Tag: cloud computing

Most want their SAP applications on the cloud

Posted on September 30, 2020 by - News

While the majority of SAP applications are still housed on-premise, 70 percent  of those responsible for SAP believe migrating to the public cloud will be more beneficial than keeping it on-premise, according to a new report from Ensono

Ensono found that 61 percent stated that migrating SAP to public cloud is critical for business success.

There was consensus amongst the 100 IT leaders responsible for SAP within UK enterprise that public cloud provides businesses with opportunities. Almost 20 percent of those surveyed had one or more SAP application already hosted on public cloud and this is set to increase by 79 percent in the next two years as enterprise organisations launch their migration plans. This indicates that, following many years of barriers to public cloud such as security, loss of control and regulation, customers are edging towards public cloud maturity.

Telarus teams up with Avaya on its UK cloud

Posted on September 8, 2020 by - News

Cloudy distie Telarus has teamed up with Avaya and will begin offering the new Avaya Cloud Office UCaaS solution to its extensive partner network in the UK.

This will broaden the reach of the new app and help agents drive COVID-19 business recovery by giving them access to an efficient, all-in-one UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) offering that solves the challenges of distributed working. The news comes as Gartner predicts 90 percent of all new UC purchases will be cloud-based UCaaS by 2021, up from 50 percent in 2018.

HPE launches GreenLake cloud services

Posted on July 17, 2020 by - News

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a new cloud product for the European market.

Dubbed HPE GreenLake cloud services, the product will be hosted by Interxion, A digital realty company and provider of co-location services in 13 countries.

HPE said that the new offer brings customers the benefits of a managed cloud experience without the complexity of managing data centres, while maintaining ownership and control of their data and workloads.

Data loss fears still plague the cloud market

Posted on July 13, 2020 by - News

Fears over data loss and compliance breaches have held back UK organisations from cloud adoption according to the latest research from Veritas Technologies.

The 2020 UK Veritas Databerg Report shares perspectives from senior IT decision makers across UK enterprises.  It reveals that half of growth of data in cloud environments took nearly five years, rather than the 12 months organisations previously predicted.   In the last UK Databerg Report, released in 2015, IT decision makers believed 43 percent of data would be stored in the cloud within a year, but, by 2020 the number stands at 47 percent.

Three quarters of public cloud users had a security incident

Posted on July 9, 2020 by - News

Sophos has warned that  nearly three quarters of organisations experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year.

In its The State of Cloud Security 2020 global survey Sophos said that the incidents  included ransomware and other malware (50 percent), exposed data (29 percent), compromised accounts (25 per ent), and cryptojacking (17 percent). Organisations running multi-cloud environments were greater than 50 percent more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud.

Outfits ignoring the cloud are defying gravity

Posted on May 18, 2020 by - News

Companies which ignore the cloud are trying to defy gravity, according to AWS’s CEO of Amazon Web Services.

At  the vendor’s online Summit event, Andy Jassy said he understood why some organisations are wary of a cloud move, but that they will be at a competitive disadvantage if they don’t.

“There is still a segment of companies trying to fight gravity and they argue that they can still do the infrastructure less expensively than can be done in the cloud or that they have enough services to allow their organisation to move as quickly as people can in the cloud. We’ve done many thousands of these comparisons over the years and I don’t think I’ve yet seen a company that can move at the cost structure and the pace of changing their customer experience that they can in AWS and in the cloud.”

Big cloud needs to work on channel trust claims report

Posted on February 6, 2019 by - News

Canalys beancounters have warned that the big cloud players need to sort out their trust issues with the channel.

The big cloud providers need the channel to help widen sales but need to be straighter with the channel and build trust if they are going to deepen the relationship throughout what is set to be a year of growth, Canalys said.

AWS continued to hold its position as the dominant cloud service provider in Q4, but Azure is taking more share as it looks to mount a challenge to its rival.

Microsoft solves EU cloud problem

Posted on March 16, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudMicrosoft announced a number of new cloud offerings today including one which will solve the company’s European cloud problesm.

The problem is that Microsoft is US company and its country delights in spying on its allies.  The EU fears that the NSA could get a court order and force Microsoft to hand over data from its European clouds and force it not to tell anyone.

Microsoft has come up with a wizard wheeze by creating a product called Azure Deutschland — a German cloud region that will offer Azure services that come not directly from Microsoft, but from the German data trustee Deutsche Telekom.

It not only makes sure that data remains in Germany, but also means that Microsoft can’t actually get to the data itself.  By operating under a German company, the NSA can’t force Vole to do squat.

In fact, while the region offers redundancy and backup, it does so through a private network to ensure that none of the bits being backed up even go through the public Internet where they might stray onto foreign soil.

Germany has some of the strictest data privacy protection laws on the books, and Microsoft said that Deutsche Telekom will have strict protocols regarding when Microsoft is allowed access, even for support:

 

Amazon offers unlimited cloud storage

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeOnline giant Amazon said it is to offer unlimited cloud storage, offering two plans for people who want to upload vast collections of media that they have.

The first is called the Unlimited Photos Plan – it comes with a free three month trial, then a subscription of $12 a year – this lets you store as many photographs as you like on the Amazon Cloud and includes 5GB of extra storage for videos, documents or other files.

The second is called the Unlimited Everything Plan – this also comes with a three month trial at no charge then a subscription of $60 a year.  As the name implies, it lets you store all of your stuff in Cloud Drive.

Existing members with a Prime subscription already can use unlimited photo storage but can add a subscription to the Unlimited plan to store everything else too.

Amazon is now a considerable player in the IT business – although many people can buy CDs, books and the like – it also offers services for enterprise players too, particularly in the cloud.

 

Alibaba gets its own US cloud

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeAlibaba is launching a cloud computing hub in Silicon Valley which is the first that the e-commerce giant has set up outside of China.

The new California data centre marks the Chinese company’s latest expansion onto an US market dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Alibaba’s Aliyun cloud division intends the new data centre to cater initially to Chinese companies with operations in the United States. Later it will target US businesses seeking a presence in both countries.

Ethan Yu, a vice president at Alibaba who runs the international cloud business said that it was all part of Alibaba’s international expansion plans. The next stage would be a cloud on the East Coast, or somewhere in the middle of the US.

Aliyun is similar to Amazon Web Services and was part of the company’s in-house technical infrastructure. It has since expanded to lease processing and storage space for small and medium Internet businesses in China.

Aliyun, also known as Alibaba Cloud Computing, holds about a 23 percent market share in the Chinese market. It faces both Chinese and foreign competitors, from carriers like China Telecom to Microsoft and Amazon. Its existing data centers span the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

IBM wants cloud killing

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeBig Blue thinks it can restore itself to its former suited glory by pushing heavily into cloud and big data.

Apparently the outfit has set itself a target of making $40 billion a year from cloud, big data, security and other growth areas by 2018.

The target was mentioned at the company’s annual investor meeting in New York yesterday and is the first hint of a serious “cunning plan” since IBM moved away from its previous strongholds in hardware and servers.

The $40 billion will come from areas which IBM calls its “strategic imperatives,” namely cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security software.

That would represent about 44 percent of $90 billion in total revenue that analysts expect from IBM in 2018.

Those businesses generated $25 billion in revenue for IBM last year, or 27 percent of its total $93 billion in sales.

The company said it would shift $4 billion in spending to its “strategic imperatives” this year.

Revenue at IBM has gradually shrunk over the past three years as it sold off its unprofitable units in businesses such as low-end servers, semiconductors and cash registers.

IBM Chief Executive Virginia Rometty has said she was happy to jettison revenue from such unprofitable businesses, which she dubs “empty calories.” Although we would have thought that empty calories would be a good thing, because they would fill you up without meaning you put on weight.

IBM revenue has now fallen for the past 11 quarters, while earnings growth has been sporadic.

The company says its long-term plan is to hit “low single-digit” revenue growth and “high single-digit” growth in operating earnings per share. Last year IBM withdrew its long-term plan to hit $20 per share in operating earnings for 2015.

Things have not been going that well for IBM of late. It gets more than half of its cash from foreign parts, and the strong US dollar has hurt its sales by more than six per cent this year.

Juniper extends deal with Canonical

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeUbuntu provider Canonical and Juniper Networks said they have extended their relationship to provide OpenStack based cloud offerings.

The deal is intended for use by the telecommunications industry.

The OpenStack software lets service providers virtualise core networks and network functions and is claimed to give better performance, scale and reliability.

Juniper said it will also provide complete service support for Canonical’s Ubuntu server operating system.

OpenStack is an open source cloud management platform with a large community of users, developers and founders, and Jupiter said over half of OpenStack instances run Ubuntu.

Both Juniper and Canonical have created Contral Cloud Platform which is a carrier grade OpenStack offering. Both companies will work on joint product development and marketing, and will work with their customers to include service provider needs in the cloud.

IBM steps up educational push

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeMassive services giant International Business Machines (IBM) said it has now enrolled over 300 colleges and universities around the world in its Power Systems Academic Initiative (PSAI).
IBM said that the push is to help students learn skills related to big data, cloud computing, mobile and social networking.
That, said IBM, is important in today’s job market.
The initiative, which started in October 2012. has grown by 152 percent over the last two years, IBM claimed.
Schools and universities hooked up to IBM include New York University’s polytechnic school of engineering, Virginia Tech, the UK University of Greenwich, the University of Ulster, and Glasgow Caledonian University.
Of course, IBM’s move is not all altruism – it is pinning its future on cloud computing, big data, analytics and security.
Several of the academic bodies offer courses related to IBM specific operations, and the company said it recruit from universities and business schools.

Microsoft reveals cloud roadmap

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSoftware company Microsoft said it has introduced a web site that reveals details of its roadmap for its Cloud Platform.
Microsoft has been aiming to move to the cloud as fast as it can and now offers cloud services including Azure, Intone, Visual Studio and server platforms including Windows Server, SQL Server.  It also has covered system appliance offerings including Analytics and Stor System.
Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of the cloud and enterprise marketing group at Microsoft said the company wanted to be transparent about its cloud strategy.
He said that the web site, which you can find here, is intended to show what technology it’s developing and what’s coming in the next few months.
It also will include products in public preview.
Microsoft isn’t the only company struggling to re-invent itself as a cloud player.  Others in the game include SAP, Oracle and IBM.
Analysts predict that over the next few years the majority of enterprise IT users will use cloud computing and services more and more.

 

IBM announces personal cloud security

Posted on January 28, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue said it has announced a cloud technology that will help ordinary people protect themselves online.
The tech, dubbed Identity Mixer, has a cryptographic algorithm which will protect age, nationality, address and credit card numbers.
Mixer acts as an agent between somebody buying a product and a vendor – it means that the vendor won’t hold the actual details, just the authentication.
IBM said it is offering Identity Mixer to developers as part of its platform as a service (PaaS) cloud.
It means developers will be able to use Identity Mixer in their own apps and in conjunction with their services.
IBM is already testing the technology in two major projects across Europe.