All posts by James

Box has another go at IPO after cloud market sweetens

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Cloud storage provider Box is set to finally go public nine months after its aborted first attempt, according to an updated regulatory filing.

The updated S-1 filing, viewable here, outlines plans to sell 12.5 million shares at between $11 and $13 a share, with CEO Aaron Levie tweeting a thinly veiled comment on the delay:

There was plenty of furore back in March when reports surfaced that Box had filed for IPO, with this publication noting at the time Levie’s comment over how neither he nor CFO Dylan Smith had “storied” careers at IBM or Oracle, and the general disruption between cloudy upstarts and legacy tech vendors.

Yet the ending wasn’t a happy one; after shares of various public cloud companies tanked – no, not that sort of public cloud – the Los Altos-based firm decided to withdraw and keep its powder dry.

In the updated document, many of the figures haven’t changed. Profitability is at -137%, while sales and marketing spend remains at 137% of the firm’s revenue. These are figures which don’t seem to concern Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, who wrote in his blog: “Compared to other publicly traded SaaS companies, Box is among the least in efficient customer acquisition.

“But in this market, which values revenue growth and seemingly ignores profitability, the bottom line doesn’t seem to matter as much as the top line. In that regard, Box is close to the top of the heap.”

Events since then have improved Box’s standing, not least the acquisition of General Electric as a new customer in May. In July, Levie announced the removal of cloud storage limits for Box’s business customers, calling it “the end of the storage wars.” Given Microsoft responded in kind, first by offering 1TB and then unlimited cloud storage for Office 365 subscribers, then it’s clear the next phase for Box and its nearest competitors is not just the storage of data, but its location and protection as well.

Not every pundit is in agreement, however. Vineet Jain, CEO of competitor Egnyte, previously spoke of the need for “basic financial sense” in IPO valuations. Yet Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Box partner Docurated, told this publication back in September of the difference between the media’s comment and what customers are actually thinking. “If you talk to customers and leading CIOs, they’re all enthusiastically investing in Box,” he said.

Box is usually portrayed as a bitter rival of Dropbox, although both companies play this down. Yet Dropbox’s recent business decisions – partnering with Microsoft for Office 365, for instance – marks a change in their strategy over recent months. Where Box goes from here, particularly given Microsoft and Google’s aggressive push on cloud storage, among others, remains to be seen.

As cloud adoption continues to rise, fears over data breaches rise with it

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Organisations on average use 613 cloud apps, according to the latest study from Netskope – but almost 90% of them aren’t enterprise-ready.

That’s the key takeaway from Netskope’s January 2015 cloud report of millions of users in the Netskope Active Platform, which found that more than one in five organisations have over 1000 cloud apps in use.

Given 15% of users admitted they had their credentials compromised, as well as a quarter of all files in cloud storage apps being shared with at least one person outside the organisation, it’s certain to give CIOs a headache.

Marketing, collaboration and HR departments are least likely to be using enterprise-ready cloud apps – marketing departments polled by Netskope had a whopping 96% of apps not ready.

The report asserts that a growing number of users are logging into their cloud apps using compromised credentials, be it through reused passwords or details which have been stolen through a data hack or exposure. Despite this, cloud adoption continues to grow, with a 6% increase between the last two quarters.

“Employees today have shifted from thinking of apps as a nice-to-have to a must-have,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO and founder of Netskope. “CISOs must continue to adapt to that trend to secure their sensitive corporate and customer data across all cloud apps, including those unsanctioned by IT.”

The most popular enterprise cloud apps, according to the study, were Google Drive, Facebook and YouTube, with Twitter and Gmail completing the top five. This is an interesting comparison, given aside from Google Drive, there were no other storage and collaboration apps in the top five. iCloud (#6), Dropbox (#7), OneDrive (#9) and Box (#10) however all featured strongly.

Despite the worries about what files go where and who has access to what, some organisations are attempting to stem the tide. Veradocs, a Mountain View-based startup, aims to effectively provide a ‘kill switch’ for compromised data, allowing end users and IT to set policies for files and change their in real time.

Cyberattacks such as Heartbleed and Shellshock were cited by Beri as a serious danger last year. “These events underscore the sobering reality that many in the workforce have been impacted by data breaches and will subsequently use compromised accounts in their work lives, putting sensitive information at risk,” he said.

You can download the full report here.

Are you aware of your employees’ shadow IT activity? CSA cloud study shows most aren’t

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Fewer than 10% of companies polled in the latest Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey are aware of their employees’ shadow IT activity.

The survey, created in conjunction with Skyhigh Networks, gave a definition of shadow IT as “technology spending and implementation that occurs outside the IT department, including cloud apps adopted by individual employees, teams, and business units.”

And the report, which polled executives and IT managers, found their biggest worry over shadow IT is security of corporate data in the cloud, with almost half (49%) of respondents citing it. Compliance violations (25%), the ability to enforce policies (19%) and redundant services creating inefficiency (8%) were also noted.

It’s certainly a worry for business executives – and particularly so given these worrying stats:

  • File sharing and collaboration tools (80%) by far the most popular cloud services used, followed by communication tools (41%), social media (38%) and content sharing (27%)
  • Dropbox (80%) is by far the most likely cloud service to be blocked, followed by Facebook (50%) and Apple iCloud (50%). Surprisingly, 18% of respondents say they block LinkedIn
  • Security of data (73%) is the biggest concern for holding back cloud projects, with loss of control over IT services (38%) and concern over regulatory compliance (38%) again highly cited

Remarkably, half of companies still don’t have a policy in place on acceptable cloud usage. But is it apathy which is holding firms back? Yes and no: 27% of those polled admitted they didn’t have a plan but are looking to create one, while 23% were more apathetic.

However in terms of data breaches, 2014 was hardly a banner year according to the CSA. While more software vulnerabilities were uncovered last year than any other year on record, only 17% of companies polled said they’d experienced an insider threat in the past 12 months, such as an employee taking sensitive data with them after quitting. Yet around a third (31%) said they weren’t sure, which certainly raises alarm bells.

The report again sounds out issues facing organisations when moving data to the cloud. “Companies will need to enforce the same security, compliance, and governance policies that they do for data stored on premises,” the report argues.

“IT will also need to work more collaboratively with business users to understand the motivations behind shadow IT and enable the cloud services that drive employee productivity and growth in the business without sacrificing security,” it adds.

Back in 2013 the CSA coined the term ‘the notorious nine’ for security threats to cloud, with data breaches, data loss and account hijacking the top three fears. As we enter 2015, it seems not much has changed.

CIOs still concerned over public cloud, Google usage dwindling in new report

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CIOs surveyed by investment firm Piper Jaffray in its latest study have reported dissatisfaction with public cloud solutions, and are departing Google as their choice of public cloud provider.

The report, which polled 112 CIOs across eight industries, found nearly three quarters (73%) had allocated budget to private, hybrid or public cloud projects in 2015, yet the security of public cloud was cited by 35% of respondents as the primary reason for keeping data on premise.

Amazon Web Services remains the most popular public cloud provider and is growing, with 35% of respondents citing it compared to 33% in 2014. It was a similar story with the top three, Microsoft Azure (21% this year, 20% last year) and Rackspace (16% this year, 15% last year), while Google’s usage went down to 7% from 12%. IBM SoftLayer went up to 6% share, while other players – VMware, Verizon, Dell, Savvis, HP, polled 3% or less.

The results in the Piper Jaffray survey ring true when compared to recent industry research in the cloud infrastructure market, which showed Microsoft as taking the clear second place behind AWS – and according to the report, it indicates how organisations will continue to take up Microsoft in 2015.

Cloud budgets are up 6% year over year, with on-premises spending up 2%. 89% of those polled said they would expect their private cloud spending to increase, with a similar number (88%) agreeing for AWS and 70% saying their Microsoft Azure cloud spending would go up.

Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, told the WSJ that the Google losses were predominantly attributed to their losing the ‘initial branding war’ with AWS.

Google has been pushing its cloud options aggressively in recent months, offering one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who bought a Chromebook during December. Compare that with Microsoft allowing free unlimited storage to Office 365 customers, however, and it doesn’t look as rosy, even though Microsoft had a several hour outage in November.

Read more: Cloud computing and the changing role of the CIO: Which is best for your business?

IBM launches first SoftLayer cloud data centre in Germany, bolsters data privacy

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IBM has announced the launch of the first SoftLayer cloud data centre in Germany, joining an ever growing list of cloud service providers (CSPs) setting up roots in the European country.

The move, to Frankfurt, had been coming, with Germany and France on Big Blue’s confirmed list of targets after launching a London data centre back in July, Paris already having been opened.

It’s a prevalent trend for cloud providers for a variety of reasons; it helps customers based in Europe attain the stricter security and data privacy regulations on the continent, as well as lowering latency to improve application performance. IBM claims there is only seven milliseconds of latency between the Frankfurt and Amsterdam data centres.

“Data privacy regulations in the European Union are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby in a statement. “While all our cloud data centres have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”

The move makes sense for all parties, with Germany consistently in the top five of IBM Cloud’s best performing EMEA countries in terms of monthly recurring revenue and growth.

Following a ruling in New York whereby Microsoft had to hand over data stored on an overseas server, it has become imperative for organisations – and CSPs – to ensure data is truly kept private.

Back in November Interoute launched a second virtual data centre (VDC) zone in Germany, following their Berlin data centre in 2012, while Amazon Web Services opened a series of data centres in Frankfurt in October. Salesforce also mentioned the possibility of expanding its European operations to Germany, following the launch of its first UK data centre in the same month.

Pricing was not disclosed, although IBM is offering a $500 discount to Frankfurt customers, valid until March 31. You can find out more here.

New paper assesses change in management approach for hybrid cloud IT

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As cloud continues to pervade businesses, the primary role of central IT will be to protect sensitive data, maintain centralised software and optimise IT spending, managing chargebacks to line of business.

This is the key takeaway from a study published by IDC and Red Hat. Entitled ‘How IT is planning for its hybrid reality’, the study examines how many of the challenges facing IT with the proliferation of cloud relate back to business rather than technology.

The accompanying survey, which polled over 200 IT professionals in North America, found that 69% of respondents were using at least four public cloud IaaS platforms today, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer.

IDC notes the fractured landscape of the IaaS market with this data, although related research suggests a clear pecking order and dominant players, with AWS ahead of Microsoft.

This shared ownership demands a new management model, according to the report. Even though organisations are taking a hybrid cloud approach, cloud management tools have yet to catch up, requiring greater degrees of application and data portability, along with a greater number of integration points.

Primary challenges in creating a new management model include developing a public cloud governance strategy, cited by 35% of respondents, as well as unifying the management of public and private cloud resources (25%). Just under a third (32%) of respondents said they were allowing users to manage cloud services on their own, while 36% said they were enabling IT to enforce policy while looking for ways to allow users to manage their own cloud services.

It’s a clear sign for executives to change. 45% of respondents cite deploying a unified cloud management platform as one of their top five initiatives going forward, although problems with deploying it include managing chargebacks and SLA reports for the business, as well as ensuring alignment between business and IT goals.

One of the more interesting facets to come out from this research goes against the commonly held belief that IT is unaware of how IT services are swapping over to cloud providers. “Respondents displayed awareness of the proliferation of public cloud services, and they do recognise the need to increase their level of responsiveness to users, even if IT believes it is already offering a reasonable set of services,” the report notes.

Gordon Haff, a cloud strategist at Red Hat, said of the results: “Augmenting in-house IT with public clouds can help organisations develop the applications and services the business needs faster and deliver them more flexibly. However, a completely ad hoc approach to using public clouds is a recipe for high costs and compliance failures.

“A cloud management strategy lets you take advantage of new and innovative cloud platforms while maintaining control of IT and protecting the business,” he added.

You can take a look at the full report here.

Campaign for Clear Licensing pens open letter to Oracle after report slamming software practices

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The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL), a not-for-profit organisation advocating clear software practices, has written an open letter to Oracle urging the tech giant to address concerns over vendor lock-in to ensure users migrate to its cloud products.

The group released a report in November slamming Oracle for having an “arms length, impoverished relationship” with its licensees; with report author Martin Thompson claiming customers’ relationships with Oracle were “hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust.”

The timing of the report was critical for both Oracle and the CCL. After a slow start, Oracle is making an aggressive play in cloud, hiring Shawn Price, formerly of SAP, and Peter Magnusson of Google App Engine in recent months. However Oracle’s most recent financial numbers suggest there is still a long way to go before cloud is the main source of revenue, a fact the CCL acknowledges in the letter (viewable here).

“We believe there are significant challenges to overcome along the way,” the letter reads. “Not least of all is overcoming the deep-rooted mistrust of your core customer base as a result of your auditing and licensing practices.

“We fear that if Oracle does not address these concerns then the company’s ability to meet its stated $1 billion cloud sales target next year, together with the longer term outlook for its cloud computing business, will remain in doubt,” it adds.

In total there were seven calls to action prompted by the report, which the CCL emphasised again in the letter. Oracle needs to up its game in various areas, including investing in a well organised knowledge base to educate its customers, providing one corporate voice instead of passing licensees across different departments, as well as providing greater risk management to ensure businesses don’t shy away from the product.

The most important takeaway, however, remains in terms of strategic focus; customer satisfaction, relationship strength and strategic value should replace audit revenue as a key performance indicator.

The CCL was willing to praise Oracle in places, however. The company was chosen initially because of its reputation, but also because it was willing to cooperate with the campaign.

“We applaud the levels of engagement we have already received from Oracle and in particular members of LMS (License Management Services) who wish to address these already well-known issues,” the letter states. “We are writing this letter to further increase this engagement so that real change can be achieved to everyone’s benefit.”

CloudTech understands SAP, IBM and Microsoft are among the next targets for the CCL.

A review of cloud in 2014 – and what’s on the horizon for 2015

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2014 was an extremely busy year for cloud computing, as more and more businesses migrate and cloud increasingly becomes the de facto setting for IT. The competition between vendors for infrastructure as a service continued ferociously, with Microsoft and IBM cutting back some of AWS’ market dominance.

Before we look at what might happen in 2015, here’s a quick reminder of the main events and highlights from 2014:

Cloud in 2014

March: IBM rebrands as a cloud-first company, lays out its strategy. 2014 has been a year of turbulence and change for the large legacy tech vendors. IBM announced it was to push $1bn of its resources into cloud and that it was rebranding as a cloud company. Rival companies also gave it the big one this year; SAP, for example, made frequent overtures about its ambition to become ‘THE’ cloud company.
Read more: IBM’s cloud strategy: Will it become the best in the business?

April: Microsoft forced to hand over data stored on overseas server. A court in New York ruled against Redmond, after the tech giant resisted a US government warrant demanding access to emails stored on its Dublin server. Whilst bad news for Microsoft, it also raised alarm bells for any company that employs a US cloud provider – their data could be searched and taken at any given moment.
Read more: US judge orders Microsoft to give up overseas cloud data

June/July: Code Spaces ceases trading after DDoS attack, Autotask suffers serious outage. Web-based SVN and Git hosting provider Code Spaces waved the white flag after a devastating denial of service attack, while two weeks later CRM provider Autotask went down after a capacity spike. CloudTech secured an exclusive chat with VP engineering Adam Stewart, who admitted this was the worst outage the company had suffered.
Read more: Code Spaces RIP: Code hosting provider ceases trading after “well-orchestrated” DDoS attack
Read more: Autotask: “We have to earn everybody’s trust again – which we will do”

August: 4chan users leak private photos of celebrities from iCloud devices. Personal photos of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, many featuring nudity, were leaked after being obtained from iCloud. Apple later reported that the victims’ accounts “were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions.”
Read more: Nude celebrity photo leaks: Cloud expert calls for common sense approach

October: IBM and SAP announce partnership for HANA Enterprise Cloud. IBM and SAP, who have had a fruitful partner relationship for over 40 years, announced a major partnership with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud being delivered through IBM, allowing users the choice to run SAP’s HANA in-memory database either across SoftLayer or IBM’s cloud managed services.
Read more: IBM and SAP team up to run HANA Enterprise Cloud in major deal

October: Microsoft announces unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers, Bitcasa removes its unlimited option. The same week saw two companies arrive at two different strategies, leaving wide ranging consequences in the cloud storage wars. Back in June, Microsoft gave each Office 365 user 1TB of storage, but Bitcasa’s move may be for the best – cloud storage and enterprise file and sync is a hot market, and differentiation may be key.
Read more: Cloud storage wars: The Bitcasa and Microsoft stories are a sign of the times  

Analysing the 2014 outlook

CloudTech looked at three areas of focus back in December 2013; hybrid cloud, PaaS, and Amazon Web Services. So what did we get right, and what fell wide of the mark?

Hybrid cloud: Hit. As 2013 was the year when hybrid cloud came of age, 2014 was going to be a continuation on this theme. “Public cloud offers cost and scale benefits, while private cloud provides security and control,” commented Len Padilla, VP product strategy at NTT Europe. “Businesses need them both.”

As 2014 drew to a close, there were a glut of stories which proved this point. Back in October a survey found more than half of attendees at the 2014 Cloud Expo and AWS Summit were adopting hybrid cloud strategies, while recent IDC figures put the global cloud market at $118bn for 2015, fuelled by enterprise interest in the hybrid cloud.

It’s not that simple however. Has hybrid cloud hit the mainstream? Not yet. A recent survey by Avanade found that while companies believe more than half of their applications and services will be deployed on the hybrid cloud within three years on average, many are confused about what hybrid actually is and how they have to shape up to prepare for implementation.

PaaS: Hit. Platform as a service was considered a key area for 2014, with organisations demanding their cloud partners offer it to create solutions to make their customer journey unique.

The majority of headlines last year were with IBM after the company rolled out its dedicated BlueMix developer platform, although there were other launches, notably Heroku launching Performance Dynos in Europe. Increasingly companies are looking at agile application development, and this is borne out in the popularity of Node.js and JSON.

It’s not been a completely smooth ride, however. CloudBees announced it was dropping its PaaS operation to focus exclusively on Jenkins back in September, while there have also been discussions about XaaS (everything as a service) and the dissolution of traditional cloud service models.

AWS’ dominance in IaaS: Miss. CloudTech predicted Amazon Web Services would maintain “huge dominance” in the IaaS space through 2014 after analyst figures showed the company’s revenue growth continued to be greater than its four biggest rivals put together.

Things changed a bit last year, although AWS continues to be the significant market leader. Q214 figures from Synergy Research showed Microsoft take the clear second place in the market, growing 164% year on year. IBM grew 86%, Google grew 49% while AWS, by contrast, grew 49%.

Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale told CloudTech at the time it was just a blip, saying: “I do not think that Amazon is resting on its laurels – quite the opposite actually.” In October, the firm released figures which continued to back up Microsoft’s position as clear second place.

Cloud in 2015?

So what does 2015 have in store? Here are a few predictions from cloud experts:

Cost will no longer be the biggest determiner for choosing a cloud solution. John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, believes value for customers won’t just be about cost in 2015. “While providers will become more agnostic, the importance of a trusted partner will grow stronger, whether you rely on that partner to manage your public or private cloud, automate your DevOps or keep tabs on your apps,” he says.

“Companies will have to ask themselves if they want to swell their payrolls hiring the resources needed to manage all of their tools and technologies. This will force companies to determine what matters most to them – focusing on IT management or their business.”

Greater emphasis on agile development processes. Allan Leinwand, VP and CTO cloud platform and infrastructure at ServiceNow, sees cloud platforms as an important way for business teams to convert ideas into applications. “By having a common platform to develop on, organisations can let their teams rapidly create and test their ideas – in days or weeks, instead of months,” he explains. “They can fail quickly – investing and risking less money. Think of the cloud platform as enabling the ‘series A’ investor within the enterprise.”

IaaS in transition. Nigel Beighton, VP technology at Rackspace, sees infrastructure as a service becoming subordinated as containers, SaaS, PaaS, and continuous deployment continue to rise. “IaaS has spelled its own irrelevance in the mind of the buyer by its API, and the abstractions on top of that which bring value to the user,” he explains.

Enterprises will design private cloud services – with a hybrid future in mind. Sachin Sony is marketing field development manager at Equinix. He sees more successful private and public cloud implementations taking shape in 2015. “2014 was expected to be a year of explosive growth in cloud service consumption,” he explains. “Major cloud providers have become more aggressive in deploying their services, and enterprise CIOs have largely moved beyond simply deploying selected applications in the cloud.

“Yet the private or public cloud debate continues to bubble under the surface. In 2015, this debate will finally be put to bed.”

What do you think will be the main trends in cloud computing this year?

KPMG survey shows how cloud “continues to drive disruption in the business world”

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Almost half of respondents in KPMG’s 2014 cloud computing survey are using cloud to drive cost efficiencies, with a similar number utilising it to better enable their mobile workforce.

The study, of 500 global C-suite executives, saw a variety of ways in which businesses are using cloud to drive business transformation. Aside from cost savings (49%) and enabling a mobile workforce (42%), CXOs also see the benefit of cloud as improving alignment with customers and partners (37%), more effectively leveraging data to provide insight (35%), and aiding in new product development (32%).

The results show an interesting change when compared to KPMG’s last survey, The Cloud Takes Shape, in February 2013. Cost reduction was again the main driver for cloud transformation, yet speed to adoption, new market entry, business process transformation, and improved customer interaction were also cited.

Not surprisingly, security was seen as the key benchmark when seeking a cloud solution, cited by 82% of survey respondents. Price (78%) was only the third most important metric, behind data privacy (81%). The report argues the results are to be expected, describing data security as a “burning business issue across all areas of an organisation.”

Cloud isn’t just a cost saver, and any company changing their IT infrastructure for that reason alone is missing out

The report also examined the impact cloud has in terms of employee mobility and expectation. Cloud enables enterprise mobility and, through that, increases worker productivity (54%) and satisfaction (48%), as well as improve field service operations (45%) and gain a competitive advantage (44%).

The KPMG report concludes with five key takeaways for organisations looking to implement cloud solutions:

  • Make cloud transformation a continuous process: Cloud should be seen across the whole organisation, not just a tech or IT project.
  • Drive cloud transformation from the top: A lack of hierarchy could be costly to your implementation – instead, cloud projects should be managed centrally with a senior level team that guides strategic decisions.
  • Focus on strong leadership and engagement: Companies should look at changing their corporate culture to align with a cloud shift, focusing first on getting buy-in from senior business leaders.
  • Avoid silos: Similar to previous points, business and IT professionals should work side by side as cloud is brought into the enterprise, instead of creating potentially harmful shadow IT scenarios
  • Measure success: Organisations should come up with “realistic” outcomes for their cloud transformation which, crucially, tie back to key business objectives.

Yet the most important conclusion the report draws is in terms of business mindset to moving to the cloud: cloud isn’t just a cost saver, and any company which goes into changing their IT infrastructure for that reason alone is missing out.

“Making such changes to an organisation are costly and time consuming, but such a large increase in responses signals the tremendous impact, beyond cost reduction, that cloud can have on an organisation,” the report argues.

“These results suggest that for many organisations, cloud has truly become a transformative solution.”

You can read the full report here.

China to assess trustworthiness of cloud providers

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Cloud computing providers in China are to be assessed for their trustworthiness according to a report – which could mean bad news for foreign CSPs.

According to a report from China Daily, the new government system will be similar to the FedRAMP accreditation used in the US. Only firms who pass this ruling in full will be allowed to take part in government projects, according to Zuo Xiaodong, vice president of the China Information Security Research Institute.

“The basic idea of the security rating mechanism is to find trustworthy hardware, software and service providers to ensure that the government has total control of the entire ecosystem,” he said.

The overall effect, the report argues, could mean greater difficulty for overseas cloud vendors to get into Chinese business. They will be allowed to take part in the assessment, but may be required to provide further data for security reasons. According to sources cited in the report, China may want overseas IT providers out of the government procurement market by 2020.

The China Daily report quotes Wang Zhengfu, chief operating officer at server provider Sugon, who describes the development as a “golden opportunity” to take on foreign companies.

Many are looking to gain a foothold in China, which is expected to be a powerhouse in driving ICT over the coming year. A recent IDC predictions report argued China will have “skyrocketing influence” on the global market, with 43% of industry growth.

Among the foreign service providers in China include Amazon Web Services, who announced their roadmap this time last year, CenturyLink, who opened up a Shanghai data centre in October, and Interoute, who launched a new virtual data centre in nearby Hong Kong.

A report last year on behalf of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission discussed potential security concerns if the US consumer market uptake for Chinese cloud computing services increased. This sounded a warning for conflating US and Chinese services on both sides – and with this latest development, it could be full speed ahead for that plan.