Jeff has been running Parallels Desktop customer since 2010. Initially purchasing version 6, Jeff has upgraded through every version and is now happily running Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac. Sony Vegas Pro Jeff uses Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac to run Windows on his home Mac. He is a musician and depends on a video processing […]
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“Internet companies only provide the technology to build cyberspaces for online storage, but in the end, these spaces belong to China’s online territory and, hence, fall within the government’s jurisdiction,” Qin An, a cyber security expert at the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy. China has defined Cloud Storage as a territory of the Chinese government and therefore has the jurisdiction to regulate the content stored within Clouds, allowing for immense censorship.
Pornographic content is widespread on cloud services, with users uploading videos and then selling them. The government believes it should take necessary action to halt this “immoral” behavior.
President Xi Jinping has ignited a moral campaign that aims to tackle corruption within the country’s sprawling administration as well as crackdown on inappropriate online content. After the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications launched a campaign in March “to address the emerging practice of sharing and hosting pornography via cloud storage services.” Many companies cloud storage services have been shut down. The list includes interne giants Sina, Tencent and Kingsoft as well as DBank and Alibaba.
Alibaba announced in March a complete closure of the service but dates have not yet been specified. Sina soon followed on April 25 with their announcement to close cloud services. DBank has become the sixth company to close or reduce operations after this crackdown. DBank will close all services and delete all data on July 1st, 2016. . Sina and Xunlei, which operate Vdisk andKuaiPan storage services respectively, announced closure of free accounts on June 30.
Homemade videos may still be created and uploaded to personal accounts as long as the content is treated as private information.
Throughout the massive crackdown, few companies, such as search engine Baidu and Internet company Qihoo360, have no plans to suspend any operations.
This is not the first of mass censorship in China, as Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iTunes, Walt Disney’s DisneyLife services, and many online streaming shows have been blolcked in China. The Chinese government has expanded the word pornography to include any material it finds to be objectionable, such as political criticism. What will be censored next?
Comments:
Xie Yongjiang, deputy director of the Institute of Internet Governance and Law at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications: “The government has the right to supervise and intercept illegal information spread online, while companies are also obliged to prevent such information from being uploaded online in the first place by using filtration technology.”
The post China Shuts Down Cloud Storage Services for Pornographic Content appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
The 19th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo, to be held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, brings together Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
OEM, or original equipment manufacturer, is a term that is heard most often within two industries: the automotive industry and the IT industry. Initially, this term was associated with a company that manufactured a product that was then resold or rebranded by another company. However, the meaning of this term has evolved over time and […]
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While the decisive CEOs have a digital transformation agenda, those companies executing plans to re-imagine their business models are in the minority. And yet, the early-adopters now using cloud computing are enabled to respond quickly to changing market conditions. In contrast, the laggards are undecided and risk falling further behind.
This is a global phenomena, where the industry and local market leaders are able to enact their transition with limited interference or threats from more traditional competitors. Just consider the current status-quo within the United Kingdom, as an example.
(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/GoodLifeStudio)
Writing on Airbnb’s ‘Nerds’ hub, Riley Newman, head of data science, says: “A datum is a record of an action or event, which in most cases reflects a decision made by a person. If you can recreate the sequence of events leading up to that decision, you can learn from it; it’s an indirect way of the person telling you what they like and don’t like – this property is more attractive than that one, I find these features useful but those… not so much. This sort of feedback can be a goldmine for decisions about community growth, product development and resource prioritization… we translate the customer’s ‘voice’ into a language more suitable for decision-making.”
The insight gained from this feedback enables Airbnb to ensure they concentrate efforts on signing up landlords in popular destinations at peak times, and structure pricing so that the use of their global network of properties is optimized. For example, data is used to determine the appropriate price of a room or apartment, based on a number of variables such as location, time of year, type of accommodation, transport links, etc. Airbnb use an algorithm to help their hosts determine the right price for their offering. This is particularly challenging given the sheer range of accommodation available and when you consider these are real homes, not bog-standard hotel rooms that can be easily rated on a star system. After all, what is desirable in a city apartment (Wi-Fi, good transport links, etc.) may be less important in a quaint cottage (where the guests may prefer peace and romantic decor over Wi-Fi and subway connections).
To help hosts set the price, Airbnb released a machine-learning platform called Aerosolve. The platform analyses images from the host’s photos (listings with photos of cosy bedrooms are more successful than those with stylish living rooms!) and automatically divides cities into micro-neighbourhoods. The platform also incorporates dynamic pricing tips that mimic hotel and airline pricing models.
Airbnb have also just unveiled Airpal: a user-friendly data analysis platform designed to allow all of their employees, not just those trained in data science, access to all of the company’s information, and tools to query it with.
As Newman says: “Measuring the impact of a data science team is ironically difficult, but one signal is that there’s now a unanimous desire to consult data for decisions that need to be made by technical and non-technical people alike.” This is demonstrated in the Airpal system; launched in 2014, Airpal has already been used by more than one-third of Airbnb employees to issue queries. This impressive statistic shows how central data has become to Airbnb’s decision making.
The growth of Airbnb is another indication that their clever use of data is paying off.
Data is primarily internal across a mixture of structured and unstructured formats: image data from host photos, location data, accommodation features (number of rooms/beds, Wi-Fi, hot tub, etc.), customer feedback and ratings, transaction data, etc. Some external data is analysed, too, for example accommodation in Edinburgh during the popular Edinburgh Festival will be priced higher than the same accommodation in a different month.
Airbnb hold their approximately 1.5 petabytes of data as Hive managed tables in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) clusters, hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. For querying data, Airbnb used to use Amazon Redshift but they’ve since switched to Facebook’s Presto database. As Presto is open source, this has allowed Airbnb to debug issues early on and share their patches upstream – something they couldn’t do with Redshift.
Going forward, Airbnb are hoping to move to real-time processing as opposed to batch processing, which will improve the detection of anomalies in payments and increase sophistication around matching and personalization.
One big challenge for the Airbnb data science team was keeping up with the company’s dramatic growth. Early in 2011, the team consisted of just three data scientists but, as the company was still quite small, the three could still pretty much meet with every individual employee and fulfil their data needs. By the end of the year, Airbnb had 10 international offices and hugely expanded teams, meaning the data team could no longer hope to partner with everyone across the company.
As Newman puts it: “We needed to find a way to democratize our work, broadening from individual interactions, to empowering teams, the company, and even our community.” This was achieved through investing in faster and more reliable technologies to cope with the expanding volume of data. They also moved basic data exploration and queries from data scientists to the teams throughout the company, with the help of dashboards and the Airpal query tool; this empowered Airbnb teams and freed up the data scientists from adhoc requests so they could focus on more impactful work. Educating the teams on how to use these tools has been key to helping them gain insights from the data.
Airbnb are a perfect example of a fast-growing company with ever-expanding Big Data needs. The ability to shift and adapt as the company have grown has, I think, been at the heart of their success. This highlights the non-static nature of Big Data and how your data strategy may need to change over time to cope with new demands.
It’s also great to see a data science team so well integrated with all parts of the organization (even if they can no longer meet with every employee!). This not only ensures the data scientists have an excellent understanding of the business’s goals but also emphasizes the importance of data-based decision making for employees right across the company. After all, it doesn’t matter how much data you have if no one acts upon it.
This is an edited extract from Big Data in Practice: How 45 Successful Companies Used Big Data Analytics to Deliver Extraordinary Results by Bernard Marr (published by Wiley)
Did you find anything interesting from this case study of Airbnb’s use of the cloud? Let us know in the comments.
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The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has released findings from its annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey, where 69% of organizations believe security to be a top priority for the business, though only 29% have a formal written policy.
Within the large organizations category, those with 250 or more employees, 90% considered security as a ‘very high’ or ‘fairly high’ priority, though this percentage dropped to 69% when taking an average of the UK as a whole.
“The UK is a world-leading digital economy and this Government has made cyber security a top priority,” said Minister for the Digital Economy Ed Vaizey. “Too many firms are losing money, data and consumer confidence with the vast number of cyber-attacks. It’s absolutely crucial businesses are secure and can protect data. As a minimum, companies should take action by adopting the Cyber Essentials scheme which will help them protect themselves.”
Of the companies who participated in the survey, 24% said they had experienced a breach within the last twelve months, though this is higher for medium and large businesses, 51% and 65% respectively. Large organizations would appear to be the more attractive target for cyber criminals, with 25% of the larger organizations experiencing at least one attack per month over the last year. In terms of financials, the average breach costs organizations £3,480, though this increases to £36,500 for organizations in the large category.
Although a healthy proportion of organizations claim security is a top priority only 29% have written cyber security policies, and only 10% have formal incident management processes. The survey also highlighted only 17% have had their staff undergo some form of cyber security training in the last 12 months.
“One of the most shocking revelations in the Government’s research is the fact that just 10 per cent of UK businesses have an incident management plan in place,” said Jens Puhle, UK Managing Director of 8MAN. “Given that two thirds of large businesses were breached this year alone, organisations need to think in terms of “when”, not an “if” they are attacked, and it is vital they have a solid response plan in place.
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“Businesses that are equipped with the ability to identify how the breach occurred and which systems were affected will be able to mitigate the damage the impact and resume normal operations much sooner. They will also be able to take control of the aftermath, disclosing the incident on their terms and working with the authorities to catch the perpetrator. Being unable to perform these basic tasks will make it much more likely that a business is seen as inviting disaster on itself and its customers through negligence, rather than as a blameless victim of crime.”
From an employee perspective, only 34% of organizations currently employ staff whose job role specifically includes information security or governance, which could be perceived as relatively low considering 67% believe security is a top priority. These jobs were most common within finance (60%) and education, health or social care (52%), sectors which could be viewed as having more stringent regulation surrounding data protection.
While hiring people with the right skills is an important step in becoming more secure Lee Meyrick, Director of Information Management at Nuix, believes these individuals also need to have a firm grasp how and where a company’s data resides, a task which might not be as simple as first imagined.
“The first step towards responding efficiently to breaches and closing information security gaps quickly, is understanding where important data is stored. This is easier said than done, as about 80% of organisational data is unstructured, meaning it’s in complex formats – such as emails, databases, photos, and presentations– that are difficult to search and understand.
Security spend – click to enlarge
“The key principle is making sure the only people who can access high-risk data are those who need to for day-to-day work. In order to achieve this, information security, information governance and records management specialists need to become “good shepherds” of their data.
“They should know where all their sheep are, segregate them into separate fields, make sure the fences between fields are sound and regularly check to ensure the sheep are healthy. In this way, even if a wolf manages to get into one of the fields, most of the flock will be safe.”
While the survey does demonstrate good intentions from organizations throughout the UK in respect to attitudes towards security, it would appear the practical implications from these intentions have largely remained unfulfilled to date. Large organizations would appear to have a more solid grip on security within their own environments, though this does not seem to extent to their own supply chain where only 13% of UK businesses set minimum cyber security standards for their suppliers.
The report states the attitudes within medium and large organizations towards security is positive, though more could be done to implement data encryption rules, offer staff training and having formal incident management processes. It also states more could be done to raise standards within their own supply chains, which could have a ripple effect on smaller organizations throughout the UK.
Sebastian Krause, General Manager for IBM Cloud Europe
For senior CIOs, knowing how to respond to an M&A and divesture situation is key, as mergers, acquisitions and divestitures are a critical component of business strategy.
Projections for European M&A transactions show total deal values are set to rise from US$621 billion in 2014 to US$936 billion by 2017. M&A activity is likely to be bolstered by continued positive monetary policy, with additional cross-border M&A activity likely to take place as a result of a strong US dollar, primarily in Spain, Germany, and Italy.
Increasingly, businesses are using M&A to grow their organisation, achieve economies of scale, expand product portfolios, globalise and diversify.
In the intense negotiations around this business change, IT operations are likely to face dramatic reorganisation as various stakeholders analyse existing systems and look at the potential for efficiencies.
This is about survival and the IT division is likely to be under intense scrutiny during this period, under pressure to perform critical functions such as the integration or separation of critical systems and data, the provision of an uninterrupted service during the transition period, and the prompt delivery of synergy targets. IT strategy is therefore core to any successful M&A or divestiture plan and a critical contributor to its success or failure.
Increasingly, CIOs are under pressure to meet these challenges quickly and at lower cost. Their ability to do so can even impact the way analysts assess potential deals. IT dependent synergies have been found to be responsible for a large proportion (30 to 60%) of M&A benefits, but 70% of M&As fail to meet their synergy targets in the planned timeframe.
Realising these M&A and divestiture targets for enterprise IT environments is complex and requires a holistic approach that considers public, private, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as well as non-cloud delivery models.
Some CIOs may approach the situation by simply making adjustments to the existing IT landscape – from CRM, ERP through to office.
This can involve singling out certain components of an established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, cloning the existing ERP environment, deploying existing systems into the acquired business asset or transferring data between differing systems with the expectation that no issues with integration will arise. These approaches have certainly worked in the past, but can be costly, challenging to implement and disruptive.
This is why many CIOs are looking at a move towards cloud-based applications and infrastructure, which can take the pain out of the M&A process. Broadly, the drivers for moving to cloud services are increased agility, speed, innovation and lowering costs.
They can help organisations going through mergers and acquisitions to realise synergy benefits more quickly, simplify integration and accelerate the change programme, reduce costs through efficiencies, mitigate costly migration investments and encourage financial flexibility.
Top cloud benefits for M&A:
Developing a repeatable platform that delivers these benefits and simplifies M&A activities will greatly improve an organisation’s ability to grow and be successful. It may even open up new opportunities that might not have been possible without the cost, flexibility, and scalability benefits that cloud solutions can deliver.
With businesses already realising real benefits, the cloud’s role in M&A is only set to grow. By building a cloud model that works, organisations can avoid reorganising IT operations for each merger or acquisition and ensure a much more seamless transition.
Through implementing an approach that can speed the execution and success of these deals, CIOs can look to deliver value from the IT department that goes far beyond just support, to true business leadership.
Written by Sebastian Krause, General Manager for IBM Cloud Europe
Research from VMTurbo has highlighted 57% of organizations have no multi-cloud strategy at all, where as 35% do not have a private cloud strategy and 28% lack one for public cloud.
Although hybrid cloud is considered one of the growing trends within the industry, the research suggests the noise behind multi-cloud strategies is coming from either a small number of customers, or from vendor organizations themselves. Of those who would be considered in the ‘Functional Multi-cloud Owner’ group, which only represented 10.4% of the respondents, almost half were using a two-cloud model, and just over a quarter were using a three-cloud model. The multi-cloud strategy was favoured by larger organizations in general.
“A lack of cloud strategy doesn’t mean an organization has studied and rejected the idea of the cloud; it means it has given adoption little or no thought at all,” said Charles Crouchman, CTO of VMTurbo. “As organizations make the journey from on-premise IT, to public and private clouds, and finally to multi- and hybrid clouds, it’s essential that they address this.
“Having a cloud strategy means understanding the precise costs and challenges that the cloud will introduce, knowing how to make the cloud approach work for you, and choosing technologies that will supplement cloud adoption. For instance, by automating workload allocation so that services are always provided with the best performance for the best cost. Without a strategy, organizations will be condemning themselves to higher-than-expected costs, and a cloud that never performs to its full potential.”
The survey also demonstrated the total cost of ownership is not fully understood within the community itself, less so within smaller organizations. SME’s planning to build private cloud environments estimated their budget to be in the region of $150,000 (average of all respondents), whereas the total bill for those who have already completed such projects averaged at $898,508.
The stat backs up thoughts of a number of organizations who believe there should be more of a business case behind the transition to the cloud than simply reducing CAPEX and OPEX. Last month, BCN spoke to Gwil Davies, Director & Cloud Lead in the EMEA IT Infrastructure Centre of Excellence at Deloitte, to understand the economics behind cloud computing. Davies believes a successful journey to the cloud is not just focused on reducing CAPEX and OPEX throughout the organization, but identifies where value can be achieved through a cloud-enabled business.
“I think it’s more important for organizations get a real understanding of how to use the cloud and perhaps not automatically assume that moving all of their current IT into cloud is going to be the cheaper solution.” said Davies.
The business case for the cloud is almost entirely dependent on the long-term ambitions of the business itself, though the survey does imply there is a need to further educate some corners of the IT industry on the benefits and perceived cost of private cloud. Cloud computing as a concept could be perceived to have penetrated the mainstream market, though the benefits may be less so.
Bharti Airtel has announced the launch of Connexion as well as a new collaboration with Microsoft to deliver Azure ExpressRoute to Indian businesses.
The new Connexion service is designed to maximize network performance over the cloud, whereas Azure ExpressRoute ensures a more secure and scalable connection between enterprises, cloud service providers, and data centre partners, through using a private connection as opposed to public internet. Microsoft claim the service increases reliability, speed and security, while also lowering latency.
“Over the years, at Airtel, we have been serving a vast array of global customers through our world class technology and innovative connectivity solutions,” said Ajay Chitkara, CEO of Global Business at Bharti Airtel. “Today, we are excited to further expand our value proposition for them with the launch of our ‘Connexion’, which is a direct private connectivity to cloud services.
“This platform is the right choice for the service providers and businesses seeking to make their IT infrastructure more agile and flexible. With ‘Connexion’ – we are confident of helping customers seamlessly and more securely connect to Microsoft Azure, by bringing down their network cost substantially and improving performance.”
The partnership further increases Airtel’s international cloud capabilities and ability to serve customers in the Middle East, South Asia and Asia-Pacific regions. Last month, the Airtel business also announced a partnership with GBI to build its influence within the Middle East. GBI operates a multilayer carrier neutral network, connecting the world to the Middle East, a region which is a long-term target for Airtel’s growth ambitions.
“This new partnership with GBI is a significant step in that direction,” said Chitkara. “GBI being a key network asset for the region will not only improve our customers’ experience and reach but would also enable GBI’s customers to experience a seamless extension on the Airtel Global network spanning across 50 countries across 5 continents”