Cloud Tech News

Love 'em or hate 'em, you've got to give Amazon.com credit. Not only is Amazon Web Services (AWS) the undisupted leader in the IaaS market, they are moving faster than their competition. Try as their competitors might, they all appear to be losing ground to this cloud juggernaut. Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle...

With Amazon's rapid success in the cloud market comes increased awareness of what it can, and even more importantly cannot, do. The success is easy to explain, with Amazon's attractive price point and ever-growing set of technical functionality. The roadblock to wider adoption is equally easy to explain: "Businesses want a full dish to eat, while Amazon serves up ingredients and asks users to get cooking."

During 2012 the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet software as a service (SaaS), financial management and human capital management (HCM) applications showed potential for breakout growth. Through the challenging times of the previous year, however, SAP still retained worldwide market share leadership.

The recent VMware Forum 2013 in London provided a platform for VMware EMEA chief technologist, Joe Baguley, to reveal how VMware is addressing the challenges of transforming IT to an as-a-service paradigm. This transformation is based on three key pillars.

The third iteration of the UK government's cloud store is about to go live, so what has changed and what is likely to happen next?

In my role as a globetrotting cloud consultant, I continue to be amazed at how many executives still favour private clouds over public. These managers are perfectly happy to pour money into newfangled data centres (sorry, "private clouds"), even though Amazon Web Services and its brethren are reinventing the entire world of IT. Their reason? Sometimes they believe private clouds will save them money over the public cloud option...

In February 2013, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the beta version of AWS OpsWorks, a configuration and deployment service for AWS public cloud-based applications and their related resources. While AWS usually creates its services from scratch, OpsWorks is based on third-party technology, namely the open source Chef-based SaaS offering, Scalarium, developed by Peritor, a small Germany-based IT service provider that AWS acquired in 2012.

Is public cloud mature enough for enterprise adoption? Should public cloud be a part of every business IT strategy? How big a barrier are legacy applications and hardware to public cloud adoption?