Cloud Tech News

The overlap between cloud computing and enterprise mobility is becoming ever more pronounced. And according to a new survey from Rackspace Hosting, the proliferation of cloud computing, and mobilising workforces means that companies are likely to spend far less on office space.

Analyst houses IDC and Gartner are of the same mind: the age of the Digital Enterprise is upon us. As these elements of cloud, social, mobile and information come together, it does look as though this year will witness a radical change in the way we work and do business, both individually and collectively. So, as businesses, we must ask ourselves whether we can survive if we are not digital.

The International Data Center (IDC) has released a report which reveals that Microsoft remains the largest software vendor globally through 2012 revenues and overall market share. Figures from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker put the Washington-based tech giant at a 17.1% market share, lower than its 2011 figure of 17.4% but still nearly twice as far ahead as its nearest competitors, IBM and Oracle.

An open cloud must have freely accessible, open application programming interfaces (APIs), the freedom to move data between providers at will and no on-site hardware requirement, according to Alex Williams writing at TechCrunch. And an open cloud is federated, meaning that your organization can move data, images and files across multiple cloud environments at will.

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.

Communications provider CommScope has released a report, entitled the 2013 Global Enterprise Survey, to assess which aspects of IT were changing the paradigm for organisations around the world – and found that cloud computing and enterprise mobility were the biggest tickets on the list.

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.