Oracle has launched its next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMWare and Kubernetes.

The dual-region infrastructure, comprising two separate sites in London and Wales connected by Oracle Cloud’s high-speed network backbone, will allow public sector bodies to deploy cloud services in multiple regions with ease. 

Bodies can use Oracle’s infrastructure to deploy not just disaster recovery services, but cloud hosting and storage of data from within the region.

The company’s partnership with the public sector has expanded in recent times to service organisations such as the Home Office and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), and local government organisations. 

The private dual-region cloud will also allow public sector customers to take up additional services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Oracle OCI services, as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud applications. 

“We’ve had a Government Cloud Region in the UK for several years, but today’s announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud,” said Richard Petley, senior vice president with Oracle UK and Israel.

“This is a completely unique offering to the UK government – no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today. We’ll be working with all aspects of government – both local and central – to help them understand how they make use of the cloud to deliver better services and value to the UK taxpayer.”

The platform has been designed in collaboration with several UK government and national defence organisations, and adheres to the security requirements set out by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Oracle claims. This allows various organisations to handle and transmit sensitive information through the private cloud network.

The company’s second-gen cloud is built specifically to help large organisations and enterprises run the most demanding workloads in a secure way and is built to run autonomous services. These include Oracle Autonomous Linux and oracle Autonomous Database.

The increasing complexity of enterprise cloud environments and the rise of hybrid cloud is rapidly increasing IT workloads and fuelling a rising demand for automation, Puppet’s CTO has claimed.

During a time when many organisations are being asked to do more with less, the shift from mostly on-prem to a mixture of cloud environments in a relatively short space of time has radically complicated the workloads of CIOs. 

Speaking exclusively with CloudPro on the launch of Puppet’s automated Comply platform, Puppet CTO Abby Kearns suggested the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures over as little as the last five years is serving as the main element driving demand for automation.

“The hybrid cloud, and managing across hybrid environments, is the number one driver, honestly, because it’s so complex,” Kearns said. “So many companies started about five years ago to move workloads to the cloud, so we started to see that slow migration, but the cloud wasn’t really set up to mimic the way we were managing on-prem environments.” 

Enterprises now have an on-prem environment, a public cloud deployment or perhaps even multiple clouds, with different tools, different workloads and different approaches all in play. Businesses are also using more cloud-native applications and more microservices, so the landscape for IT standards compliance is becoming far more complex.

Puppet’s Comply automation platform is a system designed to cut out many of the traditionally manual processes IT teams and CIOs would manage when ensuring their hardware meets a range of compliance standards. 

The product, which will be offered in addition to a compliance automation consultancy service the company already markets, would allow customers to manage their own automation programmes across their IT estate.

Alex Hin, Puppet’s principal product manager, told CloudPro the platform will raise IT visibility, identify compliance shortcomings and remediate these issues.

He explained the need for such software comes from small teams of three to five people suddenly being tasked with making configuration changes on hundreds of thousands of nodes, either on-prem or on the public cloud. This becomes a high investment for the company, requiring a lot of spend and a lot of expertise for all environments to move into compliance.

“That’s really where it comes into play,” Kearns continued, “the idea that automation is really the only route to be able to do that. Because this isn’t just something where you can assign more people to the work. You can’t just throw more people at the problem, you’re going to have to figure out how to automate this as you start to get into the hundreds of thousands of workloads. It’s just a different kind of scale.”

Puppet\s Comply platform will launch in the coming weeks with pre-integrated compatibility with the CIS benchmarks, and further plans to integrate a number of other compliance standards in future. These will extend to include many common standards from DISA, FedRAMP, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

The drive to automate, Puppet hopes, will begin to free up time for many organisations that are trying to do more with less, particularly as a result of economic pressures due to COVID-19. One example of a process that Comply will automate is the ‘desired state configuration’ feature. This essentially automatically reverts any configuration changes to a ‘desired state’ if the system detects that the change has led the system to deviate from the particular standard to which it’s adhering to. 

“For us, we’ve spent the last six months really investing in a platform-centric approach and the opportunity to really extend into compliance and really build on those capabilities are really powerful for us and our customers,” Kearns added. 

“And that’s something we’re going to spend the next several years really continuing to expand on, and really continuing to drive innovation from an automation standpoint, but also from a compliance standpoint as we see those things go hand-in-hand for our customers. “

Chromebook users are being offered the capacity to run Microsoft’s flagship Windows 10 operating system on their devices using software company Parallels’ newly released platform.

Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise is the culmination of a partnership between the firm and Google, and allows users to access full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, on their Chromebooks without necessarily needing a stable internet connection. 

The system is integrated with Chrome OS and the Google Admin console – and doesn’t require virtual desktop infrastructure to run or deploy, meaning IT administrators can set up parallel desktops on devices at relative ease. This builds on a recent partnership struck in June which allowed Windows applications to run natively on budget-friendly Chromebooks.

“Chrome OS is increasingly being chosen by modern enterprises, either for remote work, hybrid, or in the office,” said Google’s vice president of Chrome OS, John Solomon.

“We are thrilled to partner with Parallels to bring legacy and full-featured Windows applications support, through Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, to help businesses easily transition to cloud-first devices and workflows.”

The platform will allow enterprise users to run multiple operating systems on their Chromebook devices simultaneously, with the company hoping it allows workers to raise their productivity. 

A number of features allow cross-talk between Windows 10 and Chrome OS, for example, copy-and-pasting text and graphics between the two operating systems, or printing from Windows apps via shared Chrome OS printers. Sharing features also extend to user profiles and custom folders, with documents and data seamlessly accessible by both platforms.

Windows 10 can also be used in full-screen mode on the Chromebook, or the operating system can be put on a separate Chrome OS virtual desktop, with users able to switch between the two with just a swipe.

There are already a number of devices supporting Windows 10 on Chrome OS, including the Google Pixelbook Go, the HP Elite c1030 Chromebook Enterprise, Acer Chromebook Spin 713, and Dell Latitude 5400 Chromebook Enterprise. There are 10 devices in total that support Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, including units from Lenovo and ASUS in addition to the aforementioned devices.

The machines themselves require at least an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and storage capacity of at least 128GB SSD. 

The revenues of computing giant IBM declined by 2.6% year-on-year during the third quarter of 2020, with the company reporting $17.6 billion of income fuelled chiefly by a surge in cloud revenue.

This dip represented the third quarter of consecutive year-on-year revenue decline for the company, with IBM’s systems division, global business services and global technology services and global financing sector suffering over the last three months.

The positive trend in terms of the firm’s cloud business also continued, following a 30% spike in cloud revenue during the previous quarter, and 19% growth in the three months before that.

The company’s cloud computing divisions, particularly its cloud and data platforms division, led by Red Hat, grew by 7% year-on-year, bucking the wider business trend. Within this segment, cloud and data platforms grew 20%, while cognitive applications grew 1%. 

These financial results have emerged only days after the company announced it plans to divide its business in half, spinning its infrastructure services unit into a separate entity while going all-in on the cloud.

“The strong performance of our cloud business, led by Red Hat, underscores the growing client adoption of our open hybrid cloud platform,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. 

“Separating the managed infrastructure services business creates a market-leading standalone company and further sharpens our focus on IBM’s open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. This will accelerate our growth strategy and better position IBM to seize the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity.”

The company’s plans to pour all its efforts into its cloud business will, on paper, be justified based on these most recent financial results, with the general health of cloud computing improving following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The firm’s global technology services division, which includes infrastructure and cloud services as well as technology support services, contracted by 4% year-on-year, with cloud revenue within this segment up 9%. 

The systems division, meanwhile, saw revenues of $1.3 billion, down 15%, driven by declines in IBM Z and Storage Systems. This is reflective of the impact of product cycle demands, the company said.

As part of the spin-off, IBM wants to create two separate companies by the end of 2021, with the to-be-cleaved infrastructure business, dubbed NewCo, making way for IBM to focus on AI capabilities and hybrid cloud.

Australian software company Atlassian will end support for all of its on-premise server products from 2024 as it plots a major shift to the cloud.

From 2 February 2021, customers will no longer be able to purchase or request a quote for a new server product, while prices will increase for a host of the company’s on-prem products, with a view to discontinuation three years later. 

The 10 services which will no longer be supported from 2 February 2024 include Jira Service Desk Server, Bitbucket Server and Jira Software Server, among other core Atlassian products.

“From staying ahead of the latest regulatory and security requirements to expanding our ecosystem with a new development platform and introducing flexible plans, we’ve continuously invested in our cloud tools so that your teams can work flexibly and innovate quickly,” said Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar.

“But, when it comes to our mission of unleashing the potential of every team – including yours – you need us to move faster and go even further.”

Atlassian will offer on-prem support in the form of bug fixes for server products until 2022, after which point only critical flaws will be addressed, through to 2024.

The company says offering three years of support and maintenance will help customers transition to the cloud, in addition to loyalty discounts for eligible customers to upgrade to its cloud or data centre products at a lower price.

The company’s Atlassian Migration Program (AMP) also provides customers with a step-by-step guide, free migration tools, a dedicated migration support team, and a free cloud migrationtrial for up to 12 months.

For customers for whom three years is not enough, the firm will also offer a robust self-managed enterprise edition, Atlassian Data Center. This will include new capabilities and integrations that makes it easier to use cloud and data centre products in harmony.

Dropbox has told its staff that permanent remote working will become the norm, joining a string of the world’s biggest tech companies in abandoning physical office spaces in favour of working virtually.

The existing working from home policy the company has adopted will continue until at least June 2021, in line with policies adopted by the majority of tech companies due to the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The company has, however, also outlined plans to establish at least four Dropbox Studios in sites across the world when it’s safe to do so, starting with San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Dublin, for employees who prefer to work in-person.

“We believe the data shows the shift to remote work, though abrupt, has been successful overall,” the company said in a blog post. As a company, we’ve continued to serve our customers without interruption and shipped new products and features.  

“But things aren’t perfect. Back-to-back video conferences, constant notifications, and isolation from peers can be overwhelming. In our study with the EIU, workers also say company culture suffers with no in-person interaction, risk of miscommunication is higher, and it’s harder to start new projects with multiple collaborators. There are many things people miss about the office.”

Becoming a virtual-first company means remote working will become the default for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.

The remote experience will go one step further with “non-linear workdays” too, meaning core collaboration hours will be set up with overlap between time zones, with employees encouraged to design their own schedules beyond that. 

Dropbox will also invest in a holistic ecosystem of resources, including a dedicated team, to support employees and track progress by measuring impacts on productivity, engagement, and culture so the firm can continue to adapt. 

The company’s Virtual First Toolkit, comprising guidance about supporting the remote workforce, is also being open-sourced, meaning any learnings picked up along the journey will be shared with the wider industry.

Managers also hope the virtual-first approach will give the firm an opportunity to build an even stronger, more diverse workforce as it hires from increasingly varied backgrounds and perspectives. 

News of Dropbox’s new “virtual first” approach comes just days after Microsoft announced that staff will be given the option to work remotely on a permanent basis. 

Cloud data protection and management company Druva has launched the “industry’s first” cloud-based backup service for network attached storage (NAS) devices.

While NAS devices serve as a great way to create local backups of important data, it’s traditionally not been possible to make an additional backup of that data on the cloud using a dedicated system.

Druva’s system claims to improve backup performance by more than five times, and introduces a feature dubbed intelligent cold-storage tiering. This is in addition to the capacity to diffuse storage growth with integrated storage insights.

The direct-to-cloud architecture also eliminates redundant copies of backed-up files, and the infrastructure allows businesses to safeguard the value of unstructured data and manage their information in a much simpler way than traditional methods.

“Traditional backup providers have treated NAS as an afterthought, at the expense of reliability, security, and cost-efficiency,” said Druva’s chief technologist, Stephen Manley.

“Now, IT teams can augment their data management strategy with a simple and resilient NAS-optimized protection solution that requires no on-premises storage and no cloud management. By reducing data copies and redundant data centrally with our patent global source-side deduplication, Druva’s new offering eliminates storage management headaches while delivering the built-in ransomware protection today’s businesses need.”

The company’s system is targeted at unstructured data, which Druva claims accounts for more than 80% of the total data stored in enterprise storage systems. Managing this quantity of data, however, is becoming increasingly complex and difficult.

Organisations routinely maintain multiple copies of a dataset, the company adds, including versions for short-term recovery and off-site copies for resiliency, long-term retention, compliance and more. This increases the overall cost of storing and managing data. 

Druva’s platform comes as a solution to this conundrum, with the direct-to-cloud nature of the architecture seamlessly backing-up and archiving unstructured data without the need for configuration, integration or managing cloud storage tiers.

The cloud backup and archiving capabilities are already generally available, while infrequent access tier is in early release, with general availability expected in the first half of 2021.

Google Cloud has launched a fully integrated workspace productivity platform from which customers can access widely-used G Suite apps including Gmail, Calendar and Drive, among others.

With a new user interface, the desktop-based application will allow users to seamlessly cycle between the entire G Suite portfolio depending on the task at hand, building on the integration of core tools earlier in the year. 

The merging of these core tools, including chat, email, voice and video calling as well as content management, aims to give employees access to all the tools they need in one place. Users have previously needed to endlessly cycle between web browser tabs, or third-party desktop clients, in order to replicate the same experience. 

The launch of Google Workspace essentially overwrites the G Suite, with new branding also launched to coincide with the platform rollout. 

“Now, work itself is transforming in unprecedented ways. For many of us, work is no longer a physical place we go to, and interactions that used to take place in person are being rapidly digitized,” said VP and GM for Google Workspace, Javier Soltero.

“Office workers no longer have impromptu discussions at the coffee machine or while walking to meetings together, and instead have turned their homes into workspaces.

“These are unique challenges, but they also represent a significant opportunity to help people succeed in this highly distributed and increasingly digitized world. With the right solution in place, people are able to collaborate more easily, spend time on what matters most, and foster human connections, no matter where they are.”

Beyond merely serving as a centralised hub, among the uses of Google Workspace, customers can dynamically create and collaborate on a document with guests through a chat room, for example. This means it’s easier to share content and work together with users beyond the confines of your organisation’s network. 

Users can also preview a linked file in Docs, Sheets and Slides without having to open a new tab, meaning, again, less time is spent cycling between web tabs. Google Meet video conferencing sessions, meanwhile, can be seen as picture-in-picture in not only Gmail and Chat, as the firm previously announced, but in Docs, Sheets and Slides as well.  

There are different pricing tiers available with Google Workspace, depending on the needs of any particular organisation, in addition to varying amounts of cloud storage. Subscriptions also include administrative and security tools to manage workforce access to Google’s productivity tools, as well as threat protection.

​Microsoft has suggested it will launch its Office productivity suite of apps and services in the form of a refreshed ‘perpetual release’ edition, two years after the launch of Office 2019.

Expected to be sold at a standalone cost to customers on Windows and Mac, this variety of Microsoft Office will bring the apps and services that compromise the Microsoft 365 suite to enterprises that don’t wish to buy a subscription.

The perpetual release, touted to launch in the second half of 2021, may come as welcome news to businesses not yet fully enticed by the nature of cloud services.

Office 2019, launched for Windows 10 devices two years ago, was released with a reduced extended support period against that offered in previous offline editions, namely Office 2016.

Although Microsoft offered five years of mainstream support, lasting through to 2023, the firm would only offer an additional two years of extended support, with updates ending on 14 October 2025. This was in order for the Office 2019 end-of-life cycle to align with Office 2016.

The announcement of another standalone Office suite, likely to be named Office 2022 based on historical naming conventions, suggests Microsoft has backed away from intentions to phase out this form of software launch. The firm had previously hinted it would abandon standalone releases and instead encourage its customers to opt for subscription-based services, honed by the launch of Microsoft 365 earlier this year.

“Software that is more than a decade old, and hasn’t benefited from this innovation, is difficult to secure and inherently less productive,” Barnardo Caldas, general manager for Windows and Jared Spataro, general manager for Office said in a joint blog post to mark the launch of Office 2019, for instance. “As the pace of change accelerates, it has become imperative to move our software to a more modern cadence.”

The firm announced the expected launch of a new ‘perpetual release’ for Microsoft Office alongside updates on Exchange Server as part of its Microsoft Ignite 2020 event.

The apps and services that will be available with this edition of Microsoft Office are also yet to be confirmed, although Office 2019 launched with a host of services, many of which are likely to be bundled into the release again.

These included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio, Access, and Project at launch, as well as Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, SharePoint Server, Project Server and Office Online Server released later down the line.

Microsoft has said it would share additional details around the official names, pricing and availability of this edition of Microsoft Office in the near future.

Unilever has partnered with Google Cloud to harness its cloud computing and big data processing technologies to gain an overview of ecosystems the business influences, and make supply chain interventions to better conserve the environment.

The multinational consumer goods firm will collaborate with Google Cloud to build platforms that can pave the way for sustainable commodity sourcing by both Unilever and companies in its supply chain. 

As part of the implementation, cloud computing will be combined with satellite imaging and AI in order to build a more holistic view of forests, water cycles and biodiversity that intersect Unilever’s supply chain.

By working with Google Cloud’s global geo-spatial platform, which includes the Google Earth Engine, Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery, Unilver can utilise accurate satellite imagery with the ability to store and process large amounts of complex data.

Uniler will use the platform to obtain insights into the impact on its sourcing processes on the environment and local communities and will allow the company and its suppliers to make interventions when they’re required.  

The project will demand that complex datasets are simplified and analysed in order to increase transparency within supply chains and allowing collaboration across public sector and private partners. The Google Earth Engine is currently used by academic and public institutions, as well as civil society groups, and this represents the first commercial venture by the project.

“At Google, we strive to build sustainability into everything that we do. Unilever has been an industry leader in environmental sustainability for many years, and we’re excited to be on this journey with them,” said Google Cloud president Rob Enslin. 

“Together, we’re demonstrating how technology can be a powerful tool in aiding businesses who strive to protect the Earth’s resources. It will require collective action to drive meaningful change, and we are committed to doing our part.” 

Owning more than 400 brands, and with its products used by 2.5 billion people every day, Unilever bears such a massive footprint on the global environment. The Google Cloud implementation, which contributes to the company’s aim to eradicate deforestation from its supply chain by 2023, will first focus on palm oil use, and then extend to other commodities.

The two companies will work with a number of tech partners to build a centralised command centre that will provide a more complete picture of ecosystems connected to Unilever’s supply chain and create a stronger mechanism for detecting deforestation. This would lead to greater accountability while also prioritising critical ares of forests and habitats that might need special protection.

“This collaboration with Google Cloud will take us to the next level in sustainable sourcing,” said Unilever’s chief procurement officer, Dave Ingram. “We will now be able to process and combine complex sets of data like never before. 

“The combination of these sustainability insights with our commercial sourcing information is a significant step-change in transparency, which is crucial to better protect and regenerate nature.”