Data center traffic likely will triple over the next five years, Cisco predicted in its Global Cloud Index. The cloud is expected to represent 76 percent of total data center traffic, it said Tuesday in a news release. In 2013, the cloud accounted for 54 percent of data center traffic, it said. By 2018, 53 percent of all residential Internet users globally will use personal cloud storage, it said. The average consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 811 MB per month by 2018, “compared to 186 megabytes per month in 2013,” it said. Countries with the best fixed network performance this year include Japan, the Netherlands and Taiwan, it said. Countries with the best mobile network performance this year include China, Denmark and Uruguay.

Publicis Groupe, a French PR firm, will buy digital marketing company Sapient for $3.7 billion, said a Publicis news release Monday. The buy will let Publicis derive 50 percent of revenue from “digital and technology three years ahead of 2018 plan,” said Maurice Levy, Publicis CEO. “This transaction provides substantial value to our shareholders, offers an ideal cultural match for our people and provides an opportunity to share a wealth of new capabilities with our clients,” said Sapient CEO Alan Herrick. Publicis plans to create Publicis.Sapient, a website focused on “digital transformation and the dynamics of an always-on world across marketing, omni-channel commerce, consulting and technology,” said the release.

SiriusXM’s Q3 earnings of $136 million make clear that the company should pay pre-1972 public performance royalties, said the musicFIRST Coalition in a blog post Friday. SiriusXM “pleads poverty to Congress and runs to the courts to avoid paying pre-72 royalties while gorging on profits that would make Scrooge McDuck blush,” it said. The digital streaming company didn’t comment. SiriusXM has lost two recent California court battles on the issue of pre-1972 performance royalties. Like U.S. District Court in Los Angeles Judge Philip Gutierrez in September (see 1409240079), Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel handed down a decision in October in favor of plaintiffs Flo & Eddie, who own the sound recordings of The Turtles, a 1960’s music group (see 1410160001). SiriusXM is appealing those rulings, said musicFIRST. Public performance royalties are expected to play a key role in music licensing debates on Capitol Hill next year (see 1410090092).

Many small businesses don’t have access to broadband, and Communications Act Title II reclassification would make things only worse, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council said in meeting with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, according to an ex parte filing posted in docket 14-28 Thursday. Reclassification could “negatively impact small business access to broadband, impair innovation in new tools and services that benefit entrepreneurs” and “drive costs higher,” the group said. It also met with Adonis Hoffman, aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.

Online security breaches in 2014 increased by 48 percent from 2013, said a study released by PricewaterhouseCoopers. It was based on responses from 9,700 industry executives in 154 countries, it said, 35 percent from North America. Respondents said they had 42.8 million security breaches in 2014, or 117,339 attacks per day, it said. The study included “only the total incidents detected and reported,” it said. “The number of respondents reporting losses of $20 million or more almost doubled over 2013.” A separate survey, also released Monday from Kaspersky Lab, said 94 percent of companies had cybersecurity issues in 2014, a 3 percentage point increase from last year. Kaspersky partnered with B2B International on the survey, which covered 3,900 respondents from companies of all sizes in 27 countries, it said. The survey was done from April 2013 to May 2014, it said. The average cost of one data security incident was estimated to be $720,000, it said. Thirty-eight percent of companies said that “protection of confidential data against leakages” is their top priority, it said. Twelve percent of companies were the victims of targeted data security attacks, up from 9 percent last year, it said.

The “potential” for data breaches “grows apace as the number of connected devices multiplies,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in remarks prepared for Monday's Internet of Things Global Summit. “The risks those breaches pose intensify as we adopt more and more devices linked to our physical safety, such as our cars, our medical care, and our homes.” The FTC is “concerned that some companies are underinvesting in security,” said Ramirez. “We’ve found that some organizations fail to take even the most basic security precautions, such as updating antivirus software or requiring network administrators to use strong passwords.” Data security should be built into a company’s devices from the “outset, not as an afterthought,” she said. Data collectors should “follow the principle of data minimization,” which would limit data collection for a “specific purpose," said Ramirez. Companies should also “appropriately de-identify consumer data,” she said. “Those handling data should give consumers simplified choices for unexpected collection or uses of their data,” Ramirez said. “Transparency” is the most important goal for data collectors, she said. Privacy policies for businesses are “broken,” she said. “Too many companies use them primarily as tools to shield themselves from liability,” said Ramirez: “This must change.” She said such policies should “clearly lay out what data is being collected, how it is being used, and with whom it will be shared.” The FTC last week commended the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for taking privacy and security concerns into account, in a rulemaking on vehicle-to-vehicle communication capability for passenger cars and light trucks (see 1410240027).

Zebra Technologies completed its $3.45 billion purchase of Motorola Solutions’ enterprise unit, Zebra CEO Anders Gustafsson said in a Monday news release. The deal, disclosed in April, will allow Zebra to “provide the building blocks of Internet of Things solutions, as customers worldwide increasingly take advantage of data analytics and mobility to improve business performance,” Gustafsson said. Some 4,500 Motorola Solutions employees will transfer to Zebra, the company said.

The percentage of U.S. households that get broadband service at home increased from 20 percent in 2004 to 79 percent this year, a Leichtman Research Group survey found. Adults reported spending an average of 2.8 hours online at home a day, up from 2.2 hours per day in 2009, said a Friday Leichtman news release (http://bit.ly/1ruAw9b). Those aged 18 to 34 spent an average of 3.3 hours online at home daily, compared with 2.1 hours daily among those aged 55 and older, the release said. It said 63 percent of adults get Internet on a smartphone, up from 44 percent in 2012. The findings are based on a phone survey of 1,261 households in September.

The average bandwidth of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased 389 percent between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014, Akamai Technologies said Thursday in a report (http://bit.ly/1FKpy9i). Akamai said its service defended against 17 DDoS attacks in Q3 that had traffic of more than 100 Gbps, including one at 321 Gbps. “We witnessed none of that size in the same quarter a year ago and only six” in Q2, said John Summers, Akamai vice president-Security Business Unit, in a news release. “These mega-attacks each used multiple DDoS vectors to deliver large bandwidth-consuming packets at an extremely high rate of speed.” More than half of all attacks measured in Q3 used multiple attack vectors, an 11 percent increase from Q2 and a 9 percent increase from the same period last year, Akamai said. Multi-vector attacks are increasing due to “the increased availability of attack toolkits with easy-to-use interfaces as well as a growing DDoS-for-hire criminal industry,” Akamai said (http:// bit.ly/1xenfVC).

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) is “seeing the right trends illustrating that the marketplace is accepting” Version 1.0 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, said Danielle Kriz, director-global cybersecurity policy, in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1rpPQmz). ITI was one of several information and communications technology (ICT) sector participants that submitted comments to NIST on industry use of the framework, which the agency released in February (see 1410140173). Companies in the ICT sector “are having new conversations about cybersecurity risk management” and the market is responding with new products and services to manage cyber risks outside the sector, Kriz said. ITI said it is urging NIST to “pivot away from developing a framework or standard and focus its work on” on its Privacy Engineering Objectives and Risk Model, which is meant to address gaps in privacy-related technical best practices. “Such a resource would be useful to organizations seeking to improve how they build privacy into their information management structures,” Kriz said. ITI suggested NIST seek out additional comment on the Cybersecurity Framework in a year’s time.