Jio AI-Cloud is an upcoming service that provides up to 100 GB of free cloud storage. In Drive, free storage is limited to 15 GB. Set to launch this Diwali, Jio AI-Cloud promises to simplify file storage and organization with advanced AI features. Integrated with the Jio ecosystem, this service aims to enhance how users manage their digital content. Sound good? Here is everything you need to know about Jio AI-Cloud and the broader ecosystem.

An early look at the Jio AI-Cloud

Jio AI-Cloud is a new offering from Reliance Industries designed to make advanced cloud storage and AI-powered services accessible to everyone. At the heart of Jio AI-Cloud is the provision of up to 100 GB of free cloud storage for Jio users. This feature is aimed at providing a secure and convenient space for individuals to store a wide array of digital content, including:

• Photos and Videos: Safely backing up personal media, ensuring that precious moments are preserved and easily retrievable.
• Documents: Storing important files, such as work documents, academic papers, or personal records, with easy access from any device.
• Other Digital Content: Any other types of data that users might need to keep safe and accessible, such as music files, eBooks, or application data.

Jio AI-Cloud uses artificial intelligence to improve cloud storage. Data management is simplified because AI automatically sorts and organizes files. This means users don’t have to spend time manually arranging their data; AI does it for them, so finding and accessing files is easier.

AI also improves security. It continuously watches for unusual activity and potential threats, helping to keep data safe from cyber risks. Additionally, AI helps with personalization by analyzing what users store, suggesting relevant content, or organizing data according to their preferences. This aims to make the whole experience more user-friendly and tailored to individual needs.

Good to know that Jio AI-Cloud is accessible from various devices—smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Jio AI-Cloud launch date

The Jio AI-Cloud Welcome offer is set to launch during Diwali this year, making it available to millions of Jio users across India. The rollout will accompany various promotions and support to ensure a smooth transition for users adopting this new service.

“We plan to launch the Jio AI-Cloud Welcome Offer starting Diwali this year, bringing a powerful and affordable solution where cloud data storage and data-powered AI services are available to everyone everywhere.”

Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries

Integration with Jio Ecosystem

Jio AI-Cloud is integrated with the broader Jio ecosystem, including other services and platforms offered by Reliance. This integration allows for seamless interactions between Jio’s various products and services. For example:

• JioTV+: Users can store and access their favorite shows and movies.
• Jio Phonecall AI: Call recordings and transcriptions can be stored and managed within Jio AI-Cloud.

Featured image credit: Eray Eliaçık/Bing

The amount of data that businesses create continues to grow; at the same time, more of it is slipping out of our central data centres and into a mix of Cloud applications, mobile endpoints and remote or branch office file servers. But how can companies keep track of all this data when it is not in one place or even one type of location? The answer lies in taking a “Cloud First” approach to IT.

Taking a “Cloud First” approach to IT doesn’t mean simply lifting everything into public Cloud services like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure then trying to maintain existing management processes. Instead, it requires a new mindset around how to make the most of Cloud architectures while still meeting compliance and security goals.

According to research by industry analysts, around 40 per cent of all corporate data is outside the data centre at the moment. Gartner predicts that this percentage will grow to more than 50 per cent of all data by 2020. This trend is an interesting one, as companies want to take advantage of the flexibility that mobile working and cloud-based services can deliver.

However, IT can’t afford to lose all control. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation put together by the European Union forces all companies to keep control over customer records or risk heavy fines. For companies with operations in multiple countries, different standards of data privacy can make it difficult to ensure that all necessary steps around data protection are followed.

The shift to Cloud has led to the growth of more management controls around how and where data can be created, in order to keep pace with business needs for governance. Whereas this started as a way to build trust in the Cloud, today this has begun to take over more of the management requirements across all the places where data might exist across all business IT assets.

As IT becomes more fractured across internal services, external IT assets and third party providers, it’s important to look at how to keep a consistent approach to data management in place. This includes looking at how to consolidate management requirements while ensuring that all data is handled appropriately.

What Cloud First strategies have to deliver

The availability of information means that finding a common platform internally can be very challenging, if not impossible. As applications move to the Cloud, the data they produce tends to follow. Similarly, the devices used to consume data from Cloud applications can be more mobile, making it even more difficult to use internal infrastructure as a platform for data protection.

Secondary storage requirements will tend to follow where applications and service move. There are two reasons for this: the first is that the Cloud can provide that common location for data to sit where it can be available to those that need it, while also being kept secure. The second reason is cost, as Cloud services can host data far more cost effectively than the equivalent internal platform can achieve.

However, these two reasons should not be seen as the end goals for “Cloud First” initiatives. Simply keeping track of data or reducing cost on their own provide some value, but they don’t capture all the opportunities that Cloud can provide. Instead, the emphasis should be on how to make the most of having this data in one central location, even as the data created gets more dispersed. By efficiently consolidating, auditing and indexing data from multiple enterprise sources, businesses can derive more value from the information that users create, wherever that happens to be.

By linking up on-demand compliance, search, recoverability and analytics services on top of the underlying data set, users can be supported more efficiently. However, the business can use this insight to run its own operations more efficiently too. Detecting anomalies in data being rewritten can not only stop annoyances like ransomware from harming individuals; it can prevent those small problems becoming huge company-wide issues.

Similarly, anomaly detection can be used to prevent security problems caused by rogue employees that suddenly start deleting large amounts of data, whether this data is held on individual devices or elsewhere. By looking at baseline activity for file creation and usage, deviations can be spotted by tracking against either previous personal activity or comparing to other similar job roles.

Where user activity starts to deviate from previous patterns, this can be flagged and the right next steps initiated. On a human level, actions here might include taking a closer look at activity to check that it is OK, alerting a line manager or consulting performance results to see that there are no problems in store. From technology and data perspectives, keeping multiple data protection requirements fulfilled will help over time. In the example of a rogue employee, this includes being able to roll back to previous sets of data, whether the user wanted to keep them or not.

By looking at the whole business and taking a “Cloud First” approach, company IT teams can take a more proactive and automated approach to management of problems. Moreover, these teams can look to provide better service and compliance handling wherever those users happen to be working. By concentrating on what data management issues currently exist and making the most of Cloud technologies, IT teams can overcome some of the most challenging issues that face them.

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The march to the cloud for mission-critical applications is picking up speed. Even financial services firms, noted for their caution, are making headway. UK-based insurance intermediary Towergate Insurance announced last year that it is moving its IT infrastructure to the cloud. And The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2016 that Deutsche Bank researchers are projecting that public cloud adoption of an infrastructure as a service model by big banks will grow from as little as 0% today to 30% within three years.

Despite this positively sunny outlook there are still some data security, privacy and governance hoops to jump through before betting your business on the public cloud.

Is your data secure?

It’s true that the major cloud providers do a great job on perimeter security, helping to alleviate enterprise concerns over traditional network and operational security in the cloud. However, cloud security is about far more than just securing the perimeter. Rather it is just the first step in a multi-layered strategy.

The data inside the public cloud environment needs to be secure too – and this is the responsibility of the data owner or custodian, not the cloud provider. Failure to secure the data itself makes large organisations far more likely to suffer a successful data breach and make the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

One of the major strengths of the cloud is its ability to let employees, customers, partners and suppliers – as well as your cloud provider’s operations team – access your network and services to conduct business. But you need to know who’s accessing the network at any point in time, ensure their access and editing rights are set correctly and be able to audit their actions. This requires an enterprise-hardened database, like enterprise NoSQL, which wraps layers of security right around the data and uses advanced encryption to mitigate the risk from both insider threats and external hackers.

Do you dare share?

Although the cloud makes it easier to share data – it also comes with some risks. The more the data is shared, the greater the risk of leakage. This is where data privacy and data governance considerations come in.

We come across lots of enterprises that have built massive data lakes at great expense only to find they are stymied because their data governance is below par. Ironically, this inability to share data securely and appropriately means they end up missing out on the benefits of a cloud strategy.
In such cases, giving data scientists or testing teams access to the data for analysis or testing purposes represents too great a risk because data lineage and provenance can’t be adequately protected. If sensitive information has not been fully redacted, it could lead to a brush with the regulators for inadvertently exposing personally identifiable information (PII) about employees or customers. As well as untold reputational damage, an eye-wateringly large fine for violating regulations such as the EU GDPR could be on the cards after May 2018.

Data governance as a business enabler

But there is another way.

Some of the more enlightened businesses we speak to are starting to look at data governance as a business enabler that unlocks the value of their data assets, rather than an administrative headache.

This approach is being fuelled by the rise of highly flexible databases with advanced security built-in. With tools to easily and quickly redact PII and other sensitive information at the data layer, organisations can be confident that data can be shared securely and appropriately. And any updates required due to people moving roles or regulatory changes can be completed fast, with minimal coding.

Plus, some of the latest enterprise NoSQL databases support even more granular controls such as element-level security. This allows parts of a file to be redacted or hidden, depending on who is viewing the file and the specific job they are doing. For example, to ensure GDPR compliance, a call centre handler might see the name and phone number of the caller on her screen, but no other personal information.

A clear future

The move to the cloud seems unstoppable and the benefits gained from greater flexibility and agility only too plain to see. According to 451 Research’s latest Voice of the Enterprise (VotE): Cloud Transformation study, 22% of organisations polled have already adopted a ‘cloud first’ approach, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or the public cloud the fastest-growing model.

For organisations to make the most of a cloud-shaped future, their data security, data privacy and data governance strategies need to be fit for purpose. Otherwise the opportunities for sharing data and extracting more value and insights from the data will be extremely limited. And that cloud might end up being quite a lonely and costly place.

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Nasuni, a cloud-integrated storage provider for the global enterprise that combines on-premise hardware with cloud storage, has struck a $10 million round of venture capital funding. Early investors like Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, were joined by newer investors as they participated in this extension of the company’s C round.

“Simply put, we wanted a bigger share of Nasuni,” said Paul Flanagan, managing director at Sigma Partners. “With their disruptive technology and approach to delivering enterprise storage as a service, Nasuni is revolutionizing the way data storage is deployed. Clearly, we’re excited about the company and have been super impressed with its growth. The opportunity here is enormous, and Nasuni is perfectly positioned to take full advantage of IT’s shift to the cloud.”

Andres Rodriguez, founder and CEO explains, “The Nasuni Service liberates data from the limitations and high cost of traditional storage silos. With this new financing, we will expand our outreach and accelerate innovation and market adoption.”

Firmly established vendors like EMC and NetApp are probable competitors that Nasuni’s unified storage intends to take on with a patented UniFS Global File System, which gives users fast access to a global file share no matter where they are located.

The Nasuni Service logged a 232-percent increase in bookings in the second quarter of 2014 and 181-percent sales growth. Expected to be a few years away from an IPO, this Boston startup will use the new funds to scale engineering, sales and marketing efforts.

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(Image credit: Nasuni)

Google announced that Stackdriver, a cloud monitoring system, will be joining their team to deploy its services on Google‘s Cloud Platform, making it clear that the tech giant is taking the cloud market very seriously. The acquisition went for an undisclosed amount, but Stackdriver has raised a total of $15 million in venture funding in two rounds.

Tom Kershaw, Google Cloud’s product manager, wrote on Cloud Platform’s blog that, “Stackdriver has built a leading service to help developers intelligently monitor the apps and services they’re building and running in the cloud. This allows customers to have more visibility into errors, performance, behavior, and operations. The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver’s great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform customers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.“

Stackdriver is known for monitoring Amazon Web Services, but it also supports monitoring individual servers, Rackspace’s cloud services and Google Cloud Engine instances. The company will not stop offering its existing services, and will provide users with tools for working in a hybrid cloud environment. The team’s newest  focus is on integrating the service with the Google Cloud Platform.

Kershaw added:  “we’re excited they’re joining us. We’ll be investing more in this area in the coming months — stay tuned!“