Volume LXII, Issue 9

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In This Issue

Verizon Offers Irma Victims Data Relief

Excerpted from Verizon Press Announcement

To all of our Florida customers, Verizon Wireless is saying, “We’ve got your back.”

Beginning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) on September 9th and running through midnight on September 11th, Verizon is giving postpaid customers talk, text, and data relief while prepaid customers receive an extra 3 GB for data.

Wireless communication is essential during severe weather, which is why the Verizon network team prepares year-round to ensure a strong performance during times like these.

Following this initial offer, we will continue to closely monitor the storm’s path and impact and make additions and adjustments as needed, and will communicate those details as those decisions are made.

“We understand that our network is never more important than when disaster strikes,” said Russ Preite – President, Southeast Market for Verizon.

“This offer is just one way that we are showing our commitment to the entire state of Florida as this historic superstorm continues on its path to make landfall there.”

Verizon values the safety and security of all Florida residents, including the company’s employees… Read More

Rackspace Buys Cloud Rival Datapipe

Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Natalie Gagliordi

Rackspace has inked a deal to acquire rival managed public cloud service provider Datapipe as it looks to expand its global footprint and Fortune 500 customer base.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Rackspace claims it is the largest in its history.

Datapipe, based in Jersey City, NJ, has cloud infrastructure capabilities in Silicon Valley, the New York Metro area, London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Datapipe also opened a data center in Moscow under the pretense of helping enterprises operate and sell in the country while abiding by Russia’s strict data sovereignty laws.

Rackspace listed a string of new capabilities and market benefits that it expects to gain from Datapipe.

Boiled down, the most significant gains stem from Datapipe’s presence among large companies, including the US Departments of Defense, Energy, and Treasury, as well as the UK Cabinet Office, Ministry of Justice, and Department of Transport.

Datapipe also has data centers and offices in key markets where Rackspace has little to no footprint, including Brazil, China and Russia… Read More

BuyDRM Showcases Innovation at IBC

Excerpted from BuyDRM Press Announcement

BuyDRM, a pioneer in Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) and Content Security Services is set to give multiple presentations and demos at IBC 2017 in Amsterdam, Netherlands in conjunction with several of the largest names in digital media.

These three events with Akamai, Google, and IBC include a demo of the new KeyOS CPIX Integration, the KeyOS Widevine Everywhere program and our CEO’s entertaining look back on sixteen years in the DRM business.

On September 16th at 11:00 AM BuyDRM CEO & Founder Christopher Levy will lead the discussion with the “KeyOS Widevine Everywhere Program” in the Google Theater located in Hall 14/Stand A.10.

This presentation will deep-dive into Widevine-based solutions across HTML5 and modern devices.

On September 18th at 2:30 PM Christopher Levy will be presenting in the Content Everywhere Hub located in Hall 14.

This presentation entitled “The Death of DRM and More Fake News” will discuss the recent history of DRM for media, it’s perceived failures and success and it’s rise to a now mandatory technology for premium online video content.

Throughout the duration of the IBC trade show, BuyDRM and Akamai will demonstrate the first ever large-scale CPIX… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

The DCIA is pleased to co-sponsor the 2017 Storage Visions Conference (SV 2017) with the Entertainment Storage Alliance and Coughlin Associates taking place on Monday, October 16th, in Milpitas, CA.

The conference theme is “New Visions for Digital Storage,” and the event will bring together the vendors, end-users, researchers and visionaries who will meet the growing demand for digital storage for all aspects of unstructured and lightly structured data.

The rise of the digital economy is good news for digital storage.

There are a number of significant trends emerging that will likely have important implications on our industry.

At SV 2017, attendees will find-out “what’s in-store for storage” and how to capitalize with smarter storage system solutions.

In the next few years, vast quantities of data will be generated and will need rapid analysis to be useful.

This data will come from digital healthcare, genomics, the internet of things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, as well as cloud and fog computing.

The 2017 Storage Visions Conference will help businesses, IT professionals, and data scientists understand the digital storage solutions that will make them successful in this new world.

The agenda can be accessed here and conference registration is available here. Share wisely, and take care

Equifax Breach Worst Leak of Personal Info Ever

Excerpted from Ars Technica Report by Dan Goodin

It’s a sad reality in 2017 that a data breach affecting 143 million people is dwarfed by other recent hacks – for instance, the ones hitting Yahoo in 2013 and 2014, which exposed personal details for 1 billion and 500 million users respectively; another that revealed account details for 412 million accounts on sex and swinger community site AdultFriendFinder last year; and an eBay hack in 2014 that spilled sensitive data for 145 million users.

The breach Equifax reported Thursday, however, very possibly is the most severe of all for a simple reason: the breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals.

By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be.

The theft, by criminals who exploited a security flaw on the Equifax website, opens the troubling prospect the data is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both and will remain so indefinitely.

Hacks hitting Yahoo and others may have breached more accounts, but the severity of the personal data was generally more limited… Read More

Equifax Data Breach Spurs Lawsuits

Excerpted from Reuters Report by Jonathan Stempel

At least two proposed federal class-action lawsuits have been filed against Equifax after the credit reporting company disclosed a hacking that may have compromised personal information for 143 million American consumers.

One lawsuit filed in Equifax’s hometown of Atlanta accused the company of negligence and willfully violating the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act for failing to take necessary steps to protect customer data including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers.

A second lawsuit was filed in the federal court in Portland, OR, and accused Equifax of negligence.

Both seek unspecified damages.

Equifax did not immediately respond on Friday to requests for comment.

More lawsuits are expected to be filed against Equifax on behalf of consumers as well as shareholders.

The company’s stock price fell as much as 17.8 percent on Friday morning.

Equifax disclosed the breach after US market hours on Thursday, nearly six weeks after discovering it on July 29… Read More

Experian Still Waiting for Explanation

Excerpted from Bloomberg Report by Sarah Ponczek

Equifax’s lack of transparency about its massive data breach makes it difficult for the credit-rating firm’s competitors to check the security of their own information, according to Experian.

“We don’t have a conclusive statement from Equifax,” Alex Lintner, Experian’s President of Consumer Information Services, said. “We’re trying to get one about what happened, so we can double-, triple-, quadruple-check whatever equivalent we have.”

Atlanta-based Equifax last week reported a cyberattack that may have affected 143 million people — or about half the US population — revealing Social Security numbers, driver’s license data and birth dates.

Experian, which collects similar customer information, said it has confidence in its underlying security and technologies.

“Information security is a company’s job and this is an Equifax problem,” Lintner said.

“We’ve always invested in technologies and processes and people with the skills to try to avoid an event like this.”

TransUnion, another Equifax rival, said Monday it conducted a review and doesn’t believe it’s vulnerable to the same type of assault… Read More

Equifax Hack Teaches Hard Lessons

Excerpted from ThinkAdvisor Report by Gabrielle Hernandez

Most cybersecurity experts now agree that organizations should be planning incident response strategies for when, not if, their companies experience data breaches.

Credit reporting agency Equifax learned this lesson the hard way when it was hit by a cyberattack that exposed addresses, Social Security numbers and financial information for 134 million customers.

Equifax is the latest in a line of breaches at large companies, following major incidents at Wells Fargo and Yahoo, among others, in the last year.

In the current cybersecurity threat landscape where breaches are all but guaranteed, companies often fall short of the regulatory standards set forth for data security.

Regardless, regulators don’t seem to be letting up.

Although cybersecurity’s regulatory landscape has perhaps not kept pace with the rate of data collection and hacker exploits, it has certainly expanded over the last few years at both the federal and local levels.

These emerging regulations keep information governance staff on their toes… Read More

Congress May Need to Rethink Cybersecurity

Excerpted from Broadcasting & Cable Report by John Eggerton

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said Congress might need to rethink cybersecurity policies in the wake of a data breach of Equifax, one of the largest data brokers in the US.

The company said it discovered the breach on July 29 and immediately took steps to stop the breach and reported it to law enforcement.

It also said there was no evidence that the breach involved its “core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.”

That was cold comfort for Warner.

“The recent news that one of the largest credit reporting agencies and data brokers in the US suffered a breach involving over 143 million Americans is profoundly troubling,” said Warner, Co-Founder of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus.

“While many have perhaps become accustomed to hearing of a new data breach every few weeks, the scope of this breach – involving Social Security Numbers, birth dates, addresses, and credit card numbers of nearly half the US population… Read More

Top Cybersecurity Threats Facing Business

Excerpted from TechRepublic Report by Conner Forrest

Ransomware, insider threats, and denial of service are the three biggest threats faced by organizations as they try to secure sensitive data, according to a new study from Infoblox and SANS, released Thursday.

However, these threats and others were not experienced alone.

According to firms surveyed for the report, 78% had run into two or more distinct threats against their data in the past year.

Additionally, 68% encountered the same threat type more than once.

In that same time frame, 12% dealt with an actual breach, with 43% of those experiencing exfiltration of sensitive data through encrypted channels, the report said.

The most commonly targeted data in these attacks was access data, or data that can be used in user credentials and additional account information.

“This shows how highly attackers prize access data,” Sean Tierney, Director of Threat Intelligence at Infoblox, said… Read More

Cloud Spurs Hybrid Architecture Adoption

Excerpted from Information Week Report by John Edwards

Cloud computing is transforming the way enterprises approach IT.

The shift started with SaaS applications and is now rapidly sweeping through the data center with a growing focus on hybrid cloud initiatives.

A recent Evaluator Group survey of enterprise IT administrators discovered that 62% believe that a hybrid cloud infrastructure is in their long-term future and 58% said they would increase their hybrid cloud workload in 2017.

John Webster, an Evaluator Group senior partner, says that a hybrid cloud is essentially an IT architecture that integrates on-premises computing resources with off-premises public cloud resources. “This includes multi-cloud architectures,” he notes.

The most common hybrid cloud use case among traditional enterprise users, Webster notes, is disaster recovery (DR).

“Upwards of 80% in our survey research,” he states. Hybrid architectures allow enterprises to essentially spin-up DR sites on-demand.

“Although hybrid cloud requires enterprises to investigate an area that is for many organizations an entirely new data center concept… Read More

Why Hybrid Cloud Is Future of Enterprise IT

Excerpted from NetworkWorld Report by Majid Ahmed

As cloud computing continues to generate a huge amount of buzz and interest over its future, another phenomenon is gaining investors’ and developers’ interest with promises to upend the future of enterprise IT.

Hybrid cloud tech, which has only recently come into its own, is increasingly being recognized as the cash-cow of the future. But what exactly is this tech, and is it worth all the hubbub it’s garnered?

A quick look at today’s hybrid cloud tech shows that the attention it’s drawn to itself is entirely warranted; the idea behind it may not be new, but recent advancements in computing have enabled it to truly thrive in the marketplace for the first time, and it could very well be on the verge of redefining modern computing.

So what exactly is the future of hybrid cloud, and how close is it to taking off?

Today’s market, which moves at dizzying paces and seems to churn out innovative new technologies on an almost daily basis, is more equitable in terms of access to technology than ever before.

Massive transnational corporations and small, ambitious startups alike have driven the recent explosion of investment in tech largely because, for the first time, they all have equal (or at least more equal) access to advanced computing… Read More

Half of Customers Running More Than One Cloud

Excerpted from GeekWire Report by Tom Krazit

Cloud computing was supposed to simplify the process of deploying enough infrastructure to support a company’s business applications, but it’s getting complicated as companies employ multiple cloud vendors and try to get a handle on multiple cloud services.

That’s according to the results of a recent survey of tech professionals conducted by Cloudify and IOD Cloud Tech Research, released Tuesday.

Half of all respondents now run workloads at more than one cloud vendor’s facilities, and of those, most are using Amazon Web Services and Azure as part of their multi-cloud strategy.

Interestingly, respondents reported running OpenStack, the beleaguered open-source cloud software that runs private clouds and a shrinking number of public clouds, as often as AWS.

That suggests that larger companies are maintaining private cloud investments made in OpenStack a few years back: AWS was much larger than OpenStack among companies with under 500 employees, while OpenStack beat AWS among companies with more than 5,000 employees… Read More

Edge Is Future, but Security a Challenge

Excerpted from SiliconANGLE Report by Mark Albertson

VMware’s continued rise in popularity is testimony to customers’ desire for a flexible, virtualized system that can facilitate a common data structure, from the edge to the data center, from private clouds to public clouds.

But customers also need their systems to be secure, and this is gaining more attention as information technology vendors begin to see data streams from sensor-connected internet of things (IoT) devices become a major part of enterprise computing, especially at the edge.

“We see a lot of opportunities as it relates to edge computing. IoT is the biggest security challenge that we face” said Dom Delfino (pictured, right), senior vice president of worldwide sales and systems engineers at VMware.

Delfino spoke about edge computing and other subjects during his visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. He talked with host Stu Miniman and guest host Keith Townsend during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, NV and was joined by Lee Caswell (pictured, left), Vice President of Products at VMware.

They discussed the how VMware is taking steps in security and the importance of leveraging scale in the infrastructure. VMware is seeking to support security tools for protecting data wherever it may reside… Read More

Selecting the Right Hyperscale Partner

Excerpted from Report by Data Center Frontier Report by Bill Kleyman

The rapid pace of our evolving infrastructure is forcing data center administrators to make infrastructure decisions at a blistering pace.

In fact, many organizations are re-creating their business plans around the direct capabilities of the modern data center. Here’s the important piece to understand-the proliferation of cloud computing IT consumerization has created the need for powerful, hyperscale data center platforms.

That means your infrastructure must be able to handle an increased density for new types of workloads.

All of these trends are fueling the push for more efficient data center utilization and more specifically, the deployment of hyperscale data centers.

Organizations must work with the right type of partner to help them stay agile and resilient.

The data center is becoming a truly integral part of any company.

And, at the heart of the IT infrastructure, a hyperscale data center must be capable of scaling with the needs of the business… Read More

5G Pushes Carriers Toward Cloud-Native NFV

Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Ian Maclean

The promise of 5G is ultra-reliable, low-latency communications with speeds that we’ve never seen before in a mobile network.

But today’s mobile networks are not set up in a way that can handle 5G requirements without needing extensive and expensive over-engineering.

Mobile networks now are built in the mold of the traditional telephone network, with radios covering the last mile.

To make 5G possible, they’ll need to borrow principles of the more scalable, flexible networks that deliver cloud-based services from companies like Netflix and Google.

Tomorrow’s networks require more than RAN upgrades; they require a new kind of core network to deliver on the service, scale, security and quality-of-experience demands.

These demands will present challenges for network operators because they will require virtualized network functions that can allow the network services they support to cost effectively scale to billions of devices.

Two key technology developments will unlock the potential of 5G networks for today’s network operators… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

Industry of Things World Europe — September 18th and 19th in Berlin, Germany. Join more than 1,000 high-level executives to rethink your technology and business strategy for scalable, secure, and efficient IoT.

IoT Solutions World Congress — October 3rd through 5th in Barcelona, Spain. This event has grown enormously in no time and is an excellent barometer and source of information, inspiration, collaboration and transformation.

2017 Storage Visions Conference — October 16th in Milpitas, CA. “New Visions for Digital Storage” will bring together the vendors, end-users, researchers, and visionaries who will meet the growing demand for digital storage for all aspects of unstructured and lightly structured data.

Mobility Unmanned — November 1st and 2nd in Washington, DC. Providing key stakeholders the unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge autonomous technology and examine the emerging regulatory landscape governing the commercial use of unmanned vehicles in all sectors – air, land, and sea.

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) Europe — November 7th and 8th in Munich, Germany. IoT Europe will bring together forward-thinking companies from the manufacturing, energy, and transportation sectors to pave the way for the Industrial IoT revolution.

Government Video Expo & National Drone Show — November 28th-30th in Washington, DC. The 22nd annual GVE will feature a full exhibit floor with numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, networking opportunities, and five new educational pavilions.

Delivery of Things World 2018 — April 23rd and 24th in Berlin, Germany. Meet the most influential DevOps practitioners and experts and discuss what DevOps means for your business.

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