By Greg Schulz

Depending on whom you talk to or ask, you will get different views and opinions, some of them stronger than others on if magnetic tape is dead or alive as a data storage medium. However an aspect of tape that is alive are the discussions by those for, against or that simply see it as one of many data storage mediums and technologies whose role is changing.

Here is a link to an a ongoing discussion over in one of the LinkedIn group forums (Backup & Recovery Professionals) titled About Tape and disk drives.

Rest assured, there is plenty of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and hype on both sides of the tape is dead (or alive) arguments, not very different from the disk is dead vs. SSD or cloud arguments. After all, not everything is the same in data centres, clouds and information factories.

For what it …

Mark Little, Principal Analyst, Consumer, Ovum

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it,” Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy is quoted as saying at a product launch back in 1999. McNealy will surely have grown almost as tired of hearing his famous quote as consumers appear to be of being tracked on the Internet, and Ovum’s latest Consumer Insights survey suggests that two-thirds of the Internet population is very tired indeed.

Internet players and data collectors of every type are at risk of taking the consumer’s personal data, their “little data,” for granted, turning the Big Data value system into a battleground.

Regulation and hardening attitudes are squeezing the supply of personal data

Since Scott McNealy made his famous quote there have been many privacy infringements and policy errors. These have mostly involved major players, and notable examples include Google Street View’s covert collection of consumers …

Cloud computing providers are increasingly falling for bad habits – they are offering customers “standard form” contracts whereby they set the provider lays out the terms, very much like insurance companies do with their policies.

These contracts are somewhat problematic, as they levy all responsibility and liability onto the client making use of the cloud service. Whilst many small businesses may accept these contracts due to not having sufficient legal resources, large businesses have means and are extremely unlikely to take up a one-sided contract.

This contractual quandary could well hinder the process of cloud adoption, unless the providers address the matter, and soon. Large businesses have already taken the lead in rejecting cloud providers with such contracts.

Many of the standard form contracts are extremely basic and presented very much like software contracts whereby you must simply accept the terms in order to proceed, or else don’t accept – “take …

Cloud service provider Interoute has announced the launch of CloudStore, an enterprise app store which doubles up as a compute and storage facility, hosting OS and databases, as well as business apps.

Interoute, known for its virtual data centre and owning Europe’s largest cloud platform, is further focusing its efforts on the enterprise – understandable, given that’s where most of its client base lies – but featuring a much more rounded product than just hosting apps.

Counting Microsoft, RedHat and Ubuntu among its cast list, the Interoute CloudStore integrates several assets, with its integrated network, compute storage platform underneath a layer of appliances, from which secure platforms can be built.

The store also comes with an online knowledge centre, designed to help enterprises choose a bespoke model to suit their business needs.

In a press release, Interoute calls the solution a “game changer” and “the next generation of cloud computing …

The eighth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from security provider Arbor Networks has revealed how cloud services and data centres are “increasingly victimised” by cyber attackers.

The report, which looked at a 12 month period ending September 2012, asked nearly 200 security-based questions to 130 respondents in the enterprise and network operator fields.

The key points of the research were:

• 94% of data centre operators reported security attacks
• 76% had suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks towards their customers, whilst just under half (43%) had partial or total infrastructure outages due to DDoS
• Yet only 14% of respondents had seen attacks targeting any form of cloud service

The result of this was that “complex multi-vector attacks” – combinations of attack vectors intending to hack away at a company’s defences – were on the rise, with big security breaches becoming less common. To exemplify this, advanced persistent threats (APTs) were cited …

You often hear people saying that privacy is important. Especially online, where your data can be used in ways unknown to you, it’s even more important. Why exactly is it important though? Does an average Joe, someone who has a couple of files here and there on the Internet need to care about privacy?

The answer is an astounding yes. In an ideal world, privacy wouldn’t be something you would have to ask for, or choose. Every software and app you use, and every website you visit will respect your privacy. Unfortunately, it is far from an ideal world, and it’s shocking to see what people who matter think of privacy.

Take the case of cloud file storage, for example. There are some great solutions out there but almost all of them don’t care for your privacy. Some, in fact, are rather frightening.

The excerpt below …

Parallels is a global firm reputed in offering cloud service enablement, hosting and desktop visualisation. The company was founded in 1999 and currently boasts of over 900 employees spanning across the globe- North America, Asia and Europe.

To capitalise on Parallels’ success story, Cisco, the global networking giant, of recent has made an equity investment of $11 million to the desktop virtualisation firm. The investment was done through Almaz Capital Partners.

According to Hilton Romanski, V.P., Corporate Business Development Cisco, «Cisco is continuing its commitment to technology development and innovation through strategic investments. » The collaboration with Parallels is geared to deliver easier to use and efficient cloud services.

In addition, Cisco is hoping to leverage on Parallels’ global presence – especially in Russia – to fuel innovation worldwide. The investment is a viable acquisition for Cisco, especially if the cloud infrastructure giant intends to incorporate virtualisation in its Cisco Unified Computing …

In his most recent blog post, Art Coviello, the executive chairman at RSA posed an important question. How do we move from traditional security to intelligence-driven security? In his answer he described that the quickly interdependent exchanges between parties (B2C, B2B, B2P, etc) have grown beyond the traditional means of securing the enterprise:

“IT organizations have continued to construct security infrastructures around a disintegrating perimeter of increasingly ineffective controls.”

He described a new-model of cyber-security that includes 5 concepts:

1. A thorough understanding of risk
2. The use of agile controls based on pattern recognition and predictive analytics
3. The use of big data analytics to give context to vast streams of data to produce timely, actionable information
4. Personnel with the right skill set to operate the systems
5. Information sharing at scale

I have to stand up and applaud. I have been waiting for someone of Art’s stature to publicly acknowledge that …

A new survey from Brocade has revealed the extent of the changing CIO role in enterprise – and put cloud adoption as a major driver of it.

The research, which asked 100 CIOs from the EMEA sector (Europe, Middle East, Africa) found the following top-line takeaways:

• 50% of the CIOs polled expect that cloud adoption will result in their jobs involving less time fretting over the company IT infrastructure
• One third of CIOs confirmed that cloud services had been deployed by their business without involving the IT department
• Two in three envisage that by 2020, this trend will continue with business units procuring cloud services much more frequently

There were other interesting results, with 75% of respondents unsure whether their company’s SLAs (service level agreements) will meet minimum requirements, which may come as a surprise.

Of course, a downwardly revised SLA will mean downtime and greater IT costs, but Forrester …

By Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT Enterprise Solutions

Because (or in spite) of the hype, sentiment about Big Data vendors was generally bullish in 2012. The attention spilled over from IT to the business media. These were among the findings reported by DataSift, which conducted a retrospective analysis of vendor mentions on Twitter during 2012 for Ovum.

To some extent, the results were surprising: while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a Big Data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project. Although only peripherally a Big Data story, HP and Autonomy was the biggest negative story of the year.

The data provided by DataSift provides a good example of how social media mining provides a useful snapshot of popular thinking that supplements – or replaces – the traditional role of marketing focus groups.

Mining Twitter for insights

Traditionally …