and the healthy market share enjoyed by AWS, but Azure Functions have been generally available since last November and Azure CTO Mark Russinovich recently gave an update on the state of Micrsofts serverless efforts.
Ahead of the Serverless Conference on Thursday, IBM announced new capabilities for its Bluemix OpenWhisk product, including a new API Gateway that allows developers to target multiple endpoints. Google just elevated Google Cloud Functions to beta status, but has not announced a time frame for general availability.
Their approaches can be a little different, but they all allow a developer to upload code once and set a trigger that instructs the application to behave a certain way in response to certain inputs.
A classic example of an application that can benefit from a serverless approach is one that might experience rapid, unpredictable spikes in demand, such as when DJ Khaled posts something to Snapchat. Serverless tools can automatically execute code in response to a flood of incoming traffic, or a pre-determined event such as when a file is uploaded to a database. (This well-written primer from Martin Fowler covers all the technical bases.)
One of the things that has come out of this serverless movement is the recognition that an event-based or trigger-based programming model is actually a very powerful model one where I can get code activated very quickly and respond to it, Russinovich said earlier this month.
Along those lines, Algorithmia CEO Diego Oppenheimer will discuss how the benefits of serverless computing could enable the next generation of machine learning at our Cloud Tech Summit in the Seattle areathis June.
And because serverless functions can be spun up and taken down in fractions of a second, a cloud provider is able to charge its customers accordingly, rather than charging them for computing services by the hour, week, month, or even year.
You only have to pay for what you use. This is a tremendous change in the way people are developing applications; build highly scalable environments and only build what they are paying for, Vogels said last week.
This is still early-adopter territory. After all, there are so many companies that are just getting started designing applications for the cloud, let alone embracing something like serverless computing.
You have to be a bit of a self-starter to put serverless computing at the heart of your application strategy. The biggest complaint among early adopters of serverless computing is the lack of proper tools optimized for this style.
Some of the basics of software development were not there in early days, like being able to properly debug and deploy, said Kroonenburg, noting this has improved a lot in just the last year. Google hopes to address this problem by working with the open-source community to develop serverless tools instead of building its own Google Cloud Functions-oriented tools, said Alan Ho, a product marketing manager for the company.
Serverless can also get very complicated, very fast, if youre using it for Internet of Things applications.
The Next Web recently published an account of how iRobot is using serverless computing to run its robot vacuum cleaners, and while there are a lot of benefits, with any technology, here are the places where it works and where it doesnt, you are always trying to find a balance with how pragmatic the solution is to meet your goals, said Ben Kehoe, cloud robotics research scientist, in the profile.
However, thisis clearly an exciting cloud technology one that could really drive the promise of cloud computing to the next level.
To me, this has strong potential for being the future model of compute, said Michael Behrendt, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, because you really dont have to pre-buy or pre-allocate; with serverless that goes away. Were used to that already in other domains, like with APIs: you pay by the API call. Serverless is applying that notion to compute in general.
[Editors Note: This story has been corrected to properly spell the last name of IBMs Michael Behrendt.]
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Serverless computing might finally deliver on the promise of the ... - GeekWire
Scaleway thinks the future of cloud hosting is ARM-based servers … – TechCrunch
Iliads cloud hosting division Scaleway is launching a new type of server today. In just a minute, you can launch your server with its own dedicated ARMv8 processor, 2GB of RAM, 50GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. And it only costs around $3.25 per month (2.99).
If youre not familiar with processor architecture, your computer and your smartphone use two different chipsets. Your laptop uses an x86 CPU manufactured by Intel or AMD, while your smartphone uses an ARM-based system-on-a-chip.
ARM-based devices dont need a lot of cooling and are quite efficient when it comes to power usage. And they are also becoming increasingly powerful. Thats why its a smart bet to use those chips for servers.
In many ways, using Scaleway as your cloud hosting provider feels like using DigitalOcean, Linode or any typical VPS provider. But theres a big difference as Scaleway provides BareMetal servers (and a few virtual server options as well).
For the past few years, the main trend in cloud computing is that you dont rent actual physical servers if you dont have insane needs. Cloud hosting companies run multiple virtual servers on the same physical server, and you can rent those virtual servers.
By splitting up servers into tiny chunks and pooling resources, it has become much more flexible for developers. For instance, you can create a virtual server, install a VPN on it while you travel to China and destroy your server a few days later. Youll only get billed for the hours of usage, making it much more flexible than signing up for servers with a 30-day commitment.
Similarly, if you face big spikes of new users and traffic, youll be able to adjust your server infrastructure in no time. Ive been using Scaleway for my weekend projects and it works well.
Scaleway wants the best of both worlds the reliability of physical servers with the flexibility of virtual private servers. So it means that you can create a server in just a few seconds, assign an IP address, load up an image and attach SSD storage to it.
But youre also the only one using your ARMv8 cores. You wont get any performance surprise as you dont share your CPU raw power with your server neighbor you dont have a neighbor.
Scaleways systems-on-a-chip are provided by Cavium ThunderX. For 2.99 per month, you get 2 ARMv8 cores and 2GB of RAM. You can also choose 4 cores with 4GB of RAM or 8 cores with 8GB of RAM for 5.99 and 11.99 respectively. Scaleway already had ARMv7 servers, so this is a major update of these options.
Scaleway is launching its new ARM-based servers in its French data center first with Amsterdam following course in a few days. I hope the company is also planning to launch new data centers in the U.S. and Asia to make it more compelling for users outside of Europe.
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Scaleway thinks the future of cloud hosting is ARM-based servers ... - TechCrunch
Cloud Produces Sunny Earnings at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet – New York Times
New York Times | Cloud Produces Sunny Earnings at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet New York Times The impact of cloud computing was particularly noticeable at Amazon, far and away the leader in this still-young business. The profit Amazon can make on cloud-computing services is significantly bigger than in its retail sales, and that has helped turn ... |
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Cloud Produces Sunny Earnings at Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet - New York Times
How serverless computing affects a cloud operations team – TechTarget
Virtual resources have always created a challenge for operations teams. Most IT professionals learned their skills...
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in an age where organizations deployed servers, maintained consistent operating systems and middleware on each, and assigned applications to those servers in a way that could optimize efficiency and performance. But virtual resources -- particularly those in the cloud -- break the connection to the physical world. They require a cloud operations team to plan hosting, and view redeployment, in new ways.
The emerging concept of serverless computing in the cloud demands even more change of IT admins and cloud operations teams, ranging from the way they track cloud costs to the management tools they use.
Serverless computing is a model for public cloud services in which users pay to run application components, rather than for the resources on which they run. With serverless computing, cloud providers don't charge for standby resources, and applications aren't assigned to a specific hosting environment. Cloud providers decide where to run an application component when it's needed, based on service-level agreements and their own resource efficiencies.
IT operations practices for bare-metal or virtual machines work fairly well with the traditional pay-as-you-go cloud pricing model. You build a machine image that contains the right operating system and middleware version, combine that with the application images and deploy it on a cloud server that has the specific characteristics you need.
Serverless computing takes the explicit notion of a cloud server away. Instead of paying a fixed price for the server instance, you pay when your application runs. That means applications with spotty usage would likely cost you less, and those that run continuously might cost more.
For serverless computing, a cloud operations team needs to rethink application costs based on the usage of each separate application component. To start, deploy traditional monitoring tools to find out how often your applications are used. Used, in this sense, means given work to do -- not just being available. Those usage rates, combined with the serverless pricing models of cloud providers, will tell you which provider will run serverless applications at the lowest cost and which applications may be unsuitable for the serverless model.
Cost isn't the only big change serverless computing brings to a cloud operations team. The primary drive behind serverless computing isn't price -- it's flexibility. Most legacy applications are transactional, meaning a specific set of users generates specific inquiries or updates that the applications process.
Serverless computing in the cloud is driven by event-based applications. These applications may be linked to not only a few users, but to millions of mobile users or billions of internet-of-things devices. At certain times, there may be no events at all for these applications, and at others, they could be flooded. To handle this application model, it's best to spin up processing resources on demand, which is why serverless computing fits well.
When you select cloud providers for serverless, remember that their operations data and tools are just as important as their pricing.
However, the flexibility and elasticity of serverless computing creates cloud operations issues, too.
First, it's not possible to scale all applications or their components on demand. You have to ensure that two copies of the same application can run side by side without colliding in database updates. Also, make sure that when you spin up a host of serverless components to handle increased load, it doesn't bog down performance of core business applications, such as the database system.
Serverless applications are a mix of different components, constantly spinning up and disappearing. A cloud operations team can't determine the sum of their capabilities and costs by measuring virtual machine usage. This means cloud administration teams, as well as operations and development, have to forge a new partnership to optimally use serverless computing.
These IT teams also require new data to successfully deploy and maintain applications in serverless computing. Old-style virtual machine operations data isn't useful, or even available, in the serverless cloud. Instead, the cloud provider's own tools and statistics on serverless applications become the critical operations resource for day-to-day use. When you select cloud providers for serverless, remember that their operations data and tools are just as important as their pricing.
It's still possible to supplement cloud provider data with your own. Through cooperation with developers, IT teams can include some statistics-gathering features into the serverless components of each application. The applications themselves may also be able to provide you with end-to-end response times and quality-of-experience (QoE) data. The operations focus for serverless computing in the cloud is on application performance, not virtual machine performance, so focus on this new data for proper administration.
Serverless computing is still in its infancy. Traditional IT and cloud operations tools have only limited applicability to serverless environments. Even DevOps tools that focus on deployment can't operate as usual when the deployment is entirely virtual. Most users will probably overlook the need to customize applications for serverless use and, as a result, gain little or no benefit. Plan every step carefully for serverless adoption, and validate that you can sustain QoE and cost-effectiveness.
Compare serverless services from AWS and Azure
Learn how to create a Lambda function
Explore Azure Functions and if it's right for you
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How serverless computing affects a cloud operations team - TechTarget
Bahrain migrates 10 govt websites to cloud – Trade Arabia
Bahrains Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) will begin the migration of 10 government websites as a trial of Cloud Computing - developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The trial phase is intended to complete the process of full migration during one year. This came about following the signing agreement with the technology investment firm C5 Capital.
The websites comprise the Ministry of Justice & Islamic Affairs; Ministry of Health; Central Bank of Bahrain; National Oil & Gas Authority; Survey & Land Registration Bureau; Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning; Ministry of Transportations & Telecommunication; Public Prosecution; Capital Governorate and the Northern Area Municipality.
iGA chief executive Mohamed Ali AlQaed said that implementing this project comes to enhance authority efforts of keeping pace with the latest international advancements in the IT sector and provide it to government institutions by offering solutions and alternatives for a unified archiving of big data as well as hosting the government websites via AWS cloud computing platform.
He also indicated that such initiative will contribute in employing government direction to save costs and operation flexibility in public entities by specifying a single cloud computing that gathers websites of every entity and ministry in the country at the same time enabling the public entities to benefit from the single cloud with higher speed, less time, minimal costs and maximum protection.
AlQaed also stressed that such migration will open wide doors for Bahrains entities and ministries to enhance and increase its production on the short and long runs. The migration process will redirect the exerted efforts, by entities, to strategic projects and plans as it will save time and efforts. Entities and ministries will focus on designing their work by simplifying efforts of ensuring security and maintenance of their websites which requires logistic services round-the-clock. Migration will assist its work performance and the delivery of high-quality services by relying on the available national competences.
The Information & eGovernment Authority, in collaboration with C5 Capital, will work on starting the migration process of the 10 websites to the cloud platform as a pilot stage by assigning a working team to carry-out such task under the direct supervision of the authority.
Furthermore, completing all the preparations in the first phase while ensuring the maintenance of all data and information during the transporting process.
C5 Capital is a technology investment firm that supports innovation and is a specialist in cyber security, data analytics and cloud computing. During last year, the company announced the launch of the technology programme Cloud 10 that is developed to speed technology businesses; operating with AWS services. TradeArabia News Service
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Bahrain migrates 10 govt websites to cloud - Trade Arabia
Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management – HostReview.com (press release) (blog)
Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management
Accurate and timely management of business finances is one of the most crucial tasks for smooth operations of an organization. Cloud QuickBooks, in this context, has evolved as a brilliant and highly cost effective solution that not only allows busy CPAs, accountants and small business owners to accomplish their accounting operations with ease but also provides them more agility, security and freedom to work from anywhere, anytime.
The modern accounting industry has witnessed a lot of breathtaking advances in recent years, thanks to the ever-expanding landscape of the Cloud technology. Certainly, the evolution of the Cloud computing has opened the floodgates to never-before-seen possibilities and at present, organizations all round the globe are significantly adopting new solutions like cloud storage and application hosting to make the most of their core processes. For most of the small and medium businesses and accounting firms,cloud QuickBookshosting has become the hottest trend as it has been making their operationsmore economical and productive while rendering agility, accuracy, flexibility and freedom to the busy professionals.
QuickBooks: A Brief Introduction
QuickBooks is among the highest rated accounting application that has been around for the longest time. Developed and marketed by Intuit, QB is a cutting edge software suite that combines a whole host of accounting and bookkeeping functionalities into one interactive, user-friendly system to make most complex financial management processes easy, convenient and less time-consuming.
With reference to its core functions, it has been designed to the highest standards that help in precisely tracking income and expenses of a business while alleviating the use of multiple tracking sheets, tables and spreadsheets. To add more to the benefits, it keeps CPAs, accountants and business owners tax return ready all the time. Business users can import or manually enter the entire credit card transactions, banking transactions, and loan transactions in real time.
Cloud QuickBooks Solutions
Choosing Cloud QuickBooks hosting solutions is a very smart and effective way to add more strength to the already powerful accounting software. It gives users the opportunity to use most of the robust features of QuickBooks desktop version from anywhere at any point of time using any internet-connected device. Whether you are at home, office, travelling or holidaying, you can check your business finances and get the needed information with absolute ease. Given that hosted QB solutions is beneficial in more than just a few ways, more and more businesses around the world are switching to cloud.
The Impact of Moving to Moving to QuickBooks Cloud
As mentioned above, upgrading to cloud-based accounting offers myriad of advantages to the CPAs, accounting firms and businesCloud QuickBooksses of all shapes and sizes. Lets check out some of the most significant benefits ofhosting:
The first and foremost advantage of moving to the cloud is anywhere, anytime accessibility. Authorized users can seamlessly access their accounting applications and data irrespective of the geographical location using any kind of device like PC, laptop, tablet or Smartphone.
Businesses dont even need to setup or maintain a full-fledged IT department as hosting solutions gives them the freedom to store, access and use their software via cloud. It eventually saves a great deal of investments, and adds more to the overall profitability of the businesses.
Multiple user accessibility is another great feature that gives cloud QuickBooks hosting a competitive edge. It simply means a large number of users (who have been granted the permission) can access, edit, modify and use the data simultaneously irrespective of their locations. Multi-user feature boost team co-ordinance and productivity in a significant way.
Updates and maintenance are handled by the third party vendors so you need not to worry about anything related to it.
Last but not the least, you are provided unlimited technical support from experts to keep accounting application up and running all the time.
How important is to choose the right hosting service provider?
It is certainly the most important consideration as it can make or break your QB experience. As a professional CPA or business owner, it is extremely crucial for you to do a comprehensive research and evaluate the competency and professionalism of the hosting company depending on various parameters like pricing, services, experience, data security and technical support, among other factors. These all parameters are equally important to be checked so as to make a well-informed decision.
Moving your business to the cloud allows you to reap maximum benefits but at the same time you must be careful enough not to handover your sensitive business data in wrong hands as it can adversely affect the growth and reputation of your company. Thus, before jumping into the bandwagon you must find a reliable service provider that can provide you with the best cloud hosting experience within your estimated budget.
I am Gary Smith, working with SageNext Infotech LLC as a system Engineer SageNext leading QuickBooks Hosting provider. I am an eminent author of topics related to Access QuickBooks Remotely, Peachtree Accounting Online. My suggestion are sought after in cloud computing field.
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Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management - HostReview.com (press release) (blog)
Hybrid the key to cloud benefits – iTWire
Australian enterprises are embracing the cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) but the hybrid cloud (a mix of private and public) is the best route to gain the full benefits of cloud computing.
At a media/analyst briefing hosted by Rob Willis, Regional Managing Director for Oracle Australia and New Zealand, Telsytes senior analyst Rodney Gedda, and Michelle Rapport, Director, Marketing and Customer Experience, at CHOICE discussed the cloud journey from different perspectives.
According to TelsytesAustralian Infrastructure Cloud Market Study 2017 spending on cloud IaaS offerings will pass one billion dollars by 2020, up from $621 million in 2016. By that year, cloud IaaS is expected to be used by 99% of Australian enterprises.
Willis said, "Telsytes study shows strong growth and investment in infrastructure cloud services. While work remains to be done before Australian enterprises will achieve the full IaaS benefits we are seeing increasing numbers of customers powering ahead with transformation powered by the cloud. There is just so much more they can do in the cloud.
Gedda said 34% of Australian enterprises now have a cloud first policy and 49% of these indicated they plan to increase cloud spending demonstrating a determination to achieve the benefits the cloud can offer.
For the 69% remaining, 34% said they have a cloud strategy in the initial phase of deployment and 16% have reached the test and development stage. A further 11% use cloud hosting but lack any integration with on-premise systems and only 9% still have no strategic cloud use.
Hybrid cloud was high on the agenda with 72% either creating a hybrid cloud platform or were investigating the approach. This is an increase from 60% in 2014 and 56% in 2013.
Hybrid cloud aligns well with the preferences of IT leaders when it comes to application hosting. 57% intend to run most of their IT infrastructure in-house and augment it with selective cloud resources for different applications. This compares with 24% that said they intended to run most IaaS in the cloud while also retaining some on-premises infrastructure, said Gedda.
Hybrid allows organisations to be agile when choosing the mix of platforms and services that best meets their requirements, said Willis.
Rapport said that CHOICE, a not-for-profit, membership-funded, consumer advocate had a small IT department and a massive need for IT. After a request for proposal process in mid-2014 to begin its cloud journey it chose Oracle because of its end-to-end stack and data security. Having a small IT team meant that they engaged external consultants and the move took about five months hooking up its three core systems from NetSuite, Salesforce, and Sitecore.
Our aim was to facilitate greater levels of personalisation and communication between Choice and its members with the aim of increasing membership retention and offering more tailored services to them. It has enabled us to know our customers better, she said.
Gedda said, "When a business need arises, rather than having to go through the traditional process of acquiring and deploying new hardware, the services can be obtained rapidly and treated as an operational expense."
Willis said, This is a move we expect to see accelerate with our recent expansion of cloud infrastructure services delivered locally from within Australia. We have democratised the cloud for small to large business alike. We are the only vendor to offer Australian customers a full-stack Platform cloud service and a true hybrid offering with mirrored environments whether in-the-cloud or on-premise, giving customers unprecedented choice and flexibility in how they work.
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Hybrid the key to cloud benefits - iTWire
Botnet Controllers in the Cloud – Spamhaus
Cloud computing is popular these days. Millions of users consume computing power out of the cloud every day. Cloud computing comes with several advantages over traditional server hosting, such as scalability and quick deployment of new resources.
As of January 2017, several large botnet operators appear to have discovered the benefits of cloud computing as well, and have started to deploy their botnet controllers in the cloud.
Since early 2017, we at Spamhaus have seen a significant increase in the number of botnet controllers (botnet command and control servers, C&C, C2) popping up at legitimate cloud computing providers. Most have been at Amazon's Cloud Computing platform "AWS" but we have recently seen an increase in new botnet controllers hosted on Google's Cloud Computing platform "Compute Engine". The chart below documents the numbers of newly detected botnet controllers at Amazon AWS and Google Compute Engine.
This chart is based only on botnet controllers. It does not include other fraudulent infrastructure, such as payment sites for ransomware (TorrentLocker, Locky, Cerber etc) or malware distribution sites. We have seen a spike in those types of criminal infrastructure at Amazon and Google as well.
Neither Amazon nor Google are handling abuse reports about botnet controllers, malware distribution sites, and other types of criminal activity on their clouds in a timely manner. Both allow botnet controllers to remain online for weeks at a time, despite multiple abuse reports and reminders.
Spamhaus has reached out repeatedly to both Amazon and Google about these abuse problems, but has received no relevant response from either so far.
As we are lacking any useful feedback from Amazon and Google on the causes of these ongoing abuse problems, we can only speculate. Previous experience with issues at cloud providers suggest that a weak or non-existent customer verification process might be the root cause of these abuse problems. Other factors which could lead to such problems include a weak Acceptable Use Policy, or a corporate culture and management not supporting of Abuse Desk policy enforcement.
We encourage Amazon and Google to take the appropriate actions to stop all outstanding abuse problems on their networks, just as all responsible hosting networks must do. These are the specific issues which we are presently tracking at those networks:
Open SBL Advisories in the responsibility of amazon.com: https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/amazon.com
Open SBL Advisories in the responsibility of google.com: https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/google.com
In addition, Amazon and Google must take necessary and appropriate steps to prevent further abuse of all types from being generated on their network. That includes reacting to abuse reports from many sources including, but not limited to, SBL listings, and effectively prohibiting all services to spammers and other abusive users.
We at Spamhaus are continuing to monitor the situations at Amazon AWS and Google Compute Engine, and may take additional action(s) to protect Spamhaus users from further abuse generated on those networks. We are by no means happy to publish a complaint of this nature against two such established Internet companies, yet at this time we are very concerned about the ongoing abuse tolerated by networks which should be setting reputational standards for legitimate hosting, and not for supporting botnets.
How hosting providers can battle fraudulent sign-ups: https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/687/how-hosting-providers-can-battle-fraudulent-sign-ups
Spamhaus Botnet Summary 2016: https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/733/spamhaus-botnet-summary-2016
M3AAWG Hosting Best Practices 2015 https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/document/M3AAWG_Hosting_Abuse_BCPs-2015-03.pdf
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Botnet Controllers in the Cloud - Spamhaus
How Cloud Computing has Enabled SMBs to Embrace ERP – Social Barrel (blog)
Posted By Firdaus on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Source https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/key-drivers-companies-moving-cloud-erp-diwakar-rai
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) initially improved the efficiencies of large companies and organizations. As the ERP industry has evolved and technologies have improved, the benefits of ERP are now cost-effective for medium and even smaller businesses that have a need to streamline processes.
The principal technology that has made this feasible is the evolution of cloud computing. As PC Mag writes, many businesses are accessing their data over cloud-based platforms rather than storing it all locally. Many enterprises in the small and midmarket businesses (SMB) sector have already taken to the cloud for hosting and storage. This makes ERP solutions easier and, in many cases, more cost effective to implement for the smaller company that needs to manage processes, improve communication, and create synergies within the business.
ERP software ensures the smooth functioning of inventory management, order processing, and production while tracking and controlling other aspects of the business such as payroll, cash, raw materials, and orders. It also allows for faster communication and information sharing between internal members of the company as well as business partners, suppliers, and clients.
Early ERP systems were too costly for SMBs so they mainly ended up patching together various systems in random parts of the organization, but cloud-based ERP offers several benefits to smaller companies wanting to implement ERP. Firstly, it takes away the initial cost required for non-cloud systems. There is also no need for companies to have in-house expertise to manage and maintain the hardware. All applications are hosted in the cloud and accessed via an internet connection.
The companies creating ERP systems have enjoyed this opportunity as well and have designed some innovative systems to work with the cloud. At the same time, they have come up with creative pricing structures to make ERP affordable and highly attractive to SMBs. There are several ways to pay, and pay-per-transaction pricing models often suit smaller businesses.
The entry barrier has lowered, taking away some maintenance concerns. The savings on capital expenditure can be better used to grow the business; plus, there are efficiencies achieved from having the system in place. It also makes planning and budgeting easier as ERP costs will ultimately be a percentage of turnover.
But how do you know whether your small or medium-sized business could benefit from switching to an ERP? Business.com offers four scenarios that may indicate its time to take the plunge:
Another benefit cloud offers is that as the business grows, the ERP system is very easy to adjust. It is highly adaptable so you can start with the core functionality required and add to it over time. This is particularly useful in turbulent markets where short-term futures are not secure. A small, growing company can reap the benefits of ERP without any major up-front costs or long-term, onerous obligations.
You pay only for what you need as you need it and scale it over time if necessary. This eliminates the risk of investing in software that is too small for your needs, which you outgrow quickly, or getting something more powerful than desired and underutilized. A system can even be scaled down where necessary if volume or turnover drops dramatically.
You want to select a product that is not only right for you right now but will be in the future as well. While most ERP systems are scalable, the cloud makes it a bit faster, easier, and less expensive. As the technology evolves, so does the ERP industry. Once a massive system preserved only for the largest companies, ERP is now nimble, flexible and affordable enough for all but the smallest of companies thanks to advances in cloud computing.
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Author: Firdaus
I work as an IT consultant in the Toronto area and I love to write blogs about a variety of subjects. My passion for writing stems from the desire that everyone should have access to meaningful information. Whether it is a blog about society, culture, technology, or social media, I dont want to miss the opportunity of sharing my thoughts with my friends and audience. Since I believe in mutual exchange of ideas, I am always on the lookout for a feedback on my writings.
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How Cloud Computing has Enabled SMBs to Embrace ERP - Social Barrel (blog)