Harness Big Data and Embrace Challenges and Reward

Use Big Data to Deliver Content Dedicated to your end Customer/Client

Improve your Services based on Big Data Results

Big Data is about Identifying and Analysing Trends

Big Data is a Big Deal

Undoubtedly, ‘Big Data’ gives you the power to analyse your customer/client choices and develop products and services which fit their needs.  You can also, arguably, influence their choices.  Given the right people and enterprise architecture, you can develop a user driven business.  This is has obvious advantages including lower marketing costs.

For years we have taken advice from websites such as Amazon and iTunes who employ recommendation engines:  “Customers, who bought this, bought that.”  This algorithm has no doubt contributed to more sales for both giants.  This has paved the way for one of the best uses of Big Data we have seen in recent times and how it can be utilised to give subscribers what they desire.  The company that has achieved this goal is Netflix.

Using data it mined from subscribers it discovered that customers liked political dramas, especially the BBC miniseries “House of Cards”, the actor Kevin Spacey, and director David Fincher.  The result was a remake of the BBC miniseries.  The TV show has been a huge success.  It is currently in its third season since it launched in 2012. 

Netflix did not just look at popularity but trends.  And it is these trends that your architecture and algorithms has to handle to make use of Big Data, and to justify developing the resources to handle it.

Big Data Influence

Big data is being used to influence how organisations are run at almost every level of our day to day lives.  Police collate data to predict where crimes are going to take place, and allocate resources accordingly. 

Purchase history is now being linked in ways which were a pipe dream a few years ago.  Target, a company which make various lotions and beauty products predicted with some accuracy that when sales of unscented lotions increased the chances are the purchaser was pregnant.  They then targeted her with related products.

In the realm of human health, air quality and certain conditions are being linked for the first time as researchers can pull in data from a wider variety of sources. 

For your organisation the results can be just as good.  Imagine what you could do if you had algorithms capable of predicting with a high degree of accuracy the spending habits of 80% of your customers.  How much you would sell if you could influence their decisions?  Netflix have stated that 3 out of 4 customers are influenced by their recommendation engine.

Big data is not just limited to service delivery but impacts other aspects such as stock control, and the times of year when you are going to be busier.  This influences how much stock you need to hold and when you need to take on temporary staff.

Big data is active in business and public life.  Providing you have the infrastructure to collate and make sense of the data, a new world of revenue streams becomes available.  In fact your organisation might change the way it develops products and services entirely.

Understand Cloud Vendors for Better Cloud Performance

Choose Vendors who use Multiple Systems

Ensure you Have Good Relationships with your Vendors

Ensure your Supplier is Suitable

Understanding cloud vendors will make all the difference to your business

 

Making the cloud work for you

A key area for effective cloud management is to understand your vendors.  This is true in performance terms, security, and their future direction.  The idea of this article is to help you understand the sourcing strategy you require for the cloud and that through careful consideration you can decide exactly what you need from your cloud supplier.

Key Elements of Cloud Suppliers

Business Needs

As the cloud allows you to build apps which are bespoke to business requirements, it is important you choose a supplier which is more aligned and in-tune with your business.  Ideally, you want vendors that can facilitate multiple software systems, to minimise your API development.  Without covering well trodden ground, some aspects you need to consider are:

Data Storage: Where will your data be held?  Does it violate your present client contracts?  See my article; Will Compliance stop you implementing the Cloud?

Suitability: Will it deliver what you need to make your business more efficient?  If you are going to endure a transfer period to the cloud, related hardships during the process, you have to ensure you will have a better more agile way of working at the end of it.  See my article, Transforming to the Cloud- A Restructure Story

Cost:  Do the long term costs justify the expenditure?  This is often hard to assess as pricing models for the cloud are quite different from traditional IT services models.  Nonetheless, it is possible to get a reasonably accurate picture of cloud costs by looking at data consumption of previous years.  Where it is hazier is trying to predict the impact of having more of your staff working on app development.  This is a major selling point of the cloud.  Your workforce will be more agile once implementation is complete.

Business Security

With a cloud platform security both in terms of accessibility and data storage location are issues.  Given that your provider can store your data to the satisfaction of your clients and regulation, how is accessibility managed by your provider? And how effective are the controls?  This may not be a major concern with bigger established suppliers such as SAP, IBM, and Microsoft, but it might be a problem if you go with a small independent supplier.

Future Direction of your Cloud Provider

A key to good cloud vendor management is to understand their future direction.  Are they comparable to the needs of your business?  A year downs the line do you envision a better or worse cloud system?  The key to getting a picture of their future direction is to maintain a good relationship with your supplier.  Make sure you have a way of getting advance notice of major changes, and from your side ensure you have key people involved at every stage.

When you choose to go down the cloud route your selection of vendor will be crucial to success.  Ensure you choose one which can both deliver a good agile system and one which complies with your business needs.

 

Costs and the Cloud: Implementation and Beyond

Understand the Need to have two Systems

Use SLAs to Drive the Cloud

Your Business may not be Able to run on a 100% on a Cloud Based System

Assessing the True Costs of the Cloud and is it Right for your Organisation?

The true costs of the cloud will be hard to pinpoint in the first instance

 

Although there are plenty of blogs about how the cloud saves money and maximises profits, there could be a considerable amount of time before you start to see the savings and the increase in revenue streams after a cloud model is established.  With this in mind let's examine the costs of the cloud more closely.

Two Systems

The chances are that for a while you will operating two systems as the transition to the cloud completes.  You may also be operating an on premise and cloud based system depending on your type of industry and its compatibility to the cloud.  This may also be a demand of your clients especially if you are involved with government contracts.  See my post: Will Compliance stop you implementing the Cloud? This goes into further detail on this aspect of cloud implementation.

In terms of implementation costs, the two systems will have to run side by side and therefore to implement the cloud there will be a one off cost in the first instance.  Provision should be made for staff training and security requirements before starting the cloud implementation process.

Is the Cloud Right for you?

To discover whether the cloud is right for you in terms of costs, you must first ascertain whether or not it will work for your organisation.  This is a question of assessing staff skills.  They need to be able to manage relationships with vendors and clients/customers, and you will need to take into consideration the following:

·         Service Level Agreements (SLA) - Can the cloud platform handle monitoring, data recovery/backups, real-time metrics?  You will also need to establish penalties for non-compliance

·         Full time-staff to monitor the SLAs

·         Security Requirements of the cloud, specifically those that apply to the European Data Protection Authorities

·         Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are available for the cloud.  If your business is quite specialised, then this may not be compatible with the cloud straight away.  In this instance you must plan for additional complexities should you decide to switch fully to the cloud as and when possible.

Assessing the Cloud vs. on - Premise

To discover the true costs of implementing the cloud vs. on premise will be a challenging task.  The cloud uses a consumption based pricing model, and although the number of users will be defined from the outset, just how many resources they'll consume is not so easy to determine.  This is harder given the changing dynamic of business which can see considerable increases and decreases in resource usage.

One approach to determine costs is to factor out initial setup and training costs of the cloud.  This will give you an idea of how much the cloud will cost once the training and other implementation costs are out of the way. This should give you figures to compare, although bear in mind until the system is up and running you will not have an exact figure.

Cloud Cost vs. Benefits

When all is said and done, the capabilities of the cloud will bring considerable benefits to your business.  Perhaps not all will be realised right away, but the time is coming when nearly every industry will see a need and potential in a cloud model. 

The question is not is the cloud right for you, but is the cloud right for you right now?

Source:

European Data Protection Authorities

 

How the Cloud Improves Baseline Infrastructure Operations

Reduce Support Tasks and Repurpose your IT Teams

Why Tinker with Baseline Infrastructure?

Through using the cloud for baseline infrastructure you will free up your support staff to work on development

 

It is fair to say that most IT baseline infrastructure has a good up time ratio.  Many work to the three 9's, or 99.9% uptime.  The continuous and routine tasks of maintaining the messaging environment, provisioning electronic storage solutions, operating data centre services, and keeping the cogs turning in a multifaceted contact centre, are handled well.  Therefore it is only natural that the question is asked why tinker with something that works?

The main reason to switch to a cloud's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is that you can divert your staff away from support to development projects.  The fact is most current models require a fair number of staff to keep the system fit for purpose.  The advantage of the cloud is that it delivers aspects of the baseline infrastructure much faster.  This enables your staff to work on development projects.  And indirectly or directly, the development projects will contribute to ROI.

Consider:

Non cloud based systems which as we have seen require regular and routine maintenance tend to compartmentalise IT teams.  The knock-on effect of this structure is that your baseline IT teams do not really engage with the business.  They are very much in the background, and their main concern is keeping systems running smoothly. 

Although in theory this is fine, the reality is that you have a high number of staff not actually working in a development capacity.  In essence they are not generating revenue.

With an increased input into development, the productivity of development teams will rise.  Furthermore, your development teams will have more free time to learn the business and develop business aligned, agile applications. 

As you can imagine with more business friendly and agile bespoke applications, productivity increases are inevitable.  Apps for your customers are developed faster, problems addressed sooner, and functionality improvements are almost sure to follow.  The combination of this increase in development is bound to have a positive effect on your brand, and business reputation.

As well as the repurposing of staff, cloud based baseline systems also allow for utilising a consumption based pricing model as well as a capacity on demand.  It also delivers tasks such as buying, receiving, making payments, installing hardware and software, patch and change management, troubleshooting, and monitoring faster. 

Switching to Cloud IaaS

Switching to a new infrastructure cloud based or otherwise is going to incur costs and take time.  The chances are you will have two models up and running for some time.  This will mean that you will have to be patient to see the improvements in app development productivity. 

However, if you have a business model that relies on development of apps, and to take this further to have bespoke apps for the business both as tools for existing staff and for customers, then your patience will be well rewarded.

To learn more about the cloud and IT baseline infrastructure get in touch. I'm happy to discuss the cloud and other IT projects.