Cloud Computing Symposium – get ready for the cloud!

Cloud computing is experiencing a growth in attention world-wide. The necessity for this emerges from ever increasing amounts of data that must be stored and computed by companies of almost any area of business. Additionally, many business problems cannot be tackled without Cloud and HPC technology, especially the age of Industry 4.0.

To compete successfully in today’s market, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) require the same tools that larger companies make use of. Needless to say, small businesses do not have all the assets of bigger corporations. This can be financial resources or technical staff like data scientists, programmers and analysts being responsible for the implementation & operation of cloud services as well as GDPR-compliant data handling.

SMEs lag behind at the uptake of cloud services

Thus, SMEs often struggle at the implementation of cloud computing services in their businesses. However, being a small business is not a restriction to obtaining business and market intelligence, as outlined by services, such as SaaS for example.
SaaS helps to turn your data into insights that will inform your decision making, as well as providing a new viewpoint on your own business, no matter if your business is a large, midsize, or a small organization. But to shift data effectively, you'll need the right platform to embrace big data.
All businesses – regardless of size or sector – should consider a cloud-first strategy. That strategy should extend across cloud provision, whether that's software, platform or infrastructure providing your business with flexibility, scalability, automation, easy access to industry software in your business field etc.

The Symposium

The Cloud Computing Symposium aims to enlighten the options cloud services offer to SMEs and how they can be secure and GDPR compliant when using them.

Lectures will cover the opportunities of cloud services while also adressing the security and privacy concerns, many companies have. Initially discussing the opportunities of different clouds (private, public, hybrid or multi-) or cloud services, such as Nextcloud or Open Stack, the event extends to the efficient management of resources. The latter program point will introduce efficient resource management using (autoscaling) orchestration tools like Kubernetes or MiCADOscale (an autoscaling framework for Kubernetes) and others. The feasibility of Big Data processing will be outlined taking a look at a concrete use case tackling Social Media Analytics for Public Sector Organisations.