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More than half of respondents in a survey from cloud migration services provider SADA Systems say cloud-based apps are improving patient satisfaction and leading to better treatment.

The survey, which polled more than 300 North American IT professionals, found Microsoft was the primary cloud infrastructure platform for healthcare organisations, cited by 42% of respondents. Google (29%) and Amazon (27%) trailed behind. In terms of mobile device management, Microsoft (55% of respondents) was again the leader, ahead of IBM (27%) and MobileIron (5%).

Healthcare is traditionally one of the laggards when it comes to cloud adoption due to the severity of any potential data loss. Yet the survey shows cloud concerns seem to be abating; 61% said they had greater confidence in the security and reliability of cloud providers.

This seems to be the case even if issues occur; even though half (49%) of organisations polled had suffered a security breach or patient data leak – a major issue in itself – less than 10% attributed the issue to their cloud provider.

In terms of usage, laptops (88%), tablets (80%) and smartphones (77%) were all naturally very common, but wearables, with 24% adoption, are gaining traction in healthcare, according to the research. Email was the most popular cloud app, used by 68% of respondents, followed by patient care (64%) and file sharing (55%).

“Cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications are apparently providing healthcare organisations the opportunity to operate more efficiently, innovate faster and better engage so-called millennials,” said Tony Safoian, president and CEO at SADA Systems. “This is consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners.

“Cloud apps and tools that connect administrators to suppliers, doctors to patients and hospitals to staff are increasingly important – not only because they improve productivity and enhance patient care and satisfaction, but because they distinguish modern organisations from legacy providers, which is attractive to the younger generation of healthcare users.”

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A new UK study from cloud disaster recovery provider iland has found that 95% of respondents have faced an outage or data loss in the past year – with 87% of that number saying it triggered a failover.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Matters and which specifically polled 250 UK decision makers responsible for their company’s IT disaster recovery plans, also found that of the 87% who had executed a failover, while 82% said they were confident it would be successful, 55% encountered problems.

The majority of ‘disasters’, as noted by respondents, were more likely to be mundane system failure (53%) or human error (52%) compared to cyber attacks (32%) and environmental issues (20%).

42% of those polled said that if their systems were down for seconds, it would be ‘highly disruptive’ or ‘catastrophic’ for businesses. Naturally, the numbers go up when it comes to minutes (69%) and hours (90%), but only 27% of companies said they were able to recover all their systems immediately following an outage.

98% agreed their systems could be available within 24 hours – clearly not a good enough standard. “What we see a lot of the time is customers are coming in with old solutions where they are getting more hours and days from a recovery time perspective,” Sam Woodcock, iland principal solutions architect, told CloudTech.

Another interesting facet of the research showed the key differences between cloud-based and on-premise disaster recovery (DR). Respondents were more likely to spend more on their on-premise kit, but expected less downtime with it when compared to a cloud solution. Perhaps not surprisingly, iland’s message from the study is that cloud DR can be both cost-effective and minimise downtime.

DR testing was also examined; 37% of respondents are testing infrequently or not at all, while 63% has a trained team that tests DR either quarterly or twice a year. The study argues that more can – and should – be done in this regard.

“Traditionally, a long time back solutions were quite intrusive,” said Woodcock. “Some solutions involved replication actually being paused – reducing your recovery point objectives. That’s obviously not beneficial to the business if a disaster were able to hit during that test – potentially there would be some additional data loss with those more traditional solutions.

“What we’re seeing more, as we’re progressing through, [are] products come to the market that give you the ability to test non-intrusively,” he added. “That’s really giving an upward trend into the frequency that people test, and how frequently people test as well.”

iland gave three recommendations for organisations to get the most of their disaster recovery plans. Companies need to ensure a balance between downtime and cost, ensure testing is easy and cost-effective, and ensure that their DR solution helps maintain IT compliance.

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IBM has announced the launch of a new cloud data centre in Oslo, Norway, becoming the latest vendor to support a growing need for cloud in the Nordics.

The new facility, which takes IBM’s global cloud data centres to 48 in total with 12 in Europe, offers the full range of IBM’s cloud infrastructure services, from bare metal to virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. Customers will also have access to a plethora of other options, from platform as a service (PaaS) Bluemix, to Watson, as well as more than 150 APIs and services across big data, blockchain, and the Internet of Things.

One of the customers IBM is championing is Nordic IT services company EVRY. The two companies announced a strategic partnership this time last year, including establishing a private cloud and running on SoftLayer ‘later next year’, inferring the launch of a specific data centre.

“We are committed to providing global and local clients the fastest and easiest on-ramp to the IBM cloud to accelerate their digital transformation,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM Cloud senior vice president. “This investment will provide Nordic customers, especially those in regulated industries, with more flexibility to manage and gain insight into data within the region.”

“Local access to IBM’s global network of public cloud data centres provides the ideal flexibility for our customers,” said Arne Norheim, CEO of IBM Norway. “The new cloud data centre is designed to fuel support for innovation and quick adoption of new solutions that will improve business efficiency.”

Plenty of stories have been written on how the Nordics is increasingly becoming a tech hub. Virtual data centre provider Interoute announced the launch of a zone in Stockholm earlier this month, while in June the Swedish government announced plans to lower electricity taxes on data centres, following an initial study last year.

Cloud infrastructure rival Microsoft announced greater availability of its German data centres on the same day as IBM’s announcement. 

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Microsoft has announced its new German Azure data centres are being managed by a subsidiary of telco giant Deutsche Telekom in what is being claimed as a ‘first of its kind’ European business model.

The German data centre regions, in Magdeburg and Frankfurt, were announced at the end of 2015 and opened earlier this year. Yet being under the control of a ‘data trustee’, T-Systems International, enables customers with additional controls on their data, as well as complying with German data handling regulations, Microsoft said.

“As part of our mission to enable every person and organisation to achieve more, we continue to make Microsoft Cloud offerings more accessible to organisations around the world that need their data to remain within specific borders,” wrote Takeshi Numoto, corporate VP for Microsoft cloud and enterprise in an official company blog.

Customers in the new region include the Hamburg Port Authority, as well as the Austria, Switzerland and Germany (ASG) arm of technology and managed services provider Avanade. “Microsoft Cloud Germany enables the successful digital transformation of customers, even those that have had reservations about public cloud solutions or have to meet strict compliance requirements,” said Robert Gögele, general manager of ASG Avanade Deutschland GmbH.

“The openness of Microsoft’s platform is significant: we are now able to move Linux-based applications as well as SAP to the cloud.”

Microsoft recently announced the launch of its UK data centres, again having first revealed the plans late last year. As with the German announcement, high profile customers were revealed; in this case, the Ministry of Defence and the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust.

Read more: Seven ways Microsoft redefined Azure for the enterprise – and emerged a leader

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Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief technical officer, has claimed that “Amazon’s lead is over” in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space after Oracle announced the launch of next generation data centres at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco.

The event came days after the software giant released its first quarter 2017 financial results, in which Oracle announced that its cloud sales were nudging $1 billion. Of that number, more than 80% was in the platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) bucket.

Consequently, the key theme of Ellison’s keynote was around Oracle’s push in IaaS. “I’ve got a lot of respect for what Amazon’s accomplished, especially in the area of infrastructure,” Ellison told delegates. “They were the innovator in this space, and I have a lot of respect for them. But now, we’re aggressively moving into infrastructure, and we have a new generation of data centres that we’re building around the world.”

The next-gen data centres were referenced by Ellison when speaking to analysts last week – as well as the requisite pops at Amazon and Workday, which Oracle sees as the main rivals in infrastructure and applications respectively – and the Redwood firm promises its latest offering has twice as many cores, twice as much memory, four times as much storage, and 10 times the IO capacity of AWS’ offerings.

Picture credit: Oracle

“We have a modern architecture for infrastructure where there’s no single point of failure,” Ellison explained. “Faults are isolated, therefore faults are tolerated. If we lose the data centre, then you won’t even know about it.”

Among the other statistics which Oracle tossed out to the audience included bare metal cloud servers claimed to be more than 11 times faster and 20% cheaper than competitors’ efforts. Ellison pointed to the firm’s six key design tenets of cost, reliability, performance, standards, compatibility and security – “some things never change” – and added that the company was “very proud” of its second generation IaaS and intended to aggressively feature it over the next couple of fiscal years.

While such bullish statements are not atypical, eyebrows are more than likely going to be raised, particularly given current market research on the cloud infrastructure market. Synergy Research’s analysis, from as recently as August, argued that between them, AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google owned more than half of the global market.

Amazon on its own holds more than 30%, compared to nearest competitor Microsoft with just over 10%, with the four companies continuing to grow faster than the overall market. Oracle, according to Synergy, sits in the next 20 vendors – including HPE, Rackspace, and Salesforce – whose combined market share is smaller than Amazon’s.

Elsewhere, among the many products launched by the Redwood firm include Oracle FastConnect, which aims to help customers connect their data centre to the cloud more easily, Oracle Ravello Cloud, which is claimed to be the first cloud service which can run VMware and Kernel-based virtual machine workloads in the public cloud without any changes, and the general availability of Docker-friendly Oracle Container Cloud Service.

Picture credit: British Medical Journal

During a recent VMworld keynote, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, gave special praise to General Electric (GE). For a company which was founded when Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, its continued innovations through cloud, analytics, and more has helped it remain the only company still standing from the original 12 listed as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ), founded in 1840, a full 52 years before GE, is another case in point. The company’s expansion over its storied history now encompasses 60 specialist medical and science journals. Its infrastructure grew with it; but with time at a premium, and new products to launch, there was little to scope to examine and evaluate the architecture. An expiring hosting contract gave the journal time to breathe, however, with the BMJ selecting managed hosting provider Datapipe to help them through this digital change.

Sharon Cooper is chief digital officer at the BMJ. Having previously been CTO since 2012, the parallels between then and now are stark. “Like any company, we had a lot of legacy systems,” Cooper tells CloudTech. “One member of staff threw their laptop on my desk after a business trip referring to it as ‘as much use in a sales meeting as an etch-a-sketch’.” This meant that the whole company was running on Lotus Notes and Windows XP. Employees used third party cloud storage systems and forwarded email to home accounts to help get their job done.

Today, Cooper insists that the cloud storage provided by the company is just as good as anything else. But this is just the icing on the cake, the baubles on the Christmas tree, or whichever metaphor you prefer. Underpinning the journal’s transformation is a concerted move to DevOps and agile processes.

Back in 2012, there would be on average one release a month with “several people standing around whilst a manual process that took the best part of an afternoon played out”, as Cooper explains. Now, it’s up to four times a day. The working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs is “unrecognisable” from before. “One of our product owners was disappointed he didn’t have a ‘big bang’ release [that] one of the devs built an Android app in an afternoon with a big red button on it – to bring back the sense of ‘ta-da’,” says Cooper.

As the team and collaboration aspects changed, the infrastructure was changing with it. In total, more than a dozen suppliers were long listed, which then became five, and eventually three. The shortlisted firms were given some code and asked to stand it up; and Datapipe came out on top. “Some vendors draw a line – you’re either fully managed or not at all, but Datapipe had the flexibility and the know-how to work BMJ’s way,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ’s head of operations.

This partly refers to the fact that the BMJ’s environment is not the easiest to work with; they operate on a separate managed service outsourced platform. But the results spoke for themselves; alongside the already-mentioned much improved release cycle, content and services are now built and delivered around APIs as opposed to weekly batch file transfers, while more than 200 virtual machines run applications 24×7 in a private cloud infrastructure.

Plans for the future, however, will aim to see workloads being moved to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. Cooper explains that some workloads are not suited for public cloud, such as development environment, but moving over without any interruptions, and ensuring maximum cost reduction, is equally important.

“We have some experience in this, having moved between two private clouds recently,” says Cooper. “Generally, we’d move the application servers across first but leave the data stores in the old data centre – we had a VPN set up between the two cloud, and all the data traffic flowed across that. Then we’d replicate the databases between data centres and switch to the replica in the new data centre.

“This worked very well, easily taking the 200 request a second authentication traffic until we finally moved that system across,” Cooper adds. “Getting that hybrid architecture right between private and public cloud will be key.”

For organisations in a similar boat, Cooper advocates several points to consider. Think about the problem you are trying to solve before jumping in, work out where your talent is – “you can outsource the doing part, but don’t outsource all of the understanding” – manage expectations, and build in contingency plans. Above all, however, is the importance of getting employees onside.

“You need your team to buy into the change,” Cooper explains. “Infact, I can’t take much credit at all for our modernising programme in detail. I set out a very clear place I wanted to get to – it was very business-focused, it was really clear just how critical that back office ops team was in ensuring our customers got what they wanted – and why I wanted them to change to improve that customer experience.

“How we got to that future state was really determined by the team,” adds Cooper. “They worked out the detail, they changed significant parts of their jobs, built really strong working relationships across the team to deliver. I’m immensely proud of my team – it has been their dedication, hard work and preparedness to change that has made this work for us.”

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Oracle has announced total revenues of $8.6 billion (£6.6bn) in its first quarter 2017 financial results, up 3% in constant currency and with the cloud change at the heart of it.

Addressing analysts after the results were announced, Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO, said in her first remarks, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha: “Clearly, we are pleased with our results, with the most obvious thing being that we overachieved again in the cloud especially in the United States. As you all know, we have pivoted the organisation to go after the cloud and we are outperforming even our most aggressive expectations.”

Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $798m, up 79% in constant currency, while total cloud revenues – in other words, factoring in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with it, were $969m, up 61% respectively. Oracle expects to sell more than $2bn of SaaS and PaaS in annually recurring revenue.

In the press material, Oracle again fired shots at its opponents – noting that the previous quarter has seen the sign up of ‘more ERP customers than Workday has sold in the history of their company’ – while in the analyst call Larry Ellison, Oracle CTO, had his sights set on Amazon Web Services with the rollout of new second generation IaaS data centres.

“For the first time, we have this big technology advantage in the infrastructure as a service,” said Ellison. “We expect this will enable Oracle to accelerate our infrastructure as a service business to the same high growth rates that we’re currently experiencing in both SaaS and PaaS.”

The key move from Oracle over the past quarter has been the company’s acquisition of cloud ERP rival NetSuite for $9.3bn in July. Only one mention was made of the deal on the analyst call – Catz confirmed that the antitrust reviews had all been cleared for the deal except in the US.

Other notes from the financial results showed short-term deferred revenue at $9.5bn, up 5% in constant currency compared with this time last year, while operating income was $2.6bn.

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The global public cloud services market is set to break the $200 billion mark, going to $208.6bn (£157.8bn) at a 17.2% increase by the end of this year, according to the latest prognostication from analyst house Gartner.

Gartner’s verdict comes primarily through the rapid growth of cloud system infrastructure services, which the analysts expect to grow 42.8% this year, with cloud application services – SaaS – growing at a 21.7% clip, to reach $38.9bn.

The forecast also argues that the main driver of public cloud adoption was IT modernisation, followed by cost savings, innovation, and agility. Yet the key here is not that revenues continue to rise – but how more and more organisations are trusting cloud security, always a moaning point for many survey respondents.

“Gartner’s position on cloud security has been clear – public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner,” said Ed Anderson, Gartner research vice president. “More education is needed to help organisations overcome the hype associated with the security concerns. This should be a key area of focus for providers in working with their clients to unlock the benefits of public cloud services.”

Yet according to Angelo Di Ventura, director at end to end technology provider Trustmarque, it’s not all plain sailing. Citing the growth in SaaS services, Di Ventura said: “It’s important CIOs are able to retain visibility over the cloud services in use throughout the business. In particular, if left unchecked, easy to purchase SaaS services can cause considerable disruption.”

Gartner adds that while hybrid cloud is expected to dominate, challenges still remain in this field, including integration, application incompatibilities, and a lack of management tools, APIs, and vendor support.

“Cloud integration can offer serious challenges to today’s organisations,” added Di Ventura. “Ultimately, maximising the ROI of cloud demands new skills and capabilities of businesses.”

You can read the Gartner note here.

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Note-taking app provider Evernote has announced it is moving to Google Cloud Platform and is ditching its own servers and networks.

The company, which celebrated its eighth anniversary earlier in the summer, said in a company blog post that the current arrangement did not give Evernote the ‘speed and flexibility’ needed for the future.

What was more interesting in the move, as confirmed by both Evernote and Google, was that after various consultations, the search giant’s interests in machine learning and data analytics sealed the deal.

“We look forward to taking advantage of these technologies to help you more easily connect your ideas, search for information in Evernote, and find the right note at the moment you need it,” Ben McCormack, VP operations wrote. “That’s exciting to us, and we’re already exploring some ideas that we think you’ll love.”

Brian Stevens, VP at Google Cloud Platform, added: “By moving its data centre operations to Google’s cloud, Evernote can focus on its core competency: providing customers with the best experience for taking, organising and archiving notes.”

Another key area for both stakeholders, naturally enough, was security. Evernote’s self-claimed three laws of data protection – “your data is yours, your data is protected, your data is portable” – does not change with the move to Google’s cloud, the company said.

Ultimately, despite this big customer win – the press material could not resist the opportunity to reel off other A-list customers, from Coca-Cola, to Spotify, and Snapchat, the poster child of the Google cloud platform – Google is fighting for the bronze medal in cloud infrastructure, as plenty of industry research, from Synergy to Gartner, insists.

Evernote expects the change to be completed by the end of this year, with McCormack noting the experience will be generally status quo for customers.

“The transition to the cloud will occur completely in the background,” McCormack added. “You should see no impact to your service during the transition, and you do not need to take any action. Behind the scenes, Evernote will become faster, stronger, and more stable.”

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The company may only be a week old – but Dell Technologies is already challenging the traditional leaders in the cloud infrastructure space, according to new data released from Synergy Research.

Naturally, this statement isn’t quite telling the whole truth. Even though Dell Technologies came into being on September 7, the company’s history, having come about following the completion of Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC, and all it entails – Virtustream, Pivotal, VCE et al – means it is more a question of semantics than anything else.

The Synergy verdict for Q216 revenues shows Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the overall leader by a nose, with 15% of the overall market including public cloud hardware, private cloud hardware, and software, while Cisco (14%) and Dell/EMC (13%) took the silver and bronze medals respectively.

The overall numbers show the continuation of a well-known trend.

The cloud software market is growing more quickly than the others, yet remain smaller. Microsoft has the lion’s share of the market, with VMware – another Dell Technologies subsidiary – in second place. Synergy notes the other primary players in this space are Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, and Oracle.

“While total spending on data centre infrastructure remains relatively flat, cloud share of that spending continues to rise as an ever-increasing portion of computer workloads migrate to either public or private clouds,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research founder and chief analyst, adding: “We are also seeing that within the cloud infrastructure market, hyperscale cloud operators are accounting for an ever-larger share of overall capex. This is a trend which is not going to change any time soon.”

The verdict of HPE leading the way was also echoed in the most recent analysis from IDC, in figures released in April of this year.