Governments world over are adopting cloud in a big way to leverage the many benefits that come from it. This foray into cloud, popularly known as government cloud market, is expected to explode over the next few years.

A report titled “Government cloud market by solution” has been released by the research firm MarketsandMarkets. According to this report, the market size of this industry is likely to grow from $15.4 billion in 2017 to a whopping $28.85 billion by 2022. That’s almost double the growth within just the next five years, accounting for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4 percent.

These numbers clearly show that government cloud is growing by the day. But why, you may wonder.

Much of this growth is driven by factors such as

• Low IT costs
• Availability of a ton of solutions, so governments can choose the one that is best compliant with their standards.
• Little to no dependence on humans for operations and maintenance. This means the employee costs is negligible for governments
• Hassle-free maintenance and obviously there is no need for a large IT department to monitor operations.
• Compliance with most standards
• Instant access from anywhere and the associated flexibility with respect to working hours and locations for employees
• Easy deployment of cloud storage solutions. A lot of it can be deployed within just a few ours, thereby saving time and effort for governments.

Due to these benefits, government cloud is all set to boom over the next few years.

The report further states that out of all the different segments, the cloud storage segment is likely to see the highest growth.  This is not really a surprise considering the vast amounts of data that local, state and national governments have to collect and maintain to provide the right benefits to the right people.

The next sector that is likely to see major growth is the integration and migration segment.  Already, many government agencies have started making the move to cloud solutions, so migrating their existing data to the new platform will require help. Also, there are many legacy systems that need to be integrated with cloud, so solutions that bridge this gap will be in great demand.

Region wise, North America is expected to have the highest contribution to government cloud market while the Asia Pacific region is likely to have the highest growth during this period.

Overall, this is likely to be a period of high growth for government cloud and companies of all sizes, ranging from the mighty AWS and Microsoft to small startups are looking to cash in on this boom.

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Cryptoeconomics is an emerging field that revolves around the protocols involved in production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy.

There is no official definition yet because this is a new field. But broadly speaking, it encompasses the latest technologies such as blockchain, game theory and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

Before we understand about cryptoeconomics, let’s briefly look into how it evolved.

Evolution of cryptoeconomics

If you take any torrent system, users can share or download files freely. However, the unwritten rule was users who download these files and have to seed them as well. But, not all users followed this rule simply because there was no economic incentive to seed and the process of seeding took up a lot of unnecessary space on the computer. As a result, peer to peer network sharing failed as a concept.

In 2008, a group or an individual called Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper about bitcoins. This concept used blockchain technology to take peer to peer network sharing to new levels. The difference between the failed sharing system and this one is that, now people had an economic incentive to follow the rules.

As a result, bitcoin has caught on in a big way and has led to the development of a new form of digital economy called the cryptoeconomics. As you would’ve guessed, it’s a combination of two words – cryptography and economics.

Why is it so called?

Bitcoins are based on blockchain technology where each block contains the hash of the previous block, so the entire chain is continuous. Each of these blocks will have transactions and a state that can change based on the nature of the transactions. For example, if one person has 100 bitcoins and wants to send 40 to another person, then these blocks will reflect the new states of 60 and 40 respectively. All these information is protected by cryptography functions like hashing, signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. This means, you’re transactions are safe and only valid transactions are allowed.

Since money in some form is exchanged for goods and services, there is economics involved. Each user has some financial incentive to perform a particular action in the peer-to-peer network. Broadly speaking, there are two types of incentives they have. The first incentive is in the form of tokens or cryptocurrencies that are assigned to users for their contribution to the peer-to-peer network.

The second incentive is rewards for doing a good and responsible task on the network. Likewise, users can also pay a fine or can even have their rights taken away for any bad acts they do. So, there is enough incentive for a positive contribution and this leads to economics.

That’s how cryptoeconomics came about.

We’ll talk in depth about this technology and how it works in future pieces. Do check back to know more about bitcoins, blockchain technology and cryptoeconomics.

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Teridion, an Israeli-American based cloud networking company, has got a new CEO. Saar Gillai, the former vice-president of Hewlett Packard enterprises has taken over the reins of this company to put it on the past of fast growth.

Teridion is a company that aims to create fast lanes for content to move from cloud providers like Box top their end users. In many ways, this company’s software acts as a traffic cop that direct users through the best possible route to reach the destination.

Let’s say, a user requests content from Box, but one of the nodes in the network is down. Instead of delaying the availability of data to customers, Teridion’s software routes it through other nodes, so the user doesn’t even know something is amiss. It’s not just when a node is down, even during normal transmissions, this software finds the best possible route to ensure that the content reaches users quickly.

Teridion claims that it can increase network speed by ten times, thereby offering high availability and on-demand services to customers. Also, there is zero capital expenditure involved in this process, as everything is controlled by Teridion’s software.

This four year old company helps SaaS customers to have a congestion-free and latency-ridden performance. As Internet traffic grows, it is difficult to continuously build out hardware and infrastructure as both are expensive and time-consuming. This is why Teridion came up with this unique idea to create a software that will manage congestion, without any capital expenditure for clients.

So far, this idea seems to have caught on well with customers in the tech world. Teridion’s revenue has grown manifold over the last four years and now, it is all geared to move on to the next level of growth and performance.

To help Teridion to leap to this next level, this San Francisco-based company has hired Gillai because of his in-depth knowledge in networking. He had worked in Cisco from 1998 to 2005 after which he joined a company called 3Com, a Cisco rival that was eventually acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2010. He continued with HPE in the role of a senior vice-president until last year. With more than 20 years of innovative experience and knowledge, the Teridion Board believes that he is the right person to head this company at this juncture. Gillai, replaces Chris Keene, who held this position for one year.

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This is not your typical hacking incident when a hacker enters the network of a cloud provider to take the sensitive data of millions of customers and sell them on the dark web for millions of dollars.

This is a rather bizarre case where hackers compromised the powerful AWS cloud network to mine the crypto currency bitcoin!

According to a report from RedLock, the hackers wanted a computer to mine bitcoins. In the process, they realized that the admin consoles of AWS cloud servers are not password protected. As a result, two major companies, namely Aviva and Gemalto, were affected. It is not known whether data was stolen and how many customers were affected. So far, Amazon, Aviva and Gemalto have not come forth to give any statements in this regard.

But overall, this is an interesting and worrying trend, especially if hackers want to use different tools to hack into a system just to use it for mining a cryptocurrency. If you’re wondering why this is worrying, it’s simply because mining bitcoins is super energy intensive and could be extremely costly in terms of electricity costs. When someone wants to mine these coins, they could spend a lot of money on utility costs. To avoid this, they hack into powerful servers and use the resources of these servers.

Why this is alarming is because it can affect cloud companies without their knowledge. While hacking will also affect them, this is a completely different kind of crime that can go unnoticed. When the utility costs go up by a few thousand dollars, it won’t even be so obvious to the company. But at the same time, hackers are exploiting a vulnerability for which customers or the company itself is paying the price.

In fact, this bitcoin mining is spreading faster than you may think. Many bitcoin miners are coming together to form groups to share the costs that come with it. These miners put together complex algorithms to find the best computers to mine and that’s probably how a few reached AWS in the first place.

As of October 7th, bitcons were worth about $4,300 each and this mining can happen until there are 21 million bitcoins available on the Internet. But, mining becomes difficult as years pass because almost every technique is explored and exhausted.

In this scenario, the big question is how are companies going to protect their assets not just from hackers, but also from bitcoin miners?

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Dropbox has come up with a new design that’s colorful, vibrant and definitely more attractive than the current design of white and blue. The logo has also undergone a change and it’s a lot flatter than before. As a result, the logo looks like it’s inside a plane rather than a box, and it is hands down cool and elegant.

This is the first time that Dropbox has redesigned over the last decade. If you look at the design of Dropbox’s competitors such as Box, iDrive and the like, you’ll notice that all of them are plain and predictable. Probably, Dropbox wanted to stand out amongst its competitors and this is a way to do it. The redesigned Dropbox looks absolutely wonderful when compared to its competitors.

Another possible reason could be that Dropbox wants to appeal to the younger generation as a cool app to use. In fact, the new typeface called Sharp Grotesk is well-liked by the millennials, so that could be a reason for the redesign.

An official statement from Dropbox also affirms to this idea that it wants to stay ahead of its competitors and maybe even create a strong impression and brand image in the minds of its customers.

In addition, Dropbox wants to establish itself as a tool to bring together teams and ideas, rather than just a place to store files. For this new outlook, Dropbox needed a brand new design.

In many ways, the new design is an ode to the creativity of its designers as it is both expressive, playful and at the same time, comes with rich images and vibrant colors.

However, besides the logo, the rest of the web and app user-interface is the same; the standard white with blue and gray accents. This may change over time, but for now, the new colors seem to be more on advertising and marketing campaigns than the actual user-interface. ALready, Dropbox has put up posters and hoardings on many major cities to project itself as a hipster brand that helps everyone to store and sync files.

Let’s see if this marketing and designing strategy gives Dropbox the edge it needs in the competitive file sharing market.

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Oracle has been trying to get its act together and move on a path of technology and innovation that will make it a leader in the coming years. To this end, it has implemented many strategic changes and has been successful in a big way. The latest such strategy is to move into the blockchain bandwagon.

If you’ve never heard of blockchain, that’s the latest technology that could transform the Internet as we know it today. Invented by an individual or a group of ingenious developers, this technology allows digital information to be distributed, but not copied. You can imagine this to be a distributed database that is duplicated millions of times across different networks.

The obvious advantage of blockchain is that the information is automatically reconciled across all networks, so a single change is updated everywhere. Also, all records contained in blockchain are public and verifiable, which means, it allows greater transparency and security. Since there is no centralized database or repository, no single hacker can hack the information it contains.

In some ways, it is an Internet that comes with a built-in robustness to adapt based on the existing situation. To top it, this technology has no single point of failure. Probably the best implementation of blockchain technology is bitcoins, that could become the defacto standard of transaction if more people and companies start adopting it.

So, what’s Oracle doing with this technology?

Oracle has created its own blockchain service on top of an open source platform called Hyperledger. This is the second company after IBM to use the Hyperledger fabric project to create a robust blockchain technology.

Using this technology, Oracle plans to offer a wide range of cloud services that come with better flexibility and resilience when compared to existing services offered by its competitors such as AWS, Microsoft and Google. In a way, this is Oracle’s way of catching up with companies that have a lead in the cloud market because of their early foray into it.

Though blockchain sounds promising, it all boils down to how well it is adopted and implemented. Though oracle has jumped on the blockchain bandwagon, it’s hard to predict how it will eventually play out for the company.

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