hybrid cloud, Ixia, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Visibility

Ixia launches CloudLens to increase network visibility across cloud environments

Closeup on eyeglasses with focused and blurred landscape view.Ixia has launched its new CloudLens offering, a platform which it claims will increase network visibility across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments for service providers, cloud providers, and enterprise customers.

The new offering will enable customers to gain insight into network traffic in both physical and virtualized environments, using the company’s virtual network taps, packet and application flow filtering. The offering claims to answer the challenge of elastic demands of cloud customers in a multi-tenant self-serve model, deploying scalable traffic monitoring system in a matter of minutes, as opposed to days.

“The CloudLens platform is a true reflection of what Ixia is well recognized for in the industry, which is combining technology innovation with solutions that address real-world network challenges,” said Dennis Cox, Chief Product Officer at Ixia. “We are committed to addressing those challenges, and will continue to innovate, leveraging our years of experience, to deliver unprecedented visibility across all cloud environments.”

CloudLens will also include a number of automation features enabling the virtual taps and analysis tools to automatically change in reaction to demand or failures, without the need for an operator. The platform currently supports OpenStack KVM, VMWare ESXi, and NSX, and is expected to be extended to Microsoft Hyper-V later in the coming months.

Datta, Features, hybrid cloud, SME

How SMEs are benefitting from hybrid cloud architecture in the best of both worlds

Firm handshakeHybrid cloud architecture has been a while maturing, but now offers businesses unparalleled flexibility, ROI and scalability. The smaller the business, the more vital these traits are, making hybrid cloud the number one choice for SMEs in 2016.

It’s been more than two years since Gartner predicted that, by 2017, 50 per cent of enterprises would be using a hybrid of public and private cloud operations. This prediction was based on growing private cloud deployment coupled with interest in hybrid cloud, but a lack of actual uptake – back then in 2013. “Actual deployments [of hybrid cloud] are low, but aspirations are high”, said Gartner at the time.

It’s fair to say that Gartner’s prediction has been borne out, with hybrid cloud services rapidly becoming a given for a whole range of businesses, but perhaps less predictably the value of hybrid is being most felt in the SME sector, where speed, ROI and overall flexibility are most intensely valued. As enterprise data requirements continue to rocket – indeed overall business data volume is growing at a rate of more than 60 per cent annually – it’s not hard to see why this sector is burgeoning.

Data protection is no longer an option

Across the board, from major corporations through to SMEs in particular, there’s now clear recognition that data protection is no longer merely a “nice-to-have”, it’s a basic requirement for doing business. Not being able to access customer, operational or supply-chain data for even short periods can be disastrous, and every minute of downtime impacts on ROI. Critically, losing data permanently threatens to damage operational function, as well as business perception. The latter point is particularly important in terms of business relationships with suppliers and customers that may have taken years to develop, but can be undone in the course of a few hours of unexplained downtime. It’s never been easier to take business elsewhere, so the ability to keep up and running irrespective of hardware failure or an extreme weather event is essential.

Speed and cost benefits combined

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of hybrid cloud technology (a combination of on-premises and off-premises deployment models) is that SMEs are presented with enterprise class IT capabilities at a much lower cost. SMEs that outsource the management of IT services through Managed Service Providers (MSP), pay per seat, for immediate scalability, and what’s more avoid the complexity of managing the same systems in-house. This model also avoids the requirement for capital investment, allowing SMEs to avoid large upfront costs, but still enjoy the benefits – such as data protection in the example of hybrid cloud data backup.

One UK business that saved around £200,000 in lost revenue due to these benefits is Mandarin Stone, a natural stone and tile retailer. Having implemented a hybrid cloud disaster recovery system from Datto the company experienced an overheated main server just months later, but were able to switch operations to a virtualised cloud server in just hours while replacement hardware was setup, in contrast to a previous outage that took days to resolve. “Datto was invaluable,” said Alana Preece, Mandarin Stone’s Financial Director, “and the device paid for itself in that one incident. The investment [in a hybrid cloud solution] was worth it.”

The considerable upside of the hybrid model is that where immediate access to data or services is required, local storage devices can make this possible without any of the delay associated with hauling large datasets down from the cloud. SMEs in particular are affected by bandwidth concerns as well as costs. In the event of a localised hardware failure or loss of a business mobile device, for example, data can be locally restored in just seconds.

Unburden the network for better business

Many hybrid models use network downtime to backup local files to the cloud, lowering the impact on bandwidth during working hours, but also ensuring that there is an off-premises backup in place in the event of a more serious incident such as extreme weather, for example. Of course, this network management isn’t a new idea, but with a hybrid cloud setup it’s much more efficient – for example, in a cloud-only implementation the SMEs server will have an agent or multiple agents running to dedupe, compress and encrypt each backup, using the server’s resources. A local device taking on this workload leaves the main server to deal with the day-to-day business unhindered, and means that backups can be made efficiently as they’re required, then uploaded to the cloud when bandwidth is less in demand.

Of course, since Gartner’s original prediction there’s been considerable consumer uptake of cloud-based backups such as Apple’s iCloud and Google’s Drive, which has de-stigmatised the cloud and driven acceptance and expectations. SME’s have been at the forefront of this revolution, making cloud technology far more widely accepted as being reliable, cost-effective, low-hassle and scalable. The fact that Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 are both largely cloud-based show just how the adoption barriers have fallen since 2013, which makes reassuring SME decision-makers considerably easier for MSPs.

Compliance resolved

Compliance can be particularly onerous for SMEs, especially where customer data is concerned. For example, the global demands of a standard like PCI DSS, or HIPAA (for those with North American operations) demand specific standards of care in terms of data storage, retention and recovery. Hybrid solutions can help smooth this path by providing compliant backup storage off-premises for retention, protect data from corruption and provide a ‘paper trail’ of documentation that establishes a solid data recovery process.

Good news for MSPs

Finally, hybrid cloud offers many benefits for the MSP side of the coin, delivering sustainable recurring revenues, not only via the core backup services themselves, which will tend to grow over time as data volumes increase, but also via additional services. New value-add services might include monitoring the SME’s environment for new backup needs, or periodic business continuity drills, for example, to improve the MSPs customer retention and help their business grow.

Written by Andrew Stuart, Managing Director, EMEA, Datto

 

About Datto

Datto is an innovative provider of comprehensive backup, recovery and business continuity solutions used by thousands of managed service providers worldwide. Datto’s 140+ PB private cloud and family of software and hardware devices provide Total Data Protection everywhere business data lives. Whether your data is on-prem in a physical or virtual server, or in the cloud via SaaS applications, only Datto offers end-to-end recoverability and single-vendor accountability. Founded in 2007 by Austin McChord, Datto is privately held and profitable, with venture backing by General Catalyst Partners. In 2015 McChord was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” ranking of top young entrepreneurs.

Dell, EMC, hybrid cloud, Interviews, Virtustream

Virtustream enters European cloud market place

competitive swimmingWhen looking at the European cloud market ecosystem, most people would be forgiven for not looking much past the three largest holders of market share; AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. But there are alternatives, despite them being less well known. This is the challenge facing Virtustream MD Simon Walsh.

Although as a company Virtustream has been in operation since 2009, the team consider themselves in start-up mode, taking position to pounce on the European market over the company months. The company was acquired by EMC last year, and formed the tech giant’s managed cloud services business, a position which could be seen as enviable by other cloud companies aiming to topple the top three’s firm grasp on the cloud market.

“EMC is the largest storage company in the world,” said Walsh. “And we’re aiming to leverage that position. We’re taking a rifle shot approach to building business in the European markets, but in parallel we’ve partnered with EMC because they own us, and we’ve partnered with Dell because they own EMC. With these relationships, we have access to multiple routes to market, and we plan on leveraging the recognition of companies like EMC and Dell to scale Virtustream rapidly.”

Virtustream is currently one of six EMC Federation companies (EMC2, Pivotal, RSA, VCE, VMWare and Virtustream), and will continue to be an independent brand following the introduction of Dell Technologies, and the subsequent sub-brands, in the coming months. While the brand is relatively unknown in the EMEA and APJ markets, this is not the case in North America where it has a number of certifications for federal government contracts and a number of enterprise customers.

Growth in the European market will firstly utilize the certifications Virtustream has in the US market to provide credibility for public sector organizations in Europe, and secondly, leverage customers who are already bought into the EMC and Dell portfolios.

The new EMC/Dell execs are seemingly learning lessons from Microsoft’s rise to the top of the market segment, as opposed to AWS’, becoming an end-to-end enterprise IT vendor (similar to Microsoft) as opposed to a specialist public cloud company (AWS). While AWS is widely recognised as the cloud leader worldwide, a recent study from JP Morgan will give the new EMC/Dell execs confidence.

The research highlighted 46.9% of the CIOs surveyed highlighted Microsoft as the most critical and indispensable to the future of their IT environment, whereas AWS only accounted for 13%. The all-encompassing portfolio offered by Microsoft (cloud, desktop, server and database etc.) was more appealing than AWS’ offering.

Simon Walsh

Virtustream Managing Director Simon Walsh

Virtustream can offer cloud capabilities across the board, from cloud native to traditional systems of record, and now the team have connected the cloud storage options directly to three EMC platforms in the software. The team are leaning on the idea of trust in the EMC brand, straightforwardness of upgrade and the simple integration between the offerings of all federation businesses, will offer customers a portfolio which can’t be matched in the industry.

“EMC is globally 30% of the storage market, if we go to the installed base and connect these customers to our storage cloud we should be able to scale pretty quickly (on growth of the Virtustream business),” said Walsh. “We may not be number one in the cloud storage market, but I can see us being in the top three for market share within the near future.”

One area the team are targeting in particular is the core business applications. Most enterprise organizations cloud be perceived to have a reluctance and a paranoia to run core business applications in the cloud, though Virtustream believes it has an offering which can counter this trend.

“Yes, I see paranoia, however it is geographically different,” said Walsh. “Europe is behind. Europe is still clinging onto building it themselves or outsourcing. There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing, but in the America’s they are much bolder at adopting cloud.

“Most people have used cloud to date for dev and test or they’ve used it for web front end or scale out systems of engagement, hardly anybody actually has an application which they run their business on in the cloud. It’s either in their own data centre which they run themselves or they’ve outsourced, and they have someone doing application management services. We have a hybrid solution which can change all this.”

The team have combined public cloud attributes of agility and tiered payment, and the outsourcing attributes of a core app, with an SLA and a performance guarantee, to create a hybrid proposition which they claim is unique for the industry. Walsh and his team now face the task of convincing European decision makers there is a feasible option to run core business applications in the cloud.

“The entire world has not shifted to cloud native,” said Walsh. “There is still a substantial amount of money spent by corporations around the world on running core business applications. We have a proposition which can run cloud native but can also run core business applications in the cloud, on demand and on consumption. No-one else in the industry does that. We can run all the systems on the same billing engine, the same cloud management tools and the same application management tools, which gives us a differentiator in the market.”

AWS, Financial Results, hybrid cloud, Managed services, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Rackspace

Rackspace prioritises AWS and Azure partnerships for future growth

Taylor Rhodes

Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace

Rackspace has reported healthy growth for Q1 2016, as the team continues its transition to become managed services provider, leveraging partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $518 million, a year-on-year growth of 9.9%, while profits grew 77.5%. Although the growth of the business over the last 12 months has been viewed as generally positive, industry commentators highlighted the $24 million gain from the divestiture of Jungle Disk, and what could be perceived as a lacklustre outlook for the rest of 2016 has dampened the news. The exec team expects revenues of between $519 million and $524 million for the second quarter.

“First, we saw a strong demand for our expertise and support on the AWS and Microsoft Clouds and for our OpenStack private cloud offer. Collectively, we now serve more than 400 customers on these platforms and our demand is scaling rapidly,” Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace. “From the October launch of our AWS service through the end of April, we’ve been actively marketing with AWS and have signed 187 customers across every firm size, geography, and vertical.”

The transition to a managed cloud services company began a number of years ago with the launch of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support services, though seemingly began making real traction within the industry last year, as the team announced expanded partnerships with Microsoft in July, when Azure public and private cloud infrastructure was incorporated into the offering, and AWS in August. The team also recently announced a new partnership with Cloud Technology Partners, which it believes will increase cloud adoption rates.

The partnerships are also enabling the company to diversify its geographical focus as over 40% of the AWS customers are coming from non-U.S. regions. Rhodes also believes the new capital-light business models employed enables the company to roll-out new offerings worldwide. Previously, new products were rolled out first in the USA, due to capital intensity, and then phased out over time into other regions worldwide, however the new model is claimed to offer Rackspace increased flexibility and agility in bringing new offerings to the market.

The shift in strategic direction is supported by a renewed effort in the marketing department, as Rhodes highlighted campaigns will now be directed towards driving brand awareness and demand generation for the managed cloud services business, specifically the Fanatical Support services offered to AWS and Microsoft Azure customers.

“Our new head of Global Sales and Marketing, Alex Pinchev, started work at the beginning of Q1,” said Rhodes. “He and his team are moving aggressively to shift resources toward our new fast-growing offers while sustaining our core business. They are training more of our sales teams to sell our new offers and are hiring additional specialists in areas of high demand. We advised you last quarter that these sales and marketing efforts will take time to gain full traction, that transition contributed to our slow start to the year”

Efforts for Rackspace on the OpenStack front would also appear to be bearing fruit, with the launch of OpenStack Everywhere, Next Generation Bare Metal Servers and the Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat offering. All three offerings would seemingly demonstrate the company’s drive towards the OpenStack private and hybrid cloud market segments. The team are confident in the growth potential of the OpenStack private cloud market, and highlighted a number of major customers wins were through this aspect of the business.

“Our role as the co-founder of OpenStack has given us unique capabilities in software development, DevOps, continuous integration and deployment, and other key disciplines,” said Rhodes. “Those capabilities provide a major differentiation for us versus other managed services providers as we expand to provide managed cloud services on AWS and the Microsoft Cloud.

“We’ve really seen a tipping point, what really looks like a significant tipping point in the market for OpenStack private clouds in the last six months to nine months. Some of our largest deals that we closed in March were OpenStack private cloud deals and some of the largest deals that we have in our pipeline today are OpenStack private cloud deal. So, really that’s the traction that we’re seeing.”

agility, Business Transformation, Digital Transformation, EMC, Enterprise IT, Etisalat, News & Analysis, Telco Cloud

What does business transformation mean to you – view from EMC, Etisalat and Partner’s Healthcare

Business Transformation Pic

EMC’s President of Global Sales and Customer Operations Bill Scannell (Right), was joined by EMC customers John Grieco, VP of Information Technology at Partner’s Healthcare (Middle) and Etisalat Egypt CIO Khalid Almasouri (Left)

Speaking at EMC World, EMC’s President of Global Sales and Customer Operations Bill Scannell, was joined by EMC customers John Grieco, VP of Information Technology at Partner’s Healthcare and Etisalat Egypt CIO Khalid Almasouri to discuss the role of business transformation in the digital era.

Business transformation as a term has been used by the vast majority of the industry, though the wide variety of definitions of the buzzword has created some complications. What is generally accepted is there are few companies who would be able to compete with the digitally enabled, cloud-orientated new breed of organizations who have shaken the industry in recent years. Business transformation is a necessity for those organizations who do not want to head the same direction as Blockbuster.

“IT needs to be a business enabler not an obstacle to our employees,” said Grieco. “We need to make sure our people are able to do what they do best, and our IT systems do not hinder what they want to on a day-to-day basis.”

For Grieco and Partner’s Healthcare, business transformation is the process to ensure they are serving their customers as effectively as possible. Partner’s Healthcare is a Boston-based non-profit hospital and physicians network, the largest private employer and the biggest healthcare provider in the Boston metropolitan area, serving more than a third of the population. Grieco’s belief is business transformation will enable the team to create an organization which can serve its customers faster and safer.

“We want to be agile, we want to be nimble and we want to move,” said Grieco. “We want an enterprise look and feel, but the ability to perform like an SME. We want data to be accessible, and we want that accessibility to be fast. We want to drive down the cost of IT, and put that money back into the business. We want to reduce the complexity of the network, and improve its accessibility to the rest of the business. This is what business transformation means to us.”

While cloud and the digital era for Partner’s Healthcare presents an opportunity to better serve customers, it is very much a different story for Etisalat. The digital era has created a new environment which has challenged the telecommunications industry, and created a new level of competition for telcos.

The newly-empowered OTT brands are now stealing market share from the telco’s, offering services which are gradually eroding the profit margins of these companies. Business transformation for the telcos is not so much an opportunity to be better, but more a necessity to survive and more readily compete with technologies such as WhatsApp.

Business Transformation Pic 2

EMC’s President of Global Sales and Customer Operations Bill Scannell

“Business transformation is a change in business mentality,” said Khalid Almansouri, CIO at Etisalat Egypt. “IT used to be the backbone of the company, it used to be about keeping the lights on, but now the CIO has to be outside the IT department. The new breed of CIO needs to be throughout the business to create new opportunities by having a conversation with other departments to understand how technology can answer the challenges which are thrown out by the digital era.”

The rise of OTT’s will not mean the end of telco’s, but should these organizations want to continue to report revenues which shareholders have become accustomed to, there is a requirement for the business to be more agile, to deliver a new experience and also deliver new, innovative products, as fast (if not faster) and cheaper than the OTT’s. Transforming the business for the digital era is critical to achieve these goals.

“We used to know who are competitors were,” said Almansouri. “They were Orange or Vodafone and they were based in the same region as us. They had the same infrastructure, they had the same billing system, so we could compete.

“But now we’re competing with OTT’s who are on the other side of the world. They are more agile and are taking our market share. Business transformation makes us an organization which can compete with these organizations.”

Irrelevant of what the reasoning for business transformation, it is an objective for a vast number of organizations around the world. The introduction of cloud computing has created a horde of cloud native organizations who are disrupting the ecosystem. To answer the call-to-arms traditional business has had to transform to a digital-enabled organization. For EMC, this begins with the modern data centre.

“The first step in building a hybrid cloud or native cloud infrastructure is having a modern data centre,” said Scannell. “To have a modern data centre, you have to have a modern infrastructure. And to have a modern infrastructure you have to have a modern architecture. Scalable infrastructure is important. All flash is important. Software defined everything and cloud-enabled are important. That is how you achieve the modern business and drive digital transformation.”

Customer Spotlight, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Sony Vegas Pro

Customer Story: Jeff, Parallels, & Sony Vegas Pro!

Jeff has been running Parallels Desktop customer since 2010. Initially purchasing version 6, Jeff has upgraded through every version and is now happily running Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac. Sony Vegas Pro Jeff uses Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac to run Windows on his home Mac. He is a musician and depends on a video processing […]

The post Customer Story: Jeff, Parallels, & Sony Vegas Pro! appeared first on Parallels Blog.

News, Services, Storage

China Shuts Down Cloud Storage Services for Pornographic Content

“Internet companies only provide the technology to build cyberspaces for online storage, but in the end, these spaces belong to China’s online territory and, hence, fall within the government’s jurisdiction,” Qin An, a cyber security expert at the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy. China has defined Cloud Storage as a territory of the Chinese government and therefore has the jurisdiction to regulate the content stored within Clouds, allowing for immense censorship.

Pornographic content is widespread on cloud services, with users uploading videos and then selling them. The government believes it should take necessary action to halt this “immoral” behavior.

President Xi Jinping has ignited a moral campaign that aims to tackle corruption within the country’s sprawling administration as well as crackdown on inappropriate online content. After the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications launched a campaign in March “to address the emerging practice of sharing and hosting pornography via cloud storage services.” Many companies cloud storage services have been shut down. The list includes interne giants Sina, Tencent and Kingsoft as well as DBank and Alibaba.

Alibaba announced in March a complete closure of the service but dates have not yet been specified. Sina soon followed on April 25 with their announcement to close cloud services. DBank has become the sixth company to close or reduce operations after this crackdown. DBank will close all services and delete all data on July 1st, 2016. . Sina and Xunlei, which operate Vdisk andKuaiPan storage services respectively, announced closure of free accounts on June 30.

Homemade videos may still be created and uploaded to personal accounts as long as the content is treated as private information.

Throughout the massive crackdown, few companies, such as search engine Baidu and Internet company Qihoo360, have no plans to suspend any operations.

This is not the first of mass censorship in China, as Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iTunes, Walt Disney’s DisneyLife services, and many online streaming shows have been blolcked in China. The Chinese government has expanded the word pornography to include any material it finds to be objectionable, such as political criticism. What will be censored next?

 

Comments:

Xie Yongjiang, deputy director of the Institute of Internet Governance and Law at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications: “The government has the right to supervise and intercept illegal information spread online, while companies are also obliged to prevent such information from being uploaded online in the first place by using filtration technology.”

The post China Shuts Down Cloud Storage Services for Pornographic Content appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Uncategorized

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley ‘Call for Papers’ Now Open | @CloudExpo #Cloud

The 19th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo, to be held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, brings together Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

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Uncategorized

Savvy Digital Visionaries See Beyond Nearby Clouds | @CloudExpo #Cloud

While the decisive CEOs have a digital transformation agenda, those companies executing plans to re-imagine their business models are in the minority. And yet, the early-adopters now using cloud computing are enabled to respond quickly to changing market conditions. In contrast, the laggards are undecided and risk falling further behind.
This is a global phenomena, where the industry and local market leaders are able to enact their transition with limited interference or threats from more traditional competitors. Just consider the current status-quo within the United Kingdom, as an example.

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