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Category Archives: Cloud Computing
Autonomous Driving Market Focuses on Artificial Intelligence and … – PR Newswire (press release)
Posted: May 9, 2017 at 4:05 pm
Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2017, recent research from Frost & Sullivan's Automotive & Transportation Growth Partnership Service program, finds that the global autonomous driving market will be worth $83 billion by 2025. The study examines the top trends in the automated driving market, including developments like growing usage of driver assistance, new solutions, robot taxis, cognitive cloud computing, and adoption of mechanical light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for perception improvement.
Click here for more information on the Autonomous Driving market and to speak to us: https://goo.gl/1izEYn.
"Concerns surrounding legislation, system reliability issues, and incompatible infrastructure limit the opportunities for OEMs looking at automated driving," noted Venkitaraman. "Nevertheless, the journey from human-operated to completely autonomous cars is a progression, and pioneering semi-automated vehicles will be an important milestone toward achieving level 5 automated vehicles."
For now, fast-tracked innovation from startups and technology leaders in automated vehicle technologies will force OEMs, technology providers and disruptors to partner with, acquire or upgrade R&D to stay competitive. Key growth trends and opportunities expected in the global automotive driving market this year include:
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion
Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2017 MCCA-18
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The cloud computing tidal wave – BetaNews
Posted: at 4:05 pm
The title above is a play on the famous Bill Gates memo, The Internet Tidal Wave, written in May, 1995. Gates, on one of his reading weeks, realized that the Internet was the future of IT and Microsoft, through Gatess own miscalculation, was then barely part of that future. So he wrote the memo, turned the company around, built Internet Explorer, and changed the course of business history.
Thats how people tend to read the memo, as a snapshot of technical brilliance and ambition. But the inspiration for the Gates memo was another document, The Final Days of Autodesk, written in 1991 by Autodesk CEO John Walker. Walkers memo was not about how the future could be saved, but about how seemingly invincible market advantages could be quickly lost. If Autodesk, the Computer Aided Design pioneer, was ever going to die, this was how Walker figured it would happen. And Gates believed him. Now its about to happen again. Amazon Web Services -- the first and still largest public computing cloud -- is 11 years old, which is old enough for there not only to be some clear cloud computing winners (AWS, Microsoft Azure and a bunch of startups) but some obvious losers, too. This rising tide is not raising all ships. Thats why its time for the Cloud Computing Tidal Wave.
In the world of computing, almost every platform transition creates a new market giant. Old companies generally die to make way for new companies. Univac and Burroughs were parts of the mainframe era that didnt survive, replaced by minicomputers from companies like Digital, Data General and Prime. Those companies in turn gave way to personal computing pioneers like Apple, Compaq, and Microsoft. Only IBM seemed to remain a constant from one hardware generation to the next. But now were in the mobile era and IBM has almost no presence there, so the platform transition rule may still hold true.
The new things the cloud and that wave will have its new champions, too, as well as losers. Weve tended to focus our attention on providers of cloud hosting services, but the cloud is much more than data centers and servers. Its applications and services, too, and hardly any of those are coming from old guard companies.
First among the losers in cloud computing are the venerable mainframes that survive today mainly because Big Business still relies on a lot of old COBOL code -- code too big to be comfortable on a PC or even a minicomputer. But the cloud scales infinitely and COBOL is heading there and it can only hurt mainframe computer makers.
Suffering, too are the personal computer makers. As processing moves from the desktop to the cloud, desktops get punier, cheaper, and less profitable. Theres money to be made in the initial transformation from desktop to cloud, but what happens when all those desktops have been replaced? For the most part they wont need to be upgraded ever. The three-year PC upgrade cycle for businesses is already being disrupted. I am writing this column on a mid-2010 Apple MacBook Pro -- a seven year old computer I have no plans to replace because it works just fine, thanks to the boost it gets from cloud services.
In every platform transition there are companies that probably cant make the jump. One of those that stands out today especially because it has been in the news is Citrix Systems, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) pioneer. VDI is, on first glance, a lot like the cloud. Citrix even refers to itself as a "cloud services company." But VDI isnt the cloud. VDI allows businesses to make one PC serve several users or one server help dozens or hundreds. But in cloud computing even the PC is virtual, which is very different.
Old market leaders like Citrix are making too much profit in legacy VDI contracts to really switch to the cloud. The company cant bring itself to make obsolete its own products and so thats left to some other company -- in the case of Citrix the likely vanquisher is a Silicon Valley startup called Frame, which has been moving companies like Adobe, Autodesk, HP, and Siemens to the cloud.
Citrix, which hired Goldman Sachs earlier this year to help it find a buyer, would probably love to sell itself to Microsoft, but how likely is that given Microsofts absolute commitment to the cloud? Not very.
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Profit From Cloud Computing Boom With This ETF – Seeking Alpha
Posted: at 4:05 pm
Cloud is fast emerging as the new model of computing in the technology industry. Many companies now prefer to rely on cloud based service providers for highly specialized computing services so that they can focus on their core businesses.
Cloud computing is more secure as also cheaper than traditional systems. It also provides firms a lot of flexibility and agility in scaling up or down their computing capacity according to business needs.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), public cloud spending will experience a 21.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) - nearly seven times the rate of overall IT spending growth. By 2020, IDC forecasts public cloud spending will reach $203.4 billion worldwide.
As of now, three tech titans - Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)and Google/Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL)- control much of the market for cloud computing. From the recent earnings reports, they have been investing heavily in their cloud computing business and those investments are bearing fruit now. Revenue growth in cloud businesses was very strong.
The First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (NASDAQ:SKYY) is the only US listed ETF that is exclusively focused on this niche space. The product classifies companies operating in this space into three segments: 1) Pure play cloud computing companies 2) Non-pure play cloud computing companies that provide goods and services to the industry, and 3) Technology conglomerate cloud computing companies, and assigns equal weights to each company within its classification.
FANG stocks - Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) and Google - are among the top holdings.
With an expense ratio of 60 basis points, the ETF is not cheap, particularly compared with broad tech ETFs, but expenses are in line with many other niche ETFs.
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OpenStack Foundation cites ‘capabilities, compliance and cost’ as Summit kicks off – Cloud Tech
Posted: at 4:05 pm
The latest OpenStack Summit has kicked off in Boston, with the Foundation naturally being tooled up with news and announcements for attendees.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, spoke of the three Cs capabilities, compliance, and cost with organisations becoming more sophisticated in their approach to workload placement across public and private clouds.
Each of these Cs was exemplified by a company working with OpenStack in that area. GE Healthcare presented the benefits of their private cloud as a service in partnership with Rackspace for compliance, while the US Army Cyber School was cited for saving money through OpenStack. For capability, Verizon outlined how it was leveraging OpenStack for Virtual Network Solutions, a product which focuses on edge computing and the Internet of Things for compute, network, and storage.
The foundation also announced it had elected China Unicom and FiberHome Telecommunication technologies as gold members. The two companies both demonstrate[d] OpenStacks strategic value for networking and large-scale service providers, the company said.
Recent headlines in the press have not been entirely kind to OpenStack. As reported by Fortune last month, Intel cut funding on an OpenStack initiative it launched alongside Rackspace, resulting in job losses for the latter.
Yesterday, Rackspace announced it was collaborating with Dell EMC to deliver OpenStack private clouds with the behemoth conglomerate providing the compute and storage side. Rackspace also took the opportunity to scotch the recent press cuttings in a blog post authored by Scott Crenshaw, SVP strategy and product.
Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing, he wrote. It is becoming a standard cloud platform for corporations of all sizes, which are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack. That trend is [borne] out at Rackspace, where were seeing dramatic growth in our customers usage of OpenStack.
Crenshaw cited a Forrester Research report from December last year which argued OpenStack had become a de facto standard platform for the private cloud market. While admitting the initiative had seen a couple of false starts, he added that those who were willing to take the plunge will reap rewards.
OpenStack marks the point where open source infrastructure software became too complex to be delivered as traditional software distribution, he wrote. To successfully harness the power of open source innovation, the vast majority of users will consume open source infrastructure as a service, which is, after all, the way cloud was meant to be used.
Some of the vendors who havent crossed this chasm are indeed exiting the OpenStack business. Rackspaces billion server hours of OpenStack operational experience is probably an insurmountable lead, Crenshaw added.
The negative headlines came amid a recent user survey from the foundation which said OpenStack was capturing 44% more deployments and input from 22% more organisations than one year previously. Far from being in danger of demise, OpenStack has become the catalyst for a rich and vital transformation in the way the world consumes open source infrastructure, said Crenshaw.
You can read the full Rackspace post here.
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OpenStack Foundation cites 'capabilities, compliance and cost' as Summit kicks off - Cloud Tech
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3 things to know about the cloud v. data center decision – ZDNet
Posted: May 8, 2017 at 12:30 am
Cloud computing has made a dramatic surge over the past five years, but issues such as compliance and data residency are also driving tech leaders to carefully consider their IT architecture. In the video above, we break down the three most important things you need to know about the cloud versus data center decision. For those who prefer reading to watching, you'll find the entire summary below.
And to explore more about this topic, check out the full ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature The Cloud v. Data Center Decision. You can also download the full report as a PDF ebook (free registration required).
Up until a few years ago, companies had to make a strong case for why they wanted to use the cloud, and they often had to overcome fears about security and lack of control. Today, the script has flipped. Many IT leaders now have to justify why they want to run something on-premise, if there are comparable options in the public cloud. Plenty of companies ARE still choosing their own data center, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, but the context has completely changed.
When it comes to new applications for standard business functions, most enterprises are choosing go cloud-first. There's a very high bar to justify running something like email, CRM, or ERP on-premise. Launching custom applications or migrating legacy applications is a different story though.
The initial perception of cloud was that companies were doing it to cut costs. However, today's cloud isn't as much about saving money. It's more about shifting to a modern architecture so you can take advantage of the latest technologies like containers and microservices. And, being in the cloud insures that your business will always have access to the next big leap in tech without a big infrastructure upgrade. In other words, it's about agility.
Again, to learn more about this topic, read our full special report "The Cloud v. Data Center Decision" and you can download them in one PDF on TechRepublic, available for free to registered users.
The Monday Morning Opener is our opening salvo for the week in tech. Since we run a global site, this editorial publishes on Monday at 8:00am AEST in Sydney, Australia, which is 6:00pm Eastern Time on Sunday in the US. It is written by a member of ZDNet's global editorial board, which is comprised of our lead editors across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US.
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Google: No to Price War Over Cloud Computing – Investopedia
Posted: May 6, 2017 at 4:07 am
Investopedia | Google: No to Price War Over Cloud Computing Investopedia Concerns about a price war in the cloud market started last year when Amazon and Google both moved to lower the prices on some of their cloud offerings. Microsoft took a page from both companies in 2017, also reducing the prices on some of its ... Google says it doesn't need to get into a cloud price war with Amazon, Microsoft to win Google May Need an Acquisition to Catch Amazon, Microsoft, Says Goldman Is the Google Cloud Pricing Strategy Really That Different from AWS or Microsoft? |
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A prepaid wallet that helps start-ups access cloud-computing services – The Hindu
Posted: at 4:07 am
The Hindu | A prepaid wallet that helps start-ups access cloud-computing services The Hindu MUMBAI: For start-ups in India and around the world, the emergence of cloud-computing services to build and scale business has been an incredible advantage, allowing entrepreneurs to work immediately on a great idea without worrying about the time it ... |
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A prepaid wallet that helps start-ups access cloud-computing services - The Hindu
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CLOUD COMPUTING Cisco Expands Cloud IoT Services with $610M Viptela Acquisition – CIO Today
Posted: at 4:07 am
By Jef Cozza / CIO Today. Updated May 05, 2017.
This year's event, which will be held in the MGM Grand from May 15-19, will focus on issues such as security, cloud, DevOps, data and analytics, and infrastructure. The conference will include 130 sessions consisting of hands-on, panel, and speaker-led sessions.
Expanded Format
Event organizers said the decision to change Interop's format and expand its programming was due to the need to address modern trends such as artificial intelligence and security, expanding beyond its traditional focus on networking and infrastructure technology. The event will include more than two dozen sessions related to cloud technology, with cloud content being offered on each of the five days.
Several of those sessions aim to take a closer look at the role containers play in cloud-delivered services, and how they can be deployed and managed both within the cloud and on-premises. Other sessions will focus on various in-cloud services, such as the need for cloud operations to be unbound from infrastructure and tied to applications.
Security will also be a subject of major attention this year, with events focusing on strategies enterprises can use to block ransomware attacks, and how to respond to attacks once they've taken place.
Other sessions will focus on what companies can do to promote internal security, identify malicious insiders, and mitigate threats coming from within the organization without having to resort to Big Brother tactics.
Skills Shortages and IoT Threats
Skills shortages among IT professionals is another timely topic for Interop this year. A panel discussion titled "Surviving the Security Skills Shortage" will tackle questions such as how organizations can survive with small IT staffs, discover new talent, and retain talented IT security professionals once they're hired.
One of the biggest security issues for enterprises in recent years has been the advent of devices for the Internet of Things. Interop has three events scheduled on the issue. Among the IoT topics to be discussed are ways organizations can prepare to address IoT issues, adjustments they can make to identify management and risk profiles, and how to protect DNS services against security threats such as IoT botnets.
Other sessions will focus on ways enterprises can analyze the mountains of security data they have in order to extract actionable intelligence, how managers can address security issues with developers in order to get them to produce more secure code, and the basics of cyber-insurance policies.
Enterprise I.T. Exhibits
The Interop ITX exhibit hall opens Tuesday evening, May 16, followed by a full day May 17, and half day May 18.
Approximately 100 exhibitors will be on hand, including 18 designated as featured exhibitors: AT&T, IBM, Comcast Business, Kaspersky Lab, VMware, ManageEngine, Cylance, 128 Technology, Veeam, WatchGuard, Viptela, Axis Communications, ExtraHop, Cumulus, Extreme Networks, Capterra, PathSolutions, and Pluribus Networks.
Keynotes and Panels
Keynote addresses will be presented Wednesday and Thursday from 8:30 to 10:00 AM, in the MGM Grand Ballroom.
Wednesday's keynote addresses include Otto Berkes, chief technology officer for CA Technologies, speaking about "Freeing Technology to Drive Creativity."
Cyber security expert and FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia will address "Cyber Securitys Grown-Up Phase," providing tangible recommendations for what enterprises can do to survive today's increasingly complex security landscape.
A "Fireside Chat" with VMware CTO Chris Wolf will address business demands faced by VMware customers, including why IT leaders must adapt to a new type of infrastructure, plus an overview of specific technologies to help drive their businesses forward.
Wednesday "Lightning" panel presenters include analyst Sam Charrington who founded CloudPulse Strategies; Josh Bloom, who founded and serves as CTO for Wise.io; and Coco Krumme, who heads the Data Science team at Haven Inc, a technology platform for trade and logistics.
Thursday's keynotes begin with MIT Research Scientist Andrew McAfee's talk on "Harnessing the Digital Revolution." Andrew will discuss what enterprises and technology leaders need to think about with regard to machine learning and other disruptive changes expected over the next 10 years.
Also on Thursday, Susie Wee, who founded Cisco's developer program for infrastructure and application developers, will address innovative solutions using "Modern Apps on a Programmable Infrastructure."
Thursday "Lightning" panel presenters feature Amazon's Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition Ester Frey; Olga Braylovskiy who is VP of the workforce technology at Intuit; Ed McLaughlin, CIO for Mastercard; and Janine Gianfredi, Chief Marketing Officer of the United States Digital Service.
And finally, Best of Interop awards will be presented on Thursday, May 18 at 12:45pm in the Interop ITX Theater.
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CIOs embrace the value of cloud computing in healthcare – TechTarget
Posted: May 4, 2017 at 3:57 pm
Healthcare has finally abandoned fear of the cloud and now realizes the value of cloud computing.
"People are actually embracing [the cloud] in healthcare," said Ed McCallister, senior vice president and CIO at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). "Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time."
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In the past, health IT professionals worried about the security of the cloud, but over the years, the stability of major cloud platforms has eased those concerns. Instead, healthcare organizations see the value of cloud computing choices, such as how cost-effective the cloud is and its role in value-based care, population health and patient engagement.
Of the three well-known cloud computing options -- public, private and hybrid (see "Three different cloud options") -- hybrid cloud has gained favor among some hospital CIOs.
"A lot of us ... use a hybrid approach," said Karen Clark, CIO at OrthoTennessee in Knoxville, Tenn. Along with Clark and McCallister, Indranil Ganguly, vice president and CIO at JFK Health System, and Deanna Wise, CIO and executive vice president at Dignity Health, are using a hybrid approach with the cloud.
Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time. Ed McCallisterCIO, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
UPMC is among those facilities that favor a hybrid approach. It takes applications already used within the organization that have a competitive advantage -- such as storage -- and moves them into the cloud, leaving everything else on-premises. "That's probably the most prominent approach that people would take," McCallister said.
Ganguly and JFK Health take a similar approach. Many of the applications used by JFK Health, based in Edison, N.J., also reside on a hybrid cloud setup, Ganguly said. The facility uses "a vendor partner [cloud platform], and multiple customers [are] hosted on it, but it's not our infrastructure," he explained. "We don't even set it up or own it. It's not a private cloud, but it is a restricted cloud, and so that's what we use right now for a lot of our applications. It's a software-as-a-service type [of] model, and the software is housed at the vendor side, and we're accessing it remotely."
McCallister said the hybrid cloud model is popular in healthcare right now because the cloud still represents a bit of the unknown. The hybrid cloud acts as a testbed for certain things in healthcare, he noted, adding, "Some of it is kind of toe in the water -- not knowing the cloud as well as they know the traditional environment."
Additionally, the hybrid cloud can take the pressure off IT staff, Ganguly said: "I don't have to have people focused on [hybrid], and it allows our team to focus more on the application itself and making sure the application is set up well for our users."
For many CIOs, the value of cloud computing includes cost-effectiveness, scalability and easier access to data. The cloud also offers opportunities for improved storage, big data analytics, population health, patient engagement and value-based care.
Access to data and population health. At UPMC, the cloud has outdistanced legacy systems in terms of data access, McCallister said. "The cloud allows us to ... lift the data from those many different sources that we have and actually allow access to that data in a way that's not possible when you think about the legacy systems," he said. For example, the cloud allows patients or physicians to access any data living in the cloud wherever and whenever they need it. When it comes to legacy systems, certain computers and devices need to be networked to a physical server, and access outside this network is difficult.
If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are ... on [their mobile] phone. Karen ClarkCIO, OrthoTennessee
At this point, McCallister added, the value of legacy systems lies in the data they hold from both the payer and provider sides. "It's a very rich data source to get," he said.
However, the value of cloud computing can be realized here because the cloud allows easier access to all of this data. And greater access can be applied to and help with population health efforts, which refers to a movement in healthcare to analyze care data across a group of individuals and improve wellness. "If I know about you through your payer activity, through your clinical activity, through the provider activities and we can have that in a cloud with tools that reside in the cloud that are accessible to the consumer, that's where the cloud actually enables a better strategy," McCallister said.
Patient engagement and value-based care. Meanwhile, the cloud is critical to greater patient engagement, OrthoTennessee's Clark said. "If you want to engage with patients, you can't say, 'Well, why don't you drive to our office and complete this survey,' right?" she said. "If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are. And where the patients are is on [their mobile] phone. So for patient engagement, that would be a cloud-necessary area."
Furthermore, "value-based care always requires patient engagement," Clark said. Value-based care is a national trend being pushed by federal regulators in which providers are no longer paid for the quantity of services they provide, but rather for the quality of patient health outcomes.
OrthoTennessee, which runs several area orthopedic clinics, is already pursuing value-based care with a patient-reported outcomes tool, Clark noted. Before surgeries, she explained, the organization surveys patients via a mobile device to see, for example, how they're doing, how bad their pain is, where the pain is and whether they're able to walk up stairs. After a surgery is completed, the organization uses this tool to continue monitoring the patient.
Big data and storage. One issue that many discuss in healthcare is dealing with the flood of data that comes from initiatives like population health and technology trends like the internet of things. "We can't do big data in the traditional way that we did with data centers," McCallister said. "You can't do traditional data center and storage strategies when you have something like genomics at the doorstep." Genomics is the science of sequencing the human genome, and there's a lot of data behind that activity -- petabytes of information each year.
"When you think about how much data we're collecting, it's enormous," said Wise of Dignity Health, which is headquarted in San Francisco. "And it's only going to get bigger with [genomics] and everything else we're doing. You need a place that you can increase that size as fast as you need to without feeling like you've got to wait until the next budget cycle."
The cloud offers such scalability. McCallister predicted that in the future, there will be very few data center companies. Instead, today's big cloud storage players that have the ability to expand "the way that we need them to expand in healthcare" will become the new norm, he said.
While many healthcare organizations use routine applications hosted in the cloud, some CIOs are now moving critical apps over to the cloud, including their electronic health records (EHRs).
Ganguly said JFK Health is currently moving its core EHR system over to a cloud platform. "So it's all going to be hosted in [the vendor's] data center, and then we're accessing from our site over the web, over the cloud," he explained.
Cost is the main reason for the move. "If I was to build the whole infrastructure in-house, there's a significant cost, and I have to refresh that cost every three, four, five years maximum," Ganguly said. "Whereas now, if it's on [the vendor's] infrastructure, they're responsible for keeping everything maintained [and] upgraded. They're refreshing the servers as needed, and it's invisible to us."
Managing and maintaining EHRs in-house, "I'd spend a couple million dollars upfront, and I'd leverage that investment over five years," he said. "Here, what I'm doing is I'm paying this contract-type model, and it's a uniform cost throughout."
Ganguly said that some IT pros will argue that this approach ultimately will break even. Others will say because of the ability to negotiate due to economies of scale, the price point is actually much better and there's the added benefit of not having to manage it.
Meanwhile, UPMC decided to go with a colocation model and partnered with a tier-three data center company, McCallister reported. "We had some aging data centers, and probably five years ago we would've built a new data center," he said. "By the time we move into the new data center, we will have retired probably close to a thousand servers in our existing data centers because of our move to the cloud."
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A CIO talks cloud adoption in healthcare
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CIOs embrace the value of cloud computing in healthcare - TechTarget
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Heptio’s Joe Beda: Before embracing cloud computing, make sure your culture is ready – GeekWire
Posted: at 3:57 pm
Heptio CTO Joe Beda
Ours is a world enamored with the possibilities unlocked by technological advances. And if we ever update our organizational thinking to account for those advances, we might actually follow through on those possibilities.
That issue is at the forefront of Joe Bedas mind these days. Beda is the co-founder of Heptio, a company that makes tools for developers interested in bringing containers into their development environment. Hes worked at large companies (he helped create Kubernetes and Google Cloud Engine at the search giant) and small (Heptio is up for Startup of the Year at Thursdays GeekWire Awards), and understands why so many companies struggle with the shift to cloud computing.
One of the big fallacies of cloud is everybody thinks if I run on AWS Ill turn into Netflix, said Beda, who is preparing a talk around these issues for our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in the Seattle area in June. When people move to cloud, (there are) two things: physically running in cloud and changing development practices to take advantage of cloud.
Companies born on the cloud (which Beda calls cloud native or tech-forward West Coast Silicon Valley-ish companies) often dont realize how much legacy baggage they avoided because they set up their development organizations in the modern era of computing.
For example, developers at older companies that want to provision a virtual machine for a project often have to fill out a ticket with operations and wait a week or more for approval. This is laughable in todays era: A developer at a cloud native company would look at you with astonishment after hearing such a story, but those situations are more common than we think.
DevOps is thought to be the answer to this problem, but nobody really knows what this means, Beda said, accurately describing the DevOpspitch emails in my inbox. Too often companies scrambling to implement DevOpsideas wind up in a situation where everybody is in everybody elses business, he said.
So if youre a well-intentioned CIO trying to drag your company into the 21st century, Beda has some advice. Most of the people at these big companies arent stupid, they know there has to be a better way to do this stuff, he said.
Your actual tech strategy (cloud or not) has to be reflected in your organizational strategy: changing one without changing the other is arguably worse than whatever youre doing now. We like to talk about how computers have abstracted and automated humans out of the picture, but thats not true at all.
One easy way to set up your IT organization for the cloud is to embrace microservices, the concept of breaking down an application into various pieces that can be worked on separately by small teams and later reassembled. This allows people to focus on the task at hand without having to wait for something else to get finished before starting their work.
Another tactic is to create a culture where code or applications can be reused across your infrastructure by teams working on completely separate projects. This was a lesson Beda learned at Google, where new engineers are given an orientation showing them all the common resources at their disposal.
The most important thing to remember is that for most companies, technology is an enabler of what they should be focused on: making money in their core line of business. That means giving people the tools, resources, and support to do their jobs, and understanding the business context of any new technology before plunging headlong into a new product or service.
Beda is just one of many awesome speakers planned for the Cloud Tech Summit, which will take place June 7th in Bellevue. More information is available here, where you can also register for the event.
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Heptio's Joe Beda: Before embracing cloud computing, make sure your culture is ready - GeekWire
Posted in Cloud Computing
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