There is nothing quite like illicit nude photos of movie stars to draw the media’s attention. As we’ve seen recently with the internet hacking which exposed private parts of the anatomy of super stars like Nicole Kidman for all to see, when its combined with exposure of the wheeling’s and dealings of the corporate giants that control the industry, and in a very real sense influence the hearts and minds of the people everywhere, it becomes gripping viewing.
Then when it’s linked to political espionage and those “evil” North Koreans, who no one can really understand but certainly appear to be very ominous, the story becomes magnetic. Even back home in little New Zealand we’ve seen hacking lead to Nicky Hagar’s book “Dirty Politics” which over-night dominated the recent election campaign focus when it exposed dealings between politicians from the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice down, corporate big businessmen of questionable reputation and bloggers going way beyond what we used to hold as acceptable media practice. And of course the whole saga surrounding former German hacker Kim Dotcom, his international whistle blowing mates Edward Snowden and Julienne Assage, the CIA, the international Five Fingers spy network we are part of but knew nothing about, and those self-same movie studio’s brought home that we are not on the fringes of the new global village but in ways at its very heart. It portrayed a world which many have struggled to comprehend let alone accept and it raised questions about our own vulnerability to cyber crime.
If Sony Pictures could be hacked and if the Prime Minister’s communications could be so easily broken into what of our own secret information treasure troves both business and personal? Our money, our intellectual property, our private lives - what chance do we have of protecting them in this new cyber age? All of a sudden the stories of super viruses and targeted attacks were no longer on our doorstep they were in our boardroom, our living room and even the bedroom door was ajar. And if this wasn’t hard enough to get our heads around another challenge was upon us.
A meteoric change reshaping the very way the internet operates was here with the hard drive boxes and servers where we stored our information being made obsolete by a far more efficient and flexible system which holds the information in cyber space, the so-called Cloud. Before our eyes the hard-drives and servers we’ve invested in are fast becoming as obsolete as the floppy disks at the back of the office cupboard. An era where work colleagues, for example, can be connected and work together in real time regardless of physical location is not a vision for the future, it is here now. If we’ve struggled to come to grips with safety and security issues of information stored in the old way getting our heads around The Cloud presents a whole new challenge with it being almost natural to think if we were vulnerable under a system where we could see and touch the place where our information was stored surely a system where it’s out there in space must be even more at risk.
However the truth is quite the reverse. With the Cloud system using encryption and coding techniques our information is now held in fragmented parts which make no sense on their own and hence are of no appeal to the super highwaymen hacker of the past. What’s more - it is more efficient and with that can come economic benefits as financial considerations shift from capital to cash flow issues. The implications are not just in terms of the technology itself and the gains from improved operating systems but the accounting and associated taxation management issues are huge as the emphasis shifts from hardware to software.
Big businesses already have professionals handling the fundamental change in business operation sweeping the world. The challenge for medium and small size businesses is to grab the huge opportunity to be smarter and more efficient than competitors or fall by the wayside. The lesson of history is that those who adopt new and more efficient technologies can fast triumph over those locked into old technologies and nowhere is this more true than in the communications field. Its seen wars won and lost. Business empires prosper and fail. In fact civilizations come and go. But there is another clear lesson here for the business looking at the Cloud. Get someone who knows what they are doing to set up and manage your new system because it doesn’t lend itself to ‘Heath Robinson” short-cuts and amateur “experts” who are anything but. In fact a recent survey by international computing firm Gartner found that 95 percent of private cloud systems failed for reasons summed up in the following diagram:
Content provided by David Verschaffelt, Managing Director, Atmospheric.
Atmospheric is a New Zealand based business which specialises in the provision of Cloud technology solutions to SMB’s. Formerly known as Network Agents it has recently restructured becoming fully focused around The Cloud and is one of only five companies who are currently members of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program that is being rolled out globally. In addition to this Atmospheric have core Microsoft competencies in Cloud Productivity as well as Small & Midmarket Cloud Solutions, ensuring they are at the forefront of deploying and supporting Microsoft Office 365 and Cloud Solutions to New Zealand SMB’s.
Writer Peter Verschaffelt is a former business and financial journalist and communications advisor. His early work with online computing systems saw him managing communication for the introduction of EFTPOS to New Zealand by the New Zealand Bankers Association. He was an advisor to the New Zealand Internet Society when global protocols for the web were put in place and he has worked as a communications consultant for a number of government ministries and corporations including Microsoft, IBM and Sperry Systems.