Critical Evaluation Of Cloud Computing, Big Data, And Mobile Platforms In Business

Finding and Analysis

Today in this technological world various new techniques have been introduced that are used for different purposes such as business, education and for other purposes. Information system is an advanced technique to store, process and modify important information. In business organizations, information systems play an important role by introducing a new business model that is required for better decision making and competitive advantages. At most workplaces, use of information systems have become necessary. These information systems may be based on cloud computing, big data and mobile platforms. Now in this report, we will emphasize on critical evaluation of impact of cloud computing, mobile platforms and big data on business of an organization. ABC Pvt. Ltd. is a business organization where I am working as executive manager. Our business organization is a software development company where cloud and big data applications are used for handling various regular business activities. In critical evaluation, we will discuss about cloud computing, big data and mobile platforms, its benefits and challenges. Besides this, evaluation of big data as a foundation of business intelligence, as analytical tools and as decision maker in our organization. The discussion about opportunities and challenges of cloud computing and big data to our organization is important to discuss here in this report.

In this segment of report, we will discuss above mentioned topics in detail.

In simple words, the storage, access and programming of data over internet is known as cloud computing instead of hard drive of computer. Cloud computing is considered as a symbol for the internet. The cloud computing is not only known as hard drive of a computer system or a dedicated network like Network Attached Storage. In case of cloud computing, a user access its data through internet from remote locations anytime. Cloud computing can be done anywhere and anytime with the help online connection. (SearchCloudComputing, 2017).

On another side, big data is a term that describes large volume of data and this data can be structured and unstructured. Big data is analyzed for visions that further lead to better decisions and strategic processes (Zettaset, 2017). It is also considered that big data is a new term for storing huge amount of information in appropriate form. Big data is always considered as 3Vs that is commonly known as large volume of data, wide variety of data types and the velocity at which data processing is done.  If we talk about mobile platform then it is considered as hardware/software environment for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other portable devices. There are different types of mobile platforms such as Android OS, Palm OS, BlackBerry OS and WebOS. In this way, by using different mobile platforms, smartphones and cellphones are developed. These mobile platform are so much popular worldwide and people trust on services and quality of these mobile platforms.

Challenges of Cloud Computing

1. The service suitability is key challenge of cloud computing. It means, no all applications can be moved to cloud, some specific applications have potential to use cloud platform. The highly standardized commodity services are successfully handled with cloud computing strategy.
2. It is right that cloud computing reduced cost and increased time to market new services to deliver. But it is commonly seen in business organizations that they underestimate the cost and time that is required to integrate cloud services. It is required by business organizations to plan adequately to run cloud computing.
3. The implementation of cloud computing will be a significant change for employees in an organization and slower adoption of cloud service by employees will cause significant delay in business value realization (Transforming Data with Intelligence, 2017).

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Besides challenges of cloud computing, there are also some benefits of cloud computing that are listed as below:

1. The key benefit of cloud computing is its rapid elasticity. Cloud vendors provide an infinite computing resources on demand. So cloud customer no longer need to spend so much time on accurate forecasting for future needs of resources. It is a boon for startup companies that want to start with small investments.
2. The cloud computing services are cost efficient. As we know customers share computing resources with other tenants, so vendors of cloud computing are able to provide this service at efficient cost to customers.
3. With the help of cloud services, business organizations can save their time by consuming existing cloud services rather than developing those services. The proper utilization of cloud services leads to significant integration of services into organization.
4. Cloud services can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. Through this, it becomes easier for employees to handle business tasks from remote locations.

Challenges of Big Data

1. The main challenge in Big Data is of privacy and security. Big data uses huge amount of sensitive data that has legal, conceptual and technical significance. Therefore, security and privacy of this data is very much necessary.
2. Due to issues of security and privacy, problem in data access and sharing of information can occur.
3. Another challenge in big data is related to lack of control on technical issues such as fault tolerance, scalability and quality of data. These technical issues puts bad influence over performance of big data.

Description about Cloud Computing, Big Data and Mobile Platform

Benefits of Big Data

Following are some extensive benefits of Big Data:

1. The most publicized area of Big Data is understanding and targeting customers and it is also considered one of the main advantage of big data.
2. Another advantage of big data is that it provides easier way to understand and optimize business processes.
3. Big Data technique is helpful to improve security and law enforcement. NSA, the National Security Agency in the United States uses big data analytics to stop terrorist plots.

Challenges of Mobile Platform

1. The major challenge of mobile platform is to understand its own languages and tools that make development of mobile applications bit complex.
2. Another major challenge of mobile platforms is visible its apps in the 50 to top 100 across a category in app store. If it will possible then users can download a particular app.
3. Next big challenge is testing of mobile apps on variety of devices by developers.

Benefits of Mobile Platforms

1. The major benefit of mobile platform is that variety of mobile apps are used by mobile users today for business, education and entertainment purposes.
2. Mobile apps are based on advanced techniques and these apps have made easier the access of remote information quickly from anywhere and anytime.
3. Mobile platforms have potential to provide secure access of information from different websites with the help of mobile apps.

Most of the business experts are familiar with term Business Intelligence (BI). But Big Data is new for business experts, but IT professionals are familiar with this. Many IT professionals have already worked with huge amount of data in different industries. Both terms BI and Big Data are important and continuously evolving according to customers’ requirements. Whether both terms are separate from each other, but both are moving towards each other and it is found that big data is used as a source for business intelligence. But how is it possible? As we know that big data is growing so fast as much as business organizations are contributing in technologies, social media data and other sources (SearchBusinessAnalytics, 2017). This use of big data technologies is related to business intelligence in a way that to get full return on investments in these technologies, business intelligence is required. Business intelligence systems provide more structured user experience and it is highly rich in visualization, reporting and performance management metrics. Therefore, these features are required to manage big data techniques. Our organization, ABC Pvt. Ltd., also want to contribute in various new technologies of Big Data, but besides this, company also need to concentrate on Business Intelligence (India et al., 2017).

If we talk about use of big data as analytical tool then we can say that big data is not just about large amounts of data. But digging and analysis of semi-structured and unstructured of data, is new feature of big data. The analyzing of email messages, PDF files or videos has become possible with help of big data. There are many enterprises and they have multiple database vendors with huge amount of data. The management of this data is a complex task to perform. In this case, big data techniques such as a Hadoop is so much helpful (Datafloq.com, 2017). Besides this, analytical tools of big data also provide help to business organizations to manage their large amount of data and to perform other actions such as identification of trends, detection of different patterns and gathering of other important findings from available multiple sources of information. In this way, Big Data is used as a source for business intelligence and as analytical tools in our business organization ABC Pvt. Ltd (analytics, 2017).

In this rapidly changing world, it has become important for every organization to stay ahead in competitive market. In this case, it is necessary for business organizations to react faster on market changes and make decisions accordingly. In this case, Big Data can provide help in a way that it provides variety of data sources that can be used to make decisions on marketing. These data sources include reports, financial information, traffic and measurements. On another side, Big Data is also helpful in knowledge management because large amount of structured and unstructured information that is collected from different sources can be easily managed with big data (Azure.microsoft.com, 2017).

Evaluation of Challenges and Benefits of Cloud Computing, Big Data and Mobile Platform

As we have already discussed about challenges and benefits of cloud computing and big data. From that discussion it is cleared that these techniques are better than traditional systems that were used for accessing remote information and to store huge amount of data. Some years ago, in our organization traditional systems were used to store huge amount of data such as in multiple databases information was stored (Harvard Business Review, 2017). Besides this, information access and communication were also limited at local levels and remote access of information was difficult. But now our company has started using cloud platform and big data (Fao.org, 2017). With the opportunities of cloud computing and big data, for our company it has become easy to access remote data anytime without any problem. Cloud platform has saved our company’s time to perform its marketing activities and it is valuable for company that they no need to spend so much time on developing applications for marketing of services and products. Besides this, cloud computing is cost-efficient. On another side, the main challenge that is faced by our company due to cloud computing is that a big change is faced by employees of ABC Pvt. Ltd. and some employees were not ready to accept this change (Mishra, 2017). 

Not only cloud computing, but also big data has put influence over our organization. Due to opportunities of big data, our company is able to manage huge amount of information and optimize business processes by making effective decisions on the behalf of available data sources. From big data, the company’s management got to know about security and law enforcement that must be implemented in an organization to run business securely. From challenges of Big Data, it is cleared that while managing or using large amount of business information then company should be careful about privacy and security of this information. Otherwise heavy loss can occur (atlas.ti, 2017).

A huge amount of data is used by our organization to perform different business activities and make important decisions. This information is collected from different data sources and these sources are managed by Big Data (Forbes.com, 2017). Now the main question that we will discuss here is what methodologies and procedures are used by our organization to collect data. In answer of this question we can say that registration, questionnaires, direct observations, interview and reporting are main methodologies that are used for collecting data. Besides this, historical company’s record, surveys and feedback of employees are some procedures to collect business information (strom et al., 2017).

Conclusion

After this whole discussion about cloud computing, big data and mobile platforms, it is cleared that these are powerful and advanced technologies that can provide effective business solutions in different fields. With the implementation of these technologies, our company got some opportunities and also faced some challenges but still getting better performance as compare to traditional systems. So we recommend to our organization that be careful about security, privacy and other issues that may put influence over cloud computing, big data and mobile platforms and in this IT professionals can provide lots of help.

References

SearchCloudComputing. (2017). What is big data ? – Definition from WhatIs.com. [online] Available at: https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/big-data-Big-Data [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Zettaset. (2017). What is Big Data and why do organizations need it?. [online] Available at: https://www.zettaset.com/index.php/info-center/what-is-big-data/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Azure.microsoft.com. (2017). What is cloud computing? A beginner’s guide | Microsoft Azure. [online] Available at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

India, P., Networking Reviews, R., Products, N. and Griffith, E. (2017). What Is Cloud Computing?. [online] PCMag India. Available at: https://in.pcmag.com/networking-communications-software/38970/feature/what-is-cloud-computing [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

SearchBusinessAnalytics. (2017). Guide to big data analytics tools, trends and best practices. [online] Available at: https://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Guide-to-big-data-analytics-tools-trends-and-best-practices [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Transforming Data with Intelligence. (2017). Big Data and Business Intelligence: How They Come Together – Transforming Data with Intelligence. [online] Available at: https://tdwi.org/webcasts/2012/07/big-data-and-business-intelligence-how-they-come-together.aspx [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

analytics, B. (2017). Big data business intelligence analytics. [online] Ibm.com. Available at: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ba-big-data-bi/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

strom, d., thomas, o., paul, f., gonsalves, a., finley, k. and Boger, Y. (2017). Finally—Business Intelligence Comes To Big Data – ReadWrite. [online] ReadWrite. Available at: https://readwrite.com/2014/11/11/business-intelligence-big-data-zoomdata-justin-langseth/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

SearchCloudApplications. (2017). Challenges of developing applications for mobile platforms. [online] Available at: https://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/podcast/Challenges-of-developing-applications-for-mobile-platforms [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Mishra, (2017). Big Data: Issues and Challenges. [online] Slideshare.net. Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/HarshMishra3/harsh-big-data-seminar-report [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Transforming Data with Intelligence. (2017). Big Data: Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices – Transforming Data with Intelligence. [online] Available at: https://tdwi.org/Articles/2012/06/26/Big-Data-Best-Practices.aspx?Page=1 [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Datafloq.com. (2017). How Big Data Will Improve Decision Making in Your Organisation – Infographic. [online] Available at: https://datafloq.com/read/big-data-will-improve-decision-making-in-your-orga/307 [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Fao.org. (2017). 6. DATA COLLECTION METHODS. [online] Available at: https://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x2465e/x2465e09.htm [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

atlas.ti. (2017). Qualitative Data Collection – Methods in Research. [online] Available at: https://atlasti.com/data-collection/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Harvard Business Review. (2017). How the Big Data Explosion Has Changed Decision Making. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2016/08/how-the-big-data-explosion-has-changed-decision-making [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].

Forbes.com. (2017). Forbes Welcome. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherfrank/2012/03/25/improving-decision-making-in-the-world-of-big-data/&refURL=https://www.google.co.in/&referrer=https://www.google.co.in/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2017].