Key Takeaways

Domain-Driven Cloud (DDC) is an approach for creating your organizations cloud architecture based on your business model. DDC uses the bounded contexts of your business model as inputs and outputs a flexible cloud architecture to support all of the workloads in your organization and evolve as your business changes. DDC promotes team autonomy by giving teams the ability to innovate within guardrails. Operationally, DDC simplifies security, governance, integration and cost management in a way that promotes transparency for IT and business stakeholders alike.

Based on Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and the architecture principle of high cohesion and low coupling, this article introduces DDC including the technical and human benefits of aligning your cloud architecture to the bounded contexts in your business model. You will learn how DDC can be implemented in cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure while aligning with their well-architected frameworks. Using illustrative examples from one of our real customers, you will learn the 5 steps to implementing DDC in your organization.

DDC extends the principles of DDD beyond traditional software systems to create a unifying architecture spanning business domains, software systems and cloud infrastructure.

Our customers perpetually strive to align "people, process and technology" together so they can work in harmony to deliver business outcomes. However, in practice, this often falls down as the Business (Biz), IT Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) all go to their separate corners to design solutions for complex problems that actually span all three.

What emerges is business process redesigns, enterprise architectures and cloud platform architecture all designed and implemented by different groups using different approaches and localized languages.

Whats missing is a unified architecture approach using a shared language that integrates BizDevOps. This is where DDC steps in, with a specific focus on aligning the cloud architecture and software systems that run on them to the bounded contexts of your business model, identified using DDD. Figure 1 illustrates how DDC extends the principles of DDD to include cloud infrastructure architecture and in doing so creates a unified architecture that aligns BizDevOps.

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In DDC, the most important cloud services are AWS Organizational Units (OUs) that contain Accounts and Azure Management Groups (MGs) that contain Subscriptions. Because 100% of the cloud resources you secure, use and pay for are connected to Accounts and Subscriptions, these are the natural cost and security containers. By enabling management and security at the higher OU/MG level and anchoring these on the bounded contexts of your business model, you can now create a unifying architecture spanning Biz, Dev and Ops. You can do this while giving your teams flexibility in how they use Accounts and Subscriptions to meet specific requirements.

The benefits for aligning your cloud architecture to your organizations business model include:

DDC may not be the best approach in all situations. Alternatives such as organizing your cloud architecture by tenant/customer (SaaS) or legal entity are viable options, too.

Unfortunately, we often see customers default to organizing their cloud architecture by their current org structure, following Conways Law from the 1960s. We think this is a mistake and that DDC is a better alternative for one simple reason: your business model is more stable than your org structure.

One of the core tenets of good architecture is that we dont have more stable components depending on less stable components (aka the Stable Dependencies Principle). Organizations, especially large ones, like to reorganize often, making their org structure less stable than their business model. Basing your cloud architecture on your org structure means that every time you reorganize your cloud architecture is directly impacted, which may impact all the workloads running in your cloud environment. Why do this? Basing your cloud architecture on your organizations business model enables it to evolve naturally as your business strategy evolves, as seen in Figure 2.

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We recognize that, as Ruth Malan states, "If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins". We also acknowledge there is work to do with how OUs/MGs and all the workloads within them best align to team boundaries and responsibilities. We think ideas like Team Topologies may help here.

We are seeing todays organizations move away from siloed departmental projects within formal communications structures to cross-functional teams creating products and services that span organizational boundaries. These modern solutions run in the cloud, so we feel the time is right for evolving your enterprise architecture in a way that unifies Biz, Dev and Ops using a shared language and architecture approach.

Both AWSs Well-Architected framework and Azures Well-Architected framework provide a curated set of design principles and best practices for designing and operating systems in your cloud environments. DDC fully embraces these frameworks and at SingleStone we use these with our customers. While these frameworks provide specific recommendations and benefits for organizing your workloads into multiple Accounts or Subscriptions, managed with OUs and MGs, they leave it to you to figure out the best taxonomy for your organization.

DDC is opinionated on basing your cloud architecture on your bounded contexts, while being 100% compatible with models like AWSs Separated AEO/IEO and design principles like "Perform operations as code" and "Automatically recover from failure". You can adopt DDC and apply these best practices, too. Tools such as AWS Landing Zone and Azure Landing Zones can accelerate the setup of your cloud architecture while also being domain-driven.

Do you think a unified architecture using a shared language across BizDevOps might benefit your organization? While a comprehensive list of all tasks is beyond the scope of this article, here are the five basic steps you can follow, with illustrations from one of our customers who recently migrated to Azure.

The starting point for implementing DDC is a set of bounded contexts that describes your business model. The steps to identify your bounded contexts are not covered here, but the process described in Domain-Driven Discovery is one approach.

Once you identify your bounded contexts, organize them into two groups:

To illustrate, lets look at our customer who is a medical supply company. Their domain and technical contexts are shown in Figure 3.

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Your organizations domain contexts would be different, of course.

For technical contexts, the number will depend on factors including your organizations industry, complexity, regulatory and security requirements. A Fortune 100 financial services firm will have more technical contexts than a new media start-up. With that said, as a starting point DDC recommends six technical contexts for supporting all your systems and data.

You dont have to create these all up-front, start with Cloud Management initially and build out as-needed.

WIth your bounded contexts defined, its now time to build a secure cloud foundation for supporting your organizations workloads today and in the future. In our experience, we have found it is helpful to organize your cloud capabilities into three layers based on how they support your workloads. For our medical supply customer, Figure 4 shows their contexts aligned to Application, Platform and Foundation layers of their cloud architecture.

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With DDC, you align AWS Organizational Units (OUs) or Azure Management Groups (MGs) to bounded contexts. By align, we mean you name them after your bounded contexts. These are the highest levels of management and through the use of inheritance they give you the ability to standardize controls and settings across your entire cloud architecture.

DDC gives you flexibility in how best to organize your Accounts and Subscription taxonomy, from coarse-grained to fine-grained, as seen in Figure 5.

DDC recommends starting with one OU/MG and at least two Accounts/Subscriptions per bounded context. If your organization has higher workload isolation requirements, DDC can support this too, as seen in Figure 5.

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For our customer who had a small cloud team new to Azure, separate Subscriptions for Prod and NonProd for each context made sense as a starting point, as shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 7 shows what this would look like in AWS.

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For our customer, further environments like Dev, Test and Stage could be created within their respective Prod and Non-Prod Subscriptions. This provides them isolation between environments with the ability to configure environment-specific settings at the Subscription or lower levels. They also decided to build just the Prod Subscriptions for the six technical contexts to keep it simple to start. Again, if your organization wanted to create separate Accounts or Subscriptions for every workload environment, this can be done too and still aligned with DDC.

From a governance perspective, in DDC we recommend domain contexts inherit security controls and configurations from technical contexts. Creating a strong security posture in your technical contexts enables all your workloads that run in domain contexts to inherit this security by default. Domain contexts can then override selected controls and settings on a case-by-case basis balancing team autonomy and flexibility with required security guardrails.

Using DDC, your organization can grant autonomy to teams to enable innovation within guardrails. Leveraging key concepts from team topologies, stream-aligned teams can be self-sufficient within domain contexts when creating cloud infrastructure, deploying releases and monitoring their workloads. Platform teams, primarily working in technical contexts, can focus on designing and running highly-available services used by the stream-aligned teams. These teams work together to create the right balance between centralization and decentralization of cloud controls to meet your organizations security and risk requirements, as shown in Figure 8.

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As this figure shows, policies and controls defined at higher level OUs/MGs are enforced downwards while costs and compliance are reported upwards. For our medical supply customer, this means their monthly Azure bill is automatically itemized by their bounded contexts with summarized cloud costs for Orders, Distributors and Payers to name a few.

This makes it easy for their CTO to share cloud costs with their business counterparts and establish realistic budgets that can be monitored over time. Just like costs, policy compliance across all contexts can be reported upwards with evidence stored in the Compliance technical context for auditing or forensic purposes. Services such as Azure Policy and AWS Audit Manager are helpful for continually maintaining compliance across your cloud environments by organizing your policies and controls in one place for management.

With a solid foundation and our bounded contexts identified, the next step is to align your workloads to the bounded contexts. Identifying all the workloads that will run in your cloud environment is often done during a cloud migration discovery, aided in part by a change management database (CMDB) that contains your organizations portfolio of applications.

When aligning workloads to bounded contexts we prefer a workshop approach that promotes discussion and collaboration. In our experience this makes DDC understandable and relatable by the teams involved in migration. Because teams must develop and support these workloads, the workshop also highlights where organizational structures may align (or not) to bounded contexts. This workshop (or a follow-up one) can also identify which applications should be independently deployable and how the teams ownership boundaries map to bounded contexts.

For our medical supply customer, this workshop revealed the permissions required for a shared CI/CD tool in the Shared Services context was needed to deploy a new version of their Order Management system in the Orders context. This drove a discussion on working out how secrets and permissions would be managed across contexts, identifying new capabilities needed for secrets management that were prioritized during cloud migration. By creating a reusable solution that worked for all future workloads in domain contexts, the cloud team created a new capability that improved the speed of future migrations.

Figure 9 summarizes how our customer aligned their workloads to bounded contexts, which are aligned to their Azure Management Groups.

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Within the Order context, our customer used Azure Resource Groups for independently deployable applications or services that contain Azure Resources, as shown in Figure 10.

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This design served as a starting point for their initial migration of applications running in a data center to Azure. Over the next few years their goal was to re-factor these applications into multiple independent micro-services. When this time came, they could incrementally do this an application at a time by creating additional Resource Groups for each service.

If our customer were using AWS, Figure 10 would look very similar but use Organizational Units, Accounts and AWS Stacks for organizing independently deployable applications or services that contained resources. One difference in cloud providers is that AWS allows nested stacks (stacks within stacks) whereas Azure Resource Groups cannot be nested.

For networking, in order for workloads running in domain contexts to access shared services in technical contexts, their networks must be connected or permissions explicitly enabled to allow access. While the Network technical context contains centralized networking services, by default each Account or Subscription aligned to a domain context will have its own private network containing subnets that are independently created, maintained and used by the workloads running inside them.

Depending on the total number of Accounts or Subscriptions, this may be desired or it may be too many separate networks to manage (each potentially has their own IP range). Alternatively, core networks can be defined in the Network Context and shared to specific domain or technical contexts thereby avoiding every context having its own private network. The details of cloud networking are beyond the scope of this article but DDC enables multiple networking options while still aligning your cloud architecture to your business model. Bottom line: you dont have to sacrifice network security to adopt DDC.

Now that we have identified where each workload will run, it was time to begin moving them into the right Account or Subscription. While this was a new migration for our customer (greenfield), for your organization this may involve re-architecting your existing cloud platform (brownfield). Migrating a portfolio of workloads to AWS or Azure and the steps for architecting your cloud platform is beyond the scope of this article, but with respect to DDC this is a checklist of the key things to keep in mind:

For brownfield deployments of DDC that are starting with an existing cloud architecture, the basic recipe is:

Your cloud architecture is not a static artifact, the design will continue to evolve over time as your business changes and new technologies emerge. New bounded contexts will appear that require changes to your cloud platform. Ideally much of this work is codified and automated, but in all likelihood you will still have some manual steps involved as your bounded contexts evolve.

Your Account / Subscription taxonomy may change over time too, starting with fewer to simplify initial management and growing as your teams and processes mature. The responsibility boundaries of teams and how these align to bounded contexts will also mature over time. Methods like GitOps work nicely alongside DDC to keep your cloud infrastructure flexible and extensible over time and continually aligned with your business model.

DDC extends the principles of DDD beyond traditional software systems to create a unifying architecture spanning business domains, software systems and cloud infrastructure (BizDevOps). DDC is based on the software architecture principle of high cohesion and low coupling that is used when designing complex distributed systems, like your AWS and Azure environments. Employing the transparency and shared language benefits of DDD when creating your organizations cloud architecture results in a secure-yet-flexible platform that naturally evolves as your business changes over time.

Special thanks to John Chapin, Casey Lee, Brandon Linton and Nick Tune for feedback on early drafts of this article and Abby Franks for the images.

Original post:
Domain-Driven Cloud: Aligning your Cloud Architecture to your ... - InfoQ.com

In the past several months, rampant excitement about the potential benefits of generative AI technology has increased the technology's priority status across enterprise organizations worldwide.

According to a recent research report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, "Beyond the GenAI Hype: Real-world Investments, Use Cases, and Concerns," 42% of organizations said they are in a generative AI proof of concept if they haven't already deployed it in production. Our research showed that generative AI ranks higher than cloud in overall strategic business initiatives, which highlights how critical these projects are now.

In other words, the adoption rate for generative AI projects is expected to be massive and unlike anything we've seen from enterprise technology. And as a result, there is a high likelihood that your own executive team is currently in a conflicted state: They are excited about the potential productivity benefits of generative AI, but they are concerned about the risks to data privacy.

Regardless of the pace of AI adoption within your own organization, the expected overall adoption rate means that if your organization lags in adopting and deploying generative AI products, your competition will gain an increased advantage.

Organizations need to move quickly when it comes to generative AI, but they should do so in a manner that enables them to start small, scale quickly and mitigate risk associated with data privacy, compliance and security. With that necessity in mind, Nutanix has introduced GPT-in-a-Box.

The product combines the following elements:

There is a lot to like in this packaging, but most important is its simplicity of design. Nutanix is known for simplicity, which is a hallmark of its HCI technology.

Overall, there is likely going to be a longer than usual "crawl" phase before you get to "run" with generative AI within your organization. But if you want to get a leg up on generative AI initiatives, don't waste time trying to deploy the perfect infrastructure for what the ideal use will be in three to five years. In fact, few -- if any -- organizations truly have a strong grasp on what the ideal use will be.

We do have a sense of what those uses will look like in general. According to Enterprise Strategy Group's generative AI research report, the more commonly identified uses improve productivity, efficiency and the overall customer experience.

As a result, organizations should seek to speed up infrastructure deployment to enable their data science teams to get started on identifying the right data and models. As an example, the Nutanix product enables organizations to start quickly, and it gives them the flexibility to scale and adapt as needed.

The ability to deploy the product on premises is also important. While public cloud services will likely support most generative AI products, a separate Enterprise Strategy Group research study, "Multi-cloud Application Deployment and Decision Making," found that 29% of organizations identified AI/machine learning workloads as not being candidates for cloud deployment.

Some of those organizations will be launching AI initiatives that will use sensitive data or data sets with privacy concerns. Or maybe the data and compute requirements in the cloud are simply too costly for organizations just getting started. According to the multi-cloud research report, the cost of low-latency performance in the cloud is the most common reason organizations decided that an on-premises workload is not a candidate for the public cloud.

Ultimately, when it comes to generative AI, speed is of the essence. And given the increased executive-level priority on generative AI workloads, IT leaders must be proactive.

GPT-in-a-Box is simple to use and flexible, but Nutanix is not the only provider that has announced a strengthened Nvidia partnership and a product for generative AI. Always evaluate your options.

See the original post here:
Why IT leaders should deploy generative AI infrastructure now - TechTarget

No matter how much experience you have with Microsofts Windows, it can still be improved by turning to software and tools that can make the operating system that much better.

Take Windows 11, for example: When Microsoft introduced it with extremely strict system requirements in autumn 2021, it was only a matter of time before those barriers could be circumvented.

In order to install the new operating system on older PCs, the registry first had to be changed manually. Later, this could be simplified with a batch file, and now even that is superfluous thanks to Rufus, a small tool for creating bootable USB sticks. Now, with just a few additional mouse clicks, you can run Windows 11 on almost any computer.

Lets start this look at helpful, dead simple Windows software with that very program, before diving deeper into several different categories.

Download the installation file for Windows 11 from Microsoft via the option Download a Windows 11 disk image (ISO).

Now insert a flash drive with at least 8GB of storage space into the computer. Start Rufus, click on Select on the interface, select the Windows 11 ISO file, and then click Start. The Customize installation dialogue then appears, giving you an option to avoid Windows 11s obligation to set up an online account. Follow the setup process until Windows 11 is installed.

This Rufus-loaded flash drive will not only reinstall Windows 11 on any PC, but also upgrade any Windows 10 installation via the setup.exe file!

If you want to move an older Windows 10 system 1:1 to a new PC, we recommend Easeus Todo Backup. With it, you create an image of your old computers storage, from which you restore your system with all settings, programs, and data on your new PC. In addition, Windows 10 can then be upgraded to Windows 11 without any problems.

To install an older Windows version for example Windows 8.1, 10, or 11 version 21H2 save it to your storage with Windows ISO Downloader and create a setup flash drive from it with Rufus.

Depending on the Windows version, the hardware and the history of the PC, you may need a product key to activate the operating system for the new installation. You can read this key on your existing system with Showkeyplus.

Reset Windows Update Tool solves various update problems: Almost 20 features are available after starting the program with administrator rights.

If you have installed several versions of Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on your computer, you can use Easy BCD to adjust the boot entries and their prioritization.

Creating a flash drive as a multiboot system for booting different live systems was a complex matter for a long time. Ventoy fundamentally changes that. With this tool, all you have to do is make the flash drive bootable by clicking on Install and then simply save the ISO files on the stick within Windows. After booting from the flash drive, you select the desired live system via the Ventoy interface. The key benefit here is you dont need to create a new bootable flash drive when a new system version appears, but simply replace the older one with the new ISO file. Another plus: You can continue to use free space on the USB stick to save and transport your data.

Glary Utilities makes both problem analysis and their elimination possible with a mouse click, everything else is done automatically by the software in the background.

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The promise of 1-click maintenance is hit or miss on the PC. The causes of possible errors are too varied and the solutions too complex. That said, Ccleaner and Glary Utilities are always worth a try. You can start the system analysis and the subsequent problem elimination with just one mouse click.

Bootracer requires a few more clicks. The program analyzes the start-up process and breaks it down into individual segments. This shows at a glance which process or autostart program has a problem. You can choose to start the boot analysis as a normal complete Windows start, or limited to the system without autostarting software. The wizards make it easy to use Bootracer, including the necessary restarts. You can see in the details where and why your start-up may take an unusually long time. These limitations help to get to the bottom of the cause or, if it makes sense, to exclude the software in question from autostarting when Windows loads.

The analysis tools Hwinfo and Speccy show whether something is wrong with your hardware. Both programs provide a wealth of information and sensor measurement data. Even more information on your processor is provided by CPU-Z and Core Temp, while GPU-Z digs deep into graphics card details. Unknown Device Identifier is helpful in identifying unknown components; the tool shows many more components than the native Windows device manager.

Memtest86 tests the main memory for errors, while Crystaldiskinfo analyzes SSDs and magnetic hard drives by reading out the SMART parameters. A look at the overall status shows whether everything is OK. The tool sounds an alarm in the event of abnormal values, which is very important for drives full of personal data.

Snappy Driver Installer recognises outdated hardware drivers and automatically updates them with the latest versions if desired.

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Snappy Driver Installer checks whether your installed hardware drivers are up-to-date. The tool starts without installation. Click on the option Download indices only and wait until the system analysis is complete. Now, if desired, activate the Restore point field. To replace all obsolete drivers, continue by clicking on Select all Install at the top left. Alternatively, check the obsolete entries individually. Due to the file sizes of some drivers, downloading and installing may take some time.

Windows Explorer and the desktop are always used on a computer even if mostly unconsciously. While Microsoft has equipped the file manager with tabs in Windows 11, you have to retrofit the file explorer tabs into Windows 10.

To do this, install Qttabbar, restart the PC, open Explorer, and click on the down arrow in the View tab under the Options symbol on the right. There, you activate the list entry Qttabbar to show the new tab bar.

The free version of Tidy Tabs allows up to three tabs in a window, across programs for example, an Excel sheet, a Word document, and Outlook. It makes it easier to view pictures with a large preview that you start and close by pressing the space bar.

Treesize Free shows you at a glance which files are eating up space on your hard drive. The already mentioned Ccleaner also offers a quick search function for duplicate files (Extras - Duplicate Finder). Other tools like Anti-Twin offer more options, but are more complicated to use.

Small intervention, big effect. Capslock Goodbye prevents you once and for all from accidentally pressing the Caps Lock key again.

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Clipboard Master can do more and is more convenient than the Windows clipboard. If youre annoyed by accidental clicks of the caps lock key, Capslock Goodbye is the tool for you. The software deactivates the key or assigns an alternative function to it. Desktop OK restores the icon placement on the desktop if it has been mixed up.

Three other programs provide more order (and more space on the hard disk): Should I Remove it shows which pre-installed software you can safely delete on new computers. O&O Appbuster makes it easier to remove Windows apps that hardly anyone needs. Unchecky prevents the secret installation of unwanted programs and toolbars. Its a godsend.

Remote help, i.e. taking over a remote computer via the Internet, is not only efficient, but also very simple with just one click in TeamViewer Quicksupport. The person who needs help starts the tool and gives his or her displayed ID and password to the helper. The helper takes care of the rest with the fully comprehensive Teamviewer software, which is also free for private use.

Changes to hard drives and partitions have a profound effect on your system and are often not easy to reset. Smaller tools can cause much less damage: Superdiskformatter, for example, allows you to change the file system (FAT32, NTFS, etc.) except for the Windows partition. Fat32formatter formats almost arbitrarily large data media as a FAT32 system, and Drive Letter Changer is used to assign fixed drive letters to USB drives.

Raidrive assigns a drive letter to cloud storage devices such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive for quick 1-click access in Explorer. To do this, select a storage service and a letter via Add, log in with your login data and allow Raidrive to access the cloud. Done!

Cloudevo combines several cloud storages under Windows into one drive. This is convenient and allows you to store even oversized files on the internet.

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Cloudevo also simplifies the handling of online storage by combining diverse cloud storage pools into a single drive with theoretically unlimited capacity. This is also possible with several free accounts from the same provider. While you as a user only see your Cloudevo drive, the service behind it automatically distributes the stored data to the various cloud storage providers.

Drive pooling with local drives, for example with several USB drives, can be done with Liquesce. Data that is too large to be sent by email can be forwarded with O&O FileDirect. The software creates an access link to your PC, which the recipient can use to transfer the shared data. Your computer must be switched on and online during the transfer.

If Windows blocks access to certain files, thus preventing deletion, renaming, or copying, Lock Hunter releases them again. You can change other permissions of folders and files with Attribute Changer.

Have I been pwned? and HPI Identity Leak Checker are not programs to install, but a simple mouse click is enough here too. Just type in your email address and youll know whether your account has been affected by one of the countless account and password hacks. If so, please be sure to change the corresponding password!

Defender UI provides a new, easier-to-use interface for all Microsoft security features than the integrated Windows Defender offers. The software contains four predefined security profiles and clearly groups together many security features and settings otherwise scattered throughout the operating system.

Virustotal Uploader simplifies the process of uploading potentially dangerous files to the Virustotal scanning platform. Instead of manually calling up the website, selecting the file. and uploading it, this free app works much faster via the Windows context menu. The browser plug-in I dont care about cookies eliminates the hassle of deselecting cookies on many websites by blocking or hiding the usual pop-up dialogues. It is best to combine the add-on with the automatic deletion of all cookies when you close your browser.

Wipe is suitable as a supplement for removing online traces. The software not only deletes browser data, but also temporary files and more.

You can securely delete data from your hard drive with Eraser: The name says it all.

Ungoogled Chromium is a special fork of the free Chromium browser, on which Google Chrome is also based. Unlike Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium does without any Google services for more privacy.

Simple Code Generator creates QR codes for private information that you wouldnt want to entrust to an online QR generator, such as mail addresses, Wi-Fi access information, Outlook or personal contacts, and the like.

Last but not least is USB-Logon. It lets you create a USB stick for fast and secure Windows logon without a password. USB-Logon is a good alternative for PCs without a Windows Hello-enabled webcam or fingerprint sensor.

The Microsoft Powertoys tool collection has grown to over 20 amazingly helpful features, many of them with (almost) one-click operation. For example, Always on top keeps any program window visible in the monitor at all times; Awake switches off the power settings for a certain time; FancyZones allows multiple windows to be easily arranged even under Windows 10; the File Explorer Add-Ons show the contents for various file formats as a large preview; and Image Resizing changes the size of photos simply via the context menu. Also via the context menu, PowerRename functions allow automatic renaming of files.

Because we had to wait so long for it, the new PowerToys feature Paste as plain text is downright ingeniously simple. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Windows-Alt-V inserts the content stored in the clipboard unformatted into any program ideal, for example, for quickly transferring web content into word processing.

This article has been translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.

Original post:
50 programs that solve Microsoft Windows problems quickly - PCWorld

Technology keeps evolving and with each update comes a better way to perform a task.

One of the innovations is cloud computing technology, which allows individuals and businesses access to certain data or services in a location separate from end users.

Cloud storage has grown increasingly popular among businesses that need larger storage space and seeking an efficient off-site data backup solution.

Huawei Technologies among others is one of the most recognized cloud service providers in

Uganda.

In 2022, Ethan Bampaire, the team lead at Klark.io, a product of Campaignity Technologies was among the selected beneficiaries to get Huawei's cloud tech offer.

The company creates content, social media advertising, gets leads, and builds AI technologies to convert sales for their business-to-business SME clients.

"We do all this and more on our Klark platform which is hosted in the cloud," he told the media.

. With hefty server costs reduced, Bampaire says they can think about other things.

"We are experimenting a bit more such as with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for optimized operations. We can also increase the random access memory (RAM) and disk space for optimal operation," he said.

The company had also suffered downtime though not as severe as to cause client complaints.

The Huawei cloud, however, is mainly appreciated by developers on the back end due to higher speeds, resulting in greater capacity, and a more flexible platform.

"We delved into some manual processes such as Open AI which did not depend on a third party. With Huawei, they are faster which boosts our research and development arm," Ethan added.

Early this year, David Kombe of Bluss Tech, a web application building company was among the selected companies to get an offer from Huawei Cloud.

Blue Streams Solution first interfaced with Huawei Technologies during the National ICT Job Fair 2022 that was at Makerere University through that interaction, they were able to be among the selected companies to get a good Huawei cloud offer.

While the small-scale tech company was not unaware of the technology, it relied on other cloud providers whose costs were higher.

Kombe said the technology company transferred all their services to Huawei servers which has allowed them to build capacity resulting in more clients.

Opportunities in cloud

Cloud computing helps businesses stay at the forefront of technology without making large investments in purchasing, maintaining, and servicing equipment.

Cloud computing technology gives users access to storage, files, software, and servers through internet-connected devices which include computers, smartphones, tablets, and wearables.

Some of the technologies offered include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), communication as a service (CaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

Users shift to cloud services

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) can benefit significantly from cloud technologies due to its various advantages.

Elijah Mwesigwa, the IT and cloud solutions specialist at Huawei Technologies, said cloud is crucial because most SMEs have brilliant economy-advancing ideas but few resources to invest in their business.

"Building and maintaining a physical data centre is very costly and often relies on the capital expenditure model. This is where one buys servers based on estimates, which may be over, or underestimated. With cloud, that is dealt with as cloud payments are based on need. Therefore, cloud gives businesses more power to think about business advancement as it handles the operation end," he said.

Cloud services allow SMEs to easily scale up or down their resources based on business needs. "This flexibility is particularly beneficial for businesses with fluctuating demands or growth," Nabukenya Beatrice, a cloud services engineer at NITA-U stated.

According to the expert from NITA-U, cloud services can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, enabling employees to work remotely or on the go which enhances collaboration and improves productivity.

Cloud services providers handled system updates, security patches, and

maintenance tasks whereas with a physical setting, an SME will need a systems administrator to create a

recovery database that could also get corrupted.

"Cloud providers offer robust data backup and recovery mechanisms, ensuring that critical business data is safe and can be restored in the event of a disaster or data loss,"Nabukenya added.

Technological advancement

With recent technological advancements, the transport sector has the potential to witness significant breakthroughs that can revolutionize the way people move goods and services.

With Uganda's economy and population experiencing steady growth, government has been pushed to invest significantly in new infrastructure, particularly roads to accelerate socio- economic development.

As the demand for efficient transportation solutions continues to rise, the need for digitization in Kampala's transport sector has become increasingly evident.

According to a recent report, the fast-growing capital city has seen an influx of commuters and passengers relying on buses and commuter taxis for daily travel, making it imperative to adopt modern technologies to streamline operations and improve customer experience.

Digitalisation and the shift away from internal combustion engines emerge as two megatrends shaping the future of transportation and mobility.

The driving licence, motor vehicle registration, and related services are all digitised.

In developed countries and dynamic emerging markets such as China, digitisation of the transport sector is in advanced stages.

Digitalisation is becoming increasingly crucial for modern modes of transport, enabling coordinated traffic management systems, remote ticketing, and booking for metro and long-haul services.

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In the context of digitisation, tech startups such as Kacyber play a crucial role in streamlining and improving the efficiency of public transportation in Uganda.

Kacyber offers digital ticketing solutions for buses and Uganda Railways Corporation commuter trains, helping to manage transactions and data storage for millions of passengers.

The company's exponential data growth underscores the need for cloud services and data collocation to support its expansion and ensure smooth operations.

Innocent Orikiriza, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kacyber, recently revealed that on average, a single bus in Uganda issues about 90 passenger tickets daily of which their tech support system is required to store this data for some time due to monetary regulations.

Therefore, with the increasing data generation and storage requirements, the need for cloud services has become eminent for Kacyber to flourish.

However, being a tech startup, Kacyber faces financial constraints to afford such extensive storage facilities.

Recently, they received a proposal from Huawei, a technology company providing a timely and welcome solution.

Huawei's storage services will allow Kacyber to manage its data efficiently, ensuring a seamless and scalable business expansion.

Digitisation not only streamlines operations, but also contributes to cost savings and accountability in the transport sector.

However, according to experts, a national cloud infrastructure is necessary to support data storage and encourage widespread digitization across various industries and sectors for instance transport.

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Uganda: Experts Say Cloud Storage Is the Future - AllAfrica - Top Africa News