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|In: Internet|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Subex, a pioneering entity in the cyber-security space, hosted the first edition of its Cyber-security Symposium with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University [NTU]. The Symposium aimed towards creating a collaborative platform for the industry and academia to discuss ideas and initiatives around cyber-security education.

Image Source – Cyber Security

Representing NTU Singapore was esteemed NTU Academician and cyber-security practitioner Prof Lam Kwok Yan, who provided his overview of the cyber-security landscape in Singapore and perspectives on how the lessons learnt can be applied to the Indian ecosystem.

Also taking place on the same day was the launch of Subex’s IoT Security Lab, which will solve threats specific to IoT Industrial Control Systems [ICS] and IT Systems. Using the world’s most comprehensive IoT and ICS focused honeypots of over 400 different architectures and over 4000 devices, Subex IoT Lab collects threat intelligence across multiple verticals including Telecom, Academics, Enterprises, Defense and Smart City projects.

As part of the lab inauguration, Subex also announced that it will be opening its lab up to Public-Private Partnerships with universities such as NTU and other colleges in Bengaluru with a goal to create specific IoT security threat detection and prevention mechanisms for IoT ecosystems.

The Cyber-security symposium also witnessed the formation of a Cyber Security Academic Forum with the objective of establishing an ecosystem in the country for cyber security research to emerge and grow, with the main mission to foster ‘A Safer Cyberspace’. This forum will provide a unique opportunity to meet and discuss the current issues of cyber disruption and the ever-changing landscape of cyber security and IoT security related threats.

Speaking at the Cyber-security Symposium, Vinod Kumar, CEO and MD, Subex said

With increasing threats in the Indian and Global cyberspace, we believe that education and awareness around cyber-security will play an important role towards preparing and securing our critical assets against these threats.

However, the topic of cyber-security is yet to gain prominence within colleges in India, leading to gaps in the available talent pool. We are extremely proud to be partner with NTU Singapore to host the cyber-security symposium, and play a part in addressing this gap. The symposium witnessed collaborative discussions and brainstorm sessions between the industry and academia to identify ways to improve cyber-security education in the country. Having Prof. Lam Kwok Yan provide his expertise on the topic was of tremendous value.

Further, we also inaugurated our IoT Security Lab that will now be open to public-private partnerships with universities. The lab provides research opportunities on IoT Security threat intelligence using a one-of-its kind honeypot network. This along with the continuous monitoring of over 8.5 million customer devices have enabled us to obtain 30% more IoT and ICS threat signatures and thereby offer a comprehensive IoT threat intelligence and prevention solution to our customers.

About Subex

Subex is the market leader in the products Security and Fraud Management market, with over 180+ customers in total. Subex is a pioneering entity in the Cybersecurity space involved in multiple public and private partnerships in India. The company runs the world’s most comprehensive IoT and ICS focused honeypots of over 400 architectures in 32 locations around the world.

|In: Internet|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

VeriSign, Inc. , a global leader in domain names and internet security have announced that approximately 1.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the first quarter of 2017, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to approximately 330.6 million across all Top-Level Domains [TLDs] as of March 31, 2017.

Image Source – Domains

The increase of approximately 1.3 million domain name registrations globally equates to a growth rate of 0.4 percent over the fourth quarter of 2016. Domain name registrations have grown by 11.8 million, or 3.7 percent, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 143.6 million domain name registrations in the domain name base in the first quarter of 2017. This represents a 0.8 percent increase year over year. As of March 31, 2017, the .com domain name base totaled 128.4 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base totaled 15.2 million domain name registrations.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 9.5 million during the first quarter of 2017. In the first quarter of 2016, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 10 million.

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide internet users throughout the world with statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry. The first quarter 2017 Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained from here

|In: India|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Google India released the 2016 recap of trending stories-biggest moments, major events and users interests based on trillions of searches made by Indians on Google this year.

Extending unprecedented support to the Indian contingent this year, the sprawling nation of 1.3 billion moved beyond Cricket, as Rio Olympics 2016 emerged as the top trending search query on Google in 2016. Following up close was a game that took the world by storm, Pokemon Go.

The US presidential elections have always been closely watched in India but this year the interest was further heightened, US President Donald Trump emerged on top of the list of trending personalities. Following him were the world-class performances by Indian female athletes at the world’s biggest sporting event. Indian badminton star and Olympic medallist, P.V.Sindhu took the second spot in the overall trending personality searches. The latest social media obsession Sonam Gupta, made a surprise entry at third position while Indian gymnast Dipa Karmakar taking the fourth spot followed by Bollywood actress Disha Patani who recently made her Bollywood debut in a biopic on Indian cricketing star M S Dhoni. Indian female wrestler and Olympic champion Sakshi Malik also featured among the Top 10 trending personalities on Google.

A quick look at  the year’s top news moments that captured India’s attention reveals that even though Olympics topped the charts, the historic win for Donald Trump in US elections and Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) reflected on India’s rising involvement and interest around global issues. The 7th Pay commission, Demonetization, and the strategic surgical strike on terror groups caught everyone’s attention and generated a great deal of search curiosity among Indian users.

Among the Bollywood leads, power packed performance by Sushant Singh Rajput and Disha Patani not just won them accolades but the duo also emerged on the top trending charts of male and female Bollywood stars. When it comes to movies and entertainment, Bollywood Superstar Salman Khan with his blockbuster film ‘Sultan’ captured the peak position among top trending movies followed closely by Thalaiva Rajinikanth’s blockbuster film ‘Kabali’.  Shahid Kapoor starrer Udta Punjab, Akshay Kumar’s Airlift and Ranbir and Anushka Sharma starrer ‘Ae Dil Hai Mushkil’ also made it to the Top 5.

To see more information about Year in Search across the globe, use interactive data visualisations, please visit google.com/2016

|In: Internet|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Mobility and Digital Transformation are no longer just buzz-words and it is very difficult for individuals as well as organizations to ignore them! In fact, having a long-term as well as sound Digital Strategy has become one of the key agendas’ for any organization. Existence of technologies like hyper-connectivity,  IoT, smart devices, drones, VR, AR, cloud computing, etc. are acting as the key pillars of connected growth. In such a connected world, organizations are having access to huge amount of data that can then be leveraged to transform them into tangible actions.

Image Source - Cloud Computing
Image Source – Cloud Computing

 Some of the growing challenges of Digital Transformation are below:

1. Increasingly complex environments and the growing need for efficiency
2. New cyber-security threats everyday
3. Support both existing and new apps/services/frameworks

Keeping your website’s up-time optimum, keeping data at the back-end secure and ensuring that it functions smoothly is very important in this age where information spreads like fire and can adversely affect your business if these factors are not handled with care.

VMWare, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud and virtualization software and services made a plethora of exciting announcements at the recently concluded vForum 2016 that was held in Mumbai. It aims to revolutionize and optimize businesses via it’s products in areas of Private Cloud, IoT, Enterprise mobility management (Air Watch), Network virtualization (NSX), Software defined data centers, etc.

Image Source – Facebook

Some of the major highlights and announcements from vForum 2016 are below:

Adopting digital route using VMWare’s Cloud infrastructure

As per a study by IDC, only 20% of traditional businesses are leading in the digital transformation and Culture & Technology are the key factors that differentiate the leaders from the laggards. From a culture perspective, leaders rewrite the rules and from the technology perspective, they consider the mobile-cloud core to their business.

Using VMWare’s Cross-Cloud Architecture, customers can run, manage, connect and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment. VMWare’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) strategy ensures that all the elements of infrastructure namely network, storage, security, etc. are abstracted from the user and are delivered as a service [Source*].

John Gilmartin, VP & GM at VMWare stressed upon advantages of Public-Private Cloud, ease of setting up a private cloud in less than two hours, reduced over-head cost and power consumption, design of Virtual SAN w.r.t high performance & scalability.

Organizations, irrespective of their size can utilize VMWare’s secure cloud infrastructure to simplify their IT infrastructure and take the digital route.

VMWare’s Vision [Courtesy VForum 2016, Mumbai]
vSphere 6.5 : Built-in security, simplified experience and more…

vSphere 6.5 is considered as a turning point in VMWare infrastructure security. It is built on three basic principles:

Comprehensive built-in security – This is possible via Secure access (using Audit-Quality logging), Secure Infrastructure (Secure boot) and Secure data (using VM level encryption).

Superior performance and scale – As shown in the snapshot below, vSphere 6.5 is 6x times faster than it’s predecessors.

Universal App platform – Stressing on the need for Digital work-spaces, growing focus on mobility and meeting the demands on diverse set of customers; vSphere 6.5 has a universal app platform for running any application.

It also supports new REST APIs and provides a simple method to migrate from Windows to any Appliance model.

Since the average cost of data breach is around USD 4 million [Source], security is the central focus in vSphere 6.5 due to which there is micro-segmentation level security in NSX.

Partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Skype for Business

VMWare announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft for Skype for Business where VMWare would ensure that Skype is able to deliver the best user experience using it’s Horizon platform. VMWare also announced it’s strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. This new offering will allow customers to leverage their existing investments in VMware skillsets and seamlessly take advantage of the flexibility and economics of the AWS Cloud [More].

Tech talk on NSX, PowerCLI

VMWare NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). In NSX, entire network stack is abstracted from the user and is moved to the software level and it’s goal is to reproduce all Network and Security services in the Logical Space. It is at the core of the SDDC approach.

Below components are all moved to the logical space:

1. Switching (DHCP Server or Relay, DNS)
2. Routing/NAT (Distributed or Centralized)
3. Firewall (Distributed or Centralized)
4. Load Balancing (InLine or OneArm)
5. L2 & L3 VPN (L2VPN, Site to Site, SSL VPN)

Since, all the changes are done in the logical space hence no modifications are required in the VMs. More information about VMWare NSX can be found here

VMWare vSphere PowerCLI provides an easy to use Windows PowerShell interface for command-line access for creating executable scripts or for administration tasks. It follows the Noun-Verb structure where the Verb represents the action and Noun represents the object on which to operate. All command categories take parameters and arguments. More information about vSphere PowerCLI can be found here

More announcements

Within a span of 2+ years, VMWare Virtual SAN (Storage Area Network) is the widest deployed HCI Solution and has scaled to more than 5000+ enterprise customers!

The staggering figures of VMWare Private cloud are below

VMWare India has around 4,000 employees and has offices in six locations, with R&D centers in Bengaluru and Pune. VMWare registered revenue of USD 6.6 billion in 2015 and has over 50,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide [Source]

We started this article with Importance of Digital Transformation, hence if your organization aims to accelerate the Digital journey, consider using these technologies that are front-runners to drive that strategy!

Image Source - VMWare Blog
Image Source – VMWare Blog

The complete guide for acceleration of Digital Transformation can be found here

For further updates on vForum 2016, please visit vForumIN on Facebook, vForum on Twitter

|In: Internet|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Yahoo Inc. have made a number of product announcements, primarily in the area of communications. This month marks Yahoo Mail’s 18th anniversary, and the company is celebrating that occasion by introducing a new Yahoo Mail app that is fast, intuitive and beautifully designed. Available on iOS [iPhone and iPad] and Android, the new app comes with a number of features, including smarter search, contacts management and rich compose.

Yahoo_Logo

Most people have an email account from more than one provider. So starting today, Yahoo Mail users can connect and manage their email accounts from Outlook.com, Hotmail and AOL Mail, right from Yahoo Mail on mobile and desktop.

Once connected, users can access Yahoo Mail’s features across all their mailboxes. [The ability to manage multiple mailboxes is rolling out globally today in the Yahoo Mail app. The desktop experience is currently available for U.S. English users, and will be coming soon to users outside of the U.S.]

Jeff Bonforte, senior vice president of communication products at Yahoo said

Email is the most prevalent way people communicate online. However, what we want from our inbox is evolving. Mobile use requires a faster and smarter inbox. Both of these needs are at the center of our new app.

In addition to speed, smarts and support for multiple mailboxes, the new app marks the introduction of Yahoo Account Key – a more secure and simple future alternative to the old password. This new feature simplifies the sign-in process with a secure and easy-to-use interface to access a Yahoo account with the tap of a button.

Dylan Casey, vice president of product management at Yahoo.

Passwords are difficult to remember and secondary sign-in verification is inconvenient and confusing. Earlier this year we launched on-demand passwords using an SMS code. We’re now taking a major leap towards a password-free future with the launch of Yahoo Account Key, which uses push notifications to give users simple and secure access using their mobile device.


Availability
The ability to manage multiple mailboxes is rolling out globally today in the Yahoo Mail app. The desktop experience is available for U.S. English users today and will be coming soon to users outside of the U.S.  Yahoo Account Key is available globally today.

The new Yahoo Mail app is available in the Apple App Store to all global users today, and rolling out to Android users in Google Play starting today. Additional information can be found on the Yahoo Tumblr

Do share your experience if you have tried the new Yahoo Mail App 🙂

|In: AddOns|Last Updated:
Few months back, I had blogged about GMDesk – the Adobe AIR app that makes access to all your favorite Google services easy. However, the issue with the app was that it worked fine on Windows but on Linux, the app crashes when you type M/m in user-id/password text box !!!

Mozilla Labs came out with an interesting add-on called Prism which like GMDesk allows you to access your favorite sites as a standalone app.Yesterday, I gave a try to Prism and really loved it – some of the reasons listed below:

  • Firefox on my PC has lot of add-ons and few like TwitterFox make it really very slow since they have to poll for new messages every xyz minutes.
  • For users of Chrome, this would be one of the potential reasons to switch to Firefox since Prism does not share the memory with Firefox and hence Prism app continues to run even though your browser crashes/hangs.
  • Last but not the least, Prism enhances your productivity since you don’t have to switch tabs or open multiple windows to get to your favorite sites since, the desktop shortcuts to your Prism apps would do the trick smile

Though Prism apps take up lot of memory [snapshot below] yet they really make browsing fun as well as interesting.

Important Links :
Prism download page
Youtube channel

Do give Prism a try & definitely it would be a big productivity booster for you like it has been for me !!!

|In: Business Networking|Last Updated: | 10 Comments
It has been more than a year since I am on Twitter but I was never caught in the the web of Twitdiction [Twitter Addiction].The first question that always comes to mind is “Who would read my tweet” and if at all someone reads my tweet, why would (s)he bother to reply me with a solution.But this turned out to be a misconception just like the one we have about Blogging.

For the past few days, there has been a steady growth in my T-follower count & T-following count, which gave a trigger to this article.

Below are my picks on how to make EFFECTIVE use of Twitter :

1. Use Twitter like LinkedIn:
LinkedIn has been a great tool for Business Networking[link here] and it is a place where you would find guys from the top to the bottom part of the corporate ladder.Seeing Twitter’s phenomenal growth, you wouldn’t be surprised to see the same set of people here as well.The idea is connect with them; check their followers list and follow the relevant people in their network. To take it further, Twitter is one step better in terms of transparency since you won’t require the other person’s email-id to follow him/her [exception is when the profile is locked].TweetSum is an awesome service that helps you more efficiently decide whether you should follow someone back once they’ve followed you on Twitter

2. Understand the time-zone :
Once you have established the network, you need to maintain it properly. How would a follower feel if you tweet “Good Morning tweeple,howz you?” and your follower in a different time-zone reads that in the night sad It is bound to happen that after irrelevant tweets like these you may loose a handful number of precious followers. We are no celebrities like @BarackObama or @ShahrukhKhan or @Padmashree Warrior etc.,that our followers would be interested in whether we had tea or doing coding or sitting with girlfriend; such tweets would surely bring down your follower count. This becomes very important when your precious followers are from various parts of the world.Though Twitter tag line says “What are you doing”, it’s meaning is much more than that !!!

3. Tweet & retweet relevant content :
This is an extension of the previous point, tweet[or even retweet] something meaningful which might be interesting and relevant to you & your network, keeping in mind that each tweet should bring in more RELEVANT followers on board[There should be some ROI for each tweet].Use HashTags or tags like [MY BLOG],[TECHNOLOGY],[STARTUPS] etc. wherever required so that uninterested followers won’t spend time in reading that tweet.The crux is Tweet less , tweet relevant …

4. PASSIONATELY LISTEN to your followers :
This would be the basic usage of Twitter and needs no elaboration. If you are a brand, it becomes necessary to look into what the Twitter(ers) are saying about your brand & be proactive enough to reply to their tweet.For example: Online travel company Cleartip was fast enough to respond to one of my tweets that referred them[Tweet here and Cleartrip’s reply here], I really like their UI but this quick response doubles my liking for them.Freshbooks have proved that Twitter is a great platform to create passionate brand evangelists;their must-read case study here.

5. Use “Social Media Monitoring” tools for your links :
Being only limited to 140 characters, links that are posted on twitter have to be shortened using URL shortening services[list here].Though each service gives us a short URL, many a times it becomes important to know status of the link[how many read, percentage of people reading from different parts of the world etc.];to keep it simple-we need something like Google Analytics for short URL(s).These analytics would help you understand whether twitter is REALLY working for you & your brand. My personal favourite is Cligs, you can find the pros & cons of various services here

6. Maintain an effective Twitter background :
This just came out from my personal experience.Being passionate about Entrepreneurship, once I changed the twitter background to my current one; the number of followers increased at a very steady rate.Compare the profile page with RSS Feed; we read an article based on the title & it’s relevance to us[even though the complete article may not be present in the feed !!!], similarly an effective backgound gives a clear idea about “THE REASON WHY YOU ARE ON TWITTER“. This even saves the other person’s time & his/her decision to connect with you becomes faster !!! TwitBacks also helps you creating custom Twitter backgrounds that would make your profile page more meaningful smile


7. MONITOR your twitter behavior :

One fine day, you realize that ‘N’ followers have stopped following you, hence before this happens it becomes necessary to check your TWIT(avior)- Twitter Behavior.TweetEffect helps in understanding which Tweet of your’s caused a negative effect on your followers and helps you keep a check on your activity.

Note:
If you liked this article, we could get connected on Twitter & LinkedIn.

In case you have some more interesting points to add, please leave a comment and the same would be added to the main article [with due credit to the commenter].

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated: | 4 Comments
In continuation to the previous article by Scott Fox , author of the best selling book Internet Riches[who is the Guest Writer on this blog]; let us now look at the remaining two factors that would help to create more online opportunities for Entrepreneurs in India.
Note:
“I” in the article refers to Scott Fox.
4. India’s English Triple Advantage: 
With their greater literacy in English, Indian entrepreneurs can continue to capture a greater share of English-speaking customer dollars than entrepreneurs from other countries like China.
This linguistic advantage is important because it allows Indian startups to:
  • Compete on a global basis by more easily marketing their e-commerce products and services outside of India into affluent English-speaking markets worldwide.
  • Take advantage of proven e-commerce platforms from the U.S. for use in India. Services like Google’s Adsense, Paypal, eBay, Elance, and many others are all available to English-speaking Indian entrepreneurs today, at least for imitation and research if not outright deployment in Indian markets.
  • Access the huge amount of technical and strategy information available in English online. Many of the most important lessons learned by American entrepreneurs are well documented online and often available for free. This expertise includes technical documents, the U.S. Patent Office libraries, community forums of all sorts, and even thousands of free email newsletters and e-courses [like those I offer at ScottFox.com] that teach many of the e-business revolution’s tactical innovations for free.
5. Anyone Can Play Online: 
Perhaps most exciting about the E-Business Revolution is the liberation of the creativity of non-traditional entrepreneurs. With little capital required, low risk, and worldwide reach, the World Wide Web offers economic opportunity to a wider class of people, including the disenfranchised, the physically disabled or house-bound, and lower socio-economic classes, than ever before in history. Particular opportunities are emerging to serve youth markets [with more than half of the Indian population under the age of 25], and women [only 23% of Internet users in India are female], for example.
As previous online innovations like eBay, YouTube, Facebook, and CraigsList have demonstrated in the U.S. , it’s difficult to predict how new platforms for commerce and communication can empower people. Today e-commerce’s egalitarian approach to allowing participation and making money is increasingly available to inspire bursts of creativity from Indian entrepreneurs. Additionally, it’s easy to foresee dramatic advances, including the establishment of new billion-dollar companies dedicated to serving the unique needs of previously underserved sectors of Indian society.
Increasingly, the only entry requirements into the race for internet riches are a broadband connection, creativity, and some hard work. As discussed in my book, Internet Riches, and with free updates by email from my blogs at ScottFox.com , I look forward to helping nurture this coming tidal wave of achievement too. I am excited to see the innovative, profitable, and inspiring ways that Indian entrepreneurs of all kinds will find to respond to the opportunities offered by the e-business revolution.
With this closing remark from Scott, I would like to thank Scott for being a guest author on ThoughtsPrevail and hope to see him back in the near future !!!