Using Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cathay Pacific created a more efficient and scalable platform for developing and delivering new services, enabling the company to ultimately create a better overall experience for their customers, Red Hat said in a press statement.

Based in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific is an international airline offering passenger and cargo services to 200 destinations in 52 countries and territories worldwide. Digital capabilities are a critical function of the company’s business strategy for growth, with the heart of this initiative emphasizing a responsive and adaptable customer experience. Cathay Pacific’s legacy infrastructure and development process posed a challenge, making it difficult for the airline to maintain a high level of performance from its internal systems and customer-facing applications. Its existing systems were inflexible and time consuming to modify, forcing the company to handle an increasing level of technical debt dedicated to system maintenance and “keeping the lights on.”

Using Red Hat’s open standards-based, enterprise technologies and guided by Red Hat’s technical expertise, Cathay Pacific migrated from its legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud architecture, consisting of aprivate cloud environment that includes Red Hat OpenStack Platform which can provision workloads as needed into public cloudinstances. Forming the bridge to the public cloud is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which supports more than 50 consumer-facing applications. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cathay Pacific is able to move applications in a more streamlined fashion across its hybrid infrastructure and is able to scale computing resources up and down as demand requires, the press statement added.

In addition to Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation of its hybrid cloud, Cathay Pacific has implemented additional Red Hat technologies, including:

·         Red Hat CloudForms to manage its new architecture across its IT footprints. CloudForms provides self-service provisioning, tracks costs, and helps drive compliance across virtual machines, containers, physical infrastructure, including both public and private clouds.

·         Red Hat Ansible Tower helps Cathay Pacific automate the creation of new environments and standardize change requests, reducing the number of errors while taking less overall time to provision. With Red Hat Ansible Automation as part of Red Hat Ansible Tower, change requests that used to take two weeks are now automated and completed within 15 minutes.

·         Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, provides a scalable, more secure, and supported Linux foundation for Cathay Pacific’s infrastructure.

·         Red Hat Satellite provides a streamlined way for Cathay Pacific to keep its Red Hat infrastructure running efficiently, up-to-date with security patches, and compliant with various industry standards.

​With its new IT architecture, Cathay Pacific is able to bring new services to market more expediently and better scale infrastructure to meet evolving application requirements.

Throughput for application deployment has been increased by a factor of 10, from 20 to 200 changes a day, for both production and non-production environments, with little-to-no end user downtime around these updates. Additionally, the new cloud environment has led to a reduced infrastructure footprint in terms of hardware, maintenance, and operations cost. With improved efficiency and better resource utilization, Cathay Pacific has lowered the total cost of ownership for its production environments.

Red Hat Consulting assisted Cathay Pacific nearly every step of the way, from the initial discovery session to identifying requirements and business-drivers through to technology implementation. Working with Red Hat Consulting also provided Cathay Pacific with hands-on expert support and training during the migration, including ongoing support as needed.

Flow provides application-centric security to protect against internal and external threats not detected by traditional perimeter-oriented security products, Nutanix said in a press statement.

Flow capabilities are fully integrated into Nutanix’s AcropolisTM software for easy deployment and will be enhanced with real-time application visibility and discovery technology from the company’s recent acquisition of Netsil. Nutanix Flow non-intrusively automates the creation and management of application security, the statement added.

Enterprise IT teams are turning to cloud-based infrastructure to deliver today’s modern business applications, many of which are built from discrete but interconnected services. Protecting these applications requires the microsegmentation capabilities of Nutanix Flow, which enforces app-centric policies that govern communications between individual application services. Nutanix will also leverage Netsil’s advanced stream processing, application discovery and mapping technology to simplify security policy definition for applications running in both public and private clouds. IT teams and business owners gain the confidence that their business applications are protected from both internal and external security threats.

“The next frontier of networking is about providing customers with visibility into their networks so they can track and analyze data, improve cloud application performance and optimize their resources,” said Harjot Gill, Sr. Director, Product & Engineering, Nutanix. “We have worked hard to integrate Netsil’s advanced functionality into Nutanix Flow and we’re proud our customers will soon be able to take advantage of the visibility and discovery technology we pioneered.”

Nutanix Flow is built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, and today provides:

●     Network Visualization — giving application owners an at-a-glance view of network performance and availability per application

●     Application-Centric Microsegmentation — providing granular control and governance for all application traffic to protect sensitive workloads and data

●     Service Insertion and Chaining — integrating additional network functions from multiple Nutanix Ready ecosystem partners into a single networking policy

●     Network Automation —streamlining and automating common network configuration changes, like VLAN configuration or load balancer policy modifications, based on application lifecycle events for VMs running on Nutanix AHV

To accelerate infrastructure innovation and agility, Gartner recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders “make network automation, visualization and optimization capabilities an integral part of their selection process by prioritizing vendors that provide an application-specific view of cluster performance.”[1]

“Nutanix Flow completes Nutanix’s mission to make IT infrastructure invisible,” said Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer, Nutanix. “As we looked to simplify networking, we took a modern approach to enable visibility and control for both enterprise apps and next-generation cloud-native services. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS now converges the compute, storage, virtualization and networking resources to power nearly any application, at any scale.”

With built-in advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, these new PaaS services automate and eliminate key tasks to enable organizations to lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights, Oracle said in a press statement.

Earlier this year, Oracle made available the world’s first Autonomous Database for data warehouse workloads. The company is committed to adding self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities to all of its PaaS services coupled with specific autonomous capabilities for each functional area. In addition to today’s news, Oracle plans to release more autonomous services later in calendar year 2018 focused on mobile and chatbots, data integration, Blockchain, security and management, and additional database workloads, including OLTP.

“Embedding AI and machine learning in these cloud services will help organizations innovate in revolutionary new ways,” said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of development, Oracle Cloud Platform. “These new cloud services are the latest in a series of steps from Oracle to incorporate industry-first autonomous capabilities that will enable customers to significantly reduce operational costs, increase productivity, and decrease risk.”

As organizations focus on delivering innovation fast, they want a secure set of comprehensive, integrated cloud services to build new applications and run their most demanding enterprise workloads. Only Oracle’s cloud services can automate key operational functions like tuning, patching, backups and upgrades while running to deliver maximum performance, high availability, and in demand security features, the statement added.

Brake Parts, a global company that supplies the world’s top brake brands for cars, vans, SUVs, light trucks and heavy duty vehicles, has partnered with Oracle to build an intelligent sales operation. By automating its end-to-end customer change, RFQ, and new product introduction processes, Brake Parts was able to eliminate manual steps and increase customer responsiveness.

“Using Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud with Oracle Sales Cloud, we were able to modernize our applications and automate customer-facing activities across departments – transforming our sales operations,” said Lisa Oliver, Sales Operations, Brake Parts. “Oracle’s autonomous PaaS services enable us to digitize many of our manual processes so we can decrease costs, increase business insights, and better innovate.”

Newly available autonomous services include Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud. These services help organizations easily build and deploy modern applications, as well as integrate and analyze critical organizational data.

Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud combines machine learning, adaptive intelligence, and service automation to create an analytics platform that breaks down barriers between people, places, data, and systems, fundamentally changing the way people analyze, understand, and act on information as:

– Empowers business users to uncover more insights, quickly. Users can ask questions on their mobile devices, and natural language processing converts those questions into queries in the backend to deliver rich visualizations on their device.  It uses machine learning to gain intelligence and proactively suggest insight on data the user might not even have asked for.

– Reveals hidden patterns and performance drivers through predictive insights and automatic natural-language explanations powered by machine learning.

– Provides predictive analytics on IoT data applying domain specific machine learning algorithms on large volumes of sensor data and historical patterns of failure.

Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud accelerates digital transformation by enabling business processes spanning multiple Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS and on-premises applications through a combination of machine learning, embedded best-practice guidance, and pre-built application integration and process automation as:

– – Speeds up integrations in the complex process of mapping attributes of objects across two different applications by using crowd sourced data of all executed integrations, and machine learning to deliver visual recommendations of how to connect those objects.

Delivers intelligent dynamic adaptive case management by providing APIs to embed AI/machine learning frameworks, and suggest the next best action in an automated process flow.

– Increases resiliency and performance by providing self driven and tuning Integrations to manage large workloads intelligently.

– Enables Robotic Process Automation with AI/machine learning to automate the last mile of case management or process automation with systems that are not API enabled.

Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud helps to accelerate mobile and web application development and deployment by enabling business users and developers to build these applications with no coding. Learn more here.

Automates code generation using the latest industry-standard technologies with single click deployment enabling rapid application development even by line-of-business users.

Automates delivery of mobile applications across multiple platforms including iOS and Android.

Easily extensible and based on standard open-source technology (Oracle JET, Swagger)

Oracle Cloud Platform services all share foundational autonomous capabilities including:

– Self-Driving to Lower Costs and Increase Productivity: Eliminate human labor to provision, secure, monitor, backup, recover and troubleshoot. Automatically upgrade and patch itself while running. Instantly grow and shrink compute or storage without downtime.

– Self-Securing to Lower Risk: Protect from external attacks and malicious internal users. Automatically apply security updates while running to protect against cyberattacks, and automatically encrypt all data.

– Self-Repairing for Higher Availability: Provide automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime with up to 99.995 percent availability, resulting in less than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month including planned maintenance.

Responding to calls for transparency after the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, Facebook said those closures came on top of blocking millions of attempts to create fake accounts every day.

Despite this, the group said fake profiles still make up 3-4 percent of all active accounts.

It claimed to detect almost 100 percent of spam and to have removed 837 million posts assimilated to spam over the same period.

Facebook pulled or slapped warnings on nearly 30 million posts containing sexual or violent images, terrorist propaganda or hate speech during the first quarter.

Improved technology using artificial intelligence had helped it act on 3.4 million posts containing graphic violence, nearly three times more than it had in the last quarter of 2017.

In 85.6 percent of the cases, Facebook detected the images before being alerted to them by users, said the report, issued the day after the company said about 200 apps had been suspended on its platform as part of an investigation into misuse of private user data.

The figure represents between 0.22 and 0.27 percent of the total content viewed by Facebook’s more than two billion users from January through March.

“In other words, of every 10,000 content views, an estimate of 22 to 27 contained graphic violence,” the report said.

Responses to rule violations include removing content, adding warnings to content that may be disturbing to some users while not violating Facebook standards; and notifying law enforcement in case of a “specific, imminent and credible threat to human life”.

Improved IT also helped Facebook take action against 1.9 million posts containing terrorist propaganda, a 73 percent increase. Nearly all were dealt with before any alert was raised, the company said.

It attributed the increase to the enhanced use of photo detection technology.

Hate speech is harder to police using automated methods, however, as racist or homophobic hate speech is often quoted on posts by their targets or activists.

Sarcasm needs human touch

“It may take a human to understand and accurately interpret nuances like… self-referential comments or sarcasm,” the report said, noting that Facebook aims to “protect and respect both expression and personal safety”.

Facebook took action against 2.5 million pieces of hate speech content during the period, a 56 increase over October-December. But only 38 percent had been detected through Facebook’s efforts — the rest flagged up by users.

The posts that keep the Facebook reviewers the busiest are those showing adult nudity or sexual activity — quite apart from child pornography, which is not covered by the report.

Some 21 million such posts were handled in the period, a similar number to October-December 2017.

That was less than 0.1 percent of viewed content — which includes text, images, videos, links, live videos or comments on posts — Facebook said, adding it had dealt with nearly 96 percent of the cases before being alerted to them.

Facebook has come under fire for showing too much zeal on this front, such as removing images of artwork tolerated under its own rules.

In March, Facebook apologised for temporarily removing an advert featuring French artist Eugene Delacroix’s famous work “Liberty Leading the People” because it depicts a bare-breasted woman.

Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bicket said the group had kept a commitment to recruit 3,000 more staff to lift the numbers dedicated to enforcing standards to 7,500 at the start of this year.

The new approach looks at behavioral patterns of users in addition to the content of the tweets, allowing Twitter to find and mute online bullies and trolls.

Even if the offending tweets are not a violation of Twitter policy, they may be hidden from users if they are deemed to “distort” the conversation, Twitter said.

The announcement is the latest “safety” initiative by Twitter, which is seeking to filter out offensive speech while remaining an open platform.

Twitter already uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in this effort but the latest initiative aims to do more by focusing on the actions of certain users in addition to the content.

“Our ultimate goal is to encourage more free and open conversation,” chief executive Jack Dorsey said.

“To do that we need to significantly reduce the ability to game and skew our systems. Looking at behavior, not content, is the best way to do that.”

A Twitter blog post said the move aims at “troll-like behavior” which targets certain users and tweets with derisive responses.

“Some troll-like behavior is fun, good and humorous. What we’re talking about today are troll-like behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation on Twitter,” said the blog from Twitter executives Del Harvey and David Gasca.

“Some of these accounts and tweets violate our policies, and, in those cases, we take action on them. Others don’t but are behaving in ways that distort the conversation.”

Harvey and Gasca said the challenge has been to address “disruptive behaviors that do not violate our policies but negatively impact the health of the conversation.”

The new approach does not wait for people who use Twitter to report potential issues.

“There are many new signals we’re taking in, most of which are not visible externally,” the blog post said.

“Just a few examples include if an account has not confirmed their email address, if the same person signs up for multiple accounts simultaneously, accounts that repeatedly tweet and mention accounts that don’t follow them, or behavior that might indicate a coordinated attack.”

In some cases, if the content is not a violation of Twitter policies, it will not be deleted but only shown when a user clicks on “show more replies.”

“The result is that people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search,” Harvey and Gasca wrote.

Twitter said its tests of this approach shows a four percent drop in abuse reports from search and eight percent fewer abuse reports from conversations.

Facebook Thailand managing director John Wagner said it was Facebook’s mission to lead the transformation of Thailand into a digital economy and society and to support the country’s businesses and communities to realise their digital aspirations.

Facebook will launch new programmes, partnerships, and initiatives to support the three drivers it has identified for Thailand’s transformation.

Wagner said SMEs were central to the Thai economy, carrying out 98 per cent of business, employing 70 per cent of the workforce and accounting for 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Facebook has committed to offering the support programmes, included workshop and live training, online training, and chat support for SMEs.

“Facebook also see the huge opportunities from the gaps in the digital transformation among large businesses,” Wagner said. “While a lot more large Thai businesses have recognised that digital transformation is necessary, only a few of them have a digital strategy, while most of them are aware of this need but have yet acted.”

Wagner cited a finding from BCG Analysis 2018 that there are US10 billion in digital transformation opportunities in Thailand, “if businesses evolve their digital strategies to move faster and build more efficient Net experiences for customers”, he said.

Thais have created more than one million group accounts on Facebook, including those that aim to create a positive social impact.

“For example, Help Us Read is a Facebook group connecting more than 11,000 volunteers with people who are visually impaired,” Wagner said. “Run2Gether hosts running events to promote inclusivity and wellness for disabled people. And Handup Network is a community that connects social enterprises with skilled professional mentors to help them build sustainable organisations and drive their mission forward. Our journey is 1 per cent done.”

He said: “Facebook is an integral part of Thai digital society reflected in the numbers that over 51 million Thais access Facebook every month, and over 34 million Thai people access Facebook every day.”

According to the “GWI Thailand Market Report Q4 2017: Profiling Internet users”, Thais are deeply engaged in digital experiences and Thailand ranks No 1 on time spent on mobile internet daily.

The transfer “includes customer data storage and processing for most regions, as well as software assembly, including threat detection updates,” said Kaspersky, whose software protects some 400 million computers worldwide.

“To ensure full transparency and integrity, Kaspersky Lab is arranging for this activity to be supervised by an independent third party, also based in Switzerland,” it added.

The move follows controversy in the United States last year when the federal government removed Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors, weeks after senior US intelligence agency and law enforcement officials expressed concerns about the safety of its software.

US government workers were ordered to stop using Kaspersky anti-virus software.

Kaspersky denied that its products had “backdoors” which would allow Russian intelligence agencies to spy on computers using its software, and said it would take measures to reassure customers about the safety of its products.

By the end of this year, the production of its anti-virus software will be shifted to Zurich and a data centre will be built there next year where information on most non-Russian customers will be stored.

Development and data storage for the Russian market will remain in Russia, a Kaspersky executive told AFP.

While all firms globally are required to comply with the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when it comes to the data of Europeans, the rules may have a wider impact if firms decide to extend the protections to all users.

Major US platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Airbnb have begun to notify their users in Europe of modifications of their user terms in order to comply with the new EU rules.

Under GDPR firms user consent for use of their personal data must be freely “given, specific, informed and unambiguous”.

Facebook has recently begun asking its European users that they approve the use of their data in order provide them with more pertinent advertisements as well as permission for facial recognition.

But it is still not clear which US firms will apply GDPR to all their users and which will do so only for Europe.

“We intend to make all the same controls and settings available everywhere, not only in Europe,” Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told reporters last month as the crisis exploded over the use of user data for political purposes by the firm Cambridge Analytica.

“Is it going to be exactly the same format? Probably not,” he added.

Marketing advantage

For Sam Pfeifle, content director at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), some US firms will have no other choice but to extend European protections to all users.

“For some companies being able to discern where their customers are coming from and segregate the data is very difficult and perhaps too difficult to make it worth it,” he said.

Some companies are transforming this pragmatic decision into a marketing advantage, telling their US clients they are offering European-level data protection, said Pfeifle.

Other companies are taking the opposite approach — deciding they would rather part ways with European users entirely rather than go through the effort of complying with the GDPR.

This is what the online role-playing game Ragnarok decided to do, sparking indignant reactions from European users who will find themselves cut off from May 25.

In China, there are fewer sensitivities about privacy, and the EU regulation will certainly be viewed more as a constraint than a marketing advantage.

“Of course we will respect the GDPR for our European clients,” said a European working for a major Chinese internet firm on condition of anonymity.

But for Chinese users, the application of such privacy guards is likely for another day.

– Impact on China –

The Chinese “don’t have any reticence handing over their personal data if they see they are of some value” such as in new services or discounts, said the European executive, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Chinese internet titans are currently testing a system that assigns every citizen a social credit system that goes beyond a regular credit rating of a person’s finances and payment history by evaluating their behaviour and preferences as well as their personal relationships.

But it isn’t impossible that the European effort to codify and organise the respect for privacy will have an influence even in China, where internet users have occasionally lashed out.

At the beginning of the year Beijing said it had reprimanded several Chinese tech firms for inadequate protection of user data following a controversy implicating Alipay, the top Chinese payments platform linked to online commerce giant Alibaba.

Users reacted angrily after discovering the platform had been set up to automatically share user data with a credit rating service.

Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial apologised and redesigned the service so users had to opt in to use it.

They follow scandals involving lax personal data protection procedures such as at Facebook where US-British political research firm Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of 87 million users.

In another case, Grindr, the self-proclaimed world’s largest gay dating app, admitted in April to sharing data on its clients’ HIV status with third party software vendors.

Such scandals are, however, less frequent than cases in which data are stolen through hacking attacks on websites.

Here are some of the biggest:

Yahoo, billions hacked

In what is considered the biggest cyber-attack in history, a 2013 hack affected all three billion accounts at Yahoo.

The disclosure in October 2017 by Verizon, which acquired Yahoo’s online assets in June, revised upward the initial estimate of one billion accounts affected.

Yahoo said the stolen user information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data or bank account information.

The disclosure threatened the sale to Verizon, which finally secured a lower price.

Another hacking attack on Yahoo affected some 500 million accounts in 2014 but was only revealed in September 2016, for which its financial arm Altaba was fined $35 million.

Uber off the road

The ride-sharing giant was vilified after the hacking in 2016 of data on 57 million of its riders and drivers, unveiled only in November 2017.

It was also criticised for paying the hackers $100,000 to destroy their booty.

Investigations have been opened in the United States and Europe.

Equifax loses credit

A breach by major American credit agency Equifax in September 2017 is seen as potentially more damaging than that of Yahoo because of the sensitivity of the data leaked.

Equifax said hackers obtained names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver’s licence numbers, potentially exposing victims to identity theft.

It said the breach could have affected more than 147 million US, Canadian and British clients.

The company was sued for having identified but not corrected the breach, for having insufficient security systems and for delaying reporting the problem.

Its chiefs were also suspected of insider trading as they sold shares before the hacking was revealed.

Password plunder

In August 2014 online data protection firm Hold Security claimed that Russian hackers had accessed 1.2 billion passwords linked to 420,000 internet sites around the world, from corporate giants to individual accounts.

Hold Security pointed to a group of hackers called CyberVor, which it said had potentially gained access to 500 million e-mail accounts. There was no major fallout from the announcement.

Taking aim at Target

The US retail giant was hit by a computer attack in December 2013 that affected 110 million clients.

Seventy million might have lost personal data including names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail accounts, while 40 million bank accounts and credit cards were also put at risk.

Hottest hack

In August 2015 hackers calling themselves The Impact Team published nearly 30 gigabytes of files including the names and sexual orientation of people who had signed up with Ashley Madison, a website facilitating extra-marital affairs.

The company’s boss stepped down as several suicides in the United States and Canada were linked to the revelations.

Ashley Madison had earlier offered to delete users’ personal data for a modest fee but did not.