With its giant, gleaming skyscrapers and seemingly endless wealth, Dubai is often viewed as being one of the world’s most high tech cities. When it comes to digital innovation, Dubai, one of seven Emirates in the United Arab Emirates, with a population of 2.5 million, has one of the highest levels of ICT adoption in the region, both by the public and government.

Over the past two decades a number of digital transformation initiatives, with titles such as Dubai Internet City and Dubai e-government, have...

Cloud computing has come a long way over the last several years. It has gone from an emerging technology used in tech startups, to a catalyst for driving enterprise business transformations. According to IDC’s CloudView 2017 report, 70 percent of CIOs say they embrace a “cloud-first IT strategy.” This shows that cloud has moved way beyond the early-adopted phase, where born in the cloud startups were the only...

The cloud-first enterprise is gaining in prominence, through multi-cloud strategies, losing data centres, and adopting cloud-native infrastructures.

That is the key finding from a new report released by hybrid cloud IT operations management provider OpsRamp. The study, which polled IT leaders in companies with 500 or more employees, also found that public cloud services are grabbing a bigger share of IT budgets, and that security – again – is the primary reason for reticent companies sitting it...

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...

• Worldwide public cloud services market revenue is projected to grow 18.5% in 2017 reaching $260.2B, up from $219.6B in 2016.
• 2016 worldwide SaaS revenue exceeded Gartner’s previous forecast by $48.2B.
• SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21% in 2017 reaching $58.6B by the end of this year.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is projected to grow 36.6% in 2017 alone, reaching $34.7B this year making this area the fastest growing of all cloud services today.

Gartner’s latest worldwide public cloud...

IBM has announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, a new piece of software which aims to ‘extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.’

As a study from AlgoSec earlier this week posited, organisations are on the whole expecting their public cloud usage to ramp up in the next couple of years. Yet not everything is suitable for the public cloud.

IBM Cloud Private is...

Moving to the cloud is not called a journey for nothing. Cloud journeys, like other transformations, comprise a never-ending bell curve of change.

So, while it may be tempting to crack open the champagne once you have migrated some initial services to the cloud and shift attention on the next item on the CIO’s ‘to do’ list, the job is far from over. This period simply marks the point at which the cloud journey veers off on a different tangent.

A business-driven transformation

Because moving...

Read almost any article on IT trends today and it’s likely that ‘digital’ and ‘digital transformation’ feature heavily. And yet there is confusion over what this actually means. It has been misappropriated by some, diluting everyone’s understanding. I have heard it used for anything from technology change to new application releases, or, even more cringeworthy, to describe any IT focused project.

The latest usage setting my teeth on edge are those IT transformation projects...

GPUs are becoming ever more attractive to cloud service providers and customers as the demand for intensive computing increases – and UKCloud has become the first European cloud service provider to offer a cloud GPU computing service through NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 and M60 units.

UKCloud, formerly Skyscape, offers services for the public sector as well as healthcare. The company said the move for GPUs came about through its ‘maniacal focus’ on service excellence following customer demand...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia are coming together to speed up the migration of service provider applications to the cloud, the latter has announced.

Through the deal, Nokia will support service providers throughout their AWS implementation with consulting, design, integration, migration and operation, alongside Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, through AWS Greengrass and Amazon Machine Learning among others.

On the strategic side, both companies will work together for 5G and edge cloud, including...

With all the hype about how cloud delivery brings new levels of flexibility and availability, many organisations may be falling for misleading reports claiming that moving to a cloud model somehow diminishes the need to worry about business continuity (BC) or disaster recovery (DR).

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Like the parody disaster movie Airplane, it would just take one thing to go wrong and you could find yourself in quite a pickle, but without any of the...

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...

Another day, another research study which reveals the benefits of the public cloud tinged with security concerns.

This time, a report from Barracuda Networks has shown that while respondents – 300 IT decision makers from companies across the US – expect the percentage of their infrastructure in the public cloud to almost double in five years, three quarters (74%) say security concerns restrict their organisations’ migration.

Yet perhaps the most worrying aspect of the research was around...

Two in three UK IT decision makers polled in a new study say their organisation is losing out on revenue as they lack specific cloud expertise.

The report, put together by Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found 67% of the latter believed they could bring greater innovation to their organisation with the ‘right cloud insight’. 85% said greater expertise within their organisation would help them recoup the return on their cloud...

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...

If you’re taking the plunge and migrating to cloud technologies, make sure you do a full return on investment (ROI) assessment – as companies who do are almost 50% more successful in realising cost savings.

This is the key finding from a new study issued by global IT provider Unisys. The report, conducted by IDG, polled 400 IT and business executives across eight countries and found four out of five respondents expected cost savings from adopting the cloud. An even higher number (82%) of those...

With the general cloud hype and the widely declared corporate intent to base future business solutions on cloud technology stacks, businesses may take the view that deploying cloud solutions involves little more than accessing a vendor’s cloud portal and following a few clicks, have your virtual services deployed and ready for operations.

Whilst this approach will give an enterprise a cloud-based virtual environment, what’s delivered is far from being part of a corporate information...

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...

Much like the earth’s climate has been undergoing a gradual shift, so has the climate for cloud-based business applications and systems. The use of cloud-based applications for personal purposes including email, picture-sharing, and listening to music has become ubiquitous.

As a result, people have become accustomed to accessing what they want, when they want, from wherever they want. Their tolerance for traditional desktop software has diminished. Each day, more businesses are embracing the cloud as...

More than four in five respondents to a survey from Commvault and CITO Research say they are at least ‘very concerned’ about missing out on new advancements in cloud technology.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) in this space is real. Of the 100 IT leaders polled, more than two thirds said they were worried about keeping up to date with the latest products and iterations across the primary cloud providers. The most popular methods of keeping up to date were through reading tech publications and...