Oracle has extended its work with the UK government by updating its existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS).

The update aims to foster stronger working relationships between Oracle and the UK’s public sector by enabling better use of secure cloud technologies and includes support from Oracle’s Centre of Excellence.

Oracle’s original MoU was penned in 2012 and the update will push more of its services into public sector bodies, such as NHS Trusts and local and devolved governments. Critical public services will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Cloud applications, secure infrastructure services and also autonomous technology.

“This enhanced Memorandum of Understanding will continue to deliver savings and benefits for new and existing public sector customers using Oracle’s cloud based technologies. It will continue delivering value for money whilst supporting public sector customers’ journey to the cloud”, said Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer, Crown Commercial Service.

With the enhanced Oracle Centre of Excellence, the UK government will enable better use of secure cloud technologies to support long term innovation and transformation of public services.

Oracle provides a dual-region sovereign cloud that is used by public sector customers, such as the Home Office, Office for National Statistics, the NHS NEP, the Ministry of Defence and West Midlands Police. Its updated MoU will expand on these relationships and allow more public sector organisations to use cloud technologies.

While Oracle is an existing customer, the UK’s list of cloud providers has grown during the pandemic, with the likes of Microsoft and Google Cloud all signing MOU. However, earlier in the year, MPs questioned the number of cloud contracts that had gone to AWS, claiming the government had given too much to one provider.

Amazon, GitHub and the UK government’s online portal were among countless websites taken offline by the outage of cloud computing provider Fastly.

The outage, which started just before 11am on Tuesday, impacted a variety of websites, ranging from governmental portals and news outlets to IT and code-hosting services.

Among those which have been affected are payment websites PayPal and Shopify, internet forums Quora and Reddit, streaming sites Spotify, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max, and Vimeo, and developer portals GitHub and Stack Overflow.

The Fastly outage has also taken down gov.uk, as well as numerous online newspapers and news outlets. These include the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, CNN, the Guardian, Bloomberg News, and The Verge, with the latter opting to take its reporting onto Google Docs.

The precise number of affected sites is at this time unknown. Fastly reportedly has 2,084 paying customers who could all be impacted by the outage. The average Fastly customer reportedly spends $136,000 (£96,125) per year.

The gov.uk Twitter account stated that it’s “aware of the issues with http://GOV.UK which means that users may not be able to access the site”. 

“This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency,” it added.

On its status information site, Fastly described the issue as a “global CDN disruption”, noting that it’s “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”. Fastly’s own website was also down, displaying an “I/O error” message, while other websites showed a “503 error“.

At 11:44 am BST, the company announced that it had identified the issue and that “a fix [was] being implemented.

A Fastly spokesperson told IT Pro that the company “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” across its POPs “globally” and has since “disabled that configuration”.

“Our global network is coming back online,” they added.

Gov.uk’s services were brought back shortly after Fastly’s announcement, and most of the affected sites appeared to come back online at around noon BST.

At least half of Salesforce employees will continue to work from home after the pandemic, according to the CRM services provider’s CEO Marc Benioff.

In an interview with CNBC, Benioff said that “maybe 50%, 60% [of staff] are going to be working at home”, which is considerably more than prior to the pandemic.

“Before this all started, 20% of our workers worked at home,” he said. 

Salesforce has had a notably lax attitude towards its employees returning to the office, with the company’s president and chief people officer Brent Hyder recently stating that “the 9-to-5 workday is dead”. 

In February, the company announced that it would provide its employees with the choice of three working models; flex, fully remote and office-based. Those opting for the ‘flex’ model will spend between one and three days a week in the office, mostly for collaborative projects, customer meetings and presentations.

Although Benioff said that he “won’t be ringing any bell saying: alright everybody get back in the office”, he expects staff to “come back” eventually. However, he noted that the working experience has been inadvertently changed over the course of the pandemic.

“The past is gone,” he said. “We’ve created a whole new world, a new digital future, and you can see it playing out today.”

Other tech companies embracing remote working include Dropbox, Panaseer, HomeHero, and 3RSP, with the latter’s business development director Stuart Melling telling IT Pro that he “can’t imagine why we’d force people to return just for the sake of it”.

However, not all companies seem to agree. Last week, Apple employees received a company memo requesting their presence in the office for at least three days a week from September, which was met with protest. According to an internal letter obtained by The Verge,  staff responded by asking the company to reconsider its stance and let the workers experience the same level of flexibility as during the pandemic.

“We would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues, that Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit,” they said in the letter.

“Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”

​Welcome to issue 17 of IT Pro 20/20, our sister title’s digital magazine that distills the most important themes of the previous month into an easy-to-read package.

In this issue, we once again look at how regulations are shaping the development of technology. Our lead story is a deep-dive into the EU’s recent attempts to create a GDPR-like framework for AI, and what this might mean for businesses across the bloc.

Keeping with that theme, we also explain how altcoins work and how they fit into a market likely to face tough new rules in the coming years, and also examine the ways in which businesses can walk that fine line between privacy and personalisation.

Also in this issue, you’ll find an in-depth analysis of IBM’s recent pivot to the cloud, and a look at why Formula 1 teams are so enamoured with big tech.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on 30 June – 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.

Google is planning to migrate parts of YouTube away from its internal on-premise data centre infrastructure to its public cloud division, Google Cloud.

Although Google Cloud has carved a solid reputation through the years, its overall market share still languishes behind the likes of  Azure and AWS. With the cloud market continuing to expand at pace, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm is therefore hoping to exploit the potential for higher revenues.

Moving parts of YouTube’s operations to Google’s own public cloud division may serve as a spark the company needs to stay competitive, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaking with CNBC. 

Doing so would also allow the company to fight alongside the likes of AWS and Azure, with parent companies Amazon and Microsoft each moving their core services to their own public cloud divisions through the years.

“Part of evolving the cloud is having our own services use it more and more, and they are,” Kurian told the network. “Parts of YouTube are moving to Google Cloud.”

This migration will be the latest Google service to be powered by its public cloud arm, alongside its Google Workspace suite of productivity apps and services, as well as the DeepMind research division. 

YouTube, however, is one of the largest and most widely-used platforms on the internet, and migrating its operations to Google Cloud may, the company hopes, encourage other businesses to follow suit.

Google Cloud has been in a state of transition since Kurian took over from Diane Greene a couple of years ago. The division recorded losses of £4.1 billion in 2020, which were attributed to investment in new data centres, with Google Cloud intent on vastly expanding its operations in the coming years.

In 2020, the cloud giant launched four cloud regions in Indonesia, South Korea and the US, alongside another four which are set to be established in Qatar, Spain, Italy and France.

The New South Wales (NSW) Police Force is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to speed up investigations by automating manual tasks.

The force’s AI-infused platform, called Insights, gives police access to a wide array of critical information and automates many tasks such as transcribing recordings of audio interviews or poring through petabytes of CCTV footage.

A 20-minute recording of a statement can take a police officer two to three hours to manually transcribe, but through the Insights platform, this is now completed in seconds or minutes, according to Gordon Dunsford, CITO and executive director of digital technology and innovation at the police force.

In one investigation, NSW Police collected 14,000 pieces of CCTV footage that would have previously taken detectives months to analyse. With the AI/ML technology, the platform ingested all the CCTV for the analysis in around five hours. 

Insights is currently hosted internally but is expected to migrate to the cloud soon. NSW Police is using a containerisation strategy to parcel up data that needs to be interpreted rapidly and sends it to Azure for processing. Dunsford said Microsoft Azure’s security credentials are highly valued by NSW Police, helping it to de-risk its modernisation program.

Microsoft and NSW Police claim the system has been designed with ethics front and centre, and in consultation with privacy experts with a particular focus on avoiding bias. In June 2020, Microsoft confirmed it would not sell or deploy facial recognition to police services, and stated that the Insights platform aligned with that commitment and brings significant value to the NSW Police in their pursuit of justice.

NSW has the largest police force in Australia, with over 22,000 members. Since 2017/18 it has been pursuing a new Digital IT Strategy, with one of the landmark programmes being the Integrated Policing Operating System (IPOS), a modern cloud-based platform replacing the force’s 27-year-old central database. The NSW Police is working with Microsoft Consulting Services on the build of the IPOS application with Protected level security in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Following a fortnight of Black Lives Matter protests, IBM decided to “sunset” its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software over ethical concerns last June. The cloud giant declared it would no longer distribute these systems for fear it could be used for purposes that go against the company’s principles of trust and transparency. 

Microsoft followed in the footsteps of IBM and Amazon and declared it would not sell facial recognition technology to police departments in the US until a national law was in place that could govern the technology.

Half of UK businesses expect to reduce the size of their office space, with a third looking to cut it down by 30%, according to a new report. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) surveyed 258 C-Suite executives and over senior employees of the UK’s largest companies and their proposed cuts roughly equated to nine million square feet of space.

The finding indicates an appetite for ‘hybrid work‘ models in the UK, where employees mix remote and in-office shifts, with around 71% of the respondents planning to increase investment in technology to enable more agile work models over the next two years. 

As such, only 10% of those surveyed agreed that the level of employees working in the office will match that of pre-pandemic levels, despite taking into account the speed of the vaccine roll out. The consensus from the survey among the senior executives is that staff will continue working remotely for two or three days a week. 

“The figures couldn’t be more clear, the shift to hybrid working, with part of your time at home and part in the office, is pretty much embedded into the working culture of many organisations,” said Angus Johnson, the UK real estate leader for PwC UK. “So much so that a significant proportion of the businesses we spoke to are planning to reduce their office portfolio, which could lead to up to nine million square feet of vacant space. 

“However, it’s clear that the role of the office is not going to disappear. We may see an increased demand for flexible space as many businesses’ operating models may well need that option if holding dead space is to be avoided. It’s also clear that the nature and purpose of office space are going to change.”

Many of the respondents are said to be implementing ‘subleasing‘ models and exploring partnerships for shared office space. What’s more, 51% of the organisations with 100 employees or more already have a workplace strategy that considers the long-term impact of COVID. 

Video conferencing platform Zoom beat analysts’ expectations with sales more than doubling by 191% in its first-quarter earnings. 

Revenue for the quarter that ended 30 April jumped up to $956.2 million from $328.2 million in the same period of 2020. 

The company’s massive success in 2020, where it became a household name during the pandemic, has bled into 2021. The firm recorded revenue rising 369% in the previous quarter, with many analysts predicting a larger fall as more businesses bring employees back into the office. 

“Work is no longer a place,” said the company’s CEO, Eric S. Yuan. “It’s a space where Zoom serves to empower your teams to connect and bring their best ideas to life. We are energised to help lead the evolution to hybrid work that allows greater flexibility, productivity, and happiness to both in-person and virtual connections.”

The company’s profits also reached more than $227 million (£160m) in the first quarter, roughly ten times more than the $27 million it brought in over the first quarter of 2020. Paid users also increased with businesses with more than 10 employees jumping up 87% to 497,000 in the first quarter. 

Although it recorded enormous success in 2020, it wasn’t until the second quarter, which ended 31 July, that the firm really began to see huge usage spikes (355%). As the pandemic spread across Europe and the US, and lockdown restrictions started to be implemented, Zoom became bogged down by security issues. Users began reporting incidents of ‘Zoom bombing‘ and businesses questioned its lack of end-to-end encryption. 

As such, most analysts are estimating that Zoom’s growth will be lower in the second quarter compared to the year before. With the roll-out of the vaccine and more offices set to welcome workers back in again, there is a suggestion that Zoom will lose some relevance. 

Amazon’s catalogue of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will soon be able to create low-bandwidth shared networks with each other in an experiment to broaden smart home functionality.

Amazon Sidewalk will create networks between ‘bridge’ devices, such as Echo or Ring units, by pooling together small portions of bandwidth and sharing this capacity to offer better smart home services to users.

​

From 8 June, devices will be instructed to search for similar units in order to form these networks, which Amazon claims will make it easier to maintain a consistent connection, even if your own network is knocked offline temporarily. The company also says connecting the devices will extend their effective working range.

For example, if a user’s Echo device were to lose connection, it would be able to make use of the Sidewalk network to borrow bandwidth and stay online. Smart lights, pet locators, and smart locks will also continue to work over longer distances when they’re tapped into these shared networks.

“Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better,” the firm said in a series of FAQs. “Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers, Sidewalk can help simplify new device setup, extend the low-bandwidth working range of devices to help find pets or valuables with Tile trackers, and help devices stay online even if they are outside the range of their home Wi-Fi.

“In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as smart security and lighting and diagnostics for appliances and tools.”

Although users may be concerned about the potential privacy implications of participation in the experiment, Amazon claims in its security whitepaper that there are three layers of encryption applied to the data transmitted through the scheme.

Users have the option of turning off participation in any of their devices, although this will be turned on by default once it launches on 8 June.

The shared networks operate under a maximum bandwidth of 80Kbps, with the total monthly data used per account capped at 500 MB. The coverage will vary by location based on the number of participants in any given area, although Amazon claims the greater the number of people taking part, and devices in a network, the stronger it becomes.

Not all Amazon devices will be supported by the network, with the company setting out a full list of compatible devices in its FAQs. They generally include the third generation and above of several kinds of devices, as well as IoT devices released in 2019 or later.

Amazon has also launched the Sidewalk Developer Service (SDS) for device manufacturers to build and launch devices that are compatible with Sidewalk. These include silicon chipsets, development boards, software development kits (SDKs), device provisioning tools, technical documentation, and cloud integration.

Device manufacturers can get started on building proof-of-concept devices by reviewing a starting guide and technical documentation on the SDS console, before deciding which development board and Sidewalk Bridge to purchase and downloading an SDK.

Amazon had previously hinted that it would seek to create a Wi-Fi challenger network, with the firm discussing plans for Sidewalk in 2019. The service is currently only available in the US, with the company providing no details as to when it plans to extend the scheme.

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Electronic signature provider DocuSign has acquired one of its key partners, Clause, alongside its intellectual property assets and staff, in order to integrate its technology into a broader cloud-based smart contracts platform.

Clause, which was founded five years ago, develops systems to assist digital contractual agreements, such as user verification and industry-specific services such as real-time, data-driven insurance contracts.

DocuSign, which has previously collaborated with Clause on developing digital contract technologies, will integrate the startup’s broader technology portfolio into its own Agreement Cloud platform. This system aims to elevate digital contracts from photos of paper documents into ‘living documents’ with interactivity and digital functionality.

“It is a compelling and exciting frontier of technology, and it’s an important enabler of making our Agreement Cloud smart,” said DocuSign CTO, Kamal Hathi. “It’s against that backdrop that DocuSign has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the IP rights and hire the team from one of the industry’s smart agreement pioneers, Clause.

“Its products already integrate tightly with DocuSign eSignature, and we’re exploring deeper connections to contract lifecycle management (CLM) too.”

The company is also keen on integrating Clause’s services for various industries, including financial services, health care, and insurance companies, into its Agreement Cloud.

Among the features included in the latest release of Agreement Cloud are eSignature compatibility with Microsoft Teams and an eWitness feature that allows contract signers to include up to two witnesses per signer in the signing process.

Clause has been working closely with DocuSign to develop “groundbreaking capabilities” in contracting technology for the past two years, its founder Peter Hunn, said. This led to the conclusion that the scale and distribution of DocuSign would complement the innovations developed by Clause, with the two companies being a perfect fit for one another.

“The opportunity in front of us is to deliver Smart Agreements to the world, leveraging best-in-class eSignature and CLM products, as part of one of the largest tech companies,” Hunn said.

“The Clause team will continue our work within DocuSign to deliver on our shared vision for smart agreements—a development that will fundamentally change the future of contracts, just like word processing and eSignature.”

DocuSign has also been a keen investor in the startup, having led Clause’s Series A funding round of $5.5 million in 2019. The financial details of this acquisition haven’t been disclosed publicly, however.