July 8, 2013
Volume XLIV, Issue 6
Frost & Sullivan: Knowledge and Adoption of Cloud Computing
The growing demand for flexibility and scalability in business
architecture has lent momentum to the cloud computing market. Since
cloud computing is not an entirely new technology, IT infrastructure
availability is the number one market driver.
Companies themselves are looking to improve their infrastructure
capabilities by reducing capital expenditure and increasing operational
spending.
Moreover, based on an extensive survey of companies on their future plans for cloud computing adoption, Frost & Sullivan has determined that trends such as bring your own device (BYOD),
mobility, and big data will prompt investments in cloud computing.
A more detailed description of these results can be found in the newly-launched Cloud Computing End-user Analysis from Frost & Sullivan. This customer research, part of the IT
Services Growth Partnership Service program, aims to understand the
maturity of companies in terms of their knowledge and adoption of
public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and
platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
The study finds that in 2012 only 23.1 percent of the companies
interviewed had implemented or were in the process of implementing a
cloud solution, while 38.1 percent had yet not adopted any solution
related to cloud computing.
The good news is that 23.1 percent were studying the concept and 15.7
percent had executed pilot projects. In addition, 50.0 percent of the
companies were planning for 2013 to increase their budget dedicated for
cloud computing solutions in more than 10 percent, indicating that
uptake in the country is growing and will continue to do so.
The rise in adoption is due to the flexible and scalable
infrastructure offered by cloud solutions, which enables enterprises to
modify their IT infrastructure for specific needs. In 2013, 29.3 percent
of the businesses interviewed are intended to have more than 30 percent
of its infrastructure in the cloud.
This migration is mainly due to the emergence of new technologies
coupled with the increasing costs and complexities of IT management.
Additionally, with companies needing to pay only for what they use,
these solutions are becoming popular among small and medium businesses.
In fact, the market is driven by cost reduction rather than
innovation. IT executives choose providers based on how much money their
solution would save, and analyze business capabilities only as the next
step.
"When it comes to finding a cloud computing partner, customers give
priority to data center-focused organizations and global IT businesses
that offer cost-effective technological expertise," said Frost &
Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Industry Analyst
Bruno Tasco.
"Telecom companies are also making an entrance in the market, adapting their portfolio to provide compelling cloud solutions."
However, a majority of the respondents stated their apprehensions
regarding the reliability of the public cloud in particular,
highlighting one of the key restraints stalling the growth of the cloud
computing market — security. Connectivity is another challenge, since
companies will need to access information in the cloud anywhere, anytime
and from any device.
Some verticals like banking have opted to keep most of the infrastructure internal so they can guarantee availability.
"To enable customers to fully understand the benefits of the
technology, software providers can offer pilot projects for simpler
applications like email before moving to more critical functions,"
observed Tasco. "Providing service-level agreements (SLAs) and a strong
market reference will also be important to establish a robust
relationship with end users."
If you are interested in more information on this research, please click here and provide your contact info.
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in
collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that
addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that
will make or break today's market participants.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We're very pleased that our first wave of keynote speakers, panelists, and moderators for CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 (CCW:2013) includes industry leaders AT&T Mobility, Comcast, Dell, Microsoft, Netflix, and Sprint.
CCW:2013 is the Cloud Computing Association's (CCA) and Distributed Computing Industry Association's (DCIA) business strategy summit taking place October 27th-29th at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, NV.
This year's themes are "Revolutionizing Entertainment & Media" and "The Impact of Mobile Cloud Computing & Big Data."
Featured speakers include Microsoft's Platform Technology Evangelist Yung Chou, Trend Micro Director Dan Reis, and Sprint's Chief Cloud Strategist Jay Gleason.
ABI Research's Practice Director Sam Rosen will speak on "Consumer Transition to the Cloud: Service Provider & OTT Video, Gaming, and Music Services."
AT&T Mobility's Enterprise Architecture Manager Melody Yuhn will address "Mobile Storage Considerations."
Dell's Enterprise Cloud Evangelist Michael Elliott will discuss "Hybrid Clouds — The End State."
And Netflix's Architect and Principal Engineer Mikey Cohen will examine "Cloud Migration Considerations."
The second wave will be announced next week.
There's no question that advances in cloud computing are having enormous effects on the creation, storage, distribution, and consumption of diverse genres of content.
And most profound among these effects are those involving the increased proliferation of portable playback systems and the accompanying generation of unprecedented amounts of viewership, listenership, and usage information from audiences globally.
The ubiquity and widespread acceptance of user interfaces that reflect the dynamic interactivity exemplified by smart-phone applications is rapidly replacing the flat linearity of traditional TV channel line-ups and changing expectations for a new generation of consumers.
Cloud-based information and entertainment-of-all-kinds accessible everywhere always on each connected device will become the new norm.
And perfect data related to consumer behaviors associated with discovering and consuming this content will displace metering and ratings technologies based solely on statistical sampling.
Two CCW:2013 conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment production and storage, as well as media delivery and analysis options; along with the growing impact of mobile cloud computing on this sector, and the related expansion of big data challenges and opportunities.
DCINFO readers are encouraged to get involved in CCA's and DCIA's CCW:2013 as exhibitors, sponsors, and speakers.
The CCA is handling exhibits and sponsorships. Please click here for more information.
The DCIA's role is to provide keynotes, panelists, and case-study presenters to participate in our comprehensive agenda of sessions in ENTERTAINMENT & MEDIA and MOBILE CLOUD & BIG DATA.
Please click here to apply to speak at CCW:2013.
Speakers will be selected from the community of professionals involved in the production and distribution of media and the deployment of cloud computing technologies, either as solution providers or end-users, in one or more of four specific focal areas:
Producing and Storing Entertainment Content in the Cloud; Delivering Media from the Cloud and Analyzing Consumption; The Impact of Mobile Cloud Computing on this Major Sector; and Related Opportunities and Challenges of Expanding Big Data.
Topics include Ad Hoc Cloud, Adaptive Monitoring, Analytics Applications, Bandwidth Utilization, Big Data Infrastructure, BYOD Trends, Collaboration, Connectivity, Content Everywhere, Crowdsourcing, Data Integration, Data Management, Deployment Models, Interoperability, Liability Issues, Mobile App Security, and Mobile Offloading.
Also on the agenda will be discussions of Performance Measurement, Personal Cloud, Privacy Protection, Quality of Experience, Reliability and Security, Search and Mining, Service Designs, Software Development, Standardization, Storage Architecture, Supported Multimedia, Transcoding, Virtual Communities, and Virtualization.
The conference will include in-depth pre-conference workshops on Sunday, October 27th, followed on Monday and Tuesday, October 28th and 29th, by focused keynote, case study, panel, and roundtable sessions on the following subjects.
Producing and Storing Entertainment Content in the Cloud / Delivering Media from the Cloud and Analyzing Consumption sessions will include Newest Cloud Offerings for Entertainment Content; Current Obstacles to Adoption in the Media Sector; Collaboration Case Study; Production Tools Case Study; Editing Case Study; Transcoding Case Study; Program Element Storage Case Study; Distribution Channel Storage Case Study; Cloud Media Lockers Case Study.
Cloud Migration Considerations; Transitional Software Applications; Security and Reliability Concerns; Compliance and Regulatory Issues; Cloud Economics in the Entertainment Sector; Cloud Vendor Selection Criteria for Media Companies; Cloud Implementation Strategies for Media & Entertainment; and Future Cloud Opportunities for Media & Entertainment.
The Impact of Mobile Cloud Computing on this Major Sector / Related Opportunities and Challenges of Expanding Big Data sessions will include Latest Trends in Mobile Cloud Computing; Newest Offerings in Big Data Management; Current Obstacles to Adoption; Lowering Latency Case Study; Bandwidth Utilization Case Study; Adaptive Monitoring Case Study.
Big Data Infrastructure Case Study; Search & Mining Case Study; Analytic Programs Case Study; Mobile Storage Considerations; Big Data Software Applications; Security & Reliability Concerns; Compliance & Regulatory Concerns; Mobile Cloud / Big Data Economics; Mobile Cloud Vendor Selection Criteria; Big Data Implementation Strategies; Future Mobile Cloud & Big Data Opportunities.
We will also be pleased to entertain proposals for additional session or workshop topics. Please click here to make your suggestion. Share wisely, and take care.
Business Agility through Cloud Computing
Excerpted from Business2Community Report by David Grimes
In so many industries, the pace of business and the intensity of competition translate into a new mandate: be agile. More than ever before, companies need the ability to retool on the fly, respond to competitive threats, pounce on market opportunities, and support shorter product development lifecycles. In most cases these needs can only be met by a correspondingly agile supporting IT infrastructure.
With its self-service, on-demand provisioning of services, pay-as-you-go pricing, and world-class management capabilities, cloud computing can provide the agility that so many businesses require. However, many businesses have concerns. Their data is often — rightfully — regarded as the critical asset to be highly protected, which can create an "anti-cloud" mindset. Data protection and compliance considerations continue to be major barriers to cloud adoption.
But cloud computing also presents an unprecedented opportunity. By eliminating the need for the company to fund, staff, and maintain a massive computing infrastructure, cloud computing lets companies focus their IT resources on value-add functions — the things that create agility. They can focus on analytics, process improvements, and increasing efficiency.
But can cloud computing be deployed in a secure and resilient manner?
Absolutely. Cloud computing is as secure as other forms of computing. In fact, many security best practices can — and should — be applied when considering adoption of cloud based solutions. Of course, technology is only one aspect of the overall corporate security posture. Cloud architectures bring some additional considerations, but current best practices mitigate many of these risks.
Also, note that cloud computing is not limited to just "public" clouds where these security considerations are most acute. There are opportunities to leverage many cloud benefits, in "private" configurations that eliminate many security considerations.
In terms of resilience, cloud can actually enable a level of resilience previously quite difficult to attain. For example, consider an Infrastructure-as- a-Service (IaaS) cloud. In this form, the computer is a "virtual machine" which is represented as a collection of data on a storage device — essentially a collection of files.
Unlike a traditional computer the virtual machine is a purely logical construct. Now, of course, this virtual machine has to run on some underlying physical computer, and that device has some non-zero failure rate. What makes cloud unique in this case is that if the physical computer fails, the virtual machine can automatically restart within minutes on another physical computer.
While cloud computing does not eliminate the possibility of outage, it provides — within the construct of the cloud itself — an inherent level of resilience.
Deployed and managed properly, cloud computing can provide the foundation for exceptional levels of business agility — the speed to proactively lead and the speed to nimbly react — that can translate into enduring market advantage.
What the Sharing Economy Means for Cloud Computing
Excerpted from Smart Data Collective Report by Paul Barsch
The sharing movement is in full swing. Innovative collaborative consumption companies are helping pool under-utilized assets such homes, boats, cars, and then renting them out as services. With the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, it also makes sense that cloud computing — which is compute and storage "resource pooling" and renting — would also gain traction. But just as there are risks in sharing property and other assets, there are also risks in sharing cloud computing infrastructures.
Jessica Scorpio of Fast Company has it right when she says; "A few years ago, no one would have thought P2P asset sharing would become such a big thing."
Indeed, since the launch of Airbnb, more than 4 million people have rented rooms — in their own houses — to complete strangers. And in San Francisco,CA a new company called FlightCar offers to park and wash your car at the airport — with a catch, that while you're away on a business trip your car is available as a "rental" to others (at half the cost of other companies).
Intrinsically, the rise of the sharing economy makes sense. Why not take underutilized assets and make them available to others for a temporary amount of time, thus gaining higher utilization and earning extra income?
But to make a sharing economy work, a key issue of "trust" is necessary. In the case of Airbnb, homeowners must trust the company has carefully vetted those who would rent out rooms, especially when security and privacy concerns are very real. However, while there have been a few scary tales in terms of sharing homes, cars, and other services, for the most part the marketplace has run smoothly.
In a similar vein, the big target on the back of cloud computing is trust. Cloud computing providers are still wrestling with perceptions that they are not as safe and trustworthy in terms of privacy, security and availability. And while it's true that cloud providers have greatly improved in these areas, myriad surveys show there's still significant work to do in overcoming initial perceptions that sensitive corporate data is often "lost, corrupted or accessed by unauthorized individuals".
For both cloud computing and the sharing economy, overcoming trust issues is job one. That said, the trend towards sharing is unmistakable. Neal Gorenflo, publisher of Shareable Magazine says; "People don't want the cognitive load associated with owning." The same mindset can also be attributed to global CIOs and CFOs who want someone else to do the work of capitalizing, maintaining, updating and running their IT systems in the cloud while they focus on driving business value.
Forbes estimates that in 2013, $3.5 billion dollars will change hands in the sharing economy. We also know that cloud revenues are on torrid trajectory. If P2P sharing and cloud computing providers can overcome trust issues, there are few constraints on how big these markets can really be.
BitTorrent Turned 12 Years Old This Week
Excerpted from TorrentFreak Report by Ernesto Van Der Sar
BitTorrent turned 12 years old this week, and it's safe to say that it has revolutionized the Internet.
"My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here," Bram Cohen wrote on a Yahoo! message board on July 2, 2001.
It was the first time a working copy of the BitTorrent code had been made available to the public, and the initial response wasn't exactly overwhelming.
"What's BitTorrent, Bram?" was the one reply he received on the board.
Despite this underwhelming response, BitTorrent was born, and in the weeks and months that followed more and more people started to become aware of its potential.
The music-sharing community Etree was one of the first places where its full capacity was tested, among the hundreds of websites that quickly followed, most notably among which was The Pirate Bay.
Over the years, many artists have learned that BitTorrent is a great way to share their work with the public, and companies such as Facebook and Twitter have started to use it, too.
As of today, roughly a quarter billion people use BitTorrent every month, and there are no signs that the continuous growth will be put to a halt in the near future.
Who would have thought that 12 years ago?
Happy Birthday!
HP Secures Data Migration to the Cloud
Excerpted from Biztech2 Report
With the explosion of data in the enterprise and the ability to use as-a-service storage models, important security-level practices are undermined and organizations lose sight of potential threats. In the absence of these standards, IT teams are struggling to identify and assess potential risks, opening their organizations to catastrophic security breaches.
The new HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Services, part of the HP Converged Cloud Professional Services Suite, deliver choice, confidence and consistency to customers by combining expertise from across HP, supporting the management of data risk, identification of vulnerabilities and maintenance of compliance with IT governance.
This provides clients with solutions that protect their information before it migrates to or from the cloud, whether it is a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid deployment. As a result, organizations can reassign IT resources from spending time on manual tasks to focusing on innovation.
"Cloud computing is pushing the boundaries of the enterprise, expanding the attack surface and making it nearly impossible to monitor for vulnerabilities," said Marshal Correia, Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise Services India.
"HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Services create the framework to maintain information security, aid breach management and facilitate legal and regulatory compliance, so clients can take advantage of the benefits of the cloud with confidence."
HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Service provides a full-day HP workshop and online tools that measure the maturity of existing security controls, enabling clients to assess viability of workloads in a cloud environment.
Additionally, access to best practices and technology from global security providers — including HP ArcSight, HP TippingPoint, HP Fortify, HP Atalla and HP Autonomy — provides clients with a deep understanding of their cloud security risks without investing the time or money to recruit and train IT security staff. With a risk-based approach to cloud preparation and migration, organizations can develop a clear strategy that delivers a smooth transition to the cloud.
HP cloud security services and software are designed to reduce complexity, identify vulnerabilities and help enterprises maintain compliance.
Coupling the new HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Services with existing HP Threat and Vulnerability Consulting Services, clients can establish security protocols for the migration to a cloud environment and monitor for threats while running applications in the cloud.
HP Threat and Vulnerability Consulting Services leverage offers a robust solution to help clients establish appropriate vulnerability scanning and testing protocols.
Together, the services fortify the integrity of cloud deployments, supporting the efforts of clients to realize the benefits of cloud computing with more of their critical applications. For cloud services providers (CSPs) looking to extend monitoring capabilities to their customers, HP offers the HP Cloud Common Event Format P Standards.
The software builds on HP ArcSight Cloud Common Event Format (CEF) with a set of industry standards to promote a secure, scalable approach for collection of log and event data from cloud environments.
The implementation of the HP Cloud CEF Standard allows clients to obtain visibility to activity, improve security and supports compliance requirements.
Our Future is in the Cloud: Fujitsu Chief
Excerpted from Sydney Morning Herald Report by Stuart Conner
Having grown at twice the rate of the Australian IT market, Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand's future now lies in providing cloud computing and mobility services, according to its CEO, Mike Foster. The company may even enter the smart-phone market.
Speaking at an event marking the 40th anniversary of Fujitsu in Australia and New Zealand, Foster said, "When you start looking at where we are moving as a company, our future is definitely in the cloud and definitely in mobility. It is also in the ability to deliver virtual end-user computing. Doing that in a safe and secure environment is something that will be a leader in."
Fujitsu had taken an early decision to deploy cloud infrastructure in Australia, and this had paid off, Foster said. "We made the decision to go local because our biggest customers were government based and we knew that having the ability to store data here would be a big differentiator.
"We have grown our revenue at about twice the rate of the market in Australia and New Zealand. We have invested about $170 million in cloud and data centers." He said the company now had 5000 employees across Australian and New Zealand, annual revenues of $1.2 billion and about 6500 customers.
"We plan to go deeper and broader with our customers. We are some 12 months into the journey around net promoter score (NPS). We are using NPS right across our customer base to try and understand how we can improve our business."
To provide mobility services Fujitsu globally licenses mobile device management software from Zenprise - recently acquired by Citrix - which it sells as Fujitsu Managed Mobile. The software is cloud-based and provides device, policy, application, service and expense management for mobile devices. Android, iOS, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry are all supported.
Foster told IT Pro Fujitsu planned to extend its mobility offerings to include making corporate applications available on mobile devices.
The President of Fujitsu's international business, Rod Vawdry, flagged the possibility of the company entering the global smart-phone market, saying it had recently made its first foray, outside Japan, in France in partnership with Orange. In February it launched the S01, an Android 4.0 device targeted at seniors.
The principal of consultancy CapioIT, Phil Hassey, said Fujitsu had done very well in the Australian cloud computing market. "They have a geographic distribution of data centers in Australia that is much larger than the other tier one players. That strategy appears to be working."
He was less enthusiastic about the company's mobility offering, saying Fujitsu lacked the relationships with the non-IT areas of its customer base needed to facilitate growth in this business. "For them to really differentiate themselves in mobility they need to work on developing a broader range of relationships with their customers."
He also questioned Fujitsu's ability to localize solutions, like Managed Mobile, that had developed by other overseas units, saying that Fujitsu was less globally integrated that other IT multinationals.
Fujitsu's foray into the global smart-phone market had come as a surprise to him, he said. "I can't see how they can commercialize smart-phones in many markets, given the level of competition."
The Mouse Inventor's Vision of Computing
Excerpted from NY Times Report by John Markoff And Ashwin Seshagiri
Beginning in the 1950s, when computing was in its infancy, Douglas C. Engelbart set out to show that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach "bootstrapping."
At the time, computers were room-size calculating machines that were not interactive and could be used by only a single person at a time.
In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration, called the "Mother of All Demos," before more than a thousand of the world's leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, CA.
In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer.
He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing. Some of the features that Dr. Engelbart and his colleagues demonstrated now seem like prototypes for collaborative tools available today, including cloud-based programs for shared editing, like Google Drive.
Dr. Engelbart died Tuesday, but his contributions to computing have reverberated throughout the technology industry since the invention of the mouse, which he described in his patent application as a device to provide an "X-Y position indicator control mechanism" for a computer's display.
Over the years, Dr. Engelbart was awarded several honors — including the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the Turing Award — for his many contributions to the computer world.
But he will probably be most remembered for the mouse, a device that he called "one of the potentially promising means for delivering and receiving information." He had mused about his invention as a bug, for the cursor it produced on a screen, but it was a reference to another creature that stuck.
Douglas C. Engelbart's views on how a networked, interactive computing system can allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborators offered a prescient perspective on how we interact with technology.
New Hardware to Make Cloud Data Encryption Safer
Excerpted from ZeeBiz Report
A study conducted by MIT researchers found that cloud computing, a process of outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet, could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated web services without building massive server farms.
However, it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999. Encryption could make cloud servers more secure.
Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of any computations would be re-encrypted before they're sent off-chip. In the last 10 years or so, however, it's become clear that even when a computer is handling encrypted data, its memory-access patterns, the frequency with which it stores and accesses data at different memory addresses, can betray a shocking amount of private information.
The researchers described a new type of secure hardware component, dubbed Ascend, that would disguise a server's memory-access patterns, making it impossible for an attacker to infer anything about the data being stored.
Ascend also thwarts another type of attack, known as a timing attack, which attempts to infer information from the amount of time that computations take. "This is the first time that any hardware design has been proposed that would give you this level of security while only having about a factor of three or four overhead in performance," says Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, whose group developed the new system.
"People would have thought it would be a factor of 100." The "trivial way" of obscuring memory-access patterns, Devadas explains, would be to request data from every address in the memory, whether a memory chip or a hard drive, and throw out everything except the data stored at the one address of interest.
But that would be much too time-consuming to be practical. With Ascend, addresses are assigned to nodes randomly. Every node lies along some "path," or route through the tree, that starts at the top and passes from node to node, without backtracking, until arriving at a node with no further connections.
When the processor requires data from a particular address, it sends requests to all the addresses in a path that includes the one it's really after. To prevent an attacker from inferring anything from sequences of memory access, every time Ascend accesses a particular memory address, it randomly swaps that address with one stored somewhere else in the tree.
As a consequence, accessing a single address multiple times will very rarely require traversing the same path. By confining its dummy requests to a single path, rather than sending them to every address in memory, Ascend exponentially reduces the amount of computation required to disguise an address.
In a separate paper, which is as-yet unpublished but has been posted online, the researchers prove that querying paths provides just as much security as querying every address in memory would. Spyware in the cloud could still deduce what public photos it was being compared to. And the time the comparisons take could indicate something about the source photos.
So Ascend's memory-access scheme has one final wrinkle. It sends requests to memory at regular intervals, even when the processor is busy and requires no new data. That way, attackers can't tell how long any given computation is taking.
Software as a Monthly Rental
Excerpted from NY Times Report by David Pogue
Photoshop is now the biggest-name software that you can't actually buy, as the new version costs $30 a month, or $240 a year.
There's a new reason for Photoshop to be famous.
Yes, it's still the program that just about every photographer and designer on earth uses to retouch or even reimagine photos. It's still the only program whose name is a verb.
But now, Photoshop is also the biggest-name software that you can't actually buy. You can only rent it, for a month or a year at a time. If you ever stop paying, you keep your files but lose the ability to edit them.
You have to pay $30 a month, or $240 a year, for the privilege of using the latest Photoshop version, called Photoshop CC. Or, if you want to use the full Adobe suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere and so on), you'll pay $600 a year.
The price list is stunningly complex. The fees may be higher or lower depending on how many programs you rent, whether you already own an existing version and which one, whether you commit to a full year or prefer to rent one month at a time. There are also discounted first-year teaser rates, student/teacher rates and a 30-day free trial.
But you get the point: the dawn of Software as a Subscription is now upon us.
Microsoft is conducting a similar experiment with the latest version of Office. An Office 365 subscription is $100 a year. But there's a big difference: renting Office is optional. You can still buy it outright if you prefer.
It should be obvious why Adobe is enthusiastic about rental software. First, it's big money.
Not everybody will pay more than before under the new plan. If you use three or more Adobe programs and you upgrade to the latest versions every year, you'll save money by renting.
But if you use only one or two programs, you'll pay much more by renting — especially if you were in the habit of upgrading only every other year, for example. Here's the math: Photoshop CC alone will cost $240 a year. In the old days, buying the annual upgrade cost $200, and you didn't have to upgrade every year. In three years, you might have spent $200 or $400; now you'll pay $720.
And Adobe could raise the rental prices at any time. Every year, if it chooses. Please click here for the full report.
Latest NSA Leak Details PRISM's Bigger Picture
Excerpted in ZDNet Report by Zack Whittaker
New "top secret" slides released by The Washington Post on Saturday shed further light on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM program, which was first publicly disclosed through a series of leaks by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden earlier this month.
The additional four slides expand on the original leaks released by the publication The Guardian. They further back claims of widespread borderline illegal mass surveillance by Snowden, whose airside location at a Moscow airport caused a stand-off between the two former Cold War superpowers on a new diplomatic front.
The National Security Agency's "PRISM" program is able to collect, in real-time, intelligence not limited to social networks and email accounts. But the seven tech companies accused of opening 'back doors' to the spy agency could well be proven innocent.
The original disclosure blew the lid on government surveillance and the scope in which the US government worked with the UK intelligence network, and stirred further anger over alleged secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Further leaks by The Guardian showed that the program is court approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), set up under FISA in 1978, but individual warrants are not necessary, even for requesting full access to a person's collected data.
While this latest disclosure expands what is known about the PRISM program, only eight of the total 40 or more slides have been published so far.
Over the weekend, the Post published further details of the mass collection of email, video and voice chat, photos, file transfers, and other online social networking content on foreign nationals by the NSA in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
According to one freshly leaked slide, there were 117,675 "active surveillance targets" in PRISM's database, but this figure does not detail which kinds of users these were, or among them how many Americans had their data collected inadvertently by the program.
Another slide detailed the PRISM "tasking process," which shows how an NSA analyst would acquire and search for new intelligence on a surveillance target.
These tasking requests are initiated by the NSA analyst, who will determine a new target and have this authorized by their supervisor, which under Section 702 of FISA will seek to ensure there is a 51 percent likelihood that the target is not a U.S. person, and are overseas at the time of data collection.
Annotations by the Post suggest that PRINTAURA "sorts and dispatches the data stream" into different categories of data from the FBI's Data Interception Technology Unit (DITU) — understood to be the Tier 1 company wiretaps.
The data collected from these wiretaps are then sorted into data types for further analysis by SCISSORS and Protocol Exploitation. The NSA is then able to determine what is U.S. citizen data, in line with the leaked "minimization procedures," which then filters through two further systems — FALLOUT system for metadata, and CONVEYANCE for voice content — to reduce the intake of intelligence on Americans.
Once this has been completed, foreign intelligence that filtered as much U.S. persons only data out as possible will pass into databased dubbed NUCLEON for voice, PINWALE for video, MAINWAY for call data, and MARINA for Internet records.
While the slides annotated by the Post claim that the FBI "uses government equipment on private company property" to receive such data, in another infographic-like post, the publication specifically states that a tasking request "is routed to equipment installed at each company."
The FBI's DITU is understood to maintain this equipment, in which the data it collects is then passed to the NSA.
In a ZDNet article earlier in June, we suggested that the aforementioned companies were likely not actively working or engaged with the NSA as was suggested — and subsequently rolled back on by the media. But the "private company property" were likely the Tier 1 network companies that provide the high-bandwidth lines behind the named seven technology companies' data center operations.
This also ties in with the Upstream program, in which, as later leaks pointed out, physical prism-like "beam splitters" would be used to split the fiber optic beams, where one stream would go to the destination while the other was copied and sent to an NSA data center.
This data copying and snatching would prove that the named seven technology companies were not in fact handing data over to the NSA, voluntarily or forcibly, without an appropriate warrant.
The named seven companies — AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google (and YouTube), Microsoft (and Skype), Paltalk, and Yahoo — scrambled immediately after the first disclosure to counter the claims mistakenly made by some that they gave the NSA "direct access" to their systems.
Many of those companies are also currently engaged with the Obama administration in a bid to lift the lid on the exact number of National Security Letters, or so-called "gagging orders," they receive from the U.S. government under Section 505 of the Patriot Act — a statute expanded under the new 2001 provisions.
The Post's earlier claim that the NSA had "direct access" to the companies was not repeated in the latest disclosure, and instead erred on the side of caution.
The publication also notes that a tasking request
EU Warns of Serious Consequences in Wake of Spy Scandal
Excerpted from V3 Report by Michael Passingham
Neelie Kroes has warned of "multi-billion euro consequences" for cloud service providers if customers can no longer trust their security measures in the wake of the PRISM hacking scandal.
"If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out," said Kroes, the vice president of the European Commission (EC) who speaks regularly on digital issues.
She said that customers who allow their cloud suppliers to hold sensitive information will find themselves in a difficult position: "Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?" she asked.
Customers would see sense and look elsewhere, according to Kroes, with US vendors bearing the brunt of the damage: "Front or back door - it doesn't matter - any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all," she said. "Customers will act rationally, and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.
"In this case it is often American providers that will miss out, because they are often the leaders in cloud services."
But she said that while privacy is a "fundamental right", it should not be entirely down to policy makers to produce legislation for cloud providers to put stronger security measures in place. Instead, she said in the interest of an open and competitive market, cloud vendors should put their own security measures in place as they see fit, saying "privacy is not only a fundamental right, it can also be a competitive advantage."
"Companies focused on privacy need to start coming forward into the light... 2013 is the year," she concluded.
This week, allegations emerged suggesting EU buildings were bugged and EU computer equipment was hacked, with the EC labeling the incidents "deeply disturbing".
Edward Snowden's Father Writes Open Letter
Excerpted from The Guardian Report
Here is the text of the open letter Lon Snowden, along with his attorney, Bruce Fein, wrote to US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden. The letter was provided to the Associated Press.
July 2, 2013
Edward Joseph Snowden
Moscow
Dear Edward:
I, Bruce Fein, am writing this letter in collaboration with your father in response to the statement you issued yesterday in Moscow.
Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, trumpeted that a patriot saves his country from his government.
What you have done and are doing has awakened congressional oversight of the intelligence community from deep slumber; and, has already provoked the introduction of remedial legislation in Congress to curtail spying abuses under section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You have forced onto the national agenda the question of whether the American people prefer the right to be left alone from government snooping absent probable cause to believe crime is afoot to vassalage in hopes of a risk-free existence. You are a modern day Paul Revere summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny and one branch government.
In contrast to your actions, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper responded last March as follows to an unambiguous question raised by Senator Ron Wyden:
"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper testified, "No sir, it does not." Wyden asked for clarification, and Clapper hedged: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."
Director Clapper later defended his stupendous mendacity to the Senator as the least untruthful answer possible. President Obama has not publicly rebuked the Director for frustrating the right of the people to know what their government is doing and to force changes if necessary through peaceful democratic processes. That is the meaning of government by the consent of the governed. "We the people" are sovereign under the U.S. Constitution, and government officials are entrusted with stewardship (not destruction) of our liberties.
We leave it to the American people to decide whether you or Director Clapper is the superior patriot.
The history of civilization is a history of brave men and women refusing to bow to government wrongdoing or injustice, and exalting knowledge, virtue, wisdom, and selflessness over creature comforts as the North Star of life. We believe your actions fall within that honorable tradition, a conviction we believe is shared by many.
As regards your reduction to de facto statelessness occasioned by the Executive Branch to penalize your alleged violations of the Espionage Act, the United States Supreme Court lectured in Trop v. Dulles (1958): "The civilized nations of the world are in virtual unanimity that statelessness is not to be imposed as punishment for crime."
We think you would agree that the final end of the state is to make men and women free to develop their faculties, not to seek planetary domination through force, violence or spying. All Americans should have a fair opportunity to pursue their ambitions. Politics should not be a football game with winners and losers featuring juvenile taunts over fumbles or missteps.
Irrespective of life's vicissitudes, we will be unflagging in efforts to educate the American people about the impending ruination of the Constitution and the rule of law unless they abandon their complacency or indifference. Your actions are making our challenge easier.
We encourage you to engage us in regular exchanges of ideas or thoughts about approaches to curing or mitigating the hugely suboptimal political culture of the United States. Nothing less is required to pay homage to Valley Forge, Cemetery Ridge, Omaha Beach, and other places of great sacrifice.
Very truly yours,
Bruce Fein, Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden.
Coming Events of Interest
BUILD, BUY, OR RENT - July 16th Webinar at 11:00 AM ET. How should you implement your optimal cloud storage solution? This webinar will compare the three options, including an in-depth comparison of monthly Amazon pricing and OpenStack build-it-yourself costs, helping you optimize your plan for your business needs and growth.
Cloud Computing Summit - July 16th-17th in Bradenton, South Africa. Advance your awareness of the latest trends and innovations from the world of cloud computing. This year's ITWeb-sponsored event will focus on key advances relating to the infrastructure, operations, and available services through the global network.
NordiCloud 2013 - September 1st-3rd in Oslo, Norway. The Nordic Symposium on Cloud Computing & Internet Technologies (NordiCloud) aims at providing an industrial and scientific forum for enhancing collaboration between industry and academic communities from Nordic and Baltic countries in the area of Cloud Computing and Internet Technologies.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 - October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Two major conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; and the impact of mobile cloud computing and Big Data analytics in this space.
International CES - January 7th-10th in Las Vegas, NV. The International CES is the global stage for innovation reaching across global markets, connecting the industry and enabling CE innovations to grow and thrive. The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $209 billion US consumer electronics industry.
CONNECTING TO THE CLOUD - January 8th in Las Vegas, NV. This DCIA Conference within CES will highlight the very latest advancements in cloud-based solutions that are now revolutionizing the consumer electronics (CE) sector. Special attention will be given to the impact on consumers, telecom industries, the media, and CE manufacturers of accessing and interacting with cloud-based services using connected devices.
CCISA 2013 – February 12th–14th in Turin, Italy. The second international special session on Cloud computing and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and its Applications within the 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing.
|
