“Software-defined storage is a big problem in this industry because so many people have different definitions as they see fit to use it,” stated Peter McCallum, VP of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Extreme Computing is the ability to leverage highly performant infrastructure and software to accelerate Big Data, machine learning, HPC, and Enterprise applications. High IOPS Storage, low-latency networks, in-memory databases, GPUs and other parallel accelerators are being used to achieve faster results and help businesses make better decisions.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at NVIDIA, focused on some of the unique ways extreme computing is being used on IBM Cloud, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure and how to gain access to these resources in the cloud… for FREE!

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Oracle has announced the acquisition of cloud ERP software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion (£7.07bn).

The move had been rumoured strongly for the past couple of weeks – and certainly in the back of people’s minds for a significantly longer period of time – yet the agreement was confirmed today, and is expected to close later this year subject to usual regulatory approvals.

“Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary, and will co-exist in the marketplace forever,” said Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO. “We intend to invest heavily in both products – engineering and distribution.” Evan Goldberg, founder and CTO of NetSuite, said: “NetSuite has been working for 18 years to develop a single system for running a business in the cloud. This combination is a winner for NetSuite’s customers, employees and partners.”

The deal represents the latest move by Oracle to beef up its cloud operations. “This acquisition is all about strengthening Oracle’s cloud story,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research told CloudTech. “It will push Oracle a couple of places higher in the enterprise SaaS market share rankings and will strengthen its position as one of the two leading ERP SaaS vendors, alongside SAP.

“It will also help to boost Oracle’s position in the CRM segment of SaaS, though it will remain a long way behind the segment leaders, Salesforce and Microsoft,” he added.

So how far have we come? Cast your minds back to mid-2012; Larry Ellison, then CEO and now CTO, is on stage announcing the general availability of the Oracle Cloud platform as a service. At the time Ellison argued that it was not the technology he objected to, but the nomenclature.

Since then, it almost feels that the database and software giant has been racing against time to catch up. In March 2014, Madan Sheina, lead analyst for software and information management at Ovum, argued Oracle had made “significant incremental advances across both its public and private cloud portfolio offerings” as part of its “aggressive” overall cloud strategy. Later that year, Oracle hired both Peter Magnusson, former mastermind of Google App Engine, and Shawn Price, formerly of SAP.

Not everything has worked out, of course. Despite, or perhaps because of, a partnership with Salesforce in 2013 which analyst firm Ovum argued offered “less than meets the eye”, the two companies seem much more comfortable nowadays in their traditional roles of backbiting one another than cosying up. The partnership with Verizon in 2014, while still available, looks a little less glossy after the telco shut down part of its public cloud offering earlier this year.

The key now, however, is for Oracle to maintain and build upon any momentum it has in the cloud. Around the time Dell announced its intent to buy EMC for $67bn in October last year, Wired published a scathing piece on the ‘living dead’ in enterprise tech. Oracle was named alongside Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco, and IBM.

As this publication has frequently observed, moving a huge legacy software and hardware revenue base over to the cloud, whether you are SAP, Oracle, or anyone else, is not easy. According to the latest figures, cloud accounted for 8% of Oracle’s total revenues over the last quarter – although Synergy disputes those numbers and argues it is a little less.

Dinsdale added that while NetSuite won’t ‘directly’ help in the PaaS and IaaS markets, Oracle remains a top 10 player in the former and top 20 player in the latter.

Read more: Marketing cloud giants join forces as Oracle snaps up NetSuite

More than with previous technological (r)evolutions a side effect of cloud computing seems to be an increase in the degree of centralisation and concentration, not just within company organisations, but particularly in the wider commercial market. This is the most obvious with Software as a Service, where providers such as AirBNB, Uber, but also earlier cloud services such as LinkedIn and Google Search quickly established a ‘winner takes all’ distribution of market share and thus market power. And also in Infrastructure as a Service, we see an quickly diminishing number of suppliers still having the illusion that they can keep up with the gorilla in this market.

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Up until last year, enterprises that were looking into cloud services usually undertook a long-term pilot with one of the large cloud providers, running test and dev workloads in the cloud. With cloud’s transition to mainstream adoption in 2015, and with enterprises migrating more and more workloads into the cloud and in between public and private environments, the single-provider approach must be revisited.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Yoav Mor, multi-cloud solution evangelist at Cloudyn, examined the risks of sourcing IT resources from a single cloud service vendor, as well as the benefits to be reaped by adopting multi-cloud strategies.

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Security, data privacy, reliability, and regulatory compliance are critical factors when evaluating whether to move business applications from in-house, client-hosted environments to a cloud platform. Quality assurance plays a vital role in ensuring that the appropriate level of risk assessment, verification, and validation takes place to ensure business continuity during the migration to a new cloud platform.

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“We formed Formation several years ago to really address the need for bring complete modernization and software-defined storage to the more classic private cloud marketplace,” stated Mark Lewis, Chairman and CEO of Formation Data Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Though cloud-based resources are becoming increasingly important to companies’ IT operations and business strategies, only a third of sensitive cloudy data is encrypted, according to the latest research from digital security provider Gemalto.

The findings, conducted in association with the Ponemon Institute, found more than nine in 10 UK firms (92%) don’t encrypt more than three quarters of their sensitive data sent via the cloud, while almost four in 10 (39%) do not encrypt confidential data at all when it rests in the cloud.

Despite this the survey, which polled almost 3,500 IT and IT security professionals across five continents, argued that for almost three quarters (73%), cloud-based services were considered ‘important’ to their organisation’s operations. That number is expected to rise to 81% over the next two years. More than half (54%) of those polled however said that their organisations did not have a ‘proactive’ approach to managing cloud privacy and security.

“Organisations have embraced the cloud with its benefits of cost and flexibility but they are still struggling with maintaining control of their data and compliance in virtual environments,” said Jason Hart, Gemalto VP and chief technology officer for data protection. “It’s quite obvious security measures are not keeping pace because the cloud challenges traditional approaches of protecting data when it was just stored on the network.”

The report offered five key findings; beware shadow IT, remember that conventional security practices do not apply in the cloud, security departments are in the dark when buying cloud services, more customer information is being stored in the cloud, and encryption is important but not yet widely deployed. These findings echo a report released earlier this week by Fruition Partners, which also warned of shadow IT fears.

“Cloud security continues to be a challenge for companies, especially in dealing with the complexity of privacy and data protection regulations,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. “To ensure compliance, it is important for companies to consider deploying such technologies as encryption, tokenisation or other cryptographic solutions to secure sensitive data transferred and stored in the cloud.”

When it comes to cloud computing, the ability to turn massive amounts of compute cores on and off on demand sounds attractive to IT staff, who need to manage peaks and valleys in user activity. With cloud bursting, the majority of the data can stay on premises while tapping into compute from public cloud providers, reducing risk and minimizing need to move large files.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Jeschonek, Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, discussed the IT and business benefits that cloud bursting provides, including increased compute capacity, lower IT investment, financial agility, and, ultimately, faster time-to-market.

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The cloud has many benefits for businesses – but it is also making advances in the medical industry, becoming a vital tool for healthcare professionals everywhere. What makes it so valuable?

Better collaboration

Collaboration is vital to the healthcare industry, which makes the cloud a perfect companion in the field. By allowing professionals to store and access data remotely, healthcare professionals around the world can gain access to patient data immediately and apply the necessary care without a delay. In addition to this, remote conferencing, up-to-the-second updates on healthcare developments and patient conditions, and more, is allowing doctors to save those precious life-saving minutes.

Greater reach, especially during times of disaster

When disaster strikes, getting the necessary professionals to the places they need to be or giving the present doctors the information they need is a difficult task. Being able to consult with one another, send requests for additional resources or man-power, or simply keeping each other updated on the status of a disaster victim’s condition can be the difference between a life lost or saved.

An on-site doctor with very little experience in surgery can now have real-time guidance from an expert to perform a field surgery, for example, with all the present medical equipment transmitting real-time information from one source to the next to ensure the best work is done.

Better storage – lower cost

The cloud makes it possible to not only hold more information but to do it at a lower cost, much like when working with software defined storage. This allows even the smaller hospitals access to the kind of information they need to offer the best care, without the price tag that could either put them under or force them to make cuts where cuts shouldn’t be made.

Better use of big data to treat patients

When you hear “big data,” you likely think of businesses mining data for marketing or production strategies. For the medical field, it’s much of the same, except instead of narrowing down the tastes of consumers, big data allows doctors to narrow down the conditions of patients, comparing them to others to deliver a more focused and accurate assessment on their ailments.

Additionally, instead of figuring out how to tailor a product to be the most appealing, medical professionals can tailor their care or gain better insights on the conditions themselves, so there’s much less room for error with treatment. Big data, however, is far too big for any one server to manage; with the cloud, doors are being opened for the healthcare industry so they can take advantage of it first-hand.

Improved medical research

Much in the way big data is making it possible for doctors to treat their patients better, the cloud makes it possible via storing and sharing data to speed up the research process. With the ability to gather outside data from multiple fields, data analysts can use the cloud to pool this data and condense it into better results, allowing the medical professionals to get a clearer and more advanced image of the subjects they’re researching. These sort of advances are the kind that cure diseases and improve the kind of care being given.

Remote patient care

We’ve all heard about how the Internet of Things (IoT) is making it easier to drive your car or even make coffee, but with the cloud stepping into the medical field, could the IoT save your life? The answer is yes.

With new mobile devices being made to monitor a patient’s condition, and even applications on your smartphone making it possible to keep your doctor up-to-date on your condition or get remote consolation, cloud is making it possible for you to get high quality care without ever stepping into a hospital. If you’re unable to get to the hospital, don’t want to spend the money, or dislike visiting doctors altogether, you can use new devices powered by the cloud to transmit your condition or ask for advice from a doctor on standby, which will allow both patients and medical professionals to catch dangers early.