Atos and Google Cloud have teamed up to create an AI Lab in London, which will offer a place for private and public businesses to identify new use cases for the tech across a range of sectors.

The idea is to enable businesses to find new opportunities for AI and also encourage developers to come up with new solutions to business challenges.

For example, one use case could be using connected sensors for improving the supply chain, while another could be using AI to reduce fraud in financial services.

“The opening of this first AI Lab marks a new era in enterprise transformation and opportunity,” said Adrian Gregory, CEO, Atos UK & Ireland.

“In combining the advanced capabilities of Atos and Google Cloud AI technology, organizations will have access to compelling solutions acting as a springboard to growth in an evolving, digitally focused marketplace.”

Atos’ AI Lab will be open to both private and public sector organisations and will be completely sector agnostic. Both businesses hope that as well as outing the UK at the forefront of AI development, it will also build London and the UK’s Bank of highly skilled AI workers.

As part of the partnership, Google Cloud will be Atos’ preferred cloud provider.

“The new AI labs from Atos will be a valuable resource for European businesses wanting to take advantage of Google Cloud AI capabilities,” Paul Emsley-Martin, head of SI Partnerships at Google Cloud added. “This is a great next step in our partnership with Atos, and we are delighted to continue working with Atos to bring Google Cloud AI, infrastructure, machine learning and collaboration tools to enterprises worldwide.”

Digital transformation is big business. That much is a fact. But how to move from theory to reality still poses a massive headache for many organisations, large and small. 

But, with disruption happening across all organisations in all sectors, there’s never been more of a need to digitally transform to ensure current and future success. 

Indeed, research firm IDC predicts that worldwide spending on digital transformation will surpass $1 trillion in 2018 – up nearly 17% from last year. But it’s about more than just throwing money at the problem. Business and technology professionals need to have a solid strategy in place and ensure they’re working with the right partners and using the right tools and technologies. 

The HR and finance functions lie at the heart of digital transformation, but with people invested – quite literally – in legacy solutions, it can be hard to make the transition from A to B. 

If you’re struggling to join the digital dots or just want reassurance you’re on the right path, we’re here to help. Join us for a live panel discussion, where we will show you have to truly achieve organisational agility and digital transformation success.

Moderated by Dennis’ B2B editorial director Maggie Holland, with input from Dave Sohigian, EMEA CTO at Workday and Steve Brooks, an analyst at Creative Intellect Consulting, the discussion looks set to debate and digest many of the key topics of concern and interest to decision makers today.

Discussion points will include:

• Why cloud-based technologies are the right platform for digital transformation.
• How to get buy-in from key stakeholders needed in the change process.
• How large businesses can be as agile as smaller players and how small firms can scale and grow without constraint.
• How to marry your business vision with your employee and customer expectations. 
• How improved data flow and insight can help you make better decisions much more quickly and deliver greater market understanding.
• How to avoid common digital transformation and cloud migration pitfalls.

You can sign up for the webinar here. 

MongoDB has announced that it will fully acquire mLab for $68 million by the end of the fourth quarter of their fiscal year ending 31 January 2019.

The New York-based database firm noted acquisition will help deepen its relationships with developer-centric start-up communities, a segment with which mLab has been very successful.

San Francisco-based mLab started in 2011 and manages over 900,000 databases across three major cloud providers in 43 data centres worldwide. MongoDB acquired the Californian company with the ambition to build on its position in the database services segment of the ever-growing cloud market.

“MongoDB represents a dramatic sea change in how application developers work with data,” said Will Shulman, CEO at mLab.

“There is a trend towards building software systems via microservices and deploying those systems in the cloud. As this trend continues, we anticipate it will open enormous market opportunities for global cloud databases, and MongoDB will be well positioned to power these types of software systems in ways that other database technologies cannot. We are very excited to come together with MongoDB to modernize the way companies store and manage their most valuable asset – their data.”

MongoDB was founded in 2007 by Dwight Merriman, Eliot Horowitz and Kevin Ryan and provides a range of database services, including Atlas which was released in 2016.

Atlas is the company’s main general purpose database which automates complex and time-consuming administration tasks using its built-in operational and security practices. The acquisition with mLab hopes to benefit that service in particular.

“Atlas has seen tremendous momentum in its first two years since launch, growing over 400 percent year over year in the second quarter of this year. This reflects the popularity of MongoDB in the public cloud and the desire by many customers to consume MongoDB as a service,” said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO at MongoDB. “The mLab acquisition will give us the ability to scale Atlas even faster.”

IBM has launched a service for organisations that can integrate hybrid cloud services and on-premise business systems into a simplified interface.

Called ‘Multicloud Manager’ and operated via the IBM Cloud, the service aims to help businesses manage and integrate workloads from other public and private cloud providers, such as Amazon or Microsoft, via an operations console.

Multicloud Manager also makes uses of the Kubernetes container orchestration technology to make it easier to and cheaper to move and manage across both cloud and on-premise environments. An integrated compliance and rules engine helps to ensure those applications remain compliant with security standards.

Prompting this new service, a report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that 85% of companies use more than one cloud environment and the hybrid cloud/ on-premise IT model has been a popular choice for many organisations. A report from 451 research suggested that UK firms spent more on the cloud in the past three years than they did on data centres.

«With its open source approach to managing data and apps across multiple clouds, the IBM Multicloud Manager will enable companies to scale their many cloud investments and unleash the full business value of the cloud,» said Arvind Krishna, SVP, IBM Hybrid Cloud.

«In doing so, they will move beyond the productivity economics of renting computing power, to fully leveraging the cloud to invent new business processes and enter new markets.»

IBM expects its new service to be a game-changer for modernising business around the world by integrating multiple cloud services via one simple to use interface.

As an example, if a car rental company uses one cloud for AI services and separate cloud for booking systems, and also financial processes via on-premise computers, ‘Multicloud Manager’ can work across the different computing infrastructures to enable customers to book a car fast via the companies mobile app.

«The old idea that everything would move to the public cloud never happened,» said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, IDC. «Instead, the cloud market has evolved to meet the needs of clients who want to maintain on-premises systems while tapping a multitude of cloud platforms and vendors. The challenge for this approach is integration. Many IT companies have been talking about multi-cloud, but to date, the user experience has been fragmented.»

CCleaner – still developed by Puriform, but now owned by Avast – was one of the most highly recommended free software tools around, until this summer when the great junk-remover became such a ghastly junk offender that even its own parent company withdrew its latest version.

Can our old favourite ever be trusted again? Here we answer your questions and look at the best free CCleaner alternatives.

What did CCleaner do wrong?

The trouble began in May, when CCleaner 5.43 added two pre-ticked boxes: ‘Allow usage data to be shared with 3rd parties for analytics purposes’ and ‘Show offers for our other products’. You couldn’t untick either of them unless you paid for an upgrade. CCleaner’s June release (5.44), duly spammed users with pop-up adverts for a ‘Summer Sale’.

CCleaner 5.43 displayed tick boxes for data-collection and ads that you couldn’t untick

Then came the infamous July release (5.45) which removed both Privacy tick boxes, but continued to opt you into data-gathering and adverts. What’s more, CCleaner now kept running after you closed the program window, and its Active Monitoring process had become impossible to switch off.

CCleaner 5.45 removed tick boxes for ads and data collection, but opted you in anyway

Users speculated that Active Monitoring, which claims to look out for temporary files, was being used to track you. Why else would CCleaner be so reluctant to let you close it?

«Somebody over at Piriform REALLY REALLY wants you to enable monitoring whether or not you like it» said one of many furious users on the Piriform Community Forum.

Didn’t GDPR ban that kind of thing?

Indeed it did. According to the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which came into effect on 25 May, consent is not valid if: «There was no genuine free choice over whether to opt in; you use pre-ticked opt-in boxes or other methods of default consent (or) people cannot easily withdraw consent» (see the ICO’s website for more information).

CCleaner 5.44 still tries hard to stop you switching off Active Monitoring – click Yes to ignore it

So by greying out its Privacy tick boxes, and then removing them completely, it appears CCleaner failed on at least three counts to meet required standards for consent.

The one reassurance is that CCleaner’s free edition doesn’t update automatically, so you may be using an older version that does let you opt out. Sticking with outdated software isn’t usually the safest policy, but this mess shows it can pay to wait for any problems to emerge before jumping into a new version.

What did CCleaner have to say for itself?

Avast, which bought CCleaner’s developer Piriform last year, spent the summer unleashing defensive drivel that ranged from empty cliches («Your privacy is very important to us») to patronising filibuster («In order to answer that question») via oodles of self-important jargon about analytics, aggregation, anonymisation and «underlying mechanisms». Here’s 400-odd words of it.

That statement, released by Avast on 6 August, admits («as part of our ongoing mission», sigh) that version 5.45 «introduced some features… aimed at providing us with more accurate data». So they’re tracking your moves more closely than ever. And, as we know, the data is then shared.

The statement goes on to insist data-gathering is «a separate function to Active Monitoring», but doesn’t say how it’s carried out. Next, Piriform says it’s working on a new version of CCleaner, in which data-gathering and Active Monitoring will be separate. Hang on, didn’t they just say these were already separate? Avast seriously underestimates its users’ intelligence.

Hours after the statement appeared, it emerged that Avast was ditching version 5.45 and rolling back to 5.44 until the next version is ready.

Meanwhile, Avast has defended its prying by saying the info it shares is «essentially anonymous» (look for ‘Laurence Piriform’ on the forums). But anonymity does not make spying OK. If someone’s snooping on your home but they can only see your silhouette and don’t know your name, they’re still snooping.

Is CCleaner OK to use again?

At the time of writing the official version is 5.47. It lets you switch off Active Monitoring and close the program easily, and you can also now untick the ‘Allow usage data’ box.

So if you really want to stick with CCleaner, install 5.47 from www.ccleaner.com then tweak your privacy settings immediately. Go to Options, Privacy, and then untick ‘Allow usage data to be shared…’. Now go to Options, Monitoring, untick ‘Enable system monitoring’ and then untick Enable Active Monitoring. Click Yes in the pop-up that tries to talk you out of it (see screenshot).

Whether that makes it OK to use again, we’re not so sure. If you share your doubts, it may be time you tried an alternative.

What should I use instead?

Your easiest option is Windows’s built-in Disk Clean-up tool, which can remove gigabytes of temporary files, caches and old Windows updates. You can also set Windows 10 to automatically remove temporary files when space is low. Go to Settings, System, Storage and then switch on ‘Storage sense’.

Away from Windows, open-source tool BleachBit is the most powerful free alternative. There’s no fuss or flash; just tick what you want to clean, then follow BleachBit’s advice (it warns you if some files are slow to clean, and if others are worth keeping – browser passwords, for example). You can add many more programs to the list for really deep cleaning. The installable version adds a ‘Shred with BleachBit’ option for obliterating sensitive files, while the portable version runs on Windows XP and later.

Other alternatives include System Ninja, whose free version includes a duplicate finder, and ATF (All Temp File) Cleaner, a free, portable program designed for Windows XP, Vista and 7 – and still works.

To get previous versions of CCleaner click ‘Download Now’ at OldVersion.com

If you pine for the days when CCleaner got to work without rifling through your drawers, you can install editions going right back to 2004 from OldVersion.com.

Google has split up its G Suite cloud identification tool from the rest of its enterprise services for developers, so they will be able to integrate it into their own services.

The company’s Google Identity, which was built on the BeyondCorp framework was previously only available as part of the entire G Suite ecosystem. But there’s apparently a lot of demand for it to work outside of the range, so Google will now launch a beta of Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners (CICP) on its Cloud Platform.

The product will allow developers to integrate identity and access management for apps and services without having to move away from the GCP environment or enlist the help of a third party.

“We’ve had a lot of success internally with the model and what we’ve received good feedback from customers, but they wanted to use it (Cloud Identity and BeyondCorp) throughout the organization and as a standalone product,» Karthik Lakshminarayanan, product management director at Google Cloud Platform.

It’s an authentication service with integrated automated threat detection, built on scalable infrastructure that makes it the ideal environment for businesses already using GCP to develop their apps and services.

So why has Google only just decided to split its cloud identity tool away from the main G Suite set of tools?

“Expectations have changed,” Jayachandran told VentureBeat. “Users expect agile, mobile work environments across multiple devices, and it’s reshaping how we think about security, access, and control. Admins want to give them this modern, forward-thinking experience, but they don’t want security to be compromised. The perimeter has disappeared.”