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It’s certainly implausible to think of businesses incorporating a ‘no internet’ policy at their place of work, even when the web was in an embryonic state. This will naturally extend to cloud policies at work, according to analyst house Gartner, who predicts that by 2020, a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be a thing of the past.

The analysts did not stop there, however, filling out a few more betting slips in the process. Gartner also predicts that by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will be cloud-only, rather than cloud-first, while by 2020, more compute power will be sold by IaaS and PaaS providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centres.

Naturally, this prediction does not mean that cloud vs on premises will be entirely black and white. Gartner insists that not everything will be cloud-based, and with good reason; as this publication examined last week, some workloads will have difficulty in moving. Yet the idea that organisations have nothing in the cloud is the concept Gartner is targeting.

Jeffrey Mann, Gartner research vice president, argues many organisations who claim to be cloud-free will doubtless have a shadow IT influx anyway, exacerbating the problem. “We believe that this position will become increasingly untenable,” he said. “Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.”

As a result, Gartner insists that hybrid is the way forward. “Enterprises and vendors need to focus on managing and leveraging the hybrid combination of on-premises, off-premises, cloud and non-cloud architectures, with a focus on managing cloud-delivered capacity efficiently and effectively,” said Thomas J. Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst.

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The global software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to break $50 billion in terms of product spending by 2024, from $12bn this year, according to a report released by price comparison checker Better Buys.

The report, an examination on the state of the SaaS market which takes its cues from various industry reports, argues almost two thirds (64%) of small and medium businesses rely on cloud technologies to drive growth and workforce efficiency, while more than three quarters (78%) of companies polled expect to expand the number of SaaS platforms they use in the next three years, taking the number of apps up with it.

In terms of vendors, Salesforce (11% of market share in 2015) reigns supreme, according to the Better Buys verdict, with Microsoft (8%), Adobe (6%) and SAP (5%) behind. The researchers argue that despite an increase in horizontal SaaS development, such as Salesforce and Slack, vertical-specific software remains the cornerstone of the overall market: “Subscription growth in business intelligence, security, IT, and enterprise vertical applications continue to rise.”

The researchers also give an idea as to how the ‘software as a service’ landscape has evolved, arguing that the first such example was Dun & Bradstreet, founded back in 1824, whose mission was to create “a network of correspondents to serve as a source of reliable, objective credit information.” Take that into account with Moodwire, founded in 2015, with a goal of deriving actionable insights for businesses from a plethora of data, analytics, web pages and social postings, and the evolution is fascinating.

The report also gives good news as to the amount of jobs in the market, at least for US-based IT professionals. The top states for SaaS jobs per 100,000 people were Massachusetts (172), Maryland (162), Washington (150), Virginia (146) and Colorado (144), according to the researchers.

“SaaS providers are finding that fewer customers require education on the benefits of SaaS versus on-premise solutions as more SMBs are used to working with SaaS,” the report concludes. “This has forced SaaS providers to shift their focus from customer education to nurturing and maintaining customer relationships to keep them and minimise loss to growing competition.”

You can read the Better Buys analysis here.

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The move for enterprises to the cloud is not a question of if but when – and neither is it a question of pace.

That’s the view of Matthew Finnie, chief technical officer at virtual data centre (VDC) provider Interoute. He argues that the industries traditionally less than keen on changing – finance and manufacturing, and a trend which this publication has covered extensively – have all come to the same realisation. “The issue for us is not so much the speed at which stuff will move to the cloud, which is going at a good old pace, but it’s actually more the implicit understanding that most people have now – stuff is going to leave their premises,” he tells CloudTech.

“No-one, really, should be in the business of running their own infrastructure, unless of course that is your business, or you’re very, very large,” he adds. “They’ve all got to get out – it makes no sense any more for anyone to build their own.”

Nor does the outspoken Finnie believe cloud transformation is going to make things unnecessarily complicated and lead to headaches for IT departments. “It’s less about the absolute scale of the data centre, [but] more about the scale of the ability to take on some of those data centre assets in whatever form they come at you,” he says. “If you’ve got an AS/400, you ain’t sticking that in the cloud, or worse, an application written in COBOL. That’s certainly not going in the cloud. We use the network as a method of binding it together.”

Regarding the complexity, Finnie continues on the theme. “There’s no technology precedent that says it goes all from one place, your data centre, to multiple locations, platform as a service, software as a service, infrastructure as a service and your own data centre, and therefore it’s going to be really complicated. It’s all transitionary. From our experience, the speed of transformation has got nothing to do with technology… [but] many times the fear and loathing of the IT department.”

One important piece of news from Interoute’s perspective was the acquisition of cloud networks provider Easynet. The £402 million deal was announced in September and given full sign-off in November from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). As Finnie explains, the similarities between both companies, as well as a big European footprint, was vital. “What they were predominantly was manage WAN,” he says, “and in any digital transformation, the hard yards are connecting everyone up.

“For us, it was about acquiring a set of customers that we could upsell to, and practically speaking, by acquiring Easynet we acquired our next largest competitor. We gave ourselves a year to do the integration, and we’re already in a place now, six months in, where we’re actively upselling to those existing customers,” Finnie adds.

But with that in mind, Interoute has been busy expanding its empire, with new VDC zones in Singapore and Istanbul mooted. For the company, the latter is about as far south and east as you can go in Europe, and represents a good base to potentially target the Middle East. “We’ve got lots of bigger customers who are European based, but global – a lot of them will have an Asian presence,” Finnie says.

“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.”

Read Matthew’s articles on CloudTech here.HHe ioro

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A new research report from Veritas Technologies has found that while almost three quarters of enterprise adopt multiple private and public cloud strategies, the need for greater security and information management is vital.

As an information management software provider, this conclusion is hardly the most surprising from Veritas. Yet the statistics about continued hybrid cloud usage are worth the entrance fee. The manufacturing industry is the most assured in terms of migrating to the public cloud with almost a third (30%) of workloads there, compared with telecommunications (24%), healthcare (23%), financial (23%) and public sector (16%), with Japan and Brazil leading the way geographically.

38% of workloads today exist in a private cloud and 28% in a public cloud; numbers which are expected to go up at rates of 7% and 18% respectively over the coming 12 months. While cost remains the primary driver and security the main inhibitor to moving to the public cloud, for more than a quarter of respondents, backup and recovery (28%), disaster recovery (27%), and data warehousing (26%) would always remain on-premises.

With the move to public cloud being described as ‘messy’ and heterogeneous, more than four in five (81%) say they rely on service providers for help with implementation, as well as ongoing operations.

“This research underlines the current state of the hybrid cloud world,” said Simon Jelley, VP product management at Veritas. “This world is more – not less – heterogeneous, which can mean increasing complexity from an information management perspective. Organisations must be more vigilant than ever in identifying IT blind spots and potential security risks to avoid unplanned downtime or an information crisis.”

The Veritas research is perhaps more optimistic than other recent reports; a study from VMTurbo earlier this month found more than half of organisations polled did not have a multi-cloud strategy in place.

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If a security system flags up an issue in your organisation and nobody acts on it, is it even an issue? Many organisations are acting that way, according to a report from Skyhigh Networks and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

The research found that security budgets continue to rise – more than half (53%) of the 220 IT and security professionals polled expect their allocations to go up in the coming year – and the myriad of tools at teams’ disposals is a growing trend, with one in five companies having more than 10 available to them. Yet almost half (30%) of those polled admit to ignoring alerts because of the frequency of ‘false positives’ – an alert which erroneously flags normal behaviour as malicious.

Part of the issue relates to a lack of IT skills, the report asserts, with respondents saying the most important new IT skill in the coming five years is incident response management. IT workers believe the best solution to a shortage of skills is training current employees, while IT executives think bringing in junior IT workers is the best way forward.

It leads to a worrying pattern; hackers staying one step ahead of organisations and teams unable to cope.

“The frequency and sophistication of cyber threats is exposing a serious lack of the relevant skills needed to maximise the full value of new technology,” said Nigel Hawthorn, chief European spokesperson at Skyhigh Networks. “Businesses are forever playing catch up with hackers who are discovering new ways of probing networks, and firms are turning to more advanced cyber security solutions to compensate.

“To resolve the skills shortage, 37% of businesses believe that hiring junior IT professionals and investing in training is the most effective way,” he added.

The research also found that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the primary IaaS platform with 37% of respondents citing it, Microsoft Azure (28%) is closing the gap.

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It has been a particularly busy year for database platform provider Couchbase – and the company hopes that things will become a whole lot busier.

Earlier this week Couchbase launched 4.5, which continues its move to create joins between NoSQL and SQL through the SQL-based query language N1QL. The latest iteration includes greater security capabilities, alongside faster queries and graphical tools to more easily explore data models.

In March, the Mountain View-based firm announced the conclusion of a $30 million series F funding round; in all probability the last before Couchbase commits to an IPO, according to CEO Bob Wiederhold. “We’re continuing to grow our business very fast – we think this is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry, and we certainly want to continue to invest in the product [and] continue to invest in our sales and technical support channels,” he told CloudTech. “This financing gives us the runway that we need to have what we think will be a very successful IPO in the not too distant future.”

When that is remains to be seen; tech firms going public has tailed off in 2016, which may go to explain why Twilio’s move to IPO earlier this week was met with such initial acclaim. Couchbase has frequently been aggressive and bullish not only on its own position, but the positions of its competitors; and the N1QL query language is seen by the firm as another key differentiator.

“The query language is not only helpful to our existing customers and existing use cases, but it also opens up many other use cases for use with Couchbase,” said Wiederhold. “We’re seeing the downloads and the adoption of Couchbase rise significantly now that we have a query language, and as we expected the fact that it’s a SQL-compliant language significantly lowers the barriers to adopting NoSQL.”

This is a similar view with which Dave Starling, CTO of video sharing platform Seenit, agrees. “One of the biggest difficulties we had originally with Couchbase was hiring people with any level of skillset on knowing how to write MapReduce views [a system of generating large data sets] or knowing how to query manually,” he tells CloudTech, “and so having a technology like N1QL means that it’s far easier for us to train up new developers, or developers who want to start working on NoSQL technologies because it’s a language that they’re going to be familiar with.”

Seenit has not only been using the beta version of 4.5 before launch, but Starling is a certified Couchbase developer expert. The community aspect and camaraderie is vital, says Wiederhold – “that’s how technologies go viral, particularly open source technologies” – but ultimately the rise of Couchbase is indicative of the rise in NoSQL itself.

Wiederhold explains that there are three distinct phases of development, from grass roots developers, to initial deployment, and mission critical and very broad deployment. “We’re now clearly in phase three,” he said. “We had our first hand customer making [the move] from phase two to phase three – they did much larger business deals with us that will allow them to expand their usage of Couchbase very broadly onto their digital economy business.

“We think that a number of other customers will go into phase three with us this year, so we think that’s a very good sign for our business and for the growth of the NoSQL industry.”

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Another day, another piece of good news for both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS); the vendors are two of three companies which have been given authority by the US government for federal agencies to use them for sensitive cloud data.

Azure and AWS, alongside CSRA’s ARC-P IaaS, have been given the green light under the new FedRAMP High Baseline requirements. The full, mammoth spreadsheet documenting each guideline can be found on the FedRAMP website (XLS), but at a general level the requirements enable government bodies to put ‘high impact’ data – including data which involves the protection of life and financial ruin – in the cloud.

Chanelle Sirmons, communications lead for FedRAMP, explained in an official post: “While 80% of federal information is categorised at low and moderate impact levels, this only represents about 50% of federal IT spend. Now that FedRAMP has set the requirements for high impact levels, that breaks open the remaining 50% of the $80 billion a year the US government spends on IT that could potentially move to the cloud securely.”

“We are pleased to have achieved the FedRAMP high baseline, giving agencies a simplified path to moving their highly sensitive workloads to AWS so they can immediately begin taking advantage of the cloud’s agility and cost savings,” said Teresa Carlson, AWS VP worldwide public sector in a statement. A statement from Microsoft read: “Microsoft remains committed to delivering the most complete, trusted cloud platform to customers. This accreditation helps demonstrate our differentiated ability to support the unique needs of government agencies as they transition to the cloud.”

Amazon and Microsoft have had their clouds FedRAMP accredited since June and October 2013 respectively – back when the latter was still known as Windows Azure – while ARC-P was the first vendor to receive the federal stamp of approval in 2012. Three years on, this represents a major step forward for government use of cloud technologies.

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According to the latest research from virtualisation technology provider HyTrust, the software defined data centre (SDDC) is moving further towards the mainstream, with many regulated industries moving around half of their critical workloads over to SDDC and virtualisation.

The study, snappily titled ‘Industry Experience: the 2016 State of the Cloud and Software Defined Data Centre in Real World Environments’, surveyed more than 500 executives across a wide variety of company sizes, and found relatively high uptake of virtualisation and public cloud across the board. Put into three buckets, financial services, banking and insurance scored just under half (47%) of tier one workloads moved over, with healthcare, biotech and pharma, as well as technology firms, both scoring 55%.

For test and development servers, tech firms are on a much surer footing with almost three quarters (72%) of workloads making it, compared to financial (49%) and healthcare (52%) respectively. Network again saw a disparity between finance (51%) and technology companies (68%), while storage showed a closer gap (finance 53%, healthcare 61%). In each case, more than half of the workloads are being trusted in the public cloud.

There was an interesting point of contention with regard to the various platforms used; 29% of those in healthcare used AWS, while half (50%) in manufacturing opted for Azure. HyTrust insists that there is still one eye on security for large scale migrations. Between a quarter and a third of businesses encrypt the entire workload as part of their data security requirements for virtualising private cloud workloads, with disparities between business consulting and management (39%) and retail (24%). 40% of firms in energy and utilities encrypt personally identifiable information (PII) only.

As a result, while the numbers look impressive, there still has to be some concern. “Without much fanfare, this critical technology advance has become woven into the basic fabric of businesses large and small. The potential of virtualisation and the cloud was always undeniable, but there was genuine concern over security and scepticism regarding the processes required,” said Eric Chui, president of HyTrust.

“What we find in this research is that the challenges are being overcome, and every kind of function in every kind of industry is being migrated,” he added. “There are some holdouts, to be sure, but they’re now the exception, and we’re betting they won’t stay that way for long.”

Previous research from HyTrust back in April found that two thirds of US respondents expected increased adoption in the SDDC over the coming year.

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SLALOM, a European Commission-established initiative which aims to provide greater clarity for businesses dealing with cloud service level agreements (SLAs), has launched its final set of standardised contact terms, with the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) arguing it ‘reduces the uncertainty’ of migrating to the cloud.

The CIF, who is listed as a partner of SLALOM alongside service provider Atos, legal firm Bird and Bird and various educational institutions, says research into the UK IT channel shows that around half of cloud service providers would like additional support from vendors on cloud contracts.

SLALOM’s aim is to push forward the idea of an open, ready to use service level agreements and contract templates which are legally binding. At the beginning of this month, Oliver Barreto Rodriguez of Atos announced the release of the final specs in a SLALOM blog. “The legal team created a set of cloud computing terms and conditions covering all aspects of the relationship between a provider and an adopter of cloud computing services, and setting out the terms and the conditions of the contractual relationship between both parties in relation to the provision of cloud services,” he wrote. “The final document is intended to be practical and useful at European level.”

Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO, argues this is a step in the right direction. “Cloud contracts remain a major stumbling block for both providers of cloud services and end usesr; something that hasn’t been helped by the fact that there has been little consistency in the terminology in the terms used,” said Hilton. “From an end user point of view, that lack of consistency makes it difficult for businesses to know precisely what they are getting into when entering into cloud service agreements and where liabilities and responsibility for cloud service delivery lie.

“SLALOM’s work in this area should streamline that process, lowering the barriers to entry for smaller cloud providers and making it easier for them to compete,” he added.

You can find the finished document here.

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Samsung has agreed to acquire California-based cloud provider Joyent, adding another cloud platform to the Korean giant’s ever-increasing portfolio of mobile, cloud and IoT services.

The move came after Samsung assessed a “wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space”, and saw Joyent as the standout with an “experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology,” according to Samsung mobile communications CTO Injong Rhee.

From Joyent’s perspective, CEO Scott Hammond and CTO Bryan Cantrill both chipped in with their reasons for the deal. “Until today, we lacked one thing,” Hammond wrote in a blog post. “We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now that changes.” Naturally, Cantrill looked at the news from more of a technologist’s perspective. “As our engineering teams got to know one another, we found that beneath the exciting vision was a foundation of shared values: we both cared deeply about not only innovation but also robustness – and that we both valued complete understanding when systems misbehaved,” Cantrill wrote.

“The more we got to know one another, the clearer it became that together we could summon a level of scale, agility and innovation that would be greater than the sum of our parts – that together, our technology could create a new titan of container-native computing,” he added.

Like a lot of these deals, the original intent was not acquisition; Samsung had previously examined Manta, Joyent’s object storage system, for implementation but, as Cantrill noted, Joyent had never seen a request at such scale. When Joyent went back to Samsung and explained they did not have sufficient hardware to perform the requested test, Samsung provided it – and the rest, it appears, was history.

“We work closely with startups to bring new software and services into Samsung, and one of the ways we do this is by driving strategic acquisitions,” said David Eun, Samsung global innovation centre president. “Joyent is a great example of a leading and disruptive technology company that will make unique contributions to Samsung while benefitting from Samsung’s global scale and reach.”

Joyent will continue as a standalone brand after the acquisition, while financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.