Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been the first of the major cloud vendors to announce per-second billing, but Google has become the first to implement it.

The company announced yesterday that customers of Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment virtual machines (VMs) will move to the new system, applicable to all VMs.

Google’s change was made effective as of September 26, while AWS customers will have to wait until October 2 for their move. Google customers need to purchase for a minimum of one minute before the per-second billing kicks in.

“In most cases, the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small – we estimate it as a fraction of a percent,” Paul Nash, group product manager for Compute Engine wrote. “On the other hand, changing from per-hour billing to per-minute billing makes a big difference for applications (especially website, mobile apps and data processing jobs) that get traffic spikes.

“The ability to scale up and down quickly could come at a significant cost if you had to pay for those machines for the full hour when you only needed them for a few minutes,” Nash added.

As this publication noted when AWS made its move, another strong pull factor towards per-second billing is the rise of serverless computing, where code may not run for more than a few seconds.

Nash theorised that if the average business’ VM lifetime was rounded up by 30 seconds due to per minute billing, then at 2,600 vCPUs, you would save…99 cents per day. For per hour billing, naturally, it goes up to more than $100.

Either way, the customer does get greater control. “As you can see, the value of increased billing precision is mostly in per-minute,” wrote Nash. “This is probably why we haven’t heard many customers asking for per-second. But we don’t want to make you choose between your morning coffee and your core hours, so we’re pleased to bring per-second billing to your VMs.”

Nash added that Google had been using per-second billing for persistent disks since 2013, and for committed use discounts and GPUs since their introduction. The Google Cloud Platform has duly been updated with per-second billing, under the tagline “you pay per-second, which is how a cloud should work.” Previously, it was “you pay per-minute, not per hour, which is how a cloud should work.”

You can read the full blog post here.

Google Cloud has beefed up its identity and access management game with the acquisition of Bitium, a Santa Monica-based firm.

Bitium, founded in 2012, offers a variety of identity management features, including secure access, user provisioning and deprovisioning, app management and single sign on.

In a short blog post confirming the news, Karthik Lakshminarayanan, director of product management for G Suite and Cloud Identity, said the move will help mitigate customers’ risks around managing and securing cloud applications.

“Our enterprise customers want a comprehensive solution for identity and access management and SSO that works across their modern cloud and mobile environments,” wrote Lakshminarayanan. “Bitium helps us deliver a broad portfolio of app integrations for provisioning and SSO that complements our best in class device management capabilities in the enterprise.

“As we add Bitium’s capabilities, we’ll continue to work closely with our vibrant ecosystem of identity partners so that customers are able to choose the best solutions to meet their needs,” he added.

From Bitium’s side, a note from the two founders, CEO Scott Kriz and CTO Erik Gustavson, thanked their investors and explained the move. “When we started Bitium, our goal was to change how people and companies work by fundamentally changing the way they interact with software, starting with single sign-on and identity access management,” the note read. “Joining the team at Google Cloud allows us to continue along this path and accelerate these efforts.

“The Google Cloud team shares our vision for improving the way companies use software, enabling them to innovate faster.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Three quarters of organisations would be willing to pay a premium to enhance their cloud services, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

In the latest from its Voice of the Enterprise series – this time around organisational dynamics in hosting and cloud managed services – the research firm found that companies were most likely to pay more for security guarantees than anything else.

Just under half (48.7%) of those polled said they would pay to enhance their security, ahead of guaranteed uptime and performance metrics (43.3%), enhanced customer service (33.6%), and operational management (26.4%). Yet when it came to how much organisations were prepared to pay, customer service came out on top, ahead of security, uptime and operational management respectively.

The research also found gaps between current offerings and customer expectations. More than half (58.1%) of the 600 IT professionals polled said they see managed services, or security services, bundled in with infrastructure or applications as important to them, yet only two in five (38.8%) say their current vendors offer this capability to a satisfactory level. Only one in five said their vendors meet their expectation when it comes to migrating workloads to and from data centres.

“We frequently talk about pricing competition in cloud infrastructure and applications, which leaves many service providers wondering how they can differentiate themselves,” said Liam Eagle, study author and research manager at 451. “The good news is that many customers tell us they’re evaluating vendors on value, rather than cost. That value can reside in services like guaranteed levels of performance, security and support.”

This is the latest in the company’s missives around cloud and hosted services and strategy. Last month, 451 argued the majority of IT managers were examining a mix of on- and off-premises computing resources in their organisations, rather than “blindly following the pack” to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) et al. Two thirds of respondents said they found recruiting for roles across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure difficult.

Born in the cloud services may be one thing – but what are the key aspects to look out for when migrating existing applications to the cloud? According to a new whitepaper from IDC, security, privacy, and compliance regulations came out on top for organisations.

The study, ‘Critical Application and Business KPIs for Successful Cloud Migration’, polled 600 enterprises and was conducted alongside application performance management provider AppDynamics. Naturally, the paper exists to point readers in the direction of the company’s platform in helping with cloud migration – but the statistics are interesting to note.

46% of respondents said they had already migrated some custom developed, browser-based applications from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud. The numbers go steadily down after that, with email and collaboration apps (42%), mainframe applications (39%), and ERP/CRM (39%).

Two thirds (65%) said security was the primary reason for migrating existing apps to the cloud, ahead of infrastructure scalability impact (57%), app performance impact (56%), total cost of development (53%) and business agility impact (52%).

Benefits, on the technical side, included reduced IT operations and infrastructure costs, cited by 55% of respondents, and on the business side saving costs for IT and development (60%). Again, greater security was cited as a primary business benefit, alongside improved employee productivity and customer experience, while other technical benefits included greater app performance, speed of app deployments, and reduced outages and security events.

This purported cost benefit appears to be working, but with a caveat, as John Rakowski, Appdynamics director of product marketing points out. “While the survey suggests that these expectations are often met, it’s important to note that this requires modernisation of application architectures, supporting technology, people, and processes,” Rakowski wrote.

As a result, containers are increasingly playing a role in successful cloud migration, Rakowski added. When it came to the role container technologies played in organisations’ strategies, only 4% said they were not currently considering their use, and more than two thirds said they were either actively planning to implement them, or containerising new and existing applications.

IDC estimates approximately 60% of enterprises worldwide currently match the profile of organisations included in the survey – the remaining 40% were less mature, in other words only limited cloud use to development or not using cloud at all.

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

Microsoft has announced the launch of availability zones in Azure, giving customers more options if a localised data centre fault occurs – and catching up with its competitors in the process.

The move puts Microsoft alongside the likes of Amazon, Google, and Oracle in giving extra resiliency to customers with fault-tolerant locations within a data centre region. As an example, while Microsoft claims to have the most regions out of any major cloud provider – 36 regions, with six additional being announced – Amazon Web Services (AWS) has only 16 regions, with six more on the way, but 44 availability zones.

“Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking,” wrote Tom Keane, head of global infrastructure at Microsoft Azure, in a blog post. “Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to data centre failures.”

The zones are being trialled in two regions, East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to expand to additional regions in the US, Europe and Asia by the end of the year. The planned expansion includes a new data centre in Paris, first announced in October last year.

Alongside this, Microsoft announced it had completed the construction of its transatlantic subsea cable, aiming to give increased speed and lower latency.

The cable, called Marea, is a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius, the telecommunications infrastructure arm of Telefonica.  Keane said it will “help support the growing demand for high speed, reliable connections to the US and Europe, including our newest Azure regions coming to France, and beyond.”

AWS is no stranger to this sort of investment either, with the company purchasing capacity on an upcoming cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to the US. Among the six new regions on the way for AWS customers is Bahrain, also announced today, with plans to open – with three availability zones at launch – by early 2019.

“Some of the most gratifying parts of operating AWS over the last 11 years have been helping thousands of new companies get started, empowering large enterprises to reinvent their customer experiences, and allowing governments and academic institutions to innovate for citizens again,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO. “We look forward to making this happen across the Middle East.”

Database provider MongoDB has filed to go public, confirming reports from a month previously and potentially becoming the third major cloud IPO of 2017 after Okta and Cloudera.

The SEC filing, available to view here, shows MongoDB made $101.4 million in total revenues in the year ending January 31 2017, up 55% from the previous year’s $65.3m, which was up 37% from 2014-15’s $40.8m. Despite total gross profit of $71.4m, total operating expenses of $157.4m puts an overall net loss at $86.7m.

The company’s level of funding sits at more than $300m over six funding rounds – not including two undisclosed ventures – with its valuation sitting at $1.2 billion in 2013.

Continued losses are of course nothing new in this space, yet citing IDC figures of $61.3bn for the global database market, MongoDB cites a ‘highly differentiated business model that combines the developer mindshare and adoption benefits of open source with the economic benefits of a proprietary software subscription business model’ as a primary reason to take the market.

The company’s freemium product, Community Server, has been downloaded more than 30 million times in eight years with a third of that coming in the past 12 months, while 90% of MongoDB’s total revenue comes through subscriptions.

MongoDB cites legacy relationship database software providers – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle ‘and other similar companies’ are in the document – as competitors, as well as non-relational database providers and cloud providers, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure cited.

No non-relational database providers were named in the SEC; however it appears MongoDB has beaten Couchbase to the punch for going public for now. In March last year, the Mountain View firm secured a $30 million series F funding round, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this reporter it would give the company a ‘runway we need to have what we think will be a very successful IPO in the not too distant future.’

Fast forward 15 months, however, and Wiederhold has stepped aside from the CEO chair – although remaining executive chairman – to be replaced by former Veritas president Matt Cain, with no word of a public offering forthcoming.

Okta and Cloudera, who filed within weeks of each other earlier this year, set out solid financial results in their first quarter as public companies. Okta saw total revenues of $61m in the quarter, an increase of 62.9% year on year, while Cloudera hit $89.8m, up 39% from the year before.

A quarter of IT firms in Europe are already operating tiered applications across on-premise and off-premise environments; yet only a few companies have long term strategies in place, according to the latest note from IDC.

The study, which polled more than 800 IT and line of business decision makers in 11 European countries, found that while 31% prefer to hook up their systems to apps on a public cloud with back-end systems on-premise, 8% went for ‘bursting’ capacity into off-premise. 40% of respondents segregated on- and off-premise environments, with 20% not venturing into public cloud at all.

Only one in five line of business respondents said they would find standardising on one or two infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS) vendors acceptable, a number which goes up to one in three for the IT side.

IDC cited companies such as ING Bank and Siemens whose model purports to consume cloud content from several locations, as well as the ‘challenges’ this presents to CIOs. The analyst firm cited a multi-cloud strategy “based on hiring staff with negotiation skills, expanding investments in automation software, and revising cross-country connectivity options” as a result.

“Connecting cloud environments with ad hoc bridges in a hybrid fashion won’t be enough in 2018… nor will standardising on one external provider, at least for large or innovative companies,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC’s European infrastructure group research director. “Developers and line of business require ‘best of breed’, and the purchasing department wants to avoid being locked in.”

The growing need for multi-cloud was covered by this publication earlier this week, when Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Skytap, mentioned it in the context of how the wider war around the cloud – not so much a two-horse race between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft – had not started yet. “CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” he told CloudTech.

Another day, another research study which reveals the benefits of the public cloud tinged with security concerns.

This time, a report from Barracuda Networks has shown that while respondents – 300 IT decision makers from companies across the US – expect the percentage of their infrastructure in the public cloud to almost double in five years, three quarters (74%) say security concerns restrict their organisations’ migration.

Yet perhaps the most worrying aspect of the research was around confusion with regard to the shared responsibility model of cloud computing. More than three quarters (77%) of those polled say public cloud providers are responsible for securing customer data in the cloud, while 68% believed vendors are responsible for securing customer applications as well.

This is not the first time this publication – or indeed, Barracuda – has noted the disparity. Back in July, a report from the company found similar misgivings. It’s worth repeating again what Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two leading companies in the space, have to say on it.

AWS describes the relationship between vendor and customer as being responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud – compute, storage, networking, and so forth – and ‘in’ the cloud, such as customer data, applications, and identity and access management, respectively. For Microsoft, it’s a question of differentiating between software, infrastructure, and platform as a service. SaaS has more responsibility for the provider, going down through PaaS, IaaS and eventually on-prem which is of course entirely the customer’s responsibility – but with data classification always the responsibility of the user.

Here, the issues do not appear to have changed, with Barracuda making a series of recommendations to organisations. First, partner with third-party security vendors who support a wide range of ecosystems for a multi-cloud scenario – a situation Skytap, who this publication recently featured, affirmed – as well as look for vendors that provide a common management scheme. Naturally, Barracuda is adept at each of these scenarios.

“This survey confirms what we are hearing from customers and partners – security remains a key concern for organisations evaluating public cloud, and there’s confusion over where their part of the shared responsibility model begins and ends,” said Tim Jefferson, Barracuda vice president public cloud in a statement.

“Many organisations realise that cloud deployments can be inherently more secure than on-premises deployments because cloud providers are collectively investing more into security controls than they could on their own,” added Jefferson. “However, the organisations benefiting most from public cloud are those that understand that their public cloud provider is not responsible for securing data or applications and are augmenting security with support from third-party vendors.”

Two in three UK IT decision makers polled in a new study say their organisation is losing out on revenue as they lack specific cloud expertise.

The report, put together by Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found 67% of the latter believed they could bring greater innovation to their organisation with the ‘right cloud insight’. 85% said greater expertise within their organisation would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.

Almost half (46%) of IT decision makers say they find it hard to recruit the best talent to manage their organisation’s clouds, with migration project management, native cloud app development, and cloud security among the skills companies are struggling with to hire. Similarly, competition for talent, an inability to offer competitive salaries, and difficulties in providing sufficient career progression and training were also cited as barriers to recruitment.

With this in mind, almost three quarters (72%) of respondents said they were looking to increase their firm’s cloud usage in the coming five years. The research evidently denotes a friction point; 84% of IT decision makers said it took ‘a number of weeks or more’ to train new hires, with 37% opting for ‘months’.

Will Venters, assistant professor of information systems at LSE, said cloud technology had been a ‘victim of its own success’. “As the technology has become ubiquitous among large organisations – and helped them to wrestle back control of sprawling physical IT estates – it has also opened up a huge number of development and innovation opportunities.

“However, to fully realise these opportunities, organisations need to not only have the right expertise in place now, but also have a cloud skills development strategy to ensure they are constantly evolving their IT workforce and training procedures in parallel with the constantly evolving demands of cloud.

“Failure to do so will severely impede the future aspirations of businesses in an increasingly competitive digital market.”

According to Firebrand Training, an IT training and project management course provider, the top five cloud skills organisations – and employees – need to get on board for this year include database and big data, application security, and containers.

The Rackspace research polled executives from the UK, US, Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.

Oracle OpenWorld may still be a couple of weeks away, but Larry Ellison gave a glimpse of what to expect in San Francisco with the announcement of new licensing and pricing structures – promising to beat Amazon by at least 50% on cost.

Ellison, Oracle’s CTO, took to the stage to not only discuss the new structures, but reaffirm the company’s strategy, as well as its next generation, fully autonomous database, to be fully unveiled at OpenWorld.

One of the new models is ‘universal credits’ (below), which provides Oracle customers “the industry’s most flexible buying and consumption model for cloud services”, as the company itself puts it. In other words, you give Oracle what you want to spend without having to explicitly say where it’s going, whether it’s the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or which data centre you will be using. “You don’t have to in advance figure out what you’re going to buy,” Ellison told attendees. “The contract is incredibly simple.”

Also announced was a ‘bring your own license’ (BYOL) model which enables Oracle customers to reuse their existing software licenses for Oracle’s PaaS. Customers who have existing on-premises licenses can leverage their investment to move to Oracle’s cloud options at ‘a fraction of the old PaaS price’, the company added.

All this is put alongside the much-vaunted database to shape Oracle’s cloud strategy. The database was previously referenced during the company’s most recent financial results last week, whereby Ellison told analysts the new Oracle will be a “totally automated self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database.”

The elimination of human labour – and the mistakes human make – was a theme the Oracle CTO kept returning to. “Human error can have devastating consequences,” he explained, referencing the Equifax data breach as a recent example. Another theme was around explaining what Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn’t do; whence during the financial results announcement only occasional sideswipes were made at AWS, this time around pretty much the entire half hour presentation was built upon it.

Ellison said it will be ‘guaranteed’ in Oracle’s SLAs going forward that, firstly, the price will be half that of Amazon’s, and, secondly, the uptime on the new autonomous database will be 99.995%, or only 30 minutes of – planned – downtime.

“There’s nothing close in the cloud industry,” said Ellison. “There’s nothing remotely close. Our approach to the cloud business is to lower your costs and lower your risks by fully automating all sorts of platform services completely, with completely autonomous software that runs itself, eliminates the cost of human error, and eliminates the opportunity for human error.

“This is very different to what Amazon is trying to do,” he added. “They’re not even working on this.”

You can view the full presentation here.

Picture credits: Oracle