Qualys and Google Cloud Platform can now play nicely together with the launch of the security firm’s Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud SCC) integration.

The security and data risk platform will boost the security of business’ cloud infrastructure, helping companies collect data to identify threats and fix them before they become a genuine concern.

“As businesses leverage new technologies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts and move into the cloud, their focus needs to shift towards building security into applications, as well as interconnected devices, right from the start,» Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO at Qualys said. «And this is what Google is doing with their Cloud Platform, helping businesses build security into the fabric of their workloads.»

The product is an update to Qualys’ previous GCP integration, but this new addition allows businesses to gain more detail about security, drilling down into more detail, which can then be used to innovate a better security strategy for every possible vulnerability. With one click, users can then head back to their Qualys subscription to find out more information about the threats uncovered in GCP.

Qualys’ tie-up with Google also means users are able to tap into Google’s own security information, including the latest data about botnets, cryptocurrency mining, anomalous reboots and suspicious network traffic threats.

«Now more than ever, the cloud is where an increasing number of enterprises are turning to protect their data and stay secure,» said Andy Chang, senior product manager at Google Cloud. 

«With Cloud Security Command Center, we are helping security teams gather data, identify threats, and quickly act on application and data risks. By working with industry leaders like Qualys, we are giving our customers the capabilities they need to keep up with today’s ever evolving security challenges especially as they move workloads to the cloud.»

VMware is bringing data-driven intelligence to its Workspace ONE platform, enabling enhanced security monitoring across devices.

The cloud-based service, called Workspace One Intelligence, collates data from users, apps, networks and endpoints and turns the information into key insights, providing admins with actionable understandings to bolster the security within their organisation. It means IT departments and employees can identify risks before they become a problem, the vendor said, and take action to prevent them impacting productivity.

Having this information at their fingertips means IT admins can create automated tasks to deal with repeatable circumstances, such as fixing vulnerable Windows 10 endpoints with a critical patch or setting conditional controls to apps and services for certain levels of employees, VMware claimed.

“Empowered employees are at the heart of digital transformation. However, providing employees with the tools they need to improve productivity introduces operational complexity and increased cyber threats as apps, devices and networks proliferate and the security perimeter dissolves,” said Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager of end user computing at VMware.

The virtualisation giant has also announced the Workspace One Trust Network, which combines Workspace One data with third-party security solutions from firms such as Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Lookout, McAfee, Netskope and Symantec.

The integration of partners’ solutions means businesses will have more visibiity across their organisations, VMware said, rather than using mutiple, fragmented tools.

“Our new intelligence-driven digital workspace platform and partner ecosystem help customers leverage the power of insights, automation and predictive security to simplify operations and detect and remediate threats while delivering the best user experience,” Dhawan added.

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Workday and Slack have joined forces to offer users the ability to access Workday insights from within Slack.

With more integrations planned for the future, they will initially offer the ability to view contextual and actionable data to complete tasks from the collaboration platform.

Employees will now be able to engage with HR through Slack, asking questions about their benefits, reviews or annual leave, requesting time off, notifications of which will be sent to both managers and the employee. Workers can find out information about their co-workers, such as name, job title and department, as well as completing peer reviews from inside Slack. The changes are expected to be introduced in the first half of the year.

Future integrations will include the ability for IT staff to assign team members to the correct Slack channels according to department, so employees don’t have to ask to be set up across the right channels and these can be tweaked from an admin level.

Slack users will also be able to set up personalised notifications and Workday alerts, so they will know when anything changes in the channels they’re part of or if HR need them to address something in Workday.

«Innovation has always been one of our core values here at Workday, and embracing an open mindset and collaboration wherever it makes sense for the good of customers,» Joe Korngiebel, chief technology officer at Workday, said.

«We believe that the future belongs to the companies that focus on ‘we’ – and our partners like Slack are incredibly important in helping our customers maximise the value of their Workday investments.»

Korngiebel added that Slack is just the start of Workday’s push for integrations and the company will be working with other businesses, such as Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook and Google Cloud to make the platform work for everyone.

«By opening up our platform, our goal is to trigger a new era of enterprise innovation and experiences, and to make it possible for customers to leverage Workday’s context and insight for any of their applications. We are incredibly excited as we forge ahead with our customers and partners,» he added.

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Cloudian has acquired software-defined storage business Infinity Storage, helping the object-based storage company reduce its customers’ IT workloads with a scalable file system.

Cloudian’s integrated file and object-based storage services collate unstructured data into a scalable storage pool, making it easier for IT teams to manage and significantly reduce costs compared to traditional NAS-based systems.

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“For more than a decade, Infinity Storage software has helped enterprise customers simplify file management with enterprise-class features that provide a familiar user experience on next-generation storage platforms,” Infinity Storage’s founder Caterina Falchi said.

“While launching HyperFile with Cloudian, we immediately recognised that our company cultures and technologies meshed perfectly. We are genuinely thrilled to be joining the Cloudian team.”

Cloudian and Infinity Storage have worked together on a number of projects in the past, including the launch of the Cloudian HyperFile NAS controller, which delivers enterprise-level file storage services such as SMB(CIFS)/NFS support, snapshot, WORM, non-disruptive failover, scale-out performance, POSIX compliance and Active Directory integration from Cloudian Hyperstore.

“This acquisition further accelerates Cloudian’s efforts to reduce IT workloads with self-protecting and easy-to-scale file systems that analysts agree are critical for next-generation storage management,” said Michael Tso, CEO of Cloudian.

“Not only does Infinity bring deep technology expertise to the table, but also our two companies’ cultures fit perfectly, with the same uncompromising dedication to the customer, to the team and to technical excellence. We are excited to be growing together.”

Infinity Storage is Cloudian’s first ever acquisition but demonstrates the company’s drive to build upon its core services and offer businesses a wider range of enterprise services to help them realise the benefits of object-based storage.

More than three quarters of businesses have not fully analysed the financial cost of a cloud outage, meaning they’re putting their business’s security at risk.

A survey by Veritas has revealed that a third of organisations only anticipate their services to go down for less than 15 minutes a month, yet figures show the average outage lasts 16 minutes per month.

Despite the majority of the 1200 business and IT decision makers saying they expect to move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24-months, two-thirds think keeping on top of outages is the responsibility of their cloud provider. More than three quarters think it’s the cloud provider’s job to protect workloads.

However, what they don’t consider is that the majority of SLAs only protect the infrastructure layer and they are not responsible for ensuring applications come back online when service is restored or data recovery.

If businesses aren’t prepared to take on some of the load when a cloud service is knocked offline, it could have pricey consequences for the organisation, unless the firm has an on-premise failover strategy in place, to backup apps and data, should a cloud service suffer an outage.

“Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business,” Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer, Veritas said.

“Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organization’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud. Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust and damage to brand reputation.”

Dropbox has updated its S-1 IPO filing, saying it thinks it will be able to sell shares at between $16 and $18 per share, and it’s going to sell shares worth $100 million to Salesforce immediately after it floats.

The cloud-based file share and sync business is opening up 36,000,000 shares to raise $648 million when it starts trading on the Nasdaq exchange later this month, the filing reveals, valuing the company at between $7 billion and $8 billion when restricted stock units are also taken into consideration. It’s still below the $10 million the company was worth in 2014 when it raised $350 million in venture funding, but it still means Dropbox is the highest-value tech IPO since Snap went public last year.

Salesforce and Dropbox have formed a pretty close relationship over the last few months, with the SaaS firm most recently announcing plans to integrate its Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud services with Dropbox, giving customers access to the cloud storage service. It will also mean Salesforce Quip users can access Dropbox-stored content, and Dropbox adding support for Quip documents, so it’s no surprise Salesforce plans to buy a large chunk of the available shares.

Dropbox will sell a total of 5,882,353 shares to Salesforce at an average value of $17 per share, which falls right in the middle of the company’s estimated per-share value.

«Salesforce Ventures LLC has entered into an agreement with us pursuant to which it has agreed to purchase $100,000,000 of our Class A common stock in a private placement at a price per share equal to the initial offering price,» Dropbox’s S-1 filing stated. «This transaction is contingent upon, and is scheduled to close immediately subsequent to, the closing of this offering.

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Nutanix has acquired app discovery business Netsil to help boost its Enterprise Cloud Platform by monitoring containerised cloud services and identifying any problems or bottlenecks, fixing them along the way.

As more businesses switch to the cloud and, in particular, containerised services, they need a platform that will keep on top of all the interconnected apps and services in the cloud, Nutanix claimed. However, because there are so many dependencies, IT admins are struggling to keep on top of the health of everything so are turning to automation to help.

“Netsil’s innovative technology offers an original approach to simple yet comprehensive application discovery and operations management across multiple cloud environments and will be a powerful addition to Nutanix,” said Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer at Nutanix.

“Netsil, which can be consumed as a cloud-based service, and when combined with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, gives both DevOps and IT teams the power to quickly deploy and operate applications with confidence, in any cloud, at any scale, while ensuring reliability, performance and security.”

Neither business has revealed how the companies will continue to operate after the acquisition, or when it’s expected to close, although Netsil said Nutanix will be in touch with the app discovery company’s customers to explain what they can expect in the coming months.

“Joining Nutanix gives Netsil’s technology a great opportunity to be a force multiplier,» said Harjot Gill, founder and CEO of Netsil. «Nutanix has built a very solid Enterprise Cloud OS platform, which when combined with Netsil’s real-time observability, becomes even more strategic when addressing a growing microservices market. We are really happy to be joining a company where Netsil’s capabilities will be used to their fullest.”

Gartner’s latest server report has revealed global server revenues increased by 25.7% in the fourth quarter of 2017, resulting in total increases of 3.1% over the whole year. In EMEA, revenues grew by 19.9%, while shipments decreased by 7.9%.

Dell EMC led the worldwide league tables with 19.4% of the revenues in the fourth quarter, followed by HPE at 19.3% and third-place IBM with 14.1% of the worldwide market share. Little-known Inspur Electronics came in at fourth, with a huge 127% year-on-year growth. However, IBM and Dell EMC also achieved impressive year-on-year growth at 51.4% and 39.9% respectively.

«Server growth was driven by relatively strong economies for the quarter across the globe,» said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. «This was a somewhat surprising quarter because the strength was exhibited in a variety of positive server shipment and revenue mixes in almost all geographies.»

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The impressive results from the fourth quarter of 2017 allowed the entire year’s results to finish on a positive note, with shipments increasing by 3.1% compared to 2016 and revenues, up by 10.4%. Gartner explained the reason for such a positive outlook was because both businesses and hyperscale data centres decided to make the jump to digital solutions.

«The outlook for 2018 suggests that modest growth will continue, with enterprise end users taking an ongoing hybrid approach to both on-premises and public cloud choices based on their server application objectives,» Hewitt added.

In the EMEA region, HPE’s server shipments were down 21.5%, Dell EMC 10.2%, Lenovo 12.6%, and Huawei 6.6%. The biggest winners for revenues were IBM with 67.4% growth year-on-year and Dell EMC with increases of 43.5%. HPE remained in pole position.

«At first glance, the EMEA server market ended 2017 positively,» Gartner research director, Adrian O’Connell said. «The main driver for the revenue growth, however, remains the increasing cost of certain components due to supply shortages, with vendors passing that cost increase on to users.»

Oracle has opened up applications for its Startup Cloud Accelerator programme, inviting global tech businesses to join up to five other startups in its latest round of admissions in the UK. This is the second round of recruitment for Oracle’s scheme, with the first group starting their mentoring last September.

The UK’s Startup Cloud Accelerator programme will take place in Bristol, although Oracle will also be running a second initiative, Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem, which is its virtual, non-location-based equivalent for global businesses.

“The first cohort included tremendously talented startups creating innovative new products in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to virtual reality,” said Reggie Bradford, senior vice president of Oracle’s Startup Ecosystem and Accelerator. “We look forward to working with more emerging companies in the thriving UK startup market, and are dedicated to continuing to build an ecosystem of co-development and co-innovation where startups, customers, and Oracle all win.”

There are currently 40 startups taking part in Oracle’s worldwide startup accelerator, across eight locations. Each accelerator intake round accepts between five and six new businesses looking for fast growth in the tech sector.

Businesses already taking advantage of Oracle’s mentoring include machine learning-powered branded content innovator Duel, digital learning and research startup Interactive Scientific, travel tracker iGeolise and automated checklist platform Trail.

The programme offers organisations mentoring from Oracle’s technical and business leadership team, the technologies to support startup success, access to a co-working space, the opportunity to sell to Oracle customers and speak to investors, and free oracle credits.

Microsoft has decided to switch off its Outlook Web Apps (OWA) for iPhone, iPad and Android, instead, pushing users to download and install the standalone Outlook app, which it said it has turned into an «award-winning app.»

The company’s OWAs effectively functioned as a halfway-house between the browser-based Outlook experience and the fully-fledged Outlook app, offering functions that can only be provided by a native app such as contact syncing and push notifications.

Microsoft explained it’s decided to discontinue the apps as of April, removing them from the App Store and Google Play. It will notify existing users of the expiry via in-app messages, advising them to instead install the standalone Outlook app for their platform.

From May 15, the apps will stop working altogether and any Office 365 users who open them will be advised it’s been discontinued, telling them to download and install the Outlook app for iOS or Android.

«Outlook for iOS and Android has an architecture fully powered by the Microsoft Cloud and has 4.5+ star ratings in the app stores,» Eugenie Burrage, one of Microsoft’s product marketers explained to the community.

«And as we streamline our mobile portfolio, we’ll be able to further focus our efforts to deliver on our promise of the best-in-class, enterprise-grade mail, calendar and search experience and the best way to experience Office 365 features on a mobile device with Outlook.»

Microsoft’s OWA apps were designed to offer extra functionality compared to the mobile browser iterations of Outlook, such as such as push notifications, syncing of contacts, voice-activated actions, but were superseded by the much richer standalone Outlook apps that offer the same functionality as the desktop versions of Outlook, just on a smaller screen.

Microsoft hasn’t updated the OWA apps in recent months and so they don’t work particularly well now. This is clear by taking a look at the star ratings in the Android and iOS app stores – rated 2.9/5 and 2.8/5 respectively.