Volume LVII, Issue 11

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In This Issue

US Tech Firms Dominate Cloud Services in Western Europe

Excerpted from Wall St. Journal Report by Sam Schechner

When energy giant Enel started looking last year for an outside company to manage its computer systems and files, the Italian firm had a red line: All its data had to stay in the European Union.

The company that got the contract?

US tech giant Amazon, which won by promising that Enel’s data would be housed in a German facility that met Enel’s other requirements: “reliable, flexible, agile, and cheap.”

Political and legal pressure has for years been mounting on European companies to store their sensitive information in Europe – in part to keep it away from what many suspect are prying American eyes.

But the push toward so-called data localization has done little to slow the growth of US-based cloud-computing businesses operating in Europe.

Behind the growth: Big European companies are moving more of their computing work to outside providers. American firms have the scale to offer low prices, and are quick to roll out new services and upgrades, analysts say… Read More

Verizon Acquisition to Bolster Its IoT Business

Excerpted from Fortune Report by Aaron Pressman

Verizon snapped up trucking tracker Fleetmatics Group for $2.4 billion in cash on Monday, the carrier’s second deal in recent weeks to bolster its small but fast growing business of connecting smart devices and sensors to cloud software over wireless networks.

Fleetmatics was one of the few public cloud-software companies to show consistent growth in revenue and profits at the same time.

Its services to track trucks to improve safety and performance as well as providing scheduling and dispatching apps have been in high demand in an industry that typically moves slowly on new technology.

The purchase comes just a month after Verizon bought startup Telogis, which also offers fleet-tracking cloud software and has partnerships with truck makers like General Motors, Mack, and Hino.

The latest deal came together quickly, with senior executives beginning talks only in May, leading to board approvals last week, according to a Verizon securities filing.

Fleetmatics is barred from trying to solicit another offer, but the deal doesn’t appear to include a substantial termination payment… Read More

NetApp Gains Share in Flash on Versatility & Analytics

Excerpted from DailyCloud Report by Jeff Ferry

NetApp is showing a new dynamism in a key storage segment.

In Q1, NetApp’s revenue and ranking in the league table for all-flash arrays surged.

IDC’s Q1 market share report showed NetApp surpassing IBM, HP Enterprise, and Pure Storage to take second place, behind only EMC.

With triple-digit all-flash growth, and Q1 revenue of $181 million, or 22% of the total market, NetApp suddenly looks like a winner again.

Only a few months ago, conventional wisdom in the tech industry and on Wall Street was that storage equipment maker NetApp (NTAP) was in danger of being overtaken by younger companies with newer technology.

That view is looking wrong now.

All-flash arrays are a critical storage segment because price declines and capacity increases in the flash-based components that go into the arrays have made the all-flash systems highly competitive with the older, dominant technology, disk-based storage… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

Click Here for Video.

The DCIA is pleased to expand our partnership with Universum Events to include Internet & Mobile World 2016, the largest business-to-business (B2B) expo-conference for information technology (IT) and digital solutions in Central & Eastern Europe (CEE), taking place on October 5th and 6th in Bucharest, Romania.

Every business is unique in its own way, and digital solutions should be, too.

The adaptation of such technologies to each company’s needs and specifications, while keeping up with global trends, can be summed up in one word: tailoring.

The DCIA and Universum invite you to tailor your digital everything at IMWorld 2016, exploring solutions from more than 130 exhibitors and bringing together companies from across the region.

Find digital and IT service providers all in one place, including products and services for information and infrastructure security, devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), business software, cloud solutions, and e-commerce.

Plus, stay updated with international industry trends through 90+ agenda sessions, hosted by over 130 speakers.

As previously announced, also on October 5th and 6th, Bucharest will be the meeting place for over 900 representatives from the policy, legal, and technological European cloud sector.

The DCIA co-sponsored EuroCloud Forum will once again be the platform for discovering fresh information on two content stages reuniting industry leaders from across Europe – the Policy & Legal Stage and the Technology Stage.

Topics will include: the European science cloud, cloud usage for the public sector, designing a cloud-first strategy and architecture, the future of European cloud security, cloud security standards and accountability, data privacy in the cloud, and many more.

To keep in touch with the latest industry developments, build new partnerships, and take advantage of early registration discounts, secure your place by August 31st.

2016 is the year for coming of age for the European cloud sector.

As Europe moves towards becoming a digital single market on the legislative level, cloud has a pivotal role to play in technology.

It is a vital component of European innovation in e-government services, vertical industry applications, and web-based services of the future, such as smart cities and the IoT. Share wisely, and take care.

NIST Takes a Stab at Defining IoT

Excerpted from FCW Report by Mark Rockwell

A new publication from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) seeks to define the building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT) with an eye toward security and scalability.

“There isn’t a formal, analytic or descriptive set of building blocks that oversee the operation, trustworthiness and life cycle of IoT components,” said Jeffrey Voas, a computer scientist at NIST and author of “Networks of ‘Things.'”

Voas based his IoT building blocks on the elements of the familiar distributed computing model, in which computer components are connected via local-area networks and share information among themselves.

His Network of Things serves as the underlying model for larger IoT networks. NoT’s four fundamentals are sensing, computing, communication and actuation. Its five building blocks, called “primitives,” are core components of distributed systems.

For example, the primitives in a home’s motion-activated lighting system begin with the motion sensors and include the communications channel and software that process the sensor’s data and turn off lights in the room if no one is present.

NIST said the NoT model will give researchers a common language to use in solving security and other problems that arise… Read More

Ponemon: Cloud Adoption Grows as Security Lags

Excerpted from Report by Tara Seals

Cloud adoption is growing, but companies aren’t taking security into account the way they should.

A fresh Ponemon Institute survey shows that many businesses simply aren’t adopting appropriate governance and security measures to protect sensitive data in the cloud.

The results show that 73% of respondents deem cloud-based services and platforms important to their organization’s operations, and 81% said they will be more so over the next two years.

And in fact, 36% of respondents said their companies’ total IT and data processing needs were met using cloud resources today (a number that will increase to 45% over the next two years).

Yet, 54% of respondents said their companies do not have a proactive approach to managing security and complying with privacy and data protection regulations in cloud environments.

More than half say their organizations are not careful about sharing sensitive information in the cloud with third parties such as business partners, contractors and vendors… Read More

Cybersecurity Skills Shortage Leaves Companies Vulnerable

Excerpted from Information Week Report by Kelly Sheridan

A robust security strategy requires a skilled workforce.

Today’s IT managers are challenged to defend their networks as a lack of cybersecurity talent is leaving them vulnerable to attack.

Intel Security, in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), recently released a report called “Hacking the Skills Shortage.”

The report is based on research from tech market research firm Vanson Bourne, which interviewed 775 IT decision-makers involved in cyber-security within their organizations.

Respondents represented the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Israel.

The vast majority of participants (82%) reported a lack of cybersecurity skills within their organization.

One in three say the shortage makes them prime hacking targets; one in four say it has led to reputational damage and the loss of proprietary data via cyber-attack… Read More

Ransomware Attacks Cost People and Businesses Millions

Excerpted from Silicon Valley Business Journal Report by Gina Hall

Cyber-criminals are raking in $34 million annually by targeting individuals and businesses with ransomware.

An uptick in ransomware attacks is costing the average target $300, according to a new security report out from Cisco Systems.

More than 9,500 people pay ransoms to hackers each month.

“Defenders are not protecting systems in a way that matches how attackers do their work,” Cisco wrote in the Midyear Cybersecurity Report for 2016.

“Although defenders have evolved their strategies and tools for fighting online criminals, attackers are still permitted far too much unconstrained time to operate.”

To deploy the ransomware, cyber-attackers frequently create a fake website that contain what is called an Angler exploit kit.

The kit scans a user’s Web browser for security holes and then delivers malware that locks up the user’s computer… Read More

4 Laptop Security Trends You Should Know About

Excerpted from CSO Report by John Brandon

For most business users, there’s one common device we all use that is still a common attack vector for hackers.

We carry them with us everywhere, and we store most of our important files on the local drive, even if it’s just temporary.

A laptop has more storage, more connection options, and more legacy apps than any smartphone or tablet.

For any business, it’s important to take laptop security seriously, even if you already have an endpoint security product in place and teach enterprise users about best practices.

Hackers are industrious; they develop new techniques and know that one of the easiest ways to steal passwords, break into file archives, and intercept a confidential email is through a laptop.

These new techniques and products are not as widely known, yet they are effective for any laptop-carrying business worker who needs to fend off the latest attacks.

1. Laptop Kill Switch

Any security professionals who watched a recent Mark Zuckerberg live chat recently noticed he had a piece of tape over a webcam… Read More

Fog Computing vs. Cloud Computing vs. Edge Computing

Excerpted from Nanalyze Report

The world of information technology is one where grandiose sounding names often mask just how simple the underlying technologies actually are.

In a recent article, we demystified the term “cloud computing” by explaining it as a business model that leases applications on demand which are accessible via the internet.

In the olden days this was called centralized computing. For those of us who were alive in the days of mainframes, these were essentially centralized computers that did all the number crunching and you connected to them via “dumb terminals” that had no computing power themselves but simply showed you what was taking place on the mainframe.

As Moore’s Law made computing prices drop exponentially over time, we entered the era of decentralized computing where everybody had a computer (or as it was called, a workstation) that could do small-medium sized tasks.

These workstations used a local-area-network (LAN) to connect to mini-mainframes called servers that would do the heavy lifting. Anybody remember those times?

Then came the era of ecommerce and we moved on to building huge server farms called data centers… Read More

Why Will Fog Computing Eclipse Cloud?

Excerpted from Report by LinkedIn Pulse Report by Balasubramaniam Vedagiri

Fog computing is the latest metaphor to be used by the Digital Natives.

It does not describe a foggy system where the system is messed up.

The fog networking or fogging, uses an architecture that leverage one or a collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers), communication (rather than routed over the internet) and computing power.

It concentrates processing at the edge of the network instead of computing entirely in the cloud and thus called Edge computing too.

Fogging processes data locally in smart devices rather than being sent to the cloud for processing.

In a typical Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, things at the edge can create significantly large amounts of data.

Transmitting all that data to the cloud and transmitting response data back puts a great deal of demand on bandwidth, requires a considerable amount of time and can suffer from latency issues… Read More

Fog Computing vs. Edge Computing: What’s the Difference?

Excerpted from Automation World Report by David Greenfield

As companies explore the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing take center stage as strategic ways of dealing with the plethora of data to be analyzed and acted upon. But just how different are they?

The rise in interest around the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has introduced a variety of new technologies and strategies to deal with all the production-related data at the core of IIoT.

While many of these technologies are not necessarily new, they are often unfamiliar to industry and require a bit of explanation. This is definitely the case with the terms edge computing and fog computing.

Over the past year I have heard both terms used frequently and often interchangeably.

I wanted to find out just how different they are, so I spoke with David King, CEO of FogHorn Systems (a developer of edge intelligence software for industrial and commercial IoT – more about them later) and Matt Newton, director of technical marketing at Opto 22 (a manufacturer of controllers, I/O, relays and software for linking devices to networks).

Newton explained that “both fog computing and edge computing involve pushing intelligence and processing capabilities down… Read More

IoT to Use Fog Computing for More Efficiency than Cloud Computing

Excerpted from EconoTimes Report

The Internet of Things (IoT) will start relying more on fog computing in order to meet the demands of efficiency that is becoming more difficult to fill with current, conventional means.

Cloud computing simply cannot offer the same level of computing speed and response time that the IoT will require, but fog computing can.

Tech Crunch notes how IoT is quickly becoming more like the Internet of Everything or IoE, and how the future is starting to look like a futuristic sci-fi movie where the lives of people revolve around a centralized digital interface.

In any case, getting to this point will require processing and computing speeds that Fog computing is perfect for, and this is thanks to its decentralized processing architecture.

In terms of how processing works with cloud computing, it offers a huge pocket of processing capability, which makes it perfect for providing IoT with the kinds of storage presence that it needs in order to draw terabytes of information from.

However, cloud computing also suffers from a slower response time because it is essentially a huge mass, which makes it sluggish… Read More

How Fog Computing Pushes IoT Intelligence to the Edge

Excerpted from TechCrunch Report by Ben Dickson

As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves into the Internet of Everything and expands its reach into virtually every domain, high-speed data processing, analytics, and shorter response times are becoming more necessary than ever.

Meeting these requirements is somewhat problematic through the current centralized, cloud-based model powering IoT systems, but can be made possible through fog computing, a decentralized architectural pattern that brings computing resources and application services closer to the edge, the most logical and efficient spot in the continuum between the data source and the cloud.

The term fog computing, coined by Cisco, refers to the need for bringing the advantages and power of cloud computing closer to where the data is being generated and acted upon.

Fog computing reduces the amount of data that is transferred to the cloud for processing and analysis, while also improving security, a major concern in the IoT industry.

Here is how transitioning from the cloud to the fog can help deal with the current and future challenges of the IoT industry.

The IoT owes its explosive growth to the connection of physical things and operation technologies (OT) to analytics and machine learning… Read More

US Weighs Dangers & Benefits of Naming Russia in Cyber-Hack

Excerpted from Reuters Report by Warren Strobel and John Walcott

Wary of a global confrontation with Russia, US President Barack Obama must carefully weigh how to respond to what security experts believe was Moscow’s involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party organizations, US officials said.

Publicly blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services would bring instant pressure on Washington to divulge its evidence, which relies on highly classified sources and methods, US intelligence officials said.

One option for Washington is to retaliate against Russia in cyberspace.

But the intelligence officials said they fear a rapid escalation in which, under a worst-case scenario, Moscow’s sophisticated cyber warriors could attack power grids, financial systems and other critical infrastructure

Washington also has diplomacy to manage with Russia in Secretary of State John Kerry’s long-shot attempt to enlist Moscow’s help in ending the Syrian civil war and sustaining the Iran nuclear deal, as well as Russia-NATO tensions over Ukraine and Eastern Europe to manage.

Despite the outrageousness of interfering with a democratic election, the costs of saying the Russians did it would far outweigh the benefits… Read More

The NSA Is Likely ‘Hacking Back’ Russia’s Cyber Squads

Excerpted from ABC News Report by Lee Ferran

US government hackers at the National Security Agency are likely targeting Russian government-linked hacking teams to see once and for all if they’re responsible for the massive breach at the Democratic National Committee, according to three former senior intelligence officials.

It’s a job that the current head of the NSA’s elite hacking unit said they’ve been called on to do many times before.

Robert Joyce, chief of the NSA’s shadowy Tailored Access Operations, declined to comment on the DNC hack specifically, but said in general that the NSA has technical capabilities and legal authorities that allow the agency to “hack back” suspected hacking groups, infiltrating their systems to gather intelligence about their operations in the wake of a cyber-attack.

“In terms of the foreign intelligence mission, one of the things we have to do is try to understand who did a breach, who is responsible for a breach,” Joyce told ABC News in a rare interview this week.

“So we will use the NSA’s authorities to pursue foreign intelligence to try to get back into that collection, to understand who did it and get the attribution.

That’s hard work, but that’s one of the responsibilities we have… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

Industry of Things World Europe — September 19th-20th in Berlin, Germany. IoT business models, new IoT markets and strategies, product lifecycle management, next generation data handling and value assessment, IoT organizational impacts, and IoT security issues.

EuroCloud Forum — October 5th-6th in Bucharest, Romania. The seventh annual EuroCloud Congress will be held for the first time in Romania. With the theme “Creating New Frontiers in European Cloud,” it will be the sector’s largest forum on the future of cloud in Europe.

Internet & Mobile World 2016 — October 5th-6th in Bucharest, Romania. The largest business-to-business (B2B) expo-conference for information technology (IT) and digital solutions in Central & Eastern Europe (CEE).

Security of Things World USA — November 3rd-4th in San Diego, CA. The next event in the DCIA’s partnership with weCONECT Group has been designed to help you find pragmatic solutions to the most common security threats facing the IoT.

Rethink! Cloudonomic Minds — November 21st-22nd in London, England. The newest event in the DCIA’s partnership with weCONECT Group will cover how IoT is impacting cloud strategies and how to take advantage of these two key technology trends.

Government Video Expo — December 6th-8th in Washington, DC. GVE is the East Coast’s largest technology event for broadcast and video professionals, featuring a full exhibit floor, numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and more.

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