Four in five respondents say cloud adoption in their organisations will not be put off by high profile cyber-attacks, according to a new study from software and IT services provider Advanced.

The survey, which polled more than 500 senior executives in UK organisations and was conducted through Techmarketview, found that the majority of firms said they were concerned about security and data protection in the cloud, with 82% and 68% responding respectively, yet prefer to carry on with their migration plans.

Despite this, more than three quarters (76%) of those polled said governments should do more to protect businesses and customers from cyber threats, while a larger number (82%) said cloud providers need to step up to build confidence among those looking to adopt a digital transformation strategy.

The inspiration for the survey appears to have been taken from two sources; the recent WannaCry attack which took down the NHS – and appears to be wreaking havoc elsewhere – as well as the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation. As the report’s introduction puts it, “cloud has become an essential ingredient in the digital era, despite adversity from new cyber-attacks and data legislation.”

One in three respondents said they were ‘experienced’ in the cloud, while only 27% of organisations said they used cloud-based financial management systems. These figures show there is still some way to go, and the report again intimates it’s on the industry’s head to get it right.

“As an industry and profession, we all need to proactively give clear guidance on security responsibilities and support organisations in being better protected, ensuring devices and applications are properly patched and secured,” said Jon Wrennall, CTO at Advanced.

“There’s still a job to be done in creating trust in the cloud and helping customers use the cloud in the right way for the digital transformation that’s right for them,” he added. “Our survey shows most organisations want financially stable providers and prefer those that store data locally and offer local support.

“This will become even more pertinent as Britain leaves the European Union – they will trust the providers that offer certainty in an uncertain market and those with a vested interest in the UK and the cloud.”

Elsewhere, a study from storage provider Nexsan has revealed that almost half (48%) of 100 survey respondents were unaware of what GDPR was and what it meant to their organisation.

More than two thirds of businesses plan to increase their cloud computing spending in 2017, according to a new report from B2B research provider Clutch.

The report, which polled 283 IT professionals at businesses across the United States, also found that for almost half (47%) of organisations, increased cost is a key challenge with their cloud provider.

48% of those polled said they expect to increase their cloud computing spend by 11%-30% this year, compared to 14% of respondents for a 31-50% increase. 23% said they expect their spending to remain approximately flat.

“Cloud is the new normal,” said Jeremy Przygode, CEO of managed service provider Stratalux. “When businesses need to evaluate new solutions, or need to do a hardware refresh on existing solutions… cloud is the go-to solution to figure out how to do that.”

45% of respondents said security was the biggest benefit of using the cloud, ahead of increased efficiency (41%), more data space (40%), flexibility (33%) and scalability (28%).

Przygode argues the transition towards public cloud is an ‘inevitability’. “I believe that all roads lead to public cloud eventually,” he said. “Different companies have different pathways to it.

“Some are going directly to public cloud; others are trying to build a private cloud first because they still want to retain control. But ultimately I believe that over time they will eventually become public cloud customers as well.”

Only 37% of respondents said they are using a public cloud today, compared with 68% for private cloud, and 47% for hybrid cloud. Kevin Rubin, president and COO of Stratosphere Networks, explained: “When you go with a hybrid solution, you have to make sure as a company it’s engineered properly to gain access to it.

“It’s a little bit more challenging – but customising your cloud experience allows [a business] to leverage different toolsets that are truly drilled down to their department, their individuals, and how they do business.”

You can read the full report here.

RingCentral leads the way for the cloud business communications market with the overall landscape growing at a considerable clip, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The market is growing at an annualised rate of 23% driven by strong adoption of unified communications as a service (UCaaS), according to the research. The total cloud communication market is generating revenues in excess of $2 billion (£1.58bn) per year.

Synergy puts the market into three buckets; UCaaS retail being demonstrably the largest, followed by cloud comms and UCaaS wholesale. However, the later has a much quicker growth rate.

For RingCentral, presence as a market leader in both the former and latter are a boon – and the company pushed out an agreeable blog from CEO Vlad Shmunis with regard to the news.

“As we look ahead, we are excited about the market opportunity for cloud communications as enterprise customers empower their global and distributed workforce to work anywhere, any time, and on any device,” Shmunis wrote. “This market transition will fuel our growth to $1bn by 2020.”

“UCaaS continues to be a force for change within the business communications market,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research founder and chief analyst. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past and consequently we are seeing continued erosion of on-premises PBX-based systems. Clearly these trends will continue over the next few years.”

Other leading players in the market include 8×8, Mitel, and ShoreTel, Synergy added. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, released in August last year, 8×8, BT, Fuze, RingCentral, and West Unified Communications found a place in the winner’s enclosure.

Rackspace has confirmed it has completed the acquisition of TriCore Solutions, a managed application and infrastructure provider.

The move was first announced in May, at a similar time to the San Antonio-based managed cloud provider announcing Joe Eazor, formerly of EarthLink, as the company’s new CEO. Mark Clayman, CEO of TriCore, will head up the newly created enterprise applications division at Rackspace, reporting directly to president Jeff Cotten.

“We acquired TriCore in response to customer demand,” said Matt Bradley, Rackspace vice president of strategy and corporate development. “Customers want a managed application expert to deliver a high quality service experience at a lower total cost for these complex applications and TriCore has been doing this for nearly two decades – they’ve done an incredible job and now our customers will be able to benefit from their experiences.”

Rackspace was recently named as a niche player in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service, alongside companies including Virtustream, CenturyLink, and Fujitsu. Yet as David Linthicum pointed out in an InfoWorld article, Rackspace’s position as a managed services ‘enabler’, for clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, sets them apart from the competition in that particular square, which he describes as ‘niche IaaS providers to enterprises.’

In its analysis, Gartner praised Rackspace’s ‘evolution’ from OpenStack-based public cloud IaaS to its roots in managed services, making it “well-positioned to deliver hybrid and multi-cloud solutions”, but noting public cloud IaaS customers may expect more of its offerings.

The completed acquisition of TriCore, alongside the continued recognition from Gartner, will augur well as Eazor settles down in the CEO role. “Let me emphasise how excited I am by the huge market opportunity that Rackspace has in front of it, as companies move out of their corporate data centres and into multiple clouds,” he wrote in an introductory blog last month. “Rackspace is uniquely well positioned to take advantage of this trend, as the only provider who can deliver expertise and exceptional customer service for all of the leading public and private clouds, along with managed hosting.”

Eazor officially started work at Rackspace on June 12. But whither previous CEO Taylor Rhodes? Rhodes did not have a long period away from the hot seat – he has since become chief executive of SMS Assist, a multisite property management provider.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

In the race to move to hybrid cloud, enterprises are looking at containers to increase efficiency and developer productivity, according to a new study.

Of the more than 200 enterprise IT decision makers polled by CoreOS and 451 Research, their usage of containers was relatively even across the board. A quarter (24%) said they had a broad implementation of production applications, while 17% said they were still as the discovery and evaluation stage.

When it came to the drivers of container usage, greater efficiency (33%) and hybrid cloud and cross-cloud integration (32%) were the most frequently cited. The most popular benefit was developer productivity, cited by 30% of respondents, just ahead of efficiency (29%), but these numbers not surprisingly swung for DevOps (55% developer productivity) and infrastructure (37% efficiency) workers respectively.

Docker Swarm was cited as the most popular orchestration platform overall (36%), ahead of report sponsors CoreOS (27%), Kubernetes (22%) and Mesos (14%). For the largest organisations – those with 5,000 or more employees – Kubernetes saw a rise to 27%, with CoreOS going down to 19%.

The report also found that twice as many IT operations workers were identified as the primary users of containers – in other words, not developers – while a similar trend occurred with purchasing, albeit noting a ‘growing developer influence’ on this area.

“Organisations are looking for ways to create a consistent developer deployment model across on-premises and hybrid clouds,” said Jay Lyman, principal analyst at 451 Research in a statement. “The need to empower developers, the push to realise the benefits of public clouds and need to support mission critical on-premise applications have created multiple computing environments within the enterprise.

“In order to manage this increasingly chaotic IT infrastructure and avoid the mistakes of the past, organisations are turning to container software to deliver a single platform for application deployment across clouds and operationalised efficiency across the organisation,” Lyman added.

According to a report from NetEnrich last July surveying 200 IT professionals, two thirds of respondents described learning the likes of Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos as ‘moderately challenging’. CoreOS was the most popular main container technology cited by 33%, ahead of Kubernetes (32%), Docker (25%) and Joyent (11%).

As a result, it can be assumed that the technology’s usage is proliferating, if a major player has not quite burst through yet. 451 Research concludes that “given these survey results and the strong, growing production use not only of containers, but also container management and orchestration software at this early stage of the market, we expect the container market’s momentum to continue through 2017.”

Gartner has released its latest Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure and a service (IaaS) – and while Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft will continue to get the plaudits, the real story is to be found nearer the bottom left.

As per 2016, AWS and Microsoft are the only two companies in the ‘leaders’ zone, with Google pushing hard in the ‘visionaries’ side, with Microsoft moving closer to AWS in terms of completeness of vision year over year.

Yet while there were only 10 vendors in the 2016 analysis – with this publication noting a more mature market as a result – 14 companies appear this year. New players, and some old faces, appearing in this edition include Interoute, Joyent – acquired by Samsung in August – and Skytap in the ‘niche players’ section, as well as Alibaba Cloud moving straight into the ‘visionaries’ section, alongside the likes of IBM and Oracle.

Naturally, AWS and Microsoft noted their delight at their continued performance in Gartner’s analysis. “Every product planning session at AWS revolves around customers – we do our best to listen and to learn, and to use what we hear to build the roadmaps for future development,” said Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist in a blog post. “I strongly believe that this customer-driven innovation has helped us to secure the top right corner of the Leaders quadrant for the seventh consecutive year.”

Barr said that 90% of the company’s roadmap was through customer requests, while Microsoft noted that more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use its cloud services, adding that it was a leader in no less than 13 Gartner MQs. “We strongly believe that the momentum we’re seeing has been possible because of what Azure offers and stands for – a comprehensive and secure cloud platform across IaaS and PaaS, unparalleled integration with Office 365, unique hybrid experience with Azure Stack, first-class support for Linux and open source tooling, and a robust partner ecosystem,” wrote Venkat Gattamneni, Azure director of product marketing.

The cautions for Microsoft were broadly similar to last year – not being as completely enterprise-ready as it could be, with a focus on API enablement – while AWS again had a note of caution sounded out around ease of use as well as the fact it “has just begun to adapt to the emergence of meaningful competitors.”

Alibaba, however, was praised for its potential to ‘become an alternative to the global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions over time’, with Gartner also noting its ‘financial wherewithal’ to continue investing in new regions. The company announced plans to debut in India and Indonesia earlier this month, for example. Its weakness, according to the analysts, is lacking mind share and a ‘limited track record’ outside of China.

Read more: How AWS and Azure’s competition improves public cloud adoption

Gartner has predicted the global cloud-based security services market will hit $5.9 billion this year, saying the segment’s growth will ‘remain strong’.

The analyst firm looked at a variety of segments, with identity and access management (IAM), identity as a service (IDaaS) and user authentication remaining the biggest category. Gartner predicts this area to comprise $2.1bn, or 35.6% of the overall market, this year, going up to $3.42bn, or 38.3% of the overall $8.92bn market by 2020.

Secure email gateway ($702m) and secure web gateway ($707m) were the next largest categories, with the latter expecting to outstrip the former to the tune of almost $100m by 2020. Application security testing, at almost $400m ($397.3m) this year, leads the remaining categories, ahead of security information and event management (SIEM) at $359m and remote vulnerability assessment at $250m. Other cloud-based security services amounted to $1.3bn.

The announcement, which took place during the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit this week, also examined the landscape for businesses of different sizes. SMBs are driving growth as they become more aware of security threats, while enterprises are also on board as they realise the operational benefits derived from a cloud-based security delivery model.

“Cloud-based delivery models will remain a popular choice for security practices, with deployment expanding further to controls, such as cloud-based sandboxing and WAFs (web application firewalls),” said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

“The ability to leverage security controls that are delivered, updated and managed through the cloud – and therefore require less time-consuming and costly implementations and maintenance activities – is of significant value to enterprises,” Contu added.

This complements a report issued by fellow analyst firm Forrester Research earlier this month, which said cloud security spending would hit $3.5 billion by 2021 at a 28% annual growth rate.

More than half of respondents in a survey carried out by managed cloud provider 2nd Watch say at least half of their deployment pipelines are automated, with 63% saying they can deploy new applications in less than six weeks.

The study, which garnered responses from more than 1,000 participants from US companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that companies embracing cloud automation were able to deploy new applications and workloads faster and more frequently.

Alongside the almost two thirds who said deploying new applications took less than six weeks, 44% said deploying new code to production took a day or less, while 54% say they are deploying new code changes at least once a week. A similar number (55%) say they are measuring application quality by testing everything, while two thirds argue at least half of all their quality assessments, such as lint and unit tests, are also automated.

“The survey results reiterate what we’re hearing from clients and prospects: automation, driven by cloud technologies, is critical to the rapid delivery of new workloads and applications,” said Jeff Aden, 2nd Watch co-founder. “Companies are automating everything from artifact creation to deployment pipelines and process, which includes metrics, documentation and data.

“The result is faster time to market for new applications, and less application downtime.”

Earlier this month, a report from Puppet found particular discrepancies between higher and lower performing organisations when it came to automation. Top performing firms automated 72% of all configuration management processes on average, while lower ranked companies spent almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.

Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation continuing its push into the open source space, the latter has announced.

The Redmond giant has joined as a gold member – although their logo is yet to appear on the Foundation’s member list at the time of publication – alongside the likes of Accenture, Google, and Huawei.

Platinum members – Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware – pay $500,000 per annum with a commitment to three years, compared to gold membership which is $100,000 per annum for three years. Yet, as the Foundation’s prospectus document from last year shows, while Microsoft hasn’t gone all in with platinum membership, the company still gets various benefits, as well as the expectation for something in return.

Microsoft gets access to Cloud Foundry’s Global Perception Study, which provides ‘vital information about awareness and adoption of PaaS and Cloud Foundry’, as well as the opportunity to offer an executive candidate for one of two gold seats on the Cloud Foundry board of directors. Gold members are “encouraged to participate in all aspects of the Foundation including code contributions, community development, user education, and Foundation related marketing activities,” the Foundation notes.

“Microsoft and the Cloud Foundry community are deeply aligned around our mutual understanding of enterprise business and technical requirements, and our commitment to help organisations modernise their applications without vendor lock-in,” said Corey Sanders, partner director at Microsoft in a statement.

“By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we will be able to work with members to contribute to Foundation initiatives and bring a wider range of solutions to Microsoft Azure for our customers and the community.”

The decision from Microsoft to sign up to the Foundation is just the latest step in the company’s move away from the walled gardens of its past. Last year, the company joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member to ‘better collaborate with the open source community’. It’s a brave new world, and as CEO Satya Nadella explained at BUILD last month: “The opportunity for us as developers to have a broad, deep impact on all parts of society, and all parts of the economy, has never been greater.”

Cloud storage provider Box has announced the launch of Box Drive, a desktop application which aims to match the power of the cloud with the more familiar feel of traditional network drives.

The goal of the product is to ‘make it easier to adopt the cloud without changing the way people work’. “The future of work is working in the cloud,” the company notes. “Box Drive makes moving to the cloud incredibly easy. Users are freed from the constraints of their local hard drives because they have instant access to all their files in the cloud and real-time collaboration is even more simple and intuitive.”

“Box Drive combines infinite access to the cloud with an intuitive, natively integrated desktop experiences that is familiar to hundreds of millions of people today in enterprises all over the world,” said Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box in a statement. “Not only will Box Drive make collaborating on content easier than ever before, it also signals the beginning of the end for expensive network file shares.

“With Box Drive, enterprises can accelerate their move to the cloud, enhance security, and significantly reduce IT costs.”

While not in the same ballpark with regards to technology, this move from Box is reminiscent of Amazon Web Services (AWS), who announced the general availability of Greengrass earlier this month. Greengrass enablers users to perform tasks on premise while leveraging the process, analytics and storage of the AWS cloud.

This differs from Box in that the storage provider is trying to help organisations phase out expensive legacy infrastructure such as traditional network file shares. The company added that estimated cost savings through retiring legacy tech – across industries such as real estate, healthcare, and finance – can be as high as $6 million over three years.

The product is free for all Box users and is available today in public beta. You can find out more here.