At AWS re:Invent on Wednesday, Andy Jassy said that he had “a few things to share”. But, over the course of his two-hour keynote, the CEO announced a barrage of new services and capabilities from blockchain to machine learning.

The boss of the world’s biggest cloud computing company has had a busy few days at the annual event in Las Vegas. From making announcements to meeting many of the developers and partners that have flocked to Sin City, Jassy has put himself about and offered plenty of information on everything he’s revealed.

And, there was a ridiculous amount of them…

Machine Learning Marketplace

Available now, the AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning includes over 150 algorithms and models, with more, said to be coming every day, that can be deployed directly to Amazon SageMaker. Its a giant algorithm hub for developers to find and offer machine learning models for the benefit of all.

For Gavin Jackson, the managing director of AWS UK and Ireland, this was the biggest news of the day and also a very good example of an underlying theme of this year’s re:Invent. It’s about catering to both those who can and those who can’t.

“The big announcement, I thought, was the Machine Learning Marketplace,” said Jackson. “Because while SageMaker is a good use of existing training models that you can just plug straight into your application, customers who are building their own training models and algorithms for applications can just look at a much wider s

et of use cases that are available in the marketplace and then just plug them in so they don’t have to build them for themselves.

“At the same time, those that do have data scientists and are building their own algorithms and training models can plug them into the marketplace and monetise it. It’s kind of a marketplace for those that can and those that can’t and everybody wins in the end. It just accelerates the progress of machine learning artificial intelligence over time.”

Blockchain

Unexpectedly, the CEO announced two new services to help companies manage business transactions for blockchain, starting with Amazon Managed Blockchain. Jassy said that this new service makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular, open source Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks.

It’s run from an AWS Management Console, where customers can set up a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts and scale to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions

The second blockchain offering, Amazon QLDB, is a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications that need a central, trusted authority to provide a permanent and complete record of transactions, such as supply chain, financial, manufacturing, insurance, and HR. This option is for customers who want to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority.

According to Jassy, the company was asked why they had not shown any previous interest in blockchain, despite many of its customers and partners using the technology.

“We just hadn’t seen that many blockchain examples in production or that couldn’t easily be solved by database,” said Jassy. “People just assumed that meant we didn’t think blockchain was important or that we wouldn’t build a blockchain service. We just didn’t understand what the real customer need was.”

Data

Also announced during the keynote were new services for automating data applications and detailed guidance to help customers build faster on AWS services.

The AWS Control Tower is a cloud interface that allows users to govern multiple AWS workloads, particularly for companies migrating to the cloud. Jassy said it offers pre-packaged governance rules for security, operations, and compliance, which customers can apply enterprise-wide or to groups of accounts to enforce policies or detect violations.

Jumping on the data lake bandwagon, the company is now offering AWS Lake Formation, which will run on Amazon S3. Data lakes are storage systems that source data from multiple locations and stores it in files for technologies like machine learning. The AWS version is said to automate and optimise data, reducing the data management burden for customers.

Hybrid

There was some noise before the event that AWS would address hybrid cloud systems and it has confirmed AWS Outposts, which is a fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks service built with AWS-designed hardware. It’s a service that allows customers to run on-premise computing and storage functions while connecting to other AWS services in the cloud.

These outposts come in two variants; first, an extension of the VMware Cloud on AWS service that runs on AWS Outposts and second, AWS Outposts that allow customers to run on-premise ccomputing and storage that uses the same native AWS APIs used in the AWS cloud

HPE has announced a host of new enhancements to its storage portfolio, including the introduction of memory-driven flash and an expansion to the coverage of its multi-cloud service.

The new additions come at a time when the company has all but given up on keeping pace with market leader Dell, and is instead seeking to build out its Intelligent Infrastructure range with new capabilities.

Chief among these is the introduction of Memory-Driven Flash to its 3PAR family of data centre flash storage modules and its Nimble Storage range, something that HPE described as the biggest leap in storage in 25 years. It essentially combines HPE software with storage class memory (SCM) and non-volatile memory (NVMe), based on Intel’s Octane hardware.

The result is a new class of storage that’s designed to lower latency by 2x, and is billed as being 50% faster than all-flash arrays using non-volatile memory SSDs. This is particularly important for those latency-sensitive workloads that rely on real-time processing, or those that use AI at scale.

“Most applications can benefit from adding memory, but memory is very expensive,” said Milan Shetti, GM of HPE Storage, speaking at HPE Discover in Madrid this week. “You can also have intelligent storage, but one of the key attributes of this is you need to have memory.

“[This] is the industry’s first enterprise storage operating system, which will support storage-class memory,” he added. “This is something we’ve been working on for a while. With [Memory-Driven] operating system, at the speed of memory and at the cost of flash, you’re getting an entirely new way of building computing, storage and data management.

This new architecture will be available in December 2018 for 3PAR as a straightforward upgrade, and sometime in 2019 for Nimble Storage.

Another major announcement was the introduction of new tools to its InfoSight product, a management platform that is designed to predict and prevent errors across an organisation’s infrastructure without user involvement, as well as predict bandwidth, capacity and performance needs.

Now the platform can also utilise more machine learning-based controls, including an enhanced recommendation engine that replaces its basic predictive analytics with an AI-based system. This drastically improves optimisation guidance across HPE Nimble Storage as a result, the company explained.

Also announced was the release of machine learning tools for its HPE 3PAR storage range, which allows for self-diagnosis of performance bottlenecks and means InfoSight can be extended to purely on-premise deployments. HPE explained this addresses the issue of being unable to provide InfoSight analytics to data centres which may have limited access to the cloud.

The company also revealed that its Cloud Volumes, a hybrid cloud storage-as-a-service platform, is now expanding into the UK and Ireland regions in 2019. Currently available for HPE Nimble Storage, the pay-as-you-use service allows customers to move their on-prem applications to the AWS or Azure cloud, only with enterprise-grade storage instead of the default storage offered by those clouds.

This platform also now includes containers-as-a-service for the provisioning of applications hosted by HPE, and compliance certifications, including SoC Type 1, HIPAA for healthcare, and GDPR.

Three-quarters of small to medium-sized enterprises are missing out because they haven’t deployed basic mobile working tools to their staff.

That’s according to a report commissioned by Crown Workspace and carried out by an independent research firm. Crown Workspace argues that by failing to integrate technologies such as cloud-based apps and services and BYOD policies, SMEs are significantly limiting their success.

The company noted that deploying basic tools to staff, such as the cloud and allowing employees to work from home, use their own devices for work and offering flexible working conditions can have a significant positive impact on innovation and productivity.

“Modern technology has created a new set of rules for the workplace,” Simon Gammell, director at Crown Workspace said.

“Tech such as WiFi, remote storage and mobile are what employees expect, and that’s what SME owners should consider first when designing a workspace to ensure that their people can work and communicate effectively. Design factors such as layout, equipment and furniture are also massively important too but should not come at the detriment of technology.”

Some of the areas highlighted as lacking by the company include voice technologies that are only being adopted by one in five organisations. Only 25% of the businesses questioned feel prepared for mobile working and although technologies such as Li-Fi and heating are becoming buzz technologies for SMEs, few are taking up the opportunity to modernise the workplace.

This is having a knock-on impact on employee productivity, but small businesses are struggling to justify spending on new tech in their offices.

“Landlords are conscious that occupiers need faster broadband speeds and greater access to strong wireless connections, amongst other technological advances,” Hugh Prissick, project manager and owner of Storey added. “Future proofing buildings is difficult but landlords and developers are placing technology at the heart of the design of new buildings.”

HPE has announced it has acquired software provider BlueData to help it boost its AI and analytics efforts.

HPE wants to roll out more software to capture the enterprise’s demand for big data systems and by purchasing BlueData, it hopes it can bring to market the tools that businesses need a whole lot faster than it is able to on its own.

BlueData’s software is available in the cloud, on-premise and on hybrid infrastructure, making it a promising addition to HPE’s acquisition portfolio.

“BlueData has developed an innovative and effective solution to address the pain points all companies face when contemplating, implementing, and deploying AI/ML and big data analytics,” Milan Shetti, SVP and GM, Storage and Big Data Global Business Unit at HPE said.

“Adding BlueData’s complementary software platform to HPE’s market-leading Apollo Systems and professional services is consistent with HPE’s data-first strategy and enables our customers to extract insights from data – whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid architecture.”

HPE expects the acquisition to close in January 2019, although it isn’t clear whether the entire BlueData team will join HPE to help with the integration or if HPE’s staff will continue the development of the platform when it is integrated with its Apollo range of machine learning tools and services.

“Growth in the volume and the types of data in the market continues to accelerate, as does the demand for a fast, easy, and unified consumption experience for AI and big data analytics,” said Kumar Sreekanti, Co-founder and CEO of BlueData.

“From our perspective, data is fuel, and BlueData’s software is the engine that helps businesses consume their data and deliver insights in the most effective and efficient way. We’ve had tremendous customer success by providing a turn-key solution that delivers an as-a-service experience for AI and big data, and are excited to reach even more customers as part of HPE.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Ground Station on Tuesday at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

It’s a service that aims to feed satellite data straight into AWS cloud infrastructure faster, easier and at an affordable price for its customers.

There will be 12 of these ground stations located around the world and they’re effectively antennas that link up with satellites as they pass by while orbiting. This is a problem AWS customers have identified, according to the company, where satellites are only in the range of certain ground antennas briefly, making uploading and downloading data difficult.

The announcement was made by AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who cited customers as the inspiration and called the service “the first fully managed global ground station service”.

“Customers said, ‘look, there’s so much data in space and so many applications that want to use that data to completely change the way in which we interact with our planet and world,” he said. “Why don’t we just make this easier?”

There is nothing easy about dealing with satellites, particularly for transferring data.

As they’re only in range for limited periods, linking up is very challenging and the data itself needs some kind of infrastructure to be stored, processed and utilised within. From top to bottom, it’s an operation that requires a lot of resources, such as land and hardware, which is extremely expensive. Thankfully, the world’s biggest cloud provider has stepped in to find a solution.

So, how does it work? According to AWS, customers can figure out which ground station they want to interact with and identify the satellite they want to connect with. Then, they can schedule a contact time; the exact time they want the satellite to interact with the chosen ground station as it passes by.

Each AWS Ground Stations will be fitted with multiple antennas to simultaneously download and upload data through an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud – directly feeding it into the customer’s AWS infrastructure.

“Instead of the old norm where it took hours, or sometimes days, to get data to the infrastructure to process it,” added Jassy. “It’s right there in the region in seconds. A real game changer for linking with satellites.”

While AWS provides the cloud computing, the antennas themselves have come from its partnership with Lockheed Martin, which has developed a network of antennas called Verge. Where AWS offer the powers to process and store, Verge promises a resilient link for the data to travel to.

“Our collaboration with AWS allows us to deliver robust ground communications that will unlock new benefits for environmental research, scientific studies, security operations, and real-time news media,” said Ric Ambrose, executive VP of Lockheed Martin.

“In time, with satellites built to take full advantage of the distributed Verge network, AWS and Lockheed Martin expect to see customers develop surprising new capabilities using the service.”

HPE has launched a host new additions to its composable cloud portfolio, chief among these being a hybrid cloud software stack that aims to bring the flexibility and fluidity of the public cloud, as well as a host of AI-driven storage systems, to the on-premise environment.

The company claims this represents the industry’s first hybrid cloud platform built on composability and flexible deployments, something that will help those businesses struggling to move to the cloud due to a lack of skilled stack specialists.

HPE follows the likes of Microsoft, Google, and IBM, leading technology companies that have shifted their focus over the past year towards a customer base that’s increasingly adopting multiple cloud providers or hybrid over a single, all-encompassing service.

It also builds on HPE’s launch of a hybrid cloud-as-a-service model, which sits inside its GreenLake financial services brand, allowing customers to pay monthly in exchange for hybrid services deployed and managed entirely by HPE. 

This new Composable Hybrid Cloud product extends that by allowing customers to essentially upgrade their traditional data centre set up to operate in the same way as a public cloud. This means that typical public cloud features such as the fluid provisioning of resources can now be built into a server stack, which the company claims will drastically improve the efficiency of workloads and allow for better communication between deployments.

“Our customers want to innovate faster, with greater automation and intelligence,” said Phil Davis, president of Hybrid IT at HPE. With our new open hybrid cloud platform, enterprises of all sizes can now manage, provision and deliver workloads and apps instantly and continuously to accelerate innovation.”

The new software includes HPE’s Composable Fabric, first introduced as part of its Synergy platform, which is placed on top of a server setup built with ProLiant or Synergy servers. This works like a mesh that’s able to automatically scale up and scale down network resources based on the needs of workloads, as well as allow those processes to communicate with others on the network.

This simplifies the operations of the network by allowing it to effectively act like a hyperscale cloud provider, providing a means to adjust workload balancing on the fly, the company says. Once deployed, this is said to reduce the over-provisioning of resources by up to 70%.

InfoSight, HPE’s AI-powered analytics service, is also integrated into the software stack, which automatically predicts and prevents points of failure in the workload, reducing the amount of manual work required by operators.

“Organisations are demonstrating an ever-growing appetite for automation, scalability and openness to aggressively accelerate development and operations,” said Thomas Meyer, group VP of IDC. “With composable cloud, HPE aims to deliver a foundational pillar with those attributes in mind to help customers accelerate their digital transformation.”

Importantly, HPE’s hybrid cloud platform is open to third-parties. Currently, the platform supports ProLiant server workloads built for Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware. HPE’s Synergy infrastructure platform will also support workloads from SAP and Oracle, and its Image Streamer capability means it can support Dev/Ops tools from the likes of Chef, Ansible, Puppet, and VMware.

HPE’s Composable Cloud platform on ProLiant rack servers will roll out to customers in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia starting in early 2019.

The cloud may be powering a great deal of business transformation, but many security leaders aren’t entirely happy about it, as new research reveals that one-third of CISOs view the cloud as their biggest security risk.

According to a study of 250 global CISOs and security leaders conducted by Kaspersky Lab, 30% of survey participants ranked cloud computing as the security risk that they were most worried about. This outranks both legacy IT and insider threats, which were listed as the top the top concern by 12% and 10% of CISOs respectively.

To be more specific, it’s not just cloud computing in general that was identified as a potential danger, but cloud computing and “uncontrolled cloud expansion” by different departments and lines of business within the organisation.

This could imply that CISOs are concerned about the potential security risks introduced by HR, finance and other departments procuring their own IT on an as-a-service model, without any oversight from the security team – although only 5% of respondents specifically identified shadow IT as a risk.

The majority (86%) of CISOs believe that security breaches are inevitable, according to the research. That’s a belief that coincides with almost half of the respondents reporting that CISOs have become risk management professionals over the past few years.

“My role actually consists of one very simple paradigm: minimizing cybersecurity risks for the group,” the CISO of a Swiss construction firm told Kaspersky.

“Furthermore, when it comes to the more ‘human’ part of my role, I’m a manager of very talented cybersecurity specialists, who are targets of multiple head hunters at the moment.”

Despite this focus on risk, however, only around one third of CISOs said that assessing and managing security risks was the most important part of their job, with the majority reporting that it was the implementation and management of security solutions.