Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

Cloud computing, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, training

APMG launches end user cloud computing foundation certification scheme

Skills and trainingCloud industry expert Bernard Golden has created a vendor-independent course to help people and businesses make the transition to cloud-based services.

Golden developed the course for APMG International which has launched a new end user cloud computing certification scheme. The aim is to give the workforce the cloud skills needed to support the migration to cloud-based computing.

The course, Cloud Computing Foundation Certification, is designed to give an impartial and objective overview as an introduction to cloud computing. This is necessary, according to Golden, before any organisations can move to the cloud successfully.

The certification was developed in response to the mounting need for businesses to understand and prepare for the move to cloud. The course is aimed at all enterprise IT employees, from finance to operations, and sets out to outline the fundamentals of cloud computing. It will then move on to explain the benefits, challenges and pros and cons of rival delivery models.

The most important aspect, according to the author, is to create a cloud computing action plan for course participants. The ultimate proof of the course will be the successful adoption of cloud computing, according to Golden, APMG’s Chief Examiner.

“With cloud computing fast becoming the de facto platform for enterprise computing, the failure to understand its fundamentals poses a real danger,” said Golden. Failure will affect both the productivity of businesses and the employment prospects of the staff within them, he warned.

Though the benefits of moving an organisation’s data to the cloud – from potential cost savings to increased flexibility – are well documented, the execution is not, according to Golden. It is this gap in understanding that he intends to address, he said.

“The fact is that the majority of deployments aren’t as simple as just flicking a switch – you need to fully comprehend the security, technical and regulatory implications to make cloud a success, which is why training and certification are critical,” said Golden.

Many cloud computing training courses tend to be heavily weighted in favour of one vendor, which ultimately provides a skewed view, Golden claimed.

“This course has been designed to provide a vendor neutral knowledge base to provide an objective education about the topic,” said Golden, who promised there would be no ‘abstract knowledge without practical application’. Students will learn concepts and tools that can be applied immediately in the working environment, said Golden.

“For cloud projects to succeed they need to gain acceptance within businesses,” said Richard Pharro, CEO of APMG.

acquisition, Easynet, Interoute, M&A, Managed services, News & Analysis

Interoute buys Easynet for £402 million

interoute logoNetwork and cloud service operator Interoute has entered an agreement to buy European managed services provider Easynet in a deal valued at £402 million.

Easynet manages services for clients including Sports Direct, EDF, Bouygues, Anglian Water, Bridgestone, Levi Strauss and Campofrio Food Group. It has a twenty year pedigree of running integrated networks, hosting and unified communications solutions to national and global clients. Its data center and cloud computing services include colocation, security, voice and application performance management. It has been appointed by the UK government’s Procurement Service to assist the UK Government in creating a ‘network of networks’ with an emphasis on machine to machine (M2M) development.

Interoute’s technology estate includes 12 data centres, 14 virtual data centres and 31 colocation centres along with connection to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. It owns and operates 24 connected city networks within Europe’s major business centres.

According to Interoute, the acquisition means that enterprise, government and service provider customers of the two companies will get a fuller suite of products, services and skillsets.

“These are exciting times for Interoute customers,” said Interoute CEO Gareth Williams, “Interoute is creating a leading, independent European ICT provider. This is the next step in our acquisition strategy and moves us much closer to our goal of being the provider of choice to Europe’s digital economy.”

Easynet CEO Mark Thompson reassured customers that the combination of the two service providers will bring better service to clients of both. “The combined companies can offer broader and deeper connectivity options, as well as an expanded portfolio of products and services,” said Thompson. “The acquisition will expand an already market-leading cloud hosting capability in Europe.”

Williams had previously told analysts that Interoute needed to grow before going public. The takeover will double revenue in the division that sells telecoms services to large companies and government departments.

British telco Easynet became one of the champions of broadband competition in Britain after it was acquired in 2006 by Sky for £211 million. In 2010, Easynet announced its sale from BSkyB (Sky) to Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.

In December 2013 the company was acquired by MDNX Group, the UK’s largest independent carrier integrator.

Interoute was recently recognised by market analyst Gartner as a leader in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Europe report.

IDC, News & Analysis, Research, Storage

The cloud is commoditising storage for enterprises – report

Cloud storageLittle known unbranded manufacturers are making inroads into the storage market as the cloud commoditises the industry storage, according to a new report by market researcher IDC. Meanwhile, the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, it warns.

The data centres of big cloud companies like Google and Facebook are much more likely to buy from smaller, lesser known storage vendors now, as they are no longer compelled to commit themselves to specialised storage platforms, said IDC in its latest Enterprise Storage report.

Revenue for original design manufacturers (ODMs) that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew 25.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2015, in a period when overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 per cent. However, data centre purchases accounted for US$1 billion in the second quarter, while the overall industry revenue is still larger, for now, at $8.8 billion. However, the growth trends indicate that a shift in buying power will take place, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, said Sheppard.

ODMs such as Quanta Computer and Wistron are becoming increasingly influential, said Sheppard. Like many low-profile vendors, based in Taiwan, they are providing hardware to be sold under the badges of better known brand names, as sales of server-based storage rose 10 per cent in the second quarter to reach $2.1 billion.

Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the bulk of the enterprise storage business, which was worth $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment are declining, down 3.9 per cent in that period.

With the cloud transferring the burden of processing to data centres, the biggest purchasers of storage are now Internet giants and cloud service providers. Typically their hyper-scale data centres are software controlled and no longer need the more expensive proprietary systems that individual companies were persuaded to buy, according to the report. Generic, unbranded hardware is sufficient, provided that it is software defined, the report said.

“The software, not the hardware, defines the storage architecture,” said Sheppard. The cloud has made it possible to define the management of storage in more detail, so that the resources can be matched more evenly to each virtual machine. This has cut the long term operating costs. These changes will intensify in the next five years, the analyst predicted.

EMC remained the biggest vendor by revenue with just over 19 per cent of the market, followed by Hewlett-Packard with just over 16 per cent.

Datacentre, News & Analysis, Nokia, Telco Cloud

Nokia keen to promote its telco cloud portfolio

Nokia cloud service chainFinnish kit vendor Nokia is continuing to promote its nascent cloud offerings for telcos, three months after the launch of its AirFrame datacentre family of products, reports Telecoms.com.

AirFrame itself is now available as a containerised solution with a built in power and cooling system and Nokia has also added a software-defined storage module. It is supported by a cloud Care Services package, which is comprised of a service management module for resolving VNF faults, as well as a support package specifically for VMWare deployments.

As well as AirFrame Nokia is promoting its OSS Office for Telco Cloud offering, which seems to be more of a strategic consultation service than a physical product. All of this is stitched together by something Nokia is calling Service Chaining, which is a virtualized environment for the delivery of network services.

“Wherever operators are on their cloud transformation journey, Nokia has the solutions and expertise, all the way from strategy to migration to maintenance,” said Deepak Harie, VP of Systems Integration at Nokia Networks. “Our extensive and open cloud portfolio helps operators in making important decisions towards the most efficient processes, services and solutions across all cloud domains. With Nokia Telco Cloud, operators will be able to achieve maximum benefits from telco and IT convergence.”

Essentially Nokia is trying hard to strengthen its credentials as both a cloud player and a full managed service provider for that sector, something its main competitors have already established. You can expand Nokia’s service chain cloud diagram below.

forecast, News & Analysis, Personal Cloud, Research

World personal cloud worth $90 billion by 2020 says Allied Market Research

metalcloud_lowresThe personal cloud market will have a compound annual growth rate of 33.1 per cent between now and 2020, by which time it will be worth $89.9 billion globally, according to a new study.

The report, World Personal Cloud Market- Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014-2020, says growing customer awareness of personal cloud services is driving the growth. Europe and the USA will be surpassed by the Asia-Pacific region as the most voracious users of personal cloud apps, with the latter accounting for two-fifths of total market share in 2020.

Advances in smartphones, tablets and mobile devices have boosted the growth of the personal cloud market as storage needs grow, it says. The change was catalysed by the virtualizing of the work environment as employers began using personal cloud storage as a solution to work problems, says the report.

Growth rate apart, the main finding of the study by Allied Market Research was that there has been a reversal of expectations, with individuals dictating the growth of corporate networks.

In addition, the study found that the personal cloud will become a conduit for lead generation and other indirect marketing methods. These could create new opportunities and provide the potential for revenue generated through advertising. Individuals will continue to lead the personal cloud as a result of the increasing influence of personal digital content, as devices with cameras proliferate and visuals become increasingly influential in the multimedia world, says the study.

The faster growth rate enjoyed by the Asia-Pacific region is anticipated as a result of different consumer behaviour in a different computing environment. Its population has significantly higher usage of multimedia devices coupled with faster broadband networks, according to the report.

Another strong influence will be exerted by the established market players, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox, who are leading the market with their flexible packages and affordable pricing structure. Their advanced features and attractive app prices, such as two-factor authentication for security, have improved customer satisfaction and driven wider adoption. The addition of Dropbox’s two-factor authentication, in June 2015, is cited as a major confidence builder in the personal cloud.

In turn, the mobile social media applications made possible by the new multi-featured, affordable smartphones created the demand for storing personal data using personal cloud platforms. Improvised secure features helped to popularise personal data storage and make the cloud a less ominous proposition, said the report.

AutoDesk, CAD, News & Analysis, Software as a service

Autodesk to ‘embrace the new norm’ and sell its software by subscription on the cloud

autodesk st louisSoftware vendor Autodesk is to move distribution of its computer aided design (CAD) system to the cloud.

After July 31, 2016, new commercial licenses of Autodesk Design and Creation suites and individual products will be available by subscription only. The transition allows the vendor to offer new, simplified subscription options to customers, who can get multiple products and share licenses with the added benefit of flexibility, it said.

Along with a simpler customer experience, Autodesk promised its new subscription model will offer lower upfront costs and a pay per use option on Autodesk products and cloud services with multi-year, annual, quarterly or monthly subscription terms. The new model makes companies more adaptable and makes changing business environments less expensive, according to Autodesk.

“The way we design and make things is changing. Every industry is being disrupted by changes in production, demand and products,” said Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk’s senior VP of Industry Strategy and Marketing.

By giving customers the flexibility to subscribe to software Autodesk is “embracing this new norm”, said Anagnost.

Autodesk announced in March 2015 that will stop selling perpetual licenses of most of its individual products after January 31, 2016, after which new licenses will only be available as subscriptions. Now the exceptions to that announcement, Autodesk’s Design & Creation Suites, are included in its subscription-based strategy.

Autodesk said it aimed to “pave the way for a smooth transition” with a choice of simplified subscription plans tailored to individuals, teams and enterprises. Customers can buy subscription plans to gain access to individual products or a portfolio of products with the option of single user licensing or shared network licensing.

Those who buy a perpetual license of Autodesk Design & Creation Suites and affected products prior to July 31 2016 will continue to own and have full usage rights for those licenses. Customers on the Maintenance scheme for those perpetual licenses will continue to receive corresponding benefits for as long as they continue to renew their Maintenance subscription.

Autodesk has published a list of changes for Perpetual Licenses for both individual desktop software and design and creation suites affected by the cut off deadlines. A number of country specific variations is also published on the site.

autoscaling, Datacentre, Google Cloud Platform, News & Analysis, Platform as a service

Google’s new autoscaling aims to offer instants gratification

Google cloud platformGoogle is to give users more detailed and tightly controlled management of their virtual machines through a new autoscaling feature.

Announced on Google’s own blog, the Google Compute Engine Autoscaler aims to help managers exert tighter control over all the billable components of their virtual machine infrastructure, such as processing power, memory and storage. The rationale is to give its customers tighter control of the costs of all the ‘instances’ (virtual machines) running on Google’s infrastructure and to ramp up resources more effectively when demand for computing power soars.

The new Google Compute Engine allows users to specify the machine properties of their instances, such as the amounts of CPUs and RAM, on the virtual machines running on its Linux and Windows Servers. Cloud computing systems that are subject to volatile workload variations will no longer be subject to escalating costs and performance ceilings as the platform brings greater scalability, Google promised.

“Our customers have a wide range of compute needs, from temporary batch processing to high-scale web workloads. Google Cloud Platform provides a resilient compute platform for workloads of all sizes enabling our customers with both scale out and scale up capabilities,” said a joint statement from Google Compute Engine Product Managers Jerzy Foryciarz and Scott Van Woudenberg.

Spiky traffic, caused by sudden popularity, flash sales or unexpected mood swings among customers, can overwhelm some managers with millions of requests per second. Autoscaler makes this complex process simpler, according to Google’s engineers.

Autoscaler will dynamically adjust the number of instances in response to load conditions and remove virtual machines from the cloud portfolio when they are a needless expense. Autoscaler will rise from nought to millions of requests per second in minutes without the need to pre-warm, Google said.

In another related announcement, Google is to make 32-core virtual machines (VMs) available. This offering is aimed at customers with industrial scale computing loads and storage-intensive projects, such as graphics rendering. Three variations of 32-core VMs are now on offer. The Standard offering has 32 virtual CPUs and 120 GB of memory. The High Memory option providers 32 virtual CPUs and 208 GB of memory, while the High-CPU offering provides 32 virtual CPUs and 28.8 GB of memory.

“During our beta trials, 32-core VMs have proven very popular with customers running many different workloads, including visual effects rendering, video transcoding, large MySQL and Postgres instances,” said the blog.

cloud backup, Enterprise IT, Fujitsu, News & Analysis

New Fujitsu data protection appliance backs up hybrid IT

FujitsuFujitsu has announced its new Rapid Recovery Appliance, which it claimed will make it easier to install a cloud backup as a service (BaaS) offering. The new appliance will make Fujitsu’s globally available Fujitsu Cloud BaaS more resilient and secure, it claimed.

The pre-configured system is designed to be installed on the customer’s premises in order to give users of hybrid IT systems greater control over their data protection processes. The new system will solve the logistical problems created by the mixture of internal IT and external cloud services that many companies now have, according to Fujitsu.

The system should combine the benefits of a backup and recovery appliance with the convenience of cloud-computing’s ‘pay-as-you-grow’ pricing policies and data security. According to Fujitsu, it makes an enterprise’s data both secure and readily recoverable, wherever it resides.

The new Fujitsu BaaS automatically replicates data to the secure cloud for offsite data protection. It facilitates the rapid recovery of recent local backup data through the use of Fujitsu’s cloud-based backup data and retrieval services. The system uses deduplication technology from Seagate and compression techniques to minimise the cost of transferring large volumes of data across the cloud.

Fujitsu Cloud BaaS will use 256-bit AES encryption to convert data both in-flight and at-rest in both the onsite appliance backup vault and the cloud backup vault. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance also provides automated, continuous cloud replication, helping to cut the costs and resources needed to maintain system integrity.

The pre-configured system will cut the storage footprint and minimise the bandwidth costs associated with cloud backup, said Fujitsu’s Global Offering Manager James Jefferd. The main business benefit, he said, is that it simplifies and speeds up a process that hybrid clouds could make more complicated for end users.

“With the trend toward a cloud service delivery model, IT buyers want easy-to-integrate cloud offerings that combine the benefits of cloud with existing assets,” said Jefferd. The BaaS Rapid Recovery Appliance can replace traditional on-site, tape-based backup with an easy to use flexible system, he said.

Gartner analyst Dave Russell predicted it would be good for remote-office and departmental computing environments. “Most organisations cite concerns over security as their top cloud issue. The greater issue is often latency, so a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model is emerging,” said Russell.

M&A, Microsoft, News & Analysis, productivity, Volometrix

Microsoft buys VoloMetrix to include people analytics in its cloud offering

MicrosoftMicrosoft has bought Seattle-based people analytics software maker VoloMetrix. The new addition will become part of an organisational analytics offering to Microsoft’s cloud service customers.

VoloMetrix uses information about employee email and calendar use to assess their individual and collective productivity. The system can also pull in data from Salesforce and other sources. By identifying employees that have too many meetings or who create excessive email traffic it can help companies manage their time resources more effectively.

According to Microsoft corporate vice president Rajesh Jha the newly acquired technology will be a strand in Microsoft’s new organisational analytics service Delve which will be unveiled for previews in October. Eventually, the service will become part of Microsoft’s cloud service Office 365.

The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. VoloMetrix co-founder and CEO Ryan Fuller blogged that joining Microsoft means the company can grow far more quickly. “Microsoft has a huge vision to reinvent productivity and a set of assets in Office 365 that are fundamental to how work gets done,” Fuller said.

VoluMetrix had previously raised $17 million in funding, including a $12 million cash injection in September 2014. Its enterprise clients include Boeing, Facebook, Genentech, Qualcomm, Seagate and Symantec.

Quantifying employee productivity is a new growth area with two start ups, Culture Amp and VoloMetrix, leading the field. These systems collate data about employees’ electronic calendar and email behaviour and use that data to assess people’s impact at work.

The systems can expose those who spend all their time “managing up” to senior executives or promoting themselves in status meetings, rather than working, according to Volometric founder Fuller. “You can quickly see the load senior executives are imposing, as well as the social graph of who else is affected,” said Fuller.

Cloud based people analytics will be used to understand the external and internal relationships and drive corporate decision-making, Fuller said: “Once a company understands the behaviours that correlate to success, they can measure them.”

In anticipation of opposition over privacy issues, VoloMetrix recently hired former Microsoft privacy strategist, Peter Cullen, to advise it. Reports are currently anonymous and private but individuals can see their own statistics.

Australian rival Culture Amp, used by enterprises like Airbnb, Box, Etsy, GoDaddy and Jawbone,

received $6.3 million in Series A funding from Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures and Blackbird Ventures in March 2015.

cloud security, Funding, Netskope, News & Analysis

Cloud broker Netskope raises $75 million for analytics based security enforcement services

Secure cloudCloud security firm Netskope has received $75 million to develop its policy enforcement systems for cloud applications.

Describing itself as a cloud access security broker, Netskope raised the investment in a Series D funding round led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Social + Capital Partnership also participated.

Netskope monitors and enforces policy on data shared across cloud applications. It aims to give companies an instant view of the use of their data and creates plans of action to prevent betrayed confidences and information leakage. In May 2014 investors staked $35 million in a Series C round of funding. It total, the company has raised $130 million in investment.

Data protection for cloud based apps is an emerging niche in the security market which, according to analysis by Gartner, has a market value of $5 billion. The new genre of Cloud Access Security Brokers solves problems that cannot be addressed by traditional firewalls, according to Gartner.

Netskope’s founder claims that the company differentiates itself by being more precise, and going deeper into the data. This, says founder and CEO Sanjay Beri, helps customers gain better understanding of their data’s exposure.

While cloud apps give the workforce better tools and flexibility, the IT department has to manage the proliferation of data shared across the masses of unsanctioned cloud apps, said Beri. Since there are often ten times more cloud apps in use than IT departments are aware of, this is creating a massive security problem, which Netskope aims to solve, according to Beri.

“Only Netskope provides surgical visibility and control for all cloud apps, whether sanctioned by IT or not,” said Beri. Mobile apps in particular will create security problems for enterprises, as the bring your own device trend continues, according to Netskope, which offers a data loss prevention system that examines 400 different file types across over 3000 different data identifiers. Its own internal figures suggest that 90 per cent of the apps used by its enterprise customers are unsanctioned and not considered as enterprise ready. In addition, 13.6 per cent of those app users have had their account credentials compromised.

The new capital will be used to expand sales, marketing, customer success, engineering and research operations worldwide, adding to its current 250 person headcount. New data centres are planned for Asia-Pacific and Europe to meet growing demand.