March 05, 2013

Citrix Nails Its Enterprise Mobility Strategy
Many customers and colleagues have asked me why Citrix acquired an MDM provider -- what are the value-adds and isn't the world moving towards MAM anyway? To answer, we have to make a clear distinction between the use cases. I agree and concur that for BYOD initiatives, MAM is a better, cleaner way of doing this things and that MDM is not the ideal solution.


Review: Better performance with FancyCache
Romex Software states that FancyCache uses state-of-the-art read and write cache algorithms that predict what data should hit the memory reserve for optimum performance gains. If you want to tweak the caching method yourself, the settings area provides a wealth of options to tweak and mess around with to your satisfaction.


Apple blacklists old Flash Player in Safari after recent attacks
Days after Adobe released a patch for flaws being exploited in Flash Player, Apple has begun blocking older versions of the software in an effort to encourage users to update their systems. "To help protect users from a recent vulnerability, Apple has updated the web plug-in-blocking mechanism to disable older versions of the web plug-in: Adobe Flash Player," Apple said in a new support document.


One-on-one with Randy Bias: Cloud standards and the battle for control
In this one-on-one interview, Randy Bias, co-founder and chief technology officer of open source cloud infrastructure provider Cloudscaling, talks about the lack of cloud standards among providers and how today's cloud computing service provider patchwork will ultimately give way to a more uniform cloud universe.


HTML5 Web Storage loophole can be abused to fill hard disks with junk data
A security researcher has found a loophole in how the HTML5 Web Storage standard is implemented in the Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari browsers that could allow malicious websites to fill visitors' hard disk drives with large amounts of junk data. ... The localStorage attribute of the Web Storage API allows websites to store between 2.5MB and 10MB of data per origin -- domain name -- depending on the browser used.


jQuery DataTables in asp.net with CRUD
Here is a very nice article on using jQuery data tables in ASP.NET. Though the article dates back to January 2011, it is still very relevant and valid. Thanks to my friend Mr. Kamaraj Palsamy for referring this article to me.


Disruptive? That Depends
"Disruptive" can be defined as a threat to order, or as an interruption to whatever it is we're doing now. When it comes to technology, the word has been misued, sometimes just to attract attention. In the same way coincidence has been confused with irony, disruptive has become a different way of saying "new and popular."


How CIOs Can Help Manage Disruptive Technology
Quite a few people think that entrepreneurship in large companies is an oxymoron. In March of 2009, The Economist published a very good special report on entrepreneurship. Its lead article defined the term as: “somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.”


IT Department Reorgs Are on the Horizon
Given the opportunity, more than one-fourth (27 percent) of IT and business leaders would rebuild their IT departments from scratch, according to an IDG Enterprise survey of 696 senior IT and business executives. That approach may be more radical than most, but the "Future State of the IT Organization" study shows that IT departments are headed for profound changes as CIOs try to refocus their staffs on business results such as revenue, customer service and product innovation


Cyberinsurance is latest small business safety net

While cyber policies reimburse a business for the damages it must pay its customers, they do much more. A victim of a cyber loss must first investigate the cause, often with the use of IT forensic examiners. The company must then comply with required notices to potentially affected customers. ... Cyber insurance can cover the costs of paying regulatory fines and penalties.

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Quote for the day:

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best." -- Duke Ellington

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March 04, 2013

A Cloud-Based Testing Tool for the Budget-Minded
The testing tool is aimed at small and growing QA teams looking to escape the heavy lifting and expense required from enterprise-focused systems such as HP Quality Center. Its vendor claims qTest is on par with large enterprise systems, yet unlike those heavyweights the platform's SaaS subscription model makes it a low-risk proposition to pilot and adopt.


Touchless touch screen gives you control without contact (video)
One of the more jaw-dropping tech demos on view at this year's Mobile World Congress, new touch-screen technology from chipmaker STMicroelectronics lets you control your smartphone or tablet without actually touching the display. Using it, you can swipe, drag, and prod at your touch-screen device, replacing the fear of fingerprints with the feeling of controlling a spaceship's navigation system.


Hackers take Sabah conflict to cyberspace
According to GMA News Online on Sunday, one Philippine Web site and several Malaysian ones were hacked and defaced with messages sympathizing with either side of the armed conflict. The territorial dispute started on February 11, 2013 when followers of Sulu sultan Jamalul Kiram III asserted his claim over eastern parts of Sabah. The claims take root from the North Borneo dispute, when Sabah state was known as North Borneo prior to the formation of the Malaysian federation in 1963.


Yahoo bans telecommuting – Will it WORK?
"So it was perplexing to see Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer tell employees who work remotely to relocate to company facilities. This seems a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever. If you provide the right technology to keep in touch, maintain regular communication and get the right balance between remote and office working, people will be motivated to work responsibly, quickly and with high quality.


Dyson on patents and intellectual property
Sitting down with CNET Australia, Sir James Dyson shares his strongly held views on the importance of patents and intellectual property rights. From the ease with which Asian manufacturers can copy his designs, to the lenience of penalties, Sir James Dyson suggests that there is real damage to innovation when others get away with copying the hard work of companies like Dyson.


Tips for Enterprise Application Integration
A very common problem for large companies (particularly in the financial sector) is the existence of several independent IT departments with different goals and poor interaction. Companies receive a set of “automation islands” that cannot easily communicate inside or outside the organization. Let’s look at the widespread ways that companies use to integrate applications and their potential problems.


Local, vertical laws critical in SaaS adoption
Danni Xu, Asia-Pacific research analyst for data center and cloud computing of ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan, said local regulation on data has seen increasing significance across the region with several governments taking "meaningful steps" to adopt the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). Coverage and enforcement, though, vary from country to country, she said. For example, Xu noted that Singapore passed the personal data protection bill in October last year with enforcement slated to begin mid-2014.


Microsoft Starts Sending Cutoff Notices to Office 365 Preview Users
At the time, Microsoft said that the previews would expire about 60 days after the release of the final plans in each market. Microsoft launched Office 365 Home Premium in the U.S. on Jan. 29, 2013, and followed with the business-oriented plans on Feb. 27. The March 16 cut-off noted in Microsoft's email would be 47 days after the Jan. 29 launch of Home Premium, or about two weeks shy of the 60 days Microsoft previously cited.


With Business Foundations Shaking, Good Enterprise Architects Are Hard to Find
Business leaders are scrambling to take their organizations deeper into the cloud, leverage the growing amount of data about their customers, and protect their companies from new security threats. Enterprise architects are usually their first call when it comes to bringing order to IT business process chaos, but EAs are also having to adapt to the very same trends impacting corporations.


What is a PC now?
The question "What is a PC?" has been bemusing analysts and industry observers since long before the introduction of the iPad -- but especially since. The answer is not so simple. In some ways, it's a question of mere rhetoric. But when it comes to analyzing markets and companies, it becomes a lot more than that. Tablets and smartphones have been cutting into PC sales for years. That's because for many people, the newer gadgets do everything they had previously counted on PCs -- including laptops -- for: email, Web browsing, watching video.

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Quotes for the day:

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up." -- Mark Twain

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March 03, 2013

IT security managers too focused on compliance, experts say
Experts say that meeting such standards is important, but they should be used as baseline controls in a broader IT security strategy. "The audit industry has become a monster," said Anup Ghosh, founder of security firm Invincea. "Keeping those guys at bay" has become a full-time job in many IT security organizations, he said. "A lot of compliance regimens have been all about checking boxes and following processes."

'Copyright Alert System' rolls out to catch illegal downloaders
While the CAS seems like something that would raise the hackles of privacy and civil liberty groups, the plan isn't to arrest, sue, or fine people downloading illegal movies, games, or music. Instead, the group managing the program -- the Center for Copyright Information -- says its objective is to "educate" such downloaders that they are infringing on protected intellectual copyrights.


1183RA Week of Activity Underscores Challenge of Valuing Data
The consensus of Saugatuck’s discussions this week with provider and user enterprise executives is that the majority of provider activity consists of positioning themselves for future, expected opportunities; and the majority of user enterprise activity consists of interest, searches for knowledge, trials and PoCs. The most interest expressed is in the concept of data analytics, especially Big Data, rather than in the details of how it will work or benefit the enterprise customer.


Are you on the right cloud computing career path?
There is an explosion in both the use of cloud computing and the demand for people to assist in the mass migration to cloud. Indeed, there are about 50 to 70 jobs chasing truly qualified candidates at this point in time, according to technical recruiters. And there are two categories of cloud computing careers that seem to be emerging in the space: positions seeking IT pros with specific cloud skills and positions looking for IT admins with cloud architecture know-how.


Secret Weapon: How to Strengthen the Most Valuable Job Skill

An extensive analysis led at Virginia Commonwealth University, “The Relation Between Emotional Intelligence and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis,” showed that individuals with high EI made better workers. For managers or senior executives, high EI usually corresponds with a good job performance. For employees, it often leads to better decision-making abilities, job satisfaction and completion of goals. Managers who lack a good EI usually find great difficulty in social interactions and the nurturing of professional relationships.

Pets now welcome in many workplaces
It’s a growing office trend, as both employer and employees acknowledge the advantages and enjoy the benefits of allowing pets in the workplace. And now there’s research to support what people like 26-year-old Ann Marie DeLa Rosa have known for years. “Reduces stress,” said DeLa Rosa, 26, who works at software design company Inverse-Square under Baird and appreciates the pet-friendly policy. “When I’m stressed, I usually call Zoe (a chocolate Labrador retriever) over and rub her ear. That’s my therapy.”


Entity Framework 6 Alpha 3 with Code First Stored Procedures and Connection Resiliency
Microsoft has announced the availability of Entity Framework 6 Alpha 3 with support for code first mapping to insert, update, delete stored procedures with the help of fluent API, connection resiliency, pull request from iceclow, UnaiZorrilla and new DbContext API scenarios that enables you to manage your own transactions.

Refactoring Legacy Applications: A Case Study
Legacy code is stinky. Every decent developer would like to refactor it, and in order to refactor it, one ideally should have a suite of unit test cases to prevent regressions. However, writing unit tests for legacy code is not easy; the legacy code is usually a big mess. To write effective unit tests against the legacy code, you probably need to refactor it first; and to refactor it, you need unit tests to ensure you are not breaking anything. So it is a chicken and egg situation. This article describes a methodology to safely refactor legacy code by sharing a real case I once worked on.


Here’s a Quick Way to Fire Up Your Motivation
Surely all the benefit of a backup plan accrues when the main plan goes wrong and there's something to fall back on? While coming up with a 'plan b' might be necessary, I always thought of it more as a chore. (Ho-hum now I've made my main plan, instead of getting started, I've got to spend more time thinking about an alternative plan). But when you start to think about it, backup plans don't just make sense as, well, backup plans, but also as a means of driving you forward at the precarious early stages of a project.


Evernote note-sharing service says hackers stole some user data
Evernote spokeswoman Ronda Scott said via email on Saturday that the attack "follows a similar pattern" to other cyber attacks on Internet-based companies in recent weeks, but she did not elaborate. "In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost," the company said on its website. "We also have no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed."

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Quote for the day:

"Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic." -- Jean Sibelius

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March 02, 2013

The Open Group panel explores how the big data era now challenges the IT status quo
Big data means doing things differently — not just to manage the velocity and the volume and the variety of the data, but to really think about data fundamentally and differently.We also need to think about security, risk, and governance. If it's a "boundaryless organization" when it comes your data, either as a product or service or a resource, that control and management of which data should be exposed, which should be opened, and which should be very closely guarded all needs to be factored, determined, and implemented.


Office 365 confuses and bemuses

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) seems to enjoy confusing the world by adding more and more 'differentiated' options for its Office 365 suite. The additional editions bring the number offered for business to nine, not to mention all the other ones for education, government, and consumers. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers lose the will to live. Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.


Developing Well-Architected .NET Applications
Webinar: CodeFluent Entities is a unique product, integrated to Visual Studio 2008/2010/2012 which allows developers to generate components such as scripts, code, web services and UIs. The code generation process is model-first and continuous: from your declarative model, a meta-model will be inferred which code generators will then translate into code. Over 20 code generators (a.k.a. ‘producers’) are provided ‘out of the box’ and that can be combined to obtain your own application following your desired architecture, using your desired technologies.


IT Skills Shortage: The Other Critical Cliff Facing Enterprises
The shortage of IT talent is real and likely to accelerate in the near term, according to Miano. "It is not a cost issue but a demand issue," he said. Although discussions about skills gaps can become political—as some are inclined to dispute the existence of a shortage—others agree with Miano. An IBM study released late last year found that the most acute need for IT skills is in the areas of mobile computing, cloud computing, social networking and analytics.


F5 tries to stay ahead of the curve with moves into security and beyond
The idea is to combine the two companies' divergent expertise in security into one product - F5's hardware firewall and access controls alongside Websense's malware protection and content inspection. While the only immediate result of the announcement was new interoperability for BIG-IP and V-Series appliances, the main goal is to offer the option of Websense services running on F5 hardware.


Private cloud-based services to see rapid growth
Among private cloud services, IDC expects that virtual private-cloud services will dominate dedicated private cloud for companies seeking to take advantage of their speed and lower costs. Virtual private cloud also is expected to benefit from the similarity to private cloud services, especially public infrastructure as a service, which many IT users already are using as a cost-saving alternative as they replace aging IT infrastructure.


Do You Remember to Ask Why?
The more you ask why, the better your answers become. The side benefit of this is that you not only make a better decision but you leave yourself better equipped to communicate the decision to those who have to execute it. This helps all of your stakeholders get excited about what you intend to do.


The second most important BYOD security defense: user awareness
It might sound trivial at first to say that user awareness is important to security but it might be the most important non-hardware, non-software solution available. An informed user is a user who behaves more responsibly and takes fewer risks with valuable company data, including email. Not only does user education make the user aware of all the potential dangers of mobile computing, it also places a lot of the responsibility for corporate security onto the user. And that's a good thing.


Why Innovation By Brainstorming Doesn't Work
Part of what we know about the brain makes it clear why the best new ideas don’t emerge from formal brainstorming. First, the brain doesn’t make connections in a rigid atmosphere. There is too much pressure and too much influence from others in the group. The “free association” done in brainstorming sessions is often shackled by peer pressure and as a result generates obvious responses. In fact, psychologists have documented the predictability of free association.


The Progress Principle: Sparking Employee Engagement and Performance
This webcast unravels the secrets of inner work life—the usually hidden emotions, perceptions, and motivations that arise as people react to events in their work day. You’ll discover how what you say and do every day can drive positive inner work life throughout your organization and fuel great performance for the long term. In addition, you find out ways to avoid the traps that can undermine inner work life and performance.

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Quote for the day:

"If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business." -- B. C. Forbes

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March 01, 2013

A Practical Glossary and Discussion of Relevant Terms, Concepts, Models, and Measures
An important aspect of ERM is the strong linkage between measures of risk and measures of overall organizational performance. Thus, this glossary begins with a description of some key corporate performance measures, after which successive elements of the ERM process (risk assessment, measurement, modeling, management applications, monitoring, and oversight) are described.


OLTP Performance of Exadata vs SSDs vs Violin Memory Flash Array
Ashminder Ubhi writes about his experience of running some performance tests against Exadata, SSDs and Violin Memory. The approach was to test the storage performance of the three configurations so he used the great SLOB OLTP type benchmarking tool developed by Kevin Closson. SLOB is very easy to setup and each test run is always consistent unlike some of the other available tools.


Being more agile with Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)
ATDD seems to offset the increase in development efforts since it allows the whole team to collaboratively discusses acceptance criteria, with examples, and then distills them into a set of concrete acceptance tests before development begins. This ensures that everyone has the same shared understanding of what is actually being built. It may also facilitate a better shared understanding and definition of what it means to be Done.


Five smartphone and tablet trends from Mobile World Congress
This year's MWC may have been lacking in high-end smartphone launches, but the "W" stands for "world" and lower-cost models shown this week are needed to open up the mobile-phone market to more people globally. Here are some of the trends that indicate where the smartphone market is headed.


What's wrong with the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012?
There is a big difference between the description of phases of the cycle on the curve, such as "Trough of Disillusionment," and the report's table of contents, which labels sections by describing the transition between phases. The curve shows Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the upslope of the trough, yet Gartner places it in a section titled "Sliding in to the Trough." This creates two very different perceptions.


An introduction to Firefox OS for mobile developers: Q&A with Andreas Gal, Mozilla
With the first device manufacturers expected to launch Firefox OS devices at Mobile World Congress this month and with major network operators inline to release them to consumers in early 2013, Mozilla’s new operating system (OS) is starting to make waves. Firefox OS is open-source, Linux-based and Web-friendly. mobiForge gets the low-down from Mozilla’s vice president of mobile


Applying big data approaches to information security a challenge
Unlike conventional security approaches that are focused largely on blocking attacks, the new approaches emphasize breach detection and response almost as much as breach prevention. The goal is to help companies block the threats they can while helping them detect and respond to the ones they miss. Instead of deploying point products and perimeter defenses, companies need to adopt a security model that is based on actual threats and threat intelligence, Coviello said.


New Hadoop distributions proliferate
Just in time for the O'Reilly Strata conference, three companies in the tech world have announced new distributions of Apache Hadoop, the open-source, MapReduce-based, distributed data analysis and processing engine. Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.1 for Windows,EMC/Greenplum Pivotal HD, and the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop have all premiered this week on the big data stage.


Asian users go DIY with BYOD
Companies in Asia are not rendering enough IT support to help employees use personal devices for work as part of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement. This is pushing workers to find their own ways to access corporate networks or data via their gadgets, and inadvertently risks creating security holes for potential company data loss or theft.


Microsoft Strikes Back At Amazon With Windows Azure Community Portal
Microsoft unveiled the Windows Azure Community portal, which provides dozens of popular open source applications and language runtimes contributed by partners. Even more recently, Microsoft took this a step further and made the images from the portal available directly in the Azure console, so they can be easily deployed onto Azure infrastructure. By making it easier to deploy third-party apps on its cloud, Microsoft is helping to grow its own ecosystem while increasing the utilization of its infrastructure.

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Quote for the day:

"The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck." -- Anthony Robbins

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