Microsoft Office 365 usage continues to accelerate significantly across organisations of all sizes while Google’s G Suite languishes in comparison, according to new figures from Bitglass.

The cloud access security broker (CASB), in its 2018 Cloud Adoption Report, analysed software usage of more than 135,000 companies globally and found Office 365 continues to rule the roost.

56.3% of the more than 135,000 companies analysed were users, compared with only a quarter (24.8%) for G Suite. The latter has...

Google has clambered into the leaders’ section of Gartner’s latest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, while the wheat has been separated from the chaff.

The annual report concluded that the cloud IaaS market is now a three-horse race in the top right box, with the leaders’ zone not being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft-only area for the first time since 2013.

Indeed, Gartner hacked away many of the fringe players for the latest Quadrant. Only six companies...

If you want to challenge the leading cloud infrastructure providers, you are going to need some seriously deep pockets. According to the latest figures from analyst firm Synergy Research, hyperscaler cloud capex spending hit a record $27 billion (£20.1bn) in the most recent quarter.

The top five spenders in the industry remain Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, with Alibaba, IBM, JD.com, NTT, and Tencent comprising the top 10.

Google kicked off the quarter by announcing

One in four respondents to a survey from IT community Spiceworks say they remain unconvinced by cloud storage security – with Microsoft OneDrive holding firm as the most popular service.

The study, which polled more than 500 respondents from organisations across North America and Europe, found more than half (51%) are currently using OneDrive, compared with 34% for both Google Drive and Dropbox, going down to 13% and 6% for Apple iCloud Drive and Box...

Microsoft Azure, like many other cloud service providers, have built their billing and subscription models on a pay-per-use basis, i.e., if you use one hour of CPU time you pay for the hour you have consumed. No more, no less.

This basic economic principle forms the foundation of most public cloud services. However, the implementation of this simple concept can be quite complex and intricate. This is especially true if the...

Amazon and Microsoft have joined IBM and Google in reporting its quarterly numbers – and the good news just keeps on coming for the hyperscalers and the cloud market in general.

Amazon announced total revenues of $51 billion (£36.9bn) in the first quarter, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing $5.4bn (£3.94bn), or 10.6% of all revenues. This compares favourably with this time last year, AWS hitting $3.66bn of total revenues of $35.7bn in Q117, with AWS passing $5bn for the first time

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the acquisition of London-based RedPixie to further bolster its cloud consulting expertise.

RedPixie’s vision, in the company’s own words, is ‘to go beyond technology, building and managing Azure hybrid solutions for clients in financial services.’ The company was founded in 2010 and comprises a team of business consultants, cloud architects and data scientists.

The acquisition will fall under the remit of HPE Pointnext, the...

Microsoft’s latest Azure update has managed to cover two of its more recent trends with the announcement of new regions for Australia and New Zealand.

The company has already this month focused on expanding its geographic footprint, as well as beefing up its

Microsoft continues to expand its data centre empire, with new locations in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates planned, the company has announced.

The expansion takes Azure to 50 regions worldwide, with other data centres in the works including South Africa and Australia. The UAE data centres will be the first inroads Microsoft has made into the Middle East, with the company citing its ‘long-standing expertise and deep local relationships’ in the area to accelerate technological...

Microsoft has beefed up its government cloud offerings, launching government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

Microsoft 365, which comprises Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Azure Stack, which extends Azure to on-premises environments, are being upgraded as Microsoft acknowledges faster acceleration of government organisations moving to the cloud.

“This move is driven largely by the desire...

Enterprise cloud spend is on the up while Microsoft Azure gains ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud report.

The study, which polled almost 1,000 respondents, found that Azure enterprise adoption was at 58%, gaining around on AWS with 68%. For organisations who have just begun their cloud journeys (below), Azure leads AWS, in 49% and 47% implementation respectively.

Look out Box, Dropbox and Google – Microsoft is offering free OneDrive to customers of its cloud storage rivals in an attempt to poach them.

The move was announced on an official Microsoft blog yesterday. The company will offer free OneDrive for Business to Box, Dropbox and Google customers with a couple of caveats; the organisations must not currently be OneDrive for Business or Office 365...

Microsoft continues to cite the cloud as the key to its success; the company has posted revenues of $28.9 billion and operating income of $8.7bn for Q218, an increase of 12% and 10% respectively.

While the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, saying its revenue has gone up 98%, its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – which focuses on Azure and server products, saw revenues of $7.8bn, an increase of 15% year over year, while the ‘productivity and business processes’...

It’s been another exciting year in the cloud computing space. From blockchain, to AI, to containers and microservices, the technological developments have made for interesting reading – as well as the continued pushes by the leading companies in the ecosystem.

Below, CloudTech has put together five trends which shaped 2017, featuring some of the biggest stories of last year, as well as a series of predictions from executives on what they expect from 2018.

2017

The AWS/Azure competition – with Alibaba and Oracle on...

Amazon won’t have the cloudy news agenda all its own way this week: Microsoft has announced a partnership with SAP which aims to ‘provide enterprise customers with a clear roadmap to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud’, as the companies put it.

The move will enable organisations to run SAP’s private managed cloud service, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on Microsoft Azure, as well as some internal use cases; Microsoft will deploy SAP S/4HANA on Azure for its internal...

Microsoft’s recent announcement and product update aimed at helping customers migrate from their VMware environments has, unsurprisingly, not gone down very well with the virtualisation giant.

On Monday, as announced in a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft will announce Azure Migrate, a free service, will become broadly available to all Azure customers. The key use case, and one which Corey Sanders, Azure...

It may be holiday season in the US – but two companies who probably won’t be on the same Thanksgiving table are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. The two largest public cloud providers appear to have crossed paths again, this time over security giant Symantec.

Late last night, AWS issued a missive announcing that Symantec has chosen the Seattle firm as its ‘strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud workloads’.

According to the press materials, Symantec...

United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate which builds and services products including aerospace engines and elevators, is going to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure in a strategic partnership.

The company says one of its core tenets is ‘giving employees the digital tools and capabilities to work in new and different ways at market speed.’ As a result, Microsoft technologies are set to be used in a variety of UTC businesses.

Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace manufacturer under the UTC...

Chevron is making Microsoft Azure its primary cloud provider as part of a seven year partnership with the Redmond giant.

The energy corporation added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies. According to Chevron CIO Bill Braun, the company saw Microsoft as a good fit because of its global reach.

The move is especially key because of the bountiful amounts of data energy companies, among others in similar...

Amazon and Microsoft have posted their most recent financial results, and again both have delivered with a focus on cloud.

Amazon posted total revenue across all segments of $43.74 billion for the quarter with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing just over 10% of that at $4.58bn. The AWS revenue represented at 41% increase from this time last year.

Microsoft posted total revenues of $24.5 billion – and while the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, the company’s ‘intelligent...