This week has seen a bevy of announcements from Oracle at its CloudWorld event in New York, from a launch of 12 new data centre regions, to product launches, to acquisitions.

Monday saw Oracle announce plans to ‘significantly expand its modern cloud infrastructure footprint’, including the opening of 12 data centre regions across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Countries include China, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, and Switzerland. The company claims customers in more than 195 countries are running applications on Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The company’s most recent big bet, around its autonomous database cloud, has also been expanded upon. Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, demonstrated how to make all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, with the capabilities set to be available in the first half of 2018. Among the potential examples available include automated code generation and security remediation for application development, as well as self-learning chatbots.

The first day also saw the Redwood giant expanding its enterprise service level agreements with what is claimed to be the industry’s first end-to-end financially backed cloud warranty for infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Tuesday saw the launch of new capabilities for Oracle’s Internet of Things Cloud around Industry 4.0. The new capabilities are based around the range of IoT Cloud applications, such as asset, production and fleet monitoring, connected workers, and service monitoring for connected assets. The IoT Cloud ‘enables organisations to gain rich insight into the performance of assets, machines, workers, and vehicles so they can optimise their supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, reduce time to market for new products; and enable new business models’, as the company put it.

On the acquisition side, Oracle also announced an agreement to buy Zenedge, a cybersecurity firm and provider of malicious bot detection and DDoS mitigation technology. The company said that the combination will ‘allow enterprises to adopt cloud services without compromising performance, cost, control or security through an expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.’

Oracle’s most recent earnings report in December saw total cloud revenues up 44% year over year at a total of $1.5 billion, with cloud revenues representing 16% of the company’s overall revenue, up from 12% this time last year. Speaking to analysts at the time, CTO Larry Ellison said the autonomous database should ‘dramatically accelerate the growth of our PaaS and SaaS businesses’.

Elsewhere, Oracle has released a report from Dr. Michael Mendel, senior fellow at the Mack Institute of Innovation Management at the Wharton School, which argues that a cumulative $2 trillion (£1.42tn) will be added to the US GDP in the coming 10 years as a result of cloud services.

The report, titled ‘Intelligent Finance: How CFOs Can Lead the Coming Productivity Boom’, polled CFOs, CEOs at companies ‘essential to US economic growth’ – Oracle customers such as Blue Shield of California and ConnectOne Bank being some of them – and found a widening productivity gap between the haves and have nots when it came to investing in software technologies.

“Many companies are holding back from widespread adoption of cloud services and new technologies because their current system is ‘good enough’ and they worry about the transition being too disruptive,” the report notes. “They don’t see how their reluctance hurts everyone – shareholders, workers, and the larger economy.”

The CFO, or equivalent head of finance, is therefore seen as the arbiter of change, the report notes, as the exec has a broad view of what’s going on across the organisation, through the finance function being transformed by new technologies. “These new capabilities put the CFO in the right position to advocate for the future,” Mendel concludes. “Any CFO who doesn’t understand what cloud services mean for her or his company is going to end up getting left behind.”

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Burley, a Senior Business Development Executive in IT Services at NetApp, described how NetApp designed a three-year program of work to migrate 25PB of a major telco’s enterprise data to a new STaaS platform, and then secured a long-term contract to manage and operate the platform.
This significant program blended the best of NetApp’s solutions and services capabilities to enable this telco’s successful adoption of private cloud storage and launching of virtual storage services to its enterprise market.

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In the past year, cloud technologies have dominated the headlines; not just the major players, but new and emerging platforms that promise to become mainstream in the very near future.

As more and more enterprises seek out the capabilities a cloud solution can provide, including data distribution, improved performance and controlled costs, we can anticipate this trend will only continue into the new year. This is apparent by the thousands of companies who already have a fully-baked cloud strategy in place or have one in the works. According to IDG’s 2016 Cloud Computing Survey, cloud technologies are now used by at least 70 percent of U.S. businesses, and Gartner predicts 90 percent of organisations worldwide will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities within the next two years.

Still, whether private, public or a hybrid mix of cloud computing models, there are many organisations who have yet to fully take the leap. So, let’s look at three compelling motivations for businesses to implement a cloud strategy in 2018.

Motivation #1: Reducing operational overheads

Most companies fail to realise the total cost of IT ownership, such as support, additional hardware, maintenance, etc. In fact, Gartner’s 2017 IT Budget reveals that healthcare companies often spend nearly 75 percent of their IT budgets on maintaining internal systems alone.

Since cloud services operate on a subscription model, companies only pay for their usage over time, preventing IT teams from spending all their budget at once. Moving to the cloud means a decrease in rack space, power usage and IT requirements, which results in lower installation, maintenance, hardware, upgrade and support costs. It also gives IT teams time to focus on building the business in more progressive ways instead of becoming bogged down by maintenance and support tasks.

Motivation #2: Increasing control and flexibility

Many enterprises that are growing at a fast-pace are often face a bottleneck when all operations are kept on-premise. By using a hybrid approach, data centre managers and IT teams alike can enhance innovation and create new systems that can scale and grow as demand increases, while providing the necessary flexibility to turn these cloud environments up, down, or off depending upon circumstances or needs.

Through a single network that connects an on-premise data centre to several cloud environments, companies can effectively manage both standard and critical workloads to move the business strategy forward.

Motivation #3: Boosting your data centre’s security

With a growing number of companies moving to the cloud, security measures are evolving to account for this growth, pushing providers to offer higher levels of security and data integrity. However, with the shifting role of IT in business now spanning strategic planning, revenue generation, efficient management of resources, and advancing innovation, organisations have little time for such comparatively mundane tasks.

It’s important to realise that the cloud is no less secure than servers managed internally by most companies. In fact, there’s a very good chance that these cloud infrastructures are more secure. By storing data in the cloud, businesses will be able to securely and remotely access this data from any location or device, as well as manage any potential breaches, including deleting or moving sensitive data at risk in real-time.

Now that we understand several compelling reasons why more companies will move their data to the cloud and experience the value it brings to their organisations, such as a reduction in operational overhead, increased control and flexibility, and boosted data centre security, let’s briefly examine how IT staff can best utilise a mixed cloud strategy to reach a company’s full data potential.

By providing greater visibility and real-time insight into power usage, thermal consumption, server health and utilisation, cloud infrastructure tools help IT teams better understand how their cloud is performing. Whether an organisation’s cloud computing model is private, public or hybrid, the major benefits are improved operational control, infrastructure optimisation and reduced costs.

Especially as a business transitions from private to public or hybrid clouds, an organisation’s IT staff needs to understand how its systems perform internally. Understanding the needs of its mission-critical applications — including memory, processing power and operating systems — should determine what to provision in the cloud. By collecting and normalising data to help IT staff better understand their current implementation on-premise, cloud infrastructure tools enable them to make intelligent decisions concerning the requirements of a new cloud configuration.

Cloud infrastructure tools can also identify idle or under-used servers. These so called “ghost servers” can draw as much as half the power used during peak workloads. At any point in time, 10 to 15 percent of servers can fall into this category. Hence, cloud infrastructure tools can assist data centre managers to consolidate and virtualise these servers to avoid wasted energy and space, which is essential in a hybrid cloud environment.

Additionally, given that energy costs are the fastest-rising expense for today’s data centres, cloud infrastructure tools deliver real-time power and thermal consumption data, providing IT staff with the clarity needed to lower power usage, increase rack density and prolong operation during outages.

There’s no question that hybrid infrastructure creates new challenges for IT staff. By ensuring that energy, equipment and floor space are used as efficiently as possible, cloud infrastructure tools assist IT staff to optimise their organisation’s multi-cloud environment.

There is a story emerging about the role the Internet of Things (IoT) has played in disaster preparedness. Indeed this technology has matured to the point that it is making a real and measurable impact in helping communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster.

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Performance testing is a form of software testing that focuses on how a system running the system performs under a particular load. This is not about finding software bugs or defects. Performance testing measures according to benchmarks and standards. Performance testing should give developers the diagnostic information they need to eliminate bottlenecks. To understand how software will perform on users’ systems, there different types of performance tests that can be applied during software testing. This is non-functional testing, which is designed to determine the readiness of a system. (Functional testing focuses on individual functions of software.)

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UKCloud has announced a collaboration with Microsoft and Cisco to provide what is claimed to be the UK’s only implementation of Microsoft Azure Stack dedicated to the public sector.

The company says it is moving its focus from ‘public cloud for public sector’ to becoming ‘multi-cloud experts’, as organisations progress from initial cloud deployments. Through Cisco as an OEM partner, companies can use Azure alongside other platforms, such as Oracle, VMware, and OpenStack.

As analyst firm Gartner proclaimed in April, CIOs in the government sector spend only one fifth of their IT budgets on digital initiatives, compared to their private sector counterparts who spend nearer a third. In other words, while cloud has become de rigeur for new IT projects across the public sector, many companies are still beholden to legacy systems or older IT contracts.

“We started to hear from our customers that it’s not just those cloud-native, new applications that they’re looking to do, but the vast majority of what they’re seeking to do is solve the headache they have from legacy applications and the vast majority of what they need to support day in, day out,” Bill Mew, UKCloud cloud strategist, told CloudTech.

“By providing a multi-cloud platform where they can take Oracle workloads to our Oracle cloud, some of their Microsoft workloads to our Microsoft cloud, virtualised workload to our VMware cloud, and on top of that they can have an OpenStack environment… we’re providing them with the best of all worlds,” added Mew.

UKCloud has been liaising with customers for the past few months preparing for the launch, and has spotted three primary benefits. Alongside the integration between newer and more legacy technologies, customers in the more sensitive areas of the public sector – such as justice, defence and national security – say they have benefitted from the extra sovereignty and security assurance from running on UKCloud as opposed to running directly on Microsoft.

The biggest element, however, is through the support aspect. Customers will be able to enlist the help of cloud architects, DevOps consultants and more, as well as 24/7 support – with no extra cost.

“Our belief is there is no ‘one cloud fits all’ solution,” said Leighton James, UKCloud director of cloud strategy and products. “When you look at those existing systems you see Oracle, SAP, IBM… you see lots of Microsoft stuff in there, but also a lot of Linux and open source, so trying to take such a diverse and heterogeneous environment and trying to move it to a homogeneous environment – i.e. AWS or just Azure – just isn’t going to work.

“What we’re saying [to organisations] is… continue to transform, but modernise at the same time.”

This is the latest claimed industry first from the company. In October, UKCloud became the first European provider to offer a cloud GPU computing service.

You can find out more about the new service here.

Enterprise cloud spend is on the up while Microsoft Azure gains ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud report.

The study, which polled almost 1,000 respondents, found that Azure enterprise adoption was at 58%, gaining around on AWS with 68%. For organisations who have just begun their cloud journeys (below), Azure leads AWS, in 49% and 47% implementation respectively.

When it came to public cloud adoption, 64% of respondents say they now run apps on AWS compared to 57% the year before. Azure moves up to 45% from 34%, while every other company saw a positive uptake. Google went up three percentage points to 18%, IBM two to 10% and Oracle three to 6%, while VMware Cloud on AWS and Alibaba, asked for the first time this year, polled 8% and 2% respectively.

Serverless was cited as the top growing cloud service at a growth rate of 75%, with containers as a service usage growing by 36% year over year. Docker adoption increased to 49%, up from 35% the previous year, with Kubernetes almost doubling in adoption figures for the past 12 months.

For the second year running, the primary cloud initiative among respondents was optimising existing use – or in other words, cost savings – cited by 58%. Moving more workloads to the cloud (51%) and better financial reporting (44%) were also frequently chosen. Two thirds of respondents said they will increase their cloud spend by at least 20% in 2018. 18% said it would more than double, while the same number argued there would be no change or a decrease.

“The survey showed that enterprise cloud spending will grow rapidly over the next year, and yet 35% of cloud spend is wasted. As a result, optimising cloud costs is the top initiative for cloud users in 2018,” said Michael Crandell, RightScale CEO in a statement. “Multi-cloud continues to be the preferred strategy for enterprises, with companies reporting that they use nearly five different clouds on average.

“With this multi-cloud approach, Azure is now nipping at AWS’ heels and, in fact, is in a dead heat with AWS among enterprises that are just beginning their cloud adoption,” Crandell added.

The RightScale study is seen as a benchmark yearly analysis of the cloud industry. Last year’s offering found that while AWS usage had stayed the same year over year, Azure figures went up considerably.

You can see the full data set here.

Main picture credit: RightScale, used under CC BY

Blockchain technologies hold ‘great promise’ for securing connected devices and systems, according to a new paper from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

The report, put together by the alliance’s Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group and titled ‘Using Blockchain Technology to Secure the Internet of Things’, explores the intersection between the two technologies, as well as giving an extensive overview of deployment options.

As the report puts it, a cloud-enabled blockchain network can be divided into two sections; the blockchain service, which has communications between transaction and mining nodes – such as enterprise servers, smart devices, or cloud-based VMs – and the blockchain clients. The latter are IoT devices with limited hardware resources, which do not store the distributed ledger, and instead communicate either through M2M communications or API queries of the blockchain service nodes.

More than one blockchain service can co-exist in different contexts, such as a personal home network, the enterprise, and the Internet, the report adds.

As a result, the CSA advocates a system whereby IoT clients within a multi-blockchain service can collaborate. In the example the report gives, the first blockchain network is a dedicated enterprise implementation, with IoT blockchain clients being sensors and smart devices, with the second being a consumer smart home with the clients as smart refrigerators, temperature sensors, and so forth. “The architecture in which IoT devices are clients of a blockchain service is primarily adopted by current industry efforts for implementing blockchain technology,” the report notes.

This is by no means the first report which has looked to examine the two technologies. Last month a report from Kaleido Insights argued combining distributed ledger technologies and the IoT would give the latter ‘a level of interoperability, transparency, and security currently absent from today’s architectures.’

It is evident that more research bodies are coming to similar conclusions. “The IoT is having a major impact on how many companies conduct business and people go about their daily lives. However, security has become a stumbling block to widespread adoption or implementation,” said Sabri Khemissa, co-chair of the Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group and lead author of the paper.

“This research should serve as a roadmap to implementing technology that will push the dial forward in securing IoT,” Khemissa added.

There is a fundamental flaw in how many people think about digital transformation. First, as we’ve written about extensively at Intellyx, people tend to think about it as a finite corporate project, rather than as a process of continual transformation. There is a deeper flaw in thinking, however, that leads to this type of project mentality. Enterprise leaders commonly think of transformation as something done at a corporate level — something the organization does to itself. But that mindset creates a separation between the act of transformation at an organizational level and the transformation that must occur within each individual to make organizational transformation a reality.

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AI technology is ever evolving and some believe it could be the next digital frontier. Today, the artificial intelligence revolution seems to be transforming every business in just about every industry from auto to banking to retail and beyond. The gaming industry is no exception.

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