The Globus Toolkit has been an open source project since its inception, allowing the community to provide enhancements that have made it what it is today. But after a nearly 20-year run as what many see as the benchmark of grid computing, the Globus team at the University of Chicago will no longer support the Globus Toolkit. One of the toolkit’s...

In my earlier blog post, “A Day In Data: How Much Data We Generate and Consume in a Day” I examined the common data-related tasks and the amounts of data these tasks generate and consume in a day. When I finished my research, I was blown away by some of the figures I found. Did you know that 2.9 million emails are sent every second?! Or how about...

We see a lot of confusion among IT professionals about the pros/cons of cloud-based object storage like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Blob. There tends to be a general lack of awareness regarding the smaller players, like Backblaze B2 and Wasabi for instance, and their benefits. The most confusion, however, revolves around migrating data to these various cloud storage solutions, and how it can be...

I‘ve been thinking about the amount of data created and consumed in a single day, and it got me curious to look into the figures. I found the results very interesting – so I thought I would make an infographic to visualize my findings. I decided to focus on the more personal, everyday tasks most people perform in a day, such as emails and social...

There is a new wave of regulation coming in the form of the European Union Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR). These provisions and regulations have been in development over the last four years, and starting May 25th, 2018; it will begin to be enforced. After that date, substantial fines will be imposed on those who don’t comply with new regulations. Before we dive into what this will mean for...

Moving data into cloud storage can present a number of challenges for organizations across all industries. Some of these challenges include finding a tool that can simplify the process and a solution that can move the data to the cloud as fast as possible. This blog will examine two methods used to transfer files into Microsoft Azure Blob storage: using Microsoft’s tool AzCopy and using...

In a recent survey of UK workers, over half the employees who participated across 1,000 organizations admitted that they open suspicious email attachments. More than 80% also said they open strange attachments if the sender appears to be someone they know, and “one in five said the business they work for has no policy on how to handle email attachments, or they have not been made aware of it.” ...

Early this year, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced the elimination of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) from their business practices and policies—a change that strengthens the security of their data transmissions and addresses recent audit findings. What does this mean for you? The change is still in transition for now, but after August 31, 2017, mailers and shippers will need to...

Anyone with an email account is used to spam. It happens one day: you get that first unsolicited email, and then a flood of ads, flash sale offers, and foreign bank transaction requests rushes into your inbox. In that moment, the battle for your virtual sanity begins. But while spam emails are mostly harmless—you tend to see them from a mile away and respond accordingly—spear phishing emails...