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Enterprise data centre provider Aegis Data argues in its latest note that utilising artificial intelligence (AI) could be key in winning the battle for sustainable data centres.

“There’s no escaping the reality that as more connected devices and technology trends sweep the market, more demands will be placed on the data centre to provide the high-powered servers and cooling systems required,” said Greg McCulloch, CEO of Aegis. “But in the pursuit of guaranteeing performance, it is having an accumulative effect on the global share of data centre emissions… it’s not an understatement that the industry needs to take immediate action and AI may just be the solution in order to help achieve more sustainable results.”

For data centre providers, PUE (power usage effectiveness) figures have traditionally been the name of the game for sustainability, dividing energy for the whole facility by the energy for the facility’s IT equipment and aiming for an ideal score of 1.0.

Back in April 2015 this reporter attended the opening of a new Rackspace data centre (below) in West Crawley, which had an impressive 1.15 PUE rating; the average was nearer 1.7 with Rackspace admitting themselves their target was 1.25. The data centre utilised other natural benefits, including cooling using natural air – a feature that was tailor made for the UK – while the design was donated to the Open Compute Project.

Picture credit: Rackspace

It was pretty impressive stuff all round. Yet not everyone agrees that PUE is the way forward. Professor Ian Bitterlin, chair of the British Computer Society’s data centre group on server lifecycle, told E&T last year that “improving server effectiveness is the only way to improve data centre effectiveness”, and that people are erroneously putting PUE as a data centre ‘goodness’ metric.

As far as Aegis is concerned, the work Google is undertaking by putting its DeepMind technology in its data centres – and experiencing a 15% energy efficiency improvement in the process – is on the right lines, but not without its flaws. “[AI is] a technology that’s very much in its infancy, and if it is to overtake human interaction in the data centre, then it must be rigorously researched and tested to guarantee performance,” said McCulloch. “But once this hurdle is overcome, AI has the ability to provide a comprehensive visualisation, automation and monitoring process that can envision the necessary power, cooling and energy requirements needed.

“With the wide range of operations that occur in a data centre, the ability to eliminate human error and have an ‘always on’ approach will go a long way in helping reduce energy consumption,” added McCulloch.

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Opinion The Internet of Things (IoT) is well and truly upon us – and will clearly be even more prevalent in the future. Today, IoT is already branching out into commercial networks as well as enterprise applications. Smart devices are becoming more commonplace in our households with everyday appliances now able to communicate with the internet to help our lives to run more smoothly and interconnected devices are now essential tools in our working lives as well. This is all fantastic news – right?

While it’s easy to get excited about all the new gadgets that the era of the IoT has delivered, it is important to take a step back from all the excitement and talk about security.

Millions of people across the globe are connecting with these devices and sharing valuable data. However, the potential misuse of this data still remains fairly well hidden, disguised under IoT’s novelty halo effect. Infosecurity experts have long warned that IoT devices are set to be a security nightmare as they are often deployed with little or no consideration for security. The question is: are enough people aware of this and are the right security measures being taken – particularly by organisations that need to protect business critical and sensitive data? Recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks such as that experienced by the DNS provider, Dyn – which made it impossible to access the likes of Twitter, Amazon and Netflix – should be a serious wakeup call.

In its early days, the World Wide Web brought with it little protection from misuse. This, of course, generated consumer distrust, consequently slowing down initial e-commerce efforts. But, if we fast-forward to the present day, it is now the case that e-commerce represents around 15% of all retail sales in the UK, with an expected £5million to be spent online this Black Friday in the UK alone. 

This is in no doubt due to the fact that today data encryption and other security measures are simply assumed. People no longer fear sending their credit card information over the wire. As a result, security issues for the most part are kept in the background. It almost seems as though we are in a cycle in which consumers and organisations blindly trust companies with their valuable data and it is only when a case of known and reported intrusions arises that action is taken and data security is examined.

Whether it is the IoT or the cloud, companies need to begin using security technologies and procedures that have already proven to be reliable

This, in some respects, also echoes the initial response to the cloud, which saw low user adoption for the first few years due to security worries around the security of the data being stored offsite. Compare that to the beginning of this year when the UK Cloud adoption rate climbed to 84% according to the Cloud Industry Forum.

It has been found that most of the IoT devices that have been hacked to date have had default usernames and passwords, and at no point had the manufacturers prompted users to change these. Increasingly, hackers are able to use malware software to scour the web for devices that have basic security and detect vulnerabilities. This enables the hackers to upload malicious code so that the devices can be used to attack a targeted website.

What is really worrying is that the owners of the IoT devices are usually unaware of the attack. This is because once a device has been hijacked it can be impossible to tell as they often continue to work exactly as normal. Issues will then begin to occur behind the scenes when the compromised system is subsequently put on the same network as personal computers, corporate servers and even confidential government data.

The main issue is, without knowing which devices exchange data within a specific network or the internet as a whole, there is no way to develop an adequate security strategy. In theory, every single device that is being added to a network needs to be evaluated, but this is just as painstaking as it sounds.

Whether it is the IoT or the cloud, companies need to begin using security technologies and procedures that have already been proven to be reliable. This means applying on-premise levels of IT security to cloud workloads. For example, two-factor authentication, role-based access control, encryption, and vulnerability scanning can enable a protective shield for the cloud to scan all incoming and outgoing data for malicious code, regardless of the device being used. The right level of security technologies embedded into the cloud platform allows companies to gain control of all web-based traffic in order to actively manage which communications should be permitted and which should be blocked.

Recent high profile cyber attacks and, increasingly, ransomware threats have spurred a long overdue discussion about the gaps in IoT security.  Unless the security side of IoT is sorted out, it could hold back wider adoption of the technology. Early adopters beware; the best advice is to follow the data. Know how the company behind your latest gadgets and interconnected devices handles security and ensure that any cloud provider is able to provide you with the reports and ongoing visibility that will enable security settings to be managed and maintained. 

The 2017 procurement landscape has its own impressive retinue of decision bots, automated processes, and data-driven insights.
The next BriefingsDirect technology innovation thought leadership discussion explores how rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are poised to reshape procurement — like a fast-forwarding to a once-fanciful vision of the future.

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(c)iStock.com/Valerie Loiseleux

IBM has announced it is to add four new cloud data centres in the UK, tripling its capacity and aiming to keep up with client demand.

The announcement comes almost two months to the day since the Armonk giant committed to a cloud data centre in Norway citing rising demand in the Nordics, and one day after eCommerce behemoth Alibaba launched its global cloud plan, opening data centres in Australia, Germany, Japan, and the Middle East.

IBM said its key tenet for the new data centres was ‘cognitive intelligence’; in other words, utilising artificial intelligence for better business decisions, and utilising the capabilities of Watson. Airline TUI was a new customer announced by the company, with travel operator Thomson, part of the TUI Group, trialling a new search chatbot which leverages Watson and gives real-time results on travel destinations and holiday enquiries.

Picture credit: “IBM’s global cloud data center footprint“, by “ibmphoto24“, used under CC BY NC ND

IBM now has a global network of 52 data centres, with 16 across Europe overall and the UK contingent up to six, as a recently published graphic (above) notes. The first new facility will open in Farnham, Surrey, in December, with the rest opening next year.

“By adding four new cloud data centres in the UK, IBM is giving local businesses an easy route to the cloud, helping them quickly innovate and respond to market demands,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud in a statement. “IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas, offering clients higher value cloud data services such as Watson and blockchain running on our cloud infrastructure that delivers world class scalability, performance and security.”

The company’s list of new and existing customers mentioned in the press materials had a particular focus on retail and a nod towards Black Friday on November 25. Alongside TUI, Boots, Dixons, Shop Direct, and Travis Perkins were also cited.

Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, is co-located with the 20th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. @ThingsExpo New York Call for Papers is now open.

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• Deutsche Bank estimates Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a $750M revenue run-rate estimate today.
• The combined revenues of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP are still less than $15B for a market penetration of just 1%-2% of the Total Available Market (TAM).
• During the 2Q16 call, Google called out cloud as the primary driver of the re-accelerating growth for Licensing and Other revenue, the first time the business has been called out in pole position.
• Recent Orbitera and Apigee acquisitions underscore Google’s new focus and aggressiveness to grow GCP. Google has spent $1B+ on Cloud M&A over the past 12 months.
• Deutsche Bank predicts GCP is preparing a series of new product announcements in September to strengthen their customer-facing roadmap further.

These and other insights are from Deutsche Bank Markets Research study, Google Getting More Aggressive In The Cloud, (client access) published 8 September 2016 by Ross Sandler Karl Keirstead, Deepak Mathivanan, Aki Aggarwal and Taylor McGinnis. Deutsche Bank found that Google is investing heavier in the cloud, making a financial commitment with over $1bn in acquisitions in the past year including the recent Apigee deal. The study is based on interviews Deutsche Bank contacted with channel partners, prospects, partners, and customers. Despite the renewed focus on growth, Deutsche Bank predicts that GCP would continue to trail AWS and Microsoft Azure for the foreseeable future.

Key takeaways of the Deutsche Bank Markets Research survey include the following:

• Deutsche Bank defines the Total Available Market (TAM) enterprise IT spend in nine categories that together account for over a $1T TAM. Deutsche Bank defines the enterprise IT spending market by combining storage, network equipment, infrastructure software, IT outsourcing and support, data management software, BI/analytics, application software and consulting Deutsche Bank sees AWS make significant progress across a wide spectrum of their taxonomy categories.

• GCP new product launches are concentrating on machine learning, data analytics and security, including data encryption and identity and access management. Google’s aggressiveness regarding the cloud is most visible from their new service announcements shown in the table below.  Recent announcements include SQL Server Images, where customers can now natively spin up Microsoft database instances on GCP, akin to AWS RDS for SQL Server. GCP also announced a second generation version of Cloud SQL, its cloud-hosted alternative to MySQL and AWS Aurora. While all of these announcements provide GCP with greater potential to compete against AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google’s two larger competitors have formidable momentum in enterprises.

• Aggressive build-out of global infrastructure locations continues. Google announced during their 4Q15 earnings call they would build 12 new regions in 2016 and 2017. Of the 12 new planned GCP regions, the US Western region in Oregon opened in July 2016, and Google has said that the new Tokyo region will be available later this year, leaving ten more regions to be added in 2017.

• Google continues to believe in the importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Deutsche Bank interviews with GCP customers confirmed interest in using machine learning and artificial intelligence on the cloud. Customers also perceive GCP is well ahead of AWS and Azure in this regard.

• Google is quickly hiring enterprise sales reps in an attempt to close the sales gap between themselves and AWS & Microsoft Azure. Deutsche Bank found that Google has been “hiring very aggressively” to scale its enterprise sales rep capacity and also retrofitting existing sales reps from elsewhere in Google into GCP.

• GCP is gaining share rapidly within the startup community. Deutsche Bank spoke with customers who estimated that 25% startups are using GCP today (with 75% on AWS), while another estimated the ratio to be 20%/80%. While both agreed that a couple of years ago only 10% of startups were using GCP (with 90% using AWS). During the GCP NEXT Asia-Pacific keynote earlier this month Google disclosed that Snapchat “is one of our largest customers,” making up to 2 million queries per second and consuming more Google bandwidth than any other organization except for YouTube.

• Recent Orbitera and Apigee acquisitions underscore Google’s new focus and aggressiveness to grow GCP. Last month Google acquired Orbitera, a small cloud commerce platform. Orbitera simplifies the buying and selling of cloud-based software by providing vendors with packaging and provisioning, billing, and marketplace solutions on AWS and Azure. Earlier this month Google acquired Apigee for $625M, which is 5.2x Apigee’s FY17e revenues of $120M. Apigee is expected to grow by 30%-35% in The company focuses on larger enterprises (Walgreens, Nike, Target, AT&T) and despite an ongoing mix shift to the cloud or SaaS model, it still has a legacy on-premise license/maintenance business.

• Google is very focused on building relationships with all systems integration (SI) firms but that building out a GCP channel is proving to be challenging. Deutsche Bank believes that Microsoft is also finding it tough to build out its Azure channel, in part because many traditional partners and resellers struggle with how they can monetize Azure, given its different price points and the lower services attach rate. 

With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing IoT strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @ThingsExpo 2016 in New York. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is as “IoT-Ready” as it can be! Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, is co-located with 20th Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices – computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors – connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

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