Tutorial Blog 4: Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Hello everybody,

Virtualization (Source: www.techwench.com)

This is my final tutorial blog post and it is going to be about virtualization. What is virtualization? Very generally speaking, it means creating something in a virtual form rather than in an actual form. For example, there are software programs that virtualize the existence of hardware. Daemon Tools for instance, is a program that can virtualize a hard drive on your computer, e.g. a DVD drive. It will make your computer think that there is another drive when in fact, there is not. There are many forms of virtualization like hardware-, storage-, or network virtualization among others. One increasingly important and very interesting concept of hardware virtualization, also called platform virtualization, is cloud computing. I have dealt with that topic before at my home university and I am going to tell you a little bit more about this in the following section.

Cloud Computing (Source: http://www.cloudup.net)

Cloud computing is a concept that most of us already deal with and we are very likely to deal with it a lot more in the future. The concept is getting ever more important and companies are constantly evaluating how they can benefit from it. In essence it encompasses any service used over the internet that extends the existing capabilities of your IT system in real time. So for example, Software as a Service (SaaS), means that someone or some company, uses a software over the internet without actually having it on the computer. A service provider stores the software on its servers and offers it for use in real time to many people for a fee. The benefit for the customer is that no investment in necessary resources is needed and for the provider it only means maintaining one application for many people. There are obviously scale economies and everybody benefits. Watch the following video to get more insights on the topic:

Dropbox logo (Source: www.dropbox.com)

Another popular example that gets increasing attention from many people and especially students is a website called www.dropbox.com. On this website, you can download a small client software, that enables you to get access to your own personal webspace, that you can use and access from anywhere with any computer, and share with other people. It appears on your computer as just another folder that looks and behaves like any other folder but actually it is on the server of the company. So, you can put files in the folder, copy them from the folder and share the whole, or parts of the folder, with other people. The benefits are obvious again, you can have a shared folder with many people that is updated in real-time. For example, you can share documents with other students that you are working on together as part of e.g. a group project. Instead of having to send each and every file around again and again via email, you can just share a dropbox together. You even get a notification on your statusbar when someone made a change. If you can think of an occasion where you could benefit from this kind of software, you should definitely try it.

Here is another very nice video about cloud computing:





So, I hope you found today's topic interesting. Of course, this is a very complex topic that needs more explanation to fully understand it but I hope I could give you a first insight and that I have motivated you to look deeper into it.

Thank you for reading!

Sources:
http://www.techwench.com/myths-legends-for-virtualization-buffs-to-break/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
https://www.dropbox.com/
http://www.cloudup.net/why/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg

Secure Email Project

Hello everybody,

Mozilla Thunderbird user interface

Today I will talk about the Secure Email Project of my Computing in the Business Environment Course. In this project we used Mozilla Thunderbird to create an encrypted email and send it to the professor of the course. Encryption means using a specific algorithm to transform your data into secure data that can only be accessed with a certain key that can transform the data back into its original state. It is a very useful security measure and is used to protect data from theft. The actual purpose is protecting the data even if thieves get access to it because they still will not be able to use it without the key. In our project, we encypted emails and so made them safe in this way. The following screenshot of my Thunderbird interface shows those emails.

My Mozilla Thunderbird user interface containing the emails received from the professor

 In an interesting article about the hacking attack at Epsilon (http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/04/08/the-epsilon-hack-attack-time-for-sox-for-consumers/) the author talks about this attack as something that could have been prevented by using encryption. Epsilon is an e-mail marketing firm in possession of an enormous amount of consumer email addresses. Last week, hackers found their way past the firewalls of the company into their hard drives. On these hard drives they found all the unprotected email addresses and copied them to use them for phishing and other criminal purposes.The author argues that those firewalls protecting all the private user email addresses obviously were not enough and that they should have been protected on the hard drives. Consumer information has to be kept confidential and secure by law and people of course want companies to keep their information in safe places. This is why the author thinks encryption should be required by law to make data more safe. I agree with him because I do not want to change my email address just because some marketing company was unable to protect it.

Sources:

My Mozilla Thunderbird user interface

http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/04/08/the-epsilon-hack-attack-time-for-sox-for-consumers/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption