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Office 365 continues to be the most popular cloud app used by enterprises ahead of Salesforce and Box, while Slack has jumped in workplace popularity, according to the latest figures from identity management provider Okta.

Increasingly, enterprises are using both Office 365 and Google Apps, the fourth most popular service overall. Traditionally, Okta argues, industries such as finance, biotech and construction are more likely to be Microsoft houses compared to more digital businesses which prefer Google – a conclusion which mirrors research conducted by BetterCloud last year. The reason for organisations using both ranges from how different departments operate to keeping the lights on for the desktop license. In total, 82% of financial firms use Office 365 only, compared to 50% of online companies who are Google-exclusive.

The rise of communication app Slack has also been keenly noted in the research, with usage of the product rising 77% in the second half of 2015. Data visualisation provider Tableau (65%) and software analytics service New Relic (56%) also grew strongly among Okta’s customers, the latter being listed in Slack’s app directory.

Not only is Slack one of the fastest growing enterprise apps, it also pervades the vast majority of the enterprise. Not surprisingly, Office 365 and Google Apps are the leaders in this category, with Slack being used by 75% of employees on average in any one organisation. Perhaps more surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter is far lower on the list – although the prospect of these apps being not available or blacklisted to employees is a possibility. “We believe these apps still live outside of the IT realm,” comments Okta, with Facebook in particular looking to bolster their enterprise credentials with Facebook at Work.

Elsewhere, Okta argues some traditional on-prem software providers, particularly SAP, Oracle and Adobe, are making a reasonable fist of transforming its operations to a cloudy future, mostly through an acquisitive approach. This may not be a verdict which is universally agreed; when Dell’s acquisition of EMC for $67bn, the largest deal in tech history, was announced back in October, Cade Metz described the more traditional vendors as “the walking dead.”

You can read the full Okta analysis here.

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More than half (56%) of businesses have expressed concern over security gaps at the point between their wide area network (WAN) and public cloud provider, according to a recent research study.

The report, conducted by IDG and commissioned by XO Communications, argues this potential pain point could compromise data used in the cloud. Less than two in five (38%) of the 55 survey respondents say they have good visibility into their WAN cloud connection points, while the biggest security nightmare for businesses is vulnerabilities being exploited by insiders (53% of respondents), data theft (47%) and the introduction of malware (35%).

“There’s definitely a vulnerability there, when you step back and take a look at the situation as a whole of connecting public cloud services to the data centre,” said John Grady, XO senior manager of solutions marketing. “That’s because you basically have two very separate environments coming together – protecting the data centre and protecting the corporate network – so IT managers have to ask themselves which approach makes the most sense.”

Of the 38% polled who say their visibility into the network is good, the unifying reason is because they have deployed a specific dedicated solution, such as a next generation firewall and managed security. Perhaps not surprisingly, XO is touting its own system to marry the network and the cloud provider, the snappily named XO MPLS IP-VPN service. Yet in turn, recent research argues the cloud is becoming more secure, but still at a high cost; 64% of enterprises polled by analyst house Clutch argue cloud infrastructure is more secure than legacy systems.

Grady argues of XO’s platform a reason this publication has heard frequently; hypervendors have great appeal, but perhaps not for specific use cases. “There are such compelling economic reasons for using services such as AWS, but because it’s a public service, enterprises don’t have enough control,” he said. “By bringing this managed offering to the table, we can offer protection that existing solutions can’t match.”

You can read the IDG whitepaper here (PDF).

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Google has announced a major expansion of its cloud data centres, with two new regions to start running this year and another 10 to be available by the end of 2017.

The news comes days after a note from Synergy Research which found the US remains far out in front as the number one location for data centres. Google’s two upcoming launches will include one US site, a US Western region in Oregon, with another to be built in Tokyo.

“We’re opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness,” wrote Google product manager Varun Sakalkar in a company blog post. “With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price [and] performance.”

It has been a busy period for Google’s cloudy operations, with recent announcements of a client win in the form of Home Depot, as well as the news that Apple would move a portion of its data to the search giant from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The majority of the reaction to the news has not surprisingly been around Google’s attempts to catch up with AWS, which turned 10 years old earlier this month and is also looking to expand its data centre operations in the UK among other locations.

Responding to Google’s expansion of its data centre footprint, John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst and research director, said: “As we have reported previously Google lags far behind AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market, and at least part of that was down to having a cloud data centre network that wasn’t as extensive.

“Google is now on a drive to help fix that – in addition to increasing its corporate focus on the cloud market. This was long overdue,” he added.

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The US has continued to grow its data centre footprint moving further ahead of China and Japan, according to the latest analyst note from Synergy Research.

Almost half (46%) of major cloud and internet data centre sites are now based in the US, according to the research, up from 44% when the last analysis was conducted back in October. China, previously accounting for one in 10 data centres worldwide, now drops to 6% of coverage.

Not surprisingly, the vendors with the largest data centre footprint are Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Microsoft, with at least 40 data centre locations each. The analysts also argue Google, Oracle and Rackspace also have a ‘notably broad’ data centre presence, while other firms, such as Salesforce, Apple, and Baidu, have their data centre footprint concentrated primarily in the US and China respectively. The 17 major organisations analysed have more than 230 data centre sites between them.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy, questions the US dominance. “Given that explosive growth in cloud usage is a global phenomenon, it is remarkable that the US still accounts for almost half of the world’s major data centres, but that is a reflection of the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies,” he said. “Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the UK does not feature more prominently, but that situation will change this year with AWS, Microsoft and Google all opening major data centres in the country.”

Microsoft has committed to making Azure and Office 365 available from UK data centres by late 2016, just days after AWS announced its own plans. Increasingly, cloud providers are turning to the continent as well as the UK, meaning greater data sovereignty and less latency for European customers.

Speaking to this publication in February, iland EMEA marketing director Monica Brink explained: “That’s where we noticed a real difference between our European and North American customer database. There is a very keen focus on advanced security, things like vulnerability scanning, encryption, intrusion detection, and the cloud provider being able to prove they are meeting all of those regulations for the customer.”

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IBM has announced the acquisition of Microsoft software as a service (SaaS) specialist Optevia, ramping up its offering for CRM SaaS in the public sector.

Optevia’s specialism in Microsoft Dynamics CRM firms makes an interesting avenue for IBM, given how dominant Microsoft is in the public sector. Among Optevia’s more recent customers include Wealden District Council, who announced in October “significantly improved customer services” using Dynamics CRM.

The company announced record financial results in May, and among its current client base are ministries, councils, regulators, transport authorities, and social housing organisations.

“By acquiring Optevia, IBM will be able to provide public sector clients and prospects with a range of unique, industry focused CRM based solutions,” said Joanna Davinson, IBM Europe public sector leader in a statement. “This strategic acquisition will help strengthen IBM as a SaaS provider and global software integrator.”

IBM hopes the acquisition of Optevia will help establish itself as ‘a premier SaaS and digital consultant and accelerate leadership in CRM solutions’. According to Gartner figures, almost half (47%) of total CRM software revenue in 2014 was generated from SaaS-based CRM applications.

This is by no means the only IBM news to hit the wire in recent days. The University of Aberdeen recently announced a partnership with the tech giant to allow staff to use Watson Engagement Advisor, while earlier this month IBM launched its first cloud data centre in South Africa, primarily to move SAP workloads.

Optevia will be folded in to the IBM Business Services division. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

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To put a spin on a famous Mark Twain misquote, reports of hybrid cloud’s life have been greatly exaggerated.

That is the key finding from a new customer study conducted by EMC and VMware, which argues nine out of 10 survey respondents have not got past the proof of concept stage for hybrid cloud, as well as having no consistent method of evaluating workloads.

Regular readers of this publication will know the message from executives is that hybrid has represented the bright, shiny future of IT delivery for a few years. The latest North Bridge report on the future of cloud computing, in January, argued hybrid cloud usage will double in two years, while another study from EMC in the same month found the vast majority of respondents argued hybrid capabilities were ‘important’ or ‘critical’ for digital business transformation.  

Despite this, the latest findings insist the majority of companies are not where they want to be in terms of having a well engineered hybrid cloud architecture. Those in the top percentile, with the highest maturity, generally have less than 20% of their production apps in a hybrid environment. Regarding virtualisation, the top performing organisations have 80% compute virtualisation, with the numbers dropping to between 60% and 70% for storage and application. Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents want between 80% and 100% virtualisation across all areas.

The report also found some wild anomalies between what organisations want to do and how they are actually operating. 95% of those polled said it was critical for IT departments to break down silos, yet only 4% say they are operating like this, while more than half of firms have no strategy documentation with executive and line of business support despite 90% arguing its importance.

“Organisations in a variety of global, vertical industries can benefit from the implementation of a robust IT service strategy, powered by software-defined technologies,” said Loretta Brown, VP federation at VMware in a statement. “Together, with EMC, our mutual customers can achieve IT transformation by easily extending their private cloud workloads to and from the public cloud, while managing, securing and connecting all of their applications across all clouds and all devices.”

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Today marks a notable milestone in the history of cloud computing, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) turns 10 years old.

March 14 2006 saw a press release go out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” A decade on, AWS continues to hold a significant lead over the competition in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and while moving into other areas, such as gaming with Lumberyard, and virtual reality if a recent job posting is to be believed, its primary cloud operation shows no signs of stopping.

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, described a few of the various learnings AWS has provided over 10 years in a blog post. Building evolvable systems, expecting the unexpected – everything will fail over time, despite the best laid plans – and building software services for automation are all key, he argued.

“There are hundreds of lessons that we’ve learned about building and operating services that need to be secure, reliable, scalable, with predictable performance at the lowest possible cost,” he wrote. “With over a million active customers per month, who in turn may serve hundreds of millions of their own customers, there is no lack of opportunities to gain more experience and perhaps no better environment for continuous improvement in the way we serve our customers.”

James Hamilton, AWS senior principal engineer, moved to Amazon in 2008 after a “game changing” experience with AWS at his previous employer. Citing Netflix’s decision to go all-in on cloud in 2010 as key, Hamilton wrote: “The best proof of innovation is customer commitment and, without a doubt, the highest form of customer commitment is to decide to run the entire company on cloud infrastructure.”

So how does the rest of the industry see the history of AWS? Ian Moyse, a regular contributor to CloudTech and board member of Eurocloud and the Cloud Industry Forum, argues AWS has not only disrupted the landscape, it has dragged other companies – such as Microsoft – along with it more quickly than expected.

“In recent years AWS has really disrupted the cloud world, driving Microsoft into cloud deeper and quicker than they likely would have done and driving pricing down and functionality up in what has come to be known as the race to zero,” he said. “For providers and customers, AWS has driven more affordable compute, enabled innovation and empowered faster DevOps. Many apps we have today may not have existed if it were not for the change AWS has brought upon the IT sector.”

Research on the state of the cloud infrastructure market has not surprisingly seen AWS as the darling of the industry. Synergy Research offers a quarterly analysis of the market, and the current trend is that while other vendors, such as Microsoft and Google, are growing slightly quicker than Amazon year over year, it is hardly making a dent in Amazon’s 30% global market share.

Yet fellow analyst house Cloud Spectator argues AWS ranks comparatively poorly when compared to smaller, more niche players. “We see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” CEO Kenny Li told CloudTech. “The [larger] providers offer the size and additional services for handling massive customer volume, but the volume also comes with additional performance considerations which may result in lower performance on cloud servers.”

For Moyse, the Cloud Spectator report represents one dynamic of the market, and that there’s room for vendors of all shapes and sizes. “A wide range of cloud providers will continue to be selected by customers, some offering local relationship to the smaller business and feeling the goliath brands leave them uncomfortable, some choosing for support reasons where they lack in-house skills in the new services and are unable to afford them against higher paying enterprises sapping the talent pool,” he said.

“AWS and Azure, whilst very attractive commercially and easy to spin up, do need some knowledge and experience to gain the outcome and quality businesses require,” Moyse added. “Much like Salesforce has done, we can expect a services ecosystem to develop around these platforms to advise and support smaller businesses in utilising them.”

Vogels argued there will inevitably be the occasional bump in the road. But, as he finished his missive, “remember it is still day one.” For AWS, the question now, with a burgeoning ecosystem, is whether the coming decade can be as successful as the first.

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Two pieces of research have simultaneously hit the inbox of CloudTech, both with surprising findings in terms of cloud providers. A study from Spiceworks argues Microsoft Azure is more popular than Amazon Web Services (AWS) for IT professionals, while analyst house Cloud Spectator has revealed a surprising name at the top of the best ranked European cloud service providers.

The Cloud Spectator report focuses particularly on performance as well as price factors, measuring vCPU, memory, and block storage performance, and found 1&1 to be the best performer. Using 100% at its benchmark, it finished ahead of UpCloud (95), CityCloud (72) and CloudSigma (68). Of the widely considered major players, Google Compute (50) performed best, well ahead of Azure (27), AWS (27), and IBM SoftLayer (22). Verizon, who confirmed its exit from the majority of the public cloud space earlier this year, scored lowest.

1&1 was also cited in January by Cloud Spectator as the best value infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, and again the vendor’s high VM performance and competitive pricing saw it come out on top here. AWS scored highly in the VM – vCPU and memory – performance, but lower relative disk performance and higher monthly costs saw it drop, while CloudSigma came top in storage only for VM performance to see it slip to fourth overall.

“Price performance benchmarks offer important insight into the value of IaaS offerings, and this report compares the value of both large and small EU providers,” said Philbert Shih, managing director of Structure Research, adding: “It’s interesting to see the differences in performance even between different sized VMs, and that some small VMs outperform many large VMs. This type of insight can potentially provide large cost savings.”

Elsewhere, Spiceworks argues that not only is Microsoft more popular than AWS in IaaS public cloud – 16% of respondents compared to 13% – it also has more scope for growth. 21% of the almost 350 people polled said they are considering Azure, compared to 11% for Amazon.

The report also examined the what, why and where of cloud services. The most popular option according to survey respondents was web hosting, cited by more than three quarters (76%) of those polled, followed by email hosting (56%), and storage and file sharing (53%). One in five organisations is adopting infrastructure as a service currently, with an additional 16% considering it.

You can find more about the latest Cloud Spectator report here.

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The adoption of OpenStack is going up and increasingly seen as a cost effective alternative to public clouds, according to a new survey released by cloud software provider Talligent.

The survey results of almost 650 virtualisation and cloud IT professionals, published in the inaugural State of OpenStack report, finds OpenStack deployments are likely to accelerate beyond the development environment once in place. Lab environments are expected to go from 43% to 89% among respondents in 12 months, with QA and test environments going from 47% to 91% in the same timeframe.

Alongside the comparisons with the cost of public cloud, claimed by 61% of respondents as a driver for OpenStack adoption, a desire to improve responsiveness for IT service delivery was also highly cited (59%), as well as the high cost of legacy IT and avoiding vendor lock in.

Yet there are issues which still need to be overcome. According to the report, users of OpenStack are more likely to say complexity is increasing, while evaluators of OpenStack are inclined to say the opposite. So who is right? Almost one in three (30%) respondents said they were using  OpenStack to support projects or workloads, compared with a similar number (32%) who were evaluating it but not using it. Among the biggest challenges cited by respondents were finding talent to manage and operate the system, deploying VLAN-based networking, and installation complexity.

Overall, however, the survey results reflect positively on OpenStack, according to Talligent CEO Sanjay Mishra – and not altogether unsurprisingly, the Austin-based firm offers OpenBook, a product which allows organisations to monetise off OpenStack. “These survey findings are another positive indication that OpenStack is continuing to grow as a preferred method of building private and hybrid clouds for businesses of all sizes,” said Mishra.

Writing for this publication back in July, CSC chief enterprise architect David Auslander argued OpenStack was ready for the mainstream, but the right approach was vital. “At its heart, OpenStack is a pluggable, modular architecture where new components can be spun up easily,” he wrote. “The best practice here is to roll out the core services and then only add the ancillary services that are necessary.”

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IBM’s quest for cloudy world domination continues apace with the opening of its first cloud data centre in South Africa.

The new data centre is geared towards running SAP applications and workloads in the cloud, and involves IT provider Gijima and operator Vodacom as partners. From Gijima’s perspective, the move with IBM and Vodacom represents an extension of its hybrid cloud strategy, while for Vodacom, the deal will aim to put them at the forefront of IT solutions across the continent.

“Our new cloud data centre gives customers a local onramp to IBM cloud services, including moving mission critical SAP workloads to the cloud with ease. It also gives customers the added flexibility of keeping data within country, which is a key differentiator for IBM,” said Hamilton Ratshefola, IBM South Africa country general manager. “We’re working to drive cloud adoption that best leverages a customer’s existing IT investments.”

“CIOs are looking to gain efficiencies and cut cost by moving more of their IT infrastructure, application and processes into the cloud,” said Vuyani Jarana, chief officer of Vodacom Business. “Vodacom’s extensive fixed and mobile network infrastructure, Pan-African and global footprint and its investment in data centre infrastructure provides the ideal platform and environment to deliver cloud services to large and multinational enterprises.”

Africa has thus far been something of a barren territory for the major public cloud infrastructure providers; neither Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, nor Google have data centres on the continent as yet. IBM’s move to various new territories from London in July 2014, Canada in August of that year, to Italy in June 2015, shows a cloud operation which shows no sign of slowing down, even with the spectre of job cuts again hanging over the Armonk giant.

IBM’s push to Africa includes global delivery centres in Morocco, South Africa and Egypt, as well as competency centres, research labs, and technology development centres.