Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice warned against the growing threat of cyber warfare in an address at Citrix’s annual Synergy conference hosted in Anaheim, California.

In a half-hour speech, and follow-up Q&A session, Rice – who served under George HW Bush and George W Bush – spoke broadly on a range of subjects including the new geopolitical landscape, advancements in technology, and women in STEM.

“As somebody once said you either have been hacked and know it, or you have been hacked and don’t know it,” she told an audience of more than 5,000 at the Anaheim Convention Centre.

“People, particularly countries, are getting more aggressive at it, they’re getting more capable at it, and I don’t think anybody thought coming round the corner that the Russians would actually use bots and the like, to use infinity loops, to try stir chaos in American politics.

“That one I didn’t see coming and I have been a Russianist for a long time. And so people are finding ever-more innovative and creative ways for malevolence using cyber.”

Rice also outlined three points to address the growing threat of cyber warfare, including better cooperation between the private sector and government, more effort to get some expertise on boards, and that people can be “really stupid” when it comes to cyber.

She lamented Homeland Security, which she said she helped create, as a “monstrosity of an organisation” as it is really hard to use as an interface, adding the Edward Snowden leaks “really eroded any trust between the private sector and the government”.

After outlining her point that companies should be better utilising specialists and experts on their boards, Rice then went on to claim that “human beings are the real problem”.

According to Rice, a US intelligence agency conducted an experiment once where they took a USB drive and dropped it in the car park. She said a high percentage of people, who worked for the agency, picked it up and put it into their computer, concluding “human beings can’t resist doing things that are really stupid from a cyber point of view”.

Elsewhere in her address, Rice outlined her views on the biggest geopolitical issues facing democracy right now – including North Korea and Iran – as well as discussing her views on why Trump and Brexit appealed to many voters.

“The people who didn’t quite benefit from globalisation, and who are now being even further disrupted by automation are the people for whom it is worth it to take a chance, because it couldn’t get worse,” she said, adding that people with global power are failing to speak the language and connect with those who have genuine concerns.

Meanwhile, Rice outlined how technology may not always be married up with the appropriate level of wisdom, explaining “technology is not good, or bad, it’s neutral – the question is how is it applied”.

Amongst dipping into areas such as R&D investment, competing with Chinese, and the key threats facing the US, Rice outlined how to boost the position of women in tech.

“With girls in particular, the first thing is to educate them in a way that they don’t cut off their options early; so this is the issue of women not being STEM-ready when they get to college because they were somehow not convinced to get ready in elementary school – or even high school,” she said. 

“You hear the ‘we can’t find any women for our board’… uh, really? Yeah you can. There are lots of them out there, and it just comes from looking out of your normal channels; maybe it’s not an ex-CEO but maybe it’s someone who comes from government, or academia, or from cybersecurity – not a bad thing to have on your board these days.”

Citrix unveiled the Workspace App at its annual Synergy conference yesterday, underlining its vision of a simplified and unified digital workspace.

Making the keynote address at the Anaheim Convention Centre, Citrix CEO David Henshall introduced “the world’s first unified digital workspace for business” as a way for teams and users to access their applications, content, files and information in one space.

The Citrix Workspace App is “one way to organise, access and open all of your files, regardless of whether they’re on your hard drive, on your network drive, on cloud or anywhere in between,” Henshall said.

He added the app, available in-browser, on desktop, or on mobile, was “one that integrates with what you already have, what’s already existing on your on-premise infrastructure, and [is] ready to support you when you’re moving to the cloud.”

“The result is everything you need to be productive in one single unified experience,” he said.

The app sees Citrix unify a series of isolated digital workspace products, also tying into Henshall’s vision of “people-centric computing” – ridding organisations of unnecessary complexity and barriers in a bid to boost productivity.

Key features include prebuilt SaaS integrations, universal search, and all your apps and files brought together in one space. It’s essentially an app version of the Citrix Workspace Service, which debuted at last year’s Citrix Synergy conference, hosted in Orlando.

The company’s former CEO, Mark Templeton, even showed off a prototype concept called Citrix Workspace Services at Citrix Synergy 2014. The prototype version featured the ability to host apps where the business wants to, behaving as a single destination for users to do everything, no matter where they were.

However, Citrix’s latest rollout puts a focus on a mobile-first and cloud-first work environment. The idea of putting people at the heart of things has featured heavily at this year’s Synergy conference, and is a concept that Citrix’s VP of product management and workspace services, Sridhar Mullapudi, claimed was key to developing the Workspace App.

“In a lot of our conversations with customers and partners, a lot of point products and solutions are cobbled together to either solve their experience need, or security need, but it’s a broken experience for users – it’s just fractured experience, and what it does is frustrate the users, and just lowers productivity,” he said.

“So the number one thing is having that great productivity experience for users so they get things done; doesn’t matter what device, or what kind of application they’re trying to launch.”

Picture: Keumars Afifi-Sabet/Cloud Pro

Citrix products are set to support multi-factor authentication and facial recognition, instead of just relying on the age-old username and password combination.

Speaking at Citrix Synergy 2018 in California, senior company executives explained the company will support alternative ways of confirming users’ identities in a bid to boost security and improve the user experience.

Addressing reporters at a press Q&A following the keynote address along with CEO David Henshall, , chief product officer PJ Hough said Citrix was adding “full support for multi-factor authentication in the platform and the Workspace“.

“We are broadly deployed in a number of industries including healthcare, where log-in techniques such as badge swipe, etc, are already dominant as the log-in mechanisms, so the workspace will support all of those as capabilities,” he said.

But he conceded that the widespread implementation of such alternatives is rather “future-oriented” – in light of the fact many devices lack the hardware capability, despite outlining that everything announced in the keynote address was either available now, or would be within the next 90 days.

“One of the reasons why we can’t actually broadly deliver facial recognition technology is not because we haven’t implemented the software part of it, it’s that the devices aren’t broadly deployed that are necessary to support it; whether it’s encryption capabilities or high-quality facial recognition that doesn’t get fooled by holding up a picture of me in front of it.”

While the iPhone X does boast this capabilty, its status as an expensive, high-end smartphone means it likely hasn’t found much adoption within businesses.

He added: “We continue to evolve those technologies, but we are part of a broader ecosystem and we need the ecosystem partners here to continue to invest. I think part of the opportunity for us is we want to inspire the ecosystem.”

CTO Christian Reilly demonstrated a login using facial recognition during his keynote address, in which he said “usernames and passwords are not great security”. 

Expanding on the vulnerability of passwords, Sridhar Mullapudi, VP of product management for Workspace services, told IT Pro the widespread use of passwords makes it more likely to suffer a security risk, and that they were “an old way of doing things”. Plenty of recent data breaches have involved the threat of credential re-use, where, for example, a hack of LinkedIn password information has forced other companies to reset customers’ login details.

“As part of the Citrix Workspace we are building, identity and access management is a key part,” he said. “As part of that we have solutions; we built multi-factor authentication, and that could be facial recognition or thumbprint, or any other factor that you use to log-in, like two-factor authentication (2FA) – that’s built into the Workspace itself.”

He added: “If users have to remember passwords, and create passwords across multiple applications, it is not the most secure way – because users are not the best in … making passwords across everything, so you want to be able to provide them with a secure single sign-on across the applications.”

Citrix’s decision to strengthen security comes as part of a wider industry movement away from passwords. Microsoft ditched conventional passwords altogether in a test run for Windows 10 S earlier this year, opting instead for alternative options such as facial recognition, fingerprint, and FIDO keys.

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Citrix CEO David Henshall wants his company to focus on three key areas; unifying the portfolio, accelerating to the cloud, and expanding into new technologies.

In his opening keynote address at Synergy 2018 in California, Henshall outlined his future plans for the virtualisation firm, centred around the theme of “people-centric computing” where technology delivers everything users need in a simple and accessible way.

Key to Henshall’s vision is the ‘universal workspace’ – embodied in the Workplace App, Citrix’s latest innovation – which aims to reduce complexity, and raise productivity by enabling universal access to apps.

Also integral to delivering its wider vision is the rollout of Citrix Analytics, a security platform initially announced last year, with chief product officer PJ Hough walking the audience through its potential.

“This is not another dashboard, this is not another alerting system; this is an autonomous closed-loop security platform that will deliver more productivity and security to your organisations,” Hough claimed.

Using a mass of data points, Citrix Analytics builds profiles for individual users, allowing an autonomous machine learning-powered system to analyse potential security risks in real-time, without causing any disruption to day-to-day workflows or productivity.

“We’ve essentially distributed risk out of the enterprise; we’re pushing it to the user, we’re pushing to the device, we’re pushing it the network and beyond,” Henshall said, adding that traditional cybersecurity defences are struggling to keep pace with the range of modern threats.

“[Old tactics are] too cumbersome. They’re too expensive. Cyber threats as we know it are only going to get more complex as we move forward, and only going to get more sophisticated, so that’s why we’re very much focused on a security model that’s we think is future-proof. The challenge is of course balancing these competing needs – the need for security with the potential impact on productivity,” he continued.

Announcing the “broad availability” of the Citrix Analytics platform, Hough said everything announced during the keynote is available either now, or will be within 90 days.

Speaking at a press Q&A following the keynote address, Hough went into more detail around building a better user experience for Citrix customers.

“Having spent a lot of time working on productivity software before I joined Citrix, I understand the value of reducing clicks, of reducing confusion for users, and really having people have a consistent and seamless experience across all their devices and platforms,” said Hough.

The keynote address also saw the firm make a slew of additional announcements tying into the idea of taking a holistic approach toward transforming the digital workspace.

These included an SD-WAN service for MSPs, an Intelligent Traffic Management tool based on its recent Cedexis acquisition, and, although the address was generally light on the Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon Alexa for business.

Citrix’s annual showcase of the latest advancements in workplace digitisation and cloud computing will be the first event of this scale I’m attending as a reporter – hosted this year in Anaheim, California.

The last year has seen the virtualisation and software-as-a-service (SaaS) company undergo a rocky period – with CEO Kirill Tatarinov stepping down from the helm after only 18 months – replaced with former CFO David Henshall in July – as well as announcing plans to issue layoffs and consolidations.

But having recently overseen increases in revenue by 5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2018, the company will be in a buoyant mood entering next week’s conference. Citrix has had a roller-coaster last 12 months, something I’m hoping to grill its chiefs on over the coming days.

But the company will be very much focussed on the future – with CEO Henshall aiming to outline the company’s vision and strategy in delivering its single driving principle; making apps and data secure, and easy to access anywhere, at any time. Together with fellow execs Tim Minahan and PJ Hough, I expect to hear plenty of digital transformation related announcements, with a particular focus on those companies taking a cloud-first approach, as well as the latest innovations in cloud-based app security.

Speaking of security, it’s almost certainly going to feature heavily on the agenda. After launching Citrix Analytics in April, I’m expecting the conference to put a heavy focus on how machine learning can further help businesses detect anomalous behaviour and potential threats, and how this is integrated with their overall strategy to deliver always-accessible workplace apps.

I’m also expecting a great deal of commentary about Citrix’s general vision, and what cloud computing looks like moving forwards – from outlining the future of digital workspaces, to how user experience can best be configured, to the way Citrix envisions businesses utilising cloud infrastructure to maximise productivity – with a host of successful user cases, and updates on flagship products, to follow.

Beyond this, however, I’m looking at what we can gain from the ‘super sessions’, featuring former Secretary of State Condi Rice, and Moneyball author Michael Lewis. Between them we’re likely to hear about how technology has affected and changed international affairs, as well as how businesses and governments can use technology to affect positive change, including the ways in which politics, technology and finance intersect.

I’ll be live-tweeting and filing reports about the conference’s biggest takeaways over the next few days on both Cloud Pro and our sister site IT Pro.

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Microsoft’s expanding cloud services were a key driving force behind its healthy 2018 fiscal year third-quarter earnings, with year-on-year profit growing 35% to hit $7.4 billion.

Figures from the first three months of 2018 show Microsoft’s flagship cloud computing service Azure grew 93% year-on-year, driving its 16% growth in revenue from $23.2 billion to $26.8 billion. Redmond’s overall business orientated cloud portfolio division, dubbed Intelligent Cloud, grew by 17% over the same quarter qa year earlier. 

Meanwhile, Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s line of CRM and ERP applications released in 2016, grew 65% – underlining a 17% growth in revenue in Productivity and Business Processes division to $9 billion overall.

“Our results this quarter reflect the trust people and organizations are placing in the Microsoft Cloud,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are innovating across key growth categories of infrastructure, AI, productivity, and business applications to deliver differentiated value to customers.”

Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business organisation, said the company’s growth can be attributed to its customers’ digital innovation.

“As always, this growth is fueled by the innovation and success of our customers and partners,” Althoff said, highlighting several use cases. “Today, almost every company is a tech company, and below are a few examples of companies working closely with Microsoft to advance their digital business strategies.”

Citing Toyota Material Handling Europe using Azure, AI and HoloLens to drive innovation in its factories, and Bühler AG, a leading food processing manufacturer, that has used the cloud to improve food safety standards, he added: “Companies across all industries need a trusted cloud infrastructure, a powerful data estate and accessible AI technologies to grow and transform.”

Otherwise, revenue in Surface products increased 32% in-part down to Microsoft’s hardware refresh in 2017; releasing the next-generation Surface Pro and Surface Book 2 in June and November respectively. LinkedIn similarly grew strongly, by 37%, as Office 365 subscribers rose to 30.6 million consumers, and 135 million business users.

Microsoft’s healthy financial outlook may be a product of its eagerness to expand the range of applications for its cloud services, for example, unveiling a range of initiatives to boost its presence in healthcare starting with the cloud-based platform Microsoft Genomics.

Azure’s rapid growth, meanwhile, compounds recent research by Gartner that revealed large cloud providers, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Rackspace, are increasingly dominating the market, with the research institute predicting the top 10 cloud providers will account for 70% of IaaS revenues in the next three years.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today joined its rivals in releasing a blockchain service, half a year after its CEO cited a lack of “practical use cases” for the technology.

Basing its blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) on Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric networks, AWS wants to give developers the tools they need to develop their own blockchain apps.

“Some of the people that I talk to see blockchains as the foundation of a new monetary system and a way to facilitate international payments,” said AWS vice president and chief evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. “Others see blockchains as a distributed ledger and immutable data source that can be applied to logistics, supply chain, land registration, crowdfunding, and other use cases.

“Either way, it is clear that there are a lot of intriguing possibilities and we are working to help our customers use this technology more effectively.”

AWS’s Blockchain Templates allows users to quickly launch either a public or private Ethereum network, or a private Hyperledger Fabric network, with the templates creating and configuring all the AWS resources needed based on the cloud giant’s pay-as-you-go pricing structure.

The platform has been adopted by a number of companies in sectors such as healthcare and finance, including mobile operator T-Mobile and Guidewire, an insurance platform provider.

T-Mobile is building an identity and authentication platform with Sawtooth, a technology from the Intel Hyperledger project, while Guidewire is using blockchain to auto-approve insurance claims and trigger payments.

AWS’s push into the blockchain market sees it follow in the footsteps of rivals including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which have all deployed versions of this technology.

Oracle, for example, launched its Blockchain Cloud Service at its OpenWorld conference in October last year to boost the competitiveness of its cloud services against IBM and Microsoft’s packages.

However, AWS’s decision to follow suit marks a significant shift in strategy, given that its CEO, Andy Jassy, dismissed the potential of blockchain at AWS’s re:Invent 2017 conference in November.

“We don’t yet see a lot of practical use cases for using blockchain that are much broader than using a distributed ledger,” he said in a press Q&A. “We don’t build technology because we think it’s cool, we build it when we think it’s the best way of solving a customer’s problem. Ledger capabilities to me are much more limited than they should be.”

Cloud Pro has approached AWS for comment on why it has shifted direction on blockchain.

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Only half of organisations say all their cloud providers have a plan for GDPR compliance ahead of the 25 May deadline to comply with the new data protection legislation, a report has found.

Surveying 1,400 CISOs and IT managers around the world, McAfee’s The State of Cloud Security report also found a direct link between an organisation’s confidence in their provider’s state of GDPR readiness and the level of investment they are willing to commit to cloud services.

Despite over 80% of organisations in a previous survey indicating they expected help from their service providers to achieve regulatory compliance, McAfee’s latest findings showed only half of respondents said that all their cloud suppliers had a plan in place ahead of the deadline to comply with GDPR, which sets out tougher penalties for organisations that misuse EU residents’ data, and hands more control to people over how their information is used.

Organisations more confident in their cloud providers’ GDPR readiness were more likely to spend more on cloud services in the coming year, with those lacking confidence more likely to keep investment at the same level.

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Just under half of respondents anticipated increased investment in light of GDPR, while 44% of organisations said they expected spending to remain flat. Less than 10% of organisations anticipated decreasing their investment in their cloud services, again contrasting with the findings of McAfee’s Beyond the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which found organisations were projected to reduce investment by $85,000 on average as a result.

“The implementation of the incoming GDPR, due to come into force in just over a month’s time, will affect cloud users around the world,” said Nigel Hawthorn, data privacy expert in McAfee’s cloud security business unit.

“Becoming GDPR compliant requires a combination of knowledge, processes, policies, technology and training, as well as detailed understanding of data flows to and from third parties and cloud services. With this in mind, it is concerning that only half of the respondents stated that all of their cloud providers have a plan in place for GDPR compliance.”

Cloud Pro has previously warned against relying on third-parties to ensure compliance with GDPR.

Skills shortages underline wider issues

The latest edition of McAfee’s annual report on the current state and future plans for cloud adoption and security also shed light on cloud adoption progress, as well as the main concerns proving obstacles for some organisations.

A quarter of respondents highlighted a lack of staff with skills to manage security for cloud applications, and only 24% of organisations reported that they suffered no skills shortage, while the research found 40% of IT leaders reported they were slowing their organisation’s cloud adoption.

Data theft, however, was ranked as the greatest concern, with 56% of professionals saying they had tracked a malware infection back to a cloud application, up from 52% the previous year.

Lack of visibility, meanwhile, was cited as one of the most commonly experienced issues – spanning users creating cloud workloads outside of an organisation’s IT department (shadow IT), a lack of transparency around what data is stored in the cloud, and an inability to monitor cloud workloads.

UK organisations slowest to adopt, and most cautious

Organisations in the UK were the slowest to adopt cloud services of those surveyed, while they were also found to be the most cautious over storing sensitive data.

When asked how many months organisations would take for their IT infrastructure to be 80% cloud-based, respondents in the UK answered 19 months, versus an average of 14 months.

Moreover, organisations in the UK were also found to be the least likely to store all of their sensitive data in the public cloud – only 10% versus an average of 25% – while a quarter of UK organisations said they stored no sensitive data in the cloud, the joint-highest with Germany.

Personal customer information comprised the majority of sensitive data, with 61% of organisations keeping such data in the public cloud, followed by payment card information, internal documents, and employee information.

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Visibility underpins secure cloud adoption

The report pinpointed a lack of visibility as the key factor hindering organisations from securing their cloud services, concluding visibility-driven organisations, regardless of whether they have adopted a cloud-first strategy or not, have a better awareness of shadow IT and take direct responsibility for the security of their cloud data.

“Poor visibility has a bigger impact on navigation than any single control or capability. After all, you cannot steer around what you cannot see,” the report concluded.

“The leading adopters of cloud services understand this axiom and are integrating cloud visibility into their IT operations to accelerate business. Better cloud visibility enables an organisation to adopt transformative cloud applications sooner, respond more quickly to security threats, and reap the cost savings that virtualisation provides.”