News
6 key takeaways from Microsoft’s annual report
$10.7 billion in Q4 CapEx was "both the data centers… plus CPUs and GPUs and networking equipment" with spending to accelerate, said CFO Amy Hood.
deals
Thales' $3.6 billion buyout of Imperva is timely...
Imperva, generating ~$500 million in revenues, has suffered from executive churn in recent years that has caused some “adverse impact on Imperva’s roadmap execution."
Citrix
Citrix zero day used to attack critical infrastructure -- IOCs and detections now available
Attackers dropped a webshell, collected and exfiltrated Active Directory data, then ran into some healthy obstacles...
SAP
SAP CEO: Generative AI comes with a "30% premium" - could customise your on-prem deployments
"We sit on data of over 400,000 customers and their material flows, financial flows, employee customer data. We are taking this data… to benchmark and give business process recommendations"
procurement
Software spending plummets as CFOs batten down the hatches; SaaS firms hike prices
CFOs are scrutinizing net-new spending more aggressively than ever while "new product purchases emphasize 2023’s mission-critical priorities: growth, sustainability, and security"
AI
Meta’s Llama 2 AI is free and not just for research -- but it's not open source
It is a generous and permissive licence, but prohibits the use of Llama to “improve any other large language model; excluding Llama 2” and users must request a special commercial licence if their product's MAU exceed 700 million.
Citrix
Critical pre-auth RCE Citrix Gateway vulnerability is under active attack and looks bad
There are approximately 38,000 Citrix Gateway appliances exposed to the public internet and a whole host of internet traffic flows through Citrix ADC...
encryption
RFC 9420 aka Messaging Layer Security (MLS) – An Overview
MLS achieves its low complexity through the use of a binary tree. This means that the number of required operations and the payload size do not increase linearly with the group size but rather only logarithmically after a short warm-up period...
public sector
Eight years in, £2 billion spent, and nothing to show bar a big fat interoperability hole
Astonishingly the Home Office, already under pressure over interoperability challenges “does not know how many vendors provide" control room systems across 108 service stations...
economy
UK corporate insolvencies spike to the highest levels since 2008
"Zombie companies are likely to be early casualties of rising interest rates. However, if their demise frees up staff and properties for use by more profitable companies, the long run effect could be a boost to UK productivity..."
Citigroup
Citi’s tech spend hits $3 billion in Q2, as CFO highlights in-sourcing efforts
Citigroup spent the equivalent to some $50 million on technology every single working day over the past quarter..
cybersecurity
Microsoft strengthens key storage after China incident – admits “validation error in Microsoft code”
Redmond has since "substantially hardened key issuance systems... this includes increased isolation of the systems, refined monitoring of system activity, and moving to the hardened key store used for our enterprise systems..."