From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.

IT Brew

Tom McKay

itbrew.com

DNA strand next to a copy-paste select window

DNA storage could be the solution to future enterprise archival needs

DNA is dense, long-lasting, and stable—but scientists are still trying to figure out how to read and write it quickly.

Nvidia Blackwell chips are next hot commodity for megascalers

Megascale customers line up for Nvidia’s Blackwell AI chips.

Billy Hurley

Green transparent cloud silhouette with binary code displayed behind

Asked and answered: Should in-cloud data be backed up on-prem?

A round-up of industry pros offer some cloud recommendations.

Cloud

Brianna Monsanto

Pills that are hard to swallow: Not everyone will like you, life isn’t always fair, and the internet may rely too much on a handful of tech providers that can crash everything if they go down.

 (AWS) has some experts questioning the sustainability of the internet’s dependence on a small number of cloud giants.

 On Oct. 20, AWS seemingly broke the internet when it began to experience “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” in the early hours of the morning. The 

 giant said the outage was caused by a domain name system-related issue.

Because AWS is practically the backbone of the internet, millions of users were caught in the crossfire of the outage. Apps and popular websites like Snapchat, Venmo, and Roblox felt the impact, with each experiencing a spike in Downdetector reports.

“Yesterday, I was at a restaurant and I couldn’t pay because their system was down,” Catchpoint Systems CEO Mehdi Daoudi told IT Brew of his own experience with the outage, adding that the staff didn’t know how to charge his card manually, either.

The outage had more detrimental effects, as well. Critical infrastructure got whiplash from the cloud giant’s downtime as banks and airlines experienced disruptions on their apps.

By Monday evening, AWS said all of its services had returned to “normal operations.” However, the incident had already made one thing clear, according to Samir Elabed, a cybersecurity engineer: “It shows us that we rely so much on one provider, which is in terms of business planning, I would say, no, we can’t do that anymore.” AWS had a global market share of 30% in Q2, as per 

Patrick Neighorn, an AWS spokesperson, told IT Brew in a statement that AWS has “maintained a track record for reliability that surpasses other major cloud providers,” but did not comment on concerns related to the outage.

And AWS isn’t alone in shouldering that responsibility for uptime: Microsoft Azure has 20% of the cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Google Cloud at 13%.

While it may feel as if the whole internet has put its eggs in the Big Three’s basket, several professionals say all is not lost. Daoudi suggested the AWS outage is a wake-up call that should inspire businesses to consider hiring a chief resilience officer tasked with maintaining IT infrastructure resilience.

“The only solution is to start thinking about resiliency at the board level,” he said.

“There is the saying, ‘AWS never goes down,’ but look what happened yesterday,” Elabed said, adding that a multi-cloud or multi-region strategy would give a business a backup plan if another outage were to occur.

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, shared similar thoughts, adding that each of the hyperscalers is a “technical monoculture.”

Kimball said businesses should “straddle” the different cloud providers. He also referenced the EU’s respective Digital Operational Resilience Act and Data Act, which aims to bolster the digital resilience of financial entities while ban egress fees, which can make it more expensive for a company to pursue a multi-cloud strategy.

“That’s a very interesting regulation,” Kimball said. “Expect to see more of those, 100%, and things are absolutely moving in that direction.”

collection of companies like AWS, Snapchat, Amazon, Venmo, Instructure, Reddit, amazonalexa, roblox, and battlefield all showing graphs of outage reports

Why the AWS outage has some questioning the internet’s codependence on hyperscalers

One expert says the outage should inspire companies to adopt a multi-cloud strategy.

Like a Draw Four card in Uno, Oracle’s monumental deal with OpenAI is expected to shake things up—and not just for Oracle’s reputation, but for the greater tech ecosystem, according to industry experts.

 OpenAI had signed a contract with Oracle, agreeing to purchase $300 billion worth of computing power over approximately five years. The contract is slated to come into effect in 2027.

The Wall Street Journal said the OpenAI–Oracle deal is one of the largest cloud contracts signed to date, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of data center power capacity. Oracle shares jumped more than 35% following news of the deal.

However, Anetac security platform co-founder and CEO Timothy Eades argued the deal is actually not as expensive for Oracle as it seems. That’s because Eades said the arrangement will give the data giant a leg up in the industry’s trek towards deglobalization and 

 65% of governments worldwide will have some form of digital sovereignty by 2028.

Eades said the recent deal positions Oracle well for the AI era, a much-needed move given that the company had “missed out on some really big waves.”

“Part of it’s defensive,” Eades said. “Imagine if they didn’t do it right. I mean, they were left out of the hyperscaler world. Imagine if they weren’t involved in the AI world.”

Eades said that the deal also will award Oracle additional relevancy, transforming its identity beyond a “40-year-old database company.”

“This is a cheap deal…If you look at it in a 10 year time frame, holy cow,” Eades said.

Shishir Shrivastava, a practice director at TEKsystems Global Services, said the deal signifies a wave of consolidation within the AI infrastructure industry, similar to what occurred during the 

 in Intel, announced on Sept. 18, as another indicator of this.

“For the next few years, that’s what we’ll see,” Shrivastava, a former Oracle employee, said. He added that the combination of Oracle’s flagship database product, its enterprise applications, and its infrastructure will allow it to cater to large enterprises.

“With the advent of cloud, all they have to do is just take all of that infrastructure and the muscle in the power and boost it to the cloud so that they can provide that AI optimized ecosystem,” Shrivastava said.

Eades said deals on such a large scale will likely continue moving forward.

“This is just the start of something massive,” he said.

 Some may be wondering what the monumental deal means for the 

. Shrivastava said the recent deal will help catapult Oracle’s reputation in the cloud computing industry to the heights of the hyperscaler trio.

“Sooner or later, you will see that among AWS, and Microsoft, and Google, Oracle’s name will pop up as well quite frequently,” Shrivastava said.

Eades, however, predicts the OpenAI–Oracle deal won’t shake things up too much for the hyperscalers because the industry is currently in the “first innings of AI” and companies likely will establish deals with multiple cloud providers.

“It’s not like musical chairs where everybody’s going to find one at the last minute, and this is your lock to that one chair,” Eades said. “Right now, people are trying to circle around and find the right chair that’s going to be relevant for them on the product suite that they have and the markets that they see.”

 While the $300 billion deal is regarded as a win for Oracle by some, others remain skeptical. Following the news of the agreement and the market’s subsequent reaction, discussions of an oncoming AI bubble burst 

“I don’t think it’s a bubble, but if it is a bubble, then deals like these are put as a risk,” Shrivastava said.

 ratings highlighted the counterparty risk (i.e., the risk that a party will not fulfill its end of the bargain) associated with the deal. Moody’s does not mention OpenAI by name in the report, and disclosed its risk assessment is “subjective at best,” given their lack of financial information on the unnamed party.

Moody’s report also acknowledged Oracle’s high debt standing and how it could impact the company following the pending deal: “Oracle’s AI infrastructure business has tremendous potential in our view, but we note that this exponential growth and the already high debt burden at Oracle could result in an extended period of high leverage and negative cash flow.”

Correction 09/26/2025: Shishir Shrivastava's title has been corrected to "practice director."

What the Oracle–OpenAI deal means for the greater industry

One CEO calls the agreement between Oracle and OpenAI a “cheap deal.”

If the analysts are right, your work desktop could soon be streaming to you from a far-off data center. Bet they didn’t show that in 

, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will become a primary workspace for 20% of employees by 2027, versus 10% in 2019. By then, Gartner also predicts DaaS will be cost-effective for 95% of employees, up from 40% in 2019.

Gartner defines DaaS as “the provision of virtual desktops by public cloud or other service providers.” The research firm listed Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Citrix, and Omnissa as current leaders in the DaaS provider market.

 While Gartner noted that DaaS is currently leveraged for a small subset of remote workers in most organizations, use cases for virtual desktops are multiplying, particularly when it comes to cost and operational and sustainability needs.

“Total cost of ownership for DaaS, especially when users couple it with thin-client endpoints, is now lower than that of a laptop PC for many use cases,” Gartner wrote. “Enterprises continue to increase the mix of DaaS within their estates, but most are deploying DaaS for specific use cases rather than a complete PC replacement.”

 But Shannon Kalvar, a research director for enterprise systems management, enterprise client platforms, observability, and AIOps at IDC, told IT Brew that the pending shift to DaaS is a “microcosm of the bigger problem.” He said IT staffers and other tech professionals with the skills required to manage on-premises technologies are few and far between these days, forcing companies to turn to solutions such as DaaS and automation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that network and computer systems administrator employment will see a 3% downtick between 2023 and 2033.

“It’s not so much about just providing a secure desktop,” Kalvar said. “What we’re seeing is a change in the way people use human resources to manage environments because the humans are no longer there.”

Kalvar called the reliance on DaaS and automation the “new normal.”

“We see this need to bring in automated desktops, and then focus the handful of resources you have left who have experience or who know how to solve these problems on the hard problems that need to be addressed.”

A three-dimensional image of a cloud overlaid on computer chips.

Desktop-as-a-service is on the rise. Is that a good sign for IT staffers…or a really bad one?

 Gartner predicts virtual desktops will be the “primary workspace” for 20% of workers by 2027. Something big is driving the shift. 

Caroline Nihill

Like a hurricane kicking off as a gentle breeze in the middle of the Atlantic, most cloud breaches start very small. All it takes is a bad actor stealing an identity or taking over a compromised endpoint such as a laptop, and suddenly an organization’s most valuable assets—often kept in a public or private cloud—are in danger.

Even worse, cloud intrusions increased by 136% during the first half of 2025 compared to all of 2024, according to CrowdStrike’s 2025 threat-hunting report. The cybersecurity organization attributed this to more threat actors understanding how to exploit cloud environments.

Cameron Sipes, the director of cloud security product marketing at SentinelOne, also pins the skyrocketing rate of intrusions on rising cloud adoption and the use of AI in cyberattacks.

“AI has rapidly expanded the attack service, very similar to what cloud did,” Sipes said. “It just introduced new surfaces that we haven’t had to think about before, and not only new surfaces but actually multiple layers.”

Crowdstrike’s senior vice president of counter adversary operations (CAO), Adam Meyers, said during a virtual media roundtable surrounding the release of Crowdstrike’s threat-hunting report that the significant increase in cloud intrusions was accompanied by adversaries deploying other innovative strategies such as operational relay box (ORB) networks to avoid detection while harvesting credentials.

“The cloud is an ideal target, it is huge, it has vast amounts of data,” Meyers said. “Oftentimes there’s misconfigurations within that cloud infrastructure which make it such an attractive target.”

Sipes predicted that cloud adoption could increase next year as even more organizations shift from on-premises databases to private and public clouds. With so much “crown jewel data,” the cloud is an attractive target.

“I joke that it feels like there’s a trend in our culture, in general, everything old is new again—old- fashioned is cool again,” Sipes said. “Apparently old bad guy tools are new again.”

The rise of AI, including LLMs, has provided attackers with a way to supercharge yesteryear’s cyberattack tools. Infostealers, or malware that quietly collects sensitive information from a device and sends it back to the bad actors, has returned as 

, a cloud-based info stealer that uses ChatGPT to summarize and enrich information faster and more efficiently.

Typosquatting, the practice of registering an intentionally misspelled domain name so it is just slightly different than a common URL, then using that domain for malware, has also returned in a new, cloud-centric fashion as slopsquatting.

, slopsquatting is when a programmer obtains software packages from an open-source repository, not realizing that a bad actor has labeled the packages to deceive them. The packages contain a command that acts as malware.

Along with efforts to attack cloud security using AI, threat actors are turning to ORB networks, a common tool of China-nexus threat actors to mesh networks together so that espionage operations are disguised.

Additionally, Meyers said that Crowdstrike has seen adversaries harvesting credentials and pivoting to the cloud control plane, which manages and controls a company’s cloud environment.

“They gain access to a legitimate credential and then that account perhaps has some cloud access, or they’re able to then escalate privilege to an account that has cloud access, which allows them to run commands on cloud,” Meyers said.

While fending off cloud intrusions can be tough, 

 that practitioners implement best practices, including strong authentication, employee awareness, and regular security assessments.

Sipes said, concerning prevention, “Cloud security needs to be proactive and reactive. What I mean by that is that core kind of [cloud security posture management] use case of reducing your attack surface.”

Providers should, according to Sipes, inventory cloud environments, check for cloud-native misconfigurations, ensure compliance, and proactively defend against intrusions.

On the reactive side, providers should implement a cloud workload protection platform that offers runtime security. “Bad guys will come knocking,” Sipes said. “When they do, do your cloud workloads themselves have the ability to autonomously detect, respond, and remediate threats?”

Cloud intrusions are up. Is AI to blame?

 CrowdStrike, in its latest threat-hunting report, found that cloud intrusions are up 136% so far this year. What’s driving the spike?

You can’t spill coffee on a PC that’s in the cloud. For IT outages ranging from drink accidents to security incidents, Microsoft is previewing a 10-day loaner for when a user’s typical PC is on the fritz.

 a public preview of Windows 365 Reserve, a service providing access to cloud PCs. The offering, which Microsoft says is a “safety net” for companies facing threats like device failures and ransomware, had IT pros envisioning benefits and drawbacks of the new feature.

The standalone Reserve option “provides temporary, secure, and dedicated Cloud PC access when a user’'s primary PC is unavailable, for up to 10 days per year.”

Admins, according to the company’s details, can spin up cloud PCs configured with Microsoft 365 apps and access policies made via the company’s Intune cloud service.

When users recover their primary device, admins can deprovision the cloud PC via Intune and preserve any remaining time from the 10-day license.

Participation is currently limited, and orgs can contact Microsoft to take part in the preview.

Reserve requires a network connection and is subject to scale limitations, including Azure capacity constraints.

In an email to IT Brew, Microsoft’s VP of Product Marketing Stefan Kinnestrand wrote that the goal of Reserve is to streamline endpoint provisioning without “maintaining a fleet of aging loaner devices.” According to Kinnestrand, early surveys with analysts and customers “indicated strong interest in the Windows 365 Reserve concept, even prior to its creation.”

“Everyone has a story—spilled coffee during a client call, a stolen backpack on the bus, or realizing too late that your laptop’s still in the airplane seat pocket. Sometimes it’s a critical bug or hardware issue that derails your productivity, or a new hire waiting days for their device to arrive,” he wrote.

According to a fall 2024 survey from cloud-native database company Cockroach Labs of 1,000 global senior tech pros and executives, organizations average 86 outages per year. The average outage lasts 196 minutes, the report claims. For companies with more than 1,000 employees and/or $500 million in annual recurring revenue, outage-related losses averaged $495,000 in a 12-month period. Expenses included regulatory fines, recovery costs, lost revenue, and data loss.

Sunil Kumar, senior director analyst at Gartner, sees the offering helping orgs that don’t use virtual desktops—or orgs that do, but may have trouble ramping up their virtual desktops at scale when an incident arises.

“​​If an organization does not utilize any virtual desktops today, this is a great way to utilize virtual desktops as a backup option for their endpoints, because it’s as a service,” he said, adding that the capability is Microsoft’s “biggest differentiator.”

But Justin Timothy, threat intelligence consultant at GuidePoint Security, expressed skepticism about the practical benefits of Microsoft’s Windows Reserve service for ransomware recovery. IT problems, he said, could arise when a personal device—now firing up a cloud PC— joins a network. The personal device could have malware or incompatible drivers.

“At that point, if you have an end user who’s trying to do their work but they can’t get their mouse to work, then they have to reach out to their corporate IT team,” Timothy said. “And that IT team is probably busy assisting with any forensics or recovery efforts. “

When asked about logging capabilities and if IT pros will have visibility into actions taken on a cloud PC, Kinnestrand, in his email, shared that admins can access “operational information through management tools integrated with Microsoft Intune,” and that “as Windows 365 Reserve is currently in preview, logging and reporting capabilities are in development.”


A weather cloud with three ethernet cables plugged into it

Microsoft tests ‘Reserve’ cloud PCs for disaster recovery

We ask a ransomware specialist and a virtual-desktop analyst to review pros and cons.

Google is continuing its push into the cloud service provider ecosystem with its latest contract with digital workflow management platform ServiceNow.

According to Bloomberg, citing an anonymous source familiar with the deal, ServiceNow will spend $1.2 billion over the next five years on Google’s cloud computing services.

The deal follows ServiceNow’s partnerships with other cloud providers, the company shared in a statement to Bloomberg, which was also provided to IT Brew. ServiceNow declined to reveal specific details of other contracts, including who they are with.

Google did not respond in time for a request to comment. ServiceNow declined to give IT Brew a statement with a named spokesperson.

 to Google’s recent partnerships with companies like Salesforce and OpenAI as evidence for its “growing influence” in the cloud market, despite the historical dominance of AWS and Microsoft.

 that Google would provide cloud computing services to help with OpenAI’s need for increased computing capacity. The deal, which was inked in May, would specifically add the capacity for OpenAI’s “existing infrastructure for training and running its AI models.”

In February, Google and Salesforce announced that they would add Google Gemini to Agentforce, according to a 

“Google Cloud is at the forefront of enterprise AI innovation with millions of developers building with Google’s cutting-edge Gemini models and on Google Cloud’s AI optimized infrastructure,” the release said.

The company said that the deal was an expansion of an “existing partnership” to let customers use data “bi-directionally” from Google BigQuery and Salesforce through 

 which allows professionals to access data from different locations at the same time without needing to move or reformat.

“Salesforce Service Cloud will become more tightly integrated with Google Customer Engagement Suite, bringing enhanced AI-enabled contact center capabilities including real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, personalized agent recommendations, and AI-driven conversational insights across all channels,” the release said.

 to help fund AI initiatives. The new product packaging and pricing will push the company toward the edge of innovation and give its employees access to the technology and other agentic tools, according to a release.

Google signs $1.2 billion deal with ServiceNow

Google will reportedly provide five years of cloud computing services for ServiceNow, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to make building and deploying advanced AI agents feel like a walk in the park.

 annual Summit in New York City in mid-July, the cloud giant unveiled Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a suite of services that aim to take on the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” of building 

 at scale. Announced AgentCore tools included:

A serverless runtime environment that is framework and protocol agnostic.

 A designated identity and credential management service for AI agents.

 A service that allows existing APIs and Lambda functions to be made into “agent-ready” tools “with just a few lines of code.”

A tool that enables developers to “trace, debug, and monitor” their AI agent’s performance.

A service with both short-term and long-term memory capabilities that allow developers control over the context their agent has.

A service that allows AI agents to write and execute code in a sandbox environment.

 A “secure, isolated” cloud-based browser environment that allows agents to interact with websites.

The set of services, currently available in preview, can either be used in its entirety or on an individual basis. Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s VP for agentic AI, said in his keynote that AgentCore was a “step change” for securely moving 

“It provides tools and capabilities to make agents more effective and more capable, purpose-built infra to securely scale agents and provide the controls to enable you to build trustworthy agents,” Sivasubramanian said during the July 16 keynote.

In addition to AgentCore, AWS announced that AI agents and tools from its partners will now be available on the AWS marketplace. The move will allow customers to purchase agentic solutions with “streamlined procurement and multiple deployment options.”

“With this launch, you have access to a centralized catalog of AI agents, tools, solutions, and services from popular vendors,” Sivasubramanian said.

 The announcements come as companies are going all in on AI agents to enhance their workflows. A 

 found that 82% of organizations plan to incorporate AI agents in their companies within one to three years.