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Microsoft has announced it will be increasing its prices for customers buying its enterprise software and cloud services in British pounds by up to 22% from January to “harmonise” within the EU and EFTA (European Free Trade Association) regions.

The company said on-premise enterprise software will increase by 13% to align closer to the Euro, while “most” enterprise cloud prices will rise by almost a quarter, adding that after the adjustment customers will “still find our cloud offerings highly competitive.”

For existing customers, Microsoft said the changes will not affect them. “These changes will not affect existing orders under annuity volume licensing agreements for products that are subject to price protection,” the company wrote. “For example, customers with Enterprise Agreements have price protection on previously ordered enterprise software and cloud services, and will not experience a price change during the term of their agreement.

“Similarly, business customers with cloud commitment subscriptions such as Office 365 also receive price protection during their subscription term, which is normally 12 months from the start of paid subscription,” it added.

Microsoft said it assessed its prices “periodically”, noting the move was not especially different to adjustments in pricing made for Norwegian krone and Swiss franc in April 2016 – again using the word “harmonisation”.

Yet the inferences are clear; the value of the pound has dipped considerably post-Brexit. On June 23, the day of the referendum, it was 1.4819 US dollars to the pound. At the time of publication, it is hovering at 1.22312, representing a 17.5% downturn. In a piece published yesterday, the Financial Times noted the move was to “reflect the plunging pound.”

In July, analyst firm IDC warned that its coming analyses on the European cloud infrastructure market may be downscaled following the Brexit vote, adding that it expects a “challenging transition” ahead for the UK. Taylor Rhodes, CEO of managed cloud services provider Rackspace, cited Gartner’s similarly gloomy post-Brexit forecast for IT spending growth when speaking to analysts in August, following a move by the company to sell one of its ‘non-core’ business units.

It’s not all bad news, however. Writing for this publication in August, Louis Columbus discussed how Brexit can accelerate public cloud adoption, while focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The continual pressure on CIOs to reduce the high hardware and software maintenance costs is accelerating thanks to Brexit,” he wrote. “Because no one can quantify with precision just how Brexit will impact European economies, CEOs, and senior management teams want to minimise downside risk now.”

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The provocative side of IT resilience is made up of all the threats that today have more and more people talking about it than ever before. Let’s face it, who isn’t intrigued (and worried, terrified or simply concerned) by headlines about IT failures that have triggered nationwide flight cancellations or data hostage situations or global service outages? 

That said, even less dramatic outages like ING Bank and Glasgow City Council still hit the headlines here in the UK last month.  ING Bank’s regional data centre went offline due to a fire drill gone wrong (reports suggest that more than one million customers were affected by the downtime), and Glasgow City Council lost its email for three days after a fire system blew in the Council’s data centre.

The stark reality is business threats are only becoming more pervasive, and whether that is because of ever-evolving cyber-attacks, or human errors being made by overworked teams, or aging hardware and systems that just keep breaking down…the list is constantly growing and goes on and on. 

In the face of these rising threats, there have been two recent and very fundamental shifts in the way C-suite and IT executives think about business continuity.

The first one is that IT resilience is no longer doomed to the proverbial backburner and only something that the IT team needs to concern itself with. This is especially true as the “powers that be” realise cloud-based backup and disaster recovery are extremely cost and resource-efficient. Near-zero downtimes are standard with the right technology and support. Implementation time can be measured in hours meaning that the path to securing executive buy-in is well paved and far easier than it might have been in the past.

That said, at a roundtable that we hosted last month in London with senior IT executives to discuss the findings from our latest survey, The State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses, the group did debate whether business decision makers really understood the financial impact of downtime. Moreover, whether more education is needed about recovery times and what can be recovered, with the group concluding that clearer prioritisation around different systems needs to be implemented so the business understands what will happen when outages take place.

The second fundamental shift is that security is now a top priority for Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and backup. When choosing a DRaaS or Backup-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, companies are rightfully now asking more questions about security first, right along with speed of recovery and all the other questions that you might expect get asked. Here at iland, with our advanced security cloud platform as our answer, we couldn’t be happier that this is now the case.

We are thrilled to be helping more companies ensure IT resilience is faster than ever before.  In fact, these shifts in executive and business thinking have contributed to our 248% growth in DRaaS and BaaS in the first half of this year, and we’ve doubled the number of new customers we’re now working with.

So why is this? 

To my mind this comes down to a few key factors:

• Companies adopt BaaS as the natural first step to geographic diversification, sending secondary copies to a secure location with less than five minutes of setup time. With our pricing model, companies can protect themselves from data loss, compliance fines and malicious threats like ransomware at very little expense, which is of course very attractive.
• DRaaS has become the standard when every second counts, cost-efficiently enabling companies to minimise IT downtime that is often measured in the thousands of dollars per minute. 
• Security and compliance are key to our customersand our advanced security cloud platform integrates all the components our customers need to maintain security best practices in the cloud. 
• Backup and disaster recovery prove to be stepping stones to broader cloud migration. Customers increasingly fail over to the iland cloud as part of a DR effort and choose to remain there, rather than failing back.
• In a disaster, companies report exceptional phone support is critical,as it provides the last piece of assurance a failover will succeed. Therefore it is critical that cloud service providers factor this into the overall package that they offer.

As I said at the outset, IT resilience is becoming much more of a business and mainstream issue and with IT resilience now firmly on the agenda for most organisations we are excited to be able to put our customers’ worries to rest.  At the same time, we hope they are equally excited about getting some sleep and having their worries taken care of.  

Donna Yasay, President of HomeGrid Forum, today discussed with a panel of technology peers how certification programs are at the forefront of interoperability, and the answer for vendors looking to keep up with today’s growing industry for smart home innovation.
«To ensure multi-vendor interoperability, accredited industry certification programs should be used for every product to provide credibility and quality assurance for retail and carrier based customers looking to add ever increasing numbers of devices to the home network,» commented Yasay. «The successful global adoption of the Internet of Things is dependent on a robust and secure home network.»

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As we enter the final week before the 19th International Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara, CA, it’s time for me to reflect on six big topics that will be important during the show.
Hybrid Cloud
This general-purpose term seems to provide a comfort zone for many enterprise IT managers. It sounds reassuring to be able to work with one of the major public-cloud providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure while still maintaining an on-site presence.

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Right now, students all over the country are leaving home, starting university, and moving into their halls of residence. From my experience, that’s usually a single building, teeming with rooms, where they can get to know one another, collaborate on ideas, and share student facilities, like cooking. It’s a cheaper way of living too.

A true multi-tenant architecture, in other words.

This got me thinking about software development within that same multi-tenanted architecture.

First things first: what is multi-tenant? It is defined as a single instance of a software application serving multiple customers. These ‘tenants’ can customise some parts of the application, but not the application’s core. It’s cheaper because development and maintenance costs are shared, in contrast with single-tenancy, where each customer has their own software instance. Moreover, you only need to make updates once—in a single-tenancy architecture, the updates are endless.

Multi-tenancy can light the touch paper on your application development. As organisations embrace cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, and other digital disruptors that are redefining the role of IT in business, they need a proactive, comprehensive and dynamic automation strategy. Especially release automation, which accelerates the launch of innovative new services, while supporting reliability and control to enable the modern agile enterprise.

Multi-tenant release automation reduces TCO

As part of this digital transformation, organisations want to play in sandboxes: test-driving their neat new services and (mini) applications to make certain they don’t fall over in production. Automic is the only ARA vendor offering a multi-tenant service that can be deployed in the clouds. This enables enterprises to serve multiple departments and clients in isolation from each other on a single, shared multi-tenant platform, scaling for extremely large environments while driving cost of ownership down, simplifying operations, and maintenance. 

Here at Automic, for example, more than 300 customers have signed up for their own private sandbox on the Automic multi-tenant cloud. It operates on its own cloud, so organizations can get a feel for how the Automic platform can help drive digital transformation in a world of multiple rapid releases and deployments. This “try it before you buy it” service is the first of its kind in the release automation market.

This multi-tenant model isn’t just designed to help test drive Automic—it helps managed service providers (MSPs) and other large organisations kick sand in the faces of competitors. In cloud computing, the meaning of multi-tenancy architecture has broadened because of new service models that take advantage of virtualisation and remote access. MSPs, for instance, can run one instance of its application on one instance of a database and provide web access to multiple customers. In such a scenario, each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. It means MSPs can deliver great service to more customers at lower cost.

It doesn’t stop there. This multi-tenant release automation model helps large enterprises—saddled with slow-moving, legacy infrastructures—to bridge the gap between development teams launching mobile and web-based services almost non-stop, and the operations team who are more concerned with maintaining reliability and continuity. A multi-tenant release automation product enables organisations like these to be agile in the back end, and be compliant and scalable in the front office.

One more thought. Most university halls of residence are very tall buildings. Some so high they reach into the clouds. Even more reason to consider multi-tenancy release automation in the cloud.

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Revenues from OpenStack business models will surpass $5 billion (£4.08bn) by 2020 and grow at a CAGR of 35%, according to the latest figures from 451 Research.

The numbers, which are being released to coincide with the day before the latest OpenStack Summit, puts the exact figure at $5.7bn by 2020, from $4.6bn the previous year and $3.5bn in 2018.

“We continue to believe the market is still in the early stages of enterprise use and revenue generation,” said Al Sadowski, research vice president at 451 Research. “We expect an uptick in revenues from all sectors and geographic regions, especially from those companies in the OpenStack Products and Distributions category that are targeting enterprises.”

451 Research argues the primary area where OpenStack will see success is in the private cloud space.

Alongside more traditional use cases, such as DevOps, platform as a service (PaaS) and big data, the research firm sees significant benefits with regard to software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualisation (NFV), mobile, and the Internet of Things.

The primary user base, according to the research firm, remains enterprises looking to deploy cloud-native applications in private cloud environments, with “limited” appeal for organisations who are already using hyperscale cloud providers, as well as on legacy applications.

These figures make for interesting reading alongside those put out by OpenStack themselves earlier this month. According to data taken from the OpenStack user base, containers – cited by 78% of respondents – SDN and NFV (61%) and bare metal (56%). are the primary technologies of interest going forward.

451 warns that while container software is ‘mostly’ beneficial and complementary to OpenStack, “persistent attention to containers and their management threatens to eclipse OpenStack, similar to how OpenStack surpassed its rival CloudStack in mindshare and then market share.”

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By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services Business Development

Today’s hyperconverged technologies are here to stay it seems.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to employ a novel technology approach that ‘consolidates all required functionality’ into a single infrastructure appliance that provides an ‘efficient, elastic pool of x86’ resources controlled by a ‘software-centric’ architecture?  I mean, outside of the x86 component, it’s not like we haven’t seen this type of platform before (hello, mainframe anyone?).

But this is not about the technology behind HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure), nor about whether this technology is the right choice for your IT demands. It’s more about what you need to consider on day two, after your new platform is happily spinning away in your data centre.  Assuming you have determined that the hyperconverged path will deliver technology and business value for your organisation, why wouldn’t you extend that belief system to how you plan on operating it?

Today’s hyperconverged vendors offer very comprehensive packages that include some advanced support offerings.  They have spent much time and energy (and VC dollars) in creating monitoring and analytics platforms that are definitely an advancement over traditional technology support packages. 

While technology vendors such as HP, Dell/EMC, Cisco and others have for years provided phone-home monitoring and utilisation/performance reporting capabilities, hyperconverged vendors have pushed these capabilities further with real-time analytics and automation workflows, such as Nutanix Prism, SimpliVityOmniWatch, and OmniView.  Additionally, these vendors have aligned support plans to business outcomes – ‘mission critical’, ‘production’, ‘basic’, and so on.

Now you are asking: “Okay Mr. Know-It-All, didn’t you just debunk your own argument?” Au contraire I say – I have just reinforced it.

Each hyperconverged vendor technology requires its own separate platform for monitoring and analytics.  And these tools are restricted to just what is happening internally within the converged platform.  Sure, that covers quite a bit of your operational needs, but is it the complete story?

Let’s say you deploy SimpliVity for your main data centere.  You adopt the ‘mission critical’ support plan, which comes with OmniWatch and OmniView.  You now have great insight into how your OmniCube architecture is operating, and you can delve into the analytics to understand how your SimpliVity resources are being utilised.  In addition, you get software support with one, two, or four hour response (depending on the channel you use – phone, email, web ticket).  You also get software updates and RCA reports.  It sounds like a comprehensive, ‘converged’ set of required support services.

And it is, for your selected hyperconverged vendor.  What these services do not provide is a holistic view of how the hyperconverged platforms are operating within the totality of your environment.  How effective is the networking that connects it to the rest of the data centre?  What about non-hyperconverged based workloads, either on traditional server platforms or in the cloud?  And how do you measure end user experience if your view is limited to hyperconverged data-points?  Not to mention, what happens if your selected hyperconverged vendor is gobbled up by one of the major technology companies or, worse, closes when funding runs dry?

Adopting hyperconverged as your next-generation technology play is certainly something to consider carefully, and has the potential to positively impact your overall operational maturity.  You can reduce the number of vendor technologies and management interfaces, get more proactive, and make decisions based on real data analytics. But your operations teams will still need to determine if the source of impact is within the scope of the hyperconverged stack and covered by the vendor support plan, or if its symptomatic of an external influence.

Beyond the awareness of health and optimised operations, there will be service interruptions.  If there weren’t we would all be in the unemployment line.  Will a one hour response be sufficient in a major outage?  Is your operational team able to response 7X24 with hyperconverged skills?  And, how will you consolidate governance and compliance reporting between the hyperconverged platform and the rest of your infrastructure?

Hyperconverged platforms can certainly enhance and help mature your IT operations, but they do provide only part of the story.  Consider carefully if their operational and support offerings are sufficient for overall IT operational effectiveness.  Look for ways to consolidate the operational information and data provided by hyperconverged platforms with the rest of your management interfaces into a single control plane, where your operations team can work more efficiently.  If you’re looking for help, GreenPages can provide this support via its Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) offering.

Convergence at this level is even more critical to ensure maximum support of your business objectives.