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Microsoft challenged AWS today by making its infrastructure–as-a-service (IaaS) offering generally available and committing to match AWS for the price of storage and compute in the cloud.

The Redmond-based software giant said its IaaS offering will allow businesses to migrate virtual machines running on Hyper-V from their internal datacentre to Windows Azure public cloud.

Microsoft has offered the service since last year, but today's general availability means the introduction of monthly SLAs guaranteeing 99.95 percent availability for the service and 24/7 support, as well as the ability to run VMs on Azure servers with 28GB and 56GB of memory, compared to the previous limit of 14GB.

In practice Michael Newberry, Windows Azure lead for Microsoft UK, said Microsoft expected the availability of SLAs would mean companies would begin migrating existing production workloads from their datacentres to Azure, rather than just using Azure infrastructure as a test and development platform – which has mainly been the case to date.

"We want to make to make our cloud OS the place where you can take enterprise applications, both new and existing ones," he said.

Azure offers a range of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, including deploying websites and web apps and hosting SQL database instances on Azure. Newberry said the difference between PaaS and Iaas is the former is used to develop new applications whereas IaaS provides additional capacity to run existing applications currently being run on-premise inhouse.

"It's for their existing application base where they want to expand their datacentre out into the cloud.

"We're talking about taking a SQL Server app that you might have been running for years, wrapping that up within a VM and putting that into Azure."

Virtual machine images are stored in the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format, allowing VMs running on-premise to move to Azure's infrastructure cloud. Live migration of VMs to Azure is not supported.

DIMENSION Data (Didata) aims to double its annual revenue to $12bn over the next five years through acquisitions and organic growth.

The company said on Friday it would post $6bn in revenue this year as a result of robust growth from its operations in Europe and Asia. The company, owned by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, has seen consistent growth over the past few years thanks to the portfolio of technology solutions and services it provides to clients in 51 countries in five regions — Middle East and Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Americas.

The company’s revenue for the 2012 financial year was $5.8bn.

Didata CEO Brett Dawson said the company continued to perform well in "somewhat tough markets", which was a "good achievement". The fastest growing markets for Didata were Europe, despite the tough economic environment, and Asia.

"We are gaining market share in Europe," Mr Dawson said.

Most of the growth for products and services came from data centres and data security.

Didata continued to focus on extending its portfolio of solutions such as cloud computing.

But growth in other markets, including Africa, had been slower than previously, Mr Dawson said. Africa remained an important market for the company.

Didata plans to make acquisitions to extend its global footprint, strengthen its existing operations in some markets and accelerate its entry into new technology areas. "We see ourselves expanding in emerging markets like Latin America," Mr Dawson said.

"We see opportunities for increased growth. (There were) half a dozen countries we (thinking) of going into."

Mr Dawson said Didata would aggressively push cloud-computing solutions, security and enterprise mobility — including mobile device management services — to their clients. "Cloud computing is an exciting area and it’s still in the early stages of adoption."

In January, the company signed a global partnership with AirWatch, a mobile device management and mobile security provider.

Didata was bought by NTT three years ago for about R24bn and delisted from the JSE.

In a constant effort to improve customers' cloud experience and increase adoption, cloud providers are starting to introduce WAN optimization capabilities into their service offerings. This technology will allow organizations to realize significant performance improvements for cloud applications. For providers who have global cloud ecosystems, this is an extremely important step forward. One area in particular that will benefit from WAN optimization is Recovery as a Service (RaaS), a cloud-based solution that uses predetermined sets of processes to allow enterprises to implement disaster recovery in the cloud. Traditional disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) solutions, including hot sites and secondary data centers, have commonly been costly to implement, and RaaS solutions have emerged as a better alternative.

RaaS is still a fairly young technology, but coupled with the advantages of WAN optimization, could be poised for impressive growth. To date, much of the traction for RaaS has been with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This is mainly due to the fact that companies of this size, particularly the mid-tier businesses, have been among the most prevalent early adopters of the cloud. Many have IT infrastructures that aren't large enough to reap all of the benefits of virtualization but can still gain significant savings and operational improvements by moving to the cloud. In addition, the amount of data involved in the SMB recovery process is typically more moderate in scope, so the bandwidth requirements are manageable from a cost perspective, even with limited data reduction mechanisms. However, while RaaS can dramatically reduce the amount of data being sent to the recovery site (via block level replication, compression, de-duplication, multi-threading, network "throttling, caching), the bandwidth requirements and associated costs can still be quite substantial for larger organizations with massive amounts of data to be protected.

Dimension Data has done more in terms of investing in its growth strategy, in the two years since it was bought out by Japan-based NTT, than what may have been possible if it were still listed, says CEO Brett Dawson.

DiData was delisted at the end of 2010, after the R24.2 billion buyout by Japan-based Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation became final. Dawson says NTT has invested “heavily” in DiData and the company has been able to make a few acquisitions off the back of the investment.

The Internet, and indeed every business, runs on data - usually lots of it. Thanks to the proliferation of cloud-based services we discussed in the first feature in this series, that data could be all over the place, too. Keeping track of all this data, and ensuring that it is secure, is a major logistical nightmare. As we explained in an earlier feature focusing on Big Data, interlinked information and its analysis is also the next big revolution currently brewing in Web culture. In this feature we examine the issues of data growth, and look at some of the solutions available.

Reaching for the cloud store

In reality, cloud storage shouldn't be about having some documents on a service like Google Drive and others stored locally, which is clearly a recipe for confusion. It should be about having your documents appear to be in the same place all the time – on whatever machine you are currently using – but also having them seamlessly and securely stored in a remote location as well. You could, of course, standardise on just one cloud service and specify that everyone in your organisation use this for all primary document storage. But this locks you into a single vendor, which may not offer all the features you need, in particular the level of service to suit a mission-critical application. You have also moved from multiple points of failure – that is, each individual user's machine – to just one. Placing all your business storage eggs in one cloud-based basket, even if the chosen service is very reliable indeed, presents some major risks.

Dimension Data last week introduced its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) in Nigeria, promising that it was going to serve the needs of both public and private enterprise, as well as service providers.

Dimension Data said that it’s cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategic agility, lower ICT infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Cloud technology presents a new consumption model for ICT solutions and services wrapped in a predictable, monthly commercial model, which allows its adopters to reduce cost as cloud reduces the total cost of ownership of managing infrastructure and applications.

According to the General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria, Jide Agbaje, “the availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of Cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country”

Meanwhile, Solutions Executive, Dimension Data Africa, Mr Tony Munro, had earlier declared that “while the benefits of cloud computing are very compelling, the complexity of planning, building and managing cloud infrastructure, is significant. Cloud providers need to address client concerns about security, compliance, integration, performance, capital expense requirements, as well as deployment and operational risks – to allow clients accelerate their Cloud journey,”

Global ICT solutions provider Dimension Data said it has included WAN optimisation capabilities to its cloud infrastructure to enable their customers to enjoy improved cloud services.

Dimension Data said it has teamed up with Riverbed Technology to be able to deliver a faster network for practically all types of operations on the cloud requiring a faster performance -- database replication, file synchronisation, backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

Nasdaq-listed Riverbed Technology, Inc. specialises in solutions that improve the performance of networks worldwide.

With Riverbed Technology's solutions, Dimension Data said it has implemented WAN optimisation controller (WOC) appliances in its Managed Cloud Platform (MCPs) in San Jose, Ashburn, Amsterdam, Sydney and Johannesburg.

Dimension Data's MCP is a fully managed cloud delivery platform that includes the cloud infrastructure of servers, storage, networking, virtualisation and operating system software. It is managed by Dimension Data CloudControl, a cloud management system that provides operational control and automation of cloud resource provisioning, orchestration, administration, and billing.

Dimension Data has announced the launch of its global Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) that is now available in Nigeria to serve the needs of public and private enterprise, as well as service providers.

Dimension Data’s cloud offering will enable clients to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, increase strategic agility, lower Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure management expenses, and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

Announcing the availability of its cloud services, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dimension Data Nigeria, Mr. Jide Agbaje, said: “The availability of cloud computing in Nigeria makes it easier for organisations to harness the cost and agility benefits of cloud as it provides organisations high speed access to secure, enterprise-class public, private, hybrid and hosted private cloud services in the country.”

Dimension Data announced it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally.

According to Dimension Data, by deploying WAN optimization technology the Managed Cloud Platform (or MCP) cloud data centres, increases in application performance across the entire cloud are possible. Organizations can use this for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centres.

An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company's standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge. Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization controller (WOC) appliances in its MCPs in San Jose, Calif. and Ashburn, Va., U.S.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Traffic moving between these sites is encrypted over a VPN tunnel and optimized for delivery using de-duplication and application-specific protocol optimization.

Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit, said the addition of WAN optimization capabilities is helping clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.

“No other cloud provider offers a core that is optimized for acceleration. By providing optimal network and cloud performance, in addition to flexibility and ease of use, we provide organizations the ability to speed the process of migrating their data and applications to the cloud,” said Nola.

Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization technology across its entire global cloud data center to speed up application performance for its customers.

According to the ICT solutions and services provider, the deployment of WAN optimization controller appliances across its Managed Cloud Platform cloud data centers, the company has "significantly" increased application performance across its entire cloud around the world. Customers use Dimension Data's cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers, and the company noted improved performance across the cloud.

The appliances were rolled out in the cloud data centers in San Jose, California and Ashburn, Virginia in the U.S.; Amsterstam in The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. To keep things secure, Dimension Data set up the system to encrypt data over a VPN tunnel and optimized for delivery using deduplication and application-specific protocol optimization.

"With the addition of WAN optimization capabilities, we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services,” said Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit, in a prepared statement.

He added, "By providing optimal network and cloud performance, in addition to flexibility and ease of use, we provide organizations the ability to speed the process of migrating their data and applications to the cloud."

Global ICT services provider Dimension Data has deployed Riverbed Technology's WAN optimisation technology in its Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) cloud data centres. As an enhanced capability, WAN optimisation is provided as part of the company's standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge. Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimisation controller (WOC) appliances in its MCPs in San Jose, Ashburn, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Johannesburg. Traffic moving between these sites is encrypted over a VPN tunnel and optimised for delivery using de-duplication and application-specific protocol optimisation.

USA: Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion global ICT solutions and services provider, has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally.

By deploying WAN optimization technology in Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) cloud data centers, Dimension Data clients are reporting a significant increase in application performance across the entire cloud.

Organizations using the cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have realized the greatest improvement in performance. An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company's standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge.

Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization controller (WOC) appliances in its MCPs in San Jose, Calif. and Ashburn, Va., U.S.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Traffic moving between these sites is encrypted over a VPN tunnel and optimized for delivery using deduplication and application-specific protocol optimization.

"With the addition of WAN optimization capabilities, we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services," said Steve Nola , CEO of Dimension Data's Cloud Solutions Business Unit. "No other cloud provider offers a core that is optimized for acceleration. By providing optimal network and cloud performance, in addition to flexibility and ease of use, we provide organizations the ability to speed the process of migrating their data and applications to the cloud."