The Cloud Noise is Dying…Shhhhh. Quiet please… Can you hear it?

Posted November 8th, 2017

By:  Marcelo Oliveira, Director Datacenter, Infrastructure, and Continuity Solutions at Cable & Wireless Business The noise around the public cloud taking over the world has significantly lowered over the past few months. Don’t you think? As I wrote on my post in late 2015 “Cloud? No More”, it is not that cloud will cease existing, it is just that companies have really started to benefit from the cloud as another component of their corporate IT toolset. Once more: cloud is not going to terminate the need for the in-house corporate IT infrastructure, destroy the business of thousands of hosting companies, or quit employment of all IT people. The beauty of the cloud is to allow companies to do things that were not possible before. Like what? Think Machine Learning. While Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and others have the money to hire “crazy” PhDs to create the most powerful tools to run supervised and unsupervised learning processes, the vast majority of other companies do not, but can now benefit from the investment that the big tech companies have made. How? Start from a bucket of data. Any data that may be hosted in your datacenter, on your hosting partner datacenter, on the cloud, on your disaster recovery environment. By applying Machine Learning, you will be able to analyze a combination of structured and unstructured data, be it photos, videos, sounds, financial data, common language, etc. The results are phenomenal. Lots of real business value:
  • Sort out good data from junk data in order to reduce backup volume and save in storage and backup software licenses.
  • Identify the “sentiment” behind your call center calls. Investigate further the negative ones and use the positive ones to generate more business
  • Preemptively protect financial and healthcare data by identifying malicious content in files
  • What do you think of LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and other recommendations when you access their sites? You can have the same for your business with affordable Machine Learning
What else has the cloud enabled? Think large, complex industries like… hmmm… let’s say Oil and Gas. The digital transformation enabled by the cloud is tearing down silos, increasing agility, and reducing operational costs, to say the minimum. Applications to support the engineering, procurement, and construction of humongous plants are now integrated with the on-going operational applications allowing for a seamless transition from implementation to operation. Same is happening in several other industries. Now… Think disaster recovery… Yeah, yeah, this is not new on the cloud. I have been leading CWB’s cloud products for six years, and we have offered DRaaS since then. Now, as I mentioned above, combine DRaaS with Machine Learning. Not so dull anymore, huh? Currently, the data sitting idle in your disaster recovery site is generating nothing more than costs for your company. Again, by applying Machine Learning on this DR data, you can now generate decision making information for your company while there is no impact on the performance of your production applications. Did I get your attention? After all these cloud years (we have just entered the second decade of cloud and over 40 years of history of hosting), there still are some information technology professionals worried about someone moving their cheese. If you are one of those, please read here. You may have to learn some new tricks but the benefits are unlimited. Use the cloud, don’t shy away from it. Leverage the benefits, don’t try to hide behind your physical servers. Let’s talk. Marcelo Oliveira marcelo.oliveira@cwc.com / +1-305-934-4686

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