Torn between cloud-hosted and on-premises support? With Netop’s Remote Control you don’t need to choose one or the other. An annual subscription enables cloud-based support, which can be easily combined with on-premises services by adding a perpetual licence. 

If you’ve encountered the software before, you’ll note some new features in this latest version, including email notifications for connection attempts, 64-bit macOS and Linux agents, plus improved screen scaling for the browser-based client. There’s also a new optional add-on called Netop OnDemand, which supports on-demand connections and makes it possible to access iOS devices.

What hasn’t changed is Netop’s tough security measures. All sessions are 256-bit AES encrypted, and host installation packages can also be customised to only allow specific features, with multi-factor authentication optionally enforced. Once a connection is made, there are strict limits to what technicians can do: permissions can be granted on a per-user and per-group basis, or you can define and assign roles to restrict activities such as keyboard and mouse control, chat and file transfer.

Getting the agent onto Windows systems is a breeze. The web portal allows you to download the client installer directly or email a link to selected users; once the client has loaded, it provides always-on remote access, asking the user to explicitly permit connections when their device is unattended.

Mac users can be supported too, but setting this up involves some extra legwork, as the Netop host DMG package must be manually installed on each host. We also had to manually edit the host configuration file to add the Netop portal web address and account enrolment key. With this done, everything worked as expected.

When it’s time to start a remote session, support staff have the option of using a simple browser-based console, which provides basic remote control plus options to lock, restart or shut down the host. However, it’s the work of a few moments to download and install the full Netop Guest app: this can then be launched directly from the portal, giving you access to the complete range of features. Along with remote control, its ribbon menu offers file transfer, messaging, text and audio chat, remote command and application execution, Registry editing, plus keyboard and mouse controls. There’s also a Demonstrate tool that lets technicians share their screen with the host.

Since the Guest app connects to your portal account, you can also see and access all registered hosts from within its interface. If you’ve paid for an on-site installation, you’ll see a LAN connection profile within the Guest app too, allowing you to access hosts on the same network without going through the web portal.

While on-demand support isn’t included as standard, you can add it via the Netop OnDemand service, which costs £187 per technician per year. This snaps neatly into the web portal and lets you set up quick remote sessions with users who don’t have the Netop host software installed, protecting each session with a unique nine-digit code.

OnDemand also allows technicians to connect to iOS devices, once the user has installed the iOS app and entered the requisite security code. As usual, Apple’s strict security model means you can’t take remote control of an iOS device, but the app allows a technician to view its entire screen and guide the user through problem-solving steps. 

Businesses with evolving needs will appreciate how Netop Remote Control gives you the freedom to choose cloud-based, local and hybrid support. It would be nice if Mac deployment were slicker, but once everything’s in place, the software is easy to use, well stocked with features, and reassuringly secure.

There’s no shortage of online backup solutions for SMBs to choose from, but BackupVault stands out thanks to its simple pricing scheme. The price is based solely on how much data you want backed up to the cloud, so you pay a predictable monthly fee with no nasty surprises.

Don’t confuse this with competing services that charge according to how much storage your data takes up once compressed. That can be good value, but compression ratios are dependent on the type of data you’re working with, and the provider is under no obligation to use the most efficient algorithms – so your outgoings could fluctuate significantly from month to month as your backup needs evolve.

Prices for BackupVault start at £24 per month for 50GB, and you can add capacity at any time in increments of 100GB, which get cheaper as you move up the scale. The standard service includes round-the-clock UK telephone support and a rolling 30 to 60-day retention period for all file versions, with backups older than 31 days automatically deleted on the first day of the following month. If you need more than this, you can pay a 10% supplement to upgrade to a 12-month retention period.

For small offices with one server and a few PCs, the BackupVault client can be installed on each system and configured locally. For larger deployments, BackupVault also offers a free central management console app that provides remote client access, system recovery and bare-metal restore services. To get set up you just need to enter your host name, account password and encryption key. It’s imperative that you keep a record of this key, as it’s needed to restore your data and BackupVault has no access to it.

The client interface is easy to use, showing you both local and network storage and allowing you to choose what you want to protect. You can back up individual files and folders, entire drives or complete systems, and extra options become available if certain apps or services are installed. On our Hyper-V host, an additional tab appeared for VM backups, while our Exchange and SQL Server hosts had tabs for the relevant apps. The software let us click to select individual SQL databases for backup, although when it came to Exchange we were only able to select entire data stores because BackupVault doesn’t support message-level backups.

Backups can be run on demand or scheduled at regular intervals, and for hybrid strategies you can copy data to a secondary location – such as a local NAS appliance – as well as your cloud storage. If you have a large amount of data to protect, you can hit the ground running with a free vault-seeding service, which lets you send in your first set of backups on encrypted USB media, rather than waiting for it all to upload over the internet.

BackupVault passed our restore tests with flying colours. The recovery procedures are easy to use and we’re big fans of the InstantData feature, which uses a combination of sparse files and a proprietary kernel driver to greatly reduce the wait time to access files stored in the cloud: we found that this allowed us to start working on recovered files just a few seconds after the restore process had started. We also tried restoring a 2.4GB MP4 video file from the cloud using InstantData and, while playback was quite jerky, we were able to skip to any part of the video and view it within 20 seconds of starting the restore. With conventional restore methods over our fibre broadband connection, we’d have been looking at a wait of around 90 minutes before being able to open the file. 

Lastly, there’s a handy option to restore your files to a local virtual drive, meaning you can check back on older versions without replacing current ones or creating potentially confusing duplicates.

BackupVault Cloud Backup is a fine choice for SMBs, providing easily managed data protection services and almost instant access to your backed-up data – and its simple pricing structure keeps storage costs under control as well.

Solarwinds’ Dameware Remote Everywhere lives up to its name, with a hosted design that allows technicians to reach out to users no matter where they are. Its pricing model is simple too: a £355 annual licence lets one technician support up to 500 endpoints, with additional licences enabling more concurrent sessions. That makes it great value for companies of a certain size, although those with smaller headcounts will very likely find other options more cost-effective.

Deployment starts at the web portal, where you create accounts for your technicians and set privileges for each one, determining which tools they’re allowed to use. Technicians can also be assigned to particular departments, which allows support requests to be automatically routed to the right person.

The web portal also hosts the client software for Windows, Mac and Linux endpoints, to which you can apply profiles determining what features are available. A master password option lets you restrict access to the agent, and endpoints can be set to automatically lock when unattended sessions finish.

Technicians, meanwhile, get their own personal console app. From here, they can browse and connect to any endpoint that has the agent installed, and launch on-demand support sessions for systems that don’t have the software. Note that there’s no way for end users to initiate an on-demand session themselves: the technician has to make the first move. 

After that it’s plain sailing. Once the correct six-digit PIN is provided, the on-demand applet fires up and opens the remote access session, automatically removing itself when either party disconnects.

In both on-demand and always-on sessions, technicians get access to the fully featured desktop console, with tools for file transfer, remote Registry editing and the option to switch between the desktop view and a command prompt. Support staff can also share their own screen with the user, start audio or video calls and tell the endpoint to reboot, restart or shut down. Sessions can be recorded too, with video uploaded to the web portal’s reports section.

While the Dameware control software is richly featured, there’s no browser-based alternative, as offered by most other products. However, technicians can use a mobile device to provide support when away from their desks, via the iOS and Android apps. We tried this on an iPad and had no problem logging into a technician account, browsing endpoints, connecting for remote control and creating on-demand sessions. 

You can provide support to users on iOS devices via the Dameware Remote Support app – although, as expected, this provides only remote viewing, and doesn’t let support staff take control of the device.

Alongside all of this, Dameware lets technicians extract detailed system inventories from connected devices, including hardware configuration and serial numbers, network addresses, installed applications and Windows updates, both pending and installed. Reporting options are extensive too, with the portal showing session histories that can be filtered for details such as session IDs and user names. And if you want to check on technician performance, you can even send out surveys to ask end users about their experience.

Dameware Remote Everywhere’s pricing won’t work for every business. However, for larger organisations with a few hundred endpoints to look after it’s an excellent package, delivering an impressive range of secure support features that are easy to manage and use. 

BT has rolled out Facebook Workplace to enable enterprise-wide internal communications for 80,000 employees, as businesses put emphasis on new ways of interaction due to lockdown restrictions.

The telecoms giant told IT Pro that it previously used various social networking platforms, including Microsoft’s Yammer, before deciding to unify and simplify its communications channels. It started the deployment of Workplace in July 2019.

Facebook Workplace, which was launched in 2016, now connects 80% of BT employees through chats, Groups, and video across all parts of the organisation in 54 countries.

The B2B communications platform is being used to connect BT employees, including external employees at Openreach and engineers, enabling them to stay informed while working in the field. 

BT’s director of Internal Communications Helen Willett said that “Workplace was a simple choice for BT”, describing it as “mobile-friendly, easy to use and intuitive”.

“But more than that, it’s culture-enhancing. Leaders can talk to their teams in a matter of seconds and the peer-to-peer benefits include enabling a sense of belonging, instant access to news and a way to solve problems collaboratively.

«Perhaps most importantly, having Workplace has made it so much easier for us to stick to our principle of ‘inside out’ – letting our colleagues know what’s happening, increasing trust and, in turn, advocacy. Sometimes we have a matter of minutes to reach our people – Workplace allows us to do that, and to do it well,” she added.

So far, BT has seen an avalanche of involvement from its employees, with three million reactions and a further 970,000 comments on Workplace.

BT CEO Philip Jansen said that the platform is allowing the company to aim for a “fast-paced, inclusive and empowering” future. 

“We’ve seen many benefits including being able to share news instantly, gather feedback on subjects that our people care about, and enabling more authentic leadership communications,” he said, adding that the platform has also “strengthened” the company’s communities across BT and Openreach.

“Through Workplace, colleagues connect with each other on the things that matter, sharing ideas and problem-solving together in real time. That is hugely beneficial to our colleagues and customers, and therefore to BT as a whole.»

Microsoft has pledged to ‘re-invent’ customer relationship management (CRM) software after partnering with Adobe and enterprise AI company c3.ai to launch a new platform to take on the market dominance of Salesforce. 

C3 AI CRM is powered by the core functionality of Dynamics 365 and is combined with Adobe’s real-time customer profiles and journey management, as well as c3.ai’s industry-specific AI capabilities. 

The AI-driven CRM platform is purpose-built for specific industries and uses data from any source to produce meaningful business insights. The collective claims that conventional CRM is not sufficient for the modern age, given that AI can’t be used to analyse much of the data because they weren’t built with the appropriate architectures.

The three-way partnership represents a major challenge to Salesforce, which enjoys dominance in the CRM segment, and follows reports last week that Microsoft was making CRM a “priority”. SAP and Oracle are also big players in the CRM space, with Adobe and Microsoft following the pack with conventionally only a fraction of the market share.

“C3.ai, Microsoft, and Adobe bring together the perfect combination of technology, industry, and domain expertise to address the requirements for a new generation of CRM,” said c3.ai CEO Ed Abbo.

“Importantly, in addition to this combination of leading technologies and expertise, we share a common vision with our partners of an AI-first, industry-specific approach to delivering a new generation of AI CRM solutions.”

The announcement builds on a pre-existing partnership between the enterprise AI firm and Microsoft, with c3.ai also contributing its technology to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams earlier this year.

The three companies claim that C3 AI CRM will allow clients to better anticipate their customers’ needs and deliver more satisfying and personalised user journeys. The level of intelligence brought on by AI functionality, for example, could allow for more accurate forecasts, for example. Massive amounts of data can also be analysed to augment human agents or trigger automated processes in the CRM platform.

Microsoft claims that its technology has an expansive and unmatched footprint, combining Dynamics 365 business applications with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Microsoft Power Platform, powered by Azure. Microsoft hopes that when combined with Adobe’s speciality in the digital customer experience, and the AI capabilities of c3.ai, the combined system will offer customers a powerful alternative to the biggest players. 

Zoom has started rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to both free and paying users. 

E2EE is now available in technical preview on the Zoom desktop client version for macOS and Windows, the Zoom Android app and Zoom Rooms, with the Zoom iOS app currently pending App Store approval. 

Zoom’s E2EE uses the same 256-bit AES-GCM encryption that secures Zoom meetings by default. Account administrators can enable the feature in the web dashboard at an account, group, and user level, and participants must also enable the feature to join a meeting with end-to-end encryption.

When E2EE is enabled, nobody except each participant – not even Zoom’s meeting servers – has access to the encryption keys that are used to secure the meeting.

However, the company has warned that at least in the first stage of the four-phase rollout, E2EE will block certain Zoom functions, including cloud recording, streaming, live transcription, Breakout Rooms, polling, 1:1 private chat, and meeting reactions.

“End-to-end encryption is another stride toward making Zoom the most secure communications platform in the world,” said Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan.

“This phase of our E2EE offering provides the same security as existing end-to-end-encrypted messaging platforms, but with the video quality and scale that has made Zoom the communications solution of choice for hundreds of millions of people and the world’s largest enterprises.”

Phase 2 of the E2EE rollout is «tentatively roadmapped» for 2021, according to Zoom. 

The rollout of end-to-end encryption comes five months after Zoom initially announced plans to add support for the security standard. However, at the time it said it would only be available for businesses and institutions that pay for a premium Zoom subscription. Following backlash from users and privacy activists, Zoom backtracked two week’s later and announced that it would make E2EE available to both free and paying users. 

Software giant SAP saw its market valuation drop by €25 billion (£27.8bn) after it announced plans to go «all-in» on cloud computing during its third-quarter earnings call. 

The German firm is on track for its worst trading day in 12 years, according to CNBC, after slashing its revenue forecast for 2020.

Fearing that lockdown restrictions would affect demand for its business relations and customer management software into 2021, the tech giant has announced plans to go «all-in» on cloud computing. The announcement means that SAP is abandoning medium-term profitability targets which could take longer than expected to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

«As the CEO of SAP, I have to be focused on the long-term value creation of this company,» SAP CEO Christian Klein told CNBC‘s «Squawk Box Europe» on Monday. «So I cannot trade the success of our customers and the significant revenue potential of SAP against short-term margin optimisation.»

Investors reacted badly to the announcement, dumping shares and wiping €25 million off SAP’s market value. However, some will point to a year of turmoil following the exit of long-term CEO Bill McDermott and the less than successful ‘tandem’ leadership that ended in April when Klein became the company’s sole CEO. 

At that point, with the coronavirus pandemic starting to hit global operations, SAP had focused on medium-term «ambition» which was favoured by McDermott on the estimates that it would lead to profit margins growing by at least a percentage point up to 2023. 

The change, however, effectively means that profit margins will stagnate over the next three years. But cloud revenue, from subscription-based services, is now expected to triple to €22 billion by 2025. As such, total adjusted revenue is being forecast at €36 billion with an operating profit of €11.5 billion.

Oracle has launched its next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMWare and Kubernetes.

The dual-region infrastructure, comprising two separate sites in London and Wales connected by Oracle Cloud’s high-speed network backbone, will allow public sector bodies to deploy cloud services in multiple regions with ease. 

Bodies can use Oracle’s infrastructure to deploy not just disaster recovery services, but cloud hosting and storage of data from within the region.

The company’s partnership with the public sector has expanded in recent times to service organisations such as the Home Office and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), and local government organisations. 

The private dual-region cloud will also allow public sector customers to take up additional services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Oracle OCI services, as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud applications. 

«We’ve had a Government Cloud Region in the UK for several years, but today’s announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud,» said Richard Petley, senior vice president with Oracle UK and Israel.

«This is a completely unique offering to the UK government – no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today. We’ll be working with all aspects of government – both local and central – to help them understand how they make use of the cloud to deliver better services and value to the UK taxpayer.»

The platform has been designed in collaboration with several UK government and national defence organisations, and adheres to the security requirements set out by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Oracle claims. This allows various organisations to handle and transmit sensitive information through the private cloud network.

The company’s second-gen cloud is built specifically to help large organisations and enterprises run the most demanding workloads in a secure way and is built to run autonomous services. These include Oracle Autonomous Linux and oracle Autonomous Database.

The increasing complexity of enterprise cloud environments and the rise of hybrid cloud is rapidly increasing IT workloads and fuelling a rising demand for automation, Puppet’s CTO has claimed.

During a time when many organisations are being asked to do more with less, the shift from mostly on-prem to a mixture of cloud environments in a relatively short space of time has radically complicated the workloads of CIOs. 

Speaking exclusively with CloudPro on the launch of Puppet’s automated Comply platform, Puppet CTO Abby Kearns suggested the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures over as little as the last five years is serving as the main element driving demand for automation.

«The hybrid cloud, and managing across hybrid environments, is the number one driver, honestly, because it’s so complex,» Kearns said. «So many companies started about five years ago to move workloads to the cloud, so we started to see that slow migration, but the cloud wasn’t really set up to mimic the way we were managing on-prem environments.” 

Enterprises now have an on-prem environment, a public cloud deployment or perhaps even multiple clouds, with different tools, different workloads and different approaches all in play. Businesses are also using more cloud-native applications and more microservices, so the landscape for IT standards compliance is becoming far more complex.

Puppet’s Comply automation platform is a system designed to cut out many of the traditionally manual processes IT teams and CIOs would manage when ensuring their hardware meets a range of compliance standards. 

The product, which will be offered in addition to a compliance automation consultancy service the company already markets, would allow customers to manage their own automation programmes across their IT estate.

Alex Hin, Puppet’s principal product manager, told CloudPro the platform will raise IT visibility, identify compliance shortcomings and remediate these issues.

He explained the need for such software comes from small teams of three to five people suddenly being tasked with making configuration changes on hundreds of thousands of nodes, either on-prem or on the public cloud. This becomes a high investment for the company, requiring a lot of spend and a lot of expertise for all environments to move into compliance.

«That’s really where it comes into play,» Kearns continued, «the idea that automation is really the only route to be able to do that. Because this isn’t just something where you can assign more people to the work. You can’t just throw more people at the problem, you’re going to have to figure out how to automate this as you start to get into the hundreds of thousands of workloads. It’s just a different kind of scale.»

Puppet\s Comply platform will launch in the coming weeks with pre-integrated compatibility with the CIS benchmarks, and further plans to integrate a number of other compliance standards in future. These will extend to include many common standards from DISA, FedRAMP, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

The drive to automate, Puppet hopes, will begin to free up time for many organisations that are trying to do more with less, particularly as a result of economic pressures due to COVID-19. One example of a process that Comply will automate is the ‘desired state configuration’ feature. This essentially automatically reverts any configuration changes to a ‘desired state’ if the system detects that the change has led the system to deviate from the particular standard to which it’s adhering to. 

«For us, we’ve spent the last six months really investing in a platform-centric approach and the opportunity to really extend into compliance and really build on those capabilities are really powerful for us and our customers,» Kearns added. 

«And that’s something we’re going to spend the next several years really continuing to expand on, and really continuing to drive innovation from an automation standpoint, but also from a compliance standpoint as we see those things go hand-in-hand for our customers. “

A surge in attention Slack enjoyed at the start of the pandemic, that led to thousands of new paid customers, appears to have now dissipated, according to analysts, as customers appear to now be turning to rival products instead.

The communications platform has been unable to maintain the same levels of growth as that enjoyed by the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, prompting Morgan Stanley analysts to downgrade Slack’s stock to the equivalent of a selling rate, according to CNBC.

Slack shares closed down 6.3% after the downgrade. The comms platform hasn’t seen the same rapid growth as Zoom, which reportedly saw revenues increase 355% in Q2.

«Massive work from home demand for collaboration tools may end up doing more harm than good for Slack,» the analysts wrote, according to CNBC. «We see higher risk at current levels.

«In many cases, Slack did not have the opportunity to properly pitch its differentiation, and in our view, the customers that have standardised on Microsoft Teams are not looking back.»

In March, CEO Stewart Butterfield posted a lengthy tweet about the company’s reaction to the pandemic and its sudden uptick in paying customers. According to that note, by the mid-point of the first quarter of 2020, Slack had added 7,000 new paying customers, rising to 9,000 a week later. In previous quarters the average was around 5,000 new customers, suggesting that the company would be a beneficiary of the so-called ‘new normal’.

Most companies that provide technology or software to aid remote working saw some level of increased adoption in the first quarter of the year and that continued into the second quarter and beyond. Slack, however, saw its growth peak on 3 June, with its stock falling 28% in the following months.

What will hurt more, however, is how far Slack has fallen behind Microsoft Teams. The two companies are fierce rivals but Microsoft’s more holistic service helped it secure some 44 million daily active users in March. Those users have largely stayed with the service, according to Morgan Stanley’s analysts.

Slack has filed an anti-competition complaint against Microsoft, arguing that Teams is a ‘weak’ product that is forced upon Office 365 users as part of the bundle.

This complaint has only been raised with the EU and it has yet to be acknowledged.