Cloud security best practices are improving – but there is still a long way to go, according to a new report from SANS Institute.

The study, which polled several hundred respondents across the IT spectrum, came about, as author Dave Shackleford put it, as the result of concerning news stories around the security space. IDC found back in April that worldwide IT security spending would hit $103.1 billion by the end of this year – but stories continue to persist, particularly around open Amazon S3 buckets. Misinformation around shared responsibility, as this publication has regularly perused, continues to persist.

The survey respondents were most likely to have two or three public cloud providers on spec, with almost half using cloud network access services (43%) and more than a third (35%) using cloud access security brokers (CASBs). Approximately half of those polled said they have BI data (48.2%) and intellectual property data (47.7%).

The study explored organisations' biggest cloud security concerns and then correlated them with incidents that had actually occured. For instance, while 42% of respondents expressed worry about a lack of training within the organisation on public cloud services, 28% said this was a genuine issue over the past 12 months.

Number one on the worry list, cited by 55.6% of those polled, was unauthorised access to cloud services by outsiders. It was also the biggest concern in the 2017 survey. Yet 19% of respondents said it was something their organisation had to deal with. This is still a major number, of course, and the report noted how much of a concern it was, saying there was a 'significant increase.'

Looking at the technologies deployed to combat the criminals, VPNs were the most popular, used by almost 90% of respondents with three quarters of that managed internally. Anti-malware, log and event management, multi-factor authentication and vulnerability scanning were deployed by approximately four in five of those polled.

"The state of cloud security seems to be improving, albeit slowly. Cloud providers are becoming more open and accommodating of security data and controls, and more vendor solutions are able to bridge the gap between implementations on-premises and in the cloud.

"There's progress, and more acceptance of in-cloud controls and services – but that progress is still slow."

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VMware has announced its intent to acquire Bitnami, a provider of application packaging and delivery, to help accelerate app delivery for multi-cloud use cases.

Bitnami, based out of San Francisco, offers organisations the capability to deploy a multitude of applications through its libraries either natively or across a plethora of cloud providers. The company was a graduate of Y Combinator and was noted for a reticence on funding, only accepting a seed round in May 2013.

This need for greater enterprise presence and the funding required to do it ultimately precipitated the move, the company said.

“This was actually an easy decision and has to do with our shared vision for the future,” wrote co-founders Daniel Lopez and Erica Brescia in a blog post. “Our mission at Bitnami is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere… to make that software accessible to the largest number of users and developers possible.

“Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterprises use Bitnami in production, often as part of a migration of their application to the cloud or their adoption of Kubernetes,” Lopez and Brescia added. “We realised that if we wanted to continue to grow, we would have to raise money, as building an enterprise salesforce is not easy to do when you are bootstrapped.

“As part of the conversations we had during this process, we realised that VMware would be the ideal partner for us. We both believe in a Kubernetes and multi-cloud future. We both share large enterprise customers, including cloud service providers. We both are building products and services to help companies navigate this multi-platform, multi-vendor world with a focus on enterprises.”

From VMware’s side, the company said it was ‘committed to maintaining the deep partnerships that Bitnami currently has with major cloud providers.’ The company’s website has logos of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle, alongside VMware.

“Upon close, Bitnami will enable our customers to easily deploy application packages on any cloud – public or hybrid – and in the most optimal format – virtual machine (VM), containers and Kubernetes helm charts,” wrote Milin Desai and Paul Fazzone in a blog post. “Further, Bitnami will be able to augment our existing efforts to deliver a curated marketplace to VMware customers that offers a rich set of applications and development environments in addition to infrastructure software.”

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Google Cloud has announced the official launch of its Osaka cloud data centre region, making it the second facility in Japan and the 20th overall.

The Osaka region, as with all Google Cloud facilities aside from Iowa, has three availability zones and comes with the standard product set, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

The move ensures the company is going ahead at a steady clip following the opening of the Zurich data centre region in March. According to Google Cloud’s map, Seoul, Jakarta, and Salt Lake City are next on the list, pencilled in provisionally for the first half of 2020.

Writing in a blog post confirming the launch, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the strategic importance of Japan – and that with two cloud regions in the country, customers will benefit from greater business continuity, infrastructure, and more partners.

“We’ve invested more than $47 billion in our global infrastructure in the last three years, and we continue to invest to fuel the digital transformation journey of our customers across more than 150 countries,” wrote Kurian. “These key elements, combined with our global partner ecosystem and expanded go-to-market organisation, enable Google Cloud to be a strategic partner to the world’s leading enterprises.”

As ever with these things, a satisfied customer was rolled out, in the shape of beverage manufacturer Asahi Breweries. “We’re looking forward to the Osaka cloud region,” said Tatsuhito Chiku, corporate officer and general manager of IT at Asahi Group Holdings. “Using Google Cloud Platform services like BigQuery have enabled us to build a system with low latency and high resiliency, and the Osaka cloud region will further improve our system availability and achieve business continuity.”

Google was also placed as a leader for the first time in Gartner’s most recent infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant focusing specifically on Japan. This makes for an interesting analysis; when looking at the leaders, it remains an AWS-Microsoft-Google 1-2-3, with IBM as the only ‘visionary’ and a host of local providers, from Fujitsu to IIJ (Internet Initiative Japan) as niche players.

You can read the full announcement here.

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Meet Unravel Data. The California-based big data software provider has secured $35 million (£27.1m) in a series C funding round – with the aim of revamping the application performance management (APM) space.

The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Harmony Partners, as well as existing investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital, and M12, formerly Microsoft Ventures.

The company’s vision is based around the thesis that the current leaders in the APM and log management market – AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk et al – are not able to keep up with modern, data-driven, AI-enabled IT architectures. Among the company’s customers offering full stack observability for Azure, AWS, as well as big data platforms Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, are Deutsche Bank, Neustar and, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, Microsoft.

“CIOs in our network told us story after story of traditional application monitoring tools failing in a big data context because those tools were designed for the world of the past,” said Matthew Grande, chief market intelligence officer at Point72. “This new architecture requires a different product, one built from the ground up to focus on the unique challenges posed by big data applications.

“Unravel is poised to capture this emerging big data APM market,” added Grande.

The funding comes alongside various indicators of the company’s success. In what PR types call ‘momentum announcements’ – because there is not any news to speak of – the company cites annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth of 500% and the launch of Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud partner ecosystems as particular highlights.

Ultimately, there is major currency in making the most out of the deluge that is organisations’ data capacity. For some vendors, it is all about helping their customers filter the signal from the noise and glean insights on their data. For others, such as Unravel, it is about stability in performance.

“Every business is becoming a data business, and companies are relying on their data applications such as machine learning, IoT, and customer analytics, for better business outcomes using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, and NoSQL,” said Kunal Agarwal, Unravel Data CEO. “We are making sure that these technologies are easy to operate and are high performing so that businesses can depend on them. We partner with our customers through their data journey and help them successfully run data apps on various systems whether on-premises or in the cloud.”

Total funding for the company now stands at $57.2 million.

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For vendors who aren’t at the very top tier of the cloud industry, it can sometimes be a case of Muhammad and the mountain. You can use their migration path to the cloud, or you can just get Amazon, Microsoft, or Google to do it for you. SAP appears to understand this, if its newest launch, Embrace, is anything to go by.

The company announced at its SAPPHIRE NOW event a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to help organisations’ journey towards an ‘intelligent enterprise’ by offering a single blueprint.

The offering that customers will receive through Embrace consists of several strands. Alongside the foundational services running on SAP Cloud Platform, there will also be a jointly-developed reference architecture and product journey roadmap.

“Our customers are very clear about the business outcomes they expect to achieve when migrating to the cloud – and that includes operational excellence and innovation,” said Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP’s cloud business group in a statement. “Working together with the hyperscalers and global strategic service partners, we’re in a unique position to shape our customers’ journeys to becoming intelligent enterprises.”

The hyperscalers all gave off positive vibes, as to be expected. AWS said it was a ‘proud participant’ in the program, while Microsoft noted the continuation of a long-standing partnership between the two companies.

Google’s perspective however may be seen as the most interesting. From that side, it can be seen as another signpost to enterprise success. Google had a booth at SAPPHIRE NOW to emphasise this partnership. While a lot of the company’s focus at Next in April was on the development and open source side, CEO Thomas Kurian had previously advocated more aggression in its enterprise sales strategy.

“The world’s largest businesses run SAP applications, and increasingly, they’re doing it on Google Cloud,” wrote Snehanshu Shah, Google Cloud managing director for SAP in a blog post. Shah added that more customers were running mission-critical SAP applications on Google’s cloud, adding that SAP was also bringing its HANA Enterprise Cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

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Ever had that feeling of regret when you find you’re double booked? Well, spare a thought for the enterprise and developer tech world this week. On the US West Coast, Microsoft Build has just completed in Washington while Google I/O charges on in California. On the Atlantic side, meanwhile, ProgressNEXT continues in Florida – where sister publication Developer has been in residence – while Red Hat Summit enters its final day in Massachusetts. Not to mention a small AWS gathering in London yesterday.

It is almost enough to lead one to distraction. Yet parallels can be drawn – particularly with the former and latter events. Microsoft and Red Hat have boosted their alliance significantly over the past few days; and it has ramifications for the enterprise stack.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the stage at Summit on Tuesday, ostensibly to announce Azure Red Hat OpenShift. The two companies had already buddied up when Red Hat brought OpenShift to Azure last year – and as those who regularly watch such keynotes will know that having both chief execs on stage is A Big Thing, this should be seen as a significant further step.

As before, the primary watchwords here are hybrid and open. Organisations have realised they can now have it all; moving plenty of resource to the public cloud but keeping some of that on-premises infrastructure. Both companies see containers, in particular Kubernetes, as a bridge to this hybrid goal. For Red Hat, of course, containers are a no-brainer. But it is testament to Redmond’s sustained approach that we can say the same about Microsoft. The company partnered with Docker at the end of last year, and Nadella told attendees at Red Hat Summit of the combined vision.

“We’re big believers in distributed computing and hybrid computing – the cloud, the edge, and the flexibility it provides any customer,” said Nadella. “The ability to be able to use, for example, the GPUs and the FPGA inference capabilities alongside this hybrid support, to me, is probably the thing that helps any customer get the best out of their infrastructure.”

Nadella also spoke of the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) benefits. “The other one I’m seeing a lot of is the CI/CD pipeline, especially in terms of the agility,” he explained. “Let’s say you’re using GitHub, GitHub Enterprise – your ability to set up your CI there and then use CD to OpenShift, either on the cloud, or on-premise, or any other cloud.

“The ability to have that level of productivity for developers, as well as have the IT productivity, I think is fantastic.”

Given OpenShift runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this was not the only Linux-based news to come out of Microsoft towers this week. Perhaps the biggest surprise of Build were the plans for something the industry had scoffed at for years; Linux on the desktop. “Beginning with Windows Insiders builds this summer, we will include an in-house custom-built Linux kernel to underpin the newest version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux,” wrote Jack Hammons, Linux systems group program manager earlier this week.

To kick off the Summit, Red Hat issued research from IDC which argued that by 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will impact $10 trillion of global business revenues and be responsible for the employment of 900,000 IT professionals. Citing a reduction in the annual cost of software, by up to 52%, and a 5% decrease in costs associated with unplanned downtime among others, IDC said that RHEL, as the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, will be increasingly vital as the operating system moves to ‘the heart of every modern enterprise.’

The sands of time are certainly shifting – and for Red Hat, it can be seen to represent an inflection point. The company’s acquisition by IBM late last year – officially approved by the SEC earlier this week – appeared in this publication’s eyes to be a win-win. IBM, in the words of CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey, got ‘developer love and access to pretty much all CIOs on the planet’, while Red Hat got a surrogate who was willing to espouse open values. At IBM Think in February, CEO Ginni Rometty said the company was embarking on the second round of its cloud story – one with hybrid and multi-cloud at its core, and is open but secure.

Rometty also took to the stage on Tuesday to discuss where things stood with the acquisition. “I think what brought [us] together was we both saw an even bigger opportunity in front of us,” she said. “This opportunity – there’s so much what I would call mission-critical work that can still yet move to the cloud, except for so many companies, they’ve started with something already. And to get there, it means all these different islands, whether it’s public cloud, private cloud, traditional. You’ve got to have some way to modernise and connect all these pieces together.

“The timing in our mind… [companies] now have a fabric, and what [Red Hat has] built and will continue to build… obviously Linux is key but you’ve also got Kubernetes, containers, that are really going to form what I think is a standard for the world to do this,” added Rometty. “The ‘why Red Hat now?’ is that those things have really all come of age.

“I think the opportunity is right in front of so many clients – it’s a problem, they want to address this. And it isn’t just to move everything to the public cloud; there’s lots of reasons you’re going to end up with an environment that’s hybrid.”

Picture credit: "IMG_1686", by titanium22, used under CC BY-SA 2.0

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Sumo Logic, a California-based big data and analytics platform provider, has announced an $110 million (£84.5m) funding round – and secured a more than $1 billion valuation in the process.

The funding round, which was led by Battery Ventures and also featured contributions from Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton, will aim to in the company’s own words continue to keep its position ‘as the SaaS machine data analytics leader of choice for the cloud era.’

“Sumo Logic’s growth is driven by the shift to digital business and cloud adoption across all industries and companies of all sizes,” said Ramin Sayar, president and CEO at Sumo Logic. “We have proven that we are the platform of choice for not only cloud-native companies, but also enterprise companies and their cloud migration initiatives.

“It’s great to have such a powerful set of leading investors and ecosystem partners as we accelerate our category leadership,” added Sayar.

While Sumo Logic’s log management and analytics toolset has a variety of use cases, one of its primary focuses right now is as an enabler for DevSecOps which, as the name suggests, introduces security at an early stage of the application development and deployment process. Writing for this publication last April, Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps marketing at CA Technologies, explored how leading businesses were seeing significant uplift by not architecting in security flaws.

“The business case for DevSecOps couldn’t be clearer,” wrote Ravichandran. “It drives business performance because security cannot be an afterthought.”

The funding round, a series G which takes Sumo Logic’s total funding to $325m, comes off the back of a stellar year for the company. The past 12 months have seen more than $100m raised in revenue according to the firm, with more than 2,000 customers and 100,000 users globally leveraging its service.

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The majority of Oracle customers are 'currently or actively planning to reduce their spend' with the software giant citing cost, maintenance, and aggressive sales tactics, according to a new report.

The study, published by enterprise software support firm Rimini Street and titled 'Why Enterprises are Rethinking Their Oracle Relationship and Cloud Strategy', explored respondents' relationships with Oracle as well as appetite for its SaaS offerings.

More than three in five (61%) of those polled said the high cost of software and features was a key roadblock for their Oracle usage, while 58% cited the high cost of annual maintenance and support and 21% bemoaned Oracle's aggressive sales tactics and audits. 

Meanwhile, of those who are planning to move to Oracle's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, 70% have opted to move to competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, according to the report. Four in five (80%) said they were either unsure or were not interested in Oracle's SaaS capabilities, with more than half (53%) of these saying their current applications met business needs and that there was 'no justifiable business case.'

This makes for interesting reading – but it needs to have the appropriate context. Rimini Street's raison d'etre is to offer third-party support for customers looking to navigate the entangled world of enterprise software, whether it is Oracle, SAP, or Salesforce. Over the better part of a decade, however, the company has been involved in a legal wrangle with Oracle around copyright infringement. In March, the Supreme Court ordered Oracle to pay back $12.8 million to Rimini Street, with the latter having had to pay almost $100m in a ruling back in 2016.

"Don't be fooled by third-party support providers like Rimini Street," Oracle's dedicated page reads. "Your business deserves an innovative, long-term IT roadmap, with critical software security patches. Get the protection you need with Oracle's trusted, secure, and comprehensive support."

It is also worth exploring this in the context of market share. Oracle's predominant marketing message over the past year has been around its autonomous database. The company's events frequently focus on comparing against AWS and, in terms of infrastructure, Oracle continues to sit well behind the top three players. Yet the company still has many top-tier clients, including, for a long time, AWS. In November AWS CEO Andy Jassy took to Twitter to note his company was stepping up its move off Oracle's data warehousing suite.

"Oracle licensees are feeling empowered to execute on their own business-driven roadmap for the future that is guided by what their business requires, rather than based on where the vendor wants them to go," said Seth A. Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street in a statement. "By choosing Rimini Street's premium level support, our clients are able to focus more time, budget and resources on driving business transformation and competitive advantage versus being held back by the ongoing costs and resource requirements of a vendor-dictated roadmap."

You can read the full report here (email required).

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Google is still not quite ready to divulge specifics around its cloud – yet the numbers continue to rise, whether it is from revenues or employees.

Alphabet’s Q1 earnings, published yesterday, saw total revenues of $36.3 billion (£27.8bn) for the most recent three months, an uptick of 16% on the previous year. Google’s other revenues, of which Google Cloud forms a part, shifted up 25% to $5.4bn (£4.19bn).

Naturally, the biggest dent in Alphabet’s figures was the €1.49bn (£1.28bn) fine incurred by the European Commission in March for breaching online advertising antitrust rules. Including the fine, this meant operating income for the quarter fell to $6.6bn from $8.3bn. More importantly for investors, it ensured that earnings per share (EPS) fell from $11.90 to $9.50 – well below Wall Street’s expectations of $10.58.

Looking at the cloud side, CFO Ruth Porat told analysts that the biggest increase was in R&D expenses ‘with headcount growth in cloud as the largest driver’. “In terms of product areas, the most sizeable headcount increases were in cloud for both technical and sales roles,” Porat added.

Naturally, this is the first quarter where CEO Thomas Kurian had his feet under the table. At Next in San Francisco earlier this month, a variety of announcements were made, from cloud services platform Anthos, to an open source partner jamboree featuring Confluent, MongoDB, Redis Labs, and more.

“Thomas [Kurian] has really hit the ground running,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts. “I was excited to announce Anthos, which gives customers a very elegant solution to both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud in a single technology stack. We are also deeply committed to becoming the most customer-centric cloud provider for enterprise customers and making it easier for companies to do business with us.”

Many of the same stats from Next were referenced here again – nine in 10 of the biggest media companies, seven of the 10 largest retailers, and more than half of the 10 largest companies in manufacturing and financial services are using Google’s cloud.

Yet what about the specifics? Amazon Web Services (AWS) disclosed revenues of $7.4bn in its most recent filings. Why couldn’t Google offer something similar?

Heather Bellini, analyst at Goldman Sachs, had the opportunity to directly ask the top brass the question much of the media had been fascinated in for some time. Despite the momentum, Bellini asked, when will Google be able to share similar updates and growth rates to their biggest competitors?

“[At] the high level, the key differentiators which we are focused on and which we hear from customers are security and reliability, being really open about hybrid multi-cloud – customers don’t want to be locked into any one cloud provider,” said Pichai. “I think we are building a strong business across all our verticals, and we are definitely seeing a strong momentum, and look forward to being able to share more at the appropriate time.”

This committed non-committal was of course to be expected, but interestingly chimed in with similar material analysts had previously told this publication. Speaking to CloudTech on the occasion of Google’s Q418 results, in February, Paul Miller, senior analyst at Forrester Research, explained there was a wider picture to look at.

“All of the major players carve their portfolio up in different ways, and all of them have different strengths and weaknesses,” Miller said at the time. “Make it too easy to pick out G Suite’s revenue and it would look small in comparison to Microsoft’s Office revenue. Make it too easy to pick out GCP, and it would look small in comparison to AWS.

“Neither of those are really apples-to-apples comparisons,” Miller added. “The real value for Google – and for most of the others – is in the way that these different components can be assembled and reassembled to deliver value to their customers. That should be the story, not whether their revenue in a specific category is growing 2x, 3x, or 10x.”

It is an epithet with which Google appears to heartily agree.

You can read the full financial report here.

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Apple is spending more than $30 million (£23.1m) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) each month, according to reports.

Originally reported by CNBC, citing sources familiar with the matter, Apple had ‘in the past few months’ signed an agreement which included a commitment to spent ‘at least’ $1.5 billion on AWS over the course of five years.

While the company has never commented publicly on its arrangements, Apple has previously relied on both AWS and Google for its cloud computing needs. As far back as February 2016, an analyst note from Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak noted “evidence of AAPL’s intention to move away from AWS”, inferring Apple’s plans to build out its own data centre infrastructure.

This facet is also referenced in the CNBC report, noting an announcement from the Cupertino firm in January 2018 that it would plan to spend $10bn on data centres in the US by 2023.

From the software side however, Apple’s commitments do not appear to be wavering, if a recent job posting is anything to go by. In February the company began advertising for a senior DevOps engineer, with one of the key responsibilities being to “lead and architect [Apple’s] growing AWS footprint.”

One example of the role Google’s cloud plays in underpinning Apple’s operations was in a January 2018 update to the iOS Security Guide. As this publication reported at the time, page 16, which focused on iCloud, noted how after files were broken into chunks and encrypted they were stored ‘without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.’

To put the spending into perspective, Spotify revealed in its IPO filing last year that it was ‘in the process of transitioning all data storage and computing’ from its own servers to Google Cloud Platform, and was paying Google €365 million over three years to do so. This translates to approximately $11.36m (£9.8m) per month.

Apple’s commitment to Google is again long-standing. In March 2016 – one month after the Morgan Stanley note was published and with a nod to its findings – CRN reported that Apple had ‘quietly signed on as a GCP customer in a deal worth several hundred million dollars, while also reducing its reliance on AWS’, as cited by multiple sources.

The inner workings of what many call the FAANGs – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, the five most popular tech stocks – remain of fascination to industry watchers. This time last year, it was reported that Netflix, long-time poster child of AWS, was utilising Google’s cloud for several functions. Netflix told this publication at the time there was ‘no change’ in the company’s ‘comprehensive’ relationship with AWS, noting it had long-held disaster recovery workloads on Google.

As befits enterprises with significant computing resources and requirements, using more than one cloud vendor makes perfect sense. Speaking to CloudTech in May, Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s European arm, explained that becoming a company’s second – or third – provider was a key part of its expansion strategy.

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