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The verdict on cloud vendors has come in from a new research study by Forrester: must do better in assuaging compliance fears, building support issues, and making customers feel wanted.

The survey, of 275 IT decision makers in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore, revealed some eye-opening findings. 39% of UK respondents agreed with the statement “my cloud provider doesn’t know me or my company”. One in three argued “my provider charges me for every little question or incident.” 45% agreed with the statement “if I were a bigger customer, my cloud provider would care more about my success.”

Lilac Schoenbeck is VP product marketing and product management at iland, who sponsored the study. She admitted surprise over the level of negative sentiment customers have towards their providers. “As a cloud provider, that kind of thing just feels really bad,” she tells CloudTech. “I would hate to think that somebody that was basing so much of their business on their infrastructure had those negative feelings about me.”

The perceived lack of support from cloud vendors to their customers, Schoenbeck argued, was a lot less surprising. 26% of respondents said the onboarding process took too long. 21% say the onboarding lacked a sufficient human aspect. 18% had bill shock over their support costs.

Nor were the issues over compliance. 62% said on-demand access to necessary reports would ease the pressure, along with complete reporting of the compliance status of the cloud provider (54%) and suggestions for achieving compliance (43%). “[Compliance is] something that’s really risen to the fore in the last 12 months around cloud,” Schoenbeck explains. “You can see people being much more aware of their responsibilities.”

The nub of the issue is the release – or not – of metadata, information about the performance, configuration and operations of each cloud workload. While typically most cloud providers have access to it, it’s a different story for the customers. Every respondent in the survey said they were financially or operationally affected by unavailable metadata; but Schoenbeck argues this is not the full story.

“Cloud vendors have [the metadata], it’s just a decision about whether or not they’re going to invest in sharing it with their customers – and that’s not a small investment,” she says. “It’s easy to share a CSV that’s far too large and far too old for anybody to care about. For performance data to be useful, you need to get it in almost real time, and make accurate decisions based on it almost immediately.”

She adds: “I think that’s often the challenge. I was a little disappointed to see the breadth of that challenge across the industry.”

This change in customer expectation correlates with the maturity of the cloud market. Over 70% of companies surveyed said they had been using cloud services for more than one year, while 84% and 76% of UK and Singapore respondents respectively said they relied on two or more cloud providers. It’s a challenge vendors increasingly face. When enterprise storage provider Egnyte gained a client win from Box in Red Bull North America, head of EMEA Ian McEwan explained for customers with previous experience, it’s about trust, and understanding the vendor can better meet their business needs.

“What I’d like to see is that this experience of multiple vendors creates a more savvy customer,” Schoenbeck explains. “Ultimately, in any kind of technology, but specifically in an emerging technology like cloud, having a more savvy customer means that you can more powerfully partner with them and achieve their business ends in a better and faster way.”

But with this research, is iland throwing cloud vendors under the bus? “I think it is more an element of prioritisation – almost an element of benign neglect,” says Schoenbeck. “If you looked at the arc of most technologies, they do find themselves in this place where the technology is paramount, and that is the interesting piece, and nobody is really concerned with the end user. Over time, things shift.

“I think we might be at a pivot point where that benign neglect in the name of technological progress is giving way to an understanding that, ultimately, this is a business model and you need to serve your customer,” she adds.

Forrester gave three takeaways for cloud customers following the research:

• Get the metadata you require: ensure provider exposes performance, security and cost data.
• Find the clarity for compliance: look for cloud with strong reporting and compliance alerting.
• Ensure your cloud is supported by humans: don’t settle for being ‘just another account number’.

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Less than one in three delegates polled at the Infosec 2015 event in London believe the cloud is a safe storage solution for corporate data.

The survey from digital encryption and USB specialist iStorage, which questioned more than 270 respondents including heads of IT, CIOs and CTOs, saw almost half (48%) say they do use cloud technology to store confidential information. 54% of those polled say they still use USB devices to store information.

Over three quarters (78%) said they were currently aware of policies within their organisations covering data protection matters, while a similar number (75%) affirmed they knew who specifically was responsible for data protection within their firm. Yet the imminent EU data protection regulations – which this publication has recently covered – caused more of a pain point. Only 50% of respondents said they understood what the regulations would mean for them individually and their organisations.

John Michael, iStorage CEO, said: “Cloud technology may make life easier for mobile workers but it’s certainly not without its risks; it really should only be used to store encrypted, non-sensitive information.” He added: “Ultimately, the cloud concept refers to a physical data centre and as such users are very much reliant on trusting cloud providers to protect any information that they store in this way.”

This is not a view that everyone agrees with, however. Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, spoke at the recent Cloud World Forum event on five tips for making success a reality in the cloud. Subtitled “escaping cloud cuckoo land”, Stirman blasted a few myths out of the water; one of which being the security of the cloud.

“Cloud is not secure – [it’s] just not true,” he told CloudTech. “Most of these guys are vastly more secure than any of us can design in our own systems.” He added: “People tend to object to cloud, their operation [team’s] obligation…because it’s not secure. No, this thing is incredibly secure, but your ops teams need to know how to configure to be secure where you need to be secure.”

iStorage also argues that, for those who still like to use a USB to transport company information, robust encryption capabilities need to be fitted. By remarkable coincidence, the company is also hawking a new USB 3.0 drive, the datAshur SSD, with auto-lock features, self-destructing PIN and brute force protection.

Regardless, despite cloud storage providers beefing up their business credentials – Box’s customer wins with the US Department of Justice, Dropbox’s adoption of the ISO 27018 standard – there still remains a fair amount of scepticism over the validity of cloud among the C-suite.

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Dropbox has announced its number of users has exceeded 400 million, with more than eight million business customers also on board.

The figures, disclosed on the occasion of the cloud storage provider’s eighth birthday, also reveal an impressive growth in the UK market, opened up six months ago. The company has grown from three to 10 offices over the past year.

According to the figures, 4,000 edits to documents are made each second on Dropbox, with users syncing 1.2 billion files each day and creating more than 100,000 new shared folders and links each hour. The number of business users has doubled in just 19 months.

Other figures announced, such as the Dropbox for Business product holding more than 100,000 users, were previously disclosed. For the UK, Dropbox predicts more than five million UK businesses will be using at least one cloud service within a year – and the company is hoping its name is on the ticket.

“We are now the world’s largest collaboration network,” proclaimed Dropbox UK country manager Mark van der Linden. “Consumers know Dropbox is intuitive to use, and businesses are discovering we can boost productivity and creativity, keep data secure and make collaboration simple and efficient,” he added.

It’s the middle point which has often been the stumbling block. From the enterprise security side, traditionally consumer-oriented storage solutions, such as Dropbox, were not considered enterprise class – and it was not at all surprising two years ago when Fiberlink reported Dropbox was the number one banned app for iOS and Android devices. It’s worth noting however that the cloud storage provider also appeared in the top 10 iOS whitelisted apps.

The mood has changed since then however. For enterprise mobile management providers, the threat of shadow IT is now turning into a positive. As employees continue to use the likes of Dropbox, despite the repeated warnings, it’s resulted in rethought strategies and a firmer blueprint of enabling greater employee productivity through personal technology use.

Dropbox has not been slow in beefing up its business credentials either, introducing two-step verification and tiered administrative controls, as well as achieving certification with the emerging ISO/IEC 27018 privacy standard. Even when the mask has slipped, such as the disclosure of a major vulnerability in the Dropbox Android SDK, the company has been praised for its response to the issue – in this instance by IBM Security, who disclosed the vulnerability after it was fixed.

“Dropbox is experiencing incredible growth in the UK and around the world,” van der Linden added. “It’s down to the fact Dropbox is a service people want to use and that businesses trust.”

Picture credit: Box/IBM

Tech giant IBM and enterprise cloud storage provider Box have announced a wide-ranging partnership, aimed at content management and social collaboration to improve the enterprise cloud and digital push.

The two companies aim to integrate their existing products and services to develop new solutions across multiple verticals, from medicine, to engineering and academia.

Among the developments proposed, Box will integrate with IBM’s enterprise content management solution, as well as collaborating to integrate Box into IBM’s business email and social collaboration platforms, IBM Verse and IBM Connections. IBM will leverage Box’s platform and APIs in its iOS applications, while Box will for the first time enable customers to choose a partner’s cloud platform for data storage.

“This partnership represents the work of hundreds of individuals over the past nine months, bringing together the strengths of two very different but similarly-motivated companies,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, wrote in a blog post. “IBM was founded more than 100 years ago to push business technology forward, and continues to be the longest lasting and most durable company in the tech industry. We couldn’t [be] prouder to be able to work with them as we work toward creating the digital enterprise.”

The companies also promise integration with Watson Analytics, with IBM’s supercomputer linking up to content stored in Box. Watson Analytics launched in September 2014 and uses natural language to spit out its algorithms and analysis, meaning a much easier use case.

When CloudTech spoke to IBM to find out more about Watson’s working methods last year, this was a key component of its viability – and its cloud-based nature made it even more accessible. Watson doesn’t go so far to say whether the data you have is right or wrong, but it does show the strength of the data and how confident you can be in making key business decisions with it.

IBM’s extensive partnerships range from long time ally SAP, with SAP’s HANA Enterprise Cloud being delivered through IBM’s cloud, to an enterprise application partnership with Apple. You can read more about the Box and IBM deal here.

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The Cloud World Forum event, which starts tomorrow in London and will have this publication in attendance, will more than likely discuss business cloud strategies, security fears, as well as the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and DevOps concepts.

Among the list of expected attendees, there is a not unreasonable amount of security professionals from the private sector. Also there is cloud-based enterprise collaboration provider Kahootz. The company’s primary customer testimonial base and marketing push is through public sector clients, yet John Glover, Kahootz sales and marketing director, notes an interesting paradigm shift afoot in the private sector.

“People are now starting to put the reins in there, and put some government structures in there,” he tells CloudTech. “I see them having their own app store, within the enterprise on pre-approved suppliers, rather than just rely on people go and buy stuff off the Internet hoping it’s going to be okay.”

The truth is, organisations are increasingly putting sensitive data on cloud-based systems, and it’s not done haphazardly either. Sure, companies can still get it wrong – for UK businesses, a data leakage may earn them a visit from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). But most private sector enterprises will have data assurance officers in place to mop up potential spillages, and Glover argues the industry is getting “smarter”.

“The reason we reference the public sector is because it does have credentials that can be used in the private sector,” he adds. “We certainly get contacted by private sector companies now.”

As Glover explains, the theory from public sector companies is simple: if it’s good enough for government, then it’s good enough for us. Yet he admits that while the private sector is becoming smarter, they’re still “nervous”. The CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group) issued a 14 point cloud security handbook for public sector back in December 2013 – a privilege the private sector does not enjoy.

“I’ll give you the classic mistake that everyone makes,” Glover says. “[Businesses will] get a software supplier that say ‘our data centre is ISO 27001 certified.’ I don’t think people realise how naive that statement is.”

He adds: “The data centre is secure, but what about the applications, what about the staff who run that application, what about the business processes that back up that information? If your data centre is ISO 27001, [it] sounds good, but the average private sector doesn’t understand what that means and how bad a statement that is.”

Kahootz offers a secure online workspace with a variety of options, from local business intranets, so conference rooms and tender management software. Glover explains how for Kahootz’s clients – particularly the larger ones – there is a ‘land and expand’ strategy: start small first, deploy more widely later. For him, the key feature organisations look for is governance – mainly so businesses don’t “orchestrate chaos.”

When Glover attends meetings and organisations say their collaboration setup isn’t working out, he gives four points to consider when putting together a workspace: purpose; scope; the activities they perform; and governance. “The worst thing to do is just set up a site which says ‘here’s a great place to share documents and ideas,’” he says. “That doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t lead anywhere, and because of that nobody’s listening, and nobody’s taken the management over the site to take on that information and do something with it.”

So even if you are nervous about taking the leap into cloud collaboration tools, remember that a journey of a thousand miles always begins with the first step.

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Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a venture capital firm which has been investing in cloud computing for almost 20 years, has released a bullish prediction on cloud trends in the coming years.

Software as a service (SaaS) is approaching 30% of total application spend, compound annual growth rate hitting 17.6% between 2013 and 2018. On premise, by contrast, is at 2.8%. BVP also argues the ‘tipping point’ of cloud CRM will hit in 2016; by 2018, the VC firm expects cloud CRM to reach 62% revenue share. Salesforce is the current market leader with 16% share, compared to SAP (13%), Oracle (10%) and Microsoft (7%).

In this instance, describing companies as private and public cloud providers relates to whether they are pre- or post-IPO. For ‘public’ cloud companies, there has been a tremendous shift in market cap since 2008. Back then, Salesforce had a leading market cap of $7.4 billion, ahead of NetSuite ($2.3bn) and Concur ($1.5bn). In 2015, Salesforce still leads, but with a $50.5bn market cap, ahead of LinkedIn ($26.2bn) and Workday ($16.9bn).

The total cloud market cap at 2015 stands at approximately $180bn, while in 2008 it was nearer $25bn. By 2020, BVP expects it to pass $500bn.

For cloud companies that are pre-IPO, of the 300 ‘up and comers’ identified in the SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, developers, IT operations and security space, 28 have grown into $1bn and over businesses. Dropbox ($10bn), Stripe ($5bn) and Zenefits ($5bn) are the three biggest hitters.

The report outlines a variety of ways in which the cloud has outperformed its predicted market cap. For CEOs, BVP outlines major trends and coming disruptions; industry cloud coming of age, further commoditisation of IaaS, more merger and acquisition from legacy vendors who are “cornered animals” ahead, and the dawning of enterprise mobile. BVP predicts the coming five years will be “fatal” to many legacy vendors, who were caught in the innovator’s dilemma; now it’s too late to build and too expensive to buy.

You can find the full 47 page report here. Do you agree with the predictions and issues raised?

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Over the last four quarters, spend on data centre infrastructure hit $114 billion – and Microsoft and Hewlett Packard are the vendors at the top of the tree.

That’s the verdict from industry analysts Synergy Research. Microsoft is particularly dominant in the software market, with 72% of share compared to VMware on 17%. Yet that comprises less than a quarter (23%) of the overall data centre infrastructure market.

On the hardware side, HP (19%) is the largest vendor, followed by Cisco (12%), Dell (12%) and IBM (11%). Synergy describes HP’s lead in data centre hardware as “strong”, and notes other leading players in the market are EMC, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, Fujitsu and Hitachi.

Picture credit: Synergy Research

It’s worth noting here that this examines the overall market, both traditional on-prem and cloud, the former which Synergy describes as “huge”. Synergy links servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualisation apps in its overall examination of the market.

Despite the behemoth-like size of the traditional data centre market, cloud is catching up, according to Synergy founder and chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

“Clearly the single biggest driver of spend on data centre infrastructure is the boom in cloud computing,” he said. “The shift in computing workloads to public and private clouds is driving huge investments in both service provider and enterprise data centres.” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy, argued the industry focus on cloud took away from the size of the traditional data centre market. “That part of the data centre market remains enormous and will remain a prime source of revenue for vendors for many years to come,” he said.

Synergy’s other research has predominantly focused on the infrastructure and collaboration markets; the most recent report on the cloud infrastructure services market saw Amazon Web Services hit a five year high, while analysis of the cloud infrastructure equipment market saw Cisco and HP leading the way.

Earlier this week, a report from Zenium Technology Partners saw half of organisations polled do not operate a data centre that could continue to function after a natural disaster.

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Research from Zenium Technology Partners has found that one in two organisations are not operating a data centre that could continue to function after a national disaster.

The report, entitled ‘Managing Growth, Risk and the Cloud’, found that half of companies polled has experienced disruption with their data centre due to Mother Nature, with respondents experiencing five incidents in total on average. Despite this, 45% of those polled insisted their data centre was flood resistant, 43% stated their data centre was officially earthquake resistant, and 60% said it was located in an area away from physical or environmental hazards.

For companies who had experienced disruptions with the running of their data centre, more than nine in 10 (91%) confirmed it had come at a loss to their business. A third of C-suite respondents said they didn’t know what the exact cost was, with the highest figure cited as £500,000. This rings true with a similar study from Marsh, which found 61% of organisations hadn’t made an attempt to calculate real or estimated financial losses after a cyber attack.

The key talking point, according to Zenium, is whether to outsource their data centres or not. Of the respondents who have outsourced, more than twice as many (58%) had experienced disruption compared to those who had built their own (25%). Yet 64% of those that already outsource some data centre operations are considering outsourcing further to reduce exposure to natural disasters. 36% of those who don’t outsource are looking at the same tactic.

Nick Razey, CEO of data centre provider Next Generation Data, recounted a conversation he had with a CIO about expanding from 25 racks to 80 racks in his column for CloudTech in November. Not surprisingly, he advocated outsourcing, yet argues: “Why do many companies consider building their own data centre? A charitable explanation is that they feel more secure with an in-house data centre and it’s more efficient for staff. A more cynical explanation is that a data centre is the ultimate vanity project.”

Franek Sodzawiczny, CEO and founder of Zenium, said: “Discussions around scalability, connectivity and cost are of course important when selecting an outsourcing partner, but this research demonstrates quite clearly that the location of the data centre should not be underestimated. The data centre supports mission critical services and downtime is not only disastrous, but astronomically expensive in today’s 24×7 business environment.”

Read more: Data centres: To buy or not to buy – that is the question

Picture credit: IBM/SoftLayer

IBM has opened up its first cloud data centre in Cornaredo, a municipality in Milan, strengthening its European empire.

The data centre, which runs on SoftLayer infrastructure, allows customers to more easily manage, run and store data through less latency and stronger data sovereignty.

The move follows previous openings in the UK, Germany and France. The German data centre, in Frankfurt, opened in January this year. According to the Polytechnic University of Milan’s Observatory of Cloud and ICT as a Service, the Italian cloud market saw 31% year over year growth in 2014. IBM claims that, from its new location, connections to SoftLayer services within Europe take less than 30 milliseconds.

The data centre plot has capacity for up to 11000 servers and a power rating of 2.8 megawatts. The Milan data centre is part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment in 2014, aimed at expanding its global cloud footprint.

Jonathan Wisler, SoftLayer EMEA managing director, told CloudTech the expansion of SoftLayer’s data centres, not just across Europe but globally, were primarily down to performance and data compliance. “You see the execution of our strategy continuing,” he said. “The workloads are becoming more demanding in terms of low latency, so we’re trying to get as close as possible to build what I call a compute CDN (content delivery network).”

Nicola Ciniero, general manager for IBM Italy, said in a statement: “This data centre represents a financial and technological investment made by a multinational company that has faith in this country’s potential. Having an IBM cloud presence in Italy will provide local businesses with the right foundation to innovate and thrive on a global level.”

As with the German launch, customers can receive up to $500 off their first orders in the new Milan data centre. You can find out more here.

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German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom (DT) has released a bullish statement of intent detailing its plans to more than double its cloud revenue in Europe by 2018.

The company, which specifically called out Google and Amazon as its primary competition, also announced an extension to its partnership with Huawei, originally announced in March, for IT infrastructure and private cloud solutions.

DT’s annual revenue from business customers currently stands at €1 billion (£721.8m). The company explained its strategy in being ‘on the road’ to becoming the cloud leader in Europe, and ensuring its business units ‘step up’ cloud activities across the organisation.

Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT division at T-Systems, said: “At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20% each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe.”

The telco claims revenue from highly secure private cloud solutions increased by ‘double-figure percentage points’ at T-Systems, while the market for services from the public cloud ‘promises further growth’.

Yet the collaborative effect of partnerships also appeals. Haibo Zhang, president of the Huawei-Deutsche Telekom key account department, said: “After we agreed on our cooperation regarding IT infrastructure and private cloud services during CeBIT we are now taking the next step and combining our know how and cutting edge technology in the public cloud area to ensure that companies of all sizes are provided with the cloud of their choice.”

The idea of the telco making gains in cloud services is not a new one, and it was the overarching theme when Richard Warley, the new EMEA managing director of CenturyLink, spoke to CloudTech earlier in June. He explained why the telco ‘should win’ in cloud infrastructure services: “The cloud doesn’t work without the network. It takes a lot of innovative expertise to imagine the cloud and then to code it, but over a period of time it will become commoditised to an extent, and the people who can run infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively should be the telcos.”

Evidently, Deutsche Telekom has got the same idea.