Foundry’s latest cloud computing study looks at the top cloud growth areas and where tech buyers need assistance from vendors to advance their cloud strategy

Foundry, the media, data, and martech division of IDG, Inc., today released its 2023 Cloud Computing Survey. In its 10th year, the research was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers, including adoption plans, spending, business drivers, challenges, and top cloud growth areas, such as AI.

“While cloud adoption continues at a steady pace, the frenzied acceleration due to the pandemic period is easing,” said Stacey Raap, Marketing & Research Manager, Foundry. “This latest Cloud Computing Survey finds that there is significant budget to be spent on cloud computing initiatives, however migration is calming down after organizations raced to the cloud over the past three years.”

Objectives driving cloud spending

According to Foundry’s report – which surveyed ITDMs in North America, EMEA, and APAC – more than half (52%) of organizations’ current IT environment is in the cloud. This is expected to increase to 63% over the next 18 months. When asked what is driving cloud investments today, respondents said enabling disaster recovery and business continuity (40%), replacing on-premise legacy technology (40%), lower total cost of ownership (34%), improving employee productivity (32%), and greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (32%).

In order to achieve these objectives, tech buyers anticipate that their cloud spending will grow. Currently, 31% of an organization’s overall IT budget is allocated to cloud computing, and 66% expect their cloud spending to increase over the next 12 months. This increases to 70% for enterprise organizations (1,000+ employees) and is 62% for SMBs (<1,000 employees). Only 6% expect their spending to decrease while 28% think that it will remain the same.

“While cloud capabilities are used throughout all organizational departments, our research tells us that a large portion of spending decisions are controlled by IT,” added Raap. “It’s important to listen to the challenges these teams face when it comes to advancing their cloud computing adoption and help provide them with the assistance they need to move forward, such as cost management and security expertise.”

Challenges stalling cloud adoption

Almost two-thirds (65%) of IT decision-makers agree that their organization is defaulting to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing new technical capabilities. However, there are a handful of obstacles getting in the way. The top five challenges to cloud adoption are: controlling cloud costs (35%), data privacy and security challenges (31%), lack of cloud security skills/expertise (24%), integrating cloud resources with on-premises systems (23%), governance/compliance (23%), and a lack of cloud management skills/expertise (23%). Specifically addressing managing cloud costs, organizations are setting up budgets and alerts, implementing cost optimization strategies such as shutting off unused resources, and leveraging automation to monitor and allocate resources based on demand. It’s important to stay on top of these hurdles as 70% of ITDMs say their organization has brought certain cloud applications or services back to an on-premises model.

AI and cloud computing

As AI grows in popularity due to its ability to automate complex tasks, technology vendors are adding AI capabilities to their existing and new tools. The majority (53%) of ITDMs plan to use or adopt AI/machine learning cloud capabilities over the next 12 months, but they need assistance from their current providers in order to know what their options are. Only 44% of ITDMs say they understand their cloud provider’s roadmap for integrating AI tools into their platforms – this increases to 57% for enterprises and is only 37% for SMBs. If cloud providers want to keep their customers from switching vendors due to AI cloud capabilities, they need to ensure their plan is clear.

About the 2023 Cloud Computing Study

Foundry’s 2023 Cloud Computing Survey is the 10th year of this research and was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers including: adoption plans, spending, business drivers, challenges, and top cloud growth areas, such as AI. The study was fielded throughout August 2023 and is based on the responses of 893 global IT decision-makers that are involved in the purchase process for cloud computing and their organization has, or plans to have, at least one application, or a portion of their infrastructure, in the cloud.

The ad industry’s leading verification provider launches turnkey MFA measurement and protection, and advances guidance on how to identify and categorize egregious MFA content

DoubleVerify, a leading software platform for digital media measurement, data and analytics, today announced the expansion of its brand safety and suitability solution to enable advertisers to monitor and avoid MFA (“Made For Advertising”) sites. As part of this innovation, DV has advanced a clear definition of MFA, empowering advertisers to identify and address MFA-driven challenges effectively.

DV developed its proprietary MFA analysis process based on a unique blend of human and artificial intelligence-based auditing. With this release, DV’s solution can be enabled directly by a customer in their brand safety and suitability profile for measurement and monitoring, and in DV Authentic Brand Suitability for pre-bid avoidance.

"DV continues to lead with customer driven innovation that helps advertisers tackle the rapidly evolving challenges in digital advertising that impact media quality and performance" stated Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify. "With the rise of AI tools that can rapidly spawn MFA sites, DV's own AI tech is crucial in empowering global brands to identify, measure and avoid problematic MFA content in real time and ultimately drive better marketing outcomes.”

In June, amid concerns over AI tools accelerating the production of inappropriate online content, the ANA published a report stating that MFA websites account for one-fifth (21%) of all programmatic ad impressions and attract 15% of total advertising spend. In its own independent analysis, DV found that some MFA sites generate hundreds of millions of impressions per month.

Lacking a uniform definition of MFA, misunderstandings about the categorization abound. Some mistakenly view MFA content as exclusively bot-driven with entirely fraudulent traffic. While this does represent a portion of MFA traffic, these types of sites are typically identified as fraudulent and thus excluded as part of standard fraud controls. Most MFA traffic, however, comes from legitimate human users, often from paid channels like social media and content recommendation engines.

DV formally defines MFA sites as those whose sole purpose is to deliver advertisements. These sites can be identified by analyzing several factors across their ad monetization activities, ad traffic sources and approach to content creation. More specifically, these sites exhibit the following characteristics:

• Significant ad density in comparison to the actual content on the page and frequent ad refresh in order to maximize yield from a single visit
• Monetization is predominantly dependent on paid traffic sources – such as social and native advertising – with little to no traffic coming from organic sources
• Content is designed to keep you endlessly scrolling/clicking within the same domain
• Content is often duplicated verbatim across various websites and sometimes produced automatically by Generative AI

DV employs an approach that allows for the deepest and most nuanced level of analysis, preventing miscategorization and false positives. For example, a website may feature a significant number of ads, while still registering high rates of direct and search-enabled traffic. In this instance, the publisher would not meet DV’s definition of an MFA website.

"The term 'Made for Advertising' has created significant confusion within the industry," said Jack Smith, CPO at DoubleVerify. "As an industry-leading measurement and verification provider, we believe it's crucial to lead by example and offer clarity. Our goal is to safeguard advertiser investments and support high-quality publishers who are seeking to monetize legitimate content."

Historically, DV has provided clients with the ability to address MFA sites upon request. With this release, DV's offering will be available in beta to all advertisers, starting on September 20, 2023, and will be evolving and advancing the solution over subsequent development cycles.

As Part of its AI Efficiency Platform, Granica’s New Data Access Analytics Solution Optimizes Application Environments for Cost, Chargeback Enablement and Security and Compliance

Granica, the world’s first AI efficiency platform, today announced Chronicle, a new generative AI-powered SaaS offering that provides visibility and analytics into how data is accessed in cloud object stores. Chronicle is part of Granica’s AI efficiency platform, the company’s enterprise solution bringing novel, fundamental research in data-centric AI to the commercial market. Granica Chronicle provides rich analytics and observability for data with a deep focus on access. Chronicle also speeds time to value for new customers of Granica Crunch, the platform’s data reduction service, and Granica Screen, the data privacy service.

“Granica is showing impressive momentum, being recognized as a Gartner^® Cool Vendor™ two months after launching out of stealth and already introducing a new AI-powered product on their platform,” said Vanessa Larco, Partner, NEA. “Enterprise challenges around data security and compliance continue to grow as do pressures to control and reduce cloud costs, and Granica is in a strong position to help organizations tackle both.”

Cloud object stores — such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage — represent the largest surface area for breach risk given these repositories are optimized to store large volumes of file and object data for AI/ML training and big data analytics. With this surface area continuing to rapidly expand at petabyte scale, lack of visibility makes it hard for teams to optimize application environments for cost, ensure compliance, enable chargebacks, improve performance and more.

“Historically, the options for free visibility tools are either too simplistic or overly complex to solve cloud storage access issues businesses face day to day,” said Rahul Ponnala, CEO and co-founder of Granica. “These datasets are also typically siloed off, making it hard for teams to see the full picture around how their data is being accessed. Granica Chronicle delivers the sweet spot customers are looking for: a user-friendly analytics environment bringing data visibility across disparate silos together in one, cohesive place.”

Granica Chronicle is designed to provide data at-rest and access visibility into cloud object storage platforms, via an AI-powered, natural language interface which makes exploration, visualization and collaboration incredibly simple. After entering simple prompts, users are presented with relevant visualizations in graphs and tables that answer key questions related to:

• Data security and compliance – Chronicle allows users to determine potential rogue/shadow access, determine if access is compliant (e.g., with GDPR), assess and minimize risk of breach or data loss, and maintain audit trails.
• Cost optimization – Chronicle gives users more insight into scenario planning and analysis to determine potential termination of certain compute resources and determine the baseline performance/SLA to service applications. It can also help to define an optimal lifecycle policy across tiering and deletion.
• Chargeback enablement – Chronicle enables users to stratify access and identify heavy users of a cloud storage platform.

To get started, users export their server and storage access logs and other freely available storage-related datasets from their cloud provider. Chronicle ingests these datasets and readies them for prompt-based exploration via a SaaS console. Chronicle is also collaborative, enabling users to participate in a shared view of prompt-based results and history with other cross-functional Chronicle users in their organization. FinOps, security ops and application teams can collaborate and explore their data and application environment to find actionable insights, all without any knowledge of SQL. Under the covers, Chronicle itself leverages other Granica AI services to maximize efficiency.

Pete Sonsini, Venture Advisor, NEA, and Granica Board Member, observed, “Successful AI is efficient AI, and getting and staying efficient starts with data. Granica’s new AI-powered cloud data infrastructure analytics service helps organizations keep their data compliant and safe for AI use, cost-effectively. I believe their recognition as a Gartner^® Cool Vendor™ is a testament to the impact they are making in the market, and this new product announcement puts them in an even stronger position.”

The new offering:

• Enables teams to quickly build, deploy and manage Kubernetes-based AI software stacks, across any number of edge locations

• Provides integrated access to AI model marketplaces including Hugging Face, plus Kubeflow and LocalAI model frameworks, simplifying deployment and version control

• Delivers distributed training and inference capabilities that enable businesses to maximize utilization of edge resources and accelerate model innovation

• Introduces unique two-node fault-tolerant edge Kubernetes architecture that drives hardware cost savings while maintaining high availability

Spectro Cloud today announced Palette EdgeAI to simplify how organizations deploy and manage AI workloads at scale across simple to complex edge locations, such as retail, healthcare, industrial automation, oil and gas, automotive/connected cars, and more.

Palette’s EdgeAI extends Spectro Cloud’s award-winning core Palette Edge Kubernetes management platform that addresses the unique challenges of deploying and managing edge environments at scale, specifically:

• Limited on-site specialist IT expertise at the edge locations
• Increased security risk due to the distributed nature of edge infrastructure, software stack and communications.
• Inconsistent connectivity
• Costly and disruptive operational tasks, including security fixes, feature patches and updates

With a record number of organizations embracing the potential of running AI workloads at the edge, these challenges are exacerbated. Gartner¹ suggests that “by 2027, deep learning will be included in over 65% of edge use cases, up from less than 10% in 2021”. Activities that are achievable in the data center or cloud, such as deploying daily updates to a large language model (LLM), are costly or even impossible across thousands of devices and locations. Furthermore, the exposed security posture of edge locations is problematic given that AI workloads often handle sensitive data and critical intellectual property.

“More and more of our customers are exploring AI at the edge as their primary mechanism to deliver modern, rich applications and transform the customer experience”, said Jim Melton, Head of Cloud Strategy & Programs, Digital Velocity, CDW. “The need to simplify deployment and provide comprehensive management for AI-optimized infrastructure at the edge is real and solutions such as Palette EdgeAI squarely addresses those challenges”.

The new Palette EdgeAI solution offers a rich suite of capabilities to address specific requirements throughout the lifecycle of edge infrastructure and AI software stacks.

It:

• Deploys and manages complete AI-ready infrastructure stacks in edge computing environments, from the customer’s preferred OS and Kubernetes distribution, to AI model engines like Kubeflow and LocalAI, including easy “plug-and-play” device onboarding.
• Secures edge infrastructure to protect sensitive intellectual property and model data, with hardened configurations, SBOM scans, full-disk encryption and robust access controls. Palette offers FIPS compliance for highly regulated industries.
• Improves model accessibility, with integrated access to model marketplaces, including Hugging Face and an enterprise’s own private repositories. Operators can incorporate their chosen models as part of the AI stack ‘Cluster Profile’, or blueprint.
• Makes it easy to deploy models to any number of edge locations automatically with a click. Palette will deploy the model along with the infrastructure stack and regularly reconcile the state of the stack to ensure it is in line with policy.
• Enables operators to upgrade and roll back model versions deployed in each edge cluster with a click, including Over-The-Air (OTA), zero-downtime upgrades and designing canary deployments across the edge estate, with advanced model observability.
• Simplifies distributed inferencing, enabling organizations to leverage multiple edge nodes for parallel execution and reduced model latency.
• Unlocks federated training, accelerating model improvement with on-device learning using local data.
• Reduces edge infrastructure costs, by enabling workloads to run with high availability even on limited edge hardware. Palette’s unique fault-tolerant architecture allows workloads to be deployed on two-node Kubernetes clusters, instead of the usual three-node — a huge saving across multiple sites. 2-node HA now also available on all Palette solutions.

“The edge is the natural environment for AI inference workloads,” said Tenry Fu, CEO of Spectro Cloud. “Our mission is to simplify innovation for our customers and we have been working with organizations that are already disrupting their industries, reaping the benefits of AI at the edge”.

In the healthcare sector, RapidAI uses Palette Edge to deploy its AI applications into hospitals, giving clinicians deeper clinical context to quickly and accurately triage and diagnose conditions, such as strokes and embolisms, for better patient outcomes.

"At RapidAI our business is built on continuous AI innovation, helping clinicians right in the hospital," said Amit Phadnis, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at RapidAI. "When it comes to deploying our applications securely and easily to the edge, we trust Spectro Cloud's Palette."

Palette’s EdgeAI will be generally available in Q4 2023 with rapid future capabilities throughout 2024.

Today Spectro Cloud also announced a new round of investment, led by Qualcomm Ventures. The investment will accelerate Spectro Cloud’s innovation in edge computing, AI and enterprise infrastructure management.

“Qualcomm is uniquely positioned within the edge ecosystem and with the adoption of AI, edge has become a necessity,” said Dev Singh, Vice President of Business Development, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Across Industrial, Enterprise, Utilities and Retail, we are seeing a need to dynamically orchestrate AI workloads across edge and the cloud, simplify edge deployments and manage upgrades with no downtime to build the next-generation of resilient, high-performing applications.”

IT leaders are invited to learn more about Palette EdgeAI at a live webinar on Wednesday October 25th, 2023.

1. Emerging Tech: Aligning Benefits to Use Cases and Industry Sectors Is Key to Selling the Value of Edge AI, Eric Goodness, Gartner, Published 30 May 2023, ID G00778310

GARTNER is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Upland Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: UPLD) is proud to announce that it earned 33 badges in G2’s Fall 2023 market report across several of its products. Upland’s knowledge management solution, RightAnswers, earned a “High Performer” badge in the grid report for knowledge base and knowledge management, and two additional badges. Its audience development solution, Second Street, walked away with an impressive 22 badges, including “Leader” as well as “High Performer” in several different grids for email marketing, sweepstakes, and lead capture.

“Upland has made a significant R&D investment in recent years in order to meet the evolving needs of our customers and these badges are a direct reflection of the hard work our team has put forward,” said Dan Doman, Chief Product Officer at Upland. “We remain committed to innovating and improving the solutions that put our customers in a position to be successful.”

“Rankings on G2 reports are based on data provided to us by real software buyers,” said Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2. “Potential buyers know they can trust these insights when researching and selecting software because they’re rooted in vetted, verified, and authentic reviews.”

RightAnswers:

• Best Meets Requirements – Usability Index for Knowledge Base
• High Performer – Grid Report for Knowledge Base
• High Performer – Grid Report for Knowledge Management
• Users Most Likely to Recommend – Enterprise Results Index for Contact Center Knowledge Base

Second Street:

• Leader – Americas Regional Grid Report for Lead Capture
• Leader – Americas Regional Grid for Sweepstakes
• High Performer – Americas Regional Grid Report for Email Marketing
• High Performer – Grid Report for Email Marketing
• Leader – Grid for Lead Capture
• Leader – Grid Report for Sweepstakes
• High Performer – Mid-Market Americas Regional Grid Report for Lead Capture
• High Performer – Mid-Market Grid Report for Lead Capture
• Easiest To Do Business With – Mid-Market Relationship Index for Lead Capture
• Easiest Admin – Mid-Market Usability Index for Lead Capture
• Easiest To Do Business With – Relationship Index for Sweepstakes
• Best Results – Results Index for Sweepstakes
• High Performer – Small-Business Americas Regional Grid Report for Email Marketing
• High Performer – Small-Business Americas Regional Grid Report for Lead Capture
• High Performer – Small-Business Americas Regional Grid Report for Sweepstakes
• High Performer – Small-Business Grid Report for Email Marketing
• High Performer – Small-Business Grid Report for Lead Capture
• Best Relationships, Best Support, and Easiest To Do Business With – Small-Business Relationship Index for Sweepstakes
• Best Usability – Usability Index for Sweepstakes
• High Performer – Small-Business Grid Report for Sweepstakes

PSA:

• Easiest Setup – Enterprise Implementation Index for Professional Service Automation
• High Performer – Enterprise Americas Regional Grid Report for Professional Services Automation
• High Performer – Canada Regional Grid Report for Professional Services Automation

Kapost:

• Fastest Implementation – Enterprise Implementation Index for Content Creation

ComSci:

• Leader – Grid Report for Enterprise IT Management
• High Performer – Asia Pacific Regional Grid Report for Enterprise IT Management
• High Performer - Asia Regional Grid Report for Enterprise IT Management

G2 is the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 80 million people annually — including employees at all Fortune 500 companies — use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews.

Adlumin Protection Plus Suite Receives Cysurance Certification to Provide Low Friction Path to Complementary Financial Protection

Adlumin, the security operations platform and managed detection and response (MDR) service provider keeping mid-market organizations secure, today announced a new warranty program that provides up to $500,000 of financial protection at no cost to customers who qualify. The warranty comes as a result of a third-party testing and certification program by Cysurance, a next-generation risk mitigation company that insures, warranties and certifies security solutions. The Cysurance Certification Program enables Adlumin to offer customers significant discounts on cyber insurance policies.

Together these new offerings provide a low-friction path to attaining complementary financial protection for small and mid-sized organizations who often struggle to find coverage that fits their needs. The Adlumin Protect Warranty enables organizations to qualify for cyber insurance at a lower premium, while also providing fast reimbursement in the event of an incident, and financial resources to support operations before an organization meets its cyber insurance deductible. For organizations covered by Adlumin Protect Warranty, approved payments or agreed remediation will begin 48 hours after verification of a cybersecurity incident.

“Skyrocketing cyber claims, growing security complexity and exploding insurance premiums are pricing small to mid-market organizations out of insurance protection, leaving them exposed to crippling financial impact of cyberattacks,” said Mark Sangster, cybersecurity author and Adlumin Chief of Strategy. “We founded Adlumin to give these organizations the enterprise-grade resources they need and deserve, and these new financial protections build another layer on top of the security operations platform, managed detection and response services, and incident response services we’re already providing. Partnering with an industry leader like Cysurance is one more way we’re bringing top-tier resources to organizations of all sizes.”

Organizations that subscribe to the Adlumin Protection Plus Suite automatically qualify for $500,000 in warranty coverage at no charge, and are eligible for significantly discounted cyber insurance premiums from Cysurance.

“We are in a challenging landscape for small and midsized organizations. Security spending, breaches, and insurance premiums are on the rise, but coverage is becoming more limited and difficult to obtain. Our mission at Cysurance is to verify the proficiency of security operations and expedite the path to coverage,” said Kirsten Bay, CEO at Cysurance. “Establishing certification and coverage for cybersecurity providers, like Adlumin brings a new level of sophistication and assurance to organizations of all sizes. Cysurance-certified providers meet the most stringent requirements demanded by underwriters of risks associated with hardware, software, infrastructure, and security services. That is why we can offer Adlumin customers a streamlined path to insurance coverage and discounted policies.”

Adlumin Protect is a low-friction certification warranty designed to safeguard Adlumin customers against business continuity and insure against loss, protecting their revenue and recovery. It builds on the company’s vision to provide a single platform that equips organizations with full visibility and the tools required to combat cybersecurity threats. 

DataClarity, a trailblazer in data and analytics solutions, proudly unveils its game-changing platform, DataClarity Unlimited Analytics. With Unlimited Analytics, DataClarity is dismantling traditional boundaries within the analytics landscape, heralding a transformative shift in how organizations sustainably license, integrate, and monetize data and analytics capabilities within their products.

DataClarity is Redefining Embedded Analytics

DataClarity stands alone, symbolizing both an industry-disrupting force and an evolutionary leap toward a future where enterprise-grade self-service data and analytics seamlessly converge with a pioneering business model.   What sets it apart?  Unlimited Analytics is the only platform of its kind to offer perpetual free access to unlimited users, servers, and all capabilities, has sustainable longevity with free updates, and adherence to open standards with no vendor lock-in.  

Engineered from the ground up for OEMs, SaaS providers, and IT teams, Unlimited Analytics can deploy anywhere and scale limitlessly with cloud-ready architecture that seamlessly aligns with your infrastructure, application, data, and security.  This foundation along with versatile API's and flexible configuration makes rapid integration and deployment possible.

"We're thrilled to lead the charge towards a future where every organization, regardless of size, can monetize the value of their data to drive innovation and growth," said Mark Mueller, Co-founder and CEO of DataClarity.  "With Unlimited Analytics, we're not only dismantling traditional boundaries through a pioneering business model, but offering a modern, sustainable, enterprise-grade platform to easily embed analytics everywhere," added Mueller.

DataClarity Unlimited Analytics Highlights

• Simplified Data Integration – Easily connect, join, curate, cache, and catalog diverse data through drag and drop experience, custom SQL builder, and AI-powered data profiling.
• Interactive Storyboards – Craft compelling storyboards using 80 stunning visualizations, geospatial maps, and flexibility to bring your own charts.
• Real-time Analysis – Perform advanced analysis and data exploration using drill-down, drill-through, filters, built-in statistical and predictive models, and leverage your own Python and R code.
• Seamless Application Integration - Achieve smooth integration with versatile APIs, tailor-made configurations, and flexible embedding features.
• Security & Governance - Ensure adherence to your security guidelines, governance standards, multitenancy, row-level data protection, and Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities.

Nubeva Technologies is pleased to announce the appointment of Francis Chan and Michael KuoFan Lin as independent members of the Board of Directors of the Company.

“On behalf of the Board, I am pleased to welcome Francis and Michael to the team. Together, they have over 50 years of experience and expertise in the HR and semiconductor sectors, and they align perfectly with our targeted verticals for our key extraction solutions,” stated Randy Chou, CEO and Director of the Company.