Google Cloud has announced two new capabilities centred around bolstering cloud security measures, following the recent surge in ransomware attacks which many fear could lead to a global digital pandemic.

These include Cloud IDS, a managed intrusion detection system, as well as a stack of products, integrations and tools known as Autonomic Security Operations.

While Cloud IDS aims to help organisations detect malware, spyware, command-and-control attacks, and other network-based threats, the Autonomic Security Operations offers highly automated threat management and is marks the first stage in BT and Google’s new security partnership.

The UK operator will help roll out the new Google Cloud products to the managed security services market, the tech giant has announced, with BT Security managing director Kevin Brown adding that the company is “thrilled to partner with Google to bring Autonomic Security Operations to the global market through a managed security service offering”. 

“The deep experience we’ve gained from protecting the world’s largest brands and our networks across 180 countries will combine with Google’s technology vision and capabilities through ASO, providing our customers with world-class security capabilities,” he added.

Meanwhile, for Cloud IDS, Google Cloud has enlisted Palo Alto Networks to power the tool within its advanced threat detection technologies. The stack, which targets regulated industries such as financial services, retail, and healthcare, aims to be easy to operate and deploy, with Google being in charge of managing scaling, availability, and threat detection updates.

These sectors are especially vulnerable to ransomware attacks, with hackers recently targeting both Irish and US health services, as well as US department store retailer Kmart late last year. 

Google Cloud Security VP and general manager Sunil Potti said that the new products have been launched due to the fact that cyber security has “risen to the forefront of concerns for enterprises and governments around the globe.

“Attacks ripping across the software supply chain, zero-day issues in widely used email services, and ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure industries all provide evidence that adversaries are getting bolder, more successful and more prevalent,” he added.

Cloud IDS is available for free for the duration of the public preview, while those interested in Autonomic Security Operations have been asked to contact Google Cloud’s Sales team.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli firm NSO Group.

The news comes after an investigation found that the company’s Pegasus spyware was used to target at least 50,000 journalists, government and union officials, human rights activists, business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, and lawyers.

Pegasus was used to extract messages, photos, and emails, as well as to record calls and activate microphones on iOS and Android devices.

NSO Group denied the accusations, stating that its tools are used “for the sole purpose of saving lives through preventing crime and terror acts”.

“Our technologies are being used every day to break up pedophilia rings, sex and drug-trafficking rings, locate missing and kidnapped children, locate survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, and protect airspace against disruptive penetration by dangerous drones,” the company announced.

However, AWS has branded NSO Group’s actions as “hacking activity”.

A spokesperson for the cloud computing provider told IT Pro that it had shut down NSO Group’s infrastructure as it “was confirmed to be supporting the reported hacking activity”.

This was “in accordance with [AWS’] terms of use”, they added.

Amnesty International, a partner of the Pegasus Project, a collective of 17 media organisations investigating the spyware, found evidence to suggest that NSO Group had only been an AWS customer for a few months.

One Pegasus-infected phone that was dissected by the organisation sent data “to a service fronted by Amazon CloudFront, suggesting NSO Group has switched to using AWS services in recent months”.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that provides customers with the ability to deliver content, including data, videos, and APIs, securely with low latency and at a high speed.

“Amnesty International suspects the shutting down of the V4 infrastructure coincided with NSO Group’s shift to using cloud services such as Amazon CloudFront to deliver the earlier stages of their attacks,” said the human rights NGO, adding that “the use of cloud services protects NSO Group from some Internet scanning techniques”.

AWS didn’t elaborate on whether the decision to ban NSO Group from its services could be reconsidered in the future.

SAP will launch a secure UK-based cloud service and set up new offices in London and Manchester as part of a five-year investment package worth €250 million (approximately £212 million).

SAP UK Data Cloud, a new cloud infrastructure for the public sector, will combine the firm’s hyper-scale partnerships with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud with UK data centres to launch an in-nation cloud.

This will be designed to meet the tight regulatory needs of the public sector, while also supporting the UK’s critical national infrastructure in healthcare, transport, education, policing, utilities as well as central and local government operations.

Working with SAP National Security Services (NS2), SAP will ensure that all personal data is safeguarded and resides within the UK. 

The capability to handle official sensitive data will go live in early 2020, with a host of SAP cloud services available at launch. These include SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Success Factors, SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Analytics Cloud. 

It follows the company’s decision to go “all-in” on cloud computing in October last year. This announcement, however, saw the firm’s valuation drop by €25 billion (£27.8bn). 

“The impact of this for public services can’t be overstated,” SAP said in an explainer on what its UK Data Cloud is and how it works. 

“By modernising and transforming systems through cloud transformation, time after time we’ve seen services simplified, unnecessary costs removed and capacity created for staff, such as frontline workers, freed up to carry out crucial roles – without being waylaid by cumbersome and time-intensive administrative systems. 

“In addition to driving significant efficiencies, harnessing public cloud with sensitive data will facilitate better insights, driving faster and improved decision making to transform citizen services.”

As part of the five-year investment, SAP will also open offices this year to accommodate flexible working arrangements and serve its widespread customer base. 

There’ll also be a customer experience centre built into the new London offices, which will offer facilities for customers and partners to identify and pursue innovation opportunities with SAP. The facility near Manchester, which will be completed later this year, will allow SAP to work and engage more closely with companies around the country, the firm claims.

“It’s great to see SAP demonstrating its commitment to the UK and investing heavily to create new jobs and helping ensure long-term digital prosperity is evenly spread across the entire country,” said UK digital infrastructure minister, Matt Warman. 

“Tech is at the heart of our plans to power Britain’s recovery full speed out of the pandemic and we are backing the sector with world-class infrastructure and skills training to make sure the UK is the best place to start and grow a digital business.”

By 2026, SAP additionally hopes to support an additional 250 interns through its internship programme, alongside plans to scale up its apprenticeship programme to grow the number of skilled workers across the industry.

IBM beat analyst expectations after reporting that revenues increased by 3% year-on-year revenue growth in the second quarter of 2021 to $18.7 billion, its fastest increase for three years.

The tech giant also reiterated that its revenues will continue to grow across the full year.   

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the increase to “strong performance” in the company’s Global Business Services and software segments, but its revenues for cloud services and Red Hat also saw significant increases. 

“At the same time, we continued to help clients infuse our AI-based technology offerings into their core business workflows,” said Krishna. “We are pleased with our progress and we remain on track to deliver full-year revenue growth and meet our cash flow objective.”

The Cloud and Cognitive Software unit, which includes Red Hat, brought in $6.1 billion in revenue, a 6% increase compared to 2020, while revenues from IBM’s Global Business Services increased by 12%. System revenues, which includes hardware, contributed $1.71 billion, which was a 7% decline year-on-year.

The company is preparing to split its business in two with an infrastructure-focused unit called Kyndryl launching later in the year. This will include IBM’s Global Technology Services unit, which includes as outsourcing and support which brought in $6.34 billion in the second quarter.

“While our performance with existing clients remains strong, as we would expect, the sales cycles for new logo clients is elongating as they await further information related to Kyndryl,” said Jim Kavanaugh, IBM’s finance chief.

The second quarter also saw IBM spend $1.75 billion spent on acquisitions, the most in a single quarter since it splashed $34 billion on Red Hat in Q3 of 2019. It is currently working on a deal for process-mining software company myInvenio, application management firm Turbonomic and a Salesforce consulting spin-off called Waeg. 

This was in addition to the unveiling of its “breakthrough” 2-nanometer chip technology, which IBM claims will vastly improve energy efficiency and performance of various kinds of devices.

Zoom has announced that it is spending $14.7 billion to acquire a company called Five9, which provides cloud contact centre software.

The all-stock transaction is the first billion-dollar takeover for Zoom and the second-biggest tech deal of the year, following Microsoft’s $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications. 

Five9, much like Zoom, is another pandemic success story. The firm has seen rapid growth since early-2020 as demand increased for call centre technology that allowed people to do their jobs from home. The company’s business model is known as a ‘contact centre as a service’, or ‘CCaaS’, with the firm considered a pioneer in the field. It offers a “comprehensive” suite of easy-to-use applications that allow management and optimisation of customer interactions across different channels.

Zoom will combine the service with its communications platform and offer it as a way for businesses to connect with their customers as an engagement platform of the future. The video conferencing giant hopes the acquisition will enhance its presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth by entering the contact centre market, which is thought to be worth around $24 billion. 

“We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers,” said Zoom CEO, Eric S. Yuan. “Zoom is built on a core belief that robust and reliable communications technology enables interactions that build greater empathy and trust, and we believe that holds particularly true for customer engagement. 

“Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact centre, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers. We are thrilled to join forces with the Five9 team, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Zoom family.”

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2022, the two firms said. 

Google Cloud has opened a new cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), its second in India after the launch of its Mumbai region in 2017.

The company said the new region would better support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia pacific.

“We have seen enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India so expanding our footprint in a new cloud region gives us the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years,” Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, said at a news conference this week, as reported by Reuters. “It’s a large commitment from us in capital and infrastructure investment and it’s designed to allow us to capture the opportunity that we see around growth.”

Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director of Google Cloud India, said in a blog post that the region will open with three “availability zones” to protect against service disruptions.

“With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data,” added Bedi.

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via a high-performance network throughout the globe.

The other Google Cloud region in India is located in Mumbai, around 883 miles towards the south-west of Delhi, which the tech giant opened in 2017. At the time of its launch, the company claimed that hosting applications in the new region could improve latency from 20-90% for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the closest region, Singapore.

Last month, Google Cloud revealed it was partnering with Reliance Jio to provide 5G technology for enterprise customers and consumers across India. This would involve the creation of a complete end-to-end cloud offering for a fully automated lifecycle of Jio’s 5G network and services.

Furthermore, Google and Jio also announced they were jointly developing a new smartphone, the JioPhone Next, which will launch on 10 September 2021. This will use a bespoke version of Android and will have access to the Play Store.

IBM has announced it will be acquiring Spanish hybrid cloud consultancy firm Bluetab Solutions as it continues to flesh out its new hybrid cloud and AI strategy.

The financial details of the deal have not been revealed, but it’s expected to be completed by Q4 of 2021.

Bluetab will become a key part of IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy as a data services consulting practice. The firm, which is based in Madrid, was founded in 2005 and has brand partnerships in banking, telecommunications, and energy and utilities industries across Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia.

It works with enterprises by migrating their on-premise systems to hybrid multi-cloud data platforms using a combination of public cloud providers and technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift.

“The outside-in digital transformation of the past is giving way to the inside-out potential of using company-owned data with AI and automation to generate business value and create intelligent workflows,” said Mark Foster, senior vice president of IBM’s Services and Global Business Services.

“Our acquisition of Bluetab will fuel migration to the cloud and help our clients to realise even more value from their mission-critical data.”

Bluetab’s expertise in data and cloud migration services includes specialised data strategy, data fabric, and advanced analytics, according to IBM.

The firm’s data experts will also be joining IBM’s Global Business Services to capitalise on opportunities in the rapidly growing market for data services, which is estimated to reach $232 billion by 2024, according to Gartner. That’s double the $123 billion it reached in 2020.

“The key to solving data challenges for our clients has been the exceptionally talented and experienced team we have been able to build as well as the value-added accelerators we have developed,” said José Luis López, co-founder of Bluetab. “We could not be more excited by the opportunity that IBM offers us to continue to grow our team, to build on our accelerators and to help more clients achieve leadership positions by leveraging their data.”

Microsoft has announced Cloud for Sustainability, an initiative that aims to help the company and its customers meet their carbon reduction and sustainability goals by recording, reporting, and reducing emissions on their path to net zero.

The new cloud offering, which will be available later this year, will allow customers to invest in sustainable practices and partner with experts to accelerate progress around their carbon reduction and sustainable goals. 

Microsoft today unveiled Windows 365, a Windows 10 or Windows 11 as a cloud service that streams the “full Windows experience”, such as apps, data, and settings, to any device on the Microsoft Cloud.

The company declared that Windows 365, which will be generally available on 2 August to organisations of all sizes, has created “a new hybrid personal computing category” called the Cloud PC, which uses the cloud to provide a “personalised Windows experience”.

“The Windows experience is consistent, no matter the device. You can pick up right where you left off, because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices,” said Wangui McKelvey, general manager of Microsoft 365.

Users will be able to turn on their device, launch a native app or modern web browser and log on to their Windows 365 account. 

“From there, their Cloud PC appears with their background, their apps, their settings and their content just as they left it when they last were last there [sic]–in the office, at home or a coffee shop,” she said.

McKelvey added that seasonal workers can ramp on and off according to the needs of the business, allowing organisations to scale for busy periods without the “complicated logistical and security challenges of issuing new hardware”.

Furthermore, she underlined that all data is stored in the cloud, so “you won’t have any issues around security because you’re not saving anything on your device”.

All managed disks running Cloud PCs are encrypted, all stored data is encrypted at rest, and all network traffic to and from Cloud PCs is also encrypted.

Users will be able to choose the size of the Cloud PC that best meets their needs, with per user, per month pricing. Users select Windows 10 or Windows 11 along with a configuration of processing power, storage, and memory. They can then access their Cloud PC on this new platform, as long as they have an internet connection. 

Organisations will also be able to choose between two edition options that include a cloud-based offering with multiple Cloud PC configurations based on performance needs: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise.

Moreover, enterprise IT can use Microsoft Endpoint Manager to procure, deploy, and manage Cloud PCs for their organisation. The tech giant said that small businesses can use a self-service model to procure Cloud PCs for their organisations without a need for IT experience.

“Windows 365 is really going to make a huge difference for organisations that wanted to try virtualisation for various reasons but could not – maybe it was too costly, too complex or they didn’t have the expertise in house to do it,” McKelvey added.

The new platform is built on the Azure Virtual Desktop but simplifies virtualisation, according to the tech giant. Organisations can scale processing power and monitor the performance of the Cloud PC to make sure users are getting the best experience.

Microsoft has also built-in analytics to analyse connection health across the network and, from the Endpoint Analytics dashboard, the company said it is easy to identify the Cloud PC environments that are not delivering the performance needs of a given user.

McKelvey also said that the ability to log into a Cloud PC from anywhere on any device is part of the tech giant’s larger strategy around tailoring products, like Teams and Microsoft 365, for the post-pandemic hybrid workforce of the future. 

“It enables employees accustomed to working from home to continue working from home; it enables companies to hire interns from halfway around the world; it allows startups to scale without requiring IT expertise,” she said.

The Bank of England (BoE) has warned about the financial sector’s increasing reliance on “secretive” cloud service providers that operate online servers. 

In its latest survey on the state of financial systems, the BoE expressed concerns that the UK’s banks are moving more and more of their administration and accounts online, warning that this “could pose a risk to financial stability”. 

The BoE has previously raised concerns that the market for cloud services is highly concentrated, with companies such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) heavily dominating. Ministers have also previously questioned the government’s own reliance on those two tech giants. 

However, the organisation’s concerns have been repeated due to the pandemic, which has seen financial institutions accelerate digital transformation plans and increase their reliance on cloud service providers (CSPs). 

In a news conference, BoE Governor Andrew Bailey expressed his concerns about the “secretive” nature of these CSPs, saying that while he “understood cloud providers’ desire not to reveal too much publicly about their operations in case it opened the door to cyber attacks, firms needed to give more information to regulators and customers.”

“That concentrated power on terms can manifest itself in the form of secrecy, opacity, not providing customers with the sort of information they need to monitor the risk in the service,” he said, according to Reuters. 

The Prudential Regulation Authority and Financial Conduct Authority have recently strengthened regulations regarding operational resilience and third-party risk management, according to the BoE, but the increasing reliance on a small number of CSPs could increase financial stability risks without greater direct regulatory oversight of the resilience of those provider’s services. 

“The Financial Policy Committee (FPC) is of the view that additional policy measures to mitigate financial stability risks in this area are needed, and welcomes the engagement between the Bank, FCA and HM Treasury on how to tackle these risks,” the Bank of England said in its report. 

“The FPC recognises that absent a cross-sectoral regulatory framework, and cross-border co-operation where appropriate, there are limits to the extent to which financial regulators alone can mitigate these risks effectively.”