Articles about Cloud

Over the weekend, Microsoft post an article on its Azure blog announcing that there had been an astronomical 775 percent surge in the use of its cloud services. Despite the massive increase in traffic, the company added, uptime was good. But the blog post wasn't entirely correct.

Since we published a story about the claims, Microsoft has contacted us to say that it had not been "was not as clear as they intended to be with the previous statement". The company has provided updated stats explaining what it meant to say -- and it's rather different.

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This weekend, Microsoft has given an insight into the impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on its services. The company says that there has been a huge increase in Teams usage, and there are not over 44 million daily users.

In regions where there are isolation and home sheltering orders in place, Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services. Despite the surge in demand, there have not been any significant service disruptions.

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Next Tuesday is World Backup Day and to mark the event AOMEI is offering a 12 month free subscription to its Backupper Professional product. The offer is available from now until April 2nd.

With more people working at home on their own machines due to the Coronavirus, security and protection of data is more important than ever.

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Cloud storage company Storj Labs is launching a new decentralized service aimed at storing data more efficiently and providing additional revenue-generating opportunities for storage node operators.

Called Tardigrade -- in case you were wondering a tardigrade is an eight-legged water dwelling micro animal (or if you've watched 'Star Trek: Discovery' a sort of massive space-travelling flea) -- it offers cloud object storage that's S3 compatible, high performing, easily implemented, exceptionally durable, and with high availability.

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The cloud has revolutionized making it easy to build, launch, and scale a service. That's driven a wave of spending on the major cloud providers, as made evident by the latest earnings reports from Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), and Google (Google Cloud). Microsoft just reported 62 percent QoQ growth for Azure, AWS brought in nearly $10 billion for Amazon in Q4 2019, and Google reported cloud earnings for the first time in January.

Companies of all sizes are clearly investing billions on the cloud and there doesn't seem to be a ceiling. Gartner predicts that by 2022 overall cloud spend will reach more than $330 billion, and that number grows every year. But at the same time, current estimates reveal that billions of this spend is the result of needless and wasted outlay. A recent survey of companies that spend at least $5 million on the cloud annually found that a vast majority (69 percent) regularly overspend on their cloud budget by 25 percent or more.

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A new survey of over 300 enterprise chief information officers (CIOs) shows that more than 90 percent expect the pace of digital transformation to increase in 2020.

The report from Flexera shows that customer experience is the top driver of digital transformation efforts with 69 percent rating it very important, but only 36 percent considering themselves very mature in this area.

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As enterprises make more use of widely-available analytics engines such as Presto, Apache Spark SQL or Apache Hive, they often run into inefficient data formats and face performance challenges as a result.

Open source cloud data software company Alluxio is launching a new Structured Data Service (SDS) that will allow developers and data scientists to benefit from a more simplified data platform that enables connections to different catalogs for access to structured data, with less copies and pipelines and more compute-optimized data.

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A new study reveals 30 percent of businesses estimate they lose between $100,000 and $1 million per year as a result of integration-related issues such as data errors, technology impediments, or SLA violations.

The report from cloud platform Cleo shows 10 percent claim to lose $1 million or more on an annual basis from such causes. As for productivity costs, nearly half (46 percent) say it takes them a month or longer to onboard a new trading partner, causing slowdowns in their business.

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Migrating to the cloud is an increasingly popular option for businesses, but to be successful the data involved needs to be in good shape.

We spoke to Kevin Kline, principal program manager at SentryOne, to find out why the quality of data is so essential to successful migration and what businesses need to do to ensure their migration succeeds.

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What do IT executives think the world is going to look like in five year’s time? To find out INAP presented several five-year predictions to 500 IT leaders and infrastructure managers to collect and analyze their opinions.

Among the findings are that 81 percent agree that AI and machine learning will mean most common data center and network tasks will be completely automated.

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Malwarebytes is today launching a new set of enhanced enterprise features for its business cloud platform, Malwarebytes Nebula.

The platform offers cloud delivery and management across the entire Malwarebytes’ product portfolio including Incidence Response, Endpoint Protection, and Endpoint Detection and Response. Native capabilities include guided UI, threat reporting, and simple API integrations, which enable security teams to overcome gaps in team experience and bandwidth.

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Digital criminals are increasingly pivoting to the network after initially attacking an endpoint or publicly accessible cloud. Indeed, a network foothold enables attackers to move laterally to more valuable cloud workloads. They can then steal their target organization’s sensitive information and monetize it in whatever way they deem fit.

Many of us are fighting back against the threat of lateral movement by augmenting our visibility over the network. However, we’re constantly running into challenges in the cloud. When using AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or Azure Virtual Networks (VNets) to detect threats in network traffic, for instance, we’re missing packets’ application-level context. We thus can’t detect the malicious activity that hides within them. In this post, we will discuss why achieving visibility into the cloud continues to pose a challenge. We’ll then explore how we can gain the requisite level of visibility in the cloud.

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As businesses move into the cloud and expand their use of IoT devices, protecting their systems becomes much more complex.

To address this problem Cisco is launching a new integrated cloud-native security platform, Cisco SecureX, aimed at improving visibility, identifying unknown threats, and automating workflows to strengthen customers’ security across network, endpoint, cloud, and applications.

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There's a growing trend towards data breaches caused by cloud misconfigurations, leading to 33.4 billion records being exposed in breaches in 2018 and 2019, amounting to nearly $5 trillion in costs to enterprises globally, according to a new report.

The study from cloud security and compliance specialist DivvyCloud finds the number of records exposed by misconfigurations rose by 80 percent from 2018 to 2019 and this trend is expected to persist.

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Enterprises are moving more of their workloads to the cloud in order to enhance their agility and responsiveness. But in the rush to develop new applications security can sometimes take a back seat.

Today Tufin is launching SecureCloud, a security policy automation service for enterprises that need to gain visibility and control over the security posture of their cloud-native and hybrid cloud environments.

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