ClearScale Blog

When it comes to data management, there are three important components. There’s generating the data, which is often called online transaction processing (OLTP). There’s analyzing the data, which is referred to as online analytical processing (OLAP). Both can involve multiple systems. Then there’s the process of moving data between systems. This can include copying data, moving it from on-premise to the cloud, reformatting it, combining it with other data sources, and other steps. Each step can require

It’s becoming a more frequent question in IT departments: should we migrate from Apache Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB? It’s not a decision to be taken lightly. Making a move isn’t simply a “shift-and-lift” endeavor. Migration by itself can be challenging and time-consuming. Migrating between NoSQL databases, which are what both Cassandra and DynamoDB are, can be even more difficult because of the scale of the data and the rate of change. As such, it requires careful consideration

IST. NIST. GSA. DOD. DHS. SAF. OMB. FISMA. GSA. FedRAMP. With all the various acronyms and abbreviations used, the US government, its entities, and its myriad of regulations can seem like an alphabet soup. For companies that want to provide cloud-related services to federal agencies, sorting through the letters is the least of their concerns. As most IT professionals working in regulated industries know, achieving and maintaining compliance with various regulatory requirements isn’t easy. When those regulations are government-directed

The Internet of Things (IoT) encompasses a wide range of devices, from sensor-embedded medical devices to smart cars. By 2020, it’s estimated there will be over 20 billion of those devices producing 4.4 zettabytes of data. That’s a lot of data — and it offers incredible value for businesses that know how to use it. Not surprisingly, companies of all sizes and across just about every industry want to leverage IoT-generated data, and they’re eager to develop

Research shows that allowing employees to work remotely increases employee efficiency and morale while reducing overhead and real estate costs. For one company, however, it was also causing employee stress. To increase productivity and draw from a larger talent pool, a consulting firm had expanded its remote workforce. The problem was that most of these employees required access to the company’s digital resources, primarily documents, but weren’t connected to the company’s on-premise network. Further complicating matters was

For all its well-documented benefits, the cloud isn’t the place for all workloads. Some don’t perform the same in the cloud as they do in on-premise environments. Others may be restricted to an on-premise data center or on-premise private cloud due to regulatory or other requirements. That was the case for a recent ClearScale customer. The company, a sports and entertainment ticketing company, wanted to migrate from its on-premise, bare metal infrastructure to the AWS cloud. However, data

There was a time not long ago that words like “artificial intelligence” brought to mind human-like robots and mega-computers out to take over the world. Today, artificial intelligence, known as AI, along with machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, are becoming “business as usual” for an increasing number of companies. They’re driving innovation, creating efficiencies, generating new products and services, and opening the door to entirely new business models. It’s all because of

From climate-resistant crops to the ability to predict the level of disease risk in healthy individuals, genomics — the study of the full genetic balance of an organism — holds great promise for the world. It’s a data-intensive field where reproducibility, efficient management, and fast processing of large amounts of data are essential. One thing that slows down that processing is doing things manually. That was the case for a recent ClearScale customer. Lack of the right IT architecture required one

Container technology continues to grow in popularity. It’s considered by many in the IT industry as the go-to strategy for virtualization. In fact, we get a lot of requests here at ClearScale by customers who are interested in using the technology to meet their project needs. Like most technologies, however, containers have security risks. In 2017, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a guide that identifies many of those risks and offers recommendations for mitigating them

Cloud adoption statistics are high, indicating that companies are continuing to move to the cloud. But that doesn’t mean your company should jump on the cloud bandwagon — at least not without the right strategy and assistance. It’s one thing to implement software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a cloud-first strategy for new systems. It’s an entirely different ball game when it comes to moving enterprise systems to the cloud — particularly legacy systems and those that require high availability. Not all