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AUGUSTA, Ga. The U.S. Army will make swift, significant strides in cloud migration and utilization in the coming 12 months, according to the services top uniformed information technology official.

Dubbing the next year as a period of action and acceleration, Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, on Aug. 17 pledged much more rapid movement to the cloud now that the groundwork has been laid.

The Army considers cloud migration and widespread, secure use foundational to the broader modernization of its networks, computers and collaboration capabilities. Mastering cloud computing will also help realize artificial intelligence and machine learning for cyber warfare, according to the 2020 Army Cloud Plan.

We are putting the requisite capabilities into the hands of our operational formation so they can understand the applications that now need to move to the cloud, and we are aligning the requisite combat power to assist in that migration, Morrison told reporters at the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference. It is going to be much faster.

The Army requested $16.6 billion in cyber and IT funding for fiscal 2023, which starts Oct. 1, or more than 9% of the services $178 billion budget blueprint. Hundreds of millions would be invested in cloud, officials said.

Morrison and others are coordinating with Army Chief Information Officer Raj Iyer to audit data centers that the service eventually wants to shutter, to better understand what is out there and what needs to be relocated. Such analysis will speed cloud uptake, according to Morrison.

What we have learned very quickly is its not about the data center, its about the applications and the data thats in the data center, the general said. What is cloud ready? What is not cloud ready? Et cetera. And thats sort of been where weve gotten a little pitchy at times.

Iyer in June described the coming year as an inflection point along the Armys digital transformation journey. The CIO said he expected great progress to be made on cloud initiatives, as well, based on previous advancements in fiscal 2021 and 2022.

We need to make sure that the investments that we have are appropriately aligned to the Armys priorities and to the DoD priorities, quite honestly, Iyer told reporters this year. There are clearly some priorities that we have invested in. All of you know that digital means that we have to adopt at scale cloud, data and AI.

The Armys cloud efforts are tied to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, the Department of Defenses $9 billion follow-up to the failed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure endeavor. The department axed the lucrative JEDI deal, won by Microsoft, in 2021 after years of delays and accusations from Amazon that the Trump administration interfered in the competition.

The JWCC is meant to beef up the departments cloud-computing capabilities by bridging unclassified, secret and top-secret tranches while still reaching the militarys farthest edge.

The Pentagon last year contacted Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle about the JWCC, and earlier this year said proposals remained under review. Awards are expected to be made by the end of December, after an April deadline was deemed premature.

JWCC is still in the throes of moving through the acquisition process, Morrison said. So I would sit there and say were well nested, and the DoD CIO understands everything that were doing.

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

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Army IT leader pledges quicker cloud uptake in 'year of action' - C4ISRNet

Good day, Protocol Climate friends. Today were talking all about clouds. Well be exploring the best way to cut down on contrails and their sneaky bad climate impact as well as the most and least carbon-intensive places to site data centers. Float along with us!

Contrails. They look so innocuous up there, their puffy little tendrils stretching across the sky. But they have a dark climate secret, albeit one with an easy solution that could have immediate benefits for our overheating world.

Contrails have a surprisingly large impact on the climate. The clouds of ice crystals that form in the wake of a plane are responsible for more than 50% of flights climate impact and up to 2% of total global warming.

Airlines have focused on cutting carbon dioxide, but addressing contrails could be a quick fix. Despite contrails outsized impact on the climate, they have largely flown under the radar (aviation joke) outside academic circles.

Some airlines and tech companies are starting to explore options to kill contrails. Step one comes with measuring how and when they form. There's no good way to account for them yet, but it is progressing, said Sola Zheng, an aviation researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

Ultimately, reducing warming contrails could buy us a little climate breathing room while the world works to cut carbon emissions. Thats because contrails can dissipate in a few hours while carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries. So theres no reason not to get to it.

Read more about aviations dirty secret here.

Michelle Ma

Data centers have long been energy hogs, but just how much carbon pollution is tied to their energy use is often an open question. A new report makes it clear, though, which data center hubs are the most and least carbon intensive. The findings point to the challenges holding the sector back from reducing carbon emissions, as well as ways tech companies can mitigate the climate toll of their cloud computing demands.

Renewables are good, but they dont guarantee a clean cloud. The report, released Thursday by cloud management platform Cirrus Nexus, looked at carbon intensity in regions that host clusters of data centers. Carbon intensity is a measure of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of electricity generated.

Managing carbon will be key to keeping the cloud cool. Chris Noble, CEO and co-founder of Cirrus Nexus, said that while theres not a simple answer for companies wondering where to locate their workloads in order to minimize their climate toll, there are some best practices.

Still, if cloud customers do start to ask for more climate-friendly computing, it could have a major influence on the industry and even have a surprising impact on the grid.

Click here to find out about that impact and read more about the report.

Lisa Martine Jenkins

Why on-demand talent could be exactly what companies need right now: If you thought the rise of remote work, independent contractors and contingent workers rose sharply during the pandemic, just wait until the next few months when you see a higher uptick in the on-demand talent economy.

Read more from Upwork

Geothermal is getting a boost: the startup Fervo Energy raised $138 million in its latest funding round, led by DCVC, bringing its total investment up to $177 million in five years. Fervo plans to use the funds to make its plan for lower-cost geothermal power plants a reality.

Atom Power, an eight-year-old startup joining the growing number of companies aiming to improve EV charging in the U.S., got a $100 million investment from Koreas SK.

The carbon management platform Carbon Direct raked in $60 million in an equity investment co-led by Decarbonization Partners and Quantum Energy Partners. The former is a joint venture between BlackRock and Singapores state-owned holding company Temasek.

The software startup Zitara promises to make batteries safer and more profitable via both physics and machine learning, and this week closed a $12 million series A funding round led by Energy Impact Partners.

Worldfavor, a sustainability reporting platform, amassed nearly $10.2 million in its series A funding round, led by the Nordic SEB Private Equity.

French company Koolbooks aims to bring solar-powered refrigerators and freezers to Africa, where erratic power can make traditional refrigeration a challenge. The startup raised $2.5 million in seed funding, led by the Nigeria-based Aruwa Capital Management.

Mantel, a carbon capture startup, received a $2 million investment led by the MIT spin-off The Engine. The company uses molten salts that absorb carbon dioxide in hot environments like boilers and kilns, used in the notoriously hard-to-decarbonize industrial sector.

In funding news beyond the venture capital world, Volkswagens leaders have said the auto giant plans to take a stake in Canadian mining companies in order to guarantee it has sufficient raw materials for batteries for its growing EV business.

California put another nail in the internal combustion engine coffin. The state is set to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. More than a dozen states could follow its lead, further jumpstarting the EV revolution.

Google Maps could make our lives easier and help the climate. The service already offers lower-emissions driving routes. But it could go even further by giving users the ability to link biking and public transit in one trip.

You can get paid to turn your truck into a battery. Thats what a new smart-charging program from utility Duke Energy and Ford is offering lucky F-150 Lightning drivers who sign up to bolster the grid.

No one line should have all that power. Or maybe it should. Phil Anschutz, the billionaire owner of Coachella music festival and the Los Angeles Kings, wants to build a power line from Wyoming to California to transport clean energy.

The new Cold War could heat up the planet as China and the U.S. suspend climate talks. Here are five things to know about whats next for the worlds two biggest greenhouse gas emitters.

Why on-demand talent could be exactly what companies need right now: The biggest benefit of leveraging on-demand talent is often tapping into the talent and skills that businesses cant find elsewhere. Upworks recent report highlights that 53% of on-demand talent provide skills that are in short supply for many companies, including IT, marketing, computer programming and business consulting.

Read more from Upwork

Thanks for reading! As ever, you can send any and all feedback to climate@protocol.com. See you next week!

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The climate and clouds conundrum - Protocol

By Allen Guo, Country Manager for the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence

As hybrid or remote working is being adopted by many companies globally and becoming the new norm for millions of workers, cyberattacks meanwhile continue unabated. In the past year, millions of workers in the Philippines, particularly those in work-from-home set-ups, were subject to cybersecurity threats. And in just the first half of this year, the countrys national Computer Emergency Response Program (CERT-PH), under the Cybersecurity Bureau of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), handled hundreds of cybersecurity incidents, the majority of which were APT cyberattacks and compromised websites and systems.

Building a secure and reliable IT environment has therefore become an increasingly important priority for many businesses who are exploring opportunities in the global digital economy. The same is underscored by the DICTs National Cybersecurity Plan 2022, which outlines the departments plan of action to protect not just businesses and supply chains, but also government networks and individuals from cyber risks.

For businesses and enterprises, moving to the cloud and using cloud-based security features is a good way to challenge cyber risks. But its also important to delve deeper into how best to construct a secure and reliable cloud environment that can fend off even the most determined attacker.

Allen Guo: Enabling enterprises to thrive in ever-growing digital landscapeForrester names Alibaba Cloud leader in public cloud container platform

In todays digital environment, discussions about cyber securitys best practices have never been more important. In this article, I would like to share some thoughts on how to create a secure cloud environment from building the architecture to adopting cutting-edge security technologies and putting in place important security management practices to inspire more thorough conversations on this subject.

Design the next-generation enterprise security architecture

A resilient and robust security architecture is essential for creating a cloud environment capable of assuring an organization about the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of its systems and data.

From the bottom up, the architecture should include security modules of different layers, so that companies can build trustworthy data security solutions on the cloud layer by layer from the infrastructure security, data security, and application security to business security layers.

In addition to the security modules of all of the layers, there are a variety of automated data protection tools that enable companies to perform data encryption, visualization, leakage prevention, operation log management, and access control in a secure computing environment. Enterprises can also leverage cloud-based IT governance solutions for custom designs of cloud security systems to meet compliance requirements from network security and data security to operation auditing and configuration auditing. This ensures full-lifecycle data security on the cloud, with controllable and compliant data security solutions in place.

Another consideration is to build a multi-tenant environment, abiding by the principle of least privilege and adopting consistent management and control standards to protect user data from unauthorized access. In addition, establishing strict rules for data ownership and operations on data, such as data access, retention, and deletion, is also pivotal in creating a safe environment.

Moreover, enterprises can embrace the zero-trust security architecture and build a zero-trust practice by design to protect the most sensitive systems. The architecture requires everything (including users, devices, and nodes) requesting access to internal systems to be authenticated and authorized using identity access protocols. As such, the zero-trust security architecture cuts down on automatic trust, or trust without continuous verification, addressing modern challenges in securing remote working environments, hybrid cloud settings, and increasingly aggressive cyber threats.

Adopt cutting-edge security technologies

Cutting-edge security technologies such as comprehensive data encryption, confidential computing, and many more emerging tech solutions, can be leveraged to ensure we stay on top of the trends in cybersecurity.

Comprehensive data encryption provides advanced data encryption capabilities on transmission links (i.e., data-in-motion), compute nodes (i.e., data-in-use), and storage nodes (i.e., data-at-rest). Key Management Service and Data Encryption Service help users securely manage their keys and use a variety of encryption algorithms to perform encryption operations.

Another emerging technology to safeguard the cloud environment is confidential computing. Confidential computing is dedicated to securing data in use while it is being processed, protecting users most sensitive workloads. Confidential computing based on trusted execution environments (TEEs), ensures data security, integrity, and confidentiality while simplifying the development and delivery of trusted or confidential applications at lower costs. At Alibaba Cloud, we apply confidential computing to the hardware layer, virtualization layer, container layer, and application layer, so that data can be protected in the most comprehensive way.

Security management practices in place

It is equally important to adopt proper security management practices and mechanisms to maximize the security protection of ones critical system and important data.

One essential mechanism to protect the cloud environment is to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery system, which enables businesses to configure emergency plans for data centers based on factors such as power, temperature, and disasters, and establish redundant systems for basic services such as cloud computing, network, and storage. It helps companies to deploy their business across regions and zones and build disaster recovery systems that support multiple recovery models.

Setting the effective reviewing and response mechanism for your cloud security issues is imperative. First, having vulnerability scanning and testing in place is important to assess the security status of systems; second, it is vital to use cloud-native monitoring tools to detect any anomalous behavior or insider threats; furthermore, establishing proper procedures and responsibility models to quickly and accurately assess where vulnerabilities exist and their severity, will help ensure that quick remedy actions can be taken when security problems emerge.

In the future, developing the security architecture, technologies, management, and response mechanism will no longer be perceived as a cost-center burden for companies, but rather, as critical capabilities to safeguard the performance and security of daily business operations. Crafting a comprehensive cloud security plan, adopting the best industrial practices, and choosing a professional cloud service provider with strong security credentials to work with, should be an imperative subjects in a CXOs agenda.

Alibaba Cloud, founded in 2009, is a cloud computing and artificial intelligence company, that provides services to enterprises, developers, and government organizations in more than 200 countries and regions. Committed to the success of its customers, Alibaba Cloud provides reliable and secure cloud computing and data processing capabilities as a part of its online solutions. In

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Preparing a secure cloud environment in the digital new norm - Backend News