Cloud services are becoming practically ubiquitous – but according to the latest study from McAfee, one in four organisations who use the public cloud has had their data stolen.

The findings appear in ‘Navigating a Cloudy Sky: Practical Guidance and the State of Cloud Security’, a report which surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals around security concerns with private and public cloud services.

Usage numbers are as strong as one would expect – except for one. 97% of respondents...

Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong to be the number one cloud-ready Asia Pacific nation, according to the latest report from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA).

The two regions have swapped places since the previous analysis two years ago, with New Zealand retaining bronze medal position, and Japan and Taiwan overtaking Australia. While the latter has slipped a couple of places in the rankings, ACCA said it was still a ‘strong regional contender’ which performed well in most areas but was...

Cloud technologies are key to Hong Kong businesses according to a new report from SolarWinds – but containers, blockchain and robotics still have a fair way to go yet.

The findings appear in the company’s latest IT trends report, ‘The Intersection of Hype and Performance.’ The research polled 75 IT practitioners, managers and directors in Hong Kong – with the overall research quizzing more than 800 respondents across four continents – and found cloud and hybrid IT was the...

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud security is becoming top of mind for organisations – but many still persist with best of breed tools for both systems rather than combining into one ‘best of suite’ offering.

That is the key finding following a report from Santa Clara-based Cavirin Systems. The report, which polled more than 350 IT admins, IT decision makers and C-suite executives, found 81% of organisations currently deploy a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, with 11% only going on-premise and 8%...

Public cloud continues to go up and up: according to Gartner, the market will grow 21.4% in 2018 to total $186.4 billion (£131.4bn).

Almost 40% of this will come from software as a service (SaaS), with a quarter to come from what Gartner calls cloud business process services (BPaaS) – delivering business process outsourcing (BPO) – and 22% to come from infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

IaaS, however, will outstrip BPaaS by 2021 according to Gartner’s predictions. In three years total...

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...

Google has touted itself as the first public cloud provider to run all its clouds on renewable energy.

The company, which says it is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world – almost three times as much as Amazon and Microsoft, its primary cloud rivals – has been working to attain this goal for the best part of a decade.

With the belief that 2017 would be the year the ‘road to 100%’ would be completed, the company ramped up its efforts. 2016 saw Google’s...

Alibaba’s cloud expansion continues: the company has announced an expansion into Turkey alongside E-Glober.

E-Glober, the only authorised agent and business partner of Alibaba.com in Turkey, will provide their local connections and insights with Alibaba Cloud’s global infrastructure to ‘provide a compelling offering to meet the digitalisation and international expansion needs of local companies’, as the press materials put it.

Alibaba is pushing its Elastic Compute Service (ECS) with...

Microsoft has admitted the speed in which the CLOUD Act was enacted was ‘a bit of a shock’ – but added there was more to do to protect users’ privacy rights across borders.

The act, which stands for ‘clarifying lawful overseas use of data’, was signed into law two weeks ago and ultimately represents the culmination of a case which began four years ago concerning an email in Dublin.

During a drug trafficking investigation in 2013, Microsoft refused to provide details of an...

Oracle has announced the availability of enhanced UK cloud services promising customers ‘unprecedented levels of performance and availability’.

The company will expand its UK cloud region, which comprises three physically separate, high bandwidth and low latency sites, and will offer a range of Oracle PaaS and IaaS services, as well as the highly publicised autonomous database service.

To that end, the company rolled out a couple of satisfied customers; the National Grid, who said using...

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

Hosting provider GoDaddy is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) moving the ‘vast majority of its infrastructure’ over to Amazon as well as maintaining an active interest in containerised apps.

The move, announced by AWS, will see GoDaddy utilise various services, including Amazon EKS, its elastic container service for Kubernetes launched at the company’s re:Invent event at the end of November. Other services being used include P2, AWS’ general purpose GPU instances ‘to...

Larry Ellison praised Amazon for ‘inventing’ the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market – but with the announcement of the first service based on Oracle’s much-touted autonomous database, the company aims to go bigger and better than the IaaS behemoth.

At an event yesterday, Ellison announced the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud. As the company put it, the new product ‘delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of...

Another day, another earnings report where cloud is cited as the primary mover. This time it’s Red Hat, whose fourth quarter and full year revenues have gone up 23% and 21% year over year respectively.

Full year revenues were at $2.9 billion (£2.05bn) while fourth quarter total revenue was at $772 million (£546.4m). The company’s subscription revenue from infrastructure-related offerings was at $510m for the most recent quarter, representing two thirds of total revenue, while total...

Pivotal Software, the arbiter of the open source Cloud Foundry project and one of the many horses in Dell’s stable, has filed for an IPO worth a potential $100 million (£70.4m).

The S-1 filing revealed Pivotal posted overall revenues of $509.4m for fiscal 2018, at an increase of 22.4% from the year before, with subscription revenue exceeding services revenue for the first time at $259m.

The company said it had 319 ‘subscription customers’ – defined as companies who spend at least...

Organisations still believe their information is safer on-premise rather than in the cloud – and it’s a mindset that IT security firm Barracuda Networks wants to change.

According to the company, who polled more than 600 respondents around their experiences with cloud security, more than four in five (83%) said they were concerned about deploying firewalls in the cloud, while more than half (57%) of EMEA-based respondents said their on-premises security was superior to cloud.

When it came to the...

Those who attended Cloud Expo Europe earlier this week took their opportunity to assess the next level of cloud services, ranging from blockchain, to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

The cloud underpins these technologies and enables them to flourish, while as this publication has previously reported, the M&A cycle has been lit up by it. But what are some of the practical applications for...

Google Cloud has unveiled major security revamps to its portfolio, across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), G Suite, Chrome Enterprise, and more.

The company has made 20 announcements in total in conjunction with the CEO Security Forum in New York. GCP had no fewer than eight notes, with alpha services around security perimeters and cloud asset management the highlights.

VPC Service Controls aims to stop identity mismanagement, misconfigured policies and compromised virtual machines by creating a security...

Earlier this week, analyst firm Cloud Spectator published its latest report on combining price and performance in the cloud. In the main, its results mirrored previous studies; that the Amazons, Microsofts and Googles of this world may not be the best option for some organisations compared with the high performance, cheaper price specialists.

So what of the behemoths, and how are their...

Salesforce has announced the acquisition of application network platform provider MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, making it the largest acquisition in the company's history.

MuleSoft - which went public last year - offers a platform which connects SaaS and enterprise applications whether on-premise or in the cloud.

The company's role within Salesforce will be to 'power the new Salesforce Integration Cloud, which will enable all enterprises to surface any data - regardless of where it resides - to drive...