Google Cloud’s rampant push at the start of this year has continued, with the company announcing a partnership with Indian telco Bharti Airtel, as well as a customer win in airline Lufthansa.

The agreement with Airtel will see the company offer collaboration tool G Suite to small and medium sized businesses as part of its integrated B2B connectivity solutions.

According to the most recent figures from Statista, Airtel currently sits third in terms of market share for wireless telecom subscribers at 27.58%, behind leader Vodafone Idea and less than 1% behind Reliance Jio (27.8%).

“Airtel and Google Cloud have a shared vision of delighting customers with great products. India, with its growing economy and adoption of digital services, offers one of the biggest opportunities to serve customers with innovative solutions,” said Gopal Vittal, managing director and CEO of Bharti Airtel’s India and South Asia. “We are pleased to further strengthen our deep relationship with Google Cloud and build products and services aimed at transforming Indian businesses.”

In August, Reliance Jio signed a 10-year deal with Microsoft which featured a variety of integrations. The telco would move its non-network applications to Azure, while its internal workforce would receive the Microsoft 365 suite. Jio’s connectivity infrastructure would also promote the adoption of Azure as part of the company’s cloud-first strategy.

Google’s partnership with Airtel will aim to make a dent in the Microsoft/Jio deal. “Indian companies are making a massive transformation to the cloud and we’re thrilled to partner with Airtel to support this transition,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The Indian market is an interesting one. While, like China, the country performed poorly in the most recent Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) analysis in 2018, this is primarily due to the disparity between the most connected and rural areas. According to Synergy Research at the time of the Jio partnership, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft were the clear one and two in India. Satyajit Sinha, an analyst at Counterpoint, told the Economic Times in August that the move would require AWS and Google to come up with ‘new, perhaps cheaper’ models for the Indian market.

Elsewhere, Lufthansa Group has chosen Google Cloud for its operations efforts. Citing machine learning and infrastructure capabilities, the airline is looking to streamline its data processes including recommendations for greater customer experience. “We’re bringing the best of Lufthansa Group and Google Cloud together to solve airlines’ biggest challenges and positively impact the travel experience of the more than 145 million passengers that fly annually with them,” said Kurian.

It has not all been good news for Google this week, however. According to reports, healthcare software provider Epic is opting to move ahead with AWS and Azure as its cloud providers, citing a lack of interest in Google Cloud among its customers. Healthcare, alongside retail and financial services, are the three primary industries Google is targeting, as Kurian noted at last April’s Google Next.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Revenue for cloud infrastructure equipment dipped a little in the most recent quarter, IDC has argued – yet it is more indicative of a wider IT downturn than a cloud-specific malaise.

The analyst firm, in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, found an overall quarterly figure of $16.8 billion (£12.9bn) – a decline of 1.8% year over year. IDC increased its forecast for total 2019 spending to $65.4bn, which represents flat performance.

Public cloud saw something of a hit according to IDC’s figures, with a downturn of 3.7% year over year, albeit seeing $11.9bn in quarterly sales. The analyst notes to expect more quarterly volatility, particularly as the hyperscalers continue to dominate the market, as the overall segment generally trends upwards.

For 2019, public cloud saw minimal change in market share, comprising just over 30% of the overall cloud IT infrastructure market. This is expected to reach almost 40% by 2023. Yet the key figure here is 2020, where IDC expects public and private cloud spending outperform traditional IT. 2019 saw the balance nearly tipped at 49.8% for public and private cloud, although recent quarters (Q319 at 53.4%) saw success.

When it came to specific vendors, Dell Technologies was the best performing in Q3, capturing 15.5% of the market share at $2.62bn revenues. This was a 2.6% downturn on the previous year, with HPE (8% rise, 11% share), Inspur (14.8% rise, 7.2% share) and Cisco (5% rise, 6.7% share) helping to take up the slack. Lenovo, at $723 million, saw a 20.2% yearly downturn to drop to fifth in the market.

Looking at specific geographies, decline was noted in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America. Again, IDC noted, this was related to a general market blip. Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – saw growth of 1.2% year on year, which IDC saw again as flat.

You can find out more about the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Google Cloud continues to push its wares for an enterprise base with the launch of a premium support offering for enterprise and mission-critical requirements.

The service builds upon current offerings, of providing technical account managers and 15-minute SLOs (service level operations). Any companies with premium support will have their cases handled directly by the best of the best – or ‘context-aware experts’, for the jargon version. Context-aware, in this instance, means support staff who understand their customers’ peak events and will work before, during and after to ensure no issues.

Google also promises a case management API, which aims to specially integrate the vendor and customer systems, while premium members will also get access to Google Cloud’s training library, as well as a sneak peek at previews for key product launches.

“Premium Support has been designed to better meet the needs of our customers running modern cloud technology,” wrote Atul Nanda, vice president support at Google Cloud. “We’ve made investments to improve the customer experience, with an updated support model that is proactive, unified, centred around the customer, and flexible to meet the differing needs of their businesses.”

It has been a busy start to the year for Google. The company unfurled its coldest storage package, Archive, in general availability last week, before taking the opportunity availed by retail show NRF to announce updates for retailers to get on board with Google’s cloud. Kohl’s, Lowe’s and Wayfair are just three of the recently announced major retailers confirmed as Google Cloud customers.

Focusing on the enterprise space and building up the sales and marketing channels have been the key priority for Thomas Kurian in the 12 months since he became Google Cloud CEO. Indeed, Kurian used his first major speaking slot last February to advocate the use of old-school sales tactics to woo the enterprise customers. The previous October, former product management lead Amir Hermelin delivered a valedictory post which argued his previous employer had missed the boat in the enterprise.

Since then, many of Google Cloud’s moves – or at least the marketing messages behind them – have had the enterprise in mind. Take the storage growth plan announced in March for companies who spend $10,000 per month for a year, or the acquisitions of Looker and Elastifile, or security partnerships with Palo Alto and McAfee among others. The question for Google now is how to convert these moves into decision making from the highest level at the world’s largest companies.

Premium Support is available now with Google Cloud promising additional features and support plans throughout the year. You can read the full Google blog here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

85% of organisations expect to have the majority of their workloads cloud-based by the end of 2020, according to a new study from AllCloud.

The study, which polled more than 150 IT decision makers at organisations where at least 300 employees were using cloud infrastructure, found seven in 10 respondents already ran at least half of their workloads on the cloud.

When it came to organisations’ primary goals when deciding on their cloud platform of choice, three areas stood out. Not surprisingly, security came out on top, cited by 27.6% of those polled, yet reliability (26.3%) and flexibility (22.4%) fared similarly. This makes for an interesting comparison with cost, cited by only 13.8% of respondents.

Almost half of those who were using a multi-cloud approach had Microsoft Azure (49.3%) as their platform of choice. Google Cloud Platform, cited by 40.1% of those polled, came next, with IBM (32.2%) and Oracle’s (20.4%) clouds trailing.

Given AllCloud’s focus is primarily on supporting AWS initiatives – alongside Salesforce and NetSuite – it makes no attempt to hide the fact it is an AWS-centric report. When it came to specific services – of the more than 170 in AWS’ portfolio – explored next year, database, cited by 21.1% of those polled, was the most frequently cited. IoT services (17.1%) were also keenly cited, alongside containers and microservices (14.5%).

Perhaps the most illuminating statistic came through AWS’ partnership with VMware. According to the data, almost three quarters (73%) of enterprise private workloads are using VMware. Expect this to continue this year, AllCloud asserts. “The existing partnership is likely to grow stronger and broader, with more accessibility released between the technologies,” the report notes. “This will allow a faster rate of enterprise adoption for organisations that want to leverage the benefits of the cloud.”

“The report’s findings are consistent with feedback that AllCloud has been receiving from its clients across the globe – which is that their use of cloud infrastructure and related technologies has been growing – and fast,” the report notes. “As these companies have grown, and their digital transformation programs have progressed, many have embraced AWS as their foundation.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Google Cloud has announced it is expanding its retail acceleration program (RAP) among other initiatives designed to scale up retailers’ cloud projects.

The moves were announced at NRF 2020, the biggest event in the retail space, with Google doubling down on its message to accelerate retailers’ digital growth and customer experience – pinned together with its data expertise.

Alongside RAP, which is Google’s overarching term for services which help retailers optimise their websites as well as drive greater footfall, other tools were announced in various stages of availability. Google Cloud Search for Retail, in the pilot stage, aims to utilise the company’s AI and machine learning tools to provide higher quality product search results for websites and applications, while Google Cloud 1:1 Engagement for Retail, just launched, is a best practice guide to building out models and products in data analytics platform BigQuery.

Among Google Cloud’s retail customers are Kohl’s in the US, Carrefour in France, and Sainsbury’s in the UK; the latter having been announced in October. The company took the opportunity at NRF to unveil further customer updates. Hardware chain Lowe’s, which says it is in the ‘early stages’ of a large scale technology transformation to the tune of $500 million annual investment through 2021, is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud, while last week it was announced eCommerce firm Wayfair was using Google’s hybrid connectivity to tackle capacity issues during peak hours.

Writing in a company blog post, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the opportunity available to retailers in building out their digital initiatives – as well as the wide variety of complimentary services on offer.

“One thing is clear: digital transformation is more than just a requirement. It’s a race,” wrote Kurian. “Retailers that transform the fastest are the most successful.

“Staying viable in the retail market today means using technology to solve big problems,” Kurian added. “Google continues to innovate and provide industry-specific tools that help retailers not just keep up with the competition, but also to win the ever-changing race.”

A common trend assessed by industry watchers over the past 12 months has been the rise of retailers building out their cloud initiatives – and particularly those who choose not to go to infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the start of last year, Albertsons signed a three-year deal to make Microsoft Azure its preferred public cloud. Per a CNBC report, Albertsons CIO Anuj Dhanda said the decision was made because of Azure’s ‘experience with big companies, history with large retailers… and because it isn’t a competitor.’

The note was thinly veiled; in May Amazon surpassed Walmart as the leading retailer on the Forbes Global 2000 list, with the two companies previously having a well-documented spat. Amazon counts several leading retailers in its cloudy stable, from River Island, to Under Armour, to of course itself.

Under Kurian’s leadership, Google has put sharper focus on targeting specific industries. The Google Cloud CEO cited retail, healthcare, and financial services at Next in April as the three industries key to Google’s customer base, noting that the company worked with seven of the top 10 retailers.

You can read more of Google Cloud’s retail updates here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Yet another sporting franchise is signing up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to utilise its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The Bundesliga, Germany’s top flight football league, has announced it its going all-in on AWS to beef up its statistical acumen as well as improve the fan experience.

Among the technologies in AWS’ arsenal being used by the Bundesliga are image and video analysis tool Rekognition, as well as SageMaker, to build, train and deploy ML models. The league will use another ML service, Personalize, to ‘create real-time and individualised recommendations’ and ‘offer fans personalised game footage, marketing promotions, and search results based on their favourite teams, players, or matches.’

One aspect which Rekognition will be used for is particularly interesting – and relates to similar usage by another sporting client. The Bundesliga will build a cloud-based media archive which will automatically tag frames from more than 150,000 hours of video with metadata, such as games, players and venue, meaning a much easier search process.

This will, presumably, create other opportunities for the league: in June, NASCAR moved to AWS with the aim of launching new content from its archive called ‘This Moment in NASCAR History’, helped by the added metadata.

“We are extremely excited to be working alongside AWS to develop the next generation of football viewing experience,” said Christian Seifert, CEO of Bundesliga in a statement. “Innovation means challenging the status quo. Working closely with AWS, as one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, significantly enhances the investment we’ve made in innovation over the past two decades, all of which contributes to us being able to deliver a world-class football experience for our fans.”

Alongside NASCAR, AWS has announced deals with Major League Baseball and Formula 1 over the past 18 months. The latter has particularly become a flagship customer, with technical director Ross Brawn taking to the stage at re:Invent 2018 to discuss the ‘F1 Insights Powered By AWS’ launch, including exploring telemetry data and high performance computing (HPC) environments.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Archive, its coldest storage offering focused on long-term data retention.

Cold storage, unlike its antithetical hot cousin – see Wasabi as an example of the latter – is for workloads which are accessed less than once a year and has been stored, usually, for many years. It is pitched by the hyperscalers as a replacement for tape backups; when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Glacier Deep Archive at 2018’s re:Invent, CEO Andy Jassy told the audience they would ‘have to be out of their mind’ to manage their own tape moving forward.

Google’s Archive, meanwhile, aims to differ from Amazon’s version in a couple of ways. When this publication reported in March on updates to Coldline, Google’s ever-so-slightly-warmer storage class, it noted ‘high availability and low latency as its calling card.’ Google aims for no delay on data retrieval – ‘millisecond latency’, as the company puts it – compared with AWS which offers restoration any time between one minute and 12 hours.

Archive is priced at $0.0012 per GB per month, or $1.23 per terabyte per month. This is above AWS and Azure, who are priced the same at $0.00099 per GB per month and $1 per TB per month. This is part down to the longer remit for an early deletion charge – Google has it at 365 days compared with 180 days for AWS and Azure. It is worth noting that this is a basic guide, with caveats between the providers for workloads and usage.

Google Cloud Archive was first announced last April, with the promise at the time of ‘later this year’ only slightly out. “Having flexible storage options allows you to optimise your total cost of ownership while meeting your business needs,” wrote Geoffrey Noer, Google Cloud storage product manager in a blog announcing general availability. “At Google Cloud, we think that you should have a range of straightforward storage options that allow you to more securely and reliably access your data when and where you need it, without performance bottlenecks or delays to your users.”

You can compare cold storage offerings by visiting Google's page, AWS', and Microsoft's.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Veeam has always been a green company – in terms of its branding and UI at least – and now the Swiss cloud backup and data management provider is getting its Green Card.

Software investor Insight Partners announced it is set to acquire Veeam in a transaction valued at $5 billion (£3.84bn), with Veeam becoming a US-based company with a US leadership team.

Veeam focuses on what it describes as a ‘single platform for cloud, virtual and physical’; integrating cloud backup and disaster recovery, orchestration, mobility, monitoring and analytics. The company has found leadership roles in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for data centre backup and recovery solutions on three occasions, with Insight Partners boasting Veeam as ‘the clear market leader’, with more than $1 billion claimed in annual sales and more than 365,000 global customers.

William H. Largent, previously executive vice president operations, is promoted to CEO as part of the acquisition. “Veeam has enjoyed rapid global growth over the last decade and we see tremendous opportunity for future growth, particularly in the US market,” said Largent in a statement. “Veeam has one of the highest calibre global workforces of any technology company, and we believe this acquisition will allow us to scale our team and technology at an unrivalled pace.”

The comment around US expansion is an interesting one, as many will recognise Veeam as a European stronghold offering differentiation through choice and simplicity – and partnering with US companies to help them cross the chasm for European customers. CloudTech spoke with David Friend, CEO of storage provider Wasabi Technologies, in August as the company was in Europe having just announced partnership agreements. Veeam was one of the first partners.

It has been a busy – and expensive – week for Insight. Earlier the company confirmed it was buying Armis for $1.1bn in what was claimed as the largest enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) cybersecurity transaction.

“Veeam’s platform is the most advanced and complete data management solution available to businesses requiring a seamless blend of data backup and recovery, data protection, data security and data availability,” said Insight Partners managing director Mike Triplett in a statement. “We are committed to supporting Veeam’s next phase of leadership and growth in the United States, continued market-share leadership position in EMEA and continued global expansion.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2020.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

“I’m someone who always has to speak up if there is any injustice,” says Ela Osterberger, director of data science at Deliveroo. “As soon as I see something not being quite right, I have to speak about it.”

Being an experienced data science leader, with Omnicom and The Guardian among others before Deliveroo, means Osterberger has seen her fair share of it over the years. Presenting her Master’s thesis, for instance, it struck Osterberger that she was the only woman in the room. She has also noted fighting against a culture where ‘men solve problems.’

The path to a senior role at a name brand well-known for its tech expertise – as far back as 2017 the company said its ethos had been based entirely on data efficiency – was one not known when Osterberger received her Master’s. Naturally, data science was not an industry in its own right, with business and data analysts in vogue. Yet that was by no means the starting point.

I had to study coding at home secretly so no-one would judge me – and it turned out I’m actually quite good at it

“I always liked mathematics but I couldn’t see myself having a career in it,” Osterberger tells CloudTech. “I think that’s because the way I identified economics – I was interested in the more political and social aspect – but only then did I realise how passionate I was about statistics.” One element for Osterberger, however, stood in her favour. “I didn’t ever care about fitting in,” she says. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was studying for, but I guess I just kept doing the things that I loved which I think really helped me in my career.”

As is becoming increasingly apparent, a maths degree can open doors to virtually any industry. The need for data, and the ability to crunch it and gain insights, is a universal language. Deliveroo has one of the largest groups of data scientists in the UK at around 100, and as of last month was still accepting applications.

The primary languages for success in data science – R, Python, SQL – are also important to the projects Deliveroo is undertaking. But to really impress Osterberger, you have to be made of the right stuff.

“One of the things that is really important is behaviour and cultural fit,” says Osterberger. “For a company that’s growing so quickly, it’s really important to hire people who keep the team culture healthy. Right now, one of the things I’m proudest of is [that] the team is so humble. Everyone is sharing with each other, and people constantly develop each other because they work together.”

Deliveroo’s data scientists are grouped into different areas of the organisation. Some work on market development and strategic initiatives, while there are approximately 25 product teams. It is worth noting the three key stakeholders in Deliveroo’s business; the restaurant, the rider, and the customer. The company has distinct teams which work to improve the experience and efficiency for all three.

Osterberger’s role is now entirely focused on the management side, compared to a more hands-on focus when she started in 2017. This is arguably down to both the expansion and Osterberger’s management style. “I focus a lot on the team and culture,” she says. “I try to hire really brilliant people, from all over the world, and provide them with what they need to be as successful as they can be. I give feedback on their work, make the right conversations happen, introduce them to other people in the company they should talk to, and make sure they have all the skills they need.”

This is translated in hiring more women in data science roles and trying to achieve equality; Osterberger estimates recent hires to be at approximately 50/50. “We’re definitely getting a lot better at attracting women now than we have been,” she notes. “It’s not for the lack of trying – but something actually seems to be changing now.”

The change is highlighted by events such as Women in Data, which ran its latest iteration in London in November. In collaboration with online retailer NBrown, the event saw the publishing of its latest list of 20 inspiring women across the entire data landscape – in which Osterberger placed. Event co-founder Rachel Keane said Osterberger was "another fine ambassador who will be a visible example to inspire women at all stages of their careers."

The event itself was ‘amazing’, Osterberger added. “The energy was amazing and seeing so many women now going into data science and analytics really fills me with hope,” she said. “I think they’re really going to change the industry for the better.”

One of the things I’m proudest of is the data science team is so humble. People constantly develop each other because they are working together

In October, CloudTech spoke with Keane, who noted something of a parallel with getting things up and running. From a recruitment perspective, Keane, and fellow co-founder Roisin McCarthy, found they had placed fewer women for data and analytics roles in 2014 than they had in 2000. This was by no means a negligent act, of course; but both realised that it wasn’t a case of giving women more opportunities, but by helping women maximise the various skills they already have.

Events such as Women in Data are therefore part solidarity and part showing off. Getting greater awareness and more role models in the industry – of which Osterberger is undoubtedly one – will create a snowball effect that will hopefully in the coming years be impossible to stop.

Yet for all the injustice which continues to pervade for women in STEM, moving out of one’s comfort zone will help move things faster. “I think just being really brave and saying yes to opportunities is really important,” says Osterberger. “I remember at university I tried not to take the coding classes because I thought I couldn’t do it, I might fail.

“I had to start studying coding at home secretly, so no-one would judge me – and it turned out I’m actually quite good at it.”

Picture credit: Women in Data/NBrown

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

The dawn of a new decade represents a good opportunity for a more rounded assessment of cloud computing to take place – and according to industry analyst Synergy Research, the ‘remarkable transformation’ has seen the enterprise data centre hit hardest.

Synergy has kicked off 2020 with a couple of notes looking back at wider enterprise IT spending, as well as the impact of SaaS revenues. As the decade began (below) spending on cloud infrastructure services barely moved the needle; but as data centre hardware and software spend plateaued in the middle half of the decade – only seeing an increase in 2018 – last year’s projections revealed that cloud spending had finally overtaken on-prem.

Over the whole decade, Synergy noted, average annual spending growth for the data centre was 4% – and even the majority of this was due to the first three years of growth. For cloud services, the figure was 56% across the whole decade.

When it came to SaaS revenues, it has been a similar story: annual revenues are now north of $100 million at a growth rate of 39% per year. This compares with a growth in perpetual license software of just 4% per year. Microsoft, the ‘very clear software market leader’ throughout the decade as Synergy puts it, has seen its total software revenues double and SaaS revenue grow from zero to more than $20 million across the decade.

The usual suspects have seen significant growth in terms of organisations moving to SaaS-based models, from customer resource management (CRM) to human capital management (HCM). Yet enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one area which is still somewhat underrepresented, Synergy argues.

As John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, puts it, the emergence of various huge SaaS platforms around enterprise collaboration, from Workday, to Zendesk, to Cloudera, forced the hand of traditional software vendors to push SaaS more strongly.

Analysis

For those who have been involved in the industry over the past decade, the above is by no means new information. Yet it is certainly interesting – and more than a little fun – to look back and assess various growth points and predictions.

At the beginning of the decade SaaS, powered by the explosive growth of Salesforce, was clearly the poster child for cloud computing use cases. Looking at a Gartner market trends report from 2012 focusing on SaaS, as this publication reported at the time, many of their prognostications rang true. Gartner predicted that SaaS-based CRM would grow at three times the rate of on-premise applications, while noting that SaaS-based ERP would take a tougher route to cannibalisation. Each analyst report around the time put SaaS in the biggest bucket, followed by IaaS and then, much lower down, PaaS.

Infrastructure services naturally took a lot longer to earn trust among enterprises and other large organisations. Ovum’s 2013 Trends to Watch report around private and public clouds correctly identified Microsoft and Google as the key pretenders to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) crown. Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for IaaS had two leaders; AWS and CSC. The latter merged with HP Enterprise Services in 2017, before Microsoft moved into the leaders’ zone in 2014 and the status quo remained for three years before Google joined the party.

The conversations around public versus private in the first half of the decade were legion. Indeed, exploring an emerging technology, assessing what can be done where and the security concerns are cyclical – take blockchain as a more recent example. Industries with particularly sensitive data concerns were naturally reluctant to move to different infrastructure. It was around the 2013 mark that the first real shoots of hybrid cloud were seen among organisations. A Rackspace study in August of that year found three in five enterprise respondents saw hybrid as the future, with the company affirming that hybrid was ‘enterprise ready’ for CIOs.

As the decade ticked over into its second half, the benefits of multi-cloud became more clearly defined. Assuaging vendor lock-in was one thing, but as the complexity of workloads increased, so did understanding. Some providers will be more efficient than others depending on your organisation’s data needs, be that around backup and disaster recovery, or analytics and insights. As Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE, told this publication just earlier this week, her company’s strategy is to look upon this as a moveable feast.

Ultimately, the maturation and saturation in the cloud software and infrastructure markets in particular – platform may still have a little way to go, although Kubernetes has had an exceptionally strong 24 months – have seen the next wave of cloud services move in. It is all underpinned by data; K8s and containers are a part of that, but so are blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies. The quality and quantity of organisations citing machine learning capability as the primary reason to move mostly or all-in on a hyperscaler – Formula 1, Sainsbury’s and Walt Disney Studios just to name three recent examples – proves that companies are comfortable in the cloud, and want to see what’s next.

It can therefore be seen as a chicken and egg question: to what extent has the past decade been about natural technological advances, and how much has been through vendor strategy? Ultimately, and at risk of this being a cop-out, the answer is a bit of both.

Dinsdale cited ‘dramatic improvements’ in hosting and computational capabilities, leading to increasingly sophisticated enterprise applications and myriad ways of crunching, processing and analysing data both in terms of software and infrastructure. Yet much in the same way that studies show being in a plane is safer than being in a car, enterprises have understood this comparing cloud with on-prem. Breaches still happen, but as this publication has frequently reported, they are often self-inflicted. A lot of hard yards have gone into this from the vendor point of view – and expect this gap to gradually lessen over time.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.