Mission Cloud’s CTO Jonathan LaCour offers three questions to ask if your VMware renewal is approaching. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, customers face significant challenges, including unexpected price increases, forced bundle purchases, and disruption to established partner relationships. With contract renewals approaching, many IT leaders are navigating these new realities without a clear framework for evaluating their options.

IT leaders need a structured approach to assess their VMware environment and make strategic decisions about their contractual options. This should include conducting a comprehensive inventory of current VMware products, analyzing actual usage patterns, understanding new licensing models, exploring competitive alternatives, and developing a phased migration strategy if needed.

Getting Ready for Renewal

If your VMware license renewal is right around the corner, here are three questions you should ask yourself to plan your next steps:

1. How does the new subscription model impact my total cost of ownership?

With VMware moving to the Broadcom subscription model, it’s essential to evaluate how this change will affect the overall cost of running VMware on-premises or in the cloud. The transition from VMware’s traditional licensing model to Broadcom’s subscription-based model will impact your total cost of ownership (TCO).

• For many customers, Broadcom’s restructuring of VMware offerings has resulted in higher annual costs,  especially if they are consolidating previously separate products into bundled offerings. The subscription model eliminates the upfront licensing purchase costs but increases ongoing annual expenses, so it will be necessary to adjust budget planning to accommodate consistent annual payments instead of cyclical large investments.
• If you previously purchased VMware components à la carte, the new bundles may increase your costs and could potentially include some components you don’t need while excluding others that you do need. Additionally, you may also see impacts to support and maintenance levels. Though the new model integrates support into the subscription, extended support for older versions may be limited or unavailable, potentially forcing you to upgrade more frequently.
• Because Broadcom has refocused on enterprise customers, smaller businesses may find themselves pushed toward partner-led support models or cloud-based alternatives. This could potentially increase the costs for SMBs that had benefited from VMware’s direct engagement in the past.
• This pricing shift can be an opportunity to reevaluate your broader cloud strategy and start assessing competitive alternatives. Consider accelerating cloud migration instead of renewing on-premises infrastructure. You may want to evaluate hybrid approaches that could optimize costs. Despite Broadcom’s emphasis on long-term innovation benefits with this model, most organizations should anticipate higher immediate and medium-term costs, while planning for potential strategic alternatives to effectively manage their TCO.

2. Are there unique features of VMware that I’m paying for that are providing enough ROI for my business to justify the cost?

Considering this question will prevent renewing without a critical evaluation of the pros and cons. Many IT departments are inclined to renew VMware licenses automatically because that is what they’re used to doing, and migration seems too complex. But before hitting that “renew” button, IT teams need to take the time to see if the continued investment is justified based on its actual business value, not just inertia.

Start by checking to see what premium features you’re paying for but not using. Examples could include advanced security, automated disaster recovery, or sophisticated monitoring tools. This is also a good time to compare VMware with other mature alternatives that might offer comparable functionality at lower costs.

• • This evaluation shifts the focus from purely technical specifications to business outcomes, revealing whether VMware benefits justify the premium pricing for your organization’s specific needs. You could uncover opportunities to migrate certain workloads to cloud platforms.
  • Furthermore, understanding exactly which VMware features are delivering measurable value will help determine if continued investment is the right choice for your organization. If it is, presenting this information to financial stakeholders will help strengthen your case. Responsible IT financial management hinges on uncovering the real benefits, not just assumed value.

3. Do I have a sound long-term cloud strategy, and does that include a transition to AWS-native services?

It’s important to consider how your VMware license renewal timeline fits into your overall cloud strategy. Evaluating your VMware investment within the broader context of your organization’s cloud journey prevents you from viewing it as just an isolated renewal decision, especially since VMware renewals often come with major, long-term financial commitments.

• Making this often years-long investment without aligning with your cloud strategy could result in redundant spending or even create technical roadblocks that will stop your future cloud plans in their tracks. If your roadmap includes significant migration to AWS-native services over the next few years, you may want to avoid locking into extended VMware contracts — or you may want to adjust the scope of the contracts accordingly.
• Timing considerations are also important. Your VMware renewal creates a natural decision point to potentially begin transitioning workloads to AWS-native services. Understanding the intersection of these timelines can help you avoid situations of payment overlap or other missed opportunities to optimize spending during transitions. Strategic alignment ensures that your immediate VMware decisions align with your future cloud objectives.

Though it’s impossible to predict the future perfectly, preparing a long-term plan for the most strategic way to invest (or not invest) in VMware will help guide your decisions and ensure meaningful alignment with your goals.

The post 3 Questions to Ask if Your VMware Renewal is Approaching appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

Brian Pontarelli, CEO of FusionAuth, provides in-depth commentary on AI agents, local-first computing, repatriation, and more. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Data is at the heart of a business’s ability to drive value, meet regulatory requirements, control spending, operate efficiently, and do just about anything else it needs to grow revenue and serve customers. Yet, despite its importance, businesses are losing control of this critical asset.

As companies have increasingly moved to the cloud, they’ve handed over vast amounts of critical data to Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud providers, often without an easy way to get it back. It is surprisingly hard to quantify the value of this data—and how this data is used—to any given organization. But to understand the importance of data to organizations, all we need to do is understand where the data is going, who owns it, and how this is changing.

Today, three trends threaten the cloud’s data moat, which has quickly built up over the last decade: AI agents, local-first computing, and repatriation. Companies are realizing that to innovate, cut costs, and ensure compliance, they need to regain control of their data.

The Data Moat of the Cloud

The emergence of SaaS solutions has been great for collaboration and convenience but terrible for data ownership. You can use a loyalty program with an airline to build points and get perks, but try to get the data of your travels out of their system to do something different with it on your end? Good luck.

The same applies to technical teams building using SaaS tools to get their jobs done. You can outsource to a SaaS-only provider for authentication to log users into your app, so you don’t have to build authentication yourself. That’s great, but getting your data back is not always so easy. The Thales group estimates that 60 percent of corporate data is stored in the cloud, up 100 percent from 2015. But once it’s there, can you get it back?

There’s some nuance here. It depends on which kind of ‘cloud’ we are talking about. In the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, your data is stored in the cloud, and you have a dedicated instance or otherwise ‘own’ that data; it’s yours. Getting your data back is less of a problem here (though it is still a problem; see the section on repatriation).

Once we start getting into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model and pureplay SaaS, things get a little more tricky. You could get your data back, maybe, or you could get the metrics and logs from whatever application you’ve built on OpenShift. But you’ve lost control over the way ‘health’ is measured for your application, or you are dependent on third-party tools for that data. At the end of the day, you are dependent on the tool you have chosen and how they have decided to prioritize data ownership.

SaaS is the extreme situation where you put the data in, and the cloud keeps it, either because of internal rules (like Cognito’s lack of password hashing export) or data gravity (where you simply have too much data to move effectively). Yes, you can generally export your data from a SaaS solution … but can you? Maybe you can get your data from your Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool, but most certainly not from the hyperscalers. When was the last time you were able to export all the emails you’ve ever written from Gmail? It’s not easy.

AI Agents Encroach on SaaS and PaaS

With ChatGPT, it was always a huge drawback to give away search and conversation data to OpenAI’s servers in exchange for computing power and convenience. One of the biggest areas of growth and promise in AI is the AI agent, which is a far cry from the original ChatGPT SaaS model.

The value of the AI agent is predicated on direct access to data. For many AI agents, the learning and the data are local, focused on solving a local problem, like, for example, tuning solar panels and wind turbines to maximize efficiency, reducing equipment failures and leaks in chemical processing, or managing robots in an assembly line to optimize for quality. And when the agent works locally, there are no worries about where the data text you’re putting into the LLM is going.

ChatGPT is not an AI agent because it is reactive by definition, responding to user questions and requests based on patterns learned from massive datasets—always only in response to user input (versus learning on its own). And there is that small detail that it can only interact with you while you’re plugged into a WiFi connection and in the app.

With an AI agent, complex problems specific to the situation can be solved, such as allowing a robotic hand to learn different tricks and motions on its own, or in the case of the chatbot, an agentic AI chatbot could fill in any information gaps to respond to the task after assessing how its own tools and resources align to the need. Have you ever wished you could give ChatGPT access to your personal files and ask it a question about your taxes, your travel schedule, or even anything else that you asked previously, and have you come up with an informed response? A local AI agent, theoretically, could help with these challenges.

But where does the AI processing power come from for an AI agent? Doesn’t that require the cloud? The recent launch of DeepSeek from China and Llama, Meta’s LLM, demonstrate how easily AI can be downloaded and used exclusively on your local machine.

AI Agents Lead Into Local-First

Imagine an AI tool designed to organize your emails automatically with smart labels and filters. If your emails live on Gmail or another SaaS platform, that AI tool must rely on integrations provided by the cloud service, limiting its functionality. If the data was local, though, the AI agent would access your email without the layer and burden in between or any of the coaxing of the bigger cloud operators.

To be valuable, AI agents must have access to your specific data, whether it lives locally or in the cloud. This is why some agentic AI start-ups, like Vella, are also pushing for a local-first world.

The Local-First Movement Wants its Data Back

Local-first is retro. Twenty years ago, Excel was downloaded onto your laptop. You used it without a network connection, and that was that. The local-first movement aims to recapture that level of control while preserving real-time collaboration. With local-first applications, you use a sync system in place of a backend, and your application code reads and writes data to and from your local database. The app works and can be updated offline.

Local-first gives you the performance, privacy, and ownership benefits of a local app, along with the collaboration benefits of a SaaS app. For example, GitHub would be deemed truly local-first if it could operate on images and things apart from just code and if it had a real-time sync capability.

For local-first to work, there has to be a way to sync up data between local applications once they’ve connected again to a network. Academia has come up with, and continues to improve on, technology that can do just this, called Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, or (CRDTs).

It is telling that many of the apps used by engineers to develop software still revolve around a primary copy of the software on your local filesystem that’s not subordinate to any remote server. Git is a common example, but there are also Integrated Developer Environments (like VSCode), build tools (like Jenkins.io), and runtime environments (like Jupyter). When your data is local, you can control it and work quicker without the risk of a sync issue across to a remote server.

In local-first applications, you own your data. With a SaaS app, when you need to export your data, you rely on the cloud service. Imagine you’ve started a business, and you want to download all of your emails, sort them by various dates and subjects, and export them into a CRM system to understand who might be a potential customer from within your network. Doing that with today’s email systems is nearly impossible because you don’t own your data and are limited by the download functionality and rules of the email provider.

Local-first applications are everything that SaaS applications are not, so long as the syncing issue can be resolved. For many, the reward is worth the work of resolving the outstanding technical challenges to making local-first a broader reality.

How Far Are We On Making Local-First a Reality?

Today, local-first development ranges from a set of real-world implementations that act on certain objects to a set of pure-play prototypes.

‘Almost’ there: Linear’s sync engine

Linear is a tool for feature updates and planning. The founders made a name for themselves by building a real-time sync engine that allows you to handle persistent data, offline changes, and queuing, in-flight changes. It doesn’t use a lot of resources because the data is local. Only data changes require network requests.

Github: very close

GitHub allows developers to manage their code, requests to change the code, and updates to the code. GitHub is built on git, and the git functionality is truly local first. However, key functionality, such as pull requests, is not available without a network connection.

Authentication for devs: still needs the network

Developer-focused authentication tools you can download, like FusionAuth, can support local development and local testing, even though in production, the authentication process requires network calls to the authentication server to be useful for users. If you had a local webapp not hosted on the internet, you could use an authentication server like FusionAuth.

Prototypes

Ink&Switch, an independent research lab, has built multiple prototypes of local-first apps, from collaborative drawing to project management boards. Each prototype uses CRDTs and local-first development. They have found conflicting updates to be minimal, experienced great user experience and speed, and had success working with CRDTs.

Repatriation – Going After IaaS

So far, we’ve seen AI agents and local-first attacking PaaS and SaaS’s stranglehold on your data. But what about IaaS?

Even IaaS, which is the easiest to retrieve data from, is not safe from the move to gain more data control. In 2020, only 43 percent of CIOs planned to repatriate some of their cloud workloads to on-premises. That number jumped to 83 percent in 2024, according to the Barclays CIO Survey.

At first glance, it might appear that the concern around having data locally is a side-effect rather than the primary reason, which has more to do with the impact of cloud costs on overall margins. Andreessen Horowitz famously stated, “You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it,” when they published an estimate in 2022 about the cost savings that could result from full repatriation, using public data to infer the resulting change in share price in the 50 top public software companies. Their estimate totaled $100B of market value lost in reduced margins because of a reliance on cloud infrastructure.

But looking deeper at individual cases of repatriation, we see that one of the primary reasons for repatriation is the added value you can drive from your data when you have it locally. When commenting on GEICO’s massive repatriation efforts, Geico’s VP of Infrastructure, Rebecca Weekly, said, “If you spread your data and your methodology across so many different vendors, you are going to spend a lot of time re-collecting that data to actually serve customers.”

She also commented that compliance was more difficult in the cloud. At any given time, it was more difficult to produce information or analyze it, which limited speed and raised the costs of their compliance efforts.

Cultures with higher concerns over data privacy, like the EU, have been slower to migrate to the cloud. However, we might start seeing an increase in repatriation in these geographies. A recent study by Citrix found that 25 percent of organizations in the UK have already repatriated 50 percent or more of their cloud data to on-premises.

The Future of Data Ownership

The erosion of the cloud’s data moat is more than just a technical shift—it’s a rebalancing of power in the digital economy. For years, businesses have relied on SaaS and cloud providers to manage their critical data, often at the cost of control, compliance, and operational flexibility. But the rise of AI agents, local-first architectures, and cloud repatriation is changing that equation. Companies are realizing that true innovation, cost efficiency, and regulatory agility depend on owning and managing their own data rather than being locked into external platforms.

This shift isn’t just about saving money or improving compliance. It’s about redefining digital competitiveness. In the coming years, the winners won’t be those with the deepest cloud system integrations but those who can harness, secure, and optimize their data on their own terms.

The post The Great Data Escape: AI, Local-First, and the Cloud Exodus appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

Dennis Damen, Principal Product Manager at Nexthink, discusses the how and why behind the fact that IT is currently “losing the cloud blame game.” This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

IT has an accountability problem. In years gone by, when virtually all major digital assets were on-prem, IT leaders were responsible for and accountable for the smooth running of the IT environment. However, since the shift to the cloud, IT leadership has remained accountable, yet so much of the responsibility lies in the hands of a third party. Like being sideswiped by someone running a red light, CIOs today can do everything right and still find themselves in deep, deep trouble.

Some of the dangers have been mitigated by service-level agreements (SLAs), dictating that cloud providers must ensure that their platform is always available. However, while outages are a serious concern, they are far from the only issues that can go wrong. Take, for instance, contractors at a bank who use virtual desktops to connect to sensitive data and applications. While the cloud platform might technically be available, if it’s too slow to use, these workers can find themselves losing entire days of potentially productive time, causing them untold frustration and costing the businesses thousands of dollars.

To combat this, businesses are increasingly looking beyond SLAs to experience-level agreements (XLAs), which require not just that a system be available but also that users
have a minimum quality level when using the tool. But agreeing to an XLA and enforcing it are two very different things. So, how should organizations go about ensuring they’re getting what they pay for?

Did the Experience Measure Up?

There are many aspects to a good cloud experience—fast, bidirectional data migration, robust connectivity, and strong integrations. But while it’s easy to identify what is needed for a good experience, it’s far harder to break that experience down into its component parts, measure, and assess it. And without this, XLAs become functionally useless. Let’s extend our example with our banking contractor. She needs a virtual machine to securely access the system, and during that session, she needs to use, say, six different applications.

The applications she uses will greatly impact the performance of her virtual desktop and vice versa. At some point, her machine starts to lag badly. Clicks are slow, and she’s randomly disconnected from her session, dragging her productivity levels to near zero.

There is clearly an experiential issue, but where does the fault lie? It could be with the cloud provider, meaning that the XLA can kick in. But what if it’s the applications that are causing the problem? Or what if her home connection is weak because she’s working too far from the router? The cloud vendor isn’t likely to voluntarily demonstrate that their service is the problem, so the onus is on the company to find clear evidence that the XLA is being violated.

Getting Out of the Blame Game

In order to have clear evidence to trigger an XLA, organizations need a holistic view of application and desktop usage patterns (both virtual and physical). This means gathering not just technical data related to performance, availability, and stability but also experiential data regarding user productivity, usability, and adoption.

Having this level of detail across the entire IT environment allows businesses to identify root causes. Going back to our contractor, this may mean being able to show that she is not the only person having problems and that, rather than any particular application, the only common factor between her and other users dealing with bad virtual experiences is the cloud provider.

Equally, if the problem has nothing to do with the cloud vendor, the business can save time by not pointing fingers and instead can focus on addressing the problems with their internal configurations to solve the problem. Indeed, the ability to skip the blame game isn’t just important for reducing remediation time. By having proper visibility into where issues are occurring, customers and cloud vendors can reset and improve their relationship significantly. When there are clear experience quality benchmarks in place and customers can see that vendors are hitting them on a consistent basis, it builds trust and helps demonstrate the value of a specific provider far more than SLAs.

What Are We Paying For?

Ultimately, when businesses pay millions of dollars to cloud providers, they aren’t interested in a promise that the system will be always available—what they really care about is whether the provider can make their team more efficient and productive. And that comes down to the experience those employees get. Hence, the shift towards XLAs is inevitable.

But putting on in place and using it to effectively ensure accountability are two very different things. Every IT leader should keep in mind that, without proper visibility and reliable metrics across the entire environment, an XLA is really just a bit of paper.

The post IT is Losing the Cloud Blame Game appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

CloudBlue’s Mike Jennett offers insights on how there are no borders in the broader cloud ecosystem. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

In a more connected world, cloud marketplaces are powerful gateways for organizations looking to expand into new international markets. They enable businesses to transcend geographical constraints, scale faster, and transact in various languages and currencies. A Canalys report predicts that hyperscaler cloud marketplaces are gaining significant traction, with sales expected to hit $85 billion by 2028. The report also forecasts that in a few years over half of marketplace sales will be conducted through the channel.

This promise of borderless growth comes with its own set of complexities, requiring strategic planning, a thorough understanding of global operational nuances and localized follow through. One size does not fit all.

Entering a new market isn’t as simple as listing a product on a cloud storefront. Each region has unique requirements, from tax laws and data governance to cultural nuances and buyer behavior.

Top 3 Challenges to Consider

Currency Preferences: Not all countries transact in U.S. dollars or euros. Local currency options build trust and enhance user experience. Research whether your payment system can handle multiple currencies or regional nuances like dual pricing.

Tax Laws: Compliance with tax regulations is non-negotiable. Determine if your transactions require adherence to local, regional, or international tax laws. For example, selling products in the European Union requires compliance with value-added tax (VAT) regulations, while in Brazil, distinct state and federal tax frameworks may apply.

Data Governance: Compliance with data protection laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is essential. This includes understanding where data must be stored, how it is encrypted and ensuring secure handling with tools like web application firewalls. Deploy robust encryption protocols and multifactor authentication to protect sensitive data.

Utilizing a “Local Fixer”  

Cloud marketplaces often require partnerships with local distributors, service providers or resellers who understand the regional dynamics. Building these relationships can streamline your entry into new markets.

Organizations should develop a checklist for launching in new regions, covering distributor agreements, legal compliance and platform readiness:

Distributor networks: Evaluate whether you need a local distributor or an existing partnership with a global player like Arrow, Ingram Micro, or Tech Data that operates in the region.

Commitment expectations: Cultural differences influence partnership agreements. While some regions favor long-term contracts with volume-based incentives, others may prefer shorter commitments or a one-time purchase model.

Product availability: Confirm that your product can be legally sold and supported in the new market. In some cases, it may require adjustments to meet local standards or regulations.

Create pre-built templates: Streamline your entry into new markets by developing a repository of templates that address common operational challenges. Outline country-specific tax laws, data storage requirements, and seller-of-record details.

Localized Systems: Preconfigure software to handle local currencies, payment systems and regional accounting software.

The Flexibility of a Unified Platform  

It is important to ensure your platform supports multiple user bases with varying subscription models, payment preferences, and tax requirements. For instance, Infinigate Cloud, a division of Infinigate Group specializing in cybersecurity, sought to streamline its vendor onboarding process to expand its marketplace efficiently. Traditional methods were slow, resource-intensive, and complex due to regulatory and technical challenges.

By leveraging a unified platform, Infinigate Cloud created a flexible marketplace ecosystem, enabling seamless vendor integration, unified billing, and regulatory compliance. This solution significantly reduced onboarding time and costs, allowing Infinigate Cloud to scale rapidly, successfully expanding into 10 new European markets within a year.

Organizations can leverage several benefits from a unified platform, including:

Hyperscaler integrations: Cloud marketplaces offered by hyperscalers are rapidly emerging as an essential channel for software and SaaS companies to connect with their customers.

Payment Gateways: Different countries have different payment processing standards. Integration with regional tax-compliance software can simplify operations.

CRM Customization: Optimize your customer relationship management system to support multi-language communication, localized marketing materials, and culturally relevant customer engagement.

Avoiding Culture Clash 

Understanding cultural differences is crucial for building trust and fostering long-term relationships in new markets. For instance, in parts of Asia and the Middle East, informal discussions over tea or coffee often precede formal negotiations, emphasizing the importance of personal rapport before diving into transactions. While this approach may seem at odds with the streamlined, automated nature of cloud marketplaces, it is essential to incorporate such cultural nuances into your strategy.

Tailoring your sales approach to align with regional buying patterns is also essential. For example, while U.S. buyers may prioritize return on investment (ROI) and scalability, other markets might value immediate affordability or prefer bundled solutions. Adapting to these preferences can significantly enhance your ability to connect with and serve diverse customer bases effectively.

Localizing the Customer Experience 

Marketing materials and customer-facing content must resonate culturally and linguistically to foster trust and engagement. Regional marketing teams can adapt promotional campaigns to align with local cultural norms and expectations. For example, while direct sales pitches may work well in some markets, other cultures may perceive them as intrusive. In such cases, adopting a relationship-focused approach can lead to better outcomes.

Providing multi-language documentation is also important. Translating technical documentation, user guides and FAQs into the local language not only builds credibility but also reduces friction by ensuring customers can easily access and understand product information. Support teams should also be equipped to address region-specific issues and communicate effectively with customers.

The Balancing Act 

Cloud marketplaces open doors for organizations to tap into new international markets and industries, but having a solid strategy is key. Partnering with a provider of a mature, unified platform alleviates the heavy lifting and allows organizations to focus on their core business.

The path to thriving in international cloud marketplaces lies in blending agility with precision, leveraging global opportunities while respecting regional nuances. Organizations that can master this balance will position themselves not just as participants in these ecosystems but as leaders in the evolving global digital commerce landscape.

The post No Borders in the Cloud Ecosystem appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

Hyve Managed Hosting’s Jon Lucas offers insights on the cloud effect, highlighting security incidents that shaped 2024. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

The year 2024 saw an alarming increase in data breaches, resulting in substantial financial losses for businesses across industries. A recent report cites 84 percent of respondents reported losing at least $10,000 in revenue due to an outage in the past year, with nearly one-third suffering losses ranging from $100,000 to over $1 million. These statistics highlight the growing threat posed by cyberattacks, especially within cloud infrastructures.

The rapid expansion of the cloud market, coupled with the dominance of hyperscale public cloud providers, has created a complex and often vulnerable IT ecosystem. The shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, while offering greater flexibility, has also widened the attack surface for cybercriminals. The multi-tenant nature of public cloud infrastructure, where multiple users share hardware resources, further exacerbates security risks by increasing exposure to potential vulnerabilities or malicious code.

Let’s take a walk through some of the most high-profile cloud security breaches of 2024 and what we can learn from them in 2025.

The Biggest Outages Caused by Hacks in 2024

Snowflake Breach: Early in 2024, hackers exploited stolen credentials to bypass multi-factor authentication in Snowflake’s cloud platform, exposing sensitive data from 165 organizations. Affected companies included AT&T, Ticketmaster, and Santander Bank, with data breaches ranging from call records to banking details. Many SMBs suffered legal, operational, and reputational fallout, with recovery costs likely in the millions.

Loan Depot: A January cyberattack on Loan Depot compromised the personal and financial data of 16 million individuals, causing an estimated $27 million loss. The breach highlighted the need for stronger encryption and proactive threat detection.

CDK Global: In June, ransomware crippled CDK Global’s systems, disrupting thousands of U.S. auto dealerships. With an estimated $1 billion in collective losses, businesses struggled to process sales, track inventory, and manage financing. Many were forced to revert to manual operations, significantly impacting revenue.

Change Healthcare: In February, ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware targeted Change Healthcare, compromising data from 190 million individuals and disrupting insurance claims processing nationwide. Hackers exploited stolen credentials and a lack of multi-factor authentication. UnitedHealth spent $3.1 billion responding to the breach, while SMBs in healthcare faced major financial and operational setbacks.

The Impact on SMBs: Disproportionate Risks and Costs

While security breaches affect organizations of all sizes, SMBs often bear the brunt of the consequences. Unlike large corporations, which can leverage extensive financial and technical resources to recover from cyberattacks, smaller businesses frequently struggle to bounce back.

One major challenge is prioritization—large enterprises typically receive assistance first, leaving SMBs to fend for themselves. Additionally, many SMBs lack the funds to invest in advanced cybersecurity solutions or develop comprehensive disaster recovery plans.

When an SMB does suffer an attack, the impact can be devastating. While some estimates suggest that the  minimum cost of IT downtime is $5,000 per minute, a staggering 44% of surveyed businesses reported costs as high as $16,700 per server per minute, equating to over $1 million per hour. Even  micro-SMBs – companies with 25 employees or fewer – could face costs of roughly $100,000 per hour, a figure that could put them out of business within days.

Strengthening Cloud Security: A Proactive Approach for 2025

Looking ahead to 2025, organizations must focus on reinforcing their cloud security posture through a structured and proactive approach.

Here are 4 things your business can get started on right now to ensure you avoid these outages in 2025:

1. Identifying Weak Spots

Businesses must conduct thorough security assessments to identify vulnerabilities. Evaluating internal processes and recognizing potential weaknesses is the first step toward establishing a more secure IT environment. By prioritizing improvements and creating a structured action plan, companies can mitigate risk and enhance resilience.

 2. Developing a Robust Disaster Recovery Plan

A well-prepared disaster recovery plan is crucial for minimizing the impact of cyberattacks. Organizations should establish reliable data backup and recovery systems to safeguard critical information. Regular testing ensures these plans remain effective and up to date in the face of evolving threats.

3. Diversifying Risk with a Multi-Cloud Strategy

Adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud approach allows businesses to distribute workloads across multiple providers, reducing dependency on a single platform. Selecting cloud providers with geographically diverse data centers further mitigates risks associated with regional outages or disasters. Regularly updating risk mitigation strategies ensures businesses remain resilient as they grow.

4. Continuous Vigilance: The Key to Long-Term Security

Securing sensitive data requires an ongoing commitment to best practices. Regular security assessments, vulnerability testing, and proactive threat detection are essential components of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

 Key methods include:

·      Vulnerability scanning to detect weaknesses before they can be exploited.

·      Security scanning to evaluate network and application integrity.

·      Penetration testing to simulate real-world attacks and identify gaps.

·      Risk assessments to prioritize security measures based on threat levels.

·      Regular security audits to ensure compliance and effectiveness.

As cyber threats continue to evolve, businesses must remain vigilant. The security breaches of 2024 serve as cautionary tales, emphasizing the need for proactive defense strategies. By investing in robust security measures and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, organizations can navigate the complexities of cloud security and safeguard their future. The question is no longer if an attack will occur, but when—preparedness is the key to resilience.

The post The Cloud Effect: Security Incidents That Shaped 2024 appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

PwC’s Scott Petry offers insights on how harnessing the power of cloud and AI can drive growth and innovation. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

The Evolution of Cloud Engineering

Cloud engineering has experienced rapid progression in recent years, fueled by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), the emergence of industry-specific clouds, and other technology trends that are shaping how engineers solve challenges using cloud technologies. These developments have not only revolutionized the way businesses operate but have also unlocked potential for cost reduction and highly customized solutions for specific markets and industries.

AI integration within cloud solutions helps empower businesses to make data-driven decisions and drive operational efficiencies through advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and automation. By harnessing the power of AI in the cloud, organizations can gain the ability to extract valuable insights from their data, enabling them to better understand customer behavior, enhance operations, and identify new opportunities.

According to a recent survey, 72 percent of high -performing companies achieved “all-in cloud adoption” when it came to modernizing data, compared to just 33% of other companies. By moving their data to the cloud and making it more easily ingestible by large language models (LLMs), high performing companies are more readily able to unlock new value from their data as they integrate new AI capabilities.

Additionally, AI-powered cloud engineering establishes compliance and operational effectiveness through highly tailored solutions for industry-specific challenges, helping confirm compliance and operational effectiveness.

AI’s Impact on Cloud-Native Applications

The evolution of cloud-native application development and platform engineering has also been greatly influenced by advancements in cloud services and AI capabilities. Cloud-native applications and platforms are specifically engineered to be more scalable and flexible, and with the integration of AI, more effective, enabling many organizations to deliver more personalized user experiences. From chatbots to virtual assistants to multi-sided network platforms, AI-powered cloud-native applications are reshaping customer and producer interactions, enabling hyper-personalization, and helping to drive business growth.

Moreover, cloud-native applications inherently support continuous feedback mechanisms between consumers and stakeholders. This ongoing input and feedback at every stage of the development and operational processes ensures that the focus remains on essential features, functions, and capabilities that require enhancement or adjustment. Continuous feedback not only promotes greater transparency but also nurtures a meticulous software development and evolution model.

The Rise of Industry-Specific Clouds

As many organizations increasingly recognize the necessity for tailored solutions to address unique challenges and compliance requirements, industry-specific clouds are gaining traction. For instance, the manufacturing sector is tapping into the benefits of these specialized clouds that address complex supply chain issues and facilitate predictive maintenance. According to a recent report, operations executives and supply chain officers have heavily invested in multiple technologies to digitize operations, with 62 percent investing in cloud solutions and 55 percent incorporating AI, including machine learning.

In the finance industry, a dedicated cloud for banking should encompass both traditional components and emerging technologies such as AI to enhance customer experience. Artificial intelligence has long been utilized in finance for functions like fraud protection and anti-money laundering. However, expanding AI capabilities in other areas such as customer service with chat bots and virtual assistants, can help elevate the customer experience, further showcasing the overall potential of AI in the industry.

Another compelling example is in the healthcare sector. AI is already employed to detect medical conditions and analyze data from imaging instruments such as MRIs and CT scans.  However, to capitalize on these advancements, the healthcare industry requires a specialized cloud with integrative solutions, creating a true holistic healthcare cloud infrastructure.

Overall, AI and cloud engineering are strengthening the case for industry-specific cloud solutions. These customized cloud solutions are designed to help meet the unique needs of different sectors, while facilitating digital transformation and enhancing the return on cloud investments.

Enhancing Cloud Spending

Cloud spending budgets may see an increase with companies seeing the benefits of integrating AI in their cloud strategies. According to a recent survey, 63 percent of high  performers are increasing cloud budgets to leverage GenAI and 92 percent of high  performing companies expect to increase cloud budgets in their next planning cycle.

As many organizations increasingly embrace a variety of cloud solutions, managing and enhancing cloud spending should also be top of mind as it is considered an integral aspect of cloud management. To help increase the value of cloud investments, businesses should consider implementing a few practices that can put them in position to possibly see a return on their cloud investment. This includes regularly monitoring and enhancing cloud usage, leveraging cost improvement tools and services, and implementing governance frameworks to enable accountability and control.

Data and Governance

Data and governance are both important factors when leveraging the power of cloud engineering and AI. It is essential to confirm data security, compliance with regulations, and ethical use of AI. By implementing strong governance frameworks, organizations can maintain control and accountability while harnessing the power of AI and cloud computing.

Focusing on these important areas not only helps mitigate risks but also enhances business value and reputation. Proactively addressing data and governance issues helps prevent technical debt, enables organizations to operate efficiently and sustainably. Strong governance confirms that   organizations are well-prepared to manage regulatory and security requirements, fostering a secure environment that embraces emerging technologies.

Staying Up to Speed with Cloud and AI

The rapid growth of cloud engineering, fueled by AI integration, cloud-native applications, and industry-specific clouds, has transformed business operations. To take advantage of the benefits of cloud and AI, organizations should keep in mind that speed and continuous improvement can be essential.  Fostering a cycle of continuous improvement enables organizations to quickly adapt to market changes and evolving customer needs.

All in all, cloud and AI are becoming fundamental to sustainable growth and long-term success across industries. By harnessing the power of cloud engineering and AI integration, organizations can unlock new possibilities, drive innovation, while maintaining a competitive edge in their respective industry.

The post Ascending to New Heights with Cloud and AI appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

Solace’s Jamil Ahmed offers insights on why a one-size cloud doesn’t fit all and how multi-cloud arbitrage brings choice. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

Recent large-scale global outages from even the largest cloud players, including AWS and Microsoft, have underlined the risks associated with single-cloud dependencies. From disruptions in flight bookings to delays in critical medical appointments, the consequences of these outages highlight the urgent need for a multi-cloud strategy. Organizations of all sizes recognize that a single-cloud approach can no longer adequately support the demands of today’s interconnected world, where customer demand for continuous availability and real-time operations is critical.

While the benefits of a multi-cloud approach extend beyond simply avoiding vendor lock-in, implementing such a strategy presents significant complexities from an enterprise architecture perspective. Adapting to multi-cloud requires a robust and adaptable enterprise infrastructure that can seamlessly orchestrate critical data movement across different cloud providers. By establishing this foundation, organizations can unlock the true potential of multi-cloud, enabling greater agility, improved adaptability to comply with evolving regulations, and ultimately, a more competitive edge in a rapidly changing business landscape.

Regulatory Change & Hyperscalers are Paving the Way for Multi-Cloud

Already, we have the basics for multi-cloud in place. There is now a healthy market of cloud offerings thanks to the multiple hyperscalers, with regulators further encouraging competition amongst them. Just this year, AWS announced that it will allow customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem to another cloud provider with no fees imposed. Shortly after, Google announced similar plans for data transfer outside of GCP, with Microsoft now expected to lay out an approach for Azure.

These decisions follow provisions set out in the European Data Act which came into force in January, designed to promote competition by allowing cloud customers to switch providers more easily. Eliminating egress fees for data transfers to other cloud providers is a positive step towards open cloud ecosystems, aligning perfectly with the EU and UK regulations pushing for greater interoperability.

While it’s clear big moves are being made by large cloud providers, becoming truly multi-cloud will require bodies such as the CMA or EU in a GDPR-like format to really make a wave in the industry and help remove vendor lock-ins. There are no immediate plans in place, but businesses must make sure they are ready to react quickly to ensure they benefit from the cost and flexibility advantages.

24/7 Availability is the De Facto Business-Standard

Cloud outages have only highlighted the vulnerability of one cloud deployment. Even the largest cloud hosts – Google, AWS, Microsoft – suffer from outages, and having all your digital eggs in one cloud basket leaves businesses at risk of serious failure. It’s about building a fault tolerance, a buffer that enables your business to always remain operational. It will come down to how the workload is transferred or handled by another cloud provider.

Concerns about outages shuttering business operations are for good reason, with Oxford Economics calculating that downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400 billion each year, with each hour costing the business an average of $540,000.

The implications are huge. Take the recent CrowdStrike outage as an example that affected organizations such as financial services, airlines & operators, and healthcare organizations that rely on being operational 24/7. It highlighted the general IT dependency today’s businesses have, but if we dig a little deeper, then we see the impact of cloud-specific outages.

A Warning Sign – the Need for Multi-Cloud to Mitigate Outages

Large global businesses need to be accessible for customers no matter the time of day. Consider the Australian industry fund, UniSuper, when Google Cloud accidentally deleted the private cloud account of the Australian pension fund worth $125 billion. It left over half a million users without access to their accounts for a week – a fiasco that was only resolved by a single backup on another cloud provider, but the outage duration could have been minimized completely if it was truly multi-cloud all the time.

When a business is multi-cloud, the end user should never even be able to detect that a failure has occurred within the business. Any service downtime is avoided, as the failing is shielded by another cloud host. It’s this level of availability that remains at large a driver for multi-cloud deployment – if one server fails, businesses need the assurance that another cloud server will automatically pick up the slack and ensure the business itself is not adversely affected.

Not All Apps are Created Equal

For many, multi-cloud is a plan for the future, with 97 percent of IT leaders intending to expand their cloud systems further by using one or more clouds in their systems. But currently, too many businesses are preoccupied at the first hurdle – setting up their first cloud deployment. Only when businesses have this first adoption in place, they want to focus on ensuring apps are friendly at multi-cloud deployment level. This is how the risk exposure begins.

In a perfect storm, all clouds would be the same and shifting masses of information, data, and workloads from one cloud provider to another may be a simple endeavor. But the reality is much different. Large-scale organizations have various barriers to overcome when deploying tech stacks across multiple platforms. As explained by Gartner, there are nuances when it comes to features on offer by each provider, such as the operating system, programming language etc. and they range from minor to almost complete rewrites of the code.

The next challenge comes with ensuring the applications within the various clouds can “talk” to each other to ensure the seamless exchange of information. The solution lies in the underlying architecture that can seamlessly connect these different cloud providers together and enable the transfer of data-movement in real-time.

Enter the event mesh.

Multi-Cloud Adaptability – Any Time, Any Place

Between dealing with regulatory compliance changes and avoiding single provider lock-ins, many organizations have had no choice but to rethink their IT infrastructures and adapt to the complications of global operations. Being able to connect data in motion between various clouds and in real-time is a non-negotiable for global enterprises, and it’s where an event mesh can provide the interoperability businesses desperately need.

Within an event mesh, every transaction, business moment, or piece of data is an event – no matter where, and no matter what cloud the user is operating on. Businesses using an event-driven architecture have a powerful built-in event mesh which addresses this same challenge of “data in motion” by spanning all clouds and even on-prem locations as one seamless data movement layer.

That means that these businesses can now dynamically shift workloads across clouds by leveraging even relatively small and short-lived differences in separate cloud packaging, pricing, and performance advantages. Supported by its global deployment of event brokers within the event mesh, businesses can be confident that their underlying tech stack ensures a multi-region, multi-cloud agnostic approach.

Horses for Courses – Pick Processes for Best Multi-Cloud Fit

With today’s demanding consumer expectations around responsiveness and availability, the businesses that are the most responsive and available will out-compete the businesses that are not. A multi-cloud approach keeps them agile and available, even when it comes to operating in multiple regions.

For example, some applications will perform better across different clouds, so choose cloud deployments that are suitable for simple data storage versus those suitable for heavy AI-dependent apps. Some, of course, won’t work at all in geographic regions where sovereign data rules may apply. Having a multi-cloud approach will allow organizations to pick and mix according to their business needs, which in turn creates added flexibility for workload placement. For instance, allowing businesses to move applications to the lowest-cost environment and build leverage for when it’s time for cloud contract negotiations.

The benefits of multi-cloud go one step further, when trying to ensure best-of -breed cloud deployments for applications. It’s key to remember that although cloud operators all offer services in the cloud, not all services are equal in what they offer. By not locking in with a single vendor, organizations can arbitrage cloud services to get the best service for individual business needs. Being able to access the latest new technologies, not only makes innovating easier, but allows organizations to take advantage of promotional, merchandising, or product search capabilities from hyperscalers that in turn can accelerate revenue for the business.

The Multi-Cloud Train Has Left the Station – Board Now for Business Benefits

Recent high profile IT outages have highlighted the need for businesses to improve their resilience. While avoiding vendor lock-in is a significant advantage, the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy extend far beyond this. With hyperscalers increasingly offering a wider range of subscription options, businesses can benefit from the flexibility to select the most suitable and cost-effective cloud solutions for their specific needs. This allows for dynamic optimization to ensure always on applications and processes.

As a key part of this an event-driven architecture, facilitated by an underlying event mesh, ensures seamless and real-time data exchange across these multiple cloud environments. This not only improves operational efficiency but also provides a critical safeguard against service disruptions caused by outages from individual cloud providers.

The post One-Size Cloud Doesn’t Fit All: Multi-Cloud Arbitrage Brings Choice appeared first on Best Enterprise Cloud Strategy Tools, Vendors, Managed Service Providers, MSP and Solutions.

Solutions Review compiled the top DevOps certifications for cloud engineers and professionals of all skill levels.

DevOps continues to grow in popularity in the business world as companies continue to embrace collaborative environments for developers. Cloud professionals in particular often learn DevOps skills in order to successfully integrate cloud applications and solutions into their company. Earning online certifications is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge in a particular subject area, and DevOps is no exception.

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated DevOps certifications to consider taking. Each certification contains courses taught by industry experts in software, creativity, and business skills. Certifications are listed in no particular order.

7 DevOps Certifications for Cloud Professionals

Certification Title: Become a Cloud Developer

PLATFORM: Udacity

OUR TAKE: For cloud users who want to learn about developing and deploying applications on AWS, this is the Udacity nanodegree cerification for you. Topics like Kubernetes, serverless apps, and microservices are covered here.

Description: Start by learning the fundamentals of cloud development and deployment with AWS. Then, build different apps leveraging microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless application technology. You should have intermediate knowledge of Javascript, and familiarity with object-oriented programming, web development with HTML and CSS, and the Linux Command Line.

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Certification Title: DevOps Engineer Master’s Program

OUR TAKE: Over seven courses, this Simplilearn Master’s Program certification covers everything you need to become a DevOps Engineer. Simplilearn advertises itself as the World’s #1 Online Bootcamp with a 4.6-star rating on Course Report.

PLATFORM: Simplilearn

Description: This DevOps Engineer Master’s Program will prepare you for a career in DevOps, the fast-growing field that bridges the gap between software developers and operations. You’ll become an expert in the principles of continuous development and deployment, automation of configuration management, inter-team collaboration, and IT service agility using DevOps tools such as Git, Docker, Jenkins, and more.

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Certification Title: Become a Cloud DevOps Engineer

OUR TAKE: As DevOps goes hand in hand with developing applications in the cloud, this Udacity nanodegree is an essential certification course for AppDev professionals to gain the knowledge of a cloud DevOps engineer within four months.

PLATFORM: Udacity

Description: Learn to design and deploy infrastructure as code, build and monitor CI/CD pipelines for different deployment strategies, and deploy scalable microservices using Kubernetes. At the end of the program, you’ll combine your new skills by completing a capstone project. Learn the fundamentals of cloud computing while being introduced to compute power, security, storage, networking, messaging, and management services in the cloud.

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Certification Title: Full Stack Cloud Developer

OUR TAKE: This professional certification offered by IBM goes over everything you need to know in order to become a full-stack cloud developer. edX provides expert instruction in 10 skill-building courses in a self-paced program experience.

PLATFORM: edX

Description: Students will be able to describe the core concepts of cloud computing, cloud models and architectures, and components of cloud computing, and list the major cloud service providers; apply essential cloud application development concepts and languages including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, to create your first cloud-based applications; explain Cloud Native and apply DevOps practices with a CI/CD toolchain on IBM Cloud, and Git to continuously develop and update Cloud applications; and define containerization technology and state the significance of containers to Cloud Native.

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Certification Title: Cloud DevOps using Microsoft Azure

OUR TAKE: As Udacity points out, Microsoft Azure is used by 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Any Azure user with intermediate Python knowledge and familiarity with Linux shell scripting should look into this training.

PLATFORM: Udacity

Description: Microsoft Azure is one of the most popular cloud services platforms used by enterprises, making it a crucial tool for cloud computing professionals to add to their skill set. The Cloud DevOps using Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program teaches students how to deploy, test, and monitor cloud applications on Azure, thereby preparing learners for success on Microsoft’s AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert certification exam.

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Certification Title: Cloud Application Development Foundations

OUR TAKE: Kickstart your career in cloud application development with this Cloud Application Development Foundations certification offered by IBM on edX. edX provides expert instruction in 10 skill-building courses in a self-paced program experience.

PLATFORM: edX

Description: Take the first steps to becoming a Cloud Developer by completing the Cloud Application Development Foundations Professional Certificate, guided by experts from IBM. Build your own cloud-based applications and learn about the technologies behind them as you go. This Professional Certificate prepares you to develop, build, deploy, and test applications on a public cloud platform and deliver Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions using Cloud Native and DevOps lifecycle management methodologies.

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Certification Title: Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate

OUR TAKE: Google Cloud professionals wanting to learn more about DevOps and cloud application development should definitely consider this certification. The cloud solution provider has partnered with Coursera to offer official certifications.

PLATFORM: Coursera

Description: This program provides the skills you need to advance your career as a data engineer and provides training to support your preparation for the industry-recognized Google Cloud Professional DevOps Engineer certification. 87% of Google Cloud certified users feel more confident in their cloud skills. You’ll also have the opportunity to practice key job skills using Google Cloud to build software delivery pipelines, deploy and monitor services, and manage and learn from incidents. You will learn to apply SRE principles to a service, techniques for monitoring, troubleshooting, and improving infrastructure and application performance among other things.

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Solutions Review compiled the top Azure LinkedIn Learning courses for cloud engineers and administrators of all skill levels.

Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud solutions currently on the market, servicing millions of users across the globe. As cloud deployments continue to grow in popularity and more businesses turn to the cloud for vital workflows, keeping your Azure deployment in check is a critical task. Online courses and training are a great resource who those who want to learn more about Microsoft Azure.

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated LinkedIn Learning Azure courses to consider taking. Each course in its catalog is taught by industry experts in software, creativity, and business skills. Courses are listed in no particular order.

6 Azure Courses on LinkedIn Learning

Course Title: Azure: Understanding the Big Picture

OUR TAKE: Walter Ritscher, previously a senior partner at Scandia Enterprises is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn, offering technical training courses for software developers. This course covers all the basics for cloud computing and development through Microsoft Azure.

Description: Understanding the scope of the cloud is an overwhelming task, even for a seasoned developer. This course takes a step back to look at the big picture of Microsoft Azure. This perspective can help you understand the many Azure offerings, including storage, hosting, and deployment, and assess which best fit your organization’s cloud strategy. Those just entering the cloud will find the course to be a valuable resource they can return to again and again. Instructor Walt Ritscher kicks off the course by comparing the three cornerstones of the cloud: software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service. He then covers Azure subscription options and costs and dives deeper into specific Azure services. He covers web hosting, cloud storage, Azure security, infrastructure, DevOps tools, and media encoding, as well as event and notification services. Review the services that interest you or zoom out for a more complete picture of this powerful cloud-computing platform.

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Course Title: Azure for Architects: Design a Networking Strategy

OUR TAKE: For IT professionals looking to take the AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam, this is the course for you. Previously an application development manager and senior technical architect, instructor Scott Duffy has worked as a consultant for various companies.

Description: Learn about designing a network strategy with Microsoft Azure and prepare for the networking portion of Exam AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Architect Design. Instructor Scott Duffy begins with a brief overview of Azure and a review of networking fundamentals, then discusses specific networking tools inside Azure. Scott covers network and application security groups, how to manage networking using the command line, PowerShell, the Azure portal, and more.

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Course Title: Azure Administration Essential Training

OUR TAKE: President of The Netlogon Group David Elfassy covers the basics of Microsoft Azure administration, including controlling Azure costs, Azure PowerShell, implementing Azure web applications, creating and managing Azure virtual machines, and Active Directory.

Description: Get a cloud administrator’s view of Microsoft Azure. David Elfassy covers the essentials of Azure, providing an inside look at working with its cloud-based storage and networking services, which can scale up or down as your organization changes. He goes over Azure management tools, shares tactics for controlling costs, and shows how to manage your Azure account and configure options via PowerShell scripting. Plus, he details how to set up services successfully, including web apps, virtual machines, Active Directory, and VPNs.

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Course Title: Azure Active Directory: Basics

OUR TAKE: Azure Active Directory is one of the fundamental cloud security services offered through Azure, so this course by IT consultant Kunal D. Mehta covers user and group management, Azure AD security features, open standards, and how Azure AD affects infrastructure costs and growth.

Description: Azure Active Directory (AD)— a cloud-based identity and access management service—powers much of the Microsoft cloud ecosystem. It provides secure access and identity protection to on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. For those looking to adopt a cloud-first approach to identity, getting familiar with Azure AD is a must. In this beginner-level course, instructor Kunal D Mehta helps you get up and running with Azure AD. Kunal explores the platform’s place at the helm of all Microsoft cloud products, as well as why Azure AD is needed in today’s IT landscape. He also digs into key features that set Azure AD apart from its competitors, provides information on which industry standards and compliance regulations it fulfills, and highlights the business objectives it can help you achieve.

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Course Title: Learning Azure Network Security

OUR TAKE: Security analyst, system engineer, and technical trainer Shyam Raj discusses the fundamentals of Azure network security. Topics covered include managed firewall services, DDoS attack prevention, Azure identity services, authentication, and Azure Active Directory.

Description: Microsoft lists over 600 services offered by Azure, its popular cloud computing service. A key component across the hundreds of Azure services is, of course, security. In this course, Instructor Shyam Raj provides foundational coverage of the security features offered by Azure. Starting with topics like managed firewall services and protection against DDoS attacks, Shyam also covers Azure identity services, including key elements like authentication, authorization, and Azure Active Directory, and details use cases for the Azure Security Center. If you’re new to Azure, are an IT professional exploring the Azure services, or just want a deeper look at the security piece of the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam, this course is for you.

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Course Title: Learning Azure Management Tools

OUR TAKE: Having worked as a consultant and trainer since 1998, Gary Gruszinskas delivers high-quality training and e-learning content for the IT industry, including this course on operating Azure’s four key management tools: the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, PowerShell, and JSON templates.

Description: Migrating your infrastructure to the cloud? To get the most value from Microsoft Azure, you need to know how to manage it. You should be able to deploy and configure resources in a quick and repeatable way. This course provides an introduction to the four key Azure management tools: the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, PowerShell, and JSON templates. This beginner-level course is ideal for IT pros who have some experience with Azure but are looking for hands-on guidance to explore each of these tools and the solutions they provide. It also covers content found in the AZ-900 Azure Foundations certification exam.

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Solutions Review compiled the top LinkedIn Learning cloud courses for cloud engineers and administrators of all skill levels.

Cloud solutions are some of the most important technologies currently on the market, servicing millions of users across the globe. As cloud deployments continue to grow in popularity and more businesses turn to the cloud for vital workflows, keeping your cloud deployment in check is a critical task. Online courses and training are a great resource who those who want to learn more about cloud computing.

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated LinkedIn Learning cloud courses to consider taking. Each course in its catalog is taught by industry experts in software, creativity, and business skills. Courses are listed in no particular order.

The Best Cloud Computing Courses on LinkedIn Learning

Course Title: Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers

OUR TAKE: The first in a series of courses that introduces the basics of AWS, technical instructor and founder of AWS Newbies Hiroko Nishimura leads students to the first domain of the Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner exam in this top-rated course.

Description: Amazon Web Services (AWS)—and cloud computing in general—can be difficult for people without technical backgrounds to decipher. This introductory course is a bridge between non-engineers and the cloud. It is the first in a four-part series designed to help professionals in non-technical roles, including finance teams, project managers, and marketers, make the best use of AWS. Instructor Hiroko Nishimura—founder of Intro to AWS for Newbies—provides a brief history of cloud computing, an overview of cloud deployment models, and a summary of cloud design principles. She then shows how to create an account and start using the AWS Free Tier to gain hands-on experience with AWS products and services. Plus, get exam tips and learn about resources for professionals studying for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

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Course Title: AWS Essential Training for Architects

OUR TAKE: Jeff Winesett, CEO and partner at healthcare technology studio SeeSaw Labs, covers cloud management and network architecture for AWS in this course. The training covers cloud best practices, managing IAM, loading EC2 instances, and AWS serverless architectures.

Description: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most widely used cloud platforms, and the top pick for many organizations looking to scale and reduce costs by adopting a cloud infrastructure strategy. This course explores AWS from the architect’s perspective, focusing on the foundations you need to build scalable and reliable cloud-based application architectures. Instructor Jeff Winesett covers everything from high-level principles and best practices to hands-on implementation, optimization, and security. He takes three different approaches—manual, automated, and serverless—so you can see how AWS fits a variety of workflows and architectures. Each lesson is backed with practical examples, grounding services like Elastic Load Balancing, RDS, DynamoDB, and CloudFront in a real-world context.

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Course Title: Azure: Understanding the Big Picture

OUR TAKE: Walter Ritscher, previously a senior partner at Scandia Enterprises is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn, offering technical training courses for software developers. This course covers all the basics for cloud computing and development through Microsoft Azure.

Description: Understanding the scope of the cloud is an overwhelming task, even for a seasoned developer. This course takes a step back to look at the big picture of Microsoft Azure. This perspective can help you understand the many Azure offerings, including storage, hosting, and deployment, and assess which best fit your organization’s cloud strategy. Those just entering the cloud will find the course to be a valuable resource they can return to again and again. Instructor Walt Ritscher kicks off the course by comparing the three cornerstones of the cloud: software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service. He then covers Azure subscription options and costs and dives deeper into specific Azure services. He covers web hosting, cloud storage, Azure security, infrastructure, DevOps tools, and media encoding, as well as event and notification services. Review the services that interest you or zoom out for a more complete picture of this powerful cloud-computing platform.

GO TO TRAINING

Course Title: Azure Administration Essential Training

OUR TAKE: President of The Netlogon Group David Elfassy covers the basics of Microsoft Azure administration, including controlling Azure costs, Azure PowerShell, implementing Azure web applications, creating and managing Azure virtual machines, and Active Directory.

Description: Get a cloud administrator’s view of Microsoft Azure. David Elfassy covers the essentials of Azure, providing an inside look at working with its cloud-based storage and networking services, which can scale up or down as your organization changes. He goes over Azure management tools, shares tactics for controlling costs, and shows how to manage your Azure account and configure options via PowerShell scripting. Plus, he details how to set up services successfully, including web apps, virtual machines, Active Directory, and VPNs.

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Course Title: DevOps Foundations

OUR TAKE: Verica engineering manager Ernest Mueller and head of research James Wickett cover everything you need to know about DevOps if you’re a beginner, such as DevOps core values and principles, creating a positive DevOps culture, and understanding agile and lean.

Description: In this course, well-known DevOps practitioners Ernest Mueller and James Wickett provide an overview of the DevOps movement, focusing on the core value of CAMS (culture, automation, measurement, and sharing). They cover the various methodologies and tools an organization can adopt to transition into DevOps, looking at both agile and lean project management principles and how old-school principles like ITIL, ITSM, and SDLC fit within DevOps. The course concludes with a discussion of the three main tenants of DevOps—infrastructure automation, continuous delivery, and reliability engineering—as well as some additional resources and a brief look into what the future holds as organizations transition from the cloud to serverless architectures.

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