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Fears over cloud security will continue to linger, but the situation is improving: almost two thirds (64%) of enterprises polled by analyst house Clutch argue cloud infrastructure is more secure than legacy systems.

36% of the 300 respondents polled said cloud was much more secure than legacy infrastructure, compared to 28% who argued it was “somewhat” more secure. Only 11% of respondents argued cloud was in any way less secure, with 1% saying it was ‘much less’.

Yet the majority of respondents don’t entirely trust their chosen vendor; three quarters of respondents say they add in their own security on top of the vendor’s solution. Additional security measures enterprises put in range from data encryption (61%), to identity access policies (52%), and regular audits (48%). More than half of enterprises polled say they spend between $10,000 and $50,000 on these measures.

Clutch argues cloud infrastructure offers three features which makes it more secure for enterprises; the infrastructure is monitored at all times, the security features are multi-faceted, and central management ensures security systems remain up to date at all times. “Legacy systems are more difficult to keep updated because enterprises may have to go around to several hundred thousand platforms to check and update security systems,” said cloud analyst David Linthicum. “It’s easier for legacy systems to fall behind in terms of updates.”

Yet security remains the biggest issue companies have encountered with cloud infrastructure in the past year. 31% of those polled cited it, ahead of training (28%), increased cost (28%), and downtime (25%). For Jason Reichl, CEO of Go Nimbly, IT teams struggle when more transparency is required. “Because of this, the IT team needs to build new security policies to create the impression that a business is investing a lot more resources in security,” he said. “Truthfully though, a company should already have had these security measures in place.”

You can find out more about the report here.

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CIOs pay a ‘protection premium’ of up to 19% to host their data on a European cloud platform compared to the US, according to the latest Cloud Price Index report from 451 Research.

The report, which for the first time focuses predominantly on the European market, argues US providers are still ahead of their competitors across the Atlantic. The researchers targeted a variety of vendors with a large application specification, but only five providers could deliver it in Europe, and of that number, only one was headquartered in Europe. The natural conclusion, therefore, is that the US-based hypervendors are in prime position to capitalise as the European market builds.

End users are becoming savvier, according to the report, increasingly demanding clear value add, such as expertise in fulfilling local regulatory requirements, while the research also argues users can save substantially if they commit and negotiate, with the average discount for large apps in Europe being 38%. In terms of product, object storage is typically priced at approximately $0.05 per gigabyte in Europe, with SQL and NoSQL services at $11.42 per GB, or $0.10 per million transactions. Discounts range from 20% for storage and between 30-40% for database services.

The report, which aims to give enterprises insight into the cloud pricing landscape, argues the market in Europe is maturing, but issues are not likely to appear immediately. “With demand likely to increase, we don’t think the European cloud market is facing serious price pressure in the short term, as long as it is suitably showing its regional credentials and the value that locality affords,” the report notes, adding: “European providers also need to look beyond virtual machines and support if they want to take on the global players.”

“When evaluating cloud providers, enterprises should consider how they will take advantage of variances in prices in the short and long term to cut costs,” said Owen Rogers, research director of 451’s digital economics unit and author of the report. “We found one provider charged more than twice the average US price for hosting in Latin America, whilst another offered an 11% discount for hosting in Europe compared to the US.

“The global market for cloud is complex and cloud buyers need to understand typical pricing to properly evaluate their options and negotiate with suppliers,” he added.

This is a message which is often ignored somewhat when the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google announce their latest price cuts – and complexity is often a stick with which the big vendors beat each other with. A report from Tariff Consultancy in January found cloud pricing was “starting to stabilise” after continued cuts.

You can find more about the 451 Research report here.

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Big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to add £322 billion to the UK economy by 2020, according to research released by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) and analytics provider SAS.

The research, which builds upon a previous report from Cebr on big data analytics adoption, argues big data and analytics will contribute £40bn per year between 2015 and 2020. Back in 2012, Cebr argued the value of ‘data equity’ was at 0.7% of the UK’s gross domestic product, a figure which is expected to rise to 2.2% by 2020. IoT is expected to reach £81bn by 2020, to 0.7% of GDP. Overall, the market for the two by 2020 is expected to be twice the size of combined education, NHS, and defence budgets for 2015.

“Collecting and storing data is only the beginning,” said Cebr CEO Graham Brough, adding: “It is the application of analytics that allows the UK to harness the benefits of big data and the IoT. Our research finds that the majority of firms have implemented between one and three big data analytics solutions.”

“The combined benefits of IoT and big data will fuel our economy like nothing else,” said Mark Wilkinson, SAS regional vice president. “This report illustrates the considerable impact over the coming years of more organisations embracing big data and IoT to improve decision making that affects efficiency, risk management and new business opportunities.”

The telecoms industry currently has the highest rate of big data and IoT adoption, at 67% and 61% respectively, yet healthcare is expected to struggle in both big data analytics (52%) and IoT (26%).

Other research has examined how IoT will infiltrate workplace habits. A report from Webroot and IO argued that more than half of UK businesses polled plan to employ a ‘chief IoT officer’ in the coming year.

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More than 4% of enterprises have put their data at risk by sanctioning cloud apps laced with malware, according to research released by cloud security provider Netskope.

The study, which uses anonymised data from millions of users in the global Neskope Active Platform, found 88% of apps used were not enterprise-ready, while almost half (43%) of apps analysed keep data for more than a week after the service has ended, going against the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This represents another warning sign for businesses to become compliant before the regulations take hold, within two years of the GDPR becoming law in spring of this year. Previous research from Netskope, as this publication has examined, found almost 80% of IT pros were not confident of making the 2018 deadline. Eduard Meelhuysen, VP EMEA at Netskope, wrote at the time: “The GDPR will have significant and wide-ranging consequences for both cloud-consuming organisations and cloud vendors, and security teams will need to make the most of the two-year grace period before penalties for non-compliance come into force.”

Of the 88% of apps analysed which aren’t enterprise secure, the key failing were auditing and certification, service level agreements, vulnerability remediation, and legal, privacy and financial viability. Perhaps not surprisingly, technology and IT services represent the highest number of cloud apps per enterprise on average (794), ahead of healthcare and life sciences (773) and retail, restaurants and hospitality (734).

Netskope warns that employees can be unwittingly spreading malware throughout their company through using unsanctioned cloud storage apps from multiple devices. “More than ever, it’s imperative that organisations have complete visibility into and real-time actionable control over their cloud app usage to better monitor and understand trends and vulnerabilities,” said Sanjay Beri, co-founder and CEO of Netskope.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has eclipsed Google in cloud app usage for the first time in Netskope’s reports, with Outlook and Office 364 OneDrive overtaking Gmail and Google Drive respectively.

Read more: How to ensure enterprise app cloud usage complies with the GDPR

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While the vast majority of organisations hope for 99.9% uptime throughout the year, 57% of companies polled by CloudEndure say they had at least one outage in the past three months.

The survey, which quizzed 141 IT global IT professionals, found organisations are, in general, gaining confidence in cloud disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This is noticed in the key risks to system availability. The number one risk remains human error, followed by network failures and application bugs. Downtime of cloud providers fell from the third highest risk last year to #6 in 2016.

CloudEndure found the key challenges in meeting availability goals were insufficient IT resources, followed by budget limitations and a lack of in-house expertise. Yet in some cases, it is difficult to perceive how companies assess their uptime levels; 22% of organisations polled say they do not measure service availability at all.

More than half (54%) of respondents use the public cloud for disaster recovery target infrastructure, compared to private cloud (35%) and physical resources (11%). Of the public cloud users, more than half use AWS (53% and 26% overall). VMware vSphere (20% overall) was also highly cited, with Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure (10% overall) trailing.

84% of respondents say service availability is at least seven or higher out of 10 in terms of how critical it is to their customers. 38% say uptime is most critical – 10 out of 10 – while only 4% deem is as not critical. 19% say their goals for uptime is the magical ‘five nines’, or less than five minutes of outages per year, while only 3% say they have a goal of 99% uptime, or more than 88 hours down.

“While more companies continue to migrate large portions of their business data to the cloud, our survey findings are clear,” said Ofer Gadish, CloudEndure CEO. “Companies that invest in DR are likely to reap an upside in savings from the cost of downtime disrupting their operations.”

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of how the trend of cloud disaster recovery is shaping up in 2016. Writing in January Monica Brink, EMEA marketing director at cloud provider iland, explained: “Disaster recovery as a service [has] continued to claw its way to the top of CTO priority lists. With IT budgets tight and faster adoption of cloud in general, we’ve noticed a growing comfort level and confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.”

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Organisations are starting to conflate the private and public clouds – yet new research from Wikibon finds the market size of ‘true’ private cloud implementations is lower than the revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading public infrastructure as a service player.

Wikibon’s research aims to clarify private cloud and differentiate between solutions marketed by vendors and implementations by businesses. The research body assesses the true private cloud at $7 billion (£4.9bn), lower than AWS at $7.9bn and significantly lower than the overall IaaS public cloud market of $25bn in 2015. The analysis argues the private cloud market will in time be of a similar level to the traditional on-premises IT market as the latter drops in size.

According to the analysis, the top four companies in the private cloud base are HP Enterprise, Oracle, VMware, and EMC, with IBM, NetApp and Cisco trailing.

The author of the piece, Brian Gracely, assesses several reasons why private cloud has not kept up with the growth of public cloud:

• Virtualisation is not cloud: Wikibon argues the capabilities of virtualisation are now mature, and the need for it is slowing
• Cloud management is not a high priority IT focus: it is very difficult to be a standalone cloud management software business, according to the researchers
• Do business apps need a private cloud? The ownership of SaaS applications is often managed outside the core IT teams

It’s nothing new, but the changing focus on private cloud means providers are looking at products which offer the benefits of both. CenturyLink’s launch in 2014 aimed to offer the agility of a public cloud with the security of a private cloud, while earlier this month Rackspace’s announcement attempted to do similarly.

The research also examined the highest paying tech skills, with HANA ahead of database Cassandra, Cloudera, platform as a service in general and OpenStack. A piece from Firebrand Training featured in this publication earlier this week argued database, Linux, and security as among the most in-demand cloud skills for 2016.

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Verizon is to shut down part of its public cloud service, according to an email sent to customers, with an analyst arguing the telco’s pushback comes as “no surprise”.

In the email to Verizon Cloud customers, as posted by Kenn White on Twitter, users of Verizon’s Public Cloud and Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces services will have to make other plans by April 12, when the virtual servers will be switched off. Users of the Verizon Virtual Private Cloud and Verizon Cloud Storage will not be affected by the move, while the Cloud Marketplace store, launched to great fanfare in 2014, will also close.

“Verizon is discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments on April 12,” a company statement read. “Verizon remains committed to delivering a range of cloud services for enterprise and government customers and is making significant investments in its cloud platform in 2016.”

Yet the move makes for interesting, if not particularly surprising, news for telcos trying to move in on the cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale.

“Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services,” he told CloudTech. “They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.”

Synergy’s regular research into cloud infrastructure reveals a continued yawning gap between leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has more than 30% market share, and the competition, with Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Salesforce completing the top five. While Microsoft and Google’s revenues are growing faster than AWS year over year, it is hardly even a dent in the latter’s share.

Dinsdale argues it is this speed of growth which has made it difficult for telcos to compete. “Early on in the growth of the cloud market it had seemed like telcos might have a leading part to play – but the speed of cloud market development and the aggressiveness of the leading cloud providers has largely left them behind,” he said.

“There is now quite a bit of head scratching going on within telcos as they figure out how best to position themselves in the new cloud ecosystem.”

In January last year, Verizon took the unconventional decision to undertake a planned outage in order to future-proof further downtime “in the background with no impact to customers.” The company has warned customers that data will be “irrecoverably deleted” if not retrieved in time.

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

Cloud provider Rackspace has announced the launch of a new private cloud service utilising the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform.

The move plays further into Rackspace’s ‘OpenStack as a service’ offerings, which aim to simplify the process of OpenStack private and hybrid cloud uptake. The latest product, ‘Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat’ to give its full name, will be fully managed by OpenStack and Red Hat experts at Rackspace and promises all the hype of the public cloud but with enterprise-grade security.

“Rackspace is excited to expand our managed services and expertise to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform,” said VP and OpenStack private cloud general manager Darrin Hanson. “We help make OpenStack simple by eliminating the complexity and delivering it as a service to customers in their data centre, a Rackspace data centre or in a colocation facility.”

The move ties in with various Rackspace policies, including its ‘fanatical support’ for managed cloud services, and partnering with other technologies. In July, Rackspace announced an expanded service offering with Microsoft, combining its private cloud with Microsoft Cloud Platform, for customers who are not entirely ready to go all in with public cloud.

Like Microsoft, Rackspace has enjoyed a long partnership with Red Hat and claims it is uniquely positioned to provide customers benefits through managed deployment of Red Hat clouds. “We are consistently hearing feedback from enterprises that one of the primary barriers to OpenStack adoption continues to be the operational complexities around deployment,” said Gina Longoria, Moor Insights & Strategy senior analyst. “With Rackspace expanding their offerings, customers can take out a lot of the uncertainty of the do it yourself model and leverage the OpenStack as a service product portfolio at Rackspace.”

The Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat is generally available now.

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A report from analyst house Clutch has found two thirds of medium and large enterprises plan to increase their spend on cloud computing in 2016.

Of the 300 IT professionals surveyed, almost half (42%) said they would expect their cloud spend to go up by 11-30% with 14% opting for an increase between 31% and 50% and 7% anticipating even greater outlay. Comparatively, around a quarter (27%) said their cloud spending will remain mostly flat and only 6% said it would decrease in 2016.

Clutch argues such a pattern represents a clear growth opportunity for enterprise cloud service providers by appealing to organisations’ need for file storage, backup and disaster recovery and application deployment, with 70%, 62%, and 51% of those polled respectively arguing these as key priorities.

With this in mind, the research reveals cloud spending is directly influenced by the value enterprises derive from cloud infrastructure. “The cloud is building ROI faster and with better business accuracy, so companies are willing to reinvest in it ever year,” said Jason Reichl, CEO of technical consulting provider Go Nimbly.

The survey also uncovered an interesting trend in terms of outsourcing; more than half of enterprises (53%) polled hire an external consulting firm to implement their cloud infrastructure. Clutch argues the benefits of working with a consulting firm has its ups and downs; being able to access the company’s extensive knowledge base can be outweighed by the transfer of knowledge not passing through to the internal staff.

In terms of most popular providers, the survey results showed Microsoft Azure (23%) to be the widest used, ahead of Amazon Web Services (22%), Google (21%), and IBM (17%). The results are significantly at odds with other recent studies, yet Jose Alvarez, director of IT infrastructure at management consulting firm Auxis, argues that while AWS is well in front it’s all about how a provider’s services fit in to the technology at a given company’s disposal. “If a company or enterprise is attached to Microsoft products, then Microsoft Azure may be a better fit for them,” he said. “It depends on the company’s requirements.”

You can find the full study results here.

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Hybrid cloud adoption has grown significantly while DevOps and Docker uptake continues to explode, according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud research report.

The report, which surveyed more than 1,000 technical professionals, found that the more things change, the more they stay the same with regards to the overall trends pervading the cloud industry. Hybrid cloud adoption has gone up from 58% in 2015 to 71% among respondents, with private cloud going up from 63% to 77%. Similarly, DevOps adoption rose to almost three quarters (74%), with Docker uptake more than doubling from 13% last year to 27% in 2016.

Picture credit: RightScale, used under CC BY

Four in five companies polled have at least dipped their toes in cloudy waters, with 29% heavy users, 25% with apps running, and 26% on their first project. Only 9% said they had no plans to move off-premise. With this maturity, RightScale argues, the job role of cloud architect has risen with it. 40% of respondents in that role see themselves as a cloud architect, compared to 44% for IT architect and 16% development architect.

The number of clouds companies are using is also on the up; organisations are on average leveraging three public clouds and three private clouds, while running applications on 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds and experimenting on a further 1.5 and 1.3 respectively. Smaller businesses are more likely to go all-in on public, with 24% compared to 10% for enterprise, while the most popular enterprise option was for 20% public and 80% private workloads (39%, compared to 22% SMB).

Picture credit: RightScale, used under CC BY

Elsewhere, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was used by 57% of those polled, unsurprisingly making it the most popular cloud provider by far, yet the year over year figures show minimal growth, as enterprise usage increases but small business usage drops. Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service grew from 12% of respondents in 2015 to 17% in 2016, while platform as a service rose four points to 13% year over year.

These figures correlate with recent analysis on the cloud infrastructure market from Synergy Research, which argued that despite AWS having a yawning gap over the rest of the field, other vendors – in particular Microsoft – were growing at a faster pace.

“The 2016 State of the Cloud survey shows that cloud adoption is growing and hybrid cloud adoption has now hit its stride,” said Kim Weins, RightScale VP marketing, in a company blog post. “The strong growth in the use of private cloud, combined with the ubiquity of public cloud, means that a super-majority of organisations are now operating in a hybrid environment.”

Read more: State of the Cloud 2015: DevOps adoption rises and hybrid cloud strategy deepens in new study