Microsoft is facing a class-action lawsuit from shareholders in the US, accusing it of failing to come clean about the state of its Azure business.

The lawsuit, which names several senior Microsoft officials as defendants, including chief executive Satya Nadella and chief financial officer Amy Hood, has been filed by a Michigan pension fund, the City of St Clair Shores Police and Fire Retirement System.

It alleges that Microsoft failed to give investors a full picture of Azure's performance and the financial demands of its AI expansion between May 1, 2025 and January 28 this year – the date on which Microsoft issued its Q2 results.

It reported 39% revenue growth in its Azure and other cloud businesses, down from 40% in the previous quarter, and said it expected growth of between 37% and 38% growth in the first three months of this year. And following this, around $357 billion of the company's market value was wiped out in a single day, representing the company's biggest one-day decline in nearly six years.

Microsoft invested heavily in AI infrastructure, research, and products such as Copilot, the pension fund claimed, while overstating the strength of products such as Copilot and the benefits of its partnership with OpenAI.

According to the lawsuit, the company attributed both the slowing growth of Azure and the higher spending to capacity constraints as it diverted resources to AI-related research and development and Copilot.

It failed to disclose that the Copilot family of products had experienced significant brand positioning, user experience, usage, data siloing, computational capacity, organizational, and interoperability problems, the lawsuit claimed.

The company ranked well below its competitors on a number of benchmark tests, and needed to increase its capital expenditures by billions of dollars. It also needed to divert GPU and CPU capacity away from fulfilling demand for its profitable Azure services, in order to improve the competitive positioning of its Copilot family of products and increase its AI-related research and development, the pension fund said.

"As a result, Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions and Microsoft's Copilot offerings had lost market share to rival products, a trend that was increasing," said Rosen Law Firm, which is handling the case.

"When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages."

Microsoft told Reuters that the claims were without merit, adding, "Microsoft stands by the integrity of its public statements and will vigorously defend itself in court".

The Pentagon has handed a $9.7 billion deal to Dell to provide – and sort out – Microsoft licenses.

The five-year deal – known as the Microsoft Department of War Enterprise Software Agreement II Core Enterprise Technology Agreement (CETA) – was awarded to Dell Federal Systems, and will see Dell as the main contractor providing Microsoft 365, cloud subscriptions, and software licensing for Microsoft products, which have long been in use by the defense agency and military.

"By providing enterprise access to Microsoft 365 advanced cloud subscriptions and critical on-premises licensing, this CETA acts as part of the digital connective tissue essential for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, CJADC2," said Defense Department Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies at a press briefing, according to reports.

She added: "This ensures our war fighters have the tools for just-in-time data sharing, supports our pivot to AI and data analytics, and undergirds uninterrupted operational continuity for our most sensitive and disconnected environments."

The aim is that the deal will give the Pentagon one supplier for Microsoft products, rather than multiple smaller contracts, helping to reduce redundancies in licensing. The agency believes that bringing together smaller IT budgets from across departments into one deal could save as much as $422 million each year.

"This second-generation blanket purchase agreement will streamline and consolidate critical Microsoft software and services across the Department of War, the intelligence community, and the US Coast Guard," said Defense Department Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies at a press briefing, according to CNBC.

CETA will cover US intelligence agencies, the Coast Guard, and the military, including the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, and Space Force.

Previous deals

The CETA deal is the successor to the $1.76bn, five year Micrsoft Enterprise Services contract awarded in 2019, which was designed to give the intelligence community and defense agencies access to Microsoft technology and support as part of a pivot to the cloud.

That same year, the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a massive $10bn cloud deal known as JEDI, but two years later, it was scrapped following challenges by AWS that included accusations that then-President Trump had told the Department of Defense to "screw Amazon".

In 2022, Microsoft and AWS were both tapped by the Pentagon for a new joint cloud project worth $9bn.

Friendly relations

This time around, government representatives stressed the deal followed a competitive procurement process – but reports have been quick to point to Michael Dell's $6.25 billion pledge to fund so-called Trump accounts for children, as well as his wider support for Trump.

In return, Trump earlier this month said people should "go out and buy a Dell" – helping send the company's stocks soaring.

The officials announcing the deal said Dell beat out rivals in the procurement process. "The vendors were all evaluated based on competition, comparison to General Services Administration GSA schedule pricing, and overall chain of value to the department," said acting Navy Chief Information Officer Barry Tanner in a press briefing, according to reports. "Going through the process of evaluation, they came out on top."

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has expanded its global cloud portfolio with the launch of SovereignSecure Cloud in Europe, designed specifically for governments, public sector enterprises, and regulated industries.

EU organizations face a broad range of regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the NIS2 Directive, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

And promising sovereignty across data, operations, and digital infrastructure in the EU, TCS said its new offerings will enable enterprises to strengthen regulatory compliance, achieve digital autonomy, and enhance security, without compromising on speed, agility, and interoperability.

SovereignSecure Cloud for the EU, said TCS, is based on a multi-layered approach. It comprises a sovereign cloud layer delivered through hyperscalers, providing scale and the flexibility to operate securely within the EU regulatory framework.

The national sovereign cloud layer enables country-specific localization while bringing operations under a unified control plane. And its enterprise cloud services layer, meanwhile, leverages the EU-specific TCS Enterprise Cloud Framework, a unified orchestration and control layer designed to enable enterprises to dynamically apply the appropriate level of sovereignty across data, operations, and technology based on workload, risk, and sector.

"European organizations are looking to strike a balance between addressing supply chain and sovereignty risks while ensuring leverage of frontier technologies to be globally competitive," said Sapthagiri Chapalapalli, head of Europe at TCS.

"TCS SovereignSecure Cloud solutions mark an important milestone for TCS in Europe, as our customers can now benefit from a pragmatic approach to cloud that ensures resilience and sovereignty that is contextualized to the enterprise."

Alongside the launch, TCS is also introducing the TCS Sovereignty Consulting and Delivery Framework in the EU, with the aim of helping organizations become a 'minimum viable sovereign enterprise', with the right balance between control and flexibility.

Using a risk-based approach, said TCS, it categorizes workloads by importance and applies the right level of sovereignty to each, focusing effort on the areas with the greatest impact to mitigate risk.

The launch of TCS SovereignSecure Cloud in the EU follows its rollout in India last year, followed by expansions into Kenya, East Africa, and the Philippines.

And, said TCS, it builds on the firm's strength in the European region, where it has been operating for more than 45 years, with an existing workforce working from 58 offices across the region, with 10 data centres and 21 delivery locations across Europe.

"Harnessing sovereign AI unlocks sovereign cloud adoption advantages. Sovereign AI, which is built and operated within national boundaries, enables enhanced operational efficiency and supports local regulations compliance," said Pradeep Devalla, head of sales and solutions, cloud unit – growth markets.

"Sovereign AI and sovereign cloud collaboration facilitate the creation of advanced, culturally attuned digital services that protect sensitive information and reinforce digital sovereignty."

TD Synnex has announced the availability of its StreamOne White Label Storefronts for partners across the UK and Ireland.

The distributor said the move will help the channel scale cloud services and improve the customer experience.

Built on the company's StreamOne Ion aggregation platform, the white-label storefronts will enable partners to create their own branded cloud marketplaces through which customers can directly purchase, provision, and manage cloud services.

The self-service offering is designed to give partners flexibility over how they deliver cloud services while maintaining full control over elements such as branding, pricing, and customer relationships.

Channel partners can configure storefronts with their own URLs and determine exactly which solutions and services their customers have access to, alongside controls for subscription scaling. Multiple storefronts can also be created and tailored to different customer groups, with access protected through multi-factor authentication.

In an announcement, TD Synnex said the platform will enable partners to trigger cross-sell and upsell suggestions within their storefronts at key points of the lifecycle to boost average order values and help drive further revenue opportunities.

The firm added that storefronts can be tailored to partner requirements with support from its cloud team, while training via the TD Synnex Channel Academy and customer-facing marketing materials are also available.

Driving recurring cloud revenue growth

TD Synnex's UK&I storefronts launch comes as channel partners across the region increasingly look to strengthen and scale their recurring revenue models, while also improving the digital purchasing experience for customers.

Commenting on the move, Simon Bennett, TD Synnex's managing director of advanced solutions for the UK and Ireland, said the new storefronts are designed to help partners meet customer expectations as they continue to evolve.

"With StreamOne White Label Storefronts partners can give today's digitally-led customers the convenience, speed, and self-service control they expect," he explained.

"Backed by the power of our industry-leading StreamOne cloud platform, they can scale-up quickly and build stronger and more profitable business, differentiate in a crowded market, and take their cloud services to the next stage of evolution."

Cloud maturity is having a direct impact on AI adoption, new research suggests, with only 14% of firms at the highest level of expertise.

According to NTT Data's new report, Cloud-led innovation in the era of AI: The new rules for driving value with cloud, while 99% of organizations say AI is increasing demand for cloud investment, 88% say current levels of spending are putting AI, cloud native, and modernization initiatives at risk.

Notably, as expectations rise, there's a disconnect between ambition and reality, the company warned. While the cloud is seen as essential for innovation, fewer than half of organizations said they were satisfied with its impact, or with the progress their modernization efforts were making.

“AI is accelerating faster than enterprise cloud maturity,” said Charlie Li, president, global head of cloud and security at NTT Data.

“Cloud has moved well beyond infrastructure and is now the execution layer for AI. Organizations that fail to evolve their cloud foundations risk constraining the growth and value of their AI investments."

Cloud leaders or organizations that indicated they were “cloud evolved” – the most advanced in terms of cloud adoption and impact, and with solid business performance – are significantly better positioned to capitalize on AI, said NTT.

The firm's advice is to develop cloud and AI strategies in tandem: AI demand is rising, it said, but alignment is uneven. chief AI officers (CAIOs) were 22% more likely than CIOs and CTOs to say that AI increases cloud investment needs, while AI is cited as the top cloud skills gap.

Cloud architecture choices are crucial, with organizations increasingly adopting a mix of public, private, hybrid and sovereign cloud models. Nearly all respondents told NTT they expect private cloud growth and sovereign cloud adoption to grow 50% in two years.

However, despite widespread agreement that cloud should drive innovation, half said legacy applications and data platforms are holding it back. Modernization is the top priority for the next two years.

Similarly, as investments stall and environments become more complex, more than half cited cloud cost management challenges, with organizations expecting a threefold increase in fully managed cloud platforms.

Mastering the cloud

Organizations should reset their cloud transformation KPIs, according to NTT Data.

Although AI is critical in helping organizations shift from technical to business metrics for cloud initiatives, adoption remains uneven. Nearly half of cloud leaders used AI in their last cloud migration project, compared with just a third of the rest.

Elsewhere, NTT Data noted that while security is the top cloud investment priority, confidence remains uneven, with 68% of the leaders feeling highly confident, compared with 36% of all others.

Leaders are also much more likely to define clear roles and responsibilities backed by regular audits.

"Our clients who are succeeding are treating cloud as a value creator, not a technology initiative," said Li.

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SAP has announced a significant expansion of its sovereign cloud offering with a new “On-Site” solution.

The launch of the On-Site model will give customers the ability to host managed cloud infrastructure within their own facilities in a move the tech firm said provides the “ultimate level of physical control and data residency”.

Thomas Saueressig, member of the executive board of SAP SE for customer services and delivery, said the expansion is in direct response to growing enterprise calls for heightened data sovereignty controls.

“Organizations around the world are seeking greater control over their digital environments,” Saueressig said.

“With Sovereign Cloud On-Site, SAP empowers customers to define their own sovereignty boundaries while leveraging our global infrastructure expertise and partnerships.”

The new On-site option aims to offer “flexible sovereignty models” that meet the needs of organizations operating across various areas, SAP said, particularly governments and businesses in regulated sectors.

Varied deployment options mean organizations can choose between SAP-hosted infrastructure, hyperscaler-based models, or customer-site hosted options.

“With SAP Sovereign Cloud On-Site, we are redefining what sovereignty means for our customers,” said Martin Merz, president of SAP’s sovereign cloud division.

“By placing SAP-managed infrastructure directly within customers’ own facilities, we offer unmatched control, compliance, and operational assurance without compromising innovation.”

What to expect from SAP’s sovereign cloud

SAP said its sovereign cloud initiative centers around a series of “core capabilities”, which naturally includes a strong focus on data sovereignty.

Under the scheme, organizations retain full ownership and control of sensitive data, based on local regulatory requirements.

“Operational sovereignty” features allow enterprises to manage environments with SAP resources while “technical sovereignty” enables customers to run SAP workloads using deployment options based on their individual needs - this applies to those operating in regulated industries, for example.

Sovereign cloud in the spotlight

Data sovereignty has become a recurring talking point on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. In May 2024, industry analysts told ITPro that sovereign cloud services are now the “bare minimum” expected from European customers.

A key factor behind this growing demand is the array of stringent regulatory requirements introduced - or currently being introduced - in Europe. Naturally, providers have acted swiftly to meet this demand.

A host of industry heavyweights, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Oracle, have all since launched dedicated sovereign cloud services for European customers.

Recent months have seen new concerns arise about data sovereignty, with research showing enterprises in the UK and EU both cited worries about US interference.

These concerns came after the Trump administration issued a memorandum in early 2025 pledging to defend American tech companies from “overseas extortion”.

In the wake of the move, Microsoft president Brad Smith said the tech giant would resort to legal action to protect EU customers from US demands to shut down services.

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The breathless pace of technological evolution slows for no one. But is it moving too fast for the channel to take stock of where a customer’s network infrastructure should be in the future?

Does this rapid pace mean that the channel only has time to quickly fix customers’ ‘now’ problems and not enough time to discuss their long-term network strategy and planning?

It's a question I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of cloud-based services. If the cloud is to deliver on its promise of greater agility, scalability, security and efficiency for organizations, how can we steer conversations from addressing ‘now’ problems to higher-value ones that are more consultative? And, I also wonder, to what extent is being forced to compete on price in tenders compounding this situation and compromising the value the channel adds to its customers?

Cloud clarity with clearer communication

My thoughts on this topic are founded on my experience with print, which is one of the last of the core business services to migrate to the cloud. Observing that process, I’ve been really impressed by the channel’s knowledge of and passion for the cloud.

But while the channel excels at upskilling and learning about new technologies quickly, this knowledge base isn’t always consistently distributed across the industry. It’s only right that this is addressed if all channel partners are to help their clients embrace the opportunities offered by the cloud, as well as if they are to make the transition from fixing problems to providing long-term, value-added cloud and network-related services.

How do independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware manufacturers fix this problem? While many ISVs and manufacturers work very hard to help train partners and provide them with the tools and resources they need perhaps we still need to impress upon them that for their business to fully unlock its potential – and for them to act as consultants and not mere suppliers – they must elevate their offering.

That improved communication is essential, because the cloud is not just the backbone of the digital economy but also the bones underpinning every business. Not being able to fully support a company’s cloud journey hinders the ISV’s prosperity, the channel partner’s, and the end users’ equally.

My reasoning for this is that cloud adoption is, at its heart, an infrastructure removal project. If, for instance, you’re removing servers and active directories, you have to be acutely aware of what the customer’s network environment is actually like, right down to details like the bandwidth between locations. If they've got a low bandwidth and they're sending heavy duty files up and down the cloud, it’s important to be aware that there could be impact on other business services.

With software as a service (SaaS) solutions now the norm, I do wonder about future risk or exposure if the reseller isn’t fully equipped to understand the solution or the network it’s integrated on. Being more IT savvy and understanding the implications of decisions is probably more important than ever. Therefore, having a holistic appreciation of the network and the ripple effect of making changes to it, rather than just actioning a quick fix in isolation, is imperative.

From a print perspective, it seems that managed service providers (MSPs) appear better equipped to take their customers along the cloud migration path because they're selling software and services, compared to those that are focused solely on hardware sales. Those resellers still focused on hardware sales shouldn’t miss the opportunity to accelerate their business growth by looking at the opportunity to support customers’ wider infrastructure. And we, as ISVs and manufacturers, need to reflect on how we support their progress on that front.

Valuing the value add and breaking the loop

I often wonder whether some channel partners’ interest in a customer’s complete network is informed early on by tender processes. Often, a prospect will push for the lowest possible price and, in order to secure the business, the channel partner has to strip the ‘value add’ element out of the service they deliver to their customers.

This takes us to where we started: the role of the partner is then diminished to that of problem solver, rather than value add network consultant. Long term, this means a technology infrastructure that’s ‘fixed’ for now, rather than thoughtfully mapped out for the future. And that’s problematic itself, as staying competitive in today’s agile digital economy is made more difficult if there’s no provision for the space and time needed to know how your tools or architecture can scale for the future, or to respond to sudden economic or market challenges.

So, what’s the solution to helping some of the channel partners to ensure that they’re maximising the opportunities presented by the cloud and not missing out? I think it’s threefold.

One, hardware manufacturers and ISVs must focus their communication to show how they can help their partners optimize their offering for the cloud future. Two, channel partners focused on sales and quick fixes must be receptive to the idea that long term value – and growth – lies in the ongoing support and consultancy necessary for today’s cloud-first companies.

Finally, customers must look beyond the lowest price when selecting resellers because when the value is stripped out, the long-term opportunity presented by the cloud is lost and we all end up back at square one: fixing, rather than planning.

ShareFile has an impressive track record in the cloud collaboration and file sharing market and it starts this year under new ownership having recently been acquired by Progress Software. It joins a diverse portfolio of data and infrastructure management solutions including the IT Pro Recommended WhatsUp Gold network monitoring and FlowMon analysis products.

ShareFile is available in four plans which start at 1TB of cloud storage per user with all supporting a generous 100GB maximum file size. The Advanced plan starts at £13 per user/month when billed yearly for a minimum of three users and includes file sharing, syncing and versioning, file encryption using TLS or SSL up to AES-256, email encryption, desktop and mobile apps, custom portal branding, and malware protection.

The Premium plan costs under £20 per user/month and adds rapid client onboarding, the new AI-powered secure share recommender, projects, and templates for streamlining repetitive tasks and all the e-signatures you can eat. We review the Industry Advantage plan which ups the price to around £34 per user and adds a heap of extra features such as preconfigured workflows, a custom workflow user interface (UI) for tax preparation services, prefilled customer agreements, and options to import files from other accounting programs.

Progress ShareFile Industry Advantage review: Clients and employees

A feature that adds a lot of value to businesses working with external consultants and customers is ShareFile's support for two different types of users. External users are classed as clients and don't require a license so you can create as many as you want.

Internal users, or employees, each require a license and have full access to all ShareFile features as determined by the administrator which can include creating and sharing cloud folders, having their own web portal, and managing specific aspects of the company account. Clients receive a more basic web portal, are not allowed to share or request files, and can only access folders, files, and projects they have been expressly invited to by an employee.

ShareFile's rapid onboarding feature simplifies adding new clients. It emails one-click agreements with auto-fill templates, provides options to e-sign them, and tracks their progress using automated workflows.

Employees are equally easy to create as new users receive an email invitation to create their account and password protect it. Admins can delegate specific permissions from a list of nearly thirty management privileges while access security has been tightened up with mandatory two-factor authentication (2FA) for employees and clients.

Progress ShareFile Industry Advantage review: An inviting web portal

The ShareFile web portal dashboard provides shortcuts to common activities, a list of favorite folders, the most recent file activity, and links to video tutorials. Admin users have full access to all ShareFile functions while employees can view their folders, drag and drop files into them, share them with other users, and use their personal File Box for temporary storage of incoming file requests.

Both employees and clients can download the Windows and macOS syncing apps for fast cloud file access using a mapped drive and ShareFile offers free Android and iOS mobile apps. Employees are allowed to create connections to third-party apps such as Salesforce, Quickbooks plus Xero and integrate external cloud storage services using connectors for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online.

Plug-ins for Outlook and Google Workspace are provided, allowing users to sidestep any file size restrictions enforced by their mail provider and securely send and request large files. The e-signature service is a smart feature as users import Word, text, or PDF documents to the web portal, add multiple signatories, arrange their signing order, and email them for drawn and typed signatures.

Documents can be viewed directly from the portal's content viewer and ShareFile's new AI Assistant generates summaries to save you reading all the content. Providing the document has less than 400,000 characters and is no larger than 20MB, you scan it in the viewer and ShareFile produces a concise and accurate summary.

Progress ShareFile Industry Advantage review: Engagements and workflows

The Industry Advantage plan has a sharp focus on streamlining tax return processes. Customer engagements are used to create automated workflows where you upload predefined documents, create an engagement, and assign an agreement template.

When the agreement is assigned to a client, ShareFile fills in all the variables such as their name, and creates a signature request. The client is notified of the request and once they've e-signed it, ShareFile starts the workflow process by sending further requests to fill in the assigned questionnaires and forms which the client can view and edit from their personal portal.

Clients are kept informed of the process and will receive email reminders for overdue tasks. Employees view engagements from the Tax section in their portal which provides a status view of completed and outstanding tasks for the client.

The predefined templates are currently aimed at US tax returns so UK users will need to create new ones, assign roles, add signature requests, and place variables in them so they are auto-filled using the assigned client's details. A wizard guides you through the process and once completed, the templates can be reused for all further client engagements.

More AI power is evident when creating new document requests for projects. Choose your line of work, your company role, and the purpose of the request, and ShareFile will generate a list of recommended items for your perusal.

Progress ShareFile Industry Advantage review: Is it worth it?

ShareFile is completely transparent about pricing and its plans look good value when compared to the competition. It will appeal to businesses with big cloud collaboration plans and the Industry Advantage edition provides clever workflow automations and customer engagements that can be easily customised for a wide range of industries - including accountancy.

General file sharing features are extensive and the 100GB size limit makes it ideal for businesses handling large files such as medical images or CAD drawings. It's easy to manage, offers plenty of app integrations and security is tight as it includes integral malware scanning, suspicious behavior detection and automated threat remediation.

Technological developments such as AI are revolutionizing industries, unlocking new ways of working and automating tired processes. Yet, this new computing power comes with a hefty price – unprecedented power consumption.

Following the United Nation’s COP29 conference that took place last month, which introduced the first ever Digitalisation Day and Declaration on Green Digital Action, the tech industry is facing increasing pressure to get carbon emissions under control and counter climate change – and the channel is no exception.

Unfortunately for business leaders, this coincides with the same time that companies and leadership teams are looking to prioritise sustainability targets – 74% of public companies plan to invest in sustainability reporting technology and tools over the next year, according to a recent report from Deloitte.

This leaves us with the question, how can we protect the planet and our cloud usage?

Channel leaders can navigate this ‘perfect storm’ by using the GreenOps approach to optimize their resources. This, paired with the adoption of more efficient cloud architectures and the development of a sustainability-focused culture can hit the sweet spot – meeting environmental targets without sacrificing any of the benefits of cloud.

Value of a GreenOps approach

At a high level, GreenOps is not dissimilar to FinOps. Both look to maximize cloud efficiency and usage for organizations. But where FinOps focuses on the financial and business value first, GreenOps puts environmental impact front and center.

When it comes to implementation, the two approaches actually go hand in hand. Optimizing operations often leads to a decrease in both costs and environmental impact. Admittedly, some sustainable practices do require significant investment, but the GreenOps approach emphasizes balance with operational efficiency at the heart.

To even implement it in the first place, you’ll need to have at least some FinOps in place as many of the sustainability principles in GreenOps rely heavily on FinOps practices. With energy efficiency, for example, GreenOps focuses on the optimization of IT infrastructure and data centers to consume less energy.

It requires FinOps practices to identify the cost-saving opportunities that can reduce the use of cloud resources and by extension, energy usage, however. Think of it as a GreenOps approach with a FinOps focus on the details. It’s not a world away from FinOps, just looking at it from a different perspective.

Once you’ve got the hang of that, the only thing left to do is to monitor. Energy and waste-related targets must be continually monitored by the relevant teams. Traditionally, operational monitoring tools account for everything but sustainability but there’s not much point in adopting GreenOps if there’s no visibility of its impact is there?

Efficient architecture and practices

Adopting a ‘GreenOps approach’ is not an overnight fix for sustainability, true organizational change takes time. There are still several key changes you can make to day-to-day operations to see a difference immediately, however.

Efficient resource management might as well be formally made ‘step one’ for any and every organization looking to reduce their environmental impact. By critically assessing your organizational demand for cloud resources, you’ll likely find many areas with excess unused cloud resources, allowing you to scale back and score an easy win. There’s also a lot to be gained by going back to basics and re-examining your code. Optimized code can save you more resources than you’d think.

Organizations could (and should) also look at adopting serverless functions. These are single-purpose programmable functions that ensure resources are only used when needed, rather than always running on in the background, driving up energy consumption.

A not-too-distant relative of automated idle and shut-down policies that operate similarly, powering servers down when not in use. Changes like these come in handy particularly during established off-peak times when servers could be left running for extended periods without use, driving up unnecessary waste.

Building a culture of sustainability

Of course, to reach the sustainability targets necessary to counter climate change effectively it can’t all be completely reliant on the tech. After all, your employees are what keeps the tech running day in and day out.

This GreenOps approach should inform everything, right down to company policy. By engaging employees with training on exactly why sustainability is so vital, you can make it a priority across the whole company. With business leaders driving this change from the front, processes could also be opened up for feedback to make sure everybody is truly involved.

There’s also room to explore some out-of-the-box methods. Perhaps a reward or some form of recognition for the teams that reduce their resource usage methods the most. Carbon offsetting might also be considered, potentially working with carbon offset projects that interest the wider team could also drive engagement with the process.

Whichever methods you choose to explore, keeping employee engagement top of mind is key. The more aware they are, the more conscious their actions will be when dealing with cloud resources and the more likely they are to spot further savings.

Fair weather ahead?

While the storm clouds of looming sustainability targets and conferences continue to pile pressure onto cloud organizations, a GreenOps approach offers a safe shelter through the storm. Leveraging existing FinOps methods can deliver sustainable reductions in environmental impact, and with a mix of ‘quick wins’ and embedded cultural change, it allows organisations to put sustainability at the heart of operations without sacrificing efficiency.

Beyond the already discussed environmental impacts, adopting a GreenOps approach to cloud optimization could also bring you reduced overspending and increased productivity. Maximizing the use of your existing resources has a plethora of benefits beyond the environment and without GreenOps, you’re missing out on them all. This is one of those few and far-between instances where doing something for the wider world can also do you a whole lot of good at the same time.

During the holiday season businesses can face an array of operational challenges, ranging from traffic surges and reduced staffing to an escalating threat of cyber attacks.

This had led to a growing reliance on cloud computing because of its abilities to rapidly scale resources, handle significant traffic spikes and ensure uninterrupted service; important since research commissioned by Hyve Managed Hosting highlights that a third (33%) of UK consumers will abandon an unresponsive website within 30 seconds.

This dependence has intensified in recent years, says Adam Gogarty, director and cloud strategy lead at Deloitte UK, particularly by video on-demand services and telecoms providers.

"Especially when the nation sits down to watch its favorite family Christmas movies," Gogarty adds.

Key challenges

Maintaining uptime during the holiday season is imperative for businesses, and there are certain challenges they may have to overcome. Reduced staffing due to holiday schedules is one of the most obvious, as are resource mismanagement and inadequate capacity planning.

Other issues can arise with legacy applications that have been converted to run on the cloud without adopting a cloud-native architecture as they often don’t have the same resilience, for example. However, it’s similarly vital to understand the complete supply chain during peak holiday periods.

“If a retailer wants to guarantee delivery before Christmas, systems will need to consider physical, not just digital aspects of business operations such as warehouse capacity and the ability to pack and ship goods,” explains Maynard Williams, managing director of consultancy firm Accenture.

“Businesses need to understand how different solutions interact and how to handle failure, particularly at their boundaries. Failure often isn’t in the digital cloud-native solutions, but the interface between them and, say, a warehousing solution,”

With businesses focused on high demand or downtime, security can also be often overlooked, which can put an organization at higher risk. This is because it’s commonly understood that there will always be an increase in threat actors over the holidays as they assume organizations will be slightly off guard.

Be prepared

To ensure uptime during the holidays, best practice should include conducting pre-holiday stress tests to identify system vulnerabilities and configure autoscaling to handle demand surges. Experts also recommend simulating failures through chaos engineering to expose weaknesses.

Redundancy across regions or availability zones is essential, as is a well-documented incident response plan – with clear escalation paths – “as this allows a team to address problems quickly even with reduced staffing,” says VimalRaj Sampathkumar, technical head – UKI at software company ManageEngine.

It’s all about understanding the business requirements and what your demand is going to look like, says Luan Hughes, chief information officer (CIO) at tech provider Telent, as this will vary from industry to industry.

“When we talk about preparedness, we talk a lot about critical incident management and what happens when big things occur, but I think you need to have an appreciation of what your triggers are,” she says.

“That means that, as a technology function, you’re driving action. Be clear on where your tolerances are and aware of when you need to mobilize people to take action and get ahead of the situation before it becomes a critical incident. This way you’re not creating a headache for yourself when you return from the holidays.”

It’s also important to focus on your people as much as your systems, she adds, noting that it’s imperative to understand your management processes, out-of-hours and on-call rota and how you action support if problems do arise.

Take advantage of the available tech

As well as robust strategies, a number of different technical solutions also support cloud reliability during high-stress periods, including multi-cloud and serverless computing.

AI and automation are two key areas than can support uptime management, by enabling dynamic resource scaling in response to demand and predicting hardware and software failures.

Self-healing systems, for example, powered by automation, can detect and fix common issues without manual intervention, reducing the impact of staffing shortages and accelerating problem resolution.

While technology has a multitude of benefits in terms of ensuring cloud uptime, Hughes advises that having such solutions doesn’t mean teams can rest on their laurels.

“You have to make sure you’ve got some manual intervention – it’s all about understanding what the risk is, allowing the automation to do the work, but still making sure your staff are checking in the background.”

Also, in case the worst does happen, Sid Nag, vice president, cloud, edge and AI infrastructure technologies at analyst firm Gartner, recommends implementing fully or near fully automated disaster recovery (DR). This could be through your own tools or third-party cloud native DR tools.

“This provides the foundation needed to meet aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs),” he notes.

Does this approach work for businesses of all sizes?

The core strategy to maintain cloud uptime during the holidays should be the same whatever the organization’s size, but SMEs may benefit from taking a slightly different approach.

Uptime may be easier to manage as platforms are likely to be more contained, but on the flipside there’s a smaller team to manage this work. Therefore, smaller organizations that don’t have the scale to build and maintain all capabilities in-house may benefit from outsourcing critical workloads to managed service providers (MSPs) and/or collaborate with cloud providers for technical support during peak times.

Additionally, choosing a cloud solution that’s customizable based on demand, or offers auto-scaling features, can help smaller organizations efficiently handle traffic fluctuations and ensure consistent performance during peak times, advises Hyve’s operations director, Charlotte Webb.

Ensuring cloud uptime over the holidays requires a continuous cycle of planning, execution and improvement, always with a focus on financial sustainability and operational resilience, notes Gogarty.

However, with a focus on preparedness and by taking advantage of the tools available to support this, businesses of any size should be able to navigate peak periods problem-free.

Huawei Cloud has used its first Cloud Summit in France to announce a series of products and services and emphasize the importance of France as a region within Huawei’s global cloud picture.

At Huawei Cloud Summit France, the firm made much of its new Flexus cloud services, offering out-of-the-box solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It also announced Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 would be released in France, which brings over 120 hybrid cloud services for better performance across AI and intelligent transformation.

Attendees heard from customers such as The Explorers, a company that creates 8k footage of the natural world in partnership with UNESCO which sought Huawei Cloud’s data storage and management expertise.

ITPro spoke to Wanying Song, general manager at Huawei Cloud France, alongside Dafu Shi, director of marketing and solution sales at Huawei Cloud France, about the potential for Huawei Cloud France and what it saw as the main opportunities of the future.

“In the past, Huawei Cloud France merely cooperated with carriers to develop business with the carriers together,” said Song.

“Due to the huge potential of public cloud and private cloud, our company decided to have our own public cloud and permanent cloud business in France.”

Shi noted that Huawei Cloud France is excited to offer customers in France more choice over database and big data solutions, especially as firms in Europe look to make the most of AI investment and digital transformation.

“We are in an era of AI and we are facing a lot of changes and challenges in every new domain, so Huawei cannot be the only one to conquer the new challenges and use cases,” he said.

“We must also assemble our partners and let them build their solutions upon our platform, that’s another purpose of this event.”

Song also emphasized the importance of Huawei Cloud’s work with Station F, the world’s largest startup incubator which is based within Paris, on a new sustainability program. The pair worked on ensuring startups were given the right cloud resources, alongside mentorships and office space.

“We really believe every enterprise and every startup needs to have equal access to a dynamic business world and equal access to business opportunities,” said Song.

Huawei Cloud France is committed to bringing its digital expertise to France, both to its 500 local existing partners and to the large potential market throughout the region.

“I’m also a newcomer in France, but I really see there is a trend in France, a convergence of public cloud and private cloud,” said Song.

IDC has warned that the growing trend of cloud repatriation is driven by missed expectations, largely around the growing costs of running workloads in the cloud.

The report comes a week after 37 Signals — the SaaS company behind Basecamp — has revealed it will save $10 million over five years by ditching the cloud in favor of investing in its own hardware.

And we can expect more companies to follow that lead, though IDC said repatriation is a growing trend, but not "a wholesale migration." Indeed, the analyst firm's own research suggests only 8-9% of companies plan a full workload repatriation, with most moving only specific workloads back in house.

"Cloud computing has been heralded as the panacea for modern IT challenges, promising scalability, flexibility, and cost savings," IDC said. "However, as the cloud landscape matures, many organizations are finding that the reality of cloud adoption does not always align with their expectations."

Cost is one aspect driving repatriation, with IDC research showing half of organizations spent more on cloud than expected last year, with 59% expecting similar cost overruns this year.

"The complexities of cloud environments, coupled with unforeseen external influences, make it challenging to forecast costs accurately," IDC said. "Factors such as the increasing cost of third-party services, energy costs, and the financial implications of new technologies like GenAI are contributing to these budget blowouts.

It’s not just costs driving cloud repatriation efforts

IDC said the cloud repatriation trend wasn't just about fluctuating costs, but performance and security concerns, too. The cloud isn't necessarily suitable for all workloads, IDC said, causing concerns with performance and latency.

"For instance, technical and AI-related workloads often experience performance bottlenecks in public cloud environments, prompting organizations to consider repatriation," IDC said.

Another challenge is security and compliance, with IDC saying cloud companies do offer advanced security measures, but that hasn't been enough to assuage concerns by organizations operating in sensitive industries, such as finance and healthcare.

"As a result, production data and backup/disaster recovery processes are among the most repatriated elements of workloads."

Beyond technical complaints, IDC said managing multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setups has become "incredibly complex". That can lead some companies to reconsider their cloud strategies, as it makes it costly to manage and difficult to secure data across multiple platforms.

IDC added that larger companies are more likely to repatriate than smaller businesses. "This is due to their greater resources, larger workloads, and more complex IT environments," IDC added. "Economic factors and comprehensive workload strategies also play a role in driving repatriation activities among large enterprises."

Millions for 37 Signals

Back in 2023, 37 Signals' CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said the company had looked at its setup and decided it made more sense to ditch the cloud because of the "grotesque" costs. Instead of shelling millions on its cloud bill, the company would invest in its own hardware.

The repatriation project has taken years, largely because of the length of cloud contracts — some stretch for up to four years, meaning 37 Signals won't be able to move all of its setup in-house for some time yet.

But in the meantime, the company has reported significant savings. Hansson has said the company will save $10 million over five years, which is three million dollars more than 37 Signals predicted when it set out on the project.

Of course, there are significant hardware investments to be made, but Hansson said that was recouped in the first year — and that's for hardware the firm expects to use for several years. The company has stressed that the repatriation project isn't just about cost savings, but the flexibility to try experiments and innovate.

Hansson suggested all companies should consider repatriation, but warned it may not make sense for everyone.

"Now, as with all things cloud vs on-prem, it's never fully apples-to-apples. If you're entirely in the cloud, and have no existing data center racks, you'll pay to rent those as well — but you'll probably be shocked at how cheap it is compared to the cloud," he wrote at the time.

Only when leaders rigorously scrutinize their assumed knowledge will they be able to properly determine the best path to take for their organization's IT environment. This approach enables firms to make more informed decisions and have real confidence that they are more likely to support their business objectives. Accepting ‘received wisdom’ may not be a wise act in itself.

Public cloud has been the default option for many organizations over the past decade. The much-touted benefits of cloud computing and the dominance of a handful of major players swallowed most of the business, through brand recognition, lock-in through the wider technical environment, and partnerships with just about every MSP and channel partner in the world.

Assumptions were and continue to be made across the board about the inevitability of using public cloud services. The same names appear on everyone’s lips together with an implicit assumption that such services will meet most if not all requirements.

Which it does, for some. For many even. Especially those with relatively lightweight requirements. But when it doesn’t, when it leads to underperformance, downtime, and burst budgets, there is a reckoning which significantly impacts end users, MSPs, and channel partners.  

This is why there has been a recent movement away from public cloud. Many organizations realize there are solutions available that better fit their needs, and that the big tech vendors don’t necessarily hold all the answers.

Dynamic services can be an expensive illusion

Dynamic public cloud resources appear to be a perfect solution – only paying for the services you need when you need them. Hardware resources are transformed from an unsightly on premises space-eater to something to be spun out of the air when required. A kind of technological magic trick or illusion, if you will.

To provide dynamic resources, the public cloud vendor must have pre-provisioned large amounts of hardware to be ‘available’ for dynamically scaling customers. Much of that equipment won’t be in use for much of the time, sitting on standby, losing value and using up space in an expensive data center. To be profitable, the use of that equipment needs to be priced high and be over-provisioned.   

This equates to high usage costs, which are not always clear when forecasting budgets based on granular pricing. Additionally, there’s a risk of underperformance, which worsens with increased over-provisioning often done to try and keep monthly bills low.

To ensure profitability, this equipment will also remain in use for as long as possible, meaning customers are often offered base components that do not meet current demands. This can leave many organizations paying much more while being much less performant than they were before moving to the public cloud.

Against vendor dominance

Beyond the issues around cost and performance, the dominance of certain players now constitutes an increasing threat to the overall cyber resilience of global business. The recent global outage of Microsoft services caused by CrowdStrike, followed quickly by a global Azure outage, clearly demonstrates the risk of vendor dominance in any market.

Of course, it also goes without saying that providing anyone with an almost monopolistic dominance over a market is bad for competition, innovation, and specificity. In such scenarios, a small number of organizations win big and the rest lose.

Private cloud and sector experts

Mitigate the risk by investing in a wider range of technologies and supporting smaller, innovative vendors alongside the big players. This leads to a healthier, more varied environment, ensuring the market makes improvements in cost, performance, and security. It allows sector expertise to thrive and evolve, unlocking benefits that might otherwise be overshadowed by big tech generalism.

Private clouds may be less dynamic but are more likely to be fit for purpose when managed by sector-specific experts who can spend time with you to ensure appropriate solutions that meet both performance and budget requirements. Alongside better-informed solution design, it is also more probable that private cloud offerings will be supported by responsive, available experts rather than rabbit holes of outdated knowledge bases, AI best-guessing chatbots and layers of outsourced non-experts trying to communicate over muffled telephone lines.

Cloud benefits do exist

Much of the promise of cloud computing still exists. Centralization of resources can enable better collaboration with the right tech and solution design, better security management through the reduction of countless locations and endpoints, greater efficiency of estate administration, overall reduction of hardware, and increased resiliency. In addition, cloud-hosted services better serve modern hybrid and remote working use cases for businesses.

Scalability is also easier, even if not fully dynamic (the best solutions tend to be an informed balance of dedicated and dynamic resources). Finally, cloud services support greater flexibility, a critical factor in a world that is changing ever faster.

Reverting to on premises after being burnt by public cloud might be the right answer for your organization. But that could also be cutting your nose off to spite your face. Research private cloud options first, ask the difficult questions and make sure it’s right for you.

To fully embrace the benefits of the cloud, businesses have to distribute existing workloads across hybrid and/or multi-cloud environments. While the benefits of this digital transformation are undeniable, it’s not a process without its challenges.

This can be particularly true for firms with sprawling environments, perhaps as the result of mergers and acquisitions over the years, or those looking to get data in the right shape to be used for machine learning or AI.

How can businesses reconcile these problems at scale? And what are the specific steps to success when it comes to cloud consolidation?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Rajesh Naidu, SVP, chief architect, and head of data platform & data management at Expedia, to discuss the challenges of cloud migration.

Highlights

“We have over 70 petabytes of data at Expedia group, and one of the things we learned early on is we need to bring all this data together. So we actually consolidated and built a data lake, where we brought all of the data together from our brands.”

“The key thing with AI that we've seen at least, is going back to the data and having the quality of the data and other things. And I think that naturally leads to some of this consolidation and bringing things together. Because it can get expensive if you're running these bespoke spokes of data and these separate hubs.”

“I think a key requirement over here is to have the right top-down executive sponsorship, a prioritization within the company to understand what the priority is. Sometimes you may have to put a little bit of a pause on some of the growth aspirations to bring this stack together, but as soon as you bring it together you need to be prepared to turn on the growth faucet again because that is the expectation from a business perspective.”

Footnotes

• How Expedia Group used platform convergence to harness the efficiency of generative AI
• How to prepare and prioritize workloads for cloud migration
• “The tech guys want to move to the cloud, the finance people want the savings”: IT leaders feel ‘rushed’ to the cloud – here’s why slow and steady wins the race
• Consolidate to simplify application security: Why this is a business imperative
• Why 'shadow SaaS' is becoming a major blind spot for enterprise security teams
• Structured vs unstructured data management
• What is machine learning and why is it important?
• What is generative AI?

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Rising cloud costs and energy consumption are driving IT leaders away from cloud-only solutions, marking a big change in enterprise data analytics and management strategies, according to new research.

Analysis from Ocient found only a quarter of IT leaders are prioritizing cloud-only data analytics solutions over the next 12 to 18 months, a significant 10% drop from the 2023 figure.

Similarly, two-thirds said that 'surprising' cloud costs are the main reason they struggle to predict spending accurately. Meanwhile, more than half highlighting energy consumption as a top concern, with three-in-ten citing reducing energy consumption as a reason to switch or upgrade data warehouse or database solutions.

"Ocient’s survey indicates a growing recognition among IT leaders that current cloud costs and energy consumption are unsustainable," commented Brad Shimmin, chief analyst, AI and data analytics, at Omdia Research.

“Enterprises are pivoting to more energy-efficient solutions as they prepare for an increase in data volume and complexity over the next one to three years."

AI, of course, is a significant factor, with more than nine-in-ten IT and data leaders saying they plan to make AI investments in the next 12 to 18 months.

However, two-thirds noted the scalability of their existing data infrastructure could create challenges while 63% revealed a lack of staffing to support their increasing AI/ML workloads. Six-in-ten cited data movement and pipelines as one of their biggest AI/ML related challenges.

"As data volumes continue to explode, enterprises are facing a dual challenge: rising costs and growing energy consumption. To harness the full potential of data while mitigating these risks, leaders must fundamentally rethink their data analytics strategies," said Chris Gladwin, CEO of Ocient.

"The latest Beyond Big Data report confirms this shift and highlights the critical significance of sustainable, energy-efficient data analytics and management solutions."

The report echoes research earlier this summer from Civo, which found that six-in-ten organizations have seen their cloud bills rise over the last year. More than a third concluded that the cloud hasn't turned out to be as cost-effective as promised.

As a result, 37% of organizations said they were considering a move to alternative infrastructures, with another 7% saying they'd already started transitioning away from dominant cloud providers.

Establishing true costs can be challenging, however, with a survey from CloudZero last month finding that organizations are struggling to calculate overall cloud cost efficiency.

Three-quarters said that cloud service provider costs represented at least 20% of their total cost of goods sold (COGS), with 28% saying the figure was more than half.

More from ITPro

• Lack of cloud skills exacerbating rising IT costs for businesses
• Nearly half of cloud storage budgets are spent on usage fees in Europe
• Short-sighted cost management strategies are to blame for spiraling cloud bills

IT leaders in the UK have voiced concerns about their organization’s exposure to cloud outages as the costs of downtime continue to mount.

With major IT incidents shutting down millions of business services and applications around the world each year, it may be time organizations rethink their cloud strategy and the service providers their business depends on.

A joint survey commissioned by HPE and digital transformation firm Auxilion spoke to 100 IT decision makers in enterprises with over 250 employees across the UK.

Almost three quarters (73%) of the respondents said they were worried about cloud security threats over the next 12 months. 

In addition, 72% of these business leaders who are currently using the cloud said a potential cloud outage would be “catastrophic” for their organization.

Research indicates executives are right to be concerned about outages shuttering their business operations. For example, Oxford Economics calculated that downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400 billion each year, with each hour costing the business an average of $540,000. 

Breaking down the direct costs associated with downtime, Splunk’s Cost of Downtime report found that businesses suffered an average of $49 million in lost revenue, $22 million in regulatory fines, $16 million in SLA penalties, and $14 million in legal costs.

The costs don’t stop there, however. The indirect costs linked to rebuilding trust in your enterprise ($27 million), lost productivity ($12 million), overtime wages ($11 million), and increased cyber insurance premiums ($10 million) all add to the pain businesses endure when their systems go offline.

The vast majority of businesses need to be aware of the potential damage an outage could incur, with the great cloud transition all but complete in the UK, as 90% of respondents reported their organization used cloud technologies.

Despite their understandable concerns, business appetite for the cloud remains strong, with 88% of IT decision makers claiming they intend on migrating more infrastructure and applications over the course of the next year.

Cloud outages hit hardest when relying on a single vendor

With a series of high-profile IT outages causing chaos around the world, is it time for technology leaders to rethink their cloud strategies and evaluate who they are dependent on?

Speaking to ITPro, Jamil Ahmed, distinguished engineer at middleware specialist Solace, said outages are an inevitability when it comes to any technology and as a result businesses need to diversify their cloud portfolio between multiple service providers. 

“Even as cloud technology evolves, failures within the system will inevitably happen. ‘One-of-a-kind’, extremely rare outages or issues continue to plague every service provider from time to time, which is why the need to store valuable information on multiple provider services, known as an event mesh, have arisen.”

Ahmed added that it's inexcusable for businesses to be reliant on a single cloud provider, stating any organization that does so is being “demonstrably dangerous and negligent”.

“From a business perspective, there are no excuses [for] having a single cloud provider. It's multi-cloud all the way, treating cloud as commoditised compute, not building apps and services that are tied to knowing what cloud they're in,” he argued.

“Unfortunately, when businesses first introduced the cloud into their strategy, about 10 years ago, they made multi-provider usage a problem to solve later on. It is now 'later on,' and the strategy of using one cloud service is demonstrably dangerous and negligent. Anyone adopting cloud without thought for multi-cloud on day 1, should opt into an event mesh system or be fearful for that next "extremely rare" event.”

But managing multiple cloud environments introduces added complexity for IT workers to contend with, Guy Warren, CEO at ITRS, told ITPro. Warren said most businesses already use more than one cloud platform, but this makes it more difficult to keep on top of the integrity of each environment.

“The vast majority (93%) of businesses use more than one cloud platform, meaning many may suffer from multi-cloud complexity. This makes it harder to have complete visibility across all platforms, increasing the risk of misconfigurations and vulnerability exposure,” he explained.

“The implementation of monitoring tools is essential for firms managing hybrid cloud environments. This gives firms full visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, enabling them to manage multiple clouds through a single pane of glass. Not only does this help firms detect incidents faster, but also improves operational efficiency, cost savings and time.”

Firms need clarity from cloud providers about what aspects of security they are responsible for

Warren noted that IT leaders need to reevaluate where they see the biggest threat to their organization, suggesting that external threats draw internal resources away from addressing potential risks inside the company.

“When it comes to cloud technology, it’s a common misconception that external threats pose the greatest risk, often causing internal sources of vulnerability to be overlooked” he said.

“In fact, the most common vulnerabilities come from when firms make changes to their IT systems. For businesses looking to scale up, we recommend that they implement products and systems that can also scale in line with company growth.”

But maintaining strong cyber defenses are still critical, Warren added, stating that firms need to be clear with their cloud vendor about who is responsible for what parts of their environments' cyber posture.

“That said, businesses do also need to make sure they have stringent plans in place should a malicious attack occur. Despite the importance [of] planning for all eventualities, 84% of UK IT leaders admit that they are unsure as to whether cloud security is their responsibility or that of the cloud service provider,” he said.

“Firms should make sure that they have a clearly defined responsibility model so they can adopt a coordinated response against vulnerabilities. This means should an incident occur, they can take the necessary steps to mitigate its impact more effectively.”

Failing to plan and prepare your workloads for a cloud migration is in effect planning to fail – but the devil is in the detail no less than in other potentially complex IT transformations.

Jon Collins, senior industry analyst and vice president of engagement at research firm GigaOm, warns that moving workloads to the cloud without considering suitability has gotten organizations "stuck". In these situations, contracted cloud resources can be wasted.

"Cloud's great for quick-starts, certain answers, quickly spinning up applications, testing, and learning,” Collins says. “But you can't be hazy about it, then need 65 meetings to work things out or nothing gets built."

To begin with, businesses must analyze internal operations models. Remember: the base resource cost will likely be a similar order of magnitude to on prem. Governance is critical, especially for jumps into AI, so it’s imperative to scope out what you want to move and its cost today, then cloud, rather than pursuing a cloud "at all costs" approach.

Where 'lift and shift' offers savings, specifics still require close attention. Can you actually acquire and deploy what you need to see benefits? Dependencies between systems and services may go down the stack even with lots of virtualization.

"Solve for any lack of decision-making, and you might be three-quarters of the way there," Collins adds. "Play with ideas, consider sandboxing to build strategy skills and technical skills."

Cloud-native visions of being able to shift vendors and around multi-cloud to suit aren't yet reality, he notes. All the different options for applications need prior consideration, from virtualization to rationalization, migration, and modernization or automation.

"Do you need a thing at all? If not, turn it off," Collins adds.

Large language models (LLMs) may, in the future, help model workload performance and create inferences for better migration decisions. However, beware of hallucinations, Collins warns.

Jake Madders, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting, says cloud migration must be at the right time, and can be price-competitive depending on estate size and server infrastructure. Compute-intensive, process-hungry workloads need careful examination, especially for smaller organizations.

"A very small workload running on one to three physical boxes, chances are, can be cost-effectively virtualized."

Where to start with cloud migration

Madders prescribes first looking at physical machine specs including for number of processes, storage, and RAM versus current utilization. He tells ITPro that IT teams should analyze and document running applications to construct an idea of how the environment should look – remembering that some customers with heavy AI compute or similar may not be appropriate for the cloud.

"Average workloads such as remote desktops or storage servers should be fine. Look at interconnections. Look to match the power but virtualized," he says. "Consider tooling. There are more advanced methods in a huge environment."

Online calculators exist that can rough things out – but Madders says they typically ask for real hard-to-answer details such as how many times you're doing a specific read – so it's "very loose". Meanwhile, application updates and cleaning up your data can be worthwhile, especially if running on old, unpatched, or otherwise vulnerable infrastructure.

"You have to see what you can do. Maybe point the cloud infrastructure to that old physical server and clone it in block by block, so it comes into the cloud as legacy but virtual," he says. "Sandbox that and isolate it from the internet, over time bringing developers in to update it."

Customers may need an offering unavailable on public cloud, with a certain amount of cache for example, that will need to be sourced and made to interface with the rest. Heavy processing may go into dedicated servers or bare-metal connected back to a cloud infrastructure, he notes.

Availability, scalability, and vendor lock-in potential are other reasons to take advice before migration -- not least because costs can spiral if caught short.

"Costs can continue to ramp as you bring in more infrastructure and customers. A big provider can come in, helping run and streamline it, but costing another five grand a month too," Madders warns.

Howard Weale, vice president of global systems integrators at Cockroach Labs, adds that complicated environments can prove essential to achieving desired availability, seconding the importance of skills and experience.

Discovery of "where the bodies are buried" with tooling is critical even if, prior to a recompile for instance, it looks like things still work.

How long is a piece of string?

Weale says leaders must fit in workload migrations according to the specific strategic, technical, and tactical business objectives that matter most, in the order that makes the best sense.

A tactical technical decision could be because you want to avoid an expensive hardware refresh coming up in 18 months. Which applications consume the most energy, or need lots of CPU or GPU power?

A business strategic decision might be about a backlog of features, or function requests that stop you from making inroads against rivals "eating your lunch". "The different workloads fall into this quadrant-type architecture where you can focus," Weale explains.

Then analyze application dependencies and affinities, prioritizing early runs on the board to keep projects moving and overlaying these to the objectives quadrant. It’s also important to consider what can move separately or must be moved together.

"If you're smaller, it does overly index on choosing the right tools, getting the right partner, less so with the larger enterprises," Weale says.

Typically, "lift-and-shift" virtual machine (VM) migrations can go first, obviously solving for external dependencies and the like -- such as if external calls to hardware encryption devices are needed, entailing a cloud service with encryption and source-code changes.

Next will typically be database migrations. Customers may want a cloud-native database and one that understands nodes, versus running things through a single CPU. "3,000 nodes running one database is not a concept familiar to all legacy database users," Weale notes.

"And look carefully at what hasn't run in production for a year or two, versus what just sits in libraries. If 30-40% of the estate doesn't need bringing, your project is much smaller."

Resource-intensive workloads are typically last, with mainframes being particularly difficult, time-consuming, and complex.

Consider which business units run which programs and applications. With a bank, for instance, treasury might go first, then wealth management and corporate investment. Core banking activities, with major regulatory requirements, typically come last of all.

"Have business-unit owners expose their applications to you. Decide disposition strategy for each of those applications," Weale says. "More strategic applications driving top-line revenue growth might need refactoring and different tools, or entire rewrites."

Depending on company size, more or fewer resources will be available, a fact of which leaders should always be mindful.

Over a third (40%) of mid-market It leaders feel rushed into complex cloud migrations which ultimately went worse than planned, according to new research from Six Degrees. 

Breaking this down by role, 45% of CIOs said they felt rushed into cloud projects, along with 43% of cloud architects and 41% of IT directors. 80% of those in charge of infrastructure expressed the same sentiment. 

The research highlights a growing disconnect between those pushing for rapid cloud migration and those ultimately tasked with conducting what is an extensive, highly precarious process, according to Six Degrees’ CPTO Chris Jackson. 

Speaking to ITPro, Jackson said this feeling of being rushed stems from the fact that many organizations feel compelled to rapidly migrate to deliver business benefits. 

But in rushing this process, many enterprises - especially smaller ones - can create even bigger long-term problems. 

“I can say from lived experience that migrating to the cloud is much, much harder than the sentence makes out,” he told ITPro. 

“As you start to then get into the real scope of what needs to change inside an organization, you start to find that it's a much, much broader business-wide focus,” he added. 

The burden of cloud migrations can’t be shouldered entirely by IT departments or technical teams, as applications and systems throughout the business will need to be changed and modernized. 

The issue here is that other aspects of the organization may fail to fully understand how complex and time-consuming this process is, thus creating a level of pressure for the teams tasked with completing the migration. 

“The tech guys want to move to the cloud, the finance people want the savings - somewhere in the middle of those two things there’s a negotiation about when that starts to take hold, but if the actual transformation has been poorly scoped, you start to eat into that savings case,” Jackson said. 

There are other reasons driving cloud adoption, according to the survey, though some others are linked to finance. For example, 25% of respondents said that a reduction in operation costs was a key objective, while 28% highlighted a reduction in capital investment as a primary reason for cloud migration. 

Other reasons include access to innovative technology, which 30% of respondents put as their primary reason, and flexibility, which 32% earmarked as their primary reason. 

Nearly one-third (34%) of respondents said security was the main driving factor behind their move to the cloud. 

Businesses need to be patient in cloud migrations 

If certain business objectives - particularly cost savings -  are put first, then IT teams may feel pressure to accelerate stages of the adoption process, potentially resulting in issues later down the line. 

“Anytime when you put a time pressure onto a project that's technically complex, you incur potential risks around quality, security, and data,” Jackson said. 

“When you start to rush, there is always the chance you cut some corners and you may not have the required level of quality in your infrastructure,” he added. 

Instead, businesses should focus on dealing with their cloud migrations more gradually and acknowledging the fact that cost savings and other benefits are likely to reveal themselves at a later point.

“The initial phase of moving to cloud is probably the most visible part of a cloud migration, but it's rarely where the majority of the benefits are realized,” Jackson said.

The benefits come when the basis of the cloud migration has been laid, he added, and optimizations can be developed in the new environment. 

Going forward, Jackson implored businesses to make cloud migrations business projects rather than IT projects, adding that organizations should think carefully about the level of agility they can achieve. 

Similarly, he said that organizations should “scrutinize” the extent to which applications will benefit from the cloud, as not all applications will. 

Short-sighted or reactive cost management strategies are often the root cause for rapidly increasing cloud computing costs, a new study from Boomi and Forrester Consulting suggests. 

Companies were found to be slow to introduce cost remediation tactics, the study found, or lack a comprehensive understanding of their own infrastructure, which in turn has exacerbated wasteful cloud spending. 

72% of global companies exceeded their cloud budgets in the last fiscal year, the study noted, pointing to a widespread epidemic of cloud overspending in the market at large. 

With public cloud spending expected to reach more than $1 trillion by 2026, the report warned the “stakes are high” for reducing costs.

Despite 65% of leaders prioritizing cloud cost management and optimization (CMCO) strategies in the earlier development stages, Boomi found that most companies lack “proactive strategies” at the earlier architecture stages.

Only 6% of decision-makers cite their cloud cost strategies as being as proactive as possible, while just four-in-ten described themselves as containing costs at the “solution architecture stage.”

The traditional problems of cloud computing are a notable barrier here, with 52% of respondents suggesting that they lack a suitable strategy to deal with issues of excessive storage and 42% lacking a suitable strategy for mitigating against overconsumption of bandwidth. 

“Often, unexpected costs arise from a lack of understanding when it comes to cloud capacity management and monitoring,” Guy Warren, CEO at ITRS, told ITPro. 

“Following the same approach and relying on oversizing to avoid running out on capacity tends to work fine for on-premise but is exceptionally and unnecessarily wasteful in the cloud,” Warren added. 

Similarly, this overprovisioning of resources can often be chalked up to a lack of proper visibility within an individual organization's cloud architecture, as Adrian Bradley, head of cloud transformation at KPMG UK, told ITPro. 

"Many businesses lack visibility into their cloud usage and costs, making it difficult to identify and manage inefficiencies. This can lead to overprovisioning, underutilized resources, and wasted spending," Bradley said. 

According to Forrester’s study, there’s more complexity to come, with a rapid increase in both cloud workloads and cloud costs predicted to take place over the next two years. 

The study revealed decision-makers are expecting select groups of applications to rise at the fastest rates, with 54% looking to IT Ops, 50% looking to hybrid work, 45% looking to software creation platforms and tools, and 44% looking to digital experiences.   

With inter-departmental operations compounded by other complexities, businesses face a considerable challenge in ensuring that their cloud computing activities remain manageable.

“Cloud complexity is an unfortunate inevitability as organizations continue to advance their technological infrastructure,” Mark Coates, VP EMEA at Gigamon, told ITPro. 

“We have seen this in cloud computing for years now, as expanded workforces, sophisticated security measures, and hybrid cloud environments create ever more complex networks,” he added. 

There are many opportunities for businesses to cut cloud spending

The report leans on integration platform solutions as a method for more effective cost mitigation and reduction, citing the enthusiasm with which surveyed respondents look to the possibilities of integration. 

67% of respondents agreed that an integration platform able to connect applications, data, and people is a “game changer” in terms of improving cloud efficiencies and reducing cloud spend at the solution architecture stage. 

Of the respondents already using integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions, 59% experienced more effective cloud cost management, 56% experienced increased data visibility, and 50% experienced improved cloud spend governance. 

Regularly reviewing organizational cloud spending and services is also important, Bradley noted, owing to the often changing nature of cloud computing systems. 

“It is also important to scrutinize variable charges, spend-volume clauses, and third-party spend to identify and plug cost leaks,” he said. “Cloud offers brilliant flexibility but requires regular review to ensure cost-effectiveness.”

Ocado Retail is touting its successful modernization journey by announcing the migration of its key business systems to the cloud via two of Oracle’s enterprise-focused platforms. 

The retail giant was able to generate improved decision-making insights through the project,  as well as streamlined business processes by modernizing its platforms. 

The impetus for the project was one of pragmatism, as says Rebecca Burn, Oracle systems manager at Ocado Retail, in conversation with ITPro. 

As a joint venture between Marks & Spencer and Ocado Group, Ocado Retail’s systems were previously located within Ocado Group's on-premises infrastructure.

“The requirement really was to give us that independence … we knew that we needed to move off that system,” Burn tells ITPro, adding that, as Ocado Group had already undergone its cloud transformation, the retail wing needed to make its own move to negate the necessity for Ocado Group’s existing “legacy infrastructure”.

This move was all about a drive towards an independent platform for Ocado Retail, Burn says. With over 961,000 active customers and continued growth, Ocado Retail now uses Oracle Fusion Applications to drive more efficient business processes.

How Ocado Retail revamped its cloud infrastructure 

Ocado Retail deployed both Oracle Fusion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, the firm’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in its migration efforts. These platforms helped shift Ocado’s infrastructure over to the cloud in slightly different ways. 

The use of Oracle Fusion EPM was very much an upgrade, Burn says, as Ocado Retail had already been using the previous version of Oracle’s EPM. The company knew that it needed the updated version and saw that this was a “really good opportunity” to get it. 

With Oracle Cloud EPM, Ocado Retail was able to overhaul several of its key business requirements, allowing it to greatly improve decision-making, as well as scenario modeling, and built-in advanced analytics. Enhanced financial reporting was also a positive result of using EPM, Burn says, alongside enhanced syncing with the other Oracle system, Oracle Fusion ERP.

“It meant that we could have a more real time feed from ERP to the EPM which we didn't have before,” Burn says. 

Through the migration, Ocado Retail has harnessed the ability to automate its financial processes, streamline its procurement framework, and improve controls. This has primarily come about as a result of it consolidating several business systems into one enterprise-scale software as a service (SaaS) application.

Burn describes the move to ERP with enthusiasm, saying it put Ocado Retail “on a modern platform” fit for continued evolution and improvement. As part of the move, Ocado Retail can also now choose from Oracle’s updates in areas such as AI and machine learning (ML).

A smooth migration, but still a learning curve

Ocado’s cloud transformation was fairly straightforward, according to Burn. “From an implementation perspective, it was really painless … it was really smooth,” Burn says. 

Part of the reason for this was down to the fact the firm made sure it was “really prepared” beforehand, having laid groundwork for around a year ahead of the move. Burn says this involved, among other things, a total data cleanse to get it in a good place for future expansion.

That’s not to say that Ocado Retail wouldn’t have done a few things differently if it were to undertake the challenge again, Burn elaborates, citing the issue of moving transactions as part of cloud migration.  

“An invoice could have been added in [two] months ago but now it's … sitting in this period, which just means it looks a bit different,” Burn says.

The ramifications of this, she adds, is that finance users may be confused as to why their transactions look different from what they expected. This issue put “change management” front and center as a learning experience for Burn. 

Managing the overall change was made easier by the presence of Oracle’s “guided learning” system, Burn adds, which she describes as “priceless” in its ability to direct users through specific queries.

As Ocado Retail moves forward with its new systems in place, the firm will continue to see positive results and enhancements in productivity, better placing the firm for future success and modernization.

Kubernetes over-provisioning is among the leading causes of soaring cloud costs, according to new research.

Only 13% of provisioned CPUs and 20% of provisioned memory was utilized by DevOps teams in Kubernetes clusters of 50+ CPUs, according to CAST.AI's 2024 Kubernetes Cost Benchmark report. 

In larger clusters with 1,000 CPUs or more the rate of CPU utilization was only marginally higher, at 17%.

‘Megaclusters’ with 30,000 CPUs or more, though, were utilized at a rate of around 44%, likely owing to the “attention they receive from the large DevOps teams managing them.”

The report puts this over-provisioning down to an anxiety on the behalf of DevOps teams. Out of a fear of running out of memory, they provision for too great a size of Kubernetes clusters. 

These oversized clusters are then left largely “idle in the background,” heightening cloud costs, the study noted. A similar effect is achieved when CPU and memory requests are set “higher than what Kubernetes applications actually require”, leading to further wasted capacity.

For example, the report's analysis of “Spot instance” pricing found that costs had increased by 25% across US AWS regions. 

This is a problem with general Kubernetes practice across the board as well, the report noted, with DevOps teams on all the major platforms reporting cloud waste as a result of over-provisioning.

Though cloud waste is slightly lower on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) at 17% utilization, utilization rates on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure both sit at rates of 11%. 

The report forecasts this trend to continue as the gap between provisioned and requested CPUs has widened over the last few years from 37% to 43%. 

“As more companies adopt Kubernetes, cloud waste will likely continue to grow,” CAST said. 

The report was compiled from an analysis of 4,000 clusters of at least 50+ CPUs running on AWS, GCP and Microsoft’s Azure. 

Kubernetes costs have been rising steadily in recent years

Kubernetes has been causing cost issues for a while now. A 2023 survey by Civo found that 10% of developers have experienced a 50% rise in annual spending, while the majority saw an increase of up to 25% in spending.

Organizations and enterprise Kubernetes users need to move towards the use of more customized instance sizes, CAST's report suggests. 

Many DevOps teams start by defining workloads and then scouring cloud inventories for the best tools, but most big cloud providers provide an overwhelming “scale” of options.

This means most teams just choose options they know, often leading to the underutilization of other resources that they have paid for. 

Instances that are dynamic and automated, however, can ensure that clusters are automatically optimized. 

It's also important that teams set “accurate requests calls for the ability to constantly monitor resource consumption,” allowing them in turn to adjust requests as needed. 

Financial services firms are ramping up efforts to move away from traditional mainframe systems in favor of cloud services, according to new research from NTT Data. 

In a study from the firm, 91% of respondents reported board level support for a shift to the cloud, with 87% highlighting increasing pressure to integrate AI technologies within their respective firms. 

Why such a prominent shift in thinking is taking place can be attributed to a variety of factors, the most significant having its roots in the current generative AI boom. 

Those surveyed described generative AI as being a key motivating factor in accelerating their shift to the cloud. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said that the emergence of the technology was “decisively facilitating” in their efforts to migrate workloads and applications to the cloud. 

Another 33% see generative AI as a potential aid to data migration complexities, while 29% look to the new technology to help mitigate against risk factors. 

Nearly half (45%) of respondents noted they were already integrating AI into their technology stacks, while a further 30% were in the early stages of adoption. 

Cost was also a leading contributing factor in the decision to shift away from mainframes, respondents told NTT Data. Around 17% cited “cost reduction” as a key motivator in the shift to the cloud. 

The flexibility and scalability of the cloud took greater precedence than cost, though, described by 36% of respondents as the key drivers towards migration. 

The shift away from mainframes has been a long-running process

As NTT’s data shows, this movement towards the cloud has been in full force for some time and shows no signs of slowing.

94% of banks now currently use public cloud systems, with 48% opting for a multi-cloud approach and 32% focusing on hybrid cloud systems.

Enrique Ávila, IT transformation director at Banco Sabadell, said that while the mainframe is expected to remain in the foreseeable future, current industry trends are prompting a widespread rethink among financial services IT leaders, many of whom are eager to reap the benefits of technologies such as generative AI. 

“While the mainframe and its associated applications are expected to remain relevant in the foreseeable future, it is undeniable that the advent of generative AI will have a profound impact on the delivery of technology services,” he said.

“This will enable the deployment of viable methods to modernize existing technology landscapes, facilitating the transformation and evolution towards more modular, cloud based components throughout the software value chain,” he added.

The banking sector will have its fair share of challenges to overcome

Though the industry is enthusiastic about the advantages of the cloud, significant hurdles still remain to achieve digital transformation success, the report warned. 

Despite 89% of banking leaders describing themselves as innovators, for example, 63% still operate on the outdated mainframe system. 

Not “a single respondent” out of the 650 decision-makers surveyed said that “all suitable applications” had been moved off the mainframe,” according to NTT. 

A further 78% also described moving away from mainframe systems as “challenging.” 

To mitigate against the challenge, banks and financial service firms have been looking externally; the report found that 88% of banks had turned to “technology partners” to help in their cloud migration journeys. 

Skills shortages are also a recurring challenge faced by IT leaders in the industry, the report added. NTT specifically highlighted a marked decline in the availability of seasoned mainframe experts has become apparent.

This created an environment in which banks have to ensure both the “continuous operation of their existing mainframe systems” while at the same time looking “to keep pace with the rapidly changing digital landscape.”

The result is a worrying lack of systematic training and skills in new technologies. 

80% of those surveyed reported a lack of a strategic framework for generative AI adoption, for example, clearly expressing the need for a program of upskilling and training. 

HPE has announced the third release of HPE GreenLake for Block Storage offering, a modular, scale-out block storage service designed to create agile cloud environments for businesses.

Managed through the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform, this system delivers an on-premises cloud experience with several features likely to attract the prospective enterprise customer.

The offering combines a block storage architecture with AI-driven management capabilities, promising users 100% data availability, efficient scale, and a high-level of resilience in mission critical workloads.

“Our announcement represents the next step in a multi-step journey to consolidate, standardize and simplify our HPE block storage portfolio on a common software and hardware stack — all with a unified cloud management experience provided by the HPE GreenLake platform,” a HPE spokesperson said.

According to HPE, the service will simplify a user’s cloud environment “with an AI-driven cloud management experience” built on artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps).

It will deliver an operational experience that mitigates the need for “firefighting” by predicting potential disruptions through AI-driven intelligence. Administrators are then able to rely on AI-driven recommendations to support data management decisions. 

This will also help to reduce the time consumed through incident response and escalation. 

HPE said the release aims to “eliminate the guesswork for customers", specifically with regard to storage optimization. AI can generate detailed reports and analytics to provide insights into individual cloud environments.

These AI tools are also necessary in supporting user interaction with HPE’s block storage architecture, which aims to improve performance and resilience within cloud environments.

Where older storage architectures are often held back by weaknesses in the conduit between storage sites, also known as the midplane, HPE’s take on block storage provides users with an altered version of the conduit which is more flexible. 

This allows users to incrementally add modular units to their cloud system in the event they need to increase performance or capacity.

HPE eyes greater scalability for users

Scalability is the aim here, allowing users to constantly update and adapt, though there’s also a cost efficiency angle; businesses can tailor how much storage they purchase or use at any one time, depending on the changing demands of their workload or requirements. 

Mission-criticality also stands to benefit from this solution, if that’s the particular concern of a business.

The flexibility of HPE’s block storage creates a “shared-everything” environment which provides users with consistent, low-latency performance at scale, the firm said.

Using this storage system in conjunction with HPE’s AI-driven management platform unlocks an impressive level of usability for enterprise customers.

“HPE GreenLake for Block Storage built on HPE Alletra Storage MP is an always-on service that’s built on an AI-driven, disaggregated, no single-point-of-failure platform to guarantee unrivaled 100% data availability for your mission-critical apps,” the company said.

UK firms are turning to microservices in a bid to sharpen cloud optimization efforts and reducing their spending, according to new research from Information Services Group (ISG).

Many companies that have moved on-prem workloads to different hyperscaler environments are concerned over data visibility, interoperability, and vendor lock-in, according to company’s 2023 Provider Lens Multi Public Cloud Services.

These lingering concerns have prompted many to turn to service providers in a bid to shake up their cloud approach and reduce burdens placed on developer teams, the report noted.

"Companies in the UK that have established hyperscaler environments are looking for help," said Ola Chowning, ISG partner, North Europe.

"They are actively seeking service providers that can offer FinOps solutions to monitor and control their overall spending."

Because microservices are distinct compartmentalized functions that exist within a larger application, they are easier to scale up and down, the report said, and their role will continue to grow in significance as enterprises try to avoid the limitations that come with running monolithic applications in the cloud.

A few tools, such as those that specifically focus on streamlining cloud governance, enhancing visibility, and flagging noncompliance issues across multiple cloud environments, were typically found to run more effectively inside a microservices architecture.

Different industries are seeing different levels of adoption, the report noted. The UK's highly-regulated financial industry, for example, is required to comply with certain data transit norms, reducing its use of microservices compared with less-regulated hi-tech companies.

As a result, these limitations are inhibiting certain industries from leveraging a multi-cloud approach, which has grown in popularity in recent years as organizations seek to harness a more diverse range of cloud providers.

Cloud optimization a key focus for larger enterprises

Larger enterprises were typically found to have cumbersome, siloed data center environments, meaning that it typically takes them at least a year to streamline applications during the cloud migration phase. 

Many continue to use dedicated applications on the hyperscalers’ platforms, meaning that they don't take advantage of the benefits of scale, the report said.

Meanwhile, inflationary pressure has also ramped up operational expenditure.

A recent study from Sapio Research found that cost optimization is the biggest challenge IT decision makers face, with 54% stating they're evaluating new investments more carefully because of the economic downturn.

With many organizations reporting that underused or overprovisioned resources are causing avoidable cloud expenses, FinOps, an operational framework which maximizes the business value of cloud, is becoming increasingly attractive.

More than six-in-ten businesses globally have some sort of FinOps system in place, Sapio revealed, with another quarter saying they plan to adopt it in the next three years.

As organizations expand their cloud posture, knowing what cloud auditing is and how to do it effectively second cloud provider because their original provider just isn’t as good at new workloads.

Multi-cloud set-ups, where cloud computing services come from at least two providers are a perfectly fine strategy. As Gartner puts it, “A well-governed multi-cloud strategy can improve access to a breadth of technology choices and innovative best-of-breed capabilities.”

Over time the waters can get muddied. Organizations must know what’s going on with each of their cloud providers, and that they are only getting the services they need. A regular audit, in which outgoings and benefits associated with cloud services are interrogated, is vital. Audits often lead to a systematic clearout of unwanted services and can reduce costs and paperwork, cut wasted staff time, and help leaders assess their cloud strategy. 

What are the different types of cloud auditing?

There are several different types of cloud auditing and each comes with separate follow-through actions. Some of these are ongoing, others more formally timetabled. Perhaps the most straightforward audit is a cost review. “It tends to involve a three to four-week desk-based review of architecture and consumption patterns,” says Adrian Bradley, head of the cloud transformation at KPMG, who tells ITPro that this is the most common review to identify savings opportunities. Actions coming out of this kind of audit include finding ways to mitigate overspending with the existing provider, looking for an alternative provider, or engaging in cloud repatriation. 

Another common option for performing a cloud audit is focused on cloud security controls, and this should be an ongoing process using a recognized framework. The audit may require little human interaction. “In mature cloud organizations, these are highly automated and operate as continuous compliance, where estates are constantly monitored for workloads going out of compliance,” Bradley adds.

“But many estates lack this level of automation, and ‘manual’ reviews that enable the development of automation are the fallback.” The actions coming out of any such audit must focus on ensuring security compliance. 

The broadest form of auditing involves looking at an organization’s entire cloud environment across all providers to ensure cloud as a whole is performing optimally. It will be for each organization to identify the scope of an audit of this kind, and to understand which responsibilities lie internally versus with any third parties. Sander Barens, chief product officer at Expereo tells ITProthat the audit process should mimic everyday user experience as closely as possible. 

“There will be no one size fits all approach to improving cloud performance, however, and each audit should unveil different challenges, and solutions to them, for businesses to address,” Barens notes. A thorough audit of this kind will facilitate the collection of actionable insights. While the ultimate responsibility for all of this will lie at the board level, the chief information officer (CIO) and chief information security officer (CISO) won’t be able to do the auditing. This could be the responsibility of internal staff, but there are solid arguments for turning to external specialists for a formal auditing process. They should be free of organizational baggage and loyalties, and will ideally make constructive suggestions for action based on the insights they gain.  

Oversight and strategy for cloud auditing

It is important to remain vigilant for telltale signs outside of any formalized auditing regime, which may trigger immediate remedial action. This could include a  spike in cloud computing costs noted by accounting teams with no associated notification. If so, an audit will be necessary to determine if one’s cloud provider has suddenly raised its fees and whether competitor services are a viable alternative. Technology teams and financial teams must work together to get to the bottom of these concerns.

“FinOps-style services and solutions are fast becoming a vital requirement to ensure that cloud workloads are being deployed most cost-effectively for optimal performance and latency concerns,” Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight tells ITPro. Any breakdown, outage, slowdown, or other performance issue ought to also trigger some sort of scrutiny. IT leaders should know the most likely reasons for a cloud outage and there are specific steps to be taken so that those firms more dependent on the public cloud such as SMBs can prepare for the cloud going down. But if outages are regular it may be worth considering changing one’s provider altogether. “Too many outages should also trigger an audit,” Rotibi adds.

Any issue with a service level agreement (SLA) is another cause for concern. Depending on the nature of the issue an audit of services may or may not be necessary, but the organization’s own risk profile should identify the trigger point for that.

When it comes to the frequency of cloud auditing, this will depend on many factors including workload, maturity of the cloud provision, complexity of the organization’s work, and its multi-cloud set-up. A formal audit might be triggered by something as serious as a financial anomaly, but outside of any triggering audits should be scheduled into the regular risk work of any board. 

Without paying serious and ongoing attention to auditing cloud provision, an organization can fall into bad habits, and even the dreaded siloed datasets, duplication of processes, and muddled policy and actions that are generated by these can occur. In the end, achieving a sleek cloud estate, whether through a multi-cloud architecture or alternative, will rely on formal auditing carried out on a rigorous schedule.

Not so long ago, the public cloud boom was in full swing and businesses were moving workloads in numbers thanks to its reputation for low costs and scalability. 

Today, many businesses have reassessed the size or scope of their public cloud investment. While the benefits of the public cloud remain clear, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud have their attractive qualities with some organizations choosing to entirely repatriate to a private cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

The moves come as businesses face an uncertain cloud landscape. Many in the IT sector are battling skill shortages or struggling to convince stakeholders to spend money on cloud resources. Faced with these challenges, they are seeking ways to alleviate these challenges and get a return on investment from their cloud strategy.

Recorded live at VMware Explore, Rory is joined by Martin Hosken, chief technologist EMEA at VMware, to discuss FinOps, shifting cloud strategy, and just what the benefits of cloud repatriation are.

Highlights

“If you take an application from one place, and move it and run it in another place, the functionality of that application doesn't change. So to get business value, to get a return on investment, you have to modernize applications. What many organizations have found is moving an existing application is easy, but actually mobilizing these applications to take advantage of cloud capabilities is expensive.”

“Developers have a reputation for never switching anything off. So you build three or four test environments for your new application. And they will run for five years, and no one would even think about it. Maybe every month that’s a couple of hundred dollars, but when you start accumulating multiple environments, multiple applications it will get very, very expensive.”

“In the last cloud era, the last 10 years, it's all been about agility. Building things quickly, going to market quickly, expanding elasticity and most of the benefits of cloud. The next video is going to be about business value it’s going to be about sustainability, digital sovereignty, and legislative controls.”

Footnotes

• What is cloud repatriation?
• What is multi-cloud?
• Why cloud repatriation is a ‘fallacy’
• How to embark on your cloud repatriation journey
• 37 Signals says it saved $1 million by abandoning cloud infrastructure
• VMware unveils slew of new cloud data management and recovery tools

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There is nothing more frustrating than being let down by things outside your control. But in business, as in life, being able to manage things you can’t control is essential. 

The goal of 99.9% uptime is far from a given, as cloud providers are not infallible and outages occur. There are several likely reasons for a cloud outage, and factors such as unforeseen power availability issues, software flaws, and ransomware attacks play a role.

Any business must acknowledge the reality of cloud outages. These might be just a few hours in length, or they could last for a few days. No business wants to simply “get through” an outage no matter its duration. Instead, leaders aim to minimize as much damage and downtime as possible and prevent their clients and customers from experiencing any inconvenience as a result. 

For that to happen, especially among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited resources, planning and preparation are key.

Plan for cloud outages

The first step towards putting mitigations in place is understanding the problem. In terms of cloud, this means knowing the answer to key questions concerning your on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

Thomas King, CTO at internet exchange operator DE-CIX, tells ITPro that businesses need to account for all eventualities.

“What outages could occur? How critical is the data or the workload involved? How negative will the impact of each of these types of outages be? What countermeasures should be taken?” asks King.

It is important to categorize potential outages by the systems they will affect, from those internal and customer-facing to regional and international systems that may span an organization’s entire environment. With the number of remote-working employees today, the potential for communication outages between teams or entire offices should also be considered. Mapping all of this might be complex, but without the map, you can’t come up with meaningful mitigations.

It is also important to understand which parts of your work are business-critical, as these will need to be kept functional as a priority. Can you put in place on-premise workarounds, or do you need to have expensive but potentially business-saving redundancy arrangements that will allow a secondary system to kick in if your cloud fails?

“The most critical resources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cloud databases, should be deployed in an active-active configuration across different cloud service providers to ensure the greatest possible availability,” says King.

“Further resources such as the webshop front-end can be set up in an active-passive deployment so that they can be spawned on a separate cloud service provider when needed.”

Taking services offline

For some activities, it will be sufficient to put in place manual processes rather than maintain a separate online system. Business continuity planning can go into granular detail over which processes could go offline and provide clarity over which of these are mission-critical. This information is imperative if you get into an ‘all hands to the pump’ situation. 

Jaco Vermeulen, CTO at BML Group reminded ITPro that when offline processes are put in place it is vitally important to “include recovery operations to ensure those offline/manual functions are efficiently and accurately updated in cloud systems.” This cloud updating will need to be scheduled at speed. It is not going to help the business once the cloud is back running at a hundred percent efficiency if people can’t find recent records because they are still in the manual system.

Bring your workforce with you

It is one thing to know which key processes will need to change during a cloud outage and to prioritize these in order of importance as part of a contingency plan. It is quite another thing to know who will be doing the hands-on work to deliver the processes and for those people to feel competent and confident. 

If you will need to redeploy people into entirely new contingency roles, make sure that these people are aware of their responsibilities and that they have the required skills. If they don't, upskilling will be necessary. The last thing you want is to be running around in the first few hours of a cloud outage getting people in the right place and checking that they can do the tasks asked of them.

Manual workflows and record-keeping can make a solid backup for the cloud in the event of an outage, with hard copies still useful despite moves by many to a paperless office. If you are going to use paper systems to replace some cloud ones, it’s important to have the right forms and other materials to hand so there’s no mad rush for the printer when an outage occurs.

Work out what might be needed for a couple of hours of outage, and be sure teams can self-serve to replenish stocks. When using people to replace cloud processes the key is to plan, prepare, and run drills. Getting all this in place as part of a business continuity planning exercise might feel cumbersome and time-consuming. Some might see it as diverting energy away from day-to-day tasks. But without a worst-case scenario plan, leaders are simply biding their time until their ordinary processes are upended.

A final step is to remember that both technical and paper-based contingencies are easily ruined by changes that happen as part of everyday business evolution. Digital transformation, or replacing legacy technology with new systems, are beneficial changes that can nonetheless introduce new variables to a long-standing cloud outage contingency plan.

“All executive management and leaders are responsible for business continuity and plans need to be reviewed, whenever there is an operational change or change in systems/IT landscape,” says Vermeulen.

“Any such change can become a punch in the face to plans if not properly checked.”

The University of Bristol is at the center of a wave of investment and innovation. The institution has already begun to roll out a new digital environment for students and staff and unveiled supercomputers that will boost UK computing power by an order of magnitude.

Bristol is a civic university, and so it offers an array of multidisciplinary courses with an intense focus on research. It maintains a 50/50 balance between research and education, which presents unique challenges for its IT environment.

For years the university has aimed to achieve digital equity, in which every student and academic has access to relevant materials, resources, and the wider university community, regardless of location or the limitations of their device.

This contrasts against years of siloed networks, with students who could physically attend the university more easily able to access key resources. Staff also found it difficult to source devices through the IT department that met the budget set out by their grants. 

To realize its goals, the organization sought a multi-cloud approach. This allows the university to blend and extend its network for freer access while empowering its IT teams to maintain security controls through new operations layers. It also allows for scalable expansion into future projects.

Bristol also worked with partners to create the ideal environment for growth and invested in cutting-edge technologies such as its growing cluster of supercomputers. This has required a radical overhaul of the university’s cloud platform via a multi-cloud approach – something that public cloud providers weren’t offering.

Breaking down research barriers

Speaking to ITPro at VMware Explore Barcelona 2023, Keith Woolley, CIO at the University of Bristol, explained how he has worked since 2019 to enable a “boundaryless education and research strategy” through digital transformation. The vision is a self-service environment that is free at the point of entry, to cut out the complexity and costs of the current system.

“The challenge that the vendors were doing, at the time, was ‘please give us all your workloads, please let us stick it in a cloud,’ and I needed all clouds,” Woolley tells ITPro.

“There was only one platform that we could see and that was the VMware Cloud Foundation. It was embryonic in what it was trying to do, but very clear in the fact that it was looking to create a multi-cloud environment that could be built upon.”

VMware paired the University of Bristol with Xtravirt, one of its accredited partners. Xtravirt had already worked with Woolley and his team on its virtualization efforts and expanded its partnership to provide a proof-of-concept for this equitable VCF environment.

“By using a partner like Xtravirt that was looking more at the value of what we were trying to create, rather than the technology stack of trying to create it, we were able to work in partnership on the overall business outcomes we required,” he says.

Academics had frequently complained about inaccessible pricing and long delays when trying to obtain devices through the university’s IT services. This is principally what drove the need for a self-service environment that would be free at the point of entry for all academics at the University of Bristol.

To keep the service accessible and affordable, Woolley worked with Xtravirt to put certain limitations in place, such as constrained processor, memory, and storage allowance per user. The finished system has been well-received by researchers and has already been cited positively in academic papers.

Woolley’s team can maintain cyber security, data governance, and custom firewall rules via an onion layer.

Supercomputing integration

The University of Bristol will host Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful supercomputer from Spring 2024. This will form part of the UK government’s Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR), a supercomputer cluster that will also include the Dawn supercomputer at the University of Cambridge.

HPE announced its work on Isambard-AI in early November, having received £225 million to produce the supercomputer in collaboration with Woolley’s team and Nvidia. Once complete, Isambard-AI will support 200 quadrillion calculations per second and will be made accessible to University of Bristol academics.

While highlighting the fundamental paradigm shift that Isambard-AI represents – the supercomputer will be approximately ten times more powerful than ARCHER2, the UK’s current top dog in the high-performance computing (HPC) space – Woolley also emphasized how the work with Xtravirt and VMware formed the foundation for this innovation.

“It’s an absolutely state-of-the-art machine that we’re doing, but the underlying technology in it is very similar to what we’re doing with containerizing through Tanzu, the way in which we’re using VCF cloud financial services.”

Woolley has also overseen work on two more supercomputers at the University of Bristol. The first of these is Isambard 3, a supercomputer originally intended to enhance the Met Office’s weather and climate modeling that has subsequently been used to conduct research for the healthcare sector such as work on COVID-19 vaccines and simulations on the cause of Parkinson’s disease.

The second is Reality Emulator, a digital twin intended for use across sectors including finance, logistics, and manufacturing.

Supercomputer results will be made accessible through the university’s VCF environment and down the line, the University of Bristol will work with companies such as VMware for advanced machine learning (ML), as well as AI ethics and other AI research.

“This solution that we're bringing in now is going to change the way we think about biochemistry, radiography science, fusion power, fission power. It's going to change the way in which we can move the landscape of research.”

The University of Bristol will also seek out closer collaboration with other organizations. Woolley says a good starting point will be to enrich its relationship with research hospitals to share information and use learnings and innovations to reduce costs.

Internationalization and identity controls

Woolley tells ITPro that in time the network will also be driven by identity, with zero trust network access (ZTNA) allowing academics to assign specific resources to certain student groups without overextending privileges. To this end, the university is working on identity management programs.

“It’s vitally important to me, especially as we are trying to think about where we're taking our international business, our internationalization, and the way we're thinking about the university moving internationally, to be able to make sure that we cannot only attract international students to our campus but we can support international students in their home country,” Woolley tells ITPro.

“I want to make sure that I can truly say, ‘we are an equitable company, when you want to come and work with us you can have an equal opportunity to educational research and an equal experience’, and that's our ambition in the way we're moving forward with our technology.”

In the near future, the university will integrate virtual desktop environments and graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities for deep learning and high-volume research. Through a £52 million investment in network infrastructure, he aims to ensure the network can securely segment itself and pull in all the remote users it needs to meet Woolley’s original vision of an equitable academic environment.

“[To make that] enterprise-ready, across the whole piece, what’s left to do is a lot of scaling up,” says Woolley.

“What’s also left to do is expand to the edge, getting the software edge right to ensure we can really start to open the boundaries of where we operate and get that edge a lot wider, a flexible global edge.”

Many firms have engaged in cloud repatriation, in which public cloud workloads and applications are moved back to on-premises infrastructure. Fed up with cost estimation struggles, some companies have turned to cloud repatriation to manage costs.

Some may believe cloud repatriation involves taking all workloads off the public cloud and putting them in the private cloud/on-premises environment, but a blended approach is also possible.

Software firm 37signals opted for hybrid repatriation by working with a managed service provider (MSP) and AWS-certified advisor to manage workloads. While they’ve left AWS, their vendor hasn’t.

While multi-cloud is nothing new, partially or completely vacating the public cloud has received more attention in the past three to five years. The firms embarking on cloud repatriation have announced large cost reductions, with 37signals reporting $1 million in cost savings just months after repatriation.

Repatriation comes with its own drawbacks and challenges, and isn’t as simple as lifting and shifting one’s public cloud workloads. To get started on the process, there are a few important steps to take first.

Key considerations for cloud repatriation

For firms looking for broader insights, industry insiders recommend considering the following when choosing between leaving or staying on the public cloud.

Strategic alignment

Questioning whether repatriation is aligned with your overall objectives and strategy is a clear starting point for enterprises. For many firms, application performance and user experience are more important than the location of the application, Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst on infrastructure and private cloud at Forrester tells ITPro.

Chhabra encourages firms to consider public cloud application optimization through FinOps, which may solve cost and performance issues, as well as the security, cost, and performance implications of repatriation. Despite how critical these considerations are, Chhabra adds they often go overlooked.

Karyn Price, industry principal at Frost & Sullivan, recommends mapping all data dependencies for every application so that these can more easily be remapped to the target location.

Workload evaluation

Assessing the needs of current workloads and how these will change is core for all businesses embarking on cloud repatriation. 

“Know the amount of change that these workloads will demand and ensure you have a strategy that can deliver a service based on the customer demand,” Roy Illsley, chief analyst at Omdia tells ITPro.

Business leaders overseeing repatriation projects also need to weigh up the benefits of running some workloads in one environment and some in another depending on where they will operate best. This is especially true of apps that require very low latency to operate properly, which may be better off deployed at the edge or other on-premises infrastructure that cut out lengthy network delays.

Price contrasts this with apps that are “bursty” in that they experience sharp peaks and lulls in traffic, which can be better off in the easily scalable environments of the public cloud.

Applications with the highest uptime demand will also need to be put in the environment that can best cater to these needs. Depending on the complexity of the application, repatriation could be a boon here, as on-premises workloads can be more closely overseen and maintained to ensure they are always running and available.

This could necessitate costly investment in systems such as uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and power backups for potential grid issues, with which small businesses could struggle. Those seeking uptime for large workloads could be better off with the public cloud, with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all offering up to 99.9% uptime in their service level agreements. 

‘Five nines’ availability in the public cloud might be having a detrimental effect on maintenance cycles, however, and so each firm should assess their own uptime needs for themselves.

Data privacy regulations are another chief concern here. With some countries and global regions enacting strict data sovereignty laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), workloads may be better suited to private data centers or even a colocation facility within said regions to satisfy data location requirements.

Assessing existing on-premises resources

Illsley reminds us to find a soft landing for applications and workloads firms repatriate. Leaders should consider whether they previously ditched any dedicated server space amid their cloud migration or whether staff were reduced or re-assigned. 

If these are in good shape or relatively hassle-free to implement, repatriation could work. Otherwise, more investment might be needed to lay the groundwork for repatriation further down the line.

“Can you deliver the same service, or better, than the cloud?” Illsley asked. “If you do not have these capabilities then you must consider how easy acquiring the skills and resources will be, and what the risk is to the company.”

Is cloud repatriation right for my business?

For one of our experts, cloud repatriation is a sign of poor planning. For others, it’s a necessary tactic in a firm’s workload cost management strategy. Many businesses may ultimately aim for hybrid cloud architecture featuring some workloads in the public cloud and some on-premises/private cloud.

“Repatriation usually is a result of bad planning of application migration or due to applications that are developed in the cloud with the full intent of bringing them back on-premises,” says Sid Nag, VP cloud services & technologies at Gartner Research.

Others have argued cloud repatriation isn’t a trend at all, merely an ongoing series of decisions firms such as 37signals have made that come with situational benefits and drawbacks. If the cost savings or sovereignty benefits outweigh the scalability of a firm’s public cloud offering it may well embark on repatriation, but it would be wise to follow the steps laid out above first.

One of the main reasons to engage in repatriation is to remove the data egress charges that many cloud providers charge. “These charges are harder to estimate when a workload is moved to the cloud as they are very use-specific,” says Illsley.

“Businesses want all their workloads to run with optimal performance, low cost, and maximum security,” Price told ITPro. 

“Businesses that move apps or data from the cloud back to the premises do so because they’re experiencing disappointment in one or more [of those] areas.”

Price offers some final words of wisdom for this very daunting, but potentially rewarding endeavor. “Don't underestimate the job. It's going to take time and effort, which is why it's best to do the workload assessment upfront, so you're not having to backtrack by repatriating misplaced workloads.”

Illsley’s final insights center on the customer experience, stating that satisfying customer demand is about delivering the service properly no matter the location.

“They do not care if it is run on-premises or in the cloud," he says. 

"What they care about is the cost, the quality of the service in terms of availability, performance, etc., and how fast any changes are accommodated. The key is to ensure all stakeholders are involved and understand the reasons why and what they can expect from any move back to on-premises.”

VMware has announced a large expansion of its cloud data services, with an update for its Data Service Manager and expanded compatibility for databasing alongside new protections against ransomware and services for data recovery.

Data Services Manager 2.0 is now natively available within VMware Cloud Foundation, providing IT managers with full control over policies for data and infrastructure. VMware stated it could cut the time spent on provisioning database services from hours to minutes.

The release of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 will also bring new capabilities to support the data needs of customers seeking to implement generative AI workloads. VMware said the updated system will deliver double the GPU capacity and four times the storage performance boost, as well as improved policy enforcement.

Another new feature is Intelligent Threat Detection, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to detect hidden ransomware in customer workloads via an isolated VMware Cloud environment.

When attacks do happen, Intelligent Threat Detection scans offline snapshots for anomalies in metadata or data exchange to identify encrypted data. It will pair with VMware Live Recovery, now available as a single unified solution for data remediation in the wake of an attack. 

VMware announced the updates at VMware Explore Barcelona 2023, its annual EU event that complements the yearly VMware Explore conference in the US. 

“The challenge statement that we're trying to address with our data services manager and data service strategies is how can we provide our customers a consistent and unified operational model and ensure their service level objectives for all of these modern databases and data services,” said Prashanth Shenoy, VP marketing, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware.

VMware said that 85 million workloads now run on VMware Cloud Infrastructure, with the firm having recorded a 31% year-over-year growth in consumption for VCI workloads.

The PostgreSQL database Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni will also be added to VMware Cloud Foundation as the first native third-party integration of its kind. 

Run on VMware’s hyper-converged vSAN infrastructure, AlloyDB Omni is capable of up to 100x performance of competing PostreSQL solutions.

It will be joined by the third-party object storage MinIO Object Store, which VMware described as a resilient object store ideal for mission-critical production environments such as for AI and ML.

“Whether residing on-premises, across hybrid clouds, or in a sovereign cloud environment, data is the fuel for digital transformation,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure business unit, VMware.

“Through our new data services innovations and partnerships, we are making VMware Cloud Foundation the best platform to power the traditional, modern, and AI and ML applications that are central to business.” 

Leaps for Sovereign Cloud 

While Sovereign Cloud demand is still largely being driven by data residency requirements, Bhardwaj stated that local regulations such as the EU AI Act and Data Act are driving greater needs for sovereign cloud architecture.

Brewing legislation on AI has also driven VMware customers to implement measures that ensure data sovereignty is respected by models they are using, in the cloud or on-premise via VMware Private AI.

VMware said that as customers need to manage their Kubernetes clusters, they need centralized policy management.

To help deliver this VMware will deliver its SaaS service Tanzu Mission Control, which is used for multi-cloud Kubernetes management, as a self-service solution for air-gapped environments.

MongoDB, Kafka, and Greenplum will also be made accessible through new ‘as-a-service’ offerings, for added options on real-time and data analytics, as well as flexible and fast data transactions.

VMware additionally announced expanded partnerships with NetApp and Thales. NetApp will provide its StorageGRID Object Storage directly within Sovereign Cloud, while Thales is set to provide Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) services for Sovereign Cloud through its CipherTrust service.

“We are seeing increased adoption of our Sovereign Cloud solutions, which we announced last year in Barcelona,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president, cloud provider platform at VMware.

“I’m happy to report that we now have 55 cloud service providers who are part of the VMware Sovereign Cloud program.”

Innovations at the edge

In addition to its cloud announcements, VMware unveiled a range of advancements for its Software-Defined Edge ecosystem, such as Intelligent Assist for VMware Software-Defined Edge. 

This builds on the other VMware services containing its generative AI Intelligent Assist solutions which already serve Tanzu, Workspace ONE, and NSX+.

It is hoped that the tool will help customers to perform smoother rollouts across VMware’s SDE and secure access service edge (SASE) products. The firm cited Gartner research that indicated that by 2026, 50% of all edge computing deployments will involve machine learning (ML) at some level.

VMware is also rolling out Microsoft Security Copilot for its SASE customers as a trial, with the intention of expanding the generative AI tool’s scope to include data on network perimeter security.

Cloud service providers appear to only give causation for outages when they affect a large swath of customers. 

Yet our research reveals the majority of high-impact and high-cost outages are what experts call “micro-outages” that affect one application, one service area, one region, or one availability zone. If your business depends on any of those ‘ones’ you may not get a full readout of what happened and how to mitigate any fallout in the future.

Here we’ll outline the three most likely causes of those micro- and macro-outages and the best ways to plan around them.

Outages caused by human error

If we go far back enough to determine the cause of a cloud outage, we’ll find some semblance of human error involved. Yet glaring human failings come to light when simple duties or tiny details become ignored by the people charged with completing them.

“In my experience, the most likely source of cloud outages is human error, somebody has released some code with a bug, some configuration file was not updated,” says Roy Illsley, chief analyst of IT Operations at Omdia. 

What’s an example of a human error-induced outage?

In February 2017, AWS experienced a major outage from an improperly entered execution command by an AWS technician.

What was the cause?

“An authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” according to an excerpt from the firm’s post-event summary (PES). “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”

What was the impact?

The outage lasted for two hours between 9:37 a.m. PST and 11:37 a.m. PST on February 28, 2017. The outage knocked several major sites offline such as Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and WIX. Amazon’s own Alexa system and Nest application were affected by the outage also. 

Outages caused by automatically scaled errors

Small errors can become big problems quickly, especially when those small errors are part of an automated series of actions affecting cloud applications. That’s according to Brett Ellis, senior analyst at Forrester when he reviewed two recent automation-related outages.

What’s an example of an automatically scaled error-induced outage?

In December 2021, one automated activity to scale the capacity of an AWS service triggered a nine-hour outage affecting popular services such as Disney+ and Netflix. The outage removed several internet-dependent resources such as Roombas, Alexa-powered door locks, and Ring security cameras.

What was the cause?

An automated system didn’t function as expected, causing API requests to fail. Customers couldn’t modify or create new API calls. This created a connection request backlog that overwhelmed the connection between the AWS internal network and its main network for the US-East-1 region. The connection attempts piled up, causing even more latency between networks. The issue lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 2:20 p.m. PST.

What was the impact?

The impact of the outage was expansive, affecting Amazon’s retail arm during the most important month of the year for that sector. Reports of final exam delays and lack of access to online educational materials also poured into Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. It didn’t help that the AWS Service Health Dashboard wasn’t live for nearly the entirety of the outage, allowing for widespread speculation as to the cause of the outage. 

Outages caused by natural disasters (or poor planning for one)

Natural disasters, and the lack of planning for them, wreaked havoc on cloud network availability in recent years. AWS isn’t the only CSP with a string of outages to its name. Microsoft Azure found that weather-related issues can reveal facility management issues. 

What’s an example of a natural disaster-induced outage?

In August 2023, Microsoft experienced an outage that was initially caused by an electrical storm near the firm’s Sydney data center region. It soon became clear, though, that other factors contributed to what turned out to be a day-long outage in its Sydney availability zone.

What was the cause?

An electrical storm on 30 August created a power sag affecting cooling units in one of Microsoft’s Sydney data centers. A facility that depended on five chillers to modulate temperature was reduced to just one because one of the facility’s two backup chillers didn’t back anything up. This triggered a shutdown of servers to manage the thermal load of the facility. Microsoft later admitted three staffers were too few to cover a facility of that size. 

What was the impact?

Oracle Cloud and NetSuite also experienced shutdowns due to the chiller/staffing issue at the Microsoft facility. “… the rush to expand services and geographic availability has impacted the implementation of geographically separated redundant systems, leaving hyperscaler services vulnerable to location-based failures due to weather, earthquake, and fire,” Ellis said.

How can businesses mitigate cloud outages?

For enterprises with core systems in the cloud, it’s imperative to leverage as many of the cloud service providers’ resources as possible. Ellis outlines three steps to identify, track, and report cloud outages for enterprises. They include:

Identify: Enumerate the nested components of the services procured through cloud service providers so that those components can be tracked.  

Track: Connect service and product owners to relevant alerts. “If you purchase a SaaS healthcare application built on top of Salesforce, you might want to inquire with the vendor about where they host their components so you can add that environment into your Network Operations Center (NOC),” says Ellis. Relate regional monitoring data to an actual app purchased and have an internal service owner assigned, as well as an alerts contact. “You end up with something like a weather report for your apps where you know there is a possibility of a slowdown in your app because one of the component services is degraded or offline,” he adds.  

Report: Communicate with the hyperscaler in question about key service owners, and how to reach out. “As for updates and retrospectives, I think the expectation is that a SaaS vendor or cloud provider should have a page where updates happen on a regular interval, something between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on the service that is offline and how critical it is until the outage is resolved,” says Ellis. An example of an honest, public retrospective is Atlassian’s post-incident review for its April 2022 outage.

Failures of service providers will vary depending on the points of failure each provider has. Be sure to understand technical risks so you can mitigate them in accordance with your firm’s needs and available resources. Ellis recommends talking about technical risks prior to contracting with any hosted service, be it SaaS or cloud infrastructure. 

Rushed multi-cloud deployments and a lack of relevant expertise are compounding the impact of rising cloud costs for businesses, according to new research from Aptum. 

In a survey of senior IT professionals, 70% of respondents revealed that cloud-related costs now account for 30% of their total IT spending budget. 

A similar number of respondents said that cloud investments have resulted in “higher-than-expected” IT costs over the last 12 months amid surging prices and economic disruption. 

This, the report found, marked a 28% increase compared to the year prior, underlining the acute impact of cost increases on businesses. 

While rising cloud costs are having a significant impact on operational expenditures at many organizations, Aptum noted that a lack of relevant expertise is hampering their ability to fully maximize cloud capabilities and unlock benefits from investments.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said that a “lack of internal expertise” has prevented them from delivering value with their cloud investments. 

“IT organizations must develop skills and knowledge around cloud strategy and planning to put a stop to runaway costs and inefficiencies,” the report read. 

“This should include ensuring cloud deployment teams are educated in issues including cloud costs, chargeback, automation, and orchestration.”

Multi-cloud deployments in particular represent a key stumbling block for organizations. A report from Oracle in February this year revealed that 98% of enterprises are using - or plan to use - at least two cloud infrastructure providers. 

31% told the tech giant that they are using four providers or more, or plan to do so in the near future. 

Multi-cloud deployment difficulties complexities are being exacerbated by a lack of relevant expertise, Aptum noted. Similarly, a rushed approach and “poor planning” of such deployments is further compounding the situation for many. 

“Poor planning and a lack of internal expertise, combined with an acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic culminated in unforeseen costs, exacerbated by a lack of familiarity with complex cloud solutions,” the report noted. 

“This is particularly the case where organizations have embarked on a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy that sees a mixture of on-prem and public cloud services for different data services and workloads.”

Aptum’s insights on multi-cloud-related expertise challenges aligns with similar research on the subject from this year. 

A report from HashiCorp found that “high cloud maturity” firms are delivering value from their shift to a multi-cloud approach. However, skills remain a key inhibitor for many.  

80% of respondents identified relevant skills and expertise as a major factor in delivering successful multi-cloud deployments. These successes are being hindered by a lack of skills, the report added, which is preventing firms from accelerating their shift to multi-cloud and unlocking additional value.  

Growing FinOps focus

The Aptum study noted that firms must sharpen their focus on bolstering expertise in areas such as FinOps to mitigate rising costs moving forward. 

FinOps practices have grown in popularity in recent years as organizations seek to curtail rising costs and optimize cloud usage. A study into cloud optimization from Crayon this year found that 62% of businesses globally have implemented FinOps practices in some capacity.  

Nearly one-quarter also said they plan to adopt FinOps within the next three years. 

This FinOps skills focus should center around developing cross-functional teams that combine expertise from engineering, finance, and product sections of the organization to both support delivery and maximize financial oversight of cloud spending, the report read. 

“Crucially, FinOps helps organizations gain real visibility into cloud costs and make informed decisions on when and where to optimize.”

37 Signals has saved more than $1 million in cloud costs in a matter of months after embarking on a significant cloud repatriation project earlier this year, a company executive has revealed.

The SaaS firm’s shift to hardware has already unlocked sizable cost savings, with more expected to come, CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said in a blog post last week.

Hansson said the firm has managed to reduce cloud spend by around 60% since its shift, down from an average of $180,000 per month to “less than $80,000”.

“That’s a cool million dollars in savings at the year run rate, and we have another big drop coming in September, before the remaining spend will peter out through the rest of the year,” he wrote.

The reported initial cost savings far exceeded what the company invested in hardware earlier this year, according to Hansson.

When it first embarked on the cloud repatriation project, 37 Signals spent $600,000 on eight servers to replace cloud rentals, Hansson said. The move came in response to what he described as “grotesque” costs over the space of a year, with the firm spending $3.2 million for AWS services across 2022.

“While there are some additional other costs associated with the extra servers, it’s relative peanuts in the grand scheme,” he said.

“Which means that by the basic comparison of money saved vs money spent, we'll be in the money on the big purchase with the current monthly savings in less than six months.”

Initial projected savings were initially said to be around $7 million over the space of five years. However, he now believes that the company can increase savings to around $10 million across the same period.

“Let's see where things end up when it's all said and done, but we don't have to squint hard to see the eventual savings climb all the way up to about $2m/year,” he wrote. “That would be ten million dollars over five years. Just absolutely bonkers amount of money straight to the bottomline.”

Cloud repatriation hype

The topic of cloud repatriation came into sharp focus earlier this year during a period of rising cloud costs, with many businesses struggling to contend with heightened spending during challenging economic conditions.

Singaporean SEO firm Ahrefs revealed it had saved more than $400 million dollars across the space of several years by relying on its own on-prem infrastructure rather than cloud computing services, further highlighting potential benefits.

However, the reality for many firms is that cloud repatriation simply isn’t an achievable goal, and may actively inhibit their operations.

René Büst, senior director analyst at Gartner told ITPro in June that cloud repatriation “really isn’t a trend” and represents a reactionary backlash among some firms to rising costs.

The benefits of cloud repatriation are wholly dependent on the individual circumstances of each business, Büst said at the time.

Similarly, the analyst said they did not expect cloud repatriation to gather significant momentum among businesses due to both the complexity of this process, as well as the overall benefits of public cloud.

Leeds-headquartered transformational technology specialist CloudCoCo has continued its leadership shake-up with the appointment of Mark Allen as its new head of cyber.

Founded in 2018, the IT services and communications company focuses on network connectivity, cloud, collaboration tech, and cyber security. The firm currently has 140 employees on its books and over 1,000 clients across the country, with a turnover of £25 million.

Allen brings 18 years of technical and commercial experience, having worked for a number of telecoms, software, and digital transformation organizations during his career. His last three roles have focused on strengthening the MSP offerings within UK ISPs. 

He will leverage that experience to lead CloudCoCo’s security offering as the firm looks to chase down its target of becoming a £100 million revenue business. 

Director of group sales Gary Saunders said the company is now in a strong position to shift customers to the cloud for free, following its recently unveiled multi-cloud proposition for those looking to hyperscale.

“This completely contradicts long-standing misconceptions that a cloud journey is cost prohibitive,” he said. “But as they continue on that journey, it is important that we understand and support them with improving their security posture — that’s where Mark comes in. 

“Cyber will be a core pillar of our growth as we continue with our plan to reach £100m turnover, so as we advance our tech-agnostic position in the market, it’s critical we have ultra-experienced people in post to do the job.”

Allen’s appointment is the latest in a string of leadership hires for CloudCoCo, which included the arrival of Lee Thatcher as the firm's new head of cloud back in April.

The company also recently revealed an exclusive partnership with Leeds-based large-scale digital innovation specialist Abstract Tech, while a strategic agreement was also unveiled with Ingram Micro UK, which the firm says will allow it to offer leading-edge vendor cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“It’s a fantastic time to join CloudCoCo,” Allen commented. “The business is making waves in what is currently a crowded market, which sees most MSPs ultimately offering the same thing — everyone talks about being cloud agnostic, but few people are actually doing anything about it. I am excited by the opportunity to join the disruption.”

IBM has announced it plans to increase prices for cloud computing services from the beginning of next year.

A GitHub release note on pricing changes for the tech giant’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings shows that some customers worldwide could see an uplift of up to 29%.

In this instance, uplift refers to the price of services compared to US base costs. 

“Prices for…infrastructure services vary from location to location, based on a percentage uplift from US base prices,” the note reads.

IaaS price increases will apply to bare metal services, virtual service instances, file and block storage, and networking infrastructure, according to the release note.

Similarly, global prices for accelerated archive storage and deep archive storage will surge by 25% and 26% respectively.

According to the release note, there are no planned changes to prices for IBM power systems virtual servers, third-party software, or network bandwidth.

IBM price hikes by region

IBM customers operating in the firm’s Sao Paolo region are set for the largest price uplift at 29% - and European counterparts can also expect sizable increases.

The London data center region will see a 13% uplift while those in Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, and Paris are set for a 16% hike.

IBM’s PaaS offerings are also set for a 3% price increase across the board globally.

This increase will apply to users of Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud databases, and the firm’s Kubernetes service.

Cloud costs on the rise across the globe

These latest pricing changes could further raise concerns among global businesses reliant on cloud services, which have been steadily increasing over the last 18 months.

Many firms have reported struggling with rising cloud costs amidst challenging economic conditions, surging inflation, and rising energy costs.

Cloud costs have prompted many organisations to reassess their relationship with the cloud, exploring optimization practices such as FinOps, or even going so far as to repatriate workloads to on-prem hardware.

IBM isn’t alone in its decision to increase prices. Analysis from Liftr in February showed that the average price of cloud services at AWS had increased by 23% over the previous year until that point.

Elsewhere in 2023, a host of other major firms have hiked prices, including Salesforce. In July, the firm revealed that it planned to increase prices by 9% across its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing cloud offerings.

The price changes marked the first list price increase in seven years for the tech giant.

In July, Microsoft revealed changes to its fees in line with its consistent global pricing policy for cloud services.

The policy, which bases prices on currency exchange rates on the US dollar, means that customers in Australia and New Zealand are set for an increase of up to 9% for services.

Welcome to our live day-one coverage of VMware Explore 2023. Today's event, due to kick off at 9:00 PDT, will feature speeches from Raghu Raghuram, CEO at VMware, as well as VMware President Sumit Dhawan.

The keynote's theme is 'Taking a Cloud-Smart Approach to Harnessing the Power of Generative AI', with announcements expected on the headline-grabbing tech.

Hello and welcome to today's coverage. We'll be bringing you the latest keynote announcements as they are made, with events set to kick off in just a few short minutes.

And we're off, with a video montage featuring talking heads from some of the world's largest tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Hugging Face talking about how important AI is, but also how it has to be ethical.

"For any meaningful enterprise, their data lives in all types of locations," says Rangarajan Raghuram, CEO at VMware.

"Distributed computing and multi-cloud will be at the very foundation of AI. There's no way to separate these two."

"What this is going to do in the long term is enable us to understand global scale problems in a much deeper fashion, and therefore create new solutions that we can hardly even imagine today."

Raghu Raghuram has entered the stage to hopeful music. He notes that it's been 25 years since the VMware community first came together, and has acknowledged the company's future under Broadcom's acquisition.

Time for some words from Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who has just committed to an additional $2 billion investment in VMware, with half of this focused on R&D.

"The potential of what Broadcom and VMware can do together for customers is simply enormous," he says.

He says that the other half of the investment is to be invested into deployment of VMware solutions through VMware and partner professional services.

"We're highly confident this transaction will close within Broadcom's fiscal 2023."

Hock Tan is in the crowd, and stands up to applause as Raghuram pays tribute to him.

Now onto two of the core topics of the conference: multi-cloud and generative AI.

Starting with multi-cloud, Raghuram notes that just a few years ago very few customers were using multi-cloud. Today, he notes, 75% of customers are using two or more public clouds, alongside edge buildout and a private cloud. In recognition of this "multi-cloud journey", VMware has worked hard to offer its customers a 'cloud smart' approach.

It's not just keeping one's cloud operating or secure, Raghuram notes. Modernizing infrastructure and delivering apps efficiently have also been major victories of a proper multi-cloud approach.

Here to talk about modernization more is Sumit Dhawan, president at VMware, who says that VMware cloud foundation technologies may be the "fastest growing" cloud around right now.

There's no mystery behind this popularity, Dhawan claims.

"Simple. Lower cost, better security, higher resiliency. In fact, we did a study with some of you and over found 170% ROI in three years, and 66% reduction in network and security operations."

Quickly onto five key announcements, with just a brief joke about blackjack tables on the way.

First, vSAN Max which brings the capability of petabytes of disaggregated storage. 

Next, vSphere+ for upgrading an entire ESXi fleet from a central point. He promises VMware Cloud Foundation customers will also no longer have to do any more migrations, with "seamless upgrades" that are three times faster than earlier versions.

"Infrastructure management can sometimes feel like painting the Golden Gate Bridge; by the time you're done, you have to restart. We're changing that."

Third, NSX+ for true multi-cloud networking. First announced at last year's conference as Project Northstar, this is a long-awaited policy control tool.

"You get to define your policies once, and apply them across any cloud, which means you get deep visibility for all your networking policies in one place.

Fourth, the ability for customers to create VPCs for DevOps teams using API, "just like they're used to doing in a public cloud".

Fifth, VMware has announced improved ransomware recovery that lets customers run workloads in the public cloud while primary infrastructure is being fixed 75% faster than before.

Next up, some detail on the overhaul that VMware is announcing today for Tanzu.

Developers that use Tanzu already find they deliver projects up to 40% faster, and Dhawan states that the new additions laid out today are set to reduce developer burden and give platform engineering teams "peace of mind".

Automatically provisioned apps, that work across Kubernetes clusters, are just a taste of the improvements VMware has brought to Tanzu today. If you think you know the product, Dhawan says, think again.

For more detail on today's Tanzu announcements, read our detailed breakdown.

Next up, Anywhere Workspace. Dhawan notes that customers want apps to be available fast and problems resolved quickly.

Anywhere Workspace steps in here, Dhawan says, because it combines virtual apps, endpoint management, and digital experience management.

Dhawan calls it a "single hub" for applications, including persistent Azure Virtual Desktop.

Edge computing is fast becoming a customer demand, and VMware's next big announcement today is its Software Defined Edge.

Customers like Audi are already using VMware's edge portfolio to improve operations at such as manufacturing, Dhawan says, such as using VMware for its E-tron industrial control systems.

Today's announcement on edge also includes a commitment to managed private connectivity for enterprises, be that private 5G or integration of devices on the edge.

Dhawan welcomes Rajeev Khanna, CTO at Aon onto the stage to talk a bit about how VMware has helped his firm in their years-long partnership.

Generative AI is sparking imaginative new solutions, says Khanna, who expresses hope that the future is bright for the technology.

"We want that openness, we want the choice to run these workloads" he says in reference to new demand for AI models, and suggests that VMware has a core role to play in this space in the coming years.

Raghuram back on stage now to talk about generative AI in more detail.

"The promise is, there is potentially 100x improvement in the economics of creativity, of creating content of all types," he says, linking this into how it will improve application development too. 

The technology also enables applications that were previously thought impossible through natural language input, he states.

Amy Olli, VMware general counsel has just walked onto stage mid-speech.

"I heard you talking about legal implications and I thought I'd just jump on stage," she quips.

On a serious note, Olli is laying out the legal complications with AI including IP theft, data protection, and privacy.

VMware AI Labs was formed to tackle these issues, Raghuram says. And apparently it has a solution: private AI.

"Ask yourself the question: where is your private data?" he asks. This isn't a question with a simple answer as data is generated second-by-second at the edge.

"Instead of taking all your data to the cloud, you've got to take your AI and your compute to where the data is."

VMware has spent months working on the solution to this, and Raghuram says they've now cracked it in partnership with Nvidia.

He's announced VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia has joined Raghuram to reveal more.

"VMware is the operating system of how the world's companies are run. Today we're reinventing enterprise computing after a quarter of a century

"Instead of virtualizing applications to run on GPUs, we virtualize the GPU. We made it possible for VMware to run bare metal performance with all of its security and all of its manageability across multiple CPUs."

Together, the companies are promising the first-ever private AI at scale, secured within a company's multi-cloud estate.

Nvidia has leveraged the help of Dell, Lenovo, HPE, to produce a suite of around 100 servers that will be dedicated for VMware Private AI.

They're available starting this month, featuring brand new GPUs tailored specifically for large language models (LLMs).

This is a reference to the Nvidia L40S, which leverages up to 1.7x more performance for generative AI training than the Nvidia A100. For reference, the A100 is what the original ChatGPT model was partly trained on.

With frameworks such as Nvidia AI Workbench and NeMo, the firm will provide customers with the ability to pull together data for AI in the cloud and fine-tune it for specific use cases.

Confused? "It's easy peasy" Huang says, with the confidence of the CEO of oen of the world's largest AI hardware provider.

To emphasize the importance of the moment, Huang has promised five lucky winners within the audience a 4090 founders edition GPU signed by both him and Raghuram.

Raghuram announces that there's a whole host of partners waiting to collaborate on private AI with VMware including Hugging Face, Intel, and Anyscale.

Here to talk about more AI announcements is Amanda Blevins, VP and CTO, Americas at VMware. She begins by highlighting the importance of the audience - without them, there would be no AI users.

Intelligent Assist for VMware Tanzu is key to the company's AI strategy, she says, and the firm is confident it will change its customers' lives for the better. The system can provide intelligent recommendations to users which can be implemented "at the click of a button".

"Our vision is to help all IT operators through Intelligent Assist," she says.

"For all of you network engineers and security analysts, I think you'll really dig NSX plus Intelligent Assist. Instead of taking multiple days to find attacks and malicious in your environment, we can help you take it down to minutes."

With a wrap-up of the biggest announcements of the day, she brings the keynote to a close. A final word to those seeking the prize GPU: it's only available to those who can physically attend two of the solution keynotes in addition to today's - sorry remote attendees!

And with that, the keynote comes to a close. It's been a blur, with announcement after key announcement, but a core focus on the marrying of generative AI and multi-cloud.

VMware has announced a series of expansions for its Tanzu platform, with the aim of accelerating application development and assisting customers with intelligent insight.

Its application platform Tanzu Hub will now act as a converged platform for multi-cloud environments, providing customers with oversight of all their applications regardless of where they are located through an API-based data fabric and artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm also announced a number of updates to Tanzu Application Platform, its end-to-end platform for the building and deployment of software, and the release of the brand-new Tanzu Intelligent Services for processing data and troubleshooting.

First and foremost among the new features for Tanzu Application Platform is the Application Engine, a runtime that brings container networking and container computing together and can scale and perform processes such as mutual authentication automatically.

Purnima Padmanabhan, SVP and GM of Modern Apps & Management Business Group at VMware, said that the new updates for the platform would help firms to “develop the golden path to production”.

Through Tanzu Intelligent Services, the firm businesses will also be able to derive insights from their data using machine learning (ML).

This comes bundled with features such as ML forecasting for cloud costs, currently in beta, as well as automatic aggregation of applications logs, metrics, and other data through intelligent automation and a conversational AI interface.

The hope is that through Tanzu Intelligent services, customers will be able to troubleshoot easily across their cloud environment. In addition to its investigatory abilities, it also comes with a function to enforce policy across environments, as well as one for app migration.

VMware underlined the announcement of Intelligent Assist, its new chatbot based in generative AI  that allows customers to interact with their data using natural language processing (NLP). It is hoped it will allow customers to get to the single source of truth faster and more efficiently.

The intent for Tanzu Hub is to allow customers to operate applications at scale on any cloud or environment, including Kubernetes, and also give businesses the freedom to update underlying infrastructure without any downtime.

“Tanzu Application Platform is for building modern applications - today that’s Kubernetes and over time it’ll be any modern applications with an expanded application runtime,” said Padmanabhan.

Additional updates for Tanzu Application Platform will include an improved Developer Portal, which comes with support for open source plugins, as well as lifecycle management for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and support for .NET Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3. 

“The Hub itself is able to provide information and data about both your brownfield environment and existing apps, all types of apps whether they are modern, at the edge, monolithic, distributed - it doesn’t matter,” Padmanabhan added.

“By bringing all that application and environment information together, because as I mentioned it’s taking the power of the entire Aria management portfolio, you can analyze all your applications, you do the cost performance and security management for those applications, and you can do remediation for those applications. Over time you can also transform and modernize them.”

Tanzu Hub is grounded in the same knowledge graph as VMware Aria, which was announced in August 2022 at VMware Explore US. This provides near real-time access to data across a multi-cloud platform.

Through the updates, VMware has aimed to improve the software agility of its customers. The firm said that 91% of CIOs it speaks to have identified app strategy as their top priority, encompassing modernization, migration, and speed to market.

Many companies have grasped modernization with both hands, moving to technology such as multi-cloud architecture, Kubernetes, and a wide range of open-source tools. 

At VMware Explore Europe 2022 VMware vowed to fight ‘cloud chaos’, in which businesses become overwhelmed by multi-cloud environments and siloed workloads that have arisen as a result of this mass migration and modernization.

Tanzu Hub is a fully federated platform, which will enable customers to plug in information from third-party solutions, and VMware described it as a unified platform for both cloud ops and platform engineering.

Splunk has launched new AI tools for its security and observability platform as well as its new Edge Hub for more streamlined edge data analytics. 

The Splunk AI Assistant - now in preview - is designed to assist users with the authoring of Splunk Processing Language (SPL) queries.  

Generative AI is leveraged via an AI chatbot to write or explain SPL, something the company says will improve time to value and make SPL more accessible. 

Mark Woods, chief technical advisor EMEA at Splunk, told ITPro that training for the model behind the generative AI was based on the company’s own knowledgebase and that the limited release preview had been based on the company’s own internal experts. 

Woods’ words stand to reassure customers concerned that sensitive data might turn up in the AI. 

He said: “We wouldn’t have any visibility of the actual query that you’re putting in place, nor of any of the data that you are taking”. 

As well as the Generative AI tooling, Splunk also previewed ML-Assisted Thresholding to use historical data and patterns to create dynamic thresholds.  

Its IT Service Intelligence also features greater detection accuracy, with the Outlier Exclusion for Adaptive Thresholding aimed at detecting and omitting abnormal data points and outliers. 

A preview of the OpenTelemetry Collector was also announced, aimed at providing a unified view of an enterprise’s infrastructure and services.  

Splunk Edge Hub 

The new Edge Hub device was also shown off and is aimed at simplifying the ingestion of data into Splunk’s analytics platform. 

The compact device weighs in at just over 600g and designed to be mounted in a variety of customer environments. Splunk envisages customers simply plugging it in and using the device to stream environmental data back for analysis. 

Onboard sensors comprise temperature, humidity, light, and sound. The device also features an accelerometer and gyroscope, and it can monitor air pressure and air quality. Typical applications of the latter sensor - according to its manufacturer, Bosch - include spotting unusual gases - indicating a possible leak - and spoiled food detection. 

The device also features a screen with a dashboard showing the current sensor readings and can be connected via WiFi, Bluetooth, LTE, or Ethernet. Power is supplied by either USB-C or Power-Over-Ethernet. 

The Cortex-based processor within the device - a Verdin IMX8M+ Quad with 8GB of RAM - has sufficient power for collection and collation of data from the sensor suite. 

Woods said to ITPro that he expected the device would open customers’ eyes to the data in their OT and IoT environments: “They suddenly start to see the data that they already have all around them”. 

“All those functional domain-specific environments, they become really tangible and valuable to customers.” 

Who is Splunk’s Edge Hub for? 

Woods identified three main user groups for the device. Compared to fitting out an environment with sensors, Splunk feels the Edge Hub represents a relatively low barrier to entry, so the first user group targeted is the one that has yet to use sensors and the data does not exist. 

The second group, according to Woods, might have some sensors installed, but the systems are closed and Splunk’s device represents a useful bridge. 

Finally, there is the group that is already equipped with sensors in their environment - (Woods cited Mars as an example - and the Edge Hub provides additional resilience or a way to experiment without adding a toll to an operation system. 

Splunk said that data from the device could be used as part of its predictive analytics platform to spot anomalies in manufacturing processes as well as detect, investigate and remediate physical threats from a single platform. 

The Splunk Edge Hub is US-only for now - although the company plans to roll it out in EMEA and APAC. It is also only available through the company’s partners. 

TelcoDR has announced a new partnership with SaaS-based AWS cost optimization solution provider CloudFix in a move designed to help telcos drive down their AWS costs.

Led by renowned public cloud evangelist Danielle Royston, TelcoDR aims to help telecommunications providers transition to the public cloud. 

With its new partnership, the firm said businesses that purchase CloudFix via TelcoDR will now have access to exclusive pricing offers.

TelcoDR CEO Danielle Royston said the move will help telco companies maximize their savings and “unlock the full potential of the public cloud."

"CloudFix's laser focus on telco's largest area of spend, compute, generates monumental savings for our customers,” she said. “By liberating wasted spend, telcos can redirect these savings towards exciting new frontiers in the public cloud, such as our cutting-edge telco SaaS products under the Totogi brand."

Used by cloud operations teams around the world, CloudFix integrates with AWS environments to help for telcos, especially those with AWS expenditure exceeding $20 million, to achieve ‘significant’ savings.

Using automation-driven capabilities, CloudFix says it helps save 15% on AWS costs on average for each customer. 

One of its recent customers, with an annual AWS spend of $150 million, is currently on track to save more than $65 million over three years, the firm said.

The automations offered by the software, which continuously scans an AWS environment, are focused on identifying areas where customers are unnecessarily spending. It said these are areas with which engineering teams are unable to keep monitoring at scale. 

The offering uses AWS-native tools with least-privilege access to automatically fix issues such as outdated or default configurations that may be driving up customers’ bills. 

It includes safe fixes such as moving from GP2 to GP3 or turning on S3 Intelligent Tiering to optimize storage costs.

"We are delighted to collaborate with TelcoDR to help telcos realize significant savings on their current AWS spend so they can reinvest in new AWS innovations,” said Rahul Subramaniam, CEO and founder of CloudFix.

“With TelcoDR's unparalleled understanding of telecom companies' needs, and CloudFix’s unmatched ability to find and instantly bank AWS-approved savings, we 

The increase in cloud costs over the last 18 months has placed significant pressure on businesses globally. This surge in costs, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and the fact many organizations are overspending on cloud, has prompted many to reassess their relationship with the cloud. 

The vast majority (94%) of respondents to a joint HashiCorp and Forrester survey published last year said their organization was dealing with “avoidable cloud expenses” due to either underused or overprovisioned resources. Increasingly, many organizations are reducing their reliance on cloud, seeking alternative options, or even going so far as to repatriate workloads to on-prem hardware. 

While this confluence of factors is placing strain on organizations, many are taking proactive steps to optimize their cloud estate and reduce costs through FinOps, according to Mike Fuller, chief technology officer (CTO) at the FinOps Foundation. 

Fuller tells ITPro that FinOps is becoming an increasingly attractive practice for many businesses wrestling with skyrocketing costs. “Without FinOps, an organization will definitely be fighting an uphill battle to understand the cost drivers of cloud, allocating where those costs are coming from, and mapping out those pathways of opportunity.”

What is FinOps?

FinOps is a financial management practice that enables organizations to maximize the value of cloud by drawing upon the shared expertise of technology, finance, and business teams to drive efficiency, optimize processes, and dictate spending decisions.

“Inform, optimize, and operate” form the three tenets of the discipline, according to the foundation. This process starts by assessing the cost factors of cloud operations, establishes a clear-cut strategy to address any issues, and from there streamlines processes. 

“FinOps enables an organization to get the most value out of every dollar spent on the cloud,” Fuller says. “You have a lot of engineers who are responsible for buying decisions for an organization when they get the keys to the cloud castle. The FinOps practice is to build out a culture where those engineers are enabled to make the best decisions for the organization through collaboration with finance.”

FinOps, Fuller continues, is a hybrid of cultural change and the use of hard data. “FinOps uses the availability of the right data points to set clear pictures on expectations of cloud spend, and identify the value that the company wants in order for engineers to make the right decisions around cloud spending,” he explains. Its collaborative, cross-functional nature ensures there’s an aligned understanding of how to maximize the use of cloud. 

How widespread is FinOps?

FinOps is an emerging discipline that’s grown in popularity in recent years. Prior to COVID-19 and the ‘cloud boom’, the practice was still in its infancy but maturing at pace. But businesses have increasingly employed the practice lately, Fuller adds. 

Similarly, he reveals the FinOps Foundation itself has recorded a surge in organizations seeking advice. New companies also realize they need FinOps at the beginning of their cloud journeys, he adds.

“It used to be very common that everyone would wait until the ‘bill shock’ moment with cloud costs,” he explains. “We had a lot of individuals joining the organization saying they were at that point and wondering how they can dig themselves out of that hole.

“Coming into late last year, with a lot of focus on layoffs and the economic downturn, we’re definitely seeing that shift in attention toward FinOps being a higher class citizen in the priority order of what organizations are doing.”

Fuller’s observations align with research that shows 62% of businesses globally now have a FinOps practice in place in some capacity. An additional one-quarter (23%) said they plan to adopt FinOps within the next three years. 

What are the key FinOps challenges?

One key sticking point is there can be a disjointed view of how FinOps could fundamentally improve operations. Finance teams, for example, may view it as a means to simply reduce costs while engineers may view it more holistically. 

“The main thing here is that different personas are expecting a different outcome within a timeline that doesn’t fit each others’ goals,” he says. “There could be an expectation to move quickly and deploy the most reliable and performing service by product leaders or engineering leadership, and engineers are then guided by that..

“At the same time, that might not align well with the CFO’s expectations of what the cloud spend will be, and you end up having friction between those sides where things don’t match up together.”

This misalignment often boils down to miscommunication between departments, leading to larger headaches down the line – which is why clear-cut communication is essential. There’s also a risk that FinOps can be botched, Fuller warns. This worst-case scenario would further compound the issue of costs for an organization that fails to establish a clear strategy.

“There’s a risk that FinOps can be done badly,” he says. “So a hyper focus on just bringing the cloud figure dollar down and focusing all about savings or not having learned what FinOps is, or what its value is within the organization.

“It just comes effectively back to the old days of cost optimization talks. It’s about driving the dollar down with no attention to what you’re going to get out of it.”

Given the perilous nature of surging cloud costs, some organizations might be forgiven for assuming FinOps is a silver bullet to better managing costs. But it’s not that simple. Fuller says this approach is a fundamental shift in how organizations view cloud and its benefits. 

“We always say FinOps is about making money, not saving money,” he continues. “Enabling engineers to get that feature out might make your business a lot more money than taking attention off that and saving money.

“What I worry about is that with current headwinds, companies just get hyper focused on cutting the cost at any cost and not balancing what they’re trading off to have that focus.”

What is the future of FinOps?

Given current headwinds, companies that implement a successful FinOps strategy will in the longer term reap the rewards of optimization, and likely emerge from the current predicament in a far stronger position. 

“The companies that will win are the companies that start with the mentality that FinOps needs to be part of the cloud journey, but also focus on the fact that if they move quickly into the cloud and generate a mess, they’ll now need to go clean that up,” he says.

“So organizations are now trying to balance how quickly they move in, and decide what corners they’ll cut for their cloud migration journey, but then choosing where it makes sense to go quickly so that it’s more manageable.

“That, to me, is the ideal experience for new cloud users. For those that are existing, it’s just saying that they’re at a point now where they’re comfortable and in control of the cloud and the destination.”

Oracle has announced plans to launch its long-awaited sovereign cloud region for customers in the European Union (EU). 

The company said its new EU Sovereign Cloud will enable private and public sector organizations across the union to gain “more control over data privacy and sovereignty requirements”.

Described as one of the first cloud offerings specifically designed to address pending regulatory changes, the new cloud region will be located entirely within the EU, Oracle said. 

Similarly, the region will be supported by EU-based personnel and operated by separate legal entities within the union. 

As part of the move, sovereign cloud data centers will be located in Frankfurt and Madrid. 

The Frankfurt site will be operated by Equinix while Digital Reality is the host partner for the cloud region in Madrid.

Richard Smith, executive vice president for technology, EMEA, at Oracle, said the new region comes in direct response to a changing regulatory landscape in the union at present. 

"The European Union technology landscape has changed dramatically due to the growing importance of data protection and localization, leading to increased demand for sovereign cloud solutions that can securely host sensitive customer data and comply with regulations such as GDPR," he said. 

“Our goal is to meet customers wherever they are in their cloud journey and with Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, customers in highly regulated industries, as well as those subject to certain country-specific legislation, can now accelerate their cloud strategies."

Data sovereignty focus

The new sovereign cloud region will operate under a “comprehensive” set of policies and governance that will support OCI’s existing capabilities, Oracle said. 

This will include a framework for data and operational sovereignty focused specifically on regulating how OCI stores and manages access to EU data, as well as how data access from non-EU entities is handled. 

“Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud is designed for data residency and security with an architecture that shares no infrastructure with Oracle's commercial regions in the EU and that has no backbone network connection to Oracle's other cloud regions,” the firm said. 

“Customer access to Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud is managed separately from access to Oracle Cloud's commercial regions.”

Pending EU regulations

The move from Oracle comes at a time when EU lawmakers are tightening their regulatory approach to data sovereignty. 

This has been a contentious talking point in recent months amid plans to implement more stringent rules for non-EU companies processing data within the union. 

In May, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) revealed plans to introduce a ‘cyber security label’ that will be required for non-EU companies operating in the union. 

These proposals mean that major cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS, would be required to enter into a “joint venture” with an EU-based firm for regulatory purposes.

This forms part of a wider regulatory crackdown via the EU certification scheme (EUCS), which aims to establish a union-wide certification regime for cloud providers and companies handling EU data.

Oracle isn’t alone in its sovereignty push, either. Earlier this month, IBM confirmed its own plans to open a dedicated quantum cloud data center and cloud region in Ehningen, Germany. 

IBM said the facility, which is the second of its kind for the firm, is designed specifically to “help clients continue to manage their European data regulation requirements”. 

Organizations are continuing to waste money on cloud resources that they do not require, with 50% admitting that overprovisioning of cloud resources was a major factor.

Idle or underused resources came just behind and a lack of skills was blamed by 43% of respondents to a survey.

Other factors included “temporary” cloud resources that are never ended, such as a service trialed by a customer that is never switched off, along with varying geographical costs resulting in more spending than expected.

The report from HashiCorp and Forrester, released this week, indicated the issue of overspending has not changed from last year’s figures.

Overprovisioning occurs when a customer reserves resources in the cloud, such as CPU or storage, but doesn’t actually use them. 

While overprovisioning may simply appear like bad management or a loss of administrative control at first glance, the increasingly complex nature of cloud tooling can lead to customers buying services that are not necessarily needed.

While it might be possible to dynamically allocate resources in some instances - serverless architecture is a good example - this can result in performance or capacity issues, meaning reserving resources in advance is often unavoidable. 

One solution to the challenge of overprovisioning is careful monitoring of actual usage in order to optimize cloud spend and gain visibility over one’s estate.

The adoption of best practices across an entire organization, such as using automation and infrastructure-as-code, can also cut down on overprovisioning through the implementation of well-defined processes around resource usage while also improving scalability. 

HashiCorp’s report noted that the approach of adopting best practices also lends itself well to a multi-cloud environment. Almost all of the organizations surveyed that had done so said that multi-cloud was working well for them, or would be shortly. 

The potential difficulties in adopting those practices should not be underestimated, though, the report read. 

An issue that pervades the IT industry, 27% of respondents said skill shortages was one factor complicating the operationalization of multi-cloud in their organization. Siloed teams and a lack of training were also concerns.

Once best practices are in place, or well on the way, organizations are then well-placed to take advantage of savings by selecting services from a variety of vendors and avoid being locked-in to one particular cloud.

While avoidable cloud spend appears static compared to the previous year, the report concluded organizations that are further along the journey to the adoption of best cloud practices, including the creation of a platform team, reported a reduction in overprovisioned, idle, or underused resources as contributing factors.

Welcome to our live day two coverage of Dell Technologies World 2023. This morning's keynote, which is set to kick off at 10am PT, will be led by Co-COO Jeff Clarke and chief digital officer and CIO Jen Felch.

This keynote's theme is 'Unstoppable Innovation', and has been heavily teased to deal with both AI and security. Surprises are in store as we return to the Michelob Ultra Arena for another hour of announcements and guest speakers.

Good morning from sunny Las Vegas, and welcome to today's coverage. We'll be bringing you the keynote announcements as they come, with the hosts set to take the stage in just under 45 minutes.

We're in the arena, which is quickly filling up. Michelob Ultra Arena can seat 12,000, to give an idea of the conference numbers. A live DJ is providing a dance-heavy mix, which is a nice change from a typical pre-keynote playlist.

And we're off - Michael Dell, CEO at Dell, has taken to the stage to the tune of David Bowie's 'Starman'.

He opens by stating Dell exists to bring its customers' ideas to life, "whether your big idea is curing cancer, frictionless commerce, or sustainable supply chain".

Dell teases the massive potential of AI.

“AI, just like the PC, the internet, and the smartphone before it will transform industries and the way we live in work," he tells the audience.

“IDC estimates that by 2025, 88% of servers used for AI workloads deployed at the edge will be used for inferences. To support this, we’re going to need new architectures.”

Dell highlights the PowerEdge XE9680, which boasts eight Tensor Nvidia core H100 chips, as one such solution.

More on corporate AI strategy is being discussed. “The real opportunity is to reimagine your organization,” Dell states.

“If you’re not already using AI, posturing your organization, and thinking deeply about reinvention, you’re already behind.”

We’ve been promised more on that in tomorrow’s keynote, which we will also be covering in detail.

Dell has just promised the “largest expansion ever” of Dell’s Apex offerings.

He’s teased offerings in cooperation with Microsoft, and we’re now being treated to a conversation between him and Satya Nadella.

One such expansion announced today is Apex Block Storage for Azure, which will be running on the newly-announced Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

A brief reprieve on announcements to travel to Pandora, the fictional world in which James Cameron's Avatar is set.

The filmmakers relied on Dell Technologies' to render graphics, by providing exascale storage and the processing power needed to deliver the detailed visual effects.

Now it's time to welcome co-COO Chuck Whitten to the stage.

He says that while last year he focused on how Dell has become "an end-to-end leader built for this moment in tech," he wants to focus on the tangible innovations that can help businesses today.

Whitten outlines the five most-common challenges facing enterprises today, with the first being 'future of work', and conversations around hybrid work.

Next it's 'multi-cloud', with Whitten noting that customers want "multi-cloud by design, not by default".

The next three are AI, edge, and security. These won't be talked about too much today, but Whitten notes that these are pressing issues that will be unpacked tomorrow.

“What I know you’re feeling is pressure, to apply generative AI to your private data sets, and to do it smartly, securely and ethically," he states.

Whitten also lists the current issues with edge solutions.

“Existing models don’t solve the challenges of running multiple critical and disparate OT workloads, operating in remote and harsh environment.”

On security, he states that customers want security to be better embedded in Dell's existing solutions rather than more security products.

We're doubling down on hybrid work now and welcoming Ed Ward, president of client product group at Dell Technologies to the stage.

We're being given a look at the new Dell Latitude laptop family, which Ward and Whitten have chosen to highlight Dell's approach to hybrid work. The new series is lighter, and Ward claims that the device's LED keyboard uses up to 75% less power.

We've turned to the Precision 5680, which the firm is heralding as a powerful solution for developers looking to train AI models.

"All this power helps developers to train large AI models with 5 million to 100 million parameters, running AI at the edge and controlling the training data," says Ward.

We've got another announcement, in the form of Apex PC-as-a-service, through which IT teams can obtain hardware, peripherals, and software services.

It's a predictably-priced way for enterprises to roll out the latest Dell hardware from across its entire PC portfolio including its XPS laptops.

Now back to multi-cloud, with Whitten outlining the three things a firm needs to access cloud innovation. First, a set of ground-to-cloud capabilities - which Dell Technologies has approached through Project Alpine, its work to connect storage software to public clouds.

Next, cloud-to-ground and "air traffic control" or consolidated deployment monitoring and management.

Whitten has welcomed Roshan Navagamuwa, CIO at CVS Health, onto the stage to talk about its work with Dell Technologies in more detail.

"We need a spectrum of technologies to be able to solve our problems," says Navagamuwa.

"Dell has that spectrum of technology for us, but just as importantly what we found is it's important to simplify and standardize all of it... that's what I really like about Apex Block Storage for Azure."

Two announcements have just been made in quick succession: Apex Block Storage for AWS, Apex File Storage for AWS.

"On the Block side, this means linear scale outperformance, better resiliency, and native mobility," Whitten states.

"And on the file side, it means enterprise scale data protection."

Another announcement, in the form Apex Cloud Storage for VMware.

"This is our purpose-built cloud platform for VMware virtualized environments," Whitten states, pointing out that it's a good solution for customers looking to move and scale workloads across public cloud, on-prem environments, and existing VMware skillsets.

A short clip of Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks has just been played, to herald the announcement of Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift.

“Red Hat brings the open source container ecosystem, and Dell brings the leading infrastructure and automation,” Whitten says.

"I totally agree," Hicks responds.
"It moves that requirement on customers, to let them focus on their business and trust and rely on Red Hat's ability to build this platform, maintain it, and Dell's ability to build the infrastructure."

Struggling to keep track of all these new offerings a bit? You're not alone, and Dell has another announcement to make all this a little more manageable.

Whitten has just announced Apex Navigator for Multicloud Storage and Apex Navigator for Kubernetes, which will provide that 'air traffic control' which he mentioned earlier.

"[Navigator] provides observability across your cloud estates, and helps you optimize it first by letting you activate with mobility, and over time by embedding intelligence into the software that will help you put the right workload in the right place to maximize performance and minimize cost," Whitten declares.

In a final announcement for today, Whitten formally announces a strategic partnership between Dell and Databricks. The firms will work together to empower customers to derive insights from their data more easily.

Businesses will be able to use Databricks alongside Dell Object Storage to analyze data where it is, without having to first move it to the cloud.

And that's a wrap for today's keynote. We'll be providing live coverage of tomorrow's biggest announcements - with AI teased as featuring heavily - alongside in-depth coverage.

Make sure to keep your eye on the website for news and more from Dell Technologies World 2023, as the conference is far from over.

Good morning once again, and welcome back to our coverage coming live from the Michelob Ultra Arena. We'll be reporting the keynote announcements as they're made, with ten minutes until things are set to begin.

Yesterday, Dell announced a slew of new offerings aimed at multi-cloud success with its largest-ever Apex expansion.

Announcements included:

• Dell Apex loud Platforms for Azure, VMware, Red Hat OpenShift
• Dell Apex Block and File Storage for Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• A new partnership with Databricks
• Dell Apex PC-as-a-service
• Dell Apex Navigator

We also had announcements around Dell's Precision and Latitude laptop families, with the former providing the power necessary to train small AI models.

The day one beat-by-beat is still available right on this page. Now on with day two.

Proceedings have begun, with Co-COO Jeff Clarke taking to the stage in a more muted manner than Michael Dell did yesterday - no David Bowie for the crowd today.

Looks like we're starting on a gag about ChatGPT, with an AI graphic named 'ChatDTW' telling Clarke he "looks handsome" on a screen behind him.

Clarke tells the crowd that it has been Dell's greatest year of innovation ever, and is met with applause.

He notes that the firm has launched more than 120 new products in the last year, across divisions including its telco and its environmental achievements.

"Last year alone, we diverted more than 500,000lbs of ocean-bound plastics that made its way into our products and packaging," he states.

Clarke pays tribute to the entire team at Dell, to more audience applause.

He says Dell has an "unmatched breadth of innovation in our industry. No one can come close to what we've done in the last year."

More on cloud to begin with, following Monday's mammoth announcements around Apex.

"It all starts with your data," says Clarke.

"We believe that if we get your handling of the data right, everything else can access the tools, the choice of cloud, to your ability to control and manage your costs."

A hard pivot to generative AI now, with Clarke pointing to the hype around this technology.

"You cant be on the stage in this type of audience and not talk about the most talked-about technology in our industry today: generative AI powered by large language models," he declares.

Clarke describes the models as "game changing", and notes that businesses are looking to derive value from them.

Now we're being shown a video conversation between Clarke and Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang.

"Every company will be able to put AI to use, to revolutionize their products and their company," states Huang.

The pair are discussing the need for AI to be run at the edge as much as possible.

"You want to be at the edge, because it's the closest thing to the speed of light and you want it to respond instantaneously."

"Couldn't agree more," replies Clarke.

He points out that customers looking to deploy AI will face a new series of challenges around data security and privacy.

Clarke and Huang have segued a conversation around Dell and Nvidia's long standing work together into the first proper announcement of the day: Project Helix.

"This is a full stack solution that enables enterprises to create and run custom AI models built for knowledge on their business," says Clarke.

At the core of Helix is hardware such as Dell's XE9680, which makes use of eight Nvidia H100 GPUs.

We've now welcomed Kari Briski, vice president of product management for AI at Nvidia to demonstrate how connecting AI to an existing knowledge base can produce better results.

The pair are showing off an example in which a large language model (LLM) can give more detailed golf club recommendations when it is plugged into data rather than used as pre-trained models out of the box. 

Clarke has been given a golf club, which has been lowered from the ceiling on wires. What's Vegas good for, if not theatrics?

"What we tried to demonstrate here is that adding your data and business contacts makes generative AI a powerful tool for your organization," explains Clarke.

Another announcement now: Dell NativeEdge. This is a new software platform designed to let businesses streamline and simplify edge operations across their estate.

"It enables centralized deployment and lifecycle management in a zero trust manner, with a zero trust infrastructure," Clarke announces.

"NativeEdge is multi-cloud by design, enabling you to deploy your applications in new and existing environments."

For more detail on NativeEdge, Dell SVP edge portfolio and solutions, infrastructure solutions group Gil Shneorson has taken to the stage.

Working off the example of retail, Shneorson says that NativeEdge will deliver a "consistent experience, from the cow to the factory".

"From a ship connected by Starlink," he continues, "to the distribution center."

Clarke summarizes a lengthy example given by Shneorson involving a retail enterprise using edge devices and NativeEdge to reduce spoilage and cost across its operations.

"A single IT administrator can manage a fleet of devices, in multiple locations, leverage blueprints to handle all this hardware, and more importantly these edge native applications remotely?"

Gil confirms this, and notes that the same steps can be applied to energy and other critical areas.

He ends with a shout-out to all the team members in the audience, in an off-script moment. More applause from the crowd, in what's proving to be a lively keynote.

We're onto zero trust now and Herb Kelsey, industry CTO - government at Dell takes to the stage after a montage is shown in which he drives a large blue truck bearing the Dell logo to Mandalay Bay.

Clarke calls Kelsey "chief smart guy", and explains that he has spent 30 years working on information systems at the highest security levels.

Another announcement now, as Kelsey reveals a new end-to-end zero trust system known as 'Project Fort Zero'. This will protect businesses from cyber attacks by making zero-trust adoption easier.

This is an "industry initiative with more than 30 partners," Kelsey explains.

We're told that Dell is committed to undergoing NSA and DoD tests to receive an stamp of approval. This is part of a multi-year security expansion by Dell, to expand internal protection in addition to the focus on edge security.

More ChatDTW jokes now - perhaps one too many.

Jen Felch, chief digital officer and CIO at Dell has joined us to continue the AI joke and then relieve Jeff of his presenting duties. She was introduced with the promise of more demonstrations of today's announcements, so stay tuned.

Felch outlines six factors that Dell always considers when evaluating workloads:

• Is it in a steady state?
• What are the workload dependencies?
• Do we have data residency requirements?
• Is it real-time?
• What are the cost differences?
• What is the environmental impact?

Felch reveals that since the launch of Dell's internal cloud portal last year, developers at the firm now spend 70-75% of time on technical tasks.

Expanding on this, Felch has given an overview of Dell's Managed Developer Cloud. This launched two weeks ago, and Dell is hoping it can help developers to cut out the non-technical fluff in their workload.

Dell is also looking to include more generative AI to areas such as its low-code platform Pipeline Builder.

"We don't have to worry about unit testing when we get it automatically from AI, it's great for helping us to find defects and offering suggestions on fixes."

Felch also reveals that LLMs by companies such as OpenAI are being made more widely available through Dell's Digital Cloud Portal. The firm is focused on using AI on-premises wherever possible.

"We find it really important to be able to centralize our cloud strategies, so that we can monitor and govern these cases across the company," says Felch.

Magi Kapoor, director of multi-cloud project management at Dell, is now running us through some of the main advantages of the Apex announcements made at the conference so far.

"It works together to help application scale rapidly to new regions while maintaining agility and flexibility between all clouds," promises Kapoor, to enthusiastic response from Felch.

Kapoor runs the audience through an overview of the ground-to-cloud advantages of Apex, and also stresses how the announcements around Azure, AWS, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware offer customers real flexibility.

Now some more on AI with Apex, with a focus on bare-metal support for AI models.

"Placing AI models in public clouds may not be an option for some of the workloads," notes Kapoor.

"So Dell Apex Compute provides high-performance bare metal nodes delivered to data centers, that combined with other services can support all operating systems and all container orchestrators."

"You can choose the number of GPUs, the node type, and then select which performance tier you need."

Jeff Clarke is back on stage to end today's keynote. He says that he hopes the audience will walk away with "an impression that we continue to demonstrate turning these visions into real products, and offers on the marketplace."

"Last and most importantly, we're addressing your needs by making it real, and helping you operate in this multi-cloud environment," he adds.

And with that, it's the end of today's keynote. To summarize, the announcements this morning have included:

• Project Helix, a generative AI collaboration between Dell and Nvidia, which will seek to help businesses train and deploy AI models on-premises.
• Dell NativeEdge software platform, through which enterprises can automate and secure edge operations with a zero trust infrastructure and zero-touch deployment.
• Project Fort Zero, which seeks to deliver a government-certified, end-to-end zero trust solution to protect organizations from cyber attacks.

We'll continue to provide coverage of the biggest Dell Technologies World 2023 announcements, as well as in-depth articles and interviews, so keep an eye on the site for all that to come.

Microsoft has warned that a pervasive culture of “over-permissioning” due to rising cloud workloads and infrastructure expansion is placing organisations at greater risk of breaches.

The 2023 State of Cloud Permissions Risks report, published by Microsoft this week, found that as businesses increasingly move to multi-cloud environments, many are granting permissions that are deemed “high risk”.

Permissions allow users or machines to access applications or resources within a cloud environment and perform specific operations or commands. Microsoft said that human and machine-based user identities use just 1% of permissions granted in their daily functions, meaning that the vast majority are sitting idle and unused.

“As cloud environments expand, they have inadvertently become more complex to manage,” Microsoft warned in its report. “With over 40,000 permissions that can be granted to identities, of which more than 50% are high-risk, it is becoming increasingly difficult for organisations to know who has access to what data, and across which cloud platforms.”

Microsoft said that since the publication of its inaugural report in 2021, it has observed a “significant increase” in organisations granting permissions to access critical cloud resources.

Similarly, the report highlighted a sharp rise in the number of ‘super admins’ present in multi-cloud environments. 'Super admins' refer to user or machine-based identities that have access to all resources within an organisation’s cloud infrastructure.

Alex Simons, corporate VP of program management at Microsoft’s Identity division, warned that super admins are “extremely over-permissioned" and that 98% of these identities are unused, meaning they could be at heightened risk of misuse if a breach occurs.

“Super admins are human or workload identities that have access to all permissions and all resources. They can create and modify configuration settings to a service, add or remove identities, and access or even delete data,” he said.

“Extremely over-permissioned, our research found that less than 2% of permissions granted to super identities are used, and 40% of super admins are workload identities. Left unmonitored, these identities present a significant risk of permission misuse if breached.”

Machine-based identities posing added risks

The expansion of machine-based identities in cloud environments was a key concern highlighted by Simons, with human identities now outnumbered by a ratio of 10:1.

This means that visibility and monitoring of activity within multi-cloud environments can become an increasingly difficult task, with organisations unable to effectively mitigate potential misuse of permissions.

“In today’s multi-cloud world, human identities are no longer the only ones accessing multi-cloud infrastructure,” Simons explained. “The number of workload identities operating across clouds, including apps, VMs, scripts, containers, and services has exponentially increased, now outnumbering human identities ten to one.”

Simons said that organisations must take steps to narrow this growing permissions gap to mitigate the potential for misuse. To achieve this, firms must implement the principle of “least privilege” and reduce the number of permissions across their infrastructure.

“Closing the permissions gap and reducing the risk of permission misuse requires organisations to implement the principle of least privilege,” he said.

“This must occur consistently to all human and workload identities across multi-cloud environments. Organisations can achieve this at a cloud scale by adopting a Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution to continuously discover, remediate, and monitor the activity of every unique user and workload identity across multi-cloud.”

Overburdening cloud technical debt is posing significant challenges for CIOs amid a period of budgetary constraints, according to new research.

According to a new survey, 72% of CIOs said digital transformation progress has slowed as a result of mounting technical debt.

Many attributed the issues to the rapid cloud migrations undertaken by many during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than one-third (38%) said that “rushed cloud migrations” during this period had now placed significant strain on their organisation as they look to optimise workloads and applications and streamline operational efficiency.

Crucially, 31% of respondents said that they failed to optimise workloads before commencing cloud migrations, which has had a long-term negative impact.

Phil Dawson, VP analyst at Gartner, told IT Pro that while the pandemic-fuelled cloud shift represented a prime opportunity for businesses to transform operations, short-sighted and rushed approaches among many firms has left an indelible scar on IT infrastructure.

"I think the pandemic did somewhat emphasise the issue of technical debt,” he says. “If you take a pile of trash and virtualise it and move it to the cloud, you get virtual cloudy trash. You’re just moving the problem.”

This rapid ‘lift and shift’ approach adopted by many organisations during the pandemic offered benefits, Dawson noted. However, this initial migration is only part of the process, and many firms may have fallen into the trap of expecting rapid results without considering the long-term implications and requirements of cloud optimisation.

“What you’ve got to look at is what type of skills does this [lift and shift] need? The cloud operator is good at implementation and operational skills. But they’re not good at transitional and transformation skills,” he said.

“So, you can take your SAP, your Oracle, and move it to the cloud, which appears cheaper, but then what do you need to do to modernise it? That’s where the issue of technical debt comes into it. “

As organisations continue to modernise and scale their cloud infrastructure, the issue of technical debt becomes a critical balancing act.

“If you say you’ve got to move to a new version of another application or operating system, then where do you get the skills to do that in the cloud? Is it from the provider? It’s normally from a third party," he said.

“So, a hidden swing on technical debt is that what appears to be the smoothing of technical debt then become just moving it around. You’re essentially swinging costs.”

Dawson emphasised the need for organisations to treat migration, transition, and transformation as three different components within a broader shift.

“A migration is your lift and shift, transition is upgrading OS’ or databases, and a transformation is moving to a new architecture,” he added. “You can do those three things together, or separate, but do treat them differently. They are not the same. They require different skills and different providers.”

Cloud overspending

A key takeaway from the SoftwareOne survey was that 38% of CIOs believed their organisations “miscalculated” cloud budgets when provisioning for a migration, leading to significant overspending.

Dawson said this is an issue that could affect a range of organisations in the coming year amidst ongoing budgetary constraints and rising cloud costs.

“Cloud can cost more. Don’t assume it’s cheaper,” he said. “I think the infrastructure costs looked to be cheaper at the time, and therefore the lift and shift process was easier.”

A senior figure at US software company 37 Signals has hit out at ‘grotesque’ increases to cloud prices as the company continues its shift away from the cloud.

David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO at 37 Signals, the company behind project management platform Basecamp, revealed in a series of blog posts this week that the company expects to save $7 million over the next five years by shifting away from the cloud.

Hansson first outlined the company’s plans to repatriate cloud workloads in October in response to rising costs, noting that the firm spent $3.2 million on AWS cloud services across 2022.

$2.3 million of this, he said, was spent on simply running “app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers” and various associated costs.

This significant cost burden prompted the firm to make the decision to replace cloud spending and build out its own server infrastructure to deliver greater “independence” and reduce expenditures.

“Our sights are set on a total cloud exit by the end of the summer,” he said. “And by our preliminary calculations, we stand to save about $7m in server expenses over the five years from doing so. Without changing the size of our ops team,” he said.

“The cost of cloud is grotesque in several key instances,” Hansson added. “Whether it’s big-iron databases, large NVMe storage, or just the latest, fastest compute, we’re paying as much to rent the donkey every few months as it would cost to buy it.

“When that’s the case, you should own the donkey. We will spend our money on our own hardware and our own people. Everything else will get the squeeze.”

Hardware investment

In his blog post, Hansson said the company plans to cut its reliance on cloud servers and invest in eight servers “running dual 64-core CPUs in each data centre” or “14 machines running single-core CPUs at a higher clock frequency”.

In all, Hansson noted that the configuration “doesn’t really matter to the overall math” considering the potential cost savings, and that the company will need to add around 2,000 vCPU per data centre.

Given the company runs in two separate data centres, this will require 4,000 vCPUs to accommodate for “performance and redundancy”.

This hardware investment is expected to cost “somewhere in the region of $600,000”, he added - a sum far less than its previous cloud-related costs.

“Spending $600,000 on a bunch of hardware might sound like a lot in the age of cloud,” he said. “But if you amortise that over a conservative five years, it’s just $120,000 per year.”

Bandwidth investment

As part of this shift, Hansson said the company has been working alongside hosting provider, Deft, to further reduce bandwidth, power, and cooling costs.

At present, the company currently spends around $60,000 per month on “two full racks in each of our data centres through Deft”.

“We purposely over-provisioned our space, so we can actually fit all of these many new servers in the existing racks without needing more space or power,” he said.

Hansson noted that, even after adding this up, the total spend remains at around $720,000 per year. And combined with the average yearly cost savings from shifting away from the cloud, this brings total annual costs to $840,000 per year.

“That's a total of $840,000 a year for everything. Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortisation schedule of five years. Compared to $2.3m in the cloud,” he said. “And we'll have much faster hardware, many more cores, incredibly cheaper NVMe storage, and room to expand at a very low cost - as long as we can still fit in two racks per DC.”

“In round numbers, let's call it saving a million and a half dollars per year. Put aside half a million to unforeseen expenses over the period, and that's still seven million dollars saved over five years.”

Cloud repatriation

A recent study from Canalys revealed that spending on cloud services is expected to rise by more than one-fifth this year, placing a significant burden on businesses.

This surge is being fuelled by rising public cloud costs and inflation, and is “forcing enterprise customers to optimise their cloud approach”.

“Macroeconomic uncertainties are contributing to a more conservative approach to IT budgets,” the report said. “A growing number of customers are adjusting cloud strategies for greater efficiency and control.”

Increasingly, this is forcing organisations to consider the repatriation of cloud workloads to private or co-location data centres, the report noted.

Philip Dawson, VP analyst at Gartner, told IT Pro earlier this month that this cloud repatriation trend could continue across 2023 as organisations look to reduce expenditures and re-assess how they leverage cloud.

Motivating factors

In a follow-up blog post, Hansson revealed that there were additional motivations for shifting away from the cloud aside from rising costs.

Part of this, he explained, could be attributed to a pervasive feeling that working with cloud providers limited the company’s sense of “independence” and locked it into a system in which they were beholden to changes implemented by external stakeholders.

“We value independence above all else,” he said. “Being trapped in Amazon’s cloud and having to suffer the indignities of outrageous pricing for new experiments like Solid Cache, has become an intolerable violation of this core value.”

While cloud adoption continues to rise globally, only a small portion of businesses are yet to fully maximise the impact of their transition, according to new research from PwC.

A survey of more than 1,000 business executives found that while 78% of leaders have adopted cloud technology in “most” or “all parts” of their business, just 10% have fully unlocked the potential to drive operational improvements and deliver tangible benefits for their organisations.

This minority of “cloud-powered” businesses have effectively adopted cloud and are reaping the rewards of this process, with many expecting to see continued revenue growth of 15% - or greater - off the back of their transformation projects.

Cloud-powered companies were four times more likely to say they face “no barriers to achieving cloud transformation” across a range of areas, PwC revealed.

This has enabled them to deliver marked improvements to organisational resilience, productivity, and decision-making, and unlock significant cost savings.

PwC identified four key areas of value that distinguish the so-called "cloud-powered" companies from those that aren't fully realising the potential benefits of cloud technology across their business.

A holistic approach to cloud

Cloud-powered companies were found to be twice as likely to pursue a “multi-faceted” and non-linear cloud approach, meaning that they have bucked traditional transformation processes.

Rather than going from workload migration and asset modernisation to cloud-native development, 70% of these organisations have adopted a combined approach which focuses on applying the method that “makes the strongest business case for their goals”.

“And once they decide, they’re committed,” PwC said. “Cloud-powered companies are nearly four times as likely as other companies to sustain their current strategic focus.”

This sharpened focus on delivering tangible improvements in specific areas of the business has enabled them to maximise impact and avoid becoming bogged down in overburdening transformation programmes.

“While most cloud-powered companies have implemented enterprise-wide transformations and moved operations to cloud, they also don’t shy away from considering when it doesn’t make sense to go there,” PwC said.

C-suite collaboration is key

Cross-functional collaboration is a key factor for success at cloud-powered companies, according to the professional services giant.

CIOs at cloud-powered firms are far more likely to be “in sync” with key business functions and have stronger alliances across the C-suite, resulting in a more aligned and concise vision during the formative stages of cloud transformation projects.

Additionally, cloud-powered companies were found to prioritise closer collaboration with chief human resources officers (CHRO’s) and talent teams to ensure that the organisation has the right talent to effectively realise projects.

“This should come as no surprise given how critical it is to acquire or develop the right skills to make the most of cloud investments (while keeping legacy systems up and running),” PwC said.

The importance of a formal data strategy

Executives at cloud-powered companies “understand that data is at the heart of transformation efforts”, according to PwC.

In fact, cloud-powered businesses are far more likely to have a formal enterprise-wide data strategy in place, with 88% establishing a clear-cut vision compared to just 59% among other firms.

This concise focus on how to effectively leverage data has enabled cloud-powered firms to develop a more “streamlined architecture” to modernise their data and concentrate on “building the skills and operational changes needed to become a data-driven organisation”.

Cloud governance and control focus

Governance is a key concern for cloud-powered companies, according to PwC’s research, with 80% having cloud governance resources in place and 78% stating they have “formal and distinct cloud controls”.

Increasingly, these innovative organisations consider the potential risks that cloud poses throughout the various stages of a transformation project, as well as the long-term considerations with regard to cyber security, data privacy, and compliance.

Similarly, cloud-powered organisations were also found to have focused heavily on educating the C-suite and board on how relevant risks related to cloud technology can be identified and addressed.

BT Group has struck a ten-year deal with Kyndryl to migrate the legacy copper infrastructure-based part of its business to the cloud.

The project has been described as “complex” and will see critical applications - the shutting down of which would lead to major operational disruption - being moved from BT Group’s mainframe to the cloud so they can be managed “in a modern way”.

BT Group said it plans to realise £17 million worth of cost benefits every year by 2026 with the move.

The bulk of the savings is expected to come from areas such as lower maintenance and mainframe operating costs, and reduced energy consumption to the tune of 70%.

The project also aims to open up data insights for the business, and will see some legacy applications being retired, refactored, or rehosted.

Retired apps will no longer be used, in line with the Group’s ambition to be reliant on fewer than 500 strategic systems by 2027.

Some refactored apps will see their functionality added to existing systems and the app itself being retired, and the rehosted apps will be “repackaged” so they can be hosted in the cloud.

“We like thinking out of the box to solve complex problems - like how to move off mainframes given the prohibitive increase in legacy infrastructure cost - without rewriting decades-old applications,” said Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT Group.

“With that mindset, working with Kyndryl, we figured out how to turn legacy mainframes into modern digital apps and run them at a fraction of the cost.”

In addition to reduced costs and greater levels of insights throughout the business, BT Group also expects customer experiences to improve, such as helping customers during the migration of copper networks to fibre.

The Group said with more of an API-driven model of digitally managing its mainframe infrastructure, it will open up greater automation capabilities across its wider systems.

“It’s exciting to be partnering with BT Group on such an ambitious and critical programme,” said Petra Goude, global practice leader of core enterprise and zCloud at Kyndryl.

“Migrating from mainframes to cloud extends the usefulness and lifespan of these applications in a modern, microservices-led, cloud-centric way and helps unlock intelligent data insights.

“We’re excited to draw on our deep knowledge, ecosystem of partners, and community of industry-leading experts to help deliver this transformation.”

BT Group originally signed a five-year deal with IBM to manage its mainframe infrastructure in 2020.

After IBM spun off its infrastructure services business in 2021, the business unit was named Kyndryl and it naturally took continued managing BT Group’s mainframe under its new brand.

The announcement today marks an extension of the existing partnership that will take it to 2030.

IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has announced new cloud native services that it says will help customers accelerate their cloud application modernisation.

New Kyndryl Cloud Native Services have been developed to help customers migrate, modernise, and optimise critical workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The move comes at a time when many businesses are experiencing slow digitisation modernisation progress due to complexities, technology silos, as well as a shortage of critical in-house IT skills.

In response to this, Kyndryl said its services will help customers streamline their cloud application modernisation by providing a framework of code assets, workflows, expertise, and the end-to-end lifecycle.

“We’ve seen companies increase their use of cloud over the last few years but have had barriers to adoption – whether it’s the complexities of hybrid or multicloud landscapes or the lack of skills and expertise to manage their IT estates,” said Harish Grama, leader at Kyndryl's Cloud Global Practice.

“These new services are a direct outcome of Kyndryl’s ongoing journey to expand our innovation and offerings through strategic partnerships and new technology, which we have not been able to do before.”

One of the world’s largest IT infrastructure services providers, Kyndryl serves customers across 60 countries, specialising in designing, building, managing, and modernising complex information systems.

Formerly IBM’s managed infrastructure business, the company split from the IT giant in November 2021 and has since gone on to strike up partnerships with the three major hyperscalers: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Aligned with the cloud adoption frameworks of these partners, Kyndryl Cloud Native Services include automated backup, patching, KPI monitoring, security, alerting, and incident management.

Through these offerings, Kyndryl said it is targeting faster routes to innovation through enhanced productivity, as well as a simplified procurement process with consistent delivery across clouds. Other perks will include more cost-effective cloud migration and modernisation, integration of other technologies such as artificial intelligence, the firm said.

Ultimately, the aim is to offer more efficiency and agility, via quicker cloud deployments, reduced developer set-up time, easier management, and more resilient applications.

The provider added that it is focused on transforming customer cloud operations through the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code for secure-by-design delivery principles that allow customers to take an automation-first approach.

The cloud has revolutionised business IT, creating flexibility and affordability for companies to establish systems and perform complex tasks that once were only available to the most biggest organisations with the most resources.

However, something of a paradox exists at the heart of cloud migration. While the promise of the cloud is simplicity and scalability, the huge variety of options and providers on offer can result in complexity and costliness, with businesses ending up paying for more than they need across multiple vendors.

To realise the true benefits of the cloud, it’s important to create a clear roadmap to plan your cloud migration.

Key questions

To develop a roadmap that will ensure that your cloud migration will deliver what you need from it without costing you the Earth, there are some key questions that you need to ask yourself.

The first is the ‘why’. Understanding what you want to achieve from your migration is key to developing a plan. Perhaps you’ve outgrown your existing hardware or it is on the verge of becoming obsolete. You might want to cut costs, or build scalability or flexibility into your operations. Knowing what your goal is is vital for assessing the success of your migration, and will underpin your entire plan.

The ‘why’ is naturally followed by the ‘how’. Who will be the team responsible for the migration? This might be handled in-house by your IT team, or you might want to bring in outside specialists to help or take charge. Whatever the case, it’s essential that everyone is working together and knows what their place is in the plan.

This is also the stage where you need to prepare your existing infrastructure for the migration. Are you planning a hybrid environment? Can you foresee any compatibility issues, and what can you do to mitigate these? The better prepared you are, the more likely you are to avoid the biggest bumps in the road.

Finally, you need to get the timing right. The timeframe will be dictated by various factors, such as the amount and type of data to be migrated to the cloud and when the timing will be best for your business operations. Migrations can be done quite quickly or over an extended period of time, and it will be up to you and your migration team to decide what is best for your company.

Next steps

When your roadmap is ready, it’s time to put it into action. You are likely to encounter issues and roadblocks (whether large or small) during your migration and it’s important to not let them derail you from following your roadmap. Knowing the kinds of issues you are likely to face will help you to prepare for them and know what to do if they arise.

And once the migration is ‘complete’, that isn’t the end of the story. You are likely to have other tasks and goals ahead of you. After all, the beauty of the cloud is in its flexibility and scalability, so it will serve you to take a long-term perspective on your migration and the future management of your infrastructure.

To learn more about creating and executing your roadmap and what comes after, read our co-branded IT Pro/ANS report, ‘Future-proofing transformation: An end-to-end roadmap for SMB cloud migration’