Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 16, 2013

The Future of The Database
If you listen to the media you would believe that the end of relational database is here. The truth is in spite of the big data hype, the future of relational database has never looked better. That said the pace of database technology innovation is at an unprecedented rate. To help you cut through the hype and modernize your approaches, our database experts have developed the Clustrix 2013 predictions for the future of the database. View this infographic to be prepared to address the database challenges ahead.

Google, the Network Company: From Theory to Practice
Google puts into practice the idea that a network is a living animal composed of smaller, malleable groups. The average team size ranges from five to ten depending on the topic that serves perfectly Google’s motto: “We prefer to be fast than to be right”. Indeed, the malleability and small team size allows Google to focus on execution, one of its core strengths. As a result, there are more than 10,000 daily conferences on Google+ to facilitate working together on team projects.

The Do’s and Don’ts of OpenStack
Before a business even considers adopting OpenStack, the project management needs to have a full view of its IT landscape –a detailed matrix that classifies all of the organisation’s workloads needs to exist. This matrix should consider basics like Cloud Security (Data and Privacy Rules and Regulations), Locality Rules (Where is the consumer and where can this data be placed by regulation), Interconnections and Dependencies to other Applications and Application-Specifics like Scaling and High-Availability Architectures (Can an application be horizontally scaled, does it work highly available with stateless nodes on all tiers?).

Behind Microsoft Deal, the Specter of a Nokia Android Phone
Still, a functioning Nokia Android phone could have served as a powerful prop in Nokia’s dealings with Microsoft, a tangible reminder that Nokia could move away from Microsoft’s Windows Phone software and use the Android operating system, which powers more than three out of every four smartphones sold globally. Susan Sheehan, a spokeswoman for Nokia, declined to comment, as did Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman.

SSDs do die, as Linus Torvalds just discovered
"The timing absolutely sucks, but it looks like the SSD in my main workstation just died on me," Torvalds wrote. "I had pushed out most of my pulls today, so realistically I didn't lose a lot of work." While SSDs are vastly better performers than hard disk drives and are considered more reliable for mobile devices because they have no mechanical parts to break, they do have a limited lifespan. With some early SSDs, that lifespan ended up being less than a year, depending on the quality and use of the drive.

Google quietly dumps Oracle MySQL for MariaDB
Specifically, Google is moving to its own customized version of MariaDB 10.0. This version of MariaDB is equivalent to MySQL 5.6. Google's version of MariaDB, according to Cole, is "Not really true 'forks' [but are] branches for internal use." He added that Google had been making its own tweaks to the MySQL DBMS family for years. Reading Cole's presentation it appears that there are several reasons why Google is shifting to MariaDB

Big Switch shifts SDN strategy to bare-metal switches and software
Big Switch's next move will focus on what it has dubbed "cloud fabrics" or "P+V" (physical plus virtual). The company will try to sell software built on top of bare-metal switches to companies that are looking to build out new capacity in existing data centers for private cloud. This strategy contrasts with layering a virtual overlay on top of the legacy network or ripping out legacy switching for new OpenFlow switches.

Implementing Software Lifecycle Integration (Part Two)
If software is a key business process, it needs to be treated that way – with a clear focus, ownership and design. The practice of creating this process is emerging as a new discipline in ALM, one not focused on delivering the software, but instead on the process for manufacturing and maintenance of that software. This is in part similar to the evolution from craft approaches to more systematic engineering practices of the industrial revolution

The Importance of Smartphone Security
Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting smartphone devices using a variety of tactics for malicious intent. These tactics include the repackaging of popular applications with malicious code for download in app stores or marketplaces, malicious URLs designed to deceive users into downloading apps or provide personal information, or leveraging erroneous SMS messages or “smishing” as a means to drive up a smartphone subscriber’s bill.

Quote for the day:

"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

September 15, 2013

Steps Toward a Hybrid Development Philosophy
It’s a completely different way of doing things. People think they know what they want. But, as we have proven over decades of application development, they don’t know what they want. They really know what they want when they see it. The concept of Agile is ‘let’s discover what you desire rather than what you’ve planned.’ That’s a very different way of thinking, and it’s a change for IT associates.

Cryptographers Have an Ethics Problem
And that may be why cryptographers see blurred ethical lines. Code-making and code-breaking have always been tied up with war and diplomacy. For instance, Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician for whom the ACM’s top annual prize is named, was involved in helping to crack the Nazi enigma cipher during World War II, which allowed the Allies to read German communications.

Anomaly Detection Lets You Find Patterns in Log Data
Anomaly Detection combines machine learning, statistical analysis and human knowledge from your domain experts to analyze streams of machine data, detect events in the stream and provide alerts on those events, allowing you to remediate issues before they affect business services. "Basically, we reduce log lines into a set of patterns," Sarathy says.

The Nike+ gamification platform delivers valuable big data insights
Nike did a remarkable step, they decided to share that data with the rest of the industry so that the entire industry can start to populate the database as well as use it to make better decision. The objective is to build a “vendor index”, containing details concerning every vendor including ratings and how trustworthy the vendor is. The key is to turn big data into smart data at the point where the persons in the supply chain that needs to use it, actually can use the data.

4 Hiring Mistakes Most Entrepreneurs Make
You can teach skills, but you cannot teach passion, a good work ethic and respect for the collaborative process. When you add a lone ranger to an efficient and collaborative group, you can undermine the entire team and the evolution of your company. When interviewing, ask about the candidate's most and least favorite projects. Compare the passion with which they describe each, the effort they brought to each project and the results they achieved.

Cloud industry needs to standardize, says fed CIO
"We recognize different solutions are needed for different problems," said Baitman. "Ultimately we would love to have a competitive environment that brings best value to the taxpayer and keeps vendors innovating." To accomplish this, the agency plans to adopt a cloud broker model, an intermediary process that can help government entities identify the best cloud approach for a particular workload.

The differences in internal controls at each level of architecture
Enterprise architecture is most often associated with transformation. We may ignore operational management for the moment, and focus on transformational management. If operational management ever changes (transforms) and requires a new architecture, it becomes transformational management of some type.

WAN Acceleration Slows Down
These days, IT funding models aim to incur costs on a monthly or quarterly basis to match ROI; a technology deployment such as WAN optimization that requires a year or more to show ROI is likely a non-starter. Some analysts and engineers believe WAN acceleration has a future in hybrid cloud applications, which could perhaps justify capital and operational expenses. But I think dynamic bursting between private and public clouds is an edge case at best, not a mass-market play. Hybrid cloud rarely survives a close technical inspection.

Red Hat Storage Server 2.1 improves geo-replication performance
In addition to GlusterFS, Red Hat Storage Server includes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, the single-node XFS file system for each Linux box and a console management station based on the oVirt open source virtualization platform. Red Hat Storage supports file, object and virtual block, but not iSCSI block-based storage.

Include JavaScript exceptions in your server side logs with JSNLog
JSNLog is a logging package, similar to Log4Net, NLog, Elmah, etc. However, instead of server side events (in your C# or VB code), it logs events that happen in your JavaScript. ... JSNLog assumes you already have installed server side logging. It simply passes its log messages on to your server side logging package, so client side log message will go to the same logs as your server side log messages. It will interface with Log4Net, NLog, Elmah and Common.Logging.

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

September 14, 2013

Business Architecture 101 – It’s results that count!
Some see Business Architecture as a variation of Enterprise Architecture, but for others it is a different discipline. At OpenText we see it as different; whether we like it or not traditional Enterprise Architecture is seen as the domain of the IT folks. On the other hand, Business Architecture is, as the name implies, focused on helping business people manage business problems. It is this accessibility and relevance to business teams that we believe is leading the interest.

The Age of Data
A significant reversal happened as we moved from the Age of Hardware through the Age of Software to The Age of Data. Initially the buyers of computer capability, both hardware and software, were large organizations. This began to reverse with the emergence of the PC, with consumers gradually becoming the driving force in the market. The dynamics were that products were sold to consumers earlier or at the same time that they were sold to companies.

NetIQ Declared a Leader in Identity and Access Management Suites
In the report, Forrester Research singled out NetIQ as having consistently built a strong stack of identity and access management products. Forrester Research also named NetIQ as one of the leaders that provide an "IAM suite that encompasses identity provisioning (Identity Manager), attestation (Access Governance Suite), web SSO and federation (Access Manager)" with "easy-to-use interfaces, a differentiated vision and thought leadership for IAM, and strong execution."

Insider Threat: Limit Privileged Access
Controlling who has access to these accounts and tracking and monitoring exactly how they are being used is a critical part of preventing data leaks and network breaches. Organizations need to perform a comprehensive audit of their infrastructure to identify privileged accounts that are high-risk and need to be managed. They then must apply different levels of controls, based on the risk. And a group outside of IT needs to monitor and audit all of these privileged accounts to ensure the controls are correctly enforced.

Cybersecurity: Locks are fine, alarms better
Instead of investing loads of money building better locks for protection, Caudill encouraged agencies to develop better alarms that use available data to determine when outsiders have gotten in. "Big data analytics' capabilities have constantly improved and gotten more effective," said Caudill, speaking at an FCW cyber-security briefing Sept. 12 in Washington, D.C.

An innovative data center offers to heat up Paris homes
The team at Qarnot is rethinking data centers by breaking up the collection of servers and dispersing them into Parisians’ homes or other buildings in the form of digital radiators. “The idea was to generate the waste in the only place where it is not a waste — directly in people’s homes,” Danuta Pieter, an engineer and partner at Qarnot Computing said. This new service could provide an enticing alternative to traditional, yet costly data centers while helping bring heat to those who can’t afford it.

Next role for robots: data center diagnosticians
One of the systems on its research plan might include the use of robots for energy management and conservation. Recently IBM and EMC developed robots designed to rove data centers and collect temperature, power usage and other data that could affect the performance of data center IT systems. ... The EMC Data Center Robot helps combat these problems by patrolling for temperature fluctuations, humidity and system vibrations and locating sources of cooling leaks and other vulnerabilities.

Anatomy of an API Gateway
There are a couple of rules that many of the vendors break: They mix business and non-functional requirements together in the same architecture; and They describe the complete proxy implementation as policy. One of the most important principles we follow with our API Gateway is the separation of process, binding (style), transport, and policy; and the resulting ability to declaratively define APIs.

Risk Management And Bias: Is Human Nature in Your Way?

One of the assertions of the paper is that, when it comes to risk, we often ignore facts and apply our own subjective biases to the decisions we make. “Risk is traditionally defined in terms of probability. However, people often have difficulty in processing statistical information and may rely instead on simplified decision rules. Decision making under risk is also critically affected by people’s subjective assessments of benefits and costs.”

Big data applications require new thinking on data integration
Copying data sets from the file structure of HDFS into a database table format for storage in HBase wasn't that big of a challenge, said Hannon, who took part in a panel discussion at the conference in San Jose, Calif. "The more difficult part," he said, "was unpacking the 10 to 15 years of ETL we'd done to find out what rules were important and which weren't." Then the developers had to incorporate the business rules deemed worth keeping into the new implementation.

Quote for the day:

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -- Benjamin Disraeli

September 13, 2013

Model driven development – where to from here?
The modeling community has so far focused solely on building the right kind of business applications from their high level specifications – a subset of how. The harder problem of identifying what change needs to be introduced where and what would be the likely benefits of this adaptation is largely ignored. Models should help capture core properties such as ‘Every credit entry must have a debit entry’ in double book accounting. Then they can be analyzed for their properties.

Oracle finally adds whitelisting capabilities to Java
Oracle added a feature in Java that lets companies control what specific Java applets are allowed to run on their endpoint computers, which could help them better manage Java security risks. The new feature is called the "Deployment Rule Set" and was added in Java 7 Update 40 (Java 7u40) that was released Tuesday.

DDoS Attacks Occur on Average Every 2 Minutes, Security Firm Finds
According to NSFOCUS, TCP Flood and HTTP Flood remained the most popular attack methods, and accounted for 38.7 percent and 37.2 percent of attacks, respectively. Hybrid attacks also became more prevalent, with ICMP+TCP+UDP Flood serving as the most common combination. Increasingly, denial-of-service attacks are occurring from and within online gaming communities, according to a new report from DDoS-mitigation firm Prolexic.

Crafting Efficient Big Data Solutions
These next-generation servers come with high-performance, ARM-based CPU cores, a disk controller, and memory management, making them ideal for massively parallel applications in Big Data. Deployed in high-density chassis, SoC designs require far fewer components than current IT systems, provide integrated, high-speed fabric networks and greatly reduce space and power requirements. By using advanced SoC technology, Big Data systems can be deployed on microserver clusters with significantly high cost performance.

Google's Coder tool turns Raspberry Pi into a mini web server
According to Google, Coder offers a simple platform that teachers and others can use to demonstrate how to build for the web through browser-based projects written in HTML, CSS and Javascript. Using Coder obviously requires a Raspberry Pi device, although the tool itself can be downloaded from the web to a Mac or PC — a Mac OS X installer is included in the bundle, but PC users will need to download separate utilities. Users will also need a 4GB SD card to transfer the Coder SD image to the Raspberry Pi.

The Predictive Analytic Evolution of R
R, the open source programming language for statistics and graphics, has now become established in academic computing and holds significant potential for businesses struggling to fill the analytics skills gap. The software industry has picked up on this potential, and the majority of business intelligence and analytics players have added an R-oriented strategy to their portfolio. In this context, it is relevant to look at some of the problems that R addresses and some of the challenges to its adoption.

Is OpenStack IPv6-ready?
After all, when we evaluated the IPv6 readiness of proprietary cloud platforms, it quickly became clear that many, at best, needed a bit of work. And as an open source project, OpenStack allows us to fix and tweak components that are not IPv6-ready. OpenStack is gaining significant traction with service providers and large enterprises, which are both also experiencing increasing pressure to migrate to IPv6.

Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
The list of Wi-Fi networks and passwords stored on a device is likely to extend far beyond a user's home, and include hotels, shops, libraries, friends' houses, offices and all manner of other places. Adding this information to the extensive maps of Wi-Fi access points built up over years by Google and others, and suddenly fandroids face a greater risk to their privacy if this data is scrutinised by outside agents.

IDC: 87% Of Connected Devices By 2017 Will Be Tablets And Smartphones
IDC is predicting the worldwide smart connected device market will accelerate past 2B units by the end of 2015, attaining a market value of $735.1B. PCs will drop from 28.7% in 2013 to 13% in 2017. Tablets will increase from 11.8% in 2013 to 16.5% by 2017, and smartphones will increase from 59.5% to 70.5%. The following graphic shows the distribution of sales by platform.

Developer Evangelists Build Community, Engagement for Software Firms
Put simply, a developer evangelist, acts as a liaison between third-party, independent software developers and users and a company's software and product development teams. But there's a lot more to it than that, says Terry Ryan, whose official title is Educational Evangelist for Adobe. "We are the people responsible for bridging the gap between when a product is sold and when people actually have to use it," Ryan says.

Quote for the day:

"Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on." -- Maxwell Maltz

September 12, 2013

CFOs Holding CIOs’ Feet to the Fire
The role of today’s IT department has to change from selecting technology providers to vetting the tech providers chosen by the business unit, said Thoran Rodrigues, the owner of BigData Corp. in Rio de Janeiro, which provides cloud-based big-data services. That would include making sure that the technology provider will provide benefits, low exit costs, reliability, interoperability, security and the long-term vision that it promised, he said.

CPUsage Makes It Easier To Harness The Cloud’s Compute Power
The idea behind the service is to allow anybody to take their existing applications and then allow them to run on virtually any cloud computing service available, whether that’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure or one of their competitors. That’s still in the future, though. What the company is launching today is support for AWS, with support for Azure and Google’s Compute Engine coming by the end of the calendar year.

Securing data with Authentication as a Service in the cloud, mobile era
Authentication and identity management systems can be complex and costly, but AaaS brings the cost benefits of SaaS to authentication. Keeping up with advances in authentication, managing two-factor authentication and incorporating mobile devices can also be time-consuming. Shifting these burdens to a service provider is an appealing option.

Key Market Trends In Disaster Recovery
The growing instances of natural disasters, along with a rise in data loss, have increased the significance for having an effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy in place. IT industry trends are having a profound influence on enterprises’ current DR strategies. Organizations are being forced to reevaluate how they plan test, and execute their disaster strategies. This brief looks at some of the prominent trends currently taking place in disaster recovery.

Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption
Although McKinsey and other consulting firms have gone through many waves of change—from generalist to functional focus, from local to global structures, from tightly structured teams to spiderwebs of remote experts—the launch of McKinsey Solutions is dramatically different because it is not grounded in deploying human capital. Why would a firm whose primary value proposition is judgment-based and bespoke diagnoses invest in such a departure when its core business was thriving?

How will we integrate all these enterprise cloud apps?
Dhillon believes that people who aren’t programmers should to be able to integrate applications without learning Java or hiring a consulting company. Just drag-and-drop connections on a simple visual grid (say an order in Salesforce into an order object on the ERP system) and, voila, it all just works, and when your salespeople close an order in Salesforce it spits out the order in your financial system.

Cisco Unveils Mega Chip for New Network Demands
It’s a new product line called the nPower, and Cisco says the chips can pump as much as 400 gigabits of data per second. By contrast, the company’s prior technology could handle 140 gigabits and required more than one chip, Cisco says. The new capacity translates into hundreds of millions of transactions per second.

10 yrs later, DHS still plagued with cybersecurity, critical infrastructure problems
Today marks 12 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; it’s been a decade since 22 government agencies were combined into the Department of Homeland Security in response to those attacks. “DHS has spent more than $35 billion on homeland security grants, but cannot measure whether we are safer from terrorist attacks,” according to Republican Senator Tom Coburn.

14 Things You Need to Know About Data Storage Management
So how do you formulate that sound data storage management strategy? CIO.com asked dozens of storage and data management experts, which resulted in these top 14 suggestions regarding what steps you need to take to choose the right data storage solution(s) for your organization -- and how you can better ensure your data is properly protected and retrievable.

How to revamp your IT operational plan without getting fired
If you didn't run the generators, check the power distribution units, monitor the ambient temperature on the data center floor, perform change control, replace or rack and stack new equipment, put out fires, upgrade the storage frame, open the ports, plug the holes, and stop the distributed denial-of-service attacks, at some point nothing will work. The problem is that nobody cares that you do any of these things until one thing breaks.

Quote for the day:

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work" -- Mark Twain

September 11, 2013

Cloud financial accounting: Not just for SMBs anymore
Not every financial accounting solution does debits and credits. Beyond the general ledger, accounts payable, fixed asset and other transactional systems, there are some other important financial accounting solutions that assist in cash management, planning, budgeting and more. These other financial software products are also moving to the cloud.

NoFlo's crowd-funding effort helps coders go with the flow
Generally, flowcharts are design tools that don't make it beyond the mockup stage, but NoFlo is designed to be a crucial part of how people construct programs written in JavaScript. With NoFlo, JavaScript code modules can be wired together by dragging links from one to another. The idea is to separate the structure of the software -- especially large, complicated programs with lots of moving parts -- from the gory details of various components.

With iBeacon, Apple is going to dump on NFC and embrace the internet of things
iBeacon could be a NFC killer because of its range. NFC tags are pretty cheap compared to NFC chips, but NFC tags are required on each product because NFC works only in very close proximity. In theory, NFC range is up to 20cm (7.87 inches), but the actual optimal range is less than 4cm (1.57 inches). Also, mobile devices need to contain a NFC chip that can handle any NFC communications. On the other hand, iBeacons are a little expensive compared to NFC chips, but iBeacons range is up to 50 meters. Not all phones have NFC chips, but almost all have Bluetooth capability.

The end of enterprise-architecture?
The danger here is that if it does become someone’s role, someone’s job, there can be some unfortunate unintended-consequences. Of these, the most common traps are: the enterprise-architects interpret everything solely in terms of enterprise-architecture itself – and try to force everyone else to do likewise; and enterprise-architecture becomes regarded as solely the responsibility of the enterprise-architects – not as the necessary responsibility of everyone

IT Pros and BYOD Users See Support Much Differently
BYOD users sounded off about their issues with IT. Some were age-old refrains: "Improve IT's availability for technical issues, including faster response times." Others were specific to mobility: "Allow us to access apps which could be used for work so we aren't as dependent on our PCs." For the most part, though, users simply want better training and communication from IT as they find their way in the brave new world of mobile devices.

Smartphone Navigation Without Looking Down
To help reduce the dangers of distracted driving, GPS maker Garmin has come up with the Garmin Head-Up Display, or HUD. The dashboard accessory connects to your iPhone, Android or Windows Phone device via Bluetooth and projects directions from its Garmin StreetPilot or Navigon smartphone app onto your windshield. By displaying information in the driver's line of sight, Garmin argues it's safer than using just your smartphone for navigation.

New and emerging technology trends carry heavy compliance burden
But, as you're already surely aware, along with their potential to positively transform the enterprise, these emerging technology offerings also carry with them inherent security risks, presenting real anxieties to compliance officers everywhere. We searched our sister sites to uncover some recent stories that explain why some organizations are hesitant to embrace the big four, and share expert opinions on how to tackle the security and compliance risks these technologies pose.

Wireless charging from 30 feet away -- does startup have a game-changer?
The Cota wireless charging system includes a charge-transmitting unit and a charge receiver. The charging unit in the video was only shown briefly, but it appeared to be a pillar-shaped piece of equipment that's about 6 feet tall. The receiver can be either a dongle unit or technology integrated into a device, such as a smartphone or a battery. While it has yet to be miniaturized, Zeine said the wireless technology will eventually be small enough to fit onto the motherboard of a smartphone or even in a triple-A battery.

Big Data Governance - Protect And Serve Are Equals
The mission of data governance, and for chief data officeers, in a big data era has to be about catering to the speed, access and education of business stakeholders to make good decisions about what to trust if they look outside of IT to support their data driven initiatives. Just as IT has established policies to do things more efficiently and managing resource ratios across internal, off-shore, and outsourced venues, so will the business.

Quote for the day:

"For our own success to be real, it must contribute to the success of others." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

September 10, 2013

The SSD Endurance Experiment: 22TB update
We expect flash wear to decrease SSD performance over time, but these drives still have a lot of life left in them. Each SSD has SMART attributes that tally bad blocks, bytes written, and other variables. We're tracking those attributes, and the SSDs are so far free from bad blocks, which means all of their NAND remains intact. The data we've collected also provide some insight into SandForce's write compression mojo.

Berg’s CEO on the experience of connected devices & avoiding the creep factor
Long term it’s Amazon Web Services for connected devices. There are so many difficult things when you try making connected devices. Moving bits and bytes between the cloud and the device is just 10 percent of what you’re trying to do. The rest of it is common developer challenges. Everything from figuring out a password reminder button, to debugging tools and analytics, to fleet management, and all those sorts of things.

eHealthCareFramework - Framework for HealthCare Apps
This article we will see the various aspects , need for HealthCare Framework. The entire framework is implemented for helping the developers to easily implement applications by re-using or extending this framework. The framework purely depends on the third party API's. Most of them are CarePass API from Aetna. One has to register for the API and get keys in order to make of the framework.

Gartner Says Enterprise Architecture Is Key to Driving Digital Strategy
"Senior business executives are challenging CIOs and their IT organizations to be at the front of digital strategy, identifying innovative new business models and technologies, and getting more business value out of each technology investment," said Marcus Blosch, research vice president. "Enterprise architects can provide unique capabilities to help CIOs develop a new agenda for 'hunting and harvesting' in a digital world." Mr. Blosch said that organizations are looking to grow and improve efficiency of their operations, creating new demands on CIOs and EA.

What's the Point of Creativity?
The best creativity comes from a much deeper place than the desire to win. It comes from a desire to contribute to the lives of others, either by introducing something new that improves the quality of their lives or by showing people that something thought to be impossible is in fact possible. When you change people's perceptions about what can be accomplished or achieved, you contribute to their humanity in the richest possible way.

Seagate wants to put hard drives into tablets
Seagate still thinks that there's more life to squeeze out of the aging hard drive technology, and is releasing a new Ultra Mobile HDD. The drive combines a super-slim (5mm) 500GB 6GB/s SATA hard disk drive with 16MB of on-board cache to deliver a peak data transfer rate of 600MB/s, but this drops to only 100MB/s for sustained transfers.

U.S. and U.K. spies crack BlackBerry BES encryption, report says
Der Spiegel said that to acquire BES data involves a sustained effort on the part of the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations, a specialized hacking team based in Forte Meade, Maryland. An NSA presentation entitled "Your target is using a BlackBerry? Now what?" seen by the magazine shows what can be achieved.

Negating network latency's effects without bending law of physics
Although we cannot bend the laws of physics, we can avoid some of latency's more deleterious effects on application performance, using CDNs, TCP optimization and peering agreements. At a technical level, data can readily move between networks, but at a business level, agreements between network service providers dictate what data moves between networks.

It’s Time to Put More Context in Your Conversations
Much of our workplace communication is transactional in nature, and lacks connectivity to the bigger picture. It lacks the critical context that our colleagues and team members need to understand how their work connects to the bigger picture of customers, markets and strategies, and this lack of context adversely impacts performance.

How even agile development couldn't keep this mega-project on track
"Hard-nosed contract managers within large suppliers will see this as a change to the requirements and will often want to charge for each iteration," said John Turner. "Here the supplier can stand to make a lot of money and as such agile can introduce contract complexities. Agile developments need careful cost, time, quality and outcome definitions within the contract so that the power of agile will be of benefit but also impose the discipline on the need to deliver to the targets."

Quote for the day:

"Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that." -- Norman Vincent Peale

September 09, 2013

Trust no one, advises security expert after NSA revelations
The new revelations should raise major concerns from Internet users over who they can trust, Schneier added. "I assume that all big companies are now in cahoots with the NSA, cannot be trusted, are lying to us constantly," he said. "You cannot trust any company that makes any claims of the security of their products. Not one cloud provider, not one software provider, not one hardware manufacturer."

PostgresSQL: The Other big open-source database has a new release
Jonathan S. Katz, CTO of VenueBook, an event-planning company, said in a statement, "PostgreSQL 9.3 provides features that as an app developer I can use immediately: better JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) functionality, regular expression indexing, and easily federating databases with the PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper. I have no idea how I completed projects without 9.3."

David Linthicum Named One of TechTarget's Top 11 Cloud Computing Industry Movers and Shapers
"David earned his place on the list not just because he is such a visible presence across virtually any cloud computing website or conference, but due to the fact that he isn't just saying what vendors want to hear. He has earned his status as a thought leader by consistently challenging the status quo." The feature details how via his blogs, webinars, keynote addresses, podcasts and over 13 books, Linthicum advocates for change in the cloud market.

VMware NSX: Network virtualization doesn't need to be a turf war
"To me it just feels like the VMware NSX folks are saying the network is the biggest problem," said network engineer and blogger Tom Hollingsworth. "If you are going to blame the network for all the problems that we've been dealing with for years, give us a solution that works with the people who have been trying to fix this the whole time. Don't tell me that I'm the problem and that you'll just fix it and go around me."

Securing the Virtual World
The report showed that one-third of the group think virtualization and cloud computing make security “harder,” while one-third said it was “more or less the same,” and the remainder said it was “easier.” The results seem to indicate that many are either in the process of defining policy for virtual environments, or have chosen to postpone that effort until a later date. Perhaps, as a result of this failure to tackle the security question when deploying virtualized servers, there are experts who believe that the majority of virtual deployments may be less secure than physical deployments.

4 survival strategies for IT chaos
Today's youth are, of course, tomorrow's customers. "They demand immediacy, which is driving what IT has to deal with," says Kippelman, who is CIO at Covanta Energy and a Computerworld blogger. But the need for speed is just the tip of the iceberg. Across all industries, IT teams are up against unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, also known as VUCA.

The Wonder Years: Businesses Transform as Cloud Adoption Matures
Along with deeper benefits, early adopters are discovering deeper complexity in using cloud for day-to-day operations. After initial cloud transitions where integration is a top challenge, companies with more experience are seeing changes to IT policy become their primary concern. These changes could involve the way that technology is procured throughout the organization or the functions within the IT department as they interact with lines of business, both of which are steps towards a fully cloud-enabled business.

U.S. court takes on Internet traffic fight
The outcome will also determine whether Internet service providers can restrict some so-called crossing content, for instance, by blocking or slowing down access to particular sites or charging websites to deliver their content faster. Public interest groups have termed the FCC rules too weak, saying the agency was swayed by big industry players and needs to forge more direct and clearer power of oversight.

Myths about Enterprise Application Orchestration
It combines business processes that cut across functional areas as well as associated IT services. Orchestrating or designing an Enterprise Application is an art which can be compared with the composition of music: It requires the same amount of effort or integration to produce the desired results. The term orchestration in music refers to the way instruments are played to render any aspect of melody or harmony

Kanban - Isn’t It Just Common Sense?
Thus in response to the question in title of this post, the answer to whether kanban is common sense is “No!” However, common sense is an example of a heuristic, and I do believe kanban is a heuristical approach to solving the many challenges of product development. The remainder of this article will explore more about what heuristics are, the primary sources that led me to the realisation that heuristics are the right approach, and how we can use heuristics to design kanban systems.

Quote for the day:

"Let a man lose everything else in the world but his enthusiasm and he will come through again to success." -- H. W. Arnold

September 08, 2013

FAQ: What is the COBIT framework's approach to IT management?
The aim is to provide an overarching framework that incorporates different subsets of information management and control while promoting greater consistency among these areas. Unlike prescriptive requirements for a specific regulation, COBIT can be used for a wide range of enterprise needs, including information security, regulatory compliance, risk management and financial processing.

Criteria for Determining Which SaaS Platform to Choose
For every SaaS entrepreneur in B2B, choosing the right platform is one of the first and most important decisions you will have to make. It will affect everything. To understand why it’s such a difficult task, I will review the three integrations of SalesClic, with both their upsides and downsides. So which platform would you have started with? With our application, we started with Google Apps, then integrated with Salesforce followed by Highrise.

The New Generation of Database Technology Includes Semantics and Search
If you have a RDBMS running that’s giving you what you need, then you shouldn’t replace it just for the sake of it. Of course, if you want to combine your relational data with unstructured data or more complex structured data, then it can make sense to ingest it into MarkLogic so that you can benefit from unified search and query across all relevant data. Think of it as a data warehouse, but where you get to search and query all data instead of just pre-computed aggregates along predefined dimensions.

Future Airborne Capability Environment: FACE™ 101
Check out this videlo presentation - The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) leads the development of open standards for avionics systems. FACE 101 introduces concepts, technical standards, business model and consortium structure.

5 Ways A Flat Management Structure Can Empower Your Business
In a traditionally structured company, the low-level guys—such as customer support staff—are the people who truly have the pulse of a company. They’re the ones who are dealing with customers and who know everything that’s great and everything that’s not-so-great about a company. But if their experiences on the front lines inspire an idea, it’s virtually impossible for it to make its way to the CEO’s desk.

NSA Code-Cracking Puts Google Under Fire
“This is a fundamental attack on how the Internet works,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior staff technologist at the Washington-based policy group Center for Democracy & Technology, said in an interview. “Secure communications technologies are the backbone of e-commerce” including the transfer of medical records and financial exchanges. “People in business will either not engage in those activities, or find other ways,” Hall said.

Minimizing Oracle db file sequential Read Wait Events
Unless you trace a session with the event 10046 or have a continuously running wait event data collector, it is difficult to determine the SQL statement that is responsible for the cumulated wait time. Take the preceding SID #192 again, for example. The 243113 centiseconds wait time may be caused by one long-running or many fast SQL statements. The latter case may not be an issue. Furthermore, the SQL statement that is currently running may or may not be the one that is responsible for the waits.

Outsourcing and TOGAF 9.1 - What is the connection?
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is about developing a fundamental structure of your Business and IT components to respond to business drivers, realise business goals and establishing principles which will guide their evolution into the future. This includes core and non core components of IT and Business. When you outsource some of these components, whether they are parts of Business or IT, you need to ensure that the service provider delivers to the Enterprise Architecture of your company.

Dissecting Design
In the past few years, we’ve recognized the danger in jumping headfirst into full-comp design before we really understand the design direction. Other disciplines have recognized this for a long time—think mood boards in branding—and taken steps to ramp up their design effort. The goal here is to establish the basic building blocks we’ll use in the rest of the design process: things like color, type, texture, illustration style, photography treatment, iconography. Once these are established, the success rate for the rest of the process is greatly increased. There are a number of ways to do this on the web; let’s look at a few.

Building a Cohesive Design Team
In many organizations, skill building is a secondary activity, done only when project work is in a lull. However, amongst the most successful teams, it was a primary activity that was scheduled with the project work. One manager told us, When the [team members] come back from training jazzed to apply a new technique, that’s when we see real benefits. In order to bypass roles, the most successful teams would use techniques for facilitating discussions that equalized the power in the room.

Quote for the day:

"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -- Robert McKee

September 07, 2013

Despite Sales Surge, Enterprises Still Not Excited by 10Gbit/sec Ethernet
10Gbit/sec Ethernet is an upgrade, but not really the next generation of datacenter switching, the honor for which will go to 40Gbit/sec and 100Gbit/sec switches whose sales are growing at more than 100 percent per year and will make up the majority of Ethernet switching revenues by 2017, Crehan predicted. ... Price cuts did help increase sales, but most of the growth seemed to stem from systems makers and datacenter-service providers whose inventory of 10Gbit/sec Ethernet gear had run low, Boujelbene said in the report.

6 Time Management Mistakes You're Probably Making
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, calls it "time famine." Your doctor calls it "dangerous levels of stress." The '80s band Rush called it "too many hands on my time." Whatever label you put on the entrepreneurial trait of having more tasks than time, it's a factor of almost every successful business life. But it doesn't have to be. Check your own daily schedule to see if you're falling into one of these six time management traps.

Intel Targets Cloud Data Centers with New Atom C2000 Chips
Within the Atom Series-C processor family the configurations are highly optimized for the target workload – ranging from 2 cores and 6 watts for entry level web hosting, 4 cores and 9 or 14 watts for cold storage, and 8 cores and 12 or 20 watts for front end web tier (scale-out workloads). With the Silvermont modular design, the AtomC2000 can have 2 to 8 Silvermont cores, with shared 1MB L2 per module, or 4MB.

The Top 10 Skills for a New Business Analyst to Shore Up On
Be sure to get your manager’s feedback wherever possible and select skills that are relevant to your immediate success. ... In that case, meeting facilitation could be on the back-burner while you work on your analysis skills and learning relevant software. You won’t know what skills are most important until you ask, but now you have a starting point for having a productive conversation with your manager.

The Personas that Matter Most in Business Analytics
Understanding this context-driven user experience is the first step toward defining the personas found in today’s range of analytics users. The key is to make the personas simple to understand but comprehensive enough to cover the diversity of needs for business analytic types within the organization. To help organizations be more effective in their analytic process and engagement of their resources and time, we recommend the following five analytical personas: (Note that in my years of segmentation work,

4 Million Patient Records Stolen in Second Largest HIPAA Data Breach
A senior vice president from Advocate acknowledged that the sensitive data shouldn’t have been stored on the computers’ hard drives, but instead maintained on their secure network. One of the steps they’re taking toward remediation includes mapping its computer and software systems in order to identify where patient data is stored, and how to secure it. This is also one of the first steps that should be taken toward data encryption – classifying sensitive data and then selecting a proper encryption method is next.

In light of the NSA, how to think about encryption
But rest assured, governments crack encryption. If there happens to be some kind of encryption they can't crack, they don't just write it off. They redouble their efforts to find a way to get inside those communication streams. It is what they do. National security (and often national sovereignty) depends on it.

The Art of Reviewing Code
Arjan van Leeuwen a developer at travel software giant Amadeus, where he mainly works with C++, overviews code reviews advantages and disadvantages, how much can be done in a code review, types of critiques, how to handle critiques and conflicts that might arise from them. ... Reliability and speed are things that matter every day, but code quality is the subject that can really rile him up.

Ten Ways to Kill An Enterprise Architecture Practice
Have you seen practices that you know could kill an Enterprise Architecture practice? Nick Malik has seen it happening. A recent LinkedIn thread asked for examples, and he came up with his top ten which are listed here. He is seeking addition to the list by his blog readers.

What is Software Quality?
It is important to make this distinction because so much time and energy is spent by people arguing over what is and what is not a “defect”. If we define separate terms then we can at least reason about this situation and the fact that individual, teams and organizations often have incentives for classifying something as a defect whether it is or is not. Jon Jagger pointed out in his comment on the previous blog that “Jerry Weinberg's definition of quality is "value to someone" or "value to some persons”.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot build character & courage by taking away a man's initiative & independence." -- Abraham Lincoln