Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 30, 2013

Six data loss prevention strategies for mobile environments
Mobile data security strategies should include measures that apply not only at the employee level but also throughout the chain of command. C-level executives need to understand how much data could be lost when employees routinely store files in their Dropbox accounts. IT departments have to help executives understand the implications of unsecured data and access to corporate systems.

Common & Practical Problems of Requirements Elicitation
Requirement elicitation is an important and challenging phase of any software project. This holds good for both product and project development activities, but the approach, techniques might vary. A well specified requirement has been found to considerably improve success rates of projects. Though various methods and techniques have evolved over the last couple of decades to better produce a good requirements specification, many struggle to get it done well.

Enterprise software: 'Do our customers love us?'
Focusing on outcomes stands in stark contrast to feature-based selling, which historically has been the approach used by technology and enterprise software companies. For example, we are all aware of "feature wars," in which software companies publish endless lists of product attributes in an effort to demonstrate greater value and benefit than the competition.

5 Key Questions to Ask for Maximum Business Performance
It seems that no time is convenient to pause the action and review strategy. When you’re in the thick of the battle to produce a product on time, under budget, with superior quality, a strategic review may seem like a waste of time or a misuse of resources. That said, failure to review strategy may result in getting to the wrong destination while doing so very efficiently. By asking five basic questions and considering the answers, you might optimize business performance and not just operations performance.

Amazon's Push to the Cloud Adds to Server-Market Woes
"There will absolutely be fewer buyers of physical machines," predicts Bryan Cantrill, a senior vice president at Joyent Inc., another company that hosts computing operations. "But we don't know if there will be fewer physical machines sold." The crosscurrents can be seen in new data from market researchers. Gartner, for example, on Wednesday said second-quarter server revenue declined 3.8% from the year-earlier period.

BYOT: Where does it fit into future IT trends? Readers sound off
In a SearchCIO tweet jam recap, participants suggested current trends toward bring your own technology would continue to offer unique opportunities for enterprise IT departments, but also raise new management headaches. Their predictions shed some light on future IT trends, and we followed up by polling our readers, "Are BYOD policies a major concern for CIOs or a fizzling priority?"

The Database Administrator's Back-to-School Checklist
The DBA is responsible for recoverability, data availability, data access performance, and security. Within each of these areas there are many possible places to begin. Below, I provide the three most important areas for the DBA to address immediately. The current quiet period between summer vacations and peak season provides time for contingency planning in order to be ready for the expected upcoming resource and capacity constraints.

NIST subjects draft cybersecurity framework to more public scrutiny
The agency is scheduled to release a full preliminary draft in October, for public review. It will then issue the final 1.0 version of the framework in February 2014 and continue to update the framework thereafter. When finished, the framework will provide guidance for organizations on how to manage cybersecurity risk, "in a manner similar to financial, safety, and operational risk," the document states.

How Social Analytics Can Improve Enterprise IT Efficiency
"Think of it like a 3D networking topography," says VoloMetrix CEO Ryan Fuller. "A general organizational chart is flat -- it shows who reports to whom, but it doesn't show who's collaborating across departments and divisions and with whom, who's working together on certain projects, the dependencies and the connections. This is a great source of untapped data," Fuller says.

Preparing for Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise
As a concept, Continuous Delivery has been around for a while, and has indeed been practiced by the front runners in this field for many years. As a result, there are plenty of books and other references describing the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery, as well as sketching out in detail what the “goal state” can look like. These materials can provide an important theoretical grounding and help you develop your Continuous Delivery vision.

Quote for the day:

"Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence will come." -- Perry Paxton

August 29, 2013

Human-to-human brain interface
“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains. We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain,” said Andrea Stocco whose finger moved on a keyboard in response to his colleague Rajesh Rao’s thoughts. “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao added.

The end of Moore's Law is more than just about physics
The end of Moore's Law may ultimately be as much about economics as physics, says a DARPA director. "My thesis here is that it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law, and that it's worth pondering how it will end, not just when," Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told CNET.

The Stone Wars of Root Cause Analysis
Believing that you have found and eliminated the root cause of all your data quality problems is like believing that after you have removed the stones from your pond (i.e., data cleansing), you can stop the stone-throwers by building a high stone-deflecting wall around your pond (i.e., defect prevention). However, there will always be stones (i.e., data quality issues) and there will always be stone-throwers (i.e., people and processes) that will find a way to throw a stone in your pond

What WebRTC applications will and won't do for enterprises
There is a great deal of hype around what enterprises can expect from WebRTC functionality, and just as many misconceptions. While the protocol will not replace legacy Voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure or video conferencing systems, early WebRTC applications and capabilities are starting to impact the enterprise, offering simpler and cheaper real-time communications options, said Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director at Mokena, Ill.-based Nemertes Research Group Inc.

Q&A: Patterns of Information Management

The authors of Patterns of Information Management -- Mandy Chessell and Harald Smith -- recommend taking a holistic view of how information flows around your organization's information systems. Think of this information supply chain as you might a manufacturer's transformation of raw material into finish goods.

VMware's virtualization quest could shake up data storage, too
Storage virtualization is an industry trend that could affect how enterprises deal with data, Gartner analyst Chris Wolf said. In addition to VMware's latest strides, Microsoft is doing similar things with its Storage Spaces technology, he said. "To us, this is really technology that's inevitable," Wolf said. Storage virtualization in hypervisors will allow many enterprises to do more with less expensive commodity storage, leaving control of those resources to the software, he said.

The Decline of Star Trek and Its Implications for Requirements Management
The customer is rewarded for allowing a certain vagueness in the scope documents by having the latitude to “move the goalposts,” or surreptitiously add scope without increasing costs. The contractor is rewarded for imprecision in the scope baseline by delivering a cheaper product that fulfills the most basic interpretation of the contract terms. ... that improving the communications will not necessarily help remediate the most common problems encountered in requirements management space.

Uncover the note-taking power of Google Keep
Being on the go is all about working as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. And if you're a power tablet users, you know that having the right tool to do the job is tantamount to successful mobile work. Sometimes, however, the right tool might be a bit deceiving. Such is the case with Google Keep. This particular Google application allows you to create and save quick text notes, audio notes, and pictures.

VMware: Enterprises Still Need Data Centers
When it comes to everything moving into the cloud, "We couldn't agree less," Gelsinger threw in for good measure. The data center is going to be a fixture of the enterprise for several decades to come, he assured the crowd, acknowledging that VMware has proudly virtualized a lot of legacy systems and would continue to play a role in the data center for many years to come. Gelsinger's response contained a spark that had been missing in his other appearances at VMworld.

Big Data, Disaster Resilience and Lord of the Rings
There’s been push-back of late against Big Data, with many promoting the notion of Small Data. “For many problems and questions, small data in itself is enough”. Yes, for specific problems: locally disconnected problems. But we live in an increasingly interdependent and connected world with coupled systems that run the risk of experiencing synchronous failure and collapse. Our sensors cannot be purely local since the resilience of our communities is no longer mostly place-based. This is where the rings come in.

Quote for the day:

"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine with only interests." -- John Stuart Mill

August 28, 2013

Why Banks Are Finally Embracing Cloud Computing
The first use case for cloud computing in banks is application testing and development. It's a natural fit, since thorough testing of applications requires considerable computing resources but often takes just three to six months — so investing in equipment to test on doesn't make sense. In the next phase of cloud adoption for banks, they're starting to use human resources, accounting and operations apps in public clouds.

New SPARC M6 chip runs Oracle software faster
The latest SPARC processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.

MIT Develops 110-core Processor for More Power-efficient Computing
Typically a lot of data migration takes place between cores and cache, and the 110-core chip has replaced the cache with a shared memory pool, which reduces the data transfer channels. The chip is also able to predict data movement trends, which reduces the number of cycles required to transfer and process data. The benefits of power-efficient data transfers could apply to mobile devices and databases, Lis said on the sidelines of the conference.

Has RAID5 stopped working?
If you had a 8 drive array with 2 TB drives with one failure your chance of having a unrecoverable read error would be near 100%. That second unreadable block during a RAID5 recovery is enough to destroy the RAID group and wipe out all the data on it. Not good! Even with a four drive RAID5 - and 2TB drives - you would have around a 40% chance of a rebuild failure. Better, but not good enough.

Static and dynamic testing in the software development life cycle
Securing your system requires different approaches and tools as a function of your phase in the life cycle (see Figure 1). During the design phase, you rely on good, secure design processes and reviews (and possibly some formal methods such as specification or modeling languages). In the development and verification phase, you have code that you can touch and test as well as perfect for automated review and inspection while under execution. In production, you can inspect the application under execution.

5 Simple Ways to Become a Better Leader
"Building a real personal connection with your teammates is vital to developing the shared trust necessary to build a strong culture of accountability and exceptional performance," said Terry 'Starbucker' St. Marie, a leadership writer and consultant. "With that culture in place, the team can achieve a successful business, a happy team and a fulfilled leader." St. Marie believes that being what he calls a "more human" leader requires positivity, purpose, empathy, compassion, humility and love.

We Win In Scalability & Performance Area Among Top NoSQL Databases Says Couchbase CEO
Database industry is 35 billion dollars today and vast majority of that industry is based on proprietary software. The NoSql technologies, the Operational databases, Analytics support provided by Hadoop and things like that are causing a major-major disruption in the database industry and we think that the winners with all this new technology will all be based on open source.

Adopt Centralised Flow Management to Optimize Network Performance
Such networks are resilient to failures of links and switching nodes—the loop protection and routing protocols reconverge onto a new forwarding topology, and data continues to flow. Congestion bottlenecks can be dealt with reasonably effectively —Quality of Service (QoS) rules prioritize real-time and critical data; selective packet dropping can slow TCP sessions down to a rate appropriate to the current traffic conditions; pause control requests end-points to back off for a while.

How to Enhance the Efficiency of Application Development
Although all output-based metrics have their pros and cons and can be challenging to implement, we believe the best solution to this problem is to combine use cases (UCs)—a method for gathering requirements for application-development projects—with use-case points (UCPs), an output metric that captures the amount of software functionality delivered. For most organizations, this path would involve a two-step transformation journey—first adopting UCs and then UCPs.

With all of this innovating, isn’t it time for some innovation accounting?
The trick with innovation accounting is to measure the stuff that really matters. That means trading in “vanity metrics” for metrics that can drive the business forward, according to Ries. Vanity metrics aren’t wrong, per se, but they don’t provide insight into what might be the next best steps or what might need to be changed in order to meet customer interest or demand. Actionable metrics are more complex and provide an opportunity for comparison.

Quote for the day:

"Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution." -- Raymond E. Feist

August 27, 2013

Database Versioning and Delivery with Upgrade Scripts
In theory, the upgrade scripts should be written in such a way that they can be run without modifications on any environment. This means that they should not contain any paths, names of database instances, SQL user names or linked server configurations. In the Microsoft SQL Server world, SQLCMD variables can be used to achieve this. More information can be found here

Big data won’t be mature for at least five years, Gartner predicts
In the 2013 Hype Cycle, Gartner has changed its estimate for the time it will take big data to reach that plateau to between five and ten years. There are two trends driving big data down into the 'trough of disillusionment', Gartner said. The first is that "tools and techniques are being adopted ahead of learned expertise and any maturity/ optimization, which is creating confusion.

Do You Have the IT For the Coming Digital Wave?
It is no longer sufficient for IT just to be 'aligned' with your business objectives; a fusion is needed. As Angela Ahrendts, Burberry's CEO puts it: "I need [IT] to move from the back of the bus, where it traditionally sits, to the front of the bus...and it's traveling fast." It requires strong leadership from all senior IT executives, as well as new business acumen. Despite all the talk of ' shadow IT', digital transformations that happen without, or despite, IT are a myth.

Building a Finance, Risk, and Compliance Information and Analytics Infrastructure
The need to peer across a company’s information stores with much greater levels of granularity, consistency,
completeness and conﬁdence is understood. However, most companies contend with legacy distributed data environments. The result is that current data and analytical infrastructures ultimately underserve, or worse, fail to support ﬁnance, risk, compliance and treasury imperatives.

Transitioning from PCs to Mobile Devices
The post-PC era is not marked by the extinction of personal computers, but rather by the prevalence of portable computing devices that have ended the unchallenged dominance of desktop and laptop computers in the lives of consumers. This phenomenon is the new norm. It can no longer be dismissed as a bleeding edge technology that major players provide at a high cost or a gimmicky feature that the average user doesn’t demand.

Data Security Lagging at Midmarket Industrial Firms
"It seems as if executives at these large businesses understand something that executives at smaller businesses do not," the report notes. "This may reflect an assumption by smaller business executives that their data holds no interest for those seeking unauthorized access. This is a commonly held belief, but it is insufficient as a risk management strategy."

IBM preps its massive 12-headed Power 8 chip
Jeff Stuecheli, a systems architect at IBM, said the chips will be the brains of huge computer systems that will keep the complex e-commerce systems up and running in the future. He showed a prototype chip, but he declined to say when the Power 8 processor will ship. It could be a while still, since IBM just launched its Power 7 processors in 2012.

Unifying Virtual and Physical Data Center Networks
Increasingly, enterprises are looking to SDN and network virtualisation as a means of easily deploying, managing, and orchestrating public and private cloud networks - tasks that have grown more complex due to the combination of physical and virtual assets. The partnership between Juniper Networks and VMware represents a shared commitment to delivering simplified, flexible solutions that enable customers to more easily migrate to SDN as their business needs evolve.

Multidomain MDM – Why It’s a Superior Solution
Common sense tells you that when you’re trying to build a “single version of the truth,” a multidomain MDM approach would get you there faster. If you’re pulling together related master data from all over the company, it’s simpler and less expensive to store the “golden records” on customers, products, suppliers, employees, assets, locations – the people, places and things of master data – in one seamless technology stack.

To cloud or not to cloud your unified communications applications?
There are no silver bullets here -- the best approach depends on the unique requirements of the business. Premises-based solutions remain the dominant approach, but many enterprises are moving away from unmanaged unified communications and collaboration. Surprisingly, neither premises nor hosted solutions offer any unique user-feature advantages.

Quote for the day:

"Though bitter, good medicine cures illness. Though it may hurt, loyal criticism will have beneficial effects." -- Sima Qian

August 26, 2013

Nginx, the popular open-source Web server, goes commercial
“There has been immense interest in a commercial version of our open source software for customers that require enterprise oriented features and services,” said Gus Robertson, CEO of Nginx. “The launch of Nginx Plus provides businesses with precisely all the innovation of our open-source product paired with advanced features and services that deliver greater agility and reduce complexity for our customers.” Robertson concluded, "It's all the things that people know and love about Nginx plus additional features and support."

An Interview with Karl Kapp - Talks about gamification
The current generation entering the workforce has grown up playing video games. They are familiar with the conventions of video games, and they are not opposed to using video games for learning. They understand that the medium of learning games can help them learn because they have learned by playing games. They are also expecting more “fun” in every day interactions so elements of games added to every day experiences like driving a car or paying for gas are expected to be more “game-like.”

Let the data be your compass
Unfortunately, that same human brain is not always aware of its limitations and our species is typically way too optimistic about its analytical powers. Our brain often gets tricked into seeing a pattern that is simplistic or not really there. A human risk adjudicator may correctly perceive that some broker comes with a higher overall bad rate (the percentage of loans that default), but is unlikely to pick up on the fact that performance is above par for a very specific customer segment.

Eenie, Meanie, Mindie Your MDM Sources
“Eenie, meenie, minie, moe” is a children’s counting rhyme used to select a person to be “it” for games such as tag. Prashanta Chandramohan (aka the MDM Geek when his party role is blogger) recently blogged about Identifying the Right Sources of Master Data, which made me think that “eenie, meanie, mindie your MDM sources” would make a great counting rhyme to use for remembering the steps involved in selecting a data source to be “it” for providing master data.

Building a Big Data Storage Strategy [Live Roundtable]
The data and its complexity continue to increase, and the business wants to use it all. How can you make a big data storage system scalable, available, and reliable? How can you predict your storage needs down the road? Join this live panel of experts to learn: How to assess storage needs and create a storage strategy for big data growth; What technologies and tools to use to storage more efficient; and •Secrets and tips of creating powerful storage systems

The CIO – the man behind the cloud. But, what cloud solution will really transform business?
It is necessary to decide whether public or private cloud options work best for the business. The first option allows a business to install and customize software on its own computers that reside on-site in a private datacentre. Or, the business can receive computing services from a third party via the cloud. Using this second option, computing now acts like a utility. In the same way people moved from generators to the grid for electricity over a century ago, people are now paying for cloud services as they use them.

Intel bringing vision, 3D to laptop and tablet cameras
Intel is developing a "depth sensing" camera, which is an enhanced version of a 3D camera that can go deeper inside images to "bridge the gap between the real and virtual world," said Anil Nanduri , director of perceptual products & solutions at Intel. The webcam enhancements will help the computer understand a human better, bring new levels of interactivity to 3D games, and make webconferencing fun by blanking out the background and adding a green screen, Nanduri said.

When data classifications meet the real world
There have been some mismatches in that area. For example, the sales organization wanted to deploy a mobile application that is capable of rendering executive reports on sales forecasts. According to our classification system, anything related to sales forecasting has to be classified as Restricted. That means a user wanting to use that mobile app would need to VPN into our network, which is an overly cumbersome restriction in the minds of some of our executives.

Millions of Android users vulnerable to security threats, say feds
Android continues to be a "primary target for malware attacks due to its market share and open source architecture," the document says, and an uptick in mobile device use by government users "makes it more important than ever to keep mobile [operating systems] patched and up-to-date." As many will know, staying ahead of the Android security curve requires actively ditching existing handsets and buying a new device, particularly in a bring-your-own-device world where this falls down to the responsibility of the user.

CloudNFV group will create network functions virtualization prototypes
CloudNFV has emerged on the vendor side to prototype technologies based on these emerging standards, said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., the network technology consulting firm that is leading the CloudNFV effort. "Standardization is essential for creating interoperable frameworks for something like this, but standardization doesn't provide an implementation model," Nolle said. "You can't write software from a standard.

Quote for the day:

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook" -- William James

August 25, 2013

5 things you should know about Google’s cloud platform
Speaking about Google Cloud Datastore, the hybrid SQL-NoSQL database that powers App Engine and is now a standalone service, DeMichillie said, “We’re running about 4 trillion operations, read/write requests, per month on [it] today.” Granted, that count includes both internal Google user and external customer use, but, he noted, Snapchat is a Google cloud customer and accounts for more than a handful of transactions everyday.

Apple might be in bigger trouble than Microsoft
Still, famed columnist and economist Paul Krugman dwells not on this human aspect, but another: the idea that Microsoft might depend on more conservative humans than does Apple. In a New York Times piece posted Saturday, Krugman ponders the symmetries between Apple and Microsoft. He concludes that Cupertino might just have a more troubled future than Redmond.His logic comes down to the idea that Microsoft's core purchaser is a conservative IT manager, while Apple's is the mere fickle human consumer.

Geek of the Week: Julie Kientz, UW researcher and one of the world’s top innovators under 35
“I’m incredibly honored and flattered to be included amongst so many inspirational people,” the UW professor told us. She’s doing some pretty special work at the UW. As a human-computer interaction expert, Kientz works with her colleagues and students on how technology can help improve lives. For example, she’s using technology to assist parents of young children in tracking developmental progress, and to help people in understanding how much sleep personally impacts their everyday lives.

Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source
Gollakota says the devices could be programmed to work together in networks in which data travels by hopping from device to device to cover long distances and eventually connect to nodes on the Internet. He imagines many of a person’s possessions and household items being part of that battery-free network, making it possible to easily find a lost item like your keys. “These devices can talk to each other and know where it is,” he says.

The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography
Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the CEO of a 30-billion-dollar company. She is a woman in an industry dominated by men. In a world where corporations are expected to serve shareholders before anyone else, she is obsessed with putting the customer experience first. Worth at least $300 million, she isn’t afraid to show off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small, suburban home with an apple tree out front, but Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel.

The Information Management Hierarchy of Needs
In a 1943 paper, Abraham Maslow introduced a new theory on motivation that has subsequently been called “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” His premise is that humans demonstrate patterns in motivation ranging from the most basic needs (physiological) through to self-actualization, and that the most basic needs must be fulfilled before someone has the ability to focus on higher-level needs. In other words, someone needs to have food, water and shelter before they are motivated to seek friendship, confidence and achievement.

Exploring OpenFlow scalability in cloud provider data centers
"It's challenging to build any control plane for a large multi-tenant data center, regardless of the technology," McKeown said. "The amount of state, the number of VMs, the number of tenant policies, the number of service-level agreements, the number of flows … will create a challenge for the control plane -- SDN or not, virtualization or not -- particularly when VMs and workloads are moving around."

Knowing what it takes to generate a minimum lovable product
The MVP is a curse for ambitious technology companies that want to grow. In an increasingly transactional world, growth comes from long-term customer happiness. And long-term customer happiness comes when customers adore your product or service and want you to succeed. You should be thinking about what it will take for customers to love you, not tolerate you. Really think about the type of mindset change it would take. What would it take to create a minimum lovable product (MLP)?

A Camera That Sees like the Human Eye
“Your eye and my eye are digital cameras too. [They’re] just a different kind of digital camera,” says Tobi Delbruck, the chief scientific officer at iniLabs. ... An ordinary camera will take in everything it sees, storing the information to be processed later. This uses up a lot of power and a lot of space. Neurons in the eye, however, fire only when they sense a change—such as when a particular part of a scene gets brighter or dimmer.

Deep cyberattacks cause millions in losses for U.S. banks
To draw attention away from their activities, the banks saw attackers execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks prior to the wire transfers taking place, said Litan, who also blogged about the issue recently. Banks are frequent targets for DDoS attacks, which aim to overwhelm web-based applications with volumes of malicious traffic intended to cause the applications to stop responding.

Quote for the day:

"Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant." -- Paul Coelho

August 24, 2013

Enterprise Apache Tomcat 7 Clustering
This blog is not a step-by-step tutorial on cluster creation, but we will provide you with the tools you can use to implement a cluster rapidly and effectively. Hopefully, by the time you finish reading this blog you should be able to create your own cluster. Whether you have created many clusters in the past or this is your first attempt, we hope that you will be able to learn something, whether it be basic or advanced, from this blog

State of Open Source in The Enterprise
Of late we see pressure on the CIOs to cut costs where possible and that is a good sign that Open Source Software is getting a fresh look, more so in the Government sector. Those doing business in and around IT are building the needed skills and talent in house and embrace open source solutions. We see this more in the areas of configuration management, build automation, automated testing and other tools which aid in building and maintaining systems and infrastructure.

Why move to SaaS (software as a service)?
Amazingly, consumer SaaS really only has one major benefit: convenience. And yet we all use a half-dozen consumer SaaS apps every day. On the other side, enterprise SaaS has a whole host of benefits beyond user convenience—and yet it faces adoption struggles across a sadly laggard IT industry. What benefits, you ask? Read on, intrepid cloud adventurer!

Lucene.Net ultra fast search for MVC or WebForms site => made easy!
So, while technically possibly, though somewhat challenging, you can integrate original Apache Lucene into your.NET application, and it will give you insanely fast search. But it will take quite a while, and will probably force to cut corners here and there, thus making your site way too complex and error prone. So, unless you absolutely have to have the fastest search on the planet, you shouldn't go this way

Why it’s way too early to dismiss big data’s economic impact
A more accurate criticism of big data is probably to say it’s suffering from a case of being over-hyped — vendors says their technologies do lots of things, but they don’t always spell out how much work that’s going to be. As I’ve written before, anyone now getting upset that big data isn’t a perfect set of technologies and methodologies probably wasn’t paying much attention to what experts have been saying for years.

How to Align Analytics with Business Strategy
With these challenges in mind, this article highlights and explores the fact-finding that needs to be accomplished in order to surmount the challenges surrounding analytics adoption. There are five steps that ensure that analytics is not an afterthought, but an integral part of any business or technology investment decision. The steps include:

IBM Develops Liquidity Risk Dashboard for Bank CFOs
To give the CFO an enterprise-wide view of business credit risk, IBM has remade software it acquired with its purchase of Algorithmics, Algo Credit Administrator, into a product called IBM Signature Solution risk management. The software provides dashboards and reports for risk managers and CFOs alike. Liquidity risk and capital costs have come to the forefront of many banks' risk agendas, MacDonald says, partly due to rules stemming from Basel and the Fed's annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review.

IT Security Considerations for Departing Employees
If current employees are a potential security risk (purposely or naively), consider the larger risk that a departing, potentially disgruntled, employee might be. Whatever company loyalty an existing employee might have had soon disappears when the employee is gone. Especially in this time of ever increasing security risks, continued company layoffs, and economic turmoil, it is important to make sure you have your IT backs covered against the mischief a departing employee might cause.

The Great Stagnation?
The problem isn’t stagnation or the loss of opportunity. The problem is that we have created new paradigms, that go beyond the “Information Revolution”, and we lack the structures to think about these new paradigms. We are waiting for new cultural and social rules, new parenting and educational standards, new laws and tax systems. We are going to have to wait a long time, because the gap between technological change and societies capacity for change is growing.

Amazon Reportedly Tested Wi-fi Network in New Spectrum
"The trial underlines how Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, is moving beyond being a Web destination and hardware maker and digging deeper into the underlying technology for how people connect to the Internet," according to the Bloomberg story. "That would let Amazon create a more comprehensive user experience, encompassing how consumers get online, what device they use to connect to the Web and what they do on the Internet."

Quote for the day:

"If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been." -- Robert H. Schuller

August 23, 2013

Using social media to secure a new generation of customers
We firmly believe that by using gamification and personas like MoBo and Gyaano, we can engage customers and provide a financial learning experience that is both fun and friendly. We’re introducing young people to financial concepts while avoiding jargon and helping them understand complex scenarios. Evidence to date shows that our strategy is working.

Researchers create wallpaper that listens and measures
They are capable of taking in environmental data and wireless communication. “We originally built this for energy management in a smart building,” electrical engineering assistant professor Naveen Verma said in a release. “Temperature sensors and occupancy sensors communicate with a central management system using distributed radio arrays that are patterned on wallpaper.”

Connectivity issue caused trading problems, Nasdaq says
When Nasdaq ran into the connectivity problem Thursday afternoon it immediately issued a regulatory halt on all trading in Nasdaq-listed securities in order to protect the integrity of the markets, the statement noted. It went on to add that the technical issues with SIP were identified and resolved within 30 minutes. "For the remaining period of time, NASDAQ OMX, other exchanges, regulators and market participants coordinated with each other to ensure an orderly re-opening of trading in NASDAQ-listed securities,".

EBook: Continuous Improvement with Cycle Time
Great teams are constantly striving to improve the way they work in order to innovate and deliver faster. Meaningful, actionable data helps teams make informed decisions about what and how they can improve. Cycle time is one of the most important and helpful metrics for teams who are striving to continuously improve. In this ebook, we will discuss what cycle time is and how it can help your team improve their process and deliver faster.

Big Data Generates Some Interesting Jobs, All It Takes is a Little Creativity
In the process of exploring the avenues by which big data will deliver value to businesses, some interesting new job titles and descriptions are emerging across the industry. The new generation of jobs being spurred by Big Data are often a blend of stats-savvy and business-savvy skillsets and activities. Here is a sampling of a few of these blended positions that have recently appeared at online recruiting sites:

A Cleaner Cloud?
Google built a data center in Finland out of an old paper mill that uses a high-tech cooling system to filter cold sea water from the Bay of Finland to properly cool their servers – read more about this in Chilly Climates Ideal for Data Center Locations. Our Michigan data centers also benefit from our chilly winters and moderate temperatures, cutting down our cooling bill. Another way may be the use of renewable energy sources such as wind power.

Chinese microbloggers arrested over online rumors
Yang Xiuyu and Qin Zhihui, who each oversees a Web marketing company, were hauled in by the police which said the duo had deliberately spread rumors and defamed celebrities in a bid to generate profits, according to a Sina report Thursday. The authories added that both were paid by other companies to fabricate rumors on their Weibo accounts to damage the reputation of other competitors.

The Case for Software Lifecycle Integration
As we’ve previously noted, the tools used within the software delivery lifecycle are isolated from each other and there are an abundance of manual processes where automation should prevail. The resulting manual process for creating status and traceability reports takes time and requires the involvement of people. On large projects or projects that are spread out geographically, the amount of time required ultimately reduces the value of the information.

How Master Data Management Improves Your Understanding of the Customer
Until recently, master data management (MDM) had been regarded as one of those techie functions, deeply internal to enterprise infrastructure. As it turns out, MDM is very much a business asset that has a growing role in many areas that should matter to enterprises: strong brand presence, multichannel customer interactions, right-fit content and information, and highly variable buying journeys.

Quote for the day:

"Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." -- Jonathan Swift

August 22, 2013

CIO considerations for SMAC fusion
The disruptive trends of social, mobile, analytics and cloud, often termed “SMAC” or the “Nexus of Forces”, are well-recognized as essential elements of next generation IT applications. They represent a desirable, future end-state for IT applications and architectures due to their characteristics of collaborative functionality, ubiquitous access, and intelligent insights, all delivered via a flexible and scalable delivery model.

Better data center planning tactics from the Open Compute Project
One ambitious area under development, Data Center Technology, considers those physical layers that tend to be taken for granted in data center planning and operations, including mechanical and electrical specifications. Project members defined an approach to data center cooling that could apply to a wide range of data centers with similar environmental conditions.

Culture wasn’t built in a day
Building a shared culture and sense of common purpose can take many years, said Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, the utilities giant. “In an organisation like ours, it takes a long time,” he said. “The culture didn’t grow up overnight.” That doesn’t mean to say it’s impossible to change an organisational culture, he said. “We’ve been shifting the culture here quite considerably in the past five or six years — with some success.

Tame the Tiger in Your Network
Managing a large estate of specialised security devices from many different manufacturers is a sure fire way of multiplying the number of active security policies. In contrast, deploying a suite of complementary systems from the same vendor reduces operating costs by enabling easier and more responsive management with less policies, higher performance and better overall security.

Testing the Partition Tolerance of PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB and Riak
Partitions can occur in production networks for a variety of reasons: GC pressure, NIC failure, switch firmware bugs, misconfiguration, congestion, or backhoes, to name a few. Given that partitions occur, the CAP theorem restricts the maximally achievable guarantees of distributed systems. When messages are dropped, "consistent" (CP) systems preserve linearizability by rejecting some requests on some nodes.

Windows Server 2012 R2 kicks Hyper-V up another notch
One of the more interesting new features is the ability to choose the VM generation: Gen 1 or Gen 2. Gen 1 is the same as what you've known in previous Hyper-V versions. Gen 2 brings with it the ability to have secure boot, to boot from a SCSI virtual hard disk or DVD, and to PXE-boot using a standard network adapter, as well as UEFI firmware support.

Oracle survey examines evolving CFO role, cooperation with CIOs
This does not necessarily mean that CFOs need in-depth technical knowledge or be able to manage technology on a day-to-day basis. For Ms. Washington of Gilead, it is the application of technology that matters. “Thinking about how to leverage technology is certainly vital,” she explains. “But more importantly, I need to focus on implementing effective business processes because, as we grow, it is my job is to ensure that we continue to do so profitably.”

Poison Ivy, used in RSA SecurID attack, still popular
Poison Ivy is a remote access trojan (RAT) that was released eight years ago but is still favored by some hackers, FireEye wrote in a new report released Wednesday. It has a familiar Windows interface, is easy to use and can log keystrokes, steal files and passwords. Since Poison Ivy is still so widely used that FireEye said it is harder for security analysts to link its use to a specific hacking group.

How Technology Complicates, Benefits Innovation
Innovation is a crowded space where it’s difficult for a person or business to come up with something unique and yet, valuable. Nevertheless, innovation is the talk of the town. It’s hard to find an article without the word in it and impossible to find a company not looking to be part of the conversation. The problem is, the term is often glorified and misused. And, innovation itself is suffering because its friend, technology, made things a bit harder.

Buying server hardware for a scalable virtual infrastructure
Organizations may opt to purchase small numbers of new, powerful servers -- in a scale-upstrategy -- that allows a few servers to handle large workloads while consuming less energy. Alternatively, they can choose a scale-out approach that uses large numbers of less-powerful commodity machines, which allow for clustering and redundancy, and this architecture may be less expensive up front.

Quote for the day:

"If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders" -- Bernard Byer

August 21, 2013

Internet of Things: The next big thing after cloud, mobility and big data
Well the Internet of Things( IoT) makes all these possible and that is why it is being labeled the next big thing in the tech world after Cloud , mobility and Big data. Adaire Fox-Martin, senior vice president, Industry, Value and Solutions , SAP Asia Pacific Japan speaks on how organization can leverage IoT and Machine-to-Machine( M2M) interaction in the future to spearhead new benchmarks of productivity.

The Death of WebSphere and WebLogic App Servers?
We got to thinking that this might be interesting data to provide for other languages that we support too, such as Java. So…we decided to take a look at our top 1000 Java customers to see what versions of Java they are using and what app servers are most commonly deployed. ... What about app servers? What are folks using? The answer was intriguing so we thought we’d share it via a new infographic…

The Great Java Application Server Debate
Well, sorry Wikipedia, but for the sake of this report, we don’t care about pedantic definitions and full Java EE implementations, we care more about what a developer wants and uses. Most developers work on web applications and rarely use all of the bells and whistles that come with the EE specification. In fact many of the application servers available today with only the basic functionality are the most used, as our Developer Productivity Report section on application servers recently showed

Cloud Is Actually Expanding The Role Of Information Technology Departments
Rather than viewing IT as marginalized, 76 percent of respondents see IT as taking on a new role as a “broker,” or intermediary, of cloud services, orchestrating the planning and procurement process for lines-of-business (LOBs) across internal and external clouds while managing third-party complexity. ... the survey also finds that LOBs are funding 44 percent of total IT spending globally, and 69 percent predict that this share will only increase over the next three years.

IBM targets bank CFOs with credit, risk analytics
Specifically, IBM launched an integrated credit lifecycle management suite designed to boost profits, manage risk and meet various regulations. The risk management suite, dubbed an IBM Signature Solution, aims to give CFOs a view into credit risk from every corner of a company. Rory McClure, associate partner of risk solutions at IBM's global business services unit, said the credit risk management suite is built from various parts such as Cognos, IBM's business process management software and analytics tools via the 2011 Algorithmics acquisition.

Managing big data: Four critical practices for getting started
"Following principles of information stewardship encourages you to take a proactive approach to … managing the data through its entire lifecycle -- from its acquisition to what you decide to do with it at end of life," said John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst for the Mokena, Ill.-based Nemertes Research. Burke breaks information stewardship into five categories: information protection, data quality management, disaster resistance, information lifecycle management and compliance.

The True Cost of Integration in the World of BI
According to Loraine, “When it comes to the cost of a BI deployment, it’s not the software that will get you; it’s the miscellany -- the miscellaneous integration work, in particular.” She is referring to Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, who focuses on application development and delivery, who recently published a report that explored how to estimate the cost of a BI deployment.

Cyberattacks, not economy, could cripple banks in the future
Although investment health is still only half of what it was in 2005, lending and deposits grew in the first half of 2013. Cyberattacks and the threat of digital warfare mean that financial institutions may be left unprotected and vulnerable -- which in turn places consumers at risk and could potentially damage these signs of growth.

5 Steps to Fixing the Problems with Your Problem Solving
Problem solving is actually pretty simple though. All you have to do is follow five simple steps. I promise if you’re rigorous about the problem solving method you use, you’ll improve your chances of solving the right problem, generate solutions that address the true root cause, and select the ideas to pursue that will have the greatest impact.

Researchers outwit Apple, plant malware in the App Store
Those code gadgets -- and the app's true control flow and operation -- were disguised in such a way that it would be virtually impossible for Apple's current review methods to discover the app's real intent. "Even with a longer time [to analyze the app] they can't find that it's malicious," said Wang in an interview Monday.

Quote for the day:

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope & confidence." -- Helen Keller