If the weather isn't quite up to scratch it is hard to resist the lure of an all-inclusive family holiday. The azure blue sea, pristine white sand, and masses of food and drink - interspersed with a spot of swimming to burn off some of the excesses. 

But fast-forward to check out and you get a nasty surprise: a larger than expected bill. Those extras excluded from your “all-inclusive” deal were too tempting for your teenagers: how did they consume so many snacks between the...

A recent Gartner report estimated that 80 percent of organisations will overshoot their cloud budgets by 2020 because of a lack of optimisation. Obviously, this frustrates executives. It’s particularly hard to deal with in the case of multi-cloud environments, where each provider’s bill might be a million-plus lines long.

Start counting off the benefits of multi-cloud and you soon run out of fingers; avoiding vendor lock-in, matching the right tool for the job, democratised access to stakeholders, balancing performance and cost, geographically aligning workloads to name just five.

Yet there’s always a catch. With management of multiple clouds, one of the big gotchas is complexity. A recent MIT Technology Review/VMware study

Cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google were created to provide compute resources to save enterprises money on their infrastructure. But cloud services pricing is complicated and difficult to understand, which can often drive up bills and prevent the promised cost savings. Here are just five ways that cloud providers obscure pricing on your monthly bill.

Terminology varies

Cloud adoption is growing at a rapid pace because it enables organisations to scale their business models and meet consumer demands faster than ever before. However, with a proliferation of data and an ever-more-complex web of cloud-based business systems to manage comes a lot more user activity. As a result, many businesses, nonprofits, government agencies and more are looking for more ways to monitor how users interact with cloud applications and customer data.

This article will share how organisations are...

Cloud cost optimisation and management continues to be a hot area – and Flexera’s acquisition of RightScale, announced last week, plays into that theme even further.

RightScale may be well known for its authoritative yearly State of the Cloud...

“Software is eating the world”, claimed Marc Andreessen back in 2011; though it may have seemed like an exaggeration when his essay was published, so far he has been proved correct. Now that software exists across every industry, organisations that rely on information need to reimagine themselves as software companies to avoid falling behind competitors.

In today’s society, childhood favourite Blockbuster couldn’t stand...

Today’s IT teams aren’t so different from the IT teams of days gone by. They’re still committed to running businesses smoothly by testing technology, measuring the results, and re-calibrating. But much of the technology they’re using and managing has changed dramatically. Enterprises are much more distributed than they used to be, with more remote offices and users accessing resources...

As one company in the cloud monitoring space announces funding, another goes a different route: Microsoft has confirmed it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Israel-based Cloudyn.

The move will help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as a blog post...

CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, has announced a $46 million (£35.8m) series D funding round with the company all set to go public.

The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Meritech Capital Partners, and existing investors .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners, taking overall funding to $86m across four rounds.

The company provides a platform that sits on top of other cloud tools, enabling organisations to...