The cloud is maturing, adoption is growing, security concerns have abated and interoperability is almost assured.
These are all assertions supported by various reports, surveys and analyses, not least of which is the fifth annual “State of the Cloud Survey” by RightScale, the US-based cloud management specialist, of 1,060 IT professionals published in January of this year.
RightScale found that not only are enterprise workloads increasingly moving to cloud, both private with a view to hybrid, and also to pure public, but also that organisations are using multiple cloud providers.
The survey found that private cloud adoption had increased from 63% to 77%, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58% to 71% year-over-year. Some 17% of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13% in 2015.
Cloud users, according to the survey, are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds. They are also experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.
Important among this is the fact that security is no longer seen as the primary concern (cited by 29%), as it has now been supplanted by lack of resources/expertise (cited by 32%).
As these figures attest, acceptance and adoption of cloud, in private, hybrid and public forms is growing rapidly, but organisations are struggling to keep up with the skills necessary to manage and orchestrate these new infrastructures. Increasingly, organisations are looking to service providers for infrastructure management and service support to bridge those gaps, allowing them to focus on core business to drive value.
A key area in which organisations are increasingly looking to service providers is around continuity and availability. As organisations realise that the vast, elastic, flexible infrastructures provided by service providers are more capable, and accessible, not to mention compliant, than what can reasonably be done on-premises, there has been a further wave of adoption of public services.
However, within this, care must be taken as to what is and is not provided. Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be carefully examined to ensure that the level of back-up, recovery times and recovery points are sufficient for each user. Too often, the details of such arrangements are only explored in the event of an incident.
To explore these services, and examine the case for continuity and availability services from the cloud, TechFire, in association with SunGard Availability Services, will explore how mission critical workloads can be properly supported, benefiting from the key strengths of the cloud, while ensuring the right levels of back-up and recovery.
Solutions architect with Sungard, Brian Finnegan, will talk about availability, recovery, and continuity as the bedrock of any mission critical application, while looking at the causes of downtime and discussing the challenges that cloud services might pose.
General manager of Fujifilm Ireland, Kyran O’Kelly, will talk about why Fujifilm relies on a highly available, resilient and secure cloud infrastructure to guarantee an uninterrupted service to customers. O’Kelly will also explain how cloud technology services are helping the company to grow and scale its business at home and internationally.
This free event takes place on 28 June in Dublin at the Gibson Hotel, but registration is required. Go to TechFire.ie for more details.
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