And here’s to a hopeful 2021! We should be proud of ourselves - after last year we feel like we’ve built a bit of resilience to this whole staying home thing, and we’ll be riding that optimism right into our first newsletter of the new year. Wait…it’s February already?

WHAT’S NEW WITH US

TIDAL EVENTS

If you’ve made it a goal to get educated this year, now is the time to tune in to our next All-Virtual Migration Enablement Workshop, set for March 2, 2021! Register now and join us from home while our own David Colebatch walks you through the first 3 phases of the cloud migration process.

Can’t wait? You can sign up for a one-on-one if you like the sounds of a dedicated, private workshop, with our team.

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

While you try to wrap your head around moving your organization to the cloud, first and foremost, you’ll need to nail down your budget.

To help make this as simple as possible, we’re excited to announce the launch of our new Cloud Calculator in beta.

This tool provides rapid financial assessment for Rehost migrations, including savings forecasts for more transformative cloud migrations like Replatform and Refactor. This way you have what you need to build your business case and confidently pursue a more transformative migration.

Register if you are interested in trying it out!

ASK DAVID

“Hi David, we’ve moved several applications from our developers environment to the cloud. What’s your experience with operating these servers? Thanks” - Matt, Ottawa, Canada

Well that’s a loaded question Matt,

It really depends on how your organization approaches this transition. If the cloud is new to your company, it’s common to move non-production workloads to the cloud as one strategy to learn more about security, operations and support there. In traditional IT environments, a change order is usually requested and there is a delay while a virtual machine is stood up. However, in the cloud, it’s common to provide the developers with access to create virtual machines as they set up their environments. This new, self-serve capability, sometimes leads to standing up a large number of servers without a strict plan to decommission them resulting in them running even when no one is using them. About 3 months after the move, a large cloud bill shows up and no one likes surprises.

To combat this issue, a combination of training, development of good processes and using purpose-built services is useful. Then, setting schedules for these compute and database resources so that they are shut down when they’re not being used will help in optimizing the cloud spend and reducing your expenses by more than half.

I hope this makes sense. Keep those questions coming!

David

CLOUD NEWS

• Salesforce launches Vaccine Cloud to help public sector and businesses manage COVID-19 vaccinations - Salesforce is kind of killin’ it lately. What started as their Work.com platform, which helped businesses gauge whether to reopen during the early days of the pandemic, then became Work.com for Vaccines to help distribute and track, and has now evolved into Vaccine Cloud, which can do everything from the earlier iterations as well as manage vaccine inventory, schedule appointments and communicate with the public. Kudos to them for helping to tackle one of the most complicated administrative projects in history!
• Google Cloud wants to help secure your whole enterprise network - At ease, cloud skeptics: Google’s BeyondCorp Enterprise is here. Their much-anticipated zero trust security offering through Google Chrome offers very scalable data protection for organizations that in the past might have been delaying the all-important move to the cloud due to outmoded security practices.
• Microsoft’s Q2 Azure revenue up 50%, commercial cloud run rate at $66.8 billion - If Microsoft is looking for people to thank for their sharp upturn in revenue this pandemic, it’s gamers, remote workers, and job-seekers! Since the world changed, it seems CIOs everywhere are saying yes to a huge investment in better work-from-home setups, equalling a spike that Wall Street didn’t see coming.
• From crypto trading and home workouts to EV batteries and microLED displays, CES’ Taiwan startups cover a wide range of tech - We know…we miss Vegas, too. But just because the annual CES conference by the Consumer Technology Association went entirely virtual this year (for the first time since its inception in 1967), doesn’t mean there was any shortage of innovative startups bent on making the world better. If you need a boost of optimism about where the word’s going, you can still check out what these companies are up to until February 15th!
• Microsoft invests in Cruise in new $2 billion round - Your next rideshare driver just might be a bot, if things keep going the way they’re going for autonomous vehicle company Cruise, who, in addition to Microsoft, also count GM and Honda among confident investors. Azure will have a brand new friend when Cruise’s upcoming autonomous ride-hailing service hits the streets.
• John Deere wants to help feed the world using 5G, cloud computing - Who knew Old Macdonald’s farm ran on the cloud? Read up on how John Deere tractors use AWS to store crop data and help farmers to better understand how their fields are performing, and they’ve got big plans for a future of autonomous tractors. If they could only figure out how to get better coverage and reliability in rural areas…Elon?
• The 9 Best Cloud Computing Events and Conferences to Attend in 2021 - More good news if you’re on an education kick this year - here’s a roundup of 9 virtual conferences to up your cloud computing game. Keep an eye on Microsoft Ignite set for March 2nd!

That’s all for January, and if you’ve had a good time with us this newsletter, let us know by sharing on social media (links below) and keep your friends up to date.

And in case you have the guts to revisit 2020, check out our December newsletter.

Stay united and see you in a few weeks!

-Tidal