David Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company that delivers fast, low-cost, and reliable cloud storage. Prior to Wasabi, David co-founded Carbonite, one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies. A successful tech entrepreneur for more than 30 years, David got his start at ARP Instruments, a manufacturer of synthesizers for rock bands, where he worked with leading musicians of the day like Stevie Wonder, Pete Townsend of The Who, and Led Zeppelin. David has also co-founded five other companies including Computer Pictures Corporation – an early player in computer graphics, Pilot Software – a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data for major retail companies, Faxnet – which became the world’s largest provider of fax-to-email services, as well as Sonexis – a VoIP conferencing company.

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Contino is a global technical consultancy that helps highly-regulated enterprises transform faster, modernizing their way of working through DevOps and cloud computing. They focus on building capability and assisting our clients to in-source strategic technology capability so they get to market quickly and build their own innovation engine.

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The importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to both the biggest cloud providers and their customers continues to rise – and Google Cloud aims to get a step up on its rivals by offering pre-packaged AI services.

At Google Next back in July, Google Cloud AI chief scientist Fei-Fei Li noted that AI was ‘no longer a niche for the tech world’ but ‘the differentiator for businesses in every industry.’ It’s not difficult to see why. Take the various companies who cite AI and machine learning capability as key when they make the switch regardless of who they shop with – from Bloomberg with Google, to Formula 1 with AWS.

Google’s pre-packaged AI offerings are based around improving the enterprise contact centre and talent acquisition respectively. The roster of partners the company is working with on the contact centre is almost a who’s who of the cloud networking space, from Cisco, to RingCentral, to Twilio, with Deloitte and KPMG among the integration partners.

A blog post from Apoorv Saxena, cloud AI product manager, and Geordy Kitchen, cloud group product manager, explains the benefits of the contact centre technology. “Instead of a phone tree, [Contact Center AI] greets callers in a natural and conversational manner,” the two write., “Whenever possible, it aims to resolve simple requests and tasks, such as billing enquiries or driving directions – and when it determines that a caller’s needs exceed its abilities to help, it seamlessly transitions the call to a live agent and switches to a supporting role.

“During the conversation, it surfaces information that can help the live agent, in real time, so agents have little need to put a caller on hold,” Saxena and Kitchen add. “It also captures important analytics, such as historical trends or whether a certain kind of contact is happening more frequently.”

Many will remember that, back in May, Google conducted a demo where its Assistant software called a real hair salon to book an appointment, with the employee at the other line purportedly unaware that it was an AI calling them. Some had suspicions around the veracity of that demo – so it may be worth exploring these further.

On an earnings call last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted the company’s continued momentum, with larger and more strategic cloud deals, was ‘a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centres and machine learning.’ “We have developed these over many years and they power our own services in the cloud and are now helping others,” he told analysts.

In its Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey, 451 Research analysts found that 90 percent of organizations surveyed are using some type of cloud service. Last year, the cloud market was worth $28.1 billion; by 2021, it will almost double in value at $53.3 billion. And by next year, 69 percent of respondents intend to have some type of multi-cloud environment.

This is just one of the many analyst reports that document the fact that cloud use is on the rise. All kinds of software companies have jumped on the cloud bandwagon – huge numbers of organizations already have a cloud presence or are quickly moving in that direction. You hear the terms “born in the cloud,” “cloud-enabled” and “cloud-native” all the time, but often the differences between them are fuzzy, causing confusion among potential buyers. So, for the sake of clarity, let’s take a closer look.

Defining our cloud terms

One of the latest buzzwords is “born in the cloud,” but what does it mean and why does it matter? Techopedia defines it as “a specific type of cloud service that does not involve legacy systems but was designed for cloud delivery.” Techopedia also notes that “born in the cloud” products deliver certain benefits, such as “rapid elasticity” and “on-demand availability.”

Those cloud attributes support important features and benefits, such as desktop provisioning in minutes, instant scalability and better-than-physical-PC performance. Sounds pretty compelling, right? Then there’s simplicity. If your virtual desktop solution doesn’t simplify your world, it’s time to re-evaluate. 

Cloud-native or cloud-enabled?

A solution that was “born in the cloud” was meant to be delivered exclusively via the cloud. How is this concept related to the notions of “cloud-enabled” and “cloud-native”? These terms are sometimes used interchangeably and can be easily confused, yet the difference between them is significant.

Here is the heart of the matter: A cloud-enabled VDI solution is a legacy product that was originally designed for a traditional data center and was then plunked into the cloud. A cloud-native virtual desktop solution is built from the ground up using micro-services; it’s multi-tenant, and it features fast and easy scalability.

Cloud-enabled VDI drags along all the same baggage it had in its data center incarnation. It’s complex, single-tenant and hard to scale. The cloud-native solutions deliver all the simplicity, elasticity and scalability benefits mentioned above. So, “born in the cloud” and “cloud-native” are the same thing. It’s the “cloud-enabled” solutions you need to worry about.

Of all the VDI solutions available, only two are actually cloud-native. All the other vendors have cloud-enabled VDI solutions that cannot deliver the simplicity, scalability and performance benefits that made moving to the cloud so attractive in the first place. It’s ironic that a solution described as “cloud-enabled” is actually missing so many capabilities that the cloud makes possible. That’s why it can be confusing and why it’s so important to drill-down on whether the solution can meet your requirements.

Going native 

With so much business moving to the cloud, many vendors are scrambling to offer cloud-enabled versions of their products. That might work for some needs, but when it comes to virtual desktops, clunky legacy systems that just get moved to the cloud will never make users happy. With a cloud-native solution, IT doesn’t have to worry about infrastructure or continually put out fires started by legacy solutions, so IT staff can focus on more strategic projects for the business. Getting those resources back to focus on advancing business goals is just one of the many reasons to choose cloud-native virtual desktops.

Cloud adoption is a core component of digital transformation. Scaling the IT environment, making it resilient, and reducing costs are what organizations want. Hear from the author of the best selling Packtbook «Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions» as he presents and explains critical Cloud solution design considerations and technology decisions required to choose and deploy the right Cloud service and deployment models, that are aligned to your business and technology service requirements. This session will help you master the design considerations and operational trades required to adopt Cloud services, no matter which Cloud service provider you choose.

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Prometheus, an open source systems monitoring technology, has ‘graduated’ from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – five months after Kubernetes took the plunge.

The graduation – which is essentially an affirmation of a technology having strong adoption and governance processes – was announced at the PromCom event. Prometheus has almost 20 active maintainers today, alongside more than 1,000 contributors and more than 13,000 commits.

The CNCF, a vendor-neutral home for emerging projects and technologies, has three stages of development. For those barely out of the womb, the only criterion for the inception stage is that the technology adds value to cloud native computing in some capacity. The incubation stage requires further accreditation in terms of documents and usage before finally ‘graduating’.

In a blog post, Prometheus’ Richard Hartmann noted how both the technology and the documentation had been overhauled since reaching incubation stage, including rewriting the storage backend and a push towards making adoption easier.

“Since its inception in 2012, Prometheus has become one of the top open source monitoring tools of choice for enterprises building modern cloud native applications,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF chief operating officer. “Since being accepted as the second project in CNCF, Prometheus has cultivated an active developer and user community, giving the TOC full confidence to graduate the project.”

Kubernetes found its way to graduation in March, with the Google-developed container orchestration tool counting on companies such as Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Uber – the latter of which also being a keen Prometheus user. As this publication noted throughout last year, pretty much every leading cloud provider joined the CNCF, giving rise to Kubernetes’ growing influence.

For Prometheus, which was originally designed by engineers at SoundCloud, the push to graduation means a greater opportunity to push the technology into the enterprise. “By graduating Prometheus, CNCF shows that it’s confident in our code and feature velocity, or maturity and stability, and our governance and community processes,” added Hartmann. “This also acts as an external verification of quality for anyone in internal discussions around choice of monitoring tool.”

It has been another busy week at Alibaba Cloud, with the company’s latest releases focusing on both Asia Pacific and European expansion.

The increased focus on Asia Pacific comes through the launch of no fewer than nine products around cloud architecture, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and security.

These include PAI, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary machine learning platform, IoT Platform, which will be introduced to the global market, as well as Data Lake Analytics, a serverless offering which aims to turn customers’ data lakes into insights. Other products being introduced into this market include a hybrid backup recovery tool, a dedicated host service, and anti-bot software.

The nine products also include partner offerings. Alibaba’s partnership with China Unicom has resulted in an enterprise network solution, while HPE is on board to help organisations with hybrid cloud and analytics search engine Elasticsearch is available through Alibaba Cloud and Elastic.

The latter is being expanded in a separate announcement to deliver the service globally. Elasticsearch was previously only available to Alibaba Cloud customers in China, with the expanded collaboration including visualisation offering Kibana, data shipper Beats, and processing tool Logstash.

Alibaba had earlier this month been focusing its expansion plans on Southeast Asia; the company had announced a second infrastructure zone in Malaysia, offering DDoS protection, database, networking and monitoring services, as well as certified SAP hosting.

“Asia Pacific is a unique market, and as a global cloud services provider with an Asian origin, we are committed to leverage our knowledge and experience to build a sustainable regional ecosystem and enrich our offerings to meet the needs of our customers in this digital age,” said Derek Wang, chief solution architect at Alibaba Cloud International in a statement.

“This new suite of offering includes products that are highly efficient, cost effective, and some of them are the first of their kind in the industry,” Wang added.

Photo source: www.alibabagroup.com

Even the slowest industries are moving workloads to the cloud – take risk, audit and finance as an example. Yet there is still plenty more to be done before these verticals become truly comfortable.

That’s according to the latest report from analyst firm Gartner. In the company’s most recent Emerging Risks study, cloud computing remains the primary concern for those in risk and compliance. Cloud was ahead of cybersecurity disclosure and GDPR compliance as the biggest worry for the 110 senior executives polled.

Given Gartner predicts cloud computing to be a $300 billion business by 2021 – and is indeed a cornerstone of the company’s feted ‘digital business’ ethos – there is plenty of reason to get involved. Yet these organisations have a right to be concerned. Gartner added that through 2022, ‘at least’ 95% of cloud security failures will be attributable to the organisation – and that companies should expect to be affected by cybersecurity threats in ‘unpredictable’ ways.

Organisations continue to struggle with security despite record spending on information security over the past two years, according to Gartner. And it is only going to get worse from here. Social engineering, alongside the threat of GDPR, were cited as most likely to cause the most mayhem for enterprises if not properly addressed by risk management leaders.

This publication has explored the various strategies different industries have undertaken in adopting cloud-based technologies. Take healthcare as an example. Writing for this publication in February, Virtustream’s Roberto Mircoli noted that while to date health organisations had been ‘testing the waters by focusing on modernising the back end of systems… transforming core healthcare systems and applications’ was now the order of the day.

“Executives are right to expand cloud services as part of their digital business initiatives, but they need to ensure their cloud security strategy keeps up with this growth,” said Matthew Shinkman, practice leader at Gartner in a statement. “Leaders should start by clearly identifying their most at-risk areas, which remain obscure to many large organisation leaders.”

Enterprises are striving to become digital businesses for differentiated innovation and customer-centricity. Traditionally, they focused on digitizing processes and paper workflow. To be a disruptor and compete against new players, they need to gain insight into business data and innovate at scale. Cloud and cognitive technologies can help them leverage hidden data in SAP/ERP systems to fuel their businesses to accelerate digital transformation success.

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