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While the vast majority of organisations hope for 99.9% uptime throughout the year, 57% of companies polled by CloudEndure say they had at least one outage in the past three months.

The survey, which quizzed 141 IT global IT professionals, found organisations are, in general, gaining confidence in cloud disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This is noticed in the key risks to system availability. The number one risk remains human error, followed by network failures and application bugs. Downtime of cloud providers fell from the third highest risk last year to #6 in 2016.

CloudEndure found the key challenges in meeting availability goals were insufficient IT resources, followed by budget limitations and a lack of in-house expertise. Yet in some cases, it is difficult to perceive how companies assess their uptime levels; 22% of organisations polled say they do not measure service availability at all.

More than half (54%) of respondents use the public cloud for disaster recovery target infrastructure, compared to private cloud (35%) and physical resources (11%). Of the public cloud users, more than half use AWS (53% and 26% overall). VMware vSphere (20% overall) was also highly cited, with Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure (10% overall) trailing.

84% of respondents say service availability is at least seven or higher out of 10 in terms of how critical it is to their customers. 38% say uptime is most critical – 10 out of 10 – while only 4% deem is as not critical. 19% say their goals for uptime is the magical ‘five nines’, or less than five minutes of outages per year, while only 3% say they have a goal of 99% uptime, or more than 88 hours down.

“While more companies continue to migrate large portions of their business data to the cloud, our survey findings are clear,” said Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure CEO. “Companies that invest in DR are likely to reap an upside in savings from the cost of downtime disrupting their operations.”

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of how the trend of cloud disaster recovery is shaping up in 2016. Writing in January Monica Brink, EMEA marketing director at cloud provider iland, explained: “Disaster recovery as a service [has] continued to claw its way to the top of CTO priority lists. With IT budgets tight and faster adoption of cloud in general, we’ve noticed a growing comfort level and confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.”

We live in a hyper-connected, mobility-enabled world, one in which carriers must make drastic changes to how they do business if they are to survive and thrive in the future. Accordingly, great strides have been made over the last three years to prove the viability of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Many Proof of Concept (PoC) trials have proven that workloads can be migrated to virtual environments running on standard hardware, and there are even examples of carrier deployments using NFV.
The next step is to determine how to make NFV work effectively so it will deliver on its promise. The issue is no longer whether a service can be deployed using NFV, but whether we can manage and secure that service in an NFV environment. In other words, the challenge now is to operationalize NFV. How can we ensure that NFV is ready for this challenge?

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A year ago, I wrote a two-part series on how lower cost, higher performance on-premise storage and nearly free cloud based storage were driving both innovation and disruption in the storage industry. Applying Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation and disruption to the storage industry, my premise was that flashy startups, (e.g. Pure, Nimble, VMem, Tegile and Tintri) that were first to introduce credible data reduction to flash arrays were innovators but not disruptors in the space and would therefore disappoint investors; storage incumbents (e.g. HDS, EMC and IBM) who added data reduction would continue to survive; but the real disruptors would be the cloud players (e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The combination of struggling share prices, weak earnings reports, recent acquisitions, and raging cloud revenue witnessed throughout 2015 and into 2016 continue to point to Christensen’s theory as the explanation for an ongoing economic transformation that will forever change the storage industry as we know it.

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SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 New York.
The 18th Cloud Expo and 5th @ThingsExpo will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
“The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it,” stated Roger Strukhoff. “More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people.”

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The best-practices for building IoT applications with Go Code thatattendees can use to build their own IoT applications.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Indraneel Mitra, Senior Solutions Architect & Technology Evangelist at Cognizant, will provide valuable information and resources for both novice and experienced developers on how to get started with IoT and Golang in a day.
He will provide information on how to use Intel Arduino Kit, Go Robotics API and AWS IoT stack to build an application that gathers, analyzes, and acts on data generated by connected devices.

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After months of fine tuning and approvals from various bodies, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is almost upon us.

When the GDPR finally becomes law in spring of this year after passing a final stage of approval, organisations will have two years to comply with the regulation. Two years might seem plenty of time, but the complex picture of cloud use in modern enterprises means that GDPR compliance will be a challenge. A recent Netskope and YouGov survey found that almost 80% of IT pros in medium and large companies are not confident of ensuring compliance with the regulation in time for the expected deadline of spring 2018.

Enterprise cloud app use is a significant potential stumbling block for organisations seeking GDPR compliance, not least because cloud apps create unstructured data which is more difficult to manage but still explicitly included in the regulation. The survey found that almost a third of IT pros admit to knowing unauthorised cloud apps are in use within the organisation, but only 7% have a solution in place to deal with this phenomenon – also known as shadow IT.

Cloud app use provides such huge productivity gains that blocking apps isn’t an option. Companies must discover how to continue using cloud apps while ensuring protection of structured and unstructured data, both in-transit and at-rest. So how can organisations ensure compliance and continue using cloud apps?

The GDPR requires organisations actively to take measures to protect the data they hold. They won’t comply with the GDPR only through legal arrangements like policies, protocols and contracts. Rather, companies must take deliberate organisational and technical measures to ensure data protection and compliance in all areas. This is known as data protection by design, and goes beyond traditional security measures aimed at confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data.

Controlling and securing data in cloud apps will be central to GDPR compliance, so managing an organisation’s interactions with the cloud is a good place to start. This can be achieved by:

• Discovering and monitoringall cloud applications in use by employees
• Knowing which personal data are processed in the cloud by employees – for example, customer information such as name, address, bank details, or other forms of personally identifiable information (PII)
• Securing data by setting up policies which ensure that unmanaged cloud services are not being used to store and process PII. The policy should be granular enough to stop the unwanted behaviour while allowing compliant use of the cloud to continue
• Coaching users to adopt the services you sanction
• Using a cloud access security brokerto assess the enterprise-readiness of all cloud apps and cloud services to ensure that all data are protected when in transit or at rest

The complications arising from the use of cloud and shadow IT mean that personal data is harder to track and control than ever before. The GDPR will have significant and wide-ranging consequences for both cloud-consuming organisations and cloud vendors, and security teams will need to make the most of the two-year grace period before penalties for non-compliance come into force. Examining an organisation’s cloud app use is a great place to start.