Category Archives: Public Cloud

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Orange Business Services, Public Cloud

Orange Business Services beefs up cloud gateway

GatewayOrange Business Services has integrated its Enterprise Application Management (EAM) Riverbed offering into its Business VPN Galerie portfolio, reports Telecoms.com.

The EAM offering is a fully-managed service from Orange Business Services targeted on delivering application acceleration and WAN optimization to boost user experience. The product aims to tackle a number of different challenges for customers including insufficient WAN bandwidth, as well as insufficient transport and application protocols in high-latency environments.

The offering uses Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to deliver application acceleration and WAN optimization, which uses various optimization techniques including data, transport, application and management streamlining. The data streamlining techniques are claimed to reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65% to 98% for TCP-based applications.

“Customers need to boost end-user application experience with faster response times to increase productivity at a global scale, enable business-critical migration projects and improve the corporate image,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, VP of the connectivity business at Orange Business Services. “By integrating Riverbed’s best-of-breed technology in our secure and fully-managed solution we can deliver this promise.”

The Business VPN Galerie, which Orange claims was the world’s first cloud-ready network, offers customers a range of cloud-based applications and services from their own private network provided by Orange Business Services or its partners. The portfolio currently has 1,600 customers, as well as more than 20 cloud partners including Orange Cloud for Business, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Express Route, Salesforce and AWS.

Elsewhere in the Orange business, the team have opened a new Eco campus based in Chatillon on the outskirts of Paris, which will be devoted completely to research and innovation.

“Innovation, has always been one of the Group’s fundamentals, and must be the expression of Orange’s mission: transforming technology into progress each day and serving people through innovation,” said Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange. “To put the human context in the centre of our thinking, it is a choice we accept and that characterises us, this is a philosophy that now has a name: ‘Human Inside’. ‘Human Inside’ is both a slogan and a catchword, that gives meaning and which highlights all our action.”

AWS, News & Analysis, Outage, Public Cloud

AWS release statement to explain Aussie outage

Location Australia. Green pin on the map.AWS has blamed a power shortage caused by adverse weather conditions as the primary cause of the outage Australian customers experienced this weekend.

A statement on the company’s website stated its utility provider suffered a failure at the regional substation, which resulted in the total loss of utility power to multiple AWS facilities. At one of these facilities, the power redundancy didn’t work as designed and the company lost power to a large number of instances in the availability zone.

The storm this weekend was one of the worst experienced by Sydney in recent years, recording 150mm of rain over the period, with 93 mm falling on Sunday 5th alone, and wind speeds reaching as high as 96 km/h. The storm resulted in AWS customers losing services for up to six hours, between 11.30pm and 4.30am (PST) on June 4/5. The company claims over 80% of the impacted customer instances and volumes were back online and operational by 1am, though a latent bug in the instance management software led to a slower than expected recovery for some of the services.

While adverse weather conditions cannot be avoided, the outage is unlikely to ease concerns over public cloud propositions. Although the concept of cloud may now be considered mainstream, there are still numerous decision makers who are hesitant over placing mission critical workloads in such an environment, as it has been considered as handing control of a company’s assets to another organization. Such outages will not bolster confidence in those who are already pessimistic.

“Normally, when utility power fails, electrical load is maintained by multiple layers of power redundancy,” the statement said. “Every instance is served by two independent power delivery line-ups, each providing access to utility power, uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs), and back-up power from generators. If either of these independent power line-ups provides power, the instance will maintain availability. During this weekend’s event, the instances that lost power lost access to both their primary and secondary power as several of our power delivery line-ups failed to transfer load to their generators.”

In efforts to avoid similar episodes in the future, the team have stated additional breakers will be added to assure that we more quickly break connections to degraded utility power to allow generators to activate before uninterruptable power supplies systems are depleted. The team have also prioritized reviewing and redesigning the power configuration process in their facilities to prevent similar power sags from affecting performance in the future.

“We are never satisfied with operational performance that is anything less than perfect, and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services,” the company said.

Cisco, HPE, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Microsoft, HPE and Cisco take top-spot for infrastructure vendors

male and female during the run of the marathon raceMicrosoft, HPE and Cisco have been named as three of the leading names in the cloud industry by Synergy Research as the firm wraps up the winners and losers for the first quarter.

While the cloud infrastructure market has been growing consistently at an average rate of 20% year-on-year, 2016 Q1 was estimated at 13%, though this was to be expected following peak sales during the latter stages of 2015. Microsoft led the way for cloud infrastructure software, whereas HPE led the private cloud hardware market segment, and Cisco led the public cloud hardware segment.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

For the last eight quarters total spend on data centre infrastructure has been running at an average of $29 billion, with HPE controlling the largest share of cloud infrastructure hardware and software over the course of 2015. Cloud deployments or shipments of systems that are cloud enabled now account for well over half of the total data centre infrastructure market.

cloud leaders

Consumer IoT, Ericsson, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Wearables

44% of consumers have issues with wearables functionality

Iot isometric flowchart design bannerFindings from Ericsson ConsumerLab claim consumer enthusiasm for wearables technology is still growing but vendors are not meeting price or functionality expectations, reports Telecoms.com.

The research focused on opinions from 5,000 smartphone users from Brazil, China, South Korea, the UK and the US, though it’s worth noting 50% of respondents were current owners of wearables technology, a much higher proportion of the general public. While the statistics demonstrated there is still an appetite for wearable technologies outside of fitness applications, price of entry could be a barrier for entry, as well as customer expectations on functionality generally exceeding what vendors are currently able to offer.

32% of respondents said they would be interested or willing to buy a Panic/SOS button, and 25% said the same for an identity authentication device. Smart Watches were still of interest to the industry as 28% said they would have an interest in purchasing such as a device, but this statistic contradicts recent reports the segment has been declining. Strategy Analytics forecasted a 12% decline in Apple watch sales this year after a strong launch. A third of non-users have stated the cost of keeping digital devices connected is a key reason why they haven’t invested in wearable technology to date.

While the SA report could indicate a slight hiccup in the adoption of wearables, this is also backed up to a degree by the Ericsson report which states 10% of wearable users abandoned the technology. This is mainly due to the capabilities which are on offer. A common cause of dissatisfaction is customers feel tethered to their smartphone, as the wearable device does not have standalone features. This could also be tied into the overall value/price proposition of the devices as could be seen as a product of convenience as opposed to a smartphone replacement.

In terms of the reasoning for abandoning wearables, over half of respondents said the devices did not meet expectations. 21% highlighted limited functionality and uses, 23% stated the fact the device was not standalone or didn’t have inbuilt connectivity was the reason, where as 9% said inaccurate data and information. Despite the concerns over functionality, 83% of respondents said they expect wearables to have some form of standalone connectivity in the near future. Should this be the case, 43% believe wearables will ultimately replace smartphones.

“Although consumers show greatest interest in devices related to safety, we also see openness to wearable technology further away from today’s generation,” said Jasmeet Singh Sethi, Consumer Insight Expert, Ericsson ConsumerLab. “In five years’ time, walking around with an ingestible sensor, which tracks your body temperature and adjusts the thermostat setting automatically once you arrive home, may be a reality.” Other use cases included a smart water purifier, gesture communicator, virtual reality sports attire, emotion sensing tattoos and a wearable camera.

The survey does demonstrate long-term viability for wearable technology, though there would have to be increased functionality before it could be considered mainstream. It would appear standalone connectivity would be the bare minimum required, as the currently offering seemingly does not offer the value to customers should they have to continue to carry a smartphone as well as the wearable device.

Data migration, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

82% of C-suite say public cloud is the way forward

Silhouette Businessman Holding PuzzleResearch from HyTrust claims 82% of C-suite execs are to increase the number of workloads their organization hosts on public cloud, reports Telecoms.com.

The transition to a cloud-based mentality and business model has given rise to arguably one of the most influential brands in the world; AWS. That is not to say Amazon as a brand wasn’t influential before the rise of the cloud; more the concept of the cloud made Amazon a major player in the Enterprise IT world.

In April, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky delivered the quarterly earnings call which outlined the team’s belief the AWS business unit would break through the $10 billion barrier. While this number does only represent roughly 10% of the company’s annual revenues, it demonstrates the progress of the cloud industry on the whole.

But the cloud is still seen as a proposition which is mainly utilized by the technologically advanced organizations, so what’s holding it back? The first answer for most would be security, but this might not be the case.

A recent survey from HyTrust highlighted while there may still be concerns for decision makers in trusting the cloud, this is certainly not holding these organizations back from investing. 42% of C-suite executives (CEO, CFO, CIO etc.) say critical server workloads have already been virtualized in their environments; for IT systems administrators and engineers, that number is 65%.

Data and security breaches are still top of the list of concerns when considering such a move, but the survey also highlighted 74% of respondents are planning to move (new or additional) workloads to a public cloud in 2016. This statistic is also weighted more towards the boardroom, as executives would appear to be more bullish in their cloud ambitions than other levels within the business. 82% of C-suite executives who were surveyed believe they will migrate additional workloads to the public cloud in 2016, compared to 66% at director level and 73% at administrator or engineer level.

For most, the C-suite would generally be perceived as the more risk adverse individuals within the business, having been exposed to the stakeholders and media alike when something does go wrong, however the statistics may demonstrate a more general acceptance of cloud computing throughout the business. Security has always been a concern of organizations since the beginning of the cloud revolution, though it would appear decision makers are now okay with accepting 100% secure is impossible and the new objectives should be to remain as secure as possible, consistently.

In terms of the top players within the industry, there are few surprises as to what brand decision makers are leaning towards during 2016. The only difference from many previous reports is the inclusion of VMware vCloud Air, which made an appearance in second accounting for 24% of the respondents, pushing Google Cloud out of the top three. Microsoft Azure was top of the list representing 32% of the vote, whereas the widely recognized market leader AWS sits in third, bringing in 22%.

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

amazon awsAWS’ Australian customers suffered an outage over the course of the weekend for approximately six hours due to a power outage which coincided with adverse weather conditions.

The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed, though did occur at the same time as a storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast which caused widespread flooding, was limited to the Sydney data centre roughly between 11.30pm 4.30am (PST) on June 4.

On the company’s status page it stated, “We are investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region,” at 10.47pm as well as, “We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event with a single availability zone AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 APIs instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region,” at 11.49pm PST. Full connectivity was not reported until 4.43am PST.

Although the company has not since commented on the episode, the status page on the website currently states all services are up and running. The outage impacted a number of core and value add services including EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, ElastiCache, Redshift, Relational Database Service, Route 53 Private DNS, CloudFormation, CloudHSM, Database Migration Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Storage Gateway.

While there have been a number of outages in recent months, AWS has seemingly faired pretty well avoiding headlines for the most part. Google appeared to be taking the route of damage control in April following an 18 minute outage, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to twitter last month to apologize for his company’s 12 hour outage and Apple customers lost numerous iCloud services for seven hours earlier this month.

AWS Outage

Apple, Icloud, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Apple experiences outage in North America

Apple 1Apple has restored services to customers around the world after many of its cloud-based offerings and other services faced outages of up to seven hours.

The outages, which were reported from users mainly in North America, are yet to be explained by the company but impacted numerous products including the App Store, iCloud, Apple TV, photos and iMovies as well as a host of others.

The issues would have appeared to have begun at around 9pm (GMT) June 2, and all services were resumed by 4:55am (GMT). Apple spokespersons have been directing journalists to the company’s support page where it posted insightful comments such as “Users experienced a problem with the service above” and “Users may have experienced slower than usual performance when using iCloud Drive, Backup, iCloud Notes, iWork for iCloud and Photos. Users may have experienced slowness with multiple services at iCloud.com”.

The services aspect of the Apple business has been reporting healthy numbers in recent months, seemingly offsetting the drop in iPhone sales. During its Q2 earnings call the company ended its long run of constant year-over-year revenue growth, as it reported a decline for the first time in 13 years, according to Telecoms.com. iPhone shipments were down 16% and Mac sales also went down from $5.61 billion to $5.1 billion, however its services business increased by 20% to almost $6 billion.

Apple Twitter

 

DropBox, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Dropbox steps ups European commitment with local signing

DropboxDropbox has announced the appointment of Philip Lacor, who will act as the new VP for EMEA Sales, based out of the Dublin office.

The company has been making notable efforts in recent months to increase its presence in the European market, capitalizing on free-user growth in the region. Aside from Lacor’s appointment, Dropbox has opened offices in Hamburg, Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam, as well offering localized payment models in 12 European countries to increase the number of upgrades to the paid-for services.

With the continuing dispute between the EU and US focusing on transatlantic data transmission not looking like it would end in the near future, a number of companies have been identifying means to remove concerns of the European customers. Dropbox has opened several offices around Europe, hired local employees and outlined plans for a European data centre, where as Box has developed its Zones offering through a partnership with IBM. For the Zones offering, customers can opt to have their data stored regionally on the IBM Cloud.

“Dropbox now has over half a billion accounts across the globe and nearly 40% are in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” said Lacor. “I am incredibly excited to support the acceleration of our growth in EMEA, particularly on the Enterprise side. With our Dropbox Business and Dropbox Enterprise products, our business customers can become even more competitive by deploying Dropbox to simplify the way people work together.”

Lacor joins Dropbox from Vodafone in Germany, where he served as the Managing Director for the enterprise division. Prior to Vodafone, Lacor worked for worked at Dell for over 10 years in several European and EMEA-wide roles across sales, marketing and finance.

Box, data protection, data residency, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Box sets target on US government and Europe following 37% growth in Q1

Box co-founder and chief executive Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London this week

CEO Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London 

Box has reported healthy growth over the last quarter, increasing revenues 37% to $90.2 million, which the company has attributed to a more diversified portfolio. Public sector organizations and the European market are now in the crosshairs for future growth.

The US government is an area which has seemingly been prioritized by CEO Aaron Levie and the Box team moving forward, following the announcement Box for Government achieved FedRAMP certification from the Department of Defence. As the Department of Defence claims it has some of the highest degree of scrutiny around cloud platforms and technology, the team believe the certification will create a ripple effect throughout the US.

As a number of state and local government agencies lean on federal standards for guidance on what cloud technologies to adopt, the certification could lead to positive strides for the company. Levie highlighted the certification, as well as the partnership with IBM, has created a healthy sales pipeline for the team over recent months in the public sector segment.

The company added more than 5,000 customers to its ranks over the period, taking the total number to more than 62,000 businesses. Box now has 46 million users worldwide, of which 13% are now paying. Levie also highlighted work on its customer services processes has paid off over the quarter as customer churn rate is now below 3%.

“In Q1 we achieved record revenue of $90 million, up 37% year over year,” said Levie. “We also continue to gain operational efficiency and demonstrate leverage in our business model as we move towards our commitment to achieve positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter and in January 2017. Looking ahead underlying demand for Box remains very strong and our competitive position in the market has never been better. “

We created record sales pipeline in the quarter with several seven figure deals in the mix. This has been driven by the growing demand for a modern approach to enterprise content management, our differentiated product offerings and our maturing partnerships that are becoming an integral part of our go to market strategy.”

Box’s expansion strategy over recent months has been built upon the diversification of its product portfolio, but also its partner ecosystem. Firstly from a product perspective, the team launches Box Zones which enables organizations to dictate where data is stored around the world. This offering was brought about through the partnership with IBM.

Data residency is proving to be a sensitive area in recent months due to the confusion over data residency concerns following the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to strike down the Safe Harbour agreement, and the subsequent criticism its successor, EU-US Privacy Shield, has received. The Box Zones offering would appear to be the company’s means of negating the impact of data residency by removing the concern of transatlantic data transmission. The team claim the offering has not only gained traction with new customers, but also created a number of upselling opportunities for companies who have operations in regions where data protection rules are more stringent than the US.

Aside from Box Zones, the team has also launched a number of new offerings including its Governance product, KeySafe and the aforementioned Box for Government offering. Aside from creating new opportunities in the US, the product diversification has also been credited with growth in new regions, which is a key pillar for the Box expansion plans.

From a partner ecosystem perspective, the quarter saw a number of new announcements as well as positive wins out of longer standing relationships. Box announced a new partnership with Adobe in April, aiming to simplify working with digital documents in the cloud, though Levie was particularly focused on the relationship with Microsoft, which has yielded positive results throughout the quarter.

“And nowhere is our ecosystem strategy more relevant than our partnership with Microsoft which continues to yield significant dividends,” said Levie. “For the first time ever customers can now collaboratively edit their Office documents that are stored in Box or edit them on their iPad or iPhone. Adoption of Office 365 continues to be a key driver for new customers to invest in Box as well as allow existing customers to expand their usage of Box.”

Partnerships currently influence around 20% of Box’s revenues which aside from Microsoft also includes AT&T and IBM. The partnership with IBM has been particularly successful in the company’s drive towards Europe, where the option to store data in Big Blue’s German and Irish data centres is attractive, according to Levie.

Opinion, outsourcing, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Should Public Cloud be Synonymous with Outsourcing?

Marathon runners taking the position for the start of raceI caught an internet meme the other day that said, “The Cloud is just a computer somewhere else.”  But is that true?  Is the cloud really all about outsourcing your infrastructure to somewhere or someone else?

Popular opinion seems to indicate that’s the case.  But I would argue otherwise.

The cloud is a way of thinking.  Consider the ease with which you can swipe your credit card and walk away with a virtual infrastructure in the cloud.  Pay for what you need now, and scale out to meet your growing demands as your business or projects expand.  Who could say no to that?

In my experience as an IT leader and solutions architect, this is what the cloud is really all about.  Self-service provisioning; elastic, pay-as-you-grow infrastructure; and a service-driven operating model with all-inclusive, per-VM pricing.

If we take that perspective, we see that the cloud is not just about outsourcing.  In fact, all IT leaders should aspire to deliver the same agility, elasticity, and efficiency of the cloud model – whether their infrastructure runs on-premises or “in the cloud.”

With that said, this has not always been feasible or easy.  Traditional IT infrastructure is costly, complex, and rigid.  It simply doesn’t provide the same level of efficiency and agility as public cloud providers can deliver.  And that’s no surprise.  Early in their history, pioneering service providers and technology giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, discarded the old IT model and built their own infrastructure based on key design principles of software-defined, scale-out, and x86 commodity hardware.

Until now, visionary IT leaders who sought to deliver a cloud operating model on-site had little at their disposal.  But that is changing.  Breakthroughs in on-premises infrastructure like hyperconvergence are making it possible to bring the benefits of the cloud on-site, avoiding the tradeoffs of outsourcing their infrastructure and core business applications to the cloud.

In many ways, hyperconverged infrastructure delivers the same efficiency and agility of cloud.  It’s based on the same design principles noted above – x86 commodity building blocks, software-defined, and linear scalability. However, hyperconverged infrastructure also provides the performance, protection, and resiliency enterprises require – all while reducing complexity and costs.

In fact, in a recent independent study, focusing on the cost-effectiveness and three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of hyperconvergence and the public cloud, hyperconvergence vendor SimpliVity was compared to public cloud vendor Amazon Web Services. The study found that SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution offers a TCO savings of 22% to 49% when compared to Amazon Web Services. This shows that cost is no longer a barrier to creating a private cloud. Enterprises can choose what best suits their workloads, public or private.

Overall, with hyperconvergence, enterprises can now outsource to the public cloud or decide to stay on-premises, all the while maintaining the agility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud.

Written by Rich Kucharski, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at SimpliVity