Cloud computing Application Case Introduction and Analysis

Through the introduction and analysis of the cloud computing application cases of the U.S. federal, local government and some global famous enterprises in the financial and pharmaceutical industries, this paper summarizes the common characteristics of the cloud computing services adopted by the Government and the global famous enterprises to abandon the traditional IT system infrastructure. Finally, some ideas about the development strategy of cloud computing in our country are put forward.

The subprime crisis, which originated in America in the 2008, gradually turned into a financial tsunami, triggering a global financial crisis. Economists have likened the financial crisis to the Great Depression of the United States in the late 30, which shows the extent and severity of its impact. Today, the US sovereign credit rating has been downgraded, the European sovereign debt crisis continues to deteriorate and the global economy has yet to recover from the crisis. Faced with such a weak global economic situation, fragile financial market system, after such a severe impact and impact of enterprises, how to effectively control the cost, meet the needs of enterprise development, seize the fleeting market opportunities, become its success or failure of the key. Recently, some large multinational enterprises and government departments decisively adopted cloud computing services to improve internal management, support business integration, and achieved more significant results. This paper introduces and analyzes the application cases of cloud computing in some departments and enterprises of federal, local government, finance industry and medicine industry.

United States federal Government-by the supremacy of cloud insurance

The U.S. Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) is responsible for the implementation of the car subsidy replacement policy (government subsidy for the upgrading of old vehicles) and the construction of the business system, the selection of an IT system in a traditional data center and a specially designed commercial application system. The bureau predicts that 250,000 trading applications may be available within 4 months, but only 90 days after the system was put into operation in July 2009, the system handled nearly 690,000 transactions. The system is overloaded within three days of the first transaction, resulting in a large number of transactions that cannot be processed and multiple system paralysis. The federal government's $1 billion trillion of earmarked funds for the construction of the system is nearly exhausted within 1 weeks of the system's launch. To this end, 2 days after the federal government emergency additional funding of 2 billion U.S. dollars for the system in accordance with the initial volume of transactions 3 times times to expand, time-consuming to complete.

These cases are not cases. The current IT application environment of the United States federal Government has the problems of low resource utilization, division of resource demand, duplication of information system, difficult system environment management and too long purchase time, which affects the ability of the federal government to provide services to the public. To change the situation, the US government has studied and planned the cloud computing model, released the US federal government cloud Computing Strategy white paper (Cloud Computing Strategy), which has dramatically increased the focus, research, management and application of cloud computing models.

Vivek Kundra, former chief information officer of the federal government, said by using cloud computing, it is possible to upgrade and restore the functions of CIOs, from "Past focus on data centers, network operations, system security," and so on, to focus on the issues facing the country, such as health, education and the information gap. In addition, cloud computing will optimize the configuration of the Federal data Facility environment, enabling government departments to reduce the cost of maintaining IT systems in their data centers by virtualizing and consolidating existing IT infrastructures. Research shows that cloud computing has enormous potential to address the shortcomings of the old information system construction and applications faced by the Government, to improve the efficiency of the Government, to help the government to achieve a high reliability and innovative service mode, without being subject to the availability of resources; from three aspects of efficiency, elasticity and innovation, Cloud computing has advantages unmatched by traditional data centers:

Efficiency: The asset utilization rate can be increased from less than 30% to 60% to 70%, and the fragmented requirements and system construction will be transformed into integrated system requirements and system building plans, reducing management difficulties for many systems and improving management efficiency.

Elasticity: The new information system, which has a long cycle and large investment, is transformed into a method of demand, quantity and payment, reducing the system capacity from several months to near real-time, increasing the capacity of the system, and enhancing the rapid response to the emergency needs of information systems.

Innovation: Shift the focus from management assets to management services, release the heavy burden of asset management, and transform the more conservative government culture into a culture that encourages and integrates enterprise and industry innovation technology.

To make the most of the benefits of cloud computing, the federal government has put forward the cloud priority principle (Cloud first Policy), requiring federal agencies to use the cloud computing model as one of the options for assessing and measuring security, reliability, and so forth before investing in new IT projects. To meet the requirements is a priority selection, and the various agencies to the respective information systems Resources acquisition strategy for the new evaluation, the cloud Computing solution Application plan into the scope of investigation and evaluation, as part of the budget formulation process research and demonstration.

In addition, the federal government's 80 billion dollars in information technology investment budget, allocated 25% (20 billion U.S. dollars) for government agencies using cloud computing solutions. According to estimates, 30% of the federal government's IT investments were spent on data center infrastructure construction in 2010, but this part of the investment does not produce real quantifiable productivity. The cost can be saved by using the cloud model to provide IT services. At the same time, the federal government's Data center consolidation plan, launched in February 2010, to cut at least 800 government data centers by 2015 years ago and consolidate isolated, fragmented systems and numbers can further save a lot of investment and costs.

According to incomplete statistics, the current U.S. federal government agencies have used the situation of cloud computing:

The U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Commission uses Amazon's resilient cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services to build a recovery,gov Web site, saving $334,000 in 2010 and 2011 estimated $420,000 IT system cost savings And later will save more.

The United States Department of Defense Army Experience Center (AEC) abandoned the use, upgrade update old customer relationship management system, selected based on cloud services as a service (SAAS), the cost from the upgrade of the old system of more than $ $54,000 dollars.

The United States Department of Defense Air Force Personal Information Center for the information system based on cloud computing, the query time from 20 minutes down to 2 minutes, each year to save $ Million cost.

The US General Services Administration (GSA) migrated the mail system to cloud computing, reducing 17 redundant data centers worldwide, saving $1500 million dollars;

The US Department of Agriculture (DOA) migrated the mail system to cloud computing, consolidating 21 fragmented messaging systems, saving $2700 million dollars.

The federal government departments and agencies that have completed and submitted applications for cloud computing plans and budgets have reached 27.

The US government has a higher level of strategic significance for such a large scale of cloud computing applications and investments. According to its domestic status and international situation, the main goal of the United States Government is to reduce the deficit, develop the economy, expand employment, and continue to maintain global hegemony. The traditional approach seems to be both impossible. Cloud computing provides cheap, large-scale computing resources that can reduce energy consumption and reduce government spending; In addition, the US remains the world leader in High-tech, especially high-end cloud industries in the IT industry, which are private enterprises. By purchasing cloud services, the U.S. Government further encourages and supports the cloud industry, allowing cloud companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon to help the United States maintain its leading edge and dominance, and continue to lead the world in social, cultural, recreational and ideological terms, Strategically significant.

Los Angeles city government-by cloud propaganda green energy saving idea

Los Angeles Government, due to the current use of the traditional messaging system to provide small mailbox capacity, does not support mobile devices and high cost of system maintenance, the old mail system is dissatisfied with the system to switch to Google Apps provided by the cloud computing services, and signed a $ more than 7 million worth of contracts, Google provides 5-year mail service for its 34,000 employees.

This service, based on cloud computing technology, ability to provide Los Angeles government with enhanced synergy for instant messaging and video conferencing so that its employees do not have to be able to work efficiently at the same location; document sharing enables documents to be more efficient in joint authoring and editing, with easy access to messaging systems for any computer or mobile device. Increase availability, dramatically expand storage space, and employee mailbox capacity is 25 times times the capacity of the old system, saving IT resources, and serving other more important urban construction projects with the resources originally running the mail system.

Using the new mail system service, the Los Angeles government is expected to save $5.5 million trillion in cost savings of $20 million trillion in investment returns. 65% to 80% of employees are expected to meet the needs of all Office software services through the use of Google Apps services. Savings of nearly 100 servers in 5 years can save 750,000 of dollars in electricity bills.

The biggest problem currently plaguing U.S. local governments is to get out of poverty, where most local governments are financially embarrassed, with heavy debt burdens and frequent bankruptcies. Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg a bankruptcy reorganization on October 12, 2011 for failing to repay a large debt. In addition, local governments in the United States are now more pressured than the federal government to conserve energy and reduce emissions. The application of cloud computing can optimize resource allocation and realize green energy saving. California State is the first state in the United States to sign an agreement with the federal government to strictly limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, Los Angeles as the largest city in California, shouldering the responsibility of energy saving and emission reduction. To this end, Los Angeles in recent years to vigorously publicize and promote green energy-saving environmental protection measures to protect its film and entertainment industry and tourism and other pillar industries sustainable development. The application of cloud computing services to build its mail system, in addition to the optimization of resource allocation, reduce fiscal expenditure targets, with a greater use of IT resources to promote the rationalization of the role of environmental protection symbolic significance and publicity, on the one hand, to set an example, to effectively meet the emission reduction obligations; To drive more enterprises to fully understand and understanding of cloud computing green features and reduce the cost advantages.

III. Financial Industry AON Corporation (Yee Group)-to reduce operational risk by cloud

People who love football, especially Manchester United, must be familiar with the name Aon. The three letters were printed on the chest of Manchester United's 2010-11 uniforms. Yee on Group (AON Corporation) is a U.S. listed company, the world's top 500 companies, 2010-year income $85.12 billion. Insurance brokerage business and human information and outsourcing business are the two pillar industries, of which the subordinate insurance brokerage company is the world's largest insurance brokerage company and reinsurance brokerage company, and provide risk management services; Subordinate Yee Aon is a leading global human resource consulting and human Resource outsourcing service company.

The company's two pillar industries are involved in a large number of customer data, business data and statistical analysis. Over the past 20 years, the company has completed more than 450 mergers and acquisitions projects, each of which has its own customer relationship management system. With the rapid growth of the company and the completion of several mergers and acquisitions projects, Aon company urgently needs to seek to manage its customer information and business data through a standardized customer relationship management solution across the entire group. Problems that need to be addressed include: achieve integration with the company's existing systems, facilitate deployment and removal of existing, relatively independent customer relationship management system databases, meet broader synergy requirements, and allow IT organizations to focus more on business activities rather than spend a lot of time managing the IT infrastructure that supports versatility.

To collaborate with subsidiaries and nearly 60,000 employees in more than 120 countries, the company integrates business in such industries as insurance brokerage agency, Risk asset Management, human resource consulting and outsourcing, and the group has a wide range of cloud computing products, Service providers (including PeopleSoft) have chosen the Salesforce.com cloud computing services, which provide rapid IT system resource deployment capabilities and use cloud computing to meet the requirements of the Group's system standardization. At present, the group has replaced and eliminated more than 30 old different versions of the revenue system, forming a unified global standardized platform for the distribution of more than 80 countries in the world, more than 7,000 company employees daily use. The platform is connected with the asset pricing system and billing system, can provide real-time business development data, key monitoring indicators of the report, at any time to understand the whole group of business development status.

Risk management and insurance brokerage agency business to the risk of the quantitative model and the corresponding risk management procedures [Z2]. The company uses cloud computing as a customer relationship management, after in-depth analysis and comparison of the risks of traditional computing and cloud computing to choose cloud computing. The information silo caused by the traditional calculation method, the management difficulty caused by the isolated structure, the inconsistent information, the low information effect and so on, bring the huge operation risk to the enterprise. On the other hand, information and data are distributed and stored in the traditional way, which has high complexity and low availability, For information and data security lacks the unified executable electronic data Security level management system, the electronic data and the information exists the latent risk, the internal security management flaw is more difficult to prevent, causes the customer information and the data to be more likely to divulge or improper use. And now choose cloud Computing mode, through the confidentiality Protocol and service level agreement to standardize cloud computing service provider to meet the specific data security level requirements, to achieve data cloud storage and minimize human participation, intervention, to achieve data, especially sensitive data security level requirements. At the same time, the information of the cloud centralized storage is also conducive to privacy protection, compliance with anti-money-laundering KYC (fully understand your customers) and other laws and regulations requirements, improve information, data compliance. Along with security authentication, authorization, encryption, data drift, audit and other security technology development and its in the cloud computing services, especially in the network transmission, cloud data processing, cloud storage applications, improve the security and compliance of customer information and business data. On the contrary, the idea that cloud computing is generally safer, more reliable, and less risky than traditional computing is more conducive to reducing the risk of business operations. This is why a company that controls risk, chooses the cloud service model rather than the traditional CRM package to manage the company-wide customer relationship.

Iv. Pharmaceutical Industry Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly)-driving innovation with the cloud

Founded in 1876, Lilly Company, has now developed into one of the world's top ten pharmaceutical companies, the world's 500 strong enterprises, 2010-year income $230.76 billion.

The deterioration of the macroeconomic situation and the fierce competition in the pharmaceutical industry, courtesy to the company's sales revenue appears to decline year in, from 2008 sales revenue year-on-year growth of 9%, gradually decreased, 2009 year-on-year growth of 7%, 2010 year-on-year growth of 6%. To increase the company's sales revenue, Lilly needs to develop more new drugs that meet market demands. To that end, the company has been increasing its investment in new drug research and development in recent years.

However, in the pharmaceutical industry, the average cost of drugs from the initial laboratory research stage to the final placement in the medicine cabinet is 12 years, costing a total of 359 million dollars, with the main time and expense spent on clinical trials, regulatory testing and marketing and sales. In the initial stage of drug research and development in the laboratory, a large number of experiments and calculations need strong computing power as a support, but to this large increase of IT resources input will be diverted to the late test funds, increase the difficulty and time of drug listing. Eli Lilly is forced to cut spending on it fixed assets in the face of relatively limited research and development costs, but there is an urgent need for faster and easier access to computing resources. The Company believes that its traditional it fixed assets and infrastructure has curbed its business development, starting last year to implement a policy transformation to achieve the cost of some IT system resources from the fixed expenditure model to the floating expenditure model.

Currently, Lilly uses solutions from companies such as Google, Amazon Web Service, Alexa and Drupal to quickly install and deploy new computing resources:

Integrated Google Apps data sharing-amazon sqs,s3,simpledb data access-amazon, transmits, Drupal, s3.;saas-alexa; basic platform Services -amazon EC2.

Through transformation and integration, Lilly doubled the time it took to deploy new computing resources, allowing the company to significantly reduce start-up time for new drugs, reducing time-to-market for new drugs: 7.5 weeks to 3 minutes for new servers, and new collaborative environments reduced from 8 weeks to 5 minutes. 64-node Linux cluster reduced from 12 weeks to 5 minutes.

By using cloud computing, the company has significantly reduced its spending costs. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Elastic Computing Cloud) provides cloud computing services for large pharmaceutical companies, with a cloud cluster of 3,809 computing units, each equipped with 8 cores, 7GB of memory, and a total of 30472 core processors, 26.7TB of memory, 2PB disk space, can provide a strong computing power for pharmaceutical companies. The cost of using the cluster is $1279 dollars per hour. If the pharmaceutical companies use their own construction methods to build the above-mentioned system resources and infrastructure, huge capital investment and time-consuming construction cycle is unbearable for pharmaceutical enterprises, even if completed, will also face the problem of waste of resources and idle. By contrast, Lilly's strategy of using cloud computing services to shift from a fixed-spending model to a floating-expense model has achieved the goal of cutting it fixed assets and related costs, while satisfying the requirement of acquiring strong computing power in a timely manner.

The most important innovation of drug development Enterprises is the need for timely information, extensive information sharing, good collaborative tool support, a large number of calculations and experiments. In addition to high research and development costs, research and development work itself has a very high risk of research and development. Faced with a lot of upfront research and development costs, pharmaceutical companies are often caught in a dilemma: the construction of information systems to meet a large number of computing capacity needs will cost a lot of money, and research and Development found that the project does not have a good market prospects or development value, leading to the loss of early investment, the cost of building a large price data center, The precious funds into idle fixed assets, although the scale of assets is expanding but sales revenue, profitability is declining. Encourage innovation, will lead to higher research and development risks, avoid the risk of research and development to inhibit innovation. By contrast, using cloud computing services, Project architecture design, development and testing can be done with only a small amount of money, and it is worthwhile to evaluate the project at any time, and to build a larger scale for projects with good prospects; The cost is negligible, which minimizes the risk of research and development. And more importantly, cloud computing has broken the barriers to internal information flow in the past, and researchers can use the Collaborative communications cloud service to share information in a larger context, and find innovative ways and means of frequent communication and collision of ideas. On the other hand, through the use of open source development concept, the company's staff to expand the participation of different projects, greatly improve the speed and quality of research and development. Courtesy to the company through the application of cloud computing, spawned the development of the source of power, encourage, promote innovation and development.

The above 4 cases show that enterprises, governments to abandon the traditional IT system infrastructure and choose cloud computing services have the following common features:

1, the service coverage is wide, the geographical span is big. For business and branch offices across a number of countries and regions of large enterprises, users around the world. The regional data center and fragmented business system can not satisfy the enterprise's daily management and fully grasp the business dynamic demand, can not comprehensively and objectively reflect the survival and development of the enterprise, but also affect the market environment rapid response, rational allocation of scarce resources ability. Government official web site or IT system for the entire national, users of high degree of decentralization.

2, IT system data quantity, the use quantity is big and the change amplitude is big, presents certain periodicity but the beginning and end time is difficult to predict. As in the case of the pharmaceutical industry research and development work, with the beginning and end of research and development work, the required IT system resources to show a strong cyclical change, and research and development work is subject to the medical technology and market demand. In the field of human resource consultancy and outsourcing, there is a significant change in data volume due to the volatility of the number of personnel and the amount of outsourcing, which is sensitive to the macroeconomic situation and employment situation, which leads to the elasticity demand of IT system resources.

3. Deployment of IT systems requires high time. Regardless of the financial industry, the pharmaceutical industry or all levels of government, in the face of demand often to make timely reflection, otherwise delay business opportunities, or provoke national discontent.

It is unavoidable that the development of cloud computing still faces some unresolved issues, such as security and privacy, one of the main concerns of the US government's use of cloud computing, which has long hampered the US government's large-scale application of cloud computing. The US government uses cloud computing to build its recovery.gov website, there are stringent requirements for cloud computing service providers, for example, before using cloud IaaS services, the US Recovery and Reinvestment Commission requires cloud computing service providers to make commitments and prove their capabilities to ensure that any data contained in the site is not stored outside of U.S. territory and must comply with the U.S. federal government Laws and regulations on network, information, data security and privacy protection. Amazon, a cloud computing service provider, spends a lot of time combing through the relevant laws and regulations, applying the required certificates and authorizations to ensure consistency with the requirements of the relevant legislation.

But strict demands and cautious attitudes have not stopped the development of cloud computing, but have prompted cloud computing to make a successful attempt to meet regulatory requirements and secure data information. Even public information from the federal government's Recovery and Reinvestment committee says the cloud computing IaaS Service provides more robust network attack protection and real-time system tampering monitoring than traditional US government websites, making the site more secure than ever.

At present, the global economy has a lot of uncertainty, the enterprise survival environment is still grim. Even large enterprises, the world's top 500 companies, and even the U.S. federal government are also exploring, seeking to reduce information systems costs, improve the efficiency of the solution, optimize resource allocation and green energy-saving ways and means. In the face of the current situation, the realization of it fixed assets and related costs from the fixed expenditure model to the floating expenditure model, flexible allocation of resources on demand, the release of limited capital optimization, configuration to higher profits in the field, for enterprises to provide a new IT system construction solutions. Cloud computing can provide the relevant resources according to the enterprise's own demand, make the enterprise convenient, the economical use from the information system infrastructure to the application platform and even the application software omni-directional service, will be more and more extensive enterprise and the government attention and the choice.

Our government has been the development of cloud computing as a new generation of information technology, the focus of the selection of the pilot cities to develop cloud computing industry and to encourage and support. In addition, there are some duty-bound work to be studied and resolved by the Chinese government seriously.

First of all, we should seriously consider and study the "Government cloud" procurement and application. During the "Twelve-Five" period, the government departments should give full play to the characteristics and advantages of the cloud computing model, use cloud computing to set up e-Government public platform, encourage the application of traditional e-government to cloud computing, and solve the problem of interconnection, business synergy and resource sharing of e-government in China. To better accomplish the task of scientific development and transformation mode. The government chooses the model of the purchase cloud service, can also support, encourage and promote the rapid development of some key cloud computing enterprises, improve the technical ability, service ability and management ability of the key enterprises before, in and behind the cloud, thus driving the benign development of the whole industry.

Second, we should speed up the development and introduction of cloud computing industry standards and regulatory systems. Cloud-related enterprises at home and abroad the innovative ability and development speed is very fast, both like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, such as the International cloud computing enterprise giants, but also to the CICC data systems companies such as domestic excellent, high-quality cloud backend service provider. After the rapid development of cloud computing technology, the Government should give full play to its functions, manage and guide the enterprise's behavior, standardize the operation of the market, set up service standards, and ensure the long-term, stable and healthy development of industry, industry and Enterprise.

Finally, the importance of vigorously developing cloud computing should be further emphasized. After years of hard work, China's Lenovo, Huawei and other information and communications in the field of large enterprises have achieved great success, in some areas of its product maturity and coverage can even be comparable to world-class enterprises, in the international market is also actively engaged in competition, acquisition of overseas assets or to undertake overseas construction projects. However, the emergence and development of cloud computing will trigger the revolution of the whole information technology industry, faced with such a situation should not rely on their own power alone, if the core technology, industry standards, product pricing, business model and other strategic points by foreign forces, the Chinese Government and related enterprises will be controlled, not only loss of product overseas market share, The domestic market will also be divided by the powerful enterprises, so that the information industry into a passive, direct threat to national data sovereignty (sovereignty); Without cloud computing, there is no national information security. In addition, with the idea of green environmental protection and the efforts to protect environmental energy and reduce emissions, the Government should identify reasonable use of resources, optimize resource allocation, ensure enterprise demand, and achieve green energy-saving development path. believe that through the joint efforts of the Government and related enterprises, cloud computing must have a bright future, cloud computing will provide people with faster, more convenient, safe, low-cost services.