​Google has become the latest organisation to ban videoconferencing app Zoom over security concerns.

The tech giant sent an internal email to employees last week, according to BuzzFeed, warning that Zoom’s app would no longer work on their laptops.

Zoom, which is a competitor to Google’s own Meet and Hangouts services, has seen a spike in usage following the coronavirus lockdown, but the mass adoption has brought greater scrutiny of the service and a number of security flaws have come to the fore.

The issues being reported with Zoom range from its standard of encryption to its resistance to hacking, but Google hasn’t specified which area it is concerned about.

«We have long had a policy of not allowing employees to use unapproved apps for work that are outside of our corporate network,» a Google spokesperson, told BuzzFeed. 

«Recently, our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards for apps used by our employees.»

Employees are still allowed to use the service to stay in touch with family and friends via a web browser or via mobile, but Google has added its name to a growing list of organisations – as well as entire countries – that have moved to ban the software.

The company has owned up to many of the faults it’s accused off. It’s CEO Eric Yuan suggested the company has simply moved «too fast» and were not able to put in place the required level of enterprise security. He also said the company’s new goal was to become a «security-first» organisation.

One of its first big changes in this regard is the removal of the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. This has come in an update to its Linux, Mac and Windows apps and follows on from reports of ‘Zoom bombing‘, where uninvited guests were crashing meetings.

The UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recently posted a screenshot of a cabinet meeting over Zoom – with the ID visible to his 2.2 million Twitter followers.

An organisation might start its venture into cloud in one particular area of its work. Perhaps there is a cloud platform offering support for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning or an Internet of Things (IoT) implementation that is useful for new product or service development, or for streamlining work with an existing product or service. 

Once cloud is established as beneficial in the area it has initially been brought in to help with, it often makes sense to see how it can be used elsewhere in the business. There might be other client facing areas of the business that can benefit, such as employing cloud based AI chatbots for end user engagement, or perhaps there are back-office areas where cloud might be useful such as accounting and payroll services, with AI features that can assist with and speed up monthly close.

A business-led approach

What’s important as use of cloud grows is to continuously view its implementation as business led, and not IT led. In the boardroom the Chief Data Officer role becomes central as they look for points where the agility of cloud can deliver benefits right across the business, while the Chief Finance Officer role might change fundamentally from constantly weighing up capital expenditure to focusing more on operational expenditure. Making those moves can ensure cloud is embedded in the business, but the question then becomes, how much cloud is enough, and how do you keep cloud provision in tune with an organisation’s needs?

Analysing how well cloud usage fits with current and potential future business needs might seem like a difficult thing to do. Getting it right will likely involve a mix of time-specific work around broad business planning and ongoing activity. 

In the former area, if the business is planning a new rollout and requires specific effort such as test and dev, research or fabrication, specific additional cloud resources might be required. In addition, Ramanan Ramakrishna, Cloud CoE Lead and member of the Global Cloud Leadership team at Capgemini, suggests organisations should take a look at cloud providers. He says that “on a quarterly to half yearly basis [companies] should look at the evolution of the PaaS and SaaS offerings from the leading providers and consider them for their cloud strategy,”, just to make sure they are taking best advantage of what’s on offer. 

Rob Greenwood, technical director at Cloud and DevOps consultancy, Steamhaus, tells Cloud Pro that outside of scheduled evaluations, those responsible for cloud within an organisation, right up to the Chief Technical Officer, should keep their ears to the ground in “an on-going process, constantly being aware of new releases and announcements from your cloud provider of choice and evaluating if and how these would supplement your current usage”.

Signs that you are under-provisioned

Amid all this checking on what’s out there and on what your own needs are, it is important to look a little deeper to make sure provision across the board within your organisation is adequate. Ramakrishna points out a few really useful warning signs that an organisation could be under provisioned. “Organisations where capital expenditure on infrastructure is rising year-on-year should analyse whether their cloud adoption is conservative,” he says, suggesting that “close attention should be given to ascertain whether the on-premise infrastructure is designed for handling peak volumes instead of a more optimal strategy of sizing for average volumes  and bursting into the cloud for handling peaks”.

“Another tell-tale sign is if small pockets of cloud purchases are being made from individuals within the business directly,” he says. “This might suggest a lack of coherent cloud strategy and hence cloud not being used in an optimal enterprise manner.”

Under provisioning cloud requirements in this way can have a negative impact on business growth, and here, again, the Chief Finance Officer and Chief Data Officer should work together to spot these tell-tale signs and leverage cloud appropriately to mitigate them. 

Mix your approaches for best results

Ensuring the business has enough cloud, distributed across the right parts of the organisation, is crucial to present agility and future growth. The strategy required to achieve this is mixed, and blends a range of approaches. 

There will be some forward-looking strategising to meet the ambitions of the business. There will be constant scanning of cloud provision technologies to identify areas where the business could benefit. These will combine with actively seeking out signs of under-provisioning, and ensuring that key leadership roles, most particularly the Chief Finance Officer and Chief Data Officer have eyes across the business. Together these strategies can ensure that the business not only has enough cloud, but is using that cloud to its best advantage.

Google’s flagship G Suite collection of cloud-based collaboration tools has surpassed six million paid business subscribers, while the usage of video conferencing Google Meet has surged 25 times amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

Around a million more organisations have taken up the paid-for iteration of Google’s suite of productivity apps since February 2019, a spokesperson from Google confirmed.

This is in addition to usage on Google Meets, the business-focussed iteration of conferencing app Google Hangouts, surging by 25 times since January. 

The latest stats were first outlined by the vice president and general manager of G Suite, Javier Soltero, speaking with CNBC

«The business of G Suite is growing at an incredibly healthy and, frankly for me, surprising rate,” Soltero told the news network. 

He added that millions of people working from home have boosted the adoption rate of Google Meet, which sits alongside Gmail, Google Drive and other services that comprise the G Suite.

Meets differs from Hangouts in that it’s only available to business users, while anybody with a Google account can use the consumer-focused Hangouts.

Services offered by rival developers, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, have also seen an explosion in interest. Zoom, in particular, has seen its popularity explode despite a string of security concerns, while Microsoft previously reported a massive rise in Teams usage in Italy, amounting to a 775% surge.

G Suite, which competes with Office 365, holds a much smaller market share against the Microsoft suite of workplace applications. 

Google has implemented a host of changes over the last few years in a bid to change its fate, for example, by rolling out voice commands, text suggestions and an AI boost in the form of Google Assistant, among other new features. 

The industry giant has also been keen to make inroads on the dominance of Microsoft Teams and its rival Slack, announcing plans earlier this year to combine G Suite services into a single mobile entity alongside communications functionality.

Under the plans, the entire G Suite collection of apps would combine into a single mobile entity, with a prototype of the app currently being tested internally.

In February, Paris Saint Germain were left stunned by 18-year-old Erling Braut Haaland during their 2-1 defeat to Borussia Dortmund. The striker shocked everyone with his winning goal, scored in the 77th minute, hitting the back of the net so hard the sound of it rattling was picked up by the TV broadcast.

Despite being at the start of his career, there is already a trove of data on Haaland, who has scored 11 times from 19 attempts for the German side. Indeed, there are huge amounts of data held on all professional football players in Germany by the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL) – the governing body that runs Germany’s Bundesliga football league – which recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

This is the first move from the football world to follow the likes of Formula 1, rugby and the NFL in using a range of machine learning, analytical and storage services from AWS. The DFL wants to build a statistical platform to provide viewers with real-time information on player statistics, game outcomes and even goal predictions. 

Andreas Heyden is the CEO of the DFL’s digital sports platform, which takes care of all media and technology within the businesses. He is also the EVP for business innovation for the whole DFL group, essentially putting him in charge of its digital transformation. This isn’t a digital transfomation story, however, as the DFL is already cloud-native. As Heyden tells Cloud Pro, this partnership with AWS is about doing more with their cloud. 

“The great thing about this collaboration with AWS is we did the deal after we were already transformed,” Heyden says. “So it’s not about taking our on-premises solutions and turning them into the cloud, we’re in the cloud and have had very good experiences with AWS. By December 2018, we’d turned off nearly all legacy systems, we are completely cloud-ready.” 

Instead, the DFL is looking to improve the fan experience and capitalise on the so-called ‘second screens’, primarily mobile phones and tablets, that compete for fan attention. To use this to its advantage, the DFL is looking to innovate in three key areas: AI, 5G and augmented reality. 

Virtual and augmented reality

Heyden and his team are firm believers that humans are curious; they want to know more than their eyes can see. He says this is especially true of Generation Z, who’ve grown up with the popular FIFA computer games where they get instant real-time data as they play. How this will look to fans of the real thing is still to be decided and as Heyden points out, it might not necessarily be a visual concept as such, maybe an audio alert on a users phone. But they are keen to use the data for prediction models.  

If there is a visual aspect, augmented reality will enable fans to use their phone cameras and see information points on the field. The holy grail, as Heyden puts it, is predicting goals, but perhaps the most likely scenario is machine learning models that calculate success from dead-ball situations, such as penalties and free-kicks. This was one of the use cases for AWS’ work with the Six Nations (before it was indefinitely postponed), whereby conversion success could be calculated based on the kicker’s history and distance from the goal. 

To date, the most relevant examples of this type of prediction model is the NFL’s Pro Football Focus website and the Next Gen Stats platform. For a number of years, American football fans have been able to see pass predictions for quarter-backs on second screens. They’ve had data-rich TV broadcasts as pundits have been armed with real-time information and insight from analytical services. AI, machine learning and analytics are in every corner of the sport, thanks to a very deep and successful partnership with AWS. 

Pro Football Focus

Strangely, this all began with one fan, in the not so NFL savvy town of Luton, England. Neil Hornsby’s Pro Football Focus (PFF) website is now based in Cincinnati, co-owned by former player turned star pundit Cris Collinsworth, and is used by every single NFL team. But it’s a far cry from its humble beginnings as one man’s obsession to talk about American Football in a country besotted with “soccer”. 

“Obviously, in the UK none of your mates at the gym want to talk about football, they want to talk about soccer,” Hornsby explains. “So I started this website to really begin a discourse with high-end fans in the States. But typical of me, I didn’t hit the marketplace quite right; I overshot it a little bit and ended up in 2009 getting a call from the New York Giants, asking for more of the data.”

He was sceptical at first, believing it to be a bit of a joke – but the Giants were absolutely serious. Hornsby was collecting data, by hand initially, as a hobby. He had collected a huge amount of technical data doing things cheaply, using everyday tools like Excel and free services like MySQL. At the time he couldn’t believe NFL teams weren’t actually collecting this data themselves. He carried on providing them with the data as a hobby until 2012 when the Giants won the Super Bowl. The Wall Street Journal ran a story before the game highlighting the use of PFF’s data, which caught the attention of the rest of the league. Since then PFF has become the biggest provider of statistical sports data and analytics in the world, largely thanks to the involvement of AWS.

“AWS came into this when Cris (Collinsworth) bought the company,” Hornsby explains. “I always used to laugh when people used to call us an analytics company, that’s what they use to sell to the math nerds and all that, because we didn’t do any of that. It’s only really over the last three years, where we’ve actively gone out to try and find some of the best analytics brains in the football community that we’ve become an analytics company and started to use machine learning to use this huge amount of data that nobody else has, to really start predicting where we are.

Unlike Hornsby and the NFL, the DFL has only just started to imagine what machine learning and analytics can do for its leagues. For Heyden this is an inevitable avenue the sport must go down to engage a more modern audience. 

“If you play FIFA or fortnight, you are used to getting this kind of data,” he says. “Gen Z is coming, we can’t stop them and we want them to enjoy the Bundesliga. But we must be tactful and careful not to overwhelm the traditional fan.”

After an influx of new users pushed Zoom’s market cap as high as $42 billion, its stock price has since dropped nearly 14.5% as of Monday, April 7. While the teleconference app faced a surge in popularity last month, it now faces concerns over its privacy and security. Several major organizations and school systems across the nation have begun discouraging and, in many cases, outright banning Zoom. 

The New York City Department of Education is one of many school systems that’s banned Zoom completely. The department oversees the country’s largest public school system and has encouraged its staff members to move away from Zoom as soon as possible. The department suggested its staff members consider similar platforms, including Microsoft Teams.

The New York City Department of Education isn’t the only organization discouraging the app’s use. In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees it would disable access to Zoom immediately. 

“We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support,” SpaceX shared in the email. “Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication.”

The coronavirus outbreak has revealed a myriad of privacy and security issues for Zoom users. The most notable incidents have been “Zoom bombings,” in which uninvited attendees access Zoom meetings to harass participants. These bombings highlight an educational gap among users, as many are using online meeting software for the first time. 

The unaware users were leaving their meeting open to bombers by posting their meeting IDs in public areas and faking to password protect their meetings. Unfortunately, Zoom’s meeting ID format appears to worsen user errors, as researchers found that hackers could use an automated tool to find unprotected meetings and essentially “war dial” Zoom meetings. 

In a recent statement, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom said the company “takes user privacy, security, and trust extremely seriously” and is “working around-the-clock” to improve user security. Yuan also said, “We recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations.”

IBM has hired former Bank of America chief technology officer (CTO) Howard Boville to head up its cloud business.

Boville, who will join the company as senior vice president of Cloud Platform, replaces Arvind Krishna, who was promoted to CEO earlier this year after Ginni Rometty stepped down from the role. 

In a LinkedIn post shared with employees, Krishna wrote that Boville, who spent eight years at Bank of America designing and running the company’s cloud services, «is a proven strategist and expert in the realm of cloud and has played a critical role in developing the financial services ready public cloud with IBM.»

Boville’s appointment comes after IBM last year announced it had designed a financial services-ready public cloud by collaborating with Bank of America. IBM said it would enable independent software vendors and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers to focus on deploying their core services to financial institutions with the controls for the platform already put in place.

In his LinkedIn post, shared on his first day as CEO, Krishna also said told IBM staff that in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, «now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud.»

«An essential, ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform our clients will rely on to do their most critical work in this century,» he said. «A platform that can last even longer than the others.

«The fundamentals are already in place. Our approach to hybrid cloud is the most flexible and the most cost effective for our clients in the long term. Coupled with our deep expertise, IBM has unique capabilities to help our clients realize the potential of a hybrid cloud business model.»

He added that IBM has «to win the architectural battle in cloud», noting that «there’s a unique window of opportunity for IBM and Red Hat to establish Linux, containers and Kubernetes as the new standard.

«We can make Red Hat OpenShift the default choice for hybrid cloud in the same way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the default choice for the operating system.»

Krishna also announced other leadership changes. Jim Whitehurst, in his new role as president, will head IBM Strategy as well as the Cloud and Cognitive Software unit, and Paul Cormier will lead IBM’s open-source software company Red Hat as its new president and CEO.

A seismic shift is coming to how businesses use communications technologies. As the roll-out of 5G accelerates, the internet and the networks it supports will transform as centralised data moves to the edge of the network, creating flexible communications systems with low latency.

The burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) space will also influence how data processing takes place on the edge of networks. Already, ‘edge datacentres’ are being built, delivering efficient services to end-users who are distant from the centralised datacentres. Data processing on the edge of networks will expand to support developing sectors such as autonomous vehicles, for example, that need low-latency communications to ensure they function safely.

Data networks in their current form are highly hierarchical. The expansion of 5G not only delivers new hardware infrastructure, but also a shift to large-scale network function virtualisation (NFV). This is coupled with software defined networks (SDN) that can be used with ‘network slicing’, enabling businesses to divide the 5G network in specialised channels for specific use cases.

Communications services industry body TM Forum explains: “Architecturally, the evolution to 5G may not be as dramatic as some of the other transformations, but when it comes to opportunity, 5G promises to be revolutionary if communications service providers, suppliers, application developers and enterprises can figure out how to co-create, manage and participate in digital ecosystems.”

Speaking to Cloud Pro, Martin Garner, chief operations officer at CCS Insight, says: “The key benefit of 5G is speed and latency. By doing the initial processing of a lot of the data at the edge, decision making can be done more quickly, and at a lower cost. For example, in a processing plant, there are huge benefits from automatically detecting anomalies in real-time.» 

He continues: “An additional benefit comes from the option to process relevant data locally and never allow it to leave the premises. This is true for many healthcare uses, where the information is extremely sensitive for personal reasons, and also for businesses that, for example, do not want to let commercially sensitive production data leave the factory. Some industrial sites even have an ‘air gap’, with no external data connection to the machinery, to ensure that local data stays local.» 

Edge networks will become the fundamental foundation onto which all intensive data processing services will be built.

Computing on the edge

While edge computing offers innumerable benefits, it needs a solid mobile communications infrastructure to support it.

“A fundamental goal of 5G is to enable virtual network slicing, as fully scalable, programmable and flexible networks are the future with 5G,” says Colin Bryce, Director of Mobile Network Engineering at CommScope. 

“Dividing the infrastructure into independent virtual networks enables operators to create an independent standardised layer above the control plane, from which they can deliver proprietary value-added services. Network slicing will be especially important for 5G network success, as mobile network operators seek to find effective solutions to manage spectrum while reducing costs. Virtual networks will allow for tremendous network efficiencies and provide operators.”

In its 2017 “Introduction to Network Slicing”, the GSMA said that slicing could be determined by function or behaviour. For example, in automotive one slice could be dedicated to a high bandwidth connection for delivering infotainment, while another “ultra-reliable” slice would be used for assisted driving

John Vickery, principal technology partner at BT, who explains that the edge could also be closer to home. 

“In an enterprise context where business customers have large quantities of data to process such as HD video, video analytics or machine vision, these requirements can be met by deploying an ‘on-premise’ edge capability at their business location,” he tells Cloud Pro. 

“This allows them to benefit from reduced backhaul costs (since they won’t need to send all their data to the core) and they also get the added benefits of low latency, reliability and data sovereignty. So, any investment in a network edge capability will also need to be balanced against growth in demand for ‘on-premises’ edge.”

How businesses slice up the available 5G network to fuel their needs and how edge computing will factor into their infrastructures remains to be seen. What is clear for all enterprises is the edge offer massive potential to finally use data processing and communications to deliver world-class services.

New data ecosystems

While edge computing using 5G may be something of an emerging technology trend, there are already a number of practical applications and use cases to consider.

In a recent research paper, Julian Bright, senior analyst at Ovum, said: “The incentive for edge computing to be deployed in 5G networks appears to be growing, and it is becoming increasingly important to the 5G business case. The first commercial deployments appear likely to start in 2020 in markets such as South Korea and China with others following soon after. Above all, MEC [Multi-access edge computing] can become a reality, particularly as more commercial 5G deployments begin to appear, services start to bed in, and yet more use cases start to emerge.”

As the infrastructure begins to develop as 5G rolls out, all eyes will turn to the costs of deployment and ongoing development. It’s clear that there is a data and communications imperative no business can ignore. 

In 2019, Barclays Bank conducted a study looking at the benefits and impacts 5G could have on businesses. It found that currently 59% of companies operate across disparate locations and need to communicate in real-time, 49% need to communicate with customers and fill customer orders online, 48% have to connect multiple machines together to run their business, and 43% say that customers expect it.

The report’s authors said that in light of these findings, “it’s obvious that 5G’s projected increase in speed and reliability will greatly benefit british firms. However, factor in the forecasts for future demand for mobile internet, particularly in the context of IoT and issues such as connecting multiple devices and customer expectations leap to the fore”.

This multi-channel approach is how 5G and edge computing services will be built. Once the new communications ecosystem begins to come into focus, more use cases will develop. It’s a heady time, as businesses can see the first signs of the shackles coming off their communications services. The edge could finally deliver the quantum leap in network design and management they have been waiting for.

Zoom’s founder and CEO has admitted his company made «missteps» that should have been fixed before the service became so popular during the coronavirus pandemic.  

Eric Yuan told CNN that the company had «moved too fast» and should have done more to enforce password and meeting room security. 

The service is currently seeing a spike in usage as more and more people are using video conferencing to connect to work colleagues, family and friends. Recent reports have suggested that Zoom is now more popular in the US than Microsoft Teams, with its user base surging from 10 million to 200 million in recent weeks. 

However, this has resulted in more scrutiny of the service as numerous security issues have come to the fore. From «zoomboming» to confusion over its level of encryption, Zoom has been dogged by security concerns, forcing its CEO to make public apologies. 

«During this COVID-19 crisis, we moved too fast,» he said. «Our intention was to serve the end-users, but we had some missteps. We should have done something to enforced password and meeting rooms and double-checked everything. We should have taken actions to fix those missteps.

«New user cases are very different from our traditional customer base where they have an IT team to support them. We’ve learned our lessons and we’ve taken a step back to focus on privacy and security.»

Yuan was tougher on himself in an earlier interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying that he «really messed up as CEO» and that he felt an obligation to win back user trust. 

Zoom’s internal criticism follows a troubling few weeks where a number of problems have plagued the videoconferencing platform. Most recently, its been the target of a hack known as ‘Zoomboming’, where unwanted guests invade a meeting.

Questions have also been asked about the level encryption the service offers, as it was recently revealed Zoom didn’t have end-to-end encryption between calls, despite saying so in its privacy policy. 

The issues have seen a number of companies and organisations drop the services, such as the FBI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Going forward, Yuan promised to make Zoom a «privacy and security-first company».