Organisations are more likely to prefer storing data in the cloud instead of on a legacy system – but are spending significantly on security to keep up.

That is the latest finding from Clutch, a B2B research firm, which put out the latest report from its annual cloud computing survey earlier this week.

Nearly 70% of the 283 IT professionals polled said they would be more comfortable storing data in the cloud; yet more than half of companies surveyed admitted to spending more than $100,000 per year on additional cloud security features. 22% of respondents spend at least $500,000 on additional cloud security features per year, while 8% spend more than $1 million.

Of the security measures available, additional encryption was the most popular among respondents, while two thirds (65%) of businesses said they follow regulatory standards from the Cloud Security Alliance.

The report also delved into who should do what when it comes to cloud security. As this publication has explored this month, through a report from Barracuda Networks, there appears to be a disconnect among organisations around the shared responsibility model for infrastructure as a service.

Application level controls, identity and access management, and endpoint protection, among others, are the customer’s responsibility, as outlined by both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in their documentation. Clutch argues that the high investment in cloud security is related to the risks that are out of their cloud provider’s control.

“There is suddenly a number of people recognising that application-level security needs to be done by the user, not the vendor,” said Haresh Kumbhani, founder and CEO of cloud consulting provider Zymr. “If this is the case, then they need to invest top dollar in securing the data.”

Almost a quarter (23%) of respondents said they use Internet of Things (IoT) services on the cloud, although when it came to security on top of it – a significant threat, given the frequent global cyberattacks which invariably make the headlines – it was described by Jamie MacQuarrie, co-founder of Appivo, as ‘nascent’. “For every company that properly locks down IoT-enabled machines on a factory floor, you have thousands of unsecured ‘smart’ lightbulbs,” he said.

You can read the full report here.

IBM has issued its financial results for Q217, with revenues down 5% year over year but with its cloud arm leading ‘continued growth in strategic imperatives’.

According to the release (pdf), total revenues were at $19.3 billion (£14.9bn), compared to $20.2bn this time last year. The first half of the year totalled $37.4bn, down from $38.9bn in 2016. IBM said its second quarter cloud revenues were at $3.9 billion, up 15%, with cloud revenues over the last 12 months totalling $15.1bn.

IBM puts its revenues into four primary buckets; cognitive solutions at $4.6bn, global business services, at $4.1bn, technology services and cloud platforms, at $8.4bn, and systems, including systems hardware and operating systems software, at $1.7bn.

“In the second quarter, we strengthened our position as the enterprise cloud leader and added more of the world’s leading companies to the IBM cloud,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chief executive officer in a statement. “We continue to innovate, adding regtech capabilities to our portfolio of Watson offerings; developing solutions based on emerging technologies such as blockchain; and reinventing the IBM mainframe by enabling clients to encrypt all data, all the time.”

IBM’s focus on blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) was made abundantly clear at the company’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas in March. Rometty told attendees of her belief that blockchain “will do for trusted transactions what the internet has done for information”, and how quantum computing will solve problems businesses ‘never knew [they] had’.

Signifying the cloud push, the company has also announced the arrival of four new cloud data centres yesterday, with two opening its doors in London and the others in San Jose and Sydney. IBM’s global cloud data centre footprint now sits at almost 60, across 19 countries.

The company name dropped two customers, in the shape of Bit.ly and oilfield services provider Halliburton, with John Considine, general manager for cloud infrastructure services, saying “we continue to expand our cloud capacity in response to growing demand from clients who require cloud infrastructure and cognitive services to help them compete on a global scale.”

Given the continued downturn in overall revenues – revenue falling for the 21st consecutive quarter – analysts would be expected to have a pessimistic outlook. An excoriating note from Jefferies, reiterating ‘underperform’, said that while IBM’s Watson is one of the most complete cognitive platforms, the company is ‘outgunned’ in the war for AI talent and return on investment could be negligible.

Yet writing for Seeking Alpha, Thomas Pangia – a long IBM supporter – argued the company’s declining revenue trend should be a thing of the past by 2019, adding its strong cash flow was also a positive.

Among the highlights for IBM this quarter is buying Verizon’s cloud and managed hosting service, collaborating with Nutanix to help enterprises with hyperconverged deployments, as well as securing a cloudy client win with American Airlines.

Many enterprises are jumping on the cloud to modernize their IT. Cloud computing not only provides an on-demand highly scalable compute, storage and network infrastructure, it allows IT to spin up an environment in minutes, driving agility the enterprise has never seen before.

However, moving workloads to cloud or refactoring them to run natively in the cloud is not easy. Once those workloads are running in the cloud, monitoring and managing them is required. IT needs all the help it can get.

Fortunately, an entire cloud channel ecosystem has evolved to help companies plan for the cloud, move to the cloud and maximize their investments in the cloud. There are partners specializing in strategy and assessment, those who focus on implementation, others which do monitoring, management and security, and some companies that handle it all.

Then of course there are hundreds of vendors offering commercial and open source tools to automate various steps of the journey, and others which deliver analytics to monitor performance and aid decision-making and refinement.

Let’s look at three of the top challenges for midsize and larger companies when migrating to public cloud infrastructure, and how channel partners can help:

Understanding ROI

CIOs need to make a sound case for saving money over time by moving significant portions of their environment to the public cloud. This can be a complicated endeavor to calculate, as enterprises have a mix of legacy and homegrown applications, third-party systems such as HR and finance, usually a few SaaS applications, and likely more than one data center. The cost evaluation must consider the assessment, planning and migration costs; application modernization requirements and any training and staff needs.

How the channel helps: Skilled partners can help assess and compare on-premises infrastructure costs to the cloud with better accuracy and speed. Some channel companies have developed strong methodologies and best practices, others have powerful tools that can map your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, right-size your resources in the cloud, and identify infrastructure and application inter-dependencies.

Determining and achieving business advantage

Of course, moving to the cloud is not just about saving money. It’s about gaining new capabilities from the rapid scale, elastic workload and geolocation benefits of public cloud infrastructure. If you need to support a business unit in London, you don’t need to contract with a separate data center provider to make it happen. The major cloud providers have data centers all around the world offering the best reliability and fail-over capabilities for 24-hour businesses. Rapid scale can provide a competitive advantage, yet outside experts with plenty of experience migrating companies to the cloud can help a business understand exactly what’s needed to get there.

How the channel helps:  Companies should look for a partner that has experience in modernizing and refactoring applications within the industry that they work. You should engage partners that have experience in DevOps and TechOps tools, and those that can help you with continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), build automation and more.

Managing the cloud

Once you have successfully moved workloads or deployed new services in the cloud, you need a partner to monitor and manage your cloud environment. Even though cloud providers manage the infrastructure, you still must manage your own workloads. Cloud infrastructure services generate tons of data, events and alerts that need to be analyzed. Also, you are constantly incurring costs that can be reduced by optimizing your resources. 

How the channel helps: Cloud service providers can manage and monitor your cloud environment, ensuring your services are running efficiently. Cloud optimization requires deep expertise with tools and techniques, something a good partner can bring.

When it comes to making transformational changes in how IT resources are developed, managed, provisioned and delivered, most companies will need some outside help. Partners that can offer a program incorporating competitively priced solutions for the above three key pain points will have an edge in the cloud services market.

Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes was originally built by Google, leveraging years of experience with managing container workloads, and is now a Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) project. Kubernetes has been widely adopted by the community, supported on all major public and private cloud providers, and is gaining rapid adoption in enterprises. However, Kubernetes may seem intimidating and complex to learn. This is because Kubernetes is more of a toolset than a ready solution. Hence it’s essential to know when and how to apply the appropriate Kubernetes constructs.

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From personal care products to groceries and movies on demand, cloud-based subscriptions are fulfilling the needs of consumers across an array of market sectors. Nowhere is this shift to subscription services more evident than in the technology sector. By adopting an Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) delivery model, companies are able to tailor their computing environments to shape the experiences they want for customers as well as their workforce.

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Google Cloud has caught up to AWS with a physical ‘Transfer Appliance’ to move your data from your own local servers into the giant’s cloud.

Amazon already has a solution which it calls ‘Snowball’ and features 50TB or 80TB capacities in a ruggedised appliance which the company sends to your premises so you can fill it with your data locally before it heads back to your preferred AWS data centre. The idea, of course, is that you can benefit from a much quicker transfer without the latency and cost of uploading over a standard WAN (Wide Area Network).

If you have a large amount of data and don’t want to pay through the roof, Google’s solution may benefit you more than Amazon’s. The web giant has upped the capacity of Amazon’s similar offerings with a 100TB/2U basic Transfer Appliance, or an incredible 480TB/4U variation. Both are designed to fit into 19” racks.

Google has provided this handy chart of the estimated time differences between a physical and online transfer:

“Using a service like Google Transfer Appliance meant I could transfer hundreds of terabytes of data in days not weeks,” comments Tom Taylor, Head of Engineering at The Mill. “Now we can leverage all that Google Cloud Platform has to offer as we bring narratives to life for our clients.”

As for pricing, the 100TB model is priced at $300, plus shipping via Fedex (approximately $500); the 480TB model is priced at $1800, plus shipping (approximately $900). Initially, the appliance will only be available in the US.

It’s worth noting, of course, that Amazon still takes the crown if you need to transfer an insane amount of data with its 100PB (yes, petabyte) truck it calls the Snowmobile. Before the 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container – which is pulled by a semi-trailer truck – rolls out to your premises, you will need an initial assessment.

Are you impressed with Google’s Transfer Appliance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Massive Networks, that helps your business operate seamlessly with fast, reliable, and secure internet and network solutions, has been named “Exhibitor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo ®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. As a premier telecommunications provider, Massive Networks is headquartered out of Louisville, Colorado. With years of experience under their belt, their team of engineers can navigate the Carrier Ecosystem for your IT team acting as an extension of your business, producing a hassle-free experience.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Calligo, an innovative cloud service provider offering mid-sized companies the highest levels of data privacy and security, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo ®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Calligo offers unparalleled application performance guarantees, commercial flexibility and a personalised support service from its globally located cloud platforms. Through its four pillars of focus, Calligo delivers a platform that businesses can trust to deliver the high level of service and protection they expect and is lacking in many cloud offerings.

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After reporting a 58% year-on-year revenue growth in its cloud businesses and garnering sales of $4.6 billion worth from cloud computing software and hardware, multinational computer technology giant Oracle Corporation is expanding its cloud computing services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Cloud-related products now account for more than 12% of Oracle’s total sales.

Tino Scholman, vice president of Oracle’s cloud computing for the region, said: “Our cloud business is growing at incredible rates, so now is the right time to bring in a new generation of talent.” Hence, the company is set to recruit 1000 employees in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to serve its growing cloud computing services in the region to accommodate the growing needs of the company. It seeks workers having two to six years of experience to staff sales, management, finance, recruitment, marketing and human resources roles for its cloud computing service.

At present, the Redwood, California-based company employs about 51,000 staff in the US and 85,000 globally.

Oracle derived 28% of its overall revenue from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2016. Sales in the region declined 2% to $10.6 billion owing to shifting customer preferences from Oracle’s traditional enterprise computing software to cloud-based services.

According to research firm IDC, public-cloud spending is expected to increase 27% year-on-year to reach $82 billion by 2020. Bloomberg Intelligence’s July report states that Oracle’s “cloud infrastructure products are gaining traction and should become a major pillar of growth next year, amid increasing competition from Amazon.”

Demand for cloud-computing services is seeing a notable rise with Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, International Business Machines and others reporting sweeping growth in cloud-computing sales. To beat the cloud push and remain competitive, these companies have been adding data centers across Europe.

Are you impressed with Oracle’s growth? Share your thoughts in the comments.

DX World EXPO, LLC., a Lighthouse Point, Florida-based startup trade show producer and the creator of “DXWorldEXPO® – Digital Transformation Conference & Expo” has announced its executive management team. The team is headed by Levent Selamoglu, who has been named CEO. “Now is the time for a truly global DX event, to bring together the leading minds from the technology world in a conversation about Digital Transformation,” he said in making the announcement.

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