Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 10, 2013

10 ways to improve virtual server storage

Certainly there are scientific statistics that are analyzed in storage performance, but the difference is that the storage is external to the hypervisor and physical server and, thus, the hypervisor (and your virtualization performance monitoring tools) doesn't typically have as much insight into what's happening with storage (but that's changing fast). Here are 10 tips that can help you improve your storage systems' performance for your VMs.

Highly Available Near Real-time Data Distribution Beyond the Network Edge
Darach Ennis who has a wealth of experience and expertise from his background working as Principal Consultant, Systems Engineer & Global Solutions Architect with companies such as Betfair, IONA, JP Morgan Chase and StreamBase, investigates data distribution biased for occasionally connected near-real-time data streaming in low fidelity environments with traditional messaging and discusses the nuances, tradeoffs and considerations that require a very different approach from traditional practices.

Make performance and scalability testing continuous ... or else
You don't build a bridge, then try to add load-bearing capabilities at the end of the project -- but most software projects try to do exactly that. Even projects that claim to be "agile" actually treat performance and scalability as that thing they push off all the risk onto at the end. About the only thing worse than this silly behavior is going through the motions of "early optimization" for a routine or two and acting is if that meant something.

Geojit BNP Paribas launches India's first trading app for Facebook
Geojit BNP Paribas’ new application suite offers a mix of education and fun as it allows visitors to play stock games, access investment tutorials and other multimedia contents. It also allows users to carry out transactions in BSE using their access credentials. The application was developed by Geojit Technologies Ltd., which is a subsidiary of Geojit BNP Paribas.

Keeping Working When the Network Doesn’t
In reality, there are other multipliers to downtime, including the interruption to Internet service at customer premises. The interruption could come as a result of link fails to the provider among other possible reasons. A visit to Outage Analyzer indicates that, at any point in time, there is always a network outage here or there. There are times when the outage may not be absolute but the Internet may be running at a speed that cannot run the software smoothly, which may either slow down or stop work for a while.

For young students, a C# coding workshop for kids
Pluralsight, a private company, primarily offers online coding courses for professionals for a fee, but the online C# course is free and doesn't even require registration. The C# course is offered along with two other programming courses for children and young people called Scratch and App Inventor.

SIX Exchange Launches Mutual Fund Intraday Trading Platform
Secondary market trading is usually done in the over-the-counter market, which is a bilateral trading market where trades are not logged. The new segment, however, will mean that the trades are recorded and therefore visible. “The platform will allow visibility of prices and trades, which increases transparency, and in volatile markets being able to see what is going on is a big advantage for the end user,” said Picard.

Enterprise Data World reveals nine principles of analytics rock stars
Wehbe, who spoke this week before a crowded room at the Enterprise Data World 2013 conference, is making it his business to teach people about what it takes to become an indispensable analytics professional. And he had a great message for newcomers to the profession as well as seasoned veterans: Remember that analytics excellence is about more than just crunching numbers; it's also about people, processes and, not least of all, passion.

Managing Technical Debt
Messy code, which is rarely read or touched and doesn’t implement important requirements, does not have to be absolutely perfect and therefore we don’t need to spend a lot of effort on refactoring it into great code. So the question is which parts of the code should have high quality? It’s possible that a piece of the implementation has a bad design without having a bad quality - if no good design is required for that piece of the implementation.

Learning From Auditor War Stories
Organizations need to remember that if an auditor is on-site, they're always on the lookout for practices that give them hints that things are amiss. One big hint could be the way that IT workers make changes in response to audit queries -- "The really silly things assessors see happen when someone says, 'Oh, I'll just change that for you,'" says Walt Conway, a QSA for audit firm 403 Labs.

Quote for the day:

"Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises." -- Demosthenes

May 09, 2013

Keeping up with Moore's Law is getting harder
"Are we closer to an end than we were five years ago? Of course. But are we to the point where we can realistically predict that end, we don't think so. We are confident that we are going to continue to provide the basic building blocks that allow improvements in electronic devices," Holt said.

Does a cloud have to be public, or can it be private?
Is "private cloud" an oxymoron? Or just plain moron? The top brass at Amazon Web Services have been very clear since the launch of the e-tailers public cloud in 2006 that they do not believe in private clouds running in corporate data centers, and that to be a cloud, by definition, means being a shared public utility and not investing in servers, storage, switches, and infrastructure software.

Flash vs. Hybrid vs. HDD Decision Points
Today’s storage landscape is more competitive than it’s ever been. CIOs in the market for new storage have a plethora of options from which to choose, from making a decision to buy from a traditional storage vendor vs. a scrappy startup, to deciding between flash versus HHD, to everything in between. Such a range of options and opportunities often breeds concern over making the right choice for an organization’s storage needs.

Can't Use DHCP? Try VMM 2012 IP Pools
IP Pools are best described by what they aren't: They aren't DHCP. They might look like DHCP and they might behave like DHCP, but VMM IP Pools are an altogether different animal. These nifty little VMM constructs enable a DHCP-like experience for Windows Server VMs. They introduce all the best parts of DHCP to server address provisioning, but without being DHCP itself. What results is the same zero-effort IP addressing experience that desktop administrators have enjoyed for years.

BaaS: The One Cloud Acronym Every Mobile App Developer Should Know
Have you heard of BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service)? No, BaaS is not some cloud based escort service, instead it describes a new type of cloud service which allows mobile app developers to offload many common ‘backend’ operations like online storage, push notifications and social network integration that they would have otherwise had to build themselves.

Highly critical vulnerability fixed in Nginx Web server software
Identified as CVE-2013-2028, the vulnerability is a stack-based buffer overflow and was first introduced in the Nginx 1.3.9 development version back in November 2012. The flaw is also present in the 1.4.0 stable version released last month. The bug, which has been rated as highly critical by vulnerability management firm Secunia, was fixed in the new Nginx 1.4.1 stable version and Nginx 1.5.0 development version.

Government Lab Reveals Secure Quantum Internet
Com Dev said it's using cheaper, off-the-shelf parts in the satellite construction because of the overall uncertainty that is a new technology. Who knows if the atmosphere can even support quantum distribution? And, if our atmosphere can support such a distribution, a practical network is still years away. The firm is shooting for a public demonstration of the technology in 2016.

Bridging IT-business divide a two-way street; BI projects can help
Determining a return on investment (ROI) for IT initiatives is often difficult. The metrics for measuring success are at best unclear—or worse, they change for each project. Furthermore, the ROI may span multiple departments or large functions, making it all but impossible to calculate in any meaningful way. What’s the ROI of your network, data warehouse or operational applications?

How to set the Big Data Strategy
The need is to understand why traditional business intelligence/data warehousing cannot solve a given problem, as big data is not necessarily the only answer. Develop a minimal set of big data governance directives upfront. Big data governance is a chicken-and-egg problem--you can't govern or secure what you haven't explored. However, exploring vast datasets without governance and security introduces risk, and firms must address this.

Different Approaches for Product Backlog Grooming
The purpose of backlog grooming is to keep the product backlog up to date and clean. Scrum doesn’t prescribe how you should do backlog grooming, and different approaches are used by product owners and teams to do this. Jeff Patton describes an experience that he had with a team that was doing backlog grooming, in the blog post backlog grooming bugs me.

Quote for the day:

"You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one." -- John Wooden

May 08, 2013

CVS Ends Refill Reminders As New Privacy Rule Looms

“Over the years, we have collaborated with pharmaceutical companies to improve patient compliance to medication dispensed in our retail pharmacies by mailing select refill reminders to encourage and improve their medication adherence,” a CVS spokesman writes us. “However, in light of the recent HIPAA Omnibus Rule effective this September that places new restrictions on the usage of PHI, we have decided to end supplier-funded refill reminders through our retail business.”

Seagate unleashes first consumer SSD; enterprise version gets blazing fast 12Gbps
Seagate calls its 600 SSD "the ultimate laptop upgrade," delivering nearly four times faster boot speeds over standard hard disk drives, shorter application load times and improved system responsiveness. The drive has the latest 6Gbps SATA interface. The Seagate 600 SSD is available in multiple 7mm or 5mm-high form factors, meaning they fit into most ultra-thin notebooks as well as standard laptops. The drive comes in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities.

Are Solid State Disk Storage Options Right for Your Enterprise?
On the flip side of the equation, solid state disks are pretty terrible when it comes to raw capacity. Traditional spinning hard drives can grow to be much larger than solid state disks. It's common to see solid state disks still measured in gigabytes, whereas the biggest traditional hard disk tops out at a whopping 4 TB. In terms of capacity, then, solid state disks are very expensive.

Turn your board of directors into a key strategic asset
Creating a board that is a key asset begins with making sure that you find the best people to join. Failure to take this process seriously can result in problems relating to oversight of management activities, delays in decision making and legal action by outside shareholders who depend on the directors to look out for their interests.

Hitachi NAS Platform adds primary deduplication
BlueArc still hadn't implemented dedupe at the time of the HDS acquisition, and it took HDS engineers more than a year to make it ready for commercial use. HDS made sure the primary dedupe didn't impact performance by offloading much of the performance to hardware. Michael Hay, vice president of product planning for HDS, said Hitachi NAS uses Permabit'shash database, but "all the other heavy lifting is done by Hitachi."

Internet of Things: turning flying into a more pleasurable experience using data
“Many of the more advanced features involve tracking passengers through a mix of face recognition and crowd-sourcing software that already exists in airports, plus the GPS that is already available in smart devices. For instance, a traveler who pre-orders food online or though their smartphone will be able to have it delivered to them as they arrive at the departure lounge. When someone arrives, sensors will detect that person’s frame, and will notify the F&B outlet to get everything ready”

Data scientists need a cloud sandbox
Today’s statistical modelers and business analysts need high-performance cloud-centric development platforms–often known as “sandboxes”–where they can aggregate and prepare data sets, tweak segmentations and decision trees, and iterate through statistical models as they look for deep statistical patterns. Big data sandboxes are where you develop the all-important intellectual property – advanced analytic models – that extract intelligence from otherwise inchoate gobs of content.

How Data Centers Address Challenges in the Financial Services Industry
In an interview with RTHK Radio 3 in Hong Kong, Stewart Orrell, Equinix’s Director of Global Financial Services, explained how outsourcing data center services can save banks and brokers millions of dollars in capital expenditure. Stewart appeared on “Money for Nothing” – a business and finance show in which industry experts analyze current market trends.

Data-driven culture helps analytics team generate business value
In this excerpt from Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders, by business intelligence consultant and TechTarget research director Wayne Eckerson, readers will find commentary by three analytics managers, who explain to Eckerson how building a skilled analytics team and working effectively with business units on analytics applications can create tangible business value for a company.

AutoIt scripting increasingly used by malware developers
"Recently, we have seen an uptick in the amount of nefarious AutoIt tool code being uploaded to Pastebin," Kyle Wilhoit, a threat researcher at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, said Monday in a blog post. "One commonly seen tool, for instance, is a keylogger. Grabbing this code, anyone with bad intentions can quickly compile and run it in a matter of seconds."

Quote for the day:

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle."-- Martin Luther King

May 07, 2013

Hackers: From innocent curiosity to illegal activity
The researchers divided the process of evolving into a criminal hacker into three stages: initiation, growth, and maturation. ... Published studies focus primarily on the middle stage — growth — of the evolutionary path of computer hackers, in which hackers organize into loosely connected groups and virtual or real communities; acquire technical skills through mentoring and sharing; and establish social orders, group norms, and individual and social identities.

11 signs your IT project is doomed
Whether you're looking to avoid being saddled to a dud or to steer a doomed rollout out of the ditch, you must be able to recognize the signs of imminent failure well before a project comes apart at the seams. It can be a career-saver. We have gathered 11 red flags to look for in assessing IT project health. Be proactive whenever you encounter one -- or if you can, simply walk away. You career depends on it.

Up close and personal: VMware's Duncan Bennet
"I can still swim pretty well and still do rescues, but I do more of the directing," Bennet said. Sitting across from Bennet, who was dressed in a neat suit and clean-cut white hair, it was hard to imagine him listing surf lifesaving as a hobby outside of work. It seemed rather left of field for a man who is an integral part of a multibillion-dollar company.

Building an Interactive Navigation Bar

While you probably already have a design in mind that fits with the rest of your site, concentrating on HTML first, before worrying about the presentation and CSS, will help you keep your markup clean and tight. This results in better front-end performance and aids in organization as you continue your development.

Gates sticks to company line on tablets, knocks iPad
"With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device," Gates said. "But a lot those users are frustrated. They can't type. They can't create documents. They don't have Office there. So we're providing them something with the benefits they've seen that has made that a big category but without giving up what they expect in a PC."

Take back your power

As gifted as you might be, sometimes you might feel powerless. The larger organization asks a lot of you. Expectations are high, and you must continually find a way to navigate the politics, bureaucracy and naysayers while staying strong and committed to your work. Does this sound like you? If so, you might not be fully aware of the times that powerlessness grips you. Watch for these signs in your thoughts and words.

In an age of hacks, PA Senate addresses data breach security
“There’s no good reason to delay public notification after a data breach,” Pileggi said. “Potentially affected residents should know what happened as soon as possible when personal information is stolen so they can take steps to protect themselves from identity theft.” ... the bill requires state and local agencies involved in a beach to notify the state Office of Administration or local district attorney within three days.

Intel unveils low-power SoC architecture: Silvermont
Intel touts that the 22-nanometer System-on-a-Chip platform offers three times more performance for five times less power than the current Atom core generation. Some of the key enhancements include power sharing between GPUs and SoC IPs along with being able to manage burst frequency based on thermal, electrical, and power delivery constraints.

EU data law changes offer opportunities for Asia's datacenter markets
The challenge, however, is not many countries meet Europe's stringent data protection requirements, which effectively excludes them from being data transfer partners with the region, he noted. In Asia-Pacific, for example, only Australia and New Zealand meet the European Commission's criteria of having the adequate level of protection "by reason of its domestic law or of the international commitments it has entered into", according to the EC's Web site.

Dealing With Data and Customer Complexity
The explosion in channels, platforms, devices and other consumer touchpoints – not to mention the huge volumes of data produced as a result – has fundamentally changed the way companies approach the customer. Since changing its name from PPR to Kering ... has been focusing on an omnichannel approach that aims to develop closer relationships with consumers and present more of a seamless experience across its entire portfolio. How? By leveraging data. Why? Because customers are already operating that way.

Quote for the day:

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else." -- Tom Stoppard

May 06, 2013

Game Changers for a Cool Data Centre
Aniket Patange, Director–Datacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric, says the solution lies in evolving strategy around power conversion and distribution, server load/computing operations using server innovation, virtualisation, high efficiency, power supplies and load management strategy, and deploying cooling equipment such as better air management, moving to liquid cooling, optimised chilled-water plants, use of free cooling and heat recover and so on.

Why Are There So Many Points of View About What Lean is?
Lean thinking is not a religious dogma, it’s scientific thinking applied to business problems, which is why it’s OK in lean that different people have different opinions. Scientific thinking is counter-intuitive. One never learns something new – that works for reading newspapers and chatting with colleagues and friends. Instead, one refine’s one understanding of the world by testing hypotheses and learning to know when they apply, by how much.

Careful: Your big data analytics may be polluted by data scientist bias
Big data can only ever be as good as the machine learning that is used to provide insight, and even the most sophisticated machine learning techniques aren’t omniscient – the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” sums up this dilemma perfectly. Businesses planning to invest in big data science, with the hopes of reaping the potential wealth of insights available, must at all costs avoid introducing bias into the process – or risk jeopardizing everything.

8 Ways to Conquer Your Leadership Blind Spots
When we're in a leadership position, our blind spots can cause a great deal of damage, not only to our career but to the people who depend on us. How can you avoid this potential pitfall for yourself and your business? These eight tips can help.

Multiple Active Data Centers Required
Sandy “highlighted the importance of having data centers in geographically diverse locations,’’ DeCiccco said at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association 2013 Operations Conference here. “Multiple active data centers now are no longer a luxury, but a requirement.’’

Nine Business Drivers for Cloud Adoption
There is always a hype word or concept in technical fields, and it is up to us as technology professionals to determine if it is really hype or if the current industry topic/discussion may be life changing for our organizations. The talk amongst the “cool data kids on the block” right now is “the cloud.”

Cloud security: A real concern or just an excuse?
How do these seemingly inconsistent statistics come together? Rather than discussing the negative points at play, let’s think about what factors are at work. I’ve been talking to a lot of organizations lately — both enterprises as well as cloud service providers (CSPs) — about their cloud migration perspectives, and here’s what I’m seeing…

Struggling Companies Turn to Business-Savvy IT Pros to Boost the Bottom Line
"We're all buying from Oracle, from SAP, from Microsoft," he said. "What's the competitive advantage? There is none. The competitive advantage is all about information acquisition." Obtaining and using that information to develop the right products when markets need them is the future of Philips and its IT unit, Norton said. "They're going to be business technologists who review how we go to the marketplace," Norton said.

Growing Others
Many of us feel we do a great deed by giving our colleagues what our job requires or by being helpful. It’s one thing to be the light or water for a plant, and quite another to be the earth where the plant takes root or the trellis on which it leans for support and climbs skyward. Gardeners come and go, but the soil and trellis persist for at least a season of its development.

How to be an Encouraging Leader?
Encouraging leadership is a process that focuses on the individual’s strength and contributions in order to drive their motivation and performance to a higher level. When people are encouraged, they feel valued and cared for. Encouraging leaders bring the best in other people. Each one of us needs an encouraging leader to be around us when we need a lift. The encouraging leader adds value through believing in our potential and provides resources to help us achieve better results.

Quote for the day:

"You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through" -- Rosalynn Carter

May 05, 2013

The lighthouse of risk management

Some people think that risk management means you cannot innovate. If that were true, then how do people successfully innovate and comply with the laws and risks surrounding innovation? Because, they utilise all the experts they can to make the best solution. These people, utilise the lighthouse to assist them, and then generate an even better outcome.

RightScale Sees Increase in Multi-Cloud Use and Adoption
The cloud is growing and businesses are becoming more comfortable using it, even if it is of limited use cases for most businesses. The technologies are maturing faster than the customer base which means we should expect to see acceleration in developer use of cloud in the next five years, the report added.

Iron Penguin: First open-source "Iron Man" suit within reach?
Still with promising work with the integration of Google Glass, the Parallela supercomputer board, and Raspberry Pi, the first steps to Linux-powered fighting armor suits are being taken. It's rumored that Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, is working on a Iron Penguin, a powered diving suit, to go with his Subsuface diving log program.

Microsoft works to connect the cloud to your car
Switching to Microsoft's cloud computing will cut costs for operating the services, although Toyota plans to invest more money in new content for Gazoo.com. Toyota reached an agreement with Microsoft in April 2011, to work together on telematics, or network technology for cars. Toyota looked at other cloud computing services before picking Microsoft for the latest project, said Hiroyuki Yamada, an executive at e-Toyota, which looks over such technology.

How Today’s Sensors Could Make Tomorrow’s Cars Safer

Much of the advantage is due to software improvements that make the decisions to activate and control the brakes. “The millimeter wave radar sensor can only see out so far. So the question is: at the time we can detect it, what’s the rate we can slow it down?” says Bill Camp, an instructor at the company’s training facility, Lexus College.

Excellent Analytics Tip #22: Calculate Return On Analytics Investment!
Businesses, by and large, don’t understand the ROI of analytics… the Return on Analytics, if you will. Everyone else seems to get an ROI calculation, but not us. Marketing dollars (hopefully!) get measured by their Return on Ad Spend. Product improvements are quantified in incremental sales. Even internal tools are evaluated by work hours saved. Yet the analytics team rarely has its costs measured in terms of impact on The Company.

The CIA and the Cloud

One reason the CIA started moving to cloud-based computing in 2009 was that it saw the cloud as being more secure than conventional IT systems. Back then, Jill Tummler Singer, who was the CIA's deputy CIO at the time, said, "By keeping the cloud inside your firewalls, you can focus your strongest intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors on your perimeter, thus gaining significant advantage over the most common attack vector -- the Internet."

Implementing Kanban in Practice
During our conversations with David J. Anderson, Kanban pioneer, at the Lean Kanban Conference in Chicago, we asked if there was any Kanban quick-start guide that might demystify things. David recommended we speak to Dr. Arne Roock of IT-Agile, author of the 30-page Kanban booklet "Stop Starting, Start Finishing". Dr. Roock is a speaker and chair of the "Scaling Kanban" track at the conference, and also works as an Agile consultant and trainer in Germany.

CTM - Clone To Modify Pattern
Immutability by its own is very simple and at the same time very powerful. It's simple because it simply means that an object content will not change. When we know that an object is immutable we have the guarantee that we can give such object to other methods without risking to have a different object at the end. If we don't have such guarantee and we need it, we usually are forced to give a copy of such object to the method so our private instance is not touched.

Addressing the Rotten-Apple-People Problem
Rotten apples – negative, destructive, self-absorbed, unethical employees – pollute organizations. Furthermore, foul leaders inevitably build stagnant, foul organizations. Worse yet, passive leaders – those who tolerate rotten apples – create rotten environments by default. Leaders who tolerate rotten apples are rotten themselves.

Quote for the day:

"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is the knack of getting along with people." -- Theodore Roosevelt

May 04, 2013

NoBackend: Front-End First Web Development
Gregor Martynus gave a talk entitled "Look ma, no backend!" about developing applications primarily from a front-end perspective, falling back to using server-side components only to implement the features the browser does not yet support. This approach is the opposite of how web applications have traditionally been developed: focusing primarily on the server-side part of an application, and then enhancing the application with front-end techniques. A website named noBackend was launched to further evangelize this idea.

Clients Like It When We Grow
Growth is good for us and for our clients. The good news is that our customers usually recognize our bias towards growth. Some clients are scared of it. Some embrace it. The ones who embrace and value growth are the people we usually enjoy the most. It makes sense for us to appeal to and sell to those customers. When I say “sell,” you know that I’m not talking about money. To be effective as a practitioner, you need people to buy your ideas, your questions, and your challenges. They need to invest enthusiasm and time.

Outside info adds to big data challenges on integration projects
Damoulakis warned that data integration efforts are complicated by the addition of external sources of information, such as demographic data and text-based data collected from social networks. In addition to ratcheting up the technical challenges of integrating data, he said external information can create data quality, security and privacy issues for IT managers and integration teams.

Local, state gov CIOs underprepared for attacks
“Insufficiently secure information networks of state and local governments create the potential for major crises ranging from identity theft to inaccessibility of the public to government services,” Consero CEO Paul Mandell said in a media release. “Governments must defend themselves and their constituents against any forms of data-security beaches.”

Google: The future of search is Now
Google Now, arguably not the most compelling name, makes the point: Google wants to tell you what you need to know "now," quickly and accurately. It works by turning natural language queries -- speaking to computer as if to another human -- into precise answers delivered from Google's servers.

Are Older Programmers More Knowledgeable?
A recent study based on Stack Overflow’s data attempts to answer if programming knowledge is related to age, if older programmers are more knowledgeable and if they acquire new skills or not. Patrick Morrison, Ph.D. Student, and Emerson Murphy-Hill, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of North Carolina State University, US, have recently published the study Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age? An Exploration of Stack Overflow (PDF), researching the relationship between programming knowledge and age.

10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job
If you want to know the most in-demand tech skills, that info is readily available. Want to learn the programming skills most coveted by employers? Done. But what are the skills and specialties that no one wants any more? What core competencies raise red flags instead of call backs?

Federal CIOs Fret Over Budget Pressures, IT Talent and Cybersecurity
"When budgets are tight, you have to get really serious about what you're spending money on," McClure says. "I think that's a healthy exercise to go through, because every year if you get your budget you don't ask yourself those questions." ... "CIOs are resigned to that fact," DelPrete says. "The budgetary situation has really worked to help them find new ways to save and invest."

IT departments: Compete with consumer cloud apps or risk a security breach
“The only way we can get the business on side is to up our game, to be more accommodating, more agile or they will carry on doing this until something really bad happens. I see it as a bit of a failure of the IT organisation. We’ve had the business going out and procuring cloud services and platforms that we really should have provided for them as part of our enterprise offering.”

Two Strategy Questions That Matter
Strategy is a heavy topic. Either it requires a seemingly infinite time commitment, or it is easily mistaken for an organizational vision or (perhaps worse) a short-term operational plan. If you’re trying to build a solid strategy, then there are a number of resources you can draw from. No matter what tools you use, ultimately you’re strategy has to answer two questions, brilliantly posed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley: “Where will we play?” and “How will we win?”

Quote for the day:

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. " -- Jack London

May 03, 2013

Self-service business intelligence not a give-and-go affair
In an interview with Search Business Analytics, Eckerson expanded on the complexities of managing self-service BI initiatives and said that segmenting end users into separate groups and supporting different levels of functionality based on their varying needs can go a long way toward ensuring an effective implementation. In other words, one size fits all is not the path to self-service success. Excerpts from the interview follow:

Common Misconceptions About Touch
The visual target is the link text, icon, or other graphic element that affords an interaction. Visual targets need to be big enough and clear enough so: They attract the user's eye; The user understands that they are actionable elements; They are readable, and the user can understand what action they will perform; The user is confident that he can easily tap them.

Microsoft readies 'Mohoro' Windows desktop as a service
In yet another example of its growing emphasis on remaking itself as a devices and services company, Microsoft looks to be developing a pay-per-use "Windows desktop as a service" that will run on Windows Azure. The desktop virtualization service, codenamed Mohoro, is in a very early development phase, from what I've heard from sources. I don't know the final launch target, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't until the second half of 2014.

Insect-like flying robot developed at Harvard
The robot represents more than a decade of work by several teams of researchers. It can be traced back to work done by Wood when he was a graduate student at the Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. The California lab was working on similar technology.

Are you a Weather Station?
A weather station is a department that tells you that it is raining when you are standing in the rain getting wet. This links to the whole conversation about portfolio management value and one of the reasons that portfolio offices get killed is because of lack of value. Being a weather station is a prime example of being as useful as last weeks newspaper. Here is a brain dump of 10 key indicators that your portfolio office is nothing more than a weather station:

Adobe's Lightroom app for iOS is yet another step to Post-PC
It suggests a future in which many of us won't even need a computer: We'll simply rent time on remote computers access to which is supplied as a service by software developers such as Adobe. That model means you might work on an image on your iPad and then send the edits to the remote Lightroom server farm. Your edits would be applied to the original (lossless) image and the results made available, probably online.

Can Firefox OS be the new Android?
"Firefox OS is not a proprietary platform, it is fully standards-based and built on HTML5," says Andreas Gal, Vice President, Mobile Engineering, Mozilla.  "What's more, Firefox OS is not a new ecosystem - it is the Web and the Web is the largest existing ecosystem we have today."

YouTube™ Embedded Video Player: Extended API (C#)
This extended version of embedded YouTube™ API demonstrates additional customization features, namely: Setting the startup options; Selecting the item from the playlist; Setting the autoplay mode; Setting player's dimension (W/H); Changing the border options; Starting the video at predefined time

Beijing to add more prosecutors to curb cybercrime
To handle online cases, prosecutors should be able to analyze and examine online evidence, but this is a challenge for current prosecutors, Zhang Kai, a prosecutor from Chaoyang district, said in the report. However, many prosecutors are not knowledgeable about online fraud skills used by cybercriminals, which makes it difficult to solve such cases, Ma Shuang, another prosecutor from the Shijingshan district, noted, adding online evidence is "a key to lodge a prosecution, but is hard to find and inspect".

Australian Defence White Paper emphasises need for cybersecurity
"It might become evident that the risk of cyberattack is even greater than we had first thought, and so we might decide to build on a foundation in this area by further enhancing our cybersecurity capabilities," the 2009 paper predicted. However, the 2013 Defence White Paper (PDF) has a significantly different emphasis on these threats, highlighting it as a matter that has far-reaching consequences.

Quote for the day:

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

May 02, 2013

Big Data versus Big Value
Operational decisions are arguably the most important layer for embracing analytics for several reasons. One reason is that executing the corporate strategy is not solely accomplished with strategy maps and the resulting key performance indicators displayed in a balanced scorecard and dashboards. The daily operational decisions are what actually move the performance measure dials more than big strategic decisions.

Blackberry CEO's comments ignite debate on future of personal computing
"I think [Heins] is looking for publicity. He cannot be serious in his prediction, [which is] pretty much akin to saying the Earth is flat," said Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney. "There's no rationale for tablets dying." Dulaney said he wouldn't be surprised if BlackBerry eliminates the PlayBook, which shipped only 150,000 or so units in the third quarter of 2012. "They probably would not be successful with a new tablet if they reintroduced a tablet," he added.

Five questions directors need to ask about the cloud
“Board members need a clear understanding of cloud computing benefits and how to maximise them through effective governance practices,” said Marc Vael, an ISACA board member and chief IT audit executive at Smals.“This requires the board to see cloud computing not as an IT project, but rather as a business strategy.” ... boards should address the following five questions to determine the strategic value that cloud services are expected to provide and the impact that the cloud may have on resources and controls:

Enterprise IT Will Be Out of Infrastructure Biz in 5 Years

Today, most (and, no, not all) datacenters are colocated and typically "lights-off" datacenters. That is, while we still purchase, lease and manage the infrastructure, it is very much hands off. ... So, if we assume that in five years most of the regulatory compliance, security, connectivity, and other issues would be resolved, what other barriers do you have for running your business completely on an IaaS?

Texas hospice group sees HIPAA breach
After conducting an internal audit in February 2013, Hope Hospice officials discovered the employee emailed patient data back in December 2012 and again in February 2013. The data sent in the reports included 818 patient names, referral source, referral and admission dates, insurance information, clinical chart data, county and date of discharge. Social Security numbers, patient dates of birth and addresses were not contained in the report, officials added.

Bank of America CIO on Big Data, Emerging Enterprise Tech
Both terms — Big Data and cloud — needlessly create mystery around technology, Bessant says. "And technology as a mystery is a bad idea." It's harder to align the technology to the business under such a veil and "people don't know how to fund or prioritize technology decisions because we've made them so mysterious." She muses that this is why the average tenure of CIOs in general tends to be short. "Anything that distances technology from the business is inherently self-limiting," she says.

The Key to Governance
There are advocates from each of these three orientations on management who will insist that their take – and their take alone – is the most appropriate information feed for upper-level decision-makers, and will expend considerable energy to sell that narrative. Often these management “science” advocates are utterly unaware of where their pet theory exists in the overall scheme of management information streams, but the manager functioning in the role of Governance must know where they are coming from, and the limits to their advocacies.

10 Best Practices to Get BYOD Right
Here are ten best practices compiled from multiple sources and are only indicative in nature. IT leaders should use them to formulate their own detailed BYOD policies that best meet their respective needs.

IBM Launches an Appliance for the 'Internet of Things'
The Message Site appliance can collect, queue, filter and route data messages based on MQTT, which OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has just recommended to be the protocol of choice for communicating with embedded systems. Because the appliance can read the messages, it can be programmed to route them to different locations, depending on the message's content.

Why the cloud will never (entirely) replace in-house applications
Decisions about cloud versus on-premise come down to the level of complexity in your IT infrastructure, said Michael Hanken, VP of IT at Multiquip: "For the regular 'bread and butter' processes there is no compelling reason to have it on premise; however if you are tightly integrated with important real-time components and/or very high data volumes there is still a case for on-premise ERP."

Quote for the day:

"When I've heard all I need to make a decision, I don't take a vote. I make a decision." -- Ronald Reagan

May 01, 2013

Amazon Web Services SVP defends why public clouds trump private models
Businesses are moving to the cloud at a faster pace than ever before -- and for a few select reasons, according to Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services. "There's a lot of noise about this point, and there are a lot of companies trying to commandeer this messaging for select purposes," said Jassy while speaking at the opening keynote of the AWS Summit on Tuesday morning.

10 stupid things people do in their data centers
We’ve all done it — made that stupid mistake and hoped nobody saw it, prayed that it wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the systems or the network. And it’s usually okay, so long as the mistake didn’t happen in the data center. It’s one thing to let your inner knucklehead come out around end user desktop machines.

User provisioning best practices: Access recertification
The first step in the recertification process is to gain access to all the account and access information on the systems being provisioned. In the beginning phases of a provisioning deployment, this is normally done by auditors and/or security personnel who either physically extract account information into a format for comparison, like a spreadsheet, or are granted administrative privileges on the business systems to view provisioned account information.

Apps for the data center technician's iPhone
Smartphones are now offering data center technical staff a new level of mobility by enabling them to have a view into critical data center systems, regardless of where they’re located. Data center technicians no longer have to be tethered to a PC, because many data center infrastructure vendors have mobile apps that provide just as powerful views as were once only available from a web browser on a PC.

CERN celebrates the Web and how it changed the world
"The web will grow at an even faster rate over the next decade than it did over the past decade," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "This will be driven by the Internet of Things, where many objects are interconnected. Things like your door locks, lights, jewelry, home appliances and even clothing will be connected."

BlackBerry chief questions tablet category: Maybe he's not wrong
Heins is basically saying that BlackBerry can't make money on tablets. In fact, it's unclear anyone beyond Apple can make money on tablets. The Android tablet race is headed to a commodity hardware market. There's just no room for BlackBerry. The leap Heins is taking is that tablets are a transition device and may suffer the same fate as netbooks in five years.

Shifting to an MDM Golden Profile
When the business wants to put master data to use, it is about how to have a view of a domain. They don't think in terms of records, they think about using the data to improve customer relationships, grow the business, improve processes, or any host of other business tasks and objectives. A golden profile fits this need by providing the definition and framework that flexes to deliver master data based on context. It can do so because it is driven by data relationships.

Nanowire Transistors Could Keep Moore’s Law Alive
Unlike with most vertical nanowire transistor prototypes, in which the nano wires are grown upward from a substrate, the French duo created their nanowires by starting out with a block of doped silicon and then etching away material to leave nano pillars. In between the pillars, they deposited an insulating layer to about half the pillars’ height. Then they deposited the 14 nm of chromium and filled the remaining space with another insulating layer.

The power of information in the new consumer health insurance market
The key to success in this new environment will be information. Knowing who is at risk, and connecting them to services that will reduce their risk, will be important for preventing out-of-control costs and financial disaster. It will also give health plans the ability to provide coverage at affordable rates, increasing their sales.

New theory could streamline operations management, cloud computing
“The topic of flexibility has been explored in various directions,” says Ton Dieker, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Algorithms and Randomness Center and Thinktank. Indeed, the classic literature on flexibility in manufacturing systems includes several papers by David Simchi-Levi, of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Stephen Graves.

Quote for the day:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker