The taxi industry never saw Uber coming. Startups are a threat to incumbents like never before, and a major enabler for startups is that they are instantly “cloud ready.” If innovation moves at the pace of IT, then your company is in trouble. Why? Because your data center will not keep up with frenetic pace AWS, Microsoft and Google are rolling out new capabilities.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Don Browning, VP of Cloud Architecture at Turner, posited that disruption is inevitable for companies that refuse to embrace the cloud and the culture shift that comes along with it.
Monthly Archives: June 2017
Cloud security spending to hit $3.5bn by 2021, says Forrester
Cloud security spending is set to hit $3.5 billion (£2.74bn) by 2021 at a 28% annual growth rate, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
The report, authored by analysts Jennifer Adams and Andras Cser, discusses a variety of trends, from cloud security risk, to traditional security tools.
According to the figures, cloud security gateways will continue to be the primary route of global spending, contributing to $1.6bn – or 45% – of the overall figure by 2021. Native infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will come in to the tune of $1.1bn, while hypervisor security and centralised cloud workload security management are at $0.5bn and $0.3bn respectively.
Financial services represent the larger market for cloud services today and will continue to do so until at least 2021, the report adds. This marks an interesting point – the report rightly points out that the idea of cloud-based services in financial would be ‘controversial’ and ‘radical’ just a few years ago – but the industry is embracing it today to reduce costs and stay competitive. The report also earmarked retail, government, and professional services – such as consultants, law firms, and advertising agencies – as industries to look out for.
Writing in a blog post, Adams noted the upward trends, although warning about the nascence of the market. “While spending on cloud security solutions is relatively small today compared with total spending on security software, its rapid growth is attracting the attention of more traditional security tech vendors,” Adams wrote. “Larger tech vendors are quickly entering and consolidating the space via acquisitions.”
This isn’t the same story for everyone; take for instance Netskope, the acclaimed ‘cloud access security broker’ who announced a $100 million boost in series E funding earlier this month. Yet recent acquisitions in the space, as Adams notes, include Microsoft acquiring Adallom in 2015, as well as Cisco buying CloudLock, and Oracle acquiring Palerra in 2016.
Either way, the trend is inexorable as old school security fails to live up to the task. “Traditional perimeter-based security tools do little to protect cloud workloads, and do it yourself internal solutions can be costly to develop and consume variable in-house IT resources,” the report notes. “We expect most companies to look to commercial off the shelf solutions for their cloud security needs.”
You can find out more and read the full report here (paid).
Alibaba Expands Further into APAC
Alibaba, a Chinese multinational cloud company, has been looking to expand beyond the Chinese shores. Also called Aliyun, this is the largest cloud provider in China.
Recently, the company announced that it is opening two datacenters, one in India and the other in Indonesia, in a clear strategy to expand its footprint in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Already, the company has been operating in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE and Australia within APAC and Germany and the US in the Western world. Besides these data centers, there’s one in Malaysia that is expected to open sometime in 2017. It plans to open two more datacenters by 2018, as it believes these facilities are essential to meet the growing demands from its customers.
The company’s strategy has been to meet the needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across the entire region. This sector operates with limited budgets, so it’s not easy for them to spend much money for cloud. Also, their operations tend to be smaller, which means, they need lesser computing resources when compared to larger players. To meet this unique requirements, many cloud companies are crafting their own strategies and products, and Alibaba is no different.
In fact, Alibaba has more experience in this sector than many other cloud companies because a good number of its clients in China are SMEs. So, Alibaba thoroughly understands the workings, expectations and the restrictions of this sector and has adopted its products to effectively meet them. It now wants to put this experience to good use by offering services to SMEs of other countries as well.
Another advantage that Alibaba has is that it understands the cultural context and pulse of the Asian market better than companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Much of this is again because it has its roots in China, which is culturally very different from the Western countries where AWS, Google and Microsoft had their roots.
This strategy has worked well so far for the company. During the 2017 fiscal year, Alibaba’s customers grew to 874,000 and this represents an increase of almost 70 percent over the previous year.
That said, Alibaba has a long way to go if it truly wants to catch up with companies like Microsoft and AWS. In fact, Alibaba sees AWS as its competitor, though both the companies are nowhere in the same league when it comes to revenue and operations.
For one, Alibaba doesn’t use an open cloud platform like AWS and this is a big disadvantage for many clients, especially those that want to use their own tools or explore more options. As of now, they can pick from Alibaba’s proprietary tools only and this is not always a convenient choice.
Even in it terms of infrastructure, Alibaba can never handle the same amount of workloads as that of AWS, Microsoft or Google Cloud. So, these are some of the area that it needs to address, especially if it wants to fulfill its ambitions of becoming a truly international company.
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Meet Angus, the new sales engineer in the UK
Angus Adigun joined Parallels a few weeks ago after spending the past decade at both VMware and Citrix. With his extensive knowledge of application delivery and virtualization, he will be a strong point of reference for customers and resellers using our technology, helping them achieve the best results for their businesses. We sat down for […]
The post Meet Angus, the new sales engineer in the UK appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Ayehu to Exhibit at @CloudExpo CA | @Ayehu_Eyeshare #DevOps #Serverless
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ayehu will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on October 31 – November 2, 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara California. Ayehu provides IT Process Automation & Orchestration solutions for IT and Security professionals to identify and resolve critical incidents and enable rapid containment, eradication, and recovery from cyber security breaches. Ayehu provides customers greater control over IT infrastructure through automation. Ayehu solutions have been deployed by major enterprises worldwide, and currently, support thousands of IT processes across the globe. The company has offices in New York, California, and Israel.
[slides] Public Cloud Alternative | @CloudExpo @Cloudistics #AI #Cloud #DataCenter
You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.
Blockchain Business Innovation | @CloudExpo #Cloud #FinTech #Blockchain
Is there more than bitcoin to blockchain?
Absolutely, because today’s blockchain is opening up a pathtowards the delivery of trusted online services.
To understand this statement, you need to see blockchain as more that it’s more famous bitcoin use case. As a fundamental digital tool, blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. If used in this fashion, it can enable transactional applications that can have embedded trust, accountability and transparency attributes. Instead of having a Bitcoin blockchain that is reliant on the exchange of cryptocurrencies with anonymous users on a public network, a Business blockchain can provide a permissioned network with known and verified identities. With this kind of transactional visibility, all activities within that network are observable and auditable by every network user. This end-to-end visibility, also known as shared ledgering, can also be linked to business rules and business logic that can drive and enforce trust, openness and integrity across that business network.
Enzu to Exhibit at @CloudExpo CA | @EnzuInc #AI #DX #Serverless #DataCenter
SYS-CON Events announced today that Enzu will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Int\ernational Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enzu’s mission is to be the leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions worldwide. Enzu enables online businesses to use its IT infrastructure to their competitive advantage. By offering a suite of proven hosting and management services, Enzu wants companies to focus on the core of their online business and let Enzu manage their IT hosting infrastructure.
MobiDev to Exhibit @CloudExpo CA | @MobiDev_ #Mobile #IoT #AI #ML #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a client-oriented software development company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. MobiDev is a software company that develops and delivers turn-key mobile apps, websites, web services, and complex software systems for startups and enterprises. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business managers to a full-scale mobile software company with over 200 developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, project managers in house, specializing in the world-class mobile and web development.
Consegna Advances Through AWS
The cloud market in New Zealand is booming and this has led to the entry of many players catering to varying niches within this segment. One such company is an Auckland-based start up called Consegna.
Founded in 2016, this company has made rapid strides within one year of its start. It is currently backed by AWS and is supported by a global team of cloud specialists.
It’s one of the few certified AWS consulting partners in New Zealand’s cloud space and is an Authorized Public Sector Partner. It offers a range of advisory services in the cloud market, data center migration, managed services and more for all businesses located within its country.
Specifically, it helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to migrate their data and applications to AWS, so that everyone can leverage the power of the most popular cloud services platform in the world. Besides SMEs, it also offers support and consultation to large corporations, government organizations and just about anyone else who want to move to the cloud. This company’s specialists take care of the entire journey, from early consultations to the actual migration, so every client makes an informed decisions throughout its cloud journey.
Consegna provides not just consulting service, but can also take care of the tooling required to prepare your organization to move to the cloud. Architecture, design, building, implementation are other things they work on.
Now that we have an idea of what Consegna is and what it does, let’s see how it can impact the New Zealand cloud market.
First off, New Zealand is one of the more stable economies in the Asia Pacific region with a mature market and a thriving economy. Given this environment, it’s no surprise that it has a growing cloud market too. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2018, the cloud market in New Zealand would be worth around NZ$14.7 billion, thereby making it one of the fastest growing markets in the world. It’s annual rate is likely to be around 14.7 percent year-on-year.
This strong growth is backed by a solid support from the government. It’s policies and regulations making it easy for the corporate world to use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), so that every company can leverage the many advantages like scalability and cost effectiveness that come with it.
New Zealand’s data centers are expected to grow by 18 percent and is expected to reach NZ$272 million by 2020. Many large IT organizations like IBM are already increasing their presence in this market, and they are aptly joined by smaller companies like Consegna.
An analysis of these growth numbers show that cloud management, security and consulting are likely to be the top growing segments, and Consgena has a firm footing in them. Also, the fact that it is backed by AWS and has accessed to a global team of cloud specialists means it’s in a right position to create a deep impact in New Zealand’s cloud market.
Overall, exciting times are ahead for Consegna and the cloud market as a whole.
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