Cloud Computing

Looking Back at Top Cloud Computing Stories and Trends of 2014

Is it realistic now to run in the cloud all applications required by a business? Most cloud computing providers use of cloud computing elements in a hybrid combination of public and private cloud to lure customers in 2014.

Apart from the discussion on the management, control, governance and the ecosystem within the cloud, big companies like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle and others address a variety of issues such as the cost of long-term operation, security, integration with other business applications and implications for the technical architecture and long-term information.

As we are at dawn of the New Year, we have rounded up some top cloud computing news of the year 2014.

Increased adoption of the cloud

As cloud technologies mature, more organizations are deploying cloud services to cut IT costs and optimize operations. Public cloud services spending was at $56.6 billion in 2014 and likely to grow $127 billion in 2018, according to IDC.

AWS has a larger partner ecosystem of SaaS applications, optimization services and plug-ins that are built to run seamlessly on AWS’s cloud. Microsoft is still building and expanding its Azure cloud platform and with SaaS applications as well, its vision is global and it is aggressively expanding into multiple international markets.

Cisco announced plans to build the world a network of larger global Intercloud clouds. Together with strategic partners and service providers, Cisco global Intercloud is being architected for the Internet of Everything. Cisco will optimize the safety, mobility and application monitoring and policy compliance using ACI’s ability to establish a security policy framework that facilitates centralized and programmable control, scalability and segmentation for both public and private cloud environments.

IBM SmartCloud initiative

IBM started the year 2014 with a massive one billion investment in IBM Watson Group, a new division that aims to bring together software, services, research, experts and market forces to accelerate the development and marketing of new classes of applications dedicated to the cognitive informatics and big data.

The goal was to create a team composed of coders, researchers, developers, marketers and industry experts to collaborate with customers and partners to help develop and launch faster products based on the cognitive technology solutions.

IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty outlined the company’s three strategies for the year 2014 – data, cloud and systems of engagement. The company plans to drive growth and profit through three key initiatives: transforming industries and professions with data, remaking enterprise IT for the cloud and building systems of engagement leveraging enterprise security and data.

During the mid of the year, the blue chip company unveiled 3 billion investment in chip and new technology. Over the next five years, IBM will invest a significant amount of their total revenue in new technologies like non-silicon computer chips, quantum computing research, and computers that mimic the human brain.

The company also introduced the industry’s first intelligent enterprise security portfolio to protect users, data and applications in the cloud. The new security solution expands the potential of using cloud solutions across infrastructure to protect critical business data and applications through advanced analytics – whether they are moving in the company’s data center, in public or private clouds, or between apps on mobile devices.

Microsoft – cloud and mobile come first

After months of research, analysis and interviews with various candidates, Microsoft found a new CEO Satya Nadella at the beginning of the year. A veteran in profitable cloud business at Microsoft, Nadella puts a new mantra for the software company – cloud first, mobile first. Under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Microsoft is trying to maintain the momentum of the company in the growing field of cloud computing as part of its “Cloud First, Mobile First” strategy.

In that regard, Microsoft and rival Salesforce.com joined forces by announcing strategic partnership to integrate Salesforce CRM solution to the Azure cloud platform and the office suite Office 365. Microsoft also made partnership with another rival SAP in the areas of cloud, data, and mobility. As part of the partnership, the two companies are working on a better integration of Business Objects BI tool with the Power of Microsoft.

From innovative technologies and global brands to specialized channel partners, Cisco and Microsoft announced a three-year sales and go-to-market collaboration to transform the traditional datacenter. By providing customers and partners with deeper technology integration, Microsoft will help them transform their datacenters and accelerate the journey to the cloud.

Amazon redefining cloud services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the target to attract more developers to its cloud platform. At the annual AWS re: Invent the company introduced several new services for developers. The important services that Amazon announced is called AWS Lambda, which is a computing service that runs the code developers in response to events and automatically manages computing resources to them, facilitating the creation and management of applications that respond quickly to new information.

In July 2014, Amazon introduced Amazon Cognito, a service that represents a single system for user identification and synchronization of your data, giving developers the ability to create software applications that authenticate users by providers while synchronizing data between different devices of the application.

The cloud leader also introduced a DropBox killer cloud storage service called Zocalo. The service is designed especially for corporate customers that want to save the data and share. Zocalo proposes to implement security policies allowing for example to prevent copying of certain documents to the outside. It can also control and restrict user access, or choose the country in which your data will be stored via a system of regions.

IoT cloud

The Internet of Things (IoT) was a buzzy topic throughout the year 2014. IDC in a study found IoT will grow from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to $3.04 trillion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13%. The early stage of formation of the market, according to analysts IDC, provides an unprecedented opportunity for governments, suppliers and consumers. Sensors, applications and data center will talk more and more in a heterogeneous technology environment, where the evolution will be driven by the ability to experiment and collaborate the most innovative companies.

Gartner also believes that most emerging technologies in IoT are predictive analytics, intelligent robots, holographic displays, quantum computing and the connected home. By 2020, more than 35 percent of the data can be regarded as useful data, thanks to the growth of the data from the Internet of Things. This phenomenon will provide the latest revolutionary way how to interact with customers, shorten the growth cycle, and reduce operating costs and to encourage business opportunities in the value of trillions of dollars.

Looking Back at Top Big Data Stories and Trends of 2014

Big data analytics give enterprises faster access to their own data more than before. The trend of big data remains a high priority for businesses in 2014. Organizations indicate that the top benefits that they have already realized are greater scalability, faster access to infrastructure, higher availability, and faster time to market for applications.

The major forces driving in this market is the constant need among enterprises to upgrade their business processes and enhance performance and efficiency. Also the other forces are continuous rise of unstructured data and demand to provide advanced & predictive analytics.

Let’s look at some of the 2014 top news and trends on big data.

Big data market remains high

Companies providing hardware and software IT solutions are looking forward to gain a better competitive advantage in this growing market, thereby creating sophisticated analytical solutions and data management platforms for the enterprises.

Most of the reports and survey in 2014 found that the big data is changing the conduct of business for companies and executives to get the most from their big data projects and help ease big data challenges. The market for big data is growing and over the next five years big data market is estimated compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.52% from 2013 to 2018 to $46.34 billion by 2018, reports research firm MarketsandMarkets.

According to research firm Gartner, the global market for business intelligence will reach $17 billion by 2016. Gartner sees big data and “Data as a Service” as the growth factors for BI and analytics solutions. More and more companies would take advantage of services that bundle specific data with BI and analytics tools.

Big data main tool Hadoop was driven by the exponential growth in the volume of unstructured data from big data analysis and the ability to access data at high speed with reduced costs compared to traditional RDBMSs. According to a report published by Allied Market Research last year, the worldwide market for Hadoop set to grow to $50.2 billion by 2020 from $2.0 billion in 2013 with a CAGR of 58.2% between 2013 and 2020.

IDC estimates that the volume of digital data globally continues doubling every two years. According to IDC, 90% of all current digital data is unstructured, i.e. from sources that are not in traditional databases, such as videos or image data. IDC also predicts cloud-based big data and analytics will grow three times faster than spending for on-premise solutions.

Research firm Gartner said that big data analytics will play a crucial role in detecting crime and security infractions. By 2016, more than 25 percent of global firms will adopt big data analytics for at least one security and fraud detection use case, up from current eight percent.

New tools to boost big data

Last year, public cloud providers used big data to drive their own operations, get new customers and expand product portfolios. These vendors are also expanding their relationships with consultants and system integrators to provide most effectively managed private cloud implementation.

Microsoft introduced Azure ML, which brings together the capabilities of new analytics tools, powerful algorithms developed for Microsoft products like the Xbox and Bing, and years of machine learning experience into one simple and easy-to-use cloud service. By providing the computing power of their servers, Microsoft promises a strong reduction of costs and increasing efficiency of machine learning, which is already used in many sectors, from search engines to recognize spam from the suggestions of products online at prevention of fraud, from directions to the personal assistant.

The strategy behind Azure ML is different, but the goals are similar to those of Watson. The machine learning was democratized by IBM with Watson. IBM Watson was born with the ambitious goal of defining a new era in the field of cognitive technologies. The platform can be used in all those areas that have a point of contact with the concept of artificial intelligence, taking advantage of the interaction and integration with the potential offered by cloud computing.

IBM also launched a new big data service that is designed to deliver better results and decision-making across the enterprise. Oracle jumped to big data analytics market with the range of updates for Oracle Big Data Analytics, which allows companies to maximize their efforts in the management of information, transforming it into strategic knowledge. During Oracle OpenWorld event, Oracle offered customers the ability to use the framework of big data Hadoop processing in entering the market infrastructure as a service. The Big Data Discovery tool allows you to profile, explore, analyze and find correlations in data from a Hadoop system.

SAP updated its SAP Lumira data visualization software, as well as its SAP InfiniteInsight advanced predictive analytics software. With these tools, companies can better predict which places will visit potential customers as next based on the analysis of historical data. Companies can also combine with new external data sources from all industries advanced analytics to generate new revenue and profit opportunities.

Road ahead

Going forward, big data will have an impact that will change most of the product categories in the field of computer security including solutions, network monitoring, authentication and authorization of users, identity management, fraud detection, and systems of governance, risk and compliance.

Data privacy considerations are often overlooked in the development phase of cloud, IoT and big data solutions, and instead are viewed through a maze of complicated regulations and guidance. Big data will change also the nature of the security controls as conventional firewalls, anti-malware and data loss prevention. In coming years, the tools of data analysis will evolve further to enable a number of advanced predictive capabilities and automated controls in real time.

How cloud adoption trends are driven by strategic imperatives

As this year comes to a close, let's take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends - including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies.

Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud, according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise.

Survey respondents believe that business technology is a game changer, and cloud solutions are providing advantages from increasing IT agility (63 percent), IT innovation (61 percent) and improving the ability to access critical business data and digital service applications (58 percent).

Removing the barriers to cloud adoption

That said, IT leaders perspective on barriers to bringing these advantages to fruition differs from their Line of Business (LOB) counterparts. There is agreement, however, that a company's biggest challenge to implementing a cloud platform is ensuring security.

But there's a significant disconnect on the second most important barrier. IT leaders are concerned about integration (46 percent).  In contrast, LOB leaders believe measuring return-on-investment is a more important challenge (37 percent).

"As use of cloud solutions mature, more than half of companies surveyed are shifting from adoption to upgraded services," said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer of IDG Enterprise. "This opens the door for new and existing solution providers as businesses continue to look for ways to improve agility and innovation while balancing enterprise security and risk."

Cloud service preferences are evolving

Three-quarters of companies are confident that the assets they have placed in the cloud are secure. To help companies have a sense of control, 80 percent have already created, or will create, a governance policy in the next year.

Also, public cloud (60 percent) and private cloud (57 percent) solutions remain the preferred environments compared to hybrid cloud (19 percent). As more workloads move into the cloud, the amount of data stored in private and public clouds will each increase to 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in the next 18 months.

Since 2012, cloud investments have increased by 19 percent, with large enterprises spending on average $3.3 million a year, compared to SMBs spending $400,000. Moreover, spending on cloud solutions will account for almost a quarter of IT budgets in the coming year.

Cloud deployment motivation is strategic

Current estimates show that 23 percent of spending on cloud solutions happens outside of the IT department - with marketing, sales and human resources most often investing in solutions.

Besides, even when a cloud solution is purchased by LOB leaders, the IT team can still be involved in the management of the project. And, in instances where IT does not lead the project, 45 percent of the time IT is still called upon to take over the project.

No matter who initiates the move to cloud, one thing will always be certain, CEOs and other senior executives that approve the budget are not enamored by the technology - they have a strategic imperative and they seek a meaningful competitive advantage in the marketplace.