IT decision makers are conservative by nature: “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I frequently hear the question, “What does the cloud do for me that I can’t do in my own data centre?” The honest answer is nothing.

There is nothing that can be done in the cloud that couldn’t also be done in an in-house data centre or with collocated hardware in an external data centre.

However, almost everything a business may want to do with IT can be done more quickly, less expensively, and with intrinsically more scalability in the cloud. That’s the true value of cloud platforms.

A business could choose to buy and collocate new servers when updating its groupware application. It’s a simple process of getting approval for the capital expenditure, procuring the servers and the data centre space, paying for support and licensing, paying for server …

By Kenneth N Rashbaum Esq. and Jason M. Tenenbaum of Rashbaum Associates, LLC.

This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. Any legal information provided in this post should not be relied upon as legal advice. It is not intended to create, and does not create, an attorney-client relationship and readers should not act upon the information presented without first seeking legal counsel.

Among the European responses to the release of documents by Edward Snowden was a plethora of proposals to create cloud providers that would host data exclusively on servers located in Europe.  The basis of this reaction may be found in the European privacy laws, which place severe constraints upon disclosures of personal data (data that can be linked to an identifiable person).  For reasons steeped in history, the greatest concern of many countries is the prospect of the U.S. government accessing personal data of …

Feature IBM wants your cloudy dollars – and it’s making an extremely aggressive play to be the market leader in enterprise cloud computing.

In some minds, however, it already is.

Exhibit A: chief executive Virginia Rometty, in an open letter to investors published as part of the company’s 2013 annual report, spelled it out: “IBM today is the leader in enterprise cloud.”

The reason? Investment. Big Blue has shelled out $7bn on 15 acquisitions, with Rometty singling out the purchase of IaaS provider SoftLayer above all else. The latest move was earlier in March, when the company announced it was to push $1bn of resources and investments into cloud, rolling out SoftLayer in new geographies and providing a developer-friendly PaaS offering called BlueMix.

In other words, the 102-year-old International Business Machines now sees itself as a cloud company first and foremost. For Doug Clark (left), cloud leader at IBM …

The continuing revelations by former US National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden about the extent of data surveillance are rumbling like thunder around the cloud computing industry.

This is likely to be more than just a passing storm in a tea cup as there could be lasting repercussions on where cloud users and providers store their data.

Companies, governments and the European Parliament are starting to take a long hard look at the whole issue of data sovereignty which may well trigger a rush for securing data on home soil. At this moment the European Parliament is considering a proposal to suspend the ‘US – EU Safe Harbor Framework’ currently in place and so prevent the data flows of EU citizens being passed to American companies – not only this, the motion is also calling for the creation of indigenous European clouds to promote more growth and greater trust in cloud computing …

Jeremy Cox, Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement, Madan Shaina, Lead Analyst, Information Management Software

Salesforce.com grew by 33% year-on-year in its fiscal year 2014, breaking the $4bn mark. It was involved in larger transactions, several of which broke the $10m ceiling. At the earnings call in February 2014, the company’s chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, was clearly feeling bullish about the immediate future; he delivered a forecast that the company would grow by approximately 30% to $5.3bn over the coming year.

No other software company of this magnitude is growing as fast, but there are concerns around profitability and the increasingly competitive environment, as major vendors flesh out their cloud-based offerings.

Salesforce.com’s evangelism about the “Internet of Customers” pays off

As Salesforce.com continues to fund its growth at the expense of short-term profits, Marc Benioff’s evangelism about the “customer company” and Salesforce1 as the …

It’s been almost 10 years since Salesforce.com filed for IPO, on June 23 2004. And with a 56.4% gain in initial trading, it was the first genuine indicator of the huge monetisation potential in software-as-a-service (SaaS).

While Salesforce remains the leader in SaaS, there have been a plethora of public offerings since then – but not at the lightning pace that would have been expected.

Back in December Altos Ventures wrote about the first decade of SaaS IPOs, with an interesting conclusion: of the 40 SaaS firms who had floated, it took on average 9.7 years to go from founding to IPO, with the biggest hurdle breaking the $30m revenue mark.

It had been a tough journey for the majority of these firms, even the “unicorns” – the best in class organisations.

Yet there is light at the end of the tunnel, according to a new research infographic …

Research from IT services bods MTI has revealed that UK channel businesses are struggling to meet the needs of their demands due to the accelerated growth of cloud computing.

No prizes for guessing the angle of this research; if your instant thought was ‘resellers struggle in a cloud-heavy market, thus they’ll need a partner to help monetise’, then you’d be right. Yet the stats, taken from over 150 respondents with seven in ten resellers, make for interesting reading.

The results show infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the most common service provided by resellers, with over three quarters (77%) of respondents citing it as a key service for their clients. Conversely, the least popular being managed security services.

For resellers, the biggest challenge over the next 18 months was clear: clients are requesting more complex solutions which is affecting their business. Ranked one to six with one being …

2014 is likely to prove to be a big year in data protection for many industries – none more so that the cloud computing industry with the possible adoption of the EU’s proposed Data Protection Regulation, implementation of European cyber security strategies and moves by Germany and France to set up a European Communications Network.

In a recent weekly podcast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a European Communications Network should be set up to avoid potential access to data by the U.S. Government. In the podcast Merkel commented: “We’ll talk about European providers that offer security to our citizens, so one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic”.

It is not clear whether these comments will ever develop into anything more concrete but what is clear is that concerns around data protection and cyber security are driving a number of regulatory developments that …

PaaS provider CloudBees has secured series C funding to the tune of $11.2m (£6.7m), in a round of investment led by Verizon Ventures.

The latest round puts the total investment at $25.7m (£15.4m), with Verizon joining existing investors Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as new investor Blue Cloud Ventures.

According to CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey, the money will be used in two capacities – increasing go-to-market capability in different geographies, as well as further investment in the product, with particular focus on its enterprise product, Jenkins.

“We are getting great traction especially around Jenkins, and there is demand from large organisations to scale their environment and help us get more efficient at managing big companies’ delivery environment,” he told CloudTech.

According to Labourey, the enterprise expertise only plays a small part in what makes CloudBees appealing to the venture capitalists.

“A lot of the …

A recent report from market research firm Markets and Markets reveals that the cloud market is expected to grow to $121 billion dollars by 2015: a 26% compound annual growth rate from the $37 billion value in 2010.

A large proportion of the growth of the cloud services sector is being driven by rapid adoption of Software-as-a-service platforms, which are saving businesses on the cost of licensing, management, and deployment of software and hardware for productivity and collaboration.

Infrastructure-as-a-service is also expected to grow rapidly as a platform on which businesses will host their own SaaS solutions and for other business critical infrastructure deployments.

Much of the growth is being driven by larger companies that have previously been reluctant to invest in cloud infrastructure because of concerns of vendor lock-in, lax security, and the difficulty of developing cloud solutions that are tailored to their specific requirements.

As the cloud sector …