December 15, 2013

Exploring the Influence of Finjan's Proactive Content Security
"We realized there had to be a better solution for anti-virus software," said Phil Hartstein, president of Finjan. "The notion at the time was to spend so much time on matching signatures." Aside from the fact that the signature-based approach only defends from what is already known, Hartstein also pointed out how expensive and resource-consuming the process was. "So we thought, 'Maybe there's a better way,'" he said. "Instead of matching signatures, let's identify the behavior."


Will Advanced AI Be Our Final Invention?
Technological innovation always runs far ahead of stewardship. Look at nuclear fission. Splitting the atom started out as a way to get free energy, so why did the world first learn about fission at Hiroshima? Similarly, Barrat argues, advanced AI is already being weaponized, and it is AI data mining tools that have given the NSA such awesome powers of surveillance and creepiness. In the next decades, when cognitive architectures far more advanced than IBM’s Watson achieve human level intelligence, watch out —“Skynet!” No, seriously.


5 Signs You Have High Emotional Intelligence
Thankfully, it appears that it is. "Whereas IQ is very hard to change, EQ can increase with deliberate practice and training," Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of Business Psychology at University College London explained earlier this year on the HBR Blogs. "The most important aspect of effective EQ-coaching is giving people accurate feedback. Most of us are generally unaware of how others see us," he added.


Demystifying 4 myths around PaaS
The last year has been a whirlwind in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space. Traditional middleware vendors finally released long-awaited offerings. Some early PaaS players, like Google and Microsoft, have since exposed Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings directly. And traditional hosting providers like CenturyLink (s ctl), have realized that PaaS helps them connect with developers. There is clearly still a lot of PaaS learning going on, and it’s very difficult for those not embedded in all-things-cloud to figure it all out. With that in mind, here are some major myths we’ve encountered in the PaaS market.


Automation – Orchestrator Back to Basics – Use Cases Spotlight (1 of 5)
Who knows, your CIO might be asking you what the fuss is all about and what the benefits would be. So, in general, automation achieves the following: Integrate silo’ed environments and processes together, leading to more agility, service delivery performance and reliability; Automate recurring manual tasks : This helps minimize costs, lets operations teams focus on more valuable and sometimes more interesting tasks; and Standardize and document processes : The combination of technology integration and manual tasks reduction helps standardize processes


Enterprise Architecture as Story
Your stakeholders need change, but they may not want it. In some cases, they want the change, but their peers are not asking for change. Either way, getting change to happen in an organization requires a touchstone – some common belief or idea that everyone can relate to. It has to be more than a fact, and more emotive than a strategy. It has to be compelling, interesting, surprising, and easy to remember. In the words of Chip and Dan Heath, this central idea has to be “made to stick.”


SOA Governance Through Enterprise Architecture
In a typical SOA governance approach, a SOA Center of Excellence features stakeholders from different backgrounds and with different competencies: SOA governance specialists; SOA architects; enterprise architects, operations, security, quality assurance specialists, business analysts, etc. Every role has different objectives and needs regarding SOA, and its significance varies from one to another.


On layers in enterprise-architecture
Within any architecture – ‘enterprise’ or otherwise – every entity can be viewed in multiple ways, and often must be viewed in multiple ways if we’re to make sense of where that entity might best fit in the overall scheme. Any supposed ‘layering’ is therefore an arbitrarily-chosen overlay or filter on the overall view. The layers are an artificial abstraction based on a set of assumptions about ‘how the world works’, that exists for practical convenience only, and for a specific type of purpose only – never more than that.


Modernizing the IT governance framework for fun and profit
The IT culture has an image as the "No" team: "No, you can't use that device"; "No, you can't access that website"; "No, you can't implement that Software as a Service tool that works 10 times better than the crap we built for you six years ago and have failed to maintain"; "No, you can't use the cloud because it's not secure or can't be managed the same way we manage everything else." All of these "No you can't" decisions are well-intentioned -- or at least aren't meant to be capricious -- but the perspective is wrong.


A Persona- Driven Approach to Exploring Architecturally Significant Requirements
More often than not, requirements elicited from stakeholders describe a system’s intended functionality but fail to address qualities such as performance, reliability, portability, and availability. Documenting these requirements is often overlooked because there are implicit assumptions that the system will perform to expected levels. Unfortunately, stakeholders and developers might think they are in agreement, when in reality they have very different expectations.



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

December 14, 2013

The IT Department Is Dead. Long Live the IT Department
Instead of focusing on cutting costs and keeping their servers and networks secure, they argue, IT departments will act more as curators, providing tools that will make their workers happier, which translates to more productivity. For companies like his, Preston-Werner says, that means thinking about what they do in a way that doesn’t distinguish between personal and professional. That means that people can use their personal apps at work, and it means that their work software has to be just as compelling as the stuff they use for fun.


FIO Releases Insurance Modernization Report
In the report, the FIO calls for a “hybrid approach to insurance regulation that provides a practical, fact-based roadmap to modernize and improve the U.S. system of insurance regulation,” said Michael McRaith, Director of the Federal Insurance Office. “Importantly, this report reflects the dynamic nature of the regulatory system for insurers and provides an explicit path for state and federal regulatory entities to calibrate involvement going forward.”


Marissa Mayer 'very Sorry' for Yahoo Mail Outage
"Unfortunately, the outage was much more complex than it seemed at first, which is why its taking us several days to resolve the compounding issues," she wrote. Yahoo's Mail engineering team was alerted Monday night to a hardware outage in one of the company's storage systems serving 1 percent of Yahoo's users, she said. With around 100 million daily users, that implies about a million users may have been affected at the start of the week.


Yogaglo Patent Issued: What’s Happening, and What it Means for You
“We quickly realized the implications of this patent,” says Yoga International Executive Director Todd Wolfenberg. “It is a landmark issue that impacts the future of how yoga is delivered, which increasingly includes online and video study. And if YogaGlo can patent one way of filming a class, pretty soon all possible angles could become patented. So this this isn’t just about us, it’s really about the entire community and the future direction of yoga.”


The Future Of Customer Experience: Culture, Data, And Technology
They need to be able to harness the insights of disruptive technologies of our day, technologies like social, business networks, mobility, and cloud to become this predictive business. The predictive business is not going to be an option going forward. It will be what’s required not only to win, but eventually to survive. Customers are demanding it and companies’ livelihoods are going to depend on it.


How To Create A Moore's Law For Data
To make a Moore’s Law for data, we also need two layers, a data stack and a data economy layer. If both of these layers were as mature as the hardware and software industries, more data would mean more value. But these layers are just getting off the ground. I suspect most people looking to take advantage of the glut of data will benefit from thinking about how to create their own data stack and how to put it to work in the context of a data economy.


2014 IT Security Predictions: Cloud Privacy and New Malware Targets To Dominate the Year
"We predict that CSPs will begin deploying technologies like encryption, administrative access controls, and other monitoring tools, and market these more aggressively to their customers," says Michele Borovac, chief marketing officer with HighCloud Security Inc. -- a firm specializing in cloud encryption and security. "Overall, I think this will improve data security for the entire industry, which is a good thing."


SaaS Lifecycle Management (Part 2): Approach
SaaS implementations enable IT to become both a broker of internal and external services, as well as a strategic driver for growth and change. This change in purpose and function requires a different approach, one that is more creative and forward-thinking. Business and IT management must understand this fundamental shift to ensure that the IT organization has the right skills to support business growth and innovation functions.


Recommender systems, Part 1: Introduction to approaches and algorithms
Recommendation systems changed the way inanimate websites communicate with their users. Rather than providing a static experience in which users search for and potentially buy products, recommender systems increase interaction to provide a richer experience. Recommender systems identify recommendations autonomously for individual users based on past purchases and searches, and on other users' behavior. This article introduces you to recommender systems and the algorithms that they implement.


Agile Walls
BVCs are Big Visible Charts, TOWs are Things on Walls and POWs are Plain Old Whiteboards – information radiators all. Why are they valuable tools? Because everyone can see them, study them and ideally understand them. By making things Big and Visible we make them available to the entire team, not just select individuals. On the walls means that we publish them in public where we can get full cross team feedback.



Quote for the day:

"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible" -- Vince Lombardi

December 13, 2013

Return on security investment: The risky business of probability
One challenge with probability estimates is how to determine what the population should be (that's the denominator). This can be as simple as the organization overall -- three out of every 10 companies in the population. But more likely, the probability is based on percent of assets -- users, systems, applications -- expected to be compromised over a defined period of time. Completely crazy people (like me) may want to select a population of event actions.


Internet of things devices will dwarf number of PCs, tablets and smartphones
“By 2020, the number of smartphones, tablets and PCs in use will reach about 7.3 billion units," said Peter Middleton, research director at Gartner. "In contrast, the IoT will have expanded at a much faster rate, resulting in a population of about 26 billion units at that time." Part of this will be because of the low cost of adding IoT capability to consumer products, Gartner said, and it expects that "ghost" devices with unused connectivity will be common.


K-Means Data Clustering Using C#
There are many different clustering algorithms. The k-means algorithm is applicable only for purely numeric data. Data clustering is used as part of several machine-learning algorithms, and data clustering can also be used to perform ad hoc data analysis. I consider the k-means algorithm to be one of three "Hello Worlds" of machine learning (along with logistic regression and naive Bayes classification).


Hamish Taylor on innovation: think outside your industry
“We need to change the way we understand customers,” Taylor said. “We’ve got to get better generally at soft insights, not data.” Insightful customer understanding, he explained, comes from understanding the customer’s world, and to illustrate this he gave an example from his time at the helm of Sainsbury’s Bank.  The project was to set up the bank in the supermarket. The traditional approach suggested a bank information point, with leaflets and a desk staffed by people in uniform. In short, a traditional bank, but just situated in the supermarket.


Beyond Mobile Gestures
These gestures are becoming one of the main reasons while customers choosing their new smart phone such as battery consumption, screen size, weight or processor. The mobile phone companies are investing much on the features to be selected by customers. Especially the phone companies who offer their customer same Operating System (Android) are in the competition.


Michael Skok on Bring Your Own Cloud
The relentless consumerization of IT has moved from BYOD to Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). An example of this is how people are taking cloud services like LinkedIn from home to work and expecting those services to work seamlessly with technologies like their office CRM systems. As a result, LinkedIn has built a service for Salesforce.com, integrating its contact networks and social network with that CRM platform. ... BYOC is here to stay and will be a very significant force in the enterprise to drive business and on the IT side spurring adaptation to allow employees to freely consume these cloud services.


ITU standardizes 1Gbps over copper, but services won't come until 2015
The technology increases the bandwidth by using more spectrum, which could be compared to adding more lanes to a road. G.fast will use the 106MHz of spectrum, which compares to the 17MHz or 30MHz used by VDSL2 and the 40MHz used by the fastest LTE-Advanced networks currently being tested. The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters.


Enhanced threat detection: The next (front) tier in security
The Chinese military classic, The Art of War, is commonly quoted within the security community: "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles…" We know the enemies well and their methods for evading detection. The "know yourself" part is somewhat lost in translation; most of us are focused on adding security countermeasures, which are not cookie cutter for every corporate infrastructure.


Steve Ballmer: The Exit Interview
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley didn't get an interview with Steve Ballmer for 20 years but got his exclusive exit interview now that Ballmer's reign at Microsoft is coming to an end. Here, Foley and ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan discuss the highlights of that interview as well as Ballmer's hits and misses in 14 years as CEO and his larger legacy.


Bots now running the Internet with 61 percent of Web traffic
According to a recent study by Incapsula, more than 61 percent of all Web traffic is now generated by bots, a 21 percent increase over 2012. Much of this increase is due to "good bots," certified agents such as search engines and Web performance tools. These friendly bots saw their proportion of traffic increase from 20 percent to 31 percent. Incapsula believes that the growth of good bot traffic comes from increased activity of existing bots, as well as new online services, like search engine optimization



Quote for the day:

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't." -- Erica Jong

December 12, 2013

AT&T's predictions for the enterprise in 2014
M2M technology is a label that describes the connection of devices and machines through a networks to a control center which allows the exchange of information -- and then for actions to be performed without human intervention. M2M systems -- based on the idea of the "Internet of Things" -- can include sensor relays, RFID and Wi-Fi connections. Machines developed with M2M are ideally able to interpret data transferred through a network and make decisions automatically in real time.


Technology in restaurants: Fast-casual sector represents growing market
Much has changed, however, as the restaurant sector pursues new directions in IT. Technology in restaurants now includes sophisticated POS devices, mobile applications, thin clients and cloud computing. For VARs, it's a little more involved than selling a glorified cash register. As a consequence, channel partners must offer more than basic POS automation. Resellers are responding with a wider range of technology systems, as well as consulting and professional services.


Inter-thread communications in Java at the speed of light
The Akka framework is great for inter-process communications when actors cross process boundaries between different JVM instances on the same machine or on machines distributed across a network. However it may be excessive to use Akka typed actors for smaller projects, where you need only inter-thread communication but you still want to stick with the typed actor approach.


Banks shouldn't rely on mobile SMS passcodes, security firm says
"Do not rely on SMS-based authentication," the report said. "It has been thoroughly compromised." Nearly all mobile malware is written for the open-source Android OS, which allows users to install any application, the report said. iOS mobile malware is rare since Apple forbids downloading applications that haven't been vetted by the company.


Big data demands nonstop experimentation
In business, the applications of statistical models are practical, but the need to vet the underlying causative factors remains. If you're unsure whether the historical correlations you've built into your statistical models will continue in the future, you treat that low confidence as a risk factor. For example, if you have low confidence in your predictive models of demand and response rates in a given customer segment, you're probably not going to wager millions of dollars on a new product launch that targets that segment.


2014 Trend Predictions for the Mobile Web
There will be renewed demand for all kinds of connected devices, with nomophobia becoming even more prevalent. We can expect to see greater demand for highly customized experiences that prioritize exact user context. As one of the biggest challenges facing brands in 2014, this one movement itself will fundamentally shake-up how organizations need to interact with their customers. Brands no longer belong just to a company.


Top 10 smartphones of 2013: There's One that's best
Thus, I must rank the HTC One my top smartphone of the year and until about a month ago it was the best smartphone I have ever used. The hardware is fantastic, HTC has done a great job updating the OS to the latest and greatest while also updating its Sense UI, you can pick it up in various colors, and it can be found for a good deal (as low as $50 with contract) with rumors of a successor launching in early 2014.


Confirmed: Cloud infrastructure pricing is absurd
As O’Grady points out in a list of caveats, this is very big picture because his analysis doesn’t include special offers, reserved instances or special packages. For a deeper examination of pricing, companies can pull out the 451 Research report, but it’s not for the weak of heart. It’s an incredibly detailed analysis of the different kinds of pricing models and which are used by each of the 53 vendors that analysts examined. However, it doesn’t actually reveal which vendors offer the best prices for any given service. Instead it classifies the different pricing methods and shows which vendors use which ones.


Amazon WorkSpaces: A threat to DaaS providers in the VDI market?
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a new opportunity for Amazon, but it's also a new challenge because the provider is not used to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads, said Mark Margevicius, research vice president of virtualization for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Research Inc. While WorkSpaces will appeal to companies that want to experiment with VDI without making a significant investment or to those that want to spin up a quick desktop for a contractor, DaaS providers still have value-added management services that will help them keep their competitive edge.


DevOps @ large investment bank
The solution is to somehow redefine the software delivery process in order to enable it to support these two requirements – fast and stable – simultaneously. But how exactly should we redefine it? Let us have a look at this question from the point of view of the three layers that make up the software delivery process: the process itself, the tooling to support it and the culture



Quote for the day:
 
“You can't connect with something you're not passionate about.” – Gemma Arterton

December 11, 2013

Telecom CIOs Seek Innovative Solutions
“From an IT perspective, the emerging challenge is to meet the changing expectations of the Indian consumers. Customers today do not go by just what is given to them. Customers have a wide range of options and if we don't provide them with what they want then they will surely move on and Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has made this even easier. At the same time MNP can be used as an opportunity as well to attract new customers with superior capabilities, offers and service. For IT, the focus is on providing cheaper services and maintaining a proper speed of delivery pipeline.


Is There Hope for Small Firms, the Have-Nots in the World of Big Data?
If it’s true, as Andrew McAfee writes, that “data-dominated firms are going to take market share, customers, and profits away from those who are still relying too heavily on their human experts,” then we can expect to see a very different business landscape some years down the road. It will be a landscape with many fewer of the small, artisan businesses that have been so important to societies for millennia.


JetBlue launches inflight Wi-Fi, promising a home broadband experience in the sky
What’s a decent connection? Perry said speed tests on FlyFi’s trial flights produced connections as fast as 20 Mbps to the device, though as with any shared wireless network, speeds are subject to fluctuations. JetBlue isn’t promising any baseline speed, however. Instead, Perry said, the airline is claiming that passengers will get a true broadband experience. They will be able to browse the web with ease, stream music, and even watch standard definition video with no interruption, he said.


Compliance in the Cloud: PaaS and the CISO
As GigaOM notes in the report Private PaaS: The next generation platform for enterprises, “the drivers behind using private PaaS extend the benefits of PaaS to environments that provide the right amount of security, compliance, and control over core business processes and data.” In fact, according to the GigaOM report: The top two drivers for enterprises that have deployed or are considering private PaaS are compliance related:


One in four cloud providers will be gone by 2015
The research firm is predicting a major consolidation in cloud services and estimates that about 25% of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won't be around by 2015. "One in four vendors will be gone for whatever reason -- acquisition, bankruptcy," said William Maurer, a Gartner analyst. Most of the time, the changes will come through acquisition.  "There is real risk," said Maurer to a packed room for his presentation at the Gartner Data Center Conference.


SDN Market to Reach $3.1 Billion by 2017: Infonetics
"The important question that everyone wants answered is, 'What's the real market for SDN?'" Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics, said in a statement. "It's still early days, but our research over the last two years confirms that SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in use for SDN will play a role in enterprise and data center networks." Grossner said larger enterprises and cloud service providers will be the first to bring wide-scale SDN deployments into their data centers.


Will Juniper's Metafabric Architecture Simplify Data Center Management?
As businesses have to adapt quickly to the tight market competition, the IT team is somewhere feeling restricted. Another key issue that CIOs complain about is interoperability. Nobody likes to be locked down. Single-site data centres have also been replaced with a more complex data centre landscape that includes multiple, distributed data centre sites as well as services in the cloud. Managing multiple, geographically dispersed data centres, has been a problem which Juniper is trying to solve through its MetaFabric architecture


Cyber Security Watch List for 2014: Seven Trends
In addition to policy, provider organizations can expect to face added pressure from technological changes, among them, cloud storage, the burgeoning use of personal devices in the workplace, the changing nature of “insider” threats, and additional focus from the corporate boards, which are increasingly taking a more proactive look at their organizations’ preparedness and mitigation strategies.


10 Ways to Be a Great Leader
So, how does a leader bring out the best in others? It starts with having Emotional Intelligence. More than just “people skills,” Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a powerful awareness about ourselves and others. It gives us the ability to choose new ways of handling difficult situations and to break free of old habits of thinking and acting that don’t produce the results we want. When Emotional Intelligence is high, the tremendous amount of team energy that is wasted on things such as miscommunication, misunderstandings, ego trips, unresolved tension, and conflict is freed up and can be redirected toward productive, effective endeavors.


Q&A: Adapting data governance strategies to the digital age
Information governance is defined by rules. Information governance involves, as does any governance, applying rules and behavior and indicating form of conduct. Therefore, information governance is the rules-based management of digital information to create wealth for the company. For years we focused on records management as improving compliance or reducing litigation costs, but what information governance can do differently is connect to the primary objective of the companies existence: to create new wealth.



Quote for the day:

"It is not the strongest of the species ... nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one ... most adaptable to change." -- C Darwin

December 10, 2013

To Execution profile or to Memory Profile? That is the question.
Profilers work by either sampling top of stack or instrumenting the code with probes, or a combination of both. These techniques are very good at finding computations that happen frequently or take a long time. As my group experienced, the information gathered by execution profilers often correlates well with the source of the memory inefficiency. However it points to an execution problem which can sometimes be confusing.


Despite cloud computing security risks, infosec pros know their role
"If all of us by default have this level of trust in the cloud, why are we so uncomfortable when the business units come to us and say, 'I'm going to put this data out in the cloud'?" asked LaRosa. As he sees it, even though society has already come to trust the cloud tacitly, security pros still "push back" against enterprise cloud computing initiatives. "The problem isn't with the cloud," LaRosa added, it's with security practitioners' ability to evolve and accept it.


Other browser makers follow Google's lead, revoke rogue certificates
Google revoked the certificates for users of its Chrome browser on Saturday after a four-day investigation. Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera Software followed suit on Monday. In a security advisory, Microsoft said it had released an update to most versions of Windows -- including Windows Phone 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 -- that revoked the pertinent certificates. Unlike other browser makers, Microsoft records trusted digital certificates in Windows, not in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser.


Report: Risk of an Uncertain Security Strategy
In spite of high-profile data breaches and the potential business impact of cyber attacks and data loss, small and midsize organizations are still not making cyber security a priority. Sophos and the Ponemon Institute recently released a report, Risk of an Uncertain Security Strategy, that highlights the need to make security a key priority.


Enterprise mobile management demands rethinking of work, play and productivity
To share his insights on how to better prepare for a mobile-enablement future that quickly complements other IT imperatives such as cloud, big data, and even more efficient data centers, we’re joined by Tom Kendra, Vice President and General Manager, Systems Management at Dell Software. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.


Tomorrow's Data Center Will Be Mobile, Flexible, Highly Efficient and Secure
"This year, we're seeing organizations really start to examine how 'software-defined' everything impacts the data center," Cappuccio says. "Software-defined networking, software defined storage, that's all part of the conversation; how to move away from the physical and into the conceptual, but is there a way to take that concept and apply that to data centers as a whole."


Building Innovative Organizations with Lean Thinking
Since Peter Drucker first introduced the concept of "innovative organization”, it has become a buzzword amongst corporate managers. Particularly in IT, companies strive to create innovative teams. But whilst there has been a lot of theoretical discussion on how to build innovative organizations, there have been few practical experiments and analysis. Innovative organizations are like the moon: beautiful to look at, but seemingly impossible to grasp.


Do two-factor authentication vulnerabilities outweigh the benefits?
Most two-factor authentication technologies used with online services generate a one-time password (OTP) when users logs in with their username and password. A user receives the OTP via an SMS on their registered mobile device and enters it on the website to complete the login procedure. While two-factor authentication is a definite improvement on plain password authentication, it is not infallible.


Information Governance: Why It's Becoming a Boardroom Imperative
The rapid growth of data across the enterprise has resulted in increasing risk, liability and cost to organizations. At the same time, there is a significant opportunity to tap into this data to deliver increased productivity and greater strategic insight. In this slide show, with input from a Hewlett-Packard Autonomy study, eWEEK looks at the key reasons information governance is fast becoming a boardroom imperative.


Meg Whitman: Moonshot servers will solve datacenter power and cost crisis
"If the cloud were an independent county, it would rate number five in energy use. China is number one, the US is number two, Russia is number three, India is number four and the cloud is number five, and Japan is sixth," she said. Datacentres consume about two percent of the world's electricity, Whitman told the conference audience. "By the end of the decade datacentre demand will rise to over three percent unless we find a more efficient technology. This is not sustainable. We have to make better use of the electricity that we've got," she said.



Quote for the day:
 
"Education is more than a luxury; it is a responsibility that society owes to itself." -- Robin Cook

December 09, 2013

Orchestrated offline VM Patching using Service Management Automation
So the goal is to ensure images stored in the Virtual Machine Manager library are updated as soon as Microsoft Security Updates become available on Patch Tuesday. In this post I’ll present you a way to achieve that goal, while leveraging the entire CLOUD OS stack including Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. The solution itself is provided by a SMA (Service Management Automation) Runbook. If you have not looked into SMA I highly recommend you to do so.


Surfing a digital wave, or drowning?
One reason for worry is that IT bosses are conservative by habit and with good reason. Above all they must keep essential systems running—and safe. Those systems are under continual attack. If they are breached, the head of IT carries the can. More broadly, IT departments like to know who is up to what. Many of them gave up one battle long ago, by letting staff choose their own smartphones (a trend known as “bring your own device”). When the chief executive insists on an iPhone rather than a fogeyish BlackBerry, it is hard to refuse.


Don’t be held hostage by the IT expert
“We changed our IT culture significantly to one of service, and we realigned departments within our organization several years ago,” said one financial services CIO. “The process was necessary, but in reorganizing, I also knew that I was risking losing key technical contributors who didn’t want to be part of a cross-disciplinary service culture, but who instead preferred to operate in their traditional technical expertise silos.”


Microsoft Exec Hints at Separate Windows Release Trains for Consumers, Business
At a technology symposium hosted by financial services giant Credit Suisse, Tony Myerson acknowledged the operating system adoption chasm between consumers and more conservative corporations. Myerson, who formerly led the Windows Phone team, was promoted in July to head all client-based OS development, including that for smartphones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox game console.


Core wars redux: Intel to ship 15-core Ivytown chip
Intel confirmed Thursday that it will release a 15-core server chip code-named Ivytown, which will be based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Intel until now had topped off at 12 cores with the Xeon E5 v2 chips that shipped in the third quarter of this year. The 15-core chip is destined for high-end servers. It will likely go into four- to eight-socket servers, which typically handle high-end computing for databases and enterprise resource planning systems.


The Status of Finance and Cloud
After several years of first inhibiting and prohibiting Cloud use, then a brief period of Cloud uncertainty, Finance leaders overall, and Finance as a corporate entity, have embraced Cloud as a means of enabling, increasing, and delivering the value required of Finance by enterprises in an increasingly-fast-changing business environment. As a result, Cloud has become the first choice of Finance leaders and buyers for Finance management solutions – and is increasingly encouraged by Finance leadership and policy as a first choice for broader enterprise business IT.


6 Storage & Management Predictions for 2014
IDC forecasts that the volume of digital data will grow 40 - 50 percent per year clearly indicating that Information Storage and Management will remain in vogue and a big focus area for CIOs across sectors. With new buzzwords emerging such as Software Defined Datacenters, integrated backup appliances etc. we believe that 2014, will continue to see these new trends gaining momentum. As cloud based storage, backup and disaster recovery become commonplace, managing and protecting data will also be a focus area for enterprises and SMBs.


US tech companies ask governments to reform surveillance practices
The latest move appears to be one of a number by the Internet companies to highlight that they are on the side of the user, and to bring pressure on governments, particularly of the U.S. Facebook, AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo wrote in October to the chairman and members of a U.S. Committee on the Judiciary, demanding that the surveillance practices of the U.S. should be reformed to enhance privacy protections and provide "appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms."


Enterprise software 2014: Three themes to ponder
There are very few greenfield opportunities in Enterprise Software any more. While there are a number of vibrant, high-growth SaaS companies, the vast majority of them are selling replacement products. We believe there is an enormous secular growth opportunity in automating processes at the very low end of the market. The Cloud has ushered in a new era of software where, for less than $50 a month in most instances, the smallest of small businesses can get enterprise-class software to automate core functions like Finance and Sales & Marketing.


DARPA makes games of finding software vulnerabilities
The games are designed in such a way that when users solve puzzles in order to advance to the next level of game play, they are actually generating program annotations and mathematical proofs that can identify or prove the absence of flaws in software written in either C or Java. DARPA funded the games and the portal through its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) program. Formal software verification typically relies on engineers reviewing code for possible errors and omissions that could be used by an attacker to compromise a system.



Quote for the day:

"Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one's aim." -- John D. Rockefeller

December 08, 2013

Beyond Data Mining
This article compares and contrasts the four kinds of miners: Algorithm miners explore tuning parameters in data mining algorithms; Landscape miners reveal the shape of the decision space; Decision miners comment on how best to change a project; and Discussion miners help the community debate trade-offs regarding the different decisions. Note that algorithm and landscape mining are more research-focused activities that explore the miners' internal details.


The Discipline of Digital Disruption
As an enterprise architect, I’ve been helping design businesses for over 20 years, and I can attest that companies haven’t mastered the basics of dealing with the existing daily disruptions that arise. Throwing emerging technology into the mix of disruption is one more complicating factor that many organizations simply aren’t equipped to handle. Companies want technology to disrupt to their advantage, but they don’t have the discipline to avert disaster or misdirection.


Intel CIO Kimberly Stevenson is working to deliver products faster and drive revenue
Kimberly Stevenson, a corporate vice president and CIO at Intel, has spent her professional career immersed in technology, working for some of the world's most recognized technology companies. Not surprisingly, she's a vocal champion for IT and how it will transform business and society. "I love to see all this disruption coming in all different industries, and it's all coming from IT," says Stevenson, one of four finalists for the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award.


Vulnerability Counts, Remediation and Risk
Every year there are thousands of new vulnerabilities published. It’s important to understand that this isn’t the same as the number of vulnerabilities that exist, nor is it the same as the number of vulnerabilities you have in your environment. In fact, there are probably thousands more vulnerabilities that exist that haven’t been published. Those would fall into the category of zero-days; conditions that are not publicly known.


Trends: Seven Priorities In The Shift From CMO to Chief Digital Officer
Unfortunately the shift to digital requires a greater reliance on technology. Historically, CMOs relied on IT for help on the database or CRM system or even the website. However consumerization of technology and the cloud have now given marketers more control on their technology destiny. In fact, a recent post by fellow analyst Gavin Heaton on “CMO to CIO, It’s time we talked” highlights many of these new challenges.


A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining
"This guide follows a learn-by-doing approach. Instead of passively reading the book, I encourage you to work through the exercises and experiment with the Python code I provide. I hope you will be actively involved in trying out and programming data mining techniques. The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques. This book is available for download for free under a Creative Commons license"


What's Your Relationship with the Cloud?
Word on the street is the accounting profession might be ready to embrace the cloud — in a full on relationship — and vice versa. Like any meaningful relationship, there are different stages: the joy of new love, the longstanding relationship, and sometimes the dismal state of separation. Not sure where your relationship with the cloud stands? Read on


Writing Automated Tests with Jazz Automation
Jazz Automation differs from other automated testing frameworks by allowing test writers to describe how software features work in plain and understandable English. Most automated testing frameworks, such as Selenium and Cucumber, require programming in languages like Java and Ruby before tests are executed. Jazz Automation provides an abstraction layer, removing programming requirements from test writers and configurators.


Lean & Enterprise Architecture: The seven deadly wastes of Enterprise Architects
We believe EA is a powerful and often indispensible aid for organizations. However, not all EA initiatives are a great success. We see many EA practitioners struggle to keep EA on the agenda. It is then a common reflex to say: “They don’t understand us; they only want quick fixes instead of doing the right thing for the long term”. But let’s take a closer look at our own behavior as Enterprise Architects, from a Lean perspective. A truly Lean Enterprise Architect ensures that all EA activities create value. In practice, however, we see a lot of behavior that does the opposite.


VITA: Application Framework
VITA is a framework for creating .NET applications that work with databases. It is a powerful implementation of pure .NET ORM. Supports modular construction of complex applications, query and data caching. It supports data models distributed over multiple databases. Provides built-in Authorization framework. Works with MS SQL Server 2008/2012, MS SQL Compact Edition, MySQL.



Quote for the day:
 
“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.” -- Charles Baudelaire

December 07, 2013

5 Things You Should Do Better with Each Passing Project
Project management is a great blend of the old and the new. Each new project sees you have to learn new processes and systems as well as deal with new people, which keeps it fresh and interesting. However, a lot of the tasks remain the same each time, which stops you from feeling overwhelmed with each new piece of work. This also means that you can expect to progress in your skill levels on certain tasks with each passing project.


The Year in Tech Quotes
"I just figured two's better than one. Seriously, it's a large company. We have a separation of responsibilities." ... With 2013 coming to an end, IDG News Service took an annual look back at quotes from news stories over the last 12 months. Here are a handful that stuck with us through the year


Thousands delayed after flights grounded at UK airports
Problems began when the control centre’s computer systems failed to automatically switch from night to day operations, forcing flight controllers to carry out the procedure manually. ... "We experienced a technical problem in the early hours of this morning, which means that it hasn't been possible to reconfigure the voice communications system to split out the sectors for the busier daytime traffic in some areas of the UK enroute airspace.


Never Stop Expecting More from Your Unstructured Data
Keyword technologies use probabilistic algorithms that focus on matching and are not able to make sense of the exact meaning of each word in search. Today’s businesses are dealing not only with traditional structured data, but more and more with the unstructured data (text, email and documents and more) that fill our databanks, file sharing systems and CRMs. Analysts rightly wonder how they can effectively relate the structured with the ever growing volume of unstructured data for something meaningful.


Three Ways to Say No to a Reference Request
If you find yourself in the unenviable position of being asked for a reference letter you have no interest in, or ability to write, there is a way out. In fact, there are three ways out — three excuses that are perfectly suitable. They include: 1. Not being willing or able to spend the time; 2. Not knowing someone well enough; and 3. Not being able to provide a glowing review


International Rescue - Recovering a Failing Project
Communication is key – across the team, with the external suppliers engaged to assist and most importantly with the impacted business areas. We had some tense conference calls throughout the recovery but being able to demonstrate a risk based plan to address the issues and clearly communicating it, and progress against it, bought us the time we need to succeed.


How can you adapt ITIL to be used in the Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is here and being used by organizations to allow them to be more fleet footed in time to market, and nimble in aligning to changing business needs when it comes to delivering the services to the business and its customers. From a service management perspective it makes no difference wether the service is delivered from the “Cloud”, an in house hosted infrastructure or a combination of both. You still need a framework for managing service delivery and ensuring services.


Study: Data Center Downtime Costs $7,900 Per Minute
The study reveals that even more significant costs are incurred by organizations with revenue models that depend on the data center’s ability to deliver IT and networking services to customers. The highest cost of a single event in the study was more than $1.7 million. These industries saw a slight decrease compared to 2010 costs, while organizations that traditionally have been less dependent saw a significant increase.


Is Poor Quality the Antihero of Data?
Perhaps poor quality is data’s antihero — a central character lacking some of the conventional heroic attributes but nonetheless benefits the greater good, albeit not always by the most noble means possible. After all, without poor quality there would not be, according to Gartner research, a market for data quality technology projected to produce $2 billion in constant-dollar revenue by 2017. Which is not to say that all you have to do is throw technology at poor quality data, but it is one of many essential aspects of data quality best practices.


Tokyo Has Plans to Be Asia’s Tech HQ – But Are They Enough?
“Tokyo’s high status in Asia is threatened as we face a situation where foreign companies increasingly move to other Asian cities,” project director Noriko Adachi told the newspaper. To encourage more to come back to Tokyo, the initiative will offer free Accenture consulting and advisory services; up to 5 million yen (about $50,000) in subsidies; the use of a Business Development Center peopled by bilingual staff to provide extra support;



Quote for the day:

"There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience." -- Archibald McLeish

December 06, 2013

5 Ways To Turbocharge Innovation
How can companies avoid falling into the groupthink trap? It starts with fostering "creative conflict," whereby organizations bring cognitive confrontation to the forefront when discussing ideas and innovation opportunities. We've identified five ways to foster an environment -- and mindset -- to turn ordinary ideas into extraordinary innovations through creative conflict.


Using metro storage clusters to manage data growth, add value to IaaS
Service providers may gain significant business value by implementing metro storage clusters as well. They can use the technology to create multilayer data storage packages for customers, depending on which metro storage cluster design they chose to deploy. Requirements would dictate the design, architecture and services to be offered. Cloud providers could offer every layer of service within the data storage package at a premium service charge.


Asus 2 in 1 Device Pulls Off Hat Trick
But this is no ordinary 2 in 1 device. It requires a double take. “There are two (dual core) processors, two operating systems, two drives, two WiFi modules and more,” points out Paine. The Trio can also switch from Android to Windows 8 operating systems with a click of a button. “The tablet experience is optimized with an Intel Atom processor to run Android and the laptop experience is optimized with an 4th generation Intel Core processor that runs Windows 8 and Android,” said Jon Falker, global partner marketing manager at Intel. “It’s a trend-setter and something we’ll likely see more of in 2014,” he said.


Researchers compete to bring humanoid robots to life
"Robots right now, for the most part, are either on stationary bases working on repetitive tasks or working in a lab," said Gill Pratt, a DARPA program manager. "We're trying to move to task-level autonomy. Instead of saying, 'Move ahead a tenth of an inch,' we'd say, 'Move forward and open that door.' During a disaster, communications could be very poor. The robot needs more smarts to be able to do things on its own." Robots have yet to reach that level of development. In fact, to date they are far from it.


RedHat Takes On VMware For PaaS Crown
PaaS typically provides tools, a code check-in and check-out repository, and the ability to roll back a recent build to a more reliable version. It provides team processes and collaborative development tools in a cloud environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is already a favored operating system for running workloads in public cloud services. Now Red Hat needs to find its follow-up success, and it's looking to its PaaS offering.


Speedy storage: Pros and cons of SSDs and flash
Enterprise storage architects have developed many ways to increase application performance by implementing flash memory. This has raised the bar for IT professionals, who need to be able to understand the differences in order to evaluate their options. So here’s a handy guide, including use-cases and caveats for typical applications.


IT security pros often seen as 'innovation killers,' says ADP's IT security chief
IT security managers are fascinated with technology, worry a great deal about risks and are often the last to know about some IT projects, especially those involving cloud-based services, because business people tend to want to avoid the IT security department as much as they can, LaRosa suggested. ... Being a savvy technologist is great in and of itself, but talking tech to business people usually backfires because they don't want to hear "geekspeak," they want to find out how to try new things to grow the business, LaRosa said.


Sen. Markey wants to know: Can your car be hacked?
Few controls exist to prevent hackers from breaking into automobiles wirelessly and taking control of systems, McClure said. But because hackers are unlikely to gain much by breaking into individual automobiles, he said they're unlikely to spend much time hacking vehicles. The only scenario where such a threat would be likely is if someone wanted to carry out a targeted attack against a specific individual.


CIO's focus on people, innovative thinking leads to revenue-generating idea
Organizations that really value innovation, Pasik said, have to be willing to fully invest in making it work for the people who generate ideas. In January, for example, Griffin was relieved of his former duties and took the title director of innovation. To easily keep in touch, Pasik moved Griffin next door to his office. They have two officially scheduled meetings every week, but Pasik's famous pop-ins, to discuss progress on projects and new ideas, are frequent.


Steps to Address the Aging IT Workforce
Novarica identifies the impact on IT and the business, including newer systems that were built with aging client/server or Web-oriented technologies that carry great risk of adverse impact on daily operations and IT staffs that are on average less tenured than their business unit counterparts, leading to knowledge management issues. To mitigate the impact of this change, the report lists steps in three areas: processes, people and structure, that carriers can take today to preserve intellectual property, maintain or improve competitive positioning and minimize organizational and operational risk associated with the aging IT workforce.



Quote for the day:

“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.”  -- Robert F. Kennedy