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Global revenues from public cloud services will hit more than $195 billion (£150.2bn) by 2020, according to the latest forecast from analyst house IDC.

The new prediction, which arrives in the firm’s semi-annual public cloud services spending guide, argues 2020 will double 2016’s expected revenues of $96.5bn, and represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% between 2015 and 2020.

“Cloud software will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery over the next five years, growing nearly three times faster than the software market as a whole and becoming the significant growth driver to all functional software markets,” said Benjamin McGrath, IDC senior research analyst for SaaS and business models. “By 2020, about half of all business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute more than a quarter of all software sold.”

According to the IDC analysis, manufacturing, banking, and professional services represent almost a third of public cloud services revenues in 2016. The US is expected to be the largest market for public cloud with almost two thirds of revenues, followed by Western Europe and the snappily-titled Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ).

“Cloud computing is breaking down traditional technology barriers as line of business leaders and their IT organisations rely on cloud to flexibly deliver IT resources at the lower cost and faster speed that businesses require,” said Eileen Smith, program director of customer insights and analysis. “Organisations across all industries are now free to adapt to market changes quicker and take more risks, as they are no longer bound by legacy IT constraints.”

Previous IDC research focused on EMEA cloud IT infrastructure, which grew by 17% to $1.3bn in the first quarter of this year. The second quarter figures are yet to be disclosed, but the analyst house warned of the potential impact the Brexit EU referendum vote could have.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Liquid Web, a Michigan based hosting and cloud services provider, has announced an agreement to purchase Rackspace’s Cloud Sites business unit, based in San Antonio.

The acquisition of Cloud Sites, which supports WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .NET, and PHP among others, will give Liquid Web 550 more employees and 30,000 more global customers.

“With the addition of Cloud Sites, we further our mission to empower web professionals all over the world to create content and commerce without worry, free of problems and devoid of even one bit of hesitation by providing absolutely flawless web hosting,” said Jim Geiger, CEO of Liquid Web in a statement. “Our job is to delight and every single human being in our company is empowered to do so. Each of them has a relentless devotion to simplifying how our customers experience web hosting and cloud services.”

The news comes amidst interesting times at Rackspace. The company’s most recent financial results, had some illuminating stats – 277 customers on its AWS service in the last nine months, with 60% of them choosing the higher service option, compared to 211 Microsoft cloud customers by the end of July – as well as other titbits.

Chief executive Taylor Rhodes cited Gartner statistics on the impact of the Brexit EU referendum vote to analysts – 2017 IT spending growth would ‘almost certainly’ be negative, he said – and added that Cloud Sites was a ‘non-core’ business which would give Rackspace “more focus” by selling it.

Responding to an analyst question, and as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Rhodes explained: “In our Cloud Sites business, it runs several hundred thousand websites for its customers and it competes in a market that if we wanted to really focus there, we’d have to make some substantial investment and instead, what we’ve been able to do is find a strategic buyer in Liquid Web, who will buy the company at a higher multiple than it was producing for us and allow us to both focus our portfolio, as well as find a happy home for that business and hope us raise some incremental funds that we can invest in growth.”

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In some instances, encryption is a double-edged sword: if data is encrypted in the cloud, it’s secure, but you can’t get access to it. Yet a new research paper presented by Microsoft may be the first step to changing it.

The paper examines the concept of secure data exchange (SDE), where the aim, as a blog post from Microsoft Research writer John Roach puts it, is to “unlock the full value of encrypted data by using the cloud itself to perform secure data trades between multiple willing parties in a way that provides users full control over how much information the exchange reveals.”

Microsoft gave a real-world example of their plan. For instance, imagine if a group of employees wanted to know where their salary ranks in relation to each other, but not wanting to reveal their salary to the rest of the group. A trusted colleague could hear each employee’s salary in confidence, calculate an average and then forget about it. Here, the cloud – as a ‘secure multiparty computation’ enabler – makes the latter redundant.

As a result, all of the computation is performed in the cloud and is encrypted in such a way that the cloud server does not know what is being computed. If all goes to plan, the cloud reveals the decrypted results to the interested parties and privacy and security are not compromised.

The research also examines the potential such an implementation could have on machine learning – for instance, in making progress in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to assess whether genetic variants have effects on certain diseases. The report authors note that the privacy fears of those who do not wish to participate in these projects would be assuaged, as well as making better use of the data generally – “full of potential but ultimately of little use to anyone but its owner,” as Roach writes.

“What we are trying to build is a mechanism by which you can say ‘Look, I am interested in your data, but I want to verify it is really what I need before I purchase it,’” said Ran Gilad-Bachrach, a researcher in Microsoft’s Cryptography Research group and co-author of the paper.

You can read the full paper (PDF) here.

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Google has announced the acquisition of Orbitera, a cloud commerce platform, to help boost its multi-cloud efforts with one eye on rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

“Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds. This acquisition will not only improve the support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for the multi-cloud world,” said Nan Boden, Google head of global technology partners in a blog post.

“The Google Cloud Platform team shares our vision for seamless purchase and deployment of IT services across heterogeneous cloud infrastructure,” said Marcin Kurc, Orbitera CEO. “It quickly became clear to us that becoming a part of Google would lead to the best possible outcome for our customers. We will continue to deliver the products and services our customers rely on with the added scale that Google provides.”

The move is particularly interesting given Orbitera’s links with the other leading cloud providers. Orbitera has a long-standing partnership with AWS, with six products available on the AWS Marketplace. The company is also a Microsoft gold partner. Matthew Leonard, hired as vice president of product in January this year, has previous experience in leadership roles for both AWS and Microsoft cloud commerce.

Google says that it is not looking to change Orbitera’s proposition with the acquisition. “We’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform supporting multi-cloud commerce,” said Boden. “We look forward to helping the modern enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world.”

Given the recent second quarter financial results released by many of the main players – including Amazon and Alphabet – it’s not surprising that analyst reports assessing the cloud infrastructure and services markets soon followed. Google was placed as a leader by IHS Markit, while finding a place as the only visionary – behind AWS and Microsoft – in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Orbitera acquired $2 million in a seed funding round in June last year.

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Here’s a slightly different take on a widely analysed space: IHS Markit has put Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft as leaders in the cloud IT infrastructure services sector – but put Amazon at the left of the others.

The analyst house released its cloud services scorecard which provides an interesting examination of the landscape – certainly different in its approach to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for instance. The graph is divided into three segments; challengers, established players, and leaders. Assuming the two axes, of market presence and momentum, average at 3.0, any organisation which scores higher in both is automatically in the leaders’ square.

It’s a clever way of putting the crosses in the box. Other vendors in the scorecard included CenturyLink, Equinix, Rackspace and Verizon in the established bucket, and Salesforce as the only challenger.

“Leadership in the cloud IT infrastructure services market requires very strong in-house software development skills, and all the leaders in our scorecard have a long history of innovation,” said Cliff Grossner, senior research director for data centre, cloud and SDN at IHS Markit in a statement. “This is not expected to change moving forward.”

Grossner added: “Established players, meanwhile, are able to leverage an existing services client base to which they can offer operational efficiencies. Although they have lower market momentum than the leaders, their significant presence indicates strong adoption of their solutions.”

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant arrived late last week, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google clearly holding the first three positions in that order. The former two were, for the second year running, the only vendors to make an appearance in the leaders’ section, while Google was the only company which found a place in the visionaries’ pile.

IHS and Markit, both analyst firms in their own right, announced a merger in March, with the details being fully ironed out in July. You can find out more about the report here (subscription required).

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Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced a new customer win in the form of sports brand The Adidas Group.

The announcement, which appeared on the firm’s official blog this morning, explains how Adidas is utilising Dropbox Enterprise, which was launched in November last year, to have ‘fast, reliable access to…data’ and ‘seamless collaboration’ for its employees.

“At the Adidas Group, we want to provide our employees with the best tools they need to get their work done,” said Soren Schmidt, collaboration and mobile director in a statement. “When selecting a technical solution that is meant to change the way people collaborate, usability and simplicity were among our most important criteria.

“The strong adoption of Dropbox Enterprise among employees shows us that we made the right choice.”

Dropbox Enterprise was launched as an attempt to bridge between the traditionally friendly user experience and the grunt needed to managed ‘tens of thousands of users’, as the company put it at the time. Among the new functions presented to enterprises included a suspended user state option, which gives greater control if an employee leaves the organisation, and custom branding.

Elsewhere, Dropbox announced last week the beta availability of Dropbox Paper, a collaborative tool which has been linked by practically the entire tech media as a competitor to Google Docs. Users can create to-do lists, take meeting notes and brainstorm ideas including text, videos and images.

The release, which is available on Android worldwide and will be ready ‘soon’ for EU users on iOS, comes at a particularly interesting time after Salesforce announced its intent to buy Quip, a similar company in the space, for $582 million last week. Writing for sister publication Enterprise AppsTech, Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Docurated – another collaboration firm – discussed the deal’s importance in the context of the sphere’s maturation.

“The entire customer lifecycle, from sales, to account management, to support, is highly content intensive,” Gorbansky wrote. “Owning the content stack will make Salesforce more sticky and, more importantly, provide them with invaluable data and insight around which content is most effective at driving deals.”

According to figures released by Dropbox a year ago, the company had exceeded 400 million users, with eight million business customers on board. Figures from Statista argued the cloud storage firm had exceeded 500 million overall users by March this year.

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Google has launched customer-supplied encryption keys (CESK) for its Compute Engine infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which enables organisations to better protect their cloudy data.

The search giant automatically encrypts customer content stored at rest, including all Compute Engine disks, but in a blog post written by Maya Kaczorowski and Eric Bahna, product managers at Google Cloud Platform, the new release is aimed to be “secure, fast and easy” for users.

“With CESK, disks at rest are protected with your own key that cannot be accessed by anyone, inside or outside of Google, unless they present your key,” the blog notes. “Google does not retain your keys and only holds them transiently to fulfil your request, such as attaching a disk or starting a VM.”

“Customer-supplied encryption keys give us the fidelity and granular control to provide strong data protection assurances to our customers,” said Neil Palmer, CTO of advanced technology at FIS Global and a Google customer. “It’s a critical feature and Google’s approach is key to our end to end security posture.”

The IaaS space has been overwhelmingly examined in recent weeks due to various financial figures and analysis coming out. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced its Q2 results at the end of last month. While Google does not disclose specific revenues for its cloud arm, chief executive Sundar Pichai told analysts of the potential of combining cloud with machine learning. Google was also named on its own as a ‘visionary’ in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud IaaS. AWS and Microsoft, not for the first time, were on their own in the leaders’ section.

Currently, CESK is only available in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, the UK and the US, with plans to expand to Australia, Italy, Mexico, Norway and Sweden later this month.  

You can find out more about CESK here.

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For all those who may deride Gartner’s Magic Quadrants across its various subject areas, it does provide a clear cut snapshot of when a market has sufficiently matured. Nowhere is this better exemplified in the latest quadrant for cloud infrastructure services, released earlier this week – which shows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft on their own in the leaders’ zone.

It’s always a fun exercise comparing between technologies and between years to see what has changed in the eyes of the analysts. Take enterprise mobility management (EMM). Back in 2011, the segment Gartner focused on was mobile device management (MDM); no fewer than 16 companies squeezed themselves into the niche player zone. This year, the overall analysis featured 14 vendors, with many of the leaders similar five years on but many more who have fallen by the wayside.

With regard to cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), there is a clear pattern. October 2012’s ranking saw AWS at the top, with Terremark, Savvis, CSC, and Dimension Data also in the leaders’ section. By 2014, AWS and Microsoft were the only companies named as leaders, with a gaggle of firms as visionaries – Google, CenturyLink, CSC, IBM SoftLayer, and the rebranded Verizon Terremark. This time round, only Google makes it into the visionaries section, with seven companies named as niche players; CenturyLink, Fujitsu, IBM SoftLayer, NTT Communications Rackspace, VMware, and Virtustream.

So there it is; the top two categories to aim for are populated by only three companies, and in the order practically every industry pundit places them. AWS at number one, Microsoft at two and Google at three. That looks like a pretty mature market to this reporter – but as always there is plenty to glean from each piece of analysis.

Even though five vendors dropped off the quadrant over the past 12 months, Gartner certainly argues they have their merits. Dimension Data, for instance, is the only “significant” IaaS provider with a presence in South Africa, the analysts argue, while Interoute continues to demonstrate strong growth in Europe.

In terms of cautions for the leaders, the key for AWS was around its relative complexity for optimal use. This is a well-founded point, with the company launching AWS Migration Competency, a list of more than 30 long-standing partners in cloud delivery, consulting and mobility to help customers who are looking for deeper migrations, back in June. As far as Microsoft was concerned, Gartner argues it is still in the process of building out its Azure ecosystem, even though it adds its integrated IaaS and PaaS ‘operate and feel like a unified whole’.

Microsoft was bullish about its placing. In a blog post, Nicole Herskowitz, cloud platform director of product marketing, noted how the Redmond giant was a leader in 18 Gartner MQs encompassing practically every aspect of enterprise IT, compared to Salesforce (6), AWS (3), and Google (0). “We are honoured by this continued recognition as we are relentless about our commitment and rapid pace of innovation for infrastructure services,” wrote Herskowitz.

“By partnering closely with customers around the world, we see the natural path to enterprise cloud adoption – starting with software services like email and collaboration, the moving to infrastructure for storage, compute and networking and finally embracing platform services to transform business agility and customer engagements,” she added. “In this journey to adopt the cloud, customers are looking for a vendor who understands and leads in meeting the broad spectrum of their cloud needs.”

According to recent analysis from Synergy Research, AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft own more than half of the global cloud infrastructure market. 

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Microsoft has announced it has obtained ISO 27017 compliance, a new cloud-based security certification published at the end of last year.

The certification from the ISO, the global organisation which has published more than 21,000 international standards across a variety of industries, is newer and subsequently less known than the ISO 27018 standard, which sets out guidelines to protect personally identifiable information (PII).

Microsoft claimed to be the first adopter of ISO 27018, in February last year, and now, the ISO 27017, which gives additional controls that specifically relate to cloud services, is in Microsoft’s hands, according to an Azure company blog post.

“We are happy to announce Microsoft Azure obtained the ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certification, an international standard that aligns with and complements the ISO/IEC 27002:2013 with an emphasis on cloud-specific threats and risks,” wrote Alice Rison, Microsoft Azure senior director.

The certification is still nascent among cloud providers, yet Amazon Web Services (AWS) secured 27017 compliance as far back as November last year, claiming to be the first to get the green light. “Certifying that we follow yet another best practice won’t come as a surprise; we’ve already proven that information security is job #1 here at AWS,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, trumpeted in a blog post at the time.

The need for compliance – and ensuring data stays where it should – by certification with a globally recognised authority needs to be key for both customers and cloud providers. Writing for this publication last month on ISO 27001, a standard launched in 2013 around information security management, Frank Krieger, director of compliance at iland, explained the important questions for organisations to ask; not least that certificates should not be taken at face value.

“Organisations should care a great deal about ISO compliance in the cloud and ensure their partners and providers care as well,” he wrote. “ISO compliance in the cloud doesn’t have to be a nightmare, but you do need to approach the process with the level of rigour that the standard demands.”

You can find out more about the ISO 27017 standard here.

Read more: ISO compliance in the cloud: Why should you care, and what do you need to know?

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Equinix has announced the purchase of Digital Reality’s Paris operations, including its real estate and data centre facility, for approximately $211 million (£158m).

The two companies, who continue to fight for supremacy in the colocation rankings – findings from Synergy Research in May showed Equinix as number one in colocation, with Digital Realty second and NTT third – came to a deal which included 1,000 cabinets of sold capacity in Equinix’s PA2 and PA3 data centres, as well as a further 1,000 for customer growth. Equinix has seven data centre locations in Paris alone, three of which came with the company’s acquisition of Telecity in January this year.

Equinix argues its seven Paris locations are business hubs for more than 575 companies, while its interconnection platform gives access to more than 160 network service providers and 100 cloud service providers, including Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer.

“As one of the largest economies in Europe, France continues to be a strong destination for local French businesses, as well as multinationals,” said Steve Smith, Equinix president and CEO in a statement. “We believe that by fully owning the site of our PA2 and PA3 facilities and the surrounding land, we will be able to ensure additional capacity and the ability to interconnect more networks, clouds, people and data, as customers require in the future.”

Another research study, this time from 451 Research in April, argued 2015 was a landmark year for deals in the data centre, arguing that while Digital Realty owned the most real estate, Equinix secured the most annual revenues. “Colocation is quickly becoming the nexus of both cloud and enterprise IT,” said Katie Broderick, 451 research director at the time. “The colocation market is serving as ‘data centre arms dealer’ to both enterprises and the cloud.”