Enterprise adoption of cloud continues to expand, and by next year, 60 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud, according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation, Workloads and Key Projects survey. 451 Research also reports that enterprise adoption of OpenStack is expanding in parallel, with enterprises in nearly all verticals and regions now running mission-critical workloads on OpenStack software. To support these workloads, the Queens release includes robust, enterprise-oriented features, most notably the multi-attach feature in Cinder.  

Device Choice Is Getting Better

A quick look at a site like Gadget Gestures is enough to make it clear that we currently have access to quite a lot of devices to pick from, and that number is growing on a pretty much daily basis. It used to be hard to find a smartphone that offers everything a user needs to have, while also being a comfortable solution for using in a desktop mode, but that’s far from the case now. And with companies like Microsoft making some real effort in this area and evolving ideas like Continuum, it likely won’t be long before we see ubiquitous mobile desktop computing.

Written by Tim Mullahy

The cloud is constantly changing – both for better and for worse – as is its security landscape. Here are just a few of the big trends we’ll see this year.

While some fear-mongers in the media might have you believe otherwise, the cloud is actually quite secure – in some cases, even moreso than traditional infrastructure. That isn’t to say there aren’t still challenges, mind you. The cloud’s cybersecurity profile and threat landscape are constantly (and rapidly) changing.

New threats are constantly on the rise, with security experts constantly puzzling over new problems and challenges. Today, we’re going to talk about just a few of the developments we can expect to see in 2018, for better and for worse.

Cloudistics, the cloud software appliance company, announced the launch of its Cloudistics Application Marketplace integrated within its SaaS cloud controller, Ignite. The marketplace is a turnkey solution that includes pre-built, ready-to-run, reusable application and OS templates that can be deployed instantly, with the click of a button. 

"We were able to cut our application deployment and management tasks from weeks to minutes using the Cloudistics Application Marketplace", said Jon Halseth, IT Manager of The Atlanta Hawks. "The ease of use significantly changed our work output. We are able to easily import applications into the marketplace, assign cloud computing resources and launch applications on-demand based on our organizational needs in a fraction of the time it used to take us."

The new products being launched for European enterprises fall into a number of inter-related categories. In relation to data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud is launching three key products – Image Search solutions, which allow users to search for information online and offline using images; Intelligent Services Robot, a chatbot for business; and Dataphin, an intelligent data engine developed to cope with the cross-industry big data development, management and application needs.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high performance computing solution of ECS that combines the strengths of virtualized systems and bare metal servers. When connected as a supercomputer, ECS Baremetal Instances becomes a Super Computing Cluster that will reduce network latency to the level of micro-seconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced new innovations in its management portfolio, including the latest releases of Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms, designed to accelerate deployments of Red Hat-powered cloud environments, and automate and greater simplify ongoing infrastructure management.

"Being able to scale and deploy more quickly are key capabilities of digital transformation, where enterprises embrace emerging digital technologies to fuel differentiated products and services. This agility, however, can often require a new management approach, one that builds upon a core of task automation in the face of increased complexity. With today’s announcement, Red Hat continues to build out our management offerings based upon the powerful automation capabilities of Ansible, helping our customers to adopt new technologies while maintaining greater control over their hybrid cloud infrastructures." — Joe Fitzgeraldvice president and general manager, Management, Red Hat

IT infrastructure is increasingly complex with disparate systems across physical hardware, virtualized environments, private cloud deployments, and public cloud instances. The heterogeneous nature of modern enterprise computing can often require a new type of management solution, one that can improve scale, speed, and stability while still providing a clear picture across disparate infrastructures.

Veeam Software, the Availability for the Always-On Enterprise innovator, today announced the general availability of NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator – the newest addition to the Veeam Availability Platform – which enables enterprises to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) compliance. Most DR failures can be tracked back to outdated and untested plans. The rapidly increasing rate of business and technology changes makes it critical that companies update their DR plans continuously, something that only 14 percent do today, according to Forrester Research. Veeam Availability Orchestrator solves this problem by delivering a DR orchestration solution that reduces the time, cost and effort associated with planning for and recovering from a disaster.

While many enterprises have a DR plan already in place, executing on these plans is often complex, cumbersome and time-consuming. Expensive, error-prone manual processes are common but do not scale, resulting in DR plans that can easily become obsolete. This results in risk to both data and application Availability, but also to compliance with industry regulations and governing bodies. Veeam Availability Orchestrator is the answer, providing an orchestration engine rich with planning, automated documenting and testing capabilities for preparedness and compliance, with full support for Veeam replicas.

The time required to recreate customer issues is one of the major pain points faced by technical support organizations at technology and software vendors. In many cases, before troubleshooting can even begin, Tier 2 and 3 support reps spend hours or even days recreating a customer’s environment.

CloudShare’s virtual IT labs speed time to resolution by enabling support engineers to easily import complex customer environments and product versions. Reps can also take advantage of a large library of ready-made, fully licensed templates for testing with popular applications and operating systems. Resources can be spun up on-demand, saved in specific states, and shared with team members around the globe for true 24/7 support. Easy environment replication and sharing also makes it easy for reps to troubleshoot issues in parallel, instead of traditional linear approaches.

Bitnami is known for its automated end to end process of packaging and maintaining software for any platform. It publishes a catalog of over 120 open source applications and development stacks which get deployed over 1 million times a month across all platforms including leading cloud vendors like Amazon, Azure, Google and Oracle. Now, for the first time with Stacksmith, enterprises can leverage this powerful application automation technology and tooling to replatform their own applications from the datacenter to the cloud. With this simple SaaS solution, enterprise developers and operations teams now have a single tool to migrate and maintain custom in-house applications.

Stacksmith is designed to deliver a complete application migration experience for enterprises, in support of data center consolidation and digital transformation initiatives. It takes a running application in the traditional datacenter, repackages it, and delivers a running application in the public or private cloud. This is a significant departure from many other solutions in the market that simply build a container or virtual machine, or require teams of consultants.

Express Logic, provider of the comprehensive X-Ware IoT Platform powered by the industry leading ThreadX RTOS, announced today turnkey support for all the leading cloud providers. Among this group are Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Baidu, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Tencent, and Xively. Designed from the ground up to be industrial grade, and developed entirely in-house by Express Logic engineers, the X-Ware IoT Platform leverages its size, performance, safety, security, ease of use, and other advanced features to provide best-of-class IoT connectivity for deeply embedded IoT sensors, devices, edge routers, and gateways.

Powered By ThreadX

Express Logic’s high-performance ThreadX RTOS is at the heart of the X-Ware IoT Platform. With over 6.2 billion deployments, as certified by VDC Research, ThreadX is arguably the world’s most widely deployed RTOS. ThreadX provides embedded developers with priority-based preemptive scheduling, preemption-threshold scheduling, optimized context switching, real-time event trace, downloadable memory-protected application modules, and full determinism, all accessed through a highly intuitive API. ThreadX is deployed in environments where small footprint, low overhead, high performance, solid reliability, and fast time-to-market are essential. ThreadX is ideally suited for cloud-infrastructure connectivity and related products from such sectors as consumer electronics, medical and scientific instrumentation, industrial control and automation, automotive, aerospace, and more.