How Cloud Systems Are Impacting Business Environments

Martin Stegner, CIO, NOVUM Hospitality

Ever since their first introduction in 1995, the cloud systems have been evolving massively. In general, one can say that cloud has accelerated innovation as well as the access to resources. Likewise, cloud has revolutionized economies of scale: everything is infinitely ascendable, and, as a result, new horizons of data processing are being tapped into every day.

Over the past years, more and more large providers have entered the market, and, in doing so, have enabled us to store and access our data in many different ways. With the evolution of the cloud, however, expectations from the software providers have been growing. Thus, to enable long-term data storage and security, back up scenarios must be well thought out. As part of this, the aspiring topic of big data has gained popularity as more and more companies have resorted to outsourcing their big data for advanced aggregation. The cloud has managed to simplify the storage of large amounts of data. Often, this data is made available to not only a single company or client but can be accessed by various parties; thus, improving the synergy. Especially, within the hospitality sector, the potential for community clouds is massive as the large-scale use of corresponding systems andbest practice is unfolding.

At NOVUM Hospitality, the use of the cloud has facilitated a roll out of company infrastructure which can be scaled based on the demand. Simultaneously, the advancement of processes has brought about cloud services that are entirely tailored to our needs. At the same time, it has become extremely easy to work with the cloud technologies in our daily business processes. From a hotel group standpoint, , the emergence of container management has been of particular importance. Container solutions not only enable the integration of bundled applications into production environments but also retract the level of abstraction between on-prem and cloud. Additionally, container management systems aid the interoperability between cloud platforms and can be synchronously run on bothon-prem systems as well as SaaS platforms ( proprietary intranets). Among other trends, artificial intelligence has gained significant usability owing to the evolution of cloud computing.

At NOVUM Hospitality, we currently aim to transpose speech recognition. Areas of application for a software of this kind comprise among other things: reservations departments, front offices as well as the guest rooms. AI-backed in-room applications allow guests to use voice control for ordering room service, checking hotel offerings or weather forecast. Technological tools like AI learns from the input given and concurrently yield data that can,, in turn, be utilized for service improvement purposes.

Considering all of the above, and despite the multifaceted ways in which Cloud computing and corresponding systems can be used for IT disciplines on a globalscale, I am certain there is one aspect that IT professionals worldwide can agree on: there is no such thing as a contemporary approach to local data storage in the digital age.Consequently, there is no viable alternative to cloud computing at present