Microsoft updated Remote Desktop for Windows this week, bringing a number of significant new features.
The new update allows users to copy files between local and remote PCs, use an email address to access remote resources and allows user accounts assigned to remote resource feeds to be changed. There are also a number of bug fixes, including an actual icon showing up in the File Explorer when assigning .rdp files to Remote Desktop.
As the primary method of accessing another computer in the Windows ecosystem, these updates bring a number of quality-of-life improvements to the app. The new version, 10.1.1149.0, is available for download.
Release Notes
You can now copy files between the local and remote PCs.
Your email address can now be used to access remote resources, if enabled by your admin.
The user account assigned to a remote resource feed can now be changed.
When assigning .rdp files to this app, a proper icon will be shown in File Explorer instead of a blank one.
Dell Technologies has agreed to sell RSA to Symphony Technology Group, in an effort to streamline its business portfolio and strategy.
The Symphony Technology Group consortium, which includes the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’) and AlpInvest Partners (AlpInvest), agreed to an all-cash deal of $2.075 billion. The deal includes RSA Archer, RSA NetWitness Platform, RSA SecurID, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence and RSA Conference, and should be completed in the next six to nine months.
RSA currently has 12,500 customers and provides “risk, security and fraud teams with the ability to holistically manage digital risk, including threat detection and response, identity and access management, integrated risk management and omnichannel fraud prevention.”
Dell is looking at the deal as a way of focusing its business and better aligning its portfolio with its long-term strategy.
“This is the right long-term strategy for Dell, RSA and our collective customers and partners,” said Jeff Clarke, Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman, Dell Technologies. “The transaction will further simplify our business and product portfolio. It also allows Dell Technologies to focus on our strategy to build automated and intelligent security into infrastructure, platforms and devices to keep data safe, protected and resilient.”
Outlook may be getting a major upgrade with a new ‘Outlook Spaces’ feature, providing a new project-based organization system.
Twitter user Walking Cat (@h0x0d) tweeted a video of the new feature in action. Cat also posted a test form that contained the following description:
“Spaces pulls together your documents, emails, and events using the search terms you provide here. In upcoming releases, we’ll be using AI to assist in discovering and grouping work items into Spaces.”
As some users replying to Cat’s tweet have said, while the feature looks amazing, it will be interesting to see how well it does at a time when Microsoft is pushing Teams as a means of communication and collaboration. For many individuals, Teams is increasingly replacing email in importance. For those who still rely on email, however, this has the potential to be a major improvement.
In a big win for Slack, Business Insider (BI) is reporting that IBM is deploying the messaging app to all of its 350,000 employees.
Slack is locked in a rivalry with Microsoft Teams, with the two companies battling for the corporate messaging market. Microsoft Teams recently doubled Slack’s user base, and has kept the pressure up with TV ads. In spite of Microsoft’s momentum, however, IBM has chosen Slack as its messaging app of choice. This, in turn, helps Slack make the case that it can compete with Microsoft on the largest scale, in the most mission-critical environments.
“Going wall to wall in IBM — it’s basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told BI.
Konrad Lagarde, director of IBM Toolbox, told BI that one of the reasons IBM went with Slack was their willingness to meet IBM’s needs. When Lagarde first starting using the app, teams were limited to 2,000 individuals. With some departments larger than that, IBM needed an app that could scale better and Slack was willing to add the necessary features.
IBM also likely chose Slack over Microsoft Teams as a result of increasing competition between the two computing giants. Microsoft is second in the U.S. cloud market, and IBM has increasingly staked its future on moving into the cloud. In fact, IBM’s recent earnings were buoyed by its cloud business. Just as many retail companies are turning to Microsoft rather than relying their prime competitor Amazon, IBM probably wants to avoid relying on a company it directly competes with.
Either way, today’s announcement is good news for Slack and will likely help the company continue to attract business, both large and small.
“Digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. McDermott says there are three things that any c-suite executives will tell you:
We have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty.
Employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war.
Step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses how digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time in an interview on CNBC:
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time
Now I’m at ServiceNow and I’m so excited about this cloud future and digital transformation. I have been all over the world and met hundreds of customers in the last three months. Digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time. There are basically three things that any c-suite executives will tell you. One, we have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty. Two, employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war. And three, step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
ServiceNow is the platform that essentially is the platform of all platforms. Every environment in the enterprise today is a heterogeneous environment. We are that cross-platform integration engine of the 21st-century economy which is why ServiceNow is growing faster than all of the companies in the cloud.
You’ve Got To Move Everything To a Modern Cloud Architecture
Here’s the root cause of the problem (of executives hesitating on digitization). It took 50 years to build the chaos, the complexity that exists in these enterprises. When you’re talking to these executives they don’t know what to do. That’s because they don’t know how to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they’re not going to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they are not going to did their way out of this mess. These systems of record will stay there for long periods of time.
A system of innovation, a system of action, over these systems of record (is what is needed), where you can integrate the data into a new generation workflow in the cloud. Workflow designed experiences can take the mess and move it into a modern cloud architecture so they can execute their mission. The light bulbs go on when they see the solution. Unfortunately, and sadly, the vendors who got them there in the first place are telling them to buy new messes and add it on to the old mess. You have got to leave that old mess alone, put a tourniquet on it, and move everything to a modern cloud architecture, a modern workflow.
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time, Says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott
ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft has reorganized, combining its Windows Client and Surface teams, effective February 25.
The new team will be called Windows + Devices and will report to Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. The move formalizes a workflow that has already been in place for several years. One of the challenges Microsoft has faced for decades, in comparison to rival Apple, is trying to make Windows function well on a virtually endless combination of hardware profiles made by companies and individuals alike.
Surface changed all of that, giving Microsoft the ability to optimize Windows for a single hardware profile, while giving customers the same benefits of software and hardware integration as Apple provides. As ZDNet points out, OEM computer manufacturers were not pleased when Microsoft started its own PC business and may be upset with today’s news.
For customers, however, the news is a win and will only help improve Windows and Surface integration and performance even more.
According to Business Insider (BI), Piper Sandler analyst Brent Bracelin is predicting Microsoft could buy Salesforce if it became available.
Earlier reports by RBC Capital Markets predicted that Google may buy Salesforce in an effort to leapfrog Microsoft in the cloud market. Google is a distant third among U.S. cloud providers, and RBC did not see an organic way for the company to meet CEO Thomas Kurian’s goal of becoming the No. 2 provider within five years.
Bracelin, however, believes Microsoft would be the buyer, not Google. Specifically, the purchase could help Microsoft gain market share in the front-office application space, “the market term for software that helps salespeople and service reps keep track of their customers, which is an area where Salesforce specializes,” according to BI.
At this time, there is no evidence Salesforce is interested in selling. Even if it were, RBC believes a Salesforce acquisition could be valued as high as $250 billion, almost 10 times what Microsoft paid for LinkedIn, its largest acquisition to date.
One thing is certain: If Salesforce ever does go up for sale, there could be a major bidding war for the company.
Following assurances from Foxconn that the coronavirus would not impact its production, it appears factory shutdowns are on the verge of doing just that and impacting iPhone output in the process, according to Reuters.
The Chinese government has told companies to shut down production until at least February 10, and Foxconn has stopped “almost all” production as a result. According to Reuters, a “source told Reuters on Monday that Foxconn has so far seen a ‘fairly small impact’ from the outbreak as it was utilizing factories in countries including Vietnam, India and Mexico to fill the gap, adding that the company will be able to make up for the delay if factories work overtime after the ban.”
The real concern is if production is stopped beyond February 10. If manufacturing remains stopped for weeks, a month or more, the impact to Foxconn’s output, and the iPhone specifically, would be “big.”
This is just the latest indication that the coronavirus could have severe implications across various industries as governments and agencies around the world struggle to deal with the outbreak.
Ars Technica is reporting on a new type of ransomware that tampers with and stops critical infrastructure software, such as that used by gas refineries, power grids and dams.
Ransomware has become a multi-billion dollar plague, with some estimates placing the cost in 2019 at $7.5 billion. Hospitals, businesses, government agencies and universities have all been impacted. The usual M.O. for ransomware is to encrypt files on the target system and hold the files for ransom until the victim pays.
One of the latest ransomware strains, dubbed Ekans, may have far more chilling implications. According to Ars Technica, in addition to the traditional methods Ekans employs “researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that actively seeks out and forcibly stops applications used in industrial control systems, which is usually abbreviated as ICS. Before starting file-encryption operations, the ransomware kills processes listed by process name in a hard-coded list within the encoded strings of the malware.”
Fortunately, Ekans is relatively primitive and is likely to have minimal impact on ICS programs. As Ars Technica highlights, “Monday’s report described Ekans’ ICS targeting as minimal and crude because the malware simply kills various processes created by widely used ICS programs. That’s a key differentiator from ICS-targeting malware discovered over the past few years with the ability to do much more serious damage.”
Even so, this is a disturbing escalation in the cybersecurity wars, one that is likely the beginning of a new breed of ransomware.
Oracle has added five new cloud regions as it works to take on Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, according to a company press release.
According to the announcement, Oracle has“added local regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam). As of today, all of them are open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console.”
The company has added 10 new regions in the last six months, making a total of 21 locations offering Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud. The company’s goal is to reach 36 by the end of 2020 and, with this announcement, it says it is on target to reach that goal.
The company is also focused on redundancy to meet customers mission-critical needs.
“To that end, four of these new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—give customers a second site within the same country (or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region),” the press release reads. “The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.
“Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where we operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.”
It remains to be seen if Oracle can compete long-term with Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon currently dominates the cloud market, but Microsoft has been making significant headway, with some analysts predicting it could overtake Amazon. In the meantime, Oracle is one of the companies seen as most vulnerable to continued gains by Microsoft.
“Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally,” says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe. “It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way.”
Our customers are very excited about mobile coming to the enterprise. It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. You can show a young new employee, a millennial, that you are in fact a modern company that helps get them onboard and productive quickly.
Also, the Now Mobile app which will allow employees to get their questions answered, problems reported and then dealt with, and get information. All my approvals are now in one place where I can check them. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way. Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally.
We feel very good about our growth. We feel very good about our customer and very good about our prospects. We are just focusing and executing so our customers get those great experiences.
We Feel Very Good About the Relations We Are Building
We now have 766 customers that are a million dollars and greater. We signed 14 customers that are a million dollars and greater in the quarter. That’s just symptomatic of the fact that we now work with 75 percent of the global 500. We are increasingly a strategic partner with those customers. Of our top 20 deals, 17 had three or more products. We feel very good about the relationships that we are building with our largest customers, which are the world’s largest companies and governments.
Our relationship with Microsoft is a very good one. We are initially focusing on US federal business where Microsoft has a strong presence as do we. We have a huge federal business and our datacenters have a certain security clearance. Microsoft Azure has the highest security clearance. Rather than us trying to replicate that, we are going to partner with them to take advantage of that Azure capability and jointly call on US federal customers.
We are doing the same with federal customers in Australia and increasingly we will look at other government markets. We have 20 different product integrations with Microsoft and a long history with them. We think there is a lot of shared opportunity together.
RPO Is the Best Forward-Looking Indication of Our Business
We do think RPO is a very good indication and probably the best forward-looking indication of our business because it demonstrates what kind of revenue you can expect going forward. Our current RPO grew 35 percent in the quarter. We feel very good about the outlook and future of our business. We raised guidance for the full year, both on revenue and billings. We see a lot of opportunity and we have a lot of strong momentum. We are focused on building those customer relationships that drive that growth.
Mobile Is Finally Coming To the Enterprise, Says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe
IBM announced it has added artificial intelligence (AI) to its TRIRIGA facilities management solution.
TRIRIGA is an integration workplace management system, that helps customers manage their workspace and facilities. By utilizing existing real estate to its maximum potential, companies can reduce waste and save money on operating cost and real estate purchases.
According to the press release, “the new TRIRIGA Assistant, a smart, conversational AI tool which uses natural language processing to help users quickly and easily engage with the spaces around them. TRIRIGA Assistant can help remove the hassle of coordinating with colleagues to schedule and reserve conference rooms, submit service requests such as lighting and catering, or locate a colleague’s assigned workspace.”
IBM sees workplace management as a critical part of a company’s efforts, one that can improve workflows, boost productivity, cut costs and improve bottom lines.
“Employees and real estate are key elements to organizational growth and development, driving companies to create cost-effective and engaging workplaces that help attract and retain top talent,” said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D., general manager, AI Applications, IBM. “The implementation of TRIRIGA with embedded AI provides corporations and facility managers with insights into how they can more effectively utilize space across their enterprise. This technology can help companies address the growing expectations of today’s modern workforce and achieve better business results.”
FedScoop is reporting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will soon close its last data center as it finishes moving its data and applications to AWS.
ATF CTO Mason McDaniel told FedScoop the goal is to completely transition users to its AWS cloud environment by the end of the year. The last remaining data center will then be converted into office space.
The transition has been a long time coming, as the agency has worked to modernize its IT after shutting down its disaster recovery data center in 2013. From that point forward, the agency was operating without a safety net, a situation it put to the test in 2016 when it had to evacuate its data center for two days as a result of weather. With no disaster recovery plan in place, the agency had to hope for the best that nothing catastrophic would happen during those two days. Moving to AWS will provide the safety and redundancy the agency needs.
McDaniel believes the upgrade to the cloud should result in significant efficiency gains as well.
“What they’re going to see soon after that, once we finish this part, is a focus back on the actual processes themselves,” McDaniel told FedScoop. “Many, many of the processes that our users and analysts and agents have to go through require them to go from system to system to system because of how we built things in projects over time. Every time something new was needed, the teams that developed the old ones were gone. And over time, we’ve got all the tiny little disconnected systems so the users have to manually go back and forth between them to do stuff.”
This, in turn, should reduce by “half or more the amount of time it takes them to do a lot of their daily activities,” McDaniel said. “That’s when they’re really going to start seeing the benefits.”
For the third time in a year, Intel is preparing to release a patch to address two microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) flaws, also known as Zombieland flaws.
According to the company’s blog post, of these two new issues, one is considered low risk and the other medium. Both of them require authenticated local access, meaning a hacker should not be able to remotely exploit these flaws. These new issues are closely related to issues that were addressed in May and November 2019, as Intel has worked to progressively reduce the MDS vulnerability.
“These issues are closely related to INTEL-SA-00233, released in November 2019, which addressed an issue called Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) Asynchronous Abort, or TAA,” writes Jerry Bryant, Director of security communication in the Intel Platform Assurance and Security group. “At the time, we confirmed the possibility that some amount of data could still potentially be inferred through a side-channel and would be addressed in future microcode updates.
“Since May 2019, starting with Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), and then in November with TAA, we and our system software partners have released mitigations that have cumulatively and substantially reduced the overall attack surface for these types of issues. We continue to conduct research in this area – internally, and in conjunction with the external research community.”
Intel has faced intense criticism from security researchers for its decision to address these vulnerabilities in phases, rather than taking an immediate, comprehensive approach to fixing them.
In the meantime, the latest patch should be available “in the near future.”
Google has announced it is shutting down App Maker, its low-code development environment.
App Maker was unveiled in 2016 and provided a way for IT departments, developers and enthusiasts to create apps to improve G Suite workflows. App Maker users will need to find another solution, however, as the development environment is nearing the end of its life.
In the blog post announcing the change, Google said existing apps made with App Maker will continue to work, and critical bugs will be addressed, but the tool is no longer under active development. Effective April 15, 2020, developers will no longer be able to create new applications and effective January 19, 2021, all App Maker apps will stop working.
The company says there is no migration path to other platforms, including any of its own tools. In the meantime, Google encourages app developers to start recreating their apps using AppSheet, a similar product the company acquired in mid-January. Of course, given the abandonment of App Maker, with no easy migration path, Google may have trouble convincing users to trust another of the company’s solutions.
“We’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future,” says Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco. “What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills.”
“I lead our DevNet and technical community and certifications team for Cisco,” says Whaley. “This includes everything about helping developers use our APIs. We do a lot of work on the paths that you can take to build the skills to learn about Cisco technology, to learn about software skills, to learn about automation, and then prove and test those skills by earning some certifications.”
Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco, says that the engineer of the future combines infrastructure, software, and automation skills:
How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
I come from a software development background. I’m working with a lot of DevOps, network engineering teams, infrastructure engineering teams, and we’re really looking at how all these skill sets have been evolving over time. What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills. Whether those skill sets are combined in one person or combined within a team of engineers who have specialties, that’s what it really takes to succeed with the scale, the speed, the agility, and the distributed nature of applications that we’re seeing today.
We’ve really seen this come into effect with COVID and the way that companies have had to respond really quickly. Automation came to the forefront as being very important. Companies that had at least a start on those skill sets have been able to respond more quickly. Now we’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future.
New Job Roles Are Emerging
Part of that has a lot to do with new job roles that are coming out of that. These business drivers of speed and agility and scale are driving things like the need for CI/CD pipeline for more than just your software, even for your networks, for your infrastructure. Out of that are these new job roles emerging, things like a Network Automation Engineer or DevSecOps Engineer, bringing security strongly into your DevOps flow.
That’s part of what we’re learning from the DevNet community and what we’re working with the DevNet community on is how people are building the skills to go after those new job roles. There are a lot of opportunities and a lot of fun stuff to learn.
Cisco’s Mandy Whaley Explains How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
In light of the ongoing ascendancy of clouding computing, Google has released a new whitepaper addressing cloud-native security.
The whitepaper highlights a new approach to cloud security, emphasizing the unique needs of cloud-based systems. For example, in traditional computer security, tremendous emphasis is placed on perimeter security—keeping people out. As Google points out, however, that approach doesn’t work well with cloud-based systems.
“It had become clear to us that a perimeter-based security model wasn’t secure enough,” the whitepaper reads. “If an attacker were to breach the perimeter, they would have free movement within the network. While we realized we needed stronger security controls throughout our infrastructure, we also wanted to make it easy for Google developers to write and deploy secure applications without having to implement security features themselves.
“Moving from monolithic applications to distributed microservices deployed from containers using an orchestration system had tangible operational benefits: simpler management and scalability. This cloud-native architecture required a different security model with different tools to protect deployments aligned with the management and scalability benefits of microservices.”
This new approach is called BeyondProd. BeyondProd builds on the principles outlined in a previous approach called BeyondCorp, and emphasizes zero trust between services.
“In the same way that BeyondCorp helped us to evolve beyond a perimeter based security model, BeyondProd represents a similar leap forward in our approach to production security. The BeyondProd approach describes a cloud-native security architecture that assumes no trust between services, provides isolation between workloads, verifies that only centrally built applications are deployed, automates vulnerability management, and enforces strong access controls to critical data. The BeyondProd architecture led Google to innovate several new systems in order to meet these requirements.
“All too often, security is ‘called in’ last一when the decision to migrate to a new architecture has already been made. By involving your security team early and focusing on the benefits of the new security model like simpler patch management and tighter access controls, a cloud-native architecture can provide significant benefits to both application development and security teams. When applying the security principles outlined in this paper to your cloud-native infrastructure, you can strengthen the deployment of your workloads, how your workloads’ communications are secured, and how they affect other workloads.”
The full whitepaper is a must read for companies designing and deploying cloud-based systems and illustrates the unique approach cloud security demands.
Digital Trends is reporting that Intel has reaffirmed its “maniacal” efforts to fix its processor supply shortage.
Intel has been struggling for some time to keep up with demand, specifically for its 10nm processors. The ongoing shortage has prompted Dell—historically one of Intel’s staunchest allies—to start looking at AMD to make up for Intel’s shortfall. Dell opened the door to the possibility following a 6% decline in consumer PC shipments, largely as a result of Intel’s supply issues.
In fact, the problem became so bad that Intel penned an open letter to customers, apologizing for their manufacturing issues and promising to address them as soon as possible.
According to Digital Trends, during Intel’s fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday, “CEO Bob Swann and George Davis, chief financial officer, were on the call and insisted that they hope to ramp up yields on 10nm products throughout 2020. The ‘supply remains tight,’ Swann added. By the end of year, the executives promised to be out of the constraint entirely by adding 25% higher wafer capacity to normalize the inventory levels.”
Intel also acknowledged it was facing “a more competitive environment” in 2020. AMD has been making significant inroads in the processor market. After it’s wildly successful desktop-class Ryzen 3000 series, the company launched the Ryzen 4000 mobile processor series, challenging what has been Intel’s strongest bastion.
Intel has a window of opportunity to deliver on its promises. If it fails, it will likely see more partners defect to AMD.
“The acquisition today of Fiix is a really exciting one,” says Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret. “It spans the gap that’s traditionally existed between manually entered keystroke data and real-time data that’s coming from the equipment itself. This helps take maintenance and automation really to a whole new level.”
Fiix Inc. is a privately-held, AI-enabled computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) company. Fiix, founded in 2008, is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
“We’re really taking manufacturing to a whole new level,” added Moret. “We’re taking the traditional operational technology and know-how that’s existed on the plant floor for so many years and we’re marrying that with IT technology and bringing those together. It’s really unlocking a whole new level of productivity across all the industries that we serve.”
Fiix’s cloud-native CMMS creates workflows for the scheduling, organizing, and tracking of equipment maintenance. It connects seamlessly to business systems and drives data-driven decisions. The company’s revenue grew 70% in 2019 with more than 85% recurring revenue.
“We believe that the future of industrial asset management is performance-based,” said Tessa Myers, vice president, product management, Software & Control, for Rockwell Automation. “With the addition of the Fiix platform and expertise, our customers will benefit from a 360-degree view of integrated data across automation, production, and maintenance, helping them to monitor and improve the performance of their assets and optimize how maintenance work is done.”
James Novak, Fiix CEO, said, “From the beginning, Fiix has been on a mission to connect maintenance and operations teams to the tools, resources, and technology they need to modernize and join the future of maintenance. Joining Rockwell Automation will allow us to help even more companies modernize maintenance and increase asset performance by connecting to industry-leading data, automation, and production systems.”
The company says that the addition of Fiix directly aligns with Rockwell Automation’s software strategy.
Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret also discussed their involvement with COVID treatments and the vaccine:
“We’re involved with virtually all of the manufacturers who are working on the treatments and the tests and the vaccines around the world for the COVID virus. We’re really helping them and helping the world to recover. So we’re involved in the formulation, the packaging, the tracing, and you obviously have to do this at unbelievable scale to be able to meet the need.”
Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level
On the heals of a survey showing Microsoft making significant inroads in the cloud industry, Morgan Stanley has even worse news for the company’s competitors, according to Business Insider.
In the previous survey by Goldman Sachs—despite AWS taking in the lion’s share of cloud revenue—97% of companies said they currently use Azure, compared with 58% for AWS and 25% for Google Cloud. Even more concerning, the survey showed that far more companies were planning to use Microsoft’s platform within the next three years compared to its competitors.
Morgan Stanley’s research provides more validation for Microsoft’s current strategy, predicting the company will “gain the largest percentage of IT budgets over the next three years, while VMware, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle, and Dell stand to lose the most.”
Further complicating things is an expected slowdown in IT budgets in 2020. The slowdown will negatively impact the above companies as more and more businesses move to the cloud. This move signals more good news for Microsoft, however, as it is expected to see gains “driven by an increasing proportion of customers citing Microsoft as their preferred hybrid cloud vendor,” according to the survey.
After years of telling customers onsite hardware was antiquated and unnecessary, even Amazon recently joined the hybrid market. As Business Insider points out, with Microsoft’s lead in this particular segment, Amazon may regret ignoring the hybrid cloud market for so long.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has issued a press release detailing a severe vulnerability in Windows 10 and encouraging all users to update immediately.
According the NSA’s press release, the agency discovered the vulnerability in the Windows 10 cryptography functionality. “The certificate validation vulnerability allows an attacker to undermine how Windows verifies cryptographic trust and can enable remote code execution. The vulnerability affects Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 as well as applications that rely on Windows for trust functionality.”
It is relatively unusual for the NSA to issue a press release about a vulnerability, but the severity of this particular one warranted it.
“The vulnerability places Windows endpoints at risk to a broad range of exploitation vectors. NSA assesses the vulnerability to be severe and that sophisticated cyber actors will understand the underlying flaw very quickly and, if exploited, would render the previously mentioned platforms as fundamentally vulnerable. The consequences of not patching the vulnerability are severe and widespread. Remote exploitation tools will likely be made quickly and widely available. Rapid adoption of the patch is the only known mitigation at this time and should be the primary focus for all network owners.”
The agency recommends all users immediately apply all January 2020 Patch Tuesday patches to mitigate the danger.
