Intel, Google and Microsoft are among nine tech giants who have teamed up to launch a new industry group to advance data centre performance.

The group, which also includes Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, HPE and Huawei, is looking at solidifying Compute Express Link (CXL), an emerging high-speed CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory interconnect. The particular focus is on high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence...

Microsoft Azure continues to eat into Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) dominance in the enterprise market, while managing cloud spend and governance continues to be the primary concern, according to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud report.

The study, a yearly benchmark assessing cloud adoption and which polled almost 800 executives with a relatively even spread between enterprise and SMB respondents, found cloud cost...

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...

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...

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...

Applications such as Exchange, Sharepoint and OneDrive are the oil that keeps the wheels of commerce turning. Adoption of Office 365 is growing at such a rate that even Microsoft has been taken by surprise. The company estimates that during FY2019 it will reach the point where two-thirds of its office business customers will have migrated to the software-as-a-service platform which, it says, is about a year ahead of...

Plenty of factors have to be taken into account when choosing a cloud provider, from performance to price and everything in between. Indeed, many organisations have gone ahead of this process and are now weighing up more than one cloud provider, assessing which workloads fit best.

When it comes to the combination of price and performance, companies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit almost $6.7 billion (£5.2bn) in revenues for its most recent quarter – up almost 10% from the previous quarter and marking a 45% jump from this time last year.

Despite Amazon’s overall figures being a slight disappointment for investors and analysts – shares dipped in after-hours trading after total quarterly revenues of $56.6bn missed the $57.1bn target – AWS continues to...

It would not have been beyond the realms of possibility for this publication to open its analysis of Microsoft’s Q119 results by simply providing a link to Q418 and leaving it at that. After all, Redmond’s message has barely changed. Whereas July’s headline was ‘Microsoft Cloud...

Opinion We hear the term ‘the year of the cloud’ many times. I profess that it is ‘the decade of the cloud’ – and what’s more, we haven’t even really started yet.

Having been in the cloud industry for more than 12 years, and had a wealth of opportunity to engage with business across vertical sectors – from small local businesses to global enterprises and across geographic regions...

Mission-critical database applications are often the most complex use case in the public cloud for a variety of reasons. They need to keep running 24x7 under all possible failure scenarios. As a result, they require full redundancy, which involves provisioning standby server instances and continuously replicating the data. Configurations that work well in a private cloud may not be possible in the public cloud. And providing high availability can incur considerably...

More and more enterprise data is being transferred to the cloud, but sometimes the journey can break the network's back - which calls for less virtual and more physical solutions.

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Data Box, a physical box which organisations can order, fill up, and then return to Redmond for it to be uploaded to an Azure environment. 

Companies and users can store up to 100 TB per standard box, with variables either way. The newly announced Data Box Heavy can...

The first official post-mortems are starting to come out of Microsoft in regards to the Azure outage that happened last week. While this first post-mortem addresses the Azure DevOps outage specifically (previously known as Visual Studio Team Service, or VSTS), it gives us some...

Microsoft has put together a post-mortem on what it described as an 'unprecedented' Azure outage - exploring an interesting question of data loss and failover capability.

The outage, which affected customers on the VSTS - or Azure DevOps - service in the South Central US region, required more than 21 hours to recover all facilities, as well as an additional incident regarding a database which went offline taking another two hours to resolve.

As the status page - which originally went down with the...

It’s becoming a rather shop-worn tale – but for another quarter, Microsoft has cited cloud success as key to its financial results.

And why not? For Q418, Microsoft posted revenues of $30.1 billion (£23.1bn), an increase of 17% on this time last year. Total revenue for the year was $110.4bn, an uptick of 14% on 2017. For the various buckets into which Microsoft divulges its revenues, ‘intelligent cloud’ was at $9.6bn – up from $7.8bn the previous year – while...

Walmart is making Microsoft its preferred cloud provider – with machine learning and artificial intelligence a key focus.

The two companies – both rivals of Amazon – have signed a five year strategic partnership deal with Walmart looking to utilise ‘the full range of Microsoft’s cloud solutions’, as the retailer put it.

A ‘significant portion’ of walmart.com and samsclub.com will be migrated to Azure, including its cloud-powered checkout, while Walmart and...

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of services to help an organisation meet business challenges. Azure is a cloud platform for building, deploying and managing services and applications, allowing you and your clients to meet all your needs through all their services, within one platform.

Their on-premise servers are out-of-date

Operating on out-of-date servers is like driving a rusty old car. First you lose a wing mirror, then a door panel until you’re left in the street clutching nothing more...

Those who attended or watched Cisco Live’s opening keynotes earlier this week – or indeed read our story on it – will have recognised the importance of Kubernetes to attendees with Google Cloud’s cameo being a particular highlight.

Now Microsoft is making waves of its own – with the general availability of its Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

The move will see...

Microsoft Office 365 usage continues to accelerate significantly across organisations of all sizes while Google’s G Suite languishes in comparison, according to new figures from Bitglass.

The cloud access security broker (CASB), in its 2018 Cloud Adoption Report, analysed software usage of more than 135,000 companies globally and found Office 365 continues to rule the roost.

56.3% of the more than 135,000 companies analysed were users, compared with only a quarter (24.8%) for G Suite. The latter has...

Google has clambered into the leaders’ section of Gartner’s latest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, while the wheat has been separated from the chaff.

The annual report concluded that the cloud IaaS market is now a three-horse race in the top right box, with the leaders’ zone not being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft-only area for the first time since 2013.

Indeed, Gartner hacked away many of the fringe players for the latest Quadrant. Only six companies...