Forbes

Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017 Forbes Cloud platforms are enabling new, complex business models and orchestrating more globally-based integration networks in 2017 than many analyst and advisory firms predicted. Combined with Cloud Services adoption increasing in the mid-tier and small ...

View post:
Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017 - Forbes

Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Ignite 2016 (Photo by GeekWire/Kevin Lisota)

Microsoft is a huge multinational technology company, with lines of business spread across PCs, productivity software, gaming, internet search, and more. But after its third fiscal quarter earnings report came out yesterday, financial analysts spent most of their time asking about a very specific business.

Questions about Microsoft Azure and associated cloud services dominated Microsofts financial results call yesterday afternoon. By contrast, market leader Amazon Web Services only came up a handful of times during the Amazon call with analysts, which makes some sense given that AWS is already a well-understood component of Amazons overall business.

For Microsoft watchers, this shift is a little newer. The company still doesnt break out revenue for Azure (come on, folks, its about time) but said Azure revenue nearly doubled compared to last year, and CEO Satya Nadella was peppered with questions about Azure and cloud growth in general.

Heres a few of his answers, courtesy of a transcript from Seeking Alpha:

On the evolution of the cloud: For example, right when everyones talking about the cloud, the most interesting part is the edge of the cloud. Whether its IoT, whether its the auto industry, whether its whats happening in retail, essentially compute is going where the data gets generated, and increasingly data is getting generated at the volumes in which its drawing compute to it, which is the edge.

On cloud holdouts: But we do have a huge on-premise base. There is still a need for those on-premise products. That will continue, but our focus is on transitioning to the cloud.

On short-term thinking: These are generational opportunities that whats at play when it comes to the Intelligent Cloud or whats happening in augmented reality. Either one of those things, I think if we started viewing it quarter to quarter or year to year, well completely miss the trend.

But I completely understand that all of you measure us to what we have done for you lately. And thats a fine way and well keep account of it, but thats not how it works.

On enterprises moving to the cloud: its not about in fact taking any old workload per se, but its about reimagining what they want to do across these. And in that context, of course, theyre lifting and shifting some of the older workloads, but theyre modernizing the entire business process flow. And thats whats I think (is) the killer opportunity, not any one technology, but the entire flow.

Read more:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlines its cloud computing strategy for Wall Street - GeekWire

Lennon and McCartney; Warhol andBasquiat;F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald historys filled with famouscreative duos, and new technology couldcreate more by knocking down collaborative barriers of time and locality.

You dont want to be restricted by geography in finding the person you want to collaborate with, saidShailendra Mathur(pictured), vice president/chief architect at Avid Technology Inc.Artists are finding that digital tech and cloud, in particular, give them more co-creative choices than ever before, he added.

Mathur spoke with Lisa Martin (@Luccazara),host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias mobile live streaming studio, during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, this week.(*Disclosure below.)

What does cloud deliver? That one centralized location where you can exchange information, exchange your creativity wherever one is in the world, saidMathur.

This is more than correspondence it mirrors in-person human synergy with real-time exchange of ideas, words, images or piano notes. When you are interacting with a surface controller, a mixer thats tactile information thats right there, Mathur said. However, the music created can be experienced remotely, and all computations can be performed in the cloud with all musicians present.

This same seamless collaboration is possible in visual arts.Instead of having a workstation on premise, you actually have it in the cloud, Mathur explained. Advances in virtual display technology now allow advanced visual and graphic technology to work in the cloud.

Things like GPU-based computing thats appearing on the cloud providers thats allowing your cloud back-end to drive your displays now, remotely, he stated.

Journalists can also take advantage of real-time computing to collaborate, not just with other journalists, but with citizens via Twitter and other social feeds.Ill confess, some of my news in the morning is not by the newspaper Im checking my Facebook, Mathur said.

These feeds will not replace professional reporters. You still need the skills of making sure that you can craft it all together, he said. The social feeds can serve as micro sources, purveying the word on the street and providing exposure to diverse views.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs independent editorial coverage of theNAB Show. (*Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBEs coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

See more here:
Artistic collaboration goes 2.0 with real-time cloud computing - SiliconANGLE (blog)

Microsofts cloud computing business continues to be a rising star, with revenue growing 11% to $6.8 billion in its Q3 2017 from a year earlier.

That growth was a welcome sight as the companys largest revenue streamthe Windows operating system and gamingdeclined for the third consecutive quarter. Microsoft reported $22.1 billion in overall revenue, which just missed analysts expectations. Microsoft shares tumbled in after hours trading.

These results included LinkedIns first full quarter as a Microsoft company. The professional social networking site brought in $975 million in revenue for the quarter, but produced an overall $386 million loss. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, which now has 500 million members, for $26.2 billion.

One area of continued strength within cloud is Microsofts Azure platform, which gives developers paid access to Microsofts artificial intelligence algorithms for use in their own software. Azure revenue, nestled within the $6.8 billion of Intelligent Cloud revenue, jumped exactly 93% year over year for the second quarter in a row.

Revenue from Microsofts line of tablets and desktop computer, Surface, decreased 26% YoY. Its latest computer, the Surface Studio, was announced in October 2016, and has only started to roll out in large numbers this year. These preliminary numbers dont give great hope that the computer, geared toward artists and power users, will save Microsofts hardware business.

Of course, that just puts even more pressure on Azure and the enterprise cloud business to prop up Microsoftand suggests that CEO Satya Nadella could be right in shifting the companys focus toward the cloud. But it will be an uphill battle: Amazon and Google are fierce competitors in the space, with Amazon enjoying a large lead.

Link:
Satya Nadella's biggest bet for Microsoft could be its future - Quartz

Does security continue to be a drag on cloud adoption? About half of the IT professionals participating in a recent survey say yes, but their nervousness isn't on the data itself -- it's about the lack of cybersecurity skills available to manage cloud-borne projects.

That's one of the takeaways of a recent survey of 2,009 IT managers and professionals from Intel Security, which finds that, unsurprisingly, 93% of organizations now employ cloud services in some form. However, 49% reportedly have slowed their cloud adoption due to a lack of cybersecurity skills.

The survey report's authors speculate that this slowdown is creating an increase in shadow IT services, which only increases security risks. Increasingly, the report states, "IT departments are working with users to find and secure acceptable solutions, instead of just blocking them. While good news for those users and departments, this is increasing the burden on security teams."

Any slowdown in cloud adoption is being accompanied by moves to hybrid architectures, the survey also shows. The majority (57%) are running a hybrid public/private architecture, up from last year's 19%. Those using private-only clouds went down, from 51% last year to just 24% this year. Public-only architectures also recorded a big drop, from 30% to just 19%.

This shift to hybrid architecture was accompanied by a decrease in the average number of cloud services in use, which dropped from 43 in 2015, to just 29 in 2016, as organizations appear to be consolidating their cloud applications and services.

The survey also finds a consolidation beginning within the cloud sector, which favors top-tier providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. These vendors may be helping to address cybersecurity skills concerns as well. Executives are more favorable to storing their data in public clouds, seeing these as safer havens than their own data centers. In fact, 74% say they now store some or all of their sensitive data in public clouds. "Trust in public clouds as a safe place to work and store sensitive data continues to increase, and most senior management now appear to have a reasonable understanding of the risks involved," the report's authors state. "The top-tier providers, have been improving their security posture and expanding their security resources, increasing the differences between them and smaller cloud service providers."

High costs and poor value is now the number one operational issue that IT professionals have experienced with their cloud providers in the past year, followed by poor customer service at number two.

Lack of visibility into cloud provider operations remains the top technical issue, as it was last year. Poor availability and uptime has moved up into the top five, increasing from 17% last year to 22% this year.

Shadow IT is another issue looming on the enterprise landscape. IT departments appear to be moving towards more active methods of monitoring and employing technology in an effort to gain better visibility. Next-generation firewalls have replaced database activity monitoring as the most likely method being used this year,increasing from 41% to 49%. Use of web gateways increased from 37% to 41%, and use of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) increased slightly from 32% to 33%. At the same time,more passive methods of detecting Shadow IT activity, such as working with finance, checking license usages, or word or mouth, dropped significantly.

Usage of Platform as a Service (PaaS) is on a growth path, surpassing Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the survey also shows. Overall, PaaS is now in use by 40% of organizations surveyed, up from 21% last year. PaaS usage and hybrid architecture are strongly related, with more than half of those running a hybrid architecture also using PaaS as part of their cloud services. This year's investment plans are 66% SaaS, 64% IaaS, and 59% PaaS, which is consistent with their relative usage rankings.

See the original post here:
Survey hints at cloud computing consolidation, staffing woes - ZDNet