Three in five enterprises will move the majority of their IT away from enterprise data centres and onto public cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS), according to a new report from 451 Research.

The study, the analyst firm’s inaugural Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse survey, polled more than 1,000 IT professionals worldwide, finding the largest spending increase for IT teams this year is for ‘as a service’ delivery.

Naturally, providers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web...

• Digitally transforming enterprises (63%) is the leading factor driving greater public cloud engagement or adoption today.
• 66% of IT professionals say security is their most significant concern in adopting an enterprise cloud computing strategy.
• 50% of IT professionals believe artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a role in cloud computing adoption today, growing to 67% by 2020.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning will be the leading catalyst driving greater cloud computing adoption by 2020.

These insights and findings are from 

• Big data adoption reached 53% in 2017 for all companies interviewed, up from 17% in 2015, with telecom and financial services leading early adopters.
• Reporting, dashboards, advanced visualization end-user “self-service” and data warehousing are the top five technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence.
• Data warehouse optimization remains the top use case for big data, followed by customer/social analysis and predictive maintenance.
• Among big data distributions, Cloudera is the most popular, followed by Hortonworks, MAP/R, and Amazon...

New figures from Synergy Research around the state of the enterprise IT infrastructure market show that hosted and cloud collaboration revenues continue to grow quickly – with Microsoft at the top of the tree.

The overall market however – including data centre servers, switchers and routers, on-premise collaboration, network security and WLAN – has Cisco at its front with HPE behind. Aside from data centre servers and cloud collaboration, where it is second behind Microsoft, Cisco leads in...

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The upcoming holiday season certainly seems to have brought some festive cloudy cheer in one corner of the world, with two Australian cloud and data centre companies being acquired by Oracle and Equinix respectively.

Aconex, a Melbourne-based cloud software provider which aims to manage teams in the construction industry, has been bought by Oracle for $1.2 billion US (£899m) to create ‘the world’s most comprehensive cloud offering for managing all aspects of...

Multi-cloud continues to be a major trend as we move into 2018 – and according to a new research report from VMware, organisations need to overcome the inherent technical and skill challenges of multi-cloud deployments for success.

Over half (57%) of the more than 1,300 global IT decision makers in large enterprises polled said that technical challenges, as well as the demand for new skills and staff, were unexpected, critical learnings from managing multiple clouds. Integrating legacy systems and...

Acuity expects cloud-based biometric solutions to authenticate more than one trillion transactions annually by 2022

Cloud-based biometric solutions are expected to drive the mobile biometric market to $50.6 billion in annual revenue by 2022, according to Acuity Market Intelligence.

Acuity predicts that more than 5.5 billion biometrically enabled mobile devices will create a global platform that would support one trillion cloud-based biometric transactions yearly by 2022.

Maxine Most, Acuity's Principal...

Machine learning-optimised stacks, container-first architectures and DevOps for both software and hardware are among the key trends redefining enterprise IT infrastructure, according to a new report from McKinsey.

The piece, authored by Arul Elumalai, Kara Sprague, Sid Tandon, and Lareina Yee, looks at what is changing and how companies need to fight back.  

Many of these have frequently been covered by this publication; some, like the public cloud going mainstream, are long overdue. Yet there is an interesting titbit here. Given...

Become the disruptor of your industry's status quo, or face the consequences. To succeed, CEOs need to know the answer to a key question in 2018 and beyond. Does our CIO and/or CTO have what it takes to contribute to a meaningful and substantive digital transformation agenda?

As digitally-fuelled disruptors reshape industries, the clear mandate for every enterprise is to re-imagine itself to compete in the increasingly digital economy that's platform-powered and ecosystem-enabled.

To help CIOs and...

United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate which builds and services products including aerospace engines and elevators, is going to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure in a strategic partnership.

The company says one of its core tenets is ‘giving employees the digital tools and capabilities to work in new and different ways at market speed.’ As a result, Microsoft technologies are set to be used in a variety of UTC businesses.

Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace manufacturer under the UTC...

A new survey released by AlgoSec sets the scene on organisational cloud deployments: almost a third of respondents say they plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but major security challenges remain across hybrid enterprise networks both during and after migrations.

The study, titled ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’, polled 450 senior security and network professionals and found a lack of visibility and managing security policies consistently were...

• In 2020, AI will become a positive net job motivator, creating 2.3m jobs while eliminating only 1.8m jobs.
• By 2020, IoT technology will be in 95% of electronics for new product designs.
• By 2021, 40% of IT staff will be versatilists, holding multiple roles, most of which will be business, rather than technology-related.

These and many other insights were presented earlier this month at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 being held in Orlando, Florida. Gartner’s...

By 2020 there will be 1.3 million unfilled jobs in Europe, many will be in cloud-related fields. As businesses invest in digital transformation (83% believe cloud skills are critical for digital transformation, according to Microsoft), demand for skilled cloud professionals is set to surge.

Microsoft’s leading cloud platform, Azure, now boasts

The rush to move IT applications from on-premises enterprise data centers to public cloud service providers, primarily on the basis of the promise of a low-cost, has once again been challenged by recent market research findings.

In fact, savvy CIOs and CTOs are seeking comprehensive solutions that meet all their expectations, rather than merely a limited subset. Even if it costs more to achieve that goal, the demand for superior hybrid cloud services is gaining momentum across the globe.

As an example,...

CIOs and CTOs are developing comprehensive hybrid IT infrastructure models, in response to growing demand from CFOs and line of business leaders that request access to applications hosted via both on-premises private cloud and off-premises public cloud offerings.

That's why savvy technology leaders must therefore align with the most qualified vendors and service providers that enable them to manage and support these complex multi-cloud scenarios. Furthermore, the chosen provider must demonstrate vertical...

• 84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
• 83% believe AI is a strategic priority for their businesses today.
• 75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review study published this week, Reshaping Business With Artificial Intelligence. An online 

The key to successful cloud technology implementation lies with the workforce.

Implementing new cloud hosted technology in companies of any size presents challenges and opportunities. It also induces uncertainty and anxiety among the workforce who may see their jobs under threat. There is no doubt that some companies introduce new technology to reduce headcount. But simply replacing people with technology implies that the human capital of the organisation remains underdeveloped and while short-term savings...

“CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” says Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Seattle-based Skytap, “which tells me the war around the cloud hasn’t even started.”

It makes for an interesting viewpoint, considering the assertion that the market is all but sewn up. Indeed, Gartner, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), has placed Amazon Web Services...

According to IDC, only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for cloud adoption, with 32% having no cloud strategy at all, describing the need for a best practice based repeatable framework for planning cloud adoption that drives business success.

If you’ve moved your enterprise infrastructure into the cloud, to say you’re not alone is an understatement. In researching our latest infographic, it’s clear that more and more enterprises are adopting cloud models and increasing their spending for cloud technologies. It’s also clear that, as cloud options and models increase, building in-house cloud skills and expertise will be necessary to keep pace with advancing cloud technologies and to optimize ROI.

So what's driving cloud...