The founding member of a coalition of tech firms that accused Microsoft of anti-competitive behaviour, based on how it sells and packages its cloud services in Europe, has claimed the software giant must do more to address the antitrust complaints being levied against it.

Microsoft published a blog post this week acknowledging the antitrust concerns that have been raised with regulators and authorities about its cloud-related business practices in Europe, which it also used to outline a series of meaningful actions it would take to address the issues raised.

As detailed in a report on Reuters last month, these concerns are known to have prompted the European Commissions antitrust authorities to send a questionnaire to Microsoft customers and competitors, asking for their views on Microsofts cloud-related licensing deals.

The commission has information that Microsoft may be using its potentially dominant position in certain software markets to foreclose competition regarding certain cloud computing services, the questionnaire said, reported Reuters.

This information is based on complaints filed with the European Commission by several European cloud service providers, including German file sync and share software maker NextCloud and French infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider OVHcloud.

Nextclouds antitrust complaint, filed in early 2021, takes umbrage at the way Microsoft bundles its OneDrive cloud storage service and online collaboration platform Teams in with its flagship Windows operating system. It claims this practice is aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft.

Nextclouds complaint has since won the support of more than 50 tech firms and non-profit organisations, leading to the formation of a coalition that is collectively speaking out against how Microsoft sells and packages its cloud software in Europe. The company has also filed a complaint against Microsoft of a similar nature with Germanys own antitrust authorities.

In ablog post dated 18 May 2022, Microsoft president and vice-chair Brad Smith said the company was taking meaningful action on the complaints being raised against it, including the adoption of five pledges that it claims will shape its approach to doing business in Europe in years to come.

These pledges include commitments to ensuring its public cloud meets Europes needs and serves Europes values, that its platforms are set up to ensure the success of European software developers and that it will provide support for European cloud providers through partnership.

The remaining two pledges made by Microsoft include a commitment to ensure our cloud offerings meet European governments sovereign needs, in partnership with local trusted technology providers and a vow to recognise that European governments are regulating technology, and we will adapt to and support these efforts.

According to Microsoft, these pledges mark the start of the work it is doing to address regulatory concerns, and are intended to guide all aspects of our cloud business, enhance transparency for the public, and help us to better support Europes technology needs.

In addition, the company said it was also taking steps to ensure European cloud providers could more easily host a wider variety of Microsoft products on their cloud infrastructure.

It added: This will make European cloud providers more competitive by enabling them to better serve customers.

While these actions are broad they are also not necessarily exhaustive, continued Smith. As I said in a video meeting a few weeks ago with the CEO of a European cloud provider, our immediate goal is to turn a long list of issues into a shorter list of issues.

In other words, lets move rapidly so we can learn quickly. Today were taking a big step, but not necessarily the last step we will need to take, and we look forward to continuing feedback from European cloud providers, customers and regulators, he added.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek said the actions Microsoft was committing to take were indicative of the pressure it is feeling in the wake of the complaints, but there is still more the company should be looking to do.

The main issue here is that we have a super-dominant position from Microsoft [It is] really dominating this whole market and this is not healthy, he said. Thats not healthy for the open market, thats not healthy for privacy and its not healthy for digital sovereignty for Europe. We want the regulators to do something against it to make sure theres fair competition and a level playing field.

In terms of the follow-up action Nextcloud and the coalition would like to see Microsoft take, Karlitschek said a commitment from the company to make parts of its cloud stack open source would be a start.

Across Europe, you have this movement towards digital sovereignty, where governments want to be in control of their data and applications. So, if you are a government or a company and you use Microsoft or Google or Amazons service even if its hosted in Europe thats still under US jurisdiction because of the CLOUD Act, he said.

This is what theyre trying to solve here by giving other cloud providers the option to hold this Microsoft stick, but obviously this is not enough, because you still have a dependency to Microsoft because Microsoft is not open source.

He continued: Digital sovereignty would only come with open source software. What it has proposed so far is interesting and is a move in the right direction, in response to the pressure it is under, but this is not enough.

Data from IT market watcher Synergy Research Group in September 2021 shed some light on the impact the US tech giants growing hold on the European market was having on the fortunes of local cloud providers.

While the market itself has grown nearly fourfold since 2017 to a value of $8.8bn, European cloud providers have seen their share of the market fall from 27% to 16% during that same time period, although the revenue these firms make has doubled during that time.

Computer Weekly also contacted OVHcloud for its take on Microsofts plans, given it has also raised an antitrust complaint against the company with regulators in the past, and received the following statement in response.

Microsoft acknowledges the merits of our complaint and we can only regret that it has to go as far as mobilising the relevant authorities to secure a level playing field in Europe, where competition is both open and fair, said the statement.

We are now waiting to see the concrete implementation conditions of these resolutions and remain committed to defending a level playing field for the European cloud ecosystem.

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Microsoft urged to do more to address European cloud antitrust complaints - ComputerWeekly.com

Google Photos is a reliable cloud storage platform to save your memories. It lets you access your photos from any device by logging in to your Google account. You can also store your photos in alocked folder, rediscover old photos using theMap Viewfeature, and search pictures by faces in Google Photos.

The app also allows you to print your photos and other features. This post will show you how you can print photos from Google Photos on Android and iPhone. Please ensure that you are using the latest version of the app.

Google Photosis the default photo gallery and cloud storage app for many Android phones, especially if you are using a Google Pixel. Users get 15GB of cloud storage for free for saving their pictures and other documents. In case you are a shutterbug who regularly loves to click and capture, you can opt for increasing the cloud storage by paying a monthly subscription fee.

Before we begin, make sure that your printer and Android phone are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Follow these steps.

Step 1:Open the Google Photos app.

Step 2:Select the photo that you wish to print.

Step 3:Tap on the three dots at the top-right corner.

Step 4:Swipe left the top options and select Print.

The Print menu will open on your screen.

Step 5:Tap the top arrow to Select a Printer.

Step 6:Select your printer from the list which is connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Step 7: After you select the printer, tap on the bottom arrow to reveal print settings.

You can now select print settings like the color, layout, and print copies.

Step 8:After selecting your preferences, tap on the Print icon.

Alternatively, you can follow these steps to print photos from Google Photos on Android.

Step 1:After selecting the photo that you wish to print, tap on the Share icon in the bottom-left corner.

Step 2: Swipe left and tap on Print from the Share options.

Step 3:You will once again arrive at the Print page. Select your printer, choose your print settings and tap on the Print icon.

Thats how you can print your photo directly from the Google Photos app. You can select and print multiple photos as per your choice.

The Google Photos app is also available for iPhone users. This is very helpful in case you have switched from an Android device. You can also sync your Apple Photos library with Google Photos. Follow these steps to print photos from Google Photos on your iPhone.

Step 1:Open the Google Photos app.

Step 2:Select the photo you wish to print.

Step 3:Tap the Share icon at the bottom-left corner.

Step 4:From the Share menu, tap the Share To option.

Step 5:Scroll down and tap on Print.

Step 6:From the Print Options, select your Printer.

Step 7:Select your Printer from the list.

Step 8:Select your printer settings.

Step 9:After choosing your print preferences, tap on Print.

Bonus Tip Print Photos from Google Photos Web Page

Users can directly access their photos on the Google Photos webpage as well. Like your iPhone or Android, you need to ensure that your computer and printer are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Follow these steps.

Step 1:Open Google Photos site in a browser on your computer

Visit Google Photos

Step 2:Sign in to your Google account. Click on the photo that you wish to print.

Step 3: Press Command + P if you are using a Mac. Press Control + P on Windows.

The Print Settings will appear on your screen.

Step 4: Choose your print preferences and click on Print.

If your printer doesnt support wireless connectivity, you can connect your laptop or phone to the printer using an OTG cable. Then you can follow the same steps mentioned above to print your photos.

The Google Photos app lets you view, store and print high-quality photos. The world of photographs has gone digital with these cloud services. But there are still a lot of folks who love the physical nature of photographs. This feature is helpful, especially for photographers who have to display their work physically and digitally.

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How to Print Pictures From Google Photos on Android and iPhone - Guiding Tech

Dan Lawyer

Dan Lawyer, chief product officer at Lucid Software, is passionate about creating value by solving problems in delightful ways. Prior to Lucid, he led product and design organizations at Adobe, Ancestry and Vivint.

Getting the most value out of an organizations cloud infrastructure can be a daunting task. But the key considerations can be winnowed down to an easy-to-remember acronym: CROPS, which stands for cost optimization, reliability, operational excellence, performance efficiency and security. (Sometimes, the five cloud pillars are called CORPS, which is the same thing, just in a different order.)

These five pillars are proven guidelines through which companies can design, evaluate and implement cloud architecture in a way that can most effectively scale, ensuring compliance with the relevant standards and saving money over time. And one of the best ways to implement CROPS principles is with real-time cloud visualization. A complete, real-time understanding of your cloud environment will ensure your resources are best utilized and your CROPS get the attention they need.

There are many different aspects of cloud computing that can get costly, such as infrastructure, downtime and staffing. The way to get the most value out of your cloud infrastructure and minimize costs is to eliminate unused components and refine suboptimal processes. This begins by knowing what youre paying for or in other words, knowing exactly whats in your cloud infrastructure.

Companies that want to know the content of their cloud infrastructure pour resources into an effort to visualize that infrastructure. This is where cloud visualization can play a critical role. The right cloud visualization solution will work seamlessly with your Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage or Azure cloud environments to build an inventory of your cloud components. Then through automation, a resulting diagram can allow you to see all the relationships between resources in your current cloud environment, making it easy to identify where costs can be cut.

When engaging in a cost optimization exercise, such as analyzing opportunities for cost reduction, its also important to remember that time is money. For example, if something is misconfigured, gets hacked or malfunctions, that could cause costly downtime. Cloud visualization will allow you to compare the intended state of your cloud with its current state through filters. This way, you can more quickly identify the malfunctioning areas and address them without significant downtime.

If you understand your cloud infrastructure, you can more confidently ensure your customers can rely on your organization. With the ability to constantly meet your workload demands and quickly recover from any failures, your customers can count on you to consistently meet their service needs with little interruption to their experience.

A great way to increase reliability in your cloud infrastructure is to set key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to both monitor your cloud and alert the proper team members when something within the architecture fails. Using a cloud visualization platform to filter your cloud diagrams and create different visuals of current, optimal and potential cloud infrastructure allows you to compare what is currently happening in the cloud to what should be happening.

When you can quickly identify and fix problems, youll be able to maintain uptime and establish ongoing reliability.

Striving for operational excellence means creating an environment for your cloud to always function at its best, and this includes continuous improvement. If you neglect to upgrade products or processes to help your cloud environment function at higher levels, you put a ceiling on the levels to which your business can ascend.

Its essential to do constant research to see where and how you can improve your cloud infrastructure and environment. However, improvement doesnt have to be a massive overhaul. Keep improvements small and continuous to balance the need for upgrades while minimizing downtime. One way to help identify these opportunities for improvement is through a cloud visualization platform that allows real-time discussion about improving your cloud environment.

Cloud visualization can enable different presentations of your environment to understand different scenarios. For example, you may need planning architecture designs for communication with engineers, architects and coders. On the other hand, you may need easy-to-understand, simplified diagrams for nontechnical stakeholders from whom you need buy-in. A high-quality cloud visualization solution should be able to automatically generate these different views.

Many factors can impact cloud performance, such as the location of cloud components, latency, load, instance size and monitoring. If any of these factors become a problem, its essential to have procedures in place that result in minimal deficiencies in performance. For example, if you have cloud components in different locations, a malfunction in one region shouldnt lead to severe downtime and service disruption throughout your whole cloud environment.

The ability to analyze horizontal and vertical scaling structures is invaluable. Ask yourself: How much do we have in our cloud infrastructure? Where is each component and are they working best where they currently reside? When companies can access a comprehensive, dynamic view of their entire cloud environment, they will better understand where each dependency is. You can visualize your auto-scaling groups and compute instance sizes, availability zones and relationships between resources. Then you will be better able to decide how you need to adjust your cloud infrastructure to improve performance.

Each cloud architecture must be able to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your information, systems and assets. A robust and proactive approach to security will also ensure that your organization maintains compliance with all government regulations and cloud security standards, such as General Data Protection Regulation, System and Organization Controls 2, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Companies may face disruptive technical debt if they dont realize the need to meet these standards until after deployment.

This is another place where cloud visualization can play a critically valuable role. With real-time visuals, you can stay on top of your cloud security, cloud compliance and internal best practices by visualizing and overlaying your metadata in the context of your diagram. Such metadata may include instance names, security groups, IP addresses and more.

For example, you can develop categories to visualize your cloud based on sensitivity levels and mechanisms such as encryption, tokenization and access control. Additionally, you can use cloud visualization to document where data is stored and how its transmitted.

Last, you can set up conditional formatting in your cloud visualization solution that allows easy identification of security issues, such as unencrypted databases, instead of taking an extended amount of time to search for these issues in your cloud. Conditional formatting can also be valuable in other pillars, such as determining what resources are underperforming or what cloud components are a waste in cost.

Each of the five pillars of cloud architecture plays a vital role in optimizing your cloud environment. Following these principles can help avoid wasting time and money. The ability to dynamically visualize your complex cloud infrastructure and enable real-time collaboration within your cloud environment will help you gain clarity and communicate what is needed to adhere to each of these pillars across your organization. Each stakeholder should be left with little question about the current and future state of your organizations cloud environment, making it easier to build and maintain and pursue future organizational growth.

Featured image via Pixabay.

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Visualizing the 5 Pillars of Cloud Architecture The New Stack - thenewstack.io

Western Digital execs revealed its disk and flash/SSD roadmaps at a May 10 Investor Day event. We covered the disk part of this in a previous article. Here we look at flash.

EVP Robert Soderbery, head of the flash business unit, talked about growing the capacity of a flash die by increasing the layer and shrinking the lateral dimensions of a cell. The latter means that more cells can fit in a layer and thus fewer layers are needed to reach a set capacity level. A slide showed a 10 per cent increase in lateral density through a 40 percent reduction in cell size.

President of Technology Siva Sivaram used a slide showing that Western Digitals 162-layer NAND, at a 1Tbit x4 die capacity and 100TB wafer size,had a 68mm2 cell size compared to Kioxia and Seagates 69.6 and 69.3mm2 cell size and they are building 176-layer NAND.

Sivaram said Western Digitals charge trap NAND cell had a 40MB/s program performance vs competitors 60MB/sec. He presaged 200+layer 3D NAND coming, calling it BiCS+. We have previously understood this to be 212-layers and called BiCS 7. A Sivaram slide showed what looked like string-stacking, called multi-bonding, and penta-level cell (PLC 5bits/cell) technologies coming.

BiCS+ will have 55 percent more bits/wafer than BiCS 6 (162-layer), a 60 percent better transfer speed and 15 percent more program bandwidth.

Sivarams 3D NAND roadmap showed a route to 500+ layers in 2032.

Western Digital makes three main classes of SSD consumer, client and cloud (enterprise), along with automotive and IoT drives using its own NAND, controllers, and firmware. It has a 37 percent share of the consumer SSD market, 20 percent of the client market, but only 8 percent of the cloud market. Soderbery wants to get that cloud market share higher, to 16 percent, and says the cloud SSD market is separating into three segments: compute (for cache and direct access), storage (capacity-optimized), and boot and journaling (endurance-optimized).

The BiCS 4 (96-layer) was good for storage (TLC 3 bits/cell) and boot segments, and BiCS 5 (112-layer) was good for storage (TLC and QLC) and boot. BiCS 6 (162-layer) will be good for compute, storage (TLC, QLC), and boot.

Soderbery sees a significant consumer SSD opportunity as flash replaces 2.5-inch disk. In 2022 62 percent of consumer drives were disk and 38 percent SSDs. In 2026 that is forecast to have changed to 30 percent disk and 70 percent SSD. He thinks there is a 100EB opportunity in this disk-to-SSD transition with consumer SSDs having a greater than 45 percent CAGR from 2022 to 2025.

Overall WD has a 14-16 percent overall SSD market share target. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers noted that WD is forecasting flash capacity shipped in the cloud to grow at ~37 percent year-on-year from 2022 to 2027, and told subscribers: This is where WDs qualification/ramp of their NVMe SSDs is a key focus for the company.

That is probably Soderberys key goal: get the cloud/enterprise NVMe SSD sales up while not foregoing growth in the consumer and client markets. WD is betting that its cell density and layer count advantages will translate to better price/performance and so enable it to win share, grow its business, and, maybe, fend off activist investor Elliott Management.

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Western Digital: The flash roadmap Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

Ransomware has pushed backup and recovery firmly back onto the corporate agenda. Without a sound backup and recovery strategy, firms have little chance of surviving a ransomware attack, even if they pay the ransom.

IBM, for example, named ransomware as the leading cyber security threat in 2021, accounting for 23% of all cyber attacks.

This has forced CIOs to revisit their backup and recovery strategies, says Barnaby Mote, managing director at online backup provider Databarracks. The paradox is that ransomware has brought backup and recovery back into focus, he says. If you go back five years, it was a hygiene issue, and not on the CIO or CEO agenda. Now it is again.

High-profile attacks against organisations including shipping company Maersk and US oil network Colonial Pipeline have focused attention on the risks posed by this type of cyber attack and prompted organisations to invest in cyber defences.

But ransomware is becoming smarter, with double- and triple-extortion attacks, and techniques that allow the malware to remain undetected for longer. This puts pressure on that other essential defence against ransomware good data backups.

The other factor that has changed dramatically is that when you get a ransomware infection, it doesnt always trigger immediately, says Tony Lock, analyst at Freeform Dynamics. You might find that the ransomware has been in your system a long time before you noticed it, but its only now theyve triggered it and everythings encrypted.

As a result, organisations have to go back further in time to find clean backups, stretching recovery point objectives (RPOs) to the point where the business is put at risk, or its leaders might even feel they must pay the ransom. How far do you need to go, says Lock, so that when youre doing a recovery from your copies, you make sure youre not bringing the infection back with you?

As Lock suggests, when organisations deal with a ransomware attack, one of the greatest risks is reinfecting systems from a compromised backup. Some of the industrys tried-and-tested backup and recovery and business continuity tools offer little protection against ransomware.

Snapshots record the live state of a system to another location, whether that is on-premise or in the cloud. So, if ransomware hits the production system, there is every chance it will be replicated onto the copy.

Conventional data backup systems face the same risk, copying compromised files to the backup library. And malware authors are adapting ransomware so it actively targets backups, prevents data recovery, or immediately targets any attempt to use recovered files by encrypting them.

Some ransomware Locky and Crypto, for example now bypass production systems altogether and go straight for backups, knowing that this puts the victim at a real disadvantage. This has forced organisations to look again at their backup strategies.

One option is to use so-called immutable backups. These are backups that, once written, cannot be changed. Backup and recovery suppliers are building immutable backups into their technology, often targeting it specifically as a way to counter ransomware.

The most common method for creating immutable backups is through snapshots. In some respects, a snapshot is always immutable. However, suppliers are taking additional measures to prevent these backups being targeted by ransomware.

Typically, this is by ensuring the backup can only be written to, mounted or erased by the software that created it. Some suppliers go further, such as requiring two people to use a PIN to authorise overwriting a backup.

The issue with snapshots is the volume of data they create, and the fact that those snapshots are often written to tier one storage, for reasons of rapidity and to lessen disruption. This makes snapshots expensive, especially if organisations need to keep days, or even weeks, of backups as a protection against ransomware.

The issue with snapshot recovery is it will create a lot of additional data, says Databarracks Mote. It will work, but has a large impact on the storage you need, and there is the cost of putting it on primary storage.

Another way to protect against ransomware is to air gap storage, especially backups. In some ways this is the safest option, especially if the backups are stored off-site, on write-only (WORM) media such as optical storage, or even tape.

Personally I like air gaps, says Freeforms Lock. Id like the backup to be on something that is totally air-gapped take a copy on tape and put it somewhere. Preferably with logical and physical air gaps.

The disadvantage of air gaps, especially physical air gaps with off-site storage, is the time it takes to recover data. Recovery time might be too long to ensure business continuity. And if IT teams have to go back through several generations of backups to find ransomware-free copies, the cost of recovering lost data can be high, maybe even higher than the cost of the ransom.

Time to restore, at scale, is now key, says Patrick Smith, field CTO, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Pure Storage. This may mean specific solutions for the business-critical applications that need to be online first.

Suppliers are trying to work round this through virtual air-gapped technology, which allows backups to be stored on faster local (or cloud) storage. But for businesses with the most critical data, it is likely that only fully immutable and air-gapped backups will suffice, even if it is as a second or third line of defence.

However, CIOs are also looking to augment their backup tools with security measures aimed specifically at ransomware.

Perhaps the greatest risk to an organisation with a solid backup policy is unwittingly re-infecting systems from ransomware hidden in backups.

Firms need to put measures in place to scan backups before they restore to a recovery environment, but again this takes time. And malware authors are adept at hiding their trails.

Anomaly detection is one route suppliers are exploring to check whether backups are safe. According to Freeform Dynamics Lock, machine learning tools are best placed to pick up changes in data that could be malware. This type of technology is increasingly important as attackers turn to double- and triple-extortion attacks.

You need to make data protection, observability and checking for anomalies a continuous process, he says.

Link:
The limits and risks of backup as ransomware protection - ComputerWeekly.com