The cloud tech IPO landscape has arguably stalled in recent years with the M&A landscape heating up alongside it – but one company looking to buck that trend is identity and management provider Okta, who officially rang the bell today after going public last month.

According to CNBC, the company’s shares went up 37% in the aftermath of its public debut, trading at around $23.

“We’re proud that today is Okta’s first day as a public company,” a statement from co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest said. “We’re all familiar with the Okta saying ‘always on’. That includes today, the day of our IPO, and each day that follows. It speaks to the mission-critical nature of our products, and acknowledges the trust that we must build with our customers every single day.”

The company’s introduction, as per its S-1 form published on March 13, details its customer base – more than 2,900 customers in over 185 countries, with 20th Century Fox, Adobe and LinkedIn among the standouts – and its cloud-centric focus.

“We believe that we have the opportunity to serve the identity needs not just of the largest companies, but of organisations of all sizes that want to safely and securely move to the cloud,” the note explains under ‘our opportunity’. “We estimate that there is at least an $18 billion global opportunity to serve organisations of all sizes by providing an integrated approach to managing and securing all of their internal identities.”

Back in February, a report from Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners, argued the ‘state of the cloud’ was in flux last year, but has since roared back. 2016’s IPOs in the cloud space – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge, and the standout, Twilio – represented the lowest figure since the financial crisis of 2008. Yet the various M&A activity alongside that suggested a serious amount of work going on underneath: Microsoft buying LinkedIn;, Oracle buying NetSuite, and so on.

Okta was notably one of the original cloud-based investments made by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In a post on the venture capital firm’s blog, Ben Horowitz wrote that Okta has become “the cloud identity company” (emphasis theirs). “Through relentless hard work, determination and ingenuity, they defeated their startup competitors and fulfilled their original vision.”  

According to the S-1, Okta’s revenue grew to $85.9 million in the 2016 fiscal year, putting alongside it net losses of $76.3 million for the same period. 

VMware has announced it is to sell its cloud offering based on the software-driven data centre (SDDC), vCloud Air, to French cloud computing provider OVH in what was described as ‘the next step in vCloud Air’s evolution’.

OVH, with more than one million customers and 260,000 servers deployed, is a long-time VMware partner. The company was cited by analyst firm Cloud Spectator in February as the second-best infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider taking its ranking criteria of price-performance value and looking specifically at the North American market. OVH announced its US plans in March, with data centres planned for Oregon and Virginia, alongside a third in Canada.

VMware will transition vCloud Air’s US and European data centres and customer operations to OVH, with the rebranded service being known as vCloud Air Powered by OVH going forward.

“We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. “Customers will have access to OVH’s global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to.

“We remain committed to delivering our broader cross-cloud architecture that extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment,” added Gelsinger.

While vCloud Air has been going in its current guise since August 2014 – rebranded from vCloud Hybrid Service which first appeared in May 2013 – the underlying themes behind this announcement go back further. At VMworld Europe 2012, Gelsinger ‘announced the company’s move to become a heterogeneous data centre and cloud management vendor’, as Ovum analyst Roy Illsley put it, as well as a greater shift towards SDDC. “The SDDC has long been a vision of VMware, but until now has only really focused on the compute resources in the data centre,” Illsley wrote.

Since then, VMware, as part of EMC, was acquired by Dell for $67 billion – which remains one of the biggest pure tech acquisitions ever – while as Barb Darrow observes for Fortune, the previous acquisition of Virtustream by EMC appeared to give VMware’s cloud offering another competitor from within its own ecosystem.

Most recently, VMware has announced partnerships with IBM and, tellingly, Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to figures from October last year, 1,000 joint customers had moved their VMware environments to IBM’s cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS is expected to become available from ‘mid 2017’ onwards. As this publication pointed out at VMworld in Las Vegas back in August, the company’s strategy was all around hybrid and becoming ‘an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds.’ In other words – don’t be too surprised by this latest announcement.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2017, with financial details not disclosed.

An overwhelming 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020, according to the latest prognostication from analyst firm Gartner.

The forecast, which appears in a new report titled ‘Predicts 2017: Infrastructure Services Become Hybrid Infrastructure Services’, notes the duel forces of cloud and industrialised services growth and the decline of traditional data centre outsourcing as the primary factors.

Gartner argues that last year, traditional worldwide data centre outsourcing, alongside infrastructure utility services (IUS), represented 49% of the global data centre services market, priced at $154 billion. By 2020, the numbers will swell to $228bn, but the charge towards cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hosting will see the traditional base fall to 35%. Observant readers will note that the size of the market will increase – $75.46bn last year compared with $79.8bn in 2020 – but like on-prem versus cloud-based enterprise collaboration, it is an inexorable shift.

“As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organisations will shift toward more industrialised, less tailored options,” said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner in a statement. “Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.”

Maarten van Montfoort, VP north-west Europe at IT provider Comparex, makes a similar argument, noting the importance of avoiding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ migration. “Many company’s existing infrastructure are currently designed for ‘business as usual’ operations with a combination of dated licensing models not designed for cloud and a lack of application compatibility,” he said.

“Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model, and each organisation’s journey will be different,” added van Montfoort. “For example: can legacy, business-critical applications – not built with cloud in mind – be re-architected for the cloud, or do they need to stay on premise? Should the organisation be seeking out a new SaaS product to fit their needs? And does the organisation have the specific skills in-house that it will need to do this?

“These are all important considerations if organisations are to maximise the ROI of hybrid cloud.”

It’s a trend which has been monitored extensively over the past several months, and now another research firm has lent its weight to the theory: Microsoft Azure is gaining ground over Amazon Web Services (AWS) in cloud infrastructure.

451 Research, in its latest report, argues that Azure has emerged as the predominant primary infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider in Europe, cited by 43% of the more than 700 respondents compared with 32% for AWS. Globally, the figure for AWS rises to 55%.

Yet digging further into the statistics adds a further layer of intrigue. For the first time in the survey, AWS fell behind other IaaS providers in terms of value for money – with Google topping the bill – and the ‘understands my business’ category, with IBM SoftLayer and Azure scoring higher.

Taking into account the two overall variables of promise and fulfilment (below), AWS still rules the roost with 76 for promise and 77 for fulfilment, ahead of Microsoft (74 and 73), Google (73 and 74) and IBM (72 and 70). The analysis also shows, as this publication has previously reported, how far ahead the four main players are ahead of the competition.

One aspect which could be considered, however, is around multi-cloud. According to 451’s Cloud Transformation Vendor Window study, 48% of AWS users are also using Azure, with 51% on Azure using AWS.

Melanie Posey, research vice president and lead analyst on the study, argues that organisations are not actively using both providers to support the same workload, such as compute in AWS and storage in Azure.

What companies are doing, however, is leveraging the two providers to host and support efforts in different regions, such as workloads being delivered from AWS to customers and end users in North America, but an app on Azure for European customers.

Last month, Microsoft published an extensive comparison guide between AWS and Azure services, going through the entire gamut from storage and compute, to Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile.

“As the leading public cloud platforms, Azure and AWS each offer businesses a broad and deep set of capabilities with global coverage. Yet many organisations choose to use both platforms together for greater choice and flexibility, as well as to spread their risk and dependencies with a multi-cloud approach,” the document explains. Posey, however, argues that despite the chummy opening, the guide’s real aim is to ‘translate’ AWS services into Azure, and showing organisations how to migrate from one to the other.

Elsewhere, almost four in five organisations polled said their IT environments required ‘moderate’ or ‘significant’ transformation to meet business requirements in the coming five years, while 22% of enterprises say they have adopted a ‘cloud-first’ approach.

Last month, a survey from Sumo Logic found that, of the 230 respondents from organisations with more than 500 employees, Azure (66%) outranked AWS (55%) in usage.

The global data landscape will total an eye-watering 163 zettabytes by 2025, up from 16 ZB last year and the equivalent of watching the entire Netflix catalogue 489 million times, according to a new missive from Seagate.

The study, Data Age 2025, was put together in conjunction with research firm IDC, and finds that within the next decade enterprises will become the primary creator of the world’s data, at 60% by 2025. “Business leaders will have the opportunity to embrace new and unique business opportunities powered by this wealth of data and the insight it provides but will also need to make strategic choices on data collection, utilisation and location,” the company notes.

Almost every enterprise is set to be affected by these trends, the research adds, from embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), to machine learning – IDC estimates the amount of the global datasphere subject to data analysis will reach 5.2 ZB in 2025 – and real-time data.

Naturally, cloud also plays a vital part; consumers and businesses creating, sharing and accessing data between any device and the cloud – an IoT play of course – will ‘continue to grow well beyond previous expectations’, according to the report. Cisco’s most recent cloud index figures argued that global cloud traffic was set to rise to more than 14 ZB per year by 2020, assisted by greater data centre virtualisation and increased migration to cloud technologies.

“While we can see from this new research that the era of big data is upon us, the value of data is really not in the ‘known’ but in the ‘unknown’ where we are vastly underestimating the potentials today,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate CEO. “What is really exciting are the analytics, the new businesses, the new thinking and new ecosystems from industries like robotics and machine to machine learning, and their profound social and economic impact on our society.

“The opportunity for today’s enterprises and tomorrow’s entrepreneurs to capture the value of data is tremendous, and our global business leaders will be exploring these opportunities for decades to come,” Luczo added.

One zettabyte is defined as 10 bytes to the power of 21. To put this in perspective, IDC argued back in 2006 that the combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was at an estimated 160 exabytes – 10 bytes to the power of 18.

Oracle has announced its public cloud services have achieved various security and compliance certifications, including ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC1 and SOC2, in what the company describes as ‘continued momentum’ for its products.

The Redwood giant’s platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has received Service Organisation Control (SOC) attestations across a variety of key services, while its Fusion software as a service (SaaS) is HIPAA-accredited and the ISO 27001 was awarded for ‘the proper management and security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details or information entrusted to an organisation by third parties’.

The move puts Oracle alongside its various industry competitors; for example, Microsoft’s SOC1 and SOC2 information can be found here – copies of the report are only available to customers who have signed an NDA – while ISO 27001 can be found here. The Oracle accreditations were administered by Schellman & Co.

“Oracle is continuously investing time and resources to meet our customers’ strict requirements across highly regulated industries,” said Erika Voss, Oracle global senior director for public cloud compliance, risk and privacy in a statement. “These new certifications not only validate the reliability and security features of the Oracle Cloud; they effectively make Oracle’s solutions available to thousands of new customers in the healthcare and public sector industries.”

Writing for this publication last year, Frank Krieger, director of compliance at cloud hosting provider iland, explained the benefits of ISO 27001. “The business benefits of ISO 27001 certification are many,” Krieger wrote. “ISO 27001 is an effective way to reduce the risk of your organisation suffering a data breach, satisfies audit requirements and establishes trust both internally and externally that security controls are properly managed, providing customers with greater confidence in doing business with you.”

Oracle’s efforts to become the leader in public cloud, after a slow initial start, have been well documented. The company announced total cloud revenues, including IaaS, at $1.2bn in its most recent quarter, with CTO Larry Ellison telling analysts that its next-generation data centres have capabilities which potentially dwarf Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to figures from Synergy Research, the four leading players in the cloud IaaS market – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – remain entrenched, although singling out Oracle for its high growth rate.

You can check the full list here.

One in three respondents in a survey conducted by AlienVault said the state of security monitoring in their organisation was ‘complex and chaotic’, adding a ‘major disconnect’ was still in place between beliefs and actions in cloud security.

The survey, conducted at the RSA conference in San Francisco back in February, polled 974 attendees. One in five (21%) admit they don’t know how many cloud applications are being used in their organisation, while 39% say it is more than 10. 42% of respondents say lack of visibility into their cloud activities is a ‘significant’ concern.

Almost two thirds (62%) said they were worried about Internet of Things (IoT) devices in their environment – yet 45% added that they saw the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks. 43% of respondents said their company does not monitor IoT traffic at all – a finding which was described as ‘frightening’ by AlienVault – while 20% said they didn’t know what traffic was monitored.

“The driving force behind cloud and IoT is the availability and analysis of information, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way,” said Javvad Malik, AlienVault security advocate. “If data is misused, or inadequately protected, the consequences can be severe.”

Writing for this publication earlier this month, iland director of EMEA marketing Monica Brink argued that this was the year when IoT ‘moved up the agenda’ for business investment in cloud technologies. “IoT data tends to be heterogeneous and stored across multiple systems; as such, the market is calling for analytical tools that seamlessly connect to and combine all those cloud-hosted data sources, enabling businesses to explore and visualise any type of data stored anywhere in order to maximise the value of their IoT investment,” she wrote.

“It’s time for organisations to focus on what they do have control over – threat detection and incident response – and implement a unified solution that can monitor on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments,” added Malik. “Simplifying security in this way enables companies to immediately identify and respond to threats, and in today’s cybersecurity landscape, this is the best strategy to mitigate risk.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of Amazon Connect, a self-service cloud-based contact centre service which aims to make customer service easier and cheaper for businesses.

The service is an extension of the cloud infrastructure giant’s own customer contact centre technology – going back 10 years – put together as a service; think of the launch of Lex, the technology that powers Alexa, as a general service for a similar example.

Indeed, Lex is part of the package. Customers can build natural language contact flows and organisations can adapt the customer experience; in other words, callers can simply state their commands instead of having to listen to never-ending lists of menu options.

Crucially, many other players in the contact centre space are on board with AWS, including Freshdesk, Salesforce, and Zendesk. “An Amazon Connect and Zendesk integration provides our many shared customers with a seamless experience,” said Sam Boonin, Zendesk VP product strategy in a statement. “These companies are placing customer relationships at the forefront of their business and, in return, creating loyal customers.”

The press materials give a quick rundown of how Connect works. “With Amazon Connect, customers can set up and configure a ‘virtual contact centre’ in minutes,” AWS notes. “There is no infrastructure to deploy or manage, so customers can scale their Amazon Connect Virtual Contact Centre up or down, onboarding up to tens of thousands of agents in response to business cycles and paying only for the time callers are interacting with Amazon Connect plus any associated telephony charges.

“Amazon Connect’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialised skills required.”

Connect integrates with a variety of current AWS tools, including Amazon S3, Redshift, and QuickSight for data visualisation and analytics. “We’re excited to offer this technology to customers as an AWS service – with all of the simplicity, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud,” said Tom Weiland, Amazon vice president of worldwide customer service.

The product is currently available in the US and the majority of Europe, with more countries being rolled out ‘in the coming months’. You can find out more about it here.

A new survey from machine data analytics provider Sumo Logic has found more than two thirds of enterprises either plan to adopt DevOps or are already doing so, while four in five are currently or plan to use at least one public cloud service.

The study, titled ‘The New Normal: Cloud and DevOps Analytics Tools Reign in the Modern App Era’ and put together alongside UBM Technology, found that of the 230 IT operations, app development and information security professionals polled, 67% are utilising software as a service, while 42% are deploying and updating apps more frequently than in the past.

When it came to the types of public cloud service being used, Microsoft Azure (66%) and Amazon Web Services (55%) were the most popular. In another finding that was less than surprising, security was the biggest challenge to cloud adoption, cited by 27% of respondents. Only 6% of those polled thought the security of public cloud was ‘excellent’, albeit with 55% adding public cloud services were more secure than previously.

“As cloud computing becomes standard in IT organisations, concerns about security and loss of control persist,” said Amy Doherty research director for UBM Technology in a statement. “This new study confirms these findings and delves into best practices for how cloud-first companies are leveraging new tools and technologies to speed adoption.”

This publication has extensively covered previous DevOps research, with recent studies having a lack of consensus in common. Automation software provider Quali, taking data from various industry events in 2016, found earlier this month that the current vendor ecosystem was open-ended, while almost half of applications in traditional environments were considered ‘complex’ for cloud.

More than one in three companies admit it has been either ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to find specific cloud skills for their organisation, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The dreaded ‘cloud skills gap’ has been long reported by this publication – ‘the trend will continue further through 2013’, this reporter once warned – but in the Microsoft report, titled ‘Closing the Cloud Skills Gap’, only 31% of the 250 respondents polled said they have recruited for cloud skills over the past 12 months. 8% of overall respondents said it was ‘very difficult’ to find the right skills, compared with 30% who opted for ‘difficult’.

One contributing factor to the continued malaise is that companies are being forced to think ‘beyond their established business models’, Microsoft notes; for instance, Rolls-Royce now sells flight miles as opposed to aircraft engines, and RAC is a pre-emptive vehicle maintenance service as well as offering roadside assistance.

“Those organisations that are forced to stall their transformational journeys due to a lack of skills will find themselves facing significant challenges,” the report notes. “Indeed, they may find that by the time they are able to meet the demands of both customers and employees, the market has moved on, rendering them irrelevant.”

It’s not as if organisations are setting the barrier especially high either: only 8% say recognised cloud certifications were ‘essential’ when recruiting, compared with 27% who say they are ‘highly desirable’ and 45% ‘nice to have’. That said, if most people’s job hunts are anything to go by, ‘highly desirable’ usually means ‘you probably should have it’; and as the report notes, “those people that do have certifications will enter the interview room with an advantage.”

The study also looked at closing the gender gap within technology firms; 22% of companies with 250 to 999 employees said they had zero female contingent, although on the plus side not one organisation with more than 1000 employees opted for 0%; the most popular bucket was 30-39% (26% of respondents).

Ultimately, the study argues that while there is still work to be done, the figures can be spun in a positive light for those who want to move into the industry. “Whilst the data outlines the challenges that many organisations face, it should make for positive reading for those interested in pursuing a cloud career or for businesses that already offer cloud consultancy to other organisations,” the report notes.

“With demand outstripping supply, those equipped with cloud skills can be confident that their talents will be required for the foreseeable future.”

When it comes to gaining those cloud skills for an organisation, the best advice is to plan ahead and prepare for as many situations as possible. “You can’t move to the cloud until you understand fully the shape of your current IT estate and the applications which support the organisation,” wrote Eduserv’s Andrew Hawkins in this publication last year. “Mapping these will allow you to understand areas which are compatible and incompatible with a cloud operating model ahead of time.”

For individuals looking to beef up their talents, IT learning organisation Firebrand Training offered its five key in-demand skills for 2017 back in February, citing database and big data, application security, enterprise cloud migration, containers, and cloud enterprise application development. Naturally, Microsoft wants to be at the forefront of enabling businesses, outlining its commitment to train 500,000 digital specialists and 30,000 public servants by 2020.

Elsewhere, Microsoft announced that its UK Azure data centres are now compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) certification, outlining the move as ‘crucial’ for storing customers’ financial details. The news comes at an interesting time, especially given reports elsewhere over problems with AWS provisioning in its UK base.

You can read the Microsoft report in full here (no registration required).

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2017