PICTURING THE CLOUD

While Google’s image recognition might be able to correctly ascertain that a cloud looks like a cloud, doing a Google image search for “The Cloud” turns up a collection of pictures like this:

Much like an actual cloud that can look like whatever you imagine it to be, this virtual cloud is amorphous in its own right, and ever changing.

Fortunately for those who want to leverage cloud computing to improve their data sharing, storage, and analytics capabilities it is less important to understand what “The Cloud” looks like than what it does. In this issue of our newsletter, we dive into some of the silver linings of cloud computing and its applications.

Your Basic Cloud, Pure and Simple

Just the basics of cloud computing, and a breakdown of the acronyms describing the variety of services offered!

More Complex, Potentially Predictive Clouds

Cloud data sharing capabilities open up new possibilities for analytics and predictions and can offer many advantages over on prem data storage. Similarly, a wide variety of cloud based analytics apps and services help to optimize these capabilities. (Yes, the link is a bit ‘salesy’ but nonetheless provides some interesting info!)

(See here for one vendor’s even more detailed breakdown of the characteristics and functionality of the available analytics resources.)

Dark and Dangerous Clouds

On a more ominous note, data sharing in the cloud does present the potential for additional security risks. Fraud detection, data monitoring, and threat intelligence analysis are three of the top use cases for security analytics in the cloud. If this aspect of cloud functionality piques your interest, check out this in-depth article on how Microsoft is leveraging the cloud to solve data sharing problems, as well as learning from the attacks on their cloud computing systems. (Also some pretty neat graphics!)

Fun and Creative Clouds

My favorite kind!! DeepRacer from AWS gets creative with reinforcement learning, through its cloud-based racing simulator as well as autonomous vehicle racing leagues! Not only can you build your skills in a simulated environment, you can actually purchase a car, complete with sensors, in which you can try out your algorithms and race against others in the physical world! I can feel a cool new hobby coming on!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour among the clouds. Until next time!

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BEN’S TAKE

If you spend much time interviewing job applicants you’re likely to see some suspicious resumes. We certainly do. Because we think it’s our job to protect our customers from these candidates we pay close attention to try to spot inaccuracies and downright fictions. To help our clients, and the community in general, we just kicked off a new series of posts focused on resume fraud. Over the next few months posts in this series will document some of the fraud indicators we’ve encountered and discuss how you might avoid engaging with a candidate who’s being dishonest about their qualifications. Do you have any examples that you’re willing to share? I’d love to hear about them!

Golden Record – Dataspace’s Match Recognition SaaS

Well, it’s a little behind schedule but we’re putting the finishing touches on our Golden Record proof of concept. For those who haven’t been following, Golden Record accepts data from multiple sources and tells you when the same item appears in those files. For example, it can tell you that the Bob Smith in your CRM system is the same Bob Smith from that list of person demographics that you just purchased. We’re hearing about needs for this in a lot of places, especially from data scientists and analysts building data lakes who need to tie together a lot of disparate data sets. This link will give you more information about Golden Record (yes, the website needs work. Baby steps, right?)

If you’d like a demonstration or even want to try it out with some of your data, let’s talk! I’d love to show you what we can do.

SUGGESTIONS?

What do you think? How can we make this newsletter more useful to you? What topics would you like to see more of? Want to contribute an article? Just want to catch up and chat?

I’d love to hear from you! Email me at benjamin.taub@dataspace.com.

Ben Taub
Thanks for reading!