Cloud bits: Rekognition regulation, hypervisor help
Connecting state and local government leaders
AWS CEO calls for federal regulation of facial recognition technology and the National Institute of Standards and Technology issues a report on hypervisor vulnerabilities.
Facial recognition regulation. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said his company would sell its facial recognition system to any government agency "that's following the law," but he advocated for swift regulation of the technology by the federal government. "Otherwise, you’ll have 50 different laws in 50 different states,” Jassy said in a June 10 interview at the Code Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. Law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Florida have used AWS' cloud-based Rekognition, but the company's rivals Google and Microsoft have declined to sell their facial recognition systems to law enforcement. More from Vox.
Hypervisor help. To help cloud managers detect, reconstruct and prevent attacks on the hypervisior, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report analyzing the recent vulnerabilities associated with two open-source hypervisors. From that research, it developed a profile of those vulnerabilities in terms of hypervisor functionality, attack type and attack source. More from NIST.
Cross-cloud partners. Microsoft and Oracle announced an expansion of their partnership, with new "cross-cloud" capabilities to help large organizations move their on-premises hosted enterprise applications either to Microsoft's or Oracle's public cloud infrastructure. New capabilities include connecting Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly and unified identity and access management. More from Redmondmag.
Informatics cloud. The National Science Foundation issued a $2 million grant to the University of Kentucky Research Foundation to build the Kentucky Research Informatics Cloud (KyRIC), a big data cloud infrastructure for research in areas from bioinformatics and evolutionary network analysis to computational modeling and simulation. KyRIC's hybrid architecture will consist of two 50-node clusters and a petascale storage system and will leverage cloud management software that can reconfigure, schedule and load problem-specific software based on the mix of big data jobs being executed by users. KyRIC will be used by over 1,000 UK researchers and by collaborators across the state to facilitate improved algorithm design, software development and interactive data analysis. More from NSF.