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Opinion Taking a look at the latest financial results from Google/Alphabet made some of us do a double-take ... and not because of the $40bn+ in ad revenue.

If you read closely, you'll see that Google Cloud has lessened its habitual loss by extending the operational lifespan of its cloud servers by a year, and stretching out some of its other infrastructure for longer.

Google is not a bit player on the market; it could push ahead with its upgrade cycle with some adjustments if it wanted to, and say as much, but no. It is opting out

So what, you might say, wearily playing along in the office with hardware that gets refreshed less often than an octogenarian teetotaller. But this is Google Cloud, one of the headline players in the most important enterprise IT market of our time.

If it's saying that it's improving its competitive offer by not bothering to upgrade its core CPU farm, that says a lot about the cloud, the processor market, and the future of both.

You can see the cloud as it is sold to you, easing the capex/opex ratio, adding flexibility, dialled-in scale, and performance while reducing managerial overhead. In a different light, it's also a fantastic experiment in abstracting what IT actually means in business: paying other people to worry about all the boring stuff on your behalf.

Security, energy, hardware tending, meeting demand at a global scale or just giving you an instant few cores of server to run up an idea or proof of concept without you having to buy so much as a multiway plug.

So when Google says in effect it doesn't care about upgrading CPUs this time around, you can believe it. Issues like the chip shortage and global economic uncertainty will factor into the decision, but reports from the front line of the server industry indicate that if you've got the clout, you get your share. Google is not a bit player on the market; it could push ahead with its upgrade cycle with some adjustments if it wanted to, and say as much, but no. It is opting out.

This is even more significant because Google is one of the most processor-focused providers. It reveals the processors it uses for different classes of task, sometimes even letting you pick the ones you want, and sometimes they'll even be in the region and the available configuration that you fancy.

Compare that to the choices offered by Amazon AWS EC2, which are number of cores per instance and whether you want multithreading. That's it, and that's much more typical of cloud service providers (CSPs). For most workloads, these firms don't compete on CPU. Storage tiers get the works with latency versus capacity versus cost, but compute performance? Acceptable is good enough. You will get virtual machines running on virtual CPUs, and you will like it.

This leaves the chip companies with some hard questions. They really can't shake the "performance" metric as the drug of choice, and it's still an easy sell to investors.

Headline numbers look good, HPC is always a happy place to be, and you can find plenty of other places where you need lots of performance grunt. General-purpose CPUs have to face off against GPUs and other hardware-optimised silicon there although massively parallel tasks mostly don't care about x86's legacy.

And, as Apple has proven with its M1 architecture, x86 legacy doesn't have to count for that much elsewhere these days. It's not that CSPs and data centres are gagging for M1s, which work so well because they are so highly evolved for Apple's market.

The x86 emulation overhead is perfectly bearable there while the ecosystem catches up with native versions; acceptable is good enough, and the path forward is clear.

But CSPs aren't gagging for the latest x86 magic either; they'll happily take it at the right price and at the right time, but they'll leave it for a while too. That's a gap, which is suddenly much more interesting. MacBook owners like battery life, but CSPs really don't like the new era of accelerating energy costs.

The ARM-ification of servers at scale has been predicted a few times now, although it's never been quite clear how you get there from here. The M1, however, is a great proof of concept: and the energy bills, specifically, are a great motivator to pay attention.

It is easy now to imagine what the M1's cloud-component cousin would look like. It could be a system-on-chip with a set of computing cores that are intrinsically efficient and can be even more so with the right workload, very tightly coupled to IO and integrated memory, but instead of being tuned for an Apple machine, the SoC would work very well for a particularly configured VM and work acceptably for others. There would be nothing here that would be beyond the talents of a competent design team, no matter where they work.

With a sea of these, a CSP could have a new, performant, and very competitively priced tier that rewards workloads that are optimised for the native, highly efficient modes, but one that would remain competitive for the older tasks that would otherwise be happy running on the older hardware already in the racks.

The CSPs would get enough wriggle room to price-nudge the clientele into the low-energy workload domain while still picking up a bit more margin.

The world has already moved into the sort of containerised, multi-platform, open-dev, automated regime with the necessary tools and techniques for making apps for such an architecture. That means not much novel engineering would be needed at the codeface.

The motivation is there, the methods are at hand, and the barriers to transition are much reduced. Maybe Google's gap year is an indication that business will not resume as usual.

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Google Cloud takes a gap year. It may come back with very different ideas - The Register

Organizations everywhere are turning to cloud computing to reduce costs and improve mobility, flexibility and collaboration. Despite rapid adoption, however, 96% of cybersecurity professionals say they are at least moderately concerned about the security of cloud computing, according to a report from ISC2.[1]

How secure is cloud computing? And what can organizations do to fortify it? Answering these questions begins with understanding common cloud computing vulnerabilities and the cloud security policies, processes and tools to reduce them.

Cloud computing enables the delivery of computing services on demand over the internet. For businesses, these services can range from databases and storage to customer intelligence, data analytics, human resources platforms and enterprise resource planning. Cloud computing is attractive to many organizations because it can provide significant cost savings - organizations typically subscribe to and pay only for the cloud services they use, which can save them time and money otherwise spent on infrastructure and IT management.

The other benefit of cloud computing is enhanced security. In most cases, the cloud is more secure than on-premises data centers. When a company operates and manages its own on-premises data center, it's responsible for procuring the expertise and resources to appropriately secure its data from end to end. Cloud-based providers, however, offer a higher level of security than many businesses can match or could afford, particularly for growing organizations or ones with limited financial resources.

While organizations can benefit from improved security by migrating to the cloud, that doesn't mean they're free from threats. Importantly, cloud security is a shared responsibility between cloud service providers and their customers. Discussed below are some of the top risks that a cloud environment poses and what organizations can do to protect against these vulnerabilities:

Misconfiguration Creates Most Cloud Vulnerabilities

While cloud service providers often offer tools to help manage cloud configuration, the misconfiguration of cloud resources remains the most prevalent cloud vulnerability, which can be exploited to access cloud data and services, says the U.S. National Security Agency.[2] Misconfiguration can impact organizations in many ways, making them more susceptible to threats like denial of service attacks and account compromise.

Poor Access Control Gives Attackers Privileges

Poor access control results when cloud resources use weak authentication methods or include vulnerabilities that bypass authentication methods. This can allow attackers to elevate privileges and compromise cloud resources.

Employees Pose Risks

Companies that have difficulty tracking how employees are using cloud computing services risk becoming vulnerable to both external attacks and insider security threats. End users can access an organization's internal data without much trouble, so they can steal valuable information or be exploited by attackers to do similar harm.

Insecure APIs Are Becoming a Major Attack Vector

Many APIs require access to sensitive business data, and some are made public to improve adoption. APIs that are implemented without adequate authentication and authorization, however, pose risks to organizations. Insecure APIs are becoming a major attack vector for malicious actors.

Since cloud security is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the customer, sharing arrangements need to be well understood. While a provider would typically be responsible for safeguarding the infrastructure, patching and configuring the physical network, for example, its customer's responsibilities could include managing users, their access privileges and data encryption. The following cloud security tools help organizations fortify their environment:[3]

Why Cloud Security Policies Are Important

A cloud security policy is a formal guideline developed to ensure safe and secure operations in the cloud. Without one, a company risks security breaches, financial and data loss, and other costly consequences including fines for regulatory noncompliance.

A cloud security policy should include:

Cloud computing can provide important opportunities and cost savings for organizations. While security remains a prevalent concern, understanding the most common threats and putting in place the proper policies, processes and tools can help companies protect themselves and their data.

[1] "2021 Cloud Security Report," ISC2

[2] "Mitigating Cloud Vulnerabilities," National Security Agency

[3] "What Is Cloud Security?", IBM

Continued here:
Mimecast : How Secure Is the Cloud with Cloud Security Tools? - marketscreener.com

If you want to know more about the cloud computing market and its major players, I suggest you take a look at Tommy Douziech's excellent article where he details how the cloud works, the market and the future prospects of this technology, all accompanied by a complete thematic list of cloud players.

In short, cloud computing is a tool that allows you to benefit from an IT infrastructure, a development platform or even a ready-to-use service, all online, without the need for hardware at home or in your company. It runs on servers managed by the provider, who takes care of the security and maintenance of the hardware.

The cloud allows companies and users to operate infrastructure and services online, without additional hardware costs with a simple annual or monthly subscription. It is like renting a PC that is not in your office but on a server whose location is kept secret.

First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (SKYY):This ETF is provided by the Illinois based investment management company First Trust. With more than $5 bn in total net asset, SKYY is the largest cloud fund. It employs a modified equal weighted index limited to 80 companies, aiming to optimize the performance of the ISE CTA Cloud Computing Index. Companies listed in the index must respect these three criteria :

Since its inception in May 2011, the NAV average annualized total return is +17.39% (S&P500 average annualized total return over the period is +15.16%) and +10.55% over one year. The expense ratio is 0.60%.

Here are the top holdings as of 02/07/2022:

Global X Cloud Computing ETF (CLOU):CLOU is the second largest cloud computing ETF with $1.2 bn in assets under management. Provided by the well known New-York based ETF producer Global X, it is based on the Indxx Global Computing Index, which offers exposure to exchange-listed companies in developed and emerging markets that are positioned to benefit from the increased adoption of cloud computing technology. Since its launch in April 2019, the NAV average annualized total return is +23.97% and -3.26% over one year. The ETF is composed of 35 companies and total expense ratio is 0.68%.

Here are the top 10 holdings :

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3 ETFs to invest in cloud computing - Marketscreener.com

VMware report finds more than half of Cobalt Strike users are using the tool illicitly

PALO ALTO, Calif., February 09, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As the most common cloud operating system, Linux is a core part of digital infrastructure and is quickly becoming an attackers ticket into a multi-cloud environment. Current malware countermeasures are mostly focused on addressing Windows-based threats, leaving many public and private cloud deployments vulnerable to attacks that target Linux-based workloads.

Today, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) released a threat report titled "Exposing Malware in Linux-based Multi-Cloud Environments."(1) Key findings that detail how cybercriminals are using malware to target Linux-based operating systems include:

Ransomware is evolving to target Linux host images used to spin workloads in virtualized environments;

89 percent of cryptojacking attacks use XMRig-related libraries; and

More than half of Cobalt Strike users may be cybercriminals, or at least using Cobalt Strike illicitly.

"Cybercriminals are dramatically expanding their scope and adding malware that targets Linux-based operating systems to their attack toolkit in order to maximize their impact with as little effort as possible," said Giovanni Vigna, senior director of threat intelligence at VMware. "Rather than infecting an endpoint and then navigating to a higher value target, cybercriminals have discovered that compromising a single server can deliver the massive payoff and access theyre looking for. Attackers view both public and private clouds as high-value targets due to the access they provide to critical infrastructure services and confidential data. Unfortunately, current malware countermeasures are mostly focused on addressing Windows-based threats, leaving many public and private cloud deployments vulnerable to attacks on Linux-based operating systems."

As malware targeting Linux-based operating systems increases in both volume and complexity amid a rapidly changing threat landscape, organizations must place a greater priority on threat detection. In this report, the VMware Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) analyzed the threats to Linux-based operating systems in multi-cloud environments: ransomware, cryptominers, and remote access tools.

Story continues

Ransomware Targets the Cloud to Inflict Maximum Damage

As one of the leading breach causes for organizations, a successful ransomware attack on a cloud environment can have devastating consequences.(2) Ransomware attacks against cloud deployments are targeted, and are often combined with data exfiltration, implementing a double-extortion scheme that improves the odds of success. A new development shows that ransomware is evolving to target Linux host images used to spin workloads in virtualized environments. Attackers are now looking for the most valuable assets in cloud environments to inflict the maximum amount of damage to the target. Examples include the Defray777 ransomware family, which encrypted host images on ESXi servers, and the DarkSide ransomware family, which crippled Colonial Pipelines networks and caused a nationwide gasoline shortage in the U.S.

Cryptojacking Attacks Use XMRig to Mine Monero

Cybercriminals looking for an instant monetary reward often target cryptocurrencies using one of two approaches. Cybercriminals either include wallet-stealing functionality in malware or they monetize stolen CPU cycles to successfully mine cryptocurrencies in an attack called cryptojacking. Most cryptojacking attacks focus on mining the Monero currency (or XMR) and VMware TAU discovered that 89 percent of cryptominers used XMRig-related libraries. For this reason, when XMRig-specific libraries and modules in Linux binaries are identified, it is likely evidence of malicious cryptomining behavior. VMware TAU also observed that defense evasion is the most commonly used technique by cryptominers. Unfortunately, because cryptojacking attacks do not completely disrupt the operations of cloud environments like ransomware, they are much more difficult to detect.

Cobalt Strike Is Attackers Remote Access Tool of Choice

In order to gain control and persist within an environment, attackers look to install an implant on a compromised system that gives them partial control of the machine. Malware, webshells, and Remote Access Tools (RATs) can all be implants used by attackers in a compromised system to allow for remote access. One of the primary implants used by attackers is Cobalt Strike, a commercial penetration testing and red team tool, and its recent variant of Linux-based Vermilion Strike. Since Cobalt Strike is such a ubiquitous threat on Windows, the expansion out to the Linux-based operating system demonstrates the desire of threat actors to use readily available tools that target as many platforms as possible.

VMware TAU discovered more than 14,000 active Cobalt Strike Team Servers on the Internet between February 2020 and November 2021. The total percentage of cracked and leaked Cobalt Strike customer IDs is 56 percent, meaning that more than half of Cobalt Strike users may be cybercriminals, or at least using Cobalt Strike illicitly. The fact that RATs like Cobalt Strike and Vermilion Strike have become a commodity tool for cybercriminals poses a significant threat to enterprises.

"Since we conducted our analysis, even more ransomware families were observed gravitating to malware targeting Linux-based systems, with the potential for additional attacks that could leverage the Log4j vulnerabilities," said Brian Baskin, manager of threat research at VMware. "The findings in this report can be used to better understand the nature of this malware and mitigate the growing threat that ransomware, cryptomining, and RATs have on multi-cloud environments. As attacks targeting the cloud continue to evolve, organizations should adopt a Zero Trust approach to embed security throughout their infrastructure and systematically address the threat vectors that make up their attack surface."

Download the full report here.

Methodology

The VMware Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) helps protect customers from cyberattacks through innovation and world-class research. TAU is composed of malware analysts, reverse engineers, threat hunters, data scientists, and intelligence analysts at VMware. To understand how to detect and prevent attacks that bypass traditional, file-centric, prevention strategies, TAU focuses on techniques that were once the domain of advanced hackers and are now moving downstream into the commodity attack market. The team leverages real-time big data, event streaming processing, static, dynamic and behavioral analytics, and machine learning.

TAU applied a composition of static and dynamic techniques to characterize various families of malware observed on Linux-based systems based on a curated dataset of metadata associated with Linux binaries. All the samples in this dataset are public and therefore they can be easily accessed using VirusTotal or various websites of major Linux distributions. TAU collected more than 11,000 benign samples from several Linux distributions, namely, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, and Kali. TAU then collected a dataset of samples for two classes of threats, namely ransomware and cryptominers. Finally, TAU collected a dataset of malicious ELF binaries from VirusTotal that were used as a test malicious dataset. TAU started collecting the dataset in June 2021 and concluded in November 2021.

About VMware

VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to building a better future through the companys 2030 Agenda. For more information, please visit http://www.vmware.com/company.

Sources & Citations

Exposing Malware in Linux-Based Multi-Cloud Environments, VMware, February 2022

Global Security Insights Report, VMware, June 2021

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220209005064/en/

Contacts

Kerry TuttleVMware Global Communicationsktuttle@vmware.com (470) 247-1987

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Cybercriminals Target Linux-based Systems With Ransomware and Cryptojacking Attacks - Yahoo Finance

The real estate sector has transformed over the past decade with a younger crowd looking to the internet to make the first step towards buying a home or property. In order to stay competent and relevant, it is important for the real estate sector to adopt new technologies. Cloud technology is the right path for those looking to build an online presence with the help of marketing. Thanks to the pandemic, as per latest research a massive 80% of top real estate companies have switched their operations to Cloud in one form or another. It could be lead management, customer relationship management and more.

Heres how Cloud Computing can help the Real estate Sector:

1. Cost-effective

Real estate sector is depending on IT more day by day. But having an in-house infrastructure can be highly expensive since it will involve hiring resources, maintaining server and infrastructure costs. But migrating to a cloud can keep the costs to a minimum. The infrastructure used for cloud is that of the service provider, it offers pay-as-you-go model.

2. Remote Accessibility

Cloud enables files to be accessible from anywhere and on any device as long as you have a working internet connection. This will certainly help in the real estate sector when you are carrying out a client visit which will help showcase your recent work or upcoming projects as reference. All the necessary information will be at your fingertips. Cloud also enables staff to be more productive by overcoming any disruptions that can happen when physical meet is not possible during the pandemic. In such situations, having cloud accessibility makes it faster to communicate to clients in real time.

3. Increased Security

IT security is a major concern for most businesses. Implementing a robust security can be both expensive and challenging if you have limited budgets. Opting for cloud can help resolve this since cloud service providers utilize most advanced tools to protect data and deploy next-gen firewalls with intrusion and malware protection to keep cybercriminals away from servers and data.

4. Data Insights

Data is an integral part of decision making in providing insights that can help improve productivity, cost effectiveness, marketing, web design and more. Cloud technology helps analyze data and centrally manage data by providing insights needed to drive business forward.

It helps map customer journeys across all touchpoints ensuring that communications are consistent. The data also can help pinpoint poorly performing pages so that quick comebacks can be done such that customers stay on page for longer duration and this in turn helps gain advantage over competitors.

5. Superior Customer Experience

As per latest research, 86% of customers are willing to pay more if they are offered better customer experience. Migrating to the cloud provides an added advantage in providing excellent customer experience not only swiftly but cost effectively too. Using cloud helps businesses provide information to both buyers and sellers without having to visit the premises physically. To take cloud usage to the next level, some of the real estate agents even offer financial calculation tools, virtual tours, online form fills, customer service chatbots, omnichannel messaging etc. This helps buyers and sellers make an informed decision and in the long run foster strong relationships that lead to better reviews and online reputations.

6. Timely Upgrades

With cloud computing, the real estate sector does not have to worry about software upgrades.

The latest updates are generally taken care of by cloud service providers. This definitely leads to saving on investments that needs to be done towards maintaining servers, infrastructure that comes with on-premises servers.

7. Data Recovery

Data loss in the case of cloud is very minimal as cloud service providers store all the data in the cloud. In case of emergencies, there is no threat to data loss. SMEs generally cannot afford to make huge investments in terms of allocating budgets towards expensive disaster recovery systems. Cloud computing has definitely helped these businesses to thrive by providing cloud-based storage solutions that help safeguard their data.

8. Better Control of Data

Before the advent of cloud, employees had to send files back and forth before zeroing in on the final document. This would definitely lead to errors and reduced accuracy. With multiple versions of the file being tossed back and forth, it would be confusing. However, with cloud computing, multiple users can access the same file from different locations and suggest changes in real time leading to reduced error rate.

9. Enhanced Collaboration

Improving collaboration across teams and taking your business on international platforms, overcoming geographical barriers and time zones can be easily handled through cloud computing. Teams from different parts of the world can access the same document form anywhere and collaborate to perform better and in a more time-efficient manner.

10. Disaster Management and Mitigation

Cloud-based technologies are expected to only increase in disaster mitigation and management. The losses incurred by the real estate sector because of natural disasters or other calamities have been an area of concern for quite some time. With cloud-based technologies, disaster management can be handled better and more efficiently not only saving lives but minimizing the cost of repair and maintenance.

The rapid rate at which cloud technology is growing, it has become imperative that all sectors adopt the latest technology to meet the heightened expectations of consumers. Real Estate sector will need more agile environments to function better. To stay competitive and relevant, it is now more than essential to move to faster technology like cloud to achieve business continuity as well as meet customer expectations. Compared to 2020, the use of cloud computing increased by 41% in the real estate industry. The job opportunities are also booming because of the integration of cloud technology making way for new opportunities like Virtual Valuation Advisor, Virtual Leasing Manager which is of great help during the pandemic. Cloud is definitely the way to move forward for any sector, especially in the real-estate sector.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Future of Cloud Computing for Real Estate - The Times of India Blog