April 30, 2013

Hackers target shared Web hosting servers for mass phishing attacks
In this type of attack, once phishers break into a shared Web hosting server, they update its configuration so that phishing pages are displayed from a particular subdirectory of every website hosted on the server, APWG said. A single shared hosting server can host dozens, hundreds or even thousands of websites at a time, the organization said.


How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers
Companies use Gild to mine for new candidates and to assess candidates they are already considering. Gild itself uses the technology, which was how the company, desperate for programming talent and unable to match the salaries offered by bigger tech concerns, found this guy named Jade outside of Los Angeles. Its algorithm had determined that he had the highest programming score in Southern California, a total that almost no one achieves.


Servant leadership: A path to high performance
These leaders were servants in the best sense of the word. They were people-centric, valued service to others and believed they had a duty of stewardship. Nearly all were humble and passionate operators who were deeply involved in the details of the business. Most had long tenures in their organizations. They had not forgotten what it was like to be a line employee.


Three Gaps in Employee Productivity and What They Mean for IT
Fewer than 40% of employees are truly effective in the competencies shown to have the greatest impact on enterprise performance – right at the point where executives and managers consistently express the belief that they need at least 20% higher performance from employees to meet business goals. Where is employee productivity falling short, and what can IT and Infrastructure teams do to counter these figures?


The IT Conversation We Should Be Having
A simple summary of the work suggests that CEOs believe that CIOs are not in sync with the new issues CEOs are facing, CIOs do not understand where the business needs to go, and CIOs do not have a strategy, in terms of opportunities to be pursued or challenges to be addressed in support of the business.


IT Manager: An IT dashboard for the iPad
IT Manager is an app that offers IT managers another option for using an iPad as an administration tool for local network or web services. It’s a subscription-based app with a wide selection of network and web services admin tools. The growth of tablets and mobile apps in IT management means 24/7 operations go on, regardless of whether staff are working in a data center cage, a user’s desk, or responding to an outage after hours.


Infosec 2013: managing risk in the supply chain
For IT departments, securing information in the supply chain is one of the biggest challenges they face today. This is because supply chains are composed of various companies, all of which have their own set of security standards, and organisations struggle to communicate their requirements to all of these different parties. One way to approach the problem is to assess the “risk appetite” of your organisation, according to Mark Pearce, Head of Information Security at the Post Office.


How UpStream uses R for Attribution Analysis
Major retailers like Williams Sonoma use UpStream Software for marketing analytics, including revenue attribution, targeting, and optimization. In this video Tess Nesbitt (senior statistician at UpStream) describes how she uses Revolution R Enterprise and Hadoop to figure out the impact on various marketing channels (for example direct mail, email offers, and catalogs) on consumer retail sales.


A Note for the Boss Who Talks Too Much
Play leadership anthropologist in your own organization and chances are you’ll find a good number of these en-titled characters who are compelled to consume every possible molecule of oxygen and every moment of air-time to share their self-defined pearls of wisdom and precious nuggets of managerial and inspirational gold.


Microsoft Updates Cloud Agreement For HIPAA Rules
Cloud service providers are starting to take notice of the new HIPAA security regulations that define them as "business associates" of HIPAA-covered entities such as healthcare providers and health plans. Microsoft has just announced a revised business associate agreement (BAA) for its cloud services that reflects the new HIPAA Omnibus Rule governing data security.



Quote for the day:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards" -- Vernon Sanders Law

April 29, 2013

When It Comes To Big Data Is Less More?
“I think there is a fear and paranoia among companies that … if they don’t keep every little piece of information on a customer, they can’t function,” said Bradlow. “Companies continue to squirrel away data for a rainy day. We’re not saying throw data away meaninglessly, but use what you need for forecasting and get rid of the rest.”


Prepare for Oz privacy reforms now: Attorney-general, privacy commissioner
"If there continues to be under-reporting of data breaches, or we continue to find out about them only through media reports, some would argue that there is strong case to move to a mandatory scheme," Dreyfus said. "Large-scale data breaches continue to occur, and every incident that is reported in the media continues to raise community concerns about the need for a mandatory scheme."


U.S. Lawmakers Plan Sweeping Review of Copyright
"It is my belief that a wide review of our nation's copyright laws and related enforcement mechanisms is timely," said Goodlatte. "I am announcing today that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a comprehensive series of hearings on U.S. copyright law in the months ahead. The goal of these hearings will be to determine whether the laws are still working in the digital age."


IBM's emerging open cloud architecture
IBM has announced that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. This will ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of questionable and difficult-to-manage offerings. In fact, customers who choose open standards-based cloud computing are on the right course to take advantage of new opportunities. Specifically, they will be able to harness their interconnected data with high-value business analytics across traditional and mobile devices.


Hacking suspect arrested for 'biggest cyberattack in history'
The alleged hacker is accused of launching an attack against anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus. A 300Gbps distributed denial-of-service sent the non-profit into disarray, taking down the agency's website and forcing Spamhaus to turn to Cloudflare for assistance. According to the cloud services provider, the majority of the attack was traffic sent using a technique called DNS (domain name system) reflection.


Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, and Fears Rise
Even though Syrian hackers remain the prime suspects, the trading commission is now investigating 28 different futures contracts and specifically examining the five-minute period before and after The A.P.’s Twitter account was hacked. It is looking to see if there were anomalous trades, and investors who benefited from them.


Searching for Smart Data: All-In-One, Automated Big Data Applications
Once software firms like MicroStrategy, BusinessObjects and others allowed business users to generate ad hoc reports that provided insights about sales, operations and more, data warehouse technology was off and running. Second, while software giant SAP may not be the most elegant technology architecture, SAP beat out the competition in the ERP arena because their ERP applications actually solved business problems.


New Version of Software Deployment Tool Adds Self-Service Cloud Pack
The new Deployit Cloud Pack for EC2, vSphere and other clouds, is an add-on that provides a self-service portal for Developers, Testers and QA teams to easily spin up and tear down the on-demand environments they need. Deployit 3.9 then automatically deploys your applications to new environments, accelerating development and testing.


Could You Survive a Cyberattack?
One way companies can prepare is by buying cyberrisk insurance. Though it has been around since the mid-'90s, cyberinsurance has only recently started to work its way into the mainstream and is now offered by companies such as the Hartford Financial Services Group and Travelers.


7 Tips to Speed Time to Innovation
Leveraging a PPM solution and its attendant processes can help product teams get innovative products to market faster by streamlining and automating development, eliminating wishful thinking and brute force in favor of discipline and strategy. So how can Product Development leverage portfolio management as a foundation for innovation and to support time to market requirements?



Quote for the day:

"Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it." -- John Naisbitt

April 28, 2013

SaaS Business Model Competitive Advantage Revisited
Network automation enables the SaaS vendor to service not just one customer, but many customers from a single infrastructure. With each new customer added, the average cost of operating that infrastructure is reduced for all. When you ask “What is SaaS?”, it is easy to get hung up on things like multi-tenancy, virtualization, and so forth. When you ask “Why is SaaS?”, there are no such concerns. What matters is uniform, automated infrastructure and scale.


Enterprise Data Platform Reference Architecture
This article proposes reference architecture for creating a new generation platform for delivering enterprise Data Information to knowledge workers to help improve their productivity and accuracy. It also articulates some high-level design options for implementing the platform.


Risk Enchantment, The Holy Grail of Risk
“I define risk enchantment as the process of delighting people with risk management. The outcome of risk enchantment is voluntary and long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial.”. How powerful a statement is that? And now imagine working for an organisation where the CEO talks about risk management like this! Here are top 10 quotes that resonated with the Enchantment from a risk management perspective.


Pivotal Launched From VMware, EMC Technologies
Pivotal's new services and newly retailored software packages will allow enterprises the ability to replicate the IT operations used by today's "Internet Giants" such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services, said Paul Maritz, who is the Pivotal CEO and was the CEO of VMware from 2008 until 2012. Maritz spoke in a webcast Wednesday launching the new company.


Big Data vs. Business Intelligence vs. Customer Intelligence
In this video from McKinsey and Company, Shashi Upadhyay explains how Big Data can provide forward-looking insights for businesses, whereas customer intelligence and business intelligence have traditionally focused on past data. By starting with the problem your company is trying to solve (e.g. improve conversion rates, improve cross-sell rates, attract more prospects, etc.), your company will not need to focus on a large BI project. Instead, consider using a Big Data approach and analyzing internal and external data sets.


Three Essential Steps to Big Data Success
If you’re going to start a Big Data project, there are a few foundational steps to success you should know. While there’s a lot of advice about starting or succeeding with Big Data, much of it is actually about data management in general. That’s fine — you’ll need those skills, but since they apply to any data project, they can’t really be called the essential — or, if you prefer, the quintessential — steps specific to Big Data.


Free Response-Time Database Monitoring Tool
IgniteFree takes the real time features of the award winning Confio Ignite 8 software and makes them free for all to use. Why? Confio believes that when more DBAs see how effective they can be with Response Time analysis, it will drive interest in the full enterprise features of Ignite 8.


Enterprise Architecture
An EA model is an aid to avoiding the waste associated with building the wrong systems; or building the right systems in the wrong business environment. It is also an aid to breaking down silos and fostering true collaboration between the business, IT and other stakeholders ... EA is about providing the correct information to strategic planners to allow them to be more effective in what they do.


Meet DSSD, Andy Bechtolsheim’s secret chip startup for big data
The DSSD system sounds like it treats files not as a series of bits but as an object that gets a name. That name is the file’s address and it stays the same for the life of the file. The result is there’s no central index that stands between sending the data to storage and storing it, and people can write to it in parallel and not worry abut overwrites. It is both faster and can scale out.


Develop Financial Applications with F# and QuantLib
QuantLib is an open source library for modeling, trading and risk management of quantitative finance that can be used with F# lanugage. In order to access QuantLib, you have to make use of NQuantLib.dll, which is a .NET component and NQuantLibc.dll, which is a native component.



Quote for the day:

"It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle. " -- Richard M. DeVos

April 27, 2013

APK Clues: Better Gaming Services Coming to Android?
The games service probably has nothing to do with Google Glass; Glass can't run complex apps. The Glass team accidentally shipped the full suite of Google Play Services with their new app, which is not normal. This included a never-before-seen backend for an extensive multiplayer gaming service, with just about every gaming feature you could possibly imagine.


Authentication with iOS and Windows Azure Mobile Services
This article will cover how to connect the Mobile Service we set up there with an iOS client using the Mobile Services SDK for iOS. All of the source code for this iOS app is available here in GitHub. I’m going to cover a few different areas in the app in this post: giving users the choice of how to login, creating and logging in with custom accounts, logging users out and returning to the root view controller, caching user tokens so we won’t have to login each time, and dealing with expired tokens now that we’re caching them.


What do people mean when they say "the PC is dying"?
What is meant by "the death of the PC" is that the relevance of the PC within people's lives is being diluted by compute devices that are not PCs and the ability to use them for activities that are rewarding yet do not require PCs. This has in fact been going on a long time (e.g. SMS), it's just that we've reached a tipping point over the past few years where the whole world seems to be full of smartphones and tablets and everyone is now talking about it.


Islamic group expands targets in bank DDoS attacks
With each new wave of attacks the group has shifted to other targets. The first wave, which lasted about six weeks from mid-September to mid-October, targeted mostly major financial institutions. Targets included Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and PNC Bank. In the second phase, which went for seven weeks from December to late January, the attackers expanded to mid-tier banks and credit unions.


U.S. council warns of threat of cyber attacks, market runs
"Technological failures, natural disasters, and cyberattacks can emanate from anywhere, at any time," the report said. "Preparation and planning to address these potential situations are essential to maintain the strength and resilience of our financial system." The FSOC, a powerful body chaired by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, voted on Thursday to adopt its annual report, which includes a set of recommendations to other regulatory agencies. The heads of those agencies are members of the council.


Two-factor or not two-factor? That is the security question
As if to underscore the point that mere passwords are passé, the Twitter hack coincided with the release of Verizon's 2013 data breach report, which pointed the finger at single-factor authentication as a primary culprit in security spills. According to the report, 76 percent of network intrusions in 2012 exploited weak or stolen credentials. The case for two-factor authentication would appear to be a slam dunk. But not all security experts praise the solution as a remedy for all security ills.

Is it time to create your own succession plan?
If you’re in a senior leadership role in a large organization, there’s a good chance there is a succession plan for your position in case you get promoted, win the lottery, get hit by a bus, leave for another company or need to be replaced for poor performance. In smart companies, an orderly replacement of high-level, critical positions is considered to be strategically important to the continued success of the company. A failure to proactively plan for succession is the same as failing to safeguard the financial assets of an organization.


The Internet of Things gets a protocol -- it's called MQTT
"One of the big challenges for right now is that there is not a clear open standard" for message communication with embedded systems, said Mike Riegel, an IBM vice president of mobile and application integration middleware. "We know historically that unless you get to an open standard like this, it is not possible to drive the breakthroughs that are needed."


Moves, mistakes prove Steve Jobs era at Apple over, say analysts
"I just don't think Apple is running quite as well as in Jobs' days," said Ezra Gottheil, analyst with Technology Business Research. "Mistakes have been made, like the poor performance of newer OSes on older hardware, Maps, the miss on the iMac, the neglect of the professional market." Cook, in fact, rued the decision to launch the iMac, the firm's hallmark all-in-one desktop, last October even though Apple had no hardware to ship.


Java Security Questions Answered
Most of the products tested (except Windows Server 2012), use Oracle's Java in one form or another, at least for client access and also in some cases within the management interface. With numerous vulnerabilities recently discovered in Java, leading to guidance from Department of Homeland Security and others to disable it entirely, this raised some questions about usability and possibly even security of the devices tested.



Quote for the day:

"Winning becomes easier over time as the cornerstones of confidence become habits" -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

April 26, 2013

Why You Need an In-Memory Action Plan
You need to change the way you look at IT infrastructure, applications, and the infrastructure that’s running those applications. Truly, with some of these new technologies like in-memory technology, there are no barriers, things that you can’t do. Words like “no, we can’t do it” start to go away. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be cheap, I’m not going to tell you there’s not going to be bumps in the road as you’re doing it, but things that you really thought were not possible are possible now. Period.


Inside Windows Phone – code samples
What Windows Phone code samples are available to you, and how do you get them? We publish a large number of code samples that cover a solid range of Windows Phone developer scenarios. In this video, we touch on some of the code samples we’ve created to help you design and develop great Windows Phone apps, and where to find them.


Data Breaches: When the Lawyers Get Involved
Data breaches have become big business for many law firms. ... But it's not just a cash-grab by the lawyers — an interesting example was described where companies are starting to loop their attorneys in at the first hint of a data breach. This way, the attorney-client privileges kick in immediately, they can pre-empt a potential influx of lawsuits by just taking a few simple steps


Senate committee limits government electronic surveillance
"Americans are very concerned about unwarranted intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace," said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and main sponsor of the bill. "There's no question that if [police] want to go into your house and go through your files and drawers, they're going to need a search warrant. If you've got the same files in the cloud, you ought to have the same sense of privacy."


How Apple's iWatch Will Push Big Data Analytics
These intelligent wrist watches will permit monitoring of an individual's heart rate, calorie intake, activity levels, quality of sleep and more. Now imagine collecting that data on a much bigger scale. Potentially, governments, medical agencies, etc. will be able to use such collective data to gain a better insight into a nation's physical output, eating habits, risk indicators, and worrying trends. The buzz word surrounding this type of data analysis is 'big data' and I predict that it will have a huge impact in the business world.


Storage Where You Need It, When You Need It
As most CIOs understand, the business value of the IT department is only loosely correlated to the infrastructure they manage. The real value is the information contained in the datacenter. And that data is not worth much if the data is not safe and accessible. Therefore the datacenter needs to be architected in a way that stored information is highly available and applications consuming it have efficient and reliable access. How do you do that?


The fight for HTML5: 'Keep DRM out' lobby steps up standards battle
... the specification would encourage the proliferation of closed-source DRM plug-ins that would be required to view media and that each DRM plug-in could impose arbitrary restrictions on the type of hardware and software that could play media. The BBC raised the possibility of a content decryption module working with EME blocking the ability of an OS to forward an online video stream to a third party device in its submission supporting encrypted media extensions earlier this year.


Five Ways to Use ARA to Ease Agile Development Challenges
The challenges created by agile can limit the development method's value, making agile-specific support strategies key in many organizations. Fostering agile development in the enterprise can be much easier when application deployment processes are simplified. Application release automation can make this simplification possible. There are a few key ways that ARA enables better operations, these include:


Lessen Core Banking Risks, use IT controls
It is a pre-requisite for IT managers to possess good banking domain knowledge and be conversant with the features available on the CBS. He should have knowledge of IT audits with Risk assessment techniques to determine whether the information systems are properly protected and controlled and provide value to the organisation. Likewise, an IT manager should also have an understanding of the organisation and its environment, and of factors which can affect the entity, both external and internal.


No more fake names: German court sides with Facebook over pseudonym lawsuit
"The court allowed that the applicability of the strict German data protection law is undermined by clever internal organisation in an IT company... For both users and German companies which have to comply with the German data protection standards, it is difficult to understand why an offer for the German market may ignore these standards," Thilo Weichert, the head of the ULD, said in a statement.



Quote for the day:

"My responsibility is leadership, and the minute I get negative, that is going to have an influence on my team." -- Don Shula

April 25, 2013

Oracle: Renewed Security Focus Will Delay Java 8
In a blog posted Thursday, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group, wrote that maintaining Java security "always takes priority over developing new features," which is why some features planned for Java 8 slipped past Milestone 6 (M6) at the end of January, the original feature-complete target.


Six open source security myths debunked - and eight real challenges to consider
Detractors of open source software often point to its broad developer base and open source code as a potential security risk. But that's not a fair assessment, according to Dr Ian Levy, technical director with the CESG ... Open source is no worse or better than proprietary software when it comes to security, according to Levy, who busted myths about open source security — and detailed its genuine security challenges — at the Open Source, Open Standards conference in London last week.


Cisco's new director-class storage switch boosts throughput 6X
The MDS 9710 replaces the Cisco 9500 series as Cisco's top director-class storage switch. The 9500 series offered up to 256Gbps of total throughput, ... The MDS 9710 offers a total of 24 terabits per second of switching capacity for Fibre Channel connectivity and offers Cisco's highest fault-tolerant capabilities with fully redundant (N+1) fans, switching fabrics, and power-supplies or grid redundancy.


Look out, Oracle: SkySQL and MariaDB join forces
On April 23, SkySQL announced that it had signed a merger agreement with Monty Program Ab, MariaDB's parent company. The aim of this new company, which will go under the name SkySQL, is to develop MariaDB into a truly interoperable "NewSQL" open-source database in collaboration with its customers, partners, and the community. The community side will continue as the MariaDB Foundation.


How does advanced malware use the network against you?
"Attackers can change the domain every day, and that's how malware works, and they're able to hide their communication and evade detection by an intrusion prevention system (IPS) or security gateway," Newman said. But by closely watching the communications of all of the devices within a network, Damballa, FireEye, RSA and other vendors are profiling this type of behavior, using a technique often referred to as advanced threat protection.


The CIO 'can't be an order-taker'
The global economy seems to be recovering, albeit slowly, and it therefore follows that the tremendous pressure—financial, technological, existential—on companies' IT organizations will ease. Right? Wrong. Well, maybe. It all depends. Three senior executives—Freddie Mac CIO Robert Lux, Evercore Partners managing director of equity research Kirk Materne, and Blackstone CTO Bill Murphy—gathered here at theBloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit to tease out the real role of the CIO in the modern business, debate best practices for the IT organization and offer solutions for future success.


Hadoop Usage Poised to Explode
The TDWI survey, based on a sample of 263 respondents, suggests that Hadoop adoption could ramp up very quickly: for example, more than one-quarter (28 percent) of respondents expect to be managing production deployments of HDFS in the next 12 months. Others expect their Hadoop deployments to come online more gradually: 24 months (13 percent), 36 months (10 percent), or more than three years (12 percent).


Gauging BYOD acceptance
A whopping 35% of the shops surveyed say consumerization of IT will have a dramatic positive impact on user satisfaction over the next 12-18 months. Another 47% say it will have a moderately positive impact, which, taken together, means more than 80% of the IT folks surveyed see BYOD as a big win. User productivity also scores high, with 76% saying consumerization will have a moderate or dramatic positive impact, while 70% expect the same benefit for business agility, and 69% say consumerization will dramatically or moderately improve process efficiency/collaboration.


Perception is Reality: 8 Steps for Changing How Others See You
The “perception is reality” adage is most often applied to the way each of us sees our own environment. If we see the glass as half full, we will operate from that reality and the glass will always be at least half full. But what if we turn that adage inside out? What if the reality we’re experiencing is due in part to how others perceive us?


Are developers really skilled up for the cloud?
“Developers - when they build an in-house-only solution, in my experience - don’t think a lot about security and the security of that data or that application. That has been the major difference between things we put on-premise only and the things we’re going to put in the cloud,” Hackland said. “The developers are going to have to take into account the integrity and the security of that data. There are probably lots of other [skills issues] but that’s the thing that immediately jumps to mind for me. It’s a different skillset - or a different thinking at least - for the developers as we make that transition,” he said.



Quote for the day:

"Some people change their ways when they see the light; others when they feel the heat" -- Caroline Schoeder

April 24, 2013

The Storage Metrics That Matter
For many, storage is just a bunch of high-capacity hard drives storing all of the organization's data assets, but as the layers are peeled back, it becomes apparent that storage is so much more. Moreover, as organizations experience problems with their storage, nailing down the root cause of the problem can be an exercise in frustration, particularly when it's intermittent. Which metrics really matter when it comes to monitoring storage?


Colorado Startup Making App To Cure Sedentary Habits
The USB rechargeable insole, which can go in any shoe, is equipped with two sensors that can tell if a person is sitting, standing, walking, running, climbing stairs or cycling. Data collected from the insole is transferred to an application on an iPhone that will tell users how much of their day has been spent sitting versus standing, walking or running. The app also will provide calories burned and the number of steps taken.


Mac sales growth stalls -- here's why Apple doesn't care
That jibes with numbers from The NPD Group, which tracks U.S. retail sales, and which last week said Mac sales were flat in the first quarter. Figuring out why Mac sales have gone soft was relatively easy for David Daoud of IDC. In an interview two weeks ago, he dissected what others called a "brutal" quarter for PC shipments. "Apple's facing a very similar environment [to the PC industry in general]," Daoud said then.


Verizon data breach report 2013: Data shows need for risk awareness
Alexander said Verizon's findings highlight how important it is for organizations to conduct a baseline inventory of sensitive data, so it's easier to discover what's missing or what has been tampered with in the wake of a security incident. "I'm a big fan of not only knowing what data you have, but also putting it only on approved sites, because putting security controls on tired systems can be more expensive," Alexander said.


SOLID Agile Development
From reading the Agile lore, you might think that the only answer people give to this is, "Always do TDD and pair programming." But this answer is incomplete. You can do TDD (badly) and pair programming (ineffectively) and not end up in the right place. Alternatively, you can end up in the right place even if you don't do TDD and pair programming, so clearly there's something else that's really the key element.


Mobility Management is BYOD Risk Management
The most-frequently-cited CIO concerns regarding Mobility right now are about BYOD, and are primarily around the costs and risks of technology management - including the very high likelihood of increasing and accelerating technology fragmentation. As we said in a recent Strategic Perspective, “BYOD” is really “BYOT.” And BYOT’s main challenge is the increasing scale and diversity of device numbers, device types, software ecosystems (including OSes, apps, and development stacks), and access points.


ESB Performance Round 6.5
This article presents the latest performance study conducted by the WSO2 ESB team with the latest release of WSO2 ESB (4.6.0). The most significant performance enhancement in this release is making the Passthrough Transport the default transport. In this article the performance of a number of leading open source ESBs are compared and the improvements to the WSO2 ESB are discussed. The results show that the latest WSO2 ESB performs strongly compared to other open source ESBs.


WMI CIM-plified Part 2: PowerShell 3.0
PowerShell 3.0 brings us into the world of CIM which I think you'll find to be a much easier approach for systems management using WMI. On the surface the syntax hasn't really changed much. We have a cmdlet to get instances of a WMI class either by class name or a filter. This is what we used to do:


Enterprises lack confidence in detecting and preventing threats
“Security remains a major concern among organizations. The Ponemon Institute report reveals that even emerging network security technologies are not as effective as they should be. Companies need to review their security investment weighting, to assess whether the areas of greatest risk are receiving adequate attention and how they can address serious security threats,” says Ravi Chauhan, managing directorIndia and SAARC, Juniper Networks


When IT is from Mars, and the business is from Venus
“We have been talking about IT alignment for years but it doesn’t just happen you have to do something. The conversations we have with IT are very technical; business doesn’t understand server uptime so the alignment [needs to be] around communication too,” she said, speaking at CA Technologies’ customer conference in Las Vegas.



Quote for the day:

"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow" -- Robert Kiyosaki

April 23, 2013

A Role for Role-Based Monitoring in the Virtualization, Cloud Space
Virtualization has changed the way in which we must think about security. First, it has merged the traditionally separate roles of networking, storage and server management -- disrupting well-established processes based on separation of duties. Second, it has collapsed configurations of servers, switches, networks and storage into one system, effectively concentrating all of the risk into one platform, creating a system that is "too big to fail."


Network security assessment: Internal testing relies on various tools
While it is important to test the exterior of your network, an attacker may already be inside. The attacker could be a disgruntled employee or an outsider using services located behind-the-firewall and perimeter security defenses. If you are considering testing your internal security controls, there are several things you need to review, among them the types of internal tests, the testing techniques you may want to employ and the importance of testing employees


Conway's Game of Life - A rule framework and implementation
Conway's game of life is however not only fascinating to look at but is of theoretic interest for mathematics physics, philosophy, economy and many other scientific fields. E.g. it is one of the most famous examples of cellular automata which has become a popular topic to study in computability theory. See Wikipedia for a more in depth article about Conway's game of life,


JavaScript Best Practices
As a web developer who has concentrated on back-end coding in C# and front-end look and feel via HTML and CSS, my skills in JavaScript evolved over time instead of by conscious effort. While this is not uncommon, it can allow for some bad habits to be formed. This set of best practices is my way of taking a step back and addressing JavaScript as a first-class language, with both good parts and bad parts.


Security Manager's Journal: A little housecleaning
VPN configuration has always been a point of contention between the security, desktop and network teams. Our current VPN client is deployed in a split tunneling mode. When someone is using the VPN client, only resources on our network are forced to go through the encrypted VPN tunnel. Everything else, such as webmail, social media and personal file storage like Dropbox, is routed through the user's local Internet connection.


Microsoft uses OpenFlow SDN for network monitoring and analysis
The OpenFlow-based tap aggregation system, called Distributed Ethernet Monitoring (DEMON) Appliance, is an alternative to expensive network packet brokers -- the specialized appliances that aggregate network taps and SPAN ports. Microsoft Principal Network Architect Rich Groves presented DEMON at the Open Networking Summit Tuesday.


Making a business case for data storage and backup
Focus the business case on what really adds value. But, when it comes to data, what is valuable? And, just because data is available, does that mean we need it or will use it? I start with two critical, value-based questions: What decisions would you like to make?; and What data do you need in order to make those decisions?


Under New Business Demands, CIOs Can't Cling to Old BI
CIOs must grapple with the fact that the business must be involved in building out IT since he can no longer have tight centralized control of all technology. Organizations have many different applications sprouting up, from visual discovery tools and business analytics that are also becoming part of the growing use of cloud computing.


9 Fallacies of Java Performance
Java performance has the reputation of being something of a Dark Art. Partly this is due to the sophistication of the platform, which makes it hard to reason about in many cases. However, there has historically also been a trend for Java performance techniques to consist of a body of folk wisdom rather than applied statistics and empirical reasoning. In this article, I hope to address some of the most egregious of these technical fairytales.


Anti-virus Software is Dead…Really?
The study leveraged data from over a billion systems worldwide and it turns out that systems that do not have up-to-date AV are 5.5 times more likely to be infected with malware than systems that are protected. It’s also noteworthy that almost 270 million systems worldwide did not have up-to-date AV installed in the second half of 2012; many people that could be benefiting from the protection that AV offers, are not.



Quote for the day:

"The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you're learning you're not old." -- Rosalyn S. Yalow

April 22, 2013

iOS Safari Browser Has A Massive Caching Issue!
In the past to ensure my jQuery AJAX requests were not cached, the “cache: false” option within the AJAX call normally sufficed. Not if you’re making POST web service requests. It’s only until recently I found using “cache:false” option will not have an affect on POST requests, as stated on jQuery API: “Pages fetched with POST are never cached, so the cache and ifModified options in jQuery.ajaxSetup() have no effect on these requests.” ... Read on for a work around for this issue.


The Seven Information Smells of Domain Modelling
We discuss signals in your domain model that tell you there are more questions to ask. We call these signals “information smells”, and they tell us we may not have a complete understanding of the information our domain cares about. The smell could mean that we are missing information from our domain model or that we included incorrect information on the domain model.


BPM is just a subset of EA
EA is really the over acrhing framework for organizations, and if so surely BPM (as we originally conceived back in 1992) is simply a sub set of EA? So what you may ask? Well the whole world of BPM needs to get with EA, or do we need to redefine BPM completely? -- Join this discussion on Linkedin.


Dell Boomi unveils AtomSphere Summer 12
"And the security enhancements also give IT teams further assurance that their data and IP is secure, whether moving through cloud or on-premise applications," Nucci said. The new cloud integration platform comes with a crowd sourced regression testing feature called Boomi Assure to ensure that customer integration processes are tested each time Boomi is updated.


Do your due diligence before taking the leap
On the upside, the cloud gives you the flexibility of being able to take your business with you while on the go. But there are always security concerns when you store important data on the web. King offers the following pointers to consider when deciding whether cloud-computing technology is right your practice:


Review: Best tablets for business
That's a mere drop in the tablet Tsunami. On the back of a stunning 78.4 per cent year-over-year growth in tablet shipments at the close of 2012, IDC expects tablets to surpass desktop PCs in 2013, and laptops in 2014. Don't want to miss the tablet wave? Here's a rundown of four tablets which mean business.


IT Challenges and Opportunities in 2013
At a recent ISACA conference, we asked attendees about the key business/tech issues, challenges and opportunities facing them in 2013. Take a look at what the conference attendees consider as the challenges and opportunities for the year 2013.


Master Data and Integration – Data, Function, and Process
Your organization’s use of master data has to be rationalized along the different dimensions of utilization, no matter what domains are referenced and no matter the original context. A more mature approach to master data design looks at consistency and accuracy in shared data creation and use across multiple sources, for multiple domains, used by all applications, and synchronized across (and even external to) the enterprise.


10 Rules For Working With Big Data
Many organizations will need to formulate big data projects in the near future, if not already. Reflecting the all-encompassing, 360 degree perspective that a successful big data analytics campaign should take, organizations must resolve the issues and address the challenges of implementing big data in professional environments, and use it to increase revenue potential -- a result of new marketing insight and analytic enhancement.


Deep thinking on complex systems: A devops reading list
The shift in focus — from risk avoidance to anti-fragility, from a focus on stability to a focus on resilience, and from a focus on large-grained contextual systems to small-grained composable alternatives — will and is opening a whole new world of agility, experimentation and execution for enterprise IT. It’s a critical subject for every IT practitioner to understand.



Quote for the day:

"The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want. " -- Ben Stein

April 21, 2013

What Happens When Startup Founders Disagree?
One of the top reasons startups fail is conflicts between founders. In the beginning of your startup, disagreements between founders are likely to arise. In fact, I’d be worried if you never argued. The question is: how do you deal with conflict resolution? Can you channel it positively to fuel your startup’s growth? Stella Fayman has found it beneficial to develop a framework around conflict resolution.


Open Source is Taking Over the Software World
"Increasingly, enterprises see [open source software] as leading innovation, delivering higher quality, and driving growth rather than being just a free or low-cost alternative," Skok noted. "Going forward, we can expect more disruption from open source, new business models, and many more exciting new projects and companies."


Welcome to Berkeley: Where Hadoop isn’t nearly fast enough
AMPLab’s most well-known product in the big data space, called Spark, is an in-memory parallel processing framework that’s comparable to Hadoop MapReduce except, its creators claim, it is up to 100 times faster. Because it runs in-memory, Spark might be comparable with something like Druid or SAP’s HANA system, too. Spark is the processing engine that powersClearStory’s next-generation analytics and visualization service.


Windows Blue Wish List: 15 Must-See Improvements
An early leak of Windows Blue revealed several much-needed enhancements, including beefed-up syncing options, deeper Start screen personalization, and some simple yet effective interface tweaks. Still, that's just scratching the tip of the iceberg. Above and beyond the tweaks already found in the leak, here's our wish list of 15 potential Windows Blue improvements that could help make Windows 8 twice as nice as it is now.


Apple keeps patching Java on OS X Snow Leopard after proposed drop-dead date
Apple could do so for months to come. Even after Oracle halts support for Java 6, it will still distribute patches to enterprises that have negotiated contract support plans. Apple will probably have access to those only-for-corporate-customers patches and will use them to draft updates for its own users. The last public patches for Java 5, for example, shipped in November 2009, but Apple continued to issue Java 5 updates for OS X Leopard until June 2011, or 20 months later.


Wireless sensor networking technology is taking off
Arundeep Kakkar, a wireless technology expert, says that hard to service areas have found respite through the adoption of wireless sensor technology. “Wireless sensor technology revolves around the concept of remote sensing: sensing the data, transferring the data to an intended site, and processing the data meant to serve the relevant application,” he says.


Larry Page: Android powers Google Glass, obviously
"Obviously Glass runs on Android," Page said toward the end of the conference call reporting Google's strong first-quarter financial results. It's not a surprise, given how the engineering resources Google already has poured into Android. But the company hadn't confirmed it, even when it detailed Google Glass specifications last week.


As the PC market turns, touchscreens start to take over
Samsung's Chromebook has been at the top of Amazon's list of bestselling notebooks for several months. But a closer look at the rest of that list reveals some interesting facts about an industry in transition. Most notably, touchscreens are finally starting to take off.


Enterprises are moving to the "suite" life
Moving to a suite can mean asking end users to part with their preferred devices, applications or services-and therein lies the CIO’s challenge. To succeed, CIOs must demonstrate that a broad-based enterprise solution can meet most, if not all, end-user needs. The CIO must help users and decision makers understand the real goal of IT, which isn’t to give every user a specific product to solve a specific problem but to ensure that the entire organization is lean, efficient, productive, secure, and compliant.


Ember.js - Web Applications Done Right
The first thing we need to define in our application is the routes that our application will be built up with. You can think of a route as a state that the user can be in . Each route will have its own clearly defined URL. Ember.js will generate controllers, view and template automatically for you, which is convenient. Whenever you find yourself needing more than the basic pre-defined functionality you simply create you own implementation and Ember.js will automatically substitute your code in place of the generated code.



Quote for the day:

"Make the present good, and the past will take care of itself." -- Knute Rockne