Canada and the US Partner to Fight Cybercrime

Welcome to the Monday edition of the IP news roundup, where you will find the latest headlines in cybercrime, network security, cloud, data centres and more:

• In an effort to protect their digital infrastructure and improve responses to cybercrime incidents, Canada and the US have launched a joint cyber security plan. According to the AFP report, “Washington and Ottawa hope to improve collaboration on managing cyber incidents between their respective cyber security operation centers, enhance information sharing and engagement with the private sector and pursue US-Canadian collaboration to promote cyber security awareness to the public.”
• Cloud spending will increase in 2013. A Computerworld article on cloud predictions for 2013 stated that cloud services will continue to mature as more companies move their IT infrastructures off premises. Deloitte Consulting technology leader Robert Hillard predicted that “[f]ile sharing, document sharing and collaboration will very quickly gain enterprise strength and much greater support within the enterprise traditional governance.” The article also stated that the market will see strong growth in business process as a service (BPaaS). Meanwhile, software as a service (SaaS) will grow by 28%, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will grow by 55%.
• Can you secure your network with a small budget and limited resources? According to an article on the Infosec Island blog, there are ways you can secure your physical network if your resources are too limited to implement an NAC. The author recommends using RJ-45 jack locks on open ports or segmenting your network. Please see the article for further suggestions on how to protect your network if you don’t have a lot of money or resources to devote to network security.
• Data centres don’t deserve the bad rap … at least, according to an article on GigoOM, which counters the criticism that large-scale data centres cost too much money and don’t provide enough jobs. While it’s true that today’s data centres don’t require many employees on site, the article makes the point that data centres contribute to the economy, as their on-site positions help companies “employ tens of thousands more on a full-time basis offering the services delivered from those data centers. Eliminate the data centers and there goes the service delivery; no services, no revenue; no revenue, no jobs.” Not to mention all of the part-time employees, temps, consultants, contractors and vendors who perform work that is related to the data centre. The article continues, “We shouldn’t just be looking at how many people happen to be walking down the aisles of data centers at a given moment, but the total employment impact—full-time, part-time, and indirect—of high-tech firms whose entire service portfolio is delivered via those data centers.”
• And finally … the Internet Archive has enough data on file to blow your mind. Gizmodo reported that the Internet Archive has saved an incredible 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (or 10 petabytes) of data. The article states that the Internet Archive plans to not only hold it for posterity, but also store it in the Wayback Machine, a digital time capsule, and provide “an experimental 80 terabyte crawl from 2011 to researchers, to see if anyone can do anything cool with it.”

What is your take on today’s news? Feel free to share your opinions below.