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A note from Synergy Research has shed light on the most popular data centre geographies, with the US and China coming out on top.

Not surprisingly, the US is the most popular location for cloud and internet data centres in Q215. After analysing the data centre footprint of 13 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, 44% of data centres were in the US. China (10%) was in clear second place, ahead of Australia, the UK, Japan, and Singapore (all 5%), with Germany and the Netherlands (4%) behind.

Synergy argues the results reflect two trends; the dominance of the US market, and the unique proposition of China’s ecosystem. Companies who have already built data centres in China include Amazon, IBM and Microsoft – although in December it was reported that cloud computing providers in the Asian country were to be tested for their ‘trustworthiness’, potentially meaning bad news for foreign CSPs.

The research also noted the importance of traditional data centre hubs, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Ireland, but customer demand dictating reduced latency and greater data sovereignty means vendors are moving closer to home. IBM, as an example, launched its first Italian cloud data centre in Cornaredo, a municipality in Milan, in June this year, while a data centre in Frankfurt, opened its doors in January.

“While the hyperscale cloud operators continue to invest huge amounts in their data centre footprints and to expand their geographic scope, there is no doubt that the US and China will continue to be the lead countries for locating major data centres,” said John Dinsdale, a Synergy chief analyst.

The 13 companies analysed now have almost 150 major data centre sites between them, Synergy added.

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Research released by WinMagic reveals two thirds of employees do not know their company policy on cloud storage – and its usage is putting business data at risk.

The survey, which quizzed 1,000 office workers at companies with 50 or more employees, found a marked difference in employees’ usage of cloud storage; 41% of respondents said they used cloud services at least once a week, while 42% never touch them.

5% of those who said they use cloud storage once a week do so at the behest of their employer, while just over a third (35%) said they used a company-sanctioned cloud storage solution.

Worryingly, one in 10 employees who use cloud storage services at least once a week admit they have ‘no confidence’ in the security of their data accessed from the cloud. 50% of respondents use personal devices to access work information at least once a week, while a similar number (47%) use company-issued equipment at home every seven days.

The consensus points to a garbled mess, putting data breaches further in the spotlight and giving IT teams permanent headaches. Darin Welfare, EMEA VP at WinMagic, notes the challenges businesses currently face. “One of the key steps that any organisation can take to mitigate the risk from widespread use of unsanctioned cloud services is to ensure that all company data is encrypted before employees have the opportunity to upload to the cloud.

“In the eventuality that the cloud vendor does not adequately put in place control mechanisms and procedures to ensure security across their infrastructure, sensitive and valuable corporate data is still encrypted and cannot be accessed and understood beyond those who have the right to,” added Welfare. “This approach provides the company with the assurance that the IT team is in control of the key and management of all company data before any employees turn to cloud storage services.”

Recent research has shed light on the dissatisfaction customers have with their cloud providers. Earlier this month, a survey from ElasticHosts of UK-based CIOs found more than four in five believe their vendor could do more to reduce the burden on in-house IT staff.

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Analyst house Gartner argues the software defined data centre (SDCC), otherwise known as the virtual data centre (VDC), is not the right choice for every IT organisation today – but long term it will be crucial to the evolution of an agile digital business.

The SDDC is whereby IT infrastructure is virtualised and delivered ‘as a service’, leading to greater levels of automation, flexibility and, in turn, business agility. The development is seen as crucial by the analyst house in moving forward with DevOps and hybrid cloud deployments.

Gartner argues the majority of orgnaisations are not ready to begin adoption and should ‘proceed with caution’ – but by 2020, the programmatic capabilities of an SDDC will be required for three quarters of Global 2000 Enterprises that seek to deliver a DevOps and hybrid cloud approach.

“Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders can’t just buy a ready-made SDDC from a vendor,” said Dave Russell, Gartner VP and distinguished analyst. “Due to its current immaturity, the SDDC is most appropriate for visionary organisations with advanced expertise in I&O engineering and architecture.”

Organisations considering a SDDC need to consider two steps; understand why they need it for the business, and then with integration, it will more than likely come from different vendors. Different organisations have different cultures, and Russell argues this also needs to be assessed. “A broken process is still a broken process no matter how well it is automated,” he said.

“Build the right skills in your organisation by enabling top infrastructure architects to experiment with public cloud infrastructure in small projects, as well [as] giving them the opportunity to get out and learn what their peers in other organisations and visionaries in this field are doing.”

Certain components of SDDC, such as software defined networking (SDN) and storage, are still relatively immature, Gartner argues. It is a view with which this publication agrees; last month Andrea Knoblauch wrote: “The jury is still out when it comes to whether widespread adoption is ready for mainstream.

“It’s yet to be seen what the true benefits of software defined networks will be, but the ability to adapt the network to different loads, be able to prioritise traffic or reroute, and of course the ability to see a better overall picture, is enough for many organisations to start investigating this new methodology.”

Do you agree with the Gartner analysis? Let us know in the comments…

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Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced new functionality which the company claims will help CIOs to deliver hybrid IT environments without compromising compliance and data security.

The company is announcing Fujitsu Cloud Services Management, which builds on the previous Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform and aims to enable unified management of various cloud environments, across different departments within an organisation.

Fujitsu is also announcing an extension of its range of standardised managed services, and says it continues to invest in cloud platforms. As this publication reported, last year the IT giant ploughed over £1 billion into strengthening its infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) base. According to Fujitsu, the company grew its global year on year IaaS revenues by 49% last year ,with 91% growth in its virtual cloud IaaS business.

“Hybrid IT is the new reality across many organisations’ IT estates as cloud services become an increasingly important element of overall IT services,” said Joel O’Halloran, Fujitsu SVP head of managed infrastructure services and digital business platform. “CIOs of course recognise the enormous potential that cloud-based services have to offer – but to fully recognise the benefits, they need to be properly integrated and managed as part of the wider IT services.

“Therefore Fujitsu supports its customers by integrating and orchestrating these services with traditional IT so that they can gain sustainable competitive advantage.”

Many pundits in the industry are advocating a move towards hybrid architecture for greater business agility and data security. Ian Finlay, chief operating officer of Abiquo, wrote in this publication earlier this month: “As enterprise IT evaluates the best technical approach for hybrid IT management, it’s vitally important that the speed, flexibility and agility drawing end users to public cloud in the first place be preserved in the hybrid model.”

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Even though the public sector is adopting cloud as a key part of its IT strategy, new research from Sungard Availability Services has revealed the sector is facing a large number of challenges in managing and operating cloud environments.

According to the report, entitled ‘Digital by Design: Avoiding the cloud hangover in the UK public sector’, UK public sector organisations are spending over £300 million each year on ‘hidden costs’ associated with their cloud computing projects. The research, which polled 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK public sector, also found that more than three quarters (82%) of respondents had encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend.

Each organisation is paying on average just under £139,000 a year on maintaining cloud services, with an additional figure of £258,000 on average over the past five years thanks to external maintenance costs for hardware and systems integration costs among others.

The headaches do not stop there, however. 55% of respondents said cloud had increased the complexity of their IT environment, which compares badly against financial services (32%) and manufacturing (29%). 71% also argued that cloud computing had added a new set of IT challenges. In particular, interoperability between the existing IT estate and cloud platforms was the biggest issue, according to 44% of those polled.

Keith Tilley, EVP global sales and customer services management at Sungard AS, explained: “There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing and it is clear that the public sector has faced some significant challenges. The very nature of the public sector also means that highly sensitive data such as patient data, defence or security records are not always suitable for particular cloud environments.

“Cloud computing has the potential to dramatically reduce costs across health, education, central and local government and much more, if it is deployed in the right way,” he added.

The adoption of cloud across the public sector has typically been slower than other markets, in part due to the slower uptake of cloud across local government. By the end of 2014, central government accounted for 80% of G-Cloud spend, compared to 6% for local government.

You can find out more about the report here.

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Microsoft cloud platform marketing general manager Mike Schutz has told analysts at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference of the explosive growth in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and how the company is differentiating against rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and IBM in the cloud.

With Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead asking the questions, Schutz noted the varied nature of Microsoft’s customer base gives it the advantage over AWS. As transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Schutz said: “We operate today in about 19 regions, which means we have 19 data centre regions globally. We continue to expand as our customers need us to do so.”

Google Cloud has 10 zones in three regions, Central US, Western Europe, and East Asia, while AWS has nine regions, with three in Asia Pacific, three in the US, two in Europe and one in South America. Schutz added: “Even if you combined AWS and Google Cloud we’re in more regions than the two of them combined.”

Schutz argues that while hyperscale remains important, Microsoft’s overall portfolio around hybrid is a differentiating factor.

“Where differentiation [really] comes in is around hybrid, because of our fundamental strategy to help customers deploy the same technologies that we put in our public cloud hyperscale data centre and run those in their data centre on top of [native hypervisor] hyperV, on top of our systems centre assets as well as bringing Azure infrastructure service and platform as a service capabilities to run in their data centres,” he said. “They then have the flexibility to help decide which applications move and when.”

Over the past year and a half, the Microsoft cloud platform marketing GM notes the conversation with customers has shifted from ‘why should I move to the cloud?’ to ‘how should I embrace it?’, with IaaS as “the lowest friction way” to start. “By and large we’re seeing a tremendous appetite for decision makers…in the line of businesses to look at the cloud, whether it be SaaS apps, whether that be just thinking about modernising infrastructure,” said Schutz.

He added: “In terms of the demand signals that we’re seeing…just a huge explosive growth in infrastructure as a service, but as organisations get more comfortable with the cloud and they understand the benefits of not just some cost savings, but ultimately the agility into which they are able to provide…the organisation to be able to do things faster instead of waiting weeks or months to get a server deployed, or an infrastructure or new app deployed.”

While Microsoft does not disclose revenue numbers, industry tracking from Synergy Research has revealed how the Redmond giant has established a niche of second place in the cloud infrastructure market while AWS continues to hold a significant lead. The most recent figures from July show the combined market share of the big four – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – commands 54% of the overall market, with AWS holding 29% at the top.

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New survey data revealed by the SANS Institute shows more issues cloud providers face in keeping their customers happy, with a lack of visibility into operations the biggest bugbear for clients.

The report, entitled ‘Orchestrating Security in the Cloud’, spoke to 485 IT professionals and found lack of visibility was cited by 48% of respondents as a problem. A lack of virtual machine and workload visibility was selected by 46% of those polled, while vulnerabilities introduced by the vendor which resulted in a breach were a pain point for 26% of respondents.

One in three respondents (33%) say they do not have enough visibility into their cloud providers’ operations, while 40% admit unauthorised access to sensitive data from other tenants is a major concern with public cloud deployments. For the public cloud, denial of service is the biggest threat (36%), compared to malware for private cloud (33%).

Not altogether unsurprisingly, the research also found hybrid cloud architectures were the way to go forward for most respondents. 40% of those polled are currently using them, while 43% plan to move towards a hybrid architecture in the coming 12 months. Only 12% of organisations say they use public cloud.

For CloudPassage, who sponsored the study, it reinforces what the company already suspected; trying to increase speed of elastic infrastructure while maintaining security is a tough balancing act. SANS analyst Dave Shackleford, who authored the report, noted: “Although most organisations have not experienced a breach in the cloud, security teams are concerned about illicit account and data access, maintaining compliance and integrating with on-premise security controls.

“Visibility into cloud environments remains a challenge, as does implementing cloud-focused incident response and pen testing processes,” he added.

This is not the first piece of research which argues cloud providers are not doing enough to satisfy their customers. A report from iland and Forrester Research, published in June, argued the key to vendors building better relationships with their clients is to release metadata exposing performance, security and cost. One in three survey respondents agreed with the statement ‘my provider charges me for every little question or incident’, while 45% resonated with ‘if I were a bigger customer, my cloud provider would care more about my success.’

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A note released by Synergy Research shows the public cloud continues to make significant inroads into the overall IT market, generating over $20 billion (£12.9bn) in quarterly revenues for IT firms.

According to the research, public cloud operators provide $10bn in quarterly revenues for key technology and IT supplies, while generating $12bn themselves in revenues from infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

Synergy classifies the leading vendors into two main categories. On the supply side, the leaders are HP, Cisco, Dell, IBM and Equinix, while for cloud services the market leaders are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM. These separate categories have been tracked by the research firm for several years. In February, AWS hit a five years high in cloud infrastructure market share brushing off the increasing competition from Microsoft, while earlier this month it was reported that HP had finally overtaken Cisco in cloud infrastructure equipment.

Digging down into the revenue generators, hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure contributes $7bn of spend, at a 26% year on year growth, while colocation and data centre lease contributes $2.8bn at 9% growth. SaaS contributes $6.6bn output, compared to cloud infrastructure services – IaaS, PaaS, public and hybrid – at $5.5bn.

Synergy argues the public cloud market is characterised by big numbers, high growth rates – and a collection of large vendors at the top.

“While there is still a place for small to medium sized public cloud players, especially on the service side within a specific region, the public cloud really is dominated by hyperscale cloud operators that can afford to build huge data centre footprints that span multiple continents,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director.

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Smaller businesses are less likely to have a business continuity plan in place – and according to disaster recovery (DR) and backup provider Databarracks, there needs to be a stronger culture shift to put it right.

According to the vendor’s most recent Data Health Check report, only a quarter (27%) of small businesses have business continuity plans, compared to 68% of medium-sized firms and 75% of large organisations. Of the organisations with a plan in place, 88% had a specific IT disaster recovery plan outlined within it. A further 7% of respondents expect to put one in within the next 12 months.

One of the more interesting titbits from the research related to how and why data was lost. According to the figures, human error contributed to almost a quarter (24%) of data loss, ahead of hardware failure (21%). To put this in perspective, the November 2014 iteration of the Data Health Check ranked the good old fashioned cock-up in third place, narrowly behind hardware and software failure. For the second year running, large businesses are more likely to lose data through human error than a hardware meltdown.

Not surprisingly, disaster recovery testing had a major impact on the confidence organisations had in their solutions. 58% of organisations who had tested their DR systems in the past year said they were “very confident” with their choice. For those who hadn’t tested, that number fell to 28%. In contrast, only 3% of businesses had tested their DR plans and found concerns.

The figures point to a clear trend; disaster recovery is no longer out of the reach of small businesses through the commoditising effects of cloud computing. According to Oscar Arean, Databarracks technical operations manager and author of the report, businesses who say they don’t have the time to test a DR system are more than likely blowing smoke.

“Sometimes it takes a prolonged period of downtime or a substantial data loss for a business to realise the importance of a robust DR solution, but it shouldn’t come at that cost,” said Arean. He added: “We need to see a culture shift and perhaps some of that responsibility falls to the service providers as well as the customers.

“DR providers need to educate organisations on the importance of disaster recovery planning and testing, and demonstrate how vulnerable they are if this isn’t done.”

In May, figures from Databarracks revealed the majority of councils in London have disaster recovery systems in place – yet many had not been tested for at least 12 months.

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Enterprise cloud storage provider Box has announced its second quarter financial results, with revenue at $73.5 million (£47.6m) and a customer base of over 50,000.

For the second quarter of fiscal 2016, ending July 31, Box announced revenue figures at an increase of 43% year over year. Billings were at $79.6m, an increase of 45% from the same period last year, while non-GAAP operating loss was at 45% of revenue, down from 57% in fiscal year 2015.

The SaaS provider noted among its 50,000 customers were Airbnb, Uber, and IBM. The latter is particularly noteworthy. In June the two companies announced a collaboration aimed at content management and social collaboration, as well as future integration with Watson Analytics. Yet it goes beyond that; IBM signed one of the four customer deals beyond $500,000 in the last quarter.

Dylan Smith, co-founder and chief financial officer of Box, said in a statement: “We continued to execute on our path to profitability by delivering improved non-GAAP operating margin. While we continue to invest in our large market opportunity and solidify our leadership position, our business model allows us to drive gains in operational efficiency as we scale.”

Box has made various plays in recent months to strengthen its hand in both enterprise and security. Among the more than 40 federal customers on the SaaS provider’s books is the US Department of Justice, in a deal announced back in May. Two months before, Box hired former General Services Administration CIO Sonny Hashmi to help lead the company’s efforts in the space.

It was this area which was cited as key by Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo in March. Analysing strategic avenues in the aftermath of Box’s IPO, he wrote:  “Risk-averse, highly regulated industries like healthcare, banking, and government represent huge opportunities for Box. Box has a huge opportunity in terms of offering government-grade protection protocols to both large enterprises and private consumers.

“Users may come to see Box as less of a place where they store information securely, and more of a place where they go to actively secure sensitive information.”

Compare and contrast with Dropbox, a company often portrayed as a rival, particularly given both firms’ push towards enterprise customers. In June Dropbox announced eight million business users were on board, a number which has doubled in 19 months.