The Obama Administration has announced today a "Big Data Research and Development Initiative." The initiative, has committed to more than $200 million in new funding spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), seeks to "advance state-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data; harness these technologies to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning; and expand the workforce needed to develop and use Big Data technologies." more
"Facebook reported in its SEC filing that it owns 'network equipment' valued at $1.016 billion at the close of 2011," reports Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. "The number reflects the expense of rapidly building a massive Internet infrastructure, including Facebook's shift from buying vendor gear and leasing data centers to building its own servers, racks and custom data centers." more
U.S. Office of Management and Budget released a memo today establishing a program to reduce "duplicative efforts, inconsistencies and cost inefficiencies when assessing and authorizing cloud systems." The initiative called, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), is aimed to develop a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services through standardized security requirements and controls. more
Global cloud computing traffic is expected to grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes to reach a total of 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015 -- a 66% compound annual growth rate -- according to Cisco's Global Cloud Index. 1.6 zettabytes is approximately equivalent to 22 trillion hours of streaming music; 5 trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a webcam; 1.6 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming. more
A directive known as "Written Declaration 29," adopted last week by the European Parliament, calls for legislation that would require search engines to make a record of all search queries, as reported today by Startpage and Ixquick, anonymous search engine providers. "Framed as a measure to crack down on paedophiles, the controversial Declaration calls on the EU to require that search engines store all search traffic for up to two years for possible analysis by authorities." more
The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."
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Stéphane Bruno writes: "In the first few hours that followed the earthquake, mobile service was completely disrupted. It was almost impossible to place a call, due to the combination of the damages on the cellular networks and the spike in phone calls. However, on some networks, SMS service was still available. People stuck under rubbles started texting to their friends and family (in Haiti and abroad) to tell them they were still alive and needed help. Those friends and family, not knowing what to do, started posting these SOS messages on their social networks, mainly on Facebook." more
Dennis Fisher of Thread Post reports: "The malware writers and criminals who run botnets for years have been using shared hosting platforms and so-called bulletproof hosting providers as bases of operations for their online crimes. But, as law enforcement agencies and security experts have moved to take these providers offline, the criminals have taken the next step and begun setting up their own virtual data centers." more
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was interviewed at Gartner Symposium on the future of the Web and enterprise computing. Eric said to about 5000 CIOs attending the event, that Chinese will soon be a dominant language on the net and broadband connections will be so fast that various forms of media -- such as radio and TV -- will be blurred. more
During a presentation at the Interop Conference currently ongoing in Los Vegas, Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google, informed the audience that a new cloud storage service will be rolled out by Google within weeks. The role out is part of Google's expansion of its AppEngine platform which is said to offer similar security infrastructure as Gmail and Google Apps. "[T]he app partitioning and isolation are the same best of breed technology approaches that Google is developing for the rest of its customer base," Repass said. more
A recent paper released by by Urs Hölzle and Luiz André Barroso of Google's infrastructure design and operations team provides an introduction into today's high scale computing along with factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure. From the abstract: "As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers..." more
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the vast majority of business and IT executives report that cloud computing is a viable technology option that can improve a company's bottom-line results according to a new global survey conducted by an independent market research firm. However, despite growing evidence that cloud-based systems have the potential to lower costs, the majority of companies report no plans to integrate cloud computing in the next 12 months... more
According to a new study by PGP Corporation and Ponemon Institute, data breach incidents cost U.S. companies $202 per compromised customer record in 2008, compared to $197 in 2007. The study is based on 43 organizations across 17 different industry sectors with a range of 4,200 to 113,000 records that were affected. It is also noted that since 2005, the cost component has grown by more than $64 on a per victim basis since -- nearly a 40% increase. more
With the alarming increase in cyberattacks, criminals are literally turning businesses against their own customers in order to steal consumer's personal data, warns the latest annual X-Force Trend and Risk report from IBM. "The security industry puts a lot of effort into the technical evaluation of security threats, examining, sometimes at great length, the potential threat that each issue might present to corporations and consumers. Criminal attackers out for profit, however, have considerations that the security industry does not always take into account, such as monetization cost and overall profitability." more
Responding to market demand for more energy-efficient datacenters, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the completion of its new Broomfield, Colo. datacenter. The largest datacenter consolidation project undertaken in the company's history is expected to save more than $1 million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of CO2 per year in Broomfield. The new Broomfield datacenter follows similar Sun projects completed in Blackwater, UK, Santa Clara, Calif. and Bangalore, India in August 2007. more
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