Category Archives: Cloud Computing

After a successful listing in Hong Kong this week, Alibaba Group Holding chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong said he remains focused on the long term and empowering people through technology.

Today, because of digital technology, we can enable people and our merchants to do business in a digital way. We are able to help traditional companies transform themselves into a digital, data-driven company, Zhang told the South China Morning Post this week. That was our mission from day one. We have a huge digital infrastructure and we want to use this for good, rather than just build scale.

Zhang said Alibaba is focused on trying to help its partners transform their entire business including sales, transactions, product innovation, cloud infrastructure and supply chain management.

By the end of the annual 24-hour Singles Day shopping extravaganza on November 11 this year, the Chinese technology giant reported a record-shattering 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.4 billion) of sales.

All of this took place with zero downtime, thanks to its cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement following the event.

Cloud infrastructure is critical to the future of society in fact, all future businesses will need the cloud to generate and collect data and then analyse that data to create value, said Zhang. And this requires computing power and efficiency.

Around 544,000 orders per second were processed on our Apsara cloud, which is a public cloud, added Zhang. This validates our capabilities and means we can help many other companies with their cloud needs.

Furthermore, energy consumption at Alibabas data centerdropped 70% from the previous year, saving more than 200,000 kilowatt hours of energy, according to information provided by the company.

Another new trend at this years Singles Day was the sharp increase in people using smart assistants or voice shopping to buy goods. More than one million orders were placed and processed through voice command using Alibabas smart speaker Tmall Genie this year.

New technologies means that consumer behavior changes just like the desktop to mobile internet switch, said Zhang. Voice shopping is a very important new entry point from the physical world to the digital world and we were very happy to see more and more young consumers use voice shopping through Tmall Genie.

Zhang indicated that Alibaba was looking at offering its customers more innovative ways to shop by exploring various disruptive technologies.

One of this years major trends for ecommerce companies in China, including Alibaba rivals JD.com and Pinduoduo, has been the rise of the rural consumer. Spending by shoppers in the countrys second- and third-tier cities have increased as more Chinese consumers have become affluent.

Consumer internet penetration in rural areas and communities is very important. In the past year, 70% of our new customers came from lower tier cities in China, said Zhang. Due to lifestyle changes we once again saw consumer buying behavior change.

Alibaba said Juhuasuan, its ecommerce platform that targets tier-3 cities and below, had 7,000 items that hit over a million orders and 576 items that received over 10 million orders at this years Singles Day event.

Consumers in Chinas lower-tier cities, such as Guilin, Luoyang and Sanya, have showed a higher willingness to pay when compared with those in more affluent cities like Xiamen and Zhuhai, as people in smaller Chinese cities increasingly seek an upgrade in their quality of life and experience, according to PwCs Global Consumer Insights Survey 2019 China Report, issued ahead of this years event.

Zhang said it is not just about consumption though.

We want to help them create new businesses and generate more addressable income, said Zhang. For example, by helping them sell their agricultural produce to buyers in big cities in a more efficient way using digital technologies.

In terms of the risks from the current US-China trade tensions, Zhang pointed out that China is the worlds largest consumer market with rapidly improving digital infrastructure. That is something the US will not want to lose access to.

Trade can makes things easy and partners can make things easy, said Zhang, adding that he hoped the US and China would reach an agreement as that would be good for the world.

I am very confident about Alibabas future though, said Zhang. All of our core technologies today are self-developed, such as Apsara, and that is a testament to our digital capabilities.

Alibaba, which is also listed in New York, is the parent company of the Post.

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Alibaba wants its cloud computing to help power the future - Abacus

The latest innovations in technology are set to shape the future of the business world. Industry leaders are excited about the prospects of 5G technology, cloud-based operations, and artificial intelligence. While the cloud is not a new idea to businesses, the true opportunities that it holds are just now being realized. There are many things thatcloud-based systemscan bring to your company, but the main that you should know is that implementing this technology has more pros than it does cons. The cloud is going to be a foundational element of the digital infrastructure of the future, with expectations of driverless cars, smart elevators, subways, power plants, and more being managed remotely but accurately and safely through cloud-based storage and computing of massive amounts of data. Within a company, the cloud can be transformative, as it will enable small and mid-sized businesses to rely on artificial intelligence and data analytics to inform their business decisions more wholly and quickly.

Costly IT resources can be housed through the cloud with hosting platforms like Microsoft and Amazon. These arent the only options for your business needs, and you should consider which ofthese cloud software solutions are right for your staff and operating demands.

Using a web-based service, you can choose from several web functions for your business rather than an entire application package. These services use open standards and different languages with a protocol backbone to integrate with the other parts of your companys operations. You could select a web-based service for account processing or a payroll function. There are individual services that can be chosen from a multitude of providers.

A Software as a Service approach is one of the more commonly used elements of cloud computing. It provides multiple cloud users to access a specific application. The new Office 365 is a type of SaaS, with Microsoft selling subscriptions to the entire Office suite or to the applications that the user needs the most. This a streamlined approach to cloud-based interactivity, as the end-user is able to develop a more limited use of solution-based products that deal with daily operations. The services are managed by an IT services provider, help reduce the stress on the end-user.

The Infrastructure as a Service plan establishes the basic needs for cloud operations and gives the user access to virtual machines, network functions, storage space, and dedicated hardware. The technology is a way to outsource infrastructure yet serves as a foundation for the operations of your business or another cloud-based service. Amazon Web Services is a type of IaaS, establishing message queues, services buses, virtual networks, and non-relational storage platforms to users.

A Platform as a Service brings the necessary operating systems and hardware to manage cloud applications. These systems will help increase your business efficiency without the headache that comes with planning, procuring, managing, and maintaining a companys cloud-based solution. Companies will useboth an IaaS and PaaSto manage their IT infrastructure. There are many companies that offer software development kids, making it easier for developers to create and implement their own applications.

There three primary types of cloud deployment systems, either hosted, hybrid, or an on-premise solution. In a hosted cloud solution, there is a services provider that owns, manages, and maintains the system. A hybrid arrangement combines the use of an on-premise and hosted application. On-Premise deployment is generally not cloud-based, but there are applications hosted through private clouds.

Using a cloud-based computing system will give your company access to resources that are costly to achieve through your own IT department. Cloud solutions are efficient, cost-effective, and can be acquired in a number of ways to meet your companys needs.

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IT solutions found in the cloud - AZ Big Media

Cloud computing is having a huge impact on the insurance industry, with benefits for internal processes, new customer acquisition, and policyholder loyalty. Cloud Computing has had a huge impact on all sectors, in terms of business processes, production dynamics, and in the relationship with customers, users, employees, and suppliers.

Well start by consulting industry data to have a better understanding of this impact.

According to a 2018 Gartner study, cloud users will double by 2021, while the market around this technology will increase from $153 billion in 2017 to an estimated $302 billion by 2021. According to another Gartner report, by 2022 about 90% of organizations will use cloud services. Moreover, skills in Cloud Computing are the most requested by companies in any sector, according to research from LinkedIn.

For more information on cloud computing, the different types of systems, how to best exploit the potential of this sector, and the most important future trends, read this article.

In this post, well be focusing on a specific sector: insurance. We will focus, in particular, on three aspects that in a nutshell cover the whole range of action of a company in the insurance sector. Well start from the improvement of internal processes, to winning new customers, up to the loyalty of existing customers.

But first, lets start with a quick look at how digital transformation has changed the sector.

Digital transformation has profoundly revolutionized the world of insurance.

As with other sectors, digital has greatly accelerated processes and helped simplify the dialogue between companies and customers. It has also resulted in a marked that is now crowded with new players, making the challenge for loyalty more difficult than ever before.

One way to summarize these changes is to consider that the user (therefore the insured), once a figure at the culmination of business processes, is now at the center of the business.This emphasizes the fundamental importance of personalization and the necessity of a larger investment in Customer Service and Customer Communication departments.

To go into more detail, Bain & Company and Google have identified seven key technologies that are driving digital transformation in the sector. These are technologies that have already radically transformed the world of Insurance and that will have an even greater impact in the future:

Given this brief but fundamental list, one thing is clear: these drivers of innovation will all rely on Cloud Computing and its increased computing power, the simultaneous reduction in costs, the increased flexibility and scalability, and the enormous possibilities from an omnichannel perspective.

Next, well identify the three main themes around the most important advantages of Cloud Computing in the Insurance Industry ecosystem.

As we anticipated, the first advantages of Cloud Computing systems are seen inside the organization, chief among these, the financial advantages.

Companies that use cloud systems greatly reduce the cost of purchasing hardware and software, thanks to on-demand and pay-per-use optics. They no longer have to buy local servers and data centers, which require specialized personnel to manage and maintain, and which take up physical space and consume electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And, since most services are provided on-demand, you can have access to abundant computing resources quickly, easily, and with the flexibility your business needs, and without an expensive hardware or software investment.

All of this is in favor of optimizing performance and internal processes, also because, by hosting platforms, software, and databases remotely, youre able to free up memory and computing power on individual machines within the organization.

Optimization and efficiency also apply to the production of documents, such as policies, forms, and contracts of various kinds. This constitutes a very expensive (and complex) element of insurance company processes. Today, such processes can be managed in a totally digital and cloud-native way.

This is exactly what Doxee is doing in collaboration with RGI, a leading European insurance company, with the PASS_Insurance 4.0 platform (to learn more follow this link), which supports dialogue with customers (more on this point below).

Cloud Computing allows you to collect and analyze large amounts of data (Big Data); and above all to select the most important, functional and deep data (in other words, Smart Data and Deep Data).

In other words, it is a matter of going in search of the digital traces that we all leave, daily, on the web.

Its important to underline that, in Italy, more than any other group, millennials are the largest web audience. In Italy, this is around 13 million people, who prefer the web (76% of whom are permanently connected) to research and choose the products that fit their needs; this same group is also more likely to give away their data in exchange for newsletters, downloads, requests for quotes, and other useful information or services.

Once these traces have been collected (in an omnichannel way, of course) it will be easier to identify the real audience and to further segment this audience that can be approached with targeted actions that are as tailored, as personalized, as possible.

We understand that this data-driven approach is by far the most effective way to secure new customers.

According to an analysis by Bain & Company, winning a new customer costs between 6 and 7 times more than retaining one, through a satisfactory Customer Experience.

From this, we can understand why all companies are investing resources and attention on the Customer Service department. Here, the objectives are to increase engagement first and foremost, to retain customers (customer loyalty), and to initiate effective up-selling or cross-selling actions.

Now, what is the most effective way to improve the dialogue with customers, to make it effective and increase the sense of trust?

The answer is a strategy that is not new: Its about addressing each customer, each person, in a different way, depending on their unique characteristics, behaviors, and needs. Today, this is at the center of todays new strategies and future trends.

By exploiting the power and opportunities of Cloud Computing, companies can get to know their customers in greater depth. It is the frontier of personalization, which goes beyond segmentation, to arrive at a truly one-to-one dialogue between company and customer, in interactive and omnichannel mode.

Think of how fundamental this is in the insurance sector, which is characterized by a large number of potentially very slippery touchpoints (think of the collection and payment phases; during the claims process, and including dealing with unsatisfied customers).

Thats why more and more insurance companies are relying on organizations that specialize in both cloud and personalization services. Doxee has been involved in this sector for years, and collaborates regularly with leading players such as Axa, Credem, and PosteVita.

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The Impact of Cloud Computing on the Insurance Industry - Doxee

Now that the outlook for cloud data center growth and gaming is improving, many analysts recently have had a change of heart regarding the future prospects of growth for Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA).

The primary basis for analysts' renewed expectations is the recent improvement in capital expenditures by cloud computing companies after a year of slack spending on graphics processing unit chips and other microprocessors. In addition to favorable projections for data center and PC applications growth for Nvidia's powerful GPU chips, some analysts anticipate an improving game market environment, which for years had been the predominant engine of consistent revenue growth for the company.

Nvidia received a shot in the arm from sales of Nintendo's (TSE:7974) new Switch Lite gaming console, which uses the company's robust GPU chips. Nintendo sold 1.95 million of the devices in the third quarter, leading to a 26% revenue boost in Nvidia's gaming unit over sales in its second quarter.

Nvidia has a technical edge over its rivals, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC). It is the current GPU leader in data center applications as well as for gaming end uses and threatens Intel on artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Vivek Arya, an analyst at Bank of American Merrill Lynch, believes the company will greatly benefit from this technical edge in the burgeoning artificial intelligence frontier, most notably the ability of machine learning techniques to accurately listen, comprehend and, most importantly, to speak language contextually. Arya's estimate for the company's growth rests, in large part, on consistent increases in its data warehouse sales (including AI end use).

The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $1.78, down from $1.84 a year ago, yet well above the $1.58 analysts surveyed by FactSet had anticipated. Net income declined 27% to $899 million. Sales dropped to $3.01 billion from $3.18 billion.

Although the company is viewed favorably by many analysts, it should be noted that although the cloud computing sector has grown rapidly, chip demand is tied to continued robust capital spending by companies such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and IBM (NYSE:IBM), who are looking to join the cloud and hybrid computing crowd.

Accurately predicting data center sales is a difficult task. Since sales in data computing centers is a key component for some analysts' sanguine expectations, the risk, however remote, is that if spending should slow in this sector, if only momentarily, Nvidia may disappoint in the near term.

It won't be smooth sailing in the short run, however, as the company acknowledges that the decline in revenue isn't over. Indeed, Nvidia's revenue forecast in the current quarter of around $2.95 billion came in short of analysts' expectations.

Gaming revenue, which made up more than half of overall sales for the third quarter, increased strongly, though it was still lower than for the same period last year. Additionally, though it has been the market leader in GPU design, Nvidia can expect increasing competition, particularly from longtime rival AMD, which recently achieved a significant milestone. Last year, the company introduced its 7 nanometer-based Rome server chips in 2H; smaller nanometer chips are more powerful.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any of the securities referenced in this article.

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Nvidia Poised to Benefit From Cloud Computing Rebound - Yahoo Finance

Microsoft and AT&T have beefed up their strategic partnership, announcing a new offering where AT&Ts growing 5G network will be able to run Azure services.

The companies will be opening select preview availability for network edge compute (NEC) technology. The technology weaves Microsoft Azure cloud services into AT&T network edge locations closer to customers, as the companies put it.

Microsoft and AT&T first came together earlier this year, with the former somewhat stealing the thunder of IBM, who had announced a similar agreement with AT&T the day before.

While the operator will be using Microsofts technology to a certain extent the press materials noted it was preferred for non-network applications the collaborative roadmap, for edge computing and 5G among other technologies was the more interesting part of the story. The duo noted various opportunities that would be presented through 5G and edge. Mobile gaming is on the priority list, as is utilising drones for augmented and virtual reality.

Regarding AT&Ts personal cloudy journey, the commitment to migrating most non-network workloads to the public cloud by 2024 was noted, while the commitment for the operator to become public-cloud first was reaffirmed.

We are helping AT&T light up a wide range of unique solutions powered by Microsofts cloud, both for its business and our mutual customers in a secure and trusted way, said Corey Sanders, Microsoft corporate vice president in a statement. The collaboration reaches across AT&T, bringing the hyperscale of Microsoft Azure together with AT&Ts network to innovate with 5G and edge computing across every industry.

After many false starts remember Verizons ill-fated public cloud product offering? telco is finding a much surer footing in the cloud ecosystem. As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger put it in August: Telcos will play a bigger role in the cloud universe than ever before. The shift from hardware to software is a great opportunity for US industry to step in and play a great role in the development of 5G.

You can read the full Microsoft and AT&T update here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Excerpt from:

Microsoft and AT&T expand upon partnership to deliver Azure services on 5G core - Cloud Tech

Features Hub Opinion

4 days ago | Jamie Bourassa

The IT architecture at the heart of todays healthcare innovations is shifting to the edge. Schneider Electrics Jamie Bourassa explores

Today, IT within the healthcare industry is undergoing profound changes. This has been driven, in part, by the development of advanced new treatments, including robotics, analytical imaging and robust data networks, which enable the lessons learned from pioneering medical practitioners to be distributed to peers around the world, more rapidly than ever before.

For healthcare providers, ensuring a quality environment of patient care is paramount. New technologiesfrom digital imaging to security-enhancing baby finders to always-on wearable technologyare helping to reduce errors, improve care, and decrease costs simultaneously.

In the 2019 Global Health Care Outlook Report Deloitte states that, there is an exponential increase in the pace and scale with which digital healthcare innovations are emerging. Digital technologies are supporting health systems efforts to transition to new models of patient-centered care and helping them develop smart health approaches to increase access and affordability, improve quality, and lower costs.

Such disruptive digital technologies described by Delloite include Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications; all of which are helping medical professionals diagnose and treat patients with increasing speed, quality and accuracy. However, underneath them, the role of the IT system and in some cases, the data centre, has become increasingly important.

With the emergence of these disruptive technologies, the adoption of a new hybrid IT systemcombining the ubiquitous nature of the cloud with local computing resource closest to where healthcare professionals both create data and need access to itis both changing the business models of many health organisations and helping to solve many of their associated problems.

Consider, if you will, the impact of robotics on new medical treatments, those specifically used in modern surgical procedures. It is now possible for the most advanced medical instruments to carry out the most complex surgeries, under the control of a doctor who is positioned in a room separate to the patient undergoing treatment.

In this case, the surgical team will be surrounded by monitors and control systems, which they use to direct robotic equipment through the procedure. Miniature cameras operating both close to, and often inside, the patient, relay images that are analysed by the on-site IT equipment allowing surgeons to make life-changing decisions with greater accuracy and less risk of error than ever before.

Although not a subject yet synonymous with the healthcare industry, such IT equipment is an archetypal example of an edge computing deployment.

Latency, for example, is a vital factor; the images have to be relayed and analysed in real time for the treatment to be effective. Using a remote server somewhere in the cloud is a poor option for such applications, and so the necessary IT equipment must be positioned close to the point of use.

Typically, racks of IT equipment, or micro data centres, will be found in networking closets near to the control room in which the surgeon operates as will Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs), which are used to protect the equipment itself from power surges or outages. In this case, resiliency and availability are absolutely essential to the healthcare organisation.

Another consideration might be Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) functionalities. For example, as imaging information, which is essential to the surgical operation, is analysed locally, key data points are shared via the cloud to other medical systems around the world.

These data pools will analyse and document outcomes of similar surgeries that have taken place, forming a feedback loop that uses a database of crowd-sourced information. In this way, the lessons learned by surgeons pioneering advanced medical techniques can be disseminated around the world rapidly, increasing awareness of new and potential treatments that benefit humankind in a manner that was previously unimaginable.

Finally, data security is another key aspect for the healthcare IT professional. The IDC Data Centre Operational Survey, published in January 2019, found that 45 percent of respondents cited data security and compliance as the #1 issue they are tackling. Within the same survey IDC found that 17 percent of respondents had also experienced a physical security breach in the past year. Furthermore, IDCs March 2018 Enterprise Data Centre Edge Survey highlighted cyber and physical security as top concerns for businesses exploring edge computing deployments.

Since the technologies that run healthcare are becoming more and more of an extension of IT, these assets require a higher degree of both physical security and cyber security. How does one, for example, ensure that patient information, and indeed data centres and server rooms, remain safe and secure at all times? There are of course the software and cyber security services that an IT Manager must employ, but the biggest risk to patient information remains with human error; an unauthorised person gaining phyical access to its IT system.

Physical security therefore becomes paramount to the healthcare organisation and whether through ID cards, environmental monitoring or indeed, via secure access to IT racks or network closets, the protection of the patients data remains crucial.

Its clear to see that as healthcare evolves so will the technology architectures that supports it. However, in order to enable these technologies, healthcare facilities need a rock-solid physical infrastructure to support their assets.

Edge computing is the IT architecture required to deliver these new and digitised medical services, ensuring that patient care and treatment remain the primary concerns for medical professionals and not the resiliency of their IT systems.

So why should IT Managers within the healthcare industry take note of the edge? The answer is simple. This computing architecture is directly supporting tomorrows advancements in medical surgery, patient treatment and recovery.

In the future, as medical services continue to become more digitised, the challenges that accompany them the need for continuous power, avoidance of Internet congestion or low latency, the security of IT, data and rapid access to patient information can only be enabled by localised edge computing systems.

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AI, Cloud Computing and IoT: How digitalisation is driving dramatic IT changes in healthcare - Techerati

KIRKLAND, Wash. The Seattle area offers a rich smorgasbord of geeky tech-as-a-service offerings ranging from software as a service, to gaming as a service, to pizza as a service.

Now you can add farming as a service to the list.

Thats what Infarm is going for, with hydroponic plant-growth cabinets that shrink the acreage needed to grow fresh greens to fit in a grocery-store aisle. The startup, based in Berlin, Germany, has just opened up its first North American farms inside a pair of QFC supermarkets east of Seattle, at Bellevue Village and here at Kirklands Urban Plaza.

Its a merger of agriculture and technology, Emmanuel Evita, Infarms global communications director, told me during todays first harvest in Kirkland.

The process began a few weeks earlier at a distribution center in Seattles Georgetown neighborhood, where the seedlings for herbs, kale and lettuce got their start. After about a week, Infarms urban farmers transferred the plants to on-site grocery cases, where theyve been spending the past few weeks reaching maturity in a closed, temperature-controlled environment..

LED lights shine with a magenta glow thats optimized for growth, while a hydroponic system feeds and waters the greenery. The plants sit in circular trays that are designed to give the roots more room as they grow. Infarm says its process uses 95% less water and 75% less fertilizer than soil-based agriculture.

Infarms cloud-connected sensors keep track of more than 200,000 plants that cycle through the system every month.

The idea is to have a global network thats also hyperlocal, Evita said. Its grown in stores, hyperlocal. But its global: Each of these farms is connected to the cloud, if you will, where we collect data from all of our farms around the world. At any farm, at any time, we know the pH, the temperature, the nutrient levels. We know everything about whats happening to the plants, and we can adjust accordingly.

Story continues

Infarm was founded in Germany back in 2013 by a trio of entrepreneurs, and has since spread out to supermarkets across Europe. Among its partners are retail heavyweights including Amazon Fresh in Germany, Marks & Spencer in Britain, and Metro in France. In June, Infarm announced a $100 million funding round led by London VC Atomico.

The company is one of several ventures aiming to capitalize on vertical farming, with varying degrees of success. One such startup, Plenty, has attracted funding from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and other high-profile techies but announced earlier this month that it was putting its plans to build a 100,000-square-foot indoor farm in the Seattle area on hold.

About a year ago, QFC executive Suzy Monford came across Infarm during a visit to Europe. She sold her colleagues at Kroger, the grocery chains parent company, on the idea of forming the first U.S. partnership. Infarms cabinets are due to start popping up at about a dozen more QFC stores after the holidays and could put down roots with Krogers other divisions as well.

The value proposition focuses on getting fresh produce including salad staples such as lettuce and kale as well as basil, cilantro, dill, mint and parsley to customers who rarely get out of the city or down to the farmers market.

We are hoping to shorten the distance between where food is produced and where its consumed, Evita said. In 2050, therell be 7 billion people living in cities, and we want to do what we can to help feed these people in a sustainable way. What you see here is the beginning.

He offered me a snippet of the just-harvested cilantro with gloved hands. After rolling the leaf to release its aroma, I chewed the sample and was reminded of the fresh leaves of clover and lambs quarters that I munched on when I was a farmboy in Iowa. It was enough to make me believe Infarms claim that conventionally grown greens lose 45% of their nutrients by the time they arrive at the supermarket.

But dont just take my word for it: Christiane Leibrandt, a German-born transplant to Kirkland, was the first shopper to sample the basil and give a review. Really delicious, she said. I love basil and use it a lot. The flavor is really rich.

Freshness comes at a premium: Infarms lettuce sells for $2.99, compared with the $1.99 price for a head of organic leaf lettuce on the next aisle over. But that $2.99 compares more favorably with the price charged for other brands of living, hydroponically grown butter lettuce.

The acid test came when I brought a head of Infarms caravel lettuce home and pulled off a leaf for our canaries. The birds love the lettuce we grow in the back garden, but theyre not so crazy about store-bought stuff.

For what its worth, the leaf was pecked down to the stem in a half-hour.

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Infarm plants its blend of vertical farming and cloud computing in QFC grocery stores - Yahoo Tech

Brace yourselves, because Im about to share a theory that may be a little unpopular: I believe its only a matter of time before Microsoft Azure overtakes AWS as the dominant force in the world of public cloud.

I know that may sound crazy, and many of you are probably already reaching for the close tab button, but hear me out.

Its no secret that Bezos cloud computing division is currently sitting pretty as market leader, having capitalised incredibly effectively on its first mover advantage while its rivals initial efforts stalled. By cementing its reputation as the biggest force in the cloud industry, it has attracted a number of high-profile customers, but it has struggled to make a major splash within large, established enterprises.

You know who hasnt, though?

Microsoft.

While AWS has always been a favourite of startups and developers, Microsoft has concentrated firmly on the enterprise and met with remarkable success. To sweeten the deal, Microsoft has also been busily releasing a number of business-friendly features, such as its Azure Arc platform, which is designed to make it easier to consume and deploy its services across a large enterprise estate. In fact, any time Ive spoken to a CIO who hasnt yet moved to the cloud but is planning to, Azure has been a key part of their roadmap.

The stated reason for this is usually well, it works with all of our existing systems, which is a simple yet compelling point; if your on-prem servers are primarily running workloads like Active Directory, SQL Server and Exchange Server instances, opting for Microsofts cloud platform is sort of a no-brainer. Add in the fact that most large businesses are likely to be using Microsofts Office and Windows software (and even potentially Windows Server) and the logic becomes apparent.

More importantly, however, Microsoft has learned how to play nicely with others. Azure has always been a more open platform than most have given it credit for, but the addition in recent years of full native support for the likes of Linux and VMware show just how far its come. Its making a real effort to be as flexible as possible, allowing customers to run the workloads that they want in the way they want to run them.

This includes multi-cloud environments, which is the new hotness for businesses that want to avoid vendor lock-in and increase redundancy protection. Microsoft is more than happy to support multi-cloud deployments, if thats what the customer wants.

Amazon? Not so much. As we discussed on this weeks episode of the IT Pro Podcast, there have been recent reports that suggest that AWS partners are banned from even using the term multi-cloud, presumably on the basis that as the current top of the pile giving customers the option of using multiple providers only increases the risk that theyll ditch AWS for a better option. Note that in that scenario, the emphasis is not so much on giving customers the best possible option but on trying to hide from them the fact that other providers exist.

Amazon is undoubtedly on the cutting edge as far as tech development goes; its pioneering work on machine learning, serverless computing and function as a service tools are evidence enough of that. Its enterprise support that will determine the true winner of the cloud wars, however, and in this area, AWS is leagues behind Microsoft.

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Microsoft, not Amazon, is going to win the cloud wars - IT PRO

Businesses and organizations of all sizes are finally embracing cloud computing. Even holdout organizations like some large government agencies are starting to deploy private clouds, or hybrids that contain some mix of private and public cloud infrastructure. The benefits of cloud computing are numerous and well-known at this point. They include near infinite expandability, having an external provider worry about maintaining the base infrastructure, and the ability to spin up new servers or services in just a few seconds.

But the most advanced enterprises are taking cloud computing a step further, into the realm of containerization. The concept of containers is a pretty brilliant one because it provides all the benefits of cloud computing, like infinite expandability, but also provides individual control over each container, which is essentially a fully-operational and independent virtual machine.

A container can be created to fill almost any need, from a tiny microservice to a full operating system. And because each container has all the resources that it needs within its perimeter, it can easily be transported to other computing environments, such as moving from a development cloud to a production environment. Some large enterprise networks might deploy, move or modify thousands of containers every day.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity has been slow to catch up with advancements in containerization, and most traditional security products have very little visibility into containers running in the cloud. The closed and independent nature of containers means that cybersecurity scanning from the outside will yield limited results. And because most cybersecurity programs have little to no insight about how containers should and do work, even if a container is successfully scanned, the scanning program may not understand if the container is operating properly or not.

There are other issues as well. Containers can expand if they need more resources and might even be deployed or destroyed nearly instantly as needed. Most cybersecurity programs, especially things like scanners that check the network on a schedule, will almost always be operating with old information. And because containers are part of a network of other containers, they need to coordinate with one another and with the container orchestration software like Kubernetes or Docker. That causes an explosion of so-called east to west internal traffic, which is often not monitored by cybersecurity defenses.

The NeuVector container security platform was created specifically to safeguard containerized environments. In fact, its deployed as a privileged container itself within the environment that it will be protecting. From its position within the containerized environment, it can monitor all Layer 7 network traffic, including that moving between containers and the host orchestration software. In this way, it can protect against attacks made against individual containers or the entire environment.

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Review: How NeuVector protects containers throughout their lifecycle - CSO Online

Qurate Business Intelligence has recently announced the incorporation of a new report entitled Cloud Computing Stack Layers Industry to its growing repository. Emphasizes the scene of recent business along with historical records, demanding trends and global reach to the market depending on type, size and applications. They have used different techniques for selecting graphical presentation this report, such as infographics, graphics, images and flow charts that help you get a better perspective of the readers. Well it explained the SWOT analysis has been used to understand the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing the business. We analyzed the business profiles of the main stakeholders to understand the successful strategies adopted by them.

Top Leading Players Studied in Cloud Computing Stack Layers Industry: Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, IBM, Google Cloud Platform, SAP, Rackspace, H&P Helion, OVH, Avaya, Microsoft Azure, Oracle

Cloud Computing Stack Layers Industry Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers

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Cloud Computing Stack Layers Industry Research Goals:

The research is based on varied secondary and primary data sources. The primary sources include access companys annual reports, product literature, government releases, industry magazines, paid sources and government magazines. Gathered data is verified by conducting paid primary interviews with industry experts.

Enquire Here For Report Customization: https://www.qurateresearch.com/report/enquiry/BnF/world-cloud-computing-stack-layers-market/QBI-ICR-BnF-129820

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