Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) is aiming to offers its customers the capacity to scale up or down their IT infrastructures with its newly-launched private cloud platform.

Released through the firm’s flagship Cloud Console, this private cloud service offers a scalable way for customers to build their cloud without deploying an additional layer of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) software stack.

VCF is a hybrid cloud platform built on a single architecture that serves as a foundational layer for managing virtual machines (VMs) and orchestrating containers. Dell’s launch, however, would allow customers to bypass the need to deploy this architecture and build their own on-prem private cloud, the company says.

This is the second product that Dell has launched as part of its Project Apex cloud pursuit. Project Apex is an initiative the company launched in October 2020 to consolidate its ‘as a service’ cloud offerings – with its Cloud Console hub sitting at the heart of this strategy.

The Cloud Console serves as a provisioning and management platform for cloud and ‘as a service’ products, with Dell hoping that customers can use it to deploy workloads, manage resources and keep eye on costs through a simple interface.

DTCP Private Cloud is packaged with the same features that come with Dell’s existing hybrid cloud offering, with the firm also introducing instance-based offerings for DTCP Hybrid Cloud late last year.

These can be ordered in a self-service manner in quantities of 25, 50, 100, 200 and 500, and can be deployed in customers’ data centres within two weeks and scaled up in roughly five days. They can be combined to run a larger quantity of instances of the same type, or customers can mix and match multiple workloads within the same product.

While the firm’s hybrid cloud service is available for $47 per instance per month, Dell is making its private cloud offering available for $14 per instance per month. 

The release also comes with the option for customers to provide their own rack infrastructure, alongside the integrated rack Dell offers. Customers will be able to use their own rack space in combination with all the equipment required such as power distribution units, cables and switches.

Google Cloud Platform has signed a multi-year agreement with Twitter that will see the social media company shift its offline analytics, data processing and machine learning workloads to Google’s Data Cloud.

The deal means Twitter will be able to more quickly process trillions of data points generated by every tweet, retweet and like send on its platform to generate insights that, in turn, can be fed into improvements to the core product.

Twitter’s data platform currently consumes hundreds of petabytes of data and runs tens of thousands of tasks over a dozen data clusters each day. It previously struck an agreement with Google Cloud Platform as part of its ‘Partly Cloudy’ strategy in 2018, when the firm moved its Hadoop clusters to Google’s infrastructure.

With this expanded partnership, Twitter will adopt a number of Google services including BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable and machine learning tools. Ultimately, it’ll allow the firm to expand its data ecosystem and generate insights much faster, as well as allowing for deeper machine learning-driven innovation.

“Our initial partnership with Google Cloud has been successful and enabled us to enhance the productivity of our engineering teams,” said Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal. “Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day. 

“As Twitter continues to scale, we’re excited to partner with Google on more industry-leading technology innovation in the data and machine learning space.

Twitter is also hoping to ‘democratise’ data access by offering a range of data processing and machine learning tools to better understand and improve how Twitter features are used. Previously, engineers and data scientists developed large custom processing jobs, although these can now be queried faster using SQL in BigQuery. 

The partnership, generally, will make it easier for both technical and non-technical teams to study data generated from the usage of Twitter, and gain insights from these.

“Helping customers manage the entire continuum of data – from storage to analytics to AI – is one of our key differentiators at Google Cloud,” said Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian. 

“It’s been phenomenal to watch this company grow over the years, and we’re excited to partner with Twitter to innovate for the future and deliver the best experience possible for the people that use Twitter every day.”

IBM has ditched subscription-based cloud pricing in favour of a ‘pay as you go’ scheme as it continues to transform its central focus to cloud provision.

With the Cloud Pay as you Go with Committed Use model, customers will need to negotiate a certain amount of cloud usage they’d be committing to pay for month after month, as well as discounted pricing. 

IBM’s main selling point for its new cloud pricing model is that customers won’t be met with penalties for using more than is expected. Instead, customers will be charged at the normal discounted rate they’ve negotiated for their expected cloud usage.

“With this billing model, you commit to spend a certain amount on IBM Cloud and you also receive discounts across the Cloud platform,” said Amit Patel, offering management, direct sales and Haley Lucey, IBM cloud content experience.

“You are billed monthly based on your usage, and unlike a subscription, you continue to receive a discount even after you reach your yearly committed amount.”

The change comes after another mixed round of financial results for the computing giant, with a 10% surge in cloud growth overshadowed by the sharpest overall revenue decline in five years. 

IBM’s cloud business earned $7.5 billion during Q4, with revenue from Red Hat also increasing by 19%. However, this wasn’t enough to raise overall revenues, which dropped 6% between October and December. 

The pivot to pay as you go pricing is also part of a wider shift in pricing strategy, with IBM also announcing last week that it’s raised the prices of its Enterprise Plan for Db2 on Cloud programme from January 2021. 

The console user experience is also getting an overhaul, IBM says, with changes including visualisation of progress towards a cloud commitment, with ways to identify any discount, spending progress and remaining time on a commitment. 

Customers can also look at their spending break down, month by month, as well as a detailed usage dashboard for each specific calendar month.

Malwarebytes has said that the same state-backed cyber gang that attacked SolarWinds in December was able to access internal emails by using an exploit in Microsoft 365.

The hackers gained limited access to internal Malwarebytes emails, according to CEO Marcin Kleczynski, by abusing applications with privileged access to Microsoft 365 and Azure environments.

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The security firm first became aware of the threat after the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) discovered unusual activity in a third-party application sat inside the Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft had been examining its Office 365 and Azure systems for signs of compromise at the time, while details of the SolarWinds attack were also beginning to emerge.

The attackers demonstrated similar techniques and procedures to those used in the SolarWinds compromise. In this case, however, they abused a dormant email protection product within the firm’s Office 365 tenant. This granted the attackers access to a limited subset of internal emails.

The attackers, however, failed to access or compromise Malwarebytes’ source code, and the company has declared that its products were safe to use at all times.

“While Malwarebytes does not use SolarWinds, we, like many other companies were recently targeted by the same threat actor,” Kleczynski said.

“After an extensive investigation, we determined the attacker only gained access to a limited subset of internal company emails. We found no evidence of unauthorized access or compromise in any of our internal on-premises and production environments.”

The specific exploit mechanism is based on an Azure Active Directory flaw uncovered in 2019, which Fox-IT researcher Dirk-jan Mollema demonstrated could be exploited to escalate privileges by assigning credentials to applications.

An early January report published by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also revealed how attackers may have obtained access to Microsoft 365 apps by password spraying, in addition to exploiting administrative credentials.

In the Malwarebytes attack, the hackers added a self-signed certificate with credentials to the service principal account. From there, they were able to authenticate using the key and make API calls to request emails through MSGraph.

The SolarWinds breach was certainly one of the most significant security incidents of last year and carries wide-reaching implications for the industry. Since the turn of the year, it’s been revealed that the attackers accessed Microsoft source code in the breach, and had even first breached SolarWinds’ systems as far back as September 2019.

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Citrix Systems is in talks to buy the collaborative work management platform Wrike for a reported $2 billion (approximately £1.5 billion) in what might become the company’s largest acquisition in its history.

The virtualisation company may close a deal with the owners of Wrike, Vista Equity Partners, as soon as this week, according to Bloomberg. This deal potentially adds another tool to Citrix’s arsenal as the firm aims to become a major player in the collaboration space.

Talks are reportedly ongoing with nothing finalised, according to those questioned by the publication, and discussions could yet collapse at any stage.

While Citrix already develops cloud-based products that allow employees to work remotely and keep in touch with their colleagues, integrating collaboration software such as that developed by Wrike would allow the company to go one step further.

Wrike develops workplace collaboration software that incorporates elements such as planning, workflow management and project management. The core platform is also supported by a host of integrations with technologies developed by the likes of Box, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and Slack.

Of the firm’s more than 20,000 customers are several high-profile customers including Walmart and Nickelodeon in the US. Wrike’s competitors, meanwhile, include Trello and Slack Technologies, which were each recently purchased in major deals by Atlassian and Salesforce respectively.

Should the acquisition go through at the reported $2 billion figure, it’ll become the largest in the company’s history. The firm previously acquired the micro-app developer Sapho in November 2018 for $200 million (roughly £150 million). Prior to that, in February 2018, Citrix bought the web traffic management firm Cedexis for an undisclosed fee.

Citrix has been on a mission to define the “future of work” for several years, and integrating a collaboration platform into the firm’s core Workspace service would naturally fit into this strategy. The popularity of this kind of software has certainly surged during 2020, however, due to COVID-19 and its effect on encouraging remote working.

CloudPro approached Citrix for a comment on the reports, but the company didn’t respond at the time of publication.

File hosting service Dropbox has decided to cull its global workforce by 315 people, or roughly a tenth, to embark on new strategies for growth and invest in products designed for the era of hybrid working.

The “painful, but necessary” decision to shed 11% of its workforce follows a transitional year in which the firm adopted a ‘virtual first’ policy with permanent remote working at its heart.

Dropbox COO Olivia Nottebohm will also be leaving the company on 5 February after little more than a year in post, although It’s unclear whether the former Google Cloud VP has been let go as part of the wider cuts or has stepped down on her own accord.

“Over the past year, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of running a tight ship and getting the company ready for the next stage of growth,” said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

“This will require relentless focus on initiatives that align tightly with our strategic priorities, and having the discipline to pull back from those that don’t. Unfortunately, this means that we’re reducing the size of some of our teams.”

The news may surprise some given that figures from November 2020 revealed Dropbox had performed better than expected, with its Q3 income of $487.4 million (£357 million) representing a 14% year-on-year growth.

Houston explained that these 315 job cuts “will lead to a more efficient and nimble Dropbox” and help the company focus on its priorities for 2021. These include evolving the core platform, investing in new products for hybrid working, and “driving operational excellence”, although the definition of this hasn’t been clarified.

He added the company strived to maintain jobs throughout 2020, but that this move was now needed in order to achieve its goals over the coming years.

“This was an extremely difficult decision, but a necessary step as we align teams to our business priorities, which requires reallocating resources and eliminating some roles across the company,” a Dropbox spokesperson told IT Pro. 

“We’ll continue to invest in critical roles to support product expansion and growth initiatives. For affected employees, we’re committed to supporting them through the transition, including severance packages and job placement support.”

There is no official reasoning for Nottebohm’s departure, and has she is yet to issue a statement, although Houston praised her “pivotal role” in setting the company up for success in 2021. Incidentally, the role that Nottebohm filled in January 2020 had previously been vacant for more than a year.

According to social media posts by current Dropbox employees, a significant number of cuts have been made in the product design division, although this hasn’t been officially confirmed. It’s also unclear how the job losses have been distributed geographically.

Departing employees will be entitled to severance pay and bonuses depending on their location and eligibility, as well as six months of healthcare if US-based. Workers can also choose to keep all company devices currently in their possession.

US web infrastructure firm Cloudflare has devised its own tool that lets web developers build and host websites.

Taking advantage of the company’s global infrastructure network, Cloudflare Pages is a hosting service that supports platforms built directly on the edge using the JAMstack architecture.

The firm has described this as “the next breakthrough in the web performance battle” due to the way it takes advantage of edge computing, with Cloudflare claiming performance will be almost twice as fast as other platforms.

Beyond this, Cloudflare also suggests its Pages service will be secure and scalable, saving developers time on integrated disparate systems, as well as benefitting from seamless GitHub integration to ease the development process.

“From day one Cloudflare was built to service developers. Over the last ten years, millions of developers have counted on us for our network performance and security services,” said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder. “With Cloudflare Pages, we’re now providing them with a scalable, fast, secure, cost-effective platform to build next-generation applications that they can deploy globally. 

“Internally, we believe it’s only a matter of time before an individual developer builds a billion-dollar company on their own. We hope Cloudflare Pages will provide the building blocks to help make our belief a reality.”

Its scalability can be attributed to the fact it’s built on Cloudflare’s global network of more than 200 cities, the company added, while running on the edge means Pages will be within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the internet-connected population.

The firm is also hoping to soon integrate Cloudflare Pages with its Cloudflare Workers serverless development platform, so users can integrate third-party APIs into their own platforms. This will allow frontend developers versed in JavaScript to build scalable backends to their applications in the same language.

The security of the platform, meanwhile, is being assured with free SSL as standard, alongside the firm’s Web Application Firewall (WAF). The company will also provide support for the latest web standards with HTTP/3, the QUIC transport layer network protocol, and image compression.

Smart city development firm Connexin has announced plans to expand its Internet of Things (IoT) network across the entirety of the UK, with all local authorities and regions now able to link up with the company’s flagship platform.

Such a universal carrier-grade roaming long ranger wide area network (LoRaWAN) aims to lower the barriers to entry for regional governments hoping to launch their own smart city projects. This also eases the process for all organisations hoping to adopt IoT products.

This national rollout is the first of its kind in the UK and has started following successful regional deployments in Yorkshire, with organisations such as Yorkshire Water, Hull City Council and Amey among those which are already using the system.

Using the LoRaWAN network can allow any organisation in public service, from councils to utility firms, deploy IoT products without having to build their own network as they can tap into Connexin’s universal system.

“With a low-cost wide-area networking solution becoming available to all organisations across the UK, it opens up opportunities for those looking to deploy IoT solutions for a fraction of the cost of existing cellular infrastructure solutions,” said the founder and CEO of Connexin, Furqan Alamgir. 

“Not only does this promote the development of new IoT-based technology but it allows existing solutions to be rolled out nationwide to encourage further adoption and will allow more people to utilise and benefit from affordable, carrier-grade IoT connectivity.”

This news builds on an £80 million fundraising effort in September, with the company aiming to become the UK’s chief smart cities provider following successful regional deployments in Sheffield, Hull, and the South Coast. The expansion of its national IoT network to cover all areas of the UK is now underway.

The presence of a national IoT network may help to kickstart smart city projects across the UK, with only limited implementation and success to date. Many projects are either small in scale, or in the pipeline for future development, such as the government’s £90 million cash injection to build ‘future transport zones’. These will be located in the West of England Combined Authority, Portsmouth and Southampton, and Derby and Nottingham.

UK mobile network operator Giffgaff has outlined plans to shift its entire IT infrastructure and operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS), completing its migration from on-premise data centres by the end of the year.

Giffgaff will opt into more than 60 of AWS’ 175 cloud services, the company announced, including compute, analytics, storage, databases, containers and machine learning. In doing so, the firm will become the first European mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to be powered by AWS in its entirety. 

The company will have shifted its IT infrastructure and application development operations to AWS by 2021, as it aims to become more capable of experimenting at pace, and speeding up a host of internal processes. The company claims to have already transformed its development lifecycle from a complex and monolithic approach to a modern, microservices-based architecture that’s enabled fast-paced development.

“We started out with a traditional, on-premises infrastructure, but the need for ongoing maintenance made this model overwhelming for our technical team. For example, it used to take us up to two weeks to provision a new server,” said chief operating and technical officer at Giffgaff, Steve MacDonald. 

“When we began to adopt AWS, we were able to turbocharge our development lifecycle by focusing on innovation rather than wasting time on maintenance. It’s such a powerful capability for a digital-native business like ours.”

While the announcement is still fresh, the firm has been partnering with AWS for some time already, using AWS analytics and machine learning services, for example, to understand members’ network experiences.

Aggregating and analysing data across all cases helped the company create an early warning system for network incidents. Prior to moving to AWS, too, it could take Giffgaff up to two weeks to provision a server, which can now be done within a matter of minutes.

Adopting a continuous delivery approach, and moving containerised workloads to the fully managed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), meanwhile, has freed up 3,000 days of engineering and development time, according to Giffgaff.

This is equivalent to refocusing up to 15 people on innovation, and has allowed them to devote more resources to creating new apps for members.

Cisco has acquired audience interaction company Slido in efforts to enhance the Webex video conferencing user experience and stay relevant with the likes of Zoom, Teams and Google Meet enjoying a surge in popularity.

The firm is hoping to integrate Slido’s audience interaction and engagement features, such as polls and Q&As, into the Webex platform to improve the quality of the product and make it more appealing for users. 

The acquisition will pave the way for meeting owners to create engaging content such as infographics, get real-time insights as well as obtain feedback. This is in addition to Slido’s inbuilt functionality to support virtual conferences and massive events.​

“Slido technology enables higher levels of user engagement―before, during and after meetings and events,” said Abhay Kulkarni, Cisco’s VP and GM for Webex Meetings. “The Slido technology will be part of the Cisco Webex platform and enhance Cisco’s ability to offer new levels of inclusive audience engagement across both in-person and virtual experiences.

“In the massive shift to “virtual everything,” remote meetings and events have become the lifeblood for connecting people in all aspects of their lives – from friends to family to work colleagues.

“Slido has over seven million participants monthly and provides its customers with an inclusive audience engagement platform that enables real-time feedback and insight before, during and after any meeting or event via dynamic polls, Q&A, quizzes, word clouds, surveys and more.”

Bundling such features into the meetings experience is something that Cisco is hoping can keep Webex relevant at a time where its industry rivals such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom are enjoying rampant success.

This isn’t to say, however, that Cisco’s enterprise collaboration platform hasn’t enjoyed a surge in popularity itself, recording 590 million meeting participants in September, for example, according to Reuters. Zoom, however, boasted a staggering 300 million daily meeting participants during the height of the pandemic in April. 

The company describes its goal as delivering experiences that are 10x better than in-person interactions, which the integration of Slido’s audience engagement tools will help to contribute to. Cisco will also hope to integrate further insights into the broader Webex platform, with a view to raising productivity while workers are still based remotely.

This isn’t the first recent acquisition that Cisco has made squarely with the view to enhance the Webex experience, having previously acquired BabbleLabs earlier this year. The previous deal saw the firm seek to integrate AI processing technology into meetings in order to suppress background noise and enhance speech clarity.