Cloud & Channel Matters
Monday 12 September 2016
Wednesday 25 July 2012
Internet Abductions Of Olympic Proportions
By Ian Moyse, Workbooks.com, Eurocloud
UK Board Member & Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member
Recent studies demonstrate that upwards of 25% of Internet bandwidth in an
office are consumed by employees misusing the internet. According to Gartner,
the average growth of business email volume is 30% annually, with the average
size of the email content growing in parallel. Add to this the growth of Web
misuse from streaming media, downloads, file sharing, social networking, and
spam, and it becomes pretty clear that the mismanaged cost to business of
non-work-related Internet use is already bad and getting worse.With the Olympic tirade about to start there will be a mix of impacts on internet use and the security around it. Users in the city are being told to work from home with some companies we hear being instructed by officialdom to reduce their staff in the city during the game on period! These staff working remotely at home on work provided machines will spend how much time really working? Will they be distracted by the usual lures of the web, facebook, Hotmail, youtube etc – surely not!?
Worse still will be those employees across the UK still at their office location who will be viewing the Olympic activities and news online, streaming video and live TV will become commonplace. What impact will this have on not only the productivity of those guilty parties, but also those around them whose bandwidth is being sucked away from them!
There are plenty of examples already, including employees wasting more than two hours a day on recreational computer activities (according to a survey fielded by AOL & Salary.com) and that, according to an IDC report, “30% – 40% of Internet use in the workplace is unrelated to business.”
Studies and surveys such as these typically focus only on
lost productivity — and there’s no doubt that’s bad enough. But they rarely
discuss the significant hidden financial impact of
bandwidth wastage from these activities.
Social networkers are as much to blame as habitual gamers, sports fans, or file sharers: After ‘posting messages,’ the next two most common social network activities are uploading and downloading music and video content. Overall top bandwidth hogs reported include employees sending emails with large attachments, recreational Web surfing, listening to the radio over the Internet, music downloads, and streaming video over the Internet.
One rogue user in an office streaming large files can impact everyone else trying to work. Clearly, there’s a need to manage individual users’ bandwidth usage.
Perhaps by taking simple steps, such as giving users bandwidth allowances, admins can control the abuse. By blocking streaming media, allowing users to go to sites but without the ability to see streamed videos, bandwidth usage can be reduced dramatically. It may also be possible to block the downloads of certain file types or MIME types, such as Flash Video .flv files, unless the user has a legitimate business reason to view them. And blocking some MIME types can even help prevent users being bamboozled into infecting their own computers by malicious advertisements.
The web has increasingly become a valuable business tool for research, information (how often do you check a route, traffic, customer information with no second thought to the reliance on this medium) and for cloud applications that are fundamental to the business.
Action needs to be taken by organisations now to get control back of this valuable tool and medium and to reduce the negatives it can bring in terms of time wasting, HR cases (facebook examples are rife) and security risks. With a younger generation entering our businesses, for whom spending their life on facebook, twitter and the web is the norm, better to get these policies and policing tools in place now before it becomes even more of a risk and hill to climb to introduce this change of culture and behaviour.
Employees need to understand where the line is drawn, ‘drive that internet car, but don’t speed, don’t drive dangerously and certainly don’t pick up strange hitch hikers along the way.’ It’s essential our internet workers are not wasting valuable work time, acting recklessly or going off road using work assets on work systems!
An example solution to this is easy in using Software-as-a-Service Web filtering, offering unique advantages that can now be brought into play. For example, bandwidth compression of all traffic from the cloud to your users browsers, and even the ability to block Web adverts at the gateway, may conserve this bandwidth resource. Knowing and controlling where and what people can do on the web is no longer an option, its becoming a necessity.
Over time, simple measures such as these can conserve a large amount of bandwidth and regain productive employee work time. An employee spending 10 minutes an hour outside smoking is visible and you can choose to address it. An employee wasting such time on internet activities is invisible and even to them that time passes fast and unnoticeably and the internet is of more interest to more people than an activity such as smoking. Think of this as the hidden disease in your company and start to prevent it now.
While we all appreciate the privilege of using the Internet for personal purposes at work, a small number of rotten apples on your network can truly ruin the whole bunch. The Olympics will drain your resources, productivity and bandwidth for sure! Draconian measures are sure to hurt morale, so it’s a bit of a balancing act to find the right mix of measures that work. As the growth of cloud applications and hosted services continues, it will be more important than ever to keep these bandwidth hogs in check, lest the rest of the company suffer.
Wednesday 20 June 2012
Top trends in cloud computing for SMEs
Top trends in cloud computing for SMEs
Ian
Moyse, Workbooks Sales Director, Eurocloud UK Board Member& Cloud Industry
Forum Governance Board Member
Following Gartner’s recent report on
what it sees as the 5 key trends that will shape cloud computing strategies
between now and 2015, provides his perspective on the impact cloud
computing will have on an SME audience.
Gartner’s trends tend to focus on the
larger organisations, typically 5000 seats and above, yet in the UK, 99% of
businesses are sub 250 employees and will have different requirements, benefits
and considerations when looking to utilise a cloud platform. Many
customers are still confused about what the ‘cloud’ is and what all the hype
and terminology means to them in real terms. Having spent a great deal of time
in discussions with such customers at events and meetings, I continue to find a
lack of understanding and clarity past the surface level of the cloud being
internet based. Most cannot explain SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Private and public clouds,
yet alone know where they might be utilised to benefit their business and its
success. For the average smaller business the expectations and advice
needed around cloud are very different to those of the enterprise customer.
The top 5 cloud developments for these
companies will be;
§ Simplification of cloud services in terms of package and pricing to the
mass market customer.
§ Standards and bodies will continue to grow in importance, providing
customers a reference point to assist in their understanding and safe adoption
of cloud platforms.
§ Increase in Cloud Aggregation Resellers, cloud specialists who will
assist the smaller business with advice, support and even run their cloud IT
for them.
§ More education – both in terms of certification and training available –
to fulfil a growing requirement for cloud education and information.
§ New Cloud applications will appear without the brand name that smaller
companies will find more affordable and palatable to adopt, having no corporate
standards to overcome and less re-training costs or risks of an enterprise
customer making the same change.
Cloud brings great benefit to the
average size business, allowing the smaller business owner more choice and the
ability to afford solutions that previously were only within the budgets of
larger enterprise clients. Cloud platforms and services will also afford many
smaller companies to compete more effectively with larger competitors and to
enjoy growth against larger legacy competitors who are not nimble enough to
change systems and approaches to benefit from today’s more effective and
flexible cloud platforms.
To get the most out of the cloud,
companies must perform diligence as they would when buying any other solution,
asking the right questions and understanding and interpreting the answers to
make an informed decision.
10 key questions to ask before
signing up with a cloud service provider:
§ What are the terms and conditions in the service
level agreement (SLA)?
§ Are there penalties if a supplier fails to deliver
and what are they?
§ Where is your data in the system stored? Is it
in the UK, Europe, or the US?
§ Where is my failover data stored, if a primary
system in my locale fails is my data stored in any other jurisdiction?
§ Who has access to my data?
§ What has the provider’s success rate been in the
past?
§ Can they provide customer testimonials of similar
size and scenario to yourself? Can you speak to these customers directly?
§ Who is going to support the services? Will it be
their own staff or a third party?
§ Do they provide out of hours support? If so, what
kind of support do you get?
§ How easily can I extract my data if I want to leave
the service and in what format?
Friday 16 March 2012
Employing Cloud
By
Ian Moyse, Workbooks.com Sales Director, Eurocloud UK Board Member and Cloud
Industry Forum Governance Board Member
What do I mean by this. Well people are not going out looking for cloud-based solutions (“I want some cloud”), instead they are looking for a solution to a real problem. Some users are unknowingly using a cloud-based solution (either in their business or personal lives) and are quickly seeing the benefits. Take for example Dropbox, a free tool for sharing (large) files across devices seamlessly, easily and from anywhere, where users adopt it from a need that it solves and not because of the technology factor behind it or because of any cloud hype.
Cloud computing is expected to enjoy an adoption rate and growth of
between 30 to 40 percent per year, every year for the next five years and its
promise of substantial benefits will drive this adoption. . A 2012 customer
study from Rise indicating that 94% of IT departments expect
to expand their use of cloud in the next 12 months.
“Enterprises
that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to
legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget
they have for more innovative projects. When IT innovation happens, business
innovation is reached, which then supports job creation.” IDC Chief Research
Officer John F. Gantz
The key benefits of cloud Include:
- Easier more flexible access in a world of
consumerisation and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device),
- Increased resilience,
- Easier migration/implementation,
- Simplicity of use,
- Consistency across platforms ,
- Reduced cost of both implementation and
on-going usage, and
- Innovation acceleration.
We still hear the downers on cloud – the news stories of gloom, fear and
disdain. It was not so long ago that Internet shopping was placed in the same
bucket, and yet this has become the norm and is continuing to enjoy compound
growth and affect the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail arena.
There is plenty of hype on the ‘cloud’ and certainly plenty of
discussion and content, and yet reports and audiences still show a need for
education on the terms, benefits and realities of this growing form
factor. Top concerns of businesses in
survey after survey on the cloud, continue to be security, data sovereignty and
reliability. In a recent end user
study from the Cloud Industry Forum 62% of companies using or
planning to use cloud indicated Data Security was their prime concern. When it
comes to individuals the top concern in the IT arena is job loss and reduction
of individual value.
There is no doubt cloud is bringing change. With the Internet and
technology, we have a generation of users demanding access to their
applications from their iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android devices. We have
entered an era where infinite IT power and information is available to a user
on the smallest of devices, on the move and at an affordable price. As devices
get more powerful, the Internet faster, the demand and supply of cloud
applications will skyrocket and the power in the hands of the user will be
greater than we have ever delivered before. Expect the marriage between
mobility and the cloud to continue to grow.
So with this growth of cloud comes a change in skill requirements and
job opportunities. One of CRN’s top 10 cloud predictions for 2012 is a
growth in demand for cloud jobs as validated by an article in CIO magazine in early 2012. Cloud
computing is and will have a major impact on skills across business, with IT
being the most logically effected it will also impose itself onto roles in
marketing, support and business roles in general. The demand for cloud-based
skills already is showing signs of exploding. A recent report from Wanted Analytics,
reported that hiring for cloud computing expertise showed a growth of 61
percent year over year. The cloud market is growing at such a pace that the
number of job postings is accelerating and yet the talent qualifying for these
roles is marginal.
Cloud
isn’t all overcast and according to IDC ‘Spending on public and private cloud
services is predicted to generate almost 14 million jobs worldwide between 2011
and 2015. More than one-third of cloud-enabled jobs will occur in the
communications and media, banking, and discrete manufacturing industries.’ “For most organizations, cloud computing
should be a no-brainer, given its ability to increase IT innovation and
flexibility, lower capital costs, and help generate revenues that are multiples
of spending,” said John F. Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice
president at IDC. The top
three industries expected to generate the most jobs from cloud computing are communications
and media (2.4 million), banking (1.4 million) and discrete manufacturing
(1.3million).
Cloud offers opportunities for those that embrace the new form factor
and self-educate and certify themselves for the needs of employers today and
tomorrow. More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable
businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology to its
advantage.
CompTIA’s Cloud Essentials certification is an example option that enables employees of varying roles to
validate their cloud knowledge, take online training and exam condition
testing, and differentiate themselves in the competitive job market. John McGlinchey,Vice President, Europe & Middle
East, CompTIA commented “We have had a demand from the user market for a
training curriculum with testing to support this rapidly growing new form
factor. The demand and adoption is outstripping the skill base and it is key
that individuals and businesses recognise and address this shortfall, before it
becomes a serious issue for all concerned.”
More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable
businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology option to
its advantage and this need for understanding stretches past simply the border
of the IT department. Expect to see more cloud courses and exams providing the
market with the required validations in this new cloudy world. Ignoring cloud
is no longer an option, utilizing it to your advantage is!
Saturday 3 March 2012
A Cloudy World
By Ian Moyse, Eurocloud UK Board Member and
Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member
There
has been a thunderstorm of growing noise surrounding Cloud Computing in the
past 24 months. Vendors, analysts, journalists and membership groups have all
rushed to cover the Cloud medium – although everyone seems to have their own
opinion and differing definition of cloud computing. According to the most
common definition, it is Internet-based computing where shared resources,
software
and
information are supplied to users on demand, rather like a utility company
would supply electricity, water or gas. The term is not new; vendors such as
Salesforce.com have provided Cloud services in different guises for many years.
Other players have been swift to get on board, including Microsoft, HP, IBM,
Amazon and Google, to name but a few. Put simply, users now have the choice of
a new way to consume computing power, applications and data. No longer is it
necessary to buy software on a floppy disk or a CD. Instead, you can have
immediacy of delivery through the Internet for an application you want now.
Users have been educated into this way of working with iTunes and app stores,
and they’ve come to expect a seamless link between their locally run
application and data and information from the Internet – and at a very
digestible and economic price point. Buying a robust, polished application or
game for below £1 is now taken for granted.
As
an average user you are also likely to be using cloud computing in the form of
webmail, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and a plethora of other services; storing
what you would consider private information in the Cloud without knowing where
it is in reality... or even caring. In effect, Cloud has become a very simple
and trendy way of describing all things that occur outside the firewall whether
it be on a corporate network or on your home PC. And Cloud computing is already
helping to shape the way we digest IT both at home and in the workplace. It is
simply a new ‘form factor’, a new way of delivering a solution to a customer.
We have seen new form factors disrupting and changing many market sectors
already. Think of Blockbuster Video, once the darling of the entertainment
world and now struggling to survive against the new delivery factors of Netflix
and LOVEFiLM. Tower Records, once a worldwide brand, has been put out of
business by the ability for users to now purchase music faster and cheaper via
iTunes and online music stores.
The same trends are occurring in computing. The
extraordinary speed at which Cloud computing has come to dominate the landscape
has caught many by surprise. None deny it is the Zeitgeist for 2010 when
looking back at the past year. With bold press statements
such as “Cloud computing will boost UK economy by £30bn a year” grabbing
headlines, it’s no wonder it is at the centre of so much discussion and
scepticism. With Cloud computing expected to enjoy an adoption rate and growth
of between 30 to 40 per cent per year, every year for the next five years,
vendors are rushing to launch and push their cloud offerings. From a customer
point of view, it is obviously a good thing to have more choices – although you
should be aware that
in reality there is a wide range of maturity levels amongst vendors, with some
of them taking their first steps and looking for their first few candidates for
experimental purposes.
The major brands, Microsoft, Google, HP, etc are all
endorsing cloud as key to their future (Microsoft recently announced the
majority of its developers have been moved to its cloud platform), and in both
business and at home it will certainly change the way we do so many things.
Cloud computing offers substantial benefits including efficiencies, innovation
acceleration, cost savings and greater computing power. No more 12-18 month
upgrade cycles; huge IT burdens such as system or software updates are
delivered automatically with cloud computing and both consumers, small and
large organisations can now afford to get access to cutting-edge innovative
solutions. Cloud computing also brings green benefits such as reducing carbon
footprint and promoting sustainability by utilising computing power more
efficiently.
But
be warned... There will be some cloud negatives to go with all the positives.
For example, with so much reliance on applications and data stored at the
Internet level, what happens when you lose your Internet connection, can’t get
a mobile 3G connection or the service itself isn’t available for a period? In
all cases, due to circumstances outside your control, you cannot access your
data, your photos or perform the action when and where you wanted. More
worryingly, we have also seen a continued increase in threats coming from the
Internet from spam, phishing (fake eBay, bank, etc. e-mails asking you to login
in order to steal your details), viruses, spyware and scams. There was more
malware on the internet in the last 18 months than the last 18 years combined.
Never in the field of internet conflict has so much impact caused by so few to
so many. The attackers have gone Cloud and are also utilising the great virtual
computing power base to their advantage.
We
are already starting to see malware targeting non-PC devices. It’s in its early
stages, but it is inevitable we will see more targeting of smartphones, tablets
and perhaps even Apple Macintosh as the data that users send to the Cloud
becomes more valuable – and the wider range of applications used to access itgrows
at a rapid rate. Today’s generation of users expect to be able to access their
applications from their iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android device, and they
expect web-based applications and resources to be readily available to those
devices. We are entering a time when seemingly infinite IT power and
information is available to a user on the smallest of devices, on the move and
at a price affordable to the average consumer. Looking back, who would have
expected that in 2011 you could have a 59p application on your phone which
could ‘listen’ to a music tune being played in a bar and in seconds, using the
internet (accessing massive Cloud power to do the
look up and recognition analysis), present to you the details of the track and
a ‘click here’ to pay for immediate download of the song!
The
chances are that Cloud will accelerate this affordable power still further.
Just imagine where we will be in ten years time! With so much happening so
fast, the pressure is on IT experts to not only deliver more innovation but
also greater
security to defend it. As devices get more powerful, the internet faster, the
demand and supply of Cloud applications will sky rocket and the power in the
hands of the user will be greater than we have ever delivered before.
Remember
with great power, comes great responsibility and your responsibility is to
protect the data, your ID
and the information valuable to you. You would not go out and leave your front
door open. Therefore, don’t leave your ‘virtual’ front door open when
connecting to the internet and such powerful applications. By all means be a
Cloud user, but be safe and be secure in doing so.
Never in the field of internet conflict was so much impact caused by so few to so many!
By Ian Moyse, Eurocloud UK Board
Member and Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member
With Christmas fast approaching, (lest we
forget the shops have kindly put all the Christmas goods out in September and
early October again!) we can expect the online attacks to increase as per their
normal schedules.
The internet has given the few the ability
to cheaply and easily target the many, like we never saw before. It fast
became the marketers dream and changed the ways of targeted campaigns, we saw
the rise of the spammer and now we live with sophisticated social engineering
attacks hitting weekly if not daily. While the increases in incidents may
indicate more intruders attacking, the reality is the majority of the increase
is due to the growth of the Internet and its very nature. The internet
makes us all contactable and to a degree easily identifiable as we leave our
electronic fingerprint as we go via social networking sites, sites visited,
cookies, blog postings and tracking software we may have installed such as site
loggers and search tool bar monitors.
Users are more susceptible to the social
engineering scam than ever before with the fakes looking like the genuine
article, determining a real site from a fake is more and more difficult as its
training users to not post too much information about themselves online. The
growth in the Web and availability of inexpensive computers has lead to more
insecure computers and more sophisticated and empowered hackers probing the
Internet. With the web entrenched in our daily lives and social networking
sites growing faster pace than we have ever seen before the ability for
someone to connect to vast volumes of people cheaply is upon us. With this
great access comes greater threats. An incident nowadays can affect anything
from a single computer to a range of host computers at hundreds of thousands of
locations in a relatively short space of time.
In moving from centralised computing to
distributed, the business world has enabled the attacker to follow suit – to
disperse and grow their attacks to volumes never envisaged before and to allow
one individual to reach out to millions with scams, spyware and exploits. Never
before in history has one individual with a lack of resource or funds been so
empowered to use knowledge to the detriment of so many so quickly. We now see
organized crime bringing together teams of these “expert” attackers and
funding them far past the threat of the lone geek backroom
hacker/spammer. The question is how long before we see a repeat of the
growth of volume in spam for example in 2007 over 2006 when there was a 400%
year over year growth. Now we talk of the growth of malware, phishing,
backscatter as well as spam and the impact is in weeks or months rather
than years. Is there a newe type of scaled attack coming, is there a
larger spyware spambot already laying dorment waiting for its home beacon to
alarm it into action. No one can predict, but we can be sure with them monetry
gain being made by these illegal means of attack there is no motivation for
them to stop trying.
Consumerisation Driving Cloud Acceptance
By
Ian Moyse, Eurocloud UK Board Member and Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board
Member
There has been a thunderstorm of growing noise
surrounding Cloud Computing in the past 24 months. Vendors, analysts,
journalists and membership groups have all rushed to cover the Cloud medium -
although everyone seems to have their own opinion and differing definition of
cloud computing. According to the most common definition, it is Internet-based
computing where shared resources, software and information are supplied to
users on demand, rather like a utility company would supply electricity, water
or gas. The term is not new; vendors such as Salesforce.com have provided Cloud
services in different guises for many years. Other players have been swift to
get on board, including Microsoft, HP, IBM, Amazon and Google, to name but a
few. Put simply, users now have the choice of a new way to consume computing
power, applications and data. No longer is it necessary to buy software on a
floppy disk or a CD. Instead, you can have immediacy of delivery through the
Internet for an application you want now. Users have been educated into this
way of working with iTunes and app stores, and they’ve come to expect a
seamless link between their locally run application and data and information
from the Internet - and at a very digestible and economic price point. Buying a
robust, polished application or game for below £1 is now taken for granted.
As an average user you are also likely to be using
cloud computing in the form of webmail, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and a
plethora of other services; storing what you would consider private information
in the Cloud without knowing where it is in reality... or even caring.
In effect, Cloud has become a very simple and
trendy way of describing all things that occur outside the firewall whether it
be on a corporate network or on your home PC. Cloud computing is already
helping to shape the way we digest IT both at home and in the workplace. It is
simply a new ‘form factor’, a new way of delivering a solution to a customer.
We have seen new form factors disrupting and changing many market sectors
already. Think of Blockbuster Video, once the darling of the entertainment
world and now struggling to survive against the new delivery factors of Netflix
and LOVEFiLM. Tower Records, once a worldwide brand, has been put out of
business by the ability for users to now purchase music faster and cheaper via
iTunes and online music stores.
The same trends are occurring in computing. The
extraordinary speed at which Cloud computing has come to dominate the landscape
has caught many by surprise. None deny it is the Zeitgeist for 2010 when
looking back at the past year. With bold press statements such as “Cloud
computing will boost UK economy by £30bn a year” grabbing headlines, it’s no
wonder it is at the centre of so much discussion and scepticism.
With Cloud computing expected to enjoy an adoption
rate and growth of between 30 to 40 per cent per year, every year for the next
five years, vendors are rushing to launch and push their cloud offerings. From
a customer point of view, it is obviously a good thing to have more choices -
although you should be aware that in reality there is a wide range of maturity
levels amongst vendors, with some of them taking their first steps and looking
for their first few candidates for experimental purposes. The major brands,
Microsoft, Google, HP, etc are all endorsing cloud as key to their future
(Microsoft recently announced the majority of its developers have been moved to
its cloud platform), and in both business and at home it will certainly change
the way we do so many things.
Cloud computing offers substantial benefits
including efficiencies, innovation acceleration, cost savings and greater
computing power. No more 12-18 month upgrade cycles; huge IT burdens such as
system or software updates are delivered automatically with cloud computing and
both consumers, small and large organisations can now afford to get access to
cutting-edge innovative solutions. Cloud computing also brings green benefits
such as reducing carbon footprint and promoting sustainability by utilising
computing power more efficiently.
But be warned...
There will be some cloud negatives to go with all the positives. For example, with so much reliance on applications and data stored at the Internet level, what happens when you lose your Internet connection, can’t get a mobile 3G connection or the service itself isn’t available for a period? In all cases, due to circumstances outside your control, you cannot access your data, your photos or perform the action when and where you wanted.
There will be some cloud negatives to go with all the positives. For example, with so much reliance on applications and data stored at the Internet level, what happens when you lose your Internet connection, can’t get a mobile 3G connection or the service itself isn’t available for a period? In all cases, due to circumstances outside your control, you cannot access your data, your photos or perform the action when and where you wanted.
More worryingly, we have also seen a continued
increase in threats coming from the Internet from spam, phishing (fake eBay,
bank, etc. e-mails asking you to login in order to steal your details),
viruses, spyware and scams. There was more malware on the internet in the last
18 months than the last 18 years combined. Never in the field of internet
conflict has so much impact caused by so few to so many. The attackers have
gone Cloud and are also utilising the great virtual computing power base to
their advantage. We are already starting to see malware targeting non-PC
devices. It’s in its early stages, but it is inevitable we will see more
targeting of smartphones, tablets and perhaps even Apple Macintosh as the data
that users send to the Cloud becomes more valuable - and the wider range of
applications used to access it grows at a rapid rate. With consumerisation
today’s generation of users expect to be able to access their applications from
their iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android device, and they expect web-based
applications and resources to be readily available to those devices. We are
entering a time when seemingly infinite IT power and information is available
to a user on the smallest of devices, on the move and at a price affordable to
the average consumer.
Looking back, who would have expected that in 2011
you could have a 59p application on your phone which could ‘listen’ to a music
tune being played in a bar and in seconds, using the internet (accessing
massive Cloud power to do the look up and recognition analysis), present to you
the details of the track and a ‘click here’ to pay for immediate download of
the song! The chances are that Cloud will accelerate this affordable power
still further. Just imagine where we will be in ten years time!
With so much happening so fast, the pressure is on
IT experts to not only deliver more innovation but also greater security to
defend it. As devices get more powerful, the internet faster, the demand and
supply of Cloud applications will sky rocket and the power in the hands of the
user will be greater than we have ever delivered before.
Remember with great power, comes great
responsibility and your responsibility is to protect the data, your ID and the
information valuable to you. You would not go out and leave your front door
open. Therefore, don’t leave your ‘virtual’ front door open when connecting to
the internet and such powerful applications. By all means be a Cloud user, but
be safe and be secure in doing so.
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