Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy reportedly told employees at an all-hands meeting on Thursday that the Seattle-based company's cloud business was two years ahead of its competitor Microsoft's.

"If you do any thorough, apples-to-apples, objective comparison of AWS versus Microsoft, you don't come out deciding that they're comparable platforms," he said, according to a report from the Federal Times, which said it obtained a video of the meeting. "Most of our customers will tell us that we're about 24 months ahead of Microsoft in functionality and maturity."

Jassy's comments came as the executive was detailing the company's plans to challenge Microsoft's win of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, a contentious $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Department of Defense.

AWS has started to protest that decision over the so-called JEDI contract in the US Court of Federal Claims, citing "unmistakable bias."

"AWS is uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the US military needs, and remains committed to supporting the DOD's modernization efforts," an AWS representative said in a prepared statement cited by the Federal Times. "We also believe it's critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence. Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias- and it's important that these matters be examined and rectified."

Microsoft was selected October 25 for the JEDI deal, which will help move the Department of Defense's sensitive data to the cloud. It's worth as much as $10 billion over 10 years.

The contentious bidding process included involvement from tech titans such as Oracle and politicians up to and including President Donald Trump, who has publicly ridiculed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post, whose coverage Trump takes issue with.

Jassy told employees the process involved political interference and therefore was unfair.

"When you have a sitting president who's willing to publicly show his disdain for a company and the leader of a company, it's very difficult for government agencies including the DOD to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal," Jassy said, according to the report.

Experts say Amazon may have a case if it could prove political interference unfairly affected the outcome of the bidding process particularly given that a coming book claims Trump ordered then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to "screw Amazon" out of the JEDI contract.

But it's no sure thing. Amazon would have to prove not only that political pressure was applied to the process but also that the pressure affected the outcome. Experts previously told Business Insider that Microsoft most likely won the JEDI deal on its own merits as a cloud heavyweight.

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CEO Andy Jassy reportedly said AWS is two years ahead of Microsoft - Business Insider

Adobe stock gets the nod in today's IBD 50 Stocks To Watch as it sets up in a new base with a growth story that's still very much intact.

Adobe (ADBE) continues to deliver impressive growth for a company with a market capitalization of nearly $141 billion. Its five-year annualized earnings growth rate is 46%, with a sales growth rate of 22%.

CEO Shantanu Narayen shook things up when he took over reins in 2007. Initially, his focus was on digital media and marketing services, but he was also instrumental in Adobe's transformation into a full-service enterprise cloud provider.

In 2013, Adobe released Creative Cloud to take the place of Creative Suite, a group of graphic design, video editing and web development applications. Instead of paying a one-time fee of $1,800, Creative Cloud was priced at $50/month or $19 a month for a single application.

Fast forward to today, and Adobe is widely viewed as one of the cloud leaders.

With a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 39 and a forward P-E of 30, Adobe might seem like a pricey stock valuation-wise. But it's warranted due to a consistent record of strong earnings and sales growth.

The company's latest earnings report in September revealed another quarter of exceptional growth. Adjusted earnings rose 18% from the year-ago quarter. Sales rose 24% to $2.83 billion.

For its current fiscal year 2019, analysts are modeling profit of $7.84 a share, which would be up 16% from 2018. For 2020, look for growth to accelerate, up 24%.

Adobe's next earnings report is due next month, on or around Dec. 12. According to Zacks, look for adjusted profit to be up 23.5% to $2.26 a share. Look for sales to increase nearly 21% to $2.97 billion.

Adobe gapped about its 50-day moving average on Nov. 5, rising 4% in heavy volume. At its annual design conference, Adobe introduced Photoshop for iPad, the Fresco drawing app for Windows and an AI-powered Photoshop cameraapp for smartphones.

Currently, Adobe stock is forming a shallow cup base with a buy point for now of 313.21, 10 cents above its July 19 intraday high.

But an earlier entry could be seen if Adobe forms a handle area, where the last remaining sellers get shaken out of stock in preparation for a breakout attempt. An idea handle shows a gentle pullback in light volume.

Despite a huge price gain in recent years, Adobe's latest base is considered early stage. That's because a double-bottom pattern that formed in the second half of last year served to reset the base count.

Follow Ken Shreve on Twitter @IBD_Shreve for more stock market analysis and insight.

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Adobe Stock: Is The Cloud Computing Leader Ready For Another Leg Up? - Investor's Business Daily

In late October, Germany and China began commercial-scale rollouts of 5G, the wireless technology infrastructure that is transforming the way the world computes. Machines and people will still talk to each other over the borderless network we call the Internet. But with 5G, a new networking infrastructure is emerging, dependent on the Internet but distinct from it andsubject to much more government and private control.

With 5G it is possible to do enormous amounts of computing at very high speeds and without having to connect the input devicea cell phone, say, or a self-driving carto a wire of any kind. But those high speeds are possible only if the rest of the system (signal towers, base stations, distributed servers, and the megascale centers that house the data and do a great deal of computing themselves) is physically near enough to these input devices. Having your phone, car, or pacemaker in constant contact with vast computational power in the so-called cloud sounds amazingly untethered and extraterritorial. Yet in its physicality and focus on location, the emerging system is more grounded than the Internet ever was.

Whether control over 5G will be exercised principally by states or companies remains to be seen. But the implications for surveillance, security, and national prosperity are enormous, and yet policymakers and business executives have hardly begun to address them.

The Internet has proved remarkably resistant to state governance. Its use can certainly be shaped by expensive government initiatives such as Chinas Great Firewall or the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But multilateral attempts to control the Internet itself have so far failed, mainly because the deliberately impenetrable global Internet communityincluding Internet service providers and sui generis governance institutions such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Societyis dedicated, in the best geek spirit, to avoiding state capture. That posture may change, but for now the communitys obdurateness and the jealousies of states, which have kept

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The Real Fight for the Future of 5G - Foreign Affairs Magazine

In the not too distant past, cloud computing was a concept that IT professionals would spend hours explaining to their board of directors. Now, the ubiquity of the cloud requires no further explanation.

Cloud evolution is revolutionising business operations by employing a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store and process data instead of relying on-premise infrastructure.

Utilising a cloud-based IT infrastructure can significantly increase the cost efficiency of an enterprise. It has also been known to facilitate greater agility by allowing systems to operate without the constraints of on-premise infrastructure.

Migrating to the cloud is simple and there are several rental options on the market that can be scaled according to specific business needs. Indeed, the global public cloud market, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) grew 31.3% during 2018 to US$32.4 billion, according to Gartner.

The cause of this growth may be traced to the rising number of corporations embracing multiple cloud services. Indeed, more than 73% of organisations are using two or more public cloud providers.

Perhaps this is because each vendor specialises in different aspects of cloud computing from managing and maintaining IT systems, to more flexible workflows, while offering automatic updates.

The major cloud service providers are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. These services are often preferred because of their intrinsic security infrastructures. While the benefits of utilising the cloud are numerous, there are some significant shortcomings.

The decreased visibility that comes with relying on multiple third-party applications can result in a larger attack surface.

Indeed, the more an application comes into contact with the Internet, the more risk it accumulates. This risk is augmented by the fact that different providers require different services and tools to address unique problems across multiple environments.

Often the tools on cloud-hosting services fall short, especially for console and deployment security affecting enterprise customers.

This has been a contributing factor for several recent cloud breaches. The trap that ensnares many security professionals is assuming that they are completely safe and secure with no need for internal security testing. However, this is of course a myth.

The enterprise that rents virtual space on IaaS also needs to ensure their own safety, especially in environments using multiple cloud providers.

The increasing sprawl of the cloud means that there is a dire need for a new approach to cloud security; an approach that helps enterprises address vulnerabilities through one service that can assess threats across a range of platforms from a single pane of glass.

Without a system in place, blind reliance on the cloud could have detrimental consequences as breaches are increasing globally. Security professionals are expected to possess a comprehensive understanding of risk covering all aspects of the cloud.

However, defining the risk posture of your enterprise depends on what type of data is stored and processed in the cloud. Some data is more regulated than others such as: business intelligence, intellectual property, the personal information of customers, internal records, and financial information.

This data is not just valuable to organisations, but also to cybercriminals. If your corporation is putting sensitive data into a public cloud, then you are creating a promising temptation for potential hackers.

For the security professional, implementing and monitoring cloud security means dealing with a mixture of new clouds, new ways of creating and deploying apps, legacy IT, off-premise architecture, shadow clouds and potential cloud sprawl.

Addressing these challenges can be difficult with a security workforce that often lacks operational skills for every scenario.

This creates new problems that go beyond the traditional protection of physical on-premise infrastructure.

The cloud era ushers in a new way of conducting business with greater efficiency, and complications.

While increasing the speed of conducting business, it becomes more difficult to Monitor cloud assets and detect vulnerabilities. This is complicated by inconsistencies between cloud providers and the capabilities of their security tools, which typically do not collaborate with other cloud services.

In order to practically address cloud security, responsibilities must be shared by both providers and enterprises, with each focusing on the technologies that are within their remit of control.

When discussing IaaS, where the cloud provider secures the back-end data centres, networking, servers, and virtualisation; the enterprise is responsible for protecting cloud payloads such as operating systems, databases, security and applications.

This shared responsibility model puts the onus on the enterprise to protect its own workloads running in public clouds.

The enterprises intent on improving their cloud security posture should prioritise the issues not covered by their service providers. The methods of protection provided by IaaS vendors generally only protects the infrastructure they rent to the enterprise.

While these safety measures comprise an essential element of cloud security, it is not necessarily helpful for customers who have cloud security needs across other areas.

First and foremost, security professionals should secure the control plane, which consists of enterprise connections into third-party public cloud.

Security for the public control plane is all about ensuring identity access and networking management for critical applications are correctly configured, thereby reducing the risk of permission malfunction and increasing security across the board.

Secondly, enterprises should focus on securing their data plane, which includes performing security assessment for cloud workload instances (applications) for any vulnerabilities. This means that enterprises should protect any information on the cloud as thoroughly as they would if it were onsite.

Security professionals should deploy a continuous process of automatically assessing cloud environments against security best practices and security violations to recommend steps for remediation.

For the modern enterprise, the rush to multi-cloud is bringing huge operational benefits to organisations, and new classes of service for customers and business partners. Yet with these benefits comes a rapidly rising degree of risk due to inherent security vulnerabilities with cloud services.

For IaaS scenarios, responsibility for cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection rests squarely within the enterprise. Cloud providers will not do this for you. In order to ensure perpetual protection, professionals should not become complacent.

It is essential to take security into your own hands, especially when your data is in the hands of others.

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Multi-cloud, more problems: the increasing attack surfaces of multi-cloud adoption - TEISS

Cloud computing offers your business many benefits. It allows you to set up what is essentially a virtual office to give you the flexibility of connecting to your business anywhere, any time. With the growing number of web-enabled devices used in today's business environment (e.g. smartphones, tablets), access to your data is even easier. There are many benefits to moving your business to the cloud:

Moving to cloud computing may reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your IT systems. Rather than purchasing expensive systems and equipment for your business, you can reduce your costs by using the resources of your cloud computing service provider. You may be able to reduce your operating costs because:

Your business can scale up or scale down your operation and storage needs quickly to suit your situation, allowing flexibility as your needs change. Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself, your cloud computer service provider can handle this for you. Using the cloud frees up your time so you can get on with running your business.

Protecting your data and systems is an important part of business continuity planning. Whether you experience a natural disaster, power failure or other crisis, having your data stored in the cloud ensures it is backed up and protected in a secure and safe location. Being able to access your data again quickly allows you to conduct business as usual, minimising any downtime and loss of productivity.

Collaboration in a cloud environment gives your business the ability to communicate and share more easily outside of the traditional methods. If you are working on a project across different locations, you could use cloud computing to give employees, contractors and third parties access to the same files. You could also choose a cloud computing model that makes it easy for you to share your records with your advisers (e.g. a quick and secure way to share accounting records with your accountant or financial adviser).

Cloud computing allows employees to be more flexible in their work practices. For example, you have the ability to access data from home, on holiday, or via the commute to and from work (providing you have an internet connection). If you need access to your data while you are off-site, you can connect to your virtual office, quickly and easily.

Access to automatic updates for your IT requirements may be included in your service fee. Depending on your cloud computing service provider, your system will regularly be updated with the latest technology. This could include up-to-date versions of software, as well as upgrades to servers and computer processing power.

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Benefits of cloud computing | Business Queensland