Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 10, 2013

Employee engagement is about human relationships not human resources
A recent report said that 40% of the whole workforce in the USA is ‘freelance’. This is a growing trend and will have big implications for how work is done, contracted and delivered by organisations and networks of freelancers in competition or collaboration. This is going to have serious implications for employee engagement too. Money, regardless of what many people say, still matters when it comes to employee engagement and knowledge workers.

Tools To Hack Android Phones Are Getting Easier To Use
Security research firm Symantec recently highlighted a remote access tool (or RAT) known as AndroRAT being exchanged in underground forums, which together with a new tool called a binder, allow attackers to scrape personal information from an Android phone. ... Once a would-be cracker has downloaded the remote access tool, they can use the binder to package AndroRAT into a legitimate-looking app, such as a game like Angry Birds.

NSA 'secret backdoor' paved way to U.S. phone, e-mail snooping
In response to a CNET article at the time, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement saying: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper never elaborated, however, on what "proper" authorization would be.

ebizQ eGuide: Cloud BPM
Moving business processes to cloud environments may sound like a reasonably simple undertaking. But deciding which processes to migrate--and when and how to do so -- involves some complex questions. This guide aims to provide some answers by compiling expert advice from ebizQ and other TechTarget sites. ... Get advice straight from the experts in this collection of podcasts about cloud processes.

Legacy software support is no reason to maintain outdated constructs
There's no reason to maintain DOS drive letters anymore. There's no argument good enough. There's no legacy software worth it. It's time to grow up. It's time to leave that part of the past behind us. Drive letters should only be the topic of geeky conversations that I'll walk away from. Sorry drive letter fans, it's time to birth a new legacy: Drive letters.

Reinventing the CIO as Chief Interaction Officer
‘Information' is a commodity, ‘Interaction' is business value. Companies can no longer sustain the 3x investment required to attract new business. Instead, they need to drive more business and higher value deals from existing customers. That's why nearly 90% of CEOs rank customer engagement as their primary initiative.

Using automated analytics in Agile development
One way we've broken the silence is by using Application Lifecycle Intelligence, pulling together the data the team generates while working, writing code and implementing the product. This data is being captured in so many systems. By automating the process of capturing this data, digesting the data and understanding the association between the data, we can use analytics to give us a high level of transparency.

IBM Opens Up Power Design, Partners with Google
Google designs its own servers, and the search company could design its own integrated chip -- also called system-on-chip -- based on the Power architecture, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. That development is tied to one of IBM's goals -- to push Power-based chips into more servers, which could prop up the company's other businesses, McCarron said.

Scaling Dropbox
"Every time we tried to be clever about architecture we failed" muses Eranki. Hopes to use clever data structures like Bloom Filters to manage distributed hash tables never panned out against simple database sharding. Plans to use clever distributed sharding schemes for their MySQL databases proved more complex than a pragmatic master-slave architecture.

Mozilla links Gmail with Persona for email-based single sign-on
Because most internet users haven't registered with a Persona IdP, however – and many don't even know such things exist – Mozilla has developed Identity Bridging as a stopgap measure until Persona is more widely supported. A Persona Identity Bridge authenticates users using either the OpenID or OAuth protocols – most major email providers offer one or the other – and then translates the results into the Persona protocol for use with Persona-enabled websites.

Quote for the day:

"To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart." -- Thomas Watson

August 09, 2013

Making SIAM work
We put a lot of effort into identifying these dependencies, capturing them within our ITIL Framework for service management and our Governance Framework. Many of them came down to information flows. We reasoned that without knowing how the parties were to collaborate effectively in delivering end-to-end service, we could have no assurance that this would be achieved. This could not easily be bolted on after the initial construction. It had to be part of the operating environment before the arrival of the first player.

What is culture and how does it affect the practice of Enterprise Architecture?
Culture is defined in many ways by many scholars, although I find it easiest to define culture as interactions and relationships between members of an organization or unit within that organization. This assumes there is an organizational culture and sub cultures within that organization. With this said, it is important that we as architects focus on the overarching organizational culture to better understand whether our customers are ready for an EA engagement.

9 Qualities Of Truly Confident People
Confidence is quiet: It’s a natural expression of ability, expertise, and self-regard. "I’m fortunate to know a number of truly confident people. Many work with me at HubSpot, others are fellow founders of their own startups some of whom I've met through my angel investment activity. But the majority are people I’ve met through my career and who work in a variety of industries and professions."

It’s all in the Governance
Without a strong architectural voice at the governance table, the EA contribution and value will always be compromised. Unless you have effective EA governance, then you will suffer the following outcomes: Short-term, reactive fixes over proactively building longer-term capability; Inconsistent, ad-hoc and stand-alone solutions over an integrated, coherent set of services; and Unnecessary duplication of functionality or data, over taking advantage of potential sharing, synergies or collaboration.

Dutch banking regulator approves use of AWS public cloud in the financial sector
The approval also includes the storage and management of all levels of data on the AWS cloud, as well as the use of third-party technologies that run on top of it. Every Dutch financial institute is required to follow guidelines outlined by its central bank when choosing banking technology platforms. One of the guidelines requires that the DNB can oversee and confirm that the IT infrastructures used by financial firms are compliant with its regulations.

User Experience Is More Than Design—It’s Strategy
It is about the strategic understanding of users and their behavior. If we are to contribute strategically, UX professionals must be willing and able to take responsibility for their final decisions and accept the corporate accountability that comes with making critical decisions about customers. We must be willing to go outside our design skillset and embrace all corporate functions, including finance, technology, marketing, and sales.

Cloud Service Brokers: What You Need to Know
The fear of losing control over data management is among the reasons for hesitancy about cloud services, but a good broker can help users identify their ideal level of management oversight, and implement a cloud service to meet those needs. The user will still know what the broker is doing, and an administrator can and should set the policies to help alleviate these concerns.

The enterprise information Management Barbell strengthens your information Value
We no longer can depend on a single information source to make key organizational decisions. Many of our decisions depend on and gain strength from a combination of data and content. For example, the development of a patient care plan requires the lab results, patient vitals, any x-ray results, and the doctor’s notes. A complete picture of the patient is a combination of the data stored in the clinical systems and the unstructured information gathered from the x-rays and doctor’s notes.

China's Huawei unveils SDN programmable switch, taking aim at Cisco
"The Agile switch and network products we launched today can truly resolve the problems customers have in network development," said William Xu, CEO of Huawei's enterprise business group in an interview. "It's a revolutionary product." Huawei's Agile switch is designed with its own Ethernet network processor that can handle different software tasks. The company claims its product will offer better performance over rival switches

Microsoft to field a Cloud OS for government: Sources
The private cloud version of Microsoft's Cloud OS offering may be codenamed "Fairfax," according to my contacts. Fairfax, Virg., is the home of the General Services Administration, and close to other U.S. government agencies. I believe Fairfax is meant for U.S. government users. ... it would be a customized variant of Windows Server, with physical servers residing on site at government locations

Quote for the day:

"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow" -- Robert Kiyosaki

August 08, 2013

Fighting the unknown unknowns: Building the network of the future
Of course, it's not just the core of the net that's feeling the pressure. It's also the data centre that's changing, turning into a private cloud that needs to respond flexibly to changes in demand, and to behave as a combination of compute and storage fabrics, all supported by a software defined network. It's a networking future that's fraught with unknown unknowns.

Cloud-based nearline storage adds features to adapt to big data needs
In the second of a two-part interview with TechTarget senior writer Carol Sliwa, Staimer discusses the distinction between nearline and primary data, decision points associated with choosing public, private or hybrid cloud storage for nearline scenarios, and data migration and security issues with large quantities of data.

Cloud computing will kill the IT department. True or false?

Gone are the days of companies needing large data centers, with thousands of servers and an army of people to manage them. Gone are the days of ridiculously complex software customizations, integrations, and teams to manage local applications. There will be no need for most of the IT roles that exist today. The technical experts and developers will mostly work for the companies who make the software or provide the infrastructure.

Are Data Quality and Data Science Polar Opposites?

Big data gurus have said that data quality isn’t important for big data. Good enough is good enough. However, business stakeholders still complain about poor data quality. In fact, when Forrester surveyed customer intelligence professionals, the ability to integrate data and manage data quality are the top two factors holding customer intelligence back.

A New Era of Computing Requires a New Way of Programming

The era that Backus and his contemporaries helped create, the programmable computing era, is being superseded by the era of cognitive computing. Increasingly, computers will gather huge quantities of data, reason over the data, and learn from their interactions with information and people. These new capabilities will help us penetrate complexity and make better decisions about everything from how to manage cities to how to solve confounding business problems.

IBM Research unveils new chip architecture inspired by the human brain
In a nutshell, the brain served as the inspiration for the groundwork to eventually support applications by using similar techniques and patterns in regards to human perception, action, and cognition. IBM researchers offered the example of the human eyes, which they posited could sift more than a terabyte of data each day. A system mimicking the cortex could give way to low-power eyeglasses to aide visually impaired users.

Forensic researchers develop undetectable method for tracking cellphones
Although phones are mass-produced, and each model contains the exact same hardware, there are still differences in the radio signal patterns they emit. It is those tiny unchangeable differences, or “inaccuracies” sent to cell towers that are unique enough to be used as identifying digital fingerprints, thereby allowing police to track the phone.

How to Map IT capabilities with Business Capabilities
“To justify their role, future CIOs must be able to relate to the industry they work in and the inputs they provide, the output and resources they bring in to enhance the capabilities of CFO / CSO / CMO or all of them,” says Matta. Pradeep Khanna, Senior IT Manager, Infosys, relates to the theory of cause and effect when he says IT is a ‘Karta’ and it is time we realised that IT exists to facilitate business and not the other way round.

Some Tech Firms Ask: Who Needs Managers?
GitHub says employees can join projects in whatever capacity they feel they are most useful and can switch roles depending on the project. Co-founder Tom Preston-Werner has declared that the company has no managers or organizational chart and says that performance feedback is offered informally by co-workers. But as GitHub has grown—it now employs about 200 people—its leaders are coming to terms with the need for some oversight.

Creative Destruction Of Internet Age: Unstoppable
Andreessen wrote in The Wall Street Journal two years ago. "Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not."

Quote for the day:

"It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference." -- Tom Brokaw

August 07, 2013

The problem with project risk management
If risk management could prevent projects from failing or being adversely affected by external circumstances, all projects would be successful, and, clearly, they aren't. So should we bother expending time and effort planning for predictable risks that are a natural part of most projects? Would it be more effective to simply deal with the problems when they occur.

Prescriptive analytics is coming to a future near you
In prescriptive analytics, algorithms basically run wild. "We use rules, but minimally," Basu said. That's because rules don't scale. They are dependent upon human beings, and in a big data world, human beings cannot keep up. "You end up being as good as the guy making the rules." Instead, the algorithms are allowed to take over but are programmed to adapt automatically based on changes in established parameters.

Why agile isn't enough for many software projects
"It would be nice if we were all collocated in small teams, and we didn’t have to talk to anybody else, but that’s not a reality," Mark Lines continues. "What if you’re in situations where you need to more than what a classic agile project would ask for?" Examples of software projects beyond the scope of agile include applications subject to regulatory mandates, or complex programs such as software for rocket ships or medical devices.

Active/Active Data Center Design - Complexity & Challenges
Not only can it be expensive, but it's also complex. For example, if you share sessions across cells, this means that you're relying on a single database server (or database server and failover server), or trying to replicate data between data centers. As a result, maintenance on the database server(s) of any type results in an outage (or the steps to avoid an outage) across two cells. This adds complexity.

Wirelessly-charged electric buses start public route in South Korea
The power is transmitted wirelessly via Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance (SMFIR), a technology developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) that essentially runs 100 kilowatts of power through some cables at a very specific frequency (20 kHz in this case), creating a 20 kHz electromagnetic field. The underside of the bus is equipped with a pick-up coil that’s tuned to pick up that frequency, and thus AC electricity is produced via magnetic resonance.

The cloud is a revolution-enabler for SMBs
As cloud computing evolves and as providers bring more and higher-level services to the market, computing resources stop being so much of a constraint to the development of systems and applications, and become simply building blocks that we can employ. Less constraints means more opportunities, especially for small and medium companies who are more agile and quicker to react to market trends than their bigger competitors.

Bank Finds that Active/Active is Better than the End of the Rainbow
The bank realizes that going active/active is not as simple as moving to a sizzling-hot standby. Several problems must be faced when running an application in a distributed environment. For instance, the applications may need to be modified to correctly handle memory-resident data structures that are not replicated. Another problem is data collisions. A data collision occurs if applications at two nodes modify the same data object within the replication latency of the replication engine.

IT services management and best practices: An enterprise CIO guide
In this Essential Guide, get advice and tips from CIOs in the field looking to increase business value by developing cream-of-the-crop IT services management programs. These IT leaders share their dos, don'ts and personal experiences with ITSM implementation. This Essential Guide on ITSM best practices is part of SearchCIO's CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Cisco’s remedy for connected car security: Treat the car like an enterprise
Cisco Systems and auto components maker Continental believe they have an answer to the security threat facing the vehicle of the future: treat it like an enterprise. Each car should have security and access permissions of a self-contained enterprise network, and every incoming and outgoing communication would be monitored and managed the same way an IT department walls off a corporate network from the outside world.

Data Center I/O Bottlenecks Performance Issues and Impacts
The continued need for accessing more storage capacity results in an alarming trend: the expanding gap between server processing power and available I/O performance of disk storage (Figure-2). This server to I/O performance gap has existed for several decades and continues to widen instead of improving.

Quote for the day:

“With good architecture, debugging is a breeze because bugs will be where they should be.” -- David May

August 06, 2013

W3C defines local Web storage API
You won't be able to use the Web storage API for large documents or data sets. The W3C document recommends that each Web site or service limit the Web Storage data to 5MBs. The actual amount of local Web Storage on your device varies from Web browser to Web browser and even from version to version. That's still enough to make HTML5 applications much more useful.

Alternative project management styles are faster than multitasking
The best alternative, if you can manage it, is to commit to just one project for the duration of the iteration. This is called project portfolio management. Some group of decision makers in the organization decides which project is number 1, which project is number 2, which project is number 3, and so on down the line. They assign the projects to the teams and let the teams know the rank order of the projects.

U.S. cloud industry stands to lose $35 billion amid PRISM fallout
"The United States has both the most to gain and the most to lose," writes report author Daniel Castro, citing job growth and revenue dependent on the U.S. exporting cloud computing services. The "low end" scenario estimates assumes the U.S. loses about 10 percent of its foreign market to European or Asian competitors, or $21.5 billion over the next three years.

US IT worker files hiring lawsuit against Infosys
The lawsuit, citing comments from former Infosys employees, alleges that more than 90 percent of the company's 15,000 U.S. employees are foreign workers, with most of them from South Asia. The company is using H-1B visas to hire foreign workers "to performA jobs for which there are qualified American workers available," the lawsuit said.

Enterprise Private PaaS Adoption and Differentiation
While Public PaaS only requires a simple, on-demand subscription process and uploading code into the Cloud, Private PaaS requires transforming enterprise IT deployment models, monitoring and management systems, operation processes, funding models, and platform configuration options. Changing internal IT processes, infrastructure, and people skills is not easy, and often, complicated IT initiatives do not obtain the initially promoted lofty goals.

NuoDB 1.2 is Packed with Previews and Fixes
Note that our new "Preview" offerings are just that - a look at what's coming, a.ka. beta features. These will give you the chance to start using them now, knowing they are far enough along in development to try, but not quite 100% of where we expect to take them. Some will require a Beta program sign-up for participation, and some you can go straight to download and use now.

One in every five tablets will be an enterprise device by 2017
Enterprise tablets will make up around 12 percent of the 186 million tablets that Forrester expects to be in use in 2013. However, business adoption for internal and customer-facing purposes will drive tablets to become 18 percent all tablets in use by 2017, according to the company's latest global business and consumer tablet forecast update.

Linda Rising presents more practical advice about the Agile mindset
Rising described the growth mindset as an "Agile mindset" because in Agile environments, we are encouraged to learn from our mistakes. The idea of failing fast and improving, as promoted with Agile teams, is aligned with the growth mindset. Those who practice this Agile way of thinking do indeed continue to grow and learn more readily than those with the fixed mindset. If we think we can grow, we do. If we think we can't, we don't.

Microsoft Going All In with Hadoop and Hortonworks
"It is a bit different for us," Clark admitted, to work on such an open source project in view of its strong brands in the data platform space, such as SQL Server and Excel. But he said the move made sense for Microsoft and Hortonworks was the best partner. "We're putting our shoulder now firmly behind their distribution on Windows," he said.

Wrangling WebRTC: Challenges and Opportunities for Real-time Communication
Gustavo Garcia, Architect at TokBox explores actual use cases for real time communication in verticals ranging from telepresence to healthcare, where WebRTC fits and where it falls short, and what developers can do.

Quote for the day:

"The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching" -- Dennis Green

August 05, 2013

Disappointing News about SQL Server 2014
What's not fair, however, is to assume that a 16-core server running SQL Server Standard Edition only needs (or can only use) up to 4GB of Memory per core. In fact, that idea is patently ludicrous—given server hardware configurations today. It's also a bit galling to the spirit of SQL Server licensing that has existed in the past where customers paid to license the amount of computing power they were harnessing with SQL Server

PayPal co-founder on 'putting data to work' in healthcare with Glow app
"It turns out to be, as many things are in health, an information problem," Levchin reflected. Thus, Levchin declared Glow, which launched earlier this year, as "the first attempt" in making fertility (and later other medical treatments) more affordable thanks to information being made more readily available and actionable. "The fundamental truism of data-driven companies is you either talk about it or take the principal risk," Levchin remarked.

12 predictive analytics screw-ups
"Data mining is the art of making comparisons," says Dean Abbott, president of Abbott Analytics, which was retained for the project. Because the company had rules in place that always applied the exact same actions, Abbott had no idea which sequence would work better for collecting debts. "You need historical examples," he says. And if you don't have those examples, you need to create them through a series of intentionally planned experiments so that you can gather that data.

The trouble with VDI
there's the eternal network bandwidth problem. When your users are in the office, with Gigabit Ethernet and sufficient 802.11n Wi-Fi, delivering a solid desktop experience is easy. But, when your workers are often on the road with three to five Mbps DSL connections or over-subscribed Wi-Fi access points, it's another story. More often than not, there's insufficient bandwidth to deliver a quality experience.

Password Verification Security Loophole
Leighton Nelson asked an interesting Oracle security question via Twitter yesterday regarding Oracle’s built-in password verification functions and whether or not it can be bypassed by changing the way you create a user. Steve Karam says "Yes" and demonstrates the same through this blog post. As he explains any one with create / alter user privilege can bypass the password verification.

DataStax helps enterprises offload Oracle
“20 of the Fortune 100 have moved from Oracle to Datastax. We are a better fit for modern applications.” According to Ellis, relational database technologies such as Oracle are inadequate for powering modern online line-of-business applications. ... One of the companies using DataStax is eBay, which is running 250 TByte Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise cluster. Other businesses using DataStax include the movie streaming service, Netflix and Thomson Reuters.

Traffic Manager Overview
Although Traffic Manager conceptually routes traffic to a given service, the actual process is slightly different because it uses DNS. No actual service traffic routes through Traffic Manager. The user’s computer calls the cloud service directly when Traffic Manager resolves the DNS entry for the company domain to the IP address of the cloud service.

Three things Oracle has done to become a big cloud player
The moves are not just significant for Oracle; the partnerships that the company has garnered are significant to the partnering with Microsoft and Salesforce, too. And they’ll also reverberate across the industry to competing companies such as Amazon Web Services and SAP, predicts Holger Mueller, vice president at Constellation Research who recently published a report about these developments.

Tech Industry Leaders Appeal for Laxer Intellectual Property Laws
"They use the cost of litigation as a club to extort settlements out of companies that actually do things," Van Lindberg, vice president of intellectual property at the open source cloud provider Rackspace, told members of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on IP and the Internet. "If there is something that you could do to encourage innovation in America, it is to stop the patent troll problem and to really help us with this litigation abuse."

Researchers reveal methods behind car hack at Defcon
"If the only thing that keeps our cars safe is that no one bothers to do this kind of research, then they're not really secure," Miller said. "I think it's better to lay it all out, find the problems and start talking about them." However, fixing the issues won't be easy because most of them are there by design, according to Miller. Car manufacturers won't be able to just issue a patch, the researcher said. "They'll have to change the way these systems are made."

Quote for the day:

"Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities" -- Walter Scott

August 04, 2013

How to build a Roadmap – Sequence
Developing a balanced well-crafted road-map is based on the “best available” ordered set of actions subject to the set of priorities (and constraints) already agreed upon. When you think about this across multiple dimensions it does get a little overwhelming so I think the best thing to do is break the larger components into something we can attack in pieces and merge together later.

Visionary companies are driving next generation enterprise architecture in China – are you ready?
Contributing to more than 60% of total GDP in China, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have always sought to simplify their IT operation as much as possible, and at the same time scale it up when business expands as quickly as possible. IaaS solutions appear to be a perfect match for SMEs; however IT professionals have concerns about the security and data privacy over the operations by other companies.

Virtual Panel: Using Java in Low Latency Environments
The difference in performance between Java and C++ is so close that it's not a black and white decision based solely on speed. Improvements in GC techniques, JIT optimizations, and managed runtimes have made traditional Java weaknesses with respect to performance into some very compelling strengths that are not easy to ignore.

3 Different Approaches to Enterprise Manufacturing Software
While there is usually a need to simplify and consolidate processes where possible, it’s also important to integrate key processes and ensure that the systems that support manufacturing operations are actually helping to improve the business and not just feeding other systems and people in the organization with information that may not be necessary. This takes a tactical approach, and depending on your existing investments, the approach may vary.

IT Management: How do your leadership skills measure up?
Today’s marketplace is in a state of constant change. Successful companies are those that can also respond and quickly adapt to the changes around them. That requires leaders who are able to lead with the head, by focusing on the big-picture goal and business objectives; the heart, by knowing how to engage, coach and motivate people; and with the hands, by providing the tactical tools and skills necessary like a project manager.

A Metric Leading to Agility
With any metric,we need to be clear about what the curve should look like. Is the metric defects? We want them to go down. Is it lines of code? Then, presumably, we want them to go up. Number of tests? Up. RTF should increase essentially linearly from day one through to the end of the project. To accomplish that, the team will have to learn to become agile. From day one, until the project is finished, we want to see smooth, consistent growth in the number of Running, Tested Features.

Securely Managed API Technologies Key to Fostering Market Innovation
API business agility is both a management and security issue. API managers must consider how much API governance can be automated to reduce potential for coding errors. On the flip side, security issues related to governance policies, date protection, compliance adherence all need mitigation to achieve optimal business agility.

An evaluation of four patterns of interaction for integrating disparate ESBs effectively and easily
Keen at al assert that: “Integrating two or more ESBs is subject to some of the same integration patterns as connecting two or more applications; integration déjà vu” (2005, p. 87). They reasonably suggest that one important implication of this assertion is that “it seems logical that integrating ESBs should follow best practices similar to these for enterprise application integration (EAI)”

A Product Management Skills Map For Product Owners
Product manager is a formal job title, particularly at commercial tech companies, for individuals who drive product technology and make market-facing decisions intended to generate revenue. They set product strategy as well as implement it. They are heavily matrixed, often covering aspects of product marketing, sales support, external thought leadership and corporate strategy.

Quote for the day:

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." -- Zig Ziglar

August 03, 2013

Why, when to use messaging middleware
There can be overlap with workflow systems and traditional batch-scheduling systems. These systems' core focus is orchestration and keeping track of where things are in a long running process. The workflow system may not perform any processing itself, but instead will act as the master delegator to the people, integration platforms or general purpose computing platforms that handle the units of work required.

Functional GUI Testing Automation Patterns
Any application at a certain moment of time with specific input data can exist in only one specific state. According to such a definition we can picture the software program as a finite state machine (finite automaton). Considering this fact and the availability of state and transition models (Figure 1 as an example) we can define certain sets of transitions (workflows) between pages that would cover most of the program’s functionality.

SaaS contracts too often lack security specifics
"Contractually, very little security language appears in the body of SaaS contracts," Gartner analysts Jay Heiser and Alexa Bona wrote in the report. "Typically the security section contains little more than platitudes, stating that the provider will use 'commercially reasonable efforts to establish and maintain security safeguards.' These are often declared to be 'in line with industry standards,' which are mostly never defined."

Colocation - Key Considerations for Selection of Service Provider
The benefits of going for colocation service include effective use of capital and having higher quality facilities through power redundancy, cooling, and scalability/growth. Choosing a colocation provider is a strategic business decision that evolves from thoughtful consideration certain key parameters. More over, the partnership with the colocation service provider need a multi-year commitment from both.

Hackers to NSA chief: Read the Constitution
It was a far cry from when Alexander kicked off DefCon 20 with a keynote speech last year. There's a lot of crossover between Black Hat and DefCon attendees, the general spoke on Wednesday in his official uniform. This would be a more serious presentation. Over the ensuing 45 minutes or so, Alexander described in broad terms how Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act and Section 215 of the Patriot Act affect governmental intelligence gathering in the U.S.

An Extensive Glossary of Big Data Terminology
Big data comes with a lot of new terminology that is sometimes hard to understand. Therefore we have created an ABC of big data that should give some insights. Some of the definitions refer to a corresponding blog post. Of course this big data glossary is not 100% complete, so please let us know if there are missing terminology that you would like to see included.

GM’s plan to turn the car into a smartphone on wheels
GM’s not just talking about letting audio streaming and simple location-based services apps into the dashboard, it’s planning to expose engine and vehicle data and even its OnStar telematics features to its developer community. That means app builders can get access to the inner workings and technologies on an unprecedented scale, much like a smartphone or developer can delve into the core features of an Android or iOS device.

The state of business process execution language (BPEL) in 2013
In the last five years, BPEL hasn't undergone any major changes, but it has received more mature support from vendors. The support hasn't come without a price, but if developers use BPEL for automating technological processes and eschew excessive customization, they can overcome some common problems with the technology, experts say.

Data Center Innovator Ken Brill Dies At 68
Brill is also credited with technical innovations, including the introduction of dual power supplies for servers, which ensures a server keeps running if one power supply fails. He was awarded a patent for the invention in 2000 but never sought to profit from it, according to Kudritzki. "He was motivated by the desire for constant improvement," he said. "That's what drove him." -- RIP

Disrupting What We Think We Know About Disruptive Innovation
The human brain, or more specifically the neo-cortex, is designed to recognize patterns and draw conclusions from them. Experts are able to identify such patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because non-experts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain’s ability for abstraction, rather than specificity.

Quote for the day:

“If we did all the things we were capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” -- Thomas A. Edison

August 02, 2013

Applying a Life Cycle Framework to Implementing a Governance Model
Establishing structured communications will maintain linkages throughout the levels of governance and assure that the organizational strategy, mission, vision, and desired outcomes are maintained and aligned. This alignment can provide assurance to the organization, knowing that the outcomes of the performing initiatives are meeting its goals, as the predefined process provides the proper oversight to the responsible individuals. When governance is working correctly, the organization will be performing at an optimal point.

Quality of Risk Data Top Concern Among Risk Managers
Fewer than a quarter of respondents rated their technology and systems as “extremely or very effective” with data management/maintenance, data process architecture/workflow logic, or data governance, according to “Global Risk Management Survey, Eighth Edition: Setting a Higher Bar,” a new risk management report from Deloitte.

How to align your IT Strategy skillfully
“It is no longer about which products to buy; it is about a strategic approach followed to leverage the technological advancement. For example, it is about “how to treat big data in a different fashion which can help my organisation,” and therefore have negotiations around that with the vendor,” says Parikh. ... “The prioritisation is done based on a scale of vitals, essentials and desirables, and future CIOs need to spot the high business impact items for better alignment of the IT strategy to drive business growth,” points out Kumar.

Selling cloud-based communications starts with a hybrid sale
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) providers must adjust their selling strategies to match their customers' basic business needs by finding ways to work with the infrastructure customers already have installed. Enterprises with premises-based UC systems are not going to swap them out overnight, said Ken Landoline, principal analyst of unified communications and contact center research for Washington, D.C.-based Current Analysis Inc.

Utilities Behind the Big Data Curve
That shortage is one reason the industry is falling short when it comes to putting the data it collects to better use. Compounding the problem is that most utilities still take a siloed approach to their data, according to Guerry Waters, vice president for industry strategy at Oracle Utilities. “The utility industry needs to take an enterprise view of the data,” he says.

USB will soon catch up to Thunderbolt with 10Gbps speeds
Both the SuperSpeed 3.1 and the USB Power Delivery specification initiatives are in the implementation enabling phase where the functional components for each are being developed and component suppliers are working with platform and peripheral manufacturers, the spokesman said. "While some products sporting these latest technologies are potentially going to reach the market next year, 2015 is when both will likely gain a more measurable impact," he added.

The virtues of database as a service
The key initial driver is the move to more single-purpose databases. Its use in the public cloud is largely driven by small tactical enterprise IT projects that end up using database-as-a-service providers out of sheer need for the technology, as well as limited budgets. Once, Oracle was the default choice for databases, but that's no longer the case.

Luc Levesque of Trip Advisor, on Frequent Evaluations
“Wouldn’t it be great if you had a blueprint to give someone on Day 1 that encapsulates what works with me and what are some of the quirks about me that you’re just going to have to accept?” So I wrote it up, and started sharing it with my team. It’s worked really well. ... Another is no finger-pointing if something goes wrong, so fall on your sword. We’re all in this together. We move very fast and we’re going to make mistakes.

Risk and complexity: Businesses need to get a grip
From risks around cybersecurity to supply chain concerns to fast-changing trends around cloud computing, the pace of change and pressures on businesses to adjust well have never been higher. To gain a fuller grip on such risk and complexity, The Open Group is shepherding a series of standards and initiatives to provide better tools for understanding and managing true operational dependability. BriefingsDirect sat down with the President and CEO of The Open Group, Allen Brown, at the July conference to gather an update on the efforts.

Quote for the day:

"Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great." -- Fernando Flores

August 01, 2013

Understanding IT's role in cloud security and compliance
In this chapter excerpt from Cloud Computing: Assessing the Risks, authors Jared Carstensen, Bernard Golden and J.P. Morgenthal discuss what cloud consumers need to consider in terms of security, compliance and risk, how these considerations affect cloud infrastructure and applications, as well as where the compliance responsibility -- or trust boundary -- lies.

Ask these 9 questions to avoid hero worship and closed minds
Failure is essential to the human experience; we would not be able to define success without it, nor would be we be able to learn and grow if there was nothing we were shallow, ignorant or inexperienced about. And, in theory, corporate America gets this. We talk about innovation by failing fast, of developing employees by letting them make mistakes and overcome them. But do we live this or simply say it?

Secure migration to the cloud: A not impossible mission
A challenge with many of these approaches is that they are not always scalable for enterprise use: different administrators are managing passwords, SSH key pairs, and so on. You may have one solution for securing your data at rest in the cloud, one for backups and another for data migration. Got a headache yet?

Cloud contracts poor on security, says Gartner
“As more buyers demand it, and as the standards mature, it will become increasingly common practice to perform assessments in a variety of ways, including reviewing responses to a questionnaire, reviewing third-party audit statements, conducting on-site audits and/or monitoring the cloud services provider,” said Bona. ... “We recommend they also include recovery time and recovery point objectives and data integrity measures in the service level agreements, with meaningful penalties if these are missed,” she said.

Tech Trajectories: Four More Moore’s Laws
We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law, which takes an inexorable view of technological progress, with the number of components on an integrated circuit doubling like clockwork every 18 months or so. But do other technologies follow a similar pattern of exponential improvement? ... Moore’s Law–like doubling serves as a fair predictor of progress, but not without hiccups.

What to look for in Linux memory usage
Unlike Windows, where memory swap can slow programs down, Linux memory swap is advantageous, thanks to the way in which Linux analyzes processes' allocated memory page use. The Linux kernel runs a Least Recently Used algorithm to determine which memory pages need to be in RAM and which do not. In some cases, letting the Linux kernel swap faster can improve memory performance.

How the cloud is going to reinvent ERP — and how long it will take
Not that the cloud is going to banish the core of on-premise ERP. "For the next five years or more we will see the deployment of what we call hybrid-ERP, a mix of on-premise and the cloud", Rayner said. "What we do know is that there will be come occasions when on-premises ERP is the way to go and some where the cloud is better suited."

Making the Shift from Sustainable to Transient Advantage
In traditional strategy, companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry. And that worked very well in an era where most sectors of the economy were dominated by a few big players; if you're an oil company, for example, you compete with other oil companies. If you're a car company, you compete with other car companies. But that is a dangerous way to think about competition. Boundaries between industries are no longer so clear-cut.

Software-defined everything: Revolution or evolution?
It is easy to get caught up in the hype cycle and believe the buzz about the benefits of new technologies. Software-defined solutions certainly hold a lot of promise -- an automated, dynamic infrastructure, business-aligned SLAs, simpler operations and lower costs. But, technology shifts like this don’t come without risks or unintended consequences that we -- as an industry and individual companies -- will need to manage.

A Way to Drive 'Dual Transformation'
One way to make the case for change is to highlight early warning signs that disruption is taking root. Disruption typically starts innocently, with a lower-cost or simpler solution taking root among undemanding customer groups, or among people whose lack of expert skills or sufficient wealth kept them out of the market. The pattern of disruption means that these humble beginnings can lead to cataclysmic change, so even the smallest development should be watched carefully.

Quote for the day

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas." -- Marie Curie