A select group of communications and media providers are rapidly adopting cloud-native technologies in order to obtain the agility and continuous innovation needed to meet the digital experience benchmark set by digital disruptors.  However, most service providers are moving slower, hindered by legacy technology, culture and processes, as well as the challenges of managing both legacy and cloud native systems in a hybrid, combined environment. While the move to cloud native systems is visible across the industry, mainstream adoption is unlikely before 2022. The laggards will find it challenging to close the early leads established by the fast movers.

These are part of the findings from an Amdocs-commissioned global study of leading communications and media companies by Analysys Mason, a global consultancy and research firm specializing in telecoms, media and technology. The results are based on in-depth discussions with senior executives of the surveyed companies.

"Communications and media providers are following the initial lead of web-scale software companies such as Amazon and Netflix in adopting cloud computing, DevOps practices, and cloud-native software architecture," said Dr. Mark H Mortensen, research director of digital transformation at Analysys Mason. "What we see from the survey is that this is mostly being driven by the need to boost agility and innovation. Even though full transition is almost a decade away, those providers who can bring these technologies into their everyday operations quickly will secure the strongest competitive advantages."

With more than 240 retail locations, the financial technology company is focused on providing loans to consumers with poor or no credit. The company’s contact center agents provide customer service and in two languages (English and Spanish) related to loan origination, loan applications and credit-building programs.

At the center of IRP for Cloud is the well-known Noction Intelligent Routing Platform, which is designed to actively check remote prefixes for metrics such as packet loss, latency, throughput, historical reliability as well as maximum peer capacity; analyze the collected network performance metrics and select the best performing route for traffic to pass through.

Eastwind Networks, the cybersecurity solutions and breach analytics cloud platform, announced today the release and immediate availability of Eastwind for SaaS.

"The ability to respond to a breach reaches well beyond corporate networks and databases with the sprawl of modern technology integrations," said Paul Kraus, CEO, Eastwind Networks. "Eastwind’s SaaS offering enables enterprises to unify visibility by gathering and analyzing cloud telemetry from multiple SaaS providers so businesses can embrace new technologies while ensuring complete security of their cyber terrain."

Panic not! Migrating to cloud services doesn’t have to hurt, but transitioning without the headache does require some careful planning. A cloud transition is a continuous process, and although it can be made relatively painless, it’s still quite difficult. 

All About Cloud Security 

This is one of the first headaches that people think about. Making sure employees are up to date on new accounts and security procedures is a hassle (no one likes coming up with new passwords!), and you might have concerns about the security implications of an off-site service hosting your data or your client’s data. 

NVidia GeforceNow may be the hottest thing right now, but experts believe that the future of gaming in the cloud lies with browser-based games that are simpler to play. Is this really the case?

The Rise of Web-Based Games

People, especially casual gamers, want simplicity. They want to be able to visit a site and start playing their favorite games right away. In many ways, the cloud infrastructure is the perfect environment for this type of gaming. Add the fact that there are better technologies for serving web-based games, and we have the perfect mix.

DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers, today announced new pricing to deliver more memory, compute power and flexibility for customers at every price point. The offering will help businesses more confidently scale their deployments by providing the best value for performance and a flexible, predictable pricing model that makes billing simple.

"When we launched the Droplet five years ago, we offered a price point and product to help developers deploy their workloads quickly and easily. Now, we are seeing their projects grow, with many of them using DigitalOcean in a large-scale production environment," said Shiven Ramji, VP, Product, DigitalOcean. "While the rest of the market has offered complex discounts structured to force growth, we are focused on what our customers want most – a simple and predictable pricing model that enables them to rapidly scale their businesses without overpaying for the resources and flexibility they need."

Tintri, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced Neverfail, a global cloud IT service provider, has developed a comprehensive Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) platform with a secure private cloud built on Tintri’s all-flash storage solution for replication. The new DRaaS solution connects Tintri storage solutions at customer sites and at Neverfail’s data center for data to be quickly replicated and restored over a private cloud in the case of a disaster or emergency.

The joint solution incorporates a Tintri T5000 in Neverfail’s data center to replicate with the customer’s Tintri storage device, enabling images to be easily and quickly restored to Neverfail’s private cloud and data center. Customers can use the solution to reduce spending on purchasing and managing onsite DR solutions.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC), an end-user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, today published version 2.0 of its whitepaper, Interoperability and Portability for Cloud Computing: A Guide. Authors of the paper will present a complimentary webinar on January 24, 2018, from 11:00am – 12:00pm ET to introduce the paper.

Today, organizations are employing a wide range of cloud services and transitioning data and applications to cloud computing environments. The topics of "interoperability" and "portability" are significant considerations in relation to the use of cloud services, but there is also confusion and misunderstanding of exactly what this entails. The aim of this guide is to provide a clear definition of interoperability and of portability and how these relate to various aspects of cloud computing and to cloud services.