September 14, 2013

Business Architecture 101 – It’s results that count!
Some see Business Architecture as a variation of Enterprise Architecture, but for others it is a different discipline. At OpenText we see it as different; whether we like it or not traditional Enterprise Architecture is seen as the domain of the IT folks. On the other hand, Business Architecture is, as the name implies, focused on helping business people manage business problems. It is this accessibility and relevance to business teams that we believe is leading the interest.


The Age of Data
A significant reversal happened as we moved from the Age of Hardware through the Age of Software to The Age of Data. Initially the buyers of computer capability, both hardware and software, were large organizations. This began to reverse with the emergence of the PC, with consumers gradually becoming the driving force in the market. The dynamics were that products were sold to consumers earlier or at the same time that they were sold to companies.


NetIQ Declared a Leader in Identity and Access Management Suites
In the report, Forrester Research singled out NetIQ as having consistently built a strong stack of identity and access management products. Forrester Research also named NetIQ as one of the leaders that provide an "IAM suite that encompasses identity provisioning (Identity Manager), attestation (Access Governance Suite), web SSO and federation (Access Manager)" with "easy-to-use interfaces, a differentiated vision and thought leadership for IAM, and strong execution."


Insider Threat: Limit Privileged Access
Controlling who has access to these accounts and tracking and monitoring exactly how they are being used is a critical part of preventing data leaks and network breaches. Organizations need to perform a comprehensive audit of their infrastructure to identify privileged accounts that are high-risk and need to be managed. They then must apply different levels of controls, based on the risk. And a group outside of IT needs to monitor and audit all of these privileged accounts to ensure the controls are correctly enforced.


Cybersecurity: Locks are fine, alarms better
Instead of investing loads of money building better locks for protection, Caudill encouraged agencies to develop better alarms that use available data to determine when outsiders have gotten in. "Big data analytics' capabilities have constantly improved and gotten more effective," said Caudill, speaking at an FCW cyber-security briefing Sept. 12 in Washington, D.C.


An innovative data center offers to heat up Paris homes
The team at Qarnot is rethinking data centers by breaking up the collection of servers and dispersing them into Parisians’ homes or other buildings in the form of digital radiators. “The idea was to generate the waste in the only place where it is not a waste — directly in people’s homes,” Danuta Pieter, an engineer and partner at Qarnot Computing said. This new service could provide an enticing alternative to traditional, yet costly data centers while helping bring heat to those who can’t afford it.


Next role for robots: data center diagnosticians
One of the systems on its research plan might include the use of robots for energy management and conservation. Recently IBM and EMC developed robots designed to rove data centers and collect temperature, power usage and other data that could affect the performance of data center IT systems. ... The EMC Data Center Robot helps combat these problems by patrolling for temperature fluctuations, humidity and system vibrations and locating sources of cooling leaks and other vulnerabilities.


Anatomy of an API Gateway
There are a couple of rules that many of the vendors break: They mix business and non-functional requirements together in the same architecture; and They describe the complete proxy implementation as policy. One of the most important principles we follow with our API Gateway is the separation of process, binding (style), transport, and policy; and the resulting ability to declaratively define APIs.


Risk Management And Bias: Is Human Nature in Your Way?
One of the assertions of the paper is that, when it comes to risk, we often ignore facts and apply our own subjective biases to the decisions we make. “Risk is traditionally defined in terms of probability. However, people often have difficulty in processing statistical information and may rely instead on simplified decision rules. Decision making under risk is also critically affected by people’s subjective assessments of benefits and costs.”


Big data applications require new thinking on data integration
Copying data sets from the file structure of HDFS into a database table format for storage in HBase wasn't that big of a challenge, said Hannon, who took part in a panel discussion at the conference in San Jose, Calif. "The more difficult part," he said, "was unpacking the 10 to 15 years of ETL we'd done to find out what rules were important and which weren't." Then the developers had to incorporate the business rules deemed worth keeping into the new implementation.



Quote for the day:

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -- Benjamin Disraeli

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