Commercial cloud service (especially SaaS) customers find security provisions inadequate Gartner reports, with contracts often bearing ambiguous data confidentiality maintenance terms. 

Such lack of transparency leads to dissatisfaction among cloud services users, and makes it more difficult for service providers to manage risk and defense risk position with auditors and regulators. 

According to the analyst 80% of IT procurement professionals will remain dissatisfied with SaaS contracts until at least 2015. 

Thus Gartner suggests cloud service users ensure SaaS contracts allow for annual security audits and 3rd party certification, with an agreement termination option should the provider fail on any material measure in the event of security breach. 

Cloud buyers should also ask providers to respond to findings from assessment tools such as the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Cloud Controls Matrix.  Read more...

IBM admits it is the subject of a governmental probing-- one by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding how Big Blue counts the numbers for its multibillion-dollar cloud computing services division. 

The probe kicked off on May 2013 and IBM is reportedly cooperating in the matter, even if it stands by its accounting practices. 

"IBM's reporting of cloud revenue is the result of a rigorous and disciplined process, and we are confident that the information we have provided has been consistently accurate," a company statement claims.  Read more...

IBM teams up with VMWare-EMC spinoff Pivotal in the further development of Cloud Foundry, the open source cloud-agnostic Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) kicked off by VMWare in 2011. 

“Cloud Foundry's potential to transform business is vast, and steps like the one taken today help open the ecosystem up for greater client innovation,” the company says. “IBM will incorporate Cloud Foundry into its open cloud architecture, and put its full support behind Cloud Foundry as an open and collaborative platform for cloud application development, as it has done historically for key technologies such as Linux and OpenStack.”

The IBM-Pivotal partnership already has a first result-- WebSphere Liberty Core, a lightweight version of the IBM WebSphere Application Server running on Cloud Foundry to enable less complex, rapid web application development and deployment.  Read more...

According to a Microsoft-commissioned IDC study partners who generate 50% of revenues from the cloud enjoy higher gross profit, more customers, increased revenues per employees and faster growth. 

Specifically the study claims cloud-oriented partners see x2.4 faster growth, x2.4 higher new customer mix and generate 30% more revenue per employee compared with noncloud-oriented partners. 

"Cloud alone hasn't caused these impressive numbers, though that is absolutely part of it; top-performing partners were visionaries that took on cloud technologies before their peers," IDC says. "We're at the point in the industry's overall cloud transition where partners that don't move some of their business to the cloud likely won't survive." Read more...