Amrita Choudhury, Analyst, Software – Infrastructure Solutions

The last decade has seen massive growth in data volumes and there has been a corresponding seismic shift in the way in which organizations deal with data. While storage technology has become relatively affordable and improved, it has struggled to keep pace with the data growth.

Storage infrastructure expansion can be costly and is a continual process. Freeing up storage capacity is never an easy decision, with business requirements and regulatory compliance obliging organizations to have effective backup and disaster-recovery mechanisms in place.

Cloud-based storage has been a catalyst for major change in the backup and recovery arena. It also provides several benefits, including scalability, flexibility, accessibility, monitoring ease, and affordable pricing. Ovum believes that cloud-based backup and recovery is a viable proposition for many organizations, and could help mitigate one of the biggest headaches of IT departments and CIOs.

Using cloud for backup …

It’s a tradition as old as the hills, from the BBC’s scoop on spaghetti trees in 1957 to Google’s Pokemon Maps earlier today. Not surprisingly the hype around cloud has prompted a few firms to try their own spoof stories on April Fool’s Day. Here are three of CloudTech’s favourites.

Digital Science, a technology division of Macmillan Science and Education, posted worrying findings this morning that “the computing cloud is drifting towards the North Pole.”

In a blog post entitled ‘Cloud computing suffers a major blow’, the company has evidence to suggest that “global warming and the changes thus caused in the Jet Stream pose a danger to ‘the cloud’.”

“Further disturbing reports are emerging about problems being created by unidentified data objects (UDOs) saturating ‘the cloud’,” the post reads. “This saturation could possibly result in difficulties with data storage.”

If this hasn’t tipped …

Cloud is ‘driving the bulk of change’ in the software market as Salesforce.com becomes the first pure play cloud company to make the top 10 companies for global software revenue, according to analyst house Gartner.

“The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things movement,” said Gartner research VP Joanne Correia.

Salesforce.com is the only new entrant in the top 10 with a 33.3% growth rate in revenue from last year – the company now turns over $3.8bn in software according to Gartner, compared to $2.9bn in 2012. The SaaS bods are the clear winners in terms of growth, with VMware (position #8, 14.1% growth) and SAP (#4, 9.5% growth) the next fastest …

While technology changes on a regular basis, IT teams have had a standard approach to administration. In recent years, however, there has been a drastic shift in data center administration. One of the biggest shifts is the adoption of private and public clouds. In part two of this series, we will examine public cloud architectures.
From small businesses to major organizations, companies are moving to cloud architectures to meet a variety of different application needs, such as CRM and email. According to IDC, worldwide spending on public IT cloud services is expected to be more than $107 billion in 2017. They believe the next phase of cloud adoption will focus on being more user and solution driven in order to continue to drive growth and innovation across all industries that depend on IT. Public cloud services are generally used for servers, storage, and backup infrastructure. Ultimately, public cloud infrastructure is about cost, scalability and flexibility.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that NuoDB, Inc., the leader in distributed database technology, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Everyday businesses face challenges with application deployments, maintaining business continuity and providing outstanding application performance. NuoDB leads the industry with a cloud database management system to solve these problems.
NuoDB provides scale-out performance, continuous availability and active/active operation. It’s a single, logical database easily deployed in multiple locations simultaneously. This unique capability is unavailable in any other SQL product.

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The time has come for humanity’s first interstellar trek to Terranuvem, the cloud planet, and Chief Engineer Cyrus Agarwal has been chosen to ready a ship for the voyage. He must make the right architectural choices to transform the ship for the long journey and be prepared for the unknown. He will be tested and overcome challenges during the mission.
Join Cyrus and the crew of the Stratus at Oracle VP Rex Wang’s Day 2 Keynote at 14th Cloud Expo for a unique, sci-fi movie experience while learning key success factors for your own journey to cloud.

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It’s now clear that we are entering into a very diverse and even unprecedented work environment — something the world perhaps has never known. Companies need to prepare for it now.

But how do enterprises prepare, and how do they create the means to analyze and manage the transition to very different work environments? BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

To learn more about hiring and acquiring talent and managing a diverse and socially engaged — and even more knowledge-driven workforce — we sat down with Shawn Price, President for Global Cloud and Line of Business at SAP, and the former President of SuccessFactors, now part of SAP. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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You hear this everywhere these days: Build applications that are cloud-native – that is, developed specifically for cloud platforms. The trouble is everyone has his or her own definition of «cloud-native.» As a result, cloud-hosted applications are all over the place in their use of native features. Many are not designed properly, and they’re worse off in the cloud than when they ran in the data center.
What are the fundamentals of being cloud-native? As I see it, being cloud-native is more about the application architecture and design than how you code the thing. Sadly, many people – in IT and at the vendors – are missing the boat on both points.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that MetraTech Corp., the leading global provider of Agreements-Based Billing™ (ABB), Commerce and Settlement solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Commerce is driven by agreements between sellers and buyers. The best agreements can be fluidly negotiated and flexible enough to meet the needs of both sides. This allows a business to be able to adapt to new markets, new business models, or competition, giving them a distinct advantage.

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