The Cloud Buzz and Security Risks. Dropbox Exposed.

Dropbox, a cloud based storage service used by millions of users was compromised allowing illegal access by using any user name and password. The service hosts sensitive documents, and other files including media content. The reason to this nightmare according to Dropbox was a code update introducing a bug affecting their site authentication mechanism. Although a fix was delivered in just five minutes after the bug was exposed, but the site remained defenseless for four hours.
Dropbox revealed in their blog entry on June, 20 confessing “this should never have happened”
Clients are obviously outraged and raising privacy concerns over their confidential stuff stored on the cloud. Proper unit testing followed by every update might have avoided this catastrophe to take place.

Despite Billions of dollars have been invested on cloud services and solutions by companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Sales Force to compel individuals and businesses to go online and do expensive conversions; such incidents lately have had a substantial negatively impact on the cloud computing campaign.

These security breaches seriously raise a necessity of having a proper governing body to define standards and rules for all those who offer cloud services. The body should keep auditing to ensure that cloud based service is in compliance to all rules and SOPs and monitor that such companies are fairly investing on best security standards to gain confidence of clients.

Read More on similar cloud security breaches including gmail hacking.

iCloud Communications Sues Apple on its iCloud announcement

iCloud Communications sues Apple on overstepping its trademark.
The company formed in 2005 provides VoIP Solutions as well as cloud computing services to the customers.
In response to Apple’s formal announcement of iCloud just a week ago; the company filed suit against Apple on violating trademark. The company claims that it spends thousands of dollars annually in advertisements using its own iCloud logos.
The company’s stance is that Apple was either aware or consciously ignored the rights of iCloud marks of the iCloud Communications.
This is not a new incident. Technology giants with immense marketing budget, substantial influential power and playful tactics are over sighting the damage caused to the existing industry already providing relevant services. Just one week back, PayPal filed similar law suit against Google Wallet, claiming that Google stole trade secrets by pulling Osama Bedier, former executive at PayPal who is now Google's vice president of payments.

Google's Cloud Based Machine Learning Service

Google Labs now offers its cloud based machine learning API and Big Query, powered by a full fledged BI enabled engine with a hand some of Google's industry tested and renowned prediction algorithms.

This empowers developers and organizations alike to take jump start towards greatly improving their applications and services by making use of Google's deep data analytic capabilities.
It specially attracts those Organizations lacking the high tech infrastructure of maintaining a data warehouse followed by high licensing costs of purchasing data mining engines and business intelligence applications offered by major vendors like Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft.

In order for this to work; you have to upload your data to Google, process the data using Big Query and then applying the set of prediction APIs.

However, when it comes to prediction, machine learning, and data mining; we are talking about data in Giga/Tera Bytes.
Given the type of business, size, and sensitivity of data; uploading data over the internet to Google infrastructure for the first time followed by daily incremental uploads raises feasibility and security concerns. But as the cloud Buzz continue to grow massively, so does the adaptability.

Read More!