8 Reasons Why You Should Move To The Cloud Now!
Migrating your application to the cloud is not an amateur task. An expert has to take care of the environment and make sure your app runs smoothly in the cloud and is secure by all means. Still doubtful on whether to choose cloud? Here are 8 reasons why you should move to the cloud: 1. Speedier Deployment Deploying your applications and services in the cloud quickly is one of the major advantages of migrating to the cloud. There are multiple options available that help you set up servers and other resources in very few numbers of clicks. This is obviously much simpler than the traditional purchase of servers, installing OS, and placing it on a network. 2. Advanced Security Most cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Rackspace take care of tougher security issues like unwanted traffic accessing your virtual machine. They also ensure automatic security updates are applied to the system avoiding vulnerabilities from the latest threats. 3. Less Infrastructure Complexity Cloud is known for its easy accessibility. It does not confuse you with the complexity of infrastructure like data centers. You don’t need to do additional processes to activate services, just fill out some info that is required, and your necessary services are activated. It’s that simple. This can save quite a bit of time, as those particular complexities are no longer a part of your process. 4. On-the-Go Monitoring Cloud Computing services have in-built monitoring systems that notify you when an application or machine has potential issues or is actually experiencing an outage. This saves a lot of time compared to the traditional tracking of service status. 5. Auto-backup and logging of key metrics When talking about continuous monitoring, backup, and logging services are extremely important, especially if you need to perform disaster recovery from an outage and see where things went wrong. The backups will allow you to get things up and running again, and the logs may provide some critical information to help you find out the reason for the issue. 6. Flexibility for Employees You don’t need to be at a specific location to deploy, update, or fix issues when using the cloud. This makes it a more tangible solution when compared to the necessity of being on-site. The unique consistency in choosing and deploying services makes it much easier to collaborate in the cloud. 7. Reduced Datacenters The introduction of the cloud platform has tremendously lowered the usage of data centers. Choosing the cloud for your organization may downsize your data center usage to a single one, just for the sensitive information or even zero. This will surely bring down the operational costs of running multiple data centers. 8. Efficient Cost Management Auto-scaling is something provided by most IaaS providers, which allows you to use more services when you need them and turn them off, when not in use. This technique helps even more in financial savings as you are charged only for the time you use the service or keep the machine running. And the best part is that InApp can assist you through your entire journey to the cloud. Ask for Help
Moving Enterprise Applications to the Cloud
The Lift and Shift Model has been much appreciated in the cloud migration process for enterprise applications. It’s 10x cheaper than the traditional methods. While migrating to the cloud, there are some rules that need to be followed in the Lift and Shift model : Kill and Move ahead: When a server instance goes berzerk, and functions improperly – don’t waste time fixing it – just kill it and redeploy. The solid opinion is to terminate old instances and deploy new ones. This may not be the case if you have an application that was solidly built on data center architecture. Move the essentials only: We all know the messed up cable patches in our servers. One wrong color code and all goes wrong. Cloud migration is a chance to throw away the jumbled patch panel and re-authenticate security and access management. While you will need to move some of your infrastructure services along with the application, make use of the situation to organize your application strategy. Unique Identity: Running multiple identities is risky and inefficient. IdAM (Identity Access and Management) needs to be centrally monitored and used at all locations. Adding controls that identify a user’s location and devices, combined with options for two-factor authentication and one-time passwords, can provide defense against social engineering. Continuous & Close Monitoring: Although Cloud takes away many layers of direct architecture from our attention, giving us more time to be focused on the necessary – we would need to continuously monitor the cloud to plan for troubleshooting scenarios. This would also keep us updated on the security and performance of the app. Always have a Plan B: Keep a Plan B always ready – disaster recovery and/or business continuity should always be something in your short-term goal. A foolproof architecture design and efficient data center should help this to an extent. This might turn out to be costly but will surely help your organization in the long run.
Startups and QA – Is it Good to Get QA On-board Early?
One of the biggest challenges faced by most startup software product companies is their aggressive release cycles. With ever-changing requirements in order to cater to the needs of their potential clients, QA often takes a back seat, and all activities are channelized to get demo-able features out at the earliest. From our experience with many of our startup clients, we have noticed that getting the QA team on board early on has helped them reap some tangible benefits. Why QA is Important for Startups? The requirements get nailed down to the details so that the teams, particularly if they are geographically distributed, work towards the common goal, and QA gets to test what is expected. Furthermore, as features get flushed out, QA gets to validate end-user scenarios; early on, to avoid major design changes later in the application. To ensure good code is being developed that is manageable and scalable and does not break as the product grows, the need for good unit test coverage and code review mechanisms comes to the forefront. As releases get ready, the need to have a good deployment process in place comes to focus; leveraging continuous integration practices to ensure continuous quality control. Overall, QA drives to bring in a process that gets the teams to be more productive. Additionally, as the QA contributions, the following get chalked out: What is the testing strategy to be planned? What are the types of testing – performance, security, API that need to be planned, and when? When to start test automation, and what are the tools to opt for? How will test align with the development process and release cycles? How to integrate testing with the deployment process? At InApp, this is how we start working as an independent software testing partner At the onset, we bring to the team an experienced leader who will plan out the test strategy keeping in mind all the challenges stated above. A process for QA is outlined, working in consensus with the development team The apt tool for test automation is selected with POC (Proof of Concept), if required, to handle frequent UI changes and cross-browser compatibility To know more about our QA processes write to us at mktg@inapp.com
Cloud Computing disrupting the life of CIO
To understand the impact of cloud computing on the life of the CIO we have to rewind the clock to the time before the cloud. We can picture a marketing executive struggling with an email marketing tool. He goes cribbing to the IT admin guy. The admin refers the problem to the CIO. The CIO then decides and only on the basis of this decision can the marketing department expect a resolution. If the software has to be replaced, probably it will be done by the admin. Now cut to today. The marketing guy like always is cribbing about the tool he is using. It is convenient to put the blame for a bad quarter on the tool, rather than on him/her. But this time the marketing guy needn’t go to the admin. He can simply search for a Saas-based solution. Get budgetary approval from his/her boss. No installation is required its plug and play. The CIO’s role has been completely eliminated. So the CIO must be overjoyed right? Less work & the same pay! But hang on. Cut to 3 months down the line. Now the Saas solution has the problem. But the Marketing guy doesn’t call the Saas provider, he calls the CIO. Or maybe he does call the Saas provider but doesn’t understand a word of the Jargon thrown at him by this fancy tech fellow and ends up calling the CIO. So till the time, everything was fine and smooth, the CIO was not involved, but as soon as the problem starts he has to troubleshoot. But by now the company has reduced IT, staff because the cloud has reduced their requirement. So the CIO doesn’t have a team to swoop down on the problem and solve them. He has to tackle the problem by talking to the Saas vendor. The Management Expectation The above was just an example of how the role of the CIO role is changing. Even the management of companies is looking at CIOs differently. In earlier days the CEO wouldn’t probably need to talk to the CIO. But today with technology front and center, CIO is driving strategic decisions. Expectations from technology have completely changed. Most people in management now believe that IT innovations in their company are slower than their competitors. CIO in such a scenario has to have the market knowledge of the innovations driving the business and the technical knowledge to implement those solutions. This has become the hallmark of a successful CIO of today. He/She has become the Chief Innovator, rather than someone just handling the IT infrastructure. The Thunder from the Cloud So let’s list down the lightning bolts that the cloud is emitting and how it is causing disruptions: 1. Capex becomes Opex Back in the 90s and even early 2000s IT infrastructure was a huge cost. For some small companies that are still not in the cloud, it continues to be a huge cost. The CIO was then brought in to understand what Infrastructure to bring in and explain to the board and management. That was the inception of an IT guy in the boardroom of companies. All employees had just started to use computers. So computers had to be purchased, the related software had to be made; servers had to be set up, etc. Today, with cloud computing, the huge server is obsolete. Saas-based solutions are available for each problem. No huge budget has to be approved at the beginning of the year. It cannot be, as one year today, is a lifetime in software innovations. Companies are forced into being agile. But the CIO has not walked out of the boardroom. Instead, rather than playing the cameo at the beginning of the movie, he has become the star attraction. He is no longer an annual fixture in the board meetings; he has become a permanent member. Probably the most important one. 2. Shrinking In-house teams In-house IT was always costly. The cloud has enabled the teams to be shrunk further. The CIO now works with a bare minimum of staff. Earlier for every 20 systems, there would be an administrator. Now every 1000 systems might have one administrator. For smaller companies, there may not be an administrator. They might as well use the administrator of the cloud provider. Anyways all the hardware resides on the cloud. The structure of the IT team has therefore completely changed. The skill of the IT internal staff is now in understanding the virtual machines. They need to be effective vendor managers so that they can manage the army of Saas vendors. 3. Less power to say No The role has changed from an IT administrator to a strategic guy. As the example at the beginning of this blog demonstrated, the guys in the company can just buy any Saas solution off the shelf. If the CIO objects, he/she would become an impediment to change. He/she has less power now to say No. But the CIO has more power in strategic decision-making. He/she can proactively suggest solutions. He/she needs to have the ability to understand the different alternatives for a particular solution. 4. CIO as a Businessman The day is not far when instead of the CIO a master’s in technology will actually be the Master in Business administration. It is now incumbent on the CIO to make the company competitive. CIO has now become the quarterback. Contact us today to transform your application software landscape.
Top 5 Emerging Cloud Computing Trends
Till a few years ago, cloud computing was just a technological fad with little practical value and more hype. In recent years, cloud computing has altered the paradigm of how software is built, data is stored, and how it is accessed. As IT continues to play a significant role in how companies operate, cloud-based platforms and infrastructure have helped companies to streamline their operation, become more efficient and thus reduce IT operations costs. November is coming to an end and we are a month shy of 2017. In the year gone by, there have been rapid changes in cloud migration and cloud-allied strategies. Below are the top 5 trends in cloud computing services. 1. Rapid Growth in the Adoption of Cloud Computing The availability of cloud-based applications (big & small) is in abundance these days. According to reports published by Gartner, there has been a 250 percent increase in revenue from worldwide cloud services in the last two years. As of today, a significant number of organizations intend to migrate to cloud-based applications. The adoption of cloud storage and applications has helped CIOs cut down unsustainable overheads on data storage, a prime consideration for driving the adoption of cloud computing. 2. Go Mobile – The Latest Mantra Smartphones and tablets have become a basic necessity of life. Our lives revolve around these gadgets such that they have now a major impact on how business is transacted. Employees who work at sites away from the office prefer to get work done on the go without having to step into the office. Companies are tapping the benefit of convenience and productivity using mobile-compatible cloud-based applications. The ability for an application to work on mobiles is a key thrust area when designing cloud-enabled application 3. Social Tools, Cloud, and Collaboration The rapidly and ever-changing cloud computing technology is considered to be one of the core principles of the digital era. The close integration of cloud technologies and analytics has been rapidly growing. In addition to being flexible, cloud-based applications are more social than traditional onsite software. In today’s work culture, tools like chat, micro-blogging, etc play a significant role in collaboration among peers. As people are getting used to these tools, customers now have begun to adopt these non-conventional modes to communicate with prospects and fellow employees. 4. Best of Both Worlds, Hybrid Cloud the Preferred Mode Hybrid cloud computing has been gaining popularity and is still the most preferred mode of deployment among big enterprises. A hybrid cloud is a combination of a public cloud and a private cloud for data storage and retrieval. It thus provides the benefit of cost-saving and convenience offered by the public cloud and the ability to add layers of security and customization to the private cloud. With this architecture, enterprises are able to house critical and sensitive information on their private cloud and non-sensitive information on the public cloud. With the twin ability of security and convenience, more companies are opting for this mode of deployment. 5. Security and Data Privacy Key Focus In today’s world of cyber hacks and data theft, data privacy continues to be the key concern when companies strategize their migration to the cloud. With the advent of new technologies, cybercriminals have become smarter. To mitigate this risk, cloud providers and cloud-enabled applications are incorporating a mechanism for developing a secure cloud computing ecosystem. The age-old adage, “change is the only constant in life”, is apt for technology changes too. Cloud computing methodologies are rapidly evolving with every passing year. The future of computing may be hard to predict, but cloud computing will continue to have a significant impact on the IT strategy of every CIO in the years to come.
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.