Good morning! Amazon is the “everything store.” So it makes sense that its AWS Marketplace offers the widest variety of options for independent service vendors.

The AWS everything store

AWS Marketplace debuted in 2012 with self-service Amazon Machine Images. Now, it’s the most mature cloud marketplace among the Big Three providers — and many software vendors see it as a crucial part of their go-to-market strategy, Protocol’s Donna Goodison writes.

• AWS Marketplace features more than 12,000 listings in more than 65 categories that are available in 25 regions.
• Some 325,000 customers transacted more than $1 billion in revenue through it last year.

The secret to the marketplace’s growth was a feature rolled out by AWS in 2017 called “private offers.” It allows SaaS companies to negotiate custom end-user licensing agreements, pricing, and payment schedules with individual customers.

• Before AWS introduced private offers, customers could take advantage of a self-service AWS Marketplace experience and buy prepackaged annual subscriptions on demand. But once they started using large amounts of software through the platform, customers wanted discounts on their purchases.
• Private offers brought them back to Marketplace, and it now facilitates six-, seven-, or even eight-figure transactions.

There's a huge benefit from the scale of AWS. Several software vendors told Donna that they’re happy to work within the constraints of the system — and tolerate the fees AWS charges — to tap into AWS’ vast customer base.

• Customers prefer the ease of billing through AWS Marketplace, according to software vendors interviewed by Protocol.
• It also helps speed transactions and the rate at which software vendors can cut through to customers’ procurement teams.
• Customers can take advantage of AWS Marketplace’s standard contracting terms governing software usage without having to independently vet software vendors whose products have already been subject to vulnerability scanning and useability tests by AWS..

If there's a concern, it’s probably discoverability. Some software vendors who spoke with Protocol haven’t had much luck landing new customers who’ve discovered their products through searches of AWS Marketplace.

• While there are category managers in areas such as security, networking, and storage, that can help software vendors better navigate the online store, not all software vendors get one.

Read more: AWS has a clear advantage among cloud enterprise marketplaces: It has the most customers

What’s next for Parler

Ye’s acquisition of Parler, the social media platform that’s popular with conservatives, could be completed by the end of the year, Parler COO Josh Levine told Protocol’s Hirsh Chitkara.

• “This transaction will get closed very quickly,” Levine told Protocol on Wednesday. “There’s nothing to stand in the way of that except that, you know, we just [have] to go through the process of assuring it’s done correctly.”.

The takeover may be a shot in the arm for Parler, which has been bleeding users. In the first half of 2022, Parler had an average of about 983,000 monthly active users globally, down from 6 million in the first half of 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported.

• But, in the three days since the news of the acquisition broke, Parler has seen four times more signups than in the month before, Levine said.

So what’s next? The plan is to continue expanding its user base by moving beyond politics and recruiting new users like musicians, athletes, and comedians to the platform, Levine told Hirsh.

• But the app may find its political image hard to shake, especially given the role it played in the Jan. 6 riots. The platform became a haven for right-wing extremism and was used for promotion of and recruitment for the insurrection.

• And Ye also seems to want to invite more politics onto the platform: After the deal went live, the rapper spoke to former President Donald Trump and invited him to join Parler, a move that he said he would reciprocate by joining Truth Social.

​VC, but for the creator economy

Becoming financially independent as a creator is hard. But a VC-style approach could help creators get big without relying too heavily on other streams of income, Protocol’s Sarah Roach writes.

Spotter gives capital to creators. Think of the business like music licensing, only this company acquires the rights to a creator’s catalog of existing and future YouTube videos in exchange for cash.

• Spotter is growing quickly. It’s given $600 million to creators as of late September and hopes to eventually dole out $1 billion by the first half of next year. Internally, it’s building its first office and has more than doubled its workforce.
• At least right now, Spotter is just working with YouTube creators because they have a predictable cash flow stream through ad revenue. “If other platforms like TikTok started to share their revenue or reward their creators in a way that helped us provide capital to the creators, we would be there,” Spotter CEO Aaron DeBevoise told Sarah.

This targets a big issue among creators: It’s hard to make a living off platforms alone without resorting to selling merchandise, working with brands, and exploring other potential revenue streams.

• Other companies are also offering solutions to this problem: Jellysmack and Karat Financial offer creators up-front capital to jumpstart their platforms, for instance.

And this type of funding could stick around, according to Investors and marketing experts.

• Scott Sanchez, who previously led global marketing at AWS and is now the chief marketing officer of software delivery firm Harness, said Spotter will exist as long as the creator community remains strong.

A MESSAGE FROM CIRCLE

USD Coin (USDC) is the institutional grade stablecoin. Monthly attestations show exactly what reserves back USDC, and businesses all over the world are using USDC to build the next generation of financial services and global payment applications.

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People are talking

Jeff Bezos warned of tougher times ahead for the economy:

• “Yep, the probabilities in this economy tell you batten down the hatches.”

But ASML's Peter Wennink said his company’s going to be fine in a recession:

• “What we've always seen in recession or downturn — that I've seen in the last 25 years — customers never cancel.”

The West could see an increased number of cyberattacks from China and especially Russia, said cybersecurity and geopolitics expert Dmitri Alperovitch:

• "[Vladimir Putin] is steadily losing territory, including territory that he has recently tried to annex. And that may mean that he's going to be much more willing to confront not just Ukraine, but also the West."

Tesla cut full-year growth expectations, but Elon Musk still expects Tesla to sell every car it makes for the foreseeable future:

• "The factories are running at full speed and we’re delivering every car we make.”

Making moves

Palantir is setting up a second U.K. headquarters, potentially in Leeds or Manchester, as it deepens its relationship with the NHS.

Leo Olebe is YouTube’s new head of gaming. Olebe held executive roles in Google Play’s games partnerships division.

Amit Sinha is the new CEO of DigiCert, a digital security company. He joins DigiCert from Zscaler, where he served as president.

Bento added several new execs: Cassie Jackson is its chief growth officer; Charlotte Ketelaar is chief of staff; and Marcus Davis is “advice evangelist” and business development representative.

Deliveroo is leaving the Netherlands after it concluded that achieving a big market share in the region would require a “disproportionate level of investment.”

It's not privacy vs. security anymore

In the last few years, the roles of privacy and security executives — and the budgets they control — have grown significantly as organizations have worked to stymie the growing threat of cyberattacks and navigate the ever-changing landscape of data regulation.

In this event we will explore how the chief privacy and chief information security officer roles will evolve and how each can support the other best when the company needs it most. Join us 11 a.m. PT Oct. 27. RSVP here.

In other news

Amazon's luxury devices come at a cost, The Atlantic writes. Surveillance is involved with all of these devices, which can deepen racial inequities and allow for troves of data collection.

Is the 9-to-5 really over? A new Slack survey found that employees with flexible schedules reported much higher productivity and ability to focus than people with set hours.

Women are leaving workplaces at higher rates than ever. Research shows they’re leaving for more than just a high paycheck at a different company, and want better workplace culture and DEI progress.

Waymo is expanding its robotaxis to LA, the company’s third city.

Major ISPs consistently offered slower base internet speeds in poor neighborhoods and communities of color when compared to more affluent, white neighborhoods, according to an investigation by The Markup and The Associated Press.

SpaceX is rolling out Starlink for private jets, offering customers a $150,000 airplane antenna to enable internet service.

Somewhat good news for the climate: Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to grow less than 1% this year, helped by the rise of renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Thanksgiving belongs to Amazon. It'll stream the first-ever Black Friday NFL game, in addition to the traditional Thanksgiving Day game, in 2023.

Does Netflix belong in theaters?

Inside Netflix, execs are divided on the best way to release a movie, The Wall Street Journal reports. Some want Netflix to experiment with a big theatrical release before allowing people to stream. Others stand by the current model, where movies might drop in just a handful of theaters for a short amount of time before becoming available on a streaming platform. There are pros and cons to both, but it all comes down to deciding whether the movie theater is going to buoy up or bring down streaming.

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Learn why institutions trust USDC at Circle’s Transparency & Stability Hub

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.

Every social media platform has its own approach to supporting influencers, from TikTok’s creator fund to YouTube’s advertising revenue. But there’s one growing company outside these platforms that’s quietly fueling the creator economy before creators even get big.

Spotter is like a VC for YouTubers. The company gives YouTube creators up-front cash to help them pay for expenses like travel and video equipment in exchange for licensing their back catalog. It’s given $600 million total to creators as of late September and hopes to eventually dole out $1 billion by the first half of 2023.

“It's amazing to see the evolution of a creator going to the place of, ‘This capital is going to allow me to realize my dreams and goals way faster than me doing it myself,’” Spotter chief operating officer Nic Paul told Protocol.

Homing in on YouTube

The concept for Spotter isn’t particularly novel; it’s essentially giving creators cash to help build a brand, or in this case a platform. Think of the business like music licensing, where an artist gives permission to use their music for different commercial projects in exchange for a licensing fee. Spotter acquires the rights to a creator’s catalog of existing and future YouTube videos in exchange for cash. Its portfolio of licensed content has generated over 40 billion minutes of watch time per month and reached over 1.2 billion subscribers as of February.

But getting a platform up and running — especially while working a separate job — is time-consuming and challenging, creators say. Spotter fast-tracks the process of growing big enough to run a platform full time.

Unlike a social media manager or brand agent, who would help creators make money from brand partnerships across platforms, Spotter focuses on supporting those on YouTube specifically. Paul and Spotter founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise said the company only supports YouTube creators right now because it has a predictive cash flow stream — largely from ad revenue — that allows Spotter to understand how much more money a creator needs to scale their platform.

“YouTubers also have a lot more potential as they grow,” DeBevoise told Protocol. “Think of it as, ‘Hey, I know as a creator if I did these five things, I can grow faster by hiring editors, building studios, and so forth.’ These are all things that the YouTube reward system doesn't or hasn't yet figured out how to help creators do.”

DeBevoise added that the company would help creators on other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, if those sites shared revenue in a way similar to YouTube. Creators have called on TikTok to develop a payment system based on ad revenue in the past, and YouTube just recently began sharing ad revenue from its TikTok clone, Shorts.

“If other platforms like TikTok started to share their revenue or reward their creators in a way that helped us provide capital to the creators, we would be there,” he said. “YouTube is just the main place at this point.”

Building Spotter’s team

Since its launch a few years ago, Spotter has landed deals with MrBeast, Like Nastya, Dude Perfect, and other top creators. And internally, it’s poached talent from social media companies including Meta and Netflix, has more than doubled its staff over the past year, and is building a 40,000-square-foot office in Los Angeles, where the company is based.

Spotter is increasing its investments in creators, too. The company dished out about $65 million by the end of 2020; distributed over $600 million since the company was founded; and hopes to have deployed close to $1 billion by the first half of next year. DeBevoise doesn’t expect that growth to stop because creators continue to return for second and third opportunities for investment.

“We're seeing people come back because the value of their new content is much greater than what they previously created,” he said.

YouTuber Lizzy Capri, who’s been working with Spotter for about two years, said the company has given her platform enough funding to help build a production team and pay for the live content she produces. Capri said the company also alleviates some of the burnout and isolation creators often feel by continually reaching out to her and others.

“Spotter is totally on another level of what they can provide financially,” Capri told Protocol, referring to other services that help creators make money like brand managers and funds. “And then on top of that, they're pushing for a more intangible value of creating a community.”

Fueling the creator economy

Spotter is part of a quietly growing contingent of startups that license back catalogs for creators.

Karat Financial, for example, launched in 2019 as a credit card for creators. A former Instagram product manager and a Lucky Capital investor started the company after noticing that traditional banks weren’t particularly interested in supporting creators, whose businesses are often seen as illegitimate. Jellysmack, launched in 2016, and Creative Juice, which began in early 2021, are also among Spotter’s competitors.

DeBevoise said Spotter stands out over its competitors because it’s been able to offer more than mere capital to creators. The company is planning a summit, for example, where creators can get together and learn from one another, and Spotter hosts regular dinners with influencers. The company can coexist with its competitors as well; Spotter and Jellysmack, for example, have both landed deals with MrBeast.

“I think we kind of nailed it, personally, the hyperfocus on an ecosystem that rewards its creators for their work, and then trying to enhance that, has really become a great formula for success,” he said. “Other businesses had been more like, ‘Hey, can we provide credit cards to creators?’ They have had a hard time really making a significant impact on a creator's life.”

Companies like Spotter and Jellysmack are relatively new, but Scott Sanchez, who previously led global marketing at AWS and is now the chief marketing officer of software delivery firm Harness, doesn’t see them losing steam anytime soon. He said a company like Spotter would only fade in the long run if the creator community begins to matter less. “I don't know if you're paying attention, but that doesn't seem to be the way the trend is going,” he told Protocol.

Sanchez said Spotter and other companies that license content are bringing an old model — seen in music and film — to a new medium, which in this case would be the creator space. The business model for creators may be even stronger than the ones for musicians because creators want every video to be a hit, whereas artists may only get a hit on one or two of their songs, he said.

“Your hits are your catalog,” he said. “They pay the bills. When you give those up, it’s really hard to have another hit taking a real gamble. Whereas with someone like MrBeast, his goal is that every single video he puts out is better and bigger and more successful than the last … so the risk of licensing your back content when you build the hit machine is much lower.”

He added that these companies shouldn’t try to replace the relationship between brands and creators; instead, they can offer a bridge between both sides where the brand can better understand the creator’s metrics and vice versa. “A lot of brands are going to want that and [a] relationship with the creator,” he said. “Getting that balance right is going to be important.”

AWS Marketplace debuted in 2012 with self-service Amazon Machine Images, but it wasn’t until five years later when the size of the deals consummated through the online store started to increase dramatically.

In 2017, a year after opening AWS Marketplace to SaaS companies selling prepackaged annual subscriptions for their business software built on AWS, the cloud provider introduced “private offers.” SaaS companies could now negotiate custom end-user licensing agreements, pricing, and payment schedules with individual customers.

Independent software vendors today see that option as a crucial part of their go-to-market strategy, particularly for joint customers who want to deduct their third-party software costs from their AWS cloud spending commitments and have all of the charges consolidated on their AWS bills. And unlike other ISVs trying to navigate the world of enterprise platform app stores, several companies told Protocol that they’re happy to work within the constraints of the system to tap into AWS’ vast customer base, even while gaining visibility with AWS’ internal sales teams can be challenging.

Private offers are the key driver for Stackwatch’s use of AWS Marketplace to sell Kubecost, its Kubernetes cost monitoring and management software, according to Alex Thilen, head of business development.

“On the line item, we get to do custom pricing for each customer,” Thilen said. “It can be negotiated, so it doesn't disrupt the sales cycle. Our teams still work with the customer directly, they do a [proof of concept], they align on pricing, and then we use the Marketplace for transacting.”

Stackwatch is among the more than 2,000 ISVs, 260 data providers, and 900 consulting partners selling their software, data sets, and professional services through AWS Marketplace. It’s the most mature cloud marketplace among the Big Three providers, and last year more than $1 billion in revenue was transacted through it, according to AWS.

AWS Marketplace features more than 12,000 listings in more than 65 categories that are available in 25 regions. Some 325,000 customers had more than 2 million active subscriptions purchased through AWS Marketplace last year, up from 290,000 customers and 1.5 million active subscriptions in 2020.

Five years ago, Chris Grusz’s discussions with software vendors centered on giving AWS Marketplace a shot.

“Now when I talk to a software company, it's all about, ‘OK, how do I do this better?’” said Grusz, AWS’ general manager of worldwide ISV alliances and AWS Marketplace. “It's really become an accepted way to sell software from an ISV perspective, and we're starting to see more and more customers just default to buying all their third-party software for their AWS environments through AWS Marketplace.”

Before AWS introduced private offers, customers could take advantage of a self-service AWS Marketplace experience and buy prepackaged annual subscriptions on demand. But once they started using large amounts of software through the platform, customers wanted discounts on their purchases.

“Those customers would invariably leave Marketplace, and they would go work directly with the ISVs and … buy directly,” Grusz said.

Private offers brought them back to Marketplace, and AWS subsequently allowed software vendors to authorize their consulting partners to make private offers as well.

“With the private offers, we started to see very big deals: six-figure, seven-figure-type transactions, now even eight-figure-type transactions,” Grusz said. “It's really changed the trajectory of Marketplace.”

With the private offers, we started to see very big deals: six-figure, seven-figure-type transactions, now even eight-figure-type transactions.

Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace have since added private offers as well, although for both, the feature didn’t launch into general availability until this year.

Billing made easy

Customers prefer the ease of billing through AWS Marketplace, according to software vendors interviewed by Protocol. That’s been the big benefit for Komprise, which sells its unstructured data management and mobility software on AWS Marketplace. It’s simpler for customers to work with Komprise through the Marketplace in terms of consolidating purchasing, billing, and budgeting, said Krishna Subramanian, Komprise’s co-founder, president, and chief operating officer.

“We sell to some pretty big enterprises, and if those enterprises already have a relationship with AWS, they can just buy our product like it's an AWS product,” Subramanian said. “It's the same contracting vehicle.”

AWS Marketplace helps speed transactions and the rate at which Stackwatch can cut through to customers’ procurement teams, according to Thilen.

“It really goes back to the procurement benefits, moving more quickly, reducing the procurement time and overall sales cycle,” he said. “When our sales team is engaged with a potential customer, then either that customer can request to buy via a marketplace or our sales team will bring it up proactively with customers, because we tend to see that those transactions close quite quickly because we're able to use AWS' billing and we don't have to be an approved vendor, and … they have terms that we're able to apply to our software.”

Customers can take advantage of AWS Marketplace’s standard contracting terms governing software usage without having to independently vet software vendors whose products have already been subject to vulnerability scanning and usability tests by AWS.

As AWS saw larger deals going through Marketplace, it also started adding more buyer-facing features such as Private Marketplace, which allows customers to build customized digital catalogs of approved products that their employees can buy from AWS Marketplace, instead of allowing them unfettered access to the entire store. AWS Marketplace Procurement System Integration, meanwhile, allows customers to integrate Marketplace with their procurement systems, including Coupa and SAP Ariba, to gain more control of their IT spending and centralized governance of purchase orders.

Software seller benefits

The pitch is simple: Software sellers benefit from AWS being the largest cloud provider. AWS leads the cloud infrastructure services market with a 34% share, followed by Microsoft Cloud at 21% and Google Cloud at 10%, according to the latest data from Synergy Research Group.

And software vendors who spoke with Protocol were fine with the fees that AWS charges for its AWS Marketplace transactions. While there is no fee to list a product on Marketplace, AWS takes a certain percentage off the top of each subscription sold.

We do not disclose our listing fees, but they get into low single digits for a variety of our ISVs.

AWS would not disclose its tiered fees, which are higher for self-service transactions than private offers. It further breaks down its fee structure based on whether deals are net-new or renewals, the latter of which come with the lowest fees.

“We do not disclose our listing fees, but they get into low single digits for a variety of our ISVs,” Grusz said.

Google Cloud Marketplace standardized its marketplace revenue share fee at 3% earlier this year, while Microsoft also cut its fees to 3%, from 20%, last year for its Azure Marketplace and AppSource enterprise app stores.

“For us, it's less about the fees,” Komprise’s Subramanian said. “It's really more about what makes it easier for our customers to do business with us.”

Likewise, the fees are not a concern for Stackwatch, according to Thilen.

“We're a young company, we're thinking long term,” he said. “We want to sign customers up. We want to close deals faster. If we pay a couple points and the deal closes much, much faster, that is well worth it to us.”

It’s the same for Kobiton, whose mobile testing platform has been listed on AWS Marketplace for a few months.

If we pay a couple points and the deal closes much, much faster, that is well worth it to us.

“This is just a channel to us,” said Brad Goldstein, Kobiton’s director of strategic alliances. “If there's a reseller like an Accenture, Deloitte, or Capgemini, they're going to take 20 to 30% typically. So 5% for a channel to procure quickly, to get something done efficiently with budget that's already there, to get paid efficiently … all those things [outweigh] anything, and I'll give them 5% all day for that.”

Discoverability pains

Some software vendors who spoke with Protocol haven’t had much luck landing new customers who’ve discovered their products through searches of AWS Marketplace, but they say that’s not their primary reason for joining it either.

“We've not really found that a lot of people find us in AWS Marketplace who didn't know us before,” Subramanian said. “If they could make it easier for new prospects to discover a Marketplace solution it would be very helpful, especially new B2B prospects.”

While AWS is marketing more of its Marketplace categories, Subramanian suggested that more content around discovering solutions, such as product reviews and demos, could help.

“It's also maybe the nature of the buyers that we're targeting,” she said. “They're bigger enterprises, and there's more personal selling involved.”

Registering deals with AWS can help, according to Kobiton’s Goldstein.

“Once you register deals, you get contacts, so you get the reps on those accounts,” he said. “If I were to register a deal with Electronic Arts, they already have reps at AWS. They would pair us up and now we have people to talk to who have sold to EA before, who've gone through the procurement process and can also kind of give us insight about the account overall.”

But, ultimately, Kobiton will remain its own primary lead-generation engine, according to Goldstein.

Stackwatch is a member of the AWS Global Startup Program and is enrolled in the ISV Accelerate Program, which matches software vendors with AWS sales teams for co-selling support.

“It helps position us with AWS field teams, and they're definitely strategic programs to be a part of,” Thilen said. “We are starting to see a healthy amount of leads. Those are not necessarily from AWS Marketplace itself, but from the broader AWS sales ecosystem. AWS sales folks bring us into customer conversations, and having a Marketplace listing has definitely helped that.”

With AWS Marketplace now falling under the jurisdiction of the AWS Partner Organization as of the first quarter of 2022, there are category managers in areas such as security, networking, storage, and data and analytics who can help software vendors better navigate the online store, according to Mona Chadha, director of category management for AWS Marketplace. Those subject-matter experts can identify software vendors creating game-changing products that AWS should continue to nurture, she said.

“There are others that may need some more help and better guidance on how to become successful and how to integrate with AWS services, etc., which will then help them innovate faster,” Chadha said. “Coupled with partner development managers who really know how to build the partnership and the alliances with these ISVs really creates this great team.”

But not all software vendors on AWS Marketplace get category manager coverage or partner development managers.

Getting customer leads from AWS depends on how closely a software company is aligned with the cloud provider and how compelling its story is, according to Goldstein.

“We haven't quite got there yet,” he said. “If we're … driving astronomical consumption, AWS will pay attention. Your ‘better together’ messaging has to be really compelling. The AWS reps … get paid on selling things into the Marketplace, but they want the big hits, they want the home runs.”

AWS also has an industry vertical ISV and data provider team that focuses on co-selling with priority software vendors and data providers whose primary intellectual property is buyers in specialized industry verticals, which are a key growth area for AWS. That team is working with partners including HERE Technologies, Halliburton Landmark, FactSet, Qiagen, IMDb, and Foursquare, which use AWS Marketplace to transact with customers at scale.

Copycats

Komprise is not worried about the potential for AWS to see how it’s faring on the Marketplace and launch its own competing product.

“In general, that can always happen anytime you're partnering with someone,” Subramanian said. “It's not specific to the Marketplace.”

AWS Marketplace data is “completely sealed off from the rest of AWS,” according to Grusz.

“The service teams that are creating AWS services, they're not allowed to see the performance of any individual ISV through our Marketplace,” he said. “Even if there's an ISV that has some overlap with an AWS service, they actually do very well in the Marketplace … because there’s all kinds of benefits that apply to our AWS customers, and it actually provides a leveling effect.”

Grusz pointed to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ infamous flywheel model and the concept that selection plays in the success of AWS’ parent company.

“People buy from Amazon, because it's the ‘everything store,’” Grusz said. “That concept of selection is now coming across to AWS in the form of Marketplace. We want [customers] to be able to find third-party software and buy that, because we know that provides a much better customer experience versus trying to prevent that and steer them towards something else.”

Good afternoon! In today's edition, we asked Braintrust members to tell us about the thorniest challenges related to managing data in the cloud and the best ways to get around them. Questions or comments? Send us a note at braintrust@protocol.com

Rob LeePure Storage

CTO at Pure Storage

Today’s organizations store and manage their applications and data across heterogeneous environments — from on-premises data centers to edge to public cloud environments. However, many often find themselves challenged with managing duplicate copies of data, unpredictable or uncontrollable costs, differences in storage performance, and capabilities across environments, and a lack of clear data governance and controls.

With applications and services spread across environments and without a clear data integration approach, data management becomes incredibly complex. For example, data is commonly transferred and loaded into multiple different environments, proliferating copies of data. These copies of data both widen governance and security challenges, but also exacerbate new cost challenges. As traditional IT organizations increase their in-cloud data footprint, they are often caught off-guard by unexpected and hard-to-predict forecast costs surrounding the usage of their data. While many are accustomed to thinking about costs of storage, costs of data access (e.g., transit and access charges, added fees for burst performance, etc.) are not typically encountered on-premises and require operational changes to manage. But cost control is not the only area often requiring operational or application changes — customers must often manage differences in data service availability, capability, reliability, and available performance levels.

Cloud infrastructure and platform services (IaaS, PaaS) offer the freedom and flexibility of the cloud operating model to IT organizations. Realizing those benefits in-cloud versus on-premises, however, requires awareness and diligent management of these challenges.

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David MeyerDatabricks

SVP of product management at Databricks

Poor data quality and data integration issues, coupled with a lack of data discoverability, are often some of the biggest challenges facing organizations today when it comes to managing data in the cloud. According to recent research from MIT Technology Review and Databricks, data leaders reported that their teams spend 41% of their time on data integration and preparation, and nearly every respondent (96%) reported negative business effects as a result of data integration challenges. Data can be a powerful tool, but if organizations are spending a disproportionate amount of their time cleaning, organizing and migrating their data instead of analyzing and taking action from it, the value is lost. Moreover, the effects can significantly impact the bottom line – with a lack of discoverablity for the right data, teams face massive data duplication issues and are far less productive with need for more manual data scrubbing. With this, decision-makers may unknowingly be relying on incomplete or inaccurate data.

Adding to this, many of today’s enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud approach, wanting the efficiency of cloud scalability without being locked-in with a single provider. This multi-cloud approach offers greater flexibility and resiliency in a data strategy but is not without challenges as data teams may need to reimplement workloads and data models between platforms and, ultimately, need the convenience of leveraging common data tools that can work seamlessly across each cloud.

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Bob MugliaEntrepeneur

Entrepreneur and investor

Data is moving to the cloud because it is an excellent place to store, manage, and analyze data. The cloud breaks down information silos that exist in on-premises computing, making it much easier to share data internally and with business partners and customers.

However, when you put all your data in one place, you also must implement safeguards that govern the use of the data — most importantly data access control. This has proven to be a challenge for technology vendors and for the organizations that are managing their data in the cloud.

The underlying problem is caused by SQL. The industry-standard database query language is a core element of the Modern Data Stack, which is the ecosystem of technologies that enable us to manage data in the cloud. But while SQL is great for business analytics, it cannot support the complex, graph-oriented relationships required for data governance. As a result, every governance vendor uses their own purpose-built database and there is no basis for interoperability. This makes it difficult build governance applications.

What’s missing? Governance of data in the cloud requires a shared database foundation that can support the graph-oriented relationships and queries. These products should all work together based on a common understanding of an organization’s business. The technology that promises to make this possible is a new type of database called a relational knowledge graph.

Modern governance requires interoperability. Relational knowledge graphs are emerging and they have the potential to provide an industrywide solution.

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Biba HelouCapital One

SVP of enterprise data platforms and risk management technologies at Capital One

The ability to make sense of great volumes of data from an endless number of sources has become paramount to a company’s long-term success. However, managing data in the cloud at scale is not without challenges.

Capital One migrated to the cloud and built new data management platforms to make the best use of its own data. Reflecting on our journey, we have identified some of the most common, yet most difficult challenges to avoid.

• Difficulty controlling costs: An increase in the amount, proliferation, duplication, and variable usage patterns of data make it difficult to control data costs. Data professionals must manage and track usage to understand where inefficiencies are costing money. An effective cost-optimization strategy can help manage spending.
• Lack of understanding data estates: Data analysts often feel lost trying to understand a complex data estate. Any confusion around access, ownership, intent, and relationships between data can lead to valuable data sitting dormant. A federated approach with centralized tooling and policy may help solve this lack of understanding.
• Confusing data governance policies: It can be challenging to track and enforce all of the data governance policies required. However, not all data is created equal, so not all data requires the same level of protection. Data platform owners should consider using a sloped governance approach, increasing governance and controls based on the data.

Ultimately, a comprehensive data management strategy is required to overcome these challenges and unleash the power of your data in the cloud.

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George KurianNetApp

CEO at NetApp

As the cloud is now the de facto platform for businesses today, one thing has become abundantly clear: Data management isn’t easy. Whether you have a single cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a multicloud environment, the challenges of data management are amplified in the cloud.

That’s because in the initial journey to cloud, most businesses have been faced with uncontrolled cloud sprawl that greatly increased the complexity of managing applications, data, and infrastructure in the cloud. They’ve experienced new silos for applications and data being created due to the disparate implementations or lack of application portability, telemetry, and cloud interoperability frameworks. Their security risks have increased exponentially, alongside cost management and containment issues, and they’ve had to deal with new challenges around data visibility, governance, control, and compliance.

Despite these challenges, we still see the cloud as the key to unlocking endless possibilities for most companies today. When cloud is fully integrated into your architecture and operations, and not just another walled garden, the cloud has the potential to live up to its full promise. Moving data, migrating, and deploying applications also becomes remarkably easy when your storage foundation is the same on-premises and across every cloud. With this approach, applications can pull data effortlessly from multiple clouds, data can move freely, securely and with consistency between clouds to keep business logic moving forward, and businesses can quickly adapt to deliver on the outcomes they need to in a dynamic and uncertain macro environment.

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​Sanjay PoonenCohesity

CEO at Cohesity

Data is currency in our digital-first world. With the increasing amount and value of data, the risks only grow exponentially. Cloud, data management and security are the top business imperatives the C-suite must closely manage to ensure business continuity.

Organizations can no longer afford to trade off security posture for innovation, especially as ransomware attacks become more complex and new privacy regulations continue to be implemented. Existing security standards have become outdated – traditional solutions are no longer cutting it and businesses are ill-equipped to respond to and proactively address vulnerabilities today. As more and more of the enterprise resides in the cloud, businesses must bring data management and data security together for a different approach that ensures business continuity. Organizations should consider how well integrated are vendors across the technology stack to ensure airtight security for managing data in the cloud.

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Deepak GoelD2iQ

Chief technology officer at D2iQ

As organizations are looking for a competitive advantage, they are building the most disruptive products by leveraging data. They are looking to capture more and more data to dynamically customize user experiences accordingly. However, this growing data poses some real challenges to the organization. These challenges range from finding appropriate storage, which is often split between cold and hot storage depending on the frequency at which that data is accessed, to securing and making it available to run analytics. And these challenges are outside of data engineering, which deals with cleaning, transforming, and making it ready for consumption. Data has gravity, which is to say it is really costly to move data from one location to another. It is much easier to move the compute closer to the data than moving the data closer to compute. However, most of the data gets generated at the edge near the end user, which poses a challenge in moving that data to the cloud or data center to train models. The solution is to adopt containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies. Containers package the compute in a portable, repeatable manner, Kubernetes helps run those containers closer to the data, and cloud native technologies provide necessary governance to manage the entire infrastructure from a centralized platform such that even if your compute is distributed, you still have centralized governance and you no longer have to deal with expensive data migration.

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Microsoft said Wednesday that an unspecified amount of customer data, including contact info and email content, was recently left exposed to potential access over the internet as a result of a server configuration error.

Cybersecurity vendor SOCRadar, which reported the data leak to Microsoft, said in a blog post that data belonging to more than 65,000 companies was affected. Microsoft, however, said in its own post that SOCRadar "has greatly exaggerated the scope of this issue."

Microsoft didn't disclose specifics around the number of companies whose data may have been exposed in the leak or the amount of data involved.

The server misconfiguration was reported on Sept. 24, and the impacted server was "quickly secured" after that, according to Microsoft. Due to the configuration error, there was a potential that certain "business transaction data" could have been accessed without a need for authentication, Microsoft said.

The data corresponds to "interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers," including around the planning and implementation of Microsoft services, the company said in its post.

Affected data may have included "names, email addresses, email content, company name, and phone numbers, and may have included attached files relating to business between a customer and Microsoft or an authorized Microsoft partner," Microsoft said.

SOCRadar said that a "single misconfigured data bucket" was responsible the exposure of the data of the 65,000 affected companies, which the company said are based across 111 countries. The leak amounts to 2.4 terabyte of data, including 335,000 emails, and it involves more than a half million users, according to SOCRadar. The files are dated between 2017 and August 2022, the vendor said.

Microsoft disputed SOCRadar's claims about the size of the leak, saying that an "analysis of the data set shows duplicate information, with multiple references to the same emails, projects, and users."

"We take this issue very seriously and are disappointed that SOCRadar exaggerated the numbers involved in this issue even after we highlighted their error," Microsoft said in its blog post.

The leak didn't involve any vulnerability since it was solely caused by the server misconfiguration, the company said.