Cloud Storage Cyber Security for the price of a Cup of Coffee

Posted on December 15 by admin

Do you think that having an enterprise-grade cloud storage cyber security system is expensive? Think again because this level of access to some of the most sophisticated cyber security technology can cost less than a cup of Coffee.

Like most of you when I hear such a claim of incredible availability to a product or service for this sort of an unbelievable affordable cost, I would naturally be suspicious. For this reason, in this article, I would like to explain the business economics of why this is possible and realistic. It is amazing, yet absolutely true, that organizations of all sizes can now implement a comprehensive cloud storage security solution so affordably.

IoT Endpoint Protection:

Application interface costs drastically decreased: One of the first costly challenges for cloud storage security is something rather easy to understand and this is how to ensure that each endpoint is secure. By endpoint this simply means devices at the front-end of a network that initially consume data to back-end devices of a network that store the data, or each ‘end’ for creating, storing and utilizing information. Therefore, you would look for one solution that is truly ubiquitous and can run on all devices including iOS and Android mobile devices and all flavors of operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac via a web browser that is universally supported. When one solution supports all these endpoints then there is no additional development efforts required.
Bring Your Own Security to commoditized cloud storage: Another way that cloud storage security can be highly effective, yet still affordable is using a Bring Your Own Security (BYOS) strategy to commoditized cloud storage. Cloud Storage providers such as Amazon, Google, Oracle, IBM, Alibaba and others have built massive cloud storage infrastructure and are competing like crazy for market share so why not take advantage of this competition to your advantage? Now you can by bringing several key security functions including a Unified Virtual Key Encryption strategy, File Obfuscation and physical file segregation at the individual object level among these Multi-Cloud Repositories. This affords organizations of all sizes the mutual benefit of getting massive amounts of cloud storage from any one, or all of these providers, and also the benefit to easily apply your own enterprise-grade cloud security policy across these different storage vendors.

Security-as-a-Service:

Reduced price through a shared costs business model: Just like the cloud storage providers can offer these incredible amounts of storage space at such an affordable cost, cloud storage cyber security can now be offered in the same manner. Everyone participates in the costs of on-going product development, maintenance and supporting the infrastructure through a software subscription monetization model. This financial arrangement is analogous to some high budget movie that costs millions of dollars to produce, distribute and promote. There is no way in the world that one person would pay millions of dollars to watch this movie, but since this is a shared expense among many people through the purchase of movie tickets then it affords everyone the opportunity to see this blockbuster film but at an affordable cost shared by all.
No dedicated labor expense for technical resources: Long gone are the days of complicated cyber security technologies that require dedicated technical resources to install, configure and manage. In today’s modern age of cloud cyber security computing, organizations just simply subscribe to a service and literally, in minutes, can be utilizing these secure hybrid cloud storage capabilities. With Simplified Management Consoles that are easy to understand it does not take software engineers or years of technical training to manage these systems. When changes or modifications are required to the security system such as adding/removing users, adding/modifying additional storage or providing sharing folder/file permissions then these systems can be easily operated by a knowledge work that needs no specific training on the nuances of cyber security, yet still ensure no bad unintentional consequences.

Roadmap Flexibility and Scalability:

Reduced liability risk and simplified compliance/regulation: The intangible costs of decreasing risk are something rather difficult to measure yet this has to certainly considered when an organization takes into account all aspects of the business. It’s well-known that the costs of attorneys, lawyers and going through an eDiscovery process associated with lawsuits over data breaches is expensive and has driven, or will drive, breached companies out of business forever. This is a real-world fact. So, having a solid cyber security IoT Endpoint technology with many layers of defense that rivals true cyber breach paranoia, greatly helps with audits and risk compliance. This layered security is not simply a checkbox on an audit survey, but real, defendable methodology that can assist if justifying risk reduction of data breaches. One excellent example is deploying a Universal Virtual Key Encryption system which eliminates physical encryption keys. If they simply don’t exist then they can not be compromised. This one example using a new approach to Key Management can save organizations hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars expense for the technology itself as well as the labor safe guards for physical keys.
Tremendous costs savings affords for more functionality: Over time, the total savings of a BYOS strategy for a multi-cloud environment really begins to make such a positive impact to the financial bottom line that organizations consider re-investing some of these savings. Since these savings were a direct result of a solid cloud storage security strategy then the obvious area of added functionality is to even further enhance the overall cyber security portfolio through complimentary capability such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). By investing in EDR portfolio capability such as real-time dashboard analytics, proactive responses/alerts and actions or intrusion monitoring then powerful insights can be gleaned to further enhance the business process, certainly from a security perspective, but also to enhance an organizations worker productivity.

In summary, coffee is great and I’m not advocating abandoning your morning cup of java if that helps you get going in the morning. I just use this reference to illustrate the fact that to implement an enterprise-grade cloud storage cyber security solution is not only highly effective, but also extremely affordable at only pennies per day. Is your data security worth only a fraction of a Cup of Coffee?

Picture courtesy of OddTodd.com. OddTodd is a humorous website about a cartoonist guy named Todd that was once laid-off and then parlayed his funny character and cartoon skills into a successful career. OddTodd really likes his Coff-ay too!

Blockchain for Healthcare

Posted on December 15 by admin

Let me start this story and cut right to the chase. At my recent physical therapy visit there was an error in my medical record chart.

This was no big deal for me other than just setting the record straight with the therapist but, as you might imagine, it could have negative implications for the person whom this important information is most likely missing from their medical record chart because it was in my chart instead of theirs.

How or why this happened is something I can not know for sure but I can only assume it was an honest mistake. Everyone gets busy or distracted at times during their work day and somehow these records ended-up in my chart and not this other patient.

However, the big question I consider in situations like this is ‘what can be done to avoid this sort of medical record records mistake in the future?’. This was my immediate thought after I noticed the look on my physical therapist face when he realized the mistake. Let me briefly explain.

I was at my first physical therapy appointment since ‘ankle’ surgery a few months ago where I was the fortunate recipient of several titanium plates and complimentary screws. As the nice therapist was asking the normal background questions that are to be expected, and I was answering accordingly, he then asked a stunner.

He asked, “well, Kevin, you have a lot of metal in that ankle so how is the other metal in your knee feeling?”.

Naturally shocked, I said, “uhhh, sorry sir, no metal in my knee and no surgery on my knee ever”. I then turned to my wife and said, “Honey, you see this is prime example of where a Blockchain for Healthcare could have prevented such a mistake in my medical record”. We both had a chuckle then we moved on to the rest of my ankle rehab session.

However, and in all seriousness, this simple little incident is a real-world example that likely happens on a regular basis all across the country and all around the world. It simply should not happen with today’s modern technological innovations.

Specifically, I’m referring to a few simple modern technological concepts that are real, possible and should be implemented for the better accuracy of not only medical records, but in every business and all industries. These concepts are Digital Ledger Technology (DLT), Smart Contracts and Consensus or to summarize, Blockchain.

Why wouldn’t have this erroneous record made it into my medical chart when it wasn’t truly linked to me? In a blockchain it’s really easy to understand how this could have been prevented through a ‘consensus’ network. Consensus in blockchain, and there are several ways to arrive at consensus, is just like you might imagine in that there is basically a consensus decision among peers of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a particular question or request. So, in my specific case, when the incorrect knee surgery chart information was being submitted into my medical record chart the system itself should have formed a consensus that this was not a valid transaction and not allowed it. Ideally it would have kicked off an exception workflow process for handling such situations.

Consensus is formed by a network of distributed computers (i.e. ‘cloud computing’) using Smart Contracts. Smart Contracts, as it relates to blockchain, are basically decision makers. Software developers and/or organizations themselves, which have deep knowledge of their particular vertical markets, can rather easily create Smart Contracts which can allow computers to make informed decisions based on all the intelligent data available. And, believe me, there is a lot of electronic data in Healthcare that can be made intelligent through various techniques and that affords great opportunity for really smart decisions to be made that can be nearly fully automated.

And then, finally, after Consensus is arrived upon by using Smart Contracts then a Digital Ledger is either updated or not. A Digital Ledger is a shared, current real-time state of ‘truth’. This is like a gigantic distributed database where each computer in a blockchain has its own copy of the database and it is always updated to reflect the most accurate version of the ‘truth’, whatever that may be. The Digital Ledger is always synced among peer members and updated (i.e. adding ‘blocks to the chain’) with the latest version.

In my particular case, my medical record Digital Ledger would include all previous interactions and transactions recorded about my medical history including emergency room records, primary doctor records, surgery records and even my dental records. This is an example of four data sources, however in a real blockchain this could have been hundreds, thousands or millions of computers all working together to make informed, smart consensus decisions. Just imagine how difficult it would be to try and trick a blockchain of any significant size? You would have to reverse-engineer the ledgers of all these verified transactions previously recorded.

As the blockchain grows and gains other supporting nodes, data and more horsepower, then this only increases the level of tamper-resistance, more granular decisions can be formed based on more data and no single point of failure for data.

For these reasons, this is why Blockchain for Healthcare has a bright future in making positive life decisions with intelligent data and can also help prevent medical record mistakes.

Kevin Neal Life Updates, 11/18/2017

Posted on November 18 by admin

Kevin Neal from California (in the news) – #NotThatKevinNeal

I need to make a quick Public Service Announcement before I get into my Life Updates. I am not THAT Kevin Neal.

On November 14^th, 2017 there was a truly awful shooting where a lunatic, coincidently enough, named Kevin Neal and, also coincidently enough, was from California murdered several innocent people. I do not know this person, never have and never will. I feel such sadness for his victims and pray that they rest in peace.

KevinNeal.com Website Visitors Per Day

Not to make light of this awful tragedy but one rather strange thing that happened is overnight my Facebook and this Blog was of high interest all of a sudden. In fact, I bet some of you reading my words right now are just curious people. I admit that I sometimes do the same. Anyhow I met a few people on Facebook that just said a friendly hello so that was fairly cool to see the decency of people in such times. Just take a look at the drastic spike in my Blog traffic and you can clearly see when the news hit on 11/14.

………….and now that this Public Service Announcement is over, let us turn you to the regularly scheduled Kevin Neal Life Update…………

Ankle Recovery

It’s been nearly two full months since I sustained my rather serious ankle injury on September 23^rd, 2017. As I’ve expressed many times before, this injury certainly could have been much worse so I’m absolutely not going to complain about much. However, being in a hard cast for all this time is getting super annoying. I obviously still can’t drive and won’t be able to for months still. I can’t even start rehab yet because the bones are still mending. The good news is that at my last check-up with the doctor he said the x-ray looked pretty good and we are ahead of the original schedule.

I still will be in a hard cast for another three weeks and then hopefully a removal boot. Rehab might start after the being of the new year. Oh vie!!! There isn’t so much pain any more but the hassle of doing every little thing that takes so much longer and planning is about on my last nerve. Things like this really make a person humble and also make you appreciate everything that is so good about being healthy. I’ll just continue trying to be positive and do my best to get through because there isn’t much I can do to accelerate my healing.

Cloud Computing Technical Training

Cloud Computing Knowledge

Although I’m not completely stuck at home with my ankle injury and I manage to get out for about one or two meetings per week, I’ve been spending most of my ‘downtime’ being as productive as can be. I want to take full advantage of my time and utilize it for productive things. Therefore, I have been doing a ton of research, training and experimenting on many new technical technologies. It is true that there is so many new things, new concepts, new vendors, new approaches and such that it will be impossible for anyone to ever fully grasp all this knowledge. As I have always appreciated when others share their knowledge with me; I like to reciprocate and share my knowledge with them. This is absolutely required more than ever and not only when it comes to technology itself but also how business is done. Business has to be more agile, nimble and willing to change more than ever because consumers are empowered like never before.

For these reasons, I feel that if I can gain valuable personal knowledge, with hands-on learning, for such things as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure Cloud and others then I sincerely hope I can accelerate the overall knowledge of my colleagues, friends as well as our valued clients. My brain is certainly on overload right now from all the learning I’ve been doing but it feels great and I feel that 80% is sinking in already. I’m immediately being able to put a lot of this learning into practical use. This other 20% is still somewhat foreign to me and I can only hope that knowledge transfer can help everyone work together and reach their full potential.

Working Hard

It has always been a personal work character trait of mine to work even harder while others relax. It could be coincidence or by conscience decision but so much of my work history has been working with people in other countries, and time zones, that I often work unnatural hours late at night or early mornings. Or it could be that so much of my work is being creative with marketing activities or critical thinking with technical work, that it just helps me concentrate and be more productive in downtimes. Or it could be that I’m just a workaholic like my wonderful dad was 😊.

Whatever the case maybe I double my efforts during the holiday season to really digest everything from the past year and get organized with a solid plan for the future. I simply hate waiting for things to happen so while people stuff their faces with Turkey and participate in all the fun activities, I’m generally spending my time writing a plan, creating some marketing materials or planning a communication in some capacity or another. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy having fun during the holidays and like time to relax a bit but it just gets old for me rather quick and I would rather spend my time in the present bettering my life in the future.

Business is super good and our plan is coming along ahead of schedule. We planned well to be ahead of the onslaught of ‘cloud computing’ crush and now our Company is positioned extremely well with excellent knowledge, great solutions and a fantastic business plan. We have the right People, Process and Policy all in-place for a successful outcome and we can’t be any more excited about the upcoming year!

Crazy FurrBalls and a Change of Season

(Back-to-Front) Jack, Gracie and Bleu

Jack, Gracie and Bleu continue to provide a ton of comic relief at the Neal Casa. Brandee and I can already tell that the turn of seasons from fall to winter is not going to be an easy one for Gracie and Bleu especially. Jack is old-hat at the seasonal changes but Gracie is inexperienced as she just turned 1-year old a few weeks ago. And for Bleu, since she was born in the March-April 2017 timeframe, the dew on the grass or the rain drops from heaven are all new, exciting (and sometimes treacherous) challenges for her to overcome.

For our best guy, Jackson, he continues to provide sanity and wisdom for his rambunctious sisters. Once in a while he’ll get in a playful mood and have a little rough-house fun with Gracie. On the other hand, Jack and Bleu rarely interact with each other. They just act as if each other didn’t exist. Jack is such a good boy with his little sisters and he’s so gentle with them. One thing that is for sure is that poor Jack still does miss his older sissy, the beautiful Bella, as do both Brandee and I. Bella was such a precious and unique little furry, fluff of fun. She filled our hearts with joy and the pain of losing her in April is still tremendous and probably will never cease. Jack, Brandee and I are at peace that our lovely Bella-Ringa is healthy and happy at Rainbow Bridge.

Preparing for the Holidays

Bleu Neal – Halloween Spirit

Well it’s that exciting time of the year where, once again, where the months of October-December become all smashed together in a blurry haze with so many birthdays, holidays and just overall busyness going on. This year is no exception with Halloween already have flown by and Thanksgiving upon us in just a few days. It’s the time of year when Brandee over thinks plans for Thanksgiving and plans a meal for an army. I kid but it’s great fun for her and she says relaxing but I can’t imagine so as it seems like so much work! Nevertheless, she has fun and enjoys doing it so it’s all worth it in the long run.

I think this time of year is very special for Brandee in particular. She loves so many of the great qualities of the holiday spirit including spending time with family and friends, children running around crazily everywhere and the general good-vibe that the holidays bring. She can careless about the commercialism that the season brings but there is so much more positive than just minor annoyances.

Here’s to wishing everyone a great, safe and enjoyable Holiday Season!!!

-From the Neal’s

The Fujitsu Imaging Products Group (IPG) Demo and Education Lab

Posted on November 13 by Kevin

This was a self-imposed project that I was very proud of. In 2007 while working at Fujitsu I took the initiative, and was gratefully given the authority, to organize, prepare and build what I called the “Fujitsu Imaging Products Group (IPG) Demo Lab”. The concept was to setup various solutions that utilized our document scanning technologies for educational purposes.

The project was really great because people were really interested in learning about emerging technologies. I didn’t have to spend any money on building this Demo Lab. All the equipment was excess. We created an internal web portal that people could log on and follow the easy instructions to understand, and try for themselves, the different technologies.

Much of our Demo Lab was dedicated to network-attach solutions so we had many networking hardware products such as Kofax DSS, Axis or Silex but we also had network software solutions such as Network ISIS and RemoteScan TWAIN. It was really great to share this knowledge with others and get such great feedback.

Natural Language – Computer Understanding

Posted on April 17 by Kevin

Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Voice, Microsoft Clippy or whatever you call them, the fact of the matter is that voice-control and virtual assistants are coming – and in a big way!

Why? To make the user experience better to interact with computers just like you would with humans.
So what’s the big deal? Having a computer understand human language is extremely difficult.

Every single major IT company including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple (and many others) have invested significant efforts in the area of ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neural Networks or Natural Language Processing (NLP)’. I will group these terms together of the purpose of this article, and I provide some specific definition below, but please know the essence is of machine-learning, where a computer thinks (and reacts) with logic and not an algorithm.

Artificial Intelligence definition: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
Neural Network definition: a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system.
Natural Language Processing definition: is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction.

As I mentioned earlier there has been a lot of investment and research in the areas of AI and NLP, so the question begs why are we seeing such a big push in the consumer market of voice-control technology all of a sudden?

That is a reasonable question and I think it’s easily answered by two words: ‘The Cloud’! First, you need unimaginable amounts of data to ‘train’ a computer. For example, IBM Watson, at its core only knows two things which are binary (or 1’s and 0’s, yes or no, true or false). To make IBM Watson, Jeopardy-worthy it had to be pumped with years and years of library data for it to ‘learn’. My point is that without this very specific training, a computer system as powerful as Watson still cannot communicate like humans do naturally every day. Secondly, massive compute-power is required. ‘The Cloud’ offers both access to unimaginable amounts of data plus massive compute-power where, finally, computer systems an achieve machine-learning capabilities in earnest.

I was fortunate enough to work at a company called ABBYY for the past 4+ years. ABBYY is known in the industry as a leader in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is true and one of the reasons I decided to join the company, however and what I was pleasantly surprised to quickly learn, was that high-quality OCR was a result of a much bigger vision. This bigger vision was from David Yang, ABBYY founder, and his passion to help people understand each other. It might sound simple but with so many different languages, interpretations of language and structure of language it is impossible to apply scientific logic to understand meaning or intention that a computer might understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPlV9mzqeFQ

Introduction of ABBYY Machine Translation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gb9cgzxPWk (click here to see some great use case examples for NLP)

Eugene describes the use cases for NLP technology including:

Keyword vs. Semantic Search
Syntactic language parsing
Semantic indexing
Contextual understanding
Document classification
Similar documents

It was my great honor to work with some serious Linguistic scientists and learn a little bit about the complications of NLP, and true language understanding. Previously I had thought, probably like most of us reading this article, ‘why can’t Apple Siri understand what I’m saying?’. ‘Why is she so dumb about her answers?’. I do recall those reactions and it still happens to-this-day. The magic of Siri is not the voice recognition itself of word-for-word conversion, but rather the understanding of the complete question or command in a full sentence. I learned that to understand human language, meaning and intent is nearly impossible, even with the greatest scientific-minds and compute-power completely focused on such realization.

In summary, and probably in the not so distant future, I can imagine the reality of our everyday lives being controlled by voice-command. It is an undeniable trend. The domain names of NLPIsAFad.com, AIisAFad.com and ArtificialIntellingenceIsAFad.com will become hot comities as collectors gobble-up such forward-thinking treasures. A day where you walk in your front door and say something such as ‘summer-time’ and your stereo immediately starts summer-time music, then the shades automatically turn to a sandy-location and then your television instantly clicks on-to a refreshing beach sunset! Ahhhhh, so tropical. This is all within our grasp now and will soon be a realization for you.

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