Here comes the supercloud: What does it mean for multi-cloud complexity?

A new concept for cloud networking aims to bring clarity to multi-cloud and bring the true aspirational path we were all promised. Except it’s not that new.

Say hello to the supercloud. This time last year, Lori MacVittie, distinguished engineer at F5, wrote for Network Computing around the results of the multi-cloud security and app delivery provider’s annual State of Application Strategy report. MacVittie, who has previously written for CloudTech, concluded that 99% of...

Microsoft buys stake in London Stock Exchange Group in twist on digital transformation deals 

Microsoft has announced a 10-year strategic partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to put the financial markets providers’ infrastructure and data analytics onto the Microsoft cloud – and has acquired a 4% stake in the group in the process. 

Seasoned cloud industry watchers will know how these sorts of strategic partnerships play out. The client comes on board for an undisclosed amount, the right noises are made around improving customer and end-user...

Oliver Paterson, VIPRE: On email security in the era of hybrid working

With remote working the future for so many global workforces – or at least some kind of hybrid arrangement – is there an impact on email security we are all missing? Oliver Paterson, director of product management at VIPRE Security, believes so.

“The timeframe that people expect now for you to reply to things is shortened massively,” says Paterson. “This puts additional stress and pressure on individuals, which can then also lead to further mistakes. [Employees] are not...

James Todd, KPMG: On automation and machine learning as the future of security 

James Todd, SecOps director at KPMG, describes his role as a merging of SecOps, security architecture, and cloud security. It is a particularly interesting crossing point with regard to automation. 

“It’s at that intersection of the cloud environment, being very much aligned to deploying everything as code,” says Todd. “A lot of automation is a big part of that. Being able to take dynamic action within a cloud environment is much easier and well-versed than within a...

Need to take the emotion out of tech evaluation and M&A? Here’s how

In the US, tech mergers and acquisitions remain the most active M&A sector in terms of both value and volume; in the first half of this year, $415.4 billion changed hands in almost 1,300 overall deals, according to White & Case’s M&A Explorer. 

Perhaps your company’s technology acquisition is not quite at the financial level of Broadcom shelling out $61 billion for VMware back in May. Still, the importance of these deals from both a monetary and strategic...

Why it’s time to ‘embrace the discomfort’ with cloud vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in, alongside security, are issues that have pervaded IT and software procurement, whether computing has been centralized or not. In the era of the cloud, with benefits ranging from scalability to speed, the hoped-for panacea has turned out to be less than expected.

For a while, the vendors and analysts thought they’d cracked it with the gloss of multi-cloud. At the start of 2018, Cloud Academy issued a whitepaper that looked to separate multi-cloud strategy from the...

Joyce Durst, CEO, GAP: On cloud modernisation and women in leadership

As far as tech is concerned, the workplace continues to be male-dominated. According to 2015 data from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), women make up 47% of all employed adults in the US, but hold only a quarter of computing roles.

Yet the benefits of greater diversity are manifold. McKinsey noted in a 2020 report, 'Diversity Wins', that more diverse companies have better performance, more engaged workers, and better rates of...

What to look out for at Cyber Security & Cloud Expo Europe: Philips, Capital One, ING and more

In 2012, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) produced a survey which helped to articulate the most pressing issues in the cloud computing space. The group released the Notorious Nine report, which followed critical threats to cloud security, from data breaches and loss, to account hijacking and denial of service, to malicious insiders and nefarious use.

The Notorious Nine later expanded to become the Treacherous 12, but for many organisations, a whole decade on, the issues still...

La Liga expands Microsoft Azure partnership for OTT services and ML enhancements

La Liga, the foremost Spanish football league, has expanded its partnership with Microsoft Azure to focus on machine learning (ML), over the top (OTT) services, as well as augmented reality.

The two companies promise to 'digitally transform the sports experience globally', and are focusing on improvements for fans, broadcasters and stadia operations alike.

Azure Event Hubs and Azure Data Lake, as well as Azure's machine learning tools, will provide 'data-enhanced match...

AWS launches Amazon FinSpace to muscle in on financial services cloud offerings

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon FinSpace, an industry cloud offering aimed squarely at helping finance organisations efficiently prepare and analyse data.

The purpose-built analytics service 'aggregates, catalogues, and tags data across an organisation's data silos', enabling the data to be easily searchable across the entire company. This is achieved, in part, through a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine, with more than 100 'data transformations'...