Smart manufacturing looks set to drive growth in the industrial IoT market over the next five years.

According to a recent study by Jupiter Research, the number of Industrial IoT connections will increase from 17.7 billion in 2020 to 36.8 billion in 2025, representing an overall growth rate of 207%. 

The new research, Industrial IoT: Future Market Outlook, Technology Analysis & Key Players 2020-2025, predicts that 5G and LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) networks will play vital roles in creating service offerings to the manufacturing industry.

These technologies will also enable the realisation of the ‘smart factory’ concept, in which real-time data transmission and high connection densities allow highly autonomous operations for manufacturers, researchers said.

Private 5G services will also be a crucial step in maximising the value of a smart factory to service users, by leveraging the technology to enable superior levels of autonomy amongst operations. These networks should be valuable to manufacturers when used for the transmission of large amounts of data in environments with a high density of connections, Juniper said, and where significant levels of data are generated. 

The report said that this would enable large-scale manufacturers to reduce operational spend through efficiency gains.

The research predicts that over 80% of global Industrial IoT market value will be attributable to software spend by 2025, reaching $216 billion. Software tools leveraging machine learning for enhanced data analysis and the identification of network vulnerabilities are now essential to connected manufacturing operations.

“Manufacturers must exercise caution when implementing IoT technology; resisting the temptation to introduce connectivity to all aspects of operations. Instead, manufacturers must focus on the collection of data on the most valuable areas to drive efficiency gains,” said research author Scarlett Woodford.

Oracle has been forced to issue an out-of-band patch to fix a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting multiple Oracle WebLogic Server versions.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-14750, could enable hackers to remotely exploit the server via an HTTP GET through the server’s console component, without any user interaction and may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.

«Due to the severity of this vulnerability and the publication of exploit code on various sites, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply the updates provided by this Security Alert as soon as possible,” Oracle explained in an https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/alert-cve-2020-14750.html advisory.

The advisory said that the supported Oracle WebLogic Server versions that are affected by CVE-2020-14750 include 10.3.6.0.0, 12.1.3.0.0, 12.2.1.3.0, 12.2.1.4.0, and 14.1.1.0.0.

Proof-of-concept code that could exploit the bug was made public on GitHub. According to security firm Spyse, around 3,300 WebLogic servers are exposed at the moment and could be vulnerable to the flaw.

In a blog post, Eric Maurice, director of Security Assurance at Oracle, shared a link to help users harden affected servers.

He also said that the vulnerability is related to CVE-2020-14882, which was addressed in the October 2020 Critical Patch Update. That particular flaw could enable hackers network access via HTTP to achieve total compromise and takeover of vulnerable Oracle WebLogic Servers.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also warned users about the dangers of the vulnerability and encouraged administrators to apply the patch as soon as possible. 

​Welcome to the tenth issue of IT Pro 20/20, our digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

The coronavirus has forced every single company to re-evaluate how they do business. Strategies, verticals, and even the way employees work have all been disrupted, and the tried and tested products and services that have likely come to define your business may be in jeopardy.

It’s important to remember, however, that disruption is not inherently a bad thing. Being forced to reshape your business to fit the current climate presents an opportunity to demonstrate resilience. Businesses have spent months in damage mitigation mode – it’s now time to grow once again.

In this issue, we show that a business is only as agile as the data centre it relies on, and how new designs that embrace cutting-edge computing are providing the flexibility businesses need to enter new markets quickly. We also assess the volume of options available on the cloud market and whether this is causing fatigue for customers. You’ll find a handy guide to managing all the various risks associated with employees working outside the company firewall, and a run-through of some of the technology your business should consider investing in to really hit the ground running in 2021.

We appreciate you taking the time to download IT Pro 20/20, and we hope you enjoy this month’s issue.

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

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has struck an agreement with the UK government to accelerate the public sector’s digital transformation drive, boost digital skills and raise the level of participation among smaller cloud providers.

The ‘One Government Value Agreement (OGVA)’ is a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) between AWS and the Crown Commerical Service (CCS) that spans two tiers for both smaller and larger organisations. 

Cloud services will become available to the public sector as a single client, offering more cost savings for deployment against organisation-by-organisation deals. AWS will also establish a digital skills fund, which will train more than 6,000 civil servants in cloud computing free of charge.

The first tier supports organisations at the beginning of their cloud journeys, allowing them to conduct their first cloud projects with support such as bespoke training, workshops, and “cloud credits” for new research projects. The second tier, aimed at larger organisations already well underway in terms of using cloud services, offers various additional services they can take up and advantageous pricing structures. 

“CCS provides commercial agreements which help organisations across the entire public sector save time and money on buying everyday goods and services,” said chief executive of the Crown Commercial Service, Simon Tse. 

“This agreement with AWS demonstrates excellent value for the public sector organisations we serve, and supports them in their drive to improve services for citizens across the UK.”

This is an agreement in the same mould as those struck earlier this year between the government and major cloud providers such as UKCloud, Google Cloud, and Oracle.

IBM, for example, struck an agreement that would allow public sector organisations to benefit from ‘preferential commercial terms’ when moving their workloads to the cloud. HPE, meanwhile, struck a deal with the UK government to provide hybrid cloud services on a pay-per-use model. 

In addition to the skills find, the AWS agreement specifically contains an element that hopes to encourage the uptake of services by smaller cloud providers and AWS partners. More than 150 members of the AWS Partner Network would be able to pitch their own services to public sector organisations, including many cloud-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). 

AWS has announced it will be launching a new Europe region in Zurich, slated for opening in the latter half of 2022.

Zurich will be the firm’s eighth region in Europe, alongside those Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, and Spain.

AWS currently has 77 Availability Zones across 24 regions worldwide with today’s announcement bringing the total number of global regions (operational and in the works) up to 27. AWS has already announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland, Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

AWS said that the new region will give Swiss customers the ability to run applications that must comply with strict data sovereignty requirements in Switzerland. It will also enable customers to run apps from data centres in the country, lowering latencies in applications across the region.

«For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organisations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs, and transform their operations,” said Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support at AWS.

«AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative startups, and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country.”

AWS opened its first Swiss office in Zurich in April 2016 and in 2017 it announced an Amazon CloudFront Edge Location and Direct Connect location in Zurich as well as a second office in Geneva.

AWS said it would continue to build up a team of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services to help customers in the country move to the cloud.

Microsoft Teams users will soon be able to hold interactive meetings with up to 1,000 participants.

The update, which was first announced in August, is now scheduled to become available in December 2020. It will allow users to add up to 1,000 participants in a meeting, allowing greater online collaboration across enterprises as numerous countries, including the UK, head for another lockdown.

Users will also be able to hold Teams meetings for 1,000 participants while also enabling up to 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience.

According to Microsoft’s 365 Roadmap, the feature is currently «In Development» and will be ready by the end of the year.

Users will be able to access the feature using the Advanced Communications add-on which was launched on 1 August 2020. The license costs $12 (£9.28) per user a month and is available as a free trial for 60 days.

With a 20,000-participant capacity, the plan made it possible for large enterprises to host meetings for the entirety of their staff, allowing Microsoft to take advantage of the heightened demand for video conferencing.

Microsoft Teams general manager Nicole Herskowitz said that the tech giant put emphasis on users’ meeting experience when developing the capability, «making sure that even as the meeting scales it is still easy to manage and listen to the speakers”

«Therefore, we limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants, with a seamless shift to a ‘view only’ mode after the limit is met,» she added.

Microsoft Teams has enjoyed an exceptional increase in popularity since the start of the pandemic, as many organisations moved to remote working environments due to lockdown restrictions.

On 28 October, Microsoft announced that the platform’s number of daily active users surpassed 115 million, a staggering increase of 95 million since the year prior.

Commenting on the announcement, corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said that the growth «reflects the continued demand for Teams as the lifeline for remote and hybrid work and learning during the pandemic, helping people and organizations in every industry stay agile and resilient in this new era”. 

Google Chrome is losing its share in the browser market to Microsoft Edge for the first time, according to new stats from NetMarketShare.

In its latest report for October 2020, Chrome usage decreased from 69.94% in September 2020 to 69.25% a month later.

At the same time, Edge increased from 8.84% to 10.22%. It is thought the increase may be because of Microsoft promoting Edge as part of its latest Windows 10 20H2 update with a taskbar ad that urges people to use the browser.

The report also found that Firefox gained a little ground on Chrome, edging up from 7.19% in September to 7.22% a month later.

In its operating systems report NetMarketShare found that Windows 10’s market share increased from 61.26% in September 2020 to 64.04% in October. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 share also decreased from 22.77% to 20.41% over the same period. Apple’s macOS 10.15 also declined from 5.11% to 4.88%.

Seperately, NetMarketShare signalled that it would be “retiring” its browser market report in its current form as an upcoming change in browsers will “break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time”.

It added that as it has focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process, but noted that “as time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day.”

It added that Netmarketshare will “re-emerge at some point with a focus on ecommerce trends and verifiable user data”.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of this year increased by 33% to $33 billion, according to new research from an analyst firm.

Figures from Synergy Research Group showed that the year-on-year growth rate for Q3 was higher than the 32% growth seen in the previous quarter. This, said analysts, demonstrated the health of the market.

The research found that Amazon and Microsoft continue to account for over half of the global market, with Amazon’s market share staying at around 33%, while Microsoft’s share was over 18%.

Google, Alibaba and Tencent are all growing quicker than the overall market and are increasing market share, Synergy said. Together they account for 17% of the market.

The other cloud providers in the top ten rankings include IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT and SAP. In aggregate, the top ten providers account for 80% of the worldwide market, with the remaining 20% coming from a range of small cloud providers or large companies with only a small position in the market.

«While we were fully expecting continued robust growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising,» said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. «Total revenues were up by $2.5 billion from the previous quarter causing the year-on-year growth rate to nudge upwards, which is unusual for such a large market.»

He added that companies competing for a share of the market have settled into three camps: «Amazon and Microsoft are in a league of their own, while others are either aggressively seeking to grow their position in the market or are more focused on specific services, geographies or customer groupings,» he added.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q3, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $32.8 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $119 billion.

The research firm also found that Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 35% in Q3.

The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more distinct in public cloud, where the top five control almost 80% of the market. Analysts said that the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

NetSupport Manager is a complete support system that you host on your own network. That doesn’t mean it’s limited to local connections, however: it’s fully capable of supporting remote workers over the internet, and on private wide-area connections. The remote access features are included in the price, and let you link remote offices and homeworkers to the main site with a choice of encryption options, including 256-bit AES.

Deployment is inevitably a little more complex than with a cloud-hosted support solution, but it’s still straightforward. To handle off-site connections, the gateway server component needs to be installed on a Windows PC that’s accessible over the internet, which you can achieve by port forwarding or by placing the host in your DMZ. You then just need to send the NetSupport client installer to remote users, along with a configuration file containing the details of the gateway server. 

Once the software is set up, it’s very secure, as the main server, gateway and clients must all possess the same security key, and an integrated firewall ensures that no unauthorised connection attempts can get through to your internal network. Session encryption is fully supported, and you can optionally restrict which technicians are able to access which remote systems.

Installation on local Windows clients is even easier: the Deploy tool can scan the local network and push the software to selected systems for automatic installation. macOS clients require manual installation, but NetSupport tells us it’s looking into ways of streamlining the process. 

All clients can be browsed from the Control console, whether they’re connected locally or over the internet. Systems are sorted into a tree view in the left pane, with dynamic grouping allowing you to sort clients by criteria such as operating system, hardware class and geographical location. Selecting a group shows all members in the opposite pane, and a monitor mode displays scalable thumbnails of each one’s screen, so you can watch user activity in real-time.

Connecting to a client is a cinch: double-clicking on its icon initiates a desktop session, while specific functions (such as file transfer) can be accessed from the dropdown menu, a row of shortcut icons or directly from the Control host’s Explorer view.

Once you’re in, the main View app shows you the client’s screen, with a ribbon bar at the top for fast access to a wealth of support tools. You can switch between controlling, sharing or passively viewing the screen, launch local apps, have text and audio chats, share clipboards, take screen captures and reboot the client.

There’s also a selection of useful extras. The free PIN Connect server allows a technician and user to instantly start a support session by entering the same unique PIN, meaning there’s no need for support staff to hunt through a long list of clients to find the right one.

Then there’s the file-distribution tool, which allows the operator to send a set of files to multiple clients in one go. The software also includes the facility to show your own screen to single or multiple clients – potentially useful for training. You can even capture recordings of control system activity, save them locally and replay them to clients.

A final welcome feature is an extensive inventory tool, which captures hardware details along with lists of hot-fixes, installed applications, processes and services – even allowing you to remotely stop, start and pause the latter.

SMBs that want the full spectrum of support options for both on-premises and remote users will find NetSupport Manager more than meets their needs. It offers a wealth of secure and versatile support features, and its perpetual licensing model takes away any worries about ongoing costs.

Kaspersky offers an endpoint protection answer for every business. Large firms that want total control can choose its on-site Endpoint Security for Business products, while smaller companies that don’t want to run their own host server have two cloud-managed solutions to choose from.

We tested Kaspersky’s Endpoint Security Cloud, which is managed entirely from a cloud portal and protects ten to 150 Windows systems and Macs. Licensing is flexible, with each user licence supporting one workstation, laptop or server, plus two iOS or Android mobile devices.

The standard service includes protection against all types of malware and ransomware, a client firewall, a network attack blocker and vulnerability scanning. There’s also a new cloud discovery feature that lets you keep an eye on email, file-sharing, messaging and social networking services being accessed by users.

If you need more, you can move up to the Plus version, which adds Office 365 protection, URL-based web filtering, endpoint device controls, encryption and patch management. The Plus service lets you block specific cloud services too, while the regular tier only monitors them.

We found deployment pleasingly simple: the agent can be downloaded and installed directly from the web portal, or you can email a download link to users. Either way, it takes around five minutes to set up, with a further 15-minute wait while the client registers its licence.

Once that’s done, protection starts immediately with a default security policy that enables everything Kaspersky has to offer. If you want to customise your coverage, it’s easy to create your own policies, organise clients into groups and grant admin rights to specific users. For Windows systems there are three levels of file and web threat protection on offer, and you can choose whether to scan emails for dodgy content and enable network threat protection. If you have the Plus version, you can browse all detected cloud services and decide whether to block any. Macs get file, web and network threat protection, but mail and cloud discovery are off the menu.

It’s a varied offering for mobile users too. Android devices benefit from antivirus protection plus web and app controls, while for iOS it’s more about access security: the portal lets you create APNs certificates, allowing you to choose what device features are accessible, set a screen lock and password policy, apply simple website keyword blocking and restrict which networks can be joined.

As you’d hope, the whole system is highly responsive to threats. When we tried introducing malware to some of our test Windows 10 systems, the local client blocked them immediately, with email alerts landing in our administrative mailbox barely ten seconds later.

The web portal is very informative. A graph displays the top five categories of cloud services in use and lets you drill down to see exactly who’s using what; our only slight niggle is that this took several hours to populate with details on detected services. Below, more graphs show device protection status, the OS spread, detected threats and the results of daily vulnerability scans. There’s a good set of predefined reports too, covering protection status, threats, database updates and cloud discovery, which can be exported in CSV and PDF formats.

If your business is of a suitable size, Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud is great value, especially since each licence includes protection for two mobile devices. The cloud discovery component can be a little slow, but endpoint protection doesn’t get any stronger than this and the cloud portal is very easy to work with.