Latest Microsoft publications

An experimental data centre Microsoft sunk in the sea off the Scottish coast is being used to process workloads that could help scientists understand and design treatments for Covid-19.

Microsoft, which plunged the data centre into the sea off Orkney in 2018 as part of Project Natick, revealed the Folding@home computing project is harnessing the facility’s processing power to research viral proteins that cause Covid-19 in a bid to design therapeutics that might thwart it.

The Folding@home research project simulates protein dynamics to get a feel for protein complexity. These simulations can identify sites on a viral protein that potential treatments could bind to, for instance.

A new deal with Microsoft to supply its cloud-based digital tools to hospitals and medical services across England will save hundreds of millions of pounds, the NHS has said.

As many as 1.2 million staff across the NHS will gain access to the tech giant’s productivity and collaboration apps, in a move designed to ease the administrative burden on doctors and nurses.

The health service said the move will create a “truly joined-up NHS”, allowing various organisations within the system to work more seamlessly together.

Google has pledged to stop developing AI tools that help the energy sector with oil and gas extraction. 

The company made the announcement hours after Greenpeace released a report comdemning public cloud giants for providing technology to oil and gas companies that inflicts more damage on the environment. 

Microsoft and Amazon were also singled out in the ‘Oil in the Cloud’ report for providing the struggling sector with high-powered computing and cloud tools that reduce production costs.

Microsoft has announced that Italy, New Zealand and Poland will soon be getting their first cloud regions, as the technology giant steps up efforts to increase capacity amid constraints in the wake of Covid-19.

A cloud region is made up of at least two data centres to ensure redundancy and avoid a single point of failure for cloud resources.

Cyber security researchers have claimed hackers could have compromised an organisation’s entire roster of Microsoft Teams accounts by sending a malicious gif.

According to CyberArk, which published the research Monday, a subdomain takeover vulnerability in the popular communication and collaboration tool could have been exploited by hackers to scrape a user’s data and steadily infiltrate an organisation’s Teams portfolio