January 04, 2016

Why DevOps Needs To Embrace the Database

With all the new innovation, technology and methods that enable IT to move at the speed of the digital enterprise, DBAs are being asked to keep up using the same old methods. The life of a DBA has become a constant state of barely treading water if staying above it at all. As the pressure mounts, DBAs risk deploying changes that perpetuate the cardinal sin of application release – breaking the application. When erroneous database changes are not detected, the application(s) can go down and cause an unenviable ripple effect. DBAs have to track down and remedy the change, developers are annoyed that they have to go back and fix their app, C-level execs are likely livid that the business is losing money, and end users are thrown into a tailspin when they can’t access the apps they rely on.


GM and Lyft Are Building a Network of Self-Driving Cars

The partnership with Lyft, though, signifies ambitions far beyond Super Cruise. While we have no details on the proposed “network of on-demand autonomous vehicles”—such as how it will work or when it will arrive—we can assume it will require a far more advanced take on autonomous driving than Super Cruise will offer. Lyft, like other ride-sharing services, does the bulk of its work in cities, which are devilishly hard for robots to navigate. Urban areas are full of complicated intersections, pedestrians, cyclists, and other hard-to-predict variables. More to the point, it’s hard to see the benefit Lyft gets from partnering with GM on a car that sometimes needs a human driver: If you’re going to pay a person to drive, you might as well have them drive all the time.


Tech Salary Guide 2016

Technology remains a fast-growing and competitive field, and the salary changes for 2016 reflect that. Robert Half Technology reported on the salary changes for job titles across 10 tech verticals, and the average salary range has increased for every title. Some of the titles with the highest raises in salary include chief security officer, developer, business analyst, big data engineer, data scientist and wireless network engineer. Check out the salary ranges for popular technology jobs across a number of verticals and seehow much they've increased since 2015.


Are You Blind To Your Organization’s Culture?

Creating and changing a culture is a lot like losing weight. It takes hours of exercise, weeks of eating right and getting plenty of rest to drop 10-15 pounds. But it seems like those same 10 pounds (and then some) can get packed right back on in only one weekend of too much pizza, nachos, and beer. Culture can be like this. It may take a year or more for leaders to nurture the baseline of a constructive, healthy culture. And, just like that (he said with a snap) things can change. It starts to change when the CEO starts to talk badly about one of the members of their leadership team in the presence of the rest of the team. From there it continues to devolve when the members of that leadership team start doing the same to some of their own managers. In a matter of weeks, a new climate of back-stabbing and disengagement has emerged.


DBaaS to be the backbone of business transformation: Oracle

DBaaS is a paradigm where end users (database administrator, Developers, QA Engineers, Project Leads etc) can request database services, utilize it for the lifetime of the project, and then have them automatically de-provisioned and returned to the resource pool. This provides companies with a shared, consolidated platform from which organisations can easily provision database services. It also has elasticity to scale up and scale back database resources, and chargeback based on database usage, thus increasing cost efficiency. DBaaS follows the definition laid down by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for cloud computing -SelfService, Rapid Elasticity, Measured Service (metering and chargeback) and Resource Pooling.


With the Calendar Turned to 2016, Will 'CIO' Become a Part of History?

IT can lead the creation and rollout of an online portal for employees to do everything from submit IT help desk requests, request a contract review from legal, to select healthcare benefits. This is why the CIO is the logical person to assume the role of CPO. The combination of an increasing adoption of cloud computing, and analyzing Big Data to help the enterprise reach its broad business objectives, will enable the CIO-turned-CPO to lead these new service-oriented initiatives. According to the new Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ “2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud” report, 84 percent of businesses surveyed said their cloud use has increased in the past year, and half of enterprises say they will use cloud for at least 75% of their workloads by 2018.


IoT Trends for 2016. Everything connected everywhere

Smart Cities are the powerhouse of the IoT, within which all the other technology settings usually take place. All successful Smart Cities tend to have three aspects in common: non-partisan long-term objectives, combined Public and Private effort, and open data based on open standards. Successful open ecosystems rely on cost-effective cloud-based open infrastructures that are becoming the chosen solutions in many regions that are already either working or experimenting with these platforms. To ensure Smart City development to be deployed in an ordered manner, local government are attracting major technological partners through funding to put in place best-in-class Smart City services and achieve that long-term success that is key in this setting.


Ideas for WebRTC Implementation

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is an open source technology for implementing multimedia communication capabilities in real time directly in your web browser. It sets the Peer-to-Peer connection between two or more people, which is perfect for transferring of a media (audio and video streams). This technology is supported by the following browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. You do not need any additional plug-ins for these browsers; just open a web page and start a conversation. There is no native support for those using Safari and IE, but there is a possibility to add special plug-ins. The idea is simple. First, the browser sends a signal to the WebRTC server that the user wants to initiate a call. After getting the link from the server, the user sends this it to his companion.


Insurers Look to Tighten Cybersecurity Before Innovation

Insurers have realized that not only do they have a responsibility to monitor its activities, but they need to make sure that basic housekeeping is being carried out, says Steve Durbin, a former Gartner analyst and managing director of the Information Security Forum. “You may not be able to detect the malware, but you should be able to spot unusual activity, you may not be able to protect every piece of data, but you should have implemented encryption.” In a state filled with banks and insurers, it’s no surprise that New York regulators are currently considering a variety of cybersecurity requirements for banks and insurers. In a letter to other regulators, New York financial services superintendent Anthony Albanese said his agency has surveyed more than 150 banks and 43 insurers since 2013 and have concluded that “robust regulation” is needed.


The missing piece of the cloud security jigsaw

The adoption of the cloud presents additional issues that are snowballing into the unmanageable, specifically, with respect to identity management. It used to be that my active directory allowed for me to control access to most of my systems through domain and system credential access. However, the cloud doesn't necessarily conform to my existing network standards. In addition, with smaller cloud apps often IT isn't even really being consulted about user access or application operation or controls. In general control audits we do assess if users are properly activated and deactivated, but there still exists a lack of visibility which makes me feel uncomfortable in terms of who has what access when. Standards such as SAML are good but are not necessarily always available.



Quote for the day:


"Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking." -- Malcolm Gladwell


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