The possibilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) has pushed programmers, developers, scientists, and tech experts to create amazing new items and revolutionary new services. Some do it for the potential cash rewards; others do it for the scientific and technological breakthroughs sure to come. For whatever reason, the IoT will likely shape our future in the coming decades, often in exciting and fascinating ways.
Trust can be a fickle thing. As the saying goes, trust takes a lifetime to build but only a moment to ruin. In the business world, trust can certainly be hard to come by, especially when information and data valuable to the success of a company can easily be stolen or misplaced. This is the thought on the minds of many business leaders as they contemplate adopting the cloud for storage, computing power, and big data analysis.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the cloud price wars have flared up once again. After taking a brief hiatus amidst nervous tensions, competition between cloud computing vendors has reached a fever pitch in the past month. The cloud price wars (sometimes known as the “Race to Zero”) aren’t exactly a new phenomenon. For years, cloud competitors have sought to outdo the others by continually slashing prices on their cloud services. Much of the fight has centered around cloud storage, with lower and lower prices seen with surprising regularity.
It’s the law of economics – as cities scale, they cost more to operate. More employees, more assets, and more vendors can all mean that running a city costs more than ever before. Add in the concepts of risk management, disaster planning, and continuity that used to be classed under the “general fund” and are now audible expenses, and there has been an exponential cost increase to operating a city in the past two decades.
The last few seasons in the online business industry has seen a great deal of sexy work being penned on the merits of so-called “big data.” Although there are many advantages to big data, it should not be looked at as a cure-all for everything that ails you in your business endeavors. For instance, although Tableau on Hadoop is a great way to connect different types of data, you actually have to know what to do with that data for any of the consolidation to be worth anything.
Back in 2012 when the Flame virus was wreaking havoc across the world, the need for army-trained hackers became a whole new frontier for IT software companies. The threat of hacking and loss of data has never been real than now. There are over a billion passwords stolen and stored in a single Russian databases. The worst thing that can happen to any company is waking up one morning and finding out all the data has either been stolen or tampered with. Russian hackers have recently been reported as having accessed President Obama’s email address in as military hackers believe that both Hillary Clinton and the President’s emails are still vulnerable to hacking.
The cloud services market continues to grow at an impressive rate. Companies all over the world are realizing how beneficial it is to move some operations to the cloud, creating a need for the services that cloud providers offer. Research from the Everest Group shows that the cloud services market is worth $40 billion, with growth expected annually at a rate of 27 percent.
Uber isn’t some niche startup anymore. Due to impressive growth in the past few years, accompanied by headlines reveling in its successes and controversies, Uber has established itself as an innovative transportation service poised for further expansion in the future. In fact, one of Uber’s investors recently said the company could be worth more than $40 billion with an estimated annual growth of an astounding 800 percent.
As far as business trends go, few have had as big of an impact as big data. Thanks to recent advances in big data analytics, companies of all sizes now have the same opportunity to gather data, study it, and figure out the best ways to use it for growing their businesses. As a result, more companies than ever before are using big data, but as exciting as this prospect is, the results have been mixed.
Technology is essential for businesses that want to gain an edge over competitors in today’s world. Computers and the Internet have now brought in a new era that relies on data to make profitable business decisions in the competitive environment. However, many business owners neglect to take advantage of these new technologies because they believe that they are only available to large corporations.
