New Trends in MIS

Whats new in MIS

 Advancement and application of information technology are ever
changing. Some of the trends in the information technology are as follows:
Cloud computing

 Clouding computing is defined as utilization of computing services, i.e.

software as well as hardware as a service over a network. Typically, this
network is the internet.
 What is Cloud?
The term Cloud refers to a Network or Internet. In other words, we can say
that Cloud is something, which is present at remote location. Cloud can
provide services over public and private networks, i.e., WAN, LAN or VPN.
Applications such as e-mail, web conferencing, customer relationship
management (CRM) execute on cloud.
 What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing refers to manipulating, configuring, and accessing the
hardware and software resources remotely. It offers online data storage,
infrastructure, and application.
 Cloud computing offers platform independency, as the software is not required
to be installed locally on the PC. Hence, the Cloud Computing is making our
business applications mobile and collaborative.
Cloud computing is a suite of tools which enables companies to lease their
digital assets somewhere ‘in the cloud’. So unlike the ‘on-premise’ data centers,
the location of computers, applications and databases that employees are
using is unknown.
 The point is to free companies from details and ‘rent’ whatever is needed from
the cloud. They don’t need to buy and thus the IT expenses are switched from
fixed capital to operating expenses.
 Cloud Computing provides us means of accessing the applications as utilities
over the Internet. It allows us to create, configure, and customize the
applications online.
 Basic Concepts
There are certain services and models working behind the scene making
the cloud computing
feasible and accessible to end users. Following are the working models for
cloud computing:
• Deployment Models
• Service Models
Deployment Models/Types

 Deployment models define the type of access to the cloud, i.e., how the cloud
is located? Cloud can have any of the four types of access: Public, Private,
Hybrid, and Community
 PUBLIC CLOUD: The public cloud allows systems and services to be easily
accessible to the general public. Public cloud may be less secure because of its
openness.
 PRIVATE CLOUD: The private cloud allows systems and services to be accessible
within an organization. It is more secured because of its private nature.
 COMMUNITY CLOUD: The community cloud allows systems and services to be
accessible by a group of organizations.
 HYBRID CLOUD: The hybrid cloud is a mixture of public and private cloud, in
which the critical activities are performed using private cloud while the non-
critical activities are performed using public cloud.
 Service Models
Cloud computing is based on service models. These are categorized into three
basic service
models which are -
• Infrastructure-as–a-Service (IaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is yet another service model, which includes
Network-as-aService, Business-as-a-Service, Identity-as-a-Service, Database-as-
a-Service or Strategy-as-aService.
The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the most basic level of service. Each of
the service models inherit the security and management mechanism from the
underlying model, as shown in
the following diagram:
 The offerings of the cloud can broadly be categorized into the following:
 1. INFRASTRUCTUR-AS-A-SERVICE (IAAS): This is the simplest form wherein server(s)
or a storage capacity is there on cloud. Clients opting for this arrangement are typically IT
companies who don’t want the hassle of installing or maintaining the space, but want to
avail access to their material whenever required.
 2. PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE (PAAS): This platform enables employees to write code,
develop applications and integrate with their existing resources. The environment is
conducive to development as it comes installed with technologies such as .NET, Java,
Ruby on Rails, Python, etc that can prepare code and then host it for sharing
 3. SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS): This is the most mature offering of cloud that
comprises of applications residing on the cloud as opposed to the physical database.
CRM Salesforce.com was the first to implement this offering all customer relationship
management data and analytics on cloud instead of on the hard drive.
How does the Cloud help?

 Apart from doing away with purchasing and installing massive data centers and making
information available on web browsers, cloud has several benefits:
 Productivity: Employees can control their own accounts reducing precious time.
Consider a non cloud environment such as the FTP server. Usually it is difficult to use and
runs out of capacity. The IT department has to perform the repetitive task of creating a
folder for each user and granting them the required access. If the folder details are to be
shared with anyone else, the requisition has to again be routed via the IT department. In
contrast, a cloud environment can enable self administration of accounts.
 Collaboration: Teams and communities can work collectively as all resources are shared
online. This proves very useful in a typical IT onsite-offshore arrangement.
 Better Intelligence: Cloud platforms have their own study softwares that can be
combined with company specific resources to create unique results. For example, Google
Earth Builder, an application pre loaded on cloud, facilitates to companies to upload their
own data on Google Earth or Google Maps thereby establishing their presence on these
resources
 Cost Savings: Instead of purchasing and maintaining expensive servers
themselves, companies can invest in cloud based platforms which proves
out to be a cheaper alternative. This is because cloud providers acquire
mammoth quantities of bandwidth, hardware and power to get better
price points.
 Reliability: Cloud providers build redundancy to avoid major disruptions.
This investment may not be possible for individual companies. To illustrate,
as monitored in 2010, Gmail was available 99.984% of the times, with an
admirable down time of only 7 minutes per month. As per research, this is 32
times more reliable than a typical company email setup
 Benefits
Cloud Computing has numerous advantages. Some of them are listed below -
1. One can access applications as utilities, over the Internet.
2. One can manipulate and configure the applications online at any time.
3. It does not require installing software to access or manipulating cloud application.
4. Cloud Computing offers online development and deployment tools, programming
runtime
environment through PaaS model.
5. Cloud resources are available over the network in a manner that provide platform
independent access to any type of clients.
6. Cloud Computing offers on-demand self-service. The resources can be used without
interaction with cloud service provider.
7. Cloud Computing is highly cost effective because it operates at high efficiency with
optimum utilization. It just requires an Internet connection
8. Cloud Computing offers load balancing that makes it more reliable
 Risks related to Cloud Computing
 Although cloud Computing is a promising innovation with various benefits in the world of
computing, it comes with risks. Some of them are discussed below:
Security and Privacy: It is the biggest concern about cloud computing. Since data
management
and infrastructure management in cloud is provided by third-party, it is always a risk to
handover
the sensitive information to cloud service providers.
Although the cloud computing vendors ensure highly secured password protected accounts,
any sign of security breach may result in loss of customers and businesses.
Lock In: It is very difficult for the customers to switch from one Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to
another. It results in dependency on a particular CSP for service.
Isolation Failure: This risk involves the failure of isolation mechanism that separates storage,
memory, and routing between the different tenants.
Management Interface Compromise: In case of public cloud provider, the customer
management interfaces are accessible through the Internet.
Insecure or Incomplete Data Deletion: It is possible that the data requested for deletion may
not
get deleted. It happens because either of the following reasons
• Extra copies of data are stored but are not available at the time of deletion
• Disk that stores data of multiple tenants is destroyed.
 Features of Cloud Computing:
 1. High scalability: It means on demand provisioning of resources on a large scale
without
requiring human interaction with each service provider.
2. High availability and reliability: Availability of servers is more reliable and high
because it minimizes the chances of infrastructure failure.
3. Agility: It shares the resources between users and works very quickly.
4. Multi-sharing: Multiple user and applications work more efficiently with less cost by
sharing common infrastructure using cloud computing.
5. Maintenance: Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier as they are
not required to be install on each computer and can also be accessed from various
places, ultimately reducing the cost.
6. Low cost: It is cost effective because the company no more needs to set its own
infrastructure. It pays according to resources it has consumed.
7. Services in pay-per-use mode: APIs(Application Programming Interfaces) are
provided to the users for accessing the services on the cloud and pay according to
use of the service.
 On Demand Self Service
 Cloud Computing allows the users to use web services and resources on demand. One can logon
to a website at any time and use them.
Broad Network Access: Since cloud computing is completely web based, it can be accessed
from anywhere and at any time.
Resource Pooling: Cloud computing allows multiple tenants to share a pool of resources. One
can share single physical instance of hardware, database and basic infrastructure.
Rapid Elasticity: It is very easy to scale the resources vertically or horizontally at any time.
Scaling of resources means the ability of resources to deal with increasing or decreasing demand.
The resources being used by customers at any given point of time are automatically monitored.
Measured Service: In this service cloud provider controls and monitors all the aspects of cloud
service. Resource optimization, billing, and capacity planning etc. depend on it.
Concluding Remarks:
The cloud is still in its infancy stage and hence is an emerging platform. There is a fast increase in
the number of cloud vendors; they are trying to be creative and segregate their offerings. In times
ahead, there are expected to be transformative changes in this field and wider acceptance of the
technology.
Big Data:

 Introduction:
Big data is a blanket term for the non-traditional strategies and
technologies needed to gather, organize, process, and gather insights from
large datasets. While the problem of working with data that exceeds the
computing power or storage of a single computer is not new, the
pervasiveness, scale, and value of this type of computing has greatly
expanded in recent years.
 In this article, we will talk about big data on a fundamental level and
define common concepts you might come across while researching the
subject. We will also take a high-level look at some of the processes and
technologies currently being used in this space.
 What Is Big Data?
 An exact definition of "big data" is difficult to nail down because projects, vendors, practitioners,
and business professionals use it quite differently. With that in mind, generally speaking, big
data is:
• large datasets
• the category of computing strategies and technologies that are used to handle large datasets
In this context, "large dataset" means a dataset too large to reasonably process or store with
traditional tooling or on a single computer. This means that the common scale of big datasets is
constantly shifting and may vary significantly from organization to organization.
Big Data is a collection of large datasets that cannot be adequately processed using traditional
processing techniques. Big data is not only data it has become a complete subject, which involves
various tools, techniques and frameworks.
Big data term describes the volume amount of data both structured and unstructured manner that
adapted in day-to-day business environment. It’s important that what organizations utilize with these
with the data that matters.
Big data helps to analyze the in-depth concepts for the better decisions and strategic taken for the
development of the organization.
 Big Data Characteristics
The five characteristics that define Big Data are: Volume, Velocity, Variety,
Veracity and Value.
1. Volume: Volume refers to the ‘amount of data’, which is growing day by
day at a very fast pace. The size of data generated by humans, machines
and their interactions on social media itself is massive. Researchers have
predicted that 40 Zettabytes (40,000 Exabytes) will be generated by 2020,
which is an increase of 300 times from 2005.
 2. Velocity: Velocity is defined as the pace at which different sources
generate the data every day. This flow of data is massive and continuous.
There are 1.03 billion Daily Active Users (Facebook DAU) on Mobile as of
now, which is an increase of 22% year-over-year.
 This shows how fast the numbers of users are growing on social media and
how fast the data is getting generated daily. If you are able to handle the
velocity, you will be able to generate insights and take decisions based on
real-time data.
 3. Variety: As there are many sources which are contributing to Big Data,
the type of data they are generating is different. It can be structured, semi-
structured or unstructured. Hence, there is a variety of data which is getting
generated every day. Earlier, we used to get the data from
excel and databases, now the data are coming in the form of images,
audios, videos, sensor data etc. as shown in below image. Hence, this
variety of unstructured data creates problems in capturing, storage, mining
and analyzing the data.
 4. Veracity: Veracity refers to the data in doubt or uncertainty of data available due to
data inconsistency and incompleteness. In the image below, you can see that few values
are missing in the table. Also, a few values are hard to accept, for example – 15000
minimum values in the 3rd row, it is not possible. This inconsistency and incompleteness is
Veracity.
 Data available can sometimes get messy and maybe difficult to trust. With many forms of
big data, quality and accuracy are difficult to control like Twitter posts with hashtags,
abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech. The volume is often the reason behind for the
lack of quality and accuracy in the data.
• Due to uncertainty of data, 1 in 3 business leaders don’t trust the information they use to
make decisions.
• It was found in a survey that 27% of respondents were unsure of how much of their data
was inaccurate.
• Poor data quality costs the US economy around $3.1 trillion a year.
 5. Value: After discussing Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity, there is
another V that should be taken into account when looking at Big Data i.e.
Value. It is all well and good to have access to big data but unless we can
turn it into value it is useless. By turning it into value I mean, Is it adding to
the benefits of the organizations who are analyzing big data? Is
the organization working on Big Data achieving high ROI (Return On
Investment)? Unless, it adds to their profits by working on Big Data, it is
useless.
 Types of Big Data:
Big Data could be of three types:
1. Structured: The data that can be stored and processed in a fixed format is called as
Structured Data. Data stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS) is one
example of ‘structured’ data. It is easy to process structured data as it has a fixed schema.
Structured Query Language (SQL) is often used to manage such kind of Data.
2. Semi-Structured: Semi-Structured Data is a type of data which does not have a formal
structure of a data model, i.e. a table definition in a relational DBMS, but nevertheless it has
some organizational properties like tags and other markers to separate semantic elements that
makes it easier to analyze. XML files or JSON documents are examples of semi-structured
data.
3. Unstructured: The data which have unknown form and cannot be stored in RDBMS and
cannot be analyzed unless it is transformed into a structured format is called as unstructured
data. Text Files and multimedia contents like images, audios, videos are example of
unstructured data. The unstructured data is growing quicker than others, experts say that 80
percent of the data in an organization are unstructured.
Examples of Big Data

 Daily we upload millions of bytes of data. 90 % of the world’s data has been created in last
two years.
• Walmart handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour.
• Facebook stores, accesses, and analyzes 30+ Petabytes of user generated data.
• 230+ millions of tweets are created every day.
• More than 5 billion people are calling, texting, tweeting and browsing on mobile phones
worldwide.
• YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute of the day.
• Amazon handles 15 million customer click stream user data per day to recommend
products.
• 294 billion emails are sent every day. Services analyses this data to find the spams.
• Modern cars have close to 100 sensors which monitors fuel level, tire pressure etc. , each
vehicle generates a lot of sensor data.
 Applications of Big Data:

 We cannot talk about data without talking about the people, people who are getting benefited by
Big Data applications. Almost all the industries today are leveraging Big Data applications in one or
the other way.
 • Smarter Healthcare: Making use of the petabytes of patient’s data, the organization can
extract meaningful information and then build applications that can predict the patient’s
deteriorating condition in advance.
• Telecom: Telecom sectors collects information, analyzes it and provide solutions to
different problems. By using Big Data applications, telecom companies have been able to
significantly reduce data packet loss, which occurs when networks are overloaded, and thus,
providing a seamless connection to their customers.
• Retail: Retail has some of the tightest margins, and is one of the greatest beneficiaries of big
data. The beauty of using big data in retail is to understand consumer behavior. Amazon’s
recommendation engine provides suggestion based on the browsing history of the consumer.
• Traffic control: Traffic congestion is a major challenge for many cities globally. Effective
use of data and sensors will be key to managing traffic better as cities become increasingly
densely populated.
• Manufacturing: Analyzing big data in the manufacturing industry can reduce component
defects, improve product quality, increase efficiency, and save time and money.
• Search Quality: Every time we are extracting information from google, we are
simultaneously generating data for it. Google stores this data and uses it to improve its
search quality
Benefits of Big Data:

 • Using the information kept in the social network like Facebook, the
marketing agencies are learning about the response for their campaigns,
promotions, and other advertising mediums.
• Using the information in the social media like preferences and product
perception of their consumers, product companies and retail organizations
are planning their production.
 • Using the data regarding the previous medical history of patients,
hospitals are providing better and quick service.
 Challenges with Big Data
 Let me tell you few challenges which come along with Big Data:
1. Data Quality: The problem here is the 4th V i.e. Veracity. The data here is very messy,
inconsistent and incomplete. Dirty data cost $600 billion to the companies every year in
the United States.
2. Discovery: Finding insights on Big Data is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Analyzing petabytes of data using extremely powerful algorithms to find patterns and
insights are very difficult.
3. Storage: The more data an organization has, the more complex the problems of managing
it can become. The question that arises here is “Where to store it?”. We need a storage
system which can easily scale up or down on-demand.
4. Analytics: In the case of Big Data, most of the time we are unaware of the kind of data we
are dealing with, so analyzing that data is even more difficult.
5. Security: Since the data is huge in size, keeping it secure is another challenge. It includes
user authentication, restricting access based on a user, recording data access histories,
proper use of data encryption etc.
6. Lack of Talent: There are a lot of Big Data projects in major organizations, but a
sophisticated team of developers, data scientists and analysts who also have sufficient
amount of domain knowledge is still a challenge.
7. Capturing data
8. Curation
9. Storage
10. Searching
11. Sharing
12. Transfer
13. Analysis
14. Presentation