September 25, 2014

In Evolving Healthcare Business Model, Tech Plays Vital Role
This scenario mirrors what happened in the banking industry in the 1990s, when independent banks sold out to "super-regional" firms in large part to be able to afford the move to a common IT platform. Many of the health system transactions Hagood has seen in the last two years have included specific IT commitments – namely, migrating to a common system (typically Meditech, Cerner or Epic) and subsequently taking advantage of group licensing.


Digital Business Technologies Dominate Gartner 2014 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle
As you leave for work in the morning, your house automatically turns down the heat and places an order for milk (connected home) and your virtual personal assistant (VPA) alerts you that Cindy will be late to your 9 a.m. meeting and besides, the forecast you prepared has already changed (big data). You allow your car to navigate the traffic to your office (smart machines and Internet of Things [IoT]) while you manage the latest crisis. In this scenario, much of the possibility stems from the growth of digital business and continued adoption of the related technologies as they move through the Gartner 2014 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle.


Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug
The risk centres around the ability to arbitrarily define environment variables within a Bash shell which specify a function definition. The trouble begins when Bash continues to process shell commands after the function definition resulting in what we’d classify as a “code injection attack”. Let’s look at Robert’s example again and we’ll just take this line: http-header = Cookie:() { :; }; ping -c 3 209.126.230.74 The function definition is () { :; }; and the shell command is the ping statement and subsequent parameters. When this is processed within the context of a Bash shell, the arbitrary command is executed.


Understanding Partitioned Indexes in Oracle 11g
By breaking an index into multiple physical pieces, you are accessing much smaller pieces (faster), and you may separate the pieces onto different disk drives (reducing I/O contention). Both b-tree and bitmap indexes can be partitioned. Hash indexes cannot be partitioned. Partitioning can work several different ways. The tables can be partitioned and the indexes are not partitioned; the table is not partitioned but the index is; or both the table and index are partitioned. Either way, the cost-based optimizer must be used. Partitioning adds many possibilities to help improve performance and increase maintainability.


Backing Up SaaS: The Challenge
However, replication or backup doesn't protect against hack attacks, which suggest that data should be moved off to a cloud-based archiving service such as AWS Glacier. Even there, the risk of a really smart hacker going after the final tape copy exists. It will take a bit longer, but we've seen recent situations, such as Target's debacle, where the hackers had weeks of access. Someone needs to write-prevent that tape, either by offlining it or by clicking the write-protect button.


Rackspace Re-architects its OpenStack Private Clouds
With the new release Rackspace also decided to get away from Open vSwitch, the open source software defined network platform used as a plug-in for Neutron (the network element of OpenStack), conceding it was not quite ready for production and high-volume workloads. The team switched to traditional hardware load balancers and firewalls, still leveraging Neutron SDN capabilities within customer clouds. These and other changes have enabled Rackspace to offer “four nines” API Service Level Agreements for each of the core OpenStack services.


Don’t Overlook the Operationalization of Big Data, Pivotal Says
“We’re at the cusp of a tectonic shift in how organizations manage data,” Mongo vice president of business development Matt Asay said at the time. “It’s such a big opportunity it’s frankly far too big for any one company.” The folks at Pivotal might not totally agree with that assessment. While Cloudera and Mongo are working on connectors and joint solutions, the EMC spinoff–which owns its own in-memory, NoSQL database called GemFire–is looking to provide an all-in-one, soup-to-nuts big data solution.


Data Science That Makes a Difference
In a world filled with dangerous individuals who fund terrorist activities and imperil lives, data has helped the world's banks learn more about their customers and share watch lists to flag signs of trouble. This is a tremendous initiative to help fight money-laundering all around the world. As a result of data analytics and technology, financial institutions can be more confident that they are doing business with people and businesses they know, and they can vet customers regardless of where they are. Such collaborations across geographies are helping solve major problems in global business.


Android smartwatches to retail at average of $US30 by 2015: Gartner
The worldwide smartwatch market is poised for lift off and could gobble up 40 per cent of the consumer wristwatch market by 2016. That according to Gartner anlaysts, who have also predicted Android-based smartwatches could retail at an average price of $30 by 2015 as OEMs capture the consumer mass market in China and internationally. Gartner analysts say that nine out of the top 10 smartphone vendors have entered the wearables market to date or are about to ship a first product, while a year ago only two vendors were in that space.


The Pursuit of Excellence is a Choice
Many organizations struggle with a number of very common issues. They lack cogent direction. Strategies are incomplete or missing in action or in some state of flux. Employees are unengaged and unaware of how their efforts and functional or vocational goals plug into the bigger picture. Priorities are fuzzy and ever-shifting. Customers aren’t particularly loyal or happy. There’s cross-border conflict between functions where there should be cooperation and collaboration. Metrics are fuzzy and mostly rear-view mirror looking. And finally, there’s an incredible amount of waste and inefficiency due to poor and undocumented processes.



Quote for the day:

"At the heart of great leadership is a curious mind, heart, and spirit." -- Chip Conley

No comments:

Post a Comment