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The pace of businesses migrating to the cloud is accelerating.  In the UK in particular there certainly seems to be a larger and faster adoption of cloud services.  In fact, I recently read a new survey from the Cloud Industry Forum that stated that more than eight out of ten UK companies currently store some or all of their data in the cloud.  Published in May this year, the research found that 84 per cent of firms have now adopted one or more cloud services – that’s up from 78 per cent in June 2014 and an increase of 75 percent since 2010. 

These statistics don’t surprise me at all. With increased cloud adoption we are also seeing an acceleration of take up of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).  Whether safeguarding against human error, cyberattacks, small scale events or even big natural disasters, companies are now turning to DRaaS as a way to avoid serious risk without breaking the bank. 

With DRaaS, not only is disaster recovery much more affordable but it is an effective way to carry on working despite a disaster.  For example, take the recent Holborn fire incident in London where around 5,000 workers were evacuated from the area when the underground fire broke out in the Kingsway area sparked by an electrical fault.  London’s Chamber of Commerce estimated that overall around £40 million was lost in revenue as a result of the blaze. Businesses using cloud based platforms and DRaaS however were able to carry on working.  

Another high profile example is when Nirvanix cloud service customers were left virtually stranded when the company closed shop in 2013. More than 1,000 customers were given just a two weeks to migrate (or, alternatively, destroy) an estimated 40 petabytes of data out of several data centres.  Rather than look at the Nirvanix situation and hit the panic button on your own cloud project, you can easily safeguard against this scenario with DRaaS and affectively avoid the threat of cloud evaporation altogether.

DRaaS allows organisations to recover if their cloud service fails. With more and more organisations moving to cloud, disaster recovery has to be a key consideration to protect data and keep applications secure. Today, Gartner estimates the size of the DRaaS market to be approximately $1.3 billion, with a related compound annual growth rate of 30%. By 2018, Gartner estimates that the size of the DRaaS market will exceed that of the market for more traditional subscription-based disaster recovery services.

The growing uptake of DRaaS is also reflected in the fact that Gartner has just released its first ever Magic Quadrant covering DRaaS. What I was particularly delighted about was that iland was named a Challenger in this new report for our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Gartner defines Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as an offering in which the service provider manages virtual machine (VM) replication and, optionally, physical machine (PM) replication from the production data centre into the cloud, VM/PM activation inside the cloud and recovery exercising within the cloud. In the Magic Quadrant Gartner analysts evaluated 14 service providers offering DRaaS based on the criteria of ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision. iland’s DRaaS enables IT workloads to be replicated from virtual or physical environments to a global high-availability cloud infrastructure. With a decade of disaster recovery expertise, we go beyond simple backup to ensure that all key workloads are protected – and the disaster recovery process is tuned to our customers’ business priorities and compliance needs.

Unlike any other provider however, we enable customers to easily, efficiently execute failovers and tests via our proven Enterprise Cloud Services Portal and mobile application – a single interface that can also be used to manage any iland cloud resources around the globe.

The new Gartner Magic Quadrant highlights the fact that the market is maturing.  As the march to cloud continues, DRaaS is becoming increasingly attractive to both large organisations and small, and looks set to become a preferred choice to avoid risk and protect against any kind of cloud evaporation.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced that it is working with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to deliver secure file sharing and collaboration to its employees.

The move represents a major customer win for the firm, who now has more than 40 federal customers on its books. “Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information,” said Aaron Levie, Box CEO.

“We are thrilled to support the DOJ’s technology efforts, helping to transform the way they manage and share information,” he added.

The DOJ will be employing Box for three main reasons: to simplify internal and external collaboration between component agencies and third party organisations; seamlessly support mobile and offline access to content for employees; and reduce the complexity of infrastructure by eliminating fragmented content.

Despite the recent narrative around Box being framed on its will-they-won’t-they IPO imbroglio, which was finally concluded when the firm went public in January this year, the continued customer stories represent a company going in the right direction for its enterprise market. A year ago, when reports arrived stating Box was to delay its IPO, the company announced a deal with General Electric, where around 300,000 of its employees would use the cloud storage firm for content sharing and collaboration.

Box’s play into federal government has been relatively recent. In March, the company announced the arrival of Sonny Hashmi, former CIO of the General Services Administration, to help lead the company’s efforts in the space. The firm also continues to pursue FedRAMP security compliance, as can be seen here, but suffered a setback when competitor Huddle beat it to the punch in March.

In a blog post announcing the DOJ deal, Box PR Zoelle Egner wrote: “We look forward to fostering greater innovation at DOJ, helping to transform the way they manage and share information.”

Read more: The Box advantage: Growth, predictability and competitiveness

SYS-CON Events announced today that O’Reilly Media has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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More CEOs are setting bold IT innovation goals for their company. Meanwhile, CIOs are tasked to quickly build the required business technology infrastructure. What’s the primary motivation? The growing expectation that all leading organizations will achieve their key strategic business objectives via superior IT-enabled advancements.

In fact, a recent study found that 55 percent of survey respondents said their environment will be changed ‘significantly’ — 20 percent actually said it will be ‘completely transformed.’ Such major transformations can lead to significant competitive advantages, as long as the IT goals are clearly articulated, according to the findings from a Harvard Business Review (HBR) market study and associated report that was sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.

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Container technology is sending shock waves through the world of cloud computing. Heralded as the ‘next big thing,’ containers provide software owners a consistent way to package their software and dependencies while infrastructure operators benefit from a standard way to deploy and run them. Containers present new challenges for tracking usage due to their dynamic nature. They can also be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines and various cloud platforms. How do software owners track the usage of their services for licensing and billing purposes?
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Delano Seymour, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
at 6fusion, will discuss how to meter and track your services using a consumption-based methodology that keeps pace with this cutting-edge technology.

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Software Development Solution category in The 2015 American Business Awards, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie® Award winner in the program. More than 3,300 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration.
“We are honored to be recognized as a leader in the software development industry by the Stevie Awards judges,” said Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud. “We introduced ElectricFlow and our Deploy application to bring a truly unified approach to software build, test and deployment. Having these capabilities within a single solution is an industry breakthrough, further underscored by the significant achievement of being named a finalist in the 2015 American Business Awards.”

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