Software as a service (SaaS) undoubtedly holds major benefits, but unfortunately they continue to be accompanied by major data headaches.

SaaS first really started taking hold in 2007 and most organisations have never looked back since – after all, it offered the promise of significant savings, total cost ownership, and a simplified IT environment. The delivery model is now considered utterly vital to the running of those organisations, thanks in part to the disruptive assets that have only become clearer with time – agility, responsiveness, and a hands-off approach to IT. In fact, on average, enterprises now have hundreds of SaaS applications in use.

However, there has been a significant legacy – the challenge of integration with both enterprise applications and data sources which SaaS and the cloud have failed to resolve. Instead, they have produced a complex network of disparate applications and hybrid environments where data is constantly produced but not meaningfully managed, and in some cases duplicated, leading to further problems. Challenges have also been experienced by many in keeping business processes flowing smoothly.

Fragmentation has thus resulted, particularly from applications not performing well enough when exchanging data during real-time transactions. Furthermore, staff have been able to too easily adopt and then abandon applications, meaning that key data is also discarded on SaaS servers in untracked data centres. Fundamentally, data has been difficult to move, but then too easy to lose as well.

SaaS may be effective in its purest form, but when it comes to the tracking of trusted, actionable data, it’s quite simply failing, even exacerbating data fragmentation through its ‘access anywhere’ ethos.

In such a scenario, the effective leveraging of data insights for future projects is hugely compromised and may be setting you up for failure when you do embark on that new programme.

Moreover – and this is vital – data may be incompatible across the various SaaS and cloud apps in use at any one time, and thus the situation will require prompt intervention if that’s important to your business, as it almost certainly will be.

The adoption of SaaS irrevocably means that effective data aggregation and subsequent insights can only be achieved by combining information from a variety of disparate systems, which is a major challenge by anyone’s yardstick. Complex coding has been required to connect business apps in many cases, with the resultant time wastage and unnecessary cost which that has entailed.

Ultimately, this complexity continues to stand in the way of those looking to make big gains from the cloud.

Nevertheless, clearly this disconnect also represents an opportunity for those who can satisfactorily meet the challenge. A marked evolution is therefore required and automation of manual data entry in many SaaS products and integrated offerings should therefore be a priority, along with the separation of data from application.

Bridges can undoubtedly be built in the fragmented SaaS space, and the right solution may well be closer than we think.  

I recently read with interest the results of the latest Cloud Industry Forum research survey into UK Cloud adoption and a couple of aspects jumped out at me, undoubtedly mirroring the experience iland is having within the UK market.

Overall cloud adoption rates among British businesses now stand at 88% and the rate of cloud adoption has increased by a whopping 83% since 2010, with an increase of 5% since last year.  In fact, today, we rarely speak with a customer that isn’t using some type of cloud service and that’s reflected in these results. The difference now is that, rather than taking an adhoc approach, companies of all sizes in the UK are taking a more strategic, planned approach to cloud adoption in recognition of its importance to business transformation.

Conducted in February 2017, the research, polled 250 IT and business decision-makers in large enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and public sector organisations.  The survey found that 67% of users expect to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year – again, this matches our experience – particularly for companies in highly regulated sectors such as Financial Services and Bio-tech/pharma.  These organisations may have been slow to the cloud adoption trend but adoption rates have now started to speed up. I think that is because there is now growing realisation that higher levels of IT security and industry compliance can be achieved in the cloud than on-premises and new cloud use cases are emerging as a result. 

Here at iland, what we have seen is a more significant increase in cloud adoption amongst small and public sector organisations – cloud security levels have come a long way and this, combined with the cost-effectiveness of cloud models, has attracted both small companies and public sector organisations to the cloud. The survey results showed a similar pattern with small and public sector organisation adoption rates now standing at 82% for both, up from 54% and 62%, respectively, a year ago.

Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions mean that even small and medium organisations can achieve a business continuity strategy previously only available to large enterprises. A great example of this is the East Thames public housing association who have kicked off their ‘cloud-first’ strategy with a successful DRaaS project.

The research also highlighted that 70% of respondents are either currently seeing or anticipate seeing their organisation have a competitive advantage from utilising cloud services – we hear this again and again from our customers. The benefits of cloud adoption surpass their expectations and drive competitive advantage. Many iland customers have even discovered unexpected use cases from cloud services such as using DR cloud capacity for development and testing.

So, the survey results are encouraging and the only way is up for the UK cloud industry (just as long as we deal with both the Brexit and GDPR issue which are undoubtedly both big concerns for UK organisations). However, I was surprised by one of the results that the survey uncovered about cloud migration.  The survey advised that: “On average it took 15 months to migrate applications to the cloud, with 90% experiencing difficulties when migrating to a cloud solution.”

The reasons given for these migration difficulties included complexity of migration (43%) and lack of internal skills/knowledge (32%). Clearly, more planning and expert assistance is needed up front to prepare for cloud migrations.

After all, there are very few companies who can make either the monetary or time investment required to develop new cloud implementation and management skills and a partnership between the customer and cloud service provider based on mutual understanding of responsibilities needs to fill that gap. Indeed, as UK cloud adoption levels continue to rise, the complexity of cloud projects will only increase and a high-touch, consultative approach from cloud providers will become much more important.

The Internet of Things is clearly many things: data collection and analytics, wearables, Smart Grids and Smart Cities, the Industrial Internet, and more. Cool platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel’s Galileo and Edison, and a diverse world of sensors are making the IoT a great toy box for developers in all these areas. In this Power Panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists discussed what things are the most important, which will have the most profound effect on the world, and what should we expect to see over the next couple of years.

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When executing an effective digital transformation strategy, management is tasked with placing the right workload into the most appropriate IT environment. This represents a shift from buying parts for self-assembly to composing services through self-serve consumption and pay-per-use models. Quite often this transition also leads to the adoption of software defined environments across the enterprise infrastructure.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Peak 10, Inc., a national IT infrastructure and cloud services provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Peak 10 provides reliable, tailored data center and network services, cloud and managed services. Its solutions are designed to scale and adapt to customers’ changing business needs, enabling them to lower costs, improve performance and focus internal resources on core competencies.

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@DevOpsSummit at Cloud taking place June 6-8, 2017, at Javits Center, New York City, is co-located with the 20th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

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Spend on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-native services, including serverless compute AWS Lambda, data warehouse Amazon Redshift, and streaming platform Amazon Kinesis, is set to go up this year, according to a new study from 2nd Watch.

The Seattle-based firm, an AWS premier partner, found that of 1,000 US IT and business executives, almost half (48%) said they plan to spend at least 10% more on Amazon’s cloud-native options. 35% of all respondents said they planned to spend between 10% and 20% more, compared with 13% who planned to spend 21% to 30% more.

When it comes to reasons for adoption, it all comes down to money, whichever side of the equation you are on. 31% of those polled said the opportunity to increase revenue was the biggest driver for using cloud-native services, while 24% cited the opportunity to decrease costs. Enhanced customer service (22%) and the desire to achieve a faster time to market on new products (20%) were also cited.

Two thirds (66%) of respondents say they expect return on investment from these services, either now or soon.

“The survey results are consistent with what we’re seeing and hearing from our customers,” said Jeff Aden, co-founder at 2nd Watch in a statement. “They are making new investments into these cloud-native services as payoff from previous investments show up, and they’re looking for new ways of creating value and driving down costs.

“As far as challenges go, the largest enterprises will continue seeking support from leading providers that are experts in public cloud and have experience migrating and managing enterprise workloads,” Aden added.

Logicworks, another AWS partner, has previously discussed the importance of services such as Lambda in particular in this publication, describing it in a piece one year ago as ‘in many ways the future of infrastructure-as-code and cloud automation’. “Although it is likely not being adopted by many AWS cloud consumers at this point, it has generated buzz since its spotlight at Re:Invent 2015 and will likely reach many more milestones,” the company wrote.

With this latest research, it seems there is plenty of truth in that last statement.

Everyone wants to use containers, but monitoring containers is hard. New ephemeral architecture introduces new challenges in how monitoring tools need to monitor and visualize containers, so your team can make sense of everything. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, David Gildeh, co-founder and CEO of Outlyer, will go through the challenges and show there is light at the end of the tunnel if you use the right tools and understand what you need to be monitoring to successfully use containers in your environments.

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Cloud tech IPOs seem to be like buses; you wait ages for one, then two come along at once. After Okta went public earlier this month, Cloudera, a data management platform provider, said it expects its initial public offering price to be between $12 and $14 per share for 15 million shares.

The company expects 128,064,103 shares to be outstanding after its initial offering, putting its valuation at approximately $1.8 billion, and between $2.2bn and $2.4bn including options and grants.

Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, has consistently featured at the sharp end of top private cloud companies. Forbes had the firm in its top five private companies leading cloud computing in 2016, behind Slack, Dropbox, DocuSign and Stripe, while figures from recruitment firm Glassdoor last year, based on the top 100 cloud vendors list from Computer Reseller News, put the firm in the top 10 as a desirable employer, with CEO Tom Reilly given a 93% approval rating.

The company outlines its modus operandi in the filing to the SEC. “Cloudera empowers organisations to become data-driven enterprises in the newly hyperconnected world,” it reads. “We allow enterprises to operate, manage and move workloads across multiple architectures, mixing on-premises and cloud environments, including all major public cloud infrastructure providers. We believe that our solution is the most widely adopted big data platform, with a growing range of applications being built on it.”

As is often the case, Cloudera has recorded losses of $135.4m, $203.1m and $187.3m for its 2015, 2016, and 2017 financial years, adding that it expects the trend to continue ‘for the foreseeable future’. Since 2009 and its series A funding round of $5m, more than $1bn has been raised for the company, the largest being $740m in March 2014 led by Intel.

The firm adds that its competitors are in four categories; legacy data management product providers, such as HP, IBM and Oracle; public cloud providers with data management and analytics offerings, such as AWS, Google and Microsoft; strategic partners who may also offer competitors’ technology; and open source companies, like Hortonworks and MapR.

A letter from the founder, Christophe Bisciglia, examines the opportunity the company faces. “In 2008, we saw the confluence of big data and the cloud as a huge opportunity. In 2017, it’s clear that we underestimated it,” Bisciglia wrote. “The cloud is better, faster and much cheaper than it was then.

“There is more data available than ever before,” he added. “We thought we had big data back then. We were only getting started. New data is coming from trading systems, from jet engines, from diagnostic devices in hospitals, from factory floors, from cars and trucks, from people – from everywhere. Over the last nine years, we have learned that data makes things that are impossible today, possible tomorrow.”

As affirmed by Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, the five cloud IPOs of 2016 – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge and Twilio – represented the lowest number since the financial crisis of 2008.