Google fills the gap between IaaS and PaaS
"We don't think there's platform as a service and infrastructure as a service," said Dan Belcher, a Google product manager, at a recent roadshow in Cambridge, Mass. "We really think about a continuum of the level of control and management that you want us to handle and that you'll handle yourself." Developers choosing between infrastructure and platform services face too many tradeoffs, so there is still plenty of room to improve the ability to run workloads in the cloud and eliminate the either-or scenario, Belcher said.
Chief Compliance Officers: Five Steps to Hiring the Right Team
“It’s no longer about being reactive, but proactive,” says Kate Quinn, executive vice president with search firm DHR International in New York, specializing in capital markets and asset management. “Nobody wants a regulator calling to discuss a short-coming. It’s far better to catch things early on than to fix a problem later. Compliance is about following the rules and taking the preventative steps to ensure the fund or entity is following the rules, while still making money.” Granted, CCOs have always had to keep abreast of regulations, establish internal policies and procedures to meet them, document their work and ensure that everyone follows the rules.
Should the Entire Internet Be Encrypted?
What ties all these headlines together? Your online presence is being tracked, monitored, intercepted, evaluated, and compromised. With something like Heartbleed, you would pretty much be helpless if the online assets of a company that you were working with were compromised. You can mitigate your online footprint slightly by using features like “Incognito” mode in Google Chrome, or a “Private” tab in Opera web browsers, but these options really only eliminate local tracks. This is where the IceBrowser comes in. One of the best ways to cover your tracks and secure your Internet usage is through a VPN
Data Quality – Who’s Responsible
Data quality management is an important job and Everybody is sure that Somebody will do it. Anybody can do it, but Nobody does. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thinks that Anybody can do it, but Nobody realises that Everybody won’t do it. In the end, Everybody blames Somebody when Nobody does what Anybody could do. Accurate data is undoubtedly the cornerstone of industry, but a lack of standardised data prevents efficient information exchange between departments and subsidiaries and impedes decision-making and understanding of business problems.
PaaS Debate Heats Up At Interop
With microservices, each service in an application runs in its own virtual machine or Linux container. Part of developers' excitement about the Docker container system is that it provides a detailed format for doing this, allowing services to be linked and nested in relation to each other and moved around as necessary. The microservice approach also makes them more maintainable. When a master copy of a service is modified and proven by testing, the order can be given for all containers running the service to get an automated upgrade.
The Internet of Things Brings Legal Gotchas to CIOs
“Many of the legal issues are not well understood even by sophisticated privacy practitioners,” says Christopher Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “In the world of sensors rather than computer screens, the legal issues are challenging.” The Federal Trade Commission last September took its first action against an Internet of Things manufacturer. TRENDnet, which marketed its Internet-connected cameras for home security and other uses, settled with the FTC over faulty software that left its cameras vulnerable to online viewing and listening.
Regulatory pressure accompanies changing IT landscape
Monitoring multiple devices for every employee at an organization is a challenge. The virtualized enterprise is not just about technology, though. Whether you are working at a firm in New York City or on an island, the expectation is that you will be working quickly and with more agility. You have to be able to do work on a range of mobile of devices. Everyone expects a high level of manageability and efficiency. And no one wants to pay extra money for these capabilities.
New attacks secretly use smartphone cameras, speakers and microphones
Have you ever stopped to think of the front-facing camera on your phone as a keylogger? How far away do you hold your smartphone from your face/eyes? The researchers demonstrated how an “attacker can use reflections in the user’s face to perform keylogging with a smartphone’s front camera.” This attack works even on phones with wretched megapixel cameras; phone “cameras with only 2MP are already sufficient for corneal keylogging if the phone is held in not more than 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) distance. Cameras of 32MP even allow for keylogging operations if the phone is held at 60 cm (23.6 inches) distance.”
Beefed-up Couchbase Server 3.0 beta targets developers and admins
"In addition to foundational changes, like the advanced stream-based protocol and tunable memory, which improve performance and enable Couchbase to support many new use cases, we have dramatically improved the developer experience making it easier to build and extend applications built on Couchbase," Couchbase VP products and engineering Ravi Mayuram said in a statement. The stream-based DCP improves speeds by removing bottlenecks, and helps the way increased memory and network capabilities are used, according to Couchbase. Among other benefits, it lists better view performance and the immediate streaming and rapid indexing of changes made to documents to enable data queries at near real-time speeds.
SOA and API Schism and Unification
When creating a unified architecture strategy embracing SOA and REST, a logical next question is when to create a service or an API. From a messaging perspective, services and APIs have similar attributes. They are both network accessible endpoints delivering data or triggering a transaction. From an architecture perspective, both services and APIs provide an opportunity to create loosely coupled solutions exhibiting separation of concerns. Many architects and developers desire to extend their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with APIs, but are not clear on when to create a service or create an API.
Quote for the day:
"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said" -- Peter Drucker
"We don't think there's platform as a service and infrastructure as a service," said Dan Belcher, a Google product manager, at a recent roadshow in Cambridge, Mass. "We really think about a continuum of the level of control and management that you want us to handle and that you'll handle yourself." Developers choosing between infrastructure and platform services face too many tradeoffs, so there is still plenty of room to improve the ability to run workloads in the cloud and eliminate the either-or scenario, Belcher said.
“It’s no longer about being reactive, but proactive,” says Kate Quinn, executive vice president with search firm DHR International in New York, specializing in capital markets and asset management. “Nobody wants a regulator calling to discuss a short-coming. It’s far better to catch things early on than to fix a problem later. Compliance is about following the rules and taking the preventative steps to ensure the fund or entity is following the rules, while still making money.” Granted, CCOs have always had to keep abreast of regulations, establish internal policies and procedures to meet them, document their work and ensure that everyone follows the rules.
Should the Entire Internet Be Encrypted?
What ties all these headlines together? Your online presence is being tracked, monitored, intercepted, evaluated, and compromised. With something like Heartbleed, you would pretty much be helpless if the online assets of a company that you were working with were compromised. You can mitigate your online footprint slightly by using features like “Incognito” mode in Google Chrome, or a “Private” tab in Opera web browsers, but these options really only eliminate local tracks. This is where the IceBrowser comes in. One of the best ways to cover your tracks and secure your Internet usage is through a VPN
Data Quality – Who’s Responsible
Data quality management is an important job and Everybody is sure that Somebody will do it. Anybody can do it, but Nobody does. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thinks that Anybody can do it, but Nobody realises that Everybody won’t do it. In the end, Everybody blames Somebody when Nobody does what Anybody could do. Accurate data is undoubtedly the cornerstone of industry, but a lack of standardised data prevents efficient information exchange between departments and subsidiaries and impedes decision-making and understanding of business problems.
PaaS Debate Heats Up At Interop
With microservices, each service in an application runs in its own virtual machine or Linux container. Part of developers' excitement about the Docker container system is that it provides a detailed format for doing this, allowing services to be linked and nested in relation to each other and moved around as necessary. The microservice approach also makes them more maintainable. When a master copy of a service is modified and proven by testing, the order can be given for all containers running the service to get an automated upgrade.
The Internet of Things Brings Legal Gotchas to CIOs
“Many of the legal issues are not well understood even by sophisticated privacy practitioners,” says Christopher Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “In the world of sensors rather than computer screens, the legal issues are challenging.” The Federal Trade Commission last September took its first action against an Internet of Things manufacturer. TRENDnet, which marketed its Internet-connected cameras for home security and other uses, settled with the FTC over faulty software that left its cameras vulnerable to online viewing and listening.
Regulatory pressure accompanies changing IT landscape
Monitoring multiple devices for every employee at an organization is a challenge. The virtualized enterprise is not just about technology, though. Whether you are working at a firm in New York City or on an island, the expectation is that you will be working quickly and with more agility. You have to be able to do work on a range of mobile of devices. Everyone expects a high level of manageability and efficiency. And no one wants to pay extra money for these capabilities.
New attacks secretly use smartphone cameras, speakers and microphones
Have you ever stopped to think of the front-facing camera on your phone as a keylogger? How far away do you hold your smartphone from your face/eyes? The researchers demonstrated how an “attacker can use reflections in the user’s face to perform keylogging with a smartphone’s front camera.” This attack works even on phones with wretched megapixel cameras; phone “cameras with only 2MP are already sufficient for corneal keylogging if the phone is held in not more than 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) distance. Cameras of 32MP even allow for keylogging operations if the phone is held at 60 cm (23.6 inches) distance.”
Beefed-up Couchbase Server 3.0 beta targets developers and admins
"In addition to foundational changes, like the advanced stream-based protocol and tunable memory, which improve performance and enable Couchbase to support many new use cases, we have dramatically improved the developer experience making it easier to build and extend applications built on Couchbase," Couchbase VP products and engineering Ravi Mayuram said in a statement. The stream-based DCP improves speeds by removing bottlenecks, and helps the way increased memory and network capabilities are used, according to Couchbase. Among other benefits, it lists better view performance and the immediate streaming and rapid indexing of changes made to documents to enable data queries at near real-time speeds.
SOA and API Schism and Unification
When creating a unified architecture strategy embracing SOA and REST, a logical next question is when to create a service or an API. From a messaging perspective, services and APIs have similar attributes. They are both network accessible endpoints delivering data or triggering a transaction. From an architecture perspective, both services and APIs provide an opportunity to create loosely coupled solutions exhibiting separation of concerns. Many architects and developers desire to extend their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with APIs, but are not clear on when to create a service or create an API.
Quote for the day:
"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said" -- Peter Drucker
