Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 06, 2013

Don't Be A Hacker's Puppet
Countless servers are being converted to zombie or drone systems as part of botnets or coordinated attack machines. The risk to organizations is significant. A compromised network can result in embarrassment as you are blamed for the attacks on high-value targets and potentially massive costs from bandwidth and server utilization. Also, being blacklisted on the Internet makes it much harder to do business. Worse, if your infrastructure is used in a particularly heinous crime, it could be confiscated.

Cloud Buyers' Decision Tree
This White Paper describes a Decision Tree that could be used to help you discover where Cloud opportunities and solutions might fit in your organization. It is put forward for discussion, with the intention that this discussion, and validation in the field, will result in a practical tool for use by enterprises. In reverse mode, this Decision Tree can be used to quickly identify the types of business situations for which a particular type of Cloud offering will deliver the most value.

From EJBs to the mobile web: Re-emerging trends in enterprise Java development
If you've heard bad things about JSR 168, you'll be relieved to know that the new version of the API is much more developer-friendly. You even have a wide array of tooling options and technologies that support design and development on the server side or the client side, wherever you feel your greatest coding and scripting talents lie. It's probably a good idea to be involved in the portal development discussion starting at the architecture stage. That way, you can advocate for solutions that use more of the skills you already have...

Does technology improve employee engagement?
Given the parade of data on low worker engagement lately, commentators and analysts have come out of woodwork this year, claiming that the industrial era model of work is "broken", that that even the latest new models (such as social business, better intranets, unified communication, or fill-in-the-blank) for fixing this are "dead", and more. There's little doubt that things could be greatly improved, but what exactly is wrong is as variable as the lens being used, as is the potential range of solutions.

EMC sues startup for stealing trade secrets through staff hires
In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, EMC has alleged that "dozens of former EMC employees have joined Pure Storage and stolen tens of thousands of pages of proprietary, highly confidential and competitively sensitive EMC materials," in violation of their employee agreements. Many of them broke their agreements with EMC by inducing team members to join Pure Storage, it added.

The business case for information governance management and strategy
The value of governed information is measured by the confidence with which business decisions can be made when relying on that information. We have developed case studies that allow companies to measure all of the hidden costs of securing complete, authentic and validated information. Those costs become new targets that investments in information governance management can successfully attack.

Intel Is Under New Management – And It Shows
Intel saw the unattractive margins offered by ARM processors and didn’t want to commit the billions of dollars required by a fab (a chip manufacturing plant) for a product that would yield profits that were well below Wall Street expectations. The prospect of bargain basement margins undoubtedly figured in Otellini’s decision to say no to the iPhone. In 2006, no one could have predicted that it could have been made up in volume, that there would be a billion smartphone sales in 2014.

5 Signs Your Leadership Style Is Outdated
The most effective leaders know they must continually reinvent themselves. Most leaders don’t. They remain satisfied with the status quo and attempt to use the same style and approach – regardless of the individual employees and /or the organization they serve. This is why they find it difficult to create and sustain momentum in their work and careers. Rather than find ways to be proactive, they find themselves just floating along and afraid to rock the boat.

How To Develop a Big Data Strategy to Outperform Your Competitors
The challenge organisations will face in the coming years is how to become information-centric organisations that make decisions based on massive amounts of data that are collected in real time. Although the number of organisations currently taking full advantage of Big Data is still small, this will change in the future. The result will be that all companies, including the SMEs, will be able to take full advantage of the benefits of Big Data regardless of their industry or location.

Gartner Says Smartglasses Will Bring Innovation to Workplace Efficiency
Smartglasses are expected to have the most impact on heavy industry, such as manufacturing, and oil and gas, because the AR glasses enable on-the-job training of workers in how to fix equipment and perform manufacturing tasks. The impact is likely to be medium for mixed industries, such as retail, consumer packaged goods and healthcare, where the benefits may mostly be looking for information via a visual search.

Quote for the day:

"Peace is liberty in tranquility." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

November 05, 2013

12 Recent Technologies That Have Yet to Live Up to Their Hype
Indeed, all too often, today's "next big thing" is tomorrow's overhyped tech trend that never took off or lived up to its potential. So what recent technologies have (to date, at least) failed to live up to the hype surrounding their release? CIO.com asked dozens of IT professionals, marketing experts and business owners and managers to find out. Here are their top 12 nominees for the most overhyped technology of the last few years.

The Rise of Flash in the Datacenter
Hybrid combinations of flash drives and mechanical disks have become a viable option for organizations of all sizes. There are many ways IT can architect SSDs into the storage mix. Many are simply adding SSD drives to the PCIe slots in the servers, which also have hard disks (or configuring new server purchases with flash drives) or adding them as direct-attached storage (DAS). Companies managing storage networks are also increasingly adding flash to their storage arrays. In a growing number of shops where performance is critical, some are stepping up to pure flash-based SSD storage.

Is There An App For That? An Increasingly Mobile World Requires Expanding Skill Sets
The ability to keep in constant contact with both co-workers and friends, access data and information in a second, and respond to emails from our desk and our couch, alike. Now more than ever, as society continues the shift toward mobile technology, mobile app developers attempt to stay one step ahead of trends and introduce the newest and best software solutions to businesses and consumers.

Why Creativity Thrives In The Dark
Turns out you need not possess a Nobel Prize in Literature to appreciate the creative confines of a dark room. Psychologists Anna Steidel and Lioba Werth recently conducted a series of clever experiments designed to measure how creativity responded to various lighting schemes. In a paper published last month, Steidel and Werth reported some of the first evidence for what creative masters know by nature: when the lights switch off, something in the brain switches on.

Cybersecurity Is the Board's Business
Computer security is no longer a mere technical challenge; it is a strategic business issue. Protecting against cybercrime has become a critical responsibility of the board, alongside succession planning and setting strategic direction. There is a fiduciary duty to protect a company’s assets, particularly those that are digital, and regulators have made clear they expect corporations to address cybersecurity.

Avoiding cloud lock-in, self-service bloat and private cloud traps
Companies are building API-driven environments. So when they talk to their internal infrastructure, they are talking to it the same way they would any other environment and can use the same tools. This is very clever, because if they ever do need external capacity, they are ready for it. That desire for interoperability drives things like OpenStack. There is a huge concern about lock-in at this point. I won't name names, but having a bunch of VMs from one hypervisor vendor doesn't necessarily lock you in to that vendor, because you can still turn on VMs from another vendor.

BadBIOS: Malware whispers via mic & speakers to PCs disconnected from all networks?
As the “badBIOS” name implies, it’s a rootkit that burrows in to infect a system’s BIOS [Basic Input Output System]. Supposedly this nasty piece of malware is platform-independent -- capable of infecting Windows, Linux, OS X and Open BSD -- has self-healing capabilities, resists erasure, and uses ultrasonic high-frequency transmissions in order to talk to other infectedsystems that are completely disconnected from the Internet and all other networks — aka air gap systems.

20/20 vision of risk
Banks need a system that can use advanced methods to accurately detect risk while overcoming the challenges associated with poor data quality and ‘noise’ generated by existing control systems. A best-of-breed approach to improving risk management is a virtuous circle of data-driven detection and exploration, with a focus on enabling banks to ingest, calculate, explore and prioritize data in a timely manner.

InfoQ eMag: API Technologies
Web APIs are driving important new business and technology models. Download the API Technologies eMag where leading practitioners share their experience on making money from APIs and on API design best practices. InfoQ discover "cloud native" architectures that scale to meet global demand and get hands on building API's from contract to go-live. InfoQ look at connected devices, mashups and consider new standards for security in this free ebook.

Preparing for Recovery: Four Strategies for Disaster Proofing Data
More than ever, robust data protection is imperative to recovery in the event of data loss. In fact, failure to safeguard company data can result in business disruption, devastating losses, and in some cases, catastrophic consequences to the business. Numerous reports and studies show that businesses that go through critical data loss often never recover. Below are the four steps organizations should take to disaster proof their data.

Quote for the day:

"High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation." -- Charles Kettering

November 04, 2013

The Integration of Agile and the Project Management Office
It would be incorrect to claim that Agile is simply a looser, less disciplined way of running projects. In fact, on the program level, Agile teams are even more tightly controlled since the progress of one or more projects is monitored and actively communicated in real-time. Unlike the traditional approaches in which reporting is done on perhaps a monthly basis, Agile reporting is in fact continuous and runs in tandem with the six defined levels of Agile planning.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) : Part 1
SSAS uses both client and server components to provide OLAP and data mining functionality: The Server component is implemented as a Microsoft Windows service. SSAS supports multiple instances on the same computer, so each instance is implemented as a separate instance of a Windows service; Clients communicate with analysis services using XMLA (XML for Analysis), a SOAP-based protocol for issuing commands and receiving responses, exposed as a web service.

Microsoft and Apple unleash thermonuclear war on Google and Android
The lawsuit charges the companies with a number of patent infringements, the most damaging of which may be that Google infringes patents by matching search terms to relevant advertising on mobile devices. This could have a huge effect on Google because the company's game plan with Android relies on giving away the operating system in order to make money via advertising.

Top 5 tips for using IBM Security Access Manager and Federated Identity Manager
"In this article I thought I’d take the time to summarize five of the most useful and frequently used tools of my trade. These are often references to content or advice that I’ve prepared in the past, but specifically content that I am finding re-use for all the time. Hopefully these tools and ideas are useful to both experienced and novice users of our access management and federation products, and if nothing else this article can serve to remind you they exist, and help you find them again."

SaaS & Agile Development: Made for Each Other
SaaS and agile also work together to deliver software updates in a timely manner, a process called "continuous deployment." Agile development in the cloud was discussed this month at a user conference in San Jose, Calif., hosted by Electric Cloud, which offers an agile development platform that is itself cloud-delivered. In attendance were customers such as General Motors, Qualcomm, Cisco Systems, and General Electric, but also smaller, less household-name companies.

CMOs Must Expand Their Tech Skills in the Digital Marketing Era
The balance of power in the C-suite (at least as measured by dollars spent on IT) is shifting. Where once the CIO held most of the purchasing power and the decision-making capability to determine which technology investments would drive business forward, the CMO is poised to take a much more strategic role in a data-driven business climate.

Rock your data with SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) – POC Experiences
In this blog post we will have a more detailed look on the POC experiences I made with PDW v2 and also with PDW v1. Since these POCs are under NDA I’m not allowed to tell anything about my customer or the customer background. I will purely focus on the results, which are impressive enough ... We used a SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse with 8 compute nodes. The ETL Server had 24 Cores, 96 GB of RAM and was connected to the PDW via Infiniband and Ethernet.

9 reasons why your security leader needs a hug
Security is difficult, and security people are unique. They have a different way of looking at things. We try to get away from ‘techno garble,’ which isn’t important to the business. The business needs it in black and white, no theoretical things. ... At the end of the day many of the reasons why working in security is so challenging are also why it’s so rewarding and why the community is so close. There is no expectation that any battle will ever be done. There will always be a thin line that must be held between us and them.

A Cautionary Tale of Data Governance
The financial cost was huge; all of the products had to be scrapped (their contents could not be repackaged without quality concerns), but it didn’t stop there. Advertising slots booked across print, television, radio and online media were cancelled, but refunds were few and far between. Retail customers were even less forgiving; failing to meet agreed trade promotion commitments resulted in extensive commercial penalties.

The Role of Gamification in the Contact Center and Back Office
Gamification is quickly becoming recognized as a strategic means to impact contact center and back office performance. While it may seem quite simple, it is, in fact, a practice that requires a significant amount of planning, so having a strategy is critical. Another important element is technology; real-time guidance and 360-degree customer views enable a wide variety of gamification scenarios. Finally, it's critical to gain employee buy-in and socialize your gamification plan internally to ensure success.

Quote for the day:

"High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation." -- Charles Kettering

November 03, 2013

IBM Social Business Bets on Key Application and Technologies
IBM joins up the two sides of the equation – a smarter workforce and superior customer experiences – with its platform for social business. Companies can access it through the IBM SmartCloud, a private cloud, on-premises or using a hybrid model. IBM sees SmartCloud for social business as a way to connect business users more efficiently and effectively.

HP sues seven optical drive makers over price-fixing
In a statement to Computerworld about the move, HP said it takes "price-fixing very seriously and intends to pursue its rights aggressively in this and in other price-fixing litigation." None of the companies named in the lawsuit responded to requests for comment. The lawsuit claims the conspiracy to drive up prices took place from at least Jan. 1, 2004 through Jan. 1, 2010, when "almost all forms of home entertainment and data storage were on optical discs."

Enterprise Architecture Standards
Standards can be a powerful tool to get to grips with certain aspects of our work. However, managing a standards base appears to be tricky: we see many initiatives fail, despite the best intensions of all involved. In this short recording we will discuss the necessity of standards as well as standards management, and present a simple framework for documenting and governing standards in practice. This framework was co-developed and road-tested with various customers over the last 8 years

Failure Happens. Four Rules for Doing it Well
Failure is a fact of start-up life. And sometimes, sadly, it’s the entire company that fails. As much as we don’t like to think about failure, it’s important to prepare yourself mentally for the prospect that your turn in the dunk tank may be right around the corner.Here are four crucial rules to keep in mind:

Understanding Which Investments Should Go To The Cloud
The truth is, most companies significantly underestimate the scope of change required to establish cloud services until it’s too late. In the traditional model, companies buy technology from a vendor as a capital investment, and continue to invest in maintaining and servicing it over time. With the cloud being a service, however, the financial model should be treated more like a utility, requiring the reallocation of budget from capital expenses into operating expenses.

CERN: A Case Study in "Big Science" Data Management
In light of these two factors, CERN has been proactive about preserving data for future re-use, even as it remains plagued by non-standardized, ad-hoc formats, and highly complex data models. CERN was a co-founding organization in the Alliance for Permanent Access, a European data preservation working group. Internal efforts are underway as well, although these have not yet been implemented completely.

The Art of Project Management: The Siege of Portfolio Management
But project selection is only a first step. Portfolio management is more than decision-making levers and it’s more than a portfolio management tool. To create a robust portfolio management framework, process is required and governance must be established (which includes a staged approval). With this three-part equation (levers+process+governance) an organization will be able to realize the value of portfolio management.

Big Data needs Data Science but Data Science doesn’t need Big Data
What really matters in data science is the team effort and your role as a liaison. Your company has large amounts of data and you want to make sure your queries are correct. Whatever tool you use, make sure you have your data cleansed. You want to know that it’s normalized and indexed so that things run smoother. You want to be able to give insight, which requires knowledge of your audience.

Risks and Strategies: Managing Enterprise File Data Securely
Every enterprise has secret, compliance-related, or otherwise confidential data contained in the data center. The management and control of these files especially in a distributed and mobile world is fraught with hidden dangers and risks. Encryption alone cannot solve all of these problems. So join Chris Winter and fellow data center professionals for this insightful discussion on the issues involved, and discover the preventative actions and technologies needed to manage your enterprise file data securely.

Predictive Analytics 101
Predictive models typically analyze current and historical data on individuals to produce easily understood metrics such as scores. These scores rank-order individuals by likely future performance, e.g., their likelihood of making credit payments on time, or of responding to a particular offer for services. Predictive models can also detect the likelihood of a transaction being fraudulent (Risk Detection). Predictive models are frequently operationalized in mission-critical transactional systems and drive decisions and actions in near real time. A number of analytic methodologies underlie solutions in this area

Quote for the day:

"I will listen to anyone's convictions, but please keep your doubts to yourself." -- Goethe

November 02, 2013

A Different Methodology for Big Data
MVI basically considers the minimum hurdle that validates a new approach to problem solving by delivering insight that hasn’t been possible before. MVI works by taking a flexible and agile-based approach to validating a methodology for solving problems that provides an “aha” moment of insight. The insight has to be intuitively valuable for MVI to work, so it helps organize a focus on real problems to be solved.

Computer-Controlled Anesthesia Could Be Safer for Patients
Brown’s group has been studying the anesthetized brain both to further scientific understanding of consciousness and to make anesthesia safer and more effective (see “The Mystery Behind Anesthesia”). The pattern of brain activity that doctors monitor to control sedation is well defined and can be recognized by a computer, says Brown.

Start your journey to cloud, take a 360 degree view (part 3)
One of the key elements enterprises should setup is an appropriate governance ensuring business and IT get aligned on what services are required and how those are delivered. And I use the term here in its widest sense. All parties need to be aligned. Now, there are two aspects of governance to be addressed. The first one is related to the journey to cloud itself. The objective is to ensure decisions taken in one of the four areas are properly taken into account in the others.

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

FAA allows passengers to keep electronic devices turned on
There is one big exception to this, however. Passengers still cannot use their cell phones to make voice calls during the flight, based on Federal Communications Commission rules prohibiting their use. The FAA is asking the FCC to reconsider those rules. The concern is that long-range cellular communication could interfere with the airplanes avionics, so no mobile devices can use cellular communications during flight, the FAA explained.

Cisco Making A Business Out of the Internet of Things
When networking giant Cisco looks at the Internet of Things, what it sees is an opportunity. This week, Cisco officially launched its Internet of Things business unit in a bid to consolidate its efforts and fully capitalize on the opportunity. Guido Jouret, general manager of the Internet of Things Group at Cisco, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that new network connections are a good thing for Cisco. He noted that 25 years ago, most connectivity was very heterogeneous, but that that evolved as IP became dominant in the enterprise and for the Internet.

Herding Clouds: IT Faces Its Hybrid Future
Integrating cloud services isn't an easy task, which explains why one-third of respondents to our Cloud Computing Survey don't even try. Another 41% take the laborious, costly and error-prone path of custom-coding scripts or application stubs around each vendor's API to bridge internal and external systems. Manual coding is an obvious nightmare for application developers, but don't underestimate the challenge it creates for IT operations teams trying to manage a hybrid infrastructure and deploy applications across multiple clouds while guaranteeing service levels.

Is Thought Leadership the Same as Change Leadership?
We all toss our opinions on the table, but the thought leader does more than that. Thought leaders put ideas and opinions out that have underlying rationales capable of being tested, adapted and evolved. More importantly, the thought leader “leads” by doing the thinking that others won’t, don’t or can’t. Thought leaders stand by their ideas and in doing so, reframe and shift discussions in the direction that allows the solution to present itself. Thought leaders don’t take the debate on their ideas personally; they accept “wins” and “defeats” gracefully

Master Data Services (MDS) Operations Guide
SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) provides a central data hub that ensures the integrity of information and consistency of data is constant across different applications. With MDS, you can implement a master data management (MDM) hub to manage the master data that is stored in an enterprise database. This article provides guidance about how to install, configure and manage SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services. You also learn how to deploy a Master Data Services model and create a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) solution to monitor MDS.

Brazil to insist on local Internet data storage after U.S. spying
If passed, the new law could impact the way Google, Facebook, Twitter and other Internet giants operate in Latin America's biggest country and one of the largest telecommunications markets in the world. A draft of the law says "the government can oblige Internet service companies ... to install and use centers for the storage, management and dissemination of data within the national territory." The government would evaluate the requirement for each company, the draft says, "taking into consideration their size, their revenues in Brazil and the breadth of services they offer the Brazilian public."

Quote for the day:

"I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished without taking any chances at all." -- Charles Lindbergh

November 01, 2013

With big data, the DNC turns politics into political science
To learn more about how the DNC pulled vast amounts of data together to predict and understand voter preferences and positions on the issues, join Chris Wegrzyn, Director of Data Architecture at the DNC, based in Washington, DC. The discussion, which took place at the recent HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston, is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

The workplace holy grail: Successful collaboration
Collaboration at its core is harnessing the differences that each person brings and leveraging the contributions of individuals to create a greater sum. This is the fastest, most efficient way for organizations to accelerate growth. The greater sum is an exponential factor that moves companies forward at a rate that can never be achieved by singular individuals.

6 dirty secrets of the IT industry
"There are no secrets for IT," says Pierluigi Stella, CTO for managed security service provider Network Box USA. "I can run a sniffer on my firewall and see every single packet that comes in and out of a specific computer. I can see what people write in their messages, where they go to on the Internet, what they post on Facebook. In fact, only ethics keep IT people from misusing and abusing this power. Think of it as having a mini-NSA in your office."

Challenges facing the CIO in 2014
With factors like the cloud, BYOD, and big data making waves in a big way, the CIO needs to start reevaluating his or her role. What can you do to make yourself valuable in this changing environment? Here are some considerations to keep in mind as you step into 2014 and encounter some big changes.

Gartner: Cloud-based security as a service set to take off
According to its “Market Trends: Cloud-based Security Services Market, Worldwide, 2014,” Gartner is predicting growth is likely to come because of the adoption of these cloud-based security services by small- to-mid-sized business (SMB) in particular. Certain market segments mentioned in the report will see higher overall sales and year-over-year growth.

To Build a Great UI, Test the Experience, Not the Code
Because usability testing involves end users, it can be confused with "end-user testing." You should use end-user testing to test your code because users are cheap and available, and because users have some understanding of the business, so they're easier to train to do the tests (and their feedback makes more sense than what you'd get from strangers off the street).

Red Hat Targets OpenShift PaaS Tools for Enterprise App Development
The tooling is aimed at helping JBoss developers build apps for PaaS clouds without having to learn new development techniques, Cormier said, describing xPaaS as "a developer interface to the operating system of the cloud." He added, "There is a real, real gap between low-level services provided by existing PaaSes and what is needed for composite enterprise apps of today."

The CIO as technologist, strategist, business executive — and diplomat
When CIOs approach challenges, a practical approach is advisable, he adds: "It starts with some humility, some under-promising and over-delivery. It starts with some consistency in that regard. It also starts with developing a vision, strategy and roadmap that you follow and execute over a period of time." Strategy counts for a lot, says Carter, and not only in IT but in the business you serve.

Game over: Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks
That Computerworld article mirrors what analyst research is finding: Office dominates, especially in the enterprise. A recent Forrester Research study found that Microsoft Office 2010 is used in 85% of companies surveyed, Office 2007 by 51%, and Office 2003 by 28%. (Many companies use multiple versions of Office.) The survey found that Google Docs is used by only 13% of companies.

Applying the scientific method to software testing
The scientific method is based on observation and experimentation. Testing is the same thing. We set up tests that are very much like experiments, and then we run them and observe what happens. That's the same way scientists test their hypotheses. We run experiments, measure the results and analyze the data to figure out what's really happening.

Quote for the day:

"Developing a passion for learning something new every day expands your capacity to become exceptional at everything you do" -- A. Bellemare

October 31, 2013

Silent Circle, Lavabit unite for 'Dark Mail' encrypted email project
"The issue we are trying to deal with is that email was created 40 years ago," Jon Callas, CTO and founder of Silent Circle, in a phone interview. "It wasn't created to handle any of the security problems we have today." Silent Circle, Lavabit and at least one VPN provider, CryptoSeal, shut down their services fearing a court order forcing the turnover of a private SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) key, which could be used to decrypt communications.

Massachusetts grills Deloitte over large IT failures
It is striking to note that most personnel testifying were not present when the projects were begun, due to the long time frames. Therefore, the business case and underlying rationale were handed down, almost like folklore, from one administrator to the next, and metrics were ill-defined or non-existent. The lack of clear metrics governing expected outcomes helped Deloitte argue that these projects were a success.

Availability Group Listeners, Client Connectivity, and Application Failover (SQL Server)
If read-only routing is configured for one or more readable secondary replicas, read-intent client connections to the primary replica are redirected to a readable secondary replica. Also, if the primary replica goes offline on one instance of SQL Server, and a new primary replica comes online on another instance of SQL Server, the availability group listener enables clients to connect to the new primary replica.

Rise in Data Breaches Drives Interest in Cyber Insurance
"With no standard set of actuarial tables, insurance carriers are often left to their own underwriting standards and creativity when offering cyber insurance policies," they wrote. "A lack of actuarial data also makes cyber insurance less desirable to companies, while increasing the price." Insurers, though, have gotten better at quantifying certain kinds of cyber risks. "Where cyber insurance has gained some traction is in an area that's more quantifiable -- the data breach area," Andrew Braunberg said in an interview.

Talk networking strategy over technology
"Each of us carries two, three, or even four Wi-Fi-enabled devices. The heavy load of BYOD [bring your own device] and application volume is crushing conventional wireless networks, which is why we developed an architecture to deliver wired-like performance over Wi-Fi. Resellers must understand that application and device adoption is changing the rationale and choices IT managers make in implementing wireless,” Armstrong says.

Improve security through shared intelligence
While the value of sharing may be straightforward, security data itself is complex. Once an organization has made a strategic decision to join forces with other good guys, the difficulty lies in knowing what data to share and how to share it without introducing risk. ... Maximizing the benefits of shared intelligence requires more than simply feeding data into a system. Back-end analytics can help find needles in the haystack, and participants can collaborate when they spot anomalous activity.

10 hard-earned lessons from a lifetime in IT
Much of today's talk is about youth ruling development and IT. Sure, there are a lot of eager, bright young people in tech, and most of them like to think that they "rule," but the truth is we oldsters still run the show. Why? Because hard-earned lessons provide the wisdom to distinguish fantasy from reality, and the determination to do what's necessary, not just what's fun or cool. As a green programmer, I thought that coding was everything, that people were annoying and clueless, and that all my bosses had my back and would take care of me so I could just focus on the bits and be happy.

Juniper Launches MetaFabric Network Architecture, Switches
The capabilities found in the new MetaFabric offering are increasingly important to cloud providers and other companies that run multiple data centers in disparate locations and want to move their applications and network resources between them, according to Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager of Juniper's Data Center Business Unit. "Businesses have the need to move to an on-demand architecture," Davidson told eWEEK

New Algorithms May Give Keys to Predicting the Future
“The key insight,” explained Dr. Lionel Barnett in a statement, “is that the dynamics of complex systems – like the brain and the economy – depend on how their elements causally influence each other; in other words, how information flows between them. And that this information flow needs to be measured for the system as a whole, and not just locally between its various parts.”

How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability
As business demands for availability are increasing, so too are the risks. Every week there is news of another organization experiencing a major disruption. A company’s eCommerce website may be down for a few hours because of human error or a botched upgrade, or extreme weather like hurricane Sandy or even a severe winter storm can throw an organization into chaos. Why are there so many frequent disruptions and outages?

Quote for the day:

"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism." -- Norman Peale

October 30, 2013

Why is Twitter spending so much on R&D?
There is no sign that Twitter is working on anything that cool. Twitter actually gives very little detail about what it spends its R&D budget on in the offering documents for its IPO. It says that R&D expenses are to "improve our products and services." And it doesn't appear that Twitter is building some kind of high-tech lab or supercomputer. In fact, the bulk of Twitter's R&D expenses go toward personnel-related expenses.

Three strategies to align organizational compliance and security goals
Compliance teams sometimes feel that their concerns go unheeded, for example, when a requirement remains unaddressed despite investment in other areas. By contrast, technical or security personnel may look at compliance activities as siphoning budget from investments that reduce technical risk. This can be a challenging situation, but there are strategies to help overcome these hurdles or even ensure that they don't arise in the first place.

A Hybrid Cloud May Be the Answer for Midsize Businesses
The hybrid cloud is essentially a mixture of two cloud computing solutions, most often one contained within the data center and one hosted through a public cloud provider. The mixture of these two types of solutions can vary, but it is most powerful when the private cloud is used for types of data that simply cannot be stored or processed through a third party. The public cloud is used for noncritical data storage and cloudbursting, in which the public solution is tapped if internal resources become stressed due to a spike in demand.

Do software engineers need adult day care?
So if work perks aren’t necessary why do so many companies insist on providing them? Surely, that’s a distraction from their business? And it’s not good for the surrounding community because they are competing with local small businesses trying to make a living providing basic services such as dry cleaning, etc. This is especially worrisome when a large company such as Google continues to expand its footprint in the middle of Silicon Valley, and its free food and services are pushing local business into bankruptcy.

Dell to show its first 64-bit ARM server this week
"This is a key milestone for customers seeking to run real-world workloads on 64-bit ARM technology," Dell executive Robert Hormuth will announce in a blog post this week, according to a copy of the post sent to the IDG News Service. Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, is moving forward with its own low-power server plans.

The art of strategy
Good strategy isn’t easy. Yet we know vastly more today than we did even a year ago about how corporate strategies should be crafted and implemented. In this video, McKinsey principal Chris Bradley and director Angus Dawson trace the evolution of strategic thinking in recent years; outline a thorough, action-oriented approach executives can adopt; and discuss strategy’s next frontiers.

IT Spending to Grow More in Digitalisation
“What many traditional IT vendors sold you in the past is often not what you need for the digital future. Their channel strategy, sales force, partner ecosystem is challenged by different competitors, new buying centers, and changed customer business model,” Sondergaard said. “Digitalization creates an accelerated technology-driven start up environment across the globe. Many of the vendors who are on top today, such as Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft, may not be leaders in the Digital Industrial Economy.”

Java under attack — the evolution of exploits in 2012-2013
Exploits still pose a threat even when the user knows they exist, is well versed in IT security and keeps track of software updates. That’s because when a vulnerability is detected it can take weeks until a patch is released to fix it. During that time exploits are able to function freely and threaten the security of Internet users. That risk can be reduced significantly if users have high-quality security solutions installed on their computers, including technology capable of blocking attacks initiated by exploits.

CIO vs CDO: There can be only one
"In government, as well as other industries, roles like chief data officer or chief digital officer are emerging in response to the increasing importance of enterprise digital assets," Gartner managing vice president Andrea Di Maio said. The chief data officer role is focused on ensuring that heavily-regulated industries handle data in a way that complies with the rules. Before these CDO and CIO roles swallow each other, existing CIOs and CTOs should form a close working relationship with both flavours of CDO, Gartner said, particularly if they don't want their roles to collide in the near future.

Bigger Data? Or Better Models? Or…..
If you work in the analytics world, you’ve probably either read or at least heard of the seminal book "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think," published earlier this year. Authors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier’s provocative point of departure is that the new data norm of N=all and a tolerance for simple correlation over causation is changing the analytics landscape, obviating the need for much of traditional statistical analyses.

Quote for the day:

"I think any man would be nervous if his liberty is at stake." -- Wesley Snipes

October 29, 2013

Stop chasing the rats, and protect the cheese
From our perspective we've seen many different threats to data, many different factors to it. I think the one that is being skipped over and over again is the insider, because it usually comes down to a question of trust. But it's not so much trust of the individual, but trust of the architecture that you have built. Do you trust how your users interact with your data, how they manage the data, and can those become compromised and used against you?

Taming Unrestrained Data Growth in the Big Data Era
Many organizations today are fully aware going in that the volume, variety, and velocity of data continue to grow at a nearly unprecedented rate. And yet they often attempt to handle this rising tide of data without a plan. Moreover, legacy, manual methods of discovering, governing, and correcting data are no longer practical for this tremendous growth of big data.

You Can’t Be a Wimp—Make the Tough Calls
Good executives don’t let concerns about the consequences make them indecisive, however. One midwestern CEO was outperforming by a mile in the late 1990s, when the top brass at Home Depot said they wanted his company to supply theirs. Volume would obviously go up, but selling to the retail powerhouse would have several negative consequences for the brand in the long run. The CEO didn’t think it was the right thing for his company and said so.

How to more easily upgrade your network to 40/100G Ethernet
“You see a lot more in-rack virtual switching, VM-based switching that is very application specific,” Walsh says. “New line cards in new backplane architectures mean different levels of oversubscription. There’ll be generational tweaks, configuration ‘worrying’ that has to occur. The biggest thing (testers) are running into is making sure you get the 40G you are paying for (with regard to) latency issues, hops, and congestion visibility.”

Enterprises Encourage Open Source Culture
Open source culture is ultimately collaborative, and expertise-driven. Developing a successful open source culture inside an organisation also means developing the skills and abilities of technical employees, so that they can produce high-value, reusable work, rather than be constrained to simple operational tasks. Ideally, organisations want IT administrators to automate tasks and control them via policy, rather than requiring manual intervention for every activity.

Smartphones: Business Risk or Opportunity?
Smartphones and tablets are the most popular and pervasive devices used by business professionals today. Their simplicity, flexibility and convenience make them as compelling for executives working on the road as they are for consumers playing and socializing at home. But now that the smartphone genie is out of the bottle, business owners, CIOs and IT leaders must work together to harness the efficiencies these powerful tools afford, while defusing the security threats they pose.

JSIL: Challenges Met Compiling CIL into JavaScript
One of the major challenges involved is actually somewhat counter-intuitive - generating good JavaScript from IL not only requires decompiling the IL, but reversing some optimizations performed by the compiler and then applying new optimizations of my own. Doing this correctly without manual guidance from a developer requires a very, very robust knowledge of static analysis and other related topics, as without that you cannot implement optimizations without introducing significant bugs into user code.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Fuzzy Cloud Demarcation
Public, private, or community attributes specify how widely the cloud service is shared; a sharing dimension. Internal or external denote the consumer’s view of the Cloud’s service interface. The view is associated with a consumer’s responsibility for service development, operations, and management; a responsibility dimension. A third dimension, on-premise or outsourced, describes where the service assets are located; a location dimension. Many architects conflate the three dimensions.

Promote Your HR Leader, Reap Profits?
“We think what that says, based on this analysis and some other studies we’ve done, is that a chief human resources officer can drive an agenda within the executive board about aligning people to goals, and they can insure that performance appraisals are done,” says Karie Willyerd, vice president of learning and social adoption for SuccessFactors.

Exclusive Documents: State Department Lacks Basic Cybersecurity
These newly obtained documents add to the picture, revealing that the department lacks even a basic monitoring system to determine unauthorized access or modification of files. Security on the unclassified systems appears problematic, as there is potential access to classified information, even inadvertently, and back-door access to servers.

Quote for the day:

"All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary." -- Sally Ride

October 28, 2013

The three waves of disruptive trends
... there’s three waves you can catch around the same trend: the emerging wave, the differentiating wave, and the business value wave as shown below. That is, not only riding the wave around each disruptive trend, but riding the same wave of a particular trend multiple times during its journey to the shoreline. These three waves follow the adoption of the technology as it progresses from pioneers to mainstream adoption.

Broad Data - How to Use it and Where to Find it
Logically, we should expect competition to drive more adoption of broad data, barring regulatory or cultural barriers. A good case in point is in motor insurance, where insurance companies will try to gather more and more data about drivers, to help them form a more accurate view of the risk, and hence a more accurate premium. Where that accurate premium is lower than competitors’ premiums it will gain profitable business. Where it is higher than competitors’ it will lose unprofitable business.

Is Your DNS Server A Weapon?
DNS requests are an ideal mechanism by which attackers can increase the amount of traffic thrown at their victims, while hiding the origin of the attack. Many DNS servers on the Internet are configured as "open resolvers" that accept and respond to DNS queries from anywhere on the Internet. Sending very small requests to these servers can result in large replies that can be directed toward a victim's systems

ERP Comes to the Cloud and (Finally) Smaller Businesses
"In the midmarket, one of the big hurdles to greater ERP adoption has been the infrastructure. These businesses don't always have the funds or the technical ability to build their own data center, to have the infrastructure that can support a full-scale ERP solution," Stangeland says. But that requirement's going to evaporate with the cloud, he says. In addition, a per-user, per-transaction pricing model makes ERP affordable for any sized business, and those cost savings can be reinvested in the business to spur growth, Stangeland says.

Lean Enterprise Anti-Pattern: The Lean Waterfall
More and more enterprise scale companies are drinking the lean Kool Aid and starting to implement Lean Startup methodology. In doing so, they are failing at the most basic level. Lean methodology is not lean startup. An MVP is not learning. A Business Model Canvas is not business model innovation. These things are just artifacts. They are workarounds. These workarounds, applied poorly and/or inappropriately, can result in some wonderful anti-patterns.

Seagate announces Ethernet-enabled storage platform
Using a series of open application programming interfaces (APIs,) developers gain the ability to share data between drives, direct drive-to-drive transit of data without the need for an intermediate controller system, and built-in data integrity checks which the company claims will do away with silent data corruption once and for all. To the operating system, it's all transparent: applications make direct key-based requests to the storage platform, bypassing file system drivers and other overheads.

Cisco Dives Into Data Virtualization
We never thought of Cisco as having a focus on data, even though, if you think about it, most of what its technology does is transport data from device to device. However, there is a beguiling rationale for what Cisco may be planning in combining data virtualization with network virtualization. When you consider it, you quickly realize that a good deal of what happens in BI applications involves moving data around a network, from a database to the BI applications.

What is protocol spoofing as it relates to WAN optimization?
"Protocol spoofing" is actually a homonym, expert Ed Tittel explains: In the information security world, protocol spoofing masks a TCP packet to look like something legitimate. In the world of application delivery optimization, it is not malicious -- but rather helpful in optimizing traffic across a wide area network. Protocol spoofing is a WAN optimization technique that is synonymous with the term "protocol substitution."

Tearing down IT silos
Today’s IT infrastructures are more complex and interdependent than ever before. Hiccups in the infrastructure inevitably put business operations at risk. We’ve all seen the headlines of IT related outages that have real business consequences such as lost revenue and damage to a company’s reputation. These factors are driving IT organizations to rethink how they work.

Supercomputers Invade Corporate Datacenters
Other than the rapid spread of supercomputer architecture built on ranks of processors paired with GPUs that act as accelerators, the biggest surprise in the 2013 study was “the large proportion of sites that are applying big data technologies and methods to their problems and the steady growth in cloud computing for HPC,” according to Earl Joseph, IDC technical computing analyst, in a statement announcing the study.

Quote for the day:

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." -- John Powell