Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 10, 2013

How the Rack is Changing the Cooling Game
One of the newest forms of liquid cooling is the rear-door heat exchanger (RDHx). The RDHx can be added to existing equipment racks, or you can provide new rack enclosures with an RDHx incorporated as part of the new rack enclosure. RDHx systems can provide supplemental cooling support for a few high-density racks, or provide the total cooling solution with or without a raised floor.

How Big Data Becomes Smart Data
Some would say that only human intelligence can transform data into insight. While it certainly takes intelligence to interpret data, such a statement begs the question as to how to make the connections necessary to reach actionable conclusions from these massive repositories of information. In other words, how do we turn Big Data into Smart Data? Context, it turns out, is key. When we examine the surrounding environment and identify the types of data that influence a given situation, we can cross-analyze those sets to provide illumination.

Is the Internet of Things More Fact or Fiction?
Though Cisco and several other vendors have thrown tremendous support behind the IOT, most channel organizations continue to maintain a wait-and-see attitude until the business case is more firmly established. Of course, many of the core technologies required to drive this Internet-enablement initiative are already here, including wireless networks, RFID and barcode readers, temperature sensors and other measurement systems.

Has Hadoop Entered the Mainstream?
After all the hype around Apache Hadoop, we are starting to see some successful implementations that highlight its benefits. However, we do not yet see the kind of enterprise adoption typically associated with a technology that promises to manage high volumes, reduce implementation costs and, more importantly, monetize data. The question is why?

Shattered Trust: IT Survey Shows PRISM Allegations Have Brought Cloud Misgivings
A survey of Redmond magazine's readership also shows a significant number of organizations are putting some planned cloud migrations on hold, while many are retreating from those already underway. More than one-third put planned projects on hold in wake of the NSA leaks, while 13 percent brought cloud projects back in-house, according to an online survey of 300Redmond readers conducted in mid-August.

Rethinking high-availability architecture: Scale out to save money
A more economical approach is a scale-out multiserver architecture, where the workload is shared across multiple servers. A classic example is a Web server farm. To improve website performance, you use more VMs and only care about having enough Web servers running to support the current load. Newer open source database servers have the same sort of architecture: Redis, Apache Cassandra and MongoDB all scale out for performance rather than requiring a single-node scale-up.

The real value of introspection
The notion that we just lead outwardly and spend no time inwardly belies the value of introspection. Introspection and its byproduct, self-awareness, are central to any leadership, no matter what level or position. It is the essence of decision-making, behavioral efforts, action, focused energy, prioritization. Introspection is the key to clarifying what you stand for and what matters to you — in other words, what is important. It drives who we are in all aspects of our leadership.

Why a secure, multi-vendor strategy is crucial for the cloud
Even before you went to the cloud, you (hopefully) had a backup strategy in place that would help you recover critical systems in the event of an equipment malfunction or disaster. Perhaps your first foray into the cloud was as a backup measure, replacing tape or other backup media with highly scalable cloud storage. But if you are running primary or mission critical applications in the cloud, it’s even more critical that you have a plan should your provider go down for a few minutes—or forever.

Experts, users weigh in on OpenPower's open source data center systems
With denser chip-level transistors and more on-chip integration, processors can share a chip with GPUs, peripheral bus controllers (PCIe or even USB) and network interconnects. These system-on-a-chip designs are simpler and less expensive for server makers because there are fewer chips to connect and test externally on a motherboard. However, there is a disconnect between what server vendors are developing and what data center teams want, said Doug Feltman, director of systems and applications at 24 Seven Inc.

Software Is Eating Your Organizational Silos
There’s no question that ultimately, we’ll find all of our applications running in service-level, on-demand infrastructure. The software running on commoditized hardware will itself be commoditized. The vast majority of our applications will no longer be unique snowflakes with highly specific infrastructure requirements — instead, they’ll be able to run on common software platforms that eliminate the need at the application layer to worry about infrastructure at all

Quote for the day:

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes." -- Washington Irving

October 09, 2013

MDM and Next-Generation Data Sources
New data sources and real-time analytics continue to change the IT landscape as never before. Big data and other new information management technologies now allow organizations to uncover relationships that have long been buried in their data stores. ... top master data management expert Aaron Zornes, chief research officer of The MDM Institute, see another new trend emerging: master relationship management.

Building and Testing a Web API Service
Microsoft's latest tool for creating server-side services is ASP.NET Web API, so that's what I'll use as the next step in creating my sample application. The Web API isn't JavaScript and, technically, not part of this column. However, the services used by the client are a critical part of my sample application and, more important, a brief look at the service will let me make a few points about TypeScript before I return to the client, later in this article.

Gartner warns of vendor upheaval in technology shift
Gartner analysts warned that a data explosion threatens to overwhelm, sensors will be everywhere, 3-D printing will change everything, and smart machines will replace people. CIOs that don't adapt will become simple custodians of back-end systems. Companies that fail to change will join Kodak, Blackberry and Wang, each of which was slow to recognize new forces in technology.

Health Care: Big Data’s Next Frontier
Readers with experience in the health care industry might now be thinking “Privacy!” “HIPAA!” -- incredulous as they consider the challenges of sharing and integrating health data for analyses. Indeed, privacy regulations are a big obstacle blocking the use of all the data in the industry to meet health and financial goals. But help may be on the way. Last week at the Strata Rx 2013 conference in Boston, I learned of two exceptional cases that illustrated researchers leveraged big data technologies to revolutionize modern health care.

Your car is about to go open source
Automakers are working to standardize on a Linux-based operating system for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems that would make it easier for cars to act more like smartphones. An IVI is the "black box" that powers a car's audio and entertainment systems, as well as hands-free phone service and satellite navigation systems. Most IVIs today have touchscreens and can be voice-activated, but many car buyers pass up those options.

Rebuild or Reorganize: SQL Server Index Maintenance
First off: ‘Reorganize’ and ‘Rebuild’ are two different operations that each reduce fragmentation in an index. They work differently toward the same end. You don’t need to run both against the same index. (I sometimes find that people are doing both against every index in a maintenance plan. That’s just double the work and NOT double the fun.)

Superhero DBAs: How to fuel productivity gains with automation
Scoring high in “Delivery” means there is a higher probability that your DBAs will maintain service levels, even if the “Environment” gets more complex in the future. With high levels of “Delivery” maturity, your DBA’s can be proactive and business-driven. They can actively implement database consolidation initiatives to keep database counts low. Or actively implement data archival and pruning mechanisms to keep overall database sizes constant even in the face of high data growth rates. By addressing the areas that make up “Delivery” metrics, you can actively improve your productivity level.

Data will drive future successful enterprises
Rometty said every single decision made in an organisation, whether it was to buy another company or keep an employee, would be driven by the information derived from big data analysis. "All of us are going to have more complex decisions to make in a much more complex environment. Those that choose to be a smarter enterprise will get the chance, I think, to make the right decisions and it will be the basis of competitive advantage," she said.

Mobile BI: The misperceptions and the missteps
Increasingly with the shift to HTML 5, you can support a lot more devices that way, including even the Firefox device, in theory, that's coming out, and a lot of vendors are moving in that direction. So, if you already have a business intelligence product or platform in place, the first thing you ought to do if you want to do mobile BI is go talk to your existing vendor, see what they have and see if it meets your needs. There's a very good chance that it does.

Solution Architecture and Application Architecture
Solution Architecture takes looks at the overall problem and works with other experts to build the best possible solution that will work in the real world from those other available parts. Often, applications are not directly part of the solution. Application Architecture has almost exclusively been used for software architecture in my experience. The level of expertise needed to be a competent software/application architect usually prevents those practitioners from gaining expertise in systems architecture or enterprise architecture because they need to be extremely well versed in software design and construction.

Quote for the day:

"The one without dreams is the one without wings" -- Muhammad Ali.

October 08, 2013

KPMG’s analysis of third-party integrity risks
KPMG’s Astrus Insights, which analyzes some 8,000 integrity due diligence reports on third party relationships, covering 172 countries, has found that the Financial Services sector is the most exposed of any industry to the threats of fraud, corruption, insider trading, negligence and bankruptcy. Additionally, the analysis has shown that third party risks have an impact across many sectors with bribery and corruption identified as a key risk.

Microsoft enables CodePlex projects to use GPLv3 license
GPLv3 is now one of the license choices that CodePlex developers see in a drop-down list offering them licensing choices. Other options in the drop-down include Apache 2.0, Simplified BSD, GPLv2, Mozilla Public License 2 and a handful of Microsoft open-source licenses. Individuals interested in hosting an open source project on CodePlex need to select a license at the time they first put their projects on the site.

Big Data: How Can We Measure the Risks?
The chief risk factor surrounding big data is not knowing the potential future downsides associated with your failure to manage it all effectively. Making the risk factors transparent for all of your big-data sets—unstructured, structured and all gray areas in between—should be a top business priority. The above-referenced article presents a rigorous approach for modeling and measuring the risks associated with unstructured data.

Eleven Secrets of SaaS Product Design
This is the fifth and final post in a series that explores SaaS marketing strategies that drive growth throughout the customer lifecycle using the three fundamental SaaS growth levers: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and customer network effects. In the course of this exploration, we’ve encountered numerous examples where the SaaS product itself is the instrument of growth. This final installment explores the product P in more detail providing Eleven Secrets of SaaS Product Design that drive growth at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

The Post-PC era will be the best of times for security and the worst of times for security vendors
Hardware security can make a device tens of thousands of times more secure than today’s PCs. For example, use of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) (required by Windows 8) allows a device to securely attest to its own integrity when it powers on. In addition, CPU features for hardware isolation can allow the system to securely hardware-isolate the execution of untrusted code. The use of strong encryption for all data at rest means that a lost device need not result in a loss to the enterprise.

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014
“We have identified the top 10 technologies that companies should factor into their strategic planning processes,” said David Cearley. “This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the listed technologies, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.” Mr. Cearley said that the Nexus of Forces, the convergence of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information, continues to drive change and create new opportunities...

Hosting provider LeaseWeb falls victim to DNS hijacking
"Our security investigation so far shows that no domains other than leaseweb.com were accessed and changed," LeaseWeb said in a blog post Sunday after resolving the issue. "No internal systems were compromised. One of the security measures we have in place is to store customer data separately from any publicly accessible servers; we have no indication that customer data was compromised as a result of this DNS hijack."

Identifying and locking down known Java security vulnerabilities
Websense Security Labs showed that 94% of endpoints currently running Java contain at least one known vulnerability. First, is there an easy way for organizations to determine the security vulnerabilities in the Java versions they are running? Also, how can organizations further secure old versions of Java if they can't upgrade in a timely fashion?

Handbook: Architecting an Agile Enterprise
This white paper takes an in-depth look at the relationship between Agile business practices and mobile computing. Inside, learn more about the balancing act many modern businesses face when trying to provide a quick turnaround for mobile applications on a limited budget.

Open Agile Adoption: The Executive Summary
The core concept of OAA is the passage rite or “rite of passage”. A passage rite is a cultural event (and a kind of social game) that helps people make sense of complex transitions. Agile adoptions are complex transitions. These are the key events in the passage rite: A Beginning: An Open Space meeting; The Middle: With experimentation, play, and storytelling; and The End: An Open Space meeting

Quote for the day:

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." -- Ernest Hemingway

October 07, 2013

Narayana is now JTA 1.2 Compliant
Here's an overview of the three improvements: @Transactional. This is the headline feature and brings the ability to place transaction annotations on any CDI managed bean. Prior to this feature, you had to make your class an EJB in order to use transactional annotations.; @TransactionScoped. This feature allows you to associate CDI beans with the scope of a transaction; and the third change clarifies when the container should call 'delistResource' on the transactional resource. This is a minor change and is of less interest to an application developer, so I'm not going to discuss it further here

Assembling a Health Analytics Team
Analysis is nothing new in the science and data-heavy health care field, but what used to be a couple guys crunching numbers for Excel sheets and calling it "analytics" has become a high-profile, risky and expensive adventure aimed at the heart of the business of health care organizations. If you don't know your data in this stupendously complex market, you don't know your business.

Contrary to what you’ve heard, Android is almost impenetrable to malware
Ludwig sees security in biological terms: “A walled garden systems approach blocking predators and disease breaks down when rapid growth and evolution creates too much complexity. Android’s innovation from inside and outside Google are continuous, making it impossible to create such a walled garden by locking down Android at the device level.” He stated Google’s mission in defending against malware in terms more closely akin to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) than the PC security industry.

Europe Aims to Regulate the Cloud
Viviane Reding, the European Commission’s justice minister, said in her own statement that she wanted to see “the development of European clouds” certified to strict new European standards. She said that European governments could promote such a move “by making sure that data processed by them are only stored in clouds to which E.U. data protection laws and European jurisdiction applies.” “For the private sector, such European clouds could become also attractive as they could advertise, ‘These are European clouds, so your personal data is safe,’ ” she said.

What type of CIO are you? A Scotty or a Mr. Spock?
Any given CIO will typically operate in many of these roles simultaneously. What’s interesting today, however, is that the disruptive trends are creating a myriad of opportunities for CIOs to take on more and more of the “pioneer and explorer” role and make IT an integral part, or even a leading part, of new business models, new products and services, and competitive differentiation.

API design: How to properly build an application program interface
Another common question has to do with the data format. XML is the most general way of expressing parameters and exchanging information, and it is applicable to REST and SOAP interfaces. But XML processing is a heavyweight and most valuable for expressing structureless data. For REST, JSON has gained favor as being easier to use while providing some specific variable typing widely used and expected in API building. Where APIs exchange rigidly defined data elements, JSON is likely a better choice for RESTful exchanges.

The Three Bandits of Change Leadership
What are the change bandits doing to cause problems for the leaders of change? They’re feeding on the emotional conclusions that the “other guy” needs to change, “adversity” should be avoided, and “discomfort” is incompetence in disguise. Here is a more in-depth look at each.

Innovative Technology That Boosts Workforce Happiness
Think your employees are happy in their jobs? Think again. A recent study from Dale Carnegie Training quantified the number of fully engaged employees at only 29 percent and disengaged employees at 26 percent. Chances are, your team falls somewhere in the middle. Luckily, a number of innovative technology solutions can help. ... Turning to innovative solutions like these five project management tools can help.

3 Secrets of a Successful Business Intelligence Strategy
Ready to be shocked? Many of them are flawed - focusing on the wrong things, in the wrong order, and going about delivering an ROI in the wrong way. The bottom line: the best Business Intelligence strategy strives to keep Business Intelligence focused, benefit-led, and affordable. For Business Intelligence to be successful, it’s clear that you have to have a Business Intelligence strategy. Business Intelligence has a lot to deliver, and a plan for achieving those deliverables—and then turning them into cold, hard cash—is an obvious first step.

How software leaders are changing with the times
Our notion of leadership is that the leadership that really matters is between peers, across the white space and even up the hierarchy. This is absolutely essential because knowledge is not distributed according to position on the hierarchy or salary. If the person who is at the bottom of the hierarchy and makes less than anyone else in the organization has the knowledge that is essential to what has to be done, then he/she is the leader. Attempts to overrule this are always a mistake.

Quote for the day:

"The pessimist borrows trouble; the optimist lends encouragement." -- William Arthur Ward

October 06, 2013

BYOD As We Know It Is Dead
If BYOD 1.0 has been responding to the needs of the employee, BYOD 2.0 efforts will focus more on the needs of where the enterprise and the employee intersect. Perhaps the most valuable key attribute of BYOD 2.0 will be to provide right- time experience (user interface + user experience) to the systems, solutions and points of collaboration that are mutually relevant to the company and to the employee.

How to Improve Database Performance by Measuring User Experience
Rather than watching server health statistics and making guesses about their performance impact, wait and response time methods measure the time taken to complete a desired operation. The best implementations break down the time into discrete and individually measurable steps, and identify exactly which steps in which operations cause application delays. Since the database primary mission is to respond with a result, response time is the most important criteria in making database performance decisions.

Leadership Character and Corporate Governance
Competencies matter. ... Commitment is critical. ... But above all, character counts. It determines how leaders perceive and analyze the contexts in which they operate. Character determines how they use the competencies they have. It shapes the decisions they make, and how these decisions are implemented and evaluated.

The future is: Polyglot Persistence
The “cloud” is exactly this kind of cluster, which means relational databases don’t play well with the cloud. The rise of web services provides an effective alternative to shared databases for application integration, making it easier for different applications to choose their own data storage. ... Searching 300 Million voters information for 1 person with addresses, emails, phones is tough with a relational data store. MongoDB was used to store the documents about the person.

Data Is Not the New Oil, It's the New Soil
Oil is valuable. If you find, collect and store oil it will remain valuable. Data is a very different thing. Data is generated when people do something. It is a record of an event. That means it starts losing value almost as soon as it is generated because it ages. We can see trends and obtain insights but to get real value from data it must be used in real time. Simply gathering and storing data is a pointless exercise.

Five More Key Considerations for MDM Projects
While the above recommendations are certainly valid and important guidelines to follow, we have observed a number of other key considerations that our experience shows also have a significant impact on the success of an MDM implementation project. These additional points can take an MDM project from a mere milestone to a lasting and impactful cornerstone of an organization’s information technology and business process infrastructure.

Overcoming Security Challenges to Virtualize Internet-Facing Applications
This architecture also maintains existing secure administration policy by separating network and server administrative duties. In addition, we segregate virtualization host servers into landing zones analogous to those in the physical environment, and we harden and isolate virtualization management systems. Over time, we plan to further enhance our secure virtualization capabilities by taking advantage of hardware-assisted security with Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard.

Planning and Controlling Complex Projects
One of the most important insights of beyond budgeting is in my opinion to differentiate between target and forecast. The rationale is that every goal should be ambitious whereas the forecast (or estimation) is a way to close the gap to the goal. Now if both –target and forecast- are forced into one number the result is that either the target isn’t ambitious anymore or the estimation is a deception.

How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture
The selected strategy is implemented by means of programs, projects, budgets, processes and procedures. The way in which the strategy is implemented can have a significant impact on whether it will be successful, and this is where Enterprise Architecture may have a significant role to play. Often, the people formulating the strategy are different from those implementing it. The way the strategy is communicated is a key element of the success and should be clearly explained to the different layers of management including the Enterprise Architecture team.

“Designing Webs – Information Architecture as a Creative Practice” – Paul Rissen
Paul says that unlike the people looking at designs and site maps, the user isn’t interested in “the page” as an artefact. They are interested in “the things” that are contained within“the page”. And he went even further than that, saying that actually, people aren’t interested in “the things” themselves, they are interested in “the relationship between the things”. To put it in TV terms, nobody watches EastEnders because of Pat Butcher. They watch because Pat Butcher and Peggy Mitchell are going to fight.

Quote for the day:

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge

October 05, 2013

Business Architects: Do Not Start With Strategy
Business architects add no value if they bring analysis methods that are no more valuable than the poorly described “consulting methods” that management consultants use today. (If those methods worked, why would “alignment” be a problem?) Simple methods like SWOT and Five Forces and even Balanced Scorecards can fail catastrophically if there is no recognition of the fact that these methods are only useful within the clear and well described boundaries of a business model.

5 takeaways from Predictive Analytics World
"I often learn as much by talking to people in between sessions at a conference as I do when listening to the presentations, and this week's Predictive Analytics World event has been no exception. I had the opportunity to see and chat with some very smart people Monday, and here, in no particular order, are five interesting takeaways from those conversations. The conference continues Tuesday at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston."

How Disruption Happens
Take the concept a little further and it becomes obvious that influence is a function of groups rather than individuals. That, in essence, is what the threshold model of collective behavior predicts. An idea usually takes hold among people who are most receptive to it and, as they increase in numbers, more people join in. It builds on itself. This makes a lot more sense than the notion that a select class of people with magical powers of influence tells the rest of us what to do.

Data’s Ethical Landmines
There has been a lot of hype around the introduction of social media data and big data to the worlds of data integration and master data management. After all, isn’t more data – capable of helping us identify and understand our customers better – invaluable to the business? Perhaps, but along with its infinite value could come some highly unexpected, extensive costs and liabilities if not handled appropriately.

The Dirty (Not so Secret) Secret of IT Budgets
Cloud computing infrastructures, platforms and applications often allow users to try before they buy with very little risk. Users can test applications, explore new application functions and features, experiment with data, and stand up analytic capabilities with much less fuss than traditional IT routes. Best of all, much of this “experimentation” can be funded with operating budgets instead of going through the painful process of asking the CFO for a CAPEX check.

Delivering business applications to mobile devices puts focus on users
On the flip side, protecting the integrity of company data and ensuring compliance can be difficult. Though Columbia doesn't have an official bring your own device (BYOD) policy, it does have terms of use that employees must agree to. When a device is lost or stolen, Pickett's team remotely wipes it, which can be distressing for both the user and the administrator who has to delete the worker's personal information.

Shutdown affects government sites, but Weather.gov remains up as storm looms
The website for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.gov, also was operating at a limited capacity on Friday. FEMA is the main agency that responds to disasters such as hurricanes. "Due to the lapse in federal funding, portions of this website may not be updated and some non-disaster assistance transactions submitted via the website may not be processed or responded to until after appropriations are enacted," FEMA.gov said.

Financial-architecture and enterprise-architecture
The reason why we couldn’t do anything about it was because of that darn stupid notion that enterprise-architecture was ‘just an IT-thing’. ... To get the necessary changes to happen to either the organisation’s business-case processes or, preferably, the accounts-structures as well, we would have had to have the ear of the entire executive - which is the level at which enterprise-architecture actually belongs, and why it belongs there, too.

In-Memory OLTP Common Design Pattern – High Data Input Rate/Shock Absorber
As In-memory OLTP is integrated into SQL Server and you can have both memory-optimized tables and disk-based tables in the same database, separating the data storage and retrieval mechanisms between these table structures is also a common pattern. Typically a user created “background” process can execute, for example, on a timed basis, to move data from the memory-optimized table to the disk based table and remove that data from the current memory-optimized table

Keeping Your Secrets
There are still ways to protect your secrets, especially if you have some control over both ends of the exchange. In this article you'll learn how you can secure application data exchanges in ways that block exposure both now and in the foreseeable future, and see examples of applying the security techniques in Java code. Along the way you'll also get some pointers on how you can protect your own online access.

Quote for the day:

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

October 04, 2013

Do You Have an Information Governance Policy Framework?
"Healthcare has a lot of compliance-related activities," Kloss said. "And there are pockets of good governance, but they may be siloed and not looked at as part of a mosaic of activities. I look for ways to leverage activities already underway, such as a new rollout of analytics, to see if there are lessons learned about information governance that can be ported to other areas."

How to align your IT Strategy skillfully
Kumar recommends keeping entry and exit aspects very clear; and if the project is big, setting success criteria and jointly agreeing to it is even more critical. “When the requirement is specific to a domain, set the qualifying criteria; bring a score card concept for selecting the right vendor and sign SLAs with those who have realistic terms to make it a win-win situation,” reiterates Kumar.

Building the Anytime, Anywhere Network
For corporate IT, capitalizing on mobility’s potential means exchanging ironfisted control over access and devices for a more flexible approach. IT must balance firm administrative oversight with the freedom today’s knowledge workers need to innovate in the anytime, anywhere economy. And making that demanding transition without compromising. security in the process means nothing less than embracing a totally new approach to building and managing networks

Pushback against 'big data' begins
A future in which such "intuitive knowledge" about how to deploy resources is overruled by algorithms that can work only with hard data and can't, of course, account for the data they don't have ... While it might seem obvious that data, no matter how "big", cannot perfectly represent life in all its complexity, information technology produces so much information that it is easy to forget just how much is missing.

Drag-and-Drop Functionality of JavaScript UI Components Library Webix
Not so long ago, the drag-and-drop functionality was used in web apps quite rarely. With HTML5 coming on the scene, native drag-and-drop has become easily accessible and popular. The functionality that required lots of coding efforts before, now can be added with a few lines of HTML code. While developing the Webix library, we tried to keep all features and advantages of native drag-and-drop. At the same time, we’ve added new capabilities that might be useful in web app development.

Microsoft Surface: What it tells us about devices, services and the future of Microsoft
It's clear that where in the past Microsoft would have tuned its hardware for its software, with Surface it's tuned it for services. That tuning makes Surface just a surface, where both local Windows and cloud services are rendered. It's just one screen in those "three screens plus cloud" that Microsoft talked about a few years back, albeit a highly-optimised screen (and with some of the additional hardware announced in New York it can move to being any one of those three screens).

Verizon challenges Amazon with Verizon Cloud
With Verizon Cloud Compute, Verizon says, "users can determine and set virtual machine and network performance, providing predictable performance for mission critical applications, even during peak times." Other services, such as Amazon Web Services, force users to pick a preset virtual machine size. The other big selling point versus the competition is that Verizon Cloud will supposedly eliminate "latency issues that have plagued many traditional storage offerings" in the cloud.

Successful IT professionals are ‘willing to self-train’, says HP head
“You have to self-train, you have to read, you have to study. You can’t expect to be spoon-fed anymore. The world is moving too fast to spoon feed the information. You earn your success in life,” said Brooks. Brooks preferred to take an applied learning route into IT, first doing an ordinary national diploma in technology, electrical and electronics engineering at North Oxon Technical College, before doing a degree in engineering, electrical and electronics engineering at the University of Bradford.

Rebuilding Your Engine at 200 Miles per Hour
Michael Brunton-Spall, who has keynoted and spoken at conferences on a variety of subjects ranging from pragmatic functional programming to scaling large web applications, innovation practices to agile methodologies shares his experience re-architect The Guardian’ Content API from a system based on Solr to a message queue cloud service based upon Elastic Search, without any downtime.

Let maturity and evolution determine where the data science team reports
Data science teams only add more complexity to an already perplexing problem. Should they report to IT, as Mary suggests? Should they report into the lines of business, as I would probably suggest. Or, should they be on their own: perhaps assign a Chief Data Science Officer that reports to the CEO or President ? The right answer depends on whether or not it works for your organization. More specifically, the size and maturity of your organization has a lot to do with how your data science team should be structured.

Quote for the day:

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work" -- Peter Drucker

October 03, 2013

What makes models interesting
George Box said that so much better than I would have. While he was referring to science and statistics, his advice applies to Enterprise Architecture rather well. What it means is this: if you have two models, both that capture the USEFUL elements needed to describe something, and one is simpler than the other, go simple. In other words, I don’t care what is “correct.” I care what is useful.

Depth-Sensing Cameras Head to Mobile Devices
The first mobile depth-sensing technology to hit the market is likely to be the Structure Sensor, an accessory for Apple’s iPad that gives the device capabilities similar to those of Microsoft’s Kinect gaming controller. Occipital, the San Francisco company behind the device, says it will start shipping its product in February 2014. A Kickstarter campaign for the device has raised almost $750,000, with more than a month to run.

Cloud Service Brokerage Expands in Canada with ComputeNext and CACloud.com Partnership
Cloud consumers can now use CA Cloud IaaS through the ComputeNext cloud brokerage platform for discovery and procurement and provisioning of cloud services such as servers, storage, and on-demand software. IT professionals looking for cloud servers and storage will now have access to IaaS locations in Canada that are geographically separated with options for West Coast and East Coast Canadian cloud servers that provide low-latency and performance solidified with a coast-to-coast network backbone.

New Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing plan designed to unify cloud, physical environments
Socket pairs and virtual nodes are now treated as interchangeable under Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Server license, allowing for various combinations of physical servers and virtualized machines. RHEL for Virtual Data Centers also got an update, with a purely per-socket option allowing for an unlimited number of VMs on Hyper-V, VMware, or Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization.

How to Manage Big Data with a Data Governance Policy
Big data, when used wisely, can deliver tremendous value to organizations. The importance of data governance in this equation is gaining visibility. A recent report from the Institute for Health Technology Transformation, for example, indicated that a standardized format for data governance is essential for healthcare organizations to leverage the power of big data. The authors indicate that the first and most critical priority is to develop a carefully structured framework for enterprise data governance.

Building A Collaborative Culture
Companies should assess and qualify collaboration opportunities just as they qualify sales leads to decide whether a particular collaboration effort makes sense. Reducing the costs of collaboration improves the chance that a collaboration initiative will have a positive ROI.However, companies can improve their odds even further by following five guidelines for successful collaboration

CA global IT study reveals DevOps driving 20% faster time-to-market for new services
"In today's world of mobile apps and online consumer reviews, companies are under enormous pressure to deliver higher quality applications faster than ever before," says Jaco Greyling, CA Southern Africa, manager, service assurance & application delivery. "Companies which have been around for more than 20-30 years face big challenges as they have legacy systems. Those who are willing to undergo internal transformation can win the competition in fast-changing markets."

Mobile Business Application Testing: Challenges and Strategy
This unlikeness in mobile computing environments presents unique challenges in developing applications, quality assurance, and maintenance, requiring unique testing strategies. Which need to cover different types of testing such as functional, , Performance, network, compatibility, usability, installation & field testing. To address this, we have a range of options of tools and automation processes best suited to testing both mobile web and native mobile apps that can reduce complexity and time to market.

Graphene Could Make Data Centers and Supercomputers More Efficient
Graphene has a number of potential advantages over germanium, says Englund. Because of its exceptional electronic properties, devices made of the material can work at very high frequencies, and could in principle handle more information per second. Also, graphene can absorb a broader range of wavelengths than germanium can. That property could be exploited to transmit more data streams simultaneously in the same beam of light.

Creating a Culture of Learning and Innovation
A culture of continuous learning is vital to an organization that strives to be innovative. Knowledge is the foundation for new ideas, and the learning that produces knowledge is what keeps brains malleable to create innovative and disruptive solutions. So why build a culture of continuous learning in the workplace?

Quote for the day:

"When change programs fail it is because the attempt was non-systemic. Change in performance requires a change to the system." -- John Seddon

October 02, 2013

Enterprise architecture: The key to cybersecurity
A fundamental axiom of security is that we can never drive risk to zero. In other words, perfect security is infinitely expensive. We must therefore understand our tolerance for risk and our budget for addressing security, and ensure these two factors are in balance across the organization. Fundamentally, it is essential to build threats into your business model, and do so consistently.

Introducing SQL Server 2014's New Clustered Columnstore Indexes
Just like a normal clustered index, a clustered columnstore index defines how the data is physically stored on the disc. A columnstore backed table is initially organized into segments known as row groups. Each rowgroup holds from 102,400 to 1,048,576 rows. Once a rowgroup is identified it is broken up into column segments, which are then compressed and inserted into the actual columnstore.

Future Technologies
Dr. William Lafontaine shared aspects of the company’s Global Technology Outlook 2013, naming the top trends that the company is keeping top of mind, starting with a confluence of social, mobile analytics and cloud. According to Lafontaine and his colleagues, businesses must prepare for not “mobile also” but “mobile first.” In fact, there will be companies that will exist in a mobile-only environment.

Seagate, TDK show off HAMR to jam more data into hard drives
HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) uses heat delivered by a laser to help write data onto the surface of HDDs (hard disk drives). This allows drives to write bits of data closer together so more information can be stored in a given amount of space on a disk platter. At this week's huge electronics show in Tokyo, in partner TDK's booth, Seagate will demonstrate HAMR on a 2.5-inch, 10,000-rpm HDD designed for enterprise blade servers.

Healthcare orgs turn to AWS as a HIPAA cloud provider
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been marketed as a good fit for HIPPA cloud workloads over the last year, but it wasn't until June that it began signing BAAs for select organizations, according to Glenn Grant, CEO of G2 Technology Group Inc., an AWS advanced partner based in Boston. There are some design requirements for customers who want to be HIPAA-compliant while using AWS; IT pros at healthcare organizations say they are required to use dedicated instances

Bank of the West's CIO Is on a Quest for Real-Time Analytics
The bank does have real-time data for all normal banking transactions; brokerage transactions are logged in near real time. "Everything has a slight sub-second lag time," Garen observes. For the small business segment, that real-time, cross-channel data is not fully available yet. Regulation has been a big driver for many of Garen's analytics projects. But she sees this as, at least in part, a good thing. "It's one of these mixed blessings," she says. "Because we're part of a holding company here in the U.S., there are regulatory requirements that require us to do massive investment in CCAR."

Does a lack of diversity among business leaders hinder innovation?
When senior leaders have both inherent and acquired diversity ("two-dimensional" diversity), the entire chain of command tends to be more effective, we find, at both eliciting innovative ideas and securing the support and funding to develop and implement them. The top sets the tone: at companies where executives have two-dimensional diversity, leaders at all levels are 74% more likely to exhibit the inclusive behaviours that foster a speak-up culture, unlocking innovation.

FPC gives banks a year to create cyber attack plan
The FPC stressed that it wants the issue addressed by directors at the very top of the banks, rather then left to IT departments. “It was important that boards of financial firms and infrastructure providers recognised their responsibility for responding to those threats, which required a combination of continuous vigilance and investment to strengthen operational resilience,” the minutes said. Underlining the scale of concern, it stressed that the message was “a priority” and that banks would need to be able to “adapt to evolving threats”.

Gartner tells IT shops that it's 'game over' for BlackBerry
Many large companies, including some U.S. government agencies, have already replaced BlackBerry devices with Apple iPhones and iPads or Android smartphones. The trend toward BlackBerry smartphone alternatives, underway for some four years, has increased steadily in the last year. Though BlackBerry indicated Friday in its second quarter results an uptick of organizations installing or testing the latest BES 10 servers, analysts have noted a large number of organizations are also abandoning earlier versions of BlackBerry management software.

"What if the data tells you something you don't like?" Three potential big data pitfalls
As Rohit Killam, CTO at Masan Group points out: "The real bottleneck is conceptualising a value-driven big data programme with [the] right stakeholders," while Duncan James, infrastructure manager at Clarion Solicitors notes: "Understanding what the business requires is the hardest part, especially if the business can't articulate what it wants in the first place." In many organisations, whenever you want to do any project there has to be a business case before there can be any budget, says Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at Gartner.

Quote for the day:

"Success is determined by those whom prove the impossible, possible." -- James W. Pence

October 01, 2013

Transactions and SQL Server 2014’s In-Memory OLTP
Transactions in SQL Server’s In-Memory OLTP rely on a timestamp-like construct known as a Transaction ID. A transaction uses two timestamps, one for the beginning of the operation and one that is assigned when the transaction is committed. While multiple transactions can share the same start value. Likewise each version of a row in memory has a starting and ending transaction id. The basic rule is that a transaction can only read data when RowVersion.StartingId <= Transaction.StartingId < RowVersion.EndingId.

Free eBook: Graph Databases
Graph Databases, published by O’Reilly Media, discusses the problems that are well aligned with graph databases, with examples drawn from practical, real-world use cases. This book also looks at the ecosystem of complementary technologies, highlighting what differentiates graph databases from other database technologies, both relational and NOSQL. Graph Databases is written by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrém, graph experts and enthusiasts at Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j.

Govt. Shutdown would hit tech industry
In the last shutdown, in the 1990s, government employees received backpay, but Hettinger said contracting companies aren't expecting to get back lost revenue from a shutdown. Even a short agreement to fund the government would be disruptive, Hettinger said, because companies need to be able to make decisions based on a predictable revenue stream. He urged companies to communicate with their contract employees to prevent "mass confusion" when federal agencies start closing.

Cisco, Intel push 'trusted geolocation in the cloud'
This idea of “trusted geolocation in the cloud” is of growing importance because many countries have laws about how can data about their citizens can be moved outside the country if at all, and businesses have their own reasons to restrict movement of data to certain places. Cisco solutions architect Kenneth Stavinoha and Intel senior enterprise technologist Paul Yates recently spoke on the topic during a panel discussion at the ISC2 Conference in Chicago, along with HyTrust CTO Hemma Prafullchandra.

Nokia Hits Snag in India
Nokia India's assets were frozen on Wednesday, the Finnish company said in a written statement on Monday. The Delhi High Court on Thursday freed up Nokia India's bank accounts, but its immovable assets, including its buildings and facilities in India, remain frozen. "We went to court, and got a ruling in our favor on Thursday—the bank accounts were unfrozen," Nokia spokesman Brett Young said. He declined to elaborate.

Cloud PCI Compliance: The Checklist
If your business stores, processes, or transmits payment cardholder data in the cloud, you are bound by PCI DSS. But unlike “brick and mortar” data centers that must also adhere to PCI DSS, those operating in the cloud have additional needs. For example, 6 of the 12 steps outlined by PCI DSS either require or are assisted by encryption of data. However, to securely encrypt in the cloud and comply with PCI DSS, you must keep control of the encryption keys. But as a cloud operation, can you keep your encryption keys in the cloud and at the same time keep them safe?

MoD plots new ‘laptop army' to combat cybercrime
"In response to the growing cyberthreat, we are developing a full-spectrum military cyber capability, including a strike capability, to enhance the UK's range of military capabilities," he said. "Increasingly, our defence budget is being invested in high-end capabilities such as cyber and intelligence and surveillance assets to ensure we can keep the country safe."

Redefining traceability in Enterprise Architecture
Traceable is an adjective; capable of being traced. Trying to find a definition even from a dictionary is a challenge and the most relevant one I found on Wikipedia which may be used as a reference could be “The formal definition of traceability is the ability to chronologically interrelate uniquely identifiable entities in a way that is verifiable.” In Enterprise Architecture, traceability may mean different things to different people.

7 sneak attacks used by today's most devious hackers
Today's most ingenious malware and hackers are just as stealthy and conniving. Here are some of the latest techniques of note that have piqued my interest as a security researcher and the lessons learned. Some stand on the shoulders of past malicious innovators, but all are very much in vogue today as ways to rip off even the savviest users.

Closing the IT communication gap with enterprise stakeholders
Investors look at rapid returns on investment, and IT looks for systemic changes, particularly for efficiency, but both groups have different expectations for each. David Linthicum and his guest Lisa Noon, vice president of Cloud Technology Partners, discuss how to close this cloud chasm. You'll also hear about announcements from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Joyent.

Quote for the day:

"Determination gives you the resolve to keep going in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you." -- Denis Waitley