“Yelp for Enterprise IT” – IT Central Station Launches the First Tech Product Review Site for the IT decision maker

New B2B social networking and community site empowers real users to share unbiased opinions while maintaining their privacy. IT Central Station is the industry’s first online review site for the software, hardware and services used by Fortune 1000 enterprises.

New York, NY ,PRWEB

Enterprises worldwide spend nearly $3 trillion annually on technology products and services. The technology professionals who spend this money base their decisions primarily on information from vendors, consultants and analysts. However, what they really want is access to actual users of the products and services to get unbiased opinions based on their real world experience. IT Central Station enables technology users to speak out and make their opinions heard while enabling technology buyers to tap into this wealth of knowledge to make the best buying decision.

IT Central Station was built for the needs of enterprise technology users. Site features include: 

·         Private social network for the end user community: Prevents vendors from posting reviews of their products or competitor products.

·         Rigorous user validation: Validates the authenticity of users based on their company email address and cross-references with LinkedIn and other data sources.

·         User privacy: Promotes candid discussions and recommendations within the community by enabling users to post anonymously.

·         Professional social graph: Uncovers a user’s professional connections with expertise in products and services of interest.

·         Over 4,000 enterprise-class products and services from over 1,400 vendors: Includes the largest and most up-to-date catalog of technology products and services—including cloud, SaaS, mobile and Big Data solutions—that are used by enterprises.

“In my personal life I use online review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Angie’s List to help me choose what is best for me,” said Russell Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of IT Central Station. “So I was amazed to discover that enterprise technology professionals had no place to go to get online product reviews and connect with real users before making such an important purchase. That’s why we founded IT Central Station–to empower enterprise buyers with access to information and connections they never had before.”

The New B2B Technology Buying Process

The Internet is a disruptive force in the way enterprises make buying decisions. “Tech buyers delay engaging with salespeople until later in the purchase process, “ said Peter Burris VP Research Director, Digital Products at Forrester Research Inc. “Our research shows that tech buyers are using web and community resources to complete nearly 70% of their buying journey before they ever engage with a sales resource.” (Source: Catching Up To Tech Customer Communities, Forrester Research Inc., October 31, 2011). IT Central Station provides the most critical online resources technology professionals need as they start and progress through their buying journey.

Pricing and Revenue Model    

IT Central Station is 100% free for end users of technology products. Revenue comes from vendors who sign up to connect with the IT Central Station community of users and buyers. Vendors can gather candid feedback from real users, invite their happy customers to share success stories with the community, and participate in relevant discussions taking place within a high quality community of real users. IT Central Station protects the privacy of its users and has a 100% opt-in policy to prevent unwanted solicitations from vendors.

About IT Central Station  http://www.itcentralstation.com/

IT Central Station is revolutionizing the enterprise technology buying process through the power of online product reviews and social networking. Enterprise technology professionals use IT Central Station to access and share unbiased product information and tap into a community of other real users in order to make the best buying decision in the $3 trillion market worldwide for enterprise IT products and services.

November Newsletter - Security in the Cloud

Vega newsletter is published monthly by Vega BI, and distributed to our partners to facilitate pursuit of a common interest in top-notch technologies.

Security in the Cloud is our topic of the month, read an executive summary on the main security and privacy issues pertinent to public cloud computing

Security and Privacy Challenges in Public Cloud

While reducing cost is a primary motivation for moving towards a cloud provider, reducing responsibility for security or privacy should not be. Ultimately, the organization is accountable for the overall state of the outsourced service. Monitoring and addressing security and privacy issues remain in the purview of the organization, just as other important issues, such as performance, availability, and recovery.

Trust

Under the cloud computing paradigm, an organization relinquishes direct control over many aspects of security and, in doing so, confers an unprecedented level of trust onto the service provider.

Points for consideration:

P Insider Access PComposite  Services P Visibility PRisk Management

Architecture

The systems architecture of the software systems used to deliver cloud services comprises hardware and software residing in the cloud. The physical location of the infrastructure is determined by the service provider as is the implementation of reliability and scalability logic of the underlying support framework.

Points for consideration:

P Attack Surface P Virtual Network Protection P Ancillary Data P Client-Side Protection PServer-Side Protection

Identity Management

Data sensitivity and privacy of information have increasingly become a concern for organizations, and unauthorized access to information resources in the cloud is a major issue.

Points for consideration:

P Authentication PAccess Control

Software Isolation

High degrees of multi-tenancy over large numbers of platforms are needed for cloud computing to achieve the envisioned flexibility of on-demand provisioning of reliable services and the cost benefits and efficiencies due to economies of scale. It is important to note that applications deployed on guest VMs remain susceptible to attack and compromise.

Points for consideration:

P Hypervisor Complexity PAttack Vectors

Data Protection

Data stored in the cloud typically resides in a shared environment collocated with data from other customers. Organizations moving sensitive and regulated data into the cloud, therefore, must account for the means by which access to the data is controlled and the data is kept secure.

Points for consideration:

P Data Isolation PData Sanitization P Data Location

Availability

In simple terms, availability means that an organization has its full set of computing resources accessible and usable at all times. Availability can be affected temporarily or permanently, and a loss can be partial or complete. Denial of service attacks, equipment outages, and natural disasters are all threats to availability.

Points for consideration:

P Temporary Outages PProlonged and Permanent OutagesP Denial of ServiceP Value Concentration

Conclusion

In emphasizing the cost and performance benefits of the cloud, some fundamental security problems have receded into the background and been left unresolved. Several critical pieces of technology, such as a solution for federated trust, are not yet fully realized, impinging on successful deployments. Determining the security of complex computer systems is also a long-standing security problem that overshadows large scale computing in general. Security of the cloud infrastructure relies on trusted computing and cryptography. Organizational data must be protected in a manner consistent with policies, whether in the organization’s computing center or the cloud. 

 For more ...... See Vega's November   Newsletter

Security and Privacy Challenges in Public Cloud

Abstract

The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security & privacy:  while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns in public cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.

 Cloud computing has grabbed the spotlight, with vendors aplenty hawking products and services that equip IT with controls to bring order to cloud chaos. But the first step is for organization to identify precisely where the greatest cloud-related threats lie.  To that end, the NSIT by Wayne A. Jansen, publish article “security and privacy issues in cloud computing” addressing the issues of security and privacy in public cloud computing. This article summarizes the main points of view present in the research mentioned above.

Security and Privacy Challenges 

While reducing cost is a primary motivation for moving towards a cloud provider, reducing responsibility for security or privacy should not be. Ultimately, the organization is accountable for the overall state of the outsourced service. Monitoring and addressing security and privacy issues remain in the purview of the organization, just as other important issues, such as performance, availability, and recovery.

This artical  looks at the main security and privacy issues pertinent to cloud computing, as they relate to outsourcing portions of the organizational computing environment. It points out areas of concern with public clouds that require special attention and provides the necessary background to make informed security decisions.

1.      Trust

Under the cloud computing paradigm, an organization relinquishes direct control over many aspects of security and, in doing so, confers an unprecedented level of trust onto the service provider.

1.1.    Insider Access

Data processed or stored outside the confines of an organization, its firewall, and other security controls bring with it an inherent level of risk. The insider security threat is a well-known issue for most organizations. Insider threats go beyond those posed by current or former employees to include organizational affiliates, contractors, and other parties that have received access to an organization’s networks, systems, and data to carry out or facilitate operations.

Moving data and applications to an external cloud computing environment expands the insider security risk not only to the service provider’s staff, but also potentially among other customers using the service.

1.2.    Composite  Services

Cloud services themselves can be composed through nesting and layering with other cloud services. For instance, a SaaS provider could build its services upon those of a PaaS or IaaS cloud. Cloud service providers that subcontract some services to third-party service providers should raise concerns, including the scope of control over the third party, the responsibilities involved, and the remedies and recourse available should problems occur. Trust is often not transitive, requiring that third-party arrangements be disclosed in advance of reaching an agreement with the service provider, and that the terms of these arrangements are maintained throughout the agreement or until sufficient notification can be given of any anticipated changes.

Israeli Startup Develops Wireless Mobile Chargers Using Infrared Light

By Sean Sade, NoCamels

Every cellphone owner has experienced the depressing moment when their battery dies at the most inconvenient of times. Veteran Israeli entrepreneurs Victor Vaisleib and Ortal Alpert joined together to create a radical solution to charge a phone without a charger – using infrared light.

Founded in in 2010, the Wi-Charge group has been working to create a safe wireless power transmitter that allows clients to charge their devices, using infrared radiation. Wi-Charge explains: “Our mission is to render mobile devices self-sufficient and free the users of the burden of frequent charging.”

How
Wi-charge will work with hotspots, which transmit energy via infrared light beams that are converted by a photovoltaic cell into the receiver. In short, phones will charge automatically, in the same way they currently access the internet having to connect to an external device.

Although still at prototype phase, Wi-Charge aims to release its first products within 12-18 months. Envisioning “proliferation of wireless charging hotspots in homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and other public places,” as Wi-Charge says, in about 10 years. According to the company, the receiver will first be provided as an accessory and over time become fully integrated into mobile devices.

Autonomous charging
At this stage, a transmitter placed on the ceiling can cover an area of up to 50 square-meters, but the company says that future transmitters could cover larger areas. The receiver placed on the phone can theoretically be as small as a contemporary mobile phone camera.

Wi-Charge claims that their charging times can compete with that of wired chargers. Furthermore, charging will become automatic and, therefore, less noticeable. The only requirement of the client’s part is a Wi-Charge receiver component.

One would think that the usage of infrared radiation to charge your phone might result in an obvious health risk. However, according to the Wi-Charge creators the product is completely safe since the transmitter is physically incapable of delivering any power to a foreign object, and if anything blocks the infrared light beam, it automatically shuts down. The radiation can only be transferred to the receiver, or in other words, the electronic device. There is also no electromagnetic or radio frequency radiation involved, adding to the user’s safety, Wi-Charge claims.

Big Data in Brazil: where to start and how to invest

Discussion: How Brazilian organizations can start to focus their efforts on making the most our of their data and how to invest in these technologies

By Angelica Mari, ZDNET

Most Brazilian organizations already have some sort of ability in data analytics - but existing solutions may not be sufficient. In that scenario, how can businesses integrate a new set of technologies to what already exists, without wasting time and money? How to avoid the trap of investing in technologies that will be obsolete in a matter of months?

To answer these questions , we talked to the director of business analytics at IBM Latin America, Sergio Loza, about how organizations can tackle these areas of concern. Building on its many years of experience in IT, Loza has more recently been helping Brazilian organizations in sectors such as telecommunications, insurance, healthcare, government, specifically around the creation of Big Data strategies.

Picking the low-hanging fruit
According to Loza, the first thing to focus on is the areas where benefits can be obtained more rapidly, such as customer relationships, contact and service, as well as operations and finance.
"This is an area where more than half of our customers have invested in. The core operational essence of the organization is also paramount - looking, understanding and measuring processes with the data and making decisions to drive improvements. The area of risk and finance is also crucial: if it's an insurance or financial services business for example, analytics can greatly improve profitability or the planning and financial performance management financial and can use Analytics to improve such management and therefore, increase business profitability," says Loza.
According to the consultant, chances of success are bigger if the project was built around the areas where the business has had positive experiences.
"If the organization chooses a vendor platform that covers everything from the warehouse to the analysis, it will achieve progress in a sustainable manner. That's the recommendation I would give first: start with the best-known areas, with a vendor that has a proven platform with continuity," says Loza.

Invest in scalable options
Once the analytics toolset is already in place, how it is possible to monitor the results and at the same time continue to progress in this area, even with the continuing advances in Big Data? A major concern of organizations is precisely this - especially those who are developing their own analytics resources.
"The way to avoid wasting these investments is to focus on a platform that exists today and that we know it will exist tomorrow. Do not buy small, niche solutions that can solve a problem today but may not be appropriate tomorrow, considering the growing volume of information of most organizations," says Loza.
"The 'platform' as we are describing it here is a set of software and servers that will allow the company to draw up the whole chain of analysis from the system where the customer data is stored and made available for analysis - all the way to the systems that allow analysts to understand this information, discover facts and relationships among the data that is there," says the consultant.
"For example, a telecoms firm that operates in a certain area of the city and not in others, can make decisions about which investments to make in its network based on the level of the conclusions of this analysis that is then communicated to the business lines."

According to Loza, the success of these projects will be noticed according to the extent in which that the quality level of the decision-making across the business is improved.
"The decision to make an investment in one area or another, will then be made by the business manager and not the IT department. So there is a process of alignment with the various lines of business around ownership of processes, " says Loza.

The situation in Brazil
Although the situation in terms of adoption of Big Data technologies appears to be relatively incipient, Loza says the vast majority of local clients he works with have the ability to master these new tools and use them in their business - and almost all of them have plans to built on their tools to extract insight out of information.
"All they come from the understanding that it is not enough or appropriate to simply dive into a scenario to analyze the data being collected - but a scenario where they already have a lot of information about their customers within the company and seek to increase their analysis capacity by bringing their data and the information that is publicly available together, thus the capacity to make better decisions, " says Loza.

"We have worked with several Brazilian clients in the sectors of financial services, insurance, telecommunications and others, around the creation of those plans and strategies, as well as identifying areas and business processes within those businesses that can benefit from a Big Data strategy - and avoid a situation where each department has their own disparate analytics method," he adds.

Examples of important projects in Brazil include clients in insurance where customers seek to identify potential cases of fraud and carry out risk analysis - and not only credit risk. In this scenario, client information that was provided at the time of contracting the service and the data that is publicly available are cross-checked and matched to influence how businesses should interact with their customers.

"For example, a telecommunications company that has a very large amount of information can analyze data on aspects such as what time a customer was making a phone call when the signal dropped, if there was an attempt to establish the connection again or not - all this information is generated within the company but as the volume is too high, not all of them are looking at what all this information means," says Loza.

"In mobile telephony, for example, if your connection drops frequently over several weeks the company would have that information but may not have the ability to filter this information to do a proper analysis. Better analytics capability means they could know that a customer is unhappy, offer something to them or apologize or see if there is any investment that should be made to increase the signal in that area," he adds.

According to the consultant, the key question is what organizations do with the information they collect and whether the business is capable of carrying out the analysis necessary to make important decisions such as investing, modifying their offerings, creating products or actions to retain high-value customers. And Brazil is no exception when it comes to the intention of using advanced data analysis to achieve these goals.

"There is not a lot of differences in Brazil around the level of knowledge and intent to take advantage of analytics in comparison to the rest of the world. Yes, there is some difference - but not a considerable lag as is customary in technology adoption, considering that this focus on taking advantage of information is also new in the developed countries," Loza concludes.

Six Israeli Companies Changing The Gaming World

Avner Meyrav, NoCamels

The Israeli high-tech industry is not all fun and games. Or is it? When it comes to gaming, that is exactly what it is. While there are no major studios producing “triple A” console games in Israel yet, according to GamesIS, the Israeli gaming industry is a $450 million a year business.

We’ve curated six Israeli companies that are leaving their mark on the global gaming market and showcase the diversity of the Israeli gaming scene.

1. Funtactix – Blockbuster company

With the Hunger Games’s sequel “Catching Fire” recently released, there’s no doubt that Israeli Funtactix‘s award-winning game will once again be in the spotlight.Funtactix specializes in producing Facebook-game versions of popular movies and their “Hunger Games Adventures” game, originally released alongside the first Hunger Games movie, earned them a Webby award.

“Now if you’re a Hollywood studio with a major property you don’t go to Vancouver, Paris or San Francisco to make a video game based on that property — you go to a team that’s based largely in Tel Aviv,” say Funtactix CEO Sam Glassenberg .

The company is headquartered in New York with offices in Tel Aviv

2. Plarium – The Israeli Facebook power player

Plarium, founded in 2009 by CEO Avi Shalel and his brother, VP of Marketing Gabi Shalel, is a major player in social gaming. In its earlier days, the company’s main focus was on the Russian-speaking market. Nowadays, they’ve expanded their focus and produce Facebook-based multiplayer games,

such as strategy game Total Domination, which has millions of active players worldwide. The company has established itself as one of the world’s top developers for games on Facebook. “It’s the players who feed us,” say CFO Yaron Hakimi “they fertilize us and essentially push us to produce the next generation [of gaming].”

Plarium has roughly 90 million registered users overall. The company operates out of Herzliya, with three animation studios across Europe. They employ 400 employees in Israel and abroad.

3. Nordau Creative –Augmenting reality for fun

A field that is constantly developing since the introduction of smartphones is augmented reality (AR)

. Nordau creative has leveraged the technology into the field of gaming with its flagship game: Kazooloo. The game has two components: a physical pad and any smart device with a touch-screen. The player uses their device to battle a 3D monster that “appears” out of the pad when looking through the device screen:

“We aim to be the first international Israeli children oriented gaming brand, further solidifying and building upon the country’s reputation as a technology and content exporter,” Nordau CEO Nimrod Barnea tells NoCamels. Referring to augmented reality glasses, Barna says: “Our product utilizes the most advanced mobile technologies, in an era where heavily AR-based devices like Google Glass and Meta is the future, we will be there with them.”

4. Side-Kick Games – Getting into the motion

Recently, international technology giant Apple acquired Israeli 3D sensor manufacturer Primesense. However, Primesnse is not the only Israeli company in the motion recognition business. Side-Kick Games is all about putting games in motion, enabling users to play games without a controller, using only physical

gestures.

 “Side-Kick Games is working with interntional game publishers, such as SquareEnix, DeNA and Majesco to develop games for consoles, PCs and mobile devices,” say CEO Guy Bendov

Last year, the company launched Mini Ninja Adventures, an Xbox Kinect adventure game, where players use gestures to control a ninja. Recently, the company shifted focus towards the mobile market, when it launched its latest game, Romans from Mars, which requires players to defend a castle from an alien invasion, which can be played on iOS and Android devices.

5. SixSense – Making the virtual feel like reality

In the early 1990′s, there was a short-lived period of virtual reality (VR) video games, which were available at specialty arcades. The VR games didn’t last long, however, as the technology lacked maturity.

Nowadays, when 3D graphics are so real, you sometimes can no longer distinguish between a game’s environment and the real world. However, the major drawback of current VR technology is that some actions, such as looking over the edge of a cliff or touching one’s head, simply don’t feel real enough.

Israeli company Sixsense, headed by former Marvel Entertainment president Avi Arad, the company behind the hit Spiderman movie trilogy, has developed a system called STEM. The system is composed of five sensors and two handheld controllers, which can work in perfect synchronization with various VR goggles, such as the Oculus Rift, to give gamers one of the most realistic gaming experiences available.

6. PowerUp Toys – The beauty of a simple paper airplane

Although one might claim that paper planes hardly fall under the realm of “gaming,” PowerUp’s high-tech smartphone-controlled paper plane is every gamer’s dream. PowerUp 3.0 is a tiny motor that attaches to a paper plane and allows users to control it from their smartphones. Essentially, it’s like playing a flight simulator on your phone, only there’s an actual plane flying around. “It’s a new concept, a brand that focuses on innovative toys that are a fuse between origami creations and technology,” by CEO Shai Goitein .

Big Data in Brazil: 2013 is the year of adoption

Summary: Most Brazilian organizations have started to experiment with Big Data – though implemented projects are still unusual, according to research.
By Angelica Mari, ZDNET

This is the year of adoption for Big Data in Brazil. A new report issued by the industry analyst Gartner that surveyed 720 global organizations has found that most companies they talked to are planning a Big Data implementation though few can say they have projects that have already been implemented.
Finance, services, media and communications are the industries where Big Data is being used first. The Gartner survey reveals that 39 percent of media and communications companies have already invested in Big Data followed by 34 percent in the banking sector then 32 percent of other service companies.
The industry segments showing the greatest planned spending on Big Data are transport with 50 percent of companies planning budget for projects in the next two years, followed by health at 41 percent and insurance at 40 percent.

Moving from hype to reality

According to the Gartner survey, not a single industry sector in Brazil reported that they are not planning to invest in Big Data in the next two years so every business sector is taking it seriously – just some are investing more and faster than others.
Indeed, it is still hard to find many instances where Big Data systems have already been rolled out in Brazilian organizations. The Gartner survey found that just 8 percent of companies questioned had an implemented system even though 64 percent have plans already in place for future investment in this area.

It is clearly a business strategy that is moving from hype to reality as Donald Feinberg, Vice President of Research and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner explains: “The hype about Big Data continues to drive increased investment, but there is strength behind it. This research highlights companies in various industries and places seeing opportunities and real business value.”
As expected, North America leads the way with 38 percent of companies saying that they are already investing in Big Data technologies. A full 45 percent of companies in the Asia Pacific region detailed how they would be investing in Big Data within the next two years.
The Gartner study points to technology trends in general and how the cycle of hype usually moves to implementation in North America and Asia Pacific before Latin America and the EMEA regions. It looks exactly the same for the rollout of Big Data, meaning that with so much investment already planned in the leading markets, locations such as Brazil will be coming next.
"Regardless of the location, investments have different stages. Beginning with the acquisition of knowledge, to setting strategy, followed by an experiment or proof of concept. After the first stage is successful, the deployment proceeds and investment increases. In time, the business operation begins to rely on these implementations,” said Feinberg.

Exploring potential
It is clear that 2013 has been a year of experimentation and pilots for Big Data. with only 8 percent of companies in the Gartner survey reporting that they have already implemented a Big Data solution there is still a lot of room for growth. 20 percent of companies are already running pilots, 18 percent are developing their Big Data strategy, and 19 percent are gathering research.
Companies in different industries are all interested in Big Data and for various reasons. 55 percent told Gartner that they are able to use the information to improve customer experience and 49 percent aim to improve process efficiency with the additional insight the analytics can provide.

What Big Data really offers is insight so it’s natural to see companies exploring efficiency gains and an improvement to customer experience as the low hanging fruit Big Data can assist with first.
But with insight comes knowledge and with knowledge comes power. Big Data is not just an efficiency tool, it will eventually be a key driver of innovation and how new products are created. With this insight into the way your customers behave and what they need, your organization will be able to offer them what they need before they have even asked for it – creating new markets and opportunities for the future.

Apple acquired PrimeSense - Israeli 3D sensing company

PrimeSense is best known for its advanced body-movement tracking technology originally used for the Xbox 360, a popular gaming device.


Apple has signed a $350 million acquisition deal with the Israeli company PrimeSense, the maker of a motion-tracking chip technology.
Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet confirmed the deal late Sunday, but would not elaborate on the details. 

The PrimeSense acquisition contributes to what is shaping up to be a banner year for merger-and-acquisition deals for Israeli startups. Google's $1 billion purchase of navigational application Waze has received the most media attention, but other big acquisitions include IBM’s $650 million purchase of cybercrime prevention company Trusteer and Facebook’s $120 million purchase of mobile utility app maker Onavo. Mobile protection company Asurion has also agreed to purchase Soluto, a cloud-based PC management service, for $130 million.

PrimeSense,the Israeli maker of motion-tracking chip technology is best known for licensing the hardware design and chip used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360, which came out in 2010. More recently, the startup has been developing depth-sensing technology that would enable a three-dimensional camera inside a mobile phone to operate applications like indoor navigation tools or 3D shopping catalogs.

PrimeSense’s appeal is in its advanced body-movement tracking technology. Although Microsoft switched from the original PrimeSense system used in the original Kinect sensor for Xbox 360, to a homegrown alternative in the more recent version, that hasn’t stopped the company from further developing its system and targeting smaller implementations.

One such implementation is Capri, which significantly reduces the size of the sensor array while still allowing accurate motion-tracking of separate limbs and more.

Initially, Capri was seen as being the main point of appeal for PrimeSense to Apple, with suggestions that the new sensor could find its way into future iterations of iPhone and iPad. However, according to the Israeli report today, Apple’s actual intended goal for PrimeSense’s systems is its much-rumored television project.

That would suggest navigation of an on-demand, streaming smart TV system using gestures rather than a complex remote. Talk of a full TV with the Apple logo has persisted for some years now, fueled in part by comments by Steve Jobs in which he reportedly claimed to have “cracked” the problem of unintuitive interfaces.

At the time, it was assumed that Apple’s voice control system on iOS, Siri, would be the key to that system, but if the PrimeSense leaks are authentic, it now looks like motion-control could also play a part. That would certainly fit in with PrimeSense’s own development roadmap; the company said it was exploring TV integration all the way back in January 2011.
Another suggestion, though not one necessarily based on any more than speculation, is that the sensor system could be used in Apple’s smartwatch project, unofficially-dubbed the iWatch. It’s unclear whether even the reduced Capri sensor array could fit into a wrist-worn-scale device at this stage.

October Newsletter – Hybrid Cloud

Vega newsletter is published monthly by Vega BI, and distributed to our partners to facilitate pursuit of a common interest in top-notch technologies.

Cloud computing promises a new world of IT agility. Organizations often plan an elegant cloud environment that will be easy to maintain. But business needs often change that plan, and the reality is usually a complex and dynamic cloud environment that is unwieldy to manage.        Hybrid Cloud is our topic of the month, read an executive summary on the benefits and challenges of the hybrid cloud at page 2, and get an idea of some software solutions that can support such environment from different angles, at our glance on players section at page 3.

Hybrid Cloud Computing Overview & Benefits

As we witness high adoption rates for the public cloud and the private cloud, businesses are turning towards a hybrid cloud computing solution. Over the last few years security, operational challenges, performance, and data compliance issues have become a growing concern while using public cloud services. This is why businesses started shifting to the private cloud. While the private cloud offered more control and visibility over business processes, investments and infrastructure management still remained a concern.

With shrinking IT budgets and rising business demands, companies are looking for an intermediate model of cloud computing technology. The hybrid cloud computing solution rightly fits into this space. Certain applications require more control on data management solutions, while other applications do not demand such a high level of protection. By integrating the public cloud with the private cloud, businesses get the flexibility to isolate sensitive data while still benefiting from the many advantages offered by the public cloud.

What is hybrid cloud computing?

A hybrid cloud is the combination of public and private clouds that are customized to suit specific business requirements.  You can combine multiple private and public clouds to suit your needs. In short, a hybrid cloud computing solution strikes the right balance between scalability, agility, performance, security , operational flexibility as well as TCO.

Benefits of hybrid cloud computing

A hybrid cloud offers the following benefits by splitting business processes so that each process demand goes into the right cloud. Here are certain benefits offered by a hybrid cloud.

·         Flexible business operations

Every enterprise runs multiple business processes that are different in nature. While some processes work on critical data, some of them perform regular day-to-day activities. If a business function does not process critical data, you can use a public cloud. At the same time, mission critical functions can use a private cloud. By diversifying business needs, companies can leverage resources and overcome IT challenges.

·         Optimized costs

Depending on your business processes, you can configure your hybrid cloud using private and public clouds. As mission critical processes are comparatively fewer, while other less critical business process can benefits by the reduced cost and scalable solutions offered by the public cloud.

·         Enhanced security

One of the main concerns of a public cloud is data integrity and security. Hybrid clouds offer extra security to your data. By keeping your data out of the public cloud, companies can add extra security to business processes.

·         Improved performance

By optimizing available resources, businesses can gain a maximum output from business processes. With highly scalable networks offering the required agility, companies can improve SLA’s and minimize downtime.

The idea behind hybrid clouds is that businesses can combine the use of public and private clouds to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness offered by the public cloud computing environment without exposing mission-critical applications and data to the vulnerabilities associated with the public cloud option.

 For more ...... See Vega's October  Newsletter 

Hybrid Cloud/IT – IT Challenges

  

Enterprise & cloud computing

Cloud computing promises a new world of IT agility, with quick deployment of applications to support business needs. Organizations often plan an elegant cloud environment that will be easy to maintain. But business needs often change that plan, and the reality is usually a complex and dynamic cloud environment that is unwieldy to manage using the tools provided with each separate cloud.

·         The vision of enterprise cloud computing

Cloud computing offers a captivating vision of IT agility: this model promises to makes it possible for enterprise IT to deploy new applications in days or weeks rather than months or years, thus helping them make a substantive contribution to overall corporate performance, while reducing costs.  Of course, in seeking this improved agility, enterprise IT organizations must ensure that the enterprise cloud meets critical IT requirements, including:

o   Manageability— IT must be able to maintain control of the cloud environment and leverage existing IT policies and procedures without losing flexibility

o   Governance— Appropriate controls must remain in place to manage resource access by users.

o   Security— IT must be able to implement enterprise standards to prevent security breaches and protect data.

o   Cost tracking—The solution must enable assignment of computing costs to the organizational units responsible for individual applications.

With this combination of benefits and requirements in mind, many enterprise IT organizations have moved rapidly toward creating a cloud computing strategy and implementation plan. Most commonly, that strategy is based on implementing an internal cloud computing environment (a private cloud) and deploying applications in that environment.

·         The reality of enterprise cloud computing

The vision of enterprise cloud computing appears straight forward, but the reality is not quite so simple. Today, most enterprises find that they are no longer managing a single internal cloud. Rather, they have applications spread across mix cloud environment (public & private)in some cases  three, four, or even more cloud providers, both internal (private) and external (public). And for every cloud, there are multiple accounts to manage.

·         Business priorities that affect the enterprise cloud environment

Why so often this is the case?  To put it simply, many IT decisions today are driven by business priorities that conflict with IT’s cloud strategy:

o   Deployment decisions may came  by departments outside of IT— Because obtaining public cloud computing resources is easy and simple, departments  like sales or marketing have the ability to bypass central IT and deploy applications on their own public cloud environments

o   New cloud environments arrive through corporate initiatives—Changing business conditions, such as acquisitions, mergers and changes in decision. Disrupting IT’s plan to have a single “standard” cloud environment.

o   Application or operational requirements force selection of another cloud environment— This environment then becomes part of the cloud infrastructure that must be managed on an ongoing basis.

Therefore, despite IT’s natural inclination to define a simple solution that leverages a single cloud environment addressing all of a company’s cloud computing needs, the reality is that every company will use a variety of cloud solutions, including both private and public clouds, or “hybrid cloud/IT computing.”

The true reality of enterprise cloud computing, therefore, is a mix of cloud environments that must be managed on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, that mix will be dynamic, with new cloud environments regularly being added to the collection. This collection of cloud environments makes up the company’s hybrid infrastructure.

Brazil's "Internet Constitution"

Summary: The first set of internet governance rules in the country is surrounded by controversy and scares big organizations to death
By Angelica Mari, Brazil Tech

Brazil's "Internet Constitution" is due to be voted next week amid a war involving local politicians, some of the largest telecommunications firms and activists over citizens rights online.
The fate of the regulations, dubbed Marco Civil da Internet, was due to be decided earlier this week but disagreement from corporates and the political opposition over the original proposals meant the voting got postponed to next week.

The Marco Civil project is being led by Alessandro Molon of Dilma Rousseff's Workers Party and has already undergone a four-year consultation process.

What is the Marco Civil about?

The Marco Civil da Internet is the first set of internet governance rules in Brazil. Supporters of the Bill see the original text as a positive piece of legislation, which includes provisions across three key pillars: freedom of expression, net neutrality and privacy.
Freedom of expression online:

If voted in its original form, the regulations would guarantee the protection of freedom of expression and the right to privacy online. While there are fears that such measures could prompt a rise in piracy and publication of unlawful content in Brazil, the Marco Civil guarantees that users would only be identified with information on their communications disclosed at the request of a court order and limited to occasions where criminal investigations and prosecutions are taking place.
Large Brazilian media organizations such as Globo are understood to be strongly opposed to this.
Net neutrality:

The Marco Civil also determines that internet providers are required to treat all data that goes through their network in the same way. That in practice means operators would no longer be able to set higher or lower speeds according to individual internet usage patterns, load certain websites faster and also offer free access to certain content such as social networking tools while charging for others.
The Marco Civil also determines that the connection can not be suspended unless there is debt, and the company responsible for the connection is required to maintain the same quality of service on the same contract terms. The changes are clearly upsetting for the Brazilian telcos,who have been lobbying for years to ensure the current situation is maintained for fear of diminishing profits.
Privacy:

After the recent scandal involving the NSA monitoring of emails of millions of Brazilians including President Dilma Rousseff, the government requested the inclusion of another provision in the Marco Civil, stating that the data of internet users has to be stored in Brazil.
This is controversial amongst large and small companies that rely heavily on cloud services that may not necessarily be hosted locally. Additionally, it can be argued that the changes will do nothing to prevent against the possibility of intrusive surveillance.

What is happening now?

The president of the House of Representatives wants the Bill to be voted "when there is more agreement" between the various parties. Currently, there is still plenty of disagreement between the public representatives, the interests of the organizations some of them are influenced by, as well as the politicians that support the original text.
The Bill is now being processed as a matter of constitutional urgency and the fact it cannot be voted until next week prevents various other proposals from being voted too - such as the law that would allow anyone to publish biographies regardless of whether the subject allows it or not - so this process has to be out of the way soon.
Politicians and activists who have campaigned for provisions such as net neutrality wanted the Bill to be voted as soon as possible regardless of the agreement of the opposition and the telcos - however, ithe vote on the Marco Civil will only take place on November 5, when the leader of the initiative is due to present a final version of the Bill.
This weekend is set to be packed full of reports of secret dinners with politicians, media tycoons and telco bosses, petitions with several hundreds of thousands supporting the original proposal and protests against the interests of the large corporations. We just have to hope that on Tuesday, common sense will prevail and Brazil will not take yet another backwards step.

Brazil looking to build country cloud in light of NSA snooping

Radical steps to safeguard Brazil internet communications

By Ron Miller

Revelations of NSA snooping on domestic and out of country targets have put everyone on edge, including heads of state. Earlier this month, the president of Brazil proposed a couple of radical steps to safeguard her country's internet communications from external spying, including building in-country data centers to protect Brazilian data.
If more countries start demanding that their data stays internal, as the EU has already done, it could begin to have an impact on cloud vendors. That could affect you, as they pass on the cost of building these country-specific data centers to all customers.

Al Jazeera reports this isn't just patriotic chest thumping on the part of Brazil. Documents released as part of the Edward Snowden revelations revealed the NSA was monitoring email and phone calls between the Brazilian and Mexican heads of state and other high-level officials. Brazil is apparently mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore.

In response, Brazil's president Dilma Roussef has announced plans to build an underground cable between South America and Europe in order to bypass servers in the US that are more likely to be subjected to US prying. The Verge reports she has also proposed a new law that would "force Google, Microsoft, and other US web companies to store data for Brazilian users on servers located within Brazil."

It is this last part in particular which should worry the average IT pro, because if Brazil follows through on this step, it's possible other countries would soon follow. Instead of an open flow of information, data would have to be confined to these in-country clouds. Big companies could afford to open in-country data centers to accommodate the legal requirements of each country, but for smaller companies, possibly using online services like Amazon Web Services as virtual data centers, it could prove more difficult.

That could reduce competition and innovation because there would be less pressure from startups at the bottom pushing the established players at the top. It could also lead to higher prices as these established companies are forced to build and staff in-country data centers. It's likely it would require extensive auditing to prove they are complying with the legal requirements and that the data is staying within the countries according to the letter of the law --and that could prove expensive as well.

The more legal roadblocks that get put up for internet companies trying to do business, the more costly it is likely to be. That's yet another reason why you should be concerned about NSA spying -- it not only violates your constitutional rights, but it could also end up costing you money.

All of this doesn't take into account the fact that even though the Snowden documents have illustrated that there is a lot of domestic spying going on at the NSA, the chief job of the agency is actually to keep an eye on what's going on overseas.
Moving the distribution to a different cable and confining the data to in-country may ironically make it easier for the NSA to do its defined job without spying on US citizens -- although that wouldn't be much comfort to the countries being spied upon.

But in the end, these revelations are bad for business on so many levels. They make individuals, businesses and entire countries uncomfortable and that could have an impact on how we conduct business across the entire internet.

And that's something everyone should be worried about.