Cloud Computing: Discover the Skills that Power the Cloud
With the rise of cloud computing has come many shits, not the least of which is a change in the skill sets required of IT professionals. This ebook will discuss core competencies needed to successfully administer a cloud environment as well as opportunities developing in the cloud computing market place. While IT professional will be able to leverage many of their existing skills to manage cloud environments, the cloud requires holistic mindset, and that means moving beyond one's comfort zone.
What is Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a collaborative visual development environment that enables you to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions that operate on your data. The Machine Learning service and development environment is cloud-based, provides compute resource and memory flexibility, and eliminates setup and installation concerns because you work through your web browser.
Machine Learning Studio is where data science, predictive analytics, cloud resources, and your data meet.
The Machine Learning Studio interactive workspace
To develop a predictive analysis model, you typically use data from one or more sources, transform and analyze that data through various data manipulation and statistical functions, and generate a set of results. Developing a model like this is an iterative process. As you modify the various functions and their parameters, your results converge until you are satisfied that you have a trained, effective model.
Machine Learning Studio gives you an interactive, visual workspace to easily build, test, and iterate on a predictive analysis model. You drag-and-drop datasets and analysis modules onto an interactive canvas, connecting them together to form an experiment, which you run in Machine Learning Studio. To iterate on your model design, you edit the experiment, save a copy if desired, and run it again. When you're ready, you can publish your experiment as a web service so that your model can be accessed by others.
There is no programming required, just visually connecting datasets and modules to construct your predictive analysis model.
To learn how Azure and/or cloud computing can revolutionize your business, fill out the contact form to the right or call us at 800-550-3795.
Try Azure Machine Learning for free. No credit card or Azure subscription needed. Get started now
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/machine-learning-what-is-ml-studio/
3 Reasons To Extend Your Data With The Cloud
Your business requires a flexible IT infrastructure that can scale on demand. With a private cloud in your datacenter, you can be more agile and manage resources more effectively. When you extend your datacenter to meet the public cloud, you are working in a hybrid cloud model. A hybrid cloud gives you the best of both worlds, so you can take advantage of external resources when it makes sense for your business. The Microsoft hybrid cloud combines Microsoft Azure, Windows Server, and Microsoft System Center, giving you Microsoft’s enterprise-grade technology in both your company’s own datacenter and our global datacenters.
Extending into the cloud should expand your options without adding complexity. A Microsoft hybrid cloud lets you easily move workloads from your datacenter to Microsoft Azure or a hosting service provider’s datacenter, while still maintaining a complete view of the infrastructure. You can build hybrid applications that leverage both on-premises and cloud resources. And you can take advantage of storage, backup, and recovery options with increased efficiency and reduced cost.
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You're on-premises infrastructure is key to the business, and a major investment - yet the benefits of a cloud approach are becoming too great to ignore. Here are three reasons why you should extend your datacenter using cloud technologies.
The Internet has a fundamental problem with security that’s a part of its very DNA. And if things stay as they are, that problem -- and Internet security -- can only get worse. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and its industry partners intend to change that.
If things go as planned, within two years the partners will produce the first “Black Cloud” -- an open source, software-defined perimeter (SDP) solution that will stop distributed denial of service attacks dead in their tracks and enable highly secure cloud-based applications.
“We think this a pretty big idea,” said Jim Reavis, the CSA’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve already defined a very specific framework for how you could implement this so that organizations can build the software themselves, and several government agencies are now doing that.”
The current project, which the CSA is developing with Waverley Labs, will develop open source code for one specific use case to start. The intent is to create standards, Reavis said, and to start seeding the market with open source software that will then be embedded in the solutions provided by information security and network providers.
“We’ve been working for a while with the [CSA] SDP working group, and have already had several proprietary versions that have gone into different security control layers,” said Juanita Koilpillai, the CEO of Waverley Labs. “So we thought, why not make this an open source project, which we’ll develop versions for multiple layers over time, the first being single-packet authentication that will allow [network] devices to deny all connections from anything other than the application they want to talk to.”
Similarly for applications, the goal is to deny all connections except for the device that’s been authorized to talk with them, which provides the ability to hide applications from all eyes except those that have a specific right to see them.
This essentially turns the original concept of the Internet, as an open communications medium, on its head. The fabric of the Internet is now like Swiss cheese, with so many holes that it’s all but impossible to completely defend against modern threats such as man-in-the-middle or SQL injection attacks. If you use the Internet, you are vulnerable.
The CSA’s SDP approach instead makes total security the starting point for the Internet and allows only those connections it can authenticate. It can’t be done for the whole of the Internet all at once, but with the Internet of Things looming, where millions of embedded computers and sensors are connected over the Internet, “fundamentally we are now at the point where we are going to have to shift from this default open approach to layer on default closed, to darken parts of the Internet,” Reavis said.
One place where this could be immediately useful is in spurring the move of organizations to the cloud. Despite various mandates and directives, this has been a slow process for government because of security concerns, which has prompted the rise of the hybrid cloud model, where some applications and services reside in the public cloud while keeping more sensitive information behind the agency firewall in private clouds. That solution can still be costly for agencies, however, because the cost savings associated with the public cloud are blunted by having to maintain on-premise, private cloud infrastructure.
In the CSA model, however, everything could be moved to the public cloud because SDP allows the creation of dark clouds inside the public cloud infrastructure. Those dark clouds would be owned by the government agency and would be invisible to everyone except for those designated and authenticated. There’d be no possibility for anyone else in the public cloud to share the organization’s data or be able to get a look at it, the main fear of agencies in moving sensitive applications and their data to the public cloud.
“Virtual private cloud is going to be such a commonplace term once this gets implemented, and that’s going to be the default way that people operate,” Reavis said. “It’s going to be a big shift for IT and will deliver big cost savings to agencies over time.”
None of the technology the CSA and its partners are using for the project is new. It’s based on protocols developed by the Defense Department and National Security Agency, and it uses standard security tools such as public key infrastructure, layered security, IPsec and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), along with well understood concepts such as geolocation and federation to enable connections.
Up to now, however, most SDP implementations have been highly customized solutions, available only to the organizations (like Coca-Cola) that developed them. The goal of the CSA project is to move the SDP model to a more general audience, The open source version now being developed by Waverley Labs is aimed at bringing people together to talk about how to implement SDP generally, what standard protocols could be used, what sequence of events needs to be followed, how to write JSON files to allow interaction with applications and so on.
“Our goal is to create a community that is really struggling to protect their applications and help them either hide them or move them to the cloud,” Koilpillai said. “None of the problems we are trying to tackle with this are simple; otherwise, they would have been solved by now.”
Waverley will do a phased release of the SDP for different security layers over the next 18 to 24 months. The open source project will help federal agencies see how an actual implementation works, she said, which is vital for this kind of thing because “you actually have to take that and prove it, otherwise people won’t believe you.”
Source: http://gcn.com/Articles/2015/05/20/software-defined-perimeter.aspx?s=cloud_020615&admgarea=TC_Cloud&Page=1
Hybrid Cloud Environment Increases Productivity and Collaboration for a Real Estate Development Firm
Industry: Real Estate
Business Needs:
A small real estate firm with about twelve users who planned to grow their business quickly needed to provide users remote access, improve their network speed, and provide a better e-mail solution with larger mailboxes, anti-spam filtering and calendaring. They were currently using expensive third party conferencing tools but their mailboxes were small and they were having trouble collaborating through calendars. They needed better conferencing tools including bigger mailboxes, anti-spam filtering and calendaring. Because their employees constantly travel for meetings, they also wanted to provide better mobility with a remote access platform to make it easy to connect directly from anywhere on any device. With no current back-up strategy in place and a need to refresh their current hardware and collaboration tools, they needed a technology partner to assist with a solution scalable to grow with their business.
Solution:
Managed Solution created a hybrid cloud environment that included moving from their Exchange Server to Office 365. This solution would improve calendaring, create larger e-mail mailboxes, and allowed them to implement Lync for conferencing. Managed Solution started the project by upgrading their bandwidth and their switch to prevent bottlenecks in the network. We recommended virtualizing their servers to reduce hardware costs and create added redundancy and lessen physical imprint, while implementing a Back-up and Disaster Recovery Solution to prevent data loss.
Success:
Since partnering with Managed Solution, the firm has doubled in size while reducing IT costs by switching to a hybrid cloud solution. Their technology solution supports their rapid growth model without having to implement new changes as they grow. Remote users are easily accessing e-mail through the cloud and they are very happy with the increased productivity and collaboration tools. Their staff has expressed how easy it is to use our help desk services and find a solution to daily IT issues. Deploying remote desktop services and Office 365 provided a remote mobile working solution for employees to work from anywhere on any device, enabled them to fix their calendaring issues and implement Lync for conferencing, which helped them reduce costs from third party conferencing companies.
Services/Resources:
Cloud solutions help your business save money by providing scalable storage, bandwidth, and processing power; improving your access to important files; and automates many IT tasks. The three cloud options—public, private, and hybrid clouds—each have advantages depending on your business’ needs. When compliance, flexibility, and savings are your primary requirements, a hybrid cloud solution may be for you. This is how each benefit can help your business:
1. Keeps you compliant
The hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. This means businesses in highly regulated industries (such as healthcare) with compliance requirements regarding data residency (such as HIPAA) can leverage the private cloud for those sensitive workloads, while relying on the cost-effective public cloud for nonregulated operations.
Take banking, another industry that’s strictly regulated: A&P Financial (famous as Rush N Cash), the largest loan lender in Korea, expanded its business to China and decided to implement a credit scoring system customized to local market conditions. A credit scoring system entails a great deal of data analysis and corporate risk management, which makes it an ideal workload for the cloud—but which cloud?
If your company experiences an unexpected spike in usage of an in-house server, the workload can be passed off to the public cloud.
According to Lee Seowon, Director at NICE Information Service, “The hybrid model is ideally suited to enabling the expansion of A&P Financial across Asia, including China, because in this model, only data that can be delivered across countries, like ID numbers, is stored on the public cloud.” Lee says the biggest advantage of the hybrid model is that it complies with regulations but carries no security risk. (Learn more about A&P Financial’s experience with the hybrid cloud here).
2. Keeps you flexible
The hybrid cloud lets your business be more agile. If your company experiences an unexpected spike in usage of an in-house server, the workload can be passed off to the public cloud. This way, your company avoids the additional cost of having to purchase new server hardware. In addition to being agile, the hybrid cloud is also scalable, which means it’s well suited for businesses with unpredictable peaks.
Callaway Golf, one of the world’s largest makers of premium golf products, needed a way to scale up quickly: “During and after a high-profile golf tournament, there’s a great deal of interest in our product and our websites receive a lot of hits,” said Dan Cowles, Manager of Solution Development for Callaway Golf. The company’s IT infrastructure was located in its Carlsbad, California, headquarters but couldn’t scale to meet increased traffic fast enough. “Consumers and resellers could experience slow response times and even downtime,” said Cowles.
The company sought a hybrid solution to eliminate the slowdowns and be able to scale infrastructure quickly. This way, the company could proactively improve customer experience. “It’s especially valuable in responding to requests in non-US regions, because it’s difficult to set up infrastructure in Carlsbad and provide remote access to those applications,” said Cowles. (Learn more about Callaway Golf’s experience with the hybrid cloud here.)
3. Saves you money
With the hybrid cloud you don’t have to ditch all your old systems. Instead, a hybrid solution integrates your legacy technology, so you can work between old and new systems. Because the hybrid model lets you tap into the public cloud for immediate projects and scaling, your business can carry out these tasks quickly for less than it would cost to use your local IT infrastructure.
A hybrid solution integrates your legacy technology, so you can work between old and new systems.
As Cushman & Wakefield (a global real estate group) grew, it acquired more expensive hardware than it wanted to deal with. “We are a global commercial real estate firm,” said Craig Cuyar, Global CIO for Cushman & Wakefield. “We want to make investments that support our core business, and buying and managing servers is not our core business.” It came down to where to put company dollars: “We didn’t want to invest our money in hiring more IT people; we would rather hire brokers. We had to find a smarter, more efficient way to operate,” said Cuyar.
The company wanted to do away with its own servers but it wasn’t realistic to do this, 100 percent, right away. Instead, the company gradually moved workloads to the cloud. Nonetheless, the results were impressive: Cushman and Wakefield reduced IT costs by 75 percent. According to Cuyar, “with cloud computing, we’re using our IT assets far more efficiently. We’re not investing in massive piles of hardware that sit idle most of the time. We have a compact reservoir of IT resources that we can dynamically allocate when and where needed.” (Learn more about Cushman and Wakefield’s experience with the hybrid cloud here.)
Source: http://blogs.microsoft.com/work/2014/07/14/top-3-ways-the-hybrid-cloud-improves-business/
Is your business looking for a flexible, cost-efficient, and regulation-compliant cloud solution? A hybrid cloud may be exactly what you need. For more information on cloud solutions contact Managed Solution at 800-550-3795.
The Game Changer: Cloud Computing, Hosting and Cloud Services - A Hybrid Cloud Infographic
Managed Solution employs cloud technology subject matter experts to assist our clients through their cloud migration. We provide innovative cloud strategy design, consultation, migration and implementation of cloud environments. Whether your organization needs a public, private, or hybrid cloud solution, we will build you a custom cloud solution to best fit the needs of your business. For more information contact Managed Solution at 800-550-3795 or fill out the contact form.
Nationwide Senior Living Facility Saves $250,000 with Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure & Improves Employees IT Experience
Industry: Healthcare/Senior Living
Business Needs:
A large, nationwide Senior Living Facility with over 24 offices and more than 1200 employees needed to reduce IT capital and operational expenses while improving employee collaboration. The organization needed to focus on implementing new and innovative ideas to upgrade their IT infrastructure, move the business forward, and address HIPPA & PCI compliance issues. They also needed a partner that would ensure their infrastructure was running properly so they didn't need to focus on IT support.
Solution:
Managed Solution partnered with the firms IT department to create a hybrid cloud solution to virtualize more of their servers and move beyond virtualization to a private and public cloud environment. The hybrid cloud environment provided a solution for some applications to run on-premise in a Microsoft-based private cloud environment and others to run in Windows Azure, the Microsoft public cloud development, hosting, and management environment. Delivering IT as a Service provided the Senior Living facility with a solution that was able to provide reliable IT services that supported growth, reduced costs and improved the end user experience. Managed Solution implemented this strategy by performing a thorough network assessment of their existing infrastructure and understanding the firm’s business objectives.
Success:
By building a hybrid cloud infrastructure, the organization has dramatically reduced its IT spend by over $250,000 in the first year. This model supports business growth, addresses compliance issues and provides critical data back-up and disaster preparedness at an affordable price. The savings come from server consolidation, power and cooling, datacenter real estate, and management costs. Additionally, by standardizing, virtualizing, and cloud-enabling its IT assets, the firm reduced IT costs, enhanced end user experience, upgraded infrastructure and addressed HIPPA & PCI compliance concerns.
Services/Resources:
