SNIA on Cloud Storage

A Q&A on Protecting Data from New COVID Threats

February 17, 2021February 17, 2021 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative began 2021 discussing the topic that has been on everyone’s mind for the last year – COVID-19. But rather than talking about positive cases or vaccine availability, our experts, Eric Hibbard and Mounir Elmously, explored how COVID has increased cybersecurity concerns and impacted the way organizations must adapt their security practices in order to ensure data privacy and data protection. If you missed our live webcast “Data Privacy and Data Protection in the COIVD Era” it’s available on-demand.

As expected, the session raised several questions on how to mitigate the risks from increased social engineering and ransomware attacks and how to limit increased vulnerabilities from the flood of remote workers. Here are answers to the session’s questions from our experts.

Q: Do you have any recommendations for structuring a rapid response to an ongoing security threat?

The Effort to Keep Artificial Intelligence Ethical

February 11, 2021February 11, 2021 Jim Fister Leave a comment

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are possibly the most substantive and meaningful change to modern business. The ability to process large amounts of data with varying degrees of structure and form enables giant leaps in insight to drive revenue and profit. Likewise, governments and society have significant opportunity for improvement of the lives of the populace through AI. However, with the power that AI brings comes the risks of any technology innovation.

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will explore some of the ethical issues that can arise from AI at our live webcast on March 16, 2021 “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.” Our expert speakers, Rob Enderle, President and Principal Analyst at The Enderle Group and Eric Hibbard, Chair of the SNIA Security Technical Work Group, will join me for an interactive discussion on:

Understanding CDMI and S3 Together

February 9, 2021February 9, 2021 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

How does the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI™) International Standard work? Is it possible be to both S3 and CMDI compliant? What security measures are in place with CDMI? How, and where, is CDMI being deployed? These are just some of the topics we covered at our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies (CSTI) webcast, “Cloud Data Management & Interoperability: Why A CDMI Standard Matters.”

CDMI is intended for application developers who are implementing cloud storage systems, and who are developing applications to manage and consume cloud storage.

Q. Can you compare CDMI to S3? Is it possible to be both CDMI and S3 compliant? Is it too complicated?

How COVID has Changed Data Privacy and Data Protection

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The COVID-19 Pandemic has amplified cybersecurity concerns particularly related to the cloud. Threat actors have recognized a unique opportunity to exploit pandemic-related vulnerabilities through social engineering attacks, business email compromise, work from home and other remote weak points. This results in increased risk and occurrence of ransomware attacks and data breaches that can disrupt or totally compromise organizations’ ability to conduct business. These security incidents can also subject victims to liability for violations of privacy and data breach notification laws.

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) will be taking on this important topic with a live webcast on January 20, 2021, “Data Privacy and Data Protection in the COVID Era” where our SNIA experts will discuss:

Video Analytics Q&A

December 15, 2020December 15, 2020 Jim Fister Leave a comment

There is a new wave of cognitive services based on video and image analytics, leveraging the latest in machine learning and deep learning. In a recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webcast “How Video Analytics is Changing the Way We Store Video,” we looked at some of the benefits and factors driving this adoption, as well as explored compelling projects and required components for a successful video-based cognitive service. This included some great work being done in the open source community.

In the course of the presentation, there were several discussion points and questions that arose. Our SNIA presenters, Glyn Bowden from HPE and Kevin Cone from Intel provide the answers.

Implications of Internet of Payments Q&A

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020 Jim Fister Leave a comment

Internet of Payments (IoP) enables payment processing over many kinds of IoT devices and has also led to the emergence of the micro-transaction. It’s an area of rapid growth.

Recently, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) hosted a live webcast Technology Implications of Internet of Payments. The talk was hosted by me, with Glyn Bowden from HPE and Richard George from HLPS providing expert insight.

In the course of the conversation, several comments and questions arose, and they are summarized here. Feel free to view the entire discussion and provide us with feedback on the talk. We are also always interested on topics you’d like to see us cover in the future.

Q. When considering digitization of assets, currency is not locked to a solid standard. That is, they are not based on specific physical assets. Many new digital currencies are therefore unstable. But the proposition here is that they would be more secure because they’re locked to real physical value. Is that correct?

5G Streaming Questions Answered

December 2, 2020December 2, 2020 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

The broad adoption of 5G, internet of things (IOT) and edge computing are reshaping the nature and role of enterprise and cloud storage. Preparing for this significant disruption is important. It’s a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative covered in our recent webcast “Storage Implications at the Velocity of 5G Streaming,” where my colleagues, Steve Adams and Chip Maurer, took a deep dive into the 5G journey, streaming data and real-time edge AI, 5G use cases and much more. If you missed the webcast, it’s available on-demand along with a copy of the webcast slides.

As you might expect, this discussion generated some intriguing questions. As promised during the live presentation, our experts have answered them all here.

Q. What kind of transport do you see that is going to be used for those (5G) use-cases?

A New Wave of Video Analytics

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020 Jim Fister Leave a comment

Adoption of cognitive services based on video and image analytics is on the rise. It’s an intriguing topic that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will dive into on December 2, 2020 at our live webcast, “How Video Analytics is Changing the Way We Store Video.” In this webcast, we will look at some of the benefits and factors driving this adoption, as well as explore compelling projects and required components for a successful video-based cognitive service. This includes some great work in the open source community to provide methods and frameworks, some standards that are being worked on to unify the ecosystem and allow interoperability with models and architectures. Finally, we’ll cover the data required to train such models, the data source and how it needs to be treated.