24th May 2012
With customers taking charge of their retail experience and seeking the convenience of channel-agnostic shopping, to build and sustain customer loyalty in a tough economic environment, retailers must transform their siloed operations into a multi-channel set-up, as Associate VP for Retail at Infosys, Ramanan Ramakrishna explains.
We’re happy to announce general availability of Intel Cloud SSO IAM-as-a-service today after running it in private beta mode for 2 months with select customers. See press release here. Intel has partnered with Salesforce to develop and run this application … Continue reading
The Cloud comes in many flavors, types and shapes and the terminology can be daunting. You’ve got Public vs. Private. vs. Home grown. You’ve got compute, storage and database not to mention identity, caching, service bus and many more. Then there are the several players including Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, Force, and too many others to list them all
Healthcare data security has been around for a long time, but as cloud computing gains more and more traction, healthcare providers as well as healthcare software vendors, would like to use the cloud advantages and migrate healthcare data, or run healthcare software from a cloud infrastructure. In this blog I’ll focus on specific cloud computing healthcare security concerns and how cloud encryption can help meeting regulatory requirements.
The first step to securing healthcare data is to identify the type of healthcare information and the appropriate cloud storage for it. Visual healthcare data is mainly comprised of large media files such as x-ray, radiology, CT scans, and other types of video and imaging. Such files are often stored in distributed storage, such as Amazon Web Services S3 (Simple Storage Service), or Microsoft Azure blobs. Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as patient records, is often stored in a relational database as structured data.
Technologies that make buildings smarter and more energy efficient continue to evolve at a rapid pace, with new entrants and solutions announced every week. Many of the new products and services center on the big data that buildings produce in real time. Buildings have been producing volumes of information for many years, but today, according to a new white paper from Pike Research, many companies are starting to leverage the cloud as the basis for rich software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
Virtually every leading name in the building services industry has recently launched some form of building energy management system that hosts and manages building data in the cloud, the cleantech market intelligence firm finds. The white paper, which includes 10 key trends to watch in the smart building market in 2012 and beyond, is available for free download on Pike Research’s website.
HP said Wednesday that it would lay off 8% of workforce, 27,000 people,
by October or 2014.
It figures the move will save it $3 billion-$3.5 billion and expects to re-
invest the money in cloud, security and Big Data.
Many see the terms risk and threat as interchangeable. However in the simplest of terms, risk the probability or frequency of doing harm while threat is the actual or attempted infliction of that harm. Tomato, tomahto? It’s all about keeping your IT assets protected, right?
I was chatting with an IT professional about the benefits of cloud-based security and he kept referring to a recent risk assessment he performed. (And if you haven’t done this lately, you should) But what got the gears in my head turning is how interchangeably he used the terms “risk” and “threat.”
Now on the surface they seem like the same component of security management. I tend to disagree. In its simplest of terms, risk the probability or frequency of doing harm while threat is the actual or attempted infliction of that harm. Tomato, tomahto? Splitting hairs? It’s all about keeping your IT assets protected, right?
Here are the Tau Index Omega leaders as of late 2011. I’m looking forward to see how things change in the results I’ll present at Cloud Expo.
Tau Index Omega – Global Top 25
1. South Korea
2. Bulgaria
3. Ukraine
4. Lithuania
5. Romania
6. Hungary
7. Vietnam
8. Estonia
9. Czech Republic
10. Sweden
11. Hong Kong
12. Poland
13. Latvia
14. Bangladesh
15. Slovakia
16. Malaysia
17. United Kingdom
18. Singapore
19. Netherlands
20. Morocco
21. Egypt
22. Canada
23. Russia
24. China
25. Slovenia
Notes
I don’t have sufficient information to include Taiwan in my research. I think this nation would finish near the top of the rankings.
The United States finishes 33rd in the ranking, among 82 countries researched
Regional Leaders
Africa
1. Senegal
2. South Africa
3. Kenya
4. Cameroon
5. Nigeria
Americas
1. Canada
2. Honduras
3. United States
4. Mexico
5. Chile
Asia
1. South Korea
2. Vietnam
3. Hong Kong
4. Bangladesh
5. Malaysia
Central/Eastern Europe
1. Bulgaria
2. Ukraine
3. Lithuania
4. Romania
5. Hungary
Western Europe
1. Sweden
2. United Kingdom
3. Netherlands
4. Germany
5. Finland
Middle East/North Africa
1. Morocco
2. Eqypt
3. Israel
4. Saudi Arabia
5. Turkey
By Income
Developed Tier A – Per Capita Income US$29K+
(22 countries in group)
1. Sweden
2. United Kingdom
3. Singapore
4. Netherlands
5. Canada
6. Germany
7. Japan
8. Finland
9. Denmark
10. United States
Developed Tier B – PCI $17K-29K
(7 countries in group)
1. South Korea
2. Czech Republic
3. Hong Kong
4. Slovenia
5. Portugal
Developing Tier A – PCI $7K-17K
(18 countries in group)
1. Lithuania
2. Romania
3. Hungary
4. Estonia
5. Poland
6. Latvia
7. Slovakia
8. Russia
9. Saudi Arabia
10. Turkey
Developing Tier B – PCI $3K-7K
(18 countries in group)
1. Bulgaria
2. Malaysia
3. Egypt
4. China
5. Thailand
6. Tunisia
7. Costa Rica
8. South Africa
9. Jordan
10. Panama
Developing Tier C – PCI <$3K (17 countries in group) 1. Ukraine 2. Vietnam 3. Bangladesh 4. Morocco 5. Honduras 6. Senegal 7. Pakistan 8. India 9. Kenya 10. Philippines
As Cloud Expo in New York approaches, I’m working to update my Tau Index country rankings. The index integrates economic data with national ICT expenditures, Internet access and speeds, and societal factors.
I’ve created a “raw” index that simply measures the amount of ICT purchased on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis that accounts for the local cost-of-living in the 82 countries I was able to research. In addition to an overall Top 25 list, I’ve created smaller lists of regional leaders and leaders by income category.
Then I’ve created a more nuanced, “Omega” list that incorporates the technology and societal factors. All of the underlying information is publicly available – from organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations, and the International Telecommunications Union – but the weighting is done with a proprietary algorithm intended to smooth out the raw data’s rough edges and to reflect the “street-level” reality of these countries.
The purpose of this research is to derive a ranking system that provides a more level view of the nations of the world. So many rankings I see are absolute, and simply show rich nations on top, poor countries on the bottom, and a bunch of developing nations in the middle. This is not a criticism, as I use a lot of this information as the foundation of my relative calculations. My purpose is to derive something that’s unique and refreshing.
What Does It Mean?
A high listing in the Omega index most likely indicates that the nation is progressing quickly and relatively smoothly toward strong economic growth, fueld by ICT productivity. A high listing in some of the regional and income-tier groups may also indicate some societal turbulenc, given the often-disruptive power of information technology.
The Tau Index is certainly not meant to find the “best” nations when it comes to their ICT expenditures. It does have an implication that all of the leading nations are on a trajectory for rapid economic advancement, for good and bad.
The laggards on the list have a few of today’s popular countries – Brazil and Indonesia, for example. My take is that the blooms will soon be off of these roses if they don’t turn more toward the sunshine and energy of ICT.
Many of the other laggards are also economic laggards, and should be considered countries of opportunity, in my opinion. Some of the very lowest rankings I’ve discovered belong to intriguing countries that could quickly turn things around with whatever change is necessary to make them more aggressive ICT deployers – Venezuela, Paraguay, Libya, Serbia, to list a few examples.
Coming to Cloud Expo
I’ve conducted all of this research with the assistance of Cloud Computing Journal and Computerworld Philippines.
I don’t expect wholesale changes to the results that I’ll present at Cloud Expo, although I do expect some nations to move up and down. The Tau Index measures societal torque, and by extension, volatility. The Index’s leaders, particularly among developing nations, are very dynamic, even combustile places. They are the ideal places for individuals and companies who like to roll the dice a bit and are seeking (or validating) sources, locations, partnerships, and investments.
The Index’s leaders among developed nations would appear to be the most dynamic, yet stable, nations within a sometimes unstable developed world.
I wrote about the leaders of the raw Tau Index in October. Here are those results.
Then here are the Tau Index Omega leaders as of late 2011. I’m looking forward to see how things change in the results I’ll present at Cloud Expo.
Grid Dynamics, an eCommerce technology solutions company, and GridGain Systems, makers of an open source in-memory platform for Big Data processing, on Wednesday announced the expansion of their partnership which began in 2008.
Grid Dynamics provides personalization and big data solutions for large-scale eCommerce companies, GridGain’s Java based open source middleware platform allows organizations to perform real time processing and analytics on live big data.