New DDoS Reports, World Data Overload, State of Ecommerce and More News

Cyber attacks hitting new heights

Cyber attacks targeting business websites are constantly evolving, making them a greater risk due to the lack of security and the easy access to low cost DDoS-as-a-service. This makes it easy for the attackers to take down a site with little knowledge and some info about the infrastructure. The high-volume, high-bandwidth distributed denial of service, attacks have increased (over 370% in February), with their power rising by more than 200%, according to cyber security firm Prolexic, a part of Akamai Technologies.

Recovering from an attack costs a fortune, with the recovery being both financial and reputation-wise. The websites can be down for hours or even days, which is fatal for an operating web-based company. Many businesses don’t admit to being affected by an attack and simply call it “technical issues” next to an apology.

Akamai’s senior vice-president Stuart Scholly issued a following statement:

“Anyone can go out there and generate these really large attacks with really no skill sets. What we’re finding today is a lot of denial of service attacks because it has essentially become a service.”

With trends in attacks changing constantly, businesses need security staff capable of keeping up with cyber criminals, making IT security jobs more important than ever.

For the full report go to Acumin website.

How fast are the world’s top shopping sites?

Tests show that the median page takes 5.4 seconds to become usable and another 4.6 to load fully. Pages that reach up to 13 MB in size fail to follow web performance best practices. 10% of the pages tested took 20 seconds or even more to load. The fact that a page spends 5.4 seconds to become usable means that the visitor spends all that time waiting just for the page’s primary content to appear and become interactive. Research has shown that most online shoppers abandon the page after it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Image source

75% of the top 100 retail sites us a CDN to cache page resources, such as images, yet this performance best practice doesn’t correlate to faster pages. The number one reason for slow pages are images, which are basically half of the page’s total size. A typical median page is 20% bigger than it was just six months ago. Use progressive JPEGs and you can improve perceived page speed.

You can read more at WebPerformanceToday.

What it takes to tackle the world’s data overload

Every day, the information that we send and receive online amounts to over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, which is the equivalent of 2 500 000 standard hard drives. The reason for the exponential growth of data? Simply the increased use of mobile browsing, such as smartphones, tablets and iPhones. Cisco reports that 2012’s mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times larger than the one in 2000, with over half a billion mobile devices and connections added in 2013. This makes quite a challenge for the ICT companies.

International Data Corporation‘s study shows that less than 1% of data was analyzed in 2012. Interpreting masses of data might seem like the next big technological challenge, but the big opportunity lies in finding a way to make it all more manageable.
You can read more about data overload and IDC’s study at BBC website.

HUAWEI’s OceanStor 9000

HUAWEI developed a new storage system intended for big data storage and analysis. OceanStor 9000 delivers a cutting-edge performance and large-scale horizontal expansion capabilities. It comes with a super large single file system to provide shared storage for unstructured data. It’s applicable for genetic research, energy exploration, scientific research, education, satellite mapping and more.

It’s outstanding performance features a global cache, with a maximum of 55 TB, increasing the data access ratio, intelligent load balancing, dynamic storage tiering and SSD-based metadata access acceleration.

The flexible space expansion of 3 to 288 nodes enables the capacity and performance to be expanded linearly. The OceanStor 9000 adopts a scalable share-nothing symmetric distributed architecture and a global namespace (a single file system that provides a capacity up to 40 PB).

For more about the OceanStor 9000 check out the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUG7LokXU0