May 16, 2013

21 principles of enterprise architecture for the financial sector
The article lists the most relevant architectural principles for an IT department to follow in the financial market, with details about each principle. These principles are essential for an IT department to take on a strategic role in the company and to indicate actual value generation in IT decisions within an environment where pressure and business decisions are critical.


Q&A: The value of corporate information governance as a business asset
As information continues its transformation into a commodity, companies need to rethink how they manage and protect that asset. Jeffrey Ritter, an attorney expert on law and technology, says the first thing companies need to do is realize that information is property -- and develop the right corporate information governance strategy to protect that property.


CRM pain points: On-premise or in the cloud, still room to improve
The integration between CRM and internal corporate systems is not entirely seamless. Various software purveyors publish their own sets of APIs (application programming interfaces) and there has been significant industry effort to standardize these-but every integration takes on its own flavor and involves some custom configuration. Because the configuration is custom, follow-on maintenance can also become a CRM headache.


A Shortage of Privacy Engineers
Companies are increasingly realizing the importance of designing privacy into their products and services from the beginning. There are numerous cases in which companies have had to scramble to retrofit privacy into existing systems. Many highly publicized incidents have involved social networks whose users were surprised when they realized information they considered private was transmitted to other users, advertisers, or even the public.


Does your cloud vendor protect your rights?
Google was the first out of the gate when it began issuing its Google Transparency Report three years ago. Since then, more cloud vendors, including Twitter, Dropbox and, most recently, Microsoft have followed suit by issuing their own transparency reports. These reports typically provide statistics regarding how often the vendor receives and fulfills government requests to provide access to customer data.


Disaster Recovery as a Service Considerations
Many organizations are exporting certain workloads -- like messaging and collaboration -- to the cloud. You can throw disaster recovery in with them. Many of my clients tell me that they cannot justify paying a hefty price for a secondary DR site to protect against disasters that may never happen. For those clients, DR is a workload that is well suited for the cloud.


Three Traps of Change Practitioners
We must recognize that our character is important to the quality of the process of change. A change practitioner who doesn't understand the impact of both “who we are” and “what we do” in the management of change can fall into one of three traps in which his or her ability to succeed is put at risk: The trap of pride; The trap of hypocrisy; The trap of deceit


FBI trains bank executives on cyberattack threats
Members of the financial industry were taken to over 40 FBI offices around the country to join a classified video conference, according to the FBI's Executive Assistant Director Richard McFeely. Many attacks aimed at online bank services were attributed to Iran, although McFeely did not comment on whether Iran was directly responsible for the attacks, or which banks participated at the conference.


Top Ten Misconceptions about ITIL
"ITIL is since many years the most popular IT Service Management framework out in the market. As an IT professional I use this framework for some time and as an ITSM-consultant and -trainer I am often confronted with some typical misconceptions around ITIL and… I learned over time the limits of ITIL and that it is not the ‘ITSM fruit for everything’." In the following I would like to share my ‘Top Ten List’:


Data Velocity: Why Decreasing Your Time to Insight Matters
Inevitably, greater speed costs more. For this reason, one challenge for CIOs and their colleagues is to determine when non-real-time data can be effectively applied. The aim should be to combine faster and slower technologies and systems to cost effectively solve. ... In today’s global business environment, where volatility has become a constant state, data velocity is the key to securing a competitive advantage. Reducing “the time to insight” is a business necessity.



Quote for the day:

"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The Leader adjusts the sails." --John C. Maxwell

May 15, 2013

Data centers show signs of 'green fatigue'
Those service providers and colos are also the ones investing the most in going green, he said. IT energy costs make up a big part of their overall operating costs, so "every penny they save is profit," he said. Other companies, including big retailers and manufacturers, see less incentive to improve efficiency. For some, reliability and security are a bigger priority.


Security Auditing In Microsoft SQL Server
This paper(pdf) by Aaron C. Newman, CTO & Founder of Application Security Inc is based on “theoretical best-practices” combined with  “real-world practicality” to define a usable policy for auditing and monitoring databases. By following the policies we outline in this paper, you can properly implement a database system that will work well, and provide adequate security for the data it houses.


Doctors take their tablets to work
Broward Health, which has 2,000 physicians who practice at its hospitals, recently launched a "bring your own device" program at its Imperial Point hospital. The program invites doctors to bring their laptops or tablets into the hospital to enroll and encrypt them for use at the hospital or wherever they may want to update their patient orders or see records online. Two-hundred physicians have enrolled so far, and Broward Health will soon launch the program in Coral Springs.


Creativity, Innovation and Cake
Creativity is combining two or more different ideas or concepts in order to create a novel, new idea. Innovation is using those ideas to change your world for the better. In short, creativity is about the ideas. Innovation is about the implementation of those ideas in order to institute change. In a business context this would typically involve more money generated either through increased income (successful new product ideas), reduced costs or a combination of the two.


Infinite Scrolling: Let’s Get To The Bottom Of This
Infinite scrolling promises a better experience for users. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to enhance our interfaces. Human nature demands hierarchy and structures that are easy to navigate. But infinite scrolling sometimes leaves users feeling disoriented as they travel down a page that never ends.


Microsoft votes for free Windows 8.1, collects kudos
"Microsoft has a chance here," he said. "By the second half of 2014, there will be a lot more touch-enabled systems. That, and these updates, could help Windows 8 long term. I don't think Windows 8 will be more successful than Windows 7 [in the enterprise] but if 8.1 is easy to deploy, that could change over time."


Microsoft’s Uphill Battle with Analytics, Mobility
Microsoft has been steadily pouring money into big data and business intelligence. The company of course owns the most widely used analytical tool in the world, Microsoft Excel, which our benchmark research into Spreadsheets in the Enterprise shows is not going away soon.


This is why big data is the sweet spot for SaaS
When it comes to using big data technology effectively, there’s a lot to like about SaaS. When companies like BloomReach create and analyze massive web-wide data sets, they automate insights that almost no individual company could discover on its own. ... Companies are tired of managing applications and infrastructure, so something that optimizes a common task using techniques they don’t know on servers they don’t have to manage is probably compelling. It’s called cloud computing.


Wanted: More Directors With Digital Savvy
"The avalanche of digital activity is making directors conclude they are increasingly ill-equipped in the boardroom," observes Tuck Rickards, a managing director of recruiters Russell Reynolds Associates Inc. Digital directors, who are sometimes decades younger than many of their colleagues, weigh in on marketing strategy, business alliances and even recruitment, several company leaders say.


8 Risks Inherent to All Organizations
A critical part of achieving a state of “manageable risks” is realizing your organization is “never perfect.” In that ongoing risk assessment process – even mid-project – Schwager says the cultural shift of risk as integral to business may be the most difficult. “The trick is, actually, to move the risk function as close as possible to the business in order to have a really effective risk culture and management. And that can sometimes be painful in today’s risk environments,” Schwager says.



Quote for the day:

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work" -- Peter Drucker

May 14, 2013

Facebook to release data center switch spec for Open Compute Project
"If we don't do something differently now, it is quite possible that the closed and proprietary approach to technology development will be the limiting factor to how we scale the Internet and deliver awesome experiences to people," Frankovsky said. The Open Compute Project grew out of Facebook’s efforts to custom design and build software, servers and other data center components to deal with the ever-increasing demands placed on its infrastructure.


Change Management is Redundant Without Configuration Management
The first law of change management is not to use change management until you use configuration management first. ... If configuration management seeks to classify, quantify and qualify every element of computational and administrative resources alongside physical and human assets, then change management techniques can then be more accurately exerted upon any business or technical function once a process of pre-analysis has been undertaken.


Android is crushing Apple and Microsoft in the mobile device market
The market — which takes into account smartphone, tablet, and notebook shipments — grew to 308.7 million, representing year-on-year growth of 37.4 percent. But despite this market segment including traditional notebook devices powered by Windows, it is Android, a product of the Open Handset Alliance, that is making the biggest gains.


Sony to launch super-thin, flexible e-reader for universities
Sony said the bare-bones device is meant to mimic real paper and will have a feature set far smaller than other tablets or e-readers. It can handle only the PDF format, although it supports file creation as well as adding highlights and notes to existing documents. "Through actions such as replacing paper texts and materials used in universities with 'Digital Paper,' we aim to make classes more efficient and increase the learning effectiveness," the company said in a Japanese press release.


Canvas Control Library and New Forms Based System for building Web Pages and Websites
The newly introduced canvas element in HTML5 allows for drawing whatever you want on it using JavaScript. The current situation though is there are no controls you can use that are available that are purely based on the canvas. Akshay Srinivasan has created a Canvas Control Library with all the common controls and advanced ones like TreeView which due to the nature of canvas allow for great control over the graphical presentation of the controls and their item contents.


PayPal Check-in pays in shops without taking out your wallet
Once you've checked in using your phone, you wander round and do your shopping as normal. Then, when you go to the till, the shop's till system has registered you're on the premises and shows the assistant your photo. They check it's you, OK the purchase, and payment is magically made via PayPal as you trip lightly off into the sunshine with your new purchase.


DaaS vs. IaaS for Desktops
Elias Khnaser highlights few things that DaaS needs before it is a viable alternative to VDI. The biggest hurdle is Microsoft licensing. At the moment, the company doesn't have a Service Provider License Agreement for its desktop operating system products and that means customers have to provide their own Microsoft licensing to their DaaS provider. Without one, it gets very complicated, even more so than VDI Besides, it then is no longer provided in an "as a service" model.


Study: IT, business alignment tightens, but gaps remain
The Internet of Things, the concept that describes a Web-enabled world encompassing millions of devices, from automobiles to medical devices, was familiar to only 42% of respondents. That should send a strong signal to vendors and organizations backing IPv6 that much more work needs to be done to educate IT execs of the impact a copiously enabled world will have on today's infrastructure.


APAC CEOs Viewed as Tech-Savvy Pioneers-Gartner
“It is interesting that the Asia Pacific region, long seen anecdotally as more conservative in leveraging technology and driving innovation, has overtaken the global average of CEOs (26%) who describe their company cultures as being pioneering in the adoption of innovation,” said Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Partha Iyengar.


Native Cross-Platform Apps with Tabris
To successfully develop a native App, it is not enough to display native widgets. The user navigation must also reflect the platform-specific concepts. In the case of native App development, the developer has access to the relevant platform concepts for designing the application. In the case of iOS, this is the ‘ViewController’ principle, for Android ‘Activities’ and the ‘ActionBar’. Only a few cross-platform toolkits abstract these concepts and unify them. This is exactly where Tabris comes in.



Quote for the day:

"The key to success is...to locate that sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism" -- Mark Evanier

May 13, 2013

Preserving Big Data to Live Forever
Internet Archive is attempting to capture every webpage, video, television show, MP3 file, or DVD published anywhere in the world. If Internet Archive is seeking to keep and preserve data for centuries, what can we learn from this non-profit about architecting a solution to keep our own data safeguarded and accessible long-term?


Cloud Integration Do’s and Don’ts
Check out this webinar recording on cloud data integration and the impact the right strategy can have on your Salesforce.com and overall SaaS application implementation success. The discussion also featured implementation guidance from one the top systems integrator partners of both Informatica Cloud and Salesforce –Silverline. Gireesh Sonnad, a partner at the firm, outlined what he sees as the Top Cloud Integration Do’s and Don’ts.


The Science of App-Wrapping
The essential operation of app wrapping lies in setting up a dynamic library and adding to an existing binary that controls certain aspects of an application. For instance, at startup, you can change an app so that it requires authentication using a local passkey. Or you could intercept a communication so that it would be forced to use your company's virtual private network (VPN) or prevent that communication from reaching a particular application that holds sensitive data, such as QuickBooks.


The Space Between Supervising Closely and Delegating
As a leader, where do you spend most of your time? If you really want to know, ask your direct reports. You might be surprised at what they have to say. When should you stop hanging out in the middle and move to Delegating? – When they have demonstrated they are fully competent and confident to do the work independently.


Microsoft responds to 'extreme' Windows 8 criticism
"There is a trend to the extreme," Frank X Shaw, corporate vice president of corporate communications at Microsoft, wrote on The Official Microsoft Blog on Friday, addressing some of the harsher attacks. ... where those who want to stand out opt for sensationalism and hyperbole over nuanced analysis. In this world where page views are currency, heat is often more valued than light. Stark black-and-white caricatures are sometimes more valued than shades-of-grey reality. So let's pause for a moment and consider the centre.


How the Cloud is Changing Backup Vendor Strategy
“I believe that backup, as we know it, is dead. We live in an always-on world where there’s an expectation that businesses of all sizes, run without interruption. Today’s ‘backup’ companies are built around the old model of copying files and folders to prevent data loss. Businesses need a new paradigm of protection – one that enables them to not only protect and access their data, but also their applications and systems at all times. ..."-- Justin Moore, Chief Executive Officer, Axcient


IPv6: From Internet to SuperNet
The IPv6 expansion of network addressing will allow many more connections to the Internet. ... In two weeks, I've already seen a major evolution in smart parking, with an idea that the license plate reader will hook up to the GPS in your phone and guide you to your car. No more lost cars! ... Bank notes fitted with RFID tags will become common, and all the apps to track stolen money etc. will keep more than a few coders busy.


Predictive Maintenance Solutions made possible by Big Data, Open Standards, and Analytics
With PMML, a predictive solution may be built in one system and deployed in another where it can be put to work immediately. The adoption of PMML by all the major analytic vendors is a testimony to their commitment to interoperability and the advancement of predictive analytics as a critical factor to the betterment of society.


Intel Accelerates the Data Center and Telecom Network Transformation with New Reference Architecture
"SDN and NFV are critical elements of Intel's vision to transform the expensive, complex networks of today to a virtualized, programmable, standards-based architecture running commercial off-the-shelf hardware," said Rose Schooler, vice president of Intel Architecture Group and general manager of Intel's Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group. "The reference designs announced today enable a new phase in the evolution of the network and represent Intel's commitment to driving an open environment that fosters business agility and smart economics."


Networks in 2020: More Traffic, Less Energy
The tools that make this possible include new devices, components, algorithms, architectures and protocols, Klein said. All have been proved in labs, he said. The potential energy savings represents a comparison between a 2010 network with that year's traffic levels and a theoretical 2020 network with projections of traffic amounts for that year.



Quote for the day:

"An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded." -- Pope John Paul II

May 12, 2013

Essential Steps to a Successful Cloud Deployment Initiative (Part II)
Technology is only 20 percent of a successful IT initiative – 80 percent still comes down to the people driving it and the policies in place. Preparing to move to the cloud requires strategic planning and analysis, from concept to completion. So without further ado, let’s take a look at the final seven steps that will help companies launch a successful, working cloud environment.


Authenticity Deficit Disorder
Rarely do we keep our word if it will cost us, but we should always keep our word . . . especially when it costs us. We are so concerned about our short-term interest (time, money, reputation, etc.) that we lose sight of the long-term trust that will be gained by sticking to our promises. What if your promise will cost you your job or will cause your house to go into foreclosure? Or what if it will cause you to lose your professional license or something else of great value?


The Big Data Scientist's Skillset
They need to have statistical, mathematical, predictive modelling as well as business strategy skills to build the algorithms necessary to ask the right questions and find the right answers. They also need to be able to communicate their findings, orally and visually. They need to understand how the products are developed and even more important, as big data touches the privacy of consumers, they need to have a set of ethical responsibilities.


Google's Cloud Drops Custom Linux For Debian
In moving to Debian, Google is demonstrating that it wants Google Compute Engine to become less Google-technology specific and more of a standard platform. Compute Engine's predecessor, App Engine, a developer's platform as a service, restricted itself to Google's favorite language, Python, at its launch. Compute Engine workloads based on Debian means the favored operating system will be supported by a community larger than Google's development team itself.


New Research: What Sets Effective Middle Managers Apart
Large-scale innovation and change include hundreds or thousands of moving parts that require palpable, intelligent, and emotional steps that no IT system can execute. Because of their 360-degree view of organizations, MLMs are uniquely positioned to implement such large-scale initiatives. Yet, as our research found, MLMs have become cautious and unsure of their authority due to their experiences during the IT revolution and the recession.


The story of Mr. 85%
“Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal, and never congratulate themselves on a job half-done.” Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson in HBR: How to Become a Great Finisher. I asked Dr. Halvorson about her observation and she told me the story of Mr. 85%. “I sometimes tell this story about my husband because it drives me crazy – I call him “Mr. 85%” because that’s about how much he does of any project around the house before he stops, pats himself on the back for getting that far, and wanders off ...


Telecommuting: The Risks and Reward
By some estimates, a full fifth of the global tech workforce telecommutes at least occasionally, and 84% of that group does so at least once per month. One projection has up to 30% of the overall American workforce telecommuting by 2019. But, while workers consider telecommuting to be a major perk, there are risks for employers. According to one survey, 43% of employees who telecommute admit to watching TV or movies while on the clock, while 20% say they've played video games.


San Francisco Adds Social Networking Element to Emergency, Disaster Planning
"We did a lot of studies around how can we talk about preparedness in a different way," said Francis Zamora, the department's spokesman. "What we were finding was that connected communities, communities that had natural social networks, that had people who knew each other, they were a lot more resilient in terms of what happens during disasters."

What Makes a Great Risk Manager: Q&A With Michael Lopez of Booz Allen Hamilton
This Tuesday, May 14, marks the second annual World Risk Day—a global forum for those in the industry to discuss trends, challenges and best practices in risk management. One of the many speakers lined up for the event is Michael Lopez, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. To get his take on the role of the modern risk manager, RMM asked him a few questions.


Why So Many Changes Fail—and What You Can Do About It
Undoubtedly, you know that the ability to get results from new initiatives is vitally important to your organization’s survival, but did you know that about 70% of changes in organizations fail?  That is an astounding failure rate given that the field of change management has been around for almost two decades. Over those years many books and hundreds of articles have been written. Consulting practices were created just to address the challenge of leading change, and yet the failure rate remains high. What is going on?



Quote for the day:

"Always bear in mind, that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing. " -- Abraham Lincoln

May 11, 2013

Bank security weaknesses led to cyber looting of $45M from ATMs
The hackers broke into the card processing company, manipulated account balances and eliminated withdrawal limits on each of five prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. Such manipulation of debit card information is referred to as "unlimited operation" in the cyber underworld and requires a very high degree of technical sophistication, according to the indictment.


Bill would put mobile app vendors on the hook for privacy
Mobile application developers would need to have a clearly spelled out privacy and data retention policy that notifies the consumer how long data is stored and the choices they have for deleting or opting out of such collection. Under Johnson's proposal, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be responsible for enforcing the provisions of the bill.


Functional Design Patterns
In this InfoQ presentation Stuart Sierra a developer at Relevance, Inc., a member of Clojure/core, and the co-author of Practical Clojure (Apress, 2010) and a forthcoming ClojureScript book from O’Reilly discusses several design patterns implemented in functional languages, in particular Clojure: State/Event, Consequences, Accumulator, MapReduce, Reduce/Combine, Recursive Expansion, etc.


Cloud Security Starts With Development, Better Tools
Part of the problem is that early cloud providers -- and companies building private clouds -- focused on creating the applications, not getting all the security details right, says John Howie, chief operating officer at the Cloud Security Alliance. Fixing those problems after that fact has left many companies with hard-to-secure code.


Warren Buffett, the Human Big Data Engine
The way Buffett operates is not unlike the best use cases for big data. Among other things, his success lies in his ability to make good decisions in accordance with quality benchmarks. This is the key to using big data well, and to business success in general. Big data users can learn from Warren Buffett. His brain, in effect, is a kind of big data engine. Here are three lessons that Buffett provides for big data users:


BI architect has new options to meet growing data, analytics demands
End-user requirements for BI data and reports have expanded and become more complex as BI and analytics have taken on an increasingly central role in business planning and operations. And, in many cases, business users are looking for mobile BI capabilities or self-service tools that let them bypass canned report templates and IT-developed queries in order to slice and dice data according to their own needs and interests.


Top 10 ways to be rude in business
In the 1990 sleeper "Crazy People," Dudley Moore throws a guy's hardwired cell phone into the East River, saying "People who use car phones annoy other drivers." Nearly a quarter-century before smartphones hijacked our lives, Moore's character presciently hinted at an impending age of rudeness. We are now in the thick of the age Dudley warned us about. Here are the top 10 petty annoyances people in the business world inflict on others


Explain software testing benefits to the executives
So why do executives see testing as #EpicFail? Barber says it all comes down to accounting. "When you look at the accounting spreadsheet," Barber says, "testing is a cost center, not a profit center." He says it's in the same bucket as coffee. Although "no one in their right mind" would cut either out of the technology budget, they still both cost money and don't make product.


The unintended consequences of forced BYOD
The notion of forced BYOD may seem like it supports employee choice, albeit in a miserly way. It does -- but it also forces companies to accept two principles that will freak out most IT organizations and corporate counsels: Business data is no longer confined to business systems and repositories, so information management and security are no longer assurable; and Individuals will ultimately own the information and process management and ownership, not the businesses that become their clients.


Cloud, mobility exposing limitations of existing networks
"Cloud and mobility are the two key paradigm shifts when it comes to enterprise IT networks," says Rohit Mehra, IDC VP of network infrastructure. "[The network] was static and reliable, and it met the needs of IT. That needs to change now. Why does it need to change? Because of the explosion of traffic."



Quote for the day:

"Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions" -- @DeannaBrown

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