Cloud security spending is set to hit $3.5 billion (£2.74bn) by 2021 at a 28% annual growth rate, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

The report, authored by analysts Jennifer Adams and Andras Cser, discusses a variety of trends, from cloud security risk, to traditional security tools.

According to the figures, cloud security gateways will continue to be the primary route of global spending, contributing to $1.6bn – or 45% – of the overall figure by 2021. Native infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will come in to the tune of $1.1bn, while hypervisor security and centralised cloud workload security management are at $0.5bn and $0.3bn respectively.

Financial services represent the larger market for cloud services today and will continue to do so until at least 2021, the report adds. This marks an interesting point – the report rightly points out that the idea of cloud-based services in financial would be ‘controversial’ and ‘radical’ just a few years ago – but the industry is embracing it today to reduce costs and stay competitive. The report also earmarked retail, government, and professional services – such as consultants, law firms, and advertising agencies – as industries to look out for.

Writing in a blog post, Adams noted the upward trends, although warning about the nascence of the market. “While spending on cloud security solutions is relatively small today compared with total spending on security software, its rapid growth is attracting the attention of more traditional security tech vendors,” Adams wrote. “Larger tech vendors are quickly entering and consolidating the space via acquisitions.”

This isn’t the same story for everyone; take for instance Netskope, the acclaimed ‘cloud access security broker’ who announced a $100 million boost in series E funding earlier this month. Yet recent acquisitions in the space, as Adams notes, include Microsoft acquiring Adallom in 2015, as well as Cisco buying CloudLock, and Oracle acquiring Palerra in 2016.

Either way, the trend is inexorable as old school security fails to live up to the task. “Traditional perimeter-based security tools do little to protect cloud workloads, and do it yourself internal solutions can be costly to develop and consume variable in-house IT resources,” the report notes. “We expect most companies to look to commercial off the shelf solutions for their cloud security needs.”

You can find out more and read the full report here (paid).

Alibaba Cloud has announced plans to expand to data centres in India and Indonesia, as well as a connectivity partnership with Tata Communications.

The move to Mumbai and Jakarta goes alongside the recent expansion to Malaysia, with the company saying in press materials it ‘will significantly increase its computing resources in Asia’. The Indonesian data centre will be the first such development from an international cloud company, according to Alibaba, while the expansion will take the Chinese firm’s total number of data centre locations to 17, including China, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Jong, Singapore, the UAE, and US.

“I believe Alibaba Cloud, as the only global cloud services provider originating from Asia, is uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data intelligence and computing capabilities to customers in this region,” said Simon Hu, Alibaba senior vice president and president of Alibaba Cloud in a statement.

“Establishing data centres in India and Indonesia will further strengthen our position in the region and across the globe.”

Elsewhere, Alibaba Cloud and Tata Communications announced a partnership to afford customers from more than 150 countries – citing India in particular – greater connectivity through the companies’ ExpressConnect and IZO Private Connect products respectively.

“We are confident that the partnership between Alibaba Cloud and Tata Communications will assist both of us to become true digital transformation partners for our customers, empowering them to expand to new geographies, boost productivity, safeguard their business against threats, and take customer experience to the next level,” said Genius Wong, Tata president global network cloud and data centre services. “We look forward to offering more global organisations connectivity to Alibaba Cloud and to strengthening our presence in the Chinese market.”

According to the most recent analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) in April last year, Indonesia and India ranked #11 and #12 out of 14 nations respectively, with both countries scoring particularly low on international connectivity (1.8 and 1.7 respectively) and data centre risk (2.7 and 1.9). The report noted India’s ‘clear challenge’ in securing reliable access to cloud services and building the infrastructure for a huge population, while citing the need for Indonesia to implement a ‘coordinated plan to tackle the needs of the digital economy’ for cloud readiness.

Amazon has told customers it will no longer offer an unlimited cloud storage plan – although Prime members will continue to benefit from the service.

In an updated FAQ page, the company confirmed new customers will have the choice of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, with those wishing for more able to go up to 30 TB at an additional $59.99 per terabyte. Any customer who signs up for storage with Amazon will automatically get 5 GB for free.

“Current customers will keep their existing unlimited storage plan through its expiration date,” Amazon explains. “At the end of their existing subscription, customers with auto-renew turned on and 1 TB or less of data stored will be renewed into the 1 TB plan for $59.99 per year.”

This is not the first time a vendor has cut ties on its all you can eat plans. In 2015 Microsoft turned off its unlimited OneDrive option for Office 365 customers, arguing some users took advantage to store ‘entire movie collections and DVR recordings’ with a 75 TB haul in the most extreme cases. “Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users,” the company wrote at the time.

No information of such miscreants on Amazon’s side here, but the move to keep unlimited photo storage – the video production and photography industry was particularly critical of Microsoft’s shutdown in 2015 – is an interesting one. As a TechCrunch report points out, pictures have data which can potentially be extracted through machine learning technologies, making them valuable points for Amazon.

Amazon has been particularly busy of late; the company announced Greengrass, which aims to combine the power of their cloud and on-premise devices, earlier this week, as well as launching the AWS IoT Button, a Wi-Fi device which enables developers to get started with a variety of services without device-specific code, in Europe.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Greengrass, which enables users to perform tasks on premise while leveraging the processing, analytics and storage of AWS’ cloud.

The company added that a variety of customers, including Konecranes, Nokia, and Stanley Black & Decker, are using the product for their Industrial IoT efforts.

As the company puts it, Greengrass extends AWS to devices which can act locally on the data they generate. This explains the Industrial IoT angle; for many industries, such as manufacturing and healthcare, not everything can go into the cloud, nor can new projects be built on brownfield developments.

AWS argues there are three ‘laws’ as to why local data processing is important; the laws of physics – it takes time for data to go to the cloud and networks do not have 100% availability – the laws of economics, sending only high-value data to the cloud, and the law of the land, which takes into account data sovereignty restrictions.

In a blog post Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, outlined the importance of the release. “Before AWS Greengrass, device builders often had to choose between the low latency of local execution, and the flexibility, scale, and ease of the cloud,” he wrote. “AWS Greengrass removes that trade-off – manufacturers and OEMS can now build solutions that use the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage, while keeping critical functionality on-device or nearby.”

“We see AWS Greengrass as the enabler for a new set of digital services, allowing us to program and deliver software to equipment in a secure manner and without risking operational safety,” said Juha Pankakoski, executive vice president of technologies at Konecranes in a statement. “This supports well our aim to build the next generation of lifting as the leading technology company in our industry.”

Elsewhere, at the inaugural GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit, in Bellevue, Washington, software as a service (SaaS) technology business management provider Apptio said that more than three quarters (76%) of its customers were using AWS compared with 52% on Microsoft, with a rise in Azure usage noted. At the same event, as reported by GeekWire, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, said that it was “pretty much Amazon and us in every single engagement” competing for business, although adding the Google, predominantly third in the analyst rankings for cloud infrastructure, was not to be underestimated.

Turbonomic, a Boston-based cloud and virtualisation software provider, has announced new support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments with general availability of its 5.9 iteration.

The company says the move will ‘enable customers to confidently accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud’, with support offerings include visibility of all workloads regardless of where they reside, and lowering of public cloud bills by 30% on average.

Other features include being able to migrate to AWS and Azure public clouds through migration planning, workload placement and workload scaling, controlling public cloud workloads, and enforcing compliance across hybrid environments.

Turbonomic cited a Gartner forecast which argues that by 2020 a quarter of large enterprises will run ‘dynamic optimisation’ solutions to manage the public cloud, compared to less than 1% in 2016.

Gartner defines dynamic optimisation as “a technology capability that uses telemetry, algorithms, service and resource analytics, and policies to drive automated actions that reduce waste, cost and risk exposure, while simultaneously improving service levels.” Naturally, Turbonomic – back in its previous life as VMTurbo – was named as a representative vendor in the analysis, in April last year.

“Transitioning to hybrid cloud presents a new challenge: deciding which workload should run where and when, and confidently managing the transition. It’s a cloud-scale challenge that can only be solved with self-managing software,” said Shmuel Kliger, Turbonomic founder and president in a statement.

“With today’s announcement, Turbonomic is uniquely positioned to help customers monitor and automate their workloads anywhere – on premises and/or in public cloud – in real-time, to unleash the full potential of the public cloud’s elasticity and scale.”

In August, Turbonomic – alongside Verizon – issued research which argued business continuity was the most important business driver of multi-cloud adoption, yet citing cost as the primary differentiator. The company told CloudTech at the time that focusing primarily on cost was “not a recipe for assuring customers are delighted with your service.”

You can find out more here.

A new report from Puppet on the DevOps landscape has found a significant gap in productivity and results between the highest and lowest rating organisations.

The study, put together in conjunction with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and which polled 3,200 respondents across multiple industries and with organisations of all sizes, found the highest performing organisations have automated 72% of all configuration management processes, spending 28% of their time in manual configuration processes. In contrast, lower performers can spend almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.

When it came to lead time for changes – in other words, moving from code commit to code successfully running in production, the highest performers have it down to less than one hour, with the rest managing between one week and one month on average. A big discrepancy there – and it shows again with deployment frequency as well as mean time to recover.

Medium performers, however, were distinguished between the lowest rubric in terms of change failure rate. For high and medium IT performers, the percentage of changes made which subsequently requires remediation is both between 0% and 15% on average, while for low IT performers the number rises to 31%-45%.

The research also examined how leadership affects performance, with high performing outfits sharing leaders with ‘vision’, ‘inspirational communication’, ‘intellectual stimulation’, ‘supportive leadership’, and ‘personal recognition’.

No surprises on the surface there, but the report notes how leadership is not enough to differentiate at the highest level. Teams whose leaders were in the top 10% were not the highest performers as a group, instead displaying varying performance. “Leaders cannot achieve DevOps outcomes on their own,” the report notes. “DevOps success also depends on a suitable architecture, good technical practices, [and] use of lean management principles.”

“The results of the 2017 State of DevOps Report show that high-performing IT teams are deploying more frequently and recovering faster than ever before, yet the automation gap between high and low performing teams continues to grow,” said Nigel Kersten, Puppet chief technical strategist. “The report will help organisations understand how to identify their own inhibitors and embrace change on their DevOps journey.”

“This year’s results clearly demonstrate that DevOps teams are achieving tremendous success by moving towards a culture of shared accountability and trust,” said Cameron Deatsch, head of enterprise growth at Atlassian. “Shifting an organisation’s culture can be difficult and requires the right knowledge, guidance and tools that encourage collaboration and visibility across teams.

“Thousands of customers rely on Atlassian as the foundation of their DevOps practices, providing collaboration across teams, a dedicated marketplace of integrations with leading DevOps tools, and most importantly, accelerating the evolution of their team’s culture.”

Puppet has been busy of late. The company said in May that it had added more than 250 new enterprise customers over the past 12 months, as well as announcing new offices opened in Singapore and Seattle, as well as an updated facility in Sydney. A recent report from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that more than 90% of organisations are using DevOps practices in some capacity, but support production applications only a third of the time.

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

Cloud security provider Netskope has announced the close of a $100 million (£77.5m) series E funding round to press ahead with its go to market strategy as well as explore new ventures.

The round, which brings Netskope’s total funding to $231.4 million, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included contributions from existing investors Social Capital and Iconiq Capital, as well as new participation from Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

Among the upcoming projects for the company, best known for its cloud assess security broker (CASB) software, includes the first public mention of what is being described as ‘Netskope for Web’, an advancement of the security platform beyond the cloud aimed at being pushed out later this year.

“This announcement really is just a reinforcement of the notion of building the definitive leading cloud security platform,” Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO, told CloudTech. “The fact [the round] is led by existing investors is a great thing. It was oversubscribed, and for us, we haven’t gone out fundraising per se ever – we’ve had the luxury of a lot of external folks wanting to invest in the company.”

Netskope’s modus operandi is around offering a different solution to securing assets and data in the cloud. Beri describes it as delivering ‘the absolute best architecture and product that would allow enterprises to tackle the problem the way it should be’. To paraphrase the adage about lipstick and porcine creatures, if you put lipstick on legacy security tools, it’s still not going to understand the language of the cloud, or APIs.

Whether it’s the SaaS of Salesforce, Box, Office 365 et al, to the primary IaaS and PaaS of AWS, Google and Microsoft, Netskope aims to have organisations covered through data loss and threat protection, encryption, and more. The company’s next plan is to advance it from the cloud to the whole web. “[It’s] the ability and savviness to understand the way that people work now and the way that applications are built now bringing it to the entire web, not just the cloud,” said Beri, “so one of the things this funding continues to fuel us to do is advance that platform to continue to realise the vision of the definitive cloud security platform.”

Netskope says that it had seen an uptick in 2016 of ‘leading enterprise customers in the retail, financial services, manufacturing, energy, and healthcare verticals’. With customers including Toyota, Genomic Health, and the City of San Diego on the books, Beri mused on where different industries are in their cloud journeys.

“I think you should cut at it two ways – geography and then vertical,” he said. “As the market has moved, what you see now is the largest healthcare, life science companies in the world all using cloud.

“Healthcare is definitely a strong vertical,” Beri added. “When you look beyond retail, most every single retail company in the world is leveraging cloud. They want to focus on their core business and they don’t want to build infrastructure. The cloud lets them enable that remote working, large distributed workforce, and yet they’re worried about protecting customer data, protecting financial data and so on.

“[It’s] the same thing with financial and insurance – you think they’d be the laggards but some of the largest financial institutions in the world are Netskope customers, and they’re leveraging cloud, not only because their end users want, but because it’s a corporate strategy now. It’s a competitive advantage, if you can leverage these properly.”

The geographical discussion naturally beget a look at GDPR, of which the one year countdown for compliance passed last month. Netskope has previously warned companies to get their act together – fines of €10 million or 2% of annual turnover – while Beri calls the process a ‘seesaw’.

“For anybody who wasn’t taking it seriously, it’s going to hurt your business if you don’t now, and I think what a lot of enterprises are realising is that with GDPR coming, they need the next level of visibility and ability to control where their data goes, who uses it, and how it’s exposed,” he said. “One of the keys we focus on at Netskope is how you enable companies to move forward, be productive, leverage the applications that they want, yet at the same time, how you put guard rails around their usage so you’re not going to be able to for example leak EU customer data, or put yourself at risk of violating GDPR.”

It’s a good analogy for their whole ethos. 

More than 90% of organisations polled by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) say they are using DevOps practices in some capacity, yet they only support production applications only a third of the time.

The study, titled ‘DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Enterprise’, looks at the current state of software delivery and related tooling and summarises the results. The company argues that integrating and sharing metrics and data between diverse toolsets, via APIs, integration hubs, or both – need to be central to making product selections.

The primary focus areas for digital business initiatives include customer satisfaction, ‘using technology to match competitors’ digital presence’, and ‘faster time to innovation’, according to the report, although there were ‘significant’ differences in responses among small, medium and enterprise businesses.

The rubric sets out the rationale for the report. “Yesterday’s toolsets and support practices – in which tools relied heavily on human expertise and manual processes – are no longer viable,” the company notes. “At the same time, designing, developing, deploying and supporting complex modern application environments requires collaborative decision-making supported by a new level of cross-functional skills, knowledge, and judgment.

“Surmounting these challenges to embrace the requirements of a new era requires changes to mindsets, skill sets, and tooling.”

This aligns with various pieces of research around DevOps. According to a study from Sumo Logic back in March, more than two thirds of enterprises either plan to adopt DevOps or are already doing so, while in the same month Quali found that almost half of applications in traditional environments were considered complex for cloud.

“As the pace of business continues to accelerate, coordination across DevOps processes, practices, and tools becomes increasingly important,” said Julie Craig, research director of application management at EMA. “This research provides valuable insights into the ways in which high performing IT organisations are accelerating delivery of key business services and, in doing so, impacting the business bottom line.”

(c)iStock.com/MarkRubens

A couple of updates in the Australian data space this morning; Telstra has announced it has acquired Company85, a UK-based provider of data centre, cloud and network services, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching a new service in Canberra through NEXTDC.

Telstra, primarily a telecoms firm, is looking at Company85 to expand its position in the UK, seeing it as ‘a key market’ for their growing technology services business, as well as help their push towards Europe. Christopher Smith, executive director of business technology services at Telstra, added Company85’s ‘market-leading approach’ for standardising and automating data centre migrations was key.

“As organisations look to digitise their business, whether it’s to expand into new markets, create new products or improve efficiency, they are increasingly seeking integrated solutions for their network, security, and cloud infrastructure, as well as advice on how to implement and manage these,” said Smith.

“Company85’s broad set of consulting capabilities will help us to differentiate our offerings in Europe,” Smith added. “We will be able to engage in IT transformation conversations with prospective customers early in the proposal stage, which we believe will help to strengthen our position and create demand for our network services in the region.”

Elsewhere, co-location provider NextDC has announced that its C1 data centre in Canberra will be the first in the Australian capital to host AWS Direct Connect, which aims to give organisations an easier access point from their premises to AWS. AWS already has three availability zones for EC2 in Sydney, with a further edge network location in Melbourne.

“The launch of the AWS Direct Connect service out of NextDC’s Canberra data centre will enable our federal and ACT Government customers to connect the hyperscale AWS Cloud and run synchronous replication across independent zones, helping to ensure government data is managed securely – with high resilience,” said Andrew Phillips, AWS Australia and New Zealand public sector country manager.

“This, in turn, will help government agencies deliver improved services to Australian citizens, who increasingly rely on digital services for their interactions with government.”

When Melissa Di Donato, chief revenue officer at SAP, was going through the interview process at Walldorf, the company’s home town, she was asked whether she had been there before. Di Donato took the opportunity to reveal the SAP watch she was wearing, issued the better part of two decades ago, which showed she was a certified consultant through her work at PwC.

While the company had never appeared on her CV per se, starting with a dean at business school who suggested getting into ‘this SAP thing’ as it ‘may catch on’, through consultancy, to a hosting partner, to even the other side of the fence with IBM, Oracle – “as one does” – and Salesforce, SAP has been very close throughout Di Donato’s career.

Hence moving to the company towards the end of last year, to help accelerate the cloud ERP business, felt like coming home.

Today SAP, like the other software behemoths, remains committed to moving its traditional on-premise customers to the cloud. The message is now around ‘intelligent cloud ERP’. As this publication reported in February, SAP is looking to S/4HANA, its public cloud offering, and adding artificial intelligence (AI) to ERP, helping customers to adjust and adopt business processes based on real-time data and insight.

Earlier this month, this went up a notch with the general release of CoPilot, a ‘digital assistant for the enterprise’ as the company’s annual SAPPHIRE conference. Bernd Leukert, executive board member, summed up SAP’s roadmap for attendees. “Openness is the game-changer, driving new business value,” he said. “Openness in every part of the company allows you to reach completely new levels of business process excellence.

“You can inject data and derive insights across every layer of your company, like traffic and other data into logistics, machine learning data into your maintenance plans, and social data from your customer profiles.”

Di Donato puts it this way. “It’s a big, big release for us, and a change I think to the industry,” she tells CloudTech. “Effectively, [CoPilot] learns to become aware of business context, is able to drive efficient collaboration, quickly is able to recognise and connect to business objects, and offers in-context chatting. It’s fast learning and embeds a lot of machine learning, and a lot of new innovative technology that’s intelligent… [to] truly transform the way ERP is.”

SAP illustrates the product’s capabilities in various videos. One looks at monitoring and extending purchase contracts. Di Donato says that by 2020, the company is aiming for many financial functions to become ‘completely automated’. “At the end of the day, when I go out and speak with customers and say to them ‘what are you looking for in ERP?’, what can we give you to transform your business besides being less expensive, being less expensive is not the crux of where our customers are looking for benefit,” she says.

“The international finance reporting standards requirements are so extensive and so time-consuming that something basic – i.e. I want to close my books – is quite complex when you’re dealing with international reporting standards,” Di Donato adds. “Being able to offer faster time to close your books, taking away a lot of the functions and steps necessary with machine learning is hugely beneficial…detailed data in context to be able to make fast decisions…those are real business benefits that folks are seeing and asking for.”

Mention artificial intelligence in a business context, and while much of the conversation will discuss the potential benefits and efficiencies, another thought naturally occurs: will it affect my job? Back in January, Japanese company Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance made headlines after announcing it would replace more than 30 of its staff with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI.

The more optimistic view, as cited by respondents to an Adecco survey in April, is that AI will remove the duller, less palatable tasks and free up employees to be more creative. It’s a view with which Di Donato agrees. “It will be beneficial, and do I think they’ll be letting people go and that there’ll be a huge turn of events, saving money by not having people in the company? No, that’s not how we think necessarily at all,” she says.

“What we want to do is be able to allocate the mundane tasks to machines and machine learning technology, whilst taking the people and making them much more impactful on the business…giving them strategic roles, high impact roles, roles that can touch customers and service customers in a way that a machine can’t. It’s a reallocation of intelligence, if you will.”

Moreover, the rise of AI may represent a great opportunity for enhancement. Di Donato frequently speaks with young people, and the consistent message of the earlier the better in learning technical skills comes through. “I think we have the ability as a society to increase the value that everyone has to bring and bear,” she says. “When we take the mundane tasks away, it’s a perfect opportunity for our society to be upskilled and to learn more.

“Whilst yes, 99% of jobs are ‘mundane’, I venture to believe that not 99% of people want to do mundane tasks. We just have to do them, and we get used to them.”

SAP is also looking at other emerging technologies, with many coming under the banner of Leonardo, an innovation portfolio. This includes blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) – or not quite, as Di Donato explains. “I came on board and I was like ‘yawn’, I’m so sick of hearing about IoT,” she explains. “It’s not the Internet of Things anymore anyhow, it’s the Internet of Everything.

“What is true is that there are components of the Internet of Everything, IoT, machine learning, that the enterprise has not been able to consume,” she adds. “The problem was everyone talked a good game, but it wasn’t anywhere being used, and I think the difference now is that it was educational for 10 years, and now it’s consumption.

“We went from hypothesising about the business benefit of what IoT, and machine learning, and AI, and all of these things can do for the enterprise, and then all of a sudden it’s become embedded into our ERP.”

Picture credit: SAP