Going to Vegas for the Amazon Re:Invent event is one of the best ways to learn about Cloud Computing and Cloud security. And the second best of course is to just browsing the slide decks or videos of the event, from your office or home. So here you go, fresh from the Internet, the course 206 of the security track – “Security of the AWS Cloud”.
And don’t forget to follow up with the slide decks of “AWS Cloud Security” and “Security and Compliance”
If you ask the above question to the various cloud services providers, I am sure their answers are “Definite yes”.
If you ask the same question to end users, their answers may end up like “I really don’t care.”. And for the question again to business owners, their answers will probably are “May-be’s” because seriously no one really reveals all the cloud benefits, implementation pros and cons to them.
To IT professionals, however, we will probably provide a vague answer – “It depends.”. The long form of the answer is – “It depends on the maturity of the cloud market, technology and whether the solution available today can match your budget, quality requirements, and expected service level. More importantly, whether cloud technology and solutions can help your company to improve competitive advantage.”
That’s exactly what Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) did in a recent survey to answer part of the question – what is the maturity of the cloud technology and market, now ? A collaborative project by CSA and ISACA , the Cloud Market Maturity study provides business and IT leaders with insight into the maturity of cloud computing.
The study also reveals that cloud users in 50 countries were least confident about the following issues (ranked from least confident to most confident):
None of these findings are really a surprise, I suppose, however it is important to conduct such project because it helps us to understand how the cloud market will change over time, and how it advances from infancy to full maturity.
Do check out the press release and the full report to understand more about the findings, or you can check out the following infographics – the whole report in one picture.
Back in the early 1980s’ when I was a Fortran programmer, it’s a doctrine to document every programs with very detailed comments. Roll forward 15 years, then when I developed the very first homepage of my own in year 1995, I started to log down the changes of my own website and showed those in the front page, with an aim to inform my site visitors the details of the website changes. And gradually, the “logs” included not only website changes, but also news, jokes, events, photos, videos and opinions.
As you may all know, these change logs (Web Logs) later was named as Blog (coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word “weblog” into the phrase “we blog”) in year 1999.
And now I no longer develop programs (except some twists on scripts and PHP programs), but more and more, I am logging my life within the Internet … like a lifelogger but without those geeky devices.
Like it or not, every single day we are logging our lives with dozens of modern day Internet tools and social networks. I did a check lately and found that indeed I am sharing bits and pieces of my life one way or the other, every single day. And treating myself as a use case, here are the tools and services you can use to log your life if you want to, insanely …
So, are you ready to log your life ?
Since the launch of Facebook Timeline, we all look for good Timeline cover images. First of all, one needs to check the size of that image, and we all know it is 800 x 315 pixels. Then we all look for good photos / images that fit this size to download. The trouble is, an 800 x 315 pixels image may or may not be a good image to use. Reason being Facebook will automatically scroll up the Timeline a little bit after a few seconds. And in turn only 800 x 200 pixels of the cover image is shown.
So, here you go, 8 free Facebook Timeline cover images that look good not only in full resolution, but also after the Timeline scrolled up. All these photo images are free because all are taken by me. Check it out, download, enjoy and hope you all like those !!
Same as many of you, everyday (especially in the morning) I read lots of Internet news, blog posts, and tweets. If I find any good ones, I like to share it with my friends in Facebook and Google Circle; my followers in Twitter; as well as my peers in Linkedin. With so many to share and so many different social media networks as the destinations, it is not easy to manage this task. For examples:
Then I came across a very neat solution – the Buffer. Buffer let you first, with a centralized dashboard, create a queue for each of your social networks. And then you can create posts to put into those queues.
Then those posts in the queue will be posted orderly to the designated social network automatically according to a sending schedule. For example in the following screen you will find that I have created four sending times for my Linkedin network.
These two features alone, have solved the first two issues above. The next problem to solve is how to share your posts from other apps. Buffer created Chrome Extension, Safari Bookmarklet (for your iPad and iPhone) and even a special secret email address such that you can send your post to the queues via email.
Lastly, Buffer even includes an analytic screen to let you see how your posts perform – e.g. number of click-thru and retweets etc.
All in all, it is a very good tool to manage your sharings. If you are serious about social media sharing, I suggest you to give Buffer a try and it is the best solution for now.
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 