The enterprise data storage marketplace is poised to become a battlefield. No longer the quiet backwater of cloud computing services, the focus of this global transition is now going from compute to storage. An overview of recent storage market history is needed to understand why this transition is important.
Before 2007 and the birth of the cloud computing market we are witnessing today, the on-premise model hosted in large local data centers dominated enterprise storage. Key marketplace players were EMC (before the Dell acquisition), NetApp, IBM, HP (before they became HPE) and Hitachi. Company employees managed information technology resources (compute, storage, network) and companies tightly controlled their data in facilities they managed. Data security, legal and regulatory concerns, for the most part, were very localized. The data itself was highly structured (i.e., Relational Databases and SQL) in support of serially executed mostly static business processes. This structured approach worked because consumer segments in most industries were homogeneous, segregated and relatively static. Companies also felt relatively safe in their industry vertical due to the high financial and operational barriers prospective new competitive entrants would face.

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Alibaba Cloud’s new data centre in Mumbai is slated to open in January 2018 and will cater for the increasing demand for cloud services arising from small and medium-sized enterprises.

In order to help enterprises of all sizes move to the firm’s platform, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba will create a local team of professional consultants to offer service planning, implementation, and after-sales support.

Taking into consideration the rapid growth displayed by the Indian economy, Alibaba Cloud believes the market will offer tremendous business opportunities. Also in its globalisation strategy, India is earmarked as a key market.

Simon Hu, SVP of Alibaba Group and president of Alibaba Cloud said:

"We are excited to be officially opening our new Mumbai, India data centre in early 2018, enabling us to work closely with more Indian enterprises. These local enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our cloud computing and data technologies.

As we build out the Alibaba Cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is now firmly in place. This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond."

With the new data centre, Alibaba Cloud will provide Indian enterprises with a comprehensive suite of cloud computing products including largescale computing, storage resources, and Big Data processing capabilities. Other data centre services to be offered include elastic computing, database, storage and content delivery, networking, analytics and big data as well as security.

At present, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm has 33 availability zones throughout 16 economic centres worldwide, with coverage extending across mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, India and the US (East and West Coast).

What are your thoughts on Alibaba's new data centre? Let us know in the comments.

We live in a world where nobody is willing to wait for anything. We have become accustomed to websites and mobile apps working instantly. If I click on a search result from Google and it doesn’t load within a couple seconds, I will no doubt just click on a different result. We have all been trained to expect websites to load blazingly fast.
We also know that performance optimization can be very time consuming and potentially expensive. We also know that premature optimization is a bad thing.

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SAP HANA was released as a work in progress. Tenants could leverage the increased speed of the HANA database immediately, but had to wait for the updated SAP S/4HANA applications to be released. Each release has allowed applications to more fully harness HANA, creating new, compelling reasons to migrate for a range of use cases.
With the S/4HANA 1709 release, SAP has taken yet another step toward creating a complete product, with substantial benefits over Suite on HANA for most use cases. As with any ERP software, there will be future improvements and innovations, but at this point upgrading to S/4 is a worthwhile investment for nearly every landscape still on SAP ECC or Suite on HANA.

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An update to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is coming. Did I lose you already? If you’re not familiar with WCAG, it’s a collection of guidelines that developers, designers and accessibility experts use to help ensure the apps and websites they create are accessible to people with disabilities. The W3C has the latest guidelines published here.

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Decentralization of everything, the great new idea of which the web can’t stop babbling, might still seem a bit utopian if you inspect it closely.
Yes, blockchains are likely to reshape our economy, or a huge part of it, and benefit considerably those who are currently unbanked.
They might also facilitate the creation of rating/reputation systems that are not controlled by any single entity and thus allow people (say Uber drivers who’d like to work for Lyft) to switch employers without having to establish their credibility anew.
They might give users complete control over their assets; protect them, to a degree, from being robbed and provide tools to sustain privacy even when a state-level actor – a bank or a government – is after their identity.

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“Grape Up leverages Cloud Native technologies and helps companies build software using microservices, and work the DevOps agile way. We’ve been doing digital innovation for the last 12 years,” explained Daniel Heckman, of Grape Up in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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With IBM, Google, and Microsoft pouring funding into the research of quantum computing, it’s really starting to look like we are going to see the benefits in the next 5 – 10 years. Google may be just weeks from announcing they reached the quantum supremacy milestone and IBM may not be far behind either. Today, I wanted to share my thoughts on how quantum computing may affect cryptography as we know it.
When we talk about the basic cryptography used for things like TLS when you access your bank’s website, the premise behind securing your data is surprisingly simple. The certificate uses a public key which is really just a large number that’s the result of multiplying two prime numbers together. This key has a size typically between 256 bits and 2048 bits. It’s quite a large number. To find the two factors via brute force, in today’s classical computers, it would take a billion years to solve (give or take a year or two). In computational complexity theory, they refer to these problems as intractable. They just can’t be solved with the computers we have today.

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Hiring a digital marketer starts as soon as you plan to launch a prototype of your innovative idea. But, without knowing anything about digital marketing, you may not be able to reach out to investors and target audiences. You can follow the following basic points to know the significance of digital marketing even if you are not doing it on your own.

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Research published earlier this year by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) revealed that the rate of cloud adoption by UK-based businesses has reached 88%. The top three reasons respondents gave for cloud take-up were delivery flexibility, operational cost savings and scalability.

For many businesses, public cloud has been an attractive, effective way to build out their existing models and experiment with new ones, but it has often been oversold and under-performed. In my view, we’ll see a retreat from the public cloud in 2018, especially for storage of highly critical applications, and a return to on-site solutions for various reasons.

First, public cloud still requires an army of people to manage it. While many public cloud companies provide the cloud platform, they don’t provide the manpower or resources to manage it. This means the company utilising the platform has to provide the resources and time required to maintain it, both of which cost money. For anything other than short-term storage, these costs eventually add up. In particular, management costs for the public cloud are more expensive than organisations first expected.

Second, the availability of the public cloud was well-publicised in 2017, but so were the failure issues that came with it. For example, Amazon’s S3 service experienced an outage in February after an employee accidentally typed an incorrect command in the system, resulting in platforms such as Slack and Quora being down for four hours. Other public cloud giants that experienced significant outages in 2017 include IBM and Microsoft Azure. This highlights the risks associated with companies using public cloud to store critical or sensitive data, and has emphasised the importance of companies keeping greater control over that data. We predict this will lead companies to reconsider their storage strategies moving forward, particularly from a data protection, storage and management point of view.

Finally, as alluded to above, many organisations are realising that – at least for long-term storage – public cloud can more often than not turn out to be more expensive than similar on-premises solutions. To start, the advertised price of the public cloud often demonstrates the initial cost of use, but, as organisations become tied into paying recurring monthly fees, and gather larger amounts of data and deploy more extensions, the cost continually increases. Some public cloud platforms also charge per user, so although public cloud promotes unlimited scalability, it can come with a heavy price tag.

New technology that is coming through the pipeline will make it easier for businesses to orchestrate servers and VMs, providing on-premises solutions at a lower cost, and making them as easy to manage and scale as if on a public cloud platform.  That is why, in 2018, I predict that we will see a return to on-premises solutions as companies realise that adopting public cloud may not actually be cheaper or easier to use, particularly with the issue of data security coming to the fore. The adoption rate of public cloud will slow significantly next year as newer, better on-premises solutions come into play.