By now, many companies have embraced cloud computing. While a few years ago, many businesses were skeptical of cloud computing and having their software and data in a remote location. However, today, according to a recent survey by Gartner, many companies both big and small have already deployed the cloud in some capacity in their system. So, what is the future of the cloud now? Well it seems that moving forward; the hybrid cloud is where most organizations are going. According to another survey by a private company, most IT managers today want the hybrid model, that is, the mixture of private and public cloud models for their companies.

Why Go Hybrid?

For many companies, hybrid just makes more sense. Not everyone wants to completely go with public clouds because of security concerns, and not all companies may be able to afford a purely private solution. For any business owner, finding out which should go into which can be a challenge, plus with so many types of solutions, this can be even more of a difficult task.

However, with the way private and public clouds are structured, it’s not that difficult to figure out which should go where. Obviously, applications and data that require high-level security (such as financial information) should go in the private cloud to reduce the vulnerability of the company’s network. Larger applications that do have to be secured are perfect for the publish part of the cloud. Combining public and private clouds is very cost effective because private clouds are pricey, so companies can save more money by picking and choosing which goes where. Also, there are other advantages. A hybrid solution could also help protect the company’s network. It can reduce workload and should anything goes wrong in one part, it’s a good feeling to know that the other part won’t be affected.

Compliance

While many companies would prefer the cheaper public cloud solution, many have no choice but to employ a private cloud to host sensitive information to comply with government regulations. The financial sector, for example, is most affected by this. Financial institutions like banks and brokers need serious security on their networks but they must also abide by the laws that govern their industry. Putting some information in a public cloud could put their customers at risk, and some might even say it could put the economy at risk if certain information were to fall into the wrong hands. While a public cloud could offer cost savings which they can pass off to customers, they must still protect their information through a private cloud.

Eco-Friendly

Many companies today want to seem more appealing to their customers and one way to do that would be to market themselves as “eco-friendly” and one way to do that would be by using cloud computing. If you didn’t know it yet, cloud computing uses less resources and in some cases, it can even give back to the environment (like certain offices using heat from servers to warm rooms in the wintertime.) Some companies may be able to get a green business certification by using a hybrid cloud solution.

It will be interesting what the future has to bring in the world of technology and cloud computing. While we can make predictions, we can only wait and see that will happen in the next few decades.

Do you think the future of businesses is in the Hybrid Cloud? Let us know in the comments.

“We provide disaster recovery services as well as solutions. We also provide back-up solutions that work across your internal on-premise assets as well as in the public and private cloud,» stated Joel Ferman, Vice President of Marketing at InMage Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo® (http://www.CloudComputingExpo.com/), held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) is becoming big business. Research and Markets forecasts the global market of RaaS and cloud-based business continuity will reach $5.77 billion by 2018, creating major opportunities for business continuity and risk management specialists alike. Likewise, Reportstack announced recently the global Disaster Recovery-as-a Service (DRaaS) market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 54.64 percent from 2014 to 2018.[1]
One of the leading drivers for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) as well as enterprises seeking cloud solutions is Disaster Recovery (DR).[2]Organizations seek improved resiliency and failover in response to service disruptions of all kinds including natural disasters, cyber-attacks and technical malfunctions. In 2013, the financial impact of natural disasters worldwide was more than double the $100 billion estimate of 1990.[3]McAfee® Labs Threats Report indicates service disruptions are inevitable and becoming more predictable, with a reported 20 million new types of malware in the third quarter of 2013 alone. In a recent survey, IDC found that 71 percent of respondents experienced less than 10 hours of annual downtime, with a projected financial impact for SMBs of $125,000. Larger enterprise organizations could potentially have a corresponding annual financial impact of $17 million.[4] Dun & Bradstreet surveyed Fortune 500 companies with 59% of respondents reporting 1.5 hours of downtime each week, amounting to a projected $46 million impact annually for companies of 10,000 employees or more.[5]

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As an SDN network provider focused on the datacenter, we spend a good amount of time understanding the state of data centers today, tomorrow and some time into the future.

There is no question that the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud is growing rapidly. Plexxi itself is a shining example, few of the applications we use are in-house across all functional areas.

There are many reasons why we picked cloud-based applications for our needs. As a small company, in many cases there is a very simply economic choice to make. Paying for a cloud based service is simply cheaper than building your own infrastructure. Creating a datacenter infrastructure is not cheap, and maintaining it and the applications that run on top is a serious investment. When you are small, that overhead is hard to carry and per user based charges for a cloud based application is much easier to swallow.

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As an SDN network provider focused on the datacenter, we spend a good amount of time understanding the state of data centers today, tomorrow and some time into the future.

There is no question that the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud is growing rapidly. Plexxi itself is a shining example, few of the applications we use are in-house across all functional areas.

There are many reasons why we picked cloud-based applications for our needs. As a small company, in many cases there is a very simply economic choice to make. Paying for a cloud based service is simply cheaper than building your own infrastructure. Creating a datacenter infrastructure is not cheap, and maintaining it and the applications that run on top is a serious investment. When you are small, that overhead is hard to carry and per user based charges for a cloud based application is much easier to swallow.

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After CRM and business IT provider Autotask suffered a severe outage yesterday, CloudTech caught up with VP engineering Adam Stewart to get the lowdown on what happened, and what happens from here

Exclusive Late on Monday and into part of Tuesday, cloudy IT management software provider Autotask went down for English speaking customers in Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, as CloudTech reported.

The root cause, according to Autotask VP engineering Adam Stewart, was a capacity spike that brought the system down and caused two separate failures. After the first downtime, engineers added more virtual cores, or more ‘CPU horsepower’ to the web tier, only for the system to go down again at approximately 0651 GMT on July 2.

“We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems,” says Stewart, who admitted that he was ‘a bit relieved’. “Basically, we went through all the things you would go through to try and discover what the cause is.”

This included the possibility of a malicious attack – a macabre, if not unexpected development given what happened to Code Spaces last week – as well as looking at various processes in the tier, yet the issue was because of the last change made to the CPU.

Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important

“After about two hours of trying many fruitless theories, we thought – although this is quite counter-intuitive – the last change we made to the system was that we added this other CPU,” Stewart explains. “It shouldn’t because we don’t believe that’s a problem, but let’s try it because it makes sense.

“So we reverted that change and, lo and behold, those servers stabilised almost immediately. We waited 10 minutes and there was no peak, no spike, no anything else, so we gradually went through and reverted the change on all the other servers, and that’s what’s stabilised the issue.

“In hindsight we now know, empirically, that change caused it,” Stewart adds. “We’re not sure why something that we’ve done dozens of times before didn’t actually stick this time.

“It was almost as if the virtualisation software was reporting to the operating system that there were eight cores in each processor, however it was only providing four cores – something like that.”

It’s a slightly worrying admission that the company doesn’t know exactly why this happened, but Stewart assures us that there is contact between Autotask and its virtualisation provider. Additional servers were added last night to expand the capacity and mitigate the risk of further problems – and all seems well for now.

The EMEA service disruption was resolved at 10:25 GMT. We’re working to ensure the issue doesn’t reoccur. Contact Autotask support with q’s.

— Autotask (@Autotask) July 2, 2014

Stewart is keen to point out that Autotask was “constantly” on the phones and on emails to customers during the outage, with some customers taking to Twitter to praise this approach:

Good call from @Autotask; checking how we managed the unexpected system outage yesterday #professional #caring

— Sytec (@Sytec) July 3, 2014

Yet Autotask’s Twitter page throughout Monday evening and Tuesday morning was a ghost town, leading to frustrated comments from customers.

“We were a little more silent there than maybe we should have been,” Stewart admits, adding: “I work out of the New York office – we were in constant contact with our UK office where most of the support was taking place for that.”

Stewart also concedes that yesterday’s downtime puts Autotask “a little bit below” the four nines SLA for the affected zones, yet adds it’s not a contractual stipulation. “It’s just the performance our customers have grown accustomed to, and rightly so,” he explains.

When outages occur, companies are quick to reassure customers it won’t happen again, and to put appropriate policies in place. It’s a similar thing for Autotask, who is collaborating with its virtualisation partner, examining additional testing procedures, as well as setting up a test environment to repeat the problem.

We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems

It’s all good development practice, yet prevention is still better than cure in these instances.

“Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important,” Stewart says.

“This is by far the worst outage we’ve had in probably five or six years,” he adds. “Overall, I’d say we still have a great record, but I’m sure in [the media’s] eyes…it’s called into question and we have to earn everybody’s trust again – which we will do.”

Cloud computing has officially hit the mainstream in the UK, according to the latest research published by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

The research, conducted in June 2014, found that more than three quarters (78%) of organisations had “formally” adopted at least one cloud-based service, which indicated a 15% growth since the last research undertaken in September 2013.

Of that number, almost half (45%) use only one cloud service, while 28% use two, 13% use three and 14% use four or more, indicating a fairly solid uptake up the scale.

The most popular of these services are web hosting, email, CRM, data backup and disaster recovery, with video conferencing, collaboration tools, HR apps and data storage seen as in the secondary tier.

The most popular driver of cloud computing is flexibility of delivery model among the private sector (17%), while, perhaps less surprisingly, operational cost savings (21%) drive the growth of cloud in the public sector.

Branding is also seen as an important element of this report. 79% of organisations polled now formally consider cloud as part of their IT strategy, yet a similar number (78%) reported they manage the majority of their IT in house, with the other 22% opting for a managed service provider.

It’s also worth noting, however, that the vast majority (85%) of organisations polled said they also operated part of their systems on-premise, whether it’s servers or data centres.

This means the CIF research falls in line with widespread industry opinion, which profiles the growth of cloud in a hybrid IT environment. Yet CIF chief exec Alex Hilton isn’t stopping there.

“We can also predict that 10% of businesses will likely report a primary cloud-based IT strategy, 10% will remain entirely on-premise and 80% will have a hybrid IT environment,” Hilton said.

“This means that nine out of 10 companies will continue to invest in on-premise IT alongside and integrated with cloud solutions.

“In other words, we are infact seeing the normalisation of cloud in the hybrid IT market,” he added.

The Cloud Industry Forum’s state of the market research first began in 2010 – and the 2014 report has shown UK cloud growth of 61.5% since the initial research.

You can read more here.

The advent of the application programming interface (API) economy has forced a huge, pressing need for organizations to both seek openness and improve security for accessing mobile applications, data, and services anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
Awash in inadequate passwords and battling subsequent security breaches, business and end-users alike are calling for improved identity management and federation technologies. They want workable standards to better chart the waters of identity management and federation, while preserving the need for enterprise-caliber risk remediation and security.

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“About two years ago Brother launched a new group called Brother Online. We thought it was a good idea for a hardware company to get into the cloud services market and our first step into that market was web conferencing,” explained Courtney Behrens, Senior Marketing Manager at Brother International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Indeed the anticipated and most likely approach for organisations next year will not be a decision of whether to utilise a large existent infrastructure investment or a scalable on demand public cloud service but rather the most effective strategy to leverage both.
Despite all the marketing and promotion surrounding the benefits of dynamically bursting into a hybrid cloud from inception, this rarely seems to be the case. If anything the current trend towards building hybrid clouds still stems from an organic growth and demand that has emanated from either an existent public or private cloud deployment. Certainly private clouds are the most common origins of hybrid clouds as organisations look towards adding further agility to the many benefits they’ve attained.

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