May 17, 2014

Gartner Says Adaptive Sourcing Holds the Key to Business Growth
"The one-size-fits-all sourcing strategy is no longer appropriate for an IT organization that will increasingly be asked to be accountable for end-to-end production services, which will, of necessity, be based on a hybrid IT approach," said Mr. Da Rold. "IT must continue to run the essential business operations. It must differentiate the business through improvements to business processes, and it must also innovate — providing access to new digital opportunities. If IT fails to drive innovation, the business will acquire it elsewhere — because IT purchasing is already moving beyond the IT budget."


7 New Competencies for a Competent HR Department
Regrettably, however, conventional courses in International HR and IHRM textbooks do a poor job of preparing practitioners for the international marketplace. They tend to focus on categorizing employees as HCNs (Host Country Nationals), PCNs (Parent Country Nationals), and TCNs (Third Country Nationals) and calculating their compensation and benefits. Obviously, this is crucial but as it becomes increasingly more difficult to neatly slot global employees, and since there is no longer a “typical” overseas posting, many international firms choose to outsource this function to the experts specializing in international compensation.


Top 12 tech hoaxes of all time
The art of the hoax is woefully underappreciated. Properly executed hoaxes can be creative, cautionary, and (ideally) funny. The Digital Age has muddied the waters, though. Online scams, viral marketing, and even late-night TV gagshave blurred the distinctions between hoaxes, pranks, stunts, and outright criminal fraud – so blurred them, in fact, that one might need an expert to distinguish them from one another. Luckily, one such expert exists: Alex Boese, author and curator of The Museum of Hoaxes. According to Boese, a hoax is "a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public." Here is a look at 12 all-time great hoaxes in tech history.


Big Data = Big Money: The ROI of Business Intelligence
According to business intelligence advisors such as SAS Analytics, “ultimately data governance is not about the data. It’s about how better control and management of data enables business strategy, improves business outcomes, and reduces risk.” In a data-driven reimagining of a famous JFK quote: “ask not what your data can do for you, ask what you can do with your data.” Simply aggregating data isn’t enough. Companies must collect the right information. Data that isn’t actionable can only impact the bottom line negatively. Collection of non-actionable data can kill an analysis effort before it begins.


Internap Debuts OpenStack-Powered AgileCloud
“Everybody’s trying to grab market share from AWS and Microsoft Azure. I think this positions Internap really well as providing the more complete offering,” Miller told CRN. Internap's new channel program now includes services and support that Bridgepointe's sales agents and engineers can rely on to tackle technical issues, address contractual and administrative functions, and offer post-sale customer service, Miller said. “Internap had predominantly been a channel program where it was more integrated with the direct sales force on every single deal. Now we have more support on the channel-specific resources available to us,” Miller told CRN.


Why is dotAfrica Important for the African Continent?
The African Union Commission, which initiated the process of dotAfrica as far back 2009 under its mandate to unite the continent both socially and politically, received the support of 39 of the AU’s 54 member states as well as the private sector. In its ICANN application, it defined the purpose of the dotAfrica domain as: “To establish a world class domain name registry operation for the dotAfrica Top Level Domain (TLD) by engaging and utilizing African technology, know-how and funding; for the benefit and pride of Africans; in partnership with African governments and other ICT stakeholder groups…in addition, to adhere to the spirit of inclusivity…”


Peer to Peer File Sharing Through WCF
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Each node is a computer on the network which acts and communicates with other Peers to make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.


Ensuring Business Continuity with the Right Governance
Having strict governance in place ensures the BC protocols the organization has implemented will be carried out by the book in the event of a disaster. With the proper governance or committee in place, organizations are more likely to address many of the threats they face. According to the survey, 46 percent of organizations with such a system in place were able to address different levels of threats including cyber terrorism as part of their BCM, compared with 32 percent for those without.


What to expect from the data centre in 2025
“On the road, we see sports cars and family cars; we see buses and we see trucks. They have different kinds of engines, different types of seating and different characteristics in terms of energy consumption and reliability. We are going to see something similar to that in the data center world. In fact that is already happening, and I expect it to continue,” says Andy Lawrence, vice president of Datacenter Technologies and Eco-efficient IT at 451 Research. Lawrence was commenting on a new report, Data Center 2025: Exploring the Possibilitieswhich was commissioned by Emerson Network Power.


Cabling in Top-of-the-Rack Architectures
ToR switching allows oversubscription to be handled at the rack level, with a small number of fiber cables providing uniform connectivity to each rack. The advantage of this solution is that horizontal fiber can support different I/O connectivity options, including Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as Fiber Channel. The use of fiber from each rack also helps protect infrastructure investments as evolving standards, including 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, are more likely to be implemented using fiber before any other transmission mechanism. By limiting the use of copper to within racks, the ToR model isolates the cabling that changes most often to the parts of the data center that change most frequently – the racks themselves.



Quote for the day:

"Leadership requires the courage to make decisions that will benefit the next generation." -- Alan Autry

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