The Hardest Part of Cloud Migration: Migrating your Talent to the Cloud
Operating in the cloud is a huge shift for most institutions. The transition is difficult, requiring a different mindset and a new set of skills. Likewise, the effort and investment required to transform talent are significant. One key to cloud adoption on the enterprise level is a talent transformation program that enables cloud fluency across your entire organization. The below given single infographic takes you to some steps you can undertake to help with talent transformation while adopting cloud computing services. Migrating Your Talent to the Cloud Where’s your destination and why are you going? Before embarking on the journey, communicate a set of clear and compelling cloud imperatives that provide a road map for your enterprise. What do you need for the journey and how are you getting there? As you embark on the cloud journey, you will also want to clearly define the “What” and “How” of operating in the cloud. Who is driving? Empowering individuals with the right skills and situational awareness will put your organization on the right road to achieving your desired outcomes. Establish a common learning curve Consider grouping individuals into training groups that experience the program together. Offer meaningful 1:1 help The goal is to consider a space where individuals can stop by, talk to cloud experts, ask questions, and whiteboard solutions. The gamification of learning – it’s a team sport Establishing learning teams provide individuals with a sense of accountability, camaraderie, and support. Jump in, take the dive To learn how to operate in the cloud you need to operate in the CLOUD. What’s in it for you? The AWS certification program provides a great opportunity for a win-win. For the individual, it’s one of the highest-paying certifications offered in the marketplace. Keep it going To enable talent transformation at the scale of an enterprise, everyone in the organization must share accountability. Creating a common cloud culture To ensure that your cloud adoption is sustainable, organizations must achieve a critical mass of cloud fluency. At the very least, everyone should be able to order french fries in the cloud. Need help with Cloud?Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
Hybrid Cloud for Startups and Small Businesses
Cloud computing has a lot of hype around it. Most large organizations have some sort of plan to move to the cloud. These plans are in various stages from initiation to completion. But for startups and SMBs, this is not true. The difference is with the risk appetite of organizations. For a large organization, the sheer size of the company allows them to take a risk. They can afford to fail. Smaller organizations tend to be circumspect when it comes to decisions that have an organization-level impact. Despite all the benefits of Cloud Computing Services, there are some obvious issues as well. Hence SMBs and Startups are looking at different alternatives, such as the hybrid cloud. Concerns about Cloud Computing Startups and SMBs are scared of data security in the cloud. Though large cloud computing service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, etc, have very good security protocols in place, the simple thought of the locus of control of data moving away, spokes a lot of startups and SMBs. Everyone is paranoid about losing data. We all have lost precious digital data at some time or the other. This manifests itself in our psychology, which is tuned to doubt data security which is beyond our control. If not scared about security themselves, they are forced into being scared due to the compliances relating to data. For example, HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data. Cloud computing concerns also revolve around data available on-demand, access speed, etc. These are legitimate questions for many organizations that have large-sized data. The concern is that what companies save by not having to buy hardware is lost due to the huge bandwidth required to access this data. In addition, Internet speeds are still a long way from being 100% reliable and N/W outages are still possible. What is Hybrid Cloud? A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. By allowing workloads to move between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change, a hybrid cloud gives businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options. The hybrid cloud is essentially a combination of a public cloud and some on-premise hardware. Such a configuration will allow for some data to be stored on-premise and some data to be put in the cloud. This also gives flexibility to SMBs and Startups to choose how to best utilize the cloud. Many SMBs and Startups have compartmentalized their data such that data that is high risk is stored locally. This same thing is being done for data that is in needs to be accessed frequently. For data that has to be accessed frequently, storing it on-premise allows fast and reliable access to the data. Example of Hybrid Cloud Implementation: Let’s look at an example of a Startup that went for a Hybrid cloud recently. This startup was quoted as an example by the wall street journal in its recent article. This startup is a heavy user of large files, which includes digital media. Now it was difficult for this startup to coordinate its business with its offices in the USA and Hong Kong because of the size of the files. One of the senior people from the startup commented: “Opening a file would take half an hour.” Now the company couldn’t afford to put in place a high-speed gigabit network at its offices, to download and upload data from the cloud service provider’s data storage location. On researching the problem this particular company found that the only solution was to locate some of the files which are to be accessed quickly at an on-premise location. Additionally, they kept the cloud for keeping large files that didn’t require to be accessed frequently and fast. In order to make this complex architecture simple for their internal users, they built an advanced common interface for data access. Thus for the user, whether he was accessing data from the cloud or from the on-premise location, the interface was the same and actions seemed seamless. Conclusion This model is fast getting traction all over the world. Many companies will probably still embrace the cloud in its purest public form, but another hybrid model is dissolving the borders between public and private data and streamlining business operations. Need help with Cloud? Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
5 Financial Benefits of Cloud Computing
Most business leaders we talk to on cloud computing are aware of the benefit of cloud computing services in terms of providing them with Flexibility, scalability, and financial gains. For business leaders, financial gains are probably the most important aspect of their decision in moving to the cloud. So let’s understand what exactly these financial benefits are. The following are the 5 financial benefits of Cloud Computing 1. Capex is transformed into Opex With cloud computing, there is no upfront cost. This is a huge benefit for Small Businesses, Small offices/home offices, and start-ups. When these types of organizations go for IT installations, they have to plan and arrange funds for IT hardware investments. Hardware like storage drives, processors, networking equipment, etc which are required as part of any IT upgrade is very costly. With cloud computing, the cost of this hardware can actually be covered by the operations of the company. Not only is this equipment very costly the configuration which is purchased will depend on the peak capacity required by any organization. So if a small business requires X storage drives, Y processors, and Z networking equipment at peak capacity, it will purchase X storage drives, Y processors, and Z networking equipment. However, in general, the average requirement would only be X/4 storage drives, Y/4 processors, and Z/4 networking equipment. Hence most times the hardware is actually the idea. With cloud computing, you only pay for what you use. This would mean you would pay for X/4 storage drives, Y/4 processors, and Z/4 networking equipment, thus you save a lot of money. Money has a time value. As the cloud doesn’t require any capital investment, a huge amount of money is saved and which can be re-invested for higher returns. 2. Same benefit at a lower price The cloud service provider is also able to provide the services at a price that is much lower due to economies of scale. There are 2 aspects to these economies of scale. The first aspect is that the provider is able to negotiate a better deal for the purchase of hardware themselves because of purchasing in bulk. The second aspect is that the provider accumulates orders from different clients. His clients share the same equipment. Also, all these clients don’t operate at peak capacity concurrently. He can therefore actually purchase hardware configuration which is much lower than the peak capacity of all his/her clients and share them across clients. He can also pass through some of these financial benefits due to economies of scale to his customers, down the value chain. 3. Manpower cost saved Most often IT manpower is very costly. Engineers who have expertise in hardware and system administration are typically specialized and hence come at a premium. With cloud computing at least part of the cloud computing, human resource cost is reduced. Though part of the cost which the cloud service provider charges his clients includes his/her human resource, this cost will still be lower due to this resource being shared across clients and due to economies of scale. 4. Saving on infrastructure costs When small businesses or startups set up a business they make a huge investment in not just hardware, but also space for keeping the hardware. Quite often junked hardware also keeps occupying office space. All this space is being paid for and is adding to the cost of the company. With the cloud, all this space gets freed up and can be productivity utilized. There is also a huge amount saved on account of electricity charges. Typically heavy hardware like servers, processors, etc, keep running all the time, irrespective of whether they are being utilized or not. Much of this hardware is actually used for redundancy but nonetheless sucking up valuable electricity. In addition, they require a large amount per unit of electricity to run. All this cost goes away when small businesses migrate to the cloud. 5. Free of Cost Business Continuity Planning Business continuity planning is an important area for all businesses, whether big or small. For small businesses or startups, business continuity is an important but neglected area. Quite often they have the inclination for BCP but lack the budget. With Cloud computing, these small businesses, and startups can get Business continuity assurance free of cost. Typically cloud computing service providers have multiple locations acting as data centers. Quite often they mirror client data in at least a couple of locations. Need help with Cloud? Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
6 Steps to ensure Security for Cloud Computing
These are the 6 Steps to ensure Security for Cloud Computing A prescriptive series of steps for cloud customers to evaluate and manage the security of their use of cloud computing services, with the goal of mitigating risk and delivering an appropriate level of support. Need help with Cloud?Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
Difference between Hadoop and Spark – An Infographic
Most often in a conversation about big data, we hear a comparison between Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. Both are big data frameworks; however, not really serve the same purpose. Where Hadoop consists of whole components including data processing and distributed file system, Spark is a data processing tool that operates on distributed data collections. Let’s take a look at what they do and how they differ. Hadoop is a framework designed to work with huge amounts of data sets across computer clusters using the MapReduce programming model. Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework generally used for large-scale data processing. Difference between Hadoop and Spark Performance Hadoop MapReduce is designed for data that does not fit in the memory. Spark performs well when all data fits in the memory (Spark is 3X faster than Hadoop MapReduce). Ease of Use Hadoop is more difficult to program and has no interactive mode other than add-ons such as Hive and Pig Spark is easier to program and includes an interactive mode. Compatibility Hadoop MapReduce and Spark are compatible with each other. Spark can run on Hadoop clusters or on its standalone mode. Cost Hadoop is cheaper as it requires less expensive hardware. Spark could be costlier in the long run since it requires a lot of RAM t run in memory. Data Processing Hadoop is ideal for batch processing. Spark also does batch processing: however, it is ideal for real-time data processing. Fault Tolerance Hadoop is highly fault-tolerant. There is no need to restart the application if a process crashes in the middle of execution as it could continue from where it left off. Spark is less tolerant and uses Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). It will have to start processing from the beginning of the process crashes. Scalability Hadoop MapReduce is scalable using the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) As per the reports by Yahoo, it has 42,000 node Hadoop clusters. Spark is also scalable using HDFS; however, the largest known Spark cluster is 8,000 nodes. Security Hadoop has more security features as it supports Kerberos authentication. Spark’s security is still in its infancy. Summary Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop have a synergetic relationship with each other. The speed, agility, and relative ease of use of Spark complement the low cost of operation of Hadoop. Hadoop is the best choice for businesses that need huge datasets with batch processing, whereas Spark is ideal for applications that require fast and iterative processing.
Do’s and Don’ts when Migrating to the Cloud
From both a business and an IT perspective, migrating to the cloud is the right move for almost every organization. But it is not something you can do on a lazy Sunday afternoon: it takes thorough preparation and communication and, most importantly, a cloud migration needs to be closely connected to your business strategy. We have listed a few do’s and don’ts as an infographic that will help you get started. Do’s and Don’t when Migrating to the Cloud Do’s Share your roadmap Check certifications and compliance statements Look for a partner who can scale quickly Train your people before, during, and after Consider changes in architecture Don’ts Don’t forget your current investments Don’t plan a ‘big bang’ migration, but take a phased approach Don’t simply look at the quoted price, but calculate the complete TCO Don’t go at it alone Don’t forget the human factor Need help with Cloud?Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure
Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure are the big boys of the cloud computing world, even though AWS is much bigger than Azure. How much bigger? Well, AWS’s server capacity is about 6 times larger than the next 12 competitors combined. The cloud-hosting industry operates on razor-thin margins, making the bulk of its profits from volume. It is thus imperative to capture as much market share as possible. One of the main ways the tech giants (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) achieve this is by regular price cuts of their offerings, especially the all-important compute-storage combo. Here’s a first-hand look into the major factors differentiating the cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Need help with Cloud? Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
CAPEX Vs OPEX of the Cloud and other Financial Benefits
The cloud is the buzzword revolutionizing software and IT infrastructure the world over. Companies globally are leveraging the cutting-edge benefit of the cloud to get what works best for their IT network, Software & Apps. Cloud computing service cost is computed as OPEX and the purchase of a unit of a server as CAPEX. Let us try and analyze the cost-benefit of cloud-based technology beyond CAPEX Vs OPEX and look at other financial cost benefits. Cost-benefit calculation: A piece of equipment purchased can serve its intended purpose for up to 36 months before it is made obsolete. If you consider only this for an ROI calculation, the cost of running an instance of Azure/Amazon 24 X7 is much more expensive than purchasing a single unit of the server with a similar configuration. For organizations heavily dependent on IT, the calculation is flawed. The indirect (network and storage infrastructure and IT operations to manage the general infrastructure) and direct cost (Power, floor space, etc of running a server is completely ignored in this calculation. When all these costs are added, the overall cost of renting cloud space works cheaper than purchasing a server. A cloud instance purchase considered OPEX is much cheaper than a CAPEX on a server purchase. Upsize & Downsize on the go: A variable OPEX is no financially prudent way of running operations. This is true if the nature of your operations is “set and forget”. The “set and forget” model holds rarely true for an organization with IT as the core of its business. Cloud instance offers scalability and allows for a ramp-up and ramp-down based on seasonal spikes and usage patterns. This flexibility allows for payment to be made for what you use. You will no longer be bogged down by excess hardware or the lack of it. The implied benefit of this is that you pay lower OPEX for maintaining the cloud during lean seasons. When a user is finished with the resources, it is returned back to the provider. The utilization responsibility rests with the provider and he has to figure out how to make sufficient use of the resources. Lesser Financial Liability: The only thing that frees a user from making a significant long-term investment is the ability to start off small. Cloud solutions being scalable can be started out as small and can be scaled up hence, financially valuable. The short-term premium paid for cloud services is less expensive than a higher rate for a shorter period for a server purchase. Automation Saves: In today’s world, organizations across the globe are realizing the benefit of automation. Tools and automation in cloud services offer facilities for resource termination and instantiation. The biggest advantage of automating is the ability to optimize resource usage based on demand and usage. The load and usage pattern help the automation tools to determine how many instances or resources to be up and running at any given period of time. Advances made in these tools offer autonomous management of these processes with limited or no manual intervention. An environment like this incurs smaller transaction costs making “down and off” more viable. The above is clear evidence of the cost-benefit of cloud instances over a conventional server. Financial benefits are one of the biggest reasons for the exponential cloud adoption rate among organizations in the recent past and will also drive the future of cloud computing. Need help with Cloud? Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
Top 44 Questions To Ask Through Your Cloud Journey
The entire process of Cloud migration may be split into 4 stages namely; Assessment, Planning, Migration & Validation. One might have a lot of questions or doubts about the Cloud or the migration journey. Here are the top 44 questions you should ask yourself in the Cloud Journey: Cloud Migration Assessment Questionnaire Is the cloud right for your application (Application Migration Assessment) What are your capacity demands? How to find out the best cloud model for you? What are the actual ‘Actual Costs’? Analyzing your internal processes and evaluating business needs before migration? How important is knowing your cloud provider? How to prepare for cloud migration? What about cost Consideration? Technical considerations for migrating to the cloud? Where are the “gaps” and are they still gaps after migration? What’s the fit for your existing tools? What is your overview of different cloud providers? ROI? Cloud Migration Planning Questionnaire What are your migration strategy and plan? What are the candidate apps/workloads/environments? What are your considerations for choosing a cloud provider? What’s the topology of the application architecture? How to avoid cloud migration risks and hurdles? What are the possible performance bottlenecks being introduced? What are the hybrid integration plans? Have you identified the first adopters? What are the Dos and Don’ts of cloud migration? Explore the cloud tools to help the migration process. How will users access the environment? How will you train staff? What internal processes have to change in order to capitalize on the new service? How will you deploy updated code, data, and configurations to the environment? What’s the plan for operating this service after migration? Do you have a strategy for cutover? What are the things to keep in mind when you test-run your migration? How will financial processing occur? Have you completed a small-scale pilot that flexes all the above concerns? Cloud Migration Questionnaire How are you distributing the apps and data to the cloud environment? What are the security controls in place during transit? What is the Cloud-to-Cloud migration and its challenges? How do you migrate virtual machines? How do you migrate data? How do you migrate applications? Cloud Migration Validation Questionnaire Is the application reachable? Did all the data make its way into the environment? Can administrative tools access the cloud environment? Is the application stable? Will scalability affect the core architecture of the application? Do you have a business continuity or backup plan? If you have answers to all these, your migration should be smooth as cheese! Need help with Cloud? Reach us at mktg@inapp.com or Contact us
Microservices for Next-Gen Cloud Apps
About Speaker: Mr. Anil Saraswathy is the CTO of InApp. He has over 3 decades of experience in the field of computer software development. He has held leadership positions at Fischer International, HCL (Hindustan Computers Ltd), IESL (now India Satcom Ltd), and Verifone (now part of HP). He has done path-breaking work in Cloud Computing, Microservices, Custom Application Development, Enterprise application development, etc. He is also an avid programmer in Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, C++, PHP, and JavaScript. Topic: In this video, Anil explains the problems with present-day Monolithic, on-premise applications. He then describes the Microservices architecture as a solution to this problem. He goes on to explain how Microservices combine with Cloud Computing to produce robust, agile, and economical applications using Netflix as an example.