On December 22, 1944 the German General von Lüttwitz sent an ultimatum to Gen. McAuliffe, whose forces (the Screaming Eagles, in case you were curious) were encircled in the city Bastogne. McAuliffe’s now famous reply was, “Nuts!” which so confounded the German general that it gave the 101st time to hold off the Germans reinforcements arrived four days later.
This little historical tidbit illustrates perfectly the issue with language, and how it can confuse two different groups of people who interpret even a simple word like “nuts” in different ways. In the case of information security, such a difference can have as profound an impact as that of McAuliffe’s famous reply.
Archivo mensual: julio 2012
Misconceptions or Business Realities?
IDC Canada recently published a study highlighting how IT security fears may be inhibiting Canadian enterprises’ business agility and competitiveness. IDC and TELUS Enterprise Cloud Study, 2012: Three Misconceptions Curb Competitiveness sheds light on the concerns of leading Canadian businesses reluctant to implement nontraditional IT delivery methods, including public cloud-based SaaS applications, despite evidence these solutions can improve productivity, efficiency, and adaptability. Based on IDC’s research, more than 85% of the Canadian enterprises surveyed have significant concerns about public cloud security.
Cleversafe Engineers a New Dispersed Compute Storage Solution with Hadoop
Cleversafe provides dispersed storage solutions that give infinite scale and cost-effective data storage/protection/access. Apache Hadoop and the CDH4 distribution provides all the required software for implementing MapReduce and the other chores associated with analysis over massive quantities of data. What if these two capabilities could be combined in a smart, well engineered way? The potential impact on […]
This post by BobGourley was first published at CTOvision.com.
Suddenly Social Oracle to Buy Involver
Oracle said Tuesday that it’s arranged to acquire privately held Involver and its social marketing platform on undisclosed terms for its Cloud Marketing Suite.
The deal should close this summer.
Involver claims its licensed platform “supports 700,000 brands and agencies who manage audiences of more than 1.6 billion fans and provides marketers with everything they need to create rich experiences across the social web.”
That apparently means folks like Toys “R” Us and MTV building Facebook and Twitter pages good across mobile devices and tablets.
Its widgetry includes Involver SML, a markup language for social media, Visual SML, a drag-and-drop interface, an Audience Management Platform for publishing, monitoring, measuring, and managing social media content across multiple social networks from a central dashboard and a couple of dozen lightweight apps built to help marketers engage their audiences across the social web.
The company is a Facebook Preferred Developer and a technology provider for Facebook’s internal marketing team that built campaigns for the World Cup and the US elections.
Oracle said in its announcement that it expects its combination with Involver “to create the most advanced and comprehensive cloud-based social platform across marketing, sales and service touchpoints.”
Involver’s SML technology is supposed “to extend Oracle’s social platform to help customers more easily and cost-effectively collaborate and build engaging applications and social experiences across their social campaigns and sites.”
Oracle is currently reviewing Involver’s roadmap to see where it can be exploited and expects to throw more money at it. The five-year-old start-up has gotten where it is on $11 million in venture financing. Oracle will pair Involver’s SML with Java and its Oracle Database services.
Oracle’s already picking up social monitoring from Collective Intellect and social analytics from Vitrue to compete with Salesforce, which is buying Buddy Media, and Microsoft, which is buying Yammer.
Oracle says, “Companies are looking to harness the full potential of social media to increase brand loyalty, connect with potential customers and anticipate buyers’ needs.”
The Six Battlefields Disrupting the Cloud Value Chain
As cloud computing matures and hype becomes reality, uptake among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises is increasing. And although the cloud is still in its infancy, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) believes it is an appropriate time to ask: “How is the cloud value chain taking shape, and where are the battlefields I need to be concerned about?”
Five Benefits of a Storage Gateway in the Cloud
Admittedly, I’ve spent a great deal of time extolling the virtues of cloud storage and the reasons why a cloud storage gateway is the easiest way to add cloud storage into existing on-premise storage environments. But if you thought cloud storage gateways were only for on-premise environments, perhaps you may not realize that there are reasons to use gateways in the cloud as well.
CloudAccess Recognized for Technology Innovation
Los Angeles, CA, July 11, 2012 –(PR.com)– Security-as-a-service leader CloudAccess was selected as an Always Global 250 winner by the technology media watchdog AlwaysOn for its unique technology and entrepreneurial approach to the cloud-based security market.
Inclusion in the AlwaysOn Global 250 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players in the Global Silicon Valley. CloudAccess was singled out for its contributions to the fast-developing security-as-a-service space, and also for its long term vision in changing the way companies perceive and practice IT asset protection.
“This honor goes beyond the recognition of our scalable, SIEM and identity and access management solutions. It acknowledges the paradigm shift for businesses and validates that enterprise security can safely, efficiently and cost-effectively be managed from the cloud. It is a great honor and I am extraordinarily proud to share this award with the whole CloudAccess team,” said CloudAccess CEO Kevin Nikkhoo.
CloudAccess was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.
“This year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 winners are driving the technology market into new, uncharted territory, representing the highest-growth opportunities we’ve seen in the private company marketplace in the history of the Global Silicon Valley,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn.
The AlwaysOn Global 250 winners were selected from among thousands of domestic and international technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders. The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2012 list.
CloudAccess and the AlwaysOn Global 250 companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s tenth annual Innovation Summit at the Computer History Museum on July 23th, 2012.
CloudAccess was recognized for its scalable cloud-based security model which provides comprehensive, integrated and cost-effective IT asset protection for such needs as SIEM, Log Management, Single Sign On, WebSSO, Identity Management and Access Management.
“We, as IT professionals, already accept and embrace different cloud-based options. We support dozens of applications in the cloud—some are even of enterprise scale and proprietary in nature. Security-as-a-service is just part of that evolution,” Nikkhoo said. “And CloudAccess is proud to be recognized as an innovator in that space.”
A full list of all the AlwaysOn Global 250 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website at: http://www.aonetwork.com/AOStory/Announcing-2012-AlwaysOn-Global-250-Top…
For more information about the CloudAccess or security-as-a-service managed from the cloud, please contact CloudAccess at 877-550-2568 or visit the website www.cloudaccess.com or blog site at http://cloudaccesssecurity.wordpress.com/
Contact Information:
CloudAccess
Scott Davis
877-550-2568
Contact via Email
www.cloudaccess.com
Blog: cloudaccesssecurity.wordpress.com
Click here to read the full story: CloudAccess Recognized for Technology Innovation as an AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner
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Social Crowdfunding – Monetizing the Margins
Crowdfunding has become a very popular topic here in Canada, and for good reason, it’s really the key to unlocking their future, in a pretty seismic way.
By this I mean the nation has a notorious ‘Innovation Gap’ and lament a lack of Venture Capital as the reason, but really what is missing is a general culture of innovation and better processes for early stage commercialization. Most important it needs a tech sector policy because there isn’t one.
In absence of these things Crowdfunding offers a “system of the people” approach, like Napster or EBay, and so it’s not dependent on government policy or even funding, it could be entirely self-generated, and most likely will be.
It’s important for Canada because Crowdinvesting isn’t about replacing the traditional VC or high-street bank, but rather it’s about leveraging the Internet for new markets especially those at the grass roots level; lots of little projects of all shapes and sizes.
This is actually what Canada needs more so than the VC part, which is going to be really difficult to pull off to be honest. In contrast a Crowdfunding platform is easily implementable for affordable venture rates and could support a lot of active Canadian ventures.
Technology Abuse: I’m Mad as Hell
OK, so now I’m mad. Really mad. Mad as hell. Perhaps you are as well.
My anger was stoked this morning as I read several articles about the latest banking scandal, ie, the fixing of the “LIBOR” inter-bank rates by, apparently, every bank in the Western world. The sociopaths in charge of these fine institutions have been gambling with $800 trillion in securities as if they were playing penny-ante poker with their friends.
That colossal number is roughly 12X the size of the entire global economy; it was achieved through the endless, technology-driven swapping of our money that occurs in today’s 24/7 global markets.
This scandal come far too soon after the near-destruction of the global economy in 2008, brought on by unsufficiently mitigated risk and again, technology-driven markets.
Computing performance is measured in microseconds on Wall Street and London, bringing the speed of light into play and resulting in massive IT infrastructure is set up as closely as possible to trading floors. Trades in the hundreds-of-thousands per second range are now a feature of our modern markets. At this speed, when something goes sideways, it does so in a hurry.
And This, Too
Technology is also the key enabler of that other unfortunate aspect of modern society: endless war and endless domestic spying. At the risk of being trite and late to the party, it seems safe to say that we are finally approaching Orwell’s nightmarish society of 1984.
The latest revelations in the US come from Twitter and Google, who have respectively responded this year to about 800 and 18,000 government requests for private records. Furthermore, US cellphone companies have said they received 1.3 million such requests in 2011.
More malignantly, the Obama Administration has now deemed it OK to target American citizens for lethal drone attacks. A 16-year-old boy was a recent victim. Add to this the reports that law-enforcement officials at all levels in the US want drones of their own for use on American soil, and we seem to be entering a Brave New World of Blade Runner 2.0, where we are the replicants.
So, in review, our latest technology has helped create a world in which the economy is one big, all-hours casino, with security guards and bouncers provided by our government.
What Can We Do?
Einstein and everyone involved in the Manhattan Project knew that the scientific advances of the era were being applied to the worst possible use, the creation of morally indefensible weapons. “If we don’t develop atomic bombs, one of the bad guys will,” ran the mantra of the day.
Since that time, we’ve all been well aware of the dangers our technology poses. Among the more notable recent critiques was offered up by Bill Joy a few years ago in a well-known piece he wrote for Wired magazine.
In the face of such criticism, today’s mantra can be boiled down and conflated to “capitalism good, terrorism bad.” We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Yet we continue to develop our technology because a.) we believe its potential to do good outweights its potential dark side, and b.) it’s fun. But it seems the time has come for action.
It seems we need to do more than open our windows and put on our best Howard Beale impressions.
So what can we do? What shall we do?
Shall we write our Members of Congress and trust them to create an intelligent, fair-minded solution?
Or how about we create a new Port Huron Statement with these two issues as the foundation? Maybe we can create one massive union and strike until this nonsense ends. Shall we pull a Lysistrata and, er, withhold our services until all technology companies agree not to sell their stuff for nefarious uses?
Will a few like-minded CEOs emerge from the crowd and encourage ethical use of the technology? Is there such a thing as ethical use of the technology?
Perhaps I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Perhaps the global financial system is sound, tarnished only by a few bad apples. Perhaps the modern emphasis on security is making us safer after all. Perhaps the terrorists haven’t really won.
What do you think we should do?
Cloud Computing: Salesforce to Buy GoInstant
Salesforce.com is going to buy a two-year-old Nova Scotia start-up that just launched last September called GoInstant for a reported $76 million.
The outfit does real-time shared web browsing, a slick answer apparently to the cumbersome WebEx.
The start-up’s page on CrunchBase says, “All participants that join a co-browse session can click, scroll, type and browse at the same time. Co-browsing does not require any downloads or plug-ins to work; all users need is a web browser. A co-browse session can be used to co-browse any web site for customer support, sales, e-commerce and training.”
It has 14 people and got $1.7 million in seeding from Freestyle Capital, Baseline Ventures, Greylock Partners, Social Leverage and folks like LinkedIn chair Reid Hoffman.