With digital video content creation going viral and assuming the bulk of Internet traffic, how can the deluge of video content be analyzed effectively to derive insights and ROI? After all, video is not only huge in size, but it is complex given various visual, audio and temporal elements. Video summarization (a mechanism for generating a short video summary via key frame analysis or video skimming) has become a popular research topic industry-wide and across academia. Video thumbnail generation and summarization has been developed for years, but deep learning and reinforcement learning is changing the landscape and emerging as the winner for optimal frame selection. Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are improving the quality, aesthetics and relevancy of the frames to represent the original videos. Attendees will gain an understanding of the various challenges facing the industry today, emerging AI-powered solutions around video summarization and how unsupervised learning can help deliver video content understanding.

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There has been a movement recently about finding security-related issues earlier in the development and deployment pipeline. It’s about catching security issues before things hit the fan. :)In this talk, we will talk about what it means to shift left from the container security point of view. Financial benefits and ROI of the shift left security model. We will also discuss some practical examples and best practices to shift security further left for Kubernetes/containerized environment.

As the world moves towards adopting containers, security remains one of the top concerns for the IT teams. In this talk, we will talk about what has changed with containers in terms of attack surface, and how to secure your fully containerized or hybrid semi-containerized environment.

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At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

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DevOps is a world surrounded by information, starting from a single commit and ending in roll out to production. In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the world of Taboola DevOps data collection, to better understand what goes on under the hood.

The system we’ve developed in-house helps us collect and analyse the entire DevOps process from the very first commit all the way to production.

It provides us a full clear view with a drill-down toolset that helps keep us away from the dark side.

Our KPI’s moved from being abstracted ideas to data driven goals, which we can measure and act upon.

We’re living in a data driven world when all business components are based on our clients action and reaction, why not doing the same thing within our DevOps eco-system?

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Knative allows developers not only to address the challenges of using managed services, but also they can jump into the serverless world easier without specific expertise of Linux containers, Kubernetes, or cloud infrastructure platform. But what does this really look like if you’re, say, a Java developer? What’s the full developer experience?In this session, I will walk you through the beauty of Knative, via a live demo, in terms of developing the modern app on Spring Boot, building Linux containers, deploying it superfast, and scaling down to zero automatically along with workloads. In the end, you will feel better how cool Knative is for developers to make it more comfortable, easier, and quicker to run serverless cloud-native apps.

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Robert Irvine

Google is synonymous with search and, according to recent figures, is the search engine of choice for more than 89% of UK web users. Bing, in comparison, claims a measly 7% share (it’s more popular in the US), but for certain searches you may find its results are just as good – if not better – than Google’s.

To compare the two, and potentially double the quality of your searches, you can use a service that combines them. There used to be loads of these, but the best remaining one is SearchBoth, which lets you search Google and Bing (or Yahoo, which also uses Microsoft’s search engine) simultaneously, and displays the results side by side.

Search left (Bing) and right (Google) simultaneously to get the best possible results

You can search web pages, images, videos and more, and click the Split Screen Lock button at the top of the page to give both search providers equal weight.

Alternatively, the Chrome extension Double Shot Search lets you search Bing and Google at the same time directly from your browser toolbar or address bar.

Read Outlook email in Gmail – and vice versa

There was a time when you had to either pick a webmail service and stick with it, or keep switching between them, but the two most popular email providers have overcome their rivalry to work happily together.

You can read and reply to your Outlook messages in your Gmail inbox

To read messages from your Outlook account in your Gmail inbox, click the cog in the top-right corner, choose Settings and click the ‘Accounts and Import‘ tab. In the ‘Check mail from other accounts‘ section, click ‘Add an email account‘, type your ‘@outlook.com‘ address and click Next. Enter your Outlook password and click Add Account. If you want to import old Outlook messages and contacts into Gmail, click ‘Import mail and contacts‘ on the ‘Accounts and Import tab‘ and follow the steps. On the same page, you can also set up Gmail to send (and reply to) email from your Outlook address, when necessary.

Sync your Gmail account with Outlook to read everything in one place

To read your Gmail messages in your Outlook inbox, click the cog icon in the top-right corner, select ‘View all Outlook settings‘, ‘Sync email‘ and, under ‘Connected accounts‘, click Gmail. Choose how you want to connect your Gmail account – as read-only or to send messages from, too – then sign in and click Allow.

If you get a server error when trying to connect in either direction, ensure that your account is set up to allow POP access – this option can be found on the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP‘ tab in Gmail, and the ‘Sync email‘ page in Outlook.

Sync Google Drive files with OneDrive

Like money and happiness, you can never have too much backup, and there are big benefits to storing your important files in more than one cloud storage service. Not only does this make them easier to access and share, but it safeguards you against accidental deletion, file corruption and account lockout, and the generous amount of free space offered by Google Drive (15GB) and OneDrive (5GB) means you don’t need to pay for peace of mind.

MultiCloud syncs your files automatically between Google Drive and OneDrive

To save you uploading files twice to both services, you can sync and manage your accounts through an online service called MultCloud, which is free to use but also offers premium features for $9.90 (£7.80) per month. Sign up with MultCloud, then click the ‘Add Cloud Drives‘ option on the left-hand side of the home screen, choose Google Drive and grant the service access to your account.

Click ‘Add Google Drive Account‘, then repeat the same steps for OneDrive. Next, click ‘Cloud Sync‘ at the top of the page, select Google Drive and OneDrive and either choose the folders you want to sync data between or sync the whole drives. You can decide whether to sync both ways, so that any file you add to one account automatically appears in the other, or one-way only. The free version of MultCloud lets you transfer 50GB of data per month, and also supports Dropbox, Box, Mega and many more.

Merge your Google and Outlook calendars

It may be the case that you started to use Google Calendar but, after hearing about the equally excellent platform offered by Microsoft, you’ve since decided to switch over to Outlook or manage both simultaneously. Fortunately, this is easy to do without needing to enter all your events, birthdays and other data from scratch. In the ‘My calendars‘ section of Google Calendar, click the three-dots icon next to the calendar you want to view in Outlook and select ‘Settings and sharing‘. On the Calendar settings page, choose ‘Export calendar‘ to save your data as a ZIP file, then extract the ‘.ics‘ file from this.

It’s easy to import all the data from your Google Calendar into Outlook

Next, open your Outlook calendar, select ‘Discover calendars‘ in the left-hand menu and choose ‘From file‘. Browse to the Google Calendar ‘.ics‘ file on your hard drive and click Import to add it to your Outlook calendar. Annoyingly, you can’t export calendar data from Outlook into Google Calendar, so this trick only works one way.

Open documents in rival office suites

Microsoft’s default file format for documents created in its Word Online tool is its own ‘.docx‘, which means that when you add a Word document to Google Docs it won’t open as an editable file. Instead, you can either double-click the document and choose Google Docs from the ‘Open with‘ menu, or right-click it in your drive and select the option there. Google makes it much easier to download your documents in a Word-compatible format – just go to File, ‘Download as‘ and select ‘Microsoft Word (.docx)‘ or ‘Rich Text Format (.rtf)‘.

You can easily open Word documents in Google Docs – and vice versa

Similarly, you can open Excel spreadsheets by choosing ‘Open with‘, then Google Sheets, and download Sheets spreadsheets in ‘Microsoft Excel (.xlsx)‘ format.

Enterprise computing environments are increasingly complex with employees taking full advantage of mobile and cloud applications to work from a wide range of network environments and physical settings. Cloud-native tools within Azure and other platforms, including familiar faces like SCCM and Intune, can be used to keep your enterprise application stack updated and compliant to industry regulations like PCI-DSS or GDPR. Learn how to implement and automate the tools available within your cloud platform of choice to ensure mobile and desktop users alike are secure, compliant, and functional 100% of the time.

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Google has claimed that the number of its cloud deals exceeding $1 million has ‘more than doubled’ over the past 12 months in what it called a ‘strong’ year – yet remained reticent in disclosing details over run rates.

The company’s fourth quarter and fiscal year results, published late yesterday, saw Google’s ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $6.49 billion (£4.99bn) for the most recent quarter, representing a 30% increase from this time last year. Indeed, this quarterly figure was a 39% uptick from Q318. Total yearly revenues across the business went up 23% to $136.8bn.

“Google Cloud closed out [a] strong year with momentum across the business,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts in an earnings call. “Our focus on helping customers digitally transform their business is paying off.”

Here’s what we know from the call:

• Google has ‘more than doubled’ the number of both its $1 million cloud deals and multi-year contracts signed, while the number of blockbuster $100 million deals has also risen
• Google’s cloud arm saw the most new employees in this quarter for both technical and sales roles
• More than five million paying customers have signed up for collaboration tool G Suite

Yet responding to an analyst question, Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat did not go into more specific detail on Google’s cloudy revenues. “In terms of growth, cloud does continue to deliver sizeable revenues growth driven by [Google Cloud Platform] and GCP does remain one of the fastest-growing businesses across Alphabet,” said Purat, before emphasising the deals already outlined.

The biggest news by far from the most recent quarter was the departure of Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene after three years in the role, with Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian taking over. As Greene put it in her farewell letter, upon taking over in 2015 Google Cloud had ‘two significant customers and a collection of startups’, with the enterprise push ongoing.

Some have argued this push has not been fast enough, from analysts to former employees. In October Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, argued the company’s two biggest mistakes during his tenure were dallying over the enterprise market and focusing too much on Amazon and Microsoft.

As Hermelin and Greene both noted, however, Google’s focus on machine learning was where it could differentiate. “There is an important long-term investment that lays the groundwork for our future computing needs, primarily to accelerate machine learning across our businesses – but also to support the opportunities we see in cloud, search, ads, and YouTube,” Pichai told analysts.

Nevertheless, a clear theme from the earnings call was around clearing the fog of obfuscation around its ‘other’ revenues. Amazon gives its AWS revenues clearly, as does Alibaba for Alibaba Cloud, while Microsoft gives percentage increases if not total specifics around Azure.

According to Synergy Research, in its figures analysing all the major cloud players for the most recent quarter, Google holds 7% market share alongside IBM. Amazon continues to hold more than one third (34%) of the market, with Microsoft a clear second on 15% and Alibaba on 5%. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all increased market share over the past 12 months – though Synergy noted IBM’s focus differs given its strength in hosted private cloud services rather than public IaaS.

“Q4 tops off a banner year for the cloud market with the annual growth rate actually nudging up from the previous year, which is an unusual phenomenon for a high-growth market of this scale,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research.

“The rate at which the market leaders continue to expand is really rather impressive,” added Dinsdale, noting this continued performance has forced the analyst firm to review and increase its five-year market forecast. “Inevitably there will be a few road bumps along the way, but these will be minor relative to the factors that continue to drive the market.”

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

By Matt Piercy, VP and general manager, Zscaler EMEA

The business IT environment is changing rapidly and, as a result, today’s CIOs have to tackle a number of big challenges. 20 years ago, applications and data were stored on an individual’s computer. Today, cloud-delivered applications, services, and infrastructure are transforming business processes, services, and models.

Cloud transformation has turned what was once a predictable and tightly controlled ecosystem upside-down. In the midst of all this change, CIOs are under pressure to improve employee productivity, encourage standardisation throughout the organisation, and ensure any changes that are implemented drive cost savings. Indeed, CIOs have a big job on their hands as they attempt to recognise the importance of—and embrace—new technology that will help streamline business operations and keep the company competitive, while saving IT significant amounts of time and money.

Here are four key steps of a cloud transformation journey, and how CIOs can navigate these steps successfully:

Global collaboration

Improved collaboration is making its way into the CIO strategy, which isn’t surprising given the competitive advantage collaboration can bring. Creativity, innovation, and communication need to take place across the board. If a business doesn’t have the ability to share information and work amongst global teams, it is missing out on opportunities. Think of the ideas and knowledge that, if shared, could increase efficiencies, reduce costs, boost sales, and reduce customer churn. Collaboration is at the heart of today’s cutting-edge business, and CIOs need to ensure their technology encourages and simplifies collaboration at all levels.

Cloud security

Organisations everywhere are being challenged to reduce costs while increasing productivity and performance. To meet these challenges, CIOs are adopting a cloud-first strategy that utilises software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Motivated by the idea of migrating apps to public cloud providers like AWS and Azure and benefiting from increased accessibility, business productivity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, cloud migration seems to be a relatively straightforward way of enhancing performance and reducing costs related to hardware inventory and maintenance.

However, the success of a cloud-first strategy is dependent on tools that make a company cloud-ready. Legacy hardware appliances within offices and branches have limitations which are quickly reached when relying on them to support cloud use. These limitations can leave a company vulnerable in terms of security and stifled performance. CIOs can overcome this challenge with a unified cloud security solution with a full range of security controls that enable both secure internet access and secure remote access. With visibility into all traffic that’s moving across the network, CIOs can gain insight into every request—by user, location, and device around the world—in seconds.

Mobility

The number of employee-owned and managed devices, also known as BYOD, being used for work continues to grow each year. According to recent research, BYOD and enterprise mobility in Europe is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 17 percent by 2023. The benefits of BYOD are well known. Not only does it enable and maximise a productive workforce, but it saves money by eliminating the need to buy individual employees their own devices. By allowing workers to use devices they enjoy and are comfortable with, BYOD also increases employee satisfaction. 

Bringing mobile devices into the workplace does, however, put pressure on CIOs to secure these devices as they access the internet, SaaS, and internal applications. Securing traffic to different types of apps is often complex for IT and forces end users to actually think about the location of apps and how to access them, which falls short of the seamless experience users have come to expect. CIOs need to ensure they are able to enforce security and access policies, regardless of device, location, and application.

Internet-first

Last on the list is an internet-first approach. The rapid proliferation of cloud services and SaaS applications is ultimately leading all businesses to rethink their traditional approach to web security. Moving to the cloud increasingly requires CIOs to create secure, direct-to-internet connections. As such, they are embracing software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to drive network simplicity and reduce costs.

SD-WAN works by simplifying how traffic is routed in the branch, which makes it easy to establish local internet breakouts. Software-defined policies are used to select the best path to route traffic connecting the branch to the internet, cloud applications, and the data centre. By defining policies for all branches, organisations can easily deploy new applications and services and manage policies across many locations. CIOs need to make sure they are able to prioritise critical applications such as Office 365 over the likes of YouTube and streaming media, and that they have the ability to leverage multiple branch connection types, including broadband, LTE, and VPN over broadband, to allow a seamless user experience.

Recognising the importance of globalisation and shifting to more mobile-, cloud- and internet-based workloads, all the while navigating network and security challenges and concerns, is a common balancing act for today’s CIOs. However, by successfully taking these steps, CIOs can streamline business processes, enhance the user experience and, ultimately, boost business productivity.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

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