Why do businesses still need to physically move and maintain digital data?
The explosion of digital information flooding the modern enterprise today creates its own unique challenges. Organizations strive to integrate multiple disparate systems, connect to a global ecosystem of partners and customers, and transfer large files and data sets securely -- basically, do business today -- but doing so efficiently and securely challenges even the largest and most skilled IT teams.
Amazon recently launched a service to literally drive a truck to your data center, load it up with all of your data, and drive it back to an Amazon server farm to plug it in and push it to the cloud. The rationale behind this offering stems from the idea that businesses looking to move massive amounts of data -- terabytes and petabytes of information -- to Amazon’s cloud don’t have a fast, affordable option to do so over the internet. But what if they did?
Unified security management comes to the cloud
Implementing effective security can be time consuming, complex and costly, more so given the adoption of cloud-based systems.
Unified security management (USM) specialist AlienVault is aiming to simplify things with the release of USM Anywhere, an all-in-one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) security monitoring platform.
Let me tell you about Apple Fiscal Q1 2017
The measure of Apple fiscal first quarter 2017 isn't record revenues ($78.35 billion) but comparison to major competitors: More than three times Google ($26.06 billion) or Microsoft ($24.1 billion). Amazon announces tomorrow, Groundhog Day. Will the retailer's CEO, Jeff Bezos, see his shadow? The 3x multiplier nearly applies to net income: $17.89 billion, versus $6.64 billion and $5.2 billion, respectively, for the two rivals. Looked at differently, compared to Apple's same quarter in fiscal 2010, seven years later, profits exceed total revenues ($15.68 billion). That's an astounding comparison.
The results defy pundits' prognostications, including my own, about gravity pulling the company back to Earth. iPhone, as major source of revenue, can only stay up for so long, before slowing smartphone sales wreck havoc. That said, credit where it's due: CEO Tim Cook is, as I've asserted before, a logistics and manufacturing genius. He is a strategist, but not an innovation leader like predecessor Steve Jobs. Cook masterfully manages his inheritance, but he, nor Apple observers, should get lost in the quarter's glow: iPhone remains boon and bane.
Dropbox introduces Smart Sync and Paper
Dropbox has announced "significant product updates", introducing Smart Sync (some of you might know it as Dropbox Infinite), and Paper.
The company says the introduction of Smart Sync and Paper will boost team productivity and improve collaborative processes, end-to-end. First up is the Smart Sync. Dropbox calls it an "industry first", cross-platform, on-demand cloud storage solution. It offers intuitive storage, allowing users to sync all the content from their computers to their Dropbox accounts.
No, America, you can't just demand customer data from anywhere in the world
The US government has lost its bid to overturn a previous ruling which stated it could not force companies to hand over customer data that is stored on servers outside the US.
The government's appeal stems from a ruling back in July when it lost a case in which it was trying to obtain customer data from Microsoft. It was seen as a win for privacy at the time, but the government thought the ruling could stand in the way of law enforcement. A vote by the second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan means that an appeal will not be heard.
Work and personal app usage blurs as enterprise users change their habits
The use of the cloud and as-a-service software models is having a big impact on the way businesses operate, but just how is this shift playing out?
Identity management specialist Okta has collected anonymized data from its customers' networks around the world to create the third edition of its Businesses @ Work report looking at how organizations and the people who work for and with them get work done.
People, not technology, drive innovation
Anyone who has worked in the technology industry for a long time will develop a healthy cynicism towards industry buzzwords. They may also come to realize that the majority of technology "paradigms" are adaptations of concepts that have been done before. Digital disruption is not the automatic result of the arrival of new types of tech. Disruption, transformation, innovation -- call it what you will -- comes about as a result of human ingenuity, good fortune, and hard work -- in addition to technology.
Take Pokémon Go as an example. Plenty of analysis has been done on why it was so successful. Nothing about it was particularly radical; the smartphone, mapping, GPS, AR and, of course, the Pokémon themselves are not new. However the combination of these things tapped into a desire for nostalgia, collectables, and the need to complete and compete. Originally developed as an April Fool’s joke, it was, by all accounts, a highly successful mistake.
Unsanctioned cloud use remains a problem for enterprises
A new report from cloud security company Netskope reveals that while enterprise cloud adoption continues to rise, unsanctioned use of services remains a problem.
The results show that half of all users of officially sanctioned cloud storage services like Box and Dropbox also have a personal instance of the same service. This can make detection of unauthorized copying of data more difficult.
Public cloud has the greatest security implications say execs
A new survey reveals that 65 percent of senior IT and security executives think that the biggest security risks for business come from public clouds.
The study from IT solutions company BMC in conjunction with Forbes Insights also shows that 69 percent of respondents say digital transformation is forcing fundamental changes to existing cybersecurity strategies.
Tidal Masters go their own way
During Consumer Electronics Show 2017 yesterday, in licensing partnership with MQA, music streamer Tidal announced the new audio-fidelity tier "Masters", which is available for free to existing HiFi subscribers. Early album selection is extremely limited as is access option: macOS or Windows application. Both will expand in time.
But wow! I tested skeptically, wiring up my studio cans—Audio-Technica ATH-R70x—to 15.4-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to hear the difference. Hehe, if any. I deliberately started with Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" from album "Rumors", which released 40 years ago on February 4th. Tidal claims that Masters recordings deliver "an audio experience exactly as the artist intended". The band spent nearly a year painstakingly recording and engineering the disc, making any, or all, the songs great test cases.
CloudShot 5.7 uploads screenshots to Google Drive, OneDrive, more
Cloud storage-friendly screenshot tool CloudShot has just hit version 5.7.
An improved OAuth implementation means you can now directly upload your screenshots to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Imgur or your own FTP server, as well as saving it to local or network drives.
My favorite tech items of 2016 [Joe]
The year 2016 is when the United States sold its soul to Donald Trump and I signed over mine to Apple. How's that for introduction to the five favs series, joining colleagues Alan Buckingham, Brian Fagioli, and Wayne Williams? Yup. I'm an Apple whore as 2017 opens onto its second day. The fruit-logo company won back my business as I gave up the Google lifestyle. Three main reasons: 1) I believed CEO Tim Cook's privacy promises, all while my concerns about Big G information collection increased. 2) I found the visual acuity of Apple fonts and user interfaces to be far superior to Google's, which helped compensate for diminishing reading vision (later recovered through eye surgery). 3) Google's platforms proved inadequate for easily recording, producing, and publishing the Frak That! podcast (a fun side project).
My contribution to the series is a bit disingenuous, though. I wouldn't call these "My favorite tech items of 2016". They are what I bought, or was released, last year that I use most often, regardless of their benefits and flaws. Each will get belated review sometime during the next few months. Consider this story each's preview. Okay, let's get to them.
How hybrid clouds and legacy apps will evolve in 2017
The reign of the cloud has begun. Employing a strong cloud strategy has escalated from being a luxury to a must have for the enterprise. Meanwhile, as companies around the world struggle with their digital transformation efforts, Bimodal IT has become the new norm, for good or bad. I anticipate we’ll see companies look to take their cloud strategies to the next level in an effort to bridge the divide between the two modes of IT in 2017.
They’ll do that through the use of hybrid approaches including the expansion of private cloud usage and new solutions that facilitate legacy application modernization. Here’s how I see those predictions playing out this year.
Adieu, Yahoo
Yahoo, one of the earliest and brightest dot-coms, is a Hellhole at the close of 2016. It stinks of decay and neglect. The 1 billion active user accounts ravaged by hackers is a metaphor for the trendy neighborhood turned into gang-ridden slum. Verizon was, or maybe still is, buying Yahoo. Walk away, I say, unless Yahoo is willing to pay for the privilege of becoming part of the expanding VZN communications and media empire.
I typically make many changes at the start of the new year, and as 2017 begins, I take my advice offered to Verizon: Abandon Yahoo. First to go is its photo-sharing site, for many of the reasons stated seven months ago. My Flickr Pro account expires in September, and I will cancel a few weeks earlier to prevent auto-renewal. In the meantime, I consider my Flickr officially closed, and I will no longer use it. All photos will remain until the service makes them unavailable—and pursuant to the terms,
Hybrid clouds make it easy to deploy new technologies
According to IDC, by 2018 at least half of IT spending will be cloud based, reaching 60 percent of all IT Infrastructures, and 60 to 70 percent of all software, services, and technology spending by 2020.
As cloud has become a standard way of doing business, organizations globally are using it as a tool for innovation and business transformation. Those who successfully use the cloud to achieve growth will have a mature, strategic view of how best to implement and integrate it across their organizations. All approaches to cloud have advantages. From the straightforward simplicity of public cloud services, versus the increased security and control of a private cloud, there is a cloud environment to meet every organization’s needs.
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