Dropbox will make its password manager, ‘Dropbox Passwords’, available for free from next month. 

The feature was launched last year for paying customers but will be made available to anyone that has a Dropbox account, the company announced.

Dropbox Passwords generates unique passwords for new sign-ups and autofills credentials on apps and websites. The service is based on zero-knowledge encryption, which means users don’t have to reveal the password for verification. What’s more, the company said it will soon release a feature that lets users securely share passwords with friends and family.

There are a few limitations, however. Dropbox Passwords users will only be able to store up to 50 passwords up to three devices to access those credential via the cloud.

«Last year, we launched Dropbox Passwords for all paid Dropbox plans to make signing into websites and storing your passwords seamless,» the firm said in a statement. «The Passwords app remembers your usernames and passwords on all your devices – so you don’t have to. And zero-knowledge encryption ensures only you know your passwords, not Dropbox.»

Using password managers have been touted as a best practice for businesses for years and they are now seen as a crucial part of remote working due to the increase in services needed.

The importance of these services was recently highlighted by the widespread backlash to LastPass‘ announcement that its free tier will no longer offer users unlimited access to stored passwords on both desktop and mobile devices.
 
«If you are not using a password manager then you are dangerously leaving yourself more open to cyberattacks,» said Jake Moore, ESET’s cyber security specialist. «It is vital to implement a password manager into your work and home life to remain protected from attacks, but many people mistakenly think of it as a more unsecure way of protecting accounts.
 
«Most people have dozens of accounts and this number is only going to get bigger, for example with one-time purchases, so it can be easy to reuse known passwords. But this is where threat actors often capitalise, seeking out those overused non-complex passwords and then compromising other accounts with the same credentials.»

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Fault Injection Simulator, a fully managed service for running controlled experiments on AWS. 

Primarily used in chaos engineering, fault injection experiments subject applications to sudden stress, allowing engineering teams to observe how systems respond and implement improvements accordingly. 

According to AWS, its new Fault Injection Simulator makes it easy for teams to monitor and inspect blind spots, performance bottlenecks, and other unknown vulnerabilities unidentified by conventional tests. 

The tool comes with pre-built experiment templates that enable teams to gradually or simultaneously impair distinct applications’ performance in a production environment. For convenience, the simulator also provides controls and guardrails so teams can automatically roll back or stop the experiment when specific conditions are met. 

What’s more, the simulator allows teams to create disruptive experiments across a range of AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon RDS. Teams can also run “GameDay scenarios or stress-test their most critical applications on AWS at scale,” said AWS. 

For best results, AWS recommends enterprises integrate its simulator into their continuous delivery pipeline. Steadfast integration will enable teams to monitor and unearth production vulnerabilities constantly, improving application performance, observability, and resiliency.

“With a few clicks in the console, teams can run complex scenarios with common distributed system failures happening in parallel or building sequentially over time, enabling them to create the real world conditions necessary to find hidden weaknesses,” said AWS.

“nClouds is adding advanced chaos engineering capabilities and service offerings to our DevOps practice that will improve the resiliency of distributed service architectures we build for our customers and prove regulatory compliance,” comments Marius Ducea, VP of DevOps practice at nClouds.

“AWS Fault Injection Simulator has a deep level of fault injection that will enable us to create failure scenarios that more accurately reflect real-world events. With this capability, we expect to have an even better perspective on the expected time to recovery during real events.»

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Fault Injection Simulator, a fully managed service for running controlled experiments on AWS. 

Primarily used in chaos engineering, fault injection experiments subject applications to sudden stress, allowing engineering teams to observe how systems respond and implement improvements accordingly. 

According to AWS, its new Fault Injection Simulator makes it easy for teams to monitor and inspect blind spots, performance bottlenecks, and other unknown vulnerabilities unidentified by conventional tests. 

The tool comes with pre-built experiment templates that enable teams to gradually or simultaneously impair distinct applications’ performance in a production environment. For convenience, the simulator also provides controls and guardrails so teams can automatically roll back or stop the experiment when specific conditions are met. 

What’s more, the simulator allows teams to create disruptive experiments across a range of AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon RDS. Teams can also run “GameDay scenarios or stress-test their most critical applications on AWS at scale,” said AWS. 

For best results, AWS recommends enterprises integrate its simulator into their continuous delivery pipeline. Steadfast integration will enable teams to monitor and unearth production vulnerabilities constantly, improving application performance, observability, and resiliency.

“With a few clicks in the console, teams can run complex scenarios with common distributed system failures happening in parallel or building sequentially over time, enabling them to create the real world conditions necessary to find hidden weaknesses,” said AWS.

“nClouds is adding advanced chaos engineering capabilities and service offerings to our DevOps practice that will improve the resiliency of distributed service architectures we build for our customers and prove regulatory compliance,” comments Marius Ducea, VP of DevOps practice at nClouds.

“AWS Fault Injection Simulator has a deep level of fault injection that will enable us to create failure scenarios that more accurately reflect real-world events. With this capability, we expect to have an even better perspective on the expected time to recovery during real events.»

Nokia has struck partnerships with the three biggest public cloud providers to combine their respective technologies to develop packages suited to addressing 5G use cases for its customers. 

Partnering with Microsoft, Nokia hopes to integrate its mobile network technologies with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services and its developer ecosystem to build 4G and 5G private wireless use cases for enterprises. 

The firm will offer its cloud radio access network (Cloud RAN), Open RAN, Radio Access Controller (RIC) and multi-access edge cloud (MEC) with the Azure Private Edge Zone, which allows for data processing close to the user.  Nokia will also integrate its 5G RAN with Azure 4G/5G core to showcase how blending these technologies can support Microsoft’s enterprise customers.

An agreement with AWS will see Nokia research and enable its Cloud RAN and Open RAN to support the development of 5G products, with this partnership centred on developing proof of concepts to explore how the networking technologies can be deployed. 

The programme will see engineering teams from both firms delve into how Nokia’s RAN (Radio Access Network), Open RAN, Cloud RAN and edge computing systems can work seamlessly with AWS Outposts. This partnership will allow service providers and 5G-ready businesses to use AWS across the entirety of their mobile network. 

In working together with Google Cloud, meanwhile, Nokia hopes to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio systems. The two companies will collaborate on a joint product combining Nokia’s networking tech with Google’s edge computing platform and appliances ecosystem. The aim, ultimately, would be to develop use cases to solve 5G scenarios for businesses across the world. 

Work is already underway to focus on Cloud RAN, integrating Nokia’s 5G technologies with Google’s edge computing platform, which runs on Anthos. The 5G standalone network will also be tested on the Anthos platform as a cloud-native deployment.

With these partnerships, Nokia is aiming to move away from traditional infrastructure and towards the cloud, with network operators able to launch new services much more quickly by taking advantage of virtualisation and edge computing. 

The deals were announced shortly before Nokia revealed it would be cutting up to 10,000 jobs over the course of the next two years as part of wider efforts to restructure its business groups and make cost savings. The firm intends to invest heavily in R&D and future capabilities, including 5G, cloud and digital infrastructure as part of a wider package of long-term investments.  

Nokia has struck partnerships with the three biggest public cloud providers to combine their respective technologies to develop packages suited to addressing 5G use cases for its customers. 

Partnering with Microsoft, Nokia hopes to integrate its mobile network technologies with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services and its developer ecosystem to build 4G and 5G private wireless use cases for enterprises. 

The firm will offer its cloud radio access network (Cloud RAN), Open RAN, Radio Access Controller (RIC) and multi-access edge cloud (MEC) with the Azure Private Edge Zone, which allows for data processing close to the user.  Nokia will also integrate its 5G RAN with Azure 4G/5G core to showcase how blending these technologies can support Microsoft’s enterprise customers.

An agreement with AWS will see Nokia research and enable its Cloud RAN and Open RAN to support the development of 5G products, with this partnership centred on developing proof of concepts to explore how the networking technologies can be deployed. 

The programme will see engineering teams from both firms delve into how Nokia’s RAN (Radio Access Network), Open RAN, Cloud RAN and edge computing systems can work seamlessly with AWS Outposts. This partnership will allow service providers and 5G-ready businesses to use AWS across the entirety of their mobile network. 

In working together with Google Cloud, meanwhile, Nokia hopes to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio systems. The two companies will collaborate on a joint product combining Nokia’s networking tech with Google’s edge computing platform and appliances ecosystem. The aim, ultimately, would be to develop use cases to solve 5G scenarios for businesses across the world. 

Work is already underway to focus on Cloud RAN, integrating Nokia’s 5G technologies with Google’s edge computing platform, which runs on Anthos. The 5G standalone network will also be tested on the Anthos platform as a cloud-native deployment.

With these partnerships, Nokia is aiming to move away from traditional infrastructure and towards the cloud, with network operators able to launch new services much more quickly by taking advantage of virtualisation and edge computing. 

The deals were announced shortly before Nokia revealed it would be cutting up to 10,000 jobs over the course of the next two years as part of wider efforts to restructure its business groups and make cost savings. The firm intends to invest heavily in R&D and future capabilities, including 5G, cloud and digital infrastructure as part of a wider package of long-term investments.  

AMD has unveiled its third-generation Epyc Milan data centre CPUs, which is claims are the «world’s fastest» server processors. 

The hardware, which is already available, is the first set of AMD chips for the server market to be built on the company’s powerful 7-nanometer Zen 3 architecture. 

AMD claims Epyc Milan produces twice the power of Intel’s rival Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads, and claims it offers a better price-to-performance ratio.

AMD’s confidence comes from as a result of its Zen 3 architecture, which is a microarchitecture that has brought similar benefits with AMD’s Ryzen 500 series of chips, which have become increasingly popular in the desktop PC space. 

«With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD Epyc processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data centre leadership and help customers solve today’s most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem,» said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group. 

«We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.»

‘Zen 3’ refers to cores of which there are 64 within the 7003 series that is said to deliver up to twice the performance for HPC workloads compared to the competition. For cloud providers that need more computing power and security, the 7003 series has the «highest core density», according to AMD, and also includes AMD Infinity Guard protection.

Already, the AMD Epyc Milan series is being used by some of the biggest names in tech in a variety of ways. AWS will add it to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year, and it will also feature in Dell‘s new PowerEdge XE8545 server. Google Cloud will embed the EPYC 7003 series processors in a new compute optimised virtual machine and Microsoft has announced multiple virtual machine offerings that will be powered by the 7003 series. 

Other uses cases include Lenovo, Oracle, HPE, VMware, Tencent and many more. 

AMD has unveiled its third-generation Epyc Milan data centre CPUs, which is claims are the «world’s fastest» server processors. 

The hardware, which is already available, is the first set of AMD chips for the server market to be built on the company’s powerful 7-nanometer Zen 3 architecture. 

AMD claims Epyc Milan produces twice the power of Intel’s rival Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads, and claims it offers a better price-to-performance ratio.

AMD’s confidence comes from as a result of its Zen 3 architecture, which is a microarchitecture that has brought similar benefits with AMD’s Ryzen 500 series of chips, which have become increasingly popular in the desktop PC space. 

«With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD Epyc processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data centre leadership and help customers solve today’s most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem,» said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group. 

«We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.»

‘Zen 3’ refers to cores of which there are 64 within the 7003 series that is said to deliver up to twice the performance for HPC workloads compared to the competition. For cloud providers that need more computing power and security, the 7003 series has the «highest core density», according to AMD, and also includes AMD Infinity Guard protection.

Already, the AMD Epyc Milan series is being used by some of the biggest names in tech in a variety of ways. AWS will add it to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year, and it will also feature in Dell‘s new PowerEdge XE8545 server. Google Cloud will embed the EPYC 7003 series processors in a new compute optimised virtual machine and Microsoft has announced multiple virtual machine offerings that will be powered by the 7003 series. 

Other uses cases include Lenovo, Oracle, HPE, VMware, Tencent and many more. 

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has awarded a strategic IT infrastructure contract to services provider Capgemini, with the aim of improving the user experience of its internal platforms.

The contract is said to be worth £600 million and will run for five years, with the option to extend for an additional two years if needed.

The MPS is looking to improve its IT infrastructure services within the Pegasus Programme, a digital policing programme to procure new key IT suppliers for the police.

Capgemini will be working on moving the MPS away from its multi-supplier “Towers” model, essentially separated categories of services that led to unnecessary fragmentation.

The bulk of the contract work will involve amalgamating services such as the service desk, network services, end user services, cyber security services, and others under a single umbrella.

“We are delighted to have been chosen as the strategic infrastructure services provider for MPS, one of the world’s leading police forces and one of the largest public sector organisations in the UK,” said Nive Bhagat, CEO of Cloud Infrastructure Services at Capgemini.

Capgemini has a history of providing services to the police, including helping it to transform its budget control back in 2008. The contract was signed with the London’s Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime who have used Capgemini in the past in projects involving email services or agile scrum teams.

Angus McCallum, chief digital and technology officer at the Metropolitan Police, said: “Capgemini will help us continue to develop the next stage in our journey towards Met’s digital policing vision.

“Capgemini was chosen as our infrastructure partner based on the strong capabilities demonstrated throughout the bid process. We look forward to working closely with Capgemini in the delivery of critical infrastructure services over the coming years.»

Last year, Capgemini signed a three-year partnership with Barts Health NHS Trust to modernise its ICT estate.