Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 30, 2013

Is the public cloud the best place for legacy applications?
If an application is due for a refresh, why settle for just a facelift via an incremental hardware upgrade or new GUI? Instead, why not go whole hog and re-platform the application on a state-of-the-art cloud platform that delivers scalable performance, flexibility and resilience—not to mention an operational expenditure (opex) rather than capital expenditure (capex) model?

Using FileTables in SQL Server 2012
FileTables is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2012. It's a unique table that reflects metadata of files in a specified folder. The file attributes can then be modified either through SQL queries or via Windows Explorer. The two primary benefits of FileTables are the ability to dynamically access file attributes via DML, and to perform FullText search on files in the specified folder. The FileTable feature builds on FileStream and HiearchyID, which were introduced in SQL Server 2008.

Homeland Security: Disable UPnP, as tens of millions at risk
It comes only a few hours after a white paper was released by security researchers at Rapid7, which claimed that approximately 40 to 50 million devices worldwide are vulnerable to infiltration by hackers as a result of a flaw in a networking protocol. UPnP, or Universal Plug and Play, allows devices that connect to networks, to communicate seamlessly with one another and discover each other's presence. Devices can then connect over a network to share files, print documents, and access other shared resources.

Inside Look at Office 2013 for IT Pros: the Right Touch
All of the standard Office applications still exist, but there are some new components as well. One such component is the Lync client. The Lync client isn't new but this is the first time Microsoft has included it in Office. Having the Lync client included with the Office 2013 suite should prove to be handy for organizations that use Office 365 or which have an on-premise Lync Server deployment.

PowerShell 3 Web of Wow, Part 2
Jeffery Hicks's serioes: Last time we looked at one of the new PowerShell v3 cmdlets for working with web data, Invoke-WebRequest. This week we'll look at a cmdlet that I think you'll find even easier to use, Invoke-RestMethod. REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer is being used more and more to deliver web-based data.

New immigration bill focuses on high-skill workers
The Immigration Innovation Act would increase the number of H-1B visas available to U.S. companies from 65,000 a year to 115,000 a year, and would establish an economy-based escalator, allowing the number of H-1Bs to expand or contract, depending on market conditions. The top number of visas allowed would be 300,000 per year.

Free Tool: Automated Testing with Moles and Pex in Visual Studio 2010
Pex is a test generator: aim it at your application and Pex generates test cases for you. Pex does that by examining your code and then generating tests that ensures, among other things, every line gets executed. Pex is particularly interested in generating "edge cases": what happens at the outer limits of the ranges you've built into your code.

Informatica Recognized By Gartner as a Leader in Data Masking and by Infosecurity for Best Security Software
Both the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Masking and Infosecurity Products Guide recognized Informatica for continued innovation: Gartner states, “The data masking portfolio has been broadening. In addition to SDM technology… the market is beginning to offer dynamic data masking (DDM)… ”; Infosecurity Products Guide selected Informatica as a finalist for Best Security Software for its new cloud data masking offering.

Staggering Revelations About Big Data
The report, conveys staggering numbers about the size of our digital universe. Even more telling are details that reveal the wealth of good data out there that remains unexploited by organizations for business purposes. The report is sponsored by EMC, a cloud-based provider of information storage, management, protection and analytics services. (Note: The findings measure big data in a unit of measurement known as the zettabyte (ZB), which equals 1,000 exabytes. That's enough to store 250 billion DVDs, according to an estimate from Cisco.)

Good Technology Unveils Six BYOD Ready Enterprise Mobile Apps
Using Good Dynamics, industry’s most secure application development platform, enterprises/third party developers can build and manage secure business mobile apps that are required for true BYOD adoption by enterprises and employees. Good Technology recently announced availability of six such Mobile Enterprise Apps for iOS secured by Good Dynamics which now add to the available ecosystem of third-party business productivity applications.

Quote for the day:

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

January 29, 2013

Shining the lights on shadow IT in businesses
The problem is that when business owners go around IT, they almost always forget to ask the tough questions experienced IT pros would ask a cloud provider ... Failing to ask those tough questions up front has resulted in some well-publicized public cloud failures, such as the Los Angeles Police Department's move to partially pull the plug on a proposed Google Gmail deployment because of security concerns, or Web-based services going down because of an outage at a cloud provider.

Try F# - A New Wave of Education and Research
The 2013 release of TryF# is an easy on-ramp into learning, creating and sharing with the power of F# 3.0 that can solve real-world analytical programming and information rich problems. Hear how University College London uses it in their leading computer science department curriculum, particularly in the financial domain. And learn about how Jim Hendler from a data scientist perspective taps into the benefit of Try F# with his undergraduate and graduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Oracle will continue to bundle 'crapware' with Java
The practice of offering up other software alongside Java updates, including emergency security updates to patch critical vulnerabilities, again came under fire last week as new reports surfaced of deceptive installation techniques. During a conference call with leaders of the Java User Groups (JUG) last week, Doland Smith, who heads Oracle's OpenJDK team, cited contractual obligations that prevented him from discussing the bundling deal in detail. But he hinted that no changes were in the offing.

STEC bumps up enterprise SSDs to 2TB
Flash is moving closer to the mainstream of enterprise storage, with IT shops adopting it where they need fast access to data. The capacities of flash components are steadily growing, while some shortcomings that held the technology back are being overcome. STEC's new SSDs are made using MLC (multilevel cell) flash, the type used in consumer products, which is less expensive than earlier enterprise flash technologies.

Developing an end-to-end Windows Store app using C++ and XAML: Hilo (Windows)
With these resources, you'll learn: How to use modern C++, asynchronous programming, XAML, and the Windows Runtime to build a world-ready app for the global market. The Hilo source code includes support for four languages and all world calendars; How to implement tiles, pages, controls, touch, navigation, file system queries, suspend/resume, and localization; How to implement Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) and Repository patterns; How to test your app and tune its performance.

Splittable laptop-tablets: The U1 Hybrid had it right all along
The IdeaPad U1 Hybrid was a great idea, with one problem: it never arrived. After surfacing again in 2011 as a Windows/Android detachable hybrid, it again disappeared from view. That was 2010. Now it's 2013, and laptops with detachable-tablet screens are everywhere. Two recent examples reviewed at CNET are the HP Envy x2 and Acer Iconia W510.

Google stakes Pwnium hacking contest to $3.14M in potential prizes
Dubbed Pwnium 3, the challenge will pit researchers against its still-struggling-for-relevance Chrome OS, rewarding those who can hack the operating system with individual prizes of $110,000 and $150,000. Google capped the total up for grabs at $3.14159 million, giving multiple researchers a chance at prize money.

Virtualizing the Unvirtualizable

IDC put out a white paper just last April talking about the benefits of virtualization tier 1 applications. This class of applications is usually very sensitive to environmental factors and highly critical to the operations of the business. It can include components from database servers to large services like email or full business suites for enterprise resource planning.

Anatomy of HTML5/JavaScript Single Page Application in Samples
If you think of it, an SPA application is very similar to a Silverlight application, in that most Silverlight applications load all the pages at the beginning and later allow the users to navigate between the pages without calling the server. So understanding of the SPA concepts should come very naturally to Silverlight developers.

Exploratory Data Analysis: Playing with Big Data
EDA involves looking at the data from many different angles. Slicing and dicing the data along non-trivial, non-orthogonal dimensions and combinations of dimensions. Transforming the data through some nonlinear operators, projecting the data onto a different subspace, and then examine the resulting distribution. Regardless of what it involves, the number of things to try in each of these steps is infinite. Worse, it’s actually uncountably infinite, so we cannot even enumerate them and then perform an exhaustive search by trying each one systematically.

Quote for the day:

"Excellence is not an accomplishment. It is a spirit, a never-ending process." -- Lawrence M. Miller

January 28, 2013

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
The most common reason for SaaS data loss emerged to be end user deletion. This is easy to do; SaaS providers may provide multiple warnings about making sure the data changes are desired before the application is closed, but end users will still make mistakes. The second most common cause of data loss is where one employee over- writes a data element shared by others.

Helpful Forecasting Resources
This is the last post of the series on forecasting. Up to now, subjects such as varying factors, methods and evaluation criteria have been studied. This post lists key references in the field of time series prediction, particularly using Support Vector Regression (SVR). Note that some of these resources are not free:

Convergence of data, cloud to impact sourcing strategy
"Social, information, mobile and cloud shouldn't be considered in isolation as market forces," said Linda Cohen, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. "The convergence of these forces, which Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces, is what drives real business value. The Nexus of Forces converge in several ways: cloud, mobile and social solutions enable the distribution of information, social media usage and behavior drive mobile and information solutions, and cloud can be a foundation for information, social and mobile solutions."

Understanding Value: It’s the Perspective
Lean is a primarily a product dominant thinking methodology. Lean was based primarily on the Toyota Production Process, which was an avid follower of Dr. Deming. Lean became more problem/solution orientated and another outgrowth of Dr. Deming, Systems Thinking, moved more to the Peter Senge approach illustrated in The Fifth Discipline. A crude analogy at best but viewing implementing each method, you could either choose between the Systems Archetypes or the Lean way, PDCA/PDSA.

Big medical data
Certainly, the term was in heavy use around MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which in 2012 launched a new big-data initiative called bigdata@CSAIL. Several of the researchers affiliated with bigdata@CSAIL are developing new techniques for processing medical data, to make it more accessible to both physicians and patients and to find correlations that could improve diagnosis or choice of therapies.

Effective Leadership & Personal Success Through Scripting
Schedule an hour now to think about the poor or emotional decisions that have compromised your effective leadership or management decisions. Write down what you should say and what you should not say for various scenarios that you find yourself in. Refer to that document occasionally, and add to it as needed. Later, subtract the decisions that become second nature, or in other words, that you master.

OpenStack cloud backers hope 2013 is the year of user adoption
An open source cloud management platform for public or private clouds, OpenStack has spent the last two and a half years building up an impressive resume of companies that have singed on as backers. From HP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace and others have all hitched their wagons to OpenStack. Now, the question for 2013, experts say, is seeing if customer adoption of the platform rises to the same level of interest that the vendors have showed in embracing the technology.

Government backs 8 top technologies to fuel growth
Willetts said £189 million would go to big data and energy efficient computing, to boost research capacity for analysing big data sets, in areas like earth observation and medical science. There will also be £25 million of additional funding for the National Space Technology Programme for the development of commercial products and services using space technology and data from space-based systems.

Andreessen on enterprise: has he got it right?
Having morphed from 'the man who took on Microsoft and lost' but ultimately made a pot of money to respected technology investor, we now hear him speak thoughtfully about the future of enterprise vendors. It's a salutary read and one that I suspect will fall on deaf ears for many enterprise vendors.

Hortonworks Sandbox Opens Up Enterprise Apache Hadoop To Newbies
For the Hortonworks Sandbox, a team of the original architects, developers and operators of Apache Hadoop, will regularly update the learning materials providing access to new content showcasing both partner solutions and increasingly sophisticated tutorials. Additionally, users can upload their own datasets to test and validate the use of Apache Hadoop within their own data architectures.

Quote for the day:

"A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but one who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs" -- Anonymous

"The art of communication is the language of leadership." -- James Humes

January 27, 2013

Solution Architecture - Aligning Solutions with Business Needs
The Solution Architects should hold the key, being in close touch with the implementation teams, making themselves available for clarifications, being receptive to emerging issues around the solution design and coming up with needed improvement to the solution designs.

The Role of Ethics in Data Governance
Data governance has to take into account not only the interests of the company, but also the interests of the data owners. Data stewards have to be the trusted custodians of the data. Companies have to consider policies that not only benefit the corporate welfare but also the interests of customer and partners or face reputational risk and potential loss of business.

Twitter unveils Vine, its 6-second Instagram for video
The 6-second limitation on Vine posts appears to be Twitter's new atomic unit for video. A Twitter spokesperson said, "The team tested various video lengths, ranging from about 4 seconds to 10 seconds, as they were building Vine. They found that 6 seconds was the ideal length, from both the production and consumption side."

Top 5 Myths About Big Data
Despite how broadly Big Data is being discussed, it appears that it is still a very big mystery to many. In fact, outside of the experts who have a strong command of this topic, the misunderstandings around Big Data seem to have reached mythical proportions. Here are the top five myths.

HIPAA Violation Penalties Rise in Response to Data Breaches
One-time violations stay under $50k, but repeat violations within the same year can hold a fine of $1.5 million across all HIPAA violation categories, up substantially from the previous $250k minimum. That’s a bit of a hike. The new penalty structure aligns with recent data from the Ponemon Institute that found recurring data breaches are increasing among respondents

Big Data Brings Big Privacy Concerns
When CIOs think of big data, they might envision the technical challenges and opportunities posed by the vast reservoirs of information their companies are collecting and analyzing. But when some policy makers contemplate the same situation, their concerns turn to questions of privacy, and what steps data-rich companies are taking to safeguard consumers' personal information.

Big Data for Healthcare: Why are we collecting all this data?
All this time and investment in data and where it is leading us to? The latest news in Health IT has started to present some optimistic signs for healthcare providers and hospitals and patients too validating why healthcare organizations have boosted up their resources and technology.

Enhanced ObservableCollection with ability to delay or disable notifications
MSDN describes ObservableCollection as a dynamic data collection which provides notifications when items get added, removed, or when the whole list is refreshed. ObservableCollection is fully bindable. It implements both INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged, so whenever the collection is changed, appropriate notification events are fired off immediately and bound objects are notified and updated.

Free Big Data Education: A Data Science Perspective
As the third and final part of Free Big Data Education series (following Free Big Data Education: A Management Perspective and Free Big Data Education: A Technical Perspective), Daniel D. Gutierrez, Data Scientist finishes up with the area of big data closest to my heart: data science. -- Some of the indicated courses seem to have ended.

Mobile App Dev Needs 'Omni-Channel' Perspective
Software development for mobile devices is not just about adding Objective-C or JavaScript developers, Forrester says. "We're moving to a world of multiple endpoints, hybrid-use personal and corporate devices, and lightning-fast client device turnover." The report also charges that development shops have gotten complacent building MVC (model view controller) applications and the easy days for software development shops are ending.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others." -- John Maxwell

January 26, 2013

Two hours in the cloud: The year's best cloud computing Q&As
SearchCloudComputing.com had the opportunity in 2012 to speak with experts from all walks of cloud -- CEOs, cloud security directors and open source pros, among others. These eight best cloud computing Q&As put industry authorities in the hot seat for their takes on the cloud market.

'Andyhave3cats' is a better password than 'Shehave3cats,' study finds
Ashwini Rao, a Carnegie Mellon software engineering doctoral student and the lead researcher on the project, said that while phrases and sentences can make passwords easier to remember, their grammatical structure significantly narrows the possible word combinations and sequences that hackers -- and their tools -- need to guess. "We should not blindly rely on the number of words or characters in a password as a measure of its security," said Rao

CIO's cloud solutions meet collaboration needs and speed up innovation
The road to that goal, Patterson told SearchCIO.com, includes aggressive consolidation of the IT infrastructure that's spread across the university's 19 schools and colleges. The aim is to build an IT infrastructure flexible enough to support both shared services and mission-unique services. The goal is faster innovation.

Multi Process Architecture with C#
The Multi-Process Architecture has been used lately by internet browsers that use tabs, like Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome. The display rendering functionality is isolated by using child process for each tab. It protects the browser application from misbehavior. Read more in Google Chrome Multi-process Architecture.

Cloud Security Moves from Enterprise Apprehension to Allegiance
Security has long been a top enterprise worry with cloud computing. However, increases in deployments and cuts in budgets will propel the cloud as a top security infrastructure option over the next four years, according to a new assessment from Gartner Research.

How to Select the Right MDM and BYOD Security Solution for eGRC
Attend this webcast for insights on: Determining what Features/Benefits Are Important To Your Business; Evaluating the products for security/performance features that fit your market and security policy; Assessing how well the product will integrate with your existing infrastructure; Creating a shortlist of vendors that meet the unique needs of your organization; and Identifying vendors that best meet requirements and accelerate the selection process.

Do the CIO and CFO Disagree on Technology Value?
Download this CIO Search survey results to learn: What the CFO wants to see from investments; Which top technologies the CIO and CFO agree will be most important for business success in the next three years; Why CIOs take issue with the CFO's definition of ROI when applied to technology investments and much more.

Popeye, Spinach, and Data Quality
“Ultimately, the reason these errors spread,” Arbesman concluded, “is because it’s a lot easier to spread the first thing you find, or the fact that sounds correct, than to delve deeply into the literature in search of the correct fact.” What “spinach” has your organization been falsely consuming because of a data quality issue that was not immediately obvious, and which may have led to a long, and perhaps ongoing, history of data-driven decisions based on poor quality data?

Do You Need Big Data Governance? Maybe.

Sunil, a widely known figure and authority in the field of data governance, in his third book, “Big Data Governance, an Emerging Imperative,” is the first comprehensive volume on the new data phenomenon from a governance perspective. He recently spoke about the purpose and timing of this work with Information ManagementEditorial Director Jim Ericson.

Take the Long View on Value of Leadership Training
If you look at why IT projects fail, it is inevitably a combination of governance, communication, management of expectations, change management, team management, and time and budget management. So the question may be how best to develop leadership skills among project managers that will put them in a position to succeed, and to help their teams succeed.

Quote for the day:

"In youth we learn; in age we understand." -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Austrian writer

January 25, 2013

Toward a Science of Security
The past few years have seen a growing push within the research community to develop a science of security. Leading funding agencies, such as the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Defense, have initiated research programs specifically promoting the study of security as a science. The motivation behind these programs is to develop a systematic body of knowledge with strong theoretical and empirical underpinnings

Screening lean: Getting to the bottom of that resume pile
Carolyn Thompson, author of Ten Easy Steps to a Perfect Resume (BookSurge), Ten Steps to Finding the Perfect Job (BookSurge) and Ten Secrets to Getting Promoted (CreateSpace), not only counsels job seekers on how to land a position, she is also heavily involved in recruiting. In a recent conversation with tEDmag.com, she offered this advice.

What will we do when machines do all the work?
“I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045, machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.” said Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University who also directs the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology there.

Hadoop will be in most advanced analytics products by 2015, Gartner says
The Hadoop open source programming framework for large-scale data analysis is already one of the highest-profile technologies in the "big data" market, but users can expect it to become even more prevalent over the next couple of years, according to Gartner.

Project management lessons learned shouldn't be limited to postmortems
The majority of the items that come up in a lessons-learned session relate only to the project just completed. The same team, however, will not be on the next project; the issues related to a specific project will not be the same on the next project; and the technology will be different on the next project. As a result, any team-, project- or technology-specific items are not useful in a lessons-learned context.

How to Align Your New Solution with Business Needs
More choices and more users often result in a solution design that provides less – as in less-than-satisfactory – alignment with business needs and goals. But by systematically assessing the key drivers of solution design, you can determine the solution that will truly align with your business needs, in spite of more choices and more users.

Tape Storage Finds New Life in the Enterprise and Beyond
Long considered slow and outdated, tape is holding on in many enterprises that need cost-effective, long-term storage, and it's even finding new applications in the virtualized and increasingly video-centric world of IT. Despite declining shipments of equipment over the past several years, tape is increasingly important in some environments, especially large organizations that deal with mountains of information. The relic isn't as obsolete as it seemed.

New molecules could bring super-dense, solid-state hard disk alternatives
An international team of researchers led by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist has discovered a new way of making molecular memory, which stores data in individual molecules. That breakthrough could help the technology graduate from labs to data centers and drive down its manufacturing costs.

Why HR Can't Innovate
The worst part about effectively useless corporate recruiting is the notion that the best-qualified candidate for a job is the one willing to climb over the most piles of broken glass to get the job. No wonder hiring managers take a person who is more likely to be the most-compliant—rather than the most-talented—candidate. We could call this person the Last Candidate Standing.

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity
MGI studied big data in five domains—healthcare in the United States, the public sector in Europe, retail in the United States, and manufacturing and personal-location data globally. Big data can generate value in each. For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. If US healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." -- Auguste Rodin

January 24, 2013

Biggest myth – “Enterprise Architecture is a discipline aimed at creating models”
Unfortunately, most of the Enterprise Architecture practitioners and several branded consulting organizations are caught in this trap. The situation has worsened as several architects & business process experts are building “composite models” (multi variable model) and calling it “architecture” model. This ignorance has serious ramification, as several Enterprises are making considerable investments in this area without significant gain.

Three key factors to provide security in virtualization
A security solution in the cloud should at least contain three key features to make itself attractive to customers. It should have heterogeneous hypervisor support, be agentless and have automatic deployment. Let’s take a deeper look at these three features: Heterogeneous hypervisor support; Agentless; and Automatic deployment

Cloud Orchestration: What It Is, Why You Need It
Orchestration is at the heart of the private cloud. It's the tool that you will use to automate repetitive tasks that you do daily or weekly. When designing your private cloud, orchestrators are what you will need to tie in with your ticketing system so that you can automate user requests.

Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture
The belief systems underlying these schools of thought are at the heart of several challenges, such as fragmentation and misunderstanding, in the enterprise architecture community, because the beliefs are often implicitly held by people but not explicitly discussed. ... This article tries to shed some light on the situation by sharing a new taxonomy of enterprise architecture schools of thought to foster understanding and awareness to help establish enterprise architecture as a discipline and profession.

The Need to Care for Character
To be successful as an advanced change practitioner, it is important to deeply explore your character so you can understand and accept who you are ... In this series, Daryl Conner explores step one in this sequence by addressing the question, “As professional change facilitators, how can we cultivate our character to increase the impact our presence has with clients?”

Azure-based Microsoft video streaming service goes live
The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie said in a blog post.

Exposure of files on unsecured wireless no excuse to search, judge rules
The ruling involves John Henry Ahrndt, a previously convicted sex offender who was sentenced to 120 months in prison for possession of child pornography on his computer. Ahrndt had argued that some of the evidence that was used against him in court had been gathered illegally. He had filed an appeal asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in Portland to suppress the evidence on the grounds that his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search had been violated.

5 New Ways to Recruit & Hire Using Twitter’s Improved Platform
Twitter’s new Advanced Search has become increasingly popular amount recruiters who are working feverishly at filing spots via Twitter recruiting. Even on the most basic level, Twitter’s Advanced Search is a powerful tool that can pull together any type of data that you’re wanting. To look at current trends, happening right now, Twitter’s new search allows you to do just that.

Expectations and Roadblocks as BYOD Matures
The first-time survey, “BYOD: Managing the User is the Key to Big Gains and Fewer Setbacks,” was conducted by tech market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Dell and its Quest Software division. It included responses to questions on enterprise BYOD policies, maturity and concerns from 1,485 IT and executive respondents.

"One size fits all" solution for freezing a Grid's header rows, why not?
Table structure in HTML and GridView in ASP.NET has brought about various smart ways of rendering data. But there is a big question I've been looking for the answer for quite some time ago; that is how to freeze header rows to track data easily when scrolling page. Unfortunately, the GridView control doesn't provide such a feature. Truong Pham Has come up with a solution for this.

Quote for the day:

"I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through - then follow through." -- Edward Rickenbacker

January 23, 2013

For most companies, NoSQL & Big Data are misunderstood at best, or hype at worst
As you know, Big Data is so large that it's difficult to process using traditional databases and software techniques. Of course, the relational model and SQL dominate today's database landscape. But on the other side there are databases built without relations, made for higher scalability. So, we asked the expert in the database area, Monty, about the current and future state of SQL, NoSQL and Big Data. And his answers were somewhat surprising:

Large companies run with BYOD as workers cover costs
Seventy-six percent of companies supporting bring your own device policies have more than 2,000 employees and there's a good reason for that. Half of employees under BYOD policies have to foot the device and wireless costs, according to a report from Good Technology.

Micron introduces its highest-endurance MLC SSD for servers
The P400m SSD's endurance is the equivalent to writing every picture posted to Facebook daily to the drive for 311 days straight (about 78 billion photos total), Micron said. By comparison, Micron's entry-level SSDs offer one to three full drive writes per day and a midrange SSD offers about five full drive writes, according to Matt Shaine, Micron's product marketing manager for enterprise SSDs.

Download: Information Governance Research Report
Discover what smart IT leaders are doing to make sure business exectuives are fully grasping the wide range of strategic advantages information governance can bring.

Windows Workflow and Timeouts
Workflows make it easy to do something that's very hard to do in any other development environment: Take action when something doesn't happen. Here's how to protect yourself when something's isn't happening in your Windows Workflows.

Big Data for Development: From Information - to Knowledge Societies
The article uses an established three-dimensional conceptual framework to systematically review literature and empirical evidence related to the prerequisites, opportunities, and threats of Big Data Analysis for international development. The opportunities and threats around big data has potential to result in a new kind of digital divide: a divide in data-based knowledge to inform intelligent decision-making. This shows that the exploration of data-based knowledge to improve development is not automatic and requires tailor-made policy choices that help to foster this emerging paradigm.

Has Ayasdi turned machine learning into a magic bullet?

At its core, Ayasdi’s product, a cloud-based service called the Insight Discovery Platform, is a mix of distributed computing, machine learning and user experience technologies. It processes data, discovers the correlations between data points, and then displays the results in a stunning visualization that’s essentially a map of the dataset and the connections between every point within it.

German Government Should Make its Software Available As Open Source, Committee Advises
Germany should change a law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source, a German parliamentary committee has advised. German public administrations currently are not allowed to give away goods, including software, said Jimmy Schulz, a member of Parliament and chairman of the Interoperability, Standards and Free Software Project Group in an email Thursday. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community, he said.

Indian insurers to spend 101 bn rupees on IT in 2013
Indian insurers are about to go on a spending spree! Market research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that insurance firms in India will spend 101 billion rupees on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of more than 9 per cent over 2012 when they spent an approximate 92.5 billion rupees.

When Big Data Goes Bad
The break between the viability of Big Data and the efficacy of analysis lies not in the actual analysis, but rather in perspective. Ultimately, what we are talking about is not about the value of a data point, but how multiple data points interrelate with one another. How does one determine causation as opposed to allowing causation to validate an analysis?

Quote for the day:

"If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." -- Jack Welch

January 22, 2013

Incentive-based pricing models for your next IT outsourcing contract
Traditional IT outsourcing contracts are typically based on a fixed price for a set scope of work, or a set price per number of units: Vendors are paid to provide a utility function (for example, managing servers, monitoring network devices, ensuring email is available). Incentive-based pricing, on the other hand, rewards vendors for adding benefit to the service: cutting costs, boosting revenue, improving efficiency, for example. But getting there isn't easy.

Software-Defined Storage: A Buzzword Worth Examining
The adoption and propagation of new market terminology is not some conspiracy by the vendor community to confuse everyone. There is absolute value in the various types and components of SDS. But we need some context and specificity to uncover that value, and even more of that context and specificity to enjoy and benefit from that value in any given user environment.

Experience
It unfolds over the intervals necessary for assimilation and integration; however, the passage of time alone is no guarantee of learning and we shouldn’t confuse grey hairs with experience. ... Experience can’t derive from being a bystander in the classroom or on the assembly line: You have to be in the game. It means diving in, doing work, building stuff, and taking risks.

Businesses finally see ROI for IT security
Almost two-thirds of organisations regard IT security as the responsibility of everyone within the enterprise, not just the IT department, the survey found. Some 38% of respondents said their organisations see investment in IT and systems security as an "insurance policy" to protect company assets.

Who’s on deck? 3 questions for succession planning
The moment after you land the corner office, you need to be thinking about who will replace you. Your legacy lies in the hands of your successor. How you are perceived by others when you are gone relies greatly on the person you select to replace you.

New bill asks companies to notify EU of security breaches
Proposed legislation in the European Union would force tech companies that have access to user data -- such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft -- to report any security breaches to local cybersecurity agencies, the Financial Times reported today. This is the European Commission's effort to make private companies accountable for privacy and security problems, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes told the Financial Times.

The Best and Worst Methods for Enterprise Architecture
From a strategy basis, Burton recommended the following three-tier approach for enterprise architecture project leaders: Change the way you think: Frame every comment in terms of business outcomes, value and business performance; Show value for money, meaning the right services at the right level of quality and the right price; and Position EA in investment terms, including near- and long-term business performance.

Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation
As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We're averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don't even question how much we're doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay.

Asia needs regional cybercrime center
Myla Pilao, director of core technology at Trend Micro's TrendLabs, said since most of today's online crimes are becoming borderless, Asia-Pacific will need a centralized agency to help examine the crimes that have taken place and supply necessary threat information across member states. Such a cross-region agency will also provide the impetus for Asian governments to adopt stronger legislations encompassing various crimes committed online so as to deter cybercriminals, Pilao added.

Confused by the glut of new databases? Here’s a map for you
The flurry of database action over the past year rendered the usual discussion around structured or unstructured, SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL databases even more, um, nuanced than before. Matthew Aslett, research manager at 451 Research took the bull by the horns and updated his previous (one-month-old) database road map to include all sorts of new entries.

Doubt cast on the security of Kim Dotcom's Mega service
The problem is that SSL has long been recognized as a weak point on the web. In 2009, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike created a tool called SSLstrip, which allows an attacker to intercept and stop an SSL connection. The attacker can then spy on whatever data the user sends to the fake website.

Quote for the day:

"We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled but as candles to be lit." -- Robert Shaffer

January 21, 2013

Practical SOA for the Solution Architect
Most IT practitioners often lose sight of the core principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This article and its extended white paper are a retelling of the SOA philosophy in an easily understandable and practically applicable form, independent of the actual tools used to implement it. It is specially targeted to the Solution Architect, because at the end of the day, SOA is nothing but a way to put components together to build flexible, durable and reusable business solutions, and the solution architect is the person responsible for this outcome.

Why Functional Programming in Java is Dangerous
Elliotte Rusty Harold writes: The problem is that my colleagues and I are not writing code in Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, or even Ruby or Python. We are writing code in Java, and in Java functional programming is dangerously inefficient. Every few months I find myself debugging a production problem that ultimately traces back to a misuse of functional ideas and algorithms in a language and more importantly a virtual machine that just wasn’t built for this style of programming.

Don't SCIM over your Data Model
SCIM used to stand for "Simple Cloud Identity Management" but now stands for "System for Cross-domain Identity Management", which is more generic. This article looks at some aspects of the SCIM protocol as currently published. The three major areas where SCIM’s underlying data model is somewhat inadequate: Tight coupling of identifiers; Inelegant handling of multi-valued attributes; and Clumsy PATCH command syntax

'Rogue Clouds' Giving IT Staffs Nightmares
"Rogue clouds" occur if sales and marketing people, for example, order up Salesforce.com without bothering to consult IT or set up Dropbox with outside vendors to share sensitive information. It's happening to three-quarters of those using cloud, according to the survey, and it occurs more in large enterprises (83%) than in small to midsize ones (70%).

7 CES Announcements IT Pros Need to Know About
The Consumer Electronics Show is not only about consumer gadgets, as enterprise vendors such as Dell and Intel tend to announce major new technology advancements as well. CES 2013 was no different. Here are the top business tech announcements from Las Vegas.

Security is no place for traditionalists
Traditional security professionals adhere to a certain philosophy which can be detrimental to their cause. Traditionalists believe that IT risk is a technical problem, handled by technical people, buried in IT and every problem is solved with a new technology. Also, they view themselves as heroes hired to protect the company at all cost.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
An interesting periodic table of visualization methods for management by Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007).

Google looks to ditch passwords for good with NFC-based replacement
Google is currently running a pilot that uses a YubiKey cryptographic card developed by Yubico — a start-up operated out of Sweden and the US, which has produced a two-factor authentication fob that can emit encrypted one-time passwords to NFC-enabled smartphones.

CIOs say cloud computing is really, truly a priority this time
At least CIOs finally get it: Either figure out a way to leverage cloud technology, or get into real estate. Although this technology is still emerging, the value of at least putting together a plan and a few projects has been there for years. The business cases have always existed. Despite those obvious needs, many CIOs have been secretly pushing back on cloud computing.

Microsoft Cloud OS Vision Unfolds With New Products, Services
"with Windows Server and Windows Azure at its core, the Cloud OS provides a consistent platform across customer data centers, service-provider data centers and the Microsoft public cloud," Park said in a statement. "Powerful management and automation capabilities are key elements of the Cloud OS, taking the heavy lifting out of administration and freeing IT organizations to be more innovative as they embrace hybrid cloud computing and the consumerization of IT."

Quote for the day:

"The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed." -- Lloyd Jones