Welcome to The Cloud 5, our weekly feature where we scour the web searching for the five most intriguing and poignant cloud links we can find.
Before we jump into this week’s links, please have a look at one of our recent blog posts, The cloud surged in 2017. The cloud grew at a swift pace in 2017 with all of the big players reporting gaudy growth numbers. What’s more, it looks like it could continue unabated in 2018.
And without further delay, here we go with this week’s links:
Chinese company Xunlei plans US cloud computing service | Washington Post
Xunlei, yet another company from China that wants a piece of the western cloud market, and announced this week it would be launching operations in the US and Western Europe. Whether it can gain any traction in a crowded market that includes western giants like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and Chinese rivals like Alibaba and Tencent remains to be seen.
Clouds in concert | LinkedIn
MSPs can play an increasingly important role in cloud security says consultant Evan Kirstel on LinkedIn. As he notes, everyone will be hacked sooner or later, but cloud vendors and MSPs who run cloud projects for SMBs will be better suited to handle these attacks than most businesses can do on their own.
Cloud computing: Getting bigger but more complicated too | ZDNet
As it gains in popularity, the cloud which was supposed to simplify computing, has in some ways made it more complicated. That’s especially true when your company requires certain data to stay in a certain place, and accounts for the massive build up of data centers by the biggest players in the last 12-18 months. This need will likely become even more pronounced in the EU in 2018 with GDPR regulations requiring much stricter data privacy requirements.
Oracle acquires Australia’s Aconex for $1.19 billion | Mercury News
Just days before Christmas, Oracle bought itself a splashy year-end present when it acquired Australian cloud company Aconex for a hefty $1.19 billion. This one is a bit of a specialty item for Oracle, a cloud-based collaboration tool aimed specifically at the construction industry. It gives them another niche-oriented product for their growing cloud family of products.
10 Ways cloud computing will evolve in 2018 | CMS Wire
We couldn’t close out the year without a top 10 list of how the cloud will change in 2018. Many of these build on current trends we have been seeing, but we do know this much. The cloud will continue to grow and change in 2018 and we will be here to cover those trends.
Happy holidays and thank you to those who read this blog every week.
Photo Credit: Tomma Henckel. Used under CC 2.0 license.
