Articles about Cloud

In the second of our (hopefully) regular competitions, we have quite a treat for you. You've read the headline so you should know what's up for grabs, but if you missed it, the prize is a year's subscription to Office 365 Home worth $99.99.

Microsoft has very kindly donated a full subscription for us to give away, but this is more than just one copy of the world-famous office suite -- you can install Office 365 Home on up to five PCs or Macs, as well as five tablets. Enough for all the family!

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In a lengthy interview with the Guardian, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden spoke with editor Alan Rusbridger about his extraordinary rise to infamy. Currently in exile in Russia, he talked about how he disseminated documents about the activities of the NSA to numerous countries: "Once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it". He remains defiant. He may be an outlaw but "it’s been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said it’s true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our government’s doing in our name and what it’s doing against us".

He explains how during his time working as an NSA analyst, he learned about previous surveillance programs run under George W Bush. Programs that were deemed unconstitutional and, having been closed, forced the US government to assume new executive powers that were then used "against the citizenry of its own country".  For Snowden the power of the state is worrying:

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As businesses face new challenges from employees use of public cloud services along with demands to allow BYOD use, they're increasingly looking for ways to monitor and control the activity of staff on the web.

We spoke to Brian Azzopardi, founder and CEO of web filtering specialist Rawstream about how enterprises can meet these new demands and why existing products aren’t always up to the task.

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When Microsoft discontinued support for XP it left a large number of businesses, around 25 percent, needing to make a transformation of their IT environment.

As well as switching to a new desktop OS many are also moving applications to the cloud, changing hardware and introducing BYOD. In order to help IT decision makers with these choices, Israel-based software analytics specialist SoftWatch has introduced a new SaaS product.

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Cloud storage service Dropbox has detailed a new partnership with mobile operator Deutsche Telekom, that will result in its Android app being preloaded on the majority of devices sold in certain parts of Europe by the German company and its subsidiaries.

This partnership also impacts Deutsche Telekom's current customer base, who will be helped to "discover" Dropbox. The Android devices that will come preloaded with the app will be available, starting in October, in Central and Eastern European markets.

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There are a number of reasons why businesses might move data to the cloud. To reduce storage costs, improve accessibility or simply reduce the need for on-site equipment. But how can you be sure that moving data to the cloud is the correct decision?

We looked at how businesses can approach this earlier today. Now archiving specialist DocuLynx is using the Microsoft Worldwide Partnership Conference in Washington to launch a new product aimed at making cloud storage decisions easier.

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Last night, Germany won against Argentina in the World Cup 2014 final. It was a good game, with, dare I say, an expected outcome for those who watched both teams closely during the competition. But, for tech enthusiasts, there is a second winner, and that is Microsoft's Bing.

Through the Windows Phone 8.1 personal assistant, Cortana, Bing predicted the winners in 15 out of the 16 World Cup 2014 games in the knockout stage. It only failed to foresee that The Netherlands would win against Brazil in the fight for third place. This remarkable achievement shows to prove that, contrary to what some might believe, Bing really has what it takes to shine when the pressure is on.

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Three quarters of UK businesses are now officially "in the cloud" in one form or another. The universal, horizontal benefits of agility and utility are undeniable and compelling, but businesses still need to be able to translate these into competitive advantage.

Getting the most from your cloud investment can be a challenge. The fact is that not all clouds are created equal, and depending on your drivers, required outcomes and preferences, some will be a far better fit than others.

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When we talk about surveillance online, it is almost always with reference to the NSA and activities in the US. But US citizens are far from being the only web users affected by surveillance. The NSA has long arms, but there are also similar activities going on in plenty of other countries. This week in the UK, the government is pushing through legislation that requires phone and internet companies to store information about customers' communication, and to hand it over to authorities on request. What made this particularly unusual was the fact that this was classed as emergency surveillance legislation with little to no debate and, more importantly, no public consultation whatsoever. Edward Snowden has plenty say on the matter, likening the British government to the NSA.

The legislation covers not only UK-based companies, but also those based in other countries who have gathered data about UK customers. It is in direct opposition to a recent European court ruling that said retention of data was a violation of European law. This in itself would be reason for any surveillance-related laws to be debated, but the government chose instead to use emergency measures -- usually reserved for times of war or disaster -- to push through laws it knows will prove unpopular. As we are now used to hearing, the surveillance is not about recording phone calls, or storing individual emails and text messages, but about retaining the related metadata -- who contacted who, when, for how long, from where, and so on.

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Cloud storage is an increasingly popular way of storing and sharing data, but when using public services there's always a concern about how safe your information is.

But now a new startup aims to provide controlled sharing of data via an intelligent private cloud network. Sher.ly integrates your existing hard drives into a private, tightly controlled cloud network. Rather than have to send out open links to files or share copies across a public cloud, organizations and individuals can have the security of invite-only, limited-access file-sharing that keeps data on the devices that produced it.

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Seventh in a series. I ask because the user experience can't be this bad. Can it?

My "Microsoft All-In" experiment continues, and on Day 10 I must finally gripe about Xbox Music, which experience on Windows Phone 8 is pretty good, while the desktop app really sucks. I've got Pass, which should be as much about music discovery as streaming. I see some of both, but nowhere as much as core competing services, on Nokia Lumia Icon, while Surface Pro 3 disappoints. If I'm missing something, please correct my perception and also assist anyone considering Xbox Music.

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We're all familiar with software licenses. It's the bit you ignore when installing a new program, right? But what's less understood is the difficulty they cause for businesses. New research by IDC sponsored by Flexera looks at the latest trends in software licensing, virtualization and the compliance issues involved.

The report points out that the software license supply chain is one of the most opaque, difficult to understand and complex to manage. As a result, the relationship between application producer and customer has often suffered in the past.

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Complex IT systems arise for many reasons, adding new systems to old ones, expansion through mergers or takeovers, or simply demand for more sophisticated solutions.

But a new study by IDC, sponsored by business software specialist Oracle, concludes that IT complexity leads to lower profits and curbs an organization’s ability to innovate and grow.

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We already knew that the dragnet style of data collection employed by the NSA resulted in a huge level of collateral damage. As revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden the agency had been intercepting huge amounts of web traffic -- often with the assistance of web firms -- on an almost unbelievable scale. The NSA has tried to improve its public image by playing the national security card, as well as releasing a "transparency report" but there's no getting away from the fact that countless innocent web users got caught up in the net. But an investigation by the Washington Post reveals the true extent of the impact on the average internet users -- and it's far worse than many thought.

A four-month investigation by the newspaper found that the number of average internet users who had their data intercepted far outweighs the data of targeted individuals. And not just by a bit -- by a factor of nine. Data provided to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden shows that an astonishing 900 percent more innocent users than intended targets fell victim to the NSA's surveillance. (For the purposes of accuracy the exact figures are closer to an 11 to 89 percent split). These are staggering revelations. There has already been very vocal opposition to the NSA's activities but these were essentially "blind" complaints. Without knowing the scale of operations, it was difficult to know just how upset to be. Nine out of ten people who had their data collected were nothing more than collateral damage caught in the extremely wide net cast by the agency.

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The revelations about Facebook's emotional experiment with users' newsfeeds back in 2012 has seen the social network fighting off a torrent of criticism. Users were upset to learn that the content of their newsfeed may have been manipulated as researchers tried to determine the effects exposure to positive and negative newsfeed content had on users' subsequent output. Now an official complaint has been lodged against the social network by thee Electronic Privacy Information Center. Epic filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission, alleging that "the company purposefully messed with people’s minds".

There are several lines of attack in the complaint, but the main thrust is that Facebook neither obtained permission from the 700,000 affected users, nor informed them about what was happening. Epic also complains that Facebook failed to warn users that their data would be shared with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California. The complaint points out that "at the time of the experiment, Facebook was subject to a consent order with the Federal Trade Commission which required the company to obtain users' affirmative express consent prior to sharing user information with third parties".

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