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A great deal has been written over the past few years about the financial benefit of migrating to the public or hybrid cloud for enterprises around the world. For enterprise looking for economic benefits of moving to the cloud, the main points have always been the ability to only pay for what you need, reduced operational cost, agility, availability, and elasticity.

The naysayers continue to point to the risks and the considerable labour involved in an enterprise-wide cloud migration. I...

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Box, Citrix, Dropbox, and Egnyte represent the leaders’ section in the latest Gartner enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) Magic Quadrant.

The 2016 rankings show an interesting correlation year on year; Dropbox and Egnyte move from the challenger and visionary sections respectively, while the overall number of vendors, 13, represents a step down from 16...

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A short research note from analyst house IDC argues how enterprise acceptance and adoption rates are driving strong growth of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

According to IDC forecasts, public cloud IaaS revenues are set to more than triple, from $12.6 billion (£9.5bn) in 2015 to $43.6bn in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.2% over that period. The public cloud IaaS market grew 51% in 2015, according to IDC, with that growth expecting to slow after...

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There is abundant evidence that prove the mainframe remains the world’s most reliable, scalable and secure computing platform today. Does the adaptability, scalability and low entry costs offered by the cloud compete for its workload?

Short answer: no. Rather, cloud has increased the mainframe workload. Cloud, mobility, and the explosion of the application economy are directly responsible for driving growth in mainframe utilization. In fact, our mainframe customers have...

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Beware of the fast-talking salesperson with the “simple” solutions. If you’re being told that the solution to your business problems is as easy as 1-2-3, there’s a good chance it’s not. That common principle applies to most tech products, and a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) is no exception.

While the cloud has standardised software use by removing what is often the most complicated part of the process — the installation on the...

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Cloud technology can create positive business outcomes for businesses – but only if the organisation is willing to foster business transformations that leverage what the cloud offers.

That is the key finding from a report published by The Economist and sponsored by Google on how trust in cloud computing correlates with business performance.

The report, which is based on a global survey of more than 450 executives in 10 countries across five continents, finds 38% of enterprise...

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It’s perhaps the most captivating myth of cloud: autoscaling. A major selling point, the promise of autoscaling is that the amount of computing resource automatically scales based on load. It can handle those unexpected traffic spikes better, automatically, with no human intervention. Workloads just know for example when your website has been mentioned on a television show or in a major magazine, demand spikes, and the cloud compensates. The cloud becomes a nimble, always-on,...

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Every manufacturer has the potential to integrate machine learning into their operations and become more competitive by gaining predictive insights into production.

Machine learning’s core technologies align well with the complex problems manufacturers face daily. From striving to keep supply chains operating efficiently to producing customised, built- to-order products on time, machine learning algorithms have the potential to bring greater predictive accuracy to every phase of...

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The move for enterprises to the cloud is not a question of if but when – and neither is it a question of pace.

That’s the view of Matthew Finnie, chief technical officer at virtual data centre (VDC) provider Interoute. He argues that the industries traditionally less than keen on changing – finance and manufacturing, and a trend which this publication has covered extensively – have all come to the same realisation. “The issue for us is not so much the speed at...

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With researchers seeing a 3500% increase in the use of net infrastructure which criminals use to run ransomware campaigns, it’s not surprising that ransomware has been making big headlines.

The media laments the growing rings of cyber criminals that launch ransomware threats, but there’s another culprit that tends to slip under the radar: people like you and me. Sure,...

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More research has arrived detailing the importance of embracing shadow IT as opposed to cordoning it off, this time from NTT Communications, which has found almost four in five (78%) of organisations have employees using cloud services without the knowledge of IT.

The research, which polled 500 IT and business decision makers across the EU, found that more than half (57%) believe shadow IT practices are happening across at least half of the departments in their organisation, while...

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Machine learning is providing the needed algorithms, applications, and frameworks to bring greater predictive accuracy and value to enterprises’ data, leading to diverse company-wide strategies succeeding faster and more profitably than before.

Industries where machine learning is making an impact  

The good news for businesses is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to strategic goals being accomplished....

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco continue to battle it out for supremacy in the cloud infrastructure market with HPE having the slight advantage, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The note, which assesses the most recent Q1 data, sees Cisco just ahead of HPE and Dell in public cloud hardware, but HPE more dominant in the private cloud hardware space, capturing more than 20% of the overall market. In cloud software, Microsoft has more than 40% share and is...

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Enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) firm Egnyte has announced the launch of Egnyte Protect, a product which aims to give IT and line of business greater control and visibility of their content both in the cloud and on-premise.

The move positions Egynte away from the traditional EFSS buckets and moves the firm towards data and information governance, a space Egnyte claims to be worth eight times more than their current opportunity. Isabelle Guis, chief marketing and strategy...

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It has been a week of good and bad news for enterprise cloud storage provider Box with the announcement of first quarter financial results. The company announced record first quarter revenue of $90.2 million (£62m), an increase of 37% from this time last year – but because renewals were down, analysts came out of the quarter feeling somewhat unconvinced.

“We had a solid start to fiscal 2017,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in the firm’s earnings call,

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If you were to think of an industry that would be naturally reluctant to embrace technologies such as cloud and mobility for reasons of sensitive data privacy, which one would you think of first? The two most common answers are usually healthcare and banking – so it is therefore interesting to note how Santander has gone all in on enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) with cloud storage provider CTERA Networks.

According to the bank, the opportunity to move organisational...

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Research and advisory firm Technavio has brought to light three new trends that are set to play a key role in terms of market growth in the global enterprise cloud services market in the years to 2020. The trends in question are the rising adoption of hybrid cloud services, increase in adoption of BYOD policy and the rise of cloud brokerage services.

Amit Sharma, one of...

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Ponder this for a minute: our love affair with cloud technology and services, and the consequent struggle to keep cloud spending in check, is a lot like our daily eating habits.

Spinning up cloud services is almost as easy as grabbing food to go at your favourite burger joint. We’ve made fast food so convenient, affordable, and packed with calories, it’s become a national problem, because our consumption doesn’t match our nutritional needs or activity levels. Now...

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Enterprises are impatient to translate their investments in cloud apps and the insight they provide into business outcomes and solid results today.

The following insights are based on a series of discussions with C-level executives and revenue team leaders across several industries regarding their need for an Intelligent Cloud:

• In the enterprise, the cloud versus on-premise war is over, and the cloud has won. Nearly all are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy to break down the barriers that held them back from...

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Microsoft has Salesforce in its sights as the leading cloudy software as a service (SaaS) vendor, according to the latest note from analyst house Synergy Research.

According to the research, the overall enterprise SaaS market grew by almost 40% in 2015, with forecasts from Synergy suggesting it will more than triple in size within five years. The consumer SaaS market, on the other hand, is only a third the size of the enterprise with a lower growth rate.

Microsoft’s...