A California lawsuit suggests the government must take stronger steps to give protection to government data from data mining and user profiling by cloud service providers. In the technology-rich world we are living in, it is important for everybody to appreciate how their data is processed and used. For the federal government, it’s arguably much more important, given the large amounts of sensitive citizen data it possesses and stores. As we move to more sophisticated, data-driven technological environments equivalent to the cloud, it’s imperative that each one government entities become hypervigilant about with the intention that vendors are handling this knowledge appropriately. i’m not the primary person to claim this, and that i will definitely not be the last. Recent disclosures in a California lawsuit have raised several red flags about how government data may be utilized by cloud vendors — particularly vendors with business models that rely heavily on advertising revenue and monetizing user data. The lawsuit alleges that Google violated federal and state... Read More »

Tech companies, advocacy groups, and Internet users rally to demand that governments limit online surveillance. 20 Great Ideas To Steal (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) On Tuesday, a coalition of businesses and advocacy groups have scheduled a sequence of events around the globe to induce governments to reform surveillance practices. The protest against mass surveillance, inspired by the months of revelations in regards to the reach of america National Security Agency and designated “The Day We Fight Back,” was announced last month at the anniversary of the death of technology activist Aaron Swartz. It’s also intended as a reminder of the defeat two years ago of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a up to date high-water mark for online activism. By midday Pacific Time, the coalition’s website said that it has facilitated more than 37,900 calls and over 86,000 emails to legislators. A Google seek for the JavaScript code particular to the coalition’s protest banners suggests almost 1,000 of them has been put on websites.... Read More »

The price of cloud computing should keep pace with the falling price of hardware, Google insists. 8 Data Centers For Cloud’s Toughest Jobs (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Taking aim at Amazon Web Services, Google on Tuesday slashed the pricing of its Cloud Platform services and introduced new offerings to tempt developers to deploy their applications inside the company’s datacenters. At an industry event in San Francisco, Urs Hölzle, senior VP of technical infrastructure at Google, said that during the last eight years, a niche has emerged between the price of cloud computing services and the hardware used to deliver these services. Cloud service costs have declined only 6% to eight% per year on average in this period while hardware costs have fallen 20% to 30% per year, he explained. “We do not think this gap should really exist,” Hölzle said. “We believe the cost of virtualized hardware should follow an analogous price as real hardware.” To bring cloud computing costs towards where they... Read More »

“The Visual Organization” author Phil Simon discusses data visualization tools and their power to modify business conversations. Big data may be big chaos. But finding clarity — and business opportunities — in that chaos hasn’t ever been more important. Presenting data clearly and visually is now as important as finding it. Enter data visualization tools that create heat maps, data relationship trees, and geospatial overlays. They offer visual how you can explain a sales trend to the CEO in a couple of minutes. They turn data right into a conversation. This is the timely subject of Too Big To disregard author Phil Simon’s upcoming book, The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the hunt for Better Decisions (Wiley, 2014), due out next month. Simon sat down with InformationWeek to debate the right way to become more of a “visual organization,” the perils of being a big data laggard, and more. IW: Phil, you emphasize in your book, The Visual Organization, that data visibleization is... Read More »

DevOps pushes two differing cultures together — developers and operations — nevertheless it gives IT a fighting chance at maintaining with the business. A recent survey means that companies practicing DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently than others. i am not surprised. Formerly few years, we have seen at Rackspace a surge renowned from customers who like to deploy massive amounts of code — weekly, daily, even hourly. Most of them do it using a DevOps approach, a technique we now have embraced as a corporation.   When we started offering a DevOps support service late last year, we did it with the conviction born of our own company’s experience. Using DevOps at Rackspace in an average year, we push code into production greater than 2,500 times, launch about 20 new cloud products, and run greater than 15,000 automated tests. In the pre-cloud world, that might never had been possible. In actual fact, there wasn’t much incentive to work at such speed and scale.... Read More »