Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

The fairly new concept of Cloud Computing has hit the world of business with a ‘BANG’, and is being adopted, not only by Small and Medium sized Businesses but also by Large Enterprises. This is rapid shift towards this emerging technology is due to its ability to cut down IT costs by many folds, and the allowance it gives to enterprises to focus their energies and resources to their core business. In this article, I will attempt to explain, briefly and without the use of a lot of technical terms, what cloud computing is, and how it is helping businesses do what they are created to do.

The ‘CLOUD’ in Cloud Computing

If you have an email account like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo-mail etc., then you are already using cloud services being offered to you by your email service provider. The Cloud is a collection of all the servers and IT infrastructure being utilized by your email service provider to manage your email account and store its content. Since you do not have any physical evidence of your email being managed and handled, yet it seems to be happening, we say that it is happening somewhere in the Cloud. The Cloud of servers, functioning in in large datacenters, you may never know where. The benefit of having an email account with these service providers is that it is completely free for you, the user. There is no physical equipment, apart from a laptop, desktop or mobile device that you need to have, along with an internet connection, to access your email.

Adding ‘COMPUTING’ to the Cloud

Like with email providers, Cloud Computing service providers also maintain their own servers and complete IT infrastructures residing at various datacenters through which they are able to offer Cloud Computingsolutions to their customers. UNLIKE email providers, however, Cloud Computing service providers rent out not just email capabilities, but entire virtual desktops and servers, software, data storage capabilities, data security, disaster recovery and management solutions and a whole bunch of other stuff, which the user may access from any place, at any time, using any desktop, laptop or mobile device, along with an internet connection.

Cloud Computing Possibilities

Imagine being able to access your own desktop, and all the data stored thereon, while sitting at a train station or an airport. Imagine hundreds of your employees having access to their own personalized desktops and all the information that they require, from anywhere, without actually ever owning a single physical machine. Imagine giving access to software to all your employees, without ever worrying about maintain a record of the number of licenses you have available. Imagine utilizing all of these services for a nominal monthly charge, and being able to add or reduce their number as and when required. Imagine being rid of the increasingly high costs of maintaining a complete IT infrastructure, along with skilled IT labor to manage the infrastructure, forever. These are a few of the many possibilities of utilizing Cloud Computing services. Cloud Computing providers host these services on their own IT infrastructure, which is maintained by their team of highly skilled IT professionals and rent them out to you, relieving you of the HUGE IT costs and headaches. In a nutshell, due to the reason mentioned above, it is the opinion of this writer, that Cloud Computing is THE complete IT solution, and the way to the future for any enterprise, regardless of its size, scale and nature of business.

(SOURCE www.dincloud.com)

WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

 

Within the greater definition of media analytics, some specific forms of this kind of service are becoming prevalent. One of these is Web analytics, where those evaluating a web media piece look at its specific effect on a target audience through quantifiable data like original views, location of ISP addresses, and much more. Web analytics may also look at the results of embedded items like Google ad words.

Web analytics consultants, for example, focus on how to improve or upgrade an existing website or other Internet initiative. This can include creating new online forms or applications, installing shopping carts, or otherwise customizing a site to provide for personal data entry. Other elements include tracking customer events and automating some of the market research that helps business leaders chart a future course for a company.

Web analytics consulting companies often rely on specific developer skill sets for using traditional computer programming languages to work on client websites. Developers may work on creating a whole new customer interface on a webpage from scratch. They may also be involved in designing add-ons where new programming language enhances what an existing webpage can do. Programming knowledge and familiarity with common web interfaces is critical for this kind of work.

Another new part of the field of media analytics is called social media analytics. Social media is a term for very recent innovations in the online and wireless world, including sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as alternative communication methods such as Twitter, generally enabled by smart phone wireless technologies. Companies are exploring the marketing opportunities of these platforms with social media analytics that focus on how new media can help promote a company or product or sell goods or services to a consumer audience.

Social media consulting and analytics services will often focus more on how a message is deployed within a target audience. Lots of media relies on pre-existing programmed technology. Consultants and social media analytics tend to look at how these free-form technologies can be customized and used by a business for profit through better consumer outreach.

Hadoop - An Analytical Tool

What is Hadoop?

I often came across this term while attending the Business Analytics classes and especially when we talk about Big Data. So I have collected some information about Hadoop from internet. First of all what is Hadoop?Hadoop is a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. It is part of the Apache project sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation.( by Margaret Rouse )

                                       

This yellow elephant image, is the copyrighted icon which depicts Hadoop and it is also interesting to know that Hadoop was the name of the founder’s (Doug Cutting’s) son’s toy elephant.
As it is rightly said that need is the mother of invention. Hadoop was invented out of a need to process big data, because the amount of generated data was continuing to increase rapidly. As the Web and other sources generated more and more information, it was becoming a challenging job to index the content, so Google created MapReduce in 2004, then Yahoo! created Hadoop as a way to implement the MapReduce function. Hadoop is now an open-source Apache implementation project.

When Mike Olson (Cloudera CEO ) was asked he told that the Hadoop platform was designed to solve problems where you have a lot of data — perhaps a mixture of complex and structured data — and it doesn’t fit nicely into tables. It’s for situations where you want to run analytics that are deep and computationally extensive, like clustering and targeting. Hadoop applies to a bunch of markets. In finance, if you want to do accurate portfolio evaluation and risk analysis, you can build sophisticated models that are hard to jam into a database engine. But Hadoop can handle it. In online retail, if you want to deliver better search answers to your customers so they’re more likely to buy the thing you show them, that sort of problem is well addressed by this platform. 

Quantitative v/s Qualitative data

Quantitative data :Quantitative data can be defined as the data which gives the information in some quantitative form or in measurable form. We can write the quantitative data in the form of numbers (example your height, weight, age etc.) and can apply various mathematical and statistical formulas on it which can help in business decision making at various levels.This type of data is closed-ended and is generally easy to analyse. It is important to note that Quantitative data can be discrete or continuous.

Qualitative data :On the other hand Qualitative data can be defined as the data which gives the information in the form of some descriptions in a language rather than in numbers. This type of data can be observed but cannot be measured (example – color, taste, appearance etc.) but it can also help in taking business decisions under various circumstances.This type of data is open-ended and is more difficult for analysis. It is interesting to know that different analysts can draw different conclusions from the same qualitative data.

Drawbacks and Importance :Quantitative data can provide information about large size of population but does not provide in depth knowledge about a particular entity, so it is backed or supported by qualitative data. Where qualitative data can provide information about a particular thing or issue but is criticized for its unreliability, so it is supported by quantitative data. That is why both qualitative and quantitative type of data is used in any research.