In very short order, the term “Blockchain” has lost an incredible amount of meaning. With too many jumping on the bandwagon, the market is inundated with projects and use cases that miss the real potential of the technology. We have to begin removing Blockchain from the conversation and ground ourselves in the motivating principles of the technology itself; whether it is consumer privacy, data ownership, trust or even participation in the global economy, the world is faced with serious problems that this technology could ultimately help us in at least partially solving. But if we do not unpack what is real and what is not, we can lose sight of the potential.

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Cloud computing is a goal aspired to by all organizations, yet those in regulated industries and many public sector organizations are challenged in adopting cloud technologies. The ability to use modern application development capabilities such as containers, serverless computing, platform-based services, IoT and others are potentially of great benefit for these organizations but doing so in a public cloud-consistent way is the challenge.

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There are plenty of new jobs being created in the cloud sector – but organisations need to think long-term around securing the cloud skills their business needs.

That is according to a new report from UK technical recruiter Experis. The company, whose latest Tech Cities Job Watch focuses on the cloud sector, explores the skills required as well as the employers who may be looking for them.

According to the report, Google offers the most attractive salary out of the four biggest cloud providers from the Q2 data, with £71,701. This is just ahead of AWS (£70,090), followed by IBM (£68,251) and Microsoft Azure (£64,647). For contractors, AWS, with £502 per day, has the best rates, ahead of IBM (£492), Azure (£471) and Google (£445).

The vast majority of roles advertised in the UK however come from the big two. AWS, with more than half (54%) of all jobs advertised, and Azure (41%) made up 95% of postings, with Google (4%) and IBM (1%) severely trailing.

The report gives five takeaways when it comes to businesses looking for the right cloud skills; be willing to offer attractive remuneration; offer the opportunity to upgrade existing skillsets; cross-train your staff, with SQL and MySQL cited as transferable skills; consider outsourcing; and address the diversity imbalance.

This publication has long-since explored the problem of the cloud skills gap, with various reasons blamed as to why supply outstrips demand. According to a study from Skytap published in June, organisations can be ‘their own worst enemy’ in this regard, with many wanting to migrate to the cloud through refactoring or rewriting existing applications – thus requiring the highest level of IT skill.

According to Firebrand Training technical writer Alex Bennett, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), and serverless architectures are among the key skills employees need in 2018 to be noticed – but also noting the cross-sector skill sets of Experis. “The key to employability in today’s cloud jobs market is to gain cross-platform skills,” Bennett wrote. “By transferring your knowledge between cloud platforms, you’ll diversify your skillset and boost your employability in 2018.”

“In spite of the difficulties, business models are becoming increasingly reliant on the cloud to function,” wrote Dave Hannah, Experis brand leader in his foreword to the report. “As a result, demand for cloud talent is soaring, as employers recognise that they need to recruit specialists to lead adoption and integration.

“Since cloud adoption is only set to increase in the years ahead, we can expect the war for talent to intensify,” added Hannah. “In a market like this, it’s important that organisations take a long-term view of how they will stay ahead of the competition and secure the skills their business needs.”

You can read the full Experis report here (email required).

• 71% of enterprises globally predict their investments in data and analytics will accelerate in the next three years and beyond
• 57% of enterprises globally have a Chief Data Officer, a leadership role that is pivotal in helping to democratise data and analytics across any organisation
• 52% of enterprises are leveraging advanced and predictive analytics today to provide greater insights and contextual intelligence into operations
• 41% of all enterprises are considering a move to cloud-based analytics in the next year
• Cloud computing (24%), big data (20%), and AI/machine learning (18%) are the three technologies predicted to have the greatest impact on analytics over the next five years
• Just 16% of enterprises have enabled at least 75% of their employees to have access to company data and analytics

These and many other fascinating insights are from MicroStrategy’s latest research study, 2018 Global State of Enterprise Analytics Report.  You can download a copy here (PDF, 44 pp., opt-in). The study is based on surveys completed in April 2018 with 500 globally-based enterprise analytics and business intelligence professionals on the state of their organisations’ analytics initiatives across 20 industries. Participants represented organisations with 250 to 20,000 employees worldwide from five nations including Brazil, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. For additional details on the methodology, please see the study here. The study’s results underscore how enterprises need to have a unified data strategy that reflects their growth strategies and new business models’ information needs.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

Driving greater process and cost efficiencies (60%), strategy and change (57%) and monitoring and improving financial performance (52%) are the top three ways enterprises globally are using data and analytics today

The study found that enterprises are also relying on data and analytics to gain greater insights into how current products and services are used (51%), managing risk (50%) and attain customer growth and retention (49%). Across the five nations surveyed, Japan leads the world in the use of data and analytics to drive process and cost efficiencies (65%). UK-based enterprises lead all nations in their use of data and analytics to analyse how current products and services are being used.  The report provides graphical comparisons of the five nations’ results.

Cloud computing, big data, and AI/machine learning are the three technologies predicted to have the greatest global impact on analytics over the next five years

Japanese enterprises predict cloud computing will have the greatest impact on the future of analytics (28%) across the five nations’ enterprises interviewed. AI/Machine Learning is predicted to have the greatest impact on analytics in the U.K. (26%) globally as is Big Data in Germany (29%). Please see the study for country-specific prioritisation of technologies.

52% of enterprises are leveraging advanced and predictive analytics today to provide greater insights and contextual intelligence into operations

Additional leverage areas include distribution of analytics via e-mail and collaboration tools (49%), analytics embedded in other apps including Salesforce (44%) and mobile productivity apps (39%). Japanese enterprises lead the world in their adoption of advanced and predictive analytics (60%). German enterprises lead the world in the adoption of analytics for collaboration via e-mail and more real-time data and knowledge-sharing methods (50%).

59% of enterprises are using big data analytics, leading all categories of intelligence applications 

Enterprise reporting (47%), data discovery (47%), mobile productivity apps (44%) and embedded apps (42%) are the top five intelligence applications in use globally by enterprises today. Big Data’s dominance in the survey results can be attributed to the top five industries in the sampling frame is among the most prolific in data generation and use. Manufacturing (15%) is the most data-prolific industry on the planet. Additional industries that generate massive amounts of data dominate the survey’s demographics including software technology-based businesses (14%), banking (13%), retail (11%), and financial services/business services (6%).

27% of global enterprises prioritise security over any other factor when evaluating a new analytics vendor

The three core attributes of a scalable, comprehensive platform, ease of use, and a vendor’s products having an excellent reputation are all essential. Enterprises based in four of the five nations also prioritise security as the most critical success factor they evaluate potential analytics vendors to do business with. Enterprise scalability is most important in the U.S., with 26% of enterprises interviewed saying this is the most important priority in evaluating a new analytics vendor.

Data privacy and security concerns (49%) is the most formidable barrier enterprises face in gaining more effective use of their data and analytics

Enterprises from four of the five nations say data privacy and security are the most significant barrier they face in getting more value from analytics. In Japan, the greatest barrier is access limited to data across the organisation (40%).

41% of all enterprises globally are considering a move to the cloud in the next year

64% of U.S.-based enterprises are considering moving to a cloud-based analytics platform or solution in the next year. The U.S. leads enterprises from all five nations in planned cloud-based analytics cloud adoption as the graphic below illustrates.

Karl Zimmerman started his web hosting company in 1998 at the age of 14 years old in his bedroom in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin as a hobby to feed Karl’s passion for internet technology. While attending Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, that company evolved from a hobby to a multimillion dollar IT company that today provides thousands of clients with flexible cloud environments, infrastructure hosting, and a full suite of reliable managed and security services. Through it all, Karl’s passion for technology remains, serving as the cornerstone of Steadfast’s principles aimed at helping customers achieve success.

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Jim leads Wasabi’s product management, sales engineering, and customer support efforts. As a veteran of multiple startups and large enterprise organizations, Jim has deep experience in developing, delivering, and supporting products and services that provide security, scalability, and reliability to customers and partners.

Prior to Wasabi, Jim served in product management and sales/support engineering roles at Oracle (via Acme Packet and Covergence), Ciena (via WaveSmith Networks), Lucent Technologies (via Ascend Communications and Cascade Communications) and GTE. Jim holds a BSEE from Northeastern University and a MBA from Babson College.

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Google Cloud has announced the launch of a managed cloud-hosted hardware security module (HSM) service – joining Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in this security benchmark.

The Cloud HSM will enable customers to host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified HSMs, according to a company blog post.

To put this in perspective, the highest level for the FIPS 140-2 standard is Level 4, which aims to “provide a complete envelope of protection around the cryptographic module with the internet of detecting and responding to all unauthorised attempts at physical access.” Level 3, instead, requires “a high probability of detecting and responding to attempts at physical access, use or modification of the cryptographic module.”

Cloud HSM is tightly integrated with Google’s Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which enables data protection in services such as BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage and DataProc with a hardware-protected key.

The move came about, according to product manager Il-Sung Lee, because customers wanted more options to protect sensitive information and meet compliance mandates. This is despite Google claiming to be the only cloud provider that encrypts all customer data at rest.

“For those of you managing compliance requirements, Cloud HSM can help you meet regulatory mandates that require keys and crypto operations be performed within a hardware environment,” wrote Lee. “In addition to using FIPS 140-2 certified devices, Cloud HSM will allow you to verifiably attest that your cryptographic keys were created within the hardware boundary.”

Some may consider that this has been a long time coming for Google; Microsoft announced Azure Key Vault, a cloud-hosted HSM-backed service for managing cryptographic keys, as far back as the start of 2015. AWS’ CloudHSM tool is also widely documented.

Yet Google’s cloud operations have certainly been innovative elsewhere of late. Earlier this month the company announced the launch of pre-packaged AI services, around contact centres and talent acquisition, as well as supporting NVIDIA’s Tesla P4 GPUs, for graphics-intensive and machine learning applications.

Find out more about Google Cloud HSM beta here.

Microsoft continues to hold a solid lead in the enterprise SaaS market ahead of Salesforce – but even though the market can be considered mature there is plenty more potential to come.

That is the key finding from the latest note by Synergy Research. The analysis, which comes from Q2 data, notes that the enterprise SaaS market is new generating $20 billion in quarterly revenues for vendors. Microsoft holds 17% of the overall market, with Salesforce the nearest contender and the only other company to hold more than 10% share.

Microsoft is also the fastest growing company with 45% annual growth. Oracle, with just over 5% overall share, saw 43% growth, with SAP (36%), Adobe (32%) and Salesforce (25%) all solid.

While everyone is seeing solid growth, it also plays into the fact that the market is somewhat fragmented with different areas for growth. Per the company’s figures from this time last year, Microsoft, Cisco and Google dominate collaboration, with Salesforce, Microsoft and Zendesk in CRM and Oracle, SAP and Infor for ERP.

“There is a fascinating battle for SaaS playing out, with traditional enterprise software vendors slugging it out with born in the cloud vendors like Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow and Dropbox,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “The latter group are helping to rapidly transform the market, but the more traditional players like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM still have a huge base of on-premise software customers that they can convert to a SaaS-based consumption model.

“Meanwhile Cisco and Google too are making ever-bigger inroads into the SaaS market, via Cisco’s collaboration apps and software vendor acquisitions and Google’s G Suite,” added Dinsdale.

Looking at the most recent figures, IBM last month announced a third consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with cloud revenue up 20% and representing almost a quarter of the company’s total revenue. From SAP’s perspective, the company raised its 2020 outlook, having previously praised ‘stellar cloud bookings’ earlier this year.