Category Archives: Cloud Services

Cloud computing, Cloud Services, hybrid cloud, IaaS, Microsoft, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-14 05:38:21

Rackspace Hosting and has paired up with Microsoft to manage and offer technical support to Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform known as Azure. Azure support and managed services are currently available and expansion to overseas customers will begin in 2016.

Rackspace has struggled to compete with larger companies and their cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, and this agreement with Microsoft marks its first major deal to support public cloud services other than its own.

Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, John Engates, has said, “Stay tuned. As part of our managed cloud strategy, a tenet of that is we want to support industry-leading technologies. Our strategy really gives us the opportunity to apply fanatical support to any leading industry platform in the future. So stay tuned in terms of announcements.”

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Rackspace hopes to improve profit margins and reduce capital spending by offering managed services and technical support for public clouds, and it is starting with Microsoft’s Azure. Rackspace’s main strength has been providing fanatical service, training and technical support to smaller businesses.

Rackspace technical support will be available directly to clients through Microsoft. Rackspace may also resell Microsoft’s IaaS services to its cutomers. In the fourth quarter of 2014, IaaS Services accounted for thirty one percent of Rackspace’s total revenue.

Engates also added Rackspace will help customers build apps that run in hybrid, private-public cloud environments. Many companies are becoming interested in the public-private cloud model, with important business apps ran on private servers with accessing public IaaS providers on a as needed basis.

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News

Chicago Cloud Tax

Tech entrepreneurs took to city hall in Chicago to complain about the tax ruling put in effect last week. They claimed the tax, which extended a nine percent lease tax to cloud-based technology services, would hurt business and discourage startups in Chicago.

Spokeswoman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in statement, “Based on feedback we have received from Chicago’s vibrant start-up community, the administration will be taking measures to provide relief to small businesses so as not to put them at a competitive disadvantage. Proposals are being discussed with stakeholders, and we will release further guidance later this month.”

Relief may include exempting small businesses based on income.

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Harper Reed, founder of Modest, a mobile-commerce technology provider to small and mid-sized businesses, said, “My initial concern was that I might have to charge our Chicago customers more, which is kind of a bummer. Then there was the other part of it . . . where all cloud services would be taxed. This is a big thing.”

This would affect startups that run their business from the cloud, using big businesses such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud Services, that have been switching to the cloud.

City Hall has not provided a clear interpretation of the law, worrying tech entrepreneurs.  J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist who is one of the most prominent leaders of the tech community, has commented, “If they don’t want to lose momentum in the startup community, it has to be more narrowly applied. Most startups are not particularly well-funded or making money. To the extent there’s an interpretation hat would bear down on those companies and take capital out of their nascent, small treasure chests, it’s the wrong place to look.”

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cloud security, Cloud Services, News

Cisco to Acquire OpenDNS

Cisco has announced that it plans to buy cloud security company OpenDNS for $635 million. This amount is to be paid in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS, according to information released by Cisco.

OpenDNS provides a cross-platform online threat-protection service that Cisco will utilize to increase its own security, stating, “broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.”

Hilton Romanski, leader of business development at Cisco, said, “The acquisition will extend our ability to provide customers enhanced visibility and threat protection for unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, and to quickly and efficiently deploy and integrate these capabilities as part of their defense architecture.”

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OpenDNS will join the Cisco Security Business Group and the deal is expected to close during the first quarter of fiscal 2016.  David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, said,  “We’re not going anywhere and OpenDNS as you know it will continue to work as it does today.” While OpenDNS has over 50 million users, it has only 10,000 paying customers and runs 24 data centers.

Cisco has stated, “The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks.”

Hilton Romanski also added “As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks.”

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Cloud Services, News

Cloud News Daily 2015-07-03 06:15:55

iiNet will begin to provide cloud services on a consumption based infrastructure-as-a-service model to the South Australian Departments of Premier and Cabinet; Planning, Transport, and Infrastructure; and Communities and Social Inclusion.

iiNet general manager for Business and Government ,Daryl Knight, said “This infrastructure will be there for government to use. We’re very confident there will be significant workloads that will be put onto this platform, and we’re confident it will be there for some time, provided we deliver a good service and deliver value for money for the state. Its spread across two data centers iiNet owns in Adelaide, and there is a natural advantage there that appeals to the state, because the infrastructure is located in the state it resides, and we’ve got connectivity straight into the state’s internal data network.” In addition, iiNet will also offer the Australian government back up services.

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The South Australian government is taking advantage of this opportunity to promote its cloud credentials.  Public Sector Minister Susan Close said in a statement “In line with the government’s SA Connected ICT strategy, it allows agencies to invest in services rather than buying hardware and software. This solution improves agility for state government agencies with no upfront costs and provides the ability to spin up or shut down servers as required in minutes instead of months. Consumption-based pricing requires no minimum spend. With the rapidly maturing cloud market, we are now at the point where government agencies can benefit from quicker deployment speeds, greater flexibility, and improved value for money by using this model through iiNet.”
The cloud will be hosted in iiNet’s two Adelaide-based data centers and the private cloud will consume hardware reserved for the state government.

 

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Google, News

Google Pairs Up with Broad Institute

Google has paired up with high profile Broad Institute at MIT to develop its cloud genomics platform. The scientific community has needed new technologies to deal with the scale of genomic information and Google and the Broad Institute are looking to provide that.

This technology will process store, process and share genomic information as well as making it useful and accessible. The institute released a statement saying: “The goal is to enable any genomic researcher to upload, store, and analyze data in a cloud-based environment that combines the Broad Institute’s best-in-class genomic analysis tools with the scale and computing power of Google.”

Broad Institute will make its Genome Analysis Toolkit, or GATK, available as a service on the Google Cloud Platform. Initial access to the GATK will be limited, but eventually the service will be made more widely available. Any user will be able to upload their data to the cloud and GATK will analyze it using Google’s computing capacity.

 

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Product manager at Google Genomics, Jonathan Bingham, wrote in a blog post: “In order to scale up by the next order of magnitude, Broad and Google will work together to explore how to build new tools and find new insights to propel bio-medical research, using deep bioinformatics expertise, powerful analytics, and massive computing infrastructure.”

This partnership allows researchers to outsource the configuration of technical specifications and maintenance of computing capacity to Google.

GATK could give Google an edge over other cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services in the genomic field; however, Google partnership with Broad is not exclusive.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, News

Amazon Web Services Will Expand to India

Amazon Web Services has decided to enter India after having localized services in China. The decision to move into India was influenced by the fact that India is expected to see a lot of growth and has seen the emergence of a multitude of startups, including Flipkart, Snapdeal, payment services such as Paytm, which is backed by Alibaba and Uber’s main rival called Ola. Gartner research vice president Ed Anderson has said “Organizations in India seeking IT outsourcing services are increasingly turning to public cloud services as an alternative to traditional ITO offerings. In fact, cloud services are not only being used for low-value or transient workloads but also increasingly for production workloads, including some mission-critical initiatives.”

More traditional businesses are also a part of Amazon Web Services. These businesses, like automobile giant Tata Motors, media firm NDTV, and national flower retail chain Ferns N Petals, will be some of the initial launch partners.

While Amazon Web Services is already available in India, its expansion of its cloud computing platform will improve service for existing customers while potentially drawing in new ones.

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Andy Jassy, senior vice president for Amazon Web Services,  said in a statement: “Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have.”

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Cloud Services, News

Box Teams Up with IBM

Box and IBM have paired up to boost both of their sales in a corporate setting. Both companies will benefit from this pairing; IBM becomes more modern with the integration of box into its cloud services and Box has a new channel with larger corporations and will be able to reach customers in new settings like finance and healthcare.

Box users will be able to store files on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform and IBM’s mobile apps will deliver Box services on Apple’s iPhones and iPads long with IBM’s content management and security tools. “We see this partnership as a kind of blueprint for where enterprise technology is going to go,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie. While building Box into SoftLayer will take more than a year, BM could start building Box’s services into custom software immediately.

 

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Out of a registered 37 million box users, few pay for the services. In order to increase revenue, Box has built services aimed at markets such as Healthcare.

The partnership will also allow Box to expand globally, as it would be able to utilize IBM 40 data centers in 17 different countries. “We plan to use IBM’s cloud in at least a dozen or so key markets that we’re going after internationally,” Levie said.

Recently, IBM has faced declining revenues in its hardware, software and services businesses. It is looking toward companies like Box to revive it as a cloud services company and enable it to compete with companies such as Microsoft.

This partnership is just one of many both companies have made in recent months. Box has paired with both Microsoft and Cisco and IBM has also made a string of agreements that ally it with the fast growing internet.

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Cloud computing, cloud security, Cloud Services

Elastica Partners with Telstra to Expand into Australian Cloud Security Market

Recently, cloud security firm Elastica has partnered with Cisco and Telstra to expand into the New Zealand-Australia region in response to the growing threat of “Shadow IT” that has stemmed from increased cloud use.

Elastica’s APAC managing director John Cunningham describes that problems may arise from the struggle to monitor activities of the many apps operating on their network as well as the data that is left unmonitored in the system. This may pose a threat to the system. Elastica is a company whose aim is to secure the cloud.

 

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Because of Australia’s demand for cloud based solutions, it is the perfect market for companies like Elastica, for when cloud networks are needed, cloud security is necessary as well.  Cunningham describes, “Typically with technology, it starts in the US and then it would expand globally, maybe to Japan, maybe to Europe, and then Australia. But this time, it’s a little bit different. Cloud is going out simultaneously around the world, so our investment in Australia is going to be there to support that rapid adoption of cloud applications within Australia.” He then pronounces the importance of cloud security, “For every use of a cloud application, there are millions of events being generated … that becomes a data science problem. As humans, and with the scale of activities happening on cloud application, data science is required to help organizations get visibility of what is important.”

Telstra director of security practice John Ieraci said that Telstra was very impressed by Elasticas ability to handle issues that came from ‘Shadow IT.” “When Elastica appeared in mid-2014, we were impressed with the ability to monitor, track, and block sensitive data in real time and quickly identify shadow IT and shadow data for cloud applications, both SaaS and IaaS, using a data science approach and with zero deployment.”

 

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Cloud computing, Cloud Services

Alibaba’s Cloud Computing Market Strategy

Alibaba Group may be the underdog of the global cloud computing industry when compared to cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Google, but it may have an advantage. It’s Chinese.

 

Earlier this week, Alibaba acquired a deal with the city of Dalian to build a cloud-computing center and provide online government services. This deal joins many between Alibaba and the Chinese government and has arisen through the Chinese fear of foreign technology.

 

Due to this fear, Alibaba’s cloud unit, Aliyun, has been able to gain experience in the Chinese market before challenging leaders like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft on a global scale.

 

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James McGregor, at US communications consultancy Apco Worldwide, said, “Basically, they are following the political trends and they’re grabbing the business opportunities that result. China wants control of its information, of its data, of its news, of its technology food chain, and so there are huge opportunities.”

 

The cloud-computing sector has boomed largely because it has become cheaper for companies to store data in the cloud rather than maintaining servers in-house.

 

While Aliyun is still relatively small, China has the largest market share in cloud computing so it has plenty of room for growth. Acquiring enough expertise to become a major global player will take some time, so for the time being Aliyun is taking advantage of China’s unwelcoming environment for foreign providers. It has made cloud arrangements with other Chinese cities and provinces like Shanghai and Guangdong.

 

 

Cheng Jing, an Aliyun director, has stated his main priority: “First, we have to be sure our services can make money. If these services can also promote Ali’s relationship with the government then that’s a good thing.”

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology

Oracles Financial Details About Cloud Computing

In past endeavors, Oracle has sold database software to major businesses using licensing agreements. In contrast to companies like IBM, Oracle has seen where it must go in order to thrive in the new high tech world. It is going to the cloud.

 

In the latter part of 2014, Oracle acquired major cloud companies, such as Datalogix, a data analytics firm. Oracle can both store information and analyze it, making it able to not only provide technology but also a solution.

 

The Oracle cloud engine has four distinct parts: Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and, most recently, Data-as-a-Service. The aim of the Oracle cloud engine us to be able to provide a solution to a company no matter what level it is.

 

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Due to the rise of the cloud and companies such as Amazon that operate outside of the standard of locking customers into contracts, Oracle has had to be become more flexible in order to keep its customers.

 

Oracles latest financial report exemplifies how well it has been performing in the cloud market. While Wall Street was looking for earnings of 87 cents per share with $10.95 billion in revenue, Oracle reported non-GAAP revenue of 78 cents per share on revenue of $10.7 billion. Oracle blamed this disappointing news on currency fluctuation.

 

The company has noted a seventeen percent decline in new software licenses year after year. Customers have began to break away from the traditional model and have started to utilize more recently developed cloud technology.

 

“We sold an astonishing $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud subscription revenue in Q4,” CEO Safra Catz wrote. “We expect our rapidly increasing cloud sales to quickly translate into significantly more revenue and profits for Oracle Corporation. For example, SaaS and PaaS revenues grew at a 34% constant currency rate in our just completed Q4, but we expect that revenue growth rate to jump to around 60% in constant currency this new fiscal year.”

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