Top Cloud Computing News in February 2018

February 2018 was a short but eventful month in the cloud computing industry. From Microsoft taking a new approach to recruiting startups onto Azure, to Oracle quadrupling their data center footprint, read on for all the cloud computing news that caught our eye this month.

Microsoft Recruits Startups

Microsoft made a smart move in mid-February, announcing their new tactics for recruiting startups onto the Azure public cloud. Instead of throwing money at them (ahem, Google), Microsoft realized that the power of the Microsoft go-to-market ecosystem, was actually much more valuable. The new Microsoft for Startups program offers to help startups sell their products through the Microsoft sales team, and connects them with alliance partners and potential investors. The catch? The startup has to be hosted on Azure, of course. To date, Azure has had limited success attracting startups to their cloud computing, especially as compared to AWS and Google, will this new move turn the tables?

My prediction is that yes, this will make Microsoft a more attractive platform for startups, although I don’t imagine them eclipsing Google or AWS anytime soon. In today’s Venture Capital climate, many startups have more money than they know what to do with, so help with sales, marketing, and alliances may seem way more attractive than a $100k cloud credit. Will Google and AWS quickly follow suit? Likely yes, but their GTM engines are much less mature and can’t rival Microsoft.

Will Alibaba Be a (Real) Global Cloud Computing Contender?

The Alibaba cloud computing unit announced their fiscal third quarter revenue in early Feb, claiming $553 million in quarterly revenue, with 104% growth YoY. Sure, this pales in comparison when looking at AWS’s $5B in their latest quarterly earnings, but their growth can’t be ignored (compare to AWS’s 45% growth). Keep an eye on Alibaba, I’m starting to hear more and more about them from customers, primarily due to their lower cost offerings and their expansive presence in APAC. Also, it was only a few months ago that Gartner ranked Alibaba #3 in market share for public cloud services (above Google!). Sure, they have a long way to go in terms of maturity, and I’m not sure enterprises will ever be able to stomach the idea of storing data in a cloud that the Chinese Government allegedly has a giant stake in. What remains to be seen is can they make a significant dent in the global market.

Oracle Quadruples Data Centers for Cloud Computing Business, Does Anyone Care?

According to the often hilarious semi-satirical publication, The Register, Oracle is building 12 new data centers to support their growing cloud computing business (they operate four data centers today). But is it too little, too late to get a piece of the IaaS pie? Oracle groups together their IaaS and PaaS business in their reporting, and their latest reported quarterly revenue is a mere $396M, with 21% growth. Oracle isn’t the only one making big data center investments, last year, AWS, Microsoft, and Google combined spent $41.6B on data center builds, and the Wall Street Journal predicts we’ll see even more investment by 2019. Oracle simply has too much ground to make up, and lacks a compelling value proposition for anyone to switch over to them.

Amazon Buys Ring for Smart Doorbells

Ok, we’re getting a little out of the realm of pure cloud computing news with this one, but this acquisition caught my eye. Amazon recently acquired Ring, the smart doorbell maker. This was right around the time that Google’s Nest announced their foray into the smart doorbell space. This also sparked Amazon to discontinue selling Nest products on their site. I feel a vicious war over home automation brewing and I can’t wait to see what happens!

*I also take a personal interest in this, having just built myself a smart doorbell with an Amazon Dash button and a Lambda function (code can be supplied on request!) that texts me when someone rings the bell, circumventing the need for my dog to lose her mind when the bell rings.

Did Apple Ditch Azure?

Apple is one of those mysterious companies when it comes to cloud. Do they run it all in house? Do they use one of the established big cloud players? Will they even start offering their own public cloud service? (CloudHealth guessed that they might back in early 2017.) We get hints here and there as to their backend, and ZDnet recently uncovered an interesting clue. According to the popular tech publication, in the 2014 iOS Security Guide, the company stated that some files were stored in bot Amazon S3 and in Microsoft Azure.

Fast forward to the 2018 guide, Azure is no longer listed as a supporting partner, and instead lists Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform. As a former storage nerd, I see some sense in this: GCP offers much more advanced and cost effective object storage options than Azure. But what happened to all that data on Azure? Did Apple undertake a massive and expensive data migration over the past 4 years? I will share any updates in this cloud computing news series in the unlikely event that word gets out.

2% of S3 Buckets Aren’t Write-Protected

Lastly, to end this blog on a positive note (just kidding), a recent research report from French cyber-security company HTTPCS found that 5.8% of all S3 buckets are publicly readable, and then 2% are also publicly writeable. The publicly readable stat at 5.8% is not incredibly concerning, as there are valid reasons to have a publicly readable bucket. (Although, I’m sure there are plenty of buckets in this stat that aren’t meant to be readable, but we’ll glaze over that for a second.) But publicly WRITEABLE? This gives write privileges to anyone who can access the bucket, inside or outside your organization. That is bad news. At best, you might have your files ransomed, at worst, someone could write malicious code to your bucket. This means the constant terrible stories of S3 data leaks are likely going to take a darker turn, and potentially to include broader data corruption or data loss.

Amazon is bringing out new tools to help detect and remediate these risks, but in order for them to work, you HAVE TO USE THEM! So start looking now in your environment for those readable and writeable S3 buckets, and fix them now. Or if you’re investigating a more long term solution like increasing visibility and control over your cloud environment, there are Cloud Management solutions designed to help in this case.

That wraps up the top industry news in February 2018! Join me next month for the latest and greatest happenings in all things cloud computing.

Originally published at www.cloudhealthtech.com.