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...

If you want to challenge the leading cloud infrastructure providers, you are going to need some seriously deep pockets. According to the latest figures from analyst firm Synergy Research, hyperscaler cloud capex spending hit a record $27 billion (£20.1bn) in the most recent quarter.

The top five spenders in the industry remain Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, with Alibaba, IBM, JD.com, NTT, and Tencent comprising the top 10.

Google kicked off the quarter by announcing

One in four respondents to a survey from IT community Spiceworks say they remain unconvinced by cloud storage security – with Microsoft OneDrive holding firm as the most popular service.

The study, which polled more than 500 respondents from organisations across North America and Europe, found more than half (51%) are currently using OneDrive, compared with 34% for both Google Drive and Dropbox, going down to 13% and 6% for Apple iCloud Drive and Box...

Microsoft Azure, like many other cloud service providers, have built their billing and subscription models on a pay-per-use basis, i.e., if you use one hour of CPU time you pay for the hour you have consumed. No more, no less.

This basic economic principle forms the foundation of most public cloud services. However, the implementation of this simple concept can be quite complex and intricate. This is especially true if the...

Amazon and Microsoft have joined IBM and Google in reporting its quarterly numbers – and the good news just keeps on coming for the hyperscalers and the cloud market in general.

Amazon announced total revenues of $51 billion (£36.9bn) in the first quarter, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing $5.4bn (£3.94bn), or 10.6% of all revenues. This compares favourably with this time last year, AWS hitting $3.66bn of total revenues of $35.7bn in Q117, with AWS passing $5bn for the first time

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the acquisition of London-based RedPixie to further bolster its cloud consulting expertise.

RedPixie’s vision, in the company’s own words, is ‘to go beyond technology, building and managing Azure hybrid solutions for clients in financial services.’ The company was founded in 2010 and comprises a team of business consultants, cloud architects and data scientists.

The acquisition will fall under the remit of HPE Pointnext, the...

Microsoft’s latest Azure update has managed to cover two of its more recent trends with the announcement of new regions for Australia and New Zealand.

The company has already this month focused on expanding its geographic footprint, as well as beefing up its

Microsoft continues to expand its data centre empire, with new locations in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates planned, the company has announced.

The expansion takes Azure to 50 regions worldwide, with other data centres in the works including South Africa and Australia. The UAE data centres will be the first inroads Microsoft has made into the Middle East, with the company citing its ‘long-standing expertise and deep local relationships’ in the area to accelerate technological...

Microsoft has beefed up its government cloud offerings, launching government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

Microsoft 365, which comprises Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Azure Stack, which extends Azure to on-premises environments, are being upgraded as Microsoft acknowledges faster acceleration of government organisations moving to the cloud.

“This move is driven largely by the desire...

Enterprise cloud spend is on the up while Microsoft Azure gains ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud report.

The study, which polled almost 1,000 respondents, found that Azure enterprise adoption was at 58%, gaining around on AWS with 68%. For organisations who have just begun their cloud journeys (below), Azure leads AWS, in 49% and 47% implementation respectively.

Look out Box, Dropbox and Google – Microsoft is offering free OneDrive to customers of its cloud storage rivals in an attempt to poach them.

The move was announced on an official Microsoft blog yesterday. The company will offer free OneDrive for Business to Box, Dropbox and Google customers with a couple of caveats; the organisations must not currently be OneDrive for Business or Office 365...