Big greenfield cannabis cloud

Making the leap from paper ledgers to the cloud and big data analytic's, offering a provocative example

Imagine associate degree commercial enterprise that ne'er had access to a contemporary exchange and had ne'er used any real info technology. Suddenly, it had the chance to leap into high school and doubtless relish whole new economies of scale -- a pure greenfield proposition. What would happen?

With new international and state group action, in addition as a current moratorium on federal social control, marijuana is that commercial enterprise. Untouched by the traditions of an indoor IT observe, it's making a road map for the long run, charted nearly entirely within the cloud.
Birds eye read of male government with occasional and wireless portable
Subscribe to InfoWorld's Mobile school Report

Smartphones, tablets, and alternative mobile devices have reworked the trendy business. continue on the key

To be clear, dread remains concerning digitizing the business aspect of cannabis. raise Eddie Miller, chief executive officer of eCann, that runs a website referred to as Investincannabis.com:

 owing to the grey space within the laws, I realize that lots of the particular vendors, the retailers, the cultivators area unit reluctant to travel into the cloud, place their information into the cloud, to share this sort of knowledge and to own digital records of it.

Nonetheless, with multistate group action and optimism that federal group action can follow, some organizations have started moving to the cloud and desegregation analytical technologies.

eCann uses Salesforce at the side of associate degree system of promoting tools to search out interested patrons and investors. The founders area unit hosting a happening throughout the Dreamforce conference for cannabis investors.

This has raised fascinating legal queries. Since the cannabis business is against the law federally and in most of the u.  s., what's the legal exposure to third-party vendors like Salesforce? I asked Salesforce for a treat whether or not it had been encouraging cannabis growers and dealers to use its platform. Despite multiple tries, the corporate did not revisit to American state, expression it had been unlikely to satisfy my point in time even once I extended it.
Baby steps

Legal ambiguity has unbroken most of the business aspect of cannabis in file folders or personal cellphones.

There are, however, exceptions. I spoke to the parents from Grow chum, and that they delineated  their side as a chilly Fusion, SQL Server, and .Net on some cloud infrastructure. (Ironically, the last time somebody told American state they were going to use nuclear fusion reaction, I asked them if they were smoking one thing.)

Grow chum is associate degree app designed to let home growers record the parameters of their “grow,” like nutrients, watering, and size. At the instant, the app does not support cross-user analytics -- many shoppers regard this as proprietary info. The team wouldn’t reveal wherever its side was hosted, aside from to mention it had been a cloud supplier and not colocated, concerning that as each a security and privacy issue.

I conjointly interviewed New Frontier monetary, that told American state all concerning its analytics and lots concerning its methodology, however on the technology aspect would reveal solely that the corporate operated a NoSQL information within the cloud -- and it used data processing tools written in R -- not that information or activity tools were operating. the corporate truly regarded this as a form of competitive edge. I advised that if the NoSQL information and ETL tools in use was very New Frontier's competitive edge, it had been in hassle.
Data difficulties

Frontier is functioning to resolve associate degree entrenched drawback within the cannabis industry: information. information comes in at completely different quality levels from multiple sources, and monetary information has been arduous to come back by.

In fact, up up to now, even stigmatisation hasn’t been protected. within the cannabis trade, marijuana growers {in {different|totally completely different|completely different}|in several|in numerous} regions or states oft decision identical strain by different names -- or different strains by identical name. this is often a tough information drawback to resolve.

While Frontier works to resolve this at a meta level, another company, PotBotics, includes a product referred to as NanoPot that detects cistron sequences in cannabis to see that seeds belong to that strain. Meanwhile, the corporate includes a recommendation engine referred to as PotBot -- associate degreed the same product aimed toward medical marijuana referred to as BrainBot -- that uses an electroencephalogram to choose the correct personalised strain supported your brainwaves.

PotBotics uses a cloud-hosted combination of NoSQL databases, Hadoop, and Elasticsearch to power its product. the advice and discovery engines area unit supported SPARQL.
A serverless world

No one I spoke to talked concerning shopping for servers or building a hybrid cloud. tho' none folks understand what President Trump would possibly do next year, everybody began with the premise that they ought to begin with a hosted resolution -- SaaS if doable, custom if necessary, and while not a pool of system directors.

This isn’t even a aware alternative. I brought it up after I asked if they'd ever thought of shopping for a server. Grow chum was associate degree outlier with SQL Server, however everybody else started with a NoSQL operational information and varied alternative technologies within the cloud, together with Hadoop for back-end analytics.

It strikes American state that lots of corporations with lots less legal or monetary liabilities claim they have their own information center and avoid the cloud for security reasons. however even the “legalized” marijuana business carries the potential for a visit to federal jail.

If that is not a sign of our future within the cloud, i do not understand what's. The individuals I interviewed for this story all smitten American state as dead capable of creating reasoned selections. Despite terribly real risks, nobody was standing up their own servers in a very basement somewhere. The cloud, together with massive information systems to optimize production, was associate degree assumption.

SOURCE