Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the benchmark for Amazon’s profit lines and continues to improve.

The company announced revenues for AWS of $7.43 billion (£5.68bn), an increase of 45% from this time last year, with AWS revenues comprising more than 10% of Amazon’s overall sales for the quarter, up from 8.4% the year before. AWS made $2.18bn after expenses for Q4, giving it a full year profit of almost $7.3bn, or...

Microsoft’s investor relations team is evidently not frightened about repeating itself when it comes to financial announcements season. “Microsoft Cloud drives record fourth quarter results,” the company proclaimed in July; “Microsoft Cloud strength powers record first quarter results,” it tooted in October; and now, “Microsoft Cloud strength fuels second quarter results.”

Given the...

With so many new technologies vying for attention, it can be difficult for CISOs to know which ones merit attention. Will this solution save time? Will it make our organisation more productive, or enable us to do things we couldn’t otherwise do? These questions need to be considered before adopting software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV).

What makes...

Any discussion of Kubernetes is best started with an understanding of why we need Kubernetes. Kubernetes helps us manage containers, which dominate application development now because they enable portability, faster application development, and greater independence for developers. Once we started using containers in great volume, we needed a way to automate the setup, tear down, and management of containers - that's what Kubernetes does.

The battle for retailers’ cloud dollars continues apace, with grocer Albertsons the latest organisation to pledge its allegiance to Microsoft.

According to a CNBC report, Microsoft has signed a three-year deal to make Azure Albertsons’ preferred public cloud. The retailer, who owns the Safeway and Vons supermarket chains, will deploy the Microsoft 365 suite to employees as well...

Businesses understand the importance of providing seamless customer journeys, but we’ve seen a growing spate of digital service outages and software performance problems in recent months. There have been online banking outages that have left customers unable to pay bills on time, while problems with major payment systems have left shoppers unable to use their bank cards at the checkouts.

These problems seriously disrupt...

Throughout 2018, many global enterprises turned to networking technologies such as software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to cost-effectively meet burgeoning bandwidth demands without having to sacrifice simplified WAN management and better application performance.

This trend will continue into 2019 as enterprises with a global presence embrace networking technologies such as SD-WAN as a key tool to...

Transitioning to the cloud is not so much taking a fresh plot of land and building up from there, but more trying to renovate an existing property. For larger organisations with sprawling IT outfits, it can be particularly complicated even once the bulk of the work has been done, with on-premise systems here, public cloud workloads there, and private cloud in between.

What’s more, organisations are realising that one size may not fit...

IBM has gotten Juniper Networks on board in a $325 million (£252m) deal which will see the former assist the latter in enhancing their cloud journey.

The seven-year agreement – which has overtones of Microsoft’s recent deal inked with Walgreens in terms...

As more enterprise CIOs and CTOs embrace hybrid multi-cloud deployment strategies, business technology vendors and cloud service providers must continue to evolve their go-to-market approach - in recognition of the prevailing IT infrastructure investment trends.

Vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, grew 47.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2018 (3Q18), reaching $16.8 billion, according to the latest worldwide...

The good news: your organisation has finally gotten around to installing some top of the range cloud security tools. The bad news: malware has been developed which can evade detection from them.

The nefarious discovery from threat actor Rocke was made by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, with the security researchers noting that it was ‘to the best of [their] knowledge the first malware family that developed the unique capability to target and...

Another year, another study on cloud adoption – and if it’s surprising statistics you want, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Yet this may be seen as a good thing. As the report released by NetEnrich shows, the numbers on infrastructure and public cloud usage for enterprise continues to tick over, while security remains vital and DevOps still has a long way to go to mass adoption.

Pharmaceutical giant Walgreens Boots Alliance is making Microsoft its strategic cloud provider, focusing on connecting Walgreens stores and health information systems with a sprinkling of artificial intelligence (AI) on top.

The companies have signed a seven-year agreement with various strands. On the practical side, Walgreens will roll out Microsoft 365, the latter’s enterprise suite, to more than 380,000 employees and...

The data centre market saw an uptick in terms of the number of M&A deals in 2018 – but the total value has dipped, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The analyst firm found that while the number of acquisitions and transactions last year grew to 68, their value slipped to approximately $16 billion, shaving almost $5bn off last year’s total.

In terms of...

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported $6.6B in revenue for Q3, 2018 and $18.2B for the first three fiscal quarters of 2018.
• AWS revenue achieved an impressive 46% year-over-year net sales growth between Q3, 2017 and Q3, 2018 and 49% year-over-year growth for the first three quarters of the year.
• AWS’ 34% market share is bigger than its next four competitors combined with the majority of customers taken from small-to-medium sized cloud operators according to 

In 2019, we can expect the cloud industry to continue to thrive - with impressive cloud adoption across all industries, accompanied by an improvement in solutions and integrated data tools to best meet user needs. These advancements will substantially enhance operations in the cloud, leading it to ultimately become the preferred platform for all enterprise applications.

Looking ahead, we will see companies move beyond standard...

A rising tide of regulatory, governance and security concerns, a paucity of talent experienced in large-scale transformation, and boardroom concerns over the real business impact can make cloud migration feel like a journey towards shark-infested waters.

Despite these challenges, 2019 will be the year in which the UK’s largest enterprises get serious about moving production workloads to the...

The race for cloud supremacy in the emerging Asia Pacific regions continues apace, with new data centre launches planned for Singapore and Indonesia by Equinix and Alibaba Cloud respectively.

Equinix announced that $85 million had been invested in a seven-storey site called SG4, which is expected to open its doors in the fourth quarter of 2019 with 1,400 cabinets available in the first instance. The site’s name reflects...

Opinion We had the desktop. Then came the cloud. And next, we’ll have the time machine.

The Time Machine is one of the classic 60s-era sci-fi films. Based on the H.G. Wells novel, a Victorian-era inventor (Rod Taylor) gets propelled into the year 802,701 A.D. by a barber chair with a roulette wheel grafted onto it. In the distant future, he meets the Eloi, a future breed of humans that look like they just popped over from the...

You don’t have to be a Wall Street professional to understand the reasons to invest in more than one company. So, why would a business choose a strategy of investing in a single cloud? It doesn’t make sense in today’s marketplace.

Initially, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud were commodities using pricing as a competitive advantage. But today, these providers are differentiating themselves with...