The vast majority of Asia Pacific organisations remain early in their cloud maturity according to IDC – with either ‘ad hoc’ or ‘opportunistic’ initiatives the order of the day for now.

The findings appear in the analyst firm’s latest IDC MaturityScape Benchmark, for Asia Pacific nations excluding Japan, and show that while progress is slow, moves are being made. More than 20% of organisations have moved from ‘ad hoc’ to ‘opportunistic’ over the past two years, yet more than two in five (42.7% and 42.5% respectively) remain there.

Only 10% of organisations are in the next phase, ‘repeatable’, with 4% and 0.7% respectively in the further advanced ‘managed’ and ‘optimised’ brackets. The latter stages are where organisations have their cloud initiatives at an industrial level and, at the highest stage, being able to deliver innovation and transformation.

Yet moving from exploration and collaboration to innovation and transformation requires significant investment in technology, tools, processes and skills, with many of the skills and resources located in large enterprises and IT service providers.

As a result, cloud adoption requires faster time to value and agility. “Speed and agility has become the key drivers for cloud adoption. More organisations in Asia Pacific are adopting a cloud-first strategy such that cloud infrastructure has now become a preferred option for IT modernisation,” said William Lee, IDC Asia/Pacific cloud services research director.

“Organisations need more consistent, standardised, and available automated cloud resources to enable developers and LOB teams to execute at speed and cost,” Lee added. “Workloads portability and application delivery across multiple clouds will be key to build a robust cloud services delivery platform for agility.”

According to the most recent report from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) back in April, Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong as the most cloud-ready Asia Pacific nation. New Zealand, Japan, and Taiwan rounded off the top five.

One nation which continues to struggle in the ACCA analysis, however, is China. Despite IDC saying in February that the country will be the biggest public cloud spender in Asia Pacific aside from Japan, and despite the dominance from Alibaba in the Asia Pacific public cloud market, the country was placed at #13 out of 14 nations. At the time, the report stressed broadband quality and connectivity as its key weaknesses, recognising the difficulty in connecting such a large territory.

It’s becoming a rather shop-worn tale – but for another quarter, Microsoft has cited cloud success as key to its financial results.

And why not? For Q418, Microsoft posted revenues of $30.1 billion (£23.1bn), an increase of 17% on this time last year. Total revenue for the year was $110.4bn, an uptick of 14% on 2017. For the various buckets into which Microsoft divulges its revenues, ‘intelligent cloud’ was at $9.6bn – up from $7.8bn the previous year – while ‘productivity and business processes’ saw a 13% rise to $9.7bn.

As ever, Microsoft does not disclose revenues for individual products, but instead gives a ballpark figure of their improvement. Azure was the big winner, going up 89% year over year, while revenue in server products and cloud services – a part of the ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – went up 26%. LinkedIn revenues went up 37% year on year, with sessions growth rising 41%, while Office commercial products and cloud services revenue went up 10%.

Fielding an analyst question in the earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said there were a variety of accelerants for Azure, from AI services requiring storage and data, to tier one workloads.

“Our hybrid value proposition really has continued to resonate,” said Nadella. “So that means there’s a bunch of workloads that are migrating to the cloud – people use Azure Stack plus Azure. So that continues to drive a lot of IaaS growth for us as people are looking basically to lift and shift a lot of their current data centre workloads.”

Nadella added in prepared remarks that the results reflected his vision towards an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, from team reorganisation to product execution.

“Our opportunity has never been greater,” he said. “We will continue to innovate and invest across our solution areas in serving our customers and their unmet and unarticulated needs.

“With this tremendous opportunity comes great responsibility. We’re relentlessly working to instil trust in technology across everything we do.”

Highlights for Microsoft in the most recent quarter included data centre expansion, first in Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Australia and New Zealand, as well as the general launch of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Most recently, Walmart signed a five year strategic deal to use many of Microsoft’s cloud services.

You can take a look at Microsoft’s full financial report here.

IBM has delivered its third consecutive quarter of growth – with cloud revenue up 20% and now representing almost a quarter of the company’s total revenue.

The company posted total revenues of $20 billion (£15.4bn) for the most recent quarter, up from $19.3bn this time last year, with six month revenues of $39.1bn, compared with $37.4bn from the year before.

Alongside cloud – which has hit $18.5bn in revenue over the past 12 months – IBM cited AI, analytics, blockchain and security as key strengths to its ecosystem. On the earnings call, Jim Kavanaugh, SVP and chief financial officer, told analysts that IBM was exiting the quarter with ‘as a service’ annual run rate of more than $11bn.

“This reflects our success in helping enterprise clients with their journey to the cloud and we’re becoming the destination for mission-critical workloads in hybrid environments,” said Kavanaugh. “We’re capturing this high-value growth with our unique differentiation of the innovative technology combined with deep industry expertise underpinned with trust and security, all through our integrated model.”

Among IBM’s cloudy highlights in the past quarter include a partnership with CA Technologies for the mainframe side, as well as European expansion. The latter was a momentum announcement with IBM having secured several Europe-based customers, including those in healthcare, logistics, and energy.

Meanwhile, SAP’s results saw cloud and software revenue going up to €4.94bn (£4.1bn) in Q218, up from €4,76bn this time last year – and the company has raised its ambitions for 2020 as a result.

At the start of this year, the company praised ‘stellar cloud bookings’ in Q417 causing them to reiterate its 2020 vision. By 2020, the company is aiming for non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support full year revenue at a top point of €8.5bn, and ‘more predictable revenue’ – cloud support and software support revenue – to be between 70% and 75%.

Now, the company expects a top point of €8.7bn, with CEO Bill McDermott saying the company is presenting a ‘clear strategy’ and that raised guidance shows a ‘new wave of growth has been unleashed.’

“The fourth generation of enterprise applications has taken another major step forward with [in memory suite] C/4 HANA. Together with S/4 HANA, SAP customers are finally able to focus their entire business on delivering a personalised experience to their customers,” said McDermott. “The intelligent enterprise is the elixir to bridge silos inside fractured businesses and beyond so CEOs get a single view of the customer.”

Among the company’s highlights in the previous quarter included the launch of SAP’s Digital Manufacturing Cloud, helping manufacturing providers to deploy Industry 4.0 technologies in the cloud.

While these figures are impressive in isolation, it is worth noting that Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are all declaring in the next week. According to Synergy Research, Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads across all geographies, with Microsoft second and Google third. The only exception is in APAC, where Alibaba secured the silver medal position.

You can read the IBM report here and the SAP report here.

Twas the week before earnings, and all in the cloud, vendors announced new customers, and took off the shroud.

That's certainly the case with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Major League Baseball (MLB) extending its partnership with the Seattle cloud giant for its machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning expertise.

MLB already runs various workloads, including its facts and figures base, Statcast, on AWS. The new initiatives aims to improve the experience for armchair fans as well as those in the stadia – the Amazon ML Solutions Lab is being utilised to beef up in-game statistics within broadcasts, including on MLB Network.

The system's success is such that MLB will utilise Amazon SageMaker, the company's product to build, train and deploy machine learning models, to be able to accurately predict the direction of the next pitch crunching statistics on the pitcher, batter and catcher, as well as the game situation.

On a more eyebrow-raising level, MLB also says it will also utilise SageMaker, as well as Amazon Comprehend, the natural language processing service, to "build a language model that would create analysis for live games in the tone and style of iconic announcers to capture that distinct broadcast essence baseball fans know and revere."

"Incorporating machine learning into our systems and practices is a great way to take understanding of the game to a whole new level for our fans and the 30 clubs," said Jason Gaedtke, MLB chief technology officer in a statement. "We chose AWS because of their strength, depth, and proven expertise in delivering machine learning services and are looking forward to working with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab on a number of exciting projects, including detecting and automating key events, as well as creating new opportunities to share never-before-seen metrics."

The baseball arbiter is not the only new or improved customer AWS has announced in recent weeks. 21st Century Fox has expanded its relationship with the company – again with machine learning and data analytics services at the forefront – for the 'vast majority' of its platforms and workloads. The media giant said it had reduced its data centre needs by half and moved more than 30 million assets – or 10 petabytes of data – to Amazon storage.

Earlier this month, Formula 1 selected AWS as its official cloud and machine learning provider, moving the majority of its infrastructure to Amazon from on-prem data centres, while earlier this week Walmart and Microsoft announced a major five year tie-up collaborating on moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures.

This time next week all the major players will have reported their latest quarterly earnings. Watch this space for more – but for the time being the position is still one of dominance for AWS. With high levels of capex shoring them up, the growth of the hyperscalers continues, with Synergy Research describing the growth of the last two quarters as 'quite exceptional'.

With a steady stream of high value customers continuing to filter through, the next week's reports should be fascinating to explore.

Walmart is making Microsoft its preferred cloud provider – with machine learning and artificial intelligence a key focus.

The two companies – both rivals of Amazon – have signed a five year strategic partnership deal with Walmart looking to utilise ‘the full range of Microsoft’s cloud solutions’, as the retailer put it.

A ‘significant portion’ of walmart.com and samsclub.com will be migrated to Azure, including its cloud-powered checkout, while Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures.

The press materials included an interesting paragraph focusing on Walmart’s culture and how Microsoft will play within it. “Walmart continues to foster a curious, collaborative, accountable, and agile culture to position the company for further growth,” the company notes. “To do that, it’s critical to have tools that encourage those skills and traits.

“Through this partnership, Walmart is investing in its people with a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 providing associates with the productivity tools to foster a culture of collaboration, creativity and communication,” the company added.

All very good – but it is interesting to look at this deal from the perspective of where Amazon sits. Last year, it was reported that Walmart had told technology companies and vendors that if they ran apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS), they would lose business with the retailer. AWS and Microsoft, of course, are major rivals in the cloud infrastructure space.

Writing for this publication last year, David Auslander – who since the article was written now works for Azure’s customer advisory team – argued Microsoft and Google were potentially the only clear winners from Walmart’s declaration of war on AWS. “Microsoft has recently reported steady gains in [public cloud] market share, and most of that gain has come by way of taking share away from AWS,” Auslander wrote. “While AWS is a key part of Amazon’s empire there is still much speculation about the larger effect of this move on either Amazon or Walmart.”

“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”

Netskope is looking to the next generation of cloud security with the acquisition of Sift Security.

The acquisition, which closed in June, will see Sift's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) breach detection and visualisation tool Cloud Hunter move into Netskope's Security Cloud offering.

"By bringing Sift Security into our 'one cloud' architecture, we will take Netskope for IaaS (and as a result, the entire Netskope Security Cloud) to a new level," wrote Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO, in a blog post confirming the news. "Sift enhances our ability to uniquely gather and visualise the richest set of contextualised data about transactions. This rich contextual data informs nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud.

"Sift Security helped pioneer this for IaaS by ingesting and creating a rich set of data from public cloud infrastructure," added Beri. "This data, which ranges from information around the OS to the networking to the application and user level, enables Sift to correlate, visualise, detect, and remediate threats and incidents in IaaS services."

Neil King, CEO of Sift, will join Netskope's IaaS division to lead product strategy and management. "Four years ago we set out to build a security solution that could detect, correlate, visualise and automatically respond to threats in infrastructure as a service environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform," said King. "We're excited to combine those capabilities into the market-leading Netskope Security Cloud."

The move puts more emphasis on the key trend of automated cloud security tools. While the concept has been around for some time, increasingly complex cloud workloads has made the need for automated 'threat hunting' tools more evident. As a McAfee report put it in April, it's all about visibility and control for admins.

While Netskope is beefing up its cloud and IaaS security credentials with the acquisition of Sift,  the company's ambitions are much wider. As this publication reported last year when Netskope secured a $100 million series E funding round, the next step was to take the cloud platform and bring it to the whole web.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Cryptojacking is on the way to replacing ransomware as the biggest threat for consumers and enterprises – and new research reveals the size of the effect crypto is having on cloud infrastructures.

Cybersecurity firm Check Point Software, in its 'Cyber Attack Trends: 2018 Mid-Year Report', found that in the first half of this year, the number of organisations impacted by cryptomining malware doubled to 42%, compared with 20.5% from the second half of 2017.

What's more, the top three most common malware variants in the first half of this year were all cryptominers. At the most recent RSA Conference, the SANS Institute presented its list of the five newest dangerous attack vectors; cloud storage, and data leakage and monetisation of compromised systems via cryptominers both made the list.

The report asserts that 'a number of sophisticated techniques and tools' have been deployed against cloud storage services. Many of these attacks come about due to organisations' own poor security practices, but others, such as cryptomining, are leveraging cloud infrastructure leading to much greater profits for threat actors.

There have been examples of the latter this year. In February, security monitoring firm RedLock disclosed that hackers had been running cryptomining scripts on unsecured Kubernetes instances owned by Tesla. As the researchers put it at the time, the focus has changed from stealing data to stealing compute power in organisations' public cloud environments.

The top cryptominers are Coinhive, which has affected 12% of organisations worldwide, Cryptoloot, a JavaScript miner, and JSEcoin, a web-based crypto miner. All three are focused around mining the Monero cryptocurrency.

Maya Horowitz, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point, noted that attacks on cloud infrastructure and cryptomining were the latest generation of cyber attacks, which the company calls 'gen V.' "These multi-vector, fast-moving, large scale Gen V attacks are becoming more and more frequent, and organisations need to adopt a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that prevents these attacks from taking hold of their networks and data," said Horowitz.

Writing for this publication in May, Paolo Passeri, cyber intelligence principal at Netskope, said that while cryptomining campaigns were becoming bigger and more persistent, organisations could mitigate risk by using several methods. Companies could enforce policies such as scanning all uploads from unmanaged and remote devices to sanctioned cloud applications, to blocking unsanctioned instances of sanctioned cloud apps.

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

Multi-cloud is here to stay, that much we already know – but the sheer extent of its growth is helping enterprises move mission-critical applications to the cloud.

That is the key finding from a new report by cloud technology provider Virtustream. The study, titled ‘Multi-cloud Arises from Changing Cloud Priorities’ and conducted alongside Forrester, found the vast majority (86%) of respondents see their current cloud strategy as multi-cloud. What’s more, 60% of enterprises polled said they are now moving, or have already moved, mission-critical apps to the public cloud.

According to the research – which polled 727 cloud technology decision makers at businesses with more than 1,000 employees – almost half of enterprises spend at least $50 million annually on cloud initiatives. Yet the study also argues greater alignment between cloud technologies and business objectives are needed. 42% of those polled said operational efficiency was their top priority this year, ahead of innovation.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, IT is most likely to be involved in vendor choice, with only certain sections of the C-suite – chiefly the CIO – also getting involved. According to survey respondents, a multi-cloud approach offers three key benefits; improved IT infrastructure management, cited by 33% of respondents, better IT cost management (33%) and improved security and compliance (30%).

Yet cost and security are two hurdles which organisations need to cross before going full-tilt into multi-cloud, according to Gaurav Yadav, founding engineering and product manager at software-defined storage provider Hedvig.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Yadav also noted the eventual goal of multi-cloud – rather than negotiating and balancing between several vendors more than willing to sell you more of their ecosystem – is truly cloud-agnostic infrastructure.

“The promise of a cloud-agnostic infrastructure is to make data easier to access and more affordable to store long-term by putting different types of data into different clouds for their various benefits and cost structures,” Yadav wrote. “Multi-cloud deployments strengthen business continuity and resilience, empower DevOps development and cloud-native applications, and optimise regulatory compliance and service delivery for global organisations.”

“Multi-cloud is a clear reality of the next era in cloud computing,” said Deepak Patil, Virtustream senior vice president product and technology. “Whether it is employed to balance risk or to leverage the advantages and use cases of various cloud platforms – enterprises are increasingly moving their workloads to multiple cloud providers.”

Read more: Why you need to work through the growing pains to make the most out of multi-cloud

Semiconductor giant Broadcom has announced the acquisition of software provider CA Technologies for $18.9 billion (£14.3bn) in cash to ‘build one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies.’

The move will aim to give Broadcom a financial boost in a variety of areas. In an investor presentation (PDF), the company cited CA’s ‘significant’ recurring revenue, as well as an improvement on Broadcom’s long-term EBITDA margins as key to the transaction.

From a technological perspective, Broadcom cited CA’s mainframe expertise, as well as the company’s ‘continued focus on acquiring established mission critical technology businesses.’ Regular readers of this publication will note how the mainframe, which still stores a surprisingly large amount of enterprise data – up to 80% if you believe CA and IBM – is still a fundamental part of CA’s strategy.

“This transaction represents an important building block as we create one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies,” said Hock Tan, president and chief executive officer of Broadcom in a statement. “With its sizeable installed base of customers, CA is uniquely positioned across the growing and fragmented infrastructure software market, and its mainframe and enterprise software franchise will add to our portfolio of mission critical technology businesses.

“We intend to continue to strengthen these franchises to meet the growing demand for infrastructure software solutions,” Tan added.

Among CA’s most notable acquisitions in recent years include application security provider Veracode, business automation software firm Automic, and API management tool Layer 7 Technologies. From Broadcom’s perspective, the biggest acquisition story in recent years was one which didn’t go through. The protracted negotiations with fellow semiconductor firm Qualcomm – so long-winded were they that reporters tired of the non-stop press releases issued – were finally, and abruptly, blocked by US President Donald Trump in March on security grounds.

It is safe to say that moving in for CA is something of a departure for Broadcom’s current businesses. Among the company’s areas of expertise, again cited by the Broadcom investor presentation, are in API management (Gartner and Forrester), identity (Gartner) and continuous delivery (Forrester).

SolarWinds is on the acquisition trail again – this time confirming the acquisition of Trusted Metrics, a real-time threat monitoring and management software provider.

The acquisition will enable SolarWinds to release a new security product under the name of SolarWinds Threat Monitor, which is an automated tool which aims to make threat detection easier for IT operations teams, managed service providers and managed security service providers.

As regular readers of this publication will testify, organisations’ cloud initiatives are becoming ever-more complex – and with that, the security factor goes up significantly. Alex Bennett, of Firebrand Training, noted security as the number one skill businesses and employees need to know in 2018 back in May, while new security snafus are rarely out of the news.

Writing for this publication in May, Srivats Ramaswami, CTO at 42Q, cited manufacturing as an industry where cloud security needed to be taken more seriously. “Remember, the best application providers and data centres have large, dedicated security teams who have implemented automated threat monitoring systems that operate 24×7,” he wrote. “In the end, the best cloud software companies have dedicated more time, resources and budget to securing our systems than most organisations are able to provide themselves.”

This makes for interesting reading when it compares to what SolarWinds are attempting to do. The new product, utilising the technology of Trusted Metrics, will aim to aggregate a plethora of data sources, such as asset data, security events, and network intrusion detection, and correlate it with continuously updated threat intelligence to ‘identify the danger signals amidst all the innocent noise of a normal network.’

“The acquisition of Trusted Metrics will allow us to offer a new product in the SolarWinds mould – powerful, easy to use, scalable – that is designed to give businesses the ability to more easily protect IT environments and business operations,” said Kevin Thompson, SolarWinds CEO in a statement.

The move complements the company’s acquisition of software as a service provider Loggly, announced at the start of this year.