An internal investigation by the Department of Defence (DoD) has found that the decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft was administered fairly, despite widespread reports of political interference.

The DoD’s Inspector General sought to review whether the decision to award Microsoft with a $10 billion cloud computing contract had been handled fairly and legally, as well as investigate reports that the White House pressured officials to reject a proposal from Amazon Web Services.

The report found that the process met the DoD’s standards, however, it was unable to review the deal in its entirety due to restrictions imposed by a “presidential communications privilege”.

Since it was first announced, the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) project has been marred in controversy. From its single-vendor nature, to accusations of bias, the bidding process has resulted in extensive legal action. Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched an appeal shortly after Microsoft were announced the winners, citing political influence, particularly that of US President Donald Trump which has been heavily reported.

Oracle, meanwhile, launched legal action in November after it claimed AWS itself had sought to influence the decision, claiming that two DoD officials had been offered jobs at AWS during the process, while a third was a former consultant for the company.

Although the DoD report said that the process had been handled properly, it revealed that several DoD witnesses were instructed by the General Counsel (OGC) of the agency to not answer questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials regarding JEDI, according to the report.

“As a result, we could not be certain whether there were any White House communications with some DoD officials which may have affected the JEDI procurement,” the report stated.

“However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House.”

Media “swirl”

The report states that DoD witnesses were aware of media reports about the JEDI award, but they said they considered it “lobbying,” and “media swirl”. These refer to statements reportedly made by Trump that criticised Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos. However, the report said that these comments had no effect on the work of each witness.

Instead, the findings suggest that “inaccurate media reports” and stories of “lobbying” from competing cloud companies may have created “the appearance or perception” that the award process was biased.

The report uses the infamous “screw Amazon” quote as an example. According to Guy Snodgrass’ book ‘Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis‘, the President directed defence secretary Mark Esper to review the JEDI procurement. According to the DoD, the book speculated that he tried to influence Esper and other DoD officials not to select Amazon. The report also suggests that media reports, singling out CNN, contributed to speculation that Trump may have attempted to influence the procurement against Amazon.

However, the investigation could not corroborate or disprove Snodgrass’ account. Mattis told the investigation he could “not confirm” Snodgrass’ statement and said he did not recall talking to the President about JEDI. Other DoD officials said they “did not recall any meeting like” the one that Snodgrass describes in the book.

The investigation was also unable to fully corroborate or contradict Snodgrass’ account of the small group meeting, as the officials named by Snodgrass were instructed by the OGC to not answer any questions about communications with the President. The report concludes, however, that whether or not the meeting happened as described, it did not influence Mattis’ actions toward the JEDI bidding process.

There’s a growing list of companies and organisations announcing bans on the popular videoconferencing app Zoom over security concerns. 

A slew of businesses, organisations, and even countries, have banned the service after a litany of security flaws surfaced over the last few weeks. While the company and it’s CEO Eric Yuan have scrambled to patch the issues, its reputation is sinking fast.

Part of the problem is that the company, like the rest of the world, didn’t expect a global pandemic to force us all indoors. As such, videoconferencing services have become vital components of this new way of life, and Zoom is now one of the most popular. The app is simple to use and has a freemium option, which has seen a fairly big spike in enterprise usage – which is where the security issues are proving most concerning.

The two security issues that seem most concerning to businesses are ‘Zoom-bombing’ and the lack of end-to-end encryption. 

Google

Google has reportedly issued a company-wide memo telling employees who have the Zoom app on their work laptops that it will no longer work, although they can still use it on mobiles for personal use, according to an internal email leaked on 8 April.

The tech giant hasn’t specified why this decision was made, merely citing “security issues”, according to reports.

The FBI

As the coronavirus became a pandemic in March, and more of the world dived into remote working, the FBI sent out a warning about hackers invading and disrupting video conference calls.

Zoom was one of the companies singled out by the Bureau, which said that reports had come in from around the country of hackers hijacking meetings and using them to spread hate speech and pornographic images.

SpaceX

A couple of days after the FBI’s warning, reports suggested that Elon Musk had banned SpaceX employees from using the software.

It’s currently unclear if this ban extends to Musk’s other companies, such as Tesla. ‘Zoom-bombing’ is thought to be the main reason for the company-wide ban.

The Ministry of Defence

The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) is also said to be anti-Zoom, following reports on 27 March suggesting the agency had advised government departments against its use.

However, it seems the message hasn’t been communicated as Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently revealed on Twitter that his cabinet has been using Zoom for meetings – with the ID of that meeting also unwittingly revealed in a photo.

The US Senate & Germany’s Foreign Office

Given that Zoom is a Chinese company, its lack of end-to-end encryption hasn’t gone down well in the Western world. Like Google and SpaceX, the US Senate is said to have told its members to avoid using the app, according to reports on 9 April. 

There are reports that the German government have placed restrictions on the software being used on fixed-connection computers.

According to Reuters, a memo to employees said: “Based on media reports and our own findings, we have concluded that Zoom’s software has critical weaknesses and serious security and data protection problems”.

Taiwan

Taiwan is the first country to completely ban the service, blocking its public sector bodies from using it. The software platform falls under the nation’s Cyber Security Management Act, ushered in last year, that bans organisations using services that have been “associated with security issues”. 

With the issues continuing to surface, Zoom has promised to become more security-focused – it has already hired Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos – but it will need to work quickly as its client list, stock and reputation are all in free fall.

Slack boss Stewart Butterfield has poured cold water over Microsoft’s figures for Teams adoption during the coronavirus pandemic. 

The CEO was speaking to Market Watch about his own company’s spike in users and the inevitable comparison to Microsoft Teams seemed to get under his skin. 

Butterfield said the week starting March 9 was the “most productive” in his company’s history with a surge of new users turning into a “steep vertical” in two weeks. It took the platform four years to reach 10 million users, but from 10 March to 25 March, that number had grown by 2.5 million. 

There are a number of cloud-based services that have seen a big spike in users following the spread of COVID-19. Videoconferencing tools have become vital tools for people to connect with friends, family and work colleagues and Slack is also benefiting from the lockdown. It has, however, also increased the scrutiny upon its rivalry with Microsoft, which seems to irk Butterfield. 

“You probably sense the frustration in my voice,” he said on Market Watch. “Microsoft has made a huge push the past three years with a free service, but can you find a single Slack enterprise customer who has switched to Teams?”

“If Microsoft is such a competitive threat to Slack as it says, we would not have grown in sales and $1 million customers. I mean, 44 million is an impressive number, but that is out of 200 million Office 365 customers. That’s about a 20% adoption rate.”

Butterfield’s comments come just two weeks after he announced a Teams call integration on Slack, that suggested the two would bury the hatchet, but the CEO and his company have a history of firing barbs at the enterprise giant. Butterfield previously called Microsoft’s behaviour “unsportsmanlike” and in a tweet, Slack referred to it as a “boomer”. Despite recently going public, and also it’s rapid growth, Slack and Butterfield still see themselves as a startup taking on the corporate giant. 

“The smaller startup has an advantage against the large, established company because its focus is narrowed on doing one thing better,” Butterfield added. 

Cloud Pro has approached Microsoft for comment. 

​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.

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.”

Zoom’s founder and CEO has admitted his company made “missteps” that should have been fixed before the service became so popular during the coronavirus pandemic.  

Eric Yuan told CNN that the company had “moved too fast” and should have done more to enforce password and meeting room security. 

The service is currently seeing a spike in usage as more and more people are using video conferencing to connect to work colleagues, family and friends. Recent reports have suggested that Zoom is now more popular in the US than Microsoft Teams, with its user base surging from 10 million to 200 million in recent weeks. 

However, this has resulted in more scrutiny of the service as numerous security issues have come to the fore. From “zoomboming” to confusion over its level of encryption, Zoom has been dogged by security concerns, forcing its CEO to make public apologies. 

“During this COVID-19 crisis, we moved too fast,” he said. “Our intention was to serve the end-users, but we had some missteps. We should have done something to enforced password and meeting rooms and double-checked everything. We should have taken actions to fix those missteps.

“New user cases are very different from our traditional customer base where they have an IT team to support them. We’ve learned our lessons and we’ve taken a step back to focus on privacy and security.”

Yuan was tougher on himself in an earlier interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying that he “really messed up as CEO” and that he felt an obligation to win back user trust. 

Zoom’s internal criticism follows a troubling few weeks where a number of problems have plagued the videoconferencing platform. Most recently, its been the target of a hack known as ‘Zoomboming’, where unwanted guests invade a meeting.

Questions have also been asked about the level encryption the service offers, as it was recently revealed Zoom didn’t have end-to-end encryption between calls, despite saying so in its privacy policy. 

The issues have seen a number of companies and organisations drop the services, such as the FBI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Going forward, Yuan promised to make Zoom a “privacy and security-first company”.  

Red Hat, the open source technology giant, has appointed Paul Cormier as its chief executive officer (CEO). 

Cormier previously served as the company’s president of products and technology and will now replace Jim Whitehurst who left to become president of IBM following Ginni Rometty’s retirement in January. 

Since joining Red Hat in 2001, Cormier has been involved in more than 25 acquisitions, pushing the company beyond its roots with Linux.

He is credited with pioneering the subscription model that helped the company transform from an open source disruptor into an enterprise technology mainstay. Cormier was also ‘”instrumental” in helping the company combined with IBM following its $43 billion acquisition.

“When I joined Red Hat, it would have been impossible to predict how Linux and open source would change our world, but they are truly everywhere,” Cormier said in a statement. 

“The transformations I see happening in our industry are exciting, as they present new challenges and opportunities. The opportunity for Red Hat has never been bigger than it is today and I am honoured to lead the company to help our customers solve their challenges and to keep Red Hat at the forefront of innovation.”

Having worked with him at Red Hat for more than a decade, Whitehurst said that Cormier was the “natural choice” to lead the company. The IBM president called Cormier the driving force behind its product strategy and explained that he understands how to help its customers and partners make the most out of their cloud strategies. 
 
“He is a proven leader and his commitment to open source principles and ways of working will enable Red Hat not only to keep pace with the demands of enterprise IT, but also lead the way as emerging technologies break into the mainstream,” said Whitehurst. 
 
“It was my honour and privilege to lead a company filled with many of our industry’s best and brightest and I am excited to see what Red Hatters accomplish under Paul’s leadership.”​

Video conferencing app Zoom does not use end-to-end encryption, according to reports, despite specifically stating that it does on its website.

Though Zoom offers users the option to “enable an end-to-end (E2E) encrypted meeting,” and provides a green padlock that claims “Zoom is using an end to end encrypted connection,” the company this week admitted that offers no such thing.

A spokesperson for the company told The Intercept that, despite its claims, it was “currently not possible” to enable end-to-end encryption for its video meetings.

Instead, the spokesperson revealed, the service uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) which encrypts data between user’s meetings and Zoom’s servers. End-to-end refers to data encrypted between calls, blocking out third parties – which includes the service provider. As a result, the company can see and use the data for things like targeted ads. 

“When we use the phrase ‘End to End’ in our other literature, it is in reference to the connection being encrypted from Zoom end point to Zoom end point,” the spokesperson added.

Like a number of video conferencing services, Zoom is currently benefiting from the coronavirus lockdown. Its usage in the US is reportedly three times as much as Microsoft Teams, which is fairly impressive for an app that was almost unheard of this time last year. 

Given the rapid rise of Zoom, Microsoft recently singled out the service in a partner video, suggesting that it’s a threat to its business model as it can be used in tandem with rivals like Slack and Google’s G Suite, unlike Teams.

Part of Zoom’s appeal to organisations is its simplicity and the fact it can be used for free, albeit without any premium features, which lets businesses try it out before forking out any money.
 
“Video conferencing is a fantastic necessity in times like these but it is vitally important to understand the security and privacy concerns that go in parallel with this increasingly popular form of communication,” said Jake Moore, a cyber security specialist for ESET.
 
“For social and light business meetings they are fine as long as users realise what data is being shared by Zoom to third parties. I certainly wouldn’t recommend using free software for sensitive or private meetings.”

On Tuesday, Boris Johnson tweeted a picture of his cabinet’s “first digital meeting” and, comically, left the ID number visible. This security blunder will not have gone down well with the Ministery of Defence, which has reportedly banned Zoom due to security concerns. 

Zoom told The Intercept that it only collects user data to improve the service and that it never allows its employees to access specific content in meetings and doesn’t sell any kind of user data. However, the company did confirm that it could hand over data from meetings if it was compelled to for legal proceedings. 

Oracle has announced it’s offering free access to its online learning content and cloud certifications while swathes of workers are in coronavirus lockdown. 

The aim is to help IT professionals gain highly sought after skills while the coronavirus pandemic enforces remote or reduced working, according to Oracle.

The courses and certifications cover Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database and will be available until 15 May. There are seven learning paths that users can access with an Oracle Single-Sign-On account, which is also free.

Oracle users, developers, technical professionals, architects, students and professors will have access to more than 50 hours of online training and six certification exams, according to Raghu Viswanathan, the VP of education products and delivery at Oracle University.

“As our customers adapt to a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Oracle is stepping up its efforts to help build critical technical cloud skills they need to ramp up innovation,” Viswanathan said in a statement.

“We believe that certifications help professionals develop in-demand skills, shorten turnaround times for customer projects, enhance their expertise and advance their careers while improving their overall job performance.”

The free access will include an extensive library of materials for Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure and Autonomous Database, as well as content on topics like machine learning, data science and multi-cloud environments, which includes integrations with Microsoft Azure.

With these courses, the company is also going to offer access to high-quality video content, experts and recorded demos of hands-on labs, all of which will be available anywhere and anytime. This will include machine learning translations for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries.

Like Oracle, a number of tech companies have offered some services for free while the coronavirus outback drastically changes the way we live and work. Companies like Microsoft, which has offered Teams as a free service to the NHS and RingVPN, which has made the first 90 days of its service free of charge.

Microsoft’s cloud services have seen a 775% spike in usage in areas where social distancing measures and lockdowns have been enforced.

Azure services such as Microsoft Teams, Windows Virtual Desktop and Power BI have all seen increases of users in March as more and more have been forced to work from home or stay indoors.

The company recently announced it would prioritise capacity provisions for critical health and safety organisations to ensure the relevant remote workers can stay up and running during the coronavirus pandemic. However, with demand for cloud services surging in lockdown areas, the company has said it will “expedite” the creation of new capacity.

“We’re implementing a few temporary restrictions designed to balance the best possible experience for all of our customers,” the company wrote on its blog. “We have placed limits on free offers to prioritise capacity for existing customers.

“We are expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead. Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment-related issues.”

So far, the only issue with Azure has been a two-hour outage for Microsoft Teams in Europe. The service went down on the first Monday of remote working as it saw a spike in usage.

Later it was revealed that Teams had seen 12 million more users in March, taking the number of daily active users to 44 million. Windows Virtual Desktop also trebled in usage and Microsoft’s business analytics service, Power BI, saw a 42% increase in just one week.

In addition, Microsoft also said its been in regular contact with ISPs around the world and is actively working with them to “argument” capacity as needed.

“We’ve been in discussions with several ISPs that are taking measures to reduce bandwidth from video sources in order to enable their networks to be performant during the workday,” the company said.