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The hybrid cloud: it’s a buzzword which refuses to go away.

This month is a case in point. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, arguably the two biggest and most influential cloud computing organisations, both made announcements on the theme.

The general availability of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 was seen as “another big step in hybrid cloud”, Microsoft argued, with a “cloud-ready OS” which “inherently enables hybrid cloud.” AWS, on the other hand, announced a previously-rumoured hybrid cloud partnership with VMware, the two companies pointing out its leadership in public and private cloud respectively.

Demand is certainly there. According to IDC, more than 70% of IT organisations in western Europe will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017. IBM, who announced their own object storage for hybrid clouds last week, released their own study which backed up those figures; 78% of C-suite executives polled said their cloud initiatives were coordinated or fully integrated, up from 34% in 2012.

As Sebastian Krause, IBM Cloud Europe general manager wrote for this publication at the time: “Executives expect hybrid cloud adoption (in particular) to support their organisation’s growth in three main ways: by facilitating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership and by enhancing operational efficiencies and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations.”

Sounds great, right? But there may be a catch.

Charles Crouchman is CTO at enterprise cloud and virtualisation software provider Turbonomic. He argues that plenty of organisations eulogising over hybrid cloud instead have ‘multi-cloud’. “While we hear a lot of discussion about hybrid cloud, the truth is that the majority of organisations aren’t there yet,” he tells CloudTech.

“A truly hybrid cloud would allow workloads to switch seamlessly between cloud environments, whether public or private, depending on the needs of the organisation,” Crouchman adds. “Instead, what the vast majority of organisations have now is multi-cloud; while they have a number of environments, both private and public, and workloads may fluctuate in size and demand, barring exceptional circumstances those workloads will stay where they were first placed.”

Essentially, if you’re using multiple clouds, it does not automatically make it hybrid. Back in August, Turbonomic polled almost 2,000 IT decision makers, and the verdict which came back was that many organisations did not have the skills needed to manage a multi-cloud environment. This was backed up by a study from HyTrust in September which found that while 60% of VMworld attendees polled said they plan to move to a multi-cloud model, data encryption and security remain serious stumbling blocks. Interestingly, almost a third said that, if they were using two or more clouds, they preferred a flavour combination of AWS and Azure.

“This is quite believable when one considers that by their very nature multi-cloud environments aren’t managed from a single user interface,” explains Crouchman. “An organisation’s private and public clouds have, in most cases, come from separate vendors, each working differently, with their own management tools and interfaces.

“This adds extra complexity on top of an already potent mix of challenges, such as deciding which workloads should be placed in which cloud; balancing cost and performance across all environments; while meeting service level agreements and quality of service obligations.”

For Crouchman, this is indicative of a stepping stone approach; if companies are still experiencing trouble with deploying multi-cloud environments, then a truly hybrid approach is a long way away. So what would in his opinion be the perfect scenario? “In an ideal future, organisations would use autonomic, economic-based intelligence to manage multi-cloud environments and ultimately deliver hybrid cloud, with workloads always in the best possible place to suit business needs and provide peak performance,” he says.

“In such a system, the multi-cloud environment would be treated as an economy in its own right; with resources bought and traded depending on their applications’ – or end users’ – real-time needs, while obeying the organisation’s own budgetary rules.”

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With the OpenStack jamboree in Barcelona only a week away, it’s a good time to note the technologies driving its users forward – and according to the latest survey data, containers lead the way, with NFV (network function virtualisation) and bare metal also seeing an uptick.

The user study from OpenStack, which has been running semi-annually since 2013 and polled almost 400 respondents, found that container technologies continue to lead the way, cited by 78% of respondents and topping the rankings for the third year in a row. SDN and NFV (61%) and bare metal (56%) were a little further behind, ahead of hybrid cloud (46%) and platform as a service (42%). Internet of Things polled 32% of the vote.

In terms of specific container and PaaS technologies, Kubernetes came out on top. Almost half of respondents (47%) are using it in some capacity, with 31% in production compared to 10% in dev/QA and 6% at the proof of concept stage. 17% of respondents are using CloudFoundry in production, compared to 13% for OpenShift and Mesos. Over the past year, the research noted that Kubernetes usage went up 20 percentage points, while CloudFoundry fell 16 percentage points.

The survey also examined reasons why organisations choose OpenStack. For 72%, saving money is the primary business driver, while increased operational efficiency and accelerating an organisation’s ability to compete by deploying applications faster were also cited.

Similarly, the spread was pretty even when it came to OpenStack usage by organisation size; 18% of those polled who logged deployments had between 10 and 99 employees, while 12% had 100,000 employees or more.

Given the survey’s provenance, the results are understandably on the positive side – yet the technological innovations are certainly of interest. Back in March, cloud software firm Talligent noted that while OpenStack adoption was maturing and increasingly being seen as a viable alternative to public clouds, complexity in deployments remains an issue. Writing for this publication in July last year, David Auslander noted that the downside to an open source model is that “lots of developers with lots of ideas breeds complexity”, but argued that with the right planning, OpenStack was “ready for prime time.”

You can read the full OpenStack report here.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) software provider x.ai has announced the launch of the Professional version of its personal assistant product.

The personal assistant, Amy – or twin brother Andrew – schedules meetings on behalf of users, saving plenty of admin time. All users need to do is connect their calendars to x.ai, and cc Amy or Andrew, who does the rest.

The beta version was launched in June 2014, and since then the New York-based startup has been building up its data set and infrastructure. According to Dennis R. Mortensen, x.ai CEO, the key to launching a professional-grade version was playing the waiting game.

“Teaching a machine to understand natural language, even using the most advanced data science, is by any definition super hard. Add to that the fact that meeting scheduling is a high accuracy setting,” he said. “So it was important for us to wait to roll out a paid product until we felt Amy was smart enough to schedule meetings nearly flawlessly.”

Customers already using the Professional product include Walmart, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and The New York Times, as well as Astronomer, a data science engineering platform. “Once I had access to Amy, I was able to consistently schedule twice as many meetings with a small fraction of the effort,” said Ry Walker, Astronomer CEO. “There’s no question in my mind that x.ai has helped me move faster to do my real job, which is to build a great company.”

The full name of the assistants are Amy and Andrew Ingram. The initials referring to AI are obvious, but the remainder of their name, ‘N-Gram’, is a reference to a computational linguistics and probability technique.

x.ai uses the MongoDB NoSQL database to power its personal assistants, and writing for sister publication CloudTech in December last year, Kelly Stirman, VP strategy, discussed the importance of the correct infrastructure in powering AI initiatives. “Cloud computing solved the two biggest hurdles for AI: abundant, low cost computing and a way to leverage massive volumes of data,” he wrote. “Small, focused, cloud-based algorithms are going to be the AI that changes our lives over the next decade. It’s better to solve one problem really well than it is to solve 100 problems poorly.”

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Microsoft has launched a cloud services due diligence checklist aimed at providing organisations with more standardised procedures for their potential cloud push.

The checklist is based on the emerging ISO/IEC 19086 standard which focuses on cloud service level agreements, and gives structure to organisations of all sizes and sectors to identify their objectives and requirements, before comparing the offerings of different cloud service providers.

“Cloud adoption is no longer simply a technology decision,” Microsoft writes in a page explaining the checklist. “Because checklist requirements touch on every aspect of an organisation, they serve to convene all key internal decision makers – the CIO and CISO as well as legal, risk management, procurement, and compliance professionals.

“The checklist promotes a thoroughly vetted move to the cloud, providing a structured guidance and a consistent, repeatable approach to choosing a cloud service provider,” it adds.

It’s worth noting, as Microsoft does in the document, that the checklist is not intended to be, nor should be considered a substitute for the 19086 standard – its role is to essentially distil the 37 page standard document into two pages – yet it does go through performance, service, data management and governance checks.

In putting the checklist together, Microsoft also cited a Forrester research study which argued that more than 94% of organisations polled would change some terms in their current cloud agreement. Agreements often miss key considerations due to their complex nature, the research notes, while topics cloud buyers regret not having in their agreements are around security, privacy, and awareness around internal key stakeholders.

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told delegates at the company’s Transform conference in London how cloud computing, through powering artificial intelligence and machine learning, was putting technology “in the hands of humanity.” Back in August, the company announced it had obtained ISO 27017 compliance, which gives additional controls specifically relating to cloud services.

You can download the full checklist here.

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It had been rumoured, but now it’s confirmed: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware have announced a strategic alliance which will culminate in a new hybrid cloud service snappily titled ‘VMware Cloud on AWS’.

The two companies say the announcement will give customers a full software-defined data centre (SDCC) experience, combining leadership in private and public cloud. The service will run on AWS bare metal infrastructure, while the SDDC side will come predominantly from VMware Cloud Foundation, including VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN, as well as NSX virtualisation technologies.

The product will be available from ‘mid 2017’ onwards, and will be sold by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service. The companies said pricing information would be made available closer to availability date.

“VMware Cloud on AWS offers our customers the best of both worlds,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. “This new service will make it easier for customers to preserve their investment in existing applications and processes while taking advantage of the global footprint, advanced capabilities, and scale of the AWS public cloud.”

Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, added: “Most enterprises are already virtualised using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operating model.”

VMware has been busy on the partnership front of late; earlier this week, there was an update on the company’s collaborations with IBM, first announced back in February. According to IBM, 1,000 joint customers are now moving their VMware environments to the IBM Cloud, as well as mobilising and training 4,000 global service consultants to help VMware customers access and leverage IBM’s cloud.

At VMworld in August, the company made note of its SDDC capabilities; VMware Cloud Foundation was claimed to offer “a new ‘as a service’ option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment.” As this publication noted at the time, VMware’s role in the industry landscape appear to be “an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds.” With that in mind, you can’t get any bigger than AWS in that regard.

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A new research report from software and business services provider Agilisys has found that more than a third of public sector firms have ‘no concrete plans’ to adopt cloud-based technology.

The findings, which appear in the 2016 Cloud Adoption Survey, found that of the 180 respondents, 36% had no plans to migrate to the cloud.

Almost 60% said that cloud adoption would help to reduce on-site maintenance and IT support requirements, which may indicate it is not a lack of knowledge holding these companies back, although ‘confusion’ and ‘uncertainty’ were cited as key reasons hindering adoption. Perhaps not surprisingly, data compliance and security were also seen as primary obstacles.

“While the report shows that adoption of cloud services is underway in the public sector, some organisations have concerns about their capability to manage compliance and regulation within the cloud as well as how to transform, migrate and operate services in this new environment,” said Sean Grimes, Agilisys IT services director.

“Changing any IT system has inherent challenges, and moving to the cloud is no different. But working with the right partner, the shift should be seen as a transformative move about which organisations can feel positive, potentially providing more control over specific aspects of their IT, not less,” Grimes added.

Naturally, the research results mean something for Agilisys; alongside the report the company has recently launched its Community Cloud initiative aimed specifically at public sector organisations, with Microsoft being confirmed as the first partner to join.

Recent research from Eduserv, a company which offers public sector IT services, found that 12% of all UK council authorities, or 50 councils overall, account for 90% of G-Cloud local government spend. As the company noted, local governments and authorities are more than likely using cloud services, if not officially then in a shadow IT role, so it would make more sense to create official policies given the data risks involved.

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IBM has made a couple of major cloudy launches, announcing what is claimed as the industry’s first object storage service for hybrid clouds, as well as elaborating on the partnership with VMware announced earlier this year.

IBM Cloud Object Storage is based primarily around the technology of Cleversafe, which was acquired by the Armonk giant in November last year, but also around SecureSlice, which combines ‘erasure coding’ – whereby data is broken into fragments and stored across a set of different locations – with encryption and decryption.

Alongside security, IBM is also touting the availability and economic benefits of its new storage, saying it can tolerate ‘even catastrophic regional outages’ with continuous availability inherent in its architecture. The company argues that, on internal testing comparing IBM Cloud Object Storage Vault Cross-Region Services to a ‘leading vendor’, it was 24% less expensive when managing half a petabyte of data.

“As clients continue to move massive workloads to hybrid clouds there is a need for an easier, more secure and economical way to store and manage mounting volumes of digital information,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM Cloud senior vice president in a statement. “With today’s announcement, IBM becomes the leading cloud vendor to provide clients the flexibility and availability of object data storage across on-premises and public clouds.”

As is often the way, IBM has unveiled a brand spanking new customer with its launch, and in this case it is link management platform Bitly, which is using the cloud object storage to analyse the more than 10 billion clicks it processes each month globally. “We turned exclusively to IBM Cloud because of its leadership in data services,” said Robert Platzer, Bitly CTO. “Through this partnership IBM will help us transform our business and build a variety of new cloud services – from advanced analytics and data mining to data research – into our software platform.”

Regarding VMware, IBM has pushed out a number of stats: 1,000 joint customers are now moving their VMware environments to the IBM Cloud, as well as mobilising and training 4,000 global service consultants to help VMware customers access and leverage IBM’s cloud. The news of customers involved in this partnership, including Marriott International and Monitise, were referenced at the recent VMworld event in August. 

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While two thirds of organisations polled by cloud storage and data protection provider CTERA Networks deploys more than a quarter of its applications in the cloud, protecting them is a different story altogether.

The findings appear in a report entitled ‘Game of Clouds’ – no prizes for guessing the theme – which makes the research concept clear.

“The emergence and tremendous growth of cloud computing in the enterprise is taking IT environments to uncharted territory, where unprecedented efficiency and cost benefits battle with new challenges around privacy, security, and the data protection and availability of critical business data,” the report opens. “Like most IT evolutions, there will be winners and losers. The key to victory in this ‘Game of Clouds’ lies in the alignment of an organisation’s data protection strategies with its business goals.”

The report found that while more than a quarter of apps are in the cloud at two thirds of firms, and while 37% of the 400 IT decision makers polled plan to grow their cloud use by at least 25% if not more, two thirds (66%) either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ agree that there is less focus on backing up applications in the cloud.

The reason? CTERA argues there is a ‘misconception that the cloud is inherently resilient compared to on-premises applications’. Furthermore, 62% say they rely on the cloud provider to back up applications running on their platform. “It is clear these organisations have faith in the perceived inherent resilience of their cloud providers, but they should be wary of relying on a third party to serve as both a platform to run applications and to maintain the only backups of those applications,” the report notes.

More than half (54%) of respondents say they are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy, while more than a third (36%) admit loss of data in the cloud would be more catastrophic than their data centre crashing. The message is clear, CTERA argues. “The enterprise’s move beyond traditional data centres has rewritten the playbook for data protection in the cloud,” said Jeff Denworth, CTERA SVP marketing in a statement.

“As organisations adopt cloud and multi-cloud strategies, traditional backup tools fall down. Our research spotlights the key data protection considerations and challenges for enterprises as they look for simple, efficient, and automated solutions that protect critical cloud-based applications.”

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

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Oracle and Verizon have announced a new partnership which aims to ‘make the move to cloud easier for global organisations.’

The deal combines Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect services, which utilises Verizon’s network to transfer data and apps securely to cloud service providers, to create the snappily-titled Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect for Oracle FastConnect. The combination of software defined networking (SDN) from the Verizon side and in-region connectivity from Oracle is what the two companies are hoping will make it a winner for customers.

“Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect for Oracle FastConnect allows users to connect to applications simply, securely and reliably,” said Shawn Hakl, Verizon vice president of enterprise networking and innovation in a statement.

“With SDN at the heart of our Secure Cloud Interconnect solution, Oracle customers will find it can deliver an unbeatable combination of performance, control and efficiency to enable their digital transformation.” Diby Malakar, Oracle VP product management, added: “With Verizon’s leading Secure Cloud Interconnect service, Oracle customers can benefit from the latest in networking technology as they continually groom their networks to handle the demands of their business.”

Verizon offers partnerships with eight other cloud vendors through this service, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer, while Oracle and Verizon have a cloudy partnership stretching back to 2014.

It has been a particularly busy period for Oracle’s cloud initiatives, dating back to the company’s $9.3 billion acquisition of ERP software provider NetSuite back in July.

Speaking at the company’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco last month, co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison declared that “Amazon’s lead is over” in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) realm with the release of the company’s next generation data centres, while AWS was also attacked – along with Workday – in Oracle’s most recent financial results, with total cloud revenues approaching $1 billion.

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A new study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute has found that, for more than three in five businesses polled, cloud-based services were the biggest trend driving the deployment of applications using public key infrastructures (PKI).

PKI refers to the ability for users and organisations to send secure data over networks; as defined by TechTarget, it “supports the distribution and identification of public encryption keys, enabling users and computers to both securely exchange data over networks such as the Internet and verify the identity of the other party.”

According to the research, which surveyed more than 5,000 business and IT managers in 11 countries and across five continents, PKIs are being used to support more and more applications. The greatest usage is in the US, but on average PKIs support eight different apps within a business, up one from this time last year. For the 62% of respondents who say they use PKI credentials for public cloud-based applications and services, it represents a 12% increase on 2015.

Yet the report’s findings were not all positive. More than half (58%) of those polled say their existing PKI is not equipped to support new applications, while more worryingly, 37% say they have no existing PKI in their organisation.

Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, argued that in an increasingly cloud and IoT-enabled business landscape, businesses who are not adhering to best practice guidelines around PKIs could see serious danger.

“As organisations digitally transform their business, they are increasingly relying on cloud-based services and applications, as well as experiencing an explosion in IoT connected devices,” he said in a statement. “This rapidly escalating burden of data sharing and device authentication is set to apply an unprecedented level of pressure onto existing PKIs, which now are considered part of the core IT backbone, resulting in a huge challenge for security professionals to create trusted environments.

“In short, as organisations continue to move to the cloud it is hugely important that PKIs are future proofed – sooner rather than later,” Dr. Ponemon added.

Recent studies around encryption and cloud security have the potential for progress. In August, a research paper from Microsoft offered the concept of a secure data exchange where the cloud performs data trades between multiple willing parties to give users full control over the exchange of information.