Picture credit: Bob Mical/Flickr

It’s every CIO’s worst nightmare. Your employees are collaborating and getting stuff done, sharing files on cloud software. But what if a device was lost, or the files ended up in the wrong hands?

Meet Veradocs. The Mountain View based startup, until today operating in stealth, has announced a $14 million (£8.95m) round of funding despite not having a product, with the aim of “creating an entirely new way to secure and share information.”

The company was founded earlier this year by Ajay Arora and Prakash Linga, and has a plethora of admirers, including Battery Ventures, who led the funding round and whose partner Roger Lee has joined the Veradocs board, as well as Robin Daniels, former head of enterprise marketing at Box, who joins as chief marketing officer.

Using Veradocs, end users and IT can set policies for data and files, change policies in real time, and allow users to revoke access at any time – essentially a ‘kill switch’.

“In a world without walls, current offerings stop short at solving the issues around data security, and these issues now extend well beyond traditional highly regulated industries like financial services,” said CEO Arora. “With Veradocs, we are creating an entirely new way to secure and share information that gives IT strong levels of security while providing consumer-like user experience and choice.”

There are plenty of options for companies looking at storage, sync and share. From the likes of tech giants Google and Microsoft, to the traditional leaders Box and Dropbox – who recently announced a partnership with Redmond to improve its footprint in the enterprise space – there are lots of cards on the table. There are even solutions out there which put all your accounts together into one big cloud.

It’s all well and good for companies to have the data encrypted within those services, but if it travels anywhere else then the information may be at risk. With a product expected to be out in early 2015, Veradocs aims to change that.

CloudTech has reached out to Veradocs and will update accordingly.

Storing data of any kind on the cloud can be a risk, but there are ways to mitigate the risks. With such an abundance of cloud providers, there are plenty of options for you to choose from for security purposes. Finding a vendor that encrypts data in motion as well as data at rest is a wise move, making it safer to store information of all types in the cloud. Just make sure you’re aware of all the security measures a vendor takes, and you’ll make an informed choice.

read more

Microsoft Azure, a cloud platform, is rapidly expanding its scope to include newer enterprise class services. Some of the significant new additions are:
Azure Search: Azure Search Service is a fully managed, cloud-based service that allows developers to build rich search applications using REST APIs. It includes full-text search scoped over your content, plus advanced search behaviors similar to those found in commercial web search engines, such as type-ahead, suggested queries based on near matches, and faceted navigation.

read more

In the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more data processing done by processors and memory is being moved to distributed, low power nodes, and since we reduce the dynamic power required by these nodes, we will have a role to play in the design of these IoT nodes.
We produce products that enable substantial power reduction and consequent component area, BOM, and operational expense reduction in customer systems at the System, PCB, and IC levels of circuit integration. The CurrentRF products can be added to existing customer designs (no customer re-design needed) or at the time of initial design. The CurrentRF products can and should be used in conjunction with existing, standard power reduction techniques, in that they enhance, not interfere with, the said, existing standard power reduction techniques.

read more

HP analyzes its own vast data warehouses to derive new insights for its global operations, extensive supply chain, sales organization, global marketing groups, and customers.

read more

This week I had the good fortune of spending time in Lisbon, Portugal. I met with several hundred business men and women at a mobility event in Microsoft’s auditorium in Lisbon, at banks and with mobile network operators where we discussed digital transformation, enterprise mobility, IoT and mobile strategies. In preparation for these discussions I did some homework. Here is what I learned about Portuguese history and how it relates to digital transformation and enterprise mobility.
The Portuguese developed innovative sailing technologies and navigational skills in the 15th-century that enabled ocean-going ventures, where before most ships stayed within sight of land or took very short excursions. Portugal’s Vasco da Gama (among others), using these innovations and skills, sailed south and east and ultimately reached India in 1498.

read more

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

A report from CipherCloud and Gigaom Research has revealed while most companies are in the cloud, they’re still reticent about using it to develop enterprise applications.

According to the research, just less than half (44%) of respondents had already made cloud deployments, with only 14% saying it would take them more than a year to deploy. 83% of respondents said they had adopted public cloud. Yet only 21% of those surveyed said they were using the cloud as a platform to build enterprise apps.

It seems that while businesses are more than happy to espouse the virtues of the cloud, it’s only for the front end. At Apps World Europe last week John Finch, the CIO of the Bank of England, all but confirmed this at his organisation, although when you’re the central bank and have no real market competition, it’s probably better to be on the safe side.

Not surprisingly, security is the primary concern for companies moving into the cloud, being cited by 62% of those polled. App performance (44%), time to learn new skills (41%) and cost (39%) were also popular. Yet the polls changed dependent on whether you were a leading edge or mainstream buyer, most notably with security (46% leading edge buyers, 63% mainstream) and vendor lock-in (29% leading edge, 5% mainstream).

The report leads on to shadow IT as a natural issue if there’s cloudy software afoot. Shadow IT being what it is, often the IT department only hears about it through the grapevine, or worse, when something goes wrong and the rogue employee needs bailing out because of a security violation.

It further warns that a company just can’t rely on this method – data security must cut across a business’s organisational lines.  81% of line of business employees admitted to using unauthorised software as a service applications, with Dropbox, not surprisingly, the most popular choice.

The report concludes shadow IT is, in reality, “an expensive road disaster”, security needs to be implemented across the company and not just an IT bailout, and that the cloud is here to stay.

“The cloud is not going to replace IT,” the report concludes. “Instead, the cloud is simply another vehicle for which IT delivers services to users – and IT should use it appropriately.”

What do you make of the results? Are you developing enterprise apps in the cloud at your company?

Each of the G20 member countries outlined a Comprehensive Growth Strategy at the recent G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia. One of the more aggressive plans comes from Brazil, which has pledged to train 12 million young people in technical areas by 2018.

The program is called Pronatec, and is administered by the Ministries of Labor and Education jointly with local councils. The program has actually been in effect since 2011, already reaching 8 million students, according to the report. It targets an additional 4 million students over the next four years. Its cost was listed as more than US$6 billion.

Pronatec is focused on many technical areas, including manufacturing, the chemical industry, and construction. It is designed to complement other job training programs in Brazil, one of which has been in existence since 1991 and is focused on serving tens of millions of rural citizens.

The Overall Challenge
Brazil’s size and population ensure that its development challenges remain formidable. It land area is larger than that of the continental United States — its vast Amazon rain forest covers 40% of that area – and its population of more than 200 million is about two-thirds that of the US.

Our research at the Tau Institute shows the challenge facing Brazil to develop its ICT environment to be in the middle of the pack globally. It is roughly in the same boat with its regional sibling Mexico, and with Thailand a continent away.

Subjectively speaking, this result surprises me. I’ve been critical of Brazil’s standing within our rankings, thinking that given the vast attention its received as a BRIC nation and its foreign direct investment of more than $600 billion annually that it should perform even better.

Go For It
It’s heartening to see its long-running commitment to technical development. But we think the country would benefit further from explicit commitments to building its underlying ICT infrastructure, to improve such key metrics as Internet access rates and average connection speed.

If the country can increase its commitment to ICT more explicitly – and its G20 report listed a commitment to telco only of just $1.27 billion – perhaps the country will, in fact, emerge as a true economic giant some day. As of now, it ranks seventh in the world, slightly ahead of Russia and slightly behind the UK.

An aggressive, explicit commitment to ICT will, we believe, decrease the country’s still-high level of income disparity, and will increase its government transparency will increase, thus also lowering an accompanying perception of corruption.

There is a network effect to improving a nation’s ICT ecosystem, and Brazil could benefit more than any other nation in the Americas from a commitment to ICT that matches its commitment to technical education.

read more

Infrastructure has provided the path to increase commerce and trade for over 5,000 years. It has created trade routes by overcoming natural obstacles ranging from spanning rivers and gorges, to providing access by land (roads and railroads), sea (docks and ports) and air (airports) to places which we want to do business with.
Today, trade routes have become electronic. Broadband connectivity has created a new layer of infrastructure within the “Platform for Commerce.”
Many educational institutions lag behind offering solutions to what is needed to solve today’s, as well as tomorrow’s, business problems tied to infrastructure. Traditional approaches and curricula at these organizations provide answers that do not satisfy today’s questions. As I say in my book, “21st century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions.”

read more

In her General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing, at Verizon Enterprise, focused on finding the right mix of renting vs. buying Oracle capacity to scale to meet business demands, and offer validated Oracle database TCO models for Oracle development and testing environments.
Anne Plese is a marketing and technology enthusiast/realist with over 19+ years in high tech. At Verizon Enterprise, she focuses on driving growth for the Verizon Cloud platform globally. Previous to Verizon, Anne spent over 10 years with Cisco. There she was focused on growing Cisco’s global data center and cloud revenue, and boosting market awareness and affinity for Cisco data center solutions within the Enterprise and Commercial market segments.

read more