Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 24, 2014

Key Considerations in Choosing an IT Monitoring Solution
Small organizations have limited resources, but still require enterprise class IT monitoring capabilities to grow and be more agile. We spoke to Abhilash Purushothaman, Head - Service Assurance Business, India & SAARC, CA Technologies, to understand the importance of such solutions and key considerations while choosing one - See more at: http://www.pcquest.com/pcquest/interview/213560/key-considerations-choosing-it-monitoring-solution#sthash.w9qZVgfy.dpuf

How to Limit the Damage from a Data Breach by Planning Ahead
Let’s take a break from talking prevention and go where nobody likes to go: how to prepare for the time when what you don’t want to happen does happen. It pays to do some planning in this regard as evidenced by Snapchat, for instance, who has taken a bad situation and made it worse by their handling of it. Data breaches are not just a public relations burden but can cause negative impact on your company’s value and reputation. All eyes are going to be on you, the infosec pro, to provide clear answers quickly. In fact that’s one of the things we’ll deal with in this webinar – the top 5 questions in a data breach:

10 Great Android Apps for IT Pros
In the 18 months since, the 2013 Nexus 7 has proved amazing, and the Moto X is a great smartphone -- both of which are reasonably pricedand unlocked. This isn’t to say other Android phones and tablets aren’t also good, but the Nexus 7 with LTE from T-Mobile gives me the power and connectivity to fix just about any minor IT problem remotely, earning it a permanent place in my cargo pocket -- and on my list of essential “MacGyver IT” troubleshooting tools. Here are the apps every Android-wielding IT pro should know about.

Improving SQL Server Performance by Looking at the Plan Cache
The SQL Server plan cache stores details on statements that are being executed over time. Each time a statement executes SQL Server will look inside the plan cache first to see if a plan already exists. If a plan exists SQL Server will use that plan instead of spending time compiling a new plan. This ensures the engine operates efficiently. The plan cache holds a great deal of information about the overall health of your database instance. You can use the plan cache to investigate current performance issues as well as proactively look for opportunities to improve performance.

T5 Lands Financial Customer in Atlanta Data Center
“T5 continues to attract discerning customers such as financial services companies and healthcare firms that need to maintain sensitive data, and address security as part of their own compliance requirements,” said Tim Bright, Senior Vice President, of T5 Data Centers. “They come to T5 because of our reputation for reliable service, operational stability across our national portfolio, our willingness to customize our security, and power redundancy and resiliency. With backgrounds in Enterprise Data Center development, operations, and consulting, T5 approaches data center design differently by designing the kind of data center our clients would build themselves, even before we start customization.”

Internet of Things: Changing the Insurance Value Chain
The rise of the Internet of things could change every link in the insurance value chain, according to “The Internet of Things and the Insurance Value Chain,” from Celent, creating new business opportunities for early adopters and saddling late adopters with adverse selection. Donald Light, director of Celent's Americas P&C insurance practice, explains that the Internet of things (IoT) consists of three interdependent components: things with networked sensors, such as automobiles, machines, buildings and people; data stores, whether they are local or in the cloud; and analytics engines.

A 'cloud first' strategy calls for strong security: Five tips to get there
Security is still a major obstacle for IT when it comes to cloud adoption. That was made crystal clear at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar on securing data, availability and reputation in the cloud, which attracted a mix of security, IT, entrepreneurs and business folks. As one attendee succinctly put it, "Why should we trustAWS [Amazon Web Services] when we have no visibility into their other side?" Still, there are plenty of organizations thinking in terms of a "cloud first" strategy, including the federal government. For readers who are looking for guidance on cloud security, here are five quick tips from the seminar's expert panelists on how to minimize security risks before partnering with AWS or any number of Anything as a Service providers.

How to create a solid, healthy company culture
It doesn’t matter what size organization you are working or running — culture is key to achieving success. One of the easiest examples of how a weak corporate culture can topple a company was AOL/Time Warner. There was the buttoned-down corporate culture of Time Warner on the one hand, and the entrepreneurial spirit of AOL on the other. It was one of the key factors that led to the demise of the largest merger in the history of U.S. business. So how does one create a healthy culture? There are four basic ingredients

How GE Applies Lean Startup Practices
GE Appliance’s first attempt to apply FastWorks has been to create a refrigerator with French doors (doors that open from the middle) for their high end “Monogram” line. In January 2013, Chip Blankenship, CEO of GE Appliances issued a challenge to the newly formed team: “You’re going to change every part the customer sees. You won’t have a lot of money. There will be a very small team. There will be a working product in 3 months. And you will have a production product in 11 or 12 months.” The cross-functional team was thrown into a room together. They became a tight group as they went down to the factory floor and built products together and looked at market research together.

FCC will seek comments about its latest net neutrality proposal
Under the proposal, "broadband providers would be required to offer a baseline level of service to their subscribers, along with the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers," the official said by email. "In all instances, broadbandA providers would need to act in a commercially reasonable manner subject to [FCC] review on a case-by-case basis." The FCC will seek comment on "exactly what the baseline level of service would be, the construction of a 'commercially reasonable' standard, and the manner in which disputes would be resolved," the official added.

Quote for the day:

"Regardless of the changes in technology, the market for well-crafted messages will always have an audience." -- Steve Burnett

April 23, 2014

IT Control Is An Illusion
Mott's span-of-control argument jibes with his three-year initiative to flip GM's reliance on outsourcing, from 90% outsourced IT to 90% in-house. He makes a strong case for moving IT in-house, citing how expensive, slow, and undifferentiated traditional outsourcing work can be. ... Real innovation happens when IT pros are tightly aligned with company strategy and the CIO has a seat at the CEO's table; IT must produce clear strategies, governance, and metrics; IT is a strategic asset, with speed of innovation a major success factor; and sustained competitive advantage comes from a focus on continuous improvement, creative process, and technological change. No arguments from me there.

Think Capacity, Availability and Efficiency. Think DCIM.
When it comes to data center infrastructure management (DCIM), I do see a common set of challenges that decision-makers expect DCIM to solve. Whether it’s reducing energy costs, improving the management of the asset portfolio, or conducing “what if” scenarios on potential downtime issues, it invariably comes down to three core infrastructure challenges: Capacity, Availability and Efficiency. This trio is what ultimately defines the physical infrastructure’s ability to serve the business. So let’s define the terms. From a DCIM perspective, here is how I would define these capabilities:

ARIN runs out of IPv4 addresses
After today’s announcement by ARIN, they have now entered Phase 4 of their IPv4 exhaustion plan. Their Number Resource Policy Manual (NRPM) defines the process that organizations can request IPv4 addresses. At this moment, IPv4 addresses will only be allocated on an emergency basis. This means that an ISP can make one final request for a /22, but after that they will not get any more address space. This may be concerning for many organizations that intend to continue using IPv4 for decades to come. There are probably no organizations in the ARIN territories that are actively planning to stop using IPv4 at some point in the future.

The 9 Most Difficult-to-Fill IT Roles
If you look at data from across the Web, most companies are looking for IT pros with specific experience -- the more the better, but with everyone chasing the same talent, some areas of IT are downright difficult to fill. Recently, TEKsystems conducted a survey of 244 CIOs, CTOs and other senior IT professionals. These IT decision-makers spanned industries that include technology, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, government and professional services representing business large and small. Respondents marked big data, security, mobility and cloud computing as the trends having the largest impacts on their organization. The technology/roles outlined here, according to the survey, are the toughest areas in which to find tech talent.

Forget the Strategy PowerPoint

Briefly, here is the idea: a Big Opportunity articulates in language that is analytically accurate and emotionally compelling an opportunity that will move an organization forward in a substantial way. It is that exciting possibility which, if you can capitalize on it, will place you into a prosperous, winning future. It is related to vision and strategy in a very straightforward way: a strategy shows you what you need to get to a vision; a vision shows you what you will be doing if you get to, and are able to capitalize on, a big opportunity.

Sysadmin Tips and Tricks - Stop Using Root!
If you think about it, it’s clear that the operating system had to be very good at keeping users from being able to stomp on each other’s files and processes. So the early UNIX™ variants were multi-user systems from the get-go. In the ensuing forty years, these systems have only gotten better at keeping the various users and processes from harming each other. And this is the technology that you’re paying for when you use Linux or other modern variants. Now, you may think, “That doesn’t apply to me—I’m the only user on my server!” But are you, really?

Data Governance Required For Healthcare Data Warehouse
With more data pouring in via EHRs and rules related to the Affordable Care Act and other regulations, healthcare's existing lag in data-governance use will grow if organizations don't get moving, according to experts. With healthcare providers considering how to incorporate even more information from medical devices ranging from implants to fitness trackers, it's even more vital for them to figure out governance. Healthcare already has a reputation for being behind in big-data use, a tool vital for healthcare providers' ability to reduce costs while simultaneously improving performance.

Optical LANs Starting to Move From Cloud Giants to Data Centers
Fiber optics removes the need for wiring closets and air conditioning units, requires less cabling than copper-based LANs, less power and fewer electronics, Bernardino said. It also reaches farther than copper—20 to 30 kilometers, compared with 100 meters for copper—enabling the school district to centralize management so that when a problem arises in a building, network technicians no longer have to drive miles out to remote buildings to fix the problem. It can be handled from a central location. It also eliminates the need to upgrade cabling infrastructures, reducing operating expenses by ensuring that as technology evolves, the only components needing a refresh are the active endpoints.

Why IT Managers Should Define Reference Architecture to Map Big Data
Reference architecture is described in terms of technological components that achieve the capabilities and drive the vision of the project. Big data technologies are mapped to the architecture in order to illustrate how the architecture can be implemented and deployed. Organizations can use this reference architecture as a preparatory point for outlining their own distinctive and custom-tailored architecture. “With heavy investment in current BI systems, customers want to enhance the current capability of their analytics by bringing in big data solutions to their existing enterprise system’s landscape, but the million dollar question on how this is to be done,” says Ranka.

Stake Holder Leadership - Bear in Mind: Loving the Champion Bear
Much can be learned from this story. This particular chapter1 presents a discussion about stakeholder management—investigating the concept that stakeholders differ in their perceptions—and introduces a strategy for influence. Let me first give you my definition of the term “stakeholders”: They are a person or organization (e.g. customer, sponsor, performing organization, or the public) that is actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected by the execution or completion of the project. A stakeholder may also exert influence over the project and its deliverables.

Quote for the day:

"Most ideas are created by looking at something existing in a new and different way." -- Stephanie Vozza

April 22, 2014

Security Manager's Journal: Virtual machines, real mess
We found that those virtual machines were not running any antivirus software and hadn't been patched in more than two years, so we ran a virus scan of one of the virtual machines. Suddenly, everything became very clear. The virtual machine was infected with a virus whose characteristics matched the activity that caused the denial of service to the office. In fact, all 30 desktops in the classroom were infected. But that's not the worst of it. The installed images were derived from a base image maintained at a cloud provider. That base image contained the virus, which explains how 30 machines became infected.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database Security - Firewall Configuration
Deployment of cloud-based technologies introduces a wide range of challenges; however few of them are subjected to the same degree of scrutiny, concern, and public debate as security. In order to properly analyze security related challenges, it is important to note that they encompass several distinct but interrelated concepts, such as data integrity and confidentiality, access control, authentication, and authorization. In this article, we will start reviewing them in the context of Microsoft Azure Software as a Service-based SQL Database, focusing in particular on the SQL Server and database-level firewall access control functionality and methods that can be employed to implement it.

New iOS malware highlights threat to Apple mobile devices
The malware is designed to listen for outgoing connections. Once it recognises an Apple ID and password, it sends these unencrypted IDs and passwords to the cyber criminals behind the malware. The Unflod malware also highlights the risks of installing unknown apps on jailbroken iPhones. Reports of the malware targeting Apple iOS emerged in posts on reddit by iOS users hit by repeated system crashes after installing iOS customisations that were not part of the official Cydia market. A developer for the Cydia market, an alternative to the Apple App Store, has responded to news by in a reddit comment, saying that the probability of Unflod coming from a default Cydia repository is fairly low.

It’s Official: 2013 Was the Busiest Year Yet for Cyber Criminals
The finding comes in a report from the security arm of the telecom giant Verizon set to be published on Wednesday. The Verizon annual Data Breach Investigations Report is one of the most highly regarded in the industry and is now in its tenth year. It contains data on attacks from 50 companies and organizations, covering more than 63,000 computer security incidents and 1,347 confirmed breaches in 95 countries. As these things go, the report contains more data to analyze than any other report of its kind, said Jay Jacobs, a Verizon analyst and one of the report’s co-authors. If combating nine kinds of attacks sounds too ambitious, then maybe this will make it sound a little easier: On average, roughly 72 percent of all attacks were carried out using one of three methods, though the specifics tend to vary by industry.

What Is A Distributed Database And Why Do You Need One?
Grab this technical whitepaper to learn more about the NuoDB distributed database. Learn more about how NuoDB: Cracked the code and finally built a distributed database; Conceived the Durable Distributed Architecture (DDC) by studying the shortcomings of traditional designs; Built a database designed to scale-out on demand in the cloud; and Can provide your app with on-demand scale out, geo-distributed data management and resilience to failure

Managing the Demand for IT Infrastructure
To save costs and prepare for adoption of next-generation infrastructure technology and hybrid-cloud models, leading organizations are adopting commercial-style demand and service management that has two key characteristics. The first is a standard services catalog with clearly priced offerings that can be consumed on a price-times-quantity basis. Such a catalog requires creating bottom-up unit costs for each service based on a detailed bill of materials. This means that unit costs should be an aggregation of all the components making up the service and not an arbitrarily stipulated cost mostly based on averages and allocations.

Business success increasingly hinges on supply chain innovation and procurement advantages
The power of data-driven business networks and the analytics derived from them are increasing, but how do enterprises best leverage that intelligence as they seek new services, products and efficiency? How do automation and intelligence enter the picture for better matching buyers and sellers? BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference. To learn more about how business—led by procurement—is changing and evolving, and how to best exploit this new wave of innovation, we sat down with Rachel Spasser, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba, and Andrew Bartolini, Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners.

SEC seeks data on cyber security policies at Wall Street firms
The SEC Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) will review each company's tools and policies regarding governance, risk identification and assessment, network and data security controls, remote access and third party cyber risks. In a security alert released last week, the SEC said the effort was launched after participants at an SEC-sponsored roundtable discussion in March stressed the importance of strong cybersecurity controls at Wall Street firms. During the roundtable, SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar recommended that the Commission collect information from broker-dealers and other financial firms about their cyber readiness.

Now is the time to switch back to Firefox
Mozilla's commitments to your privacy and to the open web are much more important than what any of its staff might have done in the past. In any case, Mozilla co-founder and former chief executive Brendan Eich has already quit, and Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker has very publicly apologised. At this point, anybody who still thinks boycotting Firefox is a good idea is behind the times. It needs -- and deserves -- your support. Businesses, of course, tend to judge things on merit, which is where the argument for Firefox is strongest. I switched back to Mozilla Firefox in the middle of last summer, when it first became a better browser than Chrome, at least for me.

Intuitive, Robust Date and Time Handling, Finally Comes to Java
When dealing with dates and times we usually think in terms of years, months, days, hours minutes and seconds. However, this is only one model of time, one I refer to as “human”. The second common model is “machine” or “continuous” time. In this model, a point on the time-line is represented by a single large number. This approach is easy for computers to deal with, and is seen in the UNIX count of seconds from 1970, matched in Java by the millisecond count from 1970. The java.time API provides a machine view of time via the Instant value type. It provides the ability to represent a point on the time-line without any other contextual information, such as a time-zone.

Quote for the day:

"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

April 21, 2014

802.11ac standard: How did we get here?
Wireless technology began developing in the early 1970s and has since become an everyday necessity for both consumer and enterprise. The 802.11 standard, which governs the technology's development, has gone through several facelifts in the 17 years since the specification was first created. Today, unfettered access to data has revolutionized the industrial world, fueling the growth of efficiency, productivity and ultimately revenues for businesses worldwide. SearchNetworking created this visual timeline that illustrates key events in the evolution of the 802.11 standard.

The enterprise products with disruptive potential for 2014
Innovation in productivity and collaboration applications have continued apace and I omitted most of them here, since I'll cover them separately in a future exploration. However, despite growing enthusiasm, I find that workers often don't do well with excessive novelty when it comes to their business applications. While there are many interesting new tools emerging all the time, most of them are likely to fade away as they fail to find an audience. Nevertheless, it's one of the more exciting areas, especially as the innovation level at the top end of the product space is more limited.

Contributions of Individual Programming Languages to Software Development
In this blog post, I look at the contributions of several different programming languages to our discipline. In most cases, the listed language was not the very first to introduce the concept or feature, but was the first to make it popular or "mainstream." The purpose of this post is NOT to state which programming language is best or why one is the best thing since sliced bread while another is the worse thing to ever happen to a software developer. I also don't cover markup "languages" such as XML or HTML in this post, though they obviously have had significant influence on software development.

3 Benefits of Mining POS Gold
When retailers were asked to name their best systems or operations decision in 2013, the top answer was focusing on mobile and traditional Point of Sale (POS). In the same 2014 Tech Spending Survey from Integrated Solutions for Retailers (ISR), POS hardware and software headed the list of projected planned investments for this year. Those results shouldn’t be surprising. Advanced POS technology now enables retailers to collect an array of granular data on customer activity and product sales. Putting this information to work can provide retailers with a critical strategic edge. Here are three areas where POS information can make a difference:

Even Good Employees Hoard Great Ideas
What most companies should focus on first is creating an environment, or a culture, that fosters innovation. For example, in the case of the employee wanting an NDA before sharing her idea, the underlying issue may not have been money, but rather commitment and trust. For some reason, this employee didn’t feel that part of her job was to help the company come up with new ways of working, and she wasn’t excited about helping the company improve; she was only innovating because it was good for her. At the same time, she didn’t trust her manager or colleagues to explore or implement her idea, because she was afraid that she wouldn’t be recognized for her contribution. Paying her for the idea likely wouldn’t resolve these issues; rather, it might reinforce them.

Satellite communication systems are rife with security flaws, vulnerable to hackers
"We uncovered what would appear to be multiple backdoors, hardcoded credentials, undocumented and/or insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms." "These vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to compromise the affected products," the researchers said. "In certain cases no user interaction is required to exploit the vulnerability; just sending a simple SMS or specially crafted message from one ship to another ship would be successful for some of the SATCOM systems."

Dark alleys ahead when SDN automation meets Internet of Things
For IoT to work, we'll have to turn our network security strategies upside down. Today's networks are unapologetically skeptical, even hostile. If someone wants bandwidth, if they intend to pass traffic, we place the burden on proof-of-policy compliance that involves the device, the user, or a contextual combination of the two. If we define an endpoint as a person/process, plus context, plus device, we find that we put enough hoops in place that it's relatively expensive for endpoints to add themselves to a network of their choosing. Today endpoints need sponsors.

Bart Perkins: How to keep projects on track
The problems didn't come out of nowhere, of course. But IT leadership can fix problems only if they're known. And problems that fester are more difficult to fix. Unfortunately, project staff can feel strong but subtle pressure to keep problems to themselves. They worry that they won't be perceived as team players if they report any concerns. Less experienced staff can feel an unfounded optimism that convinces them that the project team will be able to recover from missed deadlines by working harder. In the case of the Fortune 500 company cited above, all six failing projects had executive sponsors who were politically powerful and known to attack bearers of bad news. Nobody wanted to raise a red flag and admit that their project was in trouble.

'BYOS' Should Replace BYOD
Wearables take us to that next level of mobility: the fully connected life, where information is available anywhere, anytime. That's a serious concern for those of us who need to manage the BYOS world. If you think smartphones present challenges when it comes to management and security, what are we supposed to do when executives want to access corporate data from their connected cars? Almost half of Baby Boomers consider it vital to access the phone in the vehicle for business and applications, according to an IDC research report.

10 Top Information Security Threats for the Next Two Years
The information security threat landscape is constantly evolving. To help you navigate the terrain, each year the Internet Security Forum (ISF) -- a nonprofit association that assesses security and risk management issues on behalf of its members -- issues its Threat Horizon report to provide members with a forward-looking view of the biggest security threats over a two-year horizon. What follows are the 10 biggest threats on the horizon through 2016 that your organization may have to manage and mitigate, along with commentary from Steve Durbin, the ISF's global vice president.

Quote for the day:

"You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity." -- Thomas Wolfe

April 20, 2014

Data Governance for Regulated Industries
Securely and cost-effectively managing petabytes of data from siloed systems is both a threat and opportunity for banking, healthcare, and other organizations in highly regulated industries. Technology advancements and the changing economics of storage and compute have made it possible to leverage this data to do more far-reaching and sophisticated analysis. However, sweeping changes to privacy and transparency laws have heightened the importance of data governance.

Shiny Objects and the Senior Management Team
Effective management teams learn to recognize the signs of a breakdown in discipline and they redouble their efforts to promote clarity and minimize the tendency to fill ambiguity with unqualified activities. These groups recognize the dangers of hubris born of success (Jim Collins) or the tendency to flail in search of quick answers when things go wrong. They understand that they are accountable for setting direction and ensuring that each and every choice to apply company resources must create the right kind of value. And they accept that determining just what the right kind of value truly is, is an exercise that can only be resolved through debate and deliberation.

How to Detect Criminal Gangs Using Mobile Phone Data
Criminal networks are just as social as friendship or business networks. So the same techniques that can tease apart the links between our friends and colleagues should also work for thieves, drug dealers, and organized crime in general. But how would your ordinary law enforcement officer go about collecting and analyzing data in this way? Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Emilio Ferrara at Indiana University in Bloomington and a few pals. These guys have created a bespoke software platform that can bring together information from mobile phone records, from police databases and from the knowledge and expertise of agents themselves to recreate detailed networks behind criminal organizations.

Dynamic Generation of Client Proxy at Runtime in WCF using a Single Factory
In conventional method, if client proxy for a WCF service is required to be generated at runtime programmatically, an instance of ChannelFactory (generic type) is created passing the interface type of the service (contract) as parameter to the generic class. This requires different implementation for different services for generating client proxy which reduces the generic scope. This article describes a method to create a factory class which generates client proxy at runtime from the type of the service contract received as parameter. This will eliminate separate implementation requirement by using a single factory class with the help of .NET reflection.

The dilution of enterprise-architecture
SA is a job title used by systems integrators in the bid, and sometimes delivery phase. The person responsible for solution outline or high-level design. Must join everything up into a coherent solution architecture, identify and mitigate all manner of technical risks, with the delivery time and cost in mind. EA is a job title used by people for the manager, leader or member of a strategic and cross-organisational function, responsible for optimisation of the enterprise system estate. Often, the job is described as requiring engagement with senior executives and their strategies.

6 Top Information Governance Certifications: Don’t Have One? Well You Should
There are numerous information governance certifications you can get to advance your career. Depending on the professional value of each certification, how long it takes to complete it, the cost and the level of difficulty, some certifications might be more necessary for you than others. After learning more about your options, including the popular certifications below, you can be a better judge of what will suit your needs and professional goals.

Biometric identification that goes beyond finger prints
The past few years have seen a great biometric leap forward, as the saturation of smartphones and biotech advances have expanded the universe of potential biomarkers and applications. It's not just the iPhone 5's fingerprint sensors or Fujitsu's plan to embed a palm vein scanner into its mobiles. We're talking scanning the irises of all 1.2 billion Indians, as well as long-range iris scans, gait-recognition systems that use your smartphone's accelerometer to identify you while you pace, electrocardiogram wristbands rigged to open your door and, yes, the butt and body odor scans. Some applications raise amusing reliability questions: How effective would a body odor ID system be if you were to eat a lot of garlic or wear a new perfume?

The data platform for a new era
At the event we celebrated the launch of SQL Server 2014. With this version we now have in-memory capabilities across all data workloads delivering breakthrough performance for applications in throughput and latency. Our relational database in SQL Server has been handling data warehouse workloads in the terabytes to petabyte scale using in-memory columnar data management. With the release of SQL Server 2014, we have added in-memory Online Transaction Processing. In-memory technology has been allowing users to manipulate millions of records at the speed of thought, and scaling analytics solutions to billions of records in SQL Server Analysis Services.

Cisco and Microsoft SQL Server 2014
Cisco and Microsoft, with our strategic storage partners EMC and NetApp, have worked to create Cisco Validated Designs built on Microsoft reference architectures. All solutions and reference architectures are field tested and validated with a primary objective to help simplify implementation and the deployment of Microsoft SQL Server workloads on Cisco UCS. Our integrated infrastructures with our partner EMC are banded ‘VSPEX’ while our solutions with our partner NetApp are branded ‘FlexPod’. With the release of SQL Server 2014, our inventory of SQL Server solutions will grow as we bring to market in spring 2014 reference architectures to support consolidation and high availability scenarios.

Nashorn - The Combined Power of Java and JavaScript in JDK 8
Starting with the JDK 8 Nashorn replaces Rhino as Java’s embedded JavaScript engine. Nashorn supports the full ECMAScript 5.1 specification plus some extensions. It compiles JavaScript to Java bytecode using new language features based on JSR 292, including invokedynamic, that were introduced in JDK 7. This brings a 2 to 10x performance boost over the former Rhino implementation, although it is still somewhat short of V8, the engine inside Chrome and Node.js. If you are interested in details of the implementation you can have a look at these slides from the 2013 JVM Language Summit.

Quote for the day:

"When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven't." -- Thomas Edison

April 19, 2014

Apple's anti-Android Holy War gets real
Apple played it cool, massively increasing its R&D investments and scouting for new executive talent to help push things forward. (In the last 12-months Apple has managed to poach at least three CEOs; numerous CTO's and an army of experts in wearable, medical and sensor technologies.) The rejuvenated company is about to respond to the negativity with new products we can only speculate about and iPhone 6, which anyone in the know in the mobile biz already calls the only phone to be of "any importance" this year.

Three Things Missing from Most Enterprise Cloud Strategies
The core problem is that some things are missing in enterprise cloud computing strategies, and these things are often not addressed or understood until it’s too late. My lot in life lately has been getting on airplanes and explaining this to many organizations that find their cloud strategies dead in the water, typically because they overlooked some fundamentals. So, save yourself the plane fare. Here are three of the most overlooked items that go missing from most enterprise cloud computing strategies. As I explain them, count how many are missing within your own organization.

Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
"As a fast-paced, global business we continually align resources with business priorities," Nike spokesman Brian Strong said in an email. "As our Digital Sport priorities evolve, we expect to make changes within the team, and there will be a small number of layoffs. We do not comment on individual employment matters." The company informed members of the 70-person hardware team -- part of its larger, technology-focused Digital Sport division comprised of about 200 people -- of the job cuts Thursday. About 30 employees reside at Nike's Hong Kong offices, with the remainder of the team at Nike's Beaverton, Ore., headquarters.

The Big Data Approach to Telematics Insurance
The potential in Big Data can take the current UBI models to an altogether different level. A convergence of multiple data dimensions can now be cohesively collected, analyzed, and modeled to offer truly dynamic, accurate and predictive risk management frameworks for insurers that maximize the benefit for the consumers. Through Big Data, insurers can include in addition to a consumer's driving patterns as seen through accelerator data, turn data, braking data, etc. and demographic & credit history; data dimensions such as current weather conditions, road traffic patterns and conditions, condition of the automobile, etc.

Discover effective data protection
We’d like to thank you for registering by offering you a free chapter of the book, “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” (CRC Taylor & Francis) by noted IT industry veteran and Server StorageIO founder Greg Schulz. In this chapter, you’ll learn opportunities for protecting data in cloud, virtual, and data storage networks -- specifically on maintaining availability and accessibility of both active and inactive data. Download the chapter now.

5 considerations when choosing between a SaaS or on-premises
Adoption of software as a service (SaaS) is accelerating and many organizations are realizing the transformative benefits. A recent IBM study highlighted how leading organizations (Pacesetters) are leveraging SaaS deployments to unlock benefits such as reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), increased enterprise collaboration and enhanced market agility. Enterprise software vendors are realizing that deployment choice is a key consideration for prospects and often are offering both cloud and on-premises versions of their software suites. When faced with the choice of cloud-based or on-premises software deployments, many purchasing organizations continue to struggle with this decision.

The rise of big data brings tremendous possibilities and frightening perils
What is scary is that we will lose our privacy, opening the door to new types of crime and fraud. Governments and employers will gain more control over us, and have corporations reap greater profits from the information that we innocently handed over to them. More data and more computing will mean more money and power. Look at the advantage that bankers on Wall Street have already gained with high-frequency trading and how they are skimming billions of dollars from our financial system. We surely need stronger laws and technology protections. And we need to be aware of the perils. We must also realize that with our misdeeds, there will be nowhere to hide—not even in our past.

The U.S. Government Wants 6,000 New 'Cyberwarriors' by 2016
The Pentagon plans to triple its cybersecurity staff by 2016, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced recently. A few days later, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Charles Gilgen said at a conference on cybercrime that his agency’s cyber division plans to hire 1,000 agents and 1,000 analysts in the coming year. Just those two agencies are looking for 6,000 people with cybersecurity skills in the next two years. That’s a very tall order. A look at one way the government has tried to build and recruit such talent—offering university scholarships—shows why.

Can Facebook Innovate? A Conversation With Mark Zuckerberg
Well, so there are a bunch of things here. One thing is that Facebook Messenger is actually a really successful thing. More than 10 billion messages a day that flow through Facebook’s messaging products. But I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally. Messenger is more about chatting with friends and WhatsApp is like an SMS replacement. Those things sound similar, but when you go into the nuances of how people use it, they are both very big in different markets.

Twenty Years of Patterns’ Impact
Design patterns have helped narrow this gap by documenting a wellworking solution to a problem that occurs repeatedly in a given context. Instead of presenting a copyandpasteready code snippet, patterns discuss forces impacting the solution design. Examples of such forces are performance and security in Web applications: encryption and decryption algorithms improve security but introduce processing overhead. Ward Cunningham once described the best patterns as your older brother teaching you how to do something right.

Quote for the day:

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

April 18, 2014

Icehouse: New OpenStack cloud arrives
"Everyone we talk to wants cloud resources that let them move faster," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "The evolving maturation and refinement that we see in Icehouse make it possible for OpenStack users to support application developers with the services they need to develop, deploy, and iterate on apps at the speeds they need to remain competitive." Approximately 350 new features and 2,902 bug fixes were added this time. The main focus was on testing, maturity, and stability.

Data encryption, notification and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
As ubiquitous compromise and data theft raise urgent questions about adequate cybersecurity and risk management, are organizations doing enough to protect sensitive information? According to the2013 Global Encryption Trends Study sponsored by Thales e-Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, since 2005 more companies are investing in security programs that include enterprise-wide encryption strategies. Adoption of enterprise encryption strategies is highest in Germany, followed by the United States and Japan.

How to speak geek and influence nerds. Wait…what??
Not all creative marketing people are hipsters. In fact, a great many mature companies would avoid hiring firms that appear to be run by undisciplined cooler-than-thou "creatives." There's a tremendous amount of money at stake in marketing and marketing science is as important as artistic skills. ... Next, not all IT geeks are geniuses. Well, actually, that one is true. You're all friction' geniuses. Resolving driver conflicts, porting linux to anything with a display, configuring complex networks, prioritizing public vs. private cloud, and all the rest of the activities you do each day does show a level of smarts we shouldn't discount. Stipulated.

Turning the legal industry tanker around on cloud adoption
Despite adoption levels growing rapidly over the past few years, it is only recently that the legal sector has begun to give cloud services serious consideration. Due to the very nature of law firms, the storage of sensitive information in an external environment has naturally been met with some caution. While early-movers have been experimenting with cloud services for some time now, the majority of the sector has been hesitant to adopt until recently. In order to address the security and functionality concerns some firms still had, support and advice from respected industry bodies was needed.

Big Data Quality: Certify or Govern?
Big data is the catalyst. If you thought your data was challenging before, chaos and messiness takes on a whole other meaning with big data. Scale now forces us to rethink what we govern, how we govern, and yes, if we govern. This is to both better manage and govern process-wise, but it also drives us to ask the questions we didn't ask before. Questions about meeting expectations for data over meeting expectations to fit data into systems. What this means...orient data governance toward data certification.

IT security is national security -- but you're not alone
"If you don't have the support of the CEO, or the board, or the owners ... you will never get anything done. Period. It's amazing," Richey said. No technology alone can make up for attention to security at all levels of the organization, she said. "It's equally a business process problem," Richey said. "You have to be on it seven days a week, 24 hours a day," handling mundane tasks such as access controls, patches and passwords. Then there are those employees who just tend to lose things. "Some people shouldn't really be asked to protect anything," Richey said. If you're one of them, you should deliberately keep as little sensitive data as possible around you, she said.

Can you hear me now? NASA to test laser communication system
With lasercom, data is transmitted via laser beams; the technology potentially offers much higher data rates than the space agency is able to achieve with current radio frequency transmissions. "Optical communications have the potential to be a game-changer," said mission manager Matt Abrahamson, in a statement. "It's like upgrading from dial-up to DSL. Our ability to generate data has greatly outpaced our ability to downlink it. Imagine trying to download a movie at home over dial-up. It's essentially the same problem in space, whether we're talking about low-Earth orbit or deep space."

Exclusive: Google's Project Loon tests move to LTE band in Nevada
Loon is an ambitious attempt by Google to bring Internet access to vast swathes of the planet that currently have little or no connectivity. The project was unveiled last June, and Google said at the time it was experimenting with balloons flying around 20 kilometers (65,000 feet) above the Earth, using radio links in an unlicensed portion of the spectrum at around 2.4GHz. But in late September, Cyrus Behroozi, the head network engineer for Loon, quietly applied to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to test Loon across a large portion of Northern Nevada, in two chunks of radio spectrum that are used as a pair for 4G LTE services.

Mobile security: The battle beyond malware
Malware has received a lot of attention from the media and IT professionals alike, as it's a rather familiar foe. Android devices in particular have a reputation for vulnerability thanks to their ability to run applications delivered outside the Google Play store. Malicious actors have also come up with clever ways to bypass Google's security. Android malware dubbed BadNews was spotted in 32 Android apps available for download in Google Play last April. It circumvented Google's Bouncer server-side scanning and its local Verify Apps feature on Android devices because it was distributed to mobile devices "at a later date" via an ad network.

Connected devices will reach 6.5 times world population by 2020 (infographic)
This infographic looks at the growth of this internet of things and explores the barriers to its integration. The internet of things (IoT) is a concept first coined by Kevin Ashton, co-founder and executive director of the Auto-ID Centre at MIT, in 1999. As advanced technology can be packed into smaller and smaller spaces, chips and sensors can be added to all sorts of devices to track and measure data. This data can either be simply relayed back to users or can even trigger a device to take action. From smart home appliances to citywide infrastructure, the application of the internet of things knows no bounds – much like its forecasted growth.

Quote for the day:

"If you decide to go for it, do it with spirit: Sometimes success is due less to ability than to zeal. " -- Charles Buxton

April 17, 2014

A simple cure for the cybersecurity skills shortage
People constantly bemoan the dearth of skilled cybersecurity personnel, especially after a high-profile breach. And we hear a lot of proposals for fixing the problem: more certifications, more training, more research. All of these solutions amount to lobbying; they come from certification bodies, training companies and university researchers. I don't deny that those proposed solutions are useful for improving some aspect of cybersecurity knowledge, skills and abilities. But taken all together, they won't give you a skilled practitioner. They won't even give you a competent practitioner. The best of these suggestions might be certification, but not all certifications are created equal.

IT Leader or IT Manager? How to Be the Best of Both
"Once you've made your user interfaces as good as they can possibly be and eked out every last bit of operational efficiency from your processes, what do you have left? You have your people. You have your ability to inspire your employees to be engaged, productive and motivated," says Rajat Paharia, founder and chief product officer of Bunchball, a company that specializes in gamification. "Smart companies are figuring out that by tapping into this employee motivation, they have a sustainable, repeatable and efficient way to drive business results," Paharia says.

Enterprise Wearables Will Avoid BYOD Pitfalls
Wearables aren't just a consumer trend; they have the potential to change the way companies conduct business. Perpetually connected wearables will allow workers, partners, and customers to experience more immediacy, simplicity, and context in their work. Field workers and surgeons can do their jobs better while using hands-free smart glasses. Police departments know immediately if the gun lock on any individual firearm in the entire police force has been released via remote sensors. Across a long tail of wearable devices, new enterprise scenarios are emerging.

How a cyber cop patrols the underworld of e-commerce
When I initially joined Payza, I received in-depth training on how the company functions, and started in customer service. The Merchant Risk department is cross-trained in CS, Fraud, and Risk, which are vital to understanding how someone might try and take advantage of our system. However, as industries and trends are always evolving it’s important to keep up to date. Having good analytical skills, and a general curious nature is key to mitigating. That said, while it has prepared me for the reality of the job, I am still sometimes surprised at what you can find online. Some other skill sets that prove vital for this role are a good understanding of web technologies and a strong investigative drive.

The insatiable desire to control
Make no mistake. It will destroy you and your organization even while it parasitizes your values and harms the spirits of those who once willingly followed you, but who now trudge along like sheep going to slaughter. “Why aren’t our employees more innovative?” you exclaim, and the question “Why must I carry the burden of being all things to all people?” is keeping you up at night. You’re blind to it when it surfaces, this thing named control. Yet it makes you feel powerful. The desire to control will surface throughout your leadership career. The trick to keeping control at bay is be aware when it surfaces and to let go of it (this is the hard part) when it’s appropriate.

IBM Looks To The Cloud To Fight Disruption
It appears that IBM’s strategy could be working if today’s earnings report is any indication. Although as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm reported, the company’s overall revenue failed to meet investor’s expectations, there was a bright spot with cloud-related revenue up 50% and “the company indicating that on a run-rate basis, cloud-as-a-service is up to $2.3 billion per year, an increase of more than 100%.” Of course, IBM is hardly alone among big tech companies when it comes to making a push to the cloud. In fact, Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat, HP, Cisco, Google and others have all made big cloud announcements recently and it’s hardly a coincidence. The technology world is tilting and this requires these companies, including IBM, to adjust.

Why You Need A Chief Information Security Officer
CISO’s retain accountability and responsibility for the success of their information security program and provide the focus and strategic presence necessary for the program to achieve its objectives. By coordinating all information security activities under the guidance and leadership of a CISO, healthcare organizations can significantly improve their security posture while reducing the risk of issues not being effectively addressed. The role of the CISO is strategic and tactical while acting as a conduit between the clinical, business and IT operations. Accomplishing the mission of an information security program requires a CISO with strong leadership skills, executive presence, security knowledge and effective placement within the organization.

Building Individual and Organizational resilience
In leadership terms, we define resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of multiple changes while continuing to persevere toward strategic goals. In the current environment where change is the norm and time to bounce back between stressors is minimal at best, we, as leaders, need to think about how we manage our personal resilience and also how we support our organization in adapting to the changes it is facing. We break resilience into four primary categories: Maintain physical well-being; Manage thinking; Fulfill life purpose using emotional intelligence; and Harness the power of human connection

Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems: 4 Facts
Edson described Intelligent System as a cross-platform companion to Microsoft's recently-announced Windows for IoT platform, a statement that seems to reaffirm that Azure has become more important than Windows to Microsoft's future. The same engineering team works on both products, she said, but "we're a cross-platform company. This is a cloud-first strategy: Connect to any device, anywhere, get data off that device." With Windows for IoT, "we want developers to know Windows will play in that space," Edson said. "But at the same time, we also realize you are going to have devices on Linux or whatever, and we need to work with that."

Google algorithm busts CAPTCHA with 99.8 percent accuracy
The algorithm developed by Google researchers is being used by its Street View team to improve Google Maps, by helping to recognising characters in natural or blurry images — for example, the house numbers captured by the Street View cars in the course of gathering imagery for the mapping service. According to the company, the algorithm can now accurately recognise 90 percent of street numbers, meaning Google Maps users looking for a particular building are likely to get a more specific result. But, given the nature of that challenge, it turns out that the algorithm is also well-suited to solving CAPTCHA puzzles designed to fox spammers using bots for services like Gmail.

Quote for the day:

"Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who will never find out." -- Frank A. Clark

April 16, 2014

The road to the 60TB hard drive
While capacity on hard disk drives has been doubling every 12 to 18 months -- faster than Moore's Law and integrated circuits -- there is a coming sea change that will drive the capacity up 10-fold, according to hard drive maker Seagate. While that is remarkable, past changes and recent technology breakthroughs have led us to today's 6TB data center drives and 4TB desktop drives. Data storage is among the few techological advances that has actually surpassed our current needs.

Linux is about to take over the desktop but not like you think it will
For years I've heard that year X is the year of the Linux desktop and I've always scoffed at it. I scoffed because it's ridiculous to think that Linux or Mac OS X or anything could supplant Windows on the desktop. That is until now. And don't get me wrong, it won't happen for at least another year in businesses but for personal computing and BYOD, it's already happening. The Linux that's taking over the desktop is called the Chrome OS and it will happen on the Chromebook device.

CIOs should prepare for the battle between old BI and new BI
At MicroStrategy Inc., former COO and co-founder Sanju Bansal left in 2013 only to resurface at startup Hunch Analytics. SAP also signaled a new strategy in 2013, announcing a research-and-development shift away from traditional BI to "advanced analysis and agile visualization." Sommer expects the clash between old BI and new BI to continue. The way he sees it, three tipping points will eventually push the BI and analytics practice out of silos and across the enterprise. In their wake, both the BI and analytics market and the role of IT role will look different.

The Limits of Social Engineering
Deciphering people’s behavior is only the first step. What really excites Pentland is the prospect of using digital media and related tools to change people’s behavior, to motivate groups and individuals to act in more productive and responsible ways. If people react predictably to social influences, then governments and businesses can use computers to develop and deliver carefully tailored incentives, such as messages of praise or small cash payments, to “tune” the flows of influence in a group and thereby modify the habits of its members. Beyond improving the efficiency of transit and health-care systems, Pentland suggests, group-based incentive programs can make communities more harmonious and creative.

Smartphone Kill Switches Coming, But Critics Cry Foul
New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman and San Francisco district attorney George Gascón, the two officials who have led the charge for improved mobile device security, welcomed CTIA's response but said it falls short of what's necessary to fight rampant cellphone theft. "We strongly urge CTIA and its members to make their anti-theft features enabled by default on all devices, rather than relying on consumers to opt-in," said Schneiderman and Gascón in a joint statement. "The industry also has a responsibility to protect its consumers now and not wait until next year."

Predictive tech is getting smarter and more pervasive — but more controversial, too
“While we are still a long way off from building the omniscient Star Trek computer, the technology is getting better at a surprisingly fast rate,” Tuttle said. “It will start with special-purpose intelligent assistants that let you easily find information you need in specific domains. For example, if you work in sales support, you will likely rely on an intelligent assistant that understands your entire product catalog.” We’ll likely see plenty more predictive-focused products and services soon. Google Now has been a big success on Android; there are a slew of “smart” calendar apps out there trying to make sense of your schedule;

How GE Plans to Act Like a Startup and Crowdsource Breakthrough Ideas
It was a triumph of crowdsourcing—for a nominal price, GE used the knowledge of someone they would have never otherwise met to innovate its way out a design problem. It was also a proof of concept for the engineering behemoth’s new innovation strategy. Under Immelt, GE has invested a sizable chunk of its annual $6 billion R&D funds into taking advantage of a simple, internet-enabled truth: Now, more than ever, it’s possible to connect with people around the world, so why not take advantage of that to solve some engineering problems?

CIOs to Become In-House Brokers -- and That's a Good Thing
The idea of IT as a brokerage is just one aspect of the emerging role of the new CIO, one that looks more like a consultancy to the business rather than the keeper and controller of all things technical. In their new role, CIOs will lose a chunk of their budget. They'll no longer drive initiatives to adopt innovative technology. They'll be asked to maintain legacy systems, in addition to building skills in cloud services and system integration. ... "Successful IT leadership of the future is less about control and more about how you add value to the business," says CIO Chris Miller at Avanade. "We're trading control for new responsibilities."

Hackonomics: Street prices for black market bugs
As RAND explained, the black market for cybercrime, once a "varied landscape of discrete, ad hoc networks of individuals motivated by ego and notoriety, has now become a burgeoning powerhouse of highly organized groups, often connected with traditional crime groups (e.g., drug cartels, mafias, terrorist cells) and nation-states." Perhaps the drug trade analogy works in some aspects of RAND's report, published three weeks ago. However, a better analogy may be found in comparing the global black "cyber" market — and its compelling profitability — to the global market for arms trading, or IP and trade secrets.

Whitelisting: Filtering for advanced malware prevention
The whitelisting filtering approach can be used in every technology area an enterprise uses today. Specific types include application whitelisting, email whitelisting and network whitelisting. With advanced malware attacks increasing and evolving every day, it's a continuous challenge for enterprises to detect them or, ideally, prevent them. Therefore, whitelisting technology can stand out as a choice for an organization looking to add a solid defense layer against evolving threats, particularly zero-day attacks that endpoint antimalware products frequently fail to detect.

Quote for the day:

"It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test." -- Lou Holtz

April 15, 2014

DRaaS pricing lifts the burden of backup responsibilities
Disaster recovery is a topic as old as data centers themselves, but emerging technologies and applications are giving it new life. In particular, disaster recovery as a service, based in the cloud, enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to protect their IT infrastructure without breaking the bank. That's the focus of this month's Modern Infrastructure cover story, which explores the benefits of DR in the cloud, or DRaaS. DR sites used to be reserved for only deep-pocketed companies and IT teams, but the cloud has been a great equalizer when it comes to disaster recovery.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) @ J.P. Morgan
Before the adoption of LeSS the teams in Securities were under mandate to adopt certain core building block components. For example all datastore interaction utilised an internal proprietary framework which abstracted the application tier from datastore specific functionality. This API layer was private code owned by a central team. The result was that if any team found a bug or needed a change they would need to persuade the central team to prioritise the work and wait (often, a long time) for the next release cycle. But, after adopting LeSS with feature teams and a more internal open source or collective code ownership approach, a more progressive stance was adopted.

Boom time for digital technologies as CEOs make IT investment top priority for 2014
"If you look at that period from 2003 - 2008, the five year economic boom period before we have a crash, at that point the talk was about offshoring, outsourcing and ERP standardisation projects. In that boom period IT in the business was generally being kept under control, put a lid on, even cut. "There was a sense that IT was a hygiene factor. That you needed to have it but it wasn't differentiating. People had bought into the idea that IT was something of a commodity, that's why we did all that offshoring and outsourcing.

Making room for risk in high-performing companies
Chobani, a relative newcomer in the yogurt industry, is a prime example of differentiation through disruption. One of Chobani’s innovations is a manufacturing process that involves recycling a whey byproduct as supplemental feed for its local farms. This helps foster sustainability as part of a commitment to the environment and the communities Chobani serves. Over time, many growing enterprises will seek to derive more value from their existing systems. This is where the process improvement journey begins. But once those processes are in place, many businesses lose room to maneuver.

Developer Details How He Built Software-Defined Networking App
Pearce, a veteran of 20 years of programming communications and networking technology, has primarily used C++ and C and admitted he didn't have a lot of experience with Java, required for the SDN programming. Pearce particularly noted he had some difficulty using the Maven project management tool, with which he had little experience. He encountered many challenges along the way, he said, but was able to produce a functioning example app on time, with help from some friends more experienced in the technology to smooth over the rough spots.

Farm machines produce privacy concerns, guidelines underway
"Virtually every company says it will never share, sell or use the data in a market-distorting way--but we would rather verify than trust," farmer Brian Marshall of the AFBF told the U.S. House Committee on Small Business in February (as reported in a post in AgProfessional). "The data would be a gold mine to traders in commodity markets and could influence farmland values," writes Karl Plume at Reuters. "While there are no documented instances so far of data being misused, lengthy contracts packed with open-ended language and differing from one supplier to the next are fueling mistrust."

Why Your Resident Loudmouth is a Big Asset
Expressive employees are your best secret weapon. They are natural leaders and passionate about improvement. So, enlist their help. Put them in charge of committees, seek their advice, and use their insights to make your company better. You will probably find that they start becoming less of a loudmouth as you treat them differently. After all, the best way to make someone stop pushing so hard is to remove the force of resistance. While opinionated and confident employees’ methods can sometimes be problematic, their intentions are often good.

New cloud service uses big data sources to improve emergency response
A platform like TIES can help to make the escalating explosion of online information more useful, Dodge said. "The problem with intelligence is that, 10 years ago, there wasn't enough to make good decisions. Now there is too much information," he said, adding that TIES allows users to take data, pull it into one location and then act on it. "What would have once taken hours and multiple people sorting through multiple sources to find vital information can now be done by a single analyst to put together a security or response plan to address top threats," he said.

USB Type-C: Simpler, faster and more powerful
In fact, the upcoming Type-C plug just might end up being the one plug to rule them all: A single USB connector that links everything from a PC's keyboard and mouse to external storage devices and displays. "The Type-C plug is a big step forward," says Jeff Ravencraft, chairman of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the organization that oversees the USB standard. "It might be confusing at first during the transition, but the Type-C plug could greatly simplify things over time by consolidating and replacing the larger USB connectors."

SparkCognition: Let machines address security threats
According to Husain, the MindSpark platform is built on patent-pending Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning techniques that enable cognitive capability. He pointed out that MindSpark — when exposed to security data — finds patterns of attack, identifies vectors, models attacker behavior, and much more. Husain also said that MindSpark aggregates its learning at a faster pace than any human or legacy software system. What it learns — the statistics models and base operational data — is offered as a cloud service.

Quote for the day:

"Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." -- Satchel Paige