Going Up! Industry Clouds have arrived
Recent historical events have shifted global business priorities, speeding up the digital transformation process. Remote work across continents and stronger collaboration with all stakeholders, including customers and employees, have spurred innovation and value-driven cloud technology offerings. While organizations were figuring out the best cloud technology applications and their implications, a new and efficient cloud solution emerged. It’s called the industry cloud. WHAT IS AN INDUSTRY CLOUD? An industry cloud provides cloud computing services tailored to a specific industry or business model. Industry clouds are highly curated environments that stack cloud technologies. THE DRIVE FOR INDUSTRY CLOUDS AND ROLE OF CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS (CSPs) Initial adoption of cloud technology was driven by cost, storage, or processing support. But as more enterprises moved to the cloud, many found that deployment and usage were often erratic or inconsistent. The need for an industry cloud arose when certain industries realized they needed a more tailored IT solution for security and compliance. And the Industry cloud was born. According to Gartner, Industry cloud ecosystems and data services are driven by increasing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation and industry compliance. Businesses today expect the same level of customization in the cloud as they do on-premises. To enable this, cloud service providers (CSPs) now offer a hybrid strategy that includes industry-specific solutions and cloud infrastructure maintenance. INDUSTRY CLOUDS… SOME EXAMPLES Today, cloud hyperscalers are partnering with industry-oriented cloud service providers to build specialized environments. Microsoft, for example, has worked with partners to develop supply chain solutions for the industrial industry through Microsoft Azure Cloud. Similarly, Microsoft Azure has now built industry clouds for financial services, retail, and other industry verticals. In the construction and real estate industries, industry clouds can comprise solutions for model management, collaboration, estimate, scheduling, site management, and more. This level of industry cloud specialization allows firms to focus more on their core business while still being able to derive the benefits of cloud computing. Salesforce introduced the ‘Revenue Cloud’ this year. The industry cloud is aimed at businesses that need to consolidate customer transactions. The revenue Industry cloud combines CPQ, billing, B2B commerce, and channel software products to offer everything from renewal to revenue recognition (PRM). BENEFITS OF THE INDUSTRY CLOUD Businesses prefer industry cloud computing over a “one-size-fits-all” cloud model for a more specialized environment. Besides niche data security, organizations want to closely align with customer priorities, for example, Banking as a Service (BaaS), Agtech Cloud (AgTech), and Health Cloud (Health Cloud). With the rise of mobile devices, the cloud market needs new and efficient apps. Customizable Offerings Industry cloud solutions are custom-built beyond security and compliance to address individual business outcomes. These solutions are also critical when integrating public cloud computing with on-premises resources in hybrid architectures. Product-Centric Approach Organizations today are becoming product-centric, agile in operations with better time to market, and composable architectures with a pay-per-use model. Leaner Footprint Industry cloud solutions are popular for SaaS deployments. As a result, many legacy IT providers can benefit from leaner data center footprints. Improved Functionality Industry-specific applications enable higher levels of technological efficiency, functionality, and performance. An industry cloud product for healthcare, for example, could securely manage electronic health records or parse medical images. Advanced Security Businesses are increasingly concerned about data security online. Industry clouds offer superior levels of security and compliance over traditional cloud offerings, allowing CIOs to rest easy. INDUSTRY CLOUDS AND THE FUTURE The future of industry clouds depends upon the cloud vendors’ ability to customize cloud technologies by business needs. According to Techaisle’s research, SMB and mid-market cloud adoption will increase by 121% increase in the US over the year. Industry clouds are ready to help organizations leapfrog their digital transformation journey and accelerate technology transformation where it is most needed. A new generation of industry cloud providers will help businesses innovate faster by providing customized applications and services.
Six IoT Testing Challenges for Testing Experts
Introduction The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to physical objects embedded with sensors and software that can exchange and collect data over a wireless network. The Internet of Things brings many consumer benefits, like simple remote control, automation, etc. It also brings added software complexity and security risks that require significantly more testing than in the past. IoT devices have evolved to look more like traditional cloud applications, with code that runs in the device itself, as well as an array of dependencies that interact with the outside sources of data such as time or weather. These dependencies can make devices expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to test as it involves real-time sharing of data and collaboration. A study says that more than 6.4 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices were in use by 2016, and that number will grow to more than 20 billion by 2026, which means that our planet will soon have more connected devices than the human population. Testing these IoT devices becomes quite challenging because of the variety and volume of data this system generates, the heterogeneity of the working environment, and the complexity of the number of working components involved. Challenges in IoT Testing One of the tough challenges for manufacturers and integrators is testing these devices. Let us discuss some challenges associated with the testing of IoT devices: Communication Protocol: IoT devices use various communication protocols such as MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), etc. These protocols aid in the establishment of a connection between devices and servers. Tools/Tech that the testing team is planning to use should support these communication protocols so that APIs written on top of these protocols can be effectively validated which interacts with these devices. Multiple IoT cloud platforms – Azure IoT, IBM Watson, and AWS are the most used cloud IoT platforms that help connect different components of IoT devices. These devices need to be tested across the cloud platforms to ensure their effective usability. In a cloud platform, we have different IoT devices with different capabilities, these devices generate data that can be structured or unstructured and will be sent to a cloud platform.When more devices are deployed on the cloud platform, it becomes difficult to replicate a real-time environment for testing, since there can be a lot of devices that need to be tested on different platforms. IoT security and privacy threats – IoT devices are the most vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Most users think that it’s a manufacturer’s responsibility to secure their devices and, therefore, do nothing to protect them. Cyber-attacks are very common across IoT devices, and security is an important aspect today. Wired systems are much less accessible than non-wired systems. Therefore, one challenge to moving into IoT solutions is that companies open themselves potentially to more risks unless they have a perfect security strategy in place. Beside functional and performance testing, special attention should be paid to the device password policy, data protection, data encryption, regular firmware, or software upgrade testing. Device Diversity – With so many brands, models, versions of the OS, Screen size, etc., it is a challenge to test an IoT application that works perfectly across all devices for all possible combinations that are not practical. Each IoT device has unique capabilities and may perform better in some environments and platforms than others. As a result, they must be tested across platforms for effective usage, and it is critical that we have good test coverage across dozens of devices. There is also a challenge with the version upgrade for the IoT devices along with their software and firmware updates. It becomes critical to test the devices across the IoT platforms with their latest software to ensure all the components are working efficiently after the update. Network Availability (Always online) – Network configuration essentially affects the performance of an IoT device because IoT is all about rapid communication and that too consistently all the time. Though, at times devices experience troubles with network configurations like unreliable internet connections, hindering channels, etc., which poses a challenge of how to test it in all possible network conditions. Data Volume, Data Variety, and Data Velocity (Real-time data testing) – Sensors on all devices simultaneously generate massive data (this data is significantly intricate and unstructured that involves appropriate cleaning of it for the end processing). IoT will be dealing with that data and different varieties of data that cause significant challenges. Gathering, organizing, and evaluating this disintegrated data is not easy as the volume of data can be boosted at any time. Conclusion: There are numerous other challenges to consider in addition to the ones mentioned above. Hardware quality and safety concerns are among other challenges that the testing team faces while testing IoT applications. Building stable and quality IOT applications might seem overpowering and a huge task, but it can be made simpler by proper planning, splitting it down into separate sub-tasks, and setting up a rock-solid test environment to manage cloud and virtualization strategies.