​Facebook will update its ecosystem of messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Portal, with a set of features aimed at capitalising on the heightened demand for video conferencing.

Messenger Rooms, which largely resembles the features included in video conferencing app Zoom, is set to be rolled out to Facebook and Messenger this week.

The free service will offer Facebook users the tools to host catchups with up to 50 participants with no time limits. The user interface (UI) will also allow up to 16 people to share the same screen.

This is in addition to added capabilities for existing video hosting features, such as allowing Facebook users able to join live broadcasts midway through.

While the likes of Messenger and WhatsApp have played a role in helping friends, family and colleagues stay in touch during the coronavirus lockdown, users have flocked to services like Zoom and Skype to maintain face-to-face contact.

“Lately Facebook has felt the demand for real-time video,” the company said in a statement. 

“Between WhatsApp and Messenger, more than 700 million accounts participate in calls every day. In many countries, video calling on Messenger and WhatsApp more than doubled, and views of Facebook Live and Instagram Live videos increased significantly in March. 

“Spending time with each other should be spontaneous, not strained. So to help people feel like they’re together, even when they are — or have to be — physically apart, we’re announcing features across our products that make video chat and live video easier and more natural.”

This massive spike in demand has seen the likes of Zoom prosper almost overnight, with the video conferencing service gaining 100 million new users within a three-week period. As a result, the company’s fortunes have expanded and its shares have risen sharply.

Like Zoom and Skype, Facebook’s video conferencing service can be used by those without an account by distributing a meeting link. No software is required, and catchups can be started through the News Feed, Groups or Events. The company is also exploring ways to create this functionality from Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal too. 

WhatsApp, meanwhile, has been updated with Group Calls feature that can allow video-chatting between eight participants, all sharing the same screen. While primarily a consumer-oriented app, many businesses use the application for colleagues to stay in touch. The addition of expanded video functionality, with secured end-to-end encryption, may tempt users to stay in-app for meetings rather than shift across to other services.

The security and privacy settings within these services, meanwhile, will be of particular concern to many, with Facebook seen by a large number of people as questionable when it comes to gathering and handling user data.

Zoom came under significant criticism during its explosion in popularity for not featuring a number of important privacy and security controls. As a result, its rise in usage coincided with the emergence of a phenomenon known as ‘Zoom-bombing’, where unauthorised third-parties would invade meetings unannounced.

The company has recently worked to address these issues as part of a 90-day effort to improve the security of its platform. Last week, for example, the firm upgraded the software to version 5.0, introducing 256-bit encryption and administrative controls. 

Messenger Rooms includes a host of privacy and security settings, allowing users to manage, for example, who can join meeting rooms. Users can also remove participants from a call and locking an entire meeting down.

While Rooms offers a certain level of encryption, the video chats hosted through the service won’t benefit from end-to-end encryption as WhatsApp does. Facebook, however, insists it doesn’t watch or listen to audio or video calls, according to its privacy policy. 

The platform will also limit the information it asks non-users to provide to just their name, which will be shown to other guests.​

​Zoom has rolled out a flagship update comprising data encryption and front-end security-centric functionality as part of the company’s 90-day plan to address privacy and security gaps. 

The company hopes the implementation of the 256-bit AES-GCM encryption standard in Zoom 5.0 will give users concerned over the security of meetings some reassurance that their data is protected from cyber criminals. 

With the added layer of encryption, Zoom Meeting, Zoom Video Webinar and Zoom Phone data will be protected against tampering, the company insists, with this latest update providing a level of confidentiality that wasn’t present in previous iterations.

The standard will take effect once all accounts are enabled with GCM, with system-wide account implementation set to take place on 30 May.

Zoom was previously criticised for not using end-to-end encryption to safeguard meetings despite claiming to on promotional materials.

The network improvement comes in addition to Control Data Routing, which allows account administrators to choose which data centre regions their account-hosted meetings and webinars use for real-time traffic. This measure was announced by the company earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the front-end user interface (UI) will be overhauled to include a host of additional functionality, from host controls to passwords for cloud recordings.

“We take a holistic view of our users’ privacy and our platform’s security,” said Zoom CPO Oded Gal. “From our network to our feature set to our user experience, everything is being put through rigorous scrutiny. On the back end, AES 256-bit GCM encryption will raise the bar for securing our users’ data in transit. 

“On the front end, I’m most excited about the Security icon in the meeting menu bar. This takes our security features, existing and new, and puts them front and centre for our meeting hosts. With millions of new users, this will make sure they have instant access to important security controls in their meetings.”

As part of the major update, users will be given a central security hub, which can be accessed through a security icon on the host’s interface. Hosts can, for the first time, report a user to Zoom, and disable the ability to participants to rename themselves, among other controls. The virtual waiting room, meanwhile, will be enabled by default so hosts can control who can enter meetings at all times.

The latest version of Zoom will also support a new data structure for larger organisations, allowing them to link contacts across multiple accounts so people can seamlessly search and find meetings, phone contacts or chats.

Improvements to the dashboard will allow account administrators to view how their meetings are connected to Zoom data centres, which includes any data centres connected to HTTP Tunnel servers, as well as Conference Room Connectors and gateways.

The company has ploughed its resources into resolving a host of well-documented security issues which have arisen since the video conferencing platform was thrust into the spotlight following an explosion of user activity.

While many have opted to use the service in light of the coronavirus pandemic forcing employees to work from home, a string of organisations have instead banned the platform, including the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Google.

SAP will part ways with its co-CEO, Jennifer Morgan, a matter of months after she took up the mantle alongside Christian Klein following the departure of former chief Bill McDermott last October.

The ERP software giant has restructured to adopt a ‘sole CEO model’, which means Morgan, who has been at the company in various capacities since 2004, has been squeezed out. The co-CEO will depart the company on 30 April. 

The changes have come in light of “the current environment” which requires the company to take “swift, determined action” supported by a clear leadership structure.

“With unprecedented change within the world, it has become clear that now is the right time for the company to transition to a single CEO leading the business,” Morgan said. 

“I would like to thank Hasso Plattner for the opportunity to co-lead this great company, and I wish Christian, the Executive Board, and SAP’s talented team much success as they drive the company forward.”

The decision to part ways with the SAP veteran comes amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is wreaking havoc in all sectors across the global economy, including major IT and tech companies. 

SAP, incidentally, has sustained growth in revenues and profits during the first quarter of 2020, suggesting the sudden move to restructure its leadership is precautionary. The strong showing is headlined by a 7% rise in revenue.

However, the company has conceded the decision to shift its leadership model has come “earlier than planned” as it needs to focus on ensuring continuity, and unambiguous decision-making, during the crisis.

“Throughout SAP’s transformation, Jennifer has always been laser-focused on customers, partners, shareholders and employees,” said sole CEO Christian Klein. 

“It’s thanks to her that we have established a strong position in experience management solutions. I know she will always be a champion of SAP.”

Morgan joined SAP in 2004 and was appointed co-CEO with Klein in October 2019 when McDermott left. He now serves as the chief of the cloud software company ServiceNow.

Microsoft has released an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to help developers categorise bugs and features that need to be addressed in forthcoming releases.

The software giant’s machine learning system classifies bugs as security or non-security with a 99% accuracy, and also determines whether a bug is critical or non-critical with a 97% accuracy rating.

With ambitions to build a system with a level of accuracy as close as possible to a security expert, Microsoft fed its machine learning model with bugs labelled as security and non-security. Once this was trained, it could then label data that was not pre-classified. 

“Every day, software developers stare down a long list of features and bugs that need to be addressed,” said Microsoft’s senior security program manager Scott Christiansen, and data and applied scientist Mayana Pereira. 

“Security professionals try to help by using automated tools to prioritize security bugs, but too often, engineers waste time on false positives or miss a critical security vulnerability that has been misclassified.

“At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn’t just apply more people to the problem. However, large volumes of semi-curated data are perfect for machine learning.”

Because the system needs to be as accurate as a security expert, security professionals approved training data before this was fed into the machine learning model. Once the model was operational, they were brought back to evaluate the model in production.

The project began with data science and the collection of all data types and sources to evaluate quality. Security experts were then brought in to review the data and confirm the labels assigned were correct. 

Data scientists then chose a modelling technique, trained the model, and evaluated performance. Finally, security experts evaluated the model in production by monitoring the average number of bugs and manually reviewing a random sample.

The mechanism uses a step-step machine learning model operation; first learning how to classify between security and non-security bugs and then to apply a severity rating.

As a result of the level of accuracy, Microsoft now believes it’s catching more security vulnerabilities before they are exploited in the wild.

Development teams can read details in a published academic paper, with the machine learning methodology set to be open-sourced through GitHub in the coming months. 

Zoom customers will be able to choose which data centre regions their account can use for transmission of real-time meeting traffic, meaning that traffic now doesn’t need to be routed through China.

From 18 April, administrators and account owners of paid-for Zoom accounts can either opt-in or opt-out of a specific data centre region across the world, giving more control over how their traffic flows. 

The data of free users outside of China, moreover, will never be routed through China, with these users locked into data centres within their default region in which their account has been established.

The platform change has been implemented following a period of sustained criticism levelled towards the company for security concerns as well as privacy risks with its now extremely popular video conferencing platform. 

Last month, for example, it emerged that Zoom had been inadvertently sending a granular level of iOS users’ device data to Facebook through the mechanism of a sign-in integration. After this came to light, the company killed the integration and pledge to no longer transmit this data to the social media firm. 

In light of countless other complaints, the company last week moved to hire former Facebook chief security officer (CSO) Alex Stamos in a freelance advisory capacity to boost the platform’s integrity and robustness.

The backlash against the company reached a nadir last week after a host of organisations announced they were banning employees from using the platform. Even Taiwan distributed a declaration prohibiting government agencies and public sector employees from using Zoom, becoming the first country to ban the platform.

This ban was issued for security reasons, although many have suggested that, reading between the lines, the severity of the move was motivated by the revelation that some Zoom traffic was inadvertently routed through China. Diplomatic ties between the two nations are frosty, given that China does not recognise Taiwan’s independence. 

The swiftness by which Zoom has implemented changes to ensure traffic does not have to be routed through China, for both paid and free users, suggests the company is keen to mend its relationship with Taiwanese officials.

Paid-for Zoom users will be able to choose which data centre region their traffic is routed through, between the US, Canda, Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America and Japan/Hong Kong. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Fundamental changes to the Edge platform have seen Microsoft’s flagship browser swell in popularity to the extent it’s overtaken Mozilla’s Firefox as the second most widely-used browser.

Microsoft Edge crept up from a market share of 7.38% in February to 7.59% during March 2020, versus a slightly reduced 7.19% share for Firefox against 7.57% the previous month, according to NetMarketShare.

A steady rise in popularity for Microsoft Edge against the steady fall of Firefox’s market share over the last couple of years has seen a crossover moment occur for the first time.

The milestone follows a period of change for Edge, that comes pre-packaged with its Windows operating systems. Among these changes are a reangling towards business users, and an overhaul of its codebase to the extent it’s now based on the open source Chromium browser.

Another feature, known as Collections, allows workers in procurement to drag and drop items from search results into a list that can be shared with others, complete with image and metadata for all items.

The Chromium-powered Edge has also seen a brand redesign to distinguish itself from the previous iteration of Edge, which has languished for years, as well as Internet Explorer, which has sustained an organic month-by-month decline.

Although Chrome enjoys a near-monopolistic market share of desktop browsers, often hitting between 60% and 70% in market share over the last few years, the tussle for second has been closely fought between Firefox, Edge and Internet Explorer.

Firefox has, itself, undergone a series of key changes focused almost exclusively on protecting user privacy. The most recent step forward in its development, which typifies this trend, involves the launch of a paid-for virtual private network (VPN) that encrypts users’ connections across apps and devices.

Unfortunately for Mozilla, these efforts haven’t paid off in the way the developer may have hoped, given its market share has continued to fall over time, from 9.27% in March 2019, for example, to just above 7% last month. Comparatively, Edge held just 5.2% market share the same time last year.

The rise of Microsoft Edge has also coincided with the fall of Internet Explorer, which held a market share above 12% during 2018. This is largely due to the fact many businesses still rely on the web browser to run business-critical applications.

The fact the new Edge is powered by Chromium is also sure to attract a swathe of users simply curious as to how it compares against previous iterations, and whether this cleaner codebase leads to smarter functionality.

Downtime can prove a fiasco for any organisation, as can a sudden surge in demand, and it’s particularly true for companies wired into the heart of the online gaming scene. From EA Sports’ FIFA to the renowned Call of Duty franchise, millions of gamers across the globe have come to expect 24/7 network availability. 

The growing demand for always-on services is akin to the way that organisations reliant on cloud-powered applications expect flawless and reliable connections on which to run their operations. Just look at the escalating COVID-19 pandemic that’s taken the cloud computing world by storm – with a surge in demand for data services, Wi-Fi networks and workplaces platforms like Microsoft Teams. The staggering work that goes into maintaining these networks as userbases swell, whether in the business or gaming worlds, is routinely overlooked; it’s often a case of missing crucial elements when things go wrong.

At games publisher Ubisoft, subsidiary i3D.net runs and maintains the networks that power widely-played AAA multiplayer games, like Tom Clancy’s The Division. While it had been successful managing with just 70 staff and servers based in 35 sites spanning 15 countries, in the mid-2010s, it became clear extra muscle was needed to continue to service a rapidly-swelling user base.

“The big thing in game hosting is the fact you need to be really flexible and very responsive to the fast-changing market,” i3D.net COO, Rick Sloot, tells Cloud Pro. “A game can be popular, or it can be a real flop. But as soon as the game is popular, and a lot of people are playing it, or maybe even more people are going to play it than you’re expecting, you need extra capacity within hours, or maybe, at most, in a matter of days.”

The pressures of an always-on world

In the past, i3D.net would factor networking issues as a business cost, but these started to become too frequent to sustain. The infrastructure was built to incorporate redundancy, though if any routers, switches or other equipment went down, i3D.net would be pressed to resolve these issues as soon as possible while game sessions across the world were put on hold. The firm sought to onboard a third-party network monitoring company in 2015 to bolster network resilience, once it became impossible to tolerate these problems. The need was especially pressing given how limited staffing levels were, combined with exponentially growing demand. Network management firm Opengear was recruited shortly before Ubisoft released its hotly-anticipated Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, to improve resilience and failover options should things get hairy.

“The way the 24/7 world is working currently, and everybody wants to be online 24/7, [network failure] was not an acceptable risk anymore,” Sloot continues. “Because the company, and everybody in the world, is demanding a 24/7 service, we needed to look for other solutions, and other ways of maintaining the flexibility but without adding a lot of overhead on us.”

The potential for demand to surge at any one time, and in any location across the world, was impractical given i3D.net would rely on its own network engineers to fly out to these sites should work need doing. Remote hands would be used where possible, but it would take crucial minutes or hours to establish a connection while networks were offline. Expansion at existing locations, or establishing new sites, also posed issues when demand for a game went “sky high”.

Going mobile

Opengear already formed a part of i3D.net’s infrastructure, but on a much smaller scale, Sloot says. The implementation phase, which spanned a year, involved heavily ramping up the company’s involvement, which, thanks to the existing relationship, was more straightforward than it could have been. The equipment was shipped to i3D.net, and its engineers spent the following year flying from location to location to install the infrastructure. As i3D.net harbours sufficient technical expertise, it primarily leant on Opengear for enhancements. Automatic failover to alternative networks, for example, would ensure games would continue running when things looked hairy. This operated through the installation of cellular friction, with communication running via 4G networks instead of traditional backup lines.

“Before, we would always try to have a backup line; for example, buy a backup line from a data centre and then connect that one. So this was a very good additional feature for us, which brought the service to a higher level,” Sloot continues. The implementation of cellular friction, however, brought its own challenges. 

“Maybe sometimes for us, from our side, it’s tricky because for cellular friction you need good quality of signal … which is always a challenge in a data centre, which is always a highly secure facility.”

As for how he’d advise other businesses to handle their networking infrastructure as they look to scale, he repeated that you would only miss the most crucial elements powering your networks behind the scenes when things go horribly wrong. 

“I always say to my guys here, what could be the worst that can happen?” he explains. “If you look at all those steps that could happen – what can you prevent, and if you can prevent them, what’s the best solution for it? 

“If there’s a solution, what are the costs versus the risks? Looking at this particular solution of Opengear, the costs of not having a network is, like, tens of thousands of Euros per hour. Buying the product is a small fraction of that, so, it’s a rather small investment for achieving high availability.”

Microsoft will no longer release non-essential updates to its line of Windows operating systems due to disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

From May 2020, businesses will only receive the most important critical security updates for a swathe of Windows systems, including the recently-published Windows 10 version 1909 through to Windows Servier 2008 SP2.

Work on category C and D cumulative updates, which are optional preview releases issued in the third and fourth weeks of the month, has been put on hold due to “challenges” posed by the pandemic, the company said.

These updates are issued so Windows users can test tweaks and fixes before these are bundled into the next Patch Tuesday releases, where they’re designated category B.

“We have been evaluating the public health situation, and we understand this is impacting our customers,” an announcement reads.

“In response to these challenges we are prioritizing our focus on security updates. Starting in May 2020, we are pausing all optional non-security releases (C and D updates) for all supported versions of Windows client and server products (Windows 10, version 1909 down through Windows Server 2008 SP2).”

The monthly Patch Tuesday security updates will continue to be published as normal, Microsoft added.

This is to ensure that organisations can continue to carry out business operations as smoothly as possible, and that they’re protected from any serious bugs or security threats.

The timing and schedule of the suspension of work suggests the company is late into its development cycle for updates set to be released in April. The announcement also suggests Microsoft feels the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 outbreak to development work will continue for a long time.

It comes just days after the company said it would be pausing development work on version 81 of its Edge browser, itself a response to Google pausing its own development work on Chromium.

Coronavirus has already had a sizeable impact on businesses of all stripes and in all sectors. While the tech sector hasn’t been as severely hit as companies in the services industry, entire workforces have shifted to remote working patterns, and a host of development projects have been put on hold.