Look out Box, Dropbox and Google – Microsoft is offering free OneDrive to customers of its cloud storage rivals in an attempt to poach them.

The move was announced on an official Microsoft blog yesterday. The company will offer free OneDrive for Business to Box, Dropbox and Google customers with a couple of caveats; the organisations must not currently be OneDrive for Business or Office 365 customers, and they must make a minimum 500 user commitment. The offer is valid as of February 6 and runs until June 30 2018.  

Microsoft added that the growth of OneDrive had been ‘amazing’, and that more than 350,000 organisations were now using the product. These include Accenture, aerospace and defence provider Textron, and Rackspace.

The company has added a variety of enhancements to OneDrive over the past months, including secure external file sharing without the need for a Microsoft account, a self-service file recovery solution, and improved on-demand file browsing and managing.

“OneDrive with Office 365 isn’t just a cloud storage solution,” wrote Ron Markezich, Microsoft corporate vice president. “It’s a core ingredient of the modern workplace.”

Elsewhere, a curious article appeared on Microsoft’s UK news centre with the opening line: “Microsoft has launched the UK’s most powerful cloud services.”

A bold statement indeed. The article relates to the launch of M-Series virtual machines in Azure, which are optimised for large in-memory workloads, such as SAP HANA, and can support up to 128 virtual central processing units (vCPU) and up to 3.8 tebibytes of RAM on a single VM. Microsoft claims this is the most offered by any public cloud.

M-Series VMs were made generally available in December, as well as B-Series VMs, which are aimed at lower CPU workloads such as web servers and small databases. The trick of B-Series is that it offers a slight twist on the usual pay as you go models; customers can build up credits for the predominant low CPU utilisation, which can then be used during spikes. If you have an hour or two, a full list of Azure VM sizes and capabilities is available on the company’s documentation page.

It goes without saying that security is a vital part – the most vital part – of cloud projects. But getting security engagement in early will make the whole process easier, from reduced risk of data loss to quicker project delivery.

That is the key finding from a new report by Hurwitz & Associates. The paper, sponsored by Lacework and titled ‘Balancing Velocity and Security in the Cloud’, polled 85 IT leaders from the Americas and Europe and examined the importance of automation in ensuring compliance and predictability in cloud projects, among other issues.

On automation, the paper offers this. “It’s no secret that there is a shortage of security professionals,” the report notes. “It is important that security offerings incorporate automation to allow security teams to address more events and to give junior analysts the ability to handle issues that are typically left for more senior analysts.”

Almost 85% of those polled said they were deploying significant cloud projects, with 35% going cloud first for all projects and 48% saying they were going for selective large projects. More than half (53%) of those polled said the most important characteristic of their cloud was that it was ‘safe and secure’, while the next most popular choice, ‘deliver new services and updates faster’, was selected by only 13% of respondents.

Only two in five (41%) of respondents agreed that their company catches every cyber attack and data breach of its cloud. That said, the researchers argue this figure may be out of kilter. “We suspect that the problem is much more serious than the level of confidence suggests,” the report noted. “It is simply not evident that security leaders are actually identifying all security threats.”

Yet organisations are attempting to improve their security operations. Almost 90% of those polled said their security and cloud operations teams were working closely together, while the same number, when asked on their most important priority before evaluating a cloud solution, inferred security was key before a line of code was written. 45% opted for project planning, compared with 22% for requirements definition, 13% for technology selection and 10% for project review and approval.

For those who get security onside early in a cloud project, the benefits are evident. Almost all (94%) of those polled said early engagement by the security team resulted in a reduced risk of cybercrime and data loss; 42% opted for faster project delivery and others for more predictable schedule (22%) and lower project costs (18%).

What’s more, when it came to key cloud security requirements, containers were certainly on the horizon. “As containers become the backbone of cloud applications, security teams need to track, identify, and manage containers along with monitoring container-to-container traffic within the cloud, not just from and to the cloud,” the report noted.

“The high velocity and scale of public clouds are shattering everything the security industry has assumed for the past 10 years,” said Sanjay Karla, co-founder and chief product officer at Lacework. “The acceleration of cloud adoption is now paving the way for security teams to deploy automated security solutions that naturally augment security teams’ ability to continuously validate their cloud configuration for security and maintain secure daily operations in the cloud.”

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

Cloud data centre traffic will represent 95% of total data centre traffic by 2021, while 94% of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centres in the same year.

This is the key finding from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report, which again offers mind-boggling forecasts and statistics around future computing power. This time around, the report predicts that global cloud data centre traffic will hit 19.5 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021, up from 6 ZB per year in 2016. When it came to cloud data centre traffic as a proportion of overall data centre traffic, however, there isn’t as huge a change; as of 2016, Cisco argues, 88% of total data centre traffic was cloud-based.

Yet a predominant feature of this year’s report is around multi-cloud growth. To realise the increasing cloud infrastructure growth, more and more hyperscale data centres will appear. By 2021, Cisco argues, hyperscale data centres will support more than half (53%) of data centre servers – up from 27% in 2016, and almost two thirds (65%) of all data stored in data centres, up from 51% two years ago.

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) will naturally also contribute to the greater traffic. Cisco expects IoT connections to reach 13.7 billion by 2021, more than double 2016’s total of 5.8m.

Conway Kosi, SVP and head of managed infrastructure services at Fujitsu EMEA, says the report highlights how organisations need to consider pursuing a cloud-native strategy. “Close collaboration between the C-suite and the IT team will enable businesses to design a balance that works for them in the long term,” said Kosi. “By unlocking the power in existing systems while facilitating innovation with new technologies, hybrid IT can enable even older companies to draw on the power of what they have today – while moving quickly enough for tomorrow.”

Software as a service (SaaS) will contribute three quarters of total cloud workloads and compute instances by 2021, with 16% being infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and 9% platform as a service (PaaS), showing a market unlikely to change from its current position.

Containers will continue to make a big noise in 2018 – and Cisco has made its own push with the launch of its own container platform in collaboration with Google Cloud.

The move, which ‘simplifies and accelerates how application development and IT operations teams configure, deploy, and manage container clusters based on 100% upstream Kubernetes’, as the press materials put it, is being played as an extension of Cisco and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud partnership, previously announced in October. Kubernetes, of course, was originally designed by Google before being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The list of certified Kubernetes platform and distribution partners is as long as one’s arm, including Alibaba Group, IBM and Microsoft among others. From Cisco’s perspective, its goal in releasing a Kubernetes-flavoured product is around networking, or more specifically, addressing ‘the end-to-end management of container clusters including setup, orchestration, authentication, monitoring, networking, load balancing and optimisation’.

The Cisco Container Platform will be available on software optimised with Cisco HyperFlex, available in April, and software supported on VM infrastructure, bare metal and public cloud, available in the summer.

“As the adoption of Kubernetes has exploded, container orchestration and management have become of paramount importance to customers because they enable application portability and consistency across on-premises and cloud-based environments,” said Eyal Manor, Google vice president of engineering in a statement.

“Cisco Container Platform is optimised in collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver a next-generation open hybrid cloud architecture, and represents an important milestone for our integrated Google and Cisco hybrid cloud solution coming later this year,” added Manor.

You can find out more about the Cisco Container Platform offering here.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just secured $5 billion in quarterly revenues – but what are its most popular products?

According to 2nd Watch, a managed cloud provider and AWS partner, the fastest growing AWS products used by their customers in 2017 include data crunching tool Amazon Elastic MapReduce, with a 24% CAGR, network monitoring offering CloudWatch (23% CAGR) and serverless product AWS Lambda at 18%.

The growth means that 92% of customers polled by 2nd Watch are using CloudWatch in their organisations. Amazon Simple Storage, AWS Data Transfer and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud were used by 100% of respondents.

“We are seeing enterprise customers adopt new services at a much faster rate than in years past, product like Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Workspaces and AWS Glue,” said Jeff Aden, co-founder of 2nd Watch. “These products make provisioning, growing and monitoring of AWS incredibly easy, and allow enterprises to focus on their core businesses.

“Large enterprises are capturing the benefits of cost savings, while decreasing their time to market and increasing their ability to make informed decisions,” added Aden.

In total, AWS issued 497 service and feature releases over the most recent financial quarter. New products launched at re:Invent included efforts focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The most evident of these was Amazon SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train, and deploy machine learning models.

Other fast growing AWS products in 2017 included Amazon Chime, an online meeting and video conferencing tool, and AWS Glue, a fully managed ETL (extract, transform and load) data service.

Read more: AWS passes $5 billion in quarterly revenue with a $20bn run rate

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has surpassed $5 billion (£3.6bn) in revenues for the most recent quarter, representing an almost 45% increase year over year and a $20 billion run rate.

The company’s latest financial results show revenues of $60.5bn across the company in the fourth quarter, with particular focus on Alexa. CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that “we don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often – expect us to double down.”

In the company’s highlights section, AWS was mentioned a total of 52 times. Service and feature releases fell just short of 500; the 497 that were released took the year’s total up to 1,430. To put that into perspective, the quarter’s total was more than three times the releases launched by AWS in the whole of 2012.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, told analysts that the $20bn run rate for AWS was up from $18bn the previous quarter. “We’re very happy with the performance in the AWS business,” he said.

As it is the first release since re:Invent back in November, product launches featured significantly in the highlights. These included SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train and deploy machine learning models, as well as products on the artificial intelligence side, including translation and transcription tools.

Of particular interest as well were the heavy-hitting customers the company has secured in the quarter. Some of these, such as Expedia going all-in, and The Walt Disney Company selecting AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider, were announced at re:Invent back in November. Another, Synamtec, was announced in the week leading up to the event, while others included Dow Jones, Experian and Ubisoft, who ‘kicked off major new moves’ to AWS in the quarter.

So what does this mean when compared to other players in the market? Microsoft issued financials yesterday, with its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket, focusing predominantly on Azure and server products, fetching $7.8bn for the quarter at an increase of 15% year over year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud was a $1bn per quarter business and that it was in the company’s opinion ‘the fastest growing major public cloud provider in the world.’

According to Synergy Research, a long-time tracker of the cloud infrastructure players, four of the five largest vendors have gained market share over the last four quarters. The only outlier is IBM, which maintains third place behind AWS and Microsoft, and ahead of Google and Alibaba.

“As demand for cloud services blossoms, the leading cloud providers all have things to be pleased about and they are setting a fierce pace that most chasing companies cannot match,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Smaller companies can still do well by focusing on specific applications, industry verticals or geographies, but overall this is a game that can only be played by companies with big ambitions, big wallets and a determined corporate focus.”

You can read the full Amazon statement here.

Microsoft continues to cite the cloud as the key to its success; the company has posted revenues of $28.9 billion and operating income of $8.7bn for Q218, an increase of 12% and 10% respectively.

While the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – which focuses on Azure and server products, saw revenues of $7.8bn, an increase of 15% year over year, while the ‘productivity and business processes’ segment, focusing more on Office 365 went up 24% to $8.95bn.

Despite the ever-improving cloudy outlook, the quarter did see an overall loss of $6.3bn, which Microsoft attributed to a ‘net charge of $13.8bn related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.’

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, told analysts the ‘intelligent cloud and intelligent edge platform [was] fast becoming a reality.’

“As intelligent cloud, intelligent edge becomes more predominant, our architectural advantage is increasingly clear to our customers,” said Nadella, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “You see this reflected in the latest CIO surveys, as well as in our 98% Azure revenue growth this quarter. Only Microsoft delivers hybrid consistency, developer productivity, AI capabilities, and trusted security and compliance.”

Highlights for Microsoft in the most recent quarter include a partnership with SAP to ‘provide enterprise customers with a clear roadmap to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud’, as well as launching Azure Migrate, a free service to help organisations move over from their VMware environments.

The latter initially did not go down well with VMware, with the company saying at the time it ‘cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimised for the VMware stack’. In other words, if customers took the plunge and something went wrong, they would be on their own. However, in December Microsoft posted a missive saying it was working with VMware and its cloud provider program partners for an offering made generally available later this year. VMware then updated its blog post removing the more antagonistic language, saying it was ‘in the process of engaging with the partner to ensure compliance and that the appropriate support model is in place.’

You can read the full financial report here. Watch this space however, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) posts its financials later today.

Red Hat has announced the acquisition of CoreOS, a provider of Kubernetes and container solutions, for $250 million (£176.5m).

The move will help Red Hat ‘further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source’, as the company put it. “We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments,” said Paul Cornier, Red Hat president of products and technologies in a statement.

The strategic rationale behind the move is straightforward enough. As cloud infrastructure becomes ever-more complex, container technologies are increasingly being used to move applications between clouds. Kubernetes, designed by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is seen by some in the industry as becoming the leading container orchestration player in 2018.

One of the key trends of last year, as this publication noted, was a serious increase in major cloud players joining the CNCF and recognising container technology, from AWS to Microsoft to Oracle. Any assessment of nascent enterprise technology trends worth its salt will have containers somewhere near the top, with McKinsey saying as much back in November.

From Red Hat’s perspective, the move certainly fits in with their ethos around open source. Speaking at a customer event at the back end of 2016, Werner Knoblich, Red Hat EMEA general manager, explained the company saw itself as the #2 player in Kubernetes and Docker after, naturally, Google and Docker respectively. The former was also referenced in the press materials, where Red Hat is the second leading contributor to Kubernetes.

CoreOS was founded in 2013, and saw its first mention in this publication two years later, when Docker and CoreOS announced at DockerCon they were joining the Open Container Project. The company has secured $48 million in total funding across three rounds, more than half of which in its $28m series B round in May 2016.

Alex Polvi, CoreOS CEO, noted how the two companies had been collaborators for many years. “This announcement marks a new stage in our shared aim to make these important technologies ubiquitous in business and the world,” said Polvi.

You can find out more about the deal here.

SAP has praised ‘stellar cloud bookings’ in its Q417 financial results, with total revenue across all segments at €6.805 billion (£6bn) and cloud and software revenues comprising 85% of that figure.

New cloud bookings were at €591 million for the quarter ended December 31 2017, up 22% from the previous year. The figures show a steady continuation of a long-term trend. Cloud subscriptions and support went up 21% to €997m year over year, while the more traditional software licenses and support bucket went down 2% to €4.81bn.

The company expects full year non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support revenue to be between €4.8bn and €5bn, thanks to ‘continued strong momentum’ in its cloud business, while full year cloud and software revenue will be between €20.7bn and €21.1bn.

SAP also reiterated its 2020 ambition for cloud and total revenue. By 2020, the German software giant is expecting non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support full year revenue at a top point of €8.5bn, and ‘more predictable revenue’ – in other words, cloud support and software support revenue – to be between 70% and 75%.

The company also announced acquisition news; that of Callidus Software, a provider of ‘quote to cash’ cloud software, for $2.4 billion. The company said the acquisition will give it ‘immediate leadership’ in the lead-to-money software space and that the combination of SAP and CallidusCloud will ‘deliver the most complete, end-to-end, fully cloud-based lead-to-cash offering.’

Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, said the company was ‘connecting the back office to the front office in this consumer-driven growth revolution.’ “The addition of CallidusCloud aligns perfectly to SAP’s innovation strategy to transform that front office,” added McDermott. “SAP gives CallidusCloud the global scale to accelerate its already impressive growth.

“These two strong companies will be better together, help the world run better and improve people’s lives.”

You can read the full financial report here.

This story is being updated with more information as soon as CloudTech gets it.

Picture credit: SAP

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Sqrrl, an advanced threat detection platform provider, according to an announcement from the latter.

A statement from Mark Terenzoni, CEO of Sqrrl, explained: “We’re thrilled to share that Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon. We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future.”

Sqrrl offers a ‘threat hunting’ platform which combines technology such as link analysis and user behaviour analytics, as well as being compatible with security information and event management (SIEM) systems. The majority of Sqrrl’s founders had previously worked for the NSA. The company has to date secured $26.5 million in funding across four rounds, with the most recent, a series C of $12.3m, landing in June last year.

The announcement confirms a story from Axios published last month which asserted AWS was in advanced acquisition talks. While the announcement does not give any indication as to how Sqrrl will fit into AWS going forward, it is worth noting that AWS launched Amazon GuardDuty, a managed threat detection service, at the company’s re:Invent showcase in November. Last month, Trend Micro announced a collaboration with AWS on its Enterprise Contracts for AWS Marketplace service.

This is not to mention the wide-ranging security snafus around the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities publicly disclosed earlier this month. AWS was among many cloud providers who issued statements fairly sharpish about how they were combating the problem. According to the most recent update, as of January 23, all instances across the Amazon EC2 fleet were protected with no ‘meaningful performance impact’ for the majority of EC2 workloads.

“For now, it is business as usual at Sqrrl,” Terenzoni added. “We will continue to work with customers to provide advanced threat hunting capabilities. And, over time, we’ll work with AWS to do even more on your behalf.”