iMPR Interview with Pacnet (Part 2)

Interviewed by: 

Ilissa Miller, CEO iMiller Public Relations

Interviewees: 

Gina Haspilaire, Vice President, Managing Director at Pacnet  

Giles Proctor, Vice President, Data Centre Construction & Operations at Pacnet

Part 2 of 2: (read part 1)

Pacnet’s Executives Discuss the Company’s Asia-Pac Data Center and Network Services Strategy

Q: (IM) - Business needs, especially technology, continue to evolve. How does Pacnet meet these demands?

(Giles) -  The key business driver is the increasing adoption of cloud services.  This represents one example of the way we enable cloud infrastructure both through providing services from a base level through our physical network assets, capacity with connectivity through landing stations and data centers located on the network to move traffic throughout the region more effectively. Pacnet’s expanding suite of services enables fast delivery of content, with the capability to rapidly deploy network services to cope with the dynamic and elastic nature of the cloud.

Q: (IM) - Who would best be served by Pacnet and why?

(Gina) – Any company who is looking to reap the benefits of opportunities that exist in Asia-Pacific.  I say this regardless of business segment.  We are in a world today where information and data is critical to any operation, and companies  traditionally that would not require or would have not generated revenue from technology have become focused on technology.  These companies have a need to service a marketplace that is about doing business in a technology-driven marketplace. A perfect example is a software company.  Traditionally, software companies would manufacture, package and shrink wrap its software to be shipped out.  Today, buyers would have to go to a traditional brick and mortar store to buy the software CD’s to physically install.  That same company no longer needs to make physical boxes, their products can be accessible online.  They need infrastructure to make it accessible.  Otherwise, these companies will lose revenue. Networks are a critical part of the future of these businesses.

Q: (IM) - Is there anything else you want our readers to know about Pacnet?

(Gina) - When people think of Pacnet, we want them to think about our capabilities that go well beyond what traditional Asia-Pacific companies deliver.  We do have license capabilities to bring companies beyond  to countries such as India.  We have capabilities to deliver services to Australia.  Furthermore, we have operations in the United States and Europe.  For Pacnet, it is important to have a customer-facing presence and be where our customers are.  While we own a great set of assets, that set of assets is augmented by what is required to deliver a global solution in most cases. 

(Giles)-  We are expanding our data center footprint in China. Our Chongqing, China data center, opened in the second quarter in 2013.  It is a 2,000 rack facility with further capacity to expand.  We have also broke ground on similar projects in Tianjin, China.  Both of these facilities are in partnership with local governments. 

For more information about Pacnet, its extensive network and data center solutions throughout the Asia-Pacific region, please email:  gina.haspilaire@pacnet.com or visit www.pacnet.com

iMPR Interview with Pacnet

Interviewed by: 

Ilissa Miller, CEO iMiller Public Relations

Interviewees: 

Gina Haspilaire, Vice President, Managing Director at Pacnet  

Giles Proctor, Vice President, Data Centre Construction & Operations at Pacnet

Part 1 of 2:

Pacnet’s Executives Discuss the Company’s Asia-Pac Data Center and Network Services Strategy

We recently sat with two executives from Asia-Pacific’s leading data center and network services provider, Pacnet; Giles Proctor, Vice President, Data Centre Construction and Operations and Gina Haspillaire, Vice President, Managing Director at Pacnet North America

Bringing two different perspectives to Pacnet’s business, our conversation was quite informative. I hope you will agree.

Question (Ilissa Miller) - Pacnet has a deep history in the industry. Could you remind our readers about Pacnet's roots and how it has evolved to today?

Answer (Gina Haspillaire) – Back in 2000, Global Crossing, now Level 3, set out to build a global subsea cable network. When it filed for bankruptcy in 2002, our company acquired the assets of its Asian arm, Asia Global Crossing, which owned and operated an intra-Asia subsea cable system called East Asia Crossing or EAC. The company was named Asia Netcom and was owned by a consortium led by China Netcom. In late 2003, China Netcom acquired 100 percent of Asia Netcom. In 2006, China Netcom sold Asia Netcom to Connect Holdings Limited, which owned another intra-Asia cable called C2C. In 2007 the new owner integrated the businesses of Asia Netcom and C2C to create a 46,420 km submarine cable network EAC-C2C. With its acquisition of Pacific Internet in 2008, Connect Holdings Limited was renamed Pacnet Limited.

Q: (IM) - Through this evolution, what has remained constant at Pacnet?

A: (Gina) - The vision and commitment to the region, and to a large extent, our employee base. Pacnet takes pride in providing regional expertise. Rather than bringing employees in from out of the region, we are committed to the region and the local markets within it. From a strategy and vision perspective, we are looked at as a carrier-neutral provider in the Asia-Pacific region, capable of providing solutions without a specific focus on individual countries. This focus and expertise provide our customers a lot of benefits because people look at Pacnet as experts for the entire region while also obtaining a consistent experience regardless of where they are doing business. Our customers know what to expect.

Q: (IM) - According to Internet World Stats, June 2011 information, Asia is the region with the largest digital population in the world. What is Pacnet doing in the region to support this burgeoning growth?

A: (Giles Proctor) - Pacnet has been busy investing in Data Center capabilities and capacity in the key locations where our submarine cables land. This strategy enables our customers to colocate equipment directly at the cable head, providing a much better experience for the end users. Our second data center in Hong Kong provides 3 MW of power with access to extensive network capacity because it is located directly in the building where the cable lands; this provides customers very fast connectivity throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Our Content Delivery Network enables faster delivery of digital content throughout the entire region with 10 Points of Presence (PoPs) that we own and control. Pacnet is dedicated to continuously building capacity and data centers to help customers meet the increasing computing, storage and connectivity required to compete in Asia’s digital economy.

Q: (IM) - China seems to be a target rich market for Pacnet - what is unique about Pacnet's opportunity in China?

A: (Giles) - China is a very exciting market. Its scale is really quite marketable. Last year there were over 538 million internet users; it is expected to be over 700 million this year. Mobile penetration is also extensive. Pacnet has been in China for many years and we have built strong relationships with incumbent carriers, regulatory authorities, municipalities and regional governments. Our equity joint venture in China, Pacnet Business Solution, is the first Sino-Foreign telecommunications joint venture to have been awarded licenses to operate telecommunication services by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). We have been granted licenses to offer IP VPN service in 23 provinces, which covers the majority of China and Data Center licenses in five cities. Together, these provide Pacnet the ability to provide a comprehensive suite of services throughout the country. Couple that with our Network PoPs that reach 62 cities throughout the Asia-Pacific.

Gina: It’s also good to note that both of our cable systems land in China. C2C lands in Shanghai, and EAC lands in Qingdao.

Giles: Like Gina said, our capabilities and network all link to our submarine cable backbone, which is extensively interconnected throughout Asia. We have unmatched one stop shop capabilities to reach nearly half of the world’s internet users.

"We have unmatched one stop shop capabilities to reach nearly half of the world’s internet users." - Giles Proctor, Vice President, Data Centre Construction and Operations, Pacnet

Q: (IM) - How is Pacnet meeting the demands of a mobile world, where content is expected on demand from nearly any device?

A: (Gina) - From a mobile perspective, our business has two major segments: one focused on enterprise and one on the carriers. Where we add value from a mobile perspective is more from our carrier business and how our carrier team supports the needs of mobile operators as it relates to infrastructure. Eventually, to get to any device, you’re going to require transport of information on the physical layer, and that physical layer is where we bring and enable mobile providers to deliver content. In addition, on a content distribution level, our IP backbone within Asia also gives us the ability to enable mobile users to access content through their mobile providers. Though we are not a mobile operator, Pacnet is a key mobility enabler in the region.

Q: (IM) - What are other areas of interest for Pacnet and how does the company differentiate itself from others?

A: (Giles) - Our focus is on Asia. Pacnet’s unique set of assets enables us to provide a very of high-level support to customers and wide-ranging ability to provide services through extensive reach in Asia. Our core focus is enabling the Internet in Asia.

(Gina) - Three key differentiators that we provide include:

1) Infrastructure: We are well represented with an extensive set of assets in the region.

2) Our market access and ability to reach all of the developed and developing countries throughout Asia. When you look at the growth rate, there are eight countries in Asia growing at a faster pace than the rest of the world’s growth. Being able to tap into these markets and have access to them is a key differentiator.

3) Pacnet’s technical expertise and people.

These three things combined set our company apart from others in the region today. We can’t over emphasize that Pacnet pioneered data communications in the region. We have never been a voice provider. We have always been a data services provider dedicated to providing services in the region . The business did not start by having a local telco mindset with a customer base that required the opportunity to bring them global. Pacnet has always been a regional provider. As a result, we were very much open and neutral in terms of the local markets. That is important in Asia. This provides us the opportunity to deliver a certain level of diversity in markets that others may not be able to. Finally, our interest is really in managed services. As a company that understands the region and has all of the infrastructure to be successful from a communications infrastructure stand point allows us to be viewed as a true service provider. 

Our focus for the next year and beyond is the deployment of data centers and systems that support that and really provide a customer experience that is bar none and consistent across the region. At the end of the day. it boils down to the customer. So we want our service to be the obvious differentiator for someone looking to do business in the region.

The second part of this interview will be published next week. So stay tuned! For more information about Pacnet and the company's data center solutions throughout the Asia Pacific region, visit www.pacnet.com. 

What Data Center Managers Need to Know About Hybrid IT

- Bret Clement, Senior Director Global Communications, RightScale, says:

"Hybrid IT is the new IT and it is here to stay.” So said Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner, in a 2012 report subtitled “How Internal and External Cloud Services are Transforming IT.” If you haven’t started spinning your organization’s cocoon in preparation for your own transformation, you need to at least consider the advantages hybrid IT brings.

Hybrid IT simply means combining internal and external resources – from data centers and clouds – to serve the business’ and users’ needs. The transformation comes from new benefits in business agility, reduced spending, easier administration and more.

Traditionally, businesses built their own data centers and populated them with their own servers. They purchased networking equipment and provisioned links to public networks. This practice had the virtue of being easy for IT to control.

However, it also had a number of drawbacks. When business users needed more resources, they had to go through the IT department. Capital budgets and administrator time could be a roadblock, and even if the users’ requests were eventually approved, it would take weeks or months before new resources could be made available for them.

Virtualization was an important first step in improving IT’s ability to meet user demands. With virtualization, IT could launch multiple virtual servers on a single hardware base.

The next logical step is cloud computing. It brings elastic scaling that can meet nearly infinite processing and storage demands. It is flexible, so businesses only pay for the resources they use, instead of having to buy enough hardware to meet infrequent peak demand. Cloud providers have created APIs that let cloud management software handle automated provisioning and management.

Typically there are two types of clouds: public and private. They share the benefits of elasticity and agility, but public clouds are maintained by providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Rackspace, HP, Microsoft and many others. You buy services from these vendors and run your workloads on their hardware, which may be shared by their other customers.

With private clouds, you acquire dedicated hardware, either on-premise or in a shared data center, on which to run your workloads. Private clouds frequently run under open source cloud platforms such as Eucalyptus, OpenStack and CloudStack.

An organization need not choose one approach over the other. The best idea is to use whichever make the most sense for a given task. Sometimes that means a combination of public and private clouds. That’s called a hybrid cloud. Hybrid IT encompasses hybrid clouds, along with any combination of in-house and cloud usage. Strategic IT professionals need to evaluate factors such as application workload, compliance, latency and cost to determine what solution best meets their most important criteria.

Can You Feel the Excitement?

Today, according to Jarrett Appleby, COO of data center and interconnection services provider CoreSite, we are facing a collision of the traditional IT world and the cloud world. Appleby said in a presentation at the recent RightScale Compute conference in San Francisco, that, in his 29 years in data center space, hybrid IT is “the most exciting and dynamic IT architecture we’ve seen.”

As a cloud management software provider, we at RightScale have seen several common use cases of hybrid environments. While we’ve seen applications contained entirely within a single environment, whether cloud or on-premise, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of larger organizations locating their private clouds near their public cloud infrastructure to help reduce latency and improve security.

One Fortune 500 clinical laboratory provider we work with had challenges shared by many larger organizations. The company wanted to maintain its existing data center infrastructure, but at same time leverage the cost and agility benefits of AWS and CloudStack. If the company were to be successful in its hybrid strategy, it would have to deliver consistent, approved configurations to developers, and data residency would have to meet compliance requirements.  Leveraging an IT vending machine approach, the company today successfully provides developers with standard configurations that can be launched without users having to create a ticket or make a request for service or a phone call. Provisioning a new server takes only 15 minutes.

With recent advances, especially in cloud management software, hybrid architecture has become a more viable IT delivery model. No one size fits all, so you must do your research around design, hardware, software and implementation details to find the right fit for your use case.

Hybrid IT does not mean you throw out all your in-house hardware next week – or ever – but if you’re not already considering cloud alternatives, you’re likely to be left on the ground when your more agile competitors take off for the clouds.

FiberMedia’s Director of Sales Engineering Discusses the Company’s Key Service Offerings and How FiberMedia’s Solutions Help Enterprises Succeed

- Greg Nares, Director of Sales Engineering for FiberMedia Group, LLC, a leading data center services provider with facilities throughout the New York metropolitan area and Cleveland, OH, recently sat down for an interview to discuss industry trends and how their service offerings provide a competitive edge.

Explain the types of solutions that FiberMedia offers?

FiberMedia provides Intelligent Data Center Solutions to enterprise customers. Intelligent Data Center Solutions seamlessly deliver both the resiliency and security of physical infrastructure and the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the Cloud. The company’s data centers are strategically located in six markets offering both primary and disaster recovery/business continuity services.  Locations include Secaucus NJ, Westchester NY, Manhattan NY, Brooklyn NY, Jersey City NJ, and Cleveland OH.

FiberMedia’s services are tailored to our client’s specific needs.  Whether the client is looking to take an existing colocation environment and wants FiberMedia to take care of physical environment or a client has a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment and wants FiberMedia to run the OS and database layer, FiberMedia has a tailored solution to meet those needs.  FiberMedia’s offerings can be as simple and straightforward as colocation with metered power or as comprehensive as a fully managed offering. This flexibility and focus on client needs is what makes FiberMedia a partner you can rely upon.

How are your solutions different from other offerings available in the market?

There are a wide range of offerings in the market from purely hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to companies that offer just colocation services.  Along this spectrum, FiberMedia is ideally positioned to be able to offer the types of services and capabilities that allow our clients to maintain control of the applications and functions they deem necessary and offload those functions that aren’t a core competency. 

Our hybrid solutions have the ability to provide a current colocation customer, whose equipment may be End Of Life (EoL), a migration path to the Cloud by providing an on ramp from our SSAE 16 certified data centers.  At the hardware’s EoL, the client can create a virtual machine in the Cloud and seamlessly continue to have compute power.  This can be done through a single contract and single bill and the services are tailored to our customer’s exacting requirements.

What enhancements, if any, will be made to FiberMedia’s offerings?

We continually seek ways to enhance and upgrade our existing platform, and it will remain at core of our offerings.  FiberMedia will continue to add the data center facilities and capabilities that its clients need to succeed.

Portal Enhancements

Self-Management - We currently offer support and management from our existing customer portal and are looking to introduce self-management capabilities such as the ability to increase or decrease committed bandwidth, vCPU, vRAM, and increase storage.  Subscribers will also be able to add/remove additional VM's for bursting. We also plan to provide a catalog of standard VM images that clients will be able to access through the portal to implement for specific deployment needs.  Finally, we plan to allow clients to create their own VM images, based on their specific requirements. 

Enhanced Visibility - We are looking to provide clients with enhanced visibility into their environment via a “single pane of glass” viewing capability.  This is a capability that many business customers are looking for and a capability we believe will benefit our clients.  It will provide a bird’s eye view into both the client’s internal and external platforms - all done through a single tool.   

In January of this year, we launched our Accelerate Partner Program, and since then the response has been great.  Our partners will now have access to a turnkey solution that will allow them to brand our IaaS portal management, and we at FiberMedia will take care of the back end support, billing.  This will allow our partners to seamlessly offer high quality Cloud services to their end users with the confidence of knowing that these services are backed by FiberMedia’s years of experience. 

What trends are you seeing in Cloud services, data center colocation and hybrid solutions?

From the technology perspective, the sector has matured in many ways, and we’re seeing that instead of proprietary ways of working with a Cloud provider or platform, the industry is starting to open up and share.  Whether OpenStack or CloudStack, there is a lot of activity in normalizing and using a common language on the platform side, which is allowing adoption of the Cloud to grow and extend rather than creating silos. 

While we are still seeing growth on the Cloud and colocation side, we aren’t seeing a lot of providers taking advantage of hybrid capabilities.  You see many Cloud providers allowing for cross connects, but they haven’t opened their doors.  While that is a step in the right direction, it is not as effective as having your servers physically colocated in the same place as the Cloud.   When it comes to the hybrid solutions, we want to push ourselves because we have the ability to offer the compelling solutions that benefit mid-sized to large enterprises.  We are looking to put smaller nodes out in more locations. 

On the colocation side, we are seeing that it is becoming somewhat commoditized.  However, options such as our FlexColo service are continuing to gain traction in the market.  We’re seeing more and more requests for metered power from customers, especially from those customers requiring less than 10 cabinets.  This is fueling our growth.

We hear a lot about “Cloud”.  From your perspective what is the Cloud and what are the benefits of a Cloud-based Solution?

Many service providers use the term “Cloud” and that has created a lot of confusion in the market as to what “Cloud” really is and what services are part of the Cloud.  FiberMedia provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  From our perspective, the Cloud is more of a utility type offering where you are turning up services through an online portal, and we view that as a “low touch” means of service.  With that type of approach there is not a lot of hand holding, and perhaps not a lot of support provided to the client.  FiberMedia provides our client base a trusted partner to work with and more of a consultative approach to design.  We provide more hand holding from a solution perspective and our designs are backed by years of experience offering these types of solutions.  Our clients confidently trust us to manage their environment, and that trust is not misplaced.  

What are some important factors that should be considered when sourcing data center colocation, Cloud, and hybrid solutions?

Some things to consider include asking the following questions: 

·         Are you working with a partner that you can trust? 

·         Is the provider working with you towards a common goal? 

·         Are the people you are interacting with in the pre-sales process going to be the same ones you work with post sale?

·         Can this provider adapt and evolve as your needs change, and do they offer the breadth of services you need to efficiently operate your environment?

·         Can the provider offer you a custom tailored solution designed to support your needs?

At FiberMedia, we take the time to understand your needs and business challenges and design a custom tailored solution that will support your organization today and into the future.  We don’t build out cages and power in advance and force fit our clients into a standard configuration.  Because of this approach, we have the ability to build a custom hybrid environment dedicated to a client.  The solution could encompass colocation, Cloud with dedicated hardware and virtual machines and dedicated storage components.  Our approach is all about flexibility and customization that provides our clients with the infrastructure necessary to succeed. 

Another key factor is data center location.    FiberMedia’s data centers are strategically located throughout the New York Metropolitan and Cleveland areas making FiberMedia an attractive choice for businesses.  From a backup perspective, our Cleveland data center is an ideal site to support our northeast footprint, and we have strong connectivity between our data centers to ensure a seamless transition should it be required.

What would you say to companies interested in the types of solutions FiberMedia offers but haven’t yet contacted FiberMedia?

FiberMedia has been the one-source infrastructure support solution for mid-sized and large enterprise clients in financial services, healthcare, media and IT for more than a decade. Our clients rely on our highly secure, redundant network of strategically located data centers offering geographic diversity and enhanced protection, each one designed to function as both a primary and disaster recovery site.

If you are looking for a trusted provider that will put your interests first as well as one that is capable of providing a full breadth of managed services, and if you are looking for a provider that is offering a solid data center environment backed by high quality service and support, then look no further FiberMedia is the data center provider for you.

Working with FiberMedia, you are not going to get “lost in the in the shuffle”.  At FiberMedia, we take a consultative approach and work with you one-on-one to understand your needs and design a solution best suited to support your organization.

Taking a consultative approach, providing high quality service and support and earning your trust - that’s what FiberMedia is all about.

What’s next for FiberMedia?

Today FiberMedia is a regional company with great financial partners.  We plan to build on this solid foundation to expand our physical footprint nationally and continue to grow our suite of services either organically or through partnerships with best-in-class providers. From colocation to managed services as well as on the Cloud side, you’ll see enhancements throughout 2013 and beyond. The team is focused on getting to the next level, and that growth is right at our door step.

Where can prospects learn more about FiberMedia?

For more information on FiberMedia, please visit our website at www.fibermedia.net or by following FiberMedia on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Is DNA Really Personally Identifiable Information (PII)? No. Maybe? Yes!

- Andy Green, technical content specialist at Varonis, says:

Biometric data is at the limits of what current personal data privacy laws consider worthy of protection. This type of identifier covers fingerprints, voiceprints, and facial images. While the risk factors are not nearly as threatening to consumers as more traditional PII, they do exist. Until recently, the dangers of biometric identification using DNA were more theoretical than real. That has suddenly changed. An article in The New York Times last week put a spotlight on research that proved the feasibility of identifying a person--getting a specific name and address---all from a DNA sequence posted online.

It’s not that regulators have overlooked biometric identifiers. Under HIPAA’s safe harbor rules, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services has a list of 18 e-PHIs that would need to be removed from public medical data for it to be effectively considered de-identified. Along with IP addresses, URLs, email addresses, HHS mentions biometric data, with voiceprints and fingerprints given as the only examples.

I’ve already written about how the Federal Trade Commission, another key US agency involved in data privacy regulation, has issued new guidelines to companies collecting facial images. Driving the FTC’s suggestions—mostly directed at retailers—are the recent improvements in image recognition technology and the availability of massive amounts of tagged photos on social media sites. Image matching software is now good enough so that a face captured by a store’s mall kiosk can eventually reveal ethnicity, mood, and with good likelihood, an actual name behind the face.

The risk of linking a name to a set of fingerprints is less serious for the general public-- unless you have a criminal record. However, after the Graduate Management Admission Council (or GMAC) began using fingerprints to establish the identity of students taking their “GMATs” for admission to business schools, the testing company realized there could be privacy issues.

GMAC ultimately decided to use palm scans, which are based on digitizing vein patterns. Since public databases of hand veins don’t exist, the possibility of identification is eliminated.

I would have put DNA into the same category as palm scans: there’s advanced matching technology--available even at the consumer level—butwithout a public database, there isn’t much of a privacy issue, and therefore DNA is not really a PII.

However, this is not true anymore, and that was the starting point for the researchers mentioned in the Times article. There are actually two public genealogy databases for tracking down one’s ancestry, Ysearch and SMGF, with a combined 135,000 records of DNA data and covering about 39,000 unique last names.

These genealogy databases simply accept a key—actually a pattern on the Y-chromosome—and then return a surname (along with a confidence level). The idea behind these services is to help subscribers find their ancestors and learn more about family backgrounds.

The researchers then examined whether they could narrow down their search. They assumed that they had the state of residency of the subject along with a birthdate--both of these, by the way, are not considered PII under current HIPAA rules. With these three data points and public US Census data, they were able to prove that successful DNA matches would lead to just 12 people on average. That’s a stunning end result from starting with just a DNA pattern.

How good is the DNA “keyword” match at finding a last name? The researchers projected a success rate of 12% for males—since it’s based on the Y chromosome--with a 5% false positive. This is not nearly as accurate as the facial scans, but still a cause for concern. They concluded that the risk of this DNA-based last name search will grow in the future, and there are other scientists and experts who are calling for more public discussion.

I decided to check the privacy policy of one of the DNA testing services. Here’s the good news. They’ll only release your DNA data to third parties with your consent; they treat genetic data as personal data (like name and address), and they say that the genetic data is stored on “secure servers.”

However, thinking purely in term of bytes, folders, and access rights, I’m wondering how truly secure those DNA files are, and whether there are already hackers looking to get that data using the same techniques and exploits they use to snatch credit card numbers.

Top 10 Highest Rated Companies Hiring For ‘Big Data’ – Report Card

- Scott Dobrowski, PR Specialist at Glassdoor (www.Glassdoor.com), says:

For the past year or more the term ‘Big Data’ has been spreading like wildfire, and as a result, companies are investing in Big Data and hiring all sorts of specialists to support it, including companies from HP to EMC to IBM, plus many more.

According to a recent McKinsey report the demand for ‘Big Data’ talent could soon outstrip supply by 50 to 60 percent, and companies in the U.S. will be looking to hire an additional 1.5 million managers and analysts with a sharp understanding of how big data can be applied. In addition, consider the fact that 90% of the world’s total data has been created just within the past two years, says IBM, and platforms are needed to keep up with the daily explosion of data created from mobile devices, online transactions, sensors and social networks.

So as the demand for employees who can support, manage and analyze ‘Big Data’ is on the rise and companies are looking to hire, which companies hiring for ‘Big Data’ rate highest among employees?
Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, turned to its vast database of active job listings and employee company reviews to find out which companies currently hiring for “big data” are rated highest by their own employees. The table below shows the top 10 highest rated companies hiring for ‘Big Data’ - the highest rated companies include: The MITRE Corporation (4.0), Google (3.9), Apple (3.8) and NetApp (3.8).

Top 10 Highest Rated Companies Hiring For ‘Big Data’:

Report based on companies with at least one active job listing featuring “Big Data” in its job title, and/or any keyword including “Big Data,” “Machine Learning,” “Data Scientist,” or “Hadoop” in its job description, as well as at least 100 approved company reviews. Report as of 10/26/11. The report does not include universities or recruitment agencies.

Interested in knowing what employees at the top 10 companies have to say about working there? Provided below is a sample of employees sounding off as of late on what’s working well and what needs to be improved:

“MITRE has a great work/life balance with respectable co-workers, high standard of education and great pay. If you work in the headquarters locations, there is ample opportunity to find something you’re interested in.” – MITRE Information Security Engineer (location n/a)

“MITRE tends to exhibit many older company ideals such as secretive promotions and compensation decisions, cliquish upper management tendencies and a ‘wait your turn’ mentality.” – MITRE Principal Information Systems Engineer (Colorado Springs, CO)

“Between on-site gyms, massage, a wide selection of health benefits, 401k and stock grants, competitive salary, and of course the free, gourmet meals, it’s one of the cushiest jobs in Silicon Valley.” – Google Software Engineer II (Mountain View, CA)

“Management can be clueless or absent at times. It can take a lot longer to get things done than you expect.” – Google Software Engineer III (New York, NY)

“The company is innovative, the corporate culture is amazing. You are truly setup for success when you start working there. I have found that management is open and ready to help.” – Apple Data Analyst (Elk Grove, CA)

Interested in a job or career with Big Data?

Big Data Jobs

Industry Trend: People Plus Data Are Aging and Living Longer

- Greg Schulz, Founder and Sr. Advisor of The Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) Group (www.storageio.com), says:

Lets face it, people and information are living longer and thus there are more of each along with a strong interdependency by both.

People living and data being retained longer should not be a surprise, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated, processed, moved and stored for longer periods of time not to mention that a data object is also getting larger.

By data objects getting larger, think about a digital photo taken on a typical camera ten years ago which whose resolution was lower and thus its file size would have been measured in kilo bytes (thousands). Today megapixel resolutions are common from cell phones, smart phones, PDAs and even larger with more robust digital and high definition (HD) still and video cameras. This means that a photo of the same object that resulted in a file of hundreds of Kbytes ten years ago would be measured in Megabytes today. With three dimensional (3D) cameras appearing along with higher resolution, you do not need to be a rocket scientist or industry pundit to figure out what that growth trend trajectory looks like.

However it is not just the size of the data that is getting larger, there are also more instances along with copies of those files, photos, videos and other objects being created, stored and retained. Similar to data, there are more people now than ten years ago and some of those have also grown larger, or at least around the waistline. This means that more people are creating and relying on larger amounts of information being available or accessible when and where needed. As people grow older, the amount of data that they generate will naturally increase as will the information that they consume and rely upon.

Where things get interesting is that looking back in history, that is more than ten or even a hundred years, the trend is that there are more people, they are living longer, and they are generating larger amounts of data that is taking on new value or meaning. Heck you can even go back from hundreds to thousands of years and see early forms of data archiving and storage with drawings on walls of caves or other venues. I Wonder if had the cost (and ease of use) to store and keep data had been lower back than would there have been more information saved? Or was it a case of being too difficult to use the then state of art data and information storage medium combined with limited capacities so they simply ran out of storage and retention mediums (e.g. walls and ceilings)?

Lets come back to the current for a moment which is another trend of data that in the past would have been kept offline or best case near line due to cost and limits or constraints are finding their way online either in public or private venues (or clouds if you prefer).

Thus the trend of expanding data life cycles with some types of data being kept online or readily accessible as its value is discovered.

Here is an easy test, think of something that you may have googled or searched for a year or two ago that either could not be found or was very difficult to find. Now take that same search or topic query and see if anything appears and if it does, how many instances of it appear. Now make a note to do the same test again in a year or even six months and compare the results.

Now back to the future however with an eye to the past and things get even more interesting in that some researchers are saying that in centuries to come, we should expect to see more people not only living into their hundreds, however even longer. This follows the trend of the average life expectancy of people continues to increase over decades and centuries.

What if people start to live hundreds of years or even longer, what about the information they will generate and rely upon and its later life cycle or span?

Here is a link to a post where a researcher sees that very far down the road, people could live to be a thousand years old which brings up the question, what about all the data they generate and rely upon during their lifetime.

Ok, now back to the 21st century and it is safe to say that there will be more data and information to process, move, store and keep for longer periods of time in a cost effective way. This means applying data footprint reduction (DFR) such as archiving, backup and data protection modernization, compression, consolidation where possible, dedupe and data management including deletion where applicable along with other techniques and technologies combined with best practices.

Will you out live your data, or will your data survive you?

These are among other things to ponder while you enjoy your summer (northern hemisphere) vacation sitting on a beach or pool side enjoying a cool beverage perhaps gazing at the passing clouds reflecting on all things great and small.

Industry Trends: Part 3 - Business Efficiencies, Regulation, and Security Risk Management

- Lisa Rhodes, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

Over the last few weeks we have been focusing on the major trends facing the data center industry throughout 2011. We have discussed both the importance of data center business efficiencies and the effects of energy efficiency monitoring and regulation. The last area we’d like to take a look at is mitigating and managing security risks within the data center as it begins to play a larger role as an outsourced solution in the cloud environment.

Whether it be outsourcing infrastructure, integrating with public cloud technologies or improving the mobile capabilities of the workforce, the CIO has many options for technical advancement of the corporate IT strategy. But it is ultimately the management’s responsibility to adapt the infrastructure to take on these technologies without risking the established best practices for business critical topics. Security tops the list.

For public, private, or hybrid cloud and even mobile computing solutions, the security teams must develop network security solutions that will be able to connect existing users with the new resources and tools. Debate in the industry as to exactly how secure the cloud actually is continues with no clear consensus coming forward at this point in time. On the one side, IBM’s CTO of Cloud Computing Strategy, Harold Moss, recently said the cloud could actually be more secure than a traditional IT environment for reasons ranging from companies paying more attention to security requirements overall to the perception that providers are better able to provide a higher level of security. On the other hand, at the CeBIT conference this week, concerns about data privacy and security concerns were cited as two major reasons why cloud adoption has not taken off yet in Europe.

For outsourced data center solutions, the security team will need a provider that has a clear service level agreement (SLA) and open book accounting of security principles that it implements while delivering the outsourced services. This appears to be one area where most in the industry can agree. The need for an SLA that guarantees specific uptime, service response, bandwidth, and physical access protections is an essential item on the IT manager’s checklist as they are shopping for a data center solution in 2011.

There is also a different element of security that is gaining more prominence within the security discussion and that is the actual physical security of the data center itself. Vodafone recently experienced this as one of their more remote data center facilities was recently broken into and equipment stolen, resulting in a service loss for customers. CIOs don’t want service loss for customers for any reason, let alone one where facilities are broken into and equipment is stolen. No CIO wants to lay awake at night worrying about every remote location within their network that can be susceptible to any sort of physical destruction or tampering.

Without forward thinking on security solutions, many of the great ideas of 2011 will be completely inaccessible to the revenue generators. Once the location and the energy source are network ready and secured, the CIO can go about filling the data center and using it to best accomplish the company’s business mission.

* Verne Global is a regular contributor on Data Center Post

Industry Trends: Part 2 - Business Efficiencies, Regulation, and Security Risk Management

- Lisa Rhodes, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

A couple weeks ago we started our three part series (see part 1) taking a deeper look at some of the trends we feel will shape the data center industry today and throughout 2011. In our last post we discussed the importance of improving business efficiencies within the data center so it seems only fitting that we turn the tables and focus on energy efficient monitoring and impending regulation.

Regulation isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, the data center industry is behind in regards to certification and regulation. In anticipation of federal legislation, self monitoring is on the increase. For example, the Green Grid recently released their concept for a CUE, a carbon usage effectiveness metric for the data center. With the PUE metric already widely accepted, the Green Grid continues to spearhead the movement to fight ‘dirty’ data centers. Now with a CUE metric, data centers will not only have to look at power efficiencies, but will also have to take carbon usage into consideration. Take Facebook, for instance. Facebook has been blasted by Greenpeace for using coal to generate electricity and is now caught up in a battle to “Unfriend Coal” and embrace clean energy. Facebook’s rationale has been that they have a very low PUE and because of it, boasted that they were one of the most efficient data centers in the world. Given the new CUE metric though, it seems like Facebook will be friending operators such as Yahoo! and Google who use renewable energy sources to power their data centers to get some ideas on cleaning up their power. The Green Grid also has a third metric in the works, WUE, that measures water use for cooling purposes. Provided that these metrics take off in a way similar to the acceptance of the PUE metric, we can expect that data centers will become the baseline for the regulatory efforts to achieve environmental friendliness.

Aside from Green Grid guidelines, regulation at federal and state levels is looming. While Britain has delayed its flagship Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) program by a year or two and the United States cannot seem to get a cap-and-trade law passed through Congress, don’t be fooled - carbon emissions, power generation, distribution and consumption are definitely on government check lists. The 2010 Uptime Institute Symposium highlighted this issue in numerous discussions on the affect of pending carbon legislation on data centers. Although symposium speakers stated that data centers are an unlikely target, the message that they will be impacted was clear. As large energy users, data centers are easy targets and with a high carbon footprint it’s not surprising they are on the radar screen. Yahoo alone stated that 75 percent of their carbon footprint was from data centers and shared that they had already taken steps to improve the numbers. A potential larger area focus in 2011 will likely be on the Clean Air Act and President Obama’s introduction of a Clean Energy Standard he referenced in his State of the Union address last month. Under the proposal, “By 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy source.” Should the Clean Energy Standard pass, data centers would be forced to use renewable power sources such as wind, solar, hydro, clean coal or natural gas. Data centers will need to start taking factors such as location seriously as they confront the issue and work to improve energy efficiency.

Carbon regulation is not the only game in town. Other data center areas including security, workplace safety and zoning are ripe for regulation as well and we’ll likely see the beginnings of those conversations in 2011. While efficiencies are improving in everything from chips to chillers, data centers are very much an energy consumer making them a prime target for energy and ultimately carbon regulations.

* Verne Global is a regular contributor on Data Center Post