Think about a smart cooler that self-monitors its stock, self-diagnoses any errors, collects information on various parameters and stores it to a centralized cloud server for easy assessment. A Media Server Application deployed on a remote cloud infrastructure, that establishes & maintains the entire audio/video session during an online test and sends streams to various clients. This does not only store media for on-demand playback but also uses video analytics algorithms to trigger an auto alarm if a person or test taker goes out of the frame. Another great example is Document Digitization through OCR where Cloud and Vision Technologies integrate to process images through an OCR engine set up on the cloud and then recognize/extract printed words from the documents (invoices, bills, forms).
All these are examples of what Cloud-Vision Technology can achieve and are solving real-world business challenges in a very efficient, reliable and scalable manner today.
As per IDC, the worldwide public cloud services spend could double and hit the $141 billion mark in 2019.
Understanding Cloud-Vision
Cloud-Vision involves the processing & orchestration of Vision-based applications over cloud infrastructure. Cloud here, refers to a computing method in which virtualized and standard resources, software and data are provided as a service over the Internet.
By 2021, Gartner projects that of the organizations that are using the cloud – more than half would go all-in, not just remain with a few workloads on the cloud.
This connotes that rather than shifting and scaling into the cloud, companies will be refactoring and re-building directly into it. Put simply, there is no turning back to on-premises infrastructure after adopting the cloud.
Why move to the Cloud?
Gartner’s IT Budget report shows that most healthcare companies often spend up to 75% of their IT budgets towards maintaining internal systems.
Companies in different spaces, however, end up paying more in the upfront price of software and hence fail to realize the total cost of ownership (support, additional hardware, maintenance, etc.). Cloud services allow you to pay for resource usage while taking advantage of scalability and reliability. And these are the two key things that most companies can’t easily afford internally.
What about your Data & its Security?
Data centers belong to mature infrastructures like Amazon Web Services and are designed while keeping robust security in mind. Equipment is monitored, and access to the premises of data centers is protected. The cloud is no less secure in comparison to the servers managed internally by your company. In fact, there are chances that these cloud infrastructures are more secure. A pool of highly skilled staff maintains these infrastructures, processes are stringent and there are many eyes watching over these powerhouses. Tons of real-world security’s best practices have been incorporated to guarantee full-fledged Security.
Let’s take a closer look at what your business can achieve by shifting to the cloud:
On-demand Resourcing – This entails the allocation of resources on an immediate basis, be it the compute space or network to suffice your application requirement. The provision of getting resources straight away eliminates lengthy steps of choosing and ordering equipment, installing and configuring it before releasing it to the production environment.
Scalability – The Cloud enables you to scale your environment’s resources both up & down and in & out depending on the needs of your applications/services. Scaling up and down means enhancing the capacity of an instance. For e.g. increasing the CPU power to balance out the load occurring on your application. Scaling in & out, on the other hand, simply means adding or removing the number of instances you’re using in a particular application.
Flexibility and Elasticity – You get huge flexibility in terms of choosing as many or as few resources as you require without making a capacity guess upfront. For example, architecting for surges in demand can be daunting when it comes to on-premise infrastructure. At the same time, failing to serve the instant needs of your customers will lead them to your counterparts. Having the sheer flexibility and elasticity of the cloud will allow you to add different resources and services in a jiffy.
Lower cost of operations – With the cloud, you only pay for resources when you are using them. You can eliminate the excessive cost overhead of an on-premise data center which sometimes remains idle. The cloud gives you the ability to shut down any instance that isn’t in use, and you can even schedule it ahead of time. For e.g., if you only have one server running for 4 hours and then shut it down. This way, you only pay for the 4 hours worth of computing resources and that’s it.
The Way Forward to Cloud-Vision
Cloud-Vision has become a future-proof technology that not only eases the work of developers in juggling with local processing power but helps companies get a full-fledged application running on the Cloud Web Server to support easy accessibility and flexibility. Free away from security risks and challenges, embracing Cloud vision is the prudent choice to overcome a lot of headache and superfluous costs.
Whether it is about Face Detection, Landmark Detection or Barcode Scanning, Text Recognition, KritiKal is making Cloud Vision a reality by building feature-intensive applications on cloud-backed architecture that ensures optimum scalability as well as desirable flexibility. We leverage web services to decentralize much of the analytics and image processing work required in vision-based systems so that the clients will get a fully-fledged application without employing local processing power and storage. We rely on the cloud for its capacity to streamline all the intricacy which comes with technical operations, storage and functional aspects to deliver modern-age cloud-vision applications.
