Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing, within addressable market segments, will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025, according to Gartner analysts.

Gartners cloud shift research includes only those enterprise IT categories that can transition to cloud, within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets.

The analysts find that by 2025, 51% of IT spending in these four categories will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 2022.

Almost two-thirds (65.9%) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7% in 2022.

Gartner research vice president Michael Warrilow says, The shift to the cloud has only accelerated over the past two years due to COVID-19, as organisations responded to a new business and social dynamic."

He says, "Technology and service providers that fail to adapt to the pace of cloud shift face increasing risk of becoming obsolete or, at best, being relegated to low-growth markets.

According to Gartner, in 2022, traditional offerings will constitute 58.7% of the addressable revenue but growth in traditional markets will be much lower than cloud.

Demand for integration capabilities, agile work processes and composable architecture will drive continued shift to the cloud, as long-term digital transformation and modernisation initiatives are brought forward to 2022.

Technology product managers should use the cloud shift as measure of market opportunity. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner.

Ongoing disruption to IT markets by cloud will be amplified by the introduction of new technologies, including distributed cloud. Many will further blur the lines between traditional and cloud offerings, the analysts state.

Enterprise adoption of distributed cloud has the potential to further accelerate cloud shift because it brings public cloud services into domains that have primarily been non-cloud, expanding the addressable market.

Organisations are evaluating it because of its ability to meet location-specific requirements, such as data sovereignty, low-latency and network bandwidth.

To capitalise on the shift to cloud, Gartner recommends technology and services providers target segments where the shift is occurring most aggressively, in addition to seeking new high-growth cloud opportunities.

For example, infrastructure-related segments have a lower level of cloud penetration and are expected to grow faster than segments such as enterprise applications that are already highly penetrated. Providers should also target specific personas, adoption profiles and use cases with go-to-market initiatives.

Gartners research on cloud shift provides a high-level view of the market impact of cloud computing by measuring the ratio of enterprise IT spending on public cloud services compared with traditional (non-cloud) for a given set of market segments.

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Public cloud computing spend to overtake traditional IT - IT Brief Australia

Salesforce, the worlds largest cloud-based software company, is reportedly working on its own NFT product, called the NFT Cloud.

Salesforces CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor revealed the plans to the companys employees during a sales kickoff on Wednesday, sources close to the matter revealed.

The companys co-CEOs shared their vision for an NFT cloud service that would enable artists to create content and release it onto NFT marketplaces. People that reportedly attended the meeting told CNBC that they referenced the NFT collection Pepsi released last December, saying that the Mic Drop collection is an example of a good foray into the industry.

NFTs issued through Salesforces NFT cloud platform could be released to marketplaces like OpenSea, where they could access billions of dollars worth of liquidity.

According to CNBCs source, Salesforce also said that it could integrate the tool into its own ecosystem and enable all of the NFT transactions to be more easily managed. A marketplace owned and operated by Salesforce would then remove the need to have the platform connected to OpenSea and potentially transfer all that trading volume directly to Salesforce.

And while the cloud computing giants foray into NFTs is the first time the company has dipped its fingers in the new asset class, comments and actions from Salesforces top executives hinted at this months ago.

Mathew Sweezy, the director of market strategy at Salesforce, said that 2022 sill see pioneering brands explore adding additional utility through NFTs.

To unlock their full potential, brands are going to have to start creating utility via the token, Sweezey wrote in a blog post. In 2022, youre going to hear a lot more about NFTs, and there will be winners and losers.

Sweezey said the latest project from Time magazine was a great example of how NFTs can be used beyond the novelty phase. Last spring, Time released TIMEPieces, a collection of NFTs giving owners access to magazine content and events.

Salesforces interest in the NFT space stems back to the release of TIMEPieces, as the magazine is owned by Marc Benioff and his wife. In November, Time established a partnership with Galaxy Digital to add Ethereum (ETH) to its balance sheet, making it the first leading media company to do so.

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Cloud computing giant Salesforce is working on an NFT platform - CryptoSlate

Companies have an option of using IT infrastructures without building, maintaining, and even owning them. They can do that through pay-as-you-go services from cloud providers. Some of the services they can access through this option are storage, computing capacity, and databases. These possibilities were not initially available for small and medium-level businesses.

Agriculture is one of the sectors that has benefited from cloud computing applications. This is an appropriate marriage between the latest invention and the oldest sector. Technology is crucial in agriculture because of increased population, limited farmland, unfertile soil, and climate change.

The article highlights how cloud computing has transformed agriculture.

Experts collect data on crops that farmers have been growing in recent years to provide them with the insights that guide them on what to plant next.

They also get weather data of a specific region and weather forecasts for future periods. Farmers can make crop-related decisions based on the cloud computing data they receive.

Analysts provide soil profiles as part of soil information. They use historical patterns of soil to forecast future trends. Soil experts evaluate soil acidity and alkalinity, changes in the soil quality and composition. So cloud computing is used to store and analyze soil information.

The growth of different crops is controlled in various regions and at regular intervals. Such a process provides a comparison of the present growth trends and the previous growth patterns. The analytics is applicable to stored data in order to avail growth tracking insights.

Authorities use cloud computing to store farmers data, which includes crop type, lands, yield, and required help. Such information is useful for future strategies and better resource allocation.

Further, the technology provides solutions to the common challenges farmers encounter. This is made possible by the quick response time from experts. They can provide solutions through cloud computing platforms such as Telemedicine. On the other hand, farmers can access these solutions through their websites and apps.

For many years farmers in the rural areas have not been able to sell their produce directly to the consumer because of middlemen, which has led to farmers being exploited in the process. However, technology such as cloud technology helps farmers to sell directly to retailers and consumers. This is possible due to a cloud computing-enabled agricultural management information system. The web-based information system provides farmers with up-to-date information about the market, sowing crops, weather, fertilizer, and much more.

Further, experts and scientists in the agriculture research station can now share their recommendations and discoveries about conventional agricultural techniques and fertilizer in the cloud.

Cloud-based technology is still developing, but so far, it is helping farmers nurture their crops the same way doctors treat their patients. Instead of viewing farmers as a homogenous field of crops, they will see an individual plant.

Experts recommend using cloud-based mobile applications, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and other automated driving technologies. Indeed, data is an integral part of this landscape, and the goal is to help farmers double their yields and farm better.

Originally posted here:

How Cloud Computing is Reshaping the Agriculture Industry - Startup.info

Mentions of cloud computing within the filings of companies in the aerospace and defence sector fell 31% between the second and third quarters of 2021.

In total, the frequency of sentences related to cloud computing between October 2020 and September 2021 was 94% higher than in 2016 when GlobalData, from whom our data for this article is taken, first began to track the key issues referred to in company filings.

When companies in the aerospace and defence sector publish annual and quarterly reports, ESG reports and other filings, GlobalData analyses the text and identifies individual sentences that relate to disruptive forces facing companies in the coming years. Cloud computing is one of these topics - companies that excel and invest in these areas are thought to be better prepared for the future business landscape and better equipped to survive unforeseen challenges.

To assess whether cloud computing is featuring more in the summaries and strategies of companies in the aerospace and defence sector, two measures were calculated. Firstly, we looked at the percentage of companies which have mentioned cloud computing at least once in filings during the past twelve months - this was 67% compared to 28% in 2016. Secondly, we calculated the percentage of total analysed sentences that referred to cloud computing.

Of the 20 biggest employers in the aerospace and defence sector, Thales SA was the company which referred to cloud computing the most between October 2020 and September 2021. GlobalData identified 47 cloud-related sentences in the France-based company's filings - 0.3% of all sentences. Leonardo SpA mentioned cloud computing the second most - the issue was also referred to in 0.3% of sentences in the company's filings. Other top employers with high cloud mentions included General Dynamics Corp, BAE Systems Plc and Leidos Holdings Inc.

Across all companies in the aerospace and defence sector the filing published in the third quarter of 2021 which exhibited the greatest focus on cloud computing came from Bharat Electronics Ltd. Of the document's 3,465 sentences, five (0.1%) referred to cloud computing.

This analysis provides an approximate indication of which companies are focusing on cloud computing and how important the issue is considered within the aerospace and defence sector, but it also has limitations and should be interpreted carefully. For example, a company mentioning cloud computing more regularly is not necessarily proof that they are utilising new techniques or prioritising the issue, nor does it indicate whether the company's ventures into cloud computing have been successes or failures.

In the last quarter, companies in the aerospace and defence sector based in Western Europe were most likely to mention cloud computing with 0.11% of sentences in company filings referring to the issue. In contrast, companies with their headquarters in the United States mentioned cloud computing in just 0.08% of sentences.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Detection for Light Armoured Vehicles and Stand-Alone Protection

Military-Approved Ruggedised Products Including Amazon Cases and 19in Racks

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Filings buzz in the aerospace and defence sector: 31% decrease in cloud computing mentions in Q3 of 2021 - Army Technology

According to one source, it is estimated that the global cloud computing market could exceed $900 billion by 2026. Even if this estimate is a bit aggressive, there is no question that the market is vast and growing fast.

Some major players dominate the sector, but there are also niche players. This assortment offers investors a massive opportunity and a plethora of options to play this red-hot market, as these three stocks show.

Image source: Getty Images.

When most people think of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), they likely think of the incredible e-commerce business and Amazon Prime, but its cloud business is increasingly the key to its success. Instead of seeing Amazon as an e-commerce business with a cloud segment attached, many investors are starting to see that it is actually the other way around. And the recent earnings release illustrates this point.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is its cloud computing business, and the segment has grown from $35 billion in net sales in 2019 to over $62 billion in 2021 -- a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 33%.

The segment's growth is also accelerating. Year over year, revenue growth for 2021 was 37%. Even better, the segment is highly profitable. In 2021, AWS produced an operating margin of 30%, as shown below.

Data source: Amazon. Chart by author.

Amazon's total sales were $470 billion in 2021, an increase of 22%. So the company still derives most of its revenue from sources other than AWS. However, AWS is much more profitable than the rest of the business. In fact, this segment was responsible for a whopping 74% of operating income in 2021, despite accounting for only 13% of sales.

AWS is a terrific reason to be bullish on Amazon stock for years to come.

Like Amazon, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) is a titan in the cloud services industry. The company recently released its full-year 2021 earnings, and the results were spectacular across the board. Total revenue grew to $258 billion, a 41% increase over 2020. Results for 2020 were dampened by COVID-19's negative effect on advertising spending, so it is essential to keep this increase in context. Looking back to 2019, the CAGR in sales is still impressive at 26%. Diluted earnings per share in 2021 were equally remarkable at $112.20.

The Google Cloud segment is growing rapidly. Total cloud sales in 2021 reached $19.2 billion, up from $13.1 billion in 2020 and $8.9 billion in 2019. Unlike AWS, Google Cloud is not yet profitable, posting an operating loss of $3.1 billion in 2021. However, this loss narrowed significantly from 2020, which may indicate that the segment will scale to profitability soon. In the meantime, Alphabet has the advantage of its highly profitable advertising business to power its income.

The stock appears reasonably valued with a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just over 25. As shown below, this is a lower P/E than it has traded for since the stock market's recovery from the March 2020 crash.

GOOG PE ratio. Data by YCharts.

Alphabet has also announced that the stock will have a 20-for-1 split in July. This is exciting news for investors who may find it challenging to accumulate shares due to their high price.

A burgeoning cloud segment and high-octane advertising business make it an excellent stock for long-term investors.

DigitalOcean Holdings (NYSE:DOCN) offers a chance for more adventurous investors to buy shares of a smaller, growing cloud enterprise. In many ways, DigitalOcean is everything that Google and Amazon are not.

Its target market is small to medium-size businesses, whereas Amazon and Google are geared more toward large corporations. Simplicity, straightforward pricing, and excellent customer service are how DigitalOcean seeks to separate itself from the pack. The company estimates that it will have a $116 billion addressable market by 2024 within its target market.

The company has experienced rapid growth in recent years, going from $203 million in annual revenue in 2018 to an estimated $427 million in fiscal 2021. This is a CAGR of over 28%. Along with this, DigitalOcean reports adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) that went from $39 million to $130 million in the same period. Perhaps most encouraging is that revenue growth is accelerating and is expected to hit 34% in 2021. The chart below shows the company's revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and revenue growth rate over the past several years.

Data source: DigitalOcean. Chart by author.

The stock has been decimated recently along with the general market sentiment away from growth stocks. This might offer long-term investors a compelling entry point. The stock currently trades over 55% down from its 52-week high. A small growth stock like DigitalOcean also carries more risk than megacaps like Amazon and Google, so investors should trade according to their risk tolerance.

The cloud computing business is booming, and should continue to do so for many years. Investors have several options to take advantage of this, including megacaps with wide-ranging services and niche providers that focus on small and mid-size companies. All three of the above stocks should serve long-term investors well over the next several years.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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3 Top Cloud Stocks to Buy in February - The Motley Fool

Cloud computing jobs are creating ample opportunities to gain experience in clouds

The global industries are adopting cloud computing for adopting digital transformation efficiently and effectively. There is no one in the tech world who has no knowledge about cloud computing as well as its types. Thus, aspiring techies and students are highly interested to work as cloud engineers, cloud architects, and many more. There are multiple jobs in cloud computing available in the global tech world at reputed companies with lucrative salary packages. Lets explore some of the top cloud computing jobs to apply for in February 2022.

Location: Malaga, Spain

Responsibilities: The technologist should compose a POC and MVP to validate ideas and act as an expert consultant leading cloud-native initiatives while producing relevant deliverables. It is necessary to serve as a cloud native evangelist, consult, as well as offer technical guidance on cloud-native solutions governance. There should be proper conduct of technical reviews of products to compare and evaluate applicability.

Qualifications: The candidate needs to have deep expertise in solution architecture and sufficient experience in the development of new solutions, service offerings, large-scale software development, Agile software development methodologies, and DevOps practices. There should be experienced with cloud computing as well as open-source solutions.

Click here to apply

Location: New York, USA

Responsibilities: The lead should drive the successful adoption as well as onboarding of Google Cloud to help customers realize the business value, create value for customers while building a joint plan with identified objectives. It is essential to develop strategic relationships while guiding IT executives to unlock the full value of the cloud.

Qualifications: There must be a Bachelors degree with 15 years of customer-facing experience and a Masters degree in a management or technical field with 20 years of experience. There should be hands-on experience with data center migration strategies and sufficient knowledge of the Google Cloud ecosystem.

Click here to apply

Location: Noida, India

Responsibilities: The engineer should leverage new Amazon and Azure technologies as well as advanced Adobe command and control systems to advance the next-gen cloud management solution. It is needed to develop and support the upgade systems for enterprise customers as well as cloud-hosted enterprise offerings.

Qualifications: There should be hands-on experience with cloud hosting, AWS, Linux, J2EE systems, and Enterprise mission-critical software including Adobe CQ.

Click here to apply

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Responsibilities: The cloud architect must contribute to go-to-market proposals for cloud implementations, target state solution architecture, and product roadmaps, as well as develop the repeatable processes, methods, and solutions.

Qualifications: The candidate must have 5-7 years of experience as a cloud engineer or cloud architect with migration from the data centre to different types of cloud. There should be a deep knowledge of infrastructure solutions, application stacks, WAN/LAN technologies, and enterprise architecture.

Click here to apply

Location: Mumbai, India

Responsibilities: The cloud engineer should help to design and deploy Oracle cloud architectures to address customer business problems while driving Oracle cloud customer consumption to boost the adoption of Oracle cloud services. It is needed to implement solutions through code development and scripting, support customers from PoC through production deployment of services, as well create and distribute technical assets.

Qualifications: The minimum qualification is a Bachelor of Science in any technical field with 12 years of technical experience through presentations, demonstrations, and consultative solutions.

Click here to apply

Location: Bengaluru, India

Responsibilities: The employee should customize and manage screens based on customer requirements while configuring routing plans for manual as well as automatic scheduling. It is necessary to configure capacity as well as quota management, forecasting, and web service creation with the OFSC API framework.

Qualifications: There should be a Bachelor of Technology with a minimum of more than two years of experience in the implementation of OFSC three to ten years of experience.

Click here to apply

Location: Bengaluru, India

Responsibilities: The cloud operations engineer should deploy and manage cloud infrastructure environment as well as applications through cross-technology administration, as well as monitoring automation execution. It is needed to manage incidents with a focus on service restoration while acting as operations support for different issues.

Qualifications: The candidate must be a graduate with sufficient experience of four to six years in designing and implementing AWS cloud solutions. The candidate must have four years of proficient AWS engineer while enhancing the self-service platform for DevOps product teams.

Click here to apply

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Vacancy Alert: Top Cloud Computing Jobs to Apply For in Feb 2022 - Analytics Insight

If you want to know more about the cloud computing market and its major players, I suggest you take a look at Tommy Douziech's excellent article where he details how the cloud works, the market and the future prospects of this technology, all accompanied by a complete thematic list of cloud players.

In short, cloud computing is a tool that allows you to benefit from an IT infrastructure, a development platform or even a ready-to-use service, all online, without the need for hardware at home or in your company. It runs on servers managed by the provider, who takes care of the security and maintenance of the hardware.

The cloud allows companies and users to operate infrastructure and services online, without additional hardware costs with a simple annual or monthly subscription. It is like renting a PC that is not in your office but on a server whose location is kept secret.

First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (SKYY):This ETF is provided by the Illinois based investment management company First Trust. With more than $5 bn in total net asset, SKYY is the largest cloud fund. It employs a modified equal weighted index limited to 80 companies, aiming to optimize the performance of the ISE CTA Cloud Computing Index. Companies listed in the index must respect these three criteria :

Since its inception in May 2011, the NAV average annualized total return is +17.39% (S&P500 average annualized total return over the period is +15.16%) and +10.55% over one year. The expense ratio is 0.60%.

Here are the top holdings as of 02/07/2022:

Global X Cloud Computing ETF (CLOU):CLOU is the second largest cloud computing ETF with $1.2 bn in assets under management. Provided by the well known New-York based ETF producer Global X, it is based on the Indxx Global Computing Index, which offers exposure to exchange-listed companies in developed and emerging markets that are positioned to benefit from the increased adoption of cloud computing technology. Since its launch in April 2019, the NAV average annualized total return is +23.97% and -3.26% over one year. The ETF is composed of 35 companies and total expense ratio is 0.68%.

Here are the top 10 holdings :

Originally posted here:

3 ETFs to invest in cloud computing - Marketscreener.com

Organizations everywhere are turning to cloud computing to reduce costs and improve mobility, flexibility and collaboration. Despite rapid adoption, however, 96% of cybersecurity professionals say they are at least moderately concerned about the security of cloud computing, according to a report from ISC2.[1]

How secure is cloud computing? And what can organizations do to fortify it? Answering these questions begins with understanding common cloud computing vulnerabilities and the cloud security policies, processes and tools to reduce them.

Cloud computing enables the delivery of computing services on demand over the internet. For businesses, these services can range from databases and storage to customer intelligence, data analytics, human resources platforms and enterprise resource planning. Cloud computing is attractive to many organizations because it can provide significant cost savings - organizations typically subscribe to and pay only for the cloud services they use, which can save them time and money otherwise spent on infrastructure and IT management.

The other benefit of cloud computing is enhanced security. In most cases, the cloud is more secure than on-premises data centers. When a company operates and manages its own on-premises data center, it's responsible for procuring the expertise and resources to appropriately secure its data from end to end. Cloud-based providers, however, offer a higher level of security than many businesses can match or could afford, particularly for growing organizations or ones with limited financial resources.

While organizations can benefit from improved security by migrating to the cloud, that doesn't mean they're free from threats. Importantly, cloud security is a shared responsibility between cloud service providers and their customers. Discussed below are some of the top risks that a cloud environment poses and what organizations can do to protect against these vulnerabilities:

Misconfiguration Creates Most Cloud Vulnerabilities

While cloud service providers often offer tools to help manage cloud configuration, the misconfiguration of cloud resources remains the most prevalent cloud vulnerability, which can be exploited to access cloud data and services, says the U.S. National Security Agency.[2] Misconfiguration can impact organizations in many ways, making them more susceptible to threats like denial of service attacks and account compromise.

Poor Access Control Gives Attackers Privileges

Poor access control results when cloud resources use weak authentication methods or include vulnerabilities that bypass authentication methods. This can allow attackers to elevate privileges and compromise cloud resources.

Employees Pose Risks

Companies that have difficulty tracking how employees are using cloud computing services risk becoming vulnerable to both external attacks and insider security threats. End users can access an organization's internal data without much trouble, so they can steal valuable information or be exploited by attackers to do similar harm.

Insecure APIs Are Becoming a Major Attack Vector

Many APIs require access to sensitive business data, and some are made public to improve adoption. APIs that are implemented without adequate authentication and authorization, however, pose risks to organizations. Insecure APIs are becoming a major attack vector for malicious actors.

Since cloud security is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the customer, sharing arrangements need to be well understood. While a provider would typically be responsible for safeguarding the infrastructure, patching and configuring the physical network, for example, its customer's responsibilities could include managing users, their access privileges and data encryption. The following cloud security tools help organizations fortify their environment:[3]

Why Cloud Security Policies Are Important

A cloud security policy is a formal guideline developed to ensure safe and secure operations in the cloud. Without one, a company risks security breaches, financial and data loss, and other costly consequences including fines for regulatory noncompliance.

A cloud security policy should include:

Cloud computing can provide important opportunities and cost savings for organizations. While security remains a prevalent concern, understanding the most common threats and putting in place the proper policies, processes and tools can help companies protect themselves and their data.

[1] "2021 Cloud Security Report," ISC2

[2] "Mitigating Cloud Vulnerabilities," National Security Agency

[3] "What Is Cloud Security?", IBM

Continued here:

Mimecast : How Secure Is the Cloud with Cloud Security Tools? - marketscreener.com

As technology evolves, it has a way of converging or diverging over time. Looking at the past decade, unified communications and contact center platforms split when UC was migrated to the cloud by way of a cloud service model. However, now that most organizations have successfully transitioned their UC platforms to a cloud service provider, the next logical step is to repeat this migration process with the contact center in mind.

Let's examine the history of the relationship between UC and contact centers and how the cloud is driving a new convergence of UC as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS).

Contact center apps, tools and integrations have traditionally been paired with internal business voice and UC services. Sharing the same hardware, software and management tools was commonplace when both platforms were managed on premises. While UC services focused on the integration of intercompany communications, contact center features are externally focused and include integrations with CRM platforms. But, at their core, both UC and contact center services use voice, video and IM features that can be shared. The service overlaps enabled businesses to do the following:

Cloud computing service offerings that required low latency transport for time-sensitive applications started to take off in the early 2010s. Voice, video and other UC services could suddenly be deployed and managed within a public cloud, as opposed to on premises. While a UCaaS model seemed appealing to IT leaders, most were hesitant to migrate both UC and contact center services to the cloud as reliable cloud connectivity for latency-adverse applications had yet to be proven.

As such, businesses opted to test the waters by migrating their internal UC services to a third-party UCaaS provider, while simultaneously keeping contact center services in-house. Likewise, most voice and video service providers chose to focus on cloud-delivered UC services with the promise of adding contact center integrations down the line. For many enterprises, this is where they sit today -- UCaaS for internal communications and traditional on-premises contact center services for customer-facing communications.

For the most part, the migration of UC services to UCaaS has been successful. UCaaS architectures have also proven to be reliable from a low-latency network delivery perspective. Because of this success, IT decision-makers have grown comfortable with the SaaS model for UC and are now entertaining the idea of migrating their on-premises contact center platforms to the cloud through CCaaS. Thus, once again, we will see a convergence of both UC and contact centers.

The benefits of combined UCaaS and CCaaS are similar to those in the early days of UC and contact center integrations. Bringing these technologies to the cloud offers additional benefits, including the following:

In addition to growing customer sentiment, communications service providers have also been busy creating or acquiring contact center services that customers can easily integrate into their existing UCaaS platforms.

Vonage and RingCentral, for example, both made CCaaS platform acquisition announcements in 2018, while Dialpad boosted its contact center functionality with an acquisition in mid-2021. The combination of service provider cloud-focused contact center feature upgrades with the growing popularity of CCaaS and the renewed convergence between UC and contact centers will be hot topics in the UC space in 2022 and beyond.

Read more:

UCaaS and CCaaS unite as organizations embrace the cloud - TechTarget

Article by SnapLogic A/NZ regional manager, James Campbell.

The pandemic has sped up digital transformation is the phrase on everyones lips since the pandemic began. But the reality may be slightly different. Although its true that, in many cases, digital transformation is steaming ahead, some enterprises still find themselves hesitant to embrace the cloud despite the evident benefits, especially for moving big data projects.

When the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its annual Characteristics of Australian Business Survey in June 2021, the results revealed that barely more than half (55%) of all businesses reported using cloud computing in 2019-20. Similarly, across the pond, the European Unions statistical office surprisingly found that cloud computing has yet to go mainstream in the EU, with only 41% of enterprises using cloud computing in 2021.

So while the pandemic appears to have forced many enterprises to take a hard look at their business processes and technology infrastructure, theres still much to be done to see cloud and digital transformation progress get closer to 100%.

So, why is it really time to move data projects to the cloud, whats holding enterprises back, and how can they make it simple?

Flying to the clouds or falling to the ground?

Put simply, by migrating their big data architecture to the cloud, enterprises can reap a number of benefits: from driving business growth whilst lowering the overall cost of operations, to increasing data governance and having a fast, scalable solution.

Moving big data to the cloud sounds simple enough. Still, it does require a high level of technical knowledge and often continuous coding resources from data engineers and core IT groups. This is why some enterprises either try and fail; or continuously postpone these projects.

For example, many developers write code to integrate with each applications programming interface (API) and authentication mechanisms. While this enables the data to freely move between various applications and a cloud data warehouse or data lake, it is time-consuming and often error-prone. These pitfalls are only emphasised during the maintenance stage of cloud-based big data projects.

As with any other software project, code decays over time and must be updated. Furthermore, if the developer who wrote the code leaves the company, often the IT organisations ability to understand the pipeline that is being used at the code level also vanishes.

One of the biggest challenges enterprises have had to overcome in moving to cloud-based big data projects is this time drain on IT staff. Finding individuals with the necessary skills and experience to build big data and cloud pipelines is a challenge.

Unsurprisingly, this is further impacted by the ever-growing skills gap in the IT landscape, an issue compounded to some degree by the Great Resignation spurred on by the pandemic. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that over 600,000 Australians expect to move jobs in 2022. Thats roughly 5% of the total workforce.

These talented individuals are in ever shorter supply, and the demand is only increasing. If you do manage to get them into your IT team, having them focused solely on managing and maintaining the plumbing that supports their big data environment, both pre, during, and post-migration to the cloud is not a smart use of resources. It also has a big impact on another big issue in moving to the cloud - cost.

With a team full of highly skilled individuals, you want them to have the time to focus on projects that deliver significant and strategic benefits to the business. The cloud provides flexibility and scalability, which can fuel innovation in the enterprise. However, the proposed time-to-innovation identified at the start of the cloud migration will never be achieved if teams are too busy focusing on infrastructure management to make the big data project work.

Buy vs build

Finding a solution to this problem could seem tricky, but it is relatively simple, and it comes down to buying vs building. The chances of you needing to self-build every aspect of your IT estate is limited and, for most, cost-prohibitive, so why not look to purpose-built off-the-shelf SaaS platforms?

If enterprises want to see their big data projects flourish in the cloud sooner, they should look towards modernising their data architecture. This includes introducing data integration (iPaaS), processing (BDaaS) and storage (SaaS) to the enterprise. This should enable organisations to seamlessly deliver large data sets to and from their cloud-based data lakes, regardless of where the data is coming from.

An additional benefit of this approach is that it can also increase productivity by eliminating mundane, repetitive manual tasks involving adding information and transforming data, allowing IT teams to free up more time and focus on value-adding activities instead.

Say goodbye to complexities

Running big data projects in the cloud should be simple. All organisations, regardless of size, should be able to realise all the benefits the cloud provides as soon as they get up and running. Its only in taking a step back at the planning stage and removing the complexities surrounding cloud migration and integration that businesses will finally be able to unleash their big data projects for innovation and to deliver business value.

Article by SnapLogic A/NZ regional manager, James Campbell.

Originally posted here:

Big data projects, cloud migrations, and digital transformation: why it doesnt need to be so hard - IT Brief New Zealand