Category Archives: Cloud Servers
Owner Says Tesla Model 3 Window Shattered By Itself, Accused Of FUD – InsideEVs
If it were not for professional matters, I would probably never open Twitter. It is the social media to pick a fight almost by definition. That is perhaps also the case of Jayakrishna Balaji Simma. He identified there only as Balaji Simma and found another reason to be on Twitter: try to talk to Elon Musk. By now, he has probably regretted it already: when he decided to show a weird incident with his brand new Tesla Model 3, he was viciously attacked. Simma claims the right rear door glass shattered by itself with a video.
It can be seen above and also in his original tweet, right below. Pay careful attention to it at around 7 seconds.
It was all it took for Tesla supporters to viciously attack him as a FUDster. Some claim the video was badly edited. Others say no surveillance video records sound. There are even the ones that say the Twitter account is fake because it has very little activity. Simma reaches a point in which he has to defend himself.
We have tried to contact him through direct messaging on Twitter to learn more about his story. Perhaps get pictures of the shattered glass, of the door that lost that glass and anything else that could help us understand his claims. He did not get back to us so far.
We have then tried to reach him by other means. Who is Balaji Simma? We have searched his name on Google and found he is the Director of Software Development at BURL Concepts, a company for medical devices. Like the tweet shows, he lives in San Diego, California. In other words, he is real.
While he was trying to defend himself, other people showed similar issues with Tesla vehicles. This one was with a Model X.
In a Facebook group, Ameya Amritwar reported this with his Model 3:
This is how he described the issue:
Broke through the glass ceiling !!!! Glass ceiling just blew out while driving
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Owner Says Tesla Model 3 Window Shattered By Itself, Accused Of FUD - InsideEVs
Insights on the ASEAN and Taiwan Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Market – Forecast to 2025 – ResearchAndMarkets.com – Business Wire
DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "ASEAN and Taiwan Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Market, Forecast to 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.
The ASEAN cloud infrastructure market will gravitate toward a hybrid deployment model (partially premises-based and partially cloud-based) in the next 3 to 5 years. The demand for managed cloud offerings has been increasing, particularly for Application-as-a-Service and Network-as-a-Service offerings. Enterprises are looking to deploy more open-source private cloud platforms across hybrid environments, as hybrid-IT emerges as a new norm. The adoption of multicloud solutions will accelerate owing to factors such as the migration of development applications to the public cloud and disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.
Active government initiatives such as Smart Cities in developing countries and key digital hubs present new monetization opportunities for service providers in developing verticalized cloud solutions to address governments' digital transformation ambitions. The demand for integrated management solutions is likely to increase in multicloud environments. Managed hybrid cloud platforms are in demand to accommodate workloads, ranging from enterprise applications (such as email, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and cloud-native applications) and analytics to the Internet of Things (IoT).
While cloud security and privacy remain major concerns for many companies in the ASEAN region, they present monetization opportunities for vendors to provide ancillary managed security, cloud, and other professional services. The expansion of open-source technologies, as well as advances in application programming interfaces (API)-accessible single-tenant cloud servers, helps promote acceptance toward managed cloud providers.
Established data center markets such as Singapore and countries experiencing high data center growth rates such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand are expected to be the key focus areas for cloud infrastructure market growth in the ASEAN region owing to the availability of necessary infrastructure and connectivity, as well as the presence of hyperscale cloud vendors. Stiff competition and increasing commoditization of pure-play storage and cloud offerings are driving providers to offer new services and innovate. These include bundling more managed services (such as managed security and analytics) into their cloud services portfolio, thereby shifting the focus away from being a pure reseller of public cloud services.
Key Issues Addressed
Key Topics Covered:
1. Executive Summary
2. Market Overview
3. Drivers and Restraints - Total Cloud IaaS Market
4. Key Trends
5. Forecasts and Trends - Total Cloud IaaS Market
6. Growth Opportunity and Call to Action
7. Singapore
8. Thailand
9. Indonesia
10. Vietnam
11. Taiwan
12. Malaysia
13. The Philippines
14. Hyperscale Cloud Providers Profiling
15. Key Cloud Providers
16. The Last Word
17. Appendix
Companies Mentioned
For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/wgjoh7
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Insights on the ASEAN and Taiwan Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Market - Forecast to 2025 - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Business Wire
Link11 Offers Its Cloud-Based DDoS Protection Solution To Public Sector Organizations Free Of Cost During COVID-19 – SecurityInformed
Link11, renowned European firm in the field of cyber-resilience and cyber security, is offering its DDoS protection solutions free of charge to public sector health, government and public education organizations during the highly contagious phase of COVID-19.
Public sector organizations are particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and the availability of critical public infrastructures is more important than ever as people look for genuine sources of information related to the virus outbreak.
Governments all over the world have taken necessary actions to lower COVID-19s spreading curve, including implementing remote working policies, resulting in significant growth in internet traffic, leading to an increased risk of social engineering, business email compromise, ransomware and DDoS attacks.
According to Link11s research, during the three-week period Monday 17 February to Monday 9 March, Link11s Security Operation Center (LSOC) defended 20,349 minutes of attacks (over 2,860 hours), which is more than 30% up compared to the 15,612 minutes of attacks mitigated during the same period in 2019.
Marc Wilczek, Chief Operations Officer (COO) of Link11 said, It takes only a small effort these days to overload servers and online services, and organizations need to protect their infrastructures. To help them deal with the evolving threat landscape, Link11 is offering government, public health and education organizations a solution that proactively identifies, blocks, and mitigates DDoS attacks within the Link11 Cloud Protection Platform, free of charge until September 2020.
Link11s integrated Cloud Security Platform ensures cyber-resilience of the entire IT infrastructure
On Sunday 15 March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suffered a cyber-attack, designed to slow the agencys services amid the governments rollout of a response to coronavirus, with the aim of overloading HHS servers. Officials assume a hostile foreign actor was behind this campaign.
Traditional on-premise DDoS defenses, which are still widely used, and load-balancing products, are not able to protect individual websites, APIs or cloud applications against Layer-7 attacks, as these malicious data tsunamis can create big damage with little total bandwidth, bringing everything to a standstill instantly.
Cloud-based DDoS protection, such as Link11s integrated Cloud Security Platform, uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, strict automation and real-time analytics to ensure cyber-resilience of the entire IT infrastructure and application landscape supporting hybrid as well as cloud-native deployments.
New HomeKit-compatible pan-and-tilt Eufy camera seems to be on the way – 9to5Mac
Earlier this week, Eufy started rolling out HomeKit Secure Video support for the eufyCam 2, and it now seems there is a new pan-and-tilt Eufy camera on the way.
If accurate, this would be the first non-static camera from the budget-focused smart home company
HomeKit News reports.
Earlier today, we sent out a tweet about a post in the HomeKit subReddit, where user u/KingKarl-TM uploaded what appears to be an offer from Eufy, via their Facebook page, revealing not one, but two indoor cameras, one of which would appear to be capable of pan and tilt functionality. Given the number of doctored images found online these days, its prudent to be cautious about such claims, however, Christopher Close from iMore did a bit more digging, and found further evidence of the tilt camera in the Eufy Security app.
Not only does the app reveal the aforementioned camera albeit in beta, but the existence of a HomeKit code is shown on the base of the device, further pushing this into the realm of being likely to be HomeKit compatible. Stranger things have happened of course, and it wouldnt be beyond the realms of possibility that such a camera doesnt actually get released. Still, given that it appears they at some point have promoted these via Facebook (no sign of this now seemingly exists beyond the Reddit post) it does look rather promising.
As we explained previously, there are two levels of HomeKit support for security cameras, and theres no indication at this stage which the new cameras might support.
HomeKit Secure Video is designed to address the main security weakness with most of todays smarter cameras. In order to do things like detect people and recognize faces, most cameras upload your video stream to the cloud and carry out the analysis there. That means that unencrypted video is stored on someone elses server, representing a tasty target for hackers.
With HSV, all of the people, animal, and vehicle detection is performed locally, on your own iPad, HomePod, or Apple TV, and only encrypted video is sent to Apples cloud servers.
The situation is, however, complicated by the fact that additional cameras have a more basic form of HomeKit-compatibility, meaning Siri support and motion-triggered actions, but not HomeKit Secure Video.
Eufy offers a range of more wallet-friendly smart home products, including security cameras and robot cleaning devices. A pan-and-tilt Eufy camera would be a welcome addition to the range.
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New HomeKit-compatible pan-and-tilt Eufy camera seems to be on the way - 9to5Mac
Here’s how AI is helping Indian Insurance industry improve customer experience – ETCIO.com
Being in the business for the past 19 years, IFFCO Tokio General Insurance has adopted an omnichannel distribution strategy, propelled by a strong IT backbone, to reach different customer segments as per their convenience.
But Artificial Intelligence is helping the insurer to go a step further.
"We leverage AI for image processing to analyse the extent of the damaged vehicle (personal cars), which helps us to generate a list of repairable and replaceable parts that were damaged in the accident. Within a few minutes, the assessment and the cost are given to the customer, which they can either accept or reject. If the assessment gets accepted, the payment is made within fifteen minutes directly to the customers bank account," Seema Gaur, ED & Head- IT, IFFCO Tokio General Insurance said. The company has automated claim settlement with Artificial Intelligence.
In the absence of AI, these photographs were assessed by claim officers, and it was tedious and manual jobs, as they took a few hours to assess the damage. With the AI-based app, the list of damaged parts is generated within minutes along with a cost. It is now much more convenient for claim officers, as they are now in a better position to justify the assessment to the claimant.
Artificial Intelligence has helped transform businesses. For large companies and industries, artificial intelligence is generating new avenues for growth and profitability.
Being an old and highly regulated industry that insurance is, companies have comparatively taken up technological implementations rather fast. Insurance no longer seems to be steeped in manual, paper based processes that are slow. McKinsey's estimates a potential annual value of $1.1 trillion, if artificial intelligence is fully applied to the insurance industry.
With all the benefits and cost saving ratios that this technology has given, organisations are more keen to adopt this in the times to come.
Take for example, Kotak Life Insurance, a life insurance business of Kotak Mahindra Bank that decided to automate the process of verifying whether the the customer receiving annuity from its insurance is still alive or not. The process was especially cumbersome for older people who had to visit the branch to prove that they are still alive, a not so good customer experience. But that has completely changed with the help of AI.
Explaining the process, Kirti Patil, Senior EVP- IT & CTO, Kotak Life Insurance says, "To submit the certificate of existence, a user had to visit the branch. It was a time consuming process for both customers and the company. We automated this process and made it digital by using Artificial Intelligence. Now, the user can simply submit a photograph through application and the intelligent algorithms verify whether the person is alive or not."
Kotak is also working on analytics-based marketing communications and AI based fraud analysis.
One key reason why AI will prove to be crucial is the ever increasing datafication of business interactions, private life and public life. AI can be used to effectively assess drivers and trends in the insurance industry and secure efficiency gains.
According to Deloitte, AI is helping insurers by predicting risk with greater accuracy, customizing products and using enhanced foresight to rapidly deploy new products. It allows institutions to be more agile, enabling them to deploy new products in response to emerging risk.
Artificial Intelligence is not only helping organisations to evaluate claims easily but is also helping them provide real time assistance to their customers. Walking on similar lines, Max Life Insurance is trying to reduce the distance with its customers with Artificial Intelligence.
"The moment you can reduce the distance between a company and the customer to zero, that is digital. So digital is not about technology from our point of view, digital is about the customer, digital is about reducing distance of communication and optimizing the ease of engagement. We are achieving it with the help of AI and bot capabilities with big data analytics, said Manik Nangia, Chief Digital Officer & Director Marketing, Max Life Insurance.
To service its customers in an instant, accurate and efficient manner, Max Life Insurance has leveraged Artificially Intelligent technologies. Its website offers a live chat supported by a bot that is constantly learning and providing more and more information to customers in a timely and precise manner.
While Insurance seems to be a space, companies have explored the capabilities of AI, there still remains some business which are yet to find the right use cases for them. To leap from AI mystery to mastery, practitioners need to bridge the gap in understanding the technologys inner workings and its business value proposition.
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Here's how AI is helping Indian Insurance industry improve customer experience - ETCIO.com
Evolution of the Cloud Conversation – UC Today
Rye Austin, Sales and Marketing Director at Core, is used to talking to people about transitioning to cloud-based services. But over the past year or so, hes observed a significant alteration in the way that conversation is going.
Today, people dont want to put servers in their offices. Even before the very recent huge drive towards remote working, the current climate was changing. Having on-premises environments is high risk and expensive and needs more maintenance. It doesnt make sense for most customers now, so everyones looking at the cloud, Austin explained.
Indeed, for any startup the way forward is obvious.
But for complex organisations with legacy systems its not so straightforward, and preserving business continuity requires expert project management to enact the change smoothly.
Rye Austin
Every organisation has got different systems, different data and different needs. So we look to understand how an organisation would make the absolute most of the cloud. And that means looking at the systems theyve got, because there are different levels of the cloud and different ways of doing things.
So for one organisation, they might choose to have email hosted in a SaaS style solution that makes the most sense for email. Other systems like document management, they might choose a different platform, and other workloads might be set up on Azure or similar. he continued, illustrating the complexity and consultative nature of the change management process involved.
While being a Microsoft Gold partner and expert, Cores independence is a critical asset in putting together a plan which best meets the needs of each client effectively on their journey to full cloud-based operations. We see a lot of vendors that are trying a kind land grab, to get customers onto their platform, said Austin. But this isnt serving customers well, nor demonstrating the transformative potential of cloud-based working:
Just putting the same stuff in the cloud and doing things the same way, then ticking the box and saying were done, is really not the best way of doing it. Sales people have targets to meet, and might be looking to meet targets to win organisations to take that first step into the cloud.
But the skill sets required to maintain cloud services are different. The tooling you need to maintain it and be secure with data is different. Its a big transition, from how things are in the on-premises world.
When Cores consultants work with clients, they avoid the rush to roll out, and instead work through a structured process to co-create a change management plan.
We start with education, Austin explained.
We explain whats out there, what the options are, and the benefits of the different options. They all have pros and cons, we want to educate the customer first
Once the customer is in a position to make an informed choice about the possibilities, the options for transition can be further discussed. We look in detail at the business case, and how well be there to support what would be a large transformation for them. We need to examine how its going to improve their organisation and enhance the bottom line.
Only at that point, can the project itself be specified. The third stage is to actually plan and roadmap the rollout and design. To say, here is where we think you should go, and heres how to get there.
So, you start with the compass, before you unroll the map which makes a lot of sense, on a complex journey to an exciting new destination.
For nearly 30 years, Core has been working with organisations to successfully implement transformative digital technologies which deliver defined business outcomes. Cores Technology Enablement services are designed to maximise user acceptance, engagement, and ultimately, the utilisation of the technology to realise business value.
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Evolution of the Cloud Conversation - UC Today
AI can better predict drug response to lung cancer therapies – ETCIO.com
New York, Researchers have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to train algorithms and predict tumour sensitivity in three advanced non-small cell lung cancer therapies which can help predict more accurate treatment efficacy at an early stage of the disease.
The researchers at Columbia University's Irving Medical Center analyzed CT images from 92 patients receiving drug agent nivolumab in two trials; 50 patients receiving docetaxel in one trial; and 46 patients receiving gefitinib in one trial.
To develop the model, the researchers used the CT images taken at baseline and on first-treatment assessment.
"The purpose of this study was to train cutting-edge AI technologies to predict patients' responses to treatment, allowing radiologists to deliver more accurate and reproducible predictions of treatment efficacy at an early stage of the disease," explained Laurent Dercle, associate research scientist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
However, this type of evaluation can be limited, especially in patients treated with immunotherapy, who can display atypical patterns of response and progression.
"Newer systemic therapies prompt the need for alternative metrics for response assessment, which can shape therapeutic decision-making,"
Dercle said in a paper appeared in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.
The researchers used machine learning to develop a model to predict treatment sensitivity in the training cohort.
Each model could predict a score ranging from zero (highest treatment sensitivity) to one (highest treatment insensitivity) based on the change of the largest measurable lung lesion identified at baseline.
"We observed that similar radiomics features predicted three different drug responses in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) ," Dercle said.
"With AI, cancer imaging can move from an inherently subjective tool to a quantitative and objective asset for precision medicine approaches," he added.
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AI can better predict drug response to lung cancer therapies - ETCIO.com
London teacher with half a million hits on maths website during coronavirus outbreak shortlisted as among world’s best – Evening Standard
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A London maths teacher whose free online learning platform is seeing over half a million hits a day as schools shut down worldwide due to coronavirus has been shortlisted to win the title of worlds best teacher.
Dr Jamie Frost, 33, who holds a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford University and was previously investment banker, now works over 90 hours a week running website DrFrostMaths.com while holding down a full-time job at Tiffin School, a boys grammar in Kingston.
His free site, which earned him the nomination for the sixth Varkey Foundation $1 million Global Teacher Prize, offers interactive online quizzes and teaching slides, videos, and a bank of UK exam board questions for students to practice on - as well as learning resources for teachers.
Dr Frost says it has had nearly seven million downloads and is used by 5,500 schools worldwide, including over half of all UK secondaries.
Since schools began closing worldwide due to the coronavirus pandemic it has seen more than 100,000 additional visits per day, and Dr Frost told the Standard its now going up.
He said: I will easily exceed half a million today.
The dedicated server is absolutely hammered because schools are closed. Theres so much traffic its struggling to cope the problem is going to be getting worse every day.
I reached out to tech companies for help... Google has now reached out to me to offer $10,000 of free 'cloud credit' and potential support moving the site to their cloud servers. It is fantastic.
Tiffin School, which shut on Monday for deep cleaning over COVID 19, is using the site for Year 11 practice exams this week.
The teacher, who lives in Surbiton, added: Its remarkable how even with schools shut down we are able to cope using technology.
Dr Frost started out as an investment banker, coding trading algorithms for Morgan Stanley in New York and Canary Wharf, but found it soul destroying.
He realised he was happier sharing his knowledge with students, as he had as an adjunct teacher at Oxford.
He completed teacher training and began working at Tiffin School in 2013, and initially launched the site in a bid to help pupils who were struggling with maths.
The Global Teacher Prize will be awarded at the Natural History Museum on October 12.
It is awarded to a single school teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession, and aims to shine a spotlight on the important role teachers play in society.
The winning educator is allowed to put their $1 million, awarded in equal instalments over 10 years, towards new projects and initiatives of their choosing.
The shortlist is compiled from over 40,000 entries worldwide by a panel of international education experts.
If he wins the prize, Dr Frost plans to use the funding to expand the site to offer questions and support on exam syllabuses in some of the sites most popular regions outside the UK, such as Malaysia, and employ teachers there to help.
The sites resources have already been used to teach in a district of schools in Zimbabwe.
Hear Dr Frost on this episode of The Leader podcast:
Dr Frost said: I love teaching so much, being in the classroom and interacting with kids. I am just delighted to be shortlisted.
Its absolutely fantastic, but its not about the recognition. Its that if I was to win the money I would spend it all on expanding the platform more globally.
Tiffin School headteacher, Mike Gascoigne, said: Dr Jamie Frost is an amazing teacher who fully deserves his shortlisting for this incredible award.
"As a Tiffin teacher, the school is proud to support his brilliant work.
At this time of COVID19 crisis and isolation, it will undoubtedly be even more useful to schools and pupils. He is a truly inspirational teacher making a huge impact in the world of maths.
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London teacher with half a million hits on maths website during coronavirus outbreak shortlisted as among world's best - Evening Standard
Galvanizing the new age of IT with AI and hybrid cloud – ETCIO.com
By- Amith Singhee At the dawn of the Information Age in the 1970s, the role of Information Technology (IT) was limited to computing plumbing - to keep the networks and computers working. In the 90s and 2000s, it evolved into an enterprise shared servicesmodel that was essential for operational efficiency, cost takeout and decision support.
Today, IT is witnessing another shift that increasingly requires the Chief Information Officer organization to act as a partner in defining business strategy and driving topline growth via IT-driven business transformation. To realize this, the IT delivery platform that includes infrastructure, applications, processes and roles of people -needs to be scalable and adaptable tokeep pace with the rapidly changing business and operational needs, and, hence, transform to a hybrid cloud IT architecture.
The transformation will involve four phases: Advice for Cloud, Move to Cloud, Build for Cloud and Manage on Cloud. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a fundamental role across all these phases. To understand this better, consider three illustrative scenarios from the Move, Build and Manage phases that are foundational to hybrid cloud adoption across industries: application modernization, DevSecOps and incident analysis and remediation.
Modernizing applications for the hybrid cloud
However, the application today does not allow for an API-based integration and is architected as a large monolith that would not efficiently scale to support dynamic loads on the system.Since enterprises have many such monolithic applications, they would like to modernize these applications to a scalable and modularized architecture, leveraging microservices and cloud technologies like Red Hat OpenShift, SaaS and IaaS, deployed across a hybrid cloud footprint. However, such modernization can take substantial manual effort, which can easily span over one to two years.
By using AI, the retailer can substantially reduce the time and effort of modernization and achieve better outcomes. Here is how Beginning with the Discover and translate stage of the modernization process, AI can analyse all application artefacts such as source code, logs and architecture documents toestimate a topological model of the application. Next, algorithmic and AI approaches can be used to do a Biz-Ops Analysis andoverlay business and operational KPIs on the components of the topological model. Finally, at the Optimize and Re-engineer stage, AI and optimizationcan be used to generate a Biz-Ops optimized target design including architecture, refactored source code, DevOps configuration and deployment specification. The architectcan guide and orchestrate all the stages of this process in an interactive manner.
DevSecOps in a Hybrid Cloud environment
DevSecOps integrates development, IT security and IT operations in a unified approach, where high levels of automation shorten application development lifecycle, enable continuous delivery, remove agility barriers from security gates, and ensure high software quality.AI can be of tremendous value in enabling effective DevSecOps. During development, for instance, AI-enhanced static code analysis will detect security vulnerabilities and non-compliance issues in the development phase itself, as plugins within the developers favourite Integrated Development Environment. This will substantially reduce the delays that occur today from post-development security checks.
AIs role in incident analysis and remediation
In the operations domain, consider the situation when an incident has occurred, for example, a user webpage may be unresponsive, or a web service API returns a 502 error and that has triggered a ticket or alert. If a site reliability engineer (SRE) is tasked with resolving the incident, AI can assist with incident analysis and predict next best actions, understand causality to estimate root causes and recommend remediation approaches.
This is how it works - AnAI system, trained from a corpus of historical incident data, can analyse all available structured and unstructured data related to the active incident, extract important incident features in the context of deployed application topology and diagnose the issue better.
Secondly, a variety of AI techniques can be used to predict the next best actions that the SRE can leverage to further diagnose the incident in collaboration with relevant subject matter experts. Updates to the active incident data can then iteratively be used to further advance the incident analysis, diagnosis and recommendations towards resolution of the incident.
While these three scenarios are widely applicable to enterprises across industries, similarly significant application of AI is likely to be seen to most other parts of the IT delivery platform and application lifecycle.
The shift to experiential age
The dramatic improvements in AI over recent years have been driven heavily by use cases and datasets from the consumer world images, speech and text. With the emerging synergy between hybrid cloud and AI, we will witness tremendous innovation and business value in the enterprise IT world. Today, customers increasingly expect instant and seamless multi-channel engagement and data privacy, andenterprises need to meet or exceed these rapidly evolving customer expectations.
As businesses leverage technology, data and AI at an increasing scale and new business models rapidly emerge,they need toundergo business transformation at tremendous speed to stay competitive while continuously reducing costs. To conclude, AI and hybrid cloud are catalysing the journey of digital transformation by enabling a fundamental shift in the role IT plays in the business.
The author is Senior Manager Hybrid Cloud, IBM Research India.
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Galvanizing the new age of IT with AI and hybrid cloud - ETCIO.com
Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature – The Register
Working from home and want to access your PC at work? The best solution may cost thousands in additional Microsoft licensing costs.
In the scramble to migrate employees to home working, there are issues for businesses who normally have staff in an office working on desktop PCs, or accessing network file shares and intranet applications, or running applications that connect to an on-premises database.
This poses some difficult and potentially risky and expensive questions for organisations that are not already set up to have all or most of their staff working remotely. Business continuity is top of mind, but as security expert Bruce Schneier has observed: "Worrying about network security seems almost quaint in the face of the massive health risks from COVID-19, but attacks on infrastructure can have effects far greater than the infrastructure itself."
One area of concern is the risk from users on home PCs accessing corporate assets. "These systems are more likely to be out of date, unpatched, and unprotected. They are more vulnerable to attack simply because they are less secure," noted Schneier and that is before taking into account the variety of websites visited and software installed by family members, including children.
Staff working at home could use a VPN to connect to the corporate network. VPNs have many advantages, but by putting the remote machine in effect on the internal business network, it also poses risks, for example if malware on the remote machine is able to damage business assets.
Microsoft has some solutions for remote access without a VPN, including a feature of Windows Server called Remote Desktop Gateway (RDS Gateway). Users can connect to the gateway over SSL (no VPN required) and use a Remote Desktop client to access their work PC, or a desktop session on Windows server, or a desktop application running on the server.
The snag here is that using RD Gateway requires a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (CAL), as Microsoft makes clear in this document [PDF]:
"An RDS CAL is required to use any functionality included in the Remote Desktop Services role in Windows Server. For example, if you are using RDS Gateway and/or Remote Desktop Web Access to provide access to a Windows client operating system on an individual PC, both an RDS CAL and Windows Server CAL are required."
An RDS CAL can cost over 100 per user we found a single CAL on sale from Microsoft for 186.53, though you can do better from other resellers and with bulk licensing deals.
Just the thing for a pandemic: an extra fee to have your users work remotely
In addition, some vendors have curious rules about remote access to their applications that incur additional fees. Rich Gibbons, a licensing trainer at IT Asset Management (ITAM), noted that Citrix and/or Remote Desktop Services are "the easiest way to quickly become non-compliant with a LOT of vendors."
The problem here is a fundamental one, which is that companies including Microsoft are in a hybrid world, part based on cloud concepts where everything is on the internet and easily accessed from all kinds of devices, and part based on traditional business networks with servers, locally installed software and desktop PCs. The licensing model for these two types of environment is different, with the traditional environment generally being more complex. Customers who license applications like Windows and Office on a per-user subscription are much better placed than those with perpetual per-device licenses.
Wes Miller, is a research analyst and licensing specialist at Directions on Microsoft, based in Kirkland near Seattle. He told us that Microsoft is trying to move to the cloud model, but "a lot of customers are stagnating; they don't want to pay for the subscription. It's on-premises versus cloud. It's per-device vs per-user. And it's perpetual licensing vs subscription licensing. You have to put all three of them together.
"What we've got is a lot of customers, especially regulated and institutional customers, who either for regulatory or cost reasons don't want to go into the cloud and subscriptions, they want to sit on-premises with perpetual product, and they don't have a good story of how to help their employees go remote today."
Security is one thing, but in the midst of a global pandemic, does anyone care about licensing? "You're not going to get audited right now," Gibbons told The Reg. "But in six months or whenever this is over, you need to know what you've done."
Miller concurs. "I think were going to see a grace period here. When those audits do start back up, I think businesses may well be able to ask for some sort of grace period or leeway, but the reality is, if you put something in place to meet these new work scenarios, you need to expect to pay for whatever Microsofts current licensing model is for that."
If you need Windows and Office, and are on a Microsoft 365 licence (not just Office 365), it is worth noting that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) running Windows 10 can be used without an additional licence or RDS Cal. You still need an RDS CAL for accessing Windows Server desktops and apps, if needed. Optimising licensing costs is a specialist task but can make a big difference to costs.
Miller says a virtual desktop environment is a good answer. "Solutions like Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) or using the server-based variant of Amazon Workspaces, have been license-proven and the technology is proven, at least in the case of Amazon Workspaces, WVD being newer. The biggest thing is, approach it in context with either what you own, or what you are willing to buy, which is weird to think about given the current time were in."
For customers not on subscriptions, Microsoft's habit of treating remote access as a premium feature looks out of date, and in the current circumstances particularly unwelcome. These problems do not exist if you are using born-in-the-cloud solutions like Google's G Suite, and largely disappear if you are on a Microsoft 365 subscription. Remote access is now the norm, which means Microsoft should give up its addiction to things like RDS cals. Customers too will have to adapt, with subscription licensing now hard to avoid.
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Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature - The Register