Google Cloud has acquired businesses intelligence platform Looker for $2.6 billion (£2bn) as it looks to further boost its data analytics services for multi-cloud customers.

Looker will be integrated into Google Cloud‘s analytics and data warehouse services, such as BigQuery and its customers will still be able to use any cloud data management they like, such as Amazon RedShift, Azure SQL or Oracle.

The deal, which was the first major acquisition of Thomas Kurian’s reign as CEO of Google Cloud, was first announced in June, but it couldn’t be completed till now as it was subject to a probe from the UK’s competition watchdog.

The competition and Markets Authority (CMA) reportedly ruled that the deal would not adversely impact competition with regard to the market for data analytics tools and software. As both Google and Looker were not close competitors, the CMA didn’t feel the deal would result in increased prices and affect organisations that use business intelligence tools, according to Reuters.

«Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are – be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on-premises,» said Kurian.

«As more organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata.»

The deal is actually the result of a four-year partnership between the two companies, according to Looker CEO Frank Bien, who said that it will give his firm better reach and strengthen its resources.

«Looker partners can expect to continue to work with us as they have before,» Bien wrote in a blog post. «We expect that our award-winning support team will not only continue delivering an exceptional chat support experience but will also be bolstered by the additional resources and global presence of the Google Cloud team.»

Oracle has stepped its cloud-focused partnership with Microsoft up a notch by focusing on enterprise interoperability with a new interconnect facility based in Amsterdam.

Given Amsterdam is a strategic European datacentre hub for Oracle, this new location will help companies in the region who use technology from both companies to be able to more easily share cross-application data and move on-premise workloads properly to the cloud, according to the tech giant.

An example cited by the company was the ability for a business to be able to run Windows-based apps on Azure connected to Oracle’s Autonomous Database or Exadata on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“Our customers have understood what cloud means. They’ve made use of our cloud and some of our competitors’ clouds. It’s started to pique real interest in whether they can apply that to [enterprise] workloads,” said Andrew Sutherland, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud in EMEA, at the firm’s Oracle OpenWorld Europe (OOW) event in London today.

“The understanding of cloud and benefits is no longer a push by Oracle. It’s a pull from the market.”

Sutherland said that the creation of the Interconnect was done directly to cater for customers who use both Azure and Oracle solutions, adding “Our job is to overcome the hurdles and we’re doing that at great speed.”

Mestec, a firm that helps manufacturers optimise performance, is one such customer giving a warm reception to news about the latest phase of the Oracle/Microsoft partnership.

“We wanted to build a SaaS-based solution manufacturers could subscribe to.  That’s done great things for our customers, but it pushed the responsibility for the resilience of the infrastructure onto us,” said Mark Carleton, chief operating officer (COO) of Mestec. 

“The next generation was to move to PaaS. The obvious choice for us in terms of database was Oracle Autonomous Database. We’ve also had experience in Microsoft .NET. We were able to port that to Azure in less than a day…We made those [technology] decisions before Oracle and Microsoft announced their partnership… It vindicated our decision.”

Making use of the combined power of both for its smart factory solution – which is reliant on high-performance cloud infrastructure and databases – Carleton believes Mestec will be able to reduce its infrastructure and management costs by 50 percent while at the same time benefitting from a whopping 500 percent boost in performance.

“By connecting Oracle and Azure, we’re able to rapidly introduce innovative technologies into our solution, ultimately resulting in a better, smarter solution for our customers enabling them to make dramatic improvements in manufacturing performance,” he added.

Datacentre and connectivity investment remains a key focus for Oracle. It has plans to add further interconnect locations in Asia and the US West Coast as well as regions dedicated for public sector customers in the US.

In terms of datacentre growth, ambitious plans previously outlined continue unabated, according to Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud.

“Our focus is to make it as simple as possible for our customers to move to the cloud,” he said.  

“We continue to expand our datacentres. We announced at OpenWorld [in San Francisco] that we were going to almost double our datacentres. We have been opening them at a click of one datacentre every 23 days. By the end of this year, we will have 36 regions available covering the entire globe. It’s a massive investment to meet the demands of our customers.”

Fujitsu has agreed on a deal with Thales to integrate the security firm’s cloud and encryption services into its own portfolio to expand its security offerings to customers in Europe.

Thales’ Cloud Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and Key Management services will be adopted by the Japanese tech firm, with a view to bolstering its public key infrastructure (PKI) based services.

The security company’s Cloud HSM service, Data Protection on Demand, will be used by Fujitsu within its core security infrastructure in order to provide businesses with a more secure key management service.

The decision to opt for Thales technology lies in a need for Fujitsu to raise the level of security in its existing customers’ infrastructure and to remain compliant with regulations, the company said.

The security firm’s Cloud HSM service offered a cost-effective way to provide customers access to a Microsoft certification authority-based PKI regime.

“We’re always looking to ensure our customers have access to the very best security solutions on the market and this partnership with Thales offers exactly that,” said Fujitsu’s security offering architect, Petri Heinälä.

“One of our customers, a leading European pharmaceutical company, is already benefitting from our adoption of Data Protection On Demand. The client needed to shore up their key management practices, with increased healthcare regulations related to data protection, data privacy and audit controls.”

The partnership has also been strengthened with the launch of an enterprise data encryption service that uses Thales’ key management platform.

The companies claim this platform ensures effective compliance with data protection legislation while offering a secure means of encrypting sensitive business data.

This new service will form part of Fujitsu’s Data Protection suite of services and will be made available to customers across on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“Data protection is a clear priority for many businesses as they fight to prevent breaches and comply with increasing regulatory requirements,” said Thales’ vice president for encryption solutions, Todd Moore.

“Protecting core assets such as identities and data using encryption and PKI management should now be the minimum security posture for every organisation.

“It’s vital that managed services providers are able to respond to the changes quickly, efficiently and affordably, while meeting the security requirements head on.”

The average salary for a UK tech worker increased by 13% in 2019, jumping to £74,000 per annum, according to recruitment site Hired. 

Software developers now earn £37,000 more than the average British worker, according to Hired’s State of Software Engineers report, which looks at 2019’s software engineering roles around the world and the programme languages they use.

UK developers saw a larger wage increase than any other tech hub around the world, even beating San Francisco which saw a 6% jump year-on-year.

Search engineers in the famous Bay Area still get paid the most, though, with an average wage of $157,000 (£122,000).  

The three best-paid developer roles in the UK were for embedded engineers, who earn £82,000 on average, blockchain engineers, who earn £81,000 a year and computer vision engineers who also get paid around £81,000 per annum. 

Global demand for Blockchain engineers has increased by 517%, according to the report, while gaming engineers saw the biggest wage increase in both London and San Francisco. 

Other software developer roles that saw an increase included machine learning engineers, which ranked in the top ten highest-paid jobs for most of the hubs listed, with an average salary of £101,000. 

«While salaries for software engineers continue to rise globally, the UK led the way in 2019, cementing the country’s place as one of the world’s top tech hubs,» said Gordon Smith, European GM at Hired. 

«To continue this unparalleled growth in the UK, employers, aside from offering competitive salaries, need to ensure that understanding what top talent want from their jobs is the main priority for hiring managers.»

Google’s Go is the world’s most in-demand coding language, according to the research, but JavaScript came out on top for most use. Although TypeScript is the most popular programming language in San Francisco, Toronto and London, while Ruby was more favoured in New York and Go in Paris.

AWS has requested testimony from Donald Trump as part of its appeal against the Pentagon’s decision to award its JEDI contract to Microsoft.

This was revealed through court fillings, which were made public on Monday, and state that Amazon’s cloud division has asked a federal court for permission to take testimony from the US president who allegedly used his position to influence the final decision.

AWS was seen as the favourite to win the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, but was left stunned as Microsoft was awarded the 10-year project in October.

The cloud giant announced it was going to appeal the decision a month later and suggested that the US commander and chief, Trump, had interfered with the bidding. Monday’s court filings show that AWS wants the President to explain his involvement in court.

«The clear, public record of the commander-in-chief’s personal animus toward Amazon and Mr Bezos, his campaign pledge to ensure that Amazon would ‘have problems’ if he became president, and his unprecedented interference in the JEDI award process with the DoD leadership team all demand that DoD’s errors be assessed in light of a full record of that bias and pressure,» the company said in the court filing.

«Accordingly, AWS seeks discovery and supplementation that are narrowly tailored to include the public record of bias and to develop facts not currently known or accessible to AWS demonstrating exactly how President Trump’s order to ‘screw Amazon’ was carried out during the decision-making process.»

A year before the final decision was made, it’s alleged that Trump called his Pentagon Secretary James Mattis and directed him to «screw Amazon» out of a chance to bid on the JEDI contract. This is according to Mattis’ book «Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis«. The account was written by Guy Snodgrass, who served as a speechwriter for Mattis.

Collaboration is an increasingly powerful tool, with Forbes recently proclaiming the transition from the information age to the collaboration age. 

In modern businesses, collaboration refers to bringing employees and business partners closer together, strengthening their working relationships. It cultivates an environment wherein expertise and knowledge is shared, creating a hotbed for innovation and growth. 

It’s also critical in other ways. Employees expect to be equipped with tools that allow them to collaborate without friction, no matter where they are located, using the devices which are most useful to them. Neglecting this business requirement could make it difficult to retain and attract talent. 

Cloud technology is a great collaboration facilitator. By acting as the foundation of the modern, digital workspace, the cloud allows users to connect and work more cohesively, both within the business and with external partners.

Employee communication

As speed and agility are critical to business demands, the ease at which internal employees can communicate is very important. Cloud technology allows team communication to be instant and robust, with chat-based workspaces displacing archaic email systems and enabling employees to collaborate on team projects.

Better communication between employees at all levels allows ideas to be easily shared, resulting in higher participation levels across projects. All members of the team have an equal opportunity to contribute, empowering employees and making for a healthy working environment.

File sharing

No matter how quickly employees can digitally communicate, if the IT infrastructure isn’t in place to support workflows, all that will get done is lots of chatting and no actioning.

In business, file transfers are the process which gets things done. The daily transfer of files and documents between external systems and external partners has become so prominent that it’s now classified as a core business process. One that, without the right technology in place, can be laborious and unreliable.

Cloud-based file sharing enables instant access to files, no matter where the team is located. It’s also able to manage larger files, such as audio and video that email servers don’t have capacity to accommodate, as well as eliminating the need for physical files. 

The fact that 80% of IT professionals are reported to have received file sharing requests via the cloud, displays how organisations are already using the cloud to ease collaboration in this way.

Remote working

Digital workspaces created by the cloud are allowing employees to connect and work in new ways. Boundaries are being deconstructed and focal points decentralised, making for a more balanced enterprise. Even employees’ locations are redistributed.

This is the remote working phenomenon. With cloud computing, employees can work anywhere, at any time, permitting collaboration between colleagues without the restriction of having to be in the same physical space. 

A wider pool of talent is created for the business to select from as geography is no longer a factor, and on the employee’s side, goes some way to improving their welfare; all feeding positively into productivity levels.

Employees are also empowered to utilise the devices they hold a preference for. Whether they need to operate on a tablet, a desktop, or on a phone on-the-go, cloud computing provides the flexibility to work with what suits them and their specific tasks the best.

Improved customer service

All initiatives within an enterprise are to some degree steered towards improving the customer experience. Cloud technology can store information on clients, ongoing sales, business intelligence, and so on, all with the aim of making it easier for employees to access shared information and communicate with one another.

Investment into a CRM system which integrates smoothly with existing applications permits further collaboration across departments within the sales and marketing process, creating ease which feeds back to the customer. This level of collaboration can power a more agile business, within which are responsive, better-informed teams capable of meeting changing customer demands.

​The National Portrait Gallery was targeted by 347,602 emails containing spam, phishing and malware attacks in the last quarter of 2019, a freedom of information (FOI) request has revealed.

Over half of the emails, 194,620, were identified as being directory harvest attacks (DHA), a technique used to harvest valid email addresses belonging to employees and associates of the gallery, according to data collected by think tank Parliament Street.

The gallery also blocked 61,710 emails from senders flagged as belonging to a «threat intelligence blacklist». A further 85,793 emails were intercepted as they were believed to have contained spam content – which is anything from unsolicited marketing to serious phishing and malware. According to the figures, 418 of the emails contained a virus of some kind.

«These figures paint a worrying picture of the volume of malicious email attacks designed to trick unsuspecting staffers into handing over confidential data such as passwords and log-in credentials,» said Andy Heather, VP of security firm Centrify.

«The National Portrait Gallery is an incredibly popular destination for tourists, attracting millions of visitors and members every year, which unfortunately makes it a top target for hackers and cyber criminals seeking to use legitimate, often stolen, credentials to gain access fear of detection.»

Stolen employee credentials are a global problem for all businesses. Last year, figures from Google’s Password Checkup report suggested that 1.5% of all sign-in attempts were being made using details compromised during a data breach.

«Addressing this threat means ensuring a zero-trust approach to employee communication, ensuring suspicious emails are spotted and full checks are made so that managers can be sure all staffers are who they say they are,» Heather added.

In 2017, London art dealers were defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds after hackers successfully breached company email accounts to monitor correspondence between clients. The incident resulted in fresh cyber security guidance being issued by the Society of London Art Dealers, as well as tips for avoiding email fraud.