Spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure in Europe will triple from 2025 to 2027, according to Gartner, with a fifth of workloads shifting to local clouds.

Analysis from the consultancy suggests worldwide sovereign cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) spending will hit $80 billion this year — up 35% from 2025.

The projection comes as Europe pushes for digital sovereignty amid geopolitical concerns and worries about overreliance on US-based big tech providers.

But it's not just Europe and the UK. Indeed, between 2025 and 2026, Gartner said European sovereign cloud spend will climb 83% from $6.9bn to $12.6bn – that growth rate is pipped by both the Middle East and Africa (89%) and the region Gartner dubs Mature Asia/Pacific (87%).

While European spending remains high – and is tipped to triple over three years to top North America at $23.1bn – the region with the highest spend on sovereign cloud remains China.

Spending in the region came in at $37.5bn spent in 2025, and Gartner forecasts this to rise to $48.4bn in 2026 and $58.5bn in 2027, with growth around 20%.

"As geopolitical tensions rise, organizations outside the US and China are investing more in sovereign cloud IaaS to gain digital and technological independence," said Rene Buest, senior director analyst at Gartner.

"The goal is to keep wealth generation within their own borders to strengthen the local economy."

Sovereign spend

Most of that spending will be from the public purse via governments, Gartner found.

Alongside the pan-European Gaia cloud, France is even shifting digital services such as video calling to locally-made products over Zoom or Microsoft Teams via the Suite Numérique project.

"Governments will remain the main buyers to meet digital sovereignty needs, followed by regulated industries and critical infrastructure organizations, such as energy and utilities and telecommunications," Buest commented.

In Europe, AWS, IBM, Google and more have all pushed sovereign cloud services via heavy investment in European infrastructure – though Microsoft has had to reassure customers that their data really will be safe from American eyes.

"To compete for local customers’ cloud business, large cloud providers must seriously acknowledge the sovereignty concerns and requirements per country, and act accordingly," added Buest.

"Solely treating digital sovereignty as a pure security, regulatory and compliance topic is not enough."

Keeping it local

The shift to "geopatriation projects," as Gartner has dubbed them, means about a fifth of existing workloads will shift from global cloud providers to local ones, the analyst house predicted.

The consultancy added that 80% of sovereign cloud spend will come from new digital projects, including shifting legacy workloads to the cloud.

Unsurprisingly, Synergy research suggests US companies dominate the European cloud market, with local providers scrapping over just 15% of the remaining market.

Although the recent shift to sovereign IaaS spending could help rebalance that, there's plenty of work to be done.

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Digital edge infrastructure provider Pulsant has announced the launch of Partner Cloud, a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution designed to help diversify partner portfolios.

Available now, Partner Cloud enables partners to leverage the full capabilities of the firm’s platformEDGE infrastructure, which connects 14 UK data centers through a low-latency network fabric.

This infrastructure is designed to provide access to cloud, connectivity, and compute services across the country to help businesses and service providers drive application performance, reach new markets, and scale IT workloads.

A central facet of the company’s partner recruitment drive in the UK, the new IaaS offering now aims to help businesses enhance their service capabilities and find new market opportunities.

Pulsant eyes predictable pricing

Pulsant said Partner Cloud brings financial benefits to partners thanks to “transparent, predictable pricing” alongside a pledge of no unexpected costs, microcharges, egress, or change fees.

This pricing structure aims to enable additional margin opportunity, backed by a monthly operational expenditure model that sees partners billed from the point of service deployment.

In the first phase of partner engagement, Pulsant said it will commit to a 24-hour SLA to create new services, as well as a subsequent 4-hour SLA for any modifications to existing services.

Once partners are confident in their use and understanding of the platformEDGE infrastructure, Pulsant will then transition them to self-service provisioning through its dedicated cloud management portal.

In an announcement, Wendy Shearer, Pulsant’s director of partnerships and ecosystems, said the new IaaS offering caters to service providers requirements - which differ to those of end users.

“They need consistent, competitive pricing for commercial advantage. They need an incredibly rapid response from partners, and they need confidence when building their solutions,” she explained. “This is what we have created with Partner Cloud.”

According to Shearer, MSPs and partners are aware of the need to move fast to capture opportunities offered by developing UK sovereign services and artificial intelligence.

“Existing and prospective partners alike recognize that it is far easier and quicker to use Pulsant infrastructure rather than investing time, effort and money into their own platforms,” she added.

“As a dedicated digital infrastructure partner, we can provide a resilient and robust foundation for these accelerated capabilities. This enables our partners to focus on core services so they get a faster time to revenue.”

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, scalable computing capacity in the cloud. It’s designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 is a reliable and scalable cloud computing service that is an essential part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of products.

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform provides a variety of instance types optimised for different use cases, including general-purpose, memory-optimised, and compute-optimised instances. These instances can be launched and terminated on demand, allowing you to pay for only the capacity you need.

EC2 also provides a range of storage options, including local storage, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Amazon S3. It also integrates with a number of other AWS products, such as Amazon VPC, Amazon EBS, and Amazon SNS, to provide a complete computing environment in the cloud.

When did EC2 launch?

Amazon EC2 was first launched in 2006 as a part of AWS. At the time, it was one of the first cloud computing services available, and it quickly became popular with developers because of its simplicity and flexibility.

In the years since its launch, EC2 has added many new features and instance types, and it has become an essential part of the AWS product lineup. Today, EC2 is used by organisations of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, for a wide range of applications, including web and mobile application hosting, data processing, and machine learning.

What does EC2 mean for the industry?

Upon launch, EC2 represented a significant shift in the way organisations accessed computing resources. Prior to the advent of cloud computing, businesses had to purchase and maintain physical servers and other infrastructure in order to run their applications. This was a time-consuming and expensive process and required a significant investment in hardware and IT staff to maintain the infrastructure.

The launch and adoption of EC2 changed all of this by allowing organisations to rent computing resources on an as-needed basis rather than having to purchase and maintain their own infrastructure. As a result, organisations were able to scale their computing capacity up or down as needed, and it significantly reduced the upfront costs of setting up an IT environment.

EC2's legacy is that it helped to pioneer the concept of public cloud as we know it today, and played a major role in driving its widespread adoption. By providing a simple and scalable way to access computing resources in the cloud, EC2 has made it easier for organisations to build and deploy applications without the need to invest in physical infrastructure.

How does AWS EC2 work?

EC2 works by providing virtual servers, called ‘instances’ that are run on Amazon's infrastructure. These instances are fully customisable and can be configured with a variety of operating systems, software packages, and other settings.

To use EC2, you first choose the type of instance that you want to run and the required resources (such as CPU, memory, and storage). You can then launch one or more instances of this type, and Amazon will allocate the necessary resources and create the instances for you.

Once your instances are running, you can connect to them using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Secure Shell (SSH). You can then use these instances to run applications, host websites, store data, or perform other tasks.

EC2 instances are charged on a per-hour basis, so you only pay for the compute resources that you consume. You can also stop and start instances as needed, which allows you to optimise your costs by only paying for the resources you use.

What does EC2 mean for the business landscape?

One of the main benefits of EC2, and similar services competitors have since launched, is the ability to provide scalable and reliable resources on demand. As a result, organisations can build and deploy applications without the need to invest heavily in physical infrastructure. It helps businesses save money by only paying for the resources they consume. This is on top of the way EC2 drove up cloud computing adoption across the business landscape.

In addition, EC2 has made it possible for businesses to access a wide range of computing resources, from basic virtual servers to high-performance graphical processing units (GPUs) and custom hardware configurations. This flexibility has made it possible for businesses to use EC2 for a wide range of applications, from basic web hosting to complex data processing and machine learning tasks.

What are the available configurations?

General purpose

These instances are suitable for a wide range of workloads, including web and application servers, development environments, and small databases.

Compute optimised

These instances are designed for applications that require high CPU performance, such as batch processing and distributed analytics.

Memory-optimised

These instances are optimized for workloads that require high memory, such as in-memory databases and real-time processing.

GPU instances:

These instances are equipped with GPUs and are designed for applications that require high-performance graphics, such as machine learning and video rendering.

ARM instances

These instances are powered by ARM processors and are designed for low-cost, general-purpose computing.

Storage optimised

These instances are optimized for high-performance storage and are suitable for workloads such as data warehousing, distributed file systems, and NoSQL databases.

EC2 instances are also available in various sizes, with different combinations of CPU, memory, and storage resources. You can choose the instance type and configuration that best meets the needs of your application.

What are the pricing models for EC2?

EC2 offers a variety of pricing models to meet different computing needs and budgets. The most common pricing model for EC2 is the on-demand model, which allows you to pay for computing capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This is better for those who need the flexibility to scale capacity up or down as needed or if you don't have a predictable workload.

EC2 also offers a ‘spot’ pricing model, which allows users to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. With spot purchasing, you can request instances at a discount compared to on-demand prices, but your instances may be terminated if Amazon needs the capacity for on-demand instances.

Another option is the ‘reserved’ pricing model, which allows you to purchase a capacity reservation for a one-year or three-year term. With reserved instances, you can get a significant discount compared to on-demand prices, but you are required to pay upfront and commit to a specific instance type.

Finally, AWS offers a ‘dedicated host’ pricing model, which allows you to rent physical servers on an hourly basis. This is a good option if you have compliance or licensing requirements that prohibit you from sharing physical resources with other customers.

Equinix and VMware have announced VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal, a new distributed cloud service that combines VMware’s cloud infrastructure-as-a-service with Equinix’s Bare Metal-as-a-service.

The offering has been designed to extend customers’ cloud environments into distributed metro locations to meet business-critical demands at the edge, while also enabling them to preserve the integrity of enterprise workloads.

VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal targets distributed cloud use cases, including smart cities, video analytics, game development, real-time financial market trading, retail POS, as well as various IoT and ML/Inference uses.

The service combines VMware Cloud’s multi-cloud infrastructure and Equinix Metal, an automated bare metal and interconnection offering that is delivered as-a-service across Equinix’s global International Business Exchange (IBX) footprint. Users will gain private, low-latency access to both private and public cloud services - as well as thousands of IT and network providers - via Equinix Fabric interconnection.

“We are pleased to partner with VMware to provide an on-demand, dedicated cloud infrastructure solution that can be deployed globally,” said Zachary Smith, global head of Edge Infrastructure Services at Equinix. “Customers benefit from secure connections to their critical private or on-prem environments and also to the thousands of clouds, networks and other ecosystem participants that come together at Equinix.”

The collaboration builds on Equinix and VMware’s existing long-standing relationship, which has seen the pair deliver multi-cloud infrastructure solutions together for almost a decade.

Narayan Bharadwaj, vice president of Cloud Solutions at VMware, said businesses across industries are now “seeking to become cloud smart by matching enterprise application needs to the best cloud environments”.

“This approach will enable them to benefit from high performance and consistent infrastructure with low TCO,” he explained. “VMware and Equinix are uniquely positioned to co-innovate on a distributed cloud service that extends VMware Cloud to new locations to provide application choice and flexibility and accelerate cloud transformation for all enterprises.”

Dave McCarthy, research vice president of Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services at IDC, said customers have so far lacked a suitable cloud option that combines on-premises security and control with high performance, data locality, and low overall TCO.

“For mission-critical applications that rely on low latency and high-performance network bandwidth, the default has been to retain workloads on-premises or perform real-time needs, such as data processing, at branch office or metro locations,” he said.

“With their combined strengths, Equinix and VMware are well positioned to deliver a distributed cloud service that will address the demands of enterprise applications where latency, performance, security, and data locality are key drivers.”

Customers will be able to purchase the VMware Cloud software as a service from VMware, and the Bare Metal as a Service capacity from Equinix.

This article originally appeared in issue 31 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here

Businesses have integrated many hosted services into their core processes, and, as work has shifted to become hybrid in nature, the cloud has become essential to keeping workforces connected. In that vein, cloud computing is also seen as the most effective vehicle to deliver the benefits of a plethora of innovations, with the ‘as a service’ model highly prevalent.

Burgeoning technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality and quantum computing – also referred to as DARQ – are making waves. The lattermost, however, might have the most explosive impact, with IBM, for example, hyping up what it refers to as ‘the quantum decade’.

Business leaders are paying attention to quantum computing but question how their companies will access and practically exploit it. This is where quantum as a service (QaaS) – or the quantum cloud – could be the answer.

What is the quantum cloud?

The race to increase the number of qubits, achieving the environmental conditions required for quantum computers to operate, as well as making them fault tolerant, are all major barriers to practical use. As enterprises have found in the past, though, leasing can offer a viable alternative that avoids any major capital investment.

Nobody will be drawn on a specific timeframe on when there will be a marketplace for quantum computing services, but businesses ought to consider QaaS until 2030, when it’s estimated real quantum services come online. Until then, a hybrid approach using ‘quantum-inspired algorithms’ that mixes binary computing with a pseudo approach to quantum computing will be an option should enterprises need specific capabilities such as interrogating massive datasets.

There’s a hosted future for most businesses seeking to access quantum computers, according to Scott Buchholz, emerging technology research director and CTO for government and public services with Deloitte. "Cloud hyperscalers and traditional hardware vendors are investing heavily in this space. Players are differentiating through the quantum processing units (QPUs) they offer and ease of access,” Buchholz says. “In addition, startups have emerged to focus on specific ecosystem pain points including connectivity, cost limiters, logging, and network latency."

From a user’s perspective, QaaS will seem like any other digital service, agrees Martin Lukac, associate professor from Nazarbayev University School of Engineering and Digital Sciences. "Once the establishment of quantum computers is achieved, the integration will be seamless,” he says. “This is because QaaS will have to come with a whole set of tools for transforming classical information to quantum, processing it, extracting the quantum information, measuring it, and proving it back to the customer. It’s also vital that the integration is as smooth as possible, otherwise, the cost and time overhead will not be worth the time and effort.”

How to access the quantum cloud

Images of exotic-looking quantum computers have, so far, created somewhat of a false image of what quantum computing is and how these machines can be put into practical business cases. For example, speed has often been a differentiating factor when quantum computers are compared to traditional binary machines. This appreciation is correct, but quantum computing's real power is when these machines are integrated with other technologies.

QaaS has existed for some time. Five years ago, IBM offered the IBM Quantum Experience – a cloud-based service enabling businesses to run algorithms on a five-qubit quantum processor. Fast forward to today, and we have several companies actively developing quantum computers, including D-Wave, Rigetti, Azure Quantum, AWS Braket, Google IonQ, and QMware.

QMware already has a QaaS platform live using their simulated 40-qubit quantum circuit. Aimed at developers who want to test quantum algorithms, and based in Europe, the service is also designed to offer an alternative to the services being developed in North America. It’s also a component of the GAIA-X project.

As techUK points out, irrespective of the plethora of services available, use cases must connect with a business need for deployments to be successful. "Many areas where quantum will be effective will not be quantum-niche, but will be incorporated into existing use cases, such as drug discovery or process optimisation to enhance efficiency, sustainability, or in novel solutions to potential data security threats from quantum,” the organisation’s report says. “They will require convergence with other technologies as part of a wider technology toolkit available for businesses.”

How businesses use quantum computers will vary once the access tools become available. Regardless of the use case, IBM’s distinguished engineer, Richard Hopkins reiterates business access will be integrated and seamless. “With quantum serverless, integrating QaaS will be a seamless process,” he says. “Mainstream applications will be able to call upon quantum-trained models, simulators, or optimisers in just the same way they interact with compute clusters or supercomputers today. It’s just that, in the near future, those serverless calls might be to QPUs, CPUs, GPUs or some form of hybrid combination – whatever it takes to get the problem solved in the most efficient manner.”

Embracing the new quantum hyperscalers

Becoming quantum-ready is an approach all businesses can take. In association with EY, the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) recently published research delving into how businesses are set to approach the new age of quantum computing.

The report concludes over 80% of senior UK business leaders will see their enterprises significantly impacted by quantum computing as they move towards 2030, which will be their quantum tipping point for many. “Quantum readiness is not so much a gap to be assessed as a road to be walked, with next steps being regularly revisited as the landscape evolves,” says Piers Clinton-Tarestad, quantum computing leader at EY UKI. “Businesses that expect industry disruption within the next three or five years need to act now."

Outside of big data users such as pharmaceutical firms, QaaS could also open many new key product and services avenues for small businesses, Paul Baird, UK chief technical security officer at Qualys, tells IT Pro. “Looking beyond the scientific and medical uses, structural engineers could run vastly complex computer simulations on digital what-if scenarios making structures and components a lot safer. Imagine game development using quantum computing, where they can render virtual reality (VR) worlds with much finer precision and detail.”

QaaS won’t be as simple as accessing many of the hosted services we use today, however, adds principal consultant at Deloitte, Tim Potter. Cloud hyperscalers, he tells IT Pro, are making it easy to get started with tutorials and free access layers. On the other hand, building a quantum strategy and gaining organisational alignment around where to invest first and how to get started can be difficult.

“There are many hardware and software options which can make architectural decisions complex,” Potter concludes. “A clear understanding of where quantum can add value to the business is a critical first step. If you don’t approach the quantum computing market with a specific set of business challenges you are looking to solve, it can be very difficult to make decisions that materially move your exploration of quantum forward.”

Quantum computing services are becoming more widely available through the ‘as a service’ model, with most businesses accessing this technology on an ad hoc basis for highly focused business use cases. The key, for organisations, is to evaluate how – if at all – they stand to benefit from the specific capabilities of quantum computing. Understanding these needs ensures every company has a quantum-ready strategy to harness the technology when it becomes more accessible and affordable.

Cloud computing firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced, with immediate effect, the appointment of Matt Harris to the role of UK managing director.

Harris will take on the management of HPE’s enterprise products and services, UK operations, and more than 2,000 staff across London, Reading, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow.

He will assume the role from Marc Waters, who has been in place since 2016 and oversaw changes such as the company’s new partner program for XaaS practices. Waters will be staying with HPE as the senior vice president of UK, Middle East, Africa and High-Performance Computing EMEA.

Having worked at HPE for 18 years, Harris has a breadth of experience in areas ranging from the public sector to accounts of global firms. After graduating with a BA in Economics & Business from Newcastle University, Harris began work for HPE as an intern in 2004.

In 2013, he joined the UK leadership organisation, where he held roles such as UK sales manager for storage and UK general manager for servers. Since 2018, he has held the role of UK chief sales officer as well as vice president of hybrid IT infrastructure.

In 2020, he spoke at an IT Pro panel about on-premise hardware, while leading the hybrid IT infrastructure group to develop solutions in emerging markets including artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and big data.

“I’m delighted to take the leadership of a business that I have called home for 18 years and at a time when HPE’s edge-to-cloud portfolio is better positioned than it has ever been,” said Harris in a statement.

“In a dynamic environment here in the UK, HPE has never been more relevant as we support organisations across all sectors find solutions that help them move forward. I believe strongly that the tech sector has a huge role to play in solving challenges for humanity and business. I am 100% focused on making HPE a great place to work, and a great business partner, as well as advancing HPE’s core purpose – to advance the way people live and work.”

Speaking of his successor, Waters said that “Matt is both an exceptional leader and a good friend who truly understands HPE.”

“He is highly regarded by our people, our customers and our partners so I am absolutely delighted to confirm him as our new UK Managing Director.”

In order to enhance performance and improve customer satisfaction, organisations need to be able to effectively leverage their data, which is why many have embraced digital transformation to become data-driven.

According to research by ESG, for these digital initiatives to succeed, businesses need to improve their data infrastructures. However this report discusses the growing complexity around accelerating IT transformation, and why IT teams are moving to as-a-Service models.

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Manhattan Associates has onboarded IBM Cloud as its preferred cloud IaaS provider for its customers deploying the company’s ecommerce applications in the cloud.

Manhattan Associates will also extend the relationship by offering technical support to customers opting to run their apps on IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure. This means customers will benefit from IBM's single private network connecting all data centres and network points of presence, IBM said.

Ed Bottini, director of cloud services channel sales at IBM said: “Enterprises today need a mix of cloud infrastructure options and services to be successful. With IBM Cloud, Manhattan Associates’ customers can accelerate their own business transformations by leveraging the SoftLayer platform’s power, security, visibility and flexibility.”

At present, Manhattan Associates serves customers including Nordstrom, Papa John’s and Genuine Parts Company. These organisations will also be able to benefit from IBM's Cloud as an alternative deployment method.

Jeff Cashman, senior vice president, Manhattan Associates added: "The ability to offer our industry-leading applications via SoftLayer will provide a cost-effective, scalable and dynamic experience for our customers.

"IBM is a strategic, long-term partner for us, and we look forward to working with them as we expand our cloud-based offerings.”

Manhattan Associates also offers its customers use of SoftLayer’s bare metal and virtual cloud servers, networking storage security and redundancy options to help traditional e-commerce businesses transform into cloud-centric companies.

Last year, IBM-owned SoftLayer announced it would be allowing access to bare metal services by the hour, with deployment speeds of less than half an hour. The company said it would give customers the performance of physical servers without the long-term commitment.

“As businesses deploy more powerful workloads in the cloud, there is increased demand for performance with even shorter demand cycles. Our new hourly bare metal servers are designed to hit the sweet spot of how much power they need, how long they need it, at price points that make sense,” said Marc Jones, chief technology officer at SoftLayer.

As organizations continue their transformation to a “new normal”, many have realised the benefits of flexible IT infrastructure; agile enough to support recovery and business continuity when disaster strikes.

Studies have shown that the use of cloud-based IT functions on a subscription basis has vastly increased - particularly post-pandemic. Service providers are realizing that the concept of Everything-as-a-Service (XAAS) is considered highly important for success, and an economical solution for organizations that don’t have the technology they need in-house.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about the advantages of XAAS - and its challenges - as well as what to consider when planning your new XAAS solution, and discover what HPE Greenlake’s platform can offer your organization.

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Surrey County Council has enlisted the help of virtualised storage vendor Nutanix to migrate workloads from its existing datacentre to a new shared services cloud hosting platform.

The move means the local authority can offer cloud, virtualisation and application hosting services to its own employees, as well as those working for other Surrey-based local government and healthcare organisations.

As such, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform will provide the borough and district councils in the region with access to a centrally-managed computing environment that no longer requires them to run their own separate IT operations.

As such, it's hoped this will pave the way for standardisation across the region's various councils and public sector organisations in terms of the platforms and applications they use.

The project is being embarked on to help the council achieve its five-year goal of shaving £200 million off its annual spend, and – in turn – become more operationally efficient.

Surrey County Council said it chose Nutanix with the help of its IT provider Virtuoso and because of how quickly its technology, which allows users to create a shared pool of computing resource by consolidating the server and storage tiers of their infrastructure, took to deploy.

Paul Brocklehurst, CIO of Surrey County Council, said the project will benefit both the council and the area's local residents.

“Nutanix and Virtuoso will enable the council to deliver cost effective, scalable and robust IT services to our local partners, ultimately helping us deliver on our long-term strategy to rationalise and consolidate local government services across the region, saving costs and delivering a better experience to our residents,” he said.

Paul Phillips, regional director of Nutanix, added: “This is a [shared services] model that is easily replicated across local authorities and healthcare providers everywhere, helping them to scale and manage their infrastructure whilst still contributing significantly to the economic and environmental targets placed upon them.”

The Phoenix Partnership (TPP), which provides hosted clinical systems, has collaborated with Microsoft and the NHS to implement a programme that gives clinicians access to a single record for each patient over their lifetime.

The SystmOne platform can be used to keep track of a patient’s medical history via a single source, and to analyse clinical trends and performance across the NHS. It also allows clinicians to access or enter data into patient files remotely.

The system supports 140,000 registered users, and can reportedly manage 24 million patient records, totalling up to 200 terabytes of data.

TPP initially built SystmOne on the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database platform and later migrated to SQL Server 2008 R2.

The service runs on a private cloud infrastructure using Windows Server 2008 R2 and has both a primary datacentre and a secondary disaster recovery site that backups simultaneously to guard against data loss.

Phil Grayson, infrastructure lead at TPP, said: “We needed a low-cost, high-performance database platform to ensure high availability and uptime of SystmOne. The database platform had to be secure and reliable to accommodate the hosted offering for sharing data.

“Moving to SQL Server 2008 R2 is a critical step to prepare for further improvements in the data platform space using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012,” he added.

Microsoft UK’s SQL product manager, Anthony Saxby, said Microsoft's server platforms were chosen as they promoted trust in the project.

“SystmOne manages highly sensitive patient records and needs to be available anytime, anywhere. It has to be secure, dependable and reliable...and that is why [these products] were chosen,” Saxby said.

NHS workers claim the new setup has allowed them to be more productive.

Dr Talac Mahmud, senior partner at FirstCare Practice GP surgery in London, explained: “Because it is so simple to update problems and summaries in the record, our data quality has been much improved. Almost everything is recorded without you having to do anything, which is vital for monitoring activity and workflow.”

It was bad luck for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its customers on Friday, as the cloud firm experienced an outage at its US East-1 Region datacentre.

The incident happened around 7.04 am Pacific Time on 13 September, with connectivity problems affecting a portion of the instances in a single availability zone. The incident lasted until 8.54am.

The firm also experienced increased error rates and latencies for the APIs for Elastic Block Storage and increased error rates for EBS-backed instance launches. Some instances were inaccessible via public IP addresses, but could be contacted using private IP addresses to other instances in the same availability zone.

The connectivity problem affected major AWS customers such as Heroku as well as parts of Github. Networking problems also impacted Amazon’s RedShift data warehousing service, Simple Messaging Services, Relational Data Service, and CloudHSM service, according to the status page.

By 9.46am, AWS had “identified the root cause of the issue and full network connectivity had been restored," according to the firm’s status page.

The US East region is one of the firm’s most popular and one of its oldest cloud facilities.

Last month an outage was suffered by AWS which led to several of the internet’s largest social media services being taken offline or experiencing intermittent service.

An outage also affected Amazon’s own retail site last month, which resulted in a disruption lasting up to an hour. No explanation for the outage, which primarily hit the AWS Management Console, was given at the time.

In 2012, EC2 on the service was repeatedly hit by outages, one of which also resulted in Twitter using its own service to apologise to users for the disruption.

Over 60% of enterprises are interested in shifting on-premises/hosted digital infrastructure spending to a consumption-as-service model. Should you be considering this move too?

This excerpt from an IDC PeerScape report shows you:

• How consumption-as-a-service subscription offerings allow customers to use on-premises or hosted infrastructure on-demand
• Real-world examples of businesses who have derived tangible benefits from using this subscription model
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Join Russell Barley, cloud solution architect at IONOS, as he takes a look behind the glitz and glamour of emerging technologies and buzzwords.

This webinar looks at the flexibility and scalability of IaaS, and offers a guide to new cloud technology adoption - to help you take advantage of its full benefits while avoiding the pitfalls.

Watch this easy-to-follow webinar now, with key takeaways for how you can best utilise cloud technologies.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri reaffirmed his company’s commitment to delivering everything as a service, saying he would be happy if the GreenLake name became more well known than HPE.

Speaking to reporters and analysts ahead of the company’s annual Discover conference, Neri said: “That's the trend, right. That's the goal. That's why we laid out a vision that GreenLake should be synonymous to HPE.

“This will be our leading product, leading offer, our leading experience, where everything else underneath is part of that experience, whether it's connectivity as a service. Whether it is … data services, whether it's a load optimisation, whether it is AI, machine learning – all of that caters to that platform.”

He also quipped that it would be a good thing if people mistook HPE for GreenLake, rather than HP Inc – a confusion that apparently persists in the market despite the two companies having split six years ago.

To say GreenLake is taking centre stage at Discover 2021 would be an understatement. There are no big hardware announcements this year – no Primera equivalent, no Gen10 equivalent, nothing for the metalheads at all. Instead, all the announcements, from a partnership with Intel that allows customers to spin up individual cores as needed to new vertical-focused offerings, fall under the GreenLake banner. Even last year’s big announcement, Ezmeral, seems, slowly but surely, to be on its way to being another component of GreenLake.

Neri doesn’t seem particularly concerned that HPE’s great rival Dell is looking to eat its consumption-based lunch with Project Apex, either, telling reporters: “I welcome [competitors’] entrance into the space, because a validates what we said few years ago about the world being hybrid, where the world will move to a consumption driven model.”

HPE Discover kicks off this evening at 4pm BST with a keynote from Neri, and runs through to the end of the week. IT Pro will be bringing you all the latest news and analysis from the show, so be sure to check back here regularly.

Approx. read time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

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Read this guide for an in-depth understanding of IaaS and how the cloud can help you provide value to the wider business, plus learn how to eliminate manual tasks and reduce costs while running your high-performance workloads.

Dell has unveiled more details surrounding its Apex services platform as part of the first day of its annual Dell Technologies World event.

First announced by the company in October of last year, the Apex Project aims to consolidate Dell’s 'as a service' cloud products as well as facilitate the process of acquiring, managing, maintaining, and servicing physical IT infrastructure by its customers.

Less than three months after launching a private cloud platform, Apex Cloud Services now also includes hybrid cloud and deployment, the latter of which was found to be up to 86% faster than a do-it-yourself hybrid cloud model, according to a recent Storage Review report, commissioned by Dell.

Apart from the addition to its Cloud Services, Dell has also unveiled Apex Data Storage Services, Apex Custom Solutions, as well as the Apex Console.

Apex Data Storage Services offers three performance tiers of block and file enterprise storage, with capacity starting as low as 50 terabytes. Available as one or three-year subscriptions, the new offering lets businesses “focus on data, not drives”, according to Dell CMO Allison Dew.

Apex Custom Solutions, described as “the industry's broadest infrastructure portfolio to customers as a service”, comprises Apex Flex On Demand and Apex Data Center Utility, which allow enterprises to customise their aaS experience based on their “specific technology needs, operational model, and consumption habits,” said Dew. While Flex On Demand provides Dell Technologies servers, storage, data protection, and hyperconverged infrastructure as a service, the Data Center Utility suite supplies custom metering and managed services applied across customers’ data centres.

“You can pick any infrastructure from Dell Technologies, and any level of management you would like. We then deliver it to you on an aaS basis. From storage or server racks, all the way to a complete data centre, APEX custom solutions can help you turn your IT infrastructure into a custom solution to meet your individual needs,” said Dew.

Lastly, Dell unveiled the Apex Console, which lets customers monitor and manage Apex services using actionable insights and predictive analytics. Described by Dew as a “real-time access to system health and performance of your services”, the console provides usage and spending reports which help businesses adjust their Dell services to their needs and budget.

According to the CMO, staying on top of current tech trends and advancements can make managing digital transformation “a complex undertaking” for businesses.

“Enter Dell Technologies Apex, a breakthrough portfolio of aaS offerings that help simplify your digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control,” she said, adding that the new offerings are available starting 5 May.

Speaking at an introductory panel of Dell Technologies EMEA executives, SVP Claire Vyvyan highlighted the differences between Apex and the public cloud.

“It's very different because we can bring it at scale, we can bring it to the edge of your infrastructure, we can bring it to your data centre, (...) we can work with your preferred service providers rather than in big global data centres,” she told Dell Technologies World attendees. “And I think that's going to be really important in the future, when the proliferation of data is at the edge.”

IBM has unveiled the name of its Managed Infrastructure Services business which is to become a fully-fledged public company by the end of this year.

The company previously referred to the spin-off as simply ‘NewCo’, but it has now been announced that the new infrastructure services company is to be named Kyndryl – a combination of the words ‘kinship’ and ‘tendril’.

The news comes six months after IBM declared that it would be splitting its business into two separate entities, bringing an end to a strategy that saw it attempt to shift towards cloud growth while maintaining a foothold in its legacy business.

Martin Schroeter, who was appointed Kyndryl CEO at the beginning of this year, said that the name “evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth”.

“Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, and an independent company with the best global talent in the industry,” he added.

According to Kyndryl chief marketing officer Maria Bartolome Winans, “creating a name is just the start of our journey as a brand”.

“It will help identify us and support recognition, but the meaning of the name will be built and enhanced over time from our behaviours, aspirations and actions, and what we enable our customers to do. Our vision is to be the leading company that designs, runs and modernises the critical technology infrastructure of the world's most important businesses and institutions, ultimately powering human progress,” said Winans.

Kyndryl’s headquarters are to be located in New York City, which Schroeter described as “one of the world's most vibrant and global urban centres”, adding that the decision “underscores [Kyndryl’s] commitment to the economic health of cities”. IBM's headquarters are to remain nearby, in Armonk, NY.

Despite being a newly-formed company, Kyndryl is uniquely positioned as a well-established business thanks to its ties with IBM, which already holds a global base of 4,600 customers.

The tax-free deal of separating Kyndryl from IBM is expected to be finalised by the end of 2021, with the latter set to focus entirely on its AI capabilities and the hybrid cloud.

For all of us in the enterprise IT space, cloud has been a fact of life for years. While it seems like cloud technology has made its way into every facet of the business IT stack, one of the most talked-about areas is the infrastructure layer, which has given CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders the scalability and flexibility to grow digital applications and services without being shackled to on-premise data centres.

But what’s the state of play for cloud infrastructure in 2020? Where are organisations in terms of adoption, and what are their plans for the future? Are we racing towards a cloud-only world, or have businesses reached a zen-like state of happy hybrid harmony? In this month’s IT Pro Panel discussion, we spoke to some of our expert IT leaders to find out whether they’ve got their heads in the clouds.

The cloud at platform one

Despite the wide range of company sizes and industry verticals represented by our panellists, all of them are invested in cloud infrastructure to significant degrees. Aside from some physical IT in its factories Moonpig is 100% cloud-based, reports CTO Peter Donlon, as is Richmond Events, and director of IT Liam Quinn says that 80% of its infrastructure is run via a private cloud, with the remainder in Microsoft Azure – although he hopes to be in a fully public cloud environment by the start of 2022.

Even in the notoriously slow-to-adopt banking and healthcare sectors, both Newcastle Building Society and Milton Keynes University Hospital (MKUH) Foundation Trust are on their way to the cloud, with both organisations opting for Azure as their provider of choice.

“We're using Azure for now,” says Newcastle Building Society CIO Manila McLean, “[which we] selected really because we're a Microsoft house, but in time we'll need to think about vendor concentration. In the financial services sector, our regulator gets nervous about concentration risks where outsourcing is concerned. This is less of a tech challenge and more of a maturity and education challenge, but we need to work within the European Banking Authority Outsourcing Guidelines, and vendor mix is something to consider.”

Newcastle Building Society is “on a journey to cloud and probably around 20% there so far”, says McLean, while more than half of MKUH’s systems and infrastructure are now hosted in the cloud. “We are moving at pace,” CTO Craig York says, due to the flexibility it provides and the speed of deployment.”

SafetyKleen CIO Pat Colombo operates a similar ratio to McLean, with 20% of his IT in the cloud while 80% resides in a colocated data centre. However, unlike the rest of our panellists, Colombo isn’t interested in engaging either of the major public cloud providers for his business.

“Cloud is growing, and fast, [but] I'm not super keen on the Azure model in terms of pricing and lack of clarity over where the money goes, which is something Microsoft has acknowledged to me,” he says, “so I'm looking at alternatives for hosting away from the big boys.”

Donlon doesn't view Azure as an ideal fit for his organisation either, explaining that while a small portion of Moonpig’s workloads are hosted on Microsoft’s cloud, this is largely a hangover from a previous strategy.

“We were on a path into Azure before I joined the business, for similar reasons to Craig,” he explains. “However, when I joined it was clear that AWS would give us a lot more of the capability we'd need and as such, we started moving all of our new development into it. It's likely in the next couple of years we'll be down to a single cloud vendor.”

Watching the pennies

Flexible management and scalability benefits are among the most common reasons cited by our panellists for moving to the cloud; York notes that running an on-premise data centre means you need to manage things like power, networking, climate control, storage capacity and on-call employees to resolve problems.

“Having all these issues to deal with on site in my own computer rooms is part of the reason to move to public cloud,” he says. “I see my onsite estate having very little in 3 years, with redundant or cached versions of Active Directory, et cetera.”

However, one potentially surprising point that all our panellists agreed on was that cost savings were not a factor in their decision. In fact, the opposite was true – our panellists all said that moving to a cloud-based infrastructure as a service model would be more expensive. Although Quinn is looking to move more of his estate from private cloud into Azure, he admits that this won’t be as cost-effective.

“Ultimately, it’s cheaper for us to virtualise servers on a few blades and sweat them for 5 years,” he explains. “However, that isn’t the whole story and I think there’s a compelling story about the benefits of public cloud that make the additional expense worth it. But, if someone is looking at cloud and thinking they’ll save money, I think in the majority of use cases they’ll be disappointed.”

“I agree with Liam,” Colombo adds; “you don't necessarily save when hosting VMs in the cloud, and in a lot of cases, it's more expensive to do so. As a lift and shift exercise, cloud seems very expensive, especially the likes of Azure or AWS. Cloud is much better when rearchitecting an application to use a platform, but not to host virtual machines.”

The common consensus was that while infrastructure as a service can be useful, it’s the platform as a service offerings where the real cost savings can be found. For this reason, most of our panellists agree, rearchitecting an application specifically for cloud is preferable to simply migrating an application as-is.

“I think Pat is hitting the nail on the head,” Donlon says. “If you're just lifting and shifting, you most likely won't save money. As soon as you move to the cloud provider's platform as a service offerings, that's where the cost can dramatically come down. But that often means re-architecting your applications which often comes with a cost too.”

“We're rearchitecting our application architecture,” McLean explains, “and will host new applications in the cloud as we go. I can't see us going for a migration, as it’s too costly and messy, which means we'll be hybrid for quite some time.”

York notes that even in an IaaS environment, customers will still have to both pay for and manage individual servers and OS licenses, which can quickly mount up. PaaS, meanwhile, removes these cost and management overheads. There are other benefits, though, and York highlights Azure’s support for integrations up and down the stack as a key driver.

The long road to cloud

Quinn says that while he’d like to take advantage of the performance, right-sizing and licensing benefits of PaaS, he’s somewhat frustrated by the fact that his previous move to a hosted private cloud removed a lot of the infrastructure management challenges that York says he eliminated by moving to public cloud. This, according to Quinn, makes it harder to justify a move from private cloud to public.

“I'm looking at that too,” Colombo says. “On CRM, we’re doing the transformation piece to go to Dynamics 365, taking away our in-house CRM, et cetera – but on the rest, as you can't transform everything at the same time, lift and shift doesn't work at all in public cloud in terms of cost. I can see my data centre being much smaller in a few years’ time, similar to what Craig mentioned, but for the time being, I think we'll still host ourselves or go to a private hosted environment in line with what Liam described.”

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has driven a huge spike in cloud-based SaaS usage through tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but by contrast, none of our panellists felt that the situation had spurred them further into the cloud from an infrastructure perspective. For example, as SafetyKleen is a chemical cleaning company, Colombo and his team have been understandably busy over the last several months – but he says the crisis hasn’t affected his ability to manage his on-premise estate.

“We were super busy during lockdown, because of what we do; we did have a dip in operations but a very fast recovery. In terms of IT, the team was busier than ever. We made sure everybody had the right equipment, they were registered at the data centre in case of hardware failures, but otherwise, most stuff is virtual these days, so it wasn't a massive problem to support things remotely.”

In fact, in Quinn’s case, coronavirus has actually delayed his move to the cloud. The crisis has hit the events business hard, and the substantial reductions in revenue have forced Richmond to limit its expenditure on projects like cloud rollouts until it can act with greater certainty.

It seems, then, that cloud is the way forward for all of our panellists – but the benefits and economics may not be as cut and dried as many vendors would like us to believe. Application age, digital maturity and workload volumes will all be factors in determining how an organisation’s cloud strategy evolves over time, including considerations like choosing between Iaas, Paas, and private cloud. The road to the cloud has certainly been a long one, but for many organisations, there’s a long way still to go.

Dell Technologies has kicked off its annual conference with the announcement of Project Apex, its plan to consolidate its ‘as a service’ offerings.

Described by Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Dell Technologies Business Unit marketing, as a “radically simplified as a service and cloud experience”, the new project acknowledges that the future of enterprise IT is “really going to be a hybrid, multi-cloud world”.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference – which, like most conferences this year is being held as a ‘virtual experience’ – Grocott explained that Apex is a strategy, rather than a product, and is “how [Dell Technologies] is going to take as a service – which is already very successful – and cloud and [make it more unified]”.

The foundation of Apex is Dell Technologies Cloud Console, which acts as both a provisioning and management platform for cloud and as a service products. The company claims that customers can deploy workloads, manage multi-cloud resources and keep an eye on costs “with a few clicks”.

Sitting atop this is Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service, an on-premises offering that features elastic block and file storage, which is delivered on an OpEx model and can be dialled up or down as needed via Cloud Console.

Also announced were Dell Technologies Cloud Platform instance-based offerings, which allows customers to start using hybrid cloud from $47 per instance per month. This can also be provisioned and managed from within Cloud Console, based on predefined configurations.

Cloud Console is available in the US as a public preview now, with general availability coming around the world in the first half of 2021. Storage-as-a-Service will also be available from the first half of 2021.

Businesses have been granted access to the first commercially-available photonic quantum computers through the Xanadu Quantum Cloud platform.

This platform allows Xanadu customers and partners to remotely access quantum machines fitted with 8-qubit and 12-qubit processors, with 24-qubit machines set to be available shortly. The company also projects they can double the capacity of these machines every six months.

The advantage of photonic quantum computers over conventional systems, built by the likes of IBM and Google, is that these quantum processors can be operated at room temperature. This means they can integrate into existing fibre optic networks, allowing for much easier scalability and far lower operating costs.

Conventional quantum systems – for example, those which qubits are based on a phosphorus atom – must operate at temperatures of 0.0015 Kelvin (slightly above -273 degrees Celcius).

Because Xanadu’s quantum systems use qubits based on squeezed states, which is a special type of light generated by chip-integrated silicon photonic devices, they can be run at room temperature.

"We believe that photonics offers the most viable approach towards universal fault-tolerant quantum computing with Xanadu's ability to network a large number of quantum processors together,” said Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook.

“We are excited to provide this ecosystem, a world-first for both quantum and classical photonics. Our architecture is new, designed to scale-up like the Internet versus traditional mainframe-like approaches to quantum computing."

The firm’s partners and customers are currently testing solutions on the pre-release iteration of the platform, including academic institutions and startups, as well as national labs. With the launch of the platform, the company is extending its access to a number of new enterprise clients.

Xanadu is the latest company to launch cloud-based access to quantum computing systems for research and development after IBM and AWS launched their own services in 2017 and 2020 respectively.

With IBM Q, the computing giant developed the first commercially available remote access quantum computing service, launching in late 2017 with access to a 20-qubit system.

AWS has only recently launched its Braket quantum cloud service, in partnership with industry leaders including D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti. Rigetti itself, meanwhile, launched its own cloud service in 2018, with users able to operate the system by reserving a Quantum Machine Image (QMI).

The major difference between these companies, and Xanadu’s efforts, is that the field of conventional quantum computing is, for the moment, far more advanced than photonics-based quantum computing. This means enterprise customers, researchers, academics or developers hoping to take advantage of these systems will be offered far more power through established providers than if they bought into Xanadu’s quantum cloud platform.

Indeed, while the Xanadu Quantum Cloud service allows customers to take advantage of maximum 12-qubit quantum processors at the time of launch, researchers have reached ‘quantum supremacy’ with conventional quantum computers.

This is the state at which point quantum computers became more powerful than the most powerful classical computer, and requires machines to be fitted with dozens, if not hundreds, of qubits. For example, Google has claimed its 53-qubit Sycamore quantum processor was able to perform a complex mathematical problem in 200 seconds where it would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.

IBM similarly launched a 53-qubit machine in September last year, accessible through IBM Q, while the American company Honeywell unveiled its own 64-qubit quantum machine in June 2020.

For customers hoping to access quantum machines remotely, much of the attraction may not just be on the size or capacity of the hardware, but the software-based services that these companies add on top.

Xanadu, for example, is also releasing its open source tools on GitHub. These include Strawberry Fields, a cross-platform Python library for simulating and executing programmes on its hardware, as well as PennyLane, a software library for quantum machine learning, quantum computing and quantum chemistry.

AWS Braket, by way of comparison, includes services such as a hardware-agnostic developer framework, which simplifies the process of designing and executing algorithms, as well as pre-built algorithms and tutorials.

Image courtesy of Xanadu

The global public cloud services market totalled $233.4 billion (£176 billion) in 2019, representing a 26% increase year-over-year.

That's according to a new report from IDC, which reveals that the top five public cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com – accounted for more than a third of the worldwide total, growing a combined 35% year over year.

Software as a service (SaaS) remained the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019, an increase of 20% year-over-year. The report predicts SaaS will grow as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as businesses shift to subscription-based models and look to software collaboration tools to facilitate remote working.

"Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic," says Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

"Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to ten years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time."

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) came in second with revenues of $49 billion, up from $35.4 billion in 2018, while platform as a service (PaaS) ranked in third place with revenues of $35.9 billion.

In the combined IaaS and PaaS market, AWS and Microsoft captured more than half of global revenues.

IDC said it expects spending on IaaS and PaaS to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market over the next several years as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.

"Today's economic uncertainty draws fresh attention to the core benefits of IaaS – low financial commitment, flexibility to support business agility, and operational resilience," said Deepak Mohan, research director of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC.

"Cost optimisation and business resilience have emerged as top drivers of IT investment decisions and IaaS offerings are designed to enable both. The COVID-19 disruption has accelerated cloud adoption with both traditional enterprise IT organisations and digital service providers increasing use of IaaS for their technology platforms."

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The US Department of Defence (DoD) has requested permission to reconsider parts of its decision to award its $10 billion cloud migration contract to Microsoft, court filings have revealed.

These concern parts of Microsoft's bid that detail price scenarios and online marketplaces which have been deemed not "technically feasible" by the US Federal Court of Claims.

Work on the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) project was halted in February after AWS launched a legal appeal that the evaluation of the bidding process was flawed; the tech firm also suggested it was subject to unfair political influence.

Federal Claims Judge Patricia Cambell-Smith, who ordered the suspension of Microsoft's work on JEDI, said that AWS was "likely to succeed" in its legal challenge as the DoD had improperly evaluated a Microsoft storage price scenario.

Now lawyers for the US government have asked for "120 days to reconsider certain aspects of the challenged agency decision", according to court filings made late on Thursday.

"DoD does not intend to conduct discussions with offerors or to accept proposal revisions with respect to any aspect of the solicitation other than price scenario," the filing said, according to Reuters.

There are no exact details on what the issue is with the pricing proposed by Microsoft but the company feels it is an easy problem to solve. A spokesman said in a statement to Bloomberg that it supports the decision to reconsider a small number of factors "as it is likely the fastest way to resolve all issues and quickly provide the needed modern technology to people across our armed forces".

Political influence, namely from President Donald Trump, is also a significant part of AWS' legal challenge, but as yet, the courts have not mentioned any action on that element of the case.

"We are pleased that the DoD has acknowledged 'substantial and legitimate' issues that affected the JEDI award decision, and that corrective action is necessary," a spokesman for AWS said to Reuters.

The NHS has migrated two of its national services to the cloud, hoping to cut costs while improving security and efficiency of services.

The NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) and NHS 111 Directory of Services (DoS) are the first major NHS systems to make the migration under the government's cloud-first policy, with both using AWS.

The aim is to cut costs at both services, but there are other benefits, says Neil Bennett, director of services at NHS Digital. "Costs are lowered, reducing pressure on the public purse, there is better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability and availability, to name a few," he said.

The e-RS is a booking service that handles 18 million referrals annually, letting patients from more than 1,100 GP practices choose clinics, hospitals and dates and times for appointments. It's now enabled for booking and managing such appointments via the internet, but that won't be available until later this year when NHS Identity takes over authentication, the NHS said in a statement.

The DoS helps connect patients to the appropriate service for the health concerns, helping relieve pressure on urgent and emergency care. It handles 16 million searches annually.

Migrating such important services without disrupting patient care was key, explained Bennett: "This was a tremendous collaborative effort across many different teams here and with external partners, to migrate such large systems with a minimum of disruption to users, in a reasonably short timescale."

Alongside cutting costs and improving services for patients, the migration to cloud is a key part of the NHS' sustainability strategy, said Ben Tongue, sustainability manager at NHS Digital.

"Large cloud operators like AWS provide significant energy and carbon savings against enterprise and legacy systems," he said. "We are working with AWS to achieve full transparency on the energy use and carbon impact of the contract, so that we can continue to focus on ensuring that our storage systems are as energy efficient as possible, reducing carbon emissions and minimising environmental impact."

Last year, the NHS unveiled a cloud framework to simplify procurement, hoping to help migrate more services as part of the government's cloud-first policy. Patient records stored by EMIS are already making the shift to AWS, while Barts Health NHS Trust is moving its IT estate to the cloud via Capgemini, but research suggests many NHS trusts remain wary of the cloud.

AWS unveiled its plans to aid and accelerate the research of quantum computing at its Re:Invent conference on Monday.

The cloud giant announced three new services for testing, researching and experimenting with the technology.

The first of which was Amazon Braket, a service that enables scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from quantum hardware providers in a single place.

To go with Braket is the AWS Center for Quantum Computing which brings together quantum computing experts from Amazon, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other academic research institutions to collaborate on the research and development of new quantum computing technologies.

And finally Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, which is a program that connects customers with quantum computing experts and consulting partners to develop internal expertise aimed at identifying practical uses of quantum computing. The aim is to accelerate the development of quantum applications with meaningful impact.

There has been significant progress in quantum computing this year, particularly from IBM and Google, with both announcing large investments in the technology. The two made headlines in October after IBM discredited claims made by Google that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had achieved "quantum supremacy".

Quantum computing refers to extremely powerful machines capable of processing massive swathes of data due to a reliance on the theory of quantum mechanics in the way they are constructed. For example, Google suggested its processor was able to perform a complex mathematical problem in 200 seconds, while the world's most-powerful supercomputer would need 10,000 years to complete.

Despite the work of IBM, Google and now AWS, quantum computing is not quite a mainstream technology just yet, but according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, that time is coming.

"I suspect that within 40 or 50 years, many applications will be powered in part using services that run on quantum computers," he wrote in a blog post. "As such, it is best to think of them like a GPU or a math coprocessor. They will not be used in isolation, but will be an important part of a hybrid classical/quantum solution."

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Microsoft is previewing an Azure Dedicated Host' service for enterprises looking to run their Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) on their own physical servers, alongside a set of changes to licensing costs.

The dedicated host service will target enterprise customers which prioritise the security benefits of physical hosting over shared cloud hosting, as well as the isolation of their sensitive information.

These servers will not be shared with any other customer, and businesses which opt for one will retain full control over how services run on the machine.

The Azure Dedicated Host is available in two iterations. The first type is based on the 2.3GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 processor and has a maximum of 64 virtual CPUs available. This can be chosen in a 256GiB and 448GiB RAM configuration, priced at $4.055 per hour and $4.492 per hour respectively.

The second version, meanwhile, is based on the Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor with 72 virtual CPUs available and is priced at $4.039 per hour in a 144GiB configuration.

Moreover, several can be grouped together into larger host groups in a particular region, so businesses can build clusters of physical servers.

The dedicated hosts will be subject to automatic maintenance by default, although administrators can defer host maintenance operations and apply them within a 35-day window. It's possible, during this window, to retain full control over the server maintenance.

This has been announced in conjunction with a set of key changes to the pricing of software licenses, which sees a separation between on-premise outsourcing services and cloud services. Customers will need an additional software assurance' to run Microsoft software on public cloud services from 1 October this year.

Businesses using rival cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) should, therefore, expect the cost of running Microsoft software to increase.

The introduction of Azure Dedicated Host, on the other hand, has also seen Microsoft roll out an Azure Hybrid Benefit licensing option, which allows customers to use software without the need for a software assurance'.

Both Google and Amazon have launched similar dedicated physical services in recent, years, with Azure the latest major cloud provider to follow suit.

Google, for instance, launched sole-tenant nodes in its Compute Engine last June, which allowed businesses to run instances on their own dedicated architecture as opposed to sharing hosting with other customers. These are similar to AWS' EC2 dedicated hosts.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has increased the bug bounty rewards as part of a big security push that has also seen the launch of the Azure Security Lab.

The highest bounty will be doubled to $40,000, while those with access to the lab can attempt a set of scenario-based challenges with a maximum award of $300,000.

The new lab itself is a set of dedicated cloud hosts that offers security researchers a secure space to test against Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) attacks.

Organisations are invited to apply to join the new security-focused community by requesting a Windows or Linux VM, with successful applicants given access to campaigns for targeted scenarios and added incentives.

When you think of cloud computing, more often than not Amazon Web Services (AWS) will come to mind. The software arm of parent company Amazon has dominated the cloud market for the best part of 20 years and offers probably most of the online services you've heard of.

In many ways, AWS is a prime example of the benefits of being first to market. It began by migrating the networks and servers of small businesses to the cloud, capitalizing on demand for virtualization, storage, and edge computing. Such was the speed it moved, most of its rivals are still playing catchup today.

Amazon Web Services: Deployment

AWS has a frankly dizzying array of features, from machine learning testbeds to augmented reality application development and Internet of Things connection kits, but we're interested in servers and networking to support a standard office.

For this, you'll want to deploy a Virtual Private Cloud and, on that, deploy any servers to handle whatever single sign-on, storage and database needs your business has. VPCs are easy to manage if you're already confident with network infrastructure, but to connect your office to your cloud-based network, you'll need a fast internet connection and a firewall router powerful enough to handle a high-throughput VPN connection.

When deploying VMs, you can't just upload an ISO of your choosing and install that - only a rather limited list of Windows and Linux versions are available to install. However, it is possible to upload a VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V or Azure virtual machine image via an Amazon S3 storage bucket or – easier still – via the AWS Server Migration Service and connector software installed on your existing platform.

Amazon Web Services: Pricing

No matter which data centre region you're based in, in the world of AWS, everything is in US dollars, right up until the point at which your final bill is calculated in your choice of currency, based on Amazon's internal exchange rate.

This can be rather annoying, particularly when the pound undergoes major fluctuations due to political events, as it makes your month-to-month costs less consistent than they otherwise would be.

The default option for your AWS deployments is its On-Demand pay-as-you-go pricing. However, as with Microsoft Azure, you can save money if you deploy longer-term reserved instances for any virtual infrastructure that you plan on leaving in operation for an extended period.

Needless to say, the exact costs of any deployments will vary widely depending on your exact needs. To provide a basic example, we use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to cost up a single general-purpose virtual machine running Windows Server on a two-core, 8GB VM with a 'moderate' connection - estimated by various third party tests at around 300Mbit/sec - costs $152.26 per month, plus $36.60 for a 1024GB HDD.

The speed of that network connection makes a great difference to pricing: two cores and 8GB RAM on an up-to-10GB/sec connection cost $282.56 per month. A little less variably, an Active Directory connector starts at $43.92 and a Virtual PrivateCloud at $36.60 per month for a single connection from your office router.

Critically, the estimation tool - unlike Azure's - won't generate a baseline estimate of how much data in and out a business might use every month. You'll have to estimate that manually: at an estimated 100GB per month in and out (only outbound traffic costs anything in this scenario), we'd pay $17.91 per month.

That adds up to $294.71 (242.53) per month, including a small free tier discount. For Windows servers, Microsoft's Azure platform is much more competitive at the moment: 196.68 per month will get you a similar setup.

A lot of that is to do with the cost of licencing Windows, which Microsoft can subsidise for Azure users. Switch that AWS server VM to Linux, and it'll cost $84.92 per month, rather than $152.26.

Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop computers start at $7.25 per month plus $0.17 per hour of active use (or a flat $21 per month) for a Linux desktop system and $7.25 per month and $0.22 per hour (or a flat $25 per month) for a Windows desktop, with one core, 2GB RAM, an 80GB root volume and 10GB of user storage.

AWS can sometimes spring unexpected costs on you, for example by billing hourly for IP addresses that were once attached to a terminated VM. Similarly, leftover key pairs and storage drives associated with virtual machine instances incur charges if they're not manually deleted when an instance is.

Data throughput and the sometimes arcane relationships between services can also add to the cost of AWS deployments, and you might miss out on its free intra-region data transfer fees if you don't set everything up correctly.

In the case of a Virtual Private Cloud, you'll have to create a specific subnet endpoint pointing at the AWS service you're trying to connect to in order to benefit from free throughput: connecting to a public IP address provided by the service will result in data transfer being billed as though it was going to a location on the wider internet, rather than inside AWS.

Like Microsoft and Google, AWS provides a wide range of free services intended to allow administrators to extensively prototype and test cloud-based systems and services for their business, from short-term free trials to always-free services and free 12-month subscriptions for new AWS subscribers.

In the latter category, new users can run up to 750 hours a month of Linux and Windows EC2 Micro virtual machine instances, 5GB of S3 storage, various Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktop and AppSteam always-available desktop application streaming bundles, 750 hours of database services and more.

In the Always Free category, you'll get ten CloudWatch resource monitoring deployments, 62,000 outbound email messages, 10GB of Glacier cold storage, key and licence management, 100GB of hybrid cloud storage, and Amazon's Chime unified communications platform among other bits and pieces.

Amazon Web Services: User interface

The AWS Management Console is a lot nicer to look at and carry out day-to-day management and deployment tasks with than Microsoft's rival Azure platform. There's more white space and fewer immediately visible options, which helps to make it feel less cluttered.

Your most recently visited services are front and centre, and you can open a full list of every single one of AWS' vast catalogue of services. At the top of the page is a search interface, where you can search for services by name or function, so if you search for 'virtual desktop', you'll be directed to WorkSpace and if you search for 'cold storage', S3 Glacier pops up.

Below, a range of wizards and tutorials are available to help you deploy and work with popular services such as virtual machines, virtual servers and hosted web apps. Each service has its own management interface which, again, is a little more comfortable to use than Azure's.

However, there's a distinct design language at work here that you'll have to get used to, particularly if you're primarily familiar with Microsoft's Server and cloud products. We were pleased to find that free-tier eligible options were clearly marked when we used the VM deployment wizard, which also provides helpful guidance when it comes to keeping your deployments secure, such as locking access to specific IP addresses.

Amazon Web Services: AWS vs Azure vs Google

AWS has been the dominant force in cloud computing, largely because it was the first real giant of the space. Next year the cloud-arm of Amazon will celebrate its 20th birthday, but it will do so with more competition than ever before. Three companies now sit at the top of the cloud market – comfortably – with the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure fighting for market share with AWS.

Differentiation is one of the main reasons for this threesome. Both the Google and Microsoft platforms are less complex than AWS; This is in terms of tiered options for features and cost. AWS does, however, offer a well-designed interface that is effective at breaking down the different user options.

Another area AWS does well is its 'quote generator' and cost management tools which allow customers to keep on top of what they're using and avoid running up unexpected fees and costs. It is important to note that data throughput costs are not bundled in here, so they will have to remember to include that in estimates.

Part of the issue here is that AWS has such a breadth of features – one can easily get lost and confused in its ecosystem. But that is also its main reason for being the number one company. That wide range of services – far more than its competitors – is reliable, flexible, and immensely cost-effective. The downside is that you might need a dedicated expert to manage your AWS services – either staffed or freelance – if you don't have the required skill sets in your organization.

Microsoft's Azure isn't much easier to use, in fairness. Users find its management interface that little bit more familiar however as it's very much in the style of Windows. The pricing for Windows-based services is also more affordable than AWS, which essentially makes it slightly office infrastructure migrations.

Is it worth it?

For a long while the answer to this question was a resounding yes, but Microsoft and Google have built out their cloud products quite significantly over the last few years, finding areas that AWS doesn't cover. Now, with the mass adoption of AI, AWS is not the defacto best anymore.

Complexity is also still an issue for AWS. It has indeed a wide array of products and services, far more than the competition, but that can be confusing and ultimately off-putting. However, AWS is, and has largely been, the market-leading company in the cloud space, and for good reason – it simply offers the most.

Amazon Web Services review: Requirements

1. Fast, ideally symmetric, internet connection
2. Powerful firewall router with VPN support

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew by 31.3% in 2018, the latest research from Gartner has revealed, rising from $24.7 billion in 2017 to $32.4 billion.

According to the research firm, Amazon continued to lead from the front last year, retaining its status as the number one vendor in the IaaS market, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM.

In fact, the top five vendors increased their collective dominance, accounting for almost 77% of the worldwide market compared to less than 73% back in 2017.

"Despite strong growth across the board, the cloud market's consolidation favours the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share," commented Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. "This is an indication that scalability matters when it comes to the public cloud IaaS business.

"Only those providers who invest capital expenditure in building out data centres at scale across multiple regions will succeed and continue to capture market share. Offering rich feature functionality across the cloud technology stack will be the ticket to success, as well."

Gartner added that market consolidation will continue through 2019, driven by the continued high rate of growth for the top providers. From 2017 to 2018, these big-name vendors experienced aggregate growth of 39% compared with 11% for all other providers for the period.

"Consolidation will occur as organisations and developers look for standardised, broadly supported platforms for developing and hosting cloud applications," Nag said.

Accounting for almost half the global IaaS market alone, market leader Amazon racked up an estimated $15.5 billion of revenue in 2018, up 27% from the previous year, as it continues to "aggressively" expand into new IT markets via new services, acquisitions and growth of its core cloud business.

For the second-placed Microsoft, which delivers its IaaS capabilities via its Azure offering, revenue surpassed $5 billion last year, up from the $3.1 billion recorded in 2017.

Elsewhere, China's dominant IaaS provider Alibaba Cloud recorded the strongest growth out of the big five vendors, expanding by 92.6% in 2018. Having built up an ecosystem of MSPs and independent software vendors, its success has been driven by aggressive R&D investment in its portfolio of offerings, with the firm also boasting the financial capacity to continue this trend and invest in global expansion.

Google placed in the fourth spot, growing 60.2% in revenue from 2017, with Gartner suggesting its cloud offering is "something to keep an eye on" thanks to its new leadership focus on customers and the enterprise.

"As the cloud business continues to gather momentum and hyperscale cloud providers consolidate the market, product managers at cloud MSPs must look at other ways to differentiate, such as focusing on vertical industries and getting certified in the hyperscale cloud provider partner programmes in order to drive revenue," Nag commented.

The purchase, roll-out and maintenance of servers for your business's Microsoft-based network can be prohibitive. But now, if you have a fast enough internet connection, you can deploy Active Directory, file servers, database servers and more in the cloud, and Microsoft's Azure platform provides a clear and cost-effective way to move server and network infrastructure online.

Microsoft's Azure cloud platform is a clear favourite for a company that would otherwise use local Windows Server and Active Directory systems to support Windows PCs for staff. While it's by no means a closed shop - a wide range of Linux distributions are also supported on Azure - Microsoft's cloud service provides ready integration with your local network and the company's desktop products.

There are potential disadvantages to using cloud infrastructure for your business: you'll never have any kind of physical access to or control over your systems and you're at the mercy of your host's outages. But Azure provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee for its virtual machines and you won't be responsible for maintaining and updating your hardware and licenses manually, which can save on both capital expenditure and time for your IT staff.

You can choose where your Azure servers are hosted, ensuring, for example, that relevant customer data is kept within the same geographic region as those customers and allowing you to get the best possible connection speeds by ensuring that you're not sending data halfway around the world.

Microsoft Azure: Deployment

There are almost unlimited potential uses for cloud computing and storage, which can be a barrier to entry in and of itself: it's important to work out what's most convenient and cost-effective to keep local and what would be most easily deployed in the cloud.

Active Directory, Windows Server VM and storage options can be used to roll out Infrastructure as a Service for your business on an Azure private virtual network. To make good use of such a setup, you'll need a fast - and ideally symmetric - internet connection and a reasonably powerful firewall router capable of handling a VPN connection between your local network and the Azure cloud.

There are also plenty of options to cover your public-facing networking needs, from Ubuntu Server images already configured with Apache for web hosting to web app development platforms that make it easy to test and roll out apps in Java, Python, Node.js and more.

Secure cloud storage is available at a range of costs and access tiers (hot, cool and archive), from managed disks for your virtual machines to file shares and scalable containers for unstructured data.

Microsoft Azure: Pricing

Opting for cloud services rather than physical infrastructure massively reduces your business's initial outlay on hardware and licences, although you'll have a higher monthly operational expenditure due to subscription fees and - potentially - support costs, either directly via an Azure support plan or from a specialist IT support firm if you don't have in-house expertise.

Pricing for complex cloud services is by its nature highly variable: one company's needs won't be the same as the next, even if both fall within the SMB bracket.

The simplest subscriptions for most services are on a pay-as-you-go basis, with exact pricing depending on the product specification you opt for, such as virtual machine configuration or quantity of storage, but cost-saving reserved instances - for which you pay an upfront flat rate for a fixed period - are also available.

You'll need to work out individual pricing based on what systems and infrastructure you need, and we strongly recommend using both Azure's estimate calculator before you buy and its cost tracking tools afterwards to make sure you're getting good value for your money. We're fans of Azure's costing tools, which are somewhat easier to work with than AWS's calculator.

On PAYG, a general-purpose VM with 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB of memory, running Windows Server will cost 150.43 per month. A 1024GB HDD to go with that costs 33.58 per month, although a wide variety of larger and smaller HDD and SSD disk options are available. Storage transactions - reads and writes, typically billed in 4MB blocks - are an additional cost, priced at 37.27 per 100,000 transaction units. A variety of snapshotting and backup options for your disks are available at further cost, depending on how much data you need to back up at any given point.

A virtual network is free, but you'll have to pay for inbound and outbound data transfer - that currently works out at 75p per 100GB. Azure Active Directory Basic costs 11.18 monthly plus 75p per user, per month and an extra 10.43 per ten users if you want multi-factor authentication.

This very basic setup works out at 196.68 per month. While making exact comparisons is challenging due to differing default configurations and terminology, an equivalent Amazon AWS estimate for a Windows Server VM, Active Directory services, Virtual Private Cloud and data throughput came to $276.27 (248.25) a month, making Azure a slightly better deal for this particular scenario.

In the case of Windows Server and other Microsoft licenced products, software license fees are included in the cost of running the deployment, but the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server means that you can use any physical Windows Server licences you already have to reduce the cost of operating your cloud servers.

Microsoft is currently competing heavily against cloud-dominating rival AWS, with a price match promise for comparable services and a promise to undercut Amazon on Windows and Microsoft SQL databases and servers. There are also plenty of trial options to help you see whether Azure is the platform for you and, Microsoft clearly hopes, get you sufficiently invested.

When you sign up, you get 150 credit to spend on anything you like within 30 days, plus 12 months of basic services for free, including Linux or Windows virtual machines and a pair of 64GB SSDs to use with them, 5GB apiece of blob (unstructured data) and file storage, SQL and Azure Cosmos databases and enough bandwidth in and out of Microsoft's data centres - 15GB - to take advantage of all that.

Azure's always-free services include entry-level cloud apps, some Active Directory services, Azure Kubernetes Service container management and deployment, developer tools and free, unlimited private code repositories, push notification sending, 50 virtual networks and more.

Microsoft Azure: User interface

Azure has departed from its Microsoft Server inspired interface choices in recent years, in favour of a more broadly accessible user interface design language that feels less cluttered than that of rivals Google and AWS. The Azure portal home screen provides an overview of the resources you currently have in use, links to monitoring and security tools and a quick access list of the most popular Azure services - a full, searchable list can be reached via the All services tab in the left-hand menu pane.

This pane also gives you access to all categories of Azure services, from your storage server and virtual machine lists to cost management and analysis tools to help you ensure that you're not burning more money than you should be.

While it's a bit of an acquired taste, the interface does an admirable job of making a mind-boggling array of services accessible and easily deployable within a few clicks. You can also create multiple, highly customisable Dashboard displays to track the status of your various hosted systems and services.

When it comes to virtual machine installations, like AWS, Azure expects you stick to using the operating system install images provided, though you can migrate existing on-premises VMs to Azure, assuming your images meet certain compatibility criteria. If you need greater flexibility on this front, such as the ability to upload and install operating systems from your own ISO images, you'll have to use a more VM-focused cloud services provider such as Vultr, but be aware that this will also involve more manual configuration in general.

Microsoft Azure: Verdict

There's a lot of competition in cloud services, but Microsoft is being particularly aggressive when it comes to undercutting Amazon and Google, which makes it a very good option for small businesses right now. A variety of reserved and pay-as-you-go pricing options are available, with enough free credit and services to support a proof-of-concept project before you commit fully.

If you're looking to deploy cloud-based infrastructure to connect your Windows systems, Azure probably represents one of the easiest routes to doing that, although you'll still need traditional Windows network and server management expertise to get everything set up: this isn't a ready-rolled and fully configured solution. However, if you're looking to deploy Microsoft products in the cloud, Azure is exactly the right tool for the job.

Azure is a competitively priced and relatively easy-to-manage platform for cloud-based office network deployments and is a particularly good choice for Windows Server users.

Nvidia has launched an edge computing platform to give businesses a greater swathe of tools to perform heavier processing workloads from data derived from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

By establishing a multitude of edge servers across the world, the chip manufacturer is hoping that firms in industries like healthcare and manufacturing can process their data instantaneously to improve business operations.

This is in light of an expected explosion in IoT devices within the next few years, and the data the monumental amount of data the ecosystem will produce.

Nvidia's EGX platform is touted as being able to perceive, understand and act in real-time on continuous data streaming between 5G base stations, warehouses, retail stores, factories, and other locations.

"Enterprises demand more powerful computing at the edge to process their oceans of raw data - streaming in from countless interactions with customers and facilities - to make rapid, AI-enhanced decisions that can drive their business," said Bob Pette, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA.

"A scalable platform like NVIDIA EGX allows them to easily deploy systems to meet their needs on premises, in the cloud or both."

The device at the heart of Nvidia's new edge servers is the company's Jetson Nano, a small module that can enable the development of low-power AI systems. Nvidia says this device can provide 500 billion operations per second using just a few watts of power, for tasks like image recognition.

As part of the project, Nvidia has also teamed up with Red Hat to integrate and optimise its Edge Stack software with OpenShift, a container application platform. Mellanox and Cisco's security, networking and storage technologies have also fed into the edge platform.

It will also be offered through major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure platform, with users able to remotely manage their Nvidia Edge Stack service.

Nvidia's AI research has spanned a number of industries, including healthcare, with the firm previously announcing a partnership with King's College London to build an AI platform to automate radiology.

Nvidia's EGX platform has already been at the heart of developing a number of healthcare-related software packages, the company says, as well as applications suitable for large retail chains and organisations involved in smart city development.

Equinix has bought Switch Datacenters' AMS1 data centre business in Amsterdam in a deal worth €30 million.

The data centre provider already owns ten data centres in the Netherlands, with eight of these in Amsterdam itself. This newest addition will further boost Equinix’s hold on the Dutch market and increasing its worldwide users to 3.9 billion.

The site not only has the capacity for an additional 700 cabinets, it's also located in a place that will enable it to expand to an adjacent building with space for another 1,300 cabinets.

"The Netherlands and especially the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area is a top destination for global businesses looking to expand into Europe,” said Peter van Bergel CEO of AMS-IX, a long-standing customer and partner of Equinix.

“There is access to a highly educated and multilingual workforce and a state-of-the art technology infrastructure to meet the digital needs of these businesses.”

He added that businesses are demanding more data centre capacity and interconnectivity and through the purchase, Equinix will be able to address this, while AMS-IX can continue to contribute to the landscape.

Equinix’s AM11 data centre will interconnect with its AM7 data centre, providing a wealth of business services to both existing AMS-IX customers and Equinix clients.

"Amsterdam is a key interconnection point for Europe, with leading enterprises and cloud service providers making it a primary hub for IT infrastructure,” Eugene Bergen, EMEA president at Equinix.

“Adding interconnection capacity in this market enables local and international customers to leverage Platform Equinix to meet their changing business needs. Whether that is to connect to networks, clouds, or content and digital media providers, Equinix is the place to be."

Cloud Run, Google Cloud's latest serverless compute platform, has entered a beta phase and aims to combine the flexibility and portability of containers with the agility of serverless.

Revealed at Google Cloud Next 2019 in San Francisco, the Cloud Run environment will let developers build apps on a hybrid platform that also promises to be stateless, erasing the issue of vendor lock-in that's become a cause of concern for many.

With a serverless environment, developers need not worry about configuring the underlying infrastructure and how much resources they will need to power their applications. Cloud Run uses HTTP-driven containers and fully manages all the execution needs of the build, automatically scaling resources up or down within seconds, meaning that you'll only pay for the resources that you need.

"What's beautiful about the system is that you're paying by the hundred-millisecond for what you use only and it scales up horizontally to many, many thousands of cores in just a few seconds," said Oren Teich, director product management at Google Cloud.

It's already and being deployed by some of the world's biggest firms. Veolia, the waste management giant praises the ease and cost-effectiveness of the new environment.

"Cloud Run removes the barriers of managed platforms by giving us the freedom to run our custom workloads at lower cost on a fast, scalable, and fully managed infrastructure," said Hervé Dumas, group CTO at Veolia. "Our development team benefits from a great developer experience without limits and without having to worry about anything."

The Cloud Run environment can be used on its own or integrated with your company's existing Google Kubernetes Engine clusters; merging the two will also offer you some specific enhancements to your stack. This includes the option to run workloads side by side within the same cluster.

Using Cloud Run on Kubernetes grants access to Google's other cloud products such as Custom Machine Types on its Compute Engine networks, which provides users with the ability to create scalable virtual machines tailored for each process that are configurable for optimal pricing.

Airbus Aerial, the aerospace company's satellite imagery arm is already using Cloud Run on Kubernetes to process and stream aerial images.

"With Cloud Run on GKE, we are able to run lots of compute operations for processing and streaming cloud-optimized aerial images into web maps without worrying about library dependencies, auto-scaling or latency issues," said Madhav Desetty, chief software architect at Airbus Aerial.

Cloud Run is also based on Google's Knative open API which lets users run workloads on Google Cloud Platform, on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster or on a company's own self-managed Kubernetes cluster. The underlying Knative API makes it easier for businesses to start on Cloud Run and then move to Cloud Run on GKE later on.

There are some operational constraints to Cloud Run which Teich detailed in a press conference. It runs at a maximum of 1Gb memory size instance, and you get a single core per instance, so it will scale horizontally rather than vertically. Each process must also respond to an HTTP 1.1 request in a maximum time of 15 minutes.

Huawei has extended its reach across Eurasia, renting 500 racks in data centres across Russia to localise their services for the market. The racks are residing in facilities owned by 3Data, IXcellerate and DataPro, according to Russian news site Kommersant.

Russia has pretty extreme data sovereignty laws, stipulating that any information held by Russian companies must be stored within the country and this meant companies such as Huawei couldn’t really serve customers in the country.

Huawei supposedly wants to use its latest rentals to support a range of its services, including enabling Russians to make use of its Huawei Pay payment system and the development of services for third parties.

Although it already has some space in data centres in the country, this is a significant step forward for Huawei. The company apparently started moving some of its infrastructure into Russia last year, with 80 racks already in use, but this is a major step forward. At the end of last year, Kommersant said Huawei had 200 servers up and running in the country, but this will rise to 500 by the end of the year.

“We have already entered into a licensing agreement with Microsoft, we are working on solutions with other vendors to provide software from our cloud, and we are also considering partnerships with operators in order to give them the opportunity to resell our cloud,” said Arthur Pärn, director of solutions for Huawei Cloud in Russia.

It’s also a pretty big snub of the US, which is trying to ban Chinese firms such as Huawei from selling its services in the country. Although Russia and the US share a pretty turbulent relationship, this move by Huawei could tighten relations between China and Russia.

Many organisations are moving to the cloud, but some do not want to support the hegemony that is AWS and Microsoft Azure (and to a lesser extent Google Cloud Platform). A good alternative is OpenStack, but what is it and what is the technology and components behind this cloud?

OpenStack is an open source cloud-based IaaS operating system that manages huge pools of compute, storage, and networking resources across a datacentre. These pools are controlled via a dashboard that gives administrators control while supporting users in the provision of resources via a web interface. It started as a joint project between RackSpace and NASA in 2010.

The cloud technology is supported by a number of software development companies and hosting providers and has a community of thousands of individuals contributing code. OpenStack is operated by the OpenStack Foundation, which looks after the development of the cloud software as well as overseeing the community that has developed around it.

Since its formation in 2010, the cloud technology has been revised roughly every six months. The latest release of OpenStack is known as Train. Ussuri is in the development stage and is set to follow in May this year.

What does it do?

OpenStack is much like AWS and Azure in that it enables users to use virtual machines and instances and create private and public clouds.

The platform contains individual projects and services dedicated to specific functions within the ecosystem.

There are nine core functions:

Nova

This manages the computing resources of an OpenStack cloud. With this function, users can create instances, resize them, and manage where they are located within the cloud.

Neutron

This function creates virtual networks in the cloud as well as routers, subnets, firewalls, load balancers, et cetera.

Glance

This maintains and manages server images for a cloud. OpenStack compatible images can also be uploaded using this function with images stored either locally or on object storage.

Keystone

This is the authentication and authorisation component built into each OpenStack cloud. The function is usually the first component to be installed as it looks after project creation.

Cinder

This function provides an OpenStack cloud with Block Storage as a Service. This is done by virtualising pools of block storage devices while providing users with a self-service API to request and consume those resources without them needing to know where storage is actually deployed.

Swift

While Cinder provides Block Storage as a Service, Swift offers Object Storage as a Service to an OpenStack cloud. This is provided as a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store.

Horizon

This is a function that provides a web-based graphical overview of what is happening in an OpenStack cloud as well as a means of managing the cloud via this dashboard.

Ceilometer

This is the telemetry function which keeps track of what components a user uses in order to make billing easier.

Heat

This orchestration function records prerequisites of a cloud application in a file in order to define what resources are essential for that application.

Beyond these core functions are other components that may be of use to organisations wishing to deploy OpenStack, such as identity management and messaging as a service, to name a few.

OpenStack pros and cons

There are no upfront costs with OpenStack as it’s available freely as open source software. Considering its key functions and components, as a platform it’s comprehensive and production-ready for enterprises wishing to build in either the public or private cloud.

OpenStack comes with a great deal of flexibility. However to fully capitalise on all of the moving parts, skilled engineers are required who understand its inner workings. Otherwise, the platform can be a dangerous foundation on which to build.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that knowledge is required not only for the initial build, but also for long-term maintenance. Organisations need to decide whether building their own applications is something that will provide a strong enough return on investment to justify using OpenStack in the first place. For many organisations, this level of specialisation and the additional cost is brings may be unnecessary.

The security of open source operating systems can also be called into question. Vulnerabilities in code continue to be uncovered by the OpenStack community, but patching projects are in place. The OpenStack Security Project allows the OpenStack community to share and report vulnerabilities, pushing them into the fix-queue. Quick-fixes are a rare occurrence, however.

AWS has unveiled five new EC2 bare metal instances to run high-intensity workloads, such as performance analysis, specialised applications and legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments.

The new instances - m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal - have all been designed to run virtualisation secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. Each offers its own set of resources, with the m5 variations offering 384 GiB memory, the r5 options 768 GiB ( both up to 3.1GHz all-core turbo power) and z1 with 384 GiB, but with up to 4GHz power across 48 logical processors.

AWS has specified that the different levels of bare metal instances have been created for different scenarios. For example, the m5 instances will be useful for web and application servers, as well as back-end servers for enterprise applications and gaming servers. While the r5 models are best suited to high-performance database applications and real-time analytics.

The company’s z1d are best used for electronic design automation, gaming and relational database workloads because of their high compute and memory offerings.

Any workloads using AWS’s bare metal instances can still take advantage of the cloud firm’s suite of cloud services, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), just with more control over the hardware.

AWS is offering the bare metal instances on a number of different plans, including on-demand, as reserved instances on a year, 3-year and convertible plans or as spot instances. They’re available now across the company’s US East, US West, Europe and Asia Pacific regions.

Lenovo has launched TruScale Infrastructure Services, a subscription service for businesses to use and pay for data centre infrastructure and associated hardware without paying upfront.

It's particularly well-suited to businesses that don't have the capital to keep paying out for infrastructure as their needs scale up or don't have the IT resources to procure and manage systems.

TruScale Infrastructure Services covers the entire hardware installation, deployment, management, maintenance and removal processes, as well as the equipment infrastructure they need to run everything.

Businesses essentially loan the resources they need to power their workloads and services via a consumption-based model, so there aren't any nasty surprises, even if the company needs to rapidly scale.

“Lenovo’s TruScale as-a-Service offering is truly revolutionary, changing how IT departments procure and refresh their data center infrastructure," said Laura Laltrello, vice president and general manager of services at Lenovo Data Center Group. "With our subscription-based model, customers pay for what they use, eliminating upfront capital purchase risk.”

“Our offering can be applied to any configuration that meets the customer’s needs – whether storage-rich, server-heavy, hyperconverged or high-performance compute – and can be scaled as business dictates.”

Customers can also view their data consumption in real time via a centralised portal so they can keep on top of their predicted costs. They're also supported by a Customer Success Manager that will offer greater insights into usage and fix any problems they may come across.

OThe UK cloud market is growing faster than ever, with vendor revenues swelling by 32% in 2018, passing $250 billion for the first time, according to Synergy Research's latest figures.

The most accelerated growth happened in the IaaS and PaaS sub-sectors, with 50% growth reported apiece in just 12 months.

Hybrid cloud management software grew by 41% and enterprise SaaS and public cloud infrastructure both increased by 30%. Hosted private cloud infrastructure services weren't far behind with 29% growth.

"In 2018 cloud started to dominate IT spending in some areas, sucking up potential growth opportunities for non-cloud technologies and services," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.

During 2018, there was a distinct increase on cloud infrastructure spend, overtaking the amount invested in hardware and software on both public and private clouds for the first time. However, total spend on hardware and software wasn't low and this surpassed $100 billion, evenly split between public and private cloud environments.

Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, Dell EMC, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, HPE, Adobe, and VMware revenues accounted for half of all cloud-related income.

Cloud service providers, in particular, had a very good year, generating more than $150 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services and enterprise SaaS via applications covering search, social networking, email, e-commerce, gaming and mobile apps.

"Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for both cloud service providers and technology vendors and our latest forecasts show that while market growth rates will inevitably erode due to the sheer scale of the numbers, the overall market will double in size in under four years," Dinsdale added.

Azure and Office 365 users were unable to login to their accounts yesterday due to issues with Microsoft's multi-factor authentication (MFA) service.

From 4.39am on Monday until later that evening users in the UK and Western Europe, as well as pockets around the world, were unable to access their Office 365 accounts.

Azure services such as Azure Active Directory was also closed off to users whose organisations enforced mandatory MFA.

Although Microsoft says its services are now operating as normal, this incident has angered organisations trying to convince their employees of MFA's benefits, as well as those who have had to contend with similar outages in recent months.

The cause, according to Azure's status history, lied with requests from MFA servers, sent to a European-based database, reaching operation threshold, which in turn caused latency and timeouts.

Attempts to reroute traffic through North America ended in failure, and caused a secondary issue when servers become unhealthy and traffic was throttled to handle increased demand.

"Engineers deployed a hotfix which eliminated the connection between Azure Identity Multi-Factor Authentication Service and a backend service. Secondly, engineers cycled impacted servers which allowed authentication requests to succeed," Microsoft wrote.

"Engineers will continue to investigate to establish the full root cause and prevent future occurrences."

The firm says it will publish a full analysis of the outage within the next couple of days.

Error messages that users received upon trying to access their Office 365 and Azure accounts

Monday's issues are the latest in a string of prominent Microsoft Azure and Office 365 outages customers have had to suffer in recent months, with the previous incident occurring just three weeks ago.

The days-long outage, which struck in late October, left predominately UK users unable to login to Office 365 due to additional login prompts appearing after user credentials had already been entered.

Another global outage in September affected Azure and Office 365 users across the world after a "severe weather event" knocked one of Microsoft's San Antonio-based servers offline.

"With less than a month between disruptions, incidents like today's Azure multi-factor authentication issue pose serious productivity risks for those sticking to a software-as-a-service monoculture," said Mimecast's cyber resilience expert Pete Banham.

"With huge operational dependency on the Microsoft environment, no organisation should trust a single cloud supplier without an independent cyber resilience and continuity plan to keep connected and productive during unplanned, and planned, email outages.

"Every minute of an email outage could costs businesses hundreds and thousands of pounds. Without the ability to securely log in, knowledge worker employees are unable to do their jobs."

IT Pro approached Microsoft for comment.

VMware's attempt to bring the benefits of the 'as-a-service' model to on-premise customers has officially been launched as an open beta at VMworld Europe in Barcelona.

First announced at VMworld in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Project Dimension is designed to leverage VMware's software-defined data centre portfolio to deliver a radically simplified deployment, management and operations experience to organisations who may have been devoid of some of the benefits of cloud-style operating models thanks to their desire to keep their infrastructure on-premise.

The offering will make use of hyper-converged appliances from VMware's parent company Dell EMC, as well as HCI hardware from market challengers Lenovo. This hardware, VMware says, will be 'zero touch', configured at the factory to the customer's specifications and self-connecting and self-configuring once plugged in in the customer's data centre.

"If you look at something like the hyper-converged systems that we have, they're typically redundant," said VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. "You have three or four servers in there, so were able to deal with some [failures] in that way. Immediately what we need to be able to do is either predict that failure, or when that failure's occurring, to alert the supply chain, or alert the vendor in a way that makes good sense."

These appliances will run VMware's Cloud Foundation software (which has just been updated to version 3.5) combining vSphere compute management, vSAN storage virtualisation and NSX SD-WAN for networking.

This is combined with VMware's Hybrid Cloud Control Plane, which is usually part of Dell's SaaS offering. Infrastructure delivered as part of Project Dimension will be fully managed by VMware, including maintenance, troubleshooting, patch application and firmware updates.

According to O'Farrell, the main focus area for this offering is edge computing - a growing trend that Dell EMC and VMware have both been making a concerted effort to capitalise on in recent years.

"We are a very pragmatic company based on what do the customers want to do. So when we do something like this, it's because we're hearing customers saying 'I want to do something like this'," he told reporters at the conference.

VMware Blockchain goes into Beta

One of the other key announcements from the show was the official launch of VMware's blockchain product, previously teased as 'Project Concord'. First seen earlier this year as an open-source research project under the Apache 2.0 license, VMware Blockchain has been officially unveiled and launched into beta release.

Developed in partnership with parent company Dell, as well as Deloitte and WWT, the product is designed to allow "enterprise consortiums" to deploy fully-permissioned blockchain-based applications without having to rely on public blockchains like Ethereum.

The product will be delivered as a managed SaaS platform and will be integrated with VMware's existing tools and management products. It will also be supported on IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, as well as on-prem VMware installations and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Western Digital has revealed its OpenFlex architecture, designed to transform the data centre into a fully scalable infrastructure to power big data and fast data workloads.

OpenFlex combines fabric-attached disk and flash devices, an API to manage data centre resources and an entire network of hardware and software providers to support it on its open standards mission.

Western Digital developed OpenFlex as part of its mission to deliver a complete foundation for open, software composable infrastructure (SCI) – the hope being that OpenFlex will encourage the creation of a community around its own APIs.

Not only will it help data centre operators to scale their resources using SCI, but end-users will be able to make better use of their installed hardware and software, significantly cutting the total cost of ownership and upfront cost of managing workloads, according to the company.

“Data centers need a more efficient approach to satisfying the needs of complex and dynamic applications and data workflows,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Data Center Systems at Western Digital.

“To ensure flexibility, data center operators also need open solutions that enable them to select from best-in-class, vendor neutral options. Western Digital’s OpenFlex architecture and products, and our commitment to the open community help satisfy these needs, while delivering significant improvements in cost and agility."

The new OpenFlex family of products includes the F3000 flash drive, E3000 Enclosure for housing these drives, and the larger D3000 Fabric device.

The company's Kingfish API works closely alongside the OpenFlex infrastructure, with its purpose to bring together flash and disk pools with the software composable infrastructure.

Companies involved in Western Digital's OpenFlex foundation project include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Apache Mesos, Broadcom, Ceph, DriveScale, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inspur, Kaminario, Kubernetes, Marvell Technology Group, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft SQL Server, Percona, and Super Micro Computer.

“Western Digital’s OpenFlex architecture provides flexible composability that maximizes resource utilization in a highly scalable and flexible way, as well as eliminates the problems of ‘stranded storage’," IDC's Ashish Nadkarni, group VP of Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies said. "In addition, its openness eliminates the ‘locked in’ barrier faced by proprietary infrastructures and paves the way for broader ecosystem engagement.”

Oracle's co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison has hit back at reports that Amazon is planning to stop using its services by claiming it would struggle without them.

Speaking at a company event in Redwood Shores, California, Ellison said it will be difficult for Amazon to rely exclusively on its own database technologies.

"They think of themselves as a competitor, so it's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle," he said. "They've had 10 years to get off Oracle and they're still on Oracle. It's not going to be easy to use their own tech. It's not going to be cost-effective."

Ellison referred to a CNBC report from last week that suggested Amazon is looking to stop using Oracle's technology by 2020. He also gave examples of other high profile companies that have tried and failed to drop Oracle services.

"They've got a goal to get off by 2020," he said. "Salesforce couldn't do it. SAP couldn't do it. I don't think they can do it. We'll see."

Ellison's comments are latest in an ongoing spat between the two tech giants, who both provide cloud infrastructure and database systems. The Oracle boss said its software is stronger than Amazon's offerings, which include the Aurora database and Redshift data warehouse. He said no database is as easy to use as Oracle's.

Last week an Oracle spokesperson said that Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its Oracle technology to run its business and that Amazon had spent another $60 million on database and data analytics software from Oracle.

Some may be surprised to learn that Amazon isn't solely reliant on its own AWS for its infrastructure needs, there are some parts of Amazon's e-commerce systems, which were set up prior to the launch of AWS, that still heavily use Oracle databases.

Starbucks has struck a deal with Chinese cloud giant Alibaba to boost the coffee company's digital and physical presence in China.

The Seattle coffee chain will use all of Alibaba's properties, including delivery platform Ele.me and supermarket chain Hema, to expand delivery services throughout China, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson told CNBC.

"We're going to integrate a Starbucks virtual store into all of the Alibaba Group properties," said Johnson. "This means that a customer that uses Alipay or Taobao or Tmall or Hema has an integrated Starbucks virtual store similar to the mobile app embedded right into that experience. That opens up 500 million or more active users of those apps that will have access to Starbucks."

The Seattle company mostly uses Azure for its cloud infrastructure in the US, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is even a Starbucks board member. But it's opted for a partnership with Alibaba, rather than Azure, or the top cloud company AWS, in China as Alibaba have a broader range of services in the country that Starbucks can utilise.

Starbucks will also use Ele.me, a food delivery platform that Alibaba acquired earlier in the year and open 150 stores in Shanghai and Beijing before expanding delivery to 2,000 stores in 30 other Chinese cities before the end of 2018.

The coffee company also plans to build up to 600 "Starbucks Delivery Kitchens" in Hema's supermarkets, that will service delivery orders for surrounding areas over the next seven years.

China is one of Starbucks biggest markets and its dominance has come under attack from Chinese startup Luckin Coffee, who have rapidly grown from two stores in January to 800 branches across the country.

Starbucks has been criticized for being slow to adapt to digital trends in China, but its partnership with Alibaba will see it pilot delivery services as soon as next month.

Picture: Shutterstock

Alphabet beat analyst expectations to deliver huge revenue yesterday, despite its earnings being hit with a $5 billion fine from the EU.

Google's parent company raked in $32.7 billion in revenue in the quarter ending June 2018, it revealed yesterday, up 26% year-on-year.

However, profit fell by a third to $3.2 billion after accounting for the EU's $5 billion penalty levied against Google for its Android antitrust practices, which Google plans to appeal.

But it still saw Google's advertising revenues grow to $28 billion, from $22 billion last year, and Google-owned subsidiaries brought in $23 billion.

"Our investments are driving great experiences for users, strong results for advertisers, and new business opportunities for Google and Alphabet," said Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google.

CEO Sundar Pichai pointed to Google Cloud Platform and YouTube as growth drivers, saying on a call with analysts that "our cloud business has great momentum", and that the firm is "investing for the long run".

When asked about the impact of the Android ruling, Pichai said: "We are analysing the decision. We will always take a constructive approach. We'll appeal the Commission's decision and take the due process available to us.

"But, we are also looking forward to finding a solution above all that preserves the enormous benefits of Android to users. I'm confident that we can find a way to make sure Android is available at scale to users, everyone."

While the firm's 'Other Bets' category - including investment arm GV and self-driving car division Waymo - recorded $145 million revenue, it made a $732 million loss, higher than last year's corresponding $633 million loss.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) like most business technology phrases, refers to online services that offer established networks, servers and datacentre infrastructures for companies that don't want the hassle of setting up their own.

The IaaS market is large, with the usual big tech names offering the best options, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Customers can use IaaS as the base layer of compute, storage and networking to suit their needs, spinning up anything from a single system server instance to thousands of virtual servers, as and when the business requires them.

This is generally a more efficient way to bring in computing resources and reduces the effort and cost of investing in your own hardware. Each resource is offered as a separate component and only needs to be rented out for as long as it is useful.

A company's IT department is free to focus on using technology to improve business operations, as opposed to worrying about purchasing, configuring and maintaining servers.

Typical business uses of IaaS include testing and development, website hosting, storage, backup and recovery systems, high-performance computing and big data analysis.

These are just some of the benefits of IaaS.

What are the core strengths of IaaS?

One of the major strengths of IaaS is its flexibility. Companies need only pay for the resources they actually use, with on-demand instances allowing business to rent by the hour or even the minute. This means companies can quickly add capacity at times of peak demand, without having to waste money on expensive server equipment of their own that will sit redundant during normal levels of demand.

Companies can often make savings by reserving a set amount of computing instances for a period of time, when they know they’ll have a constant demand for virtual servers.

And in the case of AMS, it gives businesses the option to pay for “Spot Instances” where a business bids for unused capacity in Amazon’s datacentres. This allows companies to be relatively flexible about when their applications run, for example with work on a long-term scientific research project, to take advantage of cheaper prices during quiet periods.

Continuing with the theme of flexibility and the pursuit of cost-effective IT, there are plenty of IaaS providers offering different tiers of service. Different cloud resources can be allocated and billed depending on a business' computing needs and the type of applications they wish to run on cloud servers.

Prices can vary enormously between these different tiers. Microsoft Azure’s most basic general computing tier, A0, offers a single processor core, 0.75GB of RAM and 20GB of storage for around £9 per month (prices correct at the time of publication). At the top end, the D14 plan with 16 cores, 112GB of RAM and 800GB of storage will cost £1,240 per month. It’s therefore critical that businesses tailor compute power to their needs.

General purpose computing power – which is suitable for testing or applications that don’t require advanced tools such as load balancing or automatic scaling – will cost much less than performance-optimised hardware. This higher tier may include SSDs instead of hard disks, faster processors or greater quantities of RAM, and is designed to run live applications where performance is critical.

Why choose IaaS?

Businesses, ranging from startups to global corporate entities, may choose to go with IaaS for a number of reasons.

It could be used to replace or complement existing internal infrastructure, allowing the business to run critical applications and/or a virtual LAN in the cloud. It could be used for data storage, with the company adding capacity only as it’s required. It could be used for cloud hosting, with the company running its websites from virtual servers, which can be quickly scaled up and down in response to demand. Alternatively, a business may choose to operate a virtual datacentre, allowing branch offices to feed into the same central resource.

With IaaS providing the means to let a business free itself of some IT hardware investment and maintenance, specifically avoiding the need to buy, run and cool its own server farm or datacentre, the convenience of moving to the cloud and plugging into IaaS services is looking to become the default way of deploying computing power into a business of any size.

A serious design flaw reportedly present in all Intel's CPUs made in the last 10 years could leave devices vulnerable to hackers, requiring an operating system (OS) update in order to fix it.

The flaw allegedly affects all systems running Intel x86 chips and is present across all popular operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, but is currently under embargo, meaning the full details of the bug are yet to be officially announced.

The bug allows normal user programs, such as database applications and JavaScript in web browsers, to distinguish some of the layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas of the chips, according to The Register, which uncovered the vulnerability.

However, the major problem for users is that a patch to the flaw will actually cause significant declines in performance for the affected machines, the publication said. These slow-downs could impact performance by as much as 30%, depending on the task and the processor model, but they're reportedly still being benchmarked.

The full details of the bug are expected to be revealed later this month. Microsoft is also expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday this month, after seeding them to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

A software developer who runs a popular Tumblr called Python Sweetness, has blogged about the potential trouble this flaw could cause once it's made official. They warned that "from everything I've seen, including the vendors involved, many fireworks and much drama is likely" when the embargo lifts.

"In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads. There are hints the attack impacts common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine, and additional hints the exact attack may involve a new variant of Rowhammer," they explained.

"I would not be surprised if we start 2018 with the release of the mother of all hypervisor privilege escalation bugs, or something similarly systematic as to drive so much urgency, and the presence of so many interesting names on the patch set's CC list."

An Intel spokesperson said that "many different vendors and operating systems" are vulnerable to the bug.

They added: "Intel is committed to product and customer security and is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively. Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits.

"Check with your operating system vendor or system manufacturer and apply any available updates as soon as they are available. Following good security practices that protect against malware in general will also help protect against possible exploitation until updates can be applied."

Picture: Bigstock

The OpenStack Foundation has announced a new project, Kata Containers, which is backed by 22 tech businesses including Intel, Hyper, Canonical, CoreOS, Dell/EMC, Google, Huawei, NetApp and Red Hat.

Kata Containers has been developed to bridge the gap between the security of VMs and containers, OpenStack said. It's hardware agnostic and compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, making it a felxible option for businesses looking for a simpler way to manage their containers.

The purpose is to allow businesses to run container management tools on bare metal without having to isolate workloads. Not only does this reduce the cost of running containers and increase the performance and speed up boot time, it's also a much simpler way of using containers that doesn't involve running them on virtualised infrastructure.

Intel will play an instrumental role in the development of Kata, contributing its Clear Containers technology, while Hyper will put forward its runV technology to help launch the project.

Kata Containers will comprise six parts: the Agent, Runtime, Proxy, Shim, Kernel and packaging of QEMU 2.9. However, it's been designed to work with any hardware, running on hypervisors and working with Kubernetes and Docker.

"It is great to see open source communities combine efforts and work together as with Kata Containers, and aligning with standards like OCI and key container projects like Kubernetes are important starting points for Kata," Chris Wright, vice president and CTO of Red Hat, said.

"Container technologies are having a significant impact on the industry and adding hardware isolation as an option when using containers has the potential to bring a new class of workloads to container platforms including Red Hat OpenShift, furthering that industry impact."

Microsoft has announced it will be the first vendor to offer AMD's EPYC processors on virtual machines operating via its Azure cloud platform, aimed at storage workloads.

This is the first time AMD has managed to get its made-for-server chips into the mainstream, with its previous efforts being usurped by Intel's x86 processors.

However, improved performance thanks to its Zen architecture means AMD now has the chance to take over some of Intel's market share with its EYPC made-for-server processors. This debut on Microsoft's L-Series VMs takes advantage of the chip's threads and cores, coupled with more memory and bandwidth.

"We're welcoming AMD's new EPYC processor to Microsoft Azure with the next generation of our L-Series Virtual Machines," Corey Sanders, director of compute at Microsoft Azure said. "The new Lv2-Series are High I/O, dense storage offerings which make EPYC perfect for Azure customers' demanding workloads. We've enjoyed a deep collaboration with AMD on our next generation open source cloud hardware design called Microsoft's Project Olympus.

"We think Project Olympus will be the basis for future innovation between Microsoft and AMD, and we look forward to adding more instance types in the future benefiting from the core density, memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities of AMD EPYC processors."

Microsoft's Lv2-Series instances will use AMD's EPYC 7551 processor, with a base core frequency of 2.2 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.0 GHz. They support 128 lanes of PCIe connections per processor, which AMD said should offer 33% more connectivity than two-socket alternatives.

"We are extremely excited to be partnering with Microsoft Azure to bring the power of AMD EPYC processors into their data centre," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's enterprise solutions division.

"There is tremendous opportunity for users to tap into the capabilities we can deliver across storage and other workloads through the combination of AMD EPYC processors on Azure. We look forward to the continued close collaboration with Microsoft Azure on future instances throughout 2018."

Image courtesy of AMD

IBM is suing one of its former cloud executives to try and block him from joining rival Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Ex-IBM CIO for transformation and operations, Jeff Smith, has been accused of ignoring a non-compete clause in his contract, with IBM demanding he pay back $1.7 million (£1.31 million) in stock bonuses, according to local paper Westfair.

An IBM spokeswoman told Cloud Pro: "Mr Smith possesses a wide range of highly confidential information on upcoming technological advances in IBM's cloud design that would be extremely valuable to IBM competitors such as AWS. Mr Smith, while employed by IBM in a senior technical position, engaged in repeated contacts with a senior executive at AWS and then wiped his mobile devices of data after informing IBM that he planned to violate his non-compete to go to work for the CEO of AWS. The company will vigorously protect its intellectual property."

Judge Cathy Seibel, presiding over the hearing, temporarily banned Smith from joining AWS on 1 August. The ban also bars him from soliciting customers, recruiting former colleagues or disclosing any confidential information until the court has heard a full account of the case and come to a conclusion on whether or not he did violate his contract.

This order was withdrawn on 7 August, however, with Seibel giving Smith permission to take part in employee training, as long as he promised not to disclose any information about IBM's future plans.

“Were he permitted to join the senior management of AWS on August 7th, [he] would inevitably be involved in decision-making about how best to compete against IBM and would inevitably disclose or use IBM trade secrets.” Arvind Krishna, director of research at the company said, according to the publication.

IBM said that because Smith was involved in the transformation side of its business, he would have had free access to the company's future plans, including products and services that could potentially compete with AWS's suite of cloud-based products.

Providing this intel to AWS could have a big impact on the success of IBM's new innovations when they hit the market.

A full hearing is scheduled for 21 August, when it will be decided whether Smith will be able to work for AWS before May 2018, when IBM says his non-compete agreement ends, and whether he will have to repay the $1.7 million in shares awarded as a bonus during his employment.