CloudTech caught up with Sven Denecken, VP cloud solutions at SAP at the SAP UK & Ireland Forum earlier this week, to discuss what the term ‘hybrid’ really means, the advantages of HANA Enterprise Cloud, and where SAP truly sees itself
One of the more interesting flashpoints from the opening morning of the SAP UK & Ireland Forum in Birmingham this week was at the end of Rob Enslin’s keynote.
More and more companies are transferring sensitive data to the cloud, according to the latest report from Thales e-Security and the Ponemon Institute on cloudy data encryption.
Over half (53%) of survey respondents said they were transferring such data, with a further 31% stating they were looking to push ahead in the next 12 months.
The report, one in a series of overall encryption trends, concludes that organisations, instead of not noticing the cloud security warnings, or even simply ignoring them, are...
As cloud computing continues to materialise and mature in the fabric of today’s IT, one of the primary barriers to widespread adoption is the high proportion of legacy ICT in many companies.
That’s according to the latest survey, this time from NTT Europe polling 300 CIOs and IT decision makers on current trends, barriers and solutions.
56% of those surveyed cited the complexity of their IT layout as the biggest barrier to large scale cloud adoption, with the figure rising to 70% in the public...
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report examining why the CIA chose Amazon ahead of IBM for its recent $600m private cloud contract, and whether IBM has a case to answer with its protests against the decision.
And the conclusion it arrived at was a little from column A and a little from column B. The GAO both sustained and rejected IBM’s complaint in part, and surmised that Amazon’s offer was both “the best value” and a “superior technical...
According to the latest push from analyst house Gartner, to misquote Mark Twain, the reports of legacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.
Gartner’s most recent figures show that cloud office systems only represent 8% of the total office market – rising to 33% by 2017, and 60% - or 665 million users – by 2022.
The latter figures suggest a healthy state of affairs, with Gartner suggesting that the big push to cloud would occur in the first half of 2015.
Similarly, the use of email as...
Over 95% of respondents in a comScore survey of French SMBs said cloud adoption had a positive impact on security, as well as noticing unexpected benefits, such as up-to-date systems and antivirus protection.
The study of French small to midsize businesses with between 25 and 499 PCs was conducted by comScore and commissioned by Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, although the respondents were made unaware of Microsoft’s involvement.
88% of those polled said they had noticed improved uptime as a result of...
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have come up with a model designed to show the full extent of cloud’s energy efficiency.
The report, put together by a research team comprising McCormick School of Engineering Northwestern University and Lawrence Berkeley and part funded by Google, unveils the CLEER (Cloud Energy and Emissions Research) model, described as the ‘first ever open-access, fully transparent systems model for energy analysis of cloud systems by the research...
HP Enterprise Services has become the latest CSP (cloud service provider) to announce it has passed Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) protocols to get the official US government cloud security stamp.
Amazon, as you’d probably expect, announced its FedRAMP seal of approval last week. So what’s that stomping sound you’re hearing? It’s all the public cloud competition rushing to catch...
Nearly nine in 10 small to medium businesses have experienced “cost-related challenges” with backing up and recovering virtual servers, according to the latest industry report from virtualisation provider Veeam.
These fiscal frustrations primarily included ongoing management costs, backups requiring too much storage and expensive licensing models, according to the report.
Conducted in November and December 2012 by independent market research specialists Vanson Bourne, the report surveyed C-level...
Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.
It’s not hard to imagine the reasons around this. Dallas-based SoftLayer calls its platform “cloud without compromise”, and describes itself as the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.
IBM’s cloud portfolio certainly hits home enterprise-side, particularly with
A report from Rackspace Hosting has concluded that, with the rise of wearable technology, it will drive the rise of the “human cloud”.
Cloud computing has become an integral facet of the rise in wearable tech, with the rich data available at a user’s command all being easily stored in the cloud.
As a result the report, ‘The Human Cloud: Wearable Technology from Novelty to Productivity’, examined the responses of 4000 UK and US adults, as well as collaborating with experts from...
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) service revenues surpassed $2bn in the first quarter of 2013, according to the Synergy Research Group.
This number is up 56% from last year’s figure, providing yet more evidence of the increasing numbers in cloud computing.
And it will come as no surprise as to which company is leading the way in revenues. Amazon’s overall share of the market, according to the research, stands at a whopping 27% - this was exactly the same number...
The latest cloud computing report this time comes from Microsoft in collaboration with 451 Research, and again looks towards the hybrid as the tangible future of cloud computing.
The study, ‘The New Era of Hosted Services’, took responses from more than 1500 organisations and revealed that in two years’ time 68% of organisations will adopt the hybrid cloud model, up from 49% currently.
“The next two years will be the era of the hybrid cloud”, trumpeted Marco Limena, Microsoft VP...
iomart Group, proclaimed as the UK’s leading cloud computing company, has registered end of year profits of £10.7m before tax growth, an increase of 56% and marking a significant improvement on 2012’s £6.9m profit.
Revenue growth went up 29% to £43.1m, again an improvement on the previous year, whilst adjusted EBITDA growth (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was 48%, up to £16.5m.
The figures are suitably impressive for the Scottish company,...
A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting.
The train of thought here, of course, has to wonder what those expectations were, especially in a week where service level agreements (SLAs) are at the forefront following 100% SLA provider Mimecast’s outage.
Yet for companies experienced with...
Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of a general preview release of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure.
Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.
As anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will know, the perception of the data centre has evolved considerably, from isolated resource centres to more connected pools, helping maximise IT efficiency.
Not surprisingly, with the potential available, the numbers are growing. 60% of server workloads are set to be virtualised by 2014, compared to only 12% in 2008, with total investment in data centre infrastructure growing 5% on average year on year.
There are, of course, pros and cons to...
Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails.
The first reports of irregularity occurred at approximately 1100GMT, with Mimecast acknowledging the problem at 1215.
Around forty minutes later, the company further tweeted that a fix was on the way purportedly on a tower-by-tower basis, with the majority of servers back up and running at the...
You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.
That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this...
Another day, another cloud survey, and for 69% of the near 250 IT professionals quizzed by business process automation firm PMG, the hybrid cloud is the “wave of the future within their organisations”.
The combination of public and private cloud is really starting to gain traction in 2013. But why?
The most important reason for adopting hybrid clouds, according to 38% of respondents, was that cloud apps were deployed faster. Delivering better value (21%), and being able to meet requirements more...