Clearing house UCAS has revealed its systems running off Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform were able to handle queries from 380,000 students after A-level results were handed out on Thursday.

The organisation said that at its peak, the system was handling 180 logins per second as students rushed to discover if they had been accepted by their universities, or if they faced an anxious wait to go through clearing.

UCAS, which works with an IT consultancy called IPL, moved to the cloud after a fiasco in 2011 saw the site crash under huge demand, as it was not able to expand its requirements as and when required.

The chief executive of IPL, Paul Jobbins, said that given the unique requirements of UCAS, which sees peak demand on just one day a year, the cloud is ideally suited for the job, especially with growing mobile access to the site.

“We had to provide a robust IT platform that could withstand a torrent of online access in one 24-hour period – and potentially within as little as one or two hours of that 24-hour period,” he said.

“Practically speaking, this was likely to be over half a million applicants wanting online access through browsers and mobile devices.”

The organisation also uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the processing of applications, with the firm revealing that its system was used by 385,910 students to find places at higher education institutions.

Meanwhile, A-level results for the year underlined some worrying trends among the UK, with just 229 students achieving the A* top grade in ICT A-level qualifications, as the popularity of computer-based courses continue on a steady decline.

In total 10,419 students sat A-level ICT exams this summer, down 669 on 2012. Overall, fewer students failed their courses, with 97.5 percent of students achieving an E grade or above and 65 percent managing to obtain a C or above.

The falling numbers of students sitting ICT exams comes amid ongoing efforts by the government to overhaul the teaching of technology in order to ensure a skills gap does not emerge in the nation at the same time as digital skills become ever more important to business needs.

Google has revealed a host of updates to its Google+ social networking platform to help businesses carry out automated tasks.

The new Domains API allows Google Apps customers to integrate Google+ into their existing business processes, and also now allows enterprise software vendors to access Google+ from within their products.

The API is intended to improve collaboration between employees by assigning users to specific domains, with posts created within those domains made automatically private so only other colleagues can read them. Users can automatically be added to specific domain Circles, meaning teams working particular projects together do not need to set up their own groups manually.

In addition to this API change, the Google+ app for Android has also received an update with users now able to set up multiple accounts from within the app itself, eliminating the need to sign in and out of business and personal accounts.

This is the latest in a line of updates to Google’s consumer products to make them more useful to enterprises. Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be bringing its augmented reality headwear Glass to business customers, saying that it was examining ways to bring business developers into its Explorer hardware testing programme.

Earlier in August, Google’s business suite Apps released an update to allow IT managers to keep a closer eye on their security, enabling email alerts to be sent when suspicious logins are detected.

Google is planning to release further API updates for Apps and Google+ later this year, which include the Directory API and the Reports API, first previewed at Google I/O.

HP has updated its StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) with Adaptive Optimisation capabilities including data tiering, making it the first scale-out software-defined storage platform to offer this feature, the firm said.

Available from 30 September, the updated HP StoreVirtual VSA supports automated storage tiering at the sub-LUN (logical unit number) level as part of its new software capabilities, which HP calls Adaptive Optimisation.

This capability includes continuous workload monitoring and migration of frequently accessed data to high-performance storage such as solid-state drives (SSD), while inactive data is moved to less costly storage such as conventional spinning hard disks.

Customers can reduce costs further by repurposing any legacy third-party storage capacity as a secondary tier within HP Adaptive Optimisation, the firm said.

Based on HP’s LeftHand operating system, the HP StoreVirtual VSA runs on either Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware-based virtual infrastructure.

The latest version adds support for VMware’s ParaVirtualised SCSI Controller and greater integration with Hyper-V, enabling users to provision storage from System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

David Scott, senior vice president for Storage at HP, said that customers with virtual infrastructure can save costs by moving from dedicated storage arrays to software-defined storage running on commodity x86 server boxes.

“Having pioneered software-defined storage with an installed base of over 170,000 StoreVirtual VSA licenses, HP is now extending its leadership in this area with auto-tiering capability to further optimise cost and performance for small or medium-sized businesses as well as remote enterprise branches,” he said.

HP said it now offers multiple licensing options for the HP StoreVirtual VSA. Beyond the 10 terabyte (TB) standard license, a 4TB license is available for small sites and a 50TB high-capacity license for large-scale deployments.

As a result, customers can start small and upgrade non-disruptively to a larger VSA or the HP StoreVirtual 4000 appliance as needed, the firm said. A three pack of 4TB licenses will be priced at or below $3,000 (£1,938).

Microsoft has shed more light on Power BI for Office 365, its cloud-hosted business intelligence (BI) tool, and disclosed that specialised tablet apps to view reports will be available for its own Surface devices and Apple’s iPad.

However, the promised public preview of the tool has yet to be made available. This was to have been released today, but it has been delayed for unspecified reasons, according to sources close to the company.

First unveiled at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last month, Power BI for Office 365 is described by the firm as a complete self-service BI solution delivered as part of Excel and its Office 365 suite of online applications.

Power BI is intended to deliver business intelligence capabilities to everyday business users through an environment they are already familiar with, according to Microsoft. This means integrating the tools into Excel and allowing users to share their data and reports via Office 365 in the cloud.

According to Michael Tejedor, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, the firm is “super focused on giving customers the ability to connect to the broad array of data out there”.

The tools Microsoft is offering for Excel as part of Power BI comprise Power Query (formerly Data Explorer) for searching and accessing public data sets and those internal to the organisation; the Power Map 3D data visualisation tool formerly known as GeoFlow; plus the Power Pivot and Power View tools for analysing and visualising data, respectively.

To better enable collaboration, a feature dubbed Power BI sites allows users to create online workspaces in Office 365, to share Excel worksheets with colleagues and collaborate over results. To help with this, the maximum size of workbook supported in Office 365 has been increased from 10MB to 250MB, Microsoft said.

Power BI sites supports a powerful natural language query handler that lets users query the data set using strings such as “sales by weekday” and see the results generated as a visualisation. A data management gateway enables users to define which on-premise data sources are exposed to the cloud, and refresh the data stored in them.

Microsoft envisions enterprises having a private data catalogue, with users able to save queries in Office 365 in order to re-run the same query at a later date, or even having ‘data stewards’ to maintain data ‘views’ for others in the team to consume.

Microsoft said that users will be able to view Power View reports on any device with HTML5 support, but the firm is planning to offer tablet apps when it hits general availability, to enable users to download and browse reports on the move.

Initially, only Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface Pro will be supported, according to Tejedor, but the firm plans to extend this to include an app for Apple’s iPad.

Customers can register for the preview at Microsoft’s PowerBI site.

IBM has announced a partnership with Google, Nvidia and others to form the OpenPower Consortium to push the development of next-generation data centre infrastructure with a focus on IBM’s own Power chips.

The move, which could be seen as a counter to the Open Compute project founded by Facebook, will also see IBM make its Power hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making its associated intellectual property available for licensing to others.

As well as IBM, Google and Nvidia, the initial members of the OpenPower Consortium include Mellanox, which makes Ethernet and InfiniBand switches, plus server and motherboard maker Tyan.

IBM said the Consortium will aim to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to data centre developers.

Nvidia’s involvement will see it and IBM work together to integrate Nvidia’s CUDA GPU technology into Power-based ecosystems.

Key aspects of the Consortium’s strategy revolve around IBM’s Power architecture and the Linux operating system. IBM believes that its Power chips are better suited to the kind of scale-out server applications seen in data centres than Intel’s x86 chips, and is seeking to use the lessons it has learned from Linux’s open development model to drive OpenPower.

Writing on IBM’s Smarter Planet blog, senior vice president of the Systems and Technology Group Tom Rosamilia said that many cloud data centres are today built around servers based on technologies that originated in the personal computing era. “It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that’s out of sync with the demands of the cloud era,” he claimed.

Under the OpenPower scheme, IBM will license the intellectual property behind its Power chips to others, which will enable cloud service providers to hire IBM or other companies to manufacture the processors and other related chips, and end up with servers that are custom tuned for their applications, Rosamilia said.

In this respect, the OpenPower initiative can be compared to the Open Compute Project, which has already had some success with its emphasis on collaborative development to drive relevant technologies forward.

“IBM learned a crucial lesson about the power of collaboration when we threw our weight behind Linux in 1999,” said Rosamilia. “I expect the same sort of outcome in cloud computing. If IBM and its consortium partners can create a healthy business ecosystem around a core of shared technologies, the possibilities are endless.”

Las Vegas: Adobe chief security officer Brad Arkin is preaching a unique brand of education which he says has helped to make his company’s products more secure and given employees valuable professional skills.

Arkin, who joined the company in 2008, has overseen a transition ad Adobe which saw the company move from offering its products and boxed discs and digital downloads to hosted cloud services.

“It has been a big thing for us, when you are putting software in a box, it is really just the code and you don’t have any control over the environment theey are putting that code on top of,” he told V3.

“When we are writing code for our servers, we control in theory every aspect of it.”

With the transition from shipping products to hosting them on servers, the company has had to focus on new areas such as managing and securing servers, protecting infrastructure and preventing attacks on company systems.

To help guard the cloud infrastructure and improve the security of Adobe products, Arkin insituted a unique system based on a martial arts structure of ‘belt’ ranks. By reading security materials and inline seminar material developed by security staff, employees earn a “white belt” ranking, a basic competency which can be obtained over a few days.

Further on, employees can spend more time studying materials and training over the course of several weeks to get a “green belt” certification, then a “brown belt” program designed to run six months and a top “black belt” certification obtainable over the course of a year or more.

The structure then plays a vital part in how development teams are assembled. Arkin and his team mandate that each project has a certain amount of team members with green and white certifications as well as brown belt and black belt developers overseeing security.

In addition to making products more secure, Arkin says Adobe employees are teaching themselves valuable professional skills.

“We went from getting not just the security geeks to do the training, but also the career-oriented people,” he explained.

“You go from a less-sexy project to one that is more exciting.”

The formula has proven so successful that Adobe has exported its security programme to other firms. The company has joined the Safecoat project, which is now offering Adobe’s training materials to other firms for free.

Arkin hopes that the model will help other firms to implement best practices and improve the security of their products, particularly those which interact with Adobe’s own platforms.

He is also calling on the experience of other firms to help Adobe in its transition from software vendor to cloud provider. Arkin said that as he has encountered various hurdles in the company’s efforts to take its products online, Silicon Valley neighbours such as Salesforce.com and Netflix have been valuable sources of information.

“The good news is we are not the first company to encounter these problems,” he said.

“We talk with all these guys and we can cherry pick what works and put that in our environment.”

Microsoft is set to rename its SkyDrive cloud storage service, following a court ruling in June that the name infringes on trademarks of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB).

In June this year, High Court judge Mrs Justice Asplin issued her judgment that the SkyDrive name infringed on BSkyB’s rights to the ‘Sky’ trademark. Microsoft had indicated that it intended to appeal, but has now reversed this decision and has agreed to change the name following a transition period.

In a statement issued today, BskyB and Microsoft announced the settlement of their trademark infringement proceedings in the European Union. Financial details of the deal are being kept confidential.

The agreement states that Microsoft will not pursue its planned appeal, and in return BSkyB will allow Microsoft to continue using the SkyDrive name for a reasonable period of time to allow for an orderly transition to a new brand.

BSkYB noted, “We are pleased to have reached a settlement after Microsoft agreed not to appeal the trademark infringement judgment in relation to its SkyDrive service.”

For its part, Microsoft said it was glad to have a resolution to the dispute, and would continue to deliver “the great service our hundreds of millions of customers expect”.

The announcement comes at a tough time for Microsoft as it disclosed this week that it has made a heavy loss on sales of its Surface tablets.

The move could also prove to be a period of upheaval for Microsoft customers as the firm rolls out a new name for SkyDrive, which is not only available in a browser but embedded in the Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone platforms as an app.

Microsoft also had to rethink its branding of the user interface it introduced in Windows 8 because of a similar wrangle. Originally referred to as Metro, this label was hastily dropped after the firm was reportedly threatened with a trademark action over it.

The government’s IT procurement service G-Cloud racked up £5.5m in sales throughout June, its second-highest monthly sales total since the scheme launched in early 2012, taking overall sales to £31.1m.

A series of deals made by the Home Office with IT services stalwart IBM makes up a significant proportion of sales, despite the G-Cloud being set up by the Cabinet Office to increase public sector spending on SME vendors.

The Home Office’s multiple deals with Big Blue total a little over £2m, just over a third of the total G-Cloud spending for June. It included maintenance costs of £861,000 and live support spending of £558,000.

These big sales, combined with other transactions, resulted in SME spending adding up to just 38.3 percent of the overall spend, below the total percentage of 56.5 for all previous months.

The Cabinet Office makes clear that sales figures for June may not be final as they stand, as more figures may arrive from businesses later.

The scheme is currently under the watchful eye of the Office of Fair Trading, which launched a probe last month to ensure that big vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are not shutting SMEs out of the government IT procurement market, while also ensuring that taxpayers were getting good value for money from taxpayers.

Elsewhere, the Department for Transport spent £200,000 with multinational defence company QINETIQ on enterprise licences. The largest sale made by an SME was by NextiraOne UK, for an Aberdeen data centre for the Maritime and Coastguard agency in a £175,000 deal.

This record month sees G-Cloud begin to shake its reputation of underuse, with the team undergoing a budget and personnel increase last month to allow for further expansions, doubling its staff count to 10.

G-Cloud has also been taken under the wing of the larger Government Digital Service (GDS) to ensure that public sector bodies adhere the government’s cloud-first policy.

Microsoft is set to rename its SkyDrive cloud storage service, following a court ruling in June that the name infringes on trademarks of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB).

In June this year, High Court judge Mrs Justice Asplin issued her judgment that the SkyDrive name infringed on BSkyB’s rights to the ‘Sky’ trademark. Microsoft had indicated that it intended to appeal, but has now reversed this decision and has agreed to change the name following a transition period.

In a statement issued today, BskyB and Microsoft announced the settlement of their trademark infringement proceedings in the European Union. Financial details of the deal are being kept confidential.

The agreement states that Microsoft will not pursue its planned appeal, and in return BSkyB will allow Microsoft to continue using the SkyDrive name for a reasonable period of time to allow for an orderly transition to a new brand.

BSkYB noted, “We are pleased to have reached a settlement after Microsoft agreed not to appeal the trademark infringement judgment in relation to its SkyDrive service.”

For its part, Microsoft said it was glad to have a resolution to the dispute, and would continue to deliver “the great service our hundreds of millions of customers expect”.

The announcement comes at a tough time for Microsoft as it disclosed this week that it has made a heavy loss on sales of its Surface tablets.

The move could also prove to be a period of upheaval for Microsoft customers as the firm rolls out a new name for SkyDrive, which is not only available in a browser but embedded in the Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone platforms as an app.

Microsoft also had to rethink its branding of the user interface it introduced in Windows 8 because of a similar wrangle. Originally referred to as Metro, this label was hastily dropped after the firm was reportedly threatened with a trademark action over it.

Security firm Sophos has launched a new service that will allow users to better run the company’s Unified Threat Management (UTM) platform through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute (EC2) computing cloud service.

The company said that it would also be adding an hourly licence option to its threat management service on Amazon. The option will be available for users to purchase on the AWS Marketplace.

Security services have long been a feature on Amazon’s AWS Marketplace since the company launched the feature in 2012. The market allows third-party vendors to integrate their products with AWS virtual machine instances.

Sophos believes that the new pricing model for the service will allow users to retain security on their servers when running AWS instances for short term projects or relying on the cloud platform’s elasticity to help scale with customer demand during peak operating times.

Senior product manager at Sophos Angelo Comazzetto.“As a long-standing security provider, we know about the many benefits that Amazon Web Services provides, especially to SMBs that have adopted the cloud.

“We pride ourselves on developing complete security offerings that are simple to use and, with this offering, companies can better defend their cloud security resources with layers of security provided by Sophos UTM.”

The company said that the hourly fees will depend on the pricing and region of the AWS instance. Listed prices range from $0.02 for a Standard Micro system to $3.10 for a High I/O 4XL EC2 instance.