A survey conducted by 451 Research, sponsored by Tesora, finds 68 percent of enterprises are using databases in the cloud. While initial adoption of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings from cloud providers – especially Amazon Web Services – have posed a challenge to the incumbent on-premises database vendors, the survey results indicate that those incumbents are likely to maintain their dominance as adoption of DBaaS moves mainstream.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that O’Reilly Media has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
O’Reilly spreads the knowledge of innovators through its technology books, online services, research, and tech conferences. An active participant in the technology community, O’Reilly has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that TechTarget has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
TechTarget storage websites are the best online information resource for news, tips and expert advice for the storage, backup and disaster recovery markets.

read more

The phrase that whoever “Fails to Plan” actually “Plans to Fail” also applies to cloud computing. Many organisations are therefor putting together a cloud strategy. The question is whether the establishment of a company-wide cloud strategy is the right way. After all, the use of Cloud is not an end but a means, or as the IT manager of a large Dutch retail organisation recently succinctly put it: “For us cloud is not a strategy, but a useful set of tactics”.

read more

(c)iStock.com/Clint Spencer

Cloud computing is still a very trendy topic of discussion among technology leaders around the world. It’s easy to see why; cloud adoption rates are on the rise and are predicted to continue their upward trend, while cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to roll out new features, products, and services.

Times are good in the world of cloud computing – but I believe the conversation has begun to change and is about to change to a greater extent.

Cloud, as we all know, is a platform option and not an end onto itself. As technology professionals have always known, a platform is only as effective as what it can be used for. In recent conversations with customers and colleagues, I have attempted to steer the conversation – trying to be a good enterprise architect – more towards what an enterprise can use cloud for, as opposed to the “I need to be running on cloud because the CIO wants it” discussion.

There are any number of excellent examples of enabled technologies and processes that cloud can and should be the basis for, and this is where the conversation and the focus needs to gradually move to.

DevOps

DevOps is more than just a shift in how operations, development and the business stakeholders technically work together to develop new services. It is a cultural shift within an enterprise, which changes how business and technology relates to each other.

This cultural shift causes technology organisations to move at a different pace than previously – a pace which can keep up with the business demands of time to market, as well as product and services lifecycles.

At the heart of this new pace is cloud’s ability to rapidly provision and change development and test environments. Cloud’s ability to create and change hybrid environments also allows for additional flexibility and more effective costing for development, test, deployment, update, and retirement of services.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the technologies that support it are rapidly growing in use and importance in the technology and business world.

The diversity of industries looking at IoT is on the rise. Even financial services firms are looking at IoT as a possible competitive edge in the marketplace. The simplest way to describe IoT conceptually is the transmission, collection, aggregation, analysis and reaction to, large number of small size sensor or device data.

This requires considerable and ever changing compute resources to handle this data as various stages of the process. The flexibility of cloud and the ability of a hybrid cloud to easily put resources ‘close to the action’ make it an excellent choice for an IoT platform.

Geographic distribution of services

Many times, customers have asked how they can cost effectively distribute services across a geographically diverse enterprise. These enterprises are no longer willing, and in many cases able, to put together a business case for standing up replicated server installations at multiple points on the globe.

Enter the hybrid cloud. In a multi-region hybrid cloud environment, the regions that live in the public cloud space can be geographically located close to business centres to enable users to utilise services from the region closest to them. This provides a geographic distribution of services at a much lower cost, and also enables the rapid deployment of a new site, change in resources in a region, or retirement of a site as user and business patterns change.

High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR)

Similar to geographic distribution, enterprises are tired of having to stand up a secondary set of hardware to be used only sparingly until a HA or DR event occurs. Today’s business environment simply won’t tolerate it.

Recent introductions, or upgrades, by many CSPs and cloud platform vendors have been focused on solving this problem, in the cloud. For example, Microsoft’s Automated System Recovery (ASR) product has gone through a major update with the focus being the provisioning of a passive DR environment in the Azure Cloud. The on-prem or in-cloud environment is replicated in a separate Azure cloud space. The virtual machines are then inactivated except for two, which remain up to monitor the primary site and maintain storage integrity. When an event is recognised by the monitoring VMs, the secondary site is activated and services restarted in the cloud.

Conclusion

These are just a very few cloud enabled technologies; many more exist and more than that have yet to be discovered. We as technology leaders need to shift the conversation within the enterprises we support back to what the future state looks like based on business need, and utilise cloud as a platform option to attain that future state.

(c)iStock.com/cherezoff

Global cloud traffic will more than quadruple between now and the end of 2019 from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB), according to research from Cisco.

The findings, which appear in the firm’s latest Global Cloud Index study, put a variety of reasons for this explosion in growth, from the continued popularity of public cloud services in the business domain, the increased degree of virtualisation in private clouds, and growth of M2M connections.

A zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes, approximately equal to a thousand exabytes or a billion terabytes. To put it another way – as Cisco described back in 2011 – an exabyte would have the capacity to hold more than 36,000 years of HD quality video. So theoretically, a zettabyte would be able to hold 36 million years of video. Better make sure you’re comfortable before diving into that particular boxset.

Yet the large numbers don’t stop there. Cisco also predicts the Internet of Everything (IoE) will generate a mind-bending 507.5 ZB per year – 42.3 ZB per month – by 2019. The repositories for the storage of data will continue to change as the years progress, with the networking giant arguing that by 2019, the majority (51%) of stored data will not be on the PC, but on smartphones, tablets, and M2M modules among others.

In terms of global data centre and cloud traffic, annual global data centre IP traffic is projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB last year. But the strain of the traffic going through the data centres is likely to be mitigated by technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), Cisco explains. Lower data centre tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year.

The numbers just keep going up and up; by 2019, consumer cloud storage traffic will be 1.6 gigabytes per user per month, compared to 992 megabytes per month last year. Cisco also predicts that by 2019, 55% of the consumer Internet population – more than two billion users – will be using personal cloud storage, up from 1.1bn in 2014.

These numbers aren’t as explosive, showing both the reach of cloud technologies currently and the potential user base it can still tap into, as Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco explains.

“The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years,” he said.

“Enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere,” Webster added. “This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”

Of course, we now play the waiting game to see if these exciting predictions come true. Have hope, though, that these targets may even be conservative; in 2011, Cisco argued “today we live in a world of petabytes and exabytes, but we’ll need to add the term zettabyte to our vocabulary by 2015.”

Right now it feels like the whole world is moving to digital at breakneck speed. Banks, insurance companies, retailers and large manufacturers are all looking at how they can digitally transform the organisation to keep up with customer demand, business expectations and compete globally. However, while digital transformation is becoming all-pervasive agreement on what digital transformation actually means, how to leverage its potential, and most importantly how to make a digital transformation project a success still remains elusive for many.

read more