Bitcoins are a digital cryptocurrency and have been around since 2009. As a substitute for legal tender, they are becoming the rage for investors and others but because there is no government agency auditing or performing regulatory oversights, you wonder if it is the perfect breeding ground for electronic nanocrime.
Since the introduction of the Bitcoin, some competitors have emerged and the whole segment of cryptocurrencies are defined as Altcoins. Altcoins include Dogecoin, Ethereum Feathercoin, Litecoin, Novacoin, Peercoin, and Zetacoin. Some of these cryptocurrencies are considered improvements on the original Bitcoin algorithm structure, and they are gaining some traction as well.

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Two pieces of research have hit CloudTech HQ, both examining how the security of data is perceived – and which data is more private than others.

Information security provider Trustwave, in its ‘Value of Data Report’ published today, aimed to look at which data was most important to the 500 IT decision makers polled across five countries. On average, the per capita value of personally identifiable information (PII) in the US is more than double that of the UK – $1,820 and $843 respectively. The UK ended up having scantest regard for their data, behind Australia ($1,186), Japan ($1.040) and Canada ($1,025) respectively.

What’s more, PII is of greater import than all other types of data – in most sectors, anyway. 47% of respondents cited it as a high priority, compared with intellectual property (27%), payment card data (18%), with corporate email (6%) bringing up the rear. Healthcare and hospitality give the biggest priority to PII data, with average scores of 3.5 and 3.4 out of four respectively, while industrial companies and IT firms rank IP as most important.

Given this around how fiercely protected certain types of data are, findings from Kaspersky in another report released today make for particularly interesting reading. Polling more than 2,000 IT decision makers across Europe in organisations with more than 50 employees, fewer than three in five (55%) of respondents believe companies are looking after their personal data properly.

Almost three quarters (73%) said the security of their private data was important, while 67% admitted they were concerned about their information being hacked. A similar number (64%) said they were worried about how many organisations have access to their personal information.

Again, the UK does not come out in the best light when it comes to data security. Only 56% of IT decision makers trust organisations to keep hold of their data – a meagre number when compared to their equivalents in France (76%), but a little better than Germany (48%).

Both studies cited the importance of the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – an issue which this publication has covered in chapter and verse – in their findings. “Companies that fail to accurately value their data are unlikely to make the right decisions regarding the level of cyber security investments to protect that data and are those most likely to fall short of regulations, such as the GDPR coming into effect in 2018,” commented Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Trustwave.

“Businesses should look to the managed security services business model so that they have the confidence that full data risk vigilance is applied to all types of confidential and valuable data by specialists in the industry.”

More evidence – as if it were needed – that Alibaba is serious about taking its cloud arm into new geographies: the company has announced compliance accreditation with Germany’s federal office for information security.

The C5 attestation – so called because its full natty title is the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue – with additional requirements covers Alibaba’s elastic compute service, relational database, object storage, CDN, load balancer, virtual private cloud and security offerings.

The German federal office, the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), outlines the C5 criteria thus (pdf), noting already established standards such as the ISO/IEC 27001 and 27017: “Among security experts and cloud service providers exists an informal consensus about the requirements that have to be met for secure cloud computing. A generally recognised requirements (or controls) catalogue on this, however, is not available yet. The present [C5] is intended to be an aid for the customer providing a better overview for a higher level of security and avoiding redundant audits.”

Only five cloud service providers are C5 accredited – AWS and Microsoft being among them – while Alibaba says it it’s the first company to be accredited with additional requirements.

“Alibaba Cloud is fully committed to the highest standards in all aspects of our operations no matter where that might be in the world,” said Simon Hu, Alibaba SVP and president of Alibaba Cloud in a statement. “We are proud to be the first company to meet the C5 additional requirements – something that should increase the trust placed in us by our growing client base not only in Germany, but also across the whole of Europe.”

This can be seen as the icing on the cake for a stellar year in Alibaba’s cloud operations. Naturally, its traditional eCommerce strength remains – just the $25 billion generated in sales with Singles Day last month – enabling the cloud arm to fly somewhat under the radar. CEO Daniel Zhang told analysts on an earnings call at the start of November that the cloud business “continues to defy gravity”, with revenues up 99% year on year.

Alongside an expanding partner ecosystem, the company outlined its plans to move from one million cloud customers to 10 million at its Computing Conference in Hangzhou back in October. The previous month, Gartner placed the company in third for public cloud infrastructure as a service.

Multi-cloud continues to be a major trend as we move into 2018 – and according to a new research report from VMware, organisations need to overcome the inherent technical and skill challenges of multi-cloud deployments for success.

Over half (57%) of the more than 1,300 global IT decision makers in large enterprises polled said that technical challenges, as well as the demand for new skills and staff, were unexpected, critical learnings from managing multiple clouds. Integrating legacy systems and understanding the new technology were cited by 62% and 61% of those polled respectively as the toughest challenges in the process.

As the report puts it, if you haven’t started exploring multi-cloud yet, then you’re already behind so you need to start now. What’s more, VMware says, first year progress is particularly demanding, with technical snafus as well as the usual legacy issues. For those between years two and five, patience is the order of the day, although there are some surprising benefits, particularly around security as organisations become more comfortable with cloud technologies. Beyond year six, the report argues, the possibilities are near infinite, combining technologies such as AI and IoT with confident security practices and a cloud-first organisational posture.

As this publication reported last month, research from BMC Software found that organisations are struggling to manage multi-cloud environments. In this instance, BMC advocated exploring AI and machine learning as it can increase automation in the multi-cloud management process. Plenty of market buzz has been around the concept of late too; witness Cisco’s intention to acquire Cmpute.io earlier this month as evidence of that.

“The race to digital transformation is driving the need for global organisations to dramatically speed application delivery, while simultaneously fuelling innovation and becoming more agile in the process,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president for product development of cloud services at VMware. “With digital business changing how industries operate, organisations are increasingly looking to multiple clouds to support the drive to become more secure, innovative, efficient and agile.

“This study highlights what it takes for a successful multi-cloud approach that not only allows companies to realise the true benefits of the cloud but helps them capitalise on emerging technologies to run a competitive, successful business,” Patel added. “With time, organisations are on a path to reap the full, long term benefits of multi-cloud environments.”

You can find out more about the report here.

Schooling fresh-faced young colleagues about how things used to be in the IT game is a one-way ticket to feeling old. The thing is, with technology trends evolving so rapidly, it could easily be happening to them within 12-18 months from now.

The latest focus is around technologies like augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning that are stretching imaginations yet further for how businesses engage with their customers, people and data. As exciting as each one is, what I’m interested in is how much they affect the data centre.

Those of us with grey hairs will remember data centres being controlled by facilities managers, rather than the IT team. Facilities people, with their utility belts and hi-vis jackets, who know about voltages and tensile strength and reverse-parking caravans in the snow with their eyes closed. Not IT operations people, you realise. Oh no. Nor network architects or – heaven forefend – application programmers.

Today it’s all different of course and – looking back – that switch in ownership marked a significant change; a shift in power base from screwdrivers to software. Today, data centres are the nerve centres of technology enablement. They are the physical manifestation of two buzz phrases that mean a lot in business but are tricky to pin down to anything tangible: ‘cloud’ and ‘digital’.

Many IT folk will be familiar with the term ‘software-defined’, as in a ‘software-defined network’. To my mind, all infrastructure is in fact becoming software-dominated, in one or more of the following three ways:

Being driven to achieve higher performance metrics by increasingly demanding software applications

Want to create an amazing user experience with AR/VR? Or improve business analytics through an army of IoT (Internet of Things) sensors? How about driving AI into your business decision-making? These software applications are going to fundamentally transform the infrastructure required to deliver the necessary responsiveness and agility.

However you orchestrate hybrid cloud resources to achieve your digital objectives, it will boil down to denser, faster, hotter, more scalable and more latency-sensitive infrastructure components marching to your tune.

Being driven by the flexible demands of software to move toward open-standards architecture and away from proprietary hardware

Another legacy of the old ways is to be ‘an IBM house’ or ‘a Cisco house’ etc. In other words – ascribing to the notion that no-one ever got fired for blowing a few million quid on a major global hardware manufacturer’s equipment – being loyal to a given technology brand to build your infrastructure.

Well, I’ve got news for you. Some of the smartest data centre managers see the future as riding Moore’s Law of increasing hardware performance, but without getting locked-in to a single vendor’s proprietary roadmap. They would rather look to a vendor promising that their solutions enable open standards in data centre infrastructure to give software intelligence the best possible environment to achieve their objectives. This often means eschewing the hardware brand leader in favour of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) silicon – whatever it takes to avoid being locked down. 

Being increasingly managed and governed by software automation to reduce human error and cost

Funny to think that, having successfully sprinkled its magical business-enabling fairy dust on every other part of an organisation – finance, sales, manufacturing, logistics, marketing, legal – IT has finally got its turn to benefit. For too long, IT management processes have been too manual; too driven by repetitive tasks. The digital revolution has brought a significant improvement here also, introducing better management interfaces and automated processes, thereby creating extra time for IT pros to spend on strategic IT initiatives. Data centres form a major part of the IT management burden of course – particularly with distributed data centre/server room/wiring closet estates – but this is alleviated with the development of more advanced data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions.

History tells us the battle against downtime never ends

Despite all the other advances, downtime is one issue that does not appear to be evolving. If anything, organisations’ new digital agendas have raised the stakes on the importance of ensuring continual uninterrupted uptime. Data centre dependency is at an all-time high. Going slow is unthinkable, let alone going offline.

That’s when I start remembering those much-maligned facilities people (and their utility belts). The truth is, the protection they represent has never gone away. What they lack in sophistication around software, they more than make up with in knowledge and practical value around backup electrical power, balancing cooling loads efficiently, and mitigating environmental risks. When push comes to shove, those are skills worth keeping as close to you as possible.

Let’s do a visualization exercise. Imagine it’s December 31, 2018, and you’re ringing in the New Year with your friends and family. You think back on everything that you accomplished in the last year: your company’s revenue is through the roof thanks to the success of your product, and you were promoted to Lead Developer. 2019 is poised to be an even bigger year for your company because you have the tools and insight to scale as quickly as demand requires. You’re a happy human, and it’s not just because of the bubbly in your glass.
Now how does one turn this visualization into reality? You start by setting yourself up with the right technology to succeed. Behind every great cloud app is a fleet of powerful cloud monitoring tools that provide insight and direction for improving your product. This is the ticket for turning 2018 into the year of your dreams.

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Some managed service providers are reluctant to offer unified communications because they think it’s a lot of time-consuming deployments for an on-premises VoIP system. Well, we have good news: hosted VoIP is here. With the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) model, it only takes a good internet connection for your clients to start enjoying a stable, cost-effective business phone solution. Making a profit offering unified communications is easy.

When customers are looking for a unified communications solution, they want to manage computer-related communications and phone capabilities altogether.

Let’s take a few examples.

1) An organisation wants to make sure missed calls are always followed up

The business owner needs a business phone system with voicemail. Also, each employee must be notified by email when someone leaves a message on their voicemail extension. Unified communications provide that integration between phone and email.

2) A company wants to better manage communications costs for mobile employees

The business owner needs every call made from the company phone system. But, some employees are always on the move. A unified communications solution will help roaming staff call from the company phone system using an internet-connected smartphone or laptop. These features are called WebRTC (or Virtual Phone) and Softphone.

3) A business wants to keep using fax, but wants to cut expenses on fax machine and paper

With unified communications, fax service is integrated to email. This feature is called virtual fax. So, sending and receiving fax can simply be done through the user’s mailbox. There is no fax machine needed and a fax message is only printed when required, from the email.

A good VoIP solution will provide all unified communications features to respond to every business need. 

Unified communications as a service is the new trend

Cloud solutions offer a business flexibility because they can stream expenses for better control. If your customers have already adopted subscription-based services like email, productivity applications and online CRM platforms, there’s nothing to stop them from considering Unified Communications as a Service for their business phone needs.

Customers want to be free from heavy hardware costs and they’re willing to go to the cloud. So, why keep offering a solution that can only be deployed on-premises? If you’re willing to stay competitive and keep your business sustainable, you have to give your customers what they’re looking for. Failing to do so could spell the end of your business.

Today’s buyer is more aware than you think

Maybe you’ve been offering on-premises VoIP and you’re comfortable doing it. Are you planning to attract more clients? Or, do you have a plan to renew your current clients’ contracts? Even though things look good now, you can’t be sure they’ll stay that way.

Today’s buyer is a lot more savvy. Before they decide to make a purchase, most business owners will do a lot of research to compare your Unified Communications offering with others on the market. By the time they’re ready to buy, they’re well aware of their business phone options.

Be smart when adding unified communications as a service to your offering

You have to offer hosted VoIP because that’s what your customers want. But you also have to understand their expectations so you can choose the right UCaaS provider. Don’t choose a provider based on price alone.

Here’s what your business phone customers are expecting from a unified communications as a service provider (in no particular order of importance):

• Good voice quality
• Network integration
• Good pricing
• Mobility
• Flexible billing
• Interesting features
• Security

The post The Truth About Unified Communications and Why MSPs Can’t Ignore It appeared first on SherWeb.

It appears Amazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing a presence in China after all: the company has announced a strategic technology partnership with Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology (NWCD), opening a second data centre in China in the process.

The AWS China (Ningxia) region, which offers two availability zones at launch, complements the Beijing region Amazon already has. Like the Beijing region, which is operated by Sinnet, the Ningxia region will be operated by NWCD.

This curious relationship is further expanded in this statement from the press materials. “While the cloud services offered in both AWS China regions are the same as those available in other AWS regions, the AWS China regions are isolated from all other AWS regions and operated by AWS’s Chinese partners separately from all other AWS regions,” the company notes. “Customers using the AWS China regions enter into customer agreements with Sinnet in Beijing and NWCD in Ningxia, rather than with AWS.”

The reason behind this is due to various restrictions China puts on technology companies. As a CNBC report put it, Chinese firms “usually can fully own and control data centres and cloud-related services around the world without foreign equity restrictions or technology transfer requirements, but foreign cloud companies in China don’t enjoy the same environment.” In May, the country’s new cybersecurity law took effect, putting more pressure on organisations.

As an example of the former, last month Sinnet announced in a regulatory filing it was buying part of Amazon’s cloud business in China to help “comply with China’s laws”. The news forced AWS to deny it had sold up in the Asian country.

To give an idea of the cooperation involved, the press materials included a statement from He Jian, secretary of Zhongwei Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China. “We have developed a close collaboration with AWS based on mutual trust, and are delighted that our region is now offering highly resilient, high performance data centres to enterprises across the nation,” said He.

“The second AWS region in China is part of AWS’s ongoing commitment to offer best in class cloud technologies to Chinese customers,” added AWS CEO Andy Jassy in a statement. According to the company, customers on board with the new region include Lenovo, Samsung Electronics and Xiaomi.

In October, analyst firm Synergy Research released a note which put more meat on the bones regarding the Chinese market. “The difference between China and all other countries is striking,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy, at the time. “The markets for cloud services and for data centre infrastructure are truly global in nature and in all regions they are dominated by US-headquartered companies, but China stands out as the one huge exception.

“Going forward, it is difficult to see US companies making too much headway in China, but there is no doubt that some of the Chinese companies will have an increasing impact in countries beyond China,” Dinsdale added.

«Infoblox does DNS, DHCP and IP address management for not only enterprise networks but cloud networks as well. Customers are looking for a single platform that can extend not only in their private enterprise environment but private cloud, public cloud, tracking all the IP space and everything that is going on in that environment,» explained Steve Salo, Principal Systems Engineer at Infoblox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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