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Businesses have been warned and they’ve been previously shown up for not having the required knowledge over the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – now, a new piece of research from mainframe firm Compuware argues that more than two thirds of organisations do not have a comprehensive plan in place for how they will act.

The research, which quizzed 400 CIOs across Europe and the US, found that just over half (55%) of European businesses believe they are ‘well-briefed’ on the GDPR, while 63% argued data complexity is a major hurdle in achieving compliance with the new regulations.

The new rules, which come into effect on May 25 2018, concern users’ ‘right to be forgotten’, as well as a right for them to know when their data has been hacked, as well as transferring data to another service provider without the fear of vendor lock-in. The former is a particular concern in the research; only 52% of companies said they could comply with it right now.

Perhaps most worryingly, 68% of those polled said they ‘can’t always know where customer data is’ due to the complexity of modern IT. The use of outsourcing and mobile technology makes it more difficult, the research notes, cited by 81% and 63% of respondents respectively. That said, over half (51%) of CIOs say they can locate all of an individual’s personal data quickly.

“To comply with the GDPR, businesses need to keep stricter control of where customer data resides,” said Dr Elizabeth Maxwell, Compuware EMEA technical director. “If they don’t have a firm handle on where every copy of customer data resides across all their systems, businesses could lose countless man-hours conducting manual searches for the data of those exercising their ‘right to be forgotten’.

“Even then, they may not identify every copy, leaving them at risk of non-compliance.”

Any UK businesses thinking that because of the Brexit EU vote they don’t have to comply with the new regulations will be in for a rude awakening. Speaking to this publication before June’s referendum, Jonathan Mepsted, UK managing director at Netskope, argued the legislation – if you are looking to do business in the European Union, you are in. The Compuware research also found that more than half (52%) of US businesses hold European customer data, meaning they are also liable.

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Even though almost all of the channel recognises the potential benefits of cloud computing, only two thirds of companies polled by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and Intermedia say they are offering cloud services today.

The research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne and polled 150 senior decision makers from managed service providers, value added resellers and systems integrators, found there were ‘significant’ barriers when it came to channel organisations selling cloud services today. 82% argue cultural changes within an organisation are a challenge, while staff skill shortages (81%) and cloud marketing and positioning (80%) were also cited.

78% of end user organisations are using at least one cloud-based service today, according to figures, up from 61% according to the CIF, but the channel has been unable to keep up down to a lack of vendor support, argues Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO.

“The channel is clearly struggling when it comes to cloud deployments and is missing out on major opportunities as a result,” said Hilton. “Resellers that do sell cloud services are reporting a wide range of benefits, from improved competitive edge to extended revenues and market reach. This puts channel resellers that haven’t yet made the move at a distinct disadvantage.”

“While the channel has recognised cloud’s potential, resellers, as made evident by these findings, aren’t getting the support they need to transition, said Eric Weiss, Intermedia SVP marketing.

“Beyond tailored levels of support and technical expertise, partners need help differentiating, which is why 82% of respondents incorporate value adds and 59% view white label programmes as critical or very important to their success. This is why Intermedia has put such an emphasis on its private label resale programme – so partners can create solutions customised to their customers’ needs while owning the relationship, pricing and branding.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it has signed a criminal justice information services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon, enabling AWS GovCloud services available to the state’s law enforcement officers.

Oregon joins California, Colorado, and Minnesota among others in signing up to AWS’s cloud services. The provider has two availability zones in its US GovCloud data centre.

“We are committed to doing our part as a cloud service provider by giving our customers the means, through our services, to comply with CJIS requirements within their IT environments,” an AWS statement read. “Customers can deploy applications, data, and services, all of which securely comply with CJIS Security Policy requirements.”

“The Oregon State Police is pleased to announce to the Oregon CJIS community that OSP and Amazon have agreed to a security control agreement that meets every requirement of the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy,” said Major Tom M. Worthy, Oregon State Police CSO, in a statement. “This agreement gives Oregon agencies additional hosting options that enhance security, while meeting their business requirements pertaining to criminal justice information.”

Elsewhere, research from IT services provider Eduserv has found a slightly different tone on UK public sector cloud adoption. According to the figures, 12% of all UK council authorities – some 50 councils – account for 90% of G-Cloud local government spend, while eight councils represent 57% of G-Cloud spend to date. More than a quarter (27%) of UK councils say their procurement policy does not allow them to use G-Cloud, while 61% of councils insist they do not have a cloud IT policy in place.

“The big picture behind this research is that only a minority of councils appear to have a deep appreciation of how IT must change to support service redesign and new technologies in the future,” said Jos Creese, Eduserv principal analyst and report author. “Local government is of course already using cloud, often in ‘shadow IT activity’ outside the IT department, and cloud will inevitably form an increasingly important role, given its prevalence and growth.

“Given this, and the data risks to be managed with cloud, it is therefore critical that councils have some sort of policy guidance around how and when it could or should be considered,” added Creese. “It is surprising and somewhat alarming that this is not the case.”

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Slack has been ranked as the number one private company leading cloud computing in 2016, according to research conducted by Forbes.

The messaging app provider, which was noted by Netskope in recent research to be among the top 20 cloud apps used by businesses for the first time, finished ahead of cloud storage firm Dropbox (#2) and electronic signature provider DocuSign (#3). Payments infrastructure company Stripe and data management platform provider Cloudera rounded off the top five.

The research was produced alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, which aims to ‘recognise cloud companies for the financial health and growth of their business’. The hundreds of submissions were presented to 27 public cloud CEO judges who made their verdict for the inaugural report.

Naturally, plenty of companies have been putting forward their acknowledgement of being placed in the top 100. Zuora, a subscription billing and commerce provider, issued a statement arguing the importance of this validation not just for the company but for the market in general.

“As the standard subscription finance platform for the cloud computing industry, we’re honoured to be included,” said CEO Tien Tzuo. “It’s a huge validation for Zuora, as well as the subscription economy. While we have lots of clients on this list, we’re looking forward to helping many more amazing cloud companies turn their customers into subscribers.”

Fuze – formerly ThinkingPhones – finished just inside the top 20, and was recently named as a leader in the Gartner unified communications as a service (UCaaS) Magic Quadrant. “On behalf of Fuzers worldwide, we are thrilled to be named to the inaugural Forbes 2016 Cloud 100,” said Steve Kokinos, Fuze CEO in a statement. “Our mobile-first user experience is designed to delight today’s digitally empowered workforce, while our powerful suite of business analytics integrates with other cloud services to make our solution an indispensable tool for business and technology leaders.”

“The Forbes Cloud 100 companies represent the very best private companies in cloud computing,” said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We will see big IPOs and category killers emerge from this list as cloud computing continues to propel the trillion-dollar software industry.”

This report represents an interesting examination of which privately held cloud companies are leading the charge in their respective fields; yet related research from Glassdoor and Battery Ventures released last month paints a different picture. Taking into account employees’ verdicts on their CEO, as well as a ‘positive business outlook’, seven companies came out on top, including Chef Software, which scored 100% in both categories, and Asana, a productivity app led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.

Of the companies which led the way in the Forbes research, Dropbox and Zuora only scored 71% and 77% respectively in terms of business outlook, while DocuSign fared a little better, with 90% positive outlook rating and 97% approval for CEO Keith Krach.

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According to the latest research from cloud security provider Netskope, almost 44% of malware found in cloud apps have delivered ransomware, while almost 56% of malware-infected files in cloud apps are shared publicly.

The study, which appears in the company’s latest Netskope Cloud Report, found that the number of cloud apps keep going up in enterprises; 824 on average, up from 777 during the last quarter. Microsoft continues to beat Google as the most popular cloud app, with Microsoft productivity apps usurping Facebook from the number one spot, and Office 365, Outlook, and OneDrive beating their competitors in terms of session volume.

Elsewhere, productivity app Slack has entered the top 20 overall apps, while the company was also placed at the top spot in Forbes’ top 100 leading private cloud companies in 2016. Netskope notes that with the rise of such applications, the security element needs to be noted. “Security teams will need to prioritise this trend and pay close attention to sensitive information being shared within collaboration apps, and prioritise visibility into and control over the apps with which Slack is integrated and sharing data,” the press material notes.

Elsewhere, the research also notes that cloud storage apps dominate cloud data loss prevention (DLP) violations, accounting for 76.5% of them. Looking at the various industries, manufacturing-focused enterprises had the largest proportion of DLP violating files with 24%, followed by technology and IT services (15%), and healthcare and life sciences (11%). Not surprisingly, technology and IT featured the most cloud apps on average, with 855, followed by healthcare (836), retail and hospitality (787) and financial services (714).

“With the rise of ransomware, the cloud threat landscape is now increasingly complicated,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope. “IT teams need deeper intelligence, protection, and remediation that can help them stop malware and ransomware in their tracks and prevent them from spreading.”

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Microsoft has announced its UK data centres are open for business for both Azure and Office 365, with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust among the first customers.

The move was first mooted in November last year, alongside expansions in the Netherlands and Ireland. At the time Microsoft promised the UK regions, in London, Durham, and Cardiff, would arrive by late 2016, so is bang on time in that regard.

“Today, we’ve taken a significant step forward to empower businesses to achieve more with the first complete cloud offering delivered from a global provider within the UK,” Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft cloud and enterprise corporate vice president wrote in a blog post announcing the launch.   

Mike Stone, chief digital and information officer at the MoD, said in a statement: “Microsoft’s secure and transparent cloud service in the UK fits perfectly with the MoD’s digital transformation agenda. This agreement, which is based on Microsoft’s world class reliability and performance, will allow us to deliver cost-effective, modern and flexible information capabilities.

“It will ensure we are better placed in our ever-changing, digital-first world.”

The launch takes the number of data centre regions up to 28, with six more being promised. Microsoft is naturally touting this as the highest among its cloudy competitors, although it can be a question of semantics. Google has 15 global locations for its data centres, with Belgium, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands as its European centres, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 13 locations with four in the pipeline, but 35 ‘availability zones’ – data centres within those locations.

AWS is also putting together a UK data centre zone of its own, confirming at its AWS Summit in July that the Brexit EU referendum vote will not affect the company’s plans.

According to the most recent cloud infrastructure figures from Synergy Research, Microsoft continues to grow more quickly than AWS, albeit with just over 10% market share compared to more than 30% for AWS. The four main players – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – are growing faster than their smaller competitors and between them own more than half of the global market.

Read more: AWS vs Azure: IT pros weigh the pros and cons

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A new survey from memory and storage providers Crucial argues almost half (47%) of IT professionals are planning to upgrade their server memory in the next 12 months as virtualisation workloads bite.

Given who is providing the survey data, the results aren’t exactly a surprise. But some of the statistics are illuminating.

Taking its findings from 350 IT decision makers in the US and central Europe, on average IT professionals are running 29 virtual machines per physical server. Yet – and here’s the rub – if they needed to run more virtual machines, two thirds (66%0 would need to add more memory, compared to 42% who would need more servers.

Almost three quarters (73%) of IT managers are using at least 64 gigabytes for big data and analytics applications in their organisation, the most of anyone surveyed. More than half said similarly for databases (58%), content hosting (55%), email (55%), file sharing (51%), and content creation (50%). Going up to the next step of 128GB, the trends are broadly the same. Again, big data and analytics topped the list (44%), ahead of email (33%), databases (32%), and file sharing (31%).

Around half (48%) of respondents said unexpected issues, such as unpredictable workload demands or rapid user base growth, is one of the biggest challenges they face when dealing with server workload constraints.

Michael Moreland, worldwide product manager at Crucial, argues the need for future-proofing when it comes to workloads. “It’s possible for IT professionals to get the most out of their IT budget by identifying high growth, business critical applications and then installing future-proofed 32GB modules to deliver optimal quality of server and scalability at a typically lower price than that of multiple lower-density modules,” he said.

“By installing enough memory, IT professionals can deliver optimal quality of service today and for the foreseeable future. Server memory is a long-term investment that’s never just about the here and now, it’s about predicting future workloads,” he added.

If you want to find out more, Crucial has put together an infographic around the issues surrounding memory and virtualised apps, which can be found here.

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Cloud services platform provider Interoute has launched a new virtual data centre zone in Stockholm, following the launch of similar zones in Istanbul and Singapore earlier this year.

The move represents the “growing regional demand for fast local cloud services” in the Nordics, with Interoute already employing 100 workers in the region with offices in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

One Interoute customer looking to reap the benefits of better and quicker access to data is Stockholm-based medial application services provider MedSciNet. Andrius Preibys, MedSciNet CTO, explained how having a data centre in Stockholm ensures performance with compliance. “Our online software as a service allows customers to access their data in real-time, and begin data analytics almost immediately after the last patient has been included”, said Preibys. “Therefore, control over data and where it is located is critical to us for compliance purposes.”

With the new Stockholm build, Interoute currently has 17 virtual data centres across three continents; two in Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), two in North America (Los Angeles and New York) and the remainder in Europe. Speaking to this reporter at the Cloud and DevOps World Forum in June, Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie discussed the reasons for moving to Istanbul and Singapore in particular.

“We’ve got lots of bigger customers who are European based, but global – a lot of them will have an Asian presence,” said Finnie. “They’ll want to run services natively in a region, and so [the move] is to support that, but also we’ve now got a model on this digital platform approach that will combine network and cloud, and those are very portable. It’s much lighter in terms of putting a full service set into a region.”

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According to the latest forecast from 451 Research, three in five enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by mid-2018, up from two in five (41%) today.

The analyst firm argues there will be strong growth in particular enterprise workload categories, including data and analytics and business applications. In the same timeframe, almost a quarter (23%) of enterprise workloads will be software as a service (SaaS), compared to 12% for IaaS. 451 argues that IaaS will be the highest growing segment, and despite the ‘hype and attention’ associated with it comprises only 6% of workloads today.

Almost two in five (38%) of the 1,200 global IT professionals surveyed said they have a cloud-first policy, with the most common events leading to increased cloud usage including mergers and acquisitions, as well as software upgrades, hardware refreshes, and data centre capacity expansions.

“The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space,” said Andrew Reichman, research director of 451 Research and author of the report. “Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allows organisations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex data centres and infrastructure.

“If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage,” Reichman added.

These figures dovetail nicely with a forecast made by Huawei at its Connect event earlier this week, where the Chinese telco argued that by 2025 all enterprise IT would be ‘cloudified’, and that 85% of all enterprise applications would be based in the cloud.

The 451 Research report, ‘Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation’, can be found here (registration required).

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With an increasingly open IT ecosystem, there are three key principles for all businesses, from SMBs to enterprises, to make the most of their lot: cooperation over competition, benefit sharing, and creating a bigger market rather than fighting for a larger share.

That was the verdict of Guo Ping, rotating CEO of Chinese telco Huawei, at the company’s Huawei Connect event. “Essentially, marketplace advantages will come from within an organisation, as has traditionally been the case, and also externally from the ecosystem in which they operate – forming a combination of both competitive and ecological advantages,” said Guo in the third day’s keynote.

“The ICT ecosystem will be more open, dynamic, and symbiotic. Every enterprise, big or small, can take part in this interdependent, symbiotic, and regenerative community of common interests, as long as it has its own unique value and makes its own unique contribution,” Guo added.

The previous days have seen a plethora of announcements from the Chinese vendor, with Connect being the first time that Huawei had ‘publicly given a comprehensive look at its cloud strategy’. The overall theme of Connect was “shape the cloud”, and Huawei predicts that by 2025 all enterprise IT will be ‘cloudified’, while 85% of enterprise applications will be based in the cloud.

There were plenty of numerical analogies floating around too; cloud 2.0 was used not infrequently to describe the future of IT, while another announcement prognosticated upon bank 3.0 – first noted in a 2012 book by Brett King, and used here to annotate a new financial cloud solution from Huawei and Infosys.

Ken Hu, another of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, argued that the coming 10 years will envisage the era of cloud 2.0. “Cloud is changing everything,” Hu said. “We view change as a process of rebirth. For any business in the cloud 2.0 era, change brings hope. And through action, we can create the future.”

Huawei announced enterprise cloud solutions with partner Accenture, alongside research from Forrester around digital transformation, while the Chinese giant also announced its latest excursions into the world of all-flash storage, unveiling System OceanStor Dorado V3, bolstered with support from Intel, Oracle, and Brocade.