IaaS

GigaOm – Cloud Storage Is Expensive? Are You Doing it Right?

In my day to day job, I talk to a lot of end users. And when it comes to the cloud, there are still many differences between Europe and the US. The European cloud market is much more fragmented than the American one for several reasons, including the slightly different regulations in each country. Cloud adoption is slower in Europe and many organizations still like to maintain data and infrastructure in their premises. The European approach is quite pragmatic, and many enterprises take somewhat advantage of the experiences made by similar organizations on the other side of the pond. One similarity is cloud storage or, better, cloud storage costs and reactions.

The fact that data is growing everywhere at an incredible pace is nothing new, and often faster than predicted in the past years. At first glance, an all-in cloud strategy looks very compelling, low $/GB, less CAPEX and more OPEX, increased agility and more, until of course your cloud bill starts growing out of control.

More of the GigaOm post from Enrico Signoretti

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10
Jan 19

CIO.com – What’s driving IT budgets for 2019

Technology leaders weigh in on where IT spend will shift, with many companies focusing on infrastructure, security, and user experience.

he majority of IT leaders expect their 2019 IT budgets to increase or remain unchanged, driven largely by the need to upgrade aging infrastructure, accelerate a shift to the cloud or improve the employee experience of what IT offers.

More of the CIO.com article from Sharon Florentine

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07
Jan 19

Forbes.com – Seven Remarkable Takeaways From Massive Kubernetes Conference

The 8,000 attendees attending the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Kubernetes conference this week in Seattle demonstrated the exponential growth in interest in this complex, technical combination of open source technologies.

Kubernetes is container orchestration software – essentially, plumbing for running enterprise-class software in the cloud. Not the kind of nuts-and-bolts tech that you might think would generate such enthusiasm.

More of the Forbes article from Jason Bloomberg

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04
Jan 19

InformationWeek- Debunking Three Common Cloud Misconceptions

Combatting the misconceptions surrounding cloud computing requires continuous exploration of new opportunities emerging today because of ongoing cloud technology innovations.

Each organization’s digital transformation is different, based on internal operational goals, desired business outcomes and unique customer needs. Despite specific requirements of individual businesses, there’s an important common denominator in our digital era: the need for increased agility. The speed at which organizations need to perform and transform continues to accelerate – the ability to adjust course in real-time to best serve internal and external audiences is paramount, and best enabled with open cloud platforms.

More of the InformationWeek post from Jeff Canter

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02
Jan 19

ComputerWorld – How Microsoft Lost the Web

Microsoft’s announcement earlier this month that it was dumping its own browser technology for Google’s – turning Edge into a Chrome clone – was a stunning acknowledgement that the company had lost its decades-long battle for browser supremacy.

“We intend to adopt the Chromium open-source project … to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers,” Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president in the Windows group, wrote in a Dec. 6 post to a company blog. But while Belfiore blew the open-source horn, he didn’t bother to recap how Microsoft reached this point when earlier in the century, it was the dominant browser maker, accounting for more than 90% of all usage after it laid waste to Netscape Navigator.

More of the ComputerWorld article from Gregg Keizer

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18
Dec 18

IT Business Edge – Hybrid Cloud Computing Emerges as Next Big IT Management Challenge

Going into 2019, it’s apparent that a major challenge facing IT leaders will be to bring the cost of cloud computing under control. While cloud computing in theory reduces the cost of IT, it turns out that the operational complexity of supporting multiple cloud computing platforms alongside existing on-premises IT environments has become quite expensive. IT leaders clearly need to bring some order to the cloud computing chaos.

A recent report from International Data Corp. (IDC) highlights the extent of the challenge. The survey finds that most customers (64 percent) are employing multiple clouds. But only 24 percent of IT organizations have a high degree of interoperability between their cloud environments, while another 40 percent say they have achieved low interoperability between their clouds. But only 7 percent say they have managed to build a true hybrid cloud through multiple IT environments that are managed via a single control plane. IT organizations that are trying to manage disparate IT environments in isolation from one another are going to incur higher operational costs.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Mike Vizard

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10
Dec 18

Forbes – We Must Find A Way To Defy Data Gravity In The Cloud

The IT industry is in the midst of a transformational era in terms of how we treat data. At Moor Insights & Strategy we have discussed countless the times forces that are driving the need for a data strategy, how that need is deeply impacted by real-time analytics, and how data has escaped the datacenter and is now spread from edge to cloud.

The world of IT today is one of hybrid and multi-clouds. IT deploys workloads to the public cloud because it delivers on a compelling value proposition across a number of realms. Deploying resources dynamically, as needed, and terminating them when the project is over saves countless CapEx dollars. Having resources that can be deployed dynamically, gives IT and application owners an almost infinite amount of flexibility.

More of the Forbes post from Steve McDowell

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03
Dec 18

CIO.com – Workday CIO on tackling SaaS debt and sprawl

Configure your software, don’t customize it — but make sure you have the skills available to do it well: That’s the advice of Workday CIO Diana McKenzie

Being the CIO of a cloud ERP provider is a unique balancing act. As the first customer of your company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, you must help drive the company’s flagship forward, but you also must support the technical needs of the organization as a whole.

That’s where Workday CIO Diana McKenzie found herself when joining the company nearly three years ago, after the better part of three decades running IT functions in the life sciences industry. The core of Workday was running on its own software, which performs essential financial, HR and planning functions, but elsewhere issues were coming to the fore.

More of the CIO.com post from Peter Sayer

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30
Nov 18

IT Business Edge – ERP Entering All Facets of the Economy

Enterprise Resource Planning platforms have been around for several decades. Some people love them, some hate them. What is indisputable, however, is that organizations around the world are being continuously pushed to achieve greater efficiency and faster turnaround, and ERP is a way of achieving both goals.

According to Market Research Engine, ERP is expected to near $50 billion in total market value by 2024, infiltrating tasks as wide-ranging as sales and marketing to distribution management and finance. What’s interesting about the current phase of ERP development is the way it dovetails with a number of other industry requirements besides the perennial need to become more efficient. The rising acceptance of mobile and cloud-based applications, for instance, places greater onus on the need to build more flexible, user-friendly means of support. As well, as business processes become increasingly digital-oriented, ERP brings much-needed intelligibility to complex workflows.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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28
Nov 18

ComputerWeekly Survey: Data very fragmented, and that’s a worry for most

Cohesity-sponsored survey finds most organisations store multiple copies of secondary data and worry about the cost and the effect on their competitiveness

Most UK organisations store up to 10 copies of the same secondary data, run four or five different products to manage it, and keep it in up to four locations, including two or three different public cloud storage providers.

Not surprisingly, a majority (54%) are also worried about fragmentation of their secondary – ie, not production – data.

Those are some of the findings of a survey sponsored by Cohesity, which provides scale-out data protection appliances and a data management platform.

The survey questioned 250 UK IT decision-makers as part of a study that also asked 650 of their counterparts in the US, France, Germany, Australia and Japan.

The average number of copies of the same datasets in secondary data held by UK respondents is five, and that came out the same across all countries except Japan, for which the number is seven.

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Antony Adshead

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.