Picture credit: Chef

IT automation and DevOps provider Chef has announced its availability in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, expanding its collaboration with the infrastructure giant and offering one click deployment for AWS users.

Chef, whose clients include Facebook, Splunk and GE, now enables AWS customers to migrate workloads from on premise data centres to AWS, as well as migrate, deploy, automate, and manage change in the cloud.

Ken Cheney, VP business development at Chef, said: “Chef is excited to expand our collaboration with AWS. AWS’s market leadership in cloud computing, coupled with our expertise in IT automation and DevOps practices, brings a new level of capabilities to our customers.” Dave McCann, AWS Marketplace VP, added: “Our customers want easy to use software like Chef that is available for immediate purchase and deployment in AWS Marketplace. This new partnership demonstrates our focus on offering low-friction DevOps tools to power customers’ business.”

The two companies are also coming together on the AWS Loft talks series in New York and San Francisco, with Chef providing training and content focusing on DevOps success patterns.

According to Gartner research, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy to a mainstream play by 2016, potentially being employed by a quarter of Global 2000 organisations. As things stand at the moment, however, companies are not so sure.  As Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, told this reporter at the recent Cloud World Forum event, it is not for every company.

“What DevOps is really about is developers taking more and more control of the stack, [and] at the same time automating more and more of the stack,” he said. “There’s this happy story about getting ops and developers to work more closely together, and understand each other more. That’s nice, but it’s really about developers continuing to advance and take on more and more ownership of an entire stack.”

This publication has also examined the importance of DevOps when utilising AWS. As LogicWorks wrote in November 2014: “With a DevOps approach to deployment of cloud apps in an AWS environment, it may very well be possible that while the shift to cloud computing may test the reliability of the technology, in reality, it is not something that one needs to be overly concerned about.”

You can find out more about Chef for AWS here.

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While the rest of the tech media marvelled at the world’s first seven nanometre chips unveiled by IBM earlier this week, the Armonk giant has quietly pushed out a couple of impressive cloud announcements alongside it.

IBM – who, let us not forget, wants to be seen as a cloud-first organisation – has announced the availability of NVIDIA Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal cloud servers. In other words, it provides supercomputing powers to the SoftLayer cloud without the need for companies to expand their existing infrastructure.

GPU, in a cloud environment, works alongside a server’s CPU to accelerate application and processing performance. Combining the two instead of using a CPU alone, utilising thousands of small efficient cores, results in faster processing of information.

IBM claims to be the only cloud IaaS provider to offer GPU-accelerated computing on bare metal servers, while now adding NVIDIA Tesla capability. The company wheeled out a series of customers, big and small, who are already seeing the benefits of this accelerated computing shift; New York University used NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU to support a deep-learning course, while startup MapD is using the accelerators for data and analytics.

Marc Jones, SoftLayer CTO, said: “Our global network of data centres, connectivity features, bare metal servers and GPU offerings meet the rigorous requirements of most supercomputing workloads. By introducing the K80 accelerator on IBM Cloud, we’re giving our customers an even more powerful tool to run demanding applications.”

Elsewhere, IBM also announced a $180 million deal with Columbia Pipeline Group (CPG) offering a range of IT services for five years, moving CPG’s IT infrastructure and business applications, including human resources, billing and finance and IT management, to IBM’s data centre after the transfer of CPG’s natural gas pipeline, midstream and storage business from NiSource on July 1.

The overall setup includes IBM’s data centre and its cloud infrastructure, alongside network services, intelligent security platforms through IBM’s QRadar Security Intelligence Platform, as well as mobile device management and operational analytics.

Bob Skaggs, CPG chief executive, notes the long-standing relationship IBM has with NiSource. “As an independent business, we are counting on IBM to help provide the continued strong enterprise technology support CPG needs,” he said.

You can find out more about IBM’s GPU offerings on SoftLayer here.

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Pretty much every cloud software or infrastructure pricing article this publication has ever penned has announced the news of lower prices. Google in particular continues to strenuously follow Moore’s Law, the latest being back in May when Compute Engine instance prices were slashed.

This time, however, it’s different: Microsoft is revising its cloud prices, with customers in Europe and Australia most likely to suffer price hikes. The news originally broke through blogger Aidan Finn, who wrote that effective August 1, local prices for Azure and Azure Marketplace will increase by 13% in the Eurozone, while in Australia that number rises to 26%.

On the surface, this news is not particularly surprising. The Euro in particular has predictably been hit hard in recent months. Back in August it was worth $1.36 US dollars. Since then, it hit a low of $1.05 in March, and is now at $1.11.

Yet Finn argues this may not be the only reason for the increases. “One has to wonder about the motivation of the hikes,” he wrote. “Local costs have not increase[d] by this amount. If anything, local costs have probably reduced.

“This would appear to be a bottom line operation to restore profits in the ledger for shareholders to see,” he added.

According to a statement Microsoft sent to The Register, cloud prices are being revised for contracts billed in the Euro, Australian dollar, as well as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada. Azure customers can still acquire Microsoft products or renew their contracts at current prices until July 31.

The move towards lower pricing has been a continued rigmarole for the past couple of years, from Amazon Web Services, to Microsoft and to Google. Whether the other two major players follow suit, like they normally do on price cuts, remains to be seen. Finn added a further update on July 7 noting Office 365 prices will also be increasing as of August 1. All stock keeping units are rising 10%, except for the E3 and E4 enterprise plans which rise 8%, while the Enterprise Mobility Suite will rise 26%.

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It’s that time of year again: Gartner has released its Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting, with 16 vendors in all assessed.

Seven vendors made the top right leaders section of the report; BT Global Services, CenturyLink, Claranet, Colt, Interoute, Rackspace and Verizon. Interoute scored top in completeness of vision, while Rackspace emerged victorious on ability to execute.

Of the two highest scoring players’ strengths and cautions, Interoute was praised for its self service onboarding capabilities through its CloudStore, as well as its investments in software defined networking (SDN) and offering movement of workloads and data between international data centres for no cost. However the virtual data centre provider was criticised for its relatively complicated structure of product support offerings, and cautioned as to how it will address the North American market.

Rackspace was given high marks for its early strategic play in allowing managed services to be bought on the same consumption basis as its IaaS products, as well as being praised for its customer service – the fanatical support – and its integrated portal. However, its key criticism was that, “despite being in the leaders quadrant”, Rackspace had not deployed infrastructure capacity outside of the UK. “Customers with data residency requirements or latency concerns in European regions farther away from the UK need to take this into consideration,” the report warns.

This is one of the more interesting facets of the report: Gartner notes alongside each vendor its European data centre presence, recorded by country. With new Europe-wide data protection regulations likely to be put in place, it’s an important issue for companies. Rani Osnat, VP strategic marketing at CTERA Networks, argues it’s definitely here to stay.

“There are two levels of sovereignty that people look at; one is where the data is, the other is who is it stored with and where is that company registered?” he told CloudTech. One of the classic examples, from an American perspective, was back in April 2014 during a case regarding Microsoft and an Irish customer, when a judge ruled US-based providers had to hand over customer emails even if they are stored overseas.

Yet Osnat added: “I think that is less important than where the data resides, mostly because [of the] statistics. The number of such orders that were issued and required, then actually provided, were very, very low – a few incidents per year.”

It’s worth noting, as Gartner always stresses with these reports, due diligence is its own reward and executives should not be making big business decisions purely based on where a dot lands in a square. You can find the full report here (email required).

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If you’ve ever talked to an acquaintance about what technology they use at their place of work, then this might be the article for you: a survey from BetterCloud has found the benefits of Google Apps and Microsoft Office for organisations of all sizes.

The report argues there is a “clear trend” for larger organisations to run Office 365 as opposed to Google Apps – Office 365-based organisations are more than four times larger and five years older on average, while companies who run Office 365 have IT teams five times the size of their Google counterparts.

As befitting smaller businesses, more Google Apps implementations are done in one go. More than two thirds (68%) of Google Apps organisations roll out at once, compared with 62% of Office 365 respondents who opt for a hybrid deployment strategy. This is not a surprise, according to the report authors, citing Google’s push for organisations to undergo transformational change – rolling out Google Apps over the course of a weekend, or across several weekends.

“When looking at all organisations, the deployment strategy for Office 365 organisations is essentially the exact opposite of those deploying Google Apps,” the report notes, adding: “Office 365 organisations are easing into the transition, allowing employees to choose their preferred working style, rather than abruptly shifting to a cloud-only workplace,” it adds.

Organisations utilising Google report increased collaboration levels (84%) when compared with Microsoft (72%), while running Google Apps also means a greater likelihood of cost savings. Organisations using the search giant’s cloud office experiences cost savings of 41% on average, while for Office 365 companies that number drops to 27%.

For firms which utilise more than 50% of applications, the most popular apps for Google were Gmail, Calendar and Drive, while for Office 365 the most popular apps were all desktop – Word, Excel and Outlook. Yet there’s a caveat, with BetterCloud noting the importance of Office 365’s nascent nature, the more likely older workforce at Office 365 organisations, and the hybrid approach in moving to the cloud.

As a result, BetterCloud gives a hypothetical description of a Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 customer based on their data. The average company which uses Google was a SaaS company founded in 2010, with 110 employees, three in IT, with a high percentage of millennial workforce.

For Office 365, it’s more likely to be a company founded in 1982, with complex on-premises infrastructure after 30 years of growth. While they have moved some infrastructure to the cloud, it’s not fully there yet, although the company is experiencing productivity and collaboration gains. None of the larger enterprises surveyed – 5000 or more employees – run 100% of their IT in the cloud, either from Microsoft or Google.

“The role of IT is evolving,” the report concludes. “IT admins aren’t sitting back and waiting to fix what breaks any longer; now, with the benefit of the cloud, they’re given more opportunity – and time – to spend on getting things done proactively.”

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A recent survey from cloud storage and data protection hardware provider CTERA Networks found that while employees at more than half of organisations use public file, sync and share services, almost three quarters said they were looking for an alternative.

The report recognised what CTERA highlights as a growing interest and need for enterprise-grade, private cloud storage solutions. Box portrays itself as primarily an enterprise player, most recently announcing a partnership with IBM, while the number of Dropbox business users has recently crept over eight million. Like it or not, these services continue to gain wide adoption.

Rani Osnat, VP strategic marketing at CTERA, told CloudTech there were few surprises in the survey, released earlier in June, but there is room for both public and private. “There are two ways you can look at these results,” he said. “[There] is bigger adoption of SaaS services, but companies view them as more of a temporary solution, and eventually they want to take these solutions in-house.

“The other conclusion you can draw is the market is growing so much there is room for both of these things,” Osnat added. “Companies like Box will continue to grow while private deployments also grow in parallel; these things will live side by side.

“I think there is not one answer that is correct. They are both relevant,” he explains. “We certainly see from our own perspective of the market that when you talk to larger enterprises, especially the ones that are in regulated industries like banking or insurance, or healthcare, they definitely have a strong preference for private cloud solutions. They have the know-how, and they have strict security and compliance requirements that are not entirely satisfied by solutions that utilise a public cloud infrastructure.”

Osnat argues that, while the likes of Box and Dropbox have made a concerted effort at greater security, more still needs to be done. “When you look at cloud in general, and you say ‘I’m going to take my data, I’m going to store it somewhere that’s outside my own data centres’, that already is a big hurdle to cross for many companies.

“What you need to do is wrap enough security around it for that company to feel at least as comfortable with that concept as they do with storing it in-house.”

Regarding key management, the CTERA VP is relatively dismissive: Osnat notes that Box’s solution ‘is much better than not having it’, while describing key management in Dropbox as ‘definitely sufficient for enterprise use.’

“It’s a very touchy issue with enterprises,” he explains. “Some of them will use these services on a departmental level, or some level with strict controls over what type of data can be shared with these services, but at the same time we know they all wish they had something better, and that’s what we’re trying to give then.”

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IDC’s ranking of cloud infrastructure providers is in: HP has hit the top of the charts, with Dell and Cisco making up the top three.

The findings, which arrive in the analyst house’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, cover storage, server and Ethernet switch and show HP’s revenue growing 37.4% between 1Q14 and 1Q15, and market share at 15.7% for total 1Q15 revenues of $985 million. Dell, in second, has first quarter revenues of $745m, a market share of 11.9% and year over year revenue growth of 34.2%. Cisco, in third place, has first quarter revenues of $582m, an overall market share of 9.3% but revenue growth year over year of 30.1%.

The two companies positioned in fifth place, NetApp and Lenovo, had contrasting fortunes. NetApp’s revenue went up year on year by 1.5% to capture a 4.4% market share in 2015, down from 5.4% in 2014, while Lenovo’s revenue growth between 2014 and 2015 skyrocketed at 770.3%, moving from 0.5% market share in Q114 to 3.6% in Q115 – not especially surprising given IBM sold the majority of its x86 server business to the company last year. It’s worth noting that IDC declares a statistical tie between two companies when there is less than one percent market share between them.

Cloud infrastructure spending rose to nearly 30% of overall IT infrastructure spending in Q115 according to IDC, moving from 26.4% this time last year. According to Kuba Stolarski, research manager in server virtualisation and workload research at IDC: “Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms.

“Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernise their IT for the 3rd platform [mobile, big data and social], begin to deploy next-gen software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms.”

The ranking of cloud infrastructure vendors is not too dissimilar from the various work Synergy Research has undertaken in the area. According to March 2015 figures, Cisco and HP top the charts, ahead of Microsoft, Dell, and IBM; Lenovo just missed out but its huge market share increase due to the IBM sale was also noted.

Richard Davies, the CEO of cloud server provider ElasticHosts, bemoaned the issue of server companies charging the full amount despite half of server capacity in the cloud being underutilised. “A revolution in public cloud is coming,” he said. “Customers need to put the pressure on their providers to implement usage-based billing and stop paying for capacity they’re not using.”

Elsewhere, despite cloud and colocation resources resulting in the closure of many smaller local data centres, the number of premium, centralised data centres for larger migration projects is increasing.

That’s according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) data centre quarterly survey on data centre trends. The research also found both medium and large organisations expect to increase spending on data centres, with the biggest growth expected to come from the healthcare and financial industries.

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Everyone is looking for that silver bullet which makes their cloud implementations a success. It’s little wonder that events such as Cloud World Forum and Cloud Expo are at the forefront of executives’ minds.

At Cloud World Forum in London last week, MongoDB VP strategy Kelly Stirman spoke of five directions in which the industry is changing, and how companies can make their cloud success a reality: embrace failure, double down on ops, and pick your partners wisely.

Rule number one, Stirman argued, was to embrace failure. To be able to embrace failure, you need to iterate quicker. “Today, customers expect applications faster,” he tells CloudTech. “When you wake up in the morning, you look for apps to have been installed on your phone, and to do that people need to embrace a more iterative project development lifecycle.

“Cloud makes this possible because the lead time to do things and the cost to do things is so much less, that it becomes reasonable to screw up and then recover,” he adds. “Most people aren’t comfortable with that.”

Quick iteration links in to point number two – move beyond lift and shift. Amazon is not doing releases every few days, but every few seconds. It’s a world away from where most companies are, but Stirman argues simply taking your existing application stack and moving it to the cloud isn’t going to give you a huge amount of value.

“Most people think ‘it’s going to take eight weeks for IT to get my infrastructure ready for my application, and the cloud can be just a couple of minutes’, but that’s kind of it,” he says. “If your application didn’t scale, or you had some limitation in your data centre, it’s going to be the exact same problem – or worse – with cloud.”

Stirman adds: “Things that are really important about the cloud, like elasticity, paying for what you actually use, different storage products so you can optimise for hot and cold data, programmable automated infrastructure – that’s what really is powerful and valuable about the cloud, and you need to make that part of how you think about using [it], not just lift and shift.”

Vendor lock-in, although a long-term enterprise IT issue, has long since been a worry for businesses moving to the cloud, finding the implementation is not for them as their business needs change and then finding they can’t get out of it. But it still warrants a warning note from Stirman.

He explains: “The slightly controversial assertion I made [was] in my lifetime, the tow most proprietary technologies that have come to market have been Apple and cloud. These cloud vendors [are] all based on open source software, and different types of standards – but they themselves are highly proprietary. It is inevitable that you are going to get locked in.”

Cloud products are ‘carefully designed’ for a lock in, he argues. The pricing models are the same, you can’t compare prices between offerings, there are charges to get data in, there are charges to get data out, and so on. “All of these players are adding value on top of the core stack, and the more you use those, the more you get locked in,” Stirman says.

Stirman took to burst two myths around the cloud. The first was regarding the security of the cloud – a subject which is often a bugbear for executives as survey data bears out. “It’s just not true,” he says. “Most of these guys are vastly more secure than any of us can design in our own systems.” Secondly, the idea that if you move to the cloud your operations teams halve is also a red herring. “You need them more than ever, because what you’re going to do is use way more infrastructure,” he says. “The operational obligations you have are directly proportional to the number of operating systems. So if you take a big server and slice it up for virtualisation, you are increasing your operational overhead.”

The MongoDB exec saved his most controversial comments for last; there will only be three players in the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space; Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Everyone else will run out of money. “The real cloud opportunity is going to be products that are mostly infrastructure as a service agnostic; they are layers you could play in a cloud vendor, or across those three that give value add services,” he explains.

“What’s going to be interesting to see is, are Amazon and Google and Microsoft going to let other vendors come in and play in their infrastructure stack, or are they going to hold people out, the way Apple does, and really own the value added services on top of the stack?

“You’ve got to pick your partner carefully,” he adds.

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Cloud usage is rocketing amongst UK business users – but the final decision making falls to the head of IT or the chief information officer in almost three in five (59%) cases, according to latest research.

The research, from cloud hosting provider Cobweb Solutions, shows more organisations are turning to cloud for all their business needs, with UK cloud penetration reaching a high of 84%.

78% of businesses are using more than one cloud-based service, figures which correlate with a recent Forrester survey showing 84% of UK companies rely on two or more cloud providers, compared to Singapore (76%) and the US (62%). Half of respondents expect to eventually move their entire IT estate to the cloud.

Despite the issues with security, 99% of respondents have never experienced a breach of security when using a cloud service. The applications most likely to be stored in specific locations are accounting and finance (49%), data backup and disaster recovery (43%) and data storage (43%). 70% of respondents cited concerns over data security when moving to the cloud, with 61% concerned over data privacy.

Yet the issue over who has final say over cloud implementations is a worry for Cobweb, who argues businesses may be failing to see the “holistic potential of integrated cloud solutions”, instead just seeing cloud computing as a new delivery mechanism for software.

“Using a cloud computing solution can fundamentally enhance the way an organisation does business,” Ash Patel, Cobweb director of business transformation said in a statement, adding: “It offers the liberating ability to build entirely new services that customers and partners can easily access and make part of their daily lives.

“Making best use of this liberating technology is a question not solely for the IT team, but for the whole board of directors who can use the cloud to shape a new and more effective way of doing business.”

Do you agree with this analysis?

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Earlier this week, this publication reported on a C-level study which showed a distinct lack of trust in cloud storage for fully securing corporate data. Now, a new survey from CloudPassage sheds light on the security executive perspective; 80% of security execs in North America don’t believe conventional network security solutions are enough to protect their cloud computing environments.

This is an interesting finding, not least because the amount of IT real estate based in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments is expected to reach 58% in the next 18 months compared to 43% today, according to the respondents. Similarly, while two thirds of customer data resides on-premise, that number is expected to fall to 50% in 18 months with 31% in private cloud and 19% in public cloud – so the pressure is on.

There were not many surprises when respondents were asked on the top drivers for adopting cloud infrastructure; improved agility and scalability (74%) won out ahead of cost efficiencies (67%), reduced IT overhead (60%) and faster time to market (55%).

Surprise, surprise, security concerns (66%) in general were the number one barrier impeding cloud infrastructure deployments, ahead of reconfiguring systems and applications (52%) and lack of confidence meeting compliance requirements (37%) – an issue spotted in another recent study, this time from Forrester. Only 4% said they had no concerns with cloud infrastructure deployments.

According to 65% of survey respondents, it takes three months or longer to deploy a new security solution for their cloud infrastructure environment, which leaves enterprises open to new threats and vulnerabilities which may emerge during deployment time. Only 2% of those polled said they were not concerned with the security of customer data residing in the public cloud.

Mitch Bishop, the chief marketing officer of CloudPassage, bemoaned how concerns about cloud security “continue to dog the industry.” “The plethora of point solutions on the market are overwhelming and confusing for security teams,” he said.

“A whopping 77% of survey respondents are experiencing tool fatigue and want a single solution for visibility, enforcement and compliance that is on-demand, deploys in minutes, fully automates a majority of security functions, and works across all their infrastructure: private, public, hybrid clouds and even bare metal servers.”

You can look at the full study here (email required).