Category Archives: Cloud Computing

A latest published report on Cloud Computing Market delivering key insights and providing a competitive advantage to clients through a detailed report. The report contains 174 pages which highly exhibit on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability. An exclusive data offered in this report is collected by research and industry experts team.

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The Global Cloud Computing Market size is expected to grow from US$ 272.0 Billion in 2018 to US$ 623.3 Billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.0% during the forecast period. Increased automation and Agility need for delivering enhanced customer experience, and increased cost savings and return on investment are the major growth factors for the cloud computing market.

Key Players- AWS (US), Microsoft (US), Google (US), Alibaba (China), SAP (Germany), IBM (US), Oracle (US), VMware (US), Rackspace (US), Salesforce (US), Adobe (US), Verizon (US), CenturyLink (US), Fujitsu (Japan), NTT Communications (Japan).

The key features of IaaS include automated administrative tasks, dynamic scaling, platform virtualization, and network connectivity. IaaS enables enterprises to leverage their IT infrastructure without paying for the construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, it provides flexibility, mobility, easy, and scalable access to applications, and enhanced collaboration to help enterprises focus on their core businesses.

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The retail and consumer goods vertical is one of the fastest-growing verticals with respect to the adoption of emerging and innovative technologies, such as cloud computing, big data analytics, DevOps, digital stores, and social networks. Various factors driving this adoption are the rising purchasing power of customers and the need to satisfy customer expectations leading to the existing customer retention and new customer acquisition.

North America is the most mature market in terms of cloud computing services adoption, due to several factors, such as the presence of many enterprises with advanced IT infrastructure, and availability of technical expertise. APAC is expected to offer significant growth opportunities for cloud computing vendors during the forecast period. Rapid advancements in emerging technologies, IT infrastructure services, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have led many organizations to adopt cloud computing services.

Breakdown of primary participants profile:

The Study Objectives of this report are:

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The report will help the market leaders/new entrants in the cloud computing market with information on the closest approximations of the revenue numbers for the overall cloud computing market and the sub segments. The report will help stakeholders understand the competitive landscape and gain more insights to better position their businesses and to plan suitable go-to-market strategies.

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Cloud Computing Market Expected to Grow at 623.3 Billion In Revenue by 2023 - Hitz Dairies

Governments and public sector organisations want to reduce delivery risks associated with contact centre services. They should consider migrating their contact centres to the cloud.

According to the NEC whitepaper,Cloud Migration and Contact Centres,there are three basic benefits to moving contact centres to the cloud: improved customer experience; managing risk and data sovereignty; and managing costs.

Elements such as omnichannel offer governments a new and improved way to interact with clients.

Donald Craven, account director for the ATO at NEC, said a contact centre is all about client interaction.This is so important for key government agencies dealing with significant numbers of public. Its all about citizenship and citizen interaction, and improving their reputation.

In the case of managing risk, there are elements unique to government that must be managed along the way. The government sets stringent mandatory requirements for cybersecurity which are making their way into the cloud. For example, data cannot be stored outside of Australia.

Chris Fryer, Enterprise Architect at NEC, said We have product-as-a-service but the product that governments need is Security-as-a-Service. This is an emerging market for government.

In normal contact centre operations, compliance issues are inevitably overseen internally. However, a cloud-based system offers a centralised platform for recording, archiving and managing calls and other data, and an easier way to stay compliant with legislation.

In the same vein, governments speak a slightly different language from private enterprise when it comes to costs. For instance, there is no revenue element to speak of.

Often, even when the concepts are the same as in the private sector, the terminology tends to be different.

Government agencies for instance tend to be less interested in revenue generation as a key element of customer experience, although on the cost side, government departments face similar challenges to the private sector.

According to Fryer, within government agencies there can be a confusion to which vendors can be used for certain services. The cyber.gov.au lists vendors that have been accredited in certain classifications.

The government needs to demonstrate that all the requirements are being met and they are getting the most cost-effective solution. Then finance will give it the go-ahead.

Craven says government needs to view cloud not as a cost-saving exercise. The argument is going to be about how theyre going to manage their costs, and the flexibility and the speed of half the things they can do.

Cloud can bring together the diverse datasets involved in each medium to provide a seamless customer experience.

Take for instance the not uncommon experience of acustomer calling an agent only for the agent to discover the customer has already tried unsuccessfully to contact the company in many different ways.

A successful omnichannel approach will pull all the strands together giving the agent a thorough history of the customer interaction.

The concept of omnichannel has been around for a decade, but companies are still struggling to deliver on this due to disparate data systems and processes. A consolidated data approach within a cloud platform enables them to deliver on their omnichannel strategy.

Demand for omnichannel exists on both sides of the transaction. Governments are endeavouring to become more citizen-centric, and citizens, in turn, expect a personalised connection with services.

And for government organisations there is also the added burden of the potential impact of bad customer experience where those poor experiences become political fodder in the media.

Jim Chryssikos is the national solutions manager at NEC. NEC is a corporate member of the Which-50 Digital Intelligence Unit. Members provide their insights and expertise for the benefit of the Which-50 community. Membership fees apply.

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How governments can use cloud computing to reduce risk and improve service delivery - Which-50

SILICON SLOPES, Utah, Nov. 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Domo (Nasdaq: DOMO) announced today that it won the 2019 Mobile Breakthrough Award for Enterprise Cloud Computing Software of the Year.

The annual Mobile Breakthrough Awards are sponsored by Tech Breakthrough, a leading independent market intelligence organization. These awards are designed to honor innovative products, companies and leadership across multiple mobile and wireless technology categories. In 2019, the program attracted more than 2,500 nominations across 13 categories.

According to 2018 McKinsey & Company research1, deployment of mobile internet technology has emerged as the most impactful technology deployed in successful digital transformation efforts across organizations of all sizes. McKinseys research found that 68% of organizations that deployed mobile internet technologies reported successful digital transformations compared to 53% of companies that did not.

Our mobile capabilities have been a differentiator for many of our customers, even those with numerous BI and analytics tools, said Josh James, founder and CEO, Domo. Our ability to quickly and easily get data, at scale, directly into the hands of business decision makers, is one of the gaps many companies are trying to fill in their data strategy. Our mobile-first design is also a game changer for analytics teams when they realize that they only have to build once in Domo to deliver the same experience to users on the mobile app as they do on the desktop. In addition, because the data in Domo is always updated, IT and data pros get relief from the time-consuming and mundane tasks associated with fulfilling the perpetual need for new reports. With Domo, business decision makers can interact directly with the data to get the insights they need, when they need them.

To learn more about Domos mobile capabilities, visit https://www.domo.com/mobile.

About DomoDomos mission is to be the operating system for business, digitally connecting all your people, your data and your systems, empowering them to collaborate better, make better decisions and be more efficient, right from their phones. Domo works with many of the worlds leading and most progressive brands across multiple industries including retail, media and entertainment, manufacturing, finance and more. For more information about Domo (Nasdaq: DOMO), visit http://www.domo.com. You can also follow Domo on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

1McKinsey & Company, Unlocking success in digital transformations,https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/unlocking-success-in-digital-transformations

Domo is a registered trademark of Domo, Inc.

Contact:Domo, Inc.PR@domo.com

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Domo Wins the 2019 Mobile Breakthrough Award for Enterprise Cloud Computing Software of the Year - GlobeNewswire

The research analysis on global Cloud Computing market 2019 serves a prevalent study of present market size, drivers, current trends, opportunities, challenges/risks, and also major Cloud Computing market segments. Furthermore, it describes different definitions and categorization of the Cloud Computing industry, chain structure and various applications.

Following to above information, the Cloud Computing report provides various strategies of marketing follow by distributors and key players. Then represents Cloud Computing marketing channels, prospective buyers, and improvement history. The objective of global Cloud Computing industry report is to specify the information to the readers regarding Cloud Computing market foresight and dynamics for the upcoming years.

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The analysis guide the important aspect that impacts the advancement of Cloud Computing market. Fixed evaluation of the worldwide Cloud Computing market share from various regions and countries is included within the report. In addition, it reveals Cloud Computing consumption values of segments like types and applications.

By the end of basic and necessary data, the worldwide Cloud Computing industry report focuses the mergers, collabrations, technical evolution, innovative business proposal, new advancement and revenue. Additionally, R&D position and the Cloud Computing market development in distinct regions are covered in the report.

Also, this analysis structured new investment feasibility study of Cloud Computing market. The report study the key micro markets logically, and also highlights on Cloud Computing industry-specific constraints, growing opportunities, market drivers, and threats in the Cloud Computing market.

Leading Manufacturers includes:

Amazon Web ServicesMicrosoft AzureIBMAliyunGoogle Cloud PlatformSalesforceRackspaceSAPOracleVmwareDELLEMC

Report covers Cloud Computing market trends, drivers, restraints, swot analysis, competitive landscape, companies profile, and value chain analysis.Overall Cloud Computing market is classified with respect to popular global and localite Cloud Computing players. These settled vendors have extensive imperious measures and funds for the Cloud Computing research as well as advancemental activities. Also, the Cloud Computing manufacturers concentrating on the development of new technologies and feedstocks. In fact, this will enhance Cloud Computing industry competition scheme.

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On the basis of types, the Cloud Computing market is primarily split into:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)Platform as a Service (PaaS)Software as a Service (SaaS)

On the basis of applications, the market covers:

GovernmentSmall and Medium sized enterprisesLarge enterprises

Global Cloud Computing Industry Report Roofed Below Topics:

01: Cloud Computing Market Outlook02: Global Cloud Computing Industry Sales, Revenue (USD$) and Market Share by Key Players03: Cloud Computing Market Sales, Revenue (USD$) by Regions and Segmentation04: Regionwise Cloud Computing Top Players Growth, Sales, Price and Revenue05: Worldwide Cloud Computing industry Vendors Profiles Study06: Cloud Computing Production Cost Study07: Industrial Chain Analysis, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Cloud Computing Buyers08: Cloud Computing Marketing Strategy Study, Distributors/Suppliers09: Cloud Computing Industry Growth Factors Study10: Global Cloud Computing Market Foresight (2019-2024)11: Cloud Computing Research Discoveries and Conclusion12: Cloud Computing Appendix

In brief, Cloud Computing market related people will get a thorough information on the market the affecting driving and constraning elements and its impact on the world Cloud Computing market. The report projects the forecast outlook for Cloud Computing industry which might be beneficial to the readers in taking decisive judgment regarding Cloud Computing market segments to develop in the future years accordingly.

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Cloud Computing Market Segmentation and Analysis by Recent Trends, Development and Growth by Regions to 2024 - Eastlake Times

Before the internet, there was ARPANet, an experimental government-funded prototype for a connected communications network of computers.

But before ARPANet, there was another technology called time-sharing. It was a glimpse of our own connected futurewell before the dawn of the personal computer, the smartphone, or even the web.

Time-sharing was a way of computing where a user would type into a typewriter-like terminal connected to a phone line. That phone line would connect to a larger computer somewhere else in the US. The code typed into the terminal would be transmitted to the larger computer, which would run the code and then send the output back through the phone lines to the user.

The idea of cloud computing has been around since some of the first computer systems.

The computers that we use today are far more powerful than typewriters, but its a similar idea when were typing into a program like Google Docs. We type, the data get sent to Googles servers, and we get a response in the form of words on a digital page. Software has become more complex over the years, requiring more processing power and storage. And while computers have also gotten faster, there remain tasks that are just too difficult for a single computer to run. As a result, technology companies offer cloud computing, where data are crunched or stored by massive computers, which ends up being far more cost-effective for businesses than buying, running, and updating the databases and software on their own.

This change has made cloud computing now a hundred-billion-dollar business, and its only getting bigger. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google are all vying for the largest slice of providing the infrastructure for the internet of the future. But the idea of cloud computing, which is really just multiple people using the same computer hardware at the same time, has been around since some of the first computer systems.

Through the mid-20th century, scientists worked at transforming the computer from a mechanical machine to an electronic one, shrinking the hardware from the size of a room to something that fit on a desk. But even these early, clunky electronic computers were still only capable of running one persons program a time, and generally were only found at universities and government research facilities. Everyone else at the research center would have to wait until the current programmer was done, and then reconfigure the computer for their use afterward. This hassle led to the development of a process called time-sharing, where computers could automatically handle a queue of codes to execute one after another.

One of the first projects to tackle time-sharing was MITs Project MAC, which stood for Multiple Access Computer, according to 1965 MIT graduate and then Project MAC contributor Tom Van Vleck.

Time-sharing a single computer among multiple users was proposed as a way to provide interactive computing to more than one person at a time, in order to support more people and to reduce the amount of time programmers had to wait for results, he wrote in 2014.

This is essentially the same idea that big tech companies are using today, but the speed and scale has been exponentially increased. Instead of simple mathematical equations among a handful of researchers, billions of lines of code are being run from millions of different users on tens of thousands of servers. These servers are just high-powered computers, custom-built to work together, and still take up entire warehouses, but can accomplish many orders of magnitude more computing than their earlier room-sized ancestors.

The idea of time-sharing and linking computers together in the 1960s would be formative for decades to come. In 1962, J. C. R. Licklider, a director at the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded Project MAC as a research project to build networked computers, and later directed the project. In 1968, Licklider wrote a paper (pdf) titled Computers as a Communications Device that would sketch out the basis of the internet and the idea of connecting computers to one another, which influenced the creation of ARPANet itself.

It appears that the best and quickest way to move forward the development of interactive communities of geographically separated peopleis to set up an experimental network of multiaccess computers, he wrote, referring to what would become ARPANet, which supplanted the need for time-sharing for computer researchers who had access to the network, and eventually the internet after that.

Time-sharing was one of the only ways to get access to computers before the personal computer was available. In the 1960s, computers were marketed to mathematicians and scientists because of their enormous cost. But with time-sharing, which could be done from long distances over a phone line, the cost of the hardware was distributed across many customers, meaning access could be cheaper. Rather than just running scientific equations or simple programs, time-sharing companies sprung up and started to offer tools that we still use today, says David C. Brock, director of the Software History Center at the Computer History Center in Mountain View, California.

It turned out that there were other people interested in office automation, and doing things like payroll and mailings and forms and simple databases, he said, adding that the institutions that at first were only using computers for mathematics found that they could use computers for other tasks as well.

It turned out that there were other people interested in office automation.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tinkered on time-sharing terminals when he was in high school, and the still-high cost of a terminal to connect to a time-sharing service factored into building the Apples first consumer computer, according to an interview with his co-founder, Steve Jobs.

In the years after Lickliders paper, about 150 businesses formed in the US to provide time-sharing services, according to the Computer History Museum. Small, portable typewriters with simplistic computer chips would be rented on a monthly basis, and when plugged into a phone line, these terminals would connect to a large computer computer elsewhere in the country. Just like todays cloud computing, customers were charged for how much computing power they used.

By 1978, the most well-known time-sharing startup, Tymshare, had a network of 450,000 sessions per month. At the time that was larger than ARPANet, the first iteration of what we know as the internet today which had dozens of connected computers, Brock said.

The 1980s saw the introduction of smaller, more affordable microchips, leading to the era of the personal computer, led by the likes of Apple and IBM. Time-sharing started to feel unnecessary, as many had now machines at their offices or homes, and didnt need to call into a computer somewhere else to get their work done.

But it wasnt long before the idea of cloud computing sprang up. In 1997, entrepreneur Sean OSullivan filed a trademark on the phrase cloud computing, according to MIT Technology Review. (The trademark is now dead.) OSullivans company was hammering out a contract with PC manufacturer Compaq, where OSullivan would provide the software for Compaqs server hardware. The two would in turn sell that technology to burgeoning internet service providers like AOL, who could offer new computing services to their customers.

The first mention of the technology was scribbled in a daily planner, where OSullivan wrote, Cloud Computing: The Cloud has no Borders. Just two weeks later, Compaq predicted that enterprise software, which needed to be directly installed on users computers, would be usurped by cloud services distributed over the internet, what we now call Software as a Service or SaaS.

Thats the world we live in today. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM all offer Software as a Service products, like cloud-based accounting tools, file storage, and speech recognition, as well as Infrastructure as a Service, where customers can build their entire software business on the desired tech companys servers. Much of the web is housed within Amazons servers, which is made painfully clear by huge internet outages when the company experiences malfunctions. The transaction is typically seen as a win-win: It reduces the cost of buying and maintaining servers for the customer, and the cloud provider can make buckets of money by efficiently running thousands of customers code in parallel in a server farm.

But it all started with time-sharing, and the simple idea that you could book time on someone elses computer.

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Amazon and Microsoft's cloud computing dates back fifty years - Quartz

In an era that requires massive data storage necessitated by data analytics and even routine operations cloud storage is now an unquestioned foundation for many businesses.

But while cloud storage offers a big helping hand, it's not without its own complexities. Among the several: the data is stored remotely, but we need the data right now. Also: do we store all our data with one cloud company? How do we manage a multicloud strategy?

To discuss these issues, I spoke with Ellen Rubin, CEO and Co-Founder of ClearSky Data, a cloud storage-as-a-service company. A veteran tech entrepreneur, Rubin also co-founded CloudSwitch, a cloud software firm that was later acquired by Verizon.

Among many topics, Rubin and I discussed:

See below: transcribed highlights of my discussion with Ellen Rubin.

So what we're seeing today is that a typical enterprise that is not born-in-the-cloud, never-had-a-datacenter, but instead has a mix of more traditional legacy infrastructure, as well as maybe multiple cloud providers. [They are] dealing with this very extended and complex environment where they have things like VMware and databases, Oracle, SQL, and all things sitting in more traditional data centers. Which of course they're desperately trying to consolidate and get out of.

But theyre still buying more gear, making copies of the data, backing it up, having a disaster recovery site, all the things they used to do, even if they don't have as many [elements] as they used to.

So what you have is almost like an a la carte menu for the people who are in the business side: where things could be run, and what needs to happen to support the business use cases and you've got IT in the middle trying to handle and manage it.

And what we're finding is that really, nobody has thought about the fact that what you want is not to just deal with accessing [the data] and pulling things back from the cloud, which is really expensive. What you actually want is: you just want the data to be accessible wherever the computer's running.

One of the hidden things that's true is how dramatically things are changing in the networking world because of this distributed environment. The need to be able to connect across physical distances but still deal with latency as a problem was something that nobody seemed to be dealing with.

So what you see customers doing is they are running lines and they're starting to take advantage of much more modern types of approaches, not just AT&T and Verizon, but some of the more modern on-demand, more API enabled types of services. But they're still kind of stuck with the fact that latency is a problem that is not going to be solved by them. And they also are dealing with the fact that they're not expert in that.

You can't solve this problem without addressing last mile issues and the fact that the data that's sitting physically in a cloud somewhere far away may not be that great, if your compute needs to be elsewhere or it needs to be distributed.

One of the pleasures of being an entrepreneur, especially 'cause I focus on IT-related infrastructure things, is getting to meet with CIOs all the time, and that across many companies.

And I have to say that this is as challenging and trying a time as I have seen for a lot of the heads of IT and CIOs. Because certainly, the CIOs have shifted into much more of a business type of a role where they're really meant to focus not just on how do I reduce all my costs down to as little as possible, but I'm supposed to help promote the digital transformation that the executives are trying to accomplish and the business units are trying to be agile. And be able to roll things out much more real-time in this user-based, self-service, everything on demand environment.

So that puts both incredible pressure [on them]. But it also, at the same time, requires cost production and those are very hard things to do.

But in a way, the assumption is that this is all supposed to be cheaper, and so it's just a tremendous amount of pressure in terms of the decision makers. And I think that their feeling is that some of the things, they're really, really great at. But other things would be best to turn to an outsource provider of someone who can act as a trusted advisor or provide services to them. So we're a small part of that ecosystem.

It's not like keep it all, analyze it all because rarely is that so beneficial. But also it's really hard to do, right? If you're moving petabytes of data across lines, that's gonna be pretty challenging.

So I think that's what's different. But there are also is this explosion of Edge Data Centers. So we spend a lot of time with our partner Equinix as a major data center provider. And they're in all the major metros but there are also players that are trying to be yet even further to the edge in cell towers and micro data centers and sites that are really almost just regular buildings, where a lot of the data and analytic catalogs could be captured and processed.

And so what it means is, even though people are consolidating traditional data centers, there's an explosion of more locations where some sort of infrastructure has to exist but it has to be small.

This whole pendulum swings between: it's distributed, no, it's decentralized, back and forth, so we're in a big decentralization moment, where more and more things can be processed locally, decision making can happen.

Certainly, IoT is a very extreme example of it and is very impactful to certain industries but your plain old regular traditional enterprise decision maker is a little less in the IoT world maybe. And more in the trying to have more and more access to real-time data that's happening at in people's phones, at points of interaction and local stores, that kind of thing.

And I think it's a very exciting time, but what it does is, yet again, puts a lot of pressure on how much of that are you going to own and build and manage yourself, versus how much can you take advantage of what's out there in the ecosystem from technology providers? The cloud is certainly a huge part of it, but it's not the only part.

We seem to be in a very long cycle right now. We were talking about it's 10 years of cloud. And now we've got all this edge stuff going on, and we're just in the emerging few years of that taking off. So I can't say that in the next five years it will have become simpler because that probably is a little optimistic.

But what I can say is, I am sure that we will see another swing of companies getting much more standardized on a few different key types of products and vendors, for the different types of things they're doing. There'll start to be more consensus.

And I see it by industry vertical, financial services versus healthcare versus law firms that we service, where they have certain things that they do, for different types of work that have to get done. And they all talk to each other, and what starts to emerge as: that's the right way to do it.

So I think we'll have more of that, even, I don't know what to call it, the playbooks, best practices, pick your favorite word. But what it will mean is that there'll be a lot less complexity in terms of the numbers of things that are all being tried at the same time. So at least, that hopefully, will be a little bit easier.

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Cloud Computing and Data Storage: Handling the Chaos - Datamation

Cloud computing has introduced amazing levels of efficiency to businesses. By making resources available from virtually anywhere, your team can access company resources and stay productive.

Even if your entire team is in a single location, with cloud computing the resources you need are a click away. But one of the areas where cloud computing truly excels is recovering from disasters.

Whether you had a data breach or a natural disaster, if you have the right cloud infrastructure in place, full recovery can be minutes away.

Is your small business using the cloud?

There are so many ways that cloud computing technology can benefit a small business. It truly can be a game-changer for your small business.

Are you storing files in the cloud or using it for your CRM. What about hosting your website, the cloud now offers a great alternative. The are many options available to you.

So, in this weeks poll question, we want to know what role cloud computing handles for your business.

Image: Depositphotos.com

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(POLL) What Tasks Does Cloud Computing Handle in Your Business? - Small Business Trends

Amazon and Google dont have as many existing relationships with large companies as Microsoft, Mr. Keirstead said. Amazon has been furiously hiring sales and marketing staff for AWS, investments that Amazon told investors were a drag on profit last quarter.

They are in the process of building relationships with the Fortune 500, and Microsoft is one of the largest suppliers of tech to the Fortune 500 already and has been for 20 years, Mr. Keirstead said. That is powerful.

In the Morgan Stanley survey, Microsoft was seen as the top vendor for an approach called hybrid cloud, which is popular with large organizations. Hybrid cloud computing lets companies use a single set of tools to manage their information across both remote data centers and their own servers, be it close to a store or in internet-connected machinery.

A measure of Microsofts sales for traditional servers and cloud services was up 33 percent excluding currency fluctuations, indicating the approach continued to gain traction.

Microsoft has continued to move customers from its traditional Office suite of products like Outlook and Excel to its cloud-based Office 365 service. In the quarter, Office 365s commercial sales rose 28 percent excluding currency fluctuations. The company said it had more than 200 million monthly active business users on Office 365.

Microsoft says that productivity tools are the hub of where office workers spend their time, and that moving them to the cloud can give companies more up-to-date tools and data to analyze, like improved security.

The power of that suite is clear in the fast adoption of Teams, a chat and collaboration tool that competes with Slack and Google Hangouts. While Slack has more functionality, analysts say, Teams has become good enough for companies to adopt. Also, because Microsoft bundles it with other Office 365 products, it is available at a very low cost.

That is the new user interface, Mr. Weiss said. That is why Slack is so threatening to Microsoft, and why they are competing so aggressively against it. Microsoft doesnt want you to take that nexus of where you spend your time away from them.

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Microsoft Rides Cloud to a 21% Increase in Profits - The New York Times

Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses work and continues to disrupt traditional business models. IDC predicts that by 2023 public cloud spending will more than double, growing from $229 billion this year to nearly $500 billion.

Its no secret that migrating to the cloud can deliver significant cost and efficiency gains. You can spin up cloud instances in minutes and can scale up or scale down resources as needed. At the same time, you only pay for what you use while avoiding high upfront hardware costs and maintenance.

Lets not forget. Youre storing corporate data on someone elses computer -- that you control, but its still owned by a third party. Even though your cloud service provider environment is highly secure, whats inside your cloud (applications and data) is your own responsibility.

Cloud computing security is on boardroom agendas as its impact can have serious consequences on corporate reputation and shareholder value. Data moving to the cloud beyond the traditional perimeter has led to the expansion of the attack surface. As more and more sensitive information gets stored on the cloud, cloud resources will be increasingly targeted by cyber criminals.

As organizations move to the cloud, they will have to assume new responsibilities and develop and adapt processes to combat a multitude of unknown threats.

The secret to better cloud security is assuming that there is no security at all while taking stock of your entire security posture.

There are several elements to public cloud security and it can be difficult to figure out where to start. If youre already on the cloud or are planning on moving on to one, here are five best practices you can follow to safeguard your public cloud adoption.

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5 cloud security basics and best practices - CSO Online

Todays businesses are increasingly relying on the cloud. Be it to just host their burgeoning data or to drive their end-to-end business operations, the cloud is indispensable. In this post, we look at four major cloud computing models in use by businesses today.

IaaS is the most basic or fundamental cloud computing model.

Businesses relying on IaaS are outsourcing their data storage infrastructure requirements to an external provider. This provider could be a public cloud host, such as Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), or Google (GCP). It could also be a smaller vendor with a private data center solution

In any scenario, the IaaS vendor will deliver the bare metal, servers, virtual machines, as well as day-to-day maintenance and security needs of a data center to the customer. True North ITG

In other words, the customer doesnt have to worry about any capital expenditure (CAPEX). Instead, the client pays a flat-rate fee for the capacity it needs; if the capacity decreases, so does the fee.

With IaaS, youre just talking about the cloud hosting infrastructure. What the customer hosts on that infrastructure isnt a concern for the provider. So you could have IaaS users limit their use to just backing up data, and others who could host their own platforms and software.

Like IaaS, PaaS includes a cloud infrastructure offering for hosting the clients data. However, it builds upon that by also offering a development platform/framework/stack on top of bare metal.

With PaaS, the client can develop, test, and deploy applications in the providers environment, and by using the managed cloud service providers tools or technologies.

The benefit of PaaS is that you can develop applications in an environment that just works i.e., you know the technologies and cloud platform available to you are compatible.

You wouldnt need to worry about making your software compatible with the hosting hardware, which is the case with IaaS. However, like IaaS, the vendor will manage the maintenance and security of the cloud hosting infrastructure.

In addition, the vendor will also continue improving its technology stack. You dont have to worry about falling behind in terms of technologies, your vendor will handle it, equipping you to use the advances to your benefit without worrying about development costs.

Finally, if youre working with a leading PaaS provider, then there are usually other businesses and developers on that platform too. In other words, youll have a community at your disposal in case your developers need support on using the providers technology stack.

With SaaS, youre essentially relying on an external vendor to provide the cloud infrastructure, the underlying technology stack, and the user-facing application.

In other words, youre using an entirely off-the-shelf and externally hosted application.

Common SaaS solutions include email, customer relationship management (CRM) suites, VoIP and/or messaging (e.g., Zoom, Slack, GoToMeeting, etc), and many others.

The benefit of SaaS is that theres zero lead-time in acquiring a solution. If your business needs a solution, then you can get it right away without worrying about hosting or developing it.

If theres a drawback to SaaS, its generally the fact that the feature selection and release cycle are in the hands of the vendor. For SaaS to work, you must ensure theres alignment in terms of the services features/capabilities and your needs. If not, youre going to have trouble.

Finally, you can also rely on the cloud for disaster recovery.

This is the task of backing up and, if the need arises (e.g., a cyber security breach), restoring your data. DRaaS should also involve a strong turnover element; if a data center in one areaor region goes down, the vendor should have your data back-up in another data center.

You can also work with third-party firms, such as PCM Canada, to configure and manage your DRaaS system, even if its stored in a public cloud host like Azure. For example, managed IT services include a complete DRaaS and business contuinity service.

In conclusion, cloud computing is not only essential for todays business operations, but businesses have multiple options for using the cloud. Where IaaS can favour a company with significant developer resources (to create custom frameworks and applications), SaaS enables smaller players to acquire advanced IT capabilities without having to develop, host or manage it.

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What are the Different Types of Cloud Computing? - TechSpective