TL;DR: As IT managers gain confidence in the reliability and security of cloud services, it becomes more difficult for them to ignore the cloud’s many benefits for all their business’s operations. Companies have less hardware to purchase and maintain, they spend only for the storage and processing they need, and they can easily monitor and manage their applications. With the Morpheus database as a service you get all of the above running on a high-availability network that features 24-7 support.
Give any IT manager three wishes and they’ll probably wish for three fewer things to worry about. How about 1) having less hardware to buy and manage, 2) having to pay for only the storage and processing you need, and 3) being able to monitor and test applications from a single easy-to-use console?
Knowing the built-in cynicism of many data-center pros, they’re likely to scoff at your offer, or at least suspect that it can’t be as good as it sounds. That’s pretty much the reception cloud services got in the early days, circa 2010.
An indication of IT’s growing acceptance of cloud services for mainstream applications is KPMG’s annual survey of 650 enterprise executives in 16 countries about their cloud strategies. In the 2011 survey, concerns about data security, privacy, and regulatory compliance were cited as the principal impediments to cloud adoption in large organizations.
According to the results of the most recent KPMG cloud survey, executives now consider cloud integration challenges and control of implementation costs as their two greatest concerns. There’s still plenty of fretting among executives about the security of their data in the cloud, however. Intellectual property theft, data loss/privacy, and system availability/business continuity are considered serious problems, according to the survey.
Executives rate such cloud-security challenges as intellectual property theft, data loss, and system availability greater than 4 on a scale of 1 (not serious) to 5 (very serious). Credit: KPMG
Still, security concerns aren’t dissuading companies from adopting cloud services. Executives told KPMG that in the next 18 months their organizations planned cloud adoption in such areas as sourcing and procurement; supply chain and logistics; finance, accounting and financial management; business intelligence and analytics; and tax.
Cloud ‘migration’ is really a ‘transformation’
Three business trends are converging to make the cloud an integral part of the modern organization: the need to collect, integrate, and analyze data from all internal operations; the need to develop applications and business processes quickly and inexpensively; and the need to control and monitor the use of data resources that are no longer stored in central repositories.
In a September 2, 2014, article on Forbes.com, Robert LeBlanc explains that cloud services were initially perceived as a way to make operations more efficient and less expensive. But now organizations see the cloud architecture as a way to innovate in all areas of the company. Business managers are turning to cloud services to integrate big data, mobile computing, and social media into their core processes.
Mobile and collaboration are leading the transition in organizations away from on-site management and toward cloud platforms. Credit: Ventana Research
George Washington University discovered first-hand the unforeseen benefits of its shift to a cloud-based data strategy. Zaid Shoorbajee describes in the March 3, 2014, GW Hatchet student newspaper how a series of campus-wide outages motivated the university to migrate some operations to cloud services. The switch saved the school $700,000 and allowed its IT staff to focus more on development and less on troubleshooting.
The benefits the school realized from the switch extend far beyond IT, however. Students now have the same “consumer and social experience” they’ve become accustomed to in their private lives through Google, iTunes, and similar services, according to a university spokesperson.
Four approaches to cloud application integration
Much of the speed, efficiency, and agility of cloud services can be lost when organizations become bogged down in their efforts to adapt legacy applications and processes. In a TechTarget article (registration required), Amy Reichert presents four approaches to cloud application integration. The process is anything but simple, due primarily to the nature of the applications themselves and the need to move data seamlessly and accurately between applications to support business processes.
One of the four techniques is labeled integration platform as a service (iPaas), in which the cloud service itself provides integration templates featuring such tools as connectors, APIs, and messaging systems. Organizations then customize and modify the templates to meet their specific needs.
In cloud-to-cloud integration, the organization’s cloud applications have an integration layer built in to support any required data transformations, as well as encryption and transportation. The cloud-to-integrator-to-cloud model relies on the organization’s existing middleware infrastructure to receive, convert, and transport the data between applications.
Finally, the hybrid integration approach keeps individual cloud apps separate but adds an integration component to each. This allows organizations to retain control over the data, maximize its investment in legacy systems, and adopt cloud services at the company’s own pace.
Regardless of your organization’s strategy for adopting and integrating cloud applications, the Morpheus database as a service can play a key role by providing a flexible, secure, and reliable platform for monitoring and optimizing database applications. Morpheus’s SSD-backed infrastructure ensures lightning fast performance, and direct patches into EC2 offer ultra-low latency.
Morpheus protects your data via secure VPC connections and automatic backups, replication, and archiving. The service supports ElasticSearch, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis, as well as custom storage engines. Create your free database during the beta period.
