The UK is making strides in the international cloud arena, according to the latest report from The Software Alliance (BSA), driven by strong data protection laws and cybersecurity strategy.

The alliance’s latest Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, a study which assesses cloud policies worldwide, puts the UK in fourth position out of 24 leading IT economies, behind only Germany, Japan, and the United States. This represents a significant improvement for Blighty compared with a ninth placed finish in...

Microsoft said earlier this week that government IT had reached a tipping point towards moving to the cloud – and now another large US contract is up for grabs.

During an Industry Day yesterday, plans were revealed by the Pentagon for the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) opened up for tender to any single cloud provider.

The key is in the word ‘single’: as reported

The joint cloud offering from VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now available in Europe, the former has announced, with London first on the list and Frankfurt to join in due course.

VMware Cloud on AWS, which offers benefits to joint customers including workload portability between private and public clouds, had previously been available in AWS’ US West and US East regions.

The service was only made initially available

It’s official: Kubernetes has hit the big time. According to a missive from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Google-designed, CNCF-maintained project is the first to ‘graduate’ from its foundation, throwing its mortarboard in the air in time-honoured tradition at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma Valley, California.

So what does this actually mean? Each technology adopted by the CNCF – of which there are 16 including Kubernetes – theoretically goes...

It has been an interesting week or so for Google Cloud, both directly and indirectly. The company has announced new APIs, updates and customers for its healthcare cloud initiative, while other high-profile customers have been disclosed.

At HiMSS, the healthcare information and management systems society conference, Google launched a new cloud healthcare API, which is better equipped to focus on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM, and also allows customers to crunch the numbers using analytics and machine...

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...

It’s a simple proposition for traditional companies in today’s tech-heavy marketplace: assess the prospects of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and more, or be left behind.

That is the verdict of mergers and acquisitions advisor Hampleton Partners in its latest report focusing on the tech M&A outlook up until 2020.

Back in August,...

It has been a busy couple of weeks for storage provider Cloudian. The company has announced $125 million (£90.7m) in funding, a short time after its most recent product release.

The funding round is being made alongside Digital Alpha Capital, a private equity firm focused on software as a service (SaaS) and eCommerce providers, with $100 million going on ‘consumption-model financing’ – or debt financing, as it is recorded in...

Dropbox’s IPO filing, confirmed late last week, makes for very interesting reading. For a start, it confirmed the rumours swirling around last month, as well as ensure the company won’t be making the next Forbes Cloud 100 list, having been ranked the second biggest private cloud firm two years running.

Yet more...

Hyperscale cloud and data centre operators spent $22 billion on capital expenditure (capex) in the final quarter of 2017 making the total for the year almost $75bn, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook comprise the top five spenders of the 24 major cloud and internet service firms analysed in Q417, according to the data, with growth ‘particularly strong’ at Amazon and Facebook. Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Tencent made up the top...

MWC Alibaba’s European cloud push continues, with the Chinese provider announcing a series of products for enterprises on the continent around infrastructure, automation, security and more.

The company has announced eight products in total. On the infrastructure side, launching today, are ECS bare metal instances and high performance supercomputing clusters for European customers. While these are both products currently in operation, April will see the new launch of Alibaba’s Cloud Enterprise Network...

(c)iStock.com/nastco

MWC Mobile World Congress 2018 will most likely not be overburdened by pure cloud news this year, so anything that does come this publication’s way is worth checking out: Amdocs has announced a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help cautious communications service providers (CSPs) transform their operations to become cloud-ready.

Amdocs cited a survey from Analysys Mason which found that within five years more than 90% of CSP systems will be on the cloud, with three fifths of those...

Multi-cloud continues to be on the agenda – this time, a collaboration between Cisco and Rackspace whereby the former will provide the latter’s customers with security protection for multi-cloud environments.

Rackspace will deploy high volumes of Cisco’s next-generation firewalls and integrate them directly into its services, according to Cisco. The managed cloud provider had previously served as a testing partner for Cisco’s ASA firewall series.

According to the most recent annual...

More companies are leveraging the power of APIs, but only a small minority has found a sustainable way to create and manage them.

That’s the key finding from API platform provider Jitterbit in its latest report. The study, titled ‘2018 State of API Integration’, found that of 450 companies surveyed, two in five (40%) had created APIs to expose internal data ‘as a service’ to both internal departments and external partners. More than half (57%) added that competitors in their...

Cloud computing usage continues to grow, but at the expense of security as attackers take advantage, according to the latest Cisco annual cybersecurity report.

The study, now in its 11th iteration, puts together threat intelligence and cybersecurity trends from researchers and six technology partners, and found more than a quarter (27%) of security professionals polled use off-premises private clouds. This is up from 20% this time last year.

Of that number, more than half (57%) say they host networks in the...

Inbound marketing software provider HubSpot is adopting Google Cloud to expand its international cloud infrastructure.

HubSpot will use the Google Cloud Platform Frankfurt region to provide outage and data protection, as well as support local customer data.

The company has long since been a customer of Google, particularly G Suite, with integrations for Google Calendar, Gmail, AdWords, Docs, and Drive being among the most popular among HubSpot users.

Kerry Munz, director of engineering and platform...

Hackers have been running crypto mining scripts on unsecured Kubernetes instances owned by Tesla, according to new research from security monitoring provider RedLock.

According to the study, which analysed public cloud environments monitored by RedLock – more than 12 million resources processing petabytes of network traffic – the unsecured Kubernetes pod exposed access credentials to Tesla’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. From there, the environment contained an AWS S3 bucket which...

Spending on public cloud services in the Asia Pacific region – excluding Japan – will hit $15 billion in 2018, representing an increase of 35% over the year before, according to IDC.

The findings show that while annual spending growth in the APeJ region will slow between the 2016 and 2021 forecast period, 2021 will see a total of $32.27bn. Spending on public cloud services this year will be driven by banking, with a spend of $1.85bn, ahead of professional services ($1.75bn) and discrete...

Storage provider Cloudian says it has achieved record growth for the third year in a row, with revenues up in every geographic segment and particular expansion in Europe.

The company’s results ‘point to the exploding need for scale-out storage solutions in an era when artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, high-resolution video and other data-intensive applications require businesses to manage data that is growing at an unprecedented rate’, in Cloudian’s own words.

Cloudian...

Juniper Networks has announced the launch of an expanded portfolio which includes helping organisations become ‘multi-cloud ready’.

The Sunnyvale-based network and infrastructure provider is including a variety of new offerings in the data centre, campus and branch aspects.

On the campus side – ‘recognising that campus networks will play an integral role in multi-cloud security and operations’, as the company puts it – the features include simplified management as well as...