Posts Tagged ‘business’
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a hot, much debated topic and although still in its infancy, it offers the potential to transform how complex networks work. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s only yet more industry hype, the era of Software Defined Everything is already upon us. Software is being applied to everything from servers, storage, data centres, right through to arguably the most ground-breaking piece of the jigsaw – the Wide Area Network.
SDN changes the way companies build their IT environments by essentially moving the “control plane” of the network away from each individual device in the network to a central controller that works with all the devices, both virtual and physical. This allows for a single controller to configure or manage the complete network, as opposed to each device managing its own functionality and being programmed individually. The technology has huge benefits for businesses, including reducing IT expenditure and enabling changes to the network quickly and easily.
The importance of the network
SDN deployments are still very limited and at their early stages of development. This is due in part to the fact that today’s corporate networks use open standards such as the IP protocol and Ethernet connectivity, but configuring the networks themselves often requires lots of manual tasks because each device on the network has separate policies and consoles. Making significant changes in the network – even with existing hardware – can be time-consuming, potentially taking a week or two. With the move towards server virtualisation and cloud computing, this has become even more complex.
With this in mind, it is no surprise that SDN is making its way to centre stage. SDN is being tackled from all sides of the ecosystem, from virtualisation vendors like VMWare to the traditional networking providers like Cisco. Not only is it going to fundamentally change the business models of the networking and server industries, but it is also going to escalate the importance of the network.
The value that SDN poses for businesses is immense. It holds greater potential for productivity increases from IT than any other development because of the way it acts as a unifying force between disparate elements – computing, networking, virtualisation, information, and business logic. There’s no doubt that SDN will be a disruptive force across cloud, carrier and enterprise networks, likely in that order. The natural progression of turning hardware into software will result in re-architected networks, data centres and infrastructures.
What the future holds
The integration of everything into the network will become a no-brainer in the coming year and this will essentially transform the network into the epicenter of ICT services. While no one can predict the SDN end-game, we are at the cusp of a revolution in the way global networks are designed, built, and managed.
By providing more real-time intelligence and deep application integration SDN is going to enable enterprises to realise innovation earlier with applications rolled out in hours instead of weeks. Organisations will achieve never-before-seen levels of agility while reducing both capital and operational overhead to the lowest levels ever delivered in enterprise solutions.
As a platform, SDN provides the potential to drive the next generation of IT services. Early high visibility adopters like Google and the recent significant increase in VC funding into the SDN area is fuelling momentum and the emergence of the era of Software Defined Everything looks set to change the power of the network for good. Organisations should be looking very seriously at how SDN can benefit their businesses before their competitors get there first.
Best Regards,
Kristina Kozlova – Marketing Manager (LI page)
kristina.kozlova@altabel.com
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
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Cloud computing is one of the most powerful trends nowadays. It offers vast opportunities as for the business profitability so can provide improvements in green initiatives which make enterprises more attractive and eco-friendly. Nevertheless, for every goal of this argument exists opposite opinion. So, let’s verify, concerning major factors of green computing and benefits of cloud computing: could we going green with cloud computing or no?
Defining Green Computing
Green Computing or Green IT as Cloud Computing is one of the cutting edge IT topics today. The key role of green computing is to make the use of computers as energy efficient as possible with minimal or no impact on the environment. As for the businesses it means to find the methods of cutting the consumption of power recourses and IT waste recycling. But that’s where the trouble lies. Adopting eco computing trend, saving energy, you have to be sure you won’t lose in money because the IT is where you always need to consume large amount of energy power. In this case what shall we do?
The benefits of Green Clouds usage: lower costs with high profit
So, here cloud computing is the way to save money and energy for your business. Let’s get into how to save from cloud computing with the benefit for the business both for profit and for the environment. Speaking about cost savings, cloud computing users first of all emphasize Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Using IaaS, users can improve their manageability and facilitate the maintenance of the resources. It means that benefit of business enterprises consists by avoiding spending on software and infrastructure resources, allowing business clients to focus on earning money rather than being weighted down with infrastructure concerns.
As the result, operating this model allows to reduce the consummation of power energy without spending money on running the servers. Moreover, with the absence of hardware to upgrade, no servers to repair and no software to install labor costs are also reduced.
One more aspect of Cloud Computing in order is how to accomplish money savings with a green role of using SaaS (Software as a Service). As it goes a step beyond IaaS by offloading applications to hosted services. With SaaS software accesses usually through a browser based client, meaning that it can be run on virtually any authorized computer, making desktop and laptop resources easily replaceable. Thus, when you also save on the support, it doubles the impact and in fact increases green role in business. For one hand, using cloud computing, there is no need any more for It department structure as the employees can work remotely, travelling and moving from one place to another because they have fast access to the internet and the ability to use all the services at hand, on the other hand it reduces the consumption of fossil fuels and the harmful pollution that results from vehicle emissions as well.
Meanwhile cloud computing offers vast opportunities, as always, every debate has two sides, so there is opposite opinion of the researches considering that cloud computing is just a theory. They consider that using data centers, for example, increases the possibility to get access from any point of the world with more frequency than using infrastructure hosting providers.
Nevertheless, Cloud Computing can still do more and can be more “green”, focusing not only on energy savings but also helps in recycling e-waste, claim the others. Within Cloud Computing we can cut the e-waste production by reduction of hardware and software. In order to optimize the hardware usage, cloud computing dealing with server virtualization that consolidates all servers into a single location, in such a way replacing all hardware by online devices and resources. So, buying or renting access to datacenters we minimize the usage of hardware, at the same time reducing the e-waste. Therefore, this solution improves both environmental and operational benefits.
Conclusion
Cloud green computing is the latest trend today. Balancing energy consummation and hibernating money form saving costs by leaving the purchase of servers, software, datacenter space or network equipment, make the businesses more efficient and attractive. A doubt regarding going green with cloud computing still remains open. So, I will be glad if you share your opinion or business experience of managing with cloud green computing. Thank you for the attention and please feel free to leave your comments.
Best regards,
Katerina Bulavskaya
Altabel Group – professional software development
Windows Azure Success Secret
Posted on: July 4, 2012
Windows Azure is considered innovative, simply reliable and powerful platform. The most important benefits of using it include: reduced cost, scalability, flexibility and efficiency. As you may notice, recently many enterprises, service providers, small businesses, and governments who is deeply interested in running their business challenges in efficient and effective manners, are looking for cloud solutions. So, we found interesting to find out what makes it so successful.
The answer for many companies is in the cloud. The Windows Azure Platform offers an increasingly new approach for which makes it trendy and successfully one for running the business. First of all let’s compare a little bit models of cloud computing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with PaaS (Platform as a Service). The first one is considered to be the traditional one producing on-premises custom applications. The problem is that such apps require additional spending: upfront costs to purchase hardware and acquire software licenses (database software, workflow, user management, etc.) as they all running on the location or on the server of the company. Windows Azure Cloud Computing is recognized as PaaS platform, it means that all tools to produce applications already exist and needed only the code for running custom apps. Obviously, it highly simplifies the developer’s works that already have the skills working with Windows environment. One more goal is the Azure’s care of all specialist services as Access Control Service, SQL Azure Database, Service Bus all running online and for free, because of having hosting in the cloud, remote location. It also provides you and your company an anytime and anywhere access. As a result, Windows Azure Platform with its services provides the best environment for creative and moneymaking challenges and decisions.
Make my words sound solid, I’ve asked the question to LinkedIn professionals about the growth of Windows Azures’ popularity and also I referred to some comments of enterprises’ experience working with cloud computing.
“…Of course it is also about money. If business thinks they can save 10% or 30% or more by moving their products into Azure then surely it makes it attractive option. …..Since there is so much business potential in the cloud I’m pretty sure the demand for azure developers is going to increase. I wouldn’t be surprised to see software companies trying to acquire best azure talent from all over the world. Think about it. If your company has lot of talented azure developers you have pretty good position when competing from project. Any project. Anywhere in the world. Systems from corporations, governments etc. Huge systems”.
Toni Parviainen
“Any business that uses Microsoft’s development technologies and builds/owns/operates enterprise systems needs to quickly get up to speed with Azure. From an empirical perspective, at the Microsoft developer conference in Las Vegas last March, a small minority of all developers present at the conference were currently developing on Azure. So at least in the short term, my view is that the demand for experienced Azure developers is likely exceeding the supply”.
Matt McLoughlin
Every time after working with cloud computing the enterprises tell their success stories of using this new technology which make their businesses more competitive, challenging and help to achieve better business agility. Let’s see what representatives think about their experience.
“Windows Azure enabled us to harness more than a decade of experience in producing, managing, distributing and licensing digital media to build an enterprise-class digital asset management system — in less than 12 months — that can compete with the best and biggest in the digital asset management industry”
David MacLaren, founder and CEO of VRX Studios and now of MediaValet
“With only 11 employees, we run very lean operations and employ agile development methods. By using Windows Azure, we can achieve critical levels of scalability without compromising our efficiency. We have a dynamic infrastructure in place that leaves us well-prepared for our future growth and expansion”.
Vincent Vergonjeanne, Chief Executive Officer at Kobojo
“Development and deployment was very straightforward. We used our existing skills and development tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio development system, to migrate the website to the Windows Azure platform. Plus, we won’t have to change the way we work going forward. We now have a viable cloud-based solution that we can offer to our customers. By using Windows Azure and the Umbraco accelerator, we can meet our customers’ complex content management needs and their desire to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud”
Paul Hernacki, Chief Technology Officer at Definition 6
The reviewed comments, demonstrate new horizons and new opportunities with the help of Windows Azure Cloud Computing for small to midsize businesses. If you have something to add, be sure to leave a comment on this post.
Best regards,
Katerina Bulavskaya
Altabel Group – professional software development
Agile development seems to have received more than its fair share of media attention in recent years. Yet it is still sometimes criticized for not being “robust enough for serious organizations” from time to time. Other comments suggest that it may get a project started off rapidly, but ultimately in the long term it’s more costly.
Martin Cheesbrough is CTO of financial services and energy trading software development company Digiterre. Cheesbrough maintains that the problem here may be that some organizations simply don’t understand Agile. A simple truth is that unlike other approaches, Agile doesn’t come with a weighty 300-page book of what to do, and what not to do. Instead Agile is based on a set of guiding principles that fit onto one A4 sheet.
“Problems often occur when ‘process-orientated-people’ think that delivering a project using Agile involves following an ‘Agile process’. Agile advocates a little and often approach with the development team given complete autonomy over their tasks. The feedback loop is ongoing and concise. This ensures that you stay on track and collaborate but also guarantees that the project keeps moving and remains relevant to the business. That’s the theory – and it makes perfect sense. But when putting it into practice something seems to break down. Agile isn’t about becoming a slave to process; instead it concentrates on getting the most out of the development team and playing to each person’s strengths. Smart, creative individuals that are able to break out of the process mould and embrace the Agile philosophy are fundamental to its success.”
Cheesbrough suggests that just because Agile is light on supporting paperwork that it is deemed insubstantial, lightweight and risky.
“Agile tools and techniques promote transparency and expose how the project is developing each and every day. This means that any bumps in the road can be smoothed out before they become obstructive to progress. Companies such as Flickr are demonstrating that little and often improvements negate the need to get bogged down in ongoing projects. Each day the site makes small changes that enhance the service it offers. Isn’t this the flexible IT environment that will power the businesses of tomorrow? It’s been a long time coming, but the revolution engulfing IT to make it faster and better is demanding significant changes to development. Say goodbye to prescriptive process and hello to the more free thinking future of development.”
Best Regards,
Kristina Kozlova
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
Many companies are having great success with cloud computing, and it’s evident that the market continues to grow quickly. Here are three surefire ways to fail with cloud computing and what you can learn from them to avoid suffering that same fate.
First, put the wrong people on the project. This is the most common way that cloud computing development, migration, and implementation projects fail. Cloud computing is a hyped “cool” space. Those who have the most political clout in an IT organization quickly position themselves on cloud computing projects. However, just because they are buddy-buddy with the CIO does not mean they have the architectural and technical skills to make the cloud work for the enterprise. Bad decisions are also made in terms of deciding how to select technology types and technology providers. When you select what’s popular versus what’s a true architectural fit, you shoot yourself in the foot.
Second, security is an afterthought. This means that those driving the project do not consider security and compliance requirements until after deployment. It’s almost impossible to retrofit security into a cloud computing deployment, so the approach and use of technology (such as encryption) should be systemic to the environment. This is a rookie mistake.
Third, select the wrong business problem to solve with cloud computing. The right approach is to pick new application development or existing application migration that is meaningful to the business, but that is not mission-critical. There are two paths to failure here. The first is to pick the “kill the business with a single outage” type of application, put it in the cloud, then pray to the Internet gods that nothing goes wrong. Too risky. The second is to pick a meaningless application that nobody cares about, move it to the cloud, and hope that somebody notices. Too underwhelming. Find something that falls in the middle.
Hope, you’ll find the tips above useful.
Best Regards,
Kristina Kozlova
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
