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April 28, 2020

On the Radar: A Cloudy Survey; Trucking with Corona; Data Erasers

(Oleksii Lishchyshyn/Shutterstock)

If you thought things were getting even more cloudy over the past year, then you were right. That’s according to a new cloud survey released today by Denodo, which finds multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments are up considerably.

For Denodo’s third annual cloud usage survey, the company asked 250 business execs and IT leaders about their cloud environments. It found that 42% of cloud deployments are of the hybrid variety, followed by public cloud at 18% and private cloud at 17%.

Not surprisingly, the use of container technologies was up by 50% from 2019, which indicates how central it is to cloud deployments of all stripes. Docker was used by 46% of survey-takers, followed by Kubernetes at 40%. Analytics was the most popular use case, according to the survey, followed by data warehousing and data science.

“As data’s center of gravity shifts to the cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures are becoming the basis of data management, but the challenge of integrating data in the cloud has almost doubled (43%),” said Ravi Shankar, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Denodo, which makes data virtualization software.

Trucking Along with Corona

The heavier the truck, the more likely it was to still be rolling across the roads of North American during the first two weeks of the COVID-19 crises, according to an analysis of trucking data collected by Geotab.

As March turned to April, more medium-duty trucks came back on the road, according to Geotab, which develops a small data-collection device that’s installed in 2 million commercial vehicles across the United States and Canada, giving transportation companies a real-time view into the state of their fleet. But light-duty trucks and cars remained substantially below their pre-COVID-19 levels, the data shows.

COVID-19 drove an 18% decline in commercial transportation activity in the United States between February 1 and March 27, compared to a 21% decline in Canada, the company says. In the U.S. Federal Region, which includes the State of New York and New Jersey, there was a 37% decline, the company says.

Geotab’s data also provides insights into border crossing wait times, fuel consumption, and airports and marine terminal activity. Airport volumes in the United States are down between 30% and 70%, according to GeoTab’s data analysis.

The good news is that wait times at intersections in major US cities are down anywhere from 3% (in Seattle) to 17% (in Atlanta). Average road speeds are also between 12% (Chicago) and 20% (New York City), it found.

You can keep up with Geotab’s COVID-19 analysis by following this blog.

Data Erasure as a Service

Companies that need help complying with customer data erasure requests made under GDPR or CCPA can get it through a relatively new class of offering dubbed erasure as a service, where a third-party vendor takes responsibility for certifying that data has been deleted from the company’s systems.

The leading vendor in the erasure as a service field is Blancco Technology Group. The London-based firm develops data eraser offerings that eliminate data wherever it might live, including files, drives, servers, laptops, and mobile devices. Its offerings provide audit trails to ensure that data has been deleted, as well as the capability to manage data erasure at the file level with a policy-based approach.

With GDPR in full effect and CCPA enforcement set to begin in July, Blancco is expanding its ecosystem to enable its data eraser technology to be used by any software vendor, managed service provider, or reseller that’s potentially exposed to fines for failure to abide by data erasure requests. The market for aftermarket hardware is particularly exposed, but any firm that collects and stores sensitive information is potentially at risk.

COVID-19 may be stressing the gains in data privacy that have been made recently, but it hasn’t stopped strict new data privacy laws from going into effect. As customers demand more accountability from vendors for their data privacy, expect erasure as a service offerings to grow.

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