Microsoft is planning to remove a feature from the consumer version of OneDrive soon. This feature allowed users to upload files to their cloud storage directly using a web URL. Introduced in 2021 as a preview feature, it was designed to help people upload files from the internet to their OneDrive without having to download them to their device first.

Users could just provide a link to the file they wanted to upload, and OneDrive would download it directly from the link to the user's cloud storage. Despite its usefulness, Microsoft found that not many people were using this feature. They also discovered that keeping this feature running costs a lot of money. Microsoft thinks that this feature doesn't fit with their goals for OneDrive. They want OneDrive to be a service that syncs files across devices smoothly.

This URL upload feature will be discontinued on March 29, 2024. For those who have used this feature to upload files using a URL, the good news is that those files will stay in their OneDrive accounts.

In other news, Microsoft updated the look of OneDrive for personal users in January. The new design aims to make things less cluttered. It includes new filters to help find files faster by type and an "add new" button. This button lets users create new documents like Word files right in OneDrive without opening another app.

Read next:These Are The Best Cloud Storage Apps of 2024

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Microsoft to Remove OneDrive URL Upload Feature - Digital Information World

CRN breaks down six of the most significant AWS executives who left the cloud giant in 2024 and where they landed, including at Microsoft, Oracle and NetApp.

Several of AWS top executives have departed the company so far in 2024 to join fellow cloud, AI and storage rivals including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and NetApp.

This includes former AWS vice presidents, managing directors, engineering heads and others who left this year to take top roles at other tech giants.

CRN breaks down six AWS executives who left the worlds largest cloud company in 2024 and where they landed.

Before jumping into the six executives who left, its key to note that Seattle-based AWS is the worlds No. 1 cloud market leadingowning 31 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market.

AWS is currently at a $97 billion annual run rate after generating $24.2 billion in revenue during fourth quarter 2023. AWS parent company Amazon has a market cap of $1.87 trillion.

[Related: AWS Vs. Microsoft Vs. Google Cloud Earnings Q4 2023 Face-Off]

Many of the executives who left AWS this year have joined fellow IT cloud giants like Microsoft, Google Cloud and Oracle.

In terms of global cloud market share: Microsoft ranks No. 2 at 24 percent share, followed by Google at No. 3 with 11 percent share, while Oracle currently owns approximately 2 percent share.

Here are six now-former top AWS executives who left in 2024 that partners, investors and customers should know about.

Ahmed Shihab

Former AWS Role: Vice President of Infrastructure Hardware

New Role: Microsoft, Corporate Vice President at Azure Storage

Ahmed Shihab was responsible for the innovation, building and operations of all of AWS storage and compute systems.

He spent about eight years at AWS from 2016 to 2024.

Shihab recently became corporate vice president of Azure Storage at Microsoft. On LinkedIn, he said hes now building out world class storage services [at Azure].

AWS and Microsoft Azure compete heavily in the cloud storage market. Shihab has also held top executive positions for the likes of storage giant NetApp and cloud provider Xyratex.

Former AWS Role: Managing Director, Worldwide Head of Sales, Enterprise Workloads

New Role: NetApp, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Cloud Business Unit

Ashish Dhawan was AWS enterprise workload business leader for years, tasked with helping large AWS customers migrate their infrastructure and modernize their applications.

He spent over five years at AWS, most recently as was AWS managing director and worldwide head of enterprise workload sales.

He left AWS to join NetApp this year to lead the companys cloud sales strategy. NetApp said Dhawans role was created to support NetApps continue commitment to cloud with Dhawan leading a high-performing sales team.

Prior to AWS, Dhawan was vice president of sales in Asia Pacific at Juniper Networks for over eight years.

Former AWS Role: Head of Engineering and Product Strategy, AWS Sagemaker

New Role: Cisco, Senior Director of AI/ML, Outshift by Cisco

Saurabh Gupta left AWS this year as head of engineering and product strategy for AWS Sagemaker, the companys AI and machine learning solution.

Gupta lead global organizations of AWS professionals who are building the foundational capabilities for Amazon SageMaker, which enables customers to build, train and deploy ML models at scale with familiar AWS tools.

This year, Gupta left AWS after four years to join networking kingpin Cisco as its new senior director of AI/ML for its emerging technologies business Outshift. At Cisco, Gupta will be leading generative AI development and productization at Outshift.

Gupta spent over a decade at Microsoft in top engineering positions from 2011 to 2017, as well as three years as a senior engineering manager at Meta for Facebook Ads.

Former AWS Role: Vice President, AWS Global Telco Business

New Role: Group CEO at Capita

IT veteran Adolfo Hernandez left AWS this year to become CEO of British outsourcing company Capita.

Hernandez was a prominent AWS figurehead, speaking on stage at various AWS conferences over his three years at the company as vice president of AWS global Telco Business Unit. He helped accelerate digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives for AWS telecommunications clients.

Prior to AWS, Hernandez has held top executive roles for the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Sun Microsystems, IBM, as well as CEO of former messaging platform Acision.

Former AWS Role: Enterprise Senior Partner Sales Manager

New Role: Google Cloud, Partner Development Manager

As channel partners continue to be a critical lifeline for vendors and customers, it is key to note some senior partner managers departure from AWS, including Nicolas Dubois.

Dubois spent over seven years in various senior partner sales and partner success manger roles at AWS, most recently he was enterprise senior partner sales manager.

He joined Google Cloud in January as a partner development manager.

Google Cloud and AWS are in constant battle for channel partner mindshare on a global basis.

Former AWS Role: Head of Engineering, AWS Config

New Role: Oracle, Vice President of Cloud Customer Connectivity

Kaartik Viswanath was head of engineering for AWS Config, the companys configuration tool that helps clients assess, audit and evaluate the configurations of IT resources.

Viswanath spent nine years at AWS in various top executive positions including general manager of AWS Client VPN, as well as head of product management for AWS EC2 Networking.

He left AWS in 2024 to join cloud competitor Oracle as vice president of Cloud Customer Connectivity.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) competes in the computing market against AWS cloud.

Read the rest here:
6 AWS Execs Who Left In 2024 (So Far) For Microsoft, Google, Cisco And Others - CRN

In a significant move not just for Amazon but for the cloud industry as a whole, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has declared that it will no longer charge customers to migrate their data away from the platform.

Amazon says its a decision thats aimed to provide customers with greater flexibility to choose their preferred cloud, on-prem, or hybrid solutions, and it comes in the wake of Google Cloud pulling a similar move around two months ago.

The decision aligns with the European Data Act, which came into force in January 2024 with the intention of enhancing competition by facilitating easier cloud provider transitions.

Previously, AWS users were limited by the companys 100GB-per-month free data transfer limit, which has now been lifted in favor of totally unrestricted migration upon egress.

Despite the European Data Act focusing on promoting competition specifically within Europe, AWSs policy change applies globally, as does Googles. Its unclear whether the providers agree that derestricting egress is the right thing to do or whether they anticipate similar regulations coming into force globally.

AWSs change isnt quite as simple as making a move free because customers must first contact the company in order to receive credits to cover the cost of the egress. This could even be a ploy to talk customers into staying with AWS rather than switching providers.

In a blog post introducing the change, AWS developer Sbastien Stormacq expressed hope that users will choose to stay within the AWS ecosystem despite the new ability to swap providers more freely.

Ultimately, the removal of fees is a step in the right direction, however the company, which is under the watchful eye of the UKs Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), still imposes some technical barriers that hamper interoperability.

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AWS follows Google Cloud, drops egress fees when moving data out of its system - Yahoo! Voices

Storage and backup investment plans for 2024 show a significant bias towards averting risk and building resilience. At the same time, storage spending plans lean towards the cloud, but with very robust on-premise storage spending plans also present.

Those are the findings of the Technology spending intentions survey from TechTarget and ESG, which questioned 1,432 technology decision-makers worldwide over three key areas:

When asked about storage and data protection technologies that organisations plan to invest in over the next 12 months, the overwhelming majority of responses indicate plans of arguably a defensive nature. Therefore, at number one, we find data governance, risk and compliance, with disaster recovery, cyber resilience and business continuity next. Joint-fourth is ransomware protection. Only in sixth place do we see something thats not explicitly about protection of data or risk, namely public cloud file storage as a key investment.

Next up, we were back on defence, with data management of cloud and unstructured data, backup for cloud data, and backup hardware and software.

Public cloud object storage comes last in the list of 10 investment priorities.

When these responses were broken down between enterprise and mid-market decision-makers, storage-as-a-service also creeps into the top 10 priorities.

Public cloud storage (file and object) continues to be the most likely storage investment. But on-premise investments are still significant, especially in the context of organisations reevaluating whether the cloud is the right place to store data and applications.

As mentioned above, when it comes to investment in storage capacity, cloud storage is a prominent priority, with file (31% of those questioned) and object (24%) the most significant storage investments planned worldwide.

Storage as a service came in third in the list of investment priorities, with planned spend in 2024 by 23% of respondents.

Cloud block storage was also cited by 16% of those asked, but the other seven in a list of 11 storage technology areas are unambiguously on-premise.

Internal server storage tops the list of investment priorities here (19%), followed by hyper-converged infrastructure (16%), software-defined storage (15%) and on-premise SAN capacity Ethernet (15%) and Fibre Channel (12%). Behind those are flash storage (12%) and on-premise direct attached storage (10%).

The survey also broke down responses between North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. Where these vary significantly includes public cloud file and object storage in North America, which lags behind the worldwide average (26% and 19%), while it leads in cloud block storage plans by a long way (29% versus 16%).

Meanwhile, flash storage plans are significantly more prevalent in North America (16%) and APAC (14%) than in EMEA (9%).

In data protection generally, theres a big bias towards building resilience and averting risk. Meanwhile, the nuts and bolts of that resilience, in the shape of backup including of cloud data such as containers takes up a significant portion of planned spend in 2024.

Priorities around data protection are topped by disaster recovery (37%), with the closely allied business continuity in third place (32%).

All of the top five priorities centre on resilience and include data governance, risk and compliance in joint top (37%), and cyber resilience services (33%).

Backup figures heavily as a spending priority, with backup for cloud data such as VMs and containers the most prominent (25%), backup hardware and software generally (24%), and backup-as-a-service (18%), endpoint backup (17%), and SaaS application data backup also on 17%.

In the middle of all of the above is data management for example, for cloud and unstructured data of which 27% said it would be an investment priority in 2024.

Archiving is among investment plans for 17% of those questioned.

Meanwhile, tapes not dead, but its not a huge priority for many (3%), and is down on last years 6%.

Originally posted here:
Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience - ComputerWeekly.com

Like most parents, the amount of digital photos I took exploded when my daughter was born. By the time her umbilical cord was cut Id already had emails from Google not to congratulate me (thanks Google), but to let me know my Google Drive was filling up fast.

As my daughter turned from a grey and slimy newborn into an adorable baby, and started actually doing interesting and cute things, rather than just being a screaming potato, my Google Drive capacity came under even greater strain thanks to the deluge of photos I was taking. Googles emails became more alarming as I reached my storage quota.

As a filthy Android user, Google Photos and Google Drive were my default services for cloud storage, and I hadnt felt the need to look elsewhere. As an owner of an original Google Pixel smartphone, it actually made sense to stick with Google Photos, as the company was once offering unlimited storage for your snaps. Sadly, not only had Google since stopped offering that incentive to get people to buy its smartphones, but by the time my daughter was born, Id switched to a Samsung smartphone.

Having the photos I take on my smartphone get automatically backed up in full quality was extremely important for me these were photos I would be devastated to lose if my phone got lost or broken. So, with the threat that my photos would no longer get backed up, I needed to act fast.

The most obvious step was to increase my Google Drive storage amount. However, I was already paying $2.99 per month for 200GB. The only larger option was for 2TB for $9.99 a huge increase in the monthly price and even with my trigger-happy snapping, I didnt think I would need that much. As a new parent, I needed to watch my outgoings. So, I decided to shop about and it didnt end well for Google.

When looking for a replacement cloud storage solution for my rapidly growing photo collection, there was one service I had already made up my mind about not using OneDrive.

This was Microsofts cloud storage solution, and in classic Microsoft style, it had been pushing it hard in Windows 11. To an almost obnoxious extent. Every time I tested out a new laptop or PC which due to my job, is very often I was being begged to turn on OneDrive to sync all my devices.

I wasnt a fan, and most of the time, I had been happy with Google Drive, so I didnt want another cloud storage service and I resented constantly being asked about it.

But as I was no longer content with Google Drive, I thought Id look into what Microsoft was offering. While, like Google, Microsoft offers a free tier for OneDrive, its just 5GB, which isnt enough for my photos.

However, the Microsoft 365 Personal tier offers 1TB of storage a lot more than the 200GB I was using, but without being more than I would need for $6.99 a month (and its cheaper if you pay yearly). Along with 1TB of storage, it also includes licenses for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This was another big selling point for me, as even in the age of Google Docs, Im one of those weirdos who still prefers to use office apps, especially word processors, that have been installed locally.

For longer-form articles, they give me a sense of security and control I just dont feel with Google Docs, so I was thinking of investing in Microsoft Office anyway (or using the free alternative LibreOffice). Having physical files on my PC also meant I could back them up to a NAS device, while also using cloud storage (paranoid? Perhaps).

One thing I do like about Google Docs is that its constantly saving in the background, so if your PC crashes, youre unlikely to lose much work, and you can log in and access the documents from other machines as well.

Even if your PC completely breaks, your documents will be accessible via the internet from another machine. So, I was quite happy to see that Word (and the other Office applications) offer similar functionality. If you save a document to your OneDrive folder on your PC, you can select it to auto save constantly (rather than saving every five minutes or so), and then access those files via the web. It also has version history as well, and you can edit documents within a web browser, so you dont even need Word or Excel installed.

That made my mind up and I subscribed. So far Ive been very happy with OneDrive, and feel a bit bad about ignoring it for so long. Theres an Android app available that automatically uploads the photos I take on my phone, and also helps me save space on my handset by safely deleting uploaded images once they are backed up. Its not as seamless as using the Photos app and Google Drive on an Android phone, but its also not the nightmare I had feared.

So far, the 1TB of storage space has been more than enough for all my photos. I haven't felt the need (nor been bugged) to upgrade my storage. In fact, I now use OneDrive for storing music projects Ive created in Ableton Live. These can be quite large files, but I still have plenty of space, and it means I can open up those projects on my desktop PC as well as my MacBook. Yep, theres a OneDrive app for Macs, and it integrates quite nicely into macOS.

Of course, Windows 11 integration is where it shines even if I still get annoyed by Windows 11 trying to make everything default to my OneDrive storage, and having to scroll past all my OneDrive folders in File Explorer just to get to my local storage (you know, sometimes Microsoft I may want to go into my Downloads folder).

Its also helped when reviewing new Windows 11 devices. Instead of getting angry about the suggestion of signing up for OneDrive, now when I set up a new Windows 11 laptop or PC, I use my Microsoft Account and enable OneDrive and all of my files and folders appear without me having to install any third party applications.

So I am happy to admit that I was wrong about OneDrive its a genuinely useful and good value service. Perhaps if Microsoft hadnt been so pushy about me trying it, Id have given it a go sooner.

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Ditching Google Drive for Microsoft OneDrive was one of the best choices I've ever made - TechRadar