AWS has secured an renewal of its whole-of-government cloud deal with the Australian government, extending the contract by three years.
AWS initially signed its cloud contract agreement with the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) in 2019. The contract provides AWS services to federal, state, and territorial departments, agencies, public universities, and government-controlled companies.
The new agreement builds on the previous one, extending the company’s commitment to Australia’s public sector.
Under the enhanced agreement, which will start on May 1, 2022, AWS’s public sector customers continue to receive the benefits of the Whole-of Government Agreement via the DTA, or they can choose to purchase directly from AWS or through authorised partners on the AWS Partner Network. This will ensure our public sector customers in Australia will maintain easy access to our reliable and secure cloud services as well as provide greater choice in how they procure them.
Research and Markets has released its Global Cloud Computing Services Market Report 2022, predicting cloud computing revenue will hit $519 billion by 2027.
Cloud computing has been gaining steam for years, but the global pandemic sent cloud adoption into overdrive. Companies large and small have been migrating to the cloud, utilizing a combination of private, public, hybrid, and mutlicloud options.
According to Research and Market’s latest report, the industry’s revenue is expected to hit $519 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.7%. The firm attributes that growth to the transformative effect of the cloud:
Cloud is an enabler of business process change as it facilitates key benefits including expenditure reduction (CapEx and OpEx), service development and delivery efficiencies, and greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs. Cloud technologies and solutions are becoming increasingly more important to communication service providers, enterprise, content and commerce providers. This is particularly the case as many IT departments predominantly implement virtualization of network functions and “softwaritization” of applications and operational support systems through the use of software-defined network solutions.
Mailchimp has admitted being hacked, with more than 100 customers’ data compromised.
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform, and was recently acquired by Intuit. The deal was based on Mailchimp rounding out Intuit’s suite of tools and products aimed at small businesses. Unfortunately, it appears Intuit also inherited a security issue.
According to TechCrunch, Mailchip has revealed it was hacked in late March. Fortunately, the company quickly identified the breach and took action while the perpetrators were still working.
“We acted swiftly to address the situation by terminating access for the compromised employee accounts and took steps to prevent additional employees from being affected,” Mailchimp CISO Siobhan Smyth said.
Unfortunately, the hackers were able to download audience data for 102 accounts before Mailchimp personnel were able to lock them out and secure their systems.
“When we become aware of any unauthorized account access, we notify the account owner and immediately take steps to suspend any further access,” Smyth told TechCrunch. “We also recommend two-factor authentication and other account security measures for our users as added measures to keep accounts and passwords secure.”
The use of online tracking tools is one of the primary methods that businesses can use to inform their marketing efforts and therefore grow revenue. In order to do this, companies with an online presence most often use cookies and tags, also known as web beacons, to gather data about their consumers and their habits. Cookies are small text files that a website can place on a user’s device that enables them to recognize and track their online behavior. Similarly, tags are the technical mechanism by which cookies are stored on a user’s device, collecting data including but not limited to the pages they view, products they purchase, and how they accessed the website.
Because of the expansive technology that businesses can use to gather personal data on their customers, there are many privacy regulations that have been put into place to protect the rights of the user when online, which may be part of why cybersecurity insurance rates are rising. For example, in Europe, ePrivacy Directive is the governing body of user experience and privacy, and secures one’s right to privacy in terms of online tracking, personal profiting, unsolicited marketing tactics, and nonconsensual data harvesting by third parties. Similarly, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) addresses data protection regardless of data type, giving users multiple rights and powers over where and with whom their data is shared. In the United States, state-specific legislation gives users rights related to the processing of their personal information. California, Colorado, and Virginia are only a few of the many states that outline specific guidelines for how data and private information is handled.
If too many users refuse to consent to sharing their data, businesses struggle to gather sufficient data and analytics may be rendered useless. When websites are unaware of the proportion of consenting users, what cohort is reflected in collected data, and if a sufficient sample is present to make accurate optimizations, it is increasingly difficult for businesses to make accurate inferences about user behavior. In addition, if these regulations are violated, there are heavy fines associated with non-compliance. In May 2018, the EU issued over 800 fines, and to date, big name companies like Amazon and Google have incurred millions of dollars in fines. It is tedious for users to read the consent agreement and give permission to a website to store their data, therefore a smaller proportion of users are consenting, leaving companies with insufficient information and a higher likelihood of fines and violations.
There is now a new approach to online privacy law compliance that allows businesses to make the most of the data that they have in an ethical way. This measurement methodology involves collecting data anonymously without the use of cookies, and suggests that websites prompt users to provide a login or to register early in the user funnel. Both of these methods will allow for data collection in common scenarios where consent is not necessary or when it is given voluntarily under the guise of account creation with a certain business or web page. This data is vital to marketers and users alike, as it allows a company to make informed decisions about their user’s interests in the most ethical way, which is important to customers. Data in today’s world is so powerful, and it’s important to present the best tools to harness that power, lawfully.
It’s been a bad week for wireless companies and their subscribers, with data for 70 million AT&T customers reportedly for sale online.
Just days ago T-Mobile acknowledged a data breach impacting tens of millions of users, the complete scope of which may still not be fully clear. According to Restore Privacy, a hacker is claiming to have the data of 70 million AT&T subscribers and is looking to sell it online.
In a statement to Restore Privacy, AT&T is denying the data came from its systems.
Based on our investigation today, the information that appeared in an internet chat room does not appear to have come from our systems.
The hacker maintains the data is, in fact, from AT&T. The hacker, known as ShinyHunters, is also a well known entity in the hacking community, with a long list of successful hacks against other companies, lending credence to the claims.
In the meantime, Restore Privacy got a look at a sample of the data and, while they could not confirm it came from AT&T’s systems, the data included a distributing amount of sensitive information. The data included names, social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and dates of birth.
T-Mobile has provided additional details from its investigation of its recent data breach, sharing that over 40 million people’s records were stolen.
Earlier this week, news broke that a hacker was trying to sell T-Mobile customer data online, data they claimed to have gotten via compromised T-Mobile servers. The hacker claimed the data contained names, addresses, social security numbers (SSN), driver license information, phone numbers and unique IMEI numbers.
After confirming a breach occurred, T-Mobile’s investigation has now shed light on the details. The company has confirmed that information for 7.8 million postpaid accounts was included in the stolen data, as well as over 40 million former and customers who had applied for credit. It’s unclear how much overlap there may be between the two groups.
The company says “some of the data accessed did include customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for a subset of current and former postpay customers and prospective T-Mobile customers.”
However, “no phone numbers, account numbers, PINs, passwords, or financial information were compromised in any of these files of customers or prospective customers.”
The company is taking steps to help protect those impacted, including providing two years of free identity protection via McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service. The company also recommends all postpaid customer change their account PIN, and the company is offering Account Takeover Protection to make it harder for an imposter to hijack an account.
We take our customers’ protection very seriously and we will continue to work around the clock on this forensic investigation to ensure we are taking care of our customers in light of this malicious attack. While our investigation is ongoing, we wanted to share these initial findings even as we may learn additional facts through our investigation that cause the details above to change or evolve.
London-based Pearson, a company specializing in educational publishing, has agreed to a $1 million settlement with the SEC over a data breach.
Pearson suffered a data breach in 2018 that resulted in the theft of millions of student records. Unfortunately, the company misled investors, and continued to do so well into 2019, referring “to a data privacy incident as a hypothetical risk, when, in fact, the 2018 cyber intrusion had already occurred.”
Pearson’s statements continued to gloss over what really happened as late as July 2019. In addition, the company claimed to have “strict protections,” even though the security vulnerability remained unpatched six months after Pearson became aware of it.
The company has agreed to settle with the SEC for $1 million as a result of the violations.
“As the order finds, Pearson opted not to disclose this breach to investors until it was contacted by the media, and even then Pearson understated the nature and scope of the incident, and overstated the company’s data protections,” said Kristina Littman, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber Unit. “As public companies face the growing threat of cyber intrusions, they must provide accurate information to investors about material cyber incidents.”
T-Mobile has confirmed it has suffered a data breach following reports that information for 100 million customers is for sale online.
News broke yesterday that a hacker was trying to sell T-Mobile customer information. The hacker claimed to have gained access to T-Mobile servers, copying and backing up the data before he was locked out.
T-Mobile issued a statement saying they were investigating the claims, but the company has now confirmed the breach occurred.
We have determined that unauthorized access to some T-Mobile data occurred, however we have not yet determined that there is any personal customer data involved. We are confident that the entry point used to gain access has been closed, and we are continuing our deep technical review of the situation across our systems to identify the nature of any data that was illegally accessed. This investigation will take some time but we are working with the highest degree of urgency. Until we have completed this assessment we cannot confirm the reported number of records affected or the validity of statements made by others.
A hacker is claiming to have obtained data for some 100 million T-Mobile customers and is trying to sell it.
In a forum post online, a hacker claims to have compromised T-Mobile servers and made off with a treasure trove of customer data. While the post itself didn’t specify the company, Motherboard reached out to the hacker and received confirmation the target company was T-Mobile.
The data in question is allegedly full customer information, including names, addresses, social security numbers (SSN), phone numbers, driver license information and unique IMEI numbers. Motherboard was given access to a sample of the data and confirmed its validity.
It appears T-Mobile has closed the security issue that allowed the hackers access, but not before they copied the data and made multiple backups. The hacker(s) is trying to sell a subset of the data, composed of 30 million SSNs and driver licenses, for 6 bitcoin, or roughly $270,000. The rest of the data is being sold privately.
Motherboard reached out to T-Mobile and received the following statement:
“We are aware of claims made in an underground forum and have been actively investigating their validity. We do not have any additional information to share at this time.”
The University of Kentucky has sent out a letter disclosing a data breach impacting some 355,000 individuals.
UK discovered the issue during an annual cybersecurity penetration test. The breach occurred in June 2021, impacting the College of Education database, part of the university’s Digital Driver License (DDL) platform. The DDL is used by K-12 schools and other colleges, both in and outside of Kentucky, for online training and test-taking.
UK says the database contained usernames (usually a person’s email) and passwords for some 355,000 individuals, although the university says it contained no other personal information, minimizing potential identity theft concerns.
“The University of Kentucky has spent more than $13 million on cybersecurity in last five years alone,” said Brian Nichols, UK’s chief information officer. “We have increased cybersecurity investments and enhanced our mitigation efforts in recent years, which enabled us to discover this incident during our annual inspection process conducted by an outside entity. Although the potential for identity theft is limited, we take this incident seriously and it is unacceptable to us. As a result, we will be taking additional measures to provide even more protection going forward. UK’s chief concern is end user privacy and protection and we are making every effort to secure end user data.”
You can read UK’s full disclosure letter, contributed by The Record, here.
The DDL’s primary purpose is to provide free online teaching and test-taking capabilities to K-12 schools and colleges in Kentucky and other US states. The platform is also used by the university for some of its own test-taking capabilities.
The DDL breach was discovered in early June when the university carried out scheduled penetration tests of its platforms with the help of a third party.
The test uncovered a vulnerability in the DDL platform, which when the university investigated further it discovered that it had been exploited earlier in the year.
Google Cloud has unveiled its latest innovations, aimed at helping companies unify database, analytics and AI.
Google Cloud is the third leading cloud provider, behind AWS and Microsoft Azure. The company is particularly viewed as a good option for machine learning development, and has strong support for open source software.
The company’s latest tools will go a long way toward improving its stand even further, with Dataplex, Datastream and Analytics Hub.
Dataplex is designed to “centrally manage, monitor and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools.”
Datastream, currently available in preview, helps “move and synchronize data between heterogeneous databases, storage and applications reliably to support real-time analytics, database replication and event-driven architectures with Datastream, our serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service.”
Analytics Hub is designed to make it easy to “access and share valuable datasets and analytics assets (think BigQuery ML models, Looker Blocks, data quality recipes, etc.) across any organizational boundary.” Those interested will need to sign up for preview access.
The company’s latest tools should go a long way toward helping its customers make the most of their data, as well as AI applications.
Invisibly is looking to disrupt the advertising industry, launching a platform that puts people in control of their data.
The advertising industry is in a state of flux, as privacy has become thefront-and-center issue for many consumers, regulators and companies. Apple’s recent moves with App Tracking Transparency (ATT) has been seen as particularly devastating to the advertising industry, by giving people a choice about whether to be tracked.
Invisibly is taking that a step further, putting people in control of their own data and putting them in a position to benefit from the monetization of it. Founder and CEO Jim McKelvey, also co-founder of Square, sees this is as the perfect time for Invisibly to make its mark.
“It’s time we enable people to take back control of their data,” Dr. Don Vaughn Ph.D., Head of Product at Invisibly says. “By creating a platform that lets people make money from their data, we’re not only educating people on how valuable their data is, we’re telling big tech it’s time to change the way things are done, and time to start fairly compensating people for the data they regularly profit from.”
“Right now people can make a few dollars a month from sharing their data on our platform, but within the next couple of years, we hope that people will be able to earn around $1,000 per year from Invisibly,” Vaughn continues. “We believe that data licensing will be a powerful new source of passive income for people and are excited to help the industry change to a 100% consumer-consented data model that people are fairly compensated for.”
The platform is now in beta. Those interested in participating can sign up at www.invisibly.com.
ServiceNow is extending its partnership with Microsoft to help protect organization’s data.
ServiceNow provides a cloud-based, SaaS platform that provides workflows for organizations. As pandemic and post-pandemic hybrid workflows become the norm, secure, digital workflows are more important than ever.
The company is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to include Microsoft Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Threat & Vulnerability Management, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft SharePoint. The integration will allow data from Microsoft’s service to be pulled into ServiceNow for analysis.
“Nearly 80 percent of the Fortune 500 rely on ServiceNow’s ‘platform of platforms’,” said Lou Fiorello, VP & GM of Security Products, ServiceNow. “More and more, customers are seeing the value of running security operations processes on the platform, leveraging enterprise business context, and automating workflows across the enterprise in real‑time. The powerful new integrations announced today tie Microsoft’s security products into the ServiceNow Security Operations ecosystem, helping security teams gain the context needed to prioritize and act on security incidents faster and more efficiently than ever.”
“In an increasingly hostile world, the only real competition is the bad actors and nation state adversaries,” said Eric Doerr, VP Cloud Security at Microsoft Corp. “Our integrations with Microsoft Security Solutions and ServiceNow Security Operations products enables customers to gain system‑wide visibility, automate security workflows, and respond rapidly to incidents to build a safer and more secure world for all.
Data for some 700 million LinkedIn users is for sale online, just two months after another major dataset was up for sale.
According to LinkedIn, the platform has some 756 million members. As a result, the latest dataset represents roughly 92% of all users. The hacker selling the information says an API was exploited to harvest the data, according to RestorePrivacy.
LinkedIn has responded, saying the information was scraped, and that no data breach occurred.
Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.
The data includes a significant amount of information, including LinkedIn usernames, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, gender, experience and background, geolocation records and social media accounts/usernames.
Regardless of how the data was collected, the implications are enormous with 92% of LinkedIn users now vulnerable to spam campaigns and identity theft.
Oracle reported its quarterly results, beating guidance as a result of strong cloud results.
Oracle is currently fighting for market share in the cloud market, behind leaders AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Nonetheless, the company has been making solid progress, thanks to its being able to offer the full stack of database and cloud solutions.
In its most recent quarter, the company’s revenue hit $11.2 billion, an increase of 8% year-over-year. Net income came in at $4 billion, or $1.37 per share, an increase of 29%.
Cloud services and license support revenue came in at $7.4 billion, an increase of 8%. Meanwhile, cloud license and on-premise license revenue came in at $2.1 billion, an increase of 9%.
“Our Q4 performance was absolutely outstanding with total revenue beating guidance by nearly $200 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share beating guidance by $0.24,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. “Our multi-billion dollar Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses saw dramatic increases in their already rapid revenue growth rates: Fusion ERP was up 30% in Q3 and up 46% in Q4, Fusion HCM was up 23% in Q3 and up 35% in Q4, NetSuite was up 24% in Q3 and up 26% in Q4. Oracle Fusion is the world’s biggest cloud ERP business; Oracle NetSuite is the world’s second biggest cloud ERP business. Revenue from our Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure business including Autonomous Database grew over 100% in Q4. The accelerating growth rates of both our applications and infrastructure cloud businesses this year drove earnings per share growth up to 21% in FY21. That is the fourth consecutive year of double-digit earnings per share growth at Oracle Corporation.”
“The world’s two most popular databases are the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle MySQL,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “The Oracle Database once again delivered solid revenue growth in FY21. And while our Oracle Database business as measured by revenue currently dwarfs our MySQL database business—that is about to change because the latest version of Oracle MySQL has been upgraded to include a revolutionary new ultra-high-performance parallel processing query engine called HeatWave. Independent analysts have tested and confirmed that Oracle MySQL with HeatWave runs 10 to 100 times faster than Amazon’s version of MySQL called Aurora. This technological breakthrough is causing several of Amazon’s customers to start moving their Aurora workloads to Oracle MySQL. And industry analysts are telling us they are seeing a 10x increase in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customer inquiries. Both the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle MySQL with HeatWave technology have captured the technology high-ground in the cloud database business—and that bodes well for the future of the Oracle Cloud.”
“Digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic,” says Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri. “What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities.”
Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO of Workday, discusses how the pandemic will drive digital transformation forward at an even faster pace:
Digital Transformation To Be Faster Trend Out Of Pandemic
The first three quarters during the pandemic were challenging. The vagaries of subscription accounting models are such that it is a lag indicator. We expect new bookings growth to accelerate this year and that is our primary indicator and the way we run the business. We’re very excited about where we’re headed. That acceleration will probably take at least a year to show up in subscription accounting numbers just because of the way the model works.
What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities. In many ways, companies like Nike that are just such great market-leading companies, recognize that they needed to move this capability to the cloud. So I think actually digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic.
Employee Engagement Rose To The Top Of The List
It comes back to the flexibility and agility that that cloud solutions like Workday provide. We’ve been very fortunate. We’re so happy to have Laboratory Corporation of America become a customer. J&J is a customer. Visor’s a customer. AstraZeneca is a customer. I just feel honored to be able to support these companies who are doing the best they can to save our lives and are just doing amazing work with the vaccines and testing. We’ve always had a strength in the pharmaceuticals and diagnostics role. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they’re successful because they’re taking care of all of us.
Coming back to what we learned during the pandemic, employee engagement just rose to the top of every CEO’s list and every head of HR’s list. In a remote work orientation, it was harder to really understand how do employees think about the company they work at, their engagement level, their comfort with their manager, and if they are feeling fulfilled at work. We were already down the path at Workday with something called Pulse Surveys. We recognized that this emerging trend was going to be critical going forward.
We Fell In Love With Peakon So We Acquired Them
We concluded that we had to get in this market now, the market’s happening now, and Peakon is the well-known leader in this category. Peakon is a UK-based company with an amazing management team. We fell in love with the product and the management team so we made them part of Workday. They’re one of the new generations of companies that’s machine learning first.
They really use machine learning in the right way to guide decisions and really give you insight into how employees are thinking about the company that they’re working for and how engaged are they. That is a supercritical set of information that’s going to drive companies going forward.
Digital Transformation To Be Faster Trend Out Of Pandemic, Says Worday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri
“Business is really simple, and people are more productive, and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.”
Bill McDermott, CEO, and President of ServiceNow says that only one in four digital transformation projects actually deliver positive ROI due to lack of integration:
Most Digital Transformation Projects Don’t Deliver
We have a situation on our hands where digital transformation, cloud computing, and business model innovation, are all converging at once. ServiceNow is the platform, of all the enterprise platforms, that really makes business work. One of the big lessons that business has right now is trillions have been poured into digital transformation yet only one in four projects actually deliver positive ROI. The reason for that is lack of integration.
Our system integrates with all the existing systems as well as all the collaborative tools in the enterprise. From day one, the customer gets it up and running swiftly because it’s in the cloud. They begin to derive value from it because you automate the way the work is done and ultimately, you’re now in a position to serve your customers the way they want to be served. It’s a speed game and ServiceNow is at the top of its game.
Companies Have To Create New Business Models
We’re an example. If you’re going to grow your company you’re going to take advantage of digital transformation. This is the only way out and it’s the only way forward. In the 20th Century companies put in big heavy on-premise systems. The issue is now they can’t, in a frictionless economy, immediately pivot those business models because they haven’t digitally transformed their business.
About 25 percent of the opportunity of businesses out there today over the next three years will come from white space places they are not in today. They have to create new business models. They have to think about new partnerships and new routes to market. Without the baseline of a platform like ServiceNow they’re not going to get there.
That’s The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation
I am very optimistic that the economies of the world not only are going to recover but actually going to do very well this year because people are going to be investing in digital transformation. We have seen that does not cost jobs. On the contrary, it frees people up to do things like go after new markets, derive new ideas, and so forth, because the AI revolution is also on.
We have built-in machine learning and AI into our platform. So 80 percent of the soul-crushing work people don’t want to do is done by the Now platform. The 20 percent that involves a human immediately gets initiated through a workflow order from the Now platform.
Business is really simple, and people are more productive and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity. That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.
Fastest-Growing Pure-Play SASS Silicon Valley Company
If you look at our actual earnings results, they were stunning and obviously achieved beyond expectations performance across the board. We also followed that through in the guide. We’ll continue to be the fastest-growing pure-play SASS Silicon Valley company. We will continue to have the best margin profile of all of them. Obviously, we’re going to continue to gain market share in industries around the world, in geographies around the world, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific, and Japan.
We will also gain market share on personas. Lots of people are getting the memo now that ServiceNow obviously dominated the IT automation market but the same backbone platform has enabled us to change the employee experience, the customer experience. In these tough times with COVID we can write low-code onto our platform in minutes and roll out new applications to hundreds of thousands of people so companies can move super fast.
We keep the guide consistent with the revenue that we generated in 2020. If there’s an upside to that… fantastic. That’s what good companies should do. They should go beyond expectations when they can but we stand by the guide and we’re looking forward to having a great year.
ServiceNow Was Born In The Cloud
The whole idea of ServiceNow is so different than SAP which was a company that needed to pivot to the cloud in 2010. We did that and that was very successful. ServiceNow was born in the cloud. It’s a very young company with tremendous growth opportunity on the organic front. Having said that, (we would be in interested in an acquisition) if you have a situation where there is a partner out there that has a substantial TAM, that can be highly complementary and synergistic with ServiceNow on the revenue side.
It also would have to do great things for the customer, because we have a precious platform and we jealously protect the integration power of that platform. A lot of things would have to be right but I can tell you as responsible business people we always look at it. We don’t need it to make our goals but you always have to look at it. We do want to be the defining enterprise software company the 21st century. That’s our plan.
I’m a pretty annoying founder. I’m very stubborn and very steadfast. Sort of this is my very strongly held opinion and belief and I’m gonna run into a wall to prove it out. That has certain characteristics that can be annoying at times I’m sure both at the investor level as well as for anybody that is working with me. I’ve been able to tone it down over the years and control it more and contain it. I think it’s not causing probably as much annoyance.
You have to be stubborn and right is the key. Stubborn and wrong means new job. There’s a Venn diagram of stubborn and right and you want to be right in that target zone. I look back when when I was 20, 21, or 22 and learning this trade and there were plenty of times where I was stubborn and wrong where maybe I took too long to pivot.
My co-founder was telling me we’ve got to go enterprise probably for three to six months earlier than we actually did. What are three to six months in compounding terms? I don’t know. Maybe we’d be 20 percent bigger now as a result of if I had not been so stubborn at that stage and not seeing the information in the way that he was? That can just be sometimes an annoying pattern that people run into.
“Once you get to the cloud all of a sudden the lid is off,” says Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. “People can just pursue their backlogs and whatever they can imagine. We’re now in a situation where technology is ahead of what people are capable of and imagining what they could actually do with it. That’s really a big part of what you see in Snowflake’s growth profile, a completely variable paradigm.”
Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, says that on-premise data centers can only accommodate a tiny fraction of what their real demand for data analytics really is:
Once You Get To The Cloud The Lid Is Off
The important thing to understand is that there’s a couple of long-term secular trends that are coinciding and driving the development of the market overall. One is, as everybody knows, the movement towards cloud. It’s really a modernization play. We’re moving from on-premise data centers and we’re taking workloads to the cloud because we get to take advantage of better economics and utility models. Then we no longer have to manage capacity, we pay by the drink and all that sort of thing.
The other aspect that’s really important for our business is that we’ve had an extraordinary amount of pent up demand. The on-premise data centers could only accommodate a very tiny fraction of what their real demand for data analytics really is. Once you get to the cloud all of a sudden the lid is off. People can just pursue their backlogs and whatever they can imagine. We’re now in a situation where technology is ahead of what people are capable of and imagining what they could actually do with it. That’s really a big part of what you see in Snowflake’s growth profile, a completely variable paradigm.
Notion Of Headquarters Is Evaporating
We don’t have a yearning to go back to where we were. I can see why people would have that because of lockdowns and things of that sort. From a business standpoint, there’s a lot of positives to the shock to the system that we received. It’s almost like a wake-up call that is just opening our eyes to the opportunity. This whole notion that the office is your workday home we just realized that it’s nonsense. In other words, offices need to be there for specific purposes, for events, for training, for meetings specifically, but not a place to hang out nine to five. That’s definitely changing. It’s going to really reduce the real estate footprint that companies have.
The other trend and you’ve seen it with companies leaving California, the likes of Oracle and HP and Tesla, and so on is that the whole notion of headquarters is pretty much evaporating in front of our eyes. We’re no longer operating with a physical center of the universe. We’re completely virtual. We’re connecting as needed. We’ve been operating for the better part of a whole year without a headquarters and it’s just fine. All of a sudden everybody’s staring at each other and saying like what is the headquarters anyway. You’ve seen companies like Pinterest and you’re writing up massive leeches in San Francisco and saying we’re going to be headquarter-less. It’s just a concept whose time has gone away… and that’s very profound.
We Are Buying Talent And Technology, No M&A
Usually, big M&A is a function of people running out of market and running out of a lot of opportunity. They’re trying to invade adjacent territories to give themselves new runway. That is obviously not the case for Snowflake. We’re in a tremendous marketplace and we are buying talent and technology. We sometimes refer to it as stem cells that we can use that we don’t have ourselves that we can build very specific technologies around that are very much built snowflake way. We can really enable our platform mission or footer. That’s really been our mode. If you looked at our history we don’t have a history of doing big acquisitions.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: Once You Get To The Cloud The Lid Is Off
T-Mobile has suffered a major data breach, impacting some 200,000 customers.
Wireless carriers are prime cybersecurity targets, thanks to the wealth of customer data they have access to. According to T-Mobile’s disclosure, its cybersecurity team discovered unauthorized, malicious access to some of that customer information.
Fortunately, “the data accessed did not include names on the account, physical or email addresses, financial data, credit card information, social security numbers, tax ID, passwords, or PINs.” The hackers may have accessed “phone number, number of lines subscribed to on your account and, in some cases, call-related information collected as part of the normal operation of your wireless service.”
The company is working with law enforcement agencies and has begun notifying those customers affected.
This is the third major breach T-Mobile has suffered, and the second of 2020. Especially with T-Mobile’s newfound status as the second-largest carrier, it will need to do more to keep its customers’ data safe.
TikTok has experienced another embarrassing privacy issue, with the revelation it is sending the personal data of job applicants to China.
TikTok was on the receiving end of ire from the US over its privacy practices and the perception it represents a threat to national security. The company even faced a lawsuit by an individual claiming the platform was sending photos and videos to Chinese servers without her permission, even without her signing up for an account.
The company has gone to great lengths to distance itself from those accusations, and tried to prove its independence from its owner, Chinese company ByteDance.
According to Business Insider, however, the company was routing personal information from job applications through servers in China. What’s worse, the data was “potentially highly sensitive, with the firm’s own policies stating that it collects medical data; sex and race data; marital status; geolocation data, among many other categories.” Adding to the issue, TikTok did not inform applicant’s their data would be routed through China.
After Business Insider approached TikTok, the company said it will end the practice. Nonetheless, this is an embarrassing lapse for company that seems to go from one embarrassingprivacy and security incident to another.
