The Oddest Place You Will Find Cloud Computing At Extreme Use

Innovations are on the rise in the cloud computing industry. The market is exploding with number of opportunities and cloud technology is witnessing higher adoption and growth rates. Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, estimates that the public cloud market is expected to grow 17.3% and hit the $206.2 billion mark in 2019. The cloud has offered enterprises across different industries the power to break down barriers and bring in a more agile business environment. The cloud has impacted certain areas to an extent that no one expected it to do so such as healthcare, Government projects, grassroots innovation, medical research, agriculture, education and so on. In this article, we will list out the oddest places you will see cloud computing being used and the impact created by this technology.

1.  Brewery

Everyone loves to have a pint of beer, don’t we? Brewing quality beer involves a lot of processes and it’s important for the brewing companies to have a stable IT system and a responsive infrastructure to become a modern and digital enterprise on par with other companies.

Carlsberg, one of the world’s leading brewery groups, recently made the switch to the cloud to take advantage of becoming a digitally connected enterprise and enable digital innovation. As a part of the company’s revised growth strategy, the company aimed to increase their connectivity between them and their suppliers, customers, and employees and efficiently respond to the increasing market demands.

With the help of Accenture and Avanade, Carlsberg was able to completely migrate their core infrastructure workload and   applications to Microsoft Azure in less than 6 months. This transition covered almost 150 Terabytes of data across 600 servers and about 200 enterprise applications, which also included the entire SAP application suite, serving more than 10,000 employees across the entire business. Migrating the Microsoft Azure is helping Carlsberg and their partners to accelerate innovation by taking advantage of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, DevOps and more.

It just doesn’t end with Carlsberg! Fourpure – one of the best-known craft breweries in London – makes use of cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring modern IT tools and data analytics to their business. They run their complete IT infrastructure on the cloud. The analytics helps them to find out which types of beer are popular in the market and helps them stay ahead of their competition in the market.

2.  Gaming

The gaming industry is no exception when it comes to the foray of cloud computing. Statistics show that cloud computing accounts for a revenue of more than $68 billion and by 2021, there will be 2.73 billion gamers worldwide. Cloud providers have helped a lot of gaming companies in their growth by offering gaming platforms according to the demands of users.

If you are a Facebook user, you would have definitely seen game ads for the popular games like Candy Crush Saga, and Candy Crush Soda Games from King Games. The team at King Games attribute their success to choosing Amazon CloudFront which helps them to deliver interactive game content to the users as a part of release cycles and increase user engagement. CloudFront also helps King Games to scale effectively to handle user loads, especially when a new game or special in-game offers are released. They also use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to store the high volume of data.

Play’n Go, an international gaming company specializing in gaming platforms for online and in-house casinos,  implemented Microsoft’s Office 365 to provide a secure and productive workplace for their employees and save huge server implementation costs. With Office 365, Play’n Go achieved a more unified experience through advanced internal collaboration and greater business efficiency.

3.  Non-Profit Organizations

Generally, non-profit organizations work with a very limited budget and IT resources. However, most of the non-profit businesses require an IT infrastructure similar to the profit-businesses. Over the last few years, non-profit organizations, as well as non-governmental organizations, have started to make the shift towards cloud computing. Leading cloud providers offer NGOs with special and personalized services that help non-profit organizations take full advantage of the power of the cloud at a very low investment and a long term cost.

In 2017, as a part of the “Public Cloud for Good” initiative by Microsoft, Microsoft India announced free Microsoft Azure credits worth USD 5000 for one year (free of cost) for all eligible non-profit organizations which will help these organizations with detailed analytics, deeper insights and operational efficiency.

Cloud services boost the productivity of the staff as well as improves collaboration.

Cloud services not only help businesses to save money but also improve the productivity and collaboration between the employees. NetHope, a non-profit organization, makes use of Office 365 for their day-to-day tasks, Box for their online storage and Salesforce for their collaboration needs.

One of the world’s largest social change platforms, Change.org, operating under a mission to let people create a change lacked the elasticity capability that they required to achieve the mission with their older cloud service provider. The environment was challenging for their staff to perform the build, test and deploy the new features. The maintenance costs were high and they needed a better platform to scale their website to serve more demand from users. They switched from the old cloud provider to Amazon AWS for the flexibility and scalability advantages offered by AWS. The team at Change.org started to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in their production environment, especially for email targeting and batch pipelining tasks.

4.  Military

Yes, you read it right! The United States Army’s Logistics division known as the Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) have been using the IBM cloud since 2012 and has been saving them almost $15 million per year in operational costs. In 2017, they extended the contract with a 33-month contract worth $135 million. IBM offers managed services to the US Army’s logistics division and under the current agreement will be offering services to improve the cybersecurity by applying risk management framework (RMF) security controls using IBM cognitive computing. The cloud solution will help to prevent failures on the Army vehicles using the onboard sensors on the hardware and also use IBM’s Watson IoT Equipment Advisor solution to analyze information directly from Army vehicles.

IBM has also taken a step forward to build a private cloud for the Redstone Arsenal army post in Huntsville, Alabama. The deal is worth $62 million over a period of five years. The private cloud implementation will help the company to move about 35 applications into the private cloud in the next 12 months. The solution will offer improved performance, higher efficiency, and a highly secure environment. The new project will help the company to operate with highly classified and secret information.

5.  Sports

With every industry taking advantage of cloud technology, sports is no different. Very recently, in February 2019, Los Angeles Clippers basketball team signed a deal with Amazon AWS to develop an interesting service for the fans called “Clippers CourtVision”. The Clippers CourtVision is an augmented reality experience that is made available to the Clipper fans who are watching the game that shows real-time statistics of the percentage a particular player has to make an impact on the game.

The Champions League holders of Football, Real Madrid, use cloud technology to deliver a tailored and customized experience for their supporters. Without the cloud, it would have been absolutely difficult for Real Madrid to have brought the support of fans from worldwide through their digital channels. They use the Microsoft cloud technology that offers the scalability to engage with fans and deliver the insights they are looking for. This has increased the digital revenues of the league by 30% and seen an increase in the fan profiles by more than 400%.

Wrapping up

Cloud computing has already started to replace the conventional techniques of computing. There’s every reason why most of the industries should adopt the technology and reap the benefits. The innovations across each industry is just the beginning as cloud computing will continue to develop into further newer technologies and solutions which we wouldn’t have dreamt of seeing in the years to come. If you are keen to master the architectural principles and services of the top cloud platforms, register today for our most famous Post Graduate Certificate Program in Cloud Computing course.

Written By

Kamal Jacob