It is known in this age that cloud computing and machine learning is the way to go for organizations to remain competitive. Organizations can benefit from understanding how the two technologies, combined, can help them gain a competitive edge. Combining the two technologies gives organizations the ability to make smart decisions at scale and provide a unique user experience.
What is Cloud Computing?
To meet changing business needs, companies need to invest time and money to scale up their IT equipment to include its hardware, software, and services. With on premise IT infrastructure, this process is inherently slow and costly.
According to Rackspace, “Cloud computing (also called simply, “the cloud”) describes the act of storing, managing and processing data online — as opposed to on your own physical computer or network”.
Cloud computing has changed the way we compute in a major way. It consists of a data center that hosts the necessary hardware to provide the compute power an organization needs. With the introduction of various management platforms, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and VMware’s vSphere, provisioning an operating system in the cloud is relatively simple.
Cloud Computing Technical Speak
Cloud computing is a simple concept to understand. Let’s take an implementation utilizing Microsoft’s Hyper-V, for example. The part of the architecture within your control determines what type of cloud service it is: infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as a-service, or software-as-a-service. The architecture is set up into three main layers: the hardware layer, the hypervisor (or, virtual machine kernel) layer, and the controlling layer.
Within the hardware layer contains the device hardware and holds the physical network and storage devices.
The hypervisor layer contains the software necessary to control the hardware, such as the network stack, and the storage stack.
The controlling layer is where Hyper-V and the user interface meet. This is where the main operating system is housed, and all created virtual machines.
The following figure shows an example of a Hyper-V architecture.
This computing architecture allows service providers to provision virtual machines and scale up or down their compute power on-demand. So, when a company needs to scale, it’s as easy as selecting the utilized virtual machines and increasing its resources in an instant.
Cloud Computing Use in Business
According to the Journal of Management Information Systems, “perhaps the single most distinctive benefit to users of cloud services is the pay-as-you-use attribute”. Other import benefits include:
Fast Provisioning
When a company needs computer power and resources, it can get that resource today on-demand. Services such as AWS and Rackspace make it easy for a company to provision necessary services on the fly and add or remove resources with the same ease.
Ease of Scaling
Organizations must be able to quickly respond to changing market trends. To become an agile organization, an organization must be able to increases its compute power in the shortest time possible. The cloud enables this.
Re-Use
Before cloud computing, when a hardware resource was no longer needed, it had to be deprovisioned. With the advent of cloud computing, virtual machines can be created and removed on the fly. The virtual machines can then be made available for use by another organization or process.
Companies Using Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a very popular buzz word in the tech industry, and it has taken the scene by storm. Many of today’s most popular and successful companies use cloud computing to gain a large competitive advantage.
Google utilizes Equinix to host some of its applications on a cloud platform that can scale on demand. According to Equinix, “by offering high-performance, dedicated interconnection through Equinix Cloud Exchange, Google customers will enjoy consistent, reliable, secure and scalable cloud performance across the enterprise IT infrastructure”.
Amazon
Amazon developed their own cloud product called AWS (Amazon Web Services) to provide its applications to its customers and scale on-demand. The company also utilizes machine learning to provide a unique user experience.
Uber
Uber also utilizes the Equinix data center for hosting its distributed database system. This ensures quick and on-demand access to information based on locale. It’s distributed database system provides for fail over. Because it uses cloud computing, scaling to meet customer demand is a simple process.
Cloud computing is fast becoming a staple in many businesses. Most people use it today without realizing it.
Another concept that is quickly coming to fruition is machine learning, discussed in a previous post. While very useful, machine learning requires high power systems that are capable of scaling as more data is introduced.
Cloud computing makes it easy to implement a machine learning system that is scalable. Here are some pros and cons of cloud computing and machine learning use in business.
Pros
- Organizations can gain a competitive advantage by perform predictive modeling based on past data.
- Organizations can provide a unique user experience that scales rapidly.
- Business decisions are made more smartly with the use of cloud computing and machine learning generating a prediction based on a set of data.
Cons
- Based on the amount of data collected, the cost can get high because of the need for storage.
- Decision making can be flawed if incorrect data is supplied.
Cloud computing has been a major game changer in the business world. How might your organization use cloud computing to gain a competitive advantage?
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