Cloud Tech News

The UK Cabinet Office's third iteration of the G-Cloud framework not only added an extra 368 suppliers to its CloudStore, but it raised a few eyebrows over the exclusion of one notable bidder - Amazon. The company made no secret of its desire for includsion during the G-Cloud's second iteration, touting that it was looking to get involved with the G-Cloud in the future, but what's happened since then?

CIOs engaged in cloud initiatives have identified one of their top goals - a need for a cloud strategy. The reason; cloud initiatives not only directly impact technology, but the effect extends significantly to business processes and organisational resources. A strategy that aligns process, technology and business service delivery is critical to the future returns on the initiative.

The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions. And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.

Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure. Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.

Online collaboration has evolved during the last decade, delivering even greater value - thanks to a new generation of business technology applications. Forbes Insights released "Collaborating in the Cloud", a Cisco-sponsored study examining the ways business leaders increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results and enhance innovation across borders and functions.

We are beginning to see the emergence of a new member of the board: the chief disruption officer (CDO), who can act as a channel and a focus for bold approaches to strategic decision-making. Technologies like big data and software-defined networking are paving a way for positive disruption in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market. Andrew Carr, CEO for UK & Ireland at Bull discusses how these individuals are driving adoption of a new wave of technologies to improve business performance.

Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails. Yet the outage itself does not explain the full story. Mimecast, for better or worse, promises a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) – which now is torn to shreds after today’s unfortunate difficulties.

You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought. That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.