Dell is aiming to take the hassle out of configuring and deploying laptops, with the launch of a new endpoint management platform that brings together a number of the company’s technologies and services.

The platform, dubbed the Dell Technologies Unified Workspace, is designed to give IT departments a simple and automated platform for managing devices.

Based on VMware’s Workspace One product, the Unified Workspace allows IT departments to order devices which are imaged, configured and provisioned with all of the customer’s business applications before they leave the factory, including the ability to personalise which applications are installed on a per-user basis. When customers receive their devices, Dell said, end users will be able to start working in minutes, as opposed to hours.

The platform also supports endpoint management tasks over the entire lifecycle of corporate devices, including automated patch deployment, device health and status information, and cloud-based policy tools. In line with Dell’s emphasis on the importance of data analysis, the Unified Workspace will collect and collate data from customers’ device fleets, which will allow IT departments to analyse usage patterns and identify their most widely-used apps.

To ensure security, the Unified Workspace platform integrates with tools from SecureWorks and CrowdStrike, including off-host BIOS storage and verification, threat intelligence data, behavioural analytics and more. In addition, the platform includes integrated support capabilities to allow IT to shorten the time it takes to resolve helpdesk tickets.

Customers can also spread the cost over monthly instalments via Dell Financial Services’ PC-as-a-Service offering, which offers a cloud-style consumption-based payment model for physical devices.

“No setup, no imaging, no provisioning, no installation,” said Dell vice chairman of products and operations Jeff Clarke. “No configuration is, we like to say, no problem.”

These capabilities aren’t new, however; the company already offers all of them, in the form of services like the Dell ProDeploy Client Suite and ProSupport.

Rather, the Dell Technologies Unified Workspace combines all of these functions into a single, unified console.

The value for customers comes from the simplicity and time savings that this centralisation can bring, along with the benefits of rolling all of the various costs into one monthly fee.

Alongside this new service, Dell also unveiled a brand new Data Centre-as-a-Service offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Coming as part of the newly-launched Dell Technologies Cloud portfolio, the offering is a fully managed VMware cloud solution, controlled through VMware’s cloud management console and deployed on Dell EMC hardware within the customer’s own data centre.

The aim is to allow customers to seamlessly move their workloads between public cloud, on-premise infrastructure and edge installations, with VMware acting as a central, consistent infrastructure layer.

Dell EMC is planning on tripling the amount of AMD-based servers in its portfolio, following the success of the chip manufacturer’s EPYC range.

AMD spent a long time in the wilderness, playing second fiddle to main rival Intel across both the desktop and server markets. Its Zen microarchitecture, however, has been met with widespread acclaim, with Zen-based chips offering a noticeably lower TCO than equivalent Intel parts. In our tests, EPYC-based servers from Dell EMC, Broadberry and HPE all showcased phenomenal per-core performance for an excellent price.

This has not gone unnoticed by Dell. The company currently offers three server platforms that use AMD chips but Dominique Vanhamme, the company’s EMEA vice president and general manager for storage and compute told IT Pro that the company is planning to triple the number of AMD-based platforms it offers by the end of the year.

“Out of, let’s say, 50 or so platforms that we have today,” he said, “three of them are AMD – we’ll probably triple that by the end of this year.”

He also confirmed that Dell EMC will be launching servers powered by AMD’s newest architecture – a 7nm architecture codenamed ‘Rome’ – in the second half of 2019.

While AMD will still be a minority among Dell’s server platforms, this planned expansion is in contrast to comments made by Dell EMC CTO John Roese last year, who told Cloud  Pro that Intel was still “the big player” in the market and that the company had no plans to substantially increase its AMD offering, stating “don’t expect it to be a duopoly any time soon”.

A significant barrier to AMD’s growth in the server market, as Vanhamme pointed out, is that any workloads that currently run on Intel servers will need to be re-validated to run on AMD-powered hardware. Given Intel’s relative stranglehold on the market, this means that a full AMD migration is likely to be a major project for any sizeable company.

One of the primary driving factors behind this expansion of AMD platforms is a growing demand from customers, according to Vanhamme. The lower TCO offered by AMD’s EPYC chips is a large factor, he says; along with a cheaper list price, many EPYC chips use fewer cores and sockets to match the performance of equivalent Intel systems, which means that CIOs can save money on per-core and per-socket licensing costs. Lower power consumption is also attractive, he said.

One thing that surprised Vanhamme was the demand for EPYC servers from general-purpose customers. For example. high-performance computing was expected to be the biggest revenue driver, due to the per-core and per-socket performance advantages, but general demand has been surprisingly strong.

“So in the original plan, we were thinking that it will be a few first verticals that will pick up, like service providers,” he said. “We thought that maybe there are some hosters that may want to have that extra capacity when they provide IaaS services. We clearly see HPC, but we also see general customers for sure.”

It’s the end of April, and that can mean only one thing: Michael Dell is getting ready to emerge, bear-like, from his Winter slumber and ravenously tear into something; in this case, insufficiently transformed data centres.

For the next week, Las Vegas’ Sands expo centre will be swarming with Dell’s customers, partners and technologists, all eager to hear what the company has in store over the next 12 months.

The answer, I suspect, will not be a surprise. Dell has been beating the ‘digital transformation’ drum for several years, and it shows no signs of letting up.

As such, we can expect to hear all about the company’s favourite talking-points (sing along if you know the worlds), including the importance of multi-cloud architectures, the growing role of data analytics in business and how software-defined storage and networking can unlock ‘the data centre of the future’. All important topics, to be sure, but nothing that we haven’t heard Dell talking about at its previous conferences.

In the years since the arrival of cloud to the enterprise market, Dell has pivoted rather impressively to being a full-stack provider, broadening its focus from on-premise infrastructure to hybrid cloud, edge computing and IoT in a way that its rivals haven’t been able to match quite as effectively. Realistically, there are very few parts of the modern data centre that Dell doesn’t touch in some way, and the company will be making full use of this position.

Edge computing and IoT, in particular, will almost certainly play a major role in this year’s conference; both areas are a key part of the so-called ‘4th industrial revolution’, and are supported by Dell’s product portfolio.

Analytics will likely be a major theme too – data-crunching is increasingly vital for companies, and by happy coincidence, the high performance and low-latency storage of Dell’s equipment makes it well-suited to this task.

Expect to hear the phrase ‘multi-cloud’ a lot, as well. Dell likes to emphasise how well the full suite of Dell Technologies brands (primarily VMware, Dell EMC and Pivotal) lend themselves to mixed estates, lest anyone think of it solely as a tin shop.

What all of these areas mean for customers, in practical terms, is another matter. We’d be surprised to see any major announcements from VMware – they’re usually saved for VMware’s own conference later in the year – but CEO Pat Gelsinger is all but certain to deliver his usual keynote. This will probably be where 5G, IoT and Edge receive the most airtime.

VMware aside, any cloud announcements are likely to come from Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is one of Dell Technologies’ major entry-points to the cloud market.

The meat of Dell’s announcements is most likely to focus on new hardware. We’re a little too early in the lifespan of Dell’s latest range of 14G PowerEdge servers to expect a whole new generation. But what we could well see are some newer, more powerful products. Intel has recently announced a swathe of new Xeon server processors, so we’re expecting Dell to show off some fancy new iron that actually makes use of them.

These servers will, no doubt, be touted as an ideal way to accelerate your machine learning and/or data analytics deployments; a position that neatly dovetails with Dell’s preferred messaging.

Equally, don’t be shocked to see Dell unveiling some new servers running on AMD’s EPYC architecture. It’s less likely than new Xeon-powered models – Intel is a major Dell partner with a lot of behind-the-scenes pull, so the company will want to avoid antagonising Intel – but at the same time, Dell’s run by smart people. It’s no secret that Intel’s 10nm development has hit a bit of a brick wall, while AMD has sailed merrily past it onto the 7nm process node.

The results speak for themselves, too: Dell EMC servers fitted with AMD’s EPYC processors can match the performance of Xeon-based equivalents for a considerably lower price point, and that can’t have gone unnoticed. How much attention AMD gets (both on stage and in the halls) should give a good indication of whether the tide is starting to turn in its favour.

Long story short, keep an eye out for more AMD servers than usual – although they won’t be sporting the company’s newest Rome architecture, as it’s still too early for production servers to be ready.

We wouldn’t discount the possibility of Dell launching some new storage or networking hardware, either. We’re not betting the farm on this as it’s usually not a ‘sexy’ enough area to get much attention at the company’s major league show, not to mention that both portfolios got a full refresh not long after the close of the EMC acquisition. That being said, both storage and networking are key areas of data centre transformation, and Dell has been impressing in both categories recently.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that this may well be a more cautious show than we’ve seen in recent years, as it’s the first annual conference since Michael Dell took the company back onto the public market last year. This means that, for the first time since 2013, he’s once again answerable to shareholders. Dell is riding high on the successful execution of its roadmap, but tech investors are a notoriously skittish bunch, so the pressure will be focussed on not spooking them with any controversial announcements.

Thematically-speaking, then, this year’s Dell World is set to be more of the same. Regular attendees probably aren’t going to find themselves surprised by the company’s agenda, and although we may have some excitement on hand in the form of new hardware releases, the looming spectre of public investors makes any big shocks fairly unlikely.

Still, for customers and partners, it’s an opportunity to get a closer look at the latest products and services rolling out of Dell’s development facilities; at the end of the day, that’s what it’s really all about.

Intel has further demonstrated its intention to cosy up to cloud service providers, with the announcement of a number of cloud-focused products and features as part of its new second-generation Xeon Scalable platform.

More than fifty new processors were unveiled, including two new additions to the Xeon Gold family which have been specifically built to support networking functions. Both the Xeon Gold 6200 and 5200 series’ are NFV-optimised, and support Intel’s Select Speed technology.

A new feature introduced with the updated platform, Select Speed allows IaaS providers much more flexibility and granularity to manage the frequencies and per-core performance settings of the processors in their servers, enabling them to meet more elastic workload demands.

The new Xeon Gold chips also both promise up to 1.76x improvements to NFV workloads, according to Intel, as well as the option to assign a subset of their cores to handle high-priority virtualised workload acceleration.

To accompany the new processors, Intel also unveiled a new range of Intel Ethernet 800 Series controllers and adapters, which will be hitting production lines in Q3 this year. These networking components will support maximum speeds of 100Gb/sec, and will also make application response times more than 50% more predictable, with over 45% lower latency and thoughput improvements of more than 30% when running open source Redis – all through the implementation of Application Device Queues. They’ll also support iWARP and RoCE v2 Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), as well as dynamic device personalisation.

On the software side, the company introduced Intel Security Libraries for Data Center (Intel SecL-DC), providing an easier way for cloud companies to manage and deploy all of Intel’s hardware-rooted security technologies through a single set of tools and libraries which integrate with OpenStack, Kubernetes Extensions and Docker.

Edge computing is a growing area of interest for the cloud industry, and Intel isn’t ignoring it; the company launched a new range of Xeon D-1600 SoC processors for edge computing applications in high-density environments, including built-in QuickAssist and virtualisation tools. It also debuted its new line of Agilex FPGAs, built with a 10nm process andOptane support, aimed at hardware acceleration for edge computing.

Also updated was the company’s range of co-developed Select Solutions, produced in association with key partners to suit specific tasks. It launched new products geared towards AI, HPC and SAP HANA, as well as updates to its Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSAN and more.

Apple has launched a huge slate of new services, expanding the company’s presence in sectors such as video, news, gaming and finance.

Announced at a live event at the company’s Cupertino headquarters, the biggest news was the arrival of Apple’s long-expected TV streaming service, Apple TV+. The company has partnered with a laundry-list of top talent to create a slate of new original content, including new shows from Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Kumail Nanjiani and even Oprah Winfrey.

Apple TV+ will be arriving in Autumn. The service’s original programming will be ad-free and fully downloadable for offline viewing. Pricing and availability dates for the service are being withheld until Autumn.

This announcement was preceded by a number of updates surrounding the pre-existing Apple TV app, including the news that the app will be coming to smart TVs from the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony and that the service is expected to be available in 100 countries by the end of the year.

The Apple TV app will also include the ability to subscribe to and access streaming services from within the app, as well as the ability to purchase specific individual cable channels.

The company also announced Apple Arcade, a subscription service for games on its App Store. The company will be offering more than 100 exclusive games via Apple Arcade, which will not be available on other platforms, or for non-subscribing users. Apple Arcade will be launching in Autumn, although full pricing has yet to be announced.

One of the most shocking reveals was the introduction of Apple Card, a new financial offering that provides users with a full bank account, powered by Goldman Sachs and MasterCard. The digital card will be accessible through the Wallet app and is accepted anywhere that supports Apple Pay, offering 2% cashback on all purchases. The company is also providing a physical card, which will be cut from titanium and feature only the owner’s name, with no identifiers such as a signature or card number. Apple Card is coming to the US this Summer, but there’s currently no word on when (or if) it will be coming to the rest of the world.

Apple News was expanded too, with the addition of magazines, all of which have been specifically formatted and designed for iPhone and iPad, including digital features like video covers, integrated infographics and AI-driven content recommendations.

The service – which, like the new TV package, is dubbed Apple News+ – will also include select newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, as well as a handful of digital publications. Apple News+ will be an additional subscription of $9.99 per month with free Family Sharing included as standard. It will be coming to the UK in Autumn, with UK pricing yet to be announced.

The announcements distinctly underscore Apple’s ongoing pivot from hardware sales to services and subscriptions as its primary revenue driver. The company has been experiencing a slowdown in growth as sales of recent iPhone models continue to perform below expectations.

Services like Apple Music and the App Store, meanwhile, have become a substantial chunk of the company’s revenue – a chunk that it will be hoping to augment with the addition of several new streams.

Microsoft has announced a new inbuilt security information and event management (SIEM) tool for its Azure cloud customers, which promises to use AI to slash the number of alerts that security teams need to respond to.

The new tool, dubbed ‘Azure Sentinel’, will help infosec professionals monitor and defend their cloud environments by collating all of their security logs and threat data in one place. As well as information from Office 365 and Azure, customers will be able to process data from partners such as F5 Networks, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Fortinet and more, including partners outside the security sector.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is touting the speed and scale that the cloud can offer as one of the biggest benefits of this service, promising it allows customers to “invest your time in security and not servers”. In a blog post announcing the new product, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions Group Ann Johnson boasted that early adopters of the product have seen up to 90% reductions in ‘alert fatigue’ – although she neglected to mention how this was measured.

“Azure Sentinel is the product of Microsoft’s close partnership with customers on their journey to digital transformation,” Johnson wrote “We worked hand in hand with dozens of customers and partners to rearchitect a modern security tool built from the ground up to help defenders do what they do best – solve complex security problems. Early adopters are finding that Azure Sentinel reduces threat hunting from hours to seconds.”

While other companies like Splunk and Sumo Logic have previously unveiled cloud-based SIEM tools, Microsoft says that it’s the first major cloud provider to offer one as an integrated part of its portfolio.

Azure Sentinel is currently available in preview via the Azure portal; the product is currently free to use, with future pricing to be announced at a later date. Microsoft has also said that there may be additional charges for automation workflows, machine learning model customisation and data ingestion, importing Office 365 data will be free.

The company also announced a tool that allows customers to call in the cavalry in the event of a security crisis. Microsoft Threat Experts, a new capability which will be introduced to Windows Defender ATP, allows customers to call on the expertise of Microsoft’s own security specialists, who will scour your (anonymised) security data to identify the most pressing threats to your organisation.

Customers can apply to join the service through their Windows Defender ATP settings and once approved, can access it via a button in the console labelled ‘Ask a Threat Expert’.

Security researchers who discover flaws in Microsoft’s Azure DevOps platform could earn themselves up to $20,000, after the company announced its latest bug bounty programme.

The Microsoft Azure DevOps Services Bounty is the company’s tenth concurrent bug bounty programme and covers Redmond’s suite of cloud-based DevOps tools. Previously known as Visual Studio Team Services, these include continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, Git repos, kanban boards, testing tools and more.

“Security has always been a passion of mine,” said Microsoft’s director of engineering for Azure DevOps, Buck Hodges, “and I see this program as a natural complement to our existing security framework. We’ll continue to employ careful code reviews and examine the security of our infrastructure. We’ll still run our security scanning and monitoring tools. And we’ll keep assembling a red team on a regular basis to attack our own systems to identify weaknesses.”

Rewards range from $500 all the way up to $20,000 at the top end, with payouts affected by a number of different factors. The quality of the report itself (meaning how easy the report makes it for Microsoft’s engineers to understand, reproduce and fix the problem) is graded as either high, medium or low, with different bounties for each.

Different levels of compensation are also awarded based on the severity of the bug, but only ‘critical’ or ‘important’ bugs will qualify for a reward – disclosures of any other category of bug will merely earn a public acknowledgement from Microsoft, should the report lead to a fix.

Finally, the impact of the bug itself will be taken into consideration too. Remote code execution flaws are, understandably, the most valuable, followed by privilege escalation and information leaking, while tampering flaws are eligible only for a limited payout, and denial of service vulnerabilities are not rewarded at all.

Bug bounties are becoming an increasingly common security measure among large companies, with the idea being to make it more valuable to responsibly disclose the flaw to the victim than to exploit it for personal gain.

Major organisations like Facebook, Apple, and Google all offer their own bug bounty programmes, and the practice is touted as a good way to ensure that fewer flaws and exploits appear in the wild.

Netflix will shortly announce the hiring of Activision Blizzard’s current CFO Spencer Neumann, according to reports.

A source close to the deal has said that Neumann is slated to start at Netflix early this year, according to reports from Reuters. He will reportedly be based in Los Angeles, and will focus on production costs.

Neumann will replace outgoing CFO David Wells, who announced in August that he would be stepping down after a 14-year tenure with the company. Wells has been CFO since 2010, during which time he has helped guide the company from a minor DVD rental service to an omnipresent cultural phenomenon.

Neumann is leaving his current post at Activision Blizzard under something of a cloud. The company publicly disclosed his imminent dismissal as part of a regulatory filing earlier this week, stating only that it was “unrelated to the Company’s financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures”. He is currently on paid leave.

His tenure as CFO at Activision Blizzard has lasted for less than two years, and the last 12 months have seen the games publisher’s stock price drop by just over 25%. In his absence, his predecessor Dennis Durkin – who is currently acting as chief corporate officer and served as CFO from 2012 to 2017 – will step back into the role.

Neumann has a strong media background and previously had a lengthy career as part of the Disney empire, having started with the company in 1992. His reported focus on production indicates that Netflix is still pursuing its goal of having 50% of its library of movies and TV shows being made in-house – a goal that has seen Netflix spend billions of dollars on creating high-profile shows such as House of Cards and Stranger Things.

The average person would need to be paid more than $1,000 (~£790) in order to deactivate their Facebook account for a year, according to recent research.

The study, published in scientific journal PLOS One, found that the social network is still extremely valuable – not just in terms of its share price, but to its users as well. “Our results provide evidence that online services can provide tremendous value to society even if their contribution to GDP is minimal,” the researchers wrote.

In order to test how much Facebook’s users valued it, researchers conducted auctions in which participants submitted bids of how much it would take to get them to deactivate their account. In order to prevent strategic bidding, the auctions were conducted using the ‘second-price’ method, where only the second-highest (or in this case second-lowest) bid would win the auction.

The winning bidder was paid by the researchers in exchange for proof that their account had been deactivated, in the knowledge that the researchers would be periodically checking their account.

Two groups of college students and one group of adults were tested using these auctions, with all three groups numbering between 122 and 138 people. One group of students was asked how much it would take for them to quit Facebook for one day, for three days, and for one week, extrapolating from their answers to find out how much it would take to get them to quit for one year. The other two groups were asked for the annual figure outright.

In all three cases, the average annual figure was over $1,000, ranging as high as $2,076 for one of the student groups. Unsurprisingly, the adults proved more willing to give up the social platform, with an average bid of $1,139 for the year. Even so, this means that these users would need to be paid almost $100 per month before they’d sacrifice their Facebook accounts.

The researchers also tested a separate sample of 931 users via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which yielded an annual average of $1,921 – although the researchers did not check whether the winners had deactivated their accounts following the auction.

The news of Facebook’s enduring popularity may come as a surprise to some; the company has spent the past year mired in a series of seemingly never-ending scandals over issues including data privacy, leadership struggles, information warfare and more.

“Concerns about data privacy, such as Cambridge Analytica’s alleged problematic handling of users’ private information, which are thought to have been used to influence the 2016 United States presidential election, only underscore the value Facebook’s users must derive from the service,” the researchers stated.

“Despite the parade of negative publicity surrounding the Cambridge Analytica revelations in mid-March 2018, Facebook added 70 million users between the end of 2017 and March 31, 2018. This implies the value users derive from the social network more than offsets the privacy concerns.”

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.