Cloud

Increasingly businesses don't have all of their secondary data and apps in one place. Instead they are spread across multiple locations in house and in the cloud.

Storage specialist Cohesity is launching a SaaS-based management solution that empowers customers to see, manage, and take action on their secondary data and applications globally.

As systems move to the cloud companies are faced with increased complexity and the need for flexibility. In addition there are roadblocks including intensive data migrations, reliance on legacy systems, and security and regulatory concerns.

Information management company M-Files is launching a new information management system that enables organizations to flexibly combine cloud and on-premises deployments with a single user license and without having to lock into one model.

Facebook and Google have struck a deal that benefits WhatsApp users. Starting later in the year, users will be able to store WhatsApp backups on Google Drive without using up any of their storage space.

The new arrangement means that WhatsApp users now essential have unlimited storage space available to them free of charge. But the company has also issued a warning that people need to take action if they want to avoid backups being deleted.

Previously only available to OneDrive for Business users, Microsoft is now rolling out OneDrive folder protection to everyone.

Also referred to as "known folder move" -- and rather copying the Backup and sync app from Google -- OneDrive folder protection makes it possible to back up your important files and folders to the cloud. Here's how to get started.

As businesses shift their systems to the cloud there is inevitably an increase in complexity that makes maintaining security more of a challenge.

Security policy management specialist AlgoSec is launching a new version of its Security Management Solution to enable policy management across clouds and software-define networks.

Google now has its own hardware security keys -- the Titan Security Key. These FIDO-compatible keys include Google firmware that verifies the integrity of security keys at the hardware level. The Titan Security Key offers secure hardware-based two-factor authentication, and is available to Google Cloud customers.

The keys are similar to those offered by Yubico -- so similar, in fact, that the company has gone out of its way to stress that it is not manufacturing the devices for Google.

Microsoft reported its Q4 earnings for the year, and the company posted extremely strong results helped in large parts by the performance of its cloud services and Surface business. The company far-exceeded analysts' predictions for this quarter, with revenue of $30.1 billion, net income of $8.8 billion and earnings per share of $1.14.

Microsoft's continued move to the cloud is paying off. Revenue in Intelligent Cloud increased by 23 percent to $9.6 billion, while Azure revenue growth rocketed by 89 percent, and Surface revenue went up by 25 percent as talk turns to the possibility of a Surface Phone.

SaaS management platform BetterCloud is launching a new activity-based alerts solution for Google to strengthen security for G Suite applications.

The solution enables organizations to continuously monitor event-related activity for malicious or unauthorized behavior, and automates security responses to rapidly address security risks.

Microsoft has announced that it has formed a strategic partnership with retail giant Walmart to help "make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers around the world".

The five-year deal between the two companies will see Walmart making use of Microsoft's cloud technology solutions such as Microsoft 365 and Azure. The retailer already uses some Microsoft services, but with the new partnership this expands into cloud tools that use machine learning and artificial intelligence.

A new report finds that 86 percent of businesses describe their cloud strategy as multi-cloud today, with performance and innovation rising above cost savings as the top measures of success.

In addition the report, produced by Forrester for enterprise cloud specialist Virtustream, reveals that 60 percent of enterprises are now moving or have already moved mission-critical applications to the public cloud.

There's a new version of Ubuntu on the block -- Minimal Ubuntu. It's been stripped right back to the bone to leave a tiny footprint, and these back Linux distros  should boot 40 percent faster than a standard Ubuntu server image. Despite the reduced footprint size, Minimal Ubuntu retains all of Ubuntu's standard tools (such as ssh, apt and snapd) and maintain full compatibility.

Designed for cloud developers and ops, Canonical says that the release is intended for completely automated operations, and as such much of the user-friendliness has been stripped out, but it's still ideal for used in KVM, Google Computer Engine and AWS.

Timehop -- the social network for those who like to reminisce -- has revealed that it fell victim to a security breach on Independence Day. The attacker managed to access an internal database stole the personal data of 21 million users from Timehop's Cloud Computing Environment.

The vast majority of those affected by the "security incident" (as Timehop refers to it) had their names and usernames exposed, but for nearly a quarter of them -- 4.7 million -- phone numbers were also exposed. The hacker also took access tokens which could be used to view users' posts.

Public cloud services can be affordable for many enterprise applications. But achieving the same service levels that the enterprise data center delivers for high availability and high performance for mission-critical applications can be quite costly. The reason is: high availability and high performance, especially for database applications, both consume more resources and that costs more money -- sometimes considerably more.

Is there a way to make public cloud services equally, if not more, cost-effective than a high availability, high performance private cloud? Yes, but that requires carefully managing how the public cloud services are utilized by each application.

Google has announced a new storage option for developers using Google Cloud Platform. The new Cloud Filestore is due to launch in beta next month, and it provides a managed NAS in the cloud.

Google describes Cloud Filestore as a "managed file storage for applications that require a file system interface and a shared file system", and the aim is to offer higher performance to users that need it than the existing options do.

Traditional Hadoop-style big data is giving way to cloud and container solutions like Docker, according to the results of a new survey.

The State of Data Science survey, carried out by Python data science platform Anaconda, among over 4,000 of its users, shows that Docker now makes up 19 percent of data science platforms, beating Hadoop/Spark with 15 percent and Kubernetes at 5.8 percent.