Cloud Computing Advantages and Disadvantages

Cloud computing has changed the landscape of business today. Through cloud computing many companies has improved their performance through reengineering their business process both internally and externally. In this section we will look at some of the companies who have adopted the cloud computing and gain advantage from it.

Amazon Industry Type: Online Retailer

Amazon is the biggest online retailer in the market right now. It is among first who adopted the cloud technology for its online retail store. They are the pioneers of online consumer sales with a supply chain management that has an edge over other competitors in the market. They started off by first creating in-house cloud solution for their own IT.

In the starting Amazon created a core online e-commerce website and packing service. Gradually when the e-commerce platform started improving, Amazon started offering it as a service to third-party vendors. Then they started on developing in-house, technology-driven solutions for their operations were initially outsourced, and later on offer these solutions as an external service to third-party businesses.

Later as their cloud solution model mature they started of offering their web service to other vendors. With this Amazon strategy shifted from online retailer to B2B service as they started offering a stack of critical infrastructure as a service to other business. Today, more than two million third-party sellers account for 40 percent of Amazon’s sales.

Amazon with its successful marketplace keeps on scaling and improving its technology have a developed a improve supply chain by focusing on warehousing and logistic components. Amazon’s approach of leveraging technology and scale to reduce costs will change the future of the supply chain in coming times as they have now started offering outsourced consolidation for international sellers in 2014, leveraging bulk discounts for cheaper U.S. import rates.

Amazon is driven by either the customer satisfaction or to increase their market share for which they have a cleared define structure:

• Identify inefficiencies,
• Develop a technological solution,
• Scale the solution into a platform,
• Offer the platform as a novel solution for third-party businesses.

 

ABOF (Aditya Birla Online Fashion) Industry: Fashion

The abof (Aditya Birla Online Fashion) is an online fashion store of Aditya Birla’s group. They developed a web store that provides 3D virtual “trial room” that enables customers to see how clothing items look on them by providing their body dimension data in the application. The website also provides a style quiz to help personalize the service it provides to customers.

The Challenge

The company did not wanted to have an infrastructure comprising various physical hardware such as servers, storage, and networks in an on-premise or collocated datacenter for running the web store because of the scalability issue. The business expected that an increase in demand for apparel, footwear, and accessories and that would spike during sales and other promotional events. This will impose a sizable cost burden on the business as they would have to purchase new computer and other resources, and there is always a risk that these resources will be underused during non-peak periods. Also they were not in favour of hiring any technical personnel for maintaining these resources.

The Solution

So the company chose AWS (Amazon Web Service) because of ease of use and rich array of services that can be utilize to optimize the performance of its online store. The online store launched in late 2015, with the IBM technology stack powering the e-commerce service all-in on AWS. The store infrastructure operates in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Singapore) Region and uses multiple Availability Zones for redundancy. They use following solution from AWS and IBM for running the online web store:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances run the IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite
• An IBM DB2 relational database that runs e-commerce store-related datasets also runs in Amazon EC2
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores content such as product images and videos
• Amazon CloudFront improves the website’s performance by distributing content to users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to store Amazon EC2 instance and web server logs.

The Benefits

• Multiple instances can be created instantly to update and create new software which provide agility to innovate quickly and compete effectively in the crowded online shopping marketplace.
• Process for scaling the infrastructure was automated to support demand peaks generated by campaigns that encourage customers to visit the website and purchase products.
• Good performance and availability of online store to customers with 99.999 percent infrastructure availability with AWS, and an average page loading time of around 1.5 seconds.
• Lower total cost of running abof on AWS as compared to a physical infrastructure in an on-premises or hosted datacenter.

3M Health Information Systems Industry : Health Care Service

3M Health Information Systems (3M HIS), based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is one of the world’s largest providers of software for the healthcare industry whose healthcare applications like 360 Encompass System are used throughout the United State by hospitals to integrate their clinical documentation and coding workflows. The organization provides solutions in more than 20 countries and 7,500 hospitals worldwide.

The Challenge

A core part the company software solutions uses natural-language processing to automatically create medical codes, which are critical to both clinicians and the business of healthcare delivery and is very critical for healthcare-system workflow. For this multiple IT centers and collocated environments were used to support it. However, this approach led to major challenges as many activities required more computing power and storage capacity at certain hours of the day. Moreover, the agility to develop and deploy new applications faster was need of the hour.

The Solution

After a thorough analysis, the company decided to use AWS as it has the best infrastructure and performance to meet its needs. So they started off by migrating several important applications to the AWS Cloud. The organization worked closely with AWS Professional Services, which provided the expert architecture and configuration guidance required to accelerate the migration.

The applications utilizes following service

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) running hundreds of instances
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which helps the organization operate and scale its relational database deployments.
• AWS-managed CodeCommit source-control service to host private Git repositories
• AWS CodeDeploy to automate deployment
• AWS CloudFormation to automate infrastructure-all supporting a DevOps culture
• AWS CodePipeline to manage continuous integration and continuous delivery deployment workflows.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to meet its regulatory and security requirements.

The Benefits

• Applications running on AWS, effortlessly scale up or down without the need to acquire and provision servers months in advance.
• By using AWS services developers were able to innovate faster which lead to increase efficiency.
• As it continues to migrate more of its applications to AWS, 3M HIS expects to create and implement innovative new healthcare software for its customers.

Dangote Industries Limited Industry : Manufacturing

Dangote Group is one of Nigeria’s most diversified business conglomerates with a hard – earned reputation for excellent business practices and products’ quality. Its operational headquarter is located in the bustling metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria.

The Challenge

The company was struggling to keep it datacenters, server and network up and running due to poor power supply and lengthy lead time to acquire hardware parts for these resources. The company was unable to operate it on-premises hardware at 100% due to that lack of external environment factor so their systems were neither reliable nor resilience.  And a new refinery project in hand this issue has become critical.

The Solution

The company find the solution by moving to a hybrid enterprise cloud model. Its transition is center on Microsoft Azure’s reliable, useful backup and disaster recovery features while a major enterprise software app has also just been carried over to the new platform. Following are service that is utilized from the Microsoft Azure Cloud solution:

• The delivered set-up uses Microsoft’s complete hybrid cloud storage solution for enterprises, StorSimple,
• Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provided by Azure Site Recovery. These technologies ensure rapid upload to the cloud and carry out a big part of the heavy lifting around backups.
• ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system based on EMC Documentum technology over to the cloud, the team were ensuring that the company staff in multiple locations could work jointly on the platform.
• Azure StorSimple to safely store its SAP ERP and other mission critical application backups for added resiliency.

The Benifits

• Maximum resilience of the back office.
• Solution was delivered in a very short timeframe.
• Reliable stable environment.
• A lot of inefficiencies have been removed from business processes.