Weekly Cloud Trends – Is Machine Learning Getting Cheaper?

Each passing week, we discover more about cloud computing. This particular sphere of modern-day technology constantly brings innovation and different solutions to help solve numerous business challenges. The reason for that is that the cloud space relies on tech that’s flexible and adaptable and is therefore always able to evolve. The latest Weekly Cloud Trends are showing once more how chief public cloud providers are adapting to the current demands of the market. Both AWS and MS are bringing new tools and upgraded solutions to the table.

Amazon Cuts the Cost of AWS SageMaker Instances by Up To 18%

It appears that Amazon has already taken the step towards lowering the price of its AI-based service, SageMaker. Sure, it is not exactly earth-shattering news, but it does seem to be a pretty sure sign that machine learning tech is going to be easier to obtain. “In fact, we found out that the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Amazon SageMaker over a three-year horizon is over 54% lower compared to other options, and developers can be up to 10 times more productive,” says AWS Technical Evangelist Julien Simon. He added: “This comes from the fact that Amazon SageMaker manages all the training and prediction infrastructure that ML typically requires, allowing teams to focus exclusively on studying and solving the ML problem at hand.” This is indeed an interesting move by Amazon. It’s safe to assume that we’re not far from an age when machine learning will be accepted as a commodity on the market. Imagine the opportunities that would create. Of course, we also must ponder what kind of impact this would have on the global economy, trading, and so on. Read the full story at SA.

MS Azure - Start with Cloud Adoption Framework Enterprise-scale Landing Zones

Here at Hentsū we have often discussed the importance of designing a roadmap when going through the cloud adoption process. It is great to see exactly how major companies are now growing and improving on that front. Azure, for instance, introduces new ways to enhance enterprise-scale architecture landing zones. Here’s a snippet from Microsoft’s official post:
  • Design guidelines: Guide to the critical decisions that drive the design of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure enterprise-scale landing zone.
  • Architecture: Conceptual reference architecture that demonstrates design areas and best practices.
  • Implementations: Azure Resource Manager template of the architecture to accelerate adoption.
Read more at MS.

Microsoft Will Let Employees Work From Home Permanently: Report

The challenging times we live in have certainly put both employees and companies through unprecedented hardships. Industry giant Microsoft is reportedly going to allow employees to work from home permanently, and not just during the COVID-19 pandemic, but after it is over. “The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged all of us to think, live, and work in new ways,” reveals Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, in the note to employees. “We will offer as much flexibility as possible to support individual workstyles while balancing business needs, and ensuring we live our culture.” Such powerful trends set by industry-leading companies are no doubt going to be a big influence on global business trends. Discover more at The Verge.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Cloud Strategy Roadmap: 11 Biggest Public Cloud Benefits

Singling out the key public cloud benefits is not as simple as you might think. There are many things to consider in a complex and highly competitive market. When moving to the cloud, you have to decide which type of cloud environment is best suited for your business. Before you do that, take the time to properly delve into the key differences between the public and private cloud. The next step is to understand the fundamentals of public cloud, and what they can mean in today’s technology market. Successfully implementing cloud-based functionalities and tooling into your workflow can be tricky and challenging. Fortunately, cloud tech continues to evolve at an astounding pace. Setting up your own cloud-powered business has never been easier. Companies now infuse every aspect of their business the following advantages of public cloud:
  1. Public Cloud Services with Scalability
  2. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Work for You
  3. Fast and Simple Set-Ups
  4. Cost-effectiveness
  5. Business Continuity and Resilience
  6. Speedy Data Recovery
  7. Security Through Multitenancy
  8. Lightening the Workload for IT Staff
  9. Agility for Companies Big and Small
  10. GEO Flexibility and Powerful Global Presence
  11. Reliability and Failing Fast

1. Public Cloud Services with Scalability

Many large companies are fully aware that public cloud services add a handy auto-scaling part to their business operations. Scalability is highly present in various PaaS and SaaS scenarios. Virtual machines (VMs) in public cloud can be easily created, scaled, upgraded, downsized corresponding to business needs, of course. Workload balancing becomes a cinch, especially when compared to traditional on-prem conditions, which usually involve tough to keep, server-heavy computing methodologies.

2. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Work for You

Public cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are constantly competing to create innovative services and solutions. Their goal is to streamline your business, through collaboration powerful tooling and more. For that matter, technologies, tools, and software are constantly updated. Maintaining the cloud stops being a problem and quickly becomes a solution. Using powerful, well-polished infrastructure from industry-leading cloud providers, dramatically reduces any hassle or headaches you would otherwise experience with things like system and server maintenance. Users or clients are free to focus on production, development, and testing.

3. Fast and Simple Set-Ups

Normally, you should be methodical and careful when switching to public cloud. However, setting up public cloud for your business can be completed within hours if necessary. Deployment and configuration can be handled remotely, and it will not be much of a bother for your IT team.

4. Cost-effectiveness

Managing things like bandwidth, hardware, application improvement, can be a predicament. With the public cloud system, such responsibilities rest with the provider. This effectively reduces capital spending right from the start. There are little to no initial investments. Another extremely important financial aspect is using the pay-as-you-go model. Payments are made monthly or annually, albeit resources are only used as needed.

5. Business Continuity and Resilience

Digital transformation is not just a mere buzzword. It is very much a reality, thanks to diverse public cloud benefits. Migrating your legacy applications to the cloud future-proofs your business and ensures continuity. In addition, your applications are constantly kept fresh, up-to-date and

6. Swift Data Recovery

Multiple infrastructures are available within the public cloud. This effectively reduces difficulties when deploying a disaster recovery plan. With public cloud, there is a minor risk of significant data loss. Also, businesses do not have to waste valuable time when transferring backup data from their own local in-house servers to recover critical data following a disaster. The public cloud handles this through an automation process, which involves quick data recovery with any mishaps or errors.

7. Enhanced Security Through Multitenancy and Fast Data Recovery

Public cloud providers put a high emphasis on security. Also, using public cloud infrastructure denotes a multitenancy foundation. So, you have multiple users on a single server at one time. However, the data stored by users stays safely stored and isolated from other users.

8. Lightening the Workload for IT Staff

This effectively ties back to the public cloud being cost-effective. Companies give massive budgets for computing costs, and IT staff training and education. The reason is that expert IT engineers are difficult to find and are typically quite expensive. Once your business hops on the public cloud, any cloud management or cloud-related services are handled externally. Internal teams can, therefore, free of stress, added training and can concentrate the core business.

9. Agility for Companies Big and Small

To stay afloat in today’s dynamic digital market, companies are accelerating public cloud adoption. Regardless of the business nature, they turn to the cloud for provisioning resources, handling complex workloads, big data management, using cloud-powered tools, innovative technologies, and so on. Agility is a primary characteristic of the public cloud space. Issues and challenges of a technical nature are severely reduced. Everything quickly shifts towards quality of service because you can prioritize tasks towards better client satisfaction. You effectively streamline in-house operations, thus improving delivery, collaboration, data gathering, data management, rollout efficiency, and more.

10. GEO Flexibility and Powerful Global Presence

Public cloud providers, with their massive networks of servers, network bandwidth, IT resources, make powerful cloud infrastructure available worldwide. Remember, Amazon, MS and Google also have data centres in various countries, so you can select according to business needs. So, if there is any sensitive data that needs to stay within a certain GEO location, the public cloud allows you to simply select the data centre from a specific region.

11. Reliability and Failing Fast

The well-known maxim of ‘failing fast’ has helped define the purpose of the public cloud. Historically, the public cloud environment is always based around well-thought-out architecture and designing to fail fast. On-prem or private cloud (data centres, if you will) is known for having a network of servers that can experience failures quite often. Now, keep in mind that public cloud also experiences outages and failures. However, recent research has shown that public cloud IaaS workloads will experience 60% fewer security incidents than traditional data centres by 2020. What is more, Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 99% of failures in cloud security are going to cause by customers.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Weekly Cloud Trends – IBM Adds New Level of Competition

As technologies evolve, companies find new ways to improve their respective businesses. Digital transformation also progressed from being a concept and a mere buzzword to becoming a tangible, successfully utilized business model and work methodology. At the heart of this dynamic tech industry, is the public cloud. Take a look at the latest scoops via Hentsū Weekly Cloud Trends and feel the pulse of the ever-growing cloud computing scene.

IBM Shares Rise on Plans to Spin off its IT Infrastructure Unit and Focus on the Cloud Business

Cloud computing and public cloud just got more exciting and more competitive. The year 2020 has seen a massive shift towards public cloud adoption. In an industry where everyone is increasingly turning their gaze toward the public cloud, IBM revealed its intention to spin off its IT infrastructure unit into "a new publicly traded company.” In short, the aim is to focus their legacy business more on cloud computing. IBM also revealed that it’s going to manage and modernize client-owned infrastructures. This is something the company sees as “a $500 billion market opportunity.” Other technology and solutions which include products from company Red Hat (recently bought by IBM) produced an impressive $5.75 billion in revenue in its second quarter of 2020, surpassing analysts’ forecasts. “We believe we can deliver strong growth within the company with the financial flexibility we will create with this transaction,” CEO Arvind Krishna explained to CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” Read the full story at CNBC.

Google Cloud’s Run Rate is Now Over $8B

Traditionally, Google does not divulge crucial financial information regarding its cloud business. However, that tradition changed recently, when the industry giant revealed their cloud business unit boasts a significant $8 billion annual revenue run rate, marking a huge rise from their $4 billion reported back in 2018. The news comes straight from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. While not dominant in the public cloud race, Google is beginning to catch up to its main competitors, Microsoft and AWS. Just to give you a better idea of how things are on the current market, AWS had a run rate of $30 billion during the last quarter, while Microsoft Azure ended up at approximately $11 billion. “Q2 was another strong quarter for Google Cloud, which reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion and continues to grow at a significant pace,” Pichai revealed. “Customers are choosing Google Cloud for a variety of reasons: reliability and uptime are critical. Retailers like Lowe’s are leveraging the cloud as one of the important tools to transform their customer experience and supply chain.” Catch the rest of the story at TechCrunch.

Microsoft Partners Expand the Range of Mission-critical Apps You Can Run on Azure

For years now, Microsoft Azure has been expanding its partner ecosystem. Now, they are enabling thousands of organizations to bring their mission-critical applications to Azure. What this means is in order to meet the market demand, and with an increasing amount of businesses taking the road of digital transformation, more and more solutions are coming to Microsoft’s Azure package. “As a result, the definition of mission-critical applications is evolving and goes well beyond systems of record for many businesses. It’s part of why we never stopped investing across the platform to enable you to increase the availability, security, scalability, and performance of your core applications running on Azure. The expansion of mission-critical apps will only accelerate as AI, IoT, analytics, and new capabilities become more pervasive,” claims MS in a post. Right now, they are going beyond Azure services and capabilities with even more offerings. Find out more, over at MS.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

The DON’Ts of Cloud Adoption Decision-Making

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In the current technology market, the public cloud is recognized as the safest and most efficient way to streamline business operations and improve ROI. When the process of cloud adoption takes place, this involves major changes for a business. Opting for a cloud vendor will have a huge technical impact on your team. Rather than losing time and staff or reskilling employees, you might consider passing the responsibility to experts with the cloud knowledge to develop and evolve your application stack, thus ensuring the continuity of your app within a brand new tech-savvy environment.

Avoid These 6 Common Mistakes for Cloud Adoption

Be mindful of one fact: cloud adoption is not an effortless endeavor. It’s hardly a trouble-free journey. There are many challenges on that road. Before kicking off, you need to find the biggest priorities for your business. To ensure a strong cloud strategy is possible, you can give yourself a head start by avoiding the following 6 mistakes:

1. Disregarding Powerful Tooling, Especially Docker

2. Making Sudden and Wrong Decisions

3. Neglecting Governance and Security

4. Not Expecting Failure

5. Thinking it is a Simple and Easy Process

6. Over-burdening Your Under-resourced IT Staff

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1. Disregarding Powerful Tooling, Especially Docker and Terraform

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring these tools. Terraform has been a mainstay of cloud deployments for years supplying essential building blocks for cloud deployments. Docker is also instrumental for cloud-related development projects. As opposed to VMs (Virtual Machine), using Docker means you do not have to set up clean environments and then just hope to avoid potential conflicts. Docker reduces or removes the chances of any conflicts. Make sure you dig into all the biggest benefits of Docker before handling complex cloud-based development.

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2. Making Sudden and Wrong Decisions

Migration from legacy systems to the cloud can be painful to a business, especially if wrong decisions are made. The key thing is to keep the specific nature of your business in the crosshairs. When migrating applications and data, enterprises get too eager. They try to kick things into high gear straight away. This leads to too many moving parts and not enough time to recover from mistakes. As a result, your massive migration project can collapse easily.

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3. Neglecting Governance and Security

Switching to the cloud doesn’t mean you should forget or minimize security, compliance, and governance. Security risks are like the on-premise environments, but also different that they can involve risks like hijacked of accounts, exposed public services, and so on. Sometimes a business may assume that governance and security is handled for them, or that it is the same as on-premise. Whilst it’s true that Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud platforms are far more secure and supply more governance than what could be obtained on-premise, their vast range of tooling needs correct implementation.

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4. Not Expecting Failure

There is a golden rule in cloud architecture: design for failure. Avoid getting too confident. You need to think about incorporating safety nets, recovery strategies that are built into the design right from the get-go. So, if the entire cloud set up experiences an outage, these precautions will ensure minimal harm and best output.

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5. Thinking it is a Simple and Easy Process

Cloud adoption within a larger, complex business, with mission critical processes, is not a walk in the park. It is not just a technology initiative. You must think about people and processes. Furthermore, different parts of the business may have diverse strategies, decisions, and business goals to consider during a cloud migration. We advocate for sufficient planning and business strategy ahead of time, with clear stakeholder buy-in and ongoing management.

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6. Over-burdening Your Under-resourced IT Staff

It is known for tech staff to be under pressure with day-to-day business. They commonly do not have the ability to undertake large transformational projects, such as cloud adoption. Similarly, cloud adoption often requires significant upskilling/training of the existing IT staff to undertake complex cloud infrastructure. Either of these can create a great burden on your team. So, how do you cut the risks involved with the acceleration of cloud adoption? One answer is to engage with cloud experts to bring the best practices and design patters into your team quicker. This will be more efficient. It will also allow the internal staff to transition more smoothly, whilst still focusing on your core business operations.

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Download interview with our Cloud Solutions Architect Jean-Luc Barrett HERE

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Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Weekly Cloud Trends – Cloud AI Helps You Weather the Storm

As technology turns more and more towards innovation through cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through various methodologies, companies and businesses are able to adapt and grow despite the otherwise turbulent digital market. This week we see how Google pushes the limits of AI-based tech, Amazon strives to make a mark in the video game streaming market and more. Discover the latest and hottest Weekly Cloud Trends below.

Cloud AI Can Help You Survive the Storm

The waters of today's business scene are murky and relentless. Companies strive to weather the storm through digital transformation, embracing the public cloud and new technologies. Bearing that in mind, diverse innovative tech is flooding the market in the form of cloud-native artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services. Businesses are working hard to use these technologies solve incredibly challenging problems. Some of these problems include ending the pandemic. That’s where the power of AI comes into play. Check out the following snippet: You can use pre-packaged AI services and models from major cloud providers to do such things. For example, Google Cloud’s AI-enabled services include:
  • Recommendations AI – To deliver highly personalized product recommendations.
  • Vision AI – To derive insights from images in the cloud.
  • Dialogflow – To build virtual agents and other conversational experiences.
Read more at Forbes.

Oracle’s TikTok and Zoom Deals Won’t Move Cloud Market Share Needle Significantly

The year 2020 has seen a big boost for the cloud infrastructure market, which topped an impressive $30 billion last quarter. Regardless, "Oracle is struggling with market share in the low single digits. It is hoping that the Zoom and TikTok deals can jump start those numbers, but trying to catch the market leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google, never mind several other companies ahead of it, is going to take a lot more than a couple of brand name customers." “Oracle’s cloud infrastructure services growth has been consistently below overall IaaS and PaaS market growth rates so its market share has [actually] been nudging downward. Zoom may be a good win but it is unlikely to move the needle too much — and remember Zoom  also buys cloud services from AWS,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, explained. Read the full story at TechCrunch.

Amazon's Luna Cloud Gaming Already Seems Much Different to Google Stadia

Cloud gaming is becoming a huge deal. With the ongoing health crisis, the tech market is making a huge turn towards cloud services and cloud computing in general. It's been a year that Google launched its cloud-based console, Stadia. Now, Amazon is keen to take its own stab at cloud gaming. The recently uncovered Amazon Luna service is going to make a stand on the streaming games market. To sum up, we now have Google Stadia, Microsoft's Game Pass Ultimate, Sony's PlayStation Now and Amazon's Luna, all competing in the games streaming race. Amazon Luna features a controller similar to what Google created for its Stadia console. Luna also has Alexa available on it, and a range of features and apps available. Read the full story at CNet.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY