Venture capital money for cloud technology continues to stream through, with more than $50 million announced over the past week for two companies in the identity and hybrid cloud space respectively.

Auth0, an identity as a service platform provider based in Bellevue, Washington, confirmed it has raised $30 million (£23.1m), while ‘open source as a service’ firm Platform9, based out of Sunnyvale, California, announced $22 million (£17m). Both rounds were series C.

For Auth0, the funding comes amidst a year of record growth, with revenue increasing almost three times year over year and new customers including Atlassian, News Corp, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Platform9, meanwhile, called the year’s performance ‘tremendous’ and pointed to a customer base growth of 360% and revenue growth of 300%.

Meritech Capital Partners led the Auth0 round, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and K9 Ventures, and new investors NTT Docomo Ventures and Telstra Ventures participating. For Platform9, the round was led by Canvas Ventures with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Redpoint Ventures, and Menlo Ventures, participating.

“In our dozens of calls with customers, it was clear that Auto0’s value proposition is resonating in the market,” said George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners. “Developers can leverage Auth0’s extensible and easy to integrate identity platform and free up their cycles to work on the core application. Auth0 subscriber adoption is exponentially expanding and we are excited to support their rapid growth.”

Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9, wrote in a letter about the increasing importance of open source technologies for enterprise. “Enterprises will come to bet on solutions that are rooted in open source, instead of proprietary solutions that require the vendor to lock in the customer to remain a viable business over time,” he wrote.

“This will happen across a range of computing services, but is especially pertinent in the infrastructure space. Just ask any large VMware or AWS customer and chances are, they’ll tell you they are exploring open source alternatives.”

Elsewhere, Minjar, an AWS managed service partner, announced an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A funding round led by Blume Ventures. The company tweeted out news of Blume’s investment at the recent India Cloud Summit event. 

Emerging technologies, such as IoT, robotics, and augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR), will drive the next wave of growth in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, increasing the overall opportunity to $5.5 trillion by 2020, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

The IDC forecast illustrates that the ICT sector is dependent upon new technology innovation for growth, as traditional business technology revenue streams begin to decline in the face of cannibalization, substitution, and the shift to cloud-based computing solutions.

Global ICT market development

New technologies, which IDC calls “Innovation Accelerators,” will provide almost $7.4 trillion in aggregate industry revenue from 2015-2020 — adding $1.8 trillion to the overall size of the industry in terms of annual sales by the end of the forecast period.

A large proportion of this growth will come from the fast-growing IoT market, which is forecast to reach almost $1.3 trillion in annual revenue by 2020, of which more than $1 trillion represents new opportunity outside of traditional technology market categories.

According to the IDC assessment, robotics, augmented reality or virtual reality, security, cognitive systems or artificial intelligence, and 3D printing will contribute the rest of this fast-growing portion of the ICT market.

“The traditional ICT market of data center infrastructure, client devices, software, services, and telecommunications is now growing at a rate not much faster than real GDP and increasingly resembles a mature sector of the overall economy,” said Stephen Minton, vice president at IDC.

That being said, between 2015 and 2020, overall ICT Spending – excluding the Innovation Accelerators – will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 1 percent in constant currency terms. Including the Innovation Accelerators, ICT spending will increase by 5 percent over the same period. In total, the Innovation Accelerators will post a CAGR of 18 percent.

Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) represents the largest market for Innovation Accelerators, forecast to reach more than $600 billion by 2020, followed closely by the United States. The fastest growth over the same period will be in Latin America, Central & Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa.

“Device sales are now dominated by mobile devices and cloud service providers represent a growing proportion of all infrastructure hardware and software sales, while big data and analytics are at the heart of the fastest-growing opportunities. Meanwhile, growth in the telecom market is already entirely dependent on mobile,”  added Minton.

Global outlook for public cloud services

With public cloud services still growing at a double-digit rate, cloud computing will continue to cannibalise traditional spending on infrastructure, software, and IT services. Big data and analytics is also still expanding at a double-digit rate of growth and is forecast to see a 12 percent CAGR between 2015 and 2020.

Public cloud services and big data and analytics will each provide more than $200 billion in annual revenue by 2020. Meanwhile, the explosion in smartphone sales over the past few years and the ongoing growth of mobile data services means that overall mobility offerings are already valued at more than $1.5 trillion in annual sales.

Read more: Global cloud IT infrastructure revenues hit $8 billion in Q117, says IDC

In 2013, building and construction firm Travis Perkins developed a five-year roadmap for its IT. Technology would be seen as a ‘key enabler of strategic change’ rather than a support function, with investments amounting to more than double the IT budget, enhancing infrastructure and getting to grips with open source and cloud architecture in the process.

Four years into the plan, things seem to be going swimmingly. The IT budget has been duly doubled, and the company’s self-service portal supports 30,000 staff.

The key to Travis Perkins’ success has been changing the IT service management (ITSM) environment from a firefighting ‘fix fast’ approach to focus on cloud-based technology and a ‘fail less’ outlook. This has come through the use of ServiceNow from UK-based IT solutions provider Fruition Partners.

“The previous approach was mostly a result of having a spread of legacy solutions in place and no unified way to manage them,” Wendy Collison, Travis Perkins project manager for service development, told CloudTech. “Now, we are creating greater integration and efficiency across the business by harnessing multi-channel transactional support, re-engineering and upgrading legacy systems to provide enhanced infrastructure to provide fix solutions quicker.”

In July 2014, the service delivery team launched SolveIT, the first iteration of a self-service website. To begin with, the portal was focused on IT support, which helped users log IT incidents and track progress, as well as provide information so users could fix issues themselves.

Today, it is now accessible to all 30,000 employees across the Travis Perkins group, with 10% of all incidents and service requests going through the portal. This is described by the company as a ‘good achievement’, taking into account the fact the many workers in stores and warehouses who are less likely to use the portal through their job role. The company also reports a more than 20% reduction in incidents, and quicker root cause analysis.

“It took a while to gain momentum as for some colleagues in branch and store locations they didn’t notice any significant changes to working methods,” added Collison. “But through further updates and enhancements with ServiceNow, colleagues are seeing a real difference to the updates and information they receive, they are better informed and service teams have more time to concentrate on delivering better services and anticipating problems before they happen.”

Ultimately, the goal is to ‘move fully to a services-based organisation based around a service catalogue, detailing all the business services the organisation provides along with associated costs and commitments’. One such development in the pipeline is putting together an online branded clothing store for Travis Perkins staff, with employees being able to select uniform, schedule delivery, and organise returns via an automated system.

“The first step was to create a successful product catalogue enabling colleagues to purchase devices from our self-service portal, such as phones, laptops [and] printers,” said Collison. “Moving forward, we aim to create a full service catalogue where businesses will be able to purchase readily available solutions such as websites, business analytics and customer relationship solutions.”

This shows there are still a couple of steps to go for Travis Perkins – but the journey already undertaken gives a glimpse of how a long-term cloud plan, properly executed, can reap rewards.

Main picture credit: Travis Perkins

Only one in five organisations are getting the most out of their cloud investments with 96% saying it could do with a ‘makeover’, according to new survey results from Fugue.

The research, which garnered the responses of more than 300 IT operations professionals, found the majority of those polled said compliance and security concerns, unexpected downtime, and a plethora of cloud management tools available today, means their investments are not hitting the right mark.

When asked why the cloud landscape needed a makeover, 33% said their experience needed to be simplified and easier to use, compared with 29% who cited security, with more ease controlling costs (13%) and easier to control generally (10%) also cited.

More than a third (36%) of respondents said the C-suite fails to understand its complexity, while a quarter (26%) said IT leadership struggles with it and one in five (20%) said the same for developers. This complexity is borne out in the number of disparate tools used by organisations; just under a third (31%) say they are using between six and 10 tools, compared with 38% using three to five, 16% for 11-15, and 7% who are using more than 15.

Naturally, these results bode well for Fugue, a company based in Maryland, as well as Washington DC and Silicon Valley, whose modus operandi is around cloud automation and simplifying lifecycle management of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure service stack.

“The promises of the cloud are tremendous, but they are hard-won,” said Josh Stella, CEO and co-founder of Fugue in a statement. “You hear you’ll get rid of data centres, save money and move faster; cloud’s essentially an infinite resource. But what happens is that IT departments lose control of it – they can’t keep track of everything that’s running, and there are security and compliance complications.

“If you’re Netflix, you have enough money to throw at the problem, but most companies trying to manage the cloud end up in a DIY headache of patch-ups and tools that were born in the data centre and adapted for use in the cloud,” Stella added.

For most organizations, the move to hybrid cloud is now a question of when, not if. Fully 82% of enterprises plan to have a hybrid cloud strategy this year, according to Infoholic Research. The worldwide hybrid cloud computing market is expected to grow about 34% annually over the next five years, reaching $241.13 billion by 2022. Companies are embracing hybrid cloud because of the many advantages it offers compared to relying on a single provider for all of their cloud needs. Hybrid offers balance and flexibility. It helps companies achieve a wide array of business goals, including availability, reliability, security and cost-efficiency.

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21st International Cloud Expo, taking place October 31 – November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Academy named “Bronze Sponsor” of 21st International Cloud Expo which will take place October 31 – November 2, 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Academy is the industry’s most innovative, vendor-neutral cloud technology training platform. Cloud Academy provides continuous learning solutions for individuals and enterprise teams for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and the most popular cloud computing technologies. Get certified, manage the full lifecycle of your cloud-based resources, and build your knowledge based using Cloud Academy’s expert-created content, comprehensive Learning Paths, and innovative Hands-on Labs.

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It is a question almost as old as the concept: who should look after cloud security, the vendor or the customer? A new report from Barracuda Networks argues there is a ‘concerning’ lack of understanding with regard to the shared responsibility model for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers.

For Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two leading IaaS providers, the meaning is clear. Microsoft points out the difference between software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and IaaS. For IaaS, while the provider looks after physical security and shares demands on host infrastructure and network controls, as Microsoft puts it, the customer is responsible for app level controls, identity and access management, endpoint protection and data classification. AWS describes the vendor and customer as being responsible for security ‘of’ and ‘in’ the cloud respectively.

So why, therefore, did almost two thirds (64%) of the 550 EMEA IT decision makers polled by Barracuda say they believed securing customer data in the public cloud was the vendor’s responsibility? 61% believed the same around applications, 60% for operating systems, while only 57% said service providers control the physical security of infrastructure.

“The lack of clarity regarding organisations’ versus IaaS providers’ cloud security responsibilities creates grey areas that IT decision makers must address if they want to keep key data and systems secure,” the report noted.

Issues regarding public cloud security do seem to have been picked up by the organisations polled, however. 57% of all respondents said they had added additional security to its public cloud, with 37% saying they were planning to. The figure was highest in the Belgium and Netherlands – 70% affirmative – with the UK lowest on just 43%, albeit with 39% planning to invest.

Naturally, the advice from Barracuda was to ‘partner with a vendor agnostic security expert to advise on exactly which pieces of the IaaS puzzle is the customer’s responsibility’. “The bottom line is that organisations are continuing to invest in public cloud projects, but they need a trusted vendor-neutral partner to help them navigate the choppy waters of cybersecurity if they want to minimise risk in the process,” the report wrote.

“With sweeping new European data protection regulations landing in May 2018, no organisation can afford to ignore security today.”

You can read a blog post here and download the full report (registration required) here.