Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Most organizations have started to leverage cloud computing technologies in the past few years and Ive seen some of them with good, sophisticated strategies in place - but a lot of small and midsized businesses (SMBs) still have hesitations around cloud adoption. What that means is they are reluctantly moving ahead without a complete strategy. Others still look down at their feet not moving but ShadowIT adoption means theyre really on an escalator. Regardless of where your organization falls on the adoption spectrum, its important to understand the immense value that a cloud adoption strategy will deliver for your organization.

The board, your executive team and many other departments could likely benefit from some internal conversations around how the cloud is helping to helping to drive a new era of innovation-fueled growth, business productivity and app-centric customer experiences. Every day there are cloud tactical decisions being made, but the proactive strategies are what might be missing.

Like a good new year resolution, this article just might help educate and even inspire your SMB.

The SMBs that got through 2020, from an IT perspective, were the ones willing to flex the most and the fastest. A cloud strategy that was sound enough to be flexed was a constant I observed in countless organizations across the globe to survive during the terrible year that was 2020. Its no surprise that Gartner predicted the public cloud market would grow by over 6% to $257.9 billion in 2020, and by even more going forward - to top $364 billion by 2022. More than 3%, let alone double that, is significant in a large market.

Most organizations I interact with have a hybrid cloud model as their preferred choice. Their business case for doing so is a mix of recognizing the reality of their business and having a risk and ops model that gets the best of all worlds.

What is hybrid cloud? At a fundamental level it is a combination of private cloud with one or more public cloud services. This allows organizations to get the best of both worlds: on-premises network infrastructure inside a private cloud for certain sensitive workloads, and the flexibility, scalability and cost benefits of public cloud for everything else.

Think of it as a way to combine the best cloud services and functionality from multiple cloud computing vendors. In fact, 85% of organizations are said to be using multiple clouds in their business today, with 76% using between two and 15 hybrid clouds, according to IBM. Nearly all (98%) are forecast to be using multiple hybrid clouds within three years.

Whether youre fully cloud native, in the middle of your migration process or just beginning the move, there are a number of benefits that come from implementing a solid hybrid cloud approach. These include: Support for the distributed workforce:

Over 60% of Americans say they have worked from home during the pandemic, and many more wish to continue doing so once COVID-19 recedes. But these same workers need on-demand access to enterprise resources and compute power to stay productive. A hybrid cloud model offers them exactly that - anytime, anywhere access to business-critical applications and services. We also saw disruptions to public cloud we hadnt seen before that meant a cloud-only service was the only choice and it wasnt up.

Whole markets are concerned with managing cloud utilization and billing. Migrating to the cloud can seem intimidating and expensive, but it doesnt have to be. In fact, hybrid cloud environments can actually lower long-term costs for SMBs. Thats because scalability is easier, allowing organizations to grow and turn a profit faster than they could with on-site storage. It works both ways too, meaning that if demand for their services spikes, organizations can scale-up without needing to make large investments in IT infrastructure. But if demand falls again, they can scale down and reduce costs. Especially with multiple public clouds, cost and utilization management for a lot of SMBs is an issue, especially for those who have already invested in on-premises infrastructure and want to get the most out of those investments.

As above, hybrid cloud environments enable organizations to automatically adjust to changes in demand, driving enhanced efficiency in how IT assets are used. Modern orchestration tools can also move workloads around to the lowest cost environments. Finally, hybrid cloud supports edge computing, which places compute, storage and network resources as close as possible to end users and devices. Thus, it can make IT infrastructure more efficient through lower latency.

By employing a hybrid cloud set-up which blends private and public cloud options, its easier to run complex and resource-intensive applications. Public cloud environments allow for the dynamic allocation of IT resources based on demanda faster and more cost-efficient alternative to running them in-house. Alternatively, some data may be best kept in house for governance/security/compliance reasons. SMBs in some geographies struggle with staying compliant with the most affordable public cloud options, and will utilize private cloud to ensure that compliance based on the location of data is met.

What would a cloud article be without a chat about cybersecurity? Although nearly half of IT decision makers still regard it as a potential barrier to cloud adoption, the truth is hybrid cloud offers several options for making the transfer and storage of data more secure.

However, organizations must remember that in the public cloud, security is a shared responsibility. Familiarize yourself with the extent of cloud provider-supplied measures before migrating workloads, to ensure you have the right level of protection in place.

Most SMBs are hybrid cloud, but few have a strategy that reflects that. Embrace your IT reality and have a strategy that guides your reality.

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Getting real with your hybrid cloud strategy - Techradar

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Furthermore, the global Cloud Computing Data Center It Asset Disposition Itad market is the complete package of information in terms of market size, value/volume, services, and product, Porters five Models, socioeconomic factors, government regulation. The business participants are extensively focusing on product innovations, new product launches, mergers, and acquisitions for expanding their geographic foothold and capturing greater market share. To make the most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments.

Top Key Players: AMI, Iron Mountain, CloudBlue, Apto Solutions, Arrow, Tes-Amm

Global Cloud Computing Data Center It Asset Disposition Itad Market Segmentation:

For product type segment, this report listed main product type of Cloud Computing Data Center It Asset Disposition Itad market in global. IT Equipment, Support Infrastructure

For end use/application segment, this report focuses on the status and outlook for key applications. End users sre also listed. Data Sanitization, Recovery, Recycling

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Cloud Computing Data Center It Asset Disposition Itad Market By Top Players like and Forecast To 2027 | AMI, Iron Mountain, CloudBlue, Apto Solutions ...

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Some of the Important and Key Players of the Global Southeast Asia Cloud Computing Market:

Amazon, Akamai Technologies, CA Technologies, Alibaba, Cisco Systems and Google Inc.

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Southeast Asia Cloud Computing Market Segmentation

Type Analysis of Southeast Asia Cloud Computing Market:

by Deployment (Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud) by Product (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) by Organization (Small, Medium, Large) by Application (IT & Telecom, BFSI, Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Government & Utilities, Retail, Consumer Electronics, Others)

Applications Analysis of Southeast Asia Cloud Computing Market:

by Application (IT & Telecom, BFSI, Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Government & Utilities, Retail, Consumer Electronics, Others)

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Southeast Asia Cloud Computing Market Share to Increase in Q1 2021 Amazon, Akamai Technologies, CA Technologies, Alibaba, Cisco Systems and Google...

@adipolakAdi Polak

Software Developer Blogger Speaker 1 of 25 influential women in Software Development

Well. Let's start by examining what Serverless really means.

According toWikipedia, serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider manages the server and dynamically allocates the resource needed to finish the task.

That means, as users, we are in charge of the logic only. We don't need to take care of the servers, capacity planning, or maintenance operations scale. It doesn't mean they are not happening; they are, just not by us.

According toWikipedia, SQL is a domain-specific programming language used for managing data held in relational databases.

Serverless SQL is a distributed computing tool that enables us to process distributed data using SQL language without managing the databases servers themselves. If we have data, or "big data" in one or more of our data lake/storages, likeAWS S3orAzure blob storage,we can run SQL query on that data without the need to build a pipeline or inject the data into distributed databases such as Cassandra or MongoDB.

This is a huge advantage, especially when we would like to interact with offline data without creating the pipelines or peek at completely fresh new data that was just sunk into the storage before replicating/transforming and saved into a dedicated Database.

As with all cloud services, there is a need to understand the cost model. with serverless, we pay-per-use. That means that we pay for the amount of processed data.

If we ran a

Lead Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash

Also published at https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-serverless-sql-and-how-to-use-it-for-data-exploration-eadad1f1a036

Software Developer Blogger Speaker 1 of 25 influential women in Software Development

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Cloud Computing Explained: What is Serverless SQL and Why Should You Care? - hackernoon.com

The shift to cloud computing has been one of the most significant tech trends of the past few years. While it used to be the norm for companies to own and operate their own data centers, the amount of business software running on traditional servers is set to shrink to 32% of all enterprise applications by 2022, roughly half what it was in 2019.

Forrester senior analyst Tracy Woo put it bluntly:

"It's well understood using cloud is necessary to stay competitive," she told Insider. "The question most are weighing is when and should we be moving all of our workloads to the cloud?"

Moving to the cloud can create a host of benefits for companies, including slashed IT costs, more flexibility, increased efficiency, improved security, boosted performance, and the potential for innovation and developing new capabilities, according to Woo and other experts. And the pandemic has only accelerated this transition and digital transformation.

One of the first benefits that brought attention to the cloud, according to Canalys research analyst Blake Murray, was scalability, meaning the ability to increase or decrease resources to satisfy evolving demands. That remains a draw: For example, the NFL was able to lean on Amazon Web Services to live-stream its virtual draft last year, when it needed to use far more cloud capacity than typical.

Companies that embrace the cloud can additionally find "benefits in innovations" like artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases, according to Gartner research vice president Ed Anderson, as well as "operational efficiency and cost savings."

For example, American Airlines told Insider that uniting its backend system on cloud improved the customer experience, like giving people more control over rescheduled flights, while Capital One said that moving completely to the cloud allowed it to save money and increase the security of its products.

Case studies like that highlight why firms are anxious to make the leap to the cloud: A whopping 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first principle by 2025, according to Gartner research VP Sid Nag, meaning that they'll be focusing on how to free up IT resources and deliver the most business value using the cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also increased cloud adoption: Almost 70% of organizations using cloud services plan to increase their cloud spending in the wake of the pandemic according to a Gartner survey published in November.

"COVID and the shaky economy brought on a lot of focus to business priorities specifically accelerating to a more digital business that would enable a company to more readily respond to changing circumstances," said Woo. "It also forced companies to take a bigger focus on good business fundamentals in reducing costs in order to get through tough financial times."

Nag's report highlights three priorities firms have focused on: Preserving cash and optimizing IT costs, supporting and securing a remote workforce, and ensuring resiliency. "Investing in cloud became a convenient means to address all three of these needs," he wrote.

Cloud services also helped companies "keep their businesses viable and online and connected to their customers and partners," added Anderson, who co-authored a report about this shift.

Experts note that the trajectory of the pandemic, and the lingering effects thereafter, have informed their predictions for cloud adoption in 2021.

"I think that cloud services are maybe to steal the term like a 'new normal' for business," said Canalys' Blake Murray. "I think the growth will continue. There doesn't seem to be anything that would change minds, especially if the economy stabilizes more. I think people will pour more investment into digital transformation."

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Why companies are flocking to the cloud more than ever - Business Insider

The wheel, steam engine and the internet created revolutionary jumps in the way people work and play. Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping science, business and personal interactions with equal magnitude. In every industry, including agriculture, healthcare, customer service, finance, manufacturing, retail and more, companies are quickly adopting AI to ensure theyre not left behind during this tectonic shift.

AI workloads have unique requirements, including strategic planning to ensure data scientists and researchers work efficiently on delivering successful projects. For IT teams just starting out, its helpful to know that while AI workloads require accelerated infrastructure and software, many of the solutions IT is most familiar with are already AI-ready for integration into an innovative strategy for creating an AI Centre of Excellence.

Few resources are as readily available and easy to use as the cloud, and this easy access to infrastructure extends to AI workloads. With GPU-accelerated instances available from every cloud service provider, these resources are ideal for prototyping AI projects. They provide the scale needed when training new models. The cloud also can serve enterprises well as infrastructure for AI inference workloads, where AI models are deployed for things like computer vision, conversational AI, speech, language and translation, and recommendation systems.

The challenge here is that data governance and cloud costs can complicate AI adoption. Training models generally require processing large datasets, and as AI projects grow, hosting all the data on the cloud can result in unexpected costs. Additionally, when AI is deployed in applications, many apps require real-time responsiveness for automation or user experience, which can become a challenge when data makes a round trip from the cloud.

To overcome these hurdles, enterprises are building AI Centres of Excellence with on-prem systems for AI that connect with cloud-based AI computing for prototyping and scale. This involves planning for data gravity and putting computing closer to the source of data to ensure costs are balanced and resources are at the ready. It also helps enterprises start with small projects in the cloud that grow into the hybrid ecosystem when its time to deploy. All major cloud service providers offer hybrid accelerated computing solutions, making it easier to harness both on-prem and cloud-based compute resources as needed.

With this hybrid approach, enterprise data scientists always have the resources they need to stay as productive as possible whether theyre creating new models, training AI, or evaluating a deployed model to ensure its still accurate.

Its also important to consider the big picture when looking at the cost of accelerated computing in the hybrid cloud. On paper, high-performance instances may at first look costly, but they end up delivering significant cost savings. They enable large datasets to be processed much more quickly, which results in lower total costs. Most importantly, these instances provide faster time-to-market for products and services. In addition, software technology can help right-size accelerated computing resources to maximise efficiency on diverse AI training and inference workloads.

For AI use cases like conversational AI services, accelerated computing platforms train large, sophisticated networks in hours instead of weeks. When deployed as AI-powered services, these networks deliver immediate, natural-sounding replies to complex questions.

Central to every AI project is a software architecture built to deliver on enterprise AI objectives. Workloads for conversational AI, recommender systems, robotics automation and computer vision all depend on specialised software designed for these unique applications.

These software requirements can present the biggest challenges for AI teams getting started on new projects. To help companies hit the ground running on their AI Centres of Excellence, NVIDIA offers free software resources for developers and data scientists. The NVIDIA AI platform also offers a single architecture to develop and optimise the applications while offering the flexibility to run them anywhere.

For businesses, one size rarely fits all. The same is true for AI workloads. With a hybrid cloud strategy to augment an enterprise AI Centre of Excellence, IT teams can deliver AI acceleration thats both on demand and within budgets. By keeping AI software in mind and developing a strategy to keep pace with software innovation, enterprises will be ready to scale easily from the data centre, to the cloud, to the edge.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? The Data Centre Congress, 4th March 2021 is a free virtual event exploring the world of data centres. Learn more here and book your free ticket:https://datacentrecongress.com/

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How the hybrid cloud is key to enterprise AI infrastructure strategies - Cloud Tech

Featured 2020 was a fascinating year for cloud technologies. The Covid-19 pandemic forced remote working initiatives which accelerated demand for cloud software and infrastructure. 2021 is going to be about taking advantage of the opportunities which have arisen, with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud to the fore.

As Andrew Brown, general manager EMEA for IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software wrote for this publication last month, while 2021s exact playout is unknown, the company expects hybrid cloud technologies to continue to play a large role in breaking down barriers for the enterprise. Brown added he believed regulated industries would go hybrid, while open source tools would unify clouds.

With this in mind, CloudTech has selected seven companies in the wider cloud economy to feature for 2021, from managed hyperscaler service providers, to security firms. Read their stories below:

2nd Watch is a provider of consulting and managed cloud services to enterprises. The company is a Microsoft Azure gold partner and Google Cloud partner but, headquartered in Seattle, its AWS premier partnership is the flagship service.

For these consultants and MSPs targeting the enterprise, its not good enough to just talk the talk. Chris Garvey, EVP product, tells CloudTech 2nd Watchs born-in-the-cloud culture, fluent in enterprise is key. By applying public cloud technology to our clients IT environment needs, we create a bias towards innovation enabling our clients to benefit from the latest technology and capability provided by the major cloud service providers, says Garvey.

Our approach enables our clients to reduce the level of complexity inherent to enabling digital transformation and achieve their strategic vision.

One such client is an engineering company focused on large-scale municipal water management. The company needed to gather telemetry data in real-time from tens of thousands of water meters and flow devices to support a variety of strategic data needs, as Garvey puts it. Using AWS services such as Amazon Forecast, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Glue, 2nd Watch created a data lake to capture inbound IoT data streams, data cleansing and preparation processes, and a reuseable machine learning data pipeline.

The company is hiring strategically, recently announcing Chris Whaley, late of IBM, as its EVP cloud solutions sales. Going forward, there are key trends 2nd Watch is betting on, from industry vertical-based clouds, to technological expansion.

The enterprise market in cloud is maturing and its not enough to enable their journey to cloud, explains Garvey. Enterprises are increasingly looking to leverage their applications and data in the cloud to drive innovation, market agility and increased security and governance.

2021 will be a year of reinvention for many companies, Garvey adds. Four technology trends we foresee driving the biggest chance are around the pace of cloud migration accelerating, artificial intelligence and machine learning delivering even greater business insights, edge computing taking on greater importance, and platform as a service gaining added urgency.

AppOmni is a San Francisco-based provider of cloud security posture management (CSPM) for SaaS. The company secured additional funding from Salesforce at the end of December to bolster its goal of helping companies with monitoring and security across clouds, business units, and apps.

Tim Bach, vice president at AppOmni, explains that while many cloud security tools focus on network access, an increasing need exists for securing third party applications connected to SaaS environments, as well as public access portals. AppOmni was designed to continuously monitor all of these non-network data access points as well as configuration settings for third party applications, and both internal and external users to SaaS systems, Bach tells CloudTech.

For AppOmni, like many other companies in the space, Covid-19 saw something of a boon professionally. Enterprises were forced to rely more heavily on SaaS solutions to house sensitive data and as the stakes get higher, companies found they fell foul of the new provisions.

The company says that, in more than 95% of cases analysed where external users regularly logged into enterprise SaaS environments, they were over-provisioned. Typical industries where AppOmni has a presence include technology, banking and healthcare as well as other security providers. Yet Bach notes: Were seeing this issue across all industries.

With funding in the bank, the task ahead of AppOmni is expansion. Our goal in 2021 is to enable our customers to enjoy the huge benefits of SaaS without inadvertently introducing new security risks, adds Bach. With the right security tools, increased SaaS adoption doesnt have to lead to increased SaaS data breaches.

CloudSphere, a cloud governance provider based primarily in the United States and Ireland, is another relative new kid on the block. Formed last year as a merger of HyperGrid, a provider of cloud management and governance, and iQuate, a company focused on agentless discovery and application mapping, the company sits as a middleman for the hyperscalers.

Keith Neilson, technical evangelist at CloudSphere, says the companys offering empowers users to safely harness the power of the cloud. Securing and governing multi-cloud environments is a top IT challenge facing enterprises as cloud adoption accelerates amid the pandemic, Neilson tells CloudTech. This has driven demand for CloudSpheres solution.

The company is attempting to stamp its mark with the appointment of Jane Gilson, formerly of Microsoft and Google, as CEO. Gilson spoke to CloudTech earlier this month around how the enterprise adoption of multi-cloud architectures was a once-in-a-generation transformation of the IT landscape.

This feeds in to work the company is conducting with one of its largest customers, a global service integrator (GSI). CloudSphere is assisting with the GSI across the board, on cloud migration and discovery, cloud cost economics, and governance.

CloudSphere has provided a single multi-cloud platform that addresses all of these use cases, some of which are proving to be disruptive to their current tooling, to allow them to offer a differentiated services offering that benefits both them and their enterprise customers, says Neilson. The company is also consolidating tools to help manage multi-cloud environments.

Going forward, Gilson noted that she believed CloudSphere has the right approach and tech differentiation to become a worldwide leader in this space and expect the roadmap to follow. CloudSphere plans to announce some exciting new product developments in 2021, which will strengthen CloudSpheres current solution, while adding some new features unique to the market, adds Neilson. Watch this space.

Compared with the previous two entries, Fujitsu has a lifetimes experience literally, having been founded in 1935. While the Japan-headquartered ICT services company doesnt get the headlines of the hyperscalers, it does have an extensive cloud portfolio, focused on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud support for the Amazons, Microsofts et al.

Yet this suits the company fine. As Brad Mallard, CTO for digital technology services north west Europe explains, Fujitsus focus is trust, and a deep ability to provide transformation at pace that aligns business and operational priorities together seamlessly.

We understand that a transformational big bang is no longer attractive or realistic for organisations that are seeking to undergo digital transformation, Mallard tells CloudTech. Many organisations have instead moved their transformation to an as a service model with quarterly horizons to reset and realign priorities based on pre-agreed, composable services.

Our experience and breadth of skill in delivering mission-critical services from the cloud in countries around the world including services at the highest levels of security provides confidence and ensures the resilience needed by customers in the wake of Covid, Mallard adds.

Fujitsu is taking plenty of work in helping organisations continuously respond to Covid-19 related challenges. The company has rolled out rapid cloud solutions, and enabled tens of thousands of healthcare professionals to deliver critical support remotely. Recent research conducted by the company found two thirds of businesses polled are reinventing their digital transformation strategies amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Another customer success story hinges around a major manufacturer in the automotive sector, helping the company shift towards a digital business and mobility services provider approach. Our value here centres around accelerating innovation through cloud-native applications and microservices, built by deploying agile development squads and methodologies, says Mallard.

For 2021, Mallard predicts a year where responsible digital business models prevail, with reinvention and sustainability the watchwords. We will be at the forefront of this with a focus on maximising the impact for our customers by supporting them in their operating model shift, enabling them to take advantage of their data to create actionable insights, he says.

Pax8, a Colorado-based provider of cloud management technologies, has had a hot start to the year. The company secured $96 million (69m) in funding at the beginning of January, looking to expand its geographic reach as well as improve its cloud automation and orchestration capabilities.

Nick Heddy, chief revenue officer, explains the companys rationale for providing cloud services to the IT channel and its appeal to investors. There is no company on the market today quite like Pax8, he tells CloudTech. The leadership team built Pax8 into a true innovator. Pax8 is accelerating cloud transformation, enabling our partners to easily buy, sell and manage cloud technology to SMBs worldwide.

The geographic expansion includes a UK launch, also announced last month. One UK customer, seen by CloudTech, noted the need for a simple way to bring the best of breed products available to us as an MSP or MSSP and make it easier to buy, install, implement but only pick what we need for that specific client.

Bolstering the product line is the recent launch of Pax8 Pro, which offers partners an introduction to cloud automation and simplified software as a service lifecycle management, as Heddy puts it.

Ultimately, the company focuses on automation and simplicity for partners but a rigorous process to approve vendors. Vendors go through a more than 150-step process before launching with Pax8. We have a unique approach that tightly couples our technology platform with an unparalleled customer experience that simplifies cloud adoption, says Heddy.

We are excited about the future, and how we are helping IT professionals bring best-in-class cloud technology to businesses across the world.

Ping Identity, headquartered in Denver, promises intelligent identity for the enterprise. In the words of Emma Maslen, VP and GM EMEA and APAC, this means the company understands the challenges enterprises face as they navigate through the current digital transformation acceleration, often including the need to leverage a hybrid mix of cloud solutions to successfully modernise legacy IAM systems.

This manifests itself in various ways: passwordless authentication, integration with multiple risk, fraud and threat signals, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to detect and analyse anomalous behaviour. The company asserts that a trade-off between strong security and ease of use is not necessary, and has earned praise as a result, being shortlisted in the international Cloud Computing Awards for best hybrid cloud solution.

One recent customer success story focuses around telecoms: an ISP was dealing with continual outages from use-surges and relied on multiple login credentials for different parts of the business, as Maslen puts it. The goal was to achieve a streamlined experience for identity. As they look ahead to new business opportunities with 5G, they will be ideally positioned to provide the experience customers demand between services and applications, Maslen tells CloudTech.

The ISP is not the only one to be well positioned. With remote working an inevitability even after Covid, Ping Identity sees itself as an arbiter of frictionless and secure digital experiences.

For Ping, 2021 will be the year of cloud-enabled scalability, adds Maslen. We will prioritise centralised solutions that facilitate cost reduction, enable Zero Trust security through passwordless-ness, and help businesses deliver more personalised digital experiences from anywhere.

Uptycs, headquartered in Massachusetts, looks to take a broader view when it comes to cloud security. The cloud security is still nascent and many vendors are tackling niche problems, such as identifying vulnerabilities in containers, securing Kubernetes systems, spotting misconfiguration of cloud resources, or analysing identity and access, CEO Ganesh Pai tells CloudTech.

As a result, the company promises a cloud-native approach to cloud infrastructure security. The risk of tackling these problems piecemeal is the type of tool sprawl that weve seen in the traditional, on-premises enterprise space, only mirrored in the cloud, Pai adds.

Pai admits that, looking at the shared responsibility model, it can be quite difficult to get comprehensive visibility across various services and accounts. Amazon Web Services (AWS), with more than 200 products available, is a case in point.

This is where the companys recent AWS integration, extending the types of data in Uptycs SQL-powered security analytics platform, comes in.

For comprehensive cloud workload security, you need both a view of workloads from the outside and a view from the inside, explains Pai. Data from AWS services and resources provides an outside-in view of the cloud environment to complement the inside-out view from within hosts and containers that Uptycs already provides. Flexport, a digital freight forwarder and customs broker, is one such customer of the AWS side.

With regard to 2021 plans for Uptycs, who secured $30 million (21.6m) in funding back in June, Pai notes greater integration with cloud providers, alongside extensions which provide deeper visibility into identity and access management. The company is also keen to give something back. Uptycs recently released Kubequery and Cloudquery, two open source extensions for the osquery project a key part of Uptycs rationale and more is promised.

We will also continue to contribute back to the open source community, providing a strong technical foundation for the next generation of cloud security tools, says Pai.

Editors note Feb 17: An original version of this article stated that AppOmni raised $10 million in series A funding at the end of last month. That funding round was in January 2020 while the company received funding from Salesforce at the end of the December. This has since been corrected.

Photo by Quentin Rey on Unsplash

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

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Featured: CloudTech's list of innovative cloud companies to watch in 2021 - Cloud Tech

It all starts with the cloud

The cloud stores your data, all your pictures and your phone contacts, and it processes information that helps make your favorite apps work. Cloud computing can do several things at once, really well: It can compute, store data and work with the network, all in one location. Many cloud providers, for example, have storage facilities that do cloud computing in locations all over the world. When you take a photo with your phone and send it to Instagram, it goes to a cloud facilitypossibly several hops and four or five states awaywhere all the necessary computing takes place, and then it publishes to Instagram. Its a similar process for reading your morning email or listening to a podcast. For things like that, the centralized cloud works really well, and the latency is low enough that your experience is just fine.

But certain experiences require a lot of data to move very quickly to and from a device and the cloud. Thats where MEC comes in. It brings the cloud closer to you.

The edge refers to the part of Verizons network that is closest to you: Your device connects to the network at the edge. And edge computing means bringing the cloud to the edge of the network closest to your device.

So how do you make edge computing more mobile, and closer to the devices that need it?

MEC is an entire network architecture that brings computing power close to any device thats using it. Instead of data going back and forth to cloud servers four or five states away, its processed just miles or meters from the device. For this purpose, Verizon has installed cloud servers in its own access points across its networks.

Link:

The cloud without the wait: mobile edge computing and 5G - Verizon Communications

"This ability for chains to transact and interoperate will be revolutionary for the industry"

Key features for the IBC Relayer include:

Essential to launching the IBC protocol and the only way users will be able to use IBC, the Relayer is the user interface that enables all transfers and transactions on IBC. In development for over three years, IBC is the flagship feature of the Cosmos Network. For crypto and blockchain, where interoperability and composability are essential for continued growth for decentralized sectors like DeFi, IBC is the most promising and production-ready solution.

Akash will be one of the first networks in the world to integrate with IBC and IBC Relayer, through the early March 2021 launch of Akash MAINNET 2, the first viable decentralized cloud alternative to centralized cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

For media inquiries, please contact Kelsey Ruiz at (916) 412-8709 or kelsey(at)akash(dot)network.

About Akash Network:

Akash Network is developing the world's first and only decentralized cloud computing marketplace, enabling any data center and anyone with a computer to become a cloud provider by offering their unused compute cycles in a safe and frictionless marketplace. Akash DeCloud greatly accelerates scale, efficiency, and price performance for DeFi, decentralized organizations, and high-growth industries like machine learning/AI.

Through Akash's platform, developers can easily and securely access cloud compute at a cost currently 2x-3x lower than centralized cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure). The platform achieves these benefits by integrating advanced containerization technology with a unique staking model to accelerate adoption. For more information, visit: https://akash.network/

SOURCE Akash Network

https://akash.network/

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Akash Network, the World's First Decentralized Cloud Computing Marketplace and the First DeCloud for DeFi, Develops Critical IBC Relayer for...

Technology will have an important role to play in supporting business growth opportunities as organisations begin to claw back the ground they lost during the coronavirus crisis.

It is likely that many technology-powered growth initiatives will rely on the flexibility of cloud computing, to enable organisations to deliver new products and services quickly, while maintaining a controllable and agile cost model that allows them to expand quickly as and when they need to.

But some applications, particularly those that have been designed as single tenanted, cannot shift easily to the cloud. They will major reworking, which is the main reason organisations continue to bear the costs associated with running their own datacentre facilities.

Colocation datacentre providers have carved a niche, helping organisations to lower the overheads associated with running their own datacentres. Multiple companies can rent server space in large facilities that offer all the necessary power, cooling and networking required to run their customers IT equipment.

Discussing how customer requirements for colocation are shifting, Jeff DeVerter, chief technology officer at Rackspace, says: A big change weve observed in colocation is the proliferation of smaller, closer to customer locations. We continue to see growth in private cloud deployments. They are being used in conjunction with public cloud resources or datasets creating a multicloud architecture. The lines between public and private are starting to become less visible which is a trend we expect to continue.

Deloittes latest technology, media and telecommunications predictions for 2021 estimate that cloud revenues will increase by 30% or more between 2021 and 2025. The coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to look at new ways to grow.

As demand for public cloud services grows, colocation providers have carved a new niche for themselves as hybrid cloud specialists. They have needed to adapt due to shifts in the way enterprises want to deploy core business applications.

A Deloitte global survey of 50 CIOs, undertaken in April 2020, found that the proportion of total workloads done on-premise will fall to 35% in 2021 from 59% in 2019. According to the Deloitte study, CIOs expect public clouds share to grow from about a quarter to over a third (23% to 38%), with private cloud reaching 20% and hybrid cloud accounting for 7% of workload.

As a result, along with providing datacentre hosting for customers own systems, some colocation providers have expanded into managed services, where virtualised workloads are isolated in multi-tenanted server environments. While the public cloud is largely recognised as being the more secure and cheaper option for most enterprises, IT leaders are generally risk-averse and try to avoid being locked into the technical infrastructure of a single hyperscale provider.

This has led to an opportunity for colocation providers to evolve and rebrand themselves as multicloud and hybrid cloud providers, offering fast data connectivity to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

One of the first things that IT decision-makers need to work out is whether workloads are cheaper to run in the public cloud.

Some workloads are not so well suited to public cloud deployment. An application that does not require the elasticity needed to cope with peak usage can be more cost-effectively deployed in an environment that does not charge based on use. When using public cloud, public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, organisations are billed continuously as consumption occurs, instead of a one-time payment when they procure their datacentre capacity.

As analyst Gartner points out in a recent report, in cloud computing, organisations are confronted with the difficulty of creating accurate cost estimates. They are often hit by bills that they apparently cant explain and struggle to identify items that are responsible for spending. As a result, financial management is often overlooked until spending is out of control, warn Gartner senior director analysts Marco Meinardi and Traverse Clayton.

For multinational organisations and those companies with large branch networks, architecturally, the public cloud offers an elegant way to deploy a manageable IT environment. But it is not perfect.

Organisations need to consider latency in terms of how quickly data can be processed to deliver business insights. This is particularly relevant when data needs processing close to where it is generated or there are regulations that prevent data from being processed outside of the country where it is generated.

Edge devices in an industrial context, such as a wind farm, may each offer local processing in real time. Trend analysis may also need to be performed rapidly to manage unforeseen events, adapt to environmental changes and keep production optimal. To avoid latency and backhaul network congestion, it is largely accepted that such data processing needs to be run near the industrial facility, which has led some colocation providers to specialise in supporting edge computing. More advanced processing may require data being uploaded to the public cloud, such as for predictive analytics, which usually involves connectivity to the public cloud providers,

In its Datacentre and colocation market trends 2021 report, analyst Forrester describes the concept of data gravity, which introduces strategic decision points on expansion plans based on where data will be in the future.Careless enterprises can create data silos and make migrations, network access, and contracts costly, warns analyst Abhijit Sunil in the report.

Forrester urges IT leaders to consider a hybrid cloud model for deploying workloads. Here, critical applications are housed in a colocation datacentre and can have direct access to the cloud through gateways in the same datacentre.

According to ISG (Information Services Group), enterprises are embracing colocation in the datacentre market as a way to enable multicloud strategies and deal with concerns about data sovereignty, security and privacy regulations.

In an effort to save valuable time, money and space, many large enterprises will look to move in-house IT operations to managed colocation facilities or sell their datacentres and lease the space they need to operate, says Barry Matthews, partner and leader at ISG North Europe.

The 2020 ISG provider lens next-gen private/hybrid cloud datacentre services & solutions report for the UK notes that many enterprises in the country focus on colocation because it allows them to locate and manage data closer to their cloud, network and security functions. ISG reports that UK enterprises are increasingly viewing colocation providers as an extension of their business, with providers offering services such as tracking provisioning status, interacting with customer support and monitoring system health in real time.

In spite of Deloittes predictions of massive growth in public cloud services, ISGs research finds that about 60% of UK enterprise workloads still reside on-premise and many in private datacentres are operated by internal staff.

Among the reasons why businesses are choosing colocation, according to ISG, are the need for auditing data location, migrating software licences to the public cloud, hyper-converged systems capacity and affordability, and improved management tools.

With the UK facing the dual challenges of Brexit and the pandemic, the report sees UK enterprises moving cautiously with new IT projects. Due to Brexit, companies are not circulating large requests for proposals and requests for information, but at the same time, many are concerned about a potential shortage of niche tech skills. The perceived skills gap, along with continuous demand for innovation, could eventually lead to more IT outsourcing deals.

This skills gap was highlighted in a recent survey of 1,870 IT decision-makers for Rackspace Technologies. The survey revealed that more than a third (35%) of artificial intelligence (AI) research and development initiatives in the UK either fail or are abandoned, with a large proportion (48%) therefore outsourcing the tech support to trusted external partners due to a lack of internal resources.

The technical know-how to deploy hardware and software infrastructure for AI also exists in the area of high-performance computing (HPC). In Forrestersreport, analyst Sunil notes that almost all major IT providers now offer HPC infrastructure capabilities in varying degrees.

HPC workloads impose intensive physical requirements that include purpose-built, high-density datacentres that vendors provide directly or through partnerships with cloud companies, says Sunil. For instance, Cyxtera, Digital Realty and Equinix offer Nvidia DGX-ready datacentres for supporting AI-based deep learning applications.

It is largely recognised that hiring new datacentre staff is extremely difficult. The Uptime Institute recently reported that across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), 81,500 new roles will be created for datacentre staff by 2025. This suggests a growing skills crisis, which the Uptime Institute believes will further drive enterprises to outsource at least part of their datacentre computing to public cloud or colocation providers.

While IT leaders are cognisant of the skills shortage in hot technology areas such as HPC and AI, the Uptime Institutes research shows that the skills crisis envelopes all areas of the datacentre. Enterprise facilities are currently the most numerous type of datacentre and are typically smaller than many colocation and almost all cloud facilities. According to the Uptime Institute, this often means there are fewer opportunities for economies of scale including for staff. For example, job roles such as IT hardware technicians and electricians are required in all datacentres, regardless of size.

Last year, in its Multi-tenant datacentre and services industry 2020 report, 451 Group described colocation as the obvious vehicle for connecting enterprises, service providers and cloud platforms.

UK enterprises frequently want to use more than one hyperscaler because each one has particular strengths related to vertical solutions, pricing and other factors. But as ISG points out, enterprises see some barriers to a multicloud setup, including orchestrating their workloads. This is one of the trends driving the expansion of colocation services. ISGs research found that many customers are turning to service providers to help them manage multicloud environments.

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How colocation fits alongside a cloud-native architecture - ComputerWeekly.com