Cloud Computing Pioneers: Chris Pinkham

Chris Pinkham

Before Werner Vogels got a cloud infrastructure to evangelize at Amazon, there was Chris Pinkham, designer of Amazon Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2). Actually, designing the Amazon infrastructure was one of those collaborative ventures, like Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google, where two heads are better than one. Pinkham was the project's managing director; Amazon software architect Christopher Brown was lead developer. Together they produced Amazon's first public cloud infrastructure.

It was once thought Amazon Web Services must have sprung out of Amazon.com spare capacity. Not so. Initially they were two separate things, with the cloud merely the tail of the online-merchandising dog.

Amazon.com IT operations manager Jesse Robbins has told the story of how he jealously guarded the retail operation's data centers and didn't let experimenters near them. Pinkham, who gained expertise by running the first Internet service provider in South Africa, had joined Amazon in 2000 as director of its network engineering group, then became VP responsible for IT infrastructure worldwide.

Amazon had been discussing internally the possibility of creating a public-facing, virtualized infrastructure that could be sold as a service. Pinkham was the most likely candidate to pull it off. But "Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa," Robbins once told blogger Carl Brooks, who wrote: "Rather than lose the formidable talent ... Amazon brass cleared the project and off [Pinkham and Brown] went [to work in South Africa] with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of."

Pinkham had the knowledge of how things needed to scale in a Web service environment. Both he and Brown set about exploiting the possibilities of a fully virtualized data center. EC2 was developed with different goals than the retail operation: The customer would have to be able to self-provision a virtual server, receive separate chargeback and have enough control to allow for virtual server launch, load balancing, storage activation and adding services such as database.

The two pulled it off, and Amazon EC2 was born. In 2006 Pinkham left Amazon to start a new company, Nimbula. He now proselytizes its software, Vogels-style, saying it generalizes the Amazon environment for companies to use as a private cloud. Source: Information Week

Cloud Computing : It all began with Hotmail

Consumers utilizing the cloud computing features for enhancing user experience is not a very new practice or concept. As early as in 1996, it all began with the launch of Hotmail  as one of the first web-based email services. It had all all the features that characterize a cloud service: accessible via Internet, cloud-based storage, 24/7 accessible and more. The Facebook  is also a cloud-based service with photo and media hosting capabilities and also offers online games. The list of cloud-enabled services  includes services such as Flickr. The bottom line of cloud computing is the enabling of the consumer to connect and access data when and where they need it.

The other players are using cloud computing for enhancing their service portfolios to meet ever changing customer expectations. An illustration is the Comcast Begins National Launch of X1: Next-Generation Cloud Enabled Television Platform and Introduces The X1 Remote Control App.

The trend is towards cloud enabling of every product and service. Service providers be existing or new entrepreneurs strategically add cloud enhancements and make their offerings "differential" in the market and thus offering unique user experience  

Towards Knowledge in the Cloud

Towards Knowledge in the Cloud

A research paper by Davide Cerri and et.al

Abstract. Knowledge in the form of semantic data is becoming more and more ubiquitous, and the need for scalable, dynamic systems to support collaborative work with such distributed, heterogeneous knowledge rarises. We extend the “data in the cloud” approach that is emerging today to “knowledge in the cloud”, with support for handling semantic information, organizing and finding it efficiently and providing reasoning and quality support. Both the life sciences and emergency response fields are identified as strong potential beneficiaries of having ”knowledge in the cloud”.

Here is the complete paper

Cloud Computing Pioneers- Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels, CTO and VP of Amazon Web Services, joined Amazon in 2004 as director of systems research, coming from a computer science research post at Cornell University. In Holland, he had been a student of some of the leading minds in computing. The late Jim Gray, a Turing Award winner "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation," was a proctor for Vogels' defense of his PhD thesis at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. At Vrije, Vogels' advisers included Andrew Tannenbaum, who wrote standard textbooks on operating systems as well as the code for the Minix operating system, and Henri Bal, a specialist in large, parallel systems.

He became Amazon CTO early in 2005 and later that year was named VP. He's had a vision of a new type of distributed system, one that relied on inexpensive parts but could scale out infinitely, making the Amazon Compute Cloud elastic and not come to a halt if a piece of hardware failed underneath it. He was an advocate of Amazon getting into the business of distributing virtual server computing cycles over the Internet and charging on a basis of time, and got the chance to advocate enterprises adopt it as Amazon's first "outward facing" CTO. He has been a tireless evangelizer for greater use of the Amazon public cloud. His expertise, commitment and credibility were essential to establishing the broad acceptance that Amazon Web Services enjoyed from an early stage.  Source: Information Week

Educational Institutions and Cloud Computing: A Roadmap of Responsibilities

Increasingly, educational institutions and state entities handling student data are hiring outside  companies to perform cloud computing functions related to managing personal information. Daniel J Solove recommend the following points to be considered in discussions with contractors 

The Benefits.

The benefits of cloud computing are that outside entities might be more sophisticated at managing personal data. These entities may be able to manage data more inexpensively and effectively than the educational institution could do itself. In many cases, cloud computing providers can provide better security than the educational institutions can.

The Risks

The risks of cloud computing are that educational institutions no longer have as much control over the personal data. They must rely on the cloud computing provider to have the appropriate practices and policies to ensure that data is properly maintained, handled, used, or disclosed.

The Challenging Role of Data Scientists in Business from Sand Hill

Here is an interesting write up on one of today's hot topics: Data Scientist from TextRadar  

In “Dresner’s Point: Data Scientists Have Keys to the Kingdom,” Howard Dresner discusses the role of the data scientist and brings together comments from a recent Twitter conversation on the topic. The author argues that we clearly do not have enough data scientists given current technology challenges and that it may be easier to train a business person and transform that individual into a data scientist rather than training a technologist with the necessary business skills. Communication skills seem to be at the heart of this perspective:

A data scientist needs more than business analysis, data analysis and communications skills. Such an individual also will need a really deep understanding of the company’s business because consequences definitely will arise from the scientist’s queries and insights. It could even lead to completely transforming a company.

The article concludes that anyone considering a career in data science should be “lionhearted” because they need to be aware of the business and career outcomes of any data insights they present.

Data scientists strive to produce relevant insight that makes data actionable. To do so, the right tools are needed. The Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic can turn unstructured data into actionable information for executives to use for solving business challenges. The platform includes capabilities like taxonomies, ontologies, dynamic navigation and content surfacing, and automated classification to extract facts and insights for smart content development.

Cloud Computing and Big Data

Big data has been hugely topical in the last few years. It has been highly publicised that all types of organisations are experiencing a data explosion, which is putting strain on IT departments to manage and store this vast amount of data. Big data, has therefore, been a significant driver of cloud adoption as companies struggle with how to store, manage and protect this data.

It is critical for organisations to have instant access to these large quantities of data, to successfully achieve their business objectives. However, this is a major challenge for companies, along with effectively analysing this data. Cloud computing enables companies to overcome these challenges, and it could be argued that cloud computing is in fact increasing the demand for real-time business insights, due to data being accessed and consumed through various devices anywhere, at any time.

The capability of cloud alongside the sheer power of big data analytics represents a fascinating fusion of two innovative IT trends, and the full impact of these two trends has yet to be explored.

Explosive data growth has fuelled the market for data analytics and companies readily see an application for cloud here as well. How the two disruptive trends of big data and cloud further transform the IT landscape and the role of the IT department is something that cloud watchers everywhere will be closely observing. For complete reading see here 

Future of Cloud Computing

A recent study by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) revealed that changing government regulations, plausible exit strategies, and international data privacy are the most pressing concerns of business enterprises about to the viability of Cloud Computing adoption.

The study, published as “Cloud Market Maturity,” draws on responses from 250 cloud users in 50 countries, provides unique insight into the future of en-mass cloud adoption by contemporary global business enterprises.

Other points of contention about the cloud include questions of legality, contract solvency, fundamental data ownership, stability of providers, cloud integration with local systems, provider’s credibility, and industry testing and assurance policies. for complete story read here 

BOYD: A New Level of Connectivity

Connectivity goes to next level with Bring Your Own Device ( BOYD). A study confirms that BYOD a global phenomenon. "We found that it is not simply about device usage, but freedom and innovation. It empowers employees to innovate using the tools with which they are most comfortable-how and when they want to work. BYOD also implies new challenges in security. The proliferation of these mobile devices in companies is a fact of life, and this means IT needs to change the way it manages devices. This growth in mobility affects data security, access control, platform maintenance, application support, and much more." Here is the complete story from TOI

Many IT companies are encouraging BYOD (bring your own device) to work. According to an industry survey, firms feel that with techniques like desktop virtualization their earlier concerns like data theft and network problems have been addressed and therefore they are adopting the idea of employees bringing their own devices to work.

The study, which surveyed 1,493 IT and business leaders in India and China, shows that IT leaders are increasingly embracing BYOD in their enterprises. This study was part of networking solutions provider Cisco's initiative to understand acceptance of BYOD among global IT companies in 18 industries.

Employees are turning to BYOD because they want more control of their work experience, leading to more productivity and job satisfaction. They want to work on the device with which they are most comfortable.

Their second desire is to choose when they do what. They want the flexibility to undertake personal activities while at work and to do their work during nontraditional work periods such as nights and weekends. Finally, they want freedom to use the device the way they see fit, including which apps to download.

"The new generation employees are using all kinds of devices, including smartphones and tablets. They feel uncomfortable working on systems given by their IT department. The smartphone penetration is very popular in India," said

Mahesh Gupta, vice president, Borderless Networks, Cisco India and SAARC. "The companies are now in a post-PC world where the network must accommodate new choices at every layer of the stack. These include traditional, mobile, and social applications; multiple operating systems; various server architectures; and mobile devices ranging from tablets to smartphones and other mobility tools," he added.

cloud computing: Training the Next Generation Professionals

The large amount of buzz around cloud computing has prompted many engineering colleges in India to begin a discussion around setting up a Cloud Center of Excellence within their campus.  This appears to be an imperative, not only because these institutes need to train the workforce of tomorrow, but also because it promises to solve some of the resource constraints they face, as well as increase the level of collaboration they seek with other universities. Here is an interesting article by IBM professional

What aspects of cloud computing should students get practical experience with and how should colleges structure this? What is the minimum infrastructure needed to set up a “lab” in which students can get this experience?

Cloud computing is a new paradigm which requires business and IT to get on the same page – to have a common agreement on a final objective and to then align the IT deployment to meet this end. In an academic context, many students dream of writing an application which they can host and build a web business around, it would be most useful for each of them to understand how to do so at every level; to in fact develop and host an application at “webscale” – and by getting basic experience with building each layer of this stack, concurrent with theory in a classroom, understand the tradeoffs at each layer. I believe that this is in fact the best experience – to learn by doing something many cloud professional do in the “real world.”. The complete story can be read here.

A Chines Girl Teaches Cloud Computing to Her Father

For Xu Di, a 25-year-old Beijing resident, teaching her father, 57, how to use the computer was always a difficult job.

"When I told my father how to copy and paste on the computer, he copied on his office computer and tried to paste on his home computer. When he found nothing was pasted, he blamed me for failing to teach him clearly," Xu said. However, cloud computing made a big difference to Xu's life, and her father's.Cloud computing is using computing resources, either hardware or software, that stores and delivers data as a service over the Internet.

With a Chinese cloud client-side application such as Evernote or Jinshan Kuaipan, copying from your office computer and pasting when you get home is possible.

"Photos, videos, contacts what you need to do is just register an account, and you can open anything you need, anytime, on any of your computers and your phones," Xu said.

However, Xu is just one of the Chinese computer users who take advantage of the new technology that has incrceasingly found its way into people's lives. Here the complete story 

Cloud Forensics: Basics

Cloud computing is said to be a game changing technologies in the recent history of computing. Unfortunately, due to its young age, cloud companies don’t have yet any process that allows for a set procedure on how to investigate or go about cloud issues. Due to this absence, they have no means of ensuring the robustness and suitability of cloud services when it comes to supporting investigations of criminal activity.

Introduction

Cloud computing technology has shown massive game-changing potential akin to the ones exhibited by other significant computing technologies such as mainframes, PCs, minicomputers, and even smartphones. It has the ability to radically alter the way information technology services are created, accessed, and manage.

The 2009 F5 cloud computing survey has recently revealed that 66% of IT managers from their sample have dedicated budgets for the cloud, with 71% expecting cloud computing budgets to grow larger over the next two years. On the other hand, the number of crimes related to computers and the Internet has grown over the last decade, which in turn resulted in an equal increase in companies that want to assist law enforcement by using digital evidence to determine the perpetrators, methods, victims, and timing of computer crime. This resulted in digital forensics evolving enough to assure proper representation of cyber crime evidence data in court. However, with storage capacity outpacing network bandwidth and latency improvements, forensic data is starting to grow exponentially to the point that it makes it harder to process them in a timely manner.

With the rise of cloud computing, the problem with scale for digital forensics has been exacerbated, and what’s even worse, it has also created a new avenue for cybercrime investigation with different challenges. Digital forensic practitioners must then try to adopt and extend their digital forensic skills and tools into cloud computing environments as well as help cloud organizations and cloud consumers in establishing and developing forensic capability, as well as reduce cloud security risks. Not doing so will result in a lot of difficulties when it comes to carrying out investigations on critical incidents that happen in the Cloud, including criminal intrusions and policy violations. For definition of cloud forensics and complete details here is link to source article at cloudTimes

To Understand Just How Much The Cloud Will Change The World, Look At Toyota

Cloud computing is changing everything about our world from how we work to how we  manage our health. 

Here is a live example on how cloud computing is transforming a  leading auto manufactures Toyota

The chief information officer for Toyota's U.S. arm, says that the automaker's adoption of cloud technology—Internet-based computing, served up through websites and apps—has freed up his staff to work on more meaningful projects.

Last month, Toyota  freed up more of its  team from desktop-support drudgery when Toyota signed a massive deal with Microsoft Office 365, its cloud alternative to Exchange email and Microsoft Office desktop software. The deal took more than two years, but in the end Toyota is ditching IBM's Lotus Notes and putting its entire worldwide workforce of 200,000 employees on Office 365. For complete details read here 

Company-sponsored computer science courses offer students new way to learn

An engineering college connects projects to industry challenges 

A few School of Engineering and Applied Science courses are enabling Penn students to join the exclusive ranks of those who create internet applications at companies like Google and Facebook.

The courses — Scalable and Cloud Computing, open to undergraduates, and Internet and Web Systems, open to seniors and graduate students — provide the chance to work on the technologies utilized by these top internet companies, which for most is a very difficult task because of the complex science and expensive resources involved.

By providing students with remote access to the large-scale data resources of technology companies, these offerings are unlike traditional computer science courses, which typically only utilize in-house resources.

“You need special techniques to work at systems of such large scale — like the way you program a computer the size of a football field is very different from the way you program a single workstation,” said SEAS assistant professor Andreas Haeberlen, who teaches both courses.

Through Haeberlen’s direct ties to companies like Akamai and indirect connections via his former students who are working at places like Google, Facebook and Amazon, he is able to keep the courses abreast with the rapid changes in technology.

“Grants from Amazon in the form of free credits allow students to use Amazon Web Services — their cloud and web infrastructure for their homework and projects,” Haeberlen explained.

For their final project in the spring, the students in the upper-level course used Amazon’s resources to create a cloud-based search engine, or a “mini-Google.” For the undergraduate-level course, which is currently in session, students are in the process of creating their own social networking sites like Facebook.

Last semester, Google sponsored an award for the best project in Internet and Web Systems, and this semester, Facebook is sponsoring an award for the best project in Scalable and Cloud Computing.

The prospect of interacting with engineers at these firms — along with the doors these relationships might open for jobs — is a primary motivation for many of the students.

“Having Google engineers judge your search engine is a very giddy feeling,” said 2012 Engineering masters recipient Siddartha Sengupta, who is currently working as a technology analyst at Bank of America.

Students who have taken these classes claim that they are some of the most difficult — and yet most rewarding — courses they have taken career-wise.

“Being a telecom major, it was difficult for me to get into top software firms. I created a search engine for this course, and the things I picked up doing that helped me get into Electronic Arts,” said 2012 Engineering masters recipient Nikhil Menon, who is currently a software developer at EA.

The courses also feature guest lectures from engineers at large firms, many of whom had taken these very courses during their time at Penn.

Industry ties and the prospect of working with cutting-edge technology has added to the growing popularity of these courses. According to Haeberlen, Internet and Web Systems grew from 39 students in 2010 to 88 in 2012, and Scalable and Cloud Computing went from 11 to 44 over the same time period.

“In the course evaluations, the two most common responses I get are ‘this was the hardest course I’ve ever taken’ and ‘this was the best course I’ve ever taken,’” Haeberlen said.

Measuring Cloud Services

Cloud-based services may be a darn sight cheaper than on-premise alternatives, but over time, costs can escalate.

Cloudability, the startup with a service to monitor the costs of your company’s cloud-based infrastructure, has launched its analytics tool. This enables anyone within the organization to continuously improve the way they are using cloud tools, and ensure that spending for these services does not go unmonitored.

Startups with lean budgets can sign up for free and Cloudability will pull up invoice and billing data (not estimated data, as is the industry norm) from cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

The product has been in beta for over a year and is used by 4,000 customers, ranging from tiny startups to larger businesses. Cloudability offers a free service, but enterprises will need to fork over in excess of $50 per month to manage multiple cloud accounts. It has come as a surprise to the founders that the enterprise service is growing fastest; corporate finances desperately need to be kept in check. For more details see here 

Cloud Computing for Lawyers: How the Legal Industry Can Benefit from the Cloud

As cloud computing continues to soar sky high as an efficient and effective means of storing and transmitting data, legal practices are beginning to make use of the technology to streamline the way they do business. A professional has answered a few of the concerns our legal clients have raised when it comes to switching over to a cloud computing service and assessed the benefits of merging to the cloud. For complete story see here 

Cloud apps mean developing in days, not months: IBM

Here is a speech on the nature of cloud development by an IBM expert 

This shift toward applications that begin life in the cloud has changed the way that businesses need to develop, Carr said. He explained that while cloud is certainly about moving or using "systems of records" applications such as SAP, enterprise resource planning, and human resource management systems in the cloud, newer "systems of engagement" applications have a completely different application-development life cycle.

"There's a new class of tools. There's a lot of buzz about Hadoop, big data, PHP. Not what I typically see in big enterprises. Ruby, Python; these are all sort of these new scripting tooling that a new generation of developers are using to get things done."

He said that previously, a company might have a developer team of about a hundred people to produce such a product, but when looking at a system of engagement today, a small team of developers does the same.

And they're doing it faster. Previously, developers would spend months, even years, on an enterprise-grade application. Carr said that this needs to come down to days or weeks.

Similarly, he said that these heavy tools would take months to integrate into an organisation's business practices, but this model simply couldn't work with newer applications.

"We need to do this in a continuous way. We need to continuously release. We need to deploy, not only applications very quickly, but we need to be able to deploy our infrastructure very quickly."

The infrastructure itself also plays a different role in these new applications, Carr said, and that while systems of records applications rely on the underlying infrastructure for availability and reliability, that wasn't necessarily the case for newer systems of engagement.

"These things are built in to the application. We're looking for continuous availability and scalability," he said.

How Amazon started Cloud Computing ?

Once upon a time, Amazon was a dot-com-era technology company best known for selling books. Then, in 2003 and 2004, Amazon wanted to streamline its internal process between the programmers and the hardware engineers. It was a move that many other companies were taking, but an Amazon engineer had a brilliant idea: Why not use the same project to design an application that could rent chunks of Amazon’s computing facilities to customers?

On August 24, 2006, the public beta of Amazon’s “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). And so, the ability to rent computing capacity managed by someone else was born. It was a gamble that has, so far, paid off. Amazon includes IaaS revenue in a larger unit called Amazon Web Service, which includes other cloud products. That, in turn, is under a part of the financial reports that includes non-cloud  products called “other.” Besides Amazon Web Service, Amazon’s other revenue includes non-retail activities, such as marketing and promotional activities, co-branded credit card agreements, and other seller sites. Yet most analysts studying the industry believe that the mass majority of the “other” is cloud computing, and the growth is stunning - complete story

Power of Cloud

The cloud allows professionals in any industry to extend their desktops with greater mobility, enhanced capabilities and more computing power – ultimately enabling them to do things they were never able to do before. While storage is an easy entry point into the cloud, we envision designers and engineers using the cloud for more refined capabilities such as high performance rendering, design optimization. simulation and collaboration that were once the exclusive domain of organisations with access to local high-end computing resources. Using the cloud for collaboration and compute-intensive tasks is not only easy to incorporate into one's workflow, but it will help to reduce costs and increase productivity.

Education Clouds

Education Clouds: Cloud Computing West 2012 Conference from Gigi Johnson

Twitter for Teachers

Here are three tips from an expert   to teachers who intend to use Twitter as part their teaching process. 

1. Spend your early time on Twitter following important educational hashtags:One of the things that teachers new to Twitter often misunderstand is that following individuals isn’t the only — or even the best — way to access useful information in the service. Instead, consider using Twitter’s search tool to follow conversations organized around hashtags.

Educators have embraced hashtags — unique identifiers that start with the # sign — as a way to efficiently share information with each other. Elementary school teachers add #elemchat, principals add #cpchat and math teachers add #mathchat to the ends of their messages to make the content they are sharing easy for everyone to find. Searching for the hashtags related to your field — a process facilitated by retired teacher librarian Jerry Blumengarten, who maintains an exhaustive list of educational hashtags on his website — can instantly connect you with a constantly refreshed list of new ideas worth exploring.

Following the hash-tagged resources that are filtered and sorted by other teachers will make the early time that you spend in Twitter worthwhile — and if the early time that you spend in Twitter is worthwhile, you’ll be more likely to continue tinkering with the service.

2. Persuade colleagues to join Twitter with you: The loneliest moments that I spent in Twitter were the first few weeks after signing up when I had eight followers and hadn’t ever heard of educational hashtags. Every post that I made — whether I was asking questions, sharing resources or looking for help with a specific challenge — seemed like a complete waste of time because no one ever responded. “How is this a social media service?” I’d think, “if no one is even seeing anything that I write.”

The mistake that I’d made was joining Twitter alone and hoping that people would magically find — and then start networking with — me.

I probably should have known better, right?

After all, that’s not how networking happens in real life. New people aren’t lined up at my front door every morning waiting to answer my questions or to lend a helping hand. In fact, when I need a helping hand, I almost always turn first to the people that I already have close relationships with.

If you want your Twitter network to feel vibrant and alive from Day One, you should persuade some of your closest professional colleagues to join the service with you. Doing so guarantees that someone really WILL be listening when you post early questions or share early resources — and every time they respond to a message that you’ve sent, you’ll learn a little more about the social potential of Twitter.

 3. Remember that you build relationships in Twitter one good deed at a time:  The final reminder that I give to Twitter rookies is that building meaningful relationships with people that you’ve never met before depends on the same kinds of core behaviors that you use to build relationships in real life.

Want a responsive network that offers you just-in-time support and quick answers to important questions? Then start by being responsive and offering quick answers to other people’s important questions! Spend time each day and/or week sifting through the streams of messages being shared by people that you are following and find ways to lend a hand.

Teaching: Changing Paradigms

Last week, Antioch University announced its intention to allow students to take credit-bearing classes based on some of the courses offered on Coursera. Until now, online courses have been used primarily in one of two ways: as MOOCs (non-credit-bearing classes open to anyone), and within the academic institutions producing these classes, to support a “flipped classroom” model for their own registered students.

The Antioch model reflects a third paradigm, in which one institution uses courses produced by another as the basis for a credit-bearing class. In this model, the online content is generally “ wrapped” with some face-to-face class time by a local instructor, who can facilitate discussion, answer questions, ensure that  more details here 

Professor Charles Border discusses research and teaching methods in cloud computing

The Cloud is expanding the reach and ability of users around the world, and Charles Border is an enthusiastic advocate of the cloud in education and beyond. He is preparing his students to create cloud systems that allow users all over the world to take advantage of many different types of applications and data sets without specialized equipment or software.

Teaching with Facebook: A Teacher shares experience

Deborah Lemon shares how she uses a private Facebook group to teach Spanish fully online and in a blended format. I must say, I was impressed and inspired! I've found myself thinking long and hard about some of the examples she shared in the Hangout. Deborah's point, to me, is that Facebook allows for her to seamlessly and fluidly interact with her students but also, and perhaps more importantly, the students can spontaneously stream their lives and experiences through their feed updates, functioning as authentic assessments. As Deborah explained to me, this type of fluid connection to students is essential when teaching a foreign language. 

 For example, (you'll see this in the video) Deborah showed a video of a student who set up her smartphone phone and recorded herself interacting with customers at her place of employment -- using the spanish skills she had just learned in class. Deborah likens the video clips that the students share in the Facebook microblog feed to an ePortfolio. Nearly all college students are on Facebook already so having them shift to a private FB group to share their spanish skills with their phones makes a lot more sense than requiring them to get to a computer and log into Blackboard or Moodle. To me, I had always been a bit stand offish about microblogging because it's so fragmented but Deborah demonstrated how the Facebook Group function provides a simple way to sort the contributions made by each student. This gives a comprehensive view of the students' activities in one place. Deborah covers a lot of other important topics including dealing with reluctant Facebook users (which is very rare, she says) and archiving content. I find myself thinking about how using social technologies push us, as teachers, into new and unexpected territory. We might start using a social technology for one particular reason but what blossoms from there is the exciting and unimaginable part -- that's the piece that we need to be cultivating and that's the piece that will not happen in traditional course management systems. Finally, Deborah invites you all to join her Facebook Group "Using Groups for Teaching." In this group, you'll find lots of tips and resources for learning about how to teach with Facebook, as well as the chance to interact with other like-minded educators. To check it out, go to Facebook.com, sign in, search for "Using Groups for Teaching" using the search box at the top, and click "Join group.

Three Reasons why Cloud Computing to be used in education?

We live in a world where demands are increasing and supplies are shrinking. Secondly even the available resources are not always optimally used.  In many institutions, there is a too much demand for classroom/labs on particular time of the day or in a particular semester and less or no demand on the other times or semesters. In my own college, I have seen no class room is being occupied during the afternoon or no session is held in a lab for entire semester.  With the idea of on-demand provision of resources, cloud computing can over come these challenges and thus help institution optimize their resources. 

• Optimal use of resources: In a world that is filled with problems that revolve around classrooms being too small for the number of students belonging to a particular class, use of cloud computing as means to educate them formally is definitely welcome. Not only do the lecturers not have to worry about cramming students into a small class but with the help of this technology, they can focus their attention on creating content that will ultimately help develop their students’ skills and knowledge. Moreover, this technology also allows teachers to minimize their workload by using distributed work management systems, which will definitely improve efficiency.

• Improves collaboration amongst students: Cloud computing encourages students to work together as a team. Assignments can be completed in the virtual world by working together, which is both fun and efficient. Moreover, for shy students who do not welcome discussion groups and open forums, this technology allows them a certain amount of shelter whilst allowing them to work as a team and grow. Ascertaining progress of students is also done easily with the help of cloud computing techniques.

• Easy access to knowledge and better sharing: Cloud computing also helps make available the necessary tools and materials that are required for learning at all times. Moreover, students can access this material from anywhere in the world, and at their convenience, which makes knowledge sharing truly global.

Karnataka State Law University may use cloud computing to plug question paper leaks

To ensure transparency, prevent third party interference and leakage of question papers during examination, the Karnataka State Law University (KSLU), Hubli, is planning to upload question papers on cloud computing instead of physically sending question paper bundles to colleges. 

But in this process of setting the question papers by college staff, printing and transporting the question papers, there are several opportunities for leaking the question papers by the printing press staff, college staff or transporters. In many cases, it was found that printing press staff and transport staff leaked the question papers allegedly in collusion with college staff. 

To plug these leaks, KSLU has now decided to upload the question papers of all subjects on cloud computing 20 minutes before the exam. Colleges can then download the question paper, take a print out and make photocopies of it for distributing it to the students.  See here for more details

Teaching in Turbulent Times.

Web 2.0 is one of the most prominent business models for information systems available today. It brings together technology and social networks, and the interactivity that creates business value. Like business even education can also benefits from it.However, today the ability of educators to use , create content and communicate on the web is limited by complexity and sophistication of the range of web 2.0 tools available. Some of the challenges teachers face in using web 2.0 tools are

• Most of teachers find web 2.0 tools confusing and frieghtening
• Many tools exists and teachers do not have time nor expertise to discover, identify and use best tools to meet their specific teaching needs. ( Maths teacher needs different tools that the one who teacher social studies)
• Most students are well versed with web tools and communication. They use and communicate easily and openly using web 2.0 tools.
• There is a technology gap between teachers and students and it is growing .
• These web 2.0 tools have pedagogical value and contribution to make towards enhancing teaching and learning experience.
• web 2.0 tools enable sharing, communication and knowledge discovery that teachers can use to provide more motivating , engaging, experimental  relevant and collaborative environment for students. 

With this mind, One can find out that there is a need for 

• understanding web 2.0 's potential to be used in education
• developing a pedagogy for integrating web 2.0 tools into teaching and learning process

I am currently working towards this end.

CSA offers guidance for Security as a Service

Security as a Service (SecaaS or SaaS) is a cloud computing model that delivers managed security services over the Internet. SecaaS is based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model but limited to specialized information security services.

The new report, prepared by the SecaaS Working Group, provides guidance for best practices on “how to evaluate, architect and deploy cloud-based SIEM services to both enterprise and cloud-based networks, infrastructure and applications,” it said.

Numerous security vendors are now leveraging cloud-based models to deliver security solutions – a shift has occurred for a variety of reasons, including greater economies of scale and streamlined delivery mechanisms. As a result, businesses of all sizes are now faced with evaluating security solutions which run in a hosted or web-delivered environment rather than on-premises. The CSA maintains that IT managers need to understand the unique nature of cloud-delivered security offerings so that they are in a position to evaluate the offerings and to understand if they will meet their needs.

"In many conversations with IT leaders today we discovered a common problem: they need a simple way to understand systems, processes, current policies and procedures and be able to evaluate how the cloud may help them realize lower IT security costs, improve best practices, and perhaps most importantly, communicate that to their management team," said John Howe, COO at the CSA, in a blog post. "After all, a move to the cloud needs to be a strategic one."

To that end, the main thrust of the new research is to simply define what SecaaS means to organizations and provide guidance on how these new practices should be best implemented, according to Jim Reavis, co-founder and executive director for the CSA.

Cloud Security Solutions

“Potential cloud users worry about two things about information protection in the cloud – protecting it from other tenants and protecting it from the cloud provider,” Neil MacDonald, vice president and fellow at IT research firm Gartner, said in a statement. “Encryption is one protection option; however, when the encryption keys are used, data is at risk at that point. A solution that works completely in the cloud, yet is able to keep the keys protected in memory would help reduce the scope of a possible breach entry point.”

The Virtual Private Data (VPD) cloud-based data encryption solution uses a homomorphic key-encryption approach and encrypts the entire data layer

Cloud security specialist Porticor announced on Oct. 30 the availability of its cloud-based data encryption solution, Virtual Private Data (VPD), which is designed to protect public, private and hybrid cloud data while stored and in use. The solution is currently available directly from Porticor through the company’s website. The VPD is deployed in the cloud and managed from Porticor’s customer portal, with pricing starting at $65 per month per Porticor Virtual Appliance.

The company’s patented Virtual Key Management service, with split-key encryption technology, keeps encryption keys in the organization’s control, delivering a cloud-based key management system for cloud data at rest. In addition, Porticor keeps the master encryption keys fully encrypted and secured even while being used to access cloud data.

“Potential cloud users worry about two things about information protection in the cloud – protecting it from other tenants and protecting it from the cloud provider,” Neil MacDonald, vice president and fellow at IT research firm Gartner, said in a statement. “Encryption is one protection option; however, when the encryption keys are used, data is at risk at that point. A solution that works completely in the cloud, yet is able to keep the keys protected in memory would help reduce the scope of a possible breach entry point.”

The platform, made up of the Porticor Virtual Appliance and the Porticor Virtual Key Management Service, uses a homomorphic key-encryption approach, a technique that enables mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data. Porticor technology implements partially homomorphic encryption techniques for combining and splitting encryption keys, enabling the VPD system to give the application access to the data store without exposing the master keys in an unencrypted state. It also ensures that if a master key is stolen, it can still never be used to access a data store.

Porticor encrypts the entire data layer including virtual disks, databases, files and distributed storage, and has a minimal impact on application performance or latency. Organizations can create as many Porticor appliances or agents as necessary, and in addition to a management user interface, the company also offers a secure cloud-based application programming interface (API).

“With this release, Porticor enhances the high levels of trust it was already infusing into the cloud with our split-key method to now fully protect cloud data at rest and in use,” Portico fonder and CEO Gilad Parann-Nissany, said in a statement. “Now, organizations can trust their data to the cloud, knowing that their data encryption keys are kept private 100-percent of the time.  Because the encryption keys are never exposed to risk, Porticor’s cloud data security system delivers the highest levels of data security available on premise or in the cloud.” For complete story read here