April 15, 2013

Internet of Things, once bitten, twice shy?
As you can see, the examples of Bruce Kasanoff are quit concrete. Think about what will happen, when we place sensors and wired-up objects in our bodies, in our houses, in our companies, in our cities and in our whole society. We will be able to measure every single part of society and business insights which will create competitor advantage on both short and long term.


Open standards critical for successful cloud strategy: Red Hat
For enterprises that have yet to take the cloud leap, the CEOs are increasingly putting pressure on CIOs to fast track their cloud journey as hype for the technology reaches fever pitch. But CIOs themselves are confronted by issues, such as how to adopt cloud in a manner that is not just relocating the company's IT infrastructure, and how to ensure IT security, according to McCabe.


Cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016: Gartner
"Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly," said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner. "This shift in buying behavior from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offers good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities, but those without such capabilities need to act quickly to adapt to this competitive threat."


The Difference Between Finishers and 70-Percenters
There’s a class of professionals in the world one of my former bosses labeled as “70-Percenters.” They’re the people who are great at making noise, and even getting things started, but they don’t know how to close. They’re not finishers. Are you a Finisher or a 70-Percenter? Are you cultivating Finishers on your team?


14 cloud outages in 7 months, who is next?
Since January this year we have seen over 10 outages, wherein cloud providers were forced to eat their own words (read as claims) with regards to 99.999 per cent uptime and availability. The year, cloud outages began with online service provider Zoho's outage, which lasted for several hours on January 21, and affected about 5 million customers.


BYOL: Bring your own liabilities
In order to ensure that any savings are not outweighed by ongoing operational costs, organisations need to carefully consider how they intend to apportion liability between themselves and their employees in a number of important areas. For example, who will take responsibility for lost or stolen devices, and who will be responsible for malware or virus attacks associated with an employee’s device? There is no fixed answers to these questions under the law, and these are precisely the type of tricky operational issues that should be addressed in the policy.


How Will Google Glass Change Internet Marketing?
How might Google capitalize on Google Glass beyond the first wave of sales? It's a tricky question for several reasons. Google Glass is unlike anything that Google has done before. Come to think of it, it's unlike anything that anyone has ever done. Humankind is treading into an area of vague outcomes. There is so much potential for Google Glass that it's hard to get our head around all the possibilities.


The Worst Leadership Tragedy
Take yourself and a notebook to lunch once a month and askyourself probing questions: What is the message of repetitive frustrations? Frustrations are gifts that reveal development opportunities; What new connection should I develop? Dr. Henry Cloud, author of, “Boundaries for Leaders,” said, “We develop in the context of relationship.”; Is life’s trajectory upward or downward? ...


Interview with Michael Azoff from Ovum about How To Create the Agile Enterprise
The concept of the agile enterprise arises from practices that embrace common principles and values, such as putting uppermost the delivery of value to the customer and high-quality products. The ultimate goal is business agility, where the mainstream business processes have adopted agile ways of working and where IT use is optimized, from “run the business” to innovation, and from tactical requirements to long-term strategic requirements affecting the future of the business.


Finding Business Value in Information Management
There are many technologies entering our landscape that people need to be aware of in order to capitalize on the data available to organizations. William McKnight states that people need to challenge themselves to think beyond the traditional approaches and consider the new ways to bring value to their companies.



Quote for the day:

"One needs to be slow to form conviction, but once formed, they must be defended against the heaviest odds." -- Mohandas Gandhi

April 14, 2013

Critics Question Wording of Internet Freedom Bill
"This bill will have many unintended consequences on domestic telecom policy," she said. "The bill is about rehashing the debates of the past.A The bill is also about prejudicing the debates of the future, specifically concerning the transition to IP-based voice services."


A Framework for Cloud Strategy and Planning
A model based approach or a framework based approach to come up with the cloud strategy could help maximize value creation out of cloud adoption. With their expertise on the standards and frameworks and on the internal business capabilities, the Enterprise Architects are in the best position to take this mantle. Though there are various standards and frameworks that can be used to strategize and plan the Cloud Adoption, Mike Walker in his article suggests a simple three step framework for Cloud Strategy and Planning


A Unified Environment For Big Data Analytics
Big data is adding a burden on users, and for those who were starting to enjoy the freedom from worrying about the underlying systems, this isn’t a welcome development. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The market’s momentum is building towards merging big data systems and toolsets into a single, unified analytics platform that enables users to access any amount data of any type for any analysis at any time


Leveraging Technology for Disaster Risk Management
The Tokyo event highlighted technologies Japan leveraged in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, for instance: A real-time traffic map was generated and made available to the public (including via Google) using data gathered from moving vehicles; Observation data from flood sensors was distributed to car navigation systems and smartphones; and GPS data from mobile phones was used to reproduce and analyze the flow of people at the time of the earthquake.


Startup Aims SDN Technology at Cisco WANs
Glue's gluware software runs in the cloud and provides a cloud-based service for turning up remote sites and teleworkers worldwide. It is designed to lower the cost of private WAN networking by automating those operations and handling ongoing maintenance, monitoring, life-cycle management and feature extension.


RBI penalizes JPMorgan for risk norms violation
“On a careful examination of the bank’s written reply and the documents available on record, the Reserve Bank found that the violations were conclusively established and a penalty of Rs5 lakh was thus imposed,” an RBI release said. The Indian central bank had issued a show-cause notice to the US lender first and imposed a penalty as it was not satisfied with the explanation. A JP Morgan spokeswoman said the bank had “noted the central bank’s concern and had taken remedial action.”


Lawsuit could put kink in Microsoft's push for cloud security
According to a statement by StrikeForce, PhoneFactor's authentication technology infringes a patent issued to StrikeForce in 2011 for "several key technologies underlying a multichannel security system for granting and denying access to a host computer in response to a demand from an access-seeking individual and computer." Although StrikeForce's lawsuit is aimed at Microsoft, other companies may also find themselves in the crosshairs of patent litigation.


Bahrain is poised to benefit from ICT trends says expert
Microsoft Middle East and Africa vice-president Charbel Fakhoury said the kingdom has agility by virtue of its small size, which can be a decisive advantage in bringing about transformational change. "Bahrain can use technology to surpass big transcending geographical limitations to become a key regional powerhouse. "For Microsoft, Bahrain has been a key market for more than 20 years and the challenge is how to take the country into the new area of cloud, big data, social computing and mobility, creating new economic opportunities along the way," he said.


Innovation through PoS
A new age PoS solution can facilitate rich MIS on: Central aggregation of credit card transactions--transactions from all PoS terminals are all stored / archived in a central server; Facility to upload bank Payment Advice file; Automatic bank reconciliation and transaction dispute management; Financial closures; and Proactive alerts for better operational efficiency


Mobile apps: Devising software requirement specifications
In the mobile space, retention metrics are an important measure of the combined utility and user experience. Retention metrics typically show how much time users spend with an app, relative to the time elapsed since they first installed it. The key for B2C mobile apps is creating a great user experience around functionality, while also providing value to company behind the app.



Quote for the day:

"Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great" -- Mark Twain

April 13, 2013

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.


BMC's MyIT May Be the Future of IT Services
The ideal defensive move for IT departments is to treat consumer technology as the competition that it is and step up to the challenge. It isn't that IT can't win the battle by providing more reliable and more secure services; it's that often IT isn't even in the fight. However, BMC Software's recent MyIT initiative is designed to address this problem directly by providing a personal UI that's tailored to a user's role and is accessible on mobile devices as well as the traditional desktop.


Flexible Search using Stored Procedures: varying the WHERE clause at run-time
The technique uses a single stored procedure with a single WHERE clause containing all search terms and uses nullable parameters and boolean logic to decide exactly which combination of search terms is executed.


Google Submits Antitrust Remedies to EU
According to reports, the proposed remedies submitted Thursday are similar to a settlement Google struck with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and involve Google sharing more information through its advertising APIs (application programming interfaces) and agreeing not to scrape Web content from rivals.


Nasdaq Cloud Gets Rated as Regulation-Ready
The R3 service, the consulting firms said, meets the electronic records storage, retrieval and management requirements of: Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4(f), which regulates exchange members, brokers or dealers; Commodity Futures Trading Commission Regulation 17 C.F.R. §1.31(b)-(c), which regulates commodity futures trading. Cohasset said FinQloud adequately preserves records in “a non-erasable, non-rewriteable format” and with “ a highly secure deletion process.”


New Guidance for Healthcare Organizations to Assess Cybersecurity Preparedness
The HITRUST Cybersecurity Working Group was established to review the CSF and ensure the controls fully incorporate best practices consistent with the various risk factors related to cybersecurity for healthcare organizations. Given the increasing volume, sophistication and risks associated with cyber attacks perpetrated on healthcare organizations and increased awareness by legislators and regulators, HITRUST believes there is real value in providing additional guidance to organizations wanting to review their current level of preparedness, according to the group.


Surrounded by management consultants? Speak up.
"There are good consultants and bad consultants," Phelan says. "Good consulting is a combination of detective work, counseling, and in-depth industry knowledge." Such knowledge can really only come from experience. And the bad kind? "Bright, highly educated young kids -- and I know, because I was one -- who lack real expertise but who come in and impose a standard methodology they've been trained by their firms to use." Sound familiar?


Cloud haters: You too will be assimilated
The cloud will be a better experience than you have now, and it will be less expensive in terms of asset expenditure and total cost of ownership. But we at The Cloud Continuum are not entirely without compassion. Let's go down the list of your grievances and address your concerns. I mean, it's not like we have to, because we'll just end up owning your infrastructure anyway. But we are, if anything, attentive.


Wireless IP cameras open to hijacking over the Internet, researchers say
The vendors selling these cameras also have them configured to use their own dynamic DNS services. For example, Foscam cameras get assigned a hostname of the type [two letters and four digits].myfoscam.org. By scanning the entire *.myfoscam.org name space an attacker could identify most Foscam cameras connected to the Internet, the researchers said.


Congressional panel approves Internet freedom bill
The House Energy and Commerce Committee's communications subcommittee approved the Internet freedom bill, an attempt to discourage other countries from advocating for control of the Internet by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union and other international agencies.



Quote for the day:

"Pull a string & it'll follow wherever you wish. Push it & it'll go nowhere at all." –-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

April 12, 2013

Want To Really Be Agile? Swarm!
The hackneyed phrase, "Good, fast, cheap -- choose two," is wrong in the agile world where collaboration is more powerful than divide and conquer. Our Agile Architect explains how to increase productivity significantly while also increasing code quality with a simple process change.


Modern Apps or Desktop? The Answer May be Spelled W-E-B
iOS and Android have proven that people still love their native apps, a lot. The real issue is that Web technologies are certain to be relevant for a long time and the native platform game, after having been stable for more than 20 years, is encountering upheaval that hasn't resolved yet. To which platform should you allocate more investment: the one that's volatile or the one that's stable? The latter would seem more sensible in the majority of cases.


Key benefits of architecting loosely coupled SOA-based solutions
The goal of every SOA architect is to develop a highly componentized, largely de-coupled system that makes application lifecycle management (ALM) easier -- from the start of the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) right through to the end. But are loosely coupled SOA-based systems always the answer? And isn't it true that, in some cases, tightly coupled systems aren't such a bad thing?


Privacy protections booted from CISPA data-sharing bill
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who proposed three unsuccessful privacy amendments, said afterward she was disappointed her colleagues did not limit the NSA and other intelligence agencies from collecting sensitive data on Americans. Her privacy amendments would have "required that companies report cyber threat information directly to civilian agencies, and maintained the long-standing tradition that the military doesn't operate on U.S. soil against American citizens," Schakowsky said.


Dell pushes the tablet envelope with the XPS 18
Rather than another slate somewhere between 5 and 10 inches, the XPS 18 is a monstrous 18-inch device. While this device is obviously not something that you’ll slip into your pocket, the XPS 18 presents a rather intriguing use case, especially in the office where most workers’ mobility consists of moving between meeting rooms rather than traipsing across continents.


Red Hat Updates JBoss Data Grid
The list of new features in this release includes cross-data center replication (XDR), which allows for replication across clusters and locations. The result, the company says, is better performance for remote users and applications. Another new feature, non-blocking state transfer (NBST), improves elasticity through a new pause-less join-and-leave protocol.


Is OpenDaylight the Next Penguin?
The OpenDaylight Project has a good technical overview, but even there it sounds more than a little like mumbo jumbo: "The business logic and algorithms reside in the applications. These applications use the controller to gather network intelligence, run algorithms to perform analytics, and then use the controller to orchestrate the new rules, if any, throughout the network."


Kaspersky discovers hacker group targeting online games
According to its blog post Thursday, Kaspersky fingered a group named "Winnti" to be responsible for breaking into the servers of at least 35 games developers and publishers since 2009. The evidence it had uncovered suggested the cybercriminals were looking to steal proprietary source codes to possible develop into pirated versions of the games, or to steal virtual currency which can be converted into real money, it said.


Four Master Data Management Mistakes to Avoid
Unfortunately, corporate data doesn’t naturally play well together. One customer may be present in five different systems. Three of those, however, may be derived from the first system, with one of them located in the cloud. Likewise, customer information may be stored in different ways. The finance system wants formal naming, akin to a Chamber of Commerce registry. The CRM system, meanwhile, caters to salespeople needing to trace contacts into specific business divisions, to prevent duplicate sales efforts.



A Practical Intro to Data Science
There are far fewer resources out there about the steps to take in order to obtain the skills necessary to practice this elusive discipline. Here we will provide a collection of freely accessible materials and content to jumpstart your understanding of the theory and tools of Data Science.



Quote for the day:

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts." -- Larry Ellison

April 11, 2013

USB Says New Specification to Double Transfer Speed in the Works
The new specification is an improvement over the existing USB 3.0, which can transfer data at 5Gbps. Most PCs today ship with USB 3.0 ports, while smartphones and tablets have micro-USB ports based on the older and slower 2.0 specification. Mobile devices will get faster signalling rates with micro-USB 3.0 ports in the future.


How to Become a More Decision-Centric Organization
Many organizations’ success or failure is determined by the decisions they make. Insurance companies must make good decisions about which claims to pay or what to charge for a policy. Health care organizations must decide if it is safe to discharge someone or give them a particular medication. Retailers must decide what to stock where and how to promote it to their customers. Telecommunication companies must decide if they want to retain a customer and what offer is most likely to succeed.


A Guide to SQL Server 2012
The arrival of SQL Server 2012 brings both good news and news that’s less good. On one hand, the latest version of one of Microsoft’s best-established products is full of new features, including core support for Windows Server, enhanced auditing features and enhanced PowerShell support. In this free guide from Redmond magazine, learn more about the inner workings of SQL Server 2012, which new features are the most impressive, and how to budget for and manage this new and critical product.


Intel lays out plans for the hyperscale datacentre
The reference hyperscale design will be based around current and upcoming Intel technologies. Intel has already released the sub-10w Atom Centerton S1200 targeted at the microserver market and later this year will release the 22nm Avoton SoC with integrated Ethernet and improved performance per watt over Centerton processors. Avoton samples are with customers and the first systems are expected to be available in the second half of 2013.


Self-service software broadens BI usage, reduces reliance on IT
Self-service applications offer a way to extend the scope and reach of BI deployments while also creating a more personalized and collaborative decision-making environment for information workers, added Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of Intelligent Solutions Inc., a BI and analytics consultancy in Boulder, Colo.


How to Validate the Data Model
In response to my columns on the qualifications of the data modeler and how that can help business, a reader inquired about who is responsible for validating the data model. The answer to this question depends on the type of model being validated. In this column, I will examine the responsibilities for the business data model and in a future column, I will look at the validation responsibilities for the technology data model.


Tech jobs: CIOs look safe, IT managers face chop, chief digital officer is the next big thing
Firms are planning to crank up the hiring of chief digital officers and chief data officers, but it won't necessarily be at the expense of CIOs. In fact, it is IT middle management who look more likely to lose out. Some 19 percent of business leaders expect to recruit a chief digital officer by 2014, while 17 percent foresee a chief data officer appointment, according to a study by Gartner.


More than 6 out of 10 companies approve of personal device use for work
The online survey of 502 U.S. IT and business executives was conducted in February. It also found that the most popular option, cited by 58% of the respondents, was to have a mix of corporate-owned and employee-owned devices. For 53% of those surveyed, the top reason for allowing employees to use or select their own devices was to increase productivity while employees are away from the office.


IT helpdesk must up ante in cloud, BYOD era
The result is users are now accustomed to the idea of self-service in IT and generally do not approach the IT helpdesk, at least not at the beginning until the problem escalates, he noted. Also, with increased awareness of cloud services targeted for enterprises, some business units or departments have become more confident in engaging vendors without asking for IT's help. As such, any IT helpdesk that still provides only entry level type of support with a slow response rate "has no place" in today's corporate environments, Leow stated.


Data skepticism
So, if we really want to do data science, it has to be done by incorporating skepticism. And here’s the key: data scientists have to own that skepticism. Data scientists have to be the biggest skeptics. Data scientists have to be skeptical about models, they have to be skeptical about overfitting, and they have to be skeptical about whether we’re asking the right questions. They have to be skeptical about how data is collected, whether that data is unbiased, and whether that data — even if there’s an inconceivably large amount of it — is sufficient to give you a meaningful result.



Quote for the day:

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge