Born in the cloud services may be one thing – but what are the key aspects to look out for when migrating existing applications to the cloud? According to a new whitepaper from IDC, security, privacy, and compliance regulations came out on top for organisations.

The study, ‘Critical Application and Business KPIs for Successful Cloud Migration’, polled 600 enterprises and was conducted alongside application performance management provider AppDynamics. Naturally, the paper exists to point...

Only 55.4% of companies meet all PCI DSS compliance standards, according to a new report released by Verizon. While this number is up 7% from 2015, it still translates to nearly half of retailers, IT services companies, payment software providers and hospitality organisations do not adequately protect credit cardholder information.

Companies had the greatest difficulty meeting the following requirements, many of which are related to infrastructure compliance and policies:

• Requirement 3 – Protect...

“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.

Awareness of phishing has grown significantly in recent years, and users are more suspicious than ever of emails that land in their inbox from unknown or questionable senders. In response to this, cybercriminals have had to become savvier with their phishing tactics. They’ve looked to new methods of phishing that are harder for users to expose. The latest of these phishing tactics uses spoofed cloud applications – a new trend that businesses need to watch out for.

Early phishing

Phishing was once...

Billions of people around the world use the internet to share ideas and trade with one another. With worldwide internet penetration at nearly 50 percent, the global digital economy has become a space of immense opportunity.

It’s clear that business transactions are becoming heavily reliant on us being connected onlne. Digital flows are now responsible for more GDP growth globally than trade in traditional offline goods and services. Digital transformation is now driving globalization.

As such, achieving...

The partnership between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is starting to bear fruit: the two companies have announced initial availability of the former’s cloud on the latter.

The announcement was made at VMworld in Las Vegas yesterday, where Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, joined VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger on stage to discuss the benefits of the two companies’ integration.

“This really is the ultimate hybrid solution that we’ve developed together – the ability to run any...

Editor's note: To read more about blockchain technologies, visit The Block.

Much of the initial interest in cryptocurrencies centered around their potential as alternatives to fiat currencies. Now attention has shifted to the upside potential of open distributed ledger technologies known as blockchain.

A clear indication of blockchain's increasing maturity is how the emerging fintech sector, which was once dominated by tech start-ups, is becoming crowded with leading...

Skytap, a Seattle-based public cloud provider, has announced it has raised $45 million (£35.2m) to push forward its product development and market expansion.

The round was led by Goldman Sachs, with Hillel Moerman, managing director who co-heads the investment firm’s private capital investing (PCI) group, joining Skytap’s board of directors as a result.

Skytap offers an alternative to the public cloud mindset of ‘forcing customers to rewrite their traditional applications before...

Only a fool believes that moving enterprise applications to the cloud is a panacea for the majority of the challenges facing today’s CIOs. Even cloud migration itself, like any IT project, presents a number of complex challenges. My favourite piece of advice is to think the same as you would if buying a house: don’t be impulsive. By taking the time to develop a clear focus at the outset, cloud buyers can eliminate unwanted costs and complications down the road. First and foremost, be clear around...

Opinion In late June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart had announced to technology companies and vendors that if they want to do business with the retail giant, they couldn’t run applications on Amazon Web Services.

This seemed at the time to be just another battle ground between two huge companies, one...

Editor's note: Read more around artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning at AI News.

• Tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90% of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10% on AI acquisitions.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) investment has turned into a race for patents and intellectual property (IP) among the world’s leading tech companies.
• U.S.-based companies absorbed 66% of all AI investments in 2016. China...

Organisations are more likely to prefer storing data in the cloud instead of on a legacy system – but are spending significantly on security to keep up.

That is the latest finding from Clutch, a B2B research firm, which put out the latest report from its annual cloud computing survey earlier this week.

Nearly 70% of the 283 IT professionals polled said they would be more comfortable storing data in the cloud; yet more than half of companies surveyed admitted to spending more than $100,000 per year on...

Cloud robotics is set to generate new value chains, technologies, architectures and business models, according to a new paper.

The report, put together by GTI, a body focusing on the TD-LTE (time division long term evolution) ecosystem alongside SoftBank, CloudMinds, China Mobile, Huawei and Skymind, argues the advantages of cloud robots, with the same common network, are threefold; information sharing, offloaded computation, and collaboration.

One of the examples the report looks at – or gives an image of...

The public cloud computing sector is in a constant state of evolution, as vendors design new IT infrastructure architectures and service providers deploy them in their own unique hyperscale data centre facilities.

According to the latest analysis of cloud pricing by 451 Research, for the majority of new applications, a serverless solution offers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than both virtual machines (VMs) or containers.

Severless cloud market development

When analyzing serverless offerings from the...

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...