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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Google has announced that its cloud tensor processing unit (TPU) chips are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform, aimed at speeding and scaling up specific machine learning workloads.

The company claims that using the new chips will help train business-critical machine learning models in hours rather than days or weeks. The units will utilise TensorFlow, the open source machine learning framework, with up to 180 teraflops of floating point performance – in other words, being capable of handling 180 trillion floating point calculations each second – and 64 GB of high-bandwidth memory onto a single board.

According to a blog post from John Barrus, product manager for cloud TPUs at Google Cloud, and Zak Stone, product manager for TensorFlow and cloud TPUs, the units are available in ‘limited quantities’ today with usage billed by the second at a rate of $6.50 USD per cloud TPU per hour.

As ever, Google has put together various customers exhorting the benefits of the new product. Alfred Spector, chief technology officer at investment provider Two Sigma, said the Google Cloud TPUs were ‘an example of innovative, rapidly evolving technology to support deep learning.’

“We made a decision to focus our deep learning research on the cloud for many reasons, but mostly to gain access to the latest machine learning infrastructure,” said Spector. “Using Cloud TPUs instead of clusters of other accelerators has allowed us to focus on building our models without being distracted by the need to manage the complexity of cluster communication patterns.”

“Here at Google Cloud, we want to provide customers with the best cloud for every ML workload and will offer a variety of high-performance CPUs (including Intel Skylake) and GPUs (including NVIDIA’s Tesla V100) alongside Cloud TPUs,” Barrus and Stone wrote.

You can find out more about the Cloud TPU machine learning accelerators here.

We are given a desktop platform with Java 8 or Java 9 installed and seek to find a way to deploy high-performance Java applications that use Java 3D and/or Jogl without having to run an installer. We are subject to the constraint that the applications be signed and deployed so that they can be run in a trusted environment (i.e., outside of the sandbox). Further, we seek to do this in a way that does not depend on bundling a JRE with our applications, as this makes downloads and installations rather long.

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Guided by senior executive goals for digital transformation, more organizations are increasing their use of cloud computing technologies. The typical multi-cloud mix includes a blend of public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT services. Finding the best-fit service mix starts with the business requirements.

The latest Global Cloud Index (GCI) 2016-2021 from Cisco focuses on the worldwide market outlook for enterprise data centre virtualization and cloud computing services. Today's digital business is enabled by Hybrid IT infrastructure that supports the deployment of cloud-based solutions.

Driven by the surging enthusiasm for digital reinvention projects, data centre traffic is growing fast. The market study authors forecast global cloud data centre traffic will reach 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021 — that's up from 6.0 ZB per year in 2016.

Globally, cloud data centre traffic will represent 95 percent of total data centre traffic by 2021, compared to 88 percent in 2016.

Additionally, according to the Cisco assessment, the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications requires scalable server and storage solutions to accommodate new and expanding data centre demands.

By 2021, Cisco expects IoT connections to reach 13.7 billion — that's up from 5.8 billion in 2016.

Hyperscale cloud data centre growth

By 2021 there will be 628 hyperscale data centres globally, compared to 338 in 2016 — that's 1.9-fold growth or near doubling over the forecast period. By 2021, hyperscale data centres will support:

• 53 percent of all data centre servers (27 percent in 2016)
• 69 percent of all data centre processing power (41 percent in 2016)
• 65 percent of all data stored in data centres (51 percent in 2016)
• 55 percent of all data centre traffic (39 percent in 2016)

Data centre virtualization and cloud growth

By 2021, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centres. In contrast, 6 percent will be processed by traditional IT data centres.

Overall data centre workloads and compute instances will more than double (2.3-fold) from 2016 to 2021; however, cloud workloads and compute instances will nearly triple (2.7-fold) over the same period.

The workload and compute instance density for cloud data centres was 8.8 in 2016 and will grow to 13.2 by 2021. Comparatively, for traditional data centres, workload and compute instance density was 2.4 in 2016 and will grow to 3.8 by 2021.

Stored data growth fuelled by big data and IoT

Globally, the data stored in data centres will nearly quintuple by 2021 to reach 1.3 ZB by 2021, up 4.6-fold (a CAGR of 36 percent) from 286 EB in 2016.

Big data will reach 403 exabytes (EB) by 2021, up almost 8-fold from 25 EB in 2016. Big data will represent 30 percent of data stored in data centres by 2021, up from 18 percent in 2016.

The amount of data stored on devices will be 4.5 times higher than data stored in data centres, at 5.9 ZB by 2021.

Driven largely by IoT, the total amount of data created (and not necessarily stored) by any device will reach 847 ZB per year by 2021, up from 218 ZB per year in 2016. Data created is two orders of magnitude higher than data stored.

Apps contribute to rise of global data centre traffic

– By 2021, big data will account for 20 percent (2.5 ZB annual, 209 EB monthly) of traffic within data centres, compared to 12 percent (593 EB annual, 49 EB monthly) in 2016.

– By 2021, video streaming will account for 10 percent of traffic within data centres, compared to 9 percent in 2016.

– By 2021, video will account for 85 percent of traffic from data centres to end users, compared to 78 percent in 2016.

– By 2021, search will account for 20 percent of traffic within data centres by 2021, compared to 28 percent in 2016.

– By 2021, social networking will account for 22 percent of traffic within data centres, compared to 20 percent in 2016

SaaS is still the most popular cloud service model

By 2021, 75 percent (402 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be SaaS workloads and compute instances, up from 71 percent (141 million) in 2016. (23 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021).

By 2021, 16 percent (85 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be IaaS workloads and compute instances, down from 21 percent (42 million) in 2016. (15 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021).

By 2021, 9 percent (46 million) of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be PaaS workloads and compute instances, up from 8 percent (16 million) in 2016. (23 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021).