(c)iStock.com/Yuri_Arcurs

Almost half of respondents in a new study from Redgate Software say they have adopted a DevOps approach to their projects – with a further third planning to join them within the next two years.

The study, the firm’s latest State of Database DevOps survey, polled 1,000 companies globally with more than half employing at least 500 people. While 47% polled overall said they are already on the road with DevOps initiatives, this number rises to 59% among companies with more than 10,000 employees.

IT services and retail are the industries most likely to favour DevOps, alongside finance and healthcare, while government, education and non-profit are the laggards, according to the research. Only one in five respondents said they are applying practices such as continuous delivery to their databases and their applications.

The biggest problem businesses looking at initiating DevOps face, according to the study, is a lack of appropriate skills. For those with no intentions to move over right now, the major hurdles remain a lack of awareness of business benefits, as well as not enough budget to spend on new tooling.

Naturally, any move towards DevOps benefits different job roles in various ways. Redgate argues that developers are on board because they want to be freed to do more value-added work, while database admins are more driven by collaborating between development and operations teams, as well as the need to reduce application downtime.

For Redgate, the results are somewhat unsurprising. “We’ve been helping our customers to improve the way they make changes to their databases for over 17 years now,” said Kate Duggan, Redgate product marketing manager. “This survey has highlighted that our customers are facing increasing pressure to speed up the delivery of software, and include the databases in the same processes they use for their applications. It means we can ensure we’re in a good position to help them overcome the particular challenges the database brings.”

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

(c)iStock.com/ismagilov

Bitcasa, the developer-friendly cloud storage platform based in Mountain View, is ‘no more’ according to a statement from former CEO Brian Taptich.

The statement, which appears on the Bitcasa homepage and is redirected to from other pages on the site, is cryptic in tone, only noting that the company has “become a part of something much, much bigger.” A VentureBeat article reported that the company had been acquired by Intel, something the latter subsequently denied.

“We have no doubt that Bitcasa has found the right home to fulfill a mission that has driven the company from its 2011 beginnings – to eliminate the storage and computing limitations of your connected devices, however small, in the most secure and efficient way possible,” the statement from Taptich read. “We remain optimistic that, before long (and though you may not realise it), Bitcasa’s technology will yet contribute significantly to fulfilling this mission.

“Looking back, it seems impossible to simplify a Bitcasa experience that, at times, felt so complicated,” Taptich added.

Bitcasa started life as a single-user platform for unlimited cloud storage in 2011 – something of a rarity in those days – yet the company hit the news in 2014 when it announced the end of its unlimited storage plan, citing what it called “abusers” – in other words, businesses caning individual accounts – as part of the reason.

By coincidence, in the same week Microsoft announced its first unlimited OneDrive cloud storage packages, to Office 365 subscribers, yet almost a year to the day that was also nixed for similar reasons; users were taking advantage of the offer by backing up “numerous PCs, entire movie collections and DVR recordings”. Bitcasa announced it was pulling out of consumer storage in April last year to focus more on its platform business.

Speaking to this publication in November 2015, Taptich explained that Bitcasa had reservations about its unlimited plan as far back as 2013, as well as citing the company’s “small but passionate” user base. Referring to Microsoft’s decision, Taptich said: “I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed – and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data.”

For now though, the future of Bitcasa remains unknown. “Our hope is that everybody in the Bitcasa extended family – including our partners and end-users – feels as if they reaped some benefit, however small, from this remarkable and intense experience,” the statement concluded.

CloudTech has reached out for comment and will update this story in due course.

(c)iStock.com/cherezoff

Enterprises prefer Microsoft Azure as their primary cloud provider while smaller businesses are more likely to be Google houses, according to the latest research from B2B analysis firm Clutch.

The findings, which polled almost 250 users of AWS, Google and Microsoft, appear in the firm’s latest report, found almost 40% of Azure users polled identify as enterprises, compared to only 25% for SMBs and 22% as startups or sole proprietorships. In contrast, 41% of Google Cloud Platform users identified themselves as SMBs.

The reasons are varied, although the argument that smaller businesses are more conscious of price, as opposed to security or toolsets, again reared its head. “It goes back to the trust and familiarity issues,” said Nicholas Martin, principal applications development consultant at IT solutions provider Cardinal Solutions. “Windows Server and other Microsoft technologies are prevalent in the enterprise world. Azure providers the consistency required by developers and IT staff to tightly integrate with the tools that Microsoft-leaning organisations are familiar with.”

More than one in five (21%) of respondents argued that a better selection of tools and features were key to their choice of cloud provider, ahead of familiarity with a brand, and stronger security capabilities.

The findings resonate similarly to those reported by BetterCloud in 2015, who argued there was a “clear trend” for larger organisations to use Office 365, as opposed to Google Apps for cloud offices.

Clutch gave three recommendations for organisations looking to make the right decision over their cloud provider:

• If your business is either an enterprise, requires Windows integration, or needs a strong platform as a service play, consider Microsoft
• If longevity, expertise in infrastructure as a service, and a wide selection of tools are key, go with AWS
• If you are an SMB with a limited budget or need to place heavy emphasis on analytics, consider Google Cloud Platform

This is all pretty sound advice from where CloudTech is standing. You can read the full report here.

(c)iStock.com/joloei

2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points.

Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space.

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google continue to grow quicker than the rest of the cloud infrastructure space, with the four leading players owning more than half of the market.

Read more: AWS turns 10: A dominant market share, but does that tell the full story? (March)

GDPR hits. On April 27 last year, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted, giving businesses two years – or until May 25 2018, to be precise – to get their house in order. Under the new laws users will have rights including the right to be forgotten, to transfer their data to another service provider, as well as the right to learn when they have been hacked. Businesses who do not comply could face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover as a result.

Read more: A five step crisis plan to prepare for the pending data protection legislation (February)

Oracle acquires NetSuite. One of the biggest deals of the year came in July, when Oracle announced its intent to acquire cloud ERP software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion, represented the latest cloud push from the software giant. While not all shareholders were in agreement initially, the deal was eventually completed in November, with the two companies saying in an FAQ at the time: “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary and will co-exist in the marketplace forever.”

Read more: Oracle buys NetSuite for $9.3bn to further strengthen its cloud story (July)

Rackspace goes private. Managed cloud services provider Rackspace was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion in the summer. CEO Taylor Rhodes said the deal would allow the firm to “seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company.”

In its most recent financial results before the takeover, Rhodes noted a highlight was almost 300 customers gained on its AWS service over the past nine months, but warned that IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative in 2017.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” Ian Moyse, cloud industry leader, told this publication at the time.

Read more: Rackspace goes private with $4.3bn Apollo Global transaction (August)

Dropbox security scare. On August 25, a blog post from cloud storage firm Dropbox explained that users who had not changed their passwords prior to mid-2012 would be prompted to do so the next time they logged in “purely as a preventative measure.” On August 30, a report from Motherboard led with the headline: “Hackers stole account details from over 60 million Dropbox users.”

A day later, the company confirmed the password reset measures put in place had prevented any hacking of user data. “This is not a new security incident, and there is no indication that Dropbox user accounts have been improperly accessed,” said head of trust and security Patrick Heim in a statement. “We can confirm that the scope of the password reset we completed last week did protect all impacted users. Even if these passwords are cracked, the password reset means they can’t be used to access Dropbox accounts.”

Read more: Dropbox says password reset measures have worked following leak revelations (August)

2017 predictions

Below various experts and CloudTech contributors give their views on how the cloud industry will develop in 2017:

Matthew Finnie, CTO, Interoute: cloud and digital transformation programmes will continue to drive new IT spend, while the skills shortage becomes the biggest barrier to success

“While some commentators expect 2017 to be flat on IT spending overall, we expect to see IT increase its spend on cloud and digital transformation. In particular, we’ll see investment in emerging integrated digital platforms that enable a business to move faster, deploy resources quicker and exploit new market opportunities.

“Lack of in-house skills in key areas will start to have a negative impact on the IT team’s ability to achieve its goals. Enterprises will need to look for skilled partners to support data centre migrations and development projects and manage IT systems and infrastructure. Partner management and strategic relationships will become the key to competitive success.”

James Butler, CTO, Trustmarque: ‘software defined’ continues to gain momentum while GDPR will make firms look over their shoulders

“The race to ‘software defined’ will continue apace, as most of the major storage vendors integrate their stacks to the larger cloud players, in an attempt to maintain their customer base in a changing world. Meanwhile, startups and other players will be jumping on the bandwagons of AWS and Azure, looking to solve new problems customers face around data synchronisation and management in the cloud.

“With GDPR on the horizon in the EU, everyone will be a lot more focused on data protection and risk management, which may finally drive more widespread adoption of encryption and rights management technologies.”

John Engates, CTO, Rackspace: 2017 will be the year of serverless architecture, and implications for the IoT

“Serverless computing is making developers’ lives easier, and if what I’m seeing and hearing holds true, 2017 is the year it will really take off. 

“Serverless, of course, is a misnomer. There will always be servers; serverless architecture refers to applications that depend on third party services (backend as a service) or custom code (function as a service) – AWS Lambda being the most popular vendor host today. What serverless really means is that developers no longer have to worry about infrastructure. And as those barriers to IoT entry continue to fall, we’ll continue to see new players and their devices muscle into what appears to be an almost limitless potential market.”

Jeff Denworth, SVP, CTERA Networks: prepare for a ransomware nightmare this year – but on the flip side, blockchain is on the rise

“Ransomware will not be stopped and [will] only get more sophisticated. Estimated ransomware payments will exceed $2 billion globally and there will be a series of public outages that spur investment into new approaches to counter ransomware. In addition, at least one major business cloud SaaS service will not only experience a breach of user credentials, but there will also be [a] significant data breach announced.

“In 2017 data infrastructure (and its modernisation) will become a new industry category thanks to Gartner. EFSS will begin to die as a primary market category. Customers will look for broader solutions that tie together on-premises and cloud-based files as well as associated device backups. Moreover, the move to a consolidated platform enables the elimination of silos of disconnected and ‘dark’ data and ‘data infrastructure modernisation’ will further enable IT governance and unified security initiatives.”

Do you agree with the top stories for 2016 and the predictions for 2017? Let us know in the comments…

(c)iStock.com/joloei

2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points.

Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space.

According to industry figures from Synergy Research, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google continue to grow quicker than the rest of the cloud infrastructure space, with the four leading players owning more than half of the market.

Read more: AWS turns 10: A dominant market share, but does that tell the full story? (March)

GDPR hits. On April 27 last year, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted, giving businesses two years – or until May 25 2018, to be precise – to get their house in order. Under the new laws users will have rights including the right to be forgotten, to transfer their data to another service provider, as well as the right to learn when they have been hacked. Businesses who do not comply could face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover as a result.

Read more: A five step crisis plan to prepare for the pending data protection legislation (February)

Oracle acquires NetSuite. One of the biggest deals of the year came in July, when Oracle announced its intent to acquire cloud ERP software provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion, represented the latest cloud push from the software giant. While not all shareholders were in agreement initially, the deal was eventually completed in November, with the two companies saying in an FAQ at the time: “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary and will co-exist in the marketplace forever.”

Read more: Oracle buys NetSuite for $9.3bn to further strengthen its cloud story (July)

Rackspace goes private. Managed cloud services provider Rackspace was acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion in the summer. CEO Taylor Rhodes said the deal would allow the firm to “seize the big opportunity that we face as the world’s #1 managed cloud company.”

In its most recent financial results before the takeover, Rhodes noted a highlight was almost 300 customers gained on its AWS service over the past nine months, but warned that IT spending growth would “almost certainly” be negative in 2017.

“The next 24 months is going to be key to Rackspace to reposition itself in the lucrative cloud and IoT markets,” Ian Moyse, cloud industry leader, told this publication at the time.

Read more: Rackspace goes private with $4.3bn Apollo Global transaction (August)

Dropbox security scare. On August 25, a blog post from cloud storage firm Dropbox explained that users who had not changed their passwords prior to mid-2012 would be prompted to do so the next time they logged in “purely as a preventative measure.” On August 30, a report from Motherboard led with the headline: “Hackers stole account details from over 60 million Dropbox users.”

A day later, the company confirmed the password reset measures put in place had prevented any hacking of user data. “This is not a new security incident, and there is no indication that Dropbox user accounts have been improperly accessed,” said head of trust and security Patrick Heim in a statement. “We can confirm that the scope of the password reset we completed last week did protect all impacted users. Even if these passwords are cracked, the password reset means they can’t be used to access Dropbox accounts.”

Read more: Dropbox says password reset measures have worked following leak revelations (August)

2017 predictions

Below various experts and CloudTech contributors give their views on how the cloud industry will develop in 2017:

Matthew Finnie, CTO, Interoute: cloud and digital transformation programmes will continue to drive new IT spend, while the skills shortage becomes the biggest barrier to success

“While some commentators expect 2017 to be flat on IT spending overall, we expect to see IT increase its spend on cloud and digital transformation. In particular, we’ll see investment in emerging integrated digital platforms that enable a business to move faster, deploy resources quicker and exploit new market opportunities.

“Lack of in-house skills in key areas will start to have a negative impact on the IT team’s ability to achieve its goals. Enterprises will need to look for skilled partners to support data centre migrations and development projects and manage IT systems and infrastructure. Partner management and strategic relationships will become the key to competitive success.”

James Butler, CTO, Trustmarque: ‘software defined’ continues to gain momentum while GDPR will make firms look over their shoulders

“The race to ‘software defined’ will continue apace, as most of the major storage vendors integrate their stacks to the larger cloud players, in an attempt to maintain their customer base in a changing world. Meanwhile, startups and other players will be jumping on the bandwagons of AWS and Azure, looking to solve new problems customers face around data synchronisation and management in the cloud.

“With GDPR on the horizon in the EU, everyone will be a lot more focused on data protection and risk management, which may finally drive more widespread adoption of encryption and rights management technologies.”

John Engates, CTO, Rackspace: 2017 will be the year of serverless architecture, and implications for the IoT

“Serverless computing is making developers’ lives easier, and if what I’m seeing and hearing holds true, 2017 is the year it will really take off. 

“Serverless, of course, is a misnomer. There will always be servers; serverless architecture refers to applications that depend on third party services (backend as a service) or custom code (function as a service) – AWS Lambda being the most popular vendor host today. What serverless really means is that developers no longer have to worry about infrastructure. And as those barriers to IoT entry continue to fall, we’ll continue to see new players and their devices muscle into what appears to be an almost limitless potential market.”

Jeff Denworth, SVP, CTERA Networks: prepare for a ransomware nightmare this year – but on the flip side, blockchain is on the rise

“Ransomware will not be stopped and [will] only get more sophisticated. Estimated ransomware payments will exceed $2 billion globally and there will be a series of public outages that spur investment into new approaches to counter ransomware. In addition, at least one major business cloud SaaS service will not only experience a breach of user credentials, but there will also be [a] significant data breach announced.

“In 2017 data infrastructure (and its modernisation) will become a new industry category thanks to Gartner. EFSS will begin to die as a primary market category. Customers will look for broader solutions that tie together on-premises and cloud-based files as well as associated device backups. Moreover, the move to a consolidated platform enables the elimination of silos of disconnected and ‘dark’ data and ‘data infrastructure modernisation’ will further enable IT governance and unified security initiatives.”

Do you agree with the top stories for 2016 and the predictions for 2017? Let us know in the comments…

(c)iStock.com/Maciej Noskowski

Operator and vendor revenues across the main cloud services and infrastructure market segments hit $148 billion (£120.5bn) in 2016 growing at 25% annually, according to the latest note from analyst firm Synergy Research.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) experienced the highest growth rates at 53%, followed by hosted private cloud infrastructure services, at 35%, and enterprise SaaS, at 34%. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft lead the way in IaaS and PaaS, with IBM and Rackspace on top for hosted private cloud.

In the four quarters ending September (Q3) 2016, total spend on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure exceeded $65bn, according to the researchers. Spend on private cloud accounts for more than half of the overall total, but public cloud spend is growing much more rapidly. The note also argues unified comms as a service (UCaaS) is growing ‘steadily’.

“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and I’d say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst in a statement. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead,” Duke added.

The most recent examination of the cloud infrastructure market by Synergy back in August argued AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google continue to grow more quickly than their smaller competitors and, between them, own more than half of the global cloud infrastructure service market. 

(c)iStock.com/dwryan

With 2016 drawing to a close – and some may argue with good cause – it is time to assess the landscape throughout the year. According to figures published by managed service providers IT Specialists (ITS), the 10 largest business continuity disasters of the year in the UK include storms, fires, and power outages.

Particularly observant readers of this publication will note a similar study was conducted by ITS back in May, which focused on the top 10 disasters between April 2015 and March 2016. Only two which were on that list; storm Katie and the Saltley recycling fire, which were both in March.

The full list is: storm Gertrude, in January; storm Katie; the Saltley fire; damage to an electricity cable in Cromer in April; a major power feature at a London data centre in July; flash floods in September; a fire in Exeter in October which gutted the Royal Clarence Hotel; storm Angus and a Soho power cut in November; and more London-based flooding earlier this month.

So what does this mean for your business? Put simply, be prepared for anything. “Investing in forward planning can save valuable time, protect the organisation’s revenue and preserve its customer base,” said Matt Kingswood, UK head of ITS in a statement. “We urge businesses to formulate a business continuity programme to identify inefficient processes that cost the organisation money on a daily basis and can prove a barrier to business continuity.”

Writing for this publication back in May on how to create a solid disaster recovery strategy, Kingswood cited an unnamed accountancy firm which was a “poster child” for business continuity, having been affected by a fire in Holborn in spring 2015, whose servers were on the cloud so employees could keep working. “No insurance policy will help employees continue working if they don’t have access to business-critical applications,” Kingswood warned.

“To gain the most ROI from business continuity, businesses need to form a cloud-based data backup strategy, give employees network access, set guidelines for personal device use, provision a telephony solution, have a plan for Internet outages, and set up an alternate workspace.”

(c)iStock.com/joel-t

IBM has announced the launch of new services on its Bluemix platform which are focused on continuous delivery, DevOps, and simplifying app development in the cloud.

IBM Bluemix Continuous Delivery gives DevOps teams a central hub to create, manage, and scale toolchains, which are integral to the app development process, as well as providing toolchain templates designed to be provisioned enterprise-wide with minimum fuss. The templates can also be used to help build microservices, containers, or cloud-native applications, with integrations to solutions including GitHub, Stack, PagerDuty, and Sauce Labs.

“One of the biggest challenges developers face in today’s cloud-led world is efficiently building and deploying applications to stay competitive,” said Dave Lindquist, IBM fellow and VP development at IBM Cloud DevOps and Analytics. “With the introduction of Bluemix Continuous Delivery, developesr can not only create, integrate and share DevOps toolchains using their favourite tools, but also add optional pay-as-you-go powerful services like cognitive computing with Watson, or data and analytics services from The Weather Company.”

This is not the only Bluemix announcement of recent times; in November IBM launched a variety of services aimed at helping businesses get better insights from their data. The first, IBM Decision Optimisation on Cloud, helps organisations digest predictions, business goals and transactional figures before spitting them out as decision points, while IBM Bluemix Lift looks at data encryption and IBM dashDB for Transactions is a fully managed SQL database on Bluemix.

IBM says Bluemix now features more than 150 ‘advanced technologies and services’, including cognitive computing, blockchain, the Internet of Things, cloud data services, DevOps, and security.

You can find out more about Bluemix Continuous Delivery here.

(c)iStock.com/4x-image

Data centre firm Equinix has announced its intention to purchase 24 data centre sites, consisting of 29 data centre buildings, from Verizon for $3.6 billion (£2.85bn).

The portfolio includes approximately 900 customers and are based exclusively in the US and Latin America. Equinix will open three new markets, in Culpeper in Virginia, Houston, and Bogota, and will add almost 2.5 million gross square feet to the company’s overall footprint.

“This unique opportunity complements and extends Equinix’s strategy to expand our global platform,” said Steve Smith, Equinix president and CEO in a statement. “It enables us to enhance cloud and network density to continue to attract enterprises, while expanding our presence in the Americas.”

According to the most recent industry figures from Synergy Research, Equinix leads the way in colocation, being the only vendor with more than a 10% market share. The company is ahead of Digital Realty – whose Paris operations Equinix announced it was to acquire in August for $211m – and NTT. To put this in perspective, CenturyLink, who announced in the same November week it was to acquire Level 3 Communications for $34bn and sell 57 of its data centres to a consortium, is one of the seven other players in the top 10, whose market share at the time between them was 15%.

Approximately 250 Verizon employees will switch over to Equinix as part of the move. “This deal is a significant win for our existing customers, who will gain access to new locations, ecosystems and partners,” said Karl Strohmeyer, Equinix Americas president. “It is also a win for the new companies joining Equinix, as they will be able to leverage Equinix’s global footprint and unique interconnection services.”

The full list of metro areas included in the deal is Atlanta, Bogota, Boston, Chicago, Culpeper, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C, while the transaction is expected to close by mid-2017.

(c)iStock.com/whiteson

A new report issued today by Flexera Software argues that software asset management (SAM) needs to evolve to keep up with software as a service (SaaS) and virtualisation moving into the mainstream.

The study, which polled almost 500 respondents answering questions on enterprise and application production, found that for 20% of respondents, more than a quarter of their software is SaaS-based, while 39% say more than a quarter is virtualised. Interestingly, while three quarters say 80% or more of their desktop apps run on Microsoft Windows, that number is expected to go down to 64% within two years.

This shift causes problems for the relatively long-standing SAM solutions in place, the report argues. “Organisations wrongly believe that if they move to the cloud, their SAM challenges disappear,” it explains. “In reality, the opposite is true – they become more complicated.”

“The definition of enterprise software has changed drastically – from an IT asset running on a local physical device to an asset that is exposed to the risks inherent in the Internet, and is often virtualised or running remotely from a cloud, leveraging cloud infrastructures that carry their own costs and risks,” said R ‘Ray’ Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research. “The old definitions of SAM are too limited and must expand to allow businesses to manage costs and risk in this new IT framework.”

Only 29% of organisations polled say they continually monitor their systems to identify unlicensed and unauthorised software – and the report argues that next generation SAM tools need to integrate with security initiatives such as software vulnerability management.

“SAM has moved from the fringes to the mainstream,” the report concludes. “Enterprises have experienced the pain and risk that occurs when their software assets are not managed properly, and SAM people, processes and technology are being implemented across organisations of all sizes to address the problem.

“But the software landscape is constantly evolving,” it adds. “SAM must evolve to redefine how software is managed in these new environments. And as software becomes the primary attack vector by which hackers invade corporate networks and threaten corporate security – SAM must also evolve to play its important role in corporate security.”

Some organisations are expanding their portfolio in line with this; Snow Software, traditionally a SAM player, is moving further into enterprise mobility management (EMM), as exemplified by its placing in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant on the topic. Alan Giles, business unit manager of Snow’s mobility arm, told this reporter that he was happy the company was in a “niche space populated by one.”

You can find out more about the Flexera report here (registration required).