Cloud hosting delivers services, applications, or websites via an external cloud platform, allowing firms to host content without owning a physical server or a data center.

It's a technique that takes advantage of cloud computing's fundamental flexibility. Organizations can allocate and use compute resources as and when they are needed to deliver digital services without making a significant upfront investment.

Cloud hosting makes use of cloud servers, and physical compute racks that have been virtualized for use by those not in physical contact with them. Virtualization divides physical computing space into digitally accessible computing space.

If a business needs to bring a website or online application to its customers, for example, cloud hosting is a great way of doing so. It bypasses the need for infrastructure and enables streamlined digital delivery.

There are a whole range of benefits that come with choosing to use cloud hosting services, including more efficiencies in deployment, a greater level of flexibility in service size and scale, and the opportunity to scale more effectively.

Cloud hosting vs web hosting vs VPS

Choosing to host in the cloud is an involved decision. The nuances of the process will depend largely on what specific system or application needs to be delivered, and then on how best that system or application can be delivered.

For example, a commonly hosted application may be a business website. Most organizations will have an online presence in this form, and every firm that does will need to have a digital architecture on which that website lives.

An alternative way of doing this is through web hosting, cloud hosting's predecessor and counterpart. Similarly to cloud hosting, web hosting involves a third-party provider that runs the server hosting a business website.

A web hosting provider allocates things such as storage space and network bandwidth to a user. This means business customers can access the website via a web browser that visits the domain.

Where cloud hosting trumps web hosting, though, is through its diversified server presence. Cloud hosting will keep the website live on multiple servers, providing resilience against outages, or backups when errors occur.

Organizations could also choose to host on a virtual private server (VPS), meaning renting out what is essentially a dedicated amount of server space within a physical server space that your firm will be responsible for using.

Using a VPS is costlier than other forms of hosting as it requires committing to a specific portion of a compute resource. It can also require a greater level of technical expertise if the firm chooses an unmanaged VPS option, as staff will be responsible for managing the resource.

The benefits and drawbacks of cloud hosting

Cloud hosting comes with many benefits, most of which correlate with the benefits of cloud computing in general. Because of how cloud computing works, flexibility, and scalability are a core advantage.

Unlike web hosting or VPS, cloud hosting does not depend on a single server and instead utilizes a network of servers to host the specific service or website. If a user needs more compute resources, the cloud provider can grant access across the server network rather than needing to address a specific server.

As cloud hosting is so flexible to use, most cloud providers operate on pay-as-you-go models that can be scaled just as easily. Businesses can up their compute usage in line with their payment, as well as being able to take it back down again if needed.

That being said, the industry has rallied against rising cloud costs, with many IT executives describing 'surprising' cloud costs as the reason they have been unable to accurately predict spending. Software firm 37 signals claimed it had saved $2 million a year by ditching the cloud.

Security can be an advantage of cloud hosting, as cloud providers provide security provisions such as firewalls and identity and access management (IAM) tools. However, users should bear in mind that, under the model of shared responsibility, cloud providers cannot entirely shield customers from a security perspective.

Finally, there is resilience. This relates to the multi-server nature of cloud hosting as compared with other forms of hosting. Being that cloud hosting is spread across a network of servers, customers are far better protected against the failure of any one server or larger-scale outages across networks.

How to get started with cloud hosting

Businesses looking to host on the cloud need first to assess their hosting needs. Firms should examine the relative advantages and disadvantages of cloud hosting and, if they meet the firm's requirements, they need to look at what the various cloud providers offer.

It's likely that an organization will choose to host via one of the big three cloud providers, those being Google, Microsoft, and AWS. The last of those, AWS, for example, offers a range of hosting capabilities under its cloud computing wing.

On AWS, users can host traditional websites as well as applications that can be deployed within businesses or sold to customers as software-as-a-service (SaaS), and the firm also offers file hosting services.

The other major cloud providers offer similar hosting capabilities. On Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users can deploy on the tech giant network while also gaining access to WordPress, Firebase, and Google Domains.

Users can also host applications on Microsoft's cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. Azure offers a range of hosting types, such as simplified hosting, balanced hosting, controlled hosting, and source-code hosting.

While hosting via VPS may offer a greater level of control for those who prioritize governance, most businesses will find that cloud hosting is the optimal solution for hosting digital services.

The rise of the cloud hyperscalers is one of the defining tech trends of the past decade.

In a few short years Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft have reshaped the technology ecosystem and transformed businesses’ IT infrastructure on a global scale.

Combined, the three cloud titans accounted for around $50 billion (67%) of the $74 billion global cloud infrastructure services market during Q4 2023, according to data from Synergy Research Group, who also found that the market had grown by 20% year on year.

Those numbers emphasise the size and might of the hyperscalers and are testament to their phenomenal growth.

The pre-cloud era, when on premises was the only game in town, feels like a lifetime ago.

Reshaping software procurement

An important pillar in the cloud revolution has been the rise of cloud marketplaces, with AWS Marketplace at the forefront as market leader.

For the unacquainted, AWS Marketplace is a digital catalogue with thousands of listings that makes it easy for end-users from enterprises to SMBs to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS, ranging from cybersecurity solutions to artificial intelligence applications and everything in between.

These platforms provide a seamless way for businesses to discover, purchase, and integrate new technologies, often with just a few clicks.

With their streamlined procurement processes and extensive libraries of software and service offerings, cloud marketplaces have become an indispensable resource for end-users looking to modernise or refresh their IT stack.

It’s hard to overstate the convenience and efficiency of these platforms. They eliminate the need for lengthy procurement cycles, reduce administrative overhead, and offer transparent and predictable pricing models. For enterprises, this translates to faster time-to-market and the agility to adapt to changing business needs and market dynamics.

The rise of AWS Marketplace in particular is leading end-users to change their purchasing behaviour as they strive towards the pre-defined budgets and flexible pricing on offer, including the ability to leverage AWS credits and retire spend commitments.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in simplifying the user journey, AWS Marketplace has done for software procurement and deployment what its parent company, Amazon, has done for online shopping.

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that growth looks set to be maintained, with Canalys predicting that global sales of third-party vendor software and services through cloud marketplaces will hit US $45 billion by 2025, up 84% CAGR over five years.

Channel lens

So what are the implications of all this for the channel?

It’s fair to say that, in the early days of cloud at least, some channel companies viewed the hyperscalers and their cloud marketplaces with a degree of trepidation, or at least uncertainty. The fundamental concern was that AWS Marketplace and the rest would make it so easy for end-users to procure software that resellers, distributors and others would see their business impacted.

Thankfully, reports of the marketplace-induced death of the channel have proved to be greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the channel as a whole has arguably never been in better health and the cloud era has coincided with many channel players achieving consistent year on year growth and becoming increasingly strategic cogs in the tech ecosystem.

I’d even argue that the advent of cloud marketplaces has triggered a wave of innovation in the channel, with several distributors launching their own digital marketplaces in a bid to bring the same ease of use and simplicity to their partners. 

Wake-up call

While the cloud hasn’t proved to be the existential threat to the channel that some feared or predicted, I think it’s also true that as a sector we have been slow to wake up and see the marketplace economy for what it is: a huge opportunity.

The scale of this opportunity is underscored by recent Forrester research showing that channel partners selling in AWS Marketplace can close deals up to 50% faster, with a 234% return on investment (ROI) driven by strong margins.

Thankfully, from my conversations with peers and partners, there is a growing (if slightly belated) realisation that the best approach to the hyperscalers is to become a part of their growth story, positioning your business centrally in the ecosystem they’ve created. The way to do that is by building deeper relationships.

Turning data into insights

Data is the new currency in the digital age, and channel partners are alive to the need to unleash its full potential. 

Indeed, Westcon-Comstor’s recent Bridging the Gap research report found that 97% of channel partners see data as a vital tool as they transition to recurring revenue models based on software, services and subscriptions.

The cloud marketplace environment is significant here, because by analysing AWS Marketplace transactions, partners can identify trends and tailor their offerings to meet specific customer needs.

This data-driven approach enables partners to anticipate demand, optimise their inventory, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Growth catalyst 

Rather than viewing the rise and rise of AWS Marketplace as a threat, channel partners have a golden opportunity to capitalise on it and accelerate their own growth.

Looking ahead, I believe it’s vital that cloud marketplaces are viewed as a catalyst for channel growth and innovation.

By embracing this mindset, the channel can not only thrive in the era of cloud marketplaces but also play a pivotal role in shaping the future.

The once-robust IT channel, teeming with diverse vendors and self-hosted solutions, is facing a reckoning. Economic pressures – inflation, recessionary fears, and global supply chain disruptions – are forcing businesses to re-evaluate their IT infrastructure. 

This shift will likely lead to a significant increase in consolidation, with enterprises seeking cost-effective, streamlined solutions through hosted services. In 2021, Gartner predicted that 85% of organizations will be cloud-first and it looks like we could be on track.

Rising costs for hardware, software licenses, and IT staff salaries are putting a strain on business budgets. Every dollar spent on maintaining a fragmented, self-hosted infrastructure translates to less capital available for core operations and growth initiatives. Consolidation offers a path forward, allowing businesses to optimize their IT spend by reducing the number of vendors, licenses, and internal resources needed to manage disparate systems. 

Economic uncertainty breeds caution. Businesses are hesitant to invest in large-scale IT projects, particularly those with upfront costs like hardware purchases and software deployments. Hosted solutions, often delivered through a subscription model, offer a more attractive proposition. They require minimal upfront investment, minimizing financial risk and allowing businesses to scale their spending as needed. 

The global supply chain continues to experience disruptions, leading to extended lead times and component shortages. This poses a significant challenge for businesses seeking to deploy new hardware for on-premises IT infrastructure. Hosted solutions, on the other hand, leverage the provider's infrastructure, eliminating the reliance on a volatile supply chain for business continuity.

The rise of hosted solutions

Cloud-based solutions are no longer a novelty. They offer a multitude of benefits for businesses seeking to optimize their IT environment. Hosted solutions are:

• Cost-effective: Reduced infrastructure management overhead translates to cost savings
• Scalable: Businesses can easily adjust their service level based on changing needs
• Secure: Leading cloud providers invest heavily in data security
• Reliable: Guaranteed uptime and redundancy ensure business continuity
• Accessible: Cloud-based solutions offer anywhere, anytime access to applications and data

Consolidation in action: The multi-CMS conundrum

A prime example of this consolidation trend can be seen in the Content Management System (CMS) landscape. Many businesses find themselves juggling multiple CMS platforms for different departments or regions. The new Storyblok report, The State of CMS 2024, reveals that 81% businesses use more than one CMS and almost half (47%) of those surveyed admit to using 2-3 CMSs within their organization - a rise from the 11% reported in the 2023 survey. This fragmented approach leads to duplicated efforts, increased licensing costs, and complex maintenance requirements. 

However, consolidating these disparate CMS systems into a single, robust, hosted solution unlocks a wealth of benefits. Enterprises can streamline content creation and management processes, eliminate redundant licenses, and free up internal IT resources for more strategic initiatives. Additionally, hosted CMS solutions often offer pre-built integrations with other popular business applications, further enhancing operational efficiency.

The State of CMS 2024 survey reveals that 99% of those who switched to a headless CMS report improvements that come from managing content in one central location on a modern tech stack. The most common benefits are increased ROI (61%) and productivity improvements (58%).

The new IT channel landscape - the future is hosted

As economic pressures mount, we can expect to see increased collaboration between established IT vendors and cloud providers. Traditional resellers may transition to offering managed services for hosted solutions, leveraging their existing customer relationships and expertise. This shift will create a more streamlined IT channel, where businesses can access a wider range of hosted solutions from trusted partners. 

While consolidation presents challenges, particularly for businesses reliant on legacy systems and internal IT expertise, the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term disruptions. Enterprises that embrace hosted solutions will find themselves better positioned to weather economic uncertainties and be better prepared for future technological innovations. They will benefit from agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, ultimately allowing them to focus on core business objectives.

This shift towards hosted solutions will not spell the end of the IT channel. Instead, it will usher in a new era of collaboration and innovation. As businesses prioritize cost optimization and agility, the IT channel must adapt by offering a wider range of hosted solutions with robust managed services. This new landscape will incentivise partnerships between traditional resellers and cloud providers, fostering a more streamlined and efficient ecosystem for businesses seeking to optimize their IT infrastructure in an era of economic uncertainty.

Edge computing is becoming an essential part of IT infrastructure for business leaders and IT managers as they support the Internet of Things (IoT) and on-premise applications, as well as bring high bandwidth content closer to data sources. With this comes the need for better uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

This eBook from Schneider Electric discusses the challenges that UPS can come up against at the edge, and explains the benefits of three technologies that can help mitigate them, including cloud-based management and monitoring technologies.

Download now to learn more about how wide-bandgap technology works, how lithium-ion battery technology can help reduce carbon footprints, and how cloud-based software can help with staffing.

Provided by  Schneider Electric

After running SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) for more than 13 years, marketing company Vistaprint found limitations with its legacy system. The firm wanted to improve access to data and analytics, enhance the user experience, increase agility, and reduce infrastructure costs. So it embarked on a transition to S/4HANA across key business functions including finance, supply chain, sales, and analytics.

"We had challenges with just data volume management in ECC with lower average order value and high order count. The number of transactions is high,” says Mukul Agrawal, director of technology at Vistaprint.

“In ECC if I was going to run a report on any action just for one month, it would crap out. I would not be able to run the report, because the volume is so high."

Overcoming the challenges of legacy tech

Agrawal says the implementation project began in September 2019 with a scheduled go-live of April 2020. Within this seven-month timeframe, the team completed conversions and testing in sandbox, development, and QA environments.

Just as the go-live was approaching in March 2020, COVID-19 forced the entire team to work remotely. "We had a decision to make. Are we going to go live or are we going to pause this implementation?" says Agrawal. "We were ready. So, we met with our CIO and CFO we decided we’re going to go and implement the system completely."

On 25 April 2020, Vistaprint went live on S/4HANA with over 250 people working remotely across the globe. According to Agrawal, careful planning, testing, and practice enabled a smooth transition despite the fully remote cutover.

The implementation team faced some specific technical challenges during the migration, however. "There are specific conversions that happen on fixed assets when you're moving from ECC to S/4. Even though the GUI looks very similar between the two systems, the back end, the database structure, the capabilities are very different."

Proactively identifying and cleansing stale legacy data was critical to avoid issues during cutover. Agrawal also highlighted the importance of optimizing downtime during the transition. "We cannot be without our system for 24 or 40 hours. There was a lot of TLC given to that process. SAP told us it was going to take ten business days of downtime. We were able to reduce our downtime to about 21 hours."

What moving away from on-prem means

The implementation of S/4HANA has delivered major transformational benefits across Vistaprint's business operations and processes. One area where Vistaprint has seen dramatic improvements is in data access and reporting. 

With S/4HANA's embedded analytics and real-time data capabilities, month-end closing processes that previously took teams eight to ten hours to run can now be completed in just three minutes for some reports. This massive acceleration in reporting speed enables much faster financial closes each period. 

In addition, Vistaprint has been able to eliminate the reconciliation needs between its legacy ECC system and separate analytics systems previously required. Now all reporting and analytics run directly and natively from the single source of truth in S/4HANA.

On the user experience side, adopting SAP Fiori apps on mobile and desktop has enabled Vistaprint's employees and executives to interact with the SAP system more easily and efficiently across various tasks. For example, executives can quickly approve purchase requisitions, marketing spend requests, and other transactions directly through apps rather than relying on cumbersome offline processes. 

Vistaprint has also been able to leverage S/4HANA's automation to realize process efficiencies. Tasks that previously required three to four days per month of manual efforts from the finance team for regulatory reporting, tax filings, VAT reporting across geographies, and other filings can now be completed automatically.

Finally, moving to S/4HANA has enabled Vistaprint to retire legacy systems and reduce its infrastructure footprint by migrating to SAP's cloud. This cloud transition along with decommissioning of ancillary systems has reduced Vistaprint's annual infrastructure costs by over $250,000.

How to transition to the cloud without a hitch

For any organization considering S/4HANA migration, Agrawal recommends maximizing preparatory work in the ECC environment beforehand. "Anything that you can do in your pre-planning phases, any work that you can do on ECC to de-risk your actual implementation from ECC to S4 – you should sign up and do. Because that's much less work for you to do during the implementation.

“When you are running an implementation. You have a consulting team and implementation partner; you're paying for two systems at the same time, so you need to reduce that duration.”

He also advises investing in tools to automate and accelerate the process. Vistaprint uses solutions like ActiveControl from Basis Technologies for transport management and risk mitigation. "Definitely look at these ancillary tools. These are your de-risking tools, help your change management, help it speed time to market as well.”

He continues: “Even now we use it. It's not only used for upgrade, but we also use it on daily production releases, and these tools help us to do from a weekly or monthly to production release to a daily production release because these things are automated right now for us.”

Customers of InfluxData have criticized the company’s communication channels after they were left surprised by its decision to stop using some AWS and GCP regions. 

Problems began over the weekend when customers reported difficulties accessing data before eventually discovering the removal. 

The company had previously updated its documentation to reflect that the Asia Pacific – Sydney (ap-southeast-2) AWS and the Europe West – Belgium (europe-west1) GCP regions would no longer be supported by InfluxData, but some customers claim not to have been explicitly notified. 

Posters on a support forum for the company’s products described the situation as “a catastrophic communication breakdown” and “highly unprofessional”. 

One customer reported “we’ve lost 10GB of customer data”, in response to a post from a company representative explaining that the user interface had been updated with a closure message and emails had been sent warning that the discontinuation was coming.

Jay Clifford, a developer advocate at InfluxData said: “I am ever so sorry the closure of these clusters has unexpectedly hit you”. 

“We understand that a scream test would have been another form of communication that we overlooked.” 

A ‘scream test’ is a process whereby a service is stopped in a non-destructive way to see if anyone notices or ‘screams’. The service can then be swiftly restarted and the change rolled back if required. 

Another customer replied: “Influx Cloud, as a data-storage service and data-management service, needs to do a lot more than ‘understand’ and be ‘ever so sorry’, you need to communicate clearly with customers, and actually store and manage the data responsibly and reliably”. 

InfluxData is responsible for InfluxDB, an open-source time series database. The company offers InfluxDB in the cloud as either a serverless or a dedicated product. On premises versions of InfluxDB Clustered and Edge are currently listed as available later in 2023. 

InfluxDB cloud is available on multiple cloud providers, and it is the removal of the AWS Asia Pacific - Sydney (ap-southeast-2) and GCP Europe West - Belgium (europe-west1) regions that has caught customers out. 

In its documentation, the company warned that accounts in the affected regions would need to be migrated in order to continue service after 30 June 2023. It also updated its status page to reflect the changes and, according to Clifford, sent out emails on 23 Feb, 6 April, and 15 May. 

However, some customers did not see the notifications or receive the emails and so found themselves suddenly unable to access their data with limited options for restoration. 

The situation is a reminder of the importance of keeping a close eye on notifications from all vendors in the digital supply chain. Backups must also be maintained and a contingency plan is vital in the event a service becomes unexpectedly unavailable. 

InfluxData did not immediately respond to a request for comment by ITPro. 

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Uprooting legacy tech'. We apologise for any errors.

Rory Bathgate

Hi, I'm Rory Bathgate.

Jane McCallion

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Rory

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast, where today we're discussing legacy tech.

Jane

Most companies that have been in business for more than a few years will have old technology stacks. While most firms are following some kind of digital transformation strategy, shedding legacy tech is no easy job and can lead people to take the path of least resistance, using a mix of old and new tech across their IT estate.

Rory

This can lead to big issues down the line, however. A very public recent example is the outage that led to thousands of flights being cancelled and delayed across the United States, which the FAA has blamed on accidental file deletion while updating a database. The FAA is heavily-reliant on old systems, and has said it will take until 2029 to phase out old methods such as paper flight strips.

Jane

Today, we're speaking to Ravi Mayuram, SVP of engineering and CTO at cloud database platform Couchbase, to discuss the need for businesses to upgrade their infrastructure. Ravi, thanks so much for joining us.

Ravi Mayuram

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jane

So can we start off, could you define what we mean by legacy infrastructure? Is it something that's old, is it obsolete, is it difficult to manage? What is this thing?

Ravi

Yeah, I think you know, we can maybe define legacy to be something that has been in production, in use for at least 15-odd years and more. And many of the systems that we are generally talking here have been in use, in production for at least 40-odd years. And so that definitely is legacy. It's, you know, to use an analogy here, it's like using landlines when the modern technology is sort of mobile and cellular phones. It's almost like that, many of these technologies that we're talking about in the stack were designed and invented before the internet came into be. And so you can see how that impacts your thinking and the access to those systems. And that's what leads to sort of some of these issues that we're seeing now.

Jane

Yeah, so more old than necessarily obsolete? Would you say?

Ravi

Well, obsolescence in technology happens very quickly. So it is obsolete on a certain level, but they are still useful in many ways. So in that regard, they're not useless. Definitely, there's a lot of use in them, but they are not up to the modern challenges and demands. And in that process, you find that they're difficult to maintain, difficult to use, and they have, you know, the cost of obsolescence is also high. That's where these things come into play, where you're sort of sitting on systems which are very old, and very few people know what's happening inside. These are very complex systems and enterprise software. And like what you mentioned recently happened, these are all very sophisticated systems built over many years, and layers and layers, various years of technology, various generations of technology, if you will have sort of layered on each other and ossified.

Jane

Yeah.

Ravi

Now, these are difficult systems. And so, modernising them is one of the sort of initiatives that many of them take.

Rory

So on this issue of modernising layers, what are some of the immediate challenges that it comes to when you're handling legacy infrastructure?

Ravi

Yeah, I think the the biggest thing is that what has really happened in the last, you know, decade or so perhaps a little bit more than that, is that it's the movement of direct to consumer, if you will. Which means that you and I get to directly interact with many of these systems which were actually built for, we used to call them backends, which were built for specialised people to work and operate and interact with them. Classic example, not to beat this, but it is basically very easy for all of us to relate to is travel reservation. You know, there was a time only travel agents would interact with these systems. Now you and I have straight access to that thing, including the pricing, the inventory, the availability, the flight schedules, the routes, everything's available to you. It'll tell you, "the middle seat is you know, $50 or £50 cheaper than the aisle, right? So you have, that means the pricing engine, the inventory, the availability, everything is coming directly to your thumbs. Whereas earlier, you had to have specialised people. So it's disintermediation of the intermediary, that's the sort of the generic theme. Direct to the consumer is the movement. So all these systems were built for enterprises where specialised people could interact with them. But now, you know, the common, millions of folks are interacting with them directly. And that basically poses two issues. One is scale, instead of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people sort of accessing them now, immediately millions and even billions of people are accessing them with, you know hundreds of millions concurrently using these systems. So, straightaway those systems which were built for, not for this scale start to show. And then, you know, then the ease of use, usability, maintenance, all this comes as a consequence of this. And those systems were not built for this, they could take a downtime of a night. Nowadays it's five nines availability, you cannot have the systems go down for more than five seconds in a year or something. So yeah, those systems were not built for it. So now how do you modernise it? It's like a ‘fixing the plane while flying it’ situation. So these are complex ones. But that's what the challenge is, that's what people are undergoing. So that I hope that gives you a flavour of the kinds of problems that that is existing in the system and why it came to be

Jane

Sure. Is there an element of risk by which I mean, you've kind of touched on sort of business continuity risk there if there's any downtime. But is there an element of potential cybersecurity risks if you're running older systems, and they are more vulnerable to attacks? And if you don't have the skill set to understand them and patch them, then you're going to have further problems?

Ravi

True. It’s at two levels, it's an absolute binary answer here. There are two sides of this equation. First, is that yes, because of these systems being so old there are systems here, which were written in COBOL and other sort of programming languages where there are physically they don't, they cannot find the resources, talent to actually work on this system. So part of it is people are a little bit scared in touching these systems, because people don't know what's happening inside at a certain level. Right? So they have to be careful in how they have to modernise it. And so it's, people are a little bit gun shy, correctly so. I wouldn't want to do my banking or fly an airline which is taking this lightly. So they are careful, and that's required. So on the one hand, to your security question yes, there could be loopholes which nobody would even know how to identify and fix. That's possible. The flip side is also a security thing that people are acutely aware of, which is that when you now modernise the system there are a whole bunch of modern challenges, because now you're exposing that system to everybody. That brings a different level of security and threat. And so that has got to be secured. So both sides, you know, it's not a clear case of one side fixes the problem, but it is a case of you have to modernise from the standpoint of at least you know, where the vulnerabilities are. With the older ones you don't even know, because then that's when these kinds of surprises happen. When you didn't even know what is going on, somebody was trying to do something correct and yet, it causes because these are complex systems and a little, like they would say a little butterfly flapping its wing can lead to a huge storm on the other end. That's what happens in many of these situations, without knowing what the systemic impact is, if you make a minor change it shows up somewhere else as a huge issue. So that goes away when you go from a legacy to a modern, but it does bring some new challenges of exposing your system to millions of users, and the way you have to secure that. But the good news out there is it's a well known problem, there are many companies working on it. And there's a lot of talent which can go and address that and fix it, versus the other one where you were hard pressed to sort of go fix those. Even if you find that talent, the cost of maintaining older systems always gets more and more expensive. And you might not have the right kind of returns for it.

Jane

Yeah, absolutely.

Rory

I'm interested in this point you raised of skills, of people being actually able to interface with the systems. Is there a sense of urgency here, that we need to modernise these while these people are still on the payroll or maybe that we need to train people up to be able to handle some of these systems?

Ravi

Absolutely, there is that sense of urgency. And sort of, we have ourselves seen this, when we work with many in the airline industry in the sort of operations of airports and reservation systems, which are all huge systems. Not just here but in retail and many other sectors, in every sector, the same thing is happening. Just the very simple act of curbside pickup completely changes the backend systems in retail industry, because the entire system was set up for everything to be brought to the back side of the warehouse and then stocked in shelves. Now you're saying well, direct to the curb where somebody can pick it up. So the whole mechanics, the logistics of this completely changes like this, every industry has its own. You can see the whole streaming, how that is changing the entire television and set top box to going away to cloud, DVR is how the whole thing changes. That gaming changes, instead of it being like console based, nowadays it’s mixed where half the stuff is happening in the cloud where inter-player games could be played yet, for speed and stuff, you can use your local consoles. It's this kind of transition is going everywhere. And the scale is the defining factor in the middle of all of this. And so your modern systems have to basically address that scale, and performance at scale. These are the two main things. Yes I can scale, but it's going to be slower and slower and as more people walk into the system it doesn't work anymore. The first user, as a customer put it, the first user and the billion user both should have the same experience. Saying to the billionth “So take a number and stand in line while I service the first one” doesn't work. So that's a sort of the change that is sort of going through, and people are sort of modernising. And there is urgency, simply because of this just to give you statistics. You know, when you're trying to book anything, a hotel room or or flight, they used to say the ratio was 100:1. 100 looks before one book happens. Nowadays it’s 10,000:1. 10,000 looks are happening before one booking happens, because a lot more of us are exposed to these systems obviously. The same thing is happening in banking. Anytime you introduce your mobile banking, the amount of times people are checking their bank balances seems to go up 100 times. Otherwise you have to go to the bank and ask somebody to tell you what the balance is, now you fire up your thing, “Oh my God, what was the last time” so like that, and everybody does it two times, it's already, you know, 100 times more than what you would see in a day. So it's a scale, by which I mean it's two to three orders of magnitude and in some cases even more of accessing these systems. That's what it has basically come down to. And so there is a huge, there's already a bunch of stuff work already done in the last 10-15 years, but as you can imagine, the devices are exploding, the axis is exploding, everything's becoming untethered. And so correspondingly, there is a lot more traffic. And so there is urgency in many of these systems to be modernised, and some are undertaking it, some are a little bit slower. But the game’s on.

Jane

You kind of mentioned banking, aviation, and retail there. Are there any industries in particular, whether it's those or others, that are particularly prone to the problem of legacy infrastructure?

Ravi

You know by definition, legacy infrastructure means these businesses have to be in business and thriving in the last 40-50 years, or more. It might sound negative, but it is actually not because they made some of the smart decisions for the time when they made those decisions. And the times have changed. Classic examples are the financial industry. You can imagine insurance, banking, healthcare, these are all places where people put the best money on technologies of old, just mainframe systems. They were expensive, super expensive, but they knew they understood the value of data. But the same mainframes are now what's holding you back, because that means physically your request, let's say you're sitting in London, and you're making a request and to let's say, let's say if Couchbase, were to use a mainframe, it would mean basically mean that you would have to go physically hit that mainframe sitting in some data centre in Utah, or wherever else we keep it as a cheap. And that takes a lot of time, the back and forth of it. In these days, where you're just one click away from your competition, you will be gone. “This site is too slow, I don't want to be here”. So what is happening in the modernisation is basically distribution, it’s called geo distribution of data. That same data, which was sitting in one box is actually in the cloud and distributed whereas actually, the data is sitting very close to you in London someplace. So it does not have to make the pond hop to come and fetch the data. So this is how the modernisation actually has to happen, where the data comes to meet you at your point of engagement as opposed to your request having to travel halfway across the globe to come to wherever the data is housed. So that's the legacy story already as in, you know, your modern technology of old now is sort of becoming legacy. And you just have to modernise that to get to a point where it's relevant to the way people are accessing it now.

Rory

I mean, you've touched on a key solution just now. But what options do businesses have when it comes to handling legacy systems beyond just leaving them in situ?

Ravi

Yeah I think, like I said, modernising or going away from legacy systems is not an easy thing. So what you… many times whatever happens in technology, it sounds like you're disrupting something in the past, this past is obsolete, throw that away, come to something new. That doesn't work in these kinds of situations, because there is value that they can still provide, and they are complex. And these are multi-year projects sometimes to modernise them. So the way you have to go about this, and it's difficult to do in many cases, and only sometimes certain types of software could be used to do this thing is basically instead of going this route of “let me rewrite the whole thing in a new stack”. What you have to basically do is think like, they use an analogy, things like remodelling a house as opposed to rebuilding a house, where you basically have to think in terms of “I'm going to extend”, and then maybe redesign the entire old stuff, but put something new adjacent. And the way you typically, and the problem with many of this infrastructure is that they are the weight bearing sort of systems. If you touch them, it shakes the whole foundation so to say. So how do you make foundational fixes typically, in a remodel is you actually put a beam on top which takes all the weight. And then you can move walls and stuff like that. That's how we should think about this, what can you add into your mix of systems, which will take most of your sort of where the access is happening, and then that gives you… and here there are newer technologies that help you including sort of patterns that people use in using microservices, and those sort of technologies, because you want to take small chunks of it instead of rewriting the whole thing because that's a never-ending project. Say you just want to take one microservice away from your legacy monolithic system to modernise it, and use other systems which will give you this, I'm using this analogy of a weight bearing wall. Which you would know in your system, how you have to sort of take the weight off of the one that you want to modernise. And if you do that, that's how sort of we have seen many companies approach this, and we have sort of partnered with them. And this comes from experience, not not some theory.

Jane

So it's a case of looking, I guess, when you're thinking about you want to modernise your infrastructure, you're looking for reasonable use cases where you can do that and not necessarily looking to do the whole thing if it doesn't need to be. If there is this app that's running on this old server, and it's doing its thing, and it's not harming anybody we'll just leave it where it is.

Ravi

Yes I think you just need to, but that's the toughest thing. Because what would happen is that you say “this is the part I need to modernise”, but that is the part that is getting most accessed. So how do I do that without, but you're absolutely right. Which is basically you just have to study your system to say, “which are the parts I want to modernise in which order?” So I don't have to do this whole boil the ocean thing, because at the end of it, you're not going to find anything at the bottom of it useful. But if you basically do this in a sort of organised, thought through manner where you take appropriate levels of risk, you succeed. I have heard customers say that “look, my entire career has been trying to get off of mainframes, I’ve not been able to do it so far but now I'm able to do it, because there are sort of modern tools and technology available to do it”. Because it's, it's not easy. Number one, and number two, the problem basically is one of when you have to modernise you're, you're already behind the eight ball, so to say. That's the thing that basically slows people down from modernising, because they are there risk averse. So how to mitigate your risk is the first like you mentioned, that would be the best way to analyse the system and modernise the ones, that way you can sort of manage the risk. And when you take these small chunks away, the risk automatically becomes lesser and lesser as you proceed.

Jane

When we're talking about legacy apps, rather than legacy infrastructure, one of the things that's often put forward is containers. That you take your old apps, you shove them in a container, you put it in the cloud and that is the answer to your problem. Is that the answer to the problem? Or is it a bit more complex than that?

Ravi

It is more complex than that. And that is a mistake many people have made, and they don't realise that they made the mistake directly because it's not exactly one for one. But where it ends is that, oh now my cloud costs are through the roof, I’ve got to contain the cloud costs. This is where it ends without realising. Because what they're actually in one sense doing is what I call a cut and paste. They're cutting and pasting the enterprise architecture onto the cloud, that's what they basically did. They said “I'm going to wrap this up in a container and put it there”. But then what you're losing is, on the enterprise you had bought, whereas in the cloud you're renting. So obviously, this is going to cost you way more than what you did. Whatever worked for you in the enterprise will not work, just economics doesn't work there. That's what you need to understand, and this is where your earlier point comes into play. When you're modernising don't do a cut and paste, understand which part of your systems need to change. First move when you're doing that modernisation, consider cloud as the first place where you want to start there. Because it's now changed, you don't have to go about buying hardware, installing software, maintaining patching, upgrading, all that is taken care of by the service provider so already it’s relieving you of a lot of stuff. So use that to your advantage and sort of now write those pieces of software, which you want to modernise one microservice at a time in the cloud. And you know, bridge the gap, keep some in the on-prem some on on the cloud, until such point as you've decided to move everything onto the cloud. Or whichever hybrid is the architecture that works best for you, stay there. You don't have to necessarily move everything to the cloud, because one day you may not bring it back. Because regulations, there are so many things that are unknown out here. So people who are in that domain would know what makes sense to move and what doesn't, and that's they need to take the time to do.

Jane

Is it a question of maybe finding a partner, whether that's an MSP or a consultancy or something like that, to kind of guide you through this process?

Ravi

Yes, that would help. But you also need to have a lot of in house resources, who understand because that domain knowledge is your own, your own company’s. And that's what you're protecting in one sense, right? Your IP, so to say. And yes, people from the outside can help guide you, navigate because the landscape is confusing. But you also need to have your talent be trained for this new reality, because it's not…what got you here won't get you there. You have to learn your newest set of skills, and modernise. And your domain expertise is what you bring to the table, you can use external consultants and sort of ISVs and others who can help and help you build that stuff as well who have expertise in, in the modern sort of systems in the cloud and containers and orchestrators and all that stuff, and both are required. And then you have to build a talent pool in house as well. So because these are, if anything more and more your business is, critically it's not like business is running and IT is helping No, it has become one, your IT is your business at a certain level. You know, earlier we used to say you're a software company or a service company, all that is good but now you're a data company, every company has to become a data company. Because the next phase is more that every company will become an information company. In one sense, that's when sort of AI gets in the middle of all of this stuff and, you know, separates the noise from signal. So that's the evolution because that doesn't mean others go away. They are necessary, but not sufficient. You just need to have more and where is that going? You've got to be providing sort of, look at it as what data, what value is coming out of this because everything else is sort of already spoken for.

Rory

You've mentioned resources, the need to have resources in house. We're entering into a recession right now. You know there's layoffs happening, companies are kind of reassessing their budgets. How can they do this and at the same time be handling legacy architecture?

Ravi

Yeah, I think that's a very good question. It's about training your existing people, in my opinion mainly. Of course, you have to balance your resource allocation too from your business standpoint, there's a newer business reality for that, whatever adjustments you need to make. But why you are making that you have to also invest in your talent pool, your your employees, and find ways for them to be more knowledgeable. And it's not a training, which is basically, you know, “we just go for a training”, that's not the point. How do you apply that back to what you're doing, it's in that loop where managers and leaders in the company have to sort of sit and invest their time with the engineers and sort of get them to par with the technology stack that they are planning to adopt, in the modern architecture, and they be trained. And there's also other movements happening, the DevOps movement. Agility has been there, around for a while, but there are a lot of things changing even in how you can be agile. So training and all those, you know, it's not just a skill thing, it's a philosophy as well that is changing, which is where some investment is a good time to invest in one sense in those things, so that you can, when the economy comes roaring back, you're ahead of the curve.

Jane

And it related to a lot of what we've said, when it comes to upgrading these systems how can you do that without causing downtime, which will alienate your customers, and losing money? Nobody wants to be losing it, the last time we want to be losing it is now. What's the strategy for this?

Ravi

You know, each company will basically have to zoom in this specific sort of strategy, but when you are sort of going from your older stack to the newer one, one thing you basically may always have to keep in mind is that the older one is the known, the trusted one, and the newer one is a yet inexperienced system. So you may well have to consider building more redundancy, and more sort of resources into that. Sometimes you constrain the resources that you're going to put in the new, because you're sort of cost-conscious and stuff like that, correctly so. But you’ve gotta be prudent about where you're trying to be sort of cost-conscious in a newer system, give it a little bit more. Maybe just 10%, maybe 20%, that's what, it's not gonna be like double it, triple it. It's not like that, but you just have to have a little bit more resources. You know, just to use a classic example our resting heart rate is 70 beats per second, if if our heart was at best, if you said, “let's double it, 140 beats per second ought to be good enough for a heart, because most of the time, you're not even using half of it”. You know, if a dog chased you, and you ran up a flight of stairs, you will keel over because it'll go to 200, 300. So redundancy is important in certain systems, where you just sort of give it until you understand the system better, then you can tune it back. And so this is not going to be forever investment. And this is where cloud is very useful. Because it's about elasticity, you can provision more, and then you can put it back. It's not like in the good old days, where you have to say “oh, I need to go buy one more system, what is the CapEx of this thing? Can we really afford it?” and that goes away. So this is the advantage, take advantage of what cloud gives you elasticity. And you can actually build this redundancy into the system. So you know always have, these days it’s very easy as storage is also cheap, always have replicas of stuff. So in case one thing fails, another one is easily available. The good old ways of taking backup and then recovering is gone. Because by the time, let's say these days people are talking about hundreds of terabytes and petabytes, even if you take a backup just for storing that, and getting the system back into the health where it used to be, is a week long or a couple of weeks long in many cases. You can't afford that. So you just have to have a Hot Standby as people would call it, a replica of your running system. So that you can just switch over to that, this is how five nines availability is handled in many of the cases, using redundancy and replication as a strategy.

Jane

So if you have any sort of final advice to give somebody who is looking to modernise their infrastructure, modernise their business, what would it be? Where do you start?

Ravi

You know, coming from the buyers, where they come from, and what we have done so far, most of the sort of the problems that exist when you're trying to modernise is that you've modernised various elements of your stack already. Your UI is more modern than where it was before. Your application logic tier is sort of more modern than it was before. The place you had delayed the most to make changes in your data tier, because that's the toughest and that's the that's your foundation, right? That's the one you didn't want to move all this while because it delayed it as much as possible, because you could get away with it. Now you can't, you have to realise that, that the more you sort of stick with legacy systems, the more obsolescence and the cost of it. And it's not just the bottom line, it's a top line, also, you're not sort of now able to attract more newer customers, because you're not accessible to so many of them, or you're not easily available to them, those kinds of issues show up. So you have to look deeply into your data infrastructure, data tier, and see how we want to sort of modernise that and that's where these are all the weight-bearing walls situation, whenever you attach data infrastructure. And that's where we saw, even in the recent airline situation, it was a data infrastructure tier issue which somehow bubbled up to be this bigger issue. So you just have to modernise that tier, and that's not for the faint of heart, so to say. And that's why it has come this far. Now, if you don't take that challenge and start the journey now, you will find yourself on the wrong side of the digital divide. You may not cross the chasm and things will pass by, or you will be completely upended. All these things are happening, and many are aware of this, but yet there's a time for urgency to modernise that portion of your stack. And there are enough examples now of people having done it, so you can do this safely, and there are enough guardrails and resources available so people can undertake this one safely and succeed at this.

Rory

Well, Ravi, thank you so much for being on the show.

Ravi

Fantastic, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure to talk to both of you, you guys seem to know a lot of what's going on and I hope the listeners benefited from this lively chat.

Jane

Thank you.As always, you can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes, and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk.

Rory

You can also follow us on social media, as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter. Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, why not tell a friend or colleague about us?

Jane

We'll be back next week with more from the world of IT, but until then, goodbye.

Old technology stacks can be found throughout the sector, especially in companies that have been around for more than a few years. While most firms have undergone digital transformation of some kind, shedding legacy tech is no easy job and can lead people to take the path of least resistance, using a mix of old and new tech across their IT estate.

This can lead to big issues down the line. A recent example is the outage that led to thousands of flights being cancelled and delayed across the United States, which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) blamed on accidental file deletion while updating a database. The authority is heavily-reliant on old systems, and has said it will take until 2029 to phase them out.

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Ravi Mayuram, SVP of engineering and CTO at cloud database platform Couchbase, to discuss the challenges presented by legacy infrastructure, and why enterprises need to take the opportunity to upgrade before problems become entrenched.

Highlights

“Those systems were not built for this, they could take a downtime of a night. Nowadays it's five nines (99.999%) availability, you cannot have the systems go down for more than five seconds in a year.”

“Say you just want to take one microservice away from your legacy monolithic system to modernise it, and use other systems which will give you this, I'm using this analogy of a weight bearing wall. Which you would know in your system, how you have to sort of take the weight off of the one that you want to modernise.”

“Now, if you don't take that challenge and start the journey now, you will find yourself on the wrong side of the digital divide. You may not cross the chasm and things will pass by, or you will be completely upended.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Civil servants blame legacy technology for sluggish government digital transformation progress
• BT Group extends Kyndryl deal to migrate legacy mainframe apps to the cloud
• Defra's legacy software problem 'threatens' UK gov cyber security until 2030
• Managing a blend of legacy and modern IT during digital transformation
• Government 'must focus on replacing legacy IT systems'

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Data has become a competitive advantage, helping businesses anticipate and react to change. But with data in multiple formats and locations, costs quickly add up and expertise becomes a limiting factor, forcing businesses to fall back on spreadsheets and disconnected databases.

The cloud has emerged as a critical tool for businesses of all sizes to more easily access and synthesise data to gain greater insight and make better decisions--predicting trends, improving operations, and identifying new customers and business opportunities.

Download this eBook from AWS to learn:

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• How to evaluate if your business would benefit from a cloud-based analytics strategy
• and What to look for in a cloud service provider

Provided by  AWS

Cloud service providers are now introducing industry-specific cloud offerings following the great switch to digital transformation, with the idea that businesses can purchase an entire cloud product but with the agility of a composable approach.

Banks are one of the key industries that these service providers are targeting, and this study looks into the cloud characteristics that are most important to banks, the results of which can enable bank CIOs to evaluate providers on the criteria that offer the most value.

View this whitepaper now to understand:

• How vendor capabilities aren't always consistent, and how to get around this
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Organisations today look to the cloud for their compute and data storage needs. AWS is by far the current market leader in both revenue and number of customers, and its service ecosystem is the most complete

Amason's S3 API has quickly become the standard protocol for object storage, but there are alternative APIs from major cloud providers. Many third-party solutions are now compatible with more than just S3, offering additional options to users.

API compatibility could remain an issue, though. Even if the customer has control of the entire stack, making changes to the application is not always economically or technically feasible, so download this asset to learn more.

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Whilst many applications have moved to the cloud, or are in the process of moving, most network security functions remain tied to on-premise hardware appliances. Many corporate networks rely on legacy hardware appliances to define their perimeter, enforce policies, and route traffic.

Hardware boxes can be expensive, hard to manage and slow. With new supply chain pressures, lead-times of up to a year are not uncommon, delaying business-critical IT initiatives. The steady shift of data, applications, and employees to using the Internet as the primary means of connectivity, new security and performance issues arise that hardware may not be able to handle.

Watch this recorded webinar with Cloudflare experts to learn more about:

• Challenges with provisioning and maintaining network hardware in the cloud era
• How these challenges affect remote work, IT staffing, network security, and more
• Cloud-native “as-a-Service” options you can deploy today
• A roadmap for reducing your dependence on hardware appliances through cloud transformation, whilst adopting frameworks like Zero Trust/SASE at the same time

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Google Cloud and Coinbase have announced a partnership for long-term investment in web3 technology and to allow crypto payments on the former's cloud platfor.

The deal will allow Google Cloud customers aligned with web3 systems to pay for cloud services with a number of cryptocurrencies. Such payments will be processed through Coinbase Commerce, which facilitates international payments through decentralised exchange of cryptocurrencies on the blockchain.

Once finalised, this will open the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to accepting payment using some of the most popular tokens on the market, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Solana, and Dogecoin.

Additionally, as part of the deal, Google Cloud will become Coinbase’s official cloud provider, working with the cryptocurrency firm to expand its exchange and data platform.

The firm’s capacity for big data analytics, as well as Google Cloud’s managed data warehouse, BigQuery, which was recently upgraded with the aim of becoming the ‘ultimate data cloud’, were cited as worthwhile additions to Coinbase's operations.

Coinbase is hopeful that the partnership will benefit its worldwide expansion, too. Access to GCP's infrastructure and the reach of its fibre-optic network have been cited as factors that will prove instrumental in this drive.

The owner of its namesake exchange currently has over 100 million users, including 14,500 business clients.

"We want to make building in web3 faster and easier, and this partnership with Coinbase helps developers get one step closer to that goal," said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.

"We're proud Coinbase has chosen Google Cloud as its strategic cloud partner, and we're ready to serve the thriving global web3 customer and partner ecosystem. Our focus is making it frictionless for all customers to take advantage of our scalability, reliability, security, and data services, so they can focus on innovation in the web3 space."

Coinbase is currently available in over 100 countries, and unlike rival Binance can be used in both the UK and US freely. The latter was forced in 2019 to open a separate US exchange in order to comply with US law, and in 2021 was blocked from regulated service in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

For securing crypto assets, Google Cloud will use Coinbase Prime, the firm’s integrated solution for custody and reporting.

Cryptocurrencies are often cited as more secure than traditional currencies, but experts have warned against seeing blockchain as a silver bullet for financial safety. In 2021, the Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning that those investing in Bitcoin “should be prepared to lose all their money”, and Web3 projects have lost over $2 billion to exploits since the start of 2022.

Despite this, cryptocurrencies are still seeing large-scale investment, and continue to be associated with web3 and the metaverse. As inflation rises, more customers than ever are investing in cryptocurrencies, a move also driven by pressures such as the economic crisis.

Organisations of all sizes are accelerating the number of applications being spread across cloud ecosystems. The demand for data to power cloud apps, improve AI models, and deliver on digital business initiatives has never been higher. This report focuses on cloud Master Data Management (MDM) as a key enabler of those initiatives.

The cloud enables enterprises to differentiate and innovate with MDM at a much more rapid pace than was ever possible before. The cloud is a disruptive technology: when compared to on-premises deployments, cloud enables elastic scalability, faster times for server deployment and application development, and reduced costs for storage.

Download this whitepaper to learn how the cloud can open up a great number of service possibilities for MDM, which can directly impact business results.

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Master data management (MDM) is the gold standard of data management and analytics, but many organisations struggle to select the right solution to meet their needs. With a host of MDM vendors offering packaged solutions, it is sometimes difficult to understand how they differ, or which MDM platform would be the best fit to achieve an organisation’s goals.

Therefore, it is important to first identify your desired business outcomes and understand what features are needed so you can select an MDM solution that is the best fit for both short-term and long-term needs. Choosing an MDM solution that’s not aligned properly can result in wasted time, resources, and money.

Download this whitepaper to learn the key considerations in selecting an MDM platform.

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Data is one of the most strategic assets for any business because it fuels digital transformation. The right data enables you to engage effectively with existing and potential customers, deliver a unique brand experience, empower strong business decisions, increase operational efficiency, and much more.

Yet organisations struggle with disparate, duplicate, and conflicting information from a wide range of data sources across the enterprise. Growing data volumes, new information sources, and increased velocity of data add to the challenges.

Download this whitepaper to see how Master Data Management (MDM) provides a “single source of the truth” to enhance targeting efforts, unleash cost savings, and improve operational returns for your business.

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When it comes to having an online presence in the modern world, anonymous hosting can provide you with an untraceable website. Offered by some of the best web hosting services, anonymous hosting is particularly ideal for users wanting to both maintain privacy online, and protect their identity.

With anonymous hosting, this is easily achieved, because signing up does not require personal data to be shared with a provider. As an example, many anonymous hosting platforms utilise cryptocurrency payment gateways, such as Bitcoin, to ensure that no personal or identifying information about the customer is revealed.

However, it's worth noting that it can be difficult to find the ideal anonymous hosting provider when it comes to building and publishing a completely anonymous website. In this scenario, it may be that a given provider doesn't offer domain name privacy protection. Such a situation would in turn risk you, as the user, having people track you via information registered via a DNS server, on sites such as WHOIS.

We're here to help though: below, we've run through our top five best anonymous hosting providers, and explored the key factors you should take under consideration before you choose a service.

The best anonymous hosting providers right now

Hostinger: the best anonymous web hosting

Recommended for its excellent performance, large support knowledgebase, and easy-to-use auto-installer for one-click installation of web apps, Hostinger accepts Bitcoin, and various other cryptos, like Ripple, Ethereum, and Litecoin. If you opt for a business hosting plan, you get a lot for your money.

Hostwinds: great selection and crypto accepted

Hostwinds offers a great selection of hosting plans across shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting. With responsive and helpful customer service, you also benefit from top performance, and can use various cryptocurrencies to pay anonymously.

Namecheap: top cheap anonymous hosting

Namecheap competes with Hostinger on cost, with some of the cheapest anonymous hosting available. Its shared hosting plans include free domain names, an integrated CDN, a website builder, and much more, while Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are accepted.

Which is the best anonymous hosting provider?

The best overall anonymous hosting providers are Hostinger and Hostwinds. With these services, you can maximise your online presence anonymously, and both meet the maxim that aside from successfully protecting user identity and privacy, a top anonymous hosting provider should also deliver site performance and reliability.

If you’re looking for the most affordable option, Namecheap is the best choice, as it also rates among the best web hosting services like Hostinger and Hostwinds. It's also very much worth considering both Shinjiru and OrangeWebsite, as these two lesser-known hosts are top alternatives for anonymous, or offshore, hosting reliability.

The 5 best anonymous hosting providers available

Hostinger

The best anonymous hosting provider

Hostinger clearly offers some of the best web hosting services on the market, and its anonymous hosting solutions are excellent as well. It enables you to create an account without providing a large amount of personal information, and you can pay using anonymous methods, including with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

In addition, Hostinger offers some of the most affordable hosting we’ve seen. Its shared plans are extremely competitively priced, and they are all backed by excellent security, friendly customer support, and a suite of advanced management tools.

Read our in-depth Hostinger review.

Hostwinds

Great options and anonymous payments

Hostwinds is known for its excellent selection of web hosting options, which include shared, VPS, dedicated server, and advanced cloud solutions. The customer service team is friendly and responsive, and you will benefit from leading performance and a highly redundant server network.

Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies are accepted, enabling you to make an anonymous payment.

Read our full Hostwinds review.

Namecheap

Competitive prices and great features

Like Hostinger, Namecheap offers some of the most competitively priced anonymous hosting solutions on the market. All shared hosting plans come with a free domain name and an integrated CDN, as well as access to a built-in website builder, free site migrations, and more.

Both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are accepted payment methods, enabling you to create an account without providing personally identifiable information.

Read our detailed Namecheap review.

Shinjiru

Leading on privacy options

Unlike the first three options on this list, which are mainstream hosting providers that offer some form of anonymity, Shinjiru focuses on privacy.

It offers 100% anonymous offshore hosting solutions, and even goes as far as to offer anonymous domain registrations. Various privacy-centric payment options are accepted, and the company uses various methods to ensure the identity of its customers is protected at all times.

OrangeWebsite

Competitive performance and top options

OrangeWebsite also focuses on anonymous hosting, with a focus on freedom of speech and privacy. The Icelandic company is known for its excellent hosting solutions, which use 100% green energy and offer very competitive performance.

There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, and anonymous payment methods include Bitcoin and cash by mail. Various options are on offer, including shared, VPS, and dedicated servers.

How do you choose the best anonymous hosting?

Good anonymous hosting does not disclose any personal information. With that in mind, finding the best anonymous hosting provider depends on a few important criteria.

Simple registration process: since you’re paying for data privacy, the registration process shouldn’t ask for personal information such as your name, billing account, and other sensitive information.

Cryptocurrency payment: good anonymous hosting does not disclose any personal information. With that in mind, finding the best anonymous hosting provider depends on a few important criteria:

Domain privacy protection: this feature conceals your personal information upon domain registration of the DNS. Basically, if you don't have this, then anyone can view your contact details on the WHOIS public database, assuming you're the domain registrant.

Additionally, the web hosting provider must deliver the necessary features for great hosting. This includes generous storage space and bandwidth, robust customer support, and excellent site performance – among many other qualities.

Further reading on web hosting and website builders

Check out our guide to managed vs unmanaged hosting to find out which is best suited to your needs, and discover the best VPS hosting or best cloud hosting services. If you're looking to create a new website, make sure you look over the best website builders before making your choice.

As organisations seek to become more competitive, they are often moving to cloud data warehouses (CDWs) and cloud data lakes (CDLs) to help manage large volumes of diverse data and perform advanced analytics. In many cases they are using multiple cloud providers to fit their needs.

Organisations like the idea of a multi-cloud environment, which avoids vendor lock-in and helps them stay portable. They also want to take advantage of the best features and services of each cloud provider.

Download this study to see why the respondents agree that cloud is the future of data management and realise the five must-haves to modernise data and analytics.

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Google is preparing to launch three new Google Cloud regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand, the firm revealed in a blog post on Tuesday.

The new regions will join 34 others currently operating across the globe, including 11 in the Asia Pacific.

Per Google, enterprises across industries, including public sector organisations, will benefit from the regions’ capability to maintain low latency and high security, data residency, and compliance standards.

“The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organisations’ increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in Asia Pacific," said Daphne Chung, research director of cloud services and software research at IDC Asia Pacific.

“With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” added Chung.

The new Asia Pacific regions will also join six other previously announced regions, namely Berlin, Dammam, Doha, Mexico, Tel Aviv, and Turin.

Total spending on cloud services in the APAC area (barring Japan) is set to reach $282 billion by 2025, according to IDC estimates. AWS has also announced plans to set up cloud bases in Aukland, Manila and Bangkok, although that has now been upstaged by Google's latest announcement.

“Having migrated our operations and applications onto Google Cloud’s superior data cloud infrastructure, we are already delivering more personalized services and experiences to small business owners, delivery riders, and consumers than ever before – and in a more cost-efficient and sustainable way,” commented Thana Thienachariya, chairman of the board, Purple Ventures.

“With the new cloud region, we will be physically closer to the computing resources that Google Cloud has to offer, and able to access cloud technologies in a faster and even more complete way. This will help strengthen our mission: to build a homegrown ‘super app’ that assists smaller players and revitalises the grassroots economy.”

"The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organisations increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in APAC," Google Cloud's Daphne Chung said. "With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multi-cloud environments."

Google Cloud is gradually cementing itself as the third-biggest cloud provider in what is a very competitive market. However, while AWS and Azure dominating the market, Google is still yet to match them for profit with its cloud services. Though the firm did manage to surpass $6 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in Q2 of 2022.

With additional reporting from Bobby Hellard

Business data/insights reside in databases, making them integral to business operations. As a result, IDC estimates that at least 75% of business applications interact with databases. With cloud-based application modernisation becoming the core strategy, databases also need to become cloud-ready and be flexible/cost effective, agile, and scalable to create and manage database operations.

Cloud is the infrastructure engine of digital business. But cloud adoption is moving beyond vanilla IaaS strategies.

The combined Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS market is forecast to have revenues of $400 billion in 2025 with a 28.8% CAGR for 2021-2025. Unstructured data analytics/data management and media streaming are forecast to be the fastest growing segments with CAGRs of 41.9% and 41.2%, respectively.

Deploying and scaling databases at the speed of applications and ensuring continuous security, patching, cloning, and data reduction capabilities is complementary to application modernisation on PaaS.

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Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) has been around for some time, and now with the increase in migration to the cloud, HCI is being utilised more and more as the foundation for running hybrid cloud IT operations.

This study from the IDC delves into how HCI is being utilised today, sharing how hyper converged infrastructures are being used in greater scale across a wide range of organisations.

Download this study now to realise how HCI is the perfect solution for today’s infrastructure technology challenges, and how Dell’s EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI measures up.

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Vodafone has signed a multi-year deal with Oracle to modernize and move the telco’s European IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Per the accord, Vodafone will move a significant number of its systems to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region. The fully managed region is set to integrate Oracle's public cloud offerings into Vodafone's network and data centers.

The strategic move places Vodafone in an ideal position to modernize its existing Oracle databases, while also supporting ‌the scale-out‌ ‌of mission-critical OSS and BSS systems.

“The implementation will also enable Vodafone to build new cloud-based applications faster, and by taking advantage of its geographical scale, launch them in multiple markets at the same time,” stated Oracle.

Vodafone’s partnership with Oracle also supports the telco’s multi-year initiative to transform its pivotal IT infrastructure into a shared, on-premises, open-standard platform that supports and scales the next generation of digital services.

"As Vodafone focuses on growth, data is key to how we evolve our business, build new capabilities and innovate to meet the needs of our customers. Our collaboration with Oracle supports our vision of becoming a technology communications company," said Scott Petty, chief digital & IT officer at Vodafone.

"The agreement enables Oracle to bring its entire portfolio of cloud services directly into Vodafone data centers. This includes the same architecture, software, services and control plane used in OCI public cloud.”

The flexibility offered by OCI enables us to build a robust, secure, and extensible cloud platform in our own data centers, while also providing the operational agility and scalability required to support the growth and diversification of our business," added Petty.

When you’re leading technology at a fast-growing business that’s buying up other organisations to increase company size and market share, you need an IT strategy that allows you to integrate people, processes and platforms quickly.

That’s the challenge facing Adam Miller, IT director at Markerstudy Group, which became the UK’s fifth largest motor insurance provider after completing the purchase of the Co-op Insurance underwriting business in 2020. The group, which employs more than 3,500 members of staff, now includes a range of brands, including Brightside Insurance, Insurance Factory and Auto Windscreens.

What’s more, Markerstudy continues to grow. Just before Christmas last year, the group announced the acquisitions of Clegg Gifford and BGL Insurance. Miller says the fast-growing nature of Markerstudy means preparatory IT work is absolutely critical to his ability to integrate new businesses with existing operations.

“You've got to do your homework – you need to understand what you’re taking on,” he says. “Equally, there's an element of flexibility. You can't force everything into the same footprint. Experience tells me there are always fringe cases. You can't be totally dogmatic.”

Merging with the cloud

Miller says the cloud is a key strategic tactic in helping his team integrate acquired businesses. New workers can use the cloud to log in from any location and get up and running quickly – something that’s been even more important during the past two years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acquisitive businesses need a solid platform that allows new workers to use various applications on-demand in a safe, secure and integrated manner, says Miller. At Markerstudy, he’s used Citrix Cloud Services to provide a standardised platform to support the various remote-access requirements of disparate employees.

“Citrix is a good enabler because you're putting more people on the same platform,” he says. “Yeah, these new employees might have a different set of applications, but then they sit under your data centre infrastructure, your cloud services and your support structures. So, it allows you to onboard new businesses quicker.”

When Miller joined Markerstudy in 2015, the company’s acquisitive approach had created a complex range of systems and services, so his team spent a long period of time reducing the IT estate and consolidating systems into two internal data centres.

Markerstudy was already using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on-premises from its two data centres prior to the pandemic. He estimates about 70% of the workforce were using Citrix in early 2020. But after the outbreak of COVID-19, the organisation sped up its shift to on-demand IT and transitioned wholesale to Citrix Cloud Services.

Miller says the demand from the business to create a strong platform for remote working was crucial. Within two weeks, his team were using the Citrix Cloud to support business-as-usual activities, with 1,500 call centre staff providing services to customers from home.

“We knew that we were going to have to prove our approach at a much larger scale,” he says. “But the project ran smoothly. From a customer perspective, the calls continued, and people still had access as we were moving people out of the offices to work from home.”

Boosting cyber security resilience

In many ways, the pandemic has been a proving ground for the benefits of cloud-based remote working. While Miller could have worked with other providers, he selected Citrix because of its strengths in allowing employees to log in remotely from any location.

Security was another consideration. Citrix Cloud Services includes multi-factor authentication (MFA) using virtual tokens. This built-in approach avoided the additional expense of deploying a third-party security solution, which could have cost £100 per user annually.

"One of the big drivers was moving to MFA more widely,” says Miller. “We moved people to Microsoft Authenticator as the method of delivering the token for Citrix access. Now, our end users can just turn on the device, click on an icon, and start working. That was very much the aim at the start of the project – and we’ve delivered it.”

Another key element of the project has been the decision to standardise on IGEL OS, which is a purpose-built operating system for accessing virtual environments such as Citrix. IGEL OS is hardware-agnostic, so Miller’s team have used the technology to convert a range of laptops, desktops and thin clients into locked down, centrally controlled devices.

That approach proved crucial during lockdown when the company had to get as much kit as possible to home workers quickly. So far, 3,000 IGEL OS licences have been purchased, along with IGEL Cloud Gateway, which connects and manages home-based devices outside the corporate network.

A single-minded approach

IGEL OS also makes it much easier to repurpose kit that’s absorbed during an acquisition. Miller gives the example of the Co-op Insurance deal, during which Markerstudy “hoovered up” more than a million pounds worth of equipment. Re-flashing each machine takes minutes. The hardware can then be set up as a virtual machine (VM) running Citrix Cloud Services.

“We’ve re-provisioned a vast amount of equipment from the Co-op Insurance arrangement and we're doing the same with Brightside,” says Miller. “I’m sure we'll carry on doing the same with future acquisitions. So, it's a good way of making sure that any hardware investment is still usable. That's definitely a benefit for us.”

The shift to Citrix has been managed by IGEL partner cloudDNA, who worked alongside Markerstudy’s internal infrastructure team. Miller’s team is now working closely with cloudDNA to explore new advances. He’s particularly interested in how a combination of IGEL and Citrix can continue to keep systems and services secure.

“Having a tight operating system running on most of my devices is very appealing. If you're running an encrypted OS on the device, and you strip that down to just the components you need to run on that device, you lower your threat profile considerably,” he says.

So, what started as a platform to help bring new businesses seamlessly into the group has now become a secure platform to help staff work remotely and productively on the cloud from any location. For Miller, the combination of Citrix Cloud Services and IGEL OS provides a strong platform from which to help Markerstudy continue growing with confidence.

“It drives standardisation,” he says. “If you're expanding your existing footprint, and adding another division of users into that estate, it’s a far simpler support model then continuing to manage their own devices. Our approach keeps things simple – the more you can standardise and keep people running on a common platform, the more efficient your support model.”

Businesses are realising the benefits of their cloud migration, with faster time to market, improved customer experiences, automation, and operational efficiencies. As this progresses, companies are realising opportunities for further innovation and ultimately changing their expectation of IT.

As a result, IT leaders need to manage the competing expectations of departments, and across the company, teams need to demonstrate improvements in their bottom lines to justify further innovation focus.

Download this paper for a business value approach to cloud migration, with case studies from industry leaders on how they’ve used the cloud for their digital transformation.

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For IT decision makers, the case for cloud adoption has been well established, but in a business case they need to clearly and concisely communicate those benefits to their organisation.

This whitepaper explores Amazon Web Services’ Cloud Value Framework, which breaks down the business value of the cloud into four key dimensions: cost savings, staff productivity, operational resilience and business agility.

Download to learn how to improve the ways in which you communicate cloud value to your organisation.

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With the way organisations are now operating post-pandemic, the flexibility of agile IT infrastructures has proved significantly valuable to business continuity, with this shift to cloud and subscription-style technology models paving the way forward.

The IDC predicts that by 2024, three quarters of edge infrastructure will be operated by as-a-Service solutions, yet there can be challenges when it comes to skills shortages and limited budgets to support day-to-day operations.

Download this resource to learn how HPE GreenLake’s Everything-as-a-Service platform can give your a competitive edge offering:

• Scalable IT provision
• Centralised operations
• and Automated routine management

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Those organisations that are becoming more data-driven are gaining a competitive advantage and solving business problems at a great pace. But this isn’t happening in the data centre or in the cloud.

Companies that need to deliver applications at scale, and solve challenges fast are doing so with an edge computing solution that enables them to reduce costs, connect existing infrastructure and support continuous innovation.

Download this resource to learn how containers and Kubernetes can help deliver edge computing benefits, as well as what to consider when building a modern edge infrastructure.

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Join Michele Null and Brian Coursen, product managers in edge-to-cloud technology, as they talk about the complexities of edge computing, how to define edge infrastructure locations, and what’s being done today.

Learn how edge computing can help organisations achieve improved operational efficiency in this 20 minute webinar sharing use cases and benefits of current edge technologies.

Watch now to discover how to extend automation to the edge with example deployments, and how a consistent edge platform can help you meet your needs.

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Identity management means, as an employee, being asked to prove your identity to gain access to company data. However, for customers looking to gain access to a company website, authorisation could be based on a loyalty membership status.

This scenario indicates a difference in Customer IAM (CIAM) and IAM with CIAM can requiring a greater amount of security, scalability and availability due to the vast amount of potential identities and the need for access via websites; whereas a specific no. of employees could utilise an IAM service.

Download this whitepaper to better understand the unique requirements of CIAM and why a broad cloud-based IAM solution could be sufficient to support IAM and CIAM cases.

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Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realise by working with Red Hat OpenShift cloud services.

The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Red Hat OpenShift cloud services on their organisations.

Download now to find out more.

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Corporate climate action is growing. At COP26 in November last year, more than half of FTSE 100 companies pledged to eliminate carbon emissions in line with the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) is gaining popularity among smaller and medium-sized companies as well. Digital transformation, in particular, can enable sustainable business practices and help companies to hit ESG targets.

IT leaders and CTOs have a role to play in not only supporting how their company is using technology to plan and operate more efficiently but ensuring the technology is being procured and used with sustainability in mind.

It can be difficult, however, to sieve through the alphabet soup of ESG and know where to begin without being accused of greenwashing. There are a number of key steps, though, that IT leaders can take to pursue environmentally-friendly digital transformation strategies.

Monitor employee emissions

Thanks to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, sensors and real-time data capturing, reporting ESG data to improve operational efficiencies is gaining traction. KPMG’s Survey of sustainability reporting at technology companies, published in April 2021, found 83% of 311 respondents actively report on sustainability, while 70% report carbon reduction targets.

Although companies are getting better at monitoring emissions from sources they own and operate, known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions, they’re not as adept at reporting scope 3 emissions – those up and down a company’s value chain. Unlike scope 1 and 2 emissions, which are mandatory, scope 3 emissions are optional.

The shift to remote and hybrid working during the pandemic has raised the question of whether companies should be including Scope 3 emissions in their reports. Sustainability depends on a reduction in carbon but studies indicate these models of working simply shift emissions away from the office. According to the climate consultancy EcoAct, a decrease in emissions related to commuting may make up for this, but it cautioned this can’t be known without taking into account emissions from a company’s operations.

At the least, businesses would do well to encourage or ask employees to adopt sustainable IT practices and lower their digital footprint. Nearly half (42%) of IT leaders polled by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in January are tracking the environmental impact of employees working remotely, including the electricity tariff they’re on.

Consider the environmental impact of the cloud

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of the cloud, and for good reason. Accenture research shows migrating to the public cloud could lead to 30% to 40% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.

The true impact of cloud computing and services, however, is often not communicated properly throughout enterprises, Kelly Hungerford, director of digital transformation strategy and services at oral healthcare company Sunstar Global, tells IT Pro.

“Efforts to lift and shift on-premise operations to the cloud – or spin up new services – are typically associated with streamlining operating and development costs. The impact on the business and environment, however, is more compelling than the TCO talk,” says Hungerford.

One of the biggest benefits is the reduction in energy usage. Operating on-site data centres requires a significant amount of power. Then there’s the cost of transporting, using and disposing of the equipment that needs to be factored in.

That said, in the same vein that scope 3 emissions from remote and hybrid working should be considered in ESG reporting, businesses should also be mindful of whether third parties are operating efficiently themselves. As more companies deploy cloud services, it’s putting more pressure on off-premise data centres and leading to more carbon emissions being generated across value chains.

Hungerford says Sunstar Global chooses partners that “incorporate strategic data centre environmental management policies into their business strategy”. “This means that they not only operate sustainably, strive to reduce waste, and commit to powering digital delivery of products with renewable energy, but their partners do as well,” she adds. Gartener, furthermore, predicts carbon emissions from cloud service providers will become a top-three purchasing decision for IT buyers by 2025.

Commit to sustainable hardware management

The end-of-life management of hardware has long been a weak point in business sustainability plans, says Andy Tomkins, sustainability engagement manager at Canon EMEA. With companies, too, increasing their IT and hardware expenditure to accelerate their digital transformation strategies, the situation is only likely to get worse unless steps are taken to mitigate the impact on carbon emissions.

IT buyers should start by purchasing from manufacturers and suppliers that design their products with the circular economy in mind, Xavier Battinger, director of business development at Ricoh Industries France, tells IT Pro. This might, though, be easier for laptops and PCs than specialist equipment, such as servers.

“Businesses should ask themselves if the product they’re purchasing has a long lifespan, whether it can be reused, repurposed or upgraded throughout its life cycle within the firm,” says Battinger.

According to a 2021 study of IT buying in the Netherlands by the Utrecht Sustainability initiative, if all companies were to switch to circular-based procurement and extend hardware life cycles, there would be a 50% drop in e-waste and emissions.

One way to manage hardware end-of-life is through recovery programmes. Ricoh, for example, has its Resource Smart Return Programme, which can be used to return copier and printer cartridges that are then reused or recycled.

Another way is through purchasing from manufacturers that commit to dematerialisation, says Tomkins, whereby a company leases hardware and returns it at the end of the lease. The hardware is repaired or remanufactured before being leased on to the next customer. “All the parts and products under this model need to be designed with maximum recovery of materials in mind.”

Though cloud storage is already a vital resource for most organisations, there is no ‘one size fits all’ methodology for maximising the benefits of a hybrid cloud storage environment.

This report presents a hybrid cloud storage model that describes the characteristics of organisations and their use of cloud storage, and how it could benefit your business.

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The pandemic will have a profound impact on the way businesses work in the future with many having to rethink how they operate. Data backup is one of many processes that took a back seat during lockdown, but as things return to normal, there has never been a better time for businesses to get their data protection house in order.

Even before the pandemic, many SMBs had a poor track record for data backup. A recent report by IT services provider Beaming found nearly three million UK SMBs were at high risk of losing data by not backing it up correctly, or failing to back it up at all.

There’s no reason why SMBs should be struggling with data protection, as there are plenty of top-quality backup products on the market suitable for a wide range of environments and budgets. The best backup strategies use a hybrid mix of on-premises and cloud backup to provide the requisite number of copies, with various products combining both for simplified management.

Perfect partnership

On-premises backup teamed up with cloud storage is a great way forward for SMBs as this approach satisfies the essential ‘three-two-one’ data protection mantra. This strategy allows you to retain three up-to-date copies of your data, back it up to two different types of storage media and keep one copy off-site.

It sounds complicated, but all good backup products can manage the whole thing for you. In most cases, you can create one job that copies data to an on-premises backup store and also sends it to your preferred cloud storage provider.

The cloud shouldn’t be your only backup location as, if your internet connection or provider goes down, access to your cloud storage goes with it. It’s also your responsibility to ensure data stored in the cloud is protected – some customers of French company OVH found this out the hard way recently when one of its cloud data centres was gutted in a major fire and all their data was lost.

A hybrid backup strategy will protect your business against most disasters. A second copy of data on-site provides fast access for quick recovery and if you’re unable to enter your offices for any reason, the cloud provides a third copy for external access.

Human nature

A complicated data protection strategy that relies on regular human intervention is guaranteed to fail. Backup needs to be fully automated, so look for products that provide full scheduling facilities allowing them to run jobs regularly for you at the appointed times.

Various products do this, and many default to running a strategy comprising one full backup and subsequent partial backups for each system. Partial, or incremental, backups only copy data that has changed since the last backup was run which saves on storage space and reduces the load on your internet connection when data is being transferred to the cloud.

Network administrators that want an easy life should look for products that allow their entire business backup strategy to be managed from one console. Keeping everything under one roof makes it much easier to deploy and monitor backup jobs, manage storage devices, keep an eye on problems and run restore jobs.

Virtualisation is becoming very popular for SMBs that want to save on hardware costs so look for backup products that have built-in protection for host platforms such as VMware and Hyper-V. Most include this as standard but one product in this guide requires a completely separate product to secure virtual hosts.

Stand and deliver

Another depressing downside of the pandemic is the increase in ransomware attacks, and SMBs that think they are too small to be of interest should think again. The true figure may never be known but many SMBs hit by ransomware demands simply pay up and don’t report it for fear of damage to their brand reputation.

Backup software can’t protect against these attacks, but features such as file versioning could mitigate them without you having to pay a ransom to get your data decrypted. The best backup products let you choose the number of versions to keep going back days, weeks and months so if you get hit by a ransomware demand. It’s possible to browse them and restore files to a state before they were encrypted.

Some ransomware attacks are even more devious, as they’ll gain access to the backup system and delete all backups before encrypting the source data. One defence against this type of attack is immutable storage that once written to, cannot be changed, overwritten or deleted. It’s easier to implement than you may think as many cloud storage providers offer immutable storage, for instance.

Masters of disasters

Don’t start congratulating yourself when your data protection solution is up and running, as you must regularly test its restore facilities for files, applications and systems. Called contingency planning, this will ensure your backups are working and all unforeseen problems are ironed out before you need to use them when a real disaster strikes.

Various products we’ve seen are all available as free time-limited trials, so you can test them out before buying. Data loss can have catastrophic consequences for an SMB, so consider very carefully which backup product will ensure your business is a born survivor.

The promise of cloud computing is the ability to transform and revolutionise – opening up new ways of thinking and doing things. In essence, it offers businesses, regardless of where they’re based or what industry they’re operating in, a sense of freedom – freedom to think and behave differently and freedom from traditional constraints linked to cost, scale, security and so on.

But freedom is also about the ability to choose which cloud product and services you want to consume, when, and how. So the idea of being locked into what can feel like infinity with just one cloud vendor seems unthinkable, right?

Unfortunately, while it’s unthinkable and unrealistic for many, it’s normality for others, with some cloud providers essentially promising the world, but only willing to deliver the goods if customers are willing to sign-up to fixed terms of service, complex small print and large financial penalties if they want to leave earlier than planned.

More or less?

Research by Bain & Company, published in September 2020, found that the majority (65%) of CIOs plan to use multiple cloud vendors. The reasoning is varied, with some citing price and others citing variety, but the worry about lock-in is a clear driver for many, according to the study.

The uneasiness surrounding potential lock-in can have adverse knock-on effects and result in companies working with more cloud providers than they might otherwise need to in order to avoid putting all their cloud eggs in the same basket. This, best case scenario, could result in spending far more time, effort and budget than would otherwise be needed. Worst case, multiple lock-ins. Either way, trying to forge more partnerships because you’re worried having just one will be dangerous isn’t a solid strategy.

That’s where specialist cloud firms and a multi-cloud approach arrive on the scene. Having the right mix of providers working together to deliver on your business needs, you can actually simplify rather than complicate things.

Analyst firm IDC has dubbed 2021 as the year of multi-cloud and it’s easy to see why, based on the evidence presented against vendor lock-in itself and knee-jerk reactions by organisations to try and avoid falling foul of being locked in.

"The widespread disruption caused by the global COVID-19 outbreak has reinforced the critical importance of businesses being agile enough to scale up or down with fluctuations in demand," said IDC's Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META).

"A public cloud platform provides enterprises with an agile, scalable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports their business processes. However, public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. As such, some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house data centre – or on private clouds. This approach helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations."

As a result, IDC has predicted that the majority (more than 90%) or companies will follow a multi-cloud path come 2022, seeking out fit-for-purpose specialists rather than generalists where and when it makes the most sense.

Fellow experts agreed with Michael Warrilow, VP analyst at Gartner, who said: “Most organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions. We expect that most large organisations will continue to willfully pursue this approach.”

The need for speed?

But Warrilow does urge caution before going all-in on multi-cloud and advises against moving from A to B too quickly.

“There are many nuances between platforms, and trying to build services in more than one simultaneously is challenging. Starting slowly also allows time for in-house staff to develop their skills and learn how to manage the cloud.”

“Should you really embrace the entire stack from a single vendor just to take advantage of their speciality services?” Wasabi CEO and co-founder David Friend wrote in a blog post. “While it’s convenient, what are the risks? It’s not as though the cloud has eliminated all technology risks. So what risks remain, and how are you going to address them?

“Whether you’re worried about it or not, if you go with a single cloud provider you are in fact tying yourself to that vendor, with all that entails. From the transfer fees to get your data back out (for any reason, including no longer being a customer of the vendor, extended downtime of the provider, etc.), to the closed APIs that your solution is built on that would require varying levels of refactoring (at the least), to blowing it up and trying again in order to deploy on another cloud.”

He continued: “Moving to the cloud? Don’t repeat past mistakes. Avoid vendor lock-in and build it your way with a best-of-breed, multi-cloud strategy.”

As companies realise what will work best for them when it comes to cloud, spending in this area will increase. Indeed. Gartner predicts that public cloud spend will top $396 billion this year and grow by 21.7% to reach $482 billion next year. More specifically, the analyst firm believes spend on public cloud will surpass 45% of all enterprise IT spend by 2026 – a figure that’s up from 17% this year.

“The economic, organisational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services,” said Henrique Cecci, senior research director at Gartner. “This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce.”

When/where/why?

Another Gartner research piece suggested that the pandemic had served as a catalyst for re-defining whether mission-critical workloads needed to be on-premise or in the cloud.

“The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud. Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centres,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

Nag added: “Emerging technologies such as containerization, virtualisation and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud.

“...Cloud will serve as the glue between many other technologies that CIOs want to use more of, allowing them to leapfrog into the next century as they address more complex and emerging use cases. It will be a disruptive market, to say the least.”

The cloud will also play a key role in strengthening your security posture, which makes flexibility and the avoidance of lock-in even more important. The need to plan and tread carefully in this area will only grow as the threat landscape intensifies.

Ransomware was called out as the main threat facing organisations as we move further into the final calendar quarter of 2021, according to Gartner. Other key concerns related to a growing skills gap and how to best support new ways of working and hybrid collaboration, but the possibility of new and emerging ransomware threat remains the biggest headache.

“The negative impact of evolving ransomware attacks is seen as so severe by executives that it tops a notable list of risks related to an ongoing pandemic and the disruption of the global supply chain,” said Matt Shinkman, vice president with the Gartner Risk and Audit practice.

“While new models of ransomware attacks are frightening in their own right, the consequences for organisations are even worse. Prolonged operational delays, data loss and exposure, as well as the reputational damage that follows, present potential existential risks to an organisation that executives are all too well aware of, especially if the attacks occur as a result of inadequate cyber security controls.”

Money talks

In April this year, BAE Systems suggested that the majority (74%) of banks and insurers had experienced an increased exposure to cyber crime since the pandemic began. Despite the growing risk curve, just over a quarter (26%) of firms said the budget they had to dedicate to fighting such battles had decreased in the past 12 months.

“We’re noticing a clear collaboration emerging between different groups of criminals across the wider landscape of serious and organised crime,” said Adrian Nish, Head of Cyber at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. “Fraudsters and cyber criminals seek to exploit fear, uncertainty and change, and the pandemic has offered them new opportunities to probe for weaknesses they can monetise and new ways to disguise their activity.

“Attackers are building increasingly advanced capabilities to target core banking systems and becoming more aggressive, harming victims’ ability to respond to attacks. Online criminals have reacted fast, adapting their approach to hunt out remote working security gaps and prey on the vulnerable.”

Even without the worry of vendor lock-in, security remains a boardroom concern, but add the idea of inflexibility when you need it most and you could be opening up a threat-based can of worms.

Wasabi’s Friend wrote about such concerns in a recent Fintech Herald article, highlighting that even the Bank of England was concerned about the impact on certain cloud providers and services when it came to financial security.

“Where cyberthreats are concerned, ransomware is one of the highest priority threats to banks, and cloud vendor lock-in can exacerbate the threat ransomware poses,” Friend wrote.

“By pitching themselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for data storage and management, bigger providers encourage developers to build their entire technology infrastructure on their platforms, while making it hard to move business to other cloud providers. Such a concentration of power lends itself to the risks identified in the Bank of England report, as it can give rise to opaque business practices whereby security information and how to monitor risks isn’t transparent.”

He added: “Diversifying your cloud providers is important to mitigate against the security risks of vendor lock-in. It will minimise the risks of data loss and downtime while also enabling cost savings in the long-term by avoiding getting locked into long term contracts with a single vendor.”

It’s clear, then, that lock-in can actually exacerbate existing issues and create new ones, especially when it comes to cost, complexity and security. That’s why there should never be a one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud. Businesses should be afforded the opportunity to consider – and work with a trusted partner to validate – what matters to them and proceed, albeit with caution, from thereon in.

“Many customers are beginning to feel locked into services with AWS and Azure and are looking towards alternatives to support their cloud storage needs,” according to Nucleus Research.

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Amazon has denied reports that it is changing its strategy regarding the removal of harmful content from its cloud infrastructure.

The statement comes days after two sources told Reuters that the tech giant is adopting a stricter stance about removing content that violates its cloud service policies.

However, an AWS spokesperson described Reuters' report as "wrong".

"AWS Trust & Safety has no plans to change its policies or processes, and the team has always existed," they told IT Pro over the weekend.

"As AWS continues to expand, we expect this team to continue to grow"

3/09/2021: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said it will take a more proactive approach to prevent its cloud infrastructure from being used to spread harmful content.

The company is set to become more strict about removing content that violates its cloud service policies, including hate speech, violence, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to two sources speaking to Reuters.

AWS is in the process of growing its threat-monitoring Trust & Safety team, according to one of the sources. In the last few weeks, the company has been recruiting for a number of roles within the team, including global head of policy and manager positions.

However, the team will not focus on scanning existing content hosted on AWS, but will try to prevent new harmful content from being added, the source said, with the cloud giant also confirming that the Trust & Safety team “does not pre-review content hosted by our customers”.

It's also unclear what precise actions this new team will be taking to limit how much problematic content is hosted on its infrastructure.

"AWS Trust & Safety works to protect AWS customers, partners, and internet users from bad actors attempting to use our services for abusive or illegal purposes," a spokesperson told the news agency. "When AWS Trust & Safety is made aware of abusive or illegal behaviour on AWS services, they act quickly to investigate and engage with customers to take appropriate actions," AWS said, adding that “as AWS continues to expand, we expect this team to continue to grow".

The reports come six days after the Washington Post found that an Islamic State propaganda website, which openly celebrated the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 170 people on 26 August, was hosted on AWS infrastructure. The website has since been disabled due to violating AWS’ Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).

“The AWS AUP prohibits the use of our services to threaten, incite, promote, or actively encourage violence, terrorism, or other serious harm. When we receive reports of potential violations of our AUP, we act quickly to investigate and take action to disable prohibited content,” AWS said.

In July, AWS shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to NSO Group, following reports that the Israeli firm’s Pegasus spyware was used to target at least 50,000 journalists, government and union officials, human rights activists, business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, and lawyers. Earlier this year, the cloud giant also removed right-wing social media app Parler from its infrastructure due to its role in inciting the 6 January insurrection.

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AWS has made its cloud-based health care data lake solution, Amazon HealthLake, generally available to customers, enabling health care organizations to pull medical information from different sources into a single environment and use it to improve patient care.

With the solution, the tech giant wants to end the enormous spread of medical data across various applications and other systems.

Various patient medical information, such as clinical notes, lab results, and insurance information, is often housed in separate databases. This makes it extremely difficult for health care professionals to get a complete overview of a patient’s information. Moreover, collecting this information takes a lot of time.

With HealthLake, this could be a thing of the past, as it merges all patient data into a single data repository. In concrete terms, the solution offers a collection of connectors that automatically import records from commonly used health applications. When these records are in the data repository, algorithms based on natural language processing ensure the data is organized. This makes it easier to work with, according to AWS.

The algorithms scan medical documentation, such as clinical notes, and extract patient information. Then, Amazon HealthLake indexes this information and offers it as search pages in a search engine, adapting the raw data into easily searchable data. The ultimate result is doctors can search patient information faster than manually scrolling through all the information.

Additionally, Amazon HealthLake makes it possible to move the combined patient data to other systems for further processing. For this purpose, the data is stored in the industry-standard FHIR. The moving process takes place with a separate API that AWS provides in its Amazon product.

AWS also aims to provide added services to health care customers within the solution. This includes providing artificial intelligence (AI) services to improve patient care. AI can automate tasks, such as making medical diagnoses and planning treatment trajectories. AI can also provide general recommendations.

The underlying infrastructure of the Amazon HealthLake solution is fully managed by AWS. IT specialists from health care institutions only need to create a new data store. This data store is fully operational within minutes, the tech giant indicates. AWS handles the management, configuration and setup of the underlying infrastructure.

“More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS.

“We built Amazon HealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale. Alongside AWS for Health, we’re excited about how Amazon HealthLake can help medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies provide patients and populations with data-driven, personalized, and predictive care.”

Oracle is launching a rewards programme that promises to help customers speed up their migrations plans, while also reducing their software licensing costs.

The programme is aimed at existing customers, who might be enticed into adding to their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) plans with rewards that reduce or even "eliminate" on-premise tech licensing support bills.

The terms of the scheme promise that all Oracle technology license support customers will earn at least 25 cents of Support Rewards for each dollar of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 'Universal Credits' they purchase and consume. These are a form of pay-as-you-go subscription.

More savings can be had for Oracle's 'Unlimited License Agreements (ULA)' customers, who can earn rewards at a 33% rate and potentially eliminate their bill completely by migrating $1.5m of workloads to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

"OCI is Oracle's fastest-growing business because we built a unique Generation 2 cloud infrastructure platform capable of running the most demanding mission-critical workloads faster, more reliably, and more securely than our on-premises systems," said Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison.

"We want to enable more customers to take advantage of our Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle Support Rewards gives customers an easy way to simultaneously reduce their software support spend as they increase the speed of their cloud adoption."

The rewards scheme has been launched to help CIOs and IT organisations under pressure to drive company-wide innovations under tight budget restrictions. Oracle has compared them to frequent flyer miles, as a customer's Support Rewards are automatically added in their OCI Console every month, with Rewards applied anytime.

The support programme has also been praised by IDC's cloud and edge VP Dave McCarthy, who said its transparent pricing was essential in attracting new business and accelerating the adoption of OCI.

A service designed to protect against DDoS attacks has been blamed for an internet outage that affected major banks and public sector organisations across Australia on Thursday, resulting in the failure of websites and online services.

A technical issue stemming from Akamai's DDoS mitigation tool disrupted services operated by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Westpac Bank and ANZ, as well as Virgin Australia and the Australian postal service.

A spokesperson from ANZ told IT Pro that an issue with an external provider briefly affected connectivity on its core services, including its app and online banking. The spokesperson added that connectivity was “restored quickly” and “all our impacted services are back online”.

The root cause of the problem seems to have come from Akamai’s distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation platform Prolexic, according to IT News. “If you face the downtime, kindly turn off/route off Prolexic solution,” a customer service agent, reached via chat on Akamai’s website, advised the publication.

When asked about the problem, an Akamai spokesperson told IT Pro: “We are aware of the issue and [are] actively working to restore services as soon as possible.”

Other entities seemingly affected by the outage include the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia, which had to cancel its open market operations auction, as reported by Reuters.

Last week, a Fastly outage took out a number of websites including those belonging to Amazon, GitHub and the UK government. The cause of the problem was an issue with the company’s service configuration which triggered worldwide disruptions which it disabled. Most of the impacted sites seem to return at around noon BST.

In May, a Sabre Systems outage impacted a number of airlines around the world and interrupted their scheduled flights. One of the airlines the outage affected was Virgin Australia who confirmed that the company had experienced problems with the booking system which resulted in over 30 flights being cancelled. Tweets suggested that the outage lasted for around 3 hours.

Amazon, GitHub and the UK government's online portal were among countless websites taken offline by the outage of cloud computing provider Fastly.

The outage, which started just before 11am on Tuesday, impacted a variety of websites, ranging from governmental portals and news outlets to IT and code-hosting services.

Among those which have been affected are payment websites PayPal and Shopify, internet forums Quora and Reddit, streaming sites Spotify, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max, and Vimeo, and developer portals GitHub and Stack Overflow.

The Fastly outage has also taken down gov.uk, as well as numerous online newspapers and news outlets. These include the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, CNN, the Guardian, Bloomberg News, and The Verge, with the latter opting to take its reporting onto Google Docs.

The precise number of affected sites is at this time unknown. Fastly reportedly has 2,084 paying customers who could all be impacted by the outage. The average Fastly customer reportedly spends $136,000 (£96,125) per year.

The gov.uk Twitter account stated that it's "aware of the issues with http://GOV.UK which means that users may not be able to access the site".

"This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency," it added.

On its status information site, Fastly described the issue as a "global CDN disruption", noting that it's "currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services". Fastly's own website was also down, displaying an "I/O error" message, while other websites showed a "503 error".

At 11:44 am BST, the company announced that it had identified the issue and that "a fix [was] being implemented.

A Fastly spokesperson told IT Pro that the company "identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions" across its POPs "globally" and has since "disabled that configuration".

"Our global network is coming back online," they added.

Gov.uk's services were brought back shortly after Fastly's announcement, and most of the affected sites appeared to come back online at around noon BST.

Google is planning to migrate parts of YouTube away from its internal on-premise data centre infrastructure to its public cloud division, Google Cloud.

Although Google Cloud has carved a solid reputation through the years, its overall market share still languishes behind the likes of Azure and AWS. With the cloud market continuing to expand at pace, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm is therefore hoping to exploit the potential for higher revenues.

Moving parts of YouTube's operations to Google's own public cloud division may serve as a spark the company needs to stay competitive, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaking with CNBC.

Doing so would also allow the company to fight alongside the likes of AWS and Azure, with parent companies Amazon and Microsoft each moving their core services to their own public cloud divisions through the years.

"Part of evolving the cloud is having our own services use it more and more, and they are," Kurian told the network. "Parts of YouTube are moving to Google Cloud."

This migration will be the latest Google service to be powered by its public cloud arm, alongside its Google Workspace suite of productivity apps and services, as well as the DeepMind research division.

YouTube, however, is one of the largest and most widely-used platforms on the internet, and migrating its operations to Google Cloud may, the company hopes, encourage other businesses to follow suit.

Google Cloud has been in a state of transition since Kurian took over from Diane Greene a couple of years ago. The division recorded losses of £4.1 billion in 2020, which were attributed to investment in new data centres, with Google Cloud intent on vastly expanding its operations in the coming years.

In 2020, the cloud giant launched four cloud regions in Indonesia, South Korea and the US, alongside another four which are set to be established in Qatar, Spain, Italy and France.

Cloudera has announced plans to acquire two software-as-a-service (SaaS) firms, Datacoral and Cazena, in a bid to expand its public cloud offering.

The‌ ‌announcement‌ ‌comes‌ ‌on‌ ‌the‌ ‌heels‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌firm's Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) achieving ISO 27001 certification in May.

"The acquisitions will enable Cloudera to usher in a new era of low-code, no-code self-service by automating complex operations – enabling our customers to focus on getting value from their data rather than configuring, operating and managing the underlying infrastructure," stated Rob Bearden,Cloudera chief executive officer.

Datacoral's SaaS platform will further expand Cloudera's public cloud portfolio by providing secure and reliable access to over 80 conventional data sources. The fully managed service enables fast, easy, and accurate data conversions and integrations through a flexible multi-tenant SaaS architecture that runs in the cloud. Its no-code connectors ensure customers can extract any type of data with a few clicks.

"The combination of Cloudera's robust platform with a cloud-native, ETL solution like Datacoral, offers a powerful solution to today's self-service analytics challenge," said Datacoral founder and CEO Raghotham Murthy.

Additionally, Cazena and Cloudera intend to make it easy and cost-effective for Cloudera customers to migrate to Cloudera's proprietary cloud service, CDP Public Cloud. With Cazena's Instant Cloud Data Lakes, Cloudera customers can shave months from the time it takes to implement analytics, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

"Extending the Cloudera platform to a SaaS delivery model fulfills Cazena's vision of enabling businesses to easily speed up their time to insight by focusing on their data rather than operating the infrastructure necessary to manage it – we make CDP easier to operate and consume for all enterprises," said Cazena founder and CEO Prat Moghe.

Assuming the companies meet customary closing conditions, Cloudera expects to complete the acquisitions in the second quarter of the current fiscal year.

In a separate announcement, Cloudera stated it will be acquired by affiliates of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, and global investment firm KKR in an all-cash transaction valued at $5.3 billion.

"The transaction delivers substantial value to Cloudera shareholders, who will receive $16.00 in cash per share, representing a 24% premium to the closing price as of May 28, 2021 and a 30% premium to the 30-day volume weighted average share price," added Cloudera.

This acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

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Mindtree has announced that it’s partnered with data and artificial intelligence (AI) company Databricks to help customers implement cloud-based data platforms for self-service analytics, so users can develop rapid reports, analyze data and gain valuable insights without extensive IT support.

"Companies are accelerating their digital transformation, boosting demand for our open, cloud-based platform," said, Michael Hoff, SVP of business development and partners at Databricks.

"This partnership with Mindtree will bring together the right skills and technologies to help organizations advance their digital adoption journey and drive far-reaching business impact for our customers."

Powered by Apache Spark, Databricks’ unified data analytics platform allows enterprises to build rich data sets, optimize machine learning at scale, streamline workflows across teams, foster collaboration, reduce infrastructure complexity, and deliver superior customer experiences.

Through the new partnership, Mindree will leverage Databricks’ unified solution to enable seamless implementation of self-service analytics, promoting data-driven decision-making.

“Improved, reliable access to data is a strategic differentiator for companies and enables better business decision-making," said Radhakrishnan Rajagopalan, global head of customer success, data and intelligence at Mindtree.

"Databricks offers a powerful platform for accelerating data-driven innovation across businesses. Mindtree with its legacy in digital transformation technologies will help organizations leverage the Databricks platform and get timely access to data for meaningful business insights."

Zoom has announced plans to extend its strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), selecting it as its preferred cloud provider.

The announcement follows that Zoom would be shifting a portion of its cloud infrastructure to Oracle Cloud due to an unprecedented surge in new users following the announcement of lockdown restrictions earlier this year.

Announced in late April, the deal saw Oracle join major cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure in providing support to Zoom. However, AWS managed to retain the bulk of the workload, and it seems its efforts have not gone unnoticed.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan credited AWS with helping the platform manage “unprecedented global demand this past year”.

“We’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability,” he said.

“Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”

Commenting on the announcement of the extended multi-year agreement, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that “COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe”.

“AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” he added.

AWS has been a long-term cloud provider for Zoom, having supplied the platform with necessary infrastructure since its launch in 2011.

“When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate,” said Jassy.

The announcement comes weeks after the video-conferencing platform added a set of security features to help users combat 'Zoom-bombing' attacks. The new controls will help account holders remove unwanted guests and also spot if their meeting's ID number has been shared online.

Canon has confirmed that some users’ media has been permanently lost following a coding error that arose from a botched attempt to switch its image.canon service to new software.

The company attempted to switch its cloud-based media hosting service to a new version of the software that controls these services on 30 July, but soon identified an issue involving the 10GB long-term storage option.

In order to further investigate the problem, Canon temporarily took down both the mobile and web-based applications, leading to an outage that coincided with a suspected ransomware attack, although the two incidents are entirely unrelated.

Canon identified that some of the photos and video files saved in the 10GB long-term storage before 16 June were lost, although the still image thumbnails were unaffected. After resolving the issue, Canon restored the services on 4 August.

An update issued by the firm revealed the code to control the short-term storage operated on both the short-term storage and long-term storage functions, which directly caused the loss of some images stored for more than 30 days. Canon hasn’t indicated how many users were affected, or the scale of losses from the cloud service disruption.

“There is no technical measure to restore lost video images,” the company said on the image.canon website. “Still images can be restored, but not with original resolutions. We offer our deepest apologies to affected users.”

The incident exposes one of the major shortcomings of cloud computing, in that it relies on customers entrusting their data to third parties to host safely and securely. Although, for the most part, cloud hosting services, whether it’s Dropbox or Google Drive, have a strong track record, one slip-up could shatter customer trust.

Canon customers, many of which are professional photographers who rely on the cloud hosting service, have encouraged others to follow the “3-2-1 rule” following the incident; three copies comprising two onsite backups and one offsite backup.

The image.canon outage occurred in parallel with a suspected Maze ransomware attack, in which two dozen domains were rendered offline and the hackers reportedly compromised 10TB of data.

“We are aware that Canon USA are experiencing system issues – an investigation is currently taking place," a spokesperson told IT Pro at the time. "We can confirm however that this is unrelated to the data loss we experienced on image.canon earlier this week.”