SaaS is the way – and the way is SaaS: Exploring new market moves

SaaS (software as a service) is not a new term and has shown continued adoption and growth year on year since the term first appeared fifteen years ago, with its commonality and mass adoption only growing over time. With its innate scalability and flexibility, SaaS took advantage of the new public cloud market. Today we find ourselves at a time where SaaS is taking over the cloud computing market and according to Bloomberg, public cloud platforms, business services, and applications (SaaS)...

28 May 2021 | Collaboration

AWS launches Amazon FinSpace to muscle in on financial services cloud offerings

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon FinSpace, an industry cloud offering aimed squarely at helping finance organisations efficiently prepare and analyse data.

The purpose-built analytics service 'aggregates, catalogues, and tags data across an organisation's data silos', enabling the data to be easily searchable across the entire company. This is achieved, in part, through a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine, with more than 100 'data transformations'...

5 May 2021 | AWS

Vodafone extends Google Cloud relationship to build ‘industry-first global data platform’

Vodafone is to use Google Cloud to build a new data platform and migrate its SAP workloads - in an extension of the companies' partnership and another key telecoms use case.

The two companies will jointly build the platform 'with the added capability of processing and moving huge volumes of data globally from multiple systems into the cloud', the press materials noted. Vodafone will host its SAP environment, as well as 'all big data and business intelligence workloads' on Google...

5 May 2021 | Data & Analytics

Five leading trends of database innovation: Cloud-native, self-driving, and more

In the wake of the pandemic, one trend that emerged is the need for digitalisation, and this will continue – and even grow – in the future. And, while it’s still not clear exactly what that actual economic impact of Covid-19 will be, IDC predicts that the digital economy will accelerate to counter this. The firm predicts that over 65% of APAC GDP is expected to be digitalised between 2020 and 2023 and spending will hit US$ 1.2 trillion.

As businesses – and even economies...

30 April 2021 | Alibaba Cloud

Data discovery: Defining a clear path to unlocking your most valuable asset

Data is now inevitable for every business. By the end of 2020, estimates found that 1.7 megabytes of data for every single person on the planet got produced each second. That’s 6 gigabytes per person (think storage for about 1,500 songs) created each hour.

In this world, it’s no longer a question of if your business will use data, but rather how you will use it. Specifically, how will you control it, manage it, secure it and — most importantly — use it effectively as a...

6 April 2021 | Data & Analytics

Bridging the gap between management and frontline teams with the cloud: A guide

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed two things about managers and the frontline teams they lead. First, the relationship between the two is almost entirely driven by technology — specifically cloud-based technologies — in this age of remote work. Second, many companies lack the technologies necessary to keep everyone linked together through an unprecedented event like the one we’ve experienced.

When shutdown orders forced offices to either close or start working in drastically...

30 March 2021 | Adoption

A guide to privileged access management: The doorman for the cloud

After a year when digital transformation took a quantum leap at most enterprises and remote work exploded, it’s no surprise that the majority of enterprise workloads are now running in cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. 

This is creating a whole new set of security challenges around managing access to your organisation’s infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms—with all the various identities and configurations...

10 March 2021 | Data & Analytics

Databricks launches on Google Cloud to complete hyperscaler hat-trick

Data and analytics platform provider Databricks has launched availability on Google Cloud, adding to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure offerings.

The jointly developed service provides 'a simple, open lakehouse platform for data engineering, data science, analytics, and machine learning', in the words of Hiral Jasani, Databricks partner marketing manager, in a blog post.

This means Databricks is tightly integrated with Google Cloud compute, storage,...

18 February 2021 | Big Data

Test, test, and test some more: Emphasising the importance of DR testing

With Gartner estimating that the average cost of network downtime is $5,600 per minute or $336,000 per hour, few would argue that regular testing of a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential for organisations. Even if you omit the financial implications, the lost productivity, missed opportunities, brand damage and potential data loss and SLA pay-outs associated with system downtime should be enough to keep even the most hardened IT professional up at night.

So,...

16 February 2021 | Data & Analytics

Public cloud demand accelerates during the pandemic: IDC’s analysis

The global enterprise IT modernisation and migration to SaaS cloud computing platforms has been accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as more CIOs and CTOs adapt to the increased demand for flexible online working models that enable their knowledge worker employees to work from virtually anywhere.

Clearly, IT infrastructure vendors directly benefited from this phenomenon.

Vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products for cloud environments -- including...

1 February 2021 | Data & Analytics