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

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.

AWS is taking the grunt work out of building and deploying AI agents

AgentCore Gateway, AgentCore Browser Tool, AgentCore Observability are some of the tools available in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore’s suite of services.

Data centers around the globe need to brace themselves for the 

 of the future—and the ones that are already here.

 by XDI, a physical climate risk data and analysis company, which examined the physical risk from different climate hazards for 8,868 data centers worldwide and deemed more than one-fifth of facilities (22.04%) at high or moderate risk. By 2050, XDI predicts that this proportion will increase to 26.73%.

 XDI’s findings are based on a “high-emission scenario,” a term used to describe a high-risk climate simulation where greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase with little intervention between now and the end of the century. The company describes high-risk facilities as those more likely to experience total or partial physical damage within their expected lifespan, and moderate-risk facilities as those that will experience higher insurance costs from climate hazard damage.

Examined hazards included forest fires, extreme wind, coastal inundation, tropical cyclone wind, freeze-thaw, soil movement, riverine flooding, and surface water flooding. Of the eight different climate change hazards, riverine flooding and coastal inundation (coastal flooding) were ranked as being very high levels of concern for data center infrastructure.

The findings come at a time when data centers have a reputation for causing environmental damage. While big companies like 

 have begun to experiment with unique facility designs intended to cut down their carbon emissions, the impact of AI-fueled power demands on the environment remains a concern. Morgan Stanley research 

 the data center industry will emit 2.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions globally between 2024 and the end of the decade.

Drops of water on the outside of a server case.

Data centers have a climate problem on their hands

A recent report found that more than one-fifth of data centers worldwide were at high or moderate risk for climate hazard damage.

ITBR-Cloud migration strategies audio embed

Moving furniture into your friend’s new dorm usually involves beer and pizza as a reward. Let’s hope the IT team that helped Babson College’s big digital move in 2023 got enough slices.

Over the span of about six months that summer, the Massachusetts-based school, according to its CIO Patty Patria, migrated more than 20 terabytes of data for 6,000-plus campus employees. The emails and documents—and all the links and connections associated with them—went from multiple cloud environments, including Google Workspace, to one consolidated platform: Microsoft 365.

Patria and two IT pros who’ve conducted similar migrations shared with IT Brew how to prepare so data arrives safely at its new destination—and how to respond effectively if it doesn’t.

“Any time you change an interface that somebody’s been using for five, 10, 15, 25 years, that’s a challenging thing for them, and so you have to be very careful of planning,” Patria told us.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) migrations are common during mergers and acquisitions, when the consolidating companies have clashing platforms. Babson, however, migrated data to reduce storage costs and improve collaboration between students and teachers, Patria said.

BetterCloud’s 2025 “State of SaaS Security,” which polled 568 US-based IT pros, found that the average company reduced their SaaS apps from 2022 to 2024 and orgs now have fewer SaaS applications than in 2021.

Digital storage can be a bit like your old closet: filled with years of stuff. Patria and her team monitored active and inactive users and made decisions regarding which data would make the trip—and how much mail to bring over, for example. “It’s really reviewing, if we haven’t accessed this data more than two years, three years, five years, do we need to keep this data?” Patria said.

Richard Harbridge, CTO at 2toLead, recommended companies perform a security and compliance audit of existing data to find sensitive, regulated content like PII, financial numbers, or health info across your SaaS repositories like Google Drive and Slack.

“If you find, for example, documents subject to 

, you’ll want to ensure equal or better protections in M365 or decide if that data should even move at all,” Harbridge wrote to us in a follow-up email.

A manual file copy from Google Drive to Microsoft’s OneDrive will not retain sharing permissions, version history, or external share links; migration tools (like ShareGate for migrating permissions) help with the effort, in theory. Some elements still must be reconfigured at the destination.

One of the toughest days for Patria and her staff, she said, occurred when documents arrived in unexpected condition. A third-party vendor had capabilities to migrate files over with unique permissions, Patria said, but the permissions were so unique that they didn’t carry over and required ongoing maintenance and discussions.

Each non-Microsoft SaaS has elements that don’t have a one-to-one counterpart in Microsoft 365. Google Forms, for example, cannot be auto-migrated and must be recreated in Microsoft Forms or exported to a PDF before transfer, Harbridge noted in his follow-up email, and Slack emoji reactions won’t always export into Teams. Email formatting may change, and connection points, like a Jira ticket pointing to a Google file, may break.

Mapping, however, leads to a possibility for upgrades and opportunity, Harbridge said, like upgrading to multi-factor authentication or activating data-governance features in, say, Microsoft Purview.

“It’s a great opportunity, since you have disruption, to change things and improve your security posture,” he told us.

Migrations can occur in phased content batches or a “big bang” option—one preferred by Will Thomas, managing director and cloud optimization lead at Protiviti—that stages and loads up 

content for migration while tests and pilots occur. Then the team can spend a weekend syncing a smaller workload: any updated, new, or removed data since that primary staging execution. That kind of “bang,” also known as a cutover, still requires “hypercare” to assist users with questions. Thomas said this support can include “ask me anything” sessions, or even a proactive, concierge-style treatment where the IT pro contacts users.

Harbridge, however, says there is no big bang: “Everything is phased and everything is scheduled.” When migrating file data from file shares to SharePoint, one might do an initial bulk transfer over a weekend, according to Harbridge, followed by incremental “delta” changes, which migrate any data that changed since the last transfer.

He recommends extra padded support hours for global users and the employees catching up after hours. “A lot of this stuff doesn’t happen during core time,” he said.

In a follow-up email to IT Brew, Patria said the IT team performed 65 training sessions, including office hours, and instructed a total of 96 people during the initial roll-out; she said the school offers ongoing training.

Babson users moved from Google Drive to Microsoft’s combination of OneDrive for personal data and SharePoint for shared documents.

Learning how to access documents in a new platform proved to be a tough challenge for some users, Patria said.

“Every time you do any one of these projects, as much change management and communication that you do, you could probably always do a little bit more,” Patria told us.

A big driver for SaaS migrations is that companies want to use AI—and they can’t as easily with data fragmented across legacy SaaS tools, according to Harbridge. Patria said the migration ultimately allowed them to standardize in Microsoft’s cloud and more easily work with Microsoft’s Copilot tool—another big move.

“I think cloud platforms set you up for greater transformations in other areas,” she said.