Whether you plan to continue running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or upgrade to the latest LTS, keeping your infrastructure secure and stable is a top priority. Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) provides essential security updates to protect your systems from vulnerabilities, ensuring you stay compliant and up to date against the latest threats.

As the number of organizations moving their ML projects to production is growing, the need to build reliable, scalable architecture has become a more pressing concern. According to BCG (Boston Consulting Group), only 6% of organizations are investing in upskilling their workforce in AI skills. For any organization seeking to reach AI maturity, this skills gap is likely to cause disruption.

2024 was the GenAI year. With new and more performant LLMs and a higher number of projects rolled out to production, adoption of GenAI doubled compared to the previous year (source: Gartner). In the same report, organizations answered that they are using AI in more than one part of their business, with 65% of respondents mentioning they use GenAI in one function.

Cybersecurity is not about perfection. In fact, it’s more like a game of chess: predicting your opponent’s moves and making the game unwinnable for your opponent. Like chess players, attackers are always looking for an opening, probing for weaknesses, or waiting for you to make a mistake. Therefore, the best defense isn’t a single unbreakable barrier, but instead a layered strategy that forces your adversary into a losing position at every turn.

Canonical is proud to announce it has achieved the ISO 21434 certification for its Security Management System, following an extensive assessment by TÜV SÜD, a globally respected certification provider. This milestone highlights Canonical’s leadership in providing trusted and reliable open source solutions for the automotive sector.

We are happy to announce that Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now available in Microsoft’s new tar-based distribution architecture. Ubuntu has been a widely used Linux distribution on WSL, offering a familiar development environment for many users. This new distribution architecture for WSL will make adoption easier in enterprise environments by enabling image customization and deployments at scale.

There’s good news in the US federal compliance space. The latest FedRAMP policy on the use of cryptographic modules relaxes some of the past restrictions that prevented organizations from applying critical security updates. There has long been a tension between the requirements for strictly certified FIPS crypto modules and the need to keep software patched and up to date with the latest security vulnerability fixes.

In our last blog post we talked about how you can use Intel QAT with Canonical Ceph, today we’ll cover why this technology is important from a business perspective – in other words, we’re talking data storage costs. Retaining and protecting data has an inherent cost based on the underlying architecture of the system used to store it.

When storing large amounts of data, the cost ($) to store each gigabyte (GB) is the typical measure used to gauge the efficiency of the storage system. The biggest driver of storage cost is the protection method used. It is common to protect data by either having multiple replicas within the storage system or by using erasure coding to create data chunks and parity chunks to reduce the raw storage consumed, albeit at the cost of higher CPU utilisation.

Over the past 5 years, Canonical has been contributing to Flutter, including building out Linux support for Flutter applications, publishing libraries to help integrate into the Linux desktop and building modern applications for Ubuntu, including our software store. Last year we announced at the Ubuntu Summit that we’ve been working on bringing support for multiple windows to Flutter desktop apps.