A new research report from cloud identity management provider Okta has revealed that nearly four in five (79%) UK IT decision makers are looking to increase the amount of cloud applications in their company through the coming year.

Yet the report, entitled ‘Identity Management in a Cloud and Mobile World’, also found that data security remains a concern of cloud adoption for seven in 10 organisations.

Not altogether surprisingly, the report from an identity and access management (IAM) firm focuses...

When SAP announced its fourth quarter financial results last month, the focus from analysts and the media was on one particular aspect.

Never mind a fourth consecutive year of double digit growth, or a 69% increase in full revenue on its HANA platform. Everyone’s eyes turned to the mid-term outlook, and specifically this titbit: the company has revised its target of between €3bn and €3.5bn revenue in cloud, as well as its 35% operating margin target, from 2015 to 2017.

“SAP anticipates...

Patrik Sallner, the CEO of Finnish database proprietor SkySQL, wants to make something clear. His company’s latest product, MariaDB Enterprise, was not designed with a certain Redwood-based relational database provider in mind.

“We’re not specifically targeting Oracle or anybody else here,” he tells CloudTech. “We’re just making an offering available which we clearly know there’s a strong demand for.”

This appears to be the company line, although other tech outlets, from

Cloud computing services and technology is on the cusp of mass adoption by the legal industry, according to a report from LexisNexis.

Nearly three quarters (72.4%) of firms surveyed said they were more likely to use the cloud this year, with adoption levels among attorneys in smaller firms hitting 40% - a number which is 10% higher than previous surveys.

This consensus is so grounded that, for the majority (38.7%) of the over 275 respondents, cloud systems will overtake on-premise in the legal profession...

Only a quarter of CFOs are planning to move into cloud accounting in the next five years, according to a survey from chartered accountant firm William Buck.

The survey, which covered CFOs in Australia and New Zealand, painted a cautious picture of cloud adoption among the accountancy sector. 12% of firms currently use cloud accounting, with a huge 64% saying they’re not looking at moving into the cloud by 2018.

“While the cloud accounting media drum has been beating for some time, many CFOs are...

IBM has today announced a $1.2bn (£735m) commitment to “expand its global footprint”, building data centres to cover all geographies and financial centres.

“Today’s announcement is another major step in driving a global expansion of IBM’s cloud footprint and helping clients drive transformation,” thundered Erich Clementi, IBM global technology services SVP in a statement.

IBM plans to open 15 data centres in the coming year, to add to its 12 already deployed and the...

Cloud storage provider Box is offering 50GB’s worth of free storage for users who sign up to its service in the next month – twisting the knife further into rival Dropbox, whose service went down over the weekend.

Dropbox hit the skids after what VP of engineering Aditya Agarwal described as a routine server upgrade, with a bug installed on active servers bringing down the show.

While Dropbox was at pains to insist that everyone’s files were...

Tech giants Verizon and Oracle have announced a partnership whereby customers can use Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware on Verizon’s cloud.

“This deal represents two market leaders coming together to create a compelling cloud offering that will help enterprises succeed in a highly competitive market environment,” Oracle president Mark Hurd trumpeted in a statement.

He added: “Combining Verizon’s unique enterprise experience and capabilities with Oracle’s best in...

Sony has announced PlayStation Now, a service which allows gamers to stream a variety of PlayStation titles across a range of devices without a console in sight.

The announcement was made at CES, with games from Sony’s previous three consoles being utilised and the service available on the PS4, the PS Vita, as well as Sony’s Bravia TV sets.

The technology for PlayStation Now came from Gaikai, a company which streams high-end video games. Gaikai was bought by Sony in July 2012 for $380m, a clear...

Hong Kong has launched the Government Cloud Platform, joining an array of countries with established cloud computing initiatives.

Yet the scheme, named GovCloud, is different from the US and UK initiatives as it is only for internal government use.

“GovCloud is the government’s first major private cloud computing initiative and is important central information technology infrastructure with full cloud computing functions,” a spokesman for the Office of the Government Chief Information...

IT growth in 2014 will exceed 2013, but it will be another year until we see “strong” growth in the global tech market, according to the latest report from Forrester Research.

The paper, entitled ‘A Better But Still Subpar Global Tech Market In 2014 And 2015’, pretty much does what it says on the tin, predicting that business and government IT purchasing will increase 6.2% in US dollars in 2014, aside from purchases of telecommunications services.

This is a “distinctly better” return...

The past couple of weeks have seen a variety of updates from players looking to up their cloudy stake in China, including Amazon and IBM.

Now China Unicom has joined the race, offering a service called Wo-Cloud, according to a report from Web Hosting Daily.

According to the firm’s president, Lu Yimin, China Unicom will focus on the IaaS and PaaS area.

“China Unicom will rely on its advantages in...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to extend its presence in the cloud services market by opening up a Chinese region.

The company cites “thousands” of customers in China who currently uses AWS’ services, including the likes of Xiaomi, NQ Mobile and Papaya Mobile, and is looking to expand through partnerships.

Partnerships include various local providers, including ChinaNetCenter and SINNET to provide infrastructure and ISP services, with “a select group” of China-based and...

Microsoft has announced the Cloud OS Network, a global group of over 25 cloud service providers who will deliver services on the Microsoft cloud platform.

The providers include the likes of CGI, Dimension Data and NTTX, and is a concerted play from Microsoft to enable more usage of its Windows Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering.

“This announcement represents important progress against our goals and strategy for Cloud OS,” Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft cloud and enterprise marketing corporate VP...

Tech giant Oracle has announced corporate sponsorship of the OpenStack Foundation, clearing the path for integration between the open source software and its various clouds.

The Redwood firm plans to integrate a huge amount of its products into the OpenStack technology, including Oracle’s virtual machine, its infrastructure as a service, as well as its Exalogic elastic cloud, its storage and its compute cloud.

Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, said in a statement: “Oracle is...

IBM has developed technology which will allow clients to move data between clouds and backed up whilst avoiding the dreaded vendor lock-in, it has been claimed.

A press release on the IBM website explains how the Armonk firm’s patent pending invention enables a “cloud of clouds” theory – the idea that a series of clouds can offer greater protection against outages and data loss than any single cloud.

This is alongside a software...

Cloud healthcare specialist ClearDATA has announced the conclusion of its series B round of funding to the tune of $14m, expanding its opportunities to provide cloud technology in the health industry.

The company, which describes itself as “exclusively dedicated” to healthcare in the cloud, has a solution which is approved by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and serves over 300,000 healthcare professionals.

The investors in the second round of funding included usual...

It’s that time of year again, with every analyst firm falling over themselves to predict what will happen in IT during the next 12 months.

IDC is no different, issuing the first of its 2014 predictions earlier this week with a straightforward claim: all the big players will make increased investment in cloud, mobile and big data because of the huge emergence of the “third platform” for IT management.

The term ‘third platform’ relates to the technology built on the pillars of...

Google has announced general availability of its Compute Engine IaaS platform, with the search giant aiming to play alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in infrastructure as a service.

The service was available to developers and as a preview for companies to sign up back in May. Now, it’s been fully launched – and the Mountain View giant hasn’t set the bar too high with a 99.95% SLA.

CloudTech readers will know full well the issues with

The latest report from Synergy Research has claimed that Amazon Web Services’ quarterly revenues continue to be greater than its biggest rivals combined in IaaS and PaaS.

Amazon grew by 55% between Q212 and Q213 to over $700m of revenue in the quarter, with Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Google combined making over just $600m.

John Dinsdale, of the Synergy Research Group, noted that the battle for second place will be of more interest to analysts.

“We’ve been analysing the IaaS/PaaS markets...