Developing Website using WordPress: Pros & Cons

Developing Website using WordPress

When starting out with your online business you probably want to set it up as cheaply as possible, and this includes the setting up of your website too. WordPress is often the platform of choice for those just starting out online, without the budget to hire someone to create a website for them, it offers the cheapest and most versatile option.

Pros:

•It’s free
•Fast to setup
•Easy to learn
•Lots of plugins and templates available so you don’t need to be a PHP guru or designer to have a nice looking site with lots of features.
•Easy to modify page templates allowing you to customize the presentation layers to your heart content
•Large and active open source community community of people developing add-ons, plugins, themes frequently
 •Easy to host with simple requirements

Cons:

• Many of the themes have a tendency to look the same or similar.
•PHP’s track record for security is pretty bad.
•Database queries may be very heavy
•It isn’t a full CMS product – which is fine for a lot of sites – but if your site is moving a long way away from something based around a blog then you might find it starts to creak a bit!

Cloud Data Management System: Modern superset of an RDBMS

Modern superset of an RDBMS

A CDMS is a modern superset of an RDBMS designed to meet the needs of modern, 21st century applications and deployment infrastructures.
In addition to delivering the full range of RDBMS capabilities, including SQL, ACID transactions, and supporting all of the tools and APIs that come with them, a CDMS must:
• Support modern datacenter hardware and management frameworks,
• Meet peak workload demands,
• Handle structured and unstructured datasets, and
• Support non-SQL paradigms.
In particular, a CDMS must embrace modern dynamic and flexible cloud computing environments.

Elastic Scale-out for Extreme Performance

A CDMS must deliver capacity on demand by adding or deleting computational and storage resources in a running database. A CDMS must be able to elastically scale out to very high transaction volumes – in the millions of transactions per second (TPS) – and web-scale database sizes – in the petabytes of data – by the addition of real or virtual machines, networks and storage systems to a live database. A CDMS must also scale in gracefully when resources are no longer needed.

Single Logical Database

No matter how complicated the application a CDMS must present its users the view of a single, logical, consistent and always available database. A CDMS must shield users from having to employ explicit partitioning, sharding or caching techniques to achieve massive database scalability. The CDMS must obviate or encapsulate these complexities, so that a developer or administrator can focus on using the database no matter the scale or complexity.

Run Anywhere, Scale Anywhere

A CDMS must be able to run on any infrastructure from single machines to private clouds, public clouds and combinations of the above. It must be able to run in a heterogeneous environment incorporating different machines, virtual machines, operating systems, or network infrastructures. A CDMS should excel on enterprise and commodity hardware equally.

Nonstop Availability

A CDMS must be capable of running continuously – for months or years – without failing or being made unavailable for maintenance.
A CDMS cannot have a single point of failure. It must presume infrastructure failure and be self-aware to detect it, handle systems changes and recognize extreme events like network partitions. It should remain available, or if impossible then fail in a graceful and consistent fashion. It should be able to decide how to react to network partitions, either by failing some portion of the system or understanding how to reconcile changes when the network is stabilized.
A CDMS must support live rolling upgrades of hardware, operating systems and CDMS versions, and must support dynamic changes to schemas and other database administration tasks without shutting down CDMS availability.

Dynamic Multi-tenancy

A CDMS must be dynamically multi-tenant. It must be able to manage large numbers of databases on a finite set of resources, and be able to reassign resources to databases as needed. A CDMS must be able to hibernate inactive databases and wake them on demand.

Active/Active Geo-distribution

A CDMS must be able to run concurrently in multiple datacenters to support geographically distributed workloads, always-on applications, and for disaster recovery. A CDMS must deliver active/active operations with transactionally consistent semantics, work across and between Wide Area Networks and understand how to localize activity or caches.

Embrace Cloud

A CDMS must integrate and run in a cloud environment, and be designed to support cloud-scale performance requirements while being resilient against the inherent concurrency and latency challenges. It must be able to provide transactions per second (TPS) and load rate guarantees and maintain those rates as latency spikes and concurrent load grows. It must support cloud management frameworks and integrate with modern cloud stacks.

Store Anywhere, Store Redundantly

A CDMS must be able to store the data anywhere: Locally, remotely, in a datacenter or on a public or private cloud. A CDMS should also be able to store the data in whatever storage system is appropriate: on a directly attached file system, a local Key/Value store or on a cloud-based storage service. It should be able to store all data redundantly in multiple locations, simultaneously and with transactional consistency, using a heterogeneous mix of storage locations and storage technologies.

Workload Mix

A CDMS must be flexible in the kinds of workloads it supports, and efficient in running different workloads concurrently. It should be able to support highly scalable web-facing applications with primary requirements that include high transaction throughput, web-scale concurrency and very low latency. It should be able to support enterprise applications that involve complex transactions and a more even mix of reads and updates. It should be able to support analytical applications, with a premium on un-cached reads and long-running queries. A CDMS should also support logging-style applications with a focus on sustained appending of data.
A CDMS must be able to perform backups without taking the system down, and run analytical queries without interfering with transaction processing.

Tunable Durability Guarantees

A CDMS must allow a user to define infrastructure reliability constraints that control the trade off between durability guarantees and database performance. A user must be allowed to define whether a transactional commit means that the data is safely written to storage in one place, written to storage in K places, written to storage in M non-collocated places, stored in RAM in N places, or something else.

Distributed Security

A CDMS must have enterprise class security at system level and database level, including:
• Authentication and access control of machines before they are accepted into the trusted group,
• Authentication and access control of database processes before they are allowed to participate in a particular database,
• Encryption of all communications between machines, and
• Database-level security for users of the database.

Empower Developers & Administrators

Empowering Developers:
• A CDMS must support rapid application development and frictionless application evolution,
• It should be easy to use, without time-consuming requirements for provisioning of database servers, or inflexible schemas that slow down application development,
• It must be integrated with modern programming languages and APIs, database development tools and application development frameworks,
• It must support flexible schemas with user-defined types in order to provide a clean layer for arbitrary language integration that is agnostic to row or column orientation. A CDMS should enable users to easily update and redefine data as their applications change.

Empowering Administrators:
• A CDMS should provide a single secure point of administration for all its databases and resources. It should make it simple to automate logging, auditing, profiling, process management and resource allocation,
• It should enable policy-driven, zero-admin services that manage the system as a whole,
• A CDMS should also support the separation of database administrators and systems administrators as roles using this single point of management as these roles are more distinct in a cloud environment.

Health care and Cloud Computing

For years, hospitals have longed to bring computers into the exam rooms, waiting rooms, and treatment rooms to get rid of hard-to-read patient charts, make sure everyone treating a patient was seeing the same information, record everything from vital signs to care delivery, and let doctors, nurses, and hospital techs stay connected to vital information and services as they move throughout the hospital.

Cloud computing offers significant benefits to the healthcare sector; Doctor’s clinics, hospitals, and health clinics require quick access to computing and large storage facilities which are not provided in the traditional settings, moreover healthcare data needs to be shared across various settings and geographies which further burdens the healthcare provider and the patient causing significant delay in treatment and loss of time. Cloud caters to all these requirements thus providing the healthcare organizations an incredible opportunity to improve services to their customers, the patients, to share information more easily than ever before, and improve operational efficiency at the same time. The flip side of this advantage is that healthcare data has specific requirements such as security, confidentiality, availability to authorized users, traceability of access, reversibility of data, and long-term preservation. Hence, cloud vendors need to account for all these while conforming to regulations such as HIPAA and Meaningful use.

Indeed, the cloud computing market in the health care sector is expected to grow to $5.4 billion by 2017 at a CAGR of 20.5% from 2012 to 2017, according to research firm Markets and Markets. Although cloud computing offers significant advantages to HCOs and other stakeholders, it has set of restraints. Security of patient information, interoperability and compliance with government regulations are some of the factors which are slowing down this market.
The health care sector is beginning to move to cloud-based platforms, despite the common belief that compliance and security issues would hinder the shift. The major driving factors are the need to increase storage and compute capacity using limited dollars and the ability to centrally manage patient data that now exists in silos.

Despite this growth, many in health care are still pushing back on cloud computing, citing security and privacy issues. But others are finding better security models and technology in the cloud. Moreover, most health care organizations moving to cloud computing are doing so to reduce operational costs, because many have very limited budgets -- a powerful motivation that will overcome the overblown security and privacy excuses.

Still, this transition won't be pain-free. Most IT organizations in the health care sector don't have the talent required to move their systems safely to cloud-based platforms, and they may not understand the compliance and security issues as well as they should. However, the default of "do nothing" is not acceptable considering that the IT backlog is growing again -- and budgets are not. It's time to get creative and innovative around the use of new technology, including cloud computing.

That's especially good for health care, which should get a much higher return on investment than other sectors will from cloud adoption. The amount of data that health care providers must deal with is daunting, and it is typically managed in unconnected silos. That causes huge costs both for management and in inefficiencies, including some that lead to mistreatment due to ignorance among those treating patients as each has only some of the picture.

In moving to the cloud, the health care industry will find new opportunities for data consolidation or aggregation of patient data to help physicians and clinicians make better decisions, while their organizations should save money through reduced redundancy and cheaper operational costs. It's time for health care to capitalize on the cloud opportunity -- as smart organizations have already realized.

Different Segments of Cloud Computing market in healthcare are as:

The scope of the report spans the cloud computing market in healthcare which comprises:

• Global healthcare cloud computing market, by applications
  • Clinical Information Systems (CIS)
    • Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
    • Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS)
    • Radiology Information System (RIS)
    • Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE)
    • Laboratory Information System (LIS)
    • Pharmacy Information System (PIS)
    • Others
  • Non Clinical Information Systems (NCIS)
    • Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)
    • Automatic Patient Billing (APB)
    • Cost accounting
    • Payroll
    • Claims management
• Global healthcare cloud computing market, by pricing model
  • Pay-as-you-go
  • Spot pricing
• Global healthcare cloud computing market, by deployment model
  • Public cloud
  • Private cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
• Global healthcare cloud computing market, by components
  • Software
  • Hardware
  • Services
• Global healthcare cloud computing market, by service model
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Healthcare cloud computing market, by geography
  • North America
  • Europe
  • Asia
  • Rest of the World (ROW)

TOP 15 Emerging Technologies

Research firm Forrester understands that everyone who’s been listening with even one ear knows that mobile, social, cloud, and data are big freight trains of change that are blowing up old business models and old business practices.

TOP 15 Emerging Technologies are in four groups:

End user computing technologies

 1.Next-generation devices and UIs
New sensors and new user interfaces. Think Leap Motion
 2.Advanced collaboration and communication
Think social inside, like Yammer or or other social-inside-the-enterprise solutions
 3.Systems of engagement
Real-time data, in everyone’s hands. Think Roambi

Sensors and remote computing technologies

 1.Smart products
Thing that can sense, react, and communicate. Think operating system for places and buildings
 2.In-location positioning
GPS and in-building location sensors
 3.Machine-to-machine networks
Background intelligence on people and things. Think ReelyActive

Process data management technologies

 1.Smart process applications and semantics
Real business processes are a lot messier than your flow charts. Smart process apps know that.
 2.Advanced analytics
Smarter, more predictive data. Think Cloudera’s Impala tool for Hadoop
 3.Pervasive BI
People need business intelligence that comes every hour, not at the end of the month
 4.Process and data cloud services
Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability. PaaS, BaaS, etc.

Infrastructure and application platforms

 1.Big data platforms
Infrastructure to handle big data and high speed … and use all that data you’ve been uselessly storing
 2.Breakthrough storage and compute
Yes, hardware may still be necessary, even if you’re never going to be like Google
 3.Software-defined infrastructure
Software that dynamically routes your networking and data center capabilities
 4.Cloud application frameworks
Technologies for deploying and running distributed apps in the cloud, like, perhaps, a multi-continent-spanning database
 5.New identity and trust models
New federated trust and identity models for a changing world of jobs and careers … and maybe even killing all usernames and passwords

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/07/forresters-top-15-emerging-technologies/#Gy0g4kfil8OcMOUw.99

Top 10 technology trends for 2013

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 include:

1. Mobile Device Battles
Gartner predicts that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. However, only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones.

By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google's Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Windows 8 is Microsoft's big bet and Windows 8 platform styles should be evaluated to get a better idea of how they might perform in real-world environments as well as how users will respond.

Consumerization will mean enterprises won't be able to force users to give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices. Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.

2. Mobile Applications and HTML5
The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. Currently, Gartner separates mobile development tools into several categories. For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several.
Six mobile architectures - native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. Nevertheless, native apps won't disappear, and will always offer the best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated fashion.
 3. Personal CloudThe personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives.

The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities. Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where they go for all their digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.
 4. Enterprise App StoresEnterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms.

By 2014, Gartner believes that many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs.

5. The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment.
As a result, mobile no longer refers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets. Cellular technology is being embedded in many new types of devices including pharmaceutical containers and automobiles. Smartphones and other intelligent devices don't just use the cellular network, they communicate via NFC, Bluetooth, LE and Wi-Fi to a wide range of devices and peripherals, such as wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters, and home entertainment systems. The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services while raising many new challenges.
 6. Hybrid IT and Cloud ComputingAs staffs have been asked to do more with less, IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners.

The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organization to retain and build influence inside its organization and to become a value center in the face of challenging new requirements relative to increasing adoption of cloud as an approach to IT consumption.
 7. Strategic Big DataBig Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on enterprises' strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions.
Instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.
 8. Actionable AnalyticsAnalytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.
 9. In Memory ComputingIn memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformational opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services.
Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats "as things happen." The possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.
 10. Integrated EcosystemsThe market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware.

The trend is manifested in three levels. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infrastructure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the client through the apps.

This article is by Gartner and taken from following link:
http://www.ciol.com/ciol/news/23564/top-technology-trends-2013-gartner/page/1