From cloud cost management angle, comprehensive cloud cost analytics across multiple clouds as well as granular drill downs into each of the cost elements is very important for tighter cost control and management. As enterprises are adopting cloud across many line of businesses, departments, vertical functions and geographies, an enterprise class cloud analytics tool is a must have for holistic cloud cost management.
[video] @GoogleCloud’s DX Keynote | @ExpoDX @VidyaNagarajan #AI #DigitalTransformation
Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience both online and in-store.
Hybrid cloud trends to watch in 2018: Skills, security, and more
Despite the promise of hybrid cloud, many organisations will go into 2018 attempting to work out how to derive real value from it.
As we near the end of 2017, here we examine the top hybrid cloud trends to watch out for in the coming year.
Trend 1: Transforming customer experiences and targeted business outcomes with the Internet of Things
There’s still a great deal of speculation about the potential value that IoT will bring businesses. For IoT to deliver, it’s critical for businesses to stop thinking about IoT as simply a collection of connected sensors and devices. Businesses need to leverage the power that modern analytics systems provide. It’s the combination of the data collected at the edge of the network, the networks themselves, and the big data analysis that comprise true IoT.
IoT projects are already providing tangible benefits to organisations that have approached them with clear business needs in mind, and this is a trend we see continuing in the year ahead.
Trend 2: Hybrid cloud containment is a pervasive issue
Public cloud has largely failed to live up to expectations. Already proving to be more expensive than many organisations originally thought, these costs are continuing to escalate, and most haven’t reduced their headcount. This is because a certain set of skills is needed to run public cloud environments, versus traditional, on-premise operations.
In the next 12 months, we’ll see businesses carefully assessing the return on investment generated by their ‘generation 1’ cloud projects and reducing and/or reviewing their consumption-based opex budgets in favour of what could be developed in-house, this time using more intelligent tools. Rather than continuing to consume public cloud, many organisations will consider building their own private clouds. This approach is already gaining traction in the financial services industry where we’re seeing an increase in open stack implementations for large-scale private environments.
Trend 3: Increasing understanding of the platform economy
Digital marketplaces are changing the face of business. Organisations will recognise the true potential of the platform economy, but they’ll also begin to realise its impact on their operating models, and the fundamental changes that they need to make to be successful.
In the platform economy, the risk shifts from the consumer to the provider. Organisations that operate platforms need to make significant upfront investments to build their platforms, before they receive revenue. This means that they need to change their commercial and pricing models to factor in the new risk that they’re taking on.
Trend 4: Hybrid cloud solutions are becoming verticalised
As we move through 2018, we’ll see more vertical cloud solutions coming to market, as smaller cloud providers look for ways to differentiate themselves from the hyperscalers. In the year ahead, we can expect to see these smaller players investing significantly in industry-specific compliance regimes, to build credibility within their target market.
The result will be hybrid cloud offerings that span the entire spectrum of the XaaS stack, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which deliver a comprehensive solution for specific verticals. These solutions will cover everything from the infrastructure layer, to platform tools that customers’ development teams can use to build new services without the fear of any compliance breaches, to the application that’s delivering the service.
Trend 5: The rise of hybrid cloud management solutions
Businesses will continue to commit to multi-cloud architectures – both public and private, and from several different providers. While there are significant benefits to this approach, it can result in greater management complexity and many organisations’ internal IT teams are finding it increasingly difficult to manage ‘workload sprawl’ within their environments.
As a result, businesses are recognising the importance of having a defined set of management tools to run their operations, and we can expect to see an increase in demand for hybrid cloud management solutions.
In the year ahead, organisations that set out to build hybrid cloud environments will be looking to source and adopt specific workload-centric management solutions that can be run across multiple platforms. These will include hybrid cloud management tools for IaaS – both private and public – as well as PaaS and SaaS.
I also predict that in the year ahead, more businesses will invest in new automation and orchestration software that enable improved application performance and analytics.
Trend 6: Industry skills and talent pool continue to shrink
The talent pool of people available to help organisations architect, implement, and operate hybrid cloud solutions will continue to shrink in the year ahead. As every organisation accelerates its move to become a digital business to remain competitive, software engineering will become the essential trade. In 2018, we’ll start to see this manifesting in a war for talent. There’ll be a significant spike in demand for software development talent graduating from tertiary institutions, as organisations seek the skills they need to build their digital front-ends.
Trend 7: Expectation for service providers to deliver a unified, embedded cyber security posture – across all platforms and services
Organisations that appoint service providers to take on the management of their hybrid, multiple, dispersed, and potentially unrelated IT platforms, will expect them to enable an end-to-end security posture that spans the entire platform.
As we move into 2018, the assumption from organisations is that hybrid cloud is secure. Therefore, they’ll expect their service providers to offer robust security measures that cover on-premise and cloud-based assets, the network, and applications – all built into an intelligent security core.
Providers should be able to demonstrate their understanding of how digital infrastructure, digital workplaces, and cloud environments expose new risks, and be capable of re-evaluating the most appropriate and cost-effective security controls. Organisations should also look for providers that can offer a holistic approach, with robust detection and incident response capabilities, and the ability to act effectively and efficiently, regardless of the location of a security incident.
As we move into 2018, those organisations that take note of these key hybrid cloud trends will reap the benefits and stay ahead of the pack.
[video] Get the Benefits of Public Cloud On-Prem with @Cloudistics | @CloudExpo #SDN #API #Cloud
«We’re focused on how to get some of the attributes that you would expect from an Amazon, Azure, Google, and doing that on-prem. We believe today that you can actually get those types of things done with certain architectures available in the market today,» explained Steve Conner, VP of Sales at Cloudistics, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] A Cloud-based HPC Visualization Cluster | @CloudExpo @PenguinHPC #Cloud #Containers
Data scientists must access high-performance computing resources across a wide-area network. To achieve cloud-based HPC visualization, researchers must transfer datasets and visualization results efficiently.
HPC clusters now compute GPU-accelerated visualization in the cloud cluster. To efficiently display results remotely, a high-performance, low-latency protocol transfers the display from the cluster to a remote desktop. Further, tools to easily mount remote datasets and efficiently transfer that data into the HPC cluster are described, including performance characterization results.
Oracle posts more strong cloud results – but analysts unconvinced on guidance
Oracle has announced its latest financial results with cloud again the backbone of success – although its stock slipped due to a struggling guidance.
Total cloud revenues were up 44% year over year to $1.5 billion, with software as a service contributing almost three quarters of that figure at $1.1bn, a yearly increase of 55%. Platform and infrastructure as a service was at $396 million, representing year over year growth of 21%. In total, cloud revenues represented 16% of Oracle’s total revenues, again up from 12% this time last year.
Proposed guidance for cloud revenue, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, was at between 21% and 25%, while Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, said that the company expects to sell around $2 billion in enterprise software as a service revenues in the coming four quarters.
The announcement of BYOL – bring your own license – in September reaped dividends, according to co-CEO Safra Catz. “With BYOL, we are seeing a strong increase in our technology install base as customers renew their unlimited license agreement, investing more licenses and options and renew support,” said Catz, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Because BYOL is now available and customers better understand their tradition options to move to the Oracle Cloud, technology new software license revenue is dramatically improving from the declines we were seeing previously.”
Catz added this trend was likely to continue as Oracle rolls out its long-awaited autonomous database – and this was the primary focus of CTO Larry Ellison’s remarks. The elimination of human labour and the price advantages – particularly when compared to Amazon – was nothing different from when Ellison took to the OpenWorld stage in October. The bullishness, however, remains. “We expect this innovative new technology to dramatically accelerate the growth of our PaaS and SaaS businesses and keep our database license business strong as well,” said Ellison.
Total revenues for Oracle in the most recent quarter were at $9.6bn, up 6%. You can read the full set of results here (pdf).
How more industry cloud services are gaining momentum in 2017
Worldwide spending on industry cloud services in the finance sector – such as banking, insurance, securities and investment services – is expected to reach $3.2 billion in 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).
Furthermore, IDC expects the amount to more than double in 2021, amassing total worldwide spending of $7.2 billion.
Industry cloud market development
The manufacturing industry (both discrete and process combined) was a larger spender on industry cloud though, relative to its finance counterpart. This industry is expected to spend $4.2 billion in 2017 and achieve year-over-year growth of 23 percent in 2018. Similar to the finance industry, the manufacturing industry is also set to double its 2017 spending in 2021, reaching a total of $9.2 billion.
However, IDC forecasts healthcare providers across the world will spend a total of $8.9 billion in adopting industry cloud solutions during 2017. This industry is expected to increase spending by 20 percent year-over-year in 2018 on industry cloud solutions – by 2021, that's a staggering $17.6 billion.
On a geographic basis, the United States leads by a very large margin in terms of industry cloud adoption across the three aforementioned industries combined. It's expected to reach 73 percent of worldwide spend in 2017, followed by Western Europe at 12 percent.
The U.S. is also forecast to grow 20 percent year-over-year in 2018 while the other regions are expected to achieve 27 percent annual growth during the same period. The three industries are expected to spend a total of $330 million on industry cloud solutions in China in 2018, representing very strong growth of 39 percent year-over-year.
"The industry cloud market is young, yet growing fast, with double-digit growth expected to continue for at least the next five to ten years. Dozens of new industry collaborative clouds are emerging each year, helping to foster digital transformation, streamline industry value chains, and ultimately drive innovation, while most software vendors are also shifting their portfolios to focus more heavily on designing industry cloud solutions," said Eric Newmark, program vice president at IDC.
Outlook for vertical industry cloud growth
Healthcare continues to lead the charge from a vertical standpoint, but many industries have picked up momentum, including manufacturing, financial services, and even government.
Though the market's tipping point is still a few years away, IDC believes the industry cloud market represents one of the largest vertical growth opportunities for technology and professional services firms through 2025.
According to the IDC assessment, IT vendors who become strategic suppliers to a successful industry cloud win the business of not just that one organization, but of that customer's entire digital ecosystem.
Can You Run a VM from an External Drive?
At a recent conference for Mac® IT admins, I was asked, “Can you run a VM from an external drive?” Short answer: “Yes, absolutely. I do this all the time.” Longer answer: You have always been able to run a Parallels Desktop® for Mac virtual machine from an external drive. In Parallels Desktop 13, this […]
The post Can You Run a VM from an External Drive? appeared first on Parallels Blog.
[video] Data Traffic Management with @Cedexis | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #Analytics
«There’s plenty of bandwidth out there but it’s never in the right place. So what Cedexis does is uses data to work out the best pathways to get data from the origin to the person who wants to get it,» explained Simon Jones, Evangelist and Head of Marketing at Cedexis, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] Security in a Cloud-First World Is Cloudy | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #Security
Enterprises are moving to the cloud faster than most of us in security expected. CIOs are going from 0 to 100 in cloud adoption and leaving security teams in the dust. Once cloud is part of an enterprise stack, it’s unclear who has responsibility for the protection of applications, services, and data.
When cloud breaches occur, whether active compromise or a publicly accessible database, the blame must fall on both service providers and users.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben Johnson, Co-Founder and CTO of Obsidian Security, explored how both groups must do more to make cloud more secure, from leveraging AI to improving APIs, to incorporating cloud into current security programs.