Cisco has been ordered to pay $1.9 billion (£1.46 billion) to a cyber security firm after a US district judge ruled it had infringed its patents. 

Judge Henry Morgan concluded after a month-long trial that Cisco infringed upon four out of five patents that belonged to Centripetal Networks, according to Reuters.

Virginia-based Centripetal was founded in 2009 and develops threat intelligence software and firewall hardware for cyber networks. The company took legal action against Cisco earlier this year and has successfully challenged the US tech giant. 

In a 167-page decision, Morgan said the case was “not a close call,” pointing out inconsistencies in Cisco‘s evidence and within its own technical documents. Most of these were used by Centripetal during the trial. 

The massive payout reflects $755.8 million in damages suffered by Centripetal, which has been multiplied by 2.5 on account of “willful and egregious” conduct from Cisco. Add to that prejudgment interest and it leaves the final sum at $1.9 billion. 

With regards to the four patents it lost, Morgan said that Cisco did not “advance any objectively reasonable defences at trial”.

“The infringing functionality was added to their accused products post June 20, 2017, and resulted in a dramatic increase in sales which Cisco touted in both technical and marketing documents,” Morgan wrote.

Cisco said it was disappointed with the decision and confirmed it plans to appeal: “Given the substantial evidence of non-infringement, invalidity and that Cisco’s innovations predate the patents by many years.”

In its latest fiscal year, Cisco posted $11.2 billion of net income from $49.3 billion of revenue. 

“With this judgment, the court rejected the primitive doctrine that might makes right,” Paul Andre, a lawyer for Centripetal, said in a statement. “This is a significant win for all small, innovative companies.”

​Microsoft has suffered a second global outage within a week, with users being unable to access their Outlook accounts, the tech giant has confirmed.

The reports come just days after the company said it had fixed a global outage that affected its Microsoft 365 platform. Microsoft services including Azure, Outlook, Office, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams were down for around five hours on Monday.

This latest outage began at around 2am ET, with Microsoft initially suggesting the issue was only affecting users based in India, according to a status update on Twitter. However, customers from around the world soon replied that they were also experiencing problems.

“We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols,” the tech giant tweeted. “Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208.”

Microsoft has said that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of the outage. It has now “reverted” this update and will continue to monitor the service for signs of recovery.

The company’s outage on Monday was also blamed on unexpected errors relating to a recent update, although reverting this update did not immediately solve the problem.

“Rolling back the previously described change did not resolve the incident as expected,” Microsoft said on its Office status page. “We’re evaluating additional options to remediate the problem.”

For Wednesday’s outage, the rollback has “mitigated impact” for affected features in SharePoint and Teams, Microsoft tweeted. It also said that the majority of users were “seeing recovery”.

Rackspace has joined forces with Dell Technologies and VMware to expand its private cloud portfolio to include a secure pathway to hybrid cloud services.

The new offering is described as “turnkey”, a ready to use pathway to hybrid cloud environments and includes access to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

According to VMware, the industry defines hybrid cloud as the combination of private cloud, public cloud and edge environments unified with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. It’s popular because it allows IT organisations to determine what aspects of public cloud fit their application needs.

VCF runs on Dell EMC VxRail and is used by organisations to provide consistent and secure management for application portfolios across multiple cloud environments. It is the only hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system fully integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager.

What’s more, VxRail is proven to deliver up to 52% lower cost of operations over building a proprietary HCI and reduces unplanned downtime by 88%, according to Dell Technologies.

“A successful path to hybrid cloud is much like shooting a free throw in a basketball game – a simple, consistent process leads to more efficient results,” said Fidelma Russo, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit.

“Through simplifying IT transformation and enabling consistent and secure application management, this ecosystem delivers greatly reduced cost and downtime. Those are the types of results any organisation wants to see.”

Rackspace is hoping to bring the benefits of the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) to more organisations and applications, to accelerate multi cloud adoption. The idea is to capitalise on the increased investment in digital transformation as businesses add new cloud environments to their overall IT estate.

Expanding options for multi cloud services with Rackspace will help companies achieve better performance at a lower cost, according to Brian Payne, vice president of cloud for Dell Technologies. He suggested it could ultimately help them stay competitive in this rapidly changing business environment.

Amazon‘s newly launched smart home security drone presents a “whole new wave of cyber security risks”, according to Kaspersky.

Researchers at the security firm have warned that if the technology is compromised it could give hackers a map of a user’s home and access to sensitive data, including bank details.

The flying camera drone, ‘Always Home’, is the latest product from Amazon’s Ring division. It’s a black device that sits in a white docking station that launches when something or someone sets off any home sensors.

The drone is controlled via a smartphone and is capable of capturing images which are then sent to the controlling device.

Kaspersky researchers claim it’s this functionality that has the potential to be used against the consumers who buy it.

“The development of unmanned security drones presents a whole new wave of cyber security risks,” said David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky. “If hacked, this smart technology could provide cybercriminals with a complete map of an individual’s home – including the location of valuable items and possible access points to the house.

“The linked smartphone is also vulnerable to attack. If the connection between the drone and phone is compromised, then hackers can gain access to the individual’s sensitive data, including contact and banking details.”

Emm suggests that anyone considering buying the miniature security drone, or any smart device for that matter, should take steps to improve security, such as changing any default passwords, using WPA2 encryption on home routers and enabling automatic updates.

There have been a number of reports of Amazon IoT products being hacked, or at least found to have vulnerabilities, over the past year. In November 2019, researchers found an exploit in the Ring doorbell that allowed hackers to intercept Wi-Fi passwords in clear text.

Early in 2020, it was revealed that some hackers could gain access to user voice history via an Alexa subdomain attack. This was an exploit of a cross-origin resource sharing misconfiguration.

Salesforce has launched a new platform that combines its marketing, commerce and digital services into one single package. 

Called Digital 360, the platform claims it will give businesses the ability to operate at peak levels every single day.

With the continuing impact of the coronavirus pandemic being felt around the world, Salesforce’s Digital 360 platform aims to help make digital transformation faster and easier. It combines Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud with access to the firm’s broad partner ecosystem.

There are also new products within Digital 360, such as a customer data platform called Customer 360 Audiences, a payment solution powered by Stripe called Commerce Cloud Payments, and Experience Cloud which enables fast CRM-powered digital experiences.

“Every company has gone digital overnight because of the pandemic,” said Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM of Digital at Salesforce. “With Digital 360, we’re delivering the full power of Salesforce tailored to digital leaders – our products, ecosystem, learning and expert services – enabling them to move with the speed, agility and scale they need to operate at Black Friday levels every single day.”

Digital revenue in 2020 grew by 71% compared to the previous year, according to Salesforce’s Q2 Shopping Index. As such, the cloud giant suggests that the key to success, in any industry, is scalable, data-driven solutions that personalise customer experiences, whether that be from marketing emails and timely advertising to online shopping and in store experiences.

The service has already seen success, with companies such as Sonos using it during the pandemic to sell directly to its partners. 

“Our collaboration with Salesforce has supported Sonos’ ability to scale and accommodate a massive influx in business to our e-commerce site as we focus on selling directly to our customers,” said Lindsay Whitworth, director global direct-to-consumer at Sonos.

“As a result, we’ve been able to deliver relevant, personalised engagement at scale using campaigns and data-driven insights.”

Salesforce is adding 4,000 jobs over the next six months and 12,000 over the next year, the company’s CEO said over the weekend. 

Marc Benioff made the announcement over Twitter and called for potential candidates to send their resumes to Salesforce. 

The announcement could come as a big relief to some 1,000 employees who were told their jobs were being axed in August. Those affected were given 60 days to find a new role within the business, despite Salesforce recording revenue gains following a better than expected second quarter. 

At the time, Salesforce said it was “reallocating resources” to keep the company growing, suggesting that the actual number of employees leaving the firm would be a lot less as they move to other positions. 

The firm currently employs almost 54,000 workers around the world and has adopted a largely flexible strategy since the outbreak of COVID-19. In March, Benioff pledged not to lay off any staff off for 90 days and urged other CEOs to do the same.

The 1,000 job cuts came as soon as that period ended, but there is now a possibility that very few of the 1,000 will actually be made redundant. 

“Salesforce will add 4,000 jobs over the next 6 months & 12,000 over the next year,” Benioff wrote on Twitter. “Join our 54,000 employee strong Ohana defining the future of software. Salesforce is the world’s fastest-growing Top 5 enterprise software company. Send your resume to jobs@salesforce.com.”

The cloud giant declined to provide any more details about the hiring spree – specifically where and what these jobs will be – though it did suggest further details will be released soon. Whatever form they take, the 16,000 newly created jobs will be a huge relief to many during what is a particularly tough time. The impact of the coronavirus has had a rapid impact on the global job market, cutting many traditional and on-site roles.    

In August, Salesforce’s financial officer Mark Hawkins said the company was making “strategic shifts” that reflected how and where people now work as a result of the pandemic. 

“This means we’ll be redirecting some of our resources to fuel growth and areas that are no longer as aligned with the business priority will be de-emphasised,” he said.

Box has revealed a slew of integrations and updates designed to help users manage and secure their workflows from anywhere.

The new features include integrations with Apple and Microsoft Teams, collaboration updates, and some new security and compliance settings within Box Shield.

Revealing the updates at the company’s BoxWorks conference, CEO Aaron Levie said that it has never been more challenging for enterprises to both secure their data and keep up with the pace of business.

“Our vision has always been to provide a central source of truth for your content in the cloud,” sai Levie. “At BoxWorks Digital, we’re enhancing that vision with innovation that will make it incredibly easy to collaborate on a single platform that’s secure, simple to use, easy to manage, and that extends to all the apps your teams use every day.”

Earlier in the year, Box introduced a feature that allowed users to create annotations in the Box web app. As of Thursday, this feature is now also available on iOS and fully supports the Apple Pencil. With it, users can highlight text and images, or leave a comment on the preview of a document.

Box has also expanded its integration with Microsoft Teams with users able to choose a Box folder to be synced automatically with a Microsoft Teams chat group. Users can also instantly grant access to Box files from within Teams and receive Box notifications related to content activity.

With more emphasis on remote working, Box has also updated some security and compliance protocols within its automated security hub, Box Shield. It starts with a new policy exception feature, which must be opted-into at corporate level. It allows employees to suggest policy exceptions by providing a business justification, which is then recorded for auditing purposes. This is expected to be made available to Box Shield customers sometime next year.

The company is also adding event-based retention to its content lifecycle management toolset. With this, users will be able to retain and migrate files for a configurable amount of time depending on their business needs. This includes changing schedules for the migration of files after a client account is closed, a contract expires, or an employee leaves the company.

​Cloud specialist WANdisco has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch a rapid self-service data migration tool, in a deal that’s seen as a major win for the UK cloud industry.

The ‘LiveData Migrator’ lets companies move any size of on-premises data to AWS within minutes and without the need of engineers or specialists.

WANdisco, a publicly listed company with dual headquarters in Sheffield and California that specialises in distributed computing, is already an ‘Advanced Technology Partner’ in the AWS network and its LiveData Migrator services has also achieved AWS Migration Competency status – which requires a proven level of technical proficiency and customer success.

It is one of four AWS partners to collaborate on migration requirements for use cases including Hadoop, storage and database data migration, and mainframe data integration.

One of the first to use the LiveData Migrator is website hosting platform GoDaddy, which shifted 500 terabytes of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) data to Amazon S3.

“We found that WANdisco’s LiveData Migrator delivered the best time to value solution in the use case of a Hadoop to Amazon S3 data migration and replication,” said GoDaddy chief data and analytics officer Wayne Peacock.

“Rather than running an internal time-consuming and costly manual migration project, using LiveData Migrator has helped us avoid disruption to our production processes and made 70 TB of data immediately available for Amazon S3 testing.”

Migrating large data volumes with traditional approaches requires disrupting the operation of on-premises applications, but the LiveData Migrator works without any production system downtime or business disruption, according to WANdisco.

“Enterprises that want to move their data to the cloud but are concerned about the risks of doing so now have a powerful solution that’s self-service and extremely easy to use,” said WANdicso CEO David Richards.

“Regardless of company size or technical expertise, LiveData Migrator enables businesses to migrate their data risk-free to the cloud on a massive scale without any disruption to business operations. Data can be accommodated without any risk of data loss while modernising data and applications to stay competitive.”

Zoom is reportedly working on a major update to the messaging functionality of its video conferencing platform to build a more ‘Slack-like’ service. 

The company has hired a “significant number of engineers” to move its basic text interface to a more advanced setup, according to The Information. 

Zoom is actually a partner of Slack and both services offer similar products, though each specialises in different segments. Slack is mostly a chat-based platform – though it does have low key video comm services, while Zoom is a rapidly growing video conferencing platform.

A lot of companies, particularly in the startup space, use both in tandem. 

However, as standalone services, both are rivals of Microsoft Teams which has both video conferencing and instant messaging capabilities. Slack has been heavily critical of Teams, calling it a “weak copycat product” when filling an antitrust complaint. Zoom, however, hasn’t voiced any concerns over Microsoft’s rival product – despite Microsoft reportedly labelling the firms as a “threat”. 

All three services have seen gains during the pandemic, particularly Zoom, with its revenue shooting up 355% year on year. Teams reportedly surpassed 44 million daily active users at the very start of lockdown, but Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield argued that the figure was inflated by the fact Teams was bundled into Office 365, suggesting it was anti-competitive.

Slack’s own revenue has seen a sharp decline with growth falling 32% compared to the 49% recorded in Q1. 

The general consensus seems to be that Slack is falling behind Teams, and unless its antitrust complaint is successful, its growth could be hampered. The company recently launched a service for adding external organisation to channels, called ‘Slack Connect‘, which is seen as a big play to kill off email. 

The current chat capabilities on Zoom already resembles Teams, though it doesn’t have ‘channels’ and seems more like a rudimentary instant messaging service. It does, however, sync with Google services. 

Microsoft has retrieved a data centre from the ocean floor, just off the coast of Orkney, Scotland, and early signs show that the project was a successful moonshot. 

Of the 864 servers onboard, Microsoft reports that only eight faulted, which is an eighth of the failure rate of a typical land-based data centre.

A team from Microsoft sank the cylindrical storage container, called “project Natick“, in 2018. It was loaded with 12 server racks and ocean water was used to keep the servers cool. The container was also sealed and filled with nitrogen, which is not as corrosive to computer equipment as oxygen.

The Natick research team are now conducting tests on the data centre to see what they can learn from the experiment and how it could help to solve environmental problems raised by conventional data centres.  

“Computers are not designed to work in the environment we humans operate,” said Spencer Fowers, principal researcher for project Natick. “Things like oxygen, moisture in the air, that is really bad for computers, it causes corrosion on the components. 

“You also get temperature fluctuations. The heat from night to day, summer to winter, can cause those components to fail so we had this theory: if we’re in a really stable environment, we’re in this cylinder, we’ve taken all the oxygen out, controlled the humidity, no one’s walking around, bumping into things, causing additional failures, we’d see better reliability.” 

The concept of an underwater data centre first came up at Microsoft’s 2014 ‘ThinkWeek’ as a way to provide fast cloud services to coastal populations. With more than half of the world’s population living within 120 miles of a coast, localised hubs would give data a shorter distance to travel, leading to smoother, faster services. 

Once it was hauled out of the sea, the container was cleaned and air-samples were retrieved. The data centre was then loaded onto a truck and driven to a facility in the North of Scotland, where the server racks were slid out so Fowers and his team could perform health checks and collect components to send to Microsoft for analysis.

Among the components boxed up and sent were the failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them to understand why the servers in the underwater data centre are seemingly more reliable than those on land.