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How the boardroom is becoming the key driver of cloud adoption

(c)iStock.com/letty17

Three in five (61%) cloud migration projects are driven by business leaders, according to the latest research from Rackspace and Vanson Bourne.

The study, which polled 250 IT decision makers and 250 business leaders throughout October, showed plenty of boardroom-centric concerns topping the list for driving cloud adoption. The most popular motivation for migrating to the cloud was reducing IT cost (61%), followed by increased organisational resilience (50%), improved security (38%) and increased agility (38%).

Yet the research also argues a disparity between the boardroom and the server room. Only a third (33%) of IT decision makers polled said they are highly experienced with cloud-based infrastructure, with more than half admitting they looked to a third party for support.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but Rackspace naturally argues specialist support is key to freeing up employee backlog. With support, businesses were more able to focus on streamlining operations (49%) and making sure operational models fit (48%), while without support businesses focused on making sure they have the right tools (44%) and making sure they have the right skills (42%).

More than half (58%) of those polled said their objectives had been completely met by moving to the cloud, while almost nine in 10 (88%) respondents said their organisation’s business goals were in some way met. 53% of the companies in the survey had used third party support.

“A move to the cloud is now an organisation-wide business activity rather than simply a function of the IT department,” said Darren Norfolk, Rackspace UK managing director. “Whether business leaders understand the practicalities of a cloud migration project or not, there appears to be broad acceptance that it is a ‘platform play’ that they can use to innovate and grow.

“Increased communication across all levels of the business will create new opportunities for the cloud to have a direct impact on the bottom line,” he added.

Recent research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) found that overall cloud adoption rate in the UK is now at 84%, with almost four in five (78%) of cloud users having adopted two or more cloud services. Norfolk argues that currently “fewer questions are being asked but plenty is being delivered” in terms of adoption.

News

Ovum Cloud Security

Tim Jennings, an Ovum analyst, has declared that although there are many fears surrounding the security of the cloud, the increasing number of data breaches is more likely to influence enterprise transition to the cloud. This trend exemplifies the increasing level of maturity of the cloud environment. Jennings commented in a blog,” “Given that data security and privacy concerns have been an inhibitor during the early stages of cloud adoption, it is somewhat ironic that the continued spate of high-profile customer data breaches is likely to push more enterprises toward cloud services. One can envisage, therefore, pointed conversations within boardrooms as CIOs and chief security officers are questioned about the likelihood of their organizations being the next to suffer reputational damage through the exposure of customer data. Many organizations will conclude that using the expertise of a third party is a more reliable approach than depending on in-house resources.”

To a certain extent, some degree of vulnerability will always be prevalent. Jennings added, “Many have been like rabbits caught in the headlights, seemingly having little insight into the root cause of the failure, the extent of the consequences, or the actions required for remediation.”

Outsourcing to modern cloud providers appears to be the logical move. Cloud providers have invested large amounts of money into the security sector, covering areas from the physical security of a center to encryption of customer data and advanced security intelligence.

While it is unrealistic for large companies to replicate this sophisticated cloud environments created by experts, adopting a public cloud environment is not always safer. “It may be that enterprises prefer to use either an on premise or virtual private cloud, while still taking advantage of a specialist provider’s management and security capabilities. Nor does it mean that the responsibility for security and customer data passes away from the enterprise—even though the delivery of these capabilities is in the hands of the third party, governance and control must be retained in-house.”

The post Ovum Cloud Security appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Uncategorized

Network-Aware Orchestration: The Next Level of SD-WAN By @SDietric | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Enterprise networks have become complex. They were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. Configuration modifications were rare, and manual or semi-automated processes together with strict change control procedures were enough to maintain reliability and consistent service levels across the organization.
Business needs have shifted dramatically. The adoption of cloud services, business application-focused requirements and evolving security policies require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. The common approach of either manually performing changes necessary or simply replacing the complete device configuration, rebooting and hoping it will function, creates unacceptable risks and potential network interruptions. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks through leveraging existing capabilities to optimize performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.

read more

API, Linux Foundation, News & Analysis, Open Source, smart building

Linux Foundation wants to extend Swagger in connected buildings

smart cityMembers of the Linux Foundation have met in San Francisco to push its newly announced Open API initiative. The collective want to harmonise efforts in the development of connected building technology.

Founding members of the Open API Initiative, including Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal, want to extend the range of Swagger, the popular framework for building application programming interfaces (APIs). Their collective ambition is to create a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for APIs based on the representational state architecture (REST).

A new open specification could let humans and computers discover and understand the potential of their proposed connected building services with minimal implementation logic. The Initiative will also promote the use of an open API standard.

Swagger, created in 2010 and offered as an open source license a year later, is a description format used by developers in a broad range of industries. It’s used to design and deliver APIs that support a variety of connected applications and services. Downloads of Swagger and Swagger tooling have tripled in the last year as it became the most popular open source framework for defining and creating RESTful APIs.

SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source project from Reverb Technologies and today is working with its industry peers to ensure the specification and format can continue to evolve. The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will manage the specification and keep users abreast of developments.

“Swagger is considered one of the most popular frameworks for building APIs. When an open source project reaches this level of maturity, it just can’t be managed by one entity,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Open API Initiative will extend this technology to advance connected application development through open standards.”

Amazon, AWS, Datacentre, News & Analysis, UK

AWS announces UK will be its third region in the EU by 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to add a UK region to its empire. On its opening date, mooted for the end of 2016 or early 2017, it will be the third region in European Union and the 12th in the world.

The presence of an AWS region brings lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users.

Amazon organises its ‘elastic computing’ by hosting it in multiple locations world-wide. The locations are, in turn, sub divided into regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographical area with multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. The rationale being to give instant local response but geographically diverse back up to each computing ‘instance’ (or user).

Announcing the new UK base in his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels promised that all Britain’s ranges of local and global enterprises, institutes and government departments will get faster AWS Cloud services than they have been getting. The new region will be coupled – for failover purposes – with existing AWS regions in Dublin and Frankfurt. This local presence, says AWS, will provide lower latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

“We are committed to our customers’ need for capacity,” said Vogels, who promised ‘powerful AWS services that eliminate the heavy lifting of the underlying IT infrastructure’.

The UK government’s Trade and Investment Minister Lord Maude described the decision as ‘great news for the UK’. The choice of the UK, as the third european presence for AWS is, “further proof the UK is the most favoured location in Europe for inward investment,” said Maude.

By providing commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK AWS will create more healthy competition and innovation in the UK data centre market, according to HM Government Chief Technology Officer Liam Maxwell. “This is good news for the UK government given the significant amount of data we hold that needs to be kept onshore,” said Maxwell.

Yesterday, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr revealed in his blog that AWS will be opening a region in South Korea in early 2016, its fifth region in Asia Pacific.

Europe, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation, Safe Harbour

EC calls for Safer Harbour agreement – issues new guidance

The European Commission has issued new guidance to companies on transatlantic data transfers and has called for a rapid creation of a new framework.

In October BCN reported how a ruling on the case of Schrems vs Data Protection Commissioner) rendered the US-EU Safe Harbour Agreement invalid as it was revealed that EU citizen’s data was being accessed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The Commission said it has stepped up talks with US authorities on a new framework and issued guidance to help companies comply with the ruling and work with alternative transfer tools.

“We need an agreement with our US partners in the next three months,” said EV VP Andrus Ansip, who is responsible for the Digital Single Market. “The Commission has been asked to take swift action: this is what we are doing. Today we provide clear guidelines and we commit to a clear timeframe to conclude current negotiations.”

“Citizens need robust safeguards of their fundamental rights and businesses need clarity in the transition period,” said Commissioner Vera Jourová, adding that 4,000 companies currently rely on the transatlantic data pact.

The EC guidelines advised on how data transfers can continue to be pursued by businesses in the interim period. It covers issues such as contractual solutions and contractual rules, binding Corporate Rules for intra-group transfers, derogations and the conclusion or performance of a contract. The guideline document, which is 7,981 words long, runs to 16 pages of challenging reading and is open to interpretation.

“As confirmed by the Article 29 Working Party, alternative tools authorising data flows can

still be used by companies for lawful data transfers to third countries like the United States,” concludes the guidance document. “However, the Commission considers that a renewed and sound framework for transfers of personal data to the United States remains a key priority.”

Enforcement against non-compliance with the Safe Harbour court ruling come into place at the end of January 2016.

Unified Communications, VoIP

VoIP Implementation – Why Won’t the Audio Work?

I recently worked on a project that ended up being a success but looked at first like it could end up being a failure. We were doing a Voice over IP implementation and were putting in a new switch network for a client that had 8 sites. When the time came for implementation we ran into some difficulty with getting audio working out of the local branches. At first, we were stumped, but it ended up being an issue with a 3rd party provider. In the video, I discuss what the issue was, how we found it, and how we remedied it. I also provide some tips on how to avoid similar challenges. Hope you enjoy!

 

VoIP Implementation – Why Won’t the Audio Work?

Watch the video on GreenPages’ YouTube Channel.

 

If you have any questions around unified communications, please reach out!

 

 

By Ralph Kindred, Practice Director, Unified Communications

Datacentre, Infrastructure as a Service, Lenovo, News & Analysis, Nutanix

Lenovo and Nutanix combo to run private cloud over hyperconverged datacentres

datacentreDatacentre hardware maker Lenovo is to install Nutanix Software in a bid to speed up the process of building the infrastructures that support private clouds.

The new family of hyperconverged appliances will be sold by Lenovo’s sales teams and its global network of partners.

Nutanix makes its own units that converge storage, server and virtualisation services into an integrated ‘scale-out’ appliance, but in this partnership Lenovo will use its own hardware devices to run the Nutanix software. The objective is to simplify data centre building, by pre-engineering most of the integration tasks and make data centre management easier. This, say the manufacturers, will cut down both the building costs and construction time for creating the foundation for a private cloud. It also, claims Nutanix, lowers the cost of ownership by creating modules in which moves and changes are easier to conduct and management is simpler.

By running the jointly created convergence appliances on Lenovo hardware, they can take full advantage of Lenovo’s close ties with Intel and run its latest processor inventions. Lenovo said it is making ‘sizeable investments in a dedicated global sales team to support the new converged appliances for datacentre builders. Lenovo and Nutanix say they are jointly planning more co-development in platform engineering and coding, as well as joint marketing initiatives.

“Lenovo can bring a new perspective to the global enterprise space,” said Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, “Nutanix’s well recognised technology leadership can dramatically reduce complexity in data centres of all sizes.”

The Lenovo OEM partnership with Nutanix goes well beyond typical alliances, said analyst Matt Eastwood, Senior VP for IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group. “This partnership will accelerate the reach of hyperconverged infrastructure,” he said.

Fallout New Vegas, Fallout New Vegas on Mac, gaming on Mac, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, PC gaming, PC Gaming on Mac, run windows on mac, Windows on mac

How to Play Fallout New Vegas on Mac

Are you (not so) patiently waiting for Fallout 4 to come out next week? Are you frustrated when you go to install Fallout New Vegas on your Mac—for some Fallout fun while you wait, of course—only to find it’s PC-only? Save your Darth Vader scream (James Earl Jones, not Hayden Christensen), there is (a new) hope! You […]

The post How to Play Fallout New Vegas on Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.

News, Services

Accenture Acquires Cloud Sherpas

Cloud Sherpas, an Atlanta based global technology service provider, has recently been purchased by Accenture. Cloud Sherpas provides cloud based services to companies that wish to both manage their customer relations and make their IT processes more efficient. Since its origination in 2008, Cloud Sherpas has seen rapid growth, with its current 1,100 employees across the world in countries such as Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Accenture bought Cloud Sherpas so that it could strengthen the company and become a leading provider of cloud based services to clients that want cloud based solutions. The purchase allows for the combination of each companies skill set: Accenture’s powerful cloud strategy and technology consulting and Cloud Sherpas’ cloud implementation, integration, and management services.

accenture

Cloud Sherpas’ employees will join the newly developed Accenture Cloud First Applications sector. This new team will continue to provide Sherpas’ cloud services to companies such as Google, NetSuite, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and  Workday. Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s Chief Technology Officer has commented: “The addition of Cloud Sherpas to the Accenture Cloud First Applications team reinforces our position as a leading global provider of enterprise cloud services. We welcome the extremely talented Cloud Sherpas specialists to Accenture, where together we are even better positioned to help clients move their businesses to the cloud and achieve significant business results faster than ever before.”

Details pertaining to the amount paid for Cloud Sherpas were not disclosed.

About Accenture:

Accenture plc is a multinational management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. Founded in 1989, Accenture focuses on making investments in areas such as training, acquisitions, emerging technology, and offerings and assets.  Its headquarters are currently located in Chicago.

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