Cloud

• Cloud computing


  The fastest-growing form of computing
• Biggest players in the cloud computing marketplace

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Microsoft
  • Google
• AWS


  • Provides subscribing companies with flexible computing power and data storage as well as data management, messaging, payment, and other services that can be used together or individually as the business requires
  • Anyone with an Internet connection and a little bit of money can harness the same computing systems that Amazon itself uses to run its retail business
  • Automatically allocates resources based on customer specifications
  • Customers pay for exactly what they use
  • Economies of scale keep costs astonishingly low
• To remain competitive, other cloud computing vendors have had to follow suit
• Cloud computing


  • Allows businesses to spend more time on higher-value work as the cloud services provider handles all of the maintenance and upkeep of their IT infrastructures
  • Startup companies and smaller companies no longer need to build their own data center
• Company using cloud computing

  • Oscar Insurance
• Oscar Insurance


  • Built its HIPAA-compliant health insurance platform and analytics applications on AWS in just three months
  • Can scale to support traffic spikes and make over 125 production changes a day
• For large companies, paying a public cloud provider a monthly service fee for 10,000 or more employees may actually be more expensive than having the company maintain its own IT infrastructure and staff
• Companies also worry about unexpected "runaway costs" from using a pay-per-use model
• Integrating cloud services with existing IT infrastructures, errors, mismanagement, or unusually high volumes of web traffic will run up the bill for cloud service users
• The more data and systems that a company uses in the cloud, the bigger the job of changing cloud providers
• When you buy cloud software, you may be stuck with it for a long time
• Gartner's advice for clients contemplating public cloud services

  • Take into account the number of machines an organization will run, the number of hours per day or per week they'll run, and the amount of storage their data will require
  • Additional costs include licenses that need to be paid for on a recurring basis, the rate of change for the data, and how much new data the business is expected to generate
• A very large company may find it cheaper to own and manage its own data center or private cloud
• As public clouds become more efficient and secure and the technology grows cheaper, large companies will start using more cloud resources
• Concerns about cloud reliability and security

  • Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on September 20, 2015 that affected many major services
  • There were also significant Amazon cloud outages several times a year in the preceding five years
• As cloud computing continues to mature and the major cloud infrastructure providers gain more experience, cloud service and reliability have steadily improved
• Experts recommend that companies for whom an outage would be a major risk consider using another computing service as a backup
• Company using cloud computing


  • Netflix
• Netflix's use of cloud computing

  • Completed a decade-long project to shut down its own data centers and use Amazon's cloud exclusively to run its business
  • Management liked not having to guess months beforehand what the firm's hardware, storage, and networking needs would be
  • AWS would provide whatever Netflix needed at the moment
  • Netflix had experienced a major hardware failure in 2008 at its own data center and began moving its computing to AWS the following year
  • Netflix shifted its big data platform to AWS in 2013 and billing and payments in 2014
  • Netflix is now fully reliant on AWS, using a variety of web-based software tools
• Netflix also maintains a content-delivery network through Internet service providers and other third parties to speed up the delivery of movies and web traffic between Netflix and its customers
• About 12 percent of companies run IT operations entirely in the cloud, and nearly all of these companies are small or medium-sized businesses
• BetterCloud predicts that by 2022, slightly more than 20 percent of large enterprise companies will operate entirely in the cloud
• A 100 percent cloud operation will be extremely rare for large established companies
• Many large companies are moving more of their computing to the cloud but are unable to migrate completely
• Legacy systems are the most difficult to switch over
• Hybrid cloud approach


  • The top cloud providers themselves-Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM-use their own public cloud services for some purposes, but they continue to keep certain functions on private servers
  • Worries about reliability, security, and risks of change have made it difficult for them to move critical computing tasks to the public cloud
• Companies using hybrid cloud

  • Giant Eagle
  • Marriott
• Giant Eagle's hybrid cloud solution from IBM Cloud

  • Provides capabilities for consumption-based pricing, faster procurement, and customized deployment of applications along with integrated system management for greater visibility into enterprise data
• Marriott's hybrid cloud environment


  • Keeps its own data centers but updates them to use the latest cloud technology
  • Uses IBM's cloud to host apps that it doesn't want to host itself
  • Offers faster digital services to web-savvy guests and helps Marriott use analytics to uncover insights about traveler preferences for its more than 4,000 properties across the globe