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Hyperscaler cloud capex declines – but ‘enormous barriers’ remain to reach the top table

The spending of the cloud hyperscalers has come to a comparative halt, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The analyst firm found that in the first quarter of 2019 total capex across the largest cloud vendors totalled just over $26 billion, representing a 2% downturn year on year. This excludes Google’s $2.4bn outlay on Manhattan real estate which pushed the Q118 figures even further, and not including exceptional items, represents the first quarterly downturn since the beginning of 2017.

In terms of launches in 2019, Google was the most dominant vendor, opening its doors in Zurich in March and Osaka earlier this month. At the very beginning of this year, Equinix and Alibaba Cloud focused on Asia Pacific data centre launches, in Singapore and Indonesia respectively.

Last month Synergy argued that global spend on data centre hardware and software had grown by 17% compared with the previous year. This is naturally driven by the continued demand for public cloud spend; more extensive server configurations ensured more expensive enterprise selling prices.

In order, the top five hyperscale spenders in the most recent quarter were Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple.

“After racing to new capex highs in 2018 the hyperscale operators did take a little breather in the first quarter. However, though Q1 capex was down a little from 2018, to put it into context it was still up 56% from Q1 of 2017 and up 81% from 2016; and nine of the 20 hyperscale operators did grow their Q1 capex by double-digit growth rates year on year,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research. “We do expect to see overall capex levels bounce back over the remainder of 2019.

“This remains a game of massive scale with enormous barriers for those companies wishing to meaningfully compete with the hyperscale firms,” Dinsdale added.

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AWS’ launches Textract tool capable of reading millions of files in a few hours


Connor Jones

30 May, 2019

AWS has said that its Textract tool, designed to extract and translate data between files, is now generally available for all customers.

The tool, which is a machine learning-driven feature of its cloud platform, lets customers autonomously extract data from documents and accurately convert it into a usable format, such as exporting contractual data into database forms.

The fully-managed tool requires no machine learning knowledge to use and works in virtually any document. Industries that work with specific file types such as financial services, insurance and healthcare will also be able to plug these into the tool.

Textract aims to expedite the laborious data entry process that is also often inaccurate when using other third-party software. Amazon claims it can accurately analyse millions of documents in «just a few hours«.

«Many companies extract text and data from files such as contracts, expense reports, mortgage guarantees, fund prospectuses, tax documents, hospital claims, and patient forms through manual data entry or simple OCR software,» the company said.

«This is a time-consuming and often inaccurate process that produces an output requiring extensive post-processing before it can be put in a format that is usable by other applications,» it added.

Textract takes data from scanned files stored in Amazon S3 buckets, reads them and returns data in JSON text annotated with the page number, section, form labels, and data types.

PwC is already using the tool for its pharmaceutical clients, an industry that commonly uses processes that involve Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forms that would otherwise require hours to complete, according to Siddhartha Bhattacharya, director lead, healthcare AI at PwC.

«Previously, people would manually review, edit, and process these forms, each one taking hours,» he said. «Amazon Textract has proven to be the most efficient and accurate OCR solution available for these forms, extracting all of the relevant information for review and processing, and reducing time spent from hours to down to minutes.»

The Met Office is another organisation that plans to implement Textract, making use of old weather records.

«We hope to use AmazonTextract to digitise millions of historical weather observations from document archives,» said Philip Brohan, climate scientist at the Met Office. «Making these observations available to science will improve our understanding of climate variability and change.»

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Exposed business data rises by 50% to 2.3 billion files


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

30 May, 2019

More than 2.3 billion sensitive corporate documents, including customer data and passport scans, are thought to be sitting on publicly accessible online storage systems.

One year after researchers disclosed the scale of exposed business files hosted using technologies like the server message block (SMB) protocol and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets, new findings reveal this figure has risen by approximately 750 million.

Data exposed via these misconfigured systems mean companies across the world are at risk of handing data to cyber criminals and violating data protection laws, according to security research firm Digital Shadows, with 2,326,448,731 (2.3 billion) files exposed as of 16 May. This is in contrast with the 1.5 billion files detected in 2018.

Despite the steep rise in the total number of files left exposed, researchers did see a noticeable decline in the number of files being leaked through misconfigured AWS S3 buckets, which have in the past been responsible for some of the largest data leaks. Experian data on more than 120 million American households was exposed in 2017, while similar leaks also hit the NSA, WWE, Accenture and, most recently, a third party app built from Facebook data.

Due to changes in the way S3 buckets are configured, made in November, researchers found only 1,895 exposed files on 16 May, compared to around 16 million prior to default encryption being added.

However, this is overshadowed by a dramatic rise in the number of files expose through the SMB protocol, amounting to 1.1 billion or roughly 48% of exposed business documents. This compares against 20% of files made public through misconfigured FTP services, and 16% of the 2.3 billion documents exposed via rsync sites

«Our research shows that in a GDPR world, the implications of inadvertently exposed data are even more significant,» said Photon Research analyst Harrison Van Riper.

«Countries within the European Union are collectively exposing over one billion files – nearly 50% of the total we looked at globally – some 262 million more than when we looked at last year.

«Some of the data exposure is inexcusable – Microsoft has not supported SMBv1 since 2014, yet many companies still use it. We urge all organizations to regularly audit the configuration of their public facing services.»

In their previous report, published last April, the researchers detected exposed data totalling 12,000TB hosted across S3 buckets, rsync sites, SMB servers, file transfer protocol (FTP) services, misconfigured websites (WebIndex), and network attached storage (NAS) drives. This volume of information was roughly 4,000 times greater than the Panama Papers leak three years ago.

The first set of findings were based on files detected during a three-month window between January and the end of March 2018, while their latest report has extended the observation window to between April 2018 and mid-May 2019.

Based on their most recent findings, researchers are particularly worried about a «troubling» rise in files exposed through SMB-enabled file shares, partially because they’re «not entirely sure why that’s the case».

One potential indicator could be that AWS Storage Gateway added SMB support in June 2018, allowing file-based apps developed for Windows an easy way to store objects in S3 buckets. But the greater concern centres on ransomware, with more than 17 million ransomware-encrypted files detected across various file stores.

Elsewhere, the researchers discovered a variety of sensitive data exposed through misconfigured systems, including one server that contained all the necessary information an attacker would need to commit identity theft. The FTP server held job applications, personal photos, passport scans, and bank statements. All this data was publicly available.

Another example centred on medical data, with 4.7 million medical-related files exposed through the files stored the researchers analysed. The majority of these were medical imaging files, which doubled in volume from 2.2 million last year to 4.4 million today.

In light of its findings, Digital Shadows has advised organisations to use the Amazon S3 ‘Block Public Access’ setting to limit public exposure of buckets that are intended to be private. Logging should also be enabled to monitor for any unwanted access or potential exposure points.

Researchers have also advised businesses to disable SMBv1 and update to SMBv2 or v3 for systems which require the protocol. IP whitelisting, too, should be used to enable only authorised systems to access the storage systems.

NAS drives, as with FTP servers, should be placed internally behind a firewall with access control lists implemented to prevent unauthorised access.

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Why the real multi-cloud motivator is choice – rather than lock-in

Multi-cloud is one of the biggest initiatives for enterprises today; however, if you analyse the justification for this trend, so much of it is driven by fear — fear of lock-in, fear of outages, fear of cost. And while those concerns may be valid, the enterprises that are realising the value of multi-cloud have an even more compelling reason for it: choice.

A few years ago, battle lines were drawn. For the most part you either used AWS, Azure, or GCP in addition to your data centre. People were contentious about which cloud provider was better for the business. “Cloud X is more reliable.” “Cloud Y caters to developers.” “Cloud Z has better tooling.” And switching cloud providers was a big deal. It usually meant there was a problem or some kind of secretive, exclusive business deal. More and more enterprises started picking sides, and then Adobe announced that it would use Azure and AWS as complements to each other.

This decision wasn’t because Adobe had a bad experience or fear towards one cloud over another. It was because Adobe viewed two clouds better than one. Each cloud provider boasts tens of thousands of engineers who deliver over 1,000 new features each year. Why not put all those resources to work for your business? Adobe wasn’t hedging its bet by choosing both, it was simply the smartest business move for the company.

In my work with Adobe, it is abundantly clear that these clouds are not used to compete with each other (i.e. to avoid lock-in); rather, they are used to complement one another. In fact, both Azure and AWS boast about Adobe as a featured customer.

A good analogy is streaming video. Many people now subscribe to multiple streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. But no one subscribes to Hulu because they’re worried about getting locked in with Netflix. They pay for both because they want to watch the unique programming (Stranger Things on Netflix) and features (live TV on Hulu) offered by both services. They want choice.

The same is true of enterprises and cloud providers. Each of the big three cloud providers have a different geographic footprint and unique offerings ranging from robust security to AI and machine learning to Kubernetes and microservices specialisation. And each cloud provider is always innovating, so their offerings are constantly expanding and getting better.

However, the conversation about multi-cloud remains fixated on lock-in and cost — “what if you’re locked into cloud X and they raise prices?” But cost isn’t the driver for the cloud, it’s always been speed and flexibility. Even when Netflix and Hulu raise their prices, subscribers don’t flee (and in fact Netflix feels so confident about this that it just raised their prices again). The reason is that subscribers don’t buy these services on cost alone, they’re willing to pay for multiple services to preserve choice.

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) narrative about lock-in is not very relevant when considering a multi-cloud strategy. Choice is the most important reason. As simple as that distinction may be, it is the difference between having a reactive multi-cloud strategy, driven by fear and uncertainty, and a proactive multi-cloud strategy that delivers on the promise of speed and flexibility through choice.

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Doubling down on disaster recovery-as-a-service – for business continuity and beyond

The prospect of an IT outage is one of the key issues that keeps IT professionals awake at night.  In the past two years, 93% of organisations have experienced tech-related business disruption and, as a result, one out of five experienced major reputational damage and permanent loss of customers. From natural disasters to malicious cyber-attacks, organizations face an abundance of risks to business continuity that impact productivity, prosperity and reputation. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is a mainstream use of the cloud that helps protect against outages through an infrastructure and strategy that deals with worst-case scenarios. 

The benefits of cloud DRaaS over on-premise disaster recovery are well-documented. Companies don’t have to double their infrastructure investments and run parallel systems as a backup. DRaaS also offers better protection against threats such as natural disasters because there’s no physical infrastructure to protect. DRaaS is easily scalable to grow with businesses, and it offers native high availability.

A successful DRaaS implementation requires the right cloud service provider (CSP) to help develop a DR plan that meets business objectives. Here are a few pointers to help you select a CSP that fits your needs.

Factors to consider when choosing a DRaaS CSP

When choosing a CSP for DRaaS, you trust them to protect your business during the worst possible scenario. So, you need to be clear on the capabilities and the SLAs they will deliver. This includes weighing costs as part of your budget planning and reviewing regulatory and compliance factors.

With cloud services you pay only for what you consume, which is undeniably preferable to paying for on-premise systems that may never be used. Nevertheless, CSP pricing models can be complex, making it important to know the cost implications should you need to fully failover your production environment to the cloud.

Your CSP should size your environment accurately (at iland we use a tool called Catalyst to do this) for sufficient storage and resources to avoid any nasty surprises in the event of a failover. This also ensures straightforward and transparent pricing so you’re clear on the true costs of your business continuity programme.

In a disaster scenario, your IT team will be stretched and under pressure. It helps if the DR environment you choose is based on familiar structures and terminology. For example, many IT administrators are familiar with a VMware-based cloud product that uses the same toolsets and terminology, which reduces the learning curve to respond faster during a disaster.  

It’s also important to know how much of your DR set-up will be a DIY exercise and how much support you can expect from your CSP. Will it be a concierge onboarding service, or do you need to scope extra internal resources or additional consultancy to manage set-up? Look at the support level the CSP commits to provide.  Could you ask them to press the failover button if they had to? Will they assist with failing back when the time comes?

Management is another critical factor. One of the benefits of cloud DRaaS is that in-house teams don’t have a second on-premise environment to manage. The environment is replicated without adding to the team’s administrative burden. However, visibility into the DR environment is essential and needs to be simple. Find out how your team will oversee the DR environment and what tools will they use to troubleshoot issues. Are they intuitive or do you need to budget time and resources for training?

Finally, you need assurance that your backup environment is  compliant with industry regulations to prevent data vulnerabilities that can compromise your customers and your business.  Whatever requirements your business has to meet – HIPAA, GDPR etc – your DRaaS provider needs to guarantee compliance as well.

Automation and orchestration for testing DR plans

DRaaS solutions provide facilities to test DR plans without impacting the production environment. Incredibly, many organisations are still reluctant or even afraid to test their DR plans.

With cloud DRaaS, teams can run recovery tests in replica environments in a short time, generating a full report to detail the performance of every part of the DR plan and recovery orchestration. This gives full visibility into whether or not a business can come back online during a disaster and the order in which applications will recover. Testing in this manner is much more effective than annual testing of on-premise systems and it helps businesses develop a full disaster recovery plan with absolute confidence it will work when needed.

Added value from cloud DRaaS

Beyond its primary purpose of disaster recovery, businesses can double down on their DRaaS investment with a replica virtual environment to support on-demand security testing, system upgrades, patch testing and user acceptance testing without disrupting their production environments. The replica environment contains all the quirks and eccentricities of a live environment for a more thorough testing before going live.

Having a sound disaster recovery plan in place gives peace of mind to IT professionals. Selecting the right CSP deliver DRaaS provides added comfort and confidence, even if that disaster never happens.

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Calculating the Kube roots: Why 2019’s KubeCon represented a milestone for the industry

The latest iteration of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, which took place in Barcelona last week, felt like something of a milestone – and not one shoehorned in for marketing purposes, either.

It is true however that Kubernetes came into being five years ago this June, so for those at Google Cloud, it was a time of reflection. From the acorn which was Eric Brewer’s presentation at Dockercon 2014, a veritable forest has grown. “We’re delighted to see Kubernetes become core to the creation and operation of modern software, and thereby a key part of the global economy,” wrote Brian Grant and Jaice Singer DuMars of Google Cloud in a blog post.

“Like any important technology, Kubernetes has become about more than just itself; it has positively affected the environment in which it arose, changing how software is deployed at scale, how work is done, and how corporations engage with big open source projects,” Grant and DuMars added.

2019’s KubeCon saw a smattering of news which represented a sense of continued maturation. In other words, various cloud providers queued up to boast about how advanced their Kubernetes offerings were. OVH claimed it was the only European cloud provider to offer Kubernetes deployment on multiple services, for instance, while DigitalOcean unveiled its managed Kubernetes service, now generally available. From Google’s side, with its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) managed service toolset, new products were made available, from greater control over releases, to experimentation with Windows Server containers – of which more later.

These are all clues which point to how Kubernetes has evolved since 2014 – and will continue to do so.

Analysis: The past, present and future

At the start of this year, for this publication’s 2019 outlook, Lee James, CTO EMEA at Rackspace, put it simply: “I will call it and say that Kubernetes has officially won the battle for containers orchestration.”

If 2018 was the year that the battle had been truly won, 2017 was where most of the groundwork took place. At the start of 2017, Google and IBM were the primary stakeholders; Google of course developing the original technology, and IBM holding a close relationship with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – VP Todd Moore holding the CNCF chair of the governing board. By the year’s end, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce and more had all signed up with the CNCF. Managed services duly followed.

Last year saw Kubernetes become the first technology to ‘graduate’ from the CNCF. While monitoring tool Prometheus has since joined it, it was a key milestone. The award was a recognition that Kubernetes had achieved business-grade competency, with an explicitly defined project governance and committer process and solid customer credentials. According to Redmonk at the time, almost three quarters (71%) of the Fortune 100 were using containers in some capacity.

One of the key reasons why this convergence occurred was due to the business case associated with the technology becoming much more palatable. Docker first appeared on the scene in 2013 with containerised applications promising easier management and scalability for developers. Many enterprises back then were merely dipping their toes into the cloud ecosystem, agonising between public and private deployments, cloud-first eventually moving to cloud-only.

As the infrastructure became better equipped to support it, the realisation dawned that businesses needed to become cloud-native, with hybrid cloud offering the best of both worlds. More sophisticated approaches followed, as multiple cloud providers were deployed across an organisation’s IT stack for different workloads, be they identity, databases, or disaster recovery.

This need for speed was, of course, catnip for container technologies – and as Ali Golshan, co-founder and CTO at StackRox wrote for this publication in January: “Once we started using containers in great volume, we needed a way to automate the setup, tear down, and management of containers. That’s what Kubernetes does.”

The Docker story is an interesting one to tie up. The company had a presence at this year’s KubeCon, announcing an extension of its partnership with Tigera around support for Kubernetes on Windows in Docker Enterprise. Consensus across many in the industry was that Docker had simply run its course. At the end of 2017, Chris Short, ambassador at the CNCF – though he was swift to point out this was not the foundation’s opinion – wrote a piece headlined simply “Docker, Inc is Dead.” In October of that year, Docker announced it was supporting Kubernetes orchestration. Short added that ‘Docker’s doom [had] been accelerated by the rise of Kubernetes.’

One area of potential however is through Windows. In December Docker announced a collaboration with Microsoft in what was dubbed a ‘container for containers’; a cloud-agnostic tool aimed at packaging and running distributed applications and enabling a single all-in-one packaging format. Kubernetes 1.14 brought about support for Windows nodes, and Google referenced this in its Windows Server offering for GKE. “We heard you – being able to easily deploy Windows containers is critical for enterprises looking to modernise existing applications and move them towards cloud-native technology,” the company wrote.  

Docker secured $92 million in new funding in October. As TechCrunch put it, “while Docker may have lost its race with Kubernetes over whose toolkit would be the most widely adopted, the company has become the champion for businesses that want to move to the modern hybrid application development and information technology operations model of programming.”

This is where things stand right now. As for the future, more use cases will come along and, much like cloud has become, Kubernetes will stop being spoken of and just ‘be’. “Kubernetes may be most successful if it becomes an invisible essential of daily life,” wrote Grant and DuMars. “True standards are dramatic, but they are also taken for granted… Kubernetes is going to become boring, and that’s a good thing, at least for the majority of people who don’t have to care about container management.”

“In other ways, it is just the start,” the two added. “New applications such as machine learning, edge computing, and the Internet of Things are finding their way into the cloud-native ecosystem. Kubernetes is almost certain to be at the heart of their success.”

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Nvidia launches edge platform to ramp up AI and IoT data processing


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

28 May, 2019

Nvidia has launched an edge computing platform to give businesses a greater swathe of tools to perform heavier processing workloads from data derived from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

By establishing a multitude of edge servers across the world, the chip manufacturer is hoping that firms in industries like healthcare and manufacturing can process their data instantaneously to improve business operations.

This is in light of an expected explosion in IoT devices within the next few years, and the data the monumental amount of data the ecosystem will produce.

Nvidia’s EGX platform is touted as being able to perceive, understand and act in real-time on continuous data streaming between 5G base stations, warehouses, retail stores, factories, and other locations.

«Enterprises demand more powerful computing at the edge to process their oceans of raw data – streaming in from countless interactions with customers and facilities – to make rapid, AI-enhanced decisions that can drive their business,» said Bob Pette, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA.

«A scalable platform like NVIDIA EGX allows them to easily deploy systems to meet their needs on premises, in the cloud or both.»

The device at the heart of Nvidia’s new edge servers is the company’s Jetson Nano, a small module that can enable the development of low-power AI systems. Nvidia says this device can provide 500 billion operations per second using just a few watts of power, for tasks like image recognition.

As part of the project, Nvidia has also teamed up with Red Hat to integrate and optimise its Edge Stack software with OpenShift, a container application platform. Mellanox and Cisco’s security, networking and storage technologies have also fed into the edge platform.

It will also be offered through major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure platform, with users able to remotely manage their Nvidia Edge Stack service.

Nvidia’s AI research has spanned a number of industries, including healthcare, with the firm previously announcing a partnership with King’s College London to build an AI platform to automate radiology.

Nvidia’s EGX platform has already been at the heart of developing a number of healthcare-related software packages, the company says, as well as applications suitable for large retail chains and organisations involved in smart city development.

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Cyber security crisis looms as 72% of professionals consider leaving their jobs


Jane McCallion

28 May, 2019

Cyber security professionals in the UK are struggling to hold back the ever-increasing wave of threats with limited resources, leading many to consider quitting their jobs.

These are the findings of a survey of 300 specialists working in large UK organisations with 500 employees or more.

Some 79% of respondents said they were facing a lack of resources – both technological and human – despite the increasing number of security threats faced by all businesses. The problem is so bad that nearly three quarters (72%) said they had considered leaving their jobs over it.

Half of those surveyed said a lack of cyber security specialists was their greatest problem, with ineffective technology taking second place (47%). Human error and insufficient budget were also found to be concerns, coming in at 40% and 41% respectively.

Despite 57% saying they were suffering from alert overload – with an average of 33 pieces of software in use per organisation – 65% said they thought more technology would help lift some of their burden.

Increased automation, in particular, is considered to be one of the most attractive solutions, with 86% saying their organisation would benefit from using this type of technology.

Ed Macnair, CEO of cloud security company Censornet, which commissioned the survey, said: «It’s no secret that companies of all sizes have been having a hard time finding qualified personnel to manage their often-overwhelmed security operations.»

«Until now, humans have been limited by their inability to see across multiple point products and correlate information – without huge amounts of manual work.

«Automating activity such as repetitive low-level tasks usually undertaken by a human can free up limited analyst resources to focus on more advanced tasks, helping to close staffing and expertise gaps and also help stave off cyber fatigue. It is taking the security industry beyond events and alerts and into 24×7 automated attack prevention.»

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View from the Airport: Citrix Synergy 2019


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

24 May, 2019

«Enterprise software sucks today, and we’ve really failed our employees»; these are the words of Sapho co-founder Fouad ElNaggar, parroted by Citrix’s CEO David Henshall during the company’s main keynote address on day one of Synergy 2019.

When Citrix bought out the six-year-old micro-apps platform for $200 million in 2018, the significance hadn’t been fully realised. But in Atlanta, we learned more than anything that ElNaggar’s vision for a massively heightened ‘employee experience’ has been injected directly into the heart of the virtualisation company.

The previous 12 months for Citrix have been at times uncertain and at worst torrid. The spectre of a monster 6TB data breach hung over the company throughout Synergy 2019 because executives left it unaddressed. A blog was published the day before but added little to what we already knew. It was only through conversations with the firm’s chief digital risk officer Peter Lefkowitz Cloud Pro was able to gain a sense for how Citrix has tried to learn and move on.

While Citrix didn’t so much dazzle, the company did put forward a defined vision that borrows from elements of its past while, by-and-large, feeling fresh enough from its executives’ perspective, to get excited about.

A major problem business faces today is that the majority of workers are disengaged. Henshall cited research claiming this figure is as high as 85% The reason? Well, enterprise software ‘sucks’. It can be functional but frankly looks like it should belong in a CRT monitor.

The company has pivoted towards improving the user experience (UX) for employees and slashing the time they spend on tasks like filling out expense claims. This chiefly manifests as a host of ‘intelligent experience’ improvements to its flagship Workspace platform, with the ultimate goal being to return one day per week to workers.

To get there, Citrix is stealing user interface (UI) ideas from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which the firm concedes is pulling well ahead of the enterprise space. Never-ending newsfeeds, notifications that demand your attention, and single-click buttons are making their way into business software to keep employees switched on in their work lives. This element of consumerisation, according to Chris Marsh, research director at 451 research, is not novel but a much-needed idea that hasn’t yet caught on.

«Enterprise software has been woefully bad at engaging its users,» Marsh told Cloud Pro. «What Citrix is trying to counter is the fragmentation of work across the multiple apps employees are using and all the context switching and productivity losses that result in.

«It’s of course in its interest to have users spend more time in its Workspace but it has a decent rationale as to why a single plane centralising otherwise diffuse and siloed information is necessary and could provide a good experience.»

But assuming there’s truth to this «disengagement epidemic», to what extent would revitalising clunky UIs make up for other workplace bugbears? I’m thinking along the lines of bad colleague relations, a nasty commute, or the nature of the work itself? Even on the software front, this model can’t solve everything.

«Lightweight, task-based actions it’s pitching its micro-apps as solving are just a fragment of the kinds of work the typical employee has to do,» Marsh continued. «It might be problematic if that’s all Workspace natively enables, i.e. you’d be having to go to its micro-apps for some things, yet everything else still happens within other apps.

«I suspect however that through partners and it’s micro-app builder strategy it’ll widen out what can be intelligently surfaced from other apps into the cards.»

Citrix has shifted through several guises in previous years, and ironically even pitched itself as a «new breed of security company» just two years ago. But, with a great dose of inspiration from the startup it acquired last year, the Citrix of 2019 appears to have finally stumbled upon what it believes is a roadmap for building the ‘future of work’. Time will tell whether it gets lost on the way.

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New figures show increasing Chinese influence across Asia Pacific cloud markets

Amazon may still have an iron grip on cloud infrastructure across all geographies – but in Asia Pacific (APAC) at least, Chinese cloud providers are closing the gap.

That’s according to a new study from Synergy Research, which argues the top three players in China are now in the top six across APAC as a whole. Alibaba is ranked at #2, while Tencent is at #4 and Sinnet at #6, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google filling the odd numbers in that order.

Across China, where local business reigns supreme, it may not be a surprise to note that the top six players are all local. Baidu sits just outside the medals, with China Telecom and China Unicom rounding off the six. For the rest of APAC, however, positions four to six are held by Asian vendors, but only one of them Chinese; Alibaba (#4) is followed by Japanese firms Fujitsu and NTT.

The analysis makes for an interesting exploration of market drivers across the Asia Pacific region. As far as budgets go, Synergy notes that China is ‘by far’ the largest country market and is growing ‘much faster’ than the rest of the region. Tencent, while not in the top six for the rest of APAC, is noted to be ‘moving beyond its home market.’ Synergy rates Alibaba as the seventh largest player taking into account both public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). For the former, it would evidently be higher, if Gartner and other Synergy research is anything to go by.

According to the most recent analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), this time last year, China ranked a lowly #13 in cloud readiness, with only Vietnam stopping it from propping up the table altogether. Naturally, issues such as connectivity and sustainability scored poorly given the vastness and disparity of the country. Freedom of information was another weakness.

As Synergy noted this time last year, Alibaba had moved into second place across APAC. Yet while the potential is there, a bumpy road lies ahead. IDC argued in July that the vast majority of Asia Pacific organisations remained early in their cloud maturity with either ‘ad hoc’ or ‘opportunistic’ initiatives most likely.

“While China remains a very tough proposition for the world’s largest cloud providers, the Chinese cloud providers are riding on the back of huge growth in their local cloud market,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Language, cultural and business barriers will cause some of those Chinese companies to remain tightly focused on their home market, but others are determined to become major players on the global stage.”

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