Category Archives: Cloud Computing

07 : 04 PM - 14/06/2017

Deputy Premier, HH Shaikh Ali bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, and Deputy Premier, Deputy Premier Shaikh Khalid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, and committee members attended the meeting.

The panel reviewed a report on the work of the committee in charge of following up on and implementing the requirements and recommendations of the UN report aiming to enhance Bahrains standing in UN e-Government indicators-2018.

The committee requested all ministries and relevant departments and institutions to finalise the requirements of the e-services index in the allocated time.

It also stressed the need to focus on meeting the requirements of open data, and to provide the e-content pertaining to the sustainable development goals for each ministry, entity or institution on their websites.

In this regard, HH Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak commended the efforts of the committee in charge of following up on and implementing the requirements and recommendations of the UN report.

After that, the High ICT committee adopted the Cloud Computing policy, making the kingdom the first Arab country to take such an initiative.

A detailed presentation about cloud computing regarding its methodology, principles and advantages was given.

The cloud computing policy enables government institutions to focus on the development of their services, which will result in their excellence in the provision of such services, elimination of duplicated efforts and reduction of operational expenses in infrastructure to control expenditure.

The deputy premier stressed the need to go ahead with the adoption of cloud computing, given its role in reducing expenditure, ensuring the provision of speedy e-services, expanding the scope of work and increasing flexibility and competitiveness.

He pointed out that keeping pace with technical and technological progress is the basis of the Kingdom's global status in the field of e-government, which should continue in order to provide the best and fastest e-government services at the lowest costs.

The committee also discussed efforts to increase readiness to face cyber security threats, calling for the need to start implementing standards and systems to identify the threats and put in place a government strategy for cyber security.

The committee also approved the guiding principles for implementing the requirements of the law on the protection of the state information and documents. In this regard, the deputy premier stressed that the relevant government departments should start implementing the law, given its importance in preserving the states information and documents.

The committee also reviewed a descriptive research study on customer satisfaction index for e-government programmes conducted in cooperation with the University of Bahrain

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Bahrain to introduce cloud computing - Bahrain News Agency

French startup Shadow, also known as Blade, just raised a Series A round of $57.1 million (51 million). Shadow thinks your next computer is going to be in a data center. Your existing phones, laptops and Shadows own device (pictured above) act as a thin client, a window into your virtual machine running on a beefy server in a data center near you.

Shadow had already raised $14.6 million from around 20 business angels. The same ones invested again, starting with Nick Suppipat, Pierre-Kosciusko Morizet and Michael Benabou.

Ive already written a bit about Shadow. The startup is running thousands of virtual machines on 800 server-grade Intel Xeon processors with a dedicated Nvidia GTX 1070 for each user. Its only available in France for now.

In my own testing, it works quite well already even though you can feel that the service is still a bit young. The only issue is that you currently need a speedy fiber connection, which still limits the market quite a bit in France.

You can get your personal instance for around $32.70 per month (30). This isnt just a gaming platform, you get a full Windows 10 virtual machine. So far, 3,500 people have been using the service as the company has been accepting new users in batches every other month.

With todays funding round, the company plans to accept a lot more customers. The first thing were going to change is that we were relying on a pre-order system, co-founder and CEO EmmanuelFreund said. We have a lot more demand compared to our offering output. Were going to switch to an instant ordering system.

Eventually, youll be able to sign up to Shadow and use your Shadow computer the next day. This is going to be challenging as Shadow will need to keep up with the demand and roll out enough servers so that new servers are always available.

Shadow already said that it isnt in the business of looking at your data. You control your Windows instance, you can encrypt your data and Shadow doesnt have your Windows password. But the company said that it plans to provide its own encryption system and write stronger terms of service when it comes to privacy.

On average, these users have been spending 2.5 hours per day per user over the last 30 days. By targeting gamers, Shadow has been focusing on heavy PC users so this number isnt that surprising.

But the startup doesnt plan to stop there. Up next, Shadow wants to sell instances through B2B channels and target less powerful needs. Eventually, Shadow wants to replace computers in your office or your grandparents computer. Those servers probably arent going to have a big Nvidia GPU, but its going to bring the next big wave of users.

The startup wants to attract 100,000 clients by the end of 2018. Shadow is going to expand to the U.K. and Germany in 2017, with other European countries following suit. For each geographical expansion, the startup needs to find new data centers and sign peering deals with telecom companies around Europe.

The company is also going to open an office in Palo Alto so that they can talk with American partners, such as server makers and Microsoft. And Im sure that the company will need a ton of capital to buy new servers and expand its infrastructure.

While cloud computing for end users have been a wild dream for years, internet connections may have become fast enough to turn this into something that you can actually use. Shadow plans to take advantage of that.

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Shadow raises $57 million for its cloud computing service for ... - TechCrunch

The cloud-computing unit of Amazon.com said the new AWS GovCloud Region which can include one or more data centers is expected to open in 2018. It will be located on the East Coast.

Seattle Times business reporter

Amazon Web Services is launching a second cloud-computing region dedicated to hosting sensitive data and workloads from the U.S. government and regulated industries.

The cloud-computing unit of Amazon.com said Tuesday that the new AWS GovCloud Region which can include one or more data centers is expected to open in 2018. It will be located on the East Coast.

Amazon launched its first region dedicated to sensitive computing needs by U.S. government agencies and their contractors in 2011. Located on the West Coast, it was designed to meet tough compliance requirements and remain isolated from other parts of the public cloud.

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Amazon.com to open second government cloud-computing region ... - The Seattle Times

Darren Mowry of Amazon Web Services. Photo: AWS

The head of Nordic operations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) has spelled out exactly why the US cloud computing giant chose to locate three state-of-the-art data centers in Sweden.

In April, it emerged that AWS planned to open a new infrastructure region for its cloud computing services in the Stockholm region in 2018.

Swedens enterprise and innovation minister Mikael Damberg hailed the deal as huge for Sweden.

They could do that wherever in the world, but chose to do it here," he added.

Now the man responsible for expanding AWSs cloud services operations in Sweden, American Darren Mowry, has disclosed the reasoning behind his companys decision to invest in Sweden.

Sweden truly does have it all, Mowry writes in a blog post published on the Data Centers by Sweden website.

But theres more to it than that.

Read his full explanation behind the AWS investment here.

This article was produced byThe Local Client Studioand sponsored by Data Centers by Sweden.

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'Sweden is heaven for cloud computing': Amazon Nordic chief - The Local Sweden

As a country that is experiencing exponential growth in data volume, Indonesia and its banking system have yet to fully implement cloud computing technologies due to regulation barriers and a lack of decent infrastructure.

"Major banks in Indonesia, most of which are our clients, have 10 to 40 million customers with hundreds of millions of transactions every day,"IT solution provider Teradata Indonesia president director Erwin Z Achir said in Jakarta on Monday.

Banking services are among the data giants who generate terabytes of data every day and has yet to move to cloud computing technology a type of Internet-based computing with which different services are delivered to an organization's computers and devices through the internet.

Under Government Regulation No. 82/2012 on the Management of Electronic Transactions and Systems, data and disaster recovery centers for public services must be located within Indonesia, meaning that Indonesian banks must store its customers' data in the country

Therefore, Indonesian banks that previously operated data centers located overseas must repatriate their information.

According to a 2014 survey by IDC Financial Insights on data centers, most Indonesian banks expect a 10 to 20 percent data volume growth rate per year.

Meanwhile, Fajar Muniandy, Teradata chief solution architect, said moving to clouds has yet to be an option for the companys clients because of their massive amounts of data.

He added that cloud computing was currently being adopted by startups and smaller companies because they had built their systems from the beginning. (dis/bbn)

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Indonesia banks have yet to implement cloud computing - Jakarta Post

Traditional IT can call for large data centers and server farms which are a serious investment and require 24/7 IT oversight and energy to power and cool the servers.

Computers and software are now part of everyday life. We constantly use emails and set up websites. Some of us even run our own businesses. We are able to use these services without having to host our own massive IT infrastructure, hiring tons of staff to operate it, spending a lot of money and getting mired in lengthy and complicated procurement processes.

If you can do this easily, why cant the government?

The federalgovernment has an extensive infrastructure, a broad user base in agencies with a variety of missions, and complex suites of applications. To address these challenges, the Federal CIO Council has charged the government to leverage cloud computing services.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing provides scalable IT capabilities that are offered as a service over the Internet to multiple users. Many users share pooled IT resources, reducing costs and resulting in greater computing efficiency. The federal government is focusing on security, privacy, and procurement as it moves towards cloud computing.

The Federal Government has an extensive infrastructure, a broad user base in agencies with a variety of missions, and complex suites of applications. (Source)

Traditional IT can call for large data centers and server farms which are a serious investment and require 24/7 IT oversight and energy to power and cool the servers. The federal government has hundreds of these centers around the country that often perform similar tasks, such as providing email or web hosting, and are generally used at a fraction of their capability. They typically have large carbon footprints due to their enormous energy consumption and have to comply with strict environmental controls.

SEE ALSO Vital strategies for better managing remote workers

Cloud computing can be viewed as the green computing option, as it promotes sustainability and has a much smaller carbon footprint by limiting duplicated efforts and utilizing computing power more efficiently.

Cloud computing also offers scalability, meaning you can scale capacity and processing power on-demand. It is always evolving and it is not an immediate solution for all government computing needs, but it can give the federalgovernment the same opportunity the private sector enjoys to reduce spending while making better use of staff and resources with a more forward-thinking, environmentally sensitive approach.

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The use of cloud computing in the federal government services - Born2Invest

By Gary Eastwood, star Advisor, CIO | Jun 13, 2017 11:06 AM PT

Opinions expressed by ICN authors are their own.

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The rise in cloud traffic that is expected as a result of increasing applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) might render cloud computing unmanageable. IoT hinges on processing device generated data and cloud computing involves using data from centralised computing and storage. Thus, this computational model can become overwhelmed if the growth trajectory of IoT continues as it has been.

The unprecedented amount of data generated by IoT devices is putting considerable strain on the internet architecture. Consequently, developers are finding ways to alleviate this network pressure and get around the data problem.

One of the proposed solutions to this issue is edge computing. This data processing archetype involves pushing data handling to the edge of the network, closer to the source of the data. In other words, instead of sending data to the cloud server or central data centre for processing, the device connects through a local gateway device. This allows faster analytics and reduces network pressure.

There are uses for both these types of computing models, but they are inherently different and suited to different niches. Applications for industrial IoT technology where instantaneous decision making is essential is better matched to edge computing, whereas cloud computing is appropriate for big data analytics.

Achieving a stable and sustainable network depends on the balancing act between processing on the edge and the centralized system. Edge computing is generally for custom-built systems and cloud computing is a more universal platform that is usually more compatible with third party and older applications. The industry is not looking to replace one with the other, but use them in their best use roles to complement each other and the devices they power.

For IoT and highly distributed applications the infrastructure comprises the device, network edge and server. The objective is to process near the device, for instantaneous response and subsequent decision making. This is especially true for applications using generated data in algorithms that use machine learning to make autonomous decisions. Sending the data back to the central cloud server, could negate the anticipated value. This approach leverages resources that may not have continuous network access, for example tablets and smartphones in an agricultural setting.

For example, an industrial application of IoT may include sensors in the manufacturing production line or smart traffic lights. Edge devices capture real time information that can be used by the devices themselves to internally process the data to prevent a part from failing, reroute traffic or even optimize production.

Cloud computing is still an important processing paradigm and is useful in applications that are not as sensitive to a timeou response, where the device does not need processing power itself or big data applications. This computing model serves to increase the efficiency of everyday tasks and provides a pathway for the massive amounts of data to travel to its intended endpoint.

Edge computing has benefits for applications where the device has data processing capabilities and needs to quickly process data in response to manufacturing parameters that may or may not be within limits. That said inventory control information is not likely to utilize edge computing. By processing these transactions at the edge of the network would result in a distributed, unsafe and uncontrollable disarray of data.

As mentioned, edge computing does not replace cloud computing. Effectively, the analytic algorithm may be fashioned in the cloud, and then pushed to the edge device. This is often occurs where the device is primarily a sensor gathering data and incapable of analysis.

The trick is to incorporate both models to their best effectiveness: edge computing where time is of the essence, and cloud computing where security and volumes abide. It is imperative that IoT strategies integrate stacks and layering of the computing exemplars to get the best of both worlds and optimize the processing power of IoT.

This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?

Gary Eastwood has over 20 years' experience as a science and technology journalist, editor and copywriter; writing on subjects such as mobile & UC, smart cities, ICT, the cloud, IoT, clean technology, nanotechnology, robotics & AI and science & innovation for a range of publications. Outside his life as a technology writer and analyst, Gary is an avid landscape photographer who has authored two photography books and ghost-written two others.

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The difference between edge and cloud computing all CIO's should know - CIO

Cloud computing is one of the most disruptive forces facing the Information Technology sector. This statement is not without justification. Lets cast a glance at the enormity of the phenomenon. According to the Bain & Company research report The Changing Faces of the Cloud, globally, the cloud IT market revenue is projected to increase to $390 billion in 2020 from $180 billion, translating into a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 17%.

The report also points out that cloud demand accounted for 70% of related IT market growth in 2015. Moreover, 48 out of Fortune Global 50 companies have announced plans for cloud adoption for a range of IT applications. The cloud market will continue to gain momentum as businesses shift from legacy systems to cloud-based ones, with an increasingly higher number of organizations pursuing digital business strategies.

Cloud computing represents the biggest IT industry disruptions in several years. CIOs will need to put their heads together in order to aid their company successfully and safely navigate the cloud journey, says Shashank Dixit, CEO, Deskera, a global leader in cloud tech.

While premise-based IT software and tools have their own advantages, the global trend is for cloud based applications since they offer more connectivity and functionalities than legacy systems. Moreover, enterprises are naturally gravitating towards it as the technology is reasonably reliable, affordable, and provides them access to other new and emergent technologies as well as high end skills. The cloud boom is also propelled by the fact that enterprises are trying to improve performance and productivity over the long term. Looking at the tremendous response for cloud services, several IT companies are designing applications meant solely for pure cloud play.

The overall global public cloud market will mature, and its growth rate will slightly slow down from 17.2% in 2016 to a 15.2% increase in 2020, says Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. While Brexit and other growth challenges exist, some segments such as financial SaaS applications and the PaaS user markets will still see strong growth through 2020. As buyers intensify and increase IaaS activity, they will be getting more for their investment: ongoing enhancement of performance, more memory, more storage for the same money (which will drive increases in consumptions) and increased automation in traditional IT outsourcing (ITO) delivery, added Nag.

In this fast paced world of technology, enterprises must leverage technology to stay ahead of competition. And they must choose wisely. There is a huge market that needs to be explored particularly since the reach of the Internet (including both 3G and 4G services) and the levels of automation and digitization rise exponentially.

[Disclaimer:The views expressed in this article are solely those of theauthors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views ofTrivone MediaNetwork's or that of CXOToday's.]

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Why Cloud Computing Is The Most Disruptive IT Force - CXOToday.com

Just a few years ago, billion-level funding would be beyond the imagination of Chinese cloud computing companies. But now it is becoming more and more tangible as the market matures.

QingCloud, a leading player in the field, is announcing the largest ever funding in the industry so far. The cloud computing platform made it public that they havesecured D round funding worth RMB 1.08 billion (around US$ 158 million). The current round adds to a US$ 2 million series A in 2012, aUSD 20 million Series Bin 2013 and USD 100 million in 2016.The company confirmed with TechNode that it has IPO plans, but declined to offer more details. The firm reportedly is removing their VIE structure to prepare for a local listing.

The massive round is from a consortium of investors, including China Merchants Securities International and China Merchants Zhiyuan Capital Investment (two wholly-owned subsidiaries of Chinas top security trading and brokerage firm, China Merchants Securities), Riverhead Capital Investment Management, CICC Jiatai Fund and China Oceanwide Holdings Group. Existing investors of Lightspeed China Partners and Bluerun Ventures also participated.

QingCloud founding team (L-R): Spencer Lin, Richard Huang, Reno Gan (Image credit: QingCloud)

QingClouds funding isnt a single case. It marks the latest in a series of venture investments in this sector, which has bumped several companies in the vertical to unicorn status recently.

Two companies in the arena received similar-sized backings in June alone. Cloud and big data solution provider Dt Dream received an RMB 750 million A round led by Alibaba and Everbright Industry Capital Management. Another Alibaba-backed cloud computing startup Cloudcare received nearly a 1 billion RMB C round led by FOSUN Group and Sequoia Capital China.Tencent-backed UCloud completed an RMB 960 million series D roundearlier this year.

Among the companies that have landed billion-level RMB funding, Dt Dream is the only one that announced unicorn status with over US$ 1 billion valuation. This may shed light on the valuations of the other companies, which have received similar size or higher funding.

Behind the investment frenzy is the huge potential of this market. Areport from research institute CCID shows that Chinas cloud computing market surged 41.7% YOY to RMB 279.7 billion in 2016, forecasting that this figure would reach RMB570.64 billion by 2019 with an annual growth rate of over 20%.

The emergence of several unicorns over a relatively short period of time is signifying a deeperchange in the market. In line with the second-half era proposition proposed by Meituan-Dianping CEO Wang Xing, the cloud computing startup pointed that Chinas cloud computing market is also entering a special transition point fora new period. While cloud computing platforms only used by non-core businesses for financial clients like banks, insurance, and security companies in the first-half era, it will find wider application in the new era.

Co-founded by IBM alumni Richard Huang, Reno Gan, and Spencer Lin, the company launched the QingCloud platform in July 2013. They now operate 24 data centers, of which 10 are run independently and 14 through partnerships, providing services to over 70,000 enterprise services.

Emma Lee is Shanghai-based tech writer, covering startups and tech happenings in China and Asia in general. Reach her at lixin@technode.com

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China's cloud industry moving to new era with emergence of unicorns - TechNode (blog)

Cloud technology is catching up in India and the considerations for adopting it have evolved too. Customers today are looking at deploying public and private cloud capabilities in one infrastructure. In fact, according to a recent Gartner report, the public cloud services market in India is estimated to grow at 38% in 2017 to $1.81 billion.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), projected to grow 49.2% in 2017, will be the highest growth driver, followed by software as a service (SaaS) at 33% and lastly platform as a service (PaaS) with 32.1%. This trend is a significant indicator that the migration of application and workloads from on premises data centres to the cloud, along with the development of cloud-ready and cloud-native applications, are triggering immense growth. While this may be on the rise, it also comes with some challenges and companies need to consider aspects like security, migration to new technologies, training for resources etc.

With this, the debate surrounding the security of cloud computing specifically whether data was more secure in the cloud or not has for the most part been settled. A growing number of organizations now view the cloud as secure and in many cases more so than an on-premises deployment. Beyond that, as each of the public cloud vendors point out, security in the cloud is ashared responsibility with the organization as the application owner being responsible for protecting applications, the OS, supporting infrastructure and other assets running in the cloud.

From a security standpoint, public cloud vendors management consoles are a key weak point and consequently an attractive target for an attacker, often via a phishing attempt. As such, its important to lock down and secure privileged credentials in a digital vault to secure the management console. As such, the enterprises responsibilities, specifically the functions above the hypervisor, include securing the privileged credentials used by applications and scripts accessing other applications and assets, such the enterprises customer database.

Unfortunately these credentials are all too often hardcoded. This is a particularly troubling vulnerability as there can be a large number of hardcoded credentials used throughout cloud and hybrid environments. Hard-coding and embedding credentials in the code or a script can initially make them easy to use but thisrepresents a significant vulnerabilitybecause attackers or malicious insiders can also easily access them, especially if the credentials are in clear text. But, even worse, when credentials are hard-coded or locally stored, they are nearly impossible to rotate, further making them a static and easy target for attackers.

The Risk Is Real

As part of the DevOps process developers often share source code theyve developed on code repositories such GitHub. While its part of the DevOps process, its an all too common example of how embedded passwords and credentials can become public if theyre hardcoded. Even if the code is only saved in the enterprises internal code repositories those passwords and credentials can easily be accessed by other developers and used either inadvertently or maliciously. It also becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fully identify which applications or scripts are interacting with other applications and other enterprise assets.

In the past, these mistakes might not have been so risky, exploitable and damaging within an on-premises environment. However, in a cloud environment, because of the rapid pace of change, the ability to quickly scale and the tools being used, these vulnerabilities are amplified and can pose unacceptable levels of risk.

To minimize risk and follow best practices, enterprises should avoid hardcoding passwords and credentials used by applications and scripts and instead secure credentials in a digital vault and rotate them according to policy. With this approach, just like with human users, enterprises can assign unique credentials to each application, code image or script, and then track, monitor and control access. IT administrators will know which applications access resources such as a customer database. Also, when an application or script is retired, the administrator or script can simply turn off the credentials.

A core business benefit of cloud is elasticity the ability to easily and instantaneously scale up and scale down the number of compute instances or virtual servers to meet the needs of the business at a specific point in time. With on-demand cloud computing, the business only pays for the compute, storage and other resources they use. No human intervention is required. The cloud automation tools are either built-in as a capability of the public cloud vendors offerings such as AWS Auto Scale, or as part of the orchestration and automation tools used with DevOps such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc.

On-demand computing in the cloud, enabled by the automation tools, is a huge business benefit, but it also presents challenges and new potential risks when these new application instances are created and launched, they need privileges and credentials to access resources. The automation tools can provide the credentials, but these credentials also need to be secured.

Consequently, when a new application instance is created, as the compute environment dynamically scales, a best practice is to immediately secure the permissions and credentials assigned to the new instance in the secure digital vault. This ensures that the credentials can immediately be monitored, managed, secured and rotated according to policy. When the compute instances are retired, the associated credentials can also be removed. This is achieved with integrations between the various automation tools and the secure digital vault.

Whether the enterprise is fully in the cloud with IaaS or PaaS or is migrating to the cloud, it is critical to ensure applications, scripts and other assets use secure passwords and privileged credentials to access other applications and assets in the cloud.

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The Risks and Perquisites of Cloud Computing - DATAQUEST