Cloud storage is an important element of modern computing, allowing businesses to store and access data quickly and securely.

The costs of using a cloud storage service can be expensive. With more and more sectors relying on the cloud for data storage and transfer, it is no surprise that many seek a solution for the rising, sky high costs of cloud service providers. So, in this article, we'll discuss why your cloud costs may be reaching high levels, as well as ways to monitor and potentially reduce your cloud spending.

First and foremost, it is important to understand the different types of cloud storage services, and the associated costs. Cloud storage services can be broken down into three primary categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each of these has its own set of associated costs, ranging from setup fees to monthly usage fees. Plus you may also incur additional fees as you begin using the service, such as support fees for when you need the advice of expert cloud engineers.

What are you paying for? - Depending on the particular cloud storage service, you may be paying for different elements. In addition to the fees outlined above, you could also be charged for data transfer bandwidth, or usage of applications hosted from the cloud. You may also have to pay extra for additional storage capacity or specific features and services that are not included in a basic subscription package.

One reason your cloud costs may be high is because of inefficient use or excessive storage. If you are currently storing large amounts of data that isn't being used, this can significantly drive up your costs. Its important to periodically review the data stored in your cloud and delete any unnecessary files or folders.

While it may be easy to turn to the cost of the provider, what is also useful is reviewing what you are paying for and deciding whether this is necessary for your organization. Different providers may offer varying levels of storage, features, or services that could be more cost-effective for your organization. Before signing up to access cloud services from your chosen provider, be sure to compare different providers and packages. You may find that certain providers offer better packages on a month-to-month basis.

It sounds simple to suggest simply reviewing your payments and your usage to ensure that you are truly paying for what you need from your cloud service provider. However, you may be wondering how to do this as your usage and requirements often fluctuate.

One of the best ways to manage and optimize your cloud costs is to work with cloud cost optimization tools. These tools provide daily, real-time monitoring of your cloud usage and can produce reports and analyses of your spend.

For large tech firms this is incredibly useful as cloud costs can often exceed thousands of dollars per month.

Not only are these tools automated, but they are incredibly efficient and do not require any additional software engineering work. With other features such as autoscaling and security insights, your engineers can stay on top of your organizations cloud usage without lifting a finger.

Cost optimization tools work by analyzing your cloud system for any inefficiencies or waste. They can identify areas where you may have over-provisioned resources, unused services, or misconfigured settings that are driving up costs unnecessarily. Additionally, these tools provide cost forecasts and recommendations on how to reduce your costs without compromising performance or security. By implementing a cost optimization tool into your cloud strategy, you will benefit from accurate reporting, and monitoring that will not only help you keep your cloud costs low but offer a wide range of other benefits to your IT team.

Cloud storage is an essential part of modern computing, but it comes with the potential for sky high costs. By understanding the different types of cloud storage and associated costs, you can take steps to monitor and reduce your spending. Furthermore, cost optimization tools can help automate this process and provide insights into how you are using your cloud services. Not only offering automated analysis of your cloud spending but providing real-time, continuous monitoring, optimizing your usage.

See original here:
Are Your Cloud Costs Sky High? - BBN Times

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has returned an indictment charging 14 defendants for their participation in a years-long scheme to steal millions of dollars from American consumers bank accounts, the Justice Department announced today.

According to court documents, Edward Courdy, 73, of Hawaiian Gardens, California; Linden Fellerman, 67, of Las Vegas; Guy Benoit, 68, of Cyprus; Steven Kennedy, 54, of Canada; Sayyid Quadri, of Canada; Ahmad Shoaib, 63, of Canada; John Beebe, 52, of Honolulu; Michael Young, 41, of Hollywood, Florida; Lance Johnson, 52, of Laveen, Arizona; Jenny Sullivan, 46, of Denver; Veronica Crosswell, 35, of Long Beach, California; Eric Bauer, 65, of Huntington Beach, California; Randy Grabeel, 71, of Pittsburg, California; and Debra Vogel, 68, of Las Vegas, were members and associates of a racketeering enterprise that unlawfully debited money from the bank accounts of unknowing U.S. consumer-victims.

Through various members and associates, the enterprise obtained identifying and banking information for victims, and created shell entities that claimed to offer products or services, such as cloud storage. The enterprise then executed unauthorized debits against victims bank accounts, which it falsely represented to banks were authorized by the victims. Some of the unauthorized debits resulted in returned transactions, which generated high return rates. To both conceal and continue conducting unauthorized debits, the enterprises shell entities also generated micro debits against other bank accounts controlled and funded by or for the enterprise. The micro debits artificially lowered shell entities return rates to levels that conspirators believed would reduce bank scrutiny and lessen potential negative impact on the enterprises banking relations.

Co-conspirator Harold Sobel was previously convicted for his role in the scheme in Las Vegas federal court and sentenced to 42 months in prison. In a related civil case also filed in Los Angeles federal court, injunctive relief and settlements totaling nearly $5 million were obtained against various persons, including several who are charged in this criminal indictment.

The scheme alleged in the indictment involved an elaborate plot to reach into consumers bank accounts and steal their hard-earned savings, said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Departments Civil Division. The Department of Justice will use all of the tools at its disposal to prosecute such schemes.

This sophisticated scheme allegedly generated millions of dollars in revenue by stealing consumers personal information and then using that information to fraudulently reach straight into the bank accounts of thousands of Americans, said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada for the Central District of California. The indictment alleges that an international network of fraudsters engaged in a wide-ranging ring which sought to victimize consumers while concealing their activities from banks and law enforcement authorities. Thanks to law enforcement, the defendants alleged efforts to continue this scheme have failed.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) is committed to protecting the U.S. Postal Service and its customers, the American people, said Inspector in Charge Eric Shen of the USPIS Criminal Investigations Group. This case is illustrative of our efforts to protect American consumers from a sophisticated fraud scheme that cost American consumers millions of dollars. Postal Inspectors are proud to partner with the Department of Justice to put a stop to these types of schemes.

Courdy, Fellerman, Benoit, Kennedy, Quadri, Shoaib, Beebe, Young, Johnson, Sullivan, Crosswell, and Bauer are charged with racketeering conspiracy and wire fraud; Grabeel and Vogel are charged with racketeering conspiracy. Some defendants made their initial court appearances yesterday. If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for racketeering conspiracy and, if applicable, 30 years in prison for each count of wire fraud. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The department urges individuals to be on the lookout for unauthorized debits to their accounts. Regularly check your bank, credit card, and other financial statements and contact your financial institution if you see a charge you do not recognize. Report any fraudulent debit you identify to law enforcement. Reports may be filed with the FTC at http://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov or at 877-FTC-HELP.

The USPIS is investigating the case.

Trial Attorneys Wei Xiang, Meredith Healy, and Amy Kaplan of the Justice Departments Consumer Protection Branch and Assistant U.S. Attorney Monica Tait for the Central District of California are prosecuting the case. The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Texas provided substantial assistance.

The Consumer Protection Branch, in conjunction with the USPIS, is pursing wrongdoers who disguise the unlawful nature of business activities by, among other methods, artificially lowering financial account return rates. These tactics are designed to deceive banks, resulting in bank accounts remaining open and facilitating fraud schemes and other illegal activities, including schemes that debit consumers bank accounts without authorization, tech support scams, and subscription traps.

An indictment is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Read more here:
Network of Transnational Fraudsters Indicted for Racketeering in ... - Department of Justice

Nvidia is running its AI supercomputer on Oracles cloud infrastructure with its Lustre file system relying on NVMe block access SSDs.

An Nvidia blog details how its DGX Cloud uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to provide compute, networking, and storage infrastructure to OCI users. DGX Cloud is a multi-node AI-training-as-a-service for enterprises through cloud service providers like OCI.

The team says: DGX Cloud eliminates the need to procure and install a supercomputer for enterprises that are already operating in the cloud just open a browser to get started.

With Nvidia DGX Cloud on OCI, Nvidia pairs Oracles bare-metal infrastructure with the Nvidia NVMesh software. This enables file storage that is scalable on demand for use on DGX Cloud. Nvidia acquired NVMesh technology by buying Excelero in 2022. The software takes block data from SSDs and presents it to remote systems as a pool of block storage, like a SAN(well get to Lustre in a moment).

OCI bare metal E4 DenseIO compute instances, also known as shapes, are the building blocks for this high-performance storage. They consist of:

The two 50Gbps physical NICs on the E4 DenseIO shapes enable high availability. The bare metal instance means no resources are lost to virtualization.

NVMesh takes the raw E4 shape NVMe storage and uses it to build a high-performance data volume. The shapes are combined into pairs with the NVMesh software providing high-availability across the pair. In-built data protection in other words. Encryption is also included.

These shape pairs are then used as the storage underpinnings for a Lustre file system, for both data and metadata storage.

Lustre capacity scales out on-demand dynamically by adding more shape pairs, which also means more metadata capacity is added as well. This ensures metadata capacity limitations dont cause a processing bottleneck.

The users see Lustre as an Nvidia Base Command Platform (BCP) data set and workspace storage facility. BCP provides a management and control interface to DGX Cloud, acting as its operating system, and providing AI training software as a service. It works with both the DGX Cloud and with an on-premises or co-lo with a deployed DGX SuperPOD. You can access a datasheet to find out more.

Nvidia says testing showed that its DGX Cloud on OCI had storage performance matching on-premises Nvidia Base Command Platform environments. DGX Cloud is also available on Azure with AWS and GCP availability coming.

More here:
Nvidia AI supercomputer shows its Lustre in Oracle cloud Blocks ... - Blocks and Files

GUEST OPINION: For those wondering, What is data localization? it is essentially the imposition of geographic, geopolitical, and legal constraints on data. It is about compelling organizations to store the data they obtain or generate from residents in a specific country within that country before it is transferred overseas. More importantly, it entails the need to subject such data to local laws and regulations.

Data localization mandates that people from whom data is obtained have a say, usually through their government, on how their data is stored, processed, and disposed of. It also aims to prevent the arbitrary handling of data by private entities and the possibility of governments where the data is stored to access or control the data.

Most organizations have their data hosted on servers abroad mainly because of cost-efficiency measures and the need for reliability. Established data hosting companies that offer competitive rates, uptime guarantees, and excellent technologies are usually among the usual data server industry world leaders, particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and China. Most organizations in different countries that build their online presence or e-commerce sites usually put their data on servers in these countries.

The issue is that data localization laws threaten this status quo. Governments are moving to compel organizations that operate in their respective countries to store the data they generate, especially on local customer/user activity. This means that they have to use local web hosting providers or the local branches/affiliates of leading data hosting companies.

So how does data localization affect cloud security? The impact of localization is observable in the application of varying laws on data. There are instances when local laws are different from regional and international legal requirements. For example, in Australia, there is a new law that allows the police to access social media accounts and change or delete user data. The law also makes it legal for law enforcement operatives to take over social media accounts and gather network activity information. These provisions are not compatible with data protection policies in the European Union and other parts of the world, which lean towards stricter data protection. They are similar to the policies in states like Russia and China.

The conflict in data security laws and policies makes it difficult for organizations to implement consistent cloud security rules. It can lead to confusion among customers who entrust their data to businesses that they presume to be mindful of security and privacy concerns.

Forcing organizations to localize their data or some of their data (in the case of multinational companies that serve customers in various parts of the world) can pose several serious challenges. For one, it can expose data to vulnerabilities. Some areas do not have advanced enough security technologies to address emerging threats. The available data servers in a locality may not be using high-end encryption and intrusion detection and prevention systems. They may also have no access to up-to-date cyber threat intelligence and are resistant to adopting modern cybersecurity frameworks.

Data localization laws and weak cybersecurity rules are a dangerous combination. It would be reassuring if a country forces organizations into localization but ensures that the prevailing local cybersecurity laws are formidable and in line with the standards of security-conscious countries and regions. Otherwise, forced localization does not bode well for cloud security and cybersecurity in general.

To compensate for the technical inadequacies, organizations may have to implement highly complex systems to comply with data localization rules while implementing good enough security mechanisms. They may need to adopt layer upon layer of additional security controls. This compromise can make security more complex and may worsen data security outcomes.

The complexities can create confusion among IT or cybersecurity teams, and they end up operating less efficiently because of the information overload (alert fatigue) and the risks of using multiple disparate security solutions and tools.

Additionally, data localization limits scalability and flexibility. Organizations may have a hard time finding local data servers or cloud solution providers that can keep up with their rapidly changing requirements. It also curtails the flexibility afforded by untethered cloud services. Organizations will have to make do with the inferior analytics of local providers and the inability to take advantage of cloud computings distributed processing capabilities.

Ultimately, data localization means higher costs for data storage and processing. Being limited to using local data server providers means a significant reduction of competition, which naturally helps keep prices competitive. The need to implement additional security systems to address the limitations of local data solution providers also raises the costs further.

The challenges that come with compulsory data localization are a significant burden to many organizations, especially those that operate in multiple cross-border locations. However, there are some opportunities worth exploring. McKinsey names three main opportunities, namely customer experience optimization, compliance risk reduction, and possible reputational advantage.

With customer data stored and processed locally, customers may experience notably faster transaction processing time and better data protection. Businesses can achieve better data collection, storage, and processing when data is not stored at overseas servers, transferred to servers in another country, and processed somewhere else. Redundancy (to ensure high availability and protect against data corruption) becomes local, which also leads to faster transactions and improved customer experiences overall.

On the other hand, data localization may also help reduce data regulation compliance violations. By having data storage and security governed by the same local laws, organizations can focus on local legal requirements and be assured that they operate legally by being compliant with local laws. Local operations do not have to worry about simultaneously complying with multiple data-related regulations like GDPR and the various data privacy laws in the United States. The inconsistencies, if there are any, will be addressed by those in the upper management involved in multinational operations management. Branch operations can focus on their specific needs.

Moreover, businesses may use compulsory data localization as a form of reputational boost by highlighting the positive impact it brings to the local economy. Data localization implies that businesses are supporting local industries (local data servers and network infrastructure providers) while ensuring that customers data are safeguarded by locally-formulated policies. These may not be the most attention-grabbing marketing blurbs, but they can have some effective value when reaching out to potential local customers.

To be clear, data localization does not prevent organizations from using cloud services. They can store and process data through cloud solutions in compliance with localization requirements by choosing locally-based cloud providers. As such, both data security and cloud security are determined by local cybersecurity laws. Whether or not this is good for cloud security depends on the quality of local laws and regulations being enforced. It is advisable to view data localization with an open mind to learn to navigate through its challenges and explore opportunities.

Original post:
Data localization and the future of cloud security: challenges and ... - iTWire

This is a guest post by Andy Ng, vice-president and managing director for Asia South and Pacific region at Veritas Technologies

The shift to public cloud adoption is alluring, driven by the promises of increased agility, improved operational efficiency, higher resiliency, and lower costs. However, as organisations transfer more workloads and data to the cloud, many have recognised the need to remain compliant with the plethora of data sovereignty regulations that exist across the globe.

So, what is data sovereignty and why do organisations need to care about it? In simple terms, data sovereignty is the concept that data is subject to the regulations of the country in which it was originally collected. Hence, if you collect data from individuals or organisations in multiple countries, you need to ensure that you process, manage, store, and dispose of that data in accordance with the laws of each country from which it was collected.

Data sovereignty is akin to international travel when we are back at home, we must obey local laws, but when we are travelling, we are required to obey the laws of the country we are located in. If we dont, we risk punishment. Similarly, data sovereignty implies that an enterprise that has data located in multiple countries must make sure they comply with the data privacy laws of each country or risk punishment.

For example, the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stipulates that data collected within the EU can only be transferred to a third country for which the European Commission has determined that there is an adequate level of protection, or otherwise where appropriate safeguards have been put in place. This applies to both data controllers (those responsible for determining why and how data should be processed) and the data processors (those who process the data).

In Singapore, the local equivalent here is the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) the act stipulates that companies can retain personal data if it is still being used for purposes for which the data was collected. But if data is no longer needed for that particular purpose, it must be deleted. These are just two examples of over 100 different regulations governing data sovereignty globally.

The advent of cloud has forced data sovereignty to centre stage as its dispersed nature has broken down many of the traditional geopolitical barriers limiting the storage of data across borders. The transformation to multi-cloud where enterprises rely on not just one, but multiple cloud service providers delivers benefits to enterprises but also serves to increase the risk that data could extend knowingly or not into different regions with different data sovereignty laws.

Put simply, with the multi-cloud model, organisations dont know or cant control where their data is ultimately being stored or where replicated copies of the data are being pushed to. Even if organisations can stipulate the country where data is stored and processed, there may be a risk that the cloud service provider could be subject to regulations that would require them to provide third parties access to certain types of data. As such, organisations could be breaking their data sovereignty and privacy obligations without even knowing it and the impact of failing to adhere to data sovereignty regulations can be severe.

Under the GDPR, for example, the maximum fine for non-compliance is $20m or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is larger. Just look at some of theGDPR-related fines companies have faced in the past two years. In Singapore, the financial penalty cap for breaches under the PDPA has increased from S$1m, to 10% of the organisations annual turnover in Singapore for organisations with annual local turnover exceeding S$10m, whichever is higher.

So, how should organisations address the challenges of data sovereignty? At the highest level, there are four basic steps:

In a nutshell, data sovereignty should be a consideration for any organisation that is storing or processing data in the cloud. Making sure your data, including your backup data, is compliant wherever it may reside is your responsibility. Never just assume someone else is doing that for you. With careful research, clear policies, and the right technical controls, you can build a compliance model consistent with the data sovereignty regulations in all the jurisdictions in which you operate.

Go here to see the original:
Tackling the challenges of data sovereignty in a multi-cloud world - ComputerWeekly.com