August 13, 2016

10 key considerations when building a private cloud

A private cloud enables enterprises to secure and control applications and data while providing the ability for development teams to deliver business value faster and in a frictionless manner. But while building a private cloud can transform IT, it can also be an expensive science experiment without careful planning and preparation. ... Private cloud can be a transformative path for an enterprise. But like any transformative change, it requires significant thought, dedication and perseverance. By paying attention to the practices outlined above, enterprises can navigate the transformation to empower the business to become faster at delivering value and viewing IT as an accelerator of this transformation.


The New Cloud, and the Even Newer One on the Way

First, in a reversal from earlier impressions, organizations are starting to realize that data is in fact more secure in the cloud than at home, removing the last great barrier to widespread deployment. And with Big Data and IoT workloads coming down the pike, enterprises are eager to tap into machine learning, containers and advanced mobile technologies, which can be done much quicker and at less cost in the cloud than by building out data center infrastructure. Not everything is suitable for the cloud, however. According to SolarWinds’ Gerardo Dada, there are a number of key criteria when it comes to determining what should and should not leave the data center. Applications with multiple dependencies, such as CRM and ERP, might have trouble in the cloud, while a self-contained company blog would not.


Automated Regression Testing Made Easy with CasperJS

This script will rely on Casper’s evaluate() method. The method allows you to evaluate an expressionwithin the context of the current DOM. This is an important concept to grasp when working with PhantomJS or Casper: evaluate() acts as a bridge between the casperjs environment and page context. Simply put, when you pass a function to evaluate(), it will be executed as if you typed it into the browser’s console. Using evaluate() allows us to enter the DOM, run some JS code, and return values for further processing within the Casper environment. Which is exactly how we are going to get our gallery image sizes so we can compare them and verify the dimensions.


Google makes Gmail safer with new security warnings to fight phishing

The warnings, announced Wednesday, will impact Gmail use on the web or Android. If an email sender cannot be authenticated, Gmail will display a question mark in place of the sender's profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar. Users are authenticated with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), a digital signature on outgoing messages that uses a private domain key to encrypt your domain's outgoing mail headers. If you receive a message with a link to a site known for phishing, malware, or Unwanted Software, you'll see a warning when you click on the link—an extension of the Safe Browsing protection already available on most browsers.


Aligning the organization for its digital future

Almost every company expects digital disruption in some form or another—but how are they actually preparing for it? Perhaps surprisingly, this preparation may need to be more cultural than technological. Tanya Ott spoke with Gerald Kane about companies’ differing levels of digital maturity as they compete in a rapidly changing world. ... It’s very easy to pretend to do it and not do it. It’s very easy to give it lip service and not execute on those things. If you want to be serious about competing in a digital world, you’ve got to look in a mirror first. You gotta recognize where you fall short on these aspects, and then you have to actually do real and meaningful and substantive change.


Why Data Integration is the Future of Marketing

If organizations are unable to identify the best leads or most promising existing customers, communication breaks down and marketing can become unaligned with sales. This results in irrelevant or unused content, and redundant efforts from both teams. This underscores the benefits of integrating data into one tool or dashboard that can analyze all data and surface the most relevant information. ... Organizations also must integrate their marketing technologies to create a cleaner, more manageable tech stack that drives real revenue impact. To maximize productivity and save valuable time, teams need to streamline processes by adopting fewer solutions that do more, and integrate all of those seamlessly so that insights are unearthed and presented in a digestible way for marketing and sales teams.


Introduction to Hyperledger: Why Open Blockchain is critical for business

The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort designed to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing the necessary features that can be captured in a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers. The thought leaders behind the project consider the peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology of blockchain to be the next generation foundation for transactional applications, one that establishes trust, accountability, and transparency while reducing the cost and complexity of business processes. They think of blockchain as an operating system for interactions. … a whole bunch of banks, a whole bunch of technology firms are going to get together and literally change the nature of money and trust on the Internet.


Humanizing change: Developing more effective change management strategies

When you ask employees to change, you are demanding something ambitious—asking them to change their mental model of how the organization should work. This requires engaging in “System 2” thinking, which is where much more thoughtful deliberation occurs, to reshape and even challenge an existing belief system. But when confronted with new information, System 1 automatically creates a picture of what we know, often ignoring information that conflicts with our assumptions, while filling in missing information based on what our mental models interpret to be true,  This is why simply making a rational, incentive-based case for change often fails to win over employees. It is likely falling on only partially listening ears.


Linux TCP flaw lets 'anyone' hijack Internet traffic

The problem exists in any operating system running Linux kernel 3.6 or newer. Linux 3.6 was introduced in 2012. The vulnerability allows an attacker from anywhere on the internet to search for connections between a client and a server. Once such a network connection is found, the attacker can invade it, cause connection termination, and perform data injection attacks. How bad is it? The discoverers say the attack is fast and reliable, takes less than a minute, and works about 90 percent of the time. According to University of California at Riverside (UCR) researchers, the Linux TCP/IP security hole can be used by attackers in a variety of ways: hackers can remotely hijack users' internet communications, launch targeted attacks that track users' online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts, or degrade the privacy guarantee of anonymity networks such as Tor.


Calculating True North for IoT Applications

You'll need a few libraries installed on your Raspberry Pi, these will give you access to your GPS and Magnetic Models through code. The compass does not require additional libriaries but it does use i2c-dev.h. ... The first step is to read the GPS coordinates from your device. Using GPSd and libgpsmm.h make it pretty simple to access your GPS data. We're going to make a class to manage this interface and supply us with values streamed from the device. The GPS uses a serial connection and the sentences returned are parsed for you by libgps. We can either use the raw coordinate values returned or they can be broken into components like degrees, minutes and seconds.



Quote for the day:


“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” -- Les Brown


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