Some cloud storage providers who hope to be on the leading edge of cloud security adopt a "zero-knowledge" policy in which vendors say it is impossible for customer data to be snooped on. But a recent study by computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University is questioning just how secure those zero knowledge tactics are.
The question of whether online broadcast television is to remain in the hands of a stodgy industry that once declared the VCR the enemy is being put directly before the Supreme Court.
Broadcasters' latest legal target is 2-year-old upstart Aereo—which retransmits over-the-air broadcast television using dime-sized antennas to paying consumers, who can watch TV online or record it for later viewing. Broadcasters like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and others haven't given Aereo permission to do that, and they say it violates US copyright law.
With Singapore's new Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) coming into force this July, local companies could be slapped with fines of up to a million dollars for breaches of privacy. So it is not surprising CIOs in Singapore are turning their attention to an obvious area of vulnerability: personal data stored in the "cloud", said Stella Tang, Director of Robert Half Singapore.
When Edward Snowden ripped open the curtain and began revealing details of the NSA's data vacuuming, IT analysts warned that an unintended consequence of the program was a huge blow to the credibility of U.S. cloud providers. After all, they asked, why would anyone who cares about the security of their data put it someplace where government snoops could access it?
Microsoft will announce its rebranding of its "Windows Azure" cloud operating system to "Microsoft Azure," this week, according to a couple of tipsters of mine.
The announcement is expected to happen tomorrow, March 25, and to take effect on April 3, the second day of Microsoft's Build conference in San Francisco, said a couple of individuals who asked not to be identified, but who are familiar with Microsoft's plans.
When Microsoft was forced to change the name of its cloud storage from SkyDrive, many people thought it was unfair -- myself included. After all, SkyTV is an entirely different product. But oh well, what's done is done. Truth be told, I like the OneDrive name better; it was a blessing in disguise.
Microsoft has written to Oracle-on-Azure users, letting them know that as of March 12th they'll be paying for the Oracle bits of it.
Measure twice, cut once -- this wise adage explains the value of pausing and making sure you know the potential results of your decisions. With Office 365, there are so many different plans and options that it's important to know what you gain (or lose) before you choose one.
The number of personal cloud users increases every year and is not about to slow down. Back in 2012 Gartner predicted the complete shift from offline PC work to mostly on-cloud by 2014. And it's happening.
Today, we rarely choose to send a bunch of photos by email, we no longer use USB flash drives to carry docs. The cloud has become a place where everyone meets and exchanges information. Moreover, it has become a place where data is being kept permanently.
The more data you put in a cloud, the harder it is to migrate away. And so Amazon's new "Kinesis" data ingester is a neat piece of technology, and at the same time a canny way to turn Amazon Web Services into the Hotel California of the cloud.
Kinesis was announced by the web bazaar's chief technology officer Werner Vogels in a speech at the company's re:Invent conference today. It's essentially Amazon's attempt to fire up a commercial variant of open-source data processing and messaging engines Storm, Spark Streaming, and Kafka.
