Today we are launching a dedicated Year In Review page with interactive maps and charts where you can explore what changed on the Internet in 2020. Year In Review is part of Cloudflare Radar.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: always interesting to track internet traffic from the infrastructure providers. Here Cloudflare but also Akamai, etc.
SaaS-based ecommerce technology offers all the features modern retailers need to serve their customers and run their businesses effectively. And because it’s hosted off-site by a vendor with subject matter expertise in their specific industry and software, good SaaS ecommerce tech is always up to date, always ready to handle new market trends, and always ready to scale as your business grows and changes.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a simple overview of cloud based ecommerce solutions that small businesses should consider.
There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this post is a bit theoretical for someone not bathing in digital transformation all day as I do (mostly). It explores what could come next but more importantly stresses an important fact: we now have a new platform - the mobile phone - in our pockets that has the potential to transform our world. We have started to see this with eCommerce - physical retail stores become irrelevant and we can price compare from anywhere - but we have yet to see the real impact of eCommerce+mobile+cloud+5G. THIS is what I think about most days...
However, an unwillingness to admit—or the inability to realize—that the issues are more complex and require more work than anticipated means that problems continue and often get worse. The research is quite clear on this point. Early cost and schedule overruns end up, on average, much worse in most programs, often costing twice as much as anticipated—and that’s despite the interventions of program leaders (see Exhibit 2 for an example analysis).
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this post highlights 6 key elements of successful technology projects. They include agile, cloud and service architecture. No surprise. What is interesting is that they can even prevent projects from busting their budget by 200%, which seems to be the "track record of comparable programs" according to McKinsey... #sad
Data fabric is a hot, emerging market that delivers a unified, intelligent, and integrated end-to-end platform to support new and emerging use cases. The sweet spot is its ability to deliver use cases quickly by leveraging innovation in dynamic integration, distributed and multicloud architectures, graph engines, and distributed in-memory and persistent memory platforms. Data fabric focuses on automating the process integration, transformation, preparation, curation, security, governance, and orchestration to enable analytics and insights quickly for business success. It minimizes complexity by automating processes, workflows, and pipelines, generating code and streamlining data to accelerate various use cases such as customer 360, data science, fraud detection, internet-of-things (IoT) analytics, risk analytics, and healthcare insights.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the net net of this report is that you should move all your data to the cloud and leverage very nimble solutions to aggregate, consolidate and massage data.
If you take nothing else away from this post, it should be that retention matters. A lot. No other metric is as singularly telling of whether your business will thrive or die. And so, the better you understand what good retention looks like for your business, the better shot you have at the former. We hope this research proves useful to you whether you’re building, investing, or just curious.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: with every product moving to a SaaS, pay as you go, model, retention has become a key metric to consider. This post delivers insights into retention metrics for GOOD and GREAT retention numbers. I'd love to see similar posts on email open rates, ecommerce conversion, app usage, etc.
The next evolution of AWS Single Sign-On enables enterprises that use Azure AD to leverage their existing identity store with AWS Single Sign-On. Additionally, automatic synchronization of user identities, and groups, from Azure AD is also supported.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is huge for inter-system operability and improved management and user experience. It is now possible to single sign-on between Azure and AWS cloud computing platforms. This is a big deal for us geeks... ;-)
This guide is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a community created reference that I leverage all the time when asked about AWS services. You should too.
Each year, we identify the top trends in SaaS spend and usage. This report takes a look at 2018 data from nearly a thousand companies and trends for 2019.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this report on the use of software as a service in companies - think products like salesforce.com, office365, mailchimp and others. The data is clear: SaaS solutions are popular and no one seems to be in charge. This will have serious implications in terms of accountability, security, privacy, regulation compliance, economies of scale, etc. Who will manage that?
IT operations teams struggle to maintain service quality when they apply legacy approaches to monitoring. Infrastructure and operations leaders responsible for monitoring should take the steps outlined here to increase their effectiveness and limit their exposure to challenges raised by the cloud.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: cloud computing has moved infrastructure to the cloud, limiting visibility and control of IT teams on key components of the infrastructure that may be required to monitor and troubleshoot. This report from Gartner highlights the different solutions and skills required to cover cloud computing solutions from private cloud to SaaS.
Cutting-edge technology gives a glimpse into the future of how things will get made, and what manufacturers must do to stay relevant.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: factories are being transformed by digital at a rapid pace and this paper provides insights into that transformation, including how technologies are being deployed today.
As I keep repeating, CAPEX is both a prerequisite to play in the big boy cloud and confirmation of customer success. Both IBM and Oracle are tens of billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure CAPEX behind Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Oracle’s spending has at least ticked up, but their spending is not enough to keep pace, much less to have any hope of catching up to the infrastructure of the big three.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: there are only 3 players in cloud computing market: Google, Amazon, microsoft. Sorry IBM & Oracle just don't make the cut. Here is a great analysis of why this is so.
Executive Chairman of Alphabet Eric Schmidt illustrates the results, way beyond expectations, achieved by companies that moved their business to the cloud.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
If you ever doubted if cloud computing is important to include in a business digital strategy, this 10min video by Google chairman provides very compelling business reasons to do so.
AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. Transferring data with Snowmobile is secure, fast and cost effective.
Farid Mheirs insight:
Moving large amounts of data to the cloud - petabytes and exabytes - would take years to do if transferred using networks and the Internet. Amazon provides its customers with dedicated and secure hard drives - they call snowballs - and truck - they call snowmobiles - to move the data from one data center to the next.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
There are limits to our network infrastructures and physical solutions often are required to migrate data to the cloud or digitize products. For example scanning paper files or converting books to digital ones often require specialized equipments in order to perform the work rapidly and cost effectively. Google had patented a book scanning equipment in order to create its Google books project in the past. I assume this same kind of innovation will start to happen in other fields as well.
Scott Crouch and his college buddies built Mark43 to help police do their job more efficiently and effectively.
Farid Mheirs insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Every industry is being transformed by digital, even those that were not so long ago considered off limit. Great example, the police force, which have systems that date from another era, can now benefit from cheap communication, cloud services, big data and analytics services to deliver mobile police insight and tools using everyday mobile phones and tablets.
Give employees more agility by bringing these consumer technologies to work.
Farid Mheirs insight:
A short run down on personal technologies coming our way soon.
WHY THISI S IMPORTANT
I've been speaking about the impact of digital technologies to transformation our personal lives and the opportunities this brings to business for a while in my "me.com" and "we.com" conferences (http://fmcs.digital/conferences). Looks like there is even more to it than originally I anticipated with the convergence of InternetOfThings, AI, BigData, and wearables. Your employees in the future will be even more connected and digital and companies should take notice and leverage it to 1) improve productivity 2) support work-life-wellness balance 3) tap the social networks to their benefits (ie. social recruiting).
"Spring cleaning" Buffer with an infrastructure audit has been an educational journey that also saved us a lot of money. Here's a recap of everything we did
Farid Mheirs insight:
Sharing experience on an IT audit that has proved very successful.
Predix, GE's cloud-based platform (PaaS) for Industrial Internet applications, combines people, machines, big data and analytics. Discover Predix today.
Farid Mheirs insight:
GE's industrial Internet means that in the future they may be best known for their infrastructure than their products and devices. Watch for it.
Surfer en toute liberté, c'est possible! Il existe des alternatives aux Gmail, Slack et autres Dropbox, qui collectent vos données en échange de leurs services. Guide pas à pas pour reprendre le contrôle.
Farid Mheirs insight:
(in french)
Afraid that Google and others know too much about you? Want to know how to live and work outside of the major tools and solutions? This blog post offers a list of solutions to help you do just that.
To address this problem, we began applying machine learning two years ago to operate our data centres more efficiently. And over the past few months, DeepMind researchers began working with Google’s data centre team to significantly improve the system’s utility. Using a system of neural networks trained on different operating scenarios and parameters within our data centres, we created a more efficient and adaptive framework to understand data centre dynamics and optimize efficiency.
Farid Mheirs insight:
Google uses artificial intelligence to analyze energy consumption in its data center to improve cooling and reduce energy consumption by 40%.
The paper also links to other most interesting links on data center operations including:
report on global data centers producing 2% of total green house emissions worldwide: http://bit.ly/2a9dm8W
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Energy is the main cost of data center operations so this is great news. Companies should thus use this news to further move their computing to the cloud as large data centers - Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others - are way more efficient than anything even large corporations can do.
This is true for energy consumption, and I contend it is also true for many other areas including security and speed of implementation. It is essential that any digital transformation make cloud computing the primary de facto standard over any on-premise operation.
The cloud space continues to evolve rapidly buy fundamental strategic principles will always apply - to the cloud industry or any other industry, for that matter. One of those principles is Michael
Farid Mheirs insight:
My friend PL Bisaillon raises a very good point: your digital product or services must be differentiated from that of the large established players. PLB highlights different ways that the cloud services industry providers can differentiate themselves from the large players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Cloud solutions in particular and digital solutions in general will be dominated by large global organizations. For digital transformation, large consulting firms such as McKinsey, Capgemini or the big4 will certainly offer services and solutions that appeal to a large audience and global organizations. However, this leaves room for regional providers - french speaking ones in Quebec province for examples - or niche players that focus on specific industries or verticals - eCommerce as is the case for my organization FMCS.digital for example. Always good to be reminded that the world will not be a monolithic one composed solely of large players.
Bosch joins the cloud computing bandwagon by becoming a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things. The company aims to have all of its electronics IoT- enabled through IoT Cloud by the year 2020.
Bosch is launching its own cloud computing services for the Internet of Things, with the first cloud facility to be located in Germany. The company is the latest to join the IoT bandwagon by becoming a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things. Currently, there are at least 5 million devices that are working with Bosch's IoT Suite. These include the staples of a connected home such as a central hub and contact sensors between the door and window.
It is interesting to see that companies in the non technology space - like Bosch - are investing heavily to be positioned for the year 2020, where they expect IoT devices to start taking hold. What are all the others doing?
Bosch is launching its own cloud computing services for the Internet of Things, with the first cloud facility to be located in Germany. The company is the latest to join the IoT bandwagon by becoming a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things. Currently, there are at least 5 million devices that are working with Bosch's IoT Suite. These include the staples of a connected home such as a central hub and contact sensors between the door and window.
It is interesting to see that companies in the non technology space - like Bosch - are investing heavily to be positioned for the year 2020, where they expect IoT devices to start taking hold. What are all the others doing?
Bosch is launching its own cloud computing services for the Internet of Things, with the first cloud facility to be located in Germany. The company is the latest to join the IoT bandwagon by becoming a full service provider for connectivity and the Internet of Things. Currently, there are at least 5 million devices that are working with Bosch's IoT Suite. These include the staples of a connected home such as a central hub and contact sensors between the door and window. Outside the home, the company's IoT Suite also includes connected parking spots that allow consumers to reserve a spot prior to arriving, and auto-racing applications that could monitor essential racecar details even in a distance through a pit crew.
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WHY IT MATTERS: this is just one infographics on Google Cloud services with others here https://thecloudgirl.dev/index.html and here https://github.com/priyankavergadia/GCPSketchnote . Unlike so many infographics these ones are actually useful... ;-)