Author: Zoe Stimpson

It is an undeniable fact that most of the companies are rapidly installing cloud Technology because of their capacity to access distributed computer processing and storage.

According to a Statistics in 2016 it was revealed that 41% of all the surviving businesses where planning to expand by investing in cloud Technologies. The interesting fact is large companies are themselves being examples by jumping on this Trend even faster than the smaller companies.

Statistics show that 51% of the medium-sized and large companies planned to increase on the basis of cloud computing as compared to 35% of the smaller companies. But cloud EQMS needs to prevail in order to supervise over the data.

But why so much interest in the cloud computing service?

Cloud Technology has been able to bring mind-numbing changes in the operations and customer support while cutting on costs and also enabling the employees to work in remote places.

Quality control in Cloud Computing service

Since small and large business sectors are actually investing a lot on the cloud computing service, if you are a service provider then it is definitely a huge opportunity for you to earn. But it is absolutely essential that you keep a stringent cloud EQMS system and gradually upgrade the same so that there are no complaints about your Cloud Computing service.

Questions you need to ask for improving cloud computing service quality

Most of the customers develop their own perspective and expectations on the control quality based on the use of the service. Following are the questions that you need to know and answer so that you can enhance the cloud computing service quality to a great extent. – Read more

Cloud-computing companies have a message for skittish investors: demand is still booming.

Earnings reports from the biggest providers of internet-based computing services – Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google – showed that these companies are grabbing a larger share of business technology spending, defying warnings from some of their suppliers that a hot corner of the industry might be cooling off.

The cloud giants entered the year facing questions about whether they could sustain their robust growth rates in an environment of uncertain global economic growth and investment. And at the start of fourth-quarter earnings season last month, investors got some worrying news from companies that sell the networking equipment and computer chips that go into the data centers that underpin the cloud. Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. were among those blaming lackluster results on slower spending by data-center customers.

Now, investors have some reason to be relieved. On Monday, Google reported sales in its “other revenue” segment, a bucket that includes the Google Cloud Platform, of $6.49 billion in the fourth quarter, up 31 percent from a year earlier. Capital expenditures at Google soared 80 percent, to $6.8 billion. While the stock declined in extended trading on concerns about how the investments will impact profitability, much of the higher spending is tied to new data centers and related hardware — a signal that demand for cloud services is holding up. – Read more

Last year saw almost manic growth in revenue for cloud providers as businesses continue to seek the benefits the services can provide.

New data from Synergy Research Group reveals spending on cloud infrastructure in the fourth quarter of 2018 to have surged 45 percent year-on-year, sealing a full-year growth rate of 48 percent.

Furthermore, the growth is actually accelerating as the rates achieved in 2018 were higher than those experienced in 2017.

“Q4 tops off a banner year for the cloud market with the annual growth rate actually nudging up from the previous year, which is an unusual phenomenon for a high-growth market of this scale,” says Synergy Research Group chief analyst John Dinsdale.

While the growth does paint a pretty picture, looking deeper within it is a slightly different story.

Amazon is by far and away the dominant market leader with the giant again increased its market share. Astonishingly, its share of the market is equivalent to the combined efforts of its next four competitors.

However, it certainly wasn’t a bad year for the other big three. Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba again overshadowed the overall market growth rate with all three gaining significant market shares – particularly Microsoft.

Of course this growth has to come at the expense of others and this was most pronounced among small-to-medium sized cloud operators, who collectively lost five percentage points of market share over the last four quarters.

According to Canalys, while many of these smaller players are still growing revenues, they’re finding themselves unable to keep up with the market leaders. Among the leaders, IBM’s prime focus is slightly unique from the others as it remains the strong leader in the hosted private cloud services segment of the market. – Read more

Some 71 per cent organisations in Europe Middle, East and Africa (EMEA) are aiming to move more of their business functions to the cloud in the coming years, according to a new report.

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer network.

“This reveals the huge shift towards cloud as businesses across EMEA prepare to compete in the digital economy,” said Eric Schwartz, president EMEA at American technology firm Equinix, which issued the findings of the survey on Monday.

Equinix, which operates a global network of data centres, opened its Dubai data centre in early 2013. Last year, it also inked a joint venture with Omani telco Omantel to develop a data centre in Muscat, where carriers, content and cloud providers can house their critical data and engage services such as data backup, recovery, processing, management and distribution.

Cloud and cybersecurity considerations together are top of mind for technology executives across the region, said the report.

For 48 per cent of survey respondents, the adoption of cloud-based services represented one of the top two factors that will impact their business in the future – second only to cybersecurity risks and breaches (53 per cent). Nearly 70 per cent of the respondents are still worried about risks around cloud adoption.

“Cybersecurity risks and breaches are of course a matter for close attention but must not prevent businesses from undergoing digital transformation,” said Mr Schwartz. – Read more

Agent Vi Founder Zvika Ashani explains how artificial intelligence is changing video analytics and expanding hosted applications.

With the number of surveillance cameras increasing exponentially, the pressure is on integrators to find ways to manage video data and provide maximum levels of security to their customers. Undoubtedly, investment in a video analytics solution is an effective way to achieve this goal, enabling the detection, prevention, and management of safety and security threats.

Video analytics for automatically monitoring cameras and alerting for events of interest is far more effective than relying on human operators. Even the best operators have limits to their alertness and attention, and their valuable time could be put to better use.

In recent years, huge strides have been made in artificial intelligence (AI)-based video analytics applications. This new generation of video analytics, which relies largely on deep learning, has dramatically increased the classification accuracy of different types of objects and has just as dramatically decreased false alarm rates — traditionally the Achilles heel of video analytics applications.

For example, the AI-based engine developed by Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi) has a highly accurate object classification methodology that is able to accurately classify and distinguish between various target types such as persons, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trucks, buses and animals, with more classifications in the pipeline. – Read more

There are a lot of really innovative products right now on the market in the SaaS space; products often fueled by startups full of new ideas in a time when concepts like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, social media integration with marketing and more are in their heyday.

If you have an innovative product that is doing well, you may be tempted to expand onto new markets and geolocations. However, just because a product is successful in one region of the world or where it was launched from doesn’t mean this success will translate worldwide.

Users or potential customers have different habits worldwide. In some places of the world, there is more or less capital for investment. Thus, companies – whether enterprises, SMBs or startups – may be more or less inclined to invest in new product ideas for their workflows depending on their capital and revenue they generate. Some regions of the world may also be more tied to the traditional client-server model of computing rather than the cloud, due to slower high-speed Internet adoption or simply the fact that corporate habits die hard.

It seems more and more cities worldwide — including ones from places like Minsk, Belarus – are becoming hot tickets for startup growth and innovation in product ideas. However, many countries are still stuck in the corporate culture and rely on Microsoft Office for almost all their workflow needs. Innovation in software and adoption of SaaS offerings is also not going to be easy in such places.

However, the big hurdle I’ve noticed from personal experience working with a recent Polish-based startup trying to move strongly west — into English-speaking territories of U.S. And the U.K – is impatience and not studying the market ahead of time. A market like the U.S., for instance, has a lot of competitive offerings in the SaaS space in all sorts of apps and financial software offerings. A country like Poland may not. – Read more

As companies look to move from on-premises applications to modern cloud ones, a central but often-overlooked factor can limit the migration’s success: an outdated culture.

Companies whose decision-making is strictly hierarchical—or, at the other extreme, overly dependent on building consensus—will have a difficult time adapting to the cloud, says Beth Boettcher, Oracle senior vice president of applications consulting. Slow-moving cultures in particular can run into long, or even stalled, cloud implementations, she says.

“From the outset, company leaders need to think about how the culture of their organization must operate differently during the deployment and implementation of cloud—and thereafter,” Boettcher says. “This culture change needs to come from the top.”

Setting Goals and Letting Go

Boettcher asks company leaders considering a move to the cloud what they’re trying to accomplish. Typically, the answer is that they want to reduce complexity, reduce maintenance costs so they can free up resources for more innovative work, and improve the user experience.

But each of those ambitions must be part of a larger strategic and cultural shift, she says. Cloud applications let employees access more information and, via data analytics, more insights. But employees must be empowered to act on those insights. – Read more

Hostway and Hosting, two hybrid cloud managed service providers, are merging to beef up their joint international services for enterprises, the two companies said Tuesday.

The combined company will provide support to IT organizations that are changing their roles, Emil Sayegh, CEO of the combined organization and previously CEO of Hostway, tells Light Reading. “The IT department is becoming more of a broker for vendors than doing a lot of the work themselves. We complement them nicely in helping with that digital transformation.” CIOs are brought in to reduce cost and risk, but their real role is increasing business agility — launching products faster and improving communications. “The problem is that they never get to that true mission, which is improving agility. Hostway takes on operational responsibility to free IT to innovate,” he says.

The two companies have similar cultures and complementary expertise, Sayegh says. For example, Hostway had strong expertise in Microsoft Azure while Hosting.com was strong in Amazon Web Services Inc. Combined, the two companies have 14 data centers in five countries on three continents. – Read more

In a world where data breaches dominate the headlines, I find myself in a lot of conversations on the topic of cloud security.

People often assume these hacks are pulled off by brilliant programmers exploiting obscure vulnerabilities. Some CIOs I’ve worked with as the founder of a cloud and DevOps automation company have even held back on leveraging public cloud services due to these concerns.

The truth is, I’ve found that cloud security issues are typically less dramatic than most people think. For example, security issues could be related to simple misconfigurations due to human error.

The public cloud is secure. Vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM have many cloud security experts maintaining and supporting their platforms. (Full disclosure: I’m a former employee of Amazon and Microsoft, and my company is a Microsoft Certified Partner.)

I believe leaders need to recognize that cloud security is a shared responsibility between both the provider and the customer. IT teams should take ownership of their role in supporting cloud resources and make sure they’re following vendor-recommended security best practices.

Here are some of the most common cloud security mistakes I’ve seen repeated consistently by customers in the real world that should be avoided at all costs — and what you can do instead. – Read more