Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 05, 2013

How to enact Apache security best practices for Web server security
The latest high-profile attack aimed at Apache was uncovered by researchers at security firms ESET and Sucuri. Attackers managed to work a backdoor into Apache that redirected Web traffic to malicious websites, where visitors would be infected by the Blackhole exploit kit. This attack underlined the need for organizations to enact Apache security best practices and highlighted the serious fallout that can be caused by insecure Apache Web servers.

The worst cloud outages of 2013 (so far)
As any cloud dweller knows, Web-based services can crash and burn just like any other type of technology. If the companies behind them are smart, you shouldn't lose any data in the long run -- but you'll likely lose a bit of sanity during the time the service is offline. While 2013's only halfway done, we've already seen some cringe-worthy cloud failures this year. Here are the worst -- so far.

6 ways to prevent mistakes that have cost others millions
Of all the obstacles standing in the way of a successful data center transformation, misinformation may be the most daunting. To help you separate the facts from the hype, the experts from HP Technology Consulting have created this informative guide. It’s designed to provide the immediate insight you need to make the right decisions about data center transformation—one of the most important IT issues you may ever face.

Why is Cloud Adoption Taking so Long?
A third reason is that you cannot “mix and match” cloud services from different providers. The market is consolidating, with a few key players emerging as dominant at the infrastructure and platform levels. Each of them has its own proprietary interfaces. There are no real vendor-neutral standards. ... Customers are beginning to talk of “vendor lock-in” in a way that we haven’t seen since the days of mainframes.

Examining Dimensions of Data Quality: Reasonability, Time and Access
Rational expectations, which are labeled “reasonable,” can also be documented as validity ranges, minimums, maximums and other basic business rules. ... At first glance one may think that Timeliness and Currency are the same concept, but that isn’t the case. Currency focuses on how up-to-date or how “fresh” data is, reflecting the real-world concept. Timeliness is related to how quickly a stakeholder can gain access to the data needed.

Brute-force cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, energy industry, intensify
The most common attack vectors against critical infrastructure sectors, according to the ICS-CERT report, were watering hole attacks, SQL injection, and spearphishing. Of the 200 cyberattacks so far (October 1, 2012–May 2013), 53% targeted the energy sector, followed by 17% targeting the manufacturing sector.

Will BYOD Give Rise to the Enterprise Genius Bar?
An enterprise Genius Bar is basically a walk-in center for employees to not only service their BYOD phones and tablets but also check out the latest gadgets on the market, receive tutorials on enterprise apps, and chat about where cool tech is heading. This doesn't mean that IT workers will have to wear Apple's trademark blue Genius shirts, but they will need retail people skills.

Power over Ethernet (PoE) Seeks to Extend Reach With Higher Efficiency, Faster Data Rates
By delivering data and power over the same cabling system, installation costs can be reduced and ongoing maintenance simplified. Although it has already achieved significant market success, PoE adoption is beginning to be limited by its power efficiency and by the maximum power it can deliver. Presently, it is also restricted by the maximum-data-rate Ethernet version it supports.

Enterprise Governance & Knowledge
From an architecture perspective, enterprises are made of human agents, devices, and symbolic (aka information) systems. From a business perspective, processes combine three kinds of tasks: Authority; Execution and Control ... At its core, enterprise governance is about decision-making and on that basis the purpose of systems is to feed processes with the relevant information so that agents can be put it to use as knowledge.

Employees Can't Carry Out A Strategy If They Didn't Help Plan It
By involving your employees in your strategizing, you’re preserving and protecting your business’s success. For their response to be nimble, they need more than marching orders ... Employees should be included throughout the strategy development process, and there’s plenty of space to engage everyone in the company at an appropriate level.

Quote for the day:

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." -- Arnold H. Glasow

July 04, 2013

Risk management, bottom-line benefits from records retention schedules
"[Retention schedules] certainly mitigate risk from a data management and information governance perspective because, at the end of the day, retention schedules are about two things: avoiding the cost of keeping information and making it quick and efficient to find it when a legal or regulatory request comes up," said Barry Murphy, co-founder and principal analyst at the eDJ Group consulting firm.

Business Analytics: Why Not Experiment?
Even properly-executed experiments – those with high internal validity – can still suffer from external validity shortcomings if the sample isn’t representative of the larger population or the findings don’t generalize beyond the specific experimental settings. The good news for business innovators is that experimentation has never been cheaper. Many B2C companies design, implement and analyze thousands of experiments weekly, fueled by Internet access to customers and inexpensive technologies.

The era of “Internet aware systems and services”
The major solutions in the digital ecosystem today incorporate an ever growing mix of devices and platforms that offer new user experiences and organization. This can be seen across most all industry sectors and horizontally between industry sectors ... strategic planning needs to have insight into the nature of new infrastructures and applications that will support these new multisystem workloads and digital infrastructures.

Object Pool Design Pattern
The object pool design pattern creates a set of objects that may be reused. When you need a new object you request it from the pool. If a previously prepared object is available it is returned immediately, avoiding the instantiation cost. If no objects are present in the pool, a new item is created and returned. When you have used the object and no longer need it, you return it to the pool, allowing it to be used again in the future without going through the slow instantiation process.

Cascading Change Versus Viral Change
sometimes before we even know whether this change is beneficial for us or not, simply because we have not tried it out yet. This is a risky endeavor with big stakes! By being a bit more dynamic and smarter in risk taking (at small scale and hence at low costs of failure) we could allow for more experimentation with change initiatives to be done in chosen areas. When and if these experiments succeed – they will spread automatically if we just allow for it

Cisco waited too long to address SDNs, Chambers says
Chambers said Cisco has the opportunity to fold SDNs into "a total architectural play" and offer OpenFlow switch/controller interactions at line-rate speeds. Cisco also sees an opportunity to "open (SDN) up to the network," which is the inverse of what other SDN players propose: opening up the network to SDN control. Chambers was adamant that SDNs do not threaten Cisco's successful franchise in switching and routing, which is a $180 billion installed base.

The CIO position: Why you need to eat your own dog food
Yet, the tides are turning once again, as they often do when it comes to the CIO position. Now companies across sectors don't just want a CIO with a top-notch technology background or industry-specific knowledge; they need an IT executive who has insight into the wants and needs of the customer, Banerji explained. In the technology sector, this has been true for years. "Those CIOs are expected to, as they say, eat their own dog food, and a lot of companies want that in their CIO," Banerji said.

Design Patterns after Design is Done
Abstract Factory makes code more modular and reusable, but at the expense of understandability. Flyweight makes code less expandable and reusable, and much harder to follow. Most developers don’t recognize or understand the Visitor pattern. Observer can be difficult to understand as well, although it does make the code more flexible and extendible. Chain of Responsibility makes code harder to follow, and harder to change or fix safely. And Singleton, of course, while simple to recognize and understand, can make code much harder to change.

Significant Growth Rates Expected for Enterprise App Stores
“Enterprises supporting BYOD initiatives need to consider bring-your-own-app initiatives as well,” McNicol said. “Widespread adoption of BYOD has led to an influx of third-party apps being used to support business functions. Instead of blacklisting these apps, enterprises are embracing, securing and deploying third-party apps through the enterprise app store. As such, the enterprise app store is a means to support BYOA.”

Are outsourcers stunting business innovation?
“There isn’t the incentive in the current contract structures for them to bring those new ideas to the table. We’ve talked for donkey’s years about contracting for innovation but actually nobody does,” Sheridan said. “Most organisations want the service they’ve contracted for, delivered at the level that their business requires for the price they’ve agreed - and all the focus is on doing that,” he said.

Quote for the day:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

July 03, 2013

This e-mail will self-destruct in five seconds
"The inability to control the number and type of operations that may be subsequently performed on a sent e-mail message makes conventional e-mail systems unsuitable for sending confidential information for which absolute control of distribution is a necessity," the AT&T's patent application states. It goes on to say that some e-mail systems that allow users to set up their client so that messages are deleted after a certain period of time. Still, the power to destroy the message remains in the hands of the recipient.

Better Business Decisions Through Streamlined Risk Prioritization
At the center of any successful enterprise risk management process one must have clear, accurate and easily accessible data. McAfee and LockPath have joined forces to remove barriers that often keep organizations from performing optimally. This joint solution addresses issues head-on and empowers information security professionals to better interpret and share findings, manage remediation and make more informed business decisions.

Could Your Startup Benefit from Microsoft Ventures?
The new Microsoft Ventures effort combines and strengthens programs Microsoft already has in place with new programs still being built. One of these existing programs is BizSpark. The initiative provides software including Windows and Office, Visual Studio, Windows Azure and additional support to promising and visionary startups at no cost. Microsoft says the program currently serves 50,000+ members in 100 countries on 6 continents.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c gears up for the private cloud
Oracle Enterprise Manager was originally created to deploy and manage groups of Oracle databases. Over the years, Oracle has extended the software to manage the Oracle Application Server and third-party software packages from Microsoft and others, through the use of plug-ins and connectors. Today, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange, a sort of app store for the software, offers more than 135 add-ons for third-party programs.

IE11 Preview and the New Developer Tools
The emphasis is on performance with new “UI Responsiveness”, “Profiler”, and “Memory” sections. The Memory tab is looking very useful for today’s apps and the heap snapshots are easier to use compared to the tools in other browsers. Likewise the code profiler is easy to work with and similar to the profiling tools for managed code in VS Ultimate.

Use forensics and detective work to solve JavaScript performance mysteries

Despite the amazing advances in JavaScript virtual machine technology, a recent study showed that Google applications spend between 50% and 70% of their time inside V8.... Read on, to learn about optimizing JavaScript and profile JavaScript applications, in a from the trenches story of the performance detectives on the V8 team tracking down an obscure performance problem in Find Your Way to Oz.

Latest tiered data storage trends center on automatic data movement
In this podcast with TechTarget senior writer Carol Sliwa, Nadkarni discusses the advancements in tiered data storage, the types of workloads with which automated storage tiering can be used, the ways that flash and cache fit into an automated tiering strategy, and some of the problems encountered with automated storage tiering.

The Power of Purposeful Strategy
Strategy is not a specialized, highly-complex event that has to be handled by a specific department, or outside consultants. Strategy is the life-blood, a state-of-mind of the organization that is birthed by the Commander in Chief and runs down through every department, at every level of the organization. The goal is to cultivate a constant consciousness of the strategy, or purpose, of the company in every member of the organization.

The verdict: Should you buy the Galaxy S4 and/or HTC One Google Play Edition?
The HTC One and GS4 Google Play Editions have a lot of good things going for 'em. In many ways, the combination of their hardware and a stock Android UI is actually quite nice to use. It's just that in the grand scheme of things, the phones feel more like hastily assembled experiments than carefully thought out and cohesive devices.

Crimeware-As-A-Service is a thing. Really
"Such underground platforms are implementing stronger mechanisms to ensure that participants are who they purport to be (or at the very least are not law enforcement officials). Ironically, while the platforms that facilitate the services marketplace for illegal activities are going deeper underground, the trade in zero-day vulnerabilities is more transparent than ever before," Samani and Paget report.

Quote for the day:

"If you think running a business is tough, try bringing up a baby." -- Richard Branson

July 02, 2013

10 open source projects that are leading innovation
There are thousands upon thousands of open source projects that bring about innovation. Some do so on a small scale, while others are thinking massive and global. Of the hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there, Jack Wallen comes up with a list of 10 that are leading innovation in the world of technology.

McAfee Study Reveals Abuse of Mobile App Permissions
“Most consumers don’t understand or even worry about the app permissions they agree to,” said Luis Blando, vice president of mobile product development at McAfee. “Because of that, cybercriminals are increasingly abusing app permissions as an efficient way to deliver mobile malware. Through these agreements mobile consumers are unwittingly putting their personal information into the hands of criminals disguised as ad networks, and opening up endless doors for scammers.”

How data could help solve international crime
"To understand the world, you need to make sense of the world, you need stories," explained Villa. "When you can do stories with data, you're much stronger. This is what we try to do and help society by these means." ... Villa noted violence against women is rampant in many countries, but there is a huge gap in the data because victims usually don't report these cases most of the time.

Enterprise APIs now populate path to shared services
The value of these patterns is found in the "very loose coupling between the client and the infrastructure side," Hammond continues. "That allows somebody like Netflix to build a Silverlight client for one device and an HTML client for another device, depending on the capabilities that are available on the client, and have these pieces independently move from the evolution of the infrastructure on the back end.

How to Define Your Professional Value
Part of the process of moving up or moving on involves a hefty amount of self-marketing, and it’s at this point where we attempt to share who we are and what we bring to the table that we often fall short. Whether it’s our online profiles or the summary section on our resumes too often, we resort to weasel word and jargon filled sentences that self-describe us as some kind of superficial super-beings with command over everything in the management and leadership universe.

Big data: Two truths and five myths
“All the time I come across people who tell me why they cannot do things. I don’t know about you but my job is to do things, not can’t do things. In reality, people hide behind the complexity,” Harris said. “If you use the communities, you can meet people who are doing the same stuff. It’s just about finding out how people are overcoming problems and what people are using the technology for,” he said.

Welcome to the Machine-Learning Algorithms
In the world of cloud computing, one such tedious task is troubleshooting. When a failure occurs, getting to the bottom of what happened can be a seriously challenging proposition. Enter, the machine-learning algorithms. A company called SumoLogic puts these algorithms to work – in conjunction with savvy humans, of course – to solve some of the bigger problems that face this new world of highly complex server farms. How does it all work? Check out this episode of InsideAnalysis to find out!

Data Breach--Plan a Counter Strike
“The bottom line is that unfortunately, no organisation is immune to a data breach in this day and age,” said Wade Baker, principal author of the DBIR series. “Today, we have the tools to combat cybercrime, but it’s really all about selecting the right ones and using them in the right way.” ... If you are a target of espionage, don’t underestimate the tenacity of your adversary. Nor should you underestimate the intelligence and tools at your disposal.

Encryption practices vary widely in the cloud, survey finds
Thirty-seven percent of respondents said their own organizations take steps to encrypt data as it’s transferred to and from the cloud service over the network. Thirty-one percent said they encrypted the data before transfer to the cloud. Eleven percent said the cloud provider encrypted their data in storage, while 11% of organizations handled the encryption process themselves in the cloud environment.

Two malware programs help each other stay on computers
Once Vobfus infects a computer, it downloads from a remote command-and-control server a program called Beebone, which is another kind of downloader that installs other malicious programs on a computer. The two work together, downloading variants of the other that are not immediately detected by antivirus products, Choi wrote. "This cyclical relationship between Beebone and Vobfus downloading each other is the reason why Vobfus may seem so resilient to antivirus products," Choi wrote.

Quote for the day:

"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience had brought it home." -- John Stuart Mill

July 01, 2013

NSA collected 1 trillion metadata records, harvested 1 billion mobile calls daily
The SSO document claimed that it allows “75% of the traffic to pass through the filter” before adding, “After the EvilOlive deployment, traffic has literally doubled.” Then on the last day of 2012, an SSO official boasted about yet another secret NSA program, codenamed ShellTrumpet having “just processed its One Trillionth metadata record.” …

Couchbase Takes On Oracle, MongoDB And Cassandra
"If you were developing an application from around 1995 to 2002, you had no choice but to develop it with Oracle, DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server," Wiederhold told InformationWeek. "Now they're having a difficult time scaling and they're not getting the performance they need with relational databases. They want a horizontally scalable application tier and a horizontally scalable database tier because their mobile and Web applications are very data-centric, and they're connected to the Internet and potentially billions of users."

Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive

Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can't come to Harvard Business School.

CIO concerns over IT complexity are smothering the cloud, claims NTT
“Each business has its own complexities but their CIOs need clouds which can take that complexity and hide it behind the dashboard. CIOs expect transparency in their systems and for the control to be taken by the provider. For their part, cloud providers need to demonstrate they can virtualise and industrialise a huge variety of IT platforms and services, and deliver them all with total security.”

Developers Are Lifting The Cloud, Not The Other Way Around
So all the machines and the pipes are getting abstracted and the developer, arguably, is driving that change. The smartphone is a server. As again illustrated by Joyent with Project Manta, the big storage and network machines are now becoming part of the operating system. Compute and storage are coming together and in-memory databases make for split-second analytics.

Cassandra Mythology
Like the prophetess of Troy it was named for, Apache Cassandra has seen some myths accrue around it. Like most myths, these were once at least partly true, but have become outdated as Cassandra evolved and improved. In this article, I'll discuss five common areas of concern and clarify the confusion.

What’s in a ‘G’? Why terms like 5G and LTE-Advanced are important
Anyone who claims to have a 5G network, device or technology is quite simply full of crap. There have only been a few offenders on this front so far — mainly Broadcom and Samsung appropriating the term for marketing purposes — but that hasn’t stopped 5G from eking out into news stories from reputable media organizations. What starts out as a trickle could easily become a downpour.

Singapore creates operations hub to beef up cyberdefense
"We are beefing up our cyberdefence because that's the next leap forward that we see," Ng said. He added the issue of cyberattacks was a major point made at the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore by the U.S. Defense Secretary last month. The Singapore Armed Force's back-end functions such as logistics and engineering, and its front-end capabilities in sensing and responding to threats all depend on computer networks, Ng pointed out.

Big data confusion leads corporate IT to put the brakes on BI spending
Most large organisations have BI platforms in place, he said: “They might feel the need to upgrade, but ‘big data confusion’ reigns. Users do not know what it means for them.” That might change when more concrete use cases for big data analytics emerge, he said, but for now, “people are sitting on their wallets” with respect to BI software. BI spending is also continuing to move outside IT, he confirmed.

Save network bandwidth by using Out-of-Band Initial Replication method in Hyper-V Replica
Hyper-V Replica supports an option where you can transport the initial copy of your VM to the Replica site using an external storage medium - like a USB drive. This method of seeding the Replica site is known is Out-of-Band Initial Replication (OOB IR) and is the focus of this blog post. OOB IR is especially helpful if you have a large amounts of data to be replicated and the datacenters are not connected using a very high speed network.

Quote for the day:

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." -- Lao Tzu

June 30, 2013

Adding Flexibility to your REST Implementation with Yoga
Yoga cleanly integrates with Spring MVC REST, Jersey, and RESTEasy. ... Yoga provides a @Core annotation that can be applied to your serialized domain model (or DTO) to identify fields that will always be returned on a Yoga request. ... If you need more fine-grained control over the structure of your document responses, Yoga will integrate with your existing REST application, and allow you to add selectors to your web requests.

Offsite HIPAA Data Centers Are Key to Health Organization Disaster Recovery
Dooling recommends that offsite data centers should not be located within the same geographic region as the healthcare facility. A catastrophic event like a tornado or fire could easily wipe out a hospital and data center all at once if located at the same facility. She also recommends that healthcare providers ensure the data center is not located in a flood zone or in a region that experiences natural disasters on a regular basis.

BI and the Need for Speed
The good news is that organizations like the CPG example can take advantage of more effective BI development approaches that have emerged out of the chaos; those that resonate well in 2013 and strategies that offer swifter deployments and quantifiable results without wasting excess time, energy and resources. The following are some of the more innovative, sensible guidelines that prove a business case while providing a much better bang for the buck:

Next-Gen Storage, Converged Infrastructure on the Horizon?
Welcome to another episode of Engineers Unplugged. This week’s topic is Next-Gen Storage, handled admirably by Cisco’s J Metz (@drjmetz) and Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett). What will the topology of the future look like? What is the tech evolution that will drive adoption? From token ring to SDN, they’ve got it covered. Watch and see:

Google Glass in the Workplace: Cool Benefits and Surprising Dangers
Regardless of whether it benefits or challenges your company, Google Glass, like all new technologies, will test us. Companies will have to define what Google Glass means for their business and their employees. They will have to establish some decorum when it comes to wearable tech. ... Another topic of focus will be confidentiality and trade secrets.

PayPal Galactic Initiative to Tackle Payments in Space
"We will still need a way to pay for life’s necessities, back here and out there, though exactly how we’ll do that isn’t currently clear. This is why, today we are announcing our intention to make PayPal the leading resource to address the challenges that these new and exciting times present. We are the only company currently poised to deliver payments outside of our planet."

Three Myths of the Mind That Sabotage Even the Most Motivated Achievers
Our attitude toward work and the way we think and feel about certain concepts have direct results in the workplace.For one, they can affect our results. Fortunately, these thoughts can be challenged and put aside, producing better performance. The means of change is to put aside three myths.

Who’s Your Daddy
We sit at the feet of successful leaders like children being cared for by parents. Our childishness speaks to lack of power, fear of failure, and the false hope that someone will take care of us ... Peter Block, author of, “Stewardship,” believes partnership is a healthier way to look at our relationship with leaders.

SDDC Automation and Orchestration
The orchestration and automation layer of the Software Defined Data Center is where the benefits of the SDDC are translated into working applications for end users and business constituents. Every cloud management platform relies upon either a script or one of these automation frameworks to provision and configure the actual end user services and applications.

Dark Architecture: Upgrading Infrastructure With Agile Principles
Rather than speaking on component terms (e.g., swap the reporting database backend from MySQL for Cassandra), think in flow terms (e.g., rendering a graph of wildcard queries for customer X is taking 40 seconds to render, while all other graph types for this customer render perfectly quickly). This exercise will force you to hone scope to exactly where the pain is so you can focus on delivering the solution to this pain first and save others for later.

Quote for the day:

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." -- Thomas A. Edison

June 29, 2013

If PRISM doesn’t freak you out about cloud computing, maybe it should, says privacy expert
“So effectively it’s a law aimed at the rest of the world. Now Americans can still get caught up in this law in a number of ways and that has been the focus of the American civil liberties groups campaigning against it but from the perspective of everybody else in the world, it is somewhat alarming that there is one law for Americans, and one law for everybody else.”

In-Memory Technology Speeds Up Data Analytics
The in-memory shift expands the possibilities for a database involved in real-time decision making, Lindquist says. Previously, getting a database to perform at the now-required level would call for a significant amount of tuning—configuring memory and carving out a data cache in RAM to improve performance. A cache hit is quicker than going back to disk for data, but a cache typically represents a small portion of the data stored in a database.

DR as a Service to address the Business Objectives
The Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provided jointly by HCL Infosystems and Sanovi, will also be equipped to create an entire failover site infrastructure for customers. The service will also help address critical IT DR issues including those of interoperability owing to heterogeneous operating environments. Other features include continuous monitoring; automating manual DR processes, comprehensive reporting capabilities and flip of switch fail over and fall back options.

Why the internet of things has to be not too smart and not too dumb, but just right
“Just limiting the intelligence of the device isn’t going to solve the interaction problem,” Healey said at the annual Research@Intel event. Limit connected electronics to just “yes” or “no” questions and you’ll find yourself reintroducing yourself to them every single day. “The nightmare we’re going to face …. is something akin to what Bill Murray faced in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’” Healey added.

A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate
“In the short run, we don’t find really any adverse or superpositive effect on the employment of Americans,” said William R. Kerr, a Harvard business professor who conducted the study on the work force of 300 American companies. “People take an extremely one-sided view of this stuff and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.”

M2M and the Internet of Things: A guide
The 'things' in the IoT, or the 'machines' in M2M, are physical entities whose identity, state (or the state of whose surroundings) is capable of being relayed to an internet-connected IT infrastructure. Almost anything to which you can attach a sensor — a cow in a field, a container on a cargo vessel, the air-conditioning unit in your office, a lamppost in the street — can become a node in the Internet of Things.

Cisco fixes serious vulnerabilities in email, Web and content security appliances
Releases 7.1 and prior, 7.3, 7.5 and 7.6 of the software in the Cisco Email Security Appliance are affected by three vulnerabilities, one that allows remote attackers to inject and execute commands with elevated privileges through the Web interface and two that could be used to crash the management graphical user interface (GUI) or the IronPort Spam Quarantine service and cause other critical processes to become unresponsive.

How to Close the IT Talent Gap
A skills analysis of your IT team is one of the pivotal tools in your management toolbox. ... "It's crucial to do this type of analysis for workforce planning and career development because it helps employees understand what skills the business is going to need to achieve its goals," says Rachel Russell, director of marketing at TEKsystems. This, in turn, allows leadership teams to better plan for the future needs, but more than that, when done correctly, it builds employee engagement and helps retain staff longer

Set Aside 5% of Your Time For Your "Slow-Cooked" Ideas

The secret behind many of the greatest dishes is patience and pacing. When you cook something slowly, at lower heat for a longer time, the flavors and textures can yield culinary masterpieces. The process of our own creations isn’t much different. Typically we’re searching for an answer with a deadline in mind. We’re generating an idea on a timeline in response to a creative brief, we’re trying to launch a new product or feature by a certain date to meet business goals and/or customer expectations.

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 14 on the Road: Japan

"Japan has been able to maintain relatively low malware infection rates for many years. I often get asked by the customers and governments I talk to, what Japan’s secret is. I wrote an article on this in the past called, Japan - Lessons from Some of the Least Malware Infected Countries in the World – Part 5, which includes additional context from security professionals that live and work in Japan."

Quote for the day:

"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders." -- Tom Peters

June 26, 2013

Tips to lower data storage costs: Don't always fall for the new stuff
There's also a disproportionate amount of high-performance, tier-one disk-based storage in most organizations, he noted. Following the "Tape Sucks, Move On" bumper stickers passed out at industry events years ago, administrators got rid of tape. Now the slogan seems to be "Disk Sucks, Move On" to flash. But flash isn't widely deployed yet, so many organizations still buy tier-one disk storage for every new application. "This is not sustainable," Toigo warned.

10 Windows 8 tips, tricks and hacks
There are plenty of ways to tweak, hack and make Windows 8 do things you wouldn't think were possible. In this article you'll see how to cobble together your own quick-and-dirty Start menu as well as customize the hidden Power User menu. I'll show you how to use so-called "God Mode," hack the lock screen and Start screen, master File Explorer and much more.

Five Lessons Every Startup Founder Should Learn
Often it takes a real scare to change behavior; some people quit smoking after the heart attack, but others do not. You still see people on the street pulling oxygen tanks behind them and lighting up a cigarette. If you are doing something that involves making people change habits, be prepared for a slow uptake, even though potential customers will admit they need a change.

Phoning Firefox: Browser now makes Web calls
WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) is an open-source API (application programming interface) that Web applications can call for in-browser audio and video communications. WebRTC traces its roots to Google, which acquired the VP8 video codec in 2010 from a company called On2, open-sourced the technology and pushed for its adoption as a standard by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). Mozilla engineers have been also working on the project to implement WebRTC in Firefox.

Useful jQuery code snippets
jQuery is definitely a great tool when it comes to front-end web development. Here are a bunch of super useful jQuery snippets from my personal favorites shared by Jean-Baptiste Jung. Automatically Loading content on scroll, Facebook like image pre-loader, Image resizing, Parsing Json are some of the cool snippets and you have more.

FlexPod architecture: Top five things you should know
FlexPod architecture consists of NetApp storage, Cisco connectivity and either a Microsoft or VMware hypervisor that have all been certified to work with one another. That means FlexPod should go a long way toward helping to reduce the vendor blame game, while also improving system reliability. Even so, there are a few important things to know before investing in a FlexPod architecture.

Hadoop-as-a-Service Market is Growing at 54.9%
The report says Hadoop market type is segmented into four types namely Hadoop performance monitoring software, Hadoop management software, Hadoop application software and Hadoop packaged software. In addition to market sizes and forecasts, the report also provides detailed analysis of the market trends and factors influencing market growth, offering in-depth geographic analysis of the Hadoop market in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa.

The TAO of Facebook Data Management
While Facebook has not released as open source any of the TAO code yet, the architectural details the company has provided could influence the development of new types of data stores and other software, in much the same way that company-published white papers on Amazon Dynamo and Google BigTable paved the way for a new generation of NoSQL databases.

Cisco UCS vs. IBM Flex System: Complexity and Cost Comparison
Off all the ways Principled Technologies shows how UCS is a superior solution, I wanted to touch on just one: highly available and scalable management. A UCS management domain consists of a pair of Fabric Interconnects and supports up to 160 blade and/or rack servers. In contrast, IBM is limited to 54 blade servers plus a non-redundant Flex System Manager node.

The impact of cloud and social media on risk management strategies
In part one of this three-part video shot at the Marcus Evans Enterprise Risk Management Conference in Chicago earlier this year, SearchCompliance Editor Ben Cole sits down with five risk-management professionals to discuss how the cloud and social media are influencing businesses' approaches to enterprise risk management strategies.

Quote for the day:

"Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality." -- Les Brown

June 25, 2013

Data center outage takes French state financial system offline for four days
"We can confirm that last Wednesday there was an incident affecting one of the rooms in one of our data centers," said Bull media relations manager Aurelie Negro via email. "By putting the necessary emergency plan into action, we were able to resume normal operating conditions within an hour. However, the degraded operating conditions during that hour may have had an impact on some of our customers," she wrote.

Five Great .NET Framework 4.5 Features
The problem with most of the recent Microsoft releases have been communication with .NET developers. Only one or two features are known to developers and other features just stay on MSDN and end up becoming simple documents ... Shivprasad Koirala picks his favorite five features keeping in mind the larger .NET community.

Jon Oringer of Shutterstock, on the Power of the Hackathon
"You want people who will push the thinking but not cause trouble. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a feeling you get. It’s easy to find people who will be disruptive thinkers who are reckless, but it’s hard to find disruptive thinkers who are productive. We try every day to make each dollar we spend go one penny further than it did yesterday. "

Managers, meet with your employees to show you mean business
You can ask about motivations and aspirations at annual performance appraisal time or during midyear reviews, but this approach has its limitations. For some employees a performance assessment is nerve-wracking even if they are good performers. Under these circumstances, they may not be as clear and open about their goals as you would like.

SQL Server Functions to handle date time conversion and formats.
When talking about date and time, different languages uses different standards (format) and the developer needs to take care about the date and or time format as per the geographic locations (or languages). This article will go through all the SQL Server Functions that helps to convert date and time values to and from string literals and other date and time formats.

The New Generation of Database Technology Includes Semantics and Search
“In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” The reality is that the organizational environment is too dynamic and the schema design, data cleansing and ETL tasks required to make the enterprise data warehouse work are too complex and take too long for this approach to succeed. Organizations are starting to look at a more federated approach, combining metadata from various data silos so that they can query across these silos.

11 Ways to Make Healthcare IT Easier
Technology isn't the only challenge of meaningful use stage 2. The cultural change that comes with using technology to advance clinical processes hits some physicians hard. Two years implementing CPOE, only 55 percent of physicians at New Jersey'sCentraState Healthcare System were using it, says Neal Ganguly, vice president and CIO, admitting that there's no penalty in place for noncompliance.

So What If Chief Marketing Officers Outspend CIOs On Enterprise Tech?
CIOs might recoil in horror at the thought of commercially fueled CMOs taking over a key aspect of their domain. Buying software - wait for it - simply because it threatened to get the job done - will likely ruffle some feathers. Software companies, too, might not adapt well to the challenge of selling to an entirely different audience with significantly different motivations.

SDNs, the Hype Cycle and the Future of Network Management
SDNs will succeed because they offer real value. The payoff is speed to market, according to Bethany Mayer, the senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking. During an interview at HP Discover 2013, Mayer said that SDNs enable changes to be made in a far shorter timeframe than in an environment in which every network element must be manually adjusted.

The Most Effective Ways to Make It Right When You Screw Up
Apologies are tricky. Done right, they can resolve conflict, repair hurt feelings, foster forgiveness, and improve relationships. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. Despite the fact that lawyers often caution their clients to avoid apologies, fearing that they are tantamount to an admission of guilt, studies show that when potential plaintiffs receive an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.

Quote for the day:

"Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it." -- Seth Godin

June 24, 2013

Committee throws data retention decision back to government
If ISPs are required to keep the data, it should be mandatory that the data is encrypted, and the data should not be kept for more than two years. The government should shoulder the costs for providers to keep this service, the committee said. Should the government go ahead with the scheme, there should also be an oversight committee and annual reports on the scheme submitted to parliament, the committee has recommended.

Dresner’s Point: Put Your Business Intelligence Results Under the Microscope
The discipline of creating and agreeing on the metrics and aligning them to goals is probably 80 percent of the work. But that discipline leads to great value. It’s hard work and often complicated in a corporate culture. But it’s the committed who succeed at BI, and the rewards in competitive advantages can be huge.

Reference Architecture - Auto-scaling Moodle deployment on AWS
Moodle deployments on AWS can be configured to automatically scale up and down seamlessly to meet the highs and lows in the demand curve in the most optimum and cost-effective manner. This post presents reference architecture for deploying Moodle Learning Management System over AWS Cloud to achieve high levels of Performance, Scalability, Availability, Security and Reliability.

Disruptions: Medicine That Monitors You
“You will — voluntarily, I might add — take a pill, which you think of as a pill but is in fact a microscopic robot, which will monitor your systems” and wirelessly transmit what is happening, Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said last fall at a company conference. “If it makes the difference between health and death, you’re going to want this thing.”

Cyber-retaliation: How security is becoming a priority for the Middle East
The amount of money spent on IT security is growing at 15 percent a year, IDC said, and in some cases, companies are spending big to protect their networks. Last year, MEED reported that the major national oil companies in the Middle East spend around $10m annually to secure their systems. Security is high on the minds of IT professionals in the region and attitudes are hardening.

Microsoft services agreement changes: What other enterprises can learn
Google got into trouble with recent changes to its policies regarding the handling of user information, and now Microsoft seems to have caused some concern with similar changes. Should enterprises be concerned with Microsoft's new user information policies? Are there any lessons to be learned for enterprises on how to state exactly what data they collect?

Wearable Computing Will Turn The Concept Of Big Data On Its Head
Consider the impact of health professionals wearing Google Glass to document illnesses just by looking at a patient. The benefits for the individual patient could be significant, life-saving even. But the societal benefit of this collective knowledge could be life-changing. Yet it would only be made possible through gathering data in the first place.

Microsoft wants to patent gestures inside cars … no, not that kind
A newly surfaced patent application from three Microsoft researchers outlines a system for interacting with a vehicle’s information and entertainment system using a variety of gestures, such as a finger to the lips for turning down the audio volume, a thumbs-up to approve an action, or a pinch of the chin — a “quizzical pose,” as the filing puts it — to conduct an Internet search. Another example: The user “can make a movement that mimics placing a phone near an ear” to instruct the mobile device to place a call.

Microsoft Expected To Offer Oracle 12c On Azure Cloud
“Next week, we will be announcing technology partnerships with the most important SaaS companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison promised last week. “And they will be committing to our technology for years to come.” Ellison said 12c would be the ”foundation of a modern cloud” and, since Salesforce and Netsuite already use Oracle databases, adding the new 12c version is not a big stretch for them. It merely adds technology more suited to the multi-tenant cloud model where they operate.

IT Hiccups of the Week: Southwest Airlines Computer Failure Grounded All Flights
The computer failure, a Southwest spokesperson told the AP, “impaired the airline's ability to do such things as conduct check-ins, print boarding passes and monitor the weight of each aircraft.” Planes on the taxiways were recalled to the terminals although planes in flight were unaffected. The airline was able to get its back-up system operational, although the system's performance was said to be “sluggish.”

Quote for the day:

"Being present means being present with your heart and your mind, listening intentionally, without an agenda, judgment or expectations." -- Tweet by @ReinaBach