Tag: microsoft

Dark times are good for clouds says Nadella

Posted on November 1, 2022 by - News

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEOMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella said the weaker global economy has the chance to prove the need of public cloud.

For those who came in late, Public cloud allows Microsoft customers to control ramping up and ramping down based on demand, which could also help customers with growing energy costs, it is claimed.

“The thing, though, from a customer perspective – the best way for them to align their spend with what is uncertain demand is to move to the cloud”, Nadella said.

“So we see the value prop of the cloud. So the big winner in all of this will be public cloud because public cloud helps businesses offset the risk of demand risk.”

Azure Arc has more than 8,500 customers, more than double a year ago, Nadella said. Azure Machine Learning revenue has increased more than 100 percent for the last four quarters.

 

Broadcom wants to speed up VMware approval

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - News

Broadcom wants to speed up antitrust approval from the European Union on its $61 billion VMware acquisition.

Apparently, it is using market rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominance to claim that the move is necessary to create more competition in the cloud market.

The European Commission’s four-month-long second phase investigation and for it to go to phase two, there has to be a real competition problem – horizontal, vertical, foreclosure risk.  Broadcom argues that with the big names in the market, its buy out is nothing to worry about.

After the news broke it was met with uncertainty among some VMware partners who were left with mixed feelings and were concerned it might harm the UK channel.

Kyndryl helps customers get onto public clouds

Posted on October 14, 2022 by - News

Global infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has expanded its ability to help customers run or migrate their mainframe workloads to public clouds.

There are two ways that Kyndryl can do this. The first uses its Microsoft Ignite presence and create a new cloud product which mixes its managed services expertise with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI software and Dell Technologies hardware.

The idea is to help businesses with on-premises, remote or third-party data centre workloads accelerate their cloud transformation projects. The Microsoft Azure Stack HCI supports mainframe modernisation by connecting to on-premises mainframe or distributed computing infrastructures.

The second idea sees Kyndryl working with Google Dual Run, a service introduced Wednesday by Google as a way to migrate workloads off mainframes and onto the Google Cloud by letting the workloads work on both the cloud and on the mainframe until customers feel the time is right to take them off the mainframe altogether.

Microsoft security is a leaky lifeboat

Posted on October 13, 2022 by - News

CrowdStrike CEO appears to have got Microsoft all cross when he dubbed its security approach a “leaky lifeboat”.

George Kurtz told the gathered throngs at XChange Best of Breed conference in Atlanta attributed a majority of cyberbreaches to Microsoft products, compared the software behemoth’s total security offerings to a “leaky lifeboat” and its authentication architecture “a mess”.

“The Microsoft environment is the only environment that I know of that you can take a password and just reuse it. Right? And it’s a huge architectural issue. That was in 1999. You can do that today. … You can take those passwords out of memory and basically just do the same technique in 2022. And it’s even worse now because there‘s a hodgepodge of syncing and you know that you have SAML tickets and golden SAML tickets. I mean, it’s a real mess.”

Ingram Micro Cloud gets MOME alone

Posted on September 27, 2022 by - News

Ingram Micro Cloud has jacked Microsoft Online Management Extension (MOME) under the bonnet of its Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace powered by CloudBlue technology.

Ingram claims CloudBlue Commerce capability provides an automated management solution that enables Volish partners to sell and manage services in a single location.

MOME uses data from Microsoft Customer AAD Tenants to provide new customer management, domain management, and security score services that support MSPs. It gives resellers direct access to customer accounts and domain management to reduce the demand on process.

Watchdog puts Amazon, Microsoft and Google under microscope

Posted on September 23, 2022 by - News

The UK regulator Ofcom is to have a look under the bonnets of Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the cloud services market.

Ofcom announced the launch of a market study into the £15 billon UK cloud services market. In particular, Ofcom will focus on the hyperscalers which between them account for approximately 81 percent of UK public cloud service revenues.

The study will check how well the market is working and the nature of competition in cloud services.

Ofcom wants to think about any market features that might limit innovation and growth in the cloud services sector by creating barriers to entry for smaller companies and preventing them from effectively competing and growing their market share.

Isolated cloud spotted by Wiz

Posted on September 21, 2022 by - News

Cybersecurity firm Wiz has found another major vulnerability within a popular cloud-storage environment.

After identifying multiple security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s heavily used Azure cloud services, Wiz researchers are now saying they recently found a “critical vulnerability” in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that could have allowed “unauthorised access to cloud storage volumes of any customer.”

Wiz said the vulnerability was spotted in June and quickly fixed within 24 hours by Oracle, and was  one of the most severe cloud vulnerabilities reported.

Ellison claims he is cheaper than Amazon

Posted on September 13, 2022 by - News

Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison claims he is beating Amazon Web Services on price.

Ellison claimed that some of AWS’ “most famous brands” plan to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

He said. “And the AWS bill is getting very large. And they can save a huge amount of money by moving to OCI. And we expect next quarter we’ll be announcing some brands and companies moving off of Amazon to OCI that will shock you.”

He continued: “The amount of money these huge companies, these very famous companies, spend with Amazon is kind of staggering. I mean, everyone assumes, ‘Hey, I move to the cloud, and I save a lot of money.’ Depends which cloud you move to. And Oracle is much less expensive than the competition. … We’re talking to the most famous brands that are running Amazon and some of them are going to be moving very soon.”

Security bosses focus on cloud

Posted on September 6, 2022 by - News

Enterprise security leaders in the UK are focused on cloud security, building up resilience against threats and aligning cybersecurity strategies with overall business goals.

A new research report The 2022 ISG Provider Lens Cybersecurity report from Information Services Group (ISG) claims cloud security is an enterprise manager’s top priority.

The growing use of cloud models such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is forcing companies to adapt their cybersecurity approaches, with a focus on holistic resilience that requires more communication and training for employees and outside stakeholders, the report says.

Google rains on Microsoft’s cloud licensing plans

Posted on August 31, 2022 by - News

Google is unimpressed with Microsoft’s plans to change its licensing on its cloud products.

Microsoft’s licensing changes, going into effect on 1 October claim to enable more expansive software rights and lower-cost customer solutions.

However, its rival Google claims the changes ignore the crux of the company’s most anti-competitive cloud practices.

Channel hit by currency problems

Posted on August 12, 2022 by - News

The channel is being hit by the falling pound because most vendors still price in dollars.

Sterling has fallen by as much as 12.5 percent against the dollar since February 2022. Prices will either have to rise or more gear will have to be sold to obtain the same amount of profit.

Vendors like dollars because that’s their home currency. But if a vendor planned to sell $40 million of kit in the UK in 2022 with a profit of $4 million, at July currency rates it would need to sell £32.9 million of equipment instead of £29.36 million at February rates. Sales increases of nearly 11 percent to keep your head above water rarely happen.

Microsoft expands Defender

Posted on August 9, 2022 by - News

Microsoft campusSoftware maharāj of the world, Microsoft, has expanded its suite of ‘Defender’ products for channel players and customers.

Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, and management, highlighted in the post that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2021 IC3 report found that the cost of cybercrime now totals more than $6.9 billion.

Microsoft stops encouraging new commerce experience

Posted on August 1, 2022 by - News

Microsoft campusSoftware King of the World, Microsoft, has given up on a policy that encouraged partners to move legacy subscriptions under its Cloud Solution Provider programme to the controversial “new commerce experience” by January.

Redmond announced an indefinite delay to the end date for legacy subscriptions moving to new commerce experience (NCE), crediting more migrations and giving partners more time to adopt the change.

MoD gets in Boxxe formation

Posted on July 27, 2022 by - News

Boxxe has been scored “2022’s largest Microsoft deal in the UK public sector” with the MoD.

The  deal, worth £291 million, is a three-year contract, which Boxxe claims is the largest Microsoft deals in the UK public sector this year.  Apparently, this involves Boxxe managing the MoD’s Microsoft Enterprise Licensing agreement.

The agreement will see Boxxe use their Licence Management Platform and Microsoft resources to support and manage its operations.

Microsoft cleans up in the MSP market

Posted on July 27, 2022 by - News

Software king of the world Microsoft says it has soaked up more than half of the managed service provider (MSP), reseller and services market.

This week’s partner-focused Microsoft Inspire event was shown Vole’s Microsoft’s Landscape and Attitudes study — a collaboration with Analysys Mason — released at the conference was based on an in-depth look at 3,000 small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in 10 countries.

This study discusses key findings in the SMB segment, their significance for the Microsoft partner community, and how Microsoft can help SMBs thrive in this modern, digitally enabled economy. It is a study, with a number of insights into SMBs representing all types of markets: mature, middle, and developing.