Teridion, an Israeli-American based cloud networking company, has got a new CEO. Saar Gillai, the former vice-president of Hewlett Packard enterprises has taken over the reins of this company to put it on the past of fast growth.

Teridion is a company that aims to create fast lanes for content to move from cloud providers like Box top their end users. In many ways, this company’s software acts as a traffic cop that direct users through the best possible route to reach the destination.

Let’s say, a user requests content from Box, but one of the nodes in the network is down. Instead of delaying the availability of data to customers, Teridion’s software routes it through other nodes, so the user doesn’t even know something is amiss. It’s not just when a node is down, even during normal transmissions, this software finds the best possible route to ensure that the content reaches users quickly.

Teridion claims that it can increase network speed by ten times, thereby offering high availability and on-demand services to customers. Also, there is zero capital expenditure involved in this process, as everything is controlled by Teridion’s software.

This four year old company helps SaaS customers to have a congestion-free and latency-ridden performance. As Internet traffic grows, it is difficult to continuously build out hardware and infrastructure as both are expensive and time-consuming. This is why Teridion came up with this unique idea to create a software that will manage congestion, without any capital expenditure for clients.

So far, this idea seems to have caught on well with customers in the tech world. Teridion’s revenue has grown manifold over the last four years and now, it is all geared to move on to the next level of growth and performance.

To help Teridion to leap to this next level, this San Francisco-based company has hired Gillai because of his in-depth knowledge in networking. He had worked in Cisco from 1998 to 2005 after which he joined a company called 3Com, a Cisco rival that was eventually acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2010. He continued with HPE in the role of a senior vice-president until last year. With more than 20 years of innovative experience and knowledge, the Teridion Board believes that he is the right person to head this company at this juncture. Gillai, replaces Chris Keene, who held this position for one year.

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This is not your typical hacking incident when a hacker enters the network of a cloud provider to take the sensitive data of millions of customers and sell them on the dark web for millions of dollars.

This is a rather bizarre case where hackers compromised the powerful AWS cloud network to mine the crypto currency bitcoin!

According to a report from RedLock, the hackers wanted a computer to mine bitcoins. In the process, they realized that the admin consoles of AWS cloud servers are not password protected. As a result, two major companies, namely Aviva and Gemalto, were affected. It is not known whether data was stolen and how many customers were affected. So far, Amazon, Aviva and Gemalto have not come forth to give any statements in this regard.

But overall, this is an interesting and worrying trend, especially if hackers want to use different tools to hack into a system just to use it for mining a cryptocurrency. If you’re wondering why this is worrying, it’s simply because mining bitcoins is super energy intensive and could be extremely costly in terms of electricity costs. When someone wants to mine these coins, they could spend a lot of money on utility costs. To avoid this, they hack into powerful servers and use the resources of these servers.

Why this is alarming is because it can affect cloud companies without their knowledge. While hacking will also affect them, this is a completely different kind of crime that can go unnoticed. When the utility costs go up by a few thousand dollars, it won’t even be so obvious to the company. But at the same time, hackers are exploiting a vulnerability for which customers or the company itself is paying the price.

In fact, this bitcoin mining is spreading faster than you may think. Many bitcoin miners are coming together to form groups to share the costs that come with it. These miners put together complex algorithms to find the best computers to mine and that’s probably how a few reached AWS in the first place.

As of October 7th, bitcons were worth about $4,300 each and this mining can happen until there are 21 million bitcoins available on the Internet. But, mining becomes difficult as years pass because almost every technique is explored and exhausted.

In this scenario, the big question is how are companies going to protect their assets not just from hackers, but also from bitcoin miners?

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Dropbox has come up with a new design that’s colorful, vibrant and definitely more attractive than the current design of white and blue. The logo has also undergone a change and it’s a lot flatter than before. As a result, the logo looks like it’s inside a plane rather than a box, and it is hands down cool and elegant.

This is the first time that Dropbox has redesigned over the last decade. If you look at the design of Dropbox’s competitors such as Box, iDrive and the like, you’ll notice that all of them are plain and predictable. Probably, Dropbox wanted to stand out amongst its competitors and this is a way to do it. The redesigned Dropbox looks absolutely wonderful when compared to its competitors.

Another possible reason could be that Dropbox wants to appeal to the younger generation as a cool app to use. In fact, the new typeface called Sharp Grotesk is well-liked by the millennials, so that could be a reason for the redesign.

An official statement from Dropbox also affirms to this idea that it wants to stay ahead of its competitors and maybe even create a strong impression and brand image in the minds of its customers.

In addition, Dropbox wants to establish itself as a tool to bring together teams and ideas, rather than just a place to store files. For this new outlook, Dropbox needed a brand new design.

In many ways, the new design is an ode to the creativity of its designers as it is both expressive, playful and at the same time, comes with rich images and vibrant colors.

However, besides the logo, the rest of the web and app user-interface is the same; the standard white with blue and gray accents. This may change over time, but for now, the new colors seem to be more on advertising and marketing campaigns than the actual user-interface. ALready, Dropbox has put up posters and hoardings on many major cities to project itself as a hipster brand that helps everyone to store and sync files.

Let’s see if this marketing and designing strategy gives Dropbox the edge it needs in the competitive file sharing market.

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Oracle has been trying to get its act together and move on a path of technology and innovation that will make it a leader in the coming years. To this end, it has implemented many strategic changes and has been successful in a big way. The latest such strategy is to move into the blockchain bandwagon.

If you’ve never heard of blockchain, that’s the latest technology that could transform the Internet as we know it today. Invented by an individual or a group of ingenious developers, this technology allows digital information to be distributed, but not copied. You can imagine this to be a distributed database that is duplicated millions of times across different networks.

The obvious advantage of blockchain is that the information is automatically reconciled across all networks, so a single change is updated everywhere. Also, all records contained in blockchain are public and verifiable, which means, it allows greater transparency and security. Since there is no centralized database or repository, no single hacker can hack the information it contains.

In some ways, it is an Internet that comes with a built-in robustness to adapt based on the existing situation. To top it, this technology has no single point of failure. Probably the best implementation of blockchain technology is bitcoins, that could become the defacto standard of transaction if more people and companies start adopting it.

So, what’s Oracle doing with this technology?

Oracle has created its own blockchain service on top of an open source platform called Hyperledger. This is the second company after IBM to use the Hyperledger fabric project to create a robust blockchain technology.

Using this technology, Oracle plans to offer a wide range of cloud services that come with better flexibility and resilience when compared to existing services offered by its competitors such as AWS, Microsoft and Google. In a way, this is Oracle’s way of catching up with companies that have a lead in the cloud market because of their early foray into it.

Though blockchain sounds promising, it all boils down to how well it is adopted and implemented. Though oracle has jumped on the blockchain bandwagon, it’s hard to predict how it will eventually play out for the company.

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It’s not just businesses that are moving to the cloud, but almost every organization across all spheres of work are looking to make the most of what cloud computing offers. In fact, school districts are increasingly moving to the cloud as it helps them to make the best use of their resources, not to mention the improved connectivity and better reach that comes with it. The latest school district to make this transition is the Michigan school district.

More than a dozen schools in the southwestern Michigan are undergoing a transition to the cloud, so the district could thousands of dollars in a single year. At a time when budget crunches are impacting the way education is imparted to children, this move could potentially improve the facilities and maybe even bring in more qualified teachers to give a great learning experience to the children in these districts.

The best part about this transition is that most teachers and students don’t even know that the underlying infrastructure is being upgraded – that’s really how smooth it is.

Much of this easy transition can be attributed to the fact that the Michigan school district is moving only one application at one time. For example, Moodle, the learning system used by the schools in Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency (KRESA), was one of the first applications to be moved to the cloud.

With the successful transition of this application, the others are likely to follow soon. The entire move is handled by Southwest MiTech, an IT consortium that handles all tech related work in schools located in the Kalamazoo area. This consortium handles everything from purchasing computers to deciding on infrastructural changes. Currently, it provides support to 12 schools and four charter school in this area.

For this transition, the Michigan School District has decided to go ahead with AWS. Though the infrastructure manager of Southwest MiTech is a fan of Microsoft’s products, he still chose AWS over Azure because of a combination of advanced infrastructure, features and availability.

So far, they have completed about 15 percent of the transition, but the consortium and the Michigan School District expect the rest of the transition to be smooth as well. In an interview, the consortium opined that it is the initial start that’s tough because of the potential hiccups that can arise. So, they wanted to start small and take cautious steps. But now that the initial transition is done., we can expect the rest of the transition to speed up.

Overall, this is a sensible move by the Michigan school district and we hope that more such school districts take a proactive approach to move their applications to the cloud, so it can benefit everyone, especially the young children.

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Breaches have become more common than we like, and it affects almost every one of us when it happens at a major credit bureau. Yes, Equifax, one of the three largest credit bureaus in the U.S was hacked.

It is estimated that more than 143 million people have been affected by this breach, and this is almost half the U.S population. Since Equifax stores ultra-sensitive information like your social security numbers and date of births, this loss can be significant for you and for the nation as a whole.

Besides the social security numbers of 143 million, it is believed that the credit card details of more than 209,000 consumers and the credit dispute documents of another 182,000 are also stolen. The company has refused to give the number of drivers licenses that was exposed during this hack.

This breach was believed to have started in May and has continued until late July, according to a press release from the company. Hackers had stolen the data of millions of people through a website application vulnerability that had been present in Equifax, but remained unnoticed for a long time.

Equifax has declined to comment on the type of data that was hacked and what it plans to do to curtail the damage.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing much that Equifax can do about the stolen data. Since this was happening over a period of two months, much of this data would have been sold in the dark web world for thousands or maybe even millions of dollars.

The dark web is a network of hackers and miscreants who want to get such sensitive data, so they can manipulate it and use it for their own benefit. Going by this understanding, the social security numbers are one of the most coveted information as they can be misused for maximum gain. There’s always a possibility for these numbers to have been misused by now, so the damage is going to be fairly extensive.

But what Equifax can do is limit the damage and ensure that no more data is stolen through this vulnerability or anything else that may exist in its system.

This is sure to bring up a personal question – will I be affected? Most likely yes, unless you’re one of the lucky few.

What can you do?

For starters, enroll in Equifax’s identity protection program. Though it isn’t the greatest option, it’s still good as you get access to almost every available resource to protect your identity.  If you’re the lucky person and you were not affected, still you get access to a free one-year subscription in this program.

Also, request for a credit report to see if there are any suspicious entries in it. The federal government ensures that every person gets a three free annual reports every year from one of the three credit bureaus. So, make use of it.

If you notice any suspicious activity, reach out to the concerned bank or credit card authority and report a case of fraud.

Even if your report is clean, be vigilant and take measures to protect your credit.

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CloudCherry, a provider of customer service experience software, has integrated itself with the service cloud and marketing cloud of Salesforce, in order to gather more insights into the customer behavior of its clients.

CloudCherry currently provides 17 unique channels for its clients to gather data from customers in real-time. Its software ensures that the data that’s collected is relevant and contextual, so in this sense, it filters out all the noise and unwanted information. The feedback collected from these channels is then routed towards customer center operations of the client company.

With this new integration with Salesforce Cloud, CloudCherry is in a better position to handle customer issues and even drive up the overall customer satisfaction levels. Salesforce’s CRM platform, in general, helps companies to learn more about their customers. It answers questions like who your customers are, what they do, how much do they spend on your products, and more. Putting both these platforms together, companies can glean a ton of information about their customers, that in turn, can help them to make better decisions with regard to their products as well as their customers.

For example, let’s say a dissatisfied customer calls the company’s contact center. If this call is routed to a regular customer support executive, his issue may or may not get resolved early. In turn, this can increase his frustration, especially if the problem is not resolved.

To avoid such a situation, CloudCherry can route the calls of such dissatisfied customers to a team of customer support agents who are specialized in handling such high priority calls from dissatisfied customers. The chances for this team to resolve the issue is fairly high. In turn, the customer can change his impression about the company.

Overall, you can change a customer’s negative experience into a positive one with the right customer support. And that’s exactly what CloudCherry and Salesforce can do for you.

In addition to customer support, the coming together of both these companies can help clients with marketing too. Currently, mass marketing campaigns are sent to all the customers on the database. Unfortunately, this leads to a low conversion rate.

On the other hand, if you can send a marketing campaign to a specific set of targeted users who you know will try to make the most of it, then you’re conversion rate is high. However, to know which customers are right for a specific marketing campaign, you need the software of both these companies.

In all, this integration is sure to augur well not just for CloudCherry and Salesforce, but also for the customers at large as they can better use the data to create better upselling opportunities and to improve the way the customer support team handles customers.

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What’s the first thought that comes to your mind when you think of cloud migration? Cost? Infrastructure? How about training?

Well, one of the most overlooked aspects of cloud migration is training. In fact, it’s more relevant to small businesses than large enterprises because they’re the ones that operate with limited resources.

According to Maria Roat, an administrator at the U.S Small Business Administration, finding knowledgeable trainers to train workers is one of the biggest challenge faced by small businesses that want to move to the cloud. Since cloud is a relatively new technology, not many people are familiar with how it works and other aspects. In turn, this means, they need trainers.

Due to the same reason, not many people are well-versed with cloud, so they’re unable to train others. This makes it a vicious circle that’s impacting hundreds of businesses, and is sometimes, even acting as a hindrance to a smooth cloud migration.

A research shows that this lack of training is making it difficult for small companies to make the most of the benefits offered by cloud, as they don’t have the confidence for cloud migration.

To help small businesses get around this problems, the SBA is offering to train people in cloud. Ranging from training in-house and getting them familiar to certificates, the SBA has started providing free training in many cities. They even have a combination of formal and informal training programs to help employees learn through formal channels as well as from their peers. All these efforts are being taken to make cloud training more pervasive and accessible to anyone who might benefit from it.

However, the SBA’s budget is not large enough to cover every city and every individual who is interested in learning about cloud. This is why it has been encouraging universities to offer cloud as a course.

Taking cue from these efforts from SBA, some universities like the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has started offering programs in cloud. This university has started a new Master’s program in cloud architecture and management, and so far, the response has been fairly good, according to university sources.

This program requires six six-credit courses and can be completed within two years when students do part-time. The cost is also fairly nominal, as it is priced at $16,500 for Maryland residents and a little less than $18,000 for employees of the federal government including their spouses and dependents, provided they go through the College Alliance Program.

Let’s hope more universities will soon join the bandwagon and provide more cloud courses at affordable rates, so the economy as a whole can benefit from this knowledge.

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VMware’s partnership with AWS has truly been a game-changer for the company and has ushered in a new era of hybrid cloud, so as to speak.

In many ways, VMware now sees itself as a bridge in hybrid cloud deployments, and its latest cloud strategy also revolves around this thought. In VMworld 2017, the CEO, Pat Gelsinger made a slew of announcements. Here’s a look at some of them.

New security product

VMware has announced an expanded set of products and services that’ll help customers to connect, manage, and secure applications spanning all their devices and cloud storage. These products are expected to reduce operational complexities and challenges when customers have to work across different cloud providers.

More partnerships

After taking the first step with AWS, VMware has now decided to partner with other cloud giants like Google. In fact, the CEO announced that the company will be partnering with Pivotal and Google to create a new service called Pivotal Container Service (PKS). This service is expected to provide network and security provisioning with VMware and NSX.

New version of vSphere

During this conference, VMware launched a new version of vSphere platform that’s tailored specifically for big data and high performance computing, in addition to hyper converged infrastructure. This new version is likely to help businesses to virtualize their big data and other high computing workloads.

Improvements to VMware Workspace ONE

VMware’s Workspace ONE is going to see a ton of improvements over the coming months. It will have improved onboarding, app delivery and endpoint management, according to the announcements made during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

With all these offerings, it’s clear that VMware is increasingly seeing itself as a bridge between private and public clouds, and in the process, it is also acquiring new technologies such as containers and OpenStack. Its partnership with companies like Google also is expected to boost its customer base, as its customers will have more options to choose from.

Overall, Gelsinger sees VMware’s role to be a company that can clean up any kind of messy technological footprint, whether it’s bad choice of apps or infrastructure, or even an incompatible set of software and hardware components.

This strategy has worked well for VMware as it produced stellar results during the last quarter. These results are only going to get better as VMware has placed itself in a strategic niche within the cloud market.

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Western Digital is a big name in the world of physical data storage. Headquartered in the city of San Jose in California, it is one of the largest hard drive manufacturers in the world.

Recently, this company announced that it is buying a firm called Upthere to enter the world of cloud storage. Upthere specializes in apps that sync files and folders across many devices. Founded in 2011, this company made its apps available to the public only by 2015. After that, there hasn’t been much activity which suggests that the apps did not get a good response from the market.

By 2015, companies like Dropbox and Tresorit have established themselves as good cloud storage options and all of them offer this sync feature. That could possibly explain why Upthere’s apps did not take off well.

To make up for it, Upthere decided to include a search feature, but that wasn’t effective either because Google and Apple have some of the advanced search features that’ll make it easy to find files. Why do we need an app for this when the same service is offered for free? So, that pitch didn’t help either.

Considering these aspects, this buy out was probably the best way forward for Upthere. At this point, it looks like Upthere will continue its operations under Western Digital, so the chances for lay-offs will be fairly less.

From Western Digital’s perspective, is this really a good move? How is it going to integrate cloud with its physical hard drive business and even if it does, how it take on competition head on? There has been no clear directions from Western Digital in this regard.

That said, Western Digital’s cloud business will be led by Barbara Nelson. She has an excellent entrepreneurial track record and was the Vice-President of a cloud security firm called IronKey before she joined Western Digital. She may be able to turn around business for this company and can even accelerate the entry of Western Digital into cloud storage.

Will all this really happen? Well, time is the answer. Let’s hope this acquisition really helps Western Digital to further its cloud ambitions.

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