According to a report from Verizon, enterprises are increasing their average monthly cloud spend by 45% with cloud environments becoming “more mainstream”.

The overall sense from the Verizon report, which was conducted between January 2012 and June 2013, was that the enterprise cloud was becoming more and more critical to business strategy.

Cloud-based storage capability went up by 90% during this time, with cloud-based memory usage increasing 100%.

The report examined the current state of the...

More than two in five (45%) of respondents to a Spiceworks survey admit they are using cloud networking tools in their business, or are going to push forward with it within 12 months.

The survey results, of 500 IT professionals, were collected in a report entitled “The Cloudification of the Network”, produced in association with cloudy networking solutions provider Pertino.

Of course, the more cynical and world-weary CloudTech readers will have worked out the message in this survey given...

Talkin’ Cloud has come up with its yearly Talkin’ Cloud 100, comprising a century of cloud’s best and brightest players. And, in a fiercely competitive field, it was Salesforce.com who came out on top of this year’s list.

Salesforce beat Amazon into the silver medal position, with Microsoft, Oracle and Google completing the top five.

Admittedly, it says something about the strength of the ecosystem where SAP (6th) didn’t make the top five and Workday (11th) the top 10. Terremark,...

It’s been one of the biggest stories of the summer. The battle for a lucrative CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) cloud computing contract between IBM and Amazon has featured attack, counter-attack, and all manner of legalistic name-calling as the two giants battle out for federal cloud supremacy.

While most of the talk has been in the sanctity of legal offices, a lawsuit from Amazon against the Federal Government, made public this week, reveals the true extent of the imbroglio.

The story so far: the CIA initially...

Rackspace Hosting has announced a new offering for its Managed Virtualisation Service hosting a VMware environment, entitled ‘Dedicated VMware vCenter Server’.

This is an interesting change, given how Rackspace’s most recent focus has been on OpenStack technologies instead of VMware.

Currently, the Managed Virtualisation service offers partial accessibility to vCenter’s features, but not full management capabilities. The theory, according to Rackspace, is that the dedicated environment...

Company execs have long since worked out that the cloud can be beneficial for all manner of industries, from the faster moving technological sector to the more glacial banking and healthcare divisions.

The charity, or Third Sector, is no different, according to a report from exponential-e entitled “Third sector reaches for the cloud”.

Yet it needs to be pointed out that the revolution has still got a long way to go. Whilst 42% of respondents said their companies had used software as a service...

You can’t move at the moment for surveys advocating the importance of hybrid cloud strategy – and this latest one, from Rackspace Hosting and conducted by Vanson Bourne, is no different.

60% of IT top brass see the hybrid cloud as the bright, shiny future for IT operations, with a third of that number (19%) completely integrated, compared to only 41% who are partially hybrid-oriented.

The primary reason for hybrid adoption over pure public cloud systems was more control, according to 59% of those...

Research from Quocirca in conjunction with CA Technologies has revealed that opinion on cloud services in Europe is still fiercely divided.

The Quocirca report divides respondents into three potential categories; ‘enthusiasts’, ‘avoiders’ and ‘blockers’, and found that overall 57% of those polled were ‘cloud positive’.

In Europe, 22% were considered enthusiasts, for whom “cloud is the future for much of [their] IT requirement”, whilst a further 35%...

The Cabinet Office has announced that the fourth iteration of the UK government cloud, G-Cloud 4, is open for business and is accepting submissions from suppliers for its Invitation to Tender (ITT).

Various improvements have been made to the ITT, according to Cabinet Office spokesman Peter Middleton. These include clearer application instructions, for suppliers both new to G-Cloud and for those previously on the ii and iii iterations.

The launch and timetable were posted on the UK government

According to a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the repercussions of PRISM means that, over the next three years, the US cloud computing industry can lose from $22bn to $35bn due to reneged market share.

Anyone hoping this is a brand new piece of research may be slightly disappointed, although they’re not entirely wrong either.

Last month, CloudTech reported on a survey from the Cloud...

NASA’s roadmap towards utilising cloud computing needs a serious rethink, according to an official report from the space agency’s Office of Audits (OA).

In a 38-page report, the OA criticises NASA’s cloud strategy in terms of governance, risk management and security, concluding that “weaknesses...impeded the agency from fully realising the benefits of cloud computing and potentially placed at risk its information stored in the cloud.”

Currently, NASA spends about $10m of its...

For offshore service providers, analyst house Gartner has provided a warning shot: ensure you’ve got a strategy to the cloud mapped out, otherwise your long term future will be at risk.

With public cloud services gradually gaining acceptance in the marketplace – the analyst house predicts the public cloud market will hit $180bn by 2015 – this represents something of an upswing.

This is all powered by Gartner’s influential

Software defined networking (SDN), as well as moving “beyond the cloud”, are two of the seven technology trends which will change the game for enterprise, according to the latest industry report.

For companies looking to take the next step and move ahead of the competition, establishing a sophisticated digital strategy is paramount. This much we already know of course, but IT consultancy firm Accenture has gone a step further and noted the trends underpinning it – with SDN featuring...

IBM’s partnership with Cloud Foundry will certainly go down as one of the bigger announcements in the cloud computing space this year. But what will it mean on a wider scale?

IBM and Pivotal have announced collaboration on the open platform as a service (PaaS) Cloud Foundry, pushing forward to establish open governance in the PaaS community – in other words, allowing companies total freedom to write software applications running in the cloud.

“Cloud Foundry’s potential to transform...

The after-effects of PRISM means that companies are much less likely to use US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), according to a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance.

56% were less likely to use US-based providers, with one in 10 going as far to say that they’d cancelled a project which used US CSPs as a result. Only 3%, interestingly, said their confidence in US vendors had increased.

It’s noticeable that, from the vendors’ perspective, their confidence had not been diminished. 64%...

As all eyes were on Australia in the Asia Pacific cloud computing space, New Zealand has taken a similar leap through the Institute of IT Professionals NZ (IITP) and published an updated cloud policy, called the Cloud Code.

The v2.0, released today, has two key agreements for all potential signatories: no cloud washing, and upfront disclosure of cloud products and services.

New Zealand’s cloudy code of practice was first developed in 2011, in partnership with the major CSPs, so it could be argued that...

Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action.

16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of...

With software defined networking (SDN), the network as we know it, along with the way businesses use computing processes, could be changed beyond all recognition.

And Brocade is at the very heart of that shift, being founder members of OpenFlow and OpenStack and pushing ahead with technologies that ensure its customers are SDN-ready.

Separating the data and control planes, SDN, as the name suggests, puts a layer of software between the components a network runs on and the network admin running them, leading...

Handle the hybrid cloud with care, but get to grips with it quickly to make sure you don’t miss out.

That’s according to a survey from SAP of 52 CIOs in conjunction with Wakefield Research, which comes to the conclusion that hybrid has various advantages, which even non-hybrid users can appreciate.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that SAP would be advocating this line; when CloudTech was present at its UK & Ireland Forum earlier this month,...

Companies are failing to update their software, meaning that because of the strain being put on old data centres, they suffer debilitating network outages on a weekly basis.

That’s the verdict from Brocade, whose latest research found that one in three businesses suffer “multiple” network downtime instances per week. Further, more than nine in 10 (91%) of IT decision makers admit that they have to ‘substantially’ upgrade their infrastructure in order to keep up with the demand of...