Category Archives: Cloud Computing
‘Cloud computing is coming to end,’ claims Andreesen Horowitz VC – www.computing.co.uk
Cloud computing is set to come to an end, eclipsed by the shift in computational power to "the edge".
That is the claim of Peter Levine, a venture capital investor with Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital company co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen. "I think it's actually happening right under our nose," he added, suggesting that the process had already started.
It won't be led by mobile devices, as much as it will be by connected devices, such as self-driving cars, drones and other increasingly powerful devices operating on 'the edge' of the network, he said.
"It's not just mobile devices, it's all of the other things that are going to be out at the edge that will truly transform cloud computing and put an end to what we know as cloud," Levine told the Wall Street Journal's CIO Network event last week.
"The change is that the edge is going to become a lot more sophisticated. Not with mobile devices but, broadly speaking with the internet of things (IoT). Examples are self-driving cars, drones, robots and all the IoT 'objects' that will be created over the next ten years," he said.
A self-driving car, he added, "is effectively a data centre on wheels, a drone is a data centre with wings, and a robot is a data centre with arms and legs
"These devices are collecting vast amounts of information, and that information needs to be processed in real time. That is, with the latency of the network and the amount of information there isn't the time for that information to go back to the central cloud to get processed This shift is going to obviate cloud computing as we know it," argued Levine.
A typical luxury car today has around 100 CPUs in it, while self-driving cars will have even more, alongside arrays of maths co-processors to do complex, real-world 3D computations in real-time. This, suggested Levine, will become a "massive distributed computing system at the edge of the network".
He added: "We are entering the next world of distributed computing it's literally back to the future on where processing gets done because of these very sophisticated end-point devices."
It comes at a time when computers are, for the first time, able to take information directly from the environment.
"Up until now, computing has fundamentally been us humans typing things in via keyboard or a computer generating information from a database or generating log files. But this is the first time that computers are starting to [directly] collect the world's information and that data is massive.
"So it's real-world information coupled with the idea that real-time data processing will need to occur at the edge where the information is collected."
Levine cites the example of self-driving cars needing to be aware of their surroundings, such as stop signs at junctions or pedestrian crossings.
"If I had to take that data and send it off to the cloud to decide that there's a stop sign, or a human being crossing the road, that car will have blown through the stop sign and run over ten people" before the cloud would have told the self-driving car to stop.
Levine's comments echo David Isenberg's May 1997 paper, 'Rise of the Stupid Network', which argued that a combination of cheap and plentiful bandwidth, combined with ever-more power devices, would lead to power migrating to the edge of the network, while bandwidth would become a commodity.
The paper didn't go down well with Levine's employers, telecoms giant AT&T, and he left the company shortly after the paper was published.
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'Cloud computing is coming to end,' claims Andreesen Horowitz VC - http://www.computing.co.uk
IBM Q will launch this year bringing PAYG Quantum cloud computing – The INQUIRER
IBM HAS become the world's first vendor of open Quantum cloud computing.
IBM Q begins rollout today and will be accessible on a pay-as-you-use basis in common with a number of IBM products.
But, while that sounds great, it's not going to be outperforming a regular computer, but rather a catalyst to future development in the sector.
The paid version is an upgraded version of the IBM Quantum Experience, which has been given a faceliftand is open to all as a "curiosity".
Nature reports that the IBM QE has been used to help those without direct access to Quantum machines (which let's face it, is almost everyone) to get used to designing Quantum algorithms and thus build what IBM says is a community and ecosystem'.
Details so far are scant. We don't have a launch date (apart from 2017) and we don't have pricingdetails. We also don't know the pre-selected first clients which have already been chosen.
It's easy to get distracted from what the point of all this is. At one level, because IBM Q won't be any faster than a conventional cloud array, it all seems a bit daft. But with more and more stock being put in the idea of quantum as the future of supercomputing, and further advances being announced almost weekly, this is the time for companies to get in on the ground floor and grow with the new tech.
With a huge skills shortage in the IT sector, getting ready for the next big thing in computing will mean that companies aren't bitten a second time. But it's not just like switching to another dialect or language. Programmers will need to understand the limitations of Qubits.
Because Quantum demands such specific environmental factors and still requires constant tweaking, it's an ideal candidate for the Cloud, as it lets the vendor deal with the baggage, leaving the end user free to develop.
The news comes after last week, UK scientists announced the first computer to be made using DNA, which is said to be the main potential rival to Quantum.
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IBM Q will launch this year bringing PAYG Quantum cloud computing - The INQUIRER
Cloud becoming ‘dominant vehicle’ for business analytics, says new report – Cloud Tech
A new study from Informatica and Deloitte has found that cloud is well on the way to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics.
The report, which was conducted at the end of last year alongside Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and consulted more than 400 global business and technology leaders, found that cloud was either a key or important part of the analytics strategy for 91% of respondents.
In addition, self-service was considered a key component with cloud-ready organisations more likely to go down that route for data management and governance; 94% of those polled said governed self-service was important for their organisations analytics implementations.
The benefits of using cloud-based analytics are stark, according to the report; 84% of respondents said business user agility went up through governed self-service for data integration, while similar numbers agreed for data mapping (83%), data modelling (82%) and data governance (77%).
Cost reduction was naturally the primary financial aspect driving cloud analytics, but the study also showed it was the key technical driver. Interestingly, while security and compliance remained the key barrier to adoption cited by 40% of those polled security fears lessened according to companies who were further down the road of cloud implementation.
The key takeaways from our research is that cloud adoption is expanding quickly as companies find success with their first cloud analytics implementations and move to create more mature environments and drive broader adoption, said Lyndsay Wise, EMA research director in a statement.
As these environments become more mature and robust, analytics users are demanding access to their data in ways that make it fast and easy to interact with, Wise added. In this regard, governed self-service access is the great enabler of the upswell of analytic insight that companies need to stay competitive.
You can find out more about the report here (registration required).
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Cloud becoming 'dominant vehicle' for business analytics, says new report - Cloud Tech
Cloud computing increasingly mainstream in wider enterprise IT market – Consultancy.uk
Cloud computing is maturing, creating a host of opportunities for providers as more and more companies consider the technology for their IT needs. In a new report the cloud market is found to be valued at around 16% of the $1.1 trillion enterprise IT market, while continuing to grow at around 17% per year to 2020. Concerns around cost and security among potential customers has fallen, although compliance and regulatory concerns have grown.
Cloud computing is increasingly becoming part of the wider IT market, as the technology develops, needs from customers change and the price comes down. To better understand the evolving cloud computing landscape, a new report from Bain & Company, titled The Changing Faces of the Cloud, maps out the current situation as well as opportunities for the future.
The cloud market now represents around 16% of the $1.1 trillion enterprise IT market. The largest segments in the cloud arena are SaaS and public cloud infrastructure and enabling services. The market is however, projected to see strong growth to 2020, hitting average CAGR of 17%. SaaS and IaaS/PaaS are projected to see growth rates of 18% and 27% annually respectively. Private cloud infrastructure & enabling services too are projected to see growth at above 20%, coming in at 25% annually on average.
The research also found that of the total ~$375 billion in revenue growth added to the global enterprise IT pie between 2015 and 2020, 60% is projected to go towards cloud computing solutions, whether at the infrastructure level of the sales and management level.The reasons for growth, according to Michael Heric, a Bain Partner, is that Cloud providers realized that they cant compete on price alone. In response, theyve added services that make their platforms more valuable and easier to use, and customers are willing to pay for these features. This shift in thinking has been the main reason for clouds tremendous growth over these last few years.
Cloud technology is starting to mature, and with it, perceptions about its vulnerabilities and drawbacks are changing. Data security was in 2015 cited among the top three concerns of 35% of respondents, down from 42% in 2012. Uncertainties about costs and savings have seen the most significant call, down from 36% to 21% of respondents citing it within their top three. Loss of control concerns too have fall, from 22% in 2012 to 19% in 2015.
A number of areas have seen a rise in concern however, with companies increasingly concerned about regulatory or compliance conditions for cloud computing proposition, up from 21% to 27%, while questions about data portability and ownership are up slightly, from 18% to 20%. The biggest rise in concern, however, comes from lock-in conditions, up from 7% in 2012 to 22% in 2015.
The study further found that cloud the market remains relatively undeveloped. The largest part (90%) of current demand in the segment, according to the firm, stems from replacing or upgrading existing, non-mission critical applications and from the creation of new digital businesses. Its wider uptake into new business models, IT transformations and ways of working has, largely, not yet begun in the industry.
To better understand the future potential of the market, the firm considers five key groups, which were identified by the firm in a 2011 study. A follow up study considered how the groups had transformed their IT usage in relation to the cloud. The early adopters or transformational group represents around 11% of total respondents. This group was already heavily involved in the in 2010, with 44% of its IT operation in the cloud, this has since grown to 69%, with a total value of around $24 billion.
The heterogeneous group (12% of companies surveyed), whose IT priorities evolve over time and whose IT demands are highly technical, has seen its cloud as a % of total IT increase from 13% in 2010 to 36% in 2015, with a total value of around $13 billion to the market. The opportunistic adopters (21%), have diversified IT needs, and operate with sensitive data, this group has seen cloud adoption hit around 37% of IT, with a total spend of around $24 billion.
The largest group however, the slow-and-steady segment, has 43% of companies. This group has remained in wait and see mode regarding the technology, while also focused on minimising disruption while operating within clear regulatory constraints. The group has increased its share of IT in the cloud slightly, up from 1% in 2010 to 16% in 2015.
The consultancy firm also sought to identify how the different groups are likely to respond to the increasing maturity of the cloud computing market. One key shift is in the slow-and-steady group, whose appetite for the segment, the firm projects, is likely to hit around 30% of total cloud spending by 28%, as cloud as a % of total IT spending in the group also hits 30%. The transformational group will see its share of total cloud spending decrease as a % but stay relatively close in absolute terms to the 2015 result, while the transformational group will see its share of total IT spending decrease as the segment reaches saturation.
Late adopters have made a major jump in cloud use over the last 12 months. Theyre entering the cloud market in record numbers and, in a somewhat unexpected move, are using providers few anticipated, says Michael Heric, a Bain Partner in the firms global Technology Practice. This has created a shake-up among technology providers.
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Cloud computing increasingly mainstream in wider enterprise IT market - Consultancy.uk
Typo Blamed for Amazon’s Internet-Crippling Outage – CIO Today
By Jef Cozza / CIO Today. Updated March 03, 2017.
"With [this] news, Oracle is offering organizations the ultimate in choice and flexibility in where they deploy the world's most advanced database cloud for mission-critical workloads," the company said in a statement.
Full Power of Public Cloud Inside a Data Center
Since it was first introduced over a year ago, Oracle Cloud at Customer has proved popular with enterprises as a way to help bridge the gap between public cloud and on-premises deployments. While organizations look forward to moving their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from moving their data and applications outside their own datacenters, Oracle said.
The Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is designed to deliver the full power of the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service that resides in Oracle's public cloud to customers that require or prefer their databases to be located on-premises, the company said.
"Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is an ideal platform for organizations that want the benefits of the cloud brought to their datacenter," said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technologies at Oracle, in the statement. "For many years, Oracle Exadata has been the platform of choice for running mission critical Oracle databases at thousands of customers, and the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine extends this value proposition to those customers who want cloud benefits but cannot or aren't yet ready to move to a public cloud."
Subscription-Based Pricing
The new service will provide enterprises with subscription access to the Oracle database with all its usual options and features, such as real application clusters, database in-memory, active data guard and advanced security, high levels of performance, availability and security features for mission-critical workloads, the company said.
Additionally, the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is 100 percent compatible with on-premises as well as Oracle Cloud applications and databases, ensuring any existing application can be quickly migrated to the cloud without changes.
Among the features included in Exadata Cloud Machine are a mission-critical database for OLTP; analytics; mixed workloads and consolidation; a database hardware platform with NVMe Flash,and InfiniBand networking; and an advanced database cloud platform with subscription-based pricing and real-time online capacity bursting.
Oracle said the flexible cloud can be deployed either in its public cloud or inside the customer's datacenter, with Oracle managing all of the infrastructure. The new service should also facilitate migration to the cloud with software and hardware that are fully compatible.
"The business model is just like a public cloud subscription; the hardware and software is the same; Oracle experts monitor and manage the infrastructure; and the same tools used in Oracles public cloud are used to provision resources on the Cloud Machine," the company said in the statement.
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Typo Blamed for Amazon's Internet-Crippling Outage - CIO Today
Google And Coursera Collaborate For Training on Cloud Computing – News18
Coursera, an education-focused technology company, is announcing a collaboration with Google to offer Google Cloud Training courses on its platform. Developed and taught by Google experts, these courses will be available on-demand for any current or aspiring IT professionals and data engineers.
This week, Coursera is launching the first course in the Data Engineering on Google Cloud Specialization, Big Data and Machine Learning.
This course will be the first in a 5-course Specialisation. More foundational, intermediate, and advanced courses in infrastructure, machine learning, analytics, and application development are planned for launch soon.
With companies rapidly shifting their infrastructure to the cloud, the demand for cloud computing experts is growing. In fact, adoption of cloud technology is often limited not by cost, complexity, or security, but by the shortage of trained professionals available to fill open roles in cloud systems administration, data engineering, application development, and more.
Making this training more accessible is a major step toward creating a network of skilled professionals who can utilise the latest Google Cloud Platform technology to create innovative solutions to business challenges.
Offering these courses on Coursera makes it convenient for current and aspiring IT professionals, data engineers, and anyone else to access cloud training on the latest tools and technologies.
Through the Coursera platform, learners have the flexibility to take courses on their own schedules both on their computers and on a mobile app.
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Google And Coursera Collaborate For Training on Cloud Computing - News18
Cisco Debuts Umbrella: First Secure Internet Gateway in the Cloud – CIO Today
Businesses often set up virtual private networks, or VPNs, to protect against IT threats that can be introduced via remote workers using cloud services to access corporate data. Because employees don't always use those VPNs, though, Cisco has launched a new layer of protection: a secure Internet gateway (SIG) dubbed Umbrella.
Calling it "the industry's first secure Internet gateway in the cloud," Cisco said yesterday that Umbrella is designed to provide enterprise users with a safe way to access cloud services from anywhere via any device. And because Umbrella is a cloud-based service, it's fast and easy for customers to deploy without the need for new hardware or software, according to Cisco.
Built on the OpenDNS platform, Umbrella incorporates other Cisco technologies such as Cloud Web Security and Advanced Malware Protection. Those integrations enable the gateway service to inspect files before they're downloaded from potentially risky domains, and also adds new predictive intelligence capabilities to avoid other potential threats.
'Secure Onramp to the Internet'
"Before you connect to any destination, a SIG acts as your secure onramp to the Internet and provides the first line of defense and inspection," Kevin Rollinson, product marketing manager for Cisco OpenDNS, wrote yesterday in a blog post. "Regardless of where users are located or what they're trying to connect to, traffic goes through the SIG first. Once the traffic gets to the SIG cloud platform, there are different types of inspection and policy enforcement that can happen."
As a secure Internet gateway, Umbrella offers advantages over other protection strategies such as secure Web gateways, or SWGs, added Brian Roddy, who heads cloud security for Cisco. SWGs can be hard to deploy and "constantly create problems around latency and capacity," he said. By contrast, Umbrella was developed to reimagine how security is delivered, he added.
"For us, it wasn't about taking the old technology and just sticking it into the cloud," Roddy said. "We wanted to create a new layer of defense -- protecting users whether they're on and off the corporate network. We want it to be easy to deploy, be highly effective, minimize latency, support world-wide installations and support the open architectures that have made SaaS so effective."
Umbrella 'Detects Anomalies' To Predict Threats
While software-as-a-service tools such as Salesforce , Box, Google's G Suite, Office 365, WebEx, Trello and others, are widely used today, professionals who access those services from remote locations or mobile devices don't always use them via secure connections such as VPNs. In a survey conducted on behalf of Cisco last year, IDG Research Services found that 82 percent of the corporate laptop users it questioned admitted to sometimes bypassing their organizations' VPNs.
"Much of this off-network usage was for personal activities, but nearly 30 percent of the end users said they sometimes access company data without logging into their VPNs," according to IDG.
Unlike a VPN, Umbrella uses a customer's existing Cisco hardware, such as AnyConnect clients, routers or wireless LAN controllers, to "easily point Internet traffic to Umbrella whether on or off the corporate network," the company said. Umbrella "resolves over 100 billion Internet requests every day and correlates this live data with over 11 billion historical events," according to Cisco. "This is analyzed to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and create models to automatically uncover attacker infrastructure being staged for the next threat."
Cisco did not provide pricing for Umbrella, but the company is offering a free 14-day trial to each customer who signs up for the service.
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Cisco Debuts Umbrella: First Secure Internet Gateway in the Cloud - CIO Today
Oracle Expands Cloud Services with Launch of Exadata Cloud Machine – CIO Today
Tech giant Oracle is expanding its Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio with the launch of Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine, the company announced yesterday. Enterprises will be able to deploy Oracle Exadata in a number of ways, including as a cloud service inside their own datacenter, in the Oracle Cloud or in a traditional on-premises environment, the company said.
"With [this] news, Oracle is offering organizations the ultimate in choice and flexibility in where they deploy the world's most advanced database cloud for mission-critical workloads," the company said in a statement.
Full Power of Public Cloud Inside a Data Center
Since it was first introduced over a year ago, Oracle Cloud at Customer has proved popular with enterprises as a way to help bridge the gap between public cloud and on-premises deployments. While organizations look forward to moving their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from moving their data and applications outside their own datacenters, Oracle said.
The Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is designed to deliver the full power of the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service that resides in Oracle's public cloud to customers that require or prefer their databases to be located on-premises, the company said.
"Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is an ideal platform for organizations that want the benefits of the cloud brought to their datacenter," said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technologies at Oracle, in the statement. "For many years, Oracle Exadata has been the platform of choice for running mission critical Oracle databases at thousands of customers, and the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine extends this value proposition to those customers who want cloud benefits but cannot or aren't yet ready to move to a public cloud."
Subscription-Based Pricing
The new service will provide enterprises with subscription access to the Oracle database with all its usual options and features, such as real application clusters, database in-memory, active data guard and advanced security, high levels of performance, availability and security features for mission-critical workloads, the company said.
Additionally, the Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is 100 percent compatible with on-premises as well as Oracle Cloud applications and databases, ensuring any existing application can be quickly migrated to the cloud without changes.
Among the features included in Exadata Cloud Machine are a mission-critical database for OLTP; analytics; mixed workloads and consolidation; a database hardware platform with NVMe Flash,and InfiniBand networking; and an advanced database cloud platform with subscription-based pricing and real-time online capacity bursting.
Oracle said the flexible cloud can be deployed either in its public cloud or inside the customer's datacenter, with Oracle managing all of the infrastructure. The new service should also facilitate migration to the cloud with software and hardware that are fully compatible.
"The business model is just like a public cloud subscription; the hardware and software is the same; Oracle experts monitor and manage the infrastructure; and the same tools used in Oracles public cloud are used to provision resources on the Cloud Machine," the company said in the statement.
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Oracle Expands Cloud Services with Launch of Exadata Cloud Machine - CIO Today
Cloud Computing – America’s Best Racing
Cloud Computing was impressive in winning his career debut on Feb. 11 at Aqueduct and trainer Chad Brown opted to test him in a graded stakes in his second race. He made a strong bid entering the stretch of the Grade 3 Gotham Stakes but could not match strides with winner J Boys Echo. The runner-up finish, however, placed him on the Triple Crown trail for owners Klaravich Stables and William H. Lawrence.
Cloud Computing was impressive in winning his career debut on Feb. 11 at Aqueduct and trainer Chad Brown opted to test him in a graded stakes in his second race. He made a strong bid entering the stretch of the Grade 3 Gotham Stakes but could not match strides with winner J Boys Echo. The runner-up finish, however, placed him on the Triple Crown trail for owners Klaravich Stables and William H. Lawrence.
Multiple graded stakes-placed winner Quick Temper, by 1992 Horse of the Year A.P. Indy, is the dam (mother) of Cloud Computing. She finished second in the Grade 2 Silverbulletday Stakes at Fair Grounds in 2004. Grade 1 winner Halo America, by Waquoit, is Cloud Computing's grandam (maternal grandmother).
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Cloud Computing - America's Best Racing
Report: Many Federal Government Employees Oblivious of Cloud Computing Impact – Talkin’ Cloud
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Nearly half (40 percent)of federal government employees dont know if cloud computing has had a positive or a negative impact on their department or agency, according to new research from Deloitte, highlighting a major issue as government agencies continue in their push to cloud adoption and data center consolidation.
Less than one in four respondents (24 percent) say cloud computing has had a positive impact on their organization, according to DeloittesMastering the Migrationreport, which surveyed328 federal government employees from over 30 departments and agencies.
Fortypercent of respondents do not know if cloud adoption has helped or hindered their organization, and a further 31 percent say it has had neither positive or negative impact. Almost every category in which dont know was an available response, it was the most common.
The survey also found that lift and shift strategies have been the primary method of meeting the federal governments Cloud First policy. Only one in five respondents said their organization is extensively using cloud native applications (5 percent), or even piloting applications developed for the cloud (14 percent).
The promise of the cloud is huge, but the journey isnt easy, Doug Bourgeois, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP said in a statement. Cloud value cannot be achieved through technology aloneits about governance, security, people, and processes. This report validates that support for cloud in federal agencies is growing, but perceptions of its impact vary significantly. Agencies need to rethink their core development principles and strategy for going cloud native.
Nine percent of those surveyed say their cloud migration has been successful, while 41 percent characterize it as mixed, problematic, or non-existent. As usual, security was identified as the greatest concern and challenge of cloud adoption, followed by skills and budget limitations.
Asurvey last year by MeriTalkfound that 82 percent of public sector cloud adopters say their agency will increase spending on cloud computing in 2017.
Limited migrations and incomplete migration plansidentified three years after the 2011 adoption of the Cloud First policy were largely attributed to staffing and procurement challenges by an Accenture report.
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Report: Many Federal Government Employees Oblivious of Cloud Computing Impact - Talkin' Cloud