Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 25, 2014

Decomposing Applications for Deployability and Scalability
One way to think about microservice architecture is that it’s SOA without the commercialization and perceived baggage of WS* and ESB. Despite not being an entirely novel idea, the microservice architecture is still worthy of discussion since it is different than traditional SOA and, more importantly, it solves many of the problems that many organizations currently suffer from. In this article, you will learn about the motivations for using the microservice architecture and how it compares with the more traditional, monolithic architecture. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of microservices. You will learn how to solve some of the key technical challenges with using the microservice architecture including inter-service communication and distributed data management.

10 things statistics taught us about big data analysis
Many cool ideas in applied statistics are really relevant for big data analysis. So I thought I'd try to answer the second question in my previous post: "When thinking about the big data era, what are some statistical ideas we've already figured out?" Because the internet loves top 10 lists I came up with 10, but there are more if people find this interesting. Obviously mileage may vary with these recommendations, but I think they are generally not a bad idea.

Facebook Moves to Stop Over-Sharing
Now, though, new accounts will be automatically set to only share with friends. The user can then change that if they want to. Facebook also said it plans to remind current users that they may want to rethink who can see their posts. "For people already on Facebook, we've also received the feedback that they are sometimes worried about sharing something by accident, or sharing with the wrong audience," Facebook noted. "Over the next few weeks, we'll start rolling out a new and expanded privacy checkup tool, which will take people through a few steps to review things like who they're posting to, which apps they use, and the privacy of key pieces of information on their profile."

Why a medical doctor decided to join IBM Research
With the number of examinations and tests increasing dramatically from year to year, and the number of MDs specializing in radiology going down, we need to help radiologists work with greater volumes while maintaining diagnostic quality and accuracy. The use of imaging will become ever more critical as the use of smart contrast materials becomes more popular in diagnosis. For example, if we see a shadow in the lungs, we can’t always differentiate between an infection and a growth. With more accurate visual aids and smarter materials, we’ll be able to get a more accurate diagnosis without doing a biopsy.

Deploying SQL Server 2014 with Cluster Shared Volumes
With traditional cluster storage, each SQL instance requires a separate LUN to be carved out. This because the LUN would need to failover with the SQL instance. CSV allows nodes in the cluster to have shared access to storage. This facilitates the consolidation of SQL instances by storing multiple SQL instances on a single CSV. Consolidating multiple SQL instances on a single LUN makes the storage utilization more efficient. Traditionally, the number of SQL instances that can be deployed on a cluster is limited to the number of drive letters (24 excluding the system drive and a drive for a peripheral device). There is no limit to the number of mount points for a CSV. Therefore, scalability of your SQL deployment is enhanced.

Will Intel Corporation’s Moorefield Be a Game Changer?
Intel's Moorefield looks pretty good from a CPU and graphics performance perspective, and it will likely be quite competitive with the best from Qualcomm on those fronts. However, when it comes to imaging performance, the Qualcomm and NVIDIA chips handily outpace the Intel processor. The good news is that Intel has its graphics and CPU performance/power stories down pat (something that bears usually cite as an Intel weaknesses in mobile), but the bad news is that Moorefield still isn't quite best in class when all vectors are considered. The relatively poor imaging performance will limit Moorefield's penetration in higher-end smartphones, but shouldn't be a hindrance in cellular-enabled Android tablets.

Can Predictive Analytics Prevent Mischief In Corporate Finance?
If startup Aviso has their way, sprawling corporate enterprises will turn to analytics dashboards and application programming interfaces (APIs) to handle their financial metrics. The company, which just left exited stealth mode last month, is backed by $8 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures, Bloomberg BETA, and several other investors. Their goal? Creating a dashboard that lets large companies understand their finances in real time--before quarterly reports are issued. K.V. Rao, the service’s cofounder and CEO, is best known for being the brains behind enterprise automation firm Zuora. During a phone conversation, he told me that Aviso’s mission statement is to “democratize quant science for the enterprise”

These 3 hot new trends in storage will blow your mind! Okay, maybe not quite. (2/2)
There were some rumblings in the Twittersphere about how knowing your competitor and not hiding them behind “Competitor A” or the like was invoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). And while it is a conservative, and acceptable, option not to name a competitor if you have a lot of them–Veeam chose this path in their comparisons, for example–that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically deceptive to give a fair and informed comparison within your competitive market. If Dave Wright had gone in front of the delegates and told us how bad all the competitors were and why they couldn’t do anything ri

Data Modeling in Graph Databases
Data modelling consists of using the property graph primitives — nodes, relationships, properties and labels to build an application-specific graph data model that allows us to easily express the questions we want to ask of that application's domain. When building an application with Neo4j, we typically employ a multi-step process, which starts with a description of the problem we're trying to solve and ends with the queries we want to execute against an application-specific graph data model. This process can be applied in an iterative and incremental manner to build a data model that evolves in step with the iterative and incremental development of the rest of the application.

Enterprise Architecture & Avoiding tunnel vision
What I mean by “Tunnel Vision” is that the architect only looks at what is right in front of him/her (e.g.: The current task/project) , and does not consider the implications of how the decisions being made for this task may impact the wider I.T infrastructure and customer from a commercial / operational perspective. In my previous role I saw this all to often, and it was frustrating to know the solutions being designed and delivered to the customers were in some cases quite well designed when considered in isolation, but when taking into account the “Big Picture” (or what I would describe as the customers overall requirements) the solutions were adding unnecessary complexity, adding risk and increasing costs, when new solutions should be doing the exact opposite.

Quote for the day:

“Leaders who won't own failures become failures.” -- Orrin Woodward

May 24, 2014

WCF Routing Service - Part I: Basic Concept, Simple Routing Service & Content-based Routing
The Routing Service is a generic SOAP intermediary that acts as a router. The core functionality of the Routing Service is the ability to route incoming messages based on message content (in either the header or the message body) to the actual services hosted in the same machine as the Router Service or distributed across the network. Actually Routing Service acts as a front-end service that mirrors the target service(s). The main benefit of theRouting Service is to provide location transparency to the client (application) because the client is explicitly decoupled from knowing anything about the actual services that will actually perform tasks on its behalf.

Government to help UK business get cyber security basics right
“The Cyber Essentials Scheme (CES), aimed at raising the bar, which we assess to be pretty low,” said Giles Smith, deputy director, cyber security at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). The scheme is set to be launched on 5 June, he told a seminar on cyber risks and opportunities hosted by law firm Sidley Austin and the Association of British Insurers in London. “The role of BIS within the national cyber security strategy is to enable growth by helping UK businesses to operate safely in cyberspace,” said Smith. To do this, he said, businesses need to embed cyber security in corporate governance processes, treating it like any other business risk, and establish confidence that the basic controls are in place.

Digital collaboration goes deeper, gets lightweight and intelligent
The pace of innovation in digital collaboration itself appears to remain unabated. The number of e-mails I get about new collaborative tools for the enterprise even today is astonishing. While I will share a list of the most promising ones here soon, there is no let up in sight, even though most of these products will not succeed. In reality, most companies will end up choosing relatively mature offerings, from a short list of each of the types of tools outlined in the main figure above. These include file sync and sharing, content/document management, chat, SMS, instant messaging, teleconferencing (including voice, video, and Web), legacy groupware, wikis, blogs, enterprise social networks, and some specialty outlier tools.

Dazed and Confused About Big Data
Big data sources can reveal vital information for every aspect of the business. But first, organizations have to gain a better understanding of what "big data" is and why it might matter for business insight. Research firm Gartner has introduced 12 dimensions to clarify the many aspects of the confusing world of big data. Instead of "big data", Gartner opts for Extreme Information Management, to reflect the diversity of data formats that can be considered "big data". The various dimensions underscore the reality that "big data" isn't just one thing and isn't just 'lots of data'. Approaching big data through different dimensions can help companies understand whether or not big data holds any value for their business needs, and where their most valuable big data may reside.

Wireless Power from Across the Room
Energous is the latest in a long line of companies fixated on the idea that life would be easier if we didn’t have so many wires and gadgets to plug in. Yet many of the wireless charging products that have come to market have relied on special charging mats that juice up devices at a short distance, and they’re still not that popular with consumers. “There’s not very many people that want to take their phone and go leave it somewhere while it charges,” Energous CEO Stephen Rizzone argues. “If they’re going to leave it somewhere while it charges, they’re going to plug it into a wall.” The most common wireless-charging technology currently available is magnetic induction, which uses coils to transfer power over small distances via a magnetic field. This is the method used to recharge electric toothbrushes, for example.

eBay Demonstrates How Not to Respond to a Huge Data Breach
Eva Velasquez of the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center compares the incident to the far-more-visible breach of Target last December. “Our phone lines were blowing up with people calling about the Target breach asking what to do,” she says. “This week, it’s been very quiet here.” Those serial acts of miscommunication signal that eBay, despite its role as one of the biggest ecommerce companies on the planet, may not have had a disclosure plan in place for the possibility of a breach. “For a company like eBay, this is one of the first tabletop exercises I’d ever do in an organization,” says data breach consultant Kennedy. “They’re all over the place and don’t seem to have prepared at all.”

Researchers find a global botnet of infected PoS systems
According to IntelCrawler, the Nemanja botnet included 1,478 infected systems in countries on most continents including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, Russia, Brazil and Mexico. An analysis of the Nemanja botnet revealed that the compromised systems were running a wide variety of PoS, grocery store management and accounting software that is popular in different countries. The IntelCrawler researchers identified at least 25 different such software programs used on those systems. This doesn't mean that the identified applications are particularly vulnerable or insecure for further use, but shows that the Nemanja PoS malware was designed to work with different software.

Fun with Unicode
All Unicode code points can be encoded in either of the 2 standard encoding formats: UTF16 and UTF8. UTF16 are mostly double byte encoding (except for surrogate pairs). The encoding for U+222B is hexadecimal 22 2B if the byte ordering is Big endian and hexadecimal 2B 22 if the ordering is Little endian. For encoding Unicode code points outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane, 2 sets of 4 hexadecimal numbers are used. See Surrogate Support in Microsoft Products for more details on how to do the encoding. UTF8 is an encoding standard that uses 1 or more bytes to encode each Unicode code point.

SAP mobile chief details market strategy & tactics
There are many challenges here including device OS versions and hardware choices. Most enterprises are eager to move to the cloud, but one of the top concerns is security and the related concern of privacy. A single security flaw can be cause significant damage to an organisation. Think about the issue of BYOD that has already pushed enterprises to confront the topic of security, and we know the next logical step is bring your own anything (BYOx) which raises a number of additional issues such as agility, compliance, complexity of app development, and integration across platforms and backend systems.

Kenya: Overcoming Challenges of the National Digital Register
The Consumer Federation of Kenya (Cofek) a body looking at the welfare of consumers, added its voice to the on-going debate about the project: “Kenyans have not been told what exactly went wrong with a similar project where the IEBC was not too lucky with the Biometric Voter Register (BVR) after registering over 14 million people,” Cofek said in a statement. “Public trust level in such projects is fairly low given the unmet pledges on new generation IDs and security passports. Registering voters is anchored on different legislations as compared with registration of persons. The formats could also slightly vary.”

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

May 23, 2014

Different approaches to BYOD policies are recipe for success
Different approaches must be taken in part because of different laws. For example, Germany laws don't allow EnBW, an electrical utilities company there, to lock onto a device with full MDM. Instead, the company started a BYOD approach focused solely on MAM, according to Boris Schroeder, team lead for IT mobile solutions for EnBW. "We just want to take control of the applications we deliver and what the content of the applications is," said Schroeder. As part of that approach, EnBW recently pushed out its first Citrix Worx Home application, Worx Mail, which connects to its Microsoft Outlook email.

Strategy or Culture: Which Is More Important?
Strategy must be rooted in the cultural strengths you have and the cultural needs of your businesses. If culture is hard to change, which it is, then strategy is too. Both take years to build; both take years to change. This is one of the many reasons that established companies struggle with big disruptions in their markets. For example, all the major credit card companies are seeking to transition from traditional payments to digital commerce. This shift in strategy will be difficult to pull off. It not only requires a cultural change, but also a change in companies’ target customer, value propositions, and essential capabilities—the three most fundamental choices a business strategy comprises!

Promising a privacy-friendly successor to today’s internet
A more fundamental problem is the shift to mobile. It’s all very well for a PC user to leave their machine on 24/7 in order to earn as many safecoins as they can, but you simply can’t do that with today’s mobile technology and data pricing. The connections and local processing power can probably handle it, but the batteries can’t – there’s a reason phones are forever going to sleep – and data usage caps are too restrictive. Down the line these things may change, but for now they mean mobile users are only theoretical consumers, not contributors. MaidSafe could pin basic access to the possession of safecoins, but those will be scarce in the early days. It’s a fine line to walk.

Business Adapts to a New Style of Computer
The technology industry is preparing for the Internet of things, a type of computing characterized by small, often dumb, usually unseen computers attached to objects. These devices sense and transmit data about the environment or offer new means of controlling it. For more than a decade technologists have predicted and argued about the onslaught of these ubiquitous devices. “There is lot of quibbling about what to call it, but there’s little doubt that we’re seeing the inklings of a new class of computer,” says David Blaauw, who leads a lab at the University of Michigan that makes functioning computers no bigger than a typed letter o.

Money and Government in the Virtual World
In a way, Bitcoin is a business intelligence maven’s dream come true. You can actually mine money directly on your computer, and the process is even referred to as “mining Bitcoins.” To get into the game, you must participate in the Bitcoin network and contribute compute power to solve a cryptography problem that protects the integrity and the chronological order of the transaction chain, mainly finding the key that matches a hash number accompanying a collection of transactions.

Control Without Compromise Through Superior Data Center Protection
A key challenge is that many of today’s security solutions are simply not designed for the data center, with limitations in both provisioning and performance. The situation will likely get worse before it gets better as data center traffic grows exponentially and data centers migrate from physical, to virtual, to next-generation environments like Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Application Centric Infrastructures (ACI). To deliver the protection data center administrators need – without compromising the performance and functionality that these new data center environments enable – intelligent cybersecurity solutions must address five critical issues:

Coming soon to a fridge near you -- targeted ads
The Federal Trade Commission has acknowledged the need for a closer inspection of the potential security and privacy implications of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). "Consumers already are able to use their mobile phones to open their car doors, turn off their home lights, adjust their thermostats, and have their vital signs, such as blood pressure, EKG, and blood sugar levels, remotely monitored by their physicians," the FTC noted last November while convening a workshop on IoT privacy and security issues. "In the not-too-distant future, consumers approaching a grocery store might receive messages from their refrigerator reminding them that they are running out of milk," the FTC said.

Why Banks Still Struggle with Big Data
"The challenge is that banks have these silos of info, so your deposit data isn't necessarily in the same place as your loan data.... The inside information is so extraordinarily valuable from a marketing and communications standpoint, and yet they don't use it." "Overall for banks, especially the midsize and smaller banks, there are so many things on the table that the prioritization of what they should do next gets blurred." "The bigger banks are using digital information, and it's a very big concern to make sure they don't break any privacy rules or perceived privacy rules....

Healthcare data goes from big to great
Today, with the advent of "text analytics," organizations like Highmark can make sense of vast stores of unstructured data, not just information entered in a discrete format. (Pitts called this the "bag of words" method.) According to Pitts, computers now can look for "term concurrence" across multiple documents to search out patterns, such as evidence of patient dissatisfaction, according to Pitts, so people don't have to flip through hundreds of pages in hopes of stumbling across something meaningful. "Have machines find things," he said.

Exchanging Industry Experiences with Agile Methodologies
Becoming Agile is no excuse for doing no or bad project management. On the contrary, Agile teams do more and more frequent planning than a lot of traditional teams but in a different way. Agile planning focusses much more on the outcome (value) for the customer and how to deliver and track that. And also output is measured in terms of how much working and ‘done’ product is delivered instead of the percentage of work or effort that is done. In general Agile project management switches to real measurements of done product instead of estimates as soon as possible and makes risks and uncertainty explicit in the planning.

Quote for the day:

"The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more" -- Erica Jong

May 22, 2014

Oracle set to launch in-memory database option
The in-memory option will speed up both analytic and transaction processing workloads, Oracle has said. In-memory databases place information in RAM, rather than reading it off of slower disk storage, providing those performance gains. Oracle has had in-memory technology for years, such as TimesTen, but hasn't made the approach a central part of its database strategy until now. During Oracle's third-quarter earnings call in March, Ellison said the in-memory option could be launched as late as August, but the webcast's timing could indicate the company's development teams are ahead of schedule.A

Enterprise architects: Give them a bigger role in smaller firms
Misconceptions about the place of an enterprise architecture in smaller companies may also be down to much of the literature and research on the subject. "Most of what you read about enterprise architecture speaks to larger organisations and makes assumptions about the resources that they're able to commit," Burke said. "So small businesses need to be both realistic and selective about where they are going to focus their energy, because even large organisations struggle with building a full-out enterprise architecture." Burke said maturity in this area across organisations in general is relatively low.

Is it really a tech bubble, or is it something else?
People dislike Uber, not because some founder is going to become a billionaire; the discontent comes from the visible disparity between those who have it and those who don’t. Google buses get rocks and eggs thrown at them mostly because they are a reminder of digital feudalism. As an industry, we are very fortunate; and that is why it is important to remember why we need to have compassion and understanding about the fears of the rest of the world. We need to remember that our actions now intersect and influence those who are not of our industry. Trying to be in their shoes isn’t a bad place to start.

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers
The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. ... Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

Internet of Everything in the Public Sector: Generating Value in an Era of Change
IoE brings these elements together through standards-based IP networks, and Cisco projects that it will generate a staggering $19 trillion in value over the next 10 years. Public sector organizations can capture as much as $4.6 trillion of this Value at Stake (http://bit.ly/1aSGIzn). Already, some forward-thinking organizations — federal, state, and local governments; healthcare organizations; educational institutions; utilities; and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — are seizing the opportunity. They are using IoE-enabled solutions to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and, most important, improve the lives of citizens.

Hyperconvergence on the horizon for enterprises
Enterprise cloud computing is finally becoming more enterprise-focused. IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer signaled their entry into the enterprise cloud market, offering a bare-metal option that's firmly directed toward businesses. They're competing with Amazon, though not on price, says SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby; instead, it's their "enterprise-y" approach that marks IBM's renewed cloud efforts. Senior news writer Beth Pariseau discusses her interview with Crosby and his take on the cloud computing market in this installment of the Modern Infrastructure podcast, along with discussing who might turn out to be Amazon's closest rival.

American Express CEO Ken Chenault: 'There's a $25 trillion opportunity'
Here's what's key. If we look at how mobile devices are used, people who use mobile devices in the shoppers' journey are 40% more likely to convert to sales. Think about how people use information, how they leverage recommendations they get from social media sites. The key is to understand the different elements of the commerce journey. We want to be where our customers are. We want to deliver them benefits in the way they want to have those benefits presented to them. It goes back to a key message I give in my organization: This is an environment where you innovate or die. We want to be the company that will put us out of business.

Sizing Up Candidates for Cultural Fit Throughout the Hiring Process
The onboarding process is a time to ensure new hires receive the training and education needed for them to get up to speed, but it’s also the perfect time to stress the company’s cultural values. Folding a mentorship program into onboarding efforts can be a great way to connect new hires more fully to their co-workers and the company culture at large. Depending on the company and the staff, mentors might need to receive incentives. After all, mentoring a new hire is no small feat, so bonuses like extra vacation days, financial incentives and even free lunches can sweeten the pot. Great mentors can not only get new employees up to speed faster. They can also give new hires an on-the-ground perspective of how the company culture plays out in everyday office life.

Big banks' legacy IT systems could kill them
Sam Woods, a director in the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, recently told an investigation into banking IT disasters that UK bank IT systems are far from robust. “I feel we are a very long away from being able to sit here with confidence and say the UK banks' IT systems are robust,” Woods told the committee at a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster. Computer Weekly’s senior banking source agrees. “I think all banks have similar risks but RBS has suffered more than most. There is a fine between being just OK and just not OK," he says. "The pressure on cost after 2008 has been significant and firms are also having to pay out large fines, compensation or cover trading losses, which does not help.

Restify and Mobilize Your Data
We examine two technologies that significantly reduce time to market. Executable Schema(builds on MDD and Convention over Configuration) creates a RESTful API and multi-table UI from existing schemas - literally in minutes. Declarative Behavior for logic and security bring spreadsheet-like power and simplicity - backed up by a fully programmable JavaScript model. In this piece, we’ll briefly review existing key technologies, to build on their advances and to benefit from lessons learned in the marketplace. We’ll then provide specifics for Executable Schema and Declarative Behavior.

Quote for the day:

"It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." -- Isaac Asimov

May 21, 2014

CFOs get schooled on hope and hype of big data analytics
How many chiefs does it take to invest in big data? If you haven't already, it's time to add CFOs to that list. "We used to see big data as a CIO-IT cost consolidation problem. In fact, the debate has completely shifted. It's all about revenue, growth and enhancement," said Jo Tango, co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Kepha Partners. "I would argue [that], in the big data age, CFOs have even more power and leverage as the people who write checks."

Reactive Cloud Actors: An Evolvable Web of Events
In case of a Reactive actors, the sender simply publishes an event signifying the business process accomplished and other actors choose to subscribe to such events and perform their actions. In this case, actors can evolve independently and business processes modified with only change to a single or a handful of actors. This results in higher level of decoupling and is a good fit for developing both analytics and transactional systems on the horizontal scale provided by the cloud. Implementations of Reactive Actors already exist in the industry. Fred George's body of work on Reactive MicroServices is a prime example. Amazon Kinesis can be viewed as a coarsely granular Reactive Actor framework.

Security's future belongs to open source
The proof that open source, properly applied, is available. Studies, such as the one recently done by Coverity, have found that open-source programs have fewer errors per thousand lines of code than its proprietary brothers. And, it's hard to ignore the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the group within the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that assesses operating systems and software for security issues, when they said that that while no end-user operating system is as secure as they'd like it to be, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most secure desktop. On the other hand, the mere existence of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday says everything most of us need to know about how "secure" proprietary software is.

Top Initiatives to Improve IT
Management consultancy McKinsey & Co. surveyed business executives from across functions to find out their attitudes about IT. One question asked what initiatives would be most important to improving IT performance. More than 738 executives responded, and the results were published in late March. McKinsey’s takeaway: “Surprisingly, more IT executives than business leaders see changing IT leadership as a priority to improve IT performance.” Here are McKinsey’s top nine initiatives to improve IT performance based on the results.

How To Fix Windows Server Network Performance Problems
More often than not, the network performance problems are the result of a Windows security feature. By default, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 digitally sign SMB packets. This digital signature helps to protect against spoofing, but it adds some overhead to the traffic stream. You can get rid of this overhead and improve performance by disabling the SMB packet signing feature. Keep in mind however, that disabling SMB signing does reduce security, so you should only use this fix if you are experiencing disruptive performance or reliability problems.

Businesses increase IT spending at fastest rate for eight years, say IT leaders
The survey shows that after five years of cost cutting, CIOs' number one priority has shifted to providing their business with an efficient IT service.Two-thirds of IT leaders are prioritising projects that make money for the business in an indication that more companies are focusing on investment in IT for growth rather than to save money. And more CIOs are more optimistic that their IT budgets will continue to grow than at any time since the survey began in 2005, with some 44% expecting more budget increases next year, the research revealed.

AT&T hacker wants government to pay him $13M
"I want history to record that I made an honest and public attempt to get reasonable compensation," from the government, Auernheimer said in comments via email to Computerworld. "Whatever I do in the future, I want people to know that I tried peaceful civil actions first." The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in March 2013 sentenced Auernheimer to 41 months in prison for violating provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Last month, the United State Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated that sentence on a technicality, holding that the case had been pursued in the wrong venue.

Hybrid strategies common as organizations strive for cloud GRC
Banks, for example, are required by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to have well-rounded third-party risk management, according to VanSickel. This includes initial due diligence on the third party's history, then extensive research on the security controls and services provided by the company, he said. Additionally, the organization procuring cloud services will need audit capabilities. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Payment Card Industry customers need to recertify yearly to ensure they are still complying with regulations, and the cloud provider should be able to meet these requirements.

China retaliates, nixes Windows 8 on government PCs
According to the Xinhua News Agency, an official press arm of the People's Republic, Windows 8 has been barred from government, but not private, PCs. "It's a good sound bite for the Chinese government, it goes well as a response to the DOJ action, and if sales are low -- even if they eventually use it -- they'll have a statement to back it up," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner, in an email reply to questions. Silver referred to yesterday's charges by the U.S. Department of Justiceleveled against five Chinese hackers with links to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's military. The DOJ accused the five of breaking into numerous U.S. companies' networks and stealing trade secrets and intellectual property.

5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today
The key is the word ‘process’. It’s tech stack agnostic. And the key to getting the full benefit of Agile Engineering Practices is having the diligence to uphold a certain minimum level of process discipline when things get hairy. It’s like exercising. If you exercise 5 times a week when you’re on vacation and 1 time per week when you have a tough work week, then in actuality you exercise once per week. If you practice pairing and TDD when you have no deadlines and throw Agile out the window once you have a tight deadline, then you’re not diligently practicing the process of Agile. Five specific benefits that businesses can gain by using Agile Engineering Practices are:

Quote for the day:

"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow" -- Robert Kiyosaki

May 20, 2014

eBay Shifts to Water-Cooled Doors to Tame High-Density Loads
The Motivair doors use high-efficiency EC (electronically commutated) fans, which mean the overall power usage (12.8kW vs 11kW for the in-row units) was minimal. The system also uses less energy because it can use warm water, working at a water temperature of at 60 degrees rather than the 45 degrees seen in many chiller systems. “We thought the rear doors were expensive, but when you added the six racks back into the row, it paid for itself,” said Nelson. The cost scenario also worked because eBay had pre-engineered the space to support water cooling. Nelson believes that major data centers are approaching the limits of conventional air cooling, and sees water cooling as critical to future advances in high-density equipment.

The “rush syndrome”: How it affects your health and your job
Technology feeds the illusion that multitasking is a skill we should learn and use consistently. But a notable research study, conducted by Clifford Nass of Stanford University, shows just the opposite. People who try to do several things at once do all of them less well than those who focus on one task at a time. Jumping from one thing to another doesn’t save time — it costs time. Every time you switch tasks, you have to readjust your brain and refocus your attention. For example, you’re writing an important presentation when that ever-present “ping” signals an incoming e-mail. You switch into email mode, maybe even take time to answer, and when you switch back to the presentation, you can’t remember your last important thought.

Finland's 'safe harbour for data' becomes reality with funding for Sweden-free cable
Announcing the grant approval today, Finland's communications minister and "midwife" of the cable, Krista Kiuru, stressed Finland's independence. "Our geopolitical location is based both on geography and on decisions that we make ourselves. We ourselves must first have the courage to develop Finland into a significant safe harbour of information, where companies and countries can safely place their critical data," Kiuru said. "For this reason I proposed the inclusion of a definition of policy on the cable already in last year's framework agreement, on whose basis the preparations have now been brought to a conclusion. With these kinds of actions we significantly strengthen the image of our country as a concentration of data traffic."

What is DevOps really?
Although the term is now being treated as if it were a marketing buzzword like “cloud” and “big data”, there is a real grassroots initiative behind the hype that grew out of some good ideas generated by a few smart people working on application delivery. They went on to develop these ideas until they did real, concrete, awesome things. Others saw how successful these new teamwork methods were, and tried to figure out shortcut formulas to get there, without fully understanding the original ideas. This has caused problems and confusion because it is impossible to implement DevOps practices without understanding and putting in practice the underlying ideas.

US charges Chinese military officers with cyber espionage
The targets of the alleged cyber espionage have been identified as Westinghouse Electric, US Steel, Alcoa Inc, Allegheny Technologies, SolarWorld and the US Steelworkers Union. The FBI said the hacking activities of the accused from 2006 to 2014 had caused "significant losses" at the five companies and probably many more besides. The stolen documents allegedly include solar panel pricing strategies and designs for components of a nuclear plant. The indictment alleges that one Chinese state-owned enterprise involved in trade litigation against some of the US target companies hired the unit to build a secret database to hold corporate intelligence, according to IDG News.

PSUs are Open to Cloud Beyond IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
The Public Sector has increasingly started adopting cloud computing for its benefits such as efficient and effective management and delivery of net centric services. Additionally, by migrating to the cloud, public-sector organizations will be able to free up IT expenditure for re-investment in mission-enabling activities or national objectives such as deficit reduction. The Cloud G initiative which went live recently is an important step in this direction. This will now offer infrastructure, platform, storage, and software-as-a-service for the Indian public sector. Also to note, adopting cloud infrastructure is important but instant availability of the information through cloud infrastructure is another important piece that cannot be ignored.

The Value of Chief Strategy Officers
The CSO, ideally, has deep knowledge of internal operations (usually an insider, but an outsider can succeed also) and shouldn’t be isolated from that after taking the job. “I’d say the CSO is more external-facing but with deep knowledge of internal operations. And so this goes back to what makes a successful CSO — I think the bad ones are the ones who sit in the ivory towers and pontificate … the really good ones have probably come from inside the company,” Stroh said. “They’re operational- or functionally focused, and what I mean by that is that they’ve run something. They’ve run operations, they’ve run the call center, they’ve run product development, they’ve run marketing.... So they’re eating their own dog food when developing strategy because they have to live with it.”

Cue the Data Storytellers: The Data Industry’s Next Big Stars
Good stories connect with emotion, surprise, concrete imagery, and narrative. Many books have gone into this, such as “Writing for Story” by Jon Franklin, “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud, and the relatively recent “Made to Stick” by the Heath brothers. The best of the data storytellers will add to what they already know by looking into storytelling’s rich legacy for inspiration and technique — including genres that have never been mentioned with data in the same breath. Folk songs, for one. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot’s “912 Greens” starts out with adventure and ends in the comfort of community.

Why IT needs to drive the risk conversation
The problem might not lie in some stubborn dislike by technology professionals for innovative new products. The problem, CIOs and other experts agree, is that most organizations don't have a realistic, balanced or mature system for evaluating and making decisions about technology risk. Especially the risk that always comes with implementing something new. "Somebody, typically in a line of business, has some SaaS product they want to use, and they provide a business case for it: 'Here's all the good stuff that can result from the use of this. It'll make my numbers. I can access it from anywhere,'" says Jay Heiser, an analyst at Gartner.

Cisco will lead SDN and win IT, Chambers says
"You're going to see a brutal, brutal consolidation of the IT industry," he said. Many other industries will also consolidate, and enterprises will have to transform themselves and adopt end-to-end architectures like Cisco's to stay competitive, he said. The company is directly taking on SDN (software-defined networking) in the form of so-called "white box" networking hardware with an overlay of software such as the OpenFlow open-source protocol or VMware's NSX. Cisco will win with a combination of its ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) platform with hardware built from a combination of third-party and Cisco-developed silicon, he said. Traditional, standalone networking equipment will be sidelined, he said.

Quote for the day:

"Nobody raises his own reputation by lowering others" -- Anonymous

May 19, 2014

InfoSec shake-up in full swing
After the Symantec “bombshell”, the rest of the AV industry spent the past week scurrying around trying to stop a total erosion of confidence in their products. The reaction of Kaspersky was typical of the industry – they said that although signature scanning is now pretty hopeless, AV products comprise several more layers which provide protection. The reality however, is that it does not matter how many layers AV has – it simply does not stop nearly enough malware. Symantec have pulled their fingers out the dyke – pressures to change are fast becoming a flood. AV is based on an outdated premise of attempting to prevent malware infections.

The digital CIO: How to be a digital innovator
Rather than segmenting the IT budget into support, operations and capital investment, Lambert suggested CIOs take a holistic approach. “You need to look at IT not from a budget point of view, but from an organisational point of view,” said Lambert. “If operations and support are good enough, leave it this year, and put the money into innovation.” If there is not enough funding to do the work straight away, fund a pilot project, he suggested. But don’t use pilots to test technology improvements, pilot business improvements. “If you don’t manage this process, you tend to drift down from the top strategic projects to the bottom operational and support programmes,” he said.

Lessons Learned & Some Valuable Tips on a Data Center Move
Like many organizations, its IT operation was born with a mainframe computer in makeshift space in one of the hospital building, retrofitted to house the computer systems. They continued to expand over many years, growing to over 2500 square feet, plus additional 600 square feet in other buildings. Faced with the need to expand once again they considered several options and finally chose to design, build and move to a new 4,000-square-foot data center facility. Raritan executives had the opportunity to speak with Greg Rutledge, Data Center Manager, and Trey Jones, Director of IT Infrastructure Services, who were both involved in this major project from beginning to end. They shared the valuable lessons they learned and we share them with you in this e-Book.

Architects and Innovation – Part 1
As architect teams begin to consider their engagement model, they must include their approach to innovation. Unfortunately, though most architects would like to immediately create innovative change in their companies, there are a lot of roadblocks to getting your team’s engagement model connected to the ideation process for next generation business models. Many businesses do not formally have an idea/innovation management process at all and in others architects (if they even have titled architects) are considered to be IT order takers and not business drivers. So buyer beware the process of ‘getting involved’ may actually turn into having to create a cultural change across the entire company instead.

Why IT needs to drive the risk conversation
The problem might not lie in some stubborn dislike by technology professionals for innovative new products. The problem, CIOs and other experts agree, is that most organizations don't have a realistic, balanced or mature system for evaluating and making decisions about technology risk. Especially the risk that always comes with implementing something new. "Somebody, typically in a line of business, has some SaaS product they want to use, and they provide a business case for it: 'Here's all the good stuff that can result from the use of this. It'll make my numbers. I can access it from anywhere,'" says Jay Heiser, an analyst at Gartner.

Shaping the Future of Banking
IBM and DBS Bank are partnering to engage IBM Watson™ cognitive computing innovation to deliver a next-generation banking experience for clients. The collaboration with IBM is a recent initiative by DBS Bank to harness big data for enhancing customer experience by providing precise, customized, and quality actionable insights for meeting the needs of customers. David Gledhill, managing director and head of group technology and operations, and Olivier Crespin, COO, consumer bank and wealth management, at DBS Bank explain how Watson can enable DBS Bank to transform the customer experience and help shape the future of banking.

Information Democracy vs Information Anarchy
Much of the recent growth in the business intelligence market has been in the area of "data discovery" tools that take advantage of in-memory technology to allow users to quickly mash up data from multiple sources and explore it interactively and visually without having to create new "queries" for each step. These tools are often enthusiastically adopted by business users as a reaction against the red tape and restrictions of central IT organizations, which are perceived as information dictatorships where access to data is concentrated in the hands of a few. Although this data discovery has empowered business users in new ways, it has also introduced new dangers, in the form of Information Anarchy as defined by Liautaud

Is enterprise IT falling behind as business strategy turns outside-in?
A lot of change has occurred and a lot more remains. US-based firms are more outside-in than UK-based firms, and physical goods industries tend to be changing more than information-intensive, but heavily regulated, industries such as financial services and healthcare. But clearly, the most notable result of this exercise is the fact that the business strategy scores are slightly – but meaningfully – higher than the IT management results. This is consistent with our view that enterprise IT is often the most inside-out part of the modern firm, and that sales, marketing, product design and other parts of the business are more inclined to have an instinctive outside-in orientation.

Cisco CEO tells Obama that NSA spying hits tech sales
"We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security," Chambers wrote in the letter to Obama, ... "We understand the real and significant threats that exist in this world, but we must also respect the industry's relationship of trust with our customers." A Cisco spokesman confirmed Sunday that the letter had been sent to Obama. Referring to the reports, including a photograph of what appeared to be a Cisco package being tampered with, Chambers said if the allegations are true, the actions will weaken confidence in the ability of technology companies to deliver products worldwide.

Architecting your organization for the cloud
While cloud computing has seen widespread adoption, many organizations still see cloud-based services as something to be kept at arms length rather than as an integral part of an organization’s extended IT architecture. This not only results in missed opportunities but also means that applications and services are architected without taking the wider area network into account. Aimed at heads of infrastructure in enterprise organizations, this paper considers how organizations can benefit from aspects of technology that lie beyond the corporate boundary — that is, the cloud — without being hampered by sometimes-artificial technological, organizational, and financial constraints.

Quote for the day:

"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience had brought it home." -- John Stuart Mill

May 18, 2014

APIs one drop of glue that bonds next generation enterprise architecture
“What the cloud did was act as a foundational piece to be able to rework all the architecture, and now things like DevOps, identity and mobile devices are kicking off this secondary wave,” said Eric Norlin, founder and curator of GlueCon. Norlin says this next wave will be defined by a more agile enterprise. “There is not as strict oversight from a CIO or CTO. That oversight begins to erode under this new architecture.” The mode of operation is speed; including servers instantly spun up, continuous coding, and launches happening live. “The environment is so dynamic and your ability to scale the architecture is out of this world,” said Norlin.

The SaaS Metrics Maturity Model
Becoming a Metrics-driven SaaS Business is no easy task. It takes time, commitment and plenty of customers. However, the financial rewards of moving beyond standard SaaS financial metrics to SaaS customer success metrics and ultimately to sophisticated predictive analytics are significant. Each step toward SaaS metrics greatness builds upon the last. The stages of development can be classified into a natural progression of increasing SaaS business understanding from financial stability to operational measurability to revenue predictability outlined at the very beginning of this series. These stages define a SaaS Metrics Maturity Model that provides a SaaS metrics roadmap along with benchmarks ...

7 Keys to Delivering Better Applications Faster
Instead of dividing tasks based on specialties, project work should be divided based on user stories, a term used in scrum or agile development methodologies to refer to a specific feature or piece of functionality written in in the everyday language of the end user (one format is "As a, I wantso that."). These stories should be developed by one or more business engineers as a whole. This way, every business engineer develops a full working piece of functionality each sprint rather than working on a certain activity. In the process, they're able to better focus on the business solution (see point #1) and deliver the best solution, versus simply completing his/her assigned task.

The Rise of the Full-Stack Architect
Don’t practice drive-by architecting – nothing irks developers more than an architect that designs a system, provides all the specifications, drops the finished docs on their poor heads and disappears, leaving them to suffer from the consequences of the poor choices. You need to see your architecture live in the running code, solving problems. Nothing makes me happier than developers gobbling up the new architecture and moving to it as fast and they can because it addresses their long standing problems. As a colleague of mine would say ‘the devil is in the pudding’ – if the system using your architecture is not faster, more scalable, more maintainable, your architecture sucks.

Patterns for Asynchronous MVVM Applications: Data Binding
One of the first things you have to consider when introducing async and await to the MVVM pattern is identifying which parts of your solution need the UI threading context. Windows platforms are serious about UI components being accessed only from the UI thread that owns them. Obviously, the view is entirely tied to the UI context. I also take the stand in my applications that anything linked to the view via data binding is tied to the UI context. Recent versions of WPF have loosened this restriction, allowing some sharing of data between the UI thread and background threads

Big data brings new power toopen-source intelligence
First, the explosion of social media has given us instant access to a wealth of user-generated content. From Facebook to Twitter to Google+, we are now only ever a few keystrokes away from a potentially global audience. And as these tools increase global connectivity, people seem increasingly willing to project their thoughts, opinions and observations into cyberspace. The process of information generation has produced what has been described as “new digital commons of enormous size and wealth”. Second, and on a larger scale, the scope of open-source intelligence has been completely changed by the rise of big data.

The Agile Culture - Leading through Trust and Ownership
Agile is a mindset; a mindset focused on delivering quality products that customers love. Agile is focused on getting to market quickly – before the competition. In command and control cultures, things happen in a more serial fashion. There is lots of space between development and testing. The voice of the customer is silent for long portions of time – and often missing until the project ends. Business leaders think they “know” what customers want but are often mistaken. In today’s dynamic world, organizations must turn their focus on what they can do to unleash their teams and then support them with what they need.

“Enterprise Architecture is a tech problem!” Challenge Accepted
Incremental Enterprise Architecture (iEA) is a business process that solves two main problems my client was having with how it was implementing solutions. My client has a storied past of being the best IT shop in the business, and the customer testimonials certainly tell a tale of technicians, and leaders bending over backwards to solve complex business issues with the rapid development of tools on a case by case basis. This storied past and the dedication of the staff lends itself to great external reputation which is a good thing but it also leads you to multiple different solution silos that are not interoperable and have scores of redundant data sources.

CIO-CFO Collaboration for IT Governance
Should the CFO care about their IT projects and performance, the majority opinion is a resounding “YES”! Through CIO-CFO collaboration, the right mindset can be better shaped in IT transformation project; such as: ROI-focused, vigilant on scope, knowing the business objects and how this transformation project links to the overall business goals. The strong senior leadership can enforce IT governance principles and practices, to ensure ROI is really going to achieve; control project scope and exploit business objectives accordingly.

Data Backup is More Important Than Ever
Data Loss Can Cost Your Business More Than You Ever Imagined. If you don’t have a backup strategy in place because you considered it too expensive, let’s redefine the term “expensive.” As a business owner, try to imagine what it would cost or if your company could even operate without your business data including QuickBooks files, client records and order information. Consider the time and expense of attempting to recreate the lost data and notifying your customers that their personal data has been compromised? If those scenarios sound terrible, then review these truly sobering data loss statistics and consider the impact this could have on your business if you don’t have a tested backup solution

Quote for the day:

"Success is the prize for those who stand true to their ideas!" -- Josh S. Hinds

May 17, 2014

Gartner Says Adaptive Sourcing Holds the Key to Business Growth
"The one-size-fits-all sourcing strategy is no longer appropriate for an IT organization that will increasingly be asked to be accountable for end-to-end production services, which will, of necessity, be based on a hybrid IT approach," said Mr. Da Rold. "IT must continue to run the essential business operations. It must differentiate the business through improvements to business processes, and it must also innovate — providing access to new digital opportunities. If IT fails to drive innovation, the business will acquire it elsewhere — because IT purchasing is already moving beyond the IT budget."

7 New Competencies for a Competent HR Department
Regrettably, however, conventional courses in International HR and IHRM textbooks do a poor job of preparing practitioners for the international marketplace. They tend to focus on categorizing employees as HCNs (Host Country Nationals), PCNs (Parent Country Nationals), and TCNs (Third Country Nationals) and calculating their compensation and benefits. Obviously, this is crucial but as it becomes increasingly more difficult to neatly slot global employees, and since there is no longer a “typical” overseas posting, many international firms choose to outsource this function to the experts specializing in international compensation.

Top 12 tech hoaxes of all time
The art of the hoax is woefully underappreciated. Properly executed hoaxes can be creative, cautionary, and (ideally) funny. The Digital Age has muddied the waters, though. Online scams, viral marketing, and even late-night TV gagshave blurred the distinctions between hoaxes, pranks, stunts, and outright criminal fraud – so blurred them, in fact, that one might need an expert to distinguish them from one another. Luckily, one such expert exists: Alex Boese, author and curator of The Museum of Hoaxes. According to Boese, a hoax is "a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public." Here is a look at 12 all-time great hoaxes in tech history.

Big Data = Big Money: The ROI of Business Intelligence
According to business intelligence advisors such as SAS Analytics, “ultimately data governance is not about the data. It’s about how better control and management of data enables business strategy, improves business outcomes, and reduces risk.” In a data-driven reimagining of a famous JFK quote: “ask not what your data can do for you, ask what you can do with your data.” Simply aggregating data isn’t enough. Companies must collect the right information. Data that isn’t actionable can only impact the bottom line negatively. Collection of non-actionable data can kill an analysis effort before it begins.

Internap Debuts OpenStack-Powered AgileCloud
“Everybody’s trying to grab market share from AWS and Microsoft Azure. I think this positions Internap really well as providing the more complete offering,” Miller told CRN. Internap's new channel program now includes services and support that Bridgepointe's sales agents and engineers can rely on to tackle technical issues, address contractual and administrative functions, and offer post-sale customer service, Miller said. “Internap had predominantly been a channel program where it was more integrated with the direct sales force on every single deal. Now we have more support on the channel-specific resources available to us,” Miller told CRN.

Why is dotAfrica Important for the African Continent?
The African Union Commission, which initiated the process of dotAfrica as far back 2009 under its mandate to unite the continent both socially and politically, received the support of 39 of the AU’s 54 member states as well as the private sector. In its ICANN application, it defined the purpose of the dotAfrica domain as: “To establish a world class domain name registry operation for the dotAfrica Top Level Domain (TLD) by engaging and utilizing African technology, know-how and funding; for the benefit and pride of Africans; in partnership with African governments and other ICT stakeholder groups…in addition, to adhere to the spirit of inclusivity…”

Peer to Peer File Sharing Through WCF
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Each node is a computer on the network which acts and communicates with other Peers to make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.

Ensuring Business Continuity with the Right Governance
Having strict governance in place ensures the BC protocols the organization has implemented will be carried out by the book in the event of a disaster. With the proper governance or committee in place, organizations are more likely to address many of the threats they face. According to the survey, 46 percent of organizations with such a system in place were able to address different levels of threats including cyber terrorism as part of their BCM, compared with 32 percent for those without.

What to expect from the data centre in 2025
“On the road, we see sports cars and family cars; we see buses and we see trucks. They have different kinds of engines, different types of seating and different characteristics in terms of energy consumption and reliability. We are going to see something similar to that in the data center world. In fact that is already happening, and I expect it to continue,” says Andy Lawrence, vice president of Datacenter Technologies and Eco-efficient IT at 451 Research. Lawrence was commenting on a new report, Data Center 2025: Exploring the Possibilitieswhich was commissioned by Emerson Network Power.

Cabling in Top-of-the-Rack Architectures
ToR switching allows oversubscription to be handled at the rack level, with a small number of fiber cables providing uniform connectivity to each rack. The advantage of this solution is that horizontal fiber can support different I/O connectivity options, including Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as Fiber Channel. The use of fiber from each rack also helps protect infrastructure investments as evolving standards, including 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, are more likely to be implemented using fiber before any other transmission mechanism. By limiting the use of copper to within racks, the ToR model isolates the cabling that changes most often to the parts of the data center that change most frequently – the racks themselves.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership requires the courage to make decisions that will benefit the next generation." -- Alan Autry

May 16, 2014

Towards Agile CMMI Level 3: Requirement Development and Verification
Requirement grooming is a practice widely used in the agile community. We’ll focus on the verification for requirements. Grooming ensures that backlog items will be consistent, won’t be repeated, and will not become obsolete. This is usually performed in non-agile environments with a checklist, but there is no reason not to also use a checklist with product-backlog items to remind us what a good user story should be. Since the same artefact is checked in formal lifecycles, why not use the same checklist with an agile practice?

Remedies for Data Migration Pain
Data governance is a powerful pill as it not only knocks out the causes of the common data headaches, it helps prevent them. Data migration headaches are no exception. A finely tuned data governance program can reduce duplicate data throughout the organization, reduce errors in reporting and coding and reduce costs associated with poor data quality. The administrative framework and council of a well-defined data governance program support decisions, especially cross-functional decisions, with objectivity and consistency, allowing for decisions to be made quickly with greater accuracy and confidence. The data governance charter also supports and encourages business and IT collaboration as well as interdepartmental data sharing.

Microsoft CEO Nadella aces first-100-day test
"I'd definitely give him an A on selecting his team," said Ottinger. "From the March 3 announcements on, Nadella made his decisions quickly." That day, Microsoft announced a major shake-up of its senior leadership. Out was Tony Bates, who had led business development -- and been in the running for the CEO spot -- and Tami Reller, marketing boss and once co-chief of Windows. Mark Penn, the creator of the "Scroogled" attack ads, was shifted to chief strategy officer; Chris Capossela was made chief marketing officer. "All of that within a month," said Ottinger, who ticked off other personnel changes, including Stephen Elop's return to Microsoft and Scott Guthrie's promotion to lead the cloud group Nadella had left.

Why Machine Learning Matters When Choosing a Big Data Vendor
Machine learning is the proper way to make use of all that big data companies are collecting and analyzing. In fact, machine learning is a far more effective way to analyze data since, unlike other methods, it is designed to work with vast amounts of different types of data that is constantly changing. Machine learning has the capability to analyze an entire set of data, not just a small portion of it, allowing for more accurate results. The very nature of machine learning also allows its analytics to operate at a faster pace.

Improve the Performance of Your Existing Storage Systems
Obviously, solid state storage is the king of the hill when it comes to raw performance, so it's no surprise that adding some solid state storage to an existing environment would improve overall performance of the system as a whole. In general, PCI-e-based sold state storage devices are leveraged for this purpose. They are installed inside a host machine and configured as a mega cache for the SAN. With a large cache at its disposal, a server can much more quickly read and write data from and to storage. The ultra-fast cache acts as the intermediary in this case so that the server itself doesn't have to deal with constantly slow reads and writes from the legacy storage environment. This solution is not low cost, though.

Mobile collapse and emerging markets cause cut in IT spending growth
"This volatility, coupled with the macroeconomic uncertainty in many emerging markets, is somewhat masking a more positive underlying foundation for enterprise IT spending, with firms continuing to invest in working off that pent-up demand to replace old servers, storage and network gear," said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC's Global Technology & Industry Research Organisation. "Some of that spending is also driving IT services, despite the fact that an increasing number of businesses are moving more of their traditional IT budget to the cloud," he added. IDC expects 10 percent of software spending to be on cloud services by the end of 2014, while infrastructure-as-a-service should soak up 15 percent of spend on servers and storage.

Cloud bursting: Better tools are needed to live up to its promise
The promise of cloud bursting is to do a better job of fitting capacity to demand. Organizations can't squander cash on a kit that spends half of its time idle (if they could, no one would have bothered replacing their internal telephone networks with VoIP). It would be so much easier to cope with variable computing demand by maintaining only enough hardware for predictable loads and shipping the rest -- the spikes in demand -- to the cloud. The process of deciding how much hardware to buy for next year would rely more on metrics and less on gambling.

AT&T to activate HD Voice over 4G LTE in four states on May 23
To work, HD Voice requires that both parties in a call have an HD-capable handset and a cellular base station (usually located at the base of a tower) between them that's equipped to pass the HD signal. To enable HD in the handset, the AT&T spokeswoman said the carrier will begin selling "very soon" the HD Voice-capable Samsung Galaxy S4 mini with a 4.3-in. Super AMOLED display. Both T-Mobile and Sprint started rolling out HD Voice to their 3G networks last year. T-Mobile sold its first version of the iPhone, the iPhone 5, with HD Voice capability last year.

Want 'perfect' security? Then threat data must be shared
Most of the big anti-malware companies not only understand who is doing the crime and what they are after, but know within minutes whenever one of these groups initiates a new "campaign" (such as using a new malware program or new phishing strategy) or when they are initiating from new IP addresses. There are literally a hundred companies and thousands of people that have a pretty good understanding about the badness on the Internet. They can see the new trends as they are happening. Individually, none of the groups has all the information. But if you put all these groups together sharing information we'd have a pretty good lock on all the bad guys.

Security Trends in Cloud Computing Part 4: Public sector
Data classification is an important method of increasing the protection and proper management of information by separating it into categories based on sensitivity (high, medium or low, for example). More sensitive or critical information can be given greater protection, while lower risk information can be made more accessible, as appropriate. This process can improve compliance efforts and help safeguard important records, allowing other data and resources to be managed more smoothly. Conversely, weak or incomplete data classification strategies could result in improper handling of sensitive private data, raising the risks of accidental release or corruption, or the potential exposure of confidential information to employees whose jobs do not require access.

Quote for the day:

"In a crisis if I had only an hour I'd spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem and the last 10 minutes solving it." -- Albert Einstein