Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Despite the vast majority of companies looking to expand their cloud infrastructure over time, only 14% of respondents in a NuoDB survey said they had a specific cloud strategist to oversee it.

60% of the 200 plus respondents at the Cloud Expo and AWS re:Invent events said they saw cloud as one of their companies’ top three business or IT initiatives, yet seem happy enough for their current IT team to take charge of their cloud migration projects.

This is seen as particularly interesting given other survey data which shows a mix between private, public, and hybrid cloud deployment. More than half of small to medium, mid market and enterprise businesses are using public cloud, with hybrid and private garnering more than a quarter of share. Only 4% of firms polled said they had no plans to deploy cloud solutions.

As a result, the chief technical officer (CTO) is often the primary driver in developing a cloud strategy with more than 25% of companies citing it. The CIO, IT director, and chief architect also have important roles to play, according to the report – and the researchers sound alarm bells at this perceived lack of leadership.

“Making the move [to cloud] is among the most important initiatives for most of the respondents to this survey,” the report argues. “Cloud has advanced from the cautious consideration stage to the actively planning or already arrived stages.”

So what could be driving these trends? Executives argue the ‘cloud skills gap’, of businesses searching for cloud computing talent that isn’t there, is still prevalent. Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie, speaking to CloudTech back in May, contended the gap was getting bigger.

Research from Reconnix released last month found the majority (82%) of UK IT leaders said they were not fully ready to move to IaaS providers because of a lack of in-house skills – so is a head of cloud needed?

The head of cloud, or cloud strategist role, certainly shoulders a lot of responsibility. A Salary.com job description notes the organisation who hires a director of cloud computing “will depend on this person’s vision implementation.”

Yet in other technology disciplines, a hegemonic structure is not encouraged. Cathal McGloin, the CEO of mobile backend as a service provider FeedHenry, told sister site Enterprise AppsTech in September his view that a ‘head of mobility’ doesn’t work as effectively today when organisations choose to mobilise their workforce.

“You see a trend towards mobile centres of excellence, traditional IT emerge, rather than appointing somebody to be mobile, and having that somebody separate from your head of IT, your marketing officer and so on,” he said. “So now it’s more part of the ordinary business rather than being a standalone.”

But do you think the same thing is happening with cloud computing?

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it prices reserved EC2 instances.

In a blog post published yesterday by Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, the firm is reducing its rates for outbound data transfer, along with data transfer to and from CloudFront, AWS’ content delivery network. Data transfer from AWS to CloudFront is now free of charge.

Prices aren’t going down at the same rate across the board, however; outbound data transfer for the first 10 terabytes (TB) a month is being reduced by a quarter in the US and EU regions, and for the next 40 TB it’s at 6%, however in Asia Pacific these numbers see an increase up to 43%.

Customers in the Singapore region see the greatest benefits, seeing a 37% drop for the first 10TB a month, then 43% for the next 40TB, 37% for the following 100TB and 33% for the next 350TB. Prices for the first 10TB a month take effect after AWS’ free offering is consumed.

“As I have noted in the past, we focus on driving down our costs over time,” Barr wrote. “As we do this, we pass the savings along to you.”

Elsewhere, AWS has also simplified its reserved EC2 instances pricing, meaning customers looking to buy EC2 instances now have a choice of three payment options; all upfront, partial upfront and no upfront. Those who pay all upfront get the best effective hourly price when compared to on-demand, which is available for three years, while no upfront is only offered with a one year term.

Whether it’s storage or infrastructure, this is the latest update in cloud providers offering lower prices in the hope you will part with your hard earned cash. Microsoft announced free unlimited OneDrive to its Office 365 customers – meaning you get unlimited storage even if you have the lowest Office deal – while Google announced one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who buys a Chromebook in the holiday season.

You can take a look at the full AWS announcements here and here.

Picture credit: Heroku

Heroku, the Salesforce-owned developer platform, has announced the availability of its Performance Dynos toolset for its European customers, signalling a greater intent for expansion on the continent.

Performance Dynos enables companies to build and run large scale apps, as it contains 12 times the memory of a single Heroku Dyno. The move for European expansion was a natural one; in 2014 the number of apps built on Heroku in Europe went up by nearly 180%.

As a result, it gives companies the option to give their apps greater performance and lower latency, as previously Heroku’s European customers had Performance Dynos available within US infrastructure. It also provides the freedom to scale up and down even in extreme cases for ‘overnight success’ Internet companies.

One example of this instant reward is ad-resistant social network Ello, which runs on Heroku. From barely any traffic, in September the site was clocking up a reported 31,000 invites an hour.

Adam Gross, VP product of Heroku, explains the importance of the move. “[Heroku] speaks to the particular demand that large-scale web and mobile properties have as they quickly achieve scale,” he tells CloudTech. “As we have a lot of startups, and especially large scale enterprise customers in the US, this is a technology we developed to really help democratise that capability.

“[Ello] is really a great example of the kind of customer that Performance Dynos was built to support,” he continues. “We know that if we can handle an Ello, and if we can help them scale from virtually nothing to being an overnight success and a huge Internet property, then we can have that same technology be appropriate for a European retailer in the Christmas shopping season, or a media company dealing at the height of a sporting event.”

European expansion isn’t just a priority for Heroku; it’s a priority for Salesforce overall, who launched its first UK data centre back in May this year. The continent was Salesforce’s fastest growing region in the fiscal Q3. With more and more cloud vendors opening up European data centres, not least because of data sovereignty concerns, it’s no surprise Europe is a key market for Heroku.

Performance Dynos isn’t just for startups, however. Enterprises are increasingly looking to more agile platforms and development tools, such as Node.js. “Where we’ve found a lot of success with our enterprise customers is helping them safely adopt some of the more cutting edge consumer Internet technologies,” Gross explains.

“There’s this perception that the enterprise is more about older school, more traditional technologies. Frankly we see more Node in our enterprise customers than maybe any other segment.” This isn’t a trend just seen at Heroku towers; mobile backend provider FeedHenry is seriously looking at integration following its acquisition by Red Hat, while Node was also a key factor in Progress Software acquiring Modulus back in June.

More pertinently, there have been great levels of success in the arena of open app platforms. Docker, which has partnered with Amazon, Microsoft and Google among others, is a classic example of that, although there were hair-raising security vulnerabilities clocked last week.

Gross argues the landscape makes platform as a service (PaaS) more relevant than ever.

“Clearly a lot of what platform as a service is about is providing new levels of abstraction, and with that abstraction comes new kinds of simplicity,” he says. “People are really starting to understand that this is the new way applications are going to be built and delivered across the board.

“I think it’s going to be really exciting for developers and companies as they more broadly see the benefits you get from using PaaS,” he continues. “You can feel an energy and excitement in the infrastructure community that you don’t always feel. It’s really quite fascinating.”

You can find out more about Heroku’s new regions here.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

A survey from analyst house Gartner has found key drivers for software as a service (SaaS) include redirection of in-house staff to other responsibilities, as well as quick deployment and faster access to innovation.

The research, which polled across 10 countries in May and June this year, found that respondents were still not fully satisfied by going all in to the cloud, instead opting for a mix of SaaS and on-premises.

Even though Gartner expects the traditional deployment model and usage for on-premises software is going to almost half from 34% now to 17% by 2017, issues such as data loss, data breaches, and unsecure APIs remain a problem, as well as privacy and the fear of government snooping. As a result, adoption of private cloud (46%) was cited more than public (24%). Public cloud isn’t always the best model for all use cases within companies, and CIOs appear to be aware of this.

“CIOs are focused on using the cloud to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes, whereas business leaders still see the cloud as a means to save costs and may not yet have full appreciation for the business benefits or strategic opportunity of using cloud services,” Gartner explains.

Gartner also argues that SaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors are looking at PaaS as a ‘natural extension for growth’. “Although SaaS and IaaS are fairly consolidated, PaaS is still open for expansion,” said research director Fabrizio Biscotti.

“Of all the cloud technological aspects for which respondents indicated investments, BPaaS (business process as a service), IaaS and SaaS are the most mature and established from a cloud landscape perspective, while PaaS is the least evolved,” he added.

Adam Gross, VP product for cloud developer platform Heroku, told CloudTech earlier this week that there is an “energy and excitement” concerning PaaS today, particularly with new agile technologies pervading the enterprise.

“Clearly a lot of what platform as a service is about is providing new levels of abstraction, and with that abstraction comes new kinds of simplicity,” he said. “People are really starting to understand that this is the new way applications are going to be built and delivered across the board.

Back in October, Gartner said cloud would underpin the majority of technology trends in 2015.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

IBM has announced that communications services group WPP has extended its partnership with the tech giant, providing a service delivery and technology platform to run WPP’s operations in the cloud for $1.25bn (£797m).

The current agreement will last for seven years, with WPP able to expand the use of big data and analytics and deploy new products and services through Big Blue.

“As the world’s largest communications group, we are seeking to exploit IBM’s cloud computing expertise to allow us to innovate and add value to both the service and the product we deliver to clients across 111 countries,” said WPP Group CIO Robin Dargue.

This isn’t the only deal coming from Armonk towers in recent months, with multi-billion dollar deals agreed between IBM and ABN Amro, a Dutch bank, as well as German airline firm Lufthansa. And according to reports, this won’t be the last announcement either.

IBM’s push towards becoming the leader in cloud computing has been aggressive for the past 12 months, having shoved $1bn (£638m) of investments into that space to rebrand as a cloud-first company back in March. A lot of big legacy tech firms have been moving this way as well – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft – with similar results in struggling financials and job cuts.

The firm’s Q3 numbers showed revenue down 4%, operating net income down 18%, yet cloud revenue was up more than 50%. They’re numbers which make analysts and investors worry, but it’s to be expected when moving your revenues to cloud-based ones rather than legacy software.

Globalfoundries recently picked up IBM’s chipmaking division, at a cost of $1.5bn to Big Blue, as a clear sign of where IBM CEO Ginni Rometty wants to move the company. As she explained on the analyst call: “The strategy’s correct, and now it’s our speed of execution that needs to continue to improve.”

IBM has also made strides to partner up with its perceived competition in recent months, announcing an agreement with SAP to help run its HANA Enterprise Cloud. The two companies, even though they’re enemies in the cloud vendor war, have partnered for more than 40 years. It’s certainly a trend – take Microsoft’s recent buddying up with Dropbox, even though Redmond has its own storage product in OneDrive.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Equinix has announced that app hosting provider Cloud365 has selected its first Melbourne data centre to consolidate its push in Australia.

With Cloud365’s infrastructure deployed across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the US, the deal makes sense geographically as the Melbourne ME1 data centre can allow a high-speed, low latency and high availability cloud environment for its customers.

The deal represents a significant win for Equinix, who partnered up with Google last month to deliver services across three continents, including New York, Atlanta and Frankfurt, the current data centre darling.

“Cloud is the key driver for our clients and we’re seeing growing demand from customers as they realise the benefits of not having to invest in their own infrastructure and network capacity,” said Darren Moss, general manager and founder of Cloud365. “Equinix allows us to reduce costs and optimise infrastructure, giving us freedom to be great at what we do by serving our customers in migrating them to the cloud at the application layer.”

The state of the cloud in Asia Pacific is expected to grow to $31.9bn (£17.2bn) in 2020, from $6.9bn (£3.7bn) last year.  The Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) puts out yearly reports on the market, and this year’s version (pdf) saw the Pacific entrants – New Zealand and Australia – gain four places each, to second and third respectively.

Elsewhere, data released today from Synergy Research has found that Equinix is the market leader in three of the main seven countries for retail colocation revenues. The Redwood firm ranks highest in the US, the UK and Germany, with the US far and away the leader in global revenue with over 30% share.

“Looking ahead, the colocation market is actually reasonably well insulated against the huge shift in enterprises pushing IT workloads to the cloud,” commented Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale. “The market will continue to grow.”

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Cloud computing has been named as one of 12 disruptive technologies which will change the relationship between the CIO and the boardroom, according to a report by Advanced 365.

The evolving role of the CIO, and the C-suite in general, has long been a feature of modern business. Opinions differ, whether it’s a wag who proclaims CIO to mean ‘career is over’, or whether it’s a report which advocates more fluency and fluidity between executives.

The Advanced 365 paper takes a look at the different types of CIO today and how it fits in to various businesses:

• CIO as manager: A CIO who delivers today, may not be as much of an ideas person but manages the business for commercial success
• CIO as leader: Engaging in and delivering change throughout the organisation, planning for tomorrow and designing new positions within the company
• CIO as entrepreneur: Dreams about the future, seeks out change and innovates against those changes to improve commercially

The conclusion with these three categories is that each boardroom needs a manager, a leader, and an entrepreneur in its deck. Not every executive will possess all these skills – Steve Jobs, for instance, one could argue is all three – but it’s about deciding which of these is best for your company’s CIO. Managers first ask ‘what?’, leaders first ask ‘how?’, and entrepreneurs first ask ‘why?’.

Boards are expecting more tech-savvy reports from their staff. A Spencer Stuart study saw that one in five boards look for directors with technology expertise. The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) said more than a quarter (27%) of boardrooms are unhappy with the quality of technology information they receive from below.

If we’re to accept cloud as an inexorable trend in the future – and we should, if research on enterprise cloud adoption is anything to go by – then cloud supports the ‘CIO as manager’ typology, the report argues. This is due to reducing IT costs, increasing IT agility and automating processes.

“In short, it represents a more efficient and cost effective way to run IT, which has long been the goal of the CIO as manager,” the report notes, however adding: “It could however also enable the construction of new cloud based business models and ecosystems, which ensures relevance to the CIO as leader, and especially, the CIO as entrepreneur.

“In this sense, the basic users of cloud computing is radical in impact from more advanced uses, and demands a different CIO.”

The report also notes the discrepancy between CIOs and boards, arguing the two must work more closely together if they are to gain competitive advantage from emerging technologies. Equally, CIOs need to maintain a close relationship with other C-level executives, enabling them “to better understand the operating model of the company, and be better placed to contribute tellingly to its evolution.”

The 12 disruptive technologies included in the report are cloud computing, mobile internet, automation of knowledge, Internet of Things, advanced robotics, autonomous vehicles, next generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and renewable energy. You can read the full report here.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Zenedge has announced the general availability of its latest Zenshield DOME platform with a simple goal: to protect your enterprise from what it perceives to be its weakest link.

That weakest link is a firm’s partner and supplier ecosystem, which Zenedge insists is a more likely target for hackers trying to infiltrate an enterprise in the cloud.

The product is a security platform as a service (SPaaS), and can be extended to a retailer’s partner and supplier network so organisations can oversee the entire ecosystem.

Zenedge explains how important third party security is becoming, after recent ecosystem weaknesses temporarily downed Target, Snapchat and Walmart among others.

“CISOs and hackers are discovering that the quickest path to breaking into a company’s classified data comes through remote, often inconspicuous, interconnected third parties,” said Zenedge co-founder and CTO Leon Kuperman. “It’s a reminder that networks are only as strong as their least protected link, and that all vendors need to be assessed, vetted and protected against cybersecurity risks.”

The system is self-updating, with Zenshield DOME identifying vendor access points and automatically closing ports that can expose your data. It also uses heuristic algorithms – in other words, finding a quick fix if an exact solution isn’t available – studies vendor traffic and adapts the network according to behavioural patterns.

“The IT industry has been aware of problems caused by external vendor vulnerabilities for some time,” said Rick Simpson, founder of Snow Commerce. “Seeing red flags pop up around the perimeter is one thing – being able to centrally, cooperatively act to avoid attacks against a large organisational target has so far proved more difficult.”

Zenedge has got plenty of backing from the industry, with the company pocketing $3.5m (£2.3m) in a series A funding round last month. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, there’s plenty of work for the Los Angeles firm to get stuck into for the time being.

Find out more about Zenedge here.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Docker, the Linux container for run-anywhere apps, has a major vulnerability in all but the latest version of its software which can enable malicious code to extract hosted files.

The vuln, described as ‘critical’ in severity, was first spotted by Red Hat’s security researcher Florian Weimer and independent researcher Taunis Tiigi, with Docker crediting them in a security advisory.

“The Docker engine, up to and including version 1.3.1, was vulnerable to extracting files to arbitrary paths on the host during ‘Docker pull’ and ‘Docker load’ operations,” it reads. “This was caused by symlink and hardlink traversals present in Docker’s image extraction.

“This vulnerability could be leveraged to perform remote code execution and privilege escalation,” it added.

The advisory document noted there was no cure for this issue, and urged users to upgrade to the latest iteration.

This wasn’t the only bug in the system either. An issue which affects versions 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 allows a malicious image creator to modify the default run profile of containers – yet this has been fixed with the current version.

The problem arises when taking into account the vast majority of major cloud computing providers have partnered up with Docker in order to package sleek, secure applications on its platform. Microsoft announced its deal in October, with Google, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace also on board.

It’s easy to see why these vendors are buddying up; as Docker leverages the host’s operating system, there are no overheads or difficulties in spinning up virtual machines when shipping an application in its container. But like a lot of nascent products that are hitting the zeitgeist, it’s best to not get carried away on an untested system when security scare stories are just around the corner.

Users are urged to upgrade to version 1.3.2 as soon as they can, which they can find here.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

The biggest threat to cloud security among IT is the company’s employees unintentionally exposing data, according to the latest research figures from CloudEntr.

The study, which took 438 survey responses from industries including financial and manufacturing, found three quarters (75%) of smaller businesses are most worried about their workforce when it comes to securing data in the cloud. Larger IT firms were more concerned about hackers using employee credentials to get their hands on data.

Not surprisingly, regulated institutions were more concerned about cloud compliance than non-regulated, but 75% also said their biggest tool in becoming more secure was employee education.

It’s not just employee education, but shadow IT which continues to be a problem. 29% of those polled said they had no plans to use the cloud in their organisations, but of that number, nearly half of IT pros said they knew of employees who were using it.

The vast majority (89%) of IT pros questioned said they were concerned with cloud security, and security (63%) was more important than convenience in a cloud solution.

There have been various vulnerabilities and outages in recent days, from Docker’s vulnerability recorded earlier this week, to Microsoft Azure’s downtime from a bug which slipped the testing process. Dejan Lukan, writing for CloudTech earlier this week, noted data breaches and data loss as some of the most serious threats to organisations, as well as a lack of understanding.

“Enterprises are adopting cloud services in everyday operations, but it’s often the case they don’t really understand what they are getting into,” he wrote.

“When moving to the cloud there are different aspects we need to address. If the [cloud service provider] doesn’t provide additional backup of the data, but the customer expects it, who will be responsible when the hard drive fails? The customer will blame the CSP, but in reality it’s the customer’s fault, since they didn’t familiarise themselves enough with the cloud service operations.”

The IT pros surveyed by CloudEntr are making it their prerogative to change this. 89% of respondents who have been impacted by security breaches say they planned primarily to educate their employees in the next year.

What do you make of this data? Are you worried about what your workforce is doing in the cloud?