Cloud Computing

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Cloud Computing: The New Service

The penny dropped when I started looking at cloud computing as a service rather than a new technology. In that respect it is more like Google search and a DotCom development than a set of software and hardware tools. That was what I needed to get a better strategic grip on this new concept. As with all services, business strategies are key here, rather than technologies. As soon as it is seen as a technology customer issues often come in second, which then leads to a technology looking for a market... more

Data Center Hardware and Software Grew by 17% in 2018

Global spend on data center hardware and software grew by 17% in 2018 with total infrastructure equipment revenues reaching $150 billion, according to new data released by Synergy Research Group. more

Future Network Forum to Be Held in Nanjing in December 2015

Between December 10th and 11th 2015, the China Future Network Development and Innovation Forum, jointly hosted by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Nanjing Municipal Government, is scheduled to be held in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. The forum will be jointly organized by Jiangsu Future Networks Innovation Institute and Beijing Internet Institute, with the theme of "Building future network test facilities and promoting network development & innovation", and it will invite nearly a hundred industrial experts at home and abroad, to establish a platform marked by security, innovation, openness, cooperation where the policy, industry, academics, and application are integrated. more

Automation for Physical Devices: the Holy Grail of Service Provisioning

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are finally starting to pick up momentum. In the process, it is becoming clear that they are not the silver bullet originally advertised to be. While great for some use cases, emerging technologies like SDN and NFV have been primarily designed for virtual greenfield environments. Yet large service providers continue to run tons of physical network devices that are still managed manually. more

Advantage of Commercial Clouds vs. HPC for Scientific Research

The Department of Energy (DoE) recently came out with an excellent report, called the Magellan report, on the advantages and disadvantages of using commercial clouds versus in house High Performance Computers (HPC) for leading edge scientific research. The DoE probably supports the largest concentration of HPC facilities in the world. I agree with the report that for traditional applications such as computational chemistry, astrophysics, etc. will still need large HPC facilities. more

Reputation and “The Cloud”

As Reddit recently learned it's not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you're using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. more

Does Apple’s Cloud Key Vault Answer the Key Escrow Question?

In a recent talk at Black Hat, Apple's head of security engineering (Ivan Krsti?) described many security mechanisms in iOS. One in particular stood out: Apple's Cloud Key Vault, the way that Apple protects cryptographic keys stored in iCloud. A number of people have criticized Apple for this design, saying that they have effectively conceded the "Going Dark" encryption debate to the FBI. They didn't, and what they did was done for very valid business reasons -- but they're taking a serious risk... more

Cloud Services Drive Data Center Markets

Research from Infonetics shows that last year was a strong year for data centre network equipment sales, due to a rebound from bare-bones 2009 spending levels and, more importantly, fundamental trends favouring investments in the data centre, such as the explosion of content and traffic, use of virtualization, and increasingly, cloud-based services and architectures. more

Connecting Clouds

History is littered with manifestos, the public statements of principles and intentions that announce policies, revolutions or ambitious visions in politics and the arts... And now we have a new manifesto for the modern age of distributed computing. The ‘open computing manifesto’ was launched this week with the support of some very large computer companies including Cisco, AT&T, Sun Microsystems and Telefonica as well as over fifty other players in this growing market, all under the leadership of IBM. more

A Cynic’s View of 2015 Security Predictions - Part 2

Every year those in the security industry are bombarded with various cyber security predictions. There's the good, the bad and the ugly. Some predictions are fairly ground breaking, while others are just recycled from previous years -- that's allowed of course if the threats still stand. In part one of my predictions I looked at the malware threats, so let's take a look at big data and the cloud for part two. more

Green IT Revolutionizing UK Cyber-Infrastructure via Networks, Cloud, Outsourcing, Finan. Incentives

As readers of my blogs may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing. But a big impediment in adopting cyber-infrastructure in most jurisdictions is the lack of financial incentives. The energy savings of cyber-infrastructure are usually earned by the facilities or estates department or rarely based on to researchers and educators. more

Battling Over Clouds

More than 40 years ago, the FCC was worried about telephone companies using their power over communications to control the then-nascent (and competitive) data processing marketplace. The Bell System at that point was already banned from providing services that weren't common carriage communications services (or "incidental to" those communications services)... In a 1999 article in the Texas Law Review, Steve Bickerstaff pointed out that Computer 1 meant that no one could provide a "computer utility" service... Today, we'd call the "computer utility" something different -- we'd use the term "cloud computing." more

Who Will Crack Cloud Application Access SLAs?

The broadband industry doesn't have an agreed-upon unit of supply and demand that meaningfully "adds up". This is rather odd for a service that aspires to be a utility. It is also a barrier to a much-needed transformation from "bit pipes" to "digital supply chain management". The chart here ought to be in every basic undergraduate textbook on packet networking and distributed computing. That it is absent says much about our technical maturity level as an industry. more

5G/F5G Cloud Announcements: NFV Game-Changing Confirmations

Over the past few days, Microsoft made two major announcements. One was a "playbook [for] providing a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud computing to help network operators realize the full potential of 5G technology" using its it Azure cloud data centres. The second announcement was a new platform that enables satellite-based access to those same cloud data centres designated Azure Orbital. Coupled with these announcements was another one by Samsung... more

Shifting Clouds

There have been some interesting developments in cloud computing over the last year. For over five years our position has been that we acknowledge the enormous economic advantages that cloud computing has to offer, but at the same time recognise that the risk of losing control over data and IT systems is, at this stage, too great for most companies and governments to start utilising the cloud advantages in a serious way. more

Industry Updates

Four Steps to Mitigate Subdomain Hijacking

3 Key Recommendations to Trust the Cloud More by Trusting It Less

As Global Internet Demands Skyrocket, Expert Share Advice on How to Optimize IT Infrastructure to Meet Modern-Day Challenges

Smart City Market Boom: New eco Study Forecasts Over 17 Percent Annual Growth

Looking Into the Latest Microsoft Exchange Server Vulnerability Exploitation

New Study by eco Alliance: Best Practices Show Future Potential for Green IT 2030

Not All VPN Users Are Worth Trusting, a Lesson for Cloud Service Providers

i2Coalition and DNA Merger Creates North America’s Largest Internet Infrastructure Advocacy Group

i2Coalition Launches Survey on the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Infrastructure Providers

The Internet Infrastructure Industry Is Protecting Digital Trust and Fighting COVID-19 Related Fraud

Mitigating Phishing Attacks on Cloud/File Storage Services through Domain Reputation API

Moving from the Castle-and-Moat to the Zero-Trust Model

Cloud and IaaS DLP Woes: Is Additional Threat Intelligence a Solution?

Cybercrime Innovation: Tackling Emerging Threats and Vulnerabilities

Your Business In Europe: Understanding GDPR & Privacy Shield