Cloud Tech News

Evangelising development on any cloud computing or enterprise platform is challenging, costly and takes a unique skill set that can educate, persuade, sell and serve developers at the same time.

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...

A survey of over 800 US-based IT decision makers from Virtustream in conjunction with independent cloud research firm Neovise has revealed that over half of US enterprise are using cloud computing in one form or another. 54% of those surveyed said they were in the cloud, which certainly indicates an uptake in US adoption. But it's the statistics on hybrid cloud usage and strategy which garnered the most interest...

Microsoft has stepped up its cloud push by releasing Windows Azure Infrastructure Services this week, and pricing it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Our announcement today is a significant step in our cloud computing strategy, which has been influenced directly by our discussions with customers and partners around the world,” wrote Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Azure.

Aryaka, a company which offers wide area network optimisation in the cloud, has collated together several pieces of research emphasising the importance of cloud in a modern enterprise. Pooling together studies from the likes of CIO Insight, Forrester and IDC, Aryaka has examined cloud strategies at different points of the enterprise, predominantly assessing the UK market.

Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there's an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Enterprises are prioritising how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated.

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative.