The cloud industry’s power trio fell short of analyst expectations in their most recent respective quarters as capacity constraints proved to be a real problem for the hyperscalers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported $28.8 billion in revenue for the quarter ending Dec. 31, up 19% from the previous year, and a sliver under StreetAccount analysts’ estimate of $28.84 billion. In comparison, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit brought in $25.5 billion in revenue, up 19% YoY, while Google Cloud reported just under $12 billion in revenue for the quarter, an almost 30% uptick from the year prior.

Amazon. On a call with analysts last week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy defended the subsidiary’s growth for the quarter, blaming it largely on capacity constraints it is encountering.

“It is true that we could be growing faster if not for some of the constraints on capacity,” Jassy said on the Feb. 6 call. “And they come in the form of, I would say, chips from our third-party partners come in a little bit slower than before.”

Jassy told shareholders that he expects the constraints to lighten up in the second half of 2025 and that the hyperscaler will spend upward of $100 billion in capex this year. The CEO—who made sure to tout the company’s strong relationship with Nvidia during the call—added that while he expects that AWS’s growth will be “lumpy” over the upcoming years, he remains optimistic at what’s to come.

Read the rest here.—BM

The UK-based Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) created a system to rank the severity of cybersecurity incidents from 1 (low) to 5 (help!).

The effort, which calculates scores based on factors like affected population and financial impact, lets the public know what a group of experts considers to be the most impactful threats.

“If we crack this, and I’m confident that we will, ultimately it could be a huge boost to cybersecurity efforts, not just here but internationally, too,” Ciaran Martin, technical committee leader and former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said in a statement announcing the program.

A year in review. Ransomware attacks targeted institutions like the British Library, Transport for London, and UK hospitals in 2024.

The NCSC received 317 reports of ransomware in 2024. The NCSC’s incident management team also took in 1,957 reports of cyberattacks that were triaged into 430 incidents requiring support; the previous year had 371 incidents, according to the annual report.

Read more here.—BH

Time for a bigger bucket—or at least a few hundred small buckets—to catch last year’s security flaws that slipped through the cracks.

Recent data from exploit-intel company VulnCheck revealed a lot more publicly reported vulnerabilities (and attacks on those vulnerabilities) than a year ago—a 20% annual increase, according to the firm, thanks to a greater number of available cyber-sharers out there.

“The sources are evolving and changing,” VulnCheck Security Researcher Patrick Garrity told IT Brew. He sees increased information sharing as a positive development, but one that tech pros have to scramble to digest.

“There’s a lot more organizations involved in information sharing and getting vulnerability exploitation disclosure out quicker, faster,” he said.

VulnCheck, in its Feb 3. report, claimed that 768 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) were publicly reported in 2024 as exploited—a significant annual uptick, thanks to additional reporting sources from the 2024 RSA conference, alerts from nonprofit Shadowserver, and disclosures from WordPress scanner Wordfence, Garrity said.

KEV’in! One major source of threat intel for IT pros has been the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, established by CISA and considered by the agency to be “the authoritative source of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild.”

VulnCheck’s reports show a majority of reported monthly vulnerabilities were not in the KEV. Garrity sees the KEV as a “good effort” but one “limited in scope.”

Keep reading here.—BH

From AI’s reality check to cybersecurity shifts under new leadership to the energy demands reshaping IT infrastructure—2025 is set to be a year of transformation. Get ahead of the biggest tech trends and uncover what’s next for IT pros.