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6 Disruptive Cloud Computing Trends in 2022

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a cloud computing explosion was seen when work was forced to go virtual, and companies had no choice but to embrace cloud technologies. In 2022, continued rapid adoption of cloud computing technologies is likely.

According to research by International Data Corporation (IDC), total worldwide spending on “whole cloud” (the hardware and software underpinning the cloud technology supply chain, and the cloud managed services) – will cross $1.3 trillion by the year 2025 at a CAGR of 16.9%[1].

Here are 6 of the most disruptive cloud computing trends that are expected to rule in 2022.

1. Hybrid cloud environments

Tech giants of the world, like Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, are focusing more on the rollout of their hybrid cloud models. The hybrid model will give the best-of-both (public and private clouds) world to businesses. Hybrid cloud computing services are, in no way, about compromising between the private and public cloud. Hybrid is more about combining the advantages of the two.

A BCC Research report found that the global hybrid technologies market is expected to reach $98.8 billion by the year 2022, at a CAGR of 20.1% for the period of 2017-2022 [2].

On one hand, the information that needs to be comparatively more accessible than others can be stored on the public cloud (like Azure or AWS) and accessed via apps and tools. On the other hand, the critical, confidential and more sensitive data can be stored on private cloud servers to which the access is limited and can be closely monitored.

In 2022, as we financially recover from the pandemic, more organizations will realize the power of hybrid cloud models and start will embracing hybrid technologies.

2. Serverless cloud

This is a relatively new cloud computing trend that is expected to gain traction in 2022. Also referred to as ‘functions-as-a-service’ (FAAS), the serverless cloud would mean that companies wouldn’t have to lease servers or pay for a certain fixed amount of cloud storage.

Serverless clouds would be available as a ‘pay-as-you-go’ service where you won’t have to switch between plans and the infrastructure would scale as and when the app required it.

‘Serverless’ doesn’t literally mean ‘no server’. It translates to an added layer abstraction between the platform and users. This one is one of the most exciting cloud computing trends that we want to see unfold in 2022. Serverless will play a significant role not just in cloud computing, but in the broader technology landscape of enhancing user experiences.

3. The Internet of Things & Edge Computing

In an attempt to bring data and data processing closer to the end-users, data storage and processing is becoming decentralized via edge computing. Cloud service providers are responding to the growing adoption of IoT devices with edge computing. It doesn’t just bring down bandwidth usage and its cost but also reduces latency considerably.

According to Statista, the global edge computing industry is expected to experience an increase in market size from US$ 1.93 billion in 2018 to US$ 10.96 billion by 2026 [3]. Centralized cloud servers and platforms consume a lot of processing, computational and bandwidth resources. Edge computers are localized data centers built for storage and processing at the point where they’re needed.

4. Multi-cloud environments

A multi-cloud environment is when 2 public clouds are being operated by an organization in tandem. Meaning, organizations can use 2 or more cloud solutions by different cloud solution providers. Using multi-cloud solutions helps companies in enhancing data redundancy and business expansion. A study by Accenture found that 93% of all companies are going for a multi-cloud strategy and an increase in multi-cloud adoption is expected in 2022 [4].

5. Artificial Intelligence in cloud computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing will together leave a huge mark on the world. The evolution and advancement of the two technologies are interconnected and this will become clearer in 2022 (and beyond). Cloud computing technologies and services are making AI more accessible to businesses around the world that once would have not been able to afford these technologies.

With the help of the cloud, companies can now integrate Artificial Intelligence into their day-to-day business operations. Disruptive AI technologies like machine learning, big data, and knowledge graphs are features and functionalities that are AI-enabled.

6. Containerization

Open-source systems for container orchestration, like Kubernetes by Google, provide users with the rise of containerized apps, which will continue to emerge in 2022 at an enterprise level. These “containers” bring the advantages of virtual machines, merging the forces of a self-contained operating system to offer a seamless performance across multiple machines.

In cloud settings, container portability allows performance consistency across the entire organization and resource usage distribution. With containerization, the user also has increased access to tracking the difference between containers and rolling back as and when needed.

Want to leverage our expertise in cloud computing? Reach out to us today and get a free assessment of your current cloud infrastructure.

Sources
  • [1] International Data Corporation (IDC) “Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast, 2021–2025: The Path Ahead for Cloud in a Digital-First World” (2021) [Online] Available from: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US47397521 [Accessed December 2021]
  • [2] BCC Research (2018) “Hybrid Cloud Technologies: Global Markets Through 2022” [Online] Available from: https://www.bccresearch.com/market-research/information-technology/hybrid-cloud-technologies-markets-report.html [Accessed December 2021]
  • [3] Miltz, K. “Market size for edge computing worldwide 2018-2025” (2021) Statista [Online] Available from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/948762/worldwide-edge-computing-market-size-forecast/ [Accessed December 2021]
  • [4] Accenture (2020) “Accenture-The-Cloud-Imperative-Software-Platforms-Industry.pdf” [Online] Available from: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-139/Accenture-The-Cloud-Imperative-Software-Platforms-Industry.pdf [Accessed December 2021]
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AWS Cloud Security Case Studies

Case Study | Security and Migration Solution for Property Adviser

Property Adviser is a leading real estate platform that offers an exhaustive range of properties through its self-service, user-friendly, and customized portal. They aim at assisting the 4B’s of real estate (Builders, Brokers, Buyers, and Bankers). Property Adviser was facing multiple challenges while conducting promotional and marketing activities.

The Challenge

Property Adviser was facing multiple challenges while conducting promotional and marketing activities.

Due to the massive database of users and subsequently increasing user activity, their innovative real estate portal crashed frequently. Moreover, the platform didn’t have any scalability features provisioned on-premises. The application was having security breaches making it vulnerable to potential risks.

The application used by Property Adviser was outdated, and it faced multiple issues in terms of new app upgrades and releases. At the same time, Property Adviser was following traditional engineering for versioning.

The Solution

  • After analyzing and conducting in-depth research, GoDgtl by Prutech provided Property Adviser with security and migration service by implementing the lift and shift approach and a robust security solution. Moreover, GoDgtl successfully performed live migration of their platform to AWS and later, provided additional scalability features on the cloud to the client.
  • GoDgtl also delivered Managed DevOps services to Property Adviser to enhance their AWS environment. Managed DevOps services help in the successful deployments through effective mechanisms enabling agility and higher speed. Our solution architects ensured a security first approach through a cost-effective solution.
  • By utilizing AWS tools and services such as Amazon Security Hub, Guard Duty, AWS Shield & AWS Config, the cloud environment is now better organized and secure for Property Adviser customers.

Results & Benefits

After successfully implementing the AWS services the following enhancements were experienced by the customer:

  • Migration: GoDgtl successfully migrated the on-premises data of the client to AWS cloud through Lift and Shift service. We offered Cloud assessment services to inventory all existing applications that are optimized for cloud and provide reliable support for the workloads. With the expertise support from GoDgtl’s team Property Adviser was able to migrate to AWS cloud with minimal downtime and zero data loss.
  • Scalability: Property Adviser achieved scalability through the effective implementation of auto scaling and load balancing services. The renewed architecture helped ease the process of stabilizing the infrastructure and scope for continuous enhancement.
  • Stronger Security Posture: GoDgtl created a stronger security posture for protecting sensitive data and for eliminating potential threats. GoDgtl’s security policies helped the client operate more securely and benefit from the scale and performance of the cloud. AWS best practices were implemented to eliminate direct access to the application ensuring overall security.
  • Cost Optimization: Property Adviser achieved overall security and scalability and reduced up to 30% of its cloud infrastructure costs by implementing GoDgtl’s effective cloud services. The company’s IT organization gained agility and responsiveness to deliver better service and leverage new technologies as they develop. Cost reduction and reduced latency
  • GoDgtl successfully integrated the above-mentioned solutions and features into the real estate portal of Property Adviser. We automated CI/CD Pipelines and added scalability to the platform. The first production market went live in just one month after the first tests were conducted on the AWS platform.

About GoDgtl

GoDgtl by PruTech is an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS. Through our innovative and customized cloud services, we help our customers to design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on cloud, accelerating their journey to the cloud. We offer cost-effective and secure cloud solutions through the effective implementation of the latest cloud technologies and processes that are highly scalable and compatible with changing market demands.

Our cloud managed services are offered through a holistic approach to the cloud

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Case Studies

Case Study | AWS Pinpoint Service for JSci MedCentral

JSciMed Central, an Open Source journal and publishing platform, was facing issues with regard to its email marketing campaigns and activities. The client was unable to send promotional and transactional emails to its wide network of students and researchers across the world. As they used bulk emailing tools, their email delivery rate was extremely low and their domain was marked spam by filters.

To get to the bottom of these challenges, JSciMed Central collaborated with GoDgtl by PruTech. GoDgtl suggested an AWS Pinpoint Service to the client that automates email campaigns and schedules triggers for the delivery of emails and SMS across its network. With this solution, JSCIMed Central was able to optimize its email campaigns and hurdles faced by users during transactions were minimized. 

Download our case study to read the complete case study and solution.

Want to learn more about our customized cloud consulting and migration services? Contact us today.

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Blog

4 Steps to Strategize Cloud Adoption

It has become imperative for businesses to be on cloud. They must be creative with their IT transformation strategy in formulating agile business processes such as customer resource management (CRM) systems, storage systems, complex process automation, and for yielding social media and mobile technologies. Companies have this at their core that this practice will help them to adapt to rapidly changing customer demands and business environments faster than the traditional deployments will do.

Let’s see the steps to strategize cloud adoption:

Step one: Assess

You should assess the cloud deployment hurdles, opportunities, threats, and success rates data present in the market to easily realize the business proposition, IT feasibility, and USP factors for your organization to deploy your applications in cloud.

An assessment should include testing and reporting the success stories, risks, and roadblocks involved in cloud adoption. Next, you should scrutinize cloud vendors for partnerships to help you on your digital transformation journey.

This step will give you the right guidance for understanding the pros and cons and is vital for an efficient cloud migration.

Step two: Plan

Businesses must formulate a tailor-made cloud strategy. You Should plan to yield an old setup with software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) formulation, as well as test suitable deployment models and more to set up a suitable road map and cloud process.

Step three: Adopt

The planning and adoption phases are closely stitched together as they have multiple steps that are intertwined. While testing the collateral during formulation, it is important to assess available cloud computing and adoption strategies (NIST Guidelines, OpenStack adaptability, and portability standards, as well as methodologies for migrating applications).

Step four: Optimize

Optimizing your company’s processes and software licenses will help you understand the advantages of state-of-the-art efficiency for increased value to the company and the customer.

  • Carry on “lessons learned sessions” after each cloud deployment session and filter your processes further.
  • Come up with required skill road maps and assemble skilled resources ahead of a deployment

So, in summary, assess the value of cloud for your business; strategize a simple deployment plan first, and slowly migrate to planning for ERPs, adapt to learning and strategic options, and lastly, filter out your assessments, deployment methods, and processes, and continuously refine your strategy.

Need help in migrating to AWS? Contact us today to work with a team of AWS-certified professionals and an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner in India.

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How To Optimize AWS Costs for Your Business

AWS cost optimization is a service that works on the configuration of your AWS resources. It makes reports on whether your resources are in optimum condition and produces recommendations to cut down the cost and improve the performance of your data system.

1. Optimizing EC2 Instances

Let’s begin with these three AWS cost regularization best practices. The purpose of rightsizing is to go together with instance sizes to their workloads.

If you double the capacity when you go up one size, you also reduce the capacity in half when you go down one size. Therefore, rightsizing is only an optimum when best practice is applied there. It’s worth analyzing utilization parameters to find out strengths to move the system to different families (other than “General Purpose”) that better suit their needs.

2. Working in patterns

It’s worth putting some time aside for non-production work such as those used for developing, staging, testing, and QA. With these practices, you will save around 65% of running these instances if you apply an “on” schedule of 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. Monday to Friday. However, more can be saved too, especially if development teams work in irregular patterns or at irregular hours.

You can apply more aggressive schedules by noticing the utilization metrics to know when the instances are more usually used, or always use “stopped schedule” which can be interrupted when access to the instances is needed. Pointing out that while instances are scheduled to be off is worth the time investment as you’re still being charged for EBS volumes and other contents attached to them.

3. Opting for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Choosing Reserved Instances is an easy way for AWS cost optimization. Purchasing Reserved Instances is one of the best practices for AWS cost optimization as we’re going to suggest the effective ways of maintaining a Reserved Instances as an AWS cost optimization best practice—consisting of counting all the variables before making a purchase and then reporting on utilization throughout the reservation’s lifecycle.

4. Delete unattached EBS volumes

Going back to Elastic Block Storage (EBS), when you launch an EC2 instance, an EBS volume is connected to the instance to act as its local block storage. When you move/delete the EC2 instance, the EBS volume is only deleted if you check with the “delete on termination” box when the instance was running. If the box wasn’t checked, the EBS volume is still in the system and restraining AWS cost optimization. These are ways in which AWS managed services can help you.

5. Delete old or obsolete snapshots

Snapshots are an easier way to back up information on an EBS volume to an S3 storage bucket as they only back up information that’s altered since the last snapshot to stop duplicate data in the S3 bucket. Resultantly, each snapshot contains all the data required to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume.

Explore our AWS services and learn all about AWS cost optimization, clouds managed services, DevOps, and more.

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Blog

DevOps and Cloud Consulting can grow your business

Starting a business is exciting, but it can get difficult in little time if you do not have the right tools in hand. You know your idea is worth spreading, but how do you promote that idea?

Here, the role of AWS and DevOps plays an important part. These are two of the most powerful tools that can give your business the acceleration that it needs, especially in the initial stages. The major problems AWS and DevOps can help address include:

Data Security

Data is the basis of the business revenue model. AWS helps you make data security your strength. AWS consulting services tackle data security issues in the following ways:

AWS cloud consulting services estimate the risk of your software and accordingly design a secure workflow. Other than risk calculation, there are strong security policies that are strictly adhered to including:

  • Allowing minimum access permission (using AWS IAM, Security Groups, VPC)
  • Encrypting systems that contain Personal Identifiable Items (PII) at Rest (Using AWS KMS)
  • Regular checks and reporting of the account security using AWS Configuration
  • Intelligent threat detection and regular checks of all events using AWS via compliance management.

Welcomes Innovation

DevOps consulting helps businesses to allow more time and space for innovating. After implementing DevOps, your business will streamline the system flowchart and get better efficiency. This creates more scope for brainstorming and innovative ideas during business hours. The best businesses in the world utilize time for their people to innovate, create new services, products, or strategies, or try out different routes of getting better results. Business benefits since DevOps implementation leave you more time for innovation and problem solving that will make your business grow further in the future.

Better Customer Experience Capabilities

When your business works on proprietary solutions faster, it adapts to serve business customers. That means that DevOps can provide better customer service. In a recent research paper, based on the benefits of DevOps for business, over 70% of companies reported customer experience got better after installing a DevOps program. This is one of the biggest business benefits that you can easily unlock with DevOps.

Create mobile applications

Once your business’ online presence is up and running, let AWS take care of the mobility of your business. Configure specific features for your apps with making user authentication, push notifications, content delivery, analytics, data storage, and backend logic. Post creating your app, an AWS devops consultant evaluates your apps on real devices so you can understand and work more on app performance.

These are basic tips that will help you optimize AWS cost management, as well as AWS-managed services. To learn more about cost optimization and management, visit here.

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Blog

Here’s why your startup needs cloud-first strategies

Cloud-first plans mean operational strategies where a business/company transfers all or most of its data/information to cloud computing platforms like AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. A well-defined cloud plan should help in leading the company in transiting to the cloud.

Why do startups need cloud-first strategies?

  • Scalability
    For a startup, growth is always exponential. With the help of a cloud-first strategy, one can scale the growth with limited human commitment. For example, if the business website traffic suddenly rises, its servers will have to quickly upgrade. Autoscaling is one of the most advertised plus points of the cloud.
  • Reliability
    Companies often experience service outages. With the help of a cloud computing strategy, DevOps consulting, and AWS consulting services, companies can transfer the onus to the cloud computing provider. They are responsible to maintain hardware and make sure that the power supply is uninterrupted. Thereby, startups can be stress-free.
  • Cost
    All new companies look for cost-effective plans to save and optimize cloud space. Though a cloud computing business plan might appear to be on the higher note financially at the initial stages, if you add all the costs of renting an offline space plus additional costs thereof, cloud computing strategy seems to be a more efficient alternative.
  • Configurability
    This is one of the reasons why startups should consider a cloud-first strategy. We all understand the struggle of getting a new server. Buying a digital database often comes with its own hurdles. With cloud-first strategies, one only requires management’s approval for capital spending, which makes it a seamless process.
  • Observability
    Monitoring is as important as other functions to run a startup. Therefore, you need to know what your application is doing. In the cloud, some tools make our life easy. Instead of trying to plug different applications, the tool combines and logs into a single dashboard. This will give you more insights into your software and keep you up to date.

Though a cloud-first strategy may seem to be time-consuming, the process is critical for the long-term success of a startup. To reap the benefits of the cloud, one should implement cloud-first strategies.

To get free assessment and cloud consultation services from our AWS-certified team, please contact us today.

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Combat Digital Challenges with Cloud & Cybersecurity

Due to the emergence of the pandemic, the concept of the workplace has now become obsolete. Data is not stored in devices nor is kept safe in the company’s files. Rather, it is safeguarded on the cloud. The pace of cybercrime continues to pose a threat to security teams and strategies should be checked regularly. At this stage, cybersecurity has a vital role to play for cloud and DevOps consulting.

Cloud security and cyber security are the need of the hour for all businesses, and that has some integrated digital challenges too. Let’s see what are they in detail:

Credential and access management

Common threats in both cloud and security management can be credential and access issues due to one or many reasons below:

  • Weak passwords are the primary reason for the attacks
  • Lack of multi-factor authentication
  • Absence of password, automated cryptographic key, and certificate rotation
  • Mishandling of Excessive admin accounts, zombie accounts, credentials, and users bypassing IAM controls are also more reasons.

In these cases, you can do the following:

  • paying extra attention to data that is accessible from the internet;
  • defining the company vision of data and the impact of its loss; and
  • creating and implementing a strong attack response plan

Insecure interfaces and APIs

The exposed components of a cloud environment are the CSP UIs along with APIs. The safety of a cloud service begins with how these are kept to be protected, and it is the duty of both consumers and consumer support checkpoints. Security should be integrated, & the businesses must be quick and efficient in managing the threats.

We recommend following the below tips:

  • defining value of the data and the result of its loss;
  • protecting data via encryption; and
  • having a strong, well-tested incident response plan.

Cloud attacks

Cloud hacking, which is one of the most difficult threats to tackle in cyber security for businesses, is becoming a commonplace incident. It is mostly committed to acquiring competitor data.

We recommend taking these steps:

  • conducting security awareness training;
  • fixing misconfigured cloud servers; and
  • restricting access to critical systems.
  • Take advice on AWS consulting services.

Phishing attack

Phishing is sending false communications to steal information, which seemingly comes from a reliable source. Other resources like login credentials and credit card identity can also be stolen through phishing. And it is done through various ways, such as shopping and even illegal money transfer. It is one of the major challenges of both cyber security and the cloud.

We recommend doing the following:

  • monitoring employee cloud use; and
  • using cloud data loss prevention technologies.

Account Hijacking

The exposure of a cloud account to hackers is critical to this operation. It can also be subject to weak maintenance, or administration of a cloud account environment. If these accounts are hacked, massive data loss can occur. Various reasons lead to account hijacking:

  • Phishing
  • Weak or stolen credentials
  • Improper coding
  • Account compromise

We recommend doing the following as the first action:

  • Remembering that password reset cannot stop account hijacking; and
  • using defense-in-depth and IAM controls.

To learn more about our cloud consulting services, visit our Services page.

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Blog

How startups can optimize cloud costs

Most startups end up spending a lot of money on cloud resources and capacity. You can keep a check on such expenses as a key priority, but we are talking about startups where founders are already wearing a lot of hats and have nearly zero bandwidth to sit and think about reducing cloud costs. That is where these tips will come handy:

Tip 1

Capacity planning: Auto-scaling resources make sure that your business doesn’t pay for unused cloud capacity. Cloud providers offer native services with auto-scaling features, such as AWS Auto Scaling or DevOps consulting. These features monitor and adjust usage scale to meet the demands and thus, can be used for cost optimization.

Tip 2

Limit data transfer fees: The cost of moving data to and from a public cloud service can be time-consuming and expensive. Cloud providers charge extra fees to move data off their platforms or between regions. To reduce costs in this area, keep a check on unnecessary data transfers.

The first thing you should do is assess your cloud provider’s transfer fees. Then, adjust your cloud settings to reduce the number of necessary data transfers. For example, on-premises applications that frequently take access to cloud-hosted data eliminate those loops.

Tip 3

Hire professionals. One of the best ways to optimize cloud costs is signing up with professionals who not only can serve you with end-to-end cloud consultation but will also-

  1. Help your startup with cost optimization of cloud storage
  2. Offer DevOps as a service
  3. Take care of all the compliances and governance
  4. Take up managed services from your plate so you can focus on other things that matter more to your business.

At this point, this is also important to understand why you need cloud services in the first place.

Why startups need cloud services

Cloud can take your business to higher levels giving you data freedom and flexibility. Here are some of the important benefits of the cloud:

  • Collaboration– The most important benefit of using a cloud service is collaboration. Today, when the whole world is working from home, it has now become the need of the hour. Employees working from different geographical locations can come together in a highly convenient and secure manner to work on the same platform.  And to have a smooth-functioning collaborative environment, we recommend you to try AWS consulting services.
  • Storage capacity– You can never anticipate your exact storage requirement, and this is when cloud services come in handy. Cloud infrastructure gives you the freedom to expand your data storage capacity whenever you need it, by paying a nominal fee.

  • Cost-saving – A successful business is one that not only creates revenue but simultaneously makes the optimum use of resources. The most important advantage of using this service is that it saves a great amount of capital cost for startups.

Optimization of cloud services will vary from startup to startup. Identify the goals and understand the business to make the best use of the services. Leveraging cloud services to maximize profits, in the long run, should be the ultimate aim.

Want to start your cloud journey today for free? Get our team to assess and help migrate your workloads for free with our Starter Package of Cloud Consulting.