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Why your customers should consider cloud computing – Design World Network

When designing products for industrial automation, connectivity and the introduction of cloud computing make monitoring more sophisticated. In this era of the smart factory, Johannes Petrowisch, Global Partner & Business Development Manager ofindustrial automation software expert, COPA-DATA, discusses the benefits of cloud computing for users in the manufacturing industry.

Head in the clouds

The role of cloud computing in the manufacturing industry is not always clear. Manufacturers are not well known for investing heavily in the latest IT systems and technologies on a regular basis, so why are so many now deploying cloud-computing software in their organizations?

As industrial automation becomes more intelligent and manufacturers embrace machine-to-machine (M2M) technology, cloud computing is set to become the obvious solution to store and manage the ever-growing expanse of production data. The cloud helps users reduce costs, change business models, provide new services, increase agility, optimize performance and ultimately, drive profitability.

Performing a meaningful evaluation of a manufacturing facilitys energy efficiency is only possible when complete energy consumption figures are available. To make sense of the copious amounts of data produced on the shop floor, many manufacturers are deploying energy data management systems (EDMS).

Generally, EDMS is set up locally and embedded into the existing IT infrastructure, but there are a number of different scenarios available, including moving the EDMS to the cloud, a possibility which enables company-wide analysis of energy data.

Manufacturers want actionable insights from the data they collect. Predictive analytics, or machine learning, often deliver a complete new service to sell.

For some users, there is concern surrounding the storage of production data off-premises. Although these concerns about data loss, security breaches and lack of data ownership are all valid, these fears arent as justified as they might seem.

Most cloud providers invest heavily to ensure the infrastructure is safe and resilient to any attacks. For example, Microsoft and its cloud platform, Azure, is ISO 27001 certified and therefore provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). By automating the replication of factory data, Azure will provide a secondary data center to act as a recovery site.

Above the clouds

Moving to cloud computing isnt just about moving data storage off-site. Used correctly, the cloud can enhance an organizations performance in production, efficiency and potentially, its entire business model.

COPA-DATA Copadata.com

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Alibaba seeking to reshape retail industry through big data, cloud … – South China Morning Post

Alibaba Group has set up a new committee led by its chief executive to better execute its new retail strategy--a concept driven by the integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain--one of the five new trends the Chinese e-commerce conglomerate foresees will significantly reshape the world.

New York-listed Alibaba announced on Tuesday that the committee led by the groups chief executive officer Daniel Zhang Yong will integrate all the power within its ecosystem, including its internet finance arm Ant Financial and logistic unit Cainiao, to gather momentum in the new era that will see the emergence of five trends to further transform the landscape of retail, finance and manufacturing.

The internet has entered the most critical 30 years in terms of application... Many industries will be redefined in the new era powered by cloud computing, big data and the internet of things, Jack Ma Yun, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, said in an internal memo on Tuesday, explaining the reasons for the committee.

Alibaba urges brands to digitise their entire business as part of new retail push

Alibaba, which owns the Post, is seeking to prepare for the so-called smart era in which the arrival of five trendsnew retail, new production, new finance, new technology and new resourcesare expected to bring challenges to industries, enterprises and individuals.

Only those who embrace the trend can turn challenges into opportunities, Ma said in the memo.

Ma said in October 2016, when he laid out the concept of his five new trends, that pure e-commerce will soon vanish.

In its 2017 Global Netrepreneur Conference held on Tuesday in Hangzhou, Alibabas Zhang said it would be wise to use data and the online footprint of consumers to reshape manufacturing. He noted the trend was moving from selling at internet, marketing via internet to made in internet.

Zhang said the online sales data and even consumers footprints in the digital world can allow entrepreneurs to not only better meet demand but also create new demand.

The five new trends bring new opportunities to online entrepreneurs as long as they can master the skill of using the internet to meet increasing demand for high-quality products from Chinas 300 million middle class, he said.

With nearly 500 million people shopping on Alibabas online platforms, the company has begun using the large pool of data to better match products with potential buyers. However, no further details were released on Tuesday regarding the companys plan for a consumer-driven production model.

Alibaba is like a shopping mall. It has been doing and will keep doing whatever it can to help merchants boost sales, said Shi Jialong, analyst with Nomura Research.

He wrote in a recent research note that Alibaba still has room to grow its marketing service and the growth of its cloud business would likely remain robust.

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In Illinois, cloud computing debate could open next chapter of utility rate reform – Utility Dive

A new staff report on cloud computing is putting members of the Illinois Commerce Commission in the hot seat.

A new ICC staff report recommends commissioners initiate a rulemaking on how costs for utility-scale data analytics software should be handled by the regulatory process. The staff says utilities should join their corporate peers in banking, healthcare other regulated industries by migrating their data to the cloud.

Current regulatory rules dont make that easy.

The ICCs 2016 Notice of Inquiry (NOI) proceeding revealed a strong consensus that current regulatory accounting rules have not kept pace with technological innovation, the staff report concluded. Utilities should be encouraged to make decisions based on business and ratepayer needs.

Regulatory accounting rules are currently interpreted to allow utilities to earn a rate of return for on-premise software, but categorize cloud-based software as an operating expense on which no return is allowed. This creates a disincentive for utilities to invest in new technology despite the fact that these systems can serve the same functions, staff reported.

The cloud may soon be the only place with the computing power to handle the exponentially escalating amount of data being generated by new smart technologies, according to testimony in the NOI proceeding.

The U.S. now has 70 million smart meters installed in over 55% of households, according to Adam Cooper, Director of Research for the Edison Foundation Institute for Electric Innovation. Based on his research for the just-released Grid Modernization Technologies, Cooper foresees 90 million deployed smart meters by the end of 2020.

That is just tip of the spear. Investor-owned utilities put $32 billion into grid modernization in 2016, according to Cooper. Much of that spending was for sensors and other system monitoring and management systems that produce data that is already creating new use cases and value opportunities.

Led by tech giants like Siemens, GE, Oracle and Amazon,a shift away from on-premise software is coming, according to Chris King, global chief regulatory officer for Siemens.

At some level of penetration, though there is a debate about what it is, the grid cannot support additional renewable energy without this kind of technology," he said.

In Illinois, the NOI proceeding is laying bare the potential benefits of a move to cloud computing for utilities. If the ICC chooses to change its financial treatment, insiders say it could enable more advanced distributed resources on utility systems and pave the way for similar reforms for energy efficiency and other resources.

The ICC report

The ICC proceeding was supported by a non-binding resolution approved by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) at its 2016 annual meeting. The resolution called for the elimination of regulatory barriers and disincentives to cloud-based computing.

Utilities best serve customers, society, the environment, and the grid by making software procurement decisions regardless of the delivery method or payment model, declared NARUCs Resolution Encouraging State Utility Commissions to Consider Improving the Regulatory Treatment of Cloud Computing Arrangements.

NARUC encourages state regulators to consider whether cloud computing and on-premise solutions should receive similar regulatory accounting treatment, it concluded. Both would be eligible to earn a rate of return.

The ICC staff reviewed testimony in the NOI proceeding that addressed possible regulatory barriers to utilities move to cloud-based services. It also compared the cost, reliability, and security benefits to utilities, customers, the grid, and the environment from deployment of cloud-based solutions.

Many utilities are lagging behind their unregulated peers in cloud computing system deployment, which may be preventing ratepayers from receiving the benefits that cloud-computing systems can offer, staff concluded.

To make the benefits from cloud-based software equally available to regulated utilities, the staff urges the ICC to consider a rulemaking. It would not be a debate about the value of cloud-based software, but rather seek to update and clarify rules about capital expenses (CapEx)and operating expenses (OpEx) as they apply to cloud-based and on-premise software.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) permit utilities to capitalize and earn a return on the cost of Microsofts on-premise Office product, staff reported. But the cost of licensing Microsofts cloud-based Office 365 product, which does the same thing, is an expense on which utilities cannot earn a return, staff wrote.

Cloud proponents and utility representatives testified in the NOI proceeding that this is an incentive to on-premise software over cloud solutions, staff wrote. The incentive is without regard to technical or functional merits because utilities favor fixed assets that are included in rate base on which the utility is allowed a return.

The incentive to invest in on-premise software is significant, according to energy consultant Jill Feblowitz. A provider of cloud-based software would need to reduce the typical $1/customer/month charge by half to make up for the utilitys financial benefit, she told Utility Dive.

Not everyone in Illinois is so gung-ho about allowing ROI on cloud computing.

Susan L. Satter, the Public Utilities Counsel to the Illinois Attorney General, wrote in the NOI proceeding fillingthat the attorney general's office "question[s]the notion that treating cloud-computing as an ongoing expense is a disincentive.

Expensing cloud-based software services reflects the way the cost is actually incurred, she wrote. It allows recovery of pass-through costs contemporaneously with consumption. That frees utility capital for infrastructure investment related to system safety and reliability.

Cloud-based software can provide both short-term and long-term services, Satter acknowledged. But regulatory scrutiny and not the rewriting of accounting rules is the way to determine whether it should be CapEx or OpEx.

Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rules may allow a way around the disincentive if the utilitys use of the cloud-based software fits the definition of a hosting arrangement, Satter acknowledged.

She rejected the argument that utilities would not make prudent, least cost expenditures on software because it is an OPEX and offers no return. Presentations in a 2015 ICC forum showed Microsoft, Facebook, Linked-In, Uber, and Amazon among the users of cloud-based services, demonstrating their significant value, Satter wrote.

The question for the Commission may not be whether accounting rules are correct, but whether the utilities are prudently managing their operations if they fail to take advantage of opportunities to save costs and enhance operations, she added.

The disparity in accounting rules could also be an advantage for utilities, Satter suggested. The current approach allows them to pass the cost of software through to customers and pass the burden of software to vendors that specialize in business support systems.

Utilities can then focus their attention on their essential and critical responsibility for grid investment and maintenance while keeping a clear eye on prudency, efficiency, and least cost service, Satter wrote.

Oracle UtilitiesJanuary 2016 surveyof 100 utility executives found 45% had turned from on-premises software to some form of cloud-based applications. But a 2014 multi-industry survey showed 83% of healthcare companies already used cloud-based services. And a 2016 survey of more than a thousand IT professionals by Rightscalefound that 95% of respondents are using the cloud.

One way to make a transition to the cloud work under existing accounting rules is to treat cloud-based software "as miscellaneous intangible property, which is how it treats on-premises software, said Oracle Regulatory Affairs Director Richard Caperton.

Miscellaneous intangible property goes into the rate base and allows the utility to request a reasonable rate of return during its rate case, Caperton said. We are confident a commission would see the investment as prudent.

Caperton agreed with Satter that the FASB hosting arrangement ruling, used in 2016 by the New York Public Service Commission, could accomplish the same end. As part of the Reforming the Energy VisionTrack 2 proceeding, the NY PSC ruled, in Matter 14-00581, that utilities may rate-base leased software paid for upfront because it gives the utility a type of host-like ownership, Caperton said.

Either approach will make utilities whole and indifferent between the two types of software, Caperton said. That is the important thing. Regulated utilities investment decisions should be based on the public interest and the interests of the ratepayer and utility, not on archaic accounting rules.

Caperton objected to Satter's argument that there are better CapEx opportunities for utilities than cloud-based software. You cant run a utility without software and IT solutions just like you cant run a utility without poles and wires, he said.

More fundamentally, he added, allowing utilities a return on only one type of software will skew their choices and keep them from delivering the best customer services.

Shifting cloud-based computing from OpEx to CapEx does not need to involve lengthy changes to underlying accounting rules, said Danny Kermode, an accountant and assistant director at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.

Changes to accounting rules are unnecessary because regulatory bodies are not bound by GAAP accounting, he said. Regulatory bodies can alter GAAP rules to fit their oversight duties and can require utilities to do things differently.

The cost of converting from on-premise to cloud-based software includes migration costs like converting data and retraining personnel, he said. Under GAAP, those costs are OpEx, but regulators can allow the utility to accumulate them instead passing them through to customers.

The commission and the utility can agree on a reasonable time for migration costs to remain on the balance sheet and not be recovered, Kermode said. The utility can then ask the commission for recovery of those deferred costs.

The monthly charge for cloud-based software can be rate based as working capital, Kermode added.

All companies have a working capital provision that can be rate based to fund current obligations," he said."It is a long-term asset concept so it doesnt exactly fit if it is used to finance a short-term asset, but the utility gets a return on it.

Kermode opposes changing the accounting rules to remove the disincentive to cloud-based software because companies are already going to the cloud, he said. The Oracle survey showed that.

All utilities are concerned with their quality of service and that makes cloud-based software a no brainer, Kermode said. It is a prudent decision because it provides better service to ratepayers.

Former California Public Utilities Commissioner Dian Grueneich, now a Stanford research scholar, said there is good evidence that earning a return is a strong incentive to IOUs.

Grueneich cited staffs report that almost every utility in the NOI proceeding agreed there is a perverse incentive in the current interpretation of accounting rules.

Its a case-by-case matter but the last thing I would want as a commissioner is to keep the best tools from utilities because of regulatory rules, she said.

Without changing the current regulatory treatment of cloud based solutions, there is a concern that the utility industry will fail to fully realize the substantial customer service, operational, and financial benefits of analytics solutions delivered via the cloud, Guerneich quoted from the report.

But there is a larger issue, she added. Where do we see utilities going? Where will innovation come from? And should regulatory rules be part of the answers to those questions?

Grueneich is currently focused on energy efficiency and has found there are three factors that drive utility investment. The first is allowing them to recover costs for rebates and other incentives they offer customers. The second is making utilities indifferent to revenue losses from energy efficiency growth.

The third is providing shareholder incentives, Grueneich said. And the highest performing states and utilities have all three.

She rejects the argument that utilities dont need a return for moving to the cloud or to energy efficiency as long as they can recover the expense.

"It gets managements attention when the utility can earn a profit," she said.

A utility faced with whether to build a power plant or do energy efficiency is in a similar position as one deciding whether to use on-premises or cloud-based software, Grueneich said. They are going to look much more seriously at each if the ratemaking treatment is basically the same for either option.

Regulators need to look at prudency and reasonableness but they also need to support utilities in embracing new technologies, she added. I want regulators and utilities to see clearly what reliability, customer service, and costs are possible and not see the one up in the cloud with one hand tied behind its back.

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BT Named A Leader In 2017 Magic Quadrant For Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe – BT Retains Its Position As … – Exchange News Direct

BT today announced that it has retained its position as a Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, one of the most influential reports covering the cloud sector. The company has also maintained its overall top rating for ability to execute in the report, which increasingly emphasises digital business enablement.

The 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe assesses cloud services providers completeness of vision and ability to execute in the provision of managed hybrid cloud hosting in Europe.

Gartner Inc. views Leaders as service providers who have proved they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied on for enterprise-class needs. They have proved their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They address multiple use cases with stand-alone or integrated solutions.

BT believes that its leadership position is a significant achievement as this year Gartner Inc, emphasised digital business enablement throughout its assessment. BT believes that the reports findings will provide valuable insight for its existing and prospective customers looking to leverage hybrid cloud as part of their digital transformation strategies.

Furthermore, the company believes that its retention of the top rating for ability to execute reflects the above-market-rate growth of its hybrid cloud services including its cloud and traditional Compute portfolio as well as fully-integrated, third-party hyperscale cloud services.

Bas Burger, CEO Global Services, BT, said: Were pleased this report recognises that BTs cloud propositions are resonating with customers looking to transform their business and achieve leadership in the digital economy. Our front-runner position reflects the investments weve made in our Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy. These investments are bringing to market a portfolio of innovative cloud services that remove complexity and improve control for our global customers at every stage of their digital transformation journeys.

We can help customers create hybrid environments combining the public and private cloud services their business demands. We can help them manage their cloud environments, giving them control of what their business consumes to ensure IT spend is affordable. Our global network gives customers access to their hybrid cloud wherever they need it and our track record in enablement reassures the boardroom that their digital transformation plans can be delivered.

The reports publication comes just three months after BT was given the highest scores by Gartner Inc. for Midsize European Network, Large European Network and Core City Backbone, reflecting three of the four use cases in the 2017 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Network Services, Pan-European report.

To read the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe report, please click here.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Jelastic Announces Cloud Hosting Partnership with Diadem Technologies in India – Benzinga

Jelastic announced Cloud PaaS partnership with Diadem Technologies from India, to spread a scalable hosting platform for developers and SMBs via local data center

Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) July 10, 2017

Jelastic, Multi-Cloud PaaS for hosting providers, enterprises, and developers, partnered with Diadem Technologies, India's leading cloud service provider, offering dedicated and hybrid cloud hosting solutions for clients across the globe.

Diadem Technologies powered by Jelastic will offer their customers elastic PaaS with rich web UI for easy creation, scaling, clustering and smooth updates of monolithic applications and microservices.

"We are excited about our partnership with Jelastic, as from now we will offer world class PaaS and CaaS solutions from our TIER IV IDC in Mumbai to our clients across India. After evaluating various Platform-as-a-Service options over the past year, we decided to partner with Jelastic as it appeared to be the best fit for us due to the following reasons:

"Smart service providers, as Diadem Technologies, keep searching for the advanced solutions to meet evolving requirements of their customers. And Jelastic is glad to help in upgrading commodity IaaS and VPS offerings to a unique appliance of managed PaaS and CaaS hosting," commented Ruslan Synytsky, Jelastic CEO and Co-Founder.

Diadem Technologies offer the following benefits for application hosting on their network:

Diadem Technologies powered by Jelastic provides a 14 day trial period for all customers.

About Jelastic Jelastic is a cloud platform for developing, scaling and managing hosted applications. Jelastic cooperates with trusted partners around the globe, and help them to reach local communities as well as to deliver high-quality solution for IT companies in local regions.The platform provides certified containers for Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python and .NET and the ability to use custom Docker containers. Jelastic offers agile deployment models without coding to proprietary APIs, flexible automatic scaling for stateless and stateful applications, collaboration, access control, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, built-in billing and business analytics tools while driving down TCO with high density and hardware utilization. For more information, visit https://jelastic.com/

About Diadem Technologies Diadem Technologies is in business since 2000 and are internally funded and a zero debt entity since inception with a strong focus on providing their clients with state of the art hosted solutions from South Asia's first Uptime Certified TIER IV IDC in Mumbai, India offering 99.999% SLA for its hosting infrastructure. They have evolved from a plain vanilla shared web hosting provider to a fully-fledged managed and cloud service provider offering a multitude of services which includes managed virtual private servers (VPS), IaaS & PaaS solutions on Jelastic, SaaS offerings which includes anti malware, anti spam, email archiving, email hosting solutions, among others.

Web and application hosting services of Diadem Technologies are used by leading brands and organisations including Hewlett Packard India, Emami, Turtle Limited, Yes Bank, Supertron Ltd, BiskFarm, Microtek, Manyavar, Wonderchef, Ittiam Systems, JIVA Ayurveda and over 1500+ organisations which need a secure, highly available and redundant datacenter hosting environment backed with 99.95% uptime SLA and 24x7 technical support.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/07/prweb14492540.htm

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Microsoft Launches Azure Local Cloud Solution – CFO

The company believes Azure Stack will give it an advantage over Amazon and Google in hybrid cloud computing.

Heating up its cloud competition with Amazon and Google, Microsoft has launched a long-awaited platform for organizations that prefer not to use the public cloud.

Azure Stack offers the same management tools, straightforward provisioning, and usage-based licensing as the public Azure cloud, but can be run on a companys own servers. At its Inspire conference, Microsoft announced Monday that partners like Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo will start shipping hardware that has been certified to run Azure Stack in September.

As Reuters reports, Microsoft is hoping to carve a niche among customers who cannot or do not want to have to move all their computing operations to the massive shared data centers that are collectively known as the cloud.

The company is the second-largest cloud player behind Amazon and also competes with Google. All three have been developing so-called hybrid solutions that allow enterprises to run workloads in a public cloud and in their own data centers.

One of the key differentiations we have with Azure versus our two biggest competitors in the cloud platform space is our ability to support true hybrid solutions, Judson Althoff, Microsofts executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, told Reuters.

Microsoft originally announced Azure Stack in 2015 with the intent of enabling organizations to build private Azure clouds on any suitable hardware and with an initial release date in 2016. A year ago, it switched to a 2017 release date and a delivery model using hardware from select partners.

According to HPE, its systems will start at $300,000 to 400,000 depending on configuration.

Mike Neil, Microsofts corporate vice president for Azure Infrastructure and Management, said Azure Stack is aimed at companies that want to remain in control of their data. Customers include Carnival Cruise Line, which is deploying Azure Stack to power many of the day-to-day operations of running a massive cruise ship.

Many of [these companies] have their roots in their environment today in their data centers or their hosting partners data centers, Neil told TechCrunch. We wanted to provide a solution that met these different needs.

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Atlantic Metro Expands CloudDirect(SM) Suite Nationwide – Marketwired (press release)

Integrated Platform of Managed Cloud Hosting, Server Colocation, and Network Connectivity

PARSIPPANY, NJ--(Marketwired - July 11, 2017) - Atlantic Metro Communications -- a nationwide provider of fully managed IT infrastructure services -- today announced the expansion of its CloudDirect service portfolio to cities nationwide. CloudDirect provides private and dedicated cloud hosting, data center colocation, and network connectivity as a single, integrated IT infrastructure platform.

The CloudDirect offering is now available at all Atlantic Metro sites including:

CloudDirect seamlessly combines cloud hosting and colocation services, while providing fiber connectivity between the cloud, data centers, and customer premises. Customers see increased levels of security, rapid deployment, consistent performance, and on-demand scalability, as well as the convenience of working with a single provider.

"CloudDirect has experienced tremendous growth and success in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area, and the increased demand for connectivity to other regions made the decision to expand an easy one," said Stephen Klenert, Chief Strategy Officer of Atlantic Metro. "Bringing everything together under a single service provider enables customers to reduce their risk profile -- Atlantic Metro is able to proactively monitor, test, and support our clients' entire IT infrastructure."

Integrating these core IT Infrastructure components also gives customers the flexibility to augment physical servers in the cloud, easily migrate legacy servers into the cloud as they approach end-of-life, develop a comprehensive business continuity plan, and much more.

"When we were consolidating data centers into one facility, we required high levels of reliability, security, compliance, and low latency bandwidth from our providers," says Max Reynoso, COO of Quant Technologies LLC. "Atlantic Metro fit that profile. Atlantic Metro's ability to deliver a range of services that meet our needs has been an added benefit to our organization."

For more information about Atlantic Metro's CloudDirect platform or to order service, please visit http://www.atlanticmetro.net/solutions.

About Atlantic Metro Communications Atlantic Metro is a Managed Infrastructure Service Provider, delivering cloud computing, and secure data center colocation, and nationwide network connectivity. Recently recognized by the Silicon Valley Review as one of 2017's top ten fastest growing cloud providers, more than 600 customers -- including Fortune 500 enterprises, finance companies, legal firms, media agencies, healthcare organizations, and web start-ups choose Atlantic Metro for the confidence that comes with customer-focused infrastructure solutions. Atlantic Metro's visionary team strives to foster long-standing relationships and is dedicated to empowering the growth and success of its customers.

For more information, visit http://www.atlanticmetro.net or contact us via email at sales@atlanticmetro.net.

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Women in IT Security: Eight Women to Watch – SC Magazine

Women in IT Security: Eight Women to Watch

Diana L. Burley is a full professor of human and organizational learning at The George Washington University, and executive director and chair of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P), a consortium of universities, national laboratories and nonprofit institutions dedicated to strengthening the cyber infrastructure of the U.S.

Prior, she managed a computer science education and research portfolio and led the Cyber Corps program for the U.S. National Science Foundation. She co-chairs the ACM/IEEE-Computer Society Joint Task Force on Cybersecurity Education and, in 2013, served as co-chair of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Professionalizing the Nation's Cybersecurity Workforce.

Widely cited in the media, Dr. Burley is also an in-demand speaker at industry gatherings, most recentlyat tech panelshosted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security Division, and(ISC)2.

She has been the recipient of a number of awards and honors and has authored 75 publications on cybersecurity, information sharing and IT-enabled change.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is an attorney, educator and the director of civil liberties for the Center for Internet and Society(CIS) atStanford Law School. A prominent advocate for intellectual propertylaw,free speech andprivacy, she has represented a number of high-profilehackers, including internet activistAaron Swartz.

Beginning her legal work at the statepublic defender's office, she then became a trial attorney before shifting to a private practice where she specialized in defending cases involvingcomputer crime. In 2001, she also began teaching cyber law at Stanford University. Granick was the civil liberties director at theElectronic Frontier Foundationfrom 2007 to 2010 and then an attorney at ZwillGen, where she specialized in internet security issues.

Most recently, Granick was in the news for her work on a case seeking to reveal how the government proceeds in matters of domestic snooping and how it strong arms companies into cooperating with federal efforts to thwart cryptography.

Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director for the office of the CISO at Optiv, recognizes the potential security crisis that complements the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). As our devices increasingly become tethered to the internet, she says, not enough people are concerned about the security implications and the risks presented.

"I was blown away to hear most people don't think [the IoT is] really a thing yet," she said in May at Interop during a presentation on securing enterprise infrastructure.

The former head of information security at Urban Outfitter has more than 15 years of achievement in healthcare, retail, technology, and professional services sectors. Her extensive experience in cybersecurity and risk management transfers to the board room where she is fluent in speaking with board members about the risks the company faces so the approporiate decisions can be made to enhance business strategy, improve supply chain operations and manage enterprise risk.

Jeannette Jarvis, director of product management at Intel Security, is a huge proponent of threat intelligence sharing, and she predicts it will rise this year as a primary strategy for mitigating cyberattacks.

"Sharing threat intelligence shifts the balance of power away from the adversaries and back to us, the defenders, Jarvis said.

Adversaries have more information about our defenses than we have about their attacks, and this asymmetry significantly influences threatdefenseeffectiveness," she told the World Economic Forum. "Attacks can be tested againstsecuritydefenses with impunity, whether in laboratories or deployedsystems. Preventing attackers fromtestingagainst us is very difficult and possibly unsolvable."

Jarvis told the forum that in order to improve our cyber defenses, the industry must cooperate. "Crowdsourced threat intelligence and collaborative analytics help connect the dots and form better pictures of what is happening in the attack landscape. 2017 will be the year in which threat intelligence sharing makes its most significant strides."

Armed with a master's degree in global affairs, transnational security from NYU, Alex Kassirer lent her expertise on the Anderson Cooper 360 show before becoming a terrorism analyst at NBC News as well as a senior analyst, lead on counterterrorism at Flashpoint.

Her ability to dig deep into areas of the Dark Web where most computer users never venture, along with her fluency in Arabic, enables her to keeps tabs on the online presence of jihadists who engage in hacking and cybercrime. This includes AlQaeda, ISIS and other terrorist movements, as well as nation-state actors. This reconnaissance includes getting vetted to be granted entree into underground forums and then communicating with the actors so as to interpret how they think and might act.

Frequently cited on cyber terrorism issues in the media, she was recently profiled in the The New York Times and was included among "54 Amazing Women" in Glamour magazine.

Law firms are always scanning the horizon, and cybersecurity is not only a goliath, but it is a goliath that is never going away, Nelson told an industry publication. We are here to stay in the digital world, and data is black gold. Data is the new oil, and having seen that, law firms are very responsive.

She maintains a cybersecurity and electronic evidence blog, Ride the Lightning, and is a co-host of two Legal Talk Network podcast series:The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technologyand Digital Detectives.

With more than 15 years in the security field, Wendi Whitmore, global partner & lead at IBM X-Force Incident Response & Intelligence Services (IRIS), has diverse experience to arm her in efforts in the global incident response, proactive services and intelligence teams within IBM Services.

Prior, Wendi was a VP at CrowdStrike Services, where she was responsible for professional service offerings and engagements. That included critical security breach response for Fortune 500 companies and the federal government. She spent six years at Mandiant and prior was a special agent conducting computer crime investigations with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

A frequent speaker at industry gatherings, including the fourth annual Women in Cybersecurity Conference (WiCyS), held in May in Tucson, as well as SANS, BlackHat, DoD Cybercrime and the FBI National Infragard Conference, she also has been widely cited in the media on the topics of online privacy and consumer awareness.

After a dozen years as a senior researcher at the National Security Agency, Ellison Anne Williams left to found and take the CEO title at Enveil, a data protection company that uses homomorphic crypto to protect data interactions including search and analytic.Or, as she puts it, "does cool stuff with massive amounts of data."

The company certainly reached an early milestone when it was named a runner-upin theRSAConferenceInnovation Sandbox Contest 2017 for its "pioneering work in data security." It was the youngest company to compete in the competition and was selected from a roster of more than 300 startups. This is the first time in over 20 years of work into homomorphic encryption that this kind of scale has been achieved, Williams said at the event.

Fortified with masters degrees in mathematics and computer science, and a Ph.D. in mathematics, Ellison Anne Williams in 2009 authored The Use of Neural Networks in Intrusion Detection.

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The Internet of Identities (IoI) – CSO Online

Jon Oltsik is a principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group ESG and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the New York Times.

Everyone is talking about IoT these days and for good reasonthere are already billions of devices connected to the global internet, and some researchers are predicting 50 billion by 2020. This alone will make the CISO's job more difficult, but security executives face many other associated challenges as well:

As they say down south, That dog dont hunt. In other words, traditional security processes, controls and technologies cant scale to meet the security challenges of an IoT mobile world.

This is exactly where identity (i.e. device identity, user identity, asset identity, etc.) comes into play. Connecting sources and destinations must move beyond Layer 2/3 protocols and user name and passwords. Moving forward, everything on the internet must have a trustworthy identity. These trustworthy identities can then be used to guide and monitor secure connections.

[ Related: 4 places to find cybersecurity talent in your own organization ]

My colleague Mark Bowker has dubbed this trend the "Internet of Identities" (IoI), and it fits with many security trends we are tracking. For example, trustworthy identities are at the center of networking trends such as micro-segmentation and software-defined perimeters (SDPs). Once I know the identity of a device or person and the identity of the application or service they want to connect to, I can authenticate each entity, check a policy engine to ensure that this is an authorized connection, segment and encrypt the traffic between source and destination, and maintain an audit log of connections and even all packets exchanged between the two nodes.

In essence, the big global internet gets carved up into billions of fixed-function and personal virtual network segmentsall drive by identities at either end of the pipe.

In my humble opinion, Marks theory is spot on because we need to use identity, software-defined networking technologies, and big data analytics to decrease the network attack surface and monitor whats going on across billions of nodes. On the business side, IoI will also help organizations provide high-performance services to critical network traffic and high-value customers.

While IoI seems logical, its success over the next few years depends on many factors, including:

1.Strong authentication of IoT devices. Every IoT device must have a strong and unique identity based upon biometric technologies, fingerprinting techniques or tried-and-true X.509 digital certificates.

2.Broad use of standards and baked-in technologies.Im thinking of some type of rationalization around standards like FIDO, OAuth, OpenID, SAML, etc., while increasing the use of common biometrics like fingerprint readers on phones.

3.Cloud oversight of identities.Facebook, Google and Microsoft have identity scale in the cloud and are already fighting for identity control, but IoI must evolve into a cooperative ecosystem. Industry bigwigs have to work together and agree on an identity ecosystem similar to the model provided by the Trusted Identity Group and NSTIC from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

4.Greater use of software-defined networking technologies.As I mentioned above, Im thinking about greater use of micro-segmentation and a migration from VPN technology to software-defined perimeters that provide any-to-any network access based upon user, identity, location, risk and strict business-driven policies.

5.Mature User and Entity Behavior Analysis (UEBA) tools.There will be far too much happening for security analysts to keep track of connections or spot anomalous behavior. Mature behavior-based security analytics tools based upon machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) must continue to evolve to bridge this gap.

Large organizations must plan for IoI in several ways:

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The Internet of Identities (IoI) - CSO Online

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Degoo Affordable Cloud Storage Solution | NewsWatch Review – NewsWatch

AppWatch

Cloud storage solutions are the future. For a robust cloud service, check out Degoo. Degoo is easily the worlds most affordable cloud solution. When you first start up youre offered 100 GB of free storage.

Lets put that in perspective for a second. Google Drive offers 15 GB of free storage while Dropbox only allows 2 GB.

Now another thing that sets it apart, is you dont need to have an account to access content sent with Degoo, making it less of a hassle.

You can send an unlimited number of files of any size to anyone.

When it comes to photos they offer a feature to Android users that allows you to store 10 times more photos on your phone by uploading them to the Degoo server and reducing the size of the photo on your phone.

With Degoo, you never have to think about a backup as you can choose your important files and they take care of the rest. All you must do is power off your computer and Degoo will resume your backup once powered on again.

They will detect any changes you make to your files and ensure your backup is always up to date.

The cloud, of course, is secure and uses military-grade encryption to ensure your data is kept safe. Your files are also always ready to be recovered at any time, from anywhere.

When you create a free Degoo account, you get 100 GB backup space for free. You can also upgrade to Premium and get 2000 GB backup space and more.

And as a cool bonus, the newsfeed feature shows you photos from your past by using artificial intelligence to predict what content you may want to see.

Degoo is compatible with Mac OS, Windows, Android, and iOS devices. To sign up today for free, head on over to Degoo.com.

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Degoo Affordable Cloud Storage Solution | NewsWatch Review - NewsWatch

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