Cloud Tech News

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.

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.

The combination of public and private cloud is really starting to gain traction in 2013. But why? The most important reason for adopting hybrid clouds, according to 38% of respondents, was that cloud apps were deployed faster. Delivering better value (21%), and being able to meet requirements more easily (10%) were the next most popular suggestions.

The platform as a service (PaaS) market is expected to reach $6.45bn by 2016 and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 50%, with application infrastructure and middleware PaaS expected to grow the fastest. That’s the big takeaway from analysts TechNavio, having published a report entitled Global Platform as a Service Market 2012-2016.

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.

Cloud computing is one of the biggest trends facing enterprise IT departments today, according to a quarter of respondents in the latest NaviSite survey. Slashed budgets was the top trend according to 31% of those surveyed, with data explosion (25%) rounding off the top three.