Cloud Computing

ComputerWeekly – Future of the server operating system

We look at the evolution of the server operating system, and how the next generation is moving into the cloud

Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2016 operating system (OS) is just being launched. Linux is celebrating its 25th birthday. IBM has its mainframe operating system and its Power operating system, Oracle has Solaris – and that is just a few of the OSs that still abound in the market. But what is the role of an OS in the modern world?

Going back to the early days of servers, the stack required to get a computer up and running was pretty simple – a basic input/output system (BIOS) to get the hardware started, followed by an operating system to provision basic services, followed by an application to carry out the actual work.

More of the Computerweekly article from Clive Longbottom

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07
Dec 16

Baseline – Why IT Pros Feel Unprepared for Disasters

While most C-level executives feel their organization is “very prepared” for a potential systems-crashing disaster, IT professionals sharply disagree, according to a recent survey from Evolve IP. The “2016 Evolve IP Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Survey” report indicates that a significant number of companies have suffered from a major incident that required disaster recovery (DR) over the past year—sometimes resulting in six-figure losses. Many tech employees indicate that a lack of DR budgeting leaves them unprepared for disruptions caused by hardware failures, server issues, power outages, environmental events, human error and targeted cyber-attacks. And a great many organizations still rely on old-school recovery methods such as backup tapes, instead of newer cloud-based solutions.

There is, however, notable interest in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), despite the fact that only about half of C-level executives have heard of this term. “The lack of DR education at the executive level—and the likely related lack of budget—poses a real risk to today’s businesses,” according to the report. “These factors are further exacerbated by a dramatic increase in targeted attacks, continued reliance on aging tape backups, as well as internal hardware that remains highly susceptible to failure.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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02
Dec 16

Data Center Knowledge – The Mission Critical Cloud: Designing an Enterprise Cloud

Today, many organizations are taking a look at cloud from a new lens. Specifically, organizations are looking to cloud to enable a service-driven architecture capable of keeping up with enterprise demands. With that in mind, we’re seeing businesses leverage more cloud services to help them stay agile and very competitive. However, the challenge revolves around uptime and resiliency. This is compounded by often complex enterprise environments.

When working with cloud and data center providers, it’s critical to see just how costly an outage could be. Consider this – only 27% of companies received a passing grade for disaster readiness, according to a 2014 survey by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. At the same time, increased dependency on the data center and cloud providers means that overall outages and downtime are growing costlier over time. Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power have just released the results of the latest Cost of Data Center Outages study. Previously published in 2010 and 2013, the purpose of this third study is to continue to analyze the cost behavior of unplanned data center outages. According to the new study, the average cost of a data center outage has steadily increased from $505,502 in 2010 to $740,357 today (or a 38 percent net change).

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Bill Kleyman

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29
Nov 16

CIO Insight – Why Companies Are Overhauling IT Infrastructure

Organizations are carefully examining the state of their IT infrastructure as they dedicate themselves to a digital transformation, according to a recent survey from SignalFx. With this transition considered a primary strategic goal for many businesses, CEOs are often taking the lead in preparing for this major change. However, both CIOs and their teams are also playing critical roles. To ensure success, companies are adopting virtualization and containerization solutions, hosting infrastructure in the cloud and deploying automation solutions, among other steps. With these steps, survey respondents feel very confident about what lies ahead. “Digital transformation is very much a business objective,” said Karthik Rau, CEO of SignalFx.

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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17
Nov 16

IT Business Edge – The Cloud Market Is Growing, in Complexity

Enterprise cloud deployments are on the upswing with little or no sign of slowing down in the coming year, but inside all the market projections are some key trends that indicate exactly what form this new infrastructure will take and what services it will support.

Across the board, reports are calling for a continuation of last year’s double-digit growth for 2017 and beyond, but it is fair to say that some earlier assumptions about cloud computing have not panned out, at least not yet.

For one thing, says Forrester’s Dave Bartoletti, big enterprises are turning toward big cloud providers for increased application support, which was expected. But at the same time, regional providers are also still in play due to the highly specialized nature of their service offerings.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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16
Nov 16

ZDNet – Cloud will account for 92 percent of datacenter traffic by 2020

Businesses are migrating to cloud architectures at a rapid clip and by 2020, cloud traffic will take up 92 percent of total data center traffic globally, according to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index report.

The networking giant predicts that cloud traffic will rise 3.7-fold up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1ZB per year by 2020.

“The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution. With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimizing their data center strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers,” said Doug Webster, VP of service provider marketing for Cisco, in a press release. “We anticipate all types of data center operators continuing to invest in cloud-based innovations that streamline infrastructures and help them more profitably deliver web-based services to a wide range of end users.”

Breaking things down, Cisco expects business workloads to dominate data center applications by 2020 but that their overall workload share will decrease from 79 percent to 72 percent.

More of the ZDNet article from Natalie Gagliordi

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15
Nov 16

Continuity Central – Enterprises struggle with increasing complexity of IT systems

Enterprises today are employing hybrid IT as they struggle to keep up with digital transformation, according to the recently released Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report ‘Hybrid IT Takes Center Stage’.

Sponsored by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the report presents the results of a survey of 310 business and IT executives worldwide which found that most say their organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of change in business today while working to ensure the complexity of their IT systems do not jeopardize performance, agility or security.

In fact, 63 percent of respondents indicated they are pursuing a hybrid IT approach to keep up with their existing infrastructure that consists of a mix of private clouds, public clouds and legacy data centers / centres – either on-premises or managed by service providers.

To enable hybrid IT, the report singles out the need for a secure, high-performance network architecture that can deliver the kind of security, flexibility and responsiveness required to stitch all these systems together.

“The vast majority of CIOs and line of business owners are working within the constraints of legacy apps, networks and investments,” said Chris Yousey, vice president of managed services for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “And while the move to hybrid IT is about protecting their investments, it’s really more about improving performance, availability and above all, agility in today’s business climate.”

CIO.com – The long, slow death of private cloud continues

This article offers great perspective on in-house private cloud, not IaaS private cloud.

I must have touched a nerve with my last post, as I was contacted by two vendors that wanted to share their perspective on private cloud computing. Even though I don’t consider myself an analyst and therefore typically avoid “briefings,” I thought it would be interesting to see what they had to say.

Both vendors covered what I consider well-trod ground: Organizations use private clouds for reasons of security/compliance, data sovereignty, data gravity (i.e., there is lots of data on-premises and it would be very difficult to migrate it to a public cloud provider), application inflexibility, and so on.

However, one also identified another reason that organizations choose to use private clouds: cost. This vendor asserted that IT organizations can operate a cloud environment less expensively than what a public cloud provider charges for the same capability.

More of the CIO.com post from Bernard Golden

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09
Nov 16

Continuity Central – ISACA looks at the advantages and risks of application containerization

Application containerization is gaining traction given its potential to increase efficiencies and data security options, and decrease cost, according to new expert analyses from ISACA; but it also brings its own risks.

A pair of new ISACA white papers offer insights and guidance on containerization. ‘Understanding the Enterprise Advantages of Application Containerization: An Overview,’ provides a summary of the rising popularity of containers; and ‘Understanding the Enterprise Advantages of Application Containerization: Practitioner Considerations,’ offers practical guidance for assurance, governance and security professionals.

ISACA defines an application container as “a mechanism that is used to isolate applications from each other within the context of a running operating system instance.” Containers let data centers / centres deploy business applications more rapidly. Increased business agility, lower costs and more efficient use of resources are among the other factors sparking increased global adoption.

Digital McKinsey – Leaders and laggards in enterprise cloud infrastructure adoption

Investments in organizational capabilities rather than specific technology choices separate the leaders from the laggards.

There is a lot of hype and hoopla about the cloud but few reliable facts and benchmarks about the adoption of this technology. CIOs, CTOs, and heads of infrastructure at large enterprises have shared with us their frustrations about adopting cloud-based platforms and migrating processing workloads to virtual environments. To address those frustrations, between 2014 and 2016 we surveyed senior business and technology leaders in more than 50 large organizations in Europe and North America to find out about their adoption of cloud and next-generation infrastructure.1 We focused on the structure and management of their cloud programs, the technical capabilities they’ve implemented to this point, the benefits realized, and their future plans.

More of the Digital McKinsey post from Nagendra Bommadevara, James Kaplan, and Irina Starikova

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.