Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 17, 2013

Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them
This article focus on how technology team work together well to plan, build and deliver software. It does not talk about code or not focus on specific technology or not only about Microsoft tools. Hope this will improve your professional life and the effectiveness of your team. ... The principles and values of agile software development were formed as a way to help teams to break the cycle of process inflation and mainly focus on simple techniques for achieving their goals.

Fix the 3 silent performance killers for IIS / ASP.NET apps
Watching for and fixing these 3 low-hanging issues could make a big difference in the performance of your ASP.NET application, with a minimal amount of work. ... the most direct way to improve performance is to proactively monitor it and periodically load test/profile it to address the actual bottlenecks in your code.

Mobile Leaks Make Banks Wary of 'Bring Your Own Device' Trend
"It's not clear whether the employer has a right to scan your phone; it's less clear whether or not the company can actually move your private records to a repository," says Larry Ponemon "Privacy issues haven't really been worked out or legislated as yet for employees. I can imagine a situation in which you have a whole bunch of photos, videos, and other things you cherish on your device. Now you lose the device, and IT implements a remote-wipe. That's a privacy issue."

Are you neglecting the Basics?
The term FLOW was first coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi In his excellent Book Flow: the psychology of optimal experience he discusses the need for a tension between our level of Skill and Challenge. Too much challenge with not enough skill will lead to anxiety, stress and burn out. Too much skill with not enough challenge leads to boredom, complacency and apathy.

Worldwide IT outsourcing to reach $288 bn in 2013: Gartner
“We continue to see overall market growth being constrained by near-term market factors, such as evolving ITO delivery models, economic, political and labor conditions, and service provider financial performance," said Gartner, Research vice-president, Bryan Britz. Gartner's forecast includes slight upward revisions for both custom application outsourcing and infrastructure utility services (IUS) for 2014 through 2017.

Developing employees who aren’t “born leaders”
There is no better motivation to accomplish great things than loving what you do. Another way to shape employees into leaders is to talk to them about what they are passionate about and where they would like to see themselves, their department or the company. Allowing them to see projects through that will help accomplish that goal demonstrates your interest in their vision and that you value their input.

Seven steps to building an effective incident response program
An incident response program should be one of the strategic initiatives within the enterprise. Yet even after an organization experiences a breach, it doesn't get the attention it deserves. According to our most recent Forrester security survey, investments in incident response programs in 2011 and 2012, after a breach occurred, increased only five percentage points to 23% from 18%. In a shocking trend, 21% of organizations noted no changes resulting from a security breach.

Tips on becoming a transformational leader from CIO of the UN
Transformational leaders have a vision for future success, but paradoxically that vision is formed by being super-attuned to warning signs in the present. They understand that today's success will be tomorrow's failure if their organizations are not continuously innovating. They embrace disruption. "If you are not a risk-taker, and cannot take some calculated risk, you can't do your job," Riazi said.

The Social Banker v2.0
Risk is also a key concern for many organizations embarking on an internal collaboration strategy. And rightfully so: regardless of whether you are a bank dealing with customer data or a KPMG team working on a client’s financial report, caution must always be the default position when it comes to risk. It is critical, therefore, to enlist the legal and risk teams in the planning and development of any internal system from day one.

A CPU, a GPU, and a Data Center walk into a Bar
Fear of change will be a limiting factor to rapid adoption, but not as much as might be true for other layers of IT infrastructure. However, the unfortunate truth is that often we fail to make changes because we elect to accept functioning as the same thing as “working effectively”. As I describe in my “What is a “Working” Data Center” blog, running doesn’t mean efficiently and sustainably delivering appropriate functionality and performance.

Quote for the day:

"Learn to pause.... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you." -- Doug King

July 16, 2013

The Virtual Tug of War
The basis of the age-old feud is clear – performance as dictated by the networking camp vs. a protected environment as advocated by the security folks. The uneasy Solomonic decision facing CIOs the world over is whether to skimp on security in order to ensure flawless application delivery or ensure the organization is safe by taking a performance hit in order to avoid becoming a security statistic.

Unusual file-infecting malware steals FTP credentials
Once the new EXPIRO variant runs on a system, it searches for .EXE files on all local, removable and networked drives, and adds its malicious code to them. In addition, it collects information about the system and its users, including Windows log-in credentials, and steals FTP credentials from a popular open-source FTP client called FileZilla.

Identity and access management market faces identity crisis in cloud
Legacy approaches to IAM, such as Active Directory or Oracle's Identity Manager, are failing organizations because those products can't manage access from consumer endpoints, don't support rapid adoption of cloud services and can't provide secure data exchange across user populations, said Wendy Nather, an analyst with the 451 Research Group.

Apple: Game over or room to grow?
No, the real problem with Apple is that this company, long the arbiter of cool, the corporate trendsetter on all matters from design to marketing to operational excellence, has gone from being insanely great to merely great. ... The criticism that stings Apple the most is that it has lost its edge for innovation. The defensiveness over the frequently repeated criticism shone through during Apple's keynote presentations at its annual conference for developers in June.

5 Ways to Refocus Your Small Business In Tough Times
Successful businesses need to be able to blend a great idea with a well-thought-out and repeatable plan. Striking that balance has proven to be a big challenge for many small business owners. "This is a tough time to be in business," said Gary Barnes, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Gary Barnes International. "More of us than ever are facing new problems and challenges."

What should you know about Next Generation Firewalls?
NGFW vendors must resist the urge to continue to bundle every security module in a single device since this is not how most enterprise customers deploy their network security. In addition, it is important that NGFWs retain the implicit “deny all” when it comes to application traffic rather than expecting administrators to tune individual applications to prevent tunneling in the manner of IPS signatures.

Toshiba to sell world's fastest SD cards this year
Toshiba said its latest memory is the first to use a controller that is compliant with the UHS-II (Ultra High Speed) specification, which theoretically offers speeds up to 312 MBps. The specification was first announced by the SD Association in January 2011, at the annual CES Electronics show in Las Vegas.

Gigabit-Boosted DSL Internet Standard Could be Ready in 2014, ITU Says
The standard is expected to be deployed by service providers that want to offer Fiber to the Home-like services, the ITU said. G.fast is meant to enable flexible upstream and downstream speeds to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as uploading high-resolution video and photo libraries to cloud-based storage, and communicating via HD video, it said.

The Chain of Responsibility Pattern in .NET
The Chain of Responsibility Pattern consists of three components: the handler interface, at least one concrete handler, and the client application. The handler interface defines the contract for handling a request in the chain. The concrete handler class implements the handler interface and either handles the request or forwards it to its successor handler. The client application sends the request to the initial concrete handler.

Quote for the day:

"Whatever you do, do it with intelligence, and keep the end in view." -- Thomas à Kempis

July 15, 2013

Remote replication: Comparing data replication methods
The third option is network-based replication, generally using an appliance that sits at the edge of the network. These tools, such as EMC's RecoverPoint, have the advantage of being able to manage heterogeneous arrays and servers. The other advantage of this data replication method is that it makes it easier to orchestrate replication policies that take multiple arrays and servers into account.

The hot new technology in Big Data is decades old: SQL
Over the past six months, vendors have responded to the demand for more corporate-friendly analytics by announcing a slew of systems that offer full SQL query capabilities with significant performance improvements over existing Hive/Hadoop systems. These systems are designed to allow full SQL queries over warehouse-size data sets, and in most cases they bypass Hadoop entirely (although some are hybrid approaches).

Microsoft Uses SQL Server 2012 5.8-Terabyte SAP ERP Database to Run Its Global Business
AlwaysOn also resolves another problem the Microsoft SAP Support team often encountered. In order to refresh their SAP ERP test system with the most recent data from the production database, they needed to copy the 1.6-terabyte backup over to the DR site that also hosts the SAP ERP test system. This process could take many hours and required monitoring. With AlwaysOn, backups can be taken from the secondary replicas.

When You've Done Enough, Do More
"Overdelivering" makes you stand out in the moment and makes people remember you later. You become locked in as someone who deserves to be listened to, and people don't wonder whether you have ulterior motives or hidden agendas. Doing more isn't just a onetime thing but an ongoing practice. For maximum effect, you'll want to focus on three distinct times when you can do more: before, during, and after an interaction.

Why does my Java process consume more memory than Xmx?
Besides heap there are other regions in memory which your application is using under the hood – namely permgen and stack sizes. So in order to limit those you should also specify the -XX:MaxPermSize and -Xss options respectively. In a short, you can predict your application memory usage with the following formula

IT security spend up, but in the wrong places, Oracle says
Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson said in prepared remarks: "Organizations can't continue to spend on the wrong risks and secure themselves out of business. When attackers do break through the perimeter, they can take advantage of weak security controls against the core systems by exploiting privileged user access, vulnerable applications, and accounts with excessive access."

'Superman' crystals could store 360TB of data forever
The scientists used a femtosecond laser, which emits pulses of light in femtoseconds (one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth of a second). The 5D read/write laser can record up to an estimated 360 TB/disc data capacity on nanostructured glass capable of thermal stability up to 1000°C -- and a practically unlimited lifetime.

The damaging cult of the hero leader
By all means, let’s have high expectations of leadership, but let’s distribute that leadership throughout the organization to the places where it’s best exercised. If we choose to centralize control with an individual “hero,” we are not building either a capable organization or a sustainable job.

Microsoft boosts HomeOS with a new Lab of Things
The latest new component is the addition of a new framework, called the Lab of Things (LOT), which allows researchers to better study connected device usage in homes and other physical spaces. Microsoft is fielding a first beta of the LOT software development kit (SDK), seemingly in conjunction with the opening day of the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit event in Redmond.

Will In-Chip Processing Supersede In-Memory?
Anyone who is intimately familiar with the x86 chip will know that it includes three layers of cache: L1, L2 and L3, each with its own capacity, and totaling up to roughly 20Mb. Now, no one is suggesting that all data be held in-chip, but we are suggesting that in-chip processing can be considered an additional super fast and entirely beneficial resource.

Quote for the day:

"Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." -- Richard M. Nixon

July 14, 2013

The Software Defined Data Center Meets Disaster Recovery
The typical multi-site SDDR deployment normally takes about an hour to install and configure, is done remotely and includes testing sample failovers and failbacks. The SDDR concept allows for fast recovery – near-continuous data protection combined with non-disruptive DR testing allows for recovery time objectives of minutes instead of hours or days. There’s also no reliance on inefficient storage snapshots, whose associated delays in recovery can cause major performance issues.

Beijing’s Great Leap Forward
Beijing now is not just competent in software and gadgets. It has its own brands that are bound to lead in their own directions. It’s not inconceivable that one day Beijing will sit on top of the innovation pyramid alongside Silicon Valley, each producing global companies and creating new industries. “I’ve seen startup clusters all over the world,” says Steve Blank, an entrepreneur and business school professor who recently returned from a visit to China.

Intel Rolls Out Development Kit for KVM Tools
“This technology represents an evolutionary shift from the traditional KVM hardware-based control and management appliances to a virtual solution,” said Jennifer Koppy, Research Manager, IDC. “With the goal of creating more efficient and agile data centers, IT managers and CIOs are exploring datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions to manage and control IT infrastructure.

Turning Design Thinking to Design Doing
Written materials alone cannot capture all the nuances of design thinking because the approach involves a structured approach with a lot of unstructured elements. Design thinking, like jazz, requires an appreciation for improvisation; learning how to apply it is an experiential and social activity. Like learning to ride a bicycle, it is experiential. You cannot learn how just by having someone explain it to you—you have to actually try to do it yourself to find your own balance. You also need to practice to get better.

Disruptions: Design Rivals Technology in Importance
“We want to make the product emotional for the person using it, and that happens with the design of it,” said Stefan Olander, Nike’s vice president for digital sport, who worked on the wristband. “You have to create a visceral, emotive experience around the design, which is something everyone cares about.” ... As a result of the technology slipping into the background, Nike has become one of the most advanced companies for wearable computers.

Build Your Own Internet with Mobile Mesh Networking
“We’re trying to dramatically increase the usability and take this out of the geekosphere,” says Sascha Meinrath, the leader of a project called Commotion Wireless, which is developing several software packages that allow people to create mesh networks using low-cost Internet and networking hardware, primarily Wi-Fi routers.

NServiceBus 4.0 with support for RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ
NServiceBus is based on queued messaging and provides the building blocks for systems based on a service-oriented and event-driven architecture where services are publishing business events and other services are subscribing to these events, utilizing the publish/subscribe pattern and a queue based transport mechanism. NServiceBus is an open source product, available under a commercial license

The Psychology of Kindness in the Workplace
Organizational cultures can be team-oriented, which tend to have people who are aware of one another’s contributions, and cultures can be achievement-oriented. But these things are not opposite ends of the same continuum, so it’s absolutely possible and likely that achievement-oriented cultures that are also respectful and caring are the most successful.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Networks Architecture: Programmability for WAN Networks
Cisco ONE Enterprise Networks Architecture enables applications and services to be network-aware by abstracting away the network in the Control Layer and making advanced network analytics available to the applications. Applications and services can now be smart about the network conditions and deliver an optimal user experience, securely, while simplifying IT operations.

CIO as ‘Chief Process Officer’: Process Assessment and Modeling
The challenge that many organizations have is how they move from just managing a few processes to managing a portfolio of processes and change the management approach from function to process. The process assessment evaluates process design, publication, ownership, improvement etc. against each of processes in the architecture, Process management and Enterprise Architecture should always go hand-in-hand.

Quote for the day:

"One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation." -- Arthur Ashe

July 13, 2013

Network functions virtualization: Another road to scalable networks
While some providers claim to be deploying one programmable networking concept over the other, SDN and NFV are still in their adolescence, and the terms can be used interchangeably, Bell said. "There is no difference," he said. "Some providers are trying to differentiate themselves by using one of the other, depending on what they have built.

Can Yahoo recycle your username -- and protect your data?
While the use-it-or-lose-it policy may be great for someone who's had to endure a clunky e-mail address like Mary4316594756139@yahoo and wants Mary@yahoo.com instead, it's raising some serious privacy and security concerns since e-mail addresses are linked to log-ins and password recovery on other sites. Casey said Yahoo is implementing a process to safeguard users' information and data that he described as "very, very foolproof."

The Assumption of Quality
“For crowd-sourced data, we’re assessing quality based on the first-order value rather than the immediate downstream usability. We’re not questioning the accuracy of Amazon’s assertion that customers who purchased X also purchased Y. Rather, we’re interested in the relevance of that information. In terms of knowledge management, I would describe this as broadening data quality to embrace information and knowledge quality.”

Ford Drives in the Right Direction with Big Data
For Ford, big data is nothing new; already in the 1990s they began with in-car analytics. In 2004 they created a self-learning neural network system for their Aston Martin DB9. This system was capable of keeping the engine functioning correctly and in optimized condition for the driving behaviour of the driver, adjusting alerts and performance accordingly. Since then, the culture of Ford has become data-driven, although selling the internal big data opportunities was more difficult than selling external big data opportunities.

The Shifting Buying Patterns of Cloud Service Adopters
IDC believes that by 2015, the three most important aspects of IT buying decisions will be the overall cost, internal management of cloud services, and identifying which applications to run on the cloud. Moreover, network latency of service delivery can lead to poor performance for users. Therefore, broader distribution of 1GbE-capable networks and development on new browser protocols – such as HTML5 -- are believed to be significant issues confronting cloud service providers and enterprise users.

5 things not to do when telecommuting
The benefits of having remote workers can be significant for both the employer and telecommuters. ... While a good telecommuting arrangement can be a good thing, it requires a lot of trust that the remote workers are focused on the job, even with personal things often getting in the way. These five things will go a long way toward building and keeping that employer/employee trust.

Leaders, Choose Your Words Wisely
What is a touchpoint? A touchpoint is an interaction with one other person, a couple of people, or a group that can last a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, or a couple of days. Those Touchpoints can be planned or spontaneous, casual or carefully choreographed. Every touchpoint is spring-loaded with possibilities. Each one can build — or break — a relationship.

Software Design Principles

Software design principles are a set of guidelines that helps us to avoid the bad design of a solution. The software designs helps to make a software well designed, well read and best maintainable. The design principles are associated to Robert Martin who gathered all the design principles in his book "Agile Software Development: Principles, patterns and practices

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The Current and Future Performance of the Mobile Web
The two bottlenecks that Drew describes are CPU and memory. CPU-boundedness has two aspects: the power of your CPU and efficiency of execution. Drew points out that current generation x86 processors are ten times faster than current generation ARM processors which power today's mobile devices such as the iPhone and high-end Android devices.

Quote for the day:

"Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts" -- Rita Mae Brown

July 12, 2013

Microsoft kills the enterprise cloud
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be taking a page from the Apple [AAPL] playbook in repositioning his corporation as a "devices company", but that's just smoke and mirrors to disguise a firm that's lost its soul: its data surveillance deal with the NSA threatens its position in the enterprise. Here's why:

The End of the Great-Man Theory of Innovation
A cluster of factors is driving the change. The biggest is that the world’s supply of great talent isn’t equal to demand. Not surprisingly, the push for new ways of tapping talent is coming less from the C-suite than from operations managers, who need reliable access to specialized skills.

Industry faces perception gap with data center, cloud
The perception gap is due to service providers, especially those offering cloud-based services, that are still caught up with the process of marketing key benefits of cloud and data centers such as agility, responsiveness, and flexibility, he pointed out. However, the starting point of cloud services encompassing availability, performance, and offering business resiliency is equally important to enterprises, Barnes noted.

How to make 'mobile first' an enterprise computing reality
Seekins, a mobility architect at a financial services firm, defines mobile first as the idea that "users would rather pick up [a] phone or tablet instead of a laptop." But to accommodate that notion, an organization needs to answer several questions around usability, policy, security and, of course, cost. Mobile first and other adoption trends were hot topics in the blogosphere over the past month. Check out what others had to say:

How does a CEO or founder go about improving — and measuring — company culture?
Your company culture is only as strong as you make it. It is not just setting down the bylines of your startup, but living out the culture every day in every decision you make, every meeting that you lead and every conversation that you have. If you see happy, committed employees who share your vision and passion, you know you’re doing something right!

Liberty Mutual CIO: An IT roadmap to business value and agility
Mojgan Lefebvre, CIO of insurance giant Liberty Mutual's Global Specialty, believes there are five ways to create business value: the right IT roadmap, governance, an agile IT structure, an IT team that understands the business it's in, and a federated IT organization. ... All of these things go to governance -- having the right governance and making sure that you've got the right accountable individuals.

Researchers create optical switch with graphene semiconductor, could boost internet speeds
The carbon atoms that make up graphene are arranged in a repeating pattern of hexagons. Despite being just an atom thick, graphene is incredibly strong, light and flexible. Its conductive properties also make it attractive for use in electronics. The researchers used several layers of graphene in the optical switch because they found it made the conversion time faster than a single layer. Graphene becomes less conductive as it gets thicker, but can still compete with other conductive materials.

It's a mobile-first world and that means mobile BI too
This can be a big change in approach -- not just for us but also for BI vendors. So, while we are changing our approach by taking a mobile-first or mobile-only approach, let's also revise our thinking about BI. For too long, the focus of BI has been on reporting and visualizations of those reports. I think our BI focus should be on improved decision making. To that end, I start every BI project by asking and answering three questions:

New Snowden revelation shows Skype may be privacy's biggest enemy
The article devotes a great deal of attention to details about Skype's cooperation with Prism. Skype began cooperating with Prism, in February, 2011, before it was bought by Microsoft. In May, 2011, Microsoft signed a deal to buy Skype, and by October of that year, the purchase was complete. After Microsoft bought Skype, the cooperation with Prism increased dramatically.

Microsoft reaffirms new strategy dedicated to devices, services over software
“The form and delivery of our value will shift to devices and services versus packaged software,” Ballmer reiterated. To achieve this, Ballmer remarked that Microsoft went back to its core mantra: “To help people in businesses reach their full potential.” Going forward, Ballmer said that the new strategy will be creating a family of devices and services for both businesses and individuals that power people on-the-go for the "activities people really value."

Quote for the day:

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today." -- H.G. Wells

July 11, 2013

Converged Infrastructure Bets Are In: Where Are They Paying Off?
"These conversations have shifted to one that optimizes the infrastructure and creates a much more simple-to-manage, simple-to-scale-up, and simple-to-scale-out architecture and platform," Flowers said. ... "Fewer moving parts and fewer steps equals fewer administrators to manage the platform," he said. "Streamlining the administrative and operational costs for customers allows those extra administrators to focus their attention on adding additional value to the business with other IT initiatives that simply fell to the wayside before."

SSNs Exposed In Most Data Breaches In California
"If encryption had been used, over 1.4 million Californians would not have had their information put at risk in 2012," Harris said. "It is my strong recommendation that companies and agencies implement encryption as a basic protection and reasonable security measure to help them meet their obligation to safeguard personal information entrusted to them."

EMC Bets on Flash Storage with ScaleIO Buy
"The addition of ScaleIO to our portfolio will enable EMC customers to build protected, shared storage pools from in-server direct-attached storage (DAS), such as XtremSF PCie Flash cards -- while not limiting them to any storage media type or form factor," wrote Zahid Hussain, senior vice president and general manager for EMC Flash Products Division, in a blog post announcing the pending acquisition.

Executive Report: Business Enterprise Architecture
This Executive Report discusses a new way of looking at enterprise architecture that encompasses both advanced and traditional design concepts. The EA framework that we propose here is called BEAM, short for Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling. ... More and more organizations are extracting value from their EA programs at a variety of levels. These organizations are increasingly aware of how critical enterprise architecture is to their enterprises over both the short and long term.

ACG HotSeat with Sanjeev Mervana from Cisco on Core Router
The trend has been to make the edge router "smart" and the core router "dumb and fast." Does this trend still hold true today? How are service providers using routers? Ray Mota of ACG Research and Sanjeev Mervana of Cisco Systems, discuss what defines core routers from edge routers, the architecture requirements of core, drivers for these requirements, forwarding and control planes, service substantiation and what makes both Cisco's and Juniper's products true core routers.

Is Quantum Computing Practical?
Of course, it’s easy enough to say the costs of such a quantum computer will fall over time, and advances in technology will enable smaller and more power-conscious models. But it’s just as easy to claim that the need for cryogenics and problems with decoherence may never be overcome in an economically feasible manner. Money is a greater driver of technological development than bare physical possibility. A flying car is conceivable (and likely possible, technologically), but the economics of development and marketing make it a practical impossibility.

Intercloud Architecture for Interoperability and Integration
The report briefly presents the architectural framework for cloud based infrastructure services provisioned on-demand being developed by authors that can be used as a basis for building multilayer cloud services integration framework that can allow optimised provisioning of both computing, storage and networking resources. The proposed architecture is intended to provide a conceptual model for developing Intercloud middleware and in this way will facilitate clouds interoperability and integration.

Are You Data Driven? Take a Hard Look in the Mirror
Data-driven companies work to drive decision-making to the lowest possible level. One executive I spoke to described how he thought about it this way: "My goal is to make six decisions a year. Of course that means I have to pick the six most important things to decide on and that I make sure those who report to me have the data, and the confidence, they need to make the others." Pushing decision-making down frees up senior time for the most important decisions.

Disruptive Leadership: Bowdoin College CIO Mitch Davis
The way he took a different tack on every issue was what caught my attention the most. While others sorted through the complexities of bring-your-own-device policies and supporting a variety of mobile operating systems, for example, he suggested it was far simpler to just provide iPads. He dismissed talk about the disruptive potential of massive open online courses as overblown, telling me later that MOOCs are "just an add-on to things we have been doing in the past."

Agile Concept of the Week: Retrospective
One common problem I notice with teams is that they’re unwilling to challenge what they perceive as organizational requirements outside of their control, and that’s where executive sponsorship of an agile transformation is invaluable. If “we’ve always produced a detailed design specification” even though nobody really uses it, having an executive on your side to say “we’re not doing it any more” helps tremendously.

Quote for the day:

"Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it." -- Jim Rohn

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