​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.

Microsoft’s once widely-used Internet Explorer browser will reach end-of-life status from June 2022, with the firm no longer supporting the desktop application.

The legacy browser will also be absorbed into Microsoft Edge through an in-browser Internet Explorer mode, so organisations still reliant on the out-of-date service can continue to run critical applications in an emulated environment.

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The number of users still relying on Internet Explorer is minimal compared with historic standards, with the soon-to-be legacy browser holding a 0.71% market share as of April 2021. Chrome, by contrast, holds a 64.47% market share, according to Stat Counter.

Microsoft launched the next generation of its web browser, Microsoft Edge, in 2015 as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11.

The company then launched the second iteration of its flagship browser in 2020, powered by the open source Chromium engine, while announcing plans to retire the ‘legacy’ Edge version. Chromium-based Edge is now the default browser for Windows 10, with the 2015 version removed as of last month.

“With Microsoft Edge, we provide a path to the web’s future while still respecting the web’s past,” said Microsoft developer Sean Lyndersay. “Change was necessary, but we didn’t want to leave reliable, still-functioning websites and applications behind.

“We’re here to help you transition to the more comprehensive browsing experience of Microsoft Edge and tell you a bit more about why we think it will address your needs, both at home and at work.”

Microsoft is encouraging its users to transition to Edge by promoting the wide range of benefits it over the Internet Explorer user experience. The use of a dual-engine, for example, supports both legacy and modern sites, while the Internet Explorer mode will allow users to continue using sites and apps that are only compatible with Internet Explorer.

The Edge browser is also more secure than Internet Explorer, offering a host of features including Microsoft Defender SmartScreen to block phishing attacks and malware infection attempts. While Internet Explorer 11 packaged security updates monthly, Edge can issue security patches for flaws within days.

Organisations using Internet Explorer are being encouraged to move to Microsoft Edge immediately, and continue to use their legacy applications through the dedicated Internet Explorer mode, which Microsoft will continue to support until 2029.

Internet Explorer was first released in 1995 as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95. The project was started by developer Thomas Reardon in 1994 who used source code from Spyglass’ Mosaic web browser.

The web browser underwent several transformations and redesigns through the years, before its final version, Internet Explorer 11, was released in 2013 alongside Windows 8. Development on the project was suspended in 2016 when all work was shifted over to Microsoft Edge, which launched in the previous year.

Microsoft announced in February that Internet Explorer would no longer be compatible with Microsoft 365 apps from August 2021. This follows Microsoft Teams dropping support for the browser in November last year.

Users have until June 2022 before the Internet Explorer desktop app will no longer be supported, or available to download.

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Businesses are able to update their Windows 10 systems with version 21H1, dubbed the May 2021 Update, which is designed to deliver features that improve security, remote access and the quality of experience.

The update, which will take a staggered and measured approach to rollout, introduces several new security-oriented features, namely multi-camera support for Windows Hello, Windows Defender Application Guard, and a group policy service. 

These are inspired by work Microsoft has done on its Windows 10X operating system, which was initially designed for dual-screen foldable devices but has since evolved to be a more general-purpose system.

“In the current environment, we know that you continue to rely on your PCs more than ever. As a result, we are initially taking a measured seeker-based approach to the rollout of the May 2021 Update,” said Microsoft’s vice president for program management, Windows servicing and delivery, John Cable. 

“We are throttling availability up over the coming weeks to ensure a reliable download experience for all, so the update may not be offered to you right away. Additionally, some devices might have a compatibility issue for which a safeguard hold is in place. In these cases, we will not offer the update until we are confident that you will have a good update experience.”

Among the features included in 21H1 is Windows Hello multi-camera support, which will set the default as the external camera when both external and internal Windows Hello cameras are connected to a device. 

Application Guard, meanwhile, is designed to help prevent old and emerging attacks by isolating untrusted entities in a Hyper-V-powered container. The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Group Policy Service (GPSVC), finally, will receive a performance update to better support remote work scenarios.

All editions of the May 2021 Update will receive 18 months of servicing and support, with commercial organisations recommended to begin targeted deployments to ensure services and infrastructure works as expected. 

The update also integrates elements of the once completely separated Windows 10X platform that had been in development. Instead of launching Windows 10X as a standalone product, Cable said, Microsoft is using teachings from the development process to integrate its core elements into other parts of Windows and alternative services. 

The new app container technology at the heart of Microsoft Defender Application Guard, for example, is derived from Windows 10X, as is an enhanced voice typing experience, and a modernised touch keyboard. 

Londoners were more likely to work from home during the pandemic than those living elsewhere in the country, according to an official snapshot.

An annual population survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics (ONS) found that working from home doubled in 2020, but it still remained an overall minority across the whole of the UK.

Around a quarter of people (25.9%) worked from home at some point over the year, compared with just 12.4% in 2019. But there was a concentration of remote workers in London (46.4%) that actually offset the figures for the whole country, with rural and northern towns having considerably fewer remote workers – below 14% in Burnely and Middlesbrough, for instance.

«The ONS figures confirm what we already know, that highly productive, digitally savvy jobs are concentrated in London and the South East,» said teckUK’s head of policy, Neil Ross. 

«We know as well that digital adoption, such as the uptake of home working technologies can lead to increased productivity and business performance. To prevent the pandemic from compounding the existing regional inequalities we know about we need to double down on our ambition to improve digital skills across the UK as well as incentivising business adoption of digital tech.»

Additionally, occupation also played a crucial role in the likelihood of remote working. The highest rates of people that said they had worked from home were in the communication and information (59%) and financial services (56%) sectors. The lowest numbers were in the retail and transport sectors (roughly 11% each).

It also appears that the more senior the role, the more likely people were to work from home. For example, 39% of managers, directors and senior officials and 40% of those in professional occupations said they had worked from home, compared to just 11% for those in sales and customer services and 7% for care and leisure workers. 

HPE has announced a set of capabilities to equip organisations with the tools required to monetise data by tapping into the EU’s in-development Gaia-X federated data infrastructure.

Companies, service providers and public organisations can use HPE’s Solution Framework for Gaia-X to gear up to be compatible with the data platform when it launches in the near future. The system supports all functionality required to provide and consume data and services in a decentralised, federated environment. 

By buying into HPE’s framework, organisations can tap into huge distributed data pools, strengthen data sovereignty and create value from data in ways they could never have prior to involvement in Gaia-X. 

This framework is based on a reference architecture comprising key components of HPE’s software portfolio, third-party software, and the Cloud28+ network, a marketplace for monetising data and services. Everything will also be bundled in an ‘as a service’ HPE Greenlake model, meaning it’s more accessible to customers and partners. 

“Gaia-X is not about US versus Europe, but about the key question of the next wave of digital transformation and how to create network effects without centralisation in order to unlock the value of distributed data, while at the same time reserving sovereignty of every participant,” said Johannes Koch, HPE’s senior vice president for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and MD for Germany. 

“Gaia-X is the focal point of this endeavour, and as such is also a catalyst to create the future architecture of the digital world. In essence, it’s about restoring the original freedom of the internet and about creating an open, decentralised cloud.” 

The EU proposed Gaia-X as a next-gen continental-wide system in order to reduce the reliance on, and domination of, large US tech companies with regards to data, the cloud, and digital transformation. 

The platform connects a host of cloud service suppliers through an interoperable data exchange platform that serves as a warehouse for several industries and data sources. It also acts as a data repository for businesses to pick specific services, such as IoT, big data and machine learning. 

HPE joined the non-profit organisation managing and contributing to Gaia-X on day one, and has contributed to its architecture, standards and certification since. 

The message HPE was keen to stress is that businesses cannot reap the benefits of Gaia-X unless their infrastructures and data operations are configured in such a way that they’re compatible with the platform. This is where the firm’s HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X steps in as a means of getting businesses ready to be a part of the Gaia-X project.

The firm says its own strategy is perfectly aligned with the approach Gaia-X is taking, and the problems that it’s trying to solve, with HPE’s software portfolio and business model pivoted to it. 

A key component of the HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X is a reference architecture that defines the foundation of the components needed to decentralise workloads, and this also includes a central governance structure 

The HPE Ezmeral Software Platform, which provides tools such as access to distributed data and unified control of distributed Kubernetes clusters, serves as the technological foundation of its framework. 

Its Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) offer open source standards for securely authenticating software services.

Finally, Cloud28+ allows customers to monetise their data and services through the marketplace that this platform offers, and the partners associated with the community. 

Over 17 million people in the UK lack essential digital skills (EDS) for work, while less than a quarter (23%) of employees reported having received any digital skills training from their employer.

That’s according to a new report released by FutureDotNow, a coalition of companies and civil society groups working in collaboration with the UK government to boost the nation’s digital skills. 

The coalition, which counts BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, Dropbox, CompTIA, and BT among its members, defines EDS as accessing payslips, booking shifts and leave, avoiding social media disasters, basic password practice, using cloud storage, analysing data, synchronising information across multiple devices, as well as basic cyber security skills such as being able to identify suspicious emails. 

All of these are not being addressed by the majority of UK organisations, the report has found. It also warns businesses of the risks presented by the lack of EDS among employees, such as slowing the adoption of digital processes, which negatively impacts business productivity and financial performance. This, in turn, leads to businesses being held back and the UK’s global competitiveness reduced.

FutureDotNow chief executive Liz Williams said that the report “reveals a hidden middle between digital exclusion and advanced digital skills which needs addressing urgently”.

“There’s a significant part of our workforce without the essential digital skills required for the new global digital world we’re competing in. Great businesses are underpowered like smartphones with a flat battery because their workforces lack these essential digital skills.

«FutureDotNow and its members, who are already seeing the power of working together to upskill their employees, will be able to help them take action. And our Playbook, launched today is a practical guide to identifying missing essential digital skills and how to go about upskilling employees,” she said.

According to techUK president Jacqueline de Rojas CBE, the pandemic has revealed “an increase in people wanting and needing to acquire essential digital skills”. 

“This has created positive momentum in driving the UK’s digital adoption which we must maintain in order to address the growing mismatch in the demand and supply of digital skills in the UK. FutureDotNow’s initiative to encourage business leaders to share knowledge and skills is critical to ensure the country and our citizens are ready for what comes next,” she added.

Oxford University and Oracle have collaborated on a Global Pathogen Analysis System to help governments identify and act on the spread of new COVID variants. 

The system combines Oxford University’s Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform, which was first used for tuberculosis, to with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to analyse and compare sequence data for COVID. The university has already processed half of the world’s COVID sequences, which is more than 500,000 in total.

The Pathogen Pipeline is available worldwide, 24-hours a day in the Oracle Cloud and its processing capability has been enhanced with extensive new development work from Oracle that enables high performance and security. 

The system will use Oracle’s machine learning services to deliver comprehensive results within minutes of submission before sharing its findings with countries around the world in a secure environment. This includes identifying variants of interest and their potential impact on vaccine and treatment effectiveness. There will be an analytics dashboard to show which specific strains spread more quickly and whether certain genetic features contribute to its increased transmissibility and vaccine tolerance.  

«This powerful new tool will enable public health scientists in research establishments, public health agencies, healthcare services, and diagnostic companies around the world to help further understanding of infectious diseases, starting with the coronavirus,» said Derrick Crook, professor of microbiology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

«The Global Pathogen Analysis System will help to establish a global common standard for assembling and analysing this new virus, as well as other microbial threats to public health. This adds a new dimension in our ability to process pathogen data. We are excited to partner with Oracle to further our research using this cutting-edge technology platform.»

The platform will be free for researchers and non-profits to use worldwide and the next steps will be extending the service to more pathogens beyond the COVID pandemic to enable governments to act on future outbreaks quickly. 

Business communication is a hotly contested market with a slew of different services that your organisation can use for internal messaging. However, two companies that always seem to be pitted against each other in this space, Slack and Microsoft Teams, want to take this one step further. They want businesses to talk to other businesses from within their platforms, rather than use emails. 

Slack is a communications platform that, at its most basic, offers internal instant messaging and document sharing services to businesses. Managers and employees create and use various ‘channels’ to talk to each other and these channels help to either differentiate departments or workflows, depending on the preference of the organisation. 

Microsoft Teams is also a comms platform, but it has more emphasis on video conferencing and comes with Office 365 integration. It looks and feels very similar to Slack as it also uses ‘channels’ for collaboration. The two are fierce rivals, but currently seem to have the same goal: Make email obsolete.

Slack Connect

Slack has never hidden its contempt for email and some would say its platform is entirely built for the purpose of squashing the legacy technology. But while businesses can use Slack to talk internally, until recently they still had to depend on email to reach anyone outside their organisation. However, in June 2020, Slack launched a new feature to fix this and (in its mind) kill off email altogether – Slack Connect. 

Users can connect with external parties by navigating to the sidebar in Slack and clicking on ‘Add Channels’. This will offer up two options: ‘Create a new channel’ or ‘Browse all channels’ and users will need to click on the former. The channel will need a name before it can be created and then to make it different from your internal channels, you’ll need to send an invite to the outside party you wish to speak to. From there the onus is on the receiver who needs to accept the link and set the same channel up on their end (in their own Slack account). This is then verified and approved by account administrators on both sides. 

Microsoft Connect

As Slack would have it, Microsoft Teams is a poorer version of its platform that is only dominating in the space because it comes bundled in with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of services – the argument being that it is forced upon users rather than something they would necessarily choose to use. Microsoft disputes this, naturally, but it is now offering a service similar to Slack Connect, which it has also named ‘Connect’. 

It’s currently available as a ‘preview’, with a full release scheduled for later in 2021. It works in a similar way to Slack in that you create the channel in your sidebar, under the ‘Your Teams’ section. The shared channel is called ‘Agent Portal Launch’ and once you click on this you’ll have a popup window where you can share a link with your intended party. Once again, it will need approval from administrators on both sides. 

Pros and cons

Users can only have a maxim of 20 organisations at one time with Slack Connect and bringing in anyone new to shared channels means taking someone out. You have to bear in mind that each connection has to be verified by the administrators of your account and the same process on the other end, so initially, it’s a lot more work than a simple email. But if you have a group of businesses you regularly converse with, having a shared channel is easier, faster and more collaborative – you’ll feel less like customers and partners, and more like colleagues. So far, there is no mention of any limits for the number of organisations you can link to with Microsoft Teams Connect. 

The debate around whether or not Teams is as good as Slack is frankly pointless because, as the smaller firm keeps pointing out, Teams comes bundled in with Office 365. Slack on its own doesn’t offer the breadth of services that Microsoft does so the biggest benefit with Teams is working within a suite of services many companies already use. As such, linking Teams accounts together also enables different businesses to work on projects simultaneously. This can be done with Slack as it has an integration with Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) but it’s not one holistic platform, it’s multiple providers joined together. 

However, as the first one to launch, Slack Connect has a head start on new features and security controls. Plus it’s soon to be operating under Salesforce which could potentially increase Slack’s business customers. Analysts suggest that the acquisition will see Salesforce using Slack Connect as an enterprise networking service. 

Why not just use email?

There are a number of issues that plague email, such as spam and phishing, which can slow productivity and also compromises a company’s security. Add to that the growing list of additional services people are now using to work remotely and connect to partners or customers, which all have to be installed and managed by IT, and things can get very messy, very quickly. Slack’s answer is to have everything you need – coworkers, partners, vendors, customers – in one place. 

It requires a paid Slack account for both sender and receiver, which in itself is an argument to continue with email. While Slack is popular, particularly with startups, it’s but one service in a very competitive market. There’s a very high likelihood that the people you want to speak with are using Microsoft Teams, which reportedly surpassed 75 million daily active users mid-way through 2020.  

Slack is determined to kill off email, however, and it recently added a function to Connect that lets users directly message individuals from outside their organisation. ‘Slack DMs’ works in the same way as Connect in that users send out an invite to a person at another organisation that is monitored by administrators on both sides. The function was initially launched with the option to add a bespoke message to the invite, but Slack had to shut that down after concerns were raised that it could be used to send abusive messages. Despite this, Slack DMs is now available with paid accounts and, so far, there isn’t a similar feature available on Microsoft Teams Connect.

There are lots of (often similar) benefits with both services and also plenty of room for new functions to be added. But it has to be said, there isn’t really enough in either to finally render email obsolete.