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: Read More

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? Read More

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: Read More

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. Read More

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? Read More

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? Read More

Effective cloud data management and interoperability is critical for organizations looking to gain control and security over their cloud usage in hybrid and multicloud environments. The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), also known as the ISO/IEC 17826 International Standard, is intended for application developers who are implementing or using cloud storage systems, and who are developing applications to manage and consume cloud storage. It specifies how to access cloud storage namespaces and how to interoperably manage the data stored in these namespaces. Standardizing the metadata that expresses the requirements for the data, leads to multiple clouds from different vendors treating your data the same. Read More

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.

As you might guess, there are challenges in how we do all of this. Read More

The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) recently hosted a conversation with Glyn Bowden from HPE that I moderated on “Using Data Literacy to Drive Insight.”  In a wide-ranging conversation just over 45 minutes, we had a great discussion on a variety of topics related to ensuring the accuracy of data in order to draw the right conclusions using current examples of data from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as law enforcement. In the process of the dialog, some questions and comments arose, and we’re collecting them in this blog.

Q. So who really needs Data Literacy skills?

A: Really, everyone does.  We all make decisions in our daily life, and it helps to understand the provenance of the information being presented.  It’s also important to find ways to the source material for the data when necessary in order to make the best decisions. Everyone can benefit from knowing more about data.  We all need to interpret the information offered to us by people, press, journals, educators, colleagues, friends.

Q. What’s an example of “everyone” who needs data literacy? Read More

The broad adoption of 5G, Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing will reshape the nature and role of enterprise and cloud storage over the next several years. What building blocks, capabilities and integration methods are needed to make this happen? That will be the topic of discussion at our live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast on October 21, 2020 “Storage Implications at the Velocity of 5G Streaming.”

Join my SNIA expert colleagues, Steve Adams and Chip Maurer, for a discussion on common questions surrounding this topic, including:  Read More