Articles about Cloud

As businesses adopt the cloud for increased flexibility and reliability, public cloud services are increasingly being used as a protection platform to provide backup, archiving and disaster recovery.

Data protection specialist Druva has recognized the importance of this market and is adding disaster recovery capability to its Phoenix product to offer a converged cloud solution.

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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has announced a collaboration with Oracle to make Ubuntu images available on Oracle Cloud.

Under the deal, Certified Ubuntu images will be available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, providing Oracle enterprise customers with increased choice and new and innovative ways to manage and scale their enterprise workloads, using the number one cloud operating system.

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The public cloud services market will rise in 2016 and is expected to grow its worth to $204 billion (£142bn), up from $175bn (£122bn) in 2015, Gartner has reported.

Gartner research director Sif Nag said that the 16.5 percent increase underscores the huge demand for outsourced cloud services in businesses across all verticals as they convert legacy IT services to cloud-based services "due to the increased trend of organizations pursuing a digital business strategy".

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With more and more systems moving to cloud delivery models it's not surprising that disaster recovery services should follow suit.

California-based HotLink is joining the trend with the launch of its new HotLink Managed DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide VMware data protection and cost-effective business resiliency.

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Back in August last year we reported on IBM's bid to take a slice of the enterprise Linux market with the launch of a range of dedicated mainframes.

Today the company is announcing an expansion of its Linux ecosystem along with new hybrid cloud capabilities to allow organizations to develop, deploy and manage applications for the cloud more easily and with robust security.

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The Alibaba Group is launching a "big data" cloud platform which it plans will make data asset technology widely available throughout China.

Alibaba Cloud Computing (AliCloud), said on Thursday that the cloud "Big Data Platform" would offer an initial 20 products or solutions and services, which would cover all aspects of the so-called data development chain. This includes data services and visualization products that assist with data processing and analysis, but also provide a compute engine with capabilities for machine learning.

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With great profits, comes great responsibility. Nowadays, being profitable, creating jobs and selling quality products isn't enough from a publicity perspective. Take Microsoft, for example. Windows and Office has powered countless successful businesses, while the company employs thousands of folks globally. Yet, despite those things, in order to be seen as a friendly company, the Windows-maker -- and other corporations -- must be philanthropic too. You know what though? Regardless of motivation, its donations are much appreciated.

Today, Microsoft announces that it is donating "$1 billion" worth of cloud computing resources, which it claims is "measured at fair market value". True, this is not the same as donating $1 billion to the homeless or hungry, but it is still something for which to be thankful. With that said, the dollar figure is arguably subjective, as Microsoft is pretty much setting the value. Still, the potential for this donation is immense.

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Cloud analytics specialist Birst is releasing new capabilities for its Networked BI Platform aimed at empowering end users in the enterprise to work with data effectively.

New features include Birst Mobile for Android, Collaboration, and End-User Data Preparation. The networked BI Platform is aimed at creating a network of interwoven BI instances that share a common analytical fabric, eliminating data silos to ensure collaboration and accelerate the delivery of BI across the enterprise.

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The cloud is changing the way businesses and IT teams operate and a new survey from industry specialist BetterCloud reveals the extent of the shift.

Based on a survey of 1,500 IT professionals it shows that of organizations started in the last two years 61 percent have begun their operations in the cloud. In addition 59 percent of IT professionals say the cloud has changed the structure and responsibilities of their team in the past year.

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We all know that cyber attacks can be enormously disruptive, but how far would companies go to prevent an attack?

A new survey by the Cloud Security Alliance and Skyhigh Networks reveals that 24.6 percent of companies would be willing to pay a ransom to hackers to prevent a cyber attack and 14 percent would pay more than $1 million.

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Microsoft has launched an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) targeted especially for VMware customers.

The ASR concept allows you to backup virtual machines into the Azure storage, update them and then run the VMs in Azure as a disaster recovery option. Microsoft charges $54 a month per VM instance stored in Azure, but doesn’t pay any compute or storage costs until you run the VM, which would make sense as it is only a file until the VM is spun up.

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The cloud sector’s revenues, both IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) have grown 51 percent in the last year, a new research by Synergy says. It has had the strongest growth out of all cloud services.

Private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services grew 45 percent, while operator and vendor revenues grew 28 percent.

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Storage has undergone some major changes in recent years. The growth of cloud usage, the Internet of Things and the exploitation of big data have all meant increased demand and a shift towards different solutions. But how has this affected the storage industry and and what further changes can we expect to see?

We spoke to Mark Lewis, Chairman and CEO of storage specialist Formation Data Systems to get his view on how the industry is evolving.

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Research from Sungard Availability Services, a provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, has revealed a dark side to hybrid IT systems.

Sungard’s findings based on a study which questioned 150 senior IT decision makers in UK organizations with more than 500 employees with an average IT spend of around £36m per year, found that over half of UK organizations believe that the complexity of their IT environment is hindering their ability to innovate.

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It's an increasingly rare business today that has all of its IT on its own premises. The cloud has led to many systems being moved off site and also contributed to the growth of shadow systems.

How can business manage these challenges and make sure that they're not putting their information at risk? We spoke to John Purrier, cloud visionary and CTO of business automation company Automic Software to find out.

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