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Contrasting fortunes in cloud storage this week: Google has tempted its user base with an extra 2 gigabytes of cloud storage if they have their security settings correctly configured, while the StreamNation and CudaDrive services are to shut down in the coming months.

StreamNation was launched in November 2013 with the aim of being the “first personal library in the cloud”, but the company says it hit a roadblock, and is now moving towards Project Noah, originally a side project launched in 2015 which aims to take the pain out of uploading to the cloud.

“While uploading documents is pretty fast through a normal internet connection, uploading heavy files takes a lot of time,” wrote Jonathan Benassaya, CEO and founder of StreamNation, in a blog post entitled ‘Toward a new chapter’.

“We tested different solutions to try and overcome this,” he added. “For a while, we would ship some of our users a hard drive, but we found hard disk drives were unable to sustain more than two deliveries. We also tried to have different data centres across the globe, but while we’ve experienced improved performances, it was not enough.”

For CudaDrive and Copy, a service provided by Barracuda Networks, the “difficult” decision came about after a shift in business focus.

“While this is a big change, the path forward is an exciting one as the CudaDrive engineering team will be joining forces with that Barracude backup team to accelerate the key initiatives for that product,” wrote Barracuda VP and GM storage business Rod Mathews in a company blog, adding: “There is a huge amount of opportunity in backup, data protection and business continuity features in the cloud, and adding the talented people from the CudaDrive team will allow us to more quickly and efficiently deploy new features and satisfy market and customer demands.”

On the other side of the coin, Google is dangling a 2GB carrot to users who check their security settings in line with Safer Internet Day. The move echoes the comments Brian Taptich, CEO of Bitcasa, when he told this publication back in November that competing with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google on their own terms is akin to a “suicide mission” after the former shuttered its unlimited OneDrive service.

StreamNation will be discontinued on March 8, while CudaDrive will shut down on May 1.

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Only one in five companies say they are confident of complying with the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to new research released by Netskope.

Worryingly the research, which polled more than 500 businesses, found a similar number (21%) expect their cloud providers to handle compliance obligations on their behalf – a fact which is not the case according to the wording of the GDPR.

Only 7% of businesses polled said they had a solution in place for dealing with unsanctioned apps, while 29% of IT professionals surveyed said they were aware employees used “some” or “many” unauthorised apps. Netskope argues that cloud apps present a particular challenge for organisational compliance because they create unstructured data. In particular, the rise of mobility and the bring your own device (BYOD) culture leads to data which is outside the organisation’s direct control, and again a risk to compliance.

Eduard Meelhuysen, Netskope VP EMEA, warned: “The GDPR will have far-reaching consequences for both cloud-consuming organisations and cloud vendors. With the ratification of this piece of legislation imminent, the race is on for IT security teams who now have two years to comply. The significant scope of these reforms means that businesses have their work cut out to ensure compliance in time for the EU’s deadline.”

The advice for organisations, Netskope argues, is to first of all conduct an audit to see which cloud apps, sanctioned or otherwise, are in use. Almost nine in 10 cloud apps reviewed were found to not be enterprise-ready, lacking SLAs, privacy and security certifications among others.

In the meantime, despite the warning for cloud providers some are taking steps to make the transition easier for companies. Netskope is launching a cloud compliance and remediation service, while as this publication previously reported, iland is investing in a separate compliance arm of its organisation.

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This is not the most surprising news you will hear today: a note published by Synergy Research argues Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) domination of the cloud infrastructure market continues. The Seattle giant held 31% of the worldwide market in 2015, the researchers argue, with Microsoft (9%), IBM (7%) and Google (4%) trailing.

Despite the yawning gap between the market leader and the rest, all four companies continue to grow ahead of the overall rate, as Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale argues the big four are “continuing to run away with the market.” The second tier vendors, which include Salesforce, Rackspace, Oracle, Alibaba, and Fujitsu among others, are what the research firm claims as either niche players, general IT service providers, or companies which lack the scale or focus to really challenge the top vendors.

Picture credit: Synergy Research Group

As was reported in July with the last figures, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google continue to control more than half of the overall cloud infrastructure market. Microsoft and Google have the highest growth rates among the market leaders, at 124% and 108% year on year respectively, but are making a minimal dent in AWS’ lead, with 63% yearly growth.

Synergy argues quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, including IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid cloud, are approaching $7 billion, with trailing 12 month revenues at more than $23 billion.

Opinions on the IaaS market, which has shown a relatively unchanging growth pattern for the past couple of years, range from those who think it’s a three horse race to those who think the race has long been run. Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, told this publication in July there will only be Amazon, Google and Microsoft – as everyone else will eventually run out of money.

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For many US-centric cloud providers, Europe is quickly becoming a fierce battleground for their business. Earlier this week, Oracle announced plans to recruit up to 1400 cloudy salespeople across EMEA, while data centres are popping up all over the continent, from Microsoft’s commitment to the UK by the end of 2016 to IBM SoftLayer opening a data centre in Italy last year.

With two UK data centres, in London and Manchester respectively, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider iland is acutely aware of the issues European customers want to get solved in terms of latency and, more importantly, data sovereignty. Monica Brink, who has recently taken up the post of EMEA marketing director at the Houston-based firm, tells CloudTech of the issues underlying the data sovereignty scares.

“It’s obviously very important for European customers, that whole data sovereignty issue, and that’s where we noticed a real difference between our European and North American customer database,” she explains. “With all of the hacking attacks we’ve seen, and natural disasters over the last year, there is a very keen focus on advanced security, things like vulnerability scanning, encryption, intrusion detection, and the cloud provider being able to prove they are meeting all of those regulations for the customer.”

The problem is, however, that the customer is sometimes hard to please. Research conducted by iland back in June found that, in two in five cases, customers argued their cloud provider “doesn’t know [them] or [their] company.” Brink argues that many of the larger scale IaaS public cloud vendors are ‘high on functionality but low on support, transparency and visibility’, but with data sovereignty and compliance, the issue is far more complex.

“It’s making sure they’re protecting their own customers’ data, they’re following all those rules on opting in and opting out, they know exactly where their customers’ data is at any point in time, and that they have assurance from their cloud providers that it’s not across different data centre borders,” says Brink.

As a result, iland has invested significantly in a compliance professional services arm, headed by director of compliance Frank Krieger. Writing for this publication in January on changes to the Safe Harbour ruling, Krieger noted: “Data sovereignty is ever-changing and new rules are being implemented constantly. This is a disruptor but not a destroyer for business. If you make sure your business is staying on top of the regulations, you’ll not get caught out when new laws come into play in the near future.”

Brink argues the two key issues for companies are data privacy and data security, and in particular putting the intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning within the cloud infrastructure. “It is complex for customers to navigate this post-Safe Harbour world – they need help,” she says. Overall, it represents another potential pain point for customers – and as ever, due diligence is its own reward.

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The cloud email market remains relatively immature with Microsoft ahead of Google in enterprise adoption, according to the latest figures from analyst house Gartner.

According to email server domain records of almost 40,000 public companies worldwide, only 8.5% of firms polled use Microsoft, compared to 4.7% on Google’s mail, with the remainder using on-premises, hybrid, hosted, or private cloud email systems.

Gartner also argues a trend of industries using different vendors; regulated industries such as utilities, energy, and aerospace are likeliest to be Microsoft shops, while media, publishing and advertising companies are more Gmail-friendly.

Nikos Drakos, research vice president at Gartner, argues that while it is still early days in cloud email adoption, growth is not slow. “Companies considering cloud email should question assumptions that public cloud email is not appropriate in their region, size, or industry,” he said. “Our findings suggest that many varied organisations are already using cloud email, and the number is growing rapidly.”

Gartner also found that wealthier organisations were more likely to use Microsoft; the Redmond giant has more of an 80% share of companies using cloud email with revenue in excess of $10 billion (£6.95bn).

This correlates with a study from BetterCloud, published in July last year, which argued a “clear trend” for larger organisations to run Office 365 as a cloud collaboration suite as opposed to Google Apps. For smaller businesses, the study argued, Google Apps was a more likely choice as it could be rolled out in one weekend, as opposed to Microsoft Office rollouts which were more of a hybrid deployment.

One anomaly in the Gartner study was that, in industries such as travel and hospitality, the highest revenue firms were more likely to be on a cloud email solution.

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Cloud storage providers Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, and Citrix ShareFile have announced updates which allow the ability to co-author documents in real time on Microsoft Office products.

The update comes as further validation of Microsoft’s policy for collaboration on Office as opposed to competition, having initially launched the Cloud Storage Partner Program in February 2015. The Redmond giant courted controversy after ditching unlimited offerings of its own storage product OneDrive back in November, over fears a small section of users were taking more of their fair share.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft Office corporate vice president, wrote in a blog post: “We announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program and enabled cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. Today’s interoperability announcements are another step in our journey to make Office more open for customers and partners.”

Alongside real-time co-authoring, Dropbox and Box customers will also be able to further integrate with Office on iOS and seamlessly attach content to emails in Outlook. Microsoft says it is looking to add other mobile platforms later this year, with Citrix ShareFile, Edmodo, and Egnyte integration also coming soon.

The additional move comes days after Dropbox announced the availability of an app for Windows 10. A blog post from the company reads: “With this deeper integration, you get the power of Dropbox right from the Office tools you rely on to get work done.”

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, said: “Box and Microsoft are delivering an unparalleled collaboration experience where customers have seamless access to their business content regardless of device or platform.” Isabelle Guis, chief strategy officer at Egnyte, said: “By executing successfully at the highest level with folks like Microsoft and Google, we are confident that we can replicate success with a wide variety of new partners.”

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Analyst house Gartner has looked into its crystal ball again, and predicts the worldwide public cloud services market will reach $204 billion (£142.8bn) in value by the end of this year.

The majority of the revenue will come through cloud advertising at $90.3bn in 2016 growing at 13.6%. Business process as a service (BPaaS), which Gartner defines broadly as “the delivery of business process outsourcing services that are sourced from the cloud and constructed for multi-tenancy”, will total $42.6bn this year, but with the slowest growth rate of 8.7%.

Software as a service will remain the largest of the primary markets at $37.7bn in 2016 and growing at 20.3% year on year, but infrastructure as a service will constitute the fastest growing segment, at 38.4% and $22.4bn. Cloud application infrastructure services – in other words, PaaS – will have a healthy growth of 21.1% but contribute only $4.6bn to the total.

“IaaS continues to be the strongest growing segment as enterprises move away from data centre build-outs and move their infrastructure needs to the public cloud,” said Gartner research director Sid Nag. “Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success,” he added.

No prizes for guessing who those players are. According to figures from Synergy Research back in July, the revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and IBM in infrastructure services comprise more than half of the global market. As a more recent note explained: “While there is still a place for small to medium sized public cloud players, the public cloud really is dominated by hyperscale cloud operators that can afford to build huge data centre footprints that span multiple continents.”

The same note found the public cloud continues to make significant inroads into the overall IT market, generating more than $20bn per quarter for IT firms.

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For a concept which merges different stakeholders within a business, it is perhaps not surprising that recent research concerning DevOps shows a fractured landscape. 84% of respondents surveyed by Gleanster Research in August defined DevOps in a multiple choice poll as “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production”, while 69% opted for “using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams.”

As a result, with every company being different, DevOps might not be for everyone. But Robert Reeves, chief technical officer of database automation provider Datical, disagrees. “Is DevOps right for every organisation? Yes,” he tells CloudTech. “Because the alternative is silos, and those are wrong for every organisation.”

Reeves explains this is due to a change in employee mindset rather than anything technological – if there are role-based silos, a ‘not my job’ mentality pervades, as CloudTech writer David Auslander espoused in this publication earlier this month. “Every person’s job in an organisation is to control cost and increase revenue – period,” says Reeves. “The biggest hurdle is having siloed employees recognise that fact. If a DBA [database admin] has an issue with a SQL script, then it’s the whole team’s issue because the software is not being released.”

The end goal of DevOps, as Reeves puts it, is to “trivialise releases and make them a non-event.” Providing database automation therefore makes sense, he argues, to keep up with demand. “In the past, when we had one release a quarter, it made good sense to have the DBA review each database change and manually look at each script,” says Reeves. “However we now have hundreds of applications and organisations are releasing updates monthly.

“That means one release each quarter has now become 100 releases a month – DBAs absolutely cannot continue to manually review every change.”

Datical recently received series B funding to the tune of $8 million (£5.6m), saying the money will go towards further sales, marketing and support activities. The message is simple: database admins are no longer custodians of the database, and the traditional response to turn down change requests is causing a bottleneck.

Yet Reeves explains getting this message across, with customers including eBay Enterprise, Deloitte, and the state of North Dakota, is easier than one might think. “Our customers recognise database automation is a challenge because they have previously automated application code delivery,” he says. “That makes it clear that database change is by far the biggest choke point in application release cycles.”

Reeves argues that until companies get database automation and move through changes more quickly, the full benefits of agile and DevOps will not be realised. But going back to the Gleanster survey results – is there still a need for a unified message? “More people need to be educated, but I think the market will take care of that,” says Reeves.

“Companies will start to realise that DevOps provides innumerable benefits,” he adds. “Many Fortune 500 IT executives are well aware of the benefits of DevOps and they realise that those [who] adopt DevOps will see more success.”

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Almost nine out of 10 (88%) respondents in a survey conducted by tech giant EMC believe hybrid cloud capabilities are ‘important’ or ‘critical’ to organisations who wish to enable digital business transformation.

The study, which polled more than 900 respondents, with one third in EMEA, found an overwhelming need for digital business initiatives. 92% said their company’s strategy called for such, while 90% said digital business was a “top priority” within three years. Almost two thirds (63%) claim they are already on their way to achieving digital transformation goals.

In particular, hybrid cloud enables increased IT agility, as well as making implementation of digital business initiatives easier, quicker, and less expensive, according to the survey respondents. Improving customer experience was the most popular reason behind business change (87%), ahead of acquiring new customers (86%), increasing innovation (82%) and enabling real-time business decisions (82%).

“Becoming digital is a priority for nearly every business on the planet,” commented Jeremy Burton, EMC president of products and marketing. “But how to get there is not as obvious. This study makes it perfectly clear that hybrid cloud – and the savings and agility it brings with it – is a key enabler to becoming a digital business.”

Naturally EMC, like practically every other cloud provider, has its own hybrid cloud offering. Yet the trend of hybrid cloud adoption is only going one way. According to a recent survey from North Bridge, the allure of business agility through cloud is superseding other factors like accessibility and scalability.

This is not the first study to be pumped out by EMC this week. The company, alongside VMware and VCE, previously posited that 85% of line of business decision makers surveyed in the manufacturing industry were using the public cloud in some capacity.

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The latest research from Western Digital Corporation has revealed that reliability continues to be more important than cost for enterprises looking to move their data to the cloud.

The survey, which polled 700 senior technology decision makers across three continents including in the energy, finance and healthcare industries, saw cloud budgets remain the leading growth area in IT, with more than four in five (84%) either planning, are completing or have completed cloud migrations.

Yet as far as the UK is concerned, there is less cloud hype than suspected; two in five CIOs (39%) say they have less than 10% of their company’s data in the cloud.

80% of overall respondents say their storage demands are growing, while three quarters (74%) say they need to keep up with performance demands of applications. More than half (55%) say they are not storing enough data to keep the business healthy long term; strategies for correcting this include data analytics (81% of respondents) and secure offline, or cold, storage and archiving (74%).

One of the more interesting parts of the research related to the Internet of Things (IoT). China, France, and the US agree that the Internet of Things is driving a need for change in data centres, while the energy, finance, telecom, and manufacturing sectors are most likely to receive the greatest impact from it.

83% of respondents overall argue the IoT, big data, and mobility drives change in data centres. “The findings of our survey underscore the increasing value of data, where dependable access through reliable storage systems and devices is more critical than ever before,” said Dave Tang, Western Digital SVP.