Tag Archive for: Hybrid

AI, Hybrid Cloud, Ransomware Detection, and the Enduring Role of Hard Disk Drives in Data Storage Evolution

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Scality, a global leader in reliable, secure, and sustainable data storage software, shared its annual data storage predictions for 2024. With the use of generative AI skyrocketing and cyberattacks continuing to infect organizations, ongoing demands to decrease IT complexity with secure, efficient solutions will dominate IT budgets into the new year. In addition, perennial data storage management challenges — growing data volumes, tight budgets, skills shortages, complicated IT installations, and increasing cyber threats — will persist.

While these are standard assumptions, this year, Scality focused its predictions on the ongoing conversations led by customers and thought leaders in the data storage industry.

Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality, said, “We’ve had some interesting industry debates with thought leaders this past year, including the potential death of the hard disk drive (HDD), the role on-premises data storage can play to help advance data management and AI, and, finally, what it really takes to protect data from ransomware. This year’s predictions play off all of these themes.”

Recommended AI News: Riding on the Generative AI Hype, CDP Needs a New Definition in 2024

AIThority Predictions Series 2024 bannerHDDs will live on, despite predictions of a premature death
Some all-flash vendors prognosticate the end of spinning disk (HDD) media in the coming years. While flash media and solid state drives (SSDs) have clear benefits when it comes to latency, are making major strides in density, and the cost per GB is declining, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028.

Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the tape-is-dead arguments from 20 years ago. In a similar way, HDDs will likely survive for the foreseeable future as they continue to provide workload-specific value.  

End users will discover the value of unstructured data for AI
The meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) over the past year highlights the incredible potential they hold for organizations of all sizes and industries. They primarily leverage structured, or text-based, training data. In the coming year, businesses will discover the value of their vast troves…

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Achieving Quantum-Level Security With Hybrid Networks Using PQC, QKD And Quantum Internet

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Security CEO and founder of Safe Quantum Inc., working with data-driven companies to define, develop and deploy quantum-safe technologies.

Even though commercially viable quantum computers don’t yet exist, the problem they present for data protection and security is quite real. The prospect of matching quantum speed against large volumes of data may be years away. But that hasn’t deterred cybercriminals from hijacking and holding hostage so-called evergreen data—information like personal health records, corporate intellectual property and government secrets. With these “harvesting” attacks, crooks are biding their time until a quantum computer matures enough to decrypt the existing security.

There are three technologies that companies and governments can use that could mitigate future disasters, but there’s a catch. Deployed in isolation, none of these approaches can handle the threats to data today and down the road.

First, let’s look at encryption standards. RSA is the encryption standard that most of the world has relied upon for over 40 years. That said, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is spearheading an initiative to introduce new post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms intended to replace RSA and withstand a quantum attack.

The challenge with this mathematical approach? As with RSA, mathematical solutions are only as finite as the computing power available to hack them. (For a bit more on this, see my previous article.)

The upside of the new PQC standards, however, is they will add a level of security today to transactional data, such as online commerce and consumer retail. This approach to protecting data at the edge will be a replacement for RSA and a precursor to a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of breaking RSA encryption in the future.

The second approach is to fight the threat of quantum-driven attacks with quantum-level security. This is another solution that’s rapidly coming to market. Using quantum key distribution, or QKD, organizations can use existing fiber-optic cables readily available across much of the world to securely connect a sender and a receiver. Data…

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Russia has declared hybrid war on Britain

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The reported hacking of Liz Truss’s mobile phone over the summer, suspected to have been conducted by people working on behalf of the Kremlin, should raise alarm bells across Whitehall. Britain is under fierce attack in this new era of hybrid warfare. While we may not be exchanging fire on the battlefield, our critical national infrastructure will be severely undermined and potentially destroyed if we fail to get a grip.

Currently, it is quite clear that our political establishment is not taking the threat seriously enough. The compromised information on Ms Truss’s personal phone, it is reported, may have included sensitive information about the Ukraine war. If true, that would be an extraordinary dereliction of security. Even in the analogue days of the Second World War, it is hard to imagine any government minister making calls or sending cables about sensitive military or diplomatic issues through devices otherwise used for personal matters.

We may indeed have extraordinary technology these days, allowing us to encrypt messages as soon as they are sent, but this amounts to nothing if we continue to see Ukraine as a far-off battle that affects us only on our television screens. At times of war – and this is a war the UK is heavily engaged in – even encrypted communications should be carefully guarded by Whitehall’s security apparatus.

For Putin considers Britain to be his second biggest enemy in Europe, behind Ukraine. He demonstrated his particular hatred for us four years ago, with the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury. His authorities will use any means possible to damage us.

We therefore cannot put anything past him. That includes the severing of the Shefa-2 fibre-optic cables between Scotland, Shetland and the Faroes. These have been played down as accidents – “probably by a fishing vessel” – but how likely is it that an accident would produce two separate cuts on the same day, especially when there was a Russian “research” vessel in the same seaway? We should at the very least investigate the possibility of sabotage.

Indeed, it was just a couple of days after the Shefa-2 cuts that three fibre-optic cables were cut in the Mediterranean off Marseille,…

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IBM sales jump shows the mainframe is not dead, with hybrid cloud alive and well

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At a time when most enterprises are planning cloud deployments and many are reportedly sharpening their mainframe exit strategy, IBM is seeing double-digit growth in its big iron business for the quarter ended September.

The company, which declared its third quarter results on Wednesday, reported a 98% jump in revenue for its z line of mainframe computer in terms of constant currency (that is, eliminating the effect of currency fluctuations).  

IBM, which buckets mainframes under its infrastructure line of business, released the z16 mainframe in April before beginning to sell it in the second quarter.

At launch, industry observers said they expected that the performance and scalability of the z16 would pave the way for more use of the mainframes in hybrid-cloud environments. And complementing the jump in mainframes sales, IBM revenue for its hybrid infrastructure business was also up last quarter.

For the quarter ended September, IBM’s infrastructure line of business—which includes hybrid infrastructure, distributed infrastructure, support and mainframes—reported a total revenue of $3.4 billion, up 23.1% year-on-year. Specifically, the company’s hybrid and distributed infrastructure business were up by 41% and 21% respectively.

Meanwhile, in another sign that the mainframe is still alive, Google, during its annual conference Cloud Next 2022 last week, claimed that a significant number of enterprises still run on mainframes when it launched a mainframe migration service, dubbed Dual Run.

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