The many analysts who participated as part of the GigaOm cadre of contributors are in a strange limbo. Many have not been paid for recent work with GigaOm, meaning they too are creditors, just not ones with very much legal standing.

So far there has been no insights reported on the 100’s (possibly 1000’s) of companies with access to the special research only sections of GigaOm behind their paywall. Many of these firms will have paid in advance for their access. They are now, in at least spirit, creditors who are owed something.

As companies evaluate how to fill their technology research needs we encourage all to consider our CTOvision Pro offering. All current GigaOm Research members are eligible for a 90 day free trial.

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(c)iStock.com/Ramberg

Finland has the highest proportion of enterprises in the EU using cloud computing, according to figures from Eurostat.

The findings from the European Union’s statistical office, from December 2014, saw more than half (51%) of Finnish enterprises in the cloud. Nordic and Benelux countries typically scored highly, with Sweden and Denmark in the top four and Netherlands and Belgium in the top 10. 24% of UK enterprises use cloud computing services.

Overall, 10 nations are ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting cloud services, with the average number at 19%. The most popular service taken to the cloud, not surprisingly, is email, with two thirds of enterprises using the cloud overall (66%) taking advantage of this. Italy (86%) and Croatia (85%) had the most enterprises using cloud email.

More than half (53%) overall use cloud storage facilities, with Ireland (74%), Iceland (74%) and the UK (71%) the leaders there.

The remaining services are utilised by fewer than half of cloud-ready organisations according to the figures; hosting databases (39%), Office software (34%), financial or accounting software (31%), CRM (21%) and computing power for own software (17%). Interestingly Finland, at 66% for email, 54% for storage and 38% for databases, is just above the average.

The most likely reason for EU enterprises not utilising cloud services in 2014 was lack of knowledge (42%), followed by the risk of a security breach (37%). Uncertainty regarding the location of data (33%), uncertainty about applicable law (32%) and the high cost of buying cloud services (31%) were also cited.

Similarly, the risk of a security breach (39%) was the highest limiting factor for those already utilising cloud, followed by the high cost of buying cloud services (32%) and uncertainty over applicable law (32%).

It’s worth noting the tide of North American businesses being ahead of their European counterparts in cloud computing adoption may be turning. Many cloud service providers, such as Salesforce and SoftLayer, are building data centres in Europe to provide less latency and greater data sovereignty for their European customers. Now, it seems that trust is going both ways.

Take a look at the full Eurostat data here.

Today, more enterprises are looking at cloud-based solutions. What is still missing is the ability to “sync up” transactions coming from various outbound originations to a single destination. What is necessary is Cloud Transaction Synchronicity ©.
There are many articles and white papers discussing cloud computing and shared services. We have seen numerous articles on new services that are being touted like SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
Cloud Transaction Synchronicity © is the ability to have every transaction synched up off of one Master Clock (not multiple clocks). Just like the timing of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) itself is based on one Master clock (the Atomic clock), the applications needing timing should also be provided with timing.

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Downtime! Most major providers and organizations will face it one way or another. In a recent blog post titled “High Availability of Web Apps for eCommerce Starts with Real-Time Flow Analysis.” Atchison Frazer, the VP of marketing at Xangati and a tech exec with years of networking experience, talks about the importance of high availability of e-commerce web applications. For some of the e-commerce retailers such as Target and Amazon mentioned by Frazer in his post, outages/downtime can cost more than $1,000 of revenue per second. Frazer takes the time to explain both the problem and the solution.

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Hot off the press: a brand new Solr Cookbook! One of Sematext’s Solr and Elasticsearch experts — and authors — Rafał Kuć, has just published the third and latest edition of Solr Cookbook. This edition covers both Solr 4.x (based on the newest 4.10.3 version of Solr) and the just-released Solr 5.0.

Similar to previous Solr Cookbooks, Rafal updated the book significantly — half of the previous content has been changed — and rewrote all of the recipes.

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March is Women’s History Month. As we celebrate women and their role in our history, our workplaces, and our homes, I thought it was important to bring to the forefront some of the strengths that might make them stand out as compelling agents of change in such a time as this in the IT industry.
Recent research reveals that while women account for about one-half of the labor force, their numbers for employment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields continues to lag behind men. There is much speculation as to the possible reasons for this, and this is not the focus of this article. After spending many years as one of the only women in the room in meetings and conferences, I’m starting to notice more women leading initiatives, programs, and companies in cloud computing technology.

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Synergy Research reports that cloud infrastructure spending has been growing rapidly:

“Cloud infrastructure is a fast-growing market and now accounts for almost half of all data center infrastructure shipments,” says Jeremy Duke, founder and Chief Analyst, Synergy Research.

“We are seeing strong growth across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments and across all geographic regions.

Pretty amazing…

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