Nationwide Building Society has announced an expansion of its partnership with Broadcom as the firm accelerates its digital transformation and hybrid cloud strategy.

As part of the move, the building society plans to adopt VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as the company works to build a new private cloud platform.

The VMware service allows enterprises to build custom private cloud setups, combining compute, storage, networking, and security capabilities.

Nationwide said the use of VCF will enable it to deliver more resilient and scalable digital services to customers while also streamlining integration of Virgin Money assets following a £2.9 billion takeover announced in April this year.

Paul Walsh, Director of Infrastructure and Service Delivery at Nationwide, said the partnership extension represents a “significant step forward” in the company’s technology strategy.

As we continue to evolve as a business, including integrating Virgin Money into the group, it is vital that we have a resilient, scalable, and secure technology foundation,” he commented.

“A private cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation enables us to simplify operations, accelerate innovation, and deliver seamless digital experiences for our members, while maintaining the trust and stability that define the Nationwide brand.”

Nationwide eyes long-term AI gains

While VCF will enable Nationwide to establish a private cloud setup, long-term, Broadcom said it will act as a springboard for cloud native and AI applications.

As ITPro reported last year, Nationwide ranks among a host of UK banks ramping up the use of generative and agentic AI internally, with a particular focus placed on improving workforce efficiency and productivity.

In January, Nationwide announced a partnership with Moneyhub to roll out an AI-powered transaction analytics feature for customers across the UK.

Joe Baguley, Broadcom’s chief technology officer for EMEA, said Nationwide is pursuing a “deliberate and strategic approach” to private cloud that will underpin future innovation by “balancing agility and control”.

“By extending our partnership and adopting VMware Cloud Foundation as a consistent platform across the group, Nationwide will be able to integrate operations more efficiently, accelerate service delivery, and reduce operational complexity, while maintaining the security and governance expected of a leading UK financial services brand,” he said.

Hybrid cloud innovation

As part of its hybrid cloud strategy, Nationwide also maintains close ties with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In January this year, the bank announced an extension of its partnership with the hyperscaler to deliver “more personalized experiences” for 17 million customers across the country.

Nationwide uses AWS’ cloud-based contact center platform, Amazon Connect, for customer support, giving teams access to a raft of AI-powered tools to streamline operations.

Speaking at the time, Suresh Viswanathan, group chief operating officer at Nationwide, said the expanded partnership aims to further consolidate workloads using AWS and modernize services.

"As we continue our digital transformation, we need cloud technology that can support our ambition to deliver better customer experiences, while keeping safety and security at the forefront,” Viswanathan said.

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

HPE has kicked off its Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas by announcing it's moving more of its products to a channel-only route to market on the back of success with HMP Morpheus VM Essentials.

From 1 July, HPE SimpliVity PC1000, HPE Private Cloud PC3000, and HPE Zerto Software will all only be available from partners. This builds not he announcement last year that HPE Morpheus VM Essentials would only be available through channel partners.

Since taking that decision, the company has seen "tremendous impact and momentum across the partner ecosystem", according to Kristian Kerr, hybrid channel lead at HPE.

"We've got 700 more partners that have sold VME software in the last 12 months, and over 1300 partners have taken up the certifications since November when we launched them," Kerr told press and analysts.

Making SimpliVity PC1000, Private Cloud 3000, and Zerto software available exclusively through partners means "more of the private cloud and disaster recoverable disaster recovery portfolio as channel only," Kerr said, "so a huge step forward and further commitment to our partners and extending what we announced last year in the VM essentials."

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials channel update

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials isn't being left as simply the first step in this process. HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for Partner IT Program, or VM Essentials for Partner IT for brevity, allows partners to deploy VM Essentials into their IT environment free of charge for the first three years, with a "nominal" support fee.

According to Kerr, this means they will have the chance to not only "benefit from the significant virtualization savings" but also build their own competencies.

"We're going to be making this available to around 600 partners who will gain the private cloud with virtualization competency by the end of the year, so a huge step forward, just in terms of channel only," he added.

New support for cloud service providers

Another announcement coming out of HPE Partner Growth Summit is a new product aimed at cloud service providers.

HPE CloudOps Software for cloud service providers allows these businesses to build, operate, and monetize different kinds of private cloud service with the support of HPE Partner Ready Vantage, the company claimed.

"This HPE Cloud Permit model further enhances the value with preferential pricing for these service providers, and it's going to be tied to committed spend," Kerr said.

In addition to all of this, HPE has also announced it's wrapping up Juniper's partner program, Partner Advantage, into HPE Partner Ready Vantage. Partner Ready Vantage was announced in November 2025.

Juniper specialisations will be incorporated into HPE competencies, and memberships will be mapped from Partner Advantage to Partner Ready Vantage over the course of the year. For example, Elite Plus Juniper partners will become Platinum members in the networking centre of HPE Partner Ready Vantage.

Following HPE Partner Growth Summit, the main HPE Discover 2026 conference will kick off on Tuesday 16 June. You can follow all the latest announcements and analysis from the event here.

HPE has announced a major expansion of its Private Cloud AI portfolio, with a particular focus on data sovereignty capabilities.

Unveiled at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California, updates to the service will include an air-gapped configuration for HPE Private Cloud AI. This will allow enterprises to ensure data isn’t exposed to external networks and kept in a secure, isolated location.

In a press briefing ahead of the annual conference, Dale Brown, head of growth for AI solution at HPE, said the move comes in direct response to the growing enterprise focus on sovereignty and security, as well as evolving regulatory compliance requirements.

“We’re meeting customers where they are,” he said, adding that there are three overarching considerations at play for organisations with regard to sovereignty.

“The interesting thing about sovereignty, if you notice, sovereignty always has to be put in context of customer need and use-cases,” he told assembled media.

“So security might mean completely disconnected from the internet, but also sovereignty might mean that the data can’t leave a particular country and/or a particular principality.”

Brown added that the solution “provides even extra security” through a private cloud model, “bringing AI to the data” but also offering enterprises a higher degree of control of how data is processed, and where.

HPE Private Cloud AI capacity boost

HPE also announced new capacity scaling capabilities for Private Cloud AI customers at Nvidia GTC. This includes the ability to scale network racks up to 128 GPUs, marking an increase from the previous limit of 64.

The company said this is aimed primarily at allowing customers to accommodate “larger, more demanding AI workloads” while still maintaining a “consistent operational experience”.

Again with a focus on sovereignty, HPE confirmed that the Private Cloud AI service, as well as HPE ProLiant servers and HPE AI Factories, will support the latest Nvidia Nemotron open models.

These form part of Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which helps streamline the deployment of agents in on-prem and sovereign infrastructure environments for enterprises operating in critical or regulated industries.

Brown told journalists that HPE is also adding a raft of new “additional configurations and deployment modalities” for Private Cloud AI customers.

The service includes access to an array of Nvidia AI Enterprise software and blueprints, for example, including Nvidia’s updated AI-Q blueprint for AI agents.

New Nvidia Omniverse blueprints for digital twins are also available, the company revealed.

“Ultimately, our partnership with Nvidia has been all about removing friction, repeatable patterns, speeding time to value with proven best tools and techniques between our companies,” he said.

“We’re super proud of how we’ve co-engineered these solutions consistently.”

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Dell Technologies argues that there's no longer a debate between public cloud or private – instead, the focus is on using all of the available options and finding ways to manage that complexity.

"The conversation around enterprise IT is changing," said Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Multicloud Product Management for Dell Technologies in a blog post. "It’s no longer about choosing between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure."

"Nor is it a simple decision between running traditional or modern workloads. Today, the real challenge is how to manage all of these different environments and application types together, simply and consistently."

To help, Dell is expanding its existing partnership with Microsoft – which already offers AX System for Azure Local, later adding PowerFlex to the mix – and will offer support for Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore on Azure Local, Microsoft's system for running Azure services on in-house data center infrastructure.

"Microsoft and Dell Technologies share a vision of empowering businesses to achieve more through innovation and collaboration," said Dean Paron, VP of product management for Azure Edge Infrastructure at Microsoft.

"By bringing Microsoft Azure Local to Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore, we’re helping customers simplify their IT operations and unlock the full potential of their hybrid cloud strategies," he added.

The partnership comes amid a rising debate over cloud repatriation – the idea of moving workloads from the cloud back to on-premise infrastructure to help reduce costs, increase control, or improve flexibility.

While firms like Basecamp and Ahrefs have saved millions making such a move, hybrid remains the most popular option at 68% of companies, according to one survey.

Private Cloud on Azure

Gordon said the partnership delivered a first for private setups on Azure, and this latest announcement shows the duo want to take things further.

"Dell Private Cloud is the first Azure Local offering… a full-stack solution across compute, external storage, and networking, delivered from a single vendor, with end-to-end solution-level support included," Gordon said.

With Dell Private Cloud, Azure Local users will get automated lifecycle management, with end-to-end automation to help reduce complexity, as well as independent scaling, allowing compute and storage to be managed separately to reduce costs.

Plus, the system offers a disaggregated approach – as Dell puts it – that gives businesses a future-ready, adaptable system.

"This combination of Dell Private Cloud and Dell PowerStore delivers the simplicity, flexibility, and performance customers need to manage both traditional and modern workloads across their IT estate, Gordon said.

PowerStore for flash storage

The addition of PowerStore, Dell's enterprise-grade, all-flash storage solution, will give flexible scalability with built-in data protection, Gordon added.

"Always-on data reduction lowers storage costs without impacting performance, backed by the industry’s best 5:1 DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) guarantee," Gordon added.

Early access for Azure Local with Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore will begin in Spring 2026, the company confirmed.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Dell Technologies doubles down on AI with SC25 announcements
• Dell Technologies wants to cut infrastructure costs – here's how it plans to do it
• Dell Technologies just announced a major data platform overhaul

HPE has announced an expansion to its Nvidia Computing by HPE portfolio, including the latest Nvidia hardware designed for AI.

Two new HPE ProLiant Compute servers will be made available, the company confirmed. The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11 server will support up to two Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell chips within a slim 2U RTX Pro Server configuration.

Meanwhile, the HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a Gen12 server will support up to eight of the RTX PRO 6000, in a 4U form factor. This offering will be made available in September.

The RTX PRO 6000 was previously only available in the 4U form factor, but is now available in 2U form factor. This, HPE said, can be more easily deployed by customers in their existing server racks and is capable of being run with air cooling.

HPE highlighted the intended workloads for the HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12, including inference for generative and agentic AI models, visual computing, 3D modeling, and digital twins.

HPE Private Cloud will feature Nvidia's latest models

The newest version of Private Cloud AI will include support for this hardware, as well as for Nvidia’s latest AI models.

This will include Nemotron, a set of open source reasoning models based on Meta’s Llama, as well as the Cosmos Reason vision language model intended for robotics and physical AI devices and Nvidia Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization, used to help AI agents extract information from video data.

“Our collaboration with Nvidia continues to push the boundaries of innovation, delivering solutions that unlock the value of generative, agentic and physical AI while addressing the unique demands of enterprise workloads,” said Cheri Williams SVP and general manager for private cloud and flex solutions at HPE.

HPE has doubled down on its partnership with Nvidia in recent months, with commitments to ensuring its customers have access to the latest hardware from the chip giant.

Private Cloud AI was co-developed with Nvidia from the ground up, combining HPE’s private cloud offerings and GreenLake architecture with Nvidia’s AI computing stack including its NIM microservices.

Together, the firms have stated they aim to enable enterprises to make the most of enterprise AI deployment, with baked-in investment protection designed to provide organizations with the latest Nvidia GPUs as they become available.

Customers can also choose to air gap Private Cloud AI services, if their data privacy rules demand strict controls.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• HPE unveils Mod Pod AI ‘data center-in-a-box’ at Nvidia GTC
• HPE GreenLake gets the agentic AI treatment
• HPE just announced huge changes to its channel programs

Rackspace has announced the launch of a new open source, private cloud service aimed at supporting organizations running regulated workloads.

The infrastructure specialist said Rackspace OpenStack Business will offer enterprises a “cost-effective cloud solution centered around privacy, security and control” and expands on its existing private cloud offerings.

A key focus here, the company said, centers around tackling vendor lock-in while enabling organizations to drive application development and modernization.

The new service will support a “broad range of use cases” but is designed specifically for performance-sensitive applications, as well as enterprises operating in regulated industries with strict compliance requirements.

The company said it also aims to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by combining an open source platform approach with enterprise-level performance.

Lance Weaver, chief product and technology officer at Rackspace Private Cloud, said the service represents the “next evolution in private cloud infrastructure”.

“This platform is built for customers requiring performance, security, privacy and control,” he said. “Delivered as a fully-managed open source platform, it provides businesses the freedom to modernize on their terms.”

The launch of the private cloud service follows on the success of Rackspace OpenStack Flex. Introduced in 2024 again as a cost-effective private cloud solution, the two services will work in tandem, the company said.

Rackspace OpenStack Business, for example, will provide a "stable foundation" for steady-state workloads, while the Flex service will offer scaling capabilities based on demand.

Rackspace taps into private cloud interest

The move by Rackspace comes amid a period of growing appetite for private cloud solutions.

A recent survey from GTT Communications, for example, found that growth rates for private cloud are currently outstripping investment in public cloud. Alternative research from Node4 also showed 97% of respondents plan to move a significant portion of workloads back on-prem.

Naturally, generative AI has been a key factor in this trend, with GTT Communications noting that rising concerns over security, and cost are all contributing to the shift.

Regulatory compliance considerations, particularly in Europe, are also adding to the growing interest in private cloud, both studies found. In recent months, a host of big tech provider have launched expanded private cloud offerings to tap into this growing interesting, including Broadcom and HPE.

What to expect from Rackspace OpenStack Business

According to Rackspace, the new private cloud service will provide a range of benefits for users, including full API access, 24/7 support, and proactive monitoring and management tools.

Rapid deployment times are a main talking point for the company in the wake of the new service. Rackspace said enterprises will be able to accelerate time-to-production in “hours instead of days, weeks, or months”.

Similarly, with a strong focus on efficiency, the company said users will be able to draw upon “predictable performance” to run applications and avoid multi-tenant resource congestion.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• What the new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud push means for European customers
• Where next for private cloud networks?
• There’s a ‘cloud reset’ underway, and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a chance for Broadcom to pounce on it

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 has officially dropped, with Broadcom touting a host of new capabilities for customers to “accelerate innovation, control cloud costs, and enable sovereignty and security”.

According to Broadcom, CVF 9.0 boasts a “completely new architecture” aimed at streamlining private cloud deployments and removing friction between infrastructure and application teams.

This includes the launch of a new unified interface for cloud admins, which Broadcom said will provide a "holistic view” of private cloud operations.

The new Quick Start App, for example, aims to reduce setup time and complexity for cloud administrators while fleet management tools allow users to plan and execute upgrades across an array of clusters more efficiently.

With the launch of VCF 9.0, Broadcom looks to target growing interest in private cloud amidst surging AI adoption and lingering security concerns.

Recent research from GTT Communications, for example, found growth rates for private cloud are now outpacing that for public cloud options. Similar research from Node4 showed 97% of respondents are planning to move some workloads back to on-prem infrastructure.

In a virtual press briefing ahead of the VCF 9.0 launch, Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing, VCF division at Broadcom, said research by the tech giant shows a “cloud reset” is underway - and the firm’s new capabilities address this shift directly.

“We are seeing a cloud reset happening in the market,” he said. “Private cloud is now viewed by organisations as a strategic equivalent to public cloud. So it’s not a ‘public cloud plus one’ strategy anymore, it’s more of a ‘cloud smart strategy’ with private cloud taking a predominant role in our customers’ cloud transformation.”

Shenoy said there are a number of contributing factors to this shift, with AI adoption rates a leading consideration for enterprises exploring the prospect of shifting to private cloud. Security and cost-related concerns are also driving private cloud interest, he added.

Research from the firm found 69% of customers had repatriated workloads from public cloud to private cloud environments, for example, or were at least planning to do so in the year ahead.

“The reason behind these tailwinds for private cloud really lies on three big areas. It's around the trust and security that the private cloud provides, it's around the access, the performance, the predictability needed for generative AI workloads, and number three, it's the cost transparency, the cost control, and the cost predictability that our customers are looking towards,” he explained.

So how does VCF 9.0 address these considerations for enterprises? Here’s what customers can expect.

Under the hood of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Among the biggest updates for VCF 9.0 include new identity and access management capabilities. This new approach will centralize single sign-on, password policies, and certificates, which Broadcom said aims to “enable consistency across environments”.

By consolidating log management practices and integrating new analytics features, the company hopes to improve rapid response for security incidents and help admins better understand workload behaviors, and facilitate “targeted responses” for security operators.

Broadcom is also keen to highlight a more “frictionless” cloud consumption process for platform and development teams aimed at simplifying infrastructure consumption insights.

“Platform teams can effectively organize, provision, and manage tenant resources with granular control,” the company said in a statement.

“More secure, role-based access is enabled through streamlined administration of both admin and tenant identities. Compliance across all deployments is maintained by built-in governance policies, while pre-configured blueprints simplify provisioning, lessen manual tasks, and guarantee repeatable, compliant infrastructure.”

As part of the VCF 9.0 launch, the firm also revealed developers will be given access to automated IaaS services in a bid to create a more “genuine cloud-like experience”.

Developers gain access to automated and elastic self-service IaaS services, creating a genuine cloud-like experience.

VCF 9.0 targets cloud cost transparency

With cloud costs remaining a pervasive challenge for enterprises, Broadcom is framing VCF 9.0 as a more cost-efficient option compared to public cloud.

Enterprises will now be able to access built-in analytics tools to create predictive cost modeling for infrastructure planning and forecasting, for example. This, Broadcom said, will help avoid “unforeseen financial challenges”.

Similarly, automated resource optimization tools will also reclaim underutilized capacity to bolster workload efficiency and cut down on infrastructure sprawl.

“Detailed showback and chargeback data, grounded in resource allocation, provide a clear return on infrastructure investment,” the firm added.

Sovereignty and security

Focusing specifically on security capabilities, the new SecOps dashboard for VCF users offers a “quick view” of platform security and data controls, according to Broadcom.

The new feature also comes with integrated compliance policies which enables users to accommodate differing regulatory frameworks on both sides of the Atlantic and globally.

Broadcom noted that through its collaboration with AMD and Intel, this will also allow enterprises access to “secure enclaves” and encrypted memory to allow IT teams to deploy workloads across single infrastructure planes while taking into account varied security policies.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Broadcom just announced huge changes to its VMware partner program
• Broadcom EMEA CTO claims the company has been able to solve most of its customer issues following VMware acquisition
• Broadcom's 'harsh' VMware contracts are costing customers up to 1,500% more

Cost is a key driver behind the shift back to private cloud, but growing concerns over AI security and compliance appear to be having a bigger impact.

That's according to a survey by GTT Communications that found growth rates for private cloud far outstripping investment in public cloud, following a wider trend of cloud repatriation.

The research follows a survey earlier this week from Node4 that showed a whopping 97% of respondents planned to move at least some workloads back inhouse. Analyst firm IDC found similar results earlier this year, saying cloud repatriation was not "a wholesale migration" but reflected missed expectations around costs.

SaaS company 37 Signals made headlines for saving $10 million a year by ditching public cloud and buying its own infrastructure — suggesting at least some repatriation is cost focused.

GTT Communications' research said its own results "supports that trend" and found that primary drivers include unpredictable public cloud costs and concerns about vendor lock-in. However, its research also suggests some private cloud adoption is driven by privacy, security, and compliance requirements — with control over AI a major motivator.

The survey of US and European enterprise leaders found that private cloud spending above $10 million annually will increase from 43% last year to 54% this year — a 24% growth rate that's far ahead of the 13% growth rate in public cloud spend for the same group of companies.

Indeed, public cloud remains favored for use cases that require high reliability and scalability.

Is AI driving private cloud growth?

The shift back in-house or to private cloud is partially because of AI, the company suggested. Notably, GTT's survey found more than half of AI workloads are already in private cloud or on-premise environments, largely for better security (56%), to meet compliance requirements (51%) or because of the specific needs of AI workloads (50%), in particular secure, partitioned AI testing or deployment.

GTT said that cost remained a factor but was much lower at 35%, but noted that AI applications are resource-intensive and can further expose enterprises to higher costs that are less predictable.

"We know many companies are now shifting their sensitive workloads to private clouds as part of broader multi-cloud and hybrid strategies designed to support agentic AI and other complex AI initiatives at scale,” said Bastien Aerni, VP of Strategy and Technology Adoption, GTT.

"This distributed approach allows enterprises to balance performance, security and compliance requirements while optimizing costs to advance their AI ambitions."

The report added that enterprises can either move their private data to where the AI model is hosted or move the model to where the data lives.

"It is widely recognized that enterprises are appreciating more and more the value and sensitivity of proprietary data for AI models and are showing a preference for private cloud for AI," the report added.

GTT said that complex AI workloads face challenges with repatriation. The survey found 43% of respondents faced issues with migrating apps and data from public cloud deployments.

"Enterprise infrastructure strategies are evolving fast as AI workloads surpass the limits of traditional architectures," Aerni said.

"Organizations are refining their cloud environments, whether public, private or hybrid, to support their AI initiatives at scale. But many still underestimate the complexity involved. In our experience, without reengineering connectivity and security architectures, even the most ambitious private cloud strategies can fall short."

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Cloud breaches are surging, but enterprises aren’t quick enough to react
• Enterprises are facing a ‘cloud security crisis’
• Growing AI workloads are causing hybrid cloud headaches

However you define "private cloud" or segment the analysis, it's on the up. Although organizations are moving away from owning their own on premises infrastructure in their own data centers, they’re not guaranteed to choose the public cloud as they might have in the early cloud boom years.

So says Terry Storrar, managing director at Leaseweb, who tells ITPro that the cloud market continues to diversify as firms seek more control over their data and oversight of their cloud costs.

Storrar cites cloud sovereignty as a chief concern driving this investment. Customers worry about data compliance burdens in the wake of regulatory upheaval such as Brexit and businesses increasingly come under national or public-sector pressure to track where their data is at all times.

"You're taking what you had on-prem, moving it, accessing it via longer pieces of string," he says.

It's all about which workload runs best where for specific use cases and criteria from price to performance, versus skills and other resources. And these concerns are translating into serious figures: Technavio analysis carried out in 2023 found the private-cloud services market will expand by $619 billion by 2028, a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27%.

Public cloud is losing its appeal

Workloads can be harder to manage in the public cloud, which is a part-driver of some cloud repatriation the tech sector is recording right now. Of course, using a public cloud can free firms up to only pay for what they need and managed services providers (MSPs) can easily allocate resources by need and seasonality.

But depending on one’s organizational model and the amount that can be allocated to CapEx rather than OpEx, private cloud costs can become manageable and may even be preferred to murkier public cloud contracts.

"If finance at the end of the month needs more, they can get more,” says Storrar. “A general feeling is it's more manageable and costs can be predicted.”

Yet while Storrar says interoperability between clouds will improve, he doesn't predict "massive" innovation, beyond applying that "longer piece of string" to more resources.

Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, describes the growth of private-cloud silos, building and deploying the private cloud for particular requirements. This, he says, has been eased by a rising ability to layer unifying management software on top, improving access to information.

The volumes of data that organizations store both internally and externally are also growing, as enterprises chase ROI by implementing predictive AI. Lock says that although most use "some degree" of public cloud – and growth isn't as fast as across public cloud – compelling use cases remain.

Integrated compute and analytics engines can now run on private data without having to export to public-cloud storage and back again or can do it without exposure, such as via homomorphic encryption that allows computation of data without needing to decrypt it.

"Public cloud access is subject to its functioning, and you have no direct management control of that," Lock points out. "For information where you want near 100% availability, private cloud might be preferred."

Data storage in the public cloud isn't necessarily cheap either and the private cloud offers almost as many capabilities so long as you don't need to handle dramatic elasticity through the likes of AWS EC2. Private data accessibility to AI is becoming easier, with various access mechanisms and a layer of governance on top. Cybersecurity shouldn't be harder than managing any internal system security.

"So there are all sorts of ways this particular cat is getting skinned," adds Lock.

Francis O'Haire, group CTO at distributor Climb Channel Solutions, tells ITPro that it’s essential to identify the specific needs of one’s business when it comes to making decisions on private cloud.

"Look at your workloads and decide on baseline – what you need to run day-in, day-out that's predictable," he recommends.

Public cloud repatriations can stem from poor management or an inability to automate. For example, not turning off workloads when they’re not providing an obvious business function. But O’Haire notes that cloud flavors are blurring, making it tougher to discern your best option.

The HPEs and Dells of the world have taken notice, and now offer ways to limit capex exposure. "It can be in a kind of cloud pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model, but with the kit dedicated to you and where you want it to be, in a data center or your own premises," he explains.

Organizations looking to keep private cloud in the mix, or move from public to private in select instances, should keep a firm eye on the future and examine where legacy tech can be replaced with agile cloud infrastructure which could operate in either private or public instances.

Above all else, firms need to weigh up their options to take care they’re not just kicking the can down the road on becoming cloud-native – a sentiment with which Simon Bennett, CTO at Rackspace, agrees.

"[Private cloud] will endure for quite a while. Many ISVs will try to do SaaS too even though that's not their forté, to get a foot in both the public and private camps,” he says.

"Again, that way you can deal with different regulations without a problem, for maximum deployment capability," Bennett concludes. "The thinking on sovereignty also applies to AI – a lot of benefit is actually using AI to sift your own IP, that you don't want out in the wild."

Future-proofing can be costly

Hosted private cloud options, where a provider delivers cloud solutions as a service, can offer technology choices from one or several major cloud players, potentially minimizing the cost of upgrading a private cloud set-up. This may otherwise include purchasing hardware, GPUs, sufficient power for the data center, and so on.

Hyperscaler savings and ROI from wholesale lift-and-shift have often been optimistic, yet ultimately there'll be consolidation of private cloud providers for economies of scale too, with niche services a possible exception, Bennett notes.

Lee Wilkinson, tech solutions group lead at Insight, agrees that private-cloud workloads will increasingly move into private AI and data spaces over the next three to five years. He tells ITPro that integrated reference architectures will be a major theme and use cases pre-tested in public cloud by big vendors public cloud will also be useful to enterprises.

However, Wilkinson believes the mix of private versus public will stay "relatively the same"; some workloads will move to the public cloud, while others will come back.

"Predicted growth is pretty high," says Wilkinson. "But the use case influences which technologies you choose."

Gartner predicts declining traditional procurement of servers, storage, and integrated systems - in favor of hyperconverged integrated systems on which you can run mixed or private cloud workloads including AI.

Thirty percent of this procurement will be as services, with half of critical enterprise applications expected to live beyond public cloud through to 2027.

"Integrated reference architectures will have a 30% CAGR and growth over three to four years," Wilkinson agrees. "It's still a hot market."

David Lees, CTO officer at SAP partner Basis Technologies, says organizations want private cloud benefits, but not to manage their own data centers, pointing to "customized" SAP landscapes unready for multi-tenant public cloud.

SAP itself is tackling the segment. Rise with SAP "is kind of the latest version of what they're calling private cloud" versus Grow with SAP multi-tenancy. Customers must "grow or rise" to access some newer capabilities.

"It's unattractive to buy perpetual on-prem licenses or licenses where you manage the hosting directly with a hyperscaler or a kind of virtual private cloud provider of your choice," says Lees.

Broadcom has unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation (VFC) 9, the latest iteration of VMware’s private cloud platform intended to dramatically improve the speed, ease, and cost of deploying private cloud for businesses.

In its latest major overhaul of VCF, Broadcom has lifted the curtain on a raft of private cloud improvements across its cloud deployment, management, and operational layers.

VCF 9 enables native multi-tenancy for customers, allowing different enterprise teams or departments to share infrastructure while maintaining control of their respective privacy controls and access rights.

Customers can also make use of more centralized cybersecurity controls in VCF 9. Through a new centralized information hub, security teams can assess threats across their private cloud and raise insights on misconfigurations.

Broadcom emphasized its intention to help customers future-proof their private cloud via VCF as much as possible, and to this end, customers can also use VCF 9 to deploy generative AI models more easily via VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, with new options such as GPU reservations and a dedicated service for building AI agents.

With its focus on helping businesses to automate their infrastructure and modernize it as much as possible, VCF 9 will combine existing cloud management consoles into just a single point of control for operations and automation, simplifying manual tasks for IT teams and providing them with better control observability.

This focus on automation is mirrored with new native support for VMware vSAN remote snapshots, intended to automatically preserve customer data to be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack, alongside a generative AI security assistant dubbed Project Cypress which can help teams investigate security threats and provide recommendations on remedies.

AI advancements and readiness run throughout the announcements. The new Advanced Memory Tiering with NVMe function will also provide a performance boost to AI workloads within a customer’s environment, alongside data analytics applications and databases.

“Memory is one of the highest growth costs inside a customer’s infrastructure environment,” said Paul Turner, VP of products, VCF Division at Broadcom.

“Up to 50% of the cost of servers today is often in the memory cost, so bringing down that cost is key for us.”

The firm reports up to 40% improvement in memory efficiency among customers using NVMe Tiering, citing the reduced cost of memory and licensing achievable through proper optimization.

Broadcom said that enterprises can use VCF to improve the time to deploy virtual machines (VMs) by as much as 61% and reduce infrastructure costs by 34%, per a whitepaper it produced alongside IDC.

Easing the weight of legacy infrastructure

In a briefing with assembled media, Turner emphasized the major problem that VCF 9 aims to solve:  

“We have a mixed set of environments where customers are running a storage silo, a compute silo, they've probably virtualized the compute silo but haven't done so on the storage, the networking is very much a physically-oriented setup, and security is in there afterward trying to figure out how to govern and control the entire environment.

“So, our traditional legacy architecture is really not working in terms of being able to bring governance, control, and agility to a cloud because you've got different teams managing different environments.”

The announcement was made at VMware Explore 2024 Las Vegas, the company’s annual conference and the first such event since Broadcom closed its acquisition of the firm in November 2023.

Broadcom announced improvements to VCF in June, dropping new features such as VCF Import which lets customers move siloed environments into their private cloud without re-architecting and streamlines patching and identity and access management (IAM).

VCF Import is being expanded in VCF 9, with the intention of making it easier than ever for customers to embrace the platform. With this in mind, businesses will now be able to transfer a business’s existing VMware NSX, vDefend, or Avi Load Balancer environments into VCF. This allows for better-centralized fleet management and automation across their VMware environment, moving closer to achieving what Turner dubbed “a true cloud experience”.

With VCF 9, Broadcom also aims to further meet customer needs while reducing the overall complexity of the platform by bringing services like VMware Cloud Director under the VCF banner and enabling a single point of observability for admins.

This focus on ease of deployment is also reflected in the newly announced VCF Advanced Services, off-the-shelf services across common enterprise tasks like edge orchestration, data management, containers, or disaster recovery.

“To break the infrastructure silos, reclaim control of public cloud sprawl, and capture the opportunity for AI in the enterprise, our customers are shifting from best-of-breed siloed architectures to a modern private cloud platform,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, VCF Division at Broadcom.

“VMware Cloud Foundation 9 will redefine the landscape for private cloud by delivering a modern, integrated platform that will unify operations and automation to deliver a cloud experience that enables businesses to be more innovative, efficient, resilient, and secure.”

HPE has partnered with colocation provider Equinix to deliver pre-provisioned instances of HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and the newly announced HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise Businesses Edition.

Starting in August, customers will be able to rapidly provision hosted private clouds from the GreenLake portfolio in seven Equinix International Business Exchange locations: London, Frankfurt, Washington DC, Toronto, Silicon Valley and Singapore.

The partnership was announced during HPE CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote address at HPE Discover 2023, when he was joined on stage by Jon Lin, EVP and GM of data center services at Equinix. 

“[When] you think about all the discussion around the cloud, it's so centered around the software portions of everything that's being delivered. But at the end of the day, there is a physical component, and that's difficult,” said Lin.

“The partnership that Equinix and HPE have had for years now about helping solve and locate that technology stack adjacent to the cloud has been incredible. But what we've heard loud and clear from our customers is … it's complex, it can be difficult,” Lin continued. 

“So … how can we provide that access to the ecosystems of technology partners that Equinix provides, but do it in a way that's more software enabled, make networking easier, make the logistics easier, make that present the location easier, and really make that physical infrastructure and the feeling more like just cloud at the same time?”

The answer, at least according to HPE and Equinix, is to provide a service where instances of GreenLake Private Cloud for Enterprise and Private Cloud for Enterprise Business Edition are ready to go when a customer wants them.

This solves two key problems: First, it dramatically reduces the time it takes for a customer to actually launch an instance of Private Cloud for Enterprise, which can otherwise take months.

Second, it frees customers from the need to find room either in their own data center or with a colocation provider for HPE’s hardware to be located.

Pre-provisioned instances of HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise Businesses Edition on Equinix will start rolling out across the seven named geographies initially, with plans to extend it in the future.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Weathering the cloud slowdown'. We apologise for any errors.

Rory

Hi, I’m Rory Bathgate.

Jane

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Rory

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast, where today we’re talking about the cloud slowdown.

Jane

The COVID-19 pandemic saw companies across the world scrambling to put in place cloud services that would help prop up their business during the shift to remote working. However, in recent months news has been building of a “cloud slowdown”, with some of the biggest vendors reporting a drop in the growth of their cloud sales.

Rory

In the third quarter of 2022, AWS reported the slowest growth in its history, while Google’s growth was down almost 10% on the previous year and Microsoft is also anticipating a decline in Azure revenues in its next earnings report.

Jane

Joining us to discuss what's behind the cloud slowdown. And if it's even happening is Russ Kelly. IT pros cloud specialist and staff writer Ross, thanks for joining us. Good to join you, too. So Russ, first of all, what is this cloud slowdown? What are we talking about? Exactly.

Ross

So obviously, we experienced rapid growth in the cloud computing space over the last several years. This was particularly rapid since the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. This was fueled largely by the shift online and the shift to remote operations by organisations, across a range of industries the world over. It's no surprise to anyone that over the last several months, we've seen a significant economic slowdown in particularly challenging conditions for the global tech industry. And for a global industry more broadly speaking as well. This has been rather acute in the cloud space in over the last four, or five, six months in you would say. As you mentioned at the beginning, major providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, they've all experienced rapid growth over the last really the last 13 years, with AWS logging significant revenue growth consistently from about 2014 onwards. We've seen that slow over the last two quarters in 2022. This has largely been down to you know, strained economic conditions, inflation, rising costs, and a degree of hesitancy among businesses who are now looking to curtail their cloud spending, so to speak. Perhaps not so much curtail spending broadly speaking, but at the very least optimise and reassess how they're spending on cloud and how they're leveraging cloud to unlock tangible benefits for their business.

Jane

So I think it's probably worth you know, when we're talking about a slowdown what we mean is, it's not that they're not growing, it's not that they don't still have significant margins. When we look at the figures here, we're still talking about 25%, growth, 22% profit, that kind of thing. And it's that it is not growing as quickly as it had been prior to, when did this start? From what I've seen it was sort of last autumn?

Ross

Yeah. So from the autumn period onward, we have seen slowing growth, slowing revenue growth, on the surface of things. You know like you said in some companies, AWS, Microsoft, Google, they've still recorded, you know, around 30%, growth. Google Cloud reported a 38% revenue growth in the third quarter of last year. But, you know, when you compare this to previous years, particularly 2021 for example, it does pale in comparison. So there is a slowdown there. Google Cloud reported a 58% revenue growth in the first quarter of 2021. Now that was at the height of the pandemic, when you compare that to now we're talking about a 20% drop in in revenue growth in that space. I think that highlights the fact that, yes, cloud is still growing at these companies. It's still a major revenue driver for Google, for AWS, for Microsoft. But this is... what is changing, I should say, is how businesses are spending and how they're reassessing their relationship with these hyperscalers with a lot of cloud providers.

Rory

So you've just mentioned spending, and you talked about it a bit in your kind of overview of the situation, but is this decline in growth primarily down to companies reducing their spending, kind of as recession starts to bite?

Ross

Yeah, so a piece of research from the Uptime Institute earlier this month, spoke in depth at out there saying slowdown. And a major part of this is that there's been a spending shift and how businesses are in how they're essentially how they're spending on cloud. And there's obviously, many factors to this high energy costs, combined with inflation, the cost of living crisis and obviously, a rather perilous sort of economic situation at the moment that's making organisations more cautious about spending money, it's not to say that they aren't still investing and that they aren't still spending on Cloud, because, you know, this is business critical to so many businesses across a range of industries now, but they are reassessing how they're spending. So that could be postponing, for example, postponing projects. They're deprioritising certain projects due to rising costs, skill shortages also plays a role in this. But global uncertainty, more broadly speaking, is making a lot of them hesitant and rather skittish about investing during a period where some businesses don't know how much runway they have. Some businesses just simply don't have the capacity to spend on cloud in the way that they might want to. And we're starting to see a little bit of a shift, or a little bit of a divide emerge here with regards to, I suppose, businesses that are maintaining that hesitancy and businesses that are viewing this as an opportunity to double down on spending.

Jane

Yeah, the idea of spending your way out of the recession isn't a new one. And I know some people are sort of considering the IT department as being the place where you do put any investment that you're going to use to try and bolster your business as we come out, or go into in the case of the UK, of a recession?

Ross

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a recent discussion with John-David Lovelock at Gartner highlighted this. I believe we covered this in a news capacity, there is a divide or a gap emerging in terms of those organisations that are looking to double down on IT spending, double down on cloud spending. A part of this, you know, falls back to what we saw at the back of the, the tail end of the last recession. A lot of growth in cloud, a lot of the rapid growth and shift to cloud that we saw in the previous decade was after that 2008-2009 recession, where businesses started to migrate en masse to the cloud, started to invest heavily. That obviously created a somewhat of a chain reaction that helped propel so many of these providers to those high levels of growth over that decade, and into the last couple of months. So now there is an element here of "do we sit back weather the storm? Or do we invest? And do we spend our way out of a recession?" There are obviously benefits on both sides. And that will differ depending on the business itself, some businesses are probably more willing to be conservative in this regard, see how things pan out over the next six months. Others will likely continue to spend, perhaps even up their spending over this period. A part of that is that some CIOs will view this as an opportunity to invest and strike while the iron is hot, while their competitors might not be. And then when we come out of this economic disruption at the other side, they will be all the better for it.

Jane

I suppose that's going to, I don't want to get too into the weeds of business because we are the IT Pro podcast here, but presumably on a case by case business with organisations who are considering where to put their money, if your organisation is highly dependent on online commerce, so you're some kind of retailer whether that's large or small, whatever, then investing in IT is going to make an awful lot of sense. Investing perhaps in new cloud projects is going to make an awful lot more sense than if you are a company that has an IT department, everybody does or at least some kind of external contractor, but that IT isn't necessarily core to your business. Is that kind of a fair analysis would you say?

Ross

Yeah, yeah I would say so. Absolutely. I mean this again, this is on a business to business basis. You know, some organisations will have their own priorities and they will deviate from other businesses based on their sort of areas and the sectors that they work in. I think looking at the IT function and IT spending, you know recent analysis from Gartner, for example, said that IT spending is set to increase by around 2.4% over the next year to around $4.5 trillion dollars. So it's worth noting, though, that that's down from what their previous expectations on the year would be, I believe it was around 5.1% increase in IT spending that Gartner predicted. So that does show that there is a drop there, there are organisations that are continuing this hesitancy, but we will still continue to see an increase in cloud spending over the next year. Organisations know that this is a business critical function, they can't afford to not invest in this area of their business. And if they do neglect this area, then there's going to be serious problems for them when they emerge on the other side.

Jane

So I kinda want to come back to a couple of ideas Ross, that we've got. So this the idea of, not contraction in the cloud market because that's not what's happening, but a slowdown. And, you know, the growth that happened during COVID. Is this just a course correction? Is this just, you know, had COVID not happened is this the path that actually cloud growth probably would have followed anyway, and that those sort of like 50% growth figures in 2020-21, they were an aberration, and this is where we should be now anyway?

Ross

I think it's not so much that they are an aberration, we have seen significant revenue growth and cloud consistently over the last 10 years, give or take a few periods here and there where the markets were rather shaky. 2020-22, has been an unprecedented period. Obviously, these organisations capitalised on the circumstances at the time. Now we're starting to see a bit of a plateau, perhaps, that's not to say that things are gonna start going downhill because I mean, when you look at Microsoft's recent earnings report device sales were down fairly significantly but their Azure product offerings, Microsoft's cloud offerings, were still a key revenue driver for these organisations. So if anything, we might start to see cloud being an even bigger driver, or an even more critical revenue driver for these companies in the next year or so.

Rory

So prior to the pandemic, people were already considering whether public cloud was really right for them, as it can be quite expensive. Is that part of the issue here?

Ross

Partly, yes. I mean, private cloud versus public cloud has been a lingering discussion for many years now. And it probably will continue to across 2023. Private cloud, obviously, has generally been viewed as something that offers greater control for businesses, enables them to lower costs compared to public cloud, for example. I think what this again falls back to is how businesses are reassessing their spending. This will differ on an organisation-by-organisation basis, but businesses are increasingly looking for ways to maximise the impact of their spending. This is not anything new, but we will likely see this continue across the year.

Jane

So I mean it's difficult, you kind of mentioned the cost of public cloud, and that sometimes private cloud can be more cost effective. We know this, that if it's a long ongoing project then public cloud's possibly not really the best way of doing it. But private cloud isn't free either, you still have to have the skills, you have to have the hardware, it's not a minimal thing. And you also have to have the software to go with it. These things can't all be getting cheaper, you know, part of the whole cost of living thing is inflation. How do they balance that, and what other challenges are there there?

Ross

So yeah, this is a catch-22 for a lot of businesses at the moment. You have a combination of scaling back spending with rising cloud and software prices, so this is obviously creating acute challenges in how businesses approach current digital transformation efforts, future optimisation as they sort of weather this economic turbulence, I suppose you could say. Cloud projects are no different from any other projects, you know, businesses will postpone them, they will deprioritize these due to rising costs. And on a case-by-case basis, organisations will be looking at what they can get the best bang for their buck from. When you also add in the element of skill shortages, then this again creates serious challenges for businesses, especially those on private cloud. Like you said previously, there's a lot underpinning what you can get out of private cloud. If you're dealing with skill shortages and a lack of funding or tightening purse strings, so to speak, then that's going to create even more uncertainty, it's going to create even more disruption in the business. And ultimately, that will likely lead to some form of cash flow issues or revenue problems further down the line.

Rory

So with these considerations around costs, are there likely to be any knock on impacts for customers here, such as increased costs passed on to the customer, will smaller businesses for example have to be paying higher rates?

Ross

So with regard to the impact on consumers and customers, there's not a lot we can say about this at present. Obviously, a lot of organisations have been bearing the brunt of rising energy costs and they've not been, I suppose, passing on the same heightened expenditure, this financial burden to customers. There may be exceptions to that across, you know, across the space, there may be organisations exploring this at present. One of the main things that may affect customers is what we discussed about businesses doubling down or remaining hesitant and, you know, battening down the hatches during this period. Organisations that will double down, based on a conversation with a Gartner analyst earlier this month, are more likely to fine-tune their product offering, they're more likely to be providing a far more robust and mature service offering for consumers in the wake of this. Organisations that don't will likely see their lack of action during this period transferred over to a diminished quality of service, a diminished quality of product.

Jane

So Ross is this, obviously we can kind of only look at the past in terms of results and stuff, and what has happened. Is this likely to be a long-term trend that spending in the cloud is going to slow down, that revenues are going to slow down? Or is it just something that happened when there was greater economic uncertainty globally, towards the end of last year, and as things pick up a bit this year hopefully that things going to be a bit more positive for the hyper scalars?

Ross

So looking at Microsoft as a prime example, their recent earnings showed that, yes, cloud was still a key revenue-driver for them across the board. I think that gives you a solid indication of how these organisations will fare over the next year, they will see a slowing rate of revenue growth in this area just by virtue of the fact that we're seeing an economic slowdown. We're on the cusp of a recession, perhaps in one. But I mean, when you look at previous Gartner research or recent Gartner research software spending, which also applies to cloud, is still expected to increase by around 9.3% across 2023. This highlights a traditional tendency among some businesses to focus heavily on IT spending, on cloud spending, on broader IT spending. And what this really falls back to is whether or not some companies view IT as a solution to problems, or those that see it as an expense. I think something that's worth noting here is that for many CIOs, for many organisations, this current economic environment is an entirely new experience for them, especially over the last several years where there's been a period of rather rapid growth in the cloud space. This is placing particular pressure on organisations to not only optimise how they're using cloud, but consider new approaches. When you see the fact that across 2022 cloud providers all started to increase their prices, this was also the first time that a lot of organisations and CIOs experienced a price increase. So you not only have uncertainty, you not only have economic disruption, but you also have added costs there. Better pricing is something that is really sought after now, and that falls back to I suppose our discussion around public and private cloud and the benefits there. Companies that have traditionally raced towards cloud environments, and closed down their on-prem environments are now reassessing this. My previous discussion with a Gartner analyst revealed that some companies that were doing fairly comprehensive cloud migrations are now looking to perhaps reverse that shift.

Jane

So get out your feather dusters and start dusting off those servers in the broom closet.

Ross

Absolutely.

Rory

Well, Ross, thanks so much for being on the show.

Ross

Great talking to you.

Jane

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

Rory

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

Jane

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

Rory

Goodbye.

Throughout the pandemic, companies across the world rushed to establish cloud services that could prop up the need for remote working. But in recent months, word of a “cloud slowdown” has been building, with some of the biggest vendors experiencing a drop in the growth of their cloud sales.

In the third quarter of 2022, AWS reported the slowest growth in its history, while Google’s growth was down almost 10% on the previous year.

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Ross Kelly, IT Pro’s cloud specialist and staff writer to discuss what’s behind the cloud slowdown – and whether it’s even happening.

Highlights

“Google Cloud reported a 58% revenue growth in the first quarter of 2021. Now that was at the height of the pandemic, when you compare that to now we're talking about a 20% drop in revenue growth in that space.”

“Organisations know that this is a business critical function, they can't afford to not invest in this area of their business. And if they do neglect this area, then there's going to be serious problems for them when they emerge on the other side.”

“I think something that's worth noting here is that for many CIOs, for many organisations, this current economic environment is an entirely new experience for them, especially over the last several years where there's been a period of rather rapid growth in the cloud space.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Cloud growth experiencing ‘slowdown’ amid rising economic disruption
• Hyperscaler earnings 'highlight new era of maturity' in global cloud market
• Microsoft cloud revenue still sky-high as device sales continue to slide
• UK government cloud acceleration 'on horizon' as net zero performance slips
• Public cloud market expected to surpass $1 trillion in value by 2026
• Multi-cloud vs hybrid cloud – what's the difference?

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

In order to future-proof your business, an essential part of longer term success today is in embracing the cloud. And what will help you stay ahead of the competition is a cloud strategy that’s agile enough to meet ever-changing needs.

This whitepaper shares expert advice on how to build your multi-cloud strategy, from assessing needs to evaluating ops, and considerations for both private and public cloud.

Download now to learn how to make the most of multi-cloud without the complex workflows, and discover the solutions offered by VMware and CDW that can meet your organisation’s needs today, and in the future.

Provided by

The central theme running through VMware Explore Europe 2022 was delivering 'cloud smart' by fighting ‘cloud chaos’. Talk to someone from the firm, and they’ll tell you this is simply the next step in the company’s evolution.

In the seemingly distant past, companies contended with procurement sprawl; after this, it was server sprawl. Today, the company seeks to tackle the burden of cloud silos, and its big bet on managing this crucial struggle is as much a call for a cultural shift as it is for the adoption of its trademark solutions, with a greater emphasis on data insights to drive strategy.

For every solution, there's a problem

The mission permeates any number of VMware’s big announcements, from advances in its Sovereign Cloud — a headache especially for European customers — to the challenge businesses have in lowering energy costs. A cultural shift is also leaking in through the firm's expansion of its hybrid cloud partnership with HPE, with a 'pay-as-you-go' unified cloud solution available through a consumption model. It's the kind of flexibility that VMware promises, and the move to consumption echoes the intelligent automation firm Laiye's predictions that the subscription model has five years left.

As far as sustainability goes, the company hopes to empower customers to measure their energy consumption through the new Green Score feature in Aria Cloud, and includes its use of machine learning (ML) at data centres to optimise workload in a list of measures that have helped it save around 1.2 billion tons of carbon since 2002.

On several metrics, VMware appears to be indicating the ball is firmly in the court of its customers. There’s a tool for (almost) every problem, but, of course, these can be only solved if there’s an equal desire among users to fix these problems in the first place.

Framed in this way, VMware’s calls for improvements in areas such as sustainability at least appear destined for success. Evidence repeatedly shows that many companies in the sector consider reducing their energy consumption a top priority, such as recent Gartner research which showed sustainability is the key strategic trend for 2023. The drive comes amidst VMware’s prediction of a 200% increase in energy usage in the near future, accelerated by the adoption of the likes of 5G.

Other VMware solutions such as VMware Carbon Black XDR, which the company has unveiled to fight the threat of lateral attacks facilitated by an overbearing focus on endpoint security over observability between silos, seem to be progressing slower than desired.

Joe Baguely tells IT Pro that lateral security, effectively the same concept as ‘east-west’ security, is a problem over which VMware has been banging the drum for more than a decade. The failure of the sector to progress much in this space in the years since its

The problem with having the solution to a problem that your customers don’t see as a problem is the struggle can’t be solved through the quality of a product. Let there be no doubt: the overriding sense among customers at VMware Explore Europe was the company is always willing to address their concerns. But the success of many new products may hinge on communication. As VMware's VP of marketing tells IT Pro, the company, internally, is extremely pleased with the work its product teams have done, with success now hinging on convincing customers they have problems that need to be addressed.

Change in the name, change in the game

A much-repeated phrase throughout the conference was “we’ve changed”, mostly delivered light-heartedly in reference to the conference's branding change from VMworld to VMware Explore. Delving beneath the surface, though, it’s clear there's been a more profound shift in the company’s strategy.

“Ten years ago, we were taught that VMware’s focus is, we abstract, pull, and automate,” Ed Hoppitt, senior director apps and cloud platforms at VMware, tells IT Pro. “So we abstract away from physical hardware, we pull the abstracted resources together, we automate their deployment. Nothing’s really changed. We're abstracting from across multiple clouds, as opposed to multiple servers, we're able to pull the resources of the servers, and the XPUs, and the chassis, and we're able to automate their deployment.

“I'll be honest, sending the ESX wasn't hard, right? It was a mono-product company, and it was ‘for every dollar you invest with us, you’re going to save ten.’ What’s happened is our portfolio has got bigger, and our nuanced relationship with customers has changed. We're now getting to spend much more time with customers, understanding our customers much more intimately.”

Hoppitt directly aligned adopting a software as a service (SasS) model with allowing the company to more directly cater to customer needs. There's no doubt that, among customers, the mood is high but, remarkably, this buoyancy is also mirrored externally.

“I think overall, VMware’s portfolio is now much better segmented and over the course of this year they've done a lot to reposition the products into much more sensible settings and categories,” says Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight, in conversation with IT Pro. “I think it's a much more structured portfolio and I think, actually, it does address a lot of the issues that organisations, especially particular enterprise organisations across the market landscape, are concerning themselves with.”

What does the Broadcom acquisition mean for VMware's future?

Infrastructure giant Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware has been approved by shareholders, and news of this broke on the first proper day of VMware Explore Europe. The deal had been confirmed by both companies in May, with questions raised around what this meant for company strategy going forward.

Any whispers of the deal on the conference floor were matched by an immediate, if brief, reference to the acquisition at the start of the keynote by Raghu Raghuram, VMware CEO: “Once the acquisition is completed, VMware will become the software arm of Broadcom.”

For the assembled press, this opened the sluice gates for a series of Broadcom questions at the press conference, all directed at Raghuram. “It’s up to Broadcom to structure its company once closed,” replied Raghuram.

“Ultimately, they will have the final word on it. What [Tan Hock Eng, CEO at Broadcom] said at the time the acquisition was announced, is what I spoke about today, which is Broadcom will broadly have two businesses. A microconductor business, which they historically have, and a software business, and all the software businesses will be under the VMware brand.”

Having broken away from Dell in 2021, Raghuram said VMware was uniquely positioned to become “the Switzerland of the cloud industry,” maintaining an independent and close relationship with its customers and partners. Now, after around a year, VMware is falling back into the ownership of another company; how ‘hands-off’ Broadcom will be with the company remains to be seen.

VMware becoming a brand that encompasses all Broadcom software offerings could make or break the company. If it’s simply the sum of its parts, a provider of siloed tools for business use cases, the deal should matter little to customers and partners alike. But, having fought so hard to ‘change’, and acquire the positive reputation it enjoys today, VMware may well fight to keep its brand from diluting as it takes charge of assets like Symantec and CA.

In the same way that its solutions rely on communication as much as technical ability these days, its commitment to maintaining customer relationships and holding the lead on clear product messaging will be the real measure of its success in the years to come.

VMware unveiled VMware Aria, a multi-cloud management platform, yesterday which it hopes will give customers a better overview of their cloud environments.

It hopes the platform will provide a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud-native applications. VMware Aria is powered by VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store technology that captures customers’ multi-cloud environments.

VMware Aria will be anchored by VMware Aria Hub, which was first introduced at VMworld 2021 as Project Ensemble, and will provide a centralised view and control to manage the entire multi-cloud environment. The platform will also complement and extend management of the development, delivery, DevSecOps, and lifecycle of cloud-native apps in VMware Tanzu platform, the company’s application platform that provides a set of developer tools.

At the heart of this is VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store that captures the resources and relationships of a multi-cloud environment and is updated in real-time, underlined the company. VMware stated that other products on the market were designed in a slower-moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

The company claims that VMware Aria has graph store and API services capabilities that allows it to seamlessly integrate with third-party solutions such as observability and application performance management tools. It’s set to be made available to customers as a capability within the VMware Aria Hub.

“With multi-cloud realities taking hold, managing overall cloud spend, resource utilisation, and application performance, security and compliance across different clouds can be increasingly difficult, and consequently, can lead to overspending, inefficiencies, and increased risk,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Management at VMware.

“VMware Aria's API-first approach enables developers, SREs, and platform engineering teams to pull relevant, correlated data from any source for quicker application analysis and debugging, while providing complete visibility into the cost, performance, and configuration of applications and workloads across cloud environments for Platform Ops, IT Ops, and Cloud Ops teams,” she added.

Customers of the company’s other multi cloud management products, like VMware vRealize, CloudHealth by VMware Suite, and Tanzu Observability by Wavefront, will be entitled to the corresponding VMware Aria offering. However, the company didn’t provide a timeline for when this would happen.

Google Cloud is opening its first cloud region in Mexico to meet the growing demand for cloud services around the world, after Microsoft and AWS already revealed plans to bring their cloud services closer to the country.

The tech giant said yesterday the region will be its third in Latin America, joining Santiago, Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil. It will also be joining 34 regions and 103 zones currently in operation around the world.

The company hopes the new region will deliver high-performance, low-latency cloud services to all kinds of customers, and support the digital transformations of enterprises and public sector organisations.

Local customers are set to benefit from key controls that help them to maintain low latency and the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, including specific data storage requirements, said Google Cloud.

“The cloud region in Mexico will unlock new possibilities for the use of cloud technologies by public sector organisations in the country,” said Juan Carlos Sarmiento Tovilla, director general of information systems at the Federal Court of Administrative Justice. “Different public entities would benefit from interoperating in an efficient and secure way, facilitating access to computing power and information technologies. It is important to mention that the computer developments in Mexico are highly specialised so they can become important references for other Spanish-speaking countries.”

IT Pro has asked Google Cloud where exactly in Mexico it plans to open the new region as this remains unclear.

Google Cloud is last amongst its competitors to reveal plans to establish new cloud services in Mexico. Microsoft stated two years ago that it would set up a cloud data centre region in the country, although this has yet to open.

Additionally, AWS also said in February 2022 it plans to open a local zone in the city of Querétaro. A local zone is an infrastructure deployment that extends AWS Regions to bring AWS services closer to certain geographical areas.

Google Cloud announced a five-year, $1.2 billion commitment to the Latin American region last month. The money will be invested in four areas that the company thinks it can best help the region thrive, namely digital infrastructure, digital skills, entrepreneurship, and inclusive, sustainable communities, revealed Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

In Mexico, Google Cloud said the new cloud region is the latest investment to support the digital transformation of Mexican organisations. In the last year, the tech giant has opened a support centre to help local and global companies. It also opened a delivery centre and grew its team in Monterrey to support the local ecosystem.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned against the dangers of giving up control to cloud powerhouses like AWS and Google, saying public cloud services and proprietary software, rather than open source, disempowers people and businesses, ZDNet has reported.

The former NSA contractor was speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Boston, discussing the merits of open source software with OpenStack Foundation chief operating officer Mark Collier, although he joined via video link rather than in person.

"For most people the internet is magic, but that's not enough. We can't let let people be mindless when they're building clouds. You can use Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine, these are fine, but they're fundamentally disempowering. You give them money, and they provide you with a service, but you are also providing them with more than money. You're giving up control, influence," he said.

The reasoning behind this, he said, is that by signing up to public cloud services and proprotetary software, people are spending money on something they don't own – almost like renting a home rather than buying one.

He claimed that using open source systems such as OpenStack dissolves this false economy, allowing everyone to be involved in creating their own fortunes. He envisages a world where anyone can build their own private cloud, rather than relying on the services provided by tech giants trying to own the market.

"With OpenStack, you build it layer by layer, we can envision a world where cloud infrastructure are private – not in the sense of private corporations, but private as a small business, as a community. Where everyone can build it, he said."

Snowden went on to describe open private clouds as one of the most powerful tools of the internet, making the public the ones in charge of changing the internet to become a free and open world.

Snap is spending even more on cloud than it previously disclosed.

Snapchat's parent company last week filed for an IPO, revealing in that document that it is paying $2 billion to use Google Cloud over the next five years ($400 million a year), becoming one of Google's biggest cloud customers.

But in an update to that filing yesterday, Snap revealed it is also spending $1 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next five years.

That starts with a $50 million spend this year, $125 million next year, $200 million in 2019, $275 million in 2020, then $350 million in 2021.

"If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we are required to pay the difference," the filing admitted.

Snap is paying for Google's compute and storage to host its services, and to use Google's bandwidth, with Snapchat now counting 158 million daily users.

Its deal with AWS is for "redundant infrastructure support of our business operations" - so, backup in case its primary services fail. It's been using AWS since March 2016, committing to the $1 billion spend in February this year.

"In the future, we may invest in building our own infrastructure to better serve our customers," the filing added.

03/02/2017: Snap to invest $2 billion in Google Cloud

Snap has committed to purchasing $2 billion in Google cloud services over the next five years, according to the company's S-1 filing.

The Snapchat parent company will pay $400 million each year for five years, in a licensing platform agreement that will make the company one of Google's largest cloud customers.

According to the deal, for the first four years Snap will be able to roll over 15% of each payment to a subsequent year, providing the company continues to meet a minimum purchase commitment. By 2022, Snap will have invested $2 billion into its Google cloud services.

The investment was announced alongside the company's long-awaited IPO filing set at $3 billion, although this is a placeholder amount and likely to change. Snap revealed that its social media app Snapchat now has 158 million daily users, although losses for the company rose in 2016 to $514 million, up from $373 million in the previous year.

Snap's partnership with Google first began in 2013, and since then the company has been able to scale quickly without the need for upfront infrastructure costs. However the Los Angeles-based company now heavily relies on the service to operate effectively and has acknowledged the potential risks associated with the deal.

"We rely on Google Cloud to host the vast majority of our computing, storage, bandwidth and other services. Any disruption of, or interference with our use of the Google Cloud operation would negatively affect our operations and seriously harm our business," stated Snap in its IPO filing.

The filing also made investors aware that reliance on Google Cloud may stifle its ability to grow into restrictive markets. "We also face regulatory challenges that may affect our ability to grow in certain markets. We have very limited access to the China market, as we have not yet established an operating presence in China to support Snapchat. Access to Google, which currently powers our infrastructure, is restricted in China."

SAP has announced a partnership with IBM to offer services that help customers migrate their SAP workloads to the cloud.

SAP's deal with IBM builds on an existing initiative that SAP offered its customers called Rise with SAP. IBM is now offering an enhanced version to help companies move their SAP workloads to the cloud, called Breakthrough with IBM for Rise with SAP.

The program offers advisory, implementation, and application management services to S/4HANA users. This includes technical help with migration, along with strategic consulting. IBM emphasized the need to streamline workflows and optimize business operations as part of a cloud migration.

IBM offers services including rapid discovery and automated migration to S/4HANA from any source. It also offers templates for migration and test automation.

IBM will want to prioritize its own cloud for SAP migrations and, as such, SAP has also appointed IBM as a premium supplier of Rise with SAP. This makes it the first cloud partner to offer both technical services and cloud infrastructure as part of Rise with SAP.

IBM's cloud revenues have gradually risen as a proportion of its overall revenues and it has focused increasingly on this part of its business. Last month, it beat Q4 revenue expectations with its strongest growth in ten years, thanks in part to its cloud operations.

Last year the company split in two by spinning off its managed infrastructure services unit. This left it focused on cloud services consulting and global business services, its software portfolio (including Red Hat), and hybrid cloud, which included its mission-critical public cloud business.

SAP refocused heavily on its cloud business in 2020, with an expected growth in subscription-based services from its software.

Salesforce is set to trial green AI tools with an Australian AI institute to see how it can help businesses reach their goal of net zero emissions sooner.

The company will combine its Net Zero Cloud with AI tools supplied by the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) and Green Industries SA (GISA), the government’s green economy department.

The entities said they will launch a pilot with this technology to deliver sophisticated tools and data sources required by companies to reduce their carbon emissions and take climate action.

This comes as part of a memorandum of understanding between the South Australia government and Salesforce to help businesses in the region reach their goal of net zero emissions sooner. The agreement is the first collaboration of its kind globally for Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, said the government.

As part of this, the cloud giant will also set up a technology staff hub at Lot Fourteen, a technology precinct in Adelaide.

The government added that Salesforce’s collaboration with AIML and GISA will support its transparency and accounting towards decarbonisation across the sector, along with establishing a framework to support private sector utilisation across the state.

“Having just committed to net 100% renewable energy by 2030 and net zero by 2050 as part of our Climate Change Action Plan 2021-25, Salesforce’s commitment to Adelaide demonstrates they are willing to be a foundational part of this vision and will help create high tech sustainability jobs for the future,” said premier Steven Marshall.

He added that South Australia is a beacon in attracting global high tech companies to Adelaide, with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Accenture committing to operations in the state.

"We are proud to put technology in the hands of our customers so they can make meaningful decisions about climate action and are excited to partner with the government of South Australia to help them reach their climate goals,” said Salesforce head of global distribution Net Zero Cloud, Tyler Harnish.

Salesforce said it created Net Zero Cloud to help organisations easily track, analyse, and report reliable environmental data. It claims that it transforms a complex process of carbon accounting that could take months into one that takes just weeks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its second Top Secret region: AWS Top Secret-West.

The new region, licensed to operate workloads classified as Top Secret under US security classification, adds several availability zones that are geographically separate from AWS Top Secret-East.

Together, the two Top Secret regions enable the defense, intelligence, and national security communities of the US to deploy multi-region architectures that assure maximum availability and resilience to national security missions.

Through availability zones, customers can run their applications and databases at ultra-low latency much more reliably than with a single data center. AWS also supports replicating data synchronously to a different Availability Zone within the same Region, or asynchronously to a different Region.

Commenting on security, AWS said its latest Top Secret region adheres to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Intelligence Community Directive (ICD 503), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Revision 4.

The firm is the first commercial cloud provider accredited to handle government workloads across the full spectrum of US government data, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.

“In 2011, we launched AWS GovCloud (US-West), making AWS the first cloud provider to build cloud infrastructure designed to meet US government security and compliance needs,” said AWS in a blog post.

“In 2014, we launched our first Top Secret region, AWS Top Secret-East, which was the first air-gapped commercial cloud accredited to support classified workloads. In 2017, we launched the AWS Secret Region.

"Today, with the launch of AWS Top Secret-West, we continue our support for mission workloads that span the full range of US government classifications."

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed what is likely to be a lucrative data deal with the UK's top intelligence services to store and analyse information for the purposes of espionage.

GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 will store information using AWS' cloud services, according to the Financial Times, which reports that the deal has been made so the UK spy agencies can harness the data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools the AWS platform provides.

AWS will also reportedly equip the agencies with tools that enable easier data sharing between overseas field locations and rapid translation of audio recordings.

Other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence will also use the cloud service offering during joint operations, according to the FT's report.

GCHQ was leading the calls for a cloud security platform which could be used across the intelligence services, the report added. The deal was signed this year and all data will be stored in the UK, with Amazon's main e-commerce company having no access or oversight of the data at all.

IT Pro contacted GCHQ and AWS and both declined to comment on the matter.

GCHQ's ambition to further embed AI into its intelligence practices was highlighted in a 2020 Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) report in which it claimed UK spies would need to use AI in order to stymie modern-day cyber attackers.

The report claimed there were three key areas in which AI would be able to benefit the GCHQ; analysis of intelligence, cyber security operations, and the automation of administrative tasks.

Echoing this claim, panellists including Moonpig's head of cyber Tash Norris said during a 2021 IT Pro Panel that the best AI applications for cyber security will be in detection and response tasks like SIEM, SOAR, and EDR. The sentiment is echoed in the Rusi report, which stated that AI will never replace strong human judgement.

Commenting on an October 2021 claim made by the Pentagon's former chief software officer that China has won the AI battle with the US, Jeremy Fleming, director at GCHQ, said he doesn't subscribe to the idea, though he added that "China by more or less any measure is doing well in the development of AI capabilities".

Addressing delegates at The Cipher Brief Annual Threat Conference on Monday, Fleming also claimed the UK saw twice the number of ransomware attacks in 2021 compared to 2020. Attacks are proliferating "because it works; it just pays," he said.

To evolve with the times and deliver capacity to the business, network ops teams are transforming the tooling of their on-prem, private, and cloud environments.

However, the full benefit of digital transformation cannot be realised until a key blocker is modernised: load balancing. Explore the benefits of load balancing from VMware, including:

• Increased operational efficiency

• Orchestration, automation and lifecycle management

• Load balancing that is resilient and self-healing

• Dynamic capacity scaling

Provided by

Wells Fargo has partnered with Google Cloud and Microsoft as part of its new digital infrastructure strategy, combining a multi-cloud approach with third-party data centres.

Microsoft Azure will be the bank’s primary public cloud provider, with Google Cloud providing additional business-critical public cloud services, it announced yesterday.

Wells Fargo will use the Azure platform to create new services across all bank functions and provide a secure foundation for strategic business workloads, while platforms from Google Cloud will be used for complex artificial intelligence and data solutions, with the aim of creating more powerful user experiences for its clients.

The two cloud providers will also work together to use critical data and analytics services to accelerate Well Fargo’s digital transformation, including delivering improved employee collaboration.

“The Wells Fargo of tomorrow will be digital-first and offer easier-to-use products and services, and all of that starts with driving speed, scalability, and enhanced user experience through the next generation digital infrastructure strategy we’re announcing today,” said Saul Van Beurden, Wells Fargo’s head of Technology.

The bank will also transition to a set of third-party-owned data centres, although the company added that its longer-term goal is to rely predominantly on public cloud services. It said these facilities would complement the public cloud offerings of Microsoft and Google Cloud, “with both private cloud and traditional hosting services to create a secure, resilient, and flexible technology foundation for the company’s transformation”.

In June last year, Deutsche Bank signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to redefine the bank’s services. The agreement was set to accelerate the German bank’s cloud migration and transform its IT architecture, and Deutsche was also going to get direct access to data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services.

Google Cloud is set to open a new cloud region in Melbourne, which will be the firm's second region in Australia and its 11th in the APAC region overall.

The tech giant revealed that Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions worldwide connected via its high-performance network.

“With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country,” said Alister Dias, Google Cloud vice president of Australia & New Zealand.

The company stated that its cloud customers operating in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data.

Furthermore, the region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions and offers a portfolio of key products like Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Spanner, and Compute Engine.

Google Cloud stated that it will continue to invest in expanding connectivity across Australia and New Zealand by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Auckland.

This aims to deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across the region, which it said is especially important for those in regulated industries like Financial Services and the Public Sector.

Earlier this month, Google Cloud opened its second region in India in Delhi, four years after the launch of its Mumbai cloud region in 2017. The company said this new region would better support customers and the public sector in India and across the Asia Pacific.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, said that the company had seen “enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India” so wanted to be able to offer more capacity with the new region. He called it a “large commitment” from Google Cloud in terms of capital and infrastructure investment and was designed to allow the company to capture the opportunity it sees around growth.

The importance of cloud infrastructure to offer flexible storage and computing anywhere and anytime has been well established over recent years, and even more firmly cemented by the disruption caused by the pandemic, which has led to significantly dispersed working practices across the board. We’ve all become very familiar with the big public cloud providers, promising easy scalability and flexibility.

But private cloud offerings are also booming and deliver many advantages in terms of performance and security that are more valuable than ever against the backdrop of recent global events and the need to future proof your organisation. We spoke to Phil Bullinger, who has over 30 years of experience in enterprise data storage and became CEO of enterprise-class storage solutions provider Infinidat in January 2021, about the benefits of private cloud storage in our fast-changing world.

The rewards of private cloud

Whereas public cloud leverages large-scale public service providers for compute and storage – resources which your organisation will share with other companies – the private cloud model gives your company a dedicated environment based either within your own data centre or within a service provider's data centre, allowing for complete control over those resources.

“Of the things that companies look for when they invest in private clouds, operational predictability is key,” says Bullinger. “They can uniquely tune the resources to deliver the performance, the availability, the latency that companies need, and it gives them a very predictable financial environment, whether they choose to pay for the infrastructure upfront in a traditional capital expense structure or like a public cloud, from an operating expense point of view. This flexibility also extends into being able, with almost limitless ability, to tailor those resources to exactly what the business needs.” One of the issues with public cloud is the amount of data your company may have to move over the internet. With private cloud, the resources can be based closer to where they’re needed to reduce latency, improve performance, and minimise networking costs.

The pandemic changed the playing field for businesses in practically every industry and market, forcing many companies to rapidly institute digital transformation to keep up. “There certainly was a slowdown in the global economy, and it constrained a portion of enterprise investment,” says Bullinger. “We saw projects ready to go a year ago being put on hold because of the uncertainty. However, I think more than offsetting that was this profound acceleration in the digital business models and the digital transformations companies were going through. They realised in order to be competitive, to not only thrive but even to survive in the digital economy - accelerated because of the pandemic - they had to accelerate their own pace of digital transformation. And within this, there were rapidly expanding data storage requirements.

“That’s why we seek to continually innovate our offerings – for example our brand new InfiniBox SSA, powered by deep learning software algorithms and extensive DRAM cache, consistently delivers performance and latency results that surpass all-flash arrays. All this while still providing our acclaimed customer experience, 100 percent availability, and uncompromising reliability - it takes the groundbreaking performance of our solution to the next level. A huge tenet of digital transformation is just being able to operate across larger data sets and make faster, more insightful decisions regarding products and services and how you engage customers. So, these things all drove an investment cycle for enterprise storage.

“You know the old adage, ‘meet adversity head on?” he continues. “I think the data storage industry really embodied this notion, as companies were forced to re-evaluate their operational efficiency and their digital capabilities. There is an impetus for projects worldwide including the UK focused on storage consolidation and the storage infrastructure behind digital transformation. We see companies now aggressively moving to scale their operations, improve their efficiency and transform their business models. At Infinidat, we expect 2021 to be a strong growth year.”

Security matters

2020 saw a spike in cyber-crime, with Canalys reporting that data breaches between March 2020 and March 2021 led to more records being compromised than in the previous 15 years combined. “I think most companies realise they need to be prepared for the ongoing threat of ransomware attacks,” says Bullinger. “Some of the recent IDC numbers estimate that the cost of ransomware attacks this year is going to top $20 billion. The impacts and damages related to cyber-crime, which extend far beyond just the ransom paid, is going to be in the trillions, maybe as much as $6 trillion.”

While all cloud environments require robust antivirus and firewall protection, private cloud operates in a closed environment, which can be more rigidly controlled and monitored. You can access a private cloud over private and secure network links, with tools available to provide greater levels of authentication and API-enabled protection, rather than using the public internet as with the public cloud. Service providers offering hosted private clouds can also help your organisation to maintain compliance. It is essential in this era of increasingly rigid privacy laws and regulations.

Faced with the ever-growing threat of ransomware and other cyber-attacks, the security tools available to protect your cloud infrastructure continue to evolve. For example, Infinidat has invested in immutable snapshot technology, which is available to organisations through its InfiniGuard backup and restore feature. “Infinidat’s snapshot technology is near instantaneous and has zero performance impact on your storage,” says Bullinger. “Our customers can take tens of thousands of snapshots of their data without any performance impact, and we can guarantee that they're immutable. The data can't be changed. So, they're impervious to malicious software that would want to encrypt that data, and then hold it for ransom. While our customers absolutely should be investing in multiple software layers to provide lines of defence against malicious software, the layer you have to have the most confidence in is the storage layer. We give our customers the almost instantaneous ability to recover from a ransomware attack – they can repoint their applications to snapshots of the data that they trust and know are clean, with confidence they have not been altered, and most importantly can't be altered.”

Transformation and consolidation

Making the switch to a private cloud infrastructure part of your business transformation initiative offers the opportunity to consolidate your various applications, workloads and end users into a single storage platform. “Consolidation drives efficiency and economies of scale reducing administrative and management overhead as well as allowing sharing of data between applications in a much more fluid manner,” says Bullinger. “Storage consolidation is a big driver of private cloud architectures and certainly Infinidat's strength is in those areas. Petabyte scalability and operational efficiency are critical characteristics. Of course, if you’re going to be consolidating a lot of users on applications into a single platform, you've got to assure non-stop operation, 100% uptime, availability guarantees and low administrative overhead, which we do with our product.”

While flexibility is more closely associated with the public cloud, private cloud storage providers like Infinidat can offer flexible and scalable solutions tailored to your business needs. “Required today in the market are very flexible economic and consumption models for the product, whether the customer wants to purchase it all up front, or they want to pay for it over time, or they just want to licence on a month-to-month basis for the storage they use,” says Bullinger. “Here at Infinidat, we have very flexible economic models that support all of those implementations.”

An example of a successful consolidation is Pulsant. A colocation cloud infrastructure provider in the UK with more than 10 regional data centres, Pulsant partnered with Infinidat to consolidate the multiple storage platforms it was using into one private cloud infrastructure. “[Using multiple platforms] led to greater administration overhead, less efficient data centre floor space, inconsistent performance, and more challenge in terms of delivering a consistent experience to customers across all those platforms,” says Bullinger. “With the move to Infinidat, they were able to consolidate a lot of legacy storage infrastructure into our product. This had a big impact on their simplicity of management – they didn't have to tune these products all the time, as our products automatically and intelligently adapt to changing workloads. We provided them a very compelling total customer ownership position, which in turn allows them to deliver a more competitive business model as well.”

Private cloud storage will be a powerful tool for many organisations looking to rebuild and strengthen their infrastructure after the pandemic, while also future proofing against the possibility of similar disruption in the coming years and decades. “Agility and operational efficiency are going to be very important going forward,” says Bullinger. “The environment is anything but static in the world today. Almost every business in every vertical market is seeing disruption for themselves or their competitors. And at the heart of this disruption is data. Our customers require the ability to scale seamlessly in a very agile way around data. This ability to consolidate and coalesce larger pools of data together, allows them to make better decisions around products and services and how they ultimately connect with customers. For companies to succeed, [they need to consider] operational efficiency, total cost of ownership and their ability to manage these increased data loads with lower administrative costs. Defending against increasingly malicious attacks with ransomware and all the threats that come in tandem are critical, as is the ability to tailor those storage resources to the unique requirements of their business.”

Learn more about Infinidat’s cloud storage solutions

With the shapes of public and hybrid cloud evolving, some might wonder whether anyone really needs private cloud anymore – especially if the customers in question don't have difficult-to-migrate applications to manage.

US hybrid cloud sales have been tipped to almost triple to $145 billion by 2026 versus 2020, according to a recent Mordor Intelligence forecast. With public cloud growing too, fully private infrastructures look set to shrink.

Robert Rutherford, chief executive officer at managed services provider QuoStar, confirms that most of its customers either have or will move over time to public or hybrid infrastructures. Private cloud network bottlenecks and disk restrictions make management and servicing potentially more costly, if not more complex.

"We used to do a lot more testing when we had more in private cloud. Automated load testing, obviously, was part of that, and you would need to do it and keep doing it," Rutherford explains.

"A lot of people still provide private cloud but typically they're sweating legacy assets which they perhaps spent on heavily years ago – and those margins won't be around much longer."

Private cloud often suits fairly static and predictable workloads, yet companies today typically seek dynamic scalability, he says. Also, solutions are appearing that will over time solve critical questions about the handling of sensitive data – removing more of the remaining barriers to public cloud.

If applications can be migrated and there aren't specific security, privacy or location related data restrictions, public or some variety of hybrid infrastructure typically makes more sense as a "long term fit", Rutherford says – although customers still demand private cloud, so the channel must respond.

Hiren Parekh, Northern Europe vice president at cloud provider OVHcloud, points out that cloud adoption is increasing generally overall. Certainly, customers are typically looking for more agility, but specific choices on cloud can be more about where they are on their digital transformation journey.

"I wouldn't say that private cloud is dropping off, as such. Overall, private cloud adoption is equally increasing," Parekh confirms.

It's all about customer workloads

Even if many might superficially favour public cloud, not all workloads can be refactored or repurposed to fit. Applications that cannot be migrated easily aren't ready for public cloud, Parekh adds.

"Private cloud does give you a bit more ability to migrate those native workloads in a native format. Probably less conformity is needed if you're using VMware on premises and VMware as a cloud solution. In the end your workloads are more transferable," he says.

On the other hand, hybrid cloud can make it easier to choose a preferred flavour of cloud solution for specific workloads, especially when open standards and open software can be adopted to avoid the need to conform to a specific provider or way of working.

"The channel as a trusted advisor then helps those organisations understand the right solution for them in a completely complex landscape with the different fragmentation of applications that everyone has these days," Parekh says.

The differentiation comes when public cloud gives customers new functionality and fast scaleability – but that also typically comes at a cost. On the other hand, private cloud can deliver slightly more stability in some ways, according to Parekh.

If customers need truly automated additional resources or automatic scaling, the best solution may involve a certain amount of public cloud. However, when the customer requires an additional layer of security, strict requirements around specific certifications, data sovereignty, or compliance with the likes of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), such as fintech firms, a hosted private cloud might be a better choice.

"We firmly believe there is a place for both private and public cloud and we offer both solutions. And we still offer bare-metal dedicated servers, which also give true hybrid capabilities, if you like. It's horses for courses," Parekh says.

"Hospitals, government, defence. They don't want it to be as open as public cloud and this is the right platform for them."

Those private cloud customers will also benefit from knowing the resources they're getting and what they're paying for. They can make use of a cloud environment, but with more dedicated resources and without the experience of having "noisy neighbours".

Customers shouldn't, however, assume they can't trust something running in public cloud, especially with the gap narrowing between public and private cloud when it comes to security and compliance.

Carl Lehmann, senior research analyst at 451 Research (part of S&P Global), also believes that the choice depends primarily on the types of applications that customers are looking to run and how they want to run them – especially with vendors still launching new private cloud services.

"The company needs to understand the nature of their workloads. When considering private cloud, they need to be cloud native, modern, stable, predictable, and operate within predictable performance boundaries and budget constraints. If you know all of that, a private cloud makes a lot of sense."

Google Cloud has opened a new cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), its second in India after the launch of its Mumbai region in 2017.

The company said the new region would better support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia pacific.

"We have seen enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India so expanding our footprint in a new cloud region gives us the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years," Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, said at a news conference this week, as reported by Reuters. "It's a large commitment from us in capital and infrastructure investment and it's designed to allow us to capture the opportunity that we see around growth."

Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director of Google Cloud India, said in a blog post that the region will open with three “availability zones” to protect against service disruptions.

“With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data,” added Bedi.

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via a high-performance network throughout the globe.

The other Google Cloud region in India is located in Mumbai, around 883 miles towards the south-west of Delhi, which the tech giant opened in 2017. At the time of its launch, the company claimed that hosting applications in the new region could improve latency from 20-90% for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the closest region, Singapore.

Last month, Google Cloud revealed it was partnering with Reliance Jio to provide 5G technology for enterprise customers and consumers across India. This would involve the creation of a complete end-to-end cloud offering for a fully automated lifecycle of Jio’s 5G network and services.

Furthermore, Google and Jio also announced they were jointly developing a new smartphone, the JioPhone Next, which will launch on 10 September 2021. This will use a bespoke version of Android and will have access to the Play Store.

Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) used the opening keynote of the company’s annual Discover conference to hail what he calls the “Age of Insight”.

According to Neri, the information age was defined by a focus on the volume, velocity and variety of data collection. In the Age of Insight, he said, the focus will instead be on deriving value from all the data businesses create and store.

A key part of this is cloud computing, he said, but rather than public cloud, hyperscalers or exascalers, Neri focused on what would commonly be recognised as private cloud – data held in the customers’ data centre or with a co-location provider.

Specifically, he said this should also be delivered on a consumption-based model rather than dealing with over-provisioning as one might in a standard data centre.

This coincides with the capability HPE offers through GreenLake, its “edge to cloud platform”. This service allows customers to provision capacity on HPE hardware as needed, either from HPE directly or from one of its partners offering GreenLake services – of which there are now 900.

GreenLake took centre stage during the keynote, with Neri highlighting new products and projects coming into this portfolio, including Lighthouse and Aurora.

Neri also took time to rail against cloud lock-in, where organisations can find it difficult to migrate their data from one public cloud provider to another, or back into their own data centre. Organisations, he said, should be able to move their data without being penalised for it – “after all, it’s your data”.

“The past decade was all about the cloud-first mandate,” Neri said. “Looking ahead, the next decade will be focused on using data everywhere across your distributed enterprise – a cloud everywhere mandate.”

HPE GreenLake now supports Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server.

The announcement of the new integration came just ahead of the company’s annual HPE Discover conference, held virtually for the second time in a row, where GreenLake is expected to take centre stage.

According to the company, the expansion of GreenLake to include support for Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server will enable customers to take advantage of a cloud-like experience for their applications and workloads even as they remain in a private environment, such as their own data centre.

This is no small amount of customers, either; according to research from IDC, some 70% of critical production applications remain outside the public cloud, in a secure single-tenant environment and at the edge.

In addition to providing a cloud-like experience, HPE said customers will benefit from a cloud-like operating model as well, as GreenLake is a consumption-based service.

This is not the company’s first foray into working with Microsoft Azure via GreenLake, which has been able to support public cloud deployments on Azure, as well as private cloud infrastructure via Azure Stack, since 2018. However, it’s the first time the relationship has focused on hyperconverged infrastructure in particular.

Speaking about the new offerings, Keith White, GM of HPE Greenlake cloud services, said: “The world is becoming hybrid and that’s why we are so excited about this collaboration with Microsoft, especially as we see significant growth in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure area.

“By combining Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with offerings like the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, customers benefit from a unified, automated experience. The solution means customers can determine their own right mix of hybrid cloud and workload placement, with flexibility but also control. We continue to deepen our collaboration with Microsoft to develop comprehensive solutions that help customers transform to modern cloud-driven organisations.”

In light of exponential data growth, heightened demand for functionality, stricter security requirements, and ever-tightening budgets, how does on-premises object storage compare to public cloud?

In this paper, the economics of on-premises object storage are compared with public cloud for enterprise storage. With demands on enterprise storage higher today than ever before, the features and capabilities of on-premises object storage will be first compared with public cloud to see how they stack up.

The paper will then use a realistic customer scenario to analyse the total cost of ownership (TCO) to determine which approach is the most cost-effective for current as well as future enterprise storage needs.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of this year increased by 33% to $33 billion, according to new research from an analyst firm.

Figures from Synergy Research Group showed that the year-on-year growth rate for Q3 was higher than the 32% growth seen in the previous quarter. This, said analysts, demonstrated the health of the market.

The research found that Amazon and Microsoft continue to account for over half of the global market, with Amazon's market share staying at around 33%, while Microsoft's share was over 18%.

Google, Alibaba and Tencent are all growing quicker than the overall market and are increasing market share, Synergy said. Together they account for 17% of the market.

The other cloud providers in the top ten rankings include IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT and SAP. In aggregate, the top ten providers account for 80% of the worldwide market, with the remaining 20% coming from a range of small cloud providers or large companies with only a small position in the market.

"While we were fully expecting continued robust growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "Total revenues were up by $2.5 billion from the previous quarter causing the year-on-year growth rate to nudge upwards, which is unusual for such a large market."

He added that companies competing for a share of the market have settled into three camps: "Amazon and Microsoft are in a league of their own, while others are either aggressively seeking to grow their position in the market or are more focused on specific services, geographies or customer groupings," he added.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $32.8 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $119 billion.

The research firm also found that Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 35% in Q3.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more distinct in public cloud, where the top five control almost 80% of the market. Analysts said that the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

Oracle has launched its next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMWare and Kubernetes.

The dual-region infrastructure, comprising two separate sites in London and Wales connected by Oracle Cloud’s high-speed network backbone, will allow public sector bodies to deploy cloud services in multiple regions with ease.

Bodies can use Oracle's infrastructure to deploy not just disaster recovery services, but cloud hosting and storage of data from within the region.

The company’s partnership with the public sector has expanded in recent times to service organisations such as the Home Office and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), and local government organisations.

The private dual-region cloud will also allow public sector customers to take up additional services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Oracle OCI services, as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud applications.

"We've had a Government Cloud Region in the UK for several years, but today’s announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud," said Richard Petley, senior vice president with Oracle UK and Israel.

"This is a completely unique offering to the UK government – no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today. We’ll be working with all aspects of government – both local and central – to help them understand how they make use of the cloud to deliver better services and value to the UK taxpayer."

The platform has been designed in collaboration with several UK government and national defence organisations, and adheres to the security requirements set out by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Oracle claims. This allows various organisations to handle and transmit sensitive information through the private cloud network.

The company’s second-gen cloud is built specifically to help large organisations and enterprises run the most demanding workloads in a secure way and is built to run autonomous services. These include Oracle Autonomous Linux and oracle Autonomous Database.

Digital authentication credentials—commonly referred to as secrets—are a highly desirable target for cyber attackers. With access to privileged accounts and resources, attackers can breach applications, databases, domain controllers, and other critical infrastructure to disrupt operations or steal intellectual property.

Managing secrets across Kubernetes clusters in hybrid and/or multi-cloud environments is difficult, as they cannot be securely shared across clusters or clouds, and spreading them across multiple tools can create a large attack surface for attackers to exploit.

This whitepaper explains how solution architects can use our integrated technologies to help organisations strengthen security in Kubernetes clusters across production and development environments in multiple clouds, public and private, without impeding DevOps velocity.

Are you continually running out of space on Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever your chosen cloud platform may be? If so, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Storing files on your own hardware lets you consolidate and synchronise your data without having to worry about storage limitations – and your privacy can also be better protected. Here’s how to set up either a Raspberry Pi or a spare Windows PC as a personal cloud server, using the free ownCloud platform.

Getting started with the Raspberry Pi

You can install and run ownCloud on a regular Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, but getting it working can be a little complicated, as you also need to install and configure web and database services.

To simplify things, therefore, we’ll ditch Raspbian and use the ultra-light DietPi OS distribution instead. This is based on Debian, like the official operating system, but it’s designed to take up as little space as possible (a minimal installation tips the scales at just 400MB) and to streamline the process of installing core apps and services. Thus, when we install ownCloud on DietPi, the web server and database are also automatically installed and set up so that ownCloud can work from the word go.

As DietPi is still a full, multitasking OS, you’re free to install other services on it too. It makes a great starting point for a do-everything device that can live in a cupboard somewhere and perform a broad range of functions on your network – especially if you’re using something as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 4.

Download and install DietPi

To get the DietPi OS image, head to dietpi.com, scroll down to the Download section, click “Raspberry Pi All models”, then click the download icon next to Download Image.

The DietPi image is stored in 7Z format, which means it can’t be unzipped with Windows’ built-in tools. If you’re not already running it, you can install 7-Zip (7-zip.org) to handle files of this type. Once you’ve extracted the image, you’ll need to write it onto your microSD card: there are plenty of tools that can do this, such as the official Raspberry Pi imager, which is a free download from raspberrypi.org/download.

Once you’ve written the image to the card, you’ll be told you can eject the card – but before doing this, we’ll configure the Raspberry Pi to connect automatically to your wireless network, as this conveniently allows us to set up ownCloud remotely, without needing to hook the Pi up to a monitor and keyboard.

To do this, open up your microSD card in Explorer and open the file dietpi.txt in Notepad. Find the line AUTO_SETUP_NET_WIFI_ENABLED=0 and change the last digit to 1. Save and close the file, then open dietpi-wifi.txt and look for the lines that say aWIFI_SSID[0]='' and aWIFI_KEY[0]=''. Enter your Wi-Fi network name between the first pair of quotes, and your password between the second.

Now you can save the file, eject the microSD card, insert it in your Pi and let the Pi boot.

Configure your Pi

Although you can set up DietPi and ownCloud directly on the Pi, we’ll do it from a Windows system over SSH (the Secure Shell protocol). You need to know the Pi’s IP address, which you should be able to find by checking the “Connected devices” list in your router’s administration interface.

Once you have got the address, open the command prompt on your Windows machine and type ssh root@x.x.x.x, entering the Pi’s IP address in place of x.x.x.x. Windows will ask you to confirm you want to connect; type yes. Then enter the Pi root user’s password, which defaults to dietpi. If you don’t get in right away, perform a hard reboot of the Pi – we found this solved an issue when SSH seemed initially unresponsive.

Once you’re connected, the DietPi setup process will complete. We recommend you change the default passwords on the Pi when prompted – just make sure you pick something you can remember, as the passwords you choose will be used as the defaults for any installed applications. At the end of the process, you’ll arrive at the DietPi-Software screen from which you can make further changes and install optimised apps.

We suggest you start by assigning your Pi a static IP address to ensure your cloud server will always be accessible at the same address. To do this, key down to DietPi-Config and press Return, then key down to Network Options: Adapters and press Return again.

Now key up to WiFi and press Return, then select Change Mode. Key down to Copy and press Return: the Pi will now always use your current IP address. In your router’s management interface, set the address to “reserved” to ensure that the router never tries to give it a different one.

Press the right arrow key to select Ok, then press Return; finally, key down to Apply and press Return to restart the network service.

Install ownCloud on the Pi

Now it’s time to return to the DietPi-Software launch screen. This time key down to Software Optimised and press Return to open the list of available applications. It’s a long list, including desktop GUIs, media centres, web servers, Spotify – and ownCloud, which you’ll find as item 47 in the Cloud / Backups section. Press Space to select it, then Tab to highlight Ok and press Return.

You’ll be returned to the DietPi-Software screen. Key down to Install and press Return to download, unpack and set up ownCloud, along with the web server and database software on which it relies. When the process completes, let the Pi reboot.

Once the Pi has restarted, switch back to your web browser, then type x.x.x.x/owncloud, replacing “x.x.x.x” with your Pi’s IP address. Use “admin” for the username, with the password you set earlier (or “dietpi” if you didn’t change the password) to log in.

ownCloud is now up and running on your Pi, and the service should be accessible to any user on your local network. You can use it in a browser, or install the ownCloud desktop client, which runs on various versions of Linux as well as Windows and macOS – you’ll find the installers at owncloud.org/download. If you want to make ownCloud accessible from outside of your network, see opposite.

Setting up Apache on Windows

Setting up ownCloud on Windows is less straightforward than doing so on the Pi. In fact, ownCloud doesn’t even work with some of the most popular web server and database packages on Windows. Luckily, Windows 10 includes the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which allows us to use Linux components instead.

To get started, you might need to install the subsystem: to do this, right-click the Start button and select Windows PowerShell (Admin). When the UAC prompt appears, confirm that you want to make changes to your PC and then type this command into the PowerShell window:

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

Once the subsystem is installed, check it’s running by opening the Services console and selecting “LxssManager”: if it’s not, right-click its name and select Restart from the menu.

The next thing you need to do is install a Linux distribution. There are several to choose from in the Microsoft Store but, as we’ve already set up ownCloud on a Debian-based system on the Pi, we’ll use the Debian-based Ubuntu here. Use the search box in the Store app to locate Ubuntu and install it; when the installation completes, reboot your PC.

Once your computer has restarted, reopen PowerShell with Admin rights and enter Ubuntu . The subsystem will perform some background tasks and then ask you to create a Unix user. Provide a username and password.

There’s one last thing to do before you start downloading apps, and that’s update the software catalogues: to do this, type sudo apt update and press Return (providing your password if requested).

You can now install the Apache web server by typing sudo apt install apache2 -y and pressing Return. The -y switch tells Apache not to ask for confirmation, so the process will complete without interruption. When it’s done, run the following commands, each on its own line, to enable the optional web server modules required by ownCloud:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

sudo a2enmod headers

Now restart the Apache web server with sudo service apache2 restart. Check that the server is running properly by opening a browser window and pointing it at http://localhost – you should see the Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page.

Setting up MariaDB

Now the web server is running, let’s install the MariaDB database engine. You can do this by entering:

sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Installation only takes a few seconds. When it’s complete, enter these commands to start the database server and launch the configuration process:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

sudo mysql_secure_installation

MariaDB will ask for the root password – but there isn’t one yet, so just press Return and, when asked if you want to create a root password, press Y. Enter the new root password, press Return, then repeat the process.

MariaDB will now ask if you want to delete anonymous users. Press Y then press it again when asked if you want to disallow remote login, and a third time to remove the test database. Finally, press Y to reload the tables; a moment later, you’ll be ejected from the setup routine.

Now log in using your new root account. Normally, you’ll be able to do this by simply typing mysql -u root –p. However, if you’re denied access, you might need to update some permissions by entering the following commands on separate lines:

sudo mysql -u root

use mysql;

update user set plugin='' where User='root';

flush privileges;

exit;

It should only be necessary to apply this fix once. Once you’re in, create a database called “owncloud” by entering the following command at the MariaDB prompt:

CREATE DATABASE owncloud;

You now need to make sure the root user can access your new database. Type the following and press Return, replacing PASSWORD with the password you created:

GRANT ALL ON *.* to 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';

Type \q and press Return to quit the MariaDB prompt.

Setting up ownCloud on Windows

At last, it’s time to download and install ownCloud. Switch to Apache’s default web content folder by typing cd /var/www/html; now point your web browser at download.owncloud.org/community and check for the most recent build of ownCloud. At the time of writing, that was 10.4.1, but there may be a newer release by the time you read this.

To download this, enter sudo wget https://download.owncloud.org/community/owncloud-10.4.1.zip, changing the number to the latest version if appropriate.

Once the file has downloaded, you’ll need to decompress it. First, install the unzip package with sudo apt install unzip -y, then enter sudo unzip -q owncloud-10.4.1.zip (again, changing the version number if required). This extracts the application to a subfolder called “owncloud”; switch to that now (by entering cd owncloud) and create a subfolder within it for your cloud data by entering sudo mkdir data.

Finally, you need to set the appropriate permissions on the “owncloud” folder so it can be accessed and managed via ownCloud. To do this, enter the following two lines at the command prompt:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/owncloud/

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/owncloud/

The ownCloud software is now fully installed… but, if you try to access it in a browser, you’ll just see a listing of its index page. That’s because we also need to install the PHP processor that interprets and renders the code – and before doing this, we need to add another software repository reference to the list of locations that Ubuntu checks when installing apps at the command line. To do all of this, enter each of the following lines in turn:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

sudo apt update

sudo apt install php7.2 php7.2-cli php7.2-fpm php7.2-opcache php7.2-curl php7.2-mbstring php7.2-pgsql php7.2-zip php7.2-xml php7.2-gd php7.2-intl php7.2-mysql

Finally, restart the web server by entering sudo service apache2 restart. Next, open a browser window and point it at localhost/owncloud; you should now be given the ownCloud setup screen.

All that’s left is a little bit of setup. Enter an admin username and password; these should preferably be different from those you set in MariaDB, as they’ll only be used for logging in to ownCloud. Leave the data folder setting as it is, then in the four boxes below that deal with the database connection, use “root” for the username, your password, “owncloud” as the database name and “localhost” as the host. Click the option to use MySQL/MariaDB, followed by Finish Setup.

The new user account will be created and ownCloud will deliver you to a login screen, where you can use the same username and password as you just specified to log in. As on the Raspberry Pi, you can now access ownCloud via the web from anywhere on your local network, or install the desktop client from owncloud.org/download . If you want to be able to access your cloud remotely, then follow the steps below.

Accessing your cloud remotely

When you first set up ownCloud, it will only be accessible within your local network. If you want to access it from the outside world, you’ll need to configure your router to forward incoming web connections to the computer running your ownCloud server. On our Plusnet router, we achieved this by clicking Settings followed by Port Forwarding, then selecting “HTTP Server (World Wide Web)” from the Game or Service menu, and the name of the computer we want to direct it to from the Device menu. The process may be slightly different on your router, so you might need to dig through the menus.

Once you’ve done this, you can connect to the computer hosting your ownCloud service by pointing a web browser at the external IP address of your router. However, ownCloud itself will, by default, only accept connections from within your network. To change this, navigate to the ownCloud configuration folder on your server (at /var/www/owncloud/config/) and edit the config.php file. You can do this using the nano text editor by entering this command:

sudo nano config.php

Add the domain you just set up to the trusted_domains section at the top of the file. Press Ctrl+X to quit and press Y when asked if you want to write out the code to the existing file.

You’ll probably also want to sign up with a dynamic IP service, so you can access your ownCloud server by entering a memorable name, rather than a numeric address. There are several dynamic IP services to choose from, but we’ll go with No-IP, which offers a convenient free plan. Sign up at noip.com by providing your email address and a password, and picking a suitable domain name – we chose pcpro.hopto.org. Confirm your email address by clicking the link it sends to your inbox; if you’re using Windows, install the Dynamic Update Client using the provided link, so that it can notify the No-IP servers every time your router’s IP address changes.

If you’re running ownCloud on DietPi, type dietpi-config at the command prompt and press Return to launch the setup tool. Key down to Network Options: Misc and press Return, then key to No-IP and press Return. Select Ok and press Return to set up the service. When it’s finished installing, select the same No-IP option to set it up, then enter the email address and password you used to create your No-IP account. Your domain name will be detected and your IP address will be registered.

While data is the new currency of business, it’s worthless without ensuring individuals and organisations can rely on and trust in the integrity of that data.

So suggested Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO, Marc Benioff, during his opening keynote at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference.

“It’s a trust revolution. Everything is changing in our industry. Everything is changing in our work. It’s an intelligence revolution. AI is becoming such a pervasive part of our world,” he said, setting the scene to announce the launch of Customer 360 Truth, a set of services designed to aid firms in authenticating, connecting and governing customer data and identity.

“Revolutions are not easy and there are gaps. Those gaps are also between us and our customers. We’re able to heal these gaps and bring these things together. That is also why we are building our Customer 360 platform. We have done this together. We are building this together.”

By better understanding customers, he claimed, organisations will be able to more easily and comprehensively deliver more personalised and exceptional customer experiences.

“We love data. Data is an important part of everything we are doing and everything that you are doing,” Benioff added.

“We have moved from systems of record to systems of engagement. We then moved from systems of engagement to systems of intelligence. Now we have moved from systems of intelligence to a single source of truth.

“As we pursue the truth, it requires us at Salesforce to transform. That is why we have also enhanced Customer 360.”

Customer 360 Truth provides a single source of the truth by uniting previously disparate data from commerce, marketing, sales, service, and more, to create one, universal Salesforce ID for every customer. This ID brings together behavioural historical data that can come into play during a customer engagement - whether that’s marketing, problem solving, sales or something else.

During his keynote address, Benioff used financial services firm State Farm as case in point of what can be achieved through better and easier access to customer data.

“We want to be about the customer and the customer experience is absolutely dominant in that," said Fawad Ahmad. State Farm’s chief digital officer (CDO).

“I’m proud to say I work for an organisation that has always focused on the customer. We will always be guided by their needs, their dreams, and aspirations. C360 Truth becomes a single, reliable place we can go -regardless of where in the company - to be able to look at, and then leverage, the intelligence that comes from the platform.’

SAP has announced several improvements to its business technology platform for enterprises to allow customers to exploit business insights and gain value from data points.

The company has released services pertaining to data warehousing, analytics and cloud deployment through its business technology platform, offering enterprise customers a single platform from which to deploy SAP technology.

The SAP Cloud Services suite, set to get a raft of improvements, includes SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud.

"Our business technology platform brings SAP HANA and analytics closer together with SAP Cloud Platform so users can make smarter, faster and more-confident business decisions," said SAP CTO Juergen Mueller.

"SAP ensures high levels of openness and flexibility including out-of-the-box integration, modularity and ease of extension in cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models. With this open and flexible approach, SAP is committed to helping our customers achieve superior business outcomes."

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud serves as a platform that ties in all aspects of a business' data together before translating the dataset into insights relevant to its specific field. The feature will be released towards the end of the year, with approximately 2,000 customers currently registered for the beta programme.

The tool goes beyond conventional modelling to encompass aspects like data governance and creating a single data landscape from several sources such as cloud and on-premise from within a company, as well as externally.

"Thanks to the data virtualization capabilities, we can connect all our data without creating redundancies," said Andreas Foerger, manager of the analytics and reporting team at SAP customer Randstad Germany.

"The semantic layer that SAP Data Warehouse Cloud comes with helps us sync all our data from different sources in a way that makes perfect sense to the business."

SAP HANA Cloud, meanwhile, aims to bring customers an interface that offers virtual interactive access with a scalable query engine. This service, alongside SAP Analytics Cloud, which comprises tools that improve internal business planning, will also be released towards the end of the year.

The $10 billion JEDI contract to supply cloud computing services to the Pentagon has been halted after an aggressive lobbying campaign from rival tech companies.

According to CNN, which first reported the story, an inside campaign was allegedly carried out to dissuade President Trump from choosing Amazon's AWS as the winner of the contract.

Amazon and Microsoft are currently the only two companies in the race after Oracle and IBM were knocked out of the running months ago, but a one-page document was given to Trump which appears to visually outline Amazon's ten-year plan for cloud monopolisation.

The document is identical to one created by Oracle's top Washington lobbyist, Kenneth Glueck, an executive vice president with the company, Glueck told CNN.

CNN remarked that the document delivered to Trump, which may have been the deciding factor in delaying the JEDI contract due to be announced this month, was designed to play up to the feud between Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

"So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post," tweeted Trump in relation to Bezos' divorce at the time. "Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!"

Defence Secretary Mark Esper is currently investigating allegations of unfairness in the awarding of the contract, according to Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith.

"Keeping his promise to Members of Congress and the American public, Secretary Esper is looking at the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program," Smith said in a statement on Thursday to Reuters. "No decision will be made on the program until he has completed his examination."

Speculation surrounding the treatment of AWS in the contract's bidding process has raged on for months, some have argued that the nature of the contract itself favours AWS and the services it offers.

Reports also suggest that Senator Mark Rubio penned a letter to national security advisor John Bolton requesting the contract be delayed.

"I respectfully request that you direct the delay of an award until all efforts are concluded in addition to evaluating all bids in a fair and open process in order to provide the competition necessary to obtain the best cost and best technology for its cloud computing needs," Rubio reportedly wrote.

The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is worth $10 billion and the project to renovate the Pentagon's IT infrastructure into a contemporary cloud-based one could span 10 years.

Serverless cloud. It sounds impossible, doesn't it? How can cloud computing be serverless? All that deployed code, all that accumulated data being crunched, examined and interpreted. Surely servers are needed for these tasks?

Well, as it happens, 'serverless cloud' is a poor marketing term, as nothing runs in this day and age without some form of compute engine - it's false advertising if anything. Yet the term defines a particular type of cloud deployment - the ability to use cloud without having to have any servers in your business, and without having to specifically buy or rent any server resource from your cloud provider.

Sure, the provider (AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and the rest) uses servers, but it allocates resources around these as needed, taking server related matters out of the financial relationship it has with clients.

So, why go serverless?

Serverless cloud has some very distinct advantages for organisations working in a cloud environment. Sue Daley, associate director, technology and innovation, techUK, explains that many customers are drawn to low costs and the convenience often associated with serverless.

"Paying for compute resources based upon the amount of transaction performed rather than specifying a virtual machine spec to handle the busiest predicted workloads often equates to compute charging by the microsecond rather than the hour," explains Daley. "Not having to consider or manage the underlying infrastructure, capacity or operating systems [means organisations can] just write and develop code."

Ramanan Ramakrishna, Cloud CoE Lead at Capgemini added that those organisations which operate across multiple sites stand to gain the most from serverless.

"[It can be used] as an impetus to promote event-driven computing and a micro-services mindset among developers," he explains. "This is because the applications being built have to be split into distinct services which can then be deployed and accessed from serverless cloud. This sets the stage for a quicker and easier adoption of agile development principles and CI/CD without falling into traditional waterfall methods."

Is serverless right for you?

Well, you might already be using it.

"Serverless solutions may already be used by organisations that are unaware of the fact if they are using third-party APIs in their solutions already," explains Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics. Notwithstanding that, he explains, "it is certainly a good idea to learn a little about the practical implications of serverless computing to help understand when will be the right time to look more deeply or jump in and use".

A major advantage of serverless is the additional pricing options that come with paying for only what you use, rather than being forced to make a projection. This is particularly useful for small businesses and startups that are looking to trim costs and scale at the same time, but all businesses could stand to benefit.

"[Serverless] is a tool that can be used by any organisations regardless of size and scale", explains Daley. "Where it really can add value and impact is in helping small and growing organisations that only need computing power and resources when an event is triggered. For example, those innovative companies that are part of today's growing gig economy such as car ride share app or a site that allow files or photos to be uploaded which only need to be able to spin up computing resources when a customer request, like a car ride, is requested."

Things to consider

If serverless is something you feel would be a good fit for your business, there are a few things you need to consider.

Firstly, it's important to understand the various needs of your business. "Learn how you could exploit serverless, find somewhere simple to start that is likely to have a fast return of visible benefits, and look for partners who have already started down the road and learn from their experiences, good and bad," urges Lock.

It's also important to consider your skillsets. Serverless is still a relatively young technology trend and most organisations will lack the technical skills to architect a serverless setup effectively. Of course, that's doesn't stop organisations outsourcing to other providers, which may be a short-term solution for most.

Ramanan Ramakrishna suggests "organisations should work towards incorporating serverless cloud into a digital transformation agenda for 'born in the cloud' initiatives rather than force-fitting it into traditional applications and associated methodologies".

There is the issue of going all in on serverless needlessly. Daniel Kroening, a professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, argues that the best way to adopt a serverless strategy is to weave it into existing setups.

"It makes sense to see them as a valuable addition to the existing toolkit available to developers and system designers - not as a replacement," he explains.

With multiple implementation options, less complex systems and lower costs, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has become an all-purpose weapon for businesses, with SAP applications driving its usage among organisations.

This whitepaper explores the evolution of HCI, and the partnership of SAP applications, the cloud, and HCI. Download now for opportunities and Nutanix’s recommendations for properly modernising your IT infrastructure with HCI.

EMIS Group, one of the UK's major healthcare suppliers, will migrate one of its core services to Amazon's cloud service.

EMIS, among other things, make EMIS Web, a flagship product of EMIS's which 56% of all GPs in the country rely on to provide care to patients. The service will be migrated to Amazon Web Service (AWS) as EMIS-X, a new and optimised cloud-based version of the software.

Packed with new features, EMIS-X uses a range of new technologies, including AI-driven voice recognition to automatically interpret patient-clinician conversations and respond with appropriate data from the patient's records or to provide suggestions for treatment.

"We see millions of hours currently spent by patients and staff in repeating information at each stage of the patient's healthcare journey being eliminated and the management of medicines in pharmacy being revolutionised by better insight and more efficient services delivered through EMIS-X," said Andy Thorburn, EMIS Group CEO in a statement.

It will also support a video consultation feature following the rollout of Babylon, another NHS service of this type, which will allow patients to remotely have a GP appointment, without having to leave their home.

But how will the firm transfer 40 million of the sensitive patient records to the new platform safely?

Speaking to IT Pro, a spokesperson said: "For security reasons, we cannot disclose exactly how the records will be migrated, but can report that the method is highly secure, fully certified, and has been used for migration of critical data by the U.K. and other government departments. Copying records will take only a few weeks, but EMIS will operate dual data sources (with bi-directional updating) for some time to ensure service continuity."

The software which is used by over 10,000 UK organisations will reportedly migrate slowly, on a module-by-module basis which suggests it's taking the protection of data seriously.

The firm emphasised the importance it's placing on data protection by mentioning the "unprecedented levels of protection for patient data, including strong encryption of sensitive data" that the service will provide, Thorburn said.

"From the start, EMIS Group has led the way in interoperability and we have been working closely with clinicians and other customers during 2018 to develop EMIS-X. We believe it is the blueprint for the future of connected healthcare in the UK."

Federated Appointments is another new feature that will be rolled out in the new cloud-based variant. The feature allows clinicians to more easily search for appointments, such as an MRI scan, at a convenient location for the patient, waving goodbye to appointments made in other counties with unrealistic travel times.

This feature also transcends other healthcare software. If your local hospital doesn't run EMIS-X but has the closest available appointment, that appointment will still be booked, even if your GP does run EMIS-X.

EMIS Web, its current software, allows medical professionals to make alterations to Electronic Patient Records (ERPs) whether they work in primary, secondary or specialist healthcare organisations promoting more consistent care for patients between healthcare providers.

It's not clear at this time how long it will take to implement the new cloud-based service as the proposal needs to be approved by NHS Digital but from what the company are saying, it sounds like it will be a gradual migration process.

The NHS has embarked on a massive digital transformation in the past year, delivering new technology as a result of increased funding in a variety of areas. The controversial Babylon chatbot app, the NHS app and the new multi-million pound AI application to cancer detection and treatments have all made headlines in an effort to make healthcare in the UK more efficient.

"Late diagnosis of otherwise treatable illnesses is one of the biggest causes of avoidable deaths," PM Theresa May said in a speech on the government's industrial strategy. "The development of smart technologies to analyse great quantities of data quickly and with a higher degree of accuracy than is possible by human beings opens up a whole new field of medical research and gives us a new weapon in our armoury in the fight against disease."

Earlier this year, the NHS also announced a slew of smaller, separate initiatives over the course of the year geared towards transforming aspects of the health service. These include a huge funding injection to local councils to help social care recipients and commitment to get private medical data to augment its own patient records.

UKFast has launched a new "state-of-the-art" data centre, built to service the public sector's growing demands as part of their digital transformation efforts.

The multi-million MaNOC 9 fills a gap in UKFast's existing infrastructure offerings, comprising supercomputers to enable the delivery of AI services direct to customers. As is the case with UKFast's other public sector data centres, it will include direct access to the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) and Public Sector Network (PSN).

Additionally, to make sure it's prepared for the security demands of public sector customers, MaNOC 9 is protected by high-performance CCTV, razor-wire fencing and single-entry door systems to prevent hackers or attackers gaining entry.

"Our existing government data centre is filling up fast and we realise that now is the time to deliver strategic investment and accommodate the growing demand for our services from the UK government and public sector," Lawrence Jones, UKFast CEO said, reported Manchester Evening News.

“We’re incredibly proud to launch this space for our government and public sector clients and for any organisations in regulated sectors looking for a high-level security offering. By creating this facility, we also expand our ability to deliver replicated environments to the public sector, which is an increasingly common demand."

The addition of AI abilities provided by supercomputers means public sector organisations can take advantage of deep learning and analytics, putting UKFast's customers in a more advanced position than competitors - including those in the private sector.

“This investment is the next step in enabling true digital transformation across all of our public services," Stephen Jewell, head of UKFast public sector said. "We’re enabling them to do this by plugging in and accessing burstable cloud facilities at a moment's notice, which is something they just couldn’t do before. This investment is the next step in enabling true digital transformation across all of our public services.”

Revenues from public sector organisations grew by 43% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2017.

The Metropolitan Police (Met) has chosen to implement Microsoft Cloud with partner New Signature to modernise its infrastructure.

It's one of G-Cloud’s biggest procurements and will help the Met offer new services and capabilities as it moves to cloud-based services.

Systems integrator New Signature has put in place Microsoft Azure to take over from the Met’s legacy infrastructure, using the cloud to power existing and new apps and services.

The two organisations worked closely together to choose the right platform that could not only boost the speed and efficiency of application deployment, but also one that offers the security the UK’s largest police force demands.

“We are very pleased to have selected New Signature to help us as we start to develop and implement our “Cloud First Strategy” transition,” Angus McCallum, chief information office at Metropolitan Police said. “As a Gold certified Microsoft Partner ‘born in the cloud’ they bring significant expertise and impressive experience of supporting other organisations on the journey to the Cloud.

“The Met is committed to ensuring all of our people have the right technology to do their jobs with excellence and New Signature’s involvement is a critical part of building our capability and achieving fast results.”

New Signature has also implemented a new network operations centre that will oversee the security aspect of the partnership, ensuring it meets regulations.

“We are incredibly proud to have been selected to partner with The Met Police and make their digital vision a reality,” New Signature UK founder, Dan Scarfe added.

“Being able to help them on that journey, over larger systems integrators and previous providers, is a watershed moment. Like many other organisations, they have recognised the benefit of working with a cloud specialist to unlock new opportunities and create an agile, future-proof technology environment.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in the middle of a PR disaster following comments he made about Holocaust deniers in an interview.

Zuckerberg, speaking on the Recode Decode podcast, was asked about hate speech from websites like InfoWars and why it is still allowed on Facebook and the CEO gave an unprompted example of Holocaust deniers.

"I'm Jewish and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened," he told reporter Kara Swisher.

"I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong."

The Zuckerberg's point that Holocaust deniers do not intend to impart false information attracted lots of criticism and the next day he emailed Swisher with an explanation.

"I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that," he wrote in an email that Swisher published on Recode. "Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services.

"If something is spreading and is rated false by fact checkers, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution in News Feed. And of course, if a post crossed a line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech."

But his retraction came too late to stop widespread condemnation on social media and in the press, leaving the Facebook CEO in the middle of a PR fallout.

Last night, his sister Randi Zuckerberg, one of Facebook's first employee's and a leading figure within Jewish community organisations came to her brother's defence with a more coherent explanation of the censorship on social media in a statement to CNN Tech.

"While my brother could have chosen his words differently when talking about Holocaust denial on Facebook, I applaud him for being a leader at the forefront of navigating this incredibly difficult new world where the notion of free speech is constantly changing," she wrote.

"While it can be appalling to see what some people say, I don't think living in a sterile, Stepford-like online community where we simply press the delete button on the ugly reality of how people feel is helpful either."

Randi went on to say that she wished social media platforms didn't give a voice to anti-Jewish remarks, but silencing "selectively" would be far more "nefarious".

Randi's single statement has provided more clarification on a subject Mark Zuckerberg seemed to fudged twice, but it has been a week of tech CEO's PR disasters after Elon Musk called one of the divers who rescued the Wild Boars Football team a "pedo". The Tesla CEO came under heavy criticism and even saw his company lose value because of the tweet.

Picture: Shutterstock

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed the company's intentions to integrate machine learning technology into all of its products, highlighting four main areas in which the company is actively working on integrating the technology.

Speaking to press and analysts at Dell Technologies World 2018, Gelsinger talked about several areas in which VMware is already using machine learning,as well as teasing the introduction of ML to its vRealise management suite.

"I really see that we'll be putting AI and ML essentially into our product line everywhere. We'll find ways to simply bring more intelligence," Gelsinger said. "You'll see us making announcements later this year, where we'll be adding AI and machine learning into our vRealise suite, because that benefits us for workload placement. And actually, that's been a pretty good area where machine learning has demonstrated some quite dramatic results."

VMware is already using AI and ML in various areas of its business, Gelsinger revealed, including using it in vSAN to optimise disk performance and predict failure rates, in AppDefense to automatically flag suspicious VM behaviour and in VMware Skyline.

"If you're in a place that making any kind of forward-looking view, machine learning seems to be demonstrating very good results in a variety of these areas," Gelsinger said.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been major focus areas for Dell at this year's conference. Many of its new data centre products have been positioned as being particularly suited to these tasks, and the company has even built machine learning into its new PowerMax storage array to automatically optimise performance.

Rackspace has partnered with VMware to launch its Private Cloud Everywhere, enabling businesses to setup their own private cloud in data centres and co-location facilities around the world.

Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) allows those customers wanting to take advantage of a private cloud to do so using their own existing architecture. It also means businesses in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare or governmental organisations can take advantage of the security of a private cloud, while also storing data closer to their customers.

"Today marks a new era for the VMware cloud market. For the first time, enterprises can have a fully managed VMware private cloud as a service located wherever their users need it," said Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president, private clouds at Rackspace.

"Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere makes private cloud the optimal platform for even more enterprises and workloads. Customers receive public cloud-like services, with the ease of migration, security, performance and economic advantages of private clouds."

The company explained those making use of Rackspace and VMware's tie-up can build their own private cloud with savings of up to 39%, compared to building their clouds from scratch, and have the option to align costs with either operational budgets or capex.

The companies recognise that although customers may want support from Rackspace in the short term, they may have a much more detailed roadmap, preferring to operate the cloud themselves in future. This is fully supported by its Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) programme, which helps set up companies, signing the cloud over to them when the time is right.

"Rackspace has a proven track record helping customers successfully move their business to the cloud," said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit at VMware.

"Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, provides customers a common operating environment, located wherever a customer needs it, spanning customer data centers, Rackspace locations, or third-party facilities. With Rackspace, we are delivering an optimal environment for all applications-custom-built, packaged, virtualised, and SaaS."

Image: Shutterstock

Only half of organisations say all their cloud providers have a plan for GDPR compliance ahead of the 25 May deadline to comply with the new data protection legislation, a report has found.

Surveying 1,400 CISOs and IT managers around the world, McAfee's The State of Cloud Security report also found a direct link between an organisation's confidence in their provider's state of GDPR readiness and the level of investment they are willing to commit to cloud services.

Despite over 80% of organisations in a previous survey indicating they expected help from their service providers to achieve regulatory compliance, McAfee's latest findings showed only half of respondents said that all their cloud suppliers had a plan in place ahead of the deadline to comply with GDPR, which sets out tougher penalties for organisations that misuse EU residents' data, and hands more control to people over how their information is used.

Organisations more confident in their cloud providers' GDPR readiness were more likely to spend more on cloud services in the coming year, with those lacking confidence more likely to keep investment at the same level.

Just under half of respondents anticipated increased investment in light of GDPR, while 44% of organisations said they expected spending to remain flat. Less than 10% of organisations anticipated decreasing their investment in their cloud services, again contrasting with the findings of McAfee's Beyond the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which found organisations were projected to reduce investment by $85,000 on average as a result.

"The implementation of the incoming GDPR, due to come into force in just over a month's time, will affect cloud users around the world," said Nigel Hawthorn, data privacy expert in McAfee's cloud security business unit.

"Becoming GDPR compliant requires a combination of knowledge, processes, policies, technology and training, as well as detailed understanding of data flows to and from third parties and cloud services. With this in mind, it is concerning that only half of the respondents stated that all of their cloud providers have a plan in place for GDPR compliance."

Cloud Pro has previously warned against relying on third-parties to ensure compliance with GDPR.

Skills shortages underline wider issues

The latest edition of McAfee's annual report on the current state and future plans for cloud adoption and security also shed light on cloud adoption progress, as well as the main concerns proving obstacles for some organisations.

A quarter of respondents highlighted a lack of staff with skills to manage security for cloud applications, and only 24% of organisations reported that they suffered no skills shortage, while the research found 40% of IT leaders reported they were slowing their organisation's cloud adoption.

Data theft, however, was ranked as the greatest concern, with 56% of professionals saying they had tracked a malware infection back to a cloud application, up from 52% the previous year.

Lack of visibility, meanwhile, was cited as one of the most commonly experienced issues - spanning users creating cloud workloads outside of an organisation's IT department (shadow IT), a lack of transparency around what data is stored in the cloud, and an inability to monitor cloud workloads.

UK organisations slowest to adopt, and most cautious

Organisations in the UK were the slowest to adopt cloud services of those surveyed, while they were also found to be the most cautious over storing sensitive data.

When asked how many months organisations would take for their IT infrastructure to be 80% cloud-based, respondents in the UK answered 19 months, versus an average of 14 months.

Moreover, organisations in the UK were also found to be the least likely to store all of their sensitive data in the public cloud - only 10% versus an average of 25% - while a quarter of UK organisations said they stored no sensitive data in the cloud, the joint-highest with Germany.

Personal customer information comprised the majority of sensitive data, with 61% of organisations keeping such data in the public cloud, followed by payment card information, internal documents, and employee information.

Visibility underpins secure cloud adoption

The report pinpointed a lack of visibility as the key factor hindering organisations from securing their cloud services, concluding visibility-driven organisations, regardless of whether they have adopted a cloud-first strategy or not, have a better awareness of shadow IT and take direct responsibility for the security of their cloud data.

"Poor visibility has a bigger impact on navigation than any single control or capability. After all, you cannot steer around what you cannot see," the report concluded.

"The leading adopters of cloud services understand this axiom and are integrating cloud visibility into their IT operations to accelerate business. Better cloud visibility enables an organisation to adopt transformative cloud applications sooner, respond more quickly to security threats, and reap the cost savings that virtualisation provides."

Microsoft still won’t hand over private email data to the US that sits at the focus of a long-running court case with the US government.

The case, which has been ongoing since 2013, revolves around information related to a US criminal case that's held in Microsoft's Dublin data centre. Despite the fact the data resides in the Republic of Ireland, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) has demanded the company hand it over, as it's an American entity. The suspects in the case are also believed to be American.

In January 2017, a US appeals court rejected a government appeal to rethink its denial of the attempts to get Microsoft to hand over the Outlook.com email, which has something to do with a drug trafficking prosecution.

The EU intervened in the case in December to ensure the US Department of Justice (DoJ) understands European data laws. The EU claimed that because the data would have to be moved from Europe to the US, it would come under EU data protection laws.

At the time, the European Commission submitted an amicus brief - information filed by non-litigants to give the court a better understanding of a matter - to help it make a decision about whether the data should be handed over or not.

This week, however, liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wondered why Congress isn’t regulating “this brave new world” of cloud storage, rather than expecting the nation’s top court to interpret the legality of a warrant obtained under the dusty old 1986 Stored Communications Act.

“[In 1986,] no one ever heard of clouds. This kind of storage didn’t exist… If Congress takes a look at this, realising that much time and… innovation has occurred since 1986, it can write a statute that takes account of various interests,” said Justice Ginsburg in an oral argument filling.

“Wouldn’t it be wiser to say, ‘Let’s leave things as they are. If Congress wants to regulate this ‘brave new world’ let them do it’?”

Microsoft’s lawyer, E. Joshua Rosenkranz, retorted: “If people want to break the law and put their emails outside the reach of the US government, they simply wouldn’t use Microsoft.”

Over five in six (83%) organisations using the cloud prioritise a high level of security when looking for a cloud solution, according to a new report.

The study from Ingram Micro Cloud surveyed 250 UK-based cloud end users from a variety of mid-market and enterprise organisations, and across a range of key sectors.

According to the survey, other aspects that are important to end user businesses include competitive pricing (74%), scalability (68%) and the capacity to back up and archive (52%).

Despite the security risks and challenges, cloud adoption continues at a rapid pace, with total worldwide public cloud services market revenue expected to have hit $260.2 billion in 2017, according to Gartner an increase of 18.5% year-on-year.

Ingram Micro's findings will come as no surprise following a year where top organisations have suffered serious data breaches and security incidents, and are looking to shore up against future instances.

With cloud security, the boundary for the system is no longer the edge of the physical network, but the individuals who use it. This means security measures have to focus on protecting applications, data and identity instead of simply guarding entrances and exits to the network.

The survey also revealed there are opportunities for resellers to offer additional security services as part of a managed cloud services offering, with 52% of them seeing additional security services as a necessary part of strengthening their customer relationships.

Ensuring cloud security is also vital for companies ahead of incoming GDPR regulations as a part of what any organisation storing personal data of EU citizens has to have in place by May.

These regulations are forcing companies and cloud third parties into a shared responsibility model. For cloud vendors, the main responsibility is to protect their infrastructure and applications so customers can use them without worrying about security flaws. But the responsibility for protecting data stored on that infrastructure, from the operating system to the applications, is down to the individual organisation.