Guest blog by Ramakrishna Sarma Chavali, Parallels Support Team Do you remember those times when you had to carry a huge portable external drive to copy a couple of .doc files from one computer to another? We’re pretty lucky to live in the 21st century, because now you can carry a tiny flash drive with […]
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The cloud email market remains relatively immature with Microsoft ahead of Google in enterprise adoption, according to the latest figures from analyst house Gartner.
According to email server domain records of almost 40,000 public companies worldwide, only 8.5% of firms polled use Microsoft, compared to 4.7% on Google’s mail, with the remainder using on-premises, hybrid, hosted, or private cloud email systems.
Gartner also argues a trend of industries using different vendors; regulated industries such as utilities, energy, and aerospace are likeliest to be Microsoft shops, while media, publishing and advertising companies are more Gmail-friendly.
Nikos Drakos, research vice president at Gartner, argues that while it is still early days in cloud email adoption, growth is not slow. “Companies considering cloud email should question assumptions that public cloud email is not appropriate in their region, size, or industry,” he said. “Our findings suggest that many varied organisations are already using cloud email, and the number is growing rapidly.”
Gartner also found that wealthier organisations were more likely to use Microsoft; the Redmond giant has more of an 80% share of companies using cloud email with revenue in excess of $10 billion (£6.95bn).
This correlates with a study from BetterCloud, published in July last year, which argued a “clear trend” for larger organisations to run Office 365 as a cloud collaboration suite as opposed to Google Apps. For smaller businesses, the study argued, Google Apps was a more likely choice as it could be rolled out in one weekend, as opposed to Microsoft Office rollouts which were more of a hybrid deployment.
One anomaly in the Gartner study was that, in industries such as travel and hospitality, the highest revenue firms were more likely to be on a cloud email solution.
BYOD is awesome… except for the strain it’s putting on IT. It’s probably giving your sysadmin migraines. We’re going to talk about what you can do about that.
It’s official – BYOD is now the mobile strategy of choice for the majority of enterprises. According to a comprehensive survey carried out in 2014 by the Information Security LinkedIn Group, over 60% of large organizations either tolerate or allow the use of personal devices on their network. Here’s the thing about that statistic, though – allowing it isn’t the same as accepting it.
Many businesses don’t have a choice in the matter.
Employment statistics reflect what technology-focused recruiters and project managers already know: new talent acquisition, especially in mobile app development, is the competitive environment. The industry keeps adding jobs, as the growth in mobile tech opportunities is driven by the cultural shifts in business models and processes that “mobile everywhere” demands. These shifts aren’t unique to any sector, but apply across the spectrum to retail, financial services, health care, media and entertainment – and they mean big business.
Cognitive Computing is becoming the foundation for a new generation of solutions that have the potential to transform business. Unlike traditional approaches to building solutions, a cognitive computing approach allows the data to help determine the way applications are designed. This contrasts with conventional software development that begins with defining logic based on the current way a business operates.
In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., will put cognitive computing into perspective with its value to the business. The session will detail what it takes to build a cognitive application and the types of solutions that are the best fit for this data-driven approach.
Microsoft has released details of a new pilot project for an undersea datacentre designed to cut power costs with free water cooling.
Project Natick, which connects the undersea module using giant steel tubes linked by fibre optic cables, could also use turbines to convert tides and currents into electricity to power the computing and comms equipment. The new sea bed data centres could also improve cloud response times for users living near the coast.
A prototype was placed on the sea bed off the coast of California in August 2015 as art of an investigation into the environmental and technical issues involved in this form of low power cloud service. Microsoft researchers believe that economies of scale through mass production would cut deployment time from two years to 90 days. The project is the latest initiative from Microsoft Research’s New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) which began investigating new ways to power cloud computing in 2014.
In the 105 day trial an eight foot wide steel capsule was placed 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean near San Luis Obispo, California. The underwater system had 100 sensors to measure pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions but the system stayed up, which encouraged Microsoft to extend the experiment to run data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
In the next stage of the research, Microsoft said, it will create an underwater data centre system that will be three times as large. This will be built in partnership with an alternative energy vendor. The identity of the trial partner has yet to be decided, but the launch date is mooted for 2017 at a venue either in Florida or Northern Europe, where hydro power is more advanced.
This “refactoring” of traditional methods will help fuel other innovations even if it doesn’t accomplish its goal of establishing underwater data farms, according to Norman Whitaker, MD for special projects at Microsoft Research and the former deputy director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The idea with refactoring is that it tickles a whole bunch of things at the same time,” said Whitaker.
Microsoft manages more than 100 data centres around the globe and is adding always looking for new venues to support its raid expansion. The company has spent more than $15 billion on a global datacentre system that now provides more than 200 online services.
The UK government must ‘urgently review’ the expensive obligations it is about to pass onto the cloud industry, according to a new report on the effects of the Investigatory Powers Bill.
The Investigatory Powers Bill Technology Issues report was compiled by a parliamentary select on science and technology after taking evidence from activists, academics and tech companies. The proposed legislation could prove painfully expensive for Britain’s service providers, by forcing them to incur the costs and extra work involved in storing every customer’s entire browsing history for 12 months, the report warns. It also identifies a problem over encryption, with many in the industry unclear over the legal obligations the new bill will create.
“The Government must urgently review the legislation so that the obligations on the industry are clear and proportionate,” said Nicola Blackwood MP, chair of the Science and Technology Committee.
The draft bill calls for the collection by service providers of data on each user’s internet connection records (ICRs). According to the committee, industry feedback suggests there are too many unanswered questions over the practicalities of meeting this legal requirement. The technology industry is not clear about the meaning of the definition for ICRs framed by Home Secretary Theresa May, one of the co-authors of the draft bill.
According to May, an ICR is a record of the communications service that a person has used, but not a record of every web page they have accessed. “The current draft contains very broad and ambiguous definitions of ICRs, which are confusing communications providers,” said Blackwood, in a statement.
The ambiguity is a critical problem because it leaves service provides unable to predict the time and money they need to meet their obligations, which leaves them unable to forecast and plan. It also introduces a potentially dangerous vulnerability by creating an opportunity for hackers to access that information. The report questions whether it is ‘practical to assume’ that databases of customer activity can be kept ‘secure and safe’.
The draft Bill, in its current form, appears to instruct service providers that customer information must be kept in an unencrypted state ready for inspection, according to the committee. “The Government should clarify and state clearly in the Codes of Practice that it will not be seeking unencrypted content,” said the statement, “there are still many unanswered questions about how this legislation will work.”
There are good grounds to believe that without further refinement there could be ‘many unintended consequences for commerce’ arising from the current lack of clarity of the legislation, the report concluded.
In a previous post on theoretical Appsec vulnerabilities, I covered how “it’s theoretical” is misused by those who are trying to avoid fixing a security vulnerability or taking responsibility for it-for example, the Lenovo Superfish breach, Heartbleed, and airline wifi attacks.
The idea that a vulnerability is merely theoretical is not only ignorant but dangerous. Software exploits occur because bad actors operate by finding unexpected loopholes in a software system. Think of it this way – if you left your door unlocked is it a security issue? Or perhaps “If an unlocked door is never entered, is it really unlocked” if you’re a philosopher. One could contend that the risk is theoretical, but most of us would say that such a statement is ridiculous. (Props to those who live in an area where door security isn’t required.)
UK based data centre and hosting company Pulsant claims it has created a system to help cloud buyers make fewer bad choices over online computing services.
The system aims to cut the confusion for C-level executives who currently struggle to make sense of the array of options, services and misleadingly named products. By automating the process of evaluation, the new Cloud Intelligence decision engine will take the end user closer to the conditions of ‘perfect information’ needed before the full benefits of the market are possible, it claims.
Cloud Intelligence is an interactive tool designed to concentrate the buyer’s mind when comparing different options. One of the user problems it aims to address is matching the offering to the needs of the buyer. In a relatively new market like cloud computing, companies ideally don’t want to trust their research to a conversation with a software salesman, according to Pulsant, which claims due diligence over cloud service choices has become a ‘definite challenge’.
The configuration aims to guide the decision makers by identifying their starting point. It separates technically savvy buyers, who may be familiar with the cloud landscape, from the non-technical procurement personnel who are increasingly embarking on research. The system aims to guide each type down customised paths in order to meet their needs. Non-technical users will interact with the decision engine in layman’s terms that concentrate on the benefits of the services on offer, while technical decision makers will be given more detailed information about configurations and platforms.
Pulsant said it aims to achieve for the B2B market what comparison sites achieve in B2C markets. The new service is necessary because cloud computing is changing software buying behaviours in the corporate world, according to Adam Eaton, sales director at Pulsant.
“Customers are doing a great deal of research before making IT decisions but there’s a lot of clutter to get through. We want to give people the information they’re looking for on the solutions and services they’re interested in, while still interactively engaging with them,” said Eaton.
According to Pulsant, 80% of visitors who start on their decision making journey with them will pursue it to the end.
Time for a blog about personal privacy, before we all have forgotten about the concept. The Circle is both the title of an 2009 album by Bon Jovi as a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers. A novel relevant for a cloud blog because it describes a future in which one company (the Circle) largely controls the nexus of information, social, mobile and cloud.
The use of a novel as medium for the communication of ideas regarding business or politics is not new. Think of examples as “The Goal” (about manufacturing management), “The Phoenix Project” (about IT Management), “Animal Farm” (about politics) and of course “1984” (about society). The Circle remind us of 1984, although in The Circle citizens opt-in voluntarily to life under an all seeing and omnipresent authority. An authority which, incidentally, is not a government, but a commercial social media and cloud services outfit.