Company name translated into Chinese? Tick. Chinese social media accounts up and running? Tick. A Chinese-language website? Tick.

The IT team managing your Chinese website clicks ‘deploy’, and you’re now on the way to conquering the lucrative Chinese market.

The euphoria of global expansion endures for a few days, but then the teething problems start stacking up. Website availability is patchy. No one is coming to your site — except for spammers and existing customers who complain...

After reporting a 58% year-on-year revenue growth in its cloud businesses and garnering sales of $4.6 billion worth from cloud computing software and hardware, multinational computer technology giant Oracle Corporation is expanding its cloud computing services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Cloud-related products now account for more than 12% of Oracle’s total sales.

Tino Scholman, vice president of Oracle’s cloud computing for the region, said: "Our cloud business is growing at incredible...

Only one in five organisations are getting the most out of their cloud investments with 96% saying it could do with a ‘makeover’, according to new survey results from Fugue.

The research, which garnered the responses of more than 300 IT operations professionals, found the majority of those polled said compliance and security concerns, unexpected downtime, and a plethora of cloud management tools available today, means their investments are not hitting the right mark.

When asked why the cloud...

Four in five respondents say cloud adoption in their organisations will not be put off by high profile cyber-attacks, according to a new study from software and IT services provider Advanced.

The survey, which polled more than 500 senior executives in UK organisations and was conducted through Techmarketview, found that the majority of firms said they were concerned about security and data protection in the cloud, with 82% and 68% responding respectively, yet prefer to carry on with their migration...

‘IT as a service’ (ITaaS) is on the rise as companies realise the benefits of contracting an IT service provider for all their business technology needs. While ITaaS is not a new concept, it has become a go-to operational model for medium-to-large sized companies that need 24/7 monitoring, managing, and sustaining of company technology.

Moving to ITaaS is an operational shift, where IT is run as a business and therefore can be optimised according to business needs. Companies that run hybrid IT environments,...

More than nine in 10 UK CIOs and IT decision makers polled by Trustmarque say they plan to migrate their on-premise apps to infrastructure, platform, and software as a service clouds within five years.

The study, which took the opinions of 200 CIOs and senior IT decision makers from enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, also found that public sector CIOs were more likely to move quickly compared to their private sector counterparts.

Not surprisingly, cost saving was the biggest benefit according to the...

Enterprises may be starting to move workloads to the cloud, but enterprise-owned data centres remain the ‘primary compute venue’ with workloads staying consistent over the past three years, according to new research from the Uptime Institute.

The study, which polled more than 1,000 data centre and IT professionals globally, argues that enterprises continue to see the data centre as ‘essential’ to their digital-centric strategies with the majority of budgets increasing or staying...

Microsoft has announced a slew of new customers using its Azure cloud services at its Digital Difference event in New York, including financial services provider UBS and confectioner Hershey.

The customer announcements came alongside the release of a new study, sponsored by Microsoft and put together by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which found less than half of business leaders have a coherent digital strategy despite 80% saying their industry will be positively impacted by digital transformation within...

I recently read with interest the results of the latest Cloud Industry Forum research survey into UK Cloud adoption and a couple of aspects jumped out at me, undoubtedly mirroring the experience iland is having within the UK market.

Overall cloud adoption rates among British businesses now stand at 88% and the rate of cloud adoption has increased by a whopping 83% since 2010, with an increase of 5% since last year.  In fact, today, we rarely speak with a customer that isn't...

The recent survey by 451 Research and Microsoft proves that investment in cloud hosting and managed services is soaring, with almost two thirds of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes aligned with value-added services. 

As the number of organisations moving towards the cloud increases, so too does the demand for the expertise, knowledge and tools that make the transition...

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...

More than one in three companies admit it has been either ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to find specific cloud skills for their organisation, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The dreaded ‘cloud skills gap’ has been long reported by this publication – ‘the trend will continue further through 2013’, this reporter once warned – but in the Microsoft...

(c)iStock.com/tupungato

Deloitte has announced the acquisition of Day1 Solutions, a cloud consulting business, to expand its options and accelerate clients’ digital transformation.

The consulting giant is also adding 3,000 new US-based high tech engineering jobs, as well as opening a series of cloud studios in Orlando, New York, and Washington D.C.

Day1 Solutions is a certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, and its website now links to Deloitte’s cloud page....

An ‘enormous’ opportunity is afoot for cloud companies as more organisations move towards implementing hybrid cloud and managed services, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The report – which was conducted in association with 451 Research and which comes in at a whopping 127 pages – polled more than 1700 respondents in 10 geographies, and found that almost two thirds (62%) of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes bundled with value-added services. When it came to...

As the benefits of cloud computing become more pronounced, more businesses are migrating to the cloud. Greater scalability, flexibility and financial security often come as a result of making the shift to cloud computing - and those are just a few of the advantages. The allure of the cloud is well known. However, the fine details of cloud migration and implementation are often overlooked.

Migrating to the cloud is more

CIOs are preferring hybrid cloud models with security the primary motivation for adoption, according to a new study from NetApp.

The research, which polled 750 CIOs and IT managers in France, Germany and the UK, saw more than half of respondents in each country saying they use a combination of private and public cloud. Germany came out on top with 69%, compared with France (61%) and UK (58%). In terms of partner options, local service providers are the most popular, cited by a combined 26% of respondents,...

Rackspace has announced a partnership with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner.

The news, revealed at the time of Google’s Cloud Next event in San Francisco, represents an alignment between the two companies’ ‘obsession’ with customer service and support, Rackspace said. The two companies will collaborate on a new managed services offering for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers which will be made available later this year.

Rackspace already has...

A new study from Informatica and Deloitte has found that cloud is “well on the way” to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics.

The report, which was conducted at the end of last year alongside Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and consulted more than 400 global business and technology leaders, found that cloud was either a key or important part of the analytics strategy for 91% of respondents.

In addition, self-service was considered a key component with cloud-ready organisations...

(c)iStock.com/Nicolas McComber

It continues to gain traction whilst still being significantly behind the market leader; but what underpins this growth? A new study from NetEnrich has found that while Microsoft Azure continues to see impressive usage figures, companies have to rely on channel providers to help them make the most of their implementations.

The survey, which garnered the views of more than 80 IT professionals in large and midmarket companies, found 46% of respondents were running at least half of...

(c)iStock.com/john shepherd

Organisations in the UK are among the least likely globally to have a cloud-first strategy, according to a new report from Intel Security.

The study, which polled more than 2,000 senior IT professionals, found the UK had pretty miserable scores across the board compared to their international brethren. The UK’s score of 70% for businesses who are cloud-first – whilst still a reasonable number – lagged behind the global average of more than 80%, while only 7% of UK...