Cloud adoption soared over the last decade as enterprises woke up to the cost benefits, scalability, and resilience on offer. But the competitive tech industry leaves no time for enterprises to rest on their laurels. The evolving landscape in a challenging environment forces businesses to seek continuous improvements. Having satiated the cloud’s primary advantages, enterprises seek more benefits for competitive advantage. Cloud providers such as AWS keep on upgrading their infrastructure to match the demand. In 2023, the focus is on efficiency improvements as the business world becomes more competitive and fast-paced. The cloud computing is becoming faster, greener, more collaborative, and local.
Speed and flexibility
A new IDC report, “Cloud Powering Faster, Greener, and More Collaborative Research“, reveals the cloud is now speeding up data analysis and processing in a big way. What took days or months earlier through conventional methods now gets done in a few hours.
Consider the experience at the University of British Colombia, Canada. The research team used AWS to process and move data from existing data models. The cloud allowed processing datasets at an enormous pace of over a million libraries a day. The research team could analyse 5.7 million samples and discover 130,000+ new species in eleven days, when running the same process through traditional ways would have taken eight to ten months.
Sorbonne University relied on the national supercomputing centre and AWS Cloud to research COVID-19 viruses. The high-performance computing simulations and modelling of the different proteins shed better insights into the molecular functioning of the COVID-19 virus and enabled the development of better drug treatments.
Researchers at the UNSW (University of New South Wales, Sydney), used AWS to launch innovative methods to predict floods. Drylands such as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin have been facing flooding issues for long. The crisis has become more grave of late, thanks to climate change. UNSW researchers used AWS’ cloud-based platform to analyse large data clusters, and co-opted new data sources from NASA’s Landsat-8 satellite and European Space Agency Sentinel-2 (S2) satellites. The innovative model supported real-time information on flood occurrence and predicted floods with 99% accuracy.
Advanced cloud infrastructure also reduces wait times considerably. UNSW encountered a six-month wait time for server hardware to set up a lab for protein structure prediction. Switching to AWS allowed the institute to set up and run the environment within two weeks, besides offering greater flexibility and improving ease of use. Researchers could run models when needed, a significant improvement over the previous system of booking time on the university’s shared high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. Wait times often ran into months.
Easy scalability
One big reason for cloud migrations is easy and ready scalability. Recent improvements in data processing capabilities further reduce costs and time for insights. Researchers get instant access to a vast network of applications and computing resources.
Researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) use AWS serverless infrastructure to process genomic information effortlessly. Genomic data is compute-intensive and outside the scope of traditional database schemas. The workloads involve multiple gigabytes per subject and often scale to terabytes. AWS and serverless enabled 300-fold cost savings and allowed sharing of critical data to anyone worldwide.
Research by the Structural Biology Research Center at Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization received similar benefits. The research involved studying the basic structure of matter, the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules, and the use of particle accelerators to speed particles to near-light speed. The AWS platform made managing the extensive data sets effortless. A data analysis menu allowed easy access to data specific to their niche and flexibility to customise the analysis, along with a seamless UX. Researchers could also connect to the SINET information platform used by universities worldwide.
Local
The cloud is also finding widespread use for local applications.
Low-code and no-code solutions soar in popularity. These solutions reduce entry barriers to advanced cloud applications, allowing small businesses to tap into advanced computational resources.
Several cloud-based services offer AI and ML solutions in an as-a-service model. Small businesses can now design websites, automate spreadsheets or build web applications easily. They no longer have to rely on scarce or expensive developers. By 2023, entry barriers to technology will be passé, and enterprises will compete through innovation.
One notable use case is the streamlining of grants administration in the Ivy League universities of the US. A new, lightweight application built on AWS offers a seamless view of research grant data. Today over 3,000 researchers use this scaled-up tool at the institution.
The increasing use of containers improves scalability, flexibility, and automation. Kubernetes and Docker deliver efficiency and enable easy deployment of cloud-based applications.
Green
Sustainability is no longer an option, as global warming causes grave environmental hazards. IT has been one of the major energy-intensive sectors over the last few decades, with both on-premises and cloud servers hogging energy. But of late, the cloud offers immense scope to reduce carbon footprints.
A key innovation in recent times is power-optimised application development. Developers now have the capability to code and deploy power-optimised applications. The apps always use the minimum power for their computing and storage operations. Consumption reduces by half, and the cloud usage bill also reduces. Optimised workloads need fewer cloud resources and run fewer power-consuming physical servers.
Adopting cloud computing will prevent 1billion+ metric tons of CO2 emissions from 2021 through 2024 worldwide. On average, enterprises reduce their carbon emissions by 64% through cloud migration.
Improved collaboration
Collaboration is the key to solving the most pressing problems faced by the world. The cloud enables collaboration in critical areas such as climate change and drug discovery.
Cloud-based platforms offer a central depository, enabling researchers to access data from anywhere. AWS platforms allow researchers to store petabytes of data and manage massive data pipelines. Researchers may also effortlessly apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing.
The cloud also offers researchers democracy in accessing technical resources. Researchers anywhere in the world can get equal access to any cloud-based tool as long as they subscribe to the service.
Consider an integrated view of the water, biosphere, and environmental data flows. Scientists may use such enhanced insights to devise sustainable economic and agricultural systems.
The developments listed above are the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. The cloud offers immense potential for those who know how to use it well.
