Cisco has been ordered to pay $1.9 billion (£1.46 billion) to a cyber security firm after a US district judge ruled it had infringed its patents. 

Judge Henry Morgan concluded after a month-long trial that Cisco infringed upon four out of five patents that belonged to Centripetal Networks, according to Reuters.

Virginia-based Centripetal was founded in 2009 and develops threat intelligence software and firewall hardware for cyber networks. The company took legal action against Cisco earlier this year and has successfully challenged the US tech giant. 

In a 167-page decision, Morgan said the case was “not a close call,” pointing out inconsistencies in Cisco‘s evidence and within its own technical documents. Most of these were used by Centripetal during the trial. 

The massive payout reflects $755.8 million in damages suffered by Centripetal, which has been multiplied by 2.5 on account of “willful and egregious” conduct from Cisco. Add to that prejudgment interest and it leaves the final sum at $1.9 billion. 

With regards to the four patents it lost, Morgan said that Cisco did not “advance any objectively reasonable defences at trial”.

“The infringing functionality was added to their accused products post June 20, 2017, and resulted in a dramatic increase in sales which Cisco touted in both technical and marketing documents,” Morgan wrote.

Cisco said it was disappointed with the decision and confirmed it plans to appeal: “Given the substantial evidence of non-infringement, invalidity and that Cisco’s innovations predate the patents by many years.”

In its latest fiscal year, Cisco posted $11.2 billion of net income from $49.3 billion of revenue. 

“With this judgment, the court rejected the primitive doctrine that might makes right,” Paul Andre, a lawyer for Centripetal, said in a statement. “This is a significant win for all small, innovative companies.”

Cisco has revealed plans to acquire Israeli cyber security startup Portshift, in a move the tech firm says will enable its security platform to better deploy and manage Kubernetes container clusters. 

Announcing the acquisition, Cisco said that Portshift aligns to its own approach to providing secure connectivity between users, devices and apps, regardless of where they are based. 

A Kubernetes-native security platform, Portshift enables DevOps, security and operations teams to maintain security of the entire containerised applications life-cycle, from their creation to implementation. 

Portshift’s products are also designed to provide vulnerability and configuration management, network segmentation, data encryption, as well as compliance auditing.

“Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem,” commented Cisco SVP Liz Centoni said in a blog post. “The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application.

“They bring cloud native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, which will allow us to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development​ lifecycle.”

Portshift was founded in 2018 by CEO Ran Ilany, the former head of security infrastructure at Check Point Technologies, and vice president of research and development Zohar Kaufman, who also previously co-founded CTERA networks. 

The Tel-Aviv firm has raised around $5.3 million in seed funding from the Team8 cybersecurity foundry and currently has a workforce of 14 employees. 

Cisco said it expects to complete the transaction during the first half of its FY21 but did not reveal any financial details surrounding the move. According to a report from Globes, however, the figure is expected to total around $100 million.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger last year said “multi-cloud is the new model for enterprise IT” while explaining the company’s acquisition of Pivotal just before the kickoff of its annual VMworld conference in California.

Since then, a lot has changed. Like many companies’ big annual conferences, VMworld has gone virtual in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and attendees are watching from the comfort of their own homes rather than the expansive Moscone Center.

But there are many things that haven’t and for VMware that includes its focus on multi-cloud – using services from multiple public cloud vendors – as a key strategic direction for enterprise IT.

“There’s a big shift in mindset among CIOs I talk to when it comes to multi-cloud,” Gelsinger told his audience. “Old view: Multi-cloud is a confusing mix of different services. It’s a mess I need to clean up. Today, they have a different view: Multi-cloud is the strategic platform to move my business forward, multi-cloud allows you to innovate by leveraging the strengths of different cloud services. But how do I make sure my multi-cloud strategy does not turn into a multi-silo story.”

The answer, at least according to VMware, is the company’s very own VMware Cloud product: “We are the unifying layer for today’s multi-cloud world,” Gelsinger said. “The cornerstone of VMware cloud is VMware Cloud Foundation, bringing together market leading compute, storage networking and the management, all in a single integrated stack.”

It’s not just about using multiple clouds and bridging them with VMware cloud, though. Gelsinger also took time to highlight Kubernetes, describing it as “the de facto API for today’s multi-cloud world”.

“Much like Java, two decades ago, Kubernetes is a rare technology that brings everyone together,” said Gelsinger. Indeed, like multicloud, Kubernetes was a highlight of last year’s VMworld with the launch of VMware’s management portfolio, Tanzu.

Touching on the updates announced for Tanzu this week, Gelsinger said “the best way for [VMware] to demonstrate [its] belief in the power of Kubernetes … [is to] re-architect vSphere to put Kubernetes at the core. And that’s exactly what we’ve done”.

“What we called Project Pacific is now fully available; vSphere today is the best platform to run your virtualized apps and the best platform to run your containerized apps,” he continued. “We’re putting enterprise grade Kubernetes directly into the hands of millions of mighty operators, no training required.”

Gelsinger concluded by alluding to the idea of the “new normal” that’s emerging in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and what that means for the IT community.

“If you are a technologist, this is your time. We have the will to drive change, plus the environment for change. And we have the platform we need – the digital foundation – for an unpredictable world.

“I think about all the students around the world, whose lives have been disrupted. We owe it to them to act with empathy and urgency right now. We owe it to them to chart a path forward by unlocking the power of software. Each of us must play our part, by building a better and more resilient future for all.”

​Microsoft has suffered a second global outage within a week, with users being unable to access their Outlook accounts, the tech giant has confirmed.

The reports come just days after the company said it had fixed a global outage that affected its Microsoft 365 platform. Microsoft services including Azure, Outlook, Office, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams were down for around five hours on Monday.

This latest outage began at around 2am ET, with Microsoft initially suggesting the issue was only affecting users based in India, according to a status update on Twitter. However, customers from around the world soon replied that they were also experiencing problems.

“We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols,” the tech giant tweeted. “Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208.”

Microsoft has said that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of the outage. It has now “reverted” this update and will continue to monitor the service for signs of recovery.

The company’s outage on Monday was also blamed on unexpected errors relating to a recent update, although reverting this update did not immediately solve the problem.

“Rolling back the previously described change did not resolve the incident as expected,” Microsoft said on its Office status page. “We’re evaluating additional options to remediate the problem.”

For Wednesday’s outage, the rollback has “mitigated impact” for affected features in SharePoint and Teams, Microsoft tweeted. It also said that the majority of users were “seeing recovery”.

​Welcome to the ninth issue of IT Pro 20/20, our sister title’s digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

Given all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget that technology is still evolving. Whether it’s changes to how we work, how we interact with the world, or how we communicate with one another, the next decade will likely be drastically different to the current one. It’s this idea that is at the core of this month’s issue.

In the first of our three exclusive features, we take a look at the role of augmented technology in business, and how transformative the technology has already been. Unlike the much-hyped virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) has proven to be an exceptionally powerful tool for many roles across a business, from front line workers to executives in a boardroom.

Elsewhere, we examine the surge of interest that many ‘touchless technology’ companies have enjoyed ever since it became apparent how dangerous the coronavirus truly was.

We also examine a technology described as the most serious AI threat we face today – deepfakes. What danger does this tech pose to society and is it really a threat to our democracy?

We appreciate you taking the time to download IT Pro 20/20, and we hope you enjoy this month’s future tech-themed stories.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 30 October – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

Microsoft has announced a new cloud platform called Azure for Operators that has been designed to help telecommunications operators unlock the full potential of 5G.

The new offering will help communication service providers create new opportunities and provide core infrastructure, the Redmond giant says, using cloud, cellular and edge to create the lowest latency and largest reach for a low cost.

Ultimately, Azure for Operators aims to help providers create advanced industry solutions based on connections to AI, signature consumer experiences with new forms of mixed reality content, as well as an ecosystem of developers that can quickly leverage 5G network opportunities. 

“We’re building a carrier-grade cloud and bringing more Microsoft technology to the operator’s edge,” commented Jason Zander, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Azure, in a blog post. 

“This, in combination with our developer ecosystem, will help operators to future-proof their networks, drive down costs, and create new services and business models.”

Building on its acquisitions of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch, Microsoft says the move will enable operators to offer a wide range of services such as ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity, mixed reality communications services, network slicing, as well as highly scalable Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

With Azure, businesses can also implement a more flexible and scalable model, bring down infrastructure cost, as well as automate operations using AI and machine learning to differentiate their services.

Microsoft also highlighted that it will support operators as they evolve their infrastructure and operations using tech such as software-defined networking, network function virtualisation and service-based architectures.  

“We are bringing to market a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud to support the operator’s goals to future proof their infrastructure with disaggregated, and containerised network architectures,” Zander added. 

“Recognising that not everything will move to the public cloud, we will meet operators where they are—whether at the enterprise edge, the network edge, or in the cloud.”

Red Hat has announced it’s teaming with Samsung to help deliver 5G network solutions across various use cases, including 5G core, edge computing, IoT and machine learning.

This collaboration will be built atop Red Hat OpenShift, which Red Hat calls the “most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.” It will also include other components of Red Hat’s proven hybrid cloud portfolio, including  Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage. 

Samsung will chip in with its 5G vRAN, vCore, MEC and management and analytics to expand 5G use cases. 

This new solution will allow providers to capitalize on edge economics and vRAN. According to Red Hat’s ACG report, operators can extend TCO benefits gained in horizontal designs in the core by using common horizontal infrastructure in 5G core and edge computing.

Operators can also support new applications and services based on location awareness, reduced latency and scalability in the distributed cloud when deploying horizontal clouds to vRAN sites.  

On top of all this, Red Hat has given Samsung’s virtual network functions its VNF certification, and it plans to give Samsung’s containerized network functions its CNF certification soon. These certifications are the highest standard for critical functions on Red Hat OpenShift and ensure vendors can effectively prepare their applications for a cloud-native future running in production on Red Hat OpenShift. 

These certified solutions help customers quickly reach their full 5G capabilities. With 5G rollout already underway, this partnership should help accelerate its spread. 

Wonil Roh, senior vice president and head of product strategy, networks business at Samsung Electronics said of the collaboration: “We are pleased to collaborate with Red Hat to help service providers stay competitive in this increasingly demanding global 5G market, especially on the cloud-native front.

“Through this partnership, Samsung 5G solutions will provide a highly efficient and reliable network experience for our customers by integration with Red Hat’s cloud-native solution.”

Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer and Red Hat said: “As service providers build 5G networks, they are forming the foundation for the next wave of cross-industry innovation.

“From helping businesses in their edge computing solutions to ensuring enterprises can successfully deploy their artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, we expect these services to be built on a proven, cloud-native infrastructure.

“We’re very excited to work with Samsung to bring this Kubernetes-driven solution to help service providers and their customers focus on complex and competitive use cases across the enterprise to every industry.”

Rackspace has joined forces with Dell Technologies and VMware to expand its private cloud portfolio to include a secure pathway to hybrid cloud services.

The new offering is described as “turnkey”, a ready to use pathway to hybrid cloud environments and includes access to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

According to VMware, the industry defines hybrid cloud as the combination of private cloud, public cloud and edge environments unified with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. It’s popular because it allows IT organisations to determine what aspects of public cloud fit their application needs.

VCF runs on Dell EMC VxRail and is used by organisations to provide consistent and secure management for application portfolios across multiple cloud environments. It is the only hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system fully integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager.

What’s more, VxRail is proven to deliver up to 52% lower cost of operations over building a proprietary HCI and reduces unplanned downtime by 88%, according to Dell Technologies.

“A successful path to hybrid cloud is much like shooting a free throw in a basketball game – a simple, consistent process leads to more efficient results,” said Fidelma Russo, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit.

“Through simplifying IT transformation and enabling consistent and secure application management, this ecosystem delivers greatly reduced cost and downtime. Those are the types of results any organisation wants to see.”

Rackspace is hoping to bring the benefits of the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) to more organisations and applications, to accelerate multi cloud adoption. The idea is to capitalise on the increased investment in digital transformation as businesses add new cloud environments to their overall IT estate.

Expanding options for multi cloud services with Rackspace will help companies achieve better performance at a lower cost, according to Brian Payne, vice president of cloud for Dell Technologies. He suggested it could ultimately help them stay competitive in this rapidly changing business environment.

Schneider Electric, StorMagic and HPE have joined forces to create ‘Edge in a Box’, a new micro data centre solution that provides IT systems for edge computing environments.

Available immediately worldwide, the joint offering includes Schneider Electric’s 6U Wall Mount EcoStruxure Micro Data Centre, alongside StorMagic SvSAN software and two HPE ProLiant Servers.

Designed to meet the compute requirements of small workspaces, ‘Edge in a Box’ can be wall-mounted and fully customised through a global network of channel partners. In terms of performance, the solution delivers resilient power, ultra-low latency connectivity, as well as secure, on-premise servers and data storage, the trio says.

“Customers with edge sites are experiencing a number of unique challenges, including budget constraints, lack of space and limited, or non-existent IT support,” commented David Terry, vice president of IT Channels at Schneider Electric, Europe. 

“The 6U EcoStruxure Micro Data Center is the smallest, secure and lightweight data centre solution in the market, helping organisations to quickly modernise their IT infrastructure, while reducing the costs associated with deployment, servicing and maintenance.”

Optimised to run edge applications, the system offers up industry-leading uptime, the companies say, thanks to its combination of StorMagic software, two HPE ProLiant servers, choice of VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V or Linux KVM hypervisor, APC Smart-UPS with Lithium-ion models, APC power distribution unit (PDU), as well as HPE Aruba Networking. 

“IT teams must be able to quickly deliver what the business needs – simplicity, low-cost and 100% uptime to ensure confidence that business-critical applications are always running,” said Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer at StorMagic. 

“By combining StorMagic SvSAN with APC by Schneider Electric infrastructure and HPE servers, customers can work with their integration partner of choice to customise, build and deploy ‘Edge in a Box’ solutions that meet their budget and space requirements.”

Ultimately, the trio says ‘Edge in a Box’ will enable IT professionals to mitigate IT downtime and its impact on business, reduce the complexity of on-site work, simplify system configuration and programming, as well as minimise order complexity and delivery times for rapid installation.

“By integrating HPE ProLiant servers with advanced technologies from Schneider Electric, we are able to power the edge in the box solution,” said David Stone, vice president, Worldwide Ecosystem Sales Leader at HPE. 

“Together we are making it easier for customers to deploy and manage edge computing solutions and enable them to focus on unlocking new value and creating new experiences from edge-driven data.”

Microsoft 365 is back online after suffering a major global service outage on Monday. 

The outage, which lasted for more than five hours, affected Microsoft services including Azure, Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams.

The downtime affected “millions” of users of Microsoft’s cloud-based services, according to reports, but Microsoft said people who were logged into an existing 365 session were still able to keep using the service.

“Affected users are encouraged to keep existing sessions going and to avoid re-authenticating to Microsoft 365 services,” the company said. “Any Microsoft 365 service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication may be impacted by this issue.”

Microsoft initially said the problem was linked to a recent update and restored the software to an earlier version. However, that fix failed to restore services.

“Rolling back the previously described change did not resolve the incident as expected,” Microsoft said on its Office.com status page. “We’re evaluating additional options to remediate the problem.”

About two hours later the company said it was seeing improvements after putting in place alternative mitigation steps. 

“After extended monitoring of our service, we have confirmed that the issue has been fully mitigated and is running within optimal service levels,” it said. 

The Microsoft 365 outage, which comes just months after Microsoft Teams went down across Europe, comes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen employees rely on cloud-based productivity tools like Microsoft Teams as they carry out their roles remotely. In April, Microsoft reported 75 million daily active users of Teams as a result of more people working from home.

Several Twitter users also complained that the outage meant they could miss their job interviews and deadlines for school assignments.

Microsoft said it will be reviewing its code to understand what prevented users from being able to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.