Deutsche Telekom and OVHcloud team up for Gaia-X – as Macron says Europe must resume cloud battle

French cloud and hosting provider OVHcloud and T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, have announced a cooperation to create a 'trusted public cloud offering' for Germany, France, and other European markets.

The two companies will contribute to the Gaia-X initiative, a collaboration between the European Commission (EC), Germany, France, and various organisations within the continent.

The proposed offering will 'address the specific needs of the public sector as...

15 September 2020 | Data Management

The next steps for the EU and US post-Privacy Shield: How can Europe win the digital race?

Opinion It has been seven years since Edward Snowden exposed the level of surveillance by US intelligence agencies that one might have rather expected from totalitarian countries. Petabytes of private or company data – no matter from which country – are made available to US authorities by default without suspect or a court decision.

While little is known publicly about current practice, it would certainly be more than surprising if the powers and capabilities of the US...

19 August 2020 | Data Sovereignty

Privacy Shield ruling could lead to dark clouds ahead for hyperscalers, advocates warn

The ending of the Privacy Shield agreement by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could have serious ramifications for the major hyperscale cloud providers, according to privacy activists.

Privacy Shield is an EU-US agreement which 'provides companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with data protection requirements in support of transatlantic commerce', in the words of the framework's website statement.

Max Schrems, a leading privacy advocate,...

7 August 2020 | Data & Analytics

Thoughts on encryption legislation – and the real ‘link’ between 5G and coronavirus

Opinion Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but the recent one that blamed the rollout of 5G networks for the spread of Covid-19 is one of the more bizarre examples in recent memory. Not only is it very obviously untrue to anyone that understands either the technology or virology, but there is also little real correlation. New Zealand which was one of the first countries to declare itself virus-free is accelerating its current 5G rollout while Brazil and the USA which have seen the highest...

21 July 2020 | Compliance

What are you going to do when your cloud goes down? Rethinking shared responsibility

A short history of modern business IT might report that the Noughties were all about taking baby steps in cloud applications such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Taleo, Ariba and NetSuite. The 2010s saw clouds proliferate as pioneers took a ‘cloud-first’ stance and used platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to pilot, test and run services. In the 2020s, we can be confident that businesses will attempt to harness their existing cloud investments, formalising...

2 June 2020 | Data Management

Three reasons to perform your cloud security risk assessment ASAP

The unprecedented shock to world markets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely permanently change the way we work. Millions must work from home, and businesses are scrambling to find ways to maintain productivity.

The shift to utilising a completely remote workforce has been relatively seamless for some companies and utterly chaotic for others. Adding to the chaos, cybercriminals are targeting organisations of all types with coronavirus-related phishing campaigns and...

30 April 2020 | Data & Analytics

Microsoft expands European Azure presence with Germany and Switzerland launches

Microsoft has announced the launch of new Azure availability in Germany and Switzerland, citing increased data residency and security concerns as key to European expansion.

Azure is now available from cloud data centre regions located in Zurich and Geneva, for the Switzerland release announced at the end of last month, while Germany’s newest regions are in the North and West Central zones, in...

10 September 2019 | Data Centres

Cloud providers are under attack – and sabotaged services will freeze operations

Over the next two years, cloud service providers will be systematically sabotaged by attackers aiming to disrupt critical national infrastructure (CNI) or cripple supply chains. Organisations dependent on cloud services will find their operations and supply chains undermined when key cloud services go down for extended periods of time.

Nation states that engage in a digital cold war will aim to disrupt economies and take down CNI by sabotaging cloud infrastructure through traditional...

22 May 2019 | Data Loss

Addressing the concerns of data management and sovereignty in multi-cloud and edge scenarios

MWC Barcelona last month heavily focused on two fast-emerging technology trends; 5G and edge computing. Together, they will significantly impact businesses by enabling massive volumes of digital data to transfer between cloud servers located in multiple regions around the world as well as between IoT devices and edge nodes. This is due to the hyper-fast speed of 5G networks and edge computing architectures that have micro-clouds and data centres...

26 March 2019 | Containers

Defying data gravity: How can organisations escape cloud vendor lock-in?

The process of deriving the maximum possible business value from the data you hold is not a new challenge, but it is one that all too many organisations are still learning to address in the most sustainable way.

The concept of ‘data gravity’, coined by software engineer Dave McCrory in 2010, refers to the ability of bodies of data to attract applications, services and other data. The larger...

23 November 2018 | Data & Analytics