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The majority of UK office workers are in the dark about their employer’s cloud computing policy, and even if they do know they’re likely to ignore it, according to research published by Trustmarque.

The report’s findings, of over 2000 employees, saw the growth of cloud applications used in the workplace, be it approved or through shadow IT, continue to grow, meaning security and compliance fears grow with it. It’s a similar finding to Netskope research from January, which found that while organisations use on average 613 cloud apps, almost 90% weren’t enterprise-grade.

In the Trustmarque study, one in five cloud users admitted to uploading sensitive company information to file sharing or personal cloud storage apps, while a further quarter (28%) said they had used personal email and cloud storage apps to access data from their previous job.

More than half (56%) of office workers admitted their company didn’t have a cloud policy in place, while a further 28% didn’t know if there was one in operation.

Other stats in the report included:

• 40% said they currently or have used apps that weren’t explicitly sanctioned or provided by IT
• A quarter (27%) said they have downloaded cloud apps they no longer use
• 36% admitted they had taken to using applications and services to get around the restrictions of corporate IT

“Many IT departments continue to be stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to managing cloud applications across the business,” said James Butler, Trustmarque cloud services director. “As the research shows, this has led to a considerable lack of clarity when it comes to implementing and enforcing cloud usage policies.

“Organisations should empower their users by considering cloud-enabled self service, single sign-on and identity lifecycle management to simplify adoption and reduce risk,” he added. “The shift in how IT is being consumed by users requires a similar shift in the mindset of IT departments, from being the builder of IT systems to becoming a broker of cloud services.”

A report from CipherCloud in February found the vast majority of cloud apps used by enterprises fell under the category of shadow IT. CloudTech’s sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has covered in the recent past how shadow IT could be a positive, yet the research from Trustmarque uncovers a worrying trend of a laissez faire attitude among employees to the sharing of cloud data.

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Users of Dropbox can take advantage of 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage though a Microsoft promotional deal.

This latest storage giveaway from Microsoft appears available for all, unlike the US-only Bing Rewards scheme announced earlier in February. Yet it’s an interesting play to get more users to sign up for OneDrive, which is already free and unlimited to Office 365 subscribers.

Dropbox users can verify they have an account by saving a PDF file entitled “Get Started With OneDrive” into their Dropbox folder.

The partnership between Dropbox and Microsoft, first announced in November, has been interesting to say the least. At the time, Dropbox’s perceived weaknesses in enterprise and mobile was addressed by moving in with Microsoft and gaining greater ground on Windows Mobile, with an updated version released earlier in February.

Previous announcements from either vendor were all relatively equal, yet this release certainly gives more power to Microsoft, which over the past 12 months has been ramping up access to OneDrive. It’s clearly part of CEO Satya Nadella’s strategy to give cloud storage to as many users as possible; as he put it in March 2014 when unveiling Office 365 for iPads: “Cloud that is not connected to devices is latent potential. A device which is not connected to the cloud just cannot complete the scenarios.”

The typical mindset, when comparing companies such as Microsoft handing out cloud storage like confetti, is to compare against the likes of Dropbox and Box, traditional standalone storage vendors. This isn’t the case now, of course, as Box has a litany of collaboration tools up its sleeve – Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, went as far to note that increasingly commoditised storage benefits his company’s infrastructure costs, calling it “one of the misunderstood dynamics” of his business.

The offer is limited to the first 10 million Dropbox users, and can be found here.

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Slowly but surely, capital markets and investment companies are clearly understanding the benefits of cloud computing, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and data management as the most popular options.

That’s the verdict of a report from TABB Group, based on data from 66 buy-side and sell-side firms. The adoption figures are relatively low – only 23% of companies questioned say they’re comfortable using the public cloud, while two thirds said security concerns such as compliance, security and data control  worried them – yet six in 10 firms polled said they plan to increase spending on public cloud over the next 12 months.

Data management (23%) was most frequently cited by respondents as a key use case, followed by analytics (14%), algorithm development (14%) and regulatory reporting (8%).

Shagun Bali, TABB research analyst and author of the report ‘Public Cloud for Capital Markets: Trends and Uptake’, argues the report’s findings are a step in the right direction, if not a total paradigm shift.

“Although the market at large is still not ready to leverage the public cloud for mission-critical operations and proprietary data it considers competitive differentiators, institutions have opened up to the greater possibility of utilising the cloud to maintain commoditised operations in a cost-effective and timely manner,” she said.

The investment market is an interesting one – it can be put in a similar category to the legal profession, healthcare and financial institutions. All data sets are equal, but some are more equal than others; and it’s these professions which need to be a little more risk averse regarding where their data sits.

A January study from investment firm Piper Jaffray found general dissatisfaction among CIOs with their public cloud solutions, with Google taking the brunt of the criticism. 35% of those polled said security fears of public cloud was the primary reason for keeping data on-premise.

The full report, which will set you back $3,000, can be found here.

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The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has found nearly two fifths of small businesses are sceptical about the benefits of cloud technology when compared against security risks.

The survey, which was conducted in association with Verve and polled over 1200 SMB professionals, found 59% were using cloud services of some description, and of those, the biggest worry was a risk of data being lost, stolen or damaged, cited by 61% of respondents.

55% were worried about not being able to access online services as and when, while 52% were concerned about not knowing who could access their data. Intriguingly, a third (33%) of respondents worried they would become too reliant on cloud computing services.

While security continues to be the major bugbear for smaller businesses worried they’d lose data in the cloud – or have it taken away – steps have been taken by cloud service providers to change things, most notably building data centres in Europe for European customers.

The FSB said that while the move for European data centres was welcome, it won’t in their opinion impact small businesses’ mindset, as the perception that companies won’t have control of data in the cloud will still exist.

The most popular cloud service for small businesses was by far file storage according to 73% of respondents, followed by email and contacts (63%). Online document processing (38%) and accounting (36%) were also popular.

The need for cloud services among smaller businesses was relatively mixed. Almost a quarter (23%) of respondents say their business needs cloud “a great deal,”, 22% said they needed it “a fair amount”, 27% said “not very much” when 20% opted for “not at all.” For future uptake, respondents argued that terms and conditions in plain English (47%) and more transparent pricing (46%) were key.

The FSB expects usage of cloud services to increase among SMBs in the coming 12 months, but added growth will be stronger if the concerns highlighted are taken on board.

You can find the full survey data here.

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Google has resolved an issue with Google Compute Engine whereby its platform went down for two hours.

The network issue where instances in ‘multiple zones’ lost connectivity first began at 2259 US Pacific time (0659 GMT), with Google first issuing an update on 2346.

“The problem with network connectivity in Google Compute Engine is resolved as of shortly after 0100 US/Pacific,” a Google status page explained. “We are sorry for any issues this may have caused to you or your users and thank you for your patience and continued support.

“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are constantly working to improve the reliability of our systems,” it added.

Google has traditionally been one of the more reliable public cloud providers. According to CloudHarmony’s metrics for 2014, Compute Engine suffered 66 outages last year for a 99.982% SLA. Google’s Cloud DNS had a 100% record, with Cloud Storage suffering eight outages and App Engine just one outage.

Yet this downtime is particularly ironic given the search giant launched PerfKit earlier in February, an open source cloud benchmarking tool which aims to be a “living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes.” It was particularly interesting as to how Google would measure up against its opponents.

Earlier this year Google also announced Cloud Monitoring, a service which tracks usage and uptime for Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services customers, as well as Cloud Trace, which allows developers to create reports on their app’s performance by finding traces of slow requests.

Did you suffer any issues with the outage?

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Rackspace has announced solid fourth quarter financial results, with adjusted EBIDTA at $165m, up 25% year on year, and net revenue up 16.4% from Q413.

Net income for the fourth quarter was $36.9m, up 5.1% year on year, while return on capital in the quarter went up to 15.5% from 9.6% in 2013.

The company’s primary USP in 2014 was its Managed Cloud portfolio, launched in July, aiming to give flexibility on managed services but with DIY-styled pricing. Not surprisingly the managed cloud ethos is one CEO Taylor Rhodes feels as extremely important to the company going forward.

“The cloud market is bifurcating into two distinct categories – unmanaged cloud and managed cloud,” he told analysts according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “Rackspace has emerged as the company best positioned to dominate the managed cloud segment of the market.

“We’re now competing primarily against large telecom companies and legacy providers of IT hardware and services, most of whom are struggling to adapt to the demands of the cloud era,” he added.

Rhodes sees this as a clear gap in the market for Rackspace. “We intend to dominate this part of the cloud market,” he said. “Going into 2015 we look forward to demonstrating to customers and investors the success of our strategy and our position as the world’s number one managed cloud company.”

It’s been, all told, an interesting year for Rackspace. The company was shocked by the retirement of CEO Lanham Napier in February 2014, citing Rackspace’s strength in OpenStack and hybrid cloud as good reasons to step aside. In September the company announced Rhodes as its new CEO, as well as confirming it was continuing with its standalone trajectory and dismissing any merger and acquisition talk.

Even though the company’s press material argued it had taken this decision of its own free will, not everybody was convinced, with Forbes columnist Ben Kepes writing that he was “worried…before this potential sellout was announced, and nothing seen since has changed [his] perspective.”

The company’s branding is an interesting point. Even though it’s full steam ahead for managed cloud, Rackspace continues to be lumped in with the likes of Amazon, IBM and Google for cloud infrastructure – and comes off a fairly poor relation. Yet the company insists this is not the company’s strength. Nigel Beighton, VP technology, told CloudTech in July it was a ‘good marketing challenge’.

“I’m forever explaining the difference to people and I think I still will be going forward, just because you’ve got some very strong players in the market,” he said.

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The RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud report has found DevOps adoption increase year on year in enterprises, as well as a continued push towards a hybrid cloud strategy.

The survey, of 930 respondents, found 82% of enterprises want a multi-cloud strategy; 55% want to pursue hybrid cloud, compared to 13% multiple public cloud and 14% multiple private. This is up from 74% and 48% respectively the previous year. “Hybrid cloud is (even more) the strategy of choice for enterprises,” the company notes.

Yet the most interesting stats relate to vendor usage. DevOps adoption hit two thirds (66%) in 2015, compared to 62% in 2014, with Chef the most popular according to 28% of respondents. Puppet (24%) and Docker (13%) comprised the top three, yet interestingly significantly more respondents said they would utilise Docker (35%) in the future.

Similarly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had by far the most usage according to those polled. 57% said they were currently running apps on AWS, compared with Microsoft Azure IaaS (12%), Rackspace (11%), Azure PaaS (9%), Google App Engine (8%), and Google IaaS (8%).

Other interesting stats from the study included:

• 62% of enterprise respondents say central IT makes more than half of cloud purchasing decisions
• Greater scalability (57%) remains the key benefit of the cloud, alongside faster access to infrastructure (57%) and higher availability (51%)
• 93% of the 930 respondents are using cloud in some capacity, with 58% opting for both public and private, 30% public only, and 5% private only

The move towards increased DevOps usage is not a hugely surprising one. When CloudTech spoke with Jared Wray, CTO of CenturyLink Cloud in November, he enthused about the Cloud Development Centre, which took DevOps principles and aimed to make a large telco move more effectively.

Docker’s usage is also an interesting finding; a variety of major cloud vendors, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are already partnering with the tool, yet a major vulnerability located in November might put users off deploying for now.

You can find details of the full report here.

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IBM has launched IBM Spectrum Storage, a new storage portfolio which adds a layer of intelligent software to store each piece of data at the optimal cost maximising performance and security.

The tech giant has also put more than $1bn of investments into its storage software portfolio over the next five years.

Software defined storage is an interesting area, where the programming that controls storage-related tasks is decoupled from the physical storage. It’s not to everyone’s taste, with the idea of software-concealed storage becoming more popular, according to TechTarget’s Rich Castagna; yet he complains the “laggards are – as usual – the big storage dudes.”

Yet according to Gartner, by 2019 70% of existing storage array products will be available as “software only” versions.

“A new approach is needed to help clients address the cost and complexity driven by tremendous data growth,” said IBM Systems SVP Tom Rosamilia. “Traditional storage is inefficient in today’s world where the value of each piece of data is changing all the time.

“IBM is revolutionising storage with our Spectrum Storage software that helps clients to more efficiently leverage their hardware investments to extract the full business value of data.”

The solution is described by Big Blue as a hybrid cloud offering, as it manages data wherever, whenever, from flash storage to tape and cloud.

Yet despite the huge investments in cloud from IBM over the past year – there was certainly a positive atmosphere at the media unveiling of the SoftLayer UK data centre in January – not every commentator is convinced. David Linthicum, writing for InfoWorld, argues that IBM “has a big problem to solve around the cloud.”

Linthicum cites the departure of SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, as well as the decision to make IBM veteran Robert LeBlanc its new head of cloud, as a key problem. Similarly, with an 11^th consecutive quarter of declining revenue for IBM, reports of more layoffs don’t help a company which is shifting its revenues to the cloud, Linthicum argues.

“In its current approach, IBM’s cloud efforts will suffer the death of a thousand cuts,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the company has too much legacy baggage that its leadership doesn’t know how to manage.”

Do you agree with this view? You can find out more about IBM Spectrum Storage here.

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Cloud storage provider Box has joined the Microsoft Cloud Storage Program, integrating with Microsoft Office to enable businesses to seamlessly access content across devices and platforms.

The new collaboration includes enabling users to open, edit and save documents back to Box directly from Office for iOS, and is available today for free, with integration with Office Online arriving later this year.

“We’re excited to deepen our commitment to openness in the enterprise through Microsoft’s new program,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in a statement. “We’re committed to delivering innovation that puts the customer first and allows enterprises to choose the tools they want to be successful.”

Levie wrote in a blog post the importance of openness, citing Box’s public APIs as a primary driver behind increasing enterprise productivity through being able to share documents any time, anywhere.

“The future of enterprise software is about choosing best of breed technologies to solve critical business problems,” he wrote. “Often these solutions will not come from the same vendors. To make this successful, these technologies must work together seamlessly.

“This next enterprise era will be defined by simple to use, modular services,” he added. “IT organisations will get better innovation for their dollar, users will achieve more productivity, and vendors will build stronger ties to one another.

“Today’s move is an important accelerant to this trend.”

Box isn’t the only company to partner with Microsoft in its Cloud Storage Program; Citrix and Salesforce are also inaugural members. Yet a more interesting comparison would be Microsoft’s partnership with Dropbox announced in November 2014. At the time, analysts argued the partnership was rooted in Dropbox’s greater need for an enterprise presence, and Microsoft’s need to ‘play nicely’ with other vendors.

This deal again focuses on Box’s core mission as an enterprise technology – a point Levie was keen to stress when the storage provider eventually went public in January.

You can find out more about the news here.

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Microsoft has announced it is the first major cloud provider to adopt the ISO/IEC 27018 standard, claimed as the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy.

The standard, which was published by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) last year, sets out to establish “commonly accepted control objectives, controls and guidelines for implementing measures to protect personally identifiable information in accordance with the privacy principles in [previous framework] ISO/IEC 29100 for the public cloud computing environment.”

In practical terms, this means vendors only process personally identifiable information as directed by the customer, transparency about policy regarding transfer and deletion of information stored in data centres, and defined restrictions on how personally identifiable information is handled.

Microsoft added that its Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online products were in line with the standard.

This standard covers privacy, so differs from the Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program, commonly known as FedRAMP. Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure passed that test back in October 2013. Since then however there have been plenty of developments in terms of data privacy; not least a US judge ordering Microsoft to give over data from a Dublin data centre in April 2014.

It’s worth noting here that the ISO/IEC 27018 doesn’t appear to be a failsafe for these issues. Microsoft added the new standard forces them to inform users about government access to data, unless the disclosure is prohibited by law.

Despite this, Redmond is satisfied its adoption of the new standard will lead to greater confidence in its privacy policy from customers.

“Customers will only use services that they trust,” Microsoft EVP legal and corporate affairs Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. “The validation that we’ve adopted this standard is further evidence of our commitment to protect the privacy of our customers online.”

You can find out more the standard here.