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4 emerging Data Storage Technologies to Watch

Many companies are facing the big data problem: spates of data waiting to be assorted, stored, and managed. When it comes to large IT corporations, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, data is always on the rise. Today, the entire digital infrastructure of the world holds over 2.7 zetabytes of data—that’s over 2.7 billion terabytes. Such magnitude of data is stored using magnetic recording technologies used on high-density hard drives, SAN, NAS, cloud storage, object storage, and such other technologies. How is this achieved? What are the magnetic and optical recording technologies rising in popularity these days? Let’s find out.The oldest magnetic recording technology, which is still in use, is known as perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) that made its appearance way back in 1976. This is the widespread recording technology used by most of the hard drives available today. May it be Western Digital, HGST, or Seagate, the technology used is PMR. The technology has the capability to store up to a density of 1 TB per square inch. But the data is still flowing in relentlessly, and that’s the reason why companies are investing in R&D to come up with higher-density hard drives.1. Shingled Magnetic RecordingLast year, Seagate announced their hard disks using a new magnetic recording technology known as SMR (shingled magnetic recording). This achieves about 25 percent increase in the data per square inch of a hard disk. That’s quite a whopping jump, one might say. This, according to Seagate, is achieved by overlapping the data tracks on a hard drive quite like shingles on a roof.By the first quarter of this year, Seagate was shipping SMR hard drives to select customers. Some of these drives come with around 8 TB of storage capacity. Not only Seagate but other companies such as HGST will be offering SMR drives in the next two years.2. Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) aka Thermally Assisted Magnetic Recording (TAMR)When it comes to HAMR, learn about a phenomenon known as superparamagnetic effect. As hard drives become denser and the data access becomes faster, there is ample possibility of data corruption. In order to avoid the data corruption, density of hard drives has to be limited. Older longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR) devices (tape drives) have a limit of 100 to 200 Gb per square inch; PMR drives have a limit of about 1 TB per square inch.When it comes to HAMR, a small laser heats up the part of hard disk being written, thus eliminating the superparamagnetic effect temporarily. This technology allows recording on much smaller scales, so as to increase the disk densities by ten or hundred times. For a long time, HAMR was considered a theoretical technology, quite difficult, if not impossible, to realize. However, now several companies including Western Digital, TDK, HGST, and Seagate are conducting research on HAMR technology. Some demonstrations of working hard drives using HAMR have happened since 2012. By 2016, you may be able to see several HAMR hard drives in the market.3. Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR)Using tunnel magnetoresistance technologies, hard disk manufacturers can achieve higher densities with greater signal output providing higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This technology works closely with ramp load/unload technology, which is an improvement over traditional contact start-stop (CSS) technology used on magnetic write heads. These technologies provide benefits like greater disk density, lower power usage, enhanced shock tolerance, and durability. Several companies, including WD and HGST, will be providing storage devices based on this technology in the coming days.4. Holographic Data StorageHolographic data storage technology existed as far back as 2002. However, not much research was done on this desirable data storage technology. In theory, the advantages of holographic data storage are manifold: hundreds of terabytes of data can be stored in a medium as small as a sugar cube; parallel data reading makes data reading hundreds of times faster; data can also be stored without corruption for many years. However, this technology is far from perfect. In the coming years, you may get to see quite a bit of research and development in this area, resulting in high-density storage devices.ConclusionGartner reports that over 4.4 million IT jobs will be created by the big data surge by 2015. A huge number of IT professionals and data storage researchers will be working on technologies to improve the storage in the coming years. Without enhancing our storage technologies, it will become difficult to improve the gadgets we have today.Research Sources:http://www.computerworld.com/article/2495700/data-center/new-storage-technologies-to-deal-with-the-data-deluge.php2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording3. http://www.in.techradar.com/news/computing-components/storage/Whatever-happened-to-holographic-storage/articleshow/38985412.cms4. http://asia.stanford.edu/events/spring08/slides402s/0410-dasher.pdf5. https://www.nhk.or.jp/strl/publica/bt/en/ch0040.pdf6. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2014/feb/27/data-stored-in-magnetic-holograms7. http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Holographic-data-storage-pushes-into-the-third-dimension8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_data_storage9. http://www.cap.ca/sites/cap.ca/files/article/1714/jan11-offprint-plumer.pdf

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7 Best Practices for Data Backup and Recovery – The Insurance Your Organization Needs

In our current digital age, data backup is something that all business leaders and professionals should be paying attention to. All organizations are at risk for data loss, whether it’s through accidental deletion, natural disasters, or cyberattacks. When your company’s data is lost, it can be incredibly costly—not just in terms of the money you might lose but also the time and resources you’ll need to dedicate to rebuilding your infrastructure.Network outages and human error account for 50% and 45% of downtime, respectivelyThe average cost of downtime for companies of all sizes is almost $4,500/minute44% of data, on average, was unrecoverable after a ransomware attackSource: https://ontech.com/data-backup-statistics-2022/The above downtime and ransomware statistics help you better understand the true nature of threats that businesses and organizations face today. Therefore, it’s important to have a data backup solution in place. So, what is data backup and disaster recovery, and what best practices should you use to keep your data secure? Let’s find out!What Is Data Backup?Data backup is creating a copy of the existing data and storing it at another location. The focus of backing up data is to use it if the original information is lost, deleted, inaccessible, corrupted, or stolen. With data backup, you can always restore the original data if any data loss happens. Data backup is the most critical step during any large-scale edit to a database, computer, or website.Why Is Data Backup the Insurance You Need?You can lose your precious data for numerous reasons, and without backup data, data recovery will be expensive, time-consuming, and at times, impossible. Data storage is getting cheaper with every passing day, but that should not be an encouragement to waste space. To create an effective backup strategy for different types of data and systems, ask yourself:Which data is most critical to you, and how often should you back up?Which data should be archived? If you’re not likely to use the information often, you may want to put it in archive storage, which is usually inexpensive.What systems must stay running? Based on business needs, each system has a different tolerance for downtime.Prioritize not just the data you want to restore first but also the systems, so you can be confident they’ll be up and running first.7 Best Practices for Data Backup and RecoveryWith a data backup strategy in place for your business, you can have a good night’s sleep without worrying about the customer and organizational data security. In a time of cyberthreat, creating random data backup is not enough. Organizations must have a solid and consistent data backup policy.The following are the best practices you can follow to create a robust data backup:Regular and Frequent Data Backup:The rule of thumb is to perform data backup regularly without lengthy intervals between instances. Performing a data backup every 24 hours, or if not possible, at least once a week, should be standard practice. If your business handles mission-critical data, you should perform a backup in real time. Perform your backups manually or set automatic backups to be performed at an interval of your preference.Prioritize Offsite Storage: If you back up your data in a single site, go for offsite storage. It can be a cloud-based platform or a physical server located away from your office. This will offer you a great advantage and protect your data if your central server gets compromised. A natural disaster can devastate your onsite server, but an offsite backup will stay safe.Follow the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: The 3-2-1 rule of data backup states that your organization should always keep three copies of their data, out of which two are stored locally but on different media types, with at least one copy stored offsite. An organization using the 3-2-1 technique should back up to a local backup storage system, copy that data to another backup storage system, and replicate that data in another location. In the modern data center, counting a set of storage snapshots as one of those three copies is acceptable, even though it is on the primary storage system and dependent on the primary storage system’s health.Use Cloud Backup with Intelligence: Organizations should demonstrate caution while moving any data to the cloud. The need for caution becomes more evident in the case of backup data since the organization is essentially renting idle storage. While cloud backup comes at an attractive upfront cost, long-term cloud costs can swell up with time. Paying repeatedly for the same 100 TBs of data for storage can eventually become more costly than owning 100 TB of storage.Encrypt Backup Data: Data encryption should also be your priority apart from the data backup platform. Encryption ensures an added layer of security to the data protection against data theft and corruption. Encrypting the backup data makes the data inaccessible to unauthorized individuals and protects the data from tampering during transit. According to Enterprise Apps Today, 2 out of 3 midsize companies were affected by ransomware in the past 18 months. Your IT admin or data backup service providers can confirm if your backup data is getting encrypted or not.Understand Your Recovery Objective:Without recovery objectives in place, creating a plan for an effective data backup strategy is not easy. The following two metrics are the foundation related to every decision about backup. They will help you lay out a plan and define the actions you must take to reduce downtime in case of an event failure. Determine your:Recovery Time Objectives:How fast must you recover before downtime becomes too expensive to bear?Recovery Point Objectives:How much amount of data can you afford to lose? Just 15-minutes’ worth? An hour? A day? RPO will help you determine how often you should take backups to minimize the data lost between your last backup and an event failure.Optimize Remediation Workflows: Backup remediation has always been highly manual, even in the on-prem world. Identifying the backup failure event, creating tickets, and exploring the failure issues take a long time. You should consider ways to optimize and streamline your data backup remediation workflows. You should focus on implementing intelligent triggers to auto-create and auto-populate tickets and smart triggers to auto-close tickets based on meeting specific criteria. Implementing this will centralize ticket management and decrease failure events and successful remediation time drastically.Conclusion: Data backup is a critical process for any business, large or small. By following the practices mentioned above, you can ensure your data is backed up regularly and you protect yourself from losing critical information in the event of a disaster or system failure. In addition to peace of mind, there are several other benefits to using a data backup solution.Connect with Aziro (formerly MSys Technologies) today to learn more about our best-in-class data backup and disaster recovery services and how we can help you protect your business’s most important asset: its data.Don’t Wait Until it’s too Late – Connect With us Now!

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AI/ML for Archival Storage in Quartz Glass

Data plays a crucial part in our modern communication world and daily life. As the usage of our data increases, exponential, users and customers are looking for long term efficient storage mechanisms. It’s evident that our existing storage technologies have a limited lifetime. From the below diagram, we can concur that there is a gap between data generation vs data storage. So, the need of the hour is to find technologies that will store data for a long period of time, at affordable cost and enhanced performance.Data storage in quartz glass is the upcoming new technology which addresses the limitations of the current ones. In this blog, we can see about this new technology in detail.Data storage:We all know, we can store the data in HDD, SSD and Tape drive. Each having its own Pros and cons. Based on the user requirement, cost, Performance and other factors we can choose it. Based on the temperature, we can categorize the data as Hot, Warm and Cold.For Hot data -> we use SSD,For Warm Data -> we use HDD andFor Cold data -> we use Tape DrivesArchival storage: Tape driveData archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention. Archive data consists of older data that remains important to the organization or must be retained for future reference.Need for Archival Storage: Keep the data safe and secure, Pass the information to future generations.Because of Low Cost and long archival stability, the Tape drive is the best option for Archival storage.The lifetime of Magnetic tape is around five to seven years. So, we need to Proactively migrate data to avoid any degradation issues as Regular Data migration results in high cost as the year goes on.A tape drive is Long-lasting, but they still can’t guarantee data safety over a long period of time, and it has high latency. Due to this, Archival storage is a big concern as the amount of data in the world grows. A solution to overcome this problem – To keep the data safely and securely and for over a long period of time?New Medium for Data Storage – Quartz glass.Quartz glass: Data storageQuartz is the most common form of crystalline silica and Second most common mineral on the earth’s surface, so it’s widely available and cost also less. It withstands extreme environmental conditions and doesn’t need any special environment like energy-intensive air conditioning. We are writing data in the glass (Not on the Glass). It means that even if something happens to the outer surface of the Quartz crystal, still we can able to retrieve the data. In general, we call it a WORM – Write Once Read Many.In Quartz glass, we can retain the data even after being put the glass in boiling water, put in a flame, or scratched the outer surface of the glass. Data always exists, even after 1000s of years.Tape and hard disks were designed before the cloud existed and both of them have limitations around temperature, humidity, air quality, and life-span.In Quartz glass, we can Access data non-sequentially, which is one of the best advantages when compared to a Tape drive, where we can access the data sequentially, which takes more time to retrieve the data.Data write in Quartz glass:By using Ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence, we are storing data in quartz glass. Femtosecond lasers — ones that emit ultrashort optical pulses and that are commonly used in LASIK surgery — permanently change the structure of the glass so that the data can be preserved over a long period of time. A laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles.Data Read in Quartz glass:A special device – Computer-controlled microscope is used to read the data. A Piece of Quartz glass is placed in the read head and to begin with, it focuses on the layer of interest, and a set of polarization images are taken. These images are then processed to determine the orientation and size of the voxels. The process is then repeated for other layers. The images are fused using machine learning. To read the data back, machine learning algorithms decode the patterns created when polarized light shines through the glass. ML algorithms can quickly zero in on any point within the glass, which reduces lag time to retrieve information.Below is the image, how Quartz glass looks after storing the data.Future of Quartz glass:By using Quartz glass, we are able to store the data permanently for life long. We can store Lifelong medical data, financial regulation data, legal contracts, geologic information. By using this, we can Pass not only data, entire information to the future generations.At present, we are able to store 360 TB of data – Piece of Glass.A lot of research is going on to Store more amount of data, Maximize the performance and minimize the cost. If all these researches get success full and we can able to store the data permanently with less cost and able to scalable with no limits then “Quartz Glass will be the best archival cloud storage solution and revamp the entire Data Storage industry.

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What is the Importance of NVMe and NVMe-oF in Modern Storage?

What is NVMe?NVMe is the new protocol which is known as Non Volatile Memory Express. Let’s have a brief idea about volatile and non-volatile memory before moving ahead to the details of the topic. Volatile memory is a type of memory where the data is lost, in-case of power failure. RAM is a good example of volatile memory. In contrast to volatile memory, non-volatile memory is the type of memory which will retain the data in case of a power failure as there is a battery providing the back-up. Flash is non-volatile memory and of two types- nand and nor flash memory.NVM Express (NVMe)NVM Express® (NVMe™) is an optimized, high-performance scalable host controller interface designed to address the needs of Enterprise and Client systems that utilize PCI Express®-based solid-state storage. (https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVMe_Overview.pdf). Solid-state drives (SSD) are nothing but storage made by two key components- viz. nand flash chips and flash controller. SSDs are faster than traditional hard drives as these drives have no spinning component.Need for PCIE based NVMe SSDsAll hot data should be available on flash. Now-a-days data is like gold mine, faster processing of data can have a great impact on business decisions. For achieving this kind of speed, flash based storage devices and high speed storage protocol like NVMe is required. NVMe has made its mark as a high-performance protocol and is expanding due to an industry wide adoption by storage vendors. PCIe based NVMe SSD drives achieve that speed because NVMe supports 64k commands per queue and 64 queues whereas the SATA devices support 32 and SaaS devices support up to 256 commands per queue. Hence concluding that NVMe leverages all the potential of flash-based SSDs. This technology has emerged for reducing the gap between fast CPU and slow storage. Datacenter, Gaming and entertainment industries will have great performance benefits through NVMe. Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIE) are also evolving in order to support NVMe.Diagram of PCIE NVMe storage IO stack[/capntion]DMA and RDMAA. DMADirect Memory Access provides faster data transfer rate by reducing the CPU cycle of fetching, decoding, and executing the IO. It enables faster processing as the CPU can be utilized in other operations while data transfer is going on. You need a DMA controller for carrying out the operation.Above is the simple example of CPU cycleB. RDMALet’s try to split the term and understand what Remote Direct Memory Access widely means. It is a direct memory access to a remote host’s DMA from a separate computer’s memory without involving the operating system. This increases the throughput low latency networking as this uses zero-copy, which implies that the data transfer is done without the networking stack, data is received or sent directly to the buffers, without being copied between the network stack. In addition, the RDMA bypasses the kernel, data that is transferred from user space. It is used in many markets; some of them are-HPC – High performance computing, BIG data, cloud, FSI (Finance services and insurance). For using RDMA, one needs a network adapter that supports RDMA. It should supports Ethernet or Infiniband as link layer protocol.NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF)NVMe over fabrics is a technology, which enables the extension of distance by which PCIE NVMe based hosts and storage drivers can be connected. NVMe-oF standard supports multiple storage networking fabrics for example Ethernet, Infiniband and FC.For Ethernet, RoCE v2 and iWARP are ideal RDMA fabrics. Mellanox is the leading manufacturer of RoCE based network adapter where as Qlogic has FC-NVMe ready adapters. The desired difference in latency is 10 microseconds between a distant NVMe device and a device sitting locally. The NVMe-oF solution provides the NVMe storage on a high-speed storage network to multiple hosts increasing the throughput and with low latency. Most of the areas in NVMe over fabrics are the same as the local NVMe protocol- for instance I/O and administrative commands, NVMe namespaces, registers and properties, power states, reservations, etc.There are some differences in identifier, discovery, queuing and data transfers. Disaggregation of storage from compute, higher utilization of SSDs and leveraging the CPU to its fullest capacity other than transferring the data only, are key benefits for a cloud infrastructure. NVMe over fabric works on a message based system where the NVMe commands or responses are encapsulated into capsules.ConclusionThe NVMe PCIe SSDs and over fabrics will drive future storage industry and it will add value to the business by helping the cloud infrastructure and big data analytics achieve fast access to Data.Lead storage vendors have shown their interest in these areas and some of them have already shipped their products with this specification and some of them are in-design phase of their products.

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What’s new in NFS v4.2?

NFS v4.2: new features and beyond!There is much interest amongst storage professionals to learn about new features of NFS v4.2 and understand how these features help to meet the current requirements of the storage industry.NFS v4.2 has solved a number of performance issues and brings enhancement for NFS v4.1 with its new features. These new features aim to provide features of the common local file system that were not available in earlier versions of NFS and to offer these features remotely.Discussed below are details of the new features introduced in NFS v4.2:1. Server Side Clone Copy:There was network overhead problem associated with the traditional file copy of remotely accessed file, whether done from one server to another server or between locations in the same server as the data was sent twice on the network. (Source to client then client to destination).New operations introduced in NFS v4.2 remove network overhead by:Intra-Server Clone: It allows the client to request synchronous cloning.Intra-Server Copy: It allows the client to request the server to perform copy internally.Inter-Server Copy: It allows the client to authorize source and destination servers to interact directly.2. Application Input / Output Advice:Clients and applications advise the server about expected I/O behavior.It helps to optimize I/O request from the file by prefetching or evicting data (caching).Following is the I/O behavior communicated by clients and application to server:File Access Pattern: Whether Sequential or RandomFile Access in Near Future: Whether file would be accessed in near future or not3. Sparse Files:Sparse files are defined as those files that have unallocated data or uninitialized data blocks as holes in the file. These are transferred as zeros when read from the file.READ_PLUS: Server sends to client metadata which describes holes.DEALLOCATE: It allows the client to punch holes in the file.SEEK: Provides scan for next hole.4. Space Reservations:It ensures that files have space reservation.For sparse files the application needs to ensure that there needs to be always data blocks for future writes.ALLOCATE: Allows the client to request for the guarantee that space would be available.DEALLOCATE: Allows the client to punch holes into files and release space reservation.5. Application Data Block (ADB) Support:There are some applications which treat a file like a disk and want to format the file image. WRITE_SAME: Sends metadata on the server to allow it to write block contents.6. Labeled NFS:Both the client and server use MAC ( Mandatory Access Control) security models to enforce data access.For labeled New file object an attribute called sec_label is introduced.sec_label: It allows the server to string the MAC labels on file, which the client can retrieve and restore for data access.7. Layout Enhancements:It allows the client to communicate back to metadata server with following details. Error detailsPerformance characteristics with storage devicesIt was not possible for NFS v4.1 clients to communicate back to metadata server with these details.Two new operations are introduced for the client to communicate with metadata server:LAYOUTERROR: Client can use LAYOUTERROR to inform metadata server about any errors in interaction with layouts which could be represented by the current file handle, client ID details, byte range information and lea_stateidLAYOUTSTATS: It is used to inform metadata server about interaction with layout represented by current file_handle, client ID, byte range and lsa_stateid.

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Immunize Customer Experience With These Cloud Storage Security Practices

Cloud Storage, a Great ChoiceA 21st-century industry looking for uncompromising scalability and performance cannot possibly come across Cloud Storage and say, “I’ll pass.” Be it fintech or healthcare, small-sized customers, or multi-national clients; cloud storage is there to store and protect all business sensitive data for all business use cases. While modern services like smart data lakes, automated data backup and restore, mobility, and IoT revamp the customer experience, cloud storage would ensure impeccable infrastructure for data configuration, management, and durability. Any enterprise working with cloud storage is guaranteed to enjoy:Optimized Storage CostsMinimized Operational OverheadContinuous MonitoringLatency-Based Data TieringAutomated Data Backup, Archival & RestoreThroughput Intensive Storage AndSmart Workload ManagementHowever, such benefits come with a pre-requisite priority for the security of the cloud storage infrastructure. The data center and the network it operates in need to be highly secured from internal and external mishaps. Therefore, in this blog, we will discuss the various practices which would help you ensure the security of your cloud storage infrastructure. For a more technical sense of these practices, we will talk about one of the most popular cloud storage services – Amazon S3. However, the discussion around practices will be more generic to ensure that you can use them for any cloud storage vendor of your choice.Comprehending Cloud Storage SecurityA recent study suggests that 93% of companies are concerned about the security risks associated with the cloud. The technical architects and admins directly in contact with cloud storage solutions often face security issues that they don’t fully comprehend. With an increasing number of ransomware and phishing attacks, the organization might often find themselves skeptical about migrating the data. So, how does one overcome these doubts and work towards a secure, business-boosting storage infrastructure? The answer, actually, is two-part:External Security – The security of the storage infrastructure itself is more of a vendor’s job. For instance, in the case of Amazon S3, AWS takes the onus of protecting the infrastructure that you trust your data with. Managing the cloud storage infrastructure makes sense for the vendor to carry out regular tests, audit, and verify the security firewalls of the cloud. Moreover, a lot of data compliance issues rightly fall under the vendor’s scope of responsibility so that you don’t have to worry about the administrative regulations for your data storage.Internal Security – Ensuring the security from the inside is where you, as a cloud storage service consumer, share the responsibility. Based on the services you’ve employed from your cloud storage vendor, you are expected to be fully aware of the sensitivity of your data, the compliance regulations of your organization, and the regulations mandatory as per the local authorities in your geography. The reason behind these responsibilities is the control you get as a consumer over the data that goes into the cloud storage. While the vendor would provide you with a range of security tools and services, it should be your final choice that would align with the sensitivity of your business data.Thus, in this blog, we will discuss all the security services and configurations you can demand from your vendor to ensure that cloud storage is an ally against your competition and not another headache for your business.Confirm Data DurabilityThe durability of infrastructure should be among the first pre-requisites for storing mission-critical data on the cloud. Redundant storage of data objects across multiple devices ensures reliable data protection. Amazon S3, for that matter, uses its PUT and PUTObject operations to copy the data objects at multiple facilities simultaneously. These facilities are then vigilantly monitored for any loss so that immediate repairs can be arranged. Some of the important practices to ensure data durability are:Versioning – Ensure that the data objects are versioned. This will allow recovering older data objects in the face of any internal or external application failure.Role-Based Access – Setting up individual accounts for each user with rightful liberties and restrictions discourages data leakage due to unnecessary access.Encryption – Server-side and in-transit data encryption modules provide an additional layer of protection, assuring that the data objects aren’t harmed during business operations. Amazon S3, for instance, uses Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated cryptographic modules for such purpose.Machine Learning – Cloud Storage vendors also offer machine learning-based data protection modules that recognize the business sensitivity of data objects and alert the storage admins about unencrypted data, unnecessary access, and shared sensitive data objects. Amazon Macie is one such tool offered by AWS.Making the Data UnreadableThe in-transit data (going in and out of the cloud storage data centers) is vulnerable to network-based attacks. Measures need to be taken to ensure that this data, even if breached, is of no use to the attacker. The best method to achieve this is Data Encryption. Encryption modules like SSL/TLS are available to make sure that the data is unreadable without proper decryption keys. The cloud storage vendors provide server-side and client-side encryption strategies for the same purpose. In the case of Amazon S3, the objects can be encrypted when they are stored and decrypted back when they are downloaded. You, as a client, can manage the encryption keys and choose the suitable tools for your requirements.Managing the Traffic MischiefWhile the traffic on the public network is vulnerable to data thievery, the private network might often fall prey to internal mismanagement. To avoid both cases, most cloud vendors offer security sensitive APIs. These help the application operate with transport layer security while working with cloud storage data. TLS1.2 or above are usually recommended for modern data storage infrastructures, including the cloud. Talking about Amazon S3 in particular, AWS offers VPN and private link connections like Site-to-site and Direct connect to support safe connectivity for on-premise networks. To connect with other resources in the region, S3 uses a Virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoint that ensures that the requests are limited to and from the Amazon S3 bucket and VPC cloud.SSL cipher suites provide the guidelines for secure network operations. A category of such cipher suites supports what is known as Perfect Forward Secrecy – which essentially makes sure that the encryption and decryption keys are regularly changed. As a client, you should look for cloud storage service providers that support such suites in order to ensure a secure network. Amazon S3, for this purpose, uses DHE (Diffie-Hellman Ephermal) or ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephermal. Both are highly recommended suites supported by any application running on modern programming paradigms.Ask Before AccessAdmins handling cloud storage operations should follow strict access policies for resource access control. Both the resource and user-based access policies are offered by the cloud storage provider for the organization to choose from. It is imperative that you choose the right combination of these policies so that the permissions to your cloud storage infrastructure are tightly defined. A handy ally for this purpose in the case of Amazon S3 is an Access control list (ACL) where the access policies are defined for the S3 bucket, and you can easily choose the combo of your choice.Watchful MonitoringMaintain reliability, guaranteed availability, and untroubled performance are all results of a dark knight level monitoring. For cloud storage, you need a centralized monitoring dashboard of sorts that provides multi-point monitoring data. Check if your cloud vendor provides tools for:Automated single metric monitoring – Monitoring system that takes care of a specific metric and immediately flags any deviations from the expected resultsRequest Trailing – Request triggered by any user or service needs to be trailed for details like request source IP, request time, etc., to log the actions taken on the cloud storage data. Server access requests are also logged for this purpose.Security Incident Logging – Fault tolerance can only be strengthened if any and every misconduct is logged with associated metrics and the resolutions assigned for the purpose. Such logs also help for automated recommendations for future conducts related to cloud storage.ConclusionThere’ve been multiple episodes where companies serving high-profile customer-base faced humiliating attacks that went undetected over a considerable period of time. Such security gaps are not at all conducive to the customer experience we aim to serve. The security practices mentioned above will ensure that fragile corners of your cloud storage are all cemented and toughened up against the looming threats of ransomware and phishing hacks.

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Internet of Things: What the Future Has in Store!

Imagine your washing machine calling on your smartphone and telling you in a Siri-like voice that it’s time to wash your socks. Imagine you receiving texts on your phone about your garage door being left open, your car out of fuel, or your toaster finishing its work. In the near future, this may no longer be science fiction; it is very much possible that any object you have in your home will start talking to you–in fact, not only to you but to any other objects around. What enables this is a technology known as Internet of Things (IoT).What is this revolutionary new technology? What is Internet of Things? This term has existed and been hackneyed since the early ’90s so as to breach the boarders of cliché. People have come forward with certain other terms to substitute “Internet of Things,” but most of them turned out to be just bush-league. Internet of Things refers to a future in which your commonplace objects—things that you normally do not associate with technology—start to communicate as part of a network. This concept radically augments our idea of the smart planet, because you can communicate to not just computers but every object in your home over the Internet.IoT and the Fascinating FutureIf you are a fan of popular sitcom Big Bang Theory, it has an interesting episode in which the characters light lamps and turn down stereos using their laptops by sending signals across the Internet. After a while, by giving open access, unknown people start playing around with the lamps in their apartment. This kind of development is highly invigorating as well as slightly intimidating for many people.While on one side people are talking about the advantages of IoT, a discussion is looming large on the horizon about the security concerns surrounding the concept. For instance, what if the bad guys hack into your smartphone to disable your home’s security system and open the doors of your house while you are away in Hawaii on a vacation?One area IoT is going to transmogrify is the automotive industry. Already, the cars are as smart as you want them to be. A few days ago, I was watching the Audi keynote in the International CES (watch it below), and wow! The cars can not only park themselves but drive you through busy streets. The technology is that sophisticated now. Last week, Fox News published a piece on V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) communication system that helps cars communicate with other cars in the vicinity to convey important information, such as whether or not the driver is applying breaks properly to avoid a possible collision.The US department of transportation is considering a regulatory proposal for vehicle to vehicle communication. You can go to BBC Top Gear and be literally flabbergasted at the automotive technology that is emerging. In essence, cars have advanced through technology in the last decade more than they ever did in a century led by mechanical engineering. Embedded computing technology is at the helm of all these developments.When IoT comes to our world, these cars will be well connected, through 4G technology. They will communicate fluently to bring assistance to you wherever you are.Cisco has done quite a bit of research on Internet of Things (which they call Internet of Everything in their vernacular). Check out that site; it’s a goldmine of information on IoT. According to Cisco’s findings, released in Feb 2013, IoT globally will be worth 14.4 trillion dollars in the next decade. I happened to look at the data concerning our country too, and the value at stake seems to hover around 35 billion USD. When it comes to the zenith of information technology, the United States, the total value at stake seems to be 473 billion dollars.IoT: How It Changes Your World?I have given you a slight idea of how IoT is going to change your future in the beginning of the article. While some of the ideas may be a bit out there, there is virtually no bounds to the way applications can be developed to incorporate things. Embedded systems will be subsumed into almost every object to make it more intelligent. That’s where the washing machine that talks and texts comes in. These developments can significantly improve your lifestyle.Just as the lot of geeks in the Big Bang Theory, IoT will exhilarate the techies amongst us. They will come up with specialized applications that do everything from garage-door-opening to toilet-seat-lifting. The way IoT can uplift the services in certain industries today is bound only by your imagination. Surveillance, security, healthcare, education, retail, etc., are some of the industries that will taste the massive benefits of Internet of Things.There is a minor problem. And that concerns software development. For an analogy, consider today’s mobile app development. While a developer needs to concentrate on only one device (or two) in case of iOS development, he has to consider a plethora of hardware configurations, resolutions, processors, and OS versions when it comes to Android. Imagine if a developer needs to create an app that controls refrigerators or washing machines? There is more diversity there than the number of verses in the King James Bible, figuratively speaking.This development intricacy has also been discussed by a recent podcast in GigaOM. They also discuss the rampant privacy concerns surrounding the subject. Play the podcast to listen:How IoT redefines our world is well illustrated in this image:As a first step of inventorying everything to be managed better, you can use technologies such as RFID (Radio-frequency ID) and NFC to tag each object. Then, they can be managed through a network, and locating and securing the inventoried objects become a piece of cake.There is, however, one little issue concerning IoT: the standardization. We should come up with a way to standardize the tagging technologies that we use—RFID, NFC, barcodes, or QR codes. It should not be as wayward as in the case of 4K resolutions (wherein there are six different resolutions and no fixed standard).In essence, for coherence and congruence, everything from development to nomenclature should follow a standard.How far are we in realizing IoT in our cities? Well, when it comes to Ubiquitous Cities (aka smart city, wherein everything is connected with computers), Songdo IBD of South Korea is probably the first. It is a smart city where everything is connected, not just computers.ConclusionI could go rambling on and on about IoT as it is quite an interesting topic. Aziro (formerly MSys Technologies)’s development teams have expertise in embedded computing technologies, which is right there at the brink of IoT. It is inspiring to know that we are part of a global team working toward the future of technology.

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Is there an Alternative for Hadoop ?

HadoopUsing big data technologies for your business is a really an attractive thing and Hadoop makes it even more appealing nowadays. Hadoop is a massively scalable data storage platform that is used as a foundation for many big data projects. Hadoop is powerful, however it has a steep learning curve in terms of time and other resources. It can be a game changer for companies if Hadoop is being applied the right way. Hadoop will be around for a longer time and for good reason as Hadoop can solve even fewer problems.For large corporations that routinely crunch large amounts of data using MapReduce, Hadoop is still a great choice. For research, experimentation, everyday data mugging.Apache Hadoop, the open-source framework for storing and analyzing big data, will be embraced by analytics vendors over the next two years as organizations seek out new ways to derive value from their unstructured data, according to a new research report from Gartner.Few alternatives of HadoopAs a matter of fact, there are many ways to store data in a structured way which stand as an Alternative for Hadoop namely BashReduce, Disco Project, Spark, GraphLab and the list goes on. Each one of them is unique in their own way. If GraphLab was developed and designed for use in machine learning which is focused to make the design and implementation of efficient and correct parallel machine learning algorithms easier, then Spark is one of the newest players in the MapReduce field which stands as a purpose to make data analytics fast to write and run.Conclusion:Despite all these Alternatives, Why Hadoop?One word: HDFS. For a moment, assume you could bring all of your files and data with you everywhere you go. No matter what system, or type of system, you log in to, your data is intact waiting for you. Suppose you find a cool picture on the Internet. You save it directly to your file store and it goes everywhere you go. HDFS gives users the ability to dump very large data sets (usually log files) to this distributed file system and easily access it with tools, namely Hadoop. Not only does HDFS store a large amount of data, it is fault tolerant. Losing a disk, or a machine, typically does not spell disaster for your data. HDFS has become a reliable way to store data and share it with other open-source data analysis tools. Spark can read data from HDFS, but if you would rather stick with Hadoop, you can try to spice it up.Below trend shows the percent of Hadoop adoption:Research firm projects that 65 percent of all “packaged analytic applications with advanced analytics” capabilities will come prepackaged with the Hadoop framework by 2015. The spike in Hadoop adoption largely will be spurred by an organizations’ need to analyze the massive amounts of unstructured data being produced from nontraditional data sources such as social media. Source: Gartner“It doesn’t take a clairvoyant — or in this case, a research analyst — to see that ‘big data’ is becoming (if it isn’t already, perhaps) a major buzzword in security circles. Much of the securing of big data will need to be handled by thoroughly understanding the data and its usage patterns. Having the ability to identify, control access to, and — where possible — mask sensitive data in big data environments based on policy is an important part of the overall approach.”Ramon KrikkenResearch VP, Security and Risk Management Strategies Analyst at Gartner“Hadoop is not a single entity, it’s a conglomeration of multiple projects, each addressing a certain niche within the Hadoop ecosystem such as data access, data integration, DBMS, system management, reporting, analytics, data exploration and much, much more,” – Forrester analyst Boris Evelson.Forrester Research, Inc. views Hadoop as “the open source heart of Big Data”, regarding it as “the nucleus of the next-generation EDW [enterprise data warehouse] in the cloud,” and has published its first ever The Forrester Wave: Initiative Hadoop Solutions report (February 2, 2012).Hadoop Streaming is an easy way to avoid the monolith of Vanilla Hadoop without leaving HDFS, and allows the user to write map and reduce functions in any language that supports writing to stdout, and reading from stdin. Choosing a simple language such as Python for Streaming allows the user to focus more on writing code that processes data rather than software engineering.The bottom line is that Hadoop is the future of the cloud EDW. Its footprint in companies’ core EDW architectures is likely to keep growing throughout this decade. The roles that Hadoop is likely to assume in EDW strategy are the dominant applications.So? What is your experience with big data? Please share with us in the comments section.

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Container World 2019: Key Tips, Planning and Takeaway

The much-awaited conference of cloud enthusiasts – Container World 2019 is just around the corner. Aziro (formerly MSys Technologies) will be attending the high profile event from April 17- 19 at the Santa Clara Convention center, California. Container World is a one of its kind conference focusing on the complete cloud-native ecosystem from the enterprise standpoint. It is the only vendor-neutral event to delve into strategic business questions, and technical intricacies of rolling containers into production. Container World 2019 specifically focusses on the disruption cloud-native technologies bring to enterprise IT.Attending Container World is an excellent opportunity to network and learn about best practices and advice from your peers and competitors.LocationThe Santa Clara Convention Center is approachable by three airports viz., San Jose International Airport (5.4 miles), San Francisco International Airport (31 miles), and Oakland International Airport (33.1 miles). In case you haven’t zeroed in on your travel plans yet, you need to make a move. Right now!The event attracts thousands of engineers and business leaders, and so last minute travel plans would leave you in a lurch. The official Santa Clara Convention Center website has a list of featured hotels that you pick to stay. You may want to choose one which is within a mile’s walking distance, as that will save you time (and money) to travel to the venue for the three days. You can consider using some of the available public transportation options to make travel simpler.Preparation and PackingPacking for any trip can be overwhelming for some. It always helps to create a to-pack list before you get to it. This is especially essential if you’re a first timer to Container World. As with most conferences, you will need to pack clothes that are suited for a business environment. However, events like this tend to be lighter and do not stress on strict business formals. You can aim for business casuals, with maybe a suit added in (for after hours). As for footwear, trust us, do not wear anything new, uncomfortable or anything too casual. This is because you would be on your feet most of the time during these three days.Some of the other packing essentials are:Business CardsGadgets- phones, laptops, tabs.ChargersAdaptersBattery packsIdentification CardsFlight information / ticketHotel informationListen to the KeynotesThe keynotes of Container World offer some of the “key” data and information that you’ll want to know. This is where noted experts set the underlying tone and summarize the core message of the convention. Container World has lined up some of the best names in Container and related technology practices to deliver these sessions. It is advisable to pack a note-taking kit or laptop whichever is feasible to take notes here.A brief Q&A round succeeds every key session. This is probably one of the rare opportunities to get your questions answered by the leaders of the industry- we’d recommend you go prepared beforehand with some questions. The keynotes are always a packed house, with techies scrambling to get the best seats in the house. So if you want to sit anywhere near the front, get there early.Network with PeersIt’s not every day you get to attend a tech “fest” like this. Your peers from around the world, with some of the legends whose work you follow closely, in the same room at the same time, is nothing less than a big party, trust us. Talk to the person on the next seat in between sessions and find out what drove him or her to be here. Walk up to a group of fellow attendees over lunch and see what they think of the sessions. Connect with them through the social accounts to make your impression last that much longer in their minds.You can also connect with people through Twitter and LinkedIn. Use hashtags that are relevant to the event to find out what others are sharing. Some key hashtags that you can use are:#ContainerWorld#ContainerWorld2019#ContainerWorld19If you want to connect with one of our reps, you can tweet using #MSysatContainerWorldIf you find someone really interesting, you can even ask for their phone number and ask them about the next event they will be attending. So fewer strangers for you to deal with 😉Follow UpOnce you’re back from the conference, send a follow-up email within a day or two to the people you met and any potential collaborators. To help the person remember you, make a mention of the conversation you had, for example: “I enjoyed talking to you after Wesley Chun’s keynote lecture at Container World.” Apart from emails, you can also stay in touch and further strengthen your professional relationship through LinkedIn.Set your out-of-office (OOO) autoreply messageAs you will be away for three business days plus traveling, you ought to set an out of office reply (or a delayed response reply) for your co-workers, clients or anyone who may want to get in touch with you during this time.

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