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When it comes to deploying IT infrastructure, selecting the right model is crucial. Fundamental to this decision, IT departments must make sense of the options available to them and understand their strengths and weaknesses.

But this isn’t as simple as deciding which model is better. It’s about understanding which model is right for the business — right now and into the future. With such a...

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Once again, the tea leaves and crystal balls are out at Gartner headquarters as the analyst house looks to predict the shape of the enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) industry. Accellion, Box, Citrix and Syncplicity occupy the top right leaders section in this iteration, while Microsoft, Google and – perhaps surprisingly – Dropbox again sits in the challengers square.

EFSS, as Gartner defines it, is “a range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that...

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Microsoft has reported a $3.2 billion net loss for the second quarter of 2015, the worst in the company’s history, but backed it up alongside continued strong cloud growth.

It was always going to look nasty. Following the $7.5bn writedown of its Nokia offshoot, the analysts were prepared to sink their teeth into the Redmond giant as its latest financial results came through. Yet Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was unrepentant, arguing the cloud and mobile gains were pushing the...

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By Phil Christensen, Senior Engineer, DevOps

Complexity is a huge security risk for the enterprise.

While security is always a top priority during the initial build phase of a cloud project, over time security tends to slip. As systems evolve, stacks change, and engineers come and go, it’s very easy to end up with a mash-up of legacy and cloud security policies piled on top of custom code that only a few engineers know how to work with.

The security of your system should not...

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A report from enterprise mobile collaboration provider harmon.ie argues Microsoft is making progress in moving its customers’ productivity software to the mobile cloud, yet on premise remains important.

The company, which offers a tool which puts all Microsoft productivity tools within a single screen, notes Microsoft has a stronghold on productivity suites. 97% of respondents polled said they expect their clients’ use of Office 365 to increase in the coming 12 months,...

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At DockerCon 2015 last week, it was very clear that Docker is poised to transform enterprise IT.

While it traditionally takes years for a software innovation — and especially an open source one — to reach the enterprise, Docker is defying all the rules. Analysts expect Docker will be the norm in enterprises by 2016, less than two years after its 1.0 release.

Why are Yelp, Goldman Sachs, and other enterprises using Docker? Because in many ways, enterprises have been unable to take...

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Updated A recent survey from cloud storage and data protection hardware provider CTERA Networks found that while employees at more than half of organisations use public file, sync and share services, almost three quarters said they were looking for an alternative.

The report recognised what CTERA highlights as a growing interest and need for enterprise-grade, private cloud storage solutions. Box portrays itself as...

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In late 2014, Oxford Economics and SAP collaborated on a survey of 200 senior business and IT executives globally regarding the adoption and use of cloud technology:

• 69% of enterprises expect to make moderate-to-heavy cloud investments over the next three years as they migrate core business functions to the cloud.
• 44% of enterprises are relying on cloud computing to launch new business models today, predicting this will increase to 55% in three years.
• 32% are using cloud computing to streamline their supply chains...

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Dropbox has announced its number of users has exceeded 400 million, with more than eight million business customers also on board.

The figures, disclosed on the occasion of the cloud storage provider’s eighth birthday, also reveal an impressive growth in the UK market, opened up six months ago. The company has grown from three to 10 offices over the past year.

According to the figures, 4,000 edits to documents are made each second on Dropbox, with users syncing 1.2 billion files...

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Enterprises are shaping the cloud to fit their needs, and the result is overwhelmingly a hybrid of public, private, and on-premises clouds. Today, nineteen percent (19%) of organizations manage hybrid clouds and an additional 60% plan to deploy them. Gartner estimates that hybrid cloud adoption will near 50% by 2017.

Why are enterprises going hybrid? Below are four use cases that demonstrate how enterprises determine what, when and how to move to the cloud.

Case 1: Testing...

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Tech giant IBM and enterprise cloud storage provider Box have announced a wide-ranging partnership, aimed at content management and social collaboration to improve the enterprise cloud and digital push.

The two companies aim to integrate their existing products and services to develop new solutions across multiple verticals, from medicine, to engineering and academia.

Among the developments proposed, Box will integrate with IBM’s enterprise content management solution, as well as...

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The Cloud World Forum event, which starts tomorrow in London and will have this publication in attendance, will more than likely discuss business cloud strategies, security fears, as well as the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and DevOps concepts.

Among the list of expected attendees, there is a not unreasonable amount of security professionals from the private sector. Also there is cloud-based enterprise collaboration...

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The average number of cloud apps used per enterprise has declined for the first time, according to the latest data from Netskope.

This shift – which the company notes is “consolidation efforts from IT begin[ning] to take hold” – is exacerbated by the lack of enterprise-grade security in most cloud apps. 89.6% of apps used are not enterprise-ready, and 90% of data loss prevention violations occur in cloud storage apps.

The latter point is of most concern....

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Despite the varying methodologies used in the studies mentioned in this roundup, many share a common set of conclusions. The high priority in gaining greater insights into customers and their unmet needs, more precise information on how to best manage and simplify sales cycles, and how to streamline service are common themes.

• Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) estimates adding analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) applications will increase their Total Addressable Market (TAM) by $13B in FY2014.

• 89%...

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In 2014, Gartner introduced a new organisation model for enterprise IT called “bimodal IT.” In fact Gartner first started talking about this back in 2012 following the introduction of DevOps and agile development.   Now Gartner posits that IT organisations of the future will have two separate flavours: mode 1 is traditional IT, focused on stability and efficiency, while mode 2 is an experimental, agile IT organisation focused on time-to-market, rapid application...

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Dropbox has announced new features in administration, security and integration in a bid to change the way the cloud storage provider works for business.

The company is introducing tighter account security through two-step verification, tiered administrative controls, as well as an extension to the Dropbox for Business API, with new capabilities for shared folders.

CloudLock, Netskope and SkySync are among the data migration providers who are already beginning to build...

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced that it is working with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to deliver secure file sharing and collaboration to its employees.

The move represents a major customer win for the firm, who now has more than 40 federal customers on its books. “Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive...

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Cloud usage has grown rapidly in the UK, with adoption rates shooting up over 60% in the last four years, according to the latest figures from Vanson Bourne. Yet there is an ongoing problem with a lack of clarity and understanding around cloud policies, and decision making within enterprises at all levels.

This confusion comes from the fact the IT department and the rest of the company have very differing conceptions about what cloud policy is and what it should be.

What policy?

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Many great innovations have come out of cloud computing, such as on-demand infrastructure, consumption-based pricing and access to global computing resources. However, these powerful innovations have come at a high cost: complexity.

Managing cloud infrastructure today is substantially more complex than managing traditional data center infrastructure. While some of the complexity is a direct consequence of operating in a highly transient and shared computing environment,...