Cloud Tech News

A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting. And for companies experienced with cloud, the report notes that more sophisticated systems are being demanded, such as end-to-end automation, more flexible service-level management and – the big one – the ability to flip between CSPs.

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?

LogMeIn’s Xively is ready to connect “The Internet of Things” as a brand new PaaS (platform as a service) offering APIs for interacting with real world objects, along with real-time messaging thrown into the mix for good measure.

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.

As anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will know, the perception of the data centre has evolved considerably, from isolated resource centres to more connected pools, helping maximise IT efficiency. Not surprisingly, with the potential available, the numbers are growing. 60% of server workloads are set to be virtualised by 2014, compared to only 12% in 2008, with total investment in data centre infrastructure growing 5% on average year on year.

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.

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’.

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.