Welcome to the 13th issue of IT Pro 20/20.

January always brings with it the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which serves as a showcase of emerging technology and helps set the tone for the coming year. Although 2021’s roadshow felt a little anaemic, as it was forced online for the first time, it still did the job of creating a much-needed distraction.

A part of this month’s issue covers some of our highlights of the event. CES is always a mix of technology that seeks to break the mould, and technology that reflects the zeitgeist. We saw plenty of the usual suspects, with new PC hardware, IoT technology, and new breakthroughs in TV design capturing the spotlight as they always do. Yet a great deal of technology also sought to capitalise on the pandemic, or at least the greater emphasis on remote work.

It’s important to remember that there’s plenty of innovation going on outside of CES. January also saw the release of the Raspberry Pi Pico, an even smaller addition to the already tiny family of miniature computers. The device is built from a new microcontroller technology, boasts a wide range of programmable I/O options, and supports a wide range of peripherals. We take a look at its design and use cases to see what all the fuss is about.

While the new year has brought with it shiny new toys to play with, many of you may also be feeling that same need for change in your careers. Ongoing economic disruption has made it more difficult to transition away from comfortable work and, likewise, has forced businesses to think carefully about what roles and skills they need in order to flourish. We’ve taken a look at the current market to help job seekers make sense of what skills are in demand, and help businesses create a future-proof hiring strategy.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on 26 February – 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.

​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.

Diversity has always been a challenge for the technology industry. It’s one of those few industries that struggles to maintain a varied talent pool, with white males still taking the single biggest share of the employee demographic.

This is a problem we’ve known about for a long time, and even though the figures have improved very little in recent years, awareness has. Unfortunately, there’s a very real danger that what work UK businesses have put in to make their workforce as diverse as possible could be entirely undone by the pandemic.

When faced with shrinking budgets, it’s easy to imagine companies choosing to sideline or even close some of the newer, more costly, diversity initiatives. We also know from recent research in the US that women are more likely to be furloughed than their male colleagues as, by the nature of recent diversity efforts, women are more likely to be holding those very vulnerable entry-level positions.

In this month’s issue, we aim to show why a struggling business should start thinking of diversity as less of a business luxury and more as a route to recovery and, ultimately, a competitive advantage in a fractured post-pandemic market. 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 Friday 18 December – 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.​

​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.

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

Given all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget that technology is still evolving. Whether it’s changes to how we work, how we interact with the world, or how we communicate with one another, the next decade will likely be drastically different to the current one. It’s this idea that is at the core of this month’s issue.

In the first of our three exclusive features, we take a look at the role of augmented technology in business, and how transformative the technology has already been. Unlike the much-hyped virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) has proven to be an exceptionally powerful tool for many roles across a business, from front line workers to executives in a boardroom.

Elsewhere, we examine the surge of interest that many ‘touchless technology’ companies have enjoyed ever since it became apparent how dangerous the coronavirus truly was.

We also examine a technology described as the most serious AI threat we face today – deepfakes. What danger does this tech pose to society and is it really a threat to our democracy?

We appreciate you taking the time to download IT Pro 20/20, and we hope you enjoy this month’s future tech-themed stories.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 30 October – 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.

Microsoft has announced the launch of a fully managed service that allows developers to add an array of communication tools to existing applications in a bid to help improve how businesses connect with their employees and customers.

Described by Microsoft as a first of its kind from a major cloud provider, the fully managed service, dubbed Azure Communications Service, lets businesses add voice and video calling, SMS text messaging, and instant chat support to mobile, desktop, and web apps, regardless of platform or device.

It’s currently possible for developers to add chat capabilities to existing applications, for example, by using Azure Functions. However, this is a fairly lengthy and laborious process involving sourcing code from GitHub and manually testing the application.

Microsoft claims the new set of APIs cuts much of the complexity out of the process, allowing for new integrations to be created «in a matter of minutes» using «just a few lines of code».

Perhaps its biggest selling point is that these functions can then be integrated alongside other Microsoft services, including Azure Cognitive Services. This means businesses will be able to deploy tools like sentiment analysis and translation on top of any chat functions they add to their apps.

New chat functions will also benefit from any tools the base application has access to, which could be particularly powerful if those apps already have access to wider business operations, such as the company’s website.

Azure Communications Service will run off the same global network that underpins Microsoft Teams, the company added, allowing for much of the backend work and ongoing maintenance to be handled entirely by Microsoft.

Microsoft also confirmed that all communications, regardless of how they are delivered, will be encrypted and adhere to GDPR and similar frameworks.

The Azure Communications Service is the latest move from Microsoft to try and expand its footprint across business communications, having already opened up Microsoft Teams to third-party applications – apps that customers may have been reluctant to abandon in favour of Teams.

According to Nick McQuire, senior vice president of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight, Microsoft has managed to position itself as a major player in what is traditionally a telecommunications role.

«Azure Communications Services takes all the experience Microsoft has gained from its remote development and communications solutions during the pandemic and turns them into key developer services,» said McQuire.

«The shift to remote everything during the pandemic has meant that developers are now more attracted by communications-based features in their applications. It’s an area of opportunity that telcos worldwide have failed to grasp over the past few years and above all, shows that Microsoft has ascended to become one of the world’s most important communications companies as well.»

Voice and video calling and live chat functionality are available today, and support for both SMS text messaging and dedicated phone numbers will arrive in October.

Microsoft has announced a host of new security updates to coincide with a strategic shift that pulls all of its detection and event management services under the new Microsoft Defender brand.

Microsoft Defender represents the «broadest resource coverage» of any security portfolio in the industry, the company claims, spanning identity protection, endpoints, cloud applications, and infrastructure, to name a few.

This means all of Microsoft’s extended detection and response (XDR) tools will now sit alongside its suite of security information and event management (SIEM) software, offered as a single umbrella brand in a bid to reduce complexity.

For customers, this new direction will take the form of two separate packages, namely Microsoft 365 Defender, tailored for end-user environments, and Azure Defender, built for cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Both of these packages bring their own product name changes, with Microsoft effectively abandoning the ‘advanced threat protection (ATP)’ theme for most products.

Microsoft 365 Defender will replace all instances of Microsoft Threat Protection, the name given to the suite of products covering identity, endpoint, email, and app security, launched just two years ago.

Included in that Microsoft 365 Defender suite is an updated version of Microsoft Defender ATP, now known as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, bringing with it expanded support for Android and iOS devices.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365, previously known as Office 365 ATP, and Microsoft Defender for Identity, previously known as Azure ATP, will also feature as part of the Microsoft 365 Defender suite.

The second package, Azure Defender, is described as an evolution of the Azure Security Center (ASC) and repurposes a number of its tools, although the original version ASC still exists. Firstly, Azure Defender for Servers will replace the standard version of ASC, while both Azure Defender for SQL and Azure Defender for IoT will both replace their respective ASC versions. All of these will be packaged inside Azure Defender.

Aside from the name changes, Azure Defender will bring a new look with a unified dashboard inside ASC, as well as expanded protection coverage for SQL on-premises, Kubernetes, and Azure Key Vault. It will also cover industrial IoT, operational technology (OT), and building management systems, largely thanks to the acquisition of CyberX in June.

«Today we’re delivering a new set of security, compliance, and identity innovations to help all customers simplify and modernize their environments by embracing the reality that the past seven months have likely reshaped the next 10 years of security and digital transformation,» said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity, announcing the rebrand.

«We hold a differentiated view among our peers that security should not only encompass all critical aspects of security — including cybersecurity, identity and compliance — but that these components should be tightly integrated, and built right into the products and platforms that businesses are already using.»

Also updated, but still separate from the Microsoft Defender branding, is Azure Sentinel, a tool that collates all of an organisation’s security logs and threat data into one window. This has been given an updated search functionality and the option to create watchlists for specific threats. It’s also now possible to create user and entity behaviour profiles that can be paired with Microsoft’s own security research to monitor for unseen threats.

Beginning in November, Microsoft will also be cutting the cost of Azure Sentinel for a limited time, which it estimates will help a typical organisation of 3,500 users save around $1,500 per month.

​Welcome to the seventh 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 A-levels fiasco is by no means the first example of UK leadership woefully misunderstanding technology or viewing it as a panacea. Whether it’s arrogance over the development of a centralised coronavirus contact-tracing app, or senior ministers accidentally leaking Zoom IDs over Twitter, the public sector is not exactly inspiring confidence in its ability to create a tech-savvy society.

As ever with technology, it’s going to be down to the private sector to drive this change. The coronavirus has forced many companies to shrink or close entirely, leaving likely hundreds of thousands of people out of work – although unemployment is notoriously difficult to monitor.

Yet, what we’re also seeing is a surge in the number of schemes offering retraining or courses in highly-sought after skills. In fact, in this month’s issue we argue that the coronavirus pandemic is likely going to create a learning revolution. Whether it’s a surge in the use of coding websites or encouraging veterans into technology, the fractured job market could prove fertile ground for those retraining into STEM-based roles.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Wednesday 30 September – 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.​

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

Each month, we will shine a spotlight on the content that we feel every IT professional should be aware of, only in a condensed version that can be read on the go, at a time that suits you.

This time we’re turning our attention to a part of the tech industry that has shown remarkable resilience during a time of upheaval. The small business and startups sectors have long been associated with innovation, agility, fresh talent, and, let’s face it, quirkiness. The smaller you are, the easier it is to shake things up, whether that’s in the way employees work or the markets that are targeted.

Yet, the coronavirus pandemic has forced many larger businesses to go back to basics. Restructuring is now common, and so too is mass remote work. Some business processes no longer work as well as they did, while others have ground to a halt entirely. In many ways, the larger firms have had to behave like startups in order to survive, taking cues about the prioritisation of agility above all else and abandoning longer-tail projects in favour of those that provide immediate value.

It’s this idea of smaller businesses driving the new normal that’s the theme for most of our articles this month, although it’s most prominent in our lead feature, which takes a look at the trends that are likely to define how we work over the next few years. Elsewhere, we’ve got some industry tips on how to begin building your SMB tech stack, a somewhat frank discussion on the hidden dangers of bringing staff back from furlough, and a look at whether it’s wise to launch a new business right now.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 28 August. Previous issues can be found here.

We hope you enjoy reading this month’s issue. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

​Confidential VMs will be the first product in Google Cloud’s new confidential computing portfolio, the company has revealed, allowing companies to process sensitive data while keeping it encrypted in memory.

The announcement aims to capitalise on a growing interest in confidential computing, a field that promises to revolutionise cloud computing by providing what is in effect permanent uptime on data encryption.

Until now, like many cloud providers, Google offered encryption on data at rest and while in transit, requiring that data to be decrypted before it could be processed. Through Confidential VMs, Google customers encrypt data while it is being processed inside a virtual machine.

Google’s new feature is an evolution of its Shielded VMs, a tool launched in 2018 that companies could deploy to strip out most of the potentially vulnerable startup processes that trigger when attempting to create a new environment. This is in addition to a few layers of extra protection against external attacks, and monitoring systems that check for unexpected changes to data.

These added layers of security were required given that data is normally decrypted in order to be processed inside the VM – something that not only creates added risk from external attacks, but also forces companies to deploy strict access controls to ensure only the right employees handle the data.

The Confidential VMs feature, available as a beta today, attempts to solve these issues by allowing customers to encrypt their data in memory, meaning encryption can be maintained while it is being used, indexed, queried, or trained on.

This promises to have profound implications for those industries that process highly sensitive or heavily regulated data, such as those in finance and health, or government agencies. Companies in these sectors, which are usually forced to keep most of their data processing in their own private networks, now have a public cloud option, Google claims.

“These companies want to adopt the latest cloud technologies, but strict requirements for data privacy or compliance are often barriers,” Sunil Potti, general manager and VP of Security at Google Cloud. “Confidential VMs… will help us better serve customers in these industries, so they can securely take advantage of the innovation of the cloud while also simplifying security operations.”

Providing confidential computing is largely a question of hardware, something that many vendors have grappled with over the past few years. In this case, Google has turned to AMD and its second-generation EPYC CPUs – these now support a ‘Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV)’ feature, which allows a VM to run with encrypted memory using a unique, non-exportable, key.

“Our deep partnership with Google Cloud on its Confidential VMs solution helps ensure that customers can secure their data and achieve performance when adopting this transformational technology,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Server Business Unit.

“Confidential VMs offer high performance for the most demanding computational tasks all while keeping VM memory encrypted with a dedicated per-VM instance key that is generated and managed by our hardware.”

The company has also confirmed that any customers already running workloads in a VM on Google Cloud Platform will be able to shift these over to a Confidential VM using a checkbox.

Google has also said that VM memory encryption will not interfere with workload output, promising that the performance of Confidential VMs will be on-par with that of non-confidential VMs.

​Google has launched an early version of BigQuery Omni, its new analytics tool that lets users access and view data across Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services without leaving the Big Query UI.

Powered by Google Anthos, its vendor-neutral app development platform, users will be able to use SQL and the standard BigQuery APIs to manipulate data silos sourced from multiple platforms, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Although the initial alpha launch of the service is restricted to Google Cloud and AWS, Google has also confirmed that Microsoft Azure will eventually be supported.

The tool has been designed to target those customers who rely on multiple cloud service providers and are forced to juggle and consolidate a number of analytics tools in order to get a view of their data.

This is made possible by the decoupling of storage and compute, according to the firm. The compute side has always been regarded as ‘stateless’ but, until now, BigQuery required data to be stored in Google Cloud – this restriction has now been scrapped, allowing customers to store their data in any supported public cloud.

This single view means that customers can use BigQuery Omni to run SQL queries on clusters in whichever region the data resides. For example, it will be possible to query Google Analytics 360 Ads data stored in Google Cloud while simultaneously querying logs data from any apps stored in AWS S3. This can then be used to build a dashboard to get a complete view of audience behaviour alongside ad spend.

This means customers can avoid any costs associated with moving or copying data between cloud platforms in order to get a full view, Google claims.

“85% of respondents to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise Data & Analytics, Data Platforms 1H20 survey agreed that the ability to run the same database on multiple cloud/data centre environments is an important consideration when selecting a new data platform,” said Matt Aslett, research director, Data, AI and Analytics, 451 Research.

“As hybrid and multi-cloud adoption has become the norm, enterprises are increasingly looking for data products that provide a consistent experience and lower complexity of using multiple clouds, while enabling the ongoing use of existing infrastructure investments,» he added.

The new system is built using Anthos, an app development platform launched last year to appease customers that wanted a single programming model that allowed for data to be moved between their various cloud providers without charge or requiring changes.

The underlying infrastructure is run entirely by Google, including any communication between cloud providers, on the familiar BigQuery UI, so there will be little operational change from the customers’ perspective, the company claims.

BigQuery Omni’s engine will run on Anthos clusters inside the BigQuery managed service, and will source data from the various data silos across a customer’s public cloud services, provided they have provided authorisation. In order to run queries, data is temporarily moved from the cloud provider’s data storage to the BigQuery cluster running on Anthos.

For now, BigQuery Omni is only available in private alpha, so customers will need to apply to Google to use it if they’re interested. It’s also only available for AWS S3 for now, with Azure support coming soon.

There is currently no general release date available.