Sunnier Days Ahead for Retailers that Use Cloud Computing

May 14, 2013

Brick-and-mortar retailers have long favored highly visible investments, such as advertising or store design over spending hard-earned income on back-office information technology. In fact, the retail industry devotes only about 1.7% of revenue to IT. Compare that with banking, which spends about 6%.

Big-box and boutique retailers alike see that e-commerce competitors continue to use technology as a means to win on price and selection, and know their customers increasingly use smartphones in-store to compare prices or search for deals.

IBM’s latest Big Data-based retail forecast suggests that some brick-and-mortar retailers are turning the tide against showrooming, a trend in which consumers look at items in a store before ultimately buying them online, usually at lower prices. In order to remain competitive and press their advantage further, brick-and-mortar stores must look to the cloud computing revolution as a way to upgrade their technology without busting their budgets.

Perhaps most important, clouds offer retailers a way to explore the potential of big data analytics to understand their customers better. In order to compete with e-tailers, retailers are tapping social networks to learn what customers are saying about them and about their competitors. Weather data is being used to influence product purchasing decisions, and merchandise promotions are organized around social events.

In many cases, brick-and-mortar retailers are even finding new data sources. Some companies are tracking movement of customers within stores and analyzing how many stop at displays to improve the effectiveness of merchandising. Others are considering installing license-plate cameras in parking lots to find out which customer is about to walk into the store.

All of these innovations make use of massive amounts of data. A cloud based solution, with elastic storage, computing and analytics capability, can make it economically viable for retailers as they dabble with these nascent approaches.

Cloud computing involves a new way of thinking about data. In a cloud, a single server can host many virtual servers, slashing hardware costs. The virtual servers can scale on demand depending on the need for computer capacity. That’s very useful for retailers, whose businesses are notoriously seasonal. Automatically expanding capacity on Black Friday, for example, can reduce lines at checkout counters and ensure quick service.

Further, the retail industry is aided by thousands of specialty software programs that are designed for various niches and needs. The average retail chain uses about 450 such applications — far more than most other industries. Naturally, those software programs get heavy use at certain times while they are shut down at others.

For instance, Planogram software, which lays out how boxes and cans are displayed on shelves, may only run once per month. Order entry systems run during the day and in the evening when shoppers are in stores and online. Inventory replenishment systems run full bore overnight. Frequently, each system is operated by a different part of the corporate organization. Managers order capacity based on the maximum use they anticipate for the system, knowing that it’s hard to expand later because of the need to authorize new capital budgets.

The result is that retailers use only about 10% to 15% of the computer capacity in their data centers. Some 85% is sitting idle at any time. Huge economies of scale could be gained by using the same infrastructure across multiple applications in a cloud-computing architecture.

Companies can either build private clouds in their own data centers, purchase dedicated private clouds hosted by infrastructure providers, or they can move their data and applications to a public cloud used by several different companies and run by infrastructure specialists.

Many companies choose to do both by using a hybrid cloud solution with some applications in the retailers’ own data center and others in the public cloud. In a public cloud, retailers only pay for the capacity they use, just like buying electricity from a public utility. Further, many retail applications can also be rented on a monthly basis as software-as-a-service.

As mobile, social and ecommerce continue to explode in popularity, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers must understand and harness the benefits of cloud computing to optimize the in-store experience, market to the individual and maximize every sale. If they don’t, they risk falling behind their competition.

Vish Ganapathy is the Director and Chief Technologist for IBM’s Global Retail business, and has more than 22 years of consulting experience working with retailers worldwide. Ganapathy particularly focuses on bridging software applications and technology that can enable retailers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

Thanks http://www.wired.com

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AVG: Four Common Myths About the Cloud

May 13, 2013

(This post originally appeared on AVG)

Everyone’s talking about the cloud nowadays so you’ve got to consider it, right?  It enables companies to be more flexible and save on their IT costs.  It allows free and easy access to data for employees from wherever they are, using whatever devices they want to use.    A recent survey by accounting software maker MYOB finds that small businesses that adopt cloud technologies enjoy higher revenues.  Another analysis finds that small businesses are losing money as a result of ineffective IT management that could be much improved by the use of cloud based services.  And another poll of more than 1,200 small businesses by technology reseller CDW found that “…cloud users cite cost savings, increased efficiency and greater innovation as key benefits” and that “…across all industries, storage and conferencing and collaboration are the top cloud services and applications.”

For many companies, particularly startups, small companies, virtual firms and organizations with remote employees, cloud based technologies make a lot of sense.  And it also makes sense that the more popular ones are the ones that provide storage and collaboration –these are easy to setup and not as mission critical. There are a lot of myths about cloud computing in 2013 that just aren’t true.  Here are some of the more common ones I hear from my clients.

 

“It’s cheaper and cost beneficial.”  This may be true if you’re a startup or are migrating to a relatively inexpensive cloud application.  But if you have existing applications and you decide to move your entire organization to a cloud based infrastructure you’ll likely pay about $100 per month per user.  That’s exactly what I’ve been seeing and that’s a lot more expensive than just buying a new server and having an IT guy service it for a few hours a month.  There are many inexpensive cloud based applications but the more robust, the higher the monthly fees. And if you add up the monthly fees over a 5-7 year period and compare it just buying an application you’ll see that you could be likely paying more.  I expect the costs of the cloud to continue to decrease over time, but for now it could be more expensive.

“I can connect anywhere, anytime.”  The reality is you’re not as mobile as you think.  That’s because to use the cloud effectively you need internet access.  And depending on where you are this is easier said than done.  Many places say they offer free Wi-Fi but sometimes it’s so slow it’s almost not worth doing the work.  It’s not uncommon, particularly for a business traveler, to hit dead spots and experience agonizingly slow speeds which can really hurt productivity.  Internet access and speeds continue to improve, but they haven’t caught up with the functionality that a lot of advanced cloud based apps offer.  Many of my clients experience frustration with this.

“My data is less secure.”   If any cloud provider tells you that your data is 100% secure than they’re lying to you.  Nothing is 100%.  But I’m going to bet that your data hosted on their server is way more secure than in your own internal environment.  That’s because successful companies who offer cloud based services and who want to continue being successful build their business models around data connectivity and security.  They will always be using the latest security applications and have more security resources deployed than you could ever hope.  Breaches will happen, but I favor the security of cloud companies over my IT guy.

“My service provider is guaranteeing me a long term, flat, monthly fee.”   True.  For the time being.  But my biggest question about cloud application is how much you will allow your business to become dependent on the cloud provider.  How much are you willing to relinquish control over that “flat monthly fee.”  What if your cloud services provider decides to increase it 10%?  What can you do?  What’s your recourse?  Are you going to move yourself off of their platform and go through the inconvenience of finding another solution?  Or will you opt to self-manage your cloud applications? Nothing ever stands still for long in IT.  Nothing.

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Citrix VDI and virtual desktop solutions from C24

May 13, 2013

Excellent video from Citrix. C24 are a specialist application hosting and delivery organisation that specialises in the delivery of your business applications at speed. The solutions we deliver enable you to log on, anywhere, on any device and at any time. For further information please visit http://www.c24.co.uk

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Data Retention in the Social Media Era

April 11, 2013

A variety of industry research analystshave indicated that 3 of the top 10 priorities for IT in 2013 will be initiatives focusing on BYOD, cloud computing and business analytics obtained via Social Media.  While these initiatives provide clear business benefits, they will challenge data retention and records management policies for most organizations.

BYOD, cloud computing and social media have a common thread – they all create data repositories that have been geared towards the non-IT consumer, where governance, management and retention have taken a backseat to ease of use.  With the introduction of these technologies into the enterprise, companies are obligated to develop backup, archiving, and classification strategies to ensure that relevant data is available in the event of litigation and a discovery request.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that the moment a company receives a legal hold request they must not dispose of data without having a clearly defined and demonstrable retention and disposal policy. These policies cannot be developed and implemented in the midst of litigation as an opposing  litigant could claim that destruction of data was intentional, resulting in damages and penalties awarded to the opposition.

In the article, eDiscovery Rules Applied to Social Media: What This Means in Practical Terms for Businesses, statistics show that the FRCP rules are being enforced— sanctions were ordered in 50% of the cases where sanctions were sought, with a few resulting in large monetary penalties. Needless to say, companies are compelled to comply.

While many companies have chosen the pack-rat approach – save and archive all of the data they manage, including customer data, personal data, etc., this approach is not practical due to everincreasing volumes of data, especially when considering the information generated by mobile devices and social media.

In the event that a company does need to develop a defined retention policy that takes these initiatives into account, their requirements should be part of a larger blueprint for securing their data, linking their retention strategies with governance and accessibility.  These 6 steps provide some basic guidelines:

  1.  Determine the age at which each type of data that has not been accessed would be considered stale – 1 year?  2 years? 5 years?
  2. Implement a solution that can identify where stale data is located based on actual usage (not just file timestamps)
  3. Automate the classification of data based on content, activity, accessibility, data sensitivity and data owner involvement
  4. Automatically archive or delete data that is meets your retention guidelines
  5. Automatically migrate data that is stale but contains sensitive information to a secure folder or archive with access limited to only those people who need to have access (e.g. the General Counsel)
  6. Make sure your solution can provide evidence (e.g. reports) of your defensible data retention and disposal policy

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Cloud Formations : How business is changing

April 3, 2013

We must welcome the future… and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

We will never know for sure what American philosopher George Santayana was referring to when he uttered his famous lesson, but we can certainly apply his insights as we attempt to comprehend the potential impact of technological advances as significant as cloud computing. In predicting the future of cloud computing, we must first take note of its past.

Each year, the world’s leading IT research and advisory firm Gartner identifies the top 10 strategic technologies that will have significant impact for organizations for the coming year. Gartner defines these strategic technologies as the following: technologies with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.

David Cearley, a Fellow at Gartner explains that “the technologies [on these lists] will be strategic for most organizations, and IT leaders should use this list in their strategic planning process by reviewing the technologies and how they fit into their expected needs.”

I decided to do a simple tabulation of Gartner’s lists for both 2012 and 2013 (next year’s list hasn’t been released yet) to assess if Gartner had identified cloud computing -related technologies among their top 10 strategic technologies in the last two years.

The results are tabulated below:

Top 10 Strategic Techs for 2012 Cloud-Related   Top 10 Strategic Techs for 2013 Cloud Related
Media Tablets No Mobile experiences yes
Mobile Applications no HTML 5 no
Social User Experience no Personal Cloud yes
Intelligence Sensors no Intelligence Sensors no
App Stores No Hybrid cloud computing yes
Next-gen Analytics yes Strategic Big Data no
Data Management No Actionable Analytics yes
In-memory Computing No In-memory Computing no
Low-energy Servers No Integrated Ecosystems yes
Cloud Computing yes Enterprise App Stores No
Cloud-related techs 2   Cloud-related techs 5

The number of cloud computing-related technologies on the Gartner Strategic Technology list has more than doubled from 2 to 5 over the last two years. From these results alone, it is clear that cloud computing has had a significant influence on the global IT industry.

In February 2012, Gartner released a research paper entitled “Five Cloud Computing Trends that Will Affect Your Cloud Strategy Through 2015” (Cearley, D. and Smith, D.). Inside, there is a brilliant exposé on the anticipation surrounding cloud computing.

Here’s an excerpt of the paper;

Cloud computing is a major technology trend that has permeated the market over the last two years. … Cloud computing has a significant potential impact on every aspect of IT and how users access applications, information and business services. Although the potential is significant, the breadth and depth of the impact and the level of adoption over time is uncertain. The trend and related technologies continue to evolve and change rapidly, and there is continuing confusion and misunderstanding as vendors increasingly hype “cloud” as a marketing term. This level of impact, confusion, uncertainty and change make cloud computing one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends to address.

It is remarkable to note the variety of descriptions of cloud computing in that final sentence, “impact, confusion, uncertainty and change”. Even the IT experts are unsure how this will evolve! Salesforce.com provided a comprehensive look on how data communication and management have evolved and converged towards cloud computing.

Thanks to http://risingwiththecloud.wordpress.com/

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FTC Warning on Sharing Files in the Cloud

March 26, 2013

As part of a research project I’m doing on data breaches, I came across some great practical advice about file sharing in the cloud, courtesy of the Federal Trade Commission. By the way, the FTC also has  extensive information on security incidents. In any case, this 2010 report warns businesses to carefully review the risks of sharing data outside the corporate intranet via cloud services.

The FTC reminds medical and financial organizations that they are under special obligations to protect social security and bank account numbers, healthcare data, and other personal information.  But any business that has PII that can potentially leak out of their IT infrastructure will find their guidelines very useful.

It’s not that the FTC is against external data sharing in the cloud—which they refer to in the report as P2P file sharing—but they ask companies to consider the risks. Here’s a key section that nicely summarizes the drawbacks:

People who use P2P file sharing software can inadvertently share files. They might accidentally choose to share drives or folders that contain sensitive information, or they could save a private file to a shared drive or folder by mistake, making that private file available to others. In addition, viruses and other malware can change the drives or folders designated for sharing, putting private files at risk  … Once a user on a P2P network downloads someone else’s files, the files can’t be retrieved or deleted. What’s more, files can be shared among computers long after they have been deleted from the original source computer …

And for those companies that do use P2P, the FTC suggests a few measures to improve security:

  • Bring the P2P software in-house and only give access to authorized users
  • Delete sensitive information you don’t need, and restrict where files with sensitive information can be saved
  • Use appropriate file-naming conventions that are less likely to disclose the contents
  • Monitor your network to detect unapproved P2P file sharing programs

If you’re currently looking for an in-house solution that satisfies the requirements above, check outDatAnywhere.  DatAnywhere offers the cloud experience without the cloud.  It’s a no-compromise security solution that uses your organizations existing file sharing infrastructure to provide file sync services, mobile device access, browser access, and 3rd party collaboration.

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Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)

March 19, 2013

by Ravi Kalakota (thanks to practical analytics)

CIO request — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Underutilization and the complexity of managing growing data sprawl have motivated several trends during the last several years. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) represents an opportunity  improving IT efficiency and performance through centralization of resources. DaaS strategies have increased dramatically in the last few years with the maturation of technologies such as data virtualization, data integration, SOA, BPM  and Platform-as-a-service.

These questions are accelerating the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) trend:  How to deliver the right data to the right place at the right time? How to “virtualize” the data often trapped inside applications? How to support changing business requirements (analytics, reporting, and performance management) in spite of ever changing data volumes and complexity.

Enterprise DaaS strategy & Infrastructure is core focus area for business unit and enterprise CIOs.  

  • Enterprise Datawarehouse (EDW) strategies are increasingly moving to cross enterprise Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) strategies.
  • Structured and unstructured data growth force the evolution to DaaS
  • As Data in app silos moves to a centralized corporate/enterprise asset – DaaS infrastructure becomes critical.
  • To do any form of enterprise analytics you need DaaS in place first.

In the early years of this market, most DaaS was focused primarily on the financial services, telecom, and government sectors. However, in the past 24 months, we have seen a significant increase in adoption in the healthcare, insurance, retail, manufacturing, eCommerce, and media/entertainment sectors.

Data as a Service (DaaS) Use Cases

Data as a Service (DaaS) is based on the concept that the transaction, product, customer data can be provided on demand to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. Additionally, the emergence of PaaS and service-oriented architecture (SOA) has rendered the actual platform on which the data resides also irrelevant.

Data as a Service (DaaS) has many use cases:

  1. providing a single version of the truth;
  2. enabling real-time business intelligence (BI),
  3. high-performance scalable transaction processing;
  4. exposing big-data analytics;
  5. federating views across multiple domains;
  6. improving security and access;
  7. integrating with cloud and partner data and social media;
  8. delivering information to mobile apps
  9. enterprisewide search,

Organizations are looking to solve tough data and process integration challenges as they once again begin to invest in new business capabilities.

What is Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)?

Data as a Service (DaaS) brings the notion that data related services can happen in a centralized place – aggregation, quality, cleansing and enriching data and offering it to different systems, applications or mobile users, irrespective of where they were. As such, DaaS solutions provide the following advantages:

  • Agility (and Time to Market) – Customers can move quickly due to the consolidation of data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data. If customers require a slightly different data structure or has location specific requirements, the implementation is easy because the changes are minimal.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Providers can build the base with the data experts and outsource the presentation layer, which makes for very cost-effective report and dashboard user interfaces and makes change requests at the presentation layer much more feasible.
  • Data quality – Access to the data is controlled via data services, which tends to improve data quality, as there is a single point for updates. Once those services are tested thoroughly, they only need to be regression tested, if they remain unchanged for the next deployment.
  • Cloud like Efficiency,  High availability and Elastic capacity. These benefits derive from the virtualization foundation —one gets efficiency from the high utilization of sharing physical servers, availability from clustering across multiple physical servers, and elastic capacity from the ability to dynamically resize clusters and/or migrate live cluster nodes to different physical servers.

Agility (and Time to Market) is the important driver for DaaS probably more than cost and data quality is a metric needed to show value to the technology team.

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Elements

Client need — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Components to enable this are as follows:

1)      Data acquisition – can come from any source….datawarehouses, emails, portals, third party data sources

2)      Data stewardship and standardization — boil it down to a standard manually or automatically

3)      Data aggregate – Stick build data warehouse for acquisition.  This has a strong service and technology driven quality control mechanism.  Different than let’s write 100 etl programs.

4)      Data servicing:  via web services, extracts, reports etc…  Make it easy to consume for the end user either machine to machine or directly via reporting universe.  It’s probably a while before we move up market to reporting but machine to machine consumption is in our wheelhouse.

All these capabilities come together around the data logistics chain.  The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift  in how data is handled in companies.   Firms are shifting away from from a hierarchical, one-dimensional enterprise data warehouse (EDW) initiative (with fixed data sources) to a fragmented network in favor of strategic partnerships with external data sources. This phenomenon causes ripple effects throughout the old data logistics network.  Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) at its core is way to address this problem of fragmentation.

BigData Use Case - Data Logistics

Summary

Domain Knowledge, Application Knowledge, People/talent, Processes, Technology Platforms are key requirements of DaaS strategy.

Obviously, the market leaders want to position ourselves to become the experts in knowing the underlying data so everyone else in the organization does not have to….domain expertise becomes really important here.

Notes

1) Platform as a Service (PaaS) is being applied to Enterprise Data

2) Data Virtualizaiton is a pre-cursor to DaaS. Vendors include: Composite Software, Denodo Technologies, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. Other vendors who fill pieces of the DaaS puzzle include Endeca Technologies, Gigaspaces, Ipedo, Memcached, Pentaho, Quest Software, Talend, and Terracotta.

3) A variety of technologies comprise the DaaS category including distributed data caching, search engines, elastic caches,  information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions, data replication, data quality, data transformation, content management, and data modeling.  

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Cloud or Managed Service : What is the difference?

February 15, 2013

Firstly, cloud computing is not managed hosting. They are two completely different service layers. One refers to a compute resource ie RAM, Chip set and a host, the other to a management resource

The term cloud computing refers to the actual computing layer at a resource level. Cloud computing is generically defined as an elastic and redundant computing resource usually in a multi-tenant environment. Cloud computing and Virtulisation are both very closely related

Managed hosting refers to the managed service layer that sits on top of the computing resource layer. This management layer is generally made up of two and sometimes 3 elements:

  1. Hardware & Network management
  2. OS management including basic service management i.e. Windows, Apache, IIS etc
  3. Application management i.e MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS Dynamics etc

Then there is an additional segment to the term ‘managed hosting’ being ‘complex managed hosting’ Complex managed hosting usually refers to more complex environments that may involve application management, v-lans, load balancing, complex SAN in our case 3PAR configurations and the configurations/management of these in addition to the regular inclusions of managed hosting. Complex managed hosting is typically referring to multiple server (per project) environments rather than single server environments

If you look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good example of cloud computing, they do not provide any Layer 7 management services as standard inclusions. They provide simple compute instance and that’s pretty much it. You need to perform all your own systems administration including OS, services, applications etc.

C24 is a traditionally, managed service providers (MSP) that provides the management layer on top of dedicated servers and virtulisation layers. The recent explosion of ‘cloud computing’ or cloud instances has now seen these MSP’s offer a management layer on top of ‘cloud instances’.

While people require a compute resource they will also require a management resource. Some may perform the management in-house, while others may decide to outsource the management. Most MSP’s provide both the cloud compute layer and management as a combined service.

To put cloud computing into a really simple model, it essentially takes the focus off the physical hardware layer and places the focus on a computing as a resource. Virtulisation works pretty much the same except you still have a host node. The underlying technology that most cloud computing platforms reside on is no different to traditional virtulisation without the focus on the hardware resource. Many cloud compute platforms still use as an example Citrix Xen, VMWare or Parallels as the platform on which to provide their instances, yet the instances are spread over a number of clustered hardware nodes. Cloud computing and Virtulisation still deal with the deployment of instances or virtual machines as a compute resource with zero focus on the hardware.

Many people incorrectly define cloud computing and virtulisation. They are both very similar yet different enough to deserve different definitions. Additionally many refer to items such as SaaS as cloud computing. SaaS (Software As A Service) as an example may or not be delivered via a cloud computing model. A service provider may deliver SaaS via a dedicated hardware resource which would not qualify as a cloud computing service.

C24 is a complex managed service provider as we do the whole piece from design, implementation, network installation, full system monitoring that includes the hardware, software and comms stack and delivers applications at speed globally. We truly are a specialist provider.

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2013 Security Predictions

February 12, 2013

When looking ahead, the landscape of threat, policy, and security is likely to become even more dynamic with cyber-attacks on the rise throughout 2013. These attacks will be more prevalent than ever across a larger breath of individuals and organizations as hackers broaden their target markets.

With the inevitable increase of security threats, Hardware.com presents five security trends we expect to see over the coming year.

1. Web attacks will evolve.
More common and simpler attacks will become easier to address, and companies will concurrently face new variants of web-based attacks. While effective and well-known SQL injection attacks will remain one of the most popular and damaging methods that receive media attention, other less popular attacks like Cross-Site_Request_Forgery (CSRF) are likely to increase. Many websites are vulnerable to CSRF, yet it is rarely addressed or protected against. This attack controls a user’s function of a website or application when he or she is logged into the site. As fewer damaging attacks start to drop off, CSRF is likely to become more widespread.

2. Software Defined Networking (SDN) will usher new intelligent security solutions.
In 2013 SDN will foster the rise of virtual networking focusing on activation, configuration, and service—changing the ability to direct traffic flows along a designated path. Security capabilities will begin to be distributed intelligently at the service layer. As a result, the security industry will leverage and extend the SDN approach by taking advantage of the control and data plane separation to provide for more agile and effective security. This level of security will intelligently monitor and respond to cloud and mobile network threats on a commensurate scale.

3. Cloud adoption will drive new security investments.
More organizations will adopt hybrid cloud models. They will also start looking for ways to provide secure remote access and extend BYOD & BYOS capabilities to their employees. We’ll likely see more mobile and web application security as a cloud-based service, as well as “information gateways” that add encryption and DLP from the enterprise to the cloud.

4. Mobile malware will increase and focus on profit.
Mobile threats continue to grow rapidly and increase in complexity. Juniper’s Mobile Threat Center reported a 350% increase in malicious and invasive applications targeting mostly Android users over a 12-month period, ending in October 2012. In particular, there will likely be a focus on exploiting financially-related transactions and applications. With mobile banking and NFC payment systems becoming mainstream, they will be an increasingly valuable target for attackers.

5. Expect an upsurge of large-scale web attacks.
The industry can expect to see a significant uptick in public breaches. On average, each breach is likely to be higher in financial consequences than the previous year’s breaches. It could even be possible that there will be an attack as big if not bigger than the epic Sony hacks of 2011. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, “Web applications…were associated with over a third of total data loss” in 2012, and this trend is likely to continue—if not get worse. Even more alarming, large organizations with mature security practices are more likely to be the target of web-based threats.

Thanks to hardware.com

Related articles

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BYOS Takes BYOD to a New Level

February 1, 2013

We’re all familiar with BYOD, but what about BYOS? BYOD has been taken to another level with Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS) also known as Bring Your Own Application (BYOA).

BYOD technology has grown and is continuing to revolutionize the way we work in a modern business environment. BYOD first hit the ground becoming a large trend amongst large corporates strategically looking at the way employees use and work on computers within the workplace. Employees now have their own personal storage cloud allowing them to access their work and data from any device anywhere in the world—changing the way organizations work. Employees can now work from any location around the globe which brings benefits to the company, such as optimizing talent sets and allowing organizations to “cherry pick” its employees from anywhere in the world.

The demands of business have become far more advanced than one could have predicted 10 years ago. Storage systems have developed over the past decade, such as new developments with cloud, drive mapping, peer sharing, team collaborations, and version control.

EMC, the network storage specialist, developed an innovative and unique approach to cloud storage options, called Syncplicity. Syncplicity offers companies the option to use the innovative, cloud-based service while providing data storage in-house. The whole concept that EMC developed could be debated as the current trendsetter completing the whole BYOD and BYOS collaboration; therefore, making way for a new future of the virtual office. This technology is ground-breaking in terms of allowing organizations to provide users the convenience of a cloud-hosted, file-sharing service through which they can share files with anyone both inside and outside the firewall protection.

VMware is developing BYOS even further. VMware unveiled its Version 5.1 of VMware View, a point release of the VDI platform that promises to lighten the load on shared storage through smarter caching. VMware View 5.1 broadens support for peripherals through a new USB stack and includes updated clients for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops for thin and zero clients as well as the iPad, Android, and Kindle Fire tablets.

VMware also has injected more security and compliance features into View than EMC. Admins can centrally enforce endpoint security and policy configuration and streamline antivirus processes. Additionally, View 5.1 integrates with RADIUS two-factor authentication, giving organizations an extra layer of security that provides advances over EMC’s technology.

Adding to these enhancements, VMware launched VMware vCenter Operations for VMware View: Cloud Infrastructure Insight. This add-on for View is designed to give admins in VMware vSphere shops a broader insight into desktop performance and the ability to troubleshoot problems and optimize resource utilization from within vSphere’s vCenter console. Such an advanced technology enables customers to have further IT operations, no matter where their staff may be working in the world.

Businesses that want to offer the most the best technological resources to its staff should embrace this change, as OEM’s continue developing BYOS cloud offerings. Moving forward in a contemporary business world means we could possibly see many more virtual workers being based in several different international locations. With the advancements in BYOD and BYOS, proactive companies will embrace the collaboration of these two emerging technologies.

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