Page 152 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

error—is one of the chief causes of outages in all data centers,
and the cloud is not immune to them.
Thus, applications that deal with sensitive data, such as
personal identities, financial data, and health-care data, can’t
be lightly sent off to run in the cloud. Doing so risks the com-
pany’s compliance with Sarbanes Oxley, PCI, or HIPAA regu-

lations. Such applications need to be posted with an off-limits
sign until, at some point in the future, the security experts can
guarantee secure cloud operations.
Many compute-intensive jobs fall somewhere in between
these two poles. Web site logs are a treasure trove of informa-
tion on how users move around the company Web site, but
analyzing several months of such information is an immense

computing job. The data needs to be broken down by user visit,
mouse click by mouse click, until a picture of the navigation
paths of many users can be seen. What path do loyal buyers
take through the site, and how is it different from that taken
by window shoppers and browsers? Is there a way to make the
navigation path of the window shoppers lead more directly
to a purchase decision? How can the decision path be made
simpler and easier to navigate? At what point do browsers be-
come buyers? Did the window shopper traffic conflict with

buyers’ transactions? How can the company detect such con-
flict and give priority to the parties that are ready to spend
their money?
A minute analysis of the site, collected in many server logs,
yields answers to these questions, but it requires a large amount
of processing power over many hours or days. The surplus

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