Grazed from ITBrief. Author: Sara Barker.

Cloud transformation strategies may never be finished projects but always a work in progress, and many of those will involve technologies from on-premise data centre investments. According to CenturyLink’s ANZ regional director Stuart Mills, price should not be the sole factor in choosing cloud services. It’s not a strong strategic move. Instead, organisations must consider how the cloud meets business needs and goals.

“Understanding the right steps for cloud deployment will help keep track of what enterprises require to create a technology plan that aligns with the organisation’s infrastructure both now and in the future,” he says. What else do organisations need to consider when assessing a cloud strategy? At the top of the list are the existing infrastructure investments, which include compute, network architecture, storage and application portfolios can all affect efficiency and cost…

Grazed from ProfitConfidential. Author: Stephen Karmazyn.

Investing in the tech industry has never been more interesting than today. Consider all the various technologies set to make huge breakthroughs in the coming years, promising to revolutionize everything from the way we do business to the way we live our day-to-day lives. These type of shifts in the past only come along once in a generation, but with our accelerated development and adaptation of new tech, we’re seeing these paradigm-altering events with more regularity.

And that’s what makes cloud computing stocks so intriguing. Alongside Big Data, the Internet of Things, augmented and virtual reality, the cloud computing industry could be one of the best investment opportunities for those looking to get a head start on future trends. After all, we’re already witnessing a mass migration of businesses into data-centric analytics and the online capabilities of cloud computing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.profitconfidential.com/stocks/three-cloud-computing-stocks-watch/

Grazed from Barron’s. Author: Tiernan Ray.

Goldman Sachs analysts Heather Bellini and Heath Terry, and colleagues today issued an interesting report that summarizes points from a discussion about cloud computing that has implications for Alphabet (GOOGL). The authors spoke with RightScale, a firm that helps enterprises make the transition to cloud computing.

RightScale CEO Michael Crandall told them about the trends his customers, and their views on Google, on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure cloud service, and on Amazon (AMZN). One takeaway the authors had was that Google’s cloud service is still “far behind Amazon and Azure.” That’s based on the fact that RightScale only 15% of customers report having used Google…

Article Contributed by StoneFly, Inc.

Means of disaster recovery and data protection (DR / DP) for the enterprise are constantly changing in response to increasing data-volumes, rising business demands and faster recovery needs. IT teams have to make smart choices to ensure they can keep their businesses online all the time and take advantage of the latest technologies.

Contrary to the old more or less passive role, today’s Storage Systems are becoming key players in DR / DP practices. If you’re in the market for new storage, paying attention to a few key factors will help you address your DR / DP challenges.

Any storage solution you choose must include snapshot, cloning and replication. Inline deduplication and Compression are also essential in helping you conserve both storage capacity and network bandwidth. These technologies must operate at the right granularity to control DR / DP costs and improve efficiency.

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Robert Hof.

Oracle Corp. sought to position itself once again today as the one best place for companies moving to cloud computing to get everything they need. Speaking at a media day Thursday at its Redwood Shores, California, headquarters, executives at the database and business software giant distanced Oracle from public cloud leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure that provide computing, storage and other services to corporations looking to reduce or eliminate their data centers.

“Our cloud is more comprehensive than any other cloud in the market today, a full end-to-end cloud,” said David Donatelli, Oracle’s executive vice president of converged infrastructure. “We design from the chip all the way up to the application, fully vertically integrated.” What’s interesting about that messaging, which Oracle has been refining since at least its OpenWorld conference last September, is not simply the competitive positioning…

Grazed from InformationManagement. Author: Christian Riley.

In case you haven’t heard, the cloud is like pizza. You can have pizza four different ways – at home, via take and bake, delivery, or dining out at a restaurant. Similarly, there are three different services models when it comes to cloud computing – IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS – and three different cloud types – public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.

With each different kind of pizza experience, the diner handles a certain fraction of the process, and a third party handles a certain fraction of the process. Going along with this comparison, the same can be said for the various combinations of service models and cloud types listed above. (Below is an image that makes a bit more sense of this)…

Read more from the source @ https://www.information-management.com/opinion/making-sense-of-all-the-cloud-as-a-service-models

Virtustream, the enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell Technologies Business, today announced its first customer and partner in Africa. BCX, Africa’s premier end-to-end digital solutions partner, providing advanced information and communications technology, will implement Virtustream xStream and Virtustream Viewtrust software to further orchestrate, automate and secure BCX’s cloud capabilities.

Virtustream xStream is an integrated cloud management platform that enables service providers such as BCX to deliver enterprise-class, IT-as-a-Service to their customers. BCX’s cloud capabilities are strengthened by the addition of Virtustream Viewtrust enterprise risk management and continuous compliance monitoring solution.

Nutanix today announced that Xiaomi, the world’s 5th largest smartphone maker, has addressed long-standing storage performance issues by replacing its legacy three-tier IT infrastructure with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Despite early adoption of virtualisation, the legacy three-tier infrastructure hosting Xiaomi’s business critical applications including Microsoft Exchange, MS SQL Server and SAP Business Suite, was struggling to cope with exponential growth in demand. The traditional SAN storage was quickly identified as the main bottleneck, even after upgrading to all-flash arrays. By switching to the highly scalable and robust Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform with distributed storage architecture, Xiaomi managed to remove the long-standing issues. As a result, the smartphone maker has dramatically improved the performance of business-critical workloads while delivering return on investment (ROI) and savings through Nutanix Prism, a single management pane for both compute and storage resources.

Dell EMC today announces Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, a new, turnkey, hybrid cloud platform that offers a simple and fast path for implementing and sustaining a hybrid cloud based on Microsoft Azure Stack. The new platform helps organizations standardizing on the Microsoft Azure ecosystem to accelerate their digital transformation with automated IT service delivery for traditional and cloud-native applications. As a result, organizations can better engage with their customers, reduce time to market for new services, and free-up resources to focus on adding business value.

"Cloud is an operating model, not a place, and adopting a hybrid model has become the clear choice," said Peter Cutts, senior vice president, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Dell EMC. "Making hybrid cloud platforms simple and turnkey enables businesses to rapidly develop and deploy new applications, optimize resources, control costs and deliver the best possible customer experiences."

The new Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack combines Dell EMC’s leadership in worldwide cloud infrastructure with its long history of partnering with Microsoft, which includes shipping the industry’s first Microsoft-based hybrid cloud in October 2015. According to IDC, Dell EMC was No. 1 in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market for 2016 with $5.7 billion in revenue and 17.6% market share.

Ixia will be at The OpenStack Summit, which will be held in Boston, May 8-11, 2017, at the Hynes Convention Center.

Attendees at this year’s OpenStack Summit can meet Ixia subject matter experts at Stand B16 to learn how to maintain full control as their virtual data centers grow and change.

Achieve net higher performance with less risk by gaining visibility of data flowing between virtual machines (VMs) with Ixia solutions, including the newly enhanced CloudLens Private visibility solution.

Ixia’s CloudLens platform is the start of a complete transformation for visibility. It provides unprecedented visibility across all cloud environments – public, private, and hybrid clouds. The platform provides the framework to scale virtual taps and data filtering to meet the elastic demands cloud customers expect.