Bobby Hellard

Alibaba Cloud has announced it has made the ‘core codes’ of its machine learning algorithm Alink available on GitHub.

The company notes it is one of the top 10 contributors to the GitHub ecosystem, with approximately 20,000 contributors. Alink was built as a self-developed platform to aid batch and stream processing, with applications for machine learning tasks such as online product recommendation and intelligent customer services.

Not surprisingly, Alibaba is targeting data analysts and software developers to build their own software focusing on statistical analysis, real-time prediction, and personalised recommendation.

“As a platform that consists of various algorithms combining learning in various data processing patterns, Alink can be a valuable option for developers looking for robust big data and advanced machine learning tools,” said Jia Yangqing, Alibaba Cloud president and senior fellow of its data platform. “As one of the top 10 contributors to GitHub, we are committed to connecting with the open source community as early as possible in our software development cycles.

“Sharing Alink on GitHub underlines our such long-held commitment,” Jia added.

With the US enjoying a well-earned holiday rest, and the majority of the world hunting out Black Friday deals, Alibaba had a chance to rush the opposition with Singles Day earlier this month. The numbers put out by the company did not disappoint: zero downtime was claimed, with $1 billion of gross merchandise volume achieved within 68 seconds of launch.

A recent report from ThousandEyes aimed to explore benchmark performance of the hyperscalers, noting that Alibaba, alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), relied more heavily on the public internet rather than Microsoft and Google, who generally prefer private backbone networks. The report also noted that, contrary to opinion, Alibaba suffered packet loss when it came to China’s Great Firewall.

You can take a look at the Alibaba Cloud Alink GitHub by visiting here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Victoria Woollaston

Two in five large UK organisations expect their operations to be cloud-only by 2021 according to a new report – but the gap between the haves and the have-nots is evident.

The findings appear in a new report from McAfee. The security vendor polled more than 2000 respondents – 1310 senior IT staff and 750 employees – across large businesses in the UK, France, and Germany to assess cloud readiness.

40% of large UK businesses expect to be cloud-only by 2021, yet only 5% surveyed already consider themselves to be at this stage, the research found. 86% of UK-based senior IT staff saw their business as cloud-first today, comparing similarly to France (90%) and Germany (92%), while optimism reigned over becoming cloud-only when given an indeterminate future date. 70% of UK respondents agreed this would occur, albeit lower than their French (75%) and German (86%) counterparts.

The benefits are clear among respondents. 88% of senior IT staff polled in the UK said moving to the cloud had increased productivity among end users. 84% said the move had improved security, while supplying more varied services (85%) and increased innovation (84%) were also cited.

The question of responsibility is an interesting one, and shows where the waters begin to muddy. Never mind the issue around vendor versus customer, consensus does not particularly exist within senior leadership. Ultimately, the majority believe responsibility lies with the head of IT (34%), compared with the CIO (19%), CEO (14%), or CISO (5%). One in five (19%) employees surveyed admitted to using apps which had not been approved by IT.

“The key to security in a cloud-first environment is knowing where and how data is being used, shared and stored by employees, contractors and other third parties,” said Nigel Hawthorn, director of McAfee’s EMEA cloud security business. “When sensitive corporate data is under the IT team’s control – whether in collaboration tools or SaaS and IaaS applications – organisations can ensure the right policies and safeguards are in place to protect data from device to cloud, detect malicious activity and correct any threats quickly as soon as they arise.”

Those wondering ‘whither McAfee?’ with regards to cloud security research will notice the company’s long-standing pivot to this arena. The abovementioned ‘device to cloud’ reference is taken direct from McAfee’s branding as the company looks to gather expertise as a cloud access security broker (CASB).

This is not without success, as McAfee was named for a second year, alongside Bitglass, Netskope and Symantec, as a leader in Gartner’s CASB Magic Quadrant last month. Last year Gartner noted, with the acquisition of Skyhigh Networks, McAfee’s expertise in raising awareness of shadow IT. 2019’s Quadrant sees one new face in the winners’ enclosure in the shape of Microsoft.

In April, McAfee released a special edition of its Cloud and Risk Adoption Report. According to the 1,000 enterprise organisations polled, more than half (52%) said they found security better in the cloud than on-premise, with organisations who adopt a CASB more than 35% likelier to launch new products and gain quicker time to market.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Microsoft and AT&T have beefed up their strategic partnership, announcing a new offering where AT&T’s growing 5G network will be able to run Azure services.

The companies will be opening select preview availability for network edge compute (NEC) technology. The technology ‘weaves Microsoft Azure cloud services into AT&T network edge locations closer to customers,’ as the companies put it.

Microsoft and AT&T first came together earlier this year, with the former somewhat stealing the thunder of IBM, who had announced a similar agreement with AT&T the day before.

While the operator will be using Microsoft’s technology to a certain extent – the press materials noted it was ‘preferred’ for ‘non-network applications’ – the collaborative roadmap, for edge computing and 5G among other technologies – was the more interesting part of the story. The duo noted various opportunities that would be presented through 5G and edge. Mobile gaming is on the priority list, as is utilising drones for augmented and virtual reality.

Regarding AT&T’s personal cloudy journey, the commitment to migrating most non-network workloads to the public cloud by 2024 was noted, while the commitment for the operator to become ‘public-cloud first’ was reaffirmed.

“We are helping AT&T light up a wide range of unique solutions powered by Microsoft’s cloud, both for its business and our mutual customers in a secure and trusted way,” said Corey Sanders, Microsoft corporate vice president in a statement. “The collaboration reaches across AT&T, bringing the hyperscale of Microsoft Azure together with AT&T’s network to innovate with 5G and edge computing across every industry.”

After many false starts – remember Verizon’s ill-fated public cloud product offering? – telco is finding a much surer footing in the cloud ecosystem. As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger put it in August: “Telcos will play a bigger role in the cloud universe than ever before. The shift from hardware to software is a great opportunity for US industry to step in and play a great role in the development of 5G.”

You can read the full Microsoft and AT&T update here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Dale Walker

A new report from Nordic IT services provider Tieto has found the region’s cloud landscape has matured significantly since 2015 from both a strategic and operational perspective – with Sweden and Finland fighting for supremacy.

The study, the latest Cloud Maturity Index which was based on responses from almost 300 decision-makers across the public and private sectors in the Nordics, placed almost one in five (18%) organisations as ‘mature’, while a quarter (27%) were seen as ‘proficient’, 42% at a basic level, and 13% ‘immature’.

In other words, it’s a broad church, with just a slight emphasis on the have-nots rather than the haves. Those who are described as mature use cloud services to a larger extent – virtually everything (97%) being cloud-based – and are much likelier to exploit the technology’s advantages compared with their immature cousins. Being classified as a mature cloud business means an approximately 20% lower IT operation costs, and on average 15% more efficiency in increasing business competitiveness.

When it came to specific industries, finance came out on top for Nordic organisations, maintaining its lead previously forged in the 2015 and 2017 surveys. The public sector continues to report the lowest strategic and operational maturity. Yet the gap is closing when it comes to traditionally ‘slower’ verticals, with manufacturing proving particularly effective. Whereas finance scored 6.0 in 2015 and 6.3 this time around, the manufacturing industry has leapt to 6.0 from 4.4.

The report also noted the importance of environmental factors in organisations’ initiatives. This is not entirely surprising given the temperate climate has enabled many data centre providers to set up shop in the Nordics. Approximately half of companies polled said they were already considering issues such as energy consumption or CO2 emission as part of their cloud strategy. Again less than surprisingly, mature cloud organisations were considerably further ahead on environmental initiatives than their immature brethren.

Despite the report’s figures – again ranked out of 10 – which showed Sweden and Finland comfortably ahead of Norway, according to Tieto’s head of cloud migration and automation Timo Ahomaki it is the latter who should be celebrating. Data sovereignty, Ahomaki argues, is an area which is ‘quite polarised’ in Sweden, with Finland’s more advanced cloud security meaning it is ‘at the forefront’ of the Nordic public sector.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the various initiatives which have taken place regarding the emerging data centre industry in the Nordics. As far back as 2015, CloudTech reported on a study from the Swedish government – which was later put into legislation – to give tax breaks for data centre providers. Last year, DigiPlex announced a project whereby wasted heat from its data centres would be used to warm up residential homes in Oslo.

You can read the full report here (email required).

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

In May 2017, The Economist famously ran with a front-page headline proclaiming that “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” It focused on big tech’s collection and use of data and argued that the data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules.

I agree with the idea that data is now about the world’s most valuable resource, but would suggest that it is more like uranium. It has power and energy, but too much of it can be potentially explosive. Indeed, thinking about data as if it were like uranium, might be a good way to approach data protection.

Handling data

You would not expect your staff to handle uranium without caution or without the right protective gear. Nobody treats nuclear fuels the way that Homer Simpson does! Likewise, you need to educate your staff to handle data with equal care and need to equip them with the tools that they need to do so. 

Numerous studies have found that the greatest data protection threat to a business is the one that walks out of the business at the end of each day – your staff. The insider threat, as it is known, outweighs all others.

If your staff was handling nuclear fuel, you’d expect them to do so with the utmost care. But with data, even after extensive education and training programs, the temptation can be to take short cuts or overlook the proper procedures. For this reason, ease of use (making it as easy to do the right thing as it is to do anything else) is as important in security terms as functionality.

The problem is that the cybersecurity arena is exceedingly fragmented, and we are typically expected to understand how to use a number of different tools.

Thankfully, organisations like Lenovo are focusing on exactly this challenge, bringing a selection of best-of-breed security tools from the likes of Intel and Microsoft together into a single integrated portfolio called ThinkShield and making it easy to use.

Unfortunately, the reality is that you can’t always trust users to know the right thing to do. Nor can you oversee their every move. But with ThinkShield, you not only get comprehensive and customisable end-to-end IT security that you can trust to significantly reduce the risk of being compromised, but it’s also in a package that is easy for users to understand and use. It means less business interruption for your staff and less work for your IT admins.

Data concentration

Much of the focus in The Economist was on how much data certain players were collecting and the risks that go with this. It argued that new antitrust rules were needed to address the concentration of data and of power in the hands of a few giant players. 

Again, this makes data far more like uranium than oil – after all nuclear fuels are relatively safe in small quantities. It is only once you have a critical mass that it becomes potentially explosive.

In a recent interview, Edward Snowden suggested that GDPR had been a step in the right direction, but that the real threat came not from data protection, but from data concentration.
Elizabeth Warren’s threats to break up some of the tech giants may never happen, but further regulation both in the EU and the US is most likely and will focus on ensuring nuclear safety in the digital economy.

Cyber response

Anyone in the nuclear industry will be familiar with scenario planning and simulation exercises. They run regular drills to train staff on how to deal with catastrophes such as leakage of nuclear waste. Few firms realise that GDPR mandates the need for “a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organisational measures for ensuring the security of the processing.” In other words, if you don’t run do scenario planning or run simulation exercises to test how you’d respond to a data breach, then you’re not GDPR compliant.

Obviously, most organisations have in-house information security teams, just as they have legal and PR teams, but when a breach does occur your in-house teams are going to need help – they’re unlikely to have the specialist skills to deal with everything. As a result it is best to work with specialists – my latest venture, The Crisis Team, is a good example – that work alongside your internal teams offering world-leading expertise. After all, when things get serious, you don’t want the B team.

It is also worth including letting these experts support your scenario planning and simulation exercises. It will leverage their expertise and ensure that you develop a mutual understanding and are able to practice working together – something that will come in handy if or when the worst does occur.

Considering all of this, maybe treating your data as if it is toxic, and as if it were uranium, might be a good approach. 

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.