Martin Townend

Machine learning is changing the way the world thinks and operates. Let’s face it, when the words “Machine Learning Algorithm” present themselves in a room full of peers, everyone takes a deep breath. Some are confused by the thought of math; others are thinking, “Oh no, which algorithm do we use for this problem?”

With public cloud adoption becoming the way of life for the increasing number of organizations looking to solve business challenges with remote working, questions about its security implications are inevitable. However, security has many different meanings and challenges in the public cloud with native solutions.

Over the years, we have seen a shift from the concept of traditional IT, where a relational database was used for everything, to the public cloud. As the rate of generation and the demand for data continues to grow at an exponential rate, many businesses now face the challenge of not knowing how to cope with the rapid changes while having so much data at their disposal. Users that once dealt with Gigabytes (GBs) of data find themselves now having to learn how to work with Petabytes (PBs). This goes to show that in order for businesses to continue to excel, they need to remain proactive and evolve along with the ever-changing world of technology.

Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained popularity and trust with customers on a global scale. Azure is a public cloud offering that provides solutions for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, as with any cloud provider, there are concerns around security and breach issues (i.e., how safe is my data?), as the solutions are hosted in a cloud service provider (CSP) data center.

Since the shift from the concept of traditional IT to the public cloud, there have been many new security services and cloud-native tools being implemented across all vertical industries to protect and govern the customer cloud environment. Cloud computing is evolving at an ever-increasing rate of change, but regulations and technology have not been keeping the same pace. Businesses trust the AWS cloud to secure their infrastructure so they can grow and evolve by accelerating innovation.

On a global scale, there are about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. The data grows exponentially by ten times every five years, and as the data being created continues to grow, the need to store, clean, process, and analyze the data is becoming a growing concern for many organizations. We are now storing and analyzing data in a different class beyond CRM and ERP systems, and our data includes more social media, web analytics, and IoT data from various devices, as well as machine-generated log data.

For many years, organizations have taken a traditional approach to buying expensive hardware and storing it in rows of racks in a data center located somewhere in the world. However, in 2006, Amazon launched a subsidiary called Amazon Web Services (AWS), which completely changed the future of IT Infrastructure. It began the transition away from the traditional approach of expensive data centers with high power and cooling, hands and feet, and all the hardware expense, to a cloud-based model where the cloud service provider has multiple data centers in a particular region that offer high availability (HA), with dedicated or non-dedicated servers, storage, networking, and many other services and features.

End-User Computing (EUC) refers to computer systems, platforms, and applications that are delivered via network connectivity (or internet) to an end user. EUC has been around for many years, with the customer usually having to buy expensive hardware like servers and storage to stand up the EUC environment.

During this year of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many issues within schools, colleges, and universities globally on how to deliver student applications.

In today’s pandemic times, we are finding more and more customers and end users are working remotely from home. This requires users to access a number of devices, including laptops and tablets, while at home. Is this secure? Absolutely not.