Even more technical layoffs in the growth area of cloud computing. Employees beg Google “not to be evil” and Elon Musk tells the press he doesn’t give one.
These stories and more, including the hashtags trending for optimism for Tuesday, March 21scheduled tribe ,
I’m your host, Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.
And here are today’s top tech news.
Amazon announced another 9,000 layoffs yesterday. This is another major drawback for a company that has been in growth mode for years. The latest round of layoffs will bring Amazon’s total recent reductions to 27,000 employees, which is 9 percent of its roughly 300,000 member workforce.
However, there’s a surprise this round — as industry reports suggest that as much as 10 percent of those cuts could come from the company’s cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services. or AWS
With so many companies moving to the cloud, this shortfall may come as a surprise. According to some, AWS was considered pariah until recently.
But according to Ray Wang, an industry analyst at Constellation Research, Amazon has had to carefully approach every part of its organization, and AWS was no exception. Wang notes that “this was part of a larger trend of tech companies getting lean again, and Amazon has bloated over the years. That finally countered his analysis a few weeks ago and now AWS has made the cut as well.”
The company’s most recent earnings report showed that the cloud division’s growth rate has slowed from 39 percent last year to 20 percent this year. While many companies would be thrilled to see 20 percent growth, CFO Brian Olsavsky indicated the pace of growth could slow further. In an article in Tech Crunch, he was quoted as saying “As we look ahead, we expect these optimization efforts to continue to be a headwind to AWS’s growth for at least the next few quarters.” He said that in the first month of the year, AWS’s year-over-year revenue growth had dropped to the “mid-teens.”
Over the years the cloud has evolved into the leading architecture for corporate systems, and in some cases, the “de facto” standard. A recent study of CIOs by ITWC’s research group predicted cloud growth over the next two years to be very strong, even after last year’s decline. But now, there are some signs that the cloud infrastructure market may be starting to slow down.
Source: techcrunch And reuters
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Google employees have sent an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai demanding that the company better handle its layoffs.
Employees are suggesting strategies such as new hiring for any job vacancies and prioritizing laid-off employees. A key demand also includes allowing employees to complete parental and even bereavement leave before leaving.
The letter was signed by more than 1,400 workers and said:
,Nowhere has the voice of workers been adequately considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger than we are alone.
One of the major areas of complaint has been the treatment of employees who are on various types of medical or compassionate leave. Some of the stories are heart wrenching.
An Insider article described a Google employee who was told she lost her job while she was on leave to care for sick parents.
Employees who survived the cuts told how some employees who kept their jobs cried during meetings the day the layoffs were announced. A CNBC report mentions a woman who was fired from her job a week before giving birth.
The same article cited another employee who posted that she gave birth just before receiving her notice:
She wrote “On 1/20/23 at 7:05am while holding my hourglass newborn in a hospital bed I found out I was part of #thegolden12K of Googlers that got eliminated, I for 9.5 years Was a Googler.”
In response more than 100 former employees have formed a group they call “Leave on Leave”, demanding the company honor the leave of employees who have been laid off or terminated.
But certainly one of the most scathing comments from either group was one that referred to Google’s core core value, “Don’t be evil,” — it said, calling for leadership to respond quickly to employees’ concerns. .
Source: Arstecnica And business Insider
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A Gartner survey finds that 72 percent of high-tech leaders expect revenue to grow in 2023, despite economic uncertainty.
What’s more, nearly half of the leaders surveyed think they’ll be able to outperform their competition this year.
The survey was conducted in the second half of 2022 in the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany with 195 responses.
These findings overall support Gartner’s forecast. IT spending will increase by 2.4 percent In 2023, enterprise IT spending is projected to grow by 4.1 percent. According to Gartner, the context of IT spending is changing as buyers increasingly value and invest in business outcomes rather than purchasing solutions.
But there is a contradiction in the results. Despite the optimism, the survey found that technology providers are taking steps that indicate a reduction or decline in spending:
56 percent slowed down hiring
52 percent implemented spending cuts
43 percent reduced spending on marketing
Which led to an interesting discovery:
“Outperforming the market through an uncertain market requires above-average ability to execute on revenue ambitions,” said Mark McDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “The survey results show that nearly half of firms (46 percent) do not have sufficient capacity to reliably achieve their revenue goals.”
So the question is, is the contraction we’re seeing a reflection of a lack of confidence in the market or a reflection of tech companies’ lack of confidence in themselves?
Gartner experts challenge us all to focus on the relevance of technology solutions, possibly to focus on issues critical to business, including efficiency, customer experience and growth.
According to McDonald, this relevance is important.
,Changes in context challenge the relevance of technology solutions. Low relevance reduces willingness to pay and renew relationships. Gartner views relevance as the relationship between a provider’s solution and how applicable it is to current customer needs. That connection exists at every level from C-level to individual developers. Without relevancy, we see sales cycles lengthen and renewals become more at risk.
Source: Gartner
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Data Leaks and Its Impact on Companies’ Reputations – Is This the New Ransomware Tactic
The basic strategy of ransomware was to break into your system, encrypt your data, and then demand a ransom to obtain the decryption key. Companies have become smart about having secure backups and being able to restore.
In response, ransomware criminals have changed their tactics, especially with larger companies. Now they not only encrypt data, they first steal important data and hold that hostage.
Two examples of this have come to light from two big companies. Those affected in the past few days include Amazon’s Ring system, the security camera system linked to the doorbells of thousands, if not millions, of its customers. And Elon Musk’s firm Space X plans to have one of its rocket engines stolen.
In the case of Amazon’s ring, the ransomware gang ALPHV has claimed to have hacked the ring on its site on the dark web. But the group has also not yet provided any evidence.
Without proof of the data leak, we can only speculate on the data that could have been stolen. Jordan Schroeder, on the Managing CISO barrier networkwas reported in CPO magazine as saying ,This is a highly worrying incident that puts critical consumer data at risk. It is not yet known what data was obtained by the attackers, or if any data was obtained, but given the type of information Ring will have access to, it ranges from PII, financial information to people’s physical locations. Can be related data and even data. How do they control the security of their home?
But Lior Mazor, Global Head of Information and Security perimeter 81, point out that the damage may be more related to reputation and may call into question the security of Ring devices and networks. This could be a stinging sign, especially since this isn’t the first time Ring devices have been reported to have been compromised. “Previous reports noted that a misconfiguration could have occurred, which inherently undermined the security of the device. There are a few ways this breach could have been carried out. The Ring device is a poorly configured IoT device and it It is possible that attackers have discovered a back door or zero day vulnerability in the device itself.
Elon Musk’s problems are different but equally challenging. It appears that Musk and his company SpaceX are the victims of a “supply chain attack”.
Another ransomware gang, called LockBit, managed to compromise Texas-based Maximum Industries, a third-party vendor, and steal schematics for the Raptor V2 engines used by Space X. This time the gang presented evidence, posted some sample documents on the dark web and threatened to launch an auction in a week if SpaceX did not pay the ransom.
And as much as it seems like something that has happened to two big companies will somehow survive, it’s a question for all of us?
In both cases, one has to ask – is it the value of the data or the lost trust that is going to be the biggest loss. In the case of Ring Central, are you more or less inclined to buy their product after hearing about this ransomware issue? Will the big companies do more or less business with the laser cutting firm that lost SpaceX specs?
Clearly, every company – large and small – needs to take the issue of ransomware and data theft seriously.
Source: cpo magazine and from the other cpo
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Do you have a tough question for Twitter? Elon Musk would like to tell you that he doesn’t give a… a…
Musk loves symbolism. Few would forget that they walked into the Twitter offices with sinks – in the hope that the new system and their desire for change – would sink in. just take it. in sync.
Well he’s at it again.
In a novel response to the criticism of journalism, given that Musk has fired public relations staffers handling press inquiries, Twitter has announced that it will in future answer questions from the press..
Poop emoji. The poop emoji is definitely done via a tweet.
And there’s a lot to ask about — layoffs, mass resignations, user experience changes, outages, why would Musk make fun of someone with a disability, and including whether Elon Musk will eventually step down.
So if you want to ask a question, the answer will be an automated tweet of a poop emoji.
I’m tempted to say “eternally mature”, but perhaps the best response is – don’t tweet.
Source: npr
That’s the top tech news for today. Hashtag Trending airs five days a week with daily tech news and we have a special weekend edition where we do an in-depth interview with an expert on some of the tech developments that are making the news.
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I’m your host, Jim Love, have a wonderful Tuesday!
