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The big data landscape is approaching a state of maturation: according to the latest note from analyst house Gartner, more money is being invested in big data but fewer companies are deciding to commit.

The research, which polled almost 200 members of the Gartner Research Circle, found that 48% of companies have invested in big data this year – up 3% from this time last year – but also argued that only a quarter (25%) plan to invest in the coming years, down from 31% in 2015.

One area which remained relatively unchanged was with regard to getting big data projects from ideation to creation. Gartner argues the issue of organisations being stuck in the pilot phase remains an important one; 15% of respondents reported deploying their big data project protection in the most recent survey, compared with 14% this time last year.

Gartner argues a couple of reasons may be behind the findings. Big data projects seem to be receiving less spending priority than other IT initiatives, while similarly there is also a lack of return on investment reported. This may change as the big data term dissipates; in other words, as dealing with multiple strands of data and larger datasets becomes the de facto method.

“The big issue is not so much big data itself, but rather how it is used,” said Nick Heudecker, Gartner research director. “While organisations have understood that big data is not just about a specific technology, they need to avoid thinking about big data as a separate effort.” Research director Jim Hare added: “When it comes to big data, many organisations are still finding themselves at the crafting stage. Industrialisation – and the performance and stability guarantees that come with it – have yet to penetrate big data thinking.”

A recent report from Forrester Research found that, in terms of big data technologies, NoSQL and Hadoop were forecast to grow the quickest, with the pharmaceutical, transport and primary production industries the fastest growing.

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According to the latest research from analyst house IDC, worldwide cloud IT infrastructure revenue hit $7.7 billion (£6.05bn) in the second quarter of 2016, at a growth rate of 14.5%.

The data, which comes from the company’s latest worldwide quarterly cloud IT infrastructure tracker, found Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) remains top of the tree for global infrastructure vendor revenue, with the same market share – 16.4% – as this time last year, although not growing as quickly as Dell and Cisco, in silver and bronze medal position respectively.

EMC is clear in fourth with a plethora of providers – Lenovo, NetApp, IBM, Huawei, and Inspur – in the 2.5% to 3.3% market share, with IDC placing them all in joint fifth. It’s worth noting too that, with EMC now being owned by Dell, putting their two revenue figures together would put them ahead of HPE.

In terms of the three primary infrastructure products – Ethernet switch, storage, and server – growth in private and public cloud infrastructure growth was primarily driven by the former. Ethernet switch grew 49.4% and 61.8% year over year respectively. Interestingly, while Latin America saw the fastest regional growth at 44.0% annually, Western Europe (41.2%) and Japan (35.4%) – two relatively mature markets – were the next fastest growers. In comparison, the US (6.7%) trailed.

IDC argues that despite these figures there was something of a slowdown in the first two quarters of the year, with the finger of blame being pointed at hyperscale. The rest of the year does have a positive outlook, however. “As expected, the hyperscale slowdown continues in the second quarter of 2016,” said Kuba Stolarski, research director for computing platforms at IDC. “However, deployments to mid-tier and small cloud service providers showed strong growth, along with private cloud buildouts.

“In general, the second quarter did not have as difficult a compare to the prior year as the first quarter did, and this helped improve growth results across the board compared to last quarter,” Stolarski added. “In the second half of 2016, IDC expects to see strengthening in public cloud growth as key hyperscalers bring new data centres online around the globe, continued strength in private cloud deployments, and declines in traditional, non-cloud deployments.”

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IP EXPO Never mind Brexit – London-based Volta Data Centres says an opportunity is afoot after launching another floor of its data centre site.

The vendor, which operates off a single site in central London, says enquiries have gone up by around 50% since the referendum result in June. Jonathan Arnold, Volta managing director, explains: “I think those [enquiries] that are linked to Brexit are very much looking at planning for the future because there is clearly still that unknown of what will happen next year.

“There are customers looking at their options, so that [they think] ‘if we put this in central London, we know that’s definitely in the UK, especially looking at us because we’re that single site, they know that it can’t be anywhere else. I do think there is an element of planning out there, people working out what to do before they make some decisions next year.”

Getting the expansion and the customer interest alongside it is music to Volta’s ears – the company says they had 40 serious leads from last year’s IP EXPO closing “a few” of them, and hoping for similar this year – yet the company is also focusing on European strategy.

In another announcement, Volta is forging a partnership with Luxembourg-based LuxConnect; staying true to its UK base while acknowledging a European opportunity. The deal was announced at a reception held in the Luxembourg Embassy earlier this week, with the two companies sharing carriers in BT, Cogent, Colt, Level 3 and Verizon.

“We’ve been talking to each other for quite a while – pre-Brexit, may I add – so it’s very much [the idea that] we are a single site data centre in London, they’re four sites but they’re all in Luxembourg,” says Arnold.

“It’s kind of natural we’re getting enquiries from customers saying do you know anyone in Europe, they’re getting equal enquiries…we don’t compete, we’re both pure play colocation, we don’t offer managed services which is absolutely key to us, and in the conversation that we had, we have similar cultures between the two businesses so it makes sense to form an alliance and see where that takes us.”

For the new additions to the company’s space in London, Arnold says Volta will be moving customers over in the coming two to three weeks, with capacity of between 370 and 400 racks depending on the layout. Naturally, the Brexit referendum result and the uptick as a result was somewhat unexpected, but Arnold is philosophical. “We’re not sure next year what’s going to happen, although if it carries on from this year we’re definitely seeing quite significant growth for us as a business,” he says.

“We’ve got space and availability for customers to move in very quickly, so we’ll just see what happens.” 

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The big data technology landscape is varied and vast – and a new report from Forrester examines the key strands, with non-relational databases taking the bulk of the honours.

The report, claimed to be a first of its kind from the analyst firm titled Big Data Management Solutions Forecast 2016 to 2021, argues NoSQL and Hadoop will see the biggest growth during the five year period, with the markets growing 25.0% and 32.9% per year respectively. The analysts also claim that the big data technology space will grow at three times the rate of the overall technology market.

Forrester defines big data technology in six buckets; enterprise data warehousing, NoSQL, Hdaoop, big data integration, data virtualisation, and in-memory data fabric. The latter, a product which usually offers data, compute and service grids as well as an in-memory database, is predicted to grow at 29.2% annually over the coming five years.

Usage varies by industry, but the report notes that while telecommunications, professional services, finance and government are the largest users of these technologies now, the pharmaceutical, transport and primary production industries will be the quickest growing. Almost 40% of firms polled by Forrester say they are implementing and expanding their big data technology adoption, with another 30% planning to up their usage in the next 12 months.

One industry case study which utilises Hadoop in particular is Trulia, an online residential marketplace. On a given day, Trulia would crunch more than a terabyte of data, and cross reference it with a couple of petabytes of existing data to give their users the most accurate information possible.

With regards to NoSQL, a report from Gartner released in April this year around database management systems (DBMS) argued that for the five leaders – Basho, Couchbase, Datastax, MarkLogic and MongoDB – there was “still not much to write home about” in terms of revenue compared to the relational database behemoths.

The vendors will tell a different story, however. Couchbase, for instance, concluded a $30 million series F funding round back in March, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this publication that an IPO was not too far away. Yet the overall theme, according to both Gartner and Forrester, is that change is coming – it is just taking a while to get there.

“The complexity and richness of data is changing, along with exploding data volume and velocity. Unstructured data, such as text, tweets, graphs, and video, is an increasingly important source of information,” wrote Jennifer Adams, Forrester senior forecast analyst in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, we expect non-relational databases to be the fastest growing sector within big data management solutions.”

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As night follows day, so one player in the cloud infrastructure space announces something, another has to respond.

Or at least that’s what it feels like. Google has announced eight new locations for its Cloud Platform service, with three in Europe – including the UK – and three in Asia Pacific, shortly after Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new plans for a data centre zone in France.

The full list of new zones (below) are Finland, Frankfurt, London, Mumbai, Northern Virginia, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Sydney.

Picture credit: Google

“The public cloud is built on customer trust, and we understand that it’s a significant commitment for a customer to entrust a public cloud vendor with their physical infrastructure,” wrote Brian Stevens, Google Cloud vice president, in a company blog post announcing the changes. “By offering new features to help address customer needs and collaborating with them to usher in the future with tools like machine learning, we intend to accelerate the usability of the public cloud and bring more businesses into the Google Cloud fold.”

One of those businesses is note-taking app provider Evernote, which earlier this month confirmed it was ditching its own servers and networks to move its operations to Google’s cloud. The key aspect to Evernote picking the search giant, as the company confirmed in the press details, was Google’s interests in machine learning and data analytics.

Google said that Cloud Platform now serves over one billion end users, and with this in mind has also launched Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), which is comprised of Google engineers who integrate with a customer’s operations team to share responsibilities for cloud applications. “This integration represents a new model in which we share and apply our nearly two decades of expertise in cloud computing as an embedded part of a customer’s organisation,” added Stevens, who promised there would be more updates soon.

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Cloud infrastructure giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to launch a data centre region in Paris, making it the fourth zone after the UK, Ireland and Germany.

It’s worth noting here that AWS’ UK plans are just that at the moment, with the company confirming at a recent event that the UK data centres were going ahead despite the Brexit referendum vote. Yet according to Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, writing in a blog post, the company’s expansion in France, as well as the growth in AWS in general, has led to this move.

“Over the past 10 years, we have seen tremendous growth at AWS,” Vogels wrote. “We have announced several additional regions in Canada, China, Ohio, and the United Kingdom all expected in the coming months. We don’t plan to slow down or stop there. We are actively working to open new regions in the locations our customers need them most.”

Among the customers AWS bundled into the press materials – the company named Schneider Electric, Lafarge, and Dassault Systemes as key customers in France – was Veolia Water France, which is aiming to adopt an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) project with the help of AWS. “By moving a large part of our IT system from our old IBM mainframe to AWS, we have adopted a cloud first strategy, boosting our power of innovation,” said Benito Diz, CIO of Veolia Water France. “We couldn’t have launched this industrial IoT project without the AWS flexibility.”

Earlier this month, AWS announced it had signed a criminal justice information services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon, while plenty of other vendors are expanding their European operations. Microsoft recently launched its UK data centre with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on board as first customer, as well as expanding its German operations, while IBM and Interoute launched Norwegian and Swedish data centre zones respectively.

AWS was seen as a particular target by Oracle at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco, with the release of the software giant’s next generation data centres prompting CTO Larry Ellison to exclaim that Amazon’s lead was “over” in the IaaS space.

You can read Vogels’ blog in full here.

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Great Western Railway (GWR) has enlisted the help of CoreStream to provide a new system for its compliance and regulations.

Like many organisations, ensuring compliance is vital – but for GWR it may count more than others. The railway operator is governed by a franchise agreement which includes more than a thousand obligations – and failing to comply with them can result not only in fines, but also disqualification from future franchise bids.

As a result, the company needed to overhaul its current infrastructure, which relied on a single Excel spreadsheet and, more often than not, information off the top of employees’ heads. Hence the arrival of CoreStream in August last year, going live just a month later, which offers as part of its portfolio Rail Franchise Manager; naturally specific to the rail industry, but can also be tweaked further for each operator.

“The solution becomes a train operating company’s system for managing their compliance with franchise obligations,” says Richard Eddolls, head of platforms at CoreStream. “Being able to record obligations – in excess of one thousand items – and being automatically prompted when action is required helps to solve a major data problem that previously required a great deal of manual effort.”

The Rail Franchise Manager covers risk, workflow and regulation management while the firm’s other bespoke product, the Digital Governance Portal, covers policy, controls, risk and workflow. Eddolls explains the importance of this: “The ability to not only extend to other modules, such as audit action tracking, risk and policy management, but also to integrate them into the franchise content is key. Readily available views of the policies that help govern elements of franchise compliance, and any risks or issues associated with it is the vision.”

Closer to home, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ruling affects many firms in terms of compliance. If companies don’t get up to speed within two years, they could face a fine of up to 4% of worldwide annual turnover.

Eddolls argues the proposals are much needed, adding that further down the line he expects CoreStream’s information asset management (IAM) technologies to gain greater traction because of it.

“I think it is time organisations took their responsibility to keep the data [and] information they hold seriously and legislation that enforces this can only be a good thing,” he says. “I personally believe the GDPR provides much needed, updated, and relevant data protection and regulation laws. You only have to look at the number of high profile data breaches over the last couple of years to realise that a lot of [breaches] could have been prevented if organisations and businesses took the appropriate steps to secure and manage data correctly.”

For now however, CoreStream’s vision is to continue to bring its platform to market in this way, offering guidance on best practice but with the flexibility to accommodate change, as well as to become the ‘go to provider’ for consolidating line of business applications into its platform. “The path we are on is to meet and satisfy the most complex of business requirements without needing to write a single line of code,” says Eddolls. 

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More and more enterprises are moving towards multi-cloud environments, but data encryption and security remain a stumbling block, according to the latest research from workload security provider HyTrust.

The study, which polled more than 400 respondents at the recent VMworld event in Las Vegas, found that 60% of organisations polled plan to move to a multi-cloud model, while more (64%) said their pursuit of a hybrid cloud strategy will be multi-cloud and multi-vendor. Yet almost half (47%) admit security is the main concern when battling cloud deployment.

AWS was the most popular choice among respondents, cited by 26%, compared with 21% for Microsoft Azure. 30% of organisations who say they are using two or more clouds prefer a combination of AWS and Azure.

When it comes to security, 44% encrypt data using a cloud provider solution, while 28% deploy a separate data encryption solution. Worryingly, 28% say they are doing nothing to encrypt data being stored in a public cloud, backed up by 54% who say their old approaches to security would not work for future cloud deployments.

Back in July, Tony Connor, head of EMEA marketing at Datapipe, wrote in this publication on the key success factors in a multi-cloud strategy. “In order to ensure that a company’s multi-cloud deployment is successful, a business’ different cloud services need to function smoothly and cohesively,” Connor wrote. “What most agree on is that multi-cloud is about mixing and matching the best-of-breed solutions and services from different cloud providers to create the most suitable solution for a business.

“It minimises the amount of vendor lock-in and gives organisations more flexibility with their cloud solution over different price points and by leveraging relative strengths, advantages, and geographic locations.”

“The way we work is changing and in today’s fast-paced digital business environment, organisations need solutions that offer them the scale and security they need to operate efficiently while providing excellent service to their customers,” said Eric Chiu, HyTrust president and founder in a statement. “With a multi-cloud infrastructure, enterprises can achieve this scale, but choosing the correct partners for deployment and implementing a data security and encryption strategy is mission critical.”

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Microsoft and Adobe have announced partnership plans to make Azure the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative, and document clouds, and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud the preferred option for Dynamics 365 Enterprise.

The partnership, announced in the Microsoft Ignite keynote session today, aims to help enterprise companies ‘embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalised experiences through every phase of their customer relationships’.

“Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and CEO, added: “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end to end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.”

Adobe already has a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in place, with a case study on the AWS website noting that Adobe uses the cloud infrastructure giant to “provide multi-terabyte operating environments for its customers. By integrating its systems with the AWS Cloud, Adobe can focus on deploying and operating its own software instead of infrastructure.”

Whether this continues to be the case remains to be seen, but the Microsoft/Adobe announcement contained little aside from a reference to machine learning technologies in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server. Given Adobe’s analytics capabilities, this could be an interesting move. A recent study from Adobe Digital Insights found a clearly positive correlation between website traffic growth and forms of personalised marketing, such as social advertising.

The press materials concluded with: “The companies’ mutual customers will be able to harness their data for critical insights and predictions, connect customer touchpoints across their business, bolster relationships, and drive brand loyalty and growth.”

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Cloud security services provider Skyhigh Networks has secured $40 million (£30.9m) in a series D funding round which will aim to steer the California-based firm “through to profitability.”

The round was led by Thomset Ventures, with Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners also contributing. Total venture capital to Skyhigh, launched only in February 2013, is now at $105.5m.

Skyhigh’s proposition is through being a leading ‘cloud access security broker’ (CASB), which enables a central point of control for data stored in thousands of cloud services.  

“As the massive migration to cloud accelerates, security has become a major pain point for enterprise CISOs,” said Thomset venture partner Umesh Padval, who joins the Skyhigh board of directors. “We recognise in Skyhigh the rare combination of a massive market opportunity, technical product leadership, enviable list of customers, visionary management, and a world class team.

“Skyhigh helped pioneer the CASB market, and we look forward to working with their team as they continue to innovate and lead this space,” Padval added.

Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh co-founder and CEO, added: “We are thrilled to have raised an up round from Thomvest, Greylock, and Sequoia, particularly in the current environment. It is a testament to the incredible work of our employees and will enable us to accelerate our growth and carry us to profitability.”

Skyhigh’s name will arguably be best recognised by long-time readers of this publication due to their research efforts. The company frequently collaborates with the Cloud Security Alliance on reports, with one of the most recent in June arguing that an IT skills shortage continues to pervade organisations, with many ‘false positive’ security instances – an alert which erroneously flags normal behaviour as malicious – contributing to more serious alerts being ignored.

According to recent analysis from Glassdoor ratings, 100% of employees approve of Skyhigh CEO Gupta, while 75% would recommend the company to a friend.