IaaS

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.”

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

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19
Oct 16

SearchCloudComputing – Optimize your enterprise network design for hybrid cloud

Public and hybrid cloud adoption has a major ripple effect on enterprise network design. New bottlenecks arise, and some businesses need to alter their network configurations — particularly those for wide area networks — to ensure they get the performance they need.

With hybrid and public clouds, in particular, the networking focus shifts heavily to wide area network (WAN) connections. Businesses need to link their data centers to their public cloud provider’s sites, and often rely on their existing internet lines to do so. But this approach has shortcomings.

First, bandwidth is an issue. Traffic that used to roam about the data center now needs to move off-site, often increasing WAN traffic. Consequently, organizations may need to upgrade their internet lines, which can be expensive; pricing depends on a business’ location and amount of bandwidth needed.

More of the SearchCloudComputing article from Paul Korzeniowski

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19
Sep 16

ZDNet – 5 ways cloud computing is transforming software vendors

It’s never easy being a software vendor. Demanding users, incredibly smart competitors, and rapidly evolving technology mean constantly being on top of one’s game. Now, cloud and Software as a Service have added a whole new dimension to what it means to be a software vendor.

For starters, it means more, much more, than simply shifting the delivery model from on-premises installation to online download. A new report from PwC — its Global 100 Software Leaders report — states “cloud computing changes how software vendors run their companies. Sure, there are technical issues such as reliability and security. But there are also business and cultural issues affecting all phases of a company, from product development to marketing and sales, extending to customer service and support.”

This shift has accelerated since PwC issued a similar report two years ago. At that time, the report’s authors state, “it was clear that cloud computing was already starting to change the software industry. It wasn’t clear how much it was going to change the industry.”

This year, cloud is sweeping into every corner of the industry. “SaaS/ PaaS revenues of the Top 50 software vendors now approaches 10% of their total,” PwC reports. The cloud model, of course, means lower revenues, and perhaps cannibalizing existing business. But market realities are pushing this transition. “Software vendors who’ve made the transition are well on their way to restructuring their operations to the new realities of lower average sales prices and margins,” according to Mark McCaffrey, PwC global software leader. “The companies that haven’t done so may not be on the 100 list anymore — and we haven’t seen the effects shake out yet.”

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

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15
Sep 16

ComputerWeekly – The pros and cons of cloud bursting

It’s fun to think about the possibilities of bursting and brokering, but countless barriers stand in the way of enterprise customers. Dynamic porting of workloads is an interesting concept, but not yet an agenda item.

Brokering refers to dynamic relocation of cloud workloads based on the lowest-cost platform at that time, whereas cloud bursting looks to optimise the cost and performance of an application at any time. For average use, an enterprise can pay for persistent usage in its own virtual machine (VM) environment, and it can use public cloud resources for additional capacity.

In 2011, the idea of dynamically sourcing and brokering cloud services based on real-time changes in cost and performance was the future vision of cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing – and it remains a vision.

The first tools are only just emerging and the use cases are limited, especially since costs for public clouds don’t vary enough to drive significant brokerage demand.

More of the ComputerWeekly article from Lauren Nelson

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12
Sep 16

IT Business Edge – The Cloud: Not Just Better IT, All-New IT

It’s fair to say that the cloud is fast-approaching the tipping point as the dominant means of deploying enterprise infrastructure. But while the broad outlines are coming into view, the exact architecture and the host’s location are still very much “up in the air.”

The latest estimate on cloud deployments came from 451 Research this week, which pegged the current cloud workload at about 41 percent of the enterprise total with a likely rise to 60 percent by the middle of 2018. In breaking down the numbers, the firm noted that the majority of deployments are taking place on private clouds and public SaaS infrastructure, and that going forward the private side will see largely flat growth while SaaS will jump by 23 percent. As well, IaaS deployments, currently only 6 percent of the total, will double to 12 percent in the next two years.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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02
Sep 16

PM Times – Implementing IT Governance – A Perspective

Today businesses rely on information technology (IT) as an integral part of their overall enterprise strategy. For the same very reason, a new field of thought called IT governance has been under development for several years. Just as business management is governed by generally accepted good practices, IT should be governed by practices that help ensure
-An enterprise’s IT resources are used responsibly
-Risks are managed appropriately
-Information and related technology support business objectives
In other word IT governance is the process by which decisions are made around IT investments.

Although the level of maturity and acceptance of IT Governance varies considerably across different organizations and sectors but a number of different views emerge in its favor. These view, though present conflicting arguments but favor the implementation of IT Governance.

IT alignment to the business is the highest rated driver and outcome of IT Governance practices. A large majority of organizations recognize the importance of IT alignment in order to deliver sustainable business results, and feel IT Governance is the best means to achieve this. A general understanding among all the organizations and their CIOs is

“The successful application of IT Governance principles can provide a mechanism to increase the effectiveness of IT and, in turn, meet the increasingly high demands from business for IT.”

More of the PM Times article from Atul Gupta and Alankar Karpe

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31
Aug 16

ZDNet – Why moving piece by piece to the cloud will see businesses succeed more

The conversation around whether it’s a good idea for a business to migrate their on-premises legacy infrastructure into the cloud is no longer the focus, according to Bulletproof CEO Anthony Woodward. Rather, many C-level executives are now looking at what are the best ways to use the so-called cornerstone tool to transform their business.

Woodward believes there are two key drivers behind the increasing adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The first is that businesses believe cloud will give them the competitive advantage to move faster, and the second motivator is that businesses are being required to transform for fear they may be outmanoeuvred by new entrants to the market.

Gartner has predicted the global IaaS market will reach $22.4 billion in 2016, a 38.4 percent increase on last year’s market value of $16.2 billion. In fact, the IaaS market is expected to be the fastest-growing public cloud services segment worldwide.

More of the ZDNet article from Aimee Chanthadavong

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.