Many smaller organisations resist moving to the cloud because they can find it difficult to envision the benefits it brings. This means they miss out on having access to predictive analytics, arguably one of cloud’s most important features. Predictive analytics can open up whole new areas of knowledge, helping any business gain deeper understanding of its products and services, know more about its markets and users, and plan more effectively for its future.

Opening up the box

Predictive analytics encompasses a very wide range of tools. Bryan Betts, Principal Analyst at Freeform Dynamics explains: “Predictive analytics is a catch-all term for a set of extremely powerful statistical tools. In business they can support planning and decision making – for example, predictive analytics can look for patterns in data and use those to estimate the risk of a customer defaulting, of a machine-tool breaking down, or of traffic patterns on your local network being indicative of a malware or ransomware infestation.”

In short, anything an organisation thinks it would like to know can become available to it. In addition, predictive analytics often opens up new avenues of information that may not even have been considered before. 

A third revolution in analysing data

Organisations have been doing a version of predictive analytics since the days when they totted up sales figures in manual ledgers and worked out what generated the most – and least – income for them, what sold best at different times of the year, what effect changes in pricing had, and so on. 

When spreadsheets came along it became possible to ‘do the maths’ more quickly, to do more complex analyses, and even to automate the production of reports periodically. This was a revolution. It was possible to learn more, though not necessarily easy to mine out the truly useful information from the mountain generated from growing amounts of raw data. 

What’s happened with cloud is another revolution – bringing a myriad more ways to look at data, adding in tools to help organisations see easily what’s important and useful, and producing really complex results with lightning speed. And it’s not just old-fashioned maths that’s used. ‘Fuzzy’ logic, sentiment analysis and more can provide new types of insights. 

All of this means that organisations can gain a far greater depth of insight into their data. As Bryan Betts put it: “This stuff thrives – no, depends – on having loads of data to play with. So as well as trends from data within your own organisation, you can get predictions based on data from the wider community too.”

Why not do it in-house?

Tools that are used by cloud services to analyse data in these multivariate and complex ways could be employed in-house, but there are very strong reasons why cloud is preferable for any organisation. Those same reasons are even more pronounced for smaller organisations, for whom the benefits of cloud are even greater. 

Bill Hammond, founder of Big Data LDN explains: “Small organisations can take advantage of the massive compute power in the cloud to perform batches of analysis which would be almost impossible with the consumer-level hardware many small businesses use day-to-day.” He continues, saying that the upfront cost of buying the amount of compute necessary to match cloud computing power “would be prohibitive for a lot of small businesses, meaning they simply wouldn’t be able to afford the insight predictive analytics would offer them”.

Bryan Betts echoes this, saying the biggest advantage of using cloud to smaller organisations is “you can get access to enterprise-grade technology quickly and easily”.

Speculate to accumulate

There is no getting away from the fact that an organisation will have to spend money to get access to cloud. But if they do so, the benefits of sophisticated, leading edge tools to take an in-depth look at the masses of data they collect, and extract pearls of wisdom from that data can be vital to strategic planning. 

“The advantages of cloud analytics include helping businesses more efficiently process and report data findings, enhance collaboration, and provide decision-makers faster access to business intelligence,” Hammons says. He gives a very practical example: “With small businesses having small budgets to match, every item on the shelves needs to be bought and predictive analytics can help forecast what customers will be looking for based on previous years.”

All this means that buying into cloud based predictive analytics gives smaller businesses a key advantage. As Bill Hammond concludes: “With the capability to predict unknown future events and get vital planning data, small businesses can grow by acting smart. They can punch above their weight, giving them a fighting chance against larger competitors with traditional resources.”

A federal judge has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI), the controversial project which involves almost 80% of the Department of Defence’s IT systems being migrated to the cloud – a process that could last a decade.

According to court documents filed by AWS in December 2019, it is alleged that President Trump engaged in a series of “public and behind-the-scenes attacks” against “his perceived political enemy” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reportedly telling Pentagon Secretary James Mattis to “screw Amazon”.

Now it seems that Trump’s alleged comments might potentially come back to haunt him, as Amazon wants the President to explain his involvement in court.

Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith granted Amazon’s request to pause the JEDI contract work, but also ordered Amazon to pay $42 million (£33 million) if the injunction was proven to be wrongfully issued.

Campbell-Smith did not release a written opinion nor clarify whether the President would be forced to testify in the case, an unprecedented practice so far.

The US Pentagon had awarded the controversial $10 billion, 10-year contract to Microsoft last October, despite AWS being seen as a clear frontrunner by some.

Amazon filed an appeal two months later, suggesting at the time that “political influence” had led to the ‘biased’ contract ruling. Trump had locked horns with Bezos, whom he refers to as “Jeff Bozo”, as he is the current owner of The Washington Post – a publication which has been exceptionally critical of the President ever since his 2016 election.

JEDI had been repeatedly embroiled in lawsuits and controversies. In late 2018, Oracle filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defence in the US Court of Federal Claims, arguing that it is illegal to award the cloud contract to only a single winning bidder.

To do, doing and done: that’s Trello in a nutshell. The tool is based on Kanban, a project-management and development method named after the Japanese word for “billboard”.

That’s a fair description of what Trello looks like: just as a community noticeboard will be covered in notices of events, jobs and announcements, so a Trello board holds lots of small “cards”. Each one usually details a single task, with your various cards grouped into lists to help keep everything organised.

Here’s a practical example of how Kanban works. When editors on our sister site Expert Reviews want to cover a product or news story, they create a Trello card and place it in a list entitled “Ideas”. Once the feature has been commissioned, the card is dragged onto the “Writing” list. When the copy is received, the card is moved into the “Editing” list, after which it will go into the “Publishing” list and so on. 

What makes Trello so powerful is that there’s no requirement to follow a particular workflow. You can create as many lists as you like and structure your Trello board to suit your needs. That flexibility has helped Trello gain more than 50 million users, including large organisations from Adobe to UNICEF – as well as individuals seeking to stay on top of their personal projects. If you haven’t yet considered Trello, it’s time you did. Here’s how it can help you to organise your life.

Creating your account

Getting started with Trello doesn’t have to cost a penny: you can create a free account here. You’ll see that there are also Personal, Business and Enterprise plans at various prices, but for individuals and small businesses the free service may be all you need. It offers an unlimited number of personal boards, cards and lists, and allows you to attach files of up to 10MB to your cards. It also lets you create up to ten team boards, which can be shared between users.

Being signed up to the free service doesn’t limit your ability to connect to other boards, either. If you use Trello both at work and home, your login gives you convenient central access to all of the boards to which you’ve been granted access – including both paid-for and private ones. 

Setting up a personal board is easy. Once you’ve logged in, you just need to click the plus icon at the top of the interface and give your new board a name when prompted. Your board will immediately appear. If, later on, you want to remove a board from your account, you must first close it (by selecting Show Menu | More… | Close Board…). You can then delete it by clicking the menu button on your Trello dashboard, followed by More | Delete Board….

New boards appear empty, with a prompt to create your first list. Enter a title for this and then move on to create as many additional lists as you need. When you’ve finished, click the “X” to close the new list dialog. Don’t worry if you’re not sure at first exactly how to structure your board as you can always reorganise things later. You can reorder lists by simply grabbing their headers and dragging them around, and you can add extra lists via the “Add another list” button that appears at the right end of your board. 

Now you’ve got at least one list, it’s time to populate it with some cards. You can do this by clicking the three dots at the top of a list and selecting “Add Card…” – or you can click the “Add a card” link at the bottom. Once you’ve named a card, you can click into it to give a more detailed description, add notes, attach a file or link and so on. One particularly useful feature is the ability to set deadlines and reminders for individual cards: to do this, click “Due Date” from the “Add to card” menu. Once you’ve got several cards in a list, you can drag them into any order you like, and drag them between lists as needed.

You can also create new cards by email, which can be convenient if you quickly want to add an item to your board while you’re out and about. To make use of this feature, you’ll need your board’s unique email address: to find this, click More and pick “Email-to-board Settings”. Copy the address shown and save it in your contacts for convenient access later on. Note that this address is unique to you, so if other people have access to the board, they will need to use their own address.

You can now create a card by simply sending or forwarding any email to this address; the contents will be added to a new card, along with any attachments up to an overall limit of 10MB. You can set which list emailed cards are added to by clicking List under “Your emailed cards appear in…” and picking from the menu. If you want more control over Trello via email, plugins are available for G Suite and Outlook, which allow you to customise new cards from within your email client.

When a card reaches the end of its workflow, you can archive it from the main dialog menu that opens when you click on it, or from the context menu that opens when you right-click. Archiving a card removes it from the board, but it won’t actually be deleted unless you click the Delete button that appears on archived cards. You can review, restore or purge archived cards from the list that appears when you click Show Menu | Archived Items. 

Use Trello Power-Ups

There are plenty more clever things you can do with Trello, courtesy of the plugins it calls “Power-Ups”. If you’re on the free plan, you can add a single Power-Up to your boards, while paid users can enable as many as they like.

As an example, if you use Slack to communicate with your colleagues, activating the Slack Power-Up allows you to click and drag Slack content directly onto a card. Other supported platforms include Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Mailchimp. In fact, just about any popular business tool will happily integrate. 

Integrations can also work in the other direction. Every Trello board has a calendar, which records the due dates applied to your cards. You can incorporate these into Outlook or Google Calendar using the Calendar Power-Up: to enable it, point your browser here and click Add Power-Up.

Once it’s enabled, return to your board and click on the gear icon, followed by Calendar Settings. Click “Enable sync” and copy the calendar address from the iCalendar Feed box. In Outlook, you can now open your calendar, click Open Calendar in the Home tab, click From Internet… on the menu that appears and paste in the address you copied. Events from your Trello calendar will now appear alongside those already in your Outlook calendar. You can hide them by unticking the Trello calendar in the sidebar’s My Calendars section.

Google Calendar users, meanwhile, simply need to click the three dots beside “Add calendar” in the sidebar, then paste the copied calendar address into the URL box and click to save their settings.

Save time with Trello templates

We’ve mentioned that Trello can be adapted for any type of workflow, but if someone else has already developed a board that serves your needs, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Click here and you’ll find a broad selection of ready-to-use boards for jobs such as managing a marketing calendar, planning a trip, generating ideas in the early stages of a project and propagating a corporate overview.

Note that, although a template may be free to integrate, it might rely on Power-Ups. The Learn A Language template for example – created by the CEO of Duolingo – uses the Google Drive and Calendar Power-Ups, while the Etsy Order Fulfillment template uses the Dropbox, Custom Fields and Automate.io Power-Ups. As we’ve noted, free users can only use a single Power-Up so you may need to create your own workaround, or subscribe to a paid plan to take full advantage of Trello’s potential.

Automating Trello

A lot of what you do in Trello will be repetitive – and we don’t just mean dragging cards from one column to another. For example, it’s likely that you will have weekly or monthly maintenance tasks to perform, and when you create cards of a certain type you might want to give them all default due dates. However, rather than laboriously doing this for every single card, you can apply automation using Trello’s Butler Power-Up.

Simply put, Butler works on the principle of triggers and actions, as its developer Oscar Triscon explains: “Imagine having an assistant that can be instructed to react to your actions on the board. You tell him: ‘When I move a card to the Done list, please mark the due date complete in a card, add a green label and post a comment saying ‘@board I got this’.’ Then, every time you move a card to Done, those actions are performed on the card – as if by magic. You can set up rules just like that one using Butler, which is built into every Trello board. Importantly, you don’t need to know any computer programming: the rules are entered in plain English.”

There’s plenty more you can do with Butler: it lets you add buttons to cards and boards, create schedules and manipulate due dates. So you can, for example, configure it to create a series of standard cards at the start of each day or week, or add a button to your dashboard that organises all of your tasks by deadline. 

It’s worth keeping in mind that free account users only have access to basic Butler actions, such as setting due dates, creating checklists and moving cards automatically. Paid subscribers get the full feature set, but Personal users can run only 200 commands per month performing up to 2,000 operations, while those on the Business and Enterprise plans get much higher limits.

Connect Trello to other apps

If Trello’s built-in automation doesn’t do quite what you want, you can use the IFTTT automation platform to expand its capabilities using third-party tools such as Evernote, Pocket and the Google Assistant. Get started by heading to and clicking Connect. Read what rights you’ll be granting IFTTT and, if you’re happy with them, click “Log in”, followed by Allow.

You’ll also need to connect the third-party services you want to integrate with Trello, assuming you haven’t already done so. To do this, click in the search box at the top of the screen, enter the name of the service you want to use – we’ll use the Google Assistant for this example – click Services and again click Connect to log in to your account.

Once you’ve connected both Google Assistant and Trello to IFTTT, you can then use the former to control the latter. Go here and click Connect and then customise the commands you can speak to your Google Assistant to create a new Trello card (see screenshot opposite). The “$” in the preset commands represents a spoken variable, which will be used as the title of the card you create. So, if you said “Okay Google, add tax return to the Trello list”, the card would be titled “tax return”. Scroll further down the screen, choose which board and list you want new cards to appear in, then click Save.

Convert Post-it notes to Trello boards

If you’re currently relying on a forest of Post-it notes for your project management needs, the transition to Trello shouldn’t be too difficult – after all, a Trello board already looks like a wall covered in notes. What’s more, 3M (the firm behind the ubiquitous yellow stickers) has built a handy feature into its free Post-it app for Android and iOS that lets you capture and digitise up to 200 notes at a time using your phone or tablet’s camera and export them directly to Trello. Download it here.

It’s also possible to send captured content to PowerPoint, Excel and Dropbox, or export it as PDF. You can scan things other than Post-it notes, too – but the app is optimised for square content so rectangular notes will be squashed. 

Google Cloud has acquired businesses intelligence platform Looker for $2.6 billion (£2bn) as it looks to further boost its data analytics services for multi-cloud customers.

Looker will be integrated into Google Cloud‘s analytics and data warehouse services, such as BigQuery and its customers will still be able to use any cloud data management they like, such as Amazon RedShift, Azure SQL or Oracle.

The deal, which was the first major acquisition of Thomas Kurian’s reign as CEO of Google Cloud, was first announced in June, but it couldn’t be completed till now as it was subject to a probe from the UK’s competition watchdog.

The competition and Markets Authority (CMA) reportedly ruled that the deal would not adversely impact competition with regard to the market for data analytics tools and software. As both Google and Looker were not close competitors, the CMA didn’t feel the deal would result in increased prices and affect organisations that use business intelligence tools, according to Reuters.

“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are – be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on-premises,” said Kurian.

“As more organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata.”

The deal is actually the result of a four-year partnership between the two companies, according to Looker CEO Frank Bien, who said that it will give his firm better reach and strengthen its resources.

“Looker partners can expect to continue to work with us as they have before,” Bien wrote in a blog post. “We expect that our award-winning support team will not only continue delivering an exceptional chat support experience but will also be bolstered by the additional resources and global presence of the Google Cloud team.”

Oracle has stepped its cloud-focused partnership with Microsoft up a notch by focusing on enterprise interoperability with a new interconnect facility based in Amsterdam.

Given Amsterdam is a strategic European datacentre hub for Oracle, this new location will help companies in the region who use technology from both companies to be able to more easily share cross-application data and move on-premise workloads properly to the cloud, according to the tech giant.

An example cited by the company was the ability for a business to be able to run Windows-based apps on Azure connected to Oracle’s Autonomous Database or Exadata on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“Our customers have understood what cloud means. They’ve made use of our cloud and some of our competitors’ clouds. It’s started to pique real interest in whether they can apply that to [enterprise] workloads,” said Andrew Sutherland, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud in EMEA, at the firm’s Oracle OpenWorld Europe (OOW) event in London today.

“The understanding of cloud and benefits is no longer a push by Oracle. It’s a pull from the market.”

Sutherland said that the creation of the Interconnect was done directly to cater for customers who use both Azure and Oracle solutions, adding “Our job is to overcome the hurdles and we’re doing that at great speed.”

Mestec, a firm that helps manufacturers optimise performance, is one such customer giving a warm reception to news about the latest phase of the Oracle/Microsoft partnership.

“We wanted to build a SaaS-based solution manufacturers could subscribe to.  That’s done great things for our customers, but it pushed the responsibility for the resilience of the infrastructure onto us,” said Mark Carleton, chief operating officer (COO) of Mestec. 

“The next generation was to move to PaaS. The obvious choice for us in terms of database was Oracle Autonomous Database. We’ve also had experience in Microsoft .NET. We were able to port that to Azure in less than a day…We made those [technology] decisions before Oracle and Microsoft announced their partnership… It vindicated our decision.”

Making use of the combined power of both for its smart factory solution – which is reliant on high-performance cloud infrastructure and databases – Carleton believes Mestec will be able to reduce its infrastructure and management costs by 50 percent while at the same time benefitting from a whopping 500 percent boost in performance.

“By connecting Oracle and Azure, we’re able to rapidly introduce innovative technologies into our solution, ultimately resulting in a better, smarter solution for our customers enabling them to make dramatic improvements in manufacturing performance,” he added.

Datacentre and connectivity investment remains a key focus for Oracle. It has plans to add further interconnect locations in Asia and the US West Coast as well as regions dedicated for public sector customers in the US.

In terms of datacentre growth, ambitious plans previously outlined continue unabated, according to Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud.

“Our focus is to make it as simple as possible for our customers to move to the cloud,” he said.  

“We continue to expand our datacentres. We announced at OpenWorld [in San Francisco] that we were going to almost double our datacentres. We have been opening them at a click of one datacentre every 23 days. By the end of this year, we will have 36 regions available covering the entire globe. It’s a massive investment to meet the demands of our customers.”

Fujitsu has agreed on a deal with Thales to integrate the security firm’s cloud and encryption services into its own portfolio to expand its security offerings to customers in Europe.

Thales’ Cloud Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and Key Management services will be adopted by the Japanese tech firm, with a view to bolstering its public key infrastructure (PKI) based services.

The security company’s Cloud HSM service, Data Protection on Demand, will be used by Fujitsu within its core security infrastructure in order to provide businesses with a more secure key management service.

The decision to opt for Thales technology lies in a need for Fujitsu to raise the level of security in its existing customers’ infrastructure and to remain compliant with regulations, the company said.

The security firm’s Cloud HSM service offered a cost-effective way to provide customers access to a Microsoft certification authority-based PKI regime.

“We’re always looking to ensure our customers have access to the very best security solutions on the market and this partnership with Thales offers exactly that,” said Fujitsu’s security offering architect, Petri Heinälä.

“One of our customers, a leading European pharmaceutical company, is already benefitting from our adoption of Data Protection On Demand. The client needed to shore up their key management practices, with increased healthcare regulations related to data protection, data privacy and audit controls.”

The partnership has also been strengthened with the launch of an enterprise data encryption service that uses Thales’ key management platform.

The companies claim this platform ensures effective compliance with data protection legislation while offering a secure means of encrypting sensitive business data.

This new service will form part of Fujitsu’s Data Protection suite of services and will be made available to customers across on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“Data protection is a clear priority for many businesses as they fight to prevent breaches and comply with increasing regulatory requirements,” said Thales’ vice president for encryption solutions, Todd Moore.

“Protecting core assets such as identities and data using encryption and PKI management should now be the minimum security posture for every organisation.

“It’s vital that managed services providers are able to respond to the changes quickly, efficiently and affordably, while meeting the security requirements head on.”