We’ve come across a lot of talk about “cloud-native” apps lately. (They even have their own foundation!) Developers build these apps specifically to run on a cloud-based infrastructure, with the kind of user interface we all expect from our apps now. Cloud-native applications are scalable, usable and flexible, usually packaged using containers.

It’s a step further in the cloud computing journey, and a step away from the way we used to conceive of apps. Application development happened for many years inside an IT bubble, with a long development and deployment lifecycle. They were used only in-house, on desktop computers, which were also on a strict, and non-agile, refresh cycle.

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Businesses and business units of all sizes can benefit from cloud computing, but many don’t want the cost, performance and security concerns of public cloud nor the complexity of building their own private clouds. Today, some cloud vendors are using artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify cloud deployment and management. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Ajay Gulati, Co-founder and CEO of ZeroStack, will discuss how AI can simplify cloud operations. He will cover the following topics: why cloud management is a barrier to adoption and the role of AI in cloud deployment.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced its Q317 financial results, with revenue hitting a record $102.8 million (£81.3m), an increase of 31% on the same time last year.

Billings in the third quarter was $112.4m, up 26% from this time last year, while GAAP operating loss was at $37.8m, lower than expected. The company says it is on track to achieve positive free cash flow by the end of Q4, while its guidance has been raised to $397-$398m, up from $394-$396m.

“Our results this quarter were driven by our best-in-class retention rate, strong sales execution, and increased adoption of our newer products,” said Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO of Box in a statement. “We also demonstrated significant progress in cash flow from operations, driving a year-over-year improvement of more than $10 million, and bringing us closer to achieving positive free cash flow in the current quarter.”

Highlights for the company in the most recent quarter included a new strategic partnership with Google, working with Facebook to help integrations for its Facebook Workplace product, as well as growing its paying customer base to more than 69,000 businesses, including Hertz, Southwest Airlines, and the US Department of the Treasury.

“The need for Box is clear,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box told analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Today, business content is spread across separate legacy systems, on-premises storage, disparate collaboration and workflow tools, and sync and share solutions. Every year enterprises spent tens of billions of dollars on content management technology that are no longer innovating, simplifying their competitive environment.”

Taking a question on what Box’s product will broadly look like in a couple of years, Levie noted that some of the company’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the platform. “The kind of capabilities that you’ll continue to see on our platform are things around advancing our governance solutions, advancing our enterprise content management capabilities, advancing our workflow options,” Levie said.

(c)iStock.com/ngkaki

Cloud storage provider Box has announced its Q317 financial results, with revenue hitting a record $102.8 million (£81.3m), an increase of 31% on the same time last year.

Billings in the third quarter was $112.4m, up 26% from this time last year, while GAAP operating loss was at $37.8m, lower than expected. The company says it is on track to achieve positive free cash flow by the end of Q4, while its guidance has been raised to $397-$398m, up from $394-$396m.

“Our results this quarter were driven by our best-in-class retention rate, strong sales execution, and increased adoption of our newer products,” said Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO of Box in a statement. “We also demonstrated significant progress in cash flow from operations, driving a year-over-year improvement of more than $10 million, and bringing us closer to achieving positive free cash flow in the current quarter.”

Highlights for the company in the most recent quarter included a new strategic partnership with Google, working with Facebook to help integrations for its Facebook Workplace product, as well as growing its paying customer base to more than 69,000 businesses, including Hertz, Southwest Airlines, and the US Department of the Treasury.

“The need for Box is clear,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box told analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Today, business content is spread across separate legacy systems, on-premises storage, disparate collaboration and workflow tools, and sync and share solutions. Every year enterprises spent tens of billions of dollars on content management technology that are no longer innovating, simplifying their competitive environment.”

Taking a question on what Box’s product will broadly look like in a couple of years, Levie noted that some of the company’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the platform. “The kind of capabilities that you’ll continue to see on our platform are things around advancing our governance solutions, advancing our enterprise content management capabilities, advancing our workflow options,” Levie said.

(c)iStock.com/4x-image

Opinion The Internet of Things has the potential to revolutionise society once it surmounts its initial growing pains. Unfortunately, one of those involves security.

DDOS attacks are one of the oldest and most enduring things on the web, like that creepy uncle who no one can get rid of at family reunions. And like that uncle, they’re getting progressively worse as time goes on. This past summer saw the largest DDOS attack in history, one so large that it forced content delivery network Akamai to cancel the account of one of the web’s leading security bloggers, Krebs on Security.

“It wasn’t that Akamai couldn’t mitigate the attack – it did so for three days,” writes Tim Greene of Network World. “Doing so became too costly, so the company made a business decision to cut the affected customer loose…[the attack delivered] 665 gbps of traffic.”

That’s absolutely massive- and it was all made possible through the Internet of Things. See, the advent of the connected world has had a very unpleasant side effect. As we embed sensors into more and more of our devices, it’s rapidly becoming clear that most IoT manufacturers have absolutely no idea what they’re doing as far as security is concerned.

And really, why should they? Traditionally, none of these companies needed much aside from a bog-standard IT department. That’s changed, though – and a lot of folks are struggling to keep up.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Over the next several years, botnets are going to increase exponentially in size. And they’re going to get easier to use – even now, we’re seeing massive DDOS attacks architected by amateurs.

So where does that leave us?

High and dry, unfortunately. While some headway has been made into IoT governance, we’re still a long way from what you could call security standards. And until such time as manufacturers are held accountable for shoddy security in their embedded systems – until such time as we start seeking to actively protect ‘smart’ devices – all we can do is weather the storm.

To that end, the standard DDOS mitigation advice applies:

• Use early detection techniques, such as a script that forwards periodic messages with your traffic count.
• Familiarise yourself with the most common DDOS attack techniques, and learn to recognise the unique fingerprint of each.
• Invest in a tool with automatic DDOS squelching – you aren’t always going to be able to react quickly enough to block rogue IP addresses or bogus requests, and when your site is being attacked, every second counts. As an added bonus, many of these tools also include automated DDOS detection.
• Make sure you have a proper crisis response policy in place, and that your Computer Security Incident Response Team is fully briefed on the proper procedure in the event of a DDOS.

That aside, there isn’t a great deal else you can do, save for hoping that whatever mitigation tools you’re using, they’re powerful enough to overcome whatever massive botnet aims itself your way.

For large enterprise organizations, it can be next-to-impossible to identify attacks and act to mitigate them in good time. That’s one of the reasons executives often discover security breaches when an external researcher — or worse, a journalist — gets in touch to ask why hundreds of millions of logins for their company’s services are freely available on hacker forums.
The huge volume of incoming connections, the heterogeneity of services, and the desire to avoid false positives leave enterprise security teams in a difficult spot. Finding potential security breaches is like finding a tiny needle in a very large haystack — monitoring millions of connections over thousands of servers is not something that can be managed by a team of humans.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of a new series of instances for its cloud infrastructure, both expanding current instance families and creating new categories.

At Re:Invent in Las Vegas today, Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive, announced XL and 2XL segments for its T2 series of instances, which are aimed more at the simpler workload, as well as I3, the next generation of its high I/O instances, C5 for more compute intensive workloads, and R4 for memory intensive workloads.

Two new services at opposite ends of the spectrum were also introduced; Amazon Lightsail, which caters to customers who want to spin up a virtual private server with the minimum of fuss, as well as F1 instances which cater to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and more sophisticated hardware acceleration. Additionally, Elastic GPUs, which allow GPUs to be attached to all instances, were also unveiled.

Picture credit: Screenshot

“If you look at these instances, nobody else has even half of these,” said Jassy, moments before announcing a bunch of new instances. “Having this number really matters for customers. We’re constantly reinventing our instance families.”

The keynote presentation focused on the notion that, to quote one of the slides, ‘with AWS, it can feel like you have been given superpowers.’ Tempting as it may be to scoff, the stats and citations kept flooding in: more than 1000 launches in 2016, compared to 159 in 2012 and 24 in 2008; acknowledgement of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant ranking and particular the analyst firm’s view that AWS had ‘several’ times the size of the next 14 providers combined; the thousands of systems integrators and ISVs on board, as well as companies “born or reborn in the cloud.”

So what were these superpowers? One was ‘supersonic speed’, which relates to the greater breadth and depth of AWS’ services, while another focused on ‘immortality’; how businesses can survive and thrive long term by keeping pace with emerging technologies.

Perhaps the most interesting of the lot was the second supposed superpower, ‘x-ray vision’. Here we saw practically the only instance of competitor-bashing. When Jassy described the importance of “the ability to see through the handwaving and bombast”, a picture of Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly appeared.

“In the old days, because it was so hard and so expensive to test and experiment, you would get these old guard leaders who stand up and make wild claims…and you had no ability to find out what was real,” said Jassy. “In the cloud that’s not the case. That ship has sailed – kind of like an America’s Cup ship.”

Talk about converting your own touchdown. But this led onto an interesting piece around analytics. AWS has also launched Amazon Athena, an interactive query service which aims to make data analysis in Amazon S3 simpler. Athena is designed for more ad-hoc analytics, and Jassy noted the new release complements Redshift and EMR, the firm’s other products in the space.

From analytics begat a discussion on machine learning, with AWS announcing a variety of new tools aimed at developers. Amazon Rekognition, as the name may suggest, focuses on image recognition, while Amazon Polly looks at text to speech capabilities and Lex is the natural language processing which powers Amazon Alexa, now available as a general service.

As is the way of such events, customers were ferried on and off the stage, from energy provider ENEL, who is aiming to move to ‘cloud only’ through AWS as well as using its IoT service, and Workday, who has confirmed it is using AWS as its preferred public cloud supplier. The latter follows the announcement yesterday that shipping carrier Matson has gone all-in, shutting down its four on-premises data centres in the process.

Again, the sheer amount of choice to prospective customers was emphasised, from infrastructure, to enterprise apps, to hybrid. Perhaps the last word should be given to William Fellows, vice president of 451 Research. He argues in the analyst firm’s latest note that 2017 will see the emergence of ‘AWS+1’ as an operating principle. This ‘blended cloud’ model would ensure the CIO and CFO can demonstrate “value, choice, and flexibility”, the company added.

Nerdio is an IT-as-a-service platform with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology at its core. It is designed for IT departments that need a way to easily manage their ever-increasing workloads. Nerdio allows users to efficiently manage their complete IT environments by giving them full visibility and control of users’ desktops. In addition to virtual desktops, the platform includes unlimited virtual servers, Microsoft Office 365 security, and disaster recovery and 24/7/365 support.

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Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions.
In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to “every day,” on-demand. They also reviewed two “free infrastructure” programs available to startups and innovators.

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