Top 10 Technology Terms to Know for 2009 (2)

Cloud Computing

·         Dell, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Amazon and many others are all doing it this year. Cloud computing is a type of computing that is comparable to grid computing, relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications.

·         The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power (normally used by military and research facilities) to perform tens of trillions of computations per second.

·         To do this, Cloud computing networks large groups of servers, usually those with low-cost consumer PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them.

·         This shared IT infrastructure contains large pools of systems that are linked together. Often, virtualization techniques are used to maximize the power of cloud computing.

·         There are many people out there who believe the term cloud computing is just another buzzword that is used to describe too many technologies, making it confusing to many.

·         The term Cloud computing has been used to mean grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, Internet-based applications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing and remote processing.

·         When most people use the term, they may have one of these ideas in mind, but the listener might be thinking about something else.

FDE - full-disk encryption

·         Short for full-disk encryption, FDE was introduced in 2006 as new hard drive technology from Seagate that performs encryption on the disk drive at the hardware level.

·         The hard drive contains an ASIC chip that is used to encrypt every bit of data as it is written and also decrypts data as it is being read.

·         The drive requires a user password for authentication and it is secured with strong encryption technology.

·         Seagate's FDE technology is transparent to the user and independent of the operating system.

Earlier this year the National Security Agency, the cryptologic intelligence arm of the U.S. government, qualified Seagate Technology's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive for use in laptops and other computing devices deployed by federal agencies and contractors.

·         This makes Seagate the first hard drive maker to have received the agency's nod of approval, which signifies that the drive meets national security standards for securing sensitive information.

·         This year full-disk encryption (also called whole disk protection) further made news when security vendors started releasing whole disk protection software, like PGP who unveiled a Mac OS X version of its Whole Disk Encryption 9.9 security software.

Geotagging

·         Also called geocoding, geotagging is the process of assigning geographic location metadata to a photos' EXIF data (which normally would only contain details about the digital camera being used to take the photo).

·         The geographic information can include details such as the latitude and longitude coordinates or city and state details for the geographic location of the photo.

·         The cool thing about geotagging is that the EXIF data can be read by programs that can allow you to see maps of where a photo was taken.

·         Geotagged photos, when shared online, can also be linked to several map services including Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps and other applications enabling others to pin photos to a map precisely at a place they were taken.