Kategorie: technology

Open standards vs. open source: A basic explanation

What are open standards, exactly? You’ve probably heard the term thrown around, but why does it matter to your business? How does it relate to open source? What’s the difference?
Take a common example. Have you ever noticed that Wi-Fi seems to work the same with any router, phone or computer? We tend to take these types of standards for granted, but they bring huge benefits to our daily lives.
Imagine if there were no standards like Wi-Fi. Every business might have its own form of wireless technology. If your favorite coffee shop had a router made by Company X, and you owned a computer made by Company Y, you might have to find another coffee shop to check your email.
Even if each business had a functioning form of wireless internet, a lack of standards would make interoperability nearly impossible. Customers of every company would suffer.
Have you ever wondered how competing businesses all across the world somehow converge on one format for these things?
The answer is often open standards.
What are open standards?
An open standard is a standard that is freely available for adoption, implementation and updates. A few famous examples of open standards are XML, SQL and HTML.
Businesses within an industry share open standards because this allows them to bring huge value to both themselves and to customers. Standards are often jointly managed by a foundation of stakeholders. There are typically rules about what kind of adjustments or updates users can make, to ensure that the standard maintains interoperability and quality.
What is open source?
What is open source, then? The term may sound similar to open standards; but, in reality, it is fundamentally different.
At its core, open source code is created to be freely available, and most licenses allow for the redistribution and modification of the code by anyone, anywhere, with attribution. In many cases the license further dictates that any updates from contributors will also become free and open to the community. This allows a decentralized community of developers to collaborate on a project and jointly benefit from the resulting software.
How open standards and open source help prevent vendor lock-in
Both open source and open standards can help protect clients from vendor lock-in, but they do it in different ways.
Let’s start with an example of an open standard. A business might buy a PDF reader and editor from a vendor. Over time, the team could create a huge number of PDF documents. Maybe these documents become a valuable asset for the company. Since the PDF format is an open standard, the business would have no problem switching from one PDF software to another. There is no concern that it would be unable to access its documents. Even if the PDF reader software isn’t open source, the PDF format is an open standard. Everyone uses this format.
Now, let’s instead take a look at the benefits of open source. Imagine that a business had spent millions of dollars writing internal software code for a proprietary operating system. That business would no longer have the option of changing vendors. It would be stuck with that operating system, unless it wanted to make a significant investment re-writing that code to run on a different system.
Open source software could have prevented that issue. Because open source software does not belong to any particular business, clients are not locked-in to any particular provider.
In both of these examples, the client would be able to avoid vendor lock-in. In one case this is because a piece of closed software followed a common open standard. In the other case, it is because the software itself belonged to an open source community.
While these are fundamentally different things, both help foster innovation while also providing more options to customers. Learn more about the power of open technology from IBM.
 
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Is the hybrid cloud model right for your business?

Hybrid cloud deployments have become an increasingly popular choice among enterprises. According to MarketsandMarkets research, the hybrid cloud market is expanding at a 17 percent compound annual growth rate.
What’s behind the popularity of the hybrid cloud model, which combines public and private cloud resources in the same environment? Does this setup really deliver the best of both worlds — the scalability of the public cloud with the control of a private deployment?
Some companies hesitate to bring public cloud resources into their IT mix, because they need to keep security operations in-house. Others worry that a hybrid environment will be more difficult to manage due to increased complexity and more infrastructure components.
Here’s a closer look at what factors go into deciding whether hybrid is the best cloud setup for your business, as well as what combination of private and public resources might work for you.
What impacts the hybrid cloud mix?
Here are a few business issues that the hybrid cloud model is designed to address and how those considerations determine the correct hybrid cloud mix for each business.

Capital expenses versus operating expenses

Public cloud helps with a shift from capital expenses to operating expenses. The public cloud provider takes on the responsibility of the underlying hardware, infrastructure and maintenance, while the business pays only for the service it requires. Conversely, there’s no need for a business to toss aside its own infrastructure investments. The hybrid cloud model helps a business use its existing infrastructure in support of a private cloud model.

Security

Some business systems demand greater security than others. Systems of engagement, such as mobile apps and social media interactions, may demand less security and become candidates for public cloud platforms. Conversely, systems of record, such as billing, customer account data and research data, require heavier security. Private cloud platforms managed by internal resources may be the best option for these systems.

Agility to explore and innovate

If your business has a development and test team, it may want public cloud access to quickly spin up and use computing resources for short windows. This agility allows for easy exploration without the expense of procuring private infrastructure. It also provides more freedom to innovate when the team knows resources can be spun up for development, but it can be taken down just as easily if the project doesn’t work as anticipated.

Workload variability

The public cloud/private cloud mix inside a business also depends on workload and traffic variability. For example, if you run a retail business, traffic may remain steady on your site for most of the year but spike during holidays or sales runs. For this type of business, the ability to use public cloud to handle traffic spikes may be invaluable. A B2B business that only serves one geographic locale may have higher traffic during work days and business hours and experience little traffic, if any, at other times. With a predictable and steady workload, having a hybrid mix that favors private cloud may be the best option.
Finding what works for your business
The right mix of public and private infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment depends on enterprise requirements. Companies with variable computing needs and traffic demands often do best with a higher proportion of public cloud, due to the scalability it offers. Startups that need to remain agile and quickly respond to fast-changing markets may also benefit from more public cloud resources. Meanwhile, enterprises in highly regulated industries, such as finance or health care, may lean more toward private cloud rather than public in order to maintain more control over security.
Finding out which model works best for your business requires thought and assessment. Security needs, business maturity and compute demands all play a role in deciding the correct mix of public and private cloud.
Is the hybrid cloud model right for your business? Fortunately, this isn’t a question you have to answer alone. IBM can help you explore the right mix for your business and learn about all the ways cloud computing can benefit your organization.
Learn more about the essentials of private clouds for enterprises and how it can fit within your hybrid model.
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Hybrid cloud scales IT while helping unlock the power of data

Who says enterprises can’t have the best of both clouds?
That’s exactly what the hybrid cloud delivers: the scalability and reliability of public cloud with the security and customization of private cloud. If basic cloud computing enables businesses to develop products faster and make full use of their data, then hybrid cloud is the logical next step forward. A hybrid approach helps enterprises quickly pivot their IT resources to match shifts in business strategy. It also sets an ideal foundation to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.
In a hybrid model, data and workloads can easily shift between public and private clouds based on business needs. A hybrid approach gives enterprises the flexibility to explore new business opportunities without putting a halt to the work they’ve always done best.
Scalable, flexible, secure
Many organizations depend on either a public or a private cloud, but enterprises increasingly recognize they need both services to support their IT environments. There are slightly different perspectives in the field regarding what constitutes a hybrid environment. However, the near-consensus is that it allows applications and components to operate across public and private cloud instances, as well as between old and new architectures.
The hybrid cloud market is growing at a 22.7 percent compound annual growth rate, according to research by Mordor Intelligence. This increasing popularity reflects the hybrid cloud’s strength. This IT approach can work for all types of businesses and accommodate the varying goals and projects within an organization.
To embrace the hybrid model, organizations must understand how their established IT components will connect with the two clouds and how this new approach will underpin all business applications. It’s a tricky process that will go smoother with expert help.
Once in a hybrid environment, however, users almost immediately notice how it transforms the elemental nature of design, development, sales, marketing, customer service, supply chain management and almost every element of a business.
For one, the hybrid model allows organizations to quickly spin up environments on either the public or private cloud at no additional cost to infrastructure. Scalability is now essential, and it will continue to be crucial in the future as digital-driven commerce increases the demand for new products in rapid time. A hybrid model taps unlimited cloud resources that can be scaled down as workflows change. It’s an approach that fully supports an enterprise’s commitment to innovation and speed.
Hybrid also ensures business continuity and improved security. Customer-facing applications can live on a public cloud, while back-end systems that handle sensitive information and projects can be facilitated on a private cloud and on-site infrastructure. By replicating critical data to the private cloud, business operations won’t skip a beat if the infrastructure faces an interruption.
Unlock business potential
Hybrid cloud also helps unlock the potential of a business’s greatest digital asset: data. Insight from data will create new business opportunities and ways to gauge the true pulse of the market, competition and customer base. But current IT infrastructure might not be able to handle the computational resources needed to collect, sort, clean and analyze high volumes of data on a continuous basis. Many AI-supported technologies are constantly gathering information from many data points and turning that information into real-time, actionable insight.
With a hybrid model, organizations can run data analytics programs through public clouds and tap private clouds to store sensitive data. Data management will be a top priority as organizations rely more on data analytics, and a hybrid approach will remove the stress and complications an organization would otherwise face by solely relying on its own infrastructure.
Don’t limit your enterprise’s potential to push boundaries. Make the most of both clouds and legacy IT to harness technology.Find out what 270 CIOs and IT executives had to say about their drivers and challenges with managed cloud services and why 76 percent of CIOs consider these services an essential part of their IT strategy. Register to unlock the free “Frost & Sullivan Report: Enterprise Applications and Cloud Managed Services: 269 CIOs Share Their Views”.
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