Clouds, Security and Enterprises

(This was the streamlined transcript of a community talk I prepared for some school students.) Hello friends, Thanks for the opportunity today for me to talk about a fascinating technical topic – data encryption.  Data, in common terms, is information: information about something or someone. In our today’s topic, data means the information processed and stored in computers, on the internet, and in telecommunication systems. Computer data, as per Oxford Languages, is the quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media.  Not surprisingly, with more and more things online, in the clouds, the volume of computer data has increased exponentially. Think about all the social media contents uploaded, all the websites, online maps, online banking, video conferences, emails, the assignments you wrote that stored in Google Drive…

Tom is an enterprise’s IT manager who leads a team that is responsible for driving the company’s cloud transformation. They have started a project on AWS Landing Zone with Control Tower, with the aim to introduce the number of benefits that their cloud service partner had been talking about for quite some time. Tom and the team are conscious that there can be various approaches on many aspects. They also have questions; for example, after the Control Tower managed Landing Zone is deployed, how can they maintain the best practices, prevent architectural and operational drifts – on the ongoing basis. They are in a sector that demands greater and greater data security governance so logically they would like the peace of mind knowing that the Control Tower structure will continue to fulfil this purpose, without risking itself becoming a toolset that is too complex, for their relatively small team. Their cloud service partner suggested for them to consider Landing Zone Accelerator.  The Lan

On 02 Aug 2023 AWS held a Cloud Day conference in Melbourne. I was quite pleased with the event’s quality (speaking as someone who over the years, has attended a large number of conferences in the ICT industry). The pacing was wonderful, the contents carefully arranged, and the speakers were engaging. I made a few notes / observations on the sessions I went to.   Generative AI Generative AI was definitely a hot talking point. Besides heavy featuring in the Keynote, a number of speakers touched on it in sessions that focused on other topics – people could make connections from various angles.  The common consensus on the phrase Generative AI, or GenAI, is that it describes the broad range of artificial intelligence that can create a wide variety of data – text, images, videos, audio, code, and 3D models. ChatGPT, Google Bart and Microsoft Bing AI are several well-known examples.  Generative AI can leverage large amounts of unlabelled data to pre-train the machine learning models develop