Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah: EAI

Showing posts with label EAI. Show all posts

August 31, 2014

Defining Web 3.0 and Developing the Fastest Enterprise Mobility Apps
There is also a definite demand for skills in the market in next generational frameworks and I call out Angular and Backbone as leading the way commercially, with Ember and Meteor also highly respected frameworks. This is created by a demand to build a higher quality of Web Applications and the learnings of the last projects of what went wrong when anyone tried to maintain the last attempt. The job specification is no longer “Web Developer” but instead it is “JavaScript Architect”. I interview a lot of people and the majority of web developers with 5 – 10 years of experience still do not know the following seven vital things:

How an Enterprise Architect Used Change Management Tools to Diagnose Business Problems
Desire is a difficult stage of change to get through. How do you create desire in the face of resistance to change? Keeping people informed helps overcome initial reactions against change. More desire is gained by clearly showing solutions that people will find useful. But in most engagements, we should be building buy-in with ongoing participation of stakeholders and those who will be affected by the changes. Influencing desire begins early in the planning process. Invest in stakeholder engagement early. During this phase, it can be very useful to make a vocal champion out of someone who was antagonistic at the beginning, but who has since become a supporter of the changes.

Perspectives of Business Reference Model
We are all witnessing the steady progress of the Enterprise Architecture(EA) discipline and it is now well understood that the EA is not just about IT infrastructure and the Business Architecture(BA) forms an integral part of EA. Unlike in the past, when Business Architecture was used for the purpose of eliciting the requirements for the IT systems, BA is used to develop and describe the targe business model and work on a road map that will get the business towards the target. The Open Group, as part of its "World Class EA" series, has published a White Paper on the Buiness Reference with an objective of providing the need help to organizations in developing BA assets and plan for the future.

eBook. The practice of Enterprise Architecture
This book does not propose a new framework, theory, or approach to Enterprise Architecture. Instead, we share the experience and lessons learned of many projects that we have conducted around the world over the last few years. There are three parts (1) a high-level introduction to Enterprise Architecture using TOGAF and ArchiMate, (2) an overview of good practices to get started with EA and (3) an overview of advanced topics and techniques. When you are interested after reading the first two chapters, we recommend you to contact our salesdepartment at: insidesales@bizzdesign.com. They can help you to purchase this book.

Visualizing and Measuring Enterprise Architecture: An Exploratory BioPharma Case
The focus of this paper is to test if it can also uncover new facts about the components and their relationships in an enterprise architecture, i.e., if the method can reveal the hidden external structure between architectural components. Our test uses data from a biopharmaceutical company. In total, we analyzed 407 components and 1,157 dependencies. Results show that the enterprise structure can be classified as a core-periphery architecture with a propagation cost of 23%, core size of 32%, and architecture flow through of 67%.

How Can Enterprise Architects Drive Business Value the Agile Way?
As an Enterprise Architect, chances are you are responsible for achieving business outcomes. You do this by driving business transformation. The way you achieve business transformation is through driving capability change including business, people, and technical capabilities. That’s a tall order. And you need a way to chunk this up and make it meaningful to all the parties involved. ... An Enterprise scenario is simply a chunk of organizational change, typically about 3-5 business capabilities, 3-5 people capabilities, and 3-5 technical capabilities.

Guide to OpenIG
This guide is written for access management designers and administrators who develop, build, deploy, and maintain OpenIG deployments for their organizations. This guide covers the tasks you might perform once or repeat throughout the life cycle of an OpenIG release. You do not need to be an expert to learn something from this guide, though a background in HTTP, access management web applications can help. You do need some background in managing services on your operating systems and in your application servers. You can nevertheless get started with this guide, and then learn more as you go along.

Service Bus Authentication and Authorization with the Access Control Service
Service Bus and ACS have a special relationship in that each Service Bus service namespace can be paired with a matching ACS service namespace of the same name, suffixed with “–sb”. The reason for this special relationship is in the way that Service Bus and ACS manage their mutual trust relationship and the associated cryptographic secrets. Inside the “-sb” ACS service namespace, which you can explore from the Azure Portal by selecting the Service Bus service namespace and then clicking the ACS icon on the ribbon, is a “ServiceBus” relying party definition following the ‘Relying Party Applications’ navigation.

8 Open Source Web Application Security Testing Tools
Web application security testing might seems intimidating and esoteric to many web administrator, especially to the new ones. Have you ever asked yourself why so many IT professionals ignore the security aspects of the applications? We seem to have a tendency to ignore things that is unperceivable. ... Good news for those who are new to web security is that once you have the basic understanding of the most common web app vulnerabilities, you will find it much easier to protect your application from various types of well-known web attacks.

Nigel Dalton at Agile Australia on System Thinking, Social Experiments and 20 by 2020
Probably one of the biggest breakthroughs for us last year was getting a really crisp statement of purpose for the company and it is “empowering people by making the property process, simple, efficient and stress free”. Everyone who has worked for us has had a complex, inefficient and stressful property experience - whether it was renting an apartment, a share flat, or whether it was buying, or going to an auction, or otherwise. It is thus pretty easy to get a few hundred people aligned around that as a purpose.

Quote for the day:

"Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind." -- Walter Landor

January 15, 2014

Continuous security monitoring: What enterprises can learn from CDM
With the CDM program, DHS is focusing on getting agencies to implement a six-step CSM process: installing and updating network scanning sensors, automating the search for known system flaws, collecting the scanning results, triaging and analyzing the results, initiating mitigation of the biggest or worst flaws, and reporting progress. The objective is to enable civilian agencies to fully diagnose their networks within 72 hours of sensor deployment.

Computer science: The learning machines
With triumphs in hand for image and speech recognition, there is now increasing interest in applying deep learning to natural-language understanding — comprehending human discourse well enough to rephrase or answer questions, for example — and to translation from one language to another. Again, these are currently done using hand-coded rules and statistical analysis of known text. The state-of-the-art of such techniques can be seen in software such as Google Translate, which can produce results that are comprehensible (if sometimes comical) but nowhere near as good as a smooth human translation.

Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield
CaaS will enable every app to become as smart as Siri in its own niche. CaaS powered apps will be able to think and interact with consumers like intelligent virtual assistants — they will be “cognitive apps.” You will be able to converse with cognitive apps, ask them questions, give them commands — and they will be able to help you complete tasks and manage your work more efficiently. For example your calendar will become a cognitive app — it will be able to intelligently interact with you to help you manage your time and scheduling like a personal assistant would — but the actual artificial intelligence that powers it will come from a third-party cloud based cognitive platform.

Geraldine Hamilton: Body parts on a chip
It's relatively easy to imagine a new medicine, a better cure for some disease. The hard part, though, is testing it, and that can delay promising new cures for years. In this well-explained talk, Geraldine Hamilton shows how her lab creates organs and body parts on a chip, simple structures with all the pieces essential to testing new medications -- even custom cures for one specific person. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less)

Why you should care about Net neutrality (FAQ)
The basis for the Net neutrality regulation that the FCC implemented is predicated on a centuries-old legal concept known as "common carriage." This concept of "common carriage" has been used not just to regulate telecommunications but other industries as well. It was developed to ensure that the public retained access to fundamental services that use public rights of way. In the case of the Internet, it means that the infrastructure used to deliver Web pages, video, and audio-streaming services, and all kinds of other Internet content, should be open to anyone accessing or delivering that content.

The future of shopping: When psychology and emotion meet analytics
Welcome to the future of retail, which is quickly moving beyond somewhat silly questions about whether tablets will run on Android, iOS, or Windows, and becoming much more focused on actual applications and sales. The best part about the retail sector is that it combines four fun areas: Business, technology, and human behavior and psychology. Here's a brief tour of technologies that range in maturity from those that are implemented today to ones that'll take awhile to be adopted.

Financial malware focuses on hiding malicious traffic, localization
The battle between security professionals and cybercriminals has become a cat-and-mouse game in recent years, Baylor said, as Microsoft and other botnet trackers have had success taking down malware by targeting the command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure used to relay instructions to infected machines. Microsoft led a major operation against the Citadel malware in June 2013, and reportedly took down up to 88% of the Citadel botnets, though it has since rebounded.

Of Internet-connected Crock-pots, cars, smartwatches
The Crock-pot uses Belkin's WeMo technology to connect the slow cooker's IP address to the Internet through a home Wi-Fi router. The company also showed a Wi-Fi-ready Mr. Coffee automatic coffee maker. ... Users can control both devices over the Internet, to turn on the coffee or heat up Irish stew from pretty much anywhere in the world, just as can already be done with a Nest thermostat and other devices. The Wi-Fi capability allows an office manager to turn on the morning coffee pot in the break room before arriving or a catering firm to fire up the cooker at a remote location.

Fifth of enterprise BYOD projects doomed to fail by 2016, claims Gartner
“Whether via a formal BYOD programme, or just via devices coming in the back door and being configured to access corporate systems, the use of consumer technologies in the work environment presents a threat to IT control of endpoint computing resources,” said Dulaney. “Given the control that IT has exercised over personal computers by developing and deploying images to company-managed PCs, many IT organisations will implement strong controls for mobile devices.”

R, the Integration Language?
Integration with R now appears to be a sine qua non strategy for analytics tool vendors. I’m currently investigating KNIME, an open source “user-friendly graphical workbench for the cradle-to-grave analysis process: data access, data transformation, initial investigation, powerful predictive analytics, visualisation and reporting.” KNIME is architected as a visual workflow metaphor and has much the look of a data integration tool, with drag-and-drop node folders such as IO, Database, Data Manipulation, Mining, Reporting, Statistics, etc. An R node is easily added.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." -- Warren G. Bennis

December 18, 2013

Chief Digital Officer to be Asia's hottest senior tech job in 2014
The hottest job will be the Chief Digital Officer because digital transformation touches nearly every market, especially in retail and travel, and will require executives who can navigate the move to digital and mobile platforms, said Yap. The consumerization of B2B requires the creation of a digital experience that matches what customers experience in the real world, she added. The rapidly evolving CMO role is the third in demand, and will see them increasingly using analytics to show that marketing is actually driving revenue and growth, explained Yap.

Creating Test Objects With FakeModel
There are more mature test data creation suites available, but none that I know of that will recognize DataAnnotations and handle them appropriately, its great for creating data if using an ORM. FakeModel will pay attention to the data annotations attached to a property and react accordingly. But as I say, it is in it's infancy, currently at Version 0.0.5, as of last night. FakeModel was recommended to me by a University Lecturer when I moaned that it was difficult to find a test data suite that wouldn't ignore my annotations. I don't know how he came about it.

API vs. SOA? Are they different?
A few weeks back we were at the Gartner AADI Summit at Las Vegas. Some of the best minds in the industry gathered and the focus of the conference was the impact of “The Nexus of Forces” (aka SMACT – Social, Mobile, Analytics (Big Data), Cloud and the Internet of Things) on application development and integration. At the center of this discussion were APIs and SOA. The key take away – APIs have their merits from being more open, easily consumable, mobile friendly, being more business oriented, but from an infrastructure, manageability and governance perspective, APIs are more like SOA.

Security Threats And The Business Network
According to Symantec’s 2013 Security report, there was a 42% increase in targeted attacks on businesses in 2012, with 31% of these aimed at companies employing less than 250 workers. There were 14 zero-day vulnerabilities found and one waterhole attack infected 500 organisations in just one day. This highlights the fact that internet security remains one of the biggest challenges that face modern businesses, especially as the use of the internet and cloud services become increasingly important to the enterprise.

Fake antivirus program uses stolen signing certificates
The samples of Antivirus Security Pro collected by Microsoft used stolen certificates issued "by a number of different CAs to software developers in various locations around the world," the company wrote. The certificates were issued to developers in the Netherlands, U.S., Russia, Germany, Canada and the U.K. by CAs such as VeriSign, Comodo, Thawte and DigiCert, according to a chart. Using stolen certificates is not a new tactic, but it is usually considered difficult to accomplish since hackers have to either breach an organization or an entity that issues the certificates.

Microsoft Lync vs. Cisco UC: What the decision really comes down to
Selecting the right UC vendor also requires careful consideration of the operational costs a deployment could incur, he noted. "As much as Cisco and Microsoft like to talk about their differences, they have very similar architectures," said Kieller, who represented the Microsoft perspective on the panel. "The solutions that you [choose] must be aligned to your specific business objective. Whether it's Microsoft or Cisco, things like training and change management are going to be important for your success."

The great boss as a visionary leader
Developing this kind of visionary leadership team is a boon for both the organization and the employees who participate. When you develop your top talent, you are putting in place a solid succession plan, thus assuring that your future leaders will be ready when they are needed. Moreover, it’s healthy for the bottom line when investors see that a company has a vision and is preparing for the future by retaining its best talent and providing them with exciting opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Spreading CMMI Practices among Agile Teams in Big Organizations
Although often unaware of it, most teams use good practices in their daily work; at the same time, they tend to ignore others that could add value to their solutions. The main reason for failure is the first CMMI principle, known as establishing. “Establishing” and “maintain” have strong meanings in CMMI, and they generally appear together. Summarized, the two terms mean that any involved artifact or practice shall be defined, documented, and used. All level 2 and 3 process-area specific goals contain one or more “establishing and maintain” practices.

Requirements, estimation, and planning: How these work
Estimating work that is creative and unpredictable is just plain hard. Yet we are asked to give estimates for our software projects up front and early—and despite all our efforts to remind management that these estimates are rough. But…… too often our initial estimates turn into commitments.Estimates add value where scope is uncertain and there are associated risks to be managed. That's why Scrum teams engaged on projects typically make use of them, but Lean-Kanban BAU teams generally don't.

Computers with brain-like intelligence are getting closer to reality
Scientists are looking to create advanced computers with these neural chips, which replicate the brain's circuitry and can retain information and make decisions based on patterns discovered through probabilities and associations. Projects funded by the U.S. government, European Union and private organizations are attempting to re-create the manner in which the brain's neurons and synapses work by redesigning the memory, computation and communication features of traditional circuitry.

Quote for the day:

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." -- Vincent van Gogh

December 17, 2013

Oregon health exchange technology troubles run deep due to mismanagement, early decisions
The deadline to create a functioning exchange was always tight. Federal requirements repeatedly changed or were issued at the last minute. And the project was no simple task, requiring a site that interacted securely with state and federal agencies, tribes and a dozen insurance carriers. But questionable management moves by the state and Cover Oregon also played an undeniable role.

How Strategic Agility Can Lead to Denial
You know what it’s like on the field of play. (Some of you even know what it’s like on the field of battle.) Once things have started to come undone, it’s very hard to think clearly. It feels like the sky is falling. I know this from my own undistinguished career as a high school quarterback. (I remember thinking about one chaos-raining cornerback, why don’t we just make this guy a permanent part of our backfield.) It’s hard to think at all, let alone strategically. Now it’s all damage control, all the time. Now, it all denial, all the time.

IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years
“We try to get a sense of where the world is going because that focuses where we put our efforts,” Meyerson said. “The harder part is nailing down what you want to focus on. Unless you stick your neck out and say this is where the world is going, it’s hard to you can turn around and say you will get there first. These are seminal shifts. We want to be there, enabling them.”

State of the CSO in 2013 shows an improved outlook
Not surprisingly, considering the number of enterprises with budgets on the rise, staffing levels are also expected to grow. Fully 34 percent of respondents expect their organizations' full-time security headcount to increase. Also, fewer expect to cut full-time security staff this year—only 8 percent compared to 14 percent last year. Once again, it is the larger companies that are most likely to be increasing their security resources, with 42 percent planning staffing increases, compared to 37 percent of midsize and 26 percent of small organizations.

Wal-Mart CIO's Advice For Women In IT
A mentor is somebody who stays with you over a long time. You have that trusting investment in each other. The sponsor is key for any talent to have. They will speak on your behalf in a compelling way. There's no messiness. A sponsor doesn’t worry about being second-guessed. Their credibility in their peer group is a really powerful counter-effect on subliminal bias in an organization. The sponsor can say "Why can’t she?"

CIO role in innovation begins with foresight
Too often, operations acts as a black hole, and IT gets sucked into it and that's where we spend all of our time: in the back office, keeping things up and running. If we outsource that, then we can truly spend that time getting aligned with the business, understanding the business, and helping the business to grow and to become more profitable.

CIOs: Be aware of the ever-increasing IT table stakes
Like differing table stakes, businesses and markets all have different expectations for technology. It's a given at a manufacturing company that the CIO has a firm grasp of ERP systems, but perhaps the stakes are lower when it comes to marketing automation and CRM software. While this is fairly obvious, one of the dangers I've noticed in IT leaders is not observing how table stakes are increasing around them, while they maintain the status quo in their own organization.

Exposing CQRS Through a RESTful API
Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is an architectural pattern proposed by Greg Young that segregates reads (queries) and writes (commands) of a system into two separate subsystems. Commands are usually asynchronous and stored in a transactional storage while reads are eventually consistent and retrieved from de-normalised views. This article proposes and demonstrates an approach for building a RESTful API on top of CQRS systems.

Service Providers light up the Cloud OS
The members of the Cloud OS Network are leading service providers who will offer hybrid services that give customers greater flexibility and choice. By making a substantial commitment to the Microsoft Cloud Platform, they are able to deliver tailored infrastructure and application services that meet diverse customer needs. Customers will have greater choice in customization, data sovereignty, security, privacy and service levels.

Scaling Agile development calls for defined practices, consultant says
Some Agile software developers say that a predefined development process like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a departure from, not an extension of, the Agile methodology. Agile, they say, is about adapting to change and letting processes emerge. That approach can work well in small Agile projects, said Agile consultant and practitioner Mike Bonamassa. When he has done large development projects, practicing the Agile methodology without structure hasn't worked well.

Quote for the day:

"Make no small plans for they have not the power to stir men's blood." -- Niccolo Machiavelli

December 16, 2013

For most, tablets do not make good full-time laptops
What it won't (and can't) do is become a primary PC that meets all my needs. Like virtually every hybrid out there, the lack of a full complement of ports, the small display, and the under-sized keyboard, will not have the versatility that I require to have it serve as my only computer. I believe that is true for most folks, including many of those searching for a single hybrid device to meet all of their computing needs. I don't think there is, nor will there ever be, a single device that can be my only computer.

Is Business Agility a Product of Top-Down or Bottom-Up Resource Allocation?
Making a similar argument, Gerald Nanninga said, "Much of the new growth will come from new ventures which reapply core skills in new ways. These usually fall in the cracks between the status quo business units. Unless a corporate center reallocates resources to go after those 'cracks', they will be missed." At the end of the day, he wrote, "most investors are looking at total cash flow return on total investment. An agile corporate center can better focus on getting the total right."

SOA for Process and Data Integration
Traditionally, BI has been a process-free zone. Decision makers are such free thinkers that suggesting their methods of working can be defined by some stogy process is generally met with sneers of derision. Or worse. BI vendors and developers have largely acquiesced; the only place you see process mentioned is in data integration, where activity flow diagrams abound to define the steps needed to populate the data warehouse and marts.

Why few want to be the CIO anymore
Yet there's another reason for this shift in career thinking. Technology professionals are being recruited to work in marketing, logistics and other functions outside of IT as technology becomes more deeply embedded in virtually every aspect of the business. That trend is expanding the IT career path horizontally. Rather than one career ladder with CIO at the top rung, there are increasingly multiple career bridges across organizations.

Tech Bubble Is Stable for Cybersecurity Companies
The business of cybersecurity likely will see more stable growth thanks to this demand, but the money does not come as quickly compared to consumer-targeted websites because the technology behind cybersecurity is more complicated than social media, Ackerman explains. "If you want to get into the space because you think cybersecurity is hot but you don't have a deep background in this area, the chances to make a serious mistake by investing in a company or starting a company are magnified," Ackerman says.

The Evolution of ETL
Now, the majority of the data created is machine generated, collected in application logs and produced by sensors. The verbosity and sampling rate of these sources has exploded as computing capacity has expanded, storage has become cheaper and the business value of this data has increased. To meet these extreme challenges, a new breed of platforms has been developed including Hadoop, a wide range of NoSQL stores and cloud-enabled infrastructure.

The Best Way for New Leaders to Build Trust
Without trust, it is very unlikely you will learn the truth on what is really going on in that organization and in the market place. Without trust, employees won’t level with you—at best, you’ll learn either non-truths or part truths. I see this all too frequently. Sometimes employees will go out of their way to hoard and distort the truth. The best way to start building trust to take the time and meet as many individual contributors as you can as soon as you can. In addition to meeting customers, meeting rank-and-file employees should be your top priority.

Implementing CEBP in the enterprise
Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) streamline existing processes within an enterprise. In part one of this Q&A, Davide Petramala, executive vice president of business development and sales at Esna Technologies Inc., goes over the basics of communications-enabled business processes. In part two, Petramala explains how enterprises can determine whether they should adopt CEBP, who is responsible for implementing CEBP and how to determine cost savings.

What employers want from enterprise architects
The market for talented EAs is thriving, and demand has never been better. EA as a profession has really come of age since it emerged alongside service oriented architecture and Agile practices in the mid-2000s. Here are some snapshots from recent job listings culled from the Dice recruiting site. What do they all have in common? They all call for a role in bridging the technology and business sides of their respective organizations.

IT pros get training on their own dime
"I just kept doing it on my own because I wanted to advance, but also this is what IT people need to do to stay employed. Everything changes so fast, you can't not stay in the education stream," says Bubbers, now a senior network administrator at Craig Technologies, an IT and engineering services provider in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Bubbers is hardly alone in her approach. IT spending may be on the rise, but training budgets aren't increasing at the same pace.

Quote for the day:

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." -- Karen Lamb

October 24, 2013

Reasons To Use Postgres Over SQL Server (And Vice Versa)
The difference isn’t really that much if you’ve already decided to go down the paid RDBMS route. Not being able to install SQL Server on non-Windows machines is a bit of a letdown, but again, if that’s one of your top reasons, it’s not really much of a reason for most enterprises, as they’re already using Windows servers somewhere. Regarding arrays, it’s true that SQL Server doesn’t have them. There are better and worse alternatives, but aside from parameter input, if you’re using arrays, you’re thinking procedurally and that’s doing it wrong.

IBM Begins Integration of its Cloud Portfolio with Softlayer
The IT company said in June that it had formed a new cloud services division, and after the close of the acquisition in the third quarter, the new division would combine SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform. SoftLayer infrastructure will be the foundation of IBM's cloud portfolio, it said. IBM's Social Learning, a cloud-based global education technology platform, is already in use at Boston Children's Hospital to teach pediatric medicine using real-time videos via a hybrid cloud computing environment.

Predictive policing gets personal
Initiatives are already well underway at the local level in areas such as Los Angeles, where the PredPol algorithm developed by UCLA has been used to analyze seven years of incident information to predict where, within 500 foot by 500 foot areas, or "predictive boxes," certain types of property-related crimes are most likely to occur during an upcoming patrol shift. And then the department can concentrate on those areas during their shifts, or can redeploy police person-power appropriately.

ICANN starts rolling out new generic top-level domains
The first four gTLD strings are the Arabic word for web or network, the Cyrillic words for online and website, and Chinese for game. "It's happening -- the biggest change to the Internet since its inception," said Atallah in a statement. ICANN cleared the four new gTLDs earlier this week. Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft are among a large number of companies who applied for new gTLDs.

Better metrics for planning and tracking data center investments
TCO, ROI, and such are fine, but they measure the status quo in a world of great and constant change. They also presume that everyone wants basically the same thing: lower cost. In fact, business and IT leaders want a lot of things -- only some of which are cost-related. They want capabilities that make them effective, not just cost-effective. ... We need to take a broader, more systematic view and be more honest about what we really need and value, then make IT decisions accordingly. Consider the following criteria

Why and How KeyBank Has Become Big Data-Driven
The impetus for making Big Data a focus for the KeyBank came from CEO Beth Mooney, Bonalle notes. A few years ago, she reassessed the bank's strategy and decided it needed better analytics and insights. "The insight Beth Mooney had was, if we're going to serve our clients well, we need to understand what their needs are and who they are," says Bonalle, executive vice president and director of marketing and insights, who spoke at American Banker's Banking Analytics Symposium in Boston on Friday.

Don't trust a company on its word, trust it on its tech
LinkedIn has not disclosed whether its Intro service would work if a user has enabled two-factor authentication on their email service. Google, for example, has a modified login challenge when logging in via the IMAP protocol (which Intro uses to fetch mail). Yahoo's two-factor system can be circumvented completely due to how it is implemented. Although LinkedIn potentially has the ability to do pretty much anything it wants with your emails, its measure to protect users comes in the form of a pledge not to.

Microsoft and Symantec push to combat key, code-signed malware
Under the auspices of the Certificate Authority/ Browser Forum, an industry group in which Microsoft and Symantec are members, the two companies next month plan to put forward what Coclin describes as proposed new "baseline requirements and audit guidelines" that certificate authorities would have to follow to verify the identity of purchasers of code-signing certificates. Microsoft is keenly interested in this effort because "Microsoft is out to protect Windows," says Coclin.

IT distribution strategy: Distributors upping investments in enablement
"The best true value-added distributors have moved from the mechanics of operations management and channel partner activation to sales and channel enablement," said Kevin Rhone, practice director for the channel acceleration practice at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). In their efforts to provide more core value to their partner customers, IT distributors are adding new enablement capabilities for marketing support services, such as analytics support.

Deep Focus on Your Code with CodeLens
It's a new feature in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate that shows you information about your code directly in the code editor. Before CodeLens, you had to dig through several different windows to retrieve information such as method references, tests associated with a method, the last time a line of code was changed or how many times the code has been changed. Researching and finding this information takes you away from the code editor, and away from writing code. CodeLens changes that by putting this information literally at your fingertips within the code editor.

Quote for the day:

"Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed. " -- Dale Carnegie

October 17, 2013

Pushing the Boundaries of In-Memory Performance
Challenging those assumptions, Microsoft engineered for dramatically changing latencies and throughput for so-called “hot” transactional tables in the database. Lock-free, row-versioning data structures and compiling T-SQL and queries into native code, combined with making the programming semantics consistent with SQL Server means our customers can apply the performance benefits of extreme transaction processing without application rewrites or the adoption of entirely new products.

SDN Adoption Puts DevOps Pros in High Demand
This push toward automation is a crucial element of SDN technology and one of the main reasons DevOps experience will be in high demand, says Shah. "The kind of expertise you'll look for is no longer a hard-core, specialized programmer who focuses on individual devices and pieces of the network, but someone who can write code or scripts to automate processes and actions," Shah says.

Hackers attack PR Newswire, get user data
PR Newswire, a company owned by marketing and communications services firm UBM, confirmed the breach Wednesday. "We recently learned that a database, which primarily houses access credentials and business contact information for some of our customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, was compromised," Ninan Chacko, PR Newswire's CEO, said in a blog post.

An iPad wish list for the enterprise
While new iPads would definitely focus on consumer features, Apple could also continue its efforts in the business and enterprise sectors with new features for business users and enterprise IT. With that thought in mind, here's my next generation iPad enterprise wish list. While some of these features are all but certain, there are some that are also a bit unlikely.

Does SSL decryption deserve a place in the enterprise data center?
While this practice might seem underhanded at first glance, there are valid reasons why SSL decryption has been implemented in numerous enterprise networks. The first reason pertains to protecting proprietary or sensitive information from being stolen from an enterprise network. However, a report by analyst and research firm NSS Labs Inc. states that the primary reason for implementing SSL decryption has to do with SSL-encrypted malware.

Oracle plugs critical security holes that are putting systems at risk
Out of 51 vulnerabilities patched in this Java security update, 40 affect only client deployments which include the frequently targeted Java Web browser plug-in and 8 affect both client and server deployments. These vulnerabilities can be exploited through Java Web Start applications or Java applets, and, in the case of flaws that also affect server deployments, by sending data to application program interfaces (APIs) in the vulnerable components.

Best practices for combatting integration problems
"When you go to IBM, you get an integrated IBM solution. When you go to HP, they lead with an HP solution. But when you say, 'I already have Dell servers, and I'd like to add HP storage,' that can become problematic, and that's where the integration challenge comes from," said Roger Channing, chief technology officer at MicroTech. "That's where customers are coming from. They don't want to buy bits and pieces and integrate it themselves. They want one belly button they can press to say, 'Here is the solution.' It's our job to make sure the integration is done correctly."

5 ‘Unsolved Problems’ That Have Now Been Solved and the Stories Behind Them
What connects being late to class, computer games, and being a recluse in your mum’s house? No, it’s not the latest Grand Theft Auto game. These are, in fact, the approaches to successfully solving some of the longest standing ‘unsolved problems’ – those which have puzzled the world’s brightest for centuries, until a new approach sparked a breakthrough. Each has its own interesting story behind it…

An API for Simple HTTP Requests
URLDownloadToCacheFile is one such API and comes courtesy of Internet Explorer. This function is ideally suited to console applications because it doesn't imply any particular threading model. It blocks while the file is downloaded and provides progress reporting using a callback. I'm going to show you how to use it to write a console application to download a given HTTP resource, present progress and download the file.

Snapping out of your leadership struggle
There are plenty of reasons for this struggle. It might mean that you’re unhappy in your job, frustrated with all of the things that are out of your control or that you’re lacking a skill set that will help you lead at your best. No matter the reason, there are some things you can do to ease the struggle, clearing your heart and your mind for making decisions and taking action that will send you on your way to greatness

Quote for the day:

"Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible." -- St. Francis of Assisi

September 14, 2013

Business Architecture 101 – It’s results that count!
Some see Business Architecture as a variation of Enterprise Architecture, but for others it is a different discipline. At OpenText we see it as different; whether we like it or not traditional Enterprise Architecture is seen as the domain of the IT folks. On the other hand, Business Architecture is, as the name implies, focused on helping business people manage business problems. It is this accessibility and relevance to business teams that we believe is leading the interest.

The Age of Data
A significant reversal happened as we moved from the Age of Hardware through the Age of Software to The Age of Data. Initially the buyers of computer capability, both hardware and software, were large organizations. This began to reverse with the emergence of the PC, with consumers gradually becoming the driving force in the market. The dynamics were that products were sold to consumers earlier or at the same time that they were sold to companies.

NetIQ Declared a Leader in Identity and Access Management Suites
In the report, Forrester Research singled out NetIQ as having consistently built a strong stack of identity and access management products. Forrester Research also named NetIQ as one of the leaders that provide an "IAM suite that encompasses identity provisioning (Identity Manager), attestation (Access Governance Suite), web SSO and federation (Access Manager)" with "easy-to-use interfaces, a differentiated vision and thought leadership for IAM, and strong execution."

Insider Threat: Limit Privileged Access
Controlling who has access to these accounts and tracking and monitoring exactly how they are being used is a critical part of preventing data leaks and network breaches. Organizations need to perform a comprehensive audit of their infrastructure to identify privileged accounts that are high-risk and need to be managed. They then must apply different levels of controls, based on the risk. And a group outside of IT needs to monitor and audit all of these privileged accounts to ensure the controls are correctly enforced.

Cybersecurity: Locks are fine, alarms better
Instead of investing loads of money building better locks for protection, Caudill encouraged agencies to develop better alarms that use available data to determine when outsiders have gotten in. "Big data analytics' capabilities have constantly improved and gotten more effective," said Caudill, speaking at an FCW cyber-security briefing Sept. 12 in Washington, D.C.

An innovative data center offers to heat up Paris homes
The team at Qarnot is rethinking data centers by breaking up the collection of servers and dispersing them into Parisians’ homes or other buildings in the form of digital radiators. “The idea was to generate the waste in the only place where it is not a waste — directly in people’s homes,” Danuta Pieter, an engineer and partner at Qarnot Computing said. This new service could provide an enticing alternative to traditional, yet costly data centers while helping bring heat to those who can’t afford it.

Next role for robots: data center diagnosticians
One of the systems on its research plan might include the use of robots for energy management and conservation. Recently IBM and EMC developed robots designed to rove data centers and collect temperature, power usage and other data that could affect the performance of data center IT systems. ... The EMC Data Center Robot helps combat these problems by patrolling for temperature fluctuations, humidity and system vibrations and locating sources of cooling leaks and other vulnerabilities.

Anatomy of an API Gateway
There are a couple of rules that many of the vendors break: They mix business and non-functional requirements together in the same architecture; and They describe the complete proxy implementation as policy. One of the most important principles we follow with our API Gateway is the separation of process, binding (style), transport, and policy; and the resulting ability to declaratively define APIs.

Risk Management And Bias: Is Human Nature in Your Way?

One of the assertions of the paper is that, when it comes to risk, we often ignore facts and apply our own subjective biases to the decisions we make. “Risk is traditionally defined in terms of probability. However, people often have difficulty in processing statistical information and may rely instead on simplified decision rules. Decision making under risk is also critically affected by people’s subjective assessments of benefits and costs.”

Big data applications require new thinking on data integration
Copying data sets from the file structure of HDFS into a database table format for storage in HBase wasn't that big of a challenge, said Hannon, who took part in a panel discussion at the conference in San Jose, Calif. "The more difficult part," he said, "was unpacking the 10 to 15 years of ETL we'd done to find out what rules were important and which weren't." Then the developers had to incorporate the business rules deemed worth keeping into the new implementation.

Quote for the day:

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -- Benjamin Disraeli

September 12, 2013

CFOs Holding CIOs’ Feet to the Fire
The role of today’s IT department has to change from selecting technology providers to vetting the tech providers chosen by the business unit, said Thoran Rodrigues, the owner of BigData Corp. in Rio de Janeiro, which provides cloud-based big-data services. That would include making sure that the technology provider will provide benefits, low exit costs, reliability, interoperability, security and the long-term vision that it promised, he said.

CPUsage Makes It Easier To Harness The Cloud’s Compute Power
The idea behind the service is to allow anybody to take their existing applications and then allow them to run on virtually any cloud computing service available, whether that’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure or one of their competitors. That’s still in the future, though. What the company is launching today is support for AWS, with support for Azure and Google’s Compute Engine coming by the end of the calendar year.

Securing data with Authentication as a Service in the cloud, mobile era
Authentication and identity management systems can be complex and costly, but AaaS brings the cost benefits of SaaS to authentication. Keeping up with advances in authentication, managing two-factor authentication and incorporating mobile devices can also be time-consuming. Shifting these burdens to a service provider is an appealing option.

Key Market Trends In Disaster Recovery
The growing instances of natural disasters, along with a rise in data loss, have increased the significance for having an effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy in place. IT industry trends are having a profound influence on enterprises’ current DR strategies. Organizations are being forced to reevaluate how they plan test, and execute their disaster strategies. This brief looks at some of the prominent trends currently taking place in disaster recovery.

Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption
Although McKinsey and other consulting firms have gone through many waves of change—from generalist to functional focus, from local to global structures, from tightly structured teams to spiderwebs of remote experts—the launch of McKinsey Solutions is dramatically different because it is not grounded in deploying human capital. Why would a firm whose primary value proposition is judgment-based and bespoke diagnoses invest in such a departure when its core business was thriving?

How will we integrate all these enterprise cloud apps?
Dhillon believes that people who aren’t programmers should to be able to integrate applications without learning Java or hiring a consulting company. Just drag-and-drop connections on a simple visual grid (say an order in Salesforce into an order object on the ERP system) and, voila, it all just works, and when your salespeople close an order in Salesforce it spits out the order in your financial system.

Cisco Unveils Mega Chip for New Network Demands
It’s a new product line called the nPower, and Cisco says the chips can pump as much as 400 gigabits of data per second. By contrast, the company’s prior technology could handle 140 gigabits and required more than one chip, Cisco says. The new capacity translates into hundreds of millions of transactions per second.

10 yrs later, DHS still plagued with cybersecurity, critical infrastructure problems
Today marks 12 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; it’s been a decade since 22 government agencies were combined into the Department of Homeland Security in response to those attacks. “DHS has spent more than $35 billion on homeland security grants, but cannot measure whether we are safer from terrorist attacks,” according to Republican Senator Tom Coburn.

14 Things You Need to Know About Data Storage Management
So how do you formulate that sound data storage management strategy? CIO.com asked dozens of storage and data management experts, which resulted in these top 14 suggestions regarding what steps you need to take to choose the right data storage solution(s) for your organization -- and how you can better ensure your data is properly protected and retrievable.

How to revamp your IT operational plan without getting fired
If you didn't run the generators, check the power distribution units, monitor the ambient temperature on the data center floor, perform change control, replace or rack and stack new equipment, put out fires, upgrade the storage frame, open the ports, plug the holes, and stop the distributed denial-of-service attacks, at some point nothing will work. The problem is that nobody cares that you do any of these things until one thing breaks.

Quote for the day:

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work" -- Mark Twain

September 09, 2013

Trust no one, advises security expert after NSA revelations
The new revelations should raise major concerns from Internet users over who they can trust, Schneier added. "I assume that all big companies are now in cahoots with the NSA, cannot be trusted, are lying to us constantly," he said. "You cannot trust any company that makes any claims of the security of their products. Not one cloud provider, not one software provider, not one hardware manufacturer."

PostgresSQL: The Other big open-source database has a new release
Jonathan S. Katz, CTO of VenueBook, an event-planning company, said in a statement, "PostgreSQL 9.3 provides features that as an app developer I can use immediately: better JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) functionality, regular expression indexing, and easily federating databases with the PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper. I have no idea how I completed projects without 9.3."

David Linthicum Named One of TechTarget's Top 11 Cloud Computing Industry Movers and Shapers
"David earned his place on the list not just because he is such a visible presence across virtually any cloud computing website or conference, but due to the fact that he isn't just saying what vendors want to hear. He has earned his status as a thought leader by consistently challenging the status quo." The feature details how via his blogs, webinars, keynote addresses, podcasts and over 13 books, Linthicum advocates for change in the cloud market.

VMware NSX: Network virtualization doesn't need to be a turf war
"To me it just feels like the VMware NSX folks are saying the network is the biggest problem," said network engineer and blogger Tom Hollingsworth. "If you are going to blame the network for all the problems that we've been dealing with for years, give us a solution that works with the people who have been trying to fix this the whole time. Don't tell me that I'm the problem and that you'll just fix it and go around me."

Securing the Virtual World
The report showed that one-third of the group think virtualization and cloud computing make security “harder,” while one-third said it was “more or less the same,” and the remainder said it was “easier.” The results seem to indicate that many are either in the process of defining policy for virtual environments, or have chosen to postpone that effort until a later date. Perhaps, as a result of this failure to tackle the security question when deploying virtualized servers, there are experts who believe that the majority of virtual deployments may be less secure than physical deployments.

4 survival strategies for IT chaos
Today's youth are, of course, tomorrow's customers. "They demand immediacy, which is driving what IT has to deal with," says Kippelman, who is CIO at Covanta Energy and a Computerworld blogger. But the need for speed is just the tip of the iceberg. Across all industries, IT teams are up against unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, also known as VUCA.

The Wonder Years: Businesses Transform as Cloud Adoption Matures
Along with deeper benefits, early adopters are discovering deeper complexity in using cloud for day-to-day operations. After initial cloud transitions where integration is a top challenge, companies with more experience are seeing changes to IT policy become their primary concern. These changes could involve the way that technology is procured throughout the organization or the functions within the IT department as they interact with lines of business, both of which are steps towards a fully cloud-enabled business.

U.S. court takes on Internet traffic fight
The outcome will also determine whether Internet service providers can restrict some so-called crossing content, for instance, by blocking or slowing down access to particular sites or charging websites to deliver their content faster. Public interest groups have termed the FCC rules too weak, saying the agency was swayed by big industry players and needs to forge more direct and clearer power of oversight.

Myths about Enterprise Application Orchestration
It combines business processes that cut across functional areas as well as associated IT services. Orchestrating or designing an Enterprise Application is an art which can be compared with the composition of music: It requires the same amount of effort or integration to produce the desired results. The term orchestration in music refers to the way instruments are played to render any aspect of melody or harmony

Kanban - Isn’t It Just Common Sense?
Thus in response to the question in title of this post, the answer to whether kanban is common sense is “No!” However, common sense is an example of a heuristic, and I do believe kanban is a heuristical approach to solving the many challenges of product development. The remainder of this article will explore more about what heuristics are, the primary sources that led me to the realisation that heuristics are the right approach, and how we can use heuristics to design kanban systems.

Quote for the day:

"Let a man lose everything else in the world but his enthusiasm and he will come through again to success." -- H. W. Arnold

August 21, 2013

Internet of Things: The next big thing after cloud, mobility and big data
Well the Internet of Things( IoT) makes all these possible and that is why it is being labeled the next big thing in the tech world after Cloud , mobility and Big data. Adaire Fox-Martin, senior vice president, Industry, Value and Solutions , SAP Asia Pacific Japan speaks on how organization can leverage IoT and Machine-to-Machine( M2M) interaction in the future to spearhead new benchmarks of productivity.

The Death of WebSphere and WebLogic App Servers?
We got to thinking that this might be interesting data to provide for other languages that we support too, such as Java. So…we decided to take a look at our top 1000 Java customers to see what versions of Java they are using and what app servers are most commonly deployed. ... What about app servers? What are folks using? The answer was intriguing so we thought we’d share it via a new infographic…

The Great Java Application Server Debate
Well, sorry Wikipedia, but for the sake of this report, we don’t care about pedantic definitions and full Java EE implementations, we care more about what a developer wants and uses. Most developers work on web applications and rarely use all of the bells and whistles that come with the EE specification. In fact many of the application servers available today with only the basic functionality are the most used, as our Developer Productivity Report section on application servers recently showed

Cloud Is Actually Expanding The Role Of Information Technology Departments
Rather than viewing IT as marginalized, 76 percent of respondents see IT as taking on a new role as a “broker,” or intermediary, of cloud services, orchestrating the planning and procurement process for lines-of-business (LOBs) across internal and external clouds while managing third-party complexity. ... the survey also finds that LOBs are funding 44 percent of total IT spending globally, and 69 percent predict that this share will only increase over the next three years.

IBM targets bank CFOs with credit, risk analytics
Specifically, IBM launched an integrated credit lifecycle management suite designed to boost profits, manage risk and meet various regulations. The risk management suite, dubbed an IBM Signature Solution, aims to give CFOs a view into credit risk from every corner of a company. Rory McClure, associate partner of risk solutions at IBM's global business services unit, said the credit risk management suite is built from various parts such as Cognos, IBM's business process management software and analytics tools via the 2011 Algorithmics acquisition.

Managing big data: Four critical practices for getting started
"Following principles of information stewardship encourages you to take a proactive approach to … managing the data through its entire lifecycle -- from its acquisition to what you decide to do with it at end of life," said John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst for the Mokena, Ill.-based Nemertes Research. Burke breaks information stewardship into five categories: information protection, data quality management, disaster resistance, information lifecycle management and compliance.

The True Cost of Integration in the World of BI
According to Loraine, “When it comes to the cost of a BI deployment, it’s not the software that will get you; it’s the miscellany -- the miscellaneous integration work, in particular.” She is referring to Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, who focuses on application development and delivery, who recently published a report that explored how to estimate the cost of a BI deployment.

Cyberattacks, not economy, could cripple banks in the future
Although investment health is still only half of what it was in 2005, lending and deposits grew in the first half of 2013. Cyberattacks and the threat of digital warfare mean that financial institutions may be left unprotected and vulnerable -- which in turn places consumers at risk and could potentially damage these signs of growth.

5 Steps to Fixing the Problems with Your Problem Solving
Problem solving is actually pretty simple though. All you have to do is follow five simple steps. I promise if you’re rigorous about the problem solving method you use, you’ll improve your chances of solving the right problem, generate solutions that address the true root cause, and select the ideas to pursue that will have the greatest impact.

Researchers outwit Apple, plant malware in the App Store
Those code gadgets -- and the app's true control flow and operation -- were disguised in such a way that it would be virtually impossible for Apple's current review methods to discover the app's real intent. "Even with a longer time [to analyze the app] they can't find that it's malicious," said Wang in an interview Monday.

Quote for the day:

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope & confidence." -- Helen Keller

August 11, 2013

Integration on the Edge: Data Explosion & Next-Gen Integration
The build vs. buy debate still rages on when it comes to data or application integration, though. I've lost count of the conversations I've had that include phrases such as "it's just a few web services" or "the API is easy to write to" or "it's just a simple point-to-point integration". If you want to hire me to evaluate your situation and make a recommendation on whether you should build your own integration "mechanism" or just buy one, that's great. Be forewarned that 994 times out of 1000, the answer will be: "Go buy one".

Speed of adoption risk
If you get this risk wrong, you may not, as in the past, be looking at a need to change your direction slightly, or even just have to consider embracing the technology, but you may be looking at outright bankruptcy. Let’s all consider the current situation for book retailers in Australia and around the world. There are other ways to adapt, by finding that unique segment, but if you have aspirations for growth across the globe, you may need to think again.

Who needs a smartwatch? This shirt monitors breathing and heart rate
The shirt meant to be worn under everyday clothes or on its own at the gym. The data it collects is sent to a a computer or smartphone app where the user can view instant and long-term exertion, stress and even mood. The app can share data with loved ones, including sending an alert when it detects high stress or a potentially dangerous situation.

Maharashtra chooses VMware for MahaGov Cloud
Rajesh Aggarwal, secretary IT for the government of Maharashtra, said "The Government of Maharashtra is committed to making e-governance a success in the state. We were confident that virtualization and cloud computing would play a critical role in enabling our vision for e-governance in the state of Maharashtra and have partnered with VMware, the industry leader, to help us on our cloud journey and fulfill this vision."

Culture Inhales Strategy for Breakfast… Then Spits it Out!

Culture is defined by the common values, the individual behavior, and the attitude of the people working in the organization. This is where managers often fail – perhaps because they’re simply unaware of the cultural aspect’s importance, perhaps because they don’t feel comfortable with it or because they don’t have a proper road-map at their disposal.

Gartner Says Compliance Is No Longer a Primary Driver of IT Risk and Security Measures
Organisations are relying more on their own risk assessments to guide their implementation of controls rather than the "classic" compliance approach of implementing mandated controls regardless of the anticipated risk severity or impact. “If CIOs are managing their risks effectively, their compliance requirements will be met, and not the other way round,” added Mr Wheeler.

The Best Data Scientists Cluster Around the Biggest Big-Data Challenges
Crowdsourcing data scientist expertise on a moment’s notice is often as easy as engaging the smart people in online communities and, if budgets permit, hiring them for consulting projects. Quite often, the best freelance data scientists already maintain a prominent online presence, promote their best work far and wide, and collaborate on a wide range of challenging projects. They simply crave engagement with their peers and a chance to gain greater recognition for their accomplishments.

Hoya (HBase on YARN) : Application Architecture
The first thing it does is start an HBase Master on the local machine -this is is the sole HBase Master that Hoya currently manages. In parallel with the Master startup, Hoya asks YARN for the number of containers it needs for the number of workers this cluster has. For each of these containers, Hoya provides the commands to start HBase. This is a key point: Hoya does not run any Hoya-specific code on the worker nodes.

Systems that Run Forever Self-heal and Scale
Joe Armstrong is the principal inventor of Erlang and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". In this presentation, he outlines the architectural principles needed for building scalable fault-tolerant systems built from small isolated parallel components which communicate though well-defined protocols.

Be Invincible with AlwaysOn Availability Groups
The good news was that SQL Server had an abundance of features to help with high availability, such as clustering, mirroring, replication, and log shipping. The bad news was that businesses' needs were usually complex enough that no one feature worked by itself, so you had to duct tape multiple features together. This meant you had to be good at a lot of things, and all of them had to interoperate well. That rarely happened.

Quote for the day:

"You aren't learning anything when you're talking." -- Lyndon B. Johnson

August 04, 2013

How to build a Roadmap – Sequence
Developing a balanced well-crafted road-map is based on the “best available” ordered set of actions subject to the set of priorities (and constraints) already agreed upon. When you think about this across multiple dimensions it does get a little overwhelming so I think the best thing to do is break the larger components into something we can attack in pieces and merge together later.

Visionary companies are driving next generation enterprise architecture in China – are you ready?
Contributing to more than 60% of total GDP in China, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have always sought to simplify their IT operation as much as possible, and at the same time scale it up when business expands as quickly as possible. IaaS solutions appear to be a perfect match for SMEs; however IT professionals have concerns about the security and data privacy over the operations by other companies.

Virtual Panel: Using Java in Low Latency Environments
The difference in performance between Java and C++ is so close that it's not a black and white decision based solely on speed. Improvements in GC techniques, JIT optimizations, and managed runtimes have made traditional Java weaknesses with respect to performance into some very compelling strengths that are not easy to ignore.

3 Different Approaches to Enterprise Manufacturing Software
While there is usually a need to simplify and consolidate processes where possible, it’s also important to integrate key processes and ensure that the systems that support manufacturing operations are actually helping to improve the business and not just feeding other systems and people in the organization with information that may not be necessary. This takes a tactical approach, and depending on your existing investments, the approach may vary.

IT Management: How do your leadership skills measure up?
Today’s marketplace is in a state of constant change. Successful companies are those that can also respond and quickly adapt to the changes around them. That requires leaders who are able to lead with the head, by focusing on the big-picture goal and business objectives; the heart, by knowing how to engage, coach and motivate people; and with the hands, by providing the tactical tools and skills necessary like a project manager.

A Metric Leading to Agility
With any metric,we need to be clear about what the curve should look like. Is the metric defects? We want them to go down. Is it lines of code? Then, presumably, we want them to go up. Number of tests? Up. RTF should increase essentially linearly from day one through to the end of the project. To accomplish that, the team will have to learn to become agile. From day one, until the project is finished, we want to see smooth, consistent growth in the number of Running, Tested Features.

Securely Managed API Technologies Key to Fostering Market Innovation
API business agility is both a management and security issue. API managers must consider how much API governance can be automated to reduce potential for coding errors. On the flip side, security issues related to governance policies, date protection, compliance adherence all need mitigation to achieve optimal business agility.

An evaluation of four patterns of interaction for integrating disparate ESBs effectively and easily
Keen at al assert that: “Integrating two or more ESBs is subject to some of the same integration patterns as connecting two or more applications; integration déjà vu” (2005, p. 87). They reasonably suggest that one important implication of this assertion is that “it seems logical that integrating ESBs should follow best practices similar to these for enterprise application integration (EAI)”

A Product Management Skills Map For Product Owners
Product manager is a formal job title, particularly at commercial tech companies, for individuals who drive product technology and make market-facing decisions intended to generate revenue. They set product strategy as well as implement it. They are heavily matrixed, often covering aspects of product marketing, sales support, external thought leadership and corporate strategy.

Quote for the day:

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." -- Zig Ziglar

July 27, 2013

Open-source project, Crypton, seeks to make encryption easier
"We wanted to develop more of a privacy platform that other developers and companies could use to integrate privacy in their applications without having to be cryptographers," Oberman said. "We want people to understand the power of privacy and understand it is not an interference and not an inhibitor to product development."

Integration on the Edge: Data Explosion & Next-Gen Integration
Today's "shadow IT" world - where every department seems to have the capability and desire to implement some form of IT infrastructure has resulted in a lot of developers driving the charge for Cloud adoption in organizations. Dave Linthicum rightly points out that the best approach is to start at the top.

New Onshore IT Outsourcing Centers Outnumber New Offshore Locations
Onshore centers can present unique challenges to service providers, including higher wages and overall cost of operations, reduced scalability, and--perhaps surprisingly--increased attrition rates. "Attrition in onshore locations for some transactional skills, such as basic applications development work or transaction processing, may be higher than offshore locations given availability of alternate career options in these locations, says Dani.

Top 7 Reasons Why SOAP and REST Interfaces Are Littered With Vulnerabilities
Unfortunately, their rapid rise in popularity also brings significant and damaging security vulnerabilities. Understanding how to provide web and mobile application security against these vulnerabilities is only one small step in the right direction. Developers face a number of challenges when it comes to building secure code. Let’s look at a few of them:

Ubuntu: One OS, one interface, all devices
As Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu's founder said at OSCon, the major open-source convention held in Portland, OR, "Convergence is the core story. Each device is great, but they should be part of one family. On any device you'll know what you're doing. One device should be able to give you all the experiences you can get from any one of them."

6 wishes for SysAdmin Appreciation Day
Reportedly it's kind of a big deal in Russia. And why not? All long-suffering peoples deserve their own day of celebration. Mothers get flowers, chocolate, and breakfast in bed. Fathers get ties, power tools, and craft beer. Sysadmins get ... O'Reilly books? Energy drinks? Nerf guns? Actually, high-calorie foods top the list of traditional offerings. But maybe we can do a bit better this year. Maybe we can give sysadmins a voice and allow them to ask for what they really want.

Health Data Breach Trends: An Analysis
One thing that hasn't changed: The No. 1 cause of breaches continues to be lost or stolen unencrypted devices and media. It's amazing that so many breaches still involve unencrypted devices. The importance of encryption should top-of-mind by now, given all the publicity about breaches since 2009. But perhaps these continuing breaches are proof of just how difficult it is to manage mobile devices, especially as BYOD proliferates.

CIOs Issue Social Media Privacy Practices Guide
The guide, which explains privacy best practices for establishing a social media program, addresses various ways the federal government can use social media for information sharing, situational awareness and to support agency operations. ... The guidance warns against posting information collected about specific individuals, seeking to connect with other internal or external personal users, accepting other internal or external personal users' invitations to connect; or interact on social media.

Business and enterprise architecture - match made in heaven
Often business process management and associated discipline such as business architecture are seen or managed in isolation of the overarching enterprise architecture construct. However the business architecture and enterprise architecture complement each other well to get the best value from each other.

How to Build Reliable Systems
Mission-critical and enterprise-wide computer systems today are often very complex with many moving parts and even more interfaces between components; this presents special challenges even for expert configuration management engineers. These systems are getting more complex as the demand for features and rapid time to market provides unique issues that many technology professionals could not have envisioned even a few years ago.

Quote for the day:

"Patience accomplishes its object, while hurry speeds to its ruin." -- Saadi