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More organisations are saying cloud computing gives them a competitive advantage, but fewer are saying it gives their company a significant advantage, according to the latest figures from Verizon.

The report, the third annual ‘State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud’ paper released by the telco giant, found 77% of firms cite cloud as a competitive advantage, compared with 74% this time last year. Yet only 16% argue cloud gives significant advantage this time round, down from 30% in 2014.

37% of organisations say cloud has enabled their firm to adapt its business model, with a further 19% saying they were working towards it, and 25% saying they were considering it. By 2018, Verizon argues half of companies will be putting at least three quarters of their workloads in the cloud.

Verizon argues there are three types of persona which any company can identify with:

• The sceptics: These companies, Verizon notes, aren’t luddites in terms of what cloud can do for their business – they almost certainly will use SaaS apps – but are restricted on what they can do. The financial services industry is a good example. Only 6% of survey respondents expect less than 25% of their workloads in the cloud by 2018.
• The pragmatists: These are companies which are taking a measured approach to cloud, steadily creating an enterprise-class infrastructure using standard components from cloud providers tied together using APIs and orchestration services.
• The natives: These are the cloud-first, or cloud-only, businesses, using cloud-based ERP and CRM software and utilising the subscription economy, rather than buying servers.

Elsewhere, more than a quarter (27%) of businesses are already using private cloud, while a further 17% plan to implement it. Organisations are also becoming less cloud-phobic; 87% of those polled say they think cloud is at least as reliable as on-premises infrastructure, while four in five say it is as least as secure. 93% of companies say they are using two or more cloud providers, while a quarter are using an eye-watering 10.

“Last year, the news was that cloud was being used for mission-critical workloads; now enterprises are using it to transform how they achieve that mission,” commented Ryan Shuttleworth, cloud chief technology officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Companies are using cloud technologies to create new customer experiences, reengineer their business processes, find new opportunities to grow, and manage risk and compliance measures,” he added.

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The biggest challenge any business faces is trying to predict the future; knowing what your data will look like in three or five years’ time so you can put in an infrastructure that is flexible enough to grow and accommodate change is a huge challenge.

The amount of data that all businesses are generating themselves and storing on their clients is growing all the time. The infamous statistic from 2013 that 90% of the world’s data has been generated over the last two years continues to be quoted and I suspect if we looked closer now in 2015 we’d find the numbers astounding. Being able to know what data you want to keep, what you want accessible now and what you can file away is going to become increasingly difficult.

Unsurprisingly hybrid cloud has become the cloud model of choice for many organisations that want to build greater flexibility into their infrastructure in a cost effective and future proof manner. What’s not to like about hybrid? You get to keep some of the simple data on-premise yet free up your existing infrastructure by moving critical elements to the cloud, all the while relying on your cloud provider to have the latest provisioning and security in place that helps to ensure you keep abreast of your industry regulation and legislation.

But is there a good, bad or ugly of cloud? Choosing private, public or hybrid is about being methodical in making your choice and not just diving in for what seems to be the quickest and simplest solution on the surface. 

Private cloud, as the name suggests, means that only one specific organisation can operate and access data in this particular cloud environment. The idea is that you naturally have greater control and therefore privacy for your sensitive data. This is great if you’re an industry giant with exceptionally deep pockets and can afford excessive operational costs and if you’re someone who doesn’t like to share the same environment.

The public cloud on the other hand offers a great virtualised service for consumers running at a fraction of the cost of private cloud and it’s accessible over any public network. However, the big ‘but’ here is whether any savvy business should be sharing its crucial data on a resource that is so publicly available. In this case cheap doesn’t always mean better. Yes, it will offer the ultimate in scalability because it has such a vast user base and instant flexibility if your business grows overnight, however, with businesses becoming more and more concerned about data security a simple breach could provide a massive headache.

In my experience, a hybrid cloud solution enables businesses to run multiple applications within the platform while also being able to connect back into colocation rack in the data centre or indeed linking straight back into the office using point-to-point connections. We’ve found that while people want all the benefits that cloud solutions have to offer they also want the security of knowing where their data resides and they rightly want to remain in control. A hybrid cloud solution offers just that.

At the end of the day when it comes to cloud the decision is yours. Be guided by your industry regulations and Data Protection laws. Talk to your peers and partners about what has worked best for them. A cloud solution should provide you with:

• Scalability – so you can upgrade instantaneously with no downtime or capex costs
• Performance – that’s as good as a dedicated server
• Easy management – via an online secure control panel
• Reliability – mirrored SAN storage and hot migration of your virtual servers
• A choice of operating systems – Linux, Windows, in a variety of flavours and versions.

And once you’ve taken these requirements into consideration select a partner where you can easily check their security measures – go and see it for yourself. Establish a comprehensive SLA – all reputable cloud providers will gladly provide one. And where possible select a cloud that offers a ‘try before you buy’ model which will help you to establish the success criteria appropriate for your business and ensure the version of cloud you’ve chosen is delivering maximum performance and value for your business.

A capability model is a structure that represents the core abilities and competencies of an entity (department, organization, person, system, and technology) to achieve its objectives, especially in relation to its overall mission and functions.

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The DevOps Enterprise Summit last month had a record number of attendees and speakers, all of whom were there to discuss the tremendous positive impact DevOps is having within the enterprise.

When representatives of financial services companies (not the usual industry of early adoption) such as ING, CapitalOne and Bank of America are listed among the speakers, it’s time to pay attention. This and the preponderance of articles presenting evidence, that enterprises of all kinds and sizes, are showing tremendous gains through the implementation of DevOps practices has to get the rest of the technical community thinking.

Let’s face it: which CEO wouldn’t want to see their development and operations teams and their business working seamlessly to define, deploy and maintain services for customers? Which CFO doesn’t want to hear that maintenance of services costs are down significantly?

As I recently wrote in Stop talking about cloud – and start talking about what cloud can enable: “DevOps is more than just a shift in how operations, development and the business stakeholders technically work together to develop new services. It is a cultural shift within an enterprise, which changes how business and technology relates to each other.

“This cultural shift causes technology organizations to move at a different pace than previously – a pace which can keep up with the business demands of time to market, as well as product and services lifecycles.”

So for those of us who could use a refresher into DevOps, I offer the following quick overview on DevOps components and benefits. There are many ways to implement DevOps and many components to choose from, not all listed below.

As with any methodology, an enterprise should choose those components that are appropriate to their situation. As this is only an overview, I remind the reader that a good deal more research needs to be done before trying to implement any of these components.

Community and culture

All the technology and tool changes in the world cannot replace the need to fundamentally change how the parts of a business (technology, architecture, engineering, application development, sales, marketing, product development) work together.

That may be a bold statement, but ask anyone who has successfully implemented a DevOps program. Without the following cultural mindset your impact will be limited:

• The various organisations need to see themselves as one team heading in the same direction.
• Process is critical and it needs to be a custom fit for the enterprise.
• Leadership is responsible to remove process roadblocks, not just reduce them. Anything that slows the teams down without a serious business reason needs to be looked at.
• All team members need to see themselves as a key part of the team. Get rid of the “it’s not my job” mentality.
• Start small and expand the community over time.

Application and infrastructure development

There are specific parts of DevOps that are development specific, but the all other teams need to understand what the development teams are doing and how they need to be supported. When I speak about development I am including a team that is creating components of the solution, application, API, tools, or infrastructure.

• Employing an agile methodology that fits your enterprise (and is common across the enterprise) is the first big step.
• Deployments need to be small and focused. This will allow for quick identification and repair of bugs as well as enable rapid/continuous deployment of new features and functions. This is one point where the rubber-meets-the-road in terms of rapid reaction to changing markets and business requests.
• As part of the deployment process, testing needs to be well defined, highly focused and rapidly executed. This may be one of the most difficult parts of the DevOps process to implement but also has the biggest impact.
• All application development should be based on APIs and software as a service (SaaS) concepts. Code and configuration repositories, Source code and configuration versioning and controls,  API and service based access to functionality. These provide flexibility and compartmentalisation necessary for continuous and rapid deployment.
• Infrastructure as code (IAC) is becoming a very big component of DevOps. In short IAC is the use of code development practices in the development and deployment of infrastructure configurations.

Operations and orchestration

To clarify: operations are not that group down the hall that we toss applications to! DevOps, as the name implies, requires that development and operations are partners in the creation, deployment and management of services.

Operations, as well as business stakeholders, need to be involved in the development process from the beginning. This will allow for the definition of supportability, testing, management, and security aspects of the services.

• Much the same as developing code around APIs, operations components should be developed as building blocks. This will, once again, increase flexibility, supportability and rapid issue resolution.
• A great concept that I recently heard about is the use of Flash Build Sessions to include partners and energise teams as part of the infrastructure and operations development process.
• While the choice of platform is a enterprise wide responsibility and needs to be considered seriously by all involved, a hybrid cloud platform is the platform of choice for agile enterprises. Hybrid cloud allows for rapid deployment of new services, issue resolution changes and upgrades.
• A standard set of orchestration tools coupled with hybrid cloud allow all involved to work more efficiently and more collaboratively.

Supporting concepts

There are a number of general supporting concepts that help enable a DevOps collaborative environment within the enterprise. Some of the top areas to keep in mind are:

• Consistent and continuous communication between teams and within teams is critical. Chat, Instant Messaging, Social networking, and/or email, whatever works for the enterprise.
• Leadership. DevOps cannot exist without strong leaders. Leaders are those who are willing to lead efforts by example and not by managing.
• Strong External Technology partnerships. Keeping your partners close will keep projects moving. They have knowledge about their components that you need and they are willing to share.

In conclusion, enterprises of all sizes and shapes are moving towards DevOps models. Many of the models differ greatly from each other, even within the same industries. The best way to get started is to choose a small team, a few things to change and one project to try this out on. There will be bumps in the road but keep trying and the benefits will show up eventually.

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Microsoft has announced it is to launch commercial cloud services from the UK, making Azure and Office 365 available from UK data centres by late 2016.

The Redmond giant already has data centres in 20 locations – or regions, if you prefer semantically – across five continents, yet its representation in Europe has been comparatively low, with only two data centres in Ireland and the Netherlands respectively. Back in September, cloud platform marketing general manager Mike Schutz boasted to analysts of the strength of Microsoft’s portfolio, being at that time “in more regions than [AWS and Google] combined.”

Alongside Azure and Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will follow for UK customers, according to the company. Microsoft also announced an expansion of its data centre facilities in Ireland and the Netherlands.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. “By expanding our data centre regions in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland we aim to give local businesses and organisations of all sizes the transformative technology they need to seize new global growth.”

Michel Van der Bel, area vice president and general manager of Microsoft UK, added: “The UK is a global leader in embracing the benefits of cloud-based solutions. Our commitment to offer Microsoft Azure, Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 from local data centres will help meet such demand, especially for those organisations looking for solutions delivered from data centres based in the UK.”

The sense of competition among the ‘big four’ in cloud infrastructure – AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft – remains undimmed. Microsoft has always remained tight-lipped about its exact revenue figures from Azure, but having recalibrated its financial reporting, it is noticeable that the ‘intelligent cloud’ segment of its results contributed $5.89bn of its overall revenue last quarter, up from $5.48bn this time last year.