Yesterday IBM unveiled Watson Analytics, a freemium data science tool for businesses of all sizes utilising the power of Watson’s supercomputer technology.

As we reported, for a company which isn’t averse to bigging itself up, Watson Analytics appears to be a release of which Big Blue is particularly proud, with IBM exec Oliver Oursin calling it a ‘breakthrough’.

The main talking point is that Watson uses natural language to spit out its analysis, meaning everyone in the business can get results. Whether you’re in sales, marketing, or the CEO, and whether your knowledge of code, mathematics and algorithms is spotty at best, Watson Analytics aims to make your job easier.

Ask Watson a question such as ‘Which sales are likely to close?’, or a statement such as ‘Show me revenue by time period’, and it will come back with similar results in plain language, not a bunch of code.

Gene Villeneuve, European predictive & business intelligence sales and brand leader at IBM, explained to CloudTech the various types of algorithms used in Watson, from analytical techniques such as correlations, trending, forecasting, and scoring of the data, to SPSS algorithms, a data mining software application built by IBM.

“By embedding capabilities around advanced algorithms, we are giving guided analytics directly in the box for end users,” says Villeneuve. “That’s the intent: not only is it really easy to get started, but once you’re in there and having this very immersive dialogue with the data, Watson Analytics will guide you to see other things you wouldn’t have been able to see with other capabilities on the market today.”

Oliver Oursin, global predictive and business intelligence solutions, explained how the type of question asked in the front end will influence what Watson digs through in the back end.

“When you ask the question, the real language question to us, what we’re doing is trying to go after key concepts in that question,” he says. “If I say ‘can you compare the quarters and the revenue?’, you get a bar chart, or something similar. If I say ‘can you give me the trend of the revenue over the quarters?’, then I would have to bring a line chart.

“That’s a very simple example, how the analytics of the question drives the results,” he adds.

“As we go into the mathematical end of it, obviously we have a lot of algorithms in there that are used in parallel, and they’re used where they make most sense,” Oursin continues. “As we do analytics, we don’t just think of revenue. I want to understand it by geography, I want to understand it by sales, product, channel.

“We also do multi-variant analytics in the back end, which means we specifically search for combinations that drive revenue to bring you real insight.”

Watson can’t tell you whether the data is right or wrong, Oursin adds – it’s not psychic, after all – but it can tell you whether your data is good enough to help you make key business decisions.

Another key aim of Watson Analytics is to take the hassle out of data science – cutting out the middle man. When asked how it will benefit sales and marketing professionals, Oursin replies: “I would think this makes it easier in many ways.

“The first thing is, it’s very easy to touch. Using Watson Analytics, you have no pre-knowledge that’s required, you just need to understand your business, and you have to have your data. That’s the only thing you need to bring to the table.

“The fact that it’s cloud makes it very accessible,” he adds. “You don’t have to think about us sending you software, us giving you an install guide…you just connect to it and off you [go].”

Above all, IBM sees a trend developing in terms of key stakeholders and decision makers in modern business. Gone are the days when the CEO or CIO would be solely responsible for making a decision. In some companies, the marketing manager will have lots of power; in others, not. Bringing new technology into the business used to sit with IT and IT only. It all makes for a more democratic line of business approach.

“10, 15 years ago, it was really IT driving a lot of these systems, and the power sat with IT in most of those decisions,” Oursin says. “But that has changed. Today the budget, the power, the decision making sits in the business, which means they want to make a decision, and they want to act on it right away.

“And that will make it much easier for us,” he adds.

IBM has launched Watson Analytics, offering what is claimed as instant access to powerful big data visualisation and analytics capabilities to anyone in the business.

Instead of using programming languages or complex algorithms on the front end, Watson interacts with the user in natural language and comprehends key questions, including ‘What are the key drivers of my product sales?’, ‘Which benefits drive employee retention the most?’ and ‘Which deals are most likely to close?’

“Watson Analytics produces results that explain why things happened and what’s likely to happen, all in familiar business terms,” a press release explains. “And as business professionals interact with the results, they can continuously fine tune questions to get to the heart of the matter.”

A freemium version of the service is being mooted, running off the cloud and on to desktop and mobile devices. Users can input a certain amount of data for free before the collection plate is shoved under their nose – and it’s not being restricted to IBM customers, either.

“You don’t have to be an existing customer of IBM to use Watson Analytics,” Gene Villeneuve, European predictive & business intelligence sales and brand leader at IBM, told CloudTech. “We’re not constraining it by any existing customer commitments or relationship with IBM.

“Our target is to target any line of business user across large, medium, and small organisations, who want to be able to benefit from this great new capability,” he added. “We really want the whole world to be able to bask in this.”

That last quote tells you plenty about how proud IBM is of this release. Villeneuve said  in dispatches this was a ‘big day’ for the 102 year old company. A press release calls it the ‘biggest announcement in a decade as leader in analytics’. Oliver Oursin, global predictive and business intelligence solutions, told CloudTech it was a ‘breakthrough’.

Watson has lived a varied and interesting life having come to attention through beating Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings. Having been utilised in medical diagnosis to great success in the past, Watson’s capability is finding a new home – or, at least a home that’s been refurbished.

Technologies such as this, with lots of fanfare but a relatively nomadic existence – SAP’s HANA database comes to mind – could be criticised as being a ‘solution looking for a problem’. Watson Analytics blows that out of the water, according to Villeneuve.

“For us, what we’re doing with Watson Analytics is very pertinent to a market problem out there,” he said, adding: “It’s hard for the average person to be able to really fully grasp the benefit and power of the average BI product, because the products don’t necessarily guide them, or make sure that they use the right way of visualising…for representing and telling the story around data.

“Many of the tools today on the market start you off with a blank screen,” he continued. “The average business person has normal, everyday questions. Show me sales, show me top 10, show me bottom 10, show me contributions, show me growth.

“We’ve built it so it has the ability to have that natural language dialogue – and because we’ve been partnering with customers all along, we’ve got lots of customer validation [and] lots of customer input.”

IBM is currently accepting applications for Watson Analytics beta, which is expected to go live later in Q4. You can sign up here.

Managed service provider Easynet has launched a new European cloud portfolio, featuring a “hybrid by design” format in response to customer demand.

The new solution avoids vendor lock-in by offering customers the opportunity to select the most appropriate cloud solution for their requirements, and offers a 99.99% SLA.

Philip Grannum, managing director of cloud, hosting and UC services at Easynet, told CloudTech that even though customers felt the need to switch between vendors as and when, they still needed to buy in to Easynet’s ethos.

“The key to our customers is that they see the benefits of moving to an organisation such as Easynet, and most of that is due to the extra service they get over and above the technology per se,” he said.

“But they also see the benefits of working with the likes of Amazon and Azure – Azure seems to be very compelling right now with our customers – and what they’re looking for is a solution that enables them to do both.”

Easynet describes its ‘hybrid by design’ cloud as a series of multiple public cloud offerings integrated with the Easynet Enterprise cloud. Grannum sees the trend of organisations using a mix of on-premise and cloud as “only going in one direction.”

“I think the market will move towards SaaS providers, but where it is mission critical and business critical, customers will want to have the ability to know that it’s housed in the UK, or housed in France, or Amsterdam,” said Grannum.

“They want to mix and match their key applications with the right cloud for them. Sometimes that’s going to be an on-premise solution if they want really high performance from a database point of view, and other times it’ll be using an enterprise cloud like us,” he added.

Easynet’s 99.99% SLA for single site enterprise cloud services – described as “unique in the European market” according to the press bumf – seems a fair reflection on the possibilities of downtime.

The service hasn’t gone down yet, but Grannum feels the 100% SLA claim is “misleading.”

“From an engineering point of view, I like to stick with that as a base principle,” he said, adding: “You do have failures and that’s why it rounds up to 100 rather than being 100%. We’ve got large enterprise customers, we serve mission critical applications, we know that if the service goes down customers fail, so we always aspire for 100%.”

The European cloud platforms are located in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and Madrid. Easynet’s strategy differs from other vendors in that it collaborates and integrates with like-minded companies, rather than building up data centres around the globe.

The de rigeur location for a data centre is Hong Kong, with SoftLayer and Interoute setting up shop there in recent months. Yet Grannum disagrees.

“You can guarantee that if we built a platform in Hong Kong the next customer will want one in Singapore,” he argued.

“So our solution is to integrate with similar organisations to ourselves, the sort of organisations that take service exceptionally seriously, and have local support staff, as that’s a key part of our proposition,” he added.

Photo credit: theaucitron

Google has offered an olive branch to eligible startups, promising them $100,000 (£61,500) in Cloud Platform credits to get their companies off the ground.

The initiative, with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name of ‘Google Cloud Platform for Startups’, was announced at the Google for Entrepreneurs Global Partner Summit and gives companies access to the search giant’s support team 24/7, as well as access to the firm’s technical solutions team.

“This offer supports our core Google Cloud Platform philosophy,” wrote developer relations director Julie Pearl in a blog post. “We want developers to focus on code; not worry about managing infrastructure. Starting today, startups can take advantage of this offer and begin using the same infrastructure platform we use at Google.”

Not just anyone can chance their arm for Google’s bucks, however: eligible companies have to be part of an approved Accelerator, Incubator or VC fund, have less than $5m in funding, have less than $500,000 in annual revenue, and not have had any previous Cloud Platform credits.

Google isn’t alone in providing support to startups, however. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a similar initiative in place called Portfolio Package, while Rackspace pledged £250,000 for the same cause under the Rackspace Startups Programme. It’s with Amazon in mind that Google appears to have taken this philanthropic leap.

Google recently hired former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens to run its cloud platforms division

The search giant recently hired former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens to run its cloud platforms division. Stevens unexpectedly quit Red Hat at the end of last month, leading commentators to muse about his influence running Google’s cloudy operations going forward.

Reaction to the news was generally positive. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, seemingly drew inspiration from the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch for his reply:

Google offering startups $100K in cloud credits. When we started out we had to build our servers, and walk to the office up hill both ways.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) September 12, 2014

“It has been amazing to watch Snapchat send over 700 million photos and videos a day, and Khan Academy teach millions of students,” Pearl added. “We look forward to helping the next generation of startups launch great products.”

You can find out more about the Google Cloud Platform for Startups here.

Read more: Harnessing the power of Google’s cloud: Google BigQuery Analytics book extract

We’ve all been there. It might be an email address you neglected to put in your contacts book. It’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t remember it. It might be a photo, or even an important email from the boss you swore you’d put in the right folder.

Docurated, a New York and Boston based firm, feels your pain. The firm’s product lifts, shifts and sorts through a company’s content repository, using machine learning to automatically tag the most relevant, effective and important content.

“That’s really a story that’s relevant to a lot of people,” Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Docurated, tells CloudTech. “Whether you work in sales or marketing in a large organisation, you are looking and flipping through so much content it impossible for you to find that information you need – and that’s where we help customers.”

Gorbansky says his view of the company’s position in life is as “a connectivity layer between knowledge workers and their contents.” It’s knowledge and information that’s the key. Here’s the irony: as cloud storage becomes ever cheaper, to the point of no cost at all, it’s the information that you’re actually being charged for.

At least, that’s how Docurated sees it. With clients including Netflix and The Weather Channel, and in a world where data threatens to overwhelm everyone in the team, others are seeing it that way too.

“We’re seeing a world where there’s much more heterogeneity on where content is stored,” Gorbansky explains. “People have information on Box, they have information on Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, all over the place.

“The cost of information retrieval from a human productivity perspective is going through the roof,” he adds. “And that creates an enormous challenge for organisations.”

There are other options available to companies with different fingers in different pies. Some storage vendors offer capability to merge all their storage accounts into one big cloud, for instance. Yet the biggest partner for Docurated is Box, announcing integration back in June. As Box’s search functionality is limited to 10,000 characters, Docurated can go through the entire subset.

Docurated uses a variety of what it calls ‘signals’ to assess what content is relevant or not. As Gorbansky puts it: “When people are looking for content they’re specifically not looking for a document. They’re looking for something within the document, maybe even within the page, and we bring all of that to the forefront.”

These signals are inspired in part by how Google sorts its SEO rankings. “What was really brilliant about Google Pagerank is the way that they looked at the web, they realised that the more links a site had pointing to it, the more relevant that page was,” Gorbansky explains. “We’re getting the same thing with documents, but of course documents don’t have links, so you have other signals.”

The signals include how often a slide has been used – say, to decide which bio page is best – how recently a slide has been modified, as well as analytics. “You can call it data science,” Gorbansky concedes. “We apply data science to all this content to figure out which is the most interesting and the most relevant.”

Documents can be broken up incrementally, from individual slides, to individual text blocks and charts within that slide. Users can adopt a clipboard – a workspace where they can fit all their useful data. And to complete the cycle, the user can then save as a PowerPoint file, or PDF – effectively creating a new piece of content.

Yes, it’s adding to the noise, but it’s making that noise clearer and more tuneful. “Imagine trying to do this with today’s workflow, and today’s environment,” Gorbansky adds. “It’s virtually impossible.”

Docurated was in attendance at BoxWorks last week, with Gorbansky speaking at a panel session. Given the two companies work closely together, Gorbansky is in a perfect position to comment on Aaron Levie’s strategy, from the on-again off-again IPO drama to nixing cloud storage costs – and he defended the Box CEO.

“I think a lot of companies go through ups and downs,” Gorbansky explains, adding that the same happened with a previous startup of his but the company ‘persevered, and truly understood its true north.’ “The same will happen with Box,” he adds.

“One thing I will tell you is you can listen to all the stuff in the media, which has become negative recently, but if you actually talk to customers and leading CIOs, because we have many of those in common, they’re all enthusiastically investing in Box, despite all these things.

“I think that’s really what matters,” he adds.

Continuous delivery provider CloudBees has shifted its company focus, dropping the platform as a service (PaaS) of its offering to focus exclusively on open source software Jenkins.

CEO Sacha Labourey told CloudTech it was a ‘hard’ and ‘emotional’ decision to move for CloudBees, which was founded in 2010.

“We realised at the beginning of this year that Jenkins Enterprise was growing very fast, beyond our expectations, and we knew that something was going on, but it took us a bit of time to really make the conscious decision that what we had to do was strictly focus on Jenkins,” Labourey said.

“The company had a lot of strong PaaS DNA and so, to take the conscious decision to move away from that was obviously a hard decision, and even I could say an emotional decision to make.

“As soon as we decided to do that, we spent a couple of months looking at what we should do about those [PaaS] customers, what would be the best way to treat them, and as soon as we were ready we decided to move forward and do the roll-out,” he added.

With that in mind, CloudBees is retiring its PaaS Run@Cloud service – a “big shift that the company’s taking”, as Labourey put it.

 “In the last year or two we’ve seen tremendous growth towards continuous delivery,” Labourey added. “The big difference here is it’s not just about developers, but Jenkins is becoming this hub where everybody can meet – developers, DevOps, IT, they all meet around the table to set out a unified pipeline that goes from code to transaction.”

Earlier this year Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Jenkins server, became chief technical officer at CloudBees, indicating a sign of things to come.

CloudBees has also announced a partnership with Pivotal Network to collaborate in developing enterprise-grade continuous integration. Labourey, who said the two companies were in talks for “quite a long time”, notes the strategy shift to Jenkins was also key in securing this move.

“They really liked our Jenkins portfolio and offering, and what we could bring to the table, but it always kind of hard to have discussions when in your back pocket you have a PaaS and they have a PaaS – [it] led to complicated discussions,” Labourey said.

“As soon as we decided to move on, and to solely focus on Jenkins, discussions with Pivotal became extremely simple, and it was obvious for both parties that there was a clear interest in bringing each other’s value to the table,” he added.

Labourey also confirmed the current work delivering PaaS onto Verizon’s cloud, as CloudTech reported back in February, will be discontinued, although adding the two companies are still keen on working with each other.

As cloud computing becomes ever more pervasive, future models will begin to revolve around XaaS. Anything as a service, everything as a service, more as a service, call it what you will. The overall effect is that a new type of service will deliver IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in one package.

That’s the verdict of John Dixon, consulting architect at GreenPages Technology Solutions. Let’s be clear on how we define XaaS first. Dixon cited desktop as a service (DaaS) as a good example of XaaS, citing servers to run virtual desktop infrastructure (IaaS), an office suite (SaaS), maintenance and a physical endpoint for it to come together.

A CloudTech article from August 18 on that very subject proved extremely popular, garnering over 500 shares. With that in mind, we asked cloud experts on the latest ‘as a service’ culture.

Doug Clark is UK&I cloud leader at IBM. Given IBM’s chief exec Virginia Rometty previously introduced the concept of ‘IBM as a service’, he sees XaaS as a clear trend.

“There is definitely a trajectory of providing solutions as a service,” he tells CloudTech. “We’ve got business process as a service, we’ve got various consulting services, which are bundled and wrapped in that similar pay as you go context.

“Some of those services are pretty standardised, so they’re definitely cloud, they’re not just a spoof,” he adds.

A blog post from February this year argued the concept of ‘IBM as a service’, as part of Big Blue’s cloud-first rebranding operation. Robert LeBlanc, SVP software and cloud solutions, wrote at the time: “The way I see things, we’re taking the best of IBM – all of our innovations, knowledge and aspirations – and building services around them, and delivering all that value via the cloud. That’s IBM as a service.”

At the same time, however, there’s a sense that the ‘as a service’ terms are becoming outdated, and that they only serve to cause confusion.

Chris England, director of business development and marketing EMEA at Okta, wrote on the CloudTech LinkedIn group that “ultimately the ‘as-a-service’ will disappear altogether long term.”

“I don’t talk about my telephone as voice as a service, my gas and electric as energy as a service, or my online banking as money as a service,” he wrote. “Hopefully IT will evolve to become normal day-to-day terminology in the future versus the complexity we love to introduce to confuse people on very simple topics.”

Matthew Finnie, CTO at Interoute, recalls a company which advertised its USP as ‘anything over IP.’

“I said that was a ridiculous statement,” he tells CloudTech. “He said why, and I said because anything can go over IP, so why are you stating the bleeding obvious?

“He was coming from a traditional voice and telecoms background,” Finnie adds. “He said you can speak over IP…well of course you can, it’s a packet.

“Anything you can shove into a packet you can put over an IP network. Doesn’t mean it’s going to work, but it means you can put anything over it.”

Ivan Harris, cloud services manager at Eduserv, argues the ‘as a service’ model is useful for customers.

“I think people like nice pigeonholes to put things in, so you can find stuff easily,” Harris says. “I think that’s the way Gartner makes its money in defining what those pigeonholes are.

“There’s loads of –aaS, and I think the –aaS badge is useful to help you find things,” he adds. “I think it’s going to stick for some time, and it’s going to proliferate as well.”

The overall effect of XaaS would be fewer data centres, with more IT resource and power located off-premise. This will come about as the public cloud continues to grow in stature.

A recent David Linthicum thought piece, published on CloudTech, argues the private cloud’s new role as an entry point for organisations to public cloud. Finnie argues there’s similar confusion over the definition of public and private, admitting he’s “always hated” the definition of both.

“The trouble is people assume with public cloud you get that elasticity, you get that flexibility, but you don’t get security. That’s not true,” he says. “That’s you making an assumption of what public cloud is.

“Not all cloud computing platforms are purely internet-facing. The version 2 ones which are network integrated give you the option to have that public cloud interface, and experience, and elasticity, but in an entirely private domain,” he adds.

One of Dixon’s tenets for XaaS was analogising clouds with cars. When you buy a car you pay for one service, but different parts are manufactured in different places, and components can be customised to suit the buyer’s needs.

Interoute also uses the car analogy to describe its offerings, yet Finnie adds a caveat.

“When I was a kid there were loads of brands of cars,” he explains. “Now, you’ve probably got eight manufacturers worldwide.

“As an analogy it’s a useful way of thinking about it, because it says at some level…if what you’re buying is a car, which is infrastructure in the analogy, then it is so much about scale, and size, and R&D, and how sophisticated that car’s going to be,” he adds.

“If you’re going to use a cloud service provider and you’re going to buy from someone who’s a good old boy who’s bought a couple of racks and spun up a bunch of servers, it’s possibly not the smartest thing to do. You might want to use his advice, but you might want to use his advice on something else.”

So what to conclude? The concept of XaaS has been around for a long time – but then again, so has the concept of cloud. Now, the technology and business needs may be catching up with the aspirations.

After news broke of a series of leaked photos of female celebrities on Monday morning, there have been a series of developments – with one expert calling for a common sense approach to cloud data.

Ivan Harris, cloud services development director at Eduserv, explained that “things will happen” despite the best laid plans.

“Nothing is 100% secure,” he told CloudTech. “What you have to do is make best efforts and put the appropriate controls in place.

“More often than not it’s not the infrastructure that breaks down, or the security of the infrastructure. It’s normally people closer to the operations who leaks that information.”

For Harris, who has worked in software for over 30 years, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. With various opinion articles hitting the stands speculating over the security of the cloud, he was quick to point out the advantages, and call out the scaremongers.

“You can’t govern for absolutely everything,” he said. “Everything’s about risk appetite and balancing the cost of protecting the confidentiality of an asset versus the likelihood of that asset being compromised.

“It’s always a balancing act to be done; however, I would say that cloud services are inherently more secure than non-cloud alternatives.

“It’s just as probable that information could have been found on a CD that had been dropped in a bin, or somebody’s laptop that they’d end-of-lifed and put out to be scrapped.”

So is it a matter of education for users? Is it a case of knowing the cloud isn’t infallible?

“I think that for general cloud services, you have to make the assumption that the information could leak one way or another,” said Harris.

“It could just be user error,” he added. “You think you’re applying the right settings to make your information secure, but you’re not.

“So I think it is a matter of making people security conscious. Don’t assume that things are secure.”

This is all too salient now. According to the Independent Jennifer Lawrence, who has unwittingly become the spearhead of this leak, told a reporter: “My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I’m like, I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself.”

Even though the source of the leaks was originally thought of as being from Apple’s iCloud, according to security experts there is evidence that Dropbox was also used.

Rumours persisted that the hackers were able to find an exploit in the Find My iPhone API to breach the iCloud accounts, although this was something the Cupertino firm denied in an official statement.

“After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet,” the statement read.

“None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find My iPhone.

“We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved.”

Apple closed the statement by recommending users employ strong passwords and two-factor authentication. But as Graham Cluley noted in a post for Intego, this might be an issue for celebrities.

With security questions such as asking for your mother’s maiden name, or your first pet, the average user would be assured in having that information to themselves. But for celebrities, whose minutiae and humdrum remarks are splashed on a variety of sources, it could become a goldmine for hackers.

For Harris, the leaks brought a series of regularly seen characters to the surface.

“I think some common sense has to apply, and there’ll always be the scaremongers,” he said. “As technology has evolved, there are always inflection points where technology advances and there are always the naysayers who have something negative to say about it.”

As for perceptions on the cloud itself, we like the analogy security expert Raj Samani told Bloomberg: just think of the data as being on someone else’s computer.

An anonymous hacker on the 4chan site has published a series of naked photos of more than 100 celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, after reportedly hacking into the users’ iCloud accounts.

Even though the photos appeared to originate from iCloud devices – and even though 4chan users mentioned it – it’s not been confirmed that Apple’s cloud storage system provided the leak. Other theories are being banded about as to how the photos were accessed, with one report pointing the finger of blame at Dropbox’s door.

The explicit pictures – not all of which have been verified at the time of writing – were posted on 4chan before circulating on Reddit and Twitter.

Lawrence’s agent confirmed the veracity of the pictures, and threatened legal action against those responsible.

“This is a flagrant violation of privacy,” the spokesperson told the BBC. “The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”

Winstead, posting on Twitter, also confirmed the photos were of her, adding that because of their age she could “only imagine the creepy effort that went into this.”

Elsewhere, while iCloud accounts were being hacked, Google announced its Cloud Platform had received an upgraded set of security certificates.

The new documentation includes an updated ISO 27001 certificate, as well as an SOC 2 and SOC 3 Type II audit report, which can be seen in all its glory here.

“Keeping your data safe is at the core of what we do,” wrote Google Apps director of security Eran Feigenbaum in a blog post.

“These certifications, along with our existing offerings…help assure our customers and their regulators that we’re committed to keeping their data and that of their users secure, private and compliant,” he added.

In 2012, Christopher Chaney was jailed for 10 years after leaking nude pictures of actress Scarlet Johansson.

What do you make of this leak? Does this make you more concerned about the security of your cloud data?

Eduserv, the not for profit public sector cloud provider, has won a contract with Bristol City Council worth an estimated £1.5m to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud.

The contract sees Eduserv take over the day to day running of the council’s IT, with future IT services being procured in a much more flexible manner, ensuring the council doesn’t own much of its ICT.

Bristol City Council is planning on cutting about £90m in IT costs, as local governments continue to move their resources to the cloud.

“Like every council, we are faced with the challenge of delivering high quality services while reducing our costs by 30%”, said Steven Pendleton, service manager of commissioning and supplier relationship management at Bristol City Council.

He added: “The ICT market is changing rapidly, becoming much more commoditised and consumer led, where significant economies of scale are now possible.

“Moving our IT estate to the cloud will give us a more flexible cost-effective resource which can adapt to our changing needs.”

With recent news that the Digital Marketplace, the updated one stop shop for government cloud services, is close to being prepared, the portents look good according to Eduserv, a long recognised G-Cloud vendor.

Andy Powell, head of product marketing at Eduserv, told CloudTech at the time his initial reaction to the new service, which will replace the CloudStore by the end of September, was that it had “been streamlined quite nicely”, yet added the Bath-based firm was still in a “wait and see” position.

“It’s good to see consolidation across the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks,” he added.