networkworld.com

It’s been an eventful time for Intel after its earnings call and then news that the chip vendor is spinning off its Network and Edge Group (NEX) as a standalone business. Intel made no formal announcement on the spin-off, rather, the story was broken by a customer memo leaked to CRN. The NEX business covers networking silicon, Ethernet, and communications infrastructure. Intel intends to find strategic investors for NEX and will remain an “anchor inv

The domination of the UK cloud services market by Microsoft and Amazon has stifled competition and inflated prices, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) watchdog has concluded in a long-awaited judgement. According to the CMA, in a £10.5 billion ($14 billion) UK market, the two companies now control an estimated 30%-40% of the UK Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) sector, with the equivalent shares for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) being 20%-30% for Microsoft and 10%-20% for Amazon. With the exception of Google, which enjoys a slowly growing market share of around 5%-10% in both sectors, cloud services rivals such as Oracle and IBM barely registered. A

A growing number of data center operators are embracing AI to boost efficiency and productivity, but they’re still approaching its use in critical systems with caution. Cost and capacity planning are the top management concerns, according to Uptime Institute’s 15th Annual Global Data Center Survey 2025. Interest in AI workloads adds further complexity as data center owners and operations perform or plan to perform some AI training or inference in the future, the data center advisory group reports.

Observe announced today it has secured $156 million in Series C funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Madrona Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Capital One Ventures. The infrastructure monitoring and observability vendor has tripled the number of monthly active users on its platform in recent months, and it cites the growing popularity of data lakes among the reasons for the increased interest. Observe’s approach has enterprises moving their telemetry data to data lakes for scalability and cost-efficiency

Palo Alto Networks is making what could be its biggest bet yet by agreeing to buy Israeli identity security company CyberArk for around $25 billion. The companies announced they had reached an agreement on Wednesday. The deal will mark a seismic shift for an industry that’s been consolidating at breakneck speed. More importantly for security chiefs, it signals that the days of managing dozens of different security tools are numbered. Continue reading on CSO.

Micron Technology has unveiled a new lineup of high-performance SSDs designed to meet the growing demand of AI data centers. Built on Micron’s NAND9 architecture, the lineup includes the 9650 PCIe Gen6 data center SSD, alongside the high-capacity 6600 ION SSD and the 7600 Gen5 SSD for mainstream data center workloads. Targeting high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads, the Micron 9650 SSD can support up to 28 GBps sequential read and 14 GBps sequential write speeds, along with 5.5 million IOPS for random reads and 900,000 IOPS for random writes. Micron claims the SSD is FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and Trade Agreements Act (TAA) compliant, making it suitable for US government deployments. For

The global average cost of a breach declined for the first time in five years, dropping to $4.44 million, according to IBM’s new data breach report, but the average U.S. cost rose to a record $10.22 million. In addition, AI is becoming an easy, high value target, IBM warns. Thirteen percent of organizations reported breaches of AI models or applications, and of those compromised, 97% involved AI systems that lacked proper access controls. Despite the rising risk, 63% of breached organizations either don’t have an AI governance policy or are still developing a policy. Among tho

While 90% of IT professionals describe their organizations as resilient, fewer than half feel well-equipped to handle core challenges such as adopting AI, defending against cyber threats, or supporting distributed workforces. The results of SolarWinds’ 2025 IT Trends Report, Fragile to Agile: The State of Operational Resilience, which surveyed more than 600 IT leaders across nine countries, found a distinct gap between perception and preparedness. For instance, more than half (52%) reported feeling confident managing cyber threats. And 45% of those surveyed said they are con

Cloud storage provider Backblaze this week announced a series of new security enhancements for its B2 platform, including AI-powered anomaly detection and improved enterprise tools to help customers better control access and management of data. The enhancements complement Backblaze’s existing security capabilities, which include SOC 2 certified architecture and physical security, server-side encryption for data at rest, cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) support, cloud replication for data redundancy, and Object Lock for ransomware protection. The irregularity detection function, Anomaly Alerts, uses artificial intelligence to identify suspicious patterns of data activity

Patch early, patch often, they say — almost 13 years early in the case of Debian’s patch for a potentially crippling issue with the way Unix-like systems represent time. Debian 13 “Trixie,” scheduled for August 9, marks the Linux distribution’s mitigation of the Y2K38 bug, also known as the “Unix Epochalypse,” via a shift in the operating system to storing time in 64-bit variables for all but the oldest of supported hardware. The Unix Epochalypse is the whimsical name for what could become a big problem if vendors and users don’t update their systems. Like the Y2K bug be