Quantum computing promises much – but are organisations secure enough to make the most of it? According to a new report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), companies are aware of the risk of quantum computing but not yet ready to take action.

The alliance had previously put together the Quantum Safe Security Working Group (QSS WG) to assess the risks of the emerging technology. According to today’s report, which polled more than 100 CSA members with more than 90% working in either IT or...

The migration towards cloud computing in business has grown exponentially over the last 12 months, with new installation of public and private cloud network infrastructure becoming a key area of successful business operation.

Partnering this successful adoption of cloud technology is the positive development of both core and non-core careers in the sector, which in turn has led to an increased demand for skilled professionals and a boost in the number of available jobs.

We initially saw an increased demand...

A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. The quest to discover meaningful commercial applications for blockchain, beyond cryptography apps, has begun across the globe.

451 Research revealed that 28 percent of enterprises are now evaluating or using blockchain, although fewer than 3 percent have any production...

As we enter our second decade of its existence, the role of the public cloud is changing. Infrastructure as a service altered the way that virtualised resources are consumed, but what has emerged is far more powerful than allocating compute, storage, and networking on-demand.

The derivative services that the public cloud providers now offer include speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, and machine learning functionality that are constantly being improved. While it is often prudent to run an application on...

CircleCI, a San Francisco-based continuous integration and delivery platform provider whose customers include Facebook, Spotify and Sony, has announced the close of a $31 million (£22.5m) series C funding round.

The funding round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners, alongside Industry Ventures and Heavybit, joining existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and DFJ Ventures.

The company helps organisations’ development teams automate the build, test and...

With AWS re:Invent done and dusted for another year, naturally the majority of coverage has focused on the initiatives coming out of Amazon’s headquarters. There were plenty of them too – more than 20 announcements in Andy Jassy’s keynote alone, with topics ranging from machine learning, databases, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Yet plenty more news came from the event’s many...

Google has announced a price reduction for GPUs attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36%.

For US regions – Oregon and South Carolina – NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU attached to a VM will cost $1.46 per hour, while the K80 GPU will set users back $0.45 per hour. The P100 and K80 GPUs are also available in Belgium and Taiwan

The company added that organisations such as Shazam and oilfield services provider Schlumberger were among those taking advantage of GPUs to...

Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key...

IBM has been solidly building its efforts in quantum computing over the past couple of years – and a new milestone has been reached with the launch of upgraded systems featuring 20 qubit processors, with 50 qubits on the way.

The company describes the latest news as “rapid advances in quantum hardware… as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.”

Quantum computing is gaining...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of C5 instances, aimed at more compute-intensive workloads for the EC2 cloud.

The C5 instances – three from the sharp end in Amazon’s compute class, behind G2, P2 and F1 – were introduced as the newest iteration back in November last year at the company’s Re:Invent show. The C5 promises 3.0 GHz Intel...

Big data analysis can provide continuous business intelligence to managers, enabling sophisticated monitoring of current activities, and helping them to make smarter, faster decisions based on fact data and hidden trends and patterns. But while managers may think it’s cool, rushing to implement “a big data analytics” program can get you into trouble.  There are many architectures, tools, and algorithms to sort through, and you’ll need to manage stakeholder expectations. Software...

Research in quantum computing is closely tied to the discipline of information theory, a mathematical concept concerned with communication, coding, and encryption. Various applications of quantum information theory were developed in the last 50 years.

As a result, quantum computing has been high on the research agenda of governments and technology organisations worldwide. In a quantum computing model, the basic unit of information is called the quantum bit (qubit), which can be represented by photons.

Using...

Tech-savvy banks were among the first and most enthusiastic supporters of Docker containers.

Goldman Sachs invested $95 million in Docker in 2015. Bank of America has its enormous 17,500-person development team running thousands of containers. Top fintech companies like 

Cloud content management company Box has unveiled Box Skills, a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to stored content. Box Skills will facilitate businesses to re-imagine the business processes considered as impractical to digitise or automate or too expensive.

At BoxWorks 2017, Box previewed three initial Box Skills currently in development, leveraging machine learning tools from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to solve...

IBM has announced a new capability at the Serverless Conference in New York City on October 10th, 2017 to further the development of serverless applications.

The new tool, Composer, comprises a library of patterns that are key for building serverless applications. It also has the inherent serverless features such as auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go built into it.

Currently, the programming model is available for use in only Node.js language, but developers can deploy the model to make it available in other...

• Manufacturing-based IoT connections grew 84% between 2016 and 2017, followed by energy & utilities (41%).
• 73% of executives are either researching or currently launching IoT projects.
• The IoT platform market is expected to grow 35% per year to $1.16B by 2020.
• B2B uses can generate nearly 70% of the potential value enabled by IoT.

These and many other fascinating findings are from Verizon’s State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017,...

By 2020 there will be 1.3 million unfilled jobs in Europe, many will be in cloud-related fields. As businesses invest in digital transformation (83% believe cloud skills are critical for digital transformation, according to Microsoft), demand for skilled cloud professionals is set to surge.

Microsoft’s leading cloud platform, Azure, now boasts

Demand for DevOps professionals continues apace, according to the latest analysis from Robert Half, with nine out of 10 CIOs in the UK seeing DevOps as a core competency for developers and infrastructure professionals in the next five years.

The study, which is based on more than 100 interviews with CIOs from companies across the UK, found that for 90% of respondents DevOps would be effective if security was built into continuous service and application delivery. 94% agreed that DevOps would need to...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been the first of the major cloud vendors to announce per-second billing, but Google has become the first to implement it.

The company announced yesterday that customers of Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment virtual machines (VMs) will move to the new system, applicable to all VMs.

Google’s change was made effective as of September 26, while AWS customers will have to wait until October 2 for their move. Google...

Database provider MongoDB has filed to go public, confirming reports from a month previously and potentially becoming the third major cloud IPO of 2017 after Okta and Cloudera.

The SEC filing, available to view here, shows MongoDB made $101.4 million in total revenues in the year ending January 31 2017, up 55% from the previous year’s $65.3m, which was up 37% from 2014-15’s $40.8m. Despite total gross profit of $71.4m, total...