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Cloud storage provider Box has announced that it is working with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to deliver secure file sharing and collaboration to its employees.

The move represents a major customer win for the firm, who now has more than 40 federal customers on its books. “Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information,” said Aaron Levie, Box CEO.

“We are thrilled to support the DOJ’s technology efforts, helping to transform the way they manage and share information,” he added.

The DOJ will be employing Box for three main reasons: to simplify internal and external collaboration between component agencies and third party organisations; seamlessly support mobile and offline access to content for employees; and reduce the complexity of infrastructure by eliminating fragmented content.

Despite the recent narrative around Box being framed on its will-they-won’t-they IPO imbroglio, which was finally concluded when the firm went public in January this year, the continued customer stories represent a company going in the right direction for its enterprise market. A year ago, when reports arrived stating Box was to delay its IPO, the company announced a deal with General Electric, where around 300,000 of its employees would use the cloud storage firm for content sharing and collaboration.

Box’s play into federal government has been relatively recent. In March, the company announced the arrival of Sonny Hashmi, former CIO of the General Services Administration, to help lead the company’s efforts in the space. The firm also continues to pursue FedRAMP security compliance, as can be seen here, but suffered a setback when competitor Huddle beat it to the punch in March.

In a blog post announcing the DOJ deal, Box PR Zoelle Egner wrote: “We look forward to fostering greater innovation at DOJ, helping to transform the way they manage and share information.”

Read more: The Box advantage: Growth, predictability and competitiveness

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Cloud Spectator, an analyst firm, has put together the second of its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) pricing reports, and found Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) crown slipping.

The latest study, which collected over one million data points over a 24 hour period on processor and memory, examined performance alongside other patterns, such as instability and unpredictability. Performance tests were conducted on five different virtual machine sizes across 15 IaaS providers.

The results were described by the analysts as “eye-opening.” AWS’ T2 micro, with burst performance features, revealed a controlled period of high performance alongside a controlled period of lower performance, putting it right at the bottom of the table. The high degree of fluctuation was caused by the burst performance, which occurred for three quarters of an hour during the 24 hour testing.

In contrast, CenturyLink, SoftLayer and Verizon showed steady performance over the 24 hour testing period. SoftLayer recorded the lowest variability, while DigitalOcean and Rackspace recorded the highest performance figures.

Picture credit: Cloud Spectator

Anne Liu, an analyst at Cloud Spectator, argues both performance values and performance variation should be taken into consideration when selecting a VM. She wrote: “Comparing VMs using pricing, performance and price-performance can lead to significantly different results, and therefore it is critical for customers to select the most fitting comparison criteria.

“Knowing what the most important criteria [are] and using those criteria to compare and select VMs are essential,” she added.

The 24 hour continuous testing, she noted, was to test a provider’s requirements, and due to the large performance fluctuations, the performance level may drop below a customer’s minimum performance requirement.

The first part of the report, released in January, found Amazon EC2 offers “significant” cost advantages over a long term investment.

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More than half of IT managers surveyed by West IP Communications say they expect to get full return on investment by moving to the cloud – but it’s an unconvincing figure.

54% of the more than 300 respondents said they would be able to fully recoup their costs of cloud computing adoption, which of course means 46% aren’t so sure. Yet those with bigger IT budgets were more confident: two thirds (66%) of managers with company IT budgets over $5m were “confident” the savings of cloud computing would cover the operating costs.

Of those who were expecting ROI, three quarters (74%) expected it to be through reduced costs of doing business, including maintenance costs and the size of the IT staff. 31% of respondents said they would recoup their costs in two years, and 21% said it would only take one year.

There were other interesting titbits from the research:

• 75% said that when moving telecommunications to the cloud, quality of service would either stay the same or improve
• 40% said their organisation has plans to move voice/telephony communications to the cloud
• 55% of those polled said they didn’t believe communication services providers offer requisite security checks alongside their cloud telecommunication offerings. Because of these security concerns, more than half (55%) said they would implement a private cloud solution. Another third (32%) said they would utilise a hybrid approach

A post on the West IP Communications blog concludes: “Overall, while hosting systems in the cloud has grown in popularity over the past few years, more IT managers should talk to their service providers to discuss important factors like cost and security.

“The fact is that pushing essential unified communications tools to the cloud can provide companies with a cost-effective, secure method of improving efficiencies within the IT department and the broader organisation,” it adds.

You can read more here.

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It has been nearly five years since Vivek Kundra, then CIO for the US federal government, announced a “cloud first” approach to federal IT. Now, a new report from Forbes Insights and Microsoft argues there is a tipping point for government agencies.

Curt Kolcun, vice president of US public sector at Microsoft, notes: “Initial concerns around moving to the cloud are being countered by real-world government success stories.” In other words, worries about data sovereignty, privacy and security are slowly being dissipated.

The report comes with interesting real life examples, including the state of Alabama, whose secretary of information technology Brunson White called cloud “transformative.” Stephen DePooter, CIO for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, said the agency “will be going to the cloud whenever it can.”

The research found that, primarily, the journey to the cloud by most government agencies gets off to a slow start; email, or office productivity software – low risk migration paths – are naturally the first to move over. Increasingly, the rise of authorised data security standards and processes, such as the Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program (FedRAMP), help ease the burden for government execs. Microsoft, HP and Amazon are among the list of accredited vendors.

DePooter notes five key areas where the cloud has been able to benefit his agency: speed – outlining and documentation of needs, training and implementation took 16 weeks from start to finish – security; scalability – spinning up additional resources as fast as the service level agreement allows – interoperability; and cost-effectiveness.

“What was really great about this is the way it can be configured,” he added. “If you want to change the look, or design a new report, it’s really easy. To make any kind of change in the past meant needing technical development and that took us into IT governance procedures. But now that functionality is at that user’s fingertips – it no longer requires high end, technical development.”

Back in July, IBM, alongside AT&T and KPMG, won a contract to help move the state of California to the cloud. CloudTech spoke with George Cruser, general manager infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services. He said: “What we’ve agreed in the contract is to make sure that the department has the expertise to run it if they elect to run it. One of the requirements was they would have a full understanding as opposed to pure outsourcing.”

When asked whether other states would follow suit, Cruser noted: “We’re working with a couple of states who are very much interested in the concept. Everybody is trying to figure out – how do we get into cloud safely and securely? California is clearly a leader in showing they’ve essentially built a private cloud for multi-tenant use.”

You can read the full Forbes/Microsoft report here.

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If your systems are down, and you’re just about to get on the phone to tear a strip from your cloud vendor, remember this: technical errors in failed cloud implementations are more likely to come from the user organisation itself than the supplier.

That was the surprising finding from a report recently released by The Economist Intelligence Unit, with 36% of respondents saying errors were more likely to come from within than outside (29%). The report noted commercial errors were the most common type of supplier failure, with a third of respondents said they were unaware of any failures in the cloud infrastructure they used.

Public cloud services were more likely to throw up technical failures than those using the private cloud, according to the report. Downtime is most likely to come from what the report called ‘significant outages’ (23%), as well as failure to integrate with existing systems (20%) and data breaches (17%). Inevitably, a skills shortage was also blamed for exacerbating, if not directly causing, technical issues, as well as a lack of business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The report notes: “It would be misleading to state that public cloud is always riskier. In the early days of the cloud, users may have experienced greater security issues since the technology was not yet mature and because of their own inexperience. Conversely, the bespoke nature of private clouds allows for a greater level of security, though with possibly higher initial costs.”

In a more positive vein, the survey showed that when cloud failures did occur, they were rarely catastrophic, with only 9% of those polled saying their incidents were “high” risk overall. 34% opted for “medium”, while 55% said damage was “limited.” Significantly, the loss of customer data was the biggest fear executives had over a failed cloud implementation.

The report concludes by assessing the maturation of cloud computing, calling it a “core component of the IT landscape”, yet arguing there is still more work that needs to be done, in terms of skills implementation and improved disaster recovery strategies. Businesses, wherever possible, need to be proactive, not reactive – and given Databarracks recently argued disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) was going to be the most important cloud service in 2015, many seem to be on their way.

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It’s not the first time this has happened, and it almost certainly won’t be the last; Google has slashed the prices of its Compute Engine instance types, in a bid to continue to follow the Moore’s Law pricing structure.

Moore’s Law – the simple theory, predicted in 1965 that processing power will double every two years – just keeps on going. Google appears just as committed to the process today as it was when Compute Engine was launched in November 2013. Back in March last year, Google SVP Urs Holzle argued pricing was too complex, adding that “it seems you need a PhD to figure out the best options.”

The most recent announcements from the search giant include reducing prices of virtual machines by up to 30%. In reality, that drop only comes into play for those with ‘micro’ classification; elsewhere it’s a 20% reduction for standard machines, 15% for high memory and small, and 5% for high CPU machines.

As Holzle notes in a blog post announcing the price cuts, altogether, the historic price cuts have reduced VM prices by more than half. “When combined with our automatic discounts, per-minute billing, no penalties for changing machine types, and no need to enter into long-term fixed-price commitments, it’s easy to see why we’re leading the industry in price and performance,” he wrote.

Except according to the analysts, that’s not really the case. The most recent Gartner infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, published earlier this month, shows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft going further ahead of Google. Synergy Research, which has also released many reports digging down on the numbers, comes to a similar conclusion.

Google is however not resting on its laurels when it comes to other innovations on cloud; Google Cloud Storage Nearline, a faster response storage service, and the Google Cloud Bigtable database, an analysis of which can be found here, were both launched recently.

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Analyst house Gartner has warned over the current position of the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market, claiming it to be in a “state of upheaval”, despite global spending expected to grow almost 33% in 2015.

According to VP and distinguished analyst Lydia Leong, customers are getting great value out of cloud IaaS, but as 2014 was a “year of reckoning” for many IaaS providers, some have been left high and dry, believing their current strategy was failing them.

Leong said: “Cloud IaaS can now be used to run most workloads, although not every provider can run every type of workload well. Cloud IaaS is not a commodity.

“Although in theory cloud IaaS has very little lock-in, in truth cloud IaaS is not merely a matter of hardware rental, but an entire data centre ecosystem as a service,” she added. “The more you use its management capabilities, the more value you will receive from the offering, but the more you will be tied to that particular service offering.”

Richard Davies is CEO of ElasticHosts. He argues that despite the growth in IaaS, recent figures from IBM, McKinsey, Google, and Gartner show users are still over-provisioning by up to 50% – and this number could rise further.

“By billing on usage, rather than capacity, users can be charged for the actual capacity they use, rather than the amount they provision,” he said. “As companies grow their investments in public cloud infrastructure, being able to reduce these costs by 50% will make a significant difference to the bottom line.”

Gartner urges buyers to be “extremely cautious” when selecting providers. According to the analyst house’s Magic Quadrant on infrastructure as a service, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates, followed by Microsoft and Google’s offerings. When other researchers look at the figures – Synergy Research immediately springs to mind – AWS is clearly out in front, with Microsoft a clear second place.

Gartner argues global spending on IaaS will reach almost $16.5 billion (£10.65bn) in 2015.

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Cloud storage provider Dropbox has announced it has achieved certification with the emerging privacy standard ISO/IEC 27018, boosting its security credentials.

ISO 27018 was published on July 30 2014 by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) as a follow up to the widely accepted ISO 27001 information security standard. It aims to put together a code of practice for protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in public clouds. The standard has already been taken up by Microsoft, as CloudTech reported back in February.

The benefits for consumers of Dropbox taking up this standard includes transparency on what the storage vendor does and doesn’t do with your data, the ability to add, modify or delete data from Dropbox at any time, as well as annual audits from an independent third party.

“We’re pleased to be one of the first companies to achieve ISO 27018 certification,” the company said. “Privacy and data protection regulations and norms vary around the world, and we’re confident this certification will help our customers meet their global compliance needs.”

“Businesses in the UK and all over the world are trusting Dropbox to make collaboration easier and boost productivity,” said Mark van der Linden, Dropbox UK country manager. “Our ISO 27018 accreditation shows we put users in control of their data, we are transparent about where we store it, and we operate to the highest standards of security. Dropbox is one of the first cloud services for business to be recognised with this latest independently-verified standard.”

Dropbox has had its fair share of security worries, including the recent development of a phishing attack, which asks users to download confidential documents.

The company’s certificate, which can be seen here, runs from May 13 2015 to September 30 2017.

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Today’s schoolchildren are tomorrow’s workforce. Yet even though plenty of schools are migrating to mobile devices and cloud technologies, it’s imperative to ensure the workforce of tomorrow is prepared to utilise the technologies they’ll be facing.

That’s what Amazon Web Services (AWS) is affirming. The cloud provider has announced AWS Educate, a program that helps educators and students use “real-world cloud technology” in the classroom.

The program, which has separate channels for educational institutions, educators and students, gives various collateral: AWS credits ($200 of credits per educator at member institutions, $75 at non-member institutions, $100 and $35 per student respectively); AWS training; curated content and collaboration tools.

Cloud computing, as regular readers of this publication will note, remains one of the most important skill sets in IT, a point that Amazon notes in its press information – “there is a growing demand for developers, information technology professional, and forward-thinking business leaders with demonstrated knowledge of cloud computing.” Anyone who signs up to the Educate program will get a variety of resources, including webinars on best practices, instructional videos and customer case studies.

Teresa Carlson, vice president worldwide public sector at AWS, said: “For years, the AWS educational grants program has put cloud technology in the hands of educators and students, giving them the ability to put big ideas into action. Based on the feedback and success of our grant recipients and the global need for cloud-skilled workers, we developed AWS Educate to help even more students learn cloud technology first-hand in the classroom.”

Amazon is not the only cloud provider to offer resources for education; IBM has its Cloud Academy, for example, while Microsoft has extensive Azure facilities for educators. Yet it’s an important topic, one which CloudTech has previously examined. An article from 2013 by Patrick Fogarty, faculty advisor of instructional technology at Xaverian High School, New York, noted the importance of “creating a learning environment that isn’t limited by the building’s walls.”

Find out more about AWS Educate here.

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Microsoft has announced a series of partnerships to invest in subsea cables and terrestrial dark fibre capacity in order to better connect their global data centres.

The partnerships are with Ireland-based subsea capacity-based network provider AquaComms and telecoms service providers Hibernia Networks and Chunghwa Telecom. David Crowley, managing director for network enablement at Azure, notes: “As people and organisations expect data and information at their fingertips, Microsoft must have an infrastructure that can deliver the cloud services, including Azure, which our customers need to support their global businesses.”

Hibernia announced it had been selected by Microsoft to provide connectivity between Canada, Ireland and the UK; AquaComms revealed Microsoft was its first customer on the America Europe Connect subsea cable system; and Chunghwa announced the beginning of construction of the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network, with Redmond among the NCP consortium.

In a blog post, Crowley explained: “When we look to the future with these investments, we believe our customers will see that Microsoft is pulling together all the components necessary to make its cloud services the most reliable, accessible and secure.

“Competition in the cloud and infrastructure space continues to heat up. But it’s not a battle that will be won on just cloud or infrastructure alone, but instead on holistic innovation and providing value to customers from the ‘sea to the sky,’” he added.

As cloud adoption grows, network traffic will bear the brunt of it, and so the new cables will enable Microsoft to deliver data at higher speeds, with higher capacity and lower latency for global customers. Naturally, Microsoft’s own initiatives will anticipate a spike. The proposed ceasing of support for Windows Server 2003, on July 14, will be part of this, as recent figures from the Cloud Industry Forum revealed more than 80% adoption of cloud services in the UK, and 58% of companies polled still running WS2003.