By Kenneth N Rashbaum Esq. and Jason M. Tenenbaum of Barton, LLP.

This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. Any legal information provided in this post should not be relied upon as legal advice. It is not intended to create, and does not create, an attorney-client relationship and readers should not act upon the information presented without first seeking legal counsel.

Following Superstorm Sandy in October, 2012, many lawyers in Downtown Manhattan found that they could not get to their offices.  Those attorneys with paper-based practices, or those whose IT was housed within the four walls of their law offices, were, in many cases, unable to provide billable services to their clients for several days or even weeks. 

Those firms with data in the cloud, though, were able to work unimpeded (that is, if they had an Internet connection) and sustained far less loss of revenue in …

I was asked by Mr. Peter Hastings (NH DoIT Commissioner) to document the benefits and activities behind the Standardization and Centralization Initiative (SACI). This initiative concerns the standardization of the software configuration management tool, defect tracking tool and standardizing production compiles across the enterprise of state government. In addition this includes the storage of assets for disaster recovery purposes, securing and controlling state source data assets, intellectual property and mission-critical data assets across the enterprise of state government.
This article will cover how the State of NH is working to save money in efficiencies related to standardizing and centralizing state data assets. Every state wants to save money for its citizens and stakeholders but saving money in state government can be a very challenging task. The fact that every agency in state government is basically its own separate entity makes this even more difficult. Initiatives of this size and scope can be complicated to implement if agencies don’t understand the value and don’t feel the need to cooperate or collaborate to achieve success and understand that the savings is in their best interest. In today’s economy no one wants to spend any money to achieve any savings to begin with because they don’t have the money to make any capital investments.

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This article explores how to detect fraud among online banking customers in real-time by running an ensemble of statistical and machine learning algorithms on a dataset of customer transactions and demographic data. The algorithms, namely Logistic Regression, Self-Organizing Maps and Support Vector Machines, are operationalized using a multi-agent framework for real-time data analysis. This article also explores the cloud environment for real-time analytics by deploying the agent framework in a cloud environment that meets computational demands by letting users’ provision virtual machines within managed data centers, freeing them from the worry of acquiring and setting up new hardware and networks.
Real-time decision making is becoming increasingly valuable with the advancement of data collection and analytics techniques. Due to the increase in the speed of processing, the classical data warehousing model is moving toward a real-time model. A platform that enables the rapid development and deployment of applications, reducing the lag between data acquisition and actionable insight has become of paramount importance in the corporate world.

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IndependenceIT has announced it has been featured by 451 Research in a new Impact Report titled, “IndependenceIT Gains Momentum with its Private Label Desktop-as-a-Service Platform.” In the report, the company’s Cloud Workspace Suite platform was noted for built-in multi-tenancy, its own global service broker, simple interface, the elimination of complex management tasks, and a service provider delivery model with cloud/hypervisor agnostic deployment.
The June 2014 report examines Cloud Workspace Suite, a complete cloud-based application and desktop-as-a-service enablement platform, giving IT professionals unprecedented ease of deployment and management. Beyond the ordinary virtual desktop, CWS provides an integrated online experience that incorporates business applications and corporate file systems into a single interface using a full-featured Microsoft Windows desktop from anywhere and on any device. Organizations retain complete control, security and compliance oversight through an intuitive browser-based management system that increases service quality and improves responsiveness for lower help desk support costs.

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A study of 1358 respondents have shown a dramatic rise in cloud adoption over the past few years. North Bridge Venture Partners, in partnership with GigaOm Research have published the results of the 2014 Future Of Cloud Computing Survey – according to this report, SaaS adoption has grown five-fold since the 2011 to 74% today. PaaS, on the other hand, has seen an even higher rate of growth; a six-fold increase over the past four years to 41%.

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VASCO Data Security International, Inc., announced it has sold its 200 millionth DIGIPASS authenticator. The milestone follows the company’s recent announcement of record order intake in Q1 of 2014.
“Global criminal hacking organizations pose a growing threat to our banking and enterprise customers as attacks become more frequent and utilize more sophisticated methods,” stated Jan Valcke, President and COO of VASCO. “Our next generation solutions are remarkably innovative with features such as intelligent decision engines and high-resolution QR codes to keep the user experience very friendly as we integrate more powerful security protections.”

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A converged infrastructure should incorporate a release certification matrix that validates all of the patches, maintenance and upgrades of all of the product’s components throughout its lifecycle.
Many public sector organisations are not changing their ICT legacy systems. As a result, they face increasing number of inefficiencies and challenges. These issues can nevertheless be overcome, and performance increased, by managing these legacy systems within a converged infrastructural environment. This approach can also reduce the risks associated with legacy systems, such as security, missing functionality, increased complexity and operational expenditure

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A world built on cloud is a world that is dependent upon the availability of the datacenter. If cloud services are unavailable for any amount of time, the cost to the cloud provider and the business ventures running within the cloud can become astronomical. In fact, an outage and loss of data contributed to cloud based CodeSpaces.com becoming recently defunct.

When Amazon.com went down for just under an hour in 2013, Amazon’s bottom line was hurt by over 4 million dollars. What would happen if your cloud went down for any amount of time? Do you know how much money your company would lose? More importantly, have you reviewed your cloud providers SLA to ensure you feel comfortable with the terms presented to you?

Microsoft’s statistics show that about 50% of organizations “Believe that data accounts for up to 75 per cent of their total value …

A survey of more than 250 IT professionals from cloud storage provider TwinStrata has found that more than half of organisations have at least half their data as inactive, taking up valuable storage space.

The report defines inactive or passive data as data which has been untouched for 60 days, and found that 56% of those polled had more than half their data inactive. A quarter (22%) of respondents added that three quarters of their stored data was inactive.

Digging down further into the survey data the researchers found that 59% of companies who stored more than a petabyte of data had more than half of that data inactive – a slight increase. “Given the rate at which data creation overall has increased, we expect these numbers to grow,” the report notes.

There were other interesting findings in the report. Storage area networks (SAN) are the most popular places to store …

The industry is heated with debates on whether adopting private or public cloud is the smartest, best, cheapest, you name it choice. But this debate is missing the mark. Businesses shouldn’t be discussing public vs. private, but rather how can they make the two work together to their greatest advantage. The ideal is to merge on-premise and off-premise into a seamless environment that can be managed as a single entity – a forward-looking stance that will eventually see major adoption. But as of late 2013, hybrid cloud was still “rare,” noted Gartner analyst Tom Bittman.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will discuss how public clouds need on-premise satellites to win and, conversely, how on-premise environments cannot be really powerful unless they are connected to the public cloud. It’s not two competing worlds; it’s two dimensions of the same world.

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