Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. These briefings drop on Tuesday mornings. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by editorial director Alex Coop with files from IT World Canada reporter Pragya Sehgal.
ITWC Podcasts
Listen to the latest episode of Hashtag Trending
Ethereum is quadrupling in value this year, Verizon sells Yahoo for $5 billion, and Intel announces a $3.5 billion upgrade to a chip manufacturing plant in New Mexico.
Listen to the latest episode of Cyber Security Today
Ransomware gang reportedly drops encryption, Saskatchewan insurance broker hit by ransomware and employees put COVID data at risk.
Listen to the latest episode of Hashtag Tendances (Hosted by Direction Informatique)
If you live in Quebec or prefer to consume the latest technology news in French, our sister publication Direction Informatique has you covered. Follow them on Twitter as well.
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In case you missed it
The recent tech news that we maybe didn’t get to yet, or it’s the news we’ve reported on and feel is worth resurfacing.
Red Hat crown jewels shine at summit
Red Hat Summit 2021 dedicated a lot of time to open hybrid cloud with the company announcing the expansion of its open hybrid cloud technology portfolio with new managed cloud services.
It also announced Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, a new edition of the enterprise Kubernetes platform which it says is designed to provide a holistic solution to help customers adopt DevSecOps across the entirety of the hybrid cloud. [Read about more announcements here]
Aptum study unveils cloud challenges
Visibility and control into cloud environments is difficult to achieve for most organizations as they migrate workloads to different platforms, revealed the third part of Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study which explores the financial benefits of cloud computing and how organizations can optimize cloud spend.
Although the majority of organizations (80 per cent) surveyed by the global hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider say they recognize cloud computing as being vital to their financial security, more than half (57 per cent) say they have encountered unexpected costs.
The data suggests that cloud deployments without expert guidance from a managed service partner can increase associated costs if cloud optimization is not a fundamental principle from the start. Aptum says taking a holistic approach to cloud infrastructures, where visibility and control are embedded from design, can ensure costs are optimized and the service runs at maximum efficiency.
Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study was created from the opinions of 400 senior IT professionals in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. across industries in financial services, IT, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public and commercial sectors. The company says the final report will focus on modernization opportunities. The full findings from part three, A Bright Forecast on Cloud, can be found here.
Microsoft acquires Kubernetes solutions builder Kinvolk
On April 29, Microsoft announced that it has acquired open-source Linux and cloud-native technologies builder Kinvolk to meet the increasing customer demands for container-optimized workloads and operating systems, lean application modernization, easier operations, and platform resiliency.
Microsoft says the Kinvolk team will be key contributors to the engineering development of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and future projects that will expand Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and increase Microsoft’s upstream open source contributions in the Kubernetes and container space.
The company is set to reveal more technical details soon [Read full news release here]
ICYMI – IT World Canada
Study says 33 per cent of Canadians unsatisfied with their mobile network speeds [Full story here]
The survey study, which included 9,498 respondents in rural and urban Canada, found that just 67 per cent of wireless customers consider their carrier’s network reliable when streaming music and videos. Moreover, only seven per cent of respondents think network speeds are faster than expected.
Two Canadian banks could pay up to $23 million to settle lawsuits in 2018 hacks [Full story here]
Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith approved the settlement and disbursement of money last week of a potential $21.2 million for 113,151 Bank of Montreal victims, and $1.7 million for just over 10,000 victims of CIBC’s online Simplii Financial bank.
The CIO Strategy Council says the drafted proposal is in response to “an urgent need to maintain the health of employees as COVID-19 restrictions loosen and businesses reopen.”
Toronto hit by ‘potential cyber breach’ from Accellion file transfer software [Full story here]
The City of Toronto says it suffered a “potential cyber breach” from a hack of data from use of its Accellion FTA file transfer server in January that may have involved the health information of individuals.
ICYMI – IT Business Canada
Netflix picks Toronto for its new Canadian corporate office [Full story here]
Netflix has two Canadian production hubs in Toronto. With the new office in Toronto, Netflix says it will expand its commitment to working with Canadian talent.
Toronto-based diversity & inclusion data and consulting company Diversio announced the inaugural cohort of over 80 Diversio-certified Canadian companies at a press conference co-hosted by City of Toronto Mayor John Tory this week.
Ontario to create Data Authority to securely house provincial information [Full story here]
As the province overhauls its data infrastructure, Ontario is putting the call out to public organizations and businesses to help it create a new provincial data authority.
ICYMI – Channel Daily News
Dell releases Latitude 7320 Detachable tablet PC [Full story here]
Dell released the Latitude 7320 Detachable on April 27 to give mobile enterprise users a more flexible option, and to steal some spotlight from Microsoft‘s Surface devices.
The public sector is undergoing significant changes as citizens rely more heavily on the internet to access services and other resources and staff are forced to work remotely. We reached out to three of Canada’s largest solution providers to gain a better understanding of the problems governments are trying to solve with technology and where IT channel partners serving them can help out.
Pandemic-fueled innovation highlighted at 2021 Channel Conference and Awards [Full story here]
Seven Canadian channel organizations were celebrated this week for the creation and deployment of novel solutions solving pressing problems during the Channel Daily News 2021 Channel Innovation Conference and Awards.
Bookmarks of the Week
These are bookmarked tweets that we think are worth sharing.
50 days after the incident in SBG, with @michel_paulin, to give you the current status of the recovery. pic.twitter.com/uVEYF5HufS
— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) May 4, 2021
.@Intel CEO @PGelsinger says the company is spending $20 BILLION on two new fabs in #Arizona — #Intel‘s largest investment ever & another $3.5 billion to upgrade its Rio Rancho fab in #NewMexico 🤩 @IntelBusiness @Intel5GNetworks #semiconductor #5G #IoT pic.twitter.com/0veETwWjSa
— 🟣 Evan Kirstel $B2B (@EvanKirstel) May 3, 2021
If you’re considering a career in cybersecurity, I really caution you to think about what’s going to happen once everything is secure.
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2021