(c)iStock.com/tumpikuja

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has revealed a three part philanthropic initiative whereby the tech giant will donate $1 billion (£704m) of cloud computing resources towards non-profit organisations and education over the next three years.

The Redmond firm argues the cloud is a vital resource for “unlocking the secrets held by data”, in terms of communications and problem solving, better delivery of services, and helping organisations work in a more productive and efficient manner.

The initiative comes from the recently formed Microsoft Philanthropies unit, and will include access to Microsoft Azure, the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), and CRM Online for non-profits and non-governmental organisations, as well as further access to Office 365.

“Cloud computing has emerged as a vital resource for addressing the world’s problems,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer in a company blog post. “It is vital that the cloud serve the public good in the broadest sense. While the marketplace is reaching a rapidly growing number of customers around the world, it is not yet benefiting everyone.

“If we’re going to realise Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more, we need to reach those that the market is not yet reaching,” he added.

Microsoft is certainly not the first company to be promoting a philanthropic cause – Facebook’s continued quest to get the entire planet online being a case in point – but the more cynical in the industry have previously asked quite how altruistic such goals are; “business dressed as charity”, as The Verge put it back in 2013. In 2014, Rackspace offered investment for a data science boot camp, admitting that while the key was to get the knowledge out to market, it would be no bad thing if the graduates were recruited by the managed cloud vendor.

Among the projects Microsoft has already contributed to are a biodiversity research program in Brazil, a research laboratory at the University of Texas, and leveraging cloud-based health records management in Botswana.

You can find out more here.

(c)iStock.com/stockvisual

85% of line of business (LOB) decision makers in the manufacturing industry are using at least one form of public cloud service, according to a new research study.

The report, released jointly by EMC, VCE, and VMware – all now part of Dell in some capacity after the whopping $67 billion deal for the former in October – polled more than 600 decision makers overall across six industries, with one sixth each on telecoms, finance, retail, public sector, oil and gas, and manufacturing. Yet it was the latter which provided the most interesting results.

Cutting costs (33%) and driving efficiencies (29%) are the primary use for public cloud services, according to the respondents, with the majority of line of business employees surveyed (87%) saying they consult IT for cloud deployments.

Despite this, however, security worries remain. Security exploits, cited by 50% of respondents, was the most worrying aspect for line of business leaders regarding cloud deployments. Reputational cost to the business (43%) and internal data loss (36%) were also seen as important.

“Manufacturers are united in their appreciation and use of public cloud services, and understandably so – it can offer the agility and flexibility that many LOBs in the industry need to keep up with rapidly changing market demands,” said Rob Lamb, EMC UK and Ireland cloud business director.

“For manufacturing IT departments to be more heavily involved in LOB IT decisions, they need to embrace a cloud strategy that allows others to continue cutting costs and drive efficiencies while mitigating security and data loss concerns,” he added.

According to the latest rankings from research firm IDC, EMC sits in fourth position in global cloud infrastructure vendors, behind HP, new custodians Dell, and Cisco respectively.

(c)iStock.com/BrianAJackson

Global cloud IT infrastructure, incorporating public and private, hit $7.6 billion (£5.32bn) in the third quarter of 2015, according to a research note from IDC.

HP, with a 15.7% market share in 3Q15 and revenue of $1.18bn, remains the top dog in cloud infrastructure according to the researchers, gaining in share from the previous year (15.0%). Dell and Cisco are in joint second place – the result of two vendors being less than one statistical point apart –  with revenues of $783m and $731 and market share of 10.4% and 9.7%.

It was a similar story in the battle for fifth place, with NetApp, IBM, and Lenovo all too close to be separated, and EMC on its own in fourth. The big winner over the past year was Lenovo, with an almost 750% revenue gain, while IBM was the major faller, dropping 42% in revenue year over year. All the other vendors, aside from NetApp, posted positive yearly change.

Cloud as the basis for overall IT infrastructure continues to rise, with more than a third (33.8%) of cloud infrastructure sales in 3Q15 compared to 28.7% a year ago. Revenue in traditional, non-cloud infrastructure declined by 3.2% year on year, as well as in each segment – server, storage, and Ethernet switch. On a regional basis, Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – was the fastest growing market at 35.3% year over year, well ahead of Western Europe (22.1%). In terms of individual countries, Japan (47.1%) was the fastest grower ahead of Canada (22.0%) and the US (20.1%).

“IDC continues to see healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments in the market with an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing hardware and platforms. “Customers are modernising their infrastructures, having a progressively larger number of viable options for cloud deployments either on or off premises.

“As public cloud offerings continue to evolve and improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility that they get by deploying certain workloads in these elastic environments,” Stolarski added.

(c)iStock.com/photogearch

Microsoft has announced price reductions of up to 17% on its Azure D-series Dv2 virtual machines, in an evident play against Amazon Web Services (AWS) following its own price cuts.

Just how evident this latest move is occurs when Microsoft cloud platform director of marketing Nicole Herskowitz calls AWS out. In a blog post, Herskowitz writes: “It is worthwhile to note that the Azure Dv2 instances – unlike AWS EC2 instances – have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge. This means you get even more value from Azure.”

Customers using Linux instances will get a better deal, with reductions on the D1-D5 v2s at 14% for Linux and 10% for Windows Server, and 17% and 13% respectively for the D11-D14 v2 machines.

Microsoft also took the opportunity to push further messages on how it differentiates from AWS, almost universally agreed to be the market leader in the infrastructure as a service space. Herskowitz argued the Redmond giant gives lower price points than Amazon for customers with enterprise agreements, as well as billing by the minute, as opposed to per hour.

The announcement from Microsoft completes the trio; after AWS announced its 51st price cut on EC2, Google responded by describing Amazon’s model as “an unpleasant surprise”. The AWS reductions apply to C4, M4 and R3 instances running Linux across eight regions overall.

A report from Tariff Consultancy found that while enterprise cloud computing prices had dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, overall pricing was beginning to even out. Yet Herskowitz argued price was not the only reason customers, citing Towers Watson, BMW, and Jet.com, preferred Microsoft. “Customers are using Azure for the value it brings,” she wrote. “Customers are using Azure for its hybrid capabilities that enable existing on-premises environments to seamlessly bridge with the public cloud – a reality for the vast majority of organisations.”

The price reductions will roll out in early February, with more details available here.

(c)iStock.com/Enis Aksoy

The start of any year is always a good time to take stock, inspect the landscape, and see where the puck is moving. That is exactly what Tariff Consultancy (TCL) has done, with the company’s latest cloud pricing report revealing that while enterprise cloud computing prices have dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, the race to the bottom is finally letting up.

The report, entitled ‘Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020’, assessed a total of 24 vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google, and cited the former two as a reason for stability in public cloud pricing. Price drops continue to fuel cloud adoption, but the landscape is different to 2014. Back then, both companies were offering free initial tier compute instances; now, free elements only come as part of promotional periods, or to entice customers in to paid options.

According to TCL, the average entry level cloud computing instance is now at $0.12 USD per hour (£0.08), and argues the range of pricing has narrowed in the past two years. The consultancy firm also anticipates that revenues for public cloud services will rise to approximately $82 billion (£56.8bn).

Pricing of cloud solutions, and what represents value for money, has been a hot topic in this publication in recent days. Amazon put forth its 51st price cut on EC2 instances last week, only for Google to retaliate by calling its rival’s pricing structure an “unpleasant surprise.” Earlier this week, analyst firm Cloud Spectator issued its benchmark report into cloud pricing and performance, with a surprising victor in 1&1, Google in fifth place, and AWS well outside the top 10.

Such analysis is, naturally, not always 100% objective, and it is always worth digging into providers in detail, asking key questions on data hosting, security, and SLAs, to avoid being stung. One interesting element the Cloud Spectator report found was that the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is not entirely true; in terms of pure VM performance, the analysts argued there was little difference between all cloud service providers, although this test does not take into account support, managed hosting, and other value add benefits.

Despite the Cloud Spectator ranking however, TCL puts AWS at the top of its pedestal, citing the frequent price cuts. “New cloud services are being introduced to cater for specialised customer requirements as a means of avoiding price commoditisation – however, the market share and computing power of AWS gives the company a considerable advantage in providing economies of scale which are passed on to the end user,” the company writes.

(c)iStock.com/Serjio74

Here’s something that may raise a few eyebrows: 1&1 has been named the best value infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider according to a new benchmark report from Cloud Spectator.

The report, a follow up to last year’s verdict which found Amazon EC2 had “significant” cost advantages investing long term, saw a 350% performance difference between the top 10 service providers, and urges organisations to invest in infrastructure testing or risk overspending.

In all, 17 cloud service providers (CSPs) were tested, ranked in terms of performance in virtual central processing units (vCPUs), block storage, and memory, as well as the relationship between price and performance. 1&1 came out on top due to its high VM performance combined with its least expensive packaged pricing. ProfitBricks, Ubiquity, CloudSigma, and Google round off the top five, with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM SoftLayer not even in the top 10.

The main reason for this disparity appears to be around pricing; the metrics do not count on elements such as support, security, geographical location, and managed services. Although the researchers admit smaller, more specialised CSPs with aggressive pricing structures can achieve higher rankings, IBM SoftLayer fell because of its comparatively poor price-performance value despite high rankings in VM environments.

Despite this, a note from the researchers also argues that VM performance is ‘pretty much the same from CSP to CSP.’ “On VM performance alone, the top 10 IaaS providers in this report exhibited a difference of 3.5x,” the report reads. “With block storage performance, differences exceeded 10x.”

Another interesting finding related to the ‘noisy neighbour’ protocol; Cloud Spectator argues businesses sharing physical resources with different users is not an issue with the majority of providers.

“In public cloud environments, some providers, especially major ones such as Google Compute Engine and Amazon Web Services, employ performance throttling among other strategies to deliver a consistent user experience regardless of the actual user load on the physical machine,” the report states. “This means that, while performance may be artificially low for the VM, the user will not see much change over time.”

Google and AWS have recently been embroiled in a slanging match of sorts; the former calling out the latter’s pricing structure following AWS’ 51st cost reduction last week. Rackspace, CenturyLink, Interoute, Hostway, and PhoenixNap completed the top 10 vendors.

(c)iStock.com/dolphfyn

Last week this publication reported Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) 51st price cut, lowering prices of C4, M4 and R3 instances in its EC2 cloud. Now, Google has responded, claiming it leads the way among the cloud giants.

“Developers running cloud-based apps and services will find out whether it’s a happy new year or not once they take a look at their bill,” Miles Ward, Google Cloud Platform global head of solutions wrote in a blog post. “In case you’ve been reading recent announcements and were wondering, rest assured: Google continues to be the price/performance leader in public cloud.”

Anyone thinking this was anything other than a thinly veiled dig at AWS would notice two paragraphs later, Ward writes: “While price cuts sound appealing on the surface, when you unpack the specifics of Amazon’s pricing model, it can be an unpleasant surprise.

“We often hear from customers who are locked into contracts and aren’t eligible for the new rates, or are stuck with instances that no longer fit their needs.”

No love lost there, then – but research would suggest the Seattle giant is a more likely leader. Even though AWS’ huge lead in the infrastructure as a service market was slipping slightly in 2014 before roaring back last year, it was Microsoft doing the catching up rather than Google, according to Synergy Research figures from the past 18 months. In July, the analyst house argued of the ‘big four’ – AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google – that “no other company has been able to get close to these four in terms of data centre footprint, global presence and market power.”

Ward invites potential customers to use the company’s TCO pricing calculator to assess just how much they would be paying for AWS compared with Google. “We designed Google Cloud Platform pricing to be as flexible and beneficial to our customers as possible,” he said. “Our combination of lower list prices, sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in, per minute billing, preemptible VMs and custom machine types offers a structural price advantage that’s unmatched in the industry.”

Amazon also announced the launch of its South Korean data centre last week, with further expansion in India, the US, China, and the UK expected later this year.

(c)iStock.com/pederk

The extent of the proliferation of endpoints and how IT service providers (ITSPs) are reacting to it has been revealed in a new survey released by IT management provider Autotask.

More than half of the 1,100 global ITSPs polled (55%) said they have seen ‘significant’ or ‘steady’ endpoint growth, with four in five respondents saying they rely on cloud delivery to manage and secure endpoints.

90% say they offer cloud-based services while 55% say they expect between 11% and 50% growth in client cloud adoption during 2016. Of the cloud offerings ITSPs offer, endpoint management is however only the fifth most popular, behind backup and restore, email, disaster recovery, and hosting.

“Based on the results of this year’s survey, it’s clear that service providers realise the critical need to prioritise how they manage and secure endpoints,” said Patrick Burns, vice president of product management at Autotask. “This is a significant revenue opportunity for them. By ensuring networks of communication are running smoothly, ITSPs will also be in a position to play a more strategic, trusted role, with end clients.”

There are other issues which ITSPs face, according to the report. A quarter (24%) of those polled do not measure service response times, and 31% do not know their SLA first response time. This ties in to the increased demand for managed services as the key reason for renewal rates going up, alongside improved customer service levels and demand for cloud-based services. Similarly, more than half (52%) of those polled said they lose at least 25 hours per week to manual tasks, multiple databases, and on-premise systems.

(c)iStock.com/Devonyu

A business-led approach, collaborative IT resources and adopting key controls are the three main factors to DevOps success – but many UK businesses are still struggling with it, according to a new study from CA Technologies.

The report, entitled ‘Assembling the DevOps Jigsaw’ which polled more than 500 respondents from Europe, found only one in 10 (11%) UK organisations are in the category of ‘advanced DevOps adopters’, defined as organisations who have implemented DevOps practice across at least six different business areas. Swiss businesses (23%) are the furthest advanced, but other European countries are not noticeably better, with Spain (13%), France (12%), Italy (12%) and Germany (10%) all struggling.

Yet the majority of UK businesses are tuning in to DevOps methodology. More than two thirds of companies (67%) have implemented DevOps in some capacity, such as failing fast, and streamlining IT to free up resources for digital investment.

The reason for companies making initial steps but not going further revolves around the difficulties breaking down established barriers. 68% of those polled said it was important to remove the traditional walls between Dev and Ops teams, yet only 38% say they have fully dealt with cultural transformation.

Companies in the ‘advanced adopters’ category see business benefit from their change, according to the report. 85% of organisations polled across Europe saw ‘significant measurable benefits’ in customer retention, while the majority of firms also saw similar results in customer acquisition and new income streams.

“Digital interaction with customers, partners, and suppliers increasingly takes place through applications, apps and online services,” said Ritu Mahandru, VP solution sales at CA Technologies. “To innovate new customer experiences, be more agile and grow revenues, UK organisations require a much more rapid and continuous delivery of value to create competitive advantage, while simultaneously allowing IT to become more responsive and efficient.”

Research over the past year has shown a confused outlook from businesses on the state and definition of DevOps. A report from Delphix in October found more than three quarters (77%) of firms had introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps, while in August the same firm found the primary definition was “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production.”

(c)iStock.com/4774344sean

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has embraced 2016 by lowering the prices of C4, M4, and R3 instances by 5% in its EC2 cloud, as well as announcing the launch of its new Asia Pacific data centre region, in Seoul.

The price reductions, for C4 and M4 instances running Linux, apply to customers in the US East, US West, Ireland, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney regions, while the same applies for R3 instances but adding Brazil.

The M4 instances were launched back in June as ‘next generation’ with the aim of providing lower network latency and less packet jitter, a move analyst house Zacks.com described as “an added feather to its cap.”

Customers concerned over how much they will get billed at the end of this month should note the reductions for on-demand and dedicated hosting apply retroactively as of January 1, while reserved instances are in effect as of January 5. The move represents the 51st AWS price cut overall.

Elsewhere, the South Korean AWS data centre is now open for business, having been originally announced in November alongside India, Ohio, a second region in China, and the UK – the latter of which this publication recently analysed. The Seoul region has two availability zones, bringing the total to 32 ‘zones’ from 12 geographic regions, including its government cloud. Each cloud provider has different definitions over its data centre footprint, but for comparison Microsoft – who is also launching a UK data centre this year – lists 20 ‘regions’ in its portfolio.

One company which is grabbing the chance to house data in Seoul through AWS is Korean gaming firm Nexon, which has more than two thirds of its sales coming from overseas. “We are currently running our new mobile MMORPG game, HIT, 100% on AWS,” said Sang-Won Jung, Nexon VP of new development. “With the new AWS region in Korea, we plan to use AWS not just for mobile games, but also for latency sensitive PC games as well.”

You can find out more about the EC2 price cuts here and the Seoul data centre launch here.