Category Archives: Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration, Digital Transformation, News, Tech Thought Leadership

Optimising Hybrid Cloud Application Delivery

Written by Adrian Taylor, VP EMEA at A10 Networks

For digital businesses, success depends on application performance. Organisations must deliver the best possible experiences for employees and customers while driving innovation and ensuring security. To do this, enterprises are increasingly migrating application delivery to hybrid/multi-cloud environments to achieve increased agility and resiliency.

But are businesses achieving these benefits? A10 Networks and Gatepoint Research surveyed senior technology decision-makers around the globe, revealing key insights into their experiences delivering applications in the cloud and their priorities around application delivery controllers (ADC).

Today, the industry is at a crucial inflection point in evolving digital infrastructure. To ensure the success of their move to hybrid and multi-cloud environments and deliver the best service for customers, organisations must overcome the limitations of their current ADCs. Reducing the complexity of IT operations will be essential, especially as new technologies and evolving systems expand the skills required of IT staff.

Ultimately, the ADC will either enable digital success or impede it—depending on the choices IT leaders make now.

 

Cloud complexities

Businesses are now hosting their applications in a variety of environments, both public and private, and yet 74% of respondents continue to host applications in an on-premises data centre.

The combination of environments reported by respondents show the prevalence of a hybrid approach in which an on-premises data centre is leveraged in tandem with one or more types of clouds and vendors.

While this hybrid/multi-cloud approach offers great flexibility to choose the ideal environment for each application, it also increases the complexity of application delivery. Organisations need to manage application delivery and consistent policies across heterogeneous environments, including requirements such as performance optimisation, load balancing, and troubleshooting.

 

Application Migration initiatives show moderate success

Given the strategic importance of cloud migration, you’d expect that companies would be diligent in the planning and investment needed to achieve optimal results—but our findings tell a different story: only 26% of respondents said they had been highly successful in these efforts.

These unimpressive results show a clear need for better planning. Not all applications are suitable for all clouds, or for the cloud in general. IT organisations need to make the right choices about the right environment and provider for each application, and clearly think through the migration process. The more thought companies put into their cloud initiative, the more they’ll get out of it.

 

The role of an ADC is expanding

ADC functions are growing beyond the baseline uses, such as global server load balancing (GSLB), TLS/SSL Offload, and application acceleration and optimisation.

As cloud-native, microservice architectures transform the way applications are developed and delivered, 15% of respondents reported that they are using their ADC to control access to containerised applications. With security a perennial and rising concern, 12% of organisations are using their ADC for authentication and CAPTCHA access controls, a common feature in public commercial environments that is now making its way into enterprise planning. Given that digital business runs on DevOps, 10% of respondents are also using their ADC to support continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).

 

ADC satisfaction shows room for improvement

As a critical element of digital business infrastructure, companies have a right to expect exceptional results from their ADC. Unfortunately, most fall short.

Only a third (34%) of IT leaders are highly satisfied with their solution, likely due to the limitations of older solutions in meeting the newer challenges like observability, analytics, and feedback to DevOps.

ADC requirements have changed over the years as companies adopt new technologies to support their business and employees. Meeting today’s standards for an exceptional digital experience calls for a fully modern infrastructure.

 

ROI is king

As organisations evaluate their next ADC solution, one consideration stands above all others: return on investment (46%). Over time, ROI depends on the lifetime value of a solution, so it is important to avoid getting locked into a deployment model that no longer fits an organisational needs. Interestingly, 9% of respondents cited flexible and portable licensing as a crucial consideration, a relatively new concept.

While moving to hybrid/multi-cloud environments can help companies achieve the application performance, business agility, and IT resiliency demanded by today’s digital businesses and markets, many are struggling to realise these benefits. Outdated application delivery infrastructure can make it difficult to address security threats, ensure availability, and deliver the best possible experience for customers and employees.

IT leaders are increasingly recognising the potential of the latest application delivery capabilities to solve problems more quickly, empower staff for greater effectiveness, and put data to work to improve performance, security, and uptime throughout the infrastructure, moving digital businesses into the future.

Cloud Migration, News

Yugabyte Releases YugabyteDB Voyager to Accelerate Cloud Native Adoption through Simple, Risk-Free Migration

New Migration Lifecycle Tool Helps Enterprises Overcome Migration Challenges from Legacy and Single-Cloud Databases

Yugabyte, the leading open source distributed SQL database company, today announced the general availability of YugabyteDB Voyager—a unified database migration solution. With YugabyteDB Voyager, organizations of all sizes can leave behind the limitations of legacy and single-cloud databases, and accelerate their cloud and application modernization initiatives by seamlessly evolving to an end-to-end cloud native, distributed architecture.

 

Gartner predicts cloud spending will overtake traditional IT spending by 2025, with more than half (51%) of IT spending in the cloud. The migration to cloud is driving organizations to prioritize application modernization and multi-cloud initiatives, but the complexity of moving underlying data to a modern database has delayed efforts, resulting in productivity loss, increased risk, and higher operational costs.

 

YugabyteDB Voyager enables enterprises to manage the broader lifecycle of database modernization with a single, flexible cloud native solution. As a result, organizations can lower their operational costs and reduce overall risk.

 

“Our customers want to accelerate their cloud and application initiatives but database migration is often the biggest barrier preventing them from moving these projects forward. The operational complexity of migrating hundreds of databases from legacy RDBMSs, used for decades, to a modern cloud native distributed SQL database, can be daunting,” said Karthik Ranganathan, CTO and co-founder, Yugabyte. “YugabyteDB Voyager eliminates this hurdle by providing an end-to-end database migration tool that simplifies the move to YugabyteDB by offering identical steps to migrate databases from any source database to YugabyteDB deployed in any environment. This eliminates the need to research multiple tools and retrain the database team.”

 

By accelerating cloud native adoption through YugabyteDB Voyager, organizations can lower costs by reducing legacy database spend, increasing data density, and reducing day 2 operational demands. In addition, YugabyteDB Voyager helps reduce overall risk by providing a consistent and proven process to migrate both schema and data from legacy database systems, including Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL, and from traditional single-cloud databases, like AWS RDS, Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

 

“Through 2024, six in ten organizations will re-examine current operational database suppliers with a view of supporting more agile and intelligent operational applications and improving fault tolerance,” says Matt Aslett, VP and research director, Ventana Research. “Distributed SQL databases specifically designed to provide scalability and resiliency that extend beyond a single data center or cloud instance are attractive options. Database migrations can be costly and complex. Products designed to facilitate database migration and modernization, like YugabyteDB Voyager, are therefore increasingly important to organizations as they evaluate potential data platform providers.”

 

First announced as a beta offering last June, the generally available release includes a number of additional updates and new capabilities based on feedback from a strong set of beta customers, as well as ongoing engineering investment. A new Installer greatly improves the deployment and usability of YugabyteDB Voyager, streamlining the process of getting started.

 

“As a leader in world-class advertising and marketing services, Genxlead needed to match our innovative, data-driven services with a modern data layer that could seamlessly adapt to a rapidly evolving industry. As a fully-managed distributed database-as-a-service, YugabyteDB Managed was selected as it exceeded our expectations around scalability, performance, and operational simplicity,” said Madhan Kumar, Founder of Genxlead. “To simplify the migration from our legacy databases, we were excited to embrace YugabyteDB Voyager. We completed a successful PoC that allowed us to load 120M records with YugabyteDB Voyager – an end-to-end migration product. We look forward to moving our production workloads with YugabyteDB Voyager and accelerating our cloud-native adoption.”

 

“As a total service provider of open source software with deep expertise in PostgreSQL, SRA OSS helps customers around the world simplify and accelerate their database modernization initiatives,” said Kaori Inaba, President, SRA OSS LLC. “As a strong believer in the future of distributed SQL, we have high hopes that Yugabyte will continue to lead the industry forward with new innovations. The general availability of YugabyteDB Voyager is an important step forward on the journey to help accelerate the YugabyteDB adoption by simplifying the migration from existing databases.”

 

“Since its founding in 1995, Insight Technology has been constantly thinking about how to maximize the value of data across enterprises and has continued to provide the necessary products and services with our team of database experts. We are very excited to see Yugabyte deliver an end-to-end migration solution in YugabyteDB Voyager,” said Takuma Matsuo, Product Management Division, Insight Technology, Inc. “We expect this new tool to be a huge help to enterprise customers struggling to move their applications to a modern cloud environment because of the barriers involved in moving data and escaping the challenges of legacy, monolithic databases.”

 

To learn more about YugabyteDB Voyager, visit https://www.yugabyte.com/voyager/.

 

​​About Yugabyte

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications. YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance and cloud-native agility, thus allowing enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. It is trusted by companies in cybersecurity, financial markets, IoT, retail, e-commerce, and other verticals. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and others. www.yugabyte.com

 

Cloud Migration, Digital Transformation, News

Take Control of Cloud Costs and Maximise Cloud Benefits: Aptum Cloud Impact Study

Advice on choosing the best cloud infrastructure for workloads and avoiding unforeseen costs.

Aptum, a hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider, has announced Part 3 of its annual Cloud Impact Study 2022, titled Taking Control of Cloud Costs. The findings reveal cloud computing has resulted in higher-than-expected costs for 73% of IT decision-makers – a notable increase of 28% from just over half (57%) of companies in 2021. The report explores the common financial drivers behind cloud computing, and the causes of its unplanned expenses.

 

Overall, cloud computing has given respondents more control over IT expenditure, with more than half (63%) of respondents saying cloud transformation positively impacts IT spending, and the majority (86%) saying cloud technology is essential to their company’s financial security.

The operating expenditure (OpEx) payment structures of cloud computing allow organizations to pay for the compute and storage they use, while also monitoring monthly usage and spend. The study’s respondents concur: 71% believe cloud transformation positively impacts operational efficiency.

However, 65% of surveyed IT decision-makers reveal they have “wasted significant IT spend due to cloud inefficiencies” and only 20% of respondents have a holistic strategy in place when it comes to their transformation. The report identifies the most common causes of unforeseen costs and details how businesses can overcome these hurdles to succeed and drive business growth. The top causes of unforeseen costs include the following:

  • Lack of familiarity with the cloud – Limited internal knowledge, expertise and resources are obstacles to managing cloud effectively.
  • Runaway cloud costs – When businesses do not configure the cloud to scale up and down effectively, they often consume more resources than predicted.
  • The ‘Hotel California of Cloud’ effect – Cloud is temptingly easy to enter, but hard to leave. To avoid egress charges, planning and expertise are crucial to choosing the best cloud infrastructure for workloads.
  • Hybrid complexity – Mixing hybrid, multi-cloud and legacy infrastructure platforms has its own additional management costs associated to it.
  • Cloud modernization – Organizations are increasingly looking to modernize their cloud applications. However, lack of expertise and legacy systems often add complexity and costs for those looking to do this.
  • Wrong consumption model – Companies unfamiliar with cloud may find themselves adopting the wrong consumption model.

 

“Unforeseen costs associated with the cloud can be a challenge for many businesses that lack a comprehensive cloud strategy. Typically, unanticipated costs come about due to a lack of familiarity with the cloud,” said Marvin Sharp, Vice President of Product & Strategy, Aptum. “Businesses don’t always fully understand how consumption models work and which one is best for their organization. For example, the original migration can often cause a peak in price due to lack of successful refactoring of applications. This price increase can be large, and isn’t always explained to businesses, causing unnecessary concern.”

The full report provides detailed insight into the true cost of cloud, and calls for businesses to optimize their cloud environment and make the most of their cloud budgets.

To see the full findings from part three of Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study 2022, Taking Control of Cloud Costs, download the report here: https://aptum.com/cloud-hub/2022-cis-part-3/.

To see the full findings from part two of Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study 2022, Solving the Security Equation, download the report here: https://aptum.com/cloud-hub/2022-cis-part-2/.

For part one of the report, Hybrid: Why and How– Applying Lessons from Digital Transformation, visit here: https://aptum.com/cloud-hub/2022-cis-part-1/.

The study canvassed the opinions and approaches to cloud technology of 400 senior IT professionals. Respondents were from organizations with 250+ employees in the U.S., Canada and UK. Industries included financial services, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public education, and the commercial sector.

Case Studies and Partnerships, Cloud Migration, Cloud Platforms, Digital Transformation, Hyperconvergence, News, Tech

Nutanix Enables JM Finn to Lower Operational Costs and Reduce Carbon Footprint

Nutanix today announced that JM Finn has slimmed down its data centre infrastructure from twenty four to just six equipment racks by migrating legacy datacentres to the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The migration has resulted in an impressive 75% reduction with major implications for both power and cooling requirements as well as the company’s long term carbon footprint.

Since its inception in 1946, the investment management company has grown steadily to boast both a multi-billion pound investment portfolio and enviable reputation for individual client-focused financial investment services recognised as amongst the best in the world. With a clear focus on the provision of high quality investment management services to a diverse client base, JM Finn was keen to embrace cloud computing as part of its transformation plans to make the company’s IT more agile, cost effective and easier to manage.

Choosing a suitable platform was relatively straightforward as JM Finn had previously used the Nutanix Cloud Platform to, first, replace a key legacy storage resource then rapidly host a company-wide EUC application to support working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. The solution offered hypervisor neutrality which meant JM Finn had the option to simply migrate most of its existing VMware VMs rather than immediately switch everything over to the AHV hypervisor.

Commenting on the migration, Jon Cosson, Head of IT and CISO, JM Finn, said: “Having successfully switched a workforce of over 300 onto remote working in under a week we knew just what the Nutanix Cloud Platform was capable of doing and how easy it was to manage. Over just two weekends we relocated both our primary and secondary datacentres, but that’s not all. By migrating all of our legacy servers and applications to the Nutanix Cloud Platform we were able to reduce the overall rack footprint by 75% and realise tangible benefits in terms of operational costs and environmental impact.”

Following an extensive needs analysis, Cosson and the team came up with a design which has enabled JM Finn to slim down its data centre infrastructure from twenty four to just six equipment racks. Performance gains have been widely reported and running costs significantly lowered, which has enabled JM Finn to halve the number of staff needed to support the new infrastructure with those displaced moved into other roles to find ways of better exploiting the new technology.

The required equipment was quickly ordered and installed first in a brand new primary datacentre in Suffolk then at a secondary site in Hampshire to provide additional backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Once working, migration was scheduled to take place over successive bank holiday weekends to mitigate against any disruption although, in practice the process proved trouble free.

“It all went remarkably smoothly,” commented Cosson. “There was no loss of service and no complaints which has to be a first for a project like this which could, so easily, have gone off the rails and caused real headaches for the business. It’s hats off to Nutanix and its partners for making it so seamless and we’re very pleased with the results and the high level of support both during and after the process.”

Looking ahead, JM Finn plans to take full advantage of the company’s new private cloud to further drive down operational costs and maximise the value of the company’s investment. Alongside ongoing work to identify workloads suitable for moving to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor several projects are planned, including the migration of legacy IBM systems over the next few months.

Business Advice, Cloud Migration, News

How To Boost Your Business’s Productivity Through Cloud Computing

Technology has drastically changed the way business is done across every sector. Cloud computing is one of the technologies that have emerged as a transformative solution and is set to continue having a profound impact on the business arena. 

Cloud computing essentially consists of three layers: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). A cloud service provider offers technology services you can use when you need them, but make sure you select the appropriate solutions that’ll match your demands. 

Moreover, investing in the right technology will improve productivity throughout your company. But, the extent to which cloud computing can improve productivity also depends on how you implement it. Therefore, it’d be wise to speak with IT specialists, like Timewade, to develop an optimal cloud computing solution for your company.

Having said that, here are some tips for using cloud computing to increase productivity in your company:

  

1. Streamline Processes  

The main objective of any business is to turn a profit. That goal can be more easily attained by reducing operational costs whenever possible. The cloud allows businesses to streamline systems and operations, which results in cost savings. The expectation of financial savings is one of the main advantages of cloud migration.  

The financial model of cloud services is foreseeable and cost-effective, and there are usually no upfront costs. Additionally, you have the choice of paying fixed monthly rates per user or paying according on the bandwidth used. The need for constant server refreshes is removed by switching from legacy systems to cloud servers. Moreover, cloud technology reduces the need for IT support staff. All of these factors add up to extra money in your corporate wallet. 

 

2. Foster Team Collaboration 

Given the standardization of the remote work model, it’s become increasingly important to have virtual workspaces that foster team collaboration. Cloud-based team collaboration software is well-suited for organizations with a remote working model because team members can easily access and share company data wherever they may be at any time.

Through cloud computing, your employees can easily and instantaneously share information. This preserves consistency even if team members are working on different time zones. Employees can also easily communicate real-time using the cloud’s instant messaging and video conferencing applications.

Since all files and apps are kept on one central server, the cloud can help firms streamline their information technology management. The cloud may also serve as a central storage for all project files, making it easy for team members to access the most recent version of a document or file.  


3. Conduct Business Sustainably 

The cloud reduces your need for paper, which can increase productivity. Moving legacy to cloud systems entails a massive leap in operational efficiency since it allows for process automation, and seamless data sharing and storage. Additionally, going paperless is a sustainable way of doing business and improves energy efficiency.  

Traditional data storage systems need constant cooling and aren’t power-efficient. Businesses that use the cloud and give their employees access to their data and programs from any location have also cut the carbon emissions caused by commuting. Plus, customers who use the cloud consume fewer servers and less power. 

  

4. Be Flexible  

Flexibility is an important trait to possess in an ever-changing economic climate. Trends can go as quickly as they come, so businesses that keep up with the winds of change tend to outperform those that don’t. Therefore, you have to be flexible enough to adjust to market changes and developments as they arise. 

With cloud computing solutions, you can quickly respond to internal or external (market) changes. Since cloud systems are flexible, they may be quickly scaled back as demand declines or increases. Because of this, the issue of overprovisioning or system overload is resolved.  

  

5. Use Cloud Computing To Manage Big Data 

Cloud computing helps businesses manage big data, which often require advanced or sophisticated computers to process. Older data storage systems haven’t always given businesses an easy means to analyze data thoroughly. Such procedures could take weeks for large businesses and require highly qualified personnel.  

Thankfully, the analytics tools required to swiftly and effectively sort through large amounts of data are typically available in integrated cloud-based solutions. These are particularly advantageous for smaller businesses because they can generate and reliably track relevant analytics using data at a lower cost. Plus, the cloud provides more levels of protection to safeguard your company’s data.  

 

Conclusion 

There are several cloud computing solutions to choose from on the market. But, since every business is unique, you have to choose solutions based on your company’s needs. Many benefits come with working from the cloud; however, you must first analyze your needs and what the vendors or service providers are offering, and, then, choose the solution that adds the most value to your business. By doing so, you can optimize your processes and increase productivity. 

 

Cloud Migration, Cloud Platforms, Hyperconvergence, News, Tech, Technology

Nutanix Offers A Stepping Stone To the Cloud at Crown Hosting Data Centres

Nutanix has announced a partnership with Trust Systems and Crown Hosting Data Centres to deliver against Crown Hosting’s Shared Hybrid Initiative with a new service for public service customers wanting to migrate to the cloud on their own terms.

As in the commercial sector, public service bodies are increasingly turning to the cloud as a means of delivering digital transformation, not only securely, but affordably and at least cost to the environment. To assist with this, the UK government sponsored the creation of Crown Hosting Data Centres Limited, a joint venture with Ark Data Centres, tasked with meeting the datacentre needs of public organisations regardless of size, level of expertise or starting point on their transformation journey. That brief, however, remains a work in progress and although Crown Hosting addresses many of the issues faced by customers through an established framework of platforms and services, some still face difficulties making cloud work for them.

“Mandated to take a ‘cloud first’ approach to IT, it’s easy for organisations to fall into the trap of thinking of Cloud as a place rather than a model and that they have, necessarily, to move everything out of the datacentre to one of the hyperscaler cloud platforms, like AWS or Azure,” said Andrew Puddephatt, Sr. Sales Director, Public Sector at Nutanix. “But that’s not the case, moreover it can be highly disruptive as well as costly with no guarantee that any of the anticipated savings will be realised. This kind of ‘big bang’ cloud migration can also be a real shock to support teams needing to learn new skills and ways of working, on top of which there are technological, cost and support risks from locking into a single platform no matter who the provider.”

Faced with this reality, customers across the board are increasingly looking to take a ‘cloud appropriate’ approach to transformation. An approach where individual workloads are hosted by different platforms to meet their specific needs across a mix of legacy platforms plus both public cloud services and private clouds either on premise or in a colocation datacentre. Indeed, some 83% of respondents to the latest Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index survey identified this kind of hybrid multicloud approach as their preferred model. Moreover, with Nutanix widely recognised as a champion and market leader in this approach, Nutanix technology is what Trust Systems will be offering as a core component of its new Trust Cloud service for Crown Hosting customers.

“Experience has shown that public organisations are likely to have legacy applications and platforms that can’t be easily migrated to the cloud,” said Chris Boyes, Chief Operating Officer at Trust Systems, “By partnering with Nutanix we’re able to offer those customers the same immediate benefits by migrating those workloads to scalable, highly available and easy to manage hyperconverged Nutanix infrastructure, fully compliant with the DDAT playbook and other government security standards. Beyond that, Trust Cloud customers can also host their own fully segmented private cloud as well as access tools to build, run and manage applications on any cloud, balance workloads across clouds and focus on business outcomes rather than having to manage multiple platforms and technologies. It’s a solution in its own right and a real stepping stone from legacy on-premise platforms to the cloud with less hassle, cost and risk.”

The new Trust Cloud Hosting Service is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution offering customers access to dedicated, per customer, Hyperconverged Infrastructure ensuring complete data separation. Hardware consists of Tier 1 servers running the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and a choice of virtualization hypervisor. Connectivity is also included using high performance COTS switching technologies with a dedicated high security perimeter firewall, shared edge landing network and intermediate Core LAN based on a market leading dual resilient and redundant platform.

As well as both central and local government, the new Crown Hosting service is available now on a subscription basis to NHS and other publicly funded organisations. It is made available with a tiered menu of support packages and access to additional services including encryption and both backup and disaster recovery as a service products.

Cloud Migration, News, Tech

Largest spend on cloud services expected over next 24 months, according to latest Colt research

Two-thirds of firms find cloud migration easier than expected

Businesses are accelerating their move to the cloud, with half of enterprises (50%) suggesting that their biggest anticipated spend will span the next 24 months, according to the latest research* from Colt. The research, which interviewed 500 senior IT and C-suite decision-makers across key markets in Europe and the Asia Pacific, is included in Colt’s third annual international study of cloud adoption.

Other key findings were that sustainability remains a core component of cloud adoption for decision-makers. In addition, early adopters have found it easier to migrate to the cloud, with 67% of respondents at firms that have already invested in cloud applications finding migration easier than anticipated. Much of this resulted from strong partner support on their cloud journeys.

The report also highlights how IT leaders split their time evenly between the main elements of cloud strategy (planning, testing, migration, and optimisation); however, they felt that more of a focus on optimisation could see firms reap greater rewards.

Those respondents who had overseen optimised cloud connectivity saw a range of benefits, including improved performance (41%), more network visibility (39%) and better security (45%), because they could bring in more products or solutions, for example, SASE (Secure Access Server Edge). SASE is also one of the top features decision-makers are considering or will include in future projects (66%), along with hybrid and multi-cloud orchestration (66%).

According to Colt’s research, enterprises are also achieving KPIs quicker than expected, with IT leaders believing that they’ve met almost half (49%) of their goals already, with eleven percent having completed their cloud project KPIs.

In terms of lessons learned, flexible connectivity topped the list of features that IT leaders wished they’d included in previous migration projects (24%). This is because successful projects are often followed by more requests that fixed connectivity might not be able to handle. Planning for flexible connectivity that can scale up with demand during projects and scale down when assessing, testing or optimising mitigates this problem.

Jaya Deshmukh, EVP Strategy and Transformation at Colt, said: “Our annual cloud report helps us to better understand the challenges IT decision-makers face around what companies are moving to the cloud and why, and the part that connectivity plays in delivering benefits of the cloud, so we can provide exactly what customers want and need.

“This year’s report highlights that businesses plan to invest heavily in the cloud over the next two years and that some perceived challenges around cloud migration were largely unfounded. This was put down to the key role partners play in delivering successful cloud deployments – both in terms of set up and optimisation.”

To learn more about Colt’s annual cloud study 2022 or download the report, visit https://www.colt.net/go/cloud-research-report-2022/.

* About the research methodology

Colt’s research partner was Censuswide, an independent retail consultancy that abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society, which is based on ESOMAR principles. It polled a total of 500 senior IT decision-makers – Including cloud decision-makers and C-suite respondents – at companies in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Singapore, and Japan, across retail, media & entertainment, healthcare & pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, travel, transport & logistics, financial services, telecoms, and IT verticals. The research was conducted online between April 29 and May 16, 2022. All statistics included in the report are rounded to the nearest whole number.

About Colt

Colt strives to transform the way the world works through the power of connectivity – taking what’s always been in its DNA to enable customers’ success. The Colt IQ Network connects more than 1000+ data centres and over 29,000 on net buildings across Europe, Asia, and North America’s largest business hubs.

Colt understands today’s shifting connectivity requirements and provides agile, on-demand and secure high bandwidth networking and voice solutions to ensure enterprises can thrive. Customers include data-intensive organisations spanning over 210 cities in more than 30 countries. Colt is a recognised innovator and pioneer in Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). Privately owned, Colt is one of the most financially sound companies in the sector, and because of this, it’s able to put its customers’ needs at its core. For more information, please visit https://colt.net.

Cloud Migration, News, Tech

Tech Expert Q&A: Understanding unstructured data

Mark Benson CTO at Logicalis UKI On-premises answers your questions

What are the pros and cons of on-prem, cloud and hybrid cloud approaches to unstructured data storage? 

The original data environment. For many years, on-premises was the go-to approach for unstructured and structured data storage. This is because on-premises benefits include control, speed, security, governance, and availability.  

However, with total control comes total responsibility and accountability. All staff, including database administrators and analysts, systems administrators, software and network engineers, and cyber security professionals, must create the environment, migrate and upload the data, and install on-premises systems.  

Employees are responsible for ensuring that the underlying infrastructure stays up and runs efficiently, reliably, and securely. The critical risk element here is data handling, migrating, and updating. This means there is a risk of human error. Additionally, on-premises cannot accommodate rapid data activity increases requiring more compute or memory. Essentially, it is more difficult to scale up and down depending on the activity.  

Cloud  

Cloud data storage provides the same benefits that drive organisations to migrate other applications to the cloud. Benefits of cloud data storage include scalability, cost, security, availability, and time to market.   

The challenges with cloud data storage include data integration, lock-in, security, and, possibly, latency. Cloud data storage requires writing ETL code, which consumes time and expensive resources, and introducing any new data source requires more coding. In addition, simply migrating data to a different platform can be arduous, involving technical challenges and contractual and compliance issues. However, third-party ETL tools make this task faster and easier.   

Hybrid Cloud  

Adopting a Hybrid cloud management approach to unstructured data combines private and public cloud environments – with the private cloud environment representing on-site data centres. This means that data and workloads are shared between on-premises and public cloud environments.   

Many organisations will continue to use on-premises infrastructure for the foreseeable future as they find on-premises infrastructure fitting to handle their security, compliance, and regulatory needs. However, much like the rest of us, businesses are continuing to transition to a post-pandemic world – and public cloud environments have leveraged their resources to offer flexibility and openness to meet the unpredictable data needs of enterprises.   

Organisations using hybrid cloud models will need to compete with the aggressively rapid growth of unstructured data, the analytics nightmare of unstructured data, the security risks and data protection, and the rise costs of hybrid structures and human resources required to manage these environments. Such an approach offers many benefits that fit these uncertain times. However, control over unstructured data is far more complicated than structured data.    

Besides on-premises security concerns, public cloud security concerns apply to a hybrid cloud architecture. These concerns include data breaches and potential exposure to malware. And, of course, the sheer amount of data on a hybrid cloud also increases the surface area of cyber-attacks – this is because data is not only on-premises but also on the public cloud. 

What is unstructured data and why is it important? What is the scale of the issue? 

We have well and truly entered the new digital age – and globally, we are now generating, using, and consuming more data than ever before. Unstructured data is increasing massively. It is growing in volume by more than 50% a year, and according to IDC, it will form 80% of all data by 2025 and does so already for some organisations.  

Unstructured data is not actively managed in a transactional system; for example, data that doesn’t live in a relational database management system (RDBMS).   

Unstructured data is becoming essential for business innovation and growth. This is because unstructured data helps businesses improve their customer experience. It offers the key to assisting leaders in getting to know their customers – understanding what trends they value on social media, what opinions they have, and, ultimately, what they want from the brand. Another benefit companies experience by capturing and analysing unstructured data is the ability to see gaps in the market and quickly profit from them before their competitors.   

To summarise, unstructured data provides valuable insights that lead the way for businesses to fill gaps and provide services that meet new customer needs. 

How likely are these newer, hybrid models to succeed and what type of use cases (or indeed industries) are driving take up? 

As we delve deeper into remote and hybrid working models, IT leaders continue developing their digital transformation efforts. Many are embracing hybrid cloud models to scale IT resources to effectively support business-critical applications and workloads. Hybrid cloud has provided them with and will continue providing businesses with the flexibility and efficiencies needed to grow and meet the demands of all users. This is because it is a good platform for building confidence in the cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out.  

A great example where we continue to see hybrid cloud growth is in the financial services industry. Many FSIs (financial services institutions) are turning to hybrid cloud as it enables them to gain insights into customer behaviour, product efficiency, cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Hybrid cloud can reduce their operating cost and enhance their data security simultaneously by splitting their data between on-premises storage for sensitive data and cloud storage for less sensitive data. This helps FSIs adhere to changing regulatory reporting requirements in multiple operating jurisdictions. These solutions help FSIs conduct liquidity and risk calculations and monitor data to detect fraudulent activity. Ultimately, by using a hybrid cloud, financial service organisations can maintain and support their legacy systems while simultaneously taking advantage of Cloud technology. 

Cloud Migration, News, Tech

Leaseweb Adds Microsoft Azure to Its Hybrid Cloud Networking Capabilities

Leaseweb Global, a leading hosting and cloud services provider, today announced that it has expanded its Leaseweb Cloud Connect offering to provide fast and secure connectivity to Microsoft Azure from select Leaseweb data centres in Europe, the U.S. and Singapore.

With the addition of Azure, Leaseweb Cloud Connect affords customers the flexibility to bypass the Internet and securely connect Leaseweb-hosted infrastructure to any of the big three public cloud providers, which also include Google Cloud and AWS. Customers are able to select different connectivity speeds between 100 mbps and 10 Gbps, depending on their individual budget and project requirements.

“Most organisations today, whether unintentionally or by design, are operating in a hybrid cloud environment. They recognise the utility of the public cloud for development, big data and on-off workloads while also wanting to preserve their business-critical applications and data on private infrastructure,” said Nikolaos Kolestsas, product manager, Leaseweb Global. “This latest expansion of Leaseweb Cloud Connect with Microsoft Azure allows customers to realise the best of both worlds, connecting their dedicated hosting resources to their public cloud provider of choice.”

The hybrid cloud infrastructure market is expected to reach $128.01 billion by 2025. Leaseweb Cloud Connect provides businesses with an efficient way to build secure networks that seamlessly interconnect their disparate IT platforms across Leaseweb and public cloud environments. This helps minimise infrastructure costs while increasing the speed at which organisations can bring new products and services to market.

Cloud Migration, News

The sustainable advantages of cloud-native solutions are overlooked by businesses

London, UK, 31 May 2022 – While many businesses are looking to cloud native solutions to improve efficiency, save money and to provide better experiences to their customers, the environmental benefits of operating in the cloud can often be overlooked, according to Zoosh’s Chief Revenue Officer, Souvik Dutta.

Mr Dutta said: “Post-pandemic, many businesses will be focusing on digitalisation but that doesn’t mean the quest for sustainability needs to be pushed to the side. In fact, being cloud native automatically brings with it a host of environmental and social benefits that some companies are not recognising or quantifying”.

All businesses are now falling subject to sustainability targets, with many showing their sustainability campaigns publicly, as a result of the growing pressure to ‘play their part’. However, this responsibility doesn’t have to be a burden, but a blessing. According to the HSBC Navigator: the voice of business 2021 report, 78% of businesses say that a more sustainability-driven business model would have a positive impact on overall growth.

As a physical storage solution, data centres require upkeep and maintenance which results in downtime. Cloud native offers businesses an efficient and clean way to scale and adapt, meaning less maintenance and parts, which harm the environment and the business.

Cloud native solutions create a more scalable, and adaptable solution, lowering infrastructure and maintenance costs in the long term, but will also provide a more flexible working environment for employees in the new work-from-home era. This solution has proved invaluable for businesses looking for a secure solution for their new working environment, but businesses need to also focus on the sustainable benefits that cloud-native solutions have to offer, in order to realise its full potential and stay ahead of their competition in their sustainability and business goals.

Measuring a company’s success in sustainability will depend on how proactively it can adapt and invest in technology, as digital transformation continues to be at the forefront for many businesses. Many companies aren’t aware of the sustainability benefits of going cloud-native, instead they are fixated on the business benefits (cost savings, efficiencies, customer experience etc. Companies should look at the sustainable benefits, and use them as a competitive advantage.

Dutta went on to outline how it is essential for businesses to start considering cloud native now, to stay ahead of the curve for sustainability targets and prepare for future business growth. On-site and off-site data centres can be extremely costly to manage, maintain and upgrade, so by investing in cloud native solutions now, businesses will save money in the long term, as well as playing their part in saving the planet.

“It is well-known that data centres play a core part in carbon emissions, globally. Businesses need to not only think about their travel, waste, materials and energy, they need to think about how they are storing all of their data. Cloud native solutions are a sustainable, secure and future-ready opportunity for businesses to reach their goals.