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BizCloud Experts are advanced AWS Consulting Partner and Google Technology & Service Partner. With Amazon we have also entered into a reseller agreement. They are in the middle of executing large development, migrations or creating new solutions you may/will need help in executing these projects.

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Cloud Migration: 3 Basic Steps for a Successful Migration Process

Are you thinking of moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud? Or are you struggling with how to go about it?In order to move successfully from your current IT infrastructure to the cloud, thorough research and a thoughtful approach are needed. Your business can benefit tremendously from moving to the cloud, if done right, in terms of speed, efficiency and cost. But it can be a difficult process. This article aims at providing the key steps to follow to ensure a successful migration of application to the cloud.

.The steps might not apply to your company’s infrastructure and environment or your procedures and future requirements. So you may want to customize the steps per your company’s needs. Or you can hire an experienced cloud solutions provider to do the migration.

Here are the steps to ensure a successful cloud migration.

Step 1: Plan and prepare for migration

Before you start the actual migration to the cloud, you have to prepare for it. The level of preparation details depends on your business, but there are some basic steps you should take.

First, you should be clear about the reasons why you’re moving to the cloud. The cloud offers many benefits, but you must be sure what exact benefits your organizations will get by moving your applications to the cloud.

It may be a good idea to assign a manager to plan and oversee the entire migration process. During a large migration project, organizations have to make many technical plans and decisions, and having a specialist is critical to the success of the project.

When you move an application from an on-premise data center to the cloud, there are two ways you can migrate your application—a shallow cloud integration or a deep cloud integration.

For a shallow cloud integration (sometimes called “lift-and-shift”), you move the on-premise application to the cloud, and make no—or limited—changes to the servers in the cloud for the purpose of running the application. Any application changes are just enough to get it to run in the new environment. You don’t use cloud-unique services. This model is also known as lift-and-shift because the application is lifted “as is” and moved, or shifted, to the cloud intact.

For a deep cloud integration, you modify your application during the migration process to take advantage of key cloud capabilities. This might be something simple like using auto scaling and dynamic load balancing, or it might be as sophisticated as utilizing serverless computing capabilities for portions of the application.

Step 2: Select the right cloud provider

Once you’ve identified the architecture, you need to select the cloud provider that will meet these needs. Select a provider which meets your architecture needs and also stays close to the objectives you want to achieve Apart from this, you also need to look at other factors while selecting the provider – like the promised SLA, prompt customer service, great feedback etc.

Plan the migrationNow that you have everything ready for the migration, the next step is to plan how it will take place. It is important that the plan takes into consideration the following

Minimal disruption time

Order of migration of applications

Deadlines and tracking of key metrics to define a successful migration

Changes to end-user processes because of the migration and any training required

You might come across other potential issues which you need to plan for before beginning the migration and to follow during/after the process.

Step 3: Create a data-migration plan

Migrating data is one of the trickiest parts of a cloud migration. The location of your data can significantly impact the performance of your application. Moving your data to the cloud when the data-access methods are still primarily on-premises can significantly impact performance. The same holds true if the data is still on-premise but the service accessing it resides in the cloud.Options for data migration include:

Using a bi-directional syncing mechanism between your on-premise and cloud databases. Once you’ve moved all consumers of the data to the cloud, remove the on-premise database.

Use an on-premise database with one-way synchronization to a cloud-based database, and allow consumers to connect only to the on-premise version. When you’re ready, disable access to the on-premise version so the cloud-based version becomes the main database, and enable cloud-based consumers access to the new database.

Use a cloud data migration service, such as those available from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Don’t underestimate the complexity and importance of data migration planning. Not paying close attention to your data migration plan before you begin a cloud migration can cause migrations to fail, or at least fail to meet expectations. Your migration architect should be very involved in the data-migration planning process.

Monitor the implementation

Once your migration is completed successfully, it is important to implement monitoring to help identify and fix any issues that might come up with the cloud environment.

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Great Ways Project Management Can Help Your Growing Business

Many small business owners think that project management isn’t for them, they might have a service business or handle small projects, project management isn’t just for big projects, and it can be used for everyday work tasks. In fact, if you want to run a successful business then it’s imperative that you do use project management to help you with your everyday tasks. 

Improve the Project Estimation Process Many factors influence the final outcome of a project, with upfront planning and estimation two of the most crucial determinants to long term project success. Yet many businesses fail to carry out any form of estimation or place very little importance on the benefits it provides to the business, its individuals, its project managers, its executives and to the satisfaction of its customers. Project Estimation provides a consistent method of estimating your project resourcing levels and expenditure throughout the business. By implementing a simple form of Project Estimation you can easily understand a projects impact on resource capability and its impact financially on your operating budgets. Project Estimation also helps standardize the way your sales team and project managers interact with your customers and quote for work, this results in an overall positive impact on productivity, customer satisfaction and the number of projects which you deliver on time and to budget/.

Helps You Keep Track of Resources

Managing budgets and other resources takes daily attention to detail, and using project management procedures to keep track of those helps tremendously. Send yourself reminders to balance your books, or to buy new coffee, and you will feel so much more organized.

Planning

Planning is one of the most important tools for any organization and business. Right project management strategies can help you plan your work and projects with complete perfection. This can help you achieve your goals without any problems and also prepare you for the struggles and challenges in the way.

Improve Budgeting/Cost Control For many businesses the prospect of generating a project budget is daunting, especially if little project management experience exists. However, the project budget is an essential tool for measuring the performance and progress of any project. This is where project management software excels, enabling you to create project budgets directly from project plans or from your project estimates. In addition project management software will ensure you can monitor budget, versus actual versus planned to ensure you have an accurate picture of your current budget and future financial projections in real time.

Improve Reporting and Analytics Far too often businesses without a basic project management solution struggle to produce management reports and end up using excel “which is highly prone to errors” as their main source of management information. As a growing business project management software will provide you with vital management information in real time such as project costs, progress, status and profitability, resource utilization and productivity, budget performance and customer satisfaction. 

Whatever stage your business is in its evolution, we hope you find this article useful and provides you with the inspiraton to implement or upgrade your own project management system.

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Real World Problems That can be Solved with IoT

The internet has certainly changed the way we live, work, think, feel, and behave. The way humans solved problems in the past has now evolved through the power the worldwide web offers.

Over the years, programming has become easier and more accessible, bringing about rapid innovation and technological advancement.

Connectivity now goes beyond computers, laptops, and mobile devices to various machines and daily items such as cars, home appliances, office devices, and more. The IoT Implantation is certainly making industries and cities around the world much, much smarter.

Here are some industry problems that can be solved by IoT.

1. Traffic Management

Overpopulation in large cities and urban areas lead to the growth of the number of vehicles on the road, resulting in traffic congestion on major roads and highways.

Connected devices powered by IoT sim cards such as traffic lights, smartphones, cars, GPS devices, and cameras can be used to monitor traffic patterns, inform drivers of traffic situations, and help governments determine appropriate solutions to traffic problems.

When roads are congested, it results in a delay in response time of ambulances and emergency teams.

Health Emergencies

Today, more hospital equipment and tools are interconnected with each other. A heart monitor that’s connected to the nurse’s station, for instance, will automatically trigger an alarm when the patient goes into tachycardia, bradycardia, and other cardiac emergencies.

An out-patient’s health status can be monitored by doctors and health professionals remotely. Indeed, IoT can help save lives by connecting people with health professionals in real time.

Energy Conservation

With the deterioration of the environment and global warming, energy management and conservation is of vital importance. A lot of this starts within our own homes, where regulation of electricity and water consumption can save both money and resources. This is another pressing real world problem that can be solved with IoT. Smart home automation using IoT devices is an area that holds a lot of promise today. Smart meters, which are connected to lights, fans and other electrical appliances can let owners monitor energy usage. Automatic sensors and controllers that switch off lights and air-conditioners when the home is empty can help limit the usage of electricity. Products like Amazon’s Alexa simplify home automation by connecting  various home appliances for better functionality.

IoT has now gone beyond the smart home, and is being applied everywhere you go. In the years to come, expect more devices to become connected with each other through IoT services.

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What Is Serverless Computing And What Will Be It’s Future?

The name Serverless computing is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t mean that there are no servers, they are involved, but it means that we don’t need to worry about them. In the Serverless world, we simply upload a function, specify the resources it requires and simply upload the function to the Cloud. The Cloud vendor (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) will take of provisioning the server and deploy the function on it. This way, we don’t think anywhere about the servers and so the name Serverless. As the demand for the function goes up, the Cloud vendor will provision more servers and decommission them when the demand goes down. All of this is transparent to the end user. Along the same lines, we should be able to create a RDBMS table and put data into it, without worrying about the server infrastructure.

Five Key Characteristics

In order to satisfy the requirements of being a serverless technology, the following five characteristics need to be addressed.

1. No server management: There is no need to provision or maintain any servers. There is no software or runtime to install, maintain, or administer.

2. Flexible event-driven scaling: This is one of the important characteristics of serverless; you shouldn’t worry about scaling your solution if a demand arises (see the below Facebook example). Typically, your solution will scale based on events, timer, or incoming actions. For example, this could be when you execute code every second, execute code when an  HTTP web endpoint is called, execute code when a new file is uploaded to a blob storage, or some of the simple use cases.

3. Highly available: Serverless applications have built-in availability and fault tolerance. You don’t need to architect for these capabilities since the services running the application provide them by default.

4. No idle capacity: You don’t have to pay for idle capacity. If your code is not running, you shouldn’t pay for it.

5. Micro-billing: When your code is executed, you pay per execution. Typically, the vendors calculate this based on memory consumption and the time it takes for execution. For example, if your code requires 200 MB of RAM and it takes three seconds to complete, you will only need to pay for this resource.

Key Technologies by Cloud Vendors

When it comes to serverless, there are a set of core technologies and supporting technologies. The core technologies fall under the pure serverless model and satisfy the five key characteristics highlighted above. However, the core technologies alone will not be able to support all scenarios. They typically depend on some supporting technologies, like storage, message queuing, database, API gateway, etc.

Core Technologies for Serverless

When it comes to core serverless technologies, it needs to satisfy these three characteristics:

A scalable platform to execute a piece of code

A scalable workflow solution for stitching together discrete code executions.

A scalable pub/sub event routing engine

What’s Next for the Serverless Platform

All of the major public cloud vendors are now on board with serverless, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Each company is building its own FaaS offerings and working on services (authentication, databases, storage, notifications, messaging, queuing) that developers can use. And there are plenty of other, smaller companies that have fantastic, reliable services that developers can leverage.

It is likely that many developers and organizations will try out serverless technologies and architectures due to the benefits they provide. Developers will use them to build web, mobile, game, and IoT back ends; to process data, and to create powerful pipelines that perform complex operations.

We will see a marketplace for serverless functions, and widespread adoption of serverless architectures, particularly among those who have already adopted cloud technologies. Companies that value competitiveness and innovation will study serverless technologies closely, and move quickly to adopt serverless wherever possible.

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Must Use Technologies for Cloud Application Development

Cloud application development is one of the hottest topics of 2018. As an umbrella term for all Internet-based development and services. Why do businesses prefer cloud computing? Cloud computing allows for fast development and task processing using elastic web-based infrastructure with easy “pay-as-you-go” scaling up and down of cloud capacity and functionality.

Let’s look at some popular developers’ choices when it comes to cloud application development.

CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: AMAZON WEB SERVICE

Today’s cloud application development is often based on Amazon Web Services. Developers worldwide use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for easy elastic cloud computing. The main benefit lies in scaling capacity for applications that Amazon Web Services provide. Programmers are thus able to create hundreds or thousands of server instances instantly. For clients of custom software development companies this means that their cloud-based applications can grow with their business. They can evolve on the base of reliable and secure environment that Amazon provides. Amazon EC2 is not the only cloud technology from Amazon. Together with Amazon EC2 instances developers use Elastic Block Store (EBS). Amazon EBS provides volumes of block-level storage that guarantee easy access to data and long-term persistence irrespective of the life of the instance.

Another great tool is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing and retrieving any amount of data from anywhere in the Internet. Developers use Amazon S3 as a data storage for easy, reliable, fast web-scale cloud application development.

CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM

A cloud computing service from Google that developers actively use for hosting, computing, data storage of their own cloud based apps is Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform offers all the elements necessary for fast, effective, secure and reliable cloud application development. The services are Google Compute Engine (IaaS), Google App Engine (PaaS), Google Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud CQL. All of the mentioned help developers build applications of various complexity level: from simple web apps and websites to complicated solutions.

CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: G SUITE

Formerly known as Google Apps, G Suite is a part of Google Cloud Platform. It comprises such popular apps among consumers as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Drive, but on enterprise level. Over 5 million businesses worldwide use G Suite service, and this number is growing. Developers use G Suite in cloud application development for various web apps that require establishing email addresses with their client’s domain name, video, voice calls and other features.

CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: MEMCACHED

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system used in cloud application development for speeding up dynamic web apps. Also Memcached is an open-source system, which was initially developed for LiveJournal. Furthermore, now many notable online services use it too, including Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and many other. Memcached API is available for many popular programming languages. Developers praise Memcached for its ability to alleviate database load, simple design, ease of development and fast deployment.

CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: MONGODB

Considered by many developers as the leading NoSQL database programmers widely use MongoDB together with Amazon Web Services. The main advantages of MongoDB are its open-source nature, support of Ad hoc queries, replication, load balancing, Grid file system storage, aggregation, server-side Javascript execution and other. Developers all over the world use MongoDB for cloud application development, because it allows spreading the data evenly across many servers and thus effectively handling the load.

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Tips to Implement Cloud Computing Successfully

More and more companies are introducing cloud services. However, only very few actually plan their steps in a long-term manner or ask themselves even basic questions: what does the cloud mean for the business over the short, medium and long term? How can IT leverage the benefits of the cloud and integrate them into the existing infrastructure in an orderly manner?

Providing cloud-based applications requires a certain amount of work, but this doesn’t need to cause major problems or even chaos to break out. This technology can be implemented into the IT infrastructure in such a way that it can be controlled and managed in a strategic manner. Many companies have failed to take this into consideration enough in the past and therefore refer to the confusion that this has caused as “virtual sprawl”. Companies must adopt a clearly defined strategy on using and managing the cloud in order to be able to manage the obvious advantages it offers. Outlined below are three key steps to assist organisations in the implementation of cloud services and to ensure best practices, vital to success. These have been developed on the basis of the many different projects that have already been executed and apply for large and small companies as well as firms that embrace technology or are more practice-oriented:

ementation of cloud services and to ensure best practices, vital to success. These have been developed on the basis of the many different projects that have already been executed and apply for large and small companies as well as firms that embrace technology or are more practice-oriented:

If you’re planning to maximize the convenience of cloud computing for your business, use this short but important checklist for choosing the right services.

1. Are your applications ready to run in the Cloud?

Are the applications which you use already web-based ? Will they benefit from a cloud- based architecture? Can it scale your present application up in the Cloud ? Migrating your old ‘legacy applications’ to a Cloud based infrastructure will not bring the correct benefits. You need to carry out an assessment to determine an application’s readiness for the Cloud. This means evaluating, via a potential supplier, the readiness of all your key applications. This will provide clear recommendations on your options – whether private or public Cloud.

2. Fluctuating Data Volumes

The Cloud is excellent for flexible computing, where extra resources such as additional power or sudden additional storage needs – maybe as a result of project work – are needed. However, as your storage capability grows, so does moving it. Migrating 1GB of data across a wide-area network is pretty simple but how about 1TB? That migration can take a long time, and if you need to work with that data as well in real-time, you’ll have to plan for a degree of downtime while the data is pulled from the Cloud and reinstalled against a replacement application or function. Look out for clauses in the agreement that charge for data volumes.

3. Dynamic Applications

During the third phase, cloud applications actually begin to monitor their utilisation automatically. With increasing volumes of data, they use cloud APIs to duplicate their contents and distribute processes across the extended infrastructure. Here, one common approach is to allow for generation of scripts via runbook automation that virtual machines generate automatically. They install the necessary software and activate it for production. The combination of monitoring within the application and scripting outside it enables the computing capacity to be extended and reduced dynamically.

4. Is any part of the Cloud infrastructure outsourced or subcontracted?

Cloud computing can often involve chains of sub-processors. If you work across Euorpe you need to watch this. In some parts of Europe, data protection law requires the controller to independently authorise all subcontracts and to enter into direct contracts with all processors. In most member states, it is left to data controllers or processors to determine what amounts to appropriate technical and organisational measures. However, some countries (for example, Spain, Italy and Poland) have prescriptive requirements for security set out in their legislation. If a customer that operates in one of these countries wishes to put data into the cloud, then it will need the cloud computing service provider to confirm that its security arrangements meet these particular countries laws.

Conclusion

The cloud is still considered to be a revolution, but it no longer needs to pose a problem. The enterprise IT cloud can be implemented together with the appropriate monitoring, management, integration and automation solutions without creating chaos. And companies can then take advantage of the benefits that the cloud offers in a comfortable and easy way.

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What is Operations Management: Definition, Principles, Activities, Trends

Since all companies have operations, i.e. certain ways to create an optimal output from various input sources, whether it be manufacturing physical products or offering services, it is good to be familiar with the basics of managing these operations. Especially as mastering these basics can directly support your business goals.

In this article, we will introduce you to a the current concept of operation management , its guiding principles, and the everyday activities that are the responsibility of an operation manager. 

What is Operational Management: Operations management is the administration of business practices aimed at ensuring maximum efficiency within a business, which in turn helps to improve profitability.

It involves resources from staff, materials, equipment, and technology, converting these inputs into efficient and effective outputs on both day-to-day and strategic levels within an organization.

Why Operations Management is Important:

In smaller companies, operations are very simple and straightforward. Everyone takes part in managing the processes, and more or less, things go smoothly.

The same, however, doesn’t apply to companies with 20+ employees. That’s when things start getting complicated. You can’t just rely on your employees to do work right – you need to have standardized procedures to ensure that everything as efficient as possible.

If done right, operations management can lead to…

Better Output – The operations manager optimizes and improves processes that have a heavy impact on the product or service. This usually leads to higher output, lower defect rates, lower costs, and so on.

Competitive Advantage – Better output leads to a better product or service. This allows your organization to stand out from the competition, gaining new customers.

THE ACTIVITIES OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

In most cases, planning involves designing a new product, from the initial concept to the actual launch, with several testing phases involved. During planning, you will have to consider both technical and business requirements.

Sometimes the processes need to be updated: designing a new supply chain or other logistics processes. If your product is a service, process design aims for a variety of requirements and customer contact levels.

Again in other cases, it’s about a new facility: your company decides to expand its operations, and you will have to decide on the location of the facility, its capacity, and its layout.

Plans should always support the business objectives: they are in focus when considering the costs and finding the best matching quality and capacity, or calculating inventory and human labor needs.

Therefore, it is important to set proper measures in the planning phase, to know if the actual performance meets them, or there is need for adjustments. Capacity is one of these measures, as is product quality, or delivery times. The initial figures are usually estimates based on the market analysis conducted beforehand.

One thing operation managers should be good at is critical path analysis. Learn more about that in the following video.

Management/Organization

So you have a facility for production, your product design is ready, and so is the way it will be produced: with what material and human resources, at what costs, with what workflow.

This is a solid starting base for maximizing the efficiency of your operations. Still, you will need constant and competent management to correct the accidental mistakes in planning, to adjust production to changing costs or regulations, and keep them efficient on many levels.

The operations manager selects and schedules the processes for an optimal result and does the same with materials for an ideal quality and capacity. Organizing the maintenance of the equipment is also part of the quality management activities. Furthermore, the inventory and the whole supply chain has to be managed in order to produce more efficiently.

As in all management functions, the management of human resources is an essential activity. In operations management, the planning of actual employment levels can have a great impact on whether an organization can operate effectively.

Improve

There is always room to improve when it comes to the processes used, the quality and capacity achieved, or as far as the level of inventory and human resources are concerned.

A great deal of operations management’s tasks, therefore, comes from these needs, and this is where long-term planning steps in. But remember, changes made according to these plans are only as good as the improvement they bring in business terms.

A better way to forecast demand gets you closer to an improvement of processes, as savings on costs and delivery times occur. The quality of a product will be higher if you have Total Quality Control established and assess the operational risks correctly. Inventory control accounts for a better use of supplies. With Just-In-Time manufacturing, the capacity issues can be solved. Collaboration is a common go-to strategy that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your human resources.

As a general advice, you can always consider adding some technology in the mix. The best way to do that is to develop a technology plan: identify where the company is now, in which areas it would need a boost, what relevant technologies are available, and which ones are feasible to implement.

RECENT TRENDS IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

The ever-shrinking product lifecycles, the new trends on the labor market, the environmental concerns, and the digitalization of the processes require innovative approaches to operations management. Some of the trends that have a significant impact on the discipline today are:

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

It’s a radical approach to designing core processes: take everything that you used before, discard it, and then start again from scratch. With Business Process Reengineering, you can foster innovation and improve any selected measures dramatically. If you want to do it well, focus on how you can add more value to the customer.

Lean and agile manufacturing

Established by the Toyota Corporation, the term lean manufacturing has become a mainstream trend in the industry, and it is used interchangeable with Just-In-Time production. The concept behind is a constant improvement of processes in order to reduce waste and inventory, and maximize the output of high-quality, low-cost products and services.

A new twist on this concept is agile, or otherwise known as “the new lean.” It has its origins in software development but now is used by various industries. The reason it came to life was the growing complexity of processes, and it is characterized by product development done in small increments and super-fast decision-making. These together ensure the necessary flexibility and interactivity, proven remedies for unpredictable changes in market demand.

Six Sigma

Improving processes using a data-driven approach is an innovation of Motorola from mid-1980. It’s still among the trends of impact because it is a quality-improvement and cost-reducing method that focuses on customer satisfaction.

The method is based on the Six Sigma measure, which is achieved if only 3.4 defects are found in a million of output. This way, production efficiency can be nearly 100%. When presented with a problem, the Six Sigma approach uses a five-step method called DMAIC, an acronym of define, measure, analyze, improve and control.

Reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS)

Another possible method for reacting to quick changes in the market is RMS, a production system that can be used with different functionalities within a product family. With an RMS, you can make adjustments in production cost-effectively.

Employee involvement

A recent trend that impacts the human resources management activities in operations is the increasing involvement of employees in the planning processes. Listening to the opinions of the workers often brings up fresh ideas, a different perspective on what problems should be solved and how to make the operations more effective.

Sustainability

Due to the ever constraining environmental regulations, businesses must operate under pressure to reduce their harmful impact while still being able to grow. The issues, since affecting all levels of operations, need the insights of operations management on what are the options to meet these new expectations.

Many times, principles applied for efficiency coincide with sustainable operations management principles, like organizing resources or cut times and waste.

Behavioral operations management

This trending research area studies the impact of human behavior, especially non-rational decision-making, on the discipline. Because of its complexity, operations management is a field prone to frequent deviances in problem-solving.

There is a solid interest to understand the most important factors that influence manager’s decisions, as well as to make efficient problem-solving methods more widely available. With such a toolbox, managers can make more rational decisions and improve the overall efficiency of the operations.