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IBM has announced it is to add four new cloud data centres in the UK, tripling its capacity and aiming to keep up with client demand.

The announcement comes almost two months to the day since the Armonk giant committed to a cloud data centre in Norway citing rising demand in the Nordics, and one day after eCommerce behemoth Alibaba launched its global cloud plan, opening data centres in Australia, Germany, Japan, and the Middle East.

IBM said its key tenet for the new data centres was ‘cognitive intelligence’; in other words, utilising artificial intelligence for better business decisions, and utilising the capabilities of Watson. Airline TUI was a new customer announced by the company, with travel operator Thomson, part of the TUI Group, trialling a new search chatbot which leverages Watson and gives real-time results on travel destinations and holiday enquiries.

Picture credit: “IBM’s global cloud data center footprint“, by “ibmphoto24“, used under CC BY NC ND

IBM now has a global network of 52 data centres, with 16 across Europe overall and the UK contingent up to six, as a recently published graphic (above) notes. The first new facility will open in Farnham, Surrey, in December, with the rest opening next year.

“By adding four new cloud data centres in the UK, IBM is giving local businesses an easy route to the cloud, helping them quickly innovate and respond to market demands,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud in a statement. “IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas, offering clients higher value cloud data services such as Watson and blockchain running on our cloud infrastructure that delivers world class scalability, performance and security.”

The company’s list of new and existing customers mentioned in the press materials had a particular focus on retail and a nod towards Black Friday on November 25. Alongside TUI, Boots, Dixons, Shop Direct, and Travis Perkins were also cited.

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It’s a discussion which has rumbled on for years; does a centralised or decentralised model of IT work best? According to new research commissioned by VMware, cloud computing has become key to the decentralisation of IT – and while it may ease the pressure in some areas, security, management and compliance issues remain.

The latest release, titled State of the Cloud, represents the second half of VMware’s study, with the former, The IT Archipelago, being conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the latter by research firm Vanson Bourne.

According to the 3,300 respondents across 20 countries, more than two thirds (69%) said that the management of IT has continued to decentralise over the past three years, while a similar number (65%) of IT-based respondents said they want IT to be more centralised. Three quarters (74%) say IT should be responsible for enabling other lines of business to drive innovation.

On the flip side, more than half (57%) agree that decentralisation has resulted in non-secure IT solutions being purchased, while 56% said it means a lack of regulatory compliance and data protection. Three in five (61%) have concerns that decentralisation results in some duplication of IT spending, while on average businesses are seeing a 5.7% increase on IT spend.

Naturally, VMware has its ready-made solution to the problem in the form of VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, a product which aims to provide, in the words of the press materials, ‘the world’s most complete and capable hybrid cloud architecture to enable consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on premises and off, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor.’ As this publication noted when the move was announced at VMworld back in August, it represented an extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy, positioning itself as an enabler for business running on other, more populous, clouds.

The study also looked at regional trends. For EMEA, 57% said decentralisation is making the IT department’s job more challenging, while seven in 10 respondents in Asia Pacific said it makes their organisation more innovative and more responsive to market changes.

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Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba has beefed up its cloud operations with the announcement of four new data centres opening by the end of 2016 in Germany, the Middle East, Australia, and Japan.

The German data centre, located in Frankfurt, will be run in partnership with Vodafone, while Sydney will host the Australian data centre with a dedicated team. Japan’s data centre opening will continue Alibaba’s partnership with SoftBank announced earlier this year, while the launch in Dubai is being claimed as the first instance of a global public cloud provider offering services in the Middle East.

“The four new data centres will further expand Alibaba Cloud’s global ecosystem and footprint, allowing us to meet the increasing demand for secure and scalable cloud computing services from businesses and industries worldwide,” said Sicheng Yu, Alibaba VP and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement. “The true potential of data-driven digital transformation will be seen through globalisation and the opportunities brought by the new global economy will become a reality.”

Alibaba will join a host of major cloud vendors by putting its flag in Frankfurt as its first European expansion. Of the four largest players, only Google does not have a presence there; Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in Frankfurt in 2014, with IBM following suit at the beginning of 2015 and Microsoft earlier this year.

In May this year, Alibaba announced it was teaming up with long term partner SoftBank for a cloud partnership in Japan, although it was reported a month later that the Japanese tech company, who had invested in Alibaba since 2000, was selling at least $7.9 billion of shares, reducing its stake in the eCommerce firm to around 28%. Writing for Seeking Alpha in May, Lior Ronen argued that while the partnership might be a ‘tiny development’ for Alibaba now, it would become a ‘significant move’ in the firm’s long term development and competing against AWS.

Figures from Synergy Research, whose analysis into public cloud infrastructure is long standing, puts AWS at 45% of global market share, well ahead of the next three vendors – Microsoft, Google, and IBM – put together. Yet in a note last month the analyst firm singled out Alibaba as a second tier vendor growing “particularly strongly”, although adding it was a “long way” behind Google, which is in turn a sixth of the size of Amazon.

Not surprisingly, Alibaba took the opportunity in the press materials to flex its muscles around its cloud power. During its Global Shopping Festival earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud played a supporting role to help underpin peak traffic of 175,000 transactions per second, the company said. “We want to establish cloud computing as the digital foundation for the new global economy using the opportunities of cloud computing to empower businesses of all sizes across all markets,” said Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud.

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IBM has announced a series of new cloud data services on Bluemix, its developer-friendly platform as a service (PaaS) offering, aiming to help businesses accelerate their migration and glean better insights from their data.

There are three services in total. The snappily-titled IBM Decision Optimisation on Cloud, which is in beta, helps organisations digest a large amount of data, including predictions, business goals and transactional figures, and spit them out as decision points. IBM gives the example of a retailer in need of restocking a clothing supply; by using the new feature, the retail planner can instantly get a recommendation based on all suppliers, warehouses, and other costs.

While this feature sounds like it could be inspired by Watson, IBM Bluemix Lift, a data migration tool for the Watson Data Platform, is more concerned with protection as opposed to the data itself. It can encrypt data being transferred, at a rate of up to 225GB per hour, and can continue transferring in the event of an outage or connectivity loss. IBM dashDB for Transactions, on the other hand, is a fully managed SQL database on Bluemix.

“Cloud is the platform that enables cognitive intelligence,” said John Murphy, vice president of IBM Watson Data Platform in a statement. “We’re continuing to grow our catalogue of cloud data services on Bluemix so that we can help developers and data scientists better manage and more quickly interpret data for business innovation.”

The last major IBM product news was back in October, when the Armonk giant launched what was claimed to be the industry’s first object storage service for hybrid clouds. The product was based around the technology of Cleversafe, a company which was bought by IBM last year. Among the new customers of IBM are Bitly, for the object storage, and UK construction retailer Travis Perkins for business process management.

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Goldman Sachs has upgraded its rating on Microsoft from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’ after praising the company’s Azure growth.

According to a report from StreetInsider, Goldman Sachs’ Heather Bellini raised the price target from $60 to $68 noting Azure’s continued growth; 100% or greater, year over year, in eight of the past 10 quarters.

“With a large Microsoft customer base and strong C-level relationships, we believe Azure can continue to grow revenue and improve margins over time,” Bellini wrote. “Our views are supported by channel partners as well, who have commented recently that they are seeing strong uptake of Azure amongst enterprise customers, particularly as it relates to hybrid cloud.”

The remarks ring true with industry figures; according to analysis from Synergy Research over the past several quarters, Azure continues to grow more quickly than Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market leader, but ultimately barely making a dent in AWS’ market share. The most recent figures, published at the end of October, showed AWS holds 45% of the worldwide public IaaS space, more than Microsoft, Google, and IBM put together.

Recent updates from Microsoft and AWS show greater expansion both physically and in terms of partnerships. Microsoft opened German data centre regions earlier this year, and announced in September they were being managed by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. Later that month, AWS announced plans to launch a data centre region in Paris.

Last month, Microsoft confirmed it would be increasing its prices for customers buying its enterprise software and cloud services in British pounds. On-premise enterprise software would increase by 13% to align closer to the Euro, while “most” enterprise cloud prices would rise by almost a quarter.

According to MarketWatch, shares of Microsoft went up 1% in morning trading yesterday following the Goldman Sachs note.

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A new report from Tata Communications offers a warning for service providers; their solutions do not always meet the expectations of enterprises.

The research, which was conducted by IDC among enterprises and service providers across 32 countries, saw enterprises rank security, cited by 52% of respondents, cloud (43%) and mobility (32%) as their primary technology priorities.

But there may be a gap between what enterprises want and what service providers can give. Enterprises see service providers’ main roles as increasing their network capacity or reach, cited by almost three quarters (73%) of those polled. Delivering hybrid networking services was cited by 66%, while meeting cloud needs was key to almost half (48%) of respondents.

Enterprises evidently still see their providers primarily as network suppliers, but the research sounds a note of caution over how service providers need to up their capabilities in cloud as well as think further about partnerships. “Through the right partnerships, service providers are able to open up new revenue streams in growth areas such as cloud and unified communication and collaboration, without having to invest in developing their own solutions from scratch,” said James Parker, president of global sales at Tata.

“Our research indicates that many service providers haven’t kept up with the rapid pace of digital disruption in enterprises, which is jeopardising their ability to win business in this segment,” said James Eibisch, research director at IDC. “In order for service providers to be able to meet enterprises’ changing IT needs, they should explore partnering with other like-minded players, complementing their own solutions portfolio.

“The right cloud ecosystem, for example, makes it quicker and more cost-effective for service providers to grow their revenues from the cloud,” Eibisch added.

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Small businesses continue to put security as their main priority when selecting a cloud storage provider, yet many continue to risk their security by choosing free solutions, according to a new survey from analyst firm Clutch.

According to the survey, which polled almost 300 small and medium businesses who use at least one cloud storage platform, 25% of respondents admit they use a free cloud storage product, compared to 71% who said their organisations pay for cloud storage.

More than half (57%) of those who are using free cloud storage say they are putting backup and archived files in those depositories, compared to 66% of all respondents. More than a quarter (28%) are putting company financial records in their free storage, along with medical data (14%) and customer banking information (11%).

The report, which also collated various responses from industry players and experts, came to the conclusion that the weakest link in the cloud storage chain was the user. “My data isn’t suddenly secure just because I put it in the cloud,” said Mark Estes, regional director of sales at Qubole. “There’s a lot of things you do. The cloud enables the security of data as long as you do things correctly.”

Riley Panko, marketing analyst at Clutch, told CloudTech that there is an element of ‘ignorance towards the reality of cloud storage and security’ in businesses. “They feel confident that their data is safe – until it isn’t,” she said. “Thus it’s a matter of making sure that you educate your employees in a realistic manner. Every employee should understand the consequences of a data breach of sensitive information.”

The study, titled ‘Cloud Storage and Security: The Rundown’, focused more in-depth on cloud adoption, security, and regulations compared to the previous year’s edition. Panko added: “It’s clear to see that hesitations towards adopting cloud storage are falling away as faith in its security builds. However, this security is only present if employees act accordingly.”

Elsewhere, 53% of respondents say it is important to follow the ICO regulations, with 30% citing HIPAA and 27% citing PCI. Writing for this publication in July, Frank Krieger, director of compliance at iland, argued organisations need to “care a great deal” about ISO compliance in the cloud.

You can read the full study here.

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Google has been pushing the message of machine learning as it aims to tempt more customers onto its cloud – and this push continues with the launch of a new group focused on delivering cloud-based machine learning solutions to businesses, as well as a new API.

“Building a centralised team within Google Cloud will accelerate our ability to deliver machine learning products and services to enterprise customers in every industry,” wrote Rob Craft, group lead for Google’s cloud machine learning arm in a blog post. “Today also marks an exciting next step in Google Cloud’s product commitment to make machine learning more accessible for all businesses.”

The new cloud machine learning group will be led by Fei-Fei Li, who had been director of the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University, and Jia Li, formerly head of research at Snapchat.

One of the new launches involves GPUs (graphics processing units) for Google Cloud Platform, offering more hardware flexibility. In a separate blog post, product manager John Barrus noted the importance of providing GPUs to give more computing power when compared against CPUs. “You’ll be able to strap your ML-powered applications to a rocket engine, resulting in faster and more affordable machine learning models”, as Google puts it.

Regarding APIs, the Cloud Natural Language API is now generally available, which also includes expanded entity recognition, granular sentiment analysis with expanded language support, as well as improved syntax analysis. Similarly, the Google Cloud Jobs API also utilises machine learning to provide businesses with ‘Google strength’ candidates for recommended jobs.

Plenty of research has taken place on how cloud is enabling greater power in machine learning; not least due to the economic impact of digital storage and cloud computing making machine learning more affordable for all businesses. “Enterprises looking to become competitive leaders are going after the insights in these unstructured data sources and turning them into a competitive advantage with machine learning,” wrote Louis Columbus in this publication back in June.

You can find out more here.

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According to the latest figures from 451 Research, more than a third of enterprise IT budget is expected to be spent on hosting and cloud services in 2017.

Currently, enterprises spend more than a quarter (28%) of their budget on cloud, but 451 argues this number will go up to 34% next year. Despite hosting and cloud providers positioning themselves as infrastructure players, only 31% of that budget goes towards infrastructure services, with applications (42%), managed services (14%) and security (9%) also being used.

Enterprises are also picking multiple vendors for their hosting and cloud services; public cloud infrastructure providers were cited by 69% of respondents, followed by managed hosting providers (26%).

451 argues that the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) markets are much more consolidated – which rings true with other industry research – but managed services is an area of much greater interest.

“The markets for unmanaged IaaS and SaaS are dominated by large, hyperscale vendors. However, this spending trend indicates there is an appetite for the type of bundled services a broader market of managed service providers are well positioned to deliver,” said Liam Eagle, 451 research manager. “A strong opportunity exists for service providers offering a diversified set of hosting and cloud services that includes infrastructure and application hosting, as well as managed services and security services delivered around them.”

Eagle added that the market for managed infrastructure and application services was a longer tail market, including the possibility of reselling services from the largest IaaS and SaaS vendors. Rackspace is arguably the best example of this; the company confirmed that it was going private back in August. In the firm’s most recent financial results as a public company, the company said that 277 customers chose its AWS resell service over the past nine months, with 60% choosing the higher tier option.

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It’s that time of year again: Cisco has released its latest cloud index survey, and the numbers keep getting bigger. This time, global cloud traffic is predicted to rise from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015, to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020, assisted by greater data centre virtualisation and increased migration to cloud architectures.

The figures from this time last year put the current prediction into context; back in October 2015 the networking giant put the overall figure for the end of 2019 at 8.6 ZB, although adding that the Internet of Everything (IoE) would generate an eye-watering 42.3 ZB per month by 2019.

Among the updated figures include global data centre traffic, which is forecast to hit 15.3 ZB per year by the end of 2020, while global data centre IP traffic will grow three-fold in the coming five years. 68% of cloud workloads in four years’ time will be in public cloud data centres, up from 49% in 2015, providing an interesting comparison with VMware’s analysis back in August, which argued 2021 will be the year where 50% of all enterprise IT workloads will be in the cloud, and 2030 the year when public cloud will be the dominant share.

The types of cloud service delivery models will also change, according to Cisco.

By 2020, almost three quarters (74%) of total cloud workloads will be software as a service (SaaS), up from 65% in 2015, compared with 17% for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – down from 26% last year – and 8% for platform as a service (PaaS).

One evident trend Cisco aims to emphasise is around larger scale ‘hyperscale’ data centres, and how they will have a ‘significant’ impact on the global data centre landscape. By 2020, the report argues, hyperscale will host almost half (47%) of all data centre servers, as well as more than two thirds (68%) of data centre processing power.

Collaborating with Synergy Research, whose reports on cloud infrastructure have long been covered in this publication, Cisco argues there are 24 hyperscale operators globally that either hit $1bn in IaaS or PaaS, $2bn in SaaS, $4bn in search or social networking, or $8bn in eCommerce. From 259 at the end of last year, Cisco estimates there will be 485 hyperscale data centres by 2020. “As with servers, hyperscale data centres represent a large portion of overall data, traffic, and processing power in data centres,” the report notes. “Traffic within hyperscale data centres will quintuple by 2020.”

The report’s conclusion makes for particularly interesting reading, again noting that an ‘extraordinary’ amount of data will be generated by IoE applications – somewhere to the tune of 600 ZB – by 2020, as well as other emerging technologies. “Not only is the data centre traffic growing, but it is also getting streamlined with architectural innovations such as SDN and NFV, which offer new levels of optimisation for data centres,” the report notes.

With regard to cloud readiness – the work of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) is an excellent reference point in this regard – Cisco adds countries around the globe have made ‘significant strides’ in supporting cloud services. “The focus now turns to continuing to improve network capabilities to support the advanced cloud applications that organisations and end users expect and rely upon,” the report adds.

You can read the full paper here (PDF).

Body picture credit: Cisco