Recent Blog Posts

I was at an event in London at the beginning of the year – in the days when we were allowed to do that kind of thing – a platform migration event as it happens. One of the key takeaways from that ...

In this guest post, Dean Gardner, chief technologist for cloud at IT infrastructure provider Softcat, shares his observations on how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the course of cloud adoption ...

In this follow-up guest post Paul Finch, CEO of Harlow-based colocation provider Kao Data, sets out how datacentre designs are having to change to accommodate evolving chip densities and ...

In this guest post, Dob Todorov, CEO of managed services company HeleCloud, outlines why enterprises and SMEs can ill-afford to take a "set it and forget it" attitude to their public cloud ...

In this guest post, Rob Greenwood, technical director at Manchester-based cloud consultancy, Steamhaus, sets out why developers might not be best-placed to run your company’s cloud. Just because ...

In this guest post, John Whelan, CEO of cloud-based accountancy software provider My Digital Accounts, sets out why umbrella companies should be seizing on the incoming IR35 reforms in the private ...

In this guest post, Dale Vile, CEO and research director at IT market watcher Freeform Dynamics, tells CIOs not to be afraid to change the course of their cloud plans as their IT and business needs ...

In this guest post, Ivaylo Vrabchev, head of professional services at IT services management company, HeleCloud, shares his round-up of the most eye-catching announcements from this year's AWS ...

Official estimates suggest 65,000 people made the trek out to Las Vegas this year for the 2019 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent user and developer conference, and among them were five tech-savvy ...

In this guest post, Chris Roberts, head of datacentre and cloud at Goonhilly Earth Station, wonders if enterprises are ready to tap into the business opportunities the explosion in data generated ...

In this guest post, Dave Locke, chief technology advisor for Europe, Middle East and Africa, at IT service provider World Wide Technology, sets out why organisations need a clear, consistent and ...

Like any milestone birthday it’s a time for reflection, writes Andrew Meyer, director of NHS Digital's Digital Delivery Centre. Have you achieved what you wanted in the time passed, are there ...

In this guest post, Will Grannis, founder and director of the Google Office of the CTO, sets out how adopting a multi-cloud strategy can help enterprises navigate IT challenges around value, risk ...

In this guest post, Dob Todorov, CEO and chief cloud officer, HeleCloud, sets out why it is wrong to declare cloud not fit for business use in the wake of the Capital One data breach. In two ...

In this guest post, Justin Day, CEO of hybrid cloud connectivity platform provider Cloud Gateway shares his thoughts one why some enterprises are choosing to pull back from off-premise life and ...

In this guest post, HPE UK MD Marc Waters sets out why the government's decision to place its cloud-first policy under review makes sense, as the hybrid IT consumption model continues to take hold ...

In this guest post, Paul Mercina, director of product management, at datacentre hardware and maintenance provider ParkPlace Technologies offers a step-by-step guide about how, what and when to move ...

Amazon's annual shareholder meeting appears to have highlighted a disconnect between what its staff and senior management think its stance on facial recognition tech and climate change should be. ...

The government has confirmed its long-standing public cloud-first policy is under review, and that it is seeking to launch an alternative procurement framework to G-Cloud. But why? It is hard not ...

In this guest post from Henrik Nilsson, vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at machine learning-based IT cost optimisation software supplier Apptio, offers enterprises some ...

The news that Myspace lost 12 years of user-generated content during a botched server migration has prompted a lot of debate this week, which Caroline Donnelly picks over here.  When details of ...

In this guest post, Rob Greenwood, CTO at Manchester-based cloud and DevOps consultancy, Steamhaus, sets out why the emergence of Amazon's managed Kubernetes service is such good news for the ...

Enterprise cloud users may have written off the spate between gaming companies Improbable and Unity as nothing more than industry in-fighting, but there are some cautionary tales emerging from the ...

In this guest post, DevOps consultant and researcher Dr. Nicole Forsgren, PhD, tells enterprises why execution is key to building high-performing technology teams within their organisations. I ...

If you’re among those who still think that open source is just for hobbyists and academics, think again. Open source is mature now, both as a concept and as tools for building enterprise IT, and we ...

In this guest post, Neil Briscoe, CTO of hybrid cloud platform provider 6point6 Cloud Gateway, sets about busting some common cloud myths for enterprise IT buyers The cloud provides endless ...

In this guest post, Chris Hodson, chief information security officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at internet security firm Zscaler, takes a closer look at why cloud security remains ...

In this guest post, Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS, advises enterprises to start small to achieve big change in their organisations with cloud. The success of ...

To coincide with the first day of the Google Cloud Next 2018 conference (taking place from 24-26 July) in San Francisco, John Jainschigg, content strategy lead at enterprise systems monitoring ...

In this guest post, Chip Childers, CTO of open source platform-as-a-service Cloud Foundry, makes the case for why the future of public cloud and IaaS won't be proprietary. Once upon a time, ...

In this guest post, Richard Blanford, managing director of G-cloud-listed IT services provider Fordway, advises companies to weigh up the pros and cons of using SaaS and IaaS before going all-in on ...

In this guest post, Jon Topper, CTO of DevOps and cloud infrastructure consultancy The Scale Factory, on how the growing maturity of Kubernetes dominated this year’s Kubecon. KubeCon + ...

In this guest post, Pavan Belagatti, a DevOps influencer working at automation software provider Shippable, shares his top five tips for securing senior management buy-in for your team’s agile ...

In this guest post, Craig Stewart, vice president of product management at cloud integration provider SnapLogic, spells out why the more traditional transport operators need to take a leaf out of ...

In this guest post, Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS, takes a look at what enterprises need to bear in mind before they take the plunge on multi-cloud. There’s no ...

In this guest post, Steve Lowe, CTO of student accommodation finder Student.com, weighs up the risks and benefits of relying on machines to carry out Ops jobs within cloud infrastructures. The “if ...

In this guest post, Susan Bowen, vice president and general manager at managed service provider Cogeco Peer 1, takes a look at the history of cloud computing, and where enterprises are going with ...

In this guest post, Thibaut Ceyrolle, vice president for Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) at data warehousing startup Snowflake Computing, makes the business case for using cloud to boost ...

In this guest post, Richard Blanford, managing director of cloud services provider Fordway, shares his top tips on what IT departments can do to curb public cloud overspend. As the costs of public ...

In this guest post, Naveen Kumar, vice president of innovation, enterprise software and consumer at global design and engineering company Aricent, makes the case for serverless computing. As far as ...

In this guest post, Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS and Tesco Bank’s former head of transformation, draws inspiration from a 1989 Kevin Costner movie to advise ...

In this guest post, Kat Lee, data analyst at service provider Cloudreach, shares some best practice on cloud billing to help enterprises cut costs. IT cost control and management is a hot topic of ...

In this guest post Neil Turvin, CEO at nearshore software development company Godel Technologies, shares his thoughts on how serverless computing is gaining ground in the delivery of cloud ...

In this guest post, Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS and Tesco Bank’s former head of transformation shares his thoughts on what enterprises can do to address the ...

In this guest post, Ron Vermeulen, go-to-market manager for north-west Europe at IT services provider, Comparex, runs through the process of finding and fixing cloud faults There is no doubt that ...

In this guest post, Gordon Grosse, director of technical services at IT support and datacentre managed service provider MCSA, offers advice on how to choose the right public cloud provider for your ...

The Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities constitute the greatest test yet of the public cloud provider community’s data security claims, says Caroline Donnelly, while providing enterprise IT ...

In this guest post, Rob Greenwood, technical director at Manchester-based cloud and DevOps consultancy Steamhaus weighs up the pros and cons of using OpenStack over other public cloud platforms. ...

In this guest post, Rob Anderson, principal analyst for central government at market watcher GlobalData, takes a look at the implications of delaying the launch of G-Cloud 10 by up to a year.

In this guest post, Darren Roos, president of SAP ERP Cloud, explains why automation, AI, machine learning and cloud are key to improving workplace productivity. If you take productivity at its ...

In this guest blog post, Naser Ali, head of solutions marketing for EMEA at Hitachi Vantara, explores the use cases and benefits for using cloud bursting in the enterprise. When NASA needed to ...

In this guest post, Jon Topper, CTO of DevOps consultancy, The Scale Factory, flags his four favourite announcements from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) week-long Re:Invent partner and customer ...

In this guest post, Darren Turner, general manager at healthcare-focused hosting provider Carelink, takes a look at why the healthcare sector has been slow to adopt cloud, and how NHS Digital’s ...

The OpenStack community of users and contributors are united in their belief in the enterprise-readiness of the open source platform, but accelerating its adoption requires some back-to-basics ...

In this guest post, Gary Bloom, CEO of database software supplier MarkLogic, explains why adopting a cloud-neutral strategy is essential for enterprises to avoid lock-in. Not so long ago, choosing ...

If you believe the hype, the IoT is already rampaging across businesses around the world. However, talking to end users gives a totally different picture - there is a massive chasm between those ...

The Amazon cloud storage outage provides a neat reminder about the role humans continue to play in the delivery of online services, but - when things go wrong - end-user sympathy for the plight of ...

As 2016 draws to a close, Ahead in the Clouds looks at how enterprise attitudes to cloud have changed over the last 12 months. At the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent in 2012, the cloud ...

Chanel confirmed a truth on Tuesday night that remains shamefully unacknowledged by much of the IT industry. That datacentres are cool and the  place to be seen. The luxury fashion brand’s flagship ...

VMworld US 2016 suggests VMware is under no illusions about the challenges it faces, as its traditional customers cede control for IT buying to line of business units and start exploring their ...

In this guest post, Jessica Figueras, chief analyst at market watcher Kable, mulls over the role of the Government Digital Service (GDS) in the next wave of public sector cloud adoption. The ...

The cloud industry has felt the wrath of Rupert Murdoch’s legal team more than most in recent years, as the broadcaster has taken against several firms for daring to use the word “Sky” in their ...

Cloud contracts are notorious for being weighted in favour of providers but,  for an industry still grappling with how best to win the trust of users, it's a risky way to do business, argues ...

In this guest post, James Bailey, director of datacentre hardware provider Hyperscale IT, busts some enterprise-held myths about the Open Compute Project Market watcher Gartner predicts the overall ...

Analysis of the latest trends in cloud and datacentre technology.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) celebrated its 10th anniversary on 14 March, having devoted the past decade to popularising the cloud computing concept and - in turn - shaking up the IT industry. To mark ...

In this guest post, Ashish Gupta, BT's UK president of corporate and global banking financial markets, shares his views on how the banking sector should go about embracing cloud. The need to scale ...

In a joint guest post, Rafi Azim-Khan, the European head of data privacy, and Steven Farmer, Counsel, for Pillsbury Law set out the reasons why cloud firms and users must tread carefully around ...

In this guest post, Pete Koehler, technical marketing engineer for PernixData, explains why datacentre operators need to get a handle on the Working Set concept to find out what's really going on ...

In this guest post, Sarvesh Goel, an infrastructure management services architect at IT consultancy Mindtree, offers enterprises a step-by-step guide to moving to the cloud. There are many factors ...

Ahead in the Clouds recently attended a tour of IO's modular datacentre facility in Slough, along with a handful of PhD students from University College London (UCL). The event's aim was to open up ...

In this guest post, Zahl Limbuwala, CEO of datacentre optimisation software supplier Romonet, explains why IT departments should be employing a more philosophical approach when solving business ...

In this guest post, Dominic Ward, vice president of corporate and business development at datacentre provider Verne Global, explains why the green power commitments of the tech giants may not be ...

When the G-Cloud framework was introduced back in spring 2012, its core aim was to shake-up government IT procurement, so that high-value, multi-year hardware contracts awarded to the same old ...

In this guest post, J. Tyler Rohrer, co-founder of Liquidware Labs, explains how the use of cloud apps can help user solve end user computing scalability issues. We are about to enter the golden ...

The proposed Dell-EMC merger was always going to be a major talking point at VMworld in Barcelona, given news of the deal was confirmed on the eve of this year's show. What was unclear, as ...

In this guest post, Rafi Azim-Khan, head of data privacy in Europe at legal firm Pillsbury Law, explains how the cloud provider community can side-step the European Court of Justice's Safe Harbour ...

Boosting the take-up of cloud services across Europe has been the mission statement of both public sector and commercial organisations for several years now. From the latter point of view, HP has ...

In this guest post, Frank Denneman, chief technologist of storage management software vendor PernixData, sets out why datacentre management could soon emerge as the main use case for big data ...

In this guest post, Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion, discusses how Amazon's cloud-based push to democratise machine learning sets to benefit the enterprise.Machine learning ...

In this guest post, David Angwin, marketing director for Dell Cloud Client Computing, claims the benefits of desktop virtualisation now far outweigh the risks.Desktop virtualisation (VDI) is a ...

In this guest post Amit Singh, president of Google for Work, explains why enterprises need to start adopting a mobile- and cloud-first approach to doing business if they want to remain one step ...

Cloud-championing CIOs love to bang on about how ditching on-premise technologies helps liberate IT departments, as it means they can spend less time propping up servers and devote more to ...

Google has spent the best part of a decade telling firms to ditch on-premise productivity tools and use its cloud-based Google Apps suite instead. So, the news that it's moving all of the company's ...

Myths and misunderstandings around the use and benefits of cloud computing are slowing down IT project implementations, impeding innovation, inducing fear and distracting enterprises from yielding ...

In this guest blogpost, Mike Osborne, school governor & head of business continuity at Phoenix IT talks about the importance of business continuity for Ucas

Organisations tend to have one of two IT strategies today: those who are already planning and eventually implementing cloud strategy, and those who are going to be doing it soon. But, the options ...

Microsoft Azure cloud service status website at 5pm BST on Friday, September 26th showed that while the core Azure platform components were working properly, there was "partial performance ...

Two large, very large companies that have been under tremendous pressure in the software-defined storage and cloud era - EMC and HP - toyed with the idea of a merger

I had a chance to see Michael Dell - in flesh - for the first time yesterday in Brussels at the Dell Solutions Summit. He delivered a great keynote on Dell's datacentre strategy, its investment ...

Ambitious startups and developers around the world got a big treat from Google ahead of the weekend - $100,000 worth of Google cloud credits along with 24/7 support from the tech experts at Google. ...

To reap all the benefits of the cloud, enterprises must do the boring stuff first such as eating your greens before the pudding

By asking your cloud services provider the following questions you will be on the way to knowing whether you can entrust your data into its care.

On Day 1 of its annual conference VMworld 2014 themed "No Limits", VMware unveiled its strategies around open cloud platform OpenStack and around container technology Kubernetes. It also launched ...

Users experiencing full service interruption and performance degradation across several services including StorSimple, storage services, website services, backup and recovery and virtual machine ...

Enterprises must not be too hung up on PUE alone to measure their datacentre efficiency.

Oregon is home to datacentres built by Facebook (Prineville datacentre), Google (Its first datacentre - The Dalles), Amazon (Boardman), Apple (also Prineville), and Fortune Datacentres (Hillsboro) ...

AWS is no longer the only pretty one in the room. It is having to make space for Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and IBM SoftLayer and ferociously emerging players such as ...

Microsoft's commercial cloud revenue grew 147% with an annualised run rate that exceeds $4.4bn (£2.58bn) even as the company's overall profit was down 7%

Cabinet Office seeks datacentre area of 350 sq. metres hosting 150 standard 42u racks to host official, secret and top secret data. It wants the service to be cloud-like