The UK is making strides in the international cloud arena, according to the latest report from The Software Alliance (BSA), driven by strong data protection laws and cybersecurity strategy.

The alliance’s latest Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, a study which assesses cloud policies worldwide, puts the UK in fourth position out of 24 leading IT economies, behind only Germany, Japan, and the United States. This represents a significant improvement for Blighty compared with a ninth placed finish in 2016.

The report assesses the difference in the landscape between 2012, when the first scorecard was released, and today. Cloud initiatives are increasingly driven by the enterprise, the report finds, with governments ‘recognising the cost-effective and far-reaching power of the technology’ increasingly going in as well.

What sets the leading countries apart from the laggards is advanced privacy and security policies, the report stresses. Japan, for instance, has a new central regulator in place to accompany its recent privacy legislation. Yet other countries, such as Brazil and Thailand, are lacking.

Indeed, some of the world’s largest countries, in terms of size and population, are propping up the table. Vietnam finished dead last, behind Indonesia in second last, China, Russia, and India. This correlates with the periodical findings of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), who when last polled put the same four Asian countries at the bottom of their list.

Yet the BSA report argues it is not through a lack of effort that some countries are struggling. Take Indonesia as an example. The country continues to update and reform laws and regulations in the IT sector, but without a positive result for cloud computing.

For those at the top of the tree, the focus is now on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. Cloud ‘allows [AI] data to be collected and analysed efficiently’, while it ‘allows participants in blockchain transactions to remotely record information in decentralised ledgers and subsequently access them’, as the report puts it.

“Cloud computing allows anyone to access technology previously available only to large organisations, paving the way for increased connectivity and innovation,” said Victoria Espinel, BSA president and CEO. “Countries that embrace the free flow of data, implement cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions, protect intellectual property, and establish IT infrastructure will continue to reap the benefits of cloud computing for businesses and citizens alike.”

The rest of the top 10 was comprised of Australia, Singapore, Canada, France, Italy and Spain.

You can read the full report here (pdf).

Microsoft said earlier this week that government IT had reached a tipping point towards moving to the cloud – and now another large US contract is up for grabs.

During an Industry Day yesterday, plans were revealed by the Pentagon for the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) opened up for tender to any single cloud provider.

The key is in the word ‘single’: as reported by Bloomberg, using multiple clouds would ‘exponentially increase the complexity’ of the issue, according to defence staff, therefore the plan is to go with one cloud vendor only.

As a draft statement of objectives explains: “The Department of Defence’s lack of a coordinated enterprise-level approach to cloud infrastructure makes it virtually impossible for our warfighters and leaders to make critical data-driven decisions at ‘mission speed’, negatively affecting outcomes.

“A fragmented and largely on-premise computing and storage solution forces the warfighter into tedious data and application management processes, compromising their ability to rapidly access, manipulate, and analyse data at the home front and tactical edge,” the document adds. “Most important, current environments are not optimised to support large, cross domain analysis using advanced capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to meet current and future warfighting needs and requirements.”

This comes amidst something of an issue with a recent tender. In February, the Pentagon awarded a contract for up to $950 million to REAN Cloud, a Virginia-based managed services provider, for automated pricing and procurement. Earlier this week, it was revealed that this contract had been cut to as low as $65m. Oracle had protested against the original decision according to a filing on February 20. In a statement, REAN said it was honoured to be performing work for the US military, and that it was unaware of the reasons as to why the contract was trimmed.

“Based on the threat of legal action and protest by the old guard, the only winners in this delay are those large companies that stand to lose money if DoD proceeds with innovation,” said Sekhar Puli, REAN Cloud managing partner. “In the meantime, the cost of maintaining antiquated government infrastructure has not subsided.”

Microsoft recently expanded its government cloud offerings to include government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. At the time Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure, wrote that “evidence we are at a tipping point for government to modernise IT with the cloud is coming from agencies across every level and branch of government.”

Long-time readers of this publication will remember the imbroglio between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM in 2013 for a $600 million CIA cloud computing contract eventually won, after legal rulings, by AWS. If this, and the most recent contract, are anything to go by, expect a battle to be fought to the very end by the main cloud players.

The joint cloud offering from VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now available in Europe, the former has announced, with London first on the list and Frankfurt to join in due course.

VMware Cloud on AWS, which offers benefits to joint customers including workload portability between private and public clouds, had previously been available in AWS’ US West and US East regions.

The service was only made initially available in August, with AWS chief executive Andy Jassy joining VMware compatriot Pat Gelsinger on stage at VMworld. Among the list of earliest customers using the joint offering were Moody’s, Symantec, and Western Digital. Joining them, according to the VMware press materials, are Brink’s, a secure logistics provider, who said the flexibility of the new product is a ‘key driver in Brink’s technology and business transformation.’

“Bringing together the best of VMware and AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS provides customers an operationally consistent and familiar way to run, manage and secure applications in a hybrid cloud with access to a broad range of innovative and comprehensive AWS services and robust disaster protection,” wrote Sai Gopalan, VMware senior product marketing manager in a blog post confirming the news.

“This release initiates the global expansion of the service by making it available to our European and multi-national customers.”

Gopalan added there were future plans to move to additional European and Asia Pacific regions.

It’s official: Kubernetes has hit the big time. According to a missive from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Google-designed, CNCF-maintained project is the first to ‘graduate’ from its foundation, throwing its mortarboard in the air in time-honoured tradition at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma Valley, California.

So what does this actually mean? Each technology adopted by the CNCF – of which there are 16 including Kubernetes – theoretically goes through three stages. In the inception stage, with only two projects at present, the technology simply needs to add value to cloud native computing, be it containerisation, orchestration, microservices or anything in between. The incubating stage, where projects such as Prometheus and OpenTracing are based, requires further accreditations in terms of documentation and usage, before eventually ‘graduating’.

Graduating technologies, according to the CNCF’s criteria, need to explicitly define a project governance and committer process, and have committers from at least two organisations. Three of the largest cloud providers offer their own managed Kubernetes services, while adoption of containers – with Kubernetes generally at the top of the tree – continues to soar. Companies such as Bloomberg, Uber, The New York Times and eBay are using Kubernetes, with almost three quarters (71%) of the Fortune 100 using containers, according to Redmonk.

“This designation benefits Kubernetes in many ways,” wrote Sarah Conway, CNCF senior director of PR services in a blog. “It signals that Kubernetes is mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.

“As a graduate, Kubernetes is in an even stronger position to grow faster and sustain a vibrant, healthy and diverse technical community,” Conway added.

CNCF also announced 24 new members at the Open Source Leadership Summit, including various companies well known to readers of this publication, including CloudBees and Couchbase. The foundation now stands at 178 members strong; as CloudTech reported throughout 2017, companies such as Microsoft, AWS and Oracle joining the CNCF last year showed both a rise in the technologies and the larger organisations using it.

The criteria for CNCF projects state that projects can remain in an incubating state indefinitely but are normally expected to graduate within two years – so expect further graduands in the near future.

It has been an interesting week or so for Google Cloud, both directly and indirectly. The company has announced new APIs, updates and customers for its healthcare cloud initiative, while other high-profile customers have been disclosed.

At HiMSS, the healthcare information and management systems society conference, Google launched a new cloud healthcare API, which is better equipped to focus on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM, and also allows customers to crunch the numbers using analytics and machine learning in the cloud.

On the security side, Google’s App Engine and Cloud Machine Learning Engine are now HIPAA-compliant, joining various other services, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. As a company missive explains, these services are covered by a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA), so while there is no formal certification process, the company has undergone various independent audits to assess compliance, with the complete list of services covered by the BAA including ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018.

Alongside this, Google rolled out a list of customers who are actively involved in its healthcare cloud. Many are utilising Apigee, Google’s API management platform, including The Chilean Health Ministry, Cleveland Clinic, and Rush University Medical Center, with several exploring machine learning-based predictive models to give clinicians greater insights or to identify security threats.

“Ultimately, we hope that better flow of data will inspire new discoveries with artificial intelligence and machine learning, leading to insights that improve patient outcomes,” wrote Gregory J. Moore, Google Cloud vice president of healthcare.

Regular readers will be aware that Google likes to illustrate product announcements with a sampling of customers, whether it’s launching a private ‘on-ramp’ network connection to its cloud or preemptible GPUs. Yet you can add Spotify and Apple to Google’s increasingly-impressive list of flagship customers.

Spotify’s custom was revealed in its recent IPO filing – on page 30 to be precise, deep into the list of risks the company has to provide to investors. “Currently, we are in the process of transitioning all of our data storage (including personal data of users and music data licensed from rights holders) and computing from our own servers to [Google Cloud Platform],” the filing reads. “We cannot easily switch our GCP operations to another cloud provider… while the consumer side of Google competes with us, we do not believe that Google will use the GCP operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service.”

Confirmation that Apple was a Google customer – as well as a customer of AWS – was buried even deeper, in a January update to its iOS Security Guide. First spotted by CNBC, page 16, focusing on iCloud, explains after files are broken into chunks and encrypted, they are stored ‘without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.’

One of the key themes this publication has explored over the past year is how Google has secured larger, blue riband cloud customers. At Next last year, three of the company’s announced customers, Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive and eBay, were ranked in the Fortune 500.

You can read the full healthcare announcements here.

Microsoft has beefed up its government cloud offerings, launching government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

Microsoft 365, which comprises Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Azure Stack, which extends Azure to on-premises environments, are being upgraded as Microsoft acknowledges faster acceleration of government organisations moving to the cloud.

“This move is driven largely by the desire to bring the most up-to-date tools and capabilities to employees to meet demands for mobility and create a more modern workplace – and to ensure they are better equipped to face rising security challenges,” wrote Josh Rice, general manager for Microsoft’s worldwide modern workplace in a company blog post.

The Microsoft 365 government cloud will be made available in three flavours; Government Community Cloud (GCC), aimed at agencies at the state, local and federal level, GCC High, for government customers in more sensitive situations, and DoD Cloud, as the name suggests, specifically for the Department of Defense.

“What Microsoft 365 for US Government brings to the table for government agencies of all sizes is the value of cloud services with the unique compliance commitments for handling controlled unclassified information,” Rice added.

Azure Government will also see two new regions for data classified as secret, bringing the total to eight dedicated government regions. As Microsoft’s region map shows, there are currently four dedicated government regions – in Arizona, Iowa, Texas and Virginia – as well as central and eastern DoD-dedicated regions.

Microsoft’s government customers, totalling at more than 7,000 in the federal, state and local ranks, include the Commonwealth of Virginia, the US Air Force, and the City of Chicago. “Evidence that we are at a tipping point for government to modernise IT with the cloud is coming from agencies across every level and branch of government,” wrote Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure in a blog post.

It’s a simple proposition for traditional companies in today’s tech-heavy marketplace: assess the prospects of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and more, or be left behind.

That is the verdict of mergers and acquisitions advisor Hampleton Partners in its latest report focusing on the tech M&A outlook up until 2020.

Back in August, the company’s assessment was that M&A for the Internet of Things was going at a ‘steady’ pace, with the primary acquirers being Verizon, ARM, and Intel. The verdict today is that 2018 ‘may be a good year for acquisitions’, albeit sounding a note of caution around the risks of a market correction.

When it came to enterprise software and software as a service (SaaS), the figures look promising. Hampleton argues that there were a series of ‘eye-catching’ deals in the industry, with vertical applications providing the most transactions during the second half of 2017, at 147. ERP apps also scored highly with 141 transactions, ahead of information management (58) and BI and customer analytics (47).

Among the more intriguing acquisitions the industry has seen in the latter half of last year include VMware’s buying of SD-WAN provider VeloCloud in November; Rackspace acquiring managed services firm Datapipe in September; and Microsoft buying Cloudyn, a cloud management provider, in June. The latter appeared to be a particularly hot area, with Gartner research director Mindy Cancila saying in an article at the time that ‘interest in cloud management tools [was] very high.’

The past few months have seen acquisitions around a couple of key trends; containers – Red Hat buying CoreOS – and multi-cloud, with Cisco acquiring Cmpute.io.

Hampleton looked at various industries, with automotive technology – a key component of the Internet of Things – having a positive outlook. The report argues that the second half of 2017 was stable in the industry, with an active 2018 anticipated. David Riemenschneider, Hampleton Partners director, added that 2018-19 will likely be the ‘peak’ of the autotech M&A boom.

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

It has been a busy couple of weeks for storage provider Cloudian. The company has announced $125 million (£90.7m) in funding, a short time after its most recent product release.

The funding round is being made alongside Digital Alpha Capital, a private equity firm focused on software as a service (SaaS) and eCommerce providers, with $100 million going on ‘consumption-model financing’ – or debt financing, as it is recorded in Crunchbase – and $25m as an equity commitment.

Alongside this, Digital Alpha will support the development of a partnership between Cloudian and Cisco to cover ‘relevant data centre architectures’, in the words of the press materials.

Cloudian predicts a dramatic growth in object storage in 2018 driven by the convergence of three trends; huge data growth, the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT), and the rise of the Amazon S3 API as an industry standard. Naturally, the latter is an area where Cloudian feels as though it can dominate. Rather than be a competitor, Cloudian made its flagship HyperStore product available through the AWS Marketplace back in 2016, while the company is listed in the AWS partner store.

“For our customers, this joint venture will enable flexible procurement models and new hardware options to accelerate their transition to next-generation object storage solutions,” said Cloudian CEO Michael Tso in a statement. “With emerging capacity-intensive use cases such as IoT and machine learning, today’s data management needs are rapidly outgrowing traditional platforms. Cloudian’s solutions offer the limitless scalability, superior ease of use and cloud integration our customers need to solve their largest capacity storage challenges while saving time and cost.”

Last month, Cloudian said it had achieved record growth for the third year running, with a particular note for expansion in Europe and revenues up in every geographic segment.

Dropbox’s IPO filing, confirmed late last week, makes for very interesting reading. For a start, it confirmed the rumours swirling around last month, as well as ensure the company won’t be making the next Forbes Cloud 100 list, having been ranked the second biggest private cloud firm two years running.

Yet more importantly, it showcases the company’s recent direction of travel – and where it is heading. Under the ‘recent initiative’ section of the S-1 filing, the storage provider outlined its initiatives to ‘improve the efficiency of the infrastructure that supports [its] platform’.

“These efforts include an initiative that focused on migrating the vast majority of user data stored on the infrastructure of third-party service providers to our own lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities that we directly lease and operate,” the company wrote. The process, called ‘infrastructure optimisation’, which is still ongoing in places, saw a reduction in cost of revenue, an increase in gross margins, and an improvement in free cash flow.

Speaking of margins, Dropbox posted revenues of $1.1 billion in 2017, a 31% increase from the year before, and seeing a gross profit of $737 million. Yet the ‘infrastructure optimisation’ process the company has undertaken is moving away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its own solution. This would be known as ‘Magic Pocket’. In March of that year, Akhil Gupta, Dropbox vice president of engineering, explained that the process of building its own dedicated storage infrastructure had taken two and a half years and had resulted in more than 90% of users’ data on the custom-built product.

This, as Shira Ovide wrote for Bloomberg, was what made Dropbox a viable IPO company today. “Without exaggeration, the shift away from cloud computing is one of the biggest reasons Dropbox is able to go public now,” Ovide wrote.

The filing also provided industry watchers with various insights into how the company saw its product going forward. The company’s mission, as unveiled last year, is to “unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working”, while the letter from co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi noted the importance of machine learning in improving the search and visibility of workspaces. “Over time, machine intelligence will allow Dropbox to better understand both you and your team,” the letter explained.

Houston and Ferdowsi also added a touch of braggadocio to proceedings, citing its journey to a billion-dollar revenue run rate, the fastest SaaS company to do so. “While we’re at scale, we can still move quickly,” the letter read. “We have a lot less baggage than the incumbents. The legacy office suites have had a good run, but they were designed for a world where the most important thing you did was print something out. There’s a reason why BlackBerry didn’t come up with the iPhone… sometimes it’s better to start fresh.”

For quarterly revenues, the quarter ending December 31 2017 saw revenue of $305m, compared with $238m this time last year at an increase of 28%.

Hyperscale cloud and data centre operators spent $22 billion on capital expenditure (capex) in the final quarter of 2017 making the total for the year almost $75bn, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook comprise the top five spenders of the 24 major cloud and internet service firms analysed in Q417, according to the data, with growth ‘particularly strong’ at Amazon and Facebook. Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Tencent made up the top 10.

A large amount of this spend has gone on building and expanding data centre operations. In December 2016, when the total number of hyperscale data centres passed 300, Synergy predicted this number to surpass 400 by 2018 – a forecast which came in ahead of schedule.

Synergy added capex at Alibaba more than doubled last year – as this publication has regularly reported, the company has driven cloud ambitions with recent focus on European expansion –  while growth of Oracle and SAP, also no slouches in this department, was above average.

“Over the last four years we have seen many companies try and fail to compete with the leading cloud providers. The capex analysis emphasises the biggest reason why those cloud providers are so difficult to challenge,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research.

“Can you afford to pump at least a billion dollars a quarter into your data centre capex budget? If you can’t, then your ability to meaningfully compete with the market leaders is severely limited,” Dinsdale added.

“Of course factors other than capex are at play, but the basic financial table stakes are enormous.”