IBM thinks it has gained a head-start on the slowly emerging quantum market with the launch of what it has described as the first commercially useable integrated quantum computing system.

Quantum computing is based on the principles of quantum mechanics and aims to take advantage of subatomic particles existing in more than one state at any time. Its much-vaunted potential therefore is in its ability to read between the lines and come up with calculations we can only dream of today.

It has the potential to make current standards fall desperately short. For instance, according to Microsoft, while classical computers would take one billion years to break encryptions such as RSA, a quantum research project the company is aiming to put together in 2019 would break it in 100 seconds.

The IBM Q System One, once released, can be seen as something of a milestone in the processes involved. The sheer technological effort thus far has ensured practically any quantum project has gone no further than the laboratory stage. Even the most minimal fluctuations in temperature, or the merest ambient noise will put qubits awry, which have only 100 microseconds of useful lifespan as it stands anyway.

To help mitigate against this, IBM’s design includes a nine foot tall, nine foot wide case of half-inch thick glass forming an airtight enclosure that can open effortlessly using motor-driven rotation. The company certainly didn’t skimp when it came to the design, enlisting multiple design studios alongside Goppion, a Milan-based manufacturer of high-end museum display cases whose ‘clients’ include the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London.

“For the first time ever, IBM Q System One enables universal approximate superconducting quantum computers to operate beyond the confines of the research lab,” IBM trumpeted in a press release. “The IBM Q System One is a major step forward in the commercialisation of quantum computing,” said Arvind Krishna, SVP hybrid cloud and director of IBM research. “This new system is critical in expanding quantum computing beyond the walls of the research lab as we work to develop practical quantum applications for business and science.”

More than meets the eye

Don’t think you can fill out a form, send it off and then receive a shiny box from IBM in return just yet, however. The company did not reveal how much a machine would theoretically cost, nor even a provisional release date.

The Q System One is a 20 qubit computer which, in real-world terms, unfortunately does not account for very much today. Towards the end of 2017 IBM reached the 20 qubit milestone with 50 the next target. Yet to put that in comparison, James Clarke, who heads up Intel’s quantum research unit, told New Scientist at the start of this year his team was looking to longer-term goals, saying a device will need a million qubits before it has a truly significant impact.

IEEE, the engineering standards organisation, has long had something of a sceptical view around the timeframes regarding quantum initiatives. Travis S. Humble, distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who leads the IEEE working group around quantum computing, wrote for this publication a note of caution that despite it being a ‘pivotal point’ in the technology’s development, ‘many eyes [were] watching the road ahead, but [not] moving forward.’

Writing for the IEEE in November Mikhail Dyakonov, researcher in theoretical physics at the University of Montpellier, put it particularly succinctly. “A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe,” he wrote.

So are IBM, Intel, Microsoft et al all therefore ploughing millions of dollars into a wild goose chase? Not yet at least. Analyst firm CCS Insight posited that those who are interested in cloud should become interested in quantum and its potential to ease the burden currently experienced by silicon workloads. The company predicted in October that IBM would win the race to launch the first commercial quantum computing applications, putting the year at 2022.

Alternately, let The Verge give a different perspective on the Q System One launch. “[They are] still very much experimental devices…supposed to be research tools,” wrote James Vincent, “letting us work out, qubit by qubit, how quantum devices might work at all."

Picture credit: IBM

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam and explore the future of enterprise technology.

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

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Clare Hopping

Cloud is the motor for innovation and digital transformation. CIOs will run 25% of total application workloads in the cloud by the end of 2018, based on recent Morgan Stanley report. Having the right enterprise cloud strategy in place, often in a multi cloud environment, also helps companies become a more intelligent business. Companies that master this path have something in common: they create a culture of continuous innovation.

In his presentation, Dilipkumar Khandelwal outlined the latest research and steps companies can take to make innovation a daily work habit by using enterprise cloud computing. He shared examples from companies that have benefited from enterprise cloud computing and took a look into the future of how the cloud helps companies become a more intelligent business.

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Andrew Keys is co-founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum.

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David Linthicum’s On-Demand #Serverless Keynote at @CloudEXPO

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Data center, on-premise, public-cloud, private-cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, IoT, AI, edge, SaaS, PaaS… it’s an availability, security, performance and integration nightmare even for the best of the best IT experts.

Organizations realize the tremendous benefits of everything the digital transformation has to offer. Cloud adoption rates are increasing significantly, and IT budgets are morphing to follow suit. But distributing applications and infrastructure around increases risk, introduces complexity and challenges availability at every turn.

To embrace DX and to come out on top, there are four underlying principles that should guide you. Understanding these four essentials along with their relevance and impact will elevate you to DX Hero status now. Jonathan will provide a high-level overview of these principles and how some of his organization’s clients have embraced them with resounding success.

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Dave Mitchell

An affordable cloud service for small businesses but let down by limited features and weak online help

As a new year dawns, it marks the perfect time to assess the industry landscape. According to the latest note from Synergy Research, 2018 saw the cloud market hit $250 billion (£196bn) globally, with a 32% annual growth.

While plenty of the critical acclaim goes on the public cloud infrastructure side of the house, the analyst firm posited that all market segments had risen comfortably over the past 12 months.

The wider bucket of infrastructure hardware and software saw particularly impressive growth in 2018, with public, private and hybrid cloud. The leading vendors in this space are the usual suspects in terms of network and infrastructure equipment; Dell EMC, Cisco and HPE, with a note for Microsoft and VMware. In terms of software, enterprise SaaS saw a 30% gain, with unified comms as a service (UCaaS) at just over 20%.

IaaS and PaaS however remained the biggest growth area with an almost 50% gain. This would be considered poor fare compared with previous years, but as Synergy itself noted during the most recent round of financial postings, expecting 100% growth off the bat every time would be optimistic. “[This] is just the law of large numbers kicking in,” said chief analyst John Dinsdale at the time. “You cannot keep on growing at 100% when you reach massive scale.”

The leading cloud providers also continued speculating to accumulate in 2019. As figures from November found, hyperscaler capex hit more than $26 billion, with spending up 53% from the first three quarters of 2017. This represented the largest spend – barring anomalies – since records began.

While spending on cloud services first overtook spend on the hardware and software used to build clouds in 2016, the previous two years has seen that gap ‘widen dramatically.’

“In 2018, cloud started to dominate IT spending in some areas, sucking up potential growth opportunities for non-cloud technologies and services,” said Dinsdale. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for both cloud service providers and technology vendors and our latest forecasts show that while market growth rates will inevitably erode due to the sheer scale of the numbers, the overall market will double in size in under four years.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

The cloud is a vital part of any enterprise infrastructure. The convenience of having a database that can be accessed from any location has dramatically improved efficiency within workforces. While many companies had previously been afraid of making the move, as the open nature of the cloud makes it less secure than on-premise solutions, new advances in cloud security have vastly reduced the number of successful attacks. With 2019 here, it is time to look to the future and predict where the cloud is heading.

Increased enterprise spending will make the biggest public cloud providers even bigger

While there are numerous public cloud providers out there, six stand above the rest. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, Alibaba and Oracle are the alphas in the cloud provider space and they will only get stronger throughout 2019. The growth of these providers will come primarily from increased revenue in their business services and SaaS services, as well as from new and powerful third-party apps being brought to their respective market stores. Their growth will have the adverse effect of making them a bigger target for malicious attacks and at least one of them will suffer a major breach because of this. However, it will not be enough to slow down momentum. We predict that by the end of 2019, all six will see an increase in profits.

Cloud-based applications will be forever changed by open-source containers

2018 saw the rise of enterprise container adoption with Kubernetes leading the charge. Twelve months ago, Microsoft stated that adoption of Kubernetes on its Azure service had increased by 10x compared to the year before, matching similar reports in 2017 from Google that showed a 9x increase. The open-source nature of Containers provides companies with a lot of freedom to develop secure, scalable and enterprise-ready applications, such as application load balancing and traffic monitoring tools.

There will be a rise in cloud security vendors embracing Kubernetes and other containers for their new solutions in 2019; this will help push containers into the mainstream for any cloud-based application in the future.

DDoS threats will only continue to increase as companies begin adopting multi-cloud

As the cloud becomes a bigger requirement for companies, we will begin to see many adopt multi-cloud strategies. Unfortunately, in doing so, more entry points for hackers to enter the network will become available.

As we have seen in recent years, those with malicious intent will continue to evolve their DDoS threats in order to bring down companies and accomplish their end-goals, whether it be ransomware, cryptomining or something else. This is to be expected. To counter these, many enterprises will adopt next-gen cloud security tools like convergent firewalls and secure service meshes. As the tools of hackers evolve, so must the tools of the industry.

Cloud load balancing to become the glue that keeps the cloud together

Load balancing technology is not new, but as more companies move to both the public and private cloud it has become increasingly vital. Cloud load balancing is more agile, offers greater efficiency and can be easily used with multi-cloud offerings. As the cloud becomes more complex, companies will be forced to rely more on cloud load balancing until it becomes the most important cloud security tool within a company’s SOC. A big reason why cloud load balancing is a great tool is because it offers a wide visibility of the cloud and allows for greater analytics and insights. In addition, it easily integrates with containers and utilises automation to offer instant security. It also integrates easily with the big service providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS, which makes it available to many.

Conclusion

2018 saw the cloud become a vital part of enterprise infrastructure and 2019 will continue to see it become increasingly mainstream. Many of the fear’s businesses had around the cloud have slowly subsided as next-gen security tools have become more available, with proven track records of preventing DDoS and other malicious attacks. But just as the hackers will continue to evolve, so must the companies who need to keep their data safe.

Having customised, open-source tools and containers will become more important, along with a reliance on cloud load balancing to offer full protection of a company’s cloud offerings, whether it be single, hybrid or multi-cloud.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.