Azure Bastion and Confidential Computing are among ten services Microsoft has launched for UK Azure customers to improve security and allow users to take advantage of technologies like IoT.

Bastion, a managed platform as a service (PaaS), first launched in public preview last June and is designed to protect exposed virtual machines (VMs) from outside threats. The service lets users securely connect to VMs without using public IP addresses, reducing exposure to the public internet and cyber threats such as malware.

Meanwhile, Confidential Computing will allow customers to secure information while it’s being used, as opposed to encrypting data while it’s sitting in a data centre or being moved across a network. This real-time encryption feature means multiple organisations can combine data sets and analyse them without being able to access each other’s data.

A prospective use case for the technology could be banks combining transaction data to detect fraud and money laundering, while hospitals could combine patient records for analysis to improve diagnostics.

Among the services being launched are App Configuration, Bot Service, Consumption Plan Linux, IoT Central, Premium Plan Linux, Time Series Insights, and Virtual Network NAT.

The final service being launched, Private Link, offers a secure connection to Microsoft’s cloud with no public internet access. This can also help users meet the demands of regulations in different markets across the world.

“Microsoft continues to invest in our UK Azure regions to meet the growing needs of our customers,” said Michael Wignall, Azure business lead at Microsoft UK.

“Azure is helping organisations, both large and small, adapt to a new way of working, and our cloud experts continue to help them at this challenging time.”

App Configuration allows customers to centrally manage application settings while the Bot Service gives them the capability to develop Q&A bots to improve the customer experience. Time Series Insights collects, processes, stores and analyses data, as well as giving customers the ability to launch queries.

IoT Central, meanwhile, is a secure app platform for IoT devices and software, which can also scale as businesses grow. The product’s main appeal is the offer of industry-specific app templates for sectors ranging from retail to healthcare.

Two of tech’s biggest players have announced sweeping job cuts as the economic effects of COVID-19 continue to take their toll, with IBM and HPE reducing its staff count by potentially thousands.

IBM has already swung the axe, with the number of affected staff thought to be in the thousands, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, speaking to Bloomberg. The publication spoke with a Californian-based worker who lost his job along with his entire team of 12. Job cuts are also being made across sites in other US states including Pennsylvania, Missouri, New York.

The layoffs are thought to affect several divisions across IBM including its Global Technology Services division, which offers IT outsourcing, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) also suggests.

It’s unclear how much of an effect the pandemic has had on IBM’s plans, though the actions represent the first major staffing shakeup since CEO Arvind Krishna took charge in January 2020. Krishna transitioned into the role with an ambition to revive growth at IBM, after recent quarters of declining revenue.

“IBM’s work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly add high-value skills to our workforce,” an IBM spokesperson told Bloomberg. “While we always consider the current environment, IBM’s workforce decisions are in the interest of the long-term health of our business.”

“Recognizing the unique and difficult situation this business decision may create for some of our employees, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021.”

HPE, meanwhile, has outlined plans to make severe cost reductions following a collapse in revenue in the latest quarter, falling 16% year-on-year $6 billion. As a result of job cuts, executive pay reductions, and other measures, the company expects to save between $1 billion and $1.3 billion over the next three years.

In an earnings call, the firm announced it would be reducing employees’ base salaries from 1 July through to the end of the year. The CEO and each executive officer at the executive VP level sustaining a 25% pay cut, while the base salaries of each executive officer at the senior VP level will suffer a 20% cut.

HPE will also embark on an immediate “cost optimisation” plan which will involve realigning the workforce to “areas of growth” and implementing measures to simplify the product portfolio, supply chain structures, and digital customer support model.

Each of the company’s divisions suffered losses in the last quarter, with High-Performance Compute & Mission Critical Systems revenue down the sharpest year-on-year, a fall of 18% to $589 million. This was followed by the Storage division which fell 16%, to $1.1 billion. Profit margins in both divisions also declined.

The smallest drop in revenue was in the Intelligence Edge division, which declined 2% to $665 million. This equated with an 11% operating profit margin, however, compared with 5.3% from the prior-year period.

HPE’s recent financial performance, and the resultant cost-saving measures, have been pinned heavily on the coronavirus pandemic, and its effect on demand as well as the supply chain.

As with IBM in recent years, HPE has suffered from consistent falling revenues since splitting from HP in 2015. The firm has, however, made a series of moves in recent years in order to change its fortunes, including the acquisition of supercomputing behemoth Cray last year.

Its CEO Antonio Neri declared in 2019 that his vision for the company is one that champions a “cloudless” future, adding that the cloud wasn’t a destination, rather, an “experience”, where businesses encounter true cloud interoperability.

​The seemingly endless state of isolation we have found ourselves in for the past three months has taken its toll, warping our minds in weird and wonderful ways. For me, this has manifested as a newfound obsession with the bizarre workings of the virtual House of Commons.

Our parliamentarians’ attempt to follow the government’s own advice to work from home has, by all accounts, been a success, barring the occasional sweary glitch. It’s an example of the fascinating dynamics at play, with MPs using Zoom to remote-into parliamentary debates while using a web platform to hold parliamentary votes securely. Surely, in moments like this, therefore, there must be a catch… but none came.

Despite the Palace of Westminster being seen as more old fashioned (and, indeed, just old) than the more modern regional assemblies, the project in London has been by far the most comprehensive. The Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, for example, has implemented video conferencing but hasn’t yet added provision for remote voting.

By all measures, the UK’s virtual parliament has been a success, and our MPs have been able to continue to work and scrutinise the government effectively. Then, scrolling through my Twitter feed for nuggets of news, came the catch. The ‘hybrid’ House of Commons has been such a success that it has been ditched in its entirety.

I’m ashamed to admit, for a moment, that I’d bought into the fantasy that our parliamentarians saw the proverbial light and – in a rare departure from form – embraced the progressive force of digital transformation. In typical fashion, however, as soon as they were given a taste of progress, they agreed to spit it straight back out by 350 votes to 258 – a government majority of 92. 

When the House of Commons returns on 2 June, after a two-week break coinciding with Whitsun, MPs can no longer participate in debates using video conferencing technology, let alone vote remotely using the platform that’s been in place for just a week. This, incidentally, is a system that House of Commons staff have worked tirelessly to build, install and sufficiently test over a short four-week period.

There are myriad reasons why the decision is a travesty; not just for the interests of progress, but the impracticality of asking MPs to travel into London, a COVID-19 hotspot, from across all the constituent parts of the UK. Many of our MPs also fall in the at-risk age groups, while others will have pressing childcare needs due to schools still being shut, not to mention those who should be ‘shielding’ due to medical conditions.

Beyond that, the decision to bin the remote working technology flies in the face of the government’s own advice to “work from home where possible”, based on the false logic that remote working isn’t actually working. This short-sightedness can be neatly summarised by the views of Conservative MP for Crawley, Henry Smith, who tweeted: “Not that I should be surprised by the lazy left but interesting how work-shy socialist and nationalist MPs tried to keep the remote Parliament going beyond 2 June.”

Beyond the sheer incomprehension on display, this also sends a terrible message to many businesses that have embraced the mass shift to remote working and sustained measured benefits as a result. Twitter and OpenText are among companies that will let their staff work from home indefinitely following the pandemic, for example, while workers themselves have also reported feeling more productive as a result of the added flexibility and a lack of commute.

Nevertheless, the fact that our MPs have voted to reject progress doesn’t come as a surprise, despite the fact I readily admit bought into the delusion that they finally turned a corner. British MPs have gained notoriety for neglecting the benefits of technology, best symbolised by the snail-paced rollout of Wi-Fi across the Palaces of Westminster. One former MP, Dr David Drew, for example, was sufficiently moved by the lack of Wi-Fi across the parliamentary estate as near ago as 2018 that he took it on himself to chase up the state of progress on essential works to improve availability and coverage.

Yesterday’s vote to ditch ‘hybrid’ proceedings is a minor hitch, with not even the House of Commons able to escape the inevitability of progress. For MPs to do so now, however, despite the fact it’s proven a success, is like having taken one step forward, only to immediately take two steps back and fall off a cliff.

Dell Technologies and Google Cloud Platform have partnered up to launch OneFS for Google Cloud to allow customers to keep massive amounts of data flowing between private clouds and Google Cloud.

Dell OneFS for Google Cloud offers customers a hybrid cloud storage system that can see up to 50 petabytes of data move seamlessly between cloud environments without needing to make adjustments to their applications.

The system offers a native cloud experience that combines Dell’s scalability and performance with Google Cloud’s analytics services. The advancements will allow customers to move workloads across public and private clouds with greater flexibility while adopting a hybrid approach their suits their particular needs.

“Data and workloads exist everywhere – at the edge, in core data centres and public clouds. And, while data and apps are multiplying, IT resources and budgets are not,” said senior vice president and general manager for cloud platforms & solutions with Dell Technologies, Deepak Patil.

“For companies to turn their data into competitive differentiators, they need a way to manage it seamlessly and consistently, no matter where it resides. Dell Technologies Cloud brings the best of the public cloud to the data centre and the best of the data centre to the public cloud, removing complexity so companies can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time delivering value to their customers.”

The system has been devised to encourage the movement of file data, which accounts for at least half of an organisation’s on-premise data, to public clouds. Very little of this data is stored in public clouds due to performance and scale limitations.

One clear example of businesses that could benefit from OneFS for Google Cloud is those in the media and entertainment industry, which commonly handle massive video files with 4K resolution. These files demand terabytes of storage and high throughput as well as low latency file storage, meaning it’s difficult for production companies to manage large file workloads in the public cloud.

With the joint hybrid system, Dell claims, these companies can work across private and public clouds with consistent operations, with the added flexibility to scale if needed.

“We’re proud to partner with Dell Technologies to deliver high-performance, scalable cloud storage services to our customers with OneFS for Google Cloud,” said vice president of engineering at Google Cloud Rich Sanzi.

“Through this partnership, customers can more quickly and effectively leverage Dell Technologies storage solutions through Google Cloud and have access to the best of breed file storage solutions, across hybrid cloud environments.”

Remote working arrangements have led to benefits for the majority of UK office workers, despite a handful of employers failing to equip their staff with the technology required.

Most people working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic (55%) have registered a productivity boost due to additional free time in their day, according to research commissioned by Okta.

Remote working has also led to the majority of employees (62%) experiencing an increase in flexibility, which, in turn, allows them to focus more on work.

Despite a radical shift in the way many employees across the economy are working, only a third have felt their productivity levels take a hit as a result. Incidentally, this finding chimes with the proportion of people who feel let down by their employees with regards to being supplied with the technology needed to execute their roles remotely.

For instance, 28% of newly-remote workers reported their businesses had not equipped them with the necessary hardware, such as a laptop, in order to work productively from home. Meanwhile, 24% of remote workers said they couldn’t access the software they needed at the beginning of the pandemic.

The findings culminate in just 24% of respondents indicating they want to return to the office full-time, with a further 35% suggesting they’d prefer a flexible arrangement where they can work from home on a part-time basis.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to think and act differently”, said Okta’s EMEA VP and GM Jesper Frederiksen. “Businesses have had to learn the hard way about the need to digitally transform to survive, and it is these learnings that will help us emerge from this crisis stronger.”

Drilling down into the detail of changes to peoples’ day-to-day working arrangements, almost 40% said despite their new freedom that they were working the same hours as normal. A further 20% reported working longer hours than normal.

Despite the sudden shift away from in-person meetings to video conferencing platforms, the vast majority of workers have adapted smoothly, with only 5% saying they were not comfortable at all.

With lockdown measures forcing millions of people to work from home, the key question for many is whether it’s been for better or worse. A string of major companies has used feedback from the last few months to make fundamental changes to their working arrangements that could outlast the pandemic.

Twitter, for example, announced it would allow employees to work from home indefinitely beyond the pandemic. This came after OpenText revealed earlier this month that it would close half its offices and consign 15% of its workforce to permanent remote working.

The research, conducted by YouGov, put forward questions to 2,000 office workers across the UK. Beyond changes to productivity, there are aspects of traditional working that many miss sorely. 

Most workers (57%), for example, suggest they miss having in-person conversations with their coworkers, while half miss the relationships they have forged with those in the office.

This touches on an apparent trade-off between productivity gains and the opportunity to build relationships at work. This theme is something Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella referenced in recent comments, suggesting we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the productivity gains fuelled by remote working, as the social aspects of office working are too dear to sacrifice.

The research also raised concerns over whether organisations are fitted with sufficient cyber security protocols, with only a third of respondents “completely confident” that remote working security would keep them safe from cyber attacks.

This ranges across sectors, with workers the IT industry unsurprisingly feeling more protected than others. For comparison, just a quarter of respondents in the retail and education sectors shared a similar level of confidence.

Users of the Zoom video conferencing platform reported major issues for several hours on Sunday, with the outage even disrupting the daily Downing Street coronavirus press conference.

Thousands of people began reporting issues from approximately 9 am yesterday, according to the web monitoring service DownDetector, with the company confirming the platform had sustained issues later in the afternoon. 

Zoom confirmed at approximately 3 pm that a portion of its users affected by the issues were unable to host or join meetings and that it was investigating the matter. The outage also hit the Q&A portion of the government’s daily coronavirus press conference, hosted at Downing Street, with journalists unable to field their questions due to the technical difficulties. 

“I think people watching will, I’m quite sure, be aware that Zoom users are encountering some issues at the moment,” said business secretary Alok Sharma, who was standing in for the prime minister. 

“And so, unfortunately, we won’t be able to get any journalists live on-screen. Instead, I’ll be reading out their questions which have been sent in.”

The company issued an update at around 5 pm suggesting the issue had been resolved, with users now able to host, join and participate in Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars. DownDetector, however, suggests a small number of users were experiencing problems into the evening, and beyond.

IT Pro asked Zoom what the root cause of the issue was, and what steps were taken to rectify the situation.

The video conferencing service has, in a short space of time, become integral to the functioning of many organisations, including arms of the UK government. Even the House of Commons has resumed its function as best it can while observing social distancing rules courtesy of services provided by Zoom.

Therefore, such service disruption, if sustained during working hours and over a far longer time period, could, in turn, affect the day-to-day operations of countless businesses.

The company’s meteoric surge in usage – with more than 100 million users added in a matter of weeks – has been accompanied with a much stronger spotlight thrown onto its relatively lax security and privacy policies. Zoom has consciously been addressing these issues in recent weeks as part of a 90-day security plan, however. 

The latest update, for example, added 256-bit encryption among stronger host controls to prevent incidents such as ‘Zoom-bombing’.

Software giant VMware has said it plans to acquire specialist Kubernetes company Octarine, a deal at the core of VMware’s drive to become a major security provider.

Following the firm’s decision to snap up Carbon Black seven months ago, VMware is hoping to integrate Octarine’s security platform for Kubernetes applications into its broader security services. 

The company’s technology helps simplify DevSecOps and enables cloud-native environments to be more secure from development through runtime, according to Carbon Black’s CEO Patrick Morley.

“The unique properties of the cloud (speed, agility, scale) mean that developers are increasingly using containers to modernize applications. As with any major technology adoption, attackers are not far behind, looking to take advantage of new risk areas,” he said.

“Protecting workloads is critical to the security of applications and data inside every organization. Building Octarine’s innovation into the VMware security portfolio will present a major opportunity for our team to further simplify and improve security for our customers.”

The move is seen as a leap forward for VMware, which has launched a significant push into the security market through investments and acquisitions.

Last weekend we hosted a Zoom-based birthday party for my girlfriend, packed with a four-round quiz, six-part scavenger hunt and a few rounds of e-Pictionary. Oddly enough we were having just as much fun online as we would if we’d headed for a night out at Popworld, as was originally planned. This has become the new normal, and we’re not alone. 

Millions of us have inexplicably signed up to the business-centric video conferencing platform in recent weeks to stay in touch with friends and family. Our online gatherings now extend beyond work meetings into the realm of virtual pub trips, birthday parties, and even pre-booked dance classes. 

Even as the coronavirus crisis began escalating, nobody could have foreseen the extraordinary surge in Zoom’s popularity, especially given the former dominance of Skype. Not even Zoom’s founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, would have anticipated a thirty-fold increase in usage, with daily meeting participants ballooning from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million just last month. 

Zoom’s surge is bizarre in many ways, none more so than how it flew by Skype, although the surge in popularity is something of a special case. Its success is entirely predicated on a short-term growth in demand fuelled by COVID-19 lockdown measures, which will likely be lifted to a great extent by the end of the year. The firm’s privacy and security woes have proven that success isn’t always a walk in the park either, but these problems are ultimately manageable. The more worrying challenge might come a little later down the line.

There’s every possibility, first of all, that the company has hit its peak in terms of its user base. Additionally, many of us have been taking advantage of the company’s cost-free tier, meaning the company now encounters a headache that oddly enough resembles the existential crisis plaguing the digital media industry. While online publications have had no problem attracting hundreds of millions of online readers, figuring out how to monetise this massive traffic has been difficult. Zoom, similarly, may struggle to actually convert this unprecedented demand into a viable revenue stream.

To make matters trickier, phasing in a cost-barrier beyond a 40-minute time limit, which itself can be easily bypassed by starting a new conversation with participants, may drive people away. The likes Skype or Facebook’s own newly announced services are just as capable.

The final, crucial point to consider is that people aren’t attached to Zoom as a company or platform, but to the friends and family it allows them to keep in touch with. Once lockdown measures are lifted, it’s more likely than not we’ll leave the service as quickly as we found it and arrange to meet up in-person with the folks we’re desperately missing. As enjoyable as our Zoom-based birthday bash was, I’d still choose that night out in Popworld if given the option.

For these reasons, the company’s explosion in popularity, a surge in daily participants and even its exorbitant $40.5 billion valuation – more than double its $16.1 billion market value in January – are all highly volatile. Zoom’s executives, therefore, must ensure all business and product decisions made in light of this short-term success are sufficiently future-proofed.

There really is no predicting what might happen in a world riddled with coronavirus, but there’s every chance that once we’re all allowed outside and Zoom’s active daily user count plummets, its investors will lose confidence and cut their losses. That could leave the company in a far more precarious position than it has ever been, even before COVID-19. While Zoom represents an astounding story of business success in 2020, the same forces that fuelled its rise may also be the root of its downfall.

Google Cloud has defied the current economic turbulence to experience a 52% year-on-year surge in revenue for the first quarter of 2020, despite its parent company Alphabet beginning to feel the effects.

The company’s cloud business generated $2.78 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2020, representing a 52% year-on-year surge. This is in line with its financial results from the previous quarter, with $2.6 billion in revenue representing year-on-year growth of 53%, according to Business Insider.

This continued surge is in spite of Alphabet’s executives bemoaning a “sudden and significant” slowdown in revenue in March due to the effects of COVID-19.

Although Google’s total ad revenues rose to $33.76 billion during the quarter, representing 13% year-on-year growth, this increase in revenue began to rapidly decelerate towards the end of the quarter.

“Q1 was in many ways the tale of two quarters. For our advertising business, the first two months of the quarter were strong,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an earnings call with analysts.

“In March, we experienced a significant and sudden slowdown in ad revenues. The timing of the slowdown correlated to the locations and sectors impacted by the virus and related shutdown orders. 

“As the impact of COVID-19 came into view, we delayed some ad launches and prioritized supporting our customers as many adjusted their strategies.”

While the firm’s quarterly financial results are slightly tarnished with a deceleration in ad revenue, the continued growth of its cloud business, led by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, offers signs of encouragement. 

That Google Cloud has been somewhat immune from the dire economic consequences ongoing pandemic may not come as much of a surprise, given cloud providers have generally sustained heightened demand.

The number of G Suite users, for example, has risen sharply over the last few weeks. With millions of people now working from home fuelling a 25-times surge in usage for industry-focused video conferencing platform Google Meets.

This is an effect felt by major cloud players across the industry, with SAP, for example, reported an increase in revenue last week of 7% for the first quarter of 2020. Services like Microsoft Teams, meanwhile, have also experienced a massive rise in the usage of collaboration software.

Zoom has chosen public cloud giant Oracle to manage the enormous surge in users that its video conferencing platform has sustained a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be adopted to support Zoom’s rapid growth and evolving business needs as it continues to develop its services. To illustrate the platform’s exorbitant growth, the firm added 100 million new users within a three-week period and also claims to boast 300 million daily meeting participants.

Zoom realised it needed additional cloud capacity immediately, so the service provider’s second-generation infrastructure was chosen to help the firm scale its capabilities so it could continue to deliver an undisrupted service to users and customers. 

“We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users,” said Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan. 

“We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance, and unmatched level of support.”

Oracle claims it’s well placed to support Zoom’s rapid expansion thanks to its network architecture, capacity and the locations of its data centres. For reference, Zoom is currently transferring more than 7,000TB through Oracle’s systems each day, with this figure is only expected to grow.

Despite Zoom’s rapid growth and overnight success, the platform has been tarnished with a heft backlash around a collection of security and privacy shortcomings, varying in severity. The phenomenon of ‘Zoom-bombing’, for example, was deemed severe enough for the FBI to officially warn consumers and businesses against the potential for their meetings to be infiltrated by unauthorised third-parties.

Moreover, claims in Zoom promotional material that the platform guaranteed encryption was debunked following an investigation by journalists and analysts. The company last week released a major update adding 256-bit encryption to address these concerns, as part of a 90-day plan to rectify the overarching security concerns.

For Oracle, meanwhile, the deal represents a chance to eat into the massive market share enjoyed by its major cloud rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.