Microsoft aims to snare Box, Dropbox and Google customers with new OneDrive deal

Look out Box, Dropbox and Google – Microsoft is offering free OneDrive to customers of its cloud storage rivals in an attempt to poach them.

The move was announced on an official Microsoft blog yesterday. The company will offer free OneDrive for Business to Box, Dropbox and Google customers with a couple of caveats; the organisations must not currently be OneDrive for Business or Office 365 customers, and they must make a minimum 500 user commitment. The offer is valid as of...

7 February 2018 | Cloud Computing

Cloud eight years on: From inflated expectations to enterprise adoption

It is 2018 and nearly every consumer has heard of, come into contact with or purchased cloud services in one form or another. Many of us are now dependent on cloud benefits as many of the most common life experiences such as listening to music, watching television and learning in a classroom have all been improved by the ability to access, manage and purchase IT resources online.

Businesses are no different. Enterprises are now leveraging the efficiency and on-demand access of cloud...

30 January 2018 | Data & Analytics

Consuming public cloud services on-premise: A guide

As we enter our second decade of its existence, the role of the public cloud is changing. Infrastructure as a service altered the way that virtualised resources are consumed, but what has emerged is far more powerful than allocating compute, storage, and networking on-demand.

The derivative services that the public cloud providers now offer include speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, and machine learning functionality that are constantly being improved. While it is often prudent to...

19 January 2018 | Infrastructure

Google Cloud launches low-cost preemptible GPUs

Google has announced the launch of GPUs attached to preemptible VMs, offering a 50% discount – but with a catch.

As with the preemptible VMs, first announced in 2015 but with prices significantly lowered in August last year, resources can be used for a maximum of 24 hours. In addition, Google Compute Engine can shut them down with a 30 second warning. The ideal place for these instances is distributed, fault-tolerant workloads – hence the substantial discount.

Users...

9 January 2018 | Google Cloud

AWS, Microsoft, Google and more respond on chip vulnerability issue

Leading cloud providers have said they are aware of and working on securing systems after the disclosure of two major chip-level security vulnerabilities earlier this week.

As first reported by The Register, a ‘fundamental’ design flaw in Intel’s processor chips, dubbed Meltdown, was followed by another flaw, called Spectre, found in chips from Intel, AMD and ARM. The latter was confirmed by Google researchers in a blog post published yesterday.

The key to the...

4 January 2018 | Industries

VMware says it won’t support customers who opt for Microsoft’s Azure Migrate tool

Microsoft’s recent announcement and product update aimed at helping customers migrate from their VMware environments has, unsurprisingly, not gone down very well with the virtualisation giant.

On Monday, as announced in a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft will announce Azure Migrate, a free service, will become broadly available to all Azure customers. The key use case, and one which Corey Sanders, Azure director of compute, described as a frequent request, is moving...

24 November 2017 | Cloud Migration

How to improve MSPs’ agility while reducing costs: A guide

Agility is one of the key characteristics that distinguishes a successful managed service provider from the rest of the pack. Being agile means being able to respond quickly to onboard new customers, and fulfill new service requests. Unfortunately, this is often in direct conflict with another important MSP goal: minimizing the number of staff required to deliver those services.

One of the smartest ways to resolve that conflict is to implement your own cloud infrastructure, with...

15 November 2017 | Infrastructure

The future of SD-WAN: Rethinking the network and a market going mainstream

For those of you following the SD-WAN market, it comes as no surprise that VMware has announced its intent to acquire VeloCloud for an undisclosed amount. So how does it affect the SD-WAN market, and what does the future hold? VMware’s latest acquisition: A case of ‘me too’? VMware’s acquisition of VeloCloud comes on the heels of Cisco’s Viptela acquisition earlier this year. Don’t, however, dismiss VMware’s purchase as a “me too.” VMware’s announcement is aligned with its...

14 November 2017 | Enterprise

How service providers can secure the future of virtualised networks

Telecoms networks have undergone a big transformation recently, driven by the move from 3G to 4G, long term evolution networks (LTE) and the explosion of IoT connected devices into the market. Earlier this year, Gartner forecasted that 8.4 billion connected “things” will be in use worldwide in 2017. Mobile devices have also experienced their own transformation, now every bit as powerful and ubiquitous as regular computers. The volume and variety of data they store has increased...

16 October 2017 | Enterprise

Containers: The road ahead to enterprise adoption

It is indisputable that containers are one of the hottest tickets in open source technology, with 451 Research projecting more than 250% growth in the market from 2016 to 2020. It’s easy to see why, when container technology has the ability to combine speed and density with the security of traditional virtual machines and requires far smaller operating systems in order to run.

Of course, it’s still early days and similar question marks faced OpenStack technology on its...

11 August 2017 | Containers