Cloud

Companies are jumping on the cloud bandwagon at a rapid pace. In fact, Gartner predicts that the public cloud services market will grow 16.5 percent to $204 billion in 2016.

If you attend any IT conferences, you’ve heard the buzz. "What have you moved to the cloud?" "What are you planning to move?" On top of that, the goal of moving some part of your infrastructure to the cloud may have burrowed its way into your annual performance objectives. The pressure is on. It’s time to make the move. Or is it?

The move to software-as-a-service models has meant that the humble browser is now the key endpoint software for many enterprises.

Yet this reliance on browsers can make it hard for IT teams to exercise the levels of control they need. Browser management specialist Browsium is launching a new version of its management suite to give administrators the right tools to improve security and reduce costs.

Until now, anyone using the Google cloud platform, Google Compute Engine, was forced to use encryption keys generated by Google. Clearly this spooked a lot of people, and there have long been calls for users to be granted greater control of security.

Now this is happening -- users are able to provide their own encryption keys. Customer-Supplied Encryption Key (CSEK) are used to provide a second layer of security, on top of the Google-generated keys that are used by default.

Today's climate of digital transformation (DX) is giving rise to a variety of intriguing cloud and software-as-a-service based offerings.

In the case of public cloud, instant access to infrastructure and platforms for developing new services off-premise may be extremely attractive to some organizations. The modern world of free cloud services and easily installable apps makes it all too easy for employees to bypass the IT department and use whatever systems they want.

Dropbox has just announced AdminX, a new dashboard aimed at helping IT admins better manage Dropbox Business users. AdminX, which has been in development since last year, will have a couple of new features, including new versions of folders for both individuals and groups.

With a more tier-style permission system across the board, it will tighten up security, and the permissions will be managed from AdminX. Enhanced file sync controls are also coming, which will allow admins to choose which files to sync locally, and which not to.

With strange serendipitous timing, just as the free upgrade period for Windows 10 is coming to an end, Microsoft is also celebrating the 20th anniversary of Windows Server. Way back in 1996, the company unleashed Windows NT 4.0 Server onto an unsuspecting world. The rest, as they say, is history.

Described as the operating system that would 'knock the socks of Unix' Windows NT 4.0 Server stuck around for four years before being replaced by the enterprise-specific Windows 2000 Server. With laughably low system requirements -- 133 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM and 1 GB of disk space -- this was the start of a journey incorporating centralization and security.

Microsoft today announced a series of updates for its Office apps which help to make the suite more intelligent than ever. There's a strong focus on workflow and efficiency, and things kick off with the Researcher tool. This provides context-sensitive research materials that can be accessed from within Word and quickly added to a document complete with properly formatted citations.

Microsoft says that Researcher will continue to expand to include "sources like national science and health centers, well-known encyclopedias, history databases and more". But this is far from being the only new tool to be added in the latest monthly update.

As businesses come to rely increasingly on the cloud, the impact of downtime in any part of the network infrastructure is felt more keenly.

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes is launching a new Internet Outage Detection product, providing a way for enterprises to reliably detect outages across ISPs.

The last several years have revealed enormous opportunity in consumer online storage -- numerous companies, led by Dropbox, have shown tremendous growth and opportunity in the consumer market. Unfortunately, the most recent few years have seen many, if not all, of those companies pivot their focus from consumer to enterprise.

The main players that remain focused on consumer online storage are the big boys: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. These companies do this via incredible low pricing with little apparent concern for profit (which is easy when you make lots of money via other products and services). Considering massive pent-up demand in the consumer world, why has this happened?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired the San Francisco-based startup Cloud9 for an undisclosed sum in an effort to add more development tools to its web services stack.

The company was founded in 2010 and gives remote teams of developers the ability to work together to develop, edit and test code across 300 different browsers and operating systems.

Microsoft has announced that its Azure Stack offering won’t be released before mid-2017. What’s more, it will come in appliance form, with just a few vendors -- so far only Dell, HPE and Lenovo -- being mentioned.

Announcing the news in a blog post, corporate vice president for Enterprise Cloud, Mike Neil, says the decision has been made following months of feedback gathering.

Facebook has signed a deal with Microsoft to use some of the software giant’s cloud-based productivity tools.

Facebook’s 13,000 employees will use some of Microsoft's Office 365 services, such as email and calendar, while other services, like Skype for Business or Yammer, will not be used as directly compete with Facebook’s own.

If you weren't on the ball a few months ago, your OneDrive storage space is about to be slashed. Having previously announced its plans to reduce cloud storage for all OneDrive users, Microsoft relented and said those that already had this amount of storage could keep it... but only if they asked for it.

Anyone who failed to do so will be ruing the day. Today is the day that Microsoft cuts free OneDrive storage from 15GB to just 5GB -- even less than when the cloud service first launched. In addition to this, the 15GB camera roll bonus has been discontinued. So what can you do?

For smaller organizations, managing their systems can present enough of a challenge without the additional need to worry about different aspects of security.

Now a new three-way collaboration between underwriters Victor O Schinnerer & Company, SaaS data protection company Spanning, and Microsoft, is designed to help small and mid-size organizations safeguard their business and data.

Many companies are keen to gain from the power of big data but struggle with the expense and operational complexity of expanding their on-premise systems.

Moving data to the cloud is the obvious solution but that too leads to issues surrounding migration. Big data-as-a-service company Qubole has partnered with software solutions specialist WANdisco to make the move easier with the launch of a Cloudera Migration Program.