Category Archives: Cloud Computing
Teresa Martin: Cloud computing gets new image – Nantucket Island Inquirer
International atlas updated in digital form.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
"That floats on high o'er vales and hills "
Some people love Wordsworths "Daffodils," but I always connected to the opening lines, to that image of the lonely floating cloud. But then, of course, I love clouds.
Im not talking clouds as in cloud computing, as in banks of servers accessed from any location. Nope, Im talking fluffy bits of cotton candy water skipping across the sky. Deep, roiling, rolling gray banks portending rain. Thin stretches of cobwebby filmy filaments against the red-orange-pink of a setting sun.
All these clouds have a proper name and category about 100 in all most of which I seem unable to remember. Cirrus, nimbus, cumulus Luckily for me and for other cloud and weather aficionados this kind of cloud computing just got a new image. Literally.
World Meteorological Day 2017 featured the theme Understanding Clouds, and the World Meteorological Organization celebrated that theme by launching the new International Cloud Atlas, available for the first time in digital form. Hard as it may be to believe, during the atlass last update in 1987 the web and all things digital werent.
It turns out that clouds create more than a backdrop for pictures or an inspiration for dreamers. Clouds drive the Earths water cycle and climate system. They help us forecast weather and serve as a warning signal to dangerous weather.
Consistent cloud observations support climate and hydrology studies and build a long-term record of weather, but getting to that consistency needed a common set of definitions and language. After all, clouds can be a bit challenging to describe: I see an elephant, you see a mushroom. My elephant or your mushroom might look like someone elses llama or carrot. Obviously thats no way to track the weather.
By the early 1800s work was underway to create a repeatable method for describing clouds and cloudlike objects. Eventually, the atlas emerged, providing a framework for global standard cloud observation. A weather scientist sees a cumulus humilis and when he or she says that, every other weather scientist around the world knows what type of cloud was spotted. As poetic as a mushroom sitting next to a carrot might be, that type of description does not create a consistent database entry.
The World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations, serves as a sort of global ground zero of information interchange about all things weather, climate and water cycle in other words, it coordinates data about those physical world attributes that dont pay much attention to puny human boundaries. As part of this effort, it oversees the International Cloud Atlas. The atlas, in turn, serves as the authoritative and comprehensive cloud reference; its first edition appeared in 1896 and weve been talking about the nimbus and cumulus ever since.
The Earth has changed since that first edition and so have the tools weve used to see and record those changes. Not only did the 2017 atlas go digital, it also nodded to technology by adding 11 new types of clouds. Some of these cloud types were brought to the fold by a global citizens science effort whose spotting and documentation efforts are enabled by technology, while other newly admitted clouds are literally the byproduct of technology.
The work and supporting photography of the 43,000-member Cloud Appreciation Society showed again that science no longer belongs to a small priesthood of practitioners. These global cloud-spotters have been documenting observations and championing them to the World Meteorological Organization since 2006. And yes, there is an app for that so glad you asked. It is called, logically enough, the cloud-spotter app (https://cloudspotterapp.com), and in January it hit the 250,000th submitted cloud milestone.
So join me in extending a warm welcome to the asperitas cloud, a sort of rougher, more chaotic undulatus formation, which cloud-spotters say began appearing often enough that it needed its own designation. Enter, too, the flammagenitus, a type of cloud generated by fire or combustion, and the homogenitus, a cloud created by human activity, like one you might see above a cooling tower at a power plant or trailing behind an airplane.
And, of course, welcome to the fully digital International Cloud Atlas (https://www.wmocloudatlas.org/home.html), where we can all learn to be cloud-spotters too. Or, at the very least, try out the Find a Cloud feature. May I suggest that theres nothing like a nice puffy, white cumulus to put a smile on even the grayest of days.
Teresa Martin lives, breathes and writes about the intersection of technology, business and humanity. Read more of her recent columns at http://www.capecodtimes.com/teresamartin.
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Teresa Martin: Cloud computing gets new image - Nantucket Island Inquirer
Amazon Connect offers Customer Support for Businesses with Cloud Computing – Crescent Vale (blog)
Amazon Web Services have announced today a new customer service known as Amazon Connect. The platform will allow businesses to provide call centers for their customers to interact with one-on-one.
Customers engage with products and services on a wide range of different platforms. Amazon Web Services is using their cloud computing technology to enhance the user experience for customers that prefer to speak with customer service representatives over the phone.
Amazon and Business Wire reported:
Amazon Connect is a radical shift in the contact center space there is no complex hardware configuration and management Amazon Connect makes voice an application on the network. We can rapidly connect it to anything, and easily leverage other AWS micro-services we have already developed. Brian Pearson, CTO of GE Appliances
Startups and smaller businesses will have more difficulty being able to provide engaging customer support, as well as developing and delivering products. This platform will help companies, even larger companies, provide better customer support.
Watch over the YouTube videos below, and stay connected to Amazon Web Serviceson social media.
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Amazon Connect offers Customer Support for Businesses with Cloud Computing - Crescent Vale (blog)
Is Cloud Computing Leading to Poor Security Practices? – Identity Week (blog)
Despite what you may have heard, the cloud does not make it easier to have poor security from a technical standpoint.
Heres the thing that many people fail to understand. The cloud is just the same technologies from an on-premises environment running somewhere else. Any risks that you had on-premises are still there in the cloud.
Sure, the share of risks is smaller since the provider takes care of some of them. In a case like Amazons EC2, where servers run in the cloud, your organization is just as responsible for security from the operating system on up as it would be if it were a server in your own data center.
Many fail to see this issue clearly and think that there are either unique risks or magical protections afforded by running in Amazons world. Of course, when something is over there it feels like its less your problem. So many things that would have perhaps worried you about a server in your data center may feel more distant when running in the cloud.
No, the cloud hasnt made people more complacent to risks. But it also doesnt seem to have made them more attentive either. This varies from organization to organization, of course.
The most common mistake users of public cloud make is to not read their contracts and understand where their responsibilities truly lie. Often people are unclear as to when and how the creation of a server in the cloud moves from the care and security of the provider to them. Ive run into folks who mistakenly thought their cloud provider was patching servers through some back door for them. They werent and the servers went unpatched for months.
People also forget that the layer of management given to them by the cloud provider needs some security. The administrative rights used to configure and control cloud systems needs to be treated just as carefully as any other privileged user of your systems.
Another common mistake is to think that the cloud provider will have the same services that your on-premises systems did. Its true that Amazon, Microsoft and others do build in many services for customers. But before moving to the cloud you must conduct a full inventory of everything you are doing on-premises to identify gaps.
Want to learn more? Download the solution brief Securing the Cloud Inside and Out?
Properly securing public cloud resources is, in the end, no different than securing systems running on-premises. The differences, in principle, are none. The real trick to security in the public cloud is to treat it as if its just another data center.
Attempt to build security thats at least as good as what you had on-premises. Or even take the opportunity of the new build out to make improvements that you would have done on-premises if you only had the time.
From a security perspective, the cloud has been mature for years. Take a look at the intimidating list of security and compliance certifications that the major cloud providers have earned. No IT shop except the most elite (and well-funded) have ever come close to offering a platform as well secured. They have to. If the cloud providers have a major security incident, especially considering how much their security is being scrutinized, then they would be finished.
If you have poor security in the public cloud, its likely you brought it in when you walked through the door.
Learn more by downloading the solution brief Securing the Cloud Inside and Out.
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Is Cloud Computing Leading to Poor Security Practices? - Identity Week (blog)
Cloud computing pushes into the classroom, but not without challenges – Ars Technica
Enlarge / Seth Erdman, center, and his fellow students use Chromebooks while working on a lesson in a third grade class on Friday, January 16, 2015, at Walden Elementary School in Deerfield, Illinois. (Anthony Souffle)
When you think about a traditional school workflow, it's not unlike that of a business: paper is generated and moved in a systematic way between the children and the teacher. Just as cloud computing has transformed workflows in business to make them more collaborative and mobile, that same type of change has been coming to schools. Children and teachers use the power of the cloud to collaborate while accessing, storing, and sharing content.
As with business, this change is ongoing, uneven, and by no means complete. But if schools are at least partly about preparing children for the next generation of work, then the cloud needs to be a part of that preparation. Just as some businesses have struggled to transition to the cloud, schools face similar challenges. But because schools involve a specific demographicchildren from a variety of abilities and socioeconomic and linguistic backgroundstheir challenges can be even more complicated.
Slowly but surely, in spite of the issues, cloud tools are coming to the classroom. As more companies, large and small, help schools bring about this transition in a way that makes sense for teachers and children in a classroom context, we are seeing a shift to the cloud and all the advantages (and problems) that brings.
Peter Jordan is the CEO and co-founder at Knowledge Matters, a cloud service that delivers business simulations to over one-third of high schools in the US, covering subjects like management, retail, and personal finance. He says the company has been in business long enough to remember when delivering this type of content to classrooms was far more complex.
"We think the cloud has already been transformational in delivering technology to the classroom," Jordan explained. "When we started Knowledge Matters, we were literally shipping CD-ROMs to schools across the country. From a technology standpoint, as an educational software company, it was a huge challenge, as we had to troubleshoot network configurations for teachers [and other installation issues]."
Jonathan Rochelle, director of product management for Google Education, says that operational efficiency is just part of the cloud's advantage. "Teachers no longer have to take home a box of papers," he said. "They can provide feedback much faster, and they are spending more time with the students instead of [grading] papers."
That shift in the teacher-student relationship goes even deeper, says Jason Klein, assistant superintendent for technology and learning at the Maine Township High School District in Chicago. He says using cloud tools has fundamentally changed the way teachers teach and children learn in his district's schools. Instead of a teacher being the information provider and the children being responsible for learning that information, the teacher becomes a facilitator or coach in helping children find the resources they need to learn. This arrangement makes children much more active participants in the learning process, he explained.
In fact, each of the 6,500 kids in Klein's district has a Chromebook computer and access to Google tools like Google Drive and Google Docs. Rochelle says teachers manage the flow of content between them and students using Google Classroom, which gives teachers a central administrative interface to manage cloud activity in the classroom. That includes building a roster, communicating assignments to the whole class or individual students, and facilitating communication across the classroom.
Klein says this capability enables teachers to review the documents children are working on in real time. Through the document-sharing capability, children can get feedback from peers as well as teachers.
One of the great advantages about working in the cloud is the interoperability between services. If teachers want to use a module from Khan Academy, a language lesson in Duolingo, or a YouTube video from CrashCourse, they can incorporate all of that into their course work. This allows them to customize lessons for each child or group of children, taking into account a range of abilities.
Yet trying to figure out which tools to use when accessing that world of content becomes a problem in itself. Klein's district provides a set of tools, but teachers are free to supplement those with whatever options they wish. In order to decide which tools are best from the universe of choices on the Internet, teachers communicate with one another, participate with other teachers on social networks to find what's working for them, and work with the school librarians, who are trained to find good sources and toolsand teach the teachers how to find them on their own.
Sonny Hashmi, who is managing director of global governments at online content management company Box, says his company focuses on forming relationships with as many tool providers as possible. Box builds in integrations whenever it can, whether that's with Blackboard, Khan Academy, G Suite, or Office 365. "We believe in a world where solutions have to work together seamlessly," Hashmi said.
While the cloud-computing trend favors the transition to more tools like these, obstacles remain. According to Rochelle of Google, "One of our biggest challenges is providing technology solutions that require bandwidth and some computer." This is especially true when kids go home after school. The Pew Center for Research has found that, while the Digital Divide is closing, it still persists for lower-income populations in the United States. And not every school can afford to issue digital tools to each student.
Esteban Sosnik is a partner at Reach Capital, who has invested in EdTech startups such as Nearpod, a content management and administrative tool aimed at classroom teachers, and Newsela, a reading platform that delivers leveled daily news content. He says one of the biggest challenges in bringing the cloud to the classroom is finding that central management tool that simplifies taking advantage of all the different options.
"There is a bottleneck in terms of making it easy to deploy," Sosnik said. "Teachers dont want to add more complexity into the classroom." He acknowledges Google Classroom is the closest to a central classroom administrative tool that we have. But he says that there is still no single default platform where teachers and children can start their daily digital journey (and there is a tremendous opportunity for a company to become that).
Klein points out that, just as in business, this type of change requires top-down support and innovative thinking on the part of the entire school system. But it also requires practical systems in place to manage these tools and equipment, set up refresh cycles, and simply maintain the computers the children are usingwhether that's a computer for every student or a cart system where classes share computers throughout the day.
None of these impediments is insurmountable, but it takes a clear vision on the part of school systems to give teachers and students the tools they need to learn in the 21st century. "The implementation is getting better, and the cloud and connectivity are helping. We expect in three to five years' time, it will be [even] easier for teachers to use this technology in the classroom," Sosnik said.
Ron Miller is a freelance technology journalist and blogger. He writes regularly on the cloud and the enterprise.
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Cloud computing pushes into the classroom, but not without challenges - Ars Technica
Deloitte strengthens cloud options with acquisition, new jobs and studios – Cloud Tech
(c)iStock.com/tupungato
Deloitte has announced the acquisition of Day1 Solutions, a cloud consulting business, to expand its options and accelerate clients digital transformation.
The consulting giant is also adding 3,000 new US-based high tech engineering jobs, as well as opening a series of cloud studios in Orlando, New York, and Washington D.C.
Day1 Solutions is a certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, and its website now links to Deloittes cloud page. Day1 Solutions customer base extends across commercial industries and government agencies, with significant success in the public sector, Deloitte notes. Their entrepreneurial spirit and high energy will help Deloitte reimagine how technology is delivered.
Deloitte has frequently written about and released reports on the strength of the cloud ecosystem. The companys 2015 report showed cloud computing was the strongest technology investment sector for the third year running, with an overall score of 4.18 out of 5 among venture capitalists polled, ahead of mobile (4.05) and the Internet of Things (3.95). In September, Deloitte reiterated its view that cloud infrastructure, big data and analytics were among the top technologies most likely to generate greater productivity.
Cloud is the backbone of innovation and a conduit for clients to reimagine how they do business. For years, weve helped our clients view cloud integration as a critical driver for business transformation, said Ranjit Bawa, principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP in a statement.
By adding these significant investments to our portfolio, our clients will have access to deeper cloud expertise and even more innovative capabilities, as well as the talent they need to help them thrive in a fast-moving digital economy.
At the end of the day, our commitment to clients is to harness the power of cloud to accelerate their digital transformation, added Luis Benavides, founder and CEO of Day1.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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Deloitte strengthens cloud options with acquisition, new jobs and studios - Cloud Tech
21Vianet exec says cloud computing a priority for Chinese Govt – DataCenterNews Asia
The president of 21Vianet Blue Cloud, Wing-Dar Ker, spoke at DataCloud Asia. The event was held in Singapore. This was the first time the organisers of the event held the conference in Asia.
Wing-Dar joined a panel of experts at the event to discuss the trends in Asia's cloud computing industry.
Wing leads a team responsible for managing 21Vianet Blue Cloud's partnership with Microsoft's cloud services in China.
Wing spoke of how cloud computing is a strategic priority for the Chinese government and of one particular case study done by the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of commerce.
This case suggested that by 2020 the industry could experience a compound annual growth rate of 40 to 45 percent, with a potential worth of $20 billion.
"Internet companies in China are investing billions into their own cloud businesses in coming years, seeking to take advantage of a market with 680 million Internet users," says Wing.
"Cloud computing is a strategic priority for the Chinese government, which has piloted cloud schemes in a few cities, will only drive the growth of data centers further."
"With the government viewing cloud with strategic importance alongside the hypergrowth of domestic internet companies, growth momentum in China's cloud sector is assured," says Wing.
"The market size of data centers 2015 was $7.6 billion and the average growth rate in the next few years is expected to be 35 percent or above and market demand for cloud computing and internet services combined with a willingness to invest will drive infrastructure build-up in the next few years."
Wing highlighted the value foreign players in the industry could bring to the Chinese market, especially the value of foreign companies that want local partnerships in order to navigate Chinese regulations and share market expertise.
Although domestic competition may be growing, foreign companies hold the key when it comes to technology.
Wing notes that there are risks, with one most notably being the regulatory landscape as the Chinese government continues to review the best ways to regulate the sector.
Also, foreign companies need to be aware of the nature of their product in markets other than their own, as success is not certain in China.Technological advances and brand recognition don't always translate to success in this highly competitive market.
"There are also perceived security and privacy concerns. Competition is fierce as technology continues to evolve and has not matured," Wing says.
"Entering China without an experienced local partner could be detrimental to operations, let alone market penetration."
Wing spoke of how cloud and internet data service providers are increasingly mingled together. Between the IaaS providers and internet data centers in the small-to-medium sized business sector, the latter are losing out.
"IDCs need to share with public cloud providers in the enterprise areas," Wing said. "IDC customers may not just be end users anymore, but should focus on cloud service providers because cloud service providers may not want the hassle of building, managing and operating data centers."
He also discussed 21Vianet Blue Cloud's value proposition in China, noting the company is the best partner to work with in the public and hybrid cloud areas.
"Most importantly, we have accumulated IP and knowledge by working closely with the government in areas critical to China cloud compliance and regulations," he says.
Last year, 21Vianet Blue Cloud unveiled its new "Cloud Landing in China" program. The program is designed to provide global cloud computing firms with one-stop solutions for entering the China market.
"We leverage our experience and formulate structured and systematic protocols to make market entry easier," says Wing. With the government's "One Belt, One Road", another development in the China market is the growth of cloud computing into Southeast Asia and Europe.
"We are going to follow our customers to wherever they go," he says.
"There will be a lot of opportunities for us to leverage the assets and presence of our global partners in these countries."
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21Vianet exec says cloud computing a priority for Chinese Govt - DataCenterNews Asia
Cloud Computing, App Migrations Still Stump Corporations | Fortune … – Fortune
Given the rampant chatter in Silicon Valley about companies moving software and data from their data centers to a shared public cloud, you might expect they considered what that would mean for their critical business software applications.
But you would be wrong, according to one expert who helps corporations and government agencies make this journey.
"When companies move to the cloud, they're often not doing a basic engineering task which is to look at all their applications and figure out what happens if they fail," Vishwah Lele, chief technology Officer at consulting firm Applied Information Sciences, tells Fortune .
Most big companies are aware of basic best practices for cloud computing. For example, it is recommended they distribute applications and data across different data centers within one locationor "availability zone" in Amazon Web Services parlance. That means if there's a power failure in one facility, the application will keep running from another. This applies across different geographic regions as well, say from data centers between Oregon and Northern Virginia.
But because these massive data centers rely on tens of thousands of servers, the chances of a hardware failure are inevitable. The key is to figure out which of a company's applications are most critical to its ongoing operations and "build a reliability bubble" around them, Lele says.
In a blog written in the wake of two cloud outages earlier this month (one at Amazon Web Services ( amzn ) and another on Microsoft Azure ( msft ) ), Lele wrote:
Unfortunately, we cannot eliminate such cloud failures. So what can we do to protect our apps from failures? The answer is to conduct a systematic analysis of the different failure modes, and have a recovery action for each failure type.
"You look at each application, see what can go wrong, and create a check list," Lele tells Fortune now. "Then you look at the potential for failure, and figure out how to mitigate it for the most important applications."
IT professionals can think ahead to avoid a small cloud glitch from spiraling. They can, for example, add what Lele calls "reply logic" to an important application. If the application hits a snag, this logic triggers an automatic retry. It's similar to hitting reboot on your computer before calling the help desk. This logic means that if a resource is temporarily unavailable to an application, the application will know enough to retry in a few seconds instead of shutting down. This, he continues, is something that IT pros don't have to do when running applications in-house, where they manage all the systems.
Tim Crawford, a strategic advisor with AVOA, a Los Angeles-based consultancy, agreed, noting that the problem is not that public cloud services fail but that many people mistakenly think that they won't fail.
"Many enterprises assume that cloud infrastructure is resilient in away that's similar to their corporate data centers," he noted. However, in-house data centers are built with resiliency at many levels whereas public cloud infrastructure is not.
Thus cloud applications need to be smarter and more aware of what's going on around them than they had to be when running in corporate server rooms. Hence the need to add things like reply logic to the mix.
On the other hand, some industry watchers argue that companies shouldn't overthink any cloud move, but just do it.
"I think companies do enough due diligence moving to cloudsometimes even too much if they hesitate too long," says Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research. The real issue, in his view, is that once companies are already using a public cloud, they do not necessarily build and deploy their applications in a way that can adapt to unexpected outages.
The lesson from the recent AWS outage, he says, is that many new "born to the web" businesses do not write code to ensure high-availability and disaster recovery. "Even Amazon's own dashboard didn't work in this case," Mueller says. "There is too much talk before moving to the cloud and too little work once they're already in the cloud to take advantage of the cloud's capabilities and requirements."
He also points to the failure of the DYN's domain name system (DNS) last October, which took down many popular web sites, including Twitter ( twtr ) , Etsy ( etsy ) , Spotify, GitHub, SoundCloud, and Salesforce-owned Heroku ( crm ) . (A DNS serves as a directory for Internet sites and converts human-recognizable Internet domain nameslike Twitter.cominto numbers readable by the computers running the Internet. If the DNS system fails, sites can become inaccessible.)
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The lesson: "You can't rely on a single DNS provider or you have a single point of failure," Mueller says. Avoiding single points of failure is cloud computing lesson 101.
There has long been a difference in perspectives between older companies moving key existing applicationsthink an insurance company's underwriting softwareto the cloud and "newbies" that were born there.
Holger's overriding point is that big, older companies that are moving stuff have to work carefully take advantage of cloud but even born-to-the-cloud companies can screw things up.
And both groups need to give lots of thought to how their applications can make best use of a massive shared infrastructure and mitigate the risk of hardware or other failurebecause it will happen.
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Cloud Computing, App Migrations Still Stump Corporations | Fortune ... - Fortune
IBM’s Cloud Computing Holds Potential: Should You Buy? – Yahoo Finance
International Business Machines Corps IBM recent investor briefing reflected its continuing focus on being a cloud-first company. Notably, cloud revenues grew 35% to $13.7 billion for this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock in 2016. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.
The annual exit run rate for cloud as-a-service revenue increased 53% on a year-over-year basis to $8.6 billion. Moreover, IBM had more than 50 cloud centers globally and its Bluemix platform was one of the largest open public cloud deployments worldwide at the end of 2016.
We note that the impressive growth has helped IBM outperform the S&P 500 in the last one year. While the stock has gained 18.1%, S&P increased 15.3% in the same period.
Cloud Computing: Robust Growth Expectations
We note that IBMs growth expectations from cloud computing remains positive in the long haul. Management expects market opportunity in enterprise cloud to be greater than $800 billion by 2020. Moreover, the company anticipates more than 85% of enterprises to commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2018, which is positive for its hybrid cloud offerings.
As such, the overall growth expectation for the public cloud computing services market is very much bullish. According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18% over 2016 to $246.8 billion in 2017. Further, the figure will increase to $383.3 billion by 2020.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is projected to be the highest growth service driven by improvement in PaaS and massive adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT). IaaS is projected to grow from $25.29 billion in 2016 to $71.55 billion in 2020.
IBM Lags Behind in the Cloud
Despite the impressive growth figures and bullish sentiments, we note that IBM lags behind the likes of Amazon AMZN and Microsoft MSFT in the public PaaS and IaaS cloud computing markets.
According to Synergy Researchs latest report Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its dominant position in the market followed by Microsoft Azure, Alphabets GOOGL Google and IBM at the end of fourth-quarter 2016.
The research firm noted that these three have gained market share in the last one year at the expense of smaller players as well as strong performance from Microsoft and Google. However, their combined market share of 23% lags a fare bit as compared with Amazons 40%.
We believe that IBMs hybrid approach is yet to find many takers in both the public and private cloud markets. Despite significant investments first on acquiring SoftLayer for $2 billion and then spending more than $1 billion on data centers the clientele is not as impressive as Amazon or Microsoft.
China: IBMs Savior?
Per Gartner, China has become a significant IaaS cloud market. The research firm noted that While China's cloud service market is nascent and several years behind the U.S. and European markets, it is expected to maintain high levels of growth as digital transformation becomes more mainstream over the next five years.
IBM is now planning to tap into Chinas fast- growing cloud computing market through a new company formed in collaboration with Wanda Internet Technology Group. The new company will offer IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Chinese enterprises and businesses. Reportedly, IBM will have a share in revenues.
Moreover, as a part of the deal, the company will launch Watson services to China. IBM is expected to offer Watson Conversation services at the first, which will allow developers to add natural language interactions between applications and client.
Conclusion
Despite lagging in competition, we believe that IBM is developing a niche for its hybrid cloud services along with Strategic Imperatives (cognitive computing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning).
IBM Watson on Cloud is a key growth driver in IoT, healthcare and financial services end-markets. IBM Watson is anticipated to reach more than 1 billion people by the end of 2017. Moreover, Blockchain initiatives, Quantum computing, Containers are some of the other catalysts that will support growth trajectory in the long run.
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IBM's Cloud Computing Holds Potential: Should You Buy? - Yahoo Finance
North Korea will soon launch cloud computing service, says state media – NK News
The North Korean government is set to launch its own cloud computing service, a state-run outlet reported on Friday.
The service, similar to iCloud, Dropbox or Google Drive, is called Eunjong, meaning benevolent affection, local outlet Arirangmaeri said.
These days, the Information Science Technology Department, State Academy of Sciences is pushing to finish the preparation for the cloud computing service, local outlet Arirangmaeri said on Friday.
The article didnt say exactly when the service will be open to the public, but said it is close to release and that it was part of a move to catch up with the growing demand for the cloud service, it said.
If launched, Eunjongwill be North Koreas first clouding computer service: previous articles in state media have not used the term (cloud computing service).
Soon, the parallel computing service homepage Eunjong will be established, and the users will be able to enjoy data center service software service and do large scale scientific calculation using the website.
Given North Koreas strict control of the flow of information from the outside world, its unlikely Eunjong will be linked to the internet: access will most likely be restricted to the countrys closed intranet system, to which only half a million North Koreans are believed to have regular access.
In the article, the State Academy of Sciences a North Korean government body which manages the nations scientific development claimed thatEunjongs high-performance server will provide up to 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (40T FLOPS).
While the number might seem significant, one long-time North Korea IT watcher said he feels sorry for the North Koreans who would be using the technology, which is more than a decade behind its South Korean equivalent.
Just a single smartphone produced these days has one million, five million or even up to ten million FLOPS, Choi Sung, a professor at the Computer Science department at Namseoul University, told NK News.
While it is far behind South Korea, Choi said that 40T FLOPS is an impressive performance for a North Korean server.
I would sayEunjongs performance would be close to what a South Korean bank website mightprovide, he said. Due to the shortage of servers, which they would haveto spend precious foreign currency to import, it seems that the North Korean IT developers are trying to build a single powerful parallel computer, and run multiple servers on that system using the cloud computing technology.
Multiple reports by NK News indicatethat the countrys intranet is expanding. Last month, North Korea announced the launch of its highly popular Kwangwang website, an apparently intranet-based tourism website which allows users to plan holiday itineraries.
In November last year, Manmulsang, another intranet-based platform for North Korean Donju (entrepreneurs) was announced, claiming over 3.2 million accumulated internal visitors to the website in ten months.
Edited by Oliver Hotham
Featured Image: DPRK Today
The North Korean government is set to launch its own cloud computing service, a state-run outlet reported on Friday. The service, similar to iCloud, Dropbox or Google Drive, is called Eunjong, meaning benevolent affection, local outlet Arirangmaeri said. These days, the Information Science Technology Department, State Academy of Sciences is pushing to finish the preparation
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North Korea will soon launch cloud computing service, says state media - NK News
Microsoft cites ‘enormous’ opportunity in hybrid cloud and managed services era – Cloud Tech
An enormous opportunity is afoot for cloud companies as more organisations move towards implementing hybrid cloud and managed services, according to a new study from Microsoft.
The report which was conducted in association with 451 Research and which comes in at a whopping 127 pages polled more than 1700 respondents in 10 geographies, and found that almost two thirds (62%) of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes bundled with value-added services. When it came to managed infrastructure spending, just over half (54%) was on managed and security services, as opposed to 46% on the basic infrastructure.
Not entirely surprisingly given the sponsor of the study, Microsoft came out on top for public cloud providers as part of hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Azure was cited by 61% of respondents, ahead of Google (53%), AWS (46%), IBM SoftLayer (43%) and VMware (33%). Interestingly, 86% of those polled in MEA (Middle East and Africa) are Google houses albeit with only 14 respondents.
For cloud deployment interoperability, the most popular option, cited by 64% of respondents, was an on-premise private cloud with a hosted private cloud. Expanding a little further, 57% opted for on-prem private cloud with public cloud, 55% with a hosted private cloud with public cloud, and 49% with two separate public cloud or IaaS platforms.
When it came to adoption drivers of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, flexibility and choice won out, cited by almost two thirds (64%) of overall respondents, ahead of extending ITs resource capability for existing on-prem infrastructure (56%) and maximising return on existing on-prem investments (56%).
Naturally, Microsoft looks at the potential of the landscape and offers that it is uniquely positioned to help customers with their critical managed service needs, as Aziz Benmalek, Microsoft VP of worldwide hosting and managed service providers put it in a blog post. Yet the stats show potential across the wider industry in general.
More than ever before, customers are looking to a single trusted advisor to provide transformation-oriented managed services and hybrid implementation, said Melanie Posey, 451 Research vice president. Customers are looking to service providers to not only transform IT but also transform their entire business to rewire the building and support new requirements, all while keeping the lights on.
You can take a look at the full report here (email required).
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Microsoft cites 'enormous' opportunity in hybrid cloud and managed services era - Cloud Tech