A Week In Review – Fierce Focus On Cloud Business

Running out of things to do during the lockdown? Oracle lets you get cloud certified for free!

In a bid to help existing and aspiring IT professionals upskill themselves during the COVID-19 lockdown, Oracle has made all its cloud courses and certifications free until May 15. The courses cover Oracle Cloud infrastructure and autonomous databases that consists of over 50 hours of online training and six certifications. All of this is available to instructors, students and professionals through a single sign-on account free of charge. According to the company spokesperson, Oracle believes that certifications help professionals develop skills that are in demand within a short time frame and bolsters their resumes. There is no time like now to learn the skills of an industry that is clearly set to expand exponentially in coming times.

Microsoft claims an unprecedented triple-digit surge in cloud usage. Is that even possible?

Earlier this month, Microsoft reported a mind-boggling 775% cloud usage surge mostly owing to increased use of Microsoft teams, windows virtual desktop and Governments using public Power BI to share COVID-19 dashboards. This sent existing users in a frenzy who were already worried about the inability to create resources on Azure the week before owing to capacity constraints. However, the company was quick to clarify their claim in a subsequent press release a few days later. The triple-digit surge was only in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in one month in Italy. Nevertheless, these are some hectic and challenging times for the tech giant as they race against the exponential demand curve to keep their services running flawlessly.

Opinion- As major cloud providers struggle to expedite the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead, businesses need to realize that relying on a single vendor can be detrimental to their business. Divio's latest platform release provides self-service and fully automated cloud shifting capabilities. It enables apps to be moved transparently both between regions and underlying cloud vendors. Cloud shifting is part of the Divio multi cloud technology stack that unifies clouds. It is just what enterprises need at this juncture to ensure continuity of business without the unnecessary stress of running out of provisioning capacity and outages.

Some more cloud security, please.

As cloud security continues to be a topmost priority for every CTO across industries, Amazon continues to listen and deliver. In addition to Amazon's GuardDuty, Inspector and Macie, there is now Amazon detective. It is a log analytics and visualization service that complements GuardDuty by processes logs from it, as well as CloudTrail logs and VPC Flow logs. While the new service sure could be useful, Amazon still is riddled with the problem of too many options, none of which work to reduce the time and effort required to set up a secure configuration for AWS services and applications.

Microsoft also announced its plans to add DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) to its email system by the end of this year, owing to the lower security of SMTP. The change will require a lot of effort and investment but is worth the gains in security, as per Microsoft.

IBM now wants a larger piece of the cloud pie

With the new CEO Arvind Krishna taking over the helm, IBM has set its sights on becoming a more significant player in the hybrid cloud and AI market. The CEO has called for a "maniacal focus" on these two businesses and wants to make Red Hat OpenShift the default choice for hybrid cloud in the same way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the default choice for the operating system. Given IBM's rich expertise, experience and enterprise associations, the goal is certainly not overstated. It would be quite interesting to see if IBM manages to "win this architectural battle in the cloud".