Posted by Swapnil Shukla

Cloud hosting has become the new age of levelers. Hence, the SMEs and the startups need not feel left out in the market as now cloud server hosting provides the same set of resources that a startup needs to flourish in the market at the same level as other established enterprises. So this is the best time to think of kick-starting your business idea that you have been procrastinating about.

The concept of a free cloud server is like a savior and the most cost-effective approach to an IT infrastructure. If you are thinking that how to choose the right cloud server provider, then you are in the right place.

The options in the cloud server hosting market can make you feel overwhelmed. But if you are clear with the features needed by your business then it would not be difficult to choose the right one. Although all the factors are equally important, still data sovereignty and security are the ones that are the most important.

Doubts related to a free cloud server

Irrespective of the size of your business you need to keep your game updated. Therefore, a major chunk of the small and mid-size businesses has already switched to cloud computing and so many of the others are on the verge of shifting to a cloud hosting platform. But there are still some who doubt the capabilities of a free cloud server.

At the end of this article, we would want all your doubts related to cloud hosting must get clear. As there can be no better time to invest in such technology. It makes everything easier, more secure, and even cost friendly then there is nothing much left to say. In a small business, the resources are limited and thus it becomes necessary to make the most out of it and come up with an optimum solution. A cloud hosting platform leaves no resource unused which is remarkable and the results are miraculous.

We understand that to accept the changes is quite difficult, but once you will observe your business growing through cloud hosting it will be worth it. Growth within a cloud hosting platform is certified and incomparable to the conventional methods.

Although some other issues occur due to the geographical location of the cloud data center. These are-

Latency –

This factor takes into consideration the exact physical distance between the server and your area of operation. You might not realize it but has a significant effect on business performance.

Support–

This is another and equally important factor that people mostly realize after signing up for a cloud service. It takes into account how free your cloud service provider has set you to contact them during the time of any issue. 

Disaster recovery–

It could be the possibility that your cloud service provider exists in a disaster-prone area. This leads to so many environmental-related risks to your business profile. This will compel you to ask questions like how to retrieve data during such situations. Also how to deal with such a data outage. 

When we talk about SMEs and startups, these issues get heightened up as they already run out of resources and have a lack of expertise as well as experience. Using the services of a free cloud server brings in many advantages and removes the existing issues as well. The best part is that you need not invest in hardware to store your files and other applications. Who wants to send mails again and again to email documents when the data can be easily located at a central location.

If you do not want to spend much on a cloud service in your initial days, then you can also opt for a free cloud service provided by many cloud service providers to study their user engagement in the market. Such providers will start the service for free for a limited amount of time and after that, they will start charging a minimum amount. Within this period, you will be able to check whether your idea of the startup is working in the market or not. After this, you can come up with a decision as to whether to continue in the market.

Some reputable names in the free cloud storage market

You would be surprised to know that there are so many reputed names in the market that provide free cloud server service. These are AWS cloud, Google cloud, etc. that keep a certain amount of space free wherein you can store data and do another couple of things. Such big firms provide this free service to indirectly convert some of them into long term paid clients. Through this, they have always been able to attract a long list of potential clients along with the free account holders. Out of these free account, holders can also bring in business through referral methods.

1. AWS free cloud server–  AWS or (Amazon Web Service) has a provision to enjoy their free tier services. They are equally efficient and effective as other famous AWS services. Within this free data storage space, one can enjoy exploring their other products as well. It is operated through a single account and is mostly free for 12 months. The service comprises a resizable compute capacity with all the features of a cloud service. It is secured and durable and guaranteed scalability controlled through a strong storage infrastructure.
2. Google free cloud server– The brand name of Google is enough to remove any kind of doubt in terms of their service. Apart from lightening your workloads, it provides you a hands-on experience through their world-class products. The service is although limited only for a few months but you would be able to explore their seamless computing engine and cloud storage which delivers that edge to your business. No payment will have proceeded until you ask for an upgrade and the services will neither expire. A free usage limit will be set within which you can go along any dimensions like their high-performance virtual machines or best in class storage needs. You will also be provided with real-time messaging and data streaming services.
3. Microsoft Azure free cloud server– Microsoft has been known to be the leading technology brand and its free cloud service is also one of the most renowned services. You can anytime create your free account on Microsoft Azure and unleash their world-class services. This free account will last up to 12 months and will not be charged till you opt for up-gradation. There are other services as well that are there to explore within this free account. There are so many new things that one can do like experiencing AI built applications and machine learning. You as a user can innovate and build some future based applications that can work over virtual machines. The workloads can be scaled up or down as per the requirement. This will further help you to deliver software services in a much faster and a reliable manner.

Incubators or startup cloud hosting

What greenhouses are to saplings similarly incubators are to startups. Startups are in the most need of optimal conditions to grow that can only be provided by an incubator. Startups stay in their growing state for a very long time. During this state, they need seamless internet access, office space, skills, business management, etc. along with a definite amount of capital to be invested only in business growth. In the middle of this, free cloud hosting for startups turns out to be like a blessing for them. 

They do their best to provide a fast-paced structure and a program with all the fixed-term conditions. When you will be focusing on your product development, the best free cloud hosting will be forming strategies to make your operations more smoothly. 

Some of them are free cloud servers but some of them which provide more premium services charge a minimum membership fee charged monthly or yearly. Some of such famous incubators are-

1. IBM- The name of IBM is enough to gain the trust of any kind of startup. Their incubator services are like catalysts through its world-class services based in the US. They provide their incubator and accelerator services to startups from all around the world. 
2. Rackspace- They are known to be the earliest names in the market of the best cloud hosting for startups. They have the expertise in providing public cloud, private cloud, and dedicated cloud infrastructures. Not only this they will assist you in building cloud-based products and designing them. 

There is no harm to more and more free cloud storage and such renowned names keep you away from the doubts related to the quality of the service. Thus, cloud server hosting provided for free for a limited amount of time is perfect for SMEs and startups to give a good start to their business. There are other big names also that are into the domain of free cloud servers like Dropbox, iCloud, etc. So the options are plenty, you just need to select the one that may suit your business ideas and line of customers. 

Posted by Swapnil Shukla

Australian bush fires have marked to be one of the biggest catastrophes of all times after Amazon fires. Temperatures beyond the normal records and continued drought for several months have led to a situation like this. At the very early stage only Australian Capital Territory (ACT) had declared a state of emergency as it started from Canberra. The destructions recorded are enough to show the level of disaster it has been.

The major portion of the Australia witnessed this havoc

How much elevated were the Australian fires?

According to the records, 33 people have been killed that includes 4 firefighters and millions of animals. Approximately 11 million hectares of bush area i.e. 110,000 sq. km out of which area of New South Wales and Victoria have been effected the most. In New South Wales 2,000 houses and forcing numerous to move from their homes to faraway places.

Australian fires have been shocking in size

The major destruction is caused to the wildlife of Australia which is the land known as the habitat to kangaroos and koalas. It has perished wildlife to its deepest roots by effecting 800 million animals alone in New South Wales. Overall if we see then around half a billion of animals have been impacted that includes birds, reptiles and mammals. It is near to impossible to replenish the same amount of wildlife but steps taken in the right way can bring good changes.

Australia emerged out to be the major environmental concern

Introduction to AI

Artificial intelligence is already superseding humans in each and very field and is taking over every manual task and in fact is better than humans cognitively and in terms of efficiency. The whole concern of AI is to build such machines that replaces human intelligence as much as possible. The machines then collaborate, dump piles of data to a common cloud server, dole out tasks among themselves and a front-end AI then relays results to the end-user. Already it has stepped into bizarre fields and has found appropriate application. With the implementation of machine learning a paradigm shift can be seen in every sector in the direction of positivity. A disaster as big as Australian fires needs AI to be pacified as soon as possible. Already there have been AI based solutions found out to deal with the situation.

How AI can bring or has been dealing with wildfires?

An AI based startup named Descartes Labs analyzed satellite images that were captured to detect and report the presence of smoke, changes in the thermal infrared data and other hot spots. Their AI-based algorithms are so strong in indicating a fire before it has even ignited. It is in the stage wherein they are trying to send the signals to the forestry department in the form of alerts. Due to competency of AI the company was able to detect fires which were spread for only up to 10 acres. Even when there was a big fire in Mexico, Mexico’s State Forestry Resource Protection Bureau Chief reported that Descartes startup helped a lot in being the first point of information. This has helped the wildfire rescue team to reach at pretty accurate time. It helps in narrowing down the exact location of the fire even when rescue airplanes are miles away.

AUDREY

Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory formed an AI based software application that is designed in a way to guide firefighters to how to navigate through already burning buildings. It works through data, imagery and sensory readings that helps in spreading awareness. As it becomes really difficult for a normal human eye to see through fire smoke. This makes for the firefighters so easy to make their way through the fire which was causing great hindrance before.

Inside layout showing the intensity of fire in different parts of the building

Bee2FireDetection

Big companies also are trying to implement AI to fight with the environmental disasters and lowering their adverse impacts. Hence, IBM in collaboration with Portugal’s Compta Emerging Business created a new AI-based fire detection tool named Bee2FireDetection. It aims at predicting wildfires beforehand and thus alerting the firefighters and the nearby communities for vacating the place on time. It proved that the new upcoming technologies and implementing AI, IoT and visual recognition can create miracles when applied in the right direction.

AI for Earth program with SilviaTerra

SilviaTerra is a San Francisco based company that collaborated with Microsoft’s AI for Earth program to basically use its maps and implement them to stop wildfires in spreading in a large scale. Already Microsoft is spending $50 million in the project of AI for Earth program and working very compliantly to bring in the change. These maps help planners figure out to how to advance by pointing out “fire mitigation hot spots”. This will lessen the burden on forest managers. These maps can be further used for a longer program and can also be used to analyze any area’s carbon segregating ability and recoding the groundwater levels. This means that the application of AI can bring revolution in our environment and make our Earth more habitable as it was a century before.

This is how the maps are used to detect the wildfire

Not only AI, the technology of drones also has initiated to lend their hands in pacifying the wildfires. One such drone is DroneSeed that works to fight with the problem of deforestation. It takes pride in planting trees six times faster than the normal planting by human hands.

Drones helping in planting trees…this is what you call a symbiotic relationship

There are no eyes left who wouldn’t have wept after seeing the demise of wildlife during Australian wildfire. Its high time when we as the maker of the technology and its user can apply it in saving our mother Earth. And if we talk specifically about Australia then it has the highest per capita emission of carbon dioxide in the world according to the Climate Analytics. Hence, after looking into the future AI must be applied in prevention methods before the condition reaches up to the level of destruction.   

Posted by Akriti Sharma

Questions which might come up as why we must use Cloud Computing:

1 How can media companies cope up with day-to-day advancing innovation?
2 How to have competitive advantage over new players in the market?
3 Cloud consumption models are used to provide solutions to media organizations? 

4 Cloud computing in media and entertainment industry?

Reasons for the innovation: 

•  Cloud computing offers faster time to reach the common masses. 
•  Increment in sales by having enhanced exposure to content.
•  It helps in decreasing the labor, inventory, and capital costs significantly. 
•  It provides a faster, fresher content that is identified and forwarded to the targeted set of customers.
•  Protection of the assets by using encrypted communication of content.
•  Enhanced analytics for pricing support and taking placement decisions. 
•  Separate portals are present for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) to have enhanced customer experience.
•  New Content helps in building up of cloud computing.

Introduction

Economic Pressure is the major reason of companies changing their way of doing business. So there is an increased focus on the Cloud computing for enhancing the digital supply chain system by addition of the managing the services to reduce expenses. 

The Cloud Computing is the new way of cost optimization for many organizations. Rather than large organization, Small to medium enterprises have more benefits of using cloud Computing technology. The Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) are more likely to actually outsource their content storage and content processing than the very large media companies since it is difficult to increase capital and operating expenses.

Features of Cloud Computing:

•  By the usage of cloud computing, the media companies have developed newer and innovative ways of content management and delivery to reach to targeted customers well.
•  It helps in faster reduction of costs associated with hardware set ups.
•  It brings complete technologies, services, and growing business partners on one platform for creation of business values and delivering real time solutions.
•  Cost is one of the major reason of switching to the cloud computing.
•  Higher sense of satisfaction has been seen within the cloud computing users once they have installed the complete set-up.
•  Major reason of opting for Cloud Computing is lower costs, lower entry barriers, higher mobility and scalability.
•  Security is one of the prime concern for users not to adopt Cloud Computing.
•  Cloud has come up as a relevant business practice which includes the content management and distribution effectively within the system.

Mix and Match concept: As per this concept any content present on internet is not new. Actually, the cloud-based technology of content management enables the customers to use huge amount of digital data present on internet in newer ways.

 Cloud Computing services provides the users effective scenarios:

•  End user-to-cloud: Here the customers have complete access to content by pay-per-use method.
•  Enterprise-to–cloud-to-end user: Here the Content is saved in the private cloud and pushed by the subscribing consumer.
•  Enterprise-to-cloud: The Content distribution and consumer behavior analytics is present in the cloud for integration along with the Cloud system.
•  Enterprise-to-cloud-to-enterprise (digital supply chain): Here companies collaborate on the companies easily mix up the content.
•  Private cloud: An enterprise-hosted private cloud which is outsourced and managed by an external team.
•  Hybrid cloud: It has features of both private cloud and public cloud.

Cost focused Business value model:

•  Lower IT Operating and Capital Costs.
•  Shift from a Capital Investment to operating Expense Model
•  Standardization of Applications across the Service Process Model.
•  Removing the IT Complexity from End users.
•  Fine Grained IT services and faster provisioning. 

Transformed business strategy for driving Cloud Computing well:

•  Cloud Computing offers business innovation for complete management of the system.
•  It offers a lowered Cost ownership of the complete system.
•  It offers an optimized technology investment for your business.
•  Global presence of the resources in system.
•  It offers a real-time content and data sharing with the users.

The Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has an increased and enhanced way of handling the addressed issues within the media reach to have a cost-effective and optimized solution. The SOA is the perfect architecture for managing cloud based services which run on any system that actually help them in functioning of inside or outside the organization.

An SOA allows you to manage and use the services which create a “situational” application system for having an enhanced business agility.

SOA has three fundamental features:

•  Open standards: SOA has fixed way of managing web services that allows to access services across boundaries of network. Messaging protocols (SOAP), other protocols actually includes the HTTP, HTTPS, JMS for providing higher security of Web Service.

•  Integration: It has an integrated system with system-independent and application independent architecture for running the complete business.

•  Virtualization: Here in SOA the services are invoked by service managers for having details of various business scenario.

Cloud based computing easily allows the organizations to manage the business processes for cloud. The cloud computing has benefits of on-demand services and scalable IT computing.
 
Cloud computing along with SOA is best combination.  As the cloud is an architectural instance by using SOA the cloud computing becomes efficient, cost-effective cloud platform.

The Digital supply chain Model for evolution of Media Clouds by Cloud Computing: It is done by digitization of content for creation of newer digital supply chain.

•  Building up of digital archives by converting the analog assets to digital assets.
•  It helps in storage of assets with management across various segments of businesses.
•  Development of the strategy for enterprises which is applicable across the industry.
•  Protection of the assets by usage of encrypted communication and content.
•  B2B and B2C has separate portals to enhance customer experience
•  Support complete subscription and pay-per-view model.
•  An enhanced control over the content delivery on cloud.
•  Integration of enterprises and backend systems for business growth.

Major reason for building up the archive:

•  Archives here have lower risk to manage cloud computing across the retailers.
•  Usually media companies store copies of their assets but few manage the disaster management of system for the private cloud working.
•  Usually, there is a hybrid of analog and digital content on one archive.
•  Media companies can easily develop data strategy for having higher control over demands and events.

Applicability of various Cloud Computing Models in Media and entertainment industry:

Each content deployment model has different level of content protection. Digital archive can be easily managed on the on-site and private cloud functioning. It has a customized and complete sophisticated requirements of the Solution:

•  Private clouds are highly better than the  cloud hosting because it wells well in closed controls.
•  Public clouds are much better than huge amount of content moderation for consumers present over the Internet space.
•  Hybrid clouds are highly useful for the content management and managing of the workflows for having continuous digital supply chain.

Features of Media Industry for managed Cloud Computing deployment model:

•  Business models: It offers the complete preservation of assets, Pre-production of the research, preview of archived content, and repurposing of preserved content.

•  Benefits:  It Strongly controls the content and business systems to save against the manipulating content and have complete continuity of information.

•  Assets: he Content here is likely to be used as per both the models as: analog and digital model. The latest content present here is in digital formats and is quite easy for management.

•  Business activities: You need to create baseline or balanced scorecard. The value of enterprise model helps in getting the costs associated with it. It has proper content auditing and activity that is based on analysis of costs.

•  Technical activities: It helps in digitizing, encryption and management of the catalog. 

•  Critical decisions: The content posted here has the team members for managing critical data of the cloud storage system.

Summary of Media Cloud evolution:

The media cloud computing companies regularly continue to adopt clouds services, and the cloud provider business continues to grow and mature. There are also few risks involved with Cloud computing in media and Entertainment as copying of the content, revenue being lost, reusing the content in many ways. It can actually impact the potential risks and further issues on brand of an organization. It helps in:

•  Cloud Computing has enhanced digital supply chain system with use of archive for cloud storage.
•  It offers the Pilot cloud project by managing the issues and using benefits of cloud for technology impact.
•  Media Cloud computing performs complete security assessment, whether someone owns a private cloud or has completely managed services working in private cloud. One can easily    access the security of system. 
•  You can learn cloud computing from other industries also as Retail, healthcare, banking and education sector.
•  Identification of integrations which are complex, not all integration work system is equally created by simple integration.
•  Storage assessment and strategy has value of cloud services that is based on the IT application and requirements which easily stores the data volumes along with the latency needs and specifications.

Cloud Computing along with the Go4hosting helps in offering a secured, managed and reliable business opportunity for Media and Entertainment Indu

Posted by Priyanka Singh

While more and more businesses may be moving their data and operations to the cloud, there will be many challenges. Data migration to the cloud computing by public sector organizations is not always easy as one thinks. There will be many challenges centering on security issues and cultural changes which are inevitable because of transition from an on-site data center to the cloud. It becomes vital to link the cloud to your traditional systems. You also have to make sure skills of your workers undergo changes to make the staff prepared to manage cloud contracts optimally.

The word “cloud” is also not an easy term to understand; this is because it includes many types of services like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions. As a result of these difficulties of moving the public sector companies to the cloud, discussions have been held by representatives from various public sector organizations. These representatives come from different backgrounds, namely the local authorities, the justice systems, NHS, national public bodies etc.

What are the challenges to shifting the public sector to the cloud?

There is no denying the fact that the freedom to share data both within and among organizations is perhaps the biggest benefit of cloud hosting plans. Everyone is impressed with the flexibility the cloud offers and its contribution in the field of data sharing. Sometimes the data shared will also include sensitive data, personal healthcare data, digital healthcare plans etc. So, there are going to be obvious challenges to data security.

According to Claire Taylor from SCTS or Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, there is no distinction in data management, no matter where the data is hosted. Whether the data is hosted on a shared platform or in one’s own premises, the GDPR needs are the same. Taylor is of the opinion therefore that the shift to the cloud should focus on culture rather than on data management. The real problem is that the staff is apprehensive that data is stored in places where they cannot access it. Data retention is usually a problem when one looks at the advantages of cloud hosting. Taylor feels that the volumes of data which the SCTS deals with and the time that is needed for storing it would cut down on savings which businesses can get from the cloud. When audio files have to be kept in court for 6-7 hours after which judges can make their notes, there is a huge volume of data involved. This is not likely to be cheap.

Another significant impact of this cultural shift is the need for changing skill sets before shifting to the cloud. Technically speaking, there will be many diverse services and variety of providers. So, it becomes important to know what will work and what will not, which services are performing well and which are most worthwhile. Besides these technical changes, there is a shift towards a solutions architecture job. Here, the experts will be looking at cloud solutions and thinking how they can use these to meet specific business demands. IT staff will be required to learn the cloud’s modular nature and ways to pull cloud solutions to come up with a relevant package which can serve a company’s needs.

It is important to understand whether the staff which had so long been procuring IT solutions has the know-how to handle cloud contracts. Since the cloud is a relatively new technology, skills of those who had been working in the public sector for many years may now be outdated. Getting graduates with right skills is not going to be a cakewalk.

Some experts feel that the cloud is not entirely a new concept; it had been hosted remotely for a while but the issue of legacy systems is one which is yet to be resolved. According to Peter Tollund, many legacy systems have been there for many years. How these can be integrated is something which organizations have not yet worked on. It is hard to find people who may have already integrated legacy systems or shifted data from one vendor to another. This is why for businesses in the public sector, there are many considerations which they have to look at before shifting to the cloud.

Another important challenge which companies will face is the costs of moving to a new cloud set-up from a traditional set-up. While the cloud offers a variety of services, there are also a variety of payment methods for such services. To know which is the most budget-friendly amongst them is a new challenge. It is hard to know which automation tools are most cost-effective. You will try to start things on a smaller scale at first and then develop using agile processes. But there are problems in this; people fear about data security in the cloud. Some others have inflated expectations and tend to view the cloud as a solution for all their problems. Replacing data from on-site systems to the cloud all at one go is a huge step. So, some businesses choose solutions resembling an on-premise cloud. This has cloud-like features but is hosted on-site. This gives them time to change their skills sets. Cloud computing is considered to be a business model more than a technology. It is a utilitarian business model that scores in flexibility and scalability. However, there are people who feel that the cloud solutions often fall into wrong hands.

Senior leaders also feel that putting everything in the cloud in the hope that things will improve and be less costly is not always true. You often realize that you will enjoy the outcome only if certain changes are made. That is a lesson for directors; they must be educated enough to know what they are asking the vendors for. They may be asking for the cloud simply because of the scalability and flexibility benefits without really understanding the complexities lying beneath.