The world of finance is changing fast. Where previously the industry was dominated by a clutch of major players that had been around for decades, or even centuries, the advent of cloud technology and mobile apps have allowed a swathe of new digital-only ‘challenger banks’ to spring up and start taking on the big established firms.

In order to compete in this new landscape, incumbents must modernise their offerings, and for many of them this also involves modernising their IT architecture, shifting away from on-premises data centres and monolithic applications to more agile development processes and cloud-based infrastructure.

Standard Chartered is one such incumbent; established in 1853 as the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, the UK-based multinational handles a great deal of corporate and consumer banking across the APAC and EMEA regions, although it lacks a UK retail banking presence. The company is looking to shift its applications and services into the cloud in order to take advantage of the agility that this offers, and Standard Chartered’s CTO of cloud transformation Bhupen Warathe is the man in charge of making it happen.

The bank is implementing a multi-cloud, multi-region strategy, which Warathe says provides better resilience and reliability, as well as mitigating risks around where workloads are running from a geographic perspective. The company is also planning to make use of each platform’s different strengths and capabilities, and one of Standard Chartered’s two cloud providers is Microsoft Azure, chosen in part for its strong SaaS, AI and security competencies.

Around 10% of the bank’s employees have already been moved onto Microsoft 365, Warathe says, with the migration process expected to be complete by the end of next year. The company is also planning to use Azure’s AI and data analytics capabilities to offer richer insights to both staff and clients.

“They have a whole lot of great services including Power BI, and some of the big data products. We want to utilise that for better client insight,” Warathe says. “We want to generate better insights for our frontline staff and also provide much more rich analytics to our clients, both in corporate institutional banking, as well as to our retail and private banking clients.”

Some workloads will also be migrating to Azure, with the bank’s trade finance portfolio earmarked to go first. However, Standard Chartered’s multi-cloud strategy is based around balancing its workloads between Azure and a second cloud provider, the identity of which has not yet been publicly disclosed. 

“Trade finance [will] be moved to Azure; there will be other applications that will be going to the second cloud provider,” he says. “So the examples are, our payment systems will be going to the second cloud provider, and also our digital bank – or what we call virtual bank – capabilities will also be going [there]. So, in summary, we will be balancing the compute load between the two cloud providers, and that helps us.”

There will also be geographical considerations when determining which providers are used. “We are treating Hong Kong and Singapore as a pair, and if things go wrong in Hong Kong, we will switch to Singapore,” Warathe explains. “Similarly, London and Ireland is another pair in the West and we will be using cross-regional resiliency for a specific service provider. In the longer run, we would like to have switching between the cloud providers for specific workloads, but that’s not the immediate plan.”

In addition to resiliency, the multi-region strategy also addresses the bank’s data residency requirements, and Warathe cites Azure’s strong support for regional data hosting as a key feature for enabling Standard Chartered to meet its regulatory and compliance requirements. The company has 45 booking locations across 60 markets, and now that regulators are starting to open up to the use of cloud within the financial services market, Standard Chartered has begun engaging with these regulators to support its cloud rollout.

As with many cloud migrations, the bank is aiming to improve the scalability of its services as part of the project. In some of its larger Asian markets, Warathe says, Standard Chartered has seen huge growth in the volume of payments and transactions that it is processing. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic has driven a huge shift towards digital buying behaviour and e-commerce activities.

“All of those capabilities, buying behaviour from the corporate clients as well as retail clients, is going pretty much digital. And that’s where we have scalability requirements. So in some markets, we have 10 times more volume on a particular day, as compared to another day where the volume is kind of not there. And that’s where the whole scalability aspect also fits some of our needs to become a true digital bank.”

This isn’t the company’s first experience with the cloud, however. In fact, Standard Chartered has been using public cloud for the past three years, with six applications already migrated to its second unnamed provider as pilot tests.

“We already have experience and hence we’re very comfortable going big with a couple of cloud providers,” Warathe says. “We have a financial market business, which has many deployments where we need to do grid computing for risk analysis and portfolio level computations. And at peak, we have to use 10,000 vCPUs – so it’s that kind of load, that kind of compute.”

While this isn’t the first time Standard Chartered has worked with the cloud, it’s no less of a mammoth undertaking for the company, and skills are a firm priority for Warathe. The company has two main development centres in London and Singapore, and Warathe is focusing on making sure that his staff are fully trained on all of the cloud systems that the new infrastructure will need.

“We have close to 10,000 IT professionals in the bank. Cloud needs a different kind of skill set [and] we have established a very good upskilling programme with both the cloud providers. We have already trained more than a thousand people last year,” he says; “this year, we’re training another thousand individuals on cloud technologies. Things like how Kubernetes services or container services work, how some of the PaaS services and managed services are much better than what we can get from the traditional software in production.”

For Warathe, Kubernetes is pivotal to this strategy. The company’s new payment systems are going to be fully deployed using Kubernetes, he says, as will the company’s trade finance systems. There is also a lot of replatforming going on in preparation for the move, with many of the company’s core banking systems being worked on. At the same time, many newer applications, such as its digital banking products, are being developed as cloud-native applications from the word go.

“Kubernetes gives us the best scalability the industry has ever seen. It also gives us the best portability of moving the workloads between the two cloud service providers,” he says, “and that’s where wherever we have volumes, wherever we need scalability, those are the applications we are targeting for Kubernetes and container-based services.”

As you’d expect, Standard Chartered is also taking its own finances into consideration, and Warathe notes that the OpEx-based model of cloud computing offers a very attractive way for the bank to minimise its infrastructure costs, compared to making large capital investments in on-premise hardware.

“I think that [CapEx] model was quite good when we had predictable volumes, [but] when you have massive peaks and troughs, then the CapEx model doesn’t work that well. If you have a predictable volume, you can go for a 16-CPU box and maximise your dollar for five or 10 years,” he says. “But when you have a really dynamic throughput and a very varying degree of volume, then I think the CapEx model doesn’t work as well.”

“With cloud, we don’t have to buy hardware and network and switches and everything else to really put into our books and capitalise it for the next four to five years; that‘s one of the biggest advantages on the financial management side as well. And there are industry results, which show pretty good savings once we achieve a critical mass in terms of migration of workloads… initially you’ll have a bit of double bubble that means a bit of extra cost on one side, but eventually it gives you benefits on the OpEx side as well.”

An advocate for tech startups is urging the UK government to find ways of incentivising tech adoption for SMBs to boost the country’s productivity. 

The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) have called for a digital adoption fund that provides tax reliefs to SMBs and greater collaboration from the UK’s startup ecosystem. 

In its report, ‘Hidden Figures‘, Coadec refers to the UK as «the sick man of Europe» due to its stagnated productivity. The organisation suggest that unless more is done to make digital adoption easier and more attractive to the country’s small and medium-sized businesses, the UK will fall further behind others in Europe. 

«Although most nations have experienced slow productivity growth since 2008, the situation in the UK is by far the worst amongst our peers and one of the worst performances in UK history,» the report states.

«However, the British economy hasn’t always been characterised by slow productivity growth, but performance has fluctuated compared to that of our peers across the last 60 years. In 1960, the UK had the highest level of productivity in Europe before suffering a slowdown in the 1960s and 1970s which led to the UK becoming known as the «sick man of Europe». 

To get the country back to health, Coadec recommends the government put in place four incentives for SMBs. The first is a fund that works like tax credits for companies that want to adopt new technology – helping to reduce the cost. 

For those that are perhaps not confident on what tech their business needs, or unsure what value they will offer, the report recommends creating a sector-by-sector ‘tech matrix’, a list of approved products and services. This also ties into its recommendation that tech startups offer support to SMBs on what tech to adopt and how.

Finally, the report urges the government to create a post-COVID-19 tech adoption strategy, so businesses can be more agile in the face of future challenges. 

Cyber criminals have launched a new campaign that targets Sangoma PBX, an open source web GUI that manages communications toolkit Asterisk, security researchers have said.

The attack exploits CVE-2019-19006, a critical vulnerability in Sangoma private branch exchange (PBX), which grants the attacker admin access to the system and gives them control over its functions.

Nearly 1,200 organisations worldwide over past 12 months are said to have been targeted, with the main purpose of the campaign being to lift phone numbers and gain live access to compromised VoIP services, according to a blog by researchers at Check Point Software.

Countries targeted include the Netherlands, Belgium, US, Columbia, and Germany. However, over half of the attacks so far have been aimed at companies based in the UK, in industries such as government, military, insurance, finance, and manufacturing.

“While investigating the exploitations, researchers identified several online profiles associated with private Facebook groups that deal with VoIP, and more specifically, SIP server exploitation,» said researchers Ido Solomon, Ori Hamama and Omer Ventura, in a joint blog post. 

They added that investigations into the source of the attacks suggested that most hackers were based in Gaza, the West Bank, and Egypt.

It was also concluded that the group has mostly tried to gain access to phone numbers, and sell these on to other groups, and grant access to compromised VoIP services “to the highest bidders, who can then exploit those services for their own purposes”.

Researchers said that hackers could also use the compromised systems to support further attacks, such as using the system resources for cryptocurrency mining, spreading laterally across the company network, or launching attacks on outside targets, while masquerading as representatives from the compromised company.

Companies using vulnerable systems have been urged to change all default passwords and analyse call billings on a regular basis as well as applying patches to close the CVE-2019-19006 vulnerability that hackers are exploiting.

The growth of Alibaba‘s cloud business is outpacing both AWS and Microsoft in the third quarter of 2020, with the Chinese firm capitalising on the country’s early recovery from the pandemic.

Alibaba’s cloud division brought in revenues of 14.89 billion yuan (£1.71bn) in the three months ending 30 September. That’s a 60% increase year-on-year, representing faster growth than the 29% recorded by AWS and the 48% cited by Microsoft’s Azure. 

That was also higher than the 44.7% growth recorded by the third biggest provider, Google Cloud.

It’s worth noting that Alibaba is a smaller operation that doesn’t provide the same breadth of cloud services as the three larger companies and its business is mostly in China, despite recent expansion into Europe.

The company said that most of the gains were from its internet, finance, and retail businesses, although part of it can also be attributed to China’s earlier recovery from the COVID-19-related downturn.

«We delivered another solid quarter,» said Maggie Wu, Alibaba’s CFO, in the earnings report. «Our domestic core commerce business continued to grow steadily during the post-COVID-19 environment in China through higher purchase frequency and consumer spending, while cloud computing revenue grew 60% year-over-year, driven by the acceleration in digitalisation across all industries and businesses of all sizes in China.

«We are happy to see that our strategic investments are starting to see improving operational efficiencies and the effect of scale.»

Amazon and Microsoft are currently the outright leaders in cloud, between them accounting for over half of the worldwide market, according to Synergy Research Group. Alibaba is now the fourth-largest provider of cloud services, behind Google but ahead of the likes of IBM and Oracle.

«We remain focused on our three long-term growth engines – domestic consumption, cloud computing and data intelligence, and globalisation – to effectively capture opportunities from the ongoing changes in consumer demand and acceleration of digitalisation of businesses across our digital economy,» said Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang.

WhatsApp has redesigned its storage management settings, making it easier for users to mass-delete images and large files that have been shared multiple times, including those that take up most of the phone’s storage space.

The new update, which users can find by going to Settings > Storage and Data > Manage Storage, automatically groups content into two categories: those forwarded multiple times and those greater than 5MB. Users can also choose to preview specific media files and sort them by size before deleting them in bulk. Additionally, WhatsApp will display a warning alert when the storage is almost full.

You can then choose which group to review, then click on the files you’d like to delete and click the trash can image to delete them. If you just want to delete the entire group, simply click “Select All,” then click the trash can image.

These are welcome developments, as the current WhatsApp storage usage tool only lists the number of messages, photos, GIFs, and videos in each chat, and the amount of space they take up. The risk of accidental deletion is higher because users don’t have the option to browse or review the content they delete.

With the new storage management tool, users will enjoy greater control over the storage space WhatsApp takes up. According to reports, this new feature will roll out to all users this week.

Microsoft Teams will provide support for multiple users and organizations on its desktop versions, according to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website. Users will be able to add other accounts, including one personal and one school or work account. These accounts will be able to have separate profile pictures, and users can switch between them through their settings. 

The feature is in development and will arrive to Microsoft Teams commercial and education users worldwide in December. This update applies to the desktop app. The mobile version already supports switching between personal and business accounts.

Microsoft Teams, initially launched in November 2016, is a chat-based collaboration tool within the Microsoft Office 365 suite of services. It gives in-office and remote teams a shared space to collaborate on projects and share information. Teams’ features include one-on-one chat, team chat, document collaboration, and more. Microsoft Teams is also integrated with Skype, SharePoint, Exchange, and Yammer.

Teams app has made several updates recently, including: 

• The ability to appear offline to contacts
• Support for up to 1,000 participants
• Zapier, an automation app, will allow users to connect their apps and create automated workflows, reduce busywork and improve productivity. 

Future features include Together mode (pulling users together into a virtual space), custom layouts, breakout rooms, meeting recaps and improved search results.

The coronavirus pandemic has spurred an increase of corporate and personal Microsoft Teams use, growing from 44 million to 115 million users in just six months.  

Approximately 7.5 million external attacks were recorded against cloud accounts during the second quarter, with over 200,000 of those against UK business, security firm McAfee has revealed.

The findings were based on the aggregated and anonymised cloud usage data from more than 30 million McAfee MVISION cloud users worldwide from all major industries, detailed in a new McAfee Labs Threats Report for 2020.

The UK has been ranked seventh on a top ten list showing the most cloud attacks by region, with just over 200,000. This is followed by Brazil and the Netherlands, at around 250,000, Russia and New Caledonia at just under 300,000, and India at 450,000. Thailand currently experiences the highest number of attacks against cloud accounts, with 625,000.

The report also found that Q2 saw a 605% increase in COVID-19-themed attack detections, following the trend of hackers exploiting the pandemic for criminal activities. Overall, during this past quarter, McAfee managed to observe an average of 419 new threats per minute.

Commenting on the findings, Nigel Hawthorn, data privacy expert for cloud security at McAfee, said that “the fact that there have been nearly 7.5 million attacks on users via cloud services in the second quarter of this year highlights how criminals have been quick to pivot attack methods to take advantage of the pandemic”.

“The move to widespread remote working has required many industries to adopt new cloud services to maintain staff productivity, communication and collaboration. When managed correctly, however, the cloud is the most secure place to do business and an incredible driver of business growth, innovation and resiliency. Incorporating cloud into strong data governance policies and regular staff training are the keys to making this a reality,” he added.

Hawthorn recommended that IT teams should be “able to quickly identify, prioritise and respond to these targeted attacks – across both device and cloud”.

“Technology can play a key role in helping security professionals understand whether their organisation is at risk, what specific threats they are susceptible to, and how they can pre-empt an attack,» he added. «This must go hand-in-hand with a shared responsibility security model. Everyone is accountable in some way and must play their part to protect data against cybercriminals.»

AWS has launched its latest GPU-equipped instances aimed at machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Called P4d, the new instances come ten years the first set of GPU instances were launched. They feature Intel Cascade Lake processors and eight of Nvidia’s A100 Tensor Core GPUs. These connect via NVLink with support for Nvidia GPUDirect and offer 2.5 PetaFLOPS of floating-point performance and 320GB of high-bandwidth GPU memory.

AWS claimed that the instances offer 2.5x the deep learning performance, and up to 60% lower cost to train when compared to P3 instances.

In addition, the P4 instances include 1.1TB of system memory and 8TB of NVME-based SSD storage with up to 16 gigabytes of read throughput per second. The instances can combine over 4,000 GPUs into an on-demand EC2 UltraCluster. 

Among the use cases touted by AWS for these instances include supercomputer-scale machine learning and HPC workloads: natural language processing, object detection & classification, scene understanding, seismic analysis, weather forecasting, financial modelling, etc. 

The P4 instances are available in one size (p4d.24xlarge) and can be launched in the US East (N.Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions with immediate effect.

Among the companies that have already been working with the P4 instances include Toyota Research Institute (TRI), GE Healthcare and Aon.

«At TRI, we’re working to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move,” said Mike Garrison, technical lead, Infrastructure Engineering at TRI.

«The previous generation P3 instances helped us reduce our time to train machine learning models from days to hours and we are looking forward to utilizing P4d instances, as the additional GPU memory and more efficient float formats will allow our machine learning team to train with more complex models at an even faster speed.»

Its on-demand price will be $32.77 per hour, going down to approximately $20 per hour for one-year reserved instances, and $11.57 for three-year reserved instances.

Intel has reportedly acquired Israeli data science startup Cnvrg.io in a bid to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning credentials.

In a statement given to TechCrunch, Intel confirmed the deal and said in a short statement that “Cnvrg will be an independent Intel company and will continue to serve its existing and future customers”. The company did not disclose any terms of the deal. 

Cnvrg.io was started in 2016 and runs a data science platform aimed at helping enterprises to manage and build up AI efforts. It claims that it is a pioneer in building cutting-edge machine learning development solutions to help customers rapidly build machine learning models.

The platform offers paid and free tiers and works in on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments.

Among the Israeli firm’s partners include Red Hat, NetApp and Nvidia, while its customers include Lightricks, ST Unitas and Playtika.

In a recent blog post, co-founder and CEO Yochay Ettun said that its machine learning dashboard could improve visibility and increase machine learning server usage by up to 80%. Its dashboard helps IT teams see allocation and utilisation of different jobs, clusters, by user and by job.

Admins can monitor and compare overall capacity versus allocation and utilisation with graphs to identify gaps in efficiency.

Recently, Cnvrg.io raised $8 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Hanaco Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners. 

Barely a week ago, Intel made another acquisition in the AI sector with the purchase of SigOpt for an undisclosed amount. The company provides a software platform for research groups such as OpenAI to increase AI model performance.