With so much of our personal lives “on the cloud,” so to speak, it seems there is a slow shuffle toward this ethereal space in the business world. But why? Why would we trust the Google+ images cloud to be in charge of storing precious pictures of our newborns, puppies, wedding days, and first days of kindergarten but not trust them with an excel spreadsheet?
It seems the fear is based more in irrational thinking than in good business sense. In the work world, we tend to stick with what works, even years after it’s been outdated. Take a look around—is there a fax machine in your office? Exactly. There are at least ten other better ways to get information back and forth to people than a fax machine, yet they still sell, and we’re still using them. “Faxes” can now be sent via smart phone, and for phablets (phone-tablets) like the Samsung Note II, notes can be written, documents can be signed, and more, making the facsimile totally obsolete. But even those of us with a Note II in hand are still guilty of faxing the old fashioned way at least once in a while.
When it comes to big data , the cloud is what’s next, and it won’t be optional for long. 20 years ago, the thought of a single gigabyte was mind-boggling for the average person, and most computers for consumers had only about half a gigabyte of storage. Today, kids are skating around their middle schools with 32 gig jump-drives hanging from lanyards around their necks—big data on this level is literally child’s play, and the words gigabyte and even terabyte have a childlike innocence about them when juxtaposed with the petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes now commonplace in the big data world. At any point of the day, for example, Coca-Cola is gathering, profiling, and analyzing roughly a petabyte of information in less time than it took you to read this paragraph.
But aside from not wanting to seem passé like some ironic neo-luddite, think about what else it means to take it to the cloud. For one, it makes big data accessible to anyone of your choosing from anywhere, at any time. Take the DropBox application, for example. While it’s not the number one choice for say, someone transferring zettabytes all day, for small to medium-sized businesses, it’s a tremendous way to share documents, images, presentations, and raw data. Your team in Philadelphia uploads their presentation, your graphics guy in Hong Kong drops in the images, your content editor in San Francisco does the final edit, and it lands back in your DropBox, ready for that important conference in Manhattan.
That’s essentially how the functionality of the cloud will redefine data storage, and it works for all kinds of big data. Its ability to store profound amounts of data with such little upkeep makes it a total game changer. Imagine a room of people using Samsung Galaxy 4 and iPhone 5S devices—you saunter up with your 1999 Nokia. These devices aren’t even in the same phyla. And servers are going the way of that old Nokia. Clouds are eminently accessible from today’s smartphones and handhelds, and clouds make it possible to aggregate big data for as many employees as you can drum up.
Creating a dashboard that is unique to your venture is something that not only massive corporations have vocation to do these days. Find yourself a good developer and you can have your own dashboard for your own cloud, uniquely tailored to your needs—ask your employees and others within your sphere who will be engaging on the cloud what they would like to see on the dashboard. You’ll want to consider who has access to what, what kinds of widgets will be available on the dashboard and what they will lead to, and determine how much space you’ll need. Most importantly, listen to your crew—let them help determine what the cloud looks like, and how it will help them collaborate more efficiently with one another.
Big data is only as useful as we make it—what makes the cloud the new black is its ability to aggregate, track, define, separate, and give analytics about the big data it’s storing. Au revoir servers, we’ll always have Paris.
Images via: Tech Group International
via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/servers-5-minutes-ago-cloud-new-black-0636604?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=servers-5-minutes-ago-cloud-new-black
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