Category Archives: Industry News

Study: The Adoption of Managed Services Are on Demand

Colocation-SolutionsALE, a global provider of communications solutions and services operating under the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, announced the results of research conducted in collaboration with TPNET and focused on the adoption of managed services in the Network On Demand within companies and various market sectors.

The study, titled “Network On Demand: The future for network infrastructure companies,” shows that the most popular services are the maintenance and support infrastructure (21.4%), managed services for network infrastructure (17.9%), data storage (17.9%), printers (14.3%), security (10.7%), the server (7.1%) and cloud voice communication (7%).

The research fits perfectly in the results of a recent study by IDC, which states that by 2020, 80% of enterprise network infrastructure will be provided with a pay-per-use model. The main advantages of this model are given by both the reduction or even the cancellation of investments related to the equipment, either by the possibility of having a network managed by a team of experts able to cope with an environment whose complexity is constantly evolving.

With managed services, companies use only what they need by paying for what they use, and it allows to have a flexible structure that responds to network and connectivity needs. According to ZK Research, multinationals, and large enterprises on average require more than 30 software updates for their network infrastructure, making management a real challenge.

Nearly 65% of enterprises use their own staff for management and maintenance of network infrastructure, while 20.7% use external suppliers. Less than 5% said they have an external contract, which also includes the complete management of network services.

The research also shows that 40% of respondents recognized the cost as one of the main benefits of managed services; 35% said that the greatest benefit is the ability to improve the network without having to invest in the new budget. One in four has then recognized as a convenience free updates on hardware and software.

Finally, about 18% think that the most significant advantage is the reduction of its commitment to IT network management, as well as the flexibility to apply network resource when required.

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Gartner Identifies Major IT Trends That Increase Business Competitiveness

Gartner Identifies Major IT Trends That Increase Business CompetitivenessTechnological tools dimensional that can create new experiences, showing intelligence levels not seen to date, and provide quick connection with new business ecosystems platforms are the three technology trends that Gartner identifies in its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2016 report.

The three trends are better positioned to provide companies with competitive tools with which they will be able to address the digital innovation faster.

The Gartner report has deepened over two thousand technological proposals and is the most extensive compendium that makes the analyst around the annual cycle of expectation.

The report provides an overview of all the industries in which technologies and trends of both corporate strategists, leading R&D, entrepreneurs, large development companies and teams of technologists develop technologies when dealing in their portfolios of offerings in emerging technologies.

Emerging technologies

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies at Gartner report stands out from other similar compendia by the fact that it is able to investigate in depth between more than two thousand technological proposals to draw a brief summary of the emerging technologies that will become essential resources and deep impact strategic planning of organizations, within the next ten years.

The Gartner report notes that to succeed in the digital economy, enterprise architects have to continue working in coordination with their CIO. They should be responsible decision-making with the aim of discovering proactively emerging technologies that are capable of transforming business models elements.  The emerging technologies are going to provide competitive advantages in their respective markets while maximizing the value of its bid by reducing operating costs.

Lifecycle efficient management of the given enterprise

Gartner describes here the data classification techniques to store and easily retrieve business data. The emergence of powerful tools, with intuitive search systems in the basics of business data, enable better coordination between entities of a business and a better use of data.

Widespread virtualization

Widespread virtualization described control of the assets of the company software, including in many standards (OpenStack, OpenFlow, Open Rack, etc.) more interoperable. Control of a multitude of parts or hardware components under a unified software improves efficiency through interoperability.

The Machine Learning

Machine Learning technologies designate algorithms that allow a system to adapt its analysis and behavior, based on the analysis of empirical data from a database or sensors. These algorithms use statistical methods to learn the rules of operation based on the training data and then apply them to new data.

Micro data centers

Data centers include the equipment components of enterprise information system: mainframes, servers, storage, networking, and telecommunications equipment. Micro data centers have the particularity to exist on a much smaller scale than that which characterizes enterprise data centers.

Affective computing

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices with the capacity to recognize, express, synthesize and model human emotions. The inclusion of emotions expressed then used to adapt the operation of the equipment depending on the context.

Towards transparency

According to Gartner, the technology will continue to evolve towards people-centered models, to the point where a more transparent mode of communication between people, businesses, and things.

Intelligent machines will be the most disruptive technologies of the next decade, according to the analyst firm, because of its unprecedented computational potential handling huge volumes of data, and the unprecedented advances in neural networks that enable business solutions that nobody has offered to date.

Gartner has a related revolution platforms vision, in which emerging technologies are revolutionizing how concepts are defined, and their use are given. The change of mentality that represents moving from technical infrastructure to enabling platforms ecosystems bases underlying the creation of business models completely transformers, which will be able to build bridges between humans and technology.

Faced With a Pervasive Cloud, Companies will Build on the PaaS

PaaSThe cloud will take more and more space in IT spending and business needs in the matter will be complicated, opening the way to PaaS and IaaS. These are the conclusions that could be drawn from two studies published this summer by IDC and Gartner.

If the rise of cloud in enterprises, whether public or private is indeed well established, it appears that their approach in this area tends to be more structured. So if one believes the forecasts of Gartner, the cloud strongly marked the keys, directly or indirectly, the IT spending. Even altering the structure of the IT market, the firm understands the cloud is expected to impact the whole market up to 1000 billion dollars in 2020.

Companies continue to spend IT in the cloud (a process that Gartner calls “Cloud Shift”). In 2016, the firm expects spending on the cloud to reach $111 billion, and the figure will reach to $216 billion in 2020. Gartner calculates the difference between IT spending in the traditional IT and those in the cloud, on the same technological segments.

If logically, cloud confirm its distribution model space and consumption of IT in the coming years, it appears that business requirements follow the same curve.

If the SaaS has long led the cloud segment driving growth, characterized by its ease of implementation, its billing subscription, as well as its standard mechanisms, PaaS and IaaS could turn up in power in the years to come. Growth and IaaS PaaS segments will thus be faster than that of SaaS. This is what IDC thinks its side.

Rising public PaaS

In its latest forecast, the analyst firm put in effect on an increase in the public cloud within the next five years. No longer driven by the SaaS but by the PaaS and IaaS. According to IDC, the public cloud is expected to generate some $195 billion in 2020, against $96.5 billion this year.

While some companies have indeed sold their traditional applications to a SaaS model, publishers have either expanded their catalog of a SaaS offer or businesses have migrated to pure players in the sector.

However, all will not propose SaaS equivalent. To migrate to the cloud, companies will then bet on a lower layer to build their business applications – the PaaS.

Another possible explanation is the need for companies to manage the development and integration of cloud toward the SI or between cloud services. Again, PaaS offers an option of choice.

Until the PaaS was considered the poor relation of the three layers of cloud. But with the ubiquity of the cloud model, its acceptance by businesses and the increasing complexity of IT, this brick could become unavoidable.

Companies Continue to Wage a Battle with DDoS Attacks

DDoS-attacksDDoS or denial of service attack is an attempt to make the resources of a system unavailable to its users. Virtually all industries are susceptible to this type of attack. DDoS attacks are growing rapidly, and many countries are beginning to create legislation so that they are taken more seriously and treated as a real problem.

A10 Networks announced the results of a recent report commissioned by IDG Connect: “IDG Connect DDoS Survey”.

The main conclusion of the study, which is based on interviews with 120 senior decision-making IT in large organizations, cites that companies are currently waging a brutal battle against a growing army of online attackers. As a result, companies suffer an average of 15 DDoS year, with an offensive that causes an average of 17 hours of actual inactivity, including falls, blocking or denial of access to the client.

As DDoS attacks become more popular, they are also become harder to combat. So, and while the maximum utilization of bandwidth to carry out an attack reaches the middle of incredible 30-40 gigabits per second (Gbps), 59% of organizations confirmed to have experienced assault of more than 40 Gbps. Besides, most respondents (77%) also expect sophisticated multi-vector attacks patterns as the most dangerous type of DDoS attacks in the future.

More than half of the organizations surveyed confirmed their intention to increase their budgets for prevention of DDoS attacks in the next six months. The IT security teams are the most likely to lead efforts to prevent DDoS attacks (36%), followed closely by CSOs (26%) and CIOs (26%).

DDoS attacks are called ‘sudden death’ for good reason. If the brake is not put, costs for organizations could range from loss of business to the need to invest time in restoring the service and decrease in customer satisfaction. The good news is that IDG findings show that security teams are making the DDoS attack prevention a priority. With improved threat prevention system, they can make an immediate threat to their business in a notification level.

Among the key findings of the report include:

  • The type companies suffered an average of 15 DDoS a year, with large organizations experienced more interruptions.
  • One in five companies reported that downtime were more than 36 hours, with an average duration of 17 hours attacks.
  • 33% of respondents reported DDoS attacks over 40 Gbps with the most common are Flood UDP (23%), Slow Post (16%) and SYN Flood (14%).
  • 77% believe that the multi-vector attacks, including attacks at the application level and volume, are included, will be the most dangerous in the future.
  • More than half of respondents plan to increase their DDoS budgets (54%) in the next six months.
  • 53% of respondents confirmed that on premise protection is the most effective solution to deal with multi-vector DDoS threats, followed by the hybrid protection (34%), or a single solution as the on-premise appliance (19%).

The corporate segment in various industries believes that telecom operators and ISPs are those who are best positioned to protect them against such attacks. There is, therefore, a window of opportunity for operators to generate revenues by offering security services to mitigate DDoS attacks.

Cloud Growth Shows an Uneven Performance by Segments and Geographies

cloud5783753490Billing for cloud technology infrastructure (servers, storage, and Ethernet switching) increased by 3.9% in the first three months of the year to stand at $6.6 billion, while a reduction in demand is observed in the field of the public cloud.

According to IDC, cloud revenues accounted for 32.3% of total turnover in the IT sector, 2.3 percentage points more than in the first quarter of 2015. Revenue from sales related to private cloud grew by 6.8% to $2.8 billion, while public cloud rose 1.9% to 3.9 million.

The total spending on IT infrastructure products comprising the server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches will increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1 billion for cloud deployments. By comparison, revenues from non-cloud traditional infrastructure experienced an annual fall of 6%. In this case, the results have penalized the decline in sales of servers and storage, a reduction that has not been offset by growth in the area of Ethernet switches.

Returning to the cloud, switching grew both in the public cloud and private, with increases of 53.7 and 69.4%, respectively; storage experienced an increase of 11.5% as regards to the private cloud but fell 29.6% in the public cloud. And with regard to servers, revenues decreased by 1.1% in private cloud and 8.7% in the public cloud.

“A slowdown in hyperscale public cloud infrastructure deployment demand negatively impacted growth in both public cloud and cloud IT overall,” said IDC computing platforms research director Kuba Stolarski.

“Private cloud deployment growth also slowed, as 2016 began with difficult comparisons to the first quarter of 2015, when server and storage refresh drove a high level of spend and high growth. As the system refresh has mostly ended, this will continue to push private cloud and, more generally, enterprise IT growth downwards in the near term,” added Stolarski.

From a regional perspective, where sales grew more it was in the Middle East and Africa (almost 26%), followed by Central Europe (20.6%), Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), which made it by 18, 5% and Canada 9.5%. There are also regions where sales have been lower if compared to the first part of 2015. Revenues fell 22.2% in Latin America, 4.1% in the US and an insignificant 0.1% in Central Europe and from the east.

“Public cloud services are increasingly being seen as an enabler of business agility and speed,” said Deepak Mohan, research director, Public Cloud Storage and Infrastructure at IDC. “This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for the incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies. Growth of public cloud IaaS has also created new service opportunities around adoption and usage of public cloud resources. With changes at the infrastructure, architectural, and operational layers, public cloud IaaS is slowly transforming the enterprise IT value chain.”

When it comes to private cloud, investment will grow 10.3% to 13.8 billion, with over 60% of this amount allocated to private cloud on-premises environments. The increased investment will be cut across all regions.

In the long term, IDC expects spending to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.2% by 2020, and will reach $59.5 billion. This would represent 48.7% of the total invested in the enterprise IT infrastructure. Also at that time, the public cloud service providers (CSP) will spend 38.4 billion in infrastructure to provide services, while spending on private environments will reach 21.1 billion.