Any content destined to the public that doesn’t rank on Google or Bing is destined to be obscure and gets no visibility. Writing any blog post or article is not enough to be ranked on Google or Bing, the top 2 search engines in the world.
Lack of keywords or misplaced keywords: The primary keyword must be the first word of both your domain name and blog title.
Malformed URLs
Site Not mobile friendly
No inlinks
No meta-tags
No Alt Tags
What to do Next?
If you resolve all the issues above, register your site to google search console,, then submit a sitemap url to google or Bing, then check your site performance and index status regularly to make sure that your site is getting indexed properly.
For privacy sake, it is very important for a lot of people to not trust cloud providers with their financial data. Below are some free desktop financial software products that do not require you to store data in the cloud.
Reliable, clean data, you only pay for what you use, your data stays on your computer.
2- LibreOffice Calc : Calc is the free spreadsheet program you’ve always needed. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn, while professional data miners and number crunchers appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions. Built-in wizards guide you through choosing and using a comprehensive range of advanced features.
Calc is the spreadsheet application you’ve always wanted. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn; professional data miners and number crunchers will appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions.
4- Google Sheets: With Google Sheets, you can create, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free. Price: Free for non-business use $5/month per user for basic G-Suite $10/month per user for business license
5- Excel: Well it is Microsoft Excel….Enough said. Excel provides a simple way to download financial data into a preconfigured spreadsheet at the click of a button.
Money Manager Ex is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.
Money Manager includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness – something one can use everyday.
7- Xero: Xero backs up your data and protects it with multiple layers of security including industry-standard data encryption and secure data centres. We also offer two-step authentication as an additional layer of protection for your Xero account.
8- Smartsheet Smartsheet is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company focused entirely on its core cloud-based work automation platform. Their competency is in simplifying tasks and including many diverse types of output. Since all their efforts revolve around a single product and its extensions, there is strong user support.
What are unique distinctions and similarities between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services? For each AWS service, what is the equivalent Azure and Google Cloud service? For each Azure service, what is the corresponding Google Service? AWS Services vs Azure vs Google Services? Side by side comparison between AWS, Google Cloud and Azure Service?
Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep: AWS vs Azure vs Google
1
Category: Marketplace Easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions. References: [AWS]:AWS Marketplace [Azure]:Azure Marketplace [Google]:Google Cloud Marketplace Tags: #AWSMarketplace, #AzureMarketPlace, #GoogleMarketplace Differences: They are both digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on their respective cloud platform.
Tags: #AlexaSkillsKit, #MicrosoftBotFramework, #GoogleAssistant Differences: One major advantage Google gets over Alexa is that Google Assistant is available to almost all Android devices.
Tags: #AmazonLex, #CogintiveServices, #AzureSpeech, #Api.ai, #DialogFlow, #Tensorflow Differences: api.ai provides us with such a platform which is easy to learn and comprehensive to develop conversation actions. It is a good example of the simplistic approach to solving complex man to machine communication problem using natural language processing in proximity to machine learning. Api.ai supports context based conversations now, which reduces the overhead of handling user context in session parameters. On the other hand in Lex this has to be handled in session. Also, api.ai can be used for both voice and text based conversations (assistant actions can be easily created using api.ai).
Category: Big data and analytics: Data warehouse Description: Apache Spark-based analytics platform. Managed Hadoop service. Data orchestration, ETL, Analytics and visualization References: [AWS]:EMR, Data Pipeline, Kinesis Stream, Kinesis Firehose, Glue, QuickSight, Athena, CloudSearch [Azure]:Azure Databricks, Data Catalog Cortana Intelligence, HDInsight, Power BI, Azure Datafactory, Azure Search, Azure Data Lake Anlytics, Stream Analytics, Azure Machine Learning [Google]:Cloud DataProc, Machine Learning, Cloud Datalab Tags:#EMR, #DataPipeline, #Kinesis, #Cortana, AzureDatafactory, #AzureDataAnlytics, #CloudDataProc, #MachineLearning, #CloudDatalab Differences: All three providers offer similar building blocks; data processing, data orchestration, streaming analytics, machine learning and visualisations. AWS certainly has all the bases covered with a solid set of products that will meet most needs. Azure offers a comprehensive and impressive suite of managed analytical products. They support open source big data solutions alongside new serverless analytical products such as Data Lake. Google provide their own twist to cloud analytics with their range of services. With Dataproc and Dataflow, Google have a strong core to their proposition. Tensorflow has been getting a lot of attention recently and there will be many who will be keen to see Machine Learning come out of preview.
Category: Serverless Description: Integrate systems and run backend processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers. References: [AWS]:AWS Lambda [Azure]:Azure Functions [Google]:Google Cloud Functions Tags:#AWSLAmbda, #AzureFunctions, #GoogleCloudFunctions Differences: Both AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions offer dynamic, configurable triggers that you can use to invoke your functions on their platforms. AWS Lambda, Azure and Google Cloud Functions support Node.js, Python, and C#. The beauty of serverless development is that, with minor changes, the code you write for one service should be portable to another with little effort – simply modify some interfaces, handle any input/output transforms, and an AWS Lambda Node.JS function is indistinguishable from a Microsoft Azure Node.js Function. AWS Lambda provides further support for Python and Java, while Azure Functions provides support for F# and PHP. AWS Lambda is built from the AMI, which runs on Linux, while Microsoft Azure Functions run in a Windows environment. AWS Lambda uses the AWS Machine architecture to reduce the scope of containerization, letting you spin up and tear down individual pieces of functionality in your application at will.
Category:Caching Description:An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store typically used to offload non transactional work from a database. References: [AWS]:AWS ElastiCache (works as an in-memory data store and cache to support the most demanding applications requiring sub-millisecond response times.) [Azure]:Azure Cache for Redis (based on the popular software Redis. It is typically used as a cache to improve the performance and scalability of systems that rely heavily on backend data-stores.) [Google]:Memcache (In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching) Tags:#Redis, #Memcached <Differences: They all support horizontal scaling via sharding.They all improve the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrive information from fast, in-memory caches, instead of relying on slower disk-based databases.”, “Differences”: “ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis. Memcached Cloud provides various data persistence options as well as remote backups for disaster recovery purposes. Redis offers persistence to disk, Memcache does not. This can be very helpful if you cache lots of data, since you remove the slowness around having a fully cold cache. Redis also offers several extra data structures that Memcache doesn’t— Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, etc. Memcache only has Key/Value pairs. Memcache is multi-threaded. Redis is single-threaded and event driven. Redis is very fast, but it’ll never be multi-threaded. At hight scale, you can squeeze more connections and transactions out of Memcache. Memcache tends to be more memory efficient. This can make a big difference around the magnitude of 10s of millions or 100s of millions of keys. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis. Memcached Cloud provides various data persistence options as well as remote backups for disaster recovery purposes. Redis offers persistence to disk, Memcache does not. This can be very helpful if you cache lots of data, since you remove the slowness around having a fully cold cache. Redis also offers several extra data structures that Memcache doesn’t— Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, etc. Memcache only has Key/Value pairs. Memcache is multi-threaded. Redis is single-threaded and event driven. Redis is very fast, but it’ll never be multi-threaded. At hight scale, you can squeeze more connections and transactions out of Memcache. Memcache tends to be more memory efficient. This can make a big difference around the magnitude of 10s of millions or 100s of millions of keys.
Category: Enterprise application services Description:Fully integrated Cloud service providing communications, email, document management in the cloud and available on a wide variety of devices. References: [AWS]:Amazon WorkMail, Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon Kendra (Sync and Index) [Azure]:Office 365 [Google]:G Suite Tags: #AmazonWorkDocs, #Office365, #GoogleGSuite Differences: G suite document processing applications like Google Docs are far behind Office 365 popular Word and Excel software, but G Suite User interface is intuite, simple and easy to navigate. Office 365 is too clunky. Get 20% off G-Suite Business Plan with Promo Code: PCQ49CJYK7EATNC
Category: Management Description: A unified management console that simplifies building, deploying, and operating your cloud resources. References: [AWS]:AWS Management Console, Trusted Advisor, AWS Usage and Billing Report, AWS Application Discovery Service, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Compute Optimizer (Identify optimal AWS Compute resources) [Azure]:Azure portal, Azure Advisor, Azure Billing API, Azure Migrate, Azure Monitor, Azure Resource Health [Google]:Google CLoud Platform, Cost Management, Security Command Center, StackDriver Tags: #AWSConsole, #AzurePortal, #GoogleCloudConsole, #TrustedAdvisor, #AzureMonitor, #SecurityCommandCenter Differences: AWS Console categorizes its Infrastructure as a Service offerings into Compute, Storage and Content Delivery Network (CDN), Database, and Networking to help businesses and individuals grow. Azure excels in the Hybrid Cloud space allowing companies to integrate onsite servers with cloud offerings. Google has a strong offering in containers, since Google developed the Kubernetes standard that AWS and Azure now offer. GCP specializes in high compute offerings like Big Data, analytics and machine learning. It also offers considerable scale and load balancing – Google knows data centers and fast response time.
Build and connect intelligent bots that interact with your users using text/SMS, Skype, Teams, Slack, Office 365 mail, Twitter, and other popular services.
Enables both Speech to Text, and Text into Speech capabilities. The Speech Services are the unification of speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-translation into a single Azure subscription. It’s easy to speech enable your applications, tools, and devices with the Speech SDK, Speech Devices SDK, or REST APIs. Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech (TTS) service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice. With dozens of lifelike voices across a variety of languages, you can select the ideal voice and build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications. Using the Amazon Transcribe API, you can analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech.
Computer Vision: Extract information from images to categorize and process visual data. Amazon Rekognition is a simple and easy to use API that can quickly analyze any image or video file stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Rekognition is always learning from new data, and we are continually adding new labels and facial recognition features to the service.
Face: Detect, identy, and analyze faces in photos.
The Virtual Assistant Template brings together a number of best practices we’ve identified through the building of conversational experiences and automates integration of components that we’ve found to be highly beneficial to Bot Framework developers.
Processes and moves data between different compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources at specified intervals. Create, schedule, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines.
Virtual servers allow users to deploy, manage, and maintain OS and server software. Instance types provide combinations of CPU/RAM. Users pay for what they use with the flexibility to change sizes.
Allows you to automatically change the number of VM instances. You set defined metric and thresholds that determine if the platform adds or removes instances.
Redeploy and extend your VMware-based enterprise workloads to Azure with Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. Keep using the VMware tools you already know to manage workloads on Azure without disrupting network, security, or data protection policies.
Azure Container Instances is the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to provision any virtual machines or adopt a higher-level orchestration service.
Deploy orchestrated containerized applications with Kubernetes. Simplify monitoring and cluster management through auto upgrades and a built-in operations console.
Fully managed service that enables developers to deploy microservices applications without managing virtual machines, storage, or networking. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications.
Integrate systems and run backend processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code
Managed relational database service where resiliency, scale, and maintenance are primarily handled by the platform. Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services. It is a web service running “in the cloud” designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call as AWS does not offer an ssh connection to RDS instances.
An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store typically used to offload non transactional work from a database. Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service by Amazon Web Services. The service improves the performance of web applications by retrieving information from managed in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Memcached and Redis.
Migration of database schema and data from one database format to a specific database technology in the cloud. AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
Comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. AWS X-Ray is an application performance management service that enables a developer to analyze and debug applications in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. A developer can use AWS X-Ray to visualize how a distributed application is performing during development or production, and across multiple AWS regions and accounts.
A cloud service for collaborating on code development. AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model you define. AWS CodeCommit is a source code storage and version-control service for Amazon Web Services’ public cloud customers. CodeCommit was designed to help IT teams collaborate on software development, including continuous integration and application delivery.
Collection of tools for building, debugging, deploying, diagnosing, and managing multiplatform scalable apps and services. The AWS Developer Tools are designed to help you build software like Amazon. They facilitate practices such as continuous delivery and infrastructure as code for serverless, containers, and Amazon EC2.
Built on top of the native REST API across all cloud services, various programming language-specific wrappers provide easier ways to create solutions. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services. With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts.
Configures and operates applications of all shapes and sizes, and provides templates to create and manage a collection of resources. AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers.
Provides a way for users to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated IT tasks. AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.
Provides an isolated, private environment in the cloud. Users have control over their virtual networking environment, including selection of their own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
Connects Azure virtual networks to other Azure virtual networks, or customer on-premises networks (Site To Site). Allows end users to connect to Azure services through VPN tunneling (Point To Site).
A service that hosts domain names, plus routes users to Internet applications, connects user requests to datacenters, manages traffic to apps, and improves app availability with automatic failover.
Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer. It supports SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and round robin for load-balancing traffic.
Azure Digital Twins is an IoT service that helps you create comprehensive models of physical environments. Create spatial intelligence graphs to model the relationships and interactions between people, places, and devices. Query data from a physical space rather than disparate sensors.
Provides analysis of cloud resource configuration and security so subscribers can ensure they’re making use of best practices and optimum configurations.
Allows users to securely control access to services and resources while offering data security and protection. Create and manage users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny access to resources.
Role-based access control (RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
Provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, and Kerberos/NTLM authentication that are fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory.
Azure Policy is a service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources, so those resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements.
Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called “management groups” and apply your governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale, no matter what type of subscriptions you have.
Helps you protect and safeguard your data and meet your organizational security and compliance commitments.
Key Management Service AWS KMS, CloudHSM | Key Vault
Provides security solution and works with other services by providing a way to manage, create, and control encryption keys stored in hardware security modules (HSM).
Provides inbound protection for non-HTTP/S protocols, outbound network-level protection for all ports and protocols, and application-level protection for outbound HTTP/S.
An automated security assessment service that improves the security and compliance of applications. Automatically assess applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices.
Object storage service, for use cases including cloud applications, content distribution, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
Provides a simple interface to create and configure file systems quickly, and share common files. Can be used with traditional protocols that access files over a network.
Easily join your distributed microservice architectures into a single global application using HTTP load balancing and path-based routing rules. Automate turning up new regions and scale-out with API-driven global actions, and independent fault-tolerance to your back end microservices in Azure—or anywhere.
Cloud technology to build distributed applications using out-of-the-box connectors to reduce integration challenges. Connect apps, data and devices on-premises or in the cloud.
Serverless technology for connecting apps, data and devices anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud for large ecosystems of SaaS and cloud-based connectors.
Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that enables you to run Azure services in your company’s or service provider’s datacenter. As a developer, you can build apps on Azure Stack. You can then deploy them to either Azure Stack or Azure, or you can build truly hybrid apps that take advantage of connectivity between an Azure Stack cloud and Azure.
Cloud computing is the new big thing in Information Technology. Everyone, every business will sooner or later adopt it, because of hosting cost benefits, scalability and more.
This blog outlines the Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing, Pros and Cons of Cloud Technology, Faqs, Facts, Questions and Answers Dump about cloud computing.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep PWA AppCloud Practitioner Exam Prep AWS vs Azure vs Google
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an information technology paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
Cost effective & Time saving: Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters; the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure.
The ability to pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs.
Powerful server capabilities and Performance: The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Powerful and scalable server capabilities: The ability to scale elastically; That means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.
SaaS ( Software as a service). Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
PaaS ( Platform as a service). Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service). The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis
Serverless: Running complex Applications without a single server. Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning, and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.
Infrastructure provisioning as code, helps recreating same infrastructure by re-running the same code in a few click.
Automatic and Reliable Data backup and storage of data: Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Increase Productivity: On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Security: Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Speed: Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
Privacy: Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information.Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services.
Security: According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are Insecure Interfaces and API’s, Data Loss & Leakage, and Hardware Failure—which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities.
Ownership of Data: There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership.
Limited Customization Options: Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and—like any outsourced task—you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want.
Downtime: Technical outages are inevitable and occur sometimes when cloud service providers (CSPs) become overwhelmed in the process of serving their clients. This may result to temporary business suspension.
Security of stored data and data in transit may be a concern when storing sensitive data at a cloud storage provider[10]
Users with specific records-keeping requirements, such as public agencies that must retain electronic records according to statute, may encounter complications with using cloud computing and storage. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense designated the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to maintain a list of records management products that meet all of the records retention, personally identifiable information (PII), and security (Information Assurance; IA) requirements
Cloud storage is a rich resource for both hackers and national security agencies. Because the cloud holds data from many different users and organizations, hackers see it as a very valuable target.
Piracy and copyright infringement may be enabled by sites that permit filesharing. For example, the CodexCloud ebook storage site has faced litigation from the owners of the intellectual property uploaded and shared there, as have the GrooveShark and YouTube sites it has been compared to.
Public clouds: A cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. They are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources, like servers and storage, over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software, and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hold a commanding position among the many cloud companies.
Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site datacenter. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premise resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options, and helps optimize your existing infrastructure, security, and compliance.
Community Cloud: A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. This is controlled and used by a group of organizations that have shared interest. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud, so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.
Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump
What do the top 3 public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google cloud do to insure customer data loss?
As cloud user, cloud customer, company storing customer data in the cloud, you probably have a lot of personal or private data hosted in various infrastructure in the cloud. Losing that data or having the data accessed by hackers or unauthorized third party can be very harmful both financially and emotionally to you or your customers. A cloud User or Customer Insurance can protect you against data lost or stolen data. Practically, the cloud computing insurance is a cyber liability policy that covers web-based services. Before looking for a customer insurance in the cloud, you need to clarify “What data should the insurance cover and under which governing laws?“, “What data can be considered a loss?” . The good news is : as cloud adoption is increasing in the insurance industry, insurers have the opportunity to better understand their operations models and to implement tailored insurance solutions for cloud.
Cloud Data loss can happen in the following forms:
First Party Losses: losses where the cloud provider incurs damages. Those types of losses include:
Destruction of Data
Denial of Service Attack (DOS)
Virus, Malware and Spyware
Human Error
Electrical Malfunctions and Power Surges in data centers
Natural Disasters
Network Failures
Cyber Extortion
Each of the above exposures to loss would result in direct damages to the insured, or first-party loss.
Third-Party Losses – damages that would occur to customers outside of the cloud provider. These types of losses include:
Breach of Privacy
Misuse of Private Personal Information
Defamation or Slander
Transmission of Malicious Content
The above exposures could result in a company being held liable for the damages caused to others (liability).
Cyber insurance is a form of insurance for businesses and individuals against internet-based risks. The most common risk that is insured against is data breaches. … It also covers losses from network security breaches, theft of intellectual property and loss of privacy.
Data Compromise coverage insures a commercial entity when there is a data breach, theft or unauthorized disclosure of personal information. … Thus Cyber Liability covers both the expenses to notify affected individuals of data breaches and the expenses to make the insured whole for their own damages incurred.
Contact an Independent Insurance Agent near you that writes Cyber Insurance and ask them to get multiple quotes for your business.
However, a more effective risk management solution might be loss control rather than financing. If you encrypt your data at rest and set up and adopt a process of automatic regular backups, and geographically distribute those backups , then you have effectively minimized the potential costs of loss.
Cyber Insurance is not yet standardized as many other forms of commercial insurance. Therefore, breadth of coverage and pricing can vary widely.
Access: As a customer, you maintain full control of your content and responsibility for configuring access to AWS services and resources. We provide an advanced set of access, encryption, and logging features to help you do this effectively (e.g., AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Organizations and AWS CloudTrail). We provide APIs for you to configure access control permissions for any of the services you develop or deploy in an AWS environment. We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your consent. We never use your content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising.
Storage: You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored and the type of storage. You can replicate and back up your content in more than one AWS Region. We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your consent, except as legally required and as necessary to maintain the AWS services.
Security: You choose how your content is secured. We offer you strong encryption for your content in transit and at rest, and we provide you with the option to manage your own encryption keys. These features include:
Data encryption capabilities available in AWS storage and database services, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Redshift.
Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allow customers to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or enable customers to keep complete control over their keys.
AWS customers can employ Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3), SSE with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS), or SSE with Customer-Provided Encryption Keys (SSE-C).
Disclosure of customer content: We do not disclose customer information unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order. Unless prohibited from doing so or there is clear indication of illegal conduct in connection with the use of Amazon products or services, Amazon notifies customers before disclosing content information.
Security Assurance: We have developed a security assurance program that uses best practices for global privacy and data protection to help you operate securely within AWS, and to make the best use of our security control environment. These security protections and control processes are independently validated by multiple third-party independent assessments
Property and Casualty Insurance: Property insurance covers the physical location of the business and its contents from things like fire, theft, flood, and earthquakes—although read the terms carefully to make sure they include everything you need. Casualty insurance, on the other hand, covers the operation of the business, but the two are usually grouped together in policies.
Auto Insurance:Auto insurance protects you against financial loss if you have an accident. It is a contract between you and the insurance company.
Liability Insurance: Liability insurance is insurance that provides protection against claims resulting from injuries and damage property.
Business Insurance: Business interruption insurance can make up for lost cash flow and profits incurred because of an event that has interrupted your normal business operations.
Health and Disability Insurance: Health insurance provides health coverage for you and your employees. This insurance covers your employees for the expenses and loss of income caused by non work-related injuries, illnesses, and disabilities and death from any cause.
Life Insurance: Life and disability insurance covers your business in the event of the death or disability of key owners.
Cyber Insurance: Cover Data loss, destruction of data, privacy breach, Denial of Service Attack (DOS), Network failure, Transmission of Malicious Content, Misuse of personal or private information, etc.
Crime & Employee Dishonesty Insurance: To cover your business for fraudulent acts committed by your employees, e.g. theft or embezzlement of money, securities, and other business-owned property and for burglary, theft, and robbery of cash and other representations of money, e.g. money orders, postage stamps, travelers checks, and readily convertible securities, e.g. bearer bonds;
Mandatory Workers Compensation Insurance: To cover your employees for injuries and illnesses sustained during the course of employment. This would include medical expenses and loss of income due to a work-related disability;
Transportation/Inland & Ocean Marine Insurance: To pay for loss of damage to property you own or are responsible for while it is being transported or shipped to or from customers, manufacturers, processors, assemblers, warehouses, etc. by air, ship, or land vehicles either domestically or internationally.
Umbrella Liability Insurance: To provide an additional layer of liability insurance over your primary automobile liability, general liability, employers liability, and, if applicable, watercraft or aircraft liability policies;
Directors & Officers Liability Insurance: To defend your business and its directors or officers against allegations that they mismanaged the business in some way which caused financial loss to your clients (and/or others) and pay money damages in a court trial or settlement;
Condos Unit Owners Personal Insurance & Landlord / Rental Property Insurance: Cover expenses that come from having a loss within your property. Whether the unit owner is living in their unit or not, it is your responsibility to ensure that your personal assets and liabilities are adequately protected by your own personal insurance policy. This coverage includes all the content items that are brought into a unit or stored in a storage locker or premises, such as furnishings, electronics, clothing, etc. Most policies out there will also cover personal property while it is temporary off premises, on vacation for example.
Landlord property coverage is to protect the property that you own within your rental unit, which includes but is not limited to, appliances, window coverings, or if you rent out your unit fully furnished, then all of that property that is yours.
Rental Property insurance coverage allows you to protect you revenue source. Your property is your responsibility and if you property gets damaged by an insured peril, and your tenant can’t live there for a month or two (or more), you can purchase insurance to replace that rental income for the period of time your property is inhabitable.
Do online businesses need insurance?
All businesses need insurance. Here are some suggestions:
Property Insurance: To cover your owned, non-owned, and leased business property (contents, buildings if applicable, computers, office supplies, and any other property that you need to operate your business) for such perils as fire, windstorm, smoke damage, water damage, and theft.
EDP Insurance: To cover your computer hardware and software for such perils as mechanical breakdown and electrical injury;
Cyber Property and Liability Insurance: To cover your business for its activities on the Internet. Cyber Property coverages apply to losses sustained by your company directly. An example is damage to your company’s electronic data files caused by a hacker/security breach. Cyber Liability coverages apply to claims against your company by people who have been injured as a result of your actions or failure to act. For instance, a client sues you for negligence after his personal data, e.g credit card numbers or confidential information is stolen from your computer system and released online.
Loss of Income (Business Interruption) Insurance: To cover your business for the loss of income you would sustain because it was damaged by a covered peril under your property insurance, e.g. fire, windstorm, smoke damage, and theft;
Thinking of purchasing cyber insurance? Make sure the policy you choose covers more than paying ransomware. Paying cyber criminals should be a last resort. Your policy should include cleaning & rebuilding current systems, hiring experts, & purchasing new protections.
The purpose of cyber security is to protect all forms of digital data. Protecting personal information (SSN, credit card information, etc.), protecting proprietary information .(Facebook algorithms, Tesla vehicle designs, etc.), and other forms of digital data.
Cloud computing insurance is meant to protect a cloud provider. The implementation of a system and the preservation of important information comes with risks. If anything goes wrong, such as an outage at a critical time that results in business interruption, your client can hold you responsible and seek damages. Cloud insurance can not only provide compensation to your client as a result of a claim against you, but can also cover your legal defense and lost income.
Office 365 and G Suite give you professional email, cloud storage, mailing list and fast access from anywhere using a browser.
I use both, but G suite still has an edge over all their other competitors for me.
My problem with Office 365 is that its email interface is heavy and can be confusing. Try adding an alias to forward to your main email using Office 365 and get back to me.
G suite email interface is well, Gmail: the best email system ever created.
Allows you to access documents in the cloud with over 30GB of storage
Helps you work faster from anywhere and from any device
G Suite Pros: * All useful apps to manage your small business in one place from same provider with 24/7 support * Slick and extremely fast apps like gmail, google groups * You can set them up yourself with no knowledge of IT * Cost efficient * Easy to use as most people already use gmail and other google products.
As low as $7 per month per user
24/7 Support: If you call or email Google anytime , they will help you set it up very quickly and get you ready.
With G Suite Basic, you and the other users in your organization get:
Gmail: Send and receive mail using your professional address, as in bob@yourcompany.com
Calendar: Share calendars to easily schedule meetings and events
Docs: Collaborate in real-time on online documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
Drive: Store and back up files securely in the cloud
Hangouts: Join video meetings from their laptop or other device
Administrative controls
Your administrative or IT team can also:
Manage user accounts and security settings from a central Admin console
Control user access to features and services
Remotely manage your mobile fleet
Track usage trends via audits and reports
Receive 24/7 support from G Suite experts
Unlimited storage
With G Suite Business, each user in your organization can store unlimited Gmail messages, Google Photos, and files in Drive. Or if there are 4 or fewer users in your organization, each user gets 1 TB of storage.
Company-wide search
Users can also use Google Cloud Search to:
Search for company content across Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and their other G Suite services
Receive useful information and suggestions from assist cards
With shared drives, files belong to a team instead of an individual. If members leave, files stay where they are so the team can continue to share information and get work done. Learn more
Advanced administrator controls
Archiving with Vault
Use Vault to retain, archive, search, and export your organization’s data for eDiscovery and compliance needs. Learn more
Advanced reports
Advanced Drive audit reporting, custom alerts, and APIs. Learn more
Mobile audits and alerts, such as when a device is compromised. Learn more
Drive activity alerts
Get custom alerts on Drive activity, such as when documents are shared outside your domain. Learn more
Security keys
Deploy and monitor security keys for your organization, and purchase them at a discounted rate. Learn more
One of the biggest advantages of Office 365 is the ability to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Because it’s entirely cloud-based, you can access your email, files and Office programs (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) from any location and any device.
Multiple, flexible plans tailored to businesses
Advanced Security : It is a feature that provides extra protection from sophisticated threats that may be hidden in emails and attachments. Users are also provided with additional security features such as two-factor authentication
Cons of Office 365:
Relying on network and bandwidth. If your Internet provider goes down, then you haven’t any access to your enterprise software and data. Microsoft does not control how you access the Internet and, therefore, cannot account for any failures.
The user interface for email is heavy and cumbersome.
According to Wikipedia, Corporate America is an informal (and sometimes derogatory) phrase describing the world ofcorporationsandbig businesswithin theUnited States and Canada.
A job or career in corporate America is usually the best entry to true middle class or even upper middle class for managers, but it comes with baggages.
The question is What are the top 10 biggest lessons learned from the corporate world?
1- Every single day, there is someone whose job is to figure out how to get rid of you without impacting the business. Make choice that are good for you and your family only. If you leave, no one will care. Everybody is replaceable.
2- No emotion, nobody cares for you. The occasional smiles are 95% fake. Never forget that.
3- Always figure out a way to be good and be needed, because at the second they realize they can do it without you with minimal effect to the team or business, you will be gone.
4- Always improve yourself and keep your eyes open on the market. Never get too comfortable. Be nice to recruiters, always reply nicely to their email even if you are not available. The tide can turn very quickly. Always keep a pulse on the job market. At least twice a year apply for jobs in your industry to get a sense on what your skills trade for in the open market and to sharpen your interviewing skills. It is also a great habit to be in the orbit of recruiters because they operate within a tight-knit ecosystem, network with, and know one another. If you’re not a great fit for one role, and they like you, they’ll refer you to a friend or colleague looking to fill another role as a courtesy.
5- If you are very technical , the best outcome for you is to open your own business or become an independent consultant or contractor or freelancer while working in corporate. Once your own business pick up, quit your corporate job and discover real freedom.
6- Be very wise and knowledgeable about the business, but stay humble at the same time: Be friendly without making friends. Being too cold can prevent colleagues from sharing gossips with you and those gossips can be helpful sometimes.
7- Stay away from people who complain too much, they slow productivity and can drag you with them and expose you.
8- HR is not your friend. Their jobs is to protect the big bosses and their own job. Think twice before reporting racists, sexists, bullies, …or you will be gone. If you are victim of any of that as a minority, look for a new job and report it anonymously, otherwise your career will be over. All the following characteristics are overlooked by most HR departments:
Compassion
Sympathy
Empathy
Kindness
Gratitude
Humility
Patience
Self awareness
The ability to be the “bigger person”
Sincerity
9- Become a subject matter in at least one topic or area within your department of team to make yourself indispensable. Be result oriented and not effort oriented. Result matter more than effort. Focus on getting things done instead of on working hard. They are more than often not the same thing.
10- Volunteer to headline new projects and gain visibility from leadership. It might help during tough times when cuts are needed.
11- Be kind, especially to nerds, they will probably own a company one day and will remember you. Be authentic, work hard and be wise and kind, especially to the awkward and silent ones. Introverts, extroverts, flashy dressers, frumpy dressers, are sometime gifted with supreme execution and succeed in business, which proves one thing: Success doesn’t care how you show up; just that you show up.
12- Never waste your weekend or holidays for office work. Your company is not going to take care of your family. You will regret later when the time will start taking your loved ones back, every product of nature has expiry date. This is harsh truth.
13- Emotional and professional are opposite words in corporate culture. Don’t share your emotional stories with your colleagues, surely one day, they are gonna make fun of your emotions and use it against you.
14- Keep your spirit and self respect up and never let anyone harm your image. They selected you because you were better than others and you add value to the company.
15- Never make a relationship in the office, a single mistake will destroy your personal and professional life.
Disclaimer: The content of this post doesn’t describe or target any company I worked with in particular, it is based on research and discussion with friends working with several companies within Corporate America.
VPNs are used to provide remote corporate employees, gig economy freelance workers and business travelers with access to software applications hosted on proprietary networks. To gain access to a restricted resource through a VPN, the user must be authorized to use the VPN app and provide one or more authentication factors, such as a password, security token or biometric data.
A VPN extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running on a computing device, e.g. a laptop, desktop, smartphone, across a VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network. Encryption is a common though not an inherent part of a VPN connection.
To ensure security, the private network connection is established using an encrypted layered tunneling protocol and VPN users use authentication methods, including passwords or certificates, to gain access to the VPN. In other applications, Internet users may secure their connections with a VPN, to circumvent geo restrictions and censorship, or to connect to proxy servers to protect personal identity and location to stay anonymous on the Internet. However, some websites block access to known VPN technology to prevent the circumvention of their geo-restrictions, and many VPN providers have been developing strategies to get around these roadblocks.
Private browsing on incognito window or inPrivate window a privacy feature in some web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Edge). When operating in such a mode, the browser creates a temporary session that is isolated from the browser’s main session and user data. Browsing history is not saved, and local data associated with the session, such as cookies, are cleared when the session is closed.
These modes are designed primarily to prevent data and history associated with a particular browsing session from persisting on the device, or being discovered by another user of the same device. Private browsing modes do not necessarily protect users from being tracked by other websites or their internet service provider (ISP). Furthermore, there is a possibility that identifiable traces of activity could be leaked from private browsing sessions by means of the operating system, security flaws in the browser, or via malicious browser extensions, and it has been found that certain HTML5APIs can be used to detect the presence of private browsing modes due to differences in behaviour.
The question is:
How does using a VPN or Proxy or TOR or private browsing protects your online activity?
What are the pros and cons of VPN vs Proxy?
How can VPN, Proxy, TOR, private browsing, incognito windows How does using a VPN, Proxy, TOR, private browsing, incognito windows protects your online activity? protects your online activity?
VPN masks your real IP address by hiding it with one of its servers. As a result, no third party will be able to link your online activity to your physical location. To top it off, you avoid annoying ads and stay off the marketer’s radars.
VPN encrypts your internet traffic in order to make it impossible for anybody to decode your sensitive information and steal your identity. You can also learn more what a development team tells about how they protect their users against data theft.
If your VPN doesn’t protect your online activities, it means there are some problems with the aforementioned protection measures. This could be:
VPN connection disruption. Unfortunately, a sudden disruption of your connection can deanonymize you, if at this moment your device is sending or receiving IP-related requests. In order to avoid such a situation, the kill switch option should be always ON.
DNS/IP address leakage. This problem can be caused by various reasons from configuration mistakes to a conflict between the app under discussion and some other installed software. Regardless of the reason, you will end up with otherwise perfectly working security app, which, in fact, is leaking your IP address.
Outdated protocol. In a nutshell, it is the technology that manages the сreation of your secured connection. If your current protocol becomes obsolete, the app will not work perfectly.
Free apps. This is about free software that makes money on your privacy. The actions of such applications are also considered as unethical and illegal. Stealing your private data and selling of it to third parties is one of them.
User carelessness. For instance, turn on your virtual private network when you visit any website or enter your credentials. Don’t use the app sporadically.
How is a VPN different from a proxy server?
On top of serving as a proxy server, VPN provides encryption. A proxy server only hides your IP address.
Proxies are good for the low-stakes task like: watching regionally restricted videos on YouTube, creating another Gmail account when your IP limit ran out, accessing region restricted websites, bypassing content filters, request restrictions on IP.
On the other hand, proxies are not so great for the high-stakes task. As we know, proxies only act as a middleman in our Internet traffic, they only serve a webpage which we are requesting them to serve.
Just like the proxy service, a VPN makes your traffic to have appeared from the remote IP address that is not yours. But, that’s when all the similarities end.
Unlike a proxy, VPN is set at the operating system level, it captures all the traffic coming from the device it is set up on. Whether it is your web traffic, BitTorrent client, game, or a Windows Update, it captures traffic from all the applications from your device.
Another difference between proxy and VPN is – VPN tunnels all your traffic through heavily encrypted and secure connection to the VPN server.
This makes VPN an ideal solution high-stakes tasks where security and privacy are of paramount of importance. With VPN, neither your ISP, Government, or a guy snooping over open Wi-Fi connection can access your traffic.
What are daily use of VPN for?
There are many uses of Virtual Private Network (VPN) for normal users and company employees. Here are the list of the most common usages:
Accessing Business Networks From Any Places in the World :
This is one of the best use of VPN. It is very much helpful when you are travelling and have to complete some work. You can connect any computer to your business network from anywhere and set up your work easily. Local resources need some security so they have to be kept in VPN-only to ensure their safety.
To Hide Your Browsing Data From ISP & Local Users :
All Internet Service Providers (ISP) will log the data of your IP address. If you use the VPN then they can only see the connection of your VPN. It won’t let anyone spy on your website history.
Moreover, it secures your connection when you use a public Wi-Fi network. As you may or may not know, users on these networks can spy on your browsing history, even if you are surfing HTTPS websites. Virtual Private Networks protect your privacy on public unsecured Wi-Fi connection.
To Access Geographically Blocked Sites :
Have you ever faced a problem like “This content is not available in your country”? VPNs are the best solution to bypass these restrictions.
Some videos on YouTube will also show this restriction. VPNs are a quick fix for all these restrictions.
What about TOR and VPN? What are the Pros and Cons?
The Tor network is similar to a VPN. Messages to and from your computer pass through the Tor network rather than connecting directly to resources on the Internet. But where VPNs provide privacy, Tor provides anonymity.
Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from an acronym for the original software project name “The Onion Router”. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity to the user: this includes “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”.[ Tor’s intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.
Tor does not prevent an online service from determining when it is being accessed through Tor. Tor protects a user’s privacy, but does not hide the fact that someone is using Tor. Some websites restrict allowances through Tor. For example, Wikipedia blocks attempts by Tor users to edit articles unless special permission is sought. Although a VPN is generally faster than Tor, using them together will slow down your internet connection and should be avoided. More is not necessarily better in this situation.
The deep web is the part of the web that can not be indexed by search machines: internal company login pages, or a school portal (the internal portal) private google sites or government pages.
The dark web is the more sinister form of the Deep Web. The dark web is more associated with illegal activity (i.e child pornography, drug dealing, hitmen etc). A VPN is not necessary when connecting to the DEEP WEB. Please do not confuse the DEEP WEB with the DARK WEB.
Are there any good free VPN services?
It is not recommended to use free VPN for following reasons:
1- Security: Free VPNs don’t necessarily have to ensure your privacy is protected.
2- Tracking – Free VPNs have no obligation to keep your details safe, so at any point, your details could be passed on.
3- Speed / bandwidth – Some free VPN services are capped at a lower bandwidth that is you will receive less browsing or download speed to that of paid VPN.
4- Protocols supported – A free VPN may not support all necessary protocols. PPTP, OpenVPN and L2TP are generally provided only on paid VPN services.
If you are ok with the risks of using Free VPN, here are some you can try:
2- ExpressVPN – nearly 3x NordVPN’s price but guarantees Netflix in the US. Excellent customer service and claims to not log your info.
3- Private Internet Access – a U.S. based VPN that has proven its no log policy in the court of law. This is a unique selling point that 99.99% VPNs don’t have.
4- OpenVPN provides flexible VPN solutions to secure your data communications, whether it’s for Internet privacy, remote access for employees, securing IoT, or for networking Cloud data centers.
Other Questions about VPN and security:
Why might certain web sites not load with VPN?
For security, some corporations like Banks often block IP addresses used by major VPN companies, because it is thought to improve security.
You probably need a VPN that allow you to use dedicated IP address, otherwise the server ips are constantly switching every time you reconnect to your vpn and shared ip usually raised as suspicious logins due to many people logging in from the same ip address (which make the site thinks it might be bots or mass-hacked accounts).
How is a hacker traced when server logs show his or her IP is from a VPN?
Start looking for IP address leaks. Even hackers are terrible at not leaking their IPs.
Look for times the attacker forgot to enable their VPN. It happens all the time.
Look at other things related to the attcke like domains for example. They might have registered a domain using something you can trace or they left a string in the malware that can help identify them.
Silently take control of the command and control server legally.
What is the most secure VPN protocol?
OpenVPN technology uses the highest levels (military standards) of encryption algorithms i.e. 256bit keys to secure your data transfers.
OpenVPN is also known to have the fastest speeds even in the case of long distance connections that have latency. The protocol is highly recommended for streaming, downloading files and watching live TV. In addition to speeds, the protocol is stable and known to have fewer disconnections compared to its many counterparts.
OpenVPN comes equipped with solid military grade encryption and is way better, security wise, than PPTP, L2TP/IPSec and SSTP.
What are some alternatives for VPN?
Tor network, it is anonymous, free and well, rather slow, certainly fast enough to access your private email, but not fast enough to stream a movie.
Proxies are remote computers that individuals or organizations use to restrict Internet access, filter content, and make Internet browsing more secure. It acts as a middleman between the end user and the web server, since all connection requests pass through it. It filters the request first then sends it to the web server. Once the web server responds, the proxy filters the response then sends it to the end user.
IPSec (Cisco, Netgear, etc.): secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data sent over an Internet Protocol network.
SSL (Full) like OpenVPN
SSL (Partial) like SSL-Explorer and most appliances
SSH Tunneling is a method of transporting arbitrary networking data over an encrypted SSH connection. It can be used to add encryption to legacy applications. It also provides a way to secure the data traffic of any given application using port forwarding, basically tunneling any TCP/IP port over SSH.
You can create you own VPN as well using any encryption or simple tunneling technology.
How does private browsing or incognito window work?
When you are in private browsing mode, your browser doesn’t store any of this information at all. It functions as a completely isolated browser session.
For most web browsers, their optional private mode, often also called InPrivate or incognito, is like normal browsing except for a few things.
it uses separate temporary cookies that are deleted once the browser is closed (leaving your existing cookies unaffected)
no private activity is logged to the browser’s history
it often uses a separate temporary cache
What are the advantages of Google Chrome’s private browsing?
simultaneously log into a website using different account names
access websites without extensions (all extensions are disabled by default when in Incognito)
Shield you from being tracked by Google, Facebook and other online advertising companies
Allow you to be anonymous visitor to a website, or see how a personalized webpage will look like from a third-party perspective
Firefox private browsing or chrome incognito?
Mozilla doesn’t really have an incentive to spy on their users. It’s not really going to get them anything because they’re not a data broker and don’t sell ads. Couple this with the fact that Firefox is open-source and I would argue that Firefox is the clear winner here.
Adding a VPN to Firefox is clever because it means the privacy protection is integrated into one application rather than being spread across different services. That integration probably makes it more likely to be used by people who wouldn’t otherwise use one.
Pros and Cons of Adding VPN to browsers like Firefox and Opera:
Turning on the VPN will give users a secure connection to a trusted server when using a device connected to public Wi-Fi (and running the gamut of rogue Wi-Fi hotspots and unknown intermediaries). Many travellers use subscription VPNs when away from a home network – the Mozilla Private Network is just a simpler, zero-cost alternative.
However, like Opera’s offering, it’s not a true VPN – that is, it only encrypts traffic while using one browser, Firefox. Traffic from all other applications on the same computer won’t be secured in the same way.
As with any VPN, it won’t keep you completely anonymous. Websites you visit will see a Cloudflare IP address instead of your own, but you will still get advertising cookies and if you log in to a website your identity will be known to that site.
Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. It provides massive storage for any kind of data, enormous processing power and the ability to handle virtually limitless concurrent tasks or jobs. Apache Hadoop is used mainly for Data Analysis.
The question is Which programming language is good to drive Hadoop and Spark?
The programming model for developing hadoop based applications is the map reduce. In other words, MapReduce is the processing layer of Hadoop. MapReduce programming model is designed for processing large volumes of data in parallel by dividing the work into a set of independent tasks. Hadoop MapReduce is a software framework for easily writing an application that processes the vast amount of structured and unstructured data stored in the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem (HDFS). The biggest advantage of map reduce is to make data processing on multiple computing nodes easy. Under the Map reduce model, data processing primitives are called Mapper and Reducers.
Spark is written in Scala and Hadoop is written in Java.
The key difference between Hadoop MapReduce and Spark lies in the approach to processing: Spark can do it in-memory, while Hadoop MapReduce has to read from and write to a disk. As a result, the speed of processing differs significantly – Spark may be up to 100 times faster.
In-memory processing is faster when compared to Hadoop, as there is no time spent in moving data/processes in and out of the disk. Spark is 100 times faster than MapReduce as everything is done here in memory.
Spark’s hardware is more expensive than Hadoop MapReduce because it’s hardware needs a lot of RAM.
Hadoop runs on Linux, it means that you must have knowldge of linux.
Java is important for hadoop because:
There are some advanced features that are only available via the Java API.
The ability to go deep into the Hadoop coding and figure out what’s going wrong.
In both these situations, Java becomes very important. As a developer, you can enjoy many advanced features of Spark and Hadoop if you start with their native languages (Java and Scala).
What Python Offers for Hadoop and Spark?
Simple syntax– Python offers simple syntax which shows it is more user friendly than other two languages.
Easy to learn – Python syntax are like English languages. So, it much more easier to learn it and master it.
Large community support – Unlike Scala, Python has huge community (active), which we will help you to solve your queries.
Offers Libraries, frameworks and packages – Python has huge number of Scientific packages, libraries and framework, which are helping you to work in any environment of Hadoop and Spark.
Python Compatibility with Hadoop – A package called PyDoop offers access to the HDFS API for Hadoop and hence it allows to write Hadoop MapReduce program and application.
Hadoop is based off of Java (then so e.g. non-Hadoop yet still a Big-Data technology like the ElasticSearch engine, too – even though it processes JSON REST requests)
Spark is created off of Scala although pySpark (the lovechild of Python and Spark technologies of course) has gained a lot of momentum as of late.
If you are planning for Hadoop Data Analyst, Python is preferable given that it has many libraries to perform advanced analytics and also you can use Spark to perform advanced analytics and implement machine learning techniques using pyspark API.
The key Value pair is the record entity that MapReduce job receives for execution. In MapReduce process, before passing the data to the mapper, data should be first converted into key-value pairs as mapper only understands key-value pairs of data. key-value pairs in Hadoop MapReduce is generated as follows:
