Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 10, 2013

In Agile, Simple Is Not...
Unfortunately, in the agile world, the phrase "Do the simplest thing possible" has taken on a life of its own and is used to justify poor designs and implementations. When asked to justify their poor design, developers will push back with "Well, this is the simplest thing possible." While it may be true that it is the most straightforward or obvious thing possible, it almost certainly is not the simplest. Agile says that you aren't done at that point. You still have to refactor to a good, simple design.

Microsoft issues partners Windows XP phase-out marching orders
Microsoft and its partners have a lot of work to do between now and then to try to get more businesses off Windows XP. During the first day of the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, officials reminded resellers and systems integrators of their marching orders around the 11-year-old operating system.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
If you understand who you are and what your strengths are (self-awareness), and you know how to lead yourself (self-management), then you will be a better leader. You will know how to read others and empathize. A good leader excels at leading himself first. If you can lead yourself first, then you will be better prepared to lead others. Being able to control your own emotions, being aware of your behavior, and being able to manage yourself will allow you to maximize your potential.

Virtual data protection: Seeing is believing
According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group report on Trends in Protecting Highly Virtualized Environments, virtualization rates as one of the top (or top) challenges in data protection. But digging deeper, one finds that five of the top six challenges in protecting virtual environments are related to visibility. Specifically, the top six challenges are:

Microsoft's MDM solution solves SMB and enterprise needs
Microsoft is late to the market for a comprehensive MDM solution, but has fairly quietly and quickly modified the alignment of their client device management applications, System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Windows Intune. Following a recent upgrade wave to the System Center and Intune products, when it comes to managing client devices like PCs, smart phones, and tablets, organizations of all sizes have a good value and solid MDM solution available from Microsoft.

India to overtake U.S. on number of developers by 2017
India's software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age, and economic growth. India's services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many of the nation's young.

Try Collabsuite, an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange
Collabsuite’s features include: Email, instant messaging, and calendaring; Rich AJAX webclient; Mail and IM archival; Shared rosters and multi-user conference chat; and Active Directory integration / Single Sign-On (SSO). Even if you aren’t especially knowledgeable about Linux or open source, you can get Collabsuite up and running rather quickly.

An "Acentric" Approach to Customer-centricity
Although most organizations would tend to agree with Drucker, they know that it is not practically possible to align all initiatives and actions to build a 100 percent customer-centric organization with products and services tailor-made for each customer. Over the years, organizations have begun to recognize that the customers' requirements need to be heard.

Lasting Legacy: Nelson Mandela's Evolution as a Strategic Leader
Mandela's remarkable story holds valuable lessons for other leaders involved in deep struggles, foremost among which are the importance of holding firm to a morally just vision and the ability to influence a sequence of key strategic decisions over time (decades, in his case) in order to bring about truly remarkable results. Three decisions especially stand out in Mandela's evolution as a strategic leader.

McAfee Security Architectures for the Public Sector
In general, agility is the capability of a system to change in response to a new condition. For resilience, agility is characterised by integration and interoperability. Integration is the ability of the system to rapidly adopt new technology or new security capability. An agile solution has the ability to easily interoperate with other technology through the adoption of open standards or an extensible management framework.

Quote for the day:

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." – Aristotle

July 09, 2013

End-user experience monitoring is key to SaaS provider success
"You don't want your customers to be your alerting mechanism," Essex says. "We had one mobile app vendor tell us that they found out their users were unhappy by reading user reviews. They said it was like buying a new car, having a wreck and not knowing about it for two weeks. The key is not to deploy blind, or you're asking for trouble."

EU increases penalties for cybercriminals and hackers
Lawmakers from the 28 nations in the EU decided Thursday, in a 541-91 vote, to assign harsher penalties for various cybercrimes, according to Reuters. Included in the increased prison sentences are at least two years for illegally accessing information systems and at least five years for cyberattacks against infrastructure, such as power plants, water systems, and transportation networks.

Worldwide IT Spending to Hit $3.7 Trillion in 2013: Gartner
Enterprise software spending is on pace to grow 6.4 percent in 2013. Growth expectations for customer relationship management (CRM) have been raised to reflect expanded coverage into e-commerce, social and mobile. Expectations for digital content creation and operating systems have been reduced as software as a service (SaaS) and changing device demands impact traditional models and markets.

5 Tips for Giving Really Amazing Presentations
Some people live for making presentations; others consider it their worse nightmare. It could be five people in a boardroom or 500 in the audience, but if you are the presenter the spotlight is on you. You'll either be the hero or the goat. No need to panic. Here are five ways to help make your presentation astounding and enjoy the opportunity to bask in the limelight.

Be more brilliant: Innovator shares his secrets
Innovation isn’t coming up with something new, he explains. That’s invention. It’s not changing how things look. That’s styling. Innovation is strategic problem-solving with an eye toward improvement and commercial viability, using creative tools like brainstorming, filtering, discerning, analyzing, synthesizing. And a big one: being open-minded.

Using SDN security strategies for network attack prevention
By programming flexible switches and other network devices to act as packet interception and redirection platforms, security teams can potentially detect and mitigate a variety of attacks that are commonly seen today. Many industry sources are referring to SDN-driven security analysis as software-defined monitoring (SDM). In SDM, SDN switches can act as packet brokers and controllers can aid in monitoring and analysis.

A Test Strategy for Enterprise Integration Points
Integration is a topic that can’t be ignored for enterprise applications, not only because integration with external systems could be error prone, but also because they are hard to test. This article introduces a commonly applicable testing strategy for integration points, which improves the coverage, speed, reliability and reproducibility of testing, and thus could be used as a reference for implementing and testing integration-heavy applications.

BYOD vs. COPE: Why corporate device ownership could make a comeback
The COPE model aims to ease some security concerns by making it easier for IT to monitor and protect devices, because they're corporate-owned while still offering many of the benefits of BYOD. With COPE, employees can still select the devices, services and apps they want to use, but IT gets to limit what those choices are, how they're implemented and the cost thresholds associated with them.

Snowden warns Tempora surveillance 'snarfs' everything, even worse than NSA's PRISM
“The NSA wants to be at the point where at least all of the metadata is permanently stored,” Snowden stated. “In most cases, content isn't as valuable as metadata because you can either re-fetch content based on the metadata or, if not, simply task all future communications of interest for permanent collection since the metadata tells you what out of their data stream you actually want.”

IT Spends One-third on Innovation
The clear road map for future CIOs is to be the change and bring about change within their organisations. The new arena of technology includesdata deluge, big data, agility, security, cloud etc., which are providing the necessary impetus to the IT leaders in making a transformation and driving innovation.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." -- Winston Churchill

July 08, 2013

Intel drives down server power consumption as microserver demand rises
Demand for these clusters of low power servers has created a market for microservers, servers with CPU power consumption below 10W, with HP recently launching its Moonshot servers based on the Intel Atom S1200 family of processors and Arm-based CPUs. In response to customer demand for lower power consumption, Intel is now pushing down the draw of its other server families towards microserver levels.

Windows Server 2012 R2: A First Look
Microsoft has done a lot to improve how Hyper-V works in a private cloud, with features like Shared VHDX files that make it easier to separate storage and compute, and to quickly migrate a virtual machine from one server to another. Live migration now supports migration between different base operating systems, as well as using compression to significantly speed up transfers.

A Guide to Vectorization with Intel® C++ Compilers
Enabling compiler vectorization is challenging. This report is designed for C/C++ developers working on systems that utilize Intel® processors or compatible, non-Intel processors that support SIMD instructions such as Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions. It gives a detailed overview of vectorization, their proper use with compilers along with detailed coding examples.

Voice-over-LTE won't take off until 2015, will have to compete with telephony apps
Adoption of VoLTE has been faster in some countries than in others. In South Korea, SK Telecom's VoLTE service had 3.6 million subscribers in April. Infonetics now expects 12 commercial VoLTE networks and 8 million subscribers by year-end, with about three-quarters of those in Asia Pacific, it said.

Mentoring tips and leadership advice for building a diverse IT team
In this video Q&A, filmed at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 in Orlando, Fla., Maridan Harris, a vice president of IT at Philips, sits down with SearchCIO-Midmarket.com editor Wendy Schuchart to share mentoring style and leadership advice that can aid CIOs and other IT heads in building a diverse, dynamic IT team.

Cyberwarfare: Mounting a defense
Cyberattacks related to warfare differ little from those associated with criminal activity. The main difference is in the effort expended. Cybercriminals tend to walk away when the cost of reaching their objectives exceeds expected revenue. Cyberwarriors take a different approach. Using advanced persistent threats (APTs), cyberwarriors use any means necessary (including time) to achieve political or social objectives.

Security Manager's Journal: Auto-forwarded emails could be a huge problem
Auto-forwarding rules just do not allow appropriate protection of information. There are other ways to get company email,including Outlook Web Access and VPN, which are useful for people who are traveling or working from home. I think the only reason our marketing colleague was trying to use webmail was that she is more comfortable with that service than with the services my company provides.

RAM Caching Vs. SSDs: A Startup's Gamble
Things are very different in a virtualized environment, where each VM claims, and holds, as much memory as it can. A common RAM cache that can dynamically allocate cache space to VMs as they make demands for storage access makes a lot more sense here. That's especially true if the caching engine deduplicates the cached data so common data, like common Windows DLLs, are only stored in the cache once.

Why the CIO isn't cutting it anymore
Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, said in a statement: “The world outside IT changed creating a quiet crisis for IT. Demands have increased in a world grown dynamic and digital. The harder CIOs work tended to current concerns, the less relevant IT became. CIOs know that the future rests in not repeating the past but in extending IT by hunting and harvesting in a digital world.”

Make Good Decisions Faster
What makes the Know-Think-Do framework particularly powerful for organizations ranging from tiny startups to behemoth banks and software makers is it's scalability across every level of an organizational hierarchy. ... Regardless of where you are or how big you are, this framework enables all corners of an org chart can share a common language and approach for making sound, timely decisions.

Quote for the day:

"No one can make me work harder than I do, so I'm generally not interested in who I am competing with." -- Victoria Principal

July 07, 2013

Application awareness in cloud networking: Real or imagined?
One way to extend application awareness from the cloud data center to the cloud edge is to integrate application performance management tools and firewall capabilities with virtual networking at the branch or user side of the WAN. ... it's likely that edge devices will eventually become "cloud edge devices" that incorporate firewall, SDN and virtual networking features.

The Corporate Agile Journey – A Practical Viewpoint
In the “agile” world, failure is not exactly welcomed, but nor is it frowned upon. Instead, a “fail fast” mindset leads us to explore different ways of making something work until we find the right one. By its nature, this approach is not very intuitive or appealing to traditional executives who expect to see a firm plan in place at the outset. So once again we opt for the waterfall, with its well-structured delivery phases but sub-optimal delivery effectiveness.

2013 Enterprise Information Management Predictions Assessment

The start of each year spurs waves of forecasts and predictions of what’s to come in every industry. With technological evolutions and wide-ranging maturity levels, few markets are harder to pin down accurately than developments in enterprise information management. As we pass into the second half of 2013, we invited a few trusted analysts to revisit their start-of-the-year forecasts and tap into what has come to fruition as well as what remains up in the air.

Find those black swans, because they may find you first
There is no silver bullet for finding and utilising internal and external loss event data. However there is no excuse in 2013 to not take the time to consider what you are doing within your organisation to take the wealth of data, both internally and externally (both at an industry level and globally) that exists, and to then convert that through the DIKW hierarchy from data, to information, to knowledge and then to wisdom.

Three Things Strategy is NOT
Do you know what your organization’s strategy is? Do you really know? Strategy is a cloudy word, overused, misused, and full of misconceptions about what exactly a solid strategy consists of. Leaders retreat for days or weeks at a time to develop a strategic plan, and then emerge to announce something few in the organization can remember, fewer still understand. Every leader wants to develop a clear and effective strategy. To do this, we first need to cover what strategy is not.

Critical vulnerabilities found in single sign-on enterprise tool Atlassian Crowd
"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability can (but does not necessarily) lead to a hacker taking full control of an organization's single sign-on service, potentially resulting in a catastrophic security event," the Command Five researchers said in their advisory. At the very least, successful exploitation is likely to enable attackers to expand their unauthorized access within the targeted organization, they said.

Read Fiction and Be a Better Leader
It's this back and forth, engaging the complexity of things, that doesn't guarantee you're going to make a good decision, but it raises the odds of making a good decision. And that's what you get out of really good stories. Especially in a really good discussion, the students really struggle with the fact that there are competing sound views. Part of them are pulled one way, and part of them are pulled another way.

Zato - Python-based ESB and Backend Application Server
Applications can be integrated using HTTP (with special support for JSON/SOAP and plain XML), FTP, AMQP, JMS WebSphere MQ (for seamless interoperability with existing MQ Java apps), Redis and SQL. HTTP is the only means through which Zato services can be invoked synchronously with the requesting application waiting for response in a blocking manner.

The Art of Guerilla Usability Testing
Guerrilla usability testing is very much about adapting to the situation. ... Conducting the tests is only half the battle, of course. To deliver compelling and relevant results from guerilla usability tests, designers need to strategically decide how we’ll share our findings with our colleagues. ... Guerilla usability testing presented itself as an easy-to-perform technique for refining the user experience. It helped us validate (and invalidate) critical assumptions at cheap cost and with rapid speed.

High Availability Clustering
High availability clustering is a method used to minimize downtime and provide continuous service when certain system components fail. HA clusters consists of multiple nodes that communicate and share information through shared data memory grids and are a great way to ensure high system availability, reliability, and scalability.

Quote for the day:

"Diversity is the act of thinking independently together." -- Malcolm Forbes

July 06, 2013

The five components of a successful bring-your-own-device policy
But what's often forgotten and thus missing in BYOD efforts -- especially in the initial phases --is the policy piece. BYOD isn't a free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want situation. Careful planning and end-to-end thinking are required before a company purchases any systems for managing BYOD and certainly before the general word goes out that BYOD is allowed.

What Is Natural Language Processing?
The more ambitious among us (with an internal Wiki) can understand how powerful this can be. Armed with the source code this is potentially a truly wonderful application processor to link dynamic content (think system specifications or requirements) in context back to an entire knowledge base. If you really want to get your hands dirty and dive right in, there are two widely known frameworks for natural language processing.

Adding a Backend to Your App In Android Studio
When you create a backend using Android Studio, it generates a new App Engine application under the same project, and gives your Android application the necessary libraries and a sample activity to interact with that backend. Support for GCM is built-in, making it easy to sync data across multiple devices. Once you've generated the project, you can build and run your client and server code together, in a single environment, and even deploy your backend code right from Android Studio.

Intel’s Justin Rattner on New Laser Chip Business
Justin Rattner, who has been the company’s CTO, recently met with Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review’s senior IT editor, to argue that this investment will help Intel’s mobile chips overtake those of its competitors and create new businesses. Last Thursday, Rattner announced he was stepping down as Intel’s CTO to take personal leave. He plans to return to the company in a different position.

Enterprise Architecture Documentation and Representation
As a starting point for the study the hurdles and difficulties faced by two case projects are reported. The presented novel documentation framework, which is the main contribution of this work, is later shown to avoid these complications. It is structured as a mesh of relatively small pieces of documentation, each piece having a distinct physical counterpart. As a documentation form, the framework uses almost exclusively architectural principles.

VMTurbo Takes Virtualization Management to New Levels
“To maintain the health of the infrastructure, it’s imperative to understand the topological relationships and dependencies that are required to effectively drive intelligent decisions and actions within the IT environment spanning public and private clouds,” adds VMTurbo Chief Technology Officer Shmuel Kliger in a statement celebrating the product’s release.

IT job roles in flux thanks to consumerization
"Some companies will need to make a few small tweaks here or there to [their] IT structure in the coming years to deal with consumerization," said Dan Garcia, an enterprise architect at MassMutual Financial Group, an insurance company based in Springfield, Mass. "Companies will need to adopt more pervasive technologies to attract and retain talent."

Oracle quietly slashes BI software prices
"We pushed back asking for clarification to explain if there was a reduction in functionality or any prerequisite that had been added," Colon said. "For Oracle to put out a substantial price reduction with no guidance was odd." "There's usually some gotcha," he added. "'We've reduced the price, however we're reducing the price because you'll need this management pack to realize the full value of the product.'"

Dell eyes wearable computing move as PC business keeps slumping
"There are challenges in cost, and how to make it a really good experience," Burd told the Guardian. "But the piece that's interesting is that computers are getting smaller. Having a watch on your wrist – that's pretty interesting, pretty appealing." ... There's a lot of discussion about how that fits into wearable devices like we've seen with Google Glass and watches. We're looking at a world of lots of connected devices.

MetaModel – Providing Uniform Data Access Across Various Data Stores
MetaModel’s most central construct is the DataContext interface, which represents the data store and is used to explore and query it. Additionally, the UpdateableDataContext sub-interface is available for writeable data stores where updates to the data can be performed. The whole library can more or less be learned using basic code-completion, once you just ensure you have a DataContext instance.

Quote for the day:

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance." -- George Bernard Shaw

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