Items tagged with Cloud
Microsoft this week reported earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, 2017, and what a quarter it was. Non-GAAP revenue came in a healthy $24.7 billion, with earnings per share checking in at 98 cents, beating most estimates. Microsoft's operating income for the past three months was $7 billion, while its profit for the quarter came to $7.7 billion, a large part of which was attributable to Microsoft's cloud business. "Innovation across our cloud platforms drove strong results this quarter," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft, "Customers are looking to Microsoft...
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The numbers are in and they show that Microsoft needs to seriously consider refreshing its Surface line, and especially its Surface Pro tablets. Revenue from Microsoft's Surface products declined 26 percent year-over-year during its most recent quarter ended March 31, 2017. The only other segment to post a lost was Microsoft' Enterprise Services, which dropped 1 percent. This is where it gets tough competing in hardware, as Microsoft is finding out. Microsoft now has a somewhat fleshed out lineup of Surface products, including its relatively new Surface Book laptop and Surface Studio all-in-one...
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Here at HotHardware, we've talked a lot about the importance of keeping good backups. On a personal level, a failed backup would affect just a couple of people (if not just one); but carelessness in the enterprise can can affect a lot more people. Unfortunately, this is a lesson GitLab has found out the hard way. As its name implies, GitLab is a website designed to help developers manage their open-source projects from start to finish. Users on the site have an expectation that their data is going to be kept safe, but as is proven here, problem can arise, so we can never treat a single source as...
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Do you need to move a lot of data? To be clear: we're talking lots of data. Sure, that 64 TB NAS box might seem meaty, but that's paltry compared to the kind of data we're talking about. Think 100,000 TB, aka 100 PB. It's almost hard to wrap our heads around that kind of storage, but that's the amount Amazon says it can move with ease via its new Snowmobile service. In essence, Snowmobile comes to us in the form of a pure-white 18-wheeler that's used to bring your data from point A to point B. Amazon says that Snowmobile will show up at your door after a quick assessment and then work with you...
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With Intel finding itself inside most of the world's consumer PCs and enterprise servers, it's begun making a massive push on making sure its chips wind up in all other devices - those that most of us regular folk don't think about. We're talking "edge devices" and "fog computing" hardware. "Edge devices" are those that connect all of our devices, so they can include routers, switches, and so forth. "Fog computing", by contrast, acts as decentralized resource management. An example of fog computing can be seen in Windows 10, which has the ability to serve updates to other PCs in a household or...
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In June of last year, Intel announced a $16.7B acquisition of chip designer Altera, a Silicon Valley bellwether known for producing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), PLDs (Programmable Logic Devices), Embedded Processors, and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). At the time of the announcement, Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich said, “Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments. With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more.” That’s a...
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Following a few months of teasing, Microsoft has finally rolled out Windows 10 Enterprise E3, which can be purchased through its official Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. While enterprise-level software solutions are typically feared due to their expense, Microsoft is making the E3 cost-of-entry modest enough to make even small businesses consider making the switch. Microsoft is pricing Windows 10 Enterprise E3 at $7/mo, or $84/yr. While few enjoy the idea of a subscription-based OS, this is one of those products that could pay for itself over time. We're talking enterprise-level control...
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More details about a previously disclosed security breach at cloud storage provider Dropbox have come to light. The hack itself is old news—it occurred back in 2012—but what's new is how many users were affected by it. Hackers made off with details belonging to north of 68 million Dropbox users, prompting a mass password reset. The folks at Motherboard got their mitts on a sample of files containing email addresses and hashed passwords of users affected by the Dropbox hack. The information is contained in four files totaling about 5GB, with details of 68,680,741 accounts. Apparently a senior Dropbox...
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There's a popular saying about procrastination that I'll tell you about later. In the meantime, here's a heads up that Microsoft has begun downgrading the free storage allotment of its OneDrive cloud service from 15GB to 5GB, just as the Redmond outfit said it would when it announced the impending reduction back in November of 2015. The reduction in free space was part of an overhaul to OneDrive that also saw the elimination of unlimited storage for Office 365 Home, Personal, and University subscribers. Microsoft was put off by a small number of people who used their unlimited OneDrive accounts...
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404: Weed not found? Not anymore, says Microsoft. Microsoft is turning some of those 404’s into 420’s. Microsoft is the first large corporation to jump into the legal marijuana market and the company just announced a partnership to begin offering software and services that track marijuana plants from “seed to sale.” The software is a new product in Microsoft’s cloud computing business. It is meant to help states that have legalized the medical or recreational use of marijuana keep track of sales and commerce. Microsoft will be partnering with Kind, the startup that initially developed the...
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Samsung recently acquired cloud-service company Joyent for an undisclosed sum. Joyent will continue to operate as a standalone subsidiary and provide infrastructure and software services to its customers. Samsung stated that it had looked at a number of cloud companies, but decided on Joyent because it has “an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers.” Joyent will provide Samsung with its own cloud platform to support mobile, IoT and cloud-based software and services. Joyent claims to have pioneered...
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When we hear about IoT, or Internet of Things, it often relates to products like smart clothing, accessories or even home automation. But IoT can also play a major role in the enterprise space, as Microsoft has just confirmed with its acquisition of an Italian company called Solair. In its blog post, Microsoft notes that Solair is well-established in the IoT space, having established itself involved in manufacturing, retail, food, and transportation. One of the things that no doubt stood out to Microsoft most about Solair is the company's appreciation for its Azure cloud platform, as all of its...
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This isn't a perfect analogy, but imagine if Burger King approached McDonald's about storing and managing its inventory of beef patties, buns, condiments, cups, napkins, and so forth. That's sort of what's happening between Apple and Google, with the former becoming a customer of the latter's cloud platform.Apparently this was a deal Apple inked with Google last year, and since that time it's been able to reduce its reliance on Amazon Web Services to a large degree for its iCloud service. Apple hasn't completely severed its ties with Amazon, but at this point it's entrusting Google's cloud platform...
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Microsoft added to the frustration of some of its OneDrive and Office 365 users over the weekend when it accidentally capped their storage ceiling at 1TB. The lowered data cap caught the users off guard because Microsoft had previously promised a one-year grace period for users who were using more than 1TB. OneDrive has been an ongoing source of angst for some users over recent months. It dates back to when Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers would be allowed to use as much OneDrive storage as they wanted to, only Microsoft later went back on its word because it felt that a small number...
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