Cloud Expo Europe & Cloud News!

A round-up of Cloud Expo Europe
Last week [11th and 12th March], VPS.net hit the road to meet the fellow cloud enthusiasts of  Cloud Expo Europe as it arrived into London’s ExCel Centre. A showcase of all things cloud, it was only natural that we felt right at home amongst the hundreds of exhibitors, suppliers and technology talking about what we know best. The most popular cloud event in the world, visitors benefited from expertise, cutting edge news and the chance to get up close and personal with industry leaders.
Declared by Cloud Expo Europe as “a roaring success” (even if they do say so themselves), the event gave us a chance to get to know our customers a little better, making some important new connections and reminiscing with a few old ones too. It was great to see some of you who came along to see us!
What’s going on in the cloud at the moment?
The big buzz causing a stir in the cloud at the moment is ‘Big Data’. With the Internet of Things and the rise in smart technology producing seemingly immeasurable amounts of consumer data, small and large businesses alike should consider cloud computing as a way to harvest and analyse this data if they hope to keep up with competitors in the race to understand their customers.
It’s nearly 15 years since Doug Laney defined Big Data as emerging from changes in the three Vs of data:
 

• Volume

The sheer amounts of data available to businesses has skyrocketed over the past 15 years. Last year’s mobile data traffic alone was nearly 30 times the size of the entire global internet in 2000, which gives an idea of just how much data is being produced. According to Cisco, “global mobile data traffic will increase nearly tenfold between 2014 and 2019”; meaning data will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CARG) of 57%.
 

• Velocity

Gone are the days when we thought it acceptable to wait for data to stream; data transfer speeds have accelerated at an unprecedented speed. It’s inevitable that big data analysis is expected to react to this acceleration.
 

• Variety

The popularity of social media websites – and the conversational unstructured data that emerges – is just one variety of data which constitute ‘big data. Data going into big data systems could be video, mp3, mo4, text documents, a log of Tweets, financial data’… The list goes on.
The ways that businesses deal with the huge volumes of data being created on a daily basis in this digital age has become a problem; big data is too large and loosely structured to be analysed by standard methods and databases. The different formats, shapes and sizes creates a difficulty which many businesses are having with harvesting and analysing big data.
The answer? The cloud.
Intel’s research into the convergence of big data and cloud computing is summarised in its report: ‘Big Data in the Cloud: Converging Technologies’. The company found that the flexibility offered by the cloud makes for the perfect environment for big data. “Clouds are already deployed on pools of server, storage and networking resources and can [be] scaled up or down as needed. Cloud computing offers a cost-effective way to support big data technologies and the advanced analytics applications that can drive business value”.
As business heads towards a connected world, the way business is done is  evolving to utilise the vast amount of data available. The cloud is an invaluable resource in the storage and analysis of all kinds of data; VPS cloud servers are a great way for small and medium sized businesses to collect, store and evaluate their customer data.
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