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Even though 93% of businesses are now using the cloud in some capacity, expectations are exceeding specific gains according to a new survey from cloud provider ElasticHosts.

More than four in five (84%) UK-based CIOs believe their cloud provider could do more to reduce the burden on in-house IT staff, and a similar number (80%) believe the pricing structure is a “rip off.”

Top of the list of grievances was slow response time to customer service queries, cited by 47% of respondents. Call handlers lacking sufficient technical knowledge (41%) and use of automated phone lines (33%) were also major issues.

Three in four respondents believe the move to cloud has forced them to sacrifice service and support in some capacity, while a third insist they have sacrificed the majority or all support by moving to the cloud.

This is not the first piece of research to suggest vendors must up their game. Back in June a report from iland and Forrester asserted cloud providers must do better in assuaging compliance fears, building support issues, and making customers feel wanted. At the time, Forrester gave three takeaways for customers: get the metadata you require; look for cloud providers with strong reporting and compliance alerting; and ensure your cloud is supported by humans.

The latter point correlates with the ElasticHosts research. Richard Davies, ElasticHosts CEO, argues, “Many companies adopt cloud so they can take away the headaches related to managing their IT and reduce the burden on in-house IT staff. Yet when using any services, you want to be able to ask questions. You should be able to do this without having to pay a hefty premium.”

Among Davies’ interests is Springs.io, which launched in July as the UK’s first pure play container cloud service. Building upon the auto-scaling Linux container technology from ElasticHosts, the startup aims to make cloud computing a similar commodity as gas, electricity and water  – automatically scaling and billing users based on their actual usage and not being a ‘rip off’, as a majority of CIOs claim.

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HP has finally overtaken Cisco in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, according to latest figures released by Synergy Research.

The two companies had been virtually neck and neck in the previous two quarters’ analysis, yet Synergy argues HP has grabbed the lead by virtue of its investment in the server and storage space, which now accounts for almost two thirds of the infrastructure market.

HP and Cisco maintain a huge lead over closest rivals Microsoft, Dell, and IBM, yet the two leaders represent only a quarter of the overall market. IBM was the market leader back in 2012 but has experienced a severe downturn since then, with a key reason being Big Blue selling its server business to Lenovo in 2014. Despite a slight upturn in fortunes this quarter, IBM remains behind Dell, having dropped from third place to fifth in the market between Q3 and Q4 of 2014.

At the top, however, the battle is well and truly joined – and the intriguing backdrop between the two companies adds fuel to the fire. Cisco recently unveiled new leadership in the form of CEO Chuck Robbins while HP is going ahead with plans to split the company in two, separating its computer and printer business from corporate hardware and services, with the latter forming Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, says the split – to be made official in November but already happening internally – could potentially enhance HP’s play in the cloud infrastructure equipment market. He told CloudTech in an email: “If anything the impact should be a positive one resulting from a tighter focus of the senior management team on issues that are critical to HPE’s success.”

Regarding the move as an overall strategic play, Dinsdale argues it is a “great idea” – theoretically at least. But he warned: “Of course everything will come down to how well the transition is managed operationally. There is a lot of potential for management to take its eyes off the ball as it handles issues surrounding the transition.”

Cisco maintains a commanding lead in public cloud infrastructure, while HP holds all the aces in private cloud. The overall market, including hardware and software, is now running at approximately $16 billion per quarter. With the market having grown by 25% year on year, Synergy notes the latest figures represent good news for all vendors.

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The global personal cloud market is expected to top almost $90 billion (£58.5bn) in revenue by 2020, according to the latest forecast by Allied Market Research.

The research firm anticipates a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.1% between 2015 and 2020, with growing customer awareness cited as boosting growth and personal cloud for individuals continuing to lead the market.

Individual users will comprise around 60% of total market revenue by 2020 according to Allied, however the SMB segment is expected to take nearly a quarter of revenue at a CAGR of 35% across five years. In terms of share between cloud providers and user-hosted solutions, provider-hosted personal cloud will constitute nearly 75% of the market value by 2020; yet user-hosted cloud is expected to grow at a CAGR of 46% to make up the remaining quarter.

Key growth drivers between now and 2020 include flexible packages, affordable pricing structures, as well as increased security features. Allied cites Dropbox’s addition of two factor authentication as part of this push. The company has also added the ISO/IEC 27018 privacy standard to its arsenal as of May, with Microsoft achieving certification back in February.

One interesting prediction the researchers make is through funding models; while subscriptions understandably remain the primary revenue generator for personal cloud services, Allied expects advertisement and lead generation to surpass this by 2019.

Increased uptake from the Asia Pacific region is expected to contribute significantly to overall growth, representing a greater market share than North America and Europe in six years. According to the Asia Cloud Computing Association’s 2014 cloud readiness index, Japan continues to lead the way, ahead of New Zealand and Australia. The report authors anticipate a ‘seismic data revolution once information access in Asia becomes universally cheap, powerful, and available’, aligning with Allied on there being a tipping point for Asia Pacific cloud usage.

You can read more about the report here (subscription required).

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A new paper from Osterman Research in conjunction with CTERA Networks argues a clear need for organisations to adopt enterprise grade file sync and share (EFSS) software due to security and shadow IT fears.

Naturally, the conclusion of the report is less than surprising given CTERA’s continued push against consumer grade (CFSS) software. Back in July the firm released research detailing how three quarters of firms are looking for an alternative to public file sync and share services. VP strategic marketing Rani Osnat told this publication back in July how while the likes of Box and Dropbox have made a concerted effort at greater security, more still needed to be done.

Yet the statistics from worried enterprise organisations make for interesting reading. More than three quarters (76%) of survey respondents say they are at least somewhat concerned about consumer-grade file sync and share solutions, with only 5% said they were ‘not concerned at all’.

Email (95%) was not surprisingly the most popular conduit for employees sharing files with others, followed by Microsoft SharePoint (68%), and IT managed file sync and share tools (58%). Employee-managed sharing tools comprised 42% of the vote. Yet the paper argues email creates “a number of functional problems in the context of managing servers and overall IT infrastructure”, with network bandwidth all too easily being affected.

The report also mentions the continually occurring issue of shadow IT, noting that between May 2012 and January 2015, the usage of consumer storage applications without the blessing of the IT department has not abated. According to Osterman’s figures, in 2012 only 11% of Dropbox enterprise usage was IT approved, compared to 45% which was under the radar; yet in January of this year, while over a quarter (28%) of IT departments had approved Dropbox usage, the number of miscreants rose to almost half (49%).

These results show that while IT departments are getting to grips with the usage of consumer cloud storage, significantly more employees rely on it to get their jobs done. This laxity is proven by further figures which show only 8% give their organisations an A grade for information security. The majority (84%) opted for a more humdrum mark of B or C.

Mark van der Linden, Dropbox UK country manager, wrote for this publication back in July: “The products that are most loved by employees in their personal lives are often the best solutions for businesses too. The solution for CIOs is to see cloud security as an opportunity to choose products that work best for their teams, and at the same time, strengthen their organisation’s overall security posture.”

Yet CTERA argues differently. “The use of CFSS solutions shifts control over corporate data from IT to individual employees, and has become a key element of the ‘shadow IT’ or ‘consumerised IT’ problem that organisations must address,” the report notes. “The use of EFSS solutions will mitigate the risks associated with CFSS solutions.”

You can read the full 17 page report here (sign up required). Who do you agree with?

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Three quarters of UK businesses are experiencing frustration with cloud adoption, according to a new study from Arlington Research and StratoGen.

The research, which polled 1,000 UK senior business executives, found more than a third (36%) of respondents admitting they host fewer than 10% of their IT applications in the cloud. One in five polled said their main issue with cloud technology was the cost, while 17% cited insufficient availability of applications and 16% opted for a lack of IT support.

The report argues a lack of business growth with cloud technologies is hampering UK executives – and more worryingly, many want out. One in three (33%) of respondents admit they are ready to remove their business off the cloud completely, while a further 31% are considering a similar move. Meanwhile 17% of respondents argue their current cloud solutions prevent their company from growing, and 14% are worried downtime issues impact on employee productivity and earnings.

Naturally, one can raise an eyebrow as to why Stratogen, a provider of VMware cloud hosting with data centres in three continents, would publish survey results decrying the state of cloud technologies. Yet according to chief commercial officer Karl Robinson, it’s not the issue of moving to the cloud, it’s who you move with.

“A cloud platform should always be fit for a business’s individual needs, with in-built scalability to allow for growth without surprising cost hikes,” said Robinson.

He added: “It is clear UK businesses today have a distinct lack of confidence in the cloud’s ability to deliver the benefits it is capable of. To truly instil trust, cloud solutions must prove the business value being provided. Until then, the business benefits of mass cloud adoption will not be realised.”

Recent research on the topic of adoption has been similarly gloomy. More than half of participants in an August study from Oracle admitted their IT organisations were unprepared for the competitive threat of moving to the cloud.

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Software as a service (SaaS) provider Apttus has secured $108 million (£70.4m) in series C funding, just seven months after its previous funding round.

Apttus delivers SaaS apps providing an unbroken funnel throughout the sales process, with the company claiming to pioneer the ‘quote to cash’ cycle, which is an end to end process covering an entire sales lifecycle in the cloud. The latest cash injection comes after a $37m round in September 2013 and $41m in February this year, with the investors this time round include Iconiq Capital, K1 Capital, KIA, and Salesforce Ventures.

Securing more than $100m such a short time after a previous round naturally indicates a fast growing company, yet the company shunned venture capital for the first seven years of its existence.  Now, having earned a unicorn valuation the company is going for the jugular, as Apttus CEO Kirk Krappe explains. “It’s about market opportunity, pure and simple,” he tells CloudTech. “Hiring one salesperson means bringing on more engineers, a BDR (business development representative) to develop leads, and more.

“Our current customers represent about 1% of our target accounts, and if we’re going to maximise our potential, it was time to expand, via funding.”

The link with Salesforce is key, as Apttus is delivered on the Salesforce1 platform. According to Krappe, the funding round is a ‘tremendous show of support’ from the cloud software giant – which is also a customer of Apttus – adding: “Apttus and Salesforce are in sync – where their process ends, the quote to cash cycle begins.”

A key sign of Apttus’ expansion is through its workforce; the California-based firm began 2015 with 500 employees, is now at 900 and aims to end the year at 1400. Apttus has also opened offices in London, Sydney and Chicago, with another in Japan on the way. Krappe explains: “That kind of growth does not come without a unique set of growing pains. The next 12 months will be about getting our team and workforce ready for the next step, whatever or whenever it may be.”

Regarding that next step, Apttus is understandably remaining tight lipped. After the last funding round, many in the media speculated whether Apttus would go to IPO or be acquired, possibly by Salesforce. Krappe notes the company is under no pressure from investors, saying: “There are no definite plans as far as a liquidity event – it simply could go either way.”

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CSC has announced the procurement of a contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worth $108 million (£70.4m) alongside Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other business partners.

The contract, potentially worth $1 billion over 10 years, will see the FAA move to a hybrid cloud environment, with CSC consolidating data centres and migrating data and systems across using the CSC Agility Platform cloud management tool.

The news was initially broken by Washington Technology, with the report noting that other companies involved in the team include EMC and Equinix. The FAA posted an official announcement noting the contract was awarded on August 26.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the importance of such contracts to cloud providers. The CIA’s cloud computing contract, awarded in 2013 and reportedly worth $600m, went to Amazon Web Services despite an appeal from IBM amid complaints that AWS’ bid was $50m more expensive, and that the procedures used to rank Amazon’s proposal as technically superior were wide of the mark. In February 2015, the AWS CIA cloud had achieved ‘final operational capability’.

Winning lucrative public sector contracts are also seen as vindication of a cloud provider’s security accreditation –in particular the stringent FedRAMP certification. AWS got its FedRAMP wings in June 2013, while Microsoft followed suit in October that year.

CSC president and chief executive Mike Lawrie said: “CSC and our alliance partners are demonstrating the unique value that we as a team can bring to deliver an innovative, next-gen IT cloud solution that drives the FAA’s mission forward.” He added: “We are in a unique position to help meet the agency’s operational and budgetary challenges over the life of the program.”

In statements, Amazon noted the acceleration of government cloud adoption while advocating its own compliance standards including FedRAMP, ITAR and SRG, while Microsoft argued the contract win ‘builds nicely’ on additionally moving the FAA to Office 365 for greater productivity.

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More than half of the 1,000 participants in a study by Oracle admit their IT organisations are unprepared for the competitive threat of moving to the cloud, including competitors’ ability to launch new applications faster.

The report, which looked at large enterprises in EMEA, also uncovers inadequacies in terms of how platform as a service (PaaS) offerings are being leveraged for business agility. 59% of those polled said their businesses either do not or cannot know whether they can shift workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds.

When it comes to developing, testing and deploying new enterprise apps on mobile, almost three quarters (73%) of respondents are not agile enough to iterate within one month. Worryingly, more than half (56%) cannot do this within six months.

Despite this, almost two thirds (62%) of respondents believe their company is agile, and that it can iterate products and services quickly, while more than three quarters (78%) said the ability to rapidly develop new business applications is either ‘important’ or ‘critically important’ to the success of their business. Furthermore, 30% of those polled argue the effective mobilisation of applications and services is the deciding factor for business success through IT infrastructure.

Naturally, the Oracle survey results come alongside a push towards its Oracle Cloud Platform kit, which gets a mention in dispatches. Yet Tino Scholman, vice president EMEA of Oracle Cloud, argues businesses need to do more. “There is something of an awareness gap emerging around how businesses can become more agile,” he said. “While some companies already view themselves as agile, most of these are not yet able to realise the power of PaaS solutions to help them launch new services quickly.”

He added: “If you want to become more innovative and experiment more often, then you have to make sure your cost of innovation goes down and goes down quickly. We want to help bridge this awareness gap by showing businesses how the right cloud platform solution can enable them to react almost immediately to market conditions and get well ahead of the competition.”

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The concept of the 1%, in economic terms, usually refers to wealth inequality; however, a recent report from CloudLock shows that in cloud environments, 75% of the security risk can be attributed to just 1% of users.

This instance, of course, has more in common with the Pareto principle, whereby approximately 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, than anything else. Yet the report analyses a trend familiar to the readers of this publication; a key security risk when moving data to the cloud is not so much hackers, but employees and users.

The report, which analysed 10 million users, one billion files and more than 91,000 applications, found a high concentration of app users – 1% of users represent 62% of all app installs in the cloud. Additionally, if 1% of users represent 75% of the risk, 95% of users only represent 10% of the risk. The research also found that 52,000 instances of applications were installed by highly privileged users – a number the organisation claims to be zero given privileged accounts are coveted by cybercriminals.

This is the key point of the paper; CloudLock argues users are the weak point – but it is malicious actors who expand the issue. “While there has always been a risk associated with unintentional, user-induced risk exposure in the cloud, cybercriminals exacerbate concerns as they look to exploit users, often by employing increasingly clever spear phishing tactics to compromise credentials and gain access to corporate environments,” the report notes.

The report gives an example of an unnamed Silicon Valley company with a cloud deployment of 29 million files and 16,000 users. The top 1% of users owned 66% of the files, while 77% of the 800,000 instances of files being exposed outside of the organisation could be traced back to the top 100 users.

According to CloudLock CEO and co-founder Gil Zimmermann, risk can be reduced by involving the most active users in the security process; one client decreased risk of public exposures by 62% in just one day after following these steps. “Cyber attacks today target your users, not your infrastructure,” Zimmermann said. “As technology leaders wake up to this new reality, security programs are being reengineered to focus where true risk lies: with the user.

“The best defence is to know what typical user behaviour looks like – and, more importantly, what it doesn’t,” he added.

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More proof arrives that financial organisations are becoming more comfortable with cloud technologies: according to the latest industry outlook from Skyhigh Networks, the average financial services company uses more than 1,000 cloud services, with collaboration tools the most popular type of application used. But is it a good thing?

The report, which focuses on real life data from 3.7 million employees at banks, insurance companies and credit card firms among others, found the average employee uses 31 separate cloud apps. On average, this comprises eight collaboration services, five file sharing services, three social media services, and three content services. Those with a keen eye for numbers will note those figures do not add up to 31, so it’s worth pointing out that among the others, four apps used on average are from – usually unwanted – marketing analytics and advertising services.

The risk does not end there, however. According to the report 15.5% of financial services have at least one compromised credential, more than any other industry, while 88% of those analysed showed behaviour indicative of an insider threat during the last quarter. The number across all industries which have one compromised credential or more is at 11.2%, while the report also found 94.3% of financial services companies have exposure to compromised credentials – again higher than the overall average of 91.7% from all industries.

Going with current trends, Microsoft Office 365 remains the most popular enterprise cloud app in financial services, followed by Concur and Salesforce, while on the consumer side Facebook rules the roost, followed by Twitter then LinkedIn. Yet the overall consensus from Skyhigh is that of risk rather than reward.

“While financial services companies take special care in assessing the security controls of cloud services, employees can also introduce cloud services into the workplace, creating “shadow IT”, the report warns. “As sensitive data moves to the cloud, these companies must also meet strict regulatory requirements.”

Other recent research has been mixed on the topic. In March, the Cloud Security Alliance described how financial firms were accessing cloud services more readily albeit with roadblocks still to conquer, yet in July a report from CipherCloud revealed how 100% of respondents in the finance space said they put certain personally identifiable information in the cloud.