Microsoft has launched a set of new Azure services that organisations can now run on any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster using its Azure Arc multiple-cloud service.

At its virtual Build 2021 event, Microsoft said its cloud services, such as Azure App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, and Event Grid, would now all be Arc-enabled (in preview form). Azure Arc, launched in 2019, is Microsoft’s tool to help firms manage Kubernetes container clusters across clouds and on-premises data centres.

The firm said that these Azure application services can be deployed to any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-conformant Kubernetes cluster connected via Azure Arc.

The services now enabled includes Azure App Service for creating and managing web apps and APIs with a fully managed platform and features like autoscaling, deployment slots, and integrated web authentication; Azure Functions for event-driven programming with autoscaling, and triggers and bindings to integrate with other Azure services; Azure Logic Apps for creating automated workflows for integrating apps, data, services, and backend systems, as well as Azure API Management for dealing with internal and external APIs.

«The app services are now Azure Arc-enabled, which means customers can deploy Web Apps, Functions, API gateways, Logic Apps and Event Grid services on pre-provisioned Kubernetes clusters,» the firm said in a statement.

«This takes advantage of features including deployment slots for A/B testing, storage queue triggers, and out-of-box connectors from the app services, regardless of run location. With these portable turnkey services, customers can save time building apps, then manage them consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments using Azure Arc.»

Microsoft added that with this capability now in preview, customers don’t have to choose between the productivity of platform as a service (PaaS) and the control of Kubernetes, as the same app services can run with either model.

Gabe Monroy, vice president for Azure Developer Experience at Microsoft, said in a blog post that one of the challenges he heard from customers was that despite the enhanced control and ecosystem benefits of Kubernetes, Kubernetes is difficult for developers to use directly. Developers must learn many advanced concepts and APIs, which can hurt their productivity.

«With today’s announcement, developers no longer have to choose between the productivity of Azure application services and the control of Kubernetes,» he added.

IBM will provide over-the-cloud access to its quantum systems for Indian institutions to accelerate advanced training and research in quantum computing as it hopes to help build a «quantum-ready» workforce.

Faculty and students will be able to access IBM quantum systems, quantum learning resources, and quantum tools over the IBM Cloud for education and research purposes. The company hopes this will enable them to work with actual quantum computers and programmes using the Qiskit open-source framework.

«IBM is committed to growing a quantum-ready workforce and building an ecosystem to nurture the quantum community in India. With this engagement, we can take it a step further to scale up this ecosystem in India, for India and the world,» said Gargi Dasgupta, director of IBM Research India and CTO of IBM India/South Asia.

The institutions taking part are the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) – Pune, IISER – Thiruvananthapuram, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Jodhpur, IIT – Kanpur, IIT – Kharagpur, IIT – Madras, Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Kolkata, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Mumbai, and the University of Calcutta.

This partnership will also be part of the IBM Quantum Educators programme that helps faculty in the quantum field to connect with one another and provides them with educational resources.

Plus, IISER- Thiruvananthapuram, ISI-Kolkata, and IIT-Madras will host their own Quantum Computing Lab courses for students which will include lab sessions using IBM quantum systems.

Earlier this year, IBM offered the quantum industry’s first developer certification to help workforces become «quantum-ready». Developers have to display their knowledge of Qiskit, the company’s open source quantum development kit, and answer 60 questions in the certification exam.

Using the knowledge of how to utilise Python and basic linear algebra, Qiskit allows users to programme quantum computing hardware. Since it was launched in 2017, thousands of users have developed applications and maintained and improved code, according to the company.

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The Home Office has published plans for its long-awaited digitisation of border controls and immigration. 

The new strategy promises a «fully end-to-end digital customer experience» for online applications, proof of identity and also crossing the border. 

It includes a new digital visa system to help count the number of people coming into the UK, which is said to be similar to the US Esta electronic travel authorisation. This would apply to any entrant that does not have an existing visa or immigration status.

«Our new fully digital border will provide the ability to count people in and count people out of the country,» home secretary Priti Patel told an online conference on Monday, according to the Guardian. 

The project was originally scheduled for completion in 2019 and has reportedly cost upwards of £173 million. The plans still appear to have missing details, such as the cost of the digital visa and specific details on when it will be finished. The move to a fully digital border system has been heavily criticised by MPs for being too slow. 

«As part of this, we are looking at further ways to remove physical documents from the process and streamline the system, such as potentially removing the need for separate vignettes and Biometric Residence Permits, taking out the cost and time for the user and the Home Office and improving security,» the department said in a statement.

«This would be supported by increased use of the online services to prove right to work and rent, simplifying the process for employers, landlords and individuals and reducing the number of documents relied on to prove status.»

In March, the Public Accounts Committee slammed the Home Office for failing to make progress on its digital border transformation, labelling it «miserable» and «exorbitantly expensive». 

A McKinsey survey of over 20,000 European citizens revealed that 86% of Brits have used e-commerce or online services in the past six months.

The report suggests that this makes the UK the most digitally advanced country in Europe, ahead of France (82%) and Germany (65%), and only behind India (88%) and Brazil (97%) on a global scale. 

Around seven million people in the UK have accessed new digital services since Christmas, mostly grocery and education services as a result of the pandemic, with McKinsey estimating a total of 43 million digital users in 2021.

Over the last six months, digital growth has remained the same, according to McKinsey, but it may drop once the pandemic is fully over. The report suggests that over nine million Brits are expected to return to physical stores as soon as they are safe to do so. 

«With consumers having reached high levels of digital penetration in most regions and industries, the acceleration into digital channels now seems to have levelled off in both Europe and the United States,» McKinsey said. 

«As a result, even as total digital adoption remains above pre-pandemic levels, many industries and regions may see a modest negative net change in post-pandemic digital use relative to 2020.» 

Consumer expectations of the post-pandemic future suggest a strong return of physical channels, according to the report, with some expecting to fully return to pre-pandemic behaviour. The main sectors here include travel, banking, telco carriers and entertainment. 

In the UK, 35-44 year-olds plan to use fewer digital services after the pandemic, citing «distrust» as a result of data handling. This was also apparent in questions around security, with 44% of the respondents suggested they didn’t fully trust digital services. 

Sabre Systems experienced an outage on Friday 21 May that impacted a number of airlines around the world and interrupted their scheduled flights.

Sabre is a third-party IT system used for check-in, boarding and flight bookings. The outage affected global airlines including Virgin Australia, Jet Blue, Alaskan Airlines and American Airlines.

A spokesperson for Virgin Australia confirmed the company had experienced an outage with the Sabre booking system which had resulted in over 30 flights cancelled on Friday and a «small number of flights» cancelled or delayed on Saturday.

Tweets from the airline suggested that the outage affecting Virgin Australia lasted for around three hours.

A JetBlue spokesperson told IT Pro: «JetBlue systems are back online following a Sabre outage impacting multiple airlines. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused.» 

Moreover, when IT Pro asked the company for comment, Sabre blamed the outage on Dell EMC.

«Dell/EMC has confirmed it experienced a hardware redundancy failure that impacted Sabre’s system, including PSS and check-in. The issue has been resolved. Dell/EMC is working to understand why the failure occurred,» said the spokesperson.

IT Pro has contacted Dell for comment.

Meanwhile, Air India stated that a cyber attack which took place three months ago on the systems of its data processor has exposed information belonging to around 4.5 million of its customers worldwide.

The breach which affected SITA, the data processor, involved personal data registered over a ten year period which exposed information such as passport information, date of birth and credit card data. The airline is now encouraging passengers to change passwords to ensure the safety of their personal data.

Amazon has announced it is retiring its standalone Prime Now service, with its app and website shutting down globally by the end of 2021.

Prime Now has been available since 2014 as a way for members of Amazon’s Prime subscription service to get items delivered straight to their doors within a few hours for an extra fee.

However, the e-commerce giant is now directing users that want these fast deliveries to the Amazon app and website where a two-hour delivery option will be made available. This also includes Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, which are both available in the app and website.

The move will also incorporate any third-party retailers or local stores that were offered within Prime Now, such as the supermarket chain Morrisons. Available retailers differed slightly from region to region, but the service was used in more than 5,000 cities and towns and even operated out of dedicated Prime Now warehouses.

«To make this experience even more seamless for customers, we are moving the experience from a separate Prime Now app onto the Amazon app and website so customers can shop all Amazon has to offer from one convenient location,» the company’s vice president of grocery, Stephenie Landry, said in a blog post.

«In 2014, I wrote a six-page document outlining a service that would allow customers to get last-minute items in about an hour. We even gave the project the internal code name ‘Houdini.’ In just 111 days, our team took the concept outlined in that six-page document and turned it into Prime Now, which became the foundation for Amazon’s ultrafast grocery and same-day delivery businesses.»

The change has been planned for some time with pop-up notifications in Prime Now directing users to the new website and app. The service has also been discontinued in India, Japan, and Singapore.

Chinese digital retail firm Hanshow will use Microsoft’s technology to expand globally, undergo digital transformation, and produce cloud-based software for its clients around the world, as part of a new deal.

Through the new collaboration, Hanshow is set to adopt Microsoft Azure while prioritising Microsoft technology in its products to retail clients. Hanshow said this will allow it to unify its global information systems, improve efficiency and security, and consequently enhance the company’s competitiveness.

Microsoft will also provide technical support to the digital retail firm in co-creating cloud-based products that use the tech giant’s machine learning, IoT, and data technology.

“Hanshow’s solutions empowered by Microsoft Azure are at the heart of digital transformation in the retail industry, and by partnering with Hanshow we can enable retail customers around the world together,” said Joe Bao, VP of Microsoft in China.

Hanshow claims to be one of the world’s leading electronic shelf label (ESL) providers, with products in use at over 20,000 stores across 50 countries. It said many of its clients are some of the world’s top retailers, operating hundreds of stores across multiple geographies.

Hanshow stated that managing ESL across a retailer’s multiple stores requires significant investment in IT infrastructure and technology. However, as the company has already seen in Europe and Australia, by adopting a SaaS solution using Microsoft Azure, it can manage over 10 million ESL and other IoT devices across geographies through a remote network, and it can be done without new infrastructure or other investments.

“This partnership with Microsoft not only helps streamline our company’s operations,” said Hou Shiguo, Hanshow CEO, “it also provides us with the lightweight and highly adaptable technology our retail clients need to dramatically increase their efficiency and drive profits for their business.”

Microsoft announced its new retail-focused cloud service in January this year, which includes features from Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft Advertising. It’s unified through a common data model and built on a compliant and secure platform.

The tech giant’s services already operate across several retail chains, with, for example, Microsoft Azure delivering 200 million purchase forecasts a day to Walgreens to help the retail company ensure the right items are in stock at the right time. Microsoft also has a deal with Chipotle to supply the firm with analytical tools to help it better understand customer preferences and expand its loyalty programme.

​Acronis takes a broad view to data protection: its Cyber Protect software doesn’t just take care of backup, but adds a heap of AI-driven cybersecurity measures, including malware protection, vulnerability assessments, patch management, hard disk health monitoring and remote desktop services.

Both local and cloud management options are provided; we went for the latter, as it gives you the ability to extend protection to home workers. There are also Essentials, Standard and Advanced editions, with the top-tier package including shared protection plans, deduplication, backup fingerprinting and backup malware scans. Check out Acronis’ website for a full breakdown of the differences between the various versions. 

Whichever permutation you opt for, all versions are subscription only. The Advanced licence includes protection for one physical or virtual server and 250GB of cloud storage for £458 per year; further 1TB chunks are £379 per year, while cloud seeding incurs a one-time fee of £59.

As for self-hosted backups, there’s plenty of flexibility. Supported destinations include SMB and NFS shares, IP SANs and tape drives, and Acronis also offers its own storage node service with deduplication.

For management, the web-based dashboard offers a wealth of information about your protected systems and backup repository status, along with details of any malware detections, blocked URLs, missing patches and more. It’s customisable too, allowing you to personalise and reorganise widgets to focus on whatever’s most important to you.

The only clunky aspect of the cloud-based approach is agent deployment; the client software has to be downloaded from the portal and manually installed, which might not be ideal for full-time home workers. It’s not complicated, though, and you can check the Devices page in the console to confirm that all computers have been successfully registered.

There’s also an agent specifically for Hyper-V systems, while for VMware you can download an agent VM and configure it with your cloud credentials and vCenter server details. Once we’d deployed these agents, the portal happily presented a list of all their VMs available for backup.

Cloud storage is automatically assigned to your account, and for local backups we were easily able to point the software to shares on remote Synology and Qnap NAS appliances using their UNC paths.

The specifics of your backups are configured in the form of plans, which define items to be copied, security settings, schedules and storage devices. A plan can be associated with any number of devices; a clever data protection map exposes files not covered by a backup plan, while plans created at the virtual host level will helpfully take in any new VMs as they’re added. Configuring hybrid backups is as easy as specifying two destinations in your plan, so each run backs up to both on-premises storage and the cloud repository. Malware scanning can be included in your plan too, along with URL filtering (using a predefined list of 44 categories), vulnerability assessments and other security checks. 

Acronis also shines when it’s time for recovery. Regular system backups can be easily mounted as virtual machines, so you can browse and pick out individual files or folders for restoration. Backed-up VMs can be restored to their original location, either as a new VM on the same host or to another location. It’s fast, too, which is great news for your RTOs: we restored an entire Windows Server 2019 VM back to our vSphere host in just 100 seconds.

Acronis Cyber Protect is a great all-round data protection solution, thanks to its smart combination of cybersecurity measures and cloud-managed backup. The portal is well designed too, making it easy to create and manage hybrid backup strategies, and the protection for virtualised environments is first class.

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Cisco has confirmed that its recent supply chain disruption has been a direct result of the larger global semiconductor shortage.

Chief financial officer Scott Herren estimated during an earnings call on Wednesday that the supply chain issues, which are impacting the forecast for the current quarter’s adjusted gross margins, could last until the end of 2021, with a possibility that they would extend until 2022.

“I think the supply chain issues will stay with us at least through the end of this calendar year,” he told the attendees, adding that Cisco had “locked in both supply and pricing with some of the key component providers”.

Although no specifics were given during the call, a spokesperson for the company has since confirmed to IT Pro that the supply chain issues were related to the global semiconductor shortage, which has been plaguing the tech and automotive industries for the duration of the pandemic.

“Due to material shortages across the semiconductor industry that are outside of our control, Cisco is experiencing extended lead times on select components. While the impacts are not broad-based across all Cisco products, there are some delays to production schedules for certain product families,” the spokesperson told IT Pro.

They added that the situation is expected to last through the end of our current fiscal year and into the next as efforts to expand capacity are realised and demand stabilises.

“Cisco has and will continue to be proactive in mitigating the impacts of these supply constraints and we are working closely with our network of suppliers and manufacturing partners to minimise delays and expedite orders for our customers,” they added.

The confirmation comes weeks after CEO Chuck Robbins told the BBC that it would take “another six months to get through the short term” of the global chip shortage, adding that the crisis is unlikely to be fully resolved until 2022.

«The providers are building out more capacity. And that’ll get better and better over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said, adding that the shortage was caused by unprecedented demand for semiconductors, which “go in virtually everything”.

The shortage is what might have prompted the company to acquire fabless semiconductor company Acacia Communications, the finalisation of which was announced on Wednesday. Cisco also reported a 10% year-on-year growth in total orders, representing the strongest demand in its products for almost a decade.

The company generated $12.8 billion in revenue, up 7% year-over-year, with continued momentum in transforming its business to software and subscriptions. According to the company, 81% of software revenue was sold as a subscription, up from 76% last quarter.

Zoom has announced a platform for hosting virtual events that will be available to its paid tier of customers in the summer.

The service, called ‘Zoom Events’, is described as a «comprehensive solution for event organisers» that offers features to ticket and monetise audiences of any size.

It will include a hub to manage and share events, registration portals, integrated networking, and an analytics dashboard to monitor and review attendance and revenues. The events can be hosted as both one-offs or as part of a series of conferences that can also be made private or posted on a public directory for others to discover.

Most of those features have come from a rebranded version of the ‘OnZoom’ platform, which has been in beta since October 2020. This was a service for people to adapt their in-person events, such as fitness classes or music lessons, so that they could work as virtual or hybrid ones. It included tools for monetising sessions and a marketplace to search for them.

However, OnZoom will no longer be available as a standalone service as it will be folded into Zoom Events.

«It’s an exciting time to be at Zoom where the pace of innovation continues to accelerate,» said Oded Gal, the firm’s chief product officer. «We know that people are looking for flexibility in how they attend events in the future. The hybrid model is here to stay, and Zoom Events is a perfect solution for our customers who are looking to produce and host customer, company, and public events with an easy, yet powerful solution.»

The timing of the announcement may come as a surprise to some, given that the popularity of virtual events is almost certainly going to decline as lockdown restrictions begin to lift and companies jump on the novelty of hosting a physical event.

Google, for instance, hosted its I/O developer conference earlier in the week with people allowed to attend at its Mountain View campus. MWC 2021 is also still aiming to host 50,000 people at Barcelona’s Fira Grand Via in June, despite a number of high profile companies pulling out of the event.