Gartner expects global public cloud revenue to grow 17% in 2020, with IaaS secures highest growth due to data center consolidation

The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17 percent in 2020 to total US$266.4 billion, up from $227.8 billion in 2019, according to data released Wednesday by analyst firm Gartner.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest market segment, which is forecast to grow to $116 billion next year due to the scalability of subscription-based software. The second-largest market segment is cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which will reach $50 billion in 2020. 

IaaS is forecast to grow 24 percent year over year, which is the highest growth rate across all market segments. This growth is attributed to the demands of modern applications and workloads, which require infrastructure that traditional data centers cannot meet.

Various forms of cloud computing are among the top three areas where most global CIOs will increase their investment next year, according to Gartner. As organizations increase their reliance on cloud technologies, IT teams are rushing to embrace cloud-built applications and relocate existing digital assets. 

“At this point, cloud adoption is mainstream,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The expectations of the outcomes associated with cloud investments therefore are also higher. Adoption of next-generation solutions are almost always ‘cloud-enhanced’ solutions, meaning they build on the strengths of a cloud platform to deliver digital business capabilities.”

“The cloud managed service landscape is becoming increasingly sophisticated and competitive. In fact, by 2022, up to 60 percent of organizations will use an external service provider’s cloud managed service offering, which is double the percentage of organizations from 2018,” said Nag. “Cloud-native capabilities, application services, multicloud and hybrid cloud comprise a diverse cloud ecosystem that will be important differentiators for technology product managers. Demand for strategic cloud service outcomes signals an organizational shift toward digital business outcomes.”

LayerStack updates Cloud Platform to deliver scalable, reliable and flexible infrastructure

LayerStack has launched its own-developed cloud orchestration and cloud control panel, which underlines the good market position and attractiveness of LayerStack, and providing customers with a more scalable, reliable, and flexible infrastructure around the globe.

LayerStack has concentrated its resources on product development in the past two years, successfully developed a new cloud orchestration with more stable and fully under control environment, in order to lower overall IT costs, free up engineering time for new projects, improve delivery times, and reduce friction between its system and development teams. 

At the same time, LayerStack is also satisfied with the results of the better IT management features to their data centers, such as availability, scalability, security, and optimal levels of infrastructure utilization.

Since the company came up with a new idea of developing a new cloud orchestration since 2018, the LayerStack development team perceive their passion as not only enthusiasm for the role but also for the business at large, providing the company with a clear future perspective. 

The new orchestration layer design empowers continuous integration and continuous delivery that could meet the requirements of developers in LayerStack, including high availability (HA), post-deployment, failure recovery, scaling, and more. It also simplifies and de-risk complex IT processes and accelerate the delivery of IT services to quickly configure, provision, deploy, monitoring, backup, and security services. 

Another advantage to the new orchestration is that enables the company to make their products available on a wider variety of cloud environments, meaning LayerStack will increase their products’ exposure to a wider audience, and potentially expand revenue opportunities for the company.

A further key element of this milestone is that the new cloud control panel – LayerPanel v2.0 is now ready for all regions, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Los Angeles. Over a year in development, LayerPanel v2.0 has been specifically developed to meet the demands of the enterprise users by expanding its control panel features with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 

The goal is to provide customers with maximum control over their cloud management. The APIs, developed at the company’s development team, will help users build, scale and sustain cloud servers on the new platform. At the same time, it enables integration into new features such as firewall management, private networking, templates, backups, and so much more.

Furthermore, organizations migrating to LayerStack often need to manage a large number of accounts for different clients. LayerPanel v2.0 gives customers granular control over their environments with the User permission management, like configuring a multi-account structure, managing user permission, centralized monitoring and much more.

LayerStack continued to invest in its technology, providing new solutions for the developer, mobile app development agency, software development agency, system integrator, managed service provider, value-added service provider, and hosting provider.

“We are celebrating our accomplishments from the past two years by continuing to commit to our main focus: Striving for innovative and continuous improvements,” said Dennis Ng. “We look forward to a strong year ahead.”

“We are delighted to have our development team with great experience and standing in the cloud industry,” said Dennis Ng, the CTO of LayerStack. “Every interaction with our customers must be fast and reliable. Especially in today’s fast-moving IaaS market, our cloud infrastructure needs to be agile, adaptable and ready to be changed as our customers change their strategy.”

IBM releases financial services- ready public cloud platform to meet specific compliance and security requirements

IBM announced this week that it has designed a financial services-ready public cloud. IBM will welcome financial services institutions, and their suppliers, to join the financial services-ready public cloud. 

The financial services-ready public cloud is expected to run on IBM's public cloud, which uses Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerized software across the enterprise, and includes more than 190 API driven, cloud native PaaS services to create new and enhanced cloud-native apps. 

The project draws upon technology and financial services industry experience earned through IBM's relationships with 47 of the Fortune 50 companies and the 10 largest financial institutions globally.  Additionally, to help promote a regulatory compliant environment, IBM and Bank of America are working with Promontory, an IBM business unit and provider of financial services regulatory compliance consulting. 

Bank of America will be a committed collaborator to use the platform built on IBM's public cloud. The Bank will host key applications and workloads to support the requirements and privacy and safety expectations of its 66 million banking customers. 

The financial services-ready public cloud has been designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency. This will help financial institutions transact with technology vendors who have met the platform's requirements. 

It is the only industry-specific public cloud platform that can provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support and proactive and automated security, leveraging the industry's highest levels of encryption certification.

To help develop the control requirements for the platform, IBM has collaborated intensively with Bank of America. The financial services-ready public cloud can potentially enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers – from the smallest FinTechs to more established vendors – to focus on their core offerings to financial institutions with the controls for the platform put in place.

"This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space," said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America. "This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision making. By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched."

The collaboration with IBM marks the next step in Bank of America's seven-year cloud journey and reflects the Bank's unwavering commitment to the security and privacy of banking customers while also creating an opportunity to address the unique regulatory and compliance requirements of the financial services industry.  

"The financial services-ready public cloud represents an ongoing focus from Bank of America, IBM and Promontory to help develop a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed," said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain, IBM. "Together we plan to help our customer address their ongoing compliance requirements, coupled with highly scalable, standardized capabilities that will be built to help serve today's modern financial services industry." 

"We recognize that we must help create an environment where financial services institutions can address their regulatory requirements and expectations," said Gene Ludwig, Promontory Founder and CEO. "Bank of America, IBM and Promontory are uniquely suited to help give the industry and vendors confidence in the quality of this cloud platform." 

The financial services-ready public cloud will help give financial institutions an opportunity to more efficiently assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors. Participating financial services software providers may benefit from the platform's security validation. Only ISV or SaaS providers that demonstrate they comply with the platform's policies will be eligible to deliver offerings through the platform.

McAfee MVISION Cloud offers “Shift Left” with security to boost compliance and reduce risk on Microsoft Azure

McAfee announced updates to McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Azure that will help customers “Shift Left” with security to preemptively help to address compliance and risk within their cloud infrastructure. 

With McAfee MVISION Cloud, security is pushed earlier into the DevOps process so that security professionals can catch risky configurations before they become a threat in production. This gives organizations the ability to deploy applications in the cloud with greater speed and efficiency. 

While Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments provide customers with choice and flexibility, if not configured correctly, they also potentially increase the organization’s surface area for security risks. 

McAfee detects compromised account activity in Azure based on brute force login attempts, logins from new and untrusted locations for a specific user, and consecutive login attempts from two locations in a time period that implies impossible travel – even if the two logins occur across multiple cloud services – to support immediate remediation and limit exposure.

McAfee automatically constructs a behavior model with dynamic and continuously updated thresholds for each user and group to identify activity indicative of insider threat. Privileged user analytics identifies risk from inactive administrator accounts, excessive permissions, and unwarranted escalation of privileges and user provisioning.

McAfee MVISION Cloud for Azure enforces DLP policies across data at rest and in motion to ensure compliance with regulations and internal policies. McAfee supports DLP rules based on keywords, data identifiers, user groups, and regular expressions. Enforcement actions include coach users, notify administrator, block, quarantine, and delete. Leverage pre-built industry templates, create custom policies in McAfee, or leverage policies in an existing on-premises DLP solution.

With the new features in McAfee MVISION Cloud for Azure, security groups can integrate policy natively into DevOps processes and toolsets to discover security issues before systems are deployed to accelerate business in the cloud. 

New capabilities include security scans for Azure Resource Manager templates that allow users to discover risky configuration issues or violations in Azure Resource Manager Templates prior to deploying resources. Its inline integration with the tools developers use: security checks inside the DevOps pipeline through API integration with tools including Microsoft Git, Github, and Azure DevOps. Security Feedback is natively integrated into the build process saving time, effort, and frustration.

The offering also offers unified cloud security for Azure ecosystem to allows developers to leverage Azure services knowing security will be built-in by design (IaaS/PaaS/Container services) aligning closely to the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) best practices. Its preemptive risk avoidance improves compliance with regulatory frameworks and reduces the likelihood of data loss, abuse or fines associated with improper security controls by highlighting security findings before they become security incidents.

The new “Shift Left” capabilities in McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Azure are available now.

Arrow Electronics releases new version of ArrowSphere, its multi-tier cloud platform

Arrow Electronics has enhanced on Monday its multi-tier cloud platform, ArrowSphere with new functionalities that enable channel customers to create tailored multi-vendor solutions for their clients. 

These enhancements improve design, functionalities and user experience, with new additions including extensive catalog of more than 25,000 offers worldwide; AI-enabled search bar for managing subscriptions; visualization displays key offers being purchased by channel customers by region; intelligent catalog filtering by supplier, category, add-on, trial or customer category; and recommendation engine that allows channel customers to view complementary offers for building cloud solutions.

“We already had the customer base and the reach to make a big impact in the public cloud space, but with ArrowSphere in place, we are properly equipped to scale our cloud business to even greater heights,” said Nick Benham, senior partner manager, SCC. “Our customers are getting the customized, self-service experience that they expect, and we are seeing stronger customer loyalty. The deeper intel and insights we receive allow us to plan for the future and budget accordingly.”

“We developed ArrowSphere more than eight years ago with the vision of creating an innovative platform for cloud, where channel customers can easily access our suppliers’ cloud products all in one place and build solutions for their end customers,” said Sean Kerins, global president of Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business.

In June, Arrow added functionalities that enable solution providers and value-added resellers to quote, order, manage, analyze and invoice a wide variety of cloud solutions to ArrowSphere. 

Arrow constantly extends the set of vendors, cloud services and tools available on ArrowSphere, including a deep integration of application programming interfaces. Over 50 leading cloud vendors participate in the cloud platform.

Latest add-ons include a new user interface with the end user portal MyCloudPortal, as well as FinOps and DevOps tools.

The web portal further extends the capabilities of ArrowSphere to end-user customers with a turnkey site, through which customers can seamlessly purchase cloud services, manage their cloud subscriptions and analyze their use of services, setting budgets and thresholds where required. 

MyCloudPortal can be customized by channel customers, with logos, colors and fonts, and they can add their own products and services to the portal as SKUs for their end customers to order as 'as-a-service' utility cloud services.

ArrowSphere comes with a consolidated dashboard to monitor cloud business in real time. Viewing IaaS monthly trends by customers, zooming into subscription level to set alerts and get projected consumption or analyzing the churn on SaaS products, Arrow`s Finops Tools are a smart control panel for sales teams to track customer activity, understanding business trends and take appropriate actions. 

New development operations tools allow users to orchestrate their IaaS and PaaS offering through ArrowSphere. Microsoft ARM and AWS cloud formation templates are available to provision resources. Users are able to choose from existing libraries and customize them or add third-party solutions. 

ArrowSphere offers a flexible set of cloud approaches for the channel and end customers, with different options for quotes and orders, managing cloud services, analytics and billing. A dedicated ArrowSphere team helps customers manage the entire workflow. With an updated, simpler, user-friendly interface, ArrowSphere allows more flexibility to create and customize dashboards that suit different businesses requirements.