Eric Taylor, a former hacker, reveals what he’s learned about cybersecurity.

Taylor’s life as a hacker began when he was just 12 years old and playing video games at home.
Russian hackers are notorious for their hacking skills, but one American says he hacked a Russian cyber gang at just 15 years old.

The government eventually caught up with Taylor and he pleaded guilty to posting the personal information on the internet, among other charges.

Eric Taylor, who went by the nickname Cosmo the God, also posted personal information of celebrities and government officials, including Michelle Obama, former CIA director John Brennan, Kim Kardashian and Tiger Woods.

Taylor recently became an advisor to cybersecurity start-up Path which helps companies make sure their websites are properly loading around the globe.

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We are in a digital age however when one looks for their dream home, the mortgage process can take as long as 60 days to complete. Not what we expect in a time where processes are known to take place swiftly and seamlessly. Mortgages businesses are facing the heat and are in immediate need of upgrading their operating model to reduce costs, decrease the processing time and enhance the customer experience. Therefore, providers are exploring multiple ways of tapping emerging technologies to solve this industry problem. During this session, Chander Damodaran, Chief Blockchain Architect at Brillio Technologies, will discuss how blockchain could transform the mortgage business and its value chain. Blockchain can bridge the gap and provide a seamless digital channel to enable quicker and transparent mortgage processing thereby elevating the overall experience and helping drive costs down.

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Technological progress can be expressed as layers of abstraction – higher layers are built on top of lower layers treating them as abstract black boxes with known interfaces. A serverless approach represents an inflection point that entirely separates the runtime layer from the underlying execution infrastructure. This paves a way for computations where the ultimate execution environment is not known in advance. Albert Santalo is a computer scientist, serial entrepreneur and angel investor with experience in high growth, venture-backed technology companies. His passion lies in designing products and building companies that disrupt traditional business models. He is an advocate for empowering entrepreneurs everywhere to build Silicon Valley technology companies in their local communities and was standing alongside President Obama at the signing of the Jobs Act in 2012. He is currently founder and CEO of 8base. He is also a board member and/or advisor to various technology ventures and has raised more than $100 million for his companies.

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Many in the industry have wondered about when the cloud will dissipate – in other words, when the term ceases to be used because of the technology’s ubiquity. Citrix has stuck its head over the parapet – and said that 2025 may signal the death of the buzzword.

At least, that’s the verdict of a quarter of the 750 UK-based IT decision makers polled by Citrix, alongside Censuswide. Of the 26% who believe the term cloud will be obsolete by 2025, more than half (56%) see cloud technology as being so embedded in the enterprise that it will no longer be seen as a separate term. In some instances, such as referring to the likes of Salesforce as a cloud-native app, the report argues the process has already begun.

The research, as is traditional, also explored cloud habits and strategies within organisations. 91% of respondents said they either have a cloud strategy, or plan to put one in place imminently – yet just over a third (37%) said their strategy was aligned to business objectives.

While nine in 10 (89%) of the large organisations polled said cloud was important to their business, three in five (59%) said they still access and manage data on-premises.

It may be a question of semantics primarily, but the research makes a wider point around whether the term ‘cloud’ is due a revamp. As cloud adoption continues – and as this publication has explored, workloads are becoming more complex – a lack of awareness at board level could give an idea of where the situation rests. According to IT decision makers, more than half of middle management within their organisation had a good understanding of cloud, compared with only 39% for the board.

“Most IT budget holders agree that cloud can improve productivity, lower costs, ensure security and optimise performance as part of a digital transformation agenda,” said Darren Fields, Citrix UK and Ireland regional director. “However, there is still more education required to effectively communicate the benefits of cloud services – and there’s still a gap to be bridged between boardrooms and IT decision makers in relation to this.

“Arguably a level of mistrust and misunderstanding still holds back UK businesses – and it is clear a cultural and educational shake-up is needed for cloud and digital transformation to deliver on its potential,” added Fields. “Once this awareness stems from IT to the board and beyond, there should be fewer barriers to hold cloud adoption back.”

Revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) went up 49% year over year to $6.1 billion (£4.6bn) representing another stellar quarter for the cloud infrastructure giant.

The AWS revenues, up from $4.1bn this time last year and up from $5.4bn in the previous quarter, comprise 11.5% of Amazon’s total revenues of $52.9bn.

In an analyst call after the announcement was made, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky noted how AWS’ ability to save on infrastructure resources has helped not only the company’s customers, but also on the consumer side of Amazon’s business.

“Our growth is coming from customers that span from startups to enterprise customers to government agencies, and they start small and then they continue to build and shift their businesses to us,” said Olsavsky. “A large number have gone all-in on AWS, and have had a chance to lower their cost structures as a result.”

In the most recent quarter, various new customers have been announced, from Ryanair, to Formula 1, to Major League Baseball (MLB). Only in the case of Ryanair was a customer going all-in – Formula 1 would be migrating the ‘vast majority’ of its infrastructure from on-prem, while for MLB the dialogue was of extending the partnership.

Yet in all three cases, the importance of machine learning crunching bigger and bigger data workloads was cited as a key reason for choosing Amazon’s cloud. Ryanair is aiming to utilise Amazon Lex, the technology which underpins Alexa, on a trial basis, while Formula 1 is looking to deliver real-time insights and predictions drawing from more than 65 years of race data.

Regular watchers will be interested at how often AWS is mentioned during the lengthy highlights reel on each financials release – 30 this quarter, up from 26 three months before – with the company also citing the general availability of EKS, its managed Kubernetes service, as a key highlight.

So how does this compare with the rest of the field, who all published last week? Microsoft trumpeted an 89% uptick in Azure revenues over the course of a year, while Google’s $4.4bn in ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud forms a part – was a 36% increase on the previous 12 months. IBM, meanwhile, secured another quarter of growth, with cloud revenue up 20% representing almost a quarter of the company’s total earnings.

Yet there is still of course a degree of filtering in play.

Ultimately, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research, the hyperscalers continue to squeeze the rest of the market, with each major player growing. Amazon controls more than a third of the overall market, larger than its four nearest rivals – Microsoft (14% market share), IBM (8%), Google (6%) and Alibaba (4%) – combined.

The research firm puts the market into three divisions; IBM, Oracle, Rackspace and Salesforce as strong niche players, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft as gaining market share ‘but a long way to go’, and Amazon ‘in a league of its own.’

“Amazon Web Services and its three main challengers all turned in some exceptional growth numbers in the quarter. Collectively those four firms alone accounted for well over three quarters of the sequential growth in cloud service revenues,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, they are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data centre infrastructure and operations.

“Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Dinsdale added.

You can read the full Amazon financial statement here.

Previous quarter’s analysis: AWS and Microsoft bask in strong financials – but is AI the battleground for the next ‘cloud wars’?

Eric is a seasoned product marketing leader with 20 year’s experience building product messaging and positioning for numerous SaaS-based solutions. He has worked in five startup environments at the Vice President level creating in-bound marketing strategy for multi-channel content marketing and demand generation initiatives that compel an audience to action and affect revenue growth. More than just generating leads, he plays a critical role of influencing company relationships with customers, industry analysts and partners. He delivers digital engagement strategies that lower the cost of acquisition while driving the target audience through the buying cycle.

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The traditional corporate WAN (wide area network) architecture became prolific in the client/server architecture era. We designed and built WANs to largely support branch-to-datacentre.  On paper, these often looked like Clouds, but they are in effect hub and spoke networks – the hub being the data centre.  This worked reasonably well when most of our applications were hosted in one or two datacentres, and access to the Internet was centralised and only available through the Data centre firewall.

Unfortunately, with the increasing use of the cloud this architecture has become costly and inherently inefficient, ultimately compromising application performance, business agility, and employee productivity. Most significantly the WAN is becoming a blocker to digital transformation, rather than an enabler.

The rising demand for cloud connectivity and Internet access at the branch is driving the need for a new architecture – one that SD-WAN (software defined – wide area network) is attempting to solve. So, what is it?

SD-WAN decouples the application from the underlying network transport.  Doing this provides an ability to run any application over any transport or combination of transports. This could be MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), the Internet, mobile or even satellite networks. This ability allows SD-WAN to connect branch offices and remote sites in a different way to the traditional hub and spoke model, typically by creating a Hybrid WAN – one that includes at least two WAN connections from each branch office and leverages two or more different networks (e.g. MPLS, broadband internet, 3G/4G, etc.) – and where all branch WAN connections are active.

The SD-WAN centralised policy controller develops an application aware overlay network based on the underlying transport networks. This enables the SD-WAN to provide application-driven intelligent path selection across the WAN links based on policies centrally defined on the controller. For example, VoIP (voice over internet protocol) through the QoS (quality of service) enabled MPLS network while Office 365 and Facebook across the broadband Internet connection. This allows the SD-WAN to balance loads across the WAN connections, or to monitor application performance and send traffic over the lowest cost or the most reliable WAN links, depending on application requirements.

Cloud-based applications can route directly to and from cloud services and branch locations, instead of through the traditional route of a centralised Internet connection. SD-WAN ensures that branch offices and remote sites are configured consistently to connect users to applications while assuring security compliance and optimising network and application performance, reducing complexity and costs in the process.

What about the business benefits? The SD-WAN solution can improve network and application performance and availability, especially in relation to cloud applications and services, while providing cost-effective bandwidth at the branch.

But the real benefits are in providing cost-effective delivery of business applications and cloud-based applications and services through automated service provisioning, resulting in greater enterprise productivity and business agility. It is this business agility that will enable digital transformation to happen. Being agile is now key to business growth  – this agility has enabled many enterprises to disrupt and quickly gain market share.

Traditional WANs are unable to provide the agility to drive the improved performance and speed of change business now requires. SD-WAN solutions are beginning to meet these challenges, creating better, agile solutions that can adapt quickly to meet our growing need for faster change and cloud delivered applications.

Blockchain is a new buzzword that promises to revolutionize the way we manage data. If the data is stored in a blockchain there is no need for a middleman – the distributed database is stored on multiple and there is no need to have a centralized server that will ensure that the transactions can be trusted. The best way to understand how a blockchain works is to build one. During this presentation, we’ll start with covering the basics (hash, nounce, block, smart contracts) and then we’ll create a simple blockchain and a web client for it.

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There’s no doubt that blockchain technology is a powerful tool for the enterprise, but bringing it mainstream has not been without challenges. As VP of Technology at 8base, Andrei is working to make developing a blockchain application accessible to anyone. With better tools, entrepreneurs and developers can work together to quickly and effectively launch applications that integrate smart contracts and blockchain technology. This will ultimately accelerate blockchain adoption on a global scale.

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