Articles about Cloud

The speed at which companies have adopted cloud services has led in many cases to difficulties understanding and controlling the costs involved.

Enterprise cloud management company RightScale has a solution to this issue with a new stand-alone collaborative cloud cost management and optimization solution.

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As shown by disruptive businesses such as Airbnb, cloud computing is changing the face of business as we know it. Organizations of all sizes anywhere can now harness the power of cloud-based tools to innovate and collaborate faster and more seamlessly than ever before.

Cloud is becoming the foundation for digital transformation, enabling enterprises to manage the pressure of increasing the pace of their production cycles and boosting collaboration throughout the world. McKinsey estimates that by 2018, more than half (51 percent) of enterprises will adopt cloud as their primary IT environment -- up from just 10 percent in 2015. Indeed, it is no longer often a question of "if" but rather "which" cloud services enterprises should use.

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Organizations are increasingly faced with the need to support a more distributed environment, with employees accessing data on mobile devices and information stored both in-house and in the cloud.

Keeping these systems secure places a strain on traditional gateway security models, but cyber security company iboss is launching a new Distributed Gateway Platform is purposefully designed and packaged to offer today’s distributed organizations advanced gateway security capabilities.

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Whilst cloud and hybrid models offer undoubted flexibility, they can lead to problems when it comes to keeping track of software licenses.

Analytics solutions company Teradata is looking to cut through the confusion with the launch of a new simplified licensing model. This aims to deliver portability for deployment flexibility, subscription-based licenses and simplified tiers with bundled features.

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It's a rare business that doesn't have a website these days, but for smaller companies the process of building a site and keeping it up to date can be costly and time consuming.

Texas-based startup Snaplitics is aiming to fix this with the launch of an affordable tool for creating professional websites and landing pages without having to hire developers.

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Backups aren't something that you should be doing only once a year, even so like most things these days backup has its own day and has had since 2011. World Backup Day is designed to raise awareness among consumers and businesses of the importance of keeping an up to date backup of your data.

Cloud backup specialist CloudBerry Lab is doing its bit by offering free licenses for its Windows, Linux, and macOS products for a limited period.

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The cloud skills shortage that’s omnipresent in British business seems to be forcing companies to turn a blind eye on candidates lacking certification. This is according to Microsoft’s newly released report, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm."

Polling UK businesses for the report, 45 percent said certifications are "nice to have," but just 35 per cent said they’re desirable or essential. The report calls this proportion "surprisingly low," questioning if this could "be a further symptom of the challenges of finding people with adequate skills in the first place".

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UK organizations consider cloud skills essential to digital transformation, according to a new report by Microsoft.

Entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm", it says 83 percent of UK’s organizations consider cloud skills "important" or "critical" to digital transformation.

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When it comes to cloud skills, there’s a significant gender gap, and it’s particularly visible in the UK. This is according to a new report by Microsoft, entitled "Microsoft Cloud Skills Report: Closing the Cloud Skills Chasm." According to it, the gender mix among technical IT staff is 20 percent female versus 80 percent male. In just a fifth of companies (21 percent) the gender mix was 40 percent or greater.

Microsoft says this gender imbalance is "concerning," but perhaps even more concerning is the fact that very few companies are actually doing something about it. A third (35 percent) said they had no policies to address the issues (46 percent for companies with 250 to 999 staff). A quarter (23 percent) said they didn’t know of any actions put in place.

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It’s no secret that cloud-based collaboration tools are transforming the way we work, and Microsoft, with Office 365, is playing a major role in shifting workplace communication. Last year, Microsoft continued to enhance and develop Office 365 Groups as a powerful hub for team productivity. When armed with Office 365 Groups, employees have the opportunity to collaborate within a dedicated space with popular Office 365 features like mail, persistent chat, and collaboration powered by familiar technologies like Exchange, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, and Planner.

Before organizations can embrace this new way of working, however, IT teams need to combat the challenges of natively managing Office 365 Groups. Why? First, there are several ways for users in an organization to create a Group within an Office 365 tenant -- meaning IT admins must determine the most effective way to implement administrative controls to prevent unnecessary sprawl. Once users have the ability to create new Office 365 Groups, IT is also tasked with controlling group membership, placing safeguards around content within groups, and overseeing the lifecycle of Groups, including the eventual decision to delete or archive a Group and its content.

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Organizations are using multiple cloud services and security staff are worried about the visibility problems this presents as well as the risks presented by IoT devices.

These are the findings of a survey of RSA attendees, carried out by security management and threat intelligence specialist AlienVault. A third of respondents to the survey describe the state of security monitoring within their organization as 'complex and chaotic'.

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Amazon has announced a new contact center solution aimed to "power millions of customer conversations." The solution, named Amazon Connect, is a cloud-based offering, with customers paying by the minute of usage.

It all starts with the "Virtual Contact Center" solution, integrated deep within AWS. According to Amazon, it only takes a couple of minutes to set the feature up and it requires no special training to use. Payment by the minute goes on top of telephony costs, a pricing model AWS uses in its cloud services, too.

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IBM is jumping on the cold storage bandwagon, offering a service and trying to take Amazon, Microsoft, and Google a piece of their pie. The company recently announced the launch of IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault, which basically stores data that only needs to be accessed every once in a while.

There will also be a cold storage service with "pay as you use" model, called IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex, coming later this year.

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Thousands of Alexa developers can now build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS), thanks to a newly released Amazon program.

Previously, developers have had at their disposal the AWS Free Tier, offering a million AWS Lambda requests and a total of 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) -- monthly, for free. However, exceeding these limits also meant monthly fees.

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The overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88 percent, according to a new report by the Cloud Industry Forum. The report also states that there has been a five percent increase year-on-year, and an 83 percent increase since 2010, when the first stats were taken.

What’s also interesting in this report is that two thirds (67 percent) of users expect to increase their cloud service adoption over the coming year. A "vast majority," the report claims, will maintain a hybrid IT estate for some time.

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