The cloud tech IPO landscape has arguably stalled in recent years with the M&A landscape heating up alongside it – but one company looking to buck that trend is identity and management provider Okta, who officially rang the bell today after going public last month.

According to CNBC, the company’s shares went up 37% in the aftermath of its public debut, trading at around $23.

“We’re proud that today is Okta’s first day as a public company,” a statement from co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest said. “We’re all familiar with the Okta saying ‘always on’. That includes today, the day of our IPO, and each day that follows. It speaks to the mission-critical nature of our products, and acknowledges the trust that we must build with our customers every single day.”

The company’s introduction, as per its S-1 form published on March 13, details its customer base – more than 2,900 customers in over 185 countries, with 20th Century Fox, Adobe and LinkedIn among the standouts – and its cloud-centric focus.

“We believe that we have the opportunity to serve the identity needs not just of the largest companies, but of organisations of all sizes that want to safely and securely move to the cloud,” the note explains under ‘our opportunity’. “We estimate that there is at least an $18 billion global opportunity to serve organisations of all sizes by providing an integrated approach to managing and securing all of their internal identities.”

Back in February, a report from Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners, argued the ‘state of the cloud’ was in flux last year, but has since roared back. 2016’s IPOs in the cloud space – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge, and the standout, Twilio – represented the lowest figure since the financial crisis of 2008. Yet the various M&A activity alongside that suggested a serious amount of work going on underneath: Microsoft buying LinkedIn;, Oracle buying NetSuite, and so on.

Okta was notably one of the original cloud-based investments made by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In a post on the venture capital firm’s blog, Ben Horowitz wrote that Okta has become “the cloud identity company” (emphasis theirs). “Through relentless hard work, determination and ingenuity, they defeated their startup competitors and fulfilled their original vision.”  

According to the S-1, Okta’s revenue grew to $85.9 million in the 2016 fiscal year, putting alongside it net losses of $76.3 million for the same period. 

The human body is the most complex machine ever created! With a complex network of interconnected organs, millions of cells and the most advanced processor, human body is the most automated system in this planet. In this article, we will draw comparisons between working of a human body to that of a datacenter. We will learn how self-defense and self-healing capabilities of our human body is similar to firewalls and intelligent monitoring capabilities in our datacenters. We will draw parallels between human body automation to data center automation and explain different levels of automation we need to drive in data centers. This article is divided into 4 parts covering each of body main functions and drawing parallels on automation

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Cloud adoption is often driven by a desire to increase efficiency, boost agility and save money. All too often, however, the reality involves unpredictable cost spikes and lack of oversight due to resource limitations.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder of CloudHealth Technologies, will tackle the question: “How do you build a fully optimized cloud?” He will examine:
Why TCO is critical to achieving cloud success – and why attendees should be thinking holistically about cloud cost management.
The critical elements of a sound governance program (e.g., tagging, implementing lights on/lights off policies).
Real-world examples of companies that have driven cost savings, governance, and security through automation.

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The recent survey by 451 Research and Microsoft proves that investment in cloud hosting and managed services is soaring, with almost two thirds of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes aligned with value-added services. 

As the number of organisations moving towards the cloud increases, so too does the demand for the expertise, knowledge and tools that make the transition successful.

Therein lies a real challenge.

Lots of third parties can provide cloud hosting and services, but as the recent cyber breach of ABTA has shown, the downsides of a service interruption can be severe and lingering.

The choice of cloud partner is becoming more important than ever, particularly when that partner is delivering a ‘managed’ service, where they take greater responsibility for confidentiality, reliability and availability.

But who can offer the right kind of guidance, and what should organisations look for when choosing to invest in the value added services of a managed cloud provider?

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride

One of the biggest takeaways from the study was the amount of investment directed towards lowering the risk of cyber attacks, and as data regulation gets tighter, including the implementation of GDPR, security becomes a bigger issue than ever.

Companies will be obligated to disclose the extent of breaches to both regulatory bodies as well as customers, and failure to comply will result in hefty financial penalties, loss of sensitive data and a hit to company reputation.

As compliance and security become even more essential to the success of cloud journeys, companies should look to invest in service providers that are equipped to render data unintelligible to those who wish to criminally obtain it.

Services such as data encryption can provide this assurance, as well as help protect against any backlash.

Always check your mirrors

A company’s online presence is a reflection of its brand identity, and it’s important that the platforms that sustain it are always available.

As the research shows, there is a lack of skills and knowledge in-house for companies to depend on when undergoing key digital developments, so businesses should look to third parties to provide guaranteed uptime.

For any organisation looking to undergo its journey with a goal of high reliability, choosing a provider who can offer a ‘no single point of failure’ design will minimise the chance of downtime.

Give your infrastructure a regular MOT

There have been plenty of high profile cases of websites taken offline by peaks in consumer visits or criminal activity.

A reputable managed cloud provider will offer continuous auditing on resources in order to identify issues before they manifest in order to avoid more of the same.

Non-intrusive scanning for real-time network threat awareness also allows IT staff to make better decisions about risk, faster.

Invest in recovery in case of a breakdown

Sometimes a system failure is unavoidable. For these instances, most managed cloud providers will offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) in order to minimise data loss and ensure business continuity should the worst happen.

Full, continuous replication to a third party, offsite facility provides near instant recovery in the case of an outage.

Ultimately, choose the right passenger to help you navigate

The research shows that, perhaps most surprisingly, ‘premium, 24/7 support services’ is the area of managed services expected to see the biggest increase in demand in the coming year, ahead of disaster recovery and backup.

This proves that while a company puts precedence on the accessibility of their own resources, so too do they place importance on the dependability of the service provider employed to manage and guide them.

In essence, the journey to cloud can be a challenging one, particularly as new regulation comes into place.

However, choosing a hosting provider with an ‘extra mile’ ethos to service, dedicated account managers that know each company account inside out as well as the safest route means that no query or concern is too big or small along the way. 

VMware has announced it is to sell its cloud offering based on the software-driven data centre (SDDC), vCloud Air, to French cloud computing provider OVH in what was described as ‘the next step in vCloud Air’s evolution’.

OVH, with more than one million customers and 260,000 servers deployed, is a long-time VMware partner. The company was cited by analyst firm Cloud Spectator in February as the second-best infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider taking its ranking criteria of price-performance value and looking specifically at the North American market. OVH announced its US plans in March, with data centres planned for Oregon and Virginia, alongside a third in Canada.

VMware will transition vCloud Air’s US and European data centres and customer operations to OVH, with the rebranded service being known as vCloud Air Powered by OVH going forward.

“We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. “Customers will have access to OVH’s global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to.

“We remain committed to delivering our broader cross-cloud architecture that extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment,” added Gelsinger.

While vCloud Air has been going in its current guise since August 2014 – rebranded from vCloud Hybrid Service which first appeared in May 2013 – the underlying themes behind this announcement go back further. At VMworld Europe 2012, Gelsinger ‘announced the company’s move to become a heterogeneous data centre and cloud management vendor’, as Ovum analyst Roy Illsley put it, as well as a greater shift towards SDDC. “The SDDC has long been a vision of VMware, but until now has only really focused on the compute resources in the data centre,” Illsley wrote.

Since then, VMware, as part of EMC, was acquired by Dell for $67 billion – which remains one of the biggest pure tech acquisitions ever – while as Barb Darrow observes for Fortune, the previous acquisition of Virtustream by EMC appeared to give VMware’s cloud offering another competitor from within its own ecosystem.

Most recently, VMware has announced partnerships with IBM and, tellingly, Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to figures from October last year, 1,000 joint customers had moved their VMware environments to IBM’s cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS is expected to become available from ‘mid 2017’ onwards. As this publication pointed out at VMworld in Las Vegas back in August, the company’s strategy was all around hybrid and becoming ‘an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds.’ In other words – don’t be too surprised by this latest announcement.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2017, with financial details not disclosed.

An overwhelming 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020, according to the latest prognostication from analyst firm Gartner.

The forecast, which appears in a new report titled ‘Predicts 2017: Infrastructure Services Become Hybrid Infrastructure Services’, notes the duel forces of cloud and industrialised services growth and the decline of traditional data centre outsourcing as the primary factors.

Gartner argues that last year, traditional worldwide data centre outsourcing, alongside infrastructure utility services (IUS), represented 49% of the global data centre services market, priced at $154 billion. By 2020, the numbers will swell to $228bn, but the charge towards cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hosting will see the traditional base fall to 35%. Observant readers will note that the size of the market will increase – $75.46bn last year compared with $79.8bn in 2020 – but like on-prem versus cloud-based enterprise collaboration, it is an inexorable shift.

“As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organisations will shift toward more industrialised, less tailored options,” said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner in a statement. “Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.”

Maarten van Montfoort, VP north-west Europe at IT provider Comparex, makes a similar argument, noting the importance of avoiding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ migration. “Many company’s existing infrastructure are currently designed for ‘business as usual’ operations with a combination of dated licensing models not designed for cloud and a lack of application compatibility,” he said.

“Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model, and each organisation’s journey will be different,” added van Montfoort. “For example: can legacy, business-critical applications – not built with cloud in mind – be re-architected for the cloud, or do they need to stay on premise? Should the organisation be seeking out a new SaaS product to fit their needs? And does the organisation have the specific skills in-house that it will need to do this?

“These are all important considerations if organisations are to maximise the ROI of hybrid cloud.”