Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

cloud orchestration, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Intel, News & Analysis

Intel backs software-defined-infrastructure to bolster position in hybrid cloud market

IntelIntel has backed the growth of software-defined infrastructure to bolster its management and orchestration position in the hybrid cloud market segment.

The company announced the launch of Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, and the SSD DC D3700 and D3600 Series, alongside industry partnerships with VMware and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. To boost its open-source credentials, Intel will also be collaborating with open-source players CoreOS and Mirantis.

“Enterprises want to benefit from the efficiency and agility of cloud architecture and on their own terms – using the public cloud offerings, deploying their own private cloud, or both,” said Diane Bryant, GM of Intel’s Data Center Group. “The result is pent-up demand for software-defined infrastructure. Intel is investing to mature SDI (software-defined infrastructure) solutions and provide a faster path for businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of the cloud.”

It would appear Intel is backing the growth of SDI as a means of building its position the management and orchestration market. As part of the Cloud for All initiative, Intel is investing in others in the industry to accelerate SDI-enabled clouds. A survey from 451 Research also provides weight to the Intel position as 67% of enterprises plan on increasing spend on SDI over the course of 2016.

The E5-2600 v4 product family also includes Resource Director Technology which it claims will aid customers to move to fully automated SDI-based clouds. The updated product offering will provide 20% more cores and cache than the prior generation, which could provide an improved orchestration position, according to the company.

As part of the collaboration with CoreOS and Mirantis, Intel will assist in merging together the technologies to create an open-source solution to orchestrate container and virtual machine-based applications. It would appear that alongside the move to differentiate the brand through a SDI product offering, Intel are seemingly joining the charge on open-source propositions, a growing trend throughout the cloud industry.

data backup, Enterprise IT, Interviews, Rackspace

Data, data, data. The importance of backing up data

Cloud datacentreMore often than not when browsing the internet each morning you’ll soon discover that in fact, this morning is “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, or “Hug a Vegetarian Day”, or something equally humorous. Today is an awareness day which, conversely, holds some use to the world on the whole.

World Backup Day encourages consumers to back up their family photos, home videos, documents and emails, on more than one device. The World Backup Day website lists numerous ways in which a consumer’s data or documents can be lost, however this day is also very applicable to the world of enterprise IT.

“The rapid increase in the amount of data that consumers and organisations store is one of the biggest challenges facing the backup industry,” says Giri Fox, Director of Technical Services at Rackspace. “Organisations aren’t always sure what data they should be keeping, so to make sure they don’t discard any important data they sometimes end up keeping everything which adds to this swell of data.

“For many companies, a simple backup tool is no longer enough to make sure all these company assets are safe and available, they need support in keeping up with the sheer scale of data and to fix problems when a valuable file or database goes missing.”

The volume of data being utilized (and in some cases not utilized) has grown astronomically, but to a certain degree, security and employee behaviour has not kept pace with this growth. Cyber criminals always seem to be one step ahead of ahead of enterprise when attempting to access data, but what is more worrying is the trend of employee indifference to IT security.

A recent survey highlighted employee negligence and indifference to IT policy is one of the most significant inhibitors to cloud security with only 35% of respondents highlighting that they use passwords in work.

Giri Fox, Director of Technical Services at Rackspace

Giri Fox, Director of Technical Services at Rackspace

“Over recent years, organisations have become far more aware of the importance of backing up their data and we’ve noticed the impact here at Rackspace, where currently we backup 120 PB per month globally,” adds Fox. “One of the main challenges for us is that businesses don’t just want to back-up more data than ever before, they want it to be done quicker than ever before.

“Also, the process of doing so has become more complex than it used to be because companies are more conscious than ever of the compliance regulations they have to adhere to. Fortunately, with the development of deduplication techniques, we are now able to back-up unique sections of data rather than duplicating large pools continuously, which has sped-up the backing-up process.”

Outside of employee indifference to cloud security, changes to EU-US data protection policy have highlighted the significance of data-backup and prevention of data loss. An instance of data loss could be crippling for an organization, whether it is financial penalties or the loss of information which could prove to be invaluable in the future.

“Initiatives like World Backup Day are a great way of highlighting the importance of backing up in an age where, as Ann Winbald put it, ‘data is the new oil’,” comments Fox.

In a world where data can be seen as one of the most important commodities to any business, the value of securing, backing up and encrypting data cannot be underplayed. That said, the majority of the working world (outside of the IT department), do not appreciate the value of security, mostly not out of malice, more because they don’t know any better.

“In the post-Edward Snowden era we’re also seeing just how seriously companies are thinking about encryption. Many companies now want to make sure their backed up data is no longer just encrypted when it goes outside the four walls of a data centre, but inside it as well,” says Fox.

data backup, Enterprise IT, Kroll Ontrack, News & Analysis

Cloud-based data backup solutions increasing in popularity – survey

Cloud data sharing conceptResearch from Kroll Ontrack has stated cloud-back backup solutions are increasing in popularity, though hardware based options still account for the majority.

The survey, which was only open to participants who have experienced loss of valuable data, highlighted 51% of respondents are still using hardware based options, though this figure is down from 68% in 2015. Cloud-based solutions are currently being considered by 23%, an increase from 18% over the last 12 months.

What could cause concern within the industry is that in instance of data loss, 86% of the respondents said they did have a backup in place, and 48% highlighted they backup the data on a daily basis. If these statistics are to be believed, why is data being lost on such a regular basis? 22% stated the backup was not operating correctly, 21% said the device was not included in backup procedures and 21% commented the backup was out of date.

“It’s no longer enough to have a backup solution where you just hope for the best,” said Robin England, Senior Research & Development Engineer, Kroll Ontrack. “As our survey results indicate year after year, conducting backups is just one step in an overall backup strategy.”

While security and data protection appears to be at the top of the agenda for most organizations, it would appear human indifference and negligence, as well as a shortage of resource are not backing up company claims. A number of organizations have cited recently one of the main challenges for enterprise organizations is the relaxed approach to security demonstrated by its employees.

The statistics also back this point up as 54% of respondents highlighted they did not have the time to effectively research and administer an effective backup solution. While the time factor is a significant barrier here, 24% of respondents said the cost was prohibitive which is down from 31% in 2015. When combined with the statistic that the number of respondents who do daily backups increased by six percentage points over the same period, the findings could imply that enterprise organizations are taking the process of data backup more seriously.

“Storage devices pack more and more data into smaller and more complex systems,” said England. “This not only requires IT teams to dedicate significant time to actually back up the data, but requires even more time to verify the backups worked properly. IT teams face a challenging balancing act when ensuring all of this is managed effectively.”

While the statistics are encouraging, it would still appear that human error and a lack of centralized oversight are the underlying causes for data loss.

Enterprise IT, Korea, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Korean government prioritizes growth of cloud computing

Network ExpansionThe Korean government has announced a new policy to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in the country, according to Business Korea.

Speaking at a cloud computing conference in Korea, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning have announced that it will be running a number of initiatives to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13%, seemingly over the next twelve months. Over the same period, the government also plans to increase the number of Korean cloud companies from 353 to 500, as well as growing private cloud adoption in public institutions to at least 3%.

The Korean government has estimated that should the new initiatives be successful the domestic cloud market could be worth in excess of 1.1 trillion won, roughly £670 million. To support the growth of the industry, the government will also build a cloud computing support centre in Daegu City, which will provide guidance for public institutions who are making the transition.

While the government has laid bare its intentions for the industry in the country, it has not been stated how cloud computing is currently perceived by enterprise. The government has estimated that 6.4% of businesses in Korea currently utilize the cloud, whereas in the UK the figure is viewed as generally much higher. It has been estimated recently that 93% of enterprise in the UK have adopted the cloud.

In what could be seen as a move to encourage enterprise appetite for the cloud, the government has invited enterprises in need of cloud computing in various industries to join the deregulation task force currently led by IT firms in the private sector.

Alongside this announcement, the government has also prioritized the growth of SME’s through the adoption of cloud. In what appears to be a move to emulate companies such as Uber and AirBnB, Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning will work in collaboration with the Center for Creative Economy & Innovation to provide cloud software and infrastructure to smaller organizations who could otherwise not afford the technology.

In terms of international expansion of the Korean cloud computing industry, the government will once again provide assistance highlighting the Software-as-a-Service market. It believes the SaaS market is where the country has the greatest opportunity to compete on the international scale, as there is not an outright market leader for the moment. It also believes that the country is a good position to capitalize on the growing Infrastructure-as-a-Service market in South East Asia.

The success of all cloud initiatives could partly depend on the success of the government in engaging enterprise in the country and building the appetite for the technology, which is at a low adoption rate in comparison to other nations.

Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source

Microsoft announces R Server availability inside Azure HDInsight

MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced the availability of R Server inside Azure HDInsight, the company’s Hadoop-as-a-service aspect of Azure Data Lake.

Speaking at Strata + Hadoop World, the company is seemingly hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of open source technologies. Microsoft R is now 100% compatible with Open Source R and any library that exists can be used in the R Server context.

Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in early 2015 as a means of entering the R-based analytics market, and has since delivered SQL Server R Services on SQL Server 2016 CTP3. R is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages for predictive analytics.

“By making R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, we remove obstacles for users to unlock the power of R by eliminating memory and processing constraints and extending analytics from the laptop to large multi-node Hadoop and Spark clusters,” said Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing, Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing at Microsoft. “This enables the ability to train and run ML models on larger datasets than previously possible to make more accurate predictions that affect the business.”

The company claims that by making the R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, it will remove memory and processing constraints allowing developers to better utilize the power of Hadoop and Spark clusters. If correct, organizations will be able to run machine learning models on larger datasets, increasing the accuracy of business predications which are made by the model.

“This gives you the familiarity of the R language for machine learning while leveraging the scalability and reliability built into Hadoop and Spark,” said Chiu. “It also eliminates memory and processing constraints and easily extends their code from their laptop to large multi-terabyte files producing models that are more powerful and accurate.”

Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Oracle

Oracle expands cloud offering into customer datacentres

Oracle CloudOracle launched Cloud at Customer, a new service designed to extend Oracle’s cloud into a customer’s datacentre.

The service allows companies to place an Oracle cloud server within their own datacentre to create a hybrid environment where customers can choose whether to run workloads on the Oracle cloud or on premise. Oracle claims the new offering will remove a number of barriers to cloud adoption, as the customer will retain control on what data is stored where, removing any residency or security concerns for business critical data.

“We are committed to helping our customers move to the cloud to help speed their innovation, fuel their business growth, and drive business transformation,” said Oracle’s President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. “Today’s news is unprecedented. We announced a number of new Cloud Services and we are now the first Public Cloud Vendor to offer organizations the ultimate in choice on where and how they want to run their Oracle cloud.”

The company claims it is the first in the industry to offer such a service and aims to address security and regulatory barriers for cloud adoption. Oracle stressed the service complies with many security and data regulations including FedRAMP for the US federal government, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act.

Data security and residency has been a topic of healthy discussion in recent months following the EU decision to dismiss Safe Harbour and the introduction of its successor Privacy Shield. Oracle could be capitalizing on the concerns of cloud buyers as it claims the offering answers business, legislative and regulatory obstacles enterprise organizations face when considering the transition to a cloud platform.

The new product launch forms part of Oracle’s general cloud offensive. “Oracle is now selling more new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud revenue than any other company in the world including Salesforce.com,” said Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, during the quarterly earnings call.

“We are growing much faster than Salesforce.com, more than twice as fast. Because we sell into a lot more SaaS and PaaS market than they do. We compete directly with Salesforce.com in every segment of the SaaS customer experience market including sales, service and market.”

Enterprise IT, Eversheds, News & Analysis

Suppliers over-promise on cloud deliverables – survey

Vertrag Stiftbergabe ablehnenA recent survey from law firm Eversheds claims 27% of cloud deals have fallen through due to suppliers not meeting client expectations during contract negotiations.

Despite 77% of respondents claiming they intend to increase cloud spend over the next 18 months, the research claims that a number of deals have not come to fruition due to supplier over promising on what can be delivered within the agreement.

Differing views on what should and can be delivered are only coming to light in the final stages of contract negotiation, when buyers are finding out that suppliers cannot deliver on what had previously been promised.

On top of the 27% who have terminated talks, a further 10% said they were tempted to walk away from the deal because of the differences. Suppliers also backed up these statistics, as 57% of the supplier side respondents said that they had lost deals at the contract stage.

“The number of deals breaking down at the last minute is unnecessarily high given that customers and suppliers have typically reached agreement, at least in principle, before deals get to contract negotiation,” said Charlotte Walker-Osborn, Technology & Outsourcing Partner at Eversheds.

“In cloud negotiations, issues which are both legal and commercial in nature tend to come out during contractual discussions because this is when both parties take an in-depth look at the agreed parameters around the deal. Only then, can it become apparent that differing views may be shared on certain key areas such as data privacy and related security issues,” said Walker-Osborn.

Data protection and residency has once again proved to be a contentious issue, as 33% of the customers surveyed said this was the reason they walked away from the deal. Visibility over the suppliers supply chain was another reason, as 28% of customers claimed this was the reason for the breakdown.

“Cloud purchasers are anxious about where data is hosted for two reasons. The first is regulatory. Data protection and privacy regulations vary across jurisdictions, but most countries require companies to know where their data is hosted and being processed,” said Paula Barrett, Global Head of Privacy at Eversheds.

“Conscientious suppliers will ensure relevant regulatory requirements are covered by the contractual terms. However, some suppliers still fail to include fairly mandatory terms that the law requires their clients to have in place. The second reason is because government authorities in some jurisdictions have the right to access personal data, so it is natural that businesses are concerned about where their data will reside,” said Barrett.

The survey also hints that the mass market is still to be convinced of the reliability and robustness of cloud platforms, despite early adopters demonstrated the value. 48% of cloud buyers highlighted that they would like service credits to compensate for any losses in the event of a service outage as a failsafe, whereas only 20% of service providers were likely to include them in an agreement.

Despite the appetite for cloud services being present in the industry, a lack of clarity from suppliers at the outset has seemingly quashed a number of potential deals, which could potentially be avoided with suppliers taking a more proactive stance on data protection concerns, as well as a more sympathetic view of customer caution when implementing new technologies.

Enterprise IT, GoDaddy, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

GoDaddy lauches cloud services tailored for small businesses

Godaddy logo matWeb hosting company GoDaddy has expanded its offering for small business customers to include Cloud Servers and Bitnami-powered Cloud Applications.

GoDaddy, which claims to have more than 61 million domain names under management, will offer its customers a “pay as you go” utility billing model, which will enable customers build, test and scale cloud solutions on GoDaddy’s infrastructure. The company’s traditional playing field is to give customers access to site building software like Word Press, but the new move will provide an environment where they can build and run just about any software they like.

“With the launch of Cloud Servers, GoDaddy aims to extend our lead as the number one trusted provider of Cloud Hosting solutions for individual developers and technologists. We’re looking to make it easy for developers to serve small businesses with the technology they want,” said Jeff King, GM Hosting, Security at GoDaddy. “By offering a powerful, yet simple cloud offering that integrates domains, DNS, security and backups all in one place, developers can save time and exceed their clients’ expectations.”

Unlike its better-known rivals in the cloud space, GoDaddy will build on its traditional business model of targeting individual developers, tech entrepreneurs and small-scale businesses with the new solution. The services will offer a number of features to smaller businesses that cannot afford or justify an all-encompassing service offered by the traditional players in the public cloud market. The company claims virtual instances can be built, tested, cloned and re-provisioned in less than a minute, meeting market expectations.

Alongside the servers, GoDaddy’s Cloud Applications are powered by Bitnami, an open source server application deployments library. “As a GoDaddy technology partner on Cloud Applications, we’re excited for GoDaddy’s international customer base to take advantage of our capabilities – joining the millions of developers and business users who save time and effort with our library’s consistent, secure and optimized end-user experience,” said Erica Brescia, Co-Founder at Bitnami. “We’re proud to partner with GoDaddy in serving this global market of advanced SMB-focused developers.”

The new offering from GoDaddy has seemingly been in the works for some time, as the team announced the acquisition of the public cloud customer division of Apptix for $22.5 million last September.

“With the acquisition of Apptix’s public cloud customer base, we have an opportunity to take customers using Hosted Exchange and bring them over to GoDaddy’s Microsoft Office 365 offering,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of Corporate Comms, at the time.

With Microsoft and Google making moves to take market share away from AWS in the corporate space, GoDaddy is targeting the small business market, a niche that appears to be relatively overlooked.

AWS, Cisco, Enterprise IT, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

HPE holds off Cisco for cloud infrastructure top spot

HPE street logoFindings from Synergy Research Group have HPE as the number one provider in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, narrowly outperforming Cisco over the course of 2015.

Total revenues for the cloud infrastructure equipment segment reached over $60 billion in 2015, with HPE accounting for just over 12%, and Cisco just under. Dell, Microsoft and IBM complete the top five, each controlling about 7% market share.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Synergy’s research showed between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015 total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Spend on private cloud accounted for more than 50% of these revenues, though public cloud is growing at a faster pace. HPE currently leads the private cloud space, with Cisco in second, however the roles are reversed for the public cloud segment.

While HPE and Cisco remain dominant in the server and networking segments, both companies have been releasing a number of new products in recent months to diversify their offering. Last week, HPE launched its ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure, which combines 60 API’s to provide machine learning capabilities. While HPE is seemingly capitalizing on the growing ‘as-a-service’ trend, Cisco is focused on its cloud-based collaboration service, Cisco Spark, which was launched with Verizon recently.

Market share graphMicrosoft features in the list due to its position in the server OS and virtualization applications market, where as Dell and IBM have demonstrated strong offerings in a broad number of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market.

While hardware and software to build cloud services revenues exceeded $60 billion, other areas of the industry demonstrated stronger growth. Public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51%, followed by private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud.”

CRM, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector

IBM acquires Optevia to strengthen position in public sector CRM market

cloud_IBM claims the acquisition of Optevia will improve its position as a SaaS and digital consultant in the lucrative market. Optevia has a track record of working with UK Emergency Services, Central Government, Local Government and Social Enterprises, including the Ministry of Justice’s National Taxing Team’s rollout of Dynamics CRM.

“By acquiring Optevia, IBM will be able to provide Public Sector clients and prospects with a range of unique, industry focused Microsoft Dynamics CRM based solutions,” said Joanna Davinson, IBM’s European Public Sector Leader. “This strategic acquisition will help strengthen IBM as a SaaS provider and Global Software Integrator.”

In Gartner’s CRM Forecast Overview, published last summer, the global CRM market was valued in the region of $23 billion, with around 50% of the market accounted for by the top 5 services providers. SaaS continued to demonstrate strong demand, with almost 47% of the revenue attributed to the service. According to Gartner,Salesforce.com is the market leader, with IBM claiming 4% of the CRM segment.

While IBM already has an established position in the public sector market, the company has 98 current offerings on G-Cloud, the acquisition of Optevia signals its intentions of increasing its share of the public sector CRM segment.

Alongside IBM, other players have been bolstering their position in the wider CRM market. Last year, Accenture acquired Tquila and Cloud Sherpas, both of which are Salesforce partners on G-Cloud. The acquisitions more than doubled the number of Accenture’s Salesforce consultants in the UK.

“We have seen significant growth in SaaS as more companies adopt the cloud and digital strategies to collaborate better, drive greater operational efficiencies and accelerate the development of new products and services,” said Emma McGuigan, UK and Ireland MD at Accenture Technology. “One key factor for our continued success in delivering Salesforce solutions depends on having the right skilled professionals to meet the growing demand. With Tquila on board we have the critical mass to more proactively target big opportunities both in the UK and Europe, which will extend our position in the region.”

Despite Salesforce.com’s current market-leading position there have been a number of calls-to-arms by competitors looking to challenge the CRM giant. Alongside IBM’s announcement, Oracle has hinted at its intention to take on Salesforce.com. On Oracle’s earnings call this week, CTO Larry Ellison highlighted the company’s positioning “should make it easy for Oracle to pass Salesforce.com and become the largest SaaS and PaaS cloud company in the world.”