Data Creation All-Time High for World Cup 2014: Weekly Roundup

The World Cup kicked off this week with with a bang, promising more digital data creation than any other soccer event to date. Just a snapshot of World Cup data creation includes millions of social media updates from fans, 2,500 hours of camera recordings and a satellite network handling up to 100 megabits per second as viewers streaming the games online all over the world. Information about World Cup data creation and more in this week's roundup: 

"It's the first truly digital World Cup," says Tom Levey, chief technologist at app performance management company AppDynamics. According to Alex Gibbons, vice president at Akamai, a global content delivery network, peak traffic is expected to create 25 terabytes of data per second. Akamai has predicted that the digital audience will at least double this year. They are expecting to handle up to 2.5 million live content streams at one time. Lucas von Cranach, CEO of Onefootball Brasil, an interactive app for tracking the games, says, "This World Cup is going to break every record in terms of digital traffic and engagement - we're expecting seven digit downloads of our Onefootball Brasil app." With the amount of traffic and load balancing that von Cranach and his team are expecting, they require a scalable cloud storage solution. "We couldn't do what we do without cloud computing," von Cranach says. 

Read more at BBC News     

With hordes of data that require constant backup, automation makes the life of a data center manager easier. As data facilities grow in size, automation systems have become more complex and sophisticated. Last week, Joe Kava, vice president for data centers at Google, announced that the company has begun using a neural network to analyze the vast amounts of data it collects on its server farms and come up with solutions to improve how the data center is managed. According to Kava, this machine learning will allow Google to reach new levels of efficiency for their data center. Kava doesn't see this as a people replacement, but more as a way to further enhance the role of the data center engineer. “You still need humans to make good judgments about these things,” Kava says. “I still want our engineers to review the recommendations.”

Read more at Data Center Knowledge

A survey conducted by Lieberman Software at the 2014 RSA Conference found that 13 percent of IT pros still had access to the IT systems of their previous employers. Unrestricted access to data and neglecting to perform backups can do much more than just harm a company. Take the case of an Oklahoma University researcher, in 2011, whose laptop was stolen from her car. The device contained years of prostrate cancer research that had not been backed up. "There's a misconception that endpoint devices don't contain critical data, yet increasingly this is where data lives," Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of data protection company Druva, tells CIO. "By not having or enforcing a governance policy that controls access to data and systems, especially after an employee leaves, organizations open themselves up to the possibility of a major breach."

Read more at CIO

Small business owners may need more handholding when discussing their IT needs than they think, says Mike Cullen, vice president at N-able by SolarWinds, a network monitoring and remote systems management company. "They don’t know what they don’t know and need a trusted advisor that has their best interest at heart and sees the reality of how IT can make or break their business," says Cullen. This, he says, is why flexibility is key when developing MSP services and consulting for clients. MSPs can determine their own rules of engagement. For example, if a customer only asks for tablet and desktop management, but not smartphone services, flexible MSPs can comply. "It may not be what you’d recommend, but your model can accommodate and make it happen," Cullen says.   

Read more at MSPMentor