thecloudandediscovery.com

Welcome to The Cloud and E-Discovery

Don’t be mislead by our name. Most of the crew here are lawyers driven by the analysis of electronically stored information, but all of us are technically trained in some field of computer technology. On this site we’ll drill down to cover and understand cloud characteristics ... storage, broad network access, resource pooling, infrastructure, virtualization, cloudonomics, etc. And we'll post about all aspects of "Big Data" and its analytics/visualization, and its contribution to new ways of understanding human patterns, intelligence.

February 7th, 2013

Getting a grip on cloud computing

As Alex Woodie has said “when terminology from the IT department breaks through into the mainstream culture, you know you’re onto something really hot”. This is the case with the term and the concept behind “cloud computing,” which has spread like a west Texas prairie fire.

It seems that every article you read about some new web development contains at least four references to cloud technology. Everyone is hopping on the bandwagon — even Apple is following the herd with their move from MobileMe to iCloud. Clearly, cloud-based computing systems are here to stay. Just as the world moved from mainframe architecture to personal computing, it seems that this is the start of a shift towards offloading certain aspects of personal computing to the cloud.

And long-term, the cloud represents an offloading of data from external hard drives and their ilk to online storage systems powered by some sort of cloud architecture. As LTE and other… Read more

February 7th, 2013

Getting a grip on “Big Data”

There really is no wrong definition of what “Big Data” is. We like to explain big data as taking a vast amount of information and being able to distill it in a way that can be consumed and acted upon. Yes, a common definition that’s often overused is one that focuses solely on the vast quantities of data being created. But Big data paints a picture of a human being, including the often mundane tasks a person completes through the day: using an ATM, paying bills or buying movie tickets online, taking public transportation, and so on. Each one of those things creates a unique data point. That is what business has as its focus.

In every industry, in every part of the world, senior leaders wonder whether they are getting full value from the massive amounts of information they already have within their organizations. New technologies are collecting more data than ever before, yet many organizations are still looking for better ways to obtain value from their data and compete in the marketplace. Their questions about… Read more

June 10th, 2013

Mobilité et Cloud : Atos et Samsung s’entendent sur la consumérisation de l’IT

Samsung affiche un peu plus ses ambitions à l’égard des entreprises et mise sur la consumérisation de l’IT et un partenariat stratégique avec Atos pour s’ouvrir les portes du marché entreprise avec des applications autour de la mobilité, du Cloud et du Big Data.

10 Juin 2013 – La SSII Atos et le constructeur coréen Samsung forment désormais un partenariat stratégique. Officialisé par le PDG d’Atos, Thierry Breton, ce rapprochement se traduira par le développement d’offres s’appuyant sur les technologies de Samsung.

Ces développements porteront en particulier sur « les domaines de la signalétique numérique dans les espaces de vente, des véhicules connectés, de la gestion des postes de travail et des solutions en Cloud computing pour l’utilisateur final en mobilité » précise le prestataire français dans un communiqué, finalement assez vague.

Les technos “grand public” pénètrent l’entreprise

Samsung et Atos semblent ainsi partager une même vision sur la question de la consumérisation de l’IT et s’accorder sur l’influence des technologies grand-public sur les applications et systèmes d’information des entreprises.… Read more

May 29th, 2013

Financial markets and “Big Data” crashs: “reckless behavior” replaces “market manipulation” as the standard for prosecuting misbehavior

29 May 2013 – Most of us have been following the regulators’ struggle to meet the challenges posed by high-frequency trading (for an excellent infographic on HFT click here). This ultra-fast, computerized segment of finance now accounts for most trades. HFT also contributed to that infamous “flash crash” back in 2010, the sudden, vertiginous fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. However, the HFT of today is very different from that of three years ago. This is because of … yep … our “new new” friend “Big data”. And financial markets are notorious producers of big data: trades, quotes, earnings statements, consumer research reports, official statistical releases, polls, news articles, etc.

Companies that have relied on the first generation of HFT, where unsophisticated “speed exploits” price discrepancies, have had a tough few years. Profits from ultra-fast trading firms were 74 per cent lower in 2012 compared with 2009, according to Rosenblatt Securities which tracks this sort of information for its institutional clients.

NOTE: In the hacking world an “exploit” is… Read more

May 26th, 2013

Sophisticated AI program helps reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years

28 May 2013 - One scholar likened it to finding the orphaned socks for generations of a family. Another compared it to law-enforcement’s use of DNA databases and face-recognition software. The idea is to harness technology to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean, including marriage, medicine and mysticism. For decades, scholars relied mainly on memory to match up pieces of the Cairo genizah, a treasure trove of papers that include works by the rabbinical scholar Maimonides, parts of Torah scrolls and prayer books, reams of poetry and personal letters, contracts, and court documents, even recipes (there is a particularly vile one for honey-wine).

Now, for the first time, a sophisticated artificial intelligence program running on a powerful computer network is conducting 4.5 trillion calculations per second to vastly narrow down the possibilities.

“In one hour, the computer can compare 10 million pairs — 10 million pairs is something a human being cannot do in a lifetime,” said… Read more

May 24th, 2013

Nate Silver, l’homme qui parlait à l’oreille du big data

24 Mai 2013 - Portrait de Nate Silver, « le saint patron des nerds », comme le baptise Le Monde.

« Il est là, costume gris et lunettes rectangles, avec des airs d’oiseau tombé du nid, face aux mines imprégnées de ses fidèles, aussi sûr de ses algorithmes que de son aura. Des mois avant le scrutin présidentiel américain du 6 novembre 2012, il annonçait une confortable victoire de Barack Obama. Faisant ainsi mentir les analystes et autres experts qui pronostiquaient un vote serré. “

Il fait actuellement la promo de son livre, ‘The Signal and the Noise’ (‘Le Signal et le Bruit’, paru aux Etats-Unis en septembre 2012). Dans la liste des best-sellers des œuvres non romanesques du New York Times et du site Amazon à sa sortie, il est aujourd’hui traduit dans le monde entier. Sauf en France.

‘Il n’est pas étonnant que l’Hexagone n’ait pas traduit son œuvre, estime Stéphane Rozès, conseiller politique, président de Cap. Si la France est une grande consommatrice de sondages, l’idée même qu’un statisticien puisse annoncer

May 23rd, 2013

Sears turns old stores into datacentres: converting shells of the 20th century into tools for the 21st century digital economy

23 May 2013 - Sears has decided that one of the best things to do with all those stores it had to close after the US ran out of money was to convert them into data centres. Sears has created a Ubiquity Critical Environments unit which will convert a Sears retail store in Chicago into data centre space.

The cunning plan is to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centres, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.

This way the company will convert the shells of the 20th century retail industry into tools for the 21st century digital economy. The big idea is that you have a technology platform laid atop a retail footprint, creating the possibility for a product with a different look to it, he said. So what does Sears know about data centres? Well Farney does know a thing or two as he previously managed Microsoft’s huge Chicago data centre, and then ran a network of low-latency services for the financial services firm Interactive Data.

For more from Datacenter Knowledge click here.

May 23rd, 2013

The continuing application of artificial intelligence to the legal process

By: Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.

23 May 2013 – You can certainly say this: the IT industry is nothing if not a breeding ground for an infinite variety of acronyms and neologisms. Alongside cloud computing today sits the term Big Data, which of course we understand to mean “that amount” of data which a traditional database would find hard to compute and process as a normal matter of job processing. The Big Data ethos and the zany incomprehensible world of zettabytes, petabytes and yottabytes have provided the computing world its neologism du jour, and a technology conference in 2013 is rarely considered complete without a smattering of uses.

And to make it worse … never mind the fact that Big Data has made anonymity algorithmically impossible … we are typically barraged further by volume-related qualifiers (tsunamis of big data being by far the worst offender I have encountered – other suggestions welcome). Although my favorite, used by the Chief Data Officer of a major corporation (who shall remain nameless) was at an… Read more

May 18th, 2013

A new goldmine: making official data public could spur lots of innovation

18 May 2013 – After a Soviet missile shot down a South Korean airliner that strayed into Russian airspace in 1983, President Ronald Reagan made America’s military satellite-navigation system, GPS, available to the world. Entrepreneurs pounced. Car-navigation, precision farming and 3m American jobs now depend on GPS. Official weather data are also public and avidly used by everyone from insurers to ice-cream sellers.

But this is not enough. On May 9th Barack Obama ordered that all data created or collected by America’s federal government must be made available free to the public, unless this would violate privacy, confidentiality or security. “Open and machine-readable”, the president said, is “the new default for government information.”

This is a big bang for big data, and will spur a frenzy of activity. Pollution numbers will affect property prices. Restaurant reviews will mention official sanitation ratings. Data from tollbooths could be used to determine prices for nearby billboards. Combining data from multiple sources will yield fresh insights. For example, correlating school data with transport information and

May 10th, 2013

Anonymity? HA! It’s becoming algorithmically impossible

10 May 2013 - Has Big Data made anonymity impossible? As the amount of data expands exponentially, nearly all of it carries someone’s digital fingerprints. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the amount of data created in 2012 reached a whopping 2.8 zettabytes — that’s 2.8 trillion gigabytes — and that number is predicted to double by 2015. Most of it is made by individuals as they go through their daily interactions, and consequently, as tracking and storing of that data improves, analysts are able to learn even more about those people. All of this is leading to a day when, according to computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, it will be “algorithmically impossible” to be truly anonymous.

For more, here is a great article from MIT Technology Review (click here).

May 4th, 2013

The importance of making Big Data accessible to non-data scientists

4 May 2013 – Gartner analyst Doug Laney first coined the term ”big data” over over 12 years ago although one suspects — at least in its current form — people have been complaining about “information overload” since Roman times. But the term’s meaning is still far from clear and it wins continuous nominations in the “Tech Buzzword That Everyone Uses But Don’t Quite Understand” competitions, followed closely by “the cloud”.

When using the term, Gartner usually keeps the quote marks in place (i.e. it’s “big data”, not big data). And as we learned at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit in Barcelona two months ago, Gartner has spent a tremendous amount of time on it. As Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg warned people at the conference “talking only about big data can lead to self-delusion” and he urged people not to “surrender to the hype-ocracy.”

NOTE: next month we’ll have a chance to talk about “big data” more with Gartner analyst Debra Logan along with Jason R. Baron when our video crew travels to… Read more