Organisations are taking a more sophisticated approach to cloud vendor selection and management with multi-cloud at the heart of this change, according to industry research firm Cloud Spectator.

The company has released its latest price-performance analysis for public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers in North America, and found again that behemoths Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform struggle in the rankings against smaller players.

Hosting provider 1and1 topped the list with the benchmark score of 100, with French provider OVH (75) and CenturyLink (74) picking up the silver and bronze medals respectively. 1and1 came first because of its especially strong performance in VMs – on which the figures are calculated, alongside block storage performance – and the most inexpensive pricing of the firms studied.

In contrast, Google achieved an overall score of only 37, but still ahead of AWS (31) and Azure (30). DimensionData, with a score of 20, finished bottom of the pile.

The report sets its stall out straight away with its hypothesis. “A lack of transparency in the public cloud IaaS marketplace for cloud services performance often leads to misinformation or false assumptions,” the report notes. “Users and potential users may be led to view cloud computing as a commodity, differentiated mostly by variety of services. In reality, cloud performance is impacted by a variety of factors from provider to provider, involving everything from the physical hardware to the cost of the virtualised resources.

“By evaluating cloud services based on performance rather than solely price or VM configurations, users are able to maximise value in the cloud.”

This is by no means the first study from Cloud Spectator which comes to this conclusion. As far back as January 2016, this publication reported the ascent of 1and1 as the best value IaaS provider as a ‘surprising’ finding. Today, however, the news comes as less of a surprise – and led by multi-cloud implementations, organisations are becoming savvier in terms of cloudy value for money.

“Various research inputs show that a multi-cloud approach is the preferred strategy,” Ken Balazs, Cloud Spectator CEO, tells CloudTech. “This approach helps organisations create competition, avoid vendor lock-in, provide service alternatives for applications, and ensure functionally equivalent services for pricing optimisation.”

Balazs added that the majority of clients Cloud Spectator works with have multi-cloud and hybrid cloud initiatives. “We almost always see AWS, Microsoft and Google under consideration, but I don’t think that cloud is a one size fits all proposition,” says Balazs. “There are a number of excellent providers, so vendor selection needs to start with identifying the client’s needs, aligning them to the services and offerings of providers, and matching these to budgets.”

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

It’s the same old story for Oracle as its Q318 financial results were announced; strong cloud revenues, but what about the rest of the portfolio?

Oracle announced total revenues of $9.8 billion (£7bn) over the past three months, with total cloud revenues contributing 16% of the overall figure at $1.6bn. Cloud revenues have gone up 32% year over year; cloud software as a service, the much larger bucket, saw revenues of $1.15bn at a yearly increase of 33%, while cloud platform as a service and infrastructure as a service went up 28% year on year to $415m.

Total on-premise software revenues went up 4% to $6.4bn, while new software licenses, hardware revenues and services revenues all saw a small decline.

The majority of the company’s recent news updates came at CloudWorld in New York back in February. This included the launch of 12 new data centres regions, across Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as updates to Oracle’s Internet of Things Cloud and to enterprise service level agreements.

The big kahuna, however, was around new features with Oracle’s autonomous database cloud, the company’s big bet. To help make all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, the company explained, would include such features as automated code generation, self-learning chatbots, and security remediation for application development.

Speaking to analysts after the announcement was made, CTO Larry Ellison promised more of the same. “Over the next few months, we expect to deliver autonomous analytics, autonomous mobility, autonomous application development and autonomous integration services,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“Oracle’s new suite of autonomous PaaS services delivers an unprecedented level of automation and cost savings to our customers,” Ellison added. “Our highly automated suite of autonomous PaaS services reduces cost by reducing human labour and improves reliability and security by reducing human error.

“No other cloud provider has anything like it.”

You can read the full earnings report here.

Alibaba claimed at Mobile World Congress that it was the fastest growing cloud provider in the world – and another step has been taken with the official opening of its Indonesian data centre.

The facility, in Jakarta, was first announced in June last year and represents the first data centre opened by a major cloud provider in the area. The data centre’s launch can be seen alongside Alibaba’s ‘ongoing commitment’ to support the Indonesian government in creating 1,000 startups by 2020.

“As the only global cloud services provider originating from Asia, we are uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data intelligence solutions and computing capabilities to customers across this region,” said Alex Li, Alibaba Cloud Asia Pacific general manager.

Indonesia can be seen as one of the weaker countries in the Asia Pacific region for cloud readiness. The nation ranked in 11th position out of 14 in the most recent index – from 2016 – from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), having risen one place compared with the previous report. The report at the time argued: “A coordinated plan to tackle the needs of the digital economy would aid Indonesia’s cloud readiness plans.

“Responsibility for coordinating across organisations when drafting regulations that converge across ministry silos – such as the new eCommerce framework, which spans the trade and ICT ministries, and also involves the private sector – should be clearly delineated to reduce business uncertainty.”

Further research from two years ago, this time by Barracuda Networks, found small to medium businesses in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, were intrigued by the cloud’s capabilities but weren’t fully confident in them. 71% of businesses surveyed, from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, said they would not be likely to adopt a cloud-first strategy.

Whether this situation has changed in Indonesia will be unveiled in due course, with the next ACCA report due out later this quarter. Alibaba however is seeing customers in the country get on board with its cloud, including online marketplace Tokopedia and IT services provider GTech Digital Asia.

You can find out more about the Indonesia data centre here.

Organisations are moving to the cloud without evaluating the impact of a cloud outage, according to the latest study from data management provider Veritas.

The report, titled The Truth in Cloud and put together alongside Vanson Bourne, found that an ‘alarming majority’ of firms shift full responsibility for data protection, compliance and uptime on cloud service providers.

Three in five (59%) of the 1,200 global business and IT decision makers polled said dealing with cloud service interruptions was the primary responsibility of the cloud service provider, while 83% added their provider was responsible for ensuring workloads and data in the cloud are protected against outages.

It feels as though the point has been reached where every respondent will respond affirmatively when asked about their cloud initiatives – and this study saw it almost take effect, with 99% of IT decision makers saying their organisations will move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24 months. More than a quarter (27%) added they also expect to outsource all on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud.

With more organisations taking increasingly advanced cloud initiatives, the benefits of embracing multi-cloud can be outweighed by the issues of downtime and who is responsible for it, Veritas adds.

“Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business,” said Mike Palmer, Veritas executive vice president and chief product officer. “Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organisation’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud.

“Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust, and damage to brand reputation,” Palmer added.

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

Read more: It’s not you, it’s me: Understanding the shared responsibility of cloud security

To say it has been a busy few weeks for object storage provider Cloudian would be an understatement. The company has pocketed $125 million in funding, issued its most recent product update, and touted a record year with particular growth in Europe cited.

With the latter in mind, the company today announced it had acquired Infinity Storage. The Milan-based company focuses on software-defined file storage and had previously partnered extensively with Cloudian prior to acquisition. The company’s name may not be obvious to those except long-term industry watchers – “they’re technologists, not marketers and salespeople”, as Cloudian CMO Jon Toor puts it – but their kudos cannot be doubted, with founder Caterina Falchi an inventor of WORM (write once, read many) technology.

Toor explains the rationale behind the move. “Two things became clear,” he tells CloudTech. “One is their technology was completely complementary with ours, zero overlap – there was a very nice point of intersection because they have supported the S3 instance for some years now – it was really clean from that perspective. The other thing was they had a very similar culture. They’re technologists that really strive to product a best in class solution, and very focused on making sure it meets all customer expectations.”

The continued rise of object storage is naturally a subject dear to Toor’s heart – and one which can be expanded on at some length. The benefits – inclusion of metadata, API accessibility, scalability – are known, but it’s what’s on the horizon that piques particular interest.

Multi-cloud, as regular readers of this publication will be aware, is being taken up by more and more companies, and vendors – never ones to miss an opportunity – are putting the term everywhere in their marketing materials. Cloudian is no different; but this one is genuine. Through a single API, users can access storage assets both on-premise and in public clouds, including Microsoft, Google and AWS.

“There’s been a huge interest in this, and it’s driven by all the usual suspects,” explains Toor. “One driver is people just want to have flexibility. Different clouds have different APIs. The second thing is the clouds are competing. They’ve all got different strengths, and people will want to use Microsoft for one thing, Google for something else, Amazon for something else, and the reality is the IT guy inside the organisation doesn’t really have any control over what the people in the company are doing.”

An example Toor gave was around a Cloudian customer in the industrial IoT space. All of the company’s software is written for S3, but there was also a requirement for Azure in certain scenarios. By running a controller in Azure and providing a fully compatible S3 interface into the Azure environment, the problem was solved.

Machine learning, if it’s possible, is even more of a buzzword than multi-cloud. With even the flimsiest chat applications offering ML capabilities according to the willing, it shows the one direction the industry is heading. Having data sat in silos being accessed every so often just won’t cut it anymore, whichever profession you are in. Another customer of Cloudian’s is WGBH, a Boston-based TV station, which is moving its archive from tape and hard disk drives – estimated access time 24-72 hours – to object storage.

Here’s where the benefits of attached metadata come in. “What companies want to do is learn from the data – they want to be able to analyse the data and benefit from it, and it’s very hard to do if that data is sitting on a shelf,” says Toor. “You need it to be sitting there with real-time access – preferably something that is cloud-integrated so you can also use tools in the cloud to help you learn about that data.

“You want to be able to analyse the data and then record the product of that analysis in some way that makes sense.”

The Infinity Storage team has entirely joined Cloudian, and for Toor it marks another step in what he says is a very interesting time for unstructured data. “Traditional file storage, traditional unstructured data storage has been around for 30 years now, and there really hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the space during that 30 years,” he says. “Enterprises are facing a scale problem, collecting massive amounts of unstructured data in the form of videos, image, archiving… across the board. A self-driving car, for example, can generate a petabyte of data every year just on the basis of observing the road conditions around it.

“For Cloudian and our customers, [Infinity] adds files services to our object storage environment. Customers can consolidate all unstructured data types, files and objects to a single limitlessly scalable pool where they can manage everything as one," Toor adds.

Microsoft continues to expand its data centre empire, with new locations in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates planned, the company has announced.

The expansion takes Azure to 50 regions worldwide, with other data centres in the works including South Africa and Australia. The UAE data centres will be the first inroads Microsoft has made into the Middle East, with the company citing its ‘long-standing expertise and deep local relationships’ in the area to accelerate technological innovation.

“By delivering the comprehensive, intelligent Microsoft Cloud from data centres in a given geography, we offer scalable, available and resilient cloud services for companies and organisations while meeting data residency, security and compliance needs,” wrote Jason Zander, Azure corporate vice president, in a blog post.

Alongside this, Microsoft announced the France regions were open for business with general availability of Azure and Office 365, with Dynamics 365 to follow early next year.

“With this milestone, Microsoft is empowering organisations like Naval Energies, a global player in renewable marine engines, Astrimmo, a leading provider of housing services in France, and Ercom, a French company specialising in cybersecurity, with greater scalability, agility, and the opportunity to develop new cloud-based solutions,” Zander added.

Microsoft made a point that it operates more regions than any other cloud provider. Naturally, the nomenclature slightly differs depending on who one talks to. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 19 regions at present, with five more on the way, but in terms of availability zones – each AWS region has a minimum of two, ideally three – AWS has 54 at present.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a greater push towards its government cloud offerings, with government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

The latest research report, this time from cloud cost management provider Cloudability, reveals some interesting findings: only four infrastructure services comprise almost 85% of spend among the company’s customers, while changing trends in object storage and containers are becoming apparent.

The study, which features data comprised from anonymous analysis of Cloudability’s analytics platform, found Amazon EC2 was by far the most popular service, accounting for 58.7% of spend, compared with Elastic Block Store (EBS, 9.9%), AWS’ relational database (9.3%), and S3 object storage (6.3%).

Cloudability’s customers are in the main Amazon houses, so the fact this data is AWS-heavy should not be a surprise, nor should it detract from other cloud providers. However the trend here is around ‘lift and shift’ migrations dominating enterprise cloud adoption. Cloudability argues there is still a lot of work to be done and many workloads to move over.

The data also finds that the second quarter of 2017 was the tipping point between legacy and current generation compute instances. May (below) saw cloud overtake legacy among Cloudability’s customers for the first time, and by the end of the year the divide had grown significantly to 70/30.

Organisations aren’t just moving to the cloud in greater numbers; they are also becoming savvier about their options. Object storage is a case in point. The report argues capacity has grown by more than 40% over the past 12 months, with 22% of companies opting for the infrequent access AWS S3 option – a combination of low cost and high performance – up from 10% this time last year. Standard usage has dropped almost in parallel, from 68% to 55%, while usage of Glacier, the super-low-cost ‘cold’ storage option, remained stable.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool, steadily gaining its lead over Mesos, Rancher and OpenShift throughout the course of 2017. Kubernetes, which ‘graduated’ out of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month, and how its trends were related to AWS were described thus in the report: “With ECS, Fargate and EKS offerings starting to become available and delving further into microservices, we anticipate that container adoption will accelerate.

“As a result of container growth, the management complexity (including cost management) will grow significantly as well, since containers are typically seven to eight times the number of VMs and are more ephemeral in nature.”

According to the recent RightScale State of the Cloud report, AWS continues to see its lead in the overall market shrink at the hands of Microsoft Azure, with enterprise cloud spend – as this report affirms – continuing to rise.

You can find out more about the report here.

The rise of multi-cloud has helped secure another M&A deal in the cloud division: enterprise cloud services provider Nutanix has announced the acquisition of Netsil, an app mapping, discovery and management software provider.

Netsil, based in San Francisco, aims to give enterprises complete visibility into all of their applications and services. In the words of the company, its ‘algorithm-based and non-invasive technology helps to achieve visibility and control at scale while keeping application transparency.’

As organisations increasingly bring more cloud providers into the fold, with greater numbers of applications, complexity and confusion is often the result. The rise in microservices and containerised applications, with more companies dipping their toes into the water, exacerbates the issue. With siloed IT departments relying on legacy monitoring tools based on static environments and slow application architectures, organisations simply cannot keep up – or so goes the theory.

This is the second deal announced by Nutanix this month. The start of March saw the company agree to acquire Minjar – although the company’s main product, AWS and Azure-based DevOps automation tool Botmetric, will be more familiar to readers.

“Netsil’s innovative technology offers an original approach to simple yet comprehensive application discovery and operations management across multiple cloud environments and will be a powerful addition to Nutanix,” said Sunil Potti, Nutanix chief product and development officer in a statement. Harjot Gill, CEO and founder of Netsil, added: “Nutanix has built a very solid enterprise cloud OS platform, which when combined with Netsil’s real-time observability, becomes even more strategic when addressing a growing microservices market.

“We are really happy to be joining a company where Netsil’s capabilities will be used to their fullest.”

Financial terms of the deal, which is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

Read more: Enterprise cloud for dummies: Prepare your organisation for the new era of IT infrastructure

Are Amazon and Facebook the standard bearers when it comes to security? According to the latest identity and access management (IAM) study from Gemalto, more than half of respondents say their organisation’s work authentication methods are worse than those offered by the two tech giants.

The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT decision makers globally, found that the continued rise in cloud applications, as well as the similarly shopworn story around device proliferation, means enterprises are considering consumer approaches to security. Seven in 10 respondents said authentication methods applied in consumer-land can be applied to secure access to enterprise resources, while two thirds (64%) are considering implementing consumer-grade access to cloud services for employees.

61% of those polled said they were still not implementing two-factor authentication to allow access to their network, with concerns evident around organisations’ – and employees’ – security postures.

Yet the report also assesses how cloud-based approaches can help organisations. 62% of those polled said cloud access management tools can help simplify the login process for users, while almost three quarters (72%) said they were considering cloud management in order to reduce the threat of large scale breaches.

While the overwhelming majority (94%) of those polled said cloud access management was key in adopting cloud applications, getting things right first time remains important. Nine in 10 respondents said ineffective cloud access management can lead to issues for their company, with more than half (52%) specifically saying security and 39% adding IT staff’s time would be used less efficiently.

“These findings clearly show that IT managers are struggling to balance the need for a simple and easy login experience with security,” said Francois Lasnier, Gemalto SVP identity and access management. “While there is a need to make things easier for employees, there is a fine line to be walked.

“IT and business line managers would do best to figure out the risks and sensitivities associated with the various applications used in their organisations and then use access management policies to manage risk and apply the appropriate authentication method,” added Lasnier. “In this way, they can ensure a convenient login experience for their users, while still maintaining access security.”

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

Dropbox continues to make progress after its IPO filing earlier this month, announcing a strategic partnership with Salesforce to connect platforms through new integrations.

The two companies are in their own ways poster children of the software as a service revolution; Salesforce being the first SaaS company to cross a billion dollar annual run rate, Dropbox being the fastest to do it.

While the duo already offered some level of integration – the Dropbox for Salesforce app has been available on Salesforce’s AppExchange since 2014 – the new partnership runs deeper.

In the first integration, Dropbox will be combined with Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud. A retail client, for instance, could create a Dropbox folder for product images or creative briefs while still working in Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The second integration will see Dropbox integrate with Quip, the productivity software suite.

The two companies will also push ahead with each other’s products for internal use. Salesforce will use Dropbox Enterprise across its business, while Dropbox will use Salesforce Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and PRM (Partner Relationship Management).

“This deeper partnership with Salesforce is a great opportunity to build new value for our mutual customers,” said Quentin Clark, Dropbox SVP of engineering, product and design. “We’re looking forward to delivering these new integrations so our customers can get the most out of their tools.”

As this publication explored, received wisdom on Dropbox’s bid to go public – following years of speculation – is down to the company’s long-term shift to move away from Amazon Web Services and build its own storage infrastructure. The company’s financial results, seen in the IPO filing, saw Dropbox post revenues of $1.1 billion in 2017, a 31% increase from the year before.