August 7, 2015
Sifting through an explosion of choice to build the right cloud infrastructure for you
Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Martin Cooper.
When it comes to deploying IT infrastructure, selecting the right model is crucial. Fundamental to this decision, IT departments must make sense of the options available to them and understand their strengths and weaknesses.
But this isn’t as simple as deciding which model is better. It’s about understanding which model is right for the business — right now and into the future. With such a variety of models (as well as vendors) to choose from though, this can be a challenge for companies of all sizes to figure out…
China’s Alibaba Group Holding last week said it would invest $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing arm to challenge Amazon Web Services. This move kicks off what could become a global battle between the two e-commerce giants. Also, it could change the dynamics in the cloud market now dominated by AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
Enterprise public cloud adoption is becoming a norm around the world. Gartner expects public services cloud to hit $240 billion by 2017. They also suggest that the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market will grow at 18.1% annually and the market will hit $46.35 billion by 2017 [1]. In addition to traditional dev-ops applications, business critical functions, such as CRM and ERP, are moving onto public cloud infrastructure. The goal is to take advantage of the on-demand scalability, flexibility and cost savings associated with cloud computing.
The Wall Street Journal today takes a critical eye toward IaaS cloud providers like Amazon and Google who admit they are hosting some of their companies most sensitive workloads in private servers and not in their much-touted public cloud platforms. Executives with cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services have for years been attempting to make the case that their cloud platforms are ready for any and all workloads. They trot out customers at their conferences who have closed their last data centers. But that’s not the norm. While many organizations have warmed to the idea of using the public cloud, there’s still a hesitancy to lift and shift all workloads into the cloud.
The Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation has voted unanimously to approve Fujitsu as the newest Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. The decision was made during the Foundation Board’s meeting in Austin last week. The move underscores rising momentum for the open source cloud computing project throughout the APAC region, as the worldwide community of OpenStack developers and users prepare for their global Summit in Tokyo this October.
Security platform Zscaler today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round led by late stage investor TPG. The company, which offers a wide range of web, mobile and cloud security services for enterprises, has now raised a total of $138 million and says that its valuation in this last round was over $1 billion. Other investors include EMC and previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.