Where Should You Save Your Data?

It seems every internet giant is pushing its cloud storage now. Most have a certain amount of free cloud storage. Hosting companies are offering to host in the cloud. Google has introduced notebook ‘computers’ that use the cloud for everything.

Why not use a hard drive?

Do not let the tag of Cloud fool you – all of your information is still on a hard drive. It would be more appropriately called “our hard drive instead of yours”. The term cloud simply means you can easily access it from any internet connection. It may be stored on redundant servers but in the end it is all just on a hard drive somewhere- one substantially bigger than your own.

There are some advantages to storing files on a Cloud drive.
1.       Automatic back-ups of important files
2.       Easy access to files from any computer
3.       Access with mobile devices and sharing between devices
4.       Protects against hard drive failure on your computer
5.       Protects against stolen laptop or lost/stolen smart phones

These being the reasons why every company is telling you to use their cloud drive and they are good ones. Most make it very easy. Google gives you 6GB of cloud drive with a Gmail account. Windows sets up your ‘SkyDrive’ with your Microsoft account and the Office 2013 tries to save to it by default. Hundreds of companies changed their service name from ‘online data storage and back-up’ to ‘Cloud storage service’. The question you should ask is why are the big companies offering you this free storage?

The first is simple economics. Google offers 6 GB of free storage. My computer has a 1TB hard drive. If I want to actually back up my whole drive I will need to buy a lot more space. The presumption is I will get used to using it and the easy back-up and simply upgrade to a paid plan. This does not change any of the potential benefits so there is nothing wrong with the premise.

The issue to be considered is the alternative other use hidden in the EULA (End User License Agreement). If anybody actually read these you would see that almost universally the big internet companies reserve the right to use information collected from data you send to the cloud as they see fit. Exact wording varies but you can be sure they are not saying they will not look at or read the data you store there.

They use the same processes to comb all the data people store on their ‘cloud’ to add profile information and use that for targeting advertisements and marketing. By using Big Data processing and analytics they change what you find in searches and what advertisements you see. The information is also used to present special offers to certain people and not to others based on buying habits and collected profile data.

Cloud storage offers many conveniences. Just do not make the mistake of assuming it is a ‘free benefit’.

Data backups were commonplace long before computing, and whether you are storing your records in boxes or on computer archives, it has to be secure and organised in case you need to access files or emails for e-Discovery or some other purpose. The advent of cloud data storage has changed the entire nature of data archiving.

What are ‘Cloud Storage Solutions’?

Unlike backup files, which provide an emergency copy to recover from a disaster, a data archive is a collection of data that is no longer used and stored away. With cloud storage solutions, your data archive is stored off-premises so it’s safe from natural disaster such as fire or flood. The cloud archive is optimised for long-term data retention, security, and compliance and metadata make it easily searchable.

The Benefits of Cloud Storage Solutions

Cloud storage solutions are ideal for archiving large quantities of data. The cost to install and manage an enterprise archive can be prohibitive, especially for organizations with large data retention requirements who don’t want the added hardware, software, and staffing costs. If you have a long-term archive, you will also need multiple hardware and software upgrades throughout the data life cycle, and you have to manage support contracts and staff turnover.

Cloud storage solutions eliminate these headaches. For the SaaS client, the storage capacity is virtually unlimited and you merely pay as you go; staffing is no longer your concern, and you have a central point of archive administration and access in the cloud. Cloud storage also eliminates worries about investing in redundant systems or archive backups – all the security is managed by the cloud storage service provider, but you get to make choices about how that data is archived and made accessible. Some vendors even archive email, data, and other business-critical information in tandem, using common tags so you can access all the data associated with a project or activity for e-Discovery.

Adopting a cloud storage solution for archiving also frees server space for more important tasks, and cuts your hardware costs. It centralises administration via the Web, which eliminates the need for archiving software and the added staff to manage it, providing a single point of data access without the risk of a single point of failure. And consolidating your data archive with a single cloud storage vendor also gives you ‘one throat to choke’: a single party to work with on service-level agreements that ensure data security and archive access.

Hybrid Cloud vs Cloud-Only Archiving Systems

Of course, cloud storage solutions aren’t always a panacea. Some larger organisations prefer a hybrid cloud archiving approach that is part SaaS and part on-premise. This seems particularly attractive for financial services and highly regulated industries that want stricter control over archival data or high-speed data access. However, a cloud-only archive makes more sense for organizations that don’t have the expertise or resources to manage a private data archive.

So what should you consider when considering your archive options?

Are data indexing, searching, and retention critical requirements?

What legal compliance and archival restrictions do you need to consider?

Should you consider a private or a public cloud archive?

What assurances do you need for data security and disaster recovery?

Cloud archiving technology is growing more sophisticated every day. If you haven’t looked at cloud-based data archiving lately, particularly offerings like Mimecast’s cloud archiving services, it might be time to give it a second look. You really have nothing to lose, including your files.

There has been a lot of discussion about how cloud computing is changing the networking paradigm from the traditional LAN/WAN end-to-end service guarantee to the public cloud “best effort” service delivery. This can for example be viewed in the success of services like Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com has ca. 3 million customers that use their solutions to support critical sales and support processes. Regardless of the importance of the services provided, salesforce.com does not provide customers any availability guarantee and, since services are typically delivered over the Internet, no end-to-end guarantees can be provided either.

Is best effort good enough?

The “best effort” level of obtaining services from cloud service providers appears to becoming increasingly acceptable for a large share of companies. Especially is this true when it comes to SaaS services like salesforce.com and Google Apps for Business. These services seem to provide “good enough” service levels and not contradict with the number one concern of Cloud service adoption, namely, the concern about the security and confidentiality of data.

When it comes to public cloud services like IaaS the picture might become somewhat different however. Although many cloud users accept the inherent limitations of the Internet, including latency and packet-loss, when obtaining common IaaS services like compute and storage, increasingly more companies are requiring better networking alternatives from the perspective of reliability, security and speed.

Considering dedicated network connections to the Cloud

AWS, for example, have for a while offered the “Direct Connect” service which enables users to establish a dedicated network connection between their office network or on-premise data center, to one of AWS Direct Connect data center locations. This, essentially, means to establish a multi-partitioning VLAN via dedicated connection obtained through any of AWS partner network service providers. This is of course a step beyond establishing a VPN connection as with dedicated networking a certain level of performance, consistency and reliability can be assumed. Furthermore, this scheme also allows users to extend their private IP space into the Cloud while maintaining a network separation between public and private environments. For this purpose, AWS has partnered with several Tier-1 network providers in establishing global connection points for customers wishing to leverage the Cloud in this manner. Customers pay for the “per-hour” usage of selected bandwidth in terms of “port size”, i.e. 1Gb or 10Gb port at the nearest or appropriate connection point and the amount of data transfer in GB.

Although the networking issue has not been one of the primary inhibitors of IaaS adoption, it clearly plays an important role. Other, still more fundamental, factors have topped the list of concerns, including concerns about security and confidentiality of company data. When these have been addressed sufficiently, I would not be surprised to see the networking issue becoming more prominent.

Putting your business’ data on an easily accessible network database—so long as it stays secure—can open up new opportunities for increasing employee productivity as well as decreasing IT costs. Whether your business already works in the cloud or is just now considering cloud computing, review some tips on maximizing your cloud experience, so you can get the most out of your investment.

Safe Place for Data Backup

One of the most costly—and unnecessary—IT consultant or department expenses is data recovery. In the event of a malware attack or data hacking, or even a break-in or natural disaster that results in computer equipment loss or destruction, your business’ data is at risk. Often, it takes IT people a long time to retrieve data, and sometimes it’s not even possible.






If you store digital copies of all of your essential business data on a secure cloud database, you’ll have backups that

Allowing Work on the Gosecurely remain even if your equipment is a loss. Replacing computer equipment can be a hassle and perhaps costly, if not covered by insurance. But replacing data that took countless work hours to produce is an even greater disaster that could prove even more costly in the long run, as it holds back your business from moving forward in the scramble to reproduce old work.

If you send employees out to meet current and prospective clients, a large portion of their day isn’t used towards work, even if they’re just sitting in an airport waiting for a flight—unless you allow them to access their work via the cloud. Sometimes there are last-minute changes to a business proposal, and an employee who works via the cloud can access them at any time.

Bad weather or minor family emergencies might keep an employee at home, but if you allow them to access their work via the cloud, they can still work and no time is lost. Allowing employees to work remotely when necessary, also boosts productivity as it breaks them out of the typical day-to-day routine.

Allowing BYOD

Not only is the cloud available on the go, it’s available on any brand of device. No longer will your business be compelled to buy the same brand and the same equipment for everyone in the office if you hope to keep them connected to the network servers. You can use Mac OSX, Windows or any brand of device.

Since you can use any brand of device to access data in the cloud, you might want to go a step further and allow your employees to BYOD, i.e., “bring your own device.” You can either ask them to pay for the device themselves, assuming they use one at home anyway, or give them a small allowance toward the purchase. Either way, what you currently spend on purchasing and maintaining new computer equipment and mobile devices will be greatly reduced or even eliminated entirely.

Easy Collaboration

Whether one employee is halfway across the country or just halfway across the office, collaboration on work projects shouldn’t have to involve face-to-face interaction, sharing a screen or long, disorganized email chains back and forth. New versions of projects get lost, people who were supposed to be copied along the way on the email chain get mistakenly ignored and, thus, it becomes a disorganized mess.

Putting projects on the cloud allows employees to engage in active discussion boards and share and upload new versions of a project as they work. The cloud will indicate which user uploaded which versions, so if there are questions about specific changes, you’ll know where to direct them. And even when employees go home, they will still be able to access their work.

Contact Management

Cloud systems often provide easy-to-use contact management applications. Store the contact information for clients, organize your employees by department and/or project participation and keep an organized system of records of all of your interactions for future access. You can even scan in old documents or upload copies of emails for interactions that pre-dated your use of the cloud. And remember, this content will be accessible remotely, so if you’re at a client’s place of business and need to access a detail you discussed several months prior, it’ll be a click away on the cloud.

Dreamweaver costs hundreds of pounds, but building in Wix, SquareSpace or one of the other many cloud-based HTML WYSIWYG editors out there is a much more affordable option – prices begin at free and head up towards the $20 mark at a push. So why isn’t everyone doing it? Here’s our guide to getting started.

It may not surprise you to discover that most companies who offer WYSIWYG HTML editing in the cloud also offer their own cloud hosting plans, too. Cloud hosting is a necessary component to allow users to access your website over the world wide web – it is the process of storing your website’s coded information on their servers, so other people can look at it. In fact, with many of them, signing up to a hosting plan through the HTML editor itself will result in automatic subscription to a hosting plan through the provider. Though many of them – such as SquareSpace – offer a way to tie-in a domain name from a different hosting provider, some of the providers are ‘us-only’.

With this in mind, you have to pick your editor carefully as you’re going to be tied in to their ecosystem. Companies like Wix do not offer you direct control over your HTML and CSS, whereas companies like WordPress and SquareSpace make it a selling point to do so. Even with access to the source code, though, it can be tough going – SquareSpace and Wix use their own special variants of HTML and CSS to code ‘templates’. If you’re used to starting from scratch in Dreamweaver, there’s a lot to learn.



Once you’ve picked your editor, you’ll be offered a series of templates, or ‘themes’ (WordPress). These are a great start point for your website design, and offer a jump-start in to the coding. Try to select a template with an overall feature set that you like, rather than focussing on aesthetic details. Most templates – especially WordPress ‘premium’ themes – allow you to edit appearance values manually, post-selection, but few of them allow you to make significant adjustments to the layout without first diving in to the code.

Once you have selected your template, get to grips with your editor. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll be using a CMS (Content Management System)-based editor, which will allow you to make adjustments to, and add and subtract, a few components. If you want to dive deeper, you’ll have to consider making a ‘child theme’, which is similar to forking a repo on GitHub. If you don’t know what that means, you probably won’t want to do it.

If you’re using a more liberal editor, such as SquareSpace, you’ll be confronted by a whole host of options to change the tiniest detail on your webpage. And, if that’s not enough, SquareSpace also offers CSS editing directly in the editor. The big deal about all of these cloud-based website builders is that they allow for immediate representation of your changes on-screen, without doing the little ‘save…preview in browser…reload page’ dance you have to do with desktop editors. So feel free to play around with the default functionality in the editor of your choice, safe in the knowledge that you can put it back to where it was before with little turmoil.

What, then, about Wix? Wix is one of those halfway houses. Hosting is free, but you can’t really play with your code. At worst, it’s a good place to go build a site, then use the Inspect Element function in Chrome to nab some of the better-looking CSS. At best, it’s a quick and dirty way of getting something functional up and running as soon as possible. Just don’t expect massive customization options.

So, there’s an overview of what it’s like to build websites in the Cloud. The main thing to take away is this: don’t anticipate huge amounts of control. And, if you do want control, prepare to get intimate with some tricky code. Finally, before committing to a single provider, have a look at what Adobe are working on with Edge Code – it could be that they have created the perfect halfway house between Cloud editor and Desktop IDE.

The cloud is everywhere. Setting up a server to host some games? You’re better off doing it through cloud. Sharing some files with work? You should probably look at cloud. Cloud saves the time, configuration, and resource-based expenses (like electricity) that traditional server-in-the-closet systems just love to soak up. So which cloud management provider should you be looking at to help keep your system in check? Here are 5 of the best.

Apica

Based out of Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, to be precise – where Apple is based), Apaica offers a suite of tools called WebExcellence. These test cloud servers’ ability to react to loads – intelligently. Rather than just hitting servers with as many requests as possible (DDoS-style), the program runs scripts that mimic users fulfilling roles in line with your companies purpose and business goals. WebExcellence then supplies an in-depth report and visual confirmation as to how your system performed.

Jamcracker

Another Silicon Valley startup – this time from Santa Clara – believes it has the solution to over-clouding. At the moment, the rapid adoption of cloud technology by businesses means they have often have to deal with multiple providers, and therefore multiple interfaces and log-ins. The Jamcracker Platform is one of a number of attempts to organize all these providers in one place.  Administrator workload is significantly reduced when access through single sign-on (SSO).

Netuitive

Cloud computing has been around since almost 1994, yet clients still have doubts about this technology. This is quite understandable, since many people still believe that the world will end in 2012, a software bug can destroy time and Mac doesn’t have any glitches. Judging from the common attitude towards high-tech products around the world, it seems obvious that cloud-based services still feel a bit deceptive for the general public. I am here to prove them wrong. Cloud computing is a great technological platform that will potentially help all kinds of businesses, both big and small.
Among the main fears, I would underline the following:

• The Cloud is very expensive.
• My data shouldn’t travel outside my company.
• Cloud is unreliable.

These are just a few of the reasons some of my clients named, while we were negotiating a deal. The main reason why people are afraid of cloud platforms is because they don’t really understand them. That is why many small business owners, managers and IT-specialists consider SaaS-products unreliable and dangerous. To destroy all possible prejudices against cloud computing one should just study the market.

If all cloud-products are really useless and even harmful for your business then how come there are so many cloud-based solutions. Dropbox, Carbonite, Amazon, HP flood the market with their services. Hundreds of independent companies like TeamWox, Dropbox provide customizable managing solutions. Apple builds big server farms all around US to host terabytes of data users upload to iCloud. All those people work with cloud, millions of clients use such platforms every day. If all those services are so dangerous, than how do all those companies continue to work? The potential client should understand that no one in his right mind will try to sell or give away a product that is potentially unsafe.

One can understand small businesses who do not want to go into the cloud. They are giving the most valuable assets – their data, their clients, their products. To help the client adapt to outside content storage, the cloud-provider could use a special step-by-step strategy. Let them migrate slowly, giving away one part of their infrastructure after another:

• Backup
• Disaster Recovery
• Hybrid Cloud
• Data Processing

The most obvious way to help the customer to understand the advantages of the cloud is to give back up service. Use the cloud for backups and storing your archives – the materials one does not use very often. This way the client could get adjusted to the cloud services and learn how to work with them. They will soon find out that the whole back-up process is very easy and works seamlessly. One can even start using the cloud on a personal level, before moving to a business-oriented product.

After that you could suggest the client to put his Disaster Recovery onto the cloud. This is where the user will begin to see the big-scale advantages of such platforms. External solutions do not increase the risks but minimize them. The clients will also learn that business can be restored from total wasteland to a working infrastructure in a matter of hours. Without the necessity of relying on physical hardware, small businesses will start to realize, that they have more to gain with the cloud solutions.

The next big step is the creation of a business infrastructure with a hybrid cloud system. This approach allows to segment business processes. For example, the client might keep his precious data at hand on the hard drive and only use the cloud for e-mail, direct-marketing and so on. Moreover, the client may still have his own IT-recourses, feeling that control over workflow on the hardware level, as well as in the cloud itself. I consider hybrid cloud an ideal environment for business which try to switch from completely local solution to full cloud SaaS-products.

The last and the most important step is putting your data production in the cloud. This is a big move for any company no matter the size. Most of the clients are afraid of such transitions, because it leaves the company vulnerable to external risks, connected with the failure of the cloud-provider. On this level one should push the financial advantages of using a cloud-service. We are selling a scalable system that grows together with the client’s business. For example small business client can save a lot of expenditures simply by using cloud-system that doesn’t cost much. It saves the most important resource any young startup has – money and time.

The same advantage goes for big enterprises. Sometime one may require great processing power, but most of the time is just stays there, eating up your money and destroying you business from inside. Instead why not borrow the analytical and processing power of the cloud when you really need it. You only pay for what you use. No one needs to buy a bunch of servers to support a website that will only last for 3 month.

By using these steps you will gradually build the necessary trust on client’s side. He will understand that you are selling a service, not just a product. He will learn that the Cloud is neither expensive nor unreliable. And then you will be able to start talking the same language and hopefully become partners.

Knowledge is power, and knowing what is going on with all your servers gives you the power to stay on top of things, address issues before they become outages, and meet your SLAs. With all the other tasks on your plate daily, how can you possibly keep an eye on all your servers manually? Hence a monitoring solution becomes vital, and a cloud-based server monitoring solution may be just the thing to meet your monitoring needs. If you are looking at implementing monitoring in your environment, here are the top five reasons to consider a cloud-based monitoring solution.

1.     Time to deployment

Unlike traditional monitoring solutions, cloud-based server monitoring requires only that you deploy an agent to the systems you need to monitor. There’s no hardware to buy, applications to install, firewall ports to open, or other infrastructure needs. You can go from zero to full network monitoring in an afternoon.

2.     Cost effectiveness

Like most cloud solutions, cloud-based server monitoring charges are based on a subscription model, so you only pay for what you need. Since it’s a subscription model without a large initial investment required, you can treat it as an operating expense instead of a capital expense, and the low start-up cost is very beneficial to the bottom line. Cloud-based server monitoring comes with all the monitoring expertise built-in, so you don’t have to pay for training or take the time to learn new skills. You know your servers and what needs to be monitored-the cloud-based server monitoring knows how to monitor that.

3.     Easy maintenance

When you deploy a cloud-based server monitoring solution, you focus on what you want monitored, and how you want to respond. There’s no hardware to maintain, additional operating systems to patch, or additional monitoring of the monitoring required. It’s a solution that comes without any additional overhead.

4.     Easy Access

Server monitoring ensures you always know what is going on, and cloud solutions offer a range of options to keep informed. In addition to automatically generated emails and text messages, with cloud-based monitoring you can log into a web-based management console, from a mobile device with internet access, to view the real-time status of all your workstations and servers, wherever you are.

5.     Remote Management

Cloud-based solutions work with lightweight agents to monitor the health of workstations and servers and communicate back with the cloud.  These solutions work great hand-in-hand with network monitoring software to give you total control and insight and give you complete visibility across all your monitored computers, whether they are on the corporate network or not.

With all that cloud-based server monitoring has to offer, and when you consider how easy it is to deploy, you owe it to yourself to check out the solutions that are available to you today. You can be up and running with a free trial in a matter of minutes, which will let you learn first-hand just how powerful a solution cloud-based server monitoring is.

Much has been said about cloud based applications for individuals, small groups and trivial applications meant for companies and cloud based software for small and medium businesses.  So what about heavyweight software meant for companies of size to operate their core businesses?
Much of this software continues to be developed or implemented as IT systems for individual companies. There are several software workhorses from different industrial verticals that deserve mention as examples.  A few  of them are operational support system applications in telecommunication networking, merchandising systems in retail, policy administration systems in insurance and account management systems in banking. Being able to provide or consume heavyweight software services through the cloud is a different ball game altogether.  There are many, many constraints involved.  Before thinking about these constraints, and much less how to address them, it is a good idea to think about why companies would like to have these services provided from the cloud in the first place.

The freedom from having to install and run software is a powerful motivator to obtain services from the cloud.  Maintaining sophisticated  software applications is normally not a pleasant experience for most companies.  Running software may require dedicated data centers and teams of specialists in networking, database and hardware and specialists in packaged software whose services need to be bought at high wages.  And these are companies whose core business is not to run IT systems. Implementing software makes a company highly dependent on software vendors and IT consultancies.  Another powerful motivator would be freedom from failure.  The cost of failure has been high.  In “The Critical Success Factors for ERP Implementation: An Organizational Fit Perspective,” Information & Management 40, no. 1(October 2002), K.K. Hong and Y.G. Kim make an assessment that failed implementations could be as high as 75 percent.  We are looking at the possibility of the cost of failure not being borne by companies for the first time, thanks to the cloud.  What is more, companies will not be left with software that does not work.  Apart from eliminating the need to develop, implement and run software, some alleviation from failure and agility, other key benefits would be saved CAPEX, increased access to software, increased exposure to players like suppliers, third parties etc and thereby more standardization of processes and more focus on core business activities.  However the following words of caution are in place:

• While saved CAPEX is definitely an implied gain, it is too early to assume guaranteed savings in overall expenditure at this point, unless operations are so fickle that hardware or software needs to be overhauled very frequently.
• Easier management cannot be assumed either considering that there is not much experience out there managing cloud software vendors.  Some pains and learning along the way should be expected.
• Scalability could be another gain, but the pitch about being able to meet sudden increases in business that can be made to entice smaller players or startups may be met with consternation with companies of size.  Also, insulation from failure could be a disadvantage.
• Not much is known about how much business processes may need to be modified to suit the cloud, though hopefully the availability of many and specialized variants of different services will make this less compelling than with packaged software.  But again having too many vendors involved could decrease accountability and customization may become dearer.

Ignorance is not bliss. Just ask any developer who’s been shocked to find review after review of complaints. Worse yet is when users are disgusted enough to abandon or uninstall the app — a 95 percent likelihood — but don’t feel it’s worth their time to explain why in a review or in an email to the developer.

The ideal solution would be to identify problems before they irritate enough users that an app’s reputation is irreversibly shot. The good news is there’s no shortage of tools for aggregating and analyzing that information, some of which would be difficult, time-consuming or even impossible to collect manually.

App store operators are one source of analytics tools. A recent example is Google’s beta of Mobile App Analytics, which provides information such as which device models are using your app the most. That insight can be useful because Android is highly fragmented, so developers have to decide which devices to optimize for. Mobile App Analytics also tracks usage by version — helpful for tracking the number of users who have upgraded.

Some mobile operators also provide tools. One example is AT&T’s Application Resource Optimizer (ARO), which ferrets out problems such as poor use of caching.

“According to AT&T Labs Research, nearly 20 percent of all HTTP traffic volume is redundant,” says Lisa Burks, AT&T senior product marketing manager. “Nearly all the developers we’ve talked with are surprised to learn that their mobile app is not caching properly. ARO measures this in a few ways — by looking at duplicate content, cache control, content expiration, content pre-fetching and screen rotation.”

Caching isn’t a minor issue, partly because most operators have eliminated flat-rate, unlimited-use data plans. So identifying caching problems is a way to avoid the ire of users concerned about apps using up their monthly data bucket.

“Without proper caching, content will likely be downloaded multiple times,” says Burks. “In our tests of a popular news app, it downloaded the weather 11 times in five minutes.”

Would user feedback have identified that kind of flaw? Maybe — but it’s more likely that users would simply abandon the app, leaving the developer to wonder why.

Knowing what’s going on inside your app is one thing, but it’s equally important to learn about the users who are interacting with your creation. Understanding your user demographics will help you marry the app analytics with the audience you are reaching and create an even better experience.
“With Intel AppUp, we believe it is extremely important for our developers to know as much about their users as possible,” says Alexis Crowell, product marketing manager for Intel AppUp. “We provide resources for our developers to make sure they can maintain that direct connection and garner as much insight as possible.” [Disclosure: Intel is the sponsor of this content.]

App Analytics: Time is Money

Some analytics tools can be helpful for collecting and analyzing non-technical information. For example, appFigures assesses how a price change affects downloads, identifies the day of the week when your app is downloaded most frequently and tracks similar apps’ store rankings.

“Being app developers ourselves, we started appFigures with the modest goal of automating data crunching to make interesting insights easier to spot,” says co-founder Ariel Michaeli. “Since most stores don’t provide an API for reporting, we created a proprietary syncing platform that lets us securely retrieve private data (sales, downloads, updates) directly from a developer’s account. We get public information about the app (ranks, reviews, ratings) directly from the app stores in real-time or very close to it.”

Saving time is also a big part of these tools’ appeal. After all, the less time you spend collecting data and building spreadsheets, the more time you can spend acting on those insights or developing new products.

So what can developers reasonably expect to save? “It could range from 15 minutes a day for just grabbing data from one or several stores to hours or days for actually making sense of the data,” says Michaeli. “In some cases, appFigures makes information accessible, like store-wide hourly ranks and real-time reviews, which would be impractical to get any other way.”

A similar tool, AppViz 2, is designed for iOS. “The average customer can expect to save about 30 minutes a day or more just from the daily sales analysis and chart trending,” says Dustin Bruzenak, co-founder of IdeaSwarm, the company behind AppViz 2. “If you’re doing more in-depth analysis for things like marketing spend or localization targeting, AppViz can save you days of work or more.
“For rankings and reviews, we’re talking about days and days of work to track this data for all countries. Doing that work by hand would be nearly impossible to complete in a timely manner,” says Bruzenak.

Turning App Insights Into Actions

It’s one thing for a tool to collect information and flag interesting highlights. It’s another to make suggestions about how to act on those insights. The latter can help save additional time.

For example, AT&T’s ARO suggests ways to optimize how an app manages its Internet connection. “A typical [app] startup consists of an input burst, followed by a series of bursts spread out over time,” says Burks. “This approach can dramatically slow down the application’s response time and waste energy on the device. A much better approach is to download as much content as quickly as possible when opening a connection.”

This screenshot from ARO illustrates those kinds of bursts.



“In this example, if the developer had grouped these four connections more tightly, the page would have rendered at least 15 seconds faster, and the radio would be used less, leading to battery savings,” says Burks.