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A curious finding appears in the latest DevOps market assessment from Gleanster Research and Delphix: stakeholders have a strong definition of what DevOps comprises, but each definition varies wildly.

75% of the more than 2000 survey respondents agreed DevOps was either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ defined, yet when asked to pick an option, the consensus was less than unanimous.

The most popular definition (84%) for DevOps was “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production”, while 69% plumped for “using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams” and 60% opted with “evolving operations to meet the demands of agile software development teams.”

It is worth noting each definition offers plenty of overlap, and evidently more than one option could be chosen. Yet the report argues DevOps is ‘generally ill-defined’ and adds: “Some organisations view DevOps as an integral part of the day-to-day activities of the entire IT department. However, organisations with a stronger definition of DevOps tend to empower dedicated teams who are exclusively responsible for rolling out DevOps initiatives – and these are the organisations that see the greatest DevOps success.”

The survey also uncovered key drivers for DevOps initiatives. Faster delivery of software (66%) was the most popular choice, followed by identifying bugs earlier (44%) and delivering software more frequently (43%). Four in five respondents said they were under strong pressure to deliver higher quality software, spotting defects both during and after production, more quickly and with fewer resources.

Similarly, there is a discrepancy with regards to who leads DevOps teams. According to the survey, DevOps leaders argue development teams lead the process, while practitioners are more likely to note operations teams take charge.

According to a recent analysis from Rackspace, job roles requiring DevOps expertise continues to rise, with permanent roles posted increasing by 57% year on year, although at a slower pace than 2014, where job roles increased 351%.

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More and more small businesses are moving to the cloud. According to a recent survey from BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce, cloud usage among UK SMBs has grown by 15% year on year to 69%, while more than half of respondents cite cloud computing as crucial in driving business flexibility.

Take app development house All Things Code. The Northamptonshire-based firm, in business less than two years and with only six employees, has deployed iland’s Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) to host its applications and become ‘the backbone of its IT infrastructure’.

The startup moved over to ECS approximately six months ago and Dan Harding, co-founder and director of All Things Code, argues the importance of cloud solutions not just for his business but others in the same boat. He tells CloudTech: “I think all of these cloud-based systems [have] given a startup business enterprise facilities at sensible prices, so we’d get a huge leg up with regards to not having to wait five years before we can buy the real kit and the proper software systems.”

iland was chosen by All Things Code not just because of its credibility in the market, but also because of their links to the familiar infrastructure of VMware from a previous business. “The actual deployment process, and actually being able to spin up and manage the servers as well…was definitely a tick box for us,” Harding explains. “It was on a platform I knew from a higher business perspective.”

He adds: “We may be able to talk tech and we know the industry, but as far as physically deploying and being experts in the nitty-gritty technical and deployment side of it is not our area of expertise, so we’d always felt that when we had a question or we were out of our depth…a quick question to the team there gave us the confidence to top up our lack of skill sets in that technical area.”

Regular readers of CloudTech may remember Houston-based iland from a survey they conducted in June where customers felt they weren’t being properly treated by their providers. One statistic which stood out like a sore thumb was the 45% of respondents who agreed with the statement ‘if I were a bigger customer, my cloud provider would care more about my success.’

Lilac Schoenbeck, VP product marketing and product management, notes: “We actually strive to work with [SMBs] a great deal. The nice thing is that it really pushes us to think through a lot of elements of the platform that otherwise are easy to perhaps ignore as a company.

“It’s not like a smaller company has resources to commit one or two people to full-time cloud management,” she adds. “They need to be able to manage their system very seamlessly, very quickly, without any hurdles associated with usability, interpreting information the system’s telling them, and so forth.”

For Harding, the fact iland visited the site in Northamptonshire, sat the team round a table and ‘held our hand through it’ was a boon. He explains: “Being just a year old and our customers we’ve worked really hard to get on board, it was a big deal for us even though it was probably” – he pauses – “it isn’t probably, it was definitely not a big deal to iland, the size of the project.”

Schoenback adds: “As an organisation we don’t think ‘how big is that customer’s bill every month?’ and funnel them into a different support queue. If we’re invested in the growth of our customers and that ultimately shall drive the growth of their cloud footprint, then we shouldn’t be caring about how much they’re paying at the end of every month – we try and treat everybody equally.”

Overall, moving to a cloud-based system was an easy decision for Harding for multiple reasons. “I think it really gives us a bit of a leg up with regards to credibility,” he explains. “If we were to go and buy the same amount of hardware and have it ourselves, it would have been out of our price range, and we just haven’t got the facilities to have it securely and well cooled.

“I think if anything it gave us an element of enterprise level backup with regards to what we could push and who we could push our services to.”

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Wuala, the Switzerland-based cloud storage service owned by data storage provider Seagate, is to terminate in November, according to a company blog post.

The post, from Wuala head of sales and marketing Markus Speth, details the three stages of closure. The company – as of yesterday – will not accept any new storage purchases or renewals, the service will transition to read-only on September 30, and on November 15 the service will terminate and all data will be deleted.

The company therefore stresses the importance of migrating data from the Wuala cloud to an appropriate backup – even another cloud provider. To “ease the impact of the service termination”, Wuala has partnered with Tresorit, offering a migration wizard to help transfer data smoothly.

In a post, Tresorit chief executive Istvan Lam describes Wuala as “a pioneer of secure cloud storage”, and adds the company is “proud” to be recommended as a partner. Wuala also mentions SecureSafe as a potential option for secure data storage; both companies are also based in Switzerland.

Wuala makes it clear the service is not being transferred over to Tresorit; Seagate and LaCie, the parent company of Wuala, will run it until it terminates. Customers can get a refund on their account, unless they have less than 10 USD/CHF/EUR credits in their bank.

Analysis

From a position of hindsight, the first seeds of doubt may have been sown in a blog post from Wuala in June 2014, in which the company announced a move to a paid-only model. No longer would users get a bundle of free storage in their initial account. At the time, Wuala was “excited about the next step in [its] growth.” But with the continual ‘race to zero’ in cloud storage, as prices go down and down, was this a retrograde step?

For pure-play premium cloud storage vendors, the argument remains that guaranteed security, especially in an enterprise context, reassures customers into paying a premium even though the likes of Microsoft, for instance, offer unlimited OneDrive storage with an Office 365 account.

Lam attempts to answer this question in the blog post welcoming Wuala customers. “The key problem is that you can’t build your business on storage,” he opines. “Sure, industry experts advise building added value on top of storage. But what constitutes enough added value? Is providing zero-knowledge security enough of a competitive advantage?

“If the market is any judge, the answer is yes,” he adds, stressing secure cloud providers ‘need to provide a level of convenience on par with Dropbox-like solutions’.

Dropbox, a company which often gets the rap – fairly or otherwise – for security in the cloud, argues ‘adoption is key to security.’ UK manager Mark Van Der Linden, writing exclusively for this publication in July, argued: “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.”

For now though, don’t expect this to be the last shuttering. That’s the warning of Chenxi Wang, VP cloud security and strategy at enterprise cloud security provider CipherCloud. “These closures are highly disruptive for businesses,” she says. “Customers are unexpectedly having to find another storage provider and face time pressures for moving their data out or face losing it.”

Wang also argues customers have to worry about confidentiality in their data, and how Wuala will delete data come the November 15 doomsday. “When storage is in the cloud, we can’t forget about the hardware extensions that can still ‘remember’ our information,” she notes.

Still, put this one alongside Nirvanix, Code Spaces, and other companies that have sadly fallen by the wayside. As ever, working out a cloud exit strategy for your organisation is just as important as your entrance.

The Wuala shutdown notice, with full FAQ list, can be found here.

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Gartner has released its latest hype cycle for emerging technologies, and while the likes of autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things sits atop the peak of inflated expectations, hybrid cloud computing is a bit further down the line heading straight for the trough of disillusionment.

The analyst house groups a bunch of technologies in three different stages and heavily influenced by its nexus of forces – mobile, social, cloud and information. Hybrid cloud comes under the digital marketing banner, whereby enterprises focus on new ways to reach consumers. Other technologies in this bucket include IoT, machine learning and gesture control.

For the ‘post-nexus’ stages, Gartner describes the first as digital business, whereby physical assets will be digitalised and will become equal actors in the value chain. Wearables, virtual and augmented reality and quantum computing form part of this sector. The second, autonomous, defines an enterprise’s ability to leverage technologies that, in essence, replace human capabilities.

Betsy Burton, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, said: “We encourage CIOs and other IT leaders to dedicate time and energy focused on innovation, rather than just incremental business advancement, while also gaining inspiration by scanning beyond the bounds of their industry.

“As enterprises continue the journey to becoming digital businesses, identifying and employing the right technologies at the right time will be critical,” she added.

According to Andy Soanes, chief technology officer of Bell Integration, Gartner is right to be putting hybrid cloud five years away from the vaunted plateau of productivity, citing the recent move from Netflix to shut down its last on-prem data centre to go all in on public cloud.

“Finding the sweet spot, where the business is gaining the maximum benefit from a perfect balance of on-premise IT, private cloud and public cloud services, can be extremely difficult,” he said. “A business must be able to identify its ‘crown jewels’: those applications where failure, or losing control of data, would have catastrophic consequences.”

He added: “On the other hand, IT should be wary of excessive caution, keeping applications in-house when it no longer benefits the business to do so. Losing control of an application, or putting the organisation at risk or failing compliance, is an understandable worry.”

For James Butler, chief technology officer of Trustmarque, hybrid cloud should be on the CIO’s mindset as soon as possible. “Taking an incremental approach to hybrid cloud gives CIOs a platform to lead real business change from the centre, and avoid being bypassed or replaced,” he wrote in this publication back in June. “By driving the strategy and promoting the positive benefits of cloud, CIOs will reduce risks and maximise investments; rather than simply ignoring cloud and falling behind.”

Soanes stresses the importance of organisations needing to get their house in order. “An IT department that knows the services it has, the services it needs, and the changes it has to make to get there, will be able to identify its perfect cloud sweet spot, where the crown jewels are kept in the business, but the IT department’s energy is not spent performing housekeeping for low-risk, low-value applications,” he said. “This will be where IT services are providing the maximum value to the business, regardless of where they actually reside.”

Read the full Gartner hype cycle here.

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A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services argues that as cloud usage in the enterprise continues to rise, collaboration is now the key benefit ahead of business agility.

The research, which had more than 450 participants and was sponsored by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, found 84% of respondents agreeing their organisation’s use of cloud computing had increased in the past year. 72% said their use of cloud increased collaboration options, while 71% argued business agility had been increased. Essentially, the value of the cloud comes from speed as opposed to cost savings, enabling more fluid working relationships between traditionally separate entities.

One sign of a growing maturity in the space is that companies are not as quick to espouse the competitive advantage cloud normally brings. Whereas in 2014 30% of respondents argued cloud gave their organisation a “significant” competitive advantage, that number drops to 16%. The majority of this disparity is found in those who said cloud gave “a little” competitive advantage – 23% in 2015 compared to 11% in 2014.

Cloud is no longer a differentiator – however not being on it would be a significant disadvantage

Interestingly, as the benefits of cloud computing become more apparent to the C-suite, the number of respondents who admit they don’t know if their organisation has benefitted has dropped (18% in 2014, 11% in 2015). Yet as one respondent put it, “Cloud is no longer a differentiator; however, not being on it would be a significant disadvantage.”

As ever in these instances, security (29%) continues to be top of mind for qualities that matter in a cloud provider. Integration with other systems (26%) was also seen as important by respondents, alongside compliance (18%), long term financial stability (18%), and the ability to provide cloud management capabilities (14%).

Despite this, Siki Giunta, global SVP cloud at Verizon Enterprise, insists security is no longer the barrier to adoption it once was. “Cloud is no longer on the fringes of enterprise IT – but as it matures, there are new obstacles to be faced,” she wrote. “Only now the challenges aren’t about gaining acceptance, but about how to get more from cloud to keep driving growth and profitability.”

You can find the full report here (email required).

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According to recent IT Jobs Watch figures, job roles involving container technology Docker have risen 317 places to number two in the 500 most sought after IT skills. With this in mind, recent research from Rackspace has shown a similar spike in Docker and DevOps-related skills in the UK technology industry.

An analysis of job adverts has shown an almost tenfold (991%) increase in posts seeking Docker skills over the past 12 months, while DevOps expertise continues to rise, with permanent roles posted increasing by 57% year on year. Between 2013 and 2014, demand rose by 351%.

This demand for new DevOps roles has so far not translated into salary increases, according to Rackspace. Salaries for DevOps-related skills rose by only 2% last year, compared with 28% for Docker skills. The skill sets for each role, as one would expect, were similar; for Docker roles, the core competencies were Linux (66%), DevOps (60%), Python (60%) and Puppet, while for DevOps engineers it was Linux (86%), Puppet (69%), Chef (57%), Python (53%) and Amazon Web Services (40%).

Naturally Rackspace, as a managed cloud hosting provider, aims to reassure potential customers it has this disparity covered, not least through offering support for the likes of Microsoft Azure. Yet Darren Norfolk, Rackspace UK managing director, said: “We know that technology skills and job roles are constantly evolving. What this means for both the workforce and employers alike is a deeper responsibility to stay aware of what are considered to be the best working practices and cutting edge platforms at all times. Last year it was all about DevOps coming to the fore, but the demand for Docker has surged over the last 12 months.

“These roles are fundamental to the cloud industry’s future but the reality is that businesses are struggling to fill them, as there just aren’t enough candidates with the right skill sets out there,” he added.

The importance of AWS skills aligning with DevOps is not a surprise. As was pointed out on these pages back in November 2014, AWS is bundled with offerings to deploy and manage applications and infrastructure as code “with an inherent DevOps bent”, while in July IT automation and DevOps provider Chef announced its availability in the AWS marketplace.

For vendors, the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud report, published in February, found revealing findings. DevOps usage hit two thirds (66%) in 2015 with Chef (28%) the most popular tool, followed by Puppet (24%) and Docker (13%). While Docker’s number may be seen as low, the survey also noted significantly larger numbers (35%) who said they would utilise it in the future.

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IT administrators in organisations which have migrated to Google Apps or Office 365 argue they spend much less time doing mundane activities – but it’s not exactly ‘put your feet up’ time either.

That’s the key finding from the latest study by BetterCloud on the state of the cloud office. Back in July, the first set of results was revealed, which showed a clear trend for larger organisations to move to Office 365, as opposed to SMEs running Google.

This time around, however, the spotlight focuses on the admins. BetterCloud argues that with cloud offices, tasks such as scheduled and unscheduled maintenance are not as big a factor in the IT admin’s day, with 87% and 86% of respondents respectively agreeing. Less time is also being spent on upgrades (88%), storage and quota management (86%), and data recovery (84%).

So what do admins do instead of these tasks? The report cites a wide variety of strategic and proactive jobs, including improving security, application integrations, and end user training. Not to be forgotten, however, is migrating systems over to the cloud; 67% of Office 365 and 68% of Google Apps admins say their migrations happen in-house.

Equally, there is a clear correlation between the pace of cloud migration and less time admins spend stuck doing routine tasks. For companies currently 100% in the cloud, 94% of admins polled agree they save time, compared with organisations who expect a complete move by 2020 (88%) and by at least 2026 (78%).

A particular ‘eureka’ moment cited in the report is through Office 365 admins who tell their users to run Outlook on the web when issues arise with the desktop client. This “confirm[s] to them that if they can just get their users to work in the cloud, helpdesk tickets will begin to decline,” according to the report.

Overall, however, the report argues cloud IT admins need to prepare themselves for the changes to come, and the potential expansion of the department’s role from the “cost centre” and “department of no” mentality which frequently pervades it.

“Every admin has a different agenda depending on the needs of their organisation, but with more time and less busy work, cloud IT admins have an opportunity to become agents of innovation for their organisation and truly capitalise on their emerging role as leaders,” the report concludes.

You can read the full post here.

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E-commerce giant Alibaba has announced an additional $1 billion (£641,000) investment in Aliyun to expand the international presence of its cloud computing arm.

The money will also be used to develop new cloud and big data solutions for its customers, as well as support an “alliance-based global cloud computing ecosystem.”

Aliyun currently provides public cloud services in five data centres across China and Hong Kong, while earlier this year their first overseas data centre, in Silicon Valley, was launched. Aliyun expects part of the investment to contribute towards more data centre expansion, moving towards the Middle East, Singapore, Japan, and Europe.

“Aliyun has become a world-class cloud computing service platform that is the market leader in China, bearing the fruits of our investment over the past six years,” said Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang in a statement. “As the physical and digital are becoming increasingly integrated, Aliyun will serve as an essential engine in this new economy.”

The Chinese cloud computing market is expected to ignite. A recent article from Bain & Company argues that, by 2020, China’s cloud computing is set to break the $20bn barrier, compared to just $1.5bn two years ago. Currently, cloud computing represents less than 2% of Alibaba’s overall revenues – but the company hopes for that to change soon.

This publication has assessed the Chinese cloud computing ecosystem as far back as 2013, where a report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCESRC) argued “systematic weaknesses”, such as lack of innovation and core technology in integrated circuit industries, was holding China back. In December, it was revealed cloud computing providers in China were to be assessed “to ensure that the government has total control of the entire ecosystem.”

Aliyun has competition in the public cloud arena in the form of Huawei. According to reports, Huawei is planning a launch event at the end of July 2015 to officially release its own cloud services.

Analysing cloud adoption across industry verticals, the banking and financial industry is as good a yardstick as any to assess progress due to its stringent data security requirements. A new report from CipherCloud shows financial firms have an increased confidence in cloud technologies; 100% of respondents said they put certain personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud.

This does not extend to all PII however – only one in three respondents said they use the cloud to store particularly sensitive data, such as social security numbers, birth dates and tax IDs. Yet there is a clear trend from financial firms to improve security as the sensitivity of data increases. 40% of organisations polled say that for the most sensitive information, they use tokenisation and strong encryption.

One of the more interesting facets of the report related around how companies classify their data. CipherCloud asked respondents to put their data in four categories; highly sensitive PII; regular PII; personal finance data; and business sensitive data. Intriguingly, a piece of ‘highly sensitive’ data at one company can be relegated to standard ‘regular PII’ at another. The most extreme example is ‘Name’ – some banking firms, perhaps more associated with private banking or high net worth customers, see this as highly sensitive information.

The report also examined the differences over businesses using encryption or tokenisation to protect data. For business sensitive data, the response was a clear 100% for encryption. 15% of finance organisations use tokenisation for personal finance data and 13% for regular PII.

“It’s not surprising to see that encryption is the predominant choice for those seeking to protect business-sensitive data,” the report notes. “As this category of data is typically non-critical, few are utilising heavyweight tokenisation to protect business sensitive data.”

The report also examined the protection techniques companies utilised for structured PII fields; for email addresses, 91% of those polled used format-preserving encryption, while that number dropped to 82% for phone numbers. The other respondents favoured tokenisation (9% email) or length-restricting encryption (18% phone).

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Meet Springs.io. This container-based cloud infrastructure provider claims to offer the first pure-play container cloud service in the UK.

The company builds upon the auto-scaling Linux container technology from hosting provider ElasticHosts, whose CEO, Richard Davies, is the founder of Springs.io. One of the key facets of cloud computing is the ability to ‘pay as you go’ – but Davies argues this can be taken one step further. With billing based on actual usage rather than provisioned capacity, users could theoretically pay for just 1GB when a 4GB server is lightly used.

“We have been listening to the market and what we are hearing is that people are craving simplicity,” he said. “They just want to be able to sign up to a service without having to choose instance sizes or worry about over-paying, just as you would with your gas or electricity.”

The move plays into a greater confidence and maturation from companies grappling with cloud services, Davies explains, noting: “While some customers need greater support and configuration, many don’t, and we wanted to provide a service for users that are looking for a more simplistic offering.” However, for something such as configuring a cloud environment to automatically scale, many SMEs – who the Springs.io product targets – might not have that in-house.

“Springs.io is very clear and easy to navigate, and best of all it automatically scales and bills users based on their actual usage – so it really does the thinking for you,” added Davies.

Springs.io and ElasticHosts both utilise Linux, but the latter acts more like you would expect from traditional infrastructure as a service. In May, Davies – with his ElasticHosts hat on – wrote for this publication on the next generation of Linux containers which foreshadowed this move. Vertical scaling of containerised servers, he wrote, can handle varying load with no need to pre-estimate requirements and, using a water analogy, you can simply turn the tap on and off.

“This is a giant leap forward in commoditising cloud computing and takes it closer to true utilities such as gas, electricity and water,” he wrote. Springs.io appears to be the first step on that giant leap.