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Managed IT services provider IT Specialists (ITS) has put together a list of the top 10 business continuity disasters to hit the UK over the past 12 months, including storms Abigail, Desmond, Katie, as well as a fire at Holborn and power cuts at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and Heathrow Airport.

The list of disasters encompass various business situations, from the Forth Road Bridge Closure in December where 80,000 vehicles were diverted daily for 19 days, to the Heathrow power cut which saw an outage for three hours and up to 4,000 people left without bags.

The full list of disasters, in chronological order from April 2015 to March 2016, were the Holborn fire; the Kennington floods; the Royal Berkshire Hospital power cut and flood; the Heathrow Airport power cut; the Hampton-in-Arden fire; storm Abigail; the Forth Road Bridge Closure; storm Desmond; storm Katie; and the Saltley recycling site fire.

The study was conducted for the Business Continuity Institute’s Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) which runs until May 20. Matt Kingswood, head of managed services at ITS, told CloudTech: “We want to help businesses create and improve their business continuity programs, but first they must realise the need for one. With this research, we wanted to help businesses understand the types of incidents that could affect them.”

As Graham Jarvis pointed out for this publication back in November, the business case for data centres, specifically those associated with disaster recovery, have to be geographically dispersed. It’s just common sense. Even though in some instances you can assess how ‘disaster prone’ a geographic area is – minimal resistance to flooding among others was one of the key criticisms of China as a cloud ready nation according to a recent report – Kingswood argues disasters ‘of all sorts’ are becoming more frequent in the UK.

“This increases the urgency of having a business continuity programme,” he explains. “Investing in forward planning can save valuable time, protect the organisation’s revenue and preserve its customer base.”

Kingswood argued the extent of the downtime was not especially surprising, but said not all businesses were as prepared as they could be over business continuity. “We’re seeing progress, but still too many businesses either don’t have a business continuity programme or don’t understand what business continuity entails,” he says.

“There are those who put a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution in place and all but forget about it. However, to avoid wasting money on a product that doesn’t function as needed in the aftermath of a disaster, businesses need to work with their DRaaS providers to test the solution and have a plan for coping with power outages and other consequences of a disaster.”

You can find out more about ITS here.

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The major colocation players continue to extend their leadership – and comfortably beat overall market growth – in large part due to significant acquisitions, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

According to the firm’s Q1 2016 figures, the top three vendors in the space remain Equinix, Digital Realty, and NTT, with 28%, 26%, and 41% year on year growth respectively. Yet while the analyst house argues the three firms grew well enough organically, the acquisitions made – in particular Equinix acquiring Telecity and Bit-isle, Digital Reality with Telx and NTT with e-shelter – helped boost the coffers further.

Equinix is the only single colocation player with more than 10% market share, according to the researchers; to put this into context, the remaining seven vendors in the top 10, including CenturyLink, Global Switch, and KDDI, hold just over 15% share between them. According to the data the colocation market is expanding steadily across all regions, with China, Germany, and Japan the highest growing countries in Q1.

Regardless, it shows the market in comparatively rude health. “We’ve seen a constant stream of M&A activity over the past five years and several more big deals are in the pipeline – and yet there remains a very long tail of independent small to medium sized colocation operators,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Many of these will continue to operate successfully by focusing on specific metros or countries, while others will inevitably succumb to market consolidation,” he added.

451 Research conducted a similar study back in April which argued that 2015 was the best year on record for deals in the data centre, hosting, and managed services sector. Global colocation revenues will reach more than $33 billion (£23bn) by 2018, the researchers argued, with Equinix leading on market share despite Digital Realty owning more real estate.

Anyone asking why the colocation market continues to see market growth needs to look no further than Logicworks’ description in this publication back in February. “As enterprises begin to move ‘easy’ workloads to AWS [et al], they want to move not-ready workloads to a managed environment outside their internal data centres,” Logicworks argues. “Somewhat paradoxically, colocation is rising in popularity precisely because enterprises want cloud.”

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Tech giants Microsoft and SAP have announced a partnership enabling in-memory database platform SAP HANA to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud, as well as other integrations with SAP’s cloud and Office 365.

The announcement, made at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference with SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella onstage together, also includes management and security of custom SAP Fiori apps. Developing custom mobile hybrid apps on SAP HANA will also include support with Microsoft Intune, part of Redmond’s enterprise mobility package.

“This is a partnership that has gone on now for years and years between two global juggernauts in their individual spaces,” said McDermott. “We have a very high trust between the companies, we have a belief in the customer and the idea that together we can give the customer more.

“I really do think the combination of Microsoft and SAP has always been extraordinarily special,” he added. “When you think about the work in the enterprise, and you think about the work the knowledge worker does, and bringing those things together in an interdependent way, to drive unique value…to me is very special.”

“Our identity has always been a platform identity, and an ecosystem identity – how do we bring the best out of each partner so we can serve our customers,” said Nadella. “And that’s really what it’s all about. Partnerships are absolutely necessary…if we are to meet our customers’ realities.”

This chimes in with McDermott’s belief that partnerships drive the tech industry more than competition right now. You can find out more about the partnership in this Microsoft Azure company blog post.

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More than three quarters (81%) of CIOs argue the ever-increasing complexity of IT infrastructure is creating a bottleneck for IT support, while a similar number (82%) argue IT support has become a “growing burden” on modern IT departments.

The results appear in a survey from end-to-end technology provider Trustmarque, which polled 200 UK CIOs and senior IT decision makers from large enterprises. More than half of CIOs polled (58%) admit they are struggling to offer a consistent level of IT support throughout their business, chiefly as a result of the proliferation of cloud technologies, and businesses using more than one cloud product.

85% of organisations are partly or fully outsourcing IT services in an attempt to simplify things. The IT service desk is the most commonly outsourced area, with almost half (47%) of respondents citing it, followed by application management (41%), infrastructure management (40%) and network management (40%). Not surprisingly, cost (56%) is the biggest driver of outsourcing, followed by a lack of in-house skills (46%) with increasing organisational agility (41%) similarly popular.

The research findings display the continued balancing act required between CIOs looking to increase agility and innovation in their organisation while ensuring the whole system doesn’t fall over.

“Many CIOs struggle to balance the need to run business IT as usual, while at the same time delivering innovative new services to demanding users,” said Mike Henson, Trustmarque director of cloud and managed services. “Clearly, CIOs recognise the growing need for continued innovation within their organisation – but also recognise that a lack of internal resources and skills can hamper this ambition.

“As their remit grows and their role changes from that of a builder of systems to a broker of services, more CIOs are engaging with partners as a way of continuing to support the vital, ongoing business IT functions, while freeing resources that will enable them to pursue more innovative projects,” he added.

You can find the full report here.

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If you were to think of an industry that would be naturally reluctant to embrace technologies such as cloud and mobility for reasons of sensitive data privacy, which one would you think of first? The two most common answers are usually healthcare and banking – so it is therefore interesting to note how Santander has gone all in on enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) with cloud storage provider CTERA Networks.

According to the bank, the opportunity to move organisational capabilities to the cloud arose as far back as 2011 to increase productivity – yet there was a huge task to be undertaken in terms of finding a solution that would pass all of Santander’s security tests. This is perhaps not unreasonable, but the proposed EFSS solution would need to prove ‘dramatically’ more cost effective, hardware-agnostic, and have high security standards when deployed in Santander data centres, including multi-user encryption keys, data redundancy, and file versioning. The deployment has been made across more than 60,000 employees across Spain and Latin America. 

The benefits, according to Pablo Ruiz Correa, head of open innovation at Santander, are tangible. “We realised the need to provide a solution for simple, anytime anywhere file access and collaboration, but we also needed to meet requirements for total data privacy and security,” he explained, adding: “CTERA has allowed us to transform how users sync, collaborate on and protect their files without requiring any of the security compromises that are common to public cloud SaaS offerings.”

For CTERA, it represents an impressive customer story, and one which fits into their enterprise-secure cloud storage philosophy. Research carried out by the vendor in September last year found that more than three quarters of survey respondents were at least somewhat concerned about consumer-grade file sync and share solutions. The company’s view has been consistent; even though the likes of Dropbox and Box – which is traditionally an enterprise player anyway – have been beefing up their security, it still is not enough against vendors who know the B2B game inside out, a view shared by fellow enterprise storage firm Egnyte.

Speaking to CloudTech in July last year Rani Osnat, CTERA VP strategic marketing, explained: “When you talk to larger enterprises, especially the ones that are in regulated industries like banking or insurance, or healthcare, they definitely have a strong preference for private cloud solutions. They have the know-how, and they have strict security and compliance requirements that are not entirely satisfied by solutions that utilise a public cloud infrastructure.”

An interesting comparison as to how banks are moving forward with technology was evinced by Spain’s leader, CaixaBank. Pere Nebot, the bank’s CIO, told delegates at this year’s Mobile World Congress that by now 80% of all contracts signed are digital, with only 8% of transactions now undertaken in a physical branch.

It is clearly a case of keeping up with the Joneses, and banks would do well not to be left behind. “Santander is now not only more productive and agile, but we’ve managed to increase our data security, control and cost savings in our journey to the cloud,” added Correa.

You can find the full case study here.

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The dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in cloud infrastructure has long been apparent – but a new note from analyst house Synergy Research argues the space is in three distinct tiers, with AWS all on its own at the top table.

Amazon currently holds 31% of the global market share, with Microsoft, IBM and Google between them holding 22%. The next 20 vendors, including CenturyLink, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce and VMware, have 27% share between them. As previous research indicated, Microsoft and Google are – very slowly – gaining ground on the AWS juggernaut, with more than 100% year over year growth compared to Amazon’s 57%. The 20 vendors in the third tier are growing on average by 41% each year.

The figures come amidst Amazon’s first quarter revenues published earlier this week. The cloud arm noted a particular uplift, with revenues rising 64% year over year and reaching $2.5 billion.

Synergy argues that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are not ‘comfortably’ above the $7bn mark.

 “This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy Research chief analyst and research director.

“The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business,” he added. “This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

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Hong Kong is the most ‘cloud-ready’ Asia Pacific nation with an overall ranking higher than that of the US and UK, according to the latest analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA).

Japan, previously the leader, moved down four places to #5 in the chart with an overall score of 73.0 compared to Hong Kong’s 78.1, with the latter scoring top markets in broadband quality, privacy, and data centre risk. Singapore (76.7), New Zealand (74.4) and Australia (73.2) comprised the top five, with the other categories focusing on sustainability, cybersecurity, government and regulation, intellectual property, business sophistication and freedom of information.

Looking at the other countries, there was minimal change, with the likes of Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand only moving one place up or down over the past year. South Korea, a certainly developed market and the second most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation in 2012, has dropped into mid-table obscurity with an overall position of #7 in 2016. The researchers argue the scoring “reflects the fact that South Korea has been moving slowly in the development of its infrastructure for cloud service[s] in the past few years.” However, ACCA did praise the “strong showing” in South Korea’s government initiatives.

At the bottom of the table, Vietnam finished last on 44.0 points overall, with China surprisingly slipping into the relegation zone on 45.4 points. China achieved the lowest score on a single metric, a measly 1.6 out of 10 on internet connectivity, with India (1.7 and #12 overall) and Indonesia (1.8, #11) faring similarly poorly.

This publication has in the past explored the cloud computing acumen of both China and India, with the former, back in 2013, noting evident weaknesses but expecting them to be overcome in time. The result is particularly surprising, however, given the amount of investment that has been made by major vendors in the country. According to a report from China Daily earlier this week, Microsoft announced it now has more than 65,000 corporate clients in China, raging the fuels of fire against Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has data centres in the country, and local vendor Alibaba Tencent.

Overall however, the prognosis is more than adequate for the Asia Pacific region. “The results put Asia in a very strong position to lead the next wave of global innovation and technology,” said ACCA chairman Bernie Trudel. “The next phase for markets is to put in place strong forward-looking policies which enable international data transfers, and address cybersecurity and privacy concerns from consumers and business.”

The report, which has been produced annually for the past several years, reflects the maturation of cloud globally in terms of its content, and for the first time compared its Asia Pacific metrics with other cloud markets, developed or otherwise. The association sees the UK as having an overall score of 75.7, which would put it in third place overall, and surprisingly the US with 71.6, putting it in fifth place.  

You can download the full report (no registration required) here.

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The updated EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation is coming in the next two years – but businesses are at risk of fines because of gaps in knowledge, according to new research from Trend Micro.

More than a quarter (26%) of companies don’t know how much time they have to become compliant, according to the report which surveyed 100 senior IT decision makers in the UK. Almost one in five (18%) are not currently aware that they face fines, while a third (32%) understand there are fines, but know no more than that. One in five UK IT decision makers are still unaware of the GDPR plans. 31% think their organisation has within six to 12 months to become compliant, while 11% believe they have two to three years.

Trend Micro admits the results portray a sense of confusion around the data protection regulations. The EU’s stance, as stated in a press release earlier this month, confirms that “member states will have two years to transpose the provisions of the directive into national law”. For the UK and Ireland, the directive’s provisions will apply only “to a limited extent”, while Denmark will decide within six months of adoption whether the directive will be implemented into its national law.

“As it often happens with regulation, it’s going to take a whipping boy to understand the gravity of the situation for most organisations,” said Rik Ferguson, Trend Micro global VP of security research. “One high-profile case of a company handing money over for non-compliance under GDPR will be the required wake-up call the rest of the industry needs to get their act together.”

Neil Thacker, information security and strategy officer EMEA at Forcepoint, wrote for this publication in February regarding best practice for implementing the new directives, including the right to be forgotten, and users’ rights to transfer their data to another service provider and learn when they have been hacked. Businesses should first identify where personal identifiable information (PII) resides, then move forward to detecting breaches.

Businesses can face fines of up to 4% of their annual turnover for non-compliance with the GDPR. 

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More than half of large companies plan to migrate to public cloud systems in the coming two years, according to a new report from migration and disaster recovery provider CloudEndure.

The survey, which polled more than 250 global IT professionals in the first quarter of 2016, found that across organisations of all sizes, public clouds and private clouds are set to grow 22% and 15% in year over year for the coming two years. Virtual and physical machines, by contrast, are expected to drop by 25% and 31% respectively.

The main drivers for migration, according to survey respondents, were high availability, reliability, and cost, while the primary considerations for choosing a platform were in order reliability, high availability, and security and compliance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is out in front for production workloads with 42%, ahead of VMware (29%), with physical machines perhaps surprisingly being the next most popular option (7%). Microsoft’s Azure (4%) and Hyper-V (3%) comparatively struggled. The top migration workloads being web testing and development, web applications, and websites and databases.

“Our annual data migration survey reveals significant shifts across the landscape, with large-scale cloud adoption and reductions of virtual and physical servers as organisations recalibrate how they want to run their businesses and manage their applications and data to remain competitive,” said CloudEndure CEO Ofer Gadish.

Elsewhere, a report from the Cloud Security Alliance has sent out warning signs to firms over data security. 22% of survey respondents said their data breach was due to compromised credentials, while 65% gloomily admitted the chance of a repeat occurrence was “medium to high.” Despite this however, there were no major differences in terms of security between companies who had and had not reported a data breach respectively.

You can find more about the CloudEndure study here.

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Microsoft has Salesforce in its sights as the leading cloudy software as a service (SaaS) vendor, according to the latest note from analyst house Synergy Research.

According to the research, the overall enterprise SaaS market grew by almost 40% in 2015, with forecasts from Synergy suggesting it will more than triple in size within five years. The consumer SaaS market, on the other hand, is only a third the size of the enterprise with a lower growth rate.

Microsoft’s comparative annual growth of 70%, compared to Salesforce’s 21%, means that they have captured more than 10% of the overall market share. Adobe and SAP are the third and fourth largest vendors in the space respectively, with ADP, Google, IBM, Intuit, Oracle, and Workday all in the top 10.

“In many ways SaaS is a more mature market than other cloud markets like IaaS or PaaS. However, even for SaaS it is still early days in terms of market adoption,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst and research director.

“It is notable that the big three traditional software vendors – Microsoft, Oracle and IBM – are all now growing their SaaS revenues faster than the overall market and yet SaaS accounts for less than 8% of their total software revenues.”

The moves into cloud software as a service from the longer standing players has been extremely well documented, from IBM ploughing billions of dollars into their cloud play, to similar grandstanding from SAP. Oracle CTO Larry Ellison argued last March that his company would sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce in 2015, with Synergy describing Oracle as “surging ahead”.

A recent report from identity management provider Okta found that Office 365 continues to be the most popular cloud app used in the enterprise, ahead of Salesforce and Box, while organisations are increasingly using Office and Google Apps in tandem.