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Wednesday, February 8th, 2017
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| 1:00p | AWS Uses Scale, Services to Chip Away at Public Cloud Market Share  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Small to medium-sized cloud providers only make up 18 percent of the overall public cloud services market, according to the latest data by Synergy Research Group, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to hold the lion’s share of the public cloud market. According to the latest numbers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has more than 40 percent of the public cloud services market, with Microsoft, Google and IBM accounting for 23 percent of the total public IaaS and PaaS market. The growth of these cloud behemoths is coming at the expense of smaller cloud providers, whose market share has dropped four percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 compared to the same time last year. Synergy estimates that quarterly public cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include both public IaaS and public PaaS, have reached over $7 billion, and continue to grow at the staggering rate of almost 50 percent per year. If managed private cloud services are included, that quarterly revenue number balloons to over $9 billion. Last week, Amazon released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016, where its cloud division AWS reached $3.53 billion in revenue, up 45.8 percent year over year, with all customer segments contributing to the growth.
In the managed private cloud space, IBM and Rackspace lead the pack. But companies like Rackspace rely on the growth of AWS to some extent, as newly appointed Rackspace president Jeff Cotten said that its managed AWS business was the fastest growing area of business the managed cloud company has ever had. “While a few cloud providers are growing at extraordinary rates, AWS continues to impress as a dominant market leader that has no intention of letting its crown slip,” John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group said in a statement. “Achieving and maintaining a leadership position in this market takes huge ongoing investments in infrastructure, a continued expansion in the range of cloud services offered, strong credibility with the large enterprise sector, consistently strong execution, and the wholehearted and long-term backing of senior management. AWS is checking all of those boxes and any serious challengers need to do likewise.” This article originally appeared on Talkin’ Cloud. |
| 4:00p | MSP Charged With Extortion After Cutting IT Services for Non-Payment  Brought to you by MSPmentor A Georgia MSP owner is free on $13,555 bond after being charged with allegedly shutting off IT access to a client who terminated a three-year services contract after one year, then stopped paying, according to a report in Forsyth County News. James “Jim” Darian Kubicek, 48, was arrested Friday on felony charges of extortion, computer theft and computer trespass, following a complaint by the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce. Kubicek’s firm, Kubicek Information Technologies, provided IT services to the chamber of commerce, according to Kubicek and officials from the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office. When the chamber engaged another firm towards the end of 2016 and stopped paying Kubicek, the MSP allegedly cut off chamber users’ access to Office 365, including all emails, calendars, contacts and task management tools. The chamber remained without Office 365 for 10 days, until the data could be restored by the new MSP. “All of the files on our server were secured and there were no breaches of personal information, credit card numbers, etc.,” chamber president and CEO James McCoy is quoted as telling the newspaper. “In fact, the server was taken offline immediately until we were certain it could be secured.” Kubicek insists he did nothing wrong. He acknowledged withdrawing sponsorship deals from the chamber and that he “shut off the services they refused to pay for,” according to the Forsyth County News. “I do that with any client that refuses to pay their bill,” Kubicek is quoted as saying. The MSP accused the chamber of quitting the contract early in order to go with a less expensive IT services deal. Kubicek said he has hired a civil lawyer to pursue $78,000, which he alleges he’s owed by the chamber. “I have absolutely no doubt that these trumped-up charges will be dismissed,” he said. Kubicek is scheduled to appear in court on March 10. In the meantime, the episode has caused the chamber to pay closer attention to its IT services. “We made improvements to ensure that if any changes to ownership of accounts with Microsoft Office 365 or any of our IT accounts or our domain are made in the future, that we are notified,” McCoy said. “And we will conduct regular audits of those accounts.” This article originally appeared on MSPmentor. |
| 4:30p | Five Questions to Ask Your Storage Vendor About Customer Care Rob Commins is VP of Marketing for Tegile. In business, data is everything. It guides every decision your organization makes, your relationship with your customers and the value that your business offers. And with the world’s push toward real-time analytics and predictive modeling capabilities, flash storage arrays are becoming an increasingly crucial aspect of any business. The good news is that storage vendors know this. In the last few years, we’ve seen an intense commoditization of storage arrays. While there are certainly differences between products (and these differences do matter to IT departments), they all tell a similar story: Storage technology is getting faster and cheaper. With the technology playing field is now evening out, customer support programs from vendors will become even more crucial. Many companies are coming out with new customer care initiatives, offering everything from free upgrades to replacing your equipment altogether. It can get quite confusing. Here are the five questions you need to ask your vendor about support prior to a purchase: What Performance Guarantees Do They Provide?It’s one thing if your vendor sells the speeds and feeds you are looking for. But will they deliver it? Enterprise storage arrays are not cheap and are an increasingly crucial investment for a business. It is extremely important that your vendor will not only support you in the long run; but also that it will deliver the performance that you require. Do They Help Turn CAPEX Into OPEX?Historically, expansion and maintenance of storage has always been a capital expenditure. If your business grew fast, your IT team needed to upgrade your physical goods to keep up with your growth. In today’s real-time world, this is impractical and unacceptable. Make sure your vendor has a program in place that ensures perpetual upgrades that do not interrupt the flow of your organization. Are Upgrades Non-disruptive?Many vendors have different types of strategies to ensure the operational value of your array. Some will continuously make upgrades for you, akin to replacing the engine or other parts of the hood of your car; others will give you a brand new equipment after a set number of years. Which plan is better will largely depend on your company’s own situation and business goals. The most important thing is that however your vendor runs their customer support program, it is non-disruptive to your IT processes. Is There An Expiration Date?An investment in storage arrays is a long-term one. While eventually all equipment has to be replaced, businesses need to ask if their customer care program will last the estimated length of the equipment. Check and make sure that, if there is a deadline, it makes sense with your expense cycles and forecasts. What Is The Upgrade Timeframe?Different vendors will have different approaches to this: Some will automatically provide a refresh to your arrays after a certain number of years, others will allow you to choose your own timeline, based on your business and capacity expansion needs. No matter which style you choose, make sure your data center technology plans accordingly. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 6:58p | VC Firms Back Record Number of Cybersecurity Startups in 2016 By Lizette Chapman (Bloomberg) — Venture investors are clamoring to back cybersecurity startups after record hacking last year and calls by U.S. President Donald Trump and other global leaders to do more to protect against digital attacks. VC firms invested $3.1 billion in a record 279 cybersecurity startups in 2016, according to research firm CB Insights. That compares to $3.7 billion in 272 startups the year before and $833 million in 117 in 2010. Specialized cybersecurity VC funds have sprouted, suggesting this area of the startup world will stay busy. The latest example is Trident Capital Cybersecurity, which said Wednesday it closed a $300 million fund. Others include Allegis Capital and TenEleven Ventures. “Over time, I think they’re going to win,” said Geoff Beattie, former deputy chairman of Thomson Reuters and current General Electric director who invested some of his own money in Trident Capital Cybersecurity. “We want to be in on the growth of cybersecurity.” See also: Does Cisco’s Data Center Analytics Update Truly Enable Zero-Trust? More than 4.2 billion records were exposed during data breaches last year, easily eclipsing the previous record of 1.1 billion in 2013, according to a January report by Risk Based Security Inc. Corporate cybersecurity spending is growing at twice the rate of overall IT budgets and will reach $101.6 billion by 2020, research firm IDC estimates. Governments may pay for more cybersecurity in coming years too, with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among leaders prioritizing this technology. Trident Capital Cybersecurity leaders Alberto Yépez, Don Dixon, Sean Cunningham and Will Lin increased their fundraising target to $300 million from $200 million last year at the suggestion of pension funds seeking to invest in the field. Yépez, a co-founder, said the firm is tracking about 1,400 startups and has invested in five so far. It has 47 advisers, including Keith Alexander, the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency who met with President Trump and other experts in the field last month. In exchange for their help and participation at biannual meetings, the advisers can invest up to $100,000 in an affiliate fund which, for no fees, allows them to own a share in the firm’s portfolio companies. Most have chosen to do so, with the affiliate fund now around $4 million, according to Yépez. See also: Renown Hacker: ‘People, Not Technology, Most Vulnerable Security Link’ |
| 8:35p | JPMorgan Eyeing Site in New York State for Data Center Build JPMorgan Chase is negotiating with a town in New York State to purchase a large property for a bank data center. The company has offered $7.5 million for the 60-acre property in Orangeburg, which used to be the site of the Rockland Psychiatric Center, city officials told the local news outlet The Journal News. While data center outsourcing is on the rise, with companies increasingly leasing colocation space and using cloud services instead of building their own data centers, many still find it necessary to keep some of their workloads in-house. This is especially true for bank data centers, which must comply with financial services industry regulations. Orangeburg is home to another financial-services data center, a server farm built by Bloomberg. There is also a colocation facility in town, operated by 1547 Critical Systems Realty, where one of the tenants is Green House Data. City officials have been using tax incentives to pursue companies that would build data centers in Orangeburg since Bloomberg decided to build its $710 million facility there in 2014. A lot of power is available from the local utility, and the city is close to the data center clusters in New York City and New Jersey. Bloomberg made the decision after its older data center in Manhattan came dangerously close to a disastrous outage during the flooding that followed Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Read more: Bloomberg Data Centers: Where the “Go”s Go The city estimates JPMorgan will spend about $40 million to demolish about 40 existing buildings on the site and clean up hazardous materials, including asbestos and lead. |
| 9:14p | OVH to Build Cloud Data Center in Oregon OVH is planning to build a cloud data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, which will be its third site in North America. The Roubaix-based cloud service provider is in the midst of a global expansion push, building data centers in London, Frankfurt, and Northern Virginia, following site launches in Australia, Singapore, and Poland. It is expecting to invest €1.5 billion in the five-year expansion project, at whose end it plans to have data centers in 11 countries. OVH founder and CTO, Octave Klaba, announced the future cloud data center in Hillsboro on Twitter Tuesday. It will be designed to support 80,000 servers, OVH spokesman, Guillaume Gilbert, told DCK via email. The company is not disclosing whether it will be building the data center on its own or leasing space from a data center provider there. Providers with sites in Hillsboro include Infomart data Centers, ViaWest, T5 Data Centers, and Digital Realty Trust. OVH currently operates a data center outside of Montreal. It announced construction of its first US cloud data center, in Vint Hill, Virginia, in October 2016. |
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