Monthly Archives: September 2015

News & Analysis, procurement, Public Sector, Research, Sungard

Hidden cost of public sector cloud over £300m a year, says research

The UK’s public sector is spending an extra £300 million a year on maintaining cloud services and on hidden costs associated with their cloud computing projects, according to Sungard Availability Services.

The claim follows an independent study, commissioned by Sungard, that questioned 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK in public sector organisations with more than 500 employees. The average individual cloud spend of the study group, in 2014/15, was £390,000.

Sungard’s analysis of the research appears in a report, Digital by Design: Avoiding the Cloud Hangover in the UK Public Sector, which claims that unexpected costs and increasing complexity will create a ‘cloud hangover’.

The main revelation of the research is that 82 per cent UK public sector organisations (according to the study group of 45 decision makers) have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend. The average yearly cost of maintaining cloud services (among the study group) was £139,000. A further £258,000 was spent by each, over the last five years, on unforeseen costs. External maintenance costs for hardware accounted for 41 per cent of these unexpected costs, while systems integration was the other major contributor to bill shock, accounting for 30 per cent of the unbudgeted expenditure.

According to the report, 42 per cent of UK public sector organisations use the cloud to lower the work load for their ‘IT team’, while 47 per cent expect the cloud to reduce IT costs. Some 43 per cent of the public sector’s cloud customers are allegedly struggling with the costs of personnel needed to manage cloud deployments.

Roughly half (53 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations said cost savings were the key driver for adopting cloud services, but 33 per cent believe this has not been achieved. Over half (55 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations (claims the report) complain that the cloud has increased the complexity of their IT environment and 71 per cent say that cloud computing added a new set of IT challenges. Achieving interoperability between existing IT and new cloud platforms was the most frequently mentioned challenge, cited by 44 per cent of the survey group.

“There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing,” said Keith Tilley, executive VP of Global Sales and Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services, who called for a case by case review.

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Five Companies Making Money with #BigData | @CloudExpo #IoT #API

Big Data is the revolution the business world has been waiting for. The transformation that has taken place among many companies due to the adoption of Big Data analytics simply can’t be understated. Organizations of all types have looked into the many ways in which big data can help them change how they do things for the better, cultivating more success as businesses look to the future. For all the benefits that big data provides companies, the main goal is, of course, to make money. In fact, with all the capabilities that come from using big data, if a business isn’t utilizing it to make money, it’s almost a waste of time. But there’s no single way to turn a bigger profit from Big Data. The following examples show the various strategies specific businesses are using to get the most out of all the data they collect and analyze.

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HDX, ICA, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, RDP, RDP vs. ICA, Remote Application Server, Remote Networks

RDP vs. HDX-ICA: Which One is Better for Your Remote Networks?

While remote networks are not new in the IT segment, the increasing number of virtual offices and BYOD networks have made them an inevitable option for business infrastructure in recent times. With technology innovation, businesses now have multiple options to remotely publish resources and securely share them with end-users. While Microsoft offered RDP RemoteFX, Citrix […]

The post RDP vs. HDX-ICA: Which One is Better for Your Remote Networks? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Customer Story, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac

Customer Story: My Small Business Depends on Parallels

The following post is a customer story submitted to our Advocacy program by Kevin Molloy from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. We are incredibly thankful to Kevin for sharing his experience with us and allowing us to share it with you. Read on for Kevin’s experience choosing and using Parallels Desktop. Owner and operator of Tactical Management (an American small business), Kevin flies […]

The post Customer Story: My Small Business Depends on Parallels appeared first on Parallels Blog.

News, Services

Telecoms New Opportunity

A study commissioned by cloud services marketplaces provider BCSG has implied that telecoms operators could benefit greatly from differentiating into cloud provisioning for both small and medium-sized enterprises; the size of such opportunity is quantified at about $22 billion for operators in the United Kingdom and the United States. The SME sector is generally underserved and therefore has much room for expansion under telecom.

While BT Global Services have already carved out a lucrative cloud business among enterprise customers, and many other telecoms also offer assistance in the areas of hosting and business applications for SMEs, the potential for telecoms operators to become the suppliers of cloud computing services to small businesses has generally not been taken advantage of, according to BCSG.

These comments originate from a study conducted by BCSG of SME’s in both the United Kingdom and the United States. During the study, it was discovered that there were high levels of confusion pertaining to cloud services and technologies that were appropriate for the businesses.  Just under half of those surveyed claimed they would be willing to purchase cloud services from their telecoms supplier, while only 40% said they were willing to buy software and other tools from operators to help grow their business.

Cloud-Computing (1)

With only 31% of SMEs surveyed saying they had a cloud migration strategy in place, BCSG predicted that the firm intent from SMEs  could be worth upwards of $22 billion .

“Not only is the SME market a potential goldmine for operators looking to add greater value to customers through service diversification, they also present a captive and willing audience,” said BCSG commercial director Tom Platt. “It is vital that operators seize the initiative by helping their SME customers realize the value of cloud services and business applications.”

More than half claimed they would contemplate switching operators in two years, and 58% said that they would switch operators if a broader range of technology and services was offered. “Long tenure from SME customers does not imply loyalty – and operators can’t afford to be complacent. These results demonstrate the value of operators broadening their service offering to SMEs,” said Platt.

The post Telecoms New Opportunity appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

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Business Critical Apps | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #IoT #API #AWS #Azure

The New Data Center has arrived. Over the past decade we have seen the migration from physical servers to virtual machines and now to public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Each of these migrations has taken a similar path. Test, dev and non-critical workloads are the first to make the move. As the technology matures, business critical tier 1 applications eventually make the move as well. At this point the percentage of applications still running directly on physical servers is rapidly declining. As Cloud IaaS technology such as AWS and Azure matures, many companies are moving their tier 1 applications directly to the cloud along with the rest of their infrastructure.

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Public sector fighting hidden costs of cloud computing, report reveals

(c)iStock.com/sorbetto

Even though the public sector is adopting cloud as a key part of its IT strategy, new research from Sungard Availability Services has revealed the sector is facing a large number of challenges in managing and operating cloud environments.

According to the report, entitled ‘Digital by Design: Avoiding the cloud hangover in the UK public sector’, UK public sector organisations are spending over £300 million each year on ‘hidden costs’ associated with their cloud computing projects. The research, which polled 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK public sector, also found that more than three quarters (82%) of respondents had encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend.

Each organisation is paying on average just under £139,000 a year on maintaining cloud services, with an additional figure of £258,000 on average over the past five years thanks to external maintenance costs for hardware and systems integration costs among others.

The headaches do not stop there, however. 55% of respondents said cloud had increased the complexity of their IT environment, which compares badly against financial services (32%) and manufacturing (29%). 71% also argued that cloud computing had added a new set of IT challenges. In particular, interoperability between the existing IT estate and cloud platforms was the biggest issue, according to 44% of those polled.

Keith Tilley, EVP global sales and customer services management at Sungard AS, explained: “There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing and it is clear that the public sector has faced some significant challenges. The very nature of the public sector also means that highly sensitive data such as patient data, defence or security records are not always suitable for particular cloud environments.

“Cloud computing has the potential to dramatically reduce costs across health, education, central and local government and much more, if it is deployed in the right way,” he added.

The adoption of cloud across the public sector has typically been slower than other markets, in part due to the slower uptake of cloud across local government. By the end of 2014, central government accounted for 80% of G-Cloud spend, compared to 6% for local government.

You can find out more about the report here.

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Edge Gateway at Netflix By @Moldfarm | @CloudExpo #BigData #IoT #API

An edge gateway is an essential piece of infrastructure for large scale cloud-based services.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Mikey Cohen, Manager, Edge Gateway at Netflix, will detail the purpose, benefits and use cases for an edge gateway to provide security, traffic management and cloud cross region resiliency. He will discuss how a gateway can be used to enhance continuous deployment and help testing of new service versions and get service insights and more. Philosophical and architectural approaches to what belongs in a gateway vs what should be in services will be discussed.
Real examples of how gateway services are used in front of nearly all of Netflix’s consumer facing traffic will show how gateway infrastructure is used in real highly available, massive scale services.

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Announcing @CloudRaxak Named “Sponsor” of @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Raxak has been named “Media & Session Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Raxak Protect automates security compliance across private and public clouds. Using the SaaS tool or managed service, developers can deploy cloud apps quickly, cost-effectively, and without error.

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Survey: Mobile Development for 2015 | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #DevOps

A recent survey conducted by Slashdot Media asked mobile developers four key questions that look into the most pressing challenges they face today, how their development approach is changing, which mobile platforms are taking the forefront in the coming years, and how they are ensuring that their apps will meet the quality standards that users demand. Here are the results of the survey.

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