The shift of IT workloads to hybrid cloud computing continues to grow, fuelled in part by the rise of digital transformation projects. Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $266 billion in 2021, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Although spending growth will likely slow during 2016-2021, the market is still expected to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21 percent. Moreover, public cloud services spending will reach $128 billion in 2017 — that’s an increase of 25.4 percent over 2016.

Public cloud market development

The United States will be the largest market for public cloud services accounting for more than 60 percent of worldwide revenues throughout the forecast, and total spending of $163 billion in 2021.

Western Europe and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) will be the second and third largest regions with 2021 spending levels of $52 billion and $25 billion, respectively. APeJ and Latin America will experience the fastest spending growth over the forecast period with CAGRs of 26.7 percent and 26.2 percent, respectively.

However, according to the IDC assessment, six of the eight regions are forecast to experience CAGRs greater than 20 percent over the next five years.

«In Western Europe, the public cloud market is going to more than double in the 2016-2021 time frame led by strong spending growth in Germany, which is also the largest national market, Italy, and Sweden,» said Angela Vacca, senior research manager at IDC.

The U.S. industries that will see the fastest growth in public cloud services spending are professional services (21.5 percent CAGR), media (21 percent CAGR), retail, and telecom (each with a CAGR of 20.9 percent).

The U.S. industries that will spend the most on public cloud services are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking. Together, these three industries will account for nearly one third of all public cloud services spending in the United States in 2021.

In Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, banking, professional services, and telecom will deliver more than a third of the region’s public cloud services spending in 2021 while the industries with the fastest spending growth will be professional services, personal and consumer services, and process manufacturing.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the dominant cloud computing type, capturing two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2017 and nearly 60 percent in 2021.  Spending on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will grow at much faster rates than SaaS with five-year CAGRs of 30 percent and 29.7 percent, respectively.

Outlook for enterprise adoption growth

In terms of company size, more than half of all public cloud spending will come from very large businesses (those with more than 1,000 employees) while medium-sized businesses (100-499 employees) will deliver about 20 percent of spending throughout the forecast.

Large businesses (500-999 employees) will see the fastest growth with a five-year CAGR of 22.8 percent. While purchase priorities vary somewhat depending on company size, the leading product categories include CRM and ERM applications in addition to server and storage hardware.

«I will be talking about ChatOps and ChatOps as a way to solve some problems in the DevOps space,» explained Himanshu Chhetri, CTO of Addteq, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that SkyScale will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SkyScale is a world-class provider of cloud-based, ultra-fast multi-GPU hardware platforms for lease to customers desiring the fastest performance available as a service anywhere in the world. SkyScale builds, configures, and manages dedicated systems strategically located in maximum-security facilities, allowing customers to focus on results while minimizing capital equipment investment.

read more

With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, will examine the regulations and provide insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence around personal data.

read more

Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the 1960’s it was designed to process a large numbers of transactions quickly. Although IBM is still updating the code, the last major rewrite was about ten years ago. With all the major technologies changes since then, it’s clear that IBM has already accomplished a herculean task by keeping an application viable for over 50 years!

read more

Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis. Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. Questions about how to manage cost variances and deviations with assets and cost across different suppliers abound. A recent Cloud Tech article explained that while public cloud offers considerable cost savings in comparison to private or on-premises based alternatives, there may also be significant hidden costs. Operational features like auto-scaling can cause costs to soar in line with demand for resources, making predicting costs difficult and budgeting even harder. There is also an acute need for a holistic and heterogeneous system that can track the costs of cloud services from the point of consumption (e.g., an application or business unit) down to the resources involved (e.g., storage or compute service).

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Calligo has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Calligo is an innovative cloud service provider offering mid-sized companies the highest levels of data privacy. Calligo offers unparalleled application performance guarantees, commercial flexibility and a personalized support service from its globally located cloud platforms. Through its four pillars of focus, Calligo delivers a platform that businesses can trust to deliver the high level of service and protection they expect and is lacking in many cloud offerings.

read more

Google says it has tripled the number of its big cloud deals year over year as its parent company Alphabet announced revenues of $26 billion (£19.9bn) for the most recent quarter.

In a call with analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai – who it was also announced is joining the Alphabet board of directors – discussed the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets. “[Google Cloud Platform] continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“To be more specific about our momentum with big customers, in Q2 the number of new deals we closed worth more than $0.5 million is three times what it was last year,” Pichai added.

This was about as specific as Pichai got, as Google puts cloud in its ‘other revenue’ bucket, alongside such products as the Google Play app store. Google’s other revenues for Q217 were at $3.1 billion, up 42% from this time last year but seeing a very slight decrease from Q1 this year.

Compared with Amazon, which is now reporting its AWS revenues separately, and Microsoft, which does not give specifics but instead puts revenues for ‘intelligent cloud’, including Azure and server products, it is relatively nebulous.

Yet while a lot of the focus has been on AWS and Azure’s competition in recent weeks – as this publication reported on – analysts have been noting Google’s relative rise. The company still only finds a place in the ‘visionaries’ section for Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant, however its growth remains higher than AWS if not at the same level as Microsoft, according to Canalys.

Google’s overall revenues were at $25.8 billion, with ‘other bets’, such as its autonomous car business, Waymo, at $248 million. Like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week, Pichai focused on the importance of artificial intelligence in the company’s strategy going forward. “Google continues to lead the shift to AI driven computing,” he said. “It’s our focus on infusing our products and platforms with power of machine learning and AI that’s driving our success.”

Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter were partnerships with SAP and Nutanix, opening four new cloud regions, with the most recent being in London, as well as the launch of Transfer Appliance, a product aimed at transferring data from local servers into their cloud.

You can digest the full Alphabet results here.

On-premises cloud infrastructure promises better security, governance, and performance than public cloud, but many enterprises don’t want to deploy it because they must invest in a team of cloud experts. But now, software as a service (SaaS) is being used as the management platform for some on-premises clouds, which greatly simplifies cloud management and reduces the need for cloud-savvy network administrators.

Here, we will see how the use of SaaS simplifies on-premises cloud operations in three areas: provisioning and configuration, monitoring, and management.

Why SaaS for private cloud?

SaaS has become a hit in the market because people want to consume computing resources, but they don’t want to build the infrastructure themselves. SaaS frees IT departments from having to manage a big infrastructure. According to Gartner, the cloud system infrastructure (SaaS) market will grow from $34.6 million in 2017 to $71.5 million in 2020.

Prior to the evolution of SaaS, the private cloud concept failed because many enterprises became disenchanted with the effort and cost involved in building a cloud from scratch using OpenStack, VMware, or other do-it-yourself cloud components. In contrast, SaaS enables remote management of private cloud and allows companies to consume private cloud resources and while the development and management is taken care of by a SaaS vendor.

The move to SaaS-managed cloud follows a growing trend in the industry toward cloud-managed infrastructure, a trend that began with Wi-Fi vendors like Meraki and expanded to include security, SD-WAN, and finally cloud vendors. There are two components to a SaaS-managed cloud: an on-premises cloud operating system and infrastructure (typically a hyper-converged platform) and a SaaS portal. The SaaS portal is the point of entry for management, but it can also deliver commands that automatically monitor and manage the on-premises infrastructure to further reduce enterprise overhead. Let’s look at some examples of how SaaS improves key aspects of on-premises cloud management.

Provisioning and configuration

Simply installing a cloud can be a complex process. One must assemble the necessary servers, storage and networking resources, and then implement an operating system and cloud software. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was no need for integration?

Some cloud vendors are starting to implement cloud software that is pre-installed into the operating system image, so that once a server is deployed and powered on, the cloud should come up automatically without IT administrators having to know anything about various services and their persistent stores. The image software should pool together servers, storage and networking resources to create a highly resilient cloud. Ideally, the user should be able to install a cloud and have it up and running in less than 30 minutes. Rather than sending a technician to provision the cloud, the SaaS portal can automatically discover the cloud hardware and register it automatically.

Monitoring

Rather than having an IT administrator continually monitor the cloud’s health (to see when VMs are under-provisioned, for example), the SaaS portal can do it and alert the IT staff when an issue needs to be resolved.

To reveal the state of applications and what actions other users have performed, the SaaS-managed cloud can monitor events, statistics, and dashboards in real time. It can get logs and audit the actions of all users. For example, if a service was down since 10pm last night, it is good to know if a user or script mistakenly shut down a VM that provides that service.

Management

Any system as complex as a cloud needs to monitor critical services and help monitor workloads. Companies can spend a lot of manpower resources to perform this function manually, but a SaaS-managed cloud can monitor and heal itself.

For example, if any hardware component or software service fails, the system should detect and fix the situation. Then, it can alert the administrator about which component failed, so the administrator could take corrective action to restore the capacity of the system. And beyond simply monitoring the cloud’s health, intelligent SaaS portals can respond to monitoring inputs by dynamically adjusting the storage and CPU allocations dynamically. Such a “cloud brain” could also watch for and shut down rogue VMs, push out required software patches and new software versions, for example, allowing IT administrators to focus on other, more important tasks.

SaaS-based private cloud management eliminates the most painful part of infrastructure management. IT administrators are perfectly willing to give up patching, maintenance releases and the need for new configurations and turn them over to a “cloud brain.” Essentially, a SaaS-managed cloud builds the foundation for a self-driving ­cloud, making deploying, running, and managing an on-premises cloud as “hands off: as using a public cloud. It eliminates over-provisioning and saves money by cutting the IT resources needed to run a private cloud while delivering the security, control, and performance that private cloud brings.

With a SaaS-managed cloud, IT departments can actively manage the capacity being used for on-premises cloud to optimise infrastructure spending on both manpower and hardware.

«DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society’s most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy,» said Roger Strukhoff, Conference Chair. «DX World Expo has organized these issues along 10 tracks with more than 150 of the world’s top speakers coming to Istanbul to help change the world.»

read more