Wednesday, January 25th, 2017

Time	Event
12:02a	Microsoft Backs Away from Manager’s Comment on Post-Brexit Data Center Plans Statements a senior Microsoft manager recently made about implications of potential post-Brexit hardware import tariffs for the company’s data center plans in the UK are not its official position, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Data Center Knowledge. The company issued the statement after multiple online outlets published reports Monday on comments by Owen Larter, Microsoft’s UK government affairs manager, who said new tariffs on data center hardware imports from overseas could drive the company to revise its aggressive data center construction plans in the country. Larter was speaking about a hypothetical scenario and did not make any definitive statements about the company’s plans. Although the UK government is likely to negotiate new international trade deals as it leaves the European Union, no official negotiations have started. See also: Brexit Doesn’t Stop Microsoft from Launching UK Data Centers The purpose of Microsoft’s official statement seems to be to stave off any concerns about the company’s planned investment in the UK: “The comments reported today by a Microsoft employee were not reflective of the company’s view.  As we have said both before and after the EU referendum vote, Microsoft’s commitment to the UK is unchanged.” The webinar, in which Larter made the statements, has been removed from Channel 9, a website operated by a group of Microsoft technologists that hosts deep technical discussions on a range of Microsoft-related topics. The webinar’s title was What Brexit Means for Tech. (Comment on this)
4:00p	Sponsored: Overcoming Key Data Center Challenges with Converged Infrastructure Sponsored by: Dell and Intel   Converged systems are powerful platforms with their built-in automation, high-density architecture, and high-performance chassis. They enable organizations to architect a very robust cloud and storage environment with the goal of creating unparalleled density and allowing for resources to be delivered as effectively as possible. The big benefits behind converged infrastructure (CI) are huge driving factors around the adoption boom that we’re already experiencing. According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, the global revenue in this category grew 8.5% year over year to $3.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2015 (4Q15). The market generated 1,547 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, an increase of 26.9% from the same time last year. For the full year 2015, the revenue jumped 8.3% to $10.6 billion when compared to 2014. “We are seeing some of the market demand move into deals with lower average selling prices (ASPs), which is driving a shift from traditional converged systems to hyperconverged systems,” said Kevin M. Permenter, IDC’s senior research analyst, in a press statement. “Right now, most of the growth is coming from the mid-market, which is heavily skewed toward hyperconverged systems. We are expecting to see this trend continue into the near term.” To get the complete picture, add the findings of a recent Data Center Trends Survey sponsored by Dell EMC and Intel, which indicates some of the biggest challenges facing organizations as they into 2017. They include: Security: 67% Centralizing Resources and Improved Efficiency: 43% Supporting Cloud: 40% To overcome these challenges and concerns, converged infrastructure solutions aim to revolutionize the way organizations deploy data center solutions. In working with converged infrastructure (CI), it’s important to see exactly where this type of platform can help your business. Consider the following: Ease of Deployment. Modern converged infrastructure systems are pre-validated environments deployed as building blocks into a data center. This means no more guessing or spending more than required on data center solutions. Furthermore, there is a direct reduction of risk in deployed validated designs. Today’s CI architectures allow organizations to size their workloads around specific validated converged infrastructure deployments. For example, you can size around big data, virtualization, VDI, databases, and even disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery Strategies. A big challenge in creating a good DR strategy was the architecture of secondary systems. In working with converged infrastructure, you can size the right type of data center based on your specific SLA requirements. You can design a platform capable of handling 100% of the primary, or, as much as the business requires. The good part here is that direct integration with the management and virtualization layer allows for even easier failover capabilities. This allows organizations to plan their disaster recovery strategies and size them out appropriately. Furthermore, this will help organizations control costs when deploying DR strategy. Improved Management. Traditionally, data center admins would rely on third party systems or other kinds of controls to manage a heterogenous infrastructure. Now, with CI, you have all core resources under one engine; and management is simplified dramatically. This means administrators have better ways to control how resources are allocated to virtual machines, how specific user groups can be optimized, and even where compliance and regulation-bound workloads are being housed. Furthermore, there is better integration with the underlying hypervisor via management plugins for even further control capabilities. Using Converged Infrastructure to Improve Security. Your ability to segment traffic, virtual workloads, and entire network using CI is pretty powerful. The centralization of core resources creates fewer management points and simplifies the control of data. You can create powerful resource silos around pieces of data that can’t leave specific servers or even storage repositories. Or, you can enforce access policies around very specific network segments all living on the CI architecture.  Converged infrastructure aims to simplify the way you manage critical resources, deliver key applications, and support an evolving user. To create powerful business benefits and strategic IT economics, it’s absolutely important to ensure that your deployment technology has a strong use-case. In the case of converged infrastructure – there are numerous ways that this platform can support growing business demands. This revolves around supporting new kinds of users, greater levels of virtualization, and even new technologies like containers. Most of all – a good CI deployment will give the business an easy way to scale and evolve with new market demands. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Encryption Key to Compliance Requirements as Companies Move to Cloud Ameesh Divatia is Co-Founder & CEO of Baffle Inc. The expansion of compliance requirements for data that is not in a customer’s on-premise environment is inevitable. Is your company ready? As we start the New Year, security remains a top enterprise concern. And why not? Data breaches are becoming bigger, bolder and more widespread than ever. Thanks to high profile breaches at Yahoo, AdultFriendFinder, Anthem and Target just to name a few, more records have been reported compromised in the past 12 months than in the last seven years combined. Moreover, data breaches now go way beyond just stealing money – they are being used to influence elections, derail M&A transactions, embarrass corporate and civic leaders as well as compromise national security. As civilized, law-abiding citizens, we deserve a level of security that guarantees our data is secure and our privacy is protected. For their part, governments are beefing up regulations that protect their constituent’s private information and encryption will play a key role in meeting these compliance requirements. It all started with the State of California and Senate Bill 1386 (SB 1386) that was signed into law in September 2002 and enforced from July 1, 2003.  In October 2007, Assembly Bill 1298 (AB 1298) expanded the definition of private information to include healthcare insurance and medical information. Massachusetts passed a similar regulation. These laws require any entity that does business with residents of those states ensure that any breaches of unencrypted data or encrypted data along with its keys be disclosed publicly and that each of the breach incidents be tracked and investigated. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that goes into effect in May 2018 gives this issue a lot of teeth by imposing fines of €20 million or 4 percent of that company’s turnover, whichever is higher, for violations resulting in their resident’s data records being compromised. These regulations are forcing every enterprise to re-evaluate where their cloud provider’s data centers are physically located. But wait, isn’t this counter to the promise of the cloud where one does not worry about where the data is as long as it is accessible when needed? Control Your Data There is a very simple way to address this. Encryption, a technique that has been around since the Middle Ages, can help solve this. If the data is encrypted, it really does not matter where it is stored as it is of no use to a hacker. Interestingly, a consequence of the laws mentioned above requiring disclosure of breaches is that the business is under no obligation to disclose a breach if it only loses encrypted data and not the keys along with it. According to the Consumer Loss Barometer from Forbes Insight and KPMG surveys, loss of reputation is the dominant concern for businesses in the event of a breach, even more than the financial losses involved. Encryption Adoption Challenges Ah, but here’s the rub. Few companies encrypt their data. The site breachlevelindex.com reports that less than 4 percent of the 5.8 billion records lost since 2013 were encrypted and, therefore, useless to the hacker.  Broader adoption of encryption has been stymied because the technology has proven hard to implement, complex to manage and impacts performance. Now, thanks to the power of innovation, newer SaaS or service model-based encryption solutions are addressing the complexity and performance issues that have plagued traditional encryption solutions. These new and emerging encryption solutions are easier to use and adopt with minimal DevOps impact.  They also improve privacy by ensuring that keys for encrypting the data are always controlled by the owner of the data to guarantee the security and privacy of the customer’s data. Every relevant messaging application will be end-to-end encrypted ensuring only the two parties involved in the communication can decode each other’s messages. Isn’t it time for enterprise applications to embrace this paradigm? These next generation encryption solutions are available for early access and I would urge companies and organizations across the board to consider implementing encryption of records as soon as they are created. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
6:20p	Cisco Interrupts AppDynamics IPO, Agrees to Buy It for $3.7B By Ian King (Bloomberg) — Cisco Systems Inc. agreed to acquire AppDynamics Inc. for $3.7 billion, snapping up the fast-growing software maker just before it planned to go public. Cisco, the world’s biggest maker of networking gear, will add AppDynamics’ software and services that help companies to monitor and fine-tune the performance of their own business systems. AppDynamics, based in San Francisco, was scheduled to price its initial public offering Wednesday in this year’s first major U.S. technology IPO, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins has been buying software and services companies, working to fire up Cisco’s revenue growth, which has stalled as the computing industry shifts away from expensive fixed hardware and software. Since taking the helm in 2015, Robbins has sought to transform Cisco by offering customers more flexible, customizable products that will generate recurring revenue over time. “It is important for Cisco to have market-leading software in our portfolio to deliver on this journey that we’ve been on for some time,” said Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s head of corporate strategy. “This asset is best in class. We believe this is one of the best teams out there to help us on our journey.” The acquisition will be paid for with cash and assumed equity awards, San Jose, California-based Cisco said Tuesday in a statement. AppDynamics will become a unit in Cisco’s IoT and Applications business, reporting to Rowan Trollope. The deal is expected to close in Cisco’s fiscal third quarter, which ends in April. Higher Price Founded in 2008, AppDynamics helps businesses track how well their applications and websites are running so they can respond to connection slowdowns or crashes. The company was valued at $1.9 billion in a private funding round that closed in November 2015, a person familiar with the matter said at the time. The $3.7 billion price dwarfs the market value of as much as $1.72 billion that AppDynamics was seeking to reach in its IPO. That total is based on the high end of the offer range of $14 per share and a total of 123.1 million shares outstanding after the public offering. Cisco’s Romanski said his company is paying for AppDynamics’ growth rate, which makes it stand out from software rivals. AppDynamics had $158.4 million in revenue in the nine months ended Oct. 31, an increase of more than 50 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to an IPO filing last month. Romanski said Cisco’s security business was an AppDynamics customer. Cisco is one of the richest companies in technology, with $71 billion in total cash, cash equivalents and investments at the end of its most recent quarter. About $10.4 billion of that is located in the U.S. For a company like AppDynamics, a buyout gives existing investors a defined return. Had the company gone public, investors would be left selling down the stake over time. Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, two early backers, each hold 21 percent of AppDynamics, according to the filing. Institutional Venture Partners had 8.3 percent of the shares and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers held 7.1 percent. (Comment on this)
6:45p	DonWeb Restores Services Impacted by Generator Fire Brought to You by The WHIR Latin American web hosting provider DonWeb is working to restore services impacted by a generator that caught on fire on Tuesday. As of early Wednesday morning, DonWeb said it had restored 80 percent of its services and told customers that it will continue to restore services throughout the day. Services affected include email and cloud servers (VPS). Sites were also offline for a few minutes as DonWeb added new generators. Web.com announced its plan to acquire DonWeb in December to help the hosting provider expand its reach in the Latin American hosting market. DonWeb has a 79 percent share of the Argentinian web hosting market, and many of its customers are small businesses, which aligns with Web.com’s strategy. The transaction is expected to close at the end of Q1 2017. DonWeb is updating a status page (in Spanish) about its recovery and has kept customers informed on Twitter as well throughout the process. This article originally appeared on The WHIR. (Comment on this)
6:57p	LinkedIn’s Kevin Scott Named Microsoft CTO Brought to you by IT Pro How important is LinkedIn to Microsoft’s future? One interesting sign is that chief executive Satya Nadella just tapped Kevin Scott, LinkedIn’s vice president of infrastructure, to be Chief Technology Officer — of Microsoft. “We are thrilled that Kevin will bring to Microsoft his unique expertise developing platforms and services that empower people and organizations,” Satya Nadella said in a statement. “Kevin’s first area of focus is to bring together the world’s leading professional network and professional cloud.” The CTO role is newly created, but his mandate seems clear: Help make the Microsoft and LinkedIn merger not only go smoothly, but make the connections run deep. Read more: After Microsoft Deal, What Happens to LinkedIn Data Centers? LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers One of the big departures from Microsoft custom under Nadella is giving lots of responsibility to employees relatively new to the company — a marked departure from the Gates and Ballmer years that often placed loyalty and longevity above all else. The change in style has irked some traditionalists, but has also helped Microsoft tap some key talent in unexpected places, such as Xamarin. This article originally appeared on ITPro. (Comment on this)
9:05p	IBM Wins First Cloud Deal as Army Fast-Tracks Data Center Closures The US Army has contracted IBM to set up and run the first of several private cloud environments expected eventually to host most of its applications. Announcement of the deal comes shortly after former Secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, issued a memo directing the Army to fast-track the process of eliminating unnecessary applications and systems and shutting down as many data centers as possible. The US government as a whole is very likely to be the world’s largest data center operator (a total of 11,700 data centers according to a recent estimate), and Department of Defense, which includes the Army, is one of the largest data center operators within the government. Needless to say, the government spends an enormous amount of money to maintain this sprawling infrastructure every year, and efforts to rationalize and consolidate it have been ongoing for years. Read more: White House Orders Federal Data Center Construction Freeze It’s unclear whether the next Army secretary will make those efforts as big a priority, but President Donald Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner has voiced support for government IT modernization, referring to it as “mission critical” in an email to Barack Obama’s tech advisor and former US CTO Todd Park. Trump’s secretary of the Army appointee, Vincent Viola, an Army veteran and billionaire owner of the NHL team Florida Panthers, has yet to be confirmed. The Army’s fiscal 2015 IT bill was $8.3 billion, including everything from data centers to applications, in-house and outsourced. “Many of these systems and applications are necessary for efficient operations,” Fanning’s memo read. “Many are not.” Besides just the cost of unnecessary apps, every system and application represents a potential attack surface for hackers. Despite several directives from the White House, the Department of Defense, and senior leadership of the Army itself to rationalize IT and consolidate data centers, progress has been slow. In fact, the Army’s data center consolidation and closure efforts have come to what the memo characterized as a “virtual standstill.” Now, the Army’s long-term target is four data centers total in the continental US and six outside. One of them will house the private cloud built by IBM. The company plans to compete for contracts to build and manage private clouds in the three future locations as well. If the Army exercises all options on the current five-year contract with IBM, it will be worth $62 million. IBM will stand up the cloud environment within an existing Army data center — located at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Alabama — and act as a managed service provider to the department, James Norcross, defense and intelligence VP for IBM US Federal, said in interview with Data Center Knowledge. The hardware will be a mix of IBM and non-IBM products, and the architecture will include OpenStack. The initial plan is to move three to eight applications into the cloud, expected to go live in the spring, and continue from there. “This is the tip of the spear,” Norcross said. (Comment on this)
9:09p	Renown Hacker: ‘People, Not Technology, Most Vulnerable Security Link’ Despite their link to drugs, murder, extortion—you name it–we glamorize old-time organized crime figures like Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. These gun-toting thugs, donning pin-striped suits and fedoras and smoking the finest Cuban cigars, exuded a certain class and charm despite their wrongdoings. Today, the picture of organized crime has a much different face—and very few people have ever seen its members in person or viewed photographs. Sitting secretly behind locked doors or lurking where we least expect them, Carbanak, Dyre Wolf, the Shifu Trojan and the Cryptolocker Gang don’t use brute force or bullets; they use brains, and prey on others’ vulnerabilities. Unlike in the past when ad hoc networks of individuals motivated mainly by ego and notoriety, today’s breed of hackers is described by CSO Online as: “35-year-old highly experienced developers with deep knowledge that allows them to bring constant innovation into malware and attack tactics; and 80 percent of black-hat (e.g., criminal) hackers are affiliated with organized crime—a playground of financially driven, highly organized and sophisticated groups.” The 19 cybercriminals on the FBI’s Most Wanted List are absolute masters at getting what they want: credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank accounts, health records, secret government documents, critical business data, client lists and your identity. So are former hackers who left the dark side to help fight the battle against cybercrime, many of which are landing on the payroll of major corporations or starting their own. Former hacker-turned businessman, Kevin Mitnick, to keynote Data Center World. Known for popularizing the term “social engineering,” Kevin Mitnick was convicted of several computer-related crimes, including hacking into Pacific Bell’s voice mail computers and copying proprietary software from some of the country’s largest cell phone and computer companies. Today, he is Chief Hacking Officer at security awareness training site KnowBe4. Businesses now hire him and The Global Ghost Team™  to protect against hackers and to test their systems’ vulnerabilities to attack. Once on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for hacking into 40 major corporations, Mitnick will present the keynote address at Data Center World on April 4 in Los Angeles. His specialty: social engineering. “It takes one to catch one,” he says. In his bestselling book, The Art of Deception, Mitnick writes, “Social engineering uses influence and persuasion to deceive people by convincing them that the social engineer is someone he isn’t, or by manipulation. As a result, the social engineer is able to take advantage of people to obtain information with or without the use of technology.” “My presentation will clearly illustrate why people are the weakest link in the security chain,” Mitnick says. “Attendees will see real demonstrations of some of the most current combinations of hacking, social engineering and cutting-edge technical exploits my team and I actually use to penetrate client systems, with a 100 percent success rate. They will also gain strategies to protect their organizations, and themselves, from harm and to help mitigate the risks they face.” Although attacks can come from sources other than e-mail—phone, online, social media and onsite filtration–the sheer number we send and receive make it popular among hackers. A 2015 study by the Radicati Group estimated the number of email users worldwide at 2.6 billion, and the amount of emails sent per day (in 2015) around 205 billion. Additionally, Digital Marketing Ramblings (DMR) reported that: The average office worker receives 121 emails a day Percentage of email that is spam: 49.7 percent Percentage of emails that have a malicious attachment: 2.3 percent According to Mitnick’s book, “All of the firewalls and encryption in the world can’t stop a gifted social engineer from rifling through a corporate database. If an attacker wants to break into a system, the most effective approach is to try to exploit the weakest link—not operating systems, firewalls or encryption algorithms—but people. You can’t go and download a Windows update for stupidity… or gullibility.” Although Mitnick will go into greater detail about how to prevent and spot social engineering attacks, here are three actionable steps you can take in your business and in your personal life to protect you from hackers from his Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker book: NEVER use any kind of public network (hotel, restaurant, transport etc.) even when travelling. NEVER open ANY PDF file on anything other than your desktop and only once scanned (but even then some malware might pass anti-virus). Anybody using the same private network as you HAS to apply Rule #1 and #2 otherwise there is a breach. The above rules may not result in complete prevention, but they should reduce your exposure. A word of warning, though: If you plan to attend the keynote address: Mitnick has been known to use unsuspecting volunteers from audiences to show how he can steal someone’s identity in three minutes. You might want to make sure all of your phones and electronic devices are powered down. Just a suggestion. Kevin Mitnick will present the Data Center World keynote address on Tuesday, April 4, from 4 p.m.-5:15 p.m. Register today. (Comment on this)

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