We’ve all heard about the benefits of cloud infrastructure: improved productivity, cost savings, efficiency, agility and a host of other buzzwords that paint cloud as the be all, end all for IT.

Most organisations today either already run workloads in the cloud or plan to experiment with cloud in the very near future. And it’s up to businesses to decide whether they choose cloud infrastructure provided by public cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, or cloud...

Exclusive It is still early days for the potential of blockchain technologies to become apparent - yet according to Jeremiah Owyang, founder of industry advisory group Crowd Companies, blockchain is already showing its worth in the legal and supply chain industries.

Owyang, formerly a Forrester analyst and founding partner at Altimeter Group, has for the past four years having founded Crowd Companies been helping organisations navigate the choppy digital waters of the...

American Airlines is moving critical applications, including its customer-facing mobile app and check-in kiosks, to IBM’s cloud, the latter has announced.

The move builds upon the two companies’ partnership, first announced last year, with the airline also moving workloads and tools such as its Cargo customer website to the IBM cloud.

The two companies have agreed to rewrite applications to IBM’s cloud platform as a service (PaaS), as well as establishing a cloud-native architecture....

More than half of respondents in a survey carried out by managed cloud provider 2nd Watch say at least half of their deployment pipelines are automated, with 63% saying they can deploy new applications in less than six weeks.

The study, which garnered responses from more than 1,000 participants from US companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that companies embracing cloud automation were able to deploy new applications and workloads faster and more frequently.

Alongside the almost two thirds who said...

When Melissa Di Donato, chief revenue officer at SAP S/4HANA Cloud, was going through the interview process at Walldorf, the company’s home town, she was asked whether she had been there before. Di Donato took the opportunity to reveal the SAP watch she was wearing, issued the better part of two decades ago, which showed she was a certified consultant through her work at PwC.

While the company had never appeared on her CV per se, starting with a dean at business school who suggested getting into...

Cloud native architectures will become the ‘default’ option for customer-facing applications by 2020, according to a new study from Capgemini.

The research, which surveyed more than 900 senior professionals across 11 countries, found that 15% of new enterprise applications are cloud native today, set to jump to 32% by 2020.

The study also outlined the different stages organisations are currently at in deployments. ‘Leader’ organisations, those which are already committed to...

Is it the line of business or IT leading cloud initiatives? According to the latest paper from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), IT directors believe that cloud adoption is driven principally by their IT function as part of a strategic shift, rather than the need for change driven by business decision makers.

The study, which polled 250 IT and business decision makers in large enterprises, found that overall cloud adoption now stands at 88%, with more than two thirds (67%) of users expecting to increase their...

If you want to get ahead, get tooled up on microservices as vacancies for job roles have gone up by 133% over the last year, according to the latest report from Rackspace.

Microservices, which enable applications to become more agile and prevent servers from being jammed, are becoming increasingly prevalent in a world of data overload. Think of the stat, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it at BUILD

Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) continues to be one of the hottest enterprise apps today, fuelled by the relentless need all companies have to increase sales while delivering customised orders profitably and accurately. Here are a few of the many results CPQ strategies are delivering today:

• Companies relying on CPQ are growing profit margins at a 57% greater rate year-over-year compared to non-adopters.
• 89% improvement in turning...

A new survey from machine data analytics provider Sumo Logic has found more than two thirds of enterprises either plan to adopt DevOps or are already doing so, while four in five are currently or plan to use at least one public cloud service.

The study, titled ‘The New Normal: Cloud and DevOps Analytics Tools Reign in the Modern App Era’ and put together alongside UBM Technology, found that of the 230 IT operations, app development and information security professionals polled, 67% are utilising...

Tencent’s cloud computing services will be beefed up with GPU accelerators from NVIDIA to ‘help advance artificial intelligence for enterprise customers’, the companies have announced.

The collaboration will include plugging Tencent’s cloud into NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture to connect multiple GPUs, as well as offering services incorporating Tesla P100, P40 and M40 GPU accelerators.

In other words, this means companies on Tencent’s cloud will be able to harness features...

If you attended Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month you would have heard a lot of buzz about 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) with many vendors like HPE, IBM, VMware and others talking about their role in 5G and IoT.  As iland is a V-Cloud partner, I was particularly interested to hear about the VMware IoT theatre sessions...

How does access governance apply to the cloud? Well, while the cloud has been established as a standard for many organisations, access and governance to manage such solutions has not yet become a standard solution.

Access governance helps organisations of all sizes in every industry by ensuring that each employee has the correct access to the systems that they need to perform their jobs while keeping the company’s data and network secure. Access governance specifically allows organisational leaders to...

“Attention! All your files have been encrypted.” More and more businesses are being greeted with messages such as this one, with ransomware attacks against businesses having increased threefold last year.

Advice for preventing ransomware – which is malicious software that encrypts devices or data until the owner pays a ransom in exchange for access to their data – is...

Financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016 reveals massive growth for the top cloud providers. With 47% and 93% revenue growth for Amazon AWS and Microsoft respectively, one thing is clear – cloud is growing at a breakneck pace.

Enterprises and small businesses will continue to adopt and invest in cloud technology. Cisco’s Global Cloud Index whitepaper shows global cloud IP traffic will almost...

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“We changed our business model to align with cloud,” explains Nick McNamara, VP sales Europe at connectivity provider Eseye.

The company has doubled down on both the Internet of Things (IoT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategically, as McNamara, speaking at the IoT Tech Expo event last week, explains. “All connectivity providers, whether you’re an MNO, an MVNO, or like us a smart MNO, sell megabytes per month,” he says. “We no longer sell megabytes...

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Blockchain is the new buzzword on the block; and while many business leaders, managers, developers and IT departments are Googling it and left scratching their heads, others are wising up to it, are realising how brilliant it is, and are recognising the opportunity it’s going to bring and the potential impact it will have.

If we put aside the tech behind it and focus on what it can do, it’s actually capable of disrupting many industries and bringing new innovations not...

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If your business is ahead of the curve when it comes to cloud adoption, then prepare for a hit of good news; organisations which execute a strategic cloud plan are growing revenue 2.3 times faster than their competition and are on average generating a 35% lift year on year in top line revenue.

But for those not quite there, what are the strategies which need to be examined? These and other findings comprised a new study from CloudHealth Technologies which argues cloud-leading...

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Updated Jan 25 Blockchain has serious potential to disrupt a multitude of industries, but a lot of barriers – not least confusion – still need to be ironed out.

That’s one of the verdicts from a recent research report from analyst firm Tractica on how the database technology, defined as a 'distributed data verification technology wherein financial and operational transactions are recorded and validated across a network, rather than through a central...

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Even though DevOps and automation methodologies are increasingly being used to deliver apps more frequently, only one in five respondents to a survey from F5 say DevOps has a strategic impact on their organisation.

The study, which polled almost 2,200 IT executives and industry professionals, found that among executive roles only 17% identified DevOps as key, well below software as a service (42%), big data (41%) and public cloud infrastructure as a service (39%).

VMware was the...