Nowadays we are witnessing an enormous data explosion which is set to continue and even accelerate. The volume of data is growing at a very high velocity and is rapidly becoming more varied, complex and less structured. As a result, the word Big Data has grown strong on the mind of every business leader who wants to extract critical insights and business benefits from data. Many organizations are planning to implement Big Data related initiatives or have got them already. However most organizations lack an articulated strategy for Big Data execution. Thus there is a strategy gap between high potential and risk about investing in Big Data initiatives. Although, the essential mix of technologies may deliver on the promise of Big Data, what leaders must choose and incorporate for interlocking the set of available data sources and technology is a specific business goal which makes the initiative unique. In response, Big Data providers have prepared a strong ground through the use of cloud computing at the core which address these issues. Organizations can analyze the feasibility and cost of investing. Termed as "Big-data-as-a-service" (BDaaS), it basically refer to services that provide analysis of enormous or complex data sets, typically over the cloud platform as a managed service. The adaptation of Big Data on above grounds precedes with Hadoop which was a major stepping stone, but it still has its own limitations, specifically for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) that do not have the resources to create a Hadoop infrastructure in house. Thus, on a conclusive note, It's difficult to predict which Big Data solution businesses will freeze on, but having a majority of Big Data service providers now providing a version of their platform in the cloud, it will emerge a safe bet for SMBs to venture, in wherein cloud will play a major role in building Big Data an integrated part of their business strategy. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/297257/cloud-leveling-playing-field-smbs

In present situation having a suite of products called 'marketing cloud' is necessary for any enterprise. While renowned and young companies have their own roles, marketing analytics point out that the problem is that "marketing cloud branding obfuscation" across dissimilar products makes the jobs of marketers, merchandise and IT guys harder. Gigaom Research found the priorities and hot buttons of several digital marketers and got to know about the effective marketing tactics they used. They also researched about areas where they required help. The study showed that salesforce was not wrong in its eagerness to tap into social media. The majority of big spenders use almost every digital tactic on every phases of marketing, namely awareness, acquisition, conversion and retention. Smaller companies still use SEO and email. Bigger companies are the biggest users of social media marketing as well as mobile and digital video. 50 percent of them are likely to increase their social media spending. In spite of this most marketers head to social media based on faith. They find it difficult to prove ROI for social media. Read more at: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/13/whats-needed-from-marketing-clouds/ 

Nintex , the world leader in workflow software, announced its integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the two market-leaders among CRM platforms. Nintex is the first workflow company which enabled business users to connect critical ECM and CRM systems through the cloud, and allowed customers to quickly and easily automate processes between departments in a customer-driven environment. With the new integrations, users can accelerate a variety of processes which involves frequent interactions between customer-facing teams and internal business operations. Nintex’s integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets organizations:

• Drive business processes in SharePoint in response to events in CRM so work flows better between previously siloed systems

• Automate the process of creating, updating, retrieving, and querying records in Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics using simple drag-and-drop workflow actions

• Post status updates, links and polls to Salesforce Chatter or Microsoft Yammer, and progress workflows based on user responses in social channels

To know more, go to: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nintex-announces-integration-with-salesforcecom-and-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2014-07-14

Cloud solutions can help businesses lower total costs and transition from a fixed cost structure to a variable one while freeing up critical IT resources for strategic initiatives and innovation. In case of Cloud applications cloud providers are responsible for the maintenance, operations, and bandwidth of the software and not the cloud customers. Finally, cloud applications are accessed through standard web browsers, providing scalability and agility to the customer. Unlike traditional on premise software applications, cloud applications are located and managed remotely and built with a single code-base customized to the company's needs. Some advantages of cloud computing are: Increased speed in responding to unforeseen events, Easy to get the latest updates, adoption is quick and simple, improved information security, deployment time decreases from years to months, lower risk with subscription based cost model. Increased strategic agility, short deployment times, lower risk and costs - the advantages of cloud computing are compelling. To know more, go to: http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/cloud-computing/6-benefits-of-cloud-computing-032893 

Big data, the huge amount of structured and unstructured information will slow down most traditional approaches to data management. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services are contributing powerful, profitable approaches to analyze big data. Analytics can make organizations "self-healing" or "self-optimizing."The AWS services directory has a mixture of SQL and NoSQL database technology. Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service has a single-digit millisecond latency that makes it a fine fit for big data project where fast line with the data is a must.  The first difficulty need to think in big data analytics is data amalgamation. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a relational database that can sort in the AWS cloud. Amazon Redshift  (Oracle), which is a petabyte-scale database intended for big data analytics and data warehousing. Finally, Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a Hadoop file system structure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud decrease queries. Read more at: 

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/tip/Whats-what-in-AWS-big-data-analytics?asrc=EM_ERU_30984098&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=ERU&utm_campaign=20140630_ERU%20Transmission%20for%2006/30/2014%20(UserUniverse:%20932694)_myka-reports@techtarget.com&src=5265609

Digital enterprise, associated with the design, development and delivery of innovative products and services through online channels, is the result of a long, multi-year journey that includes cloud computing as a vital component. Saugatuck Technology analyst Mike West in a recent post says Business and IT leaders still have plenty of work ahead of them — even if they are well along in their cloud implementations. With its inherent ability scale, as well as providing immediate, on-demand access to the latest solutions and approaches, cloud provides ready-to-deploy environments for creating and delivering the innovative business strategies and products that are part of digital enterprise.  A separate Saugatuck survey of 203 enterprises finds at least 60 percent are now creating and delivering new digital products and services to customers and nearly 70 percent are enhancing or updating traditional products and services as a digital experience. Most organizations are still in the early stages of their digitization efforts, but Saugatuck expects digital enterprises to accelerate over the next three to five years. The ability to effectively deploy cloud will shape the speed at which enterprises go digital. Digital business success depends on “the availability and utility of increasingly powerful and flexible cloud-enabled, and cloud-delivered, technology and business services,” Guptill analyst at Saugatuck states. To know more go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2014/06/29/are-digital-business-and-cloud-computing-joined-at-the-hip/

The integration of cloud technology and advanced analytics allows organizations to find and use information to save money, deliver on the mission more effectively, create new value and make better decisions. Through Cloud Analytics, Booz Allen( a leading provider of management and technology consulting services to the US government in defence, intelligence, and civil markets) helps organizations gain valuable insights from large data sets, and—in the critical next step—strategically use that knowledge to drive mission success. Cloud Analytics is a data driven frontier; the term for a set of technological and analytical tools and techniques specifically designed to help clients extract information from massive data. For Booz Allen’s clients, cloud analytics involves more than algorithms. According to Booz Allen “we leverage our firm-wide expertise to provide clients with end-to-end solutions”. This includes bringing in teams of experts who understand the underlying issue to be solved, can make sense of the data for a specific organization, who can help the organization use it effectively, and who can develop tailored applications to maximize the value of the data. To know more about this, go to:http://www.boozallen.com/consulting/technology/cloud-computing/cloud-analytics

Open source software and infrastructure provider Red Hat announced its Big Data strategy. To know about big data strategy in details, go through the article by Andrew J. Brust, entrepreneur and CTO, specializing in application development, databases and business intelligence technology.

http://www.zdnet.com/red-hats-big-data-strategy-a-full-stack-approach-7000011574/

Recently Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the news for reducing its cloud services prices by up to forty percent and turning into a strong competitor overnight against Google and Microsoft offering similar services. The cost reduction has resulted in an intensive price war where the price has touched a rock bottom level.

The price reduction is in line with reducing waste at every opportunity as mastered by Andy Jassy, senior VP of AWS. The price reduction policy has made public cloud space very much competitive, but the other side of the coin is that the place has become jam packed too.

So, how can AWS afford to cut its prices and offer a stiff competition? Brett Winterford and Steven Kiernan from CRN write about them here: http://www.crn.com.au/News/382683,four-secrets-of-awss-low-prices.aspx .

Small and midsize businesses(SMB) are going to play a major role in India in the coming days. Adoption of social, media, analytics and cloud(SMAC) in SMBs will not only increase the number of new customers but also raise efficiency. According to a report by EY and Assocham, the number of SMBs adopting cloud computing will increase highly. To know more on this topic, please go through the article link by Eileen Yu, a freelance blogger and content specialist.

http://www.zdnet.com/in/cloud-adoption-among-indian-smbs-to-soar-7000029009/

While considering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution versus a traditional on premise software application, several factors should be kept in mind  at the time of calculating total cost of ownership and ROI. Both software providers and customers can be benefitted from the efficiency of the cloud's economic model. TO know about SaaS pricing, please go through the following link:

http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/saas-pricing-compare-cost-premise-vs-saas-0847567#!OHXf2

According to a blog written by Todd Hixon (a contributor in Forbes), healthcare cloud is a major area of innovation.  This article also tells us about opportunities and drawbacks of healthcare cloud. Cloud technologies help in lowering cost by strengthening care coordination, and improve clinical outcomes by analyzing medical data in the cloud. Problems lie in implementing cloud technology due to unavailability of data. To read more about opportunities and problems of implementing healthcare cloud please follow this link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddhixon/2014/05/06/entrepreneurs-outlook-for-the-healthcare-cloud-is-cloudy/

It is true that cloud computing is rapidly changing the nature of businesses. Now, it is spanning across various industries. Even, the legal industry has adopted the cloud technology in recent years.

Though, it is a fact that cloud has brought in numerous benefits, but security and privacy are main concerns. Particularly, these are very much important in legal issues as they deal with clients which are privileged information. But does that mean that lawyers will stop adopting cloud technology? Definitely not. They have to use the technology in such a way so that they can realize maximum benefits of using it.

At a panel discussion titled “Privacy and Your Practice: Data Sovereignty for Lawyers,” held at CUNY Law School, experts discussed how lawyers can cope with the technology maintaining privacy and security simultaneously. To know the discussions, read them at http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/06/practicing-law-in-the-age-of-cloud-computing/ .

When technology is running fast in the cloud way, taking multinational companies as its partner, restaurants are not very much successful in it. Most of them are still using costly proprietary software that never gives benefits in return. If MNCs can adopt the cloud and mobile technology, why do restaurants, which have large number of transactions per day, are not able to do it?

With the world becoming increasingly mobile, cloud services becoming cheap, restaurants have ample chance to switch over to cloud and mobile technology. You may be thinking of what are the benefits of switching? Well, you will be able to increase your operational efficiency and better manage your employees and that too while dealing with your customers and simultaneously not sitting in front of your desktop.

So, what are you thinking of? Making your restaurant system interesting and keeping in sync with the technological advancement?   Larry Abramson, CEO of Red Book Connect writes about why you should switch to cloud and mobile technology. Read them at at http://www.fastcasual.com/article/231005/3-reasons-why-restaurants-need-mobile-cloud-technology.

Amazon web services is designing tools to help users track cloud usage & spending pattern in a much easier way. Cloud tracking ability is the new front in the feature competition among cloud services. In addition to the just-launched Cost Explorer by Amazon Web Services, for example, Google unveiled a beta version of Cloud Pricing Calculator in February to estimate costs and needs for computing power, storage, memory or other resources. According to Parmita Mehta, technical program manager at AWS, there were several things the first release focused on. One is simplicity, so that sign-up can be accomplished with a single click, and the tool runs in the browser. She said, “Cost Explorer shows you your current month's spend and automatically pre-populates your last 4 months of AWS spend so you can visualize your AWS costs, and start analyzing trends and spending patterns”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023002KGT582

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665

As industry experts suggest, PaaS solutions can make things easier and accelerate the drive towards business goals. It leads to the question that why they are not as popular as IaaS and SaaS? One has to explore the history of PaaS solutions to get the answer! PaaS, unlike IaaS and SaaS, is still relatively new and simply does not yet have the share of mind that other cloud technologies enjoy. It is also a fact that some initial PaaS offerings did not quite hit the mark, as they were too narrowly focused and not able to offer everything what organizations may have needed. PaaS solutions, particularly those developed within the open-source community, are highly modular and flexible while remaining very secure. This gives organizations the option to plug and play as necessary. PaaS solutions allow for simplified, yet powerful development, but this is where things can get a bit tricky. Too much flexibility could impede accelerated development, which is counterproductive.

Gordon Haff, from Cloud Product Strategy team, Red Hat, reveals more about PaaS in his recent article. To read, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/27/why-your-company-shouldnt-pass-on-paas-to-develop-new-apps/

The CloudMapper VMS application can be deployed with an Amazon Web Services AMI, on-premises or in a hybrid environment. This application can monitor 337 health metrics on AWS. Most enterprises use AWS in some way, but faced trouble capturing the cloud service's various metrics. With AWS rolling out new services and features rapidly, monitoring became more complicated. With a proper mechanism to address this issue, it took 2 long years to launch the visual monitoring system- CloudMapper.

According to the developer ScienceLogic, CloudMapper can be used for:

·         Spot expensive AWS resources;

·         Aligning security policies with virtual private clouds;

·         Uptime; 

·         Selecting the best zone to use;

·         Visibility into AWS.

To read more, visit

http://www.zdnet.com/sciencelogic-launches-cloudmapper-tracks-aws-performance-costs-7000027935/

Few years ago, Internet marketing in India would have meant designing On-Premise solutions for activities such as CRM or ERP. Products and tools from global software vendors were available, but integration and customization often meant huge expenditure. Today, with the SaaS delivery model, software and related data are centrally hosted on the cloud and can be accessed through a Web browser, resulting in better operations with significantly less expenditure. Migrating to a SaaS model makes sense for an e-commerce company, but it is also relevant for a company which deals in the age-old business like auto loans. A principal reason for such industry-wide demand of SaaS is its ability to make decisions faster. Sunil Padmanabhan, research director for Gartner in India had said recently that "SaaS is extremely real in India and there is a large critical mass in adoption”.

To read more, visit reputed journalist Rajiv Rao’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/in/reaching-for-the-cloud-indias-saas-journey-7000023820/