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Wednesday, February 15th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | Zero One: Cybersecurity, a Business Challenge  By The VAR Guy SAN FRANCISCO — Two years ago, security researchers hacked and disabled an autonomous car 10 miles away. RSA CTO Zulfikar Ramazan, speaking at RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco this week, cited this breach as a ripple causing a wave of chaos that continues to this day. The hack showed the world the potential for computer-savvy terrorists anywhere in the world to hack a fleet of cars and direct them to crash into populated targets. No longer limited to geekdom, cybersecurity in the digital age can lead to devastating real-world results if done poorly. It’s a critical distinction for line-of-business (LOB) executives, the new shot-callers in tech. They’re in charge of wielding emerging technology that impacts customer experiences and business outcomes, as well as society at large. In the past, LOBs often dismissed security policies handed down from IT as annoying and out of touch with their business goals. Now, though, LOBs are on the hook for all of tech’s results – both good and bad. “Security isn’t just a technology problem, it’s a business problem,” Ramazan said. In an LOB’s frenetic push to digitally transform the business or to innovate ahead of the competition, the risk of exploitation runs high, Ramazan said. Consequently, LOBs must work more closely with cybersecurity pros than ever. Related: Zero One: Are You Ready for AI? Together, they must navigate the chaos that innovation brings by treating cybersecurity as a science, not a dark art. They must simplify what chaos they can control, while planning for chaos they can’t control. And they must create a response plan based on availability, budget and collaboration, Ramazan said. In fact, collaboration between business and tech was one of the main themes running throughout RSA Conference 2017. It makes sense, of course, given the new types of threats, range of attackers and raised stakes that cybersecurity pros face today. See also: Microsoft’s Brad Smith: We Need a “Digital Geneva Convention” Homes, for instance, have emerged as the new frontlines for cybersecurity, said Christopher Young, senior vice president and general manager of security at Intel, speaking at RSA Conference 2017. From work-at-home employees with leaky wireless connectivity to the Internet of Things baby monitors falling prey to the Mirai botnet, companies better have the home front covered in their cybersecurity plans. Data has also become a target but in a different way. Hackers traditionally focused on swiping sensitive data in order to hold for ransom and make a profit, but now they’re taking a page out of the “fake news” phenomenon. By corrupting data, hackers can sway data-based decisions. “They’re weaponizing data,” Young said. Not just for profit, either. Today’s breaches can be far reaching, more damaging. Ramazan cited another high-profile hack: the Democratic National Committee email leak that the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted during the 2016 U.S. election. “It initiated a ripple that ultimately rocked the foundations of democracy,” Ramazan says. Tom Kaneshige writes the Zero One blog covering digital transformation, big data, AI, marketing tech and the Internet of Things for line-of-business executives. He is based in Silicon Valley. You can reach him at tom.kaneshige@penton.com. This article originally appeared on The VAR Guy. |
| 5:03p | Switch Launches Its First Enormous Reno Data Center Switch has brought online the first of several planned data centers on its Citadel Campus outside of Reno, Nevada, neighboring the Tesla Gigafactory that manufactures batteries, and an Apple data center campus. Switch’s anchor tenant in Reno is eBay. The Las Vegas-based data center provider is known for building facilities at massive scale, using bold, flashy interior design and ex-military armed guards. Reno was its first expansion outside of Las Vegas, but sites in Michigan, Italy, and Thailand are now also under construction. True to form, its first Reno facility, dubbed Tahoe Reno 1, is 1.3 million square feet large and can support up to 130 MW of power. Switch’s design for the 2,000 acre campus calls for up to 7.2 million square feet and 650 MW of power total, the company said in a statement. Read more: Switch Claims Reno Site Will be World’s Largest Data Center While Reno has not historically been a major data center market, the Switch and Apple campuses may change that, as Switch customers and Apple continue expanding capacity. The location has strong data center market characteristics, such as availability of low-cost energy, low taxes, and proximity to Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Switch said it buys energy in bulk at about $0.05 per kWh and offers customers 10 Gbps connectivity at 4 millisecond latency between Reno and San Francisco Bay Area. Its customers in Reno — like its customers in Las Vegas — buy telco services through a purchasing cooperative the company has set up, which enables them to take advantage of bulk deals with more than 50 carriers. Read more: eBay May Build Reno Data Center Beside Leased Space at Switch The campus is fully powered by renewable energy, thanks to a recent deal Switch struck with the local utility and state utility regulators after years of legal battles, in which the company was fighting to be allowed to exit the utility’s near-monopoly and make power purchase deals with renewable energy producers independently. This year, Switch for the first time was mentioned in Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean report, which gave it the highest marks for renewable energy use and advocacy among data center providers. The company has committed to powering all of its data centers with renewable energy. Read more: How Renewable Energy is Changing the Data Center Market |
| 7:12p | Google Turns Its Secret-Sauce Database Spanner into Cloud Service As it hinted in January it was going to do, Google has productized Spanner, the database that has allowed it to run services consistently across millions of servers in data centers distributed around the world. While there is an open source version of a similar database in the works – being built by ex-Googlers at a startup called CockroachDB – the database on its own is not enough to make Spanner’s magic happen. Its key capability of keeping server clocks across the globe in sync is due to TrueTime, a system of atomic clocks and GPS receivers in Google data centers that is hard to achieve without the scale of Google’s infrastructure. The technology underpins some of the most critical Google services, such as AdWords, its biggest moneymaker, Gmail, and Play, its Android app store. Now, as the company is fighting to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise cloud business, it is making one of its key technologies available to cloud customers. Some of the early users are Quizlet, an online learning tool, and JDA, a retail and supply chain software company. According to Google, Cloud Spanner will be especially useful for retailers, manufacturers, and distributors who have to manage global supply chains and inventory. Financial services companies are another prime target market. Spanner addresses a tradeoff developers and database admins have been forced to deal with when building cloud applications: a choice between the transactional consistency of traditional databases and horizontal scalability of newer NoSQL databases. “Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service,” Deepti Srivastava, product manager for the new cloud service, wrote in a blog post. In addition to scalability and consistency, Spanner ensures application availability, made possible through its ability to replicate data across many data centers around the world and keep all the copies up to date when changes are made at any end. The service is currently in Beta, but Google is charging customers $0.90 per compute node per hour and $0.30 per GB of storage per month, in addition to network bandwidth charges for data traveling outside of the database, between different US cloud regions, and between continents. |
| 9:00p | You Can Now Plug Directly Into Salesforce Servers at Equinix Data Centers Equinix has added a new big name to the list of cloud providers accessible directly from its data centers. Its colocation customers can now buy private network links to Salesforce, getting direct public cloud connectivity while bypassing the public internet. After rounding out the list of cloud infrastructure giants accessible through such links – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM SoftLayer, and Oracle Cloud – Equinix started pursuing similar partnerships with enterprise cloud software heavyweights. Last year, it secured Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. Salesforce is a key addition to the list. It is one of the largest software-as-a-service providers and the largest customer relationship management (CRM) company. Equinix has been pursuing the partnership since at least 2015, when its then VP of innovation, Chris Sharp, told us the company was going after all the top SaaS players. The Salesforce cloud connectivity deal is likely to further Equinix’s recent efforts to bring more enterprise customers into its data centers. Most of its users have traditionally been service providers of various kinds. The colocation giant says these private links to public clouds are a quickly growing business; for enterprises with stringent security and compliance requirements they provide the advantages of using public cloud without the risk of connecting critical networks to the internet. There’s also a reliability and performance benefit, according to Equinix. Most major Equinix rivals in the colocation market – the likes of Digital Realty Trust, CoreSite, and QTS Realty – have introduced similar cloud connectivity services. Major carriers, such as Verizon, also sell private connectivity to public clouds, either from colocation data centers or from on-premise enterprise facilities. There are also several startups, such as Megaport and Console, who have software-defined network platforms that automate provisioning of network links to cloud and other service providers from many data centers around the world. Read more: Digital Realty Challenges Equinix With Cloud Connectivity Platform Equinix sells the links either as traditional cross-connects or through its Cloud Exchange platform, a software-defined networking fabric that allows for greater flexibility for those connecting to multiple cloud providers at once. There are currently more than 500 customers using the platform, an Equinix spokesperson wrote in an email. In addition to cross-connect revenue (Equinix charges $100 per month for a 1G cloud exchange port and $200 for a 10G one), the deals with cloud providers generate regular colocation revenue, as cloud providers grow their capacity inside its data centers to serve more and more customers, Scott Mills, director of business development at Equinix, said in an interview. Another benefit is in the ecosystem effect: as more enterprises come on board to take advantage of the private connectivity to cloud, the ecosystem becomes more valuable for other service providers. In addition to cloud companies, a myriad of carriers and managed service providers use Equinix, for whom those enterprises represent potential new customers. “As we add more and more enterprises, which are key targets for all of that community, the total value of the ecosystem continues to go up,” Mills said. For now, private connectivity to Salesforce is available at Equinix data centers in Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, and Frankfurt. See also: Creating Your Enterprise Cloud Connectivity Strategy |
| 11:22p | LinkedIn Vacates Lots of Space at Equinix Data Centers LinkedIn has left a lot of vacant space in multiple Equinix data centers in the Americas. The social network company has been revamping its data center strategy, switching to an infrastructure that is more like other hyperscale cloud platforms, such as the ones operated by Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn’s new parent company, Microsoft. A part of this shift appears to be consolidating much of its retail colocation footprint into few large wholesale facilities. In the fourth quarter, LinkedIn moved equipment out of 1,300 cabinets in Equinix data centers in the Americas, Equinix CFO, Keith Taylor, said on the Equinix earnings call Wednesday. The social network retained its interconnection footprint in the colocation company’s facilities. Equinix sales “team is working hard to backfill the space,” Taylor said. The “LinkedIn churn,” he said, will have a $6.8 million impact on Equinix’s first-quarter revenue. “We have some great line-of-sight into some ecosystem-enhancing opportunities.” LinkedIn recently launched two large data centers as part of its new infrastructure strategy. One is in Hillsboro, Oregon, where the company has leased wholesale data center space from Infomart Data Centers, and the other is in Singapore, leased from Digital Realty Trust. Read more: LinkedIn Adopting the Hyperscale Data Center Way Equinix has been expecting the LinkedIn exodus since at least the middle of last year. Taylor mentioned the coming churn on the company’s second-quarter call, referring to “the elevated churn in Q1 2017 related to the final phase of LinkedIn’s bifurcation strategy.” Equinix announced $3.6 billion in revenue for 2016 — a 33 percent increase year over year — but a big chunk of the increase was due to new revenue from two big acquisitions: TelecityGroup, which closed last year, and Bit-isle, which closed at the end of 2015. Equinix stock was 2.83 percent down in after-hours trading Wednesday following the earnings release. See also: You Can Now Plug Directly Into Salesforce Servers at Equinix Data Centers |
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