Seven ways to create value with cloud computing

The bright future of cloud computing has led to a spate of new technologies in the cloud computing market, with seven examples of cloud services and devices that help businesses and increase their value.

1, Desktop Cloud

Applied Materials, a utility material company, has recently slashed its 17 decentralized IT teams with only one left. The company hopes to reduce the cost of PC purchase and maintenance by reducing the team. Many desktops have been virtualized from high-end CAD users around the world.

Applied Materials Vice Chief Information Officer Jay Kerley that applied Materials developed a desktop cloud.

Tying data to the desktop, he argues, is not necessary. The user will have the data in the cloud, can realize the data to follow the user at any time, only need a piece of screen, can let the user see the data. In this case, a compact desktop blade with a GPU can be worth a costly workstation. In addition, the use of high-speed network to connect each desktop blade together, you can also avoid slow speed. Kerley added that the end was to connect everything with HP remote Graphics Software (RGS) so that CAD professionals could collaborate in real time through the cloud and see their 3D designs on the screen.

2, the use of cloud to reduce innovation costs

Dave Smoley, Flextronics Analysys's chief information officer, used the cloud to reduce the cost of an innovative company with offices in 30 countries and 27 million square feet of production sites. It operates two data centers with storage capacity exceeding 400TB. The cost of flextronics for it is less than 1% of its total operating cost. ' Incredibly, tight budgets are essential to stimulating internal innovation, ' says Smoley. In this environment, he says, it often takes a lot of cost to find new ways rather than choosing solutions that are used by industry's leading manufacturers.

For example, all departments of the company need to recruit staff. When it comes to focusing on a platform, the conventional wisdom is that a human resource software should be developed like 70% of large enterprises. While another business unit is already using that kind of human-resource software, Flextronics is still working with small cloud vendors to find a simpler, more usable, faster, and more economical online tool.

"This saves US $15 million trillion in cost," Smoley said. ”

3. Internal Cloud

This example is also related to Flextronics. It wants to use social networks to accelerate global collaboration. There are many solutions on the market, but it has developed an in-house application called Whisper Enterprise Collaboration and has tested the company's small software team in Ukraine. So once again, it saves a lot of costs by exploiting internal resources.

Similarly, Flextronics has developed an in-house video-sharing app similar to YouTube, allowing engineers to share problems and solutions with colleagues around the world. The cost of this solution is only $8000 a year, and it saves hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.

Smoley said: "Other manufacturers want to sell you 250,000 dollars of equipment to store all the data, but if the equipment is outdated, why do you want to buy it?" Cloud and it consumption will have a huge impact. As long as there is money, everyone can solve these problems, but it is better to spend less money to solve these problems? ”

4, bleaching white clouds

The Clorox company's infrastructure is old and has been underfunded by it. But as the company develops to the international market, it must make some changes. It built two centralized data centers, outsourced some of the managed services and put other services into the cloud. It replaces Windows 2000, Lotus e-mail systems and BlackBerry devices with the latest version of Windows, smartphones and ipads. Although it did not have the funds to complete the upgrade plan, it increased its net income by 50 dollars.

"We've added more cloud services and web apps to achieve cost savings and improved revenue," said Ralph Loura, chief information officer at Clorox. ”

For example, it puts Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint in the cloud, testing it for 2 months before it is formally used.

Loura said: "It works well, employees can use them at home, out of the virtual private network firewall can also sync/connect the e-mail system." Because the entire e-mail system is in the cloud, its cost is low. ”

5. Move application to Cloud

HP Chief Information Officer Randy Mott is planning a strategy to improve efficiency by moving many IT applications to the cloud. Global inventories show that 8 to 10 other applications are doing the same job in other parts of HP's business. He thinks the company is concentrating it too much on the maintenance of existing infrastructure, and he suggests it should focus on innovation to increase business productivity. The inventory also shows that HP has previously opened 85 data centers in 29 countries, running more than 7,000 applications, 700 data markets and 1240 current business projects. After the new strategy, the number of HP's data centers has been reduced to 6, and the total number of applications is less than 1700, just one enterprise Data Warehouse and 500 current business projects.

Mott said: "Before the efficiency is too low, we can only 10% of the time for innovation." ”

HP divides the application software into 2 categories. Enterprise application software will form the 45% HP global IT platform and will be managed internally. The remainder will be implemented by means of a service-oriented software in the cloud.

"This requires a new generation of architectures and overcoming all obstacles to truly improve efficiency," Mott said. By doing this, we reduced the proportion of IT spending to total revenue from the previous 4% to 2%.

6. Cloud Acceleration

An industrial pump company called Pump FX Group has built a data center in Southern California that adds cloud storage. Jeff Rountree, PSG's global network manager, chose At&t-managed cloud resources. At&t has quickly made itself a key provider of cloud infrastructure. But he realised that putting everything into the cloud was an effective solution to the growing demand for storage, and it saved him a lot of trouble. First of all, saving storage costs obviously can save the total cost of the enterprise.

However, when all sorts of data are stored in the cloud in an undifferentiated manner, he predicts that storage costs will later occupy most of the cost of the enterprise. After all, most cloud vendors charge by storage capacity.

Instead of storing all the data in the cloud, Rountree found the value of the De-duplication technology and encrypted the data before sending the backup data to the At&t cloud server. He purchased Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator from riverbed Company.

"You may need to buy 100GB of storage if the data is not de-duplicated, but after processing you may want to buy 10GB of storage capacity," Rountree said. ”

To ensure the need for disaster recovery, he made at&t keep both local and remote backup copies, ensuring redundancy and failure redundancy. In this way, even if the at&t system fails, he also has a copy of the field data available on the Whitewater's device.

Rountree said: "Whitewater accelerators can optimize and duplicate data deletion data, so as to ensure cost control at the lowest level." Backup time has been cut into two parts, we have completely abandoned the practice of regular tape and disk backup. In fact, we do not need to use trucks to transport backup tapes to other locations for storage. ”

7. Cloud Philosophy

The cloud even raises philosophical questions about how it changes the world. "The cloud is the best medium for fast, schrage testing and testing," says Michael, the Institute of Digital Operations at MIT Sloan College. ”

He refers to the future development expectations of flexible infrastructure. He says many organizations are starting to focus on the basics of business and the value they provide. Being a technology company is not enough. Infrastructure, he says, is a very bad brand, and spending often exceeds expectations. It has to change this phenomenon, and he thinks the cloud is the best solution. But he warns that many it vendors are under threat from the cloud.

"Business managers who used to be able to solve problems with IT pros can now solve those problems themselves through the cloud," Schrage said. ”