Data may be moving to the cloud, but understanding the physical geography underlying the cloud is becoming increasingly critical. October's decision by the European Court of Justice, striking down key portions of the Safe Harbor rules that some companies had relied on to legally transfer personal data between Europe and the U.S., was only the latest example of the regulatory uncertainty involved in cross-border data flows. While Internet companies have begun to address challenges at the static geographic points where data is resident, understanding the actual paths that data travels is an important and sometimes overlooked part of the compliance analysis. more
In light of Tuesday's Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions, Datacenter Forum is updating its programme. Ask Tonsgaard Hjordt Brüel (Strategic Consultant, Rambøll), who has been tasked by the Nordic Council of Ministers to analyse the supply, security, and pricing of Nordic energy sources will share his preliminary findings at Datacenter Forum Copenhagen this week. more
It's a familiar story by now: on the 8th of August, 2016, Delta lost power to its Atlanta data center, causing the entire data center to fail. Thousands of flights were cancelled, many more delayed, and tens of thousands of travellers stranded. What's so unusual about this event is in the larger scheme of network engineering, it's not that unusual. If I think back to my time on the Escalation Team at a large vendor, I can think of hundreds of situations like this. And among all those events, there is one point in common: it takes longer to boot the system than it does to fix the initial problem. more
China's notoriously high air pollution levels are a well-documented public-health issue. But pollution also has other less talked about effects. One of them is on the efficiency of data centers in the country. more
I recently followed a webinar session organized by the University of Queensland on the factory of the future. Smart or not, the future will still need factories to make the stuff we humans use every day. One of the discussed questions included: "how will existing production models cope with the staggering and ongoing rate of digital disruption and advanced capabilities?" more
In the physical world of real estate, value is all about location, location, location. In the virtual world of enterprise business, value is all about performance. The catch is that enterprise performance today is often driven by... location, location, location. When it comes to your digital transformation, and the migration of services to the cloud, the location of your data is paramount. To reach a customer looking to complete an on-line purchase or enable a group of employees trying to collaborate on a shared document, data needs... more
Could Brexit spell turbulence for cloud computing? Larry Dignan reporting in ZDNet: "Get ready for the pause in U.K. data center build-outs. The only certainty about the United Kingdom's move to exit the European Union is the cloud computing ecosystem is going to see some turbulence and uncertainty ahead. more
Facebook has announced the construction of a new $220 million (€200 million) data centre in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland. This will be Facebook's sixth data center worldwide and the company's second in Europe, after Luleå in Sweden. more
When valuing a stock, analysts and shareholders evaluate always revenue and profit. Big tech COFs are sitting on assets worth tens of millions of dollars of annual profit (not just revenue, but true profit) in the form of unallocated IPv4 addresses. By not selling or leasing these out, they are incurring expenses to hold them and missing out on tremendous profits. At a 20X multiple (for context, Cisco is trading at nearly 18X earnings, Google at just over 33X earnings, Shopify at well over 700X earnings), big tech CFOs are actively preventing over $250 billion in market capitalization for their shareholders. more
Amidst all the recent reports of data breaches, Gunter Ollmann of IBM Internet Security Systems, has reported today about one particular case which may be the largest data breach to date. Ollmann wirtes: "The media has been full of analysis concerning data breaches over the last couple of weeks, mostly related to the uptick in 2008 reports. While much of this increase can be accounted for by the wider adoption of state legislation that mandates companies to publicly disclose their data breaches, I think it is worth pointing out today's latest disclosure -- which is quite probably the largest breach ever." more
Think your organization is exempt from in-house network abuse? Think again. A CFCA Global Fraud Survey of communication service providers found that dealer fraud was one of the top five methods of fraud, costing $US 3.35 billion annually. In this scenario, customer service representatives (CSRs) or administrators with access to account information may upgrade friends or family to a premium service package or even provide free access to services. more
Responding to market demand for more energy-efficient datacenters, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the completion of its new Broomfield, Colo. datacenter. The largest datacenter consolidation project undertaken in the company's history is expected to save more than $1 million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of CO2 per year in Broomfield. The new Broomfield datacenter follows similar Sun projects completed in Blackwater, UK, Santa Clara, Calif. and Bangalore, India in August 2007. more
Answering questions at the Internet Association's Virtuous Circle conference last week, Secretary Kerry presented the U.S. Department of State's effort to prioritize global digital economy issues abroad in order to reflect the growing importance of these issues in both economic and foreign policy. The State Department has made real progress on this initiative in the last year and hopes to continue our momentum going forward. more
Congestion. Traffic. Two words that draw a visceral response, whether you are commuting to work or managing a network. Managing data traffic used to be easy. Everything was housed in centralized data centers, and all traffic was routed through big, dedicated, effective but expensive "pipes" -- Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) links. When all the applications are at the data center, it makes sense to build private access for all traffic. more
Data generation is all the rage these days. But are you utilizing it to maximize your outcomes? You know that data is indispensable for your business to keep up and outpace the competition. And most leading corporations agree, since statistically, the speed that companies are producing and collecting data is only increasing with 40 zettabytes expected to be created by 2020. The majority of these organizations are then tossing all of this data into data lakes without any real structured methods of extracting some value from it. more
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