Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Google parent Alphabet beats forecasts with first $100bn quarter

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Strong demand for ads and cloud services powered tech giant’s growth as it makes multibillion-dollar AI investment

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, displayed steady growth in its core advertising business and cloud computing division as it reported third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating Wall Street estimates as it reported its first quarter of $100bn in revenue.

The company thrilled Wall Street – shares rose in after-hours trading – even as it announced that it would spend billions more than previously predicted. Alphabet raised its capital expenditure guidance in financial filings, declaring it would spend between $91bn and $93bn in the upcoming year, nearly all of it on infrastructure like datacenters to support artificial intelligence products, which are becoming an integral part of the company’s business. That estimate is up from an original declaration of $75bn in February and a revised figure of $85bn announced in July.

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New CMA chair will have to assess curbs on his former employer Amazon

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Doug Gurr will lead board as watchdog rules on Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance of cloud computing market

The new chair of the UK competition watchdog will have to assess whether to curb the position of his former employer, Amazon, after an independent inquiry found that a lack of competition in the £9bn cloud computing market could mean British businesses are overpaying for services.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which last week announced the surprise appointment of former Amazon UK boss Doug Gurr as its interim chair, said that Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance of the cloud computing market could mean that British businesses are paying as much as £430m more annually for services than in a “well-functioning market”.

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Child abuse: Apple urged to roll out image-scanning tool swiftly

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Exclusive: privacy concerns ‘must not delay use of neuralMatch algorithm to protect victims of abuse’

Child protection experts from across the world have called on Apple to implement new scanning technologies urgently to detect images of child abuse.

In August, Apple announced plans to use a tool called neuralMatch to scan photos being uploaded to iCloud online storage and compare them to a database of known images of child abuse.

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Major internet outage ‘shows infrastructure needs urgent fixing’

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Experts say outage shows internet services too centralised and lack resilience

One of the world’s biggest web outages should act as a “wake-up call” that internet infrastructure has become dangerously over-centralised and lacks resilience, security experts have warned.

An unexplained configuration error at a single infrastructure provider, Fastly, which handles 10% of the world’s internet traffic, was enough to render major websites and services inoperable for almost an hour on Tuesday morning.

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Global Microsoft outage brings down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook

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Microsoft says a recent update has affected the processing of authentication requests, making cloud-based services inaccessible

Microsoft has said it is investigating an outage that brought down Microsoft’s cloud-based office services including the meetings software, Teams, worldwide.

Microsoft reported issues with authentication for its cloud services at around 9.25pm UTC, meaning people were having issues logging into the online services Teams, Outlook and Office.

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Microsoft becomes third listed US firm to be valued at $1tn

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Company beat sales and profit expectations to join Apple and Amazon in prestigious club

Microsoft has become the third publicly listed US company, after Apple and Amazon, to boast a market value of more than $1tn after bumper quarterly results boosted its share price.

The company beat sales and profits expectations in the three months to 31 March, thanks in part to its cloud computing business, which signed up major corporate clients over the period.

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Pentagon Cloud Contract Funds May Be Held Back for Explanation

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The annual defense policy bill proposed by House Republicans would bar the Pentagon from spending half the money designated for a broad-based cloud computing contract until Defense Secretary Jim Mattis offers Congress more information about the project. The report should include "a description of the characteristics and considerations for accelerating the cloud architecture and services required for a global, resilient, and secure information environment to enable warfighting," according to the draft authorization measure issued Friday by House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas and obtained by Bloomberg Government.

Illustration on Federal contracting by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times

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President Obama has been out of office for 14 months now, but his ability - and that of his allies still in government - to steer gargantuan federal contracts to his friends seems not to have diminished. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced it was looking to purchase cloud computing services for its 3.4 million users and their 4 million devices.

Court Denies Full Hearing in MS Case

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Microsoft Wins Appeal on Overseas Data Searches

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Microsoft has won an appeal in a closely watched legal case that tests the limits of law enforcement's ability to obtain data stored outside of the United States. On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a lower court's ruling that Microsoft must turn over e-mail communications for a suspect in a narcotics case stored in a Microsoft data center in Dublin.