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Amazon AWS

It’s the End of Unlimited Cloud Storage at Amazon

The cloud market is maturing and prices are becoming more stable and sustainable than before. A clear signal of this trend is the latest move taken by Amazon to end its unlimited cloud storage plan. According to a statement released by the company, members of its Prime subscription plan alone will be eligible for unlimited cloud storage and that too only for photos.

Anyone signing for an Amazon Drive from today on will not be able to select the unlimited storage option Their only choices will be the 100 GB plan that costs $11.99 per year, 1 TB plan that costs $59.99 per year or the 30 TB plan that’s available for $59.99 for every additional TB. This is a big change from the earlier plans that cost customers $11.99 for unlimited storage of photos and $59.99 per year for unlimited storage of everything else. Of course, the first 5 GB is still free for all users.

This is a surprise move considering that Amazon introduced the unlimited storage option only in March 2015. In fact, this move triggered the price wars among cloud companies. As soon as Amazon announced it, other jumped on this aggressive pricing to increase their customer base. Google, for example, announced its own unlimited photo storage option just two months after Amazon’s announcement.

Though these price cuts brought much cheer to customers, industry analysts were skeptic simply because it’s not a sustainable model. They even predicted that the pricing wars would end, but never would they have thought it would end so soon. Exactly two years after Amazon started the whole process, it’s now tightening the screws and this could become a familiar story among other service providers too. At this point though, none of its rivals such as Microsoft or Google has announced any changes in their pricing. But, we can expect it soon given that Amazon is the leader in the cloud storage market and any change is likely to be emulated by others as well.

This brings up the question of what happens with existing customers? They will get to keep this unlimited storage plan until their expiry date. After that, customers who had opted for the auto-renew program will be charged $60 as they’ll go into the 1 TB plan if the data they’ve stored is less than 1 TB. Otherwise, they will be charged according to their storage size.

If you don’t have the auto-renew option setup, you can go to your dashboard and choose one of the limited storage plans that work best for you.

In case, you don’t make any selection, then your storage will fall into the “over quota status” which means, you can’t add any more files. But, you’ll still be able to view and delete content. In such a case, Amazon will give 180 days for users to decide what they want to do with their data. If no action is taken, then Amazon retains the right to delete your data until it reaches the quota limit, with the latest ones getting the axe first.

Well, that’s a lot of changes.

The post It’s the End of Unlimited Cloud Storage at Amazon appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Microsoft

Is Microsoft Cloud Secure?

Is the Microsoft Cloud secure? We’ll you’ll be surprised to know some interesting facts and what goes on behind the scenes.

For starters, Microsoft cloud is constantly under attack, which is not a surprise, given that Azure is one of the most cloud computing platforms today. With its thousands of clients and users, hackers are always tempted to break its security, so they can steal whatever information they want.

But, it’s not been that easy for these hackers. A recent report released by Microsoft shows that this company thwarts roughly about 1.5 million hacks every day. That’s overwhelming to say the least.

Microsoft has employees more than 3,500 security employees and an advanced AI grpah thathelps to keep these attacks at bay. It’s a perfect combination of men and machine that keep every piece of data safe and secure.

When it comes to machines, Microsoft feeds hundreds of gigabytes of telemetry data into it’s intelligent AI-based system called the Intelligent Security Graph. Using some advanced machine learning algorithms, the system is able to predict with reasonable accuracy the source and time of attack. In addition, Microsoft claims that it scans more than 400 billion emails that go through Office 365 and Outlook every month to identify malware and other kinds of phishing scams.

All these measures cost money and this is why Microsoft spends more than $1 billion each year to beef up its security. Besides this money, the company also spends on research and development to further enhance its security and to stay updated – all in an effort to prevent hackers from breaking its security.

Though this may sound great, the fact is Microsoft is not the only provider that faces such a barrage of attacks from hackers. All cloud based companies keeping facing such attacks and some of them fall prey to these hackers. A case in point is OneLogin, a popular password management site, that was hacked, and it uses AWS as its cloud service provider.

In this sense, hacking is a part of everyday operations for these cloud companies and they’re doing everything they can to stay away from them. But sometimes, mishaps happen and data is lost. While this is not an argument to support the cloud providers, it’s time we understand the efforts that go behind maintaining the security of a cloud platform.

This scenario also explains why venture capitalist firms keep investing in cloud security firms. One such company that has benefited from such funding is Netskope that received more than a $100 million in a series E funding led by some of the top investors in this industry. This is, in fact, a trend that we’ve been seeing for some time now.

More people are investing in these cloud access security brokers simply because they believe these companies can find a more lasting and practical solution to the security problem, as hackers are only expected to get more aggressive in the future because of the huge money they can get from the dark web for stolen data.

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News

Netskope Raises Another $100 Million

Netskope, a cloud access security broker, has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E funding was led by its previous investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. Along with these two investment firms, Social Capital and Iconiq Capital also participated. In addition, two new investors who had not participated in any Netskope’s previous rounds of funding also contributed and they are Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

According to a statement released by the company’s founder and CEO, Sanjay Beri, this additional round of funding would be used to building its customer base. In the previous round, Netskope released $938 million, thereby bringing the total money raised to $231.4 million

Netskope has been fairly successful in raising money for its activities, with the first round coming in 2013 and worth just a paltry $21 million. These funding rounds reflect the rapid strides Netskope has made over the last five years.

One of the biggest reasons could be the fact that cloud security is a booming industry. With growing use of devices, the many access points for an application is greatly increased. For example, let’s say you use an internal app to log in to your workplace and maybe even log time to it. You’re likely to see it from your desktop at work, your laptop at home and maybe even from your smartphone and tablet while on the move. This means, there are four access points to that app and a security vulnerability can come from any of it.

These multiple access points are one of the important reasons for the many hacking incidents we’ve seen over the last few years or so. Also, the emergence of different services such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and IDaaS are adding to security problems. To tackle the growing complexity of security head-on, Netskope has been working on a standalone security platform.

Existing systems and security practices don’t work well with cloud simply because it’s growing and becoming more integrated and complex by the day. This is why Netskope has come up with a unique principle that’s called “privacy by design.” This principle gives you the flexibility to track and identify specifically what you want such as a set of specific apps or documents instead of analyzing every bit of information that passes through your network, which is truly impossible. You can set keywords and create other security policies that will allow you to have a better control over your network and that’s exactly what Netskope aims to achieve with its platform. It has already secured this idea with more than a hundred patents.

That said, Netskope is not yet profitable and continues to depend on investors for its everyday operations. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much it’s able to translate its ideas into monetary value when it finally releases its platform to the world.

Until then, it’s a wait and watch game for investors and for the general public. There is also some skepticism in the industry circles about security products because none of them have really made the impact they claim to make. Let’s hope Netskope can change this barrier.

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Technology

Why Cloud Backup?

Losing data due to a system failure is probably each one of our worst nightmares. How many times have we worried if our data will be safe for us to continue working the next day? How many sleepless nights have we spent worrying about it?

Well, technology, specially cloud, is our savior again.

Cloud backup is a service that allows us to store our data in a public or private cloud, located far away from our physical premises. There are many advantages that come with it, some of which are:

  • Automatic – This is one of the biggest advantages of cloud backup, as the backup process happens automatically without any intervention from your end.
  • Protection against natural disasters – When a disaster strikes your city and your infrastructure is unfortunately damaged, you can rest assured that your data is safe because it’s stored in a different location, sometimes even in a different continent.
  • Affordable – Cloud backup is a lot cheaper than on-premise data centers that require heavy investment, right from setup to everyday maintenance.
  • Anytime access – With cloud backup, your employees can access data at anytime and from anywhere, as long as they have Internet connection.
  • Simple and hassle-free – Cloud backup is a simple and hassle-free process. It requires no prior technical knowledge and works well for all kinds of employees.

These advantages have made cloud backup one of the most preferred backup options today.

Let’s now look at a few subscription-based cloud backup options available today.

Acronis

Acronis, headquartered in Switzerland, is a company that specializes in cloud software for backup, disaster recovery, data access and file share. Last week, it announced the release of its latest version, Acronis Backup 12.5.

The company believes that Acronis Backup 12.5 is one of the fastest, reliable and most economical solutions in the market now, thereby giving customers excellent value for their money.

With a unified web interface, family data protection, support for local and cloud storage, rescue bootable media, support for six hypervisors, SAN storage snapshots, backup validation and more, Acronis Backup 12.5 is definitely one of the top contenders in the cloud backup industry.

Crashplan

Crashplan is another good choice that comes with good security options and virtually unlimited versioning. Probably, the most salient feature of this service is its slick and user-friendly interface that makes it super easy to backup all your content.

Backblaze

Backblaze is an economical cloud-based backup solution that’s easy to setup and offers unlimited backup storage with little to no input from you. Once you configure the services, it runs in the background automatically and you can simply forget about it.

SpiderOak

For privacy enthusiasts, SpiderOak is a good choice as all your data is encrypted and only you have the keys to decrypt it. Also called as zero-knowledge provider, this offers complete protection, besides other cool features.

Carbonite

If you’re looking for a backup solution with well developed mobile apps, Carbonite is a good choice. It’s continuous backup feature combined with good security features make it a popular choice.

Regardless of which service you choose, make sure you back up your data to avoid sleepless nights.

The post Why Cloud Backup? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Computing

Encryption is mandatory for healthcare data

More hospitals are turning to cloud-based services to store their data.  They want to tap into the existing infrastructure and convenience, not to mention reduced costs and lesser maintenance hassles that come with this transition.

That’s not all. The data that is stored on the cloud can be analyzed quickly to get meaningful insights. For example, it’ll be easy to know the rate of child obesity or the demographic groups that are more vulnerable to diseases like diabetes. With such deep insights, providing care will become streamlined and focused. At the same time, the government and the healthcare industry can come together to create a way to prevent such diseases from plaguing those demographic groups.

In fact, the above situations are just a tip of the iceberg as cloud storage and analytics opens the world for all kinds of possibilities in the medical world. Little wonder that more companies are moving to the cloud to leverage these benefits.

To cater to this growing demand from hospitals to store and analyze patient data, many companies have setup public healthcare cloud. But how safe are these cloud services?

A report called Cloud Infrastructure Security Trends released by cybersecurity vendor RedLock shows that 31 percent of databases in public healthcare clouds are easily accessible over the Internet and 40 percent of organizations have one or more cloud storage services exposed to the general public. In fact, this study looked at multiple verticals and were able to access 4.8 million records that includes many sensitive data about patients.

You may wonder what happened to the many privacy regulations including HIPAA?

HIPAA lays down certain regulations when it comes to public healthcare cloud, of which, a primary one is to ensure that the data you store is safe. Though these healthcare clouds have to comply with these regulations, it’s not completely foolproof. HIPAA as such faces many challenges, so the onus is on you to take measures to protect the safety and integrity of your data.

One way to ensure that your data is safe is to keep it encrypted. The report further states that 82 percent of databases are not encrypted, so the chances for accessing information with low to medium effort is fairly high. As a hospital authority, you have to make sure that all your data and databases are encrypted. This should be one of the most important aspects that you should talk about before signing a contract with a service provider.

Another option is to go with a zero-knowledge provider. If you’ve never heard this term before, don’t worry as you’re not alone.

Zero-knowledge providers are those that encrypt your data using AES algorithm and only you have the key to decrypt them. In other words, no other person other than you, not even the employees of your service provider or any other third party such as your Internet Service Provider or the NSA can access your data. Since this service doesn’t even store your username and password, you can ensure that you’re records are safe.

That said, not many zero-knowledge providers are out there and even among those, not many abide by HIPAA regulations. All this means, you’ll have to put in more time and effort before you park your healthcare data online.

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News

Wave Gets More Funding

Wave, a Canadian firm that specializes in offering cloud-based accounting software for small and medium firms got another round of funding today. NAB’s venture capital arm led this round of funding with A$32 million. Royal Bank of Canada and a few other investment firms were also a part of this funding round.

Wave was founded in 2010 to provide free accounting software for small businesses. Over the last few years, it has grown enormously and now it offers a suite of cloud-based products for a range of different financial activities such as lending, payroll, payments, invoices and receipts.

Currently, this company employs about 130 people and reaches out to more than 2.5 million customers spread across 200 countries.

Specifically, it has more than 25,000 small business customers in Australia and this explains why Australian-based companies like National Australia Bank (NAB) have invested in this company. In this round, NAB and RBC are the main investors and they are joined by companies like Social Capital, CRV, OurCrowd and HarbourVest. A few Canadian companies like IT Venture Fund, Portag3 and OMERS Ventures also participated with their Australian counterparts.

Though the exact split up of investments made by each firm is not known, NAB is one of the highest investors and this gives it an opportunity to appoint an observer to Wave’s Board of Directors. NAB has invested in many such small companies that create a big impact in the economic and social world.

This series of D investment is the eighth round of funding for Wave, and during the previous seven rounds, it has raised US$55.7 million. These levels of funding reflect the stellar performance of Wave. One of the highlights of this company is that it helps small businesses to be more productive and efficient by giving them the tools needed to be successful.

In fact, their invoicing and accounting software is free to use for anyone, but clients have to pay for additional software they need such as payroll, lending and more. In many Asian and African countries, these free tools can be a game changer and it is known to have helped many companies to become successful at what they do.

Such a social impact has garnered the interest of many firms, so it’s no surprise they are making a beeline to invest in Wave.

Wave announced that it will use this round of funding to integrate more financial services into its free software, so it has a greater benefit on small businesses and the people they employ. Such a move is sure to present opportunities for these small businesses to grow and along with, Wave will also grow.

Such accounting software can also change the way banks perform their core functions of risk assessment and credit pricing. Currently, banks use the data stored in the form of financial statements to make these decisions and the existing software systems and operational processes are based on this presumption. Now, with cloud-based accounting software, businesses can use live data which can disrupt the practices followed by the banking industry for decades.

NAB doesn’t seem to mind that though.

The post Wave Gets More Funding appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Technology

Cloud Startups to Look For

Cloud is a booming tech niche that offers plenty of opportunities for anyone with the right idea. Little wonder then that this sector is seeing so many startups, a lot of which end up being successful.

Before moving on, let’s define “success” in the context of cloud startups. Every company is started with an innovative idea or with the need to fill a gap in the existing infrastructure or services. Though many ideas are hard to implement and don’t take off as a general rule in other sectors, the cloud industry is different. Since it’s an emerging field, there’s a greater chance for entrepreneurs to come up with an innovative idea and implement it well.

Such well-done implementations brings in revenue for companies and more importantly, sets them as a perfect target for acquisition. If you look at the trends in this industry over the last few years, you’ll know that acquisition is a form of success because the idea and implementation of the startup was recognized and it was given an opportunity to become a part of a larger group.

These acquisitions work well for both the acquirer and the acquiree. The acquirer, or the company taking over a startup, is likely to gain from the new idea or practice that it can implement to a larger customer base. In the case of the company that’s being acquired, it’s a welcome event because their idea can now be sold or implemented among a larger customer base. They’ll also have access to more resources to improve on their implementation. In this sense, it’s a win-win situation for both the companies and for the public at large.

So, in the cloud industry, success means not just more revenue, but also becoming a potential target for acquisition.

That said, let’s look at a few cloud startups that have been successful or are on the path of achieving success this year.

Apcera

Apcera provides a container management platform to help its clients operate in the cloud. Founded in 2012, a unique aspect of this company’s offering is that it helps clients to manage both modern and legacy applications that so far are a thorn in cloud management.

Hedvig

Hedvig is a company that operates in hyper-scale storage, a small but growing niche. Founded in 2012, this company specializes in replicating data across public and private  cloud systems with a view to provide high levels of data protection.

Pulseaway

This company helps its clients to remotely monitor and manage any kind of cloud infrastructure. Its user-friendly interface and application access ensure that users can connect to their infrastructure from any device including tablets, smartphones and desktops.

Skyhigh Networks

Founded in 2011, this company gives real-time visibility to companies to gauge their cloud initiatives. This way, they stay on top of their threats, implementations and progress and can even lay the basis for deciding on their future business strategies.

Cazena

Cazena offers big data as a platform (dPaaS) that run well on Azure and AWS. It deals with data movements, analytics and security.

These startups are expected to go big by this year.

The post Cloud Startups to Look For appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

News

Rackspace Buys Tricore

It’s been a string of changes at Rackspace. Only last week, the company announced that it has appointed a new CEO and a few days later, it announced that it is acquiring a managed and consulting cloud services company called TriCore Solutions.

The exact terms of the deal was not disclosed though it is speculated that this acquisition can give Rackspace a big boost in terms of its offerings and its stance in the cloud space today. The deal is expected to close by the end of June.

Though the financial details were not disclosed, Rackspace claims that this is the largest ever acquisition that the company has made so far. This is an important statement coming from the company considering that it has so far acquired eight companies, with the last acquisition being in 2013. This data goes to show the importance given by Rackspace to this deal, as the company believes that TriCore’s products and client base can give a big boost to the enterprise applications management segment of cloud.

TriCore specializes in providing Oracle and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning products that include business intelligence, analytics and data integration services. These are deemed as mission critical in most organizations, yet they are hard to manage and can cost the company a ton of money too. This is why most companies prefer to take help when it comes to handling these applications.

Rackspace has a firm footing in these mission critical applications market and to take it to the next level, it has acquired TriCore. In a way, TriCore’s products are complementary to that of Rackspace, so it’s only natural for both these companies to come together to capture a larger share in this market.

This acquisition gives Rackspace the flexibility to not just manage the cloud services of a company, but also move up the stack and manage complex applications from some of the larger vendors such as Oracle and SAP. This upgrade has been something that Rackspace’s customers have been asking frequently in the near past, and to meet their demands, Rackspace has decided to go ahead with the acquisition of TriCore instead of doing any research and development in-house.

This is a sensible move considering that TriCore and Rackspace have a lot in common and can benefit from each other’s expertise and knowledge. Currently, TriCore servers about 275 customers, and after this acquisition, all these customers will become a part of Rackspace. The new CEO of Rackspace, Jeff Cotten, even opined that TriCore’s workspace is similar to Rackspace, so the transition should be smooth for both the companies.

TriCore has about 500 employees and all of them are expected to join Rackspace, though they will continue to work from their existing locations.

The next few months are likely to be crucial for Rackspace as it moves away from competing with large public cloud providers. At present, Rackspace is unable to break the wield of companies like Microsoft, AWS and Google, so it makes sense for it to change its strategy and focus on  a smaller niche area.

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News

Red Hat Buys Codenvy

Mergers, acquisitions and buys have become a standard practice in today’s business world, especially in segments that see explosive growth like the cloud industry. The latest in this list is the announcement from Red Hat that it has bought a startup company called Codenvy, though the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Codency is a four year old startup company that specializes in providing cloud native development tools to help develop containers and cloud-first applications. Based in San Francisco, this company has about 40 employees.

Codenvy’s product is built on Eclipse Che, an open source and cloud integrated development environment that doubles up as a server as well. As a result, Codenvy integrates runtimes, project, development and test environments into a single space to make collaboration easy. And the best part is all of it runs well in Linux containers.

In addition, Conenvy also connects to popular workflow tools such as Jira and Jenkins to make it easier for developers to create any kind of cloud application, regardless of the segment or industry.

According to Harry Mower, a senior director at Red Hat, Codenvy’s technology reduces the time it takes for developers to get started and create cloud-based applications. In fact, this could be one of the reasons for Red Hat to acquire this startup.

Both these companies also have a long history of association as they have collaborated with Microsoft to create development tools. In fact, Codenvy is already a part of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform. Considering this association, it’s only natural for Red Hat to acquire Codenvy to strengthen its native tools portfolios.

Red Hat has announced that going forward, it will put Codenvy and Eclipse Che at the center of its workspace management technology. Also, it plans to add Codenvy to its existing portfolio of developer tools and application platforms, with an aim to make it easy for developers to create applications in hybrid cloud environments as well. Currently, many developers find it challenging to create applications for hybrid clouds, and Red Hat wants to reverse this trend and make life easy for these developers.

This can be an important move for Red Hat because the development environment is changing and evolving. Today, developers work across concurrent projects that require them to have mastery over multiple programming languages. This has created a lot of difficulty and pressure for developers, so everyone, including the organizations they work for, want to ease this pressure on them.

To top it, more organizations are moving towards DevOps and containers to accelerate the speed of deployment. To handle both these trends, a tools like Codenvy can come handy, as it will help developers to build complex applications across varying platforms with relative ease. It even allows developers across different geographical areas to communicate and collaborate with each other on the same tool. Again, this is sure to ease a lot of pressure for developers and can help them become more productivity in the future.

Overall, this is an important acquisition in the world of open source development and one that can give developers a lot to cheer.

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Technology

Certifications for Cloud Professionals

Cloud companies are growing at a rapid pace and this means, they’re constantly going to need cloud professionals to manage their infrastructure and client projects. This translates to more opportunities for cloud professionals. In fact, this profession is likely to be the future of IT.

Given these opportunities, it makes sense for IT professionals to move to the cloud. The best way to do that is by getting hands-on knowledge about cloud applications, infrastructure, management, deployment and more.

One way to acquire this knowledge is through self-study, but then you also need to show your potential employers that you’re proficient in this area. So, a good way to learn and showcase your skills to your future employer is through certifications. The obvious advantage is you learn new things and at the same time, you have some proof to show the world your expertise on the subject.

Due to these multiple advantages, many companies are offering these certification courses. Let’s look at some of them. All these certifications are in alphabetical order, so the choice of a certification simple depends on what you want to do and the niche you want to carve for yourself.

Atlassian Certified JIRA Administrator

This is a fairly tough certification that helps you to understand the popular JIRA deployment. This certification is perfect for anyone who want to become the administrator for mission-critical applications based on JIRA. According to Indeed, the average salaries for JIRA administrators is anywhere from $70,000 to $95,000 per year.

AWS Certified DevOps

DevOps is a happening field, as it combines development with operations. In other words, you not only code and develop applications, but you also manage them. With this skill, you’ll act as a bridge between development and administration teams, putting your valuable knowledge to good use to streamline and increase the pace of deployment.

To get you into this interesting line of work, AWS Certified DevOps course is a good fit. The average salary for people with this certification can be upwards of a $100,000 a year.

CompTIA Cloud+

If you’re looking for competence in cloud technologies, then this is the one for you. It’s a non-vendor certification that tests on your general knowledge and understanding of the cloud, without going into any specific niche areas.

This makes this certification a good starting point for a more technology-agnostic and generic cloud training. It’s great if you’re just starting off and want to know as much as you can about cloud technologies in general, before deciding the specific area you want to take up.

Oracle Database Cloud Administrator

Oracle implementation specialist is a pre-requisite for this certification. As the name suggests, this certification helps you to learn more about cloud databases and how you can manage them in an efficient way. Average salary is around $87,000 according to the 2017 IT Skills and Salary Survey.

In short, if you want to become a cloud professional, choose from one or more of these certifications, as they’re sure to give you an edge over that of your competitors.

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