Microsoft has pledged that within the next 30 years it will remove all the carbon it has emitted since it was founded in 1975.

While the company has vowed to be carbon negative by 2030, it is going further by aiming to remove its historical carbon footprint completely by 2050.

The company also announced a one billion dollar climate innovation fund to help boost the development of carbon reduction and removal technologies.

In a blog post on Thursday, the company’s president Brad Smith said: “While the world will need to reach net-zero, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to ask a judge to halt Microsoft from commencing "substantial" work on a lucrative Pentagon cloud contract until its lawsuit challenging the contract's validity is resolved.

Microsoft secured the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) with the US Department of Defense in October 2019, ending a two-year-long procurement process in which rival and cloud market leader AWS was considered the frontrunner throughout.

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A group of computer scientists at the University of Bristol are teaming up with nine major media companies to create an online tool for measuring the carbon impact of digital content.

Sustainability consultancy Carnstone will facilitate a 12-month collaboration between University of Bristol researchers and sustainability and tech teams at the BBC, Dentsu Aegis Network, Informa, ITV, Pearson, RELX, Schibsted, Sky and TalkTalk, to map the "carbon hotspots" of digital media content and services.

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Insight Partners has announced the acquisition of Swiss software startup Veeam for $5 billion, just months after the private equity firm invested $500 million in the data management company.

Veeam, which posted revenues of $1 billion last year and has 365,000 customers worldwide, helps companies manage data backup and recovery across public clouds and their in-house data centres. Following the deal, Veeam will become a US company.

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The UK Home Office has confirmed it has struck a four-year £100m deal with AWS for its cloud services in a renewal of a pre-existing contract.

An awards notice published on the government's contract finders website confirms the contract started on 12 December 2019 and will run until 11 December.

A Home Office spokesperson told Computer Weekly that the contract was a "continuation of services" already provided to the department, adding the contract "provides significant savings for the department of a four-year term.”

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IBM is on track to lead the quantum computing revolution with the news that over 100 organisations have signed up to the company's initiative to advanced practical uses of the technology.

The latest members to the program, which gives participants access to quantum experts, developer tools and cloud-based quantum systems via IBM Q Cloud, include Delta Airlines, Wells Fargo and Stamford University.

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The world of enterprise software development came of age with the emergence of ‘single purpose’ software applications aligned to a specific business function. It started with accounting programmes in finance, but with time, many areas such as manufacturing, supply chain and inventory management also benefited from the emergence of purpose-built applications.

Monolithic structures like ERPs, for instance, were designed to increase efficiency by transmitting information across business functions. Problems started creeping in, however, when businesses customised these applications to cater to their own unique requirements.

More often than not, increased customisation rendered these applications slow and clunky since they were too rigid to scale, making frequent iterations difficult. The IT department that was supposed to incite productivity became the reason for falling behind.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) may still be in its relative infancy, but it’s gradually building apace – as more enterprises begin to uncover the power it possesses when looking to harness data.

From manufacturing to healthcare, or logistics to financial services, more industries are becoming aware of its critical capability to process and convert information into rich, meaningful real-time analytics, in order to do everything from flagging potential issues with infrastructure to tracking demand for services and understanding consumer behaviour.

IoT adoption shows no signs of slowing down either, as its implementation has proved to have helped many firms stay ahead of the curve and have the correct operational efficiencies in place – all of which can be adapted, and evolved, to successfully provide useful knowledge to operate more efficiently in a challenging economic climate.

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Just about every business today relies on people who write code. The problem is that hiring good developers is difficult. It may even be the most difficult thing a business will do.

The reason developer hiring is such an important topic (and something many businesses find challenging) is that unlike many other professions, good developers can be many times more productive than their peers.

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As we approach the new decade, business agility is more crucial than ever. Innovation is constant and customer expectations are constantly evolving.  Businesses simply must adapt if they are to survive. A recent study by Oracle and The Confederation of British Industry highlighted just how unrelenting this change is, with half of the largest FTSE100 companies disappearing from the index since 2009. Many businesses are struggling because they are stifled by complex and disjointed back-office systems, which put the brakes on their ability to innovate.

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When we published our selection of cloud predictions last year, most predicted container orchestrator Kubernetes to consolidate its stranglehold over the container space and, correspondingly, modern cloud infrastructure.

Last November, one of the most extensive customer surveys bore this prediction out. In its study of thousands of companies, cloud and infrastructure monitoring company Datadog found 45 percent of its customers were using Kubernetes. And if that wasn't evidence enough, just reflect on VMware's announcement in March that it plans to transition its enterprise virtualisation platform to a system that runs and runs on Kubernetes. In reality, Kubernetes' centrality to cloud was put beyond doubt just four weeks after we published last year's roundup. In January, IBM steamrollered into 2019 with a $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat that saw the company's popular Kubernetes implementation OpenShift integrated into IBM's new multi-cloud strategy.

It is in this context that most of this year's experts consulted their cloud crystal balls. Rackspace's Lee James predicts 2020 to be a year of stiff competition between enterprise IT giants jostling to deliver a Kubernetes solution that dovetails with customers' multi-cloud goals. On the other hand, Stephan Fabel of Canonical says end-users will start to understand the limitations of Kubernetes, and accordingly, utilise it more strategically. Lastly, Pivotal's Michael Cote expects companies to use this experience to establish a singular, overall Kubernetes strategy.

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In recent times, cloud platforms have rightly taken their seat at the forefront of mainstream IT plans, alongside on-premise servers. Cloud’s ability to enhance business agility, deliver cost savings, open new streams of revenue, improve application performance and unlock routes to leverage emerging technologies is widely acknowledged.

As a result, businesses have adopted cloud in their droves. Yet while the technology is thriving, the sheer myriad of choices available can make it a daunting task for IT managers when looking to find a cloud platform which meets their specific organisational needs.

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