SoftwareOne Holding AG, a global software and cloud solutions provider, has unveiled the findings of ‘CIO Pulse: 2023 budgets & priorities’. The study, which recently surveyed 600 C-suite and IT decision-makers in the UK and USA examines how the current global economy is impacting IT priorities, revealing that despite 93% of CIOs expecting IT budgets… Read more »
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Modular data platform Daasity has launched ELT+ for Commerce, Powered by Snowflake. It is thought ELT+ for Commerce will benefit customers by enabling consumer brands selling via eCommerce, Amazon, retail, and/or wholesale to implement a full or partial data and analytics stack. Dan LeBlanc, Daasity co-founder and CEO, said: “Brands using Daasity and Snowflake can… Read more »
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Recently published data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) claims that the UK is in a productivity crisis, lagging behind many other G7 nations in workforce output. But the majority (85%) of business leaders do not feel that remote and hybrid working is a cause for this, according to new research of more than… Read more »
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Microsoft has announced a 10-year strategic partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to put the financial markets providers’ infrastructure and data analytics onto the Microsoft cloud – and has acquired a 4% stake in the group in the process. Seasoned cloud industry watchers will know how these sorts of strategic partnerships play out.… Read more »
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With remote working the future for so many global workforces – or at least some kind of hybrid arrangement – is there an impact on email security we are all missing? Oliver Paterson, director of product management at VIPRE Security, believes so. “The timeframe that people expect now for you to reply to things is… Read more »
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Asda has selected Veeam Availability Suite to provide effective backup and restore for mission-critical systems. Following its divestiture from Walmart in early 2021, the supermarket chain has taken responsibility for protecting the large, virtualised infrastructure that underpins its business, and Veeam, a specialist in backup, recovery and data management solutions, has enabled it to do… Read more »
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In the US, tech mergers and acquisitions remain the most active M&A sector in terms of both value and volume; in the first half of this year, $415.4 billion changed hands in almost 1,300 overall deals, according to White & Case’s M&A Explorer. Perhaps your company’s technology acquisition is not quite at the financial level… Read more »
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The majority of US enterprises will increase their spending on cloud computing by up to 50% this year, according to US based researcher Clutch.
Conversely, the research also indicates that 6% of enterprises will cut their spending on cloud. The survey of 300 IT professionals at medium to large enterprises could indicate the different uses for cloud computing, with some companies using it to manage costs while others use it as a strategic weapon.
The study found that nearly 30% of the sample will maintain their current levels of cloud spending, with 6% saying they will reduce their cloud computing budget. A significant minority, 47%, identified efficiency improvements as the main benefit of cloud computing. There were no figures on whether performance improvements may encourage companies to spend less money on cloud services in future however.
The statistics on the uses for cloud computing do not suggest this is a tactical, strategic investment, however. The most popular motive cited for enterprise cloud usage, in the US, would appear to be better file storage, which was nominated as the primary objective for buying cloud services by 70% of the survey. The next most popular application of the cloud, backup and disaster recovery, which was nominated by 62% of the IT professionals, is another cost item. However, the cloud was chosen for application deployment among 51% of the sample, but there was no breakdown of whether this was viewed as a cost saving measure or a tactical investment. Similarly, the figures for the numbers of buyers who used the cloud for testing, 46%, was not broken down into tactical and cost saving motives.
Storage costs are the easy win and prove the value of the cloud: tactical use may be a later development, said Duane Tharp, VP of technical sales and services at service provider Cloud-Elements. “The returns on file storage are pretty straight-forward. Every company needs file storage,” said Tharp. “The ease of adopting the cloud for file storage could prove the concept and pave the way for the adoption of other use cases later.”
Microsoft’s Azure has promised more speed, lower cache demands and better data retention among a range of improvement to its cloud backup services for enterprise data.
Azure Backup now uses a technology called Update Sequence Number (USN) Journal in Windows to track the files that have changed between consecutive backups. USN keeps track of these changes to files and directories on the volume and this helps to identify changed files quickly.
The upshot of this tweak is a faster backup time. “We’ve seen up to a 50% reduction of backup times when using this optimization,” said Giridhar Mosay, Azure’s Program Manager for Cloud and Enterprise. Individual file server backup times will vary according to numbers and sizes of files and directory structure, Mosay warned.
A new algorithm that computes metadata has slashed the amount of cache space needed for each Azure Backup by 66%. The standard allocation of 15% cache space per volume size being backed up to Azure has proved prohibitive for volumes greater than 10TB. The new algorithm makes the cataloguing of the file space to be backed up a much more efficient process, which creates so much less metadata that it demands only 5% cache space, or less. Azure is now modifying its requirement for cache space to a third of the old level.
Meanwhile the resilience of the system has improved as Azure Backup has increased the number of recovery points for cloud backups. This allows for flexible retention policies to meet stringent compliance requirements such as HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) for large enterprises. The new maximum number of recovery points has increased from 366 to 9999.
Other tweaks include more timeouts across the various phases of backup process to ensure that long running jobs complete reliably. Cloud backups will also run a bit more efficiently as a result of a decoupling of the processes of cataloguing and uploading the backup data. Intermittent failures, in the service to handle incremental backups, have also been identified and resolved, according to Mosay. “We are continuing our journey to make Azure backup enterprise grade,” he said.
Microsoft has aggregated all the information about its cloud services into one single point of reference, in an attempt to clarify and simplify the increasingly ethereal nature of the cloud.
The announcement, in a blog on the company web site, comes in the same week that one of the new incarnations of HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), repositioned itself as a reseller of Microsoft’s Azure public cloud services.
With the onset of the cloud industry reshaping both the IT industry and companies, the software company turned cloud service vendor has moved to clarify the picture for enterprise buyers.
The new Microsoft Trust Center aims to unify all the different strands of its enterprise cloud services, as confused customers customer began to clamour for a single version of the truth, instead of having to choose between multiple references issued by a choice of Microsoft trusted resources. In the new scheme, the Microsoft Trust Center will be a consistent source of information about all its enterprise cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Office 365.
The Microsoft blog post says the Trust Center will be built on security, privacy and control, compliance and transparency. To this end it will advise cloud buyers on how Microsoft’s cloud services will observe international and regional standards, privacy and data protection policies and security features and function.
On Tuesday it was announced that HPE was to become a Microsoft Azure reseller partner, while in return HPE will become a preferred cloud services provider when Microsoft customers need help. The new arrangement, revealed by HPE CEO Meg Whitman in a quarterly analyst call, illustrates how the IT industry is being reshaped around the new hybridisation of computing services. The arrangement means HPE can sell its own hardware and cloud computing software to companies for the private, ‘on-premise’ part of the private-public combination. Meanwhile, the public cloud will be provided by Microsoft’s Azure computing service.
Transparency, according to the Microsoft Trust Center blog, is to be one of the foundations of cloud services.