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Google is undoubtedly the Internet giant, not only for its great search engine but also for the wide range of services and utilities that it offers completely free of charge. We refer to services such as Gmail, the Chrome browser, Google Drive, Docs, Forms, presentations or Google Photos, among others. In this sense, Google Photos has long been one of the best options for storing your photos and videos and always having them available from any device simply by accessing the cloud service. In addition, if we have a smartphone with the Android operating system, it allows us to synchronize the automatic upload of the photos we take from the mobile to the cloud to keep them safe and not take up space on our device. However, there are other services and tools that we can also use for this purpose. These are some of the best alternatives to Google Photos.

While there are many who prefer to use everything related to Google, there are many others who prefer not to depend on the environment of the giant search engine. Therefore, we have compiled some of the best alternatives to Google Photos to store our photos and videos or to synchronize the upload of all snapshots taken from our mobile phone.

Dropbox is undoubtedly one of the most popular cloud storage services, as it offers a large free space to store our photos and videos in the cloud. But in addition, it also has the option of synchronizing the upload of all the photographs and videos made with the camera of our mobile phone directly to the service. In this way, we can have all our snapshots safe, available from any device with an Internet connection and not occupy the internal storage space of our device.

The storage service is available through its website from any browser on our desktop and it also has its own app available for devices iOS and Android.

If what we are looking for is a tool to store all our photos in a safe place and design our own galleries, then Piwigo is a great alternative to Google Photos. It is a tool available as a desktop and device application iOS and Android completely free of charge.

Piwigo allows us to create a photo library and organize them to our liking in albums by date, places or people that appear in our photos. In addition, it allows you to choose whether our images are stored locally or in other Piwigo-compatible cloud storage systems.

Another of the most classic solutions is OneDrive. The Microsoft cloud storage service offers the possibility of saving all our photos and videos in the cloud to keep them safe, organize and access them whenever we want from any computer. But also, it also makes it easier for us to make backup copies of the photos taken with the camera of our mobile phone, synchronizing the upload of files from the mobile to the cloud.

OneDrive is available from the browser or Windows 10, but also offers its own app for mobile devices with operating system iOS or Android.

The online shopping giant also has its own alternative to Google Photos, Amazon Photos. An exclusive service for Amazon Prime customers that offers unlimited storage and allows us to access our photos from anywhere to view and share them from our computer, mobile phone or tablet. Secure storage for our photographs that respect the resolution of the uploaded images and that allows us to have all our photos stored and organized, as well as free up space on our smartphone. In addition to its web version, it has an app for devices iOS, Android and also for Windows and Mac.

Another of the very popular cloud storage services is Mega, therefore, we can say that it is an interesting alternative to Google Photos, since it offers a large amount of space completely free of charge. In this way, we can save all our photos in an organized way to be able to access them at any time and without having to occupy space on our hard drive, internal storage space of our mobile or on the memory card of the same.

In addition, from the Mega app, it is possible to activate uploads from the camera. In this way, we will be able to disregard having to upload the photos taken from the mobile to the cloud, since with this function, it will automatically synchronize and will be uploaded to the storage service space to free our mobile. Available for iOS and Android.

Flickr is another of the great alternatives to Google Photos. The service allows us to create an account for free and have a large amount of space to upload all our photos to the cloud. In this way, we can have all the photos and videos stored safely, available from any device and without taking up space on our phone or PC.

From your mobile app, available for devices with operating system iOS and Android, we can activate the automatic image upload function to the service.

It is a great image gallery tool to consider. Perhaps it is not especially an alternative to Google Photos since it is not a service as complete as that of Google, but if what we are looking for is an app to store, order and view our photos, it is worth trying. A + Gallery organizes our photos automatically by date and offers integration with Facebook, Dropbox and Amazon Cloud, making it easy to store and synchronize our photos in the cloud.

Other features of this app should also be highlighted, such as the option to search by favourite albums, its tools or editing options or even the possibility to search by colour among all our photos. Download A + Gallery for Android.

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Alternatives to Google Photos to save and organize your photos - InTallaght

With industry insights provided by Eran Brown, CTO of Infinidat EMEA, Technology Magazine explores the utility and rising popularity of hybrid cloud

It can sometimes be easy to understate the importance of cloud computing and its role in changing the tech landscape. Whilst other aspects of the digital transformation triumvirate (cloud, IoT and AI & analytics) are arguably more tangible in their effect, the scale for connectivity and optimisation across an enterprise is severely restricted without an integrated infrastructure wherein data can be stored and accessed. Hybrid cloud takes this revolutionary technology one step further by allowing companies to synthesize aspects of multiple cloud offerings (both private and public) and create a bespoke solution which addresses their specific needs.

With fewer companies choosing to maintain their own expensive data centres, the wide availability of public cloud offerings - such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, amongst others - means that most businesses will be able to secure a package that meets their basic storage needs. Although the lists of features for each provider can stretch into the hundreds, corporations are able to select a cloud which has specialised industry applications (IBM Clouds Watson for IoT) or a general spread of functions. However, if a companys data requirements necessitate more than what one provider can accommodate, hybrid cloud becomes a very attractive possibility. Investing in the on-premises development of a private cloud can be advantageous for those with the resources to make it happen. If this is a possibility, companies need only have a sufficient WAN (wide area network) connection in order to join their selected private and public clouds.

Eran Brown, CTO of Infinidat EMEA, believes that businesses looking to pursue hybrid cloud should do so via careful evaluation of the agility, flexibility, speed-to-market and cost efficiency offered by each option. Companies will need to draw a strategic line between how and when they use public and private cloud for data storage. It will be impacted by the quantity of legacy data to be stored, as well as what data companies want to own or store locally; not all data is suitable for storage in public clouds. What is required, then, is a frank technological assessment of what benefits they are hoping to extract from hybrid cloud, a defined plan for where and why certain data will be stored and an understanding of the financial ramifications. Choosing between on-premises and public clouds should not be driven by hype, Brown enthuses, but rather what will enable units at a cost that is acceptable for the long-term viability of the business.

The economics of data storage, particularly public cloud offerings, can be complicated and its imperative that consumers educate themselves on the short-term and long-term benefits of each clouds payment plan. Storage company Wasabis survey of Azure, Google Cloud and AWS found that customers would pay approximately $0.46, $0.26 and $0.23 per GB per month respectively (note: these prices dont take into account regional variances or added costs).

Whilst no reliable data on the average consumption of businesses generally, industries utilising high-quality video, photographs, long-form documents or other caches of extensive records could soon run up high costs. As data growth continues unabated, larger organisations will be under increased pressure to more clearly understand the cost vs benefit for different storage models as the volume of data expands exponentially, explains Brown. If the solution is combining public cloud with a companys own private infrastructure, what are the costs of doing so? Cloudian has compiled a report estimating that its on-premises data storage hardware will cost 65% less than public cloud. Assuming that such savings can be broadly achieved, companies may be drawn to private cloud as an alternative to public cloud storage which is too expensive to maintain. The cloud has proven not to be as cheap as businesses were, perhaps, expecting it to be, but whats the trade-off? Brown asks. Is converting time-to-market faster more of a business focus than bottom-line operating costs are?

The balance of flexibility, accessibility and cost-efficiency offered by hybrid cloud might account for recent widespread interest in it. Although public cloud offers a convenient off-the-peg solution for those wanting to consolidate their data, private cloud allows for transformational control of the entire framework. However, for the sake of efficiency, businesses should save themselves reinventing the wheel and simply augment a public cloud with the added features necessary to make it representative for their operations. The compatibility of the resulting hybrid will be determined by careful selection of the private clouds basepoint and the public package chosen.

In addition to hybrid is a growing trend towards multi-cloud, a strategic and often complex layering of public, private and hybrid clouds, distributing data across multiple platforms and ensuring that no one cloud asset is overly relied on. Data gravity issues and digitalisation may result in increased interest in multi-cloud solutions which are better able to compete on price, availability and resiliency, says Brown. Presenting far lower risk of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, a much more personalised infrastructure, greater reliability and optimised cost efficiency, multi-cloud is the logical next step for those who have already begun exploring the possibilities of hybrid. Hybrid cloud models will continue to provide the most commercially resilient solution, especially for those companies that want to take a cloud-first approach, Brown concludes. A subset of defining a cloud strategy is also to consider that, inadvertently, you are defining what doesnt go across to the cloud.

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Hybrid Cloud: the key to digital transformation? - Gigabit Magazine - Technology News, Magazine and Website

Sign into Windows with Google, part of the company's effort to manage Windows 10 devices

Google has upped security for business customers using its G Suite package, including Windows 10 administration, data loss prevention rules, and access rules based on where you are and what device you are using.

Remote security is top of mind for many businesses in these days of lockdown, and Google is in some respects better placed than rival Microsoft in that it has adopted a remote model from day one.

On the other hand, Microsoft has adapted and improved its enterprise security and device management tools for the cloud, pushing customers towards its premium Microsoft 365 product, which includes device management for Windows, iOS and Android via its InTune service.

In November 2019, Microsoft said that "System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Microsoft Intune are managing 200 million devices."

Google has its own endpoint management tools, though in the past it has been mainly focused on cloud identity controls and its own Android or Chrome devices. The company has now kicked out the full release of its enhanced security for Windows 10, which includes single sign-on, so that users sign into Windows 10 using Google credentials (via Google Credential Provider for Windows 10), and Windows 10 devices can be managed in Google's admin console with features including remote wipe, device configuration, and checking compliance with policies.

"More than 110 million devices are managed by our endpoint management solution," says Google still short of Microsoft's number, but substantial.

Another feature, called "fundamental desktop security", provides the basic benefits of device management as soon as a user logs into G Suite via a web browser on a desktop computer. It is not really device management, however, and is limited to showing "the device type, operating system, first sync time, and last sync time in the Admin console. They [the admin] can also sign the user out from that device."

If merely signing into a browser gave admins device management rights, it would be a breach of browser security. Note also that although Google bragged about this feature in an announcement yesterday, the actual update description says: "Due to COVID-19 related activity, full rollout of fundamental device management has been delayed until later in 2020."

Google is also improving its data loss protection. This technology aims to prevent confidential documents from leaking out of the secure corporate environment. A new feature is an automatic document classification effort based on automatic scanning for keywords in documents in Google's Drive online storage. Sensitive content can trigger alerts and warnings.

Google's Android for Work already isolates corporate data, but the company is now adding iOS copy/paste protection which prevents data being copied to personal accounts via the clipboard. Such controls are valuable for deterring accidental data loss, but determined users can normally find ways round them, for example, by photographing the screen.

The company also now offers an updated Log Viewer for viewing logs, including those of G Suite logs as well as Google Cloud Platform.

Google is probably not the first company that comes to mind for businesses looking to manage Windows 10 devices. Then again, you could say the same for Microsoft with regard to Android. Microsoft's Windows 10 management tools are far more extensive, as you would expect, but Google's new services, along with the option to sign into Windows with a Google account, mean that Google-centric businesses can make Microsoft's operating system more G-shaped than before.

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Windows 10 gets a little more G-shaped: G Suite admins can now manage Microsoft's OS, and that includes remote wipe - The Register

With over a third of Australias modern mammals having become extinct in the past two centuries, the countrys researchers are speeding up genomics research to protect endangered animals.

For the past decade, Carolyn Hogg, a senior research manager for the Australasian Wildlife Genomics Group in the University of Sydneys science faculty, has been assembling and annotating genomes for the Tasmanian devil, a rare marsupial that is being threatened into extinction by a contagious cancer.

But identifying the function and location of specific genes in a genome can be laborious and resource intensive. Hogg likened the process to putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture to work with.

Solving the puzzle would involve spreading out all the pieces and finding the edges. Slowly, you start to slot bits together, and you contract the space used by the other pieces. Were often working with more than a billion pieces of jigsaw and no guide, she said.

To address the challenge, the University of Sydney teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a trial project in 2019 to tap cloud-based services, such as Amazon EC2 and S3 storage, to process, analyse and categorise genomic data.

Within 12 weeks, Hoggs team managed to analyse and process the data in more than 50 data pipelines the same task would have taken longer if they had relied on the universitys high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

One of our most commonly employed pipelines used to take us up to a week with HPC because we would have to split it up into different commands and then wait in the queue for each one, said Parice Brandies, a doctoral student on the team who worked on the data pipelines.

And, if there was an error, we would have to start again. Weve got it down to under three hours from start to finish with Amazon, she said.

That said, Hoggs team still uses Australias National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to crunch certain workloads depending on the size of the data pipeline.

The thing that AWS gives us is the ability to scale the size of the machine quite rapidly to the size of the data that we have, said Hogg. Historically, weve had to look at the size of the data and work out where we can break the pipeline to optimise our processing time.

The genetic research is already being used to support a wildlife conservation programme initiated by the Tasmanian government to maintain a healthy population of Tasmanian devils on Maria Island off mainland Tasmania.

Specifically, Hoggs team did a genetic assessment to ascertain which Tasmanian devils could be put on the island, and subsequently monitored changes in their genes. Then, they identified those that could be moved back to Tasmania to improve the genetic make-up of the diseased animals on the mainland.

The diseased population in mainland Tasmania receives new genes, and that will help them to be more resilient in the future, Hogg said.

Now, Hoggs team is starting a new project to assemble and annotate the genomes of 40 to 50 of Australias most threatened species.

The researchers will be sharing this genome data on the AWS Public Dataset Program, an initiative designed to give researchers anywhere in the world access to scientific datasets, with the aim of accelerating scientific discovery.

At the same time, Hoggs team is planning to put up a database of immune genes in an Amazon S3 bucket that will be publicly searchable by other researchers globally, adding that the current Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic is a testament of the need to better understand genomes.

The reason were able to sequence genomes so quickly during the pandemic and be able to understand the differences between the virus and other species that we can potentially come into contact with is because weve got access to genomic data, she said.

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Australian researchers tap cloud to save the Tasmanian devil - ComputerWeekly.com