The Mozilla Corporation’s first CEO Mitchell Baker has rejoined the company to serve as its next chief executive after Chris Beard announced his intention to resign in August last year.

Baker, who was instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, has been serving as the company’s CEO on an interim basis since December 2019 when Beard officially stepped down from his position.

The company has been attracted to her “innate knowledge of Mozilla” alongside a sense of urgency and transparency and a focus on long-term development, which she’s demonstrated since taking over from Beard.

​Microsoft has announced that it will assist all UK schools in getting set up for remote learning, in order to help students continue to learn while at home.

The company has pledged to work with the 27,000 schools in the UK, helping them run lessons remotely using Microsoft Teams, Office 365, as well as software such as Minecraft: Education Edition, Flipgrid, Skype in the Classroom and InTune.

The tools are available to use on mobile devices, tablets, PCs and browsers, and focus on encouraging teamwork by allowing collaborations, communication and file sharing in real-time. Microsoft emphasised that the tools “offer a safe and secure learning environment, using intelligent security features enhanced by machine learning to protect data and identities”.

Microsoft UK’s director of education, Chris Rothwell, praised teachers for “showing incredible resilience, imagination, and passion to ensure that they can help keep children safe and can keep learning while they at home”.

“Technology is helping teachers keep in touch with students and to maintain a connection to the school and each other,” he said. “This offer to support any school get fully set up for remote learning is so that every school and pupil can benefit, and that learning can continue while schools are closed.”

In order to support teaching staff, Microsoft has also launched webinars aiming to promote the benefits of Teams. The topics covered include creating an online classroom, keeping students engaged with online meetings, as well as assisting IT Administrators in setting up Teams for online collaboration.

Schools across the UK have been closed since 20 March, allowing only vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers, such as NHS staff, to attend. Latest reports indicate that schools are not planning to reopen after Easter break.

​Google has become the latest organisation to ban videoconferencing app Zoom over security concerns.

The tech giant sent an internal email to employees last week, according to BuzzFeed, warning that Zoom’s app would no longer work on their laptops.

Zoom, which is a competitor to Google’s own Meet and Hangouts services, has seen a spike in usage following the coronavirus lockdown, but the mass adoption has brought greater scrutiny of the service and a number of security flaws have come to the fore.

The issues being reported with Zoom range from its standard of encryption to its resistance to hacking, but Google hasn’t specified which area it is concerned about.

“We have long had a policy of not allowing employees to use unapproved apps for work that are outside of our corporate network,” a Google spokesperson, told BuzzFeed. 

“Recently, our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards for apps used by our employees.”

Employees are still allowed to use the service to stay in touch with family and friends via a web browser or via mobile, but Google has added its name to a growing list of organisations – as well as entire countries – that have moved to ban the software.

The company has owned up to many of the faults it’s accused off. It’s CEO Eric Yuan suggested the company has simply moved “too fast” and were not able to put in place the required level of enterprise security. He also said the company’s new goal was to become a “security-first” organisation.

One of its first big changes in this regard is the removal of the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. This has come in an update to its Linux, Mac and Windows apps and follows on from reports of ‘Zoom bombing‘, where uninvited guests were crashing meetings.

The UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recently posted a screenshot of a cabinet meeting over Zoom – with the ID visible to his 2.2 million Twitter followers.

An organisation might start its venture into cloud in one particular area of its work. Perhaps there is a cloud platform offering support for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning or an Internet of Things (IoT) implementation that is useful for new product or service development, or for streamlining work with an existing product or service. 

Once cloud is established as beneficial in the area it has initially been brought in to help with, it often makes sense to see how it can be used elsewhere in the business. There might be other client facing areas of the business that can benefit, such as employing cloud based AI chatbots for end user engagement, or perhaps there are back-office areas where cloud might be useful such as accounting and payroll services, with AI features that can assist with and speed up monthly close.

A business-led approach

What’s important as use of cloud grows is to continuously view its implementation as business led, and not IT led. In the boardroom the Chief Data Officer role becomes central as they look for points where the agility of cloud can deliver benefits right across the business, while the Chief Finance Officer role might change fundamentally from constantly weighing up capital expenditure to focusing more on operational expenditure. Making those moves can ensure cloud is embedded in the business, but the question then becomes, how much cloud is enough, and how do you keep cloud provision in tune with an organisation’s needs?

Analysing how well cloud usage fits with current and potential future business needs might seem like a difficult thing to do. Getting it right will likely involve a mix of time-specific work around broad business planning and ongoing activity. 

In the former area, if the business is planning a new rollout and requires specific effort such as test and dev, research or fabrication, specific additional cloud resources might be required. In addition, Ramanan Ramakrishna, Cloud CoE Lead and member of the Global Cloud Leadership team at Capgemini, suggests organisations should take a look at cloud providers. He says that “on a quarterly to half yearly basis [companies] should look at the evolution of the PaaS and SaaS offerings from the leading providers and consider them for their cloud strategy,”, just to make sure they are taking best advantage of what’s on offer. 

Rob Greenwood, technical director at Cloud and DevOps consultancy, Steamhaus, tells Cloud Pro that outside of scheduled evaluations, those responsible for cloud within an organisation, right up to the Chief Technical Officer, should keep their ears to the ground in “an on-going process, constantly being aware of new releases and announcements from your cloud provider of choice and evaluating if and how these would supplement your current usage”.

Signs that you are under-provisioned

Amid all this checking on what’s out there and on what your own needs are, it is important to look a little deeper to make sure provision across the board within your organisation is adequate. Ramakrishna points out a few really useful warning signs that an organisation could be under provisioned. “Organisations where capital expenditure on infrastructure is rising year-on-year should analyse whether their cloud adoption is conservative,” he says, suggesting that “close attention should be given to ascertain whether the on-premise infrastructure is designed for handling peak volumes instead of a more optimal strategy of sizing for average volumes  and bursting into the cloud for handling peaks”.

“Another tell-tale sign is if small pockets of cloud purchases are being made from individuals within the business directly,” he says. “This might suggest a lack of coherent cloud strategy and hence cloud not being used in an optimal enterprise manner.”

Under provisioning cloud requirements in this way can have a negative impact on business growth, and here, again, the Chief Finance Officer and Chief Data Officer should work together to spot these tell-tale signs and leverage cloud appropriately to mitigate them. 

Mix your approaches for best results

Ensuring the business has enough cloud, distributed across the right parts of the organisation, is crucial to present agility and future growth. The strategy required to achieve this is mixed, and blends a range of approaches. 

There will be some forward-looking strategising to meet the ambitions of the business. There will be constant scanning of cloud provision technologies to identify areas where the business could benefit. These will combine with actively seeking out signs of under-provisioning, and ensuring that key leadership roles, most particularly the Chief Finance Officer and Chief Data Officer have eyes across the business. Together these strategies can ensure that the business not only has enough cloud, but is using that cloud to its best advantage.

Google’s flagship G Suite collection of cloud-based collaboration tools has surpassed six million paid business subscribers, while the usage of video conferencing Google Meet has surged 25 times amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

Around a million more organisations have taken up the paid-for iteration of Google’s suite of productivity apps since February 2019, a spokesperson from Google confirmed.

This is in addition to usage on Google Meets, the business-focussed iteration of conferencing app Google Hangouts, surging by 25 times since January. 

The latest stats were first outlined by the vice president and general manager of G Suite, Javier Soltero, speaking with CNBC

“The business of G Suite is growing at an incredibly healthy and, frankly for me, surprising rate,” Soltero told the news network. 

He added that millions of people working from home have boosted the adoption rate of Google Meet, which sits alongside Gmail, Google Drive and other services that comprise the G Suite.

Meets differs from Hangouts in that it’s only available to business users, while anybody with a Google account can use the consumer-focused Hangouts.

Services offered by rival developers, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, have also seen an explosion in interest. Zoom, in particular, has seen its popularity explode despite a string of security concerns, while Microsoft previously reported a massive rise in Teams usage in Italy, amounting to a 775% surge.

G Suite, which competes with Office 365, holds a much smaller market share against the Microsoft suite of workplace applications. 

Google has implemented a host of changes over the last few years in a bid to change its fate, for example, by rolling out voice commands, text suggestions and an AI boost in the form of Google Assistant, among other new features. 

The industry giant has also been keen to make inroads on the dominance of Microsoft Teams and its rival Slack, announcing plans earlier this year to combine G Suite services into a single mobile entity alongside communications functionality.

Under the plans, the entire G Suite collection of apps would combine into a single mobile entity, with a prototype of the app currently being tested internally.

In February, Paris Saint Germain were left stunned by 18-year-old Erling Braut Haaland during their 2-1 defeat to Borussia Dortmund. The striker shocked everyone with his winning goal, scored in the 77th minute, hitting the back of the net so hard the sound of it rattling was picked up by the TV broadcast.

Despite being at the start of his career, there is already a trove of data on Haaland, who has scored 11 times from 19 attempts for the German side. Indeed, there are huge amounts of data held on all professional football players in Germany by the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL) – the governing body that runs Germany’s Bundesliga football league – which recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

This is the first move from the football world to follow the likes of Formula 1, rugby and the NFL in using a range of machine learning, analytical and storage services from AWS. The DFL wants to build a statistical platform to provide viewers with real-time information on player statistics, game outcomes and even goal predictions. 

Andreas Heyden is the CEO of the DFL’s digital sports platform, which takes care of all media and technology within the businesses. He is also the EVP for business innovation for the whole DFL group, essentially putting him in charge of its digital transformation. This isn’t a digital transfomation story, however, as the DFL is already cloud-native. As Heyden tells Cloud Pro, this partnership with AWS is about doing more with their cloud. 

“The great thing about this collaboration with AWS is we did the deal after we were already transformed,” Heyden says. “So it’s not about taking our on-premises solutions and turning them into the cloud, we’re in the cloud and have had very good experiences with AWS. By December 2018, we’d turned off nearly all legacy systems, we are completely cloud-ready.” 

Instead, the DFL is looking to improve the fan experience and capitalise on the so-called ‘second screens’, primarily mobile phones and tablets, that compete for fan attention. To use this to its advantage, the DFL is looking to innovate in three key areas: AI, 5G and augmented reality. 

Virtual and augmented reality

Heyden and his team are firm believers that humans are curious; they want to know more than their eyes can see. He says this is especially true of Generation Z, who’ve grown up with the popular FIFA computer games where they get instant real-time data as they play. How this will look to fans of the real thing is still to be decided and as Heyden points out, it might not necessarily be a visual concept as such, maybe an audio alert on a users phone. But they are keen to use the data for prediction models.  

If there is a visual aspect, augmented reality will enable fans to use their phone cameras and see information points on the field. The holy grail, as Heyden puts it, is predicting goals, but perhaps the most likely scenario is machine learning models that calculate success from dead-ball situations, such as penalties and free-kicks. This was one of the use cases for AWS’ work with the Six Nations (before it was indefinitely postponed), whereby conversion success could be calculated based on the kicker’s history and distance from the goal. 

To date, the most relevant examples of this type of prediction model is the NFL’s Pro Football Focus website and the Next Gen Stats platform. For a number of years, American football fans have been able to see pass predictions for quarter-backs on second screens. They’ve had data-rich TV broadcasts as pundits have been armed with real-time information and insight from analytical services. AI, machine learning and analytics are in every corner of the sport, thanks to a very deep and successful partnership with AWS. 

Pro Football Focus

Strangely, this all began with one fan, in the not so NFL savvy town of Luton, England. Neil Hornsby’s Pro Football Focus (PFF) website is now based in Cincinnati, co-owned by former player turned star pundit Cris Collinsworth, and is used by every single NFL team. But it’s a far cry from its humble beginnings as one man’s obsession to talk about American Football in a country besotted with “soccer”. 

“Obviously, in the UK none of your mates at the gym want to talk about football, they want to talk about soccer,” Hornsby explains. “So I started this website to really begin a discourse with high-end fans in the States. But typical of me, I didn’t hit the marketplace quite right; I overshot it a little bit and ended up in 2009 getting a call from the New York Giants, asking for more of the data.”

He was sceptical at first, believing it to be a bit of a joke – but the Giants were absolutely serious. Hornsby was collecting data, by hand initially, as a hobby. He had collected a huge amount of technical data doing things cheaply, using everyday tools like Excel and free services like MySQL. At the time he couldn’t believe NFL teams weren’t actually collecting this data themselves. He carried on providing them with the data as a hobby until 2012 when the Giants won the Super Bowl. The Wall Street Journal ran a story before the game highlighting the use of PFF’s data, which caught the attention of the rest of the league. Since then PFF has become the biggest provider of statistical sports data and analytics in the world, largely thanks to the involvement of AWS.

“AWS came into this when Cris (Collinsworth) bought the company,” Hornsby explains. “I always used to laugh when people used to call us an analytics company, that’s what they use to sell to the math nerds and all that, because we didn’t do any of that. It’s only really over the last three years, where we’ve actively gone out to try and find some of the best analytics brains in the football community that we’ve become an analytics company and started to use machine learning to use this huge amount of data that nobody else has, to really start predicting where we are.

Unlike Hornsby and the NFL, the DFL has only just started to imagine what machine learning and analytics can do for its leagues. For Heyden this is an inevitable avenue the sport must go down to engage a more modern audience. 

“If you play FIFA or fortnight, you are used to getting this kind of data,” he says. “Gen Z is coming, we can’t stop them and we want them to enjoy the Bundesliga. But we must be tactful and careful not to overwhelm the traditional fan.”

After an influx of new users pushed Zoom’s market cap as high as $42 billion, its stock price has since dropped nearly 14.5% as of Monday, April 7. While the teleconference app faced a surge in popularity last month, it now faces concerns over its privacy and security. Several major organizations and school systems across the nation have begun discouraging and, in many cases, outright banning Zoom. 

The New York City Department of Education is one of many school systems that’s banned Zoom completely. The department oversees the country’s largest public school system and has encouraged its staff members to move away from Zoom as soon as possible. The department suggested its staff members consider similar platforms, including Microsoft Teams.

The New York City Department of Education isn’t the only organization discouraging the app’s use. In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees it would disable access to Zoom immediately. 

“We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support,” SpaceX shared in the email. “Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication.”

The coronavirus outbreak has revealed a myriad of privacy and security issues for Zoom users. The most notable incidents have been “Zoom bombings,” in which uninvited attendees access Zoom meetings to harass participants. These bombings highlight an educational gap among users, as many are using online meeting software for the first time. 

The unaware users were leaving their meeting open to bombers by posting their meeting IDs in public areas and faking to password protect their meetings. Unfortunately, Zoom’s meeting ID format appears to worsen user errors, as researchers found that hackers could use an automated tool to find unprotected meetings and essentially “war dial” Zoom meetings. 

In a recent statement, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom said the company “takes user privacy, security, and trust extremely seriously” and is “working around-the-clock” to improve user security. Yuan also said, “We recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations.”