The spending of the cloud hyperscalers has come to a comparative halt, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The analyst firm found that in the first quarter of 2019 total capex across the largest cloud vendors totalled just over $26 billion, representing a 2% downturn year on year. This excludes Google’s $2.4bn outlay on Manhattan real estate which pushed the Q118 figures even further, and not including...

Multi-cloud is one of the biggest initiatives for enterprises today; however, if you analyse the justification for this trend, so much of it is driven by fear — fear of lock-in, fear of outages, fear of cost. And while those concerns may be valid, the enterprises that are realising the value of multi-cloud have an even more compelling reason for it: choice.

A few years ago, battle lines were drawn. For the most part you either used AWS, Azure, or GCP in addition...

The prospect of an IT outage is one of the key issues that keeps IT professionals awake at night.  In the past two years, 93% of organisations have experienced tech-related business disruption and, as a result, one out of five experienced major reputational damage and permanent loss of customers. From natural...

Amazon may still have an iron grip on cloud infrastructure across all geographies – but in Asia Pacific (APAC) at least, Chinese cloud providers are closing the gap.

That’s according to a new study from Synergy Research, which argues the top three players in China are now in the top six across APAC as a whole. Alibaba is ranked at #2, while Tencent is at #4 and Sinnet at #6, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google filling the...

Over the next two years, cloud service providers will be systematically sabotaged by attackers aiming to disrupt critical national infrastructure (CNI) or cripple supply chains. Organisations dependent on cloud services will find their operations and supply chains undermined when key cloud services go down for extended periods of time.

Nation states that engage in a digital cold war will aim to disrupt economies and take down CNI by sabotaging cloud infrastructure through traditional physical attacks or by...

If the weather isn't quite up to scratch it is hard to resist the lure of an all-inclusive family holiday. The azure blue sea, pristine white sand, and masses of food and drink - interspersed with a spot of swimming to burn off some of the excesses. 

But fast-forward to check out and you get a nasty surprise: a larger than expected bill. Those extras excluded from your “all-inclusive” deal were too tempting for your teenagers: how did they consume so many snacks between the...

VMware has announced its intent to acquire Bitnami, a provider of application packaging and delivery, to help accelerate app delivery for multi-cloud use cases.

Bitnami, based out of San Francisco, offers organisations the capability to deploy a multitude of applications through its libraries either natively or across a plethora of cloud providers. The company was a graduate of Y Combinator and was noted for a reticence on funding, only accepting a seed round in May 2013.

This need for greater enterprise...

Google Cloud has announced the official launch of its Osaka cloud data centre region, making it the second facility in Japan and the 20th overall.

The Osaka region, as with all Google Cloud facilities aside from Iowa, has three availability zones and comes with the standard product set, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

The...

Leading hyperscale cloud service providers continue to disrupt the traditional IT infrastructure vendor landscape, as more enterprise CIOs and CTOs expand their adoption of multi-cloud strategies that marginalise the remaining applications for on-premises data centres.

Legacy IT vendors that were reluctant to evolve their business model will now seek niche cloud market segments where they can differentiate their offerings. There's no viable growth path that's based upon...

The last six years have seen a rapid acceleration in the use of cloud computing. Enterprises of all sizes and across industries are now turning to cloud infrastructure and pursuing cloud-first strategies. As IT departments increasingly shift workloads into public clouds while they simultaneously convert existing on-premises virtualised environments to support cloud-like capabilities, optimising cloud spending has become an intense focus for many organisations.

Most traditional forms of dealing with network and data latency, as well as packet loss, fall short of their promise. This includes WAN optimisation. SD-WANs are great, but their performance can also be improved by adding a WAN data acceleration layer. With the growth of the Internet of Things, therefore, organisations are looking for new ways to reduce the impact of latency and packet loss.

David Linthicum, chief cloud...

For vendors who aren’t at the very top tier of the cloud industry, it can sometimes be a case of Muhammad and the mountain. You can use their migration path to the cloud, or you can just get Amazon, Microsoft, or Google to do it for you. SAP appears to understand this, if its newest launch, Embrace, is anything to go by.

The company announced at its SAPPHIRE NOW event a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS),...

Ever had that feeling of regret when you find you’re double booked? Well, spare a thought for the enterprise and developer tech world this week. On the US West Coast, Microsoft Build has just completed in Washington while Google I/O charges on in California. On the Atlantic side, meanwhile, ProgressNEXT continues in Florida – where sister publication

Executive summary: Distributing giant Manutan moved from a reactive customer engagement strategy to a proactive approach through going cloud-native. While the process had various roadblocks, the sense of engagement and community was key. Xavier Laurent, director of value added services at Manutan, has ‘lived the journey of transformation’ over the past 10 years and discusses how the company meets customer demand in the digital...

Digital transformation continues to create opportunities for UK businesses. As uncertainty remains the mood of Britain, companies are prioritising transformation programmes to ensure continued growth. Many see digital transformation as key to becoming more competitive and a necessity to keep up with a rapidly changing business environment, and for many the cloud is critical to its success.

For years, CIOs have been caught in an 80/20 IT spending trap: 80% of the budget going to ongoing support, leaving only...

The majority of Oracle customers are 'currently or actively planning to reduce their spend' with the software giant citing cost, maintenance, and aggressive sales tactics, according to a new report.

The study, published by enterprise software support firm Rimini Street and titled 'Why Enterprises are Rethinking Their Oracle Relationship and Cloud Strategy', explored respondents' relationships with Oracle as well as appetite for its SaaS offerings.

More than three in five (61%) of those...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the market availability of its Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) service, which is designed to help companies develop and manage scalable blockchain networks.

The platform extends its support to thousands of applications and millions of transactions via open source frameworks, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Those intending to permit multiple parties to perform transactions and maintain a cryptographically verifiable record of them without the need for a...

A recent Gartner report estimated that 80 percent of organisations will overshoot their cloud budgets by 2020 because of a lack of optimisation. Obviously, this frustrates executives. It’s particularly hard to deal with in the case of multi-cloud environments, where each provider’s bill might be a million-plus lines long.

A recent survey from Capgemini revealed that while enterprise-scale automation is still in its infancy, IT automation projects are moving along (below). IT is starting to view automation less tactically, and more strategically.

Smart data is generated by filtering out the noise from big data that's generated by media, business transactions, Internet of Things (IoT), and data exhausts from online activity. Smart data can uncover valuable commercial insights, by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data analytics.

Furthermore, vast amounts of unstructured big data can be converted into smart data using enhanced data analytics tools that utilise artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)...