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

April 24th, 2013

IBM acquiert UrbanCode

24 avril 2013 – IBM a annoncé aujourd’hui l’acquisition de l’entreprise UrbanCode. Basée à Cleveland, Ohio, UrbanCode automatise le lancement d’applications et aide les entreprises à mettre rapidement sur le marché des applications liées à la mobilité, au Big Data, au Cloud Computing et au social business, ainsi que leur mise à jour.

Les technologies liées à la mobilité, au social business, au Big Data et au Cloud Computing sont en train de créer une demande nécessitant la mise à disposition plus rapide d’applications logicielles. Aujourd’hui, attendre des jours, voire des mois, afin de fournir une mise à jour logicielle aux clients n’est plus concevable. Avec les technologies d’UrbanCode, les entreprises peuvent réduire de quelques mois à quelques minutes la durée nécessaire pour la commercialisation des nouvelles applications ou des mises à jour.

April 22nd, 2013

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings a new hero emerges: technology

By: Gregory P. Bufithis, Founder & CEO

22 April 2013 - In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings we saw a new hero emerge: technology. The fast responses of medical professionals already onsite likely saved numerous lives. Furthermore, those runners that finished the race and then continued on to donate blood at the local hospital should be praised as well. The human element, no doubt, played a vital role in minimizing casualties and helping people get medical attention quickly.

But as we read and analyzed the situation, saw what law enforcement and public officials were doing, we saw the new tools at their disposal, all from technology.

According to numerous media sources reporting on the Boston Marathon bomb attack, the FBI collected more than 10 terabytes of video and mobile phone data. Within hours of obtaining identifications of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, police obtained search warrants and extensive digital records from mobile phone networks and social media and e-mail providers. The data included call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and… Read more

April 16th, 2013

Key “Big Data” terms you should know [ with video of Jakob Homan of LinkedIn putting it in perspective]

16 April 2013 – Here is a very short list of the key Big Data terms that you should know and a very brief explanation of what it is in simple language:

1. Hadoop: System for processing very large data sets
2. HDFS or Hadoop Distributed File System: For storage of large volume of data (key elements – Datanodes, Namenode and Tasktracker)
3. MapReduce: Think of it as Assembly level language for distributed computing. Used for computation in Hadoop
4. Pig: Developed by Yahoo. It is a higher level language than MapReduce
5. Hive: Higher level language developed by Facebook with SQL like syntax
6. Apache HBase: For real-time access to Hadoop data
7. Accumulo: Improved HBase with new features like cell level security
8. AVRO: New data serialization format (protocol buffers etc.)
9. Apache ZooKeeper: Distributed co-ordination system
10. HCatalog: For combining meta store of Hive and merging with what Pig does
11. Oozie: Scheduling system developed by Yahoo
12. Flume: Log aggregation… Read more

April 16th, 2013

Visualizing the Paris metro system

16 April 2013 - Data visualization group Dataveyes looks closer at the Paris metro system from a time and crowd point of view:

This visualization offers to challenge the way we traditionally view our 2D metro maps. Métropolitain takes on an unexpected gamble: using cold, abstract figures to take the pulse of a hectic and feverish metropolis. The metro map is no longer arbitrarily dictated by the spatial distance between two points. By playing around with two extra variables — time and crowds — users can transform the map, view it in 3D and unveil the true reality behind their daily commute.

No doubt inspired by the Travel Time Tube Map of the London Underground by Tom Carden, Métropolitain lets you select a station and the lines morph to represent how long it takes to get to other stations. A layer underneath is a heatmap that shows annual incoming traffic per station.

Finally, you can switch between 2-D and 3-D. I’m not sure if the extra dimension adds much from an understanding point of view, but it is fun… Read more

April 13th, 2013

Laws as algorithms: converting simple laws to machine-readable code

13 April 2013 - The legal industry remains Lady GaGa-ed with Richard Susskind and his pronouncements on the deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) leading to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model, and the relentless connectivity in the burgeoning electronic legal marketplace. He has his critics and even he was somewhat self-deprecating in a recent Oxford University Press blog when he said “the uncharitable might say that I write the same book every four years or so. Some critics certainly accuse me of having said the same thing for many years. I don’t disagree. Since the early 80s, my enduring interest has been in the ways in which technology can modernize and improve the work of the legal profession and the courts. My main underpinning conviction has indeed not changed: that legal work is document and information intensive, and that a whole host of information technologies can and should streamline and sometimes even overhaul traditional methods of practicing law and administering justice.”

His recent book does have… Read more

April 4th, 2013

If Hadoop was easy … well, then everyone would be doing it

3 April 2013 - One of our “must reads” of late has been IBM Data Magazine (available in print and digital) because of its clear, in-depth technical advice and hands-on examples on the latest topics in data management, IBM databases, and Big Data. It’s coterie of columnists include Tom Deutsch on Big Data, Paula Wiles Sigmon on Governance, and James Kobielus who writes our favorite column “Rocketship to Planet Petabyte”. From the current issue:

The advantages of enhancing an analytic ecosystem with Apache Hadoop capabilities to leverage unstructured data have never been clearer. Just a few years ago, this technology was not available to enterprises—all we had was good-old structured data in the data warehouse. Today, though, the picture is very different. Hadoop is presenting tremendous opportunities to evolve from traditional data warehousing to big data platforms where organizations can process all kinds of data.

At IBM, we’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at how customers are leveraging big data technologies. Five key use cases have emerged:

Enriching an organization’s

April 3rd, 2013

En France, Big Data versus secret d’État

03 Avril 2013 – La modernisation de l’État par l’ouverture des données publiques et l’interconnexion des systèmes est un objectif affiché. Reste le respect de la confidentialité des données, assorti d’un cadre légal très strict. Quelles mesures adopter ? Le service public fait-il courir un risque en matière de protection des données ? La protection des données est-elle un frein à l’amélioration du service public ?

La nouvelle feuille de route de l’Etalab coïncide idéalement avec le nouveau leitmotiv de “la modernisation de l’action publique et de l’État” à laquelle l’open data promet de participer, en renforçant la confiance des citoyens grâce à une plus grande transparence de l’action publique, une amélioration du fonctionnement administratif, un développement de nouveaux modes d’organisation et de nouveaux processus de travail. L’open data fait également miroiter sa capacité à soutenir le dynamisme économique, par le biais de la création de nouvelles ressources en vue de stimuler l’innovation et la croissance.

S’il est de bon ton d’insister sur le fait que l’ouverture des données publiques n’est pas nouvelle, puisqu’elle… Read more