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Enterprises prefer Microsoft Azure as their primary cloud provider while smaller businesses are more likely to be Google houses, according to the latest research from B2B analysis firm Clutch.

The findings, which polled almost 250 users of AWS, Google and Microsoft, appear in the firm’s latest report, found almost 40% of Azure users polled identify as enterprises, compared to only 25% for SMBs and 22% as startups or sole proprietorships. In contrast, 41% of Google Cloud Platform users identified themselves as SMBs.

The reasons are varied, although the argument that smaller businesses are more conscious of price, as opposed to security or toolsets, again reared its head. “It goes back to the trust and familiarity issues,” said Nicholas Martin, principal applications development consultant at IT solutions provider Cardinal Solutions. “Windows Server and other Microsoft technologies are prevalent in the enterprise world. Azure providers the consistency required by developers and IT staff to tightly integrate with the tools that Microsoft-leaning organisations are familiar with.”

More than one in five (21%) of respondents argued that a better selection of tools and features were key to their choice of cloud provider, ahead of familiarity with a brand, and stronger security capabilities.

The findings resonate similarly to those reported by BetterCloud in 2015, who argued there was a “clear trend” for larger organisations to use Office 365, as opposed to Google Apps for cloud offices.

Clutch gave three recommendations for organisations looking to make the right decision over their cloud provider:

• If your business is either an enterprise, requires Windows integration, or needs a strong platform as a service play, consider Microsoft
• If longevity, expertise in infrastructure as a service, and a wide selection of tools are key, go with AWS
• If you are an SMB with a limited budget or need to place heavy emphasis on analytics, consider Google Cloud Platform

This is all pretty sound advice from where CloudTech is standing. You can read the full report here.

JavaScript redefined web applications ushering in a new era of dynamic websites with fluid responsive designs. It has gained a strong following among developers, popular libraries and frameworks like JQuery and Angular JS are all built with JavaScript. The endless design possibilities that JavaScript provides coupled with the numerous libraries available today makes it an indispensable part of web application development.

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• U.S. retailer supply chain operations who have adopted data and analytics have seen up to a 19% increase in operating margin over the last five years.
• Design-to-value, supply chain management and after-sales support are three areas where analytics are making a financial contribution in manufacturing.
• 40% of all the potential value associated with the Internet of Things requires interoperability between IoT systems.

These and many other insights are from the McKinsey Global Institute’s study The Age of Analytics: Competing In A Data-Driven World published in collaboration with McKinsey Analytics this month. You can get a copy of the Executive Summary here (28 pp., free, no opt-in, PDF) and the full report (136 pp., free, no opt-in, PDF) here. Five years ago the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released Big Data: The Next Frontier For Innovation, Competition, and Productivity (156 pp., free no opt-in, PDF), and in the years since McKinsey sees data science adoption and value accelerate, specifically in the areas of machine learning and deep learning. The study underscores how critical integration is for gaining greater value from data and analytics.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

• Location-based services and U.S. retail are showing the greatest progress capturing value from data and analytics. Location-based services are capturing up to 60% of data and analytics value today predicted by McKinsey in their 2011 report. McKinsey predicts there are growing opportunities for businesses to use geospatial data to track assets, teams, and customers across dispersed locations to generate new insights and improve efficiency. U.S. Retail is capturing up to 40%, and Manufacturing, 30%.  The following graphic compares the potential impact as predicted in McKinsey’s 2011 study with the value captured by segment today, including a definition of major barriers to adoption.

• Machine learning’s greatest potential across industries includes improving forecasting and predictive analytics. McKinsey analyzed the 120 use cases their research found as most significant in machine learning and then weighted them based on respondents’ mention of each. The result is a heat map of machine learning’s greatest potential impact across industries and use case types.  Please see the report for detailed scorecards of each industry’s use case ranked by impact and data richness.

• Machine learning’s potential to deliver real-time optimization across industries is just starting to evolve and will quickly accelerate in the next three years. McKinsey analyzed the data richness associated with each of the 300 machine learning use cases, defining this attribute as a combination of data volume and variety. Please see page 105 of the study for a thorough explanation of McKinsey’s definition of data volume and variety used in the context of this study The result of evaluating machine learning’s data richness by industry is shown in the following heat map:

• Enabling autonomous vehicles and personalizing advertising are two of the highest opportunity use cases for machine learning today. Additional use cases with high potential include optimizing pricing, routing, and scheduling based on real-time data in travel and logistics; predicting personalized health outcomes, and optimizing merchandising strategy in retail. McKinsey identified 120 potential use cases of machine learning in 12 industries and surveyed more than 600 industry experts on their potential impact. They found an extraordinary breadth of potential applications for machine learning.  Each of the use cases was identified as being one of the top three in an industry by at least one expert in that industry. McKinsey plotted the top 120 use cases below, with the y-axis shows the volume of available data (encompassing its breadth and frequency), while the x-axis shows the potential impact, based on surveys of more than 600 industry experts. The size of the bubble reflects the diversity of the available data sources.

• Designing an appropriate organizational structure to support data and analytics activities (45%), Ensuring senior management involvement (42%), and designing effective data architecture and technology infrastructure (36%) are the three most significant challenges to attaining data and analytics objectives. McKinsey found that the barriers break into the three categories: strategy, leadership, and talent; organizational structure and processes; and technology infrastructure. Approximately half of executives across geographies and industries reported greater difficulty recruiting analytical talent than any other kind of talent. 40% say retention is also an issue.

• U.S. retailer supply chain operations who have adopted data and analytics have seen up to a 19% increase in operating margin over the last five years. Using data and analytics to improve merchandising including pricing, assortment, and placement optimization is leading to an additional 16% in operating margin improvement. The following table illustrates data and analytics’ contribution to U.S. retail operations by area.

• Design-to-value, supply chain management and after-sales support are three areas where analytics are making a financial contribution in manufacturing. McKinsey estimates that analytics have increased manufacturer’s gross margins by as much as 40% when used in design-to-value workflows and projects. Up to 15% of after-sales costs have been reduced through the use of analytics that includes product sensor data analysis for after-sales service. There are several interesting companies to watch in this area, with two of the most innovative being Sight Machine and enosiX, with the latter enabling real-time integration between SAP and Salesforce systems. The following graphic illustrates the estimated impact of analytics on manufacturing financial performance by area.

 

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has been talking a lot about the blockchain recently, so I decided to learn more about it. I read the Marketing the Blockchain e-book, watched The Grand Vision of a Crypto-Tech Economy video and the video keynote of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne at the Bitcoin 2014 conference, and did some more research on my own. While far from an expert, I do see some interesting similarities to the adoption of open source software.

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2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points.

Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space.

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google continue to grow quicker than the rest of the cloud infrastructure space, with the four leading players owning more than half of the market.

Read more: AWS turns 10: A dominant market share, but does that tell the full story? (March)

GDPR hits. On April 27 last year, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted, giving businesses two years – or until May 25 2018, to be precise – to get their house in order. Under the new laws users will have rights including the right to be forgotten, to transfer their data to another service provider, as well as the right to learn when they have been hacked. Businesses who do not comply could face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover as a result.

Read more: A five step crisis plan to prepare for the pending data protection legislation (February)

Oracle acquires NetSuite. One of the biggest deals of the year came in July, when Oracle announced its intent to acquire cloud ERP software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion, represented the latest cloud push from the software giant. While not all shareholders were in agreement initially, the deal was eventually completed in November, with the two companies saying in an FAQ at the time: “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary and will co-exist in the marketplace forever.”

Read more: Oracle buys NetSuite for $9.3bn to further strengthen its cloud story (July)

Rackspace goes private. Managed cloud services provider Rackspace was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion in the summer. CEO Taylor Rhodes said the deal would allow the firm to “seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company.”

In its most recent financial results before the takeover, Rhodes noted a highlight was almost 300 customers gained on its AWS service over the past nine months, but warned that IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative in 2017.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” Ian Moyse, cloud industry leader, told this publication at the time.

Read more: Rackspace goes private with $4.3bn Apollo Global transaction (August)

Dropbox security scare. On August 25, a blog post from cloud storage firm Dropbox explained that users who had not changed their passwords prior to mid-2012 would be prompted to do so the next time they logged in “purely as a preventative measure.” On August 30, a report from Motherboard led with the headline: “Hackers stole account details from over 60 million Dropbox users.”

A day later, the company confirmed the password reset measures put in place had prevented any hacking of user data. “This is not a new security incident, and there is no indication that Dropbox user accounts have been improperly accessed,” said head of trust and security Patrick Heim in a statement. “We can confirm that the scope of the password reset we completed last week did protect all impacted users. Even if these passwords are cracked, the password reset means they can’t be used to access Dropbox accounts.”

Read more: Dropbox says password reset measures have worked following leak revelations (August)

2017 predictions

Below various experts and CloudTech contributors give their views on how the cloud industry will develop in 2017:

Matthew Finnie, CTO, Interoute: cloud and digital transformation programmes will continue to drive new IT spend, while the skills shortage becomes the biggest barrier to success

“While some commentators expect 2017 to be flat on IT spending overall, we expect to see IT increase its spend on cloud and digital transformation. In particular, we’ll see investment in emerging integrated digital platforms that enable a business to move faster, deploy resources quicker and exploit new market opportunities.

“Lack of in-house skills in key areas will start to have a negative impact on the IT team’s ability to achieve its goals. Enterprises will need to look for skilled partners to support data centre migrations and development projects and manage IT systems and infrastructure. Partner management and strategic relationships will become the key to competitive success.”

James Butler, CTO, Trustmarque: ‘software defined’ continues to gain momentum while GDPR will make firms look over their shoulders

“The race to ‘software defined’ will continue apace, as most of the major storage vendors integrate their stacks to the larger cloud players, in an attempt to maintain their customer base in a changing world. Meanwhile, startups and other players will be jumping on the bandwagons of AWS and Azure, looking to solve new problems customers face around data synchronisation and management in the cloud.

“With GDPR on the horizon in the EU, everyone will be a lot more focused on data protection and risk management, which may finally drive more widespread adoption of encryption and rights management technologies.”

John Engates, CTO, Rackspace: 2017 will be the year of serverless architecture, and implications for the IoT

“Serverless computing is making developers’ lives easier, and if what I’m seeing and hearing holds true, 2017 is the year it will really take off. 

«Serverless, of course, is a misnomer. There will always be servers; serverless architecture refers to applications that depend on third party services (backend as a service) or custom code (function as a service) – AWS Lambda being the most popular vendor host today. What serverless really means is that developers no longer have to worry about infrastructure. And as those barriers to IoT entry continue to fall, we’ll continue to see new players and their devices muscle into what appears to be an almost limitless potential market.”

Jeff Denworth, SVP, CTERA Networks: prepare for a ransomware nightmare this year – but on the flip side, blockchain is on the rise

“Ransomware will not be stopped and [will] only get more sophisticated. Estimated ransomware payments will exceed $2 billion globally and there will be a series of public outages that spur investment into new approaches to counter ransomware. In addition, at least one major business cloud SaaS service will not only experience a breach of user credentials, but there will also be [a] significant data breach announced.

“In 2017 data infrastructure (and its modernisation) will become a new industry category thanks to Gartner. EFSS will begin to die as a primary market category. Customers will look for broader solutions that tie together on-premises and cloud-based files as well as associated device backups. Moreover, the move to a consolidated platform enables the elimination of silos of disconnected and ‘dark’ data and ‘data infrastructure modernisation’ will further enable IT governance and unified security initiatives.”

Do you agree with the top stories for 2016 and the predictions for 2017? Let us know in the comments…

(c)iStock.com/joloei

2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points.

Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space.

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google continue to grow quicker than the rest of the cloud infrastructure space, with the four leading players owning more than half of the market.

Read more: AWS turns 10: A dominant market share, but does that tell the full story? (March)

GDPR hits. On April 27 last year, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted, giving businesses two years – or until May 25 2018, to be precise – to get their house in order. Under the new laws users will have rights including the right to be forgotten, to transfer their data to another service provider, as well as the right to learn when they have been hacked. Businesses who do not comply could face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover as a result.

Read more: A five step crisis plan to prepare for the pending data protection legislation (February)

Oracle acquires NetSuite. One of the biggest deals of the year came in July, when Oracle announced its intent to acquire cloud ERP software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion, represented the latest cloud push from the software giant. While not all shareholders were in agreement initially, the deal was eventually completed in November, with the two companies saying in an FAQ at the time: “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary and will co-exist in the marketplace forever.”

Read more: Oracle buys NetSuite for $9.3bn to further strengthen its cloud story (July)

Rackspace goes private. Managed cloud services provider Rackspace was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion in the summer. CEO Taylor Rhodes said the deal would allow the firm to “seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company.”

In its most recent financial results before the takeover, Rhodes noted a highlight was almost 300 customers gained on its AWS service over the past nine months, but warned that IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative in 2017.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” Ian Moyse, cloud industry leader, told this publication at the time.

Read more: Rackspace goes private with $4.3bn Apollo Global transaction (August)

Dropbox security scare. On August 25, a blog post from cloud storage firm Dropbox explained that users who had not changed their passwords prior to mid-2012 would be prompted to do so the next time they logged in “purely as a preventative measure.” On August 30, a report from Motherboard led with the headline: “Hackers stole account details from over 60 million Dropbox users.”

A day later, the company confirmed the password reset measures put in place had prevented any hacking of user data. “This is not a new security incident, and there is no indication that Dropbox user accounts have been improperly accessed,” said head of trust and security Patrick Heim in a statement. “We can confirm that the scope of the password reset we completed last week did protect all impacted users. Even if these passwords are cracked, the password reset means they can’t be used to access Dropbox accounts.”

Read more: Dropbox says password reset measures have worked following leak revelations (August)

2017 predictions

Below various experts and CloudTech contributors give their views on how the cloud industry will develop in 2017:

Matthew Finnie, CTO, Interoute: cloud and digital transformation programmes will continue to drive new IT spend, while the skills shortage becomes the biggest barrier to success

“While some commentators expect 2017 to be flat on IT spending overall, we expect to see IT increase its spend on cloud and digital transformation. In particular, we’ll see investment in emerging integrated digital platforms that enable a business to move faster, deploy resources quicker and exploit new market opportunities.

“Lack of in-house skills in key areas will start to have a negative impact on the IT team’s ability to achieve its goals. Enterprises will need to look for skilled partners to support data centre migrations and development projects and manage IT systems and infrastructure. Partner management and strategic relationships will become the key to competitive success.”

James Butler, CTO, Trustmarque: ‘software defined’ continues to gain momentum while GDPR will make firms look over their shoulders

“The race to ‘software defined’ will continue apace, as most of the major storage vendors integrate their stacks to the larger cloud players, in an attempt to maintain their customer base in a changing world. Meanwhile, startups and other players will be jumping on the bandwagons of AWS and Azure, looking to solve new problems customers face around data synchronisation and management in the cloud.

“With GDPR on the horizon in the EU, everyone will be a lot more focused on data protection and risk management, which may finally drive more widespread adoption of encryption and rights management technologies.”

John Engates, CTO, Rackspace: 2017 will be the year of serverless architecture, and implications for the IoT

“Serverless computing is making developers’ lives easier, and if what I’m seeing and hearing holds true, 2017 is the year it will really take off. 

«Serverless, of course, is a misnomer. There will always be servers; serverless architecture refers to applications that depend on third party services (backend as a service) or custom code (function as a service) – AWS Lambda being the most popular vendor host today. What serverless really means is that developers no longer have to worry about infrastructure. And as those barriers to IoT entry continue to fall, we’ll continue to see new players and their devices muscle into what appears to be an almost limitless potential market.”

Jeff Denworth, SVP, CTERA Networks: prepare for a ransomware nightmare this year – but on the flip side, blockchain is on the rise

“Ransomware will not be stopped and [will] only get more sophisticated. Estimated ransomware payments will exceed $2 billion globally and there will be a series of public outages that spur investment into new approaches to counter ransomware. In addition, at least one major business cloud SaaS service will not only experience a breach of user credentials, but there will also be [a] significant data breach announced.

“In 2017 data infrastructure (and its modernisation) will become a new industry category thanks to Gartner. EFSS will begin to die as a primary market category. Customers will look for broader solutions that tie together on-premises and cloud-based files as well as associated device backups. Moreover, the move to a consolidated platform enables the elimination of silos of disconnected and ‘dark’ data and ‘data infrastructure modernisation’ will further enable IT governance and unified security initiatives.”

Do you agree with the top stories for 2016 and the predictions for 2017? Let us know in the comments…

The best problem solver avoids being reactive. Instead, the goal is to remain proactive and ahead of a potential problem. This is where preventative maintenance software plays a substantial role.
The primary benefit is being able to nip a problem in the bud as the saying goes. Instead of letting a problem fester and simmer, it’s better to get rid of it early. This is possible with a preventative solution, which can spot what is going on and alerts the owner. Many problems are okay until things fall apart and the system fails. Instead of letting this happen, it’s better to focus on the right preventative maintenance software.

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IMHO there is no doubt that cloud and object storage are in your future, what are some questions?
Granted, what type of cloud and object storage or service along with for work or entertainment are some questions.
Likewise, what are your cloud and object storage concerns (assuming you already have heard the benefits)?
Some other questions include when, where for different applications workload needs, as well as how and with what among others.
Keep in mind that there are many aspects to cloud storage and they are not all object, likewise, there are many facets to object storage.

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