Tag: Cloud

AWS gets three year cloud contract with Home Office

Posted on December 5, 2023 by - News

The Home Office has signed a three-year cloudy deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) valued at £450,281,369.

The contract falls under the G-Cloud 13 framework and is to provide public cloud hosting services to the Home Office. T

This latest agreement follows a series of collaborations between the Home Office and AWS, which are becoming increasingly controversial.

Last year, a report from the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) and think tank TaxWatch revealed that AWS has secured UK public sector contracts exceeding £600 million since 2017.

The report also highlighted concerns about tax payments, with AWS allegedly avoiding £84 million in taxes during the same period.

Insight Enterprises snaps up SADA

Posted on December 5, 2023 by - News

Insight Enterprises has snapped up six-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year SADA for $410 million.

Insight claims the deal puts it in the same class as Accenture and Deloitte as one of Microsoft and Google’s three biggest cloud players.

Insight said the additional earnout for SADA owners has a target of $210 million based on SADA’s three-year performance after the close of the acquisition. Insight expects the deal to add 20 to 30 cents per share to its adjusted earnings per share in December 2023 and 55 to 75 cents per share in 2024.

SADA delivered net revenue of $251 million in 2022 and gross profit of $200 million.

SADA  has Google Cloud specialisations, including security, infrastructure, cloud migration, data analytics, application development, location intelligence and machine learning. Insight has 22 Microsoft specialisations.

Insight said the deal extends its AI capabilities across two leading generative AI platforms.

 

Only a third of companies get much from the cloud.

Posted on October 13, 2023 by - News

A new study has revealed that only a third of companies are seeing their cloud ambitions realised.

HFS and EYGS announced the findings of a six-month study related to the challenging results that many enterprises find during the cloud-native transformation (CNT) process.

HFS CEO Phil Fersht said the study showed that while 65 per cent of organisations made strategic investments in the cloud, only 32 per cent are realising their ambitions.

“Many are failing to capture the value of their investment. The report clarifies the disconnect between many organisations’ supply and buy side while highlighting the need for a clear understanding of business objectives. It also pinpoints the challenge of justifying moving workloads to the cloud and aiming for business transformation through that process,” Fersht said.

Public cloud spending set to increase

Posted on August 30, 2023 by - News

Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers, divided by their collective shoe size, and projected that worldwide expenditure on public cloud services will surge to $1.35 trillion by 2027.

While the pace of annual spending growth in the Public Cloud Services market is anticipated to experience a marginal decline during the period from 2023 to 2027, the market is predicted to achieve an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9 per cent over five years.

IDC Eileen Smith Program Vice President of Data & Analytics  said organisations have widely adopted public cloud solutions as a cost-efficient means of hosting enterprise applications and facilitating the creation and deployment of consumer-centric solutions.

Cloudy company might have been busted by ransomware

Posted on August 29, 2023 by - News

A cloud hosting firm lost a “majority” of its customer data after a ransomware attack infected the company’s systems.

“Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to recreate more data, and the majority of our customers have thus lost all data with us,” CloudNordic wrote in a translated post.

CloudNordic supplies servers to host email, websites, and other IT services for its customers. But the attack is so devastating CloudNordic must start from scratch in rebuilding the company’s IT systems.

“In addition to data, we also lost all our systems and servers and have had difficulty communicating,” the company says.

Amazon Web Services loses Chris Vonderhaar

Posted on June 5, 2023 by - Moving People, News

Amazon Web Services has lost its top cloudy executive Chris Vonderhaar who was the bloke who planned, designed and constructed AWS’ data centres.

For those who came in late, AWS datacentres power the $85bn cloud company’s infrastructure and cloud services.

Vonderhaar had been with the company for nearly 13 years in top cloud infrastructure roles and it is unclear why he has left. In 2021, it was thought that Vonderhaar would be a successor to former AWS CEO Andy Jassy, recently promoted to CEO of Amazon.

In addition to leading the Amazon subsidiary’s datacentre global strategy, Vonderhaar was responsible for business development and procurement of utility connections, the AWS renewable energy portfolio, and AWS sustainability teams and business, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Public cloud has silver lining

Posted on April 24, 2023 by - News

Public cloud service spending will grow 21.7 per cent to $597.3 billion in 2023, according to beancounters and number crunchers at analyst outfit Gartner.

Cloud computing going to drive the next phase of digital business, as organisations pursue disruption through emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI), Web3 and the metaverse, Big G said.

Gartner VP Sid Nag said hyperscale cloud providers were driving the cloud agenda as organisations today view it as a strategic platform for digital transformation. This requires cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services improves.

White leaves HPE

Posted on April 18, 2023 by - News

The bloke behind HPE Greenlake as-a-service, Keith White, is stepping aside at the end of April to pursue other opportunities.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri told employees of White’s imminent departure in an email describing White as “an exceptional colleague, friend, customer advocate, and team champion.”

“Through the last several years, Keith was instrumental in accelerating the development of HPE GreenLake,” said Neri.

Nothing weird about vendor firings

Posted on April 4, 2023 by - News

Aviatrix CEO tech leader Steve Mullaney has been telling the world+dog that there is nothing unusual about the large number of layoffs that are occurring in the IT industry.

He said that a large number of sackage is due to the “overhiring” technology companies did over the past few years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mullaney said: “Everyone just kept hiring, hiring and hiring, whether it made any sense or not. There was no downside to it. And all anyone cared about was growth at any cost. Then last summer hits. All of a sudden everybody then says, ‘We’ll now, hang on. That’s not the way the world works anymore. You actually have to be profitable.’ It’s going back to what’s normal.”

He said that AWS probably hired hired tens-of-thousands of people over the last year so there is nothing wrong with AWS.

 

 

Data centres are putting pressure on London’s power

Posted on August 1, 2022 by - News

City Hall and Tower Bridge at Night, London

After it was believed that the cloud and data centres were the next big thing, London appears to be getting strangled by them.

Three West London boroughs have told building developers that they must limit their plans because there is not enough power in the grid. This might seem odd given the huge amounts of money power companies are charging people, one would expect they would have sunk a bit of cash into infrastructure.

AWS expands security partner network

Posted on July 28, 2022 by - News

Cloudy bookseller AWS has expanded and revamped its partner network.

The outfit has bought in eight new categories to help customers  locate partner software and service solutions: Threat Detection and Response; Identity and Access Management; Infrastructure Security; Data Protection; Compliance and Privacy; Application Security; Perimeter Protection; and Core Security.

Speaking to the gathered throngs at AWS’s annual re:Inforce conference worldwide head of cloud foundations for the AWS Partner Network, Ryan Orsi, claimed the move will allow partners to “increase their business, increase their trust and visibility with their customers and prospects out there to show they have all the right skill sets and knowledge about AWS environments.

Google Cloud offers training

Posted on May 18, 2022 by - News

Google Cloud has announced the initial UK pilot of its new cloud training programme, Project Katalyst, a Google Cloud Academy course specifically targeting underrepresented and underprivileged individuals in the company’s workplace.

Taking place this summer, the Project Katalyst programme has been designed to help solve the industry’s challenge to inclusively increase the pool of available skilled talent in the market and prepare participants for their first role working with Google Cloud Partners.

Google Cloud changes its prices

Posted on March 16, 2022 by - News

Google Cloud has changed its prices to allow “more flexibility for customers” which basically means low-cost options for some but increases for others.

The main changes will come to Google’s cloud storage pricing for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access.

It will also include the introduction of a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD), new outbound data processing pricing for cloud load balancing and new pricing for network topology.

The pricing changes are due to come into effect on 1 October this year.

Writing on the company bog, a spokesGoogle said: “We are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads.”

Google Cloud helped by partners

Posted on February 3, 2022 by - News

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai claimed his outfit’s cloud business was in the position it is today due to the hard work by the company partners.

Google Cloud’s sales surged 45 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter despite the public cloud giant making an operating loss.

Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2021 hit $5.5 billion for Google Cloud, parent company Alphabet’s results show, but it racked up losses of $890 million – cut from $1.2 billion compared with the fourth quarter of 2020.

Public cloud continues to grow

Posted on December 21, 2021 by - News

Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers and reached the conclusion that the European public cloud market is growing at a double-digit pace

The analyst estimates the public cloud supply chain contributed almost $500 billion to European GDP.

Writing in its  Public Cloud’s Contribution to the European Economy: A Macroeconomic Approach report IDC said this has significantly increased over the past two years, with a spike in 2020 due to the digitisation journey that many organisations undertook during the pandemic.

IDC research analyst, European cloud and multi-cloud management, Filippo Vanara said that for the past five years, the public cloud market has significantly changed the IT industry and grown like no other segment of the European IT market.