Cloud Tech News

Like businesses across all sectors of the economy, cloud service providers are far from immune to the worst ravages of the recession. But when a provider does go bust, what happens to the businesses that have put their faith, money and resources in finding a suitable partner and are now threatened with losing services, resources and data as a result of their collapse?

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...

In the midst of strong cloud competition coming from many different sources as well as rampant cloud-washing in the market, service providers need to differentiate and add value to their cloud offerings in order to be relevant. However, differentiation often drives up costs...

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.

What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release? Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.

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.

Through 2013 Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALU-E) will roll out a set of solutions on which its partners can offer a range of hosted unified communications (UC) services. The company’s strategy is different to those of its competitors in that it will deliver separate solutions for enterprises and SMBs, as well as a set of application services.

The scary part about shopping for a cloud solution is that even if the managed services provider claims compliance, this doesn’t mean that they actually are compliant.