Google promised that its cloud deals were becoming larger and more strategic – and the company can now count on Domino’s Pizza, SoundCloud and PwC among its customers after posting solid financials yesterday.

Total revenues across all of Alphabet for the three months ended June 30 were at $32.7 billion (£25bn), an increase of 26% compared with the second quarter of 2017. Google’s revenues are put into several buckets; ‘other’ revenues, of which Google Cloud is a part, was at $4.4bn, a 36% increase on the previous year, and similar to the previous quarter’s analysis.

The company is also putting its money where its mouth is with regards to investment; the largest number of headcount additions in the most recent quarter were in Google’s cloud business, with the firm bolstering its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

In an earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai elaborated on the company’s cloudy momentum. “It’s a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centres and machine learning,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We have developed these over many years and they power our own services in the cloud and are now helping others.”

Take Kubernetes as an example of that. Back in June, at the Cisco Live US event, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene took to the stage to explain her company’s partnership with Cisco and how the two firms were combining in making Kubernetes deployments easier for organisations. Naturally, Greene noted how Google was – and remains – a key adopter of the container tool, being the original designer of the technology.

Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, noted – as Google’s strategy has been – the importance of building out an ecosystem with cloud at the epicentre. “Given the core capabilities that we are building upon, our technical infrastructure, security app, machine learning, analytical tools, our view is that we’re addressing a rapidly growing market with the core pillars that are needed to win,” Porat told analysts.

“What has been the recurring theme that we’ve talked about… is the need to further build out our go-to-market capabilities and ensure that we’ve got the functional requirements that enterprise customers deserve,” Porat added. “So it’s really looking at the scale of the opportunity [and] the pace of investment that can be done effectively and therefore position us well.”

Yet while Google has been making significant strides over the past 12 months, there is still plenty of manoeuvring to be done yet. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Google ranks no higher than third in any region; apart from in APAC where Alibaba is the second biggest player, it remains an AWS, Microsoft and Google 1-2-3 in the key geographies.

This was a fact noted by Pichai responding to an analyst question around an inflection point in the industry. “For sure, I do think there is an inflection point – and that’s why it feels far from [a] zero sum game,” he said, adding that there was a ‘lot of opportunity’ in multi-cloud. “I think all the major players are definitely seeing traction.”

With Google Next kicking off in San Francisco later today, there was a sense of the company keeping some of its cards close to its chest. Yet a couple of news lines have come through.

A blog post from Tariq Shaukat, president of partners and industry platforms, discussed how financial services firms HSBC and PayPal were taking steps with Google’s cloud. Regular readers of this publication may recall that the former made an appearance at Google Next last March – so what’s new? Rather like the recent customer wins AWS has announced, it’s all about machine learning as a differentiator. In the case of HSBC, it’s being used to detect potential fraud; for PayPal, it’s about adding intelligence to customer experiences.

Expect plenty of discussion and use cases on this in the coming two days – as well as blockchain. A session on Tuesday discusses ‘distributed ledger technology partnerships on Google Cloud’, while a partner blog post, under the ‘unveiling new technology integrations with Google Cloud’ banner, mentions DLT solutions, as well as potential integrations with Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.

Among Google’s other highlights this quarter were launches in Finland and Switzerland, as well as the acquisition of enterprise cloud migration tool Velostrata.

DXWorldEXPO LLC announced today that the upcoming DXWorldEXPO | DevOpsSUMMIT | CloudEXPO New York will feature 10 companies from Poland to participate at the “Poland Digital Transformation Pavilion” on November 12-13, 2018. Polish Digital Transformation companies which will exhibit at CloudEXPO | DevOpsSUMMIT | DXWorldEXPO include All in Mobile, dhosting, Cryptomage, Perfect Gym, Polcom, Apius Technologies, Aplisens, ELZAB SA, TELDAT, and Rebug.io.

read more

Joe Curtis

If your organisation has been considering containers, then security concerns will almost certainly be paramount. Alert Logic, an information security provider, thinks it may have the answer.

The company has launched what is claimed to be the industry’s first intrusion detection system for containers which aims to ‘bring organisations powerful new capabilities to inspect network traffic for malicious activity targeting containers’, in the company’s words.

As Alert Logic is an AWS partner, this release, as part of the company’s Cloud Defender and Threat Manager solutions, focuses on containers deployed on AWS. This does of course include Docker, Kubernetes and CoreOS, as well as Amazon’s Elastic Container Service.

The product aims to snaffle malicious activity at the network layer providing greater visibility into container attacks. According to 451 Research, organisations are delaying container adoption because of security concerns, despite a global market which could top $4 billion by 2022.

“Without real-time detection capabilities, attackers and intruders can lurk within containers installing trojans, malware, ransomware and cryptominers or even corrupting and exfiltrating data,” said Chris Noell, Alert Logic senior vice president of engineering in a statement. “Network detection is critical to providing the visibility into container attacks that other approaches miss.”

As this publication has previously explored, there have been various examples of organisations leaving applications and instances open. In February, security researchers from RedLock revealed that hackers had been running crypto mining scripts on unsecured Kubernetes instances owned by Tesla, while further research found Weight Watchers had also left Kubernetes instances open.

In June, a survey from CyberArk found that IT jobs with the word ‘Kubernetes’ in the title shot up year over year – so the need for security is evident. According to Lacework, who revealed the Weight Watchers snafu, organisations need to perform a few tasks to get up to speed with a Kubernetes security policy. Companies need to build a pod security policy, configure pods to run real-only file systems, and restrict privilege escalation, among other tips.

You can find out more about Alert Logic’s container security tools here.

The vast majority of Asia Pacific organisations remain early in their cloud maturity according to IDC – with either ‘ad hoc’ or ‘opportunistic’ initiatives the order of the day for now.

The findings appear in the analyst firm’s latest IDC MaturityScape Benchmark, for Asia Pacific nations excluding Japan, and show that while progress is slow, moves are being made. More than 20% of organisations have moved from ‘ad hoc’ to ‘opportunistic’ over the past two years, yet more than two in five (42.7% and 42.5% respectively) remain there.

Only 10% of organisations are in the next phase, ‘repeatable’, with 4% and 0.7% respectively in the further advanced ‘managed’ and ‘optimised’ brackets. The latter stages are where organisations have their cloud initiatives at an industrial level and, at the highest stage, being able to deliver innovation and transformation.

Yet moving from exploration and collaboration to innovation and transformation requires significant investment in technology, tools, processes and skills, with many of the skills and resources located in large enterprises and IT service providers.

As a result, cloud adoption requires faster time to value and agility. “Speed and agility has become the key drivers for cloud adoption. More organisations in Asia Pacific are adopting a cloud-first strategy such that cloud infrastructure has now become a preferred option for IT modernisation,” said William Lee, IDC Asia/Pacific cloud services research director.

“Organisations need more consistent, standardised, and available automated cloud resources to enable developers and LOB teams to execute at speed and cost,” Lee added. “Workloads portability and application delivery across multiple clouds will be key to build a robust cloud services delivery platform for agility.”

According to the most recent report from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) back in April, Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong as the most cloud-ready Asia Pacific nation. New Zealand, Japan, and Taiwan rounded off the top five.

One nation which continues to struggle in the ACCA analysis, however, is China. Despite IDC saying in February that the country will be the biggest public cloud spender in Asia Pacific aside from Japan, and despite the dominance from Alibaba in the Asia Pacific public cloud market, the country was placed at #13 out of 14 nations. At the time, the report stressed broadband quality and connectivity as its key weaknesses, recognising the difficulty in connecting such a large territory.

Opinion There’s no denying that firms out there are experiencing a cloud skills gap.

Of course, with new technology, there logically follows a learning curve for the workforce at the coalface and the future workforce in training to traverse. But what I am suggesting is that this skills gap is not being found across the board. In fact, many firms were poised to move with the curve and are already benefiting from this thriving new market.

In the telecoms sector, for example, we’re seeing a different picture from elsewhere – and the cloud phenomenon has been a very positive movement.

For starters, due to the surge in demand for skilled workers, a whole new stream of opportunities for firms like ours to work with cloud providers has opened up. And our engineers are perfectly placed to transfer their skills into this new arena as the fundamental skillsets required of them remain in the cloud era.

We have always prioritised continuous learning at Exchange Communications as a matter of course and, as such, any peripheral training which supports our cloud partnerships is also being carried out as a matter of course. Thanks, then, to our adaptability and desire to explore this exciting new field, we’ve successfully diversified our services and positioned ourselves as an expert partner for the delivery of third party cloud solutions like ACS Select.

We’re very much moving with the curve and we’re proud to be working with global leaders Avaya and BT Wholesale on delivering innovative cloud-based solutions.

ACS Select represents the next generation of Avaya cloud solutions and will optimise communications for a range of leading business entities throughout the UK. And with such exciting projects out there, our teams are energised and eager to grow our cloud business streams. The cloud is very much the future for telecoms too.

It is important to remember that technology by its very nature is always evolving and with all major technological developments, there are nuances to consider.

Matters of cloud security and compliance have been very much in the spotlight, especially in the shadow of GDPR. However, I believe in every challenge there lies an opportunity. I dispute that there is a universal skills gap and where firms do experience gaps which is negatively impacting their bottom line, there are third party solutions out there that are worth considering to reduce the deficit. Firms can also take positive steps to retrain existing staff, recruit new people with new cloud skills, or use external partners to ease the burden to take action to close the gap quickly.

It’s becoming a rather shop-worn tale – but for another quarter, Microsoft has cited cloud success as key to its financial results.

And why not? For Q418, Microsoft posted revenues of $30.1 billion (£23.1bn), an increase of 17% on this time last year. Total revenue for the year was $110.4bn, an uptick of 14% on 2017. For the various buckets into which Microsoft divulges its revenues, ‘intelligent cloud’ was at $9.6bn – up from $7.8bn the previous year – while ‘productivity and business processes’ saw a 13% rise to $9.7bn.

As ever, Microsoft does not disclose revenues for individual products, but instead gives a ballpark figure of their improvement. Azure was the big winner, going up 89% year over year, while revenue in server products and cloud services – a part of the ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – went up 26%. LinkedIn revenues went up 37% year on year, with sessions growth rising 41%, while Office commercial products and cloud services revenue went up 10%.

Fielding an analyst question in the earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said there were a variety of accelerants for Azure, from AI services requiring storage and data, to tier one workloads.

“Our hybrid value proposition really has continued to resonate,” said Nadella. “So that means there’s a bunch of workloads that are migrating to the cloud – people use Azure Stack plus Azure. So that continues to drive a lot of IaaS growth for us as people are looking basically to lift and shift a lot of their current data centre workloads.”

Nadella added in prepared remarks that the results reflected his vision towards an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, from team reorganisation to product execution.

“Our opportunity has never been greater,” he said. “We will continue to innovate and invest across our solution areas in serving our customers and their unmet and unarticulated needs.

“With this tremendous opportunity comes great responsibility. We’re relentlessly working to instil trust in technology across everything we do.”

Highlights for Microsoft in the most recent quarter included data centre expansion, first in Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Australia and New Zealand, as well as the general launch of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Most recently, Walmart signed a five year strategic deal to use many of Microsoft’s cloud services.

You can take a look at Microsoft’s full financial report here.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Clare Hopping

Each day, Internet users generate an average of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, according to recent research from Domo. Per minute, The Weather Channel receives more than 18 million forecast requests, Netflix users stream almost 70,000 hours of video, and Google conducts 3.5 million searches.

90% of all data available today was created in the last two years. As a result, an ever-increasing amount of enterprise data is being stored in the public cloud, both exclusively and hybrid. But it seems not everything is as smooth as we want it to be in the paradise. There have been various cloud horror stories that forced us to think: how safe are we in the cloud?

Remember when hundreds of companies exposed PII as well as private emails (including confidential business emails) to the world through Google Groups back in 2017. A small settings error was to be blamed for such a massive data leakage and companies like Fusion Media Group, IBM's Weather Company, Freshworks, and SpotX etc. were affected by this security issue.

In another incident, Stanford University too suffered, not once, but in three separate data breaches. The data security breaches, which was caused by “misconfigured permissions” exposed not only personal employee information (including their salary information and Social Security numbers) but also student sexual assault reports and confidential financial aid reports. In fact, there are many such cloud data security horror stories, enough to give you nightmares.

The cloud is dangerous

It is true that cloud environment offers the benefits of flexibility, availability, and low costs etc. But at the same time data storage in the cloud is becoming an increasing concern for anyone who use file storing and data sharing tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Drive, and the likes, when it comes to keeping their information private.

Data in the cloud is stored in an encrypted form, meaning they are encoded with a specific encryption key without which the stored files look like gibberish. A hacker needs to crack these keys to read the information. The most important factor, therefore, is: Who has the key? And this factor is often responsible for most data security breaches.

In most cases, the commercial cloud storage systems keep the key themselves so that their systems can see and process user data. Moreover, these systems can access the key as a user logs in using his/her password. While this is perhaps the most convenient way for cloud storage systems, it is also less secure. Any flaw in the service provider’s security practice can leave the users’ data vulnerable. Dropbox, for example, has been severely criticized for its security and privacy controversies.

Again, there are some cloud services that allow users to upload and download files only through service-specific client applications, which also include encryption functions. These service providers allow users to keep their encryption keys themselves and are therefore a bit more secure than the others; however, they aren’t perfect and there are chances that their own apps might be hacked and compromised, allowing the intruder to access your files.

How to protect yourself and your data

While there is no way you can ensure that your information is safe on the cloud, there are some protective measures that you can take to deal the issue of cloud privacy. Here are 3 data protection tips to reduce the risk of your cloud experience.

1. Encrypt your data and use encrypted cloud services

As mentioned earlier, cloud storage services that offer local encryption and decryption of data alongside storage and backup are safer options than those who keep the encryption keys to themselves. Spideroak, for example, has a “zero-knowledge” privacy policy, meaning neither the service providers nor server administrators have access to your files. Similarly, use virtual private networks that keep your information encrypted and hidden from intruders and do not store or track your data when you use their services. This ExpressVPN review, for instance, explains how the company has a strict “No Logging” policy to ensure an optimal user experience.

In addition, to add an additional layer of security to your files, you can encrypt your data before uploading them onto the cloud. There are many software that allows you to encrypt you file and make them password-protected before moving them to the cloud.

2. Backup your data locally

Always have electronic backups for your data so that you can access them even if the one on the cloud gets lost or corrupted. You can either keep it in an external storage device or in some other cloud storage. However, the former is perhaps a better option as you can access them even without Internet connectivity.

In addition, avoid keeping your sensitive information such as passwords, Social Security number, credit/debit card details, banking information, or even your intellectual property like patents and copyrights etc. in the cloud. These kind of information, if compromised, can result in potential data leakage.

3. Have strong passwords

Although you might have heard this before, making your password stronger is perhaps one of the best ways to safeguard your files stored in the cloud. Even the U.S. government has revamped its password recommendations. The days of picking your favorite phrase as your password and replacing a few characters with symbols are practically over. Also, stop doubling your one password for other services.

Instead, choose long, weird string of words as your password and add a combination of special characters, some capital letters, or numbers to make it stronger. Most data leakage happen due to easy to guess passwords. If required, test if your password on the safety of your computer. Another good practice is to change your password is every 90 days or less. This practice will also help you keep the internal intruders away, thus avoiding workplace breaches.

Conclusion

Keeping your data safe on the cloud is all about remaining secure, vigilant and resilient. Have a multi layered data security system in place and continue monitoring to ensure your systems are still secure. However, if you still feel your data is under threats of breaching, take control and quickly address the issue to recover before it causes a havoc. Don’t just rely on your cloud service providers’ security assurances. Always have your own security measures in place from the beginning. After all – it is better to be safe than sorry.