Global enterprise wide area network (WAN) traffic saw an increase of 200% annually, with almost 50% of enterprise traffic composed of cloud and SaaS traffic, according to the latest study from Aryaka.

Aryaka has collated data of enterprise WAN traffic from over 5000 sites in 63 countries in different industries over the past four years to analyse trends, response times and inconsistencies in application performance, WAN reliability and bandwidth access. The report analyses the threshold of the network inconsistencies to affect mission-critical applications over a medium. It also examines conventional application performance time over the public Internet.

WAN traffic increased 248% in Asia-Pacific in 2016 owing to the increased use of cloud technology, Aryaka added, while the use of 100 Mbps links in China last year increased by 25%.

By industry, WAN traffic increased the most in the manufacturing vertical. Network traffic increased 526% in the software and Internet sector, whereas real estate, energy and utilities, and travel industries saw an increase of 200%. A combined 50% of all WAN traffic can be seen coming from HTTP and HTTPS. Aryaka also added that with improved Internet bandwidths and quality, the hand-off between ISPs over the Internet needs to be improved. Latency, packet loss, and jitters need to be addressed when data is transferred between long distances.

Shawn Farshchi, Aryaka president and CEO, said: “With nearly 50% of all global enterprise traffic now comprising cloud and SaaS, and legacy technologies, like MPLS, failing to address this trend, the ability to address the needs of the business translates into better business execution and competitive advantage.”

IBM has added three new advancements to the Watson Cloud platform: real-time Speaker Diarisation (beta) support available via the Watson Speech to Text API, Visual Recognition tagging with a built-in set of visual labels, and the Watson Discovery Service.

With these new capabilities, developers will be able to add intelligent visual recognition and speech to text capabilities to web and mobile applications.

Speaker diarisation is basically used for speech transcription. IBM describes the process as “the algorithms used to identify and segment speech by speaker identity.” By adding speaker diarisation to the Watson Speech to Text API, developers will be able to build applications capable of analysing conversations and taking action while the conversation is happening between two people in real-time.

IBM has updated Visual Recognition tagging and now includes a built-in library of tens of thousands of visual labels, allowing the platform to recognise various visual concepts such as objects, people, places, activities, scenes. Watson Visual Recognition can recognise broad visual concepts and objects in photos and understand visual scenes based on context. It also features custom training and classification capabilities.

The Watson Discovery Service converts, normalises, and betters streams of data so that the content can be analysed to gain insights, discover patterns, and contextualised. This happens via using integrated Watson APIs such as the AlchemyLanguage API and Document Conversion API. Developers can upload their own sets of data to the service or use publicly available datasets.

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The competition in cloud seems tough as organisations are girding well to grab the lion’s share in the market. The new Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) maintained a narrow lead over rival Cisco in the strategically important cloud infrastructure equipment market.

The data showed Dell EMC challenging the top two after the completion of their historic merger. 

At the same time, original design manufacturers (ODMs) or contract manufacturers, in aggregate, are continuingly increasing their share of the market, driven by continued heavy investments in data centres by hyper-scale cloud providers. Microsoft and IBM complete the group of top cloud infrastructure vendors.

According to Synergy, HPE and Cisco have been in a closely contested leadership battle in the cloud market for the last sixteen quarters, over which time their total revenues are virtually identical.

And across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco continues to hold a commanding lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP has a clear lead in private cloud.

Revenues continue to grow

The research firm predicts the total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including public and private cloud, hardware and software, to reach $70bn in 2016 and continue to grow at a double-digit pace.

Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualisation software, all combined, accounted for 94% of the Q3 cloud infrastructure market and the balance comprised cloud security and cloud management.

Moreover, HPE leads the cloud server segment and is a main challenger in storage, while Cisco is dominant in the networking segment and also has a growing server product line.

Dell EMC is the second-ranked server vendor and has a clear lead on storage. Microsoft features heavily in the ranking due to its position in server OS and virtualisation applications, while IBM maintains a strong position across a range of cloud technology markets.

John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group: “Growth in private cloud infrastructure is slowing down as enterprises shift more attention and workloads to the public cloud, but that means that there is a continued boom in shipments of infrastructure gear to public cloud providers.

For traditional IT infrastructure vendors there is one fly in the ointment though — hyperscale cloud providers account for an ever-increasing share of data centre gear and many of them are on a continued drive to deploy own-designed servers, storage and networking equipment, manufactured for them by ODMs.

ODMs in aggregate now control a large and growing share of public cloud infrastructure shipments.”

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The recently released Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report states that cyber-criminals are compromising virtual machines in the cloud as a way to vastly increase the scale of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS).

Microsoft has warned of many new cyber risks faced by IT companies in the report. It says that hackers have learned how to use compromised virtual machines running in the cloud to launch massive cyber-attacks.

The report says: “In the cloud weaponisation threat scenario, an attacker establishes a foothold within a cloud infrastructure by compromising and taking control of a few virtual machines. The attacker can then use these virtual machines to attack, compromise, and control thousands of virtual machines—some within the same public cloud service provider as the initial attack, and others inside other public cloud service providers.”

Attackers can easily issue commands to launch DDoS attacks that cripple online services and websites or flood the internet with spam.

Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, has witnessed attempts to exploit the cloud to establish communications with malicious IP addresses and brute force RDP, the Remote Desktop Protocol used by Microsoft to allow users to access their desktops over a network, representing 41% and 25.5% of all outbound attacks, respectively. Spam followed at just over 20% and DDoS attempts made up 7.6% of attacks.

The company is also warning IT administrators to be on the lookout for targeted threats aimed at taking control of an email account that has a high probability of containing credentials that can be used to gain access to the public cloud administrator portal. If successful, the threats may open both their on-premises and cloud infrastructures to attack.

The attacker, after logging into the administrator portal, can gather information and make changes to gain access to other cloud-based resources, execute ransomware, or even pivot back to the on-premises environment. They are also keeping tabs on GitHub and other public code repositories, hoping that developers will accidentally publish secret keys that can potentially grant access to cloud accounts and services.

Microsoft has further warned of “Man in the Cloud” (MitC) attacks wherein victims are tricked into downloading and installing malware, typically with an email containing a malicious link. Once active, the malware searches for a cloud storage folder and replaces the victim’s synchronisation token with that of the attacker’s. After this, whenever a user adds a file to their cloud storage accounts each time, a copy is delivered to the attacker.

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Google is losing ground to Microsoft in the game of “cloud”.

The company – which broke the mould with a cloud-based office productivity pack, the G Suite – is behind Microsoft Office 365 in Europe. According to a research from data protection company Bitglass, adoption of the Microsoft suite in the region has more than doubled in the past year. 

The study is based on analysis of 8,000 mail servers to determine the cloud apps being used in businesses.

Bitglass stated that, in the UK, adoption of Office 365 grew from 16.4% in 2015 to 35% in 2016, while G Suite’s adoption increased from 7.2% in 2015 to 18.7% in 2016.

In France, adoption of Office 365 grew from 22.4% in 2015 to 49.8% in 2016, while German adoption grew from 16.2% to 40%. French adoption of G Suite grew from 14.5% in 2015 to 32.3%, while in Germany the adoption of G Suite grew from 6.3% to 23.3%.

From an industry sector perspective, Google is said to have seen major wins in media companies previously, boasting businesses such as News Corp as early adopters. Google holds 31.7% share in media and 24.9% in technology, but Microsoft’s cloud-based Office Suite showed the larger share of adoption in all sectors.

Bitglass further reported that 49% of organisations with 1,000+ employees have deployed Office 365, while only 20% have deployed G Suite.

The study also found a higher cloud usage in large public companies than in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as higher rates of adoption for Office 365 than for G Suite.

Adoption of Office 365 has grown 9% among public companies to 55.4% on a year-over-year basis, while G Suite deployments is at a much slower rate in both public and private organisations.

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Microsoft recently presented three most significant IoT solutions that are said to be transforming the Indian manufacturing industry. These cloud-based solutions offered by Precimetrix, Teramatrix and Covacsis are powered by Azure – the Microsoft Cloud – that helps create digital, intelligent and predictive factories.

The solutions are already deployed across India’s leading organisations like Hero Moto Corp, Samudra LED, KEC, VE Commercial Vehicles, Godrej, TAFE, Bajaj, among others. By leveraging Azure, Microsoft partners are able to address challenges like rapidly changing customer preferences, hardware evolutions and managing hyper business growth in the manufacturing space.

This is how the solutions help the manufacturing sector create digital factories:

Customer engagement is the backbone of digital transformation which allows building tailored customer experiences by harnessing data and drawing actionable insights to achieve a segment of one.

Covacsis offers a platform that provides a 360 visibility of the manufacturing floor in real-time. Real-time visibility is helping the KEC team analyse run time, cycle time, availability and OEE of the machines in real time, allowing them to optimise the productivity output and minimise operational costs.

Another key pillar for digital transformation is the ability to empower employees, providing tools and processes for greater collaboration, mobility and insight. Microsoft works with a lot of its partners to offer solutions that help organisations achieve more by designing a workplace that is intelligent, flexible, and secure. Some of these offerings are provided by partners like ZingHR, Vymo, Qustn, Knolskape, Symphony Summitt, among others.

Precimetrix offers IoT and analytics to enable real-time process management and actionable analytics to improve productivity, efficiency and compliance. Samudra’s central monitoring system, powered by Precimetrix, provides smart street lighting system for JPC which has enabled the following benefits:

• Overall minimum committed annual energy savings of 77.13% in comparison to baseline
• Zero Investment project even for new lights for first seven years.
• 77.13% savings in energy costs at an expense of only 22.87%.
• 30.06% is JMC’s share in energy savings
• Reduction in maintenance cost by ~61.18%

Teramatrix offers an IoT software platform that enables companies to connect with their fixed or mobile infrastructure and analyse the massive data streams emanating from them. The deployment of their solution at Hero Moto Corp resulted in 20% expected increase in direct and indirect manpower productivity by enabling 24×7 continuity of testing operations and remote management of testing equipment.

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Israel-based cloud storage and data protection company CTERA Networks has received $25 million (£18.9m) in an investment round led by US-based Bessemer Venture Partners, which brings the company’s total financing to nearly $70 million to date.

Cisco and Israeli investment management firm Vintage Investment Partners also participated alongside Bessemer in the investment round.

The funds will be used to boost the company sales and marketing initiatives as well as to push global customer acquisition of its CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, which allows a gold standard for file storage, collaboration and data protection among secure and distributed enterprise organisations.

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform assimilates endpoint, office and cloud file services with uncompromising IT security, cloud choice and automation. The company claims that it is the only solution that can address a variety of end-user computing file management and data protection requirements.

It enables organisations to sync, serve and protect data from one centrally managed solution that is 100 per cent secure and deployable on any cloud infrastructure, all behind the customer’s firewall.

Liran Eshel, co-founder and CEO at CTERA: “With organisations increasingly looking to modernise their data infrastructures, CTERA is uniquely poised to provide secure tools that offer easy and globally accelerated access to files and backups. This newly announced investment round will enable CTERA to deliver best-in-class products, support and service to an even broader collection of forward-thinking enterprise customers.”

Jeff Denworth, CTERA SVP marketing, wrote in a blog post that the funding was a “terrific validation” of the company’s vision and execution. “While the business is growing at a very healthy pace, we’ve made the decision to ‘power up’ the sales execution and solution delivery engine to tackle a unique market opportunity that CTERA is well posed to lead in,” he said.

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EMC has announced the general availability of its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 4.0 product, a new hybrid cloud offering aiming to help customers advance their cloud journey, as well as given more information on Native Hybrid Cloud.

“Understanding the needs of organisations to transform a more modern, automated, self-service IT environment, EMC continues to develop and deliver innovations into its cloud platforms that are designed, supported and sustained as one to help customers simplify and accelerate their digital business initiatives,” the press material notes.

The company is also set to launch Native Hybrid Cloud in September, which is built on hyperconverged VCE VxRail appliances. The product is designed to smart small and quickly scale and provide a platform to give organisations a ‘flexible, cost effective and optimised hybrid cloud platform for cloud native application development’.

The new products make note of EMC, VMware and VCE technologies. “EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud are the fastest, surest path to the cloud based on the unrivalled level of collaboration between EMC and VMware,” said Peter Cutts, EMC VP solutions. “They enable our customers to shift their focus from building infrastructure to delivering innovative new services that differentiate their business.

“Today’s announcements emphasise our commitment to developing hybrid cloud platforms that ignite our customers’ IT transformations and simplify and accelerate their path to becoming a digital-driven business.”

“Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud are built on a foundation of proven VMware technologies,” said Loretta Brown, vice president of federation at VMware. “With the vRealize Cloud Management platform, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud delivers customers the cloud consumption experience and agility they need to make their transformational cloud journey.

“These platforms accelerate IT’s ability to deliver a software-defined environment that is ready to support the needs of both traditional and cloud-native applications,” added Brown.

EMC was bought by Dell for $67 billion (£43.7bn) in October last year.

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WANdisco and Bridgeworks have announced a new partnership, with WANdisco Fusion’s patented cloud transactional data technology will feature Bridgeworks PORTrockIT software.

David Richards, WANdisco CEO and co-founder, said: “WANdisco’s continuous availability and guaranteed data consistency can now be deployed with software from Bridgeworks that virtually removes the effects of network latency, making it possible for on-premise and cloud environments to operate as one.”

PORTrockIT’s patented technology allows businesses to rapidly move large volumes of data and increases performance by up to 100 times. The increase in speed improves critical enterprise applications such as backup, replication, disaster recovery and cloud migration. The integrated Bridgeworks and WANdisco technology will ensure that large volumes of live production data can move to and from the cloud without any business disruption.

David Trossell, CEO of Bridgeworks, said: “WANdisco software is already known for its performance and it has revolutionised the global enterprise requirement to migrate large amounts of transactional data to the Cloud. When combined with Bridgeworks PORTrockIT technology, the resulting increase of up to 100 times in transfer speed has raised the bar for business.”

The integrated technology supports hybrid cloud requirements for on-demand, burst-out processing, and offsite disaster recovery, without downtime or data loss. The integrated solution removes the requirement for cloud vendor storage appliances to be sent back and forth from customer data centers in a process that involves days of downtime and is only suitable for one-time movement of cold, less critical data.

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Earlier in 2016, ZeroStack announced general availability of its ZeroStack Cloud Platform for the simple installation and operation of a scale-out private cloud. Now, in order to bolster adoption, the company has rolled out a global Partner Program to aid partner sales.

The ZeroStack Cloud Platform is based on OpenStack and a unique feature of the offering is that management and infrastructure functionality are on premises while operations and user workflows are in the cloud. The cloud model is made available through hyper-converged ZeroStack Cloud Building Blocks that combine compute, clustered storage, software-defined networking and management software in a control plane. The on-premises infrastructure is managed by ZeroStack Cloud Portal, which provides analytics-based insights and optimizations for application deployment.

Sean Cardenas, VP of Sales and Operations at ZeroStack, said: “Whether or not we really emphasize the OpenStack depends on who we are talking to. OpenStack is really attractive to the technology crowd looking for open solutions, but there are plenty of people who just want to see a solution that works and solves their problems, and there we don’t emphasize the OpenStack aspect of it.”

Cardenas adds: “More often than not, masking complexity for the end user has a heavy burden for the partners. ZeroStack is not this at all. We refer to it as Zero Touch. It’s extremely easy to deploy within 30 minutes, as we advertise. Partners don’t necessarily have OpenStack expertise either. They know its value proposition, but most don’t have OpenStack SMEs. With this, they can literally point in the IP addresses and generate a private cloud. That’s a phenomenal win for them.”

What are your thoughts about ZeroStack’s cloud platform? Let us know in the comments.