​Welcome to the tenth issue of IT Pro 20/20, our digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

The coronavirus has forced every single company to re-evaluate how they do business. Strategies, verticals, and even the way employees work have all been disrupted, and the tried and tested products and services that have likely come to define your business may be in jeopardy.

It’s important to remember, however, that disruption is not inherently a bad thing. Being forced to reshape your business to fit the current climate presents an opportunity to demonstrate resilience. Businesses have spent months in damage mitigation mode – it’s now time to grow once again.

In this issue, we show that a business is only as agile as the data centre it relies on, and how new designs that embrace cutting-edge computing are providing the flexibility businesses need to enter new markets quickly. We also assess the volume of options available on the cloud market and whether this is causing fatigue for customers. You’ll find a handy guide to managing all the various risks associated with employees working outside the company firewall, and a run-through of some of the technology your business should consider investing in to really hit the ground running in 2021.

We appreciate you taking the time to download IT Pro 20/20, and we hope you enjoy this month’s issue.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Monday 30 November – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has struck an agreement with the UK government to accelerate the public sector’s digital transformation drive, boost digital skills and raise the level of participation among smaller cloud providers.

The ‘One Government Value Agreement (OGVA)’ is a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) between AWS and the Crown Commerical Service (CCS) that spans two tiers for both smaller and larger organisations. 

Cloud services will become available to the public sector as a single client, offering more cost savings for deployment against organisation-by-organisation deals. AWS will also establish a digital skills fund, which will train more than 6,000 civil servants in cloud computing free of charge.

The first tier supports organisations at the beginning of their cloud journeys, allowing them to conduct their first cloud projects with support such as bespoke training, workshops, and “cloud credits” for new research projects. The second tier, aimed at larger organisations already well underway in terms of using cloud services, offers various additional services they can take up and advantageous pricing structures. 

“CCS provides commercial agreements which help organisations across the entire public sector save time and money on buying everyday goods and services,” said chief executive of the Crown Commercial Service, Simon Tse. 

“This agreement with AWS demonstrates excellent value for the public sector organisations we serve, and supports them in their drive to improve services for citizens across the UK.”

This is an agreement in the same mould as those struck earlier this year between the government and major cloud providers such as UKCloud, Google Cloud, and Oracle.

IBM, for example, struck an agreement that would allow public sector organisations to benefit from ‘preferential commercial terms’ when moving their workloads to the cloud. HPE, meanwhile, struck a deal with the UK government to provide hybrid cloud services on a pay-per-use model. 

In addition to the skills find, the AWS agreement specifically contains an element that hopes to encourage the uptake of services by smaller cloud providers and AWS partners. More than 150 members of the AWS Partner Network would be able to pitch their own services to public sector organisations, including many cloud-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). 

AWS has announced it will be launching a new Europe region in Zurich, slated for opening in the latter half of 2022.

Zurich will be the firm’s eighth region in Europe, alongside those Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, and Spain.

AWS currently has 77 Availability Zones across 24 regions worldwide with today’s announcement bringing the total number of global regions (operational and in the works) up to 27. AWS has already announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland, Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

AWS said that the new region will give Swiss customers the ability to run applications that must comply with strict data sovereignty requirements in Switzerland. It will also enable customers to run apps from data centres in the country, lowering latencies in applications across the region.

«For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organisations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs, and transform their operations,” said Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support at AWS.

«AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative startups, and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country.”

AWS opened its first Swiss office in Zurich in April 2016 and in 2017 it announced an Amazon CloudFront Edge Location and Direct Connect location in Zurich as well as a second office in Geneva.

AWS said it would continue to build up a team of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services to help customers in the country move to the cloud.

Microsoft Teams users will soon be able to hold interactive meetings with up to 1,000 participants.

The update, which was first announced in August, is now scheduled to become available in December 2020. It will allow users to add up to 1,000 participants in a meeting, allowing greater online collaboration across enterprises as numerous countries, including the UK, head for another lockdown.

Users will also be able to hold Teams meetings for 1,000 participants while also enabling up to 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience.

According to Microsoft’s 365 Roadmap, the feature is currently «In Development» and will be ready by the end of the year.

Users will be able to access the feature using the Advanced Communications add-on which was launched on 1 August 2020. The license costs $12 (£9.28) per user a month and is available as a free trial for 60 days.

With a 20,000-participant capacity, the plan made it possible for large enterprises to host meetings for the entirety of their staff, allowing Microsoft to take advantage of the heightened demand for video conferencing.

Microsoft Teams general manager Nicole Herskowitz said that the tech giant put emphasis on users’ meeting experience when developing the capability, «making sure that even as the meeting scales it is still easy to manage and listen to the speakers”

«Therefore, we limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants, with a seamless shift to a ‘view only’ mode after the limit is met,» she added.

Microsoft Teams has enjoyed an exceptional increase in popularity since the start of the pandemic, as many organisations moved to remote working environments due to lockdown restrictions.

On 28 October, Microsoft announced that the platform’s number of daily active users surpassed 115 million, a staggering increase of 95 million since the year prior.

Commenting on the announcement, corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said that the growth «reflects the continued demand for Teams as the lifeline for remote and hybrid work and learning during the pandemic, helping people and organizations in every industry stay agile and resilient in this new era”. 

Google Chrome is losing its share in the browser market to Microsoft Edge for the first time, according to new stats from NetMarketShare.

In its latest report for October 2020, Chrome usage decreased from 69.94% in September 2020 to 69.25% a month later.

At the same time, Edge increased from 8.84% to 10.22%. It is thought the increase may be because of Microsoft promoting Edge as part of its latest Windows 10 20H2 update with a taskbar ad that urges people to use the browser.

The report also found that Firefox gained a little ground on Chrome, edging up from 7.19% in September to 7.22% a month later.

In its operating systems report NetMarketShare found that Windows 10’s market share increased from 61.26% in September 2020 to 64.04% in October. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 share also decreased from 22.77% to 20.41% over the same period. Apple’s macOS 10.15 also declined from 5.11% to 4.88%.

Seperately, NetMarketShare signalled that it would be “retiring” its browser market report in its current form as an upcoming change in browsers will “break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time”.

It added that as it has focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process, but noted that “as time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day.”

It added that Netmarketshare will “re-emerge at some point with a focus on ecommerce trends and verifiable user data”.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of this year increased by 33% to $33 billion, according to new research from an analyst firm.

Figures from Synergy Research Group showed that the year-on-year growth rate for Q3 was higher than the 32% growth seen in the previous quarter. This, said analysts, demonstrated the health of the market.

The research found that Amazon and Microsoft continue to account for over half of the global market, with Amazon’s market share staying at around 33%, while Microsoft’s share was over 18%.

Google, Alibaba and Tencent are all growing quicker than the overall market and are increasing market share, Synergy said. Together they account for 17% of the market.

The other cloud providers in the top ten rankings include IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT and SAP. In aggregate, the top ten providers account for 80% of the worldwide market, with the remaining 20% coming from a range of small cloud providers or large companies with only a small position in the market.

«While we were fully expecting continued robust growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising,» said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. «Total revenues were up by $2.5 billion from the previous quarter causing the year-on-year growth rate to nudge upwards, which is unusual for such a large market.»

He added that companies competing for a share of the market have settled into three camps: «Amazon and Microsoft are in a league of their own, while others are either aggressively seeking to grow their position in the market or are more focused on specific services, geographies or customer groupings,» he added.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $32.8 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $119 billion.

The research firm also found that Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 35% in Q3.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more distinct in public cloud, where the top five control almost 80% of the market. Analysts said that the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.