The emerging Internet of Everything creates tremendous new opportunities for customer engagement and business model innovation. However, enterprises must overcome a number of critical challenges to bring these new solutions to market.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Martin, CTO/CIO at nfrastructure, outlined these key challenges and recommended approaches for overcoming them to achieve speed and agility in the design, development and implementation of Internet of Everything solutions within your organization.

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New research released by Turbonomic and Verizon has revealed several key reasons for businesses wanting to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, from business continuity to resilience – yet cost is still a burning issue.

The study, which polled 1,821 IT decision makers, saw the need for business continuity as the most important business driver for adoption of multi-cloud, cited by 77% of respondents, ahead of increased resilience (74%), and reduction of operational expenditure (70%) and capital expenditure (69%). However, with regard to selecting vendors, 70% said pricing was the primary consideration, ahead of 51% who opted for service level agreements or quality of service.

More than four in five organisations identified at least 12 different management issues they were facing including balancing performance and cost (90%), delivering IT services to the appropriate budget (89%), and ensuring consistent application performance (86%).

Yet these aren’t the only challenges faced. 81% of those polled said choosing the right workloads for the right clouds is an issue, while 84% had problems with evaluating cloud vendors to meet business and technical requirements.

Charles Crouchman, CTO at Turbonomic – formerly VMTurbo – argued the one factor which will change the mindset of organisations who look at cloud as cost first is ‘experience.’

“As the cloud moves from shadow IT to enterprise IT, the costs will become more transparent – in particular, the cost of assuring that your end users are getting what they expect from your service or brand,” he told CloudTech. “Smart companies understand that customer delight is the path to success – and focusing solely on cost is not a recipe for assuring customers are delighted with your service.”

Crouchman added that he wasn’t surprised by the main survey result – that organisations are facing so many management challenges – but that organisations need to look at cost versus performance from a different perspective. “The reality is that while price and cost impact your CFO and company, performance impacts your customer,” he said. “Without them you don’t have revenue, so you have to focus on all of the trade-offs.

“The reality of the impact poor performance or downtime has on your customer means that you will pay for performance no matter what – and it is in each cloud’s economic interest for you to pay as much as possible.

“So CIOs who believe that the cloud will invariably reduce CapEx or OpEx costs will soon face the reality of cloud bills that are larger than they expected,” Crouchman added.

Earlier this month, Google announced the acquisition of cloud commerce platform provider Orbitera, ostensibly with multi-cloud strategy in mind.

Modern organizations face great challenges as they embrace innovation and integrate new tools and services. They begin to mature and move away from the complacency of maintaining traditional technologies and systems that only solve individual, siloed problems and work “well enough.” In order to build…

The post Gearing up for Digital Transformation appeared first on PagerDuty.

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US cloud provider Datapipe has announced it is acquiring Britain-based managed cloud firm and AWS partner Adapt in an attempt to expand the firm’s European presence.

The firms took the unusual step of issuing two separate press releases to cover the same news. From the Adapt side, the company noted the move to Datapipe was a ‘non-disruptive addition’ due to the firm’s similar roadmaps and propositions.

“Adapt and Datapipe both have cultures that focus on proactive, high touch customer service and a commitment to customer-specific solutions designed to meet clients’ individual business challenges,” said Robb Allen, Datapipe CEO. “Our similar approach to guiding clients on their cloud journey makes the acquisition a natural fit for us and will increase our scale and service capabilities in the United Kingdom, and the broader European market.”

Looking at the acquisition in a wider context, however, it shows demand for UK tech businesses in a post-Brexit landscape. Recent research and analysis has been less than kind to Blighty after the referendum vote to leave the European Union in June. A note from consulting firm BroadGroup earlier this month argued that while demand for European data centre space continues to rise, Brexit could send UK ambitions off-kilter, although Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently confirmed its plans for a UK data centre remain on track.

It was a similar story from analyst house IDC in July, praising EMEA infrastructure but warning of a UK downturn. This facet was inferred by Adapt CEO Stewart Smythe. “We are seeing emerging customer requirements for a tactical and strategic presence overseas, so it makes sense for us to advance the UK’s capability in a global market rather than create more bulky domestic organisations,” he said.

“UK-only consolidations in our space can get very messy and can be short-sighted. We have chosen a far more exciting path.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Cloud services have been able to store customers’ data for many years now, but the number of prospective clients for several vendors has recently dramatically increased.

Back in late June, the announcement was made that three vendors had received special certifications from the federal government, allowing them to store sensitive data that the government had on hand. Two of those providers are among the most popular within the cloud market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, while the third is CSRA’s ARC-P IaaS, a vendor that might not be as universally known as the others but still carries enough weight for those in the know. The news was certainly noteworthy for those providers, but it also has tremendous implications for federal agencies as well as the cloud market as a whole.

The federal government is no stranger to storing data using other cloud vendors. The majority of cloud providers knew this early on and even provided special services specifically tailored for government needs. Back in 2011, for example, Amazon launched its AWS GovCloud. Microsoft also started a similar service. The idea was for government agencies to use the cloud to store data of various types. Thousands of government customers quickly hopped on board with the idea, but as helpful as the service was, the most sensitive information the government had still couldn’t be placed on the cloud, at least not until rigorous security standards were met.

A newly created list of requirements was made under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) called the High Baseline. It contains more than 400 standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that cloud providers would have to meet in order to receive certification allowing it to store sensitive government data. That’s been the goal providers like Amazon and Microsoft have been working toward – being able to qualify for what would be a new influx of government customers. Those providers could already store about half of what the federal government’s IT spends on information, but the other half could be opened to them if their security standards were raised. Based off the announcement, the government says the three named vendors have cleared the bar.

So what types of data will the government be able to store in the cloud? The announcement states that the data in question is considered highly sensitive but unclassified. This includes but is not limited to things like financial data from agencies, patient medical records – likely from healthcare programs run by the government – and even law enforcement data. Most data of this sort is considered of high importance if its leak or theft were to be a great detriment to an agency’s operations, clients, resources, or employees.

The announcement is certainly big news for government agencies as being able to store government data securely will make their jobs much easier. But that’s not the only area that will benefit greatly. The cloud market itself stands to gain quite a bit from the news. For many years, as the cloud has picked up steam and grown in popularity, those organisations that have been reluctant to transition to cloud services have often cited concerns over cloud security.

It’s not easy to hand over potentially sensitive information to a third party, and many executives wanted to know their data would be in good hands. Cloud providers have answered many of those concerns with greater attention being placed on security improvements, but doubts persisted among businesses of all types. With the news that the federal government is willing to trust some cloud providers with highly sensitive data, it shows a great degree of confidence being placed on vendors’ ability to protect information. This can lead to more companies turning to the cloud for flash storage needs.

Security standards from the government have now been met by some of the most popular cloud providers, allowing them to house sensitive government data. With the standards established, we may see other providers work hard to improve their own security so that government agencies can consider them for data storage purposes. Considering how competitive the cloud market is, it would be a wise move for providers to ensure they can work with as many clients as possible.

Read more: AWS and Microsoft get FedRAMP approval for sensitive cloud data

Data is the fuel that drives the machine learning algorithmic engines and ultimately provides the business value.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Ed Featherston, a director and senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting, will discuss the key considerations around quality, volume, timeliness, and pedigree that must be dealt with in order to properly fuel that engine.

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