Google will restrict the online cloud storage capacity for high-quality photos and videos to 15GB from next year as the firm looks to capitalise on the millions of users who have come to rely on the service.

From June 2021, new high-quality content uploaded to Google Photos will count towards a free 15GB storage capacity, with the company making several pricing tiers available to those who need to store more data. The limit will also apply to files that users keep on Drive, specifically Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard files.

Google is framing these plans as a way to be able to continue to provide everybody with a great storage experience while keeping pace with the growing demand for its free services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has struck an agreement with the UK government to accelerate the public sector’s digital transformation drive, boost digital skills and raise the level of participation among smaller cloud providers.

The ‘One Government Value Agreement (OGVA)’ is a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) between AWS and the Crown Commerical Service (CCS) that spans two tiers for both smaller and larger organisations. 

Cloud services will become available to the public sector as a single client, offering more cost savings for deployment against organisation-by-organisation deals. AWS will also establish a digital skills fund, which will train more than 6,000 civil servants in cloud computing free of charge.

The first tier supports organisations at the beginning of their cloud journeys, allowing them to conduct their first cloud projects with support such as bespoke training, workshops, and “cloud credits” for new research projects. The second tier, aimed at larger organisations already well underway in terms of using cloud services, offers various additional services they can take up and advantageous pricing structures. 

“CCS provides commercial agreements which help organisations across the entire public sector save time and money on buying everyday goods and services,” said chief executive of the Crown Commercial Service, Simon Tse. 

“This agreement with AWS demonstrates excellent value for the public sector organisations we serve, and supports them in their drive to improve services for citizens across the UK.”

This is an agreement in the same mould as those struck earlier this year between the government and major cloud providers such as UKCloud, Google Cloud, and Oracle.

IBM, for example, struck an agreement that would allow public sector organisations to benefit from ‘preferential commercial terms’ when moving their workloads to the cloud. HPE, meanwhile, struck a deal with the UK government to provide hybrid cloud services on a pay-per-use model. 

In addition to the skills find, the AWS agreement specifically contains an element that hopes to encourage the uptake of services by smaller cloud providers and AWS partners. More than 150 members of the AWS Partner Network would be able to pitch their own services to public sector organisations, including many cloud-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). 

Microsoft has pledged to ‘re-invent’ customer relationship management (CRM) software after partnering with Adobe and enterprise AI company c3.ai to launch a new platform to take on the market dominance of Salesforce. 

C3 AI CRM is powered by the core functionality of Dynamics 365 and is combined with Adobe’s real-time customer profiles and journey management, as well as c3.ai’s industry-specific AI capabilities. 

The AI-driven CRM platform is purpose-built for specific industries and uses data from any source to produce meaningful business insights. The collective claims that conventional CRM is not sufficient for the modern age, given that AI can’t be used to analyse much of the data because they weren’t built with the appropriate architectures.

The three-way partnership represents a major challenge to Salesforce, which enjoys dominance in the CRM segment, and follows reports last week that Microsoft was making CRM a “priority”. SAP and Oracle are also big players in the CRM space, with Adobe and Microsoft following the pack with conventionally only a fraction of the market share.

“C3.ai, Microsoft, and Adobe bring together the perfect combination of technology, industry, and domain expertise to address the requirements for a new generation of CRM,” said c3.ai CEO Ed Abbo.

“Importantly, in addition to this combination of leading technologies and expertise, we share a common vision with our partners of an AI-first, industry-specific approach to delivering a new generation of AI CRM solutions.”

The announcement builds on a pre-existing partnership between the enterprise AI firm and Microsoft, with c3.ai also contributing its technology to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams earlier this year.

The three companies claim that C3 AI CRM will allow clients to better anticipate their customers’ needs and deliver more satisfying and personalised user journeys. The level of intelligence brought on by AI functionality, for example, could allow for more accurate forecasts, for example. Massive amounts of data can also be analysed to augment human agents or trigger automated processes in the CRM platform.

Microsoft claims that its technology has an expansive and unmatched footprint, combining Dynamics 365 business applications with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Microsoft Power Platform, powered by Azure. Microsoft hopes that when combined with Adobe’s speciality in the digital customer experience, and the AI capabilities of c3.ai, the combined system will offer customers a powerful alternative to the biggest players. 

Oracle has launched its next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMWare and Kubernetes.

The dual-region infrastructure, comprising two separate sites in London and Wales connected by Oracle Cloud’s high-speed network backbone, will allow public sector bodies to deploy cloud services in multiple regions with ease. 

Bodies can use Oracle’s infrastructure to deploy not just disaster recovery services, but cloud hosting and storage of data from within the region.

The company’s partnership with the public sector has expanded in recent times to service organisations such as the Home Office and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), and local government organisations. 

The private dual-region cloud will also allow public sector customers to take up additional services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Oracle OCI services, as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud applications. 

«We’ve had a Government Cloud Region in the UK for several years, but today’s announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud,» said Richard Petley, senior vice president with Oracle UK and Israel.

«This is a completely unique offering to the UK government – no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today. We’ll be working with all aspects of government – both local and central – to help them understand how they make use of the cloud to deliver better services and value to the UK taxpayer.»

The platform has been designed in collaboration with several UK government and national defence organisations, and adheres to the security requirements set out by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Oracle claims. This allows various organisations to handle and transmit sensitive information through the private cloud network.

The company’s second-gen cloud is built specifically to help large organisations and enterprises run the most demanding workloads in a secure way and is built to run autonomous services. These include Oracle Autonomous Linux and oracle Autonomous Database.

The increasing complexity of enterprise cloud environments and the rise of hybrid cloud is rapidly increasing IT workloads and fuelling a rising demand for automation, Puppet’s CTO has claimed.

During a time when many organisations are being asked to do more with less, the shift from mostly on-prem to a mixture of cloud environments in a relatively short space of time has radically complicated the workloads of CIOs. 

Speaking exclusively with CloudPro on the launch of Puppet’s automated Comply platform, Puppet CTO Abby Kearns suggested the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures over as little as the last five years is serving as the main element driving demand for automation.

«The hybrid cloud, and managing across hybrid environments, is the number one driver, honestly, because it’s so complex,» Kearns said. «So many companies started about five years ago to move workloads to the cloud, so we started to see that slow migration, but the cloud wasn’t really set up to mimic the way we were managing on-prem environments.” 

Enterprises now have an on-prem environment, a public cloud deployment or perhaps even multiple clouds, with different tools, different workloads and different approaches all in play. Businesses are also using more cloud-native applications and more microservices, so the landscape for IT standards compliance is becoming far more complex.

Puppet’s Comply automation platform is a system designed to cut out many of the traditionally manual processes IT teams and CIOs would manage when ensuring their hardware meets a range of compliance standards. 

The product, which will be offered in addition to a compliance automation consultancy service the company already markets, would allow customers to manage their own automation programmes across their IT estate.

Alex Hin, Puppet’s principal product manager, told CloudPro the platform will raise IT visibility, identify compliance shortcomings and remediate these issues.

He explained the need for such software comes from small teams of three to five people suddenly being tasked with making configuration changes on hundreds of thousands of nodes, either on-prem or on the public cloud. This becomes a high investment for the company, requiring a lot of spend and a lot of expertise for all environments to move into compliance.

«That’s really where it comes into play,» Kearns continued, «the idea that automation is really the only route to be able to do that. Because this isn’t just something where you can assign more people to the work. You can’t just throw more people at the problem, you’re going to have to figure out how to automate this as you start to get into the hundreds of thousands of workloads. It’s just a different kind of scale.»

Puppet\s Comply platform will launch in the coming weeks with pre-integrated compatibility with the CIS benchmarks, and further plans to integrate a number of other compliance standards in future. These will extend to include many common standards from DISA, FedRAMP, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

The drive to automate, Puppet hopes, will begin to free up time for many organisations that are trying to do more with less, particularly as a result of economic pressures due to COVID-19. One example of a process that Comply will automate is the ‘desired state configuration’ feature. This essentially automatically reverts any configuration changes to a ‘desired state’ if the system detects that the change has led the system to deviate from the particular standard to which it’s adhering to. 

«For us, we’ve spent the last six months really investing in a platform-centric approach and the opportunity to really extend into compliance and really build on those capabilities are really powerful for us and our customers,» Kearns added. 

«And that’s something we’re going to spend the next several years really continuing to expand on, and really continuing to drive innovation from an automation standpoint, but also from a compliance standpoint as we see those things go hand-in-hand for our customers. “

Chromebook users are being offered the capacity to run Microsoft’s flagship Windows 10 operating system on their devices using software company Parallels’ newly released platform.

Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise is the culmination of a partnership between the firm and Google, and allows users to access full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, on their Chromebooks without necessarily needing a stable internet connection. 

The system is integrated with Chrome OS and the Google Admin console – and doesn’t require virtual desktop infrastructure to run or deploy, meaning IT administrators can set up parallel desktops on devices at relative ease. This builds on a recent partnership struck in June which allowed Windows applications to run natively on budget-friendly Chromebooks.

“Chrome OS is increasingly being chosen by modern enterprises, either for remote work, hybrid, or in the office,” said Google’s vice president of Chrome OS, John Solomon.

“We are thrilled to partner with Parallels to bring legacy and full-featured Windows applications support, through Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, to help businesses easily transition to cloud-first devices and workflows.”

The platform will allow enterprise users to run multiple operating systems on their Chromebook devices simultaneously, with the company hoping it allows workers to raise their productivity. 

A number of features allow cross-talk between Windows 10 and Chrome OS, for example, copy-and-pasting text and graphics between the two operating systems, or printing from Windows apps via shared Chrome OS printers. Sharing features also extend to user profiles and custom folders, with documents and data seamlessly accessible by both platforms.

Windows 10 can also be used in full-screen mode on the Chromebook, or the operating system can be put on a separate Chrome OS virtual desktop, with users able to switch between the two with just a swipe.

There are already a number of devices supporting Windows 10 on Chrome OS, including the Google Pixelbook Go, the HP Elite c1030 Chromebook Enterprise, Acer Chromebook Spin 713, and Dell Latitude 5400 Chromebook Enterprise. There are 10 devices in total that support Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, including units from Lenovo and ASUS in addition to the aforementioned devices.

The machines themselves require at least an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and storage capacity of at least 128GB SSD. 

The revenues of computing giant IBM declined by 2.6% year-on-year during the third quarter of 2020, with the company reporting $17.6 billion of income fuelled chiefly by a surge in cloud revenue.

This dip represented the third quarter of consecutive year-on-year revenue decline for the company, with IBM’s systems division, global business services and global technology services and global financing sector suffering over the last three months.

The positive trend in terms of the firm’s cloud business also continued, following a 30% spike in cloud revenue during the previous quarter, and 19% growth in the three months before that.

The company’s cloud computing divisions, particularly its cloud and data platforms division, led by Red Hat, grew by 7% year-on-year, bucking the wider business trend. Within this segment, cloud and data platforms grew 20%, while cognitive applications grew 1%. 

These financial results have emerged only days after the company announced it plans to divide its business in half, spinning its infrastructure services unit into a separate entity while going all-in on the cloud.

“The strong performance of our cloud business, led by Red Hat, underscores the growing client adoption of our open hybrid cloud platform,» said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. 

«Separating the managed infrastructure services business creates a market-leading standalone company and further sharpens our focus on IBM’s open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. This will accelerate our growth strategy and better position IBM to seize the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity.”

The company’s plans to pour all its efforts into its cloud business will, on paper, be justified based on these most recent financial results, with the general health of cloud computing improving following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The firm’s global technology services division, which includes infrastructure and cloud services as well as technology support services, contracted by 4% year-on-year, with cloud revenue within this segment up 9%. 

The systems division, meanwhile, saw revenues of $1.3 billion, down 15%, driven by declines in IBM Z and Storage Systems. This is reflective of the impact of product cycle demands, the company said.

As part of the spin-off, IBM wants to create two separate companies by the end of 2021, with the to-be-cleaved infrastructure business, dubbed NewCo, making way for IBM to focus on AI capabilities and hybrid cloud.

Australian software company Atlassian will end support for all of its on-premise server products from 2024 as it plots a major shift to the cloud.

From 2 February 2021, customers will no longer be able to purchase or request a quote for a new server product, while prices will increase for a host of the company’s on-prem products, with a view to discontinuation three years later. 

The 10 services which will no longer be supported from 2 February 2024 include Jira Service Desk Server, Bitbucket Server and Jira Software Server, among other core Atlassian products.

«From staying ahead of the latest regulatory and security requirements to expanding our ecosystem with a new development platform and introducing flexible plans, we’ve continuously invested in our cloud tools so that your teams can work flexibly and innovate quickly,” said Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar.

«But, when it comes to our mission of unleashing the potential of every team – including yours – you need us to move faster and go even further.»

Atlassian will offer on-prem support in the form of bug fixes for server products until 2022, after which point only critical flaws will be addressed, through to 2024.

The company says offering three years of support and maintenance will help customers transition to the cloud, in addition to loyalty discounts for eligible customers to upgrade to its cloud or data centre products at a lower price.

The company’s Atlassian Migration Program (AMP) also provides customers with a step-by-step guide, free migration tools, a dedicated migration support team, and a free cloud migrationtrial for up to 12 months.

For customers for whom three years is not enough, the firm will also offer a robust self-managed enterprise edition, Atlassian Data Center. This will include new capabilities and integrations that makes it easier to use cloud and data centre products in harmony.

Dropbox has told its staff that permanent remote working will become the norm, joining a string of the world’s biggest tech companies in abandoning physical office spaces in favour of working virtually.

The existing working from home policy the company has adopted will continue until at least June 2021, in line with policies adopted by the majority of tech companies due to the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The company has, however, also outlined plans to establish at least four Dropbox Studios in sites across the world when it’s safe to do so, starting with San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Dublin, for employees who prefer to work in-person.

“We believe the data shows the shift to remote work, though abrupt, has been successful overall,” the company said in a blog post. As a company, we’ve continued to serve our customers without interruption and shipped new products and features.  

“But things aren’t perfect. Back-to-back video conferences, constant notifications, and isolation from peers can be overwhelming. In our study with the EIU, workers also say company culture suffers with no in-person interaction, risk of miscommunication is higher, and it’s harder to start new projects with multiple collaborators. There are many things people miss about the office.»

Becoming a virtual-first company means remote working will become the default for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.

The remote experience will go one step further with «non-linear workdays» too, meaning core collaboration hours will be set up with overlap between time zones, with employees encouraged to design their own schedules beyond that. 

Dropbox will also invest in a holistic ecosystem of resources, including a dedicated team, to support employees and track progress by measuring impacts on productivity, engagement, and culture so the firm can continue to adapt. 

The company’s Virtual First Toolkit, comprising guidance about supporting the remote workforce, is also being open-sourced, meaning any learnings picked up along the journey will be shared with the wider industry.

Managers also hope the virtual-first approach will give the firm an opportunity to build an even stronger, more diverse workforce as it hires from increasingly varied backgrounds and perspectives. 

News of Dropbox’s new «virtual first» approach comes just days after Microsoft announced that staff will be given the option to work remotely on a permanent basis. 

Cloud data protection and management company Druva has launched the «industry’s first» cloud-based backup service for network attached storage (NAS) devices.

While NAS devices serve as a great way to create local backups of important data, it’s traditionally not been possible to make an additional backup of that data on the cloud using a dedicated system.

Druva’s system claims to improve backup performance by more than five times, and introduces a feature dubbed intelligent cold-storage tiering. This is in addition to the capacity to diffuse storage growth with integrated storage insights.

The direct-to-cloud architecture also eliminates redundant copies of backed-up files, and the infrastructure allows businesses to safeguard the value of unstructured data and manage their information in a much simpler way than traditional methods.

“Traditional backup providers have treated NAS as an afterthought, at the expense of reliability, security, and cost-efficiency,” said Druva’s chief technologist, Stephen Manley.

“Now, IT teams can augment their data management strategy with a simple and resilient NAS-optimized protection solution that requires no on-premises storage and no cloud management. By reducing data copies and redundant data centrally with our patent global source-side deduplication, Druva’s new offering eliminates storage management headaches while delivering the built-in ransomware protection today’s businesses need.”

The company’s system is targeted at unstructured data, which Druva claims accounts for more than 80% of the total data stored in enterprise storage systems. Managing this quantity of data, however, is becoming increasingly complex and difficult.

Organisations routinely maintain multiple copies of a dataset, the company adds, including versions for short-term recovery and off-site copies for resiliency, long-term retention, compliance and more. This increases the overall cost of storing and managing data. 

Druva’s platform comes as a solution to this conundrum, with the direct-to-cloud nature of the architecture seamlessly backing-up and archiving unstructured data without the need for configuration, integration or managing cloud storage tiers.

The cloud backup and archiving capabilities are already generally available, while infrequent access tier is in early release, with general availability expected in the first half of 2021.