Waterloo Codefest Special Offer

All new signups from the Kitchener-Waterloo are will receive $50 account credit during the hours of Codefest (3)In celebration of this upcoming weekend’s Waterloo Codefest, we are offering $50 credit to new signups from Kitchener/Waterloo during the 36 hour hackathon. We are hoping that the Waterloo Codefest will inspire some innovation and we would like to think that this credit can give some runway to develop the bright ideas that come out of the weekend.

If you haven’t heard, Cloud-A is proudly sponsoring Waterloo Codefest and our very own Geoff Sullivan will be attending and judging the event.

About Waterloo Codefest

When: This 36-hour hackathon will take place Oct. 24 and 25, 2015

Where: Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), 67 Erb St., West, Waterloo

The hackathon will begin at 7 a.m. on Oct. 24 and end at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25, after which there will be an awards ceremony for the top three applications developed.

How do I register?

Register online using Dev Post.

Participation is free; sign up either by yourself or with a team of up to four members.

For more information on Waterloo Codefest check out the following links:

City of Waterloo – Waterloo Codefest

Waterloo Codefest Devpost page

 

Cloud Object Storage Survey

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Hello Bulk Storage users! Our partner CloudBerry Lab is offering a free license of their CloudBerry Explorer PRO to any Cloud-A Bulk Storage user who fills out the 9 questions in the link below. Please note that this data will be shared with CloudBerry Lab for market research purposes, so take this into consideration prior to submitting your responses.

We will be submitting responses to CloudBerry Lab at the end of everyday and they will be sending out the licenses to your email address.

This offer expires October 27th, 2015

Take the Survey!

 

Data Residency, Sovereignty and the Safe Harbor Sham

This past Tuesday it was announced that the American ‘Safe Harbor’ compliance has been ruled invalid by the EU’s highest courts – a ruling that is unappealable. Safe Harbor was the standard for data privacy in the US as well as Europe, but was shot down after it was proven that European data stored by American companies could be accessed and surveilled by spy agencies like the NSA.

This is the second high profile, precedent setting case where data residency has been a majorly concerning subject matter. Last year, Microsoft was ordered to hand over data residing in an Irish data centre. It was determined in court that US cloud computing companies, like Microsoft Google and Amazon Web Services, must turn over private information when served with a valid search warrant from US law enforcement agencies, even if that data resides in data centres outside of the US.

We feel that this is an extremely relevant piece of news for our customer base considering that many of our users have data residency concerns.

Here are two main considerations for keeping your data out of reach of wondering eyes:

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Announcing Cloud-A Managed Security Services

Managed-Security-Services1-396x196A few months back we released our Web Application Security Survey and were amazed at the amount of participation we had – it was the single greatest amount of feedback we have ever received at one time, which helped us realize that security is a very important topic for our users that has been unaddressed. From this data we were able to determine two main things. Either developers:

A) Don’t have confidence in their own security measures and procedures

B) Don’t have the time to spend implementing security best practises

While we were not entirely surprised with the results of the survey, it helped us realize that there was a gap in our user’s understanding of the Cloud-A security partnership model, and there was a gap in our offering to help our users better secure their environments on Cloud-A.

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