US telecoms giant AT&T Communications has signed what’s thought to be a multi-billion dollar cloud partnership agreement with Microsoft to aid the firm’s ‘public cloud-first’ strategy.

Microsoft will embark on a non-exclusive multi-year alliance with AT&T Communications to build on progress made in cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G networking. Azure will also be the preferred provider for non-networking applications, the cloud company announced.

The industry giant will also tap into AT&T’s geographically-dispersed 5G network to design and build edge-computing capabilities, as well as Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The deal will also see AT&T employees migrate to Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of apps and services, with the company also planning to move most of its non-networking workloads to the public cloud by 2024.

This deal has come just a day after AT&T announced a similar partnership with IBM and its recently-acquired subsidiary Red Hat. On the surface, this second multi-billion-dollar agreement is similar to Microsoft’s deal, but centres on its business side.

«Today’s agreement is another major step forward in delivering flexibility to AT&T Business so it can provide IBM and its customers with innovative services at a faster pace than ever before,» said IBM’s senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software Arvind Krishna.

«We are proud to collaborate with AT&T Business, provide the scale and performance of our global footprint of cloud data centers, and deliver a common environment on which they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile.»

The deal will allow AT&T to host business applications on IBM Cloud, and the networking firm will also use Red Hat’s open-source platform to manage workloads and applications. AT&T Business will have greater access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift platforms as part of the deal.

IBM will be the main developer and provider for AT&T Business, the telecoms giant’s enterprise arm. Meanwhile, IBM will help to manage the IT infrastructure of the wider organisation both on and off-premise, as well as on public, private and hybrid cloud.

Just as with AT&T and Microsoft, the two companies will also collaborate on edge computing platforms to allow enterprise clients to take advantage of 5G networking speeds as well as IoT devices. The wider aim is to reduce latency and dramatically improve bandwidth for data transfers between multiple clouds and edge devices.

The European Union’s satellite navigation infrastructure, used by businesses and government agencies across the continent, has been offline for more than 100 hours following a network-wide outage.

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA), which runs the £8 billion Galileo programme, confirmed this weekend the satellite system has been struck with a «technical incident related to its ground infrastructure».

As a result, all 24 satellites in orbit are non-operational.

«Experts are working to restore the situation as soon as possible,» the GSA said in a statement.

«An Anomaly Review Board has been immediately set up to analyse the exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.»

Galileo is used by government agencies, academics and tech companies for a wide range of applications, from smartphone navigation to search-and-rescue missions.

The programme offers several services including a free Open Service for positioning, navigation and timing, and an encrypted Public Regulated Service (PRS) for government-authorised users like customs officers and the police.

Its business application spans multiple sectors; used by fishing vessels, for example, to provide data to fishery authorities as well as by tractors with guidance for navigation. According to the GSA, 7.5 billion Galileo-friendly apps are expected by the end of 2019.

However, the satellite system, developed so European organisations aren’t wholly entirely reliant on GPS, has been offline since 1 am UTC on Thursday 11 July.

The GSA said at the time that users may experience «service degradation» on all Galileo satellites. A further update then issued two days later claimed users would be experiencing a total service outage until further notice. Neither update offered a concrete explanation for the mysterious outage, which has persisted at the time of writing.

The root cause, however, may lie with a ground station based in Italy, known as the Precise Timing Facility (PTF), according to Inside GNSS. This facility generates the Galileo System Time, which is beamed up to the satellites to enable user localisation. It is also often used as an accurate time reference.

In June, GPS services were also hit by a similar outage which affected a host of Middle-Eastern countries. According to Isreali media, that outage was linked to state-sponsored attacks from Russia.

The government and UK businesses have played an integral role in helping to develop Galileo since its pilot launch in 2016. The continental service is expected to be fully operational by 2020, with 30 satellites in total.

But the UK’s withdrawal from the EU has threatened to fully cut off access by British agencies and companies, should no deal be agreed.

The government has already set aside £92 million to develop an independent satellite system, although it’s unclear how long this would take to implement.

The number of individuals using Microsoft’s flagship workplace hub has soared in the last few months to leave its key competitor – Slack – in the dust, figures released by the firm show.

Two years after Microsoft launched its Teams platform, which is part of the firm’s Office 365 suite of apps and services, the company is boasting the digital workspace has more than 13 million active daily users.

This is one-third more than Slack’s 10 million daily user count according to the latest figures the company has disclosed. Active weekly users for Microsoft’s service, meanwhile, stand at 19 million.

The feat is more staggering considering that Microsoft’s platform was lagging behind its rival as soon as April this year, according to a chart the company produced.

Microsoft Teams owes its recent success to auto-inclusion with the 365 suite of apps and services

The pace of growth has been sharp but will not come as a surprise considering the number of organisations that are reliant on Microsoft Office 365, of which Teams is an integral component.

Distributing Microsoft Teams to its pre-existing customer base has likely been a huge factor in its growth since it was first launched two years ago.

The company says Teams now boasts a user base of 500,000 organisations. Slack, meanwhile, has more than 85,000 paid-for organisations, according to its latest figures, but the total number of businesses signed up to the workplace hub has not been disclosed.

Microsoft has also used this opportunity to introduce a raft of additional features for the workplace app, including priority notifications and read receipts for private chats.

Announcements can allow team members to flag important news in a channel, while cross-channel posting saves time on copy-and-pasting the same message to different audiences.

IT administrators are also being helped to deploy the Teams client and manage policies for every member within an organisation. Pre-defined policies, in areas like messaging and meetings, can be applied to employees based on the needs of their individual roles.

Slack itself recently announced a number of updates to its functionality and user interface. These span shared channels with customers and vendors, as well as added integration between email and calendars.

Commenting on Slack’s IPO a few weeks ago, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester, Michael Facemire, said Slack’s success will be determined by how well it can penetrate enterprises.

«Can Slack prove to the enterprise buyer that it is more than a chat app, more than a collaboration tool, but instead an enterprise collaboration platform? If Slack can do this, expanding out of a tech-savvy user base and into all parts of the business become much easier, as it starts to do work for everyone.

«The next challenge is selling its service into the enterprise. Many companies have multiple instances of free Slack in use. But this group of users face their first hurdle when these free accounts need enterprise governance (single sign-on, message retention rules, etc).

«Will Slack be able to prove the value of both paying the fee and doing the work to integrate with existing systems? This question will also signal how quickly it can succeed in an enterprise market.»

Cloud Pro approached Slack for comment and an update on its active daily user count, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

Outlook is set to get a range of new features this month including a dark mode, a redesigned email experience and improvements to calendar synchronicity as part of a major overhaul of the platform.

Users of Microsoft’s Office 365 email service will see a number of improvements to the way messages can be read, categorised and organised, the firm announced. Changes to calendar and meeting functionality, and a series of significant aesthetic tweaks, make up the full complement of changes.

The new Outlook will feature categories that make it easier to tag, find or organise messages, with users able to add multiple categories to a single message.

A favouriting mechanism, in which contacts, groups or entire categories can be highlighted, also offers easier access to certain aspects of any user’s inbox. As with Gmail, meanwhile, users can also draft multiple emails on-the-go using ‘tabs’ that rest on the lower portion of the user interface (UI).

There’s also a snooze function for emails that need to be dealt with later. Snoozing a message removes it temporarily from the inbox, with it reappearing as an unread message at top of the pile once the snooze period expires.

Among the most eye-catching features, however, is a new dark mode, which lets users personalise their UI for night-time or low-light browsing. The lights can be turned back on when reading a specific email or composing one by configuring this mode in the settings menu.

The firm’s main rival in this space, Google, has spent the past year or so updating G Suite productivity suite, including a number of significant changes to Gmail, notably the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive responses and inbox management.

Meanwhile, tweaks are also being made to Outlook’s calendar functionality, including the ability to search across multiple calendars, as well as filters to adjust the parameters when hunting for a person or event.

It’s also now possible to quickly create events and book rooms for meetings from the calendar surface on Outlook, while the ‘week view’ dedicates a larger screen area to today and tomorrow.

The changes will be implemented from in late July, with ‘targeted release’ customers no longer able to see an opt-in toggle that switches between the old Outlook and the beta version of the latest iteration.

Cloudflare has resolved an issue that led to websites serviced by the networking and internet security firm to show 502 ‘Bad Gateway’ errors en masse for half an hour yesterday.

From 2:42pm BST the networking giant suffered a massive spike in CPU utilisation to its network, which Cloudflare is blaming on bad software deployment. This affected websites hosted in territories across the entire world.

Ironically, even Downdetector was knocked offline during the outage

Once this faulty deployment was rolled back, its CTO John Graham-Cumming explained, service was returned to normal operation and all domains using Cloudflare returned to normal traffic levels.

“This was not an attack (as some have speculated) and we are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred,” Graham-Cumming said.

“Internal teams are meeting as I write performing a full post-mortem to understand how this occurred and how we prevent this from ever occurring again.”

The incident affected several massive industries, including cryptocurrency markets, with users not able to properly access exchanges like CoinMarketCap and CoinBase.

Cloudflare issued an update last night suggesting the global outage was caused by the deployment of just one misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) during a routine deployment. The company had aimed to improve the blocking of inline JavaScript used in cyber attacks.

One of the rules it deployed caused CPU to spike to 100% on its machines worldwide, and subsequently led to the 502 errors seen on sites across the world. Web traffic dropped by 82% at the worst point during the outage.

“We were seeing an unprecedented CPU exhaustion event, which was novel for us as we had not experienced global CPU exhaustion before,” Graham-Cumming continued.

“We make software deployments constantly across the network and have automated systems to run test suites and a procedure for deploying progressively to prevent incidents.

“Unfortunately, these WAF rules were deployed globally in one go and caused today’s outage.”

At 3:02pm BST the company realised what was going on and issued a global kill on the WAF Managed Rulesets which dropped CPU back to normal levels and restored traffic, before fixing the issue and re-enabling the Rulesets approximately an hour later.

Many on social media were speculating during the outage that the 502 Bad Gateway errors may be the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. However, these suggestions were fairly quickly quashed and confirmed to be untrue by the firm.

Data centre firm Equinix will invest $1 billion (approximately £793 million) into building six data centres across Europe to support some of the biggest cloud players like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Backed by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Equinix will establish new xScale facilities in key locations around Europe, including London and Paris. They will be based near, or on, the firm’s International Business Exchange (IBX) campuses and provide companies with heightened connectivity and edge computing capabilities.

Equinix is only targeting hyperscale companies initially. These, in addition to Azure and GCP, includes Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to support their unique workloads.

«It has been a long journey to reach this point, but we are tremendously excited to announce the formation of our first xScale data centers joint venture,» said Equinix president and CEO Charles Meyers.

«Partnering with a world-class investment partner like GIC will provide the opportunity to make significant capital investments in order to capture targeted large-footprint deployments while continuing to optimize our capital structure.

«The JV [joint-venture] structure will enable us to extend our cloud leadership while providing significant value to a critical set of hyperscale customers.»

Six xScale data centres, of which two are to be based in London, will allow customers to add core deployments to their existing access points so they can expand on a single platform. These are also specifically-engineered to meet the technical and operational requirements of hyperscale companies’ workloads.

The infrastructure will be managed and staffed by Equinix while being connected to the Equinix global platform in order to provide a non-disrupted experience for hyperscale firms.

«As hyperscale companies expand around the world, they will increasingly look to partners to provide both broad global scale and deep local knowledge when deploying data center space,» said vice president for datacentre infrastructure and services with 451 Research Kelly Morgan.

«By increasing the number of hyperscale facilities in the EMEA region, the joint venture between Equinix and GIC aims to accelerate the adoption of hybrid and multicloud as the IT architecture of choice by companies throughout the region.»

Equinix will sell its London LD10 and Paris PA8 IBX data centre facilities to the fund that manages this $1 billion joint-venture, with new xScale data centres expected to come to fruition on these sites.

New data centres will also be built in Amsterdam, London and on two sites in Frankfurt.

Microsoft has applied to join two security boards for representatives of Linux distributions to discuss and coordinate vulnerabilities and security issues.

The linux-distros mailing list is used as a private channel where developers can discuss flaws in Linux systems and co-ordinate fixes for issues that have not yet reached the public domain. The oss-security group is used to discuss vulnerabilities that are already known.

Microsoft’s ‘Linux Kernal Hacker’ Sasha Levin sent an application to join the security boards last week, which could see the Windows developer to be party to behind-closed-doors conversations on ongoing security issues.

Members of this community include Chrome OS, Red Hat, Oracle, SUSEand Amazon Linux AMI.

There are several criteria that organisations need to meet to join the linux-distros group. For example, Levin cited Azure Sphere and Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 as examples of the company actively maintaining Unix-like operating system distro with open source components.

Successful applications must also have a userbase that isn’t limited to their own organisation, which Microsoft said it fits through millions of cores its customers run on systems such as those aforementioned.

Organisations must also be able to demonstrate at least a year-long track record of fixing vulnerabilities, including some on Linux distros, and releasing fixes for known issues within 10 days or fewer.

Applications would also have to gain the recommendation of an individual who has been active on oss-security of years but is not affiliated with the organisation. Levin copied in renowned Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who replied separately in the email chain to vouch for Microsoft’s submission.

«I can vouch for Sasha,» Kroah-Hartman said. «He is a long-time kernel developer and has been helping with the stable kernel releases for a few years now, with full write permissions to the stable kernel trees.

«I also suggested that Microsoft join linux-distros a year or so ago when it became evident that they were becoming a Linux distro, and it is good to see that they are now doing so.»

Microsoft has shifted towards embracing Linux technology and open source principles over the last few years, and increasingly under CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership. This is after its former CEO Steve Ballmer infamously referred to Linux as a «malignant cancer» and «communism» almost 20 years ago.

A significant change happened a decade ago when Microsoft released 20,000 lines of code to the Linux open source community. This led the executive director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin to declare at the time that «hell has frozen over».

To demonstrate how much Linux popularity has surged in recent years, Sasha Levin added in a further message to the email chain that the usage of this technology on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services has now surpassed Windows. This is just two years after Microsoft said that 40% of virtual machines in Azure are running Linux.

As a result of this increased usage, Microsoft’s security centre has started receiving a higher volume of security reports of issues with Linux code from users and from vendors.

Microsoft has lifted the lid on its managed platform as a service (PaaS) product that seeks to protect exposed virtual machines (VMs) from outside threats.

The firm says it’s worked with hundreds of cloud customers across a wide area of industries to launch a preview of the service, which sits between the Azure portal to virtual interfaces.

It is said to guarantee a degree of safety when accessing off-internet VMs by providing seamless remote desktop protocol (RDP) and secure shell (SSH) connectivity via the secure sockets layer (SSL).

“For many customers around the world, securely connecting from the outside to workloads and virtual machines on private networks can be challenging,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure networking Yousef Khalidi said.

“Exposing virtual machines to the public Internet to enable connectivity through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH), increases the perimeter, rendering your critical networks and attached virtual machines more open and harder to manage.”

Azure Bastion will feed directly into a customer’s Azure Virtual Network without the need to worry about managing network security policies, Khalidi added. The feedback Microsoft received from customers centred on the need for an easy and integrated way to deploy, run, and scale jump-servers or bastion hosts within Azure infrastructure.

Among the features are increased protection against port scanning due to limiting the exposure of VMs to the public internet. Azure Bastion is also reinforced by automatic patching, handled by Microsoft, to best guard customers against zero-day exploits.

Bastion hosts are generally known to be special purpose computers on networks that are specifically built to withstand cyber attacks. The computer normally hosts just one app, and all other services are removed or limited to reduce the threat surface.

Microsoft will be building out Azure Bastion over the coming months and adding more features as its developers progress the platform towards its general release.

Intel will target small and medium-sized business (SMBs) with a significant cloud upgrade to its flagship Unite communications platform.

The four-year-old system has traditionally required customers to install physical hardware at a cost to integrate Intel’s collaboration and video conferencing tools. From Wednesday 12 June, however, the firm is hoping to eliminate these barriers and pave the way for smaller companies to take on the platform.

The firm is also seeking to infiltrate new areas such as schools and hospitals. One example may be a doctor taking advantage of pre-installed screens to communicate information to a patient instead of relying on handwritten notes or a tablet device.

The Unite platform itself is built on the Intel vPro PCs, CPUs, chipsets and Wi-Fi components, which allows for a secure hardware encryption engine, as well as remote management. It will also support a wider array of integrated apps, ranging from unified communications tools like Cisco Webex to AV systems such as Panacast.

Fundamentally, Intel wants to introduce a baseline level of technology across an organisation, in rooms of varying sizes, to ensure workflows are continuous and colleagues can collaborate anywhere. These areas include huddle spaces, medium collaboration space and the board room.

The largest change involves adding a cloud-powered rotating PIN service that provides managed security and login between the Unite hub PC and a device running the Unite app. This has been designed to ensure that only people meant to attend a meeting hosted by Unite are allowed access to it, and bypasses the need for an on-premise server to handle PIN orchestration.  

“This is going to obviously give more deployment choice for existing customers,” said Tom Loza, the company’s global director for sales of Unite. “It will provide potentially, for those customers that are on-prem to move to the cloud, a lower maintenance cost of the solution. And just give a broader, more simple managed solution to our small business customers.”

Launched as a wireless sharing platform in 2015, Unite has since added a host of additional capabilities over time, including full client device support and moderator controls. Intel said these changes are all the result of user feedback, as is the cloud launch.

The upgrade not only opens new markets to Intel, Loza noted, but enables further scaling through channel partners, and expands the capabilities of these firms by signing them up to dedicated training programmes.

Salesforce is connecting a low-code blockchain platform with its customer relationship management (CRM) suite to open up new services and operations for its customers.

The cloud-powered software developer has launched the platform to allow companies to create blockchain networks, workflows and apps, in a way that’s easier and faster than traditional methods.

The Salesforce Blockchain platform is a low-code system built on the open source technology developed by Hyperledger Sawtooth and is customised to fit with the company’s flagship Salesforce Lightning CRM product.

Beyond building networks, users can layer blockchain data above existing sales, service, or marketing workflows, and run artificial intelligence-powered algorithms to integrate this data into sales forecasts and other predictions.

Salesforce says that blockchain’s distributed ledger technology can help with authenticating and sharing data across multiple third parties, where traditionally this process has been clunky and slow. Principally, the company says it streamlines how transactions and documents are created and exchanged.

«Blockchain allows us to upend antiquated processes like these and rebuild them entirely with customers at the centre,» said Salesforce’s senior vice president for emerging technologies Adam Caplan.

«Data can securely flow beyond an organization’s four walls and be extended to partners. Every party in the blockchain network can verify and see each transaction in an open, transparent way.

«The information is secure, trusted, and – if the need arises – can be audited.»

Organisations across several industries can use the technology for conventional business processes like asset tracking, credentialing, and authentication of goods. Salesforce says that combining CRM with blockchain data can see firms devise new business processes and models across sales, marketing, and services.

A real-life application of Salesforce’s blockchain platform involves Arizona State University, which is using the system to design and create an education network that allows universities to verify and share information securely.

S&P Global Ratings, meanwhile, is using the service to reduce the time it takes to review and approve new business bank accounts by bringing together multiple reviews for greater transparency in this process.

The main problem Salesforce is aiming to tackle involves a greater need for businesses to harness and share massive amounts of data with an ever-growing network of partners and third parties – and to do so securely.

The firm, therefore, sees blockchain’s distributed ledger as a means to plugging any ‘trust gap’ that arises if companies fail to manage to increased costs and inefficiencies that it said this process will introduce.

Salesforce is just the latest company to introduce a blockchain service after its CEO Mark Benioff teased such a platform in April last year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have both released blockchain-powered services, with the former targeting the healthcare and finance sectors with its Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) templates released last year.

Salesforce Blockchain is currently available to select design partners ahead of its general release in 2020.