Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

The 3 Main Components of Azure Backup Pricing

With that, onto this week’s news:

Gartner: These 4 trends are shaping the future of the public cloud

Brandon Vigliarolo, TechRepublic, Aug. 10, 2021

“A Gartner report on the trends driving the public cloud sector predicts that the public cloud industry will grow massively over the next few years, eventually accounting for more than 45% of all enterprise IT spending by 2026. The trends (cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and CIPS automated infrastructure) driving this massive growth in the amount of money spent on the public cloud (it only accounts for 17% of IT budgets in 2021) and the industry’s value as a whole (Gartner expects it to grow by 21.7% in 2021 to a value of $482 billion in 2022) can be tied to the pandemic to some degree, said Gartner senior research director Henrique Cecci.”

Companies prioritizing sustainability need to manage data on their progress. Here’s how the cloud can help.

Business Insider: Accenture, Aug. 6, 2021

“The cloud is often used to manage financial and security information, but now firms are turning to it for their ESG data, too. It’s also sustainable. Migrating to the public cloud can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 59 million tons a year — the equivalent of 22 million cars.

It’s worth assessing how ‘carbon thoughtful’ a potential cloud provider is, considering their emissions goals, electricity sources, and renewable-energy purchases. The Google Cloud Platform, for example, matches nonurgent data-center workloads with times when low-carbon energy sources are plentiful, while Microsoft Azure gives customers a calculator to track emissions, and Amazon Web Services is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median US enterprise data center. There’s more information in Accenture’s ‘The green behind the cloud’ report.”

Hybrid cloud services the backbone of today’s e-commerce boom

Joe Devanasen, TechHQ, Aug. 5, 2021

“These sudden changes in consumer behavior as well as shifting distribution methods meant that organizations needed to scale up their e-commerce infrastructure to deliver greater speed and agility without compromising security – causing many of them to turn to hybrid cloud services to fill their gaps. Hybrid cloud harnesses different capabilities including deploying different workloads in private IT environments, public clouds, or a combination based on the computing needs. Hybrid cloud services can provide a business with greater flexibility and more data deployment options to meet the needs of the business.

For example, an apparel seller can utilize public cloud to launch its new website or app, but back-of-house operations and sensitive customer data can still be stored on-premises, safely behind a firewall. And it’s not just common e-commerce pillars like clothing and food delivery either, like in April 2020 when sales of recreational bikes grew by 203% compared to the same period last year.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

For enterprises utilizing Microsoft Azure in their environments, Azure Backup can be a critical asset for ensuring your cloud services run smoothly and access is consistent. Azure Backup has a centralized interface for managing backups for numerous enterprise services spanning several providers, including:

Pricing can get complicated for Azure Backup, so it’s important to have as many relevant facts at your disposal when you’re sorting it out.

What Components Influence Azure Backup Pricing?

There are three main components that drive the cost of Azure Backup pricing:

  1. Fixed service cost: This cost is incurred regardless of the amount of data or bandwidth consumed.
  2. Storage: This cost is based on how much data you store and depends on backup sizes, retention periods, the frequency of your backup schedule, and storage types.
  3. Average daily data churn: This cost is based on how often your data changes.

The Azure Pricing Calculator allows you to configure the various cost elements to determine your approximate Azure Backup costs. However, as multiple variables contribute to the total cost, using the Azure Backup pricing estimator offers greater accuracy. This Excel-based worksheet tool also provides accurate Azure Backup cost estimates for the various workloads protected by this service.

To learn more about how this works, check out the Microsoft Azure Backup Pricing article in our Guide to Azure Cost Optimization.

Get your Azure costs under control. Learn how CloudBolt solutions can help.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here’s what we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

100 percent of companies experience public cloud security incidents

Ian Barker, BetaNews, Aug. 4, 2021

“A new study from threat detection and response specialist Vectra AI finds that all respondents have experienced at least one security incident in their public cloud environment in the last 12 months. The study of over 300 IT executives, with 70 percent coming from enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, shows a rapid expansion and reliance on AWS services while simultaneously pointing up security blind spots within many organizations.

Among the findings are that 64 percent of DevOps respondents are deploying new workload services weekly or even more frequently. 78 percent of organizations are running AWS across multiple regions (40 percent in at least three), and 71 percent of respondents say that they are using more than four AWS services (such as S3, EC2, IAM, etc).”

Gartner reveals four trends that are shaping the future of public cloud

Aaron Hurst, Information Age, Aug. 2, 2021

“With global end-user spending on public cloud services expected to exceed $480 billion next year, the market trends revealed by Gartner are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities accelerating growth across all segments.

The research company forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021, before growing by 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022, and exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending by 2026. Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. In response, cloud providers are instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders. ‘New sustainability requirements will be mandated over the next few years and the choice of cloud services providers may hinge on the provider’s ‘green’ initiatives,” said Cecci.”

Cloud infrastructure market kept growing in Q2, reaching $42.B

Ron Miller, TechCrunch, Aug. 2, 2021

“Canalys analyst Blake Murray says that part of the reason companies are shifting workloads to the cloud is to help achieve environmental sustainability goals as the cloud vendors are working toward using more renewable energy to run their massive data centers. ‘The best practices and technology utilized by these companies will filter to the rest of the industry, while customers will increasingly use cloud services to relieve some of their environmental responsibilities and meet sustainability goals,’ Murray said in a statement.

Regardless of whether companies are moving to the cloud to get out of the data center business or because they hope to piggyback on the sustainability efforts of the Big 3, companies are continuing a steady march to the cloud. With some estimates of worldwide cloud usage at around 25%, the potential for continued growth remains strong, especially with many markets still untapped outside the U.S.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is offered as part of Microsoft Azure’s public cloud platform, and allows developers to utilize an intelligent and scalable relational database service. It conforms to all the characteristics of a genuine cloud service, one being that you only have to pay for what you use.

That sounds great, but the truth is, pricing and cost optimization for Azure SQL Database can get confusing and pile up fast. If you don’t know how to wrangle those costs and get the most out of the platform, you could be facing a hefty bill.

How Does Microsoft Azure SQL Pricing Work?

Estimating Microsoft Azure SQL Database pricing can be challenging due to the multiple configurations available. For illustration, consider the following options to get an idea of how many permutations there are:

The number of choices available can be overwhelming at first. We recommend starting your cost optimization exercise by first starting with what your requirements are. Once you have a clear understanding of what you need, you can use the Azure SQL Database pricing page filter shown in the following image to narrow down the various options.

To learn more about how this works, check out the Microsoft Azure SQL Pricing article in our Guide to Azure Cost Optimization.

Get your Azure costs under control. Learn how CloudBolt solutions can help.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here’s what we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

The evolution of public clouds will benefit enterprises

David Lithicum, InfoWorld, July 27, 2021

“I don’t normally go to the Wall Street Journal for the cloud news, but this headline caught my eye: ‘Battle for the Cloud, Once Amazon vs. Microsoft, Now Has Many Fronts. Customers increasingly sign with multiple vendors to lower costs and cobble together the best services.’ I was more interested in the headline and subhead than the article itself. This is more validation of trends we’ve been seeing the past several years now appearing in the nation’s biggest business publication. In other words, the trends of multi cloud, heterogeneity, and complexity have gone mainstream. This brings up a larger question of how public cloud providers large and small will likely morph over the next several years. Here is the more obvious trend you’ll likely see and are beginning to see now: commoditization of public clouds leading to even more growth.

As we use more public clouds for the same enterprise solutions, the clouds themselves will take on the role of a commodity resource provider. They will exist as abstracted resources, meaning that we’ll access services such as storage, compute, databases, etc., using a common set of interfaces (APIs typically) that will in turn call a public cloud service to meet the request.”

Cloud Computing’s Coming Energy Crisis

Mark Pesce, IEEE Spectrum, July 21, 2021

“Bloomberg recently estimated that about 1 percent of the world’s electricity goes to cloud computing.

That figure is poised to grow exponentially over the next decade. Bloomberg reckons that, globally, we might exit the 2020s needing as much as 8 percent of all electricity to power the future cloud. That might seem like a massive jump, but it’s probably a conservative estimate. After all, by 2030, with hundreds of millions of augmented-reality spectacles streaming real-time video into the cloud, and with the widespread adoption of smart digital currencies seamlessly blending money with code, the cloud will provide the foundation for nearly every financial transaction and user interaction with data.”

Cloud incident response demands cloud native capabilities

Nadav Arbel, Security Magazine, July 28, 2021

“Cybersecurity balances business processes, operational controls, and technology but it also entails that those solutions are controlled to properly identify and manage risks on a continuous basis. In today’s business environment security is a fundamentally functional and non-functional requirement and cannot be an afterthought where issues are chased after systems are operational. Delays, financial losses, and damaged brand equity are the fruits borne from failure. 

That’s why it’s vital that best practices be implemented by companies from the onset of any cloud migration strategy: backed by a robust and real-time capability to plan, investigate, and respond to all security incidents.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

So far on our blog series Microsoft Azure costs, we’ve looked at some of the aspects of Azure Storage Pricing, Azure Reservations and Azure Spot Virtual Machines. This week, we’re going to take a look at Azure Migrate Service and the impact it can have on pricing and costs.

How the Azure Migrate Service Works

Initially, the Azure Migrate Service offering focused on enabling users to discover and migrate to VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V virtual machines, and on-premise servers. Today, the Azure Migrate Service has evolved to accommodate more than just “lift-and-shift migration” projects.  For example, the service now allows you to migrate workloads to the Azure Platform as a Service in what is known as a “replatforming migration.”

The top Azure Migrate Service use cases include:

Although it is becoming less common to use tools that are not integrated with the Azure Migrate offering, some worth noting are: Movere, which was acquired by Microsoft for server migrations, and Azure Data Box, which helps move massive amounts of data to Azure.

Learn more about Azure Migrate Service, its associated costs and how it can help with your Azure environment in this article in our Azure Cost Optimization Guide.

Get your Azure costs under control. Learn how CloudBolt solutions can help.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Understanding the landscape of cloud security

Chris Deverill, TechRadar Pro, July 21, 2021

“The benefits of cloud-based working are not in doubt, with its flexibility, low upfront investment, and suitability for remote working, and it looks like more than half of UK-based IT will be in the cloud by 2023, with 75% of companies having already switched to a ‘cloud-first’ strategy. Cloud-based working is clearly here to stay, but with the upsides comes a new environment, but this also carries a number of risks. Cloud is the new playground for criminals.

Moving operations to the cloud does not mean offloading responsibility for security procedures, and multi-cloud implementations add extra complications. Each cloud environment has its own technical and configuration approaches, and IT departments need to navigate the organization, management, control and visibility of services on each host. Every organization remains responsible for its own data, and cloud providers require implementation of their management and security policies in order for their clients to be compliant with regulations.’

An introduction to big data in the cloud

Stephen J. Bigelow, TechTarget, July 19, 2021

“While there is benefit to big data, the sheer amount of computing resources and software services needed to support big data efforts can strain the financial and intellectual capital of even the largest businesses. The cloud has made great strides in filling the need for big data. It can provide almost limitless computing resources and services that make big data initiatives possible for any business.

The public cloud has emerged as an ideal platform for big data. A cloud has the resources and services that a business can use on demand, and the business doesn’t have to build, own or maintain the infrastructure. Thus, the cloud makes big data technologies accessible and affordable to almost any size of enterprise.”

Three ways customers will dictate the future of the cloud

Ed Anderson, SiliconAngle, July 18, 2021

“Gartner expects that cloud will not only be a technological approach for delivering infrastructure and applications, but will also serve as the key driver of information technology modernization and business innovation when and where the customer requires it.

The 2021 Gartner CIO Survey found that 52% of survey respondents characterized a more strategic rather than tactical focus of IT investment as a result of COVID-19. When asked about expectations for 2021, an even greater 71% of respondents expected an increase in the strategic focus of IT investments. Cloud services served as the bright spot throughout the entirety of the pandemic, as the organizations employing them have been able to recover more effectively and quickly from those who are not. The adaptive nature of a cloud-based approach will drive cloud spending through the next few years and make it a core aspect of business continuity. We also know that cloud services support IT modernization strategies: In Gartner’s 2020 Cloud End-User Buying Behavior Study, nearly half of respondents identified IT modernization as one of the top three outcomes achieved by adopting cloud given its elasticity, reliability, scalability and more. Although organizations can, and should, recognize both tactical (such as IT performance and cost efficiency) and strategic benefits (such as revenue growth and new customer acquisition) of using cloud, the focus must be to ensure that customers recognize a measurable outcome from their cloud investments.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

As cloud costs climb, is repatriation the answer?

Jen A. Miller, CIO Dive, July 12, 2021

“Dropbox saved nearly $75 million by repatriating workloads from the public cloud and building its own tech infrastructure, the company detailed in its S-1. That such a large company would move largely off public cloud, where startups often begin and established companies shed legacy systems to get to, seemed an anomaly.  

But as cloud computing continues to mature, the costs of running such infrastructure is catching up creating a “trillion dollar paradox,” according to a recent report from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), coauthored by Sarah Wang, a partner at a16z, and Martin Casado, general partner at a16z. In analysis of cloud spend at 50 of the top public software companies — including Adobe, DocuSign, Slack and Zoom — a16z estimates cloud infrastructure costs and impact on margins are eating away at $100 billion in market value.”

Google’s new cloud computing tool helps you pick the greenest data centers

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, ZDNet, July 13, 2021

“In another bid to make cloud computing eco-friendlier, Google has created a new tool to push customers who are picking their next cloud region towards choosing infrastructure that is more sustainable. When users browse through their options to manage cloud resources, Google will flag regions that have the lowest carbon impact highlighted with a leaf symbol and a “Lowest CO2” label. The new feature is already appearing as part of the location selector inside Cloud Console, which lets Google’s customers manage the different elements that power cloud applications, ranging from bills to databases through cloud regions. 

To earn a green badge of honor, a given cloud region will need to achieve a Carbon Free Energy Percentage (CFE%) of at least 75%, which means that on average, renewable energy is used three-quarters of the time to power the data centers in the area. Where information about the CFE% is not available, the region will instead have to show a low grid carbon intensity, which corresponds to the average emissions generated by the local grid when it is necessary to use fossil fuel energy. This can vary greatly from one region to the other, and has a direct impact on the sustainability of data centers in the area. Earlier this year, the advertising-to-cloud giant released a dataset containing the hourly CFE% and grid carbon intensity for the majority of its regions, to reflect the average mix of carbon-free and fossil-fuel energy that is used to power its data centers in different cloud regions.”

Report: Most essential US businesses are cloud-ready

Esther Shein, TechRepublic, July 12, 2021

“Some 94% of mid-sized essential businesses in the United States are adopting cloud this year, up from 25% that declared cloud a strategic priority in 2020, a new report finds. Further, 75% of mid-sized businesses expect to be fully recovered from the impact of COVID-19 by 2022, while 61% expect to expand in size and scale over the coming three years, according to Epicor Software’s annual insights report.

A key takeaway from this year’s study ‘is the sea change in attitude toward cloud as a critical business accelerant. Leaders have moved from consideration to adoption,’’ said Steve Murphy, CEO of Epicor, during his keynote address at the annual customer Insights conference. ‘While the companies who make, move and sell what is most essential to economic growth may be all aboard the cloud train, the data suggests their implementation needs vary vastly,’ Murphy said. ‘This is no longer a ‘why move’ conversation but rather a ‘how to move’ to gain advantage.’”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Long waits for IT resources shouldn’t be standard. Self-service IT from a catalog is a reality that can set you on the path of digital transformation. Learn how you can reduce IT wait times while keeping the control you need.

During this 30-minute webinar featuring CloudBolt’s Nilesh Deo and Jeff Brassard, discover:

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Get your self-service IT capabilities on track. Talk to CloudBolt today.