IT leaders have always had their hands full with ghost issues on-premises. But for businesses that rely on remote and branch offices, monitoring a sprawling network of on-premises equipment introduces even more challenges.

That’s why we move to the cloud, right? To help us eliminate truck rolls, improve cost efficiency and centralize management of applications across all locations.
When you’ve migrated to the cloud (even if it’s just for something like office applications like Office 365 or G Suite), you’ve already considered compliance, licensing, budget concerns. But what happens when your remote users start experiencing classic ghost issues?

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The purpose of this article is draw attention to key SaaS services that are commonly overlooked during contact signing that are essential to ensuring they meet the expectations and requirements of the organization and provide guidance and recommendations for process and controls necessary for achieving quality SaaS contractual agreements.

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Apache OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix provides a powerful and flexible environment for deploying cloud-native applications driven by data, message, and API call events. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Daniel Krook, Software Architect, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, and Distinguished IT Specialist, will discuss why serverless architectures are attractive for many emerging cloud workloads and when you should consider OpenWhisk for your next project. Then get started on Bluemix with three sample applications covering how the OpenWhisk programming model enables you both to implement REST APIs and process non-HTTP events at scale.

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Enterprises may be starting to move workloads to the cloud, but enterprise-owned data centres remain the ‘primary compute venue’ with workloads staying consistent over the past three years, according to new research from the Uptime Institute.

The study, which polled more than 1,000 data centre and IT professionals globally, argues that enterprises continue to see the data centre as ‘essential’ to their digital-centric strategies with the majority of budgets increasing or staying consistent through 2017.

Respondents reported that nearly two thirds of their IT assets were currently deployed in their own data centres. 22% were deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data centre providers, with only 13% deployed in the cloud.

Despite this, more than two thirds (68%) of companies polled say they rely on IT-based resiliency, relying on live application failover in case of an outage due to multiple, geographically distributed data centres. An overwhelming majority (90%) said their company’s management was more concerned around outages compared to this time last year.

“The survey findings reflect several key trends that are acting together as a powerful catalyst for change within the industry,” said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. “Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualisation, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago. Through this change, enterprise-owned data centres have remained a central component.

“We urge data centre and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it,” added Stansberry.

You can find out more about the results here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that A&I Solutions named «Bronze Sponsor» of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Founded over 15 years ago in 1999, A&I Solutions continues to provide companies with premier integrated enterprise solutions. By partnering with the trusted and proven solutions of leading technology companies, our customers are assured high performance levels across all IT environments including: physical, distributed, cloud, virtual and heterogeneous platforms. Our expertise in enterprise applications, service assurance, security and infrastructure monitoring allows our customers to transform their companies by driving consistency and maximizing efficiency.

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In this modern world of IT, you’ve probably got some new colleagues in your life-namely, the cloud and SaaS providers who now hold your infrastructure in their hands.

These business relationships-yes, they’re technology-based, but cloud and SaaS are business models-will become as important to your IT team and your company as the hardware and software you used to install. Once you’ve adopted SaaS, or inherited SaaS, it’s on you to avoid price hikes, licensing issues and app or provider sprawl. Budgeting for these apps, which means understanding their pricing models, is also likely in IT’s hands.

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The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that it actually exists. And whether you’ve realized it or not, cloud services are a problem for your IT department.
Even if you feel like you have a solid grasp of cloud technology and the nuances of making a cloud purchase, business leaders don’t share the same confidence. Nearly 80% feel that IT lacks the skills necessary to help with cloud purchases-and they’re looking to cloud brokers for help instead.
It’s time to admit we have a cloud services problem and start adapting to modern business technology. Part of that is understanding which services to outsource to the cloud so you can start proving your cloud knowledge to business leaders.

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IBM claims it has the fastest cloud for deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) after publishing benchmark tests which show NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators on the IBM Cloud can provide up to 2.8 times more performance than the previous generation in certain cases.

The tests, when fleshed out, will enable organisations to quickly create advanced AI applications on the cloud. “Deep learning techniques are a key driver behind the increased demand for and sophistication of AI applications,” the company noted. “However, training a deep learning model to do a specific task is a compute-heavy process that can be time and cost-intensive.”

IBM purports to be the first of the large cloud providers to offer NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. Separate tests were carried out, first by IBM engineers and then by cloud simulation platform provider Rescale. For the IBM tests, engineers trained a deep learning model for image classification using two NVIDIA P100 cards on Bluemix bare metal, before comparing the same process to two Tesla K80 GPU cards.

The second performance benchmark, from Rescale, also picked up time reduction on deep learning training, based on its ScaleX platform, which features capabilities for deep learning software as a service (SaaS).

“Innovation in AI is happening at a breakneck speed thanks to advances in cloud computing,” said John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services in a statement. “As the first major cloud provider to offer the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU, IBM Cloud is providing enterprises with accelerated performance so they can quickly and more cost-effectively create sophisticated AI and cognitive experiences for their end users.”

Another cloud vendor utilising NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU – although not of the same scale as IBM – is Tencent, who made the announcement back in March. As this publication noted at the time, virtually every major cloud player is an NVIDIA customer of some sort, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft.

You can find out more about the IBM tests here.