Mobile cloud computing

As more and more people and various industries start adopting cloud technology, the cloud will grow bigger and bigger. Cloud computing is seen by many as the next wave of information technology for individuals, companies and governments. 

Last year at Gartner Symposium, Gartner predicted that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide, and by 2015, media tablet shipments will constitute 50% of laptop shipments. That said, there will be a higher rate of adoption of mobile devices.

The future thus lies in integration of cloud and mobile technology. The term most commonly referred to as mobile cloud computing.  Mobile cloud computing was defined in a 5 March 2010 entry in the Open Gardens blog as "the availability of cloud computing services in a mobile ecosystem”.


Mobile cloud computing as a concept isn’t entirely new, but its widespread adoption and clouds scalability across devices and platforms is a question mark and is being worked upon.

 

 

 

Thanks to IBM, we have a new foundation for Mobile computing. As IBM claims, this new foundation allows users to easily connect their mobile applications to a variety of cloud services and back-end systems. Clearly, the technology is new and poised for rapid growth along with the growth in mobile devices, cloud technology, and enabling technologies.

The biggest advantage from mobile cloud computing is that because the application-support infrastructure is hosted on a highly advanced and shared cloud platform, mobile app developers and users get more higher quality applications and at a very low price. Also cloud supported applications are updated and replaced automatically, intuitively, and with tremendous speed. Amazon has rolled out its cloud platform to thousands of developers, integrating the platform into Kindle, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon MP3 products.

However, there are a couple of barriers to the upcoming mobile cloud conversion. First, the cloud is not yet completely regulated and concerns are raised over mobile security.

Again IBM is at the forefront to tackle this issue. Scott Hebner, VP of Marketing, IBM software group talks about IBM's Integration of Mobile Cloud Computing and Mobile Cloud security.

 

Second barrier is the flickering networks that hinder smooth access of information over cloud. Adequate networks are continuously required to maximize the usage of mobile cloud.

Not deterred by these barriers, companies continue to explore this growing space of mobile cloud computing. For instance, MobStac developed a mobile cloud publishing platform that provides tools for faster development of mobile applications and websites for the customers. Here is an interesting watch from MobStac - Mobile Cloud Publishing.

 

 

Healthcare in Cloud

In my last post, I talked about the impact of cloud computing on the media industry. We saw how cloud computing has helped launch products faster to market as well as reduced cost for media companies. In this post let’s sneak into how healthcare industry has been impacted with this growing technology.




Cloud helps to create a network between patients, doctors, and healthcare institutions by providing applications and services and also by maintaining the data on the cloud. It provides an infrastructure that allows hospitals, medical practices, insurance companies, and research facilities to use improved computing resources at lower initial capital expenditures. Medical professionals can now share and promote information amongst others in similar fields in different locations.



Cloud Computing is saving both time and money for the healthcare industry. According to the NPR’s “All Tech Considered” report, the computing power of cloud is making it easier as well less expensive for companies and clinicians to discover new drugs and medical treatments. Analyzing data that used to take years and millions of dollars can now be done quickly and at low cost.
 

Cloud Healthcare

Cloud’s usage for patient data analysis results in faster access to patient’s data throughout the facility and increase efficiency of staff. As a result there is improved delivery of care. This was observed at Seattle Children’s Hospital  in Seattle, WA.

Dr. Michael Cunningham, medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Craniofacial Center, treats young patients suffering from craniosynostosis, a disease which has the potential to cause brain damage. This disease seems to be caused by abnormality of how bone cells communicate.

He says that researchers were able to identify such patients whose cells looked similar by using cloud computing to analyze vast amounts of data. Cunningham added that crunching, analyzing and sequencing vast data would have been far too expensive and would have taken too long without cloud computing. He strongly believes that cloud computing will help in coming up with better treatments.

With the advent of cloud computing, quicker and less expensive R&D translates to less expensive drug. This is evident as Matt Wood, head of scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services, mentioned one example of a customer who wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.

“We have customers that are running very large-scale drug discovery pipelines,” said Wood. Additionally, he said, “so it really is transformative in the way that it can accelerate the drug discovery process, in the way that it can accelerate the scientific discovery process.”

According to Wood, if the company had tried to complete that project with its own computing power, it would have taken years to complete and would have cost millions of dollars. However with cloud technology, the whole experiment took about just three hours at a cost of less than $15,000.

Not only have for profit organizations benefited from cloud computing; such technology has proven significant advantages for non-profit organizations. Colleagues In Care, a non-profit organization providing healthcare services, showed that by storing information on the cloud, collaboration between specialists and clinicians becomes easier and effective.




Using IBM’s SmartCloud Engage, cloud-based solution and collaboration services, organization provides the global network of healthcare volunteers with immediate access to critical data and information for the current healthcare needs of the Haitian citizens.

The video talks about how the situation in Haiti improved by using IBM smart cloud. Doctors can now immediately determine how to best care for the patient and collaborate with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.





In today’s landscape, hospitals and health systems are continuously striving to offer new services and benefits to referring physicians so that they don’t lose patient referrals to competing providers. With cloud services, such as private-label email, hospitals and healthcare systems can provide domain names with secure email to physicians at a very low cost, while creating a channel for loyalty.

The Case Study – Advocate Health Care explains how Advocate Health Care, the largest healthcare provider in Illinois, saved US $4 million by moving email to cloud.

Advocate Health care provided nearly 29,000 employees with subscription to Microsoft Exchange Online, a cloud-based email service from Microsoft. This allowed the company to immediately access the latest email software and offered a foundation on which it could add technologies that contribute to better patient care. As a result of which, it avoided spending US $4 million on a new email infrastructure. The IT staff spends far less time administering email and Advocate enjoys improved business continuity.

Given the benefits discussed above, there is certainly a huge potential for cloud computing in healthcare industry.

According to MarketsandMarkets report “Healthcare Cloud Computing Market – Global Trends, Challenges, Opportunities & Forecasts,” the global healthcare cloud computing market is projected to increase to a value of $5.4 billion by 2017. Increasingly more cloud-computing players including SalesForce, Amazon, Dell, IBM and GE are offering health care solutions in the cloud to address the needs of the health sector.

Let’s see how Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies has envisioned the future of health care cloud computing.

     

 

Media through cloud

Cloud Computing is the latest buzz word amongst the various industries across the globe as seen in the chart below.

Sources: Cloud computing survey 2009, World Economic Forum and Accenture

Companies are focusing on improving processes and performances by exploring and utilizing the varied features of the cloud to gain a competitive edge in the market.

In this post, I am going to talk about the implications of cloud computing and specifically how it is being leveraged in the Media industry. In fact, one common axiom amongst the people in media industry today is Cloud Computing. So let’s explore what all this noise is about.

Let’s hear what Dominic Cameron, director of ITV Live, said a year ago in his talks with Rackspace about how Cloud Computing is changing the Media Industry.

Cloud computing has not only helped media companies to reduce the time to market, achieve scale, deliver great mobile experience and  save millions of dollars but also led to the development of  innovative and impressive products to view and share content across social networks.

I am fascinated by Flipboard’s new advertisement “Now You Can Create Your Own Magazines on Flipboard”.

Flipboard, one of the world’s first social magazines, started with a purpose to redefine the way people consume and share content. Flexibility and scalability of the cloud solutions enabled Flipboard to bring Social Magazine to market in just record six months and increase its customer base. It utilized Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build its infrastructure and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for all their server side processing.

Greg Scallan, Chief Architect at Flipboard, says, “We were able to go from concept to delivered product in approximately six months with just a handful of engineers, in large part because of the ability to deploy within a working cloud infrastructure very quickly.” Utilizing the cloud solution enabled Flipboard to reduce the time to market and to cut down on operational costs. (AWS Case Study: Flipboard)

Flipboard founder Mike McCue gives you an inside look into new Flipboard 2.0.

Let’s also look at the how media industry’s behemoths such as Wall Street Journal benefited from the enormous power of cloud solutions.  WSJ wanted to manage the sales components of its print and online products more effectively and also gain more insights into its sales pipeline. To achieve this, WSJ partnered with Salesforce and said,

We used Salesforce to build our own CRM in keeping with our vision. It's extremely easy to use, integrate, and customize” We used Salesforce to build our own CRM in keeping with our vision. It's extremely easy to use, integrate, and customize.”

Cloud solution, Sales cloud, from Salesforce facilitated WSJ to easily integrate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with an advertising data warehouse along with print and online advertising systems. This has enabled the advertising team to prepare proposals for digital opportunities quickly and also customize the sales contracts. Salesforce gives the WSJ a consistent face across all print and digital advertising products and also fosters strong relationships with clients. (Sales Cloud: WSJ)

Other media agencies such as Time Warner, who lacked tools to analyze critical business data, also used Salesforce’s cloud solution. It could save significant amount of time for standard business activities and up the team productivity by 10%. (Warner Story)

Cloud Computing has also flourished in the eastern hemisphere. Medialogica, a Russian Media analyst company, could reduce its data center maintenance cost by 50% once it moved the indexing portion of its solution to Windows Azure, a cloud platform from Microsoft. Thus Vsevolod Vanchikov Chief Technology Officer, Medialogica quoted,

“Crawling excellence is a key competitive differentiator for us…. After moving to Windows Azure, we achieved guaranteed 80 percent of on-time content delivery and doubled the amount of indexing cycles per hour.”  (Sources: Microsoft casestudies)

Dark side of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the latest trend when it comes to data storage that is easily accessible and that has real time data handling capability. The business model is highly appealing and advantageous for small and medium sized companies. However, there are various risk factors associated with cloud computing which we will explore in this post. As you know, clouds are dark quite often.

Some of the critical challenges to cloud technology as of today are,

1. Security and Privacy: How safe is the data and the business assets accessed through the cloud servers? Since data transfer is mainly through internet and a number of users around the world are accessing cloud servers, security and privacy of data is at high risk. To make cloud servers more secure, cloud service vendors developed password protected accounts and data encryption techniques. Yet, these safety measures have not been enough. For instance, in Aug 2012, DropBox reported that several of its user accounts were hacked (To know more click here).

2. Dependency (loss of control): The moment you upload your data to a cloud server, you not only lose control over the data but also become dependent on that server. You might not have much insight on what is going on with your data. Is your data backed up? Are there enough recovery mechanisms to restore and recover the data in case of any mishaps?

3. Cost and decreased flexibility: Becoming accustomed to proprietary applications or formats of one cloud vendor might make it difficult to adapt to similar applications from other vendors, thereby decreasing flexibility. Thus one has to ensure that as the company grows, adding users or changing formats and scalability is not an issue. Also one must realize that the financial health of the cloud vendor will have direct impact on the company.

4. Knowledge and Integration: Knowledge about the internal architecture of the cloud (eg. software, hardware, deployment, etc.) would be limited only to the cloud service provider (CSP). Thus integration of peripherals such as printers, security equipment, and smart phones might be problematic.

Besides these major challenges, cloud computing also needs to address issues regarding the business performance monitoring, legal and contractual issues, data ownership issues, compliance with the regulations, technology stability and maintaining industry accepted standards. Cloud computing has still not fully evolved and matured. It needs to grow from merely a technological solution to a broader business solution.

Despite the above listed inadequacies, which should be addressed in the near future, cloud computing is becoming wide spread and many companies are deploying it as quickly as possible. Not just the companies in developed nations, but also companies in developing nations are entering the cloud market.

According to market researcher IDC, cloud services exceeded $40 billion last year and are set to approach $100 billion in 2016 (click here to know more).

Also research firm Zinnov stated that cloud computing market in India is expected to reach $1.08 billion by 2015 from $110 million in 2010.

This blog aimed to highlight the disadvantages of cloud computing as a follow up to the previous blog. In my upcoming posts, I will talk about the cloud computing updates and trends in various industries. Stay tuned...

 

Cloud Computing: Business through clouds

Introduction:

In this blog, I will talk about what cloud computing is and what are its advantages. Starting with the definition I will walk you through some of the examples of cloud computing and later its business implications.

Have you ever visualized laptops without any storage device and access and share data stored somewhere else? This distant dream has now become a reality because of the tremendous progress made by technology and internet over the past two decades. Its “cloud computing” that has revolutionized the manner in which one can store and access data.

When I first heard the term "cloud computing", a strange thought crossed my mind. I thought data will be stored in cloud somewhere in the air and users can access it from any corner of the world.  Well, such technologies might exist in future, but per se cloud computing is defined as a model that enables users to access computing resources such as applications and services provided by service providers over the internet and from anywhere.

For the first timers, the diagram below would be useful to understand the very basics of Cloud Computing.

       Cloud Computing at a glance

Several applications, platforms and networks storages at the center form a cloud offering services and different devices from different locations access this cloud to use these services. Cloud Service Providers own this storage space and allow users to connect to these services or applications through varied security and access options.

 

The cloud can be modeled in 3 ways, namely Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  It can then be deployed as a Private cloud, a Community cloud, a Public cloud, or a Hybrid cloud. These deployment models vary in terms of accessibility and security.  

Let’s delve further deep into Cloud Computing and look at some of its usage.

The best example of cloud technology would be Google Doc, which allows users to create and edit documents online without the need of any storage device, thereby promoting collaboration and ease of use from anywhere. All you need is Internet access.

Amazon’s E2C, an example of Virtual-IT, allows programmers or developers to use the computing capacity provided by Amazon web-server and merely configure the capacity based on their computing requirements.

ICloud from Apple offers network storage. Using iCloud users can not only store documents but also store music and video files on the cloud server and access them whenever required from their mobile phone or any device connected to internet.

The biggest advantage of cloud computing is that it helps companies to overcome huge capital investment in IT-infrastructure. Cloud computing offers pay-for-use model and highly scalable data solutions for one’s business needs. This enables small to medium size companies to circumvent large investments in IT-infrastructure as they can rent the required services from cloud service providers for the required duration of time and also pay only for the resources used.

Building IT-infrastructure also consumes more time. But with cloud services, small companies can readily use the services from the available cloud servers and concentrate mainly on their business. Thus, with the increased agility in business processes, company’s revenues increase, while infrastructure costs reduce.

Another significant advantage is that cloud computing allows accessibility to the server from any location making the business processes location independent. For example, Netflix is able to deliver its streaming experience to customers across the globe with the help of Amazon’s AWS which leverages cloud computing.

As more and more companies seek benefits from cloud computing, capital investment or access to information will no longer be an obstacle. Creativity to utilize the cloud technology effectively will give company an edge.