October 28, 2013

The three waves of disruptive trends
... there’s three waves you can catch around the same trend: the emerging wave, the differentiating wave, and the business value wave as shown below. That is, not only riding the wave around each disruptive trend, but riding the same wave of a particular trend multiple times during its journey to the shoreline. These three waves follow the adoption of the technology as it progresses from pioneers to mainstream adoption.


Broad Data - How to Use it and Where to Find it
Logically, we should expect competition to drive more adoption of broad data, barring regulatory or cultural barriers. A good case in point is in motor insurance, where insurance companies will try to gather more and more data about drivers, to help them form a more accurate view of the risk, and hence a more accurate premium. Where that accurate premium is lower than competitors’ premiums it will gain profitable business. Where it is higher than competitors’ it will lose unprofitable business.


Is Your DNS Server A Weapon?
DNS requests are an ideal mechanism by which attackers can increase the amount of traffic thrown at their victims, while hiding the origin of the attack. Many DNS servers on the Internet are configured as "open resolvers" that accept and respond to DNS queries from anywhere on the Internet. Sending very small requests to these servers can result in large replies that can be directed toward a victim's systems


ERP Comes to the Cloud and (Finally) Smaller Businesses
"In the midmarket, one of the big hurdles to greater ERP adoption has been the infrastructure. These businesses don't always have the funds or the technical ability to build their own data center, to have the infrastructure that can support a full-scale ERP solution," Stangeland says. But that requirement's going to evaporate with the cloud, he says. In addition, a per-user, per-transaction pricing model makes ERP affordable for any sized business, and those cost savings can be reinvested in the business to spur growth, Stangeland says.


Lean Enterprise Anti-Pattern: The Lean Waterfall
More and more enterprise scale companies are drinking the lean Kool Aid and starting to implement Lean Startup methodology. In doing so, they are failing at the most basic level. Lean methodology is not lean startup. An MVP is not learning. A Business Model Canvas is not business model innovation. These things are just artifacts. They are workarounds. These workarounds, applied poorly and/or inappropriately, can result in some wonderful anti-patterns.


Seagate announces Ethernet-enabled storage platform
Using a series of open application programming interfaces (APIs,) developers gain the ability to share data between drives, direct drive-to-drive transit of data without the need for an intermediate controller system, and built-in data integrity checks which the company claims will do away with silent data corruption once and for all. To the operating system, it's all transparent: applications make direct key-based requests to the storage platform, bypassing file system drivers and other overheads.


Cisco Dives Into Data Virtualization
We never thought of Cisco as having a focus on data, even though, if you think about it, most of what its technology does is transport data from device to device. However, there is a beguiling rationale for what Cisco may be planning in combining data virtualization with network virtualization. When you consider it, you quickly realize that a good deal of what happens in BI applications involves moving data around a network, from a database to the BI applications.


What is protocol spoofing as it relates to WAN optimization?
"Protocol spoofing" is actually a homonym, expert Ed Tittel explains: In the information security world, protocol spoofing masks a TCP packet to look like something legitimate. In the world of application delivery optimization, it is not malicious -- but rather helpful in optimizing traffic across a wide area network. Protocol spoofing is a WAN optimization technique that is synonymous with the term "protocol substitution."


Tearing down IT silos
Today’s IT infrastructures are more complex and interdependent than ever before. Hiccups in the infrastructure inevitably put business operations at risk. We’ve all seen the headlines of IT related outages that have real business consequences such as lost revenue and damage to a company’s reputation. These factors are driving IT organizations to rethink how they work.


Supercomputers Invade Corporate Datacenters
Other than the rapid spread of supercomputer architecture built on ranks of processors paired with GPUs that act as accelerators, the biggest surprise in the 2013 study was “the large proportion of sites that are applying big data technologies and methods to their problems and the steady growth in cloud computing for HPC,” according to Earl Joseph, IDC technical computing analyst, in a statement announcing the study.



Quote for the day:

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." -- John Powell

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