Small criminals are predictable, at least that’s what London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) are hoping. New software, developed by Accenture, pulls large amounts of data in-use by the police service and puts it through an advanced analytics engine to predict when criminals are likely to strike.

By analysing five years’ worth of data, it is hoped that an accurate prediction of when / if a criminal will re-offend can be made. The data was gathered over a four year period of monitoring gang members across 32 boroughs, and was subsequently compared to criminal acts conducted in the fifth year to see whether the software was accurate.

The engine itself looks at aspects of an individual’s record, including; geography, past offenses, and associations. The advanced software will even keep an eye on social media for inflammatory comments such as taunts of other gang members, or the organising of a crime itself.

Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch is requesting more information to be made public.

Accenture highlights the fact that police forces up and down the country are seeing funding cuts, and therefore experiencing problems with limited resources. The ability to effectively allocate such precious resources is important, and big data analysis helps to save on cost whilst ensuring the vital public service is unaffected.

In terms of public reception, this could be seen as invasive after Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations about mass surveillance. The public is more likely to be acceptant if the potential benefits are clear, but privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch is requesting more information to be made public about the initiative.

Although this is said to be the first time Accenture’s analytics have been used in the UK, the firm’s software has been used for similar reasons in Spain, and in Singapore where the company tested software which monitors the video feeds of crowds, traffic, and other events to alert the authorities to potential risks.

«It is clear that harnessing and analysing vast data sets may simplify the work of the police,» said European human rights group Statewatch earlier this year

«However, this in itself is not a justification for their use. There are all sorts of powers that could be given to law enforcement agencies, but which are not, due to the need to protect individual rights and the rule of law – effectiveness should never be the only yardstick by which law enforcement powers are assessed.

«The ends of crime detection, prevention and reduction cannot in themselves justify the means of indiscriminate data-gathering and processing.»

Should police be using data analytics to predict future offences? Let us know in the comments.

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It’s official: IBM is going partnership mad. A couple of months after announcing a huge mobility collaboration with Apple, and only a week after inking a deal with Twitter for enterprise social analytics, Big Blue has announced a deal with Chinese Internet provider Tencent for cloud software.

The goal is to enable Chinese industries to provide public cloud with software as a service (SaaS), to utilise mobile, cloud computing and big data tools. It also gives IBM an interesting business angle in China.

“The industry dimension makes this especially appealing for businesses,” said Nancy Thomas, managing partner with IBM business consulting services in China. “IBM and Tencent’s shared vision is not only to bring the scale and cost benefits of cloud computing to enterprises in China, but to add differentiating value by serving the particular needs of specific industries.

“That is the key to unlocking the transformative power of cloud computing.”

China remains a very interesting market for cloud vendors to penetrate. CenturyLink, best known as a telco but weighing its options in the cloud space, offers a managed hosting facility in China, launched last month.

Similar to IBM CenturyLink is partnering up, this time going with Neusoft. Amazon Web Services launched a Chinese region in December last year, patterning with various local providers including ChinaNetCenter and SINNET.

A report released last year on the state of cloud computing in China found that “systematic” weaknesses in Chinese infrastructure were key to the region not fulfilling its potential as a cloud IT power. Amazon, CenturyLink and IBM among others have started partnering up and moving over – which can only be good news for Chinese IT.

Picture credit: Salesforce

It was first announced at the Salesforce1 World Tour back in May, but now Salesforce has finally launched its first UK data centre, with France and Germany on the hit list for the future.

“It sends a signal to the market about the seriousness and the strategic nature of this market to us,” commented Salesforce chief operating officer George Hu at the time. The announcement also sends out a signal about Salesforce’s strategy; the UK data centre will be fully powered by renewable energy, as well as the proposed French and German centres, supporting the firm’s sustainability goals.

“The opening of Salesforce’s first European data centre underscores our commitment to customers and partners in the UK,” said Andrew Lawson, Salesforce SVP for UK and Ireland.

“The new data centre will support the unprecedented growth we’ve seen in the region and further accelerates the adoption of cloud, social and mobile technologies, empowering UK companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.”

The big cloud vendors are moving towards European expansion. It’s the same path being taken by IBM. Back in July Big Blue announced a UK data centre from SoftLayer, with France and Germany also in the firm’s sights. Amazon Web Services also announced a new region in Germany last week.

Salesforce is going one step further to woo UK based customers, opening up an entire London base at the Heron Tower, near Liverpool Street.

The cloudy firm had aimed to call it the Salesforce Tower, but the proposal was nixed for now by the City of London Corporation. As Salesforce only rents six of the Tower’s 46 floors, opponents argue this isn’t a sufficient investment to warrant a whole name change.

Ixia develops amazing products so its customers can connect the world. Ixia helps its customers provide an always-on user experience through fast, secure delivery of dynamic connected technologies and services. Through actionable insights that accelerate and secure application and service delivery, Ixia’s customers benefit from faster time to market, optimized application performance and higher-quality deployments.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Gridstore™, the leader in software-defined storage (SDS) purpose-built for Windows Servers and Hyper-V, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Gridstore™ is the leader in software-defined storage purpose built for virtualization that is designed to accelerate applications in virtualized environments. Using its patented Server-Side Virtual Controller™ Technology (SVCT) to eliminate the I/O blender effect and accelerate applications Gridstore delivers vmOptimized™ Storage that self-optimizes to each application or VM across both virtual and physical environments. Leveraging a grid architecture, Gridstore delivers the first end-to-end storage QoS to ensure the most important App or VM performance is never compromised. The storage grid, that uses Gridstore’s performance optimized nodes or capacity optimized nodes, starts with as few as 3 nodes and then can grow one or more at a time to deliver a cost effective scale-as-you-grow solution. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA. its products and services are available through a global network of value-added resellers.

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Appcore aims to simplify private cloud through Apache CloudStack solutions. Nate Gordon serves as the Des Moines, IA-based company’s Director of Technology, in its effort to enhance Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform for its customers. We had a few questions for him, and this is what he told us:

Cloud Computing Journal: What have your customers found to be the advantages of using Apache CloudStack?

Nate Gordon: Appcore understands that there are a lot of orchestration platforms in the market to chose from. Before we committed to one platform or the other, we did an extensive analysis comparing architecture features, deployment process and technology roadmap. After this evaluation, Appcore chose to integrate our software solutions with Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform. A few of the advantages of the platform include:

1. Apache CloudStack is a complete platform, not a toolkit. It provides service providers all the components, right out of the box, that they need to deploy an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud.

2. Deploying an Apache CloudStack powered cloud is simple and straightforward compared to other orchestration platforms in the market. With only two components required for management, there are fewer possibilities for communication and configuration errors. Plus service providers don’t have to dedicate a large amount of hardware resources to the deployment.

3. Overall the Apache CloudStack project is organized in a unified direction as new product features are developed. The influence of the project is democratic, which is an important aspect of platform to our service providers customers. This allows them to influence the project, offer feature feedback and contribute to development.

These are just a few advantages of implementing Apache CloudStack over other orchestration platforms in the market. Our service provider customers value the simplicity, stability and scalability the Apache CloudStack platform provides.

CCJ: What are the key management challenges in using CloudStack that Appcore addresses?

Nate: Appcore is solely focused on the service provider market and continues to develop software that is feature rich to enhance IT administrators daily tasks. Appcore is a leading CloudStack solutions company focused on simplifying the complexity of cloud management. Our solutions include software, consulting and support to deliver enterprise-grade clouds tailored to your custom specifications.

Admin Centric Environment View
Appcore simplifies management by equipping service providers with an admin centric view of customer resources. These features provide several benefits including:

Easy access to all account resources
Complete view of all resources tied to a single virtual machine
Quick access to common troubleshooting actions

Metering & Billing
Appcore’s software solution, Appcore AMP, also includes integrated metering and billing for a fully productized cloud solution. Adding metering and billing functionality allows service providers the ability to charge for resources consumed by their enterprise customers.

Appcore’s software is pre-configured with WHMCS but is designed to integrate with other third-party billing solutions. Usage and metering data can also be imported into the service providers existing billing system to provide customers a single invoice.

Multi-cloud Deployments
Appcore’s latest software, Appcore Atlas, empowers service providers to deploy clouds in minutes. This multi-cloud solution integrates pre-configured standardized network, hypervisor and storage. It automates the configuration of private, on-premise and public clouds in 15 minutes.

Unified Authentication
Appcore Atlas also features unified authentication for single system sign-on. This provides a seamless transition between cloud systems for increased user efficiency. It allows the service provider to manage accounts across clouds with synchronized credentials. It also gives the mobility and integration for enhanced visibility into monitoring, orchestration and usage data.

CCJ: How have things evolved for Appcore throughout this year, and what do you expect your customers’ missions and goals to be in 2015 and beyond?

Nate: Appcore has evolved since being founded in 2008, and in this past year, we converted from delivering our product as a 2U cloud appliance to a software-only solution. This development occurred based on feedback from our service provider customers and prospects.

Our continuous involvement in the market revealed that most service providers already had hardware investments that they wished to implement as part of their cloud solution. Therefore implementing a software-only solution was just another way to simplify the complexity of cloud. For this reason Appcore released a software-only solution in May, 2014.

Heading into 2015 we anticipate that service providers will continue to look for solutions to simplify the management of cloud. The demand to deploy cloud for their enterprise customers will continue to increase and service providers will look for tools to deploy private, on-premise and public cloud environments. Service providers will continue to demand a reduction in the time it takes to deploy a cloud environment; instead of days, they will need to deploy cloud in minutes for the enterprise.

Service providers are currently yearning for unified cloud authentication so they no longer have to login to several systems to manage their cloud. Instead, administrators are looking for a tool to integrate all cloud components into a single unified platform. Cloud administrators will continue seeking deeper integration into infrastructure including networking, SAN and hypervisor management. They are also looking for management tools that feature resource and capacity planning.

Appcore’s mission heading into 2015 and the years to come is to continuously simplify the management of cloud for service providers. In order to do so, we developed our latest software solution, Appcore Atlas, which automates the deployment of multiple clouds. It simplifies the management for administrators and creates a holistic environment. As we continue listen to the service provider market, we will create new products and services that support them.

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Docker offers a new, lightweight approach to application portability. Applications are shipped using a common container format and managed with a high-level API. Their processes run within isolated namespaces that abstract the operating environment independently of the distribution, versions, network setup, and other details of this environment. This «containerization» has often been nicknamed «the new virtualization.» But containers are more than lightweight virtual machines. Beyond their smaller footprint, shorter boot times, and higher consolidation factors, they also bring a lot of new features and use cases that were not possible with classical virtual machines.

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SAP is delivering break-through innovation combined with fantastic user experience powered by the market-leading in-memory technology, SAP HANA.
In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Thorsten Leiduck, VP ISVs & Digital Commerce, SAP, will discuss how SAP and partners provide cloud and hybrid cloud solutions as well as real-time Big Data offerings that help companies of all sizes and industries run better. SAP launched an application challenge to award the most innovative SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud platforms applications. Out of many contenders, the best applications have been selected by members of the SAP Community Network via crowd-voting. Join this exciting session as SAP recognizes the winners and finalists for their great accomplishment and see the winning applications live on stage.

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The post AWS: Cloud Security Mistakes Discussed by Experts appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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Recently, @thedodgeretort of Enterprise CIO Forum held a Twitter chat about what cloud computing in 2020 will look like. I decided to write up a quick blog sharing my thoughts on the topic.

Looking into the crystal ball, I see a few things happening with cloud by 2020: call it 5 years out.

First, cloud will transform into more of a utility and a grid of computing power. Second, we’ll see a much deeper manifestation of the core characteristics of cloud computing, especially with regard to flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability. Third, I anticipate a lot of activity in machine-to-machine transactions and communications (call it IoT if you like). Fourth: superesilient applications. Fifth: compute traded as a commodity. And finally, within 5 years, I think IT and the overall business will come together to actually take advantage of these technologies. Read on for more detail.

Cloud Computing in 2020

1. A utility and computing grid

In 5 years, large companies will still hang on to their datacenters to run some services. However, with security more robust, I think that corporations will make available their own computing resources as much as they consume cloud resources – just like some households generate their own electricity and sell it back to the grid. I think Cisco’s Intercloud concept has an angle on this.

2. Flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability

A cloud/compute socket just like an electrical socket. Standardized applications and connectors that “plug in” to the grid and are removed just as easily. Virtualization has the first stab at this, encapsulating the OS, data, and applications neatly in a VMX and VMDKs. Containers are the next stab. Redhat has an angle on this with their CloudForms PaaS. Raw compute power becomes more and more of a commodity as portability improves; meaning downward pressure on IaaS prices will remain to some degree (see #4).

3. IoT or machine-to-machine communications/transactions

One machine determines that it needs to acquire more compute power to complete its work. It makes a “deal” to go out and acquire that compute power, uses it, and gives it back to the grid. Or, on the flip side, a machine that knows when it can stand idle and rent its own power. Another angle on this, a virtual machine or application has knowledge of its SLA, and moves to the provider who can deliver on that SLA at the least cost. Love it or hate it, Apple’s Siri has an early angle on this. From what I’ve read about the technology, queries to Siri find their way back to Apple datacenters, not only to obtain answers, but to improve the accuracy of queries for all Siri users.

4. Superesilient applications

As prices for cloud trend downward and portability improves (see #2 and #5), disaster recovery will take a new shape. Instead of running on a 2-site/2-region DR architecture, applications will run on a 5, 10, 20, or 30-site “DR” architecture, with all nodes being active. Does it matter where your application is running at that point? Potentially, it’s running all over the east coast, or all over the country. Some services from AWS already have an angle on this with services that are redundant across regions (a.g., S3, elastic load balancing, etc.), not to mention things like DNS on the Internet. I think it will become cost-effective to do this, in general, within 5 years.

5. Compute traded as a commodity, just like crude oil

This might be a stretch in 5 years, but with the trend of IaaS being more commoditized and portability improving, we’ll see a day when compute power is traded in a commodities market. In the channel, this is already fairly common – IaaS providers are eager to cut favorable deals with resellers who agree to purchase large chunks of infrastructure upfront, only to resell at a later date.

6. IT and the business coming together

DevOps was the first marriage of two groups that had been previously at odds (oftentimes). Within 5 years, I think maturity in IT will improve to the point that they become as focused on the business as any other traditional LOB. IT becomes an Innovation Center — they are focused on the business, and behave proactively. Corporate IT shifts its focus from requirements to possibilities. See my previous posts on the emerging idea of a cloud architect who will be important in this shift.

To sum up… we’re just at the beginning of possibilities in cloud computing.

To hear more from John, you can download his eBook, “The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department“