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According to IDC figures, there will be 8.6 million data centres worldwide by 2017, all powering the Internet economy. The technology analyst firm believes that, over the next five years, the majority of organisations will cease to manage their own IT infrastructure and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider data centres.

Smaller data centres and in-house server rooms are on the wane, being replaced by ‘mega data centres’ that house the servers that power the Internet, our cities, and the economy. IDC estimates that these will account for almost three quarters (72%) of all service provider data centre construction in terms of space, while also accounting for 44% of all new high-end data centre space around the world (up from 19% in 2013).

While large companies run their own data centres – Facebook, for example, recently announced it is spending at least $500 million (£324m) on a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas – most organisations either rent space, known as colocation, or buy cloud computing capacity.

Data centres are the engine rooms enabling the internet economy to run – and it’s an area where the UK is a leader. Research from Tariff Consulting shows that the UK data centre market is the largest in Europe by space and power. Tariff also suggests that the growth in demand has led to a surge in construction of data centres outside London, in places such as Slough and Manchester.

But these data centres need to be manned – and it’s these people who have the responsibility of keeping the internet economy running.

Around a dozen people will be responsible for running a typical data centre at any point in time, working around the clock on shifts to constantly monitor vital signals to ensure that power is available and the server rooms are kept cool. They’re a mixture of technicians, engineers, and facilities staff.

My job, as data centre services manager for CenturyLink, is to ensure CenturyLink’s data centre in Slough keeps running and is managed as efficiently as possible. This involves ensuring that equipment is installed and maintained properly, and customers that rent space in the data centre follow best practice guidelines.

An example of this is ensuring that cabling is installed properly. When it isn’t, it can interfere with airflow, which has implications for temperature control. Poor temperature control affects how much power is used, and potentially causes problems with the servers, if they overheat.

The first thing you notice when walking around a data centre is the quiet, with just the faint hum of hundreds of servers permeating the space. CenturyLink’s Slough data centre is roughly the size of an average supermarket, divided into dozens of server rooms, run by a small team of engineers, technicians, and facilities staff at any point in time.

For co-location customers, they bring their own servers in, with our job to ensure they have power and cooling to run their systems in an optimum environment. They are just responsible for what happens in their own cage and they don’t have interaction with any other company – it’s their space. As a result, security is paramount and data centre workers are thoroughly background checked before getting a job at CenturyLink. These are CenturyLink workers and not outsourced, which we – and our customers – feel is more secure and gives greater peace of mind. Even visitors entering the data centre are subject to numerous security checks.

An important part of the role is handling outages or safety issues such as fire or power failure. While these are rare in any data centre, to minimise any risk, preparation is key. These primarily involve monitoring systems, put in place to ensure we know what the ‘health’ of the data centre is at any point in time. Should anything happen that’s beyond our control, we have an escalation process to deal with it – such as standby generators and an uninterruptable power supply in the case of power failure.

Data centre technicians comes from a variety of backgrounds, but usually with a strong interest in IT, electronics, or electrical engineering. The technician role mixes desktop support, with knowledge of router and networking equipment, along with practical skills, such as cabling or repairing power equipment. It’s literally a hands-on job, and there’s more variety than you might think.

Technicians tend to stay in the industry once they join it, and as the likes of Slough and other areas outside London become greater hubs for data centres as connectivity costs dwindle, there are plenty of job opportunities for those who want to enter the profession. Working with people that share my passion for a good job well done is important – but it’s also rewarding to know that we’re an essential cog in the wheel of the internet economy.

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Brian Taptich, the CEO of developer-centric cloud storage provider Bitcasa, has told this publication that Microsoft shuttering its unlimited OneDrive storage policy is “definitely not a failure” and other players in the space are risking a “suicide mission” by competing against the hypervendors on their own terms.

Earlier this week, the Redmond giant announced it was to cap each Office 365 subscriber OneDrive account at 1 TB because some users interpreted the definition ‘unlimited’ to its fullest extent. Some users had entire movie collections in Microsoft’s cloud, with the scales topping 75 TB – or 14,000 times the average customer’s data usage – in extreme cases.

For Bitcasa, this represents a full circle change. This time last year, as Microsoft was opening up its OneDrive service for users to store the entire history of recorded cinema into, Bitcasa was shutting down its own $10 all you can eat plan for a similar reason; there was more than a suspicion of businesses using and abusing individual unlimited accounts.

Taptich said he could “empathise” with Microsoft after making the decision to stop unlimited accounts, but stopped short of saying this was akin to waving the white flag. “This is definitely not a failure or an admission of failure,” he tells CloudTech. “I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed –and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data.”

Bitcasa’s move away from unlimited, Taptich argues, was not so much a case of trying to recoup lost money, but trying to shift engineering resources from a black hole. But it wasn’t just a case of making the decision, clicking their fingers and switching over.

The company suspected the unlimited plan wasn’t working as out as early as 2013, but it took until late 2014 to implement it. As Taptich explains: “There were two important reasons to continue offering the service. Because we had grown to over 30 PB of data under management from users across 120 countries, the additional time provided an amazing sandbox to test and refine the scalability and performance of the underlying infrastructure that is now the backbone of our developer-focused platform.”

He adds: “We [also] had a small but passionate user base, and we made the decision to invest in building systems that would provide our users relatively seamless ways to transition to our new tiers or, in some cases, to retrieve their data.”

Taptich argues that, while the past year has not been without its challenges, the company’s biggest struggle has been to stay patient. “Companies like Apple and Google have understood for a number of years that whoever owns the customer data owns the customer, but it’s only in the past 12 months that the balance of the connected – and increasingly mobile – ecosystem has woken up,” he explains. “They are playing catch up, and we have a platform which solves their desire to maintain customer ownership without having to custom build solutions.”

Despite arguing that fighting “trench warfare” with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon is not a smart plan, as the battle to provide public cloud infrastructure is being fought alongside companies with trillions of dollars in market capital, Taptich insists there is an “enormous amount of opportunity” for smaller players long term.

Take enterprise-centric file sync and share vendor Egnyte. While their funding pales in comparison to the likes of Dropbox and Box, their laser focus on enterprise customers, and in particular, picking up second generation enterprise customers, is a viable target.

“You have to realise that we are in the middle of an extraordinary transformation from local, device based resources to remote, cloud based resources,” Taptich explains. “All data will eventually reside remotely, and the speed with which this happens is purely a function of connection speed and ubiquity, and security.

“Whether it takes two years or 20 years, this is a fundamental shift that represents multi-hundreds of billions of dollars,” he adds. “And in the short term, successful companies will be laser focused on providing services which enhance the 11 nines reliability of the public cloud, will be targeting customers with a user base every bit as scaled, and will be building a financial model that benefits from the plummeting costs of underlying public cloud infrastructure.”

At the very least, this is the theory which Bitcasa expects to come true.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Kintone has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
kintone promotes cloud-based workgroup productivity, transparency and profitability with a seamless collaboration space, build your own business application (BYOA) platform, and workflow automation system.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Sensorberg will exhibit at 17th Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2013, Sensorberg GmbH, based in Berlin, has provided a beacon-based, platform-independent, all-in-one proximity campaign solution. The Sensorberg cloud-based management platform is the company’s core and enables proximity campaigns to be planned, designed and managed. Sensorberg provides open source SDKs (software-development kits) that can be incorporated into any app, rendering it beacon-compatible, and supports all beacon standards: Apple’s iBeacon, Google’s Eddystone and the Microsoft 10 standard.

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The benefits hybrid cloud can bring to businesses are not in doubt. What is less understood, however, is how much is too much?

No organisation is likely to jump in with both feet, placing almost all their IT services on public cloud servers due to concerns about control. Yet at the same time, finding the sweet spot – where the business is gaining the maximum benefit from a perfect balance of on-premise IT, private cloud and public cloud services can be extremely difficult.

Has the organisation gone too far and put business operations at risk? Or are they holding back and essentially handicapping themselves? Since every organisation’s needs and responsibilities are unique, there is no easy, one size fits all answer. So how can an enterprise ensure its hybrid IT is, in the words of Goldilocks, just right?

Mapping out the territory

As with any IT project, an organisation adopting hybrid cloud must understand two things: where it is, and where it needs to be. To begin with, the IT department needs to map out its current IT services, followed by the IT environment it currently uses to provide them. It should be able to answer precisely what IT infrastructure provides what services to what part of the business; as well as the skills and other resources that support those services, and the value that they provide to the business. Once it has this understanding, the department can then begin to map out its future.

Put simply, if the loss of an application means the loss of the business, it should be kept safely in-house

This should again start with the services the business will need. If the IT department knows the business’s strategy for the next three, five, or more years, it should know what services will be crucial in supporting that strategy and meeting the relevant milestones. These services should then be mapped to the infrastructure, applications, skills and other resources that they will need to run. Armed with this map, IT will see at a glance precisely how its current capabilities match up with those the business will demand.

With this knowledge, the organisation can develop a hybrid cloud strategy to meet those demands. This is not as simple as keeping all current capacity in-house and using the public cloud to address any shortfalls. For instance, for some services it may be more cost-effective to expand on an in-house application or infrastructure; or to re-train skilled personnel, than to adopt a public cloud service; while for others the exact opposite may be true. The IT department needs to investigate each service in detail to understand precisely where each one is best served; whether that is in-house or on the public cloud.

Knowing the crown jewels

Part of this process will be identifying which applications should never be placed on the public cloud. This means knowing the crown jewels of the organisation; those business-critical applications where failure, or losing control of data, would have catastrophic consequences.

One example of this would be an airline’s reservation system. If this fails, it would cause significant damage to both revenue and reputation. At the same time, the system will contain extremely sensitive personal and financial data on passengers; which present a major risk to the business and its customers if lost. Outsourcing such an application would put the airline at the mercy of its service providers’ practices, rather than having complete control itself. Quite simply, if the loss of an application means the loss of the business, it should be kept safely in-house.

Business needs

On the other end of the scale, IT should be wary of excessive caution; keeping applications in-house when it no longer benefits the business to do so.

IT should however be wary of excessive caution, and keeping applications in-house when it no longer benefits the business to do so

Losing control of an application, or putting the organisation at risk or failing compliance, is an understandable worry. However, in many cases this can lead to IT becoming a function for its own sake, rather than an important function in supporting the business’s overall strategy.

For example, a solicitors’ firm should be focused on providing legal services to its clients and building its business. For every application that is kept in-house, IT will spend more time on troubleshooting and firefighting, rather than supporting those core goals. While the firm’s crown jewels, such as case and document management, will remain firmly in-house, other lower-risk and-value applications can be placed on the public cloud; freeing up IT department resources to focus on critical applications or new projects.

Knowledge is power

In conclusion, knowledge is power. The IT department that knows the services it has, the services it needs, and the changes it has to make to get there, will be able to identify its perfect cloud sweet spot: where the crown jewels are kept in the business, but the IT department’s energy is not spent performing housekeeping for low-risk, low-value applications.

This will be where IT services are providing the maximum value to the business, regardless of where they actually reside.

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Cloud storage provider Dropbox has launched a new enterprise product, as well as making other announcements at an event in San Francisco.

For those asking the inevitable question of ‘doesn’t Dropbox already have an enterprise product?’, then the answer is yes – Dropbox for Business, which has more than 100,000 users – but this product enhances those features to include new account management tools for greater security.

Among these are a suspended user state option, which allows for greater flexibility when employees leave a company; the ability for team admins to log in to an employee’s account; as well as custom branding capabilities.

“With Dropbox Enterprise, IT can give employees the Dropbox they love while getting the advanced capabilities they need to effectively onboard and manage tens of thousands of users, protect company data, and get the most from their investment,” a company blog post read.

While the statistics associated with Dropbox are impressive – 4,000 edits to documents are made each second, with users syncing 1.2 billion files each day and creating more than 100,000 new shared folders and links each hour – the company continues, despite its best efforts, to trail an image of being more consumer-friendly in the media. This may have a point; research released this week from MobileIron revealed that Dropbox remained among the top banned apps by enterprises – providing precisely no change to figures Fiberlink released back in 2013.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston vehemently argued the case for his company during the event. According to WIRED, Houston mentioned a competitor – not by name, but by all accounts Box – and argued Dropbox had accrued more business customers across 10 months than Box had during its lifetime.

Other announcements the company made served to beef up its enterprise stake. Dropbox announced it now meets HIPAA and HITECH Act compliance obligations, helping customers that handle Protected Health Information (PHI). Elsewhere, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to become a premier reseller of Dropbox for Business products. The company officially launched earlier this month, with $53 billion in annual revenue.