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As companies face data storage challenges, many are looking to the cloud for help.

They do so partly to reduce on-premises server dependency and take advantage of cloud-based services and usage-based pricing models.

The five case studies below highlight how organizations in different industries are using cloud storage.

BMG is a Berlin-based music company handling recording and publishing for newer and well-established artists. The robust popularity of streaming services necessitated that BMG executives find an updated way to calculate royalty payments. Getting paid accurately means knowing when, where, and how someone heard a song. BMG provides a customized service for artists to help with this.

We make sure that everyone who uses our clients music knows who needs to be paid the associated royalties, then we collect these royalties and share them out quickly and transparently, explained Sebastian Hentzschel, chief information officer at BMG.

BMG offers a web portal and mobile app artists can use to see real-time royalties and collect payments. Gaurav Mittal, the vice president of group technology at BMG, discusses how much more difficult streaming can make royalty calculations.

One CD sale is equivalent to about 1,500 streamed songs or plays, said Mittal. That means IT departments have to process 1,500 times the amount of data to calculate payments for artists, and this makes scalable micropayment processing very important.

BMG used on-premises data storage until 2019, but leaders realized it was time to move to cloud computing to remain competitive.

With our on-premises infrastructure, we were going to hit a ceiling in a few years. We still managed to process royalty payments for our clients, but it was increasingly time-consuming and expensive, said Mittal. To keep focusing on our clients, rather than our infrastructure, we decided to migrate to Google Cloud.

Mittal said this cloud-computing project would finish ahead of schedule, and it already makes royalty-processing teams more productive. It can self-serve the necessary analytics without waiting for help from IT teams. This move also allows BMG to spend more time focused on helping artists.

Industry: Music

Cloud storage products: Google Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL

Outcomes:

The UConn Health system has a teaching hospital and three schools, plus 5,000 employees and 3,000 medical researchers. Its easy to see how such a presence would cause leaders to consider cloud storage solutions. However, any cloud computing service on the shortlist must prioritize security. Protecting data and business content is essential in robust cloud security.

Commvault was one of the service providers company leaders selected to meet its goals.

Instead of building a $20 million secondary data center, we decided to use more hosted services, said Michael Catrini, assistant vice president of UConn Health. With its ability to protect data across multiple locations and multiple platforms, Commvault has been key to enabling this change.

UConn Health aspires to transform laboratory insights into actions that cause positive clinical outcomes. Thus, people need the ability to retrieve and analyze large volumes of information on demand. The organization now has a hybrid cloud environment that allows the data storage of more than 3.2 petabytes (PB), 10,000 end-user devices, 850 virtual machines, 420 physical servers, and 430 applications.

With Commvault, we can reduce our reliance on physical servers and desktops, which means we can focus internal IT resources on supporting our researchers and customers, Catrini said.

Before working with that service provider, UConn Health used four disparate backup systems to protect against loss. However, it still relied on bare-metal data restores. In one instance, a server failure compromised months of research. The organization now has both security and flexibility from its data storage solutions.

Commvault gives us complete control of our corporate data and intellectual property, said Catrini. We can now move cloud workloads more easily between providers, which means we can take advantage of the best prices. This has reduced the cost per cloud server by around 20%.

Industry: Medicine and higher education

Cloud storage products: Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, NetApp Cloud Backup, NetApp servers, and Microsoft Azure

Outcomes:

Ankabut is the largest education industry-focused information and communication technology provider in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The companys current reach extends to more than 35 educational institutions spread across 80 campuses. Ankabuts services include cloud computing but extend to equipment room and cabinet hosting, managed support, training, and more.

Ankabuts leaders envisioned creating the best education-related cloud environment in the UAE. It did so with various solutions from Huawei, including a full-stack hybrid cloud. Ankabuts decision-makers also wanted to make a substantial contribution to the UAEs position in the global educational landscape. Those executives realized that the right technological solutions could make the country more competitive and adaptable to progress.

This project represents one of the largest investments made in the UAEs education sector in 2019 and will strengthen the UAEs position as a regional leader in educational services, explained Fahem Al Nuaimi, Ankabuts CEO. Huaweis technology enables us to offer cloud services to our partner institutions throughout the UAE, which makes the academic process more efficient, reducing expenses and boosting collaborative work to benefit education and research facilities alike.

Industry: Education technology

Cloud storage products: Huawei CLOUD Stack and CloudFabric

Outcomes:

Since its establishment in 2012, VBO Tickets has experienced impressive success and sells approximately 2.5 million tickets annually. However, executives noticed room for improvement. Therefore, VBO Tickets sought the assistance of Mission Cloud Services to positively change its existing usage of cloud storage and computing products from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We did not have the load-balancing capabilities we required to handle the spikes in online traffic that our clients sometimes experience, said David Boehme, co-founder and developer of the VBO Tickets software platform. We also wanted to make it easier to scale our cloud environment to accommodate the anticipated continuing growth.

Figuring out the best way forward wasnt easy.

We first considered hiring someone to manage our AWS architecture, but our strength is coding software, so thats where our focus must be. We knew we could optimize our coding output by relying on a third party that specializes in AWS to re-architect our cloud environment, said Boehme.

The hard work paid off and enabled VBO Tickets to open a new office in South Africa. It also began utilizing AWS in Germany to reach European customers.

One of the cloud storage changes was to move the ticketing database from a shared to a managed AWS Relational Database Services (RDS) database with Microsoft SQL to decouple shared resources and enhance overall performance. The Mission Cloud Services team also utilized AWS CloudTrail for logging purposes and AWS CloudWatch for infrastructure monitoring.

Thanks to Mission, we now have a high-functioning cloud hosting environment that can scale when necessary, Boehme explained. We can easily add more web servers and expand our database capacity. These capabilities are vital because the bigger we grow, the more prepared we need to be for events that can cause sudden increases in ticket-buying activity.

Industry: Event ticketing

Cloud storage products: Amazon Web Services, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and Mission Cloud Services

Outcomes:

The Sesame Workshop has several decades of history, reaching millions of kids worldwide to educate and entertain them. However, executives found their reliance on traditional IT infrastructure limited their ability to grow with its international audience.

The organization relied on two physical data centers at the time, each serving different purposes. However, that approach made server maintenance and other necessities challenging, especially due to the organizations lean workforce.

The company began searching for a managed services provider. Shadrach Kisten, the senior vice president of information technology and digital media engineering at Sesame Workshop, explained some of the organizations must-have characteristics.

High availability, scalability, security, seamless integration, hybrid flexibility, and at the same time, cost control were all key factors in choosing a platform and partner, Kisten said.

Sesame Workshop chose Rackspace for its needs. The subject matter experts at Rackspace were exceptionally helpful in guiding the transition, mainly because the organization was new to cloud computing.

That information was important to us because uptime, resilience, performance, and the ability to scale are important to us, explained Kisten. We needed a lot of architectural guidance in terms of the database, high availability, redundancy, access, and security. It was invaluable.

One of the primary changes was to move Sesame Workshop from a managed services environment to a public-private hybrid cloud on AWS. Completing that step gave the organization an integrated and connected infrastructure that supports workflow automation.

The organizations use of cloud computing proved so successful its next steps were to migrate its mail server and part of its data center to Microsoft Azure.

Moving to the cloud requires a mind shift for your internal teams, but for us, its not difficult because they see that it worked, said Kisten.

Industry: Childrens media

Cloud storage products: Rackspace Fanatical Support for AWS, Rackspace multicloud and hybrid cloud managed support, and Microsoft Azure

Outcomes:

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How Cloud Storage is Used by BMG, UConn Health, VBO Tickets, Sesame Workshop, Ankabut: Case Studies - Datamation

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Chances are that youve moved all your important documents, photos and other digital files to the cloud. So we cant ignore the significance of cloud cybersecurity moving forward as we continue to go completely digital in so many aspects of our lives.

Cybersecurity companies are fighting for market share as data breaches and ransomware attacks become more common, more damaging and more expensive. With many companies turning towards cloud technology, its no secret that companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are going to increase focus on this business sector.

That said, Googles recent acquisition of the cyber security company, Mandiant, has stirred up a lot of conversation about the future of cloud cybersecurity and the highly competitive landscape therein. Were going to look at this space to see how much money the big players are making.

It was announced on September 12 that Googles $5.4 billion bid to acquire the cybersecurity firm Mandiant was completed. Mandiant will be joining Googles cloud computing division so Google can attempt to compete with Amazons AWS and Microsofts Azure. This is Googles second-largest acquisition as the company aims to focus on enhancing its security operations suite and advisory services.

With companies worldwide facing cyberattacks, the cloud cybersecurity space is expanding, and fast. With over 17 years of experience, Mandiant is a publicly-traded cybersecurity company that rose to prominence by discovering the SolarWinds attack where 18,000 clients unknowingly downloaded malware. Due to the detection, less than 100 customers ended up getting hacked. The companys specialization in threat detection is what helped them stand out in the market.

Google is investing heavily in its cloud cybersecurity business sector. While Google still has a long way to go to catch up with AWS and Azure, the company is willing to invest its financial resources into growth, even to the detriment of short term profit.

When Google first announced the deal, they brought up how combining Mandiant with Google Clouds security offerings will help Cloud customers with increased protection in five key areas:

The company is also hopeful that the combination of Google Cloud and Mandiant will encourage further collaboration and innovation in the cybersecurity sector while increasing threat research capabilities. As cyber-attacks become more sophisticated, its clear that organizations, governments and individuals need further protection. Theres also significant money to be made in storage as more streaming services emerge.

We looked at the earnings report for Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to see how much the cloud business brings in. During the Q2 earnings report for 2022, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, Sundar Pichai, declared that performance for the quarter was driven by search and cloud functionality. The company has invested plenty of resources into the AI and computing thats needed to grow cloud services for businesses of all sizes.

Google brought in $21 billion in revenue from cloud services in 2021, which accounted for 7.5% of the companys total revenue. However, cloud services still ended up with a net loss of $3.1 billion in 2021.

For the second quarter of 2022, Google Cloud brought in $6.3 billion in revenue, which was a 35% year-over-year increase compared to the second quarter of 2021, when they brought in $4.6 billion in revenue. However, the company also lost $858 million for cloud services in the second quarter of 2022.

Many experts have observed that Google isnt profitable with its cloud services because they continue to invest in the growth of this sector. Amazon, on the other hand, has remained profitable in its cloud business.

Google executives continue to point to the growth potential of cloud services, highlighting that many companies are still in the early stages of a digital transformation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) had an operating profit of $18.5 billion in 2021. AWS was also 74% of Amazons total operating profit in 2021. On an interesting note, AWS contributed 14% to the companys overall revenue while generating almost three-quarters of the profits.

For the second quarter of 2022, Amazon reported earnings of $19.74 billion in revenue with $5.72 billion in operating income for AWS. The revenue from the cloud services increased 33% during the quarter.

When you take a closer look at the earnings from Amazon, its clear that the cloud business is bringing in a majority of the profit, despite the e-commerce side bringing in more revenue. The cloud business simply operates atop higher margins.

AWS is the cloud computing service that provides data storage and networking for regular customers and big enterprise clients like Twitter and Netflix. Netflix uses AWS for almost all of its storage and computing needs. This includes everything from databases to analytics and even video transcoding. Amazon also has many other large companies that rely on AWS, which ensures that this sector will remain profitable.

Microsoft has remained competitive in the cloud cybersecurity space with Azure and other cloud services. According to the companys earning report for the second quarter in 2022, revenue from Intelligent Cloud was $20.9 billion. Microsofts Intelligent Cloud business sector includes Azure (the public cloud for application hosting), SQL Server, Windows Server and enterprise services. They dont list what revenues they bring in solely from Azure.

Revenue from Azure and cloud services went up by 40% in the last quarter, which is slightly lower than the 46% growth during the previous quarter.

Microsoft also invested in the cloud sector in 2021 with a few major acquisitions. They acquired CloudKnow and ReFirm labsboth major players in cloud security and internet of things (IoT) security, respectively.

The recent acquisitions by Google and Microsoft indicate that these giant companies plan to invest heavily in this business sector. With unprecedented levels of global cyberattacks, there will be more demand for increased cyber security.

Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Amazons AWS, recently remarked in an interview that he believes theres more room to grow in this space since cloud computing is still in its infancy. Selpisky told CNBCs Jim Cramer, Essentially, IT is going to move to the cloud. And its going to take a while. Youve seen maybe only, call it 10% of IT today move. So its still day 1. Its still early Most of its still yet to come.

He also mentioned that despite the steep competition, demand is still increasing for AWS. It will be interesting to observe how Googles acquisition of Mandiant performs and if this newly expanded business could increase Googles market share. Its currently estimated that Amazon has a 39% market share in the cloud cybersecurity space. Theres no telling how many more individuals and corporations are yet to make the complete digital transformation.

Its also worth mentioning that cybersecurity stocks were a rare bright spot earlier in the year when the stock market tumbled due to global conflict and rising inflation. Companies like Telos and CyberStrike remained strong as cybersecurity threats increased worldwide. This sector remained strong until worries of rising inflation and increasing interest rates led to further sell-offs.

From a business perspective, its going to be fascinating to see how Amazon and Microsoft react to Googles acquisition and if the giants decide to participate in additional mergers or acquisitions as well.

If youre looking to invest in cloud technology and cybersecurity, you have many companies to choose from. Cyber security companies will continue to do well as individual users, organizations and governments continue to rely on threat detection for safety. There will also be further demand for cloud storage as streaming services and others continue to put content online.

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Mandiant, Google, And The Future Of Cloud Cybersecurity - Forbes

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Trescons World Cloud Show, a global series of events lands in Dubai this 27 28 September 2022 as it aims at bringing together experts and thought leaders to discuss how the innovations have come about in the industry, and how this ecosystem is gearing up for a streamlined growth.

Saturday, September 24, 2022: Dubai has made exceptional progress in cloud adoption and is well on its way to emerge as a role model for the entire world. Keeping up with this pace, the 17th global edition of World Cloud Show is scheduled to take place at The Address Mall on September 27- 28, 2022 todiscuss,deliberate,and share insights within this forward-moving industry.

The event is all set to explore best practices in establishing, developing, and documenting an organization-wide approach to integrate cloud and related emerging-tech across the country. The conference will bring together over 200 C-level tech decision makers, along with CMOs, CDOs, CXOs, and Industry Practitioners.

Dr. Hamad Khalifa Alnuaimi, Head of Telecommunications Division at Abu Dhabi Police GHQ, says, World Cloud Show would be the next turning point for cloud technology revelations.

The focus on advancing the digital economy through local initiatives and innovations is the primary driver of the adoption of Cloud & Data Center solutions in the UAE, a vital pillar of the initiatives to drive the UAEs National Vision 2030.

Agile Infrastructure Modernization is driven by policy initiatives that transform the ecosystem of business and the change agent becomes the catalyst for execution, stated Adam Roosevelt, U.S. Representative & Board Member at The Private Office of Sheikh Saqer Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi.

According to Al Maryah Community Bank LLCs Chief Information Security Officer, Zaheer Shaikh, World Cloud Show brings together the global cloud computing industry to showcase their business and technical capabilities for partner-in to assist the organization and startups to achieve strategic and business goals.

The 17th World Cloud Show in Dubai aspires to redefine cloud computing and environmentally sustainable data centers around the world. Quick and effective cloud adoption has changed the organizational environment. Dr. Abdulaziz Batli, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Governor of IT and ET, Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission Founding Board Member, Saudi Cloud Computing Association reflects on rapid cloud adoption and remarks, The stakes for Cloud Computing are high and opportunities are endless. It plays a pivotal role as a facilitator and an enabler for digital economies, across the three tiers. The added value of hyperscale service providers is enormous as markets get created around their presence. This is the right time for regulators globally to walk the talk and apply the innovate then regulate approach so economies can be diversified.

Another industry stalwart Vineesha Satwani, Advisor Digitalization to Senior Leadership, Government Entity in UAE, sheds light on the proceedings and says, World Cloud Show is bringing together success stories from various leaders and experts in the region with a mix of discussions, fireside chats, panels, and keynotes not only highlighting its capability but also discussing smart ways to mitigate any concerns around it.

The 17th edition of the World Cloud Show Dubai will include notable industry speakers such as:

Dubai is a hub for digital disruption and is positioned to lead the world in providing customer-centric experiences as competition and customer demands increase, said Mithun Shetty, CEO of Trescon. He continued, World Cloud Summit will connect key players in the Cloud ecosystem to help Enterprises in Dubai foster highly efficient Cloud strategies.

The Dubai edition, which is expected to be the largest in the series thus far, will also feature the World Cloud Awards, which will honor and promote the most recent advancements in the Cloud ecosystem. A special ceremony called the World Cloud Awards will recognize business owners, trailblazers, and solution providers for their continued work in the field of cloud and data center infrastructure.

The awards will honor the innovations made by individuals, teams, and companies who have pioneered the adoption and deployment of cloud and data center infrastructure in the MENA region.

The event is sponsored by:

For more information, visit: World Cloud Show Dubai.

The World Cloud Show takes place in strategic locations across the world which gathers pre-qualified CIOs, CEOs, CTOs, Heads of Research, Industry Practitioners, IT Decision Makers, and Experts in Cloud Computing among others from cross-industry verticals.

The show will feature exciting keynotes, government and enterprise use-case presentations, product showcase, panel discussions and tech talks to discuss the latest challenges and explore latest applications of cloud-based solutions.

Trescon is a global business events and consulting firm that provides a wide range of business services to a diversified client base that includes corporations, governments, and individuals. Trescon specializes in producing highly focused B2B events that connect businesses with opportunities through conferences, roadshows, expos, demand generation, investor connect, and consulting services.

For further details about the announcement, please contact:

Nupur AswaniHead Media, PR and Corporate Communications, Trescon+91 9555915156 | [emailprotected]

For publishing articles on our website get in touch with us over email or one of the accounts mentioned below.

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Tech-titans unite to redefine the future of Cloud and Sustainable Data Centers in Dubai. - The Coin Republic

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The recent VMware Explore event brought the term cloud chaos into the information technology lexicon.

It was a welcome addition that summed up the problems of managing multiple cloud vendors within a single organization. VMware Inc. claims to be addressing this issue with its focus on multicloud management, pivoting the pure cloud-native message of the more recent VMworld events.

From VMwares perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud, said Jason Bloomberg (pictured), founder and president of Intellyx LLC. So if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have this common familiar environment. Its VMware everywhere; it doesnt really matter which cloud its in, because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff.

Bloomberg spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio. They discussed whether VMwares strategy is taking the company in the right direction for the future of cloud computing. (* Disclosure below.)

VMware is addressing the challenge of creating a control plane to manage heterogeneous IT in a unified way and meeting an organizations business needs without slowing the speed of the IT department. VMwares proposed solution is the new VMware Aria multicloud management platform, which was announced during Explore.

Aria, if they can get it up and running and straightened out, its going to be a great solution. But there are other products on the market that are more mature and well integrated, Bloomberg said.

And there is a piece of the multicloud puzzle that VMware and others seem to be missing: the edge. Its not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even to on-premises, or a private cloud, he said. Its also the edge computing, and the edge computing data center requirements.

There are thousands of current and potential mini cloud data centers scattered around the globe, from nondescript telco point-of-presence buildings to the computer rooms found at every major retail location.

Thats where the interesting part of this cloud story is going, Bloomberg said. Because that is inherently heterogeneous, inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements.

How the industry develops applications to support these edge environments, especially AI-based applications where major innovations are currently happening, is a huge, huge opportunity, he said.

Heres the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware Explore event. Neither VMware, the sponsor of theCUBEs event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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Is VMwares pivot from VMworlds cloud-native focus to VMware Explore and multicloud a smart move? Industry analysts weigh in - SiliconANGLE News

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