Cloud

Microsoft has announced the hardware requirements needed to run its Azure Stack – the upcoming on-premise hybrid version of the Azure cloud.

The Azure Stack first gets installed on a server and delivers Azure services in a customer’s datacentre, enabling developers and IT professionals to build, deploy and operate cloud applications using consistent tools, processes and artifacts.

Businesses tend to be quite conservative in their approach to technology, so it's always interesting to look at what's been sparking their interest.

Identity and mobility management specialist Okta has released a new report, based on analysis of its customers, looking at the big winners and losers in the enterprise over the past year.

Goldman Sachs thinks Microsoft is making a comeback. The investment banking firm has produced a 22-page document -- titled Righting a Wrong -- looking at Microsoft’s current business, the recent changes it has made and it’s future opportunities.

The research analyzes Microsoft’s core businesses of Azure, Windows and Office and believes that the future looks bright for the company, going as far as to change its stock rating from Sell to Neutral.

Here we are, days before Christmas, and you're thinking about last-minute stocking stuffers. I've got an eclectic selection of things I would want to get or give for December 25th. Some of them will demand rushing online to take advantage of last-minute shipping offers. Others require no shipping at all, like music subscription services. Confession: Some items will require a larger stocking but no wrapping.

I present the list alphabetically, and in no order of preference.

Google is placing an increased importance on security in 2016. The company has set aside $1 million to fund independent research into the security of its Drive cloud storage service, and will continue to offer a bug bounty program.

Acknowledging that "keeping files safe in Google Drive is super important", Google says that next year it will make the money available to independent security researchers. The money comes in addition to the funds that are used to employ hundreds of security experts at the company, with independence bringing an extra level of scrutiny.

The business communication tool Slack is trying to end the year on a high note, and looking at what the company announced yesterday, it seems to be on the right track.

The team-communication app, which now has two million daily users and 570,000 paying customers has announced three things -- an app store which will offer other productivity tools (like Trello, for example) to integrate with Slack, an $80 million fund to help developers create more apps for the store, and a new framework called Botkit which should simplify the process of creating apps.

Microsoft added support for offline storage in OneDrive for Android in September, announcing that it plans to also bring the feature to iOS and Windows smartphones later down the road. But, knowing that a few months have passed already, when exactly will this happen?

Microsoft has provided an update, revealing that offline support in OneDrive will make its way to iOS before the end of December. As far as its own platform is concerned, offline support in OneDrive will only be offered on Windows 10 Mobile, but not anytime soon.

Salesforce and Box have announced a partnership that aims to enable closer business collaboration and greater productivity.

The two companies have announced Salesforce Files Connect for Box to help businesses access files securely and Box SDK for Salesforce to assist the software development cycle.

VMware, the US cloud software company, said it will not participate in the joint venture cloud services Virtustream with its parent company EMC.

The announcement was made in a recent regulatory filling, which you can read here.

For almost a decade, each year has been dubbed "the year of the cloud". As the cloud continues to mature and more enterprises further their cloud adoption plans, it seems only natural that 2016 will indeed be (another) "year of the cloud".

But as our understanding of the cloud matures, so does the complexity of the conversation. Here are several predictions for how the cloud conversation will evolve in 2016:

When moving applications to the cloud it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that security can safely be left to the provider.

For Amazon Web Services customers there's now an extra layer of security on offer from Hillstone Networks. Hillstone CloudEdge is deployed as an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gateway to provide an additional layer of security protection.

Microsoft has announced the release of a preview and testing version of its new lightweight project management application -- Planner.

The application -- originally codenamed Highlander -- was released for initial evaluation to those customers who have one of the following Microsoft licenses:

The advantage of storing data in the cloud is that there are no physical limits, though there is of course a cost.

A new offering from cloud storage provider Backblaze, better known for its consumer backup offerings, aims to offer a service similar to Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, allowing the storing of unlimited data in the cloud, but at a lower cost.

Use of the public cloud is on the increase but in some sectors such as government agencies is being held back by security concerns.

Data protection specialist Druva is announcing that it's launching a new endpoint solution that is Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliant.

The adoption of cloud applications is soaring, up by 71 percent in the last year according to the results of a new survey.

The latest Cloud Adoption Report from data protection specialist Bitglass shows that while cloud adoption has doubled year-over-year in unregulated industries, it has nearly tripled in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare.