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Amazon Web Services (AWS) took a hit in its Sydney region for six hours over the weekend, according to official status updates, with stormy weather being blamed as the source of the problem.

The alarm was first raised on June 4 at 2247 PDT – or 1547 on June 5 Sydney time – with AWS announcing it was investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 region. An hour later, a “power event” was cited as the culprit, with power restored 45 minutes after that and periodic updates appearing until a message at 0443 PDT on June 5, saying the majority of the instances had been fixed. The issues hit various AWS services, including ElastiCache, CloudFormation and Database Migration Service.

“On June 4th at 10:25 PM PDT a significant number of EC2 instances and EBS volumes within a single availability zone in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 region experienced a loss of power,” AWS confirmed, adding: “A couple of unexpected issues prevented our automated systems from recovering the remaining instances and volumes.

“The team was able to fix these issues, and by 8:00 AM PDT, all but a small number of instances and volumes were recovered.”

AWS currently employs five regions in Asia Pacific, with 12 availability zones available overall. Three of these exist in Australia, all of which are in Sydney. Some customers on Twitter were bemoaning this relative lack of coverage across Australia; Microsoft, in comparison, has only two Azure zones in the country but in New South Wales and Victoria respectively.

Australia, in comparison to the majority of Asia Pacific nations, has a relatively good infrastructure; the country placed fourth in the most recent analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), with strong economic stability, physical infrastructure and international connectivity.

Last month AWS released X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, claiming to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today. But all that memory won’t get you very far if the system has fallen over.

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It has been a week of good and bad news for enterprise cloud storage provider Box with the announcement of first quarter financial results. The company announced record first quarter revenue of $90.2 million (£62m), an increase of 37% from this time last year – but because renewals were down, analysts came out of the quarter feeling somewhat unconvinced.

“We had a solid start to fiscal 2017,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in the firm’s earnings call, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We had strong customer momentum adding more than 5000 new customers in Q1, our largest number of new customers in a quarter. In addition, we continue to improve our already best in class customer retention with our customer churn rate improving to just below 3%.

“These metrics showcase how valuable and essential Box is to our growing global customer base,” he added.

Other results included billings in Q117 of $75.9m, an increase of 9% year over year, and GAAP operating loss of $38.6m representing 43% of revenue compared to 71% in 2015, while customer wins and extensions cited by Box included Airbnb, Brooks Brothers, and The Whirlpool Corporation.

Levie cited partnerships as key to Box’s strength going forward, also revealing the company will shortly be hiring a chief marketing officer with ’20 years of enterprise technology experience’. “As we’re becoming a more strategic investment for our customers, larger transactions are shifting towards later in the year,” Levie said. “Looking ahead, underlying demand for Box remains very strong and our competitive position in the market has never been better.

“Coming off of Box World Tour where we engaged with thousands of customers and prospective clients, we created record sales pipeline in the quarter with several seven figure deals in the mix,” he added. “This has been driven by the growing demand for a modern approach to enterprise content management, our differentiated product offerings and our maturing partnerships that are becoming an integral part of our go-to-market strategy.”

All good news, one would assume. Yet yesterday, as reported by Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase & Co analyst Mark Murphy downgraded the cloud software vendor’s stock to neutral. “Short seller’s wet dreams coming true as Box gets hammered for a beat,” as Diginomica put it. “Box turned in a decent quarter with a broadly in-line outlook,” wrote Den Hewlett. “The problem is that on the call, the Box team didn’t seem as assured as analysts were likely requiring in order to maintain the market’s already fragile view of momentum company stocks.”

“We are confident in our growth opportunity, driven by our product differentiation and expanding market, and we remain committed to achieving positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year,” said Box CFO Dylan Smith.

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Jobs relating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) have gone up 53% over the past year while job postings requiring Microsoft Azure experience have increased by 75%, according to new data from managed cloud provider Rackspace.

The research figures are not quite as marked as last year’s analysis, when job postings including Docker went up 991% year on year, but it’s still more of the same; Docker postings went up 341% over the past 12 months. DevOps skill sets went up a modest 53% in comparison with 3,723 jobs available on the market, yet Rackspace argues this is indicative of the area moving more into the mainstream, and companies willing to use budget to hire staff with particular expertise.

Vacancies for AWS engineer roles have gone up by 125%, while Microsoft Azure-based jobs have gone up 5% in salary on average.

Elsewhere, Python expertise saw a ‘significant’ rise, with 6,186 jobs spotted in 2016, up 32% from 4,694 in 2015. Linux and Puppet, again key to the DevOps and Docker scenario, again rose in the past 12 months.

Despite the recent widely publicised commercial launch of the BBC Microbit, aimed at being the first step to getting such skills on board at a young age, Rackspace argues organisations need to do more. “Technology companies have a responsibility to address these shortages by growing and fostering talent through on the job training and experience,” said Darren Norfolk, Rackspace UK managing director.

“I expect the rise in demand for cloud related jobs to continue as a growing number of businesses adopt a multi-cloud strategy, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and AWS,” he added. “The highly competitive recruitment market for skills in these areas means that managing the platforms in-house could become more costly than it has been in the past.”

Firebrand Training, a firm which specialises in technical job skills, cited Python as well as Linux – with more than a quarter of servers powering Azure being Linux based – as key cloud skills back in February.

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While this publication has been examining the futures of the private and hybrid clouds – and naturally found both to be in demand – a new piece of research from Cloud Cruiser has found that the same is true for the public cloud, fuelled primarily by big data and analytics.

The study, which polled almost 200 respondents at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global Summit last month in Chicago, found that 92% of respondents were currently using a public cloud, while even more (95%) believe public cloud usage will grow further. Of that number, 40% believe their company’s use of public cloud will go up by 25-50%, compared to 38% for 10-25% and 17% for less than 10%.

Not surprisingly, more than half (54%) of those polled said they used AWS as their only cloud environment. Of those that were using more than one cloud, 27% were using Microsoft Azure, 12% were using Google Cloud Platform, while 22% were combining AWS with a private cloud. Yet 14% of respondents – presumably those who were at least exploring the idea – said they were not using Amazon’s services.

Not surprisingly, the majority (59%) of those who are using AWS say they are deploying it for development and testing purposes. Big data and analytics (31%) was second on the list, ahead of sandboxes (30%), customer facing applications (25%) and backup (19%). Only 2% of those polled said they were using AWS for eCommerce.

Yet the research also found that organisations can be profligate with regard to their cloud spend. Almost a third (31%) admitted they do not proactively manage their cloud usage, with custom systems (25%) the most popular ahead of vendor-issued tools. Perhaps it’s little wonder; only 18% described sorting out cloud bills with finance as ‘easy’, compared to ‘just okay’ (40%), ‘challenging’ (39%), and ‘horrible’ (3%).

Naturally, this is the point where you would expect to read about Cloud Cruiser’s new product that helps customers with financial issues – and you would be correct, with Cloud Cruiser 16 being essentially a ‘smart meter’ for multi-cloud environments. This publication has covered similar ideas in the past, not least Springs.io, whose ‘reactive servers’ don’t just stop at pay as you go, meaning that theoretically users will pay for 1GB of output if a 4GB server is lightly used.

“IT teams are under tremendous pressure to deliver cloud services as quickly as possible to the business. The reality is they can only move at the speed of finance,” said Cloud Cruiser CMO Deirdre Mahon. “If business, IT, and finance stakeholders cannot view the same real-time dashboard showing exactly what cloud services are being consumed by whom, services will come to a screeching halt.”

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Businesses in the Asia Pacific region who use cloud services are more than twice as likely to have a greater presence in international markets, according to new research from NetSuite and Frost & Sullivan.

The study, which surveyed more than 800 mostly C-suite executives across Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore, found 70% of cloud-enabled firms surveyed were “internationalised” compared to 22% of their non-cloud brethren, while similar figures appeared for businesses entering new geographic markets over the past five years (71% cloud, 31% non-cloud). Globalisation was seen as an opportunity, rather than a threat, by 83% of organisations.

According to respondents, the main competitive advantage of the cloud was lower operating costs, increased responsiveness to customer needs, and a greater ability to enter overseas markets. All features were seen as key to accelerate the push towards internationalisation.

And similar to companies that were ‘born in the cloud’, the NetSuite research argues there is a rise of firms which are ‘born global’ – businesses which have successfully internationalised by entering overseas markets at an extremely early stage of development. The top three challenges to internationalisation in Singapore were recruiting suitable employees, taxation issues, and IT issues, with almost three quarters (73%) seeing cloud as a competitive advantage.

For Frost & Sullivan, the findings are indicative of an evolving industry in general. “Our research has shown how industry change is not just continuing, but accelerating,” said Mark Dougan, Australia and New Zealand managing director at the research firm. “Two new key factors that are driving this change have emerged from this study: significant increase in business costs and evolving customer needs.

“These trends may create new challenges for organisations, but at the same time they also create significant opportunities for growth, with internationalisation topping the list,” he added.

In April, the latest paper from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) found that Hong Kong had overtaken Japan as the most mature Asia Pacific cloud nation. Singapore, Australia and New Zealand were all in the top five.

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Around 30% of UK adults use cloud storage in a personal capacity, according to a report released today by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – but the governing body notes concerns over some vendor practices which conflict with consumer law.

The report, which can be found in full here at a whopping 218 pages, shares concerns, such as companies being able to change the terms of a contract at any time, for any reason, and without notice, suspending or terminating a contract without notice, and automatically renewing contracts without giving notice or withdrawal rights, as key. Dixons Carphone, JustCloud and Livedrive have committed to providing fairer terms and conditions for their customers as a result of the report’s findings.

“In this rapidly-developing market, it’s important that we act now to ensure that businesses comply with the law and that consumers’ trust in these valuable services is maintained,” said Nisha Arora, CMA senior consumer director in a statement. “We welcome the fact that a number of companies have already agreed to change their terms, and expect to see improvements from other companies.”

The report uncovered some interesting statistics; currently almost 80% of consumers surveyed do not pay for their cloud storage, while in the UK 2.5 billion gigabytes of data is being created in real time every day. The most popular file type uploaded to the cloud is photos (71%), followed by self-created personal documents (32%), music (29%), and personal documents which had been sent to them (23%).

The researchers also argue the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will take effect in less than two years, will “inevitably” have implications for the cloud storage services sector. Among the proposals outlined under the GDPR include users’ right to know if their data has been hacked, as well as greater enforcement of the ‘right to be forgotten’.

Ian Moyse, a board member of both Eurocloud UK and the Cloud Industry Forum, cites greater awareness of the GDPR as a tipping point. “Transparency and trust in cloud is going to become ever more important as the customer/consumer becomes more informed and educated on the sector and expects more,” he tells CloudTech.

“Also, as awareness, understanding and pressure comes from the combination of the new GDPR and Privacy Shield requirements on business and provider, the demands on having an understandable, clear and transparent service offering in relation to data protection [and] sovereignty, security, SLAs and offboarding processes will have mounting pressure from the industry, regulations, and the customer,” he added. “Cloud is entering the growing up phase and this will benefit the industry as a whole, not just the customer.”

In addition, the CMA has published an open letter for businesses which advises them to review their terms to ensure they are fair, as well as insist consumers get all the information they need before they buy. “If you are a cloud storage business that deals with consumers, you must ensure that your contract terms are fair and that they comply with consumer protection law,” the letter warns.

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The cloud services sector is still a long way off from being a commodity market, according to the latest note from analyst house 451 Research.

The results, which have been published in the firm’s latest Cloud Price Index (CPI), show the ‘race to the bottom’ in cloud pricing, as exemplified by continued price cuts from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and others, is something of a misnomer and that the supply of higher value services will be key to long term growth for vendors. Despite this, the researchers argue VM pricing went down 12% on average over the past 18 months, while NoSQL, load balancing, and bandwidth among others remained stable.

As a result, 451 has come up with the ‘cloud commodity score’ (CCS) metric, which measures customers’ sensitivity to price by region. The researchers found that the US was the region most likely to have market share driven by cheaper prices, yet argued Europe and APAC present more opportunities to vendors because the markets are ‘fractured’.

“Despite all the noise about cloud becoming a commodity, our research demonstrates a very limited relationship between price and market share,” said Owen Rogers, 451 Research digital economics unit research director. “Cloud is a long way from being a commodity. In fact, the real drama is the race to the top rather than the race to the bottom.”

This publication has examined the supposed disparity between the major cloud players and how their pricing stacks up. Research from Cloud Spectator back in March found 1&1 to be the best ranked European cloud provider, based on performance as well as price, well ahead of Google, Azure, and AWS. Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this publication that smaller players have an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at more competitive prices.

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New research released today by enterprise cloud hosting provider iland has revealed almost half (47%) of security workers “simply trust” their cloud providers to meet security agreements.

The findings, from 100 IT decision makers and security experts, appear in a study whose title – ‘Blind Trust is Not a Security Strategy: Lessons from Cloud Adopters’ – lays the problem on thick. Even though 78% of firms polled are using the cloud in some capacity, and more than half (56%) of respondents say security technology is more consistently applied in the cloud, the report insists vendors need to do more to keep things safe.

This will not come as a major surprise to regular readers of this publication, with a study released in June last year from iland saying largely the same thing. Back then, the finger was pointed at rogue vendors not sharing metadata with customers. Customers, ranging from one third to half of respondents, had various concerns over how closely their provider looks after them – the idea that they were ‘just another account number’.

Customers are not immune either however; the research also found a ‘significant’ gap in IT understanding of compliance requirements, with 96% of security professionals admitting their firms have compliance-related workloads in the cloud compared to just 69% of IT teams. David Monahan, research director of security and risk management at Enterprise Management Associates, who conducted the study with iland, argues a lack of staff and skills are holding firms back. “Companies can no longer combat security threats by simply throwing technology at perceived vulnerabilities,” he said.

On the plus side, business and IT are more likely to be on the same page with regard to cloud security, and if IT is reluctant to push a new application because of security fears. iland calls this a ‘fundamental shift in dynamics’, yet Monahan added: “While IT has made monumental progress in identifying and adopting necessary security technologies, cloud providers must do more to ensure teams can easily validate claims, manage disparate tools, anticipate threats and take action when needed.”

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It is a question which carries more resonance as technology matures: what is the major role of the CIO today?

The usual responses range from improving business efficiency, to spearheading the organisation’s technological revolution. At the MIT Sloan CIO Conference earlier this month, the answer was simple. “The perfect CIO is enabling the perfectly friction-less business,” argued Steve Rosenbush, the editor of CIO Journal.

Yet there are many layers to uncover to get to the heart of this statement.

The role of the CIO is becoming more strategic – the CIO’s future career opportunities are broadening out

Harvey Nash and KPMG have today released a report on ‘the creative CIO’. The authors, Harvey Nash chief executive Albert Ellis and KPMG International global CIO advisory service network lead Lisa Heneghan, conclude that despite an increasing examination of security, the CIOs with a creative mindset are winning out over those with an operational focus.

Moving up the stack

The report shows that CIOs are, on the whole, moving away from the ‘keep the lights on’ mentality – simply because there is enough stuff going on elsewhere. Four out of 10 CIOs surveyed said they spend at least one day a week outside IT, while the vast majority of core IT priorities that fall under a CIO’s remit, such as managing operational risk and compliance, business intelligence and analytics, and delivering stable IT performance to the business, are not seen as important as they were.

Heneghan tells CloudTech: “We have seen from the survey that the proportion of time the CIO is spending actually internally focused on managing IT is reducing. There is an increasing amount of time being spent working with colleagues outside of IT and in smaller organisations also working with customers.

“This supports the view that the role of the CIO is becoming more strategic – there is a need for CIOs to talk business strategy and provide a platform to enable this. The CIO’s future career opportunities are broadening out,” she adds.

Too many cooks?

Adam Woodhouse is director of CIO advisory at KPMG. He argues that the rise of job roles such as the CDO (chief digital officer) and the CTO has given CIOs ‘a jolt to recognise that to be relevant and support growth they cannot focus on their own world in isolation’ – 84% of CIOs surveyed said they do not fully own the company’s digital strategy. Also key to this change is the rise in IT budget not being provisioned by IT. “It is therefore not a surprise that CIOs now need to influence more effectively, and building relationships with customers is a key element of this,” he tells CloudTech.

Despite not spending as much time in the boiler room of IT anymore, the CIO’s technical expertise needs to be sharper than ever. Big data and analytics was cited by 39% of survey respondents as a function which suffers from a skills shortage, up from 36% the year before. Woodhouse explains the cloud is a ‘core element’ of driving an agile methodology – the principle of failing fast and learning from your errors.

“It is a given that the lights must be kept on, but we have seen from the survey an increasing emphasis on supporting business growth, and agility is fundamental to this,” he says. “When we asked what steps CIOs are taking to make their business more agile, there was the obvious top answer of implementing agile methodologies, but a clear second place was given to implementing SaaS solutions.” 69% of large organisations polled expect to make a ‘significant’ investment across infrastructure, platform, and software as a service in the next three years as a result.

More dialogue

Any thoughts however that the job role of the CIO is diminishing, with more C-suite executives in the company, is a misnomer. The report reveals that the proportion of CIOs sitting on the executive board or senior leadership committee is at its highest level in 11 years of tracking. More than two thirds (67%) of respondents expect the strategic influence of the CIO to go up in 2016.

Cloud adoption will continue to develop – and this needs to be integrated with business strategy to truly drive differentiation

Increasingly, the CIO is more likely to report directly to the CEO, with more than a third (34%) confirming this is the case, compared to 12% who report to the CFO and COO respectively. The report argues this is due to the growing strategic influence of the CIO; Heneghan argues that with CEOs needing to understand more about technology and CIOs needing to understand more about business, the boundaries are blurring.

“The role of the CIO is becoming less defensive and more proactive in stimulating debate on what technology can bring to the organisation and benefit its customers,” Heneghan says. “Therefore I see the relationship becoming more balanced and the dialogue two way, rather than the CIO always responding to requests or issues.”

As for what 2017 will bring, Woodhouse expects more of the same. “I expect the strategic importance of the role to continue to increase, and as such we will see CIOs spending even greater amounts of their time outside of the traditional fortress [of] IT,” he says.

“We know that cloud adoption will continue to develop and this needs to be integrated with business strategy to truly drive differentiation – I will be interested if skill shortages in this area hamper CIOs delivering,” he adds. “We also absolutely expect to see an increase in the adoption of digital labour strategies which may displace the broader ‘digital’ strategy question.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially launched X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, which claim to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.

The instances have 2 terabytes of memory each and are, according to Amazon, a good fit for programmes such as the SAP HANA in-memory database, big data processing engines such as Apache Spark and Presto, as well as other high performance computing workloads. The memory available in X1 is eight times more than in any other instance on EC2.

“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support any workload,” said Matt Garman, Amazon EC2 VP in a statement. “XI instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”

This is not the first time AWS has waxed lyrical over SAP this week; earlier the cloud giant issued a release which noted a significant increase of customers running SAP applications on the AWS cloud. No specifics on numbers were given, but customers include GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, and Zappos.com.

AWS as we know it turned 10 years old back in March, and still continues to be seen as the darling of the industry with a significant – almost unsurpassable – lead in infrastructure as a service and, in the words of Ian Moyse, Cloud Industry Forum and Eurocloud board member, taken companies such as Microsoft with it more quickly than expected.

X1 instances are available upon request to AWS customers in selected US, EU, and Asia Pacific regions, with the service being rolled out to more regions in the coming months.