Cloud analysis will be everywhere

Dr. Vonna Wigger, Global vice president and CTO of Amazon

In the 2014, we saw how cloud computing drives great innovation in consumer products and enterprise-class products, and becomes the new norm for organizations of different sizes. Today, cloud computing has become an engine of innovation for many companies, including not only emerging companies such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Hailo, WeTransfer and SoundCloud, but also the hundred-time Us (bristol-myers Squibb), Shell, Unilever and the Spanish Mainfrey (mapfre) insurance Group and other mature enterprises. At the same time, we also see a large number of Chinese enterprises also through cloud computing accelerated the pace of innovation, faster expansion of the international market. Millet is serving global smartphone users through cloud computing, and future energy is managing intelligent wind farms around the world through cloud computing, which provides security to users around the world through cloud computing. There is no doubt that cloud computing has had a broad impact.

Although we have witnessed a variety of impressive innovations, everything is just beginning. In the 2015 and beyond, the cloud will bring exciting innovations that touch every aspect of our lives. In the various businesses that our clients are doing, I have selected eight trends that will develop rapidly in 2015 and beyond.

Cloud analysis will be everywhere

Cloud analysis affects almost every consumer and every business area. Typically, consumers do not notice the cloud because the cloud provides support behind different applications. But cloud analysis is becoming more common. From retail advice to genomics based product development, from financial risk management to start-ups measuring the effectiveness of their new products, from digital marketing to rapid processing of clinical trial data, these areas reach new levels by leveraging cloud-based analysis.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) has clearly seen this trend as our data warehousing services Amazon redshift has become the fastest growing cloud service in the company's history. We have even found that Amazon redshift is the first cloud service used by many businesses. As more and more companies begin to understand the impact of analysis on their development, we expect the service to be able to achieve an explosive growth in 2015.

Cloud will implement self-service analysis

In the past, the organization's internal analysis system was at the top of legacy it: running a centralized data warehouse on dedicated hardware. In modern enterprises, this situation is unacceptable. Analysis plays a vital role in helping business units become more agile, respond more quickly to business needs, and develop products that customers really need. But this kind of centralized, inflexible old-style data warehouse pattern often causes enterprise user to get into trouble. The cloud based analysis completely changed that.

Business units now use the resources of cloud services to quickly create their own data warehouses in the cloud and to choose the size and speed of the data warehouse based on their needs and budgets. It can be a small data warehouse that runs during the day, has 2 nodes, a large data warehouse that runs only a few hours in the afternoon of Thursday, has 1000 nodes, or a data warehouse that runs nightly to provide the staff with the required data the next day.

The use of analysis by the Financial Times for global business publications is a good example. The Financial Times has a history of more than 120 years, has changed in a number of ways, by using the cloud to run business Intelligence (BI) workloads, to analyze all reports, to personalize newspapers, to provide readers with a more customized reading experience, and to radically change the way that content is provided to readers.

With the new business intelligence system, the FT is able to analyze 140 reports in real time every day, and to improve the agility of the analysis task, which can be shortened from several months to a few days. In addition, the Financial Times has expanded its business intelligence to provide more targeted advertising to readers. By using Amazon Redshift, the FT can handle 120 million separate events a day and integrate internal logs and external data sources to create a more dynamic newspaper for readers.

Clouds make everything smarter

Lately, everything can become "smart"-smart watches, smart clothes, smart TVs, smart homes and smart cars. Most smart-device software runs on the cloud.

Whether it's a home thermostat, an activity tracker on the wrist, or a smart movie recommendation on a pretty super High-definition TV, they're all driven by an analysis engine running on the cloud. Because the "intelligence" of these smart products exists in the cloud, this has spawned a new generation of devices. The realization of the lighting of the intelligent Philips Citytouch is a good example.

Philips Citytouch is an intelligent street lighting management system for the whole city. It provides a network of road lighting solutions that allow the entire suburbs and cities to intelligently control street lighting and manage the environment after dark in real time. City managers can maintain good lighting on streets with high human traffic, increase brightness when bad weather or ambient light is too dark, or dim lights in sparsely populated industrial areas.

The technology has been used in Prague and suburban London. Citytouch is using the cloud as a back-end technology to run the system and extract valuable information from a large amount of data collected from sensors installed on streetlights. This data allows city managers to better understand the city after dark and adopt more effective lighting management programs to avoid excessive light pollution adversely affecting urban dwellers and wildlife.

Cloud analysis will improve urban life

Cloud analysis can use urban environmental information to improve the living conditions of urban dwellers around the world. The work being done in Chicago is a good example. Chicago is one of the first cities to install sensors to permanently measure air quality, light intensity, volume, heat, precipitation, wind and transportation.

Data from these sensors are analyzed in the cloud to explore ways to improve the lives of residents. The data sets collected by the Chicago "Array of Things" project will be exposed on the cloud for researchers to find innovative ways to analyze data.

Many cities have expressed interest in emulating the use of the cloud in Chicago to improve urban life, and many European cities have begun to act, such as the Peterborough City Council in Britain. The City council of Peterborough has released its collection of data to involve local communities in innovation. The different data sets published by Parliament are integrated. For example, people can relate crime data to weather conditions to help Parliament understand whether there will be more burglaries in hot weather, so that they better distribute local police, or link medical data to weather conditions and find out trends and patterns. With the help of the cloud, the data began to open up to the public to drive innovation.

Cloud will realize industrial networking

When we think of the Internet of Things (IoT), we usually focus on what the internet of things means to consumers. But in 2015, we will witness the rise of a different internet of things-industrial networking. Industrial machinery will be connected to the Internet to transfer data to the cloud to gain insight into usage, improve efficiency and avoid downtime.

Whether it is GE's installation of gas turbines, Shell's sensors in the well, the industry-cleaning locomotive team, or the use of deconstruction sensors on construction sites, all of these will send data streams continuously to the cloud for real-time analysis.

Cloud will implement video analysis

Videos have long been used for archiving, playback, and viewing. With the powerful processing power of cloud, a new trend emerges: The video is analyzed as a data stream. This is called video content analysis (VCA), which is suitable for retail, transportation and other fields.

A common area of application is in places where cameras are installed, such as malls and large retail stores. Video analysis can help the mall understand the flow pattern. Analysis can provide human flow, residence time, and other statistical information. This allows retailers to improve their store layout and store marketing effects.

Another common area of application is real-time crowd analysis of large events such as concerts to understand the flow of people throughout the site and prevent congestion, thereby improving the participants ' experience. The transport sector also uses a similar approach to divert traffic, monitor stalled vehicles on highways and objects on high-speed trains and other transport problems.

Another example of the innovative use of video content analysis in the consumer sector is Dropcam. Dropcam analyzes the video transmitted by the networked webcam to provide alerts to customers. Dropcam is currently the largest source of Internet video content production, and it transmits more data to the cloud than YouTube.

VCA also become an important tool of sports management. The team is using video analysis to analyze players from different angles. For example, in a Premier League game, the team used a number of recorded video streaming analysis data to improve the performance of players and promote specific training programs.

The baseball team of Major League Baseball (MLB) is using video analysis to provide better real-time analysis on the field's television screen, while the NFL is using VCA to automatically make a compact version of the rugby game, shortening video time by 60%-70%.

Cloud will change medical analysis

Data analysis is rapidly becoming the core of the analysis of health risk factors and the improvement of patient care. While the healthcare industry faces reduced costs and optimized patient care levels, the cloud is playing a vital role and helping to achieve digital healthcare.

The cloud supports innovative solutions such as Philips healthsuite--a platform for managing medical data and providing support for physicians and patients. The Philips Healthsuite Digital platform analyzes and stores 15PB of patient data collected from 390 million imaging examinations, medical records and patient input, providing operational data for medical personnel that can directly affect patient care. This is revolutionizing the medical status of billions of of people around the world. In 2015 and beyond, we expect to see clouds play a greater role in promoting patient diagnosis and treatment.

Cloud will implement security analysis

From online shopping to medical care to home automation, analysis has been applied in so many new areas that it is critical to analyze the security and privacy of data. The deep integration of encryption capabilities in the storage and analysis engine and the ability of users to have keys ensures that only users of those services have access to the data.

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(Edit/yuping)