Laurie Hirsch

Enterprise Cloud Computing

Enterprise Cloud Computing is the use of cloud computing for competitive advantage. The competitive advantage goes beyond savings in the procurement, management and maintenance of infrastructure, by providing a model of utility computing that enables rapid agility and collaboration capabilities that support business innovation.

Introducing Cloud Computing

Everybody seems to be talking about cloud computing. As technology trends go, cloud computing is generating a lot of interest, and along with that interest is a share of hype as well. The aim of this book is to provide you with a sophisticated understanding of what cloud computing is and where it can offer real business advantage. We shall be examining cloud computing from historical, theoretical and practical perspectives, so that you will know what to use, in which situation, and when it will be most appropriate.

Txt2vz: A New Tool for Generating Graph Clouds

We present txt2vz (txt2vz.appspot.com), a new tool for automatically generating a visual summary of unstructured text data found in documents or web sites. The main purpose of the tool is to give the user information about the text so that they can quickly get a good idea about the topics covered. Txt2vz is able to identify important concepts from unstructured text data and to reveal relationships between those concepts. We discuss other approaches to generating diagrams from text and highlight the differences between tag clouds, word clouds, tree clouds and graph clouds.

Intelligence in the Cloud

We have seen how web and cloud technology allow us to easily store and process vast amounts of information, and as we saw in Chap. 6, there are many different data storage models used in the cloud. This chapter looks at how we can start to unlock the hidden potential of that data, to find the ‘golden nuggets’ of truly useful information contained in the overwhelming mass of irrelevant or useless junk and to discover new knowledge via the intelligent analysis of the data. Many of the intelligent tools and techniques discussed here originated well before cloud computing. However, the nature of cloud data, its scalable access to huge resources and the sheer size of the available data means that the advantages of these tools are much more obvious. We have now reached a place where many common web-based tasks would not be possible without them.

Data in the Cloud

These days we tend to think only of computer-based databases, but databases have been with us for centuries. The ancient Egyptians stored data on stone tables in columns and rows. More recently, libraries used a card index system to allow users to retrieve an ISBN number from an indexed drawer, full of cards.

Business Adoption Models and Legal Aspects of the Cloud

There are alternative ways a business might adopt cloud computing, and we will be reviewing those approaches in this chapter. As we saw earlier, there are many something-as-a-service options available, and many providers provide all of them, whilst some concentrate on specialist areas like data storage or application platforms.

Developing a Cloud Roadmap

The pace of change and innovation in Information Technology and its increasing contribution to business transformation has been a major source of spending in organisations. At the same time, companies of all sizes have increasingly been affected by unpredictable and uncertain changing business environments in recent years. Whilst externally current business landscape is driven by new hurdles and opportunities such as challenging economy, emerging technologies, increasing commoditisation of technology, shorter information life cycle, increased transparency along the supply chains, changing customer demands and preferences, evolving issues around transparency, privacy, security, as well as associated regulations, compliance and standards, internally organisations are challenged by tighter budgets and emphasis on managing investments effectively, reducing costs, managing the evolving complexity of markets, managing new relationships including developing new business models to differentiate and stay competitive, harnessing the technology capabilities for efficient and effective business delivery, process and operational efficiency, strategically aligning IT resources to business needs for optimised business benefit realisation, managing risk and many more.

Social, Economic and Political Aspects of the Cloud

That technology can make enormous changes to human society is not in doubt. Where would we be without the invention of the wheel? But deep-seated changes have also happened as a result of advances in computing.

Cloud Security and Governance

Information Technology is so pervasive now that it is difficult to imagine doing business without it. Organisations record their transactions in databases and save their documents in networked file storage. Some of that information is crucial for competitive advantage, so clearly the security of that information is important. Every day, organisations expend more funds to secure their IT operations, whether it be physical security (swipe card access to underground server bunkers), technological security (encryption) or process security (policies). With all this investment in place, why would any organisation even consider giving away the responsibility of managing their data, when you don’t know where it will reside, and you can only access it over an Internet connection?