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A study released by Rackspace and conducted by Vanson Bourne argues improving resilience and security remain in the top three motivations for businesses moving to the cloud in 2016.

The survey, which polled 500 UK IT and business decision makers, found reducing IT costs (61% of respondents) as the most popular reason for migration, ahead of resilience and disaster recovery (50%) and security (38%). While these reasons have long since been considered when companies move data to the cloud, according to Rackspace chief security officer Brian Kelly 2016 may represent a tipping point.

“Cloud has long been associated with a loss of control over information, but more and more businesses are now realising this is a misconception,” he said. “Organisations are increasingly seeing the cloud as a means to keeping their systems and information safe and in the year ahead security will be an accelerator, not an inhibitor, of cloud adoption.”

Part of this change is that security hurdles are becoming easier to clear. Only one in five (20%) respondents said they encountered problems meeting security and privacy requirements, while consulting expert advice reduced the chances of issues (17% compared to 26%). Yet overall security concerns pervade; in particular, businesses are worried about meeting security requirements (48%), losing control of data to a third party provider (39%), and cost of migration (39%) above others.

Interestingly, more than half of those polled (58%) said they moved business critical data over to the cloud first, either alone or at the same time as non-critical data. Meanwhile, companies using a third party supplier had fewer security concerns than those who went it alone.

“Many businesses do not have the expertise or budgets to combat a growing number of sophisticated cyber-attacks in house, but using the cloud – with the support of a team which is able to dedicate a large number of resources to security – will help to keep data safe at the fraction of the cost,” added Kelly.

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As we wave goodbye to 2015 and say hello to 2016, it has again been an interesting, mostly successful year for cloud. According to research from Synergy, public cloud generates over $20 billion (£12.9bn) in quarterly revenues for IT firms. With the usual mix of mergers and acquisitions, security scares, and a few surprises, here are the highlights from 2015.

2015 review

February: Box files for IPO, enjoys initial uplift. The on-again, off-again story of enterprise cloud storage provider Box going public was finally resolved in February, with the company raising $175 million in its IPO and mostly confounding the critics. Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora and a long time advocate of Box’s business model, wrote in this publication that the storage firm’s opportunities were “limitless.”
Read more: Box raises $175m with IPO, but what is next?

July: Microsoft shuts down Windows Server 2003, companies try to cling on. July 14 2015 was a date etched firmly into scores of businesses and IT execs worldwide. The shutdown of WS2003 was supposed to mark a watershed in corporate IT – but naturally, businesses reluctant to change had other ideas. Research from the Cloud Industry Forum showed almost three quarters of firms with more than 200 employees were still on the server despite support having expired.
Read more: Windows Server 2003 end of life upgrade: Why many companies are leaving it “quite late”

August: Wuala announces it is to shut down its service. Wuala, the Switzerland based cloud storage service owned by Seagate, announced in August customers would have until November 15 to transfer their data before the service disappeared. The company offered up Tresorit as a potential new home. Even though Tresorit chief exec Istvan Lam welcomed Wuala customers, he added: “You can’t build your business on storage”.
Read more: Wuala cloud storage to shut down, offers Tresorit as potential new home

October: Dell coughs up $67bn for EMC. In the biggest tech deal in history, Dell parted with an eye-watering $67 billion (£43.7bn) to acquire EMC and create what was described by the companies as “the world’s largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company.” VMware would remain an independent, publicly traded company. Some analysts strongly supported the deal, but others were less convinced.
Read more: Dell agrees $67bn EMC deal: An “enterprise powerhouse” or “the walking dead”?

November: Microsoft turns off the tap on unlimited OneDrive. As it transpired, unlimited doesn’t really mean unlimited, as Microsoft said it was no longer offering limitless OneDrive storage. The reason: a minority of users who were just too greedy for their own good, backing up numerous PCs and storing entire movie collections on the service. Brian Taptich, CEO at developer-focused storage provider Bitcasa, told this publication that while it was “definitely not a failure” on Microsoft’s part, but added that competing against Microsoft, Google, Amazon et al on their own terms was akin to a “suicide mission.”
Read more: Microsoft turns off unlimited OneDrive for Office 365, blames greedy users

2016 predictions

Unified communications will become the “true connective tissue” in organisations: That’s the view of Mike Nessler, executive vice president at InterCall, who argues: “We’ll see organisations identifying new ways to drive UC value and ROI by giving IT managers and end users metrics and data to improve their communications.” The key for UC is also around getting tools in the right hands, says Nessler. “2016 will be a year for reassessment as CIOs not only take a look at what UC software they bought, but how end users are putting it to use.”

Amazon to ride out more competition in storage: Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian, argues co-location and data centre providers could provide stiffer competition to Amazon in 2016 as a best bet for cloud storage. “To differentiate themselves, they will start to offer more high-end targeted solutions for a new part of the market, for example disaster recovery, continuity, and regulatory compliance services,” he explains, adding: “As a result of this Amazon growth, S3 will become the de facto storage interface for all new applications and will replace CIFS/NFS as the access protocol for files and content storage.”

2016 will be the year of cloud security and cloud ROI: This is the view of Yorgen Edholm, CEO and president of Accellion. “Businesses are finally recognising the ROI gains of using a public cloud for non-critical content storage don’t have to be discarded in order to retain the security [and] compliance benefits offered by on-premise and private solutions,” he said. 

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Cloud storage and data management firm NetApp has announced the acquisition of all-flash storage system provider SolidFire for $870 million (£586m) in cash.

The all-flash offering across three key market segments – traditional enterprise infrastructure buyers, application owners and next-generation infrastructure buyers – is a key reason for the purchase, NetApp argues.

“This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centres,” said NetApp CEO George Kurian. “We look forward to extending NetApp’s flash leadership with the SolidFire team, products and partner ecosystem, and to accelerating flash adoption through NetApp’s large partner and customer base.”

On the other side, SolidFire CEO and founder Dave Wright argues the acquisition represents a “tremendous opportunity to double down on our mission”, while noting that putting all-flash storage as a single market “obscures the true landscape of the data centre today.”

“All primary storage is moving to flash – fast,” he wrote in a company blog post. “The all-flash array market is not a sign of a niche market – it is displacing spinning disk at an exponential rate, with no sign of slowing down.

“There is no doubt that the IT industry is in the midst of a transformation the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades,” he added. “Customers navigating this transformation need vendors with solutions that span the full range of data centre environments and application use cases.”

In October last year, SolidFire was slurping up series D funding of $82m, bringing the overall capital raised to $150m. Jay Prassl, SolidFire VP marketing, explained to this publication at the time that the Colorado-based firm did not want to be in the position of being “forced to go public”, citing the case of Violin Memory and its less-than-stellar IPO in 2013.

Not everyone has the same opinion of the deal, however. Even though fellow enterprise flash storage provider Pure Storage went public in October – and Wright tweeted congratulations to his ‘friends’ at the company – the Mountain View firm decided to stick the knife in.

“This acquisition shows very clearly that NetApp is still scrambling to piece together a viable flash strategy,” Pure VP products Matt Kixmoeller wrote. He added: “Although we hold the folks at SolidFire in very high regard, we are confident our technology trumps. Our product lead will only grow at SolidFire is slowed down by the coming years of integration, in-fighting, and confusion that come via acquisition.”

This reporter is reminded of January 2014 when enterprise mobility management provider AirWatch was acquired by VMware. Citrix, a rival of VMware’s on desktop virtualisation and end user computing (EUC) among others, issued a blog in response describing the latter’s vision for EUC as “laughable on many counts.” The post was later pulled.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of NetApp’s 2016 fiscal year, with Wright leading the SolidFire product line within NetApp’s product operations.

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Many organisations continue to be left in the dark when it comes to providing details on cloud costs and consumption, according to research released by Cloud Cruiser.

The survey, which polled almost 350 IT professionals who were at the AWS re:Invent shows in 2014 and 2015, found almost half (42%) of respondents saying it continues to be difficult to properly allocate public cloud usage and costs, even though 85% believe it is valuable to share cloud consumption metrics with the business.

AWS usage has become universal among the companies attending AWS re:Invent over the past year, the research reveals. Whereas 7% of respondents in the 2014 survey said they were not using AWS yet, that figure drops to 0% for this year.

Similarly, the numbers of those using AWS for more business-critical operations continues to grow. Almost half (45%) of those polled say they use Amazon’s cloud for enterprise applications – ERP, CRM, HR, and email – compared to 38% in 2014, while the numbers using AWS for software development and testing has also risen (62% in 2015, 60% in 2014). The percentage of companies who use AWS as a sandbox for testing public cloud offerings has gone down year on year.

AWS made changes to its ‘reserved instance’ (RI) model – whereby users can reserve EC2 compute capacity for one or three years at a discounted hourly rate – this time last year. The usage naturally indicates a long-term commitment to Amazon’s cloud, and this is borne out in the survey results. 61% said they expect to increase their use of RIs, while 6% do not expect a change in use and 2% expect a decrease. 29% of respondents said they do not use RIs, while 2% did not know what they were.

In addition to AWS, event respondents in 2014 were more likely to supplement it with other offerings, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This year, the confidence in public cloud means the tables have turned: 43% say they have no additional resources, compared to 27% the year before.

This shows the benefits of public cloud are becoming more apparent to business – but at a price, argues Deirdre Mahon, Cloud Cruiser chief marketing officer. “Lack of usage visibility and cost transparency are key problem areas which have in turn created demand for new, flexible and easy to use solutions that drive efficiency, cost savings and a way to hold business users accountable for what they are consuming,” she explained.

“Investing in the right cloud efficiency solutions will continue to be critical for businesses of all sizes, even during the early stages of adoption.”

Are you surprised at the results of this cloud survey? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Cloud computing is already cited by CIOs as one of the biggest contributors to IT complexity – now new research released by Trustmarque shows more than four in five CIOs struggle to identify and implement cloud services must suitable for their business.

The complexity of existing IT infrastructure is a problem for moving to the cloud, according to two thirds (66%) of CIOs, while almost three quarters (74%) admitting interdependencies between different IT environments are another barrier for moving IT services to the cloud. (73%) see cloud services as making data governance more complicated.

A similar number (78%) say integrating different cloud services is a challenge, while two thirds (68%) say admit modernising or rearchitecting certain applications will slow their journey to the cloud, according to the research.

It is not just integrating different cloud services which is an issue- the needs of employees also leaves CIOs with headaches. A majority of those polled (79%) said they found a challenge to balance the productivity needs of employees against security threats, particularly with regard to cloud storage tools.

“Selecting and implementing the right cloud services remains a challenge for CIOs,” said James Butler, CTO at Trustmarque. “Many CIOs struggle to understand the differences between the many  cloud options, what these offer them and how to choose – often because of vendor hype and a lack of clarity around the solutions on offer.”

He added: “By assessing the functions that can be moved to the cloud with the least disruption, CIOs can identify the ‘quick cloud wins’ and clearly demonstrate the business value needed to justify more complicated moves that involve transformation. The hybrid approach can be a way of delivering the benefits of cloud to business rapidly, with reduced risk.”

Previous research from Trustmarque, released in October, found that simplifying IT is a priority for  four in five (79%) CIOs, while two thirds (66%) claim cloud was a primary reason for IT complexity, ahead of legacy technology (51%) and software licensing (51%).

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Accounting software provider Sage has announced it has hit 100,000 subscriptions of its cloud-based Sage One product, with the user base comprising more than half of customers already using Sage.

The numbers indicate the small business sector is alive and kicking when it comes to utilising cloud software, and Sage describes it as “one of many milestones that helps us to connect our customers to accountants and partners with real time and intuitive information about their business.”

“Our aim is to support businesses by providing the technology and ecosystem that they need to be successful and to grow,” said Stephen Kelly, Sage Group CEO. “Sage One is central to our strategy of addressing the white space opportunity of small and medium businesses which are not using any means of accounting software currently.”

Sage also took the opportunity to throw out a series of other highlights from 2015, including the launch of Sage Live, for more real-time accounting, partnerships with the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google among others, and ISV agreements with Xactly, DocuSign, and Apptus.

The small business approach to cloud computing has been analysed extensively by this publication in recent days. In particular, a survey from Clutch found nearly half of small businesses in the US do not use cloud storage. Most of the time, the main reason for this reticence is around security. Interestingly however, Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at disaster recovery firm Databarracks, argues that as managing security in-house becomes an increasing headache, cloud solutions make more sense.

Sage claims its UK subscriber base for Sage One is growing at 4,600 per month, while the company’s overall organic revenue grew at 6% for 2015.

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It has long been said that security concerns are what drives small businesses away from putting their data in the cloud. Yet according to Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at disaster recovery provider Databarracks, 2016 will see more small to medium firms move towards cloud services as managing security in-house becomes an increasing headache.

In particular, Arean argues the need for small businesses to move to Office 365 – almost by default – because of its simplicity. “Every year, more businesses reach the end of life of their onsite hardware and are faced with the choice of on-premise or move to the cloud,” he explains. “Office 365 will be the default for most small businesses because it’s so simple to use.”

He adds: “You don’t need particularly advanced IT skills to set it up and in many ways it takes the headache out of security because you know Microsoft has a vested interest in protecting your data. The damage to their reputation would be huge if they were to suffer a breach.”

A recent survey from Clutch found that almost half of small businesses in the US do not use cloud storage. Analyst Sarah Patrick, writing for this publication, argued that while “for small business protecting data is often a secondary concern to accomplishing the primary business goal”, cloud storage services provide a high level of security. “For a cloud storage provider, keeping data secure is what they do,” she noted.

Mark van der Linden, UK country manager at Dropbox, wrote for this publication back in July that ‘adoption is key to security.’ “For businesses, the real threat to security is not the cloud itself, but shadow IT,” he explains. “It is time CIOs put adoption at the heart of their IT strategies. By employing user-friendly solutions, adoption rates are higher and the risk of data being held outside official platforms is significantly reduced. IT departments put themselves back in control.”

Arean argues: “Services like Office 365 can obviously never be 100% secure, but you can be safe in the knowledge that they will have a team of skilled security specialists working to eliminate threats – which is much more time and resources than most SMEs can afford to devote to security.”

Yet he admits it is still ‘scary’ for small businesses to migrate their operations into the major cloud vendors. “Even with public cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google, which make the process much simpler, there is still work to be done in making cloud services more accessible and more intuitive for first time users,” Arean explains. “It very much still requires a ‘hold your hand’ approach to set it up which needs to be simplified in order to facilitate more widespread adoption.”

One option, as Arean notes, is to use a managed services provider, but others insist the hypervendors are not the best solution for small businesses. Mashukul Hoque, managing director of Manchester-based Datacentreplus, told this publication: “These vendors’ primary motivation for developing UK data centres is compliance-related so they can attract public sector and other very large customers who will not consent to data being stored overseas.

“Secondly, other than for the very large customer, their offerings are very much a ‘one size fits all’ that is good for a particular type of customer but unsuitable for many others,” Hoque added, citing colocation as a key differentiator.

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Google Compute Engine went down for approximately 70 minutes last week, the company has confirmed, making certain Internet destinations unreachable from the europe-west1 region during that time.

The issue first came to light at 1326 PST on November 23 with a status update, before a further missive at 1432 confirming the problems should have been resolved.

Four days later, Google explained what exactly went wrong. At 1151 PST on November 23, Google engineers activated a new peering link – with an unnamed provider who Google says it works with extensively – but during the activation, the providers’ estimations of how much capacity the link could take differed wildly from actual performance. As a result, traffic was dropped with the majority of affected destination addresses coming from eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The reason for the oversight, Google notes, was due to an ‘unrelated failure’ which meant safety checks as part of the automation process for peering links were not performed. The search giant says it will change procedure to prevent manual link activation following the downtime.

“The automated checks were expected to protect the network for approximately one hour after link activation, and normal congestion monitoring began at the end of that period,” a post from the Google Compute Engine team noted. “As the post-activation checks were missing, this allowed a 61 minute delay before the normal monitoring started, detected the congestion, and alerted Google network engineers.

“If your service or application was affected, we apologise,” the team update added. “This is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to offer you, and we have taken and are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability.”

This is not the first time Google’s cloud has hit the skids; in February Compute Engine went down for two hours with network issues in ‘multiple zones’. Figures released by CloudHarmony at the start of this year showed Google to be one of the more reliable cloud providers, although Compute Engine scored a three nines SLA with 66 outages throughout 2014. 

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Amazon is offering customers an unlimited one year cloud storage deal for $5 to tie in with its Black Friday promotions.

The deal, which would normally cost users $59.99, may be of most interest to Microsoft customers, after the company recently shuttered its unlimited OneDrive plans. In that instance, a few spoiled it for the many; a company blog post explained “a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings…in some instances exceed[ing] 75 TB per user, or 14,000 times the average.” Microsoft has since decided to cap each OneDrive account to 1 TB.

No such problems for Amazon users; as the company explains, “there’s no limit to how many files you can upload, and we’ll never change or reduce the resolution of your images.” For those who are primarily uploading photos to their storage – a key problem for many of those who complained about OneDrive – Amazon has an unlimited $11.99 per year offering, again with the carrot of a free trial. For those who do take up the offer, the price for unlimited storage goes back to $59.99 after a year.

Evidently, this is just a short term customer gain strategy from Amazon to tie in with Black Friday – if one is so inclined the official Black Friday page has a plethora of deals – but longer term, Microsoft’s decision to halt its unlimited OneDrive accounts should not be seen as an admission of failure. That was the view of Brian Taptich, the CEO of developer-focused cloud storage provider Bitcasa, whose company made a similar decision in 2014 when it found businesses were taking advantage of their plan.

“I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed – and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data,” he said.

You can find out more about the Amazon deal here.

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Public cloud adoption will continue to grow at a rapid pace, but a lack of understanding will prohibit adoption in some organisations, according to the latest research from hybrid IT monitoring provider ScienceLogic.

The research, which polled more than 1,600 IT professionals, found 62% of organisations are already using at least one public cloud, while more than four in five (83%) expect public cloud spend to increase in the next 12 months. Of the main public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (58%) not altogether surprisingly is the most popular among survey respondents, followed by Microsoft Azure (43%) and Google Cloud Platform (13%).

Yet the research found organisations lack advanced visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their public cloud environments. 82% of those polled said they were unable to ensure optimum performance, health, and availability of their public cloud workloads, while almost half (46%) said they did not know how to, or simply do not, proactively monitor their workloads.

This, of course, could spell danger – and for many organisations, it already has. Half of firms polled said they have experienced at least one complete network outage in the past 12 months, with more than a quarter (27%) saying they have had more than two hours of downtime per event. On average, organisations lose about $3.9 million – approximately $12,000 per minute – annually as a result of network outages.

“As hybrid IT and multicloud usage becomes mainstream for organisations, so does the need to simplify workload visibility and management for IT teams,” said Dave Link, ScienceLogic CEO. “Without this deep visibility of dependencies, organisations risk losing millions per year due to network outages that could have been prevented or shortened with the use of monitoring tools.”

According to figures from Synergy Research back in September, the public cloud continues to make significant inroads into the overall IT market, generating almost £13 billion in quarterly revenues for IT firms.