A couple of interesting cloudy companies who have raised capital in recent days; Snowflake Computing has closed $263 million in growth funding, while Tigera has secured an additional $10 million in funding.

Snowflake Computing, based in San Mateo, offers cloud-based data warehousing. The company aims to help organisations made their data more easily available and actionable in the cloud, with three claimed elements to help it: a unique architecture to provide complete elasticity, a database engine that natively handles both semi-structured and structured data, and technology which eliminates the need for manual data warehouse management.

The company said it will use the funding to double down on R&D and expand current operations across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions ‘to address the global surge in demand for Snowflake’s data warehouse as a service’. The capital takes Snowflake’s total funding to $473m in growth funding, with a pre-money valuation of $1.5 billion.

Tigera, however, is in the application connectivity and security space. As this publication noted earlier this month, organisations are making more cloud investments and, as a result, their infrastructure becomes more complex. Where Tigera comes in is to make app integration easier as technologies such as containers and microservices are being utilised.

Madrona Ventures Group has a stake in both deals. The Seattle-based firm was named as an existing funding partner who contributed to Snowflake, but was the lead partner in the Tigera round. In a post announcing the news, Madrona managing director S. Somasegar explained its rationale.

“While containers have been the rage for the last 18-24 months, the complexity that grows from this technology quickly escalates to an unmanageable level from an application connectivity and security perspective,” wrote Somasegar. “This conundrum has been an issue for large enterprises as they look to benefit from these new methods of software architecture and management.”

Snowflake’s round was led by ICONIQ Capital, Altimeter Capital and newcomer Sequoia Capital, alongside Capital One Growth Venture, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures, alongside Madrona. CEO Bob Muglia said in a statement the announcement “further validates Snowflake’s continued mission to enable a true data economy by removing the barriers that prevent enterprises from easily acquiring insight from all their data no matter where that data resides.”

Quantum computing promises much – but are organisations secure enough to make the most of it? According to a new report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), companies are aware of the risk of quantum computing but not yet ready to take action.

The alliance had previously put together the Quantum Safe Security Working Group (QSS WG) to assess the risks of the emerging technology. According to today’s report, which polled more than 100 CSA members with more than 90% working in either IT or information security, only 14% said they were not aware of quantum computing and its impact on data security. In contrast, only 12% said they were ‘very confident’ in their current security options to protect against quantum attacks.

Quantum computing differs from classical computing in that it has the potential to find patterns and insights based on data which does not exist, rather than finding patterns in vast amounts of existing data. Its potential applications include improving security through quantum physics and enhancements to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Readers of this publication will be aware of quantum computing through the work IBM – who, it has to be said, are experts when it comes to research and development of emerging technologies – is doing.

So what threats are there – and how are organisations taking measures against them? In essence, quantum computers will be able to break all public key systems and render them vulnerable. Yet only 40% of respondents today said they were working to future-proof their data to protect against the threat.

When it came to specific quantum-safe technologies, respondents were most likely to be aware of longer symmetric keys and longer hash functions, as opposed to quantum random number generation and key distribution. The report added that many respondents do not believe a one-size-fits-all solution yet exists to counteract quantum threats effectively.

It’s worth noting at this juncture that while the sample rate was comparatively low, the CSA argues the data provides a ‘valuable snapshot of the perception of quantum-safe issues in the industry.’

“While there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done in convincing the industry of the importance of including the threat of quantum computing in enterprise security strategies, the good news is that there is a great deal of interest in learning more about the threat quantum presents and how it can be mitigated,” said Jane Melia, CSA QSS WG co-chair in a statement.

“This latest report provides an excellent context for moving forward in our efforts to educate the industry.”

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

Deloitte may be best known in the cloud industry for its forecasts and reports – but the consulting firm is making waves of its own with the acquisition of cloud platform provider ATADATA.

ATADATA offers a migration and mapping service across almost any infrastructure one cares to think of, from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud, Oracle and VMware, with the company claims to be the only platform which can migrate SAP to AWS and Google.

Last year saw the launch of ATAsphere, certified by AWS, compatible with Azure and recommended by Google, which in the company’s own words is “the industry’s first managed workload mobility platform that enables borderless automation for hybrid IT and cloud environments.”

From Deloitte’s perspective, the move will ‘expand [the company’s] robust end-to-end offerings – from the strategy phase to the build and operate phases.’ Charles Wright, the CEO and CTO of ATADATA, will join the Deloitte team, alongside chief commercial officer Ian Easton.

“Deloitte has demonstrated exceptional success in driving innovation using cloud, digital, and cognitive technologies for a wide range of enterprise clients,” said Wright in a statement. “We are excited to amplify that success by enabling simple, scalable data and application stacks for on-premise, private and public clouds.”

In March last year, Deloitte announced the acquisition of cloud consulting firm Day1 Solutions, the opening of a series of cloud studios in Orlando, New York and Washington D.C., as well as adding 3,000 US-based high tech engineering jobs. At the time, the company said cloud was ‘the backbone of innovation’ and that the additions to its portfolio would give clients ‘access to deeper cloud expertise and even more innovative capabilities.’

Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Skyport Systems, a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HPI) and cloud-managed secure virtualisation.

The company, based out of Mountain View, has an offering which aims to converge security and infrastructure and be secure by design. The company claims its ‘continuously validated’ security platform enforces capabilities needed to avoid 85% of targeted cyber-attacks.

In a brief statement, Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team, said the acquisition “will enable Cisco to utilise Skyport’s intellectual property, seasoned software and network expertise to accelerate priority areas across multiple Cisco portfolios.”

The move highlights the importance of venture capital arms within companies. Skyport has raised in total $67 million (£47m) in funding, with the most recent, a $30m series C in March 2016, involving Cisco Investments.

Cisco has been particularly busy on the acquisitions front, with the most recent of interest being the buying of Cmpute.io, a cloud application optimisation provider, in December. Among the company’s other acquisitions in 2017 were Viptela, a provider of SD-WAN technologies, and cloud collaboration software provider BroadSoft.

The Skyport team will join the data centre-computing systems product group, as well as the service provider-networking group at Cisco.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Here’s an interesting statistic to illustrate how much influence the major cloud providers have: according to Lloyd’s of London, US businesses could lose $15 billion if a leading vendor experienced downtime of at least three days.

According to the insurer, working in partnership with risk modelling firm AIR Worldwide in its ‘Cloud Down’ report, an ‘extreme cyber incident’ which took a top cloud provider offline for three to six days would also result in insured losses of $3bn alongside the $15bn economic losses.

Businesses outside of the Fortune 1000 – who the report argues are more likely to be users of cloud services – are as a result placed at a higher risk. The companies say these businesses would carry 63% share of economic losses and 57% of insured losses.

The report also assessed how different industries would be impacted. If a large cloud provider went down for days, manufacturing would bear the brunt, with direct economic losses of $8.6bn. This compares against wholesale and retail trade ($3.6bn), information sectors ($847 million), finance and insurance ($447m) and transportation and warehousing ($439m).

Cloud providers’ services can go down for various reasons; whether it is weather-related, bug-related, or simply a case of fat fingers. Earlier this month, a study from Syncsort found that a majority of organisations had to deploy their disaster recovery solution at least once in the past year, with many not sure as to the specifics of their availability plans.

“A major cloud failure would significantly impact the insurance industry, and our research has shown that such an event is plausible,” said Scott Stransky, assistant vice president and principal scientist at AIR Worldwide. “We hope the report will help raise awareness across the industry as to how significant losses could be, how likely they are, and provide an opportunity for insurers to better understand and manage cyber risk.”

You can find out more about the report here.

Digital Realty has announced it will offer dedicated and private access to Oracle Cloud in 14 major metropolitan areas, boosting its relationship and connectivity with the Redwood giant.

According to the press materials, access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect – a product launched by Oracle in 2016 to help customers connect their data centre to the cloud more easily – will be made available through Digital Realty’s Service Exchange in Ashburn, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Silicon Valley.

In total, 59 Digital Realty data centres support private connections to Oracle’s infrastructure as a service, the company added.

“Customers require seamless connectivity from their data centres and networks to Oracle Cloud for their most demanding workloads and applications,” said Don Johnson, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure senior vice president for product development. “With Oracle’s FastConnect service via Digital Realty, customers can provision the dedicated and private connections they need today and easily scale with their growing business demands.”

“Our direct connections to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure build upon our commitment to ensure that our customers have interconnected access to the critical IT resources they need to drive business success,” said Chris Sharp, Digital Realty CTO. “The rapid growth of Oracle Cloud is a testament to its strength in the marketplace, and we are extremely pleased to be working closely with Oracle to accelerate its momentum.”

According to figures from Synergy Research in June, Digital Realty and Equinix remain the primary players in the colocation market, extending their lead over the competition thanks to – in the former’s case – merging with DuPont Fabros. As for Oracle, the company posted strong financial results in mid-December, and boosted its Australian operations by announcing the acquisition of Aconex in the same week.

Three in five enterprises will move the majority of their IT away from enterprise data centres and onto public cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS), according to a new report from 451 Research.

The study, the analyst firm’s inaugural Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse survey, polled more than 1,000 IT professionals worldwide, finding the largest spending increase for IT teams this year is for ‘as a service’ delivery.

Naturally, providers such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are emerging as likely strategic technology suppliers for enterprises. One in three enterprises already consider Microsoft in this role, with the number expected to rise to 35% by 2019, while 17% will opt for AWS in 2019 compared with 7% today.

Business intelligence and analytics was the main IT priority in 2018, according to 45% of respondents, ahead of machine learning and artificial intelligence (29%), big data (28%), and software-defined networking (25%). The figures are interesting when considering all of the emerging technologies interesting CIOs and CTOs alike. Machine learning and AI polled well, but interest in blockchain – cited by 12% of respondents – and fog and edge computing (7%) was not as significant.

Ultimately, the research does suggest a trend; that of data-centric technologies. “The survey suggests that many – but certainly not all – organisations are finally reaching the point where they can focus on endeavours that help differentiate the business, instead of merely keeping the lights on,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president at 451 Research. “In 2018 we expect to see much of this effort focused around a new set of approaches to data optimisation and analysis.”

Back in July, the analyst firm said that ‘everything as a service’ was rising towards the mainstream, thanks to the increased demand for managed security, disaster recovery, and networking.

You can find out more about the report here (subscription required).

IBM has finally stopped its revenue slide after more than five and a half years – with the company saying it has strengthened its position as the leading enterprise cloud and blockchain leader.

The Armonk giant posted revenues of $22.5 billion (£16.2bn) for the fourth quarter of 2017, up 3.5% on this time last year, where revenues were at $21.7bn. Of this figure, 40% was comprised of the technology services and cloud platforms bucket, at $9.2bn, while 24% came from cognitive solutions and 18% was derived from global business services.

In prepared remarks, Martin Schroeter, senior vice president for IBM global markets, told analysts that cloud revenue was up 27%, with revenue for the year totalling $17 billion, up from $7bn three years ago. “We play an important role in running our clients’ most critical processes,” said Schroeter, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “And now with the IBM Cloud, which is built for the enterprise, each of the 10 largest global banks, nine of the top 10 retailers and eight of the top 10 airlines are cloud-as-a-service clients.

“We also continue to make progress in emerging areas like blockchain,” added Schroeter. “Remember that for us, blockchain is a set of technologies that allow our clients to simplify complex, end-to-end processes in a way that couldn’t have been done before. It requires the attributes of immutability, permissioning and scalability, and we’re already performing thousands of transactions per second.”

“Our strategic imperatives revenue again grew at a double-digit rate and now represents 46% of our total revenue, and we are pleased with our overall revenue growth in the quarter,” said IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty in a statement. “During 2017, we strengthened our position as the leading enterprise cloud provider and established IBM as the blockchain leader for business. Looking ahead, we are uniquely positioned to help clients use data and AI to build smarter businesses.”

Among the quarter’s highlights for IBM were the launch of IBM Cloud Private and, on the branding side, removing reference to Bluemix and moving it forward as IBM Cloud. Cloud Private aims to ‘extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds’ and is compatible with a range of systems manufacturers, such as Cisco, Dell EMC and Lenovo.

IBM has also announced it is extending its partnership with Salesforce, with the latter naming IBM a preferred cloud services provider and the former naming Salesforce as a preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service. The two companies already have a complementary relationship; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to the stage at IBM’s InterConnect event back in March to discuss with Rometty the rise of artificial intelligence.

You can read the full IBM financial results and statement here (pdf).

Global spending on public cloud services is forecast to hit $160 billion in 2018 at an increase of 23.2% the previous year, according to figures from IDC.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest cloud category with almost two thirds of all public cloud spending this year, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Of the SaaS spend, applications purchases will dominate the segment, with CRM and enterprise resource management (ERM) apps seeing the most spending.

IaaS spending will be ‘fairly balanced’ through the coming year with servers just ahead of storage, IDC added, while PaaS spending will be led by data management software purchases, ahead of app platforms, integration and orchestration middleware, and data access, analysis and delivery applications.

Not surprisingly, the US will comprise the largest market for public cloud services, with $97 billion – more than 60% of the overall total – with the UK ($7.9bn) just ahead of Germany ($7.4bn) for Western Europe. Japan and China lead the way for Asia and complete the top five, with spending of $5.8bn and $5.4bn respectively.

For the US, the industries that will spend the most on public cloud services this year are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking. According to Eileen Smith, program director of customer insights and analysis, this makes for an interesting comparison. “The industries that are spending the most are the ones that have come to recognise the tremendous benefits that can be gained from public cloud services,” said Smith.

“Organisations within these industries are leveraging public cloud services to quickly develop and launch third platform solutions, such as big data and analytics and the Internet of Things, that will enhance and optimise the customer’s journey and lower operational costs.”

According to figures issued by Synergy Research earlier this month, the global cloud computing market is at $180bn in vendor revenues, with IaaS and PaaS – put into the same bucket for the purposes of the analysis – the fastest-growing sector.

Good and bad news from Intel regarding the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities; firmware updates are being pushed through for the vast majority of CPUs issued by the company in the past five years, but patches are impacting data centre performance.

According to an update published yesterday, impacts in performance have ranged from 0% to 2% on industry-standard measures, including integer and floating point throughput, and server-side Java – in other words, common workloads for enterprise and cloud customers. For a benchmark simulating different types of I/O loads, however, testing to stress the CPU in a 100% write case saw an 18% decrease in throughput performance.

Navin Shenoy, Intel EVP and general manager of the Data Center Group, stressed the importance of these being guidelines, with customer-specific workloads likely to differ.

“As expected, our testing results to date show performance impact that ranges depending on specific workloads and configurations,” wrote Shenoy. “Generally speaking, the workloads that incorporate a larger number of user/kernel privilege changes and spend a significant amount of time in privileged mode will be more adversely impacted.”

Intel added that it was “working hard” with partners and customers in the more serious cases of performance degradation. The company recommends Retpoline, a project headed by Google, as a potential mitigation. Retpoline – a portmanteau of ‘return’ and ‘trampoline’ – aims to attack speculative execution by ‘bouncing’ endlessly, in the process allowing indirect branches to be isolated. The company also recommends options that can be found in a more detailed whitepaper.

According to a report from Bridgeway earlier this week, only 4% of enterprise mobile devices have been protected against Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The company added that at least 72% of the 100,000 mobile devices analysed were still exposed to the threats.