Most cloud providers include other services into the per-user costs like internet bills, help desk services, security, and support, which helps businesses reduce their on-site storage resources to cut costs without affecting what the private cloud offers.

FREMONT, CA: Cloud computing is an alternate data storage using traditional data centers server storage that depends on internet-based hosting for data and application. Also known as serverless computing, files and applications are stored in a virtual cloud that enables access across all devices from anywhere using machine learning principles.

Here are three advantages of using cloud computing:

Security

Keeping data storage protected is crucial, and many cloud computing providers make security a priority by providing significant data protection. Public and private cloud providers cannot afford to lose customers with inferior security, therefore providing superior, multi-factor authentication and c=security certificates to patch management. Private cloud providers offer a hands-on approach, making sure practices comply with the companys goals and objectives.

Cost Savings

Cost-saving is fundamental for most companies, and cloud computing storage can offer few benefits to it. Many cloud computing services are hosted by third-party service providers, both public and private cloud solutions charge on a per-user basis. Expenses depend on how many people need access to the cloud, unlike traditional server setup in which the prices are flat, whether there is one or 1000 users.

It also reduces the number of IT FTEs needed to manage servers. All maintenance issues are managed by cloud service providers instead of hiring people to ensure that everything works properly, saving cost and time.

Most cloud providers include other services into the per-user costs like internet bills, help desk services, security, and support, which helps businesses reduce their on-site storage resources to cut costs without affecting what the private cloud offers.

Mobility

Cloud computing resources allow files, programs, applications, and data to be accessible from anywhere with any device with an internet connection. Additionally, it can also negate systems incompatibilities.

The mobility of access can allow employees to work from anywhere, optimizing productivity, and flexibility. It also improves customer satisfaction as it enables customers and clients to have access to information and reliable service, increasing the chances of loyalty to the brand.

Excerpt from:
Three Advantages Of Using Cloud Computing In Business - CIO Applications

The Redmond headquartered company, however, has competition in the skies. Almost five months earlier, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) had announced a beta of its Cloud Satellite service. But it is Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, which has a head start in space.

Around two years ago, it launched the AWS Ground Station to allow its customers to control their satellite communications, process data, and scale operations without having to build or manage their own ground station infrastructure. On 30 June, AWS said it was establishing a new space unit called the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions.

These are but a few cases in point to demonstrate that leading cloud computing service providers have begun flexing their muscles in space too. But why is there a sudden race to outer space?

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), non-geostationary satellite orbits (NGSOs) such as medium earth orbits (MEO) and low earth orbits (LEO) are being increasingly used worldwide. NGSOs, unlike fixed or geostationary satellite orbits, move across the sky during their orbit around the earth. With space launches becoming more affordable and accessible, a slew of private companies are starting to rely on this new array of satellites.

They are used for applications like weather forecasting, surface imaging, communications, and video broadcasts. However, the data from these satellites need to be processed and analysed in data centres on the ground, which explains the term ground stations.

While the cost of the satellite itself is falling, building and running ground stations can cost up to $1 million or more, according to a recent blog post by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS. Complex data processing also requires a lot of computing power, and the huge data storage requirements only add to the cost.

Leading cloud computing service providers are now starting to offer satellite operators the option to use these ground stations on a pay-per-use or subscription basis, thus, helping the latter save on capital expenditure costs by employing an operating expenditure model.

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These ground stations, thus, can help satellite operators download high-resolution imagery faster, more regularly, and analyse the data with artificial intelligence (AI) toolsall of which results in faster and enhanced monitoring of changing climate patterns, forests and agriculture, among other things.

While Microsoft and IBM are testing their services, AWS Ground Station already has customers such as NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and satellite operators Iridium Communications and Spire Global. It also has private sector customers such as Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies and Capella Space.

Lucrative market

The worldwide cloud infrastructure services market continued to surge in the April-June quarter of this calendar year to touch $34.6 billion, according to research firm Canalys. The growth was attributed to the consumption of cloud-based services for online collaboration and remote working tools, e-commerce, remote learning, and content streaming which hit new records during the lockdown.

During this period, AWS was the leading cloud service provider, accounting for 31% share of the total spend. Microsoft Azure came second, followed by Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

The revenue of the cloud unit of Amazon totalled $10.81 billion in the April-June quarter of this calendar year, accounting for 12% of its parents revenue.

Microsoft, on the other hand, said its commercial cloud surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time" for the quarter ended June 30 (which is also its financial year ending). But it does not spell out what this commercial cloud consists of.

Nevertheless, the space forays will only add to the revenue of all these companies.

Battle lines in India

Space deals will add spice in India too. Indias cloud computing market was estimated at $2.5 billion in 2018, dominated by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), according to industry body Nasscom. It is forecast to touch over $7 Billion in 2022.

AWS, Microsoft and Google are leaders on the local turf too. Last August, for instance, Microsoft signed a deal with Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (Jio)a subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL). The agreement included deploying the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in Jios data centers in locations across India.

This January, Google Cloud signed a deal with Bharti Airtel to cater to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India. However, Google said this July that it was pumping in $4.5 billion into Airtels rival Jio Platforms in exchange for a 7.7% stake. Not surprisingly, a month later, Bharti Airtel announced a multi-year agreement with AWS to deliver cloud solutions to big companies and SMEs in India.

According to Alok Shende, Managing Director of Ascentius Insights, the fusion of cloud computing with networking, linked by a satellite, is expected to shave off milliseconds in transferring data from source to destination. This is the holy grail in many applications, more specifically in finance and in mission-critical applications. There are many India-centric applications (like defence and in the stock markets) where this could play a powerful role."

He believes that for Microsoft, particularly, this move opens a new avenue to entrench itself in the enterprise market where it has traditionally been a strong player on the application side but has lost the leadership position in terms of market share for cloud."

Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner of Convergence Catalyst points out that India has always been a strong player in the space sector with the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) developing and launching satellites at a fraction of global costs. He believes that the Indian governments decision to open up Indias space sector to private players is an encouraging sign.

It has already resulted in Indian space tech startups such as Pixxel, Bellatrix Aerospace, Vesta Space and Agnikul raising over $20 million funding from venture capitalists (VCs) in the last six months. TV media, agriculture, telemedicine and logistics are a few sectors that can benefit from strong satellite communication and space technology development. The ground station services launch by Microsoft and AWS will only expedite this ecosystem development significantly in India," says Kolla.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and founder of Greyhound Research, concurs that the timing of this space move is right since many organizations are now beginning to try new use-cases by tapping into geospatial data (data related to a specific location on earth) that is omnipresent, given the proliferation of devices and edge computing devices.

This space is increasingly getting busy with the likes of AWS and IBM investing money and resources to cater to this opportunity," notes Gogia. He cautions, however: We believe the trick in making such an offering successful is to ensure that it is cheap to start with, since most of these projects are nothing more than trials and, hence, have an extremely high failure rate."

The distributed cloud

Space is just an additional frontier for the leading cloud services providers. It all began when companies, which traditionally used servers for their computing needs, realised that they could lower costs by accessing IT resources over the internet, and paying only for the services they needed, reducing capexa trend we now know as cloud computing.

Many companies today use private clouds (on-premise), public clouds (on a network, typically the internet) and hybrid clouds (combining public and private). User companies, though, became wise and began adopting a multi-cloud vendor approach to avoid being locked in by any single technology or cloud vendor.

With billions of devices getting connected to each other as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend, computing is now also getting done at the so-called edge", which simply means near the source of the data.

General Electric Co. (GE), for instance, believes cloud computing is best suited to situations that demand actions such as significant computing power, management of huge data volumes from across plants, asset health monitoring and machine learning. Edge computing, on the other hand, makes sense in places like mines or offshore oil platforms that have bandwidth constraints, which make it impractical or very expensive to transmit data from machines to the cloud.

During his speech at the Ignite event, for instance, Nadella pointed out that Microsoft was extending Azure from under the sea to outer space". He was referring to Project Natick that aims to serve customers in areas near large bodies of water. Natick uses AI to monitor signs of failure in its servers and other equipment.

Going forward, Microsoft says it will explore powering a Natick data center by a co-located ocean-based green power system, such as offshore wind or tide, with no grid connection".

Similarly, other than deploying internet balloons in space to provide broadband services, Google also provides services to companies like Planet Labs Inc. The US-based aerospace and data analytics company uses Google Cloud platform to process all of its satellite images and Google Cloud storage to host its image archive.

These moves have given rise to a trend called Distributed Cloud, which research firm Gartner describes as distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations".

By 2023, posits a 22 January note by Gartner, the leading cloud service providers will have a distributed ATM-like presence to serve a subset of their services for low-latency application requirements... Micro data centers will be located in areas where a high population of users congregates, while pop-up cloud service points will support temporary requirements like sporting events and concerts."

Greyhound Research believes offerings such as ground stations will be highly valuable in the next wave of investments in more distributed computing environments. More than 7 in 10 of our end-user inquiries with global majors have confirmed that organizations, in the next 3-5 years, will use a large variety of computing environments and make them more contextual to the use-case," says Gogia. This change is likely to be paced multiple times, given the investments in edge networks and 5G that allow remote sites in utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, and many other scenarios," he adds.

The distributed cloud market is forecast to reach $3.9 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.1% during the forecast period from 2020-2025, according to market research firm, IndustryARC. Security, though, remains a concern if proper protocols and policies are not adhered to in a distributed cloud.

For now, though, ground stations that cater to satellite companies will remain one big component of the distribution cloud. A race is clearly on and all the main players are looking up at the sky.

Leslie DMonte is a consultant who writes on the intersection of science and technology

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Cloud computing is betting on outer space - Mint

Manufacturers and assemblers of printed circuit boards are standing apart from other major industry groups in praising sections of the National Defense Authorization Act that would require defense contractors to use less and less of such equipment from adversarial nations over time.

For years, domestic industry has diminished in size and power while other countries, including China, have invested heavily in bolstering their own industrial capabilities, reads a Sept. 29 letter IPC, a trade association of the manufacturers, sent to the chair and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees. As a result, DoD today relies on nonallied producers for [printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assemblies] in areas including cloud servers, IT, and telecom networks. This continued reliance on untrusted foreign suppliers for [printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assemblies] poses numerous risks to national security.

Both the House- and Senate-passed versions of the NDAA would require Defense contractors to use increasingly more of such equipment from U.S. manufacturers or those of allied countries. Under the House bill 100% of printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assemblies would come from those covered countries by 2033. The Senate bill calls for full sourcing from covered countries by 2032 and 25% of the equipment coming from trusted countries by 2023.

The Senate bill also explicitly bars procurement of the equipment from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of which have been designated as posing world-wide threats by the intelligence community.

We urge you to speedily resolve any remaining issues between the House and Senate while keeping in mind the strong protections that passed both chambers with overwhelming support and without any vocal opposition, IPC wrote.

A conference committee which will reconcile the House and Senate bills before a final vote on the legislation has not yet been formed, staff from the office of Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., chairman of an Armed Services subcommittee on emerging threats, told Nextgov.

The NDAA provisionsSec. 808 in the Senate bill and Sec. 826 in the House billdid spur opposition from a broader group of companies in advance of those negotiations.

ARWG remains concerned with the broad applicability and programmatic impact of the House and Senate provisions related to printed circuit board (PCB) procurement, reads a Sept. 24 letter the Acquisition Reform Working Group also sent to the leaders of the Armed Services Committees in both chambers.

ARWG includes the Associated General Contractors of America, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Computing Technology Industry Association, the National Defense Industrial Association, the American Council of Engineering Companies and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

ARWG recommends the conferees direct the Secretary of Defense to implement a design verification standard to ensure that [printed circuit boards] present no national security risk regarding counterfeiting, quality, or unauthorized access, the associations collectively wrote. Subsequent to this submission, ARWG will provide specific recommendations on these matters separately.

The House and Senate bills both contain a number of ways companies might receive waivers from the provisions from the Secretary of Defense, including if the secretary determines the covered equipment poses no significant national security concerns regarding counterfeiting, quality, or unauthorized access.

Chris Mitchell, IPCs vice president for global government affairs told Nextgov the request for a design verification standard and the provisions in the NDAA bills are not mutually exclusive, noting we should and have been working to develop standards along the lines of whats laid out in the [ARWG] letter.

He added that IPC separately has a trusted supplier standardIPC 1791that the group believes is a model for DOD. And he stressed that while the design verification standard has merit, it doesnt fully address either the security issue or those of the resilience of the industrial base in general, with 55% of printed circuit board production happening in China.

A Sept. 16 blog post from IPC President John Mitchell asserts, The opposition fears the new requirements will disrupt their established supply chains in countries that are not affirmatively covered.

The status quo may be advantageous to some, but this is not a compelling enough reason to nullify a major step forward for American manufacturing capabilities, the IPC letter reads. [the NDAA provisions] would create new high-skilled workforce opportunities for U.S. workers and provide trusted supplies to the U.S. government to use in critical applications.

More here:
Industry Groups Spar Over NDAA Provisions on Sourcing of Electronics from China - Nextgov

A group of more than a dozen privacy and civil rights organizations on Thursday demanded that Amazon disclose information about breaches of election data in order to increase the companys public transparency ahead of November.

Groups including Color of Change and Demand Progress cited past incidents reported by Reuters that involved voter data, stored on Amazon Cloud servers, being left exposed online in expressing concerns about Amazon security. They noted that one or more of Amazons election services will be used in 40 states this year.

Amazons election services - including running election websites, storing voter registration information and ballot data, and helping to provide live results on election night - concentrate private voter data and history in a single centralized system, the groups wrote in a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff BezosJeffrey (Jeff) Preston BezosSenate panel votes to subpoena Big Tech executives Privacy, civil rights groups demand transparency from Amazon on election data breaches NASA's Bridenstine: We really are going to the lunar south pole MORE. A single breach could have catastrophic consequences for election integrity in dozens of states.

While the groups acknowledged that the election officials involved would have some responsibility for election data security, they warned that this did not mean Amazon should abdicate all involvement.

If a car seat manufacturer didnt provide proper instructions to make sure people installed their car seats correctly, and it put infants in harms way, people would blame the manufacturer for its negligence, the groups wrote. The car seat manufacturer would be expected to do everything necessary to prevent infants from dying.

Other groups that signed on to the letter were the AI Now Institute, Constitutional Alliance, Fight for the Future, Just Futures Law, Kairos Action, Media Alliance, MediaJustice, MPower Change, Open Markets Institute, RootsAction.org, Partnership for Working Families, Secure Justice, STOP The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, Woodhull Freedom Foundation and X-Lab.

The letter was sent just over a month ahead of the presidential election and as election interference concerns increase.

A senior official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned in an assessment last month that Russia, China and Iran were actively interfering in U.S. elections this year.

Microsoft warned this month that it was seeing Russian, Chinese and Iranian hackers target political groups including the campaigns of President TrumpDonald John TrumpJaime Harrison debates Graham behind plexiglass shield Doctors, White House staff offer conflicting messages on president's health Trump given second dose of Remdesivir 'without complication', 'not yet out of the woods', Conley says MORE and former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenPost-debate poll finds Biden with leads in two key states Democrats warn Supreme Court confirmation would endanger senators' health, call for delay Sunday shows preview: Trump COVID-19 diagnosis rocks Washington, 2020 election MORE.

The groups pointed to the Microsoft assessment in noting that adversaries were actively looking for loopholes, like cloud security compromises to interfere in the presidential election.

Given the stakes, Amazon should be doing everything they can to secure our elections, the groups wrote. Responding to these disturbing compromises by placing blame and putting the onus on the user, like you have in the past, is unacceptable.

Evan Greer, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, criticized Amazon for not doing enough to shore up the security of its systems.

Amazon is the most profitable corporation on the planet and Jeff Bezos is the richest person in human history, Greer said in a statement. If a company this size wants to sell its software to governments for election purposes, it has a responsibility to ensure that those systems are properly configured and to be transparent about the steps theyre taking to secure our elections. We cant let Amazons greed corrode whats left of our democracy.

Read more here:
Privacy, civil rights groups demand transparency from Amazon on election data breaches | TheHill - The Hill