Fog Computing - Is it the Cloud's Future

Experts in the industry opine that Cloud may not be necessarily sufficient for meeting the rapidly increasing demands of current time. To counter this problem, fog computing will play a crucial role in the coming time as it involves extending the fundamental Cloud computing technology to a network's edge thus causing the end devices and datacenters to operate in a more seamless manner. Henceforth, fog computing can be seen as the extension of Cloud computing but almost replacing the parent technology due to its effectiveness.

So, what Fog Computing Stands for?

Fog extends the Cloud much closer to all things that not just produce but also act on Internet of Things (IoT) data. Deployment of such fog nodes or devices can be done anywhere within a specific network connection. A fog node can be any device having computing, storage, & network connectivity - examples of which include routers, switches, industrial controllers, embedded servers etc. Fog computing can be applied successfully when one or more of the following conditions are met -

·         Data collection occurs across the extreme edges

·         Data generation is happening by means of millions of sources

·         Very short time, almost less than a second, is available for analyzing and acting upon the data

What Advantages Fog Computing Brings Along?

·        

       Better business agility - Developers will be able to develop fog applications quickly & accordingly deploy the same as per requirement.

·         Improved Security - By deploying physical security & cyber security solutions as deployed in your IT environment, it will be possible to safeguard fog nodes more efficiently.

·         More Useful Insights - Easily analyze all your mission-critical data locally rather than transferring it to Cloud for analysis purpose.

·         Reduced Operating Expense - Process sensitive data locally and conserve network bandwidth to bring down the operating expenses.

Fog Computing as Cloud's Future...

The Internet of Things generates two exabytes of data on a daily basis and fog computing offers Cloud that much-needed companion to effectively handle such data. Moreover, exploding data volume, velocity and variety has always been a big challenge and with fog computing this challenge is solved too as data is processed nearer to the source of its production. Also, round trip to the Cloud is eliminated as this advanced form of computing ensures accelerated response to events. Despite these interesting pros associated with fog computing, slow industry adaption will be one of the greatest limitations associated with it besides some unsolved questions on security as well. But undoubtedly fog computing will enjoy the leading edge over Cloud computing and hence it would not be wrong to consider it as the future of Cloud computing.

Research Shows Every Two Out of Three Enterprises Will Have Rising Cloud Spends in 2016

Cloud computing is said to be on a roll this year and same forecast holds true for various Cloud services providers. It's a promising scene for the Cloud service providers as companies are planning to do more spending on Cloud this year. According to reports, out of the global small & medium enterprises, 66 percent have clarified their plans for more investment in Cloud. More than 300 IT professionals were surveyed, out of which 42 percent are already expecting their Cloud spend to move up in the range of 11-30 percent. Around 27 percent professionals were sure about their Cloud spending remaining almost flat this year while only 6 percent were expecting the investment to decrease in the year 2016.

It can thus be easily predicted that enterprise Cloud service providers have quite promising growth opportunity as they cater to the diverse Cloud related requirements involving file storage & backup, application deployment and disaster recovery. Among the various professionals surveyed, 70, 51 and 62 percent have marked file storage & backup, application deployment and disaster recovery as the key priorities.

A key finding of the research was the connection between the value a company derives from Cloud infrastructure and its corresponding spending on Cloud. It's a direct proportion relation and hence more is the benefit & value an organization gains from the Cloud, more is the amount of investment that the organization prefers to make. In fact, it would be right to say that organizations are deploying Cloud due to its capability of increasing ROI and boosting business.

Another key finding that came out from the survey was that around 53 percent firms approached an external consulting firm for implementing their Cloud infrastructure successfully. However, there are always pros & cons associated with hiring an external consultant and these should be well-taken care of. Among the various service providers, Microsoft Azure (23%) tops the list while Amazon Web Services (22%) comes second, and Google (21%) ranks third, with IBM (17%) not far behind. Overall, it depends on the company's unique requirements because of which they make a selection among these service providers.

A Quick Overview of the Current Scene for Security in Cloud

Cloud security will remain to be a big issue in future unless service providers offering these services deploy fail-proof security systems that assure total security for the customer's data. However, the situation has been under control to some extent with service providers opting for advanced security measures. A recent survey has revealed that 64 percent enterprises favor Cloud infrastructure to be far more secured than legacy systems. Among the 300 survey participants, 36 percent voted Cloud to be more secure than legacy infrastructure while 28 percent said Cloud to be more secure. A rare 11 percent survey participants favored Cloud being less secure while 1 percent considered it to be quite less secure.

Absolute trust in the Cloudservice provider's capabilities is another big question mark that keeps enterprises still guessing. Had the Cloud service providers been competent enough to provide total security, there would have not been a question on adding extra layers of security. However, in the current scenario, a good number of respondents confirmed adding more security options to ensure total security of their data. Around three fourth of the total respondents confirmed deploying extra security options bedsides the custom security solutions provided by their vendor. A hefty amount in the range between $10,000-50,000 was reportedly being spent by such enterprises for deploying extra security solutions.

Irrespective of the results of the survey, Cloud infrastructure is quite secured enough due to the three features it offers including multi-faceted security, round-the-clock infrastructure monitoring and central management assuring updated security systems. In comparison to Cloud infrastructure, legacy systems are quite complicated to update as enterprises would require updating multiple security systems after scanning multiple platforms. So, legacy systems are lagging far behind when it comes to updates. As per the survey, companies consider security as the biggest challenge far ahead of problems of downtime, increased cost and training requirement. It gives a clear indication that Cloud service providers of the current industry need to focus more on strengthening the deployed security measures if they wish to win their customers’ trust.

A dominant combination of Big Data and Cloud Computing

Big Data on the cloud, and for good reasons: from aiding the discovery of new drugs  to predicting weather forecasts, earthquakes. Big Data analytics and the cloud are proving to be a dominant combination. Today scenario Cloud computing is a business enabler having a potential to take the business to the next level.

For any business, data is the most bases, for any transformation in the business; therefore, managing proliferating data is crucial.

Most of the big data projects are processed in the public cloud. Big data is required to be scaled on distributed cluster as per the demand and requirements.  The biggest factor to process big data is data gravity and data elasticity. Cloud has a big role to play to get this done.

There seems to be a dire need for the adoption of big data over cloud such that the business gets benefited with instant reporting and analytical requirements. The main reasons for efficiently managing structured, unstructured and semi-structured data of varying sizes over cloud are as follows:

Excellent bi-directional Scalability (Vertical & Horizontal)

As per the definition, Elasticity in Big Data analytics calls for innovative processing and volume requirements, in order to meet the 3V property of the big data, namely velocity, veracity and volume of the data, necessitates additional infrastructure. Additionally, the demand for processing power is not uniform, fluctuating at different times of the year. While traditional solutions would require the addition of more physical servers to the cluster in order to increase processing power and storage space, the virtual nature of the cloud allows for seemingly unlimited resources on demand. With the cloud, enterprises can scale up or down to the desired level of processing power and storage space easily and quickly.

Potential ability, power, and Capability

At this age of data explosion, today’s companies are processing 1,000 times more data than they did only a decade ago. With the proliferation of social media, 80 percent of the world's data is unstructured, and unorganized tweets, likes, videos, photos, blogs such data cannot be analyzed by traditional methods. Big Data platforms like Apache Hadoop have the capability to analyze all available 3V data. And the cloud makes the whole process easier and more accessible to both large and small enterprises.

Inexpensive and Affordable

One of the benefits of cloud computing is pay-as–you-use i.e., pay for the resources company need to store and process Big Data. In the pre-cloud era, businesses had to invest large sums of capital to purchase the necessary hardware. In order to allow for future data needs, companies typically overspent, buying more hardware than they actually required for accomplishing the task at hand. With the advent of cloud-based computing, companies can choose between hosting expensive on-site servers---which may need to be managed by IT teams or simply purchasing scalable space on demand and only paying for the storage space and processing power they actually use.

 Momentum and mobility (2M) to sustain Speed and Agility

Enterprises with traditional infrastructure used to get a new server up and running. But the real costs of time delays lies in interrupted innovation. Cloud-based services allow companies to provision whatever resources they need---as they need them. In fact, a cloud database allows hundreds and even thousands of virtual servers to be deployed smoothly and seamlessly in minutes.

The era of Big Data has arrived. And cloud capabilities are taking Big Data analytics to a new level. As the technology is more affordable and accessible to enterprises in a variety of industries, the benefits of cloud-based big data analytics will become increasingly apparent as more and more businesses get on the cloud.

The Divergent types of Big Data

In a pursuit to the software industry, big data refers to those data sets that exceed the capabilities of traditional databases. Big data is a kind of collection of divergent data, should be able to adapt to intelligence.  For many big data users, the definition of big data is an acronym for predictive analytics. For few others, the definition of big data is just an impressive amount of 1s and 0s.

The term ‘Big Data' is too general. The few different categories of Data today, are listed below:

Big Data : Such data are the classic predictive analytics problems where you want to unearth trends or push the boundaries of scientific knowledge by the mining of complex huge amount of data. A typical human genome scan generates about 200GB of data and the number of human genomes scanned is doubling every seven months, according to a study conducted by the University of Illinois (And we're not even counting the data from higher-level analyses or the genome scans from the 2.5 million plants and animal species that will be sequenced by then.) By 2025, we will have 40 exabytes of human genomic data or about 400 times more than the 100 petabytes now stored in YouTube. In general, larger the data sets, precise will be the conclusions. Still, the vast scope means rethinking where and how data gets stored and shared.

Fast Data : To seize the velocity of data in real-time is among the most important challenges of the big data. Compute of complex mathematical analytics enhances the accuracy in predicting the data at real-time. Every information or data is expected to process on a figure tip as a FAST data. Business can quickly analyze a consumer's personal preferences as they pause by a store kiosk and dynamically generate a 10% off coupon. Fast Data sets can be high in volume, but the value revolves around being able to deliver it on time. All availability of data, in real time, is generating the need to keep pace with the retrieval and process of the information. Some important data has to be forecasted immediately in real time, for example, the status of vital parameters of a patient at ICU, prediction of weather forecast, data from crucial sensors, an accurate traffic forecast in real-time than a perfect analysis an hour before, mandatory data from installed cameras at railways or airport, to detect telltale signals of intoxication to keep people away from falling onto the tracks or at airbase, etc. Big players of these fields like IBM and Cisco are building and designing their systems keeping these multifaceted properties of data in mind.

Security Challenges of Cloud Computing

Though cloud computing is upcoming technology, potentially scalable solution to the business, but it is vulnerable to lot many security challenges. Protection of data is the most significant fuss in cloud computing. Therefore, over Internet cloud needs to be re-addressed on issues like, Data Security and Privacy. The casualty of Data loss or Data leakage can have immense impress on business. The act of averting Data leak is considered most crucial and important challenges. Similarly Data Segregation and Protection has substantial influence on information security. When multiple organizations share resources there is high risk of data misusage. To avoid menace, it is necessary to secure data depositories, also the data during transition and at storage. To improve the security in cloud computing, it is vital to provide access control for data stored in cloud.

The foremost areas in data security, which needs to be introspected, are as follows:

Data Confidentiality: Top probabilities are to be examined to assure that data is fenced from any attacks. So safeguard workouts has to be done to guard data from malignant users such as Cross-site Scripting, Access Control mechanisms etc.

Data Integrity: To provide protection to the data, a concept of thin clients can be used where only few resources are available. Users should not be allowed to store their personal data such as passwords so that integrity can be assured.

Data Availability: This is among the pertinent issues in the organizations facing downtime. Data procurement supposed to be practiced as per the mutual agreement between vendor and the client. As data is housed at cloud, the data is distributed over the hybrid, heterogeneous locations, so to fetch the location of data is toilsome. The spatial difference of data locations calls for better data privacy & compliance procedures to traverse those geographic differences.  

Data Integrity: The data amendments, manipulations and modifications should be authorized to respective person ONLY.  Every transaction over cloud should follow ACID Properties to preserver data integrity. As HTTP service is incapable to support transaction, it should be implemented in the API itself.

Data Access: The encryption techniques are adopted to assure, data is shared among authorize users, only. The use of public & private key distribution mechanisms allows users to access crucial data. The data security policies must be supervening.

Confidentiality: All type of data (Structured, Unstructured, Semi-structured) is stored on remote servers. Confidentiality of data is of prime importance. User should be aware of data storage locations & data privileges over cloud. Also, user should be equipped to clear data understanding and its classification.

Breaches: A data breaches over cloud occurs due to various reasons. The Infringement of data over cloud is very high because of multiuser and multi-tenancy environment.

 Segregation: Data intrusion is very likely over cloud because of multi-tenancy environment.  To store data by multiple users on cloud servers there is a possibility of data intrusion. By injecting a client code or by using any application, data can be intruded. Therefore, data segregation is a necessity to store data separately.  Tools & Solutions like SQL injection aws, Data validation and insecure storage are very helpful to identify the Vulnerabilities with data segregation.

Storage: The concept of virtual machines is facing challenges of data storage, data accessibility & data reliability. Virtual machines, stored in a physical infrastructure may cause security risk. Data Center Operations has to have a reliable data transfer mechanisms. Organizations using cloud computing applications needs to be protected from data loss.

Solutions to Data Security Challenges Encryption is suggested as a better solution to secure information. Before storing data in cloud server it is better to encrypt data. Data Owner can give permission to particular group member such that data can be easily accessed by them. Heterogeneous data centric security is to be used to provide data access control. A data security model comprises of authentication, data encryption and data integrity, data recovery, user protection has to be designed to improve the data security over cloud. To ensure privacy and data security data protection can be used as a service. To avoid access of data from other users, applying encryption on data that makes data totally unusable and normal encryption can complicate availability. Before uploading data into the cloud the users are suggested to verify whether the data is stored on backup drives and the keywords in files remain unchanged. Calculate the hash of the file before uploading to cloud servers will ensure that the data is not altered. This hash calculation can be used for data integrity but it is very difficult to maintain it. RSA based data integrity check can be provided by combining identity based cryptography and RSA Signature. SaaS ensures that there must be clear boundaries both at the physical level and application level to segregate data from different users. Distributed access control architecture can be used for access management in cloud computing. To identify unauthorized users, using of credential or attributed based policies are better. Permission as a service can be used to tell the user that which part of data can be accessed. Fine grained access control mechanism enables the owner to delegate most of computation intensive tasks to cloud servers without disclosing the data contents.

A data driven framework can be designed for secure data processing and sharing between cloud users. Network based intrusion prevention system is used to detect threats in real-time. To compute large files with different sizes and to address remote data security RSA based storage security method can be used. In Conclusions, data security solutions should be provided to overcome these challenges and risk involved in cloud computing. Intelligent concrete standards for cloud computing security can be developed. To provide a secure data access in cloud, advanced encryption techniques can be used for storing and retrieving data from cloud. Also proper key management techniques can be used to distribute the key to the cloud users such that only authorized persons can access the data.

ERP Customization - An effects of ERP Customization Analysis

ERP is designed with huge investment and effort, to meet the global versatility of the businesses. An organization cited the need of ERP because, business requires flow of information and a mechanism which can coordinate all activities and resources to rejuvenate the business requirements.  

For business reengineering, organizations are adopting ERP. Customization has to follow the occurring business needs, without giving heed to the future scope of this transfiguring. EPR is best tailored to improve overall optimization of the business and its process.

Customization becomes a challenge sometimes because of ambiguity and unclear business requirements. Companies are looking for some ERP solutions which require No-Customization in ERP implementation. Practically, it sounds difficult, because as per the ERP reports, most of the ERP implementation in the existing system, has to go through at least minor customization.

Organization wants minimum of changes, whereas ERP implementation has to tailor changes to filter and fulfill the basic requirements of ERP System. 

This factor should be looked upon as to why most of the organizations are resistant to customization. The following factors contribute to this fact:

1.ERP customization during deployment :Most organizations have an assumption of ERP failures, resulting in over-customization instead of Customization of ERP systems, which may lead to ‘over costing’ , ‘difficult management ‘ and  ‘employees resistant to change’.  Therefore, organizations are reluctant to rely easily on any

alteration. Rather, they prefer to rely on well-proven, time-tested system.

2.ERP customization after implementation  : Enhancement becomes difficult as the code often required to be rewritten in support of newer versions (of the software), which often leads organizations to defer improvements.

3.Unable to resolve 100% organizational needs : The main challenge is, irrespective of the refine implementation of the ERP, it is not going to resolve 100% organizational need: Therefore,  ERP systems may generate a strategic disadvantage  .

4.ERP systems may lead to lots of reformation to organizational issues:  Every ERP deployment contributes to fairly significant organizational remolding and reshaping to the existing processes and functions. Such transfiguring needs to be addressed.

ERP implementation should be business driven. Any tailoring in the system should not make business difficult to adapt. 

Private, Public, or Simply Hybrid - A Closer Look into Microsoft's View & Strategy on Cloud

Microsoft's Cloud provides critical tools for connecting together Microsoft-powered private clouds and Microsoft Azure public clouds with third party service Clouds. One of the prominent Cloud service providers at present, Microsoft has established its own distinctive view on its unique Cloud offering and its composition. In this regard, it would be right to mention that having multiple options in respect to the location of your Cloud services offers a new level of agility - though there is an exception to this fact as all organizations do not desire it.

In cases where absolute control over data & data compliance is needed, you may create your Private Cloud with help of Windows Server 2016 & Microsoft System Center; it is one of the biggest leverages Microsoft provides. Organizations looking for a completely public cloud infrastructure by deploying virtual machines may look forward to Azure as it also allows for easily adding capabilities as required like the ones Hadoop provides.

Cloud service providers at present are willing to offer precisely what their enterprise customers are looking for. Be it your willingness to adopt the public cloud approach or the private one or simply a blend of the two, these service providers are almost on their toes to deliver the customization you need to keep up with the demand. For example, if you require a particular server in play, you can look forward to some service provider that allows such customization without requiring you to make any installation on-premises.

If you have been looking for the correct blend of private & public cloud, and third-party services; then Windows Azure Pack is perfect to go for as it easily plugs into Windows Server, Azure, and System Center while maintaining the Azure experience constant. However, just like there are limitations with everything, Windows Azure Pack is not an exception. As per the customers who have used it, Azure Pack is almost like Azure but not exactly Azure and this is where they want a change. Such demand has aroused as customers are willing to use the same APIs for on-premises servers as well as Azure public cloud.

It seems like Microsoft has revamped its strategy with Azure Pack so that its customers can get precisely what they have been looking for. Azure Stack is a live example of the same as it allows having one single platform for developers, thus avoiding any change of code between on-premises and Cloud.

The effectiveness of processing of big data and its delivery over cloud

Data warehouses of large organizations like of AWS(Amazon Web Services ) deploy Hadoop and other analytics clusters in multiple locations. Emergence of Cloud efficiency is oriented towards the development, testing new analytics applications and processing of Big data. Scenarios of business world need a System where real-time data processing can be handled. This requires a real time streaming of massively generated data at their disposal. It is causing a biggest challenge in front of existing IT ecosystem. Such requirement calls for the displacement of the existing options. There is a paradigm shift in the demands of real-time analytics, market needs a mature interactive BI solutions. Framework like Hadoop are caught in a tug-of-war between,  a way to extend the data warehouse and facilitating analytics across existing applications at low cost. The data gravity should be sustainable. The real time forming data sets, such as weather data, machine, census data, and sensor data, originating out of the enterprise needs to be trapped and processed over cloud.   

Enterprise requires a framework which, graciously migrate from one scale to another and to another scale. Enterprises can no more afford to allot a change on a big chunk of data , generally which is, that is frozen in time , at data centers. Say for a case, a weather channel having millions of locations reporting weather every four hours, creates billions of updates in few minutes. The efficiency of the cloud is, not only in the delivery of that data, it’s also about processing, such voluminous data. The flexibility and elastic scalability is extremely important property over cloud. During coming years, operational needs of data will bring tremendous change in the dynamism of the cloud and big data processing tools. operational challenges , compel you  to ponders upon data analytical needs, like,  the kind of data born, upon the cost of the operation also the rapidity  of data processing  etc. the range of big data technologies running on cloud have to incorporate dynamic factors the data. Analytics is addictive to BI. Big data running on elastic infrastructure has bigger role to play for big data analytics. Taking computation to data is the finest idea, but the biggest factor is , to locate the right “data gravity”, where processing needs to be done, that to at real time system.

The Essentials of Cloud Computing

With the boom of IT industry, commerce finds whole lot of opportunity for expansion and growth. Any extension in the business requires magnificent investment in infrastructure.

Therefore, the radical idea of renting instead of buying seems to be refreshing and cost effective solution. The concept of renting services and related infrastructural resources, required for the expansion of the business, over network came. This concept of cloud computing gave birth to serve the need, in context to high performance network as an essential basis of the cloud construct.

Consequently, the concept of cloud computing imperatively has to be linked with the development of the internet. Cloud! Forms a “pool of abstract “. Encompassing different characteristics of various magnitudes, cloud is highly scalable solution to administer IT infrastructure. Gradually, this solution is getting adopted by commerce of all scales, uniting the whole IT world. Excelling in providing solutions and infrastructure services for custom applications is invoiced based on its utilization.

Rent of infrastructure, software, services and bandwidths are the main functions of the cloud computing. These functionalities should be adjusted daily to the needs of the customers with profound availability and security. It includes end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs) and executes use-dependent service invoices.

An adept broadband network is essential requirement of cloud computing.  The primary and master requirements of the customers are security and availability.

Technological evolution of cloud stems from the present-day altering business scenarios; therefore, there are lots of challenges and revolutionize requirements for the up gradation of the technology.  An affordable, secure Broadband internet over cloud essentially requires fast speed, persistent and reliable connection that makes the essential basis for the optimum performance of the cloud. Over distributed computing, handling large clusters and huge databases are the biggest challenge today. Security is another issue. Data mining from the huge databases requires intelligent algorithms, maintaining security, accuracy and integrity of data at the fastest speed. A potentially protected broadband network is the only basic requirement to obtain the optimum outcomes from the cloud computing.

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Top Challenges of Cloud Computing

To retain the Advantages over competitors Cloud Service providers has to be innovatively adaptable to the inescapable businesses needs as per the current scenarios. Giant players of this field, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are adapting to the same expected expression of the market. Business Players have to be adaptive of this pragmatic approach, pushing the limits of the IT infrastructure.  Domain Driven Industries are gaining momentum in the market primarily because for reduced capital expense on innovative and trendy products/services.  

Scalability, Security shields to data breaches, is another factor. Giant Companies like Microsoft is playing pivotal role being cloud services provider, because of the same reasons. Abiding with the need of data storage and processing in petabytes, giant players have to ponder on the compute resources and solution of complex algorithms, as well. In nutshell – to run the analytics on the 3V (Varsity, Velocity, Volume) of data. Market players like Google takes huge lead over amazon, in not only building cloud based datacenters, also, scale-out storage solutions, to meet the affordable bandwidth constraints. 

Trendy Cloud Solutions are expected to the massive CPU cycles, good at meeting deep analytics/computes, mostly, to the dynamic real-time queries. The Biggest Challenge for cloud based IT infrastructure is in resolving cloud based machine learning issues/neural network problems and Artificial Intelligence, On the Data. Therefore, Today’s cloud solutions should expand horizons on add on capabilities, such that customers not only get rid of their internal data centers but, also make their business intelligent. Cloud should breathe an untapped region of Technology / Business, focusing on vertical industries in making more intelligent and specialized applications.