With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 – November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.

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Small businesses continue to put security as their main priority when selecting a cloud storage provider, yet many continue to risk their security by choosing free solutions, according to a new survey from analyst firm Clutch.

According to the survey, which polled almost 300 small and medium businesses who use at least one cloud storage platform, 25% of respondents admit they use a free cloud storage product, compared to 71% who said their organisations pay for cloud storage.

More than half (57%) of those who are using free cloud storage say they are putting backup and archived files in those depositories, compared to 66% of all respondents. More than a quarter (28%) are putting company financial records in their free storage, along with medical data (14%) and customer banking information (11%).

The report, which also collated various responses from industry players and experts, came to the conclusion that the weakest link in the cloud storage chain was the user. “My data isn’t suddenly secure just because I put it in the cloud,” said Mark Estes, regional director of sales at Qubole. “There’s a lot of things you do. The cloud enables the security of data as long as you do things correctly.”

Riley Panko, marketing analyst at Clutch, told CloudTech that there is an element of ‘ignorance towards the reality of cloud storage and security’ in businesses. “They feel confident that their data is safe – until it isn’t,” she said. “Thus it’s a matter of making sure that you educate your employees in a realistic manner. Every employee should understand the consequences of a data breach of sensitive information.”

The study, titled ‘Cloud Storage and Security: The Rundown’, focused more in-depth on cloud adoption, security, and regulations compared to the previous year’s edition. Panko added: “It’s clear to see that hesitations towards adopting cloud storage are falling away as faith in its security builds. However, this security is only present if employees act accordingly.”

Elsewhere, 53% of respondents say it is important to follow the ICO regulations, with 30% citing HIPAA and 27% citing PCI. Writing for this publication in July, Frank Krieger, director of compliance at iland, argued organisations need to “care a great deal” about ISO compliance in the cloud.

You can read the full study here.

Financial Technology has become a topic of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 20th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, 2017, will find fresh new content in a new track called FinTech.

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Google has been pushing the message of machine learning as it aims to tempt more customers onto its cloud – and this push continues with the launch of a new group focused on delivering cloud-based machine learning solutions to businesses, as well as a new API.

“Building a centralised team within Google Cloud will accelerate our ability to deliver machine learning products and services to enterprise customers in every industry,” wrote Rob Craft, group lead for Google’s cloud machine learning arm in a blog post. “Today also marks an exciting next step in Google Cloud’s product commitment to make machine learning more accessible for all businesses.”

The new cloud machine learning group will be led by Fei-Fei Li, who had been director of the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University, and Jia Li, formerly head of research at Snapchat.

One of the new launches involves GPUs (graphics processing units) for Google Cloud Platform, offering more hardware flexibility. In a separate blog post, product manager John Barrus noted the importance of providing GPUs to give more computing power when compared against CPUs. “You’ll be able to strap your ML-powered applications to a rocket engine, resulting in faster and more affordable machine learning models”, as Google puts it.

Regarding APIs, the Cloud Natural Language API is now generally available, which also includes expanded entity recognition, granular sentiment analysis with expanded language support, as well as improved syntax analysis. Similarly, the Google Cloud Jobs API also utilises machine learning to provide businesses with ‘Google strength’ candidates for recommended jobs.

Plenty of research has taken place on how cloud is enabling greater power in machine learning; not least due to the economic impact of digital storage and cloud computing making machine learning more affordable for all businesses. “Enterprises looking to become competitive leaders are going after the insights in these unstructured data sources and turning them into a competitive advantage with machine learning,” wrote Louis Columbus in this publication back in June.

You can find out more here.

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In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business world innovation is not just a differentiator – it’s fast becoming the new normal. Businesses are looking to disrupt the markets they operate in before they find themselves on the receiving end of disruption and so have made innovation a top priority.  

Equally, innovation on its own is no guarantee of success, it must be done quickly.  Each company is in a race against its competitors to come up with – and launch – the product, service or idea that rewrites the rules of their industry and leads to market dominance.

Digital battlegrounds

Examples are all around us. From taxis to banks, digital newcomers are redefining the expectations of customers and are attracting them in their millions from established, slow-moving analogue competitors.  

As we find ourselves talking to our phones, tablets and desktop computers, artificial intelligence and machine learning is finding its way into everyday life. It’s no surprise then that 56% of businesses we surveyed see the use of an integrated cloud platform as an opportunity to capitalise on AI’s potential.

Announcements from Oracle OpenWorld around the launch of Intelligent Applications and Cloud Platforms with built-in machine learning capabilities will stand to make it easier and faster for forward thinking companies to start exploring these exciting new avenues in a range of operational and customer-facing functions.

However, not all businesses are set up to take advantage of the opportunities presented by these breakthroughs.  Some that have the desire to innovate are finding themselves stifled – locked in by traditional, inflexible, IT infrastructures. This is making them slow to react at a time when they need to be nimble and respond almost immediately to customer needs.

What’s the hold up?

Recent research by Oracle found that 60% of businesses were held back by rigid IT infrastructure, and almost as many said that while their business had implemented new technologies, a fragmented approach was hampering innovation efforts. The solution is moving from traditional IT to the cloud, but this cannot be done in a slapdash and ad-hoc manner. Rather, cloud capabilities should be fully integrated.

In fact, Oracle found that 60% of businesses see an integrated approach to cloud as a way to unlock the potential of disruptive technologies.

A company’s developers can be likened to painters, and the cloud, or specifically a cloud platform (platform as a service), is the canvas on which they paint. The canvas needs a solid backing however, and compute services (infrastructure as a service) is the foundation on which the cloud platform can reliably rest.

Integrate for success

Using cloud platform tools, combined with compute services, businesses have the opportunity to innovate at speed and take an entrepreneurial approach to testing and development.

Developer tools that sit on a cloud platform can also be enhanced and updated without the time and expense of proprietary applications.

Thanks to the tight integration with compute services, workloads can be efficiently moved between environments, such as on-premise and the cloud, depending on business needs. If greater resources are needed for development, or to support an on-rush of demand for a successful product, these can be brought online instantly thanks to the elastic ‘hyperscaling’ capabilities of compute services.

The flexible nature of compute services and cloud platforms means that smaller companies can take on larger enterprises. They can exploit the power of an integrated cloud as and when they need, and scale back as necessary, without having to take on the huge investments of purchasing and managing a large IT infrastructure. Indeed, the lack of legacy IT means they are able to innovate more quickly and effectively than their larger rivals.

An integrated cloud platform then can level the playing field between large enterprises and SMEs. With such powerful tools at their disposal, the only differentiator is the willingness of the company to innovate.

If a company is moving forwards without an integrated cloud strategy, the reality is that it will be moving backwards as companies ready to embrace the power and flexibility provided by integrated cloud services are placing themselves firmly in the innovation fast lane.

Read more: “Rigid, confused and complex” infrastructure leads to employee collaboration issues

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According to the latest figures from 451 Research, more than a third of enterprise IT budget is expected to be spent on hosting and cloud services in 2017.

Currently, enterprises spend more than a quarter (28%) of their budget on cloud, but 451 argues this number will go up to 34% next year. Despite hosting and cloud providers positioning themselves as infrastructure players, only 31% of that budget goes towards infrastructure services, with applications (42%), managed services (14%) and security (9%) also being used.

Enterprises are also picking multiple vendors for their hosting and cloud services; public cloud infrastructure providers were cited by 69% of respondents, followed by managed hosting providers (26%).

451 argues that the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) markets are much more consolidated – which rings true with other industry research – but managed services is an area of much greater interest.

“The markets for unmanaged IaaS and SaaS are dominated by large, hyperscale vendors. However, this spending trend indicates there is an appetite for the type of bundled services a broader market of managed service providers are well positioned to deliver,” said Liam Eagle, 451 research manager. “A strong opportunity exists for service providers offering a diversified set of hosting and cloud services that includes infrastructure and application hosting, as well as managed services and security services delivered around them.”

Eagle added that the market for managed infrastructure and application services was a longer tail market, including the possibility of reselling services from the largest IaaS and SaaS vendors. Rackspace is arguably the best example of this; the company confirmed that it was going private back in August. In the firm’s most recent financial results as a public company, the company said that 277 customers chose its AWS resell service over the past nine months, with 60% choosing the higher tier option.

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The emergence of the Internet has given birth to a number of cloud-based technologies and services to cater to a wide audience. There has been a significant rise in the number of users and enterprises who are adapting to the radical changes cloud technologies have brought about in enterprise handling and management.

The colossal volumes of data and information held by any business organisation run the sheer risk of intrusion from malicious insiders, network threats, hacking attacks, insecure application programming interfaces (API) and unauthorised user access. Individuals and enterprises are not hesitating to rope in the best service providers to protect their cloud networks from such security threats.

The market is moving ahead with the constant need for a robust governance and network security measures driving its progress. Experts at Allied Market Research have observed a tremendous growth in the cloud security services market over the years. They predict a strong market for the cloud identity and access management (IAM) segment in particular. Here we focus on the cloud IAM segment in particular, how it has gained popularity with different users. The competitive landscape of the industry has also been covered.

Understanding the cloud IAM framework

The basic framework for cloud IAM lies within the management of electronic identities for the different processes as a part of the business network. It includes technology and the cloud networking to support the concept of identity management. Using an automated process, IAM technology enables initiating, capturing, recording and managing of user identities. The access privileges are granted after quick and careful contemplation of organisation policies. All the individuals and services as a part of cloud IAM systems are properly authenticated, authorised and audited.

The cloud IAM software of an organisation allows IT administrators to create user identities and organise them into groups. The identity and access management software then assigns permissions to access resources and services. This is done on a web portal, managed through a browser window. The concept of IAM is extremely instrumental for every business organisation to ensure a standard and credible IT infrastructure.

Why every business organisation needs an IAM expertise

If an organisation has a robust IT infrastructure in place, then half the battle against network threats is already won. The presence of a cloud security software which is backed by a tough identity and access management is a sign of how serious an enterprise takes it security. What is more important is the need to have a firm grip on IAM processes which adhere to regulatory compliance policies. Intrusion from malware, malicious insiders, hackers, spoofing, and fake identity holders can be ensured by having an IT governance structure in place that enables multi-factor authentication and careful assigning of access permissions.

A well-maintained IAM infrastructure speaks volumes about how an organisation’s reporting and auditing system is. The implementation of a cloud IAM framework in a business’s working doesn’t necessarily make it invincible, but it allows for timely addressing of access permissions related issues, and dealing with unauthorised users. Apart from keeping a close eye on the flow of information between the different end-users and services on the cloud, the IAM technology also ensures an enterprise adds to its overall security policy. Moreover, this also forms a part of a larger cost-cutting measure by enterprises, as the entire process of security and handling credentials is managed by one centralised software functioning on multiple levels.

Big names in the cloud IAM game

The key competitors in the cloud security market have different customised products on offer, which is tailor-made for particular user requirements. The established brands are looking to expand their product portfolios to gain a bigger stronghold on the industry. IT giants, such as IBM, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and CA Technologies offer an award-winning range of solutions that promise to safeguard valuable data and applications on the cloud as well as mobiles. The products they offer are available at a competitive rate in the market, and aggressive marketing strategies drive the revenues for these companies.

However, all eyes on the IAM market are on the lookout for the new promising startups, such as Salesforce, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Ping Identity. These new companies provide identity and access management solutions for new businesses looking for efficient software on a tight budget. Moreover, their products are also targeted at highly regulated businesses including the healthcare and BFSI sector. This is making the new companies stand apart and emerge as promising new entrants in the market.

Synergies promise a more dynamic market

The market for cloud IAM has so far proven to be very dynamic in the recent decades. The industry is set to grow at a rapid pace, with the development of cloud networks and IT infrastructures. The new startups offering identity solutions are giving a serious competition to big names. The larger IT brands are not shying away from joining forces with the fresh outlook offered by new startup firms.

For instance, IBM recently acquired Lighthouse Security Group to expand the scope of its operations. Even Dell joined with EMC to shift its focus from hardware to cloud-based software. Accenture was also not far behind, with its latest acquisition of an Australian firm, Redcore. All these developments on the competitive front are a testimony to the magnanimous growth of the cloud security services market.