Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wishes he had invested in cloud computing earlier in his tenure at the tech giant, CNBC reported. Ballmer made the remark Thursday on Clubhouse, an audio-chat app, during a discussion that also included Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Steven Sinofsky, a former manager at Microsoft.

"I wish we probably started a year or so, two years earlier," Ballmer said, according to CNBC's report.

Microsoft released its first cloud products in 2008 before debuting Azure, its cloud-computing service, in 2010. By then, Amazon had been selling cloud services for four years.

Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud-computing division, is the leader in the cloud-infrastructure market, earning a 32% share during the fourth quarter of 2020. Microsoft Azure was second, with a 20% share. No other company reached 10%.

Read more: Amazon and Microsoft have the $7 billion-plus federal cloud market so 'locked up,' analysts say the real challenge will be standing out from each other

Cloud services have become a larger percentage of Microsoft's business in recent years. During the company's 2020 fiscal year, which ran from July 2019 through June 2020, its "intelligent cloud" segment accounted for 34% of the company's revenue, up from 31% in fiscal 2019 and 29% in fiscal 2018.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's current CEO, ran the division at Microsoft that included its cloud business before replacing Ballmer in 2014. Nadella has also said he wished Microsoft had launched its cloud products sooner.

"We knew by looking at what Amazon was doing that we needed to reinvent ourselves," Nadella said in 2017.

During the Clubhouse discussion, Ballmer said Microsoft was also too slow in its attempt to launch a phone. The company bought Nokia's devices business in 2014, seven years after Apple released its first iPhone. By 2017, Microsoft said its phone-related revenue was "immaterial."

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Steve Ballmer said on Clubhouse that he wishes Microsoft had taken on Amazon's cloud business sooner - Business Insider

Cloud computing is a significant part of digital transformation and businesses count on cloud services for agility and efficiency.

The Covid-19 pandemic transformed businesses and the economy itself. We saw a spike in digital transformation during the pandemic since it shut down offices, laid social distancing norms, introduced remote working, and demanded agility and resilience. Many industries embraced digital transformation and automation to enhance business growth to retain their space in the economy. Going digital became the new normal and cloud services had a crucial role to play in this transformation.

Cloud was not new and it had established its significance in the pre-pandemic days by offering cost-efficient services, scalability, and flexibility to businesses. Amazon AWS defines cloud computing as the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Cloud services can be used in software development, customer-facing web applications, data storage, and processing, etc. The beneficiaries of cloud computing range from business giants to common people who use Google Drive or Apple iCloud.

The post-pandemic world would depend on the cloud more than it used to since the rapid digital evolution last year has changed the working environment and lifestyle. According to Forrester predictions, the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to 120 billion dollars in 2021. Many of us would think if the cloud is worth such hype, so let us look at some of its benefits and decide how important is the cloud in the coming years.

Flexibility and low cost are the prime factors that aid the reign of cloud computing in the coming years. Cloud offers 247 services with maximum scalability. Businesses can adopt cloud services on-demand and at any point of their journey. Cloud services offer a certain amount of freedom to their clients wherein it is possible to address fluctuating bandwidth without complicated IT updations. Cloud enables faster scaling up or down of IT infrastructure. The flexibility of the cloud is vital in the near future that expects agile businesses.

Cloud services can be implemented with minimum costs and maintenance. Since the pandemic resulted in a cash deficit, many industries look for cost-efficient options to transform their business. Cloud is a pay-as-you-go-service and hence, you do not have to worry about paying for what you dont want.

Cloud services offer great accessibility that enables people to operate the cloud from their own spaces. The remote working ecosystem is going to stay for long and with cloud services, there are no geographical limitations. Anybody can access it from anywhere and this provides companies better connectivity among employees even during a crisis. Cloud is lauded for its mobility that enables anybody to access the services from their smartphones or personal laptops. Cloud does not need a set of infrastructure or machines. We can literally carry it with us and maybe thats why they are called the cloud.

Hybrid cloud is another developing feature, which will benefit industries soon. Hybrid cloud systems increase the flexibility of cloud services and provide better options since they can be accessed from various vendors. Dependability on third-party service providers will reduce as the hybrid cloud allows companies to customize their cloud end according to their specific requirements. Hybrid clouds can reduce IT development costs in the long-term.

Today, all organizations are concerned about data security. Increased digitization might also increase data vulnerability. Last year there were several reports of cyber breaches and hacking since industries were in crisis. The coming years will demand the best safety practices to protect data. Cloud can be considered one of the best data backup space which is secure enough to keep hackers away. Data recovery becomes easier with cloud computing in place.

Cloud computing offers a wide range of benefits to industries in the post-pandemic recovery stage, which demands agility and resilience. The integration of cloud computing with AI, big data, and IoT can be leveraged to attain new heights of innovation. Cloud services can easily take over on-premise infrastructure and increase business efficiency. Business enterprises have already taken their roads to digital transformation and cloud computing will underpin them on their way to success.

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What Does the Future With Cloud Computing Look Like - Analytics Insight

Cloud computing's growing role in the energy markets positions the data center industry to drive a global shift to renewably-powered business. New on the DCF Show.

When it comes to climate change, it is time for the data center sector to lead. The massive energy footprint of cloud computing enables the data center industry to drive a global shift to renewably-powered business. This is becoming a huge issue for cloud platforms, data center developers and service providers and especially for users of data center services.

This is the second in a series of broadcasts outlining the Eight Trends That Will Shape the Data Center in 2021. The data center industry is in a unique position to accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices and reduce the damage to our changing climate.Customers and stakeholders are demanding accountability on climate impact, creating a compelling business incentive to embrace sustainability.

Listen to todays show:

Here are links to the additional resources on enterprise IT trends that I mentioned in the podcast:

These article series provide excerpts of some of the findings in our recent reports:

Be sure to check our our free Annual Forecast, outlining the DCF take on the most important trends to watch this year:

Did you like this episode? Be sure to subscribe to the Data Center Frontier show so you get future episodes on your app. We are onApple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find quality podcasts. You can also subscribe using ourRSS feed, and tell your friends and colleagues about our podcast!

Weve also just launched theData Center Frontier Channel on YouTube to showcase our videos, where we explain the infrastructure that powers the digital world. If you like data centers or work in the industry, youll want to subscribe!

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Can Cloud Computing Lead the Way on Climate? - Data Center Frontier

Anyone responsible for data security who doesnt get a shiver down their spine when they read the about yet another high-profile ransomware attack in the news is either doing something very right, or something very wrong.

The danger of falling victim to a cybersecurity issue is getting greater as the volume of attacks continues to rise and bad actors become increasingly sophisticated.Interpolhas highlighted how Covid-19 affected both the number and nature of cyberattacks during 2020, and notes: Vulnerabilities related to working from home and the potential for increased financial benefit will see cybercriminals continue to ramp up their activities and develop more advanced and sophisticated modi operandi.

The natural reaction to such worrying news is to seek protection and build the walls, and there are plenty of firms out there whose livelihood depends on providing just that. The best of them do a grand job, and their regular threat reports indicate just how many attacks they defeat.

But lets not kid ourselves. No organisation can ever ensure 100% protection from an attack. Especially when those attack types are changing faster than most firms update their defences. Data often sits in too many locations, some forgotten by the user, and ultimately too many areas like this are likely outside those protected by upfront protection, scanning services and threat intelligence. Even some approaches to data backup and restore systems can be somewhat haphazard, augmented over time as new systems are added, consequentially with complex backup routines and even some outdated scripts that are no longer fit for purpose.

How many organisations can say, with absolute certainty, that there are no data silos or duplicate systems outside of the main protected area but with accessibility to inside the network? How many organisations can provide absolute assurance that there are no backups, live or archived, that might not be completely clean of infection and are reliable?

If 100% protection is not possible, what is an organisation to do to protect itself? We would not for a moment advocate giving up on using a protection service. As a first line of defence it is absolutely necessary, but multiple lines of defence are needed for robust and reliable security. The trickier you can make it for an attacker, the less likely they are to succeed. One of the first lines of defence aside from the upfront protection and firewalls must be threat detection. For you to know there is a problem, perhaps before it materialises into a full-blown extorition attempt, and with some hope of restoration and kicking out an attacker, is invaluable.

Sadly too many organisations fail to recognise this and are punished. Consider the malware attack thats discovered because an unwitting employee has an issue, needs a restore, only for the IT team to find, hours or maybe even days later, depending on how the restore has been set up that the ransomware has reinstalled itself, because it had planted itself quietly and neatly in the backup where it has sat, undetected, just waiting for a restore to reinject itself back into the business.

None of this is idle speculation.Look at any sector and there are examples of very serious outages from the past year in the UK alone.

Early in 2020Redcar and Cleveland Councilsuffered a long-lasting outage due to what it reported as a ransomware attack. The attack started on February 8, and it took a month for services to be up and running again. The cost of getting over the problem has been put by the council at over 10 million. In October 2020Hackney Councilwas the victim of a cyberattack, and even weeks later it had still not been able to bring all the data back online. The cost of getting over this attack is, as we write, still unknown as recovery is ongoing.

Of course, for nearly any recovery strategy, the data is only as current as the last backup taken. Every organisation has differing needs, but each must weigh up a variety of factors to determine how frequently to backup, including the cost of downtime and the resources needed to bring business back online. Depending on your business size, the team you have to dedicate to recovery, the nature of the business, the regulations you operate in, and of course budget and critical operations, it will differ.

However, for a bank, they could not only lose business, and therefore money, but if the backup data used to recover is even just a few hours old, they are in trouble. However a small retailer selling plants could get by with weekly backups. Its all relative and the only people capable of assessing the criticality of backup and recovery for your business is you and your team. What is a niggle for some businesses is frontpage news and a CEO firing for another.

But what we can be pretty certain of is that an organisation cant just park its data in backup and hope for the best.

Through a robust, reliable backup and restore setup, with strong malware detection capabilities, organisations have a genuine chance to protect themselves, and get back up and running, malware free, in less than an hour. However, without the combination of a front line of defence protecting against cyberattacks and a reliable set of measures for recovery when the front line inevitably fails, no organisation has an appropriate level of protection and recovery. Now, as we head into the unknown of 2021, how does your business stand up to attack?

Read more: 83% of enterprises transformed their cybersecurity in 2020 accelerated by Covid cloud migration

Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend theCyber Security & Cloud Expo World Serieswith upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Tags: backup, Cloud Security, cybersecurity, Data Backup, Disaster Recovery, ransomware, Vulnerabilities

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Why cybersecurity isn't cybersecure without detection and recovery - Cloud Tech

Learn the essentials of cloud computing with this stacked bundle

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SEE ALSO: The fastest VPNs for browsing, streaming, and shopping securely

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Learn the essentials of cloud computing with this stacked bundle - AOL