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With everything Microsoft releases, it’s a “mobile first, cloud first” mantra which accompanies it. This is no different; the tech giant has announced the launch of the Azure App Service, a cloud service which enables developers to built web and mobile apps for any platform and any device.

The service brings together the capabilities from Azure Websites, Azure Mobile Services and Azure BizTalk Services. Microsoft aims to provide an integrated solution that streamlines development while enabling easy integration with on-premise and SaaS systems and quickly automate business processes.

Azure App Service offers the chance to develop web apps, enabling users to host any website, web app and API in the cloud, mobile apps, which offers a mobile application development platform, logic apps, which can integrate the likes of Salesforce, Dropbox and Office 365 to Azure PaaS services, and API apps, whereby developers can take a rich library of existing on-premise and cloud APIs.

Bill Staples, corporate vice president for app platform at Microsoft Azure, wrote in a company blog post: “In a mobile first, cloud first world, companies need to ensure their customers, partners and employees are able to seamlessly connect with and consume data across anywhere and on any device.”

He added: “As a developer, you need to build applications that support multiple platforms, can integrate with on-premises information systems and cloud-based services as well as automatically scale globally as your business and audience grow. That’s why today, I’m excited to announce Azure App Service.”

The aim is to provide a seamless, comprehensive selection of languages and operating systems, from .NET, to Java, NodeJS and Python among others, and for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, all under the banner of Microsoft’s cloud. Pricing will remain at the same per-minute billing used on Azure Websites.

Azure has been a particularly popular area for the tech giant to iterate from in recent weeks, with Microsoft unveiling an Azure Internet of Things suite as well as a partnership with Cisco for its ACI architecture.

You can find out more about Azure App Service here.

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Is more sensitive data being kept in the cloud? According to the latest report from Vormetric, in association with analyst house Ovum, 60% of US IT decision makers and 54% of respondents globally say they store sensitive data in the cloud.

Yet cloud environments (47%) are more of a risk to enterprise organisations than databases (37%) and file servers (29%), while cloud and big data concerns remain “genuine” and “deep rooted” according to the study, which surveyed over 800 IT decision makers worldwide.

The numbers revealed worrying findings about why organisations were moving data into the cloud; almost half (46%) of respondents expressed concerns over ‘market pressures’ forcing them to use cloud services. In terms of key changes to increase the use of cloud services, 55% wanted encryption of data with enterprise key control on their premises; 52% wanted encryption of their organisation’s data within the service provider’s infrastructure, and 52% wanted liability terms for a data breach.

The stakes are high if something goes wrong – which is more often than you think. Two in five (40%) organisations experienced a data breach or failed a compliance audit in the last year.

Increasingly, as sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has discovered, it’s the insider threat which is particularly worrying. Nine in 10 (89%) say they are at least ‘somewhat’ vulnerable to insider attacks, while respondents believe the most dangerous insiders in terms of data breaches are privileged users (55%), followed by contractors and service providers (45%) and business partners (43%).

Consequently, data breach protection is now the number one priority among IT, ahead of compliance. For Ovum, this trend can be clearly seen in recent events – the recent Sony, Target, and Vodafone security issues came about even though each company was compliant at the time.

“The cloud and big data survey results demonstrate that there is both hope and fear when it comes to cloud and big data technologies,” said Andrew Kellett, Ovum lead analyst and report author.

“This fear can lead to slow implementation of these platforms, which stymies innovation and growth. But there are steps enterprises can take and changes providers can make that will increase adoption.”

You can take a look at the full report (email required) here.

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Sipping a coffee outside the hubbub of Cloud Expo Europe, Matthew Finnie, chief technical officer at virtual data centre provider Interoute, has something on his mind.

The vast majority of the activity going on in the ExCeL arena, he surmises, will be vendors pitching their position. Nothing unusual with that at a trade show, you might say, but Finnie wants the conversations to go one step further.

“I think one of the things we’re hoping for is people start to put two and two together,” he tells CloudTech. Users realise cloud, as a flexible consumption model, is just a metaphor for how they want to buy and build their applications, so the next step is asking: what needs to happen to make this process even simpler?

According to Finnie, the answer lies in the likes of open source app container Docker and scalable network MPLS. “It’s a little bit of an odd combination,” he admits, “but the key thing is that Docker does a brilliant job of abstracting the way for me to understand the VM, so you don’t really care what’s happening below.

“But then if you build it in the traditional architecture, you’ve still then got to go off and create relationships with those VMs, so you’re still fiddling around with firewalls and load balancers. [If] you have a model where you have an integrated platform, you’re essentially saying [you’re] going to add network control to [your] cloud. It means you can predefine what relationships those machines can have.”

Despite the odd security hiccup, Docker has strategic partnerships with many big players using the service on top of their public cloud, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Finnie argues the key to Docker is that it’s lightweight, so allows you to spin up as much as you want, and it can also smash through any network connection it’s given.

“You now move away from this concept of cloud computing as being isolated silos of compute that you’ve got to manage and bind together, to a model which says ‘actually, we still haven’t finished optimising what this platform is,’” says Finnie. Pointing at the main hall, he adds: “And no doubt I don’t think anyone’s going to be talking about much of that in there – because it doesn’t work for a lot of people.”

One of the primary causes of this imbroglio is the usage of the word ‘hybrid’. It’s simply everywhere. CenturyLink VP cloud platform David Shacochis described hybrid as the most “overwrought” term in IT right now. Another source told this correspondent hybrid was simply a word certain vendors hid behind. What’s going on here?

Finnie started his career in the semiconductor game, and the word hybrid was being tossed around like a tennis ball then. It just meant different. Some time on, the lines are still blurred.

“Hybrids are a transition, but most things we do with most customers are hybrid,” he explains. “The confusion with hybrid in a cloud computing perspective is where that relationship should be formed.

“The relationship has always been formed at the network interface path. It’s the universal connector, be it an AS400, an Exadata platform, and your cloud infrastructure or dedicated infrastructure. A network interface path allows you to have a common view.” But of course you can’t virtualise everything – not least an elderly IBM AS400. Is that hybrid then?

“For us…everything is implicitly hybrid, and it’s really down to you as a customer to work out how much you can put where,” Finnie adds. “The more you can stick on the network we have, in terms of compute, the more agile and flexible it’s going to be. It’s as simple as that.”

Regular readers of this publication will remember an opinion piece Finnie wrote earlier this month analysing a new original ‘distributed cloud’ model, where processing and storage is wherever you need it to be, to save issues with latency, language or data sovereignty. The truth is, it’s neither new, nor original – John Gage discussed the ‘network as a computer’ in the 1980s, while broad themes were explored in Joe Weinman’s book Cloudonomics. Yet it’s one that seems to work for Interoute. Finnie explains the strategy that, as networks have 10% of the cost model of data centres, it’s both cheaper and more agile.

“The Internet has shown that a distributed model is the most efficient way of moving information round and presenting information,” he says. “And all we’ve said really is – let’s take the same model, and apply it to computing. Distributed cloud for us is just an optimisation of the existing model, it just brings it closer to markets.”

It’s all part of a fascinating future for Finnie. Let’s see who comes along for the ride.

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After 27 years at the top, it remains a slight culture shock to note Larry Ellison as Oracle’s chief technical officer. But despite this he’s still stealing the headlines, by telling analysts in an earnings call his belief that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce in 2015.

As reported by Seeking Alpha, Ellison told analysts in prepared remarks: “On our last quarterly conference call, I predicted that in our fiscal year 2016 Oracle would likely sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce.com. I was way too cautious and conservative – our cloud business is growing a lot faster than even I expected.

Ellison added: “I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015. It’s going to be close, but I think we’re going to sell more in the cloud than they do this year.

“I suspect that might come as a big surprise to a lot of people out there,” he noted. “You won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this.”

It’s big talk, as you’d expect. But do the financial figures back this up?

Well, it depends how you see it. Total SaaS and PaaS revenues went up 30% to $372m, while IaaS revenues went up 28% to $155m. Significantly though, this still only represents 6% of all revenues. Software and cloud represents more than three quarters of all money coming in, but the vast majority of that is tied up in software license updates and product support (50%) and new software licenses (21%). Total revenues, of $9.3bn stayed flat overall, but were up 6% in constant currency.

Oracle seems fairly happy with the results. Safra Catz, co-CEO, said the company was “very, very pleased” with the results, while co-CEO Mark Hurd described it as a “very solid quarter…and a great cloud quarter for Oracle.” The tech giant added nearly 800 brand new SaaS customers in the quarter, while more than 500 existing customers expanded their cloud services.

But how does this compare with Salesforce, who announced another billion dollar quarter and $5bn in annual revenue back in February? Tim Beyers, of the Motley Fool, noted at the time the disparity between balance growth and deferred revenue, which “could suggest the company is having a tougher time signing the sorts of lucrative, multi-year deals [CEO Marc] Benioff wants.”

Ellison said it would be close. Watch this space to see how close Oracle gets.

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Sweden-based database management provider Severalnines is an interesting company. Its name would suggest SLAs but the firm, with approximately 7000 users, supports MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB among others and enables businesses to support both SQL and NoSQL open source databases in the cloud or on-premise.

Yet the way Severalnines has built its success is of most interest. Instead of going cap in hand to VCs and building up cash without going near making a profit, Severalnines has done it the hard way, relying predominantly on the success of its ClusterControl product to expand, with customers such as BT, Orange and Cisco on board. And with a 100% growth in the past 12 months, things are certainly on track.

Vinay Joosery is CEO and co-founder of Severalnines. He argues startups today are focusing at their goals from the wrong angle.

He tells CloudTech: “Five or 10 years ago, I didn’t see as many young people really dreaming about starting their own company, but now it seems like today, when you go to some of these networking events, the dream is [to] have a good idea, build the prototype with your friends, and then go and contact the VCs.

“Basically you get excited about the wrong things. Solve a real problem and find real customers who are willing to pay for that problem – I think that’s probably where the focus should be.”

Severalnines has done that. The company’s focus is on architecting for failover – a big problem when managing databases and the majority of a firm’s staff doesn’t know how to set things up. Add cloud failures and multiple data centres to the mix and it all gets very complicated.

Covering both SQL and NoSQL use cases, Joosery argues Severalnines doesn’t push its customers in any direction – “they are the experts in what they want” – but adds: “What they don’t know though is – does this database work for me? We think that the technology is not enough. It needs to be maintained, it needs to be scaled, if there are issues you need to know how to fix it. These are the kinds of things that we address with the product.”

Plenty of complexity gets thrown in with the working environments in large enterprises, who will typically have an army of Oracle database admins in one room, an army of sysadmins in another, and armies of developers elsewhere. The growing DevOps movement is changing this landscape, and for Severalnines – which includes support for Puppet and Chef – it’s a key trend to play into.

“Our product has been addressing that angle from day one in a way,” Joosery says. “You have people managing the database, they’re doing some programming, they’re building web services, they know a bit of everything. What you will see in ClusterControl today, it’s doing a number of things addressing mainly on the sysadmin point of view, all the database aspects. The stuff it does is a combination of sysadmin tasks that you need to do on a database, as well as pure database administration tasks.”

Joosery adds another benefit of DevOps is writing infrastructure as code. In the future, you won’t need to put boxes together, screw in cables, or do anything manually. You write a program to spin up VMs in the cloud and set up connections instead.

Watch this space for further developments on that front. Yet there is a common theme between pursuing DevOps architecture and building distributed systems to architect against failover.

“We are helping people with their databases, but we are not doing it as the other tools vendors are,” Joosery explains. “They are taking an approach where they are looking at single instances. What we do is focus from day one to build tools for systems, and the system for us today is a distributed system, which can be distributed across multiple machines.

“In a distributed system you assume there will be failures. The shit will hit the fan, that’s just by default. Our software is built from the ground up to make sure that these things are easy.

“Let’s say you have a bunch of services, you’re running it in a couple of Amazon regions and you want to have the same data in your own private data centre as well. If for example the Irish region of Amazon gets knocked out, [you] failover to Singapore or failover to the US or failover to your own data centre.

“This is why we are called Severalnines – people need more availability.”

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76% of organisations surveyed by CDW in its Cloud 401 report say at least one cloud vendor failed to meet their SLAs.

The report, released in February, found reliability (43%) as the most important metric for cloud service providers, far ahead of cost (28%) and ability to integrate with existing infrastructure (27%), meaning a double whammy for providers who couldn’t meet their uptime figures.

Cloud services go down for a variety of reasons, from the preventable, such as a fat finger, to the less preventable, like adverse weather conditions. Very few cloud service providers have spotless records in this department, as data from benchmarking provider CloudHarmony found.

Yet if you claim a certain figure and can’t match up to it, as Mimecast famously did, customers won’t be happy. Nor, as Verizon found out, will they be happy if you propose ‘planned’ downtime to improve infrastructure in order to reduce the risks of further outages.

CDW also found a discord from respondents between the hype cloud promises and the reality it delivers. When asked if greater flexibility in IT was a reality, 19% agreed and 7% disagreed. For ease of use, 16% agreed and 7% disagreed, while it was equal for cost savings (17% agree, 17% disagree) and a majority disagreed regarding security (11% agree, 21% disagree).

Despite this, the research found 35% of IT services today are delivered totally or partially by cloud. Going forward, organisations are considering delivering 35% of entirely new IT services via the cloud. Barriers for further adoption according to survey respondents are security (47%) – surprise, surprise – trust in solutions (31%), budget (24%) and management support (19%).

Yet the overall consensus from the report was that cloud “works”, and organisations, particularly in more regulated industries, should face up to their fears.

A CIO in federal government told the report, “Be very optimistic and open-minded about how it can enhance the efficiency and reliability of an entity’s operations”, while a healthcare CTO said, “Although it may seem complex, cloud is by far the way to go as far as infrastructure and storage.”

Do you agree with the report’s findings?

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At the back end of 2014 Sumeet Sabharwal, group vice president and general manager at NaviSite, penned a company blog explaining how the year had been “significant” for desktop as a service (DaaS) on a number of fronts. Maturation of technology, expansion of the provider landscape, and expansion of endpoint devices, such as the support of Chromebooks, have helped create a maelstrom going into 2015.

Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe Sabharwal expanded on this vision, and why a technology with such high potential had been struggling in recent years.

“It was positioned as everything for everyone,” he tells CloudTech. “It’s really aimed at very specific workloads, very specific use cases. We kind of figured that out by trial and error.”

The theory two years ago was ‘the desktop is dead, long live the desktop’, Sabharwal argues. But it’s for industry specific workloads; if a company had 200,000 employees, then it’s only around 5,000 to 10,000 that NaviSite would see fit to target with its cloud-based virtual desktop solutions, delivered through a DaaS model.

Maturation of technology is seen as key. IP protocol issues, latency problems and resolution difficulties were major issues, but aren’t as much of a headache now. Yet Sabharwal notes it’s still a highly complex system to get to work.

“It’s not child’s play,” he says, citing the issues of image management, desktop engineering and Active Directory integration. “What we realised from customers was just taking a platform alone and saying ‘here’s a platform, go make it work’ does not work. It’s complex, it’s hard work.

“All of that has to be done as a managed service – [customers] don’t have the inclination, expertise, wherewithal, so we’ve expanded our capabilities and streamlined that.

“That is where enterprises say ‘yep, I get it, now it’s great; I know there’s applicability and I struggle to make it work, now I’ve got the expertise to make it work,’” he adds.

Back in December Sabharwal noted how 2014 was the year DaaS “came out of the shadows of VDI” (virtual desktop infrastructure). VDI, however, is at an interesting path. As Ken Hess writes for ZDNet: “I remember a time when predictions were in the billions of dollars related to converting standard desktops to virtual ones. Funny thing is it hasn’t really happened.”

For VMware however, who work with NaviSite, the acquisition of CloudVolumes is an exciting development according to Sabharwal. “The ability to build virtual desktops on the fly with the end user data, the personalisation of Ops and being able to deliver persistent desktops…the economics further makes the solution much more palatable and affordable,” he says.

How do you see desktop as a service evolving? You can find out more about NaviSite’s solutions here.

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Finland has the highest proportion of enterprises in the EU using cloud computing, according to figures from Eurostat.

The findings from the European Union’s statistical office, from December 2014, saw more than half (51%) of Finnish enterprises in the cloud. Nordic and Benelux countries typically scored highly, with Sweden and Denmark in the top four and Netherlands and Belgium in the top 10. 24% of UK enterprises use cloud computing services.

Overall, 10 nations are ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting cloud services, with the average number at 19%. The most popular service taken to the cloud, not surprisingly, is email, with two thirds of enterprises using the cloud overall (66%) taking advantage of this. Italy (86%) and Croatia (85%) had the most enterprises using cloud email.

More than half (53%) overall use cloud storage facilities, with Ireland (74%), Iceland (74%) and the UK (71%) the leaders there.

The remaining services are utilised by fewer than half of cloud-ready organisations according to the figures; hosting databases (39%), Office software (34%), financial or accounting software (31%), CRM (21%) and computing power for own software (17%). Interestingly Finland, at 66% for email, 54% for storage and 38% for databases, is just above the average.

The most likely reason for EU enterprises not utilising cloud services in 2014 was lack of knowledge (42%), followed by the risk of a security breach (37%). Uncertainty regarding the location of data (33%), uncertainty about applicable law (32%) and the high cost of buying cloud services (31%) were also cited.

Similarly, the risk of a security breach (39%) was the highest limiting factor for those already utilising cloud, followed by the high cost of buying cloud services (32%) and uncertainty over applicable law (32%).

It’s worth noting the tide of North American businesses being ahead of their European counterparts in cloud computing adoption may be turning. Many cloud service providers, such as Salesforce and SoftLayer, are building data centres in Europe to provide less latency and greater data sovereignty for their European customers. Now, it seems that trust is going both ways.

Take a look at the full Eurostat data here.

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A survey from analyst house Gartner has found that infrastructure and operations leaders should institute a ‘cloud-first’ consideration for every project on an application by application basis.

The report, entitled “Flipping to Digital Leadership: The 2015 CIO Agenda”, surveyed more than 2800 CIOs and found public cloud was an option for IT projects, but only a first consideration for a small minority.

15% of those polled aren’t considering cloud computing for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) projects, while 9% aren’t factoring cloud for software as a service (SaaS). Nearly half of respondents have shifted their priorities from cloud as a concept to a viable option, while 71% of CIOs polled felt an increasing need for context-aware services.

Gartner also asserts its ‘nexus of forces’ – mobile, social, cloud and information – first introduced in 2012 is no longer on the horizon, and reports CIOs aren’t looking enough at the long-term future. “If they haven’t already, I&O leaders must ready themselves and their organisations for a culture of experimentation, innovation and deployment of post-nexus technologies,” the analysts argue.

Regular readers of CloudTech will recall adoption rates of public cloud among CIOs isn’t what it could be. In January, investment firm Piper Jaffray polled 112 CIOs across eight industries and found the security of public cloud was cited by 35% as a primary reason for keeping data on premise. Regarding specific vendors, AWS remained the most popular public cloud provider among CIOs, with Microsoft and Rackspace completing the top three.

Elsewhere, numbers from tech giant SAP in association with Oxford Economics found 99% of its global respondents, based on the C-suite, heads of business units and IT and operations executives, said cloud computing was part of their company’s business strategy. Seven in 10 (69%) say they expect to make moderate to heavy cloud investments over the next three years, as well as step up their migration of core business functions to the cloud.

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The latest figures from Synergy Research have found Cisco and HP to be the leaders in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, while IBM, the clear market leader in Q412, slips further down the table.

The analysts point to IBM selling off its server business to Lenovo – which is now the seventh largest vendor in the space – as a key point in the Armonk firm’s downturn.

Cisco has a clear lead in public cloud infrastructure, while HP is on top in private cloud, according to the research. Synergy puts Cisco’s lead down to its dominance of the networking segment, while HP’s prominence is down to its market leading position in cloud servers. Total Q4 cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, topped $13 billion.

The IBM proposition is a particularly interesting one. Almost one year ago to the day, IBM UK&I leader Doug Clark told this publication the reasoning behind the Lenovo sell-off. “We’re seeing the centre of gravity move,” he said. “It’s been cited by a number of market watchers where the real value of cloud is, and it’s moving up the stack.

“We’re not letting go of our systems space, but I think we’re being more specific about which bits fit with which part of where the growth is going, and each element within IBM needs to justify its position as we go forwards,” he added.

John Dinsdale, Synergy Research chief analyst, agreed with Clark’s assessment. “IBM does not want to be in markets where it competes head-to-head with many other vendors for large volume [and] relatively low priced technology based on open standards,” he tells CloudTech in an email. “But it absolutely does want to maintain a strong position in servers based on its own technology, which are used in markets and applications where high performance is required and high pricing is acceptable.”

He added: “Cloud remains extremely important to IBM and I think it’s doing a good job of growing that business – especially on the services side. I think IBM’s main challenges are in the other parts of its business.”

Other Synergy research into cloud infrastructure services sees Amazon Web Services a clear market leader, but Microsoft in a clear second place with 96% year on year growth, compared to IBM in third with 48% growth.