Tag Archives: cloud computing

Cloud Services VS COVID-19: How has the pandemic affected the Cloud Hosting industry?

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/cloud-services-vs-covid-19-how-has-the-pandemic-affected-the-cloud-hosting-industry/

2020 has surely been a questionable year for the human race. An unexpected hail storm, if you will. But for the cloud services market? According to recent statistics, not a cloud in the sky.

Despite the unprecedented chaos that has befallen many facets of our daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s cloud spending has continued to significantly and consistently increase year-on-year. When it comes to the growth of cloud services, 2020 is no exception.

Ultimately, this makes sense. Demand and reliance on digital services has greatly increased this year as many businesses hurry to transform their bricks and mortar presences into digital income streams, in an attempt to survive such uncertain times. Grocery and home goods purchases, learning, working and even many social activities are now conducted primarily online as we fight the global challenges of COVID-19.

According to recent research published by Synergy Research Group, cloud spending passed $30 billion in the second quarter of 2020, an increase of $7.5 billion when compared to the same time last year. In terms of region-specific growth, cloud services have continued to grow steadily all around the world, seemingly regardless of how each region has uniquely been affected by the pandemic.

Of the largest Cloud service providers, AWS has continued to maintain a dominant lead in market share, steadily towering over Google and Microsoft’s cloud service offerings. At the time of writing, the market share is dispersed approximately as follows:

Amazon AWS: 33%

Microsoft Azure: 18%

Google Cloud Platform: 9%

Some of the smaller providers that trail this list include Alibaba Cloud, IBM, Salesforce, Tencent and Oracle.

Cloud infrastructure market share figures, including IaaS, PaaS, and Hosted Private Cloud: Q2 2020

For those of you who may have a penchant for the numbers, we’ve delved a little further into the figures for Logging as a service (LaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and hosted private cloud in 2020.

Public IaaS and PaaS services have maintained the majority of the market share, which grew by 34% in Q2. The lead that Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, and IBM hold over their competitors is even more significant in public cloud, where they control close to 80% of the market combined.

Regarding their findings, chief analyst at Synergy Research, John Dinsdale, had this to say:

“As far as cloud market numbers go, it’s almost as if there were no COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world. As enterprises struggle to adapt to new norms, the advantages of public cloud are amplified.” 

“The percentage growth rate is coming down, as it must when a market reaches enormous scale, but the incremental growth in absolute dollar terms remains truly impressive. The market remains on track to grow by well over 30% in 2020.”

As their findings indicate, the global pandemic certainly hasn’t slowed down the growth rate of Cloud services. With the pressure of more and more companies being forced online, or to shift their entire organisation to being able to work from home, the need to migrate to the cloud is clearly far greater than ever before.

John Dinsdale also had this to say:

“If anything, the pandemic has helped to highlight some of the main benefits of public cloud,” 

Chief among those benefits is the flexibility and scalability that cloud hosting offers. In a time where millions of workers have had to change the way they conduct their daily lives, and companies have had to quickly shift resources, the ability to be able to scale horizontally or vertically to accommodate for that shift in lifestyle is more important than ever. Where other industries have been devastated by COVID-19, the cloud services industry has proven to be more durable, largely due to its capacity to assist companies in tackling the numerous challenges that a pandemic inflicts.

Ready to tap in?

If you have been considering a switch to the cloud, or believe that your business could benefit from additional scalability, flexibility and durability during the new era of heightened online commerce, we strongly suggest consulting with a certified AWS partner, to make your move as smooth, secure and cost-efficient as possible.

Cloud services have proven to be one of the most resilient (and thriving) industries in a COVID-19 world. This can also be said of most companies who have utilised it to bring their businesses up-to-speed and online. If you’d like to tap into this success for your business alike, get in touch with one of our AWS-qualified experts today to learn how we can assist you.

The post Cloud Services VS COVID-19: How has the pandemic affected the Cloud Hosting industry? appeared first on AWS Managed Services by Anchor.

Anchor Joins AWS Service Delivery Program: Amazon EC2 for Windows Server

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/anchor-joins-aws-service-delivery-program-amazon-ec2-for-windows-server/

We are excited to announce that Anchor has joined the Amazon EC2 for Windows Service Delivery Program (SPD). This new SDP classification complements an expanding portfolio of AWS certifications, substantiating our commitment to both our AWS partnership and enabling the cloud for Australian businesses.

The AWS Service Delivery Program acknowledges select partners within the AWS Partner Network (APN) who have demonstrated technical proficiency across specialised solution areas. Achieving SDP status involves a stringent validation process to certify a deep understanding of, and adherence to, AWS architectural best practices. 

Amazon EC2 for Windows Server Partners are certified for delivering Windows Server environments on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). They are recommended by AWS for managing secure, reliable, and high-performance environments for deploying Windows-based applications and workloads. 

As part of the validation process for this competency, Anchor was required to demonstrate proven customer success through real customer engagement to validate that we had the technical proficiency and resources to help customers migrate, manage, or deploy Microsoft Workloads to AWS.

This AWS SDP reinforces Anchors expertise in helping businesses both modernise and future-proof legacy windows applications by replatforming onto AWS Cloud. 

“Our new SDP status for Amazon EC2 for Windows provides our customers with the highest level of confidence in our technical aptitude and alignment to AWS best practices.” – Josh Chiswell, Director of Architecture and Professional Services, APAC, Anchor Systems.

The proficiency also provides exclusive access to service-specific funding programs which partners can pass on to customers. If your business is looking to modernise or replatform old windows workloads, contact our cloud consultants for a complimentary cloud assessment.

 

Why Anchor? We exist to help SMBs and emerging enterprises who need managed AWS and cloud engineering services. Anchor enables the cloud by deeply engaging with your business. We architect, deploy, run and optimise cloud workloads and advocate for cloud best practices. Anchor’s team of certified engineers can support your workloads in three different time zones with 24x7x365 coverage from Sydney.

The post Anchor Joins AWS Service Delivery Program: Amazon EC2 for Windows Server appeared first on AWS Managed Services by Anchor.

Is your cloud hosting backup plan ready for 2021?

Post Syndicated from Ross Krumbeck original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/is-your-cloud-hosting-backup-plan-ready-for-2021/

Most businesses have a whole array of backup plans in place. A backup plan for when staff members call in sick, a backup plan for recouping damaged or lost stock, a backup plan for emergency expenses… but what about a backup plan for their cloud hosting services?

 

All too often, backing up one’s website or application, particularly when housed on cloud hosting, is a task left a little more neglected than it should be. This can be due to it being put in the “too hard” basket, or the “something to eventually get around to” basket, or simply from being overlooked due to a business believing that they have a plan in place, but never actually testing that it works. Staff turnover can also play a part. If the staff member or team, who initially set up your backup plan has since moved on, it can be a chaotic experience to unravel the plan when disaster suddenly strikes.

 

In particular, if a business conducts significant online trade, unexpected downtime of their websites or applications can mean heavy losses. In 2015, one of Anchor’s larger e-commerce customers transacted more than $100 million dollars in revenue through their Magento store. Crunching those numbers means a single hour of downtime equals a potential revenue loss of around $11,415. It should really go without saying, if a website or application is a critical part of a businesses income stream, they should be taking every precaution to guard against outages in the same way they protect themselves against any other challenges.

 

We must always keep in mind that no technology is completely fail-proof. Even cloud services are not exempt from experiencing occasional outages and unavoidable technical challenges, especially if not regularly maintained and managed by AWS-qualified professionals.

 

As we continue to wade our way through 2020, reliance on the digital world has become far heavier and more demanding than ever before. According to research published by Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud services has continued to rise during the pandemic, passing $30 billion in the second quarter of 2020 – a massive increase of $7.5 billion when compared to the second quarter of 2019. As more and more businesses turn to cloud services to continue their survival, the greater the need for a focus on preparing for downtime.

 

As we swiftly approach the Christmas shopping period, loss of profits in the event of an outage could be far worse should they strike during the busiest time for online sales. Realistically, the real cost could be four or five times your ‘business as usual’ number. If you add to that the reputational damage to your brand, the financial impacts keep growing.

 

Fortunately, every cloud provider offers some form of Service Level Agreement (SLA), including an uptime guarantee, and AWS is no different. SLAs and guarantees set out to give us confidence in the resilience of the network, infrastructure and services while describing how we may be compensated should an unscheduled outage occur. But even a 99.5% uptime guarantee means your website or app can be offline for nearly 22 minutes each and every month without compensation – and that can add up to a lot of lost sales for a busy online business.

 

With that being the case, the best thing you can do is ensure you are well prepared to get back online as quickly as possible. As well as ensuring that you have a disaster recovery plan in place, it’s just as important to regularly test it too. Relying on a cloud provider’s uptime guarantee is never an alternative to taking the necessary steps to ensure your deployment is highly available. It’s worth investing a little more to protect your bottom line.

 

To add a further complication, there are several conditions that may prevent you from claiming any SLA compensation. If you aren’t aware of these conditions, it’s entirely possible (even likely in many cases!) that you may have already voided any SLA protections.

 

If you’d like to know more about ensuring your business is eligible for SLA protections, you can download our free eBook here.

 

If your business doesn’t have a professional backup plan in place for your cloud hosting services, or you haven’t thoroughly tested that your existing plan works lately, our cloud experts can assist you in ensuring that your business backup plan is ready for the busy Christmas period, as well as future-proofed for 2021 – because after the way things have gone in 2020, who knows what’s in store for us next!

 

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