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Planning Your Journey to the Cloud – TV Technology

August 9, 2017 | Author: admin

When we introduced our Avid Everywhere vision in 2013, the industry was facing a period of unprecedented change. The rapid digitization of the media value chain made it difficult for content creators to connect and automate workflows, and increased the cost and complexity of monetizing assets. The consumerization of content creation and distribution forced media organizations to adjust to a new reality of diminishing control over how audiences consumed content. At the same time, declines in traditional revenue sources required a recalibration of business models and the relentless pressure for operational efficiency challenged an industry filled with disconnected people, tools and workflows.

These were the core issues the Avid Everywhere vision and strategy set out to resolve in 2013. And now, just four years later, the transformation of our vision to reality is complete. Weve created the most open, tightly integrated and efficient media platform that enables media organizations to more effectively connect disparate teams and accelerate their workflows. And new distribution and monetization capabilities are helping them connect with their audiences in much more powerful and profitable ways than ever before.

Yet even as technology advances, urgent operational and financial challenges remain. Pressure to create ever-greater volumes of high-quality content is immense, yet technology budgets arent increasing; theyre straining to keep pace. Heritage production environments arent as flexible or efficient as they need to be to handle the load and fast pace. Increasing operational capacity requires expensive, often redundant staffing and capital expenditures. And production facility real estate makes it very costly to house hardware. Compounding the problem, many organizations that have overprovisioned their on-premise hardware capacity are actually underutilizing their systems investments.

BENEFITS OF MOVING MEDIA PRODUCTION TO THE CLOUD

Extending media production to the cloudin the way that best suits an organizations unique operational realitiesopens the opportunity to both increase production capacity and ease the financial burdens of content creation and distribution. Media organizations gain the licensing flexibility and business agility to align their deployed technology solutions with the needs of their production environment. They can also connect and collaborate from anywhere, whether through a workstation, laptop, or mobile deviceall while increasing efficiency across every facet of the media value chain.

Now media organizations can grow viewership and brand affinity, connect with their audiences in new ways, and fully protect their assets by operating in a secure environment. Its easy to scale resources as needed to address peaks in demand, whether anticipated or not, and tap into massive economies of scale across workgroups and departments.

And the flexibility and elasticity of cloud services enables media organizations to maximize the value of their assets by expanding to new outlets. They can repurpose material to exploit new revenue streams and grow brand affinity across a broader range of viewers by making content available everywhere they want to consume it, whether on TV, online, or on a mobile device.

A VOTE FOR THE CLOUD

Its no surprise that the inaugural Avid Customer Association (ACA) Vote, which gave Avids customer community the unprecedented opportunity to directly influence Avids future offerings, revealed that the vast majority of media professionals (71.7 percent) are considering moving some part of their infrastructure or workflow to the cloud over the next two yearsthe most popular being remote access workflows (15.8 percent). However, just 4.8 percent are considering moving their entire infrastructure and workflow to the cloud, highlighting the important role that hybrid cloud deployment models will play in the media industrys future.

Thats why Avid is leading the media industry to a reality of full-scale media production in the cloud. Media organizations have the complete flexibility to create, distribute and monetize their content using the deployment type that works best for themon premises, private data center, public cloud, or hybrid.

At Avid Connect 2017, we announced that the MediaCentral Platform is now cloud-enabled, giving media organizations greater efficiency, flexibility and agility to meet todays most pressing media production challenges. With new cloud-based client applications, media services and infrastructure on demand, they can deploy the platform, services and applications in more flexible ways.

To help organizations easily transition their media production to the cloud, we also announced that weve selected Microsoft as Avids preferred public cloud partner. Well be working closely with Microsoft to offer innovative cloud solutions that work in concert with the Avid and Alliance Partner tools and services that our customers already use.

Weve chosen Microsoft Azure as our preferred cloud hosting platform because Microsoft provides a broad range of public cloud hosting and cloud service offerings that meet the needs and budget of any size media organization. With the worlds most secure data center environments, Microsoft can give media organizations peace of mind that their assets are protected and safe beyond the reach of any threat. And with Avid and Microsofts extensive cloud and media technology expertise, media organizations will be able to migrate existing production workloads to the cloud at their own pace and architect new ways of working more efficiently.

As media organizations look to capitalize on the efficiency, agility, flexibility and scalability that the cloud facilitates, Avid is ready to help them on their journey. And at IBC 2017, well unveil cloud innovations and demonstrate how they can realize the many benefits of cloud-based media productionfrom more efficiency and agility across the media value chain, to less complexity and lower costs.

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Marias Technology adds Microsoft Azure to its Hosting Services – GlobeNewswire (press release)

August 9, 2017 | Author: admin

August 08, 2017 08:07 ET | Source: Marias Technology

COVINGTON, Ohio, Aug. 08, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marias Technology, a provider of software testing, project management, integrations, implementation, hosting services, and more to the insurance industry, is now offering Microsoft Azure cloud hosting. Marias is a Cloud Connected Service Provider (CCSP) for Microsoft. Marias customers and prospects can now choose between having their systems and applications hosted on equipment in the Marias data center or in the Microsoft Cloud with Azure.

Were excited to add Microsofts Azure cloud hosting to our portfolio of products and services, said R. Christopher Haines, President and CEO of Marias. Azure gives us and our customers the best of both worlds. Some companies like the security of a known, accessible, geographic location. Others prefer the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. By incorporating Azure, we can now offer either or both and still provide the kind of responsive, personalize service our customers expect from us.

By offering Azure, Marias will give its customer the benefits of:

About Marias Technology

Marias Technology, headquartered in Covington, Ohio, is a privately held company, offering insurance technology services to property/casualty insurance companies. Services range from system testing and implementation, to software hosting and management services, as well as IT management on-demand. For more information, please visit http://www.mariastechnology.com, email info@mariastechnology.com, or call 866-611-2212.

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Marias Technology adds Microsoft Azure to its Hosting Services - GlobeNewswire (press release)

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IBM CIO leaves for AWS and Big Blue flings sueball to stop him – The Register

August 9, 2017 | Author: admin

IBM has flung a sueball at Jeff Smith, its former chief information officer, because he's trying to go to work for Amazon Web Services.

Big Blue filed a complaint [PDF] in a US district court in New York last week that says Smith threatens to violate his one-year non-competition agreement by going into direct competition with IBM as a senior executive of Amazon Web Services, one of IBM's main competitors in cloud computing.

The complaint also alleges Smith has already revealed some information to AWS CEO Andrew Jassy, violated directives not to retain presentations about IBM's new cloud, and then wiped his company-issued phone and tablet before leaving the IT giant, making it impossible for IBM to detect other communications with Jassy or determine if he transferred any other IBM information.

The complaint says Smith is one of only a dozen executives involved in top-level decision-making about IBM's next-generation cloud platform, has insider knowledge of IBMs security posture and was involved at the very highest level of internal discussions on IBM's transformation plan. If AWS can pick Smith's brains on any of those matters, IBM worries the cloud colossus will get an unfair advantage.

The filing says Smith's knowledge of its future cloud is critical, because those plans will help IBM evolve beyond its current status as a hosting-scale provider, making it more viable for IBM to match the cost economics of the market leaders. The filing adds that AWS is considered the market leader on cost and that IBM needs to be match it.

That document's assertion that IBM's current cloud can't go toe-to-toe with others accords with analyst firm Gartner's recent assessment that it is SMB-centric, hosting-oriented and missing many cloud IaaS capabilities required by midmarket and enterprise customers.

That may soon change, as the filing says IBM's new cloud is set to be launched in the coming year. Yet Gartner also warned its customers that history suggests Big Blue will struggle to deliver its next-gen cloud on time.

Perhaps that's why Smith was willing to go from being CIO of world-girdling IBM, a gig that's a big step up from his previous jobs in Australia. to being a mere vice-president of AWS.

New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman last year criticised non-compete agreements, saying that Unless an individual has highly unique skills or access to trade secrets, non-compete clauses have no place in a workers employment contract.

IBM alleges Smith has plenty of access to trade secrets, so it will be fascinating to see how the State's courts interpret the agreement.

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Will you be able to trust a quantum computer? – Digital Journal

August 9, 2017 | Author: admin

While true quantum computers remain at the developmental stage, strategies are being drawn up as to how these qubit functioning devices might be used and what their computational power promises. Also under consideration is security. Will quantum computers be safer that standard computers or will they be more exposed to security flaws? A related concern is that using the devices is likely to appeal to businesses and research institutes who will probably seek to share information over the Internet. Moreover, given that quantum computers are likely to be prohibitively expensive for many, the idea of accessing the computing power over the Internet renting quantum computing time is an attractive one. This will utilize cloud computing services and this may lead to greater vulnerabilities. IBM, for example, is developing a quantum computer with 16 quantum bits accessible to the public for free on the cloud the IBM Q); this is in conjunction with a 17-qubit prototype commercial processor. The security issue with such technology is of interest to the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore.READ MORE: The quantum computing test revealedTo address security concerns the researchers have shown that it should be possible to control a quantum computer over the Internet without the need for the user to reveal what they are calculating. This comes about due to the variety of ways through which information can flow through a computation.The researchers propose a way by which a quantum computer could be used securely over the internet. The technique is designed to hide both the data and program from the computer itself. This can happen because quantum computers provide new routes to solving problems via cryptography, modelling and machine learning.The new approach has been designed by Joseph Fitzsimons. This involves a quantum computer prepared in such a way that all of its qubits are placed into a special type of entangled state. As a computation is carried out, this by measuring the qubits one by one. The user can provide step-wise instructions for each measurement: the steps encode both the input data and the program. This approach enables users to disguise their computation. The security issues are addressed because the quantum computer does not know which steps of the measurement sequence do what, unable to decipher which qubits were used for inputs, which for operations and which for outputs. The strength of this approach is that security increases the more sophisticated quantum computers become since the set of interpretations grows rapidly with the number of qubits.The research is published in the journal Physical Review X, under the heading Flow Ambiguity: A Path Towards Classically Driven Blind Quantum Computation.For readers interested in quantum computing, Digital Journal has also published the article "Quantum technology helps prevent counterfeit electronics."

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Will you be able to trust a quantum computer? - Digital Journal

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[video] What are Altcoins and ICOs Bitcoin Whiteboard Tuesday – 99 Bitcoins (blog)

August 9, 2017 | Author: admin

Todays topic is altcoins and ICOs. In this episode, were going to go over some of the different cryptocurrencies out there and explain what are ICOs. So lets get started!

Altcoins, or alts in short, are cryptocurrencies that are not Bitcoin. The word altcoin is an abbreviation of alternative coins. So Litecoin, Ripple, Dash or any other non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency all fall under the category of altcoins.

Now you may ask yourself, Why do we even need altcoins in the first place? The answer is simple: Bitcoin is not perfect. Usually, altcoins will try to create a better or different version of Bitcoin.

For example, Litecoin is an alt that confirms transactions faster than Bitcoin. Dash and Monero are altcoins that focus on the anonymity aspect, making transactions virtually impossible to trace. Each altcoin has its own unique thing it does best.

Altcoins can also vary from Bitcoin in the way they are mined. For example, Bitcoins mining algorithm is called SHA-256, while Litecoins mining algorithm is called Scyrpt. Different mining algorithms require different types of hardware to mine.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if an altcoin is relatively new or not that well known, it will probably be harder to buy and will have fewer wallets that support it.

Until today, thousands of altcoins have been introduced to the market, but only a handful have managed to gain a significant following like Bitcoin. One way to figure out which altcoins are gaining popularity is by measuring their market cap.

A Market cap means how big is a coins market in dollar terms. Its calculated by taking the number of coins in circulation and multiplying it with the dollar exchange rate. If, for example, there are 16 million Bitcoins in circulation and the price of one Bitcoin is $2,500, the market cap for Bitcoin would be 40 billion dollars.

For a long time, Bitcoins market cap accounted for 90% of the total cryptocurrency market cap. Today, as more altcoins are gaining attention and appreciating in price, Bitcoins market cap makes up less of the total cryptocurrency market cap which has managed to surpass 100 billion dollars in 2017.

First and foremost, I suggest you read about the altcoin youre interested in. Make sure you understand what makes it unique and see if it makes sense to you. Most importantly dont invest in a coin just because of the buzz around it.

Many coins out there employ what is known as pump and dump schemes. This means the coins creators generate a lot of hype about a specific coin in order to get people to invest in it and inflate the coins price. Once the coin appreciates in value the creators sell all of their coins at a profit while crashing the price due to the massive sell off. This leaves the majority of investors with a bunch of useless coins and no one to sell them to.

Other stuff you should look into include the coins market capthis will give you an idea of how well this altcoin has been received in the community.

I would also suggest getting involved in the coins community. Usually, most major coins have an official forum, a Facebook group, a subreddit and other places of gathering where you can ask the developers of the coin specific questions. A strong community is an important predictor for a coins success.

Now you know what altcoins are, and we can move on to our next topic which is closely relatedICOs.

ICO stands for initial coin offering. The term derives from the traditional finance term, IPO (or initial public offering).

An IPO is used to describe the launch of a new company on a stock exchange, also known as going public. The purpose of an IPO is to sell stock in the company in order to raise capital from the public.

ICOs on the other hand sell coins, also known as tokens, as a way to fund a specific project. The general idea is that if you believe the project will succeed, you buy the tokens that power the project beforehand at a discount, and then you will be able to sell them later on at a profit once their project succeeds.

Lets break this process down a bit further.

When a cryptocurrency company wants to launch a new project through an ICO, it creates a whitepaper. The whitepaper is a document that states what the project is about, what needs the project will fulfill, how much money is needed for the project, and how long the ICO for this project will run for.

After the ICO is set up, the public can start investing in the ICO by sending money to the project and receiving project tokens or coins in return.

If the money raised by the ICO does not meet the minimum funds required by the whitepaper, the money is returned to the backers, and the ICO is deemed to be unsuccessful. If the funds requirements are met within the specified timeframe, the founding team will now get to work and bring the project to life through the use of the funds raised.

To sum it up, ICOs are like Kickstarter for crypto projects.

The best example of a highly lucrative ICO was the pre-sale of Ethereum tokens. In mid-2014, one Ether token (also known as ETH) sold for around 40 US cents . If you bought one hundred dollars worth of ETH back then, you would have the equivalent of 75,000 dollars in 2017.

Today, more and more projects try to mimic the success of Ethereums ICO. ICOs are conducted over the Ethereum platform, and thats why youll need to buy the Ethereum token, known as Ether, in order to participate in them.

The recent high volume of ICOs caused Ethereums price to spike and also overwhelmed the Ethereum network. This caused delayed or failed transactions, leading to the suspension of Ethereum trading in several exchanges and problems with ICO funding.

The worst example of a disastrous ICO is The DAO. The DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, project managed to raise $150 million worth of Ethereum. However, shortly after the ICO ended, a hacker managed to drain a third of the amount raised due to a bug in Ethereums code.

This crisis and the different opinions on how to handle it led to a split in the Ethereum network and the creation of both the Ethereum and Ethereum classic altcoins.

Just like with any other financial instrument, where there is the possibility for great reward, there is great risk as well, and ICOs contain a huge amount of risk.

ICOs can be considered as high-risk gambles on cryptocurrency startup companies. Many people today invest in ICOs not because they believe in the project, but because they just want to make a quick profit. This, in turn, creates a general hype before the project launches.

But as the buzz fades away, project creators and early investors want to take money off the table, so they start selling massive amounts of token. This can cause the price to sharply drop.

Another thing to consider is that the bar for creating an ICO today is pretty low. While conducting an IPO requires to comply with a lot of regulation, ICOs skip this entire burdensome procedure by raising money exclusively in cryptocurrency which has yet to be regulated.

Want to create an ICO?

Just create a shiny website outlining your concept, create a digital asset, get some crypto celebs to say nice things about it, and sell your projects assets directly to people around the web. You dont even have to have a working product.

These low barriers to entry bring about a massive amount of low-quality projects that will never see the light of day. This could be due to the fact that the founders lack the skills required to execute the project, or that the ICO was just a plain scam to begin with.

As you can imagine, this is a scammers dream come true. With a minimal investment of time and money, they can get tons of people to send them money without any legal exposure or liability to the public.

In order to emphasize the absurdness of how much dumb money is spent on ICOs, one developer went as far as creating a site called Useless Ethereum Token.

The website states:

Youre literally giving your money to someone on the internet and getting completely useless tokens in return.

There are no whitepapers, no products, and no experts. Its just you, me, your hard-earned Ether, and my shopping list.

Amazingly enough, even the Useless Ethereum Token project managed to raise over sixty thousand US dollars.

In some cases you may lose money in an ICO not due to an intended scam, but due to the hacker manipulation. For example, not long ago a hacker managed to hack an ICO website and change the Ethereum ICO deposit address to his own Ethereum address. This caused over $7 million to be sent to him. Of course that money is now lost forever.

To sum it up, ICOs should be considered as risky as gambling. Due to the irreversible and unregulated nature of cryptocurrency, you have virtually no recourse if an ICO turns out to be a complete scam or goes bust.

Well, first of all, you need to know what youre investing in. This means you should take the time to actually read the ICOs whitepaper, research the project and founders and get involved with the community around it.

Also, make sure you understand how the tokens for the project will be distributed. ICOs which hold a lions share of tokens for the founders may end up selling these tokens in order to make a quick profit after the ICO ends.

Another important question to ask is how much money is being raised and for what purpose?

If there is no cap on the amount being raised, the project may get overfunded. Getting more money than you need can also hinder project development as laziness and no clear focus may arise as a result. Some projects have managed to raise tens of millions of dollars before the first line of code was even written.

Most importantly, dont ever invest in something you dont understand.

To sum it up, ICOs are a new form of crowdfunding which very few people understand. If youre just getting started with cryptocurrencies and ICOs, you probably should do a fair amount of additional research before committing your money to any project, as exciting as it may sound.

That sums it up for today. I hope you enjoyed this lesson of Bitcoin Whiteboard Tuesday, and Ill see you.in a bit.

Blogger and owner of 99Bitcoins. I've been dealing with Bitcoin since the beginning of 2013 and it taught me a lesson in finance that I couldn't get anywhere else on the planet. I'm not a techie, I don't understand "Hashes" and "Protocols", I designed this website with people like myself in mind. My expertise is online marketing and I've dedicated a large portion of 99Bitcoins to Bitcoin marketing.

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IBM sues to stop former executive from working at cloud computing … – Westfair Online

August 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Former IBM cloud computing executive Jeff S. Smith begins a new job today at a major rival, Amazon Web Services, much to the displeasure of his former employer.

International Business Machines Corp., the Armonk-based technology giant, sued Smith last week in federal court in White Plains, accusing him of violating a noncompete agreement and demanding that he repay $1.7 million in stock bonuses.

Smith was among the top 65 executives at IBM when he left his job in May as chief information officer for transformation and operations.

Were he permitted to join the senior management of AWS on Aug. 7, declared Arvind Krishna, director of research, he would inevitably be involved in decision-making about how best to compete against IBM and would inevitably disclose or use IBM trade secrets.

Judge Cathy Seibel issued a temporary restraining order on Aug. 1, barring Smith, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, from starting work today at Amazon Web Services. He may not solicit customers, recruit former colleagues or disclose confidential information until a full hearing is held.

She modified the order the next day, allowing Smith to begin work on Aug. 7, in listen and learn mode only, for employee training.

Smith began working at IBM as chief information officer in 2014, having held a similar position for an Australian bank.

As a member of a selective leadership group responsible for transforming the company, he attended strategy sessions concerning all of IBMs businesses.

He was privy to inside information on product costs, design specifications, performance capabilities and release plans for IBMs next generation of technology in the intensively competitive cloud computing arena.

IBM, for instance, is planning to launch new products and services specifically designed to compete against Amazon Web Services, in the coming year.

One document he was privy to was so sensitive and so potentially damaging were it be shared, Krishna said, that I directed all team members to destroy their copies.

Smith also supervised the companys global chief information security officer. He was a frequent speaker at industry events, the lawsuit states, and visited more than 200 customers and partners in the past 18 months.

Smith notified the company in March that he was resigning to begin working for Amazon Web Services in April, reporting directly to CEO Andrew Jassy. IBM objected, according to the lawsuit, citing Smiths noncompetition agreement that blocked him from working for a competitor for one year.

Smith agreed to pursue other job offers, postponed his resignation to May 2 and notified IBM that he had accepted a consulting role at an Australian bank.

In June, he notified IBM that he had accepted a new offer from Amazon Web Services and intended to start work on Aug. 7.

IBM considers Amazon Web Services one of its principal competitors. IBM recently surpassed it in cloud computing revenue, the lawsuit states, making more than $15 billion in 12 months.

The lawsuit claims that Smith shared inside information with Jassy while he was still working for IBM, and that he wiped clean his company-issued phone and tablet to make it impossible to detect other communications or exchanges of information.

It was no secret that IBM was working on new technology to compete against Amazon and other cloud computing companies, the lawsuit states.

But what that technology is, how it works, what it costs and when it will be launched are trade secrets.

Smith is accused of breach of a noncompetition agreement, misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of fiduciary duty.

IBM is asking the court to bar Smith from working for Amazon Web Services until May 2, 2018 and to allow IBM to recover $1,714,800 from IBM shares awarded to Smith the year before he resigned.

A hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 21.

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Cloud computing is becoming more and more important for businesses – Information Age

August 8, 2017 | Author: admin

When you use a cloud computing service you dont have to worry about maintaining the system yourself. All of this is done for you, and the cloud computing servicewill deal with all security and software updates as well, which means far less for you to worry about

Everyday, people have seen technology become more and more advanced. This has provided both consumers and businesses with many benefits. Peoplenow have more flexibility and easier life than ever thanks to advancements in technology. The business world has benefitted hugely from todays advanced technology.

>See also:10 trends that will influence cloud computing in 2017

Both general consumers and businesses these days are keen to save money when it comes to technology for the home or business. For businesses, cloud computing does offer a very costeffective solution and it is perfect for smaller businesses without the resources or money to invest in secure systems in-house. However, it also offers many other benefits.

As a business there are many additional benefits that come with using cloud computing in addition to the cost saving benefits. Some of the key ones include:

Increased flexibility: If your bandwidth requirements tend to fluctuate, using the cloud makes perfect sense. This is because you can upgrade in line with your needs, so you do notpay for more storage than you actually need.

Recovery of data: With cloud based computing, recovery of data is far easier and this means that you can enjoy greater peace of mind. When it comes to backing up information, a smaller business may not have the necessary tools and resources so cloud computing could be the perfect solution.

>See also:How to approach cloud computing and cyber security in 2017

No maintenance: When you use a cloud computing service you dont have to worry about maintaining the system yourself. All of this is done for you, and the cloud computing servicewill deal with all security and software updates as well, which means far less for you to worry about.

Easy access: Using the cloud gives you far easier access to your documents. This benefits you and your employees, as you can access your work no matter where you are. You can provide your employees with greater flexibility and continue running operations no matter where you are as long as you have internet access.

Higher level of security: Cloud computing gives you a higher level of security. For instance, if you lose your mobile device or laptop you can still access everything you have on the cloud using another machine or device. You can also get apps from cloud service providers to enable you to access your data on your mobile device, which means fewer restrictions.

Easy to share information: You can share information with colleagues and employees far more easily using the cloud. It means that you dont have to send emails back and forthwhen it comes to sharing document access as you can all access it on the cloud.

>See also:Financial services and the great cloud conundrum

There are various cloud platforms that you can opt for when it comes to your business. All you need to do is look at factors such as the prices, amount of storage space you receive, and reviews of the provider. This will then help you to determine which one to go with.

The UKs largest conference fortechleadership,TechLeadersSummit, returns on 14 September with 40+ top execs signed up to speak about the challenges and opportunities surrounding the most disruptive innovations facing the enterprise today.Secure your place at this prestigious summit byregisteringhere

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Cisco admits to losing Meraki customer data in ‘erroneous policy change’ – Cloud Tech

August 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Cisco says it is deeply regretful after admitting losing Meraki customer data from what it described as an erroneous policy change.

The data affected from Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-controlled Wi-Fi, routing and security, included custom logos, floor plans, audio such as hold music and voicemail greetings, as well as custom enterprise applications. The companys tagline reads: Secure and scalable, Cisco Meraki enterprise networks simply work.

On August 3rd 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage services and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on August 3 to be deleted, the company wrote. The issue has since been remediated and is no longer occurring.

In the majority of cases, this issue will not impact network operations, but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost, the note added. Your network configuration data is not lost or impacted this issue is limited to user-uploaded data.

As noted elsewhere, a fair amount of this data will be in the inconvenient rather than disastrous category, as hold music and logos can be reuploaded, voicemail intros can be rerecorded, and so on.

Engineers had been working over the weekend to resolve the issues and assess what data could be recovered. The company is expecting to update by the end of August 7 with which resources will be made available to restore functionality.

You can read the full note here.

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Wasabi Technologies takes on Amazon S3 on price, performance – TechTarget

August 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Daring businesses to switch from Amazon to a company they've never heard of for cloud storage is a bold challenge. But Wasabi Technologies' founders were so encouraged by its product launch that they raised another $10.8 million to fund a second data center.

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Wasabi CEO David Friend said he expected the free trial of 1 TB for 30 days to attract a few dozen prospects when it became available on May 3. When more than 500 signed up, the Boston-based startup had to waitlist new subscribers until the week of May 17 to keep up with the server capacity demand.

Friend said about 80 users have converted to paying customers, and Wasabi boosted the available storage capacity at its leased data center space in Ashburn, Va., from about 7 PB to more than 20 PB to stay 90 days ahead of demand.

Those customers are likely lured mostly by Wasabi's claims that its cloud storage is significantly cheaper and faster than Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). They may also find it encouraging that Wasabi founders Friend and CTO Jeff Flowers also started Carbonite, an early successful cloud storage player for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.

The founders also likely learned a few things from Flowers' post-Carbonite efforts to build on-premises cold data storage for financial and security firms and service providers. Storiant, initially known as SageCloud, raised $14.8 million in equity and debt between August 2012 and May 2015. But Storiant shut down operations in November 2015 and sold off its intellectual property for a mere $90,000.

"They were selling hardware systems and ended up competing with EMC, Dell and HP, which I thought was a mistake," said Friend, who was CEO and later executive chairman at Carbonite, as well as a director on Storiant's board.

In 2016, Friend, Flowers and Storiant's founding engineers shifted their focus back to public cloud storage at BlueArchive, now called Wasabi Technologies. The startup raised $8.2 million over two rounds in 2016 to get started.

Has Wasabi built a better mousetrap when people don't realize they have a mouse problem? Or, is this a real issue? Stu Minimansenior analyst, Wikibon

Wasabi added $10.8 million through a convertible note that will become equity when the company decides to raise a Series B round of funding. That will help finance the West Coast expansion to a colocation facility in San Jose, Calif., or Seattle, according to Friend. That would allow Wasabi to add automatic replication across multiple geographies for compliance, and to mitigate the risk of having all customer data in a single data center. Wasabi is also investigating expansion into Europe, a prospect that Friend said he hadn't planned to pursue until next year.

"I'm a cautious, conservative kind of guy, and I don't like just spending money without knowing what I'm going to get for it. But at this point in time, the market is almost limitless for this," Friend said. "Every day, new opportunities show up at the company for amounts of storage that are more than we had in our whole second-year projection. If any of these big deals start to come in our direction, it's going to be pretty impressive."

Friend said the speed at which Wasabi's software can read and write data is "what really blows people away." It offers performance that he said is generally achievable only at higher cost with on-premises data center hardware. He said the Wasabi software takes control of disk write heads and packs data onto storage drives more efficiently and at higher speed than Linux or Windows operating systems can.

"We get our speed by parallelizing. The speed comes from breaking the data up and reading it and writing it simultaneously to many drives at the same time," Friend said. He added that the data is distributed with sufficient redundancy to enable 11 nines of data durability, as Amazon does.

Friend said Wasabi keeps costs low by buying directly from hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers at about the same price as Amazon does in the low-margin HDD business. He said Wasabi's technology also enables longer disk life.

Wasabi charges a flat 0.39 cents per GB per month for storage and 4 cents per GB for egress. Competing public clouds vary prices based on the amount of data stored or transferred, the type of storage service -- such as cold or nearline -- and the requests made, such as puts and gets.

"Our vision is that cloud storage is going to become a commodity that's out there for everybody to use. You don't need three plugs in the wall for good electricity, so-so electricity and crappy but cheap electricity. You don't need all these different kinds of storage as well," Friend said.

Friend said he expects most potential customers to compare Wasabi to Amazon S3. But one trial participant, Phoenix-based WestStar Multimedia Entertainment Inc., pitted Wasabi against Amazon's colder, cheaper Glacier, Backblaze and Google Coldline in addition to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Backup and Rackspace.

WestStar vice president of information technology Chris Wojno said his company had a pressing need to back up more than 26 TB of video with an estimated data growth rate of 2.7 TB per month. WestStar produces The Kim Komando Show, a syndicated digital lifestyle radio program, and operates a multimedia website.

Wojno calculated costs based on storing 39 TB of data and found Wasabi had the lowest per-month price per GB. If he chose Wasabi, his per-month cost would be $3,747.90 less than Rackspace, $1,590.80 less than Azure Backup, and $744.90 less than Amazon S3. The price differential was far less over Google Coldline ($120.90), Backblaze ($42.90) and Glacier ($3.90), according to his spreadsheet analysis.

Wojno also weighed the data recovery cost for 39 TB of backed-up video in the event of a disaster. Backblaze was least expensive at $780, compared to $1,560 for Wasabi and $3,900 for Glacier. But Wojno figured Blackblaze's higher per-month storage fee than Wasabi would negate the savings.

Based on Wojno's calculations, WestStar selected Wasabi Technologies for cloud storage. Wojno admitted he would have been suspicious of the new company had he not been familiar with Friend through his work at Carbonite, a former sponsor of the radio show. Komando, an owner of WestStar, last month invested in Wasabi after her company became a paying customer.

Wojno said WestStar spent about two weeks backing up 26.5 TB of video over a 200 Mbps connection with backup software from Wasabi partner CloudBerry Lab. He noted that WestStar received a complimentary CloudBerry license for his participation in a webinar with the vendors.

Friend said migrating data through transfer to a storage appliance, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Snowball, and transport by truck to the cloud storage provider is "an idea whose time has come and gone."

"It's much cheaper to go and put in a 10 Gigabit [Ethernet] pipe for a month, move your data and then shut it off, assuming you're in a metropolitan area where such things are available," Friend said.

Stu Miniman, a senior analyst at Wikibon, said Wasabi faces a stiff challenge against Amazon, the clear No. 1 cloud storage player. He said Amazon could lower costs as it has done in the past, or improve performance to respond to any perceived threat. Plus, he hasn't heard many public cloud users complaining that storage is a problem.

"Has Wasabi built a better mousetrap when people don't realize they have a mouse problem? Or, is this a real issue?" Miniman said.

Miniman said users might look to the free 30-day trial for new applications. He said the question is how long they'll stick with the service over the long haul, especially if the initial application runs for only a limited time.

Friend said Wasabi Technologies is going after AWS customers who want to save money on their long-term data storage or keep a second copy of their data with a different cloud provider. Wasabi provides a free tool that customers can install in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to copy their S3-stored data to Wasabi automatically.

Friend said, thanks to Wasabi's S3 compatibility, organizations using EC2 to host applications could leave the applications there and move data to Wasabi's data center via Amazon's Direct Connect, rather than store it in Amazon S3. He said Wasabi does not compete against Amazon's Elastic Block Storage, which he said is designed for fast-moving data that doesn't stay in memory long.

Friend said Wasabi uses immutable buckets to protect data against accidental deletion, sabotage, viruses, malware, ransomware or other threats. Customers can specify the length of time they want a data bucket to be immutable.

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Wasabi Technologies takes on Amazon S3 on price, performance - TechTarget

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Bitcoin extends record climb, as digital currencies on the rise – MarketWatch

August 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Bitcoin on Monday extended its ascent into rare air, with the digital currency adding to a recent record run-up about a week since the currency split into two distinct cyber units: bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

A single bitcoin BTCUSD, +1.41% was up 3.5% at $3,369.82, after enjoying a weekend ascent that has taken the cryptocurrency to its highest level since being created back in 2009. The total market value of bitcoin was nearly $55 billion, its highest on record, according to Coinmarketcap.com.

Some market participants theorized that this current rally in bitcoin is due to deceptive trading tactics employed by at least one deep-pocketed investor intended to create the illusion that a potential buyer is willing to, for example, buy bitcoin at a lofty price, which drives its value higher and potentially allows the bidder to then cancel the trade and sell at an inflated level, according to digital-money news site The Cointelegraph.

Bitcoin Cash, meanwhile, was up 52% on the session, but down 57% since its Aug. 2 peak when it hit $727.

Read: Bitcoin rallies to record, market cap hits $50 billion for first time

Prices of the original bitcoin have surged in the past week, after bitcoin launched last Tuesday a new version of its currency with a different configuration, known as Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is an attempt to solve processing issues by allowing blocks to be processed in 8-megabyte units, rather than the 1-megabyte block the older version of bitcoin uses.

Prices appear to be mostly rising across much of the digital-currency network, with Ethereums ether token ticking 0.4% higher. An ether token was at $266.61 in recent trade, with a total value of $25 billion for the currency network.

Total market value across the top cryptocurrencies put them at $116.9 billion, with Bitcoin Cash coming in as the fourth-largest cybercurrency at $5.2 billion, ahead of Litecoin tokens at $2.4 billion.

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Bitcoin extends record climb, as digital currencies on the rise - MarketWatch

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