August 01, 2013

Understanding IT's role in cloud security and compliance
In this chapter excerpt from Cloud Computing: Assessing the Risks, authors Jared Carstensen, Bernard Golden and J.P. Morgenthal discuss what cloud consumers need to consider in terms of security, compliance and risk, how these considerations affect cloud infrastructure and applications, as well as where the compliance responsibility -- or trust boundary -- lies.


Ask these 9 questions to avoid hero worship and closed minds
Failure is essential to the human experience; we would not be able to define success without it, nor would be we be able to learn and grow if there was nothing we were shallow, ignorant or inexperienced about. And, in theory, corporate America gets this. We talk about innovation by failing fast, of developing employees by letting them make mistakes and overcome them. But do we live this or simply say it?


Secure migration to the cloud: A not impossible mission
A challenge with many of these approaches is that they are not always scalable for enterprise use: different administrators are managing passwords, SSH key pairs, and so on. You may have one solution for securing your data at rest in the cloud, one for backups and another for data migration. Got a headache yet?


Cloud contracts poor on security, says Gartner
“As more buyers demand it, and as the standards mature, it will become increasingly common practice to perform assessments in a variety of ways, including reviewing responses to a questionnaire, reviewing third-party audit statements, conducting on-site audits and/or monitoring the cloud services provider,” said Bona. ... “We recommend they also include recovery time and recovery point objectives and data integrity measures in the service level agreements, with meaningful penalties if these are missed,” she said.


Tech Trajectories: Four More Moore’s Laws
We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law, which takes an inexorable view of technological progress, with the number of components on an integrated circuit doubling like clockwork every 18 months or so. But do other technologies follow a similar pattern of exponential improvement? ... Moore’s Law–like doubling serves as a fair predictor of progress, but not without hiccups.


What to look for in Linux memory usage
Unlike Windows, where memory swap can slow programs down, Linux memory swap is advantageous, thanks to the way in which Linux analyzes processes' allocated memory page use. The Linux kernel runs a Least Recently Used algorithm to determine which memory pages need to be in RAM and which do not. In some cases, letting the Linux kernel swap faster can improve memory performance.


How the cloud is going to reinvent ERP — and how long it will take
Not that the cloud is going to banish the core of on-premise ERP. "For the next five years or more we will see the deployment of what we call hybrid-ERP, a mix of on-premise and the cloud", Rayner said. "What we do know is that there will be come occasions when on-premises ERP is the way to go and some where the cloud is better suited."


Making the Shift from Sustainable to Transient Advantage
In traditional strategy, companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry. And that worked very well in an era where most sectors of the economy were dominated by a few big players; if you're an oil company, for example, you compete with other oil companies. If you're a car company, you compete with other car companies. But that is a dangerous way to think about competition. Boundaries between industries are no longer so clear-cut.


Software-defined everything: Revolution or evolution?
It is easy to get caught up in the hype cycle and believe the buzz about the benefits of new technologies. Software-defined solutions certainly hold a lot of promise -- an automated, dynamic infrastructure, business-aligned SLAs, simpler operations and lower costs. But, technology shifts like this don’t come without risks or unintended consequences that we -- as an industry and individual companies -- will need to manage.


A Way to Drive 'Dual Transformation'
One way to make the case for change is to highlight early warning signs that disruption is taking root. Disruption typically starts innocently, with a lower-cost or simpler solution taking root among undemanding customer groups, or among people whose lack of expert skills or sufficient wealth kept them out of the market. The pattern of disruption means that these humble beginnings can lead to cataclysmic change, so even the smallest development should be watched carefully.



Quote for the day

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas." -- Marie Curie

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