Cloud computing
Why we need cloud devices in now a days
16 Ways The Cloud Will Change Our Lives
“Cloud computing has the potential to generate a series of disruptions that will ripple out from the tech industry and ultimately transform many industries around the world,” says John Hagel, co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, Deloitte’s Silicon Valley-based research center. Here are some of the ways the cloud’s ability to access, analyze, store and share information could change our business and personal lives:
Everyone will become a gamer.
Gaming is called the “killer app” of cloud computing, and gamers have salivated over demos with complex 3-D graphics delivered to mobile devices through the cloud. While some technical wrinkles remain, players can now enjoy breathtaking gaming experiences anywhere because of the cloud’s power to provide higher speed without interruption. The same gaming principles are now being extended to many other areas. “You can deliver information to a patient about using a drug in a way that is as compelling to use as any game or app,” says Lynette Ferrara, a partner at the IT consultancy CSC. The new generation of wellness and chronic disease management programs use gaming techniques to educate and coach patients in real time. “We expect that information will be available at our fingertips, and the cloud will change the nature of the kind of information we can access.” Ferrara adds, “In essence, we will all become gamers, with this functionality being used for everything from product development to personalized medication and disease management programs.”
Fixing stuff will be easier.
Thanks to the cloud, you can expect to get earlier notice when things around your house or office are about to go on the fritz. For example, a cloud-based app alerts drivers of electric cars when their batteries will run out of juice, letting them get to a charging station without needing to call a tow truck. A major medical equipment company developed a cloud-based application that feeds information to field system engineers who need to maintain health equipment, helping them head off problems. And when stuff needs to be fixed, the cloud will make that easier, too. Daniel Burrus, author of Flash Foresight, says tablet PCs using cloud-based applications will give field technicians immediate access to training modules if they need to, say, figure out how to repair a certain type of furnace. “There will be a wave of just-in-time training,” Burrus says.
Computers will become invisible.
When people use search engines, they usually don’t realize they are accessing billion-dollar computer networks. As the power of the cloud spreads, one effect will be to make software and computing more invisible, says Dan Reed, vice president of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group. Your interaction with computers will be more hands free—such as the recent introduction of the Kinect, which allows gamers to eschew controllers and just use gestures and movements that are interpreted by a 3-D camera and infrared detection system. Expect to see more of this type of computer intuition because of the cloud. “You will be able to walk in a room and there could be hundreds of sensors in it that could respond,” Reed says.
You’ll actually find what you want in stores.
Surveys show a large number of consumers are dissatisfied with the growing practice of web-to-store—where they shop for products on the Internet and then go to a store to purchase them—because too often the store doesn’t have the product on hand as its website promised. With the cloud, inventory records will be much more visible and reliable. Connected shoppers, who browse brick-and-mortar aisles with web browser in hand, are beginning to exercise their leverage, such as asking the store to match a price found on a competitor’s website. Retailers’ brand value will be dramatically affected by how they satisfy these mobile-savvy shoppers.
Everyone will want to give you advice.
In an age of information overload and unlimited choice, companies in all industries will want to become your trusted advisor—which is also a key way retailers will fight against commoditization. “Companies will be less interested in the immediate sale than in providing advice in order to develop a relationship,” Hagel says. The need for guidance will spawn new companies that leverage the insights from the many footprints we leave online. Now, for example, shopping sites might offer suggestions of movies or videos based on previous purchases. “The next level will be companies that make those suggestions based on not just your activity on one specific site, but across a range of places—what you watch on web TV, on YouTube and other sites,” Hagel says. “If a company can capture all my online activity, as it occurs in real time, it can have an integrated view of me as an individual and suggest things I didn’t even know I wanted to look at.”
You will be sold to differently.
Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Business Unit of Red Hat, the open source technology solutions provider, says the cloud is fundamentally changing the way companies sell to businesses and consumers. “The old mantra used to be people buy from people,” he says. “But customers are moving to more online transactions, which is fundamentally a cloud phenomenon. Even in industries where the transaction requires direct personal interaction, buyers will form their opinions of products and services based on input from online communities.” The cloud will “give small, niche retailers the ability to tweak their offerings and develop a closer understanding of their customers,” notes Crenshaw. In addition, he expects companies to lure customers with new kinds of “freemiums”—free online versions of their wares. The idea is that a portion of customers taking advantage of free versions will eventually shift to paid versions with more features.
You’ll be able to make smarter decisions.
Having just-in-time training won’t be the only way the cloud will help you make wiser choices. Burrus points out the cloud can turn any mobile device into a “supercomputer.” This means you can access processing power as needed from the cloud to analyze virtually any type of information wherever you are. Imagine, for example, that you combined live stock market data, weather projections, scanned news stories, tweets and comments in blogs, gauging the sentiment or subtle changes in public opinions. Put those streams of information together, feed them into an advanced simulation on your mobile phone and you could gain unique insight that leads to profitable stock choices. Even if you don’t play the market, processing power on demand will make it easier for you to do original research on any topic that comes to mind, such as combining sales projections with just-in-time raw material inventories to make sure your department meets customer demands.
Small businesses will go global…in days.
To satisfy the new markets being created by the cloud, small- and medium-size companies will leverage the cloud and get a bigger slice of the action. “Small- and medium-size businesses will go from being constrained to certain geographies due to budget limitations to having the ability to scale globally with significantly reduced overhead costs,” says David Dobson, an executive vice president at CA Technologies, a maker of IT management software and solutions that enables the cloud for SMBs through its managed service provider customers. “Perhaps the most fascinating part is all of this can happen without building a physical data center at a new location. For example, instead of deploying on-site infrastructure to run their operations, companies can access infrastructure as a service, via managed service providers.” And they’ll be able to do it in days, rather than the months this often took in the past, giving them a huge advantage over slower competitors, and allowing them to keep pace with larger companies.
Road trips will be less stressful.
If you’ve ever caravanned with a group of cars, you know the pressure of constantly looking in your rear-view mirror to make sure everyone is keeping up. Leave it to a group of college students to figure out how cloud computing could improve the road trip. As part of a class project, some University of Michigan students developed a mobile app that uses cloud computing to allow a cluster of vehicles traveling together to track each other during the journey. The app lets travelers view vehicle telemetry about their speed and fuel usage; send alerts about stops along the way; notify fellow caravanners by texting road condition and hazards; and select the best route. The combination of location tracking, social media and cloud-based analytics could improve all types of transportation scenarios.
Laptop security breaches will decline.
One study found that some 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, subjecting companies to embarrassment and financial risk if important information is exposed. “In the traditional model, people can carry a laptop with all their secrets, like customer and payroll information,” says Greg Bell, practice leader for information protection at KPMG, LLP, the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm. “To protect that information, we encrypt it. But there is a fear that many countries restrict the importation of encrypted laptops, so we run the risk of breaking local country laws and having the laptop subjected to review which might disclose that information.” The cloud can eliminate those concerns by having all data securely stored on the Internet. The laptop no longer stores the data; rather, it becomes the instrument by which to access it.
“Bedside manner” will become app-infused.
Over the past year, the number of medical students who said they turned to the Internet for information dropped from 52 percent to 33 percent, while those who cited “mobile” as their preferred information source zoomed from 19 percent to 34 percent. The desire for info-on-the-go dovetails with the growth of mobile dashboard applications, which are becoming a red-hot niche with the many new touchscreen smartphones hitting the market. “Imagine a doctor or dentist who is able to pull up a patient’s radiograph and zoom into particular areas of the radiograph with the touch of a button,” says Dan Shey, practice director, Enterprise for ABI Research, a technology research company. This development would harness the cloud’s computational ability to render the image so it could be viewed on a mobile device with the touch, zoom and screen resolution of the device itself. This would allow medical practitioners to make medical decisions almost instantaneously, regardless of their location or whether they have access to a desktop computer. It is just one example of how the cloud can overcome the processing power and data storage limitations of mobile devices.
Public/private clouds will make homes healthier.
Honorio J. Padrón III, a principal and global practice leader at the Hackett Group, a global consulting firm, sees great opportunities in the convergence of the enterprise and consumer clouds. Consider the burgeoning area of home health monitoring. The cloud allows doctors to wirelessly monitor patients with sleep apnea, collect information and then tap into a network of experts to devise a treatment plan. At a recent trade show, experimental technology was showcased that uses an infrared camera mounted above the bathroom mirror to take a daily photo of a person’s face. Over time, the images can be stored and analyzed for changes, alerting doctors of pre-cancerous skin cells so treatment can begin earlier.
Developing countries will become new markets and new competitors.
Bell notes that China and other emerging countries have not developed robust IT infrastructures, which means they can embrace the cloud quicker — and exploit new opportunities faster—since they won’t be as delayed by tasks like integrating legacy technology. At the same time, the cloud will provide new opportunities in these emerging countries. In India, for example, far more people use cell phones than landlines. As the cloud eliminates barriers to what mobile devices can do, the devices will become the conduit to open up huge new markets.
Companies will use more suppliers.
The desire for greater efficiency has dictated that companies should streamline the number of suppliers they use. The cloud could reverse that by allowing companies to coordinate a more diversified group of suppliers, giving these companies the flexibility to meet unanticipated needs. The secret is “community clouds”—an embryonic type of cloud computing that allows business partners to coordinate their activities over a secure platform (which protects their secrets even from each other). One community cloud, for example, supports employees with complicated travel itineraries, coordinating the changes to hotel bookings and restaurant reservations if, say, a flight is cancelled.
Everyone will bootstrap.
The cloud offers individuals exciting ways to collaborate, develop products and test ideas rapidly and cheaply, which could accelerate the rising rate of entrepreneurialism. “You see small startups using the cloud to do complex modeling of new product offers,” Hagel says. “The speed at which you can identify what people are interested in, and what they will pay, really changes the nature of innovation.”
Language barriers will fade.
“Today, cloud computing gives mobile-device users a level of speech recognition accuracy that is virtually on par with call center-based transcription services,” says Marcello Typrin, vice president of product development for Yap, a company that makes a free iPhone application that converts voicemail messages into text. The cloud’s massive computational power may make language barriers fade in other ways as well. Imagine you were at a client site and needed to confer with a colleague in another country who speaks only Italian. You contact him on your mobile device and both your words are instantly translated into each other’s language using voice recognition and translation software. “The scenario is possible today with latency near real-time, assuming you have a network with capable bandwidth on each end,” Typrin says.
