Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 07, 2013

Application awareness in cloud networking: Real or imagined?
One way to extend application awareness from the cloud data center to the cloud edge is to integrate application performance management tools and firewall capabilities with virtual networking at the branch or user side of the WAN. ... it's likely that edge devices will eventually become "cloud edge devices" that incorporate firewall, SDN and virtual networking features.

The Corporate Agile Journey – A Practical Viewpoint
In the “agile” world, failure is not exactly welcomed, but nor is it frowned upon. Instead, a “fail fast” mindset leads us to explore different ways of making something work until we find the right one. By its nature, this approach is not very intuitive or appealing to traditional executives who expect to see a firm plan in place at the outset. So once again we opt for the waterfall, with its well-structured delivery phases but sub-optimal delivery effectiveness.

2013 Enterprise Information Management Predictions Assessment

The start of each year spurs waves of forecasts and predictions of what’s to come in every industry. With technological evolutions and wide-ranging maturity levels, few markets are harder to pin down accurately than developments in enterprise information management. As we pass into the second half of 2013, we invited a few trusted analysts to revisit their start-of-the-year forecasts and tap into what has come to fruition as well as what remains up in the air.

Find those black swans, because they may find you first
There is no silver bullet for finding and utilising internal and external loss event data. However there is no excuse in 2013 to not take the time to consider what you are doing within your organisation to take the wealth of data, both internally and externally (both at an industry level and globally) that exists, and to then convert that through the DIKW hierarchy from data, to information, to knowledge and then to wisdom.

Three Things Strategy is NOT
Do you know what your organization’s strategy is? Do you really know? Strategy is a cloudy word, overused, misused, and full of misconceptions about what exactly a solid strategy consists of. Leaders retreat for days or weeks at a time to develop a strategic plan, and then emerge to announce something few in the organization can remember, fewer still understand. Every leader wants to develop a clear and effective strategy. To do this, we first need to cover what strategy is not.

Critical vulnerabilities found in single sign-on enterprise tool Atlassian Crowd
"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability can (but does not necessarily) lead to a hacker taking full control of an organization's single sign-on service, potentially resulting in a catastrophic security event," the Command Five researchers said in their advisory. At the very least, successful exploitation is likely to enable attackers to expand their unauthorized access within the targeted organization, they said.

Read Fiction and Be a Better Leader
It's this back and forth, engaging the complexity of things, that doesn't guarantee you're going to make a good decision, but it raises the odds of making a good decision. And that's what you get out of really good stories. Especially in a really good discussion, the students really struggle with the fact that there are competing sound views. Part of them are pulled one way, and part of them are pulled another way.

Zato - Python-based ESB and Backend Application Server
Applications can be integrated using HTTP (with special support for JSON/SOAP and plain XML), FTP, AMQP, JMS WebSphere MQ (for seamless interoperability with existing MQ Java apps), Redis and SQL. HTTP is the only means through which Zato services can be invoked synchronously with the requesting application waiting for response in a blocking manner.

The Art of Guerilla Usability Testing
Guerrilla usability testing is very much about adapting to the situation. ... Conducting the tests is only half the battle, of course. To deliver compelling and relevant results from guerilla usability tests, designers need to strategically decide how we’ll share our findings with our colleagues. ... Guerilla usability testing presented itself as an easy-to-perform technique for refining the user experience. It helped us validate (and invalidate) critical assumptions at cheap cost and with rapid speed.

High Availability Clustering
High availability clustering is a method used to minimize downtime and provide continuous service when certain system components fail. HA clusters consists of multiple nodes that communicate and share information through shared data memory grids and are a great way to ensure high system availability, reliability, and scalability.

Quote for the day:

"Diversity is the act of thinking independently together." -- Malcolm Forbes

July 06, 2013

The five components of a successful bring-your-own-device policy
But what's often forgotten and thus missing in BYOD efforts -- especially in the initial phases --is the policy piece. BYOD isn't a free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want situation. Careful planning and end-to-end thinking are required before a company purchases any systems for managing BYOD and certainly before the general word goes out that BYOD is allowed.

What Is Natural Language Processing?
The more ambitious among us (with an internal Wiki) can understand how powerful this can be. Armed with the source code this is potentially a truly wonderful application processor to link dynamic content (think system specifications or requirements) in context back to an entire knowledge base. If you really want to get your hands dirty and dive right in, there are two widely known frameworks for natural language processing.

Adding a Backend to Your App In Android Studio
When you create a backend using Android Studio, it generates a new App Engine application under the same project, and gives your Android application the necessary libraries and a sample activity to interact with that backend. Support for GCM is built-in, making it easy to sync data across multiple devices. Once you've generated the project, you can build and run your client and server code together, in a single environment, and even deploy your backend code right from Android Studio.

Intel’s Justin Rattner on New Laser Chip Business
Justin Rattner, who has been the company’s CTO, recently met with Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review’s senior IT editor, to argue that this investment will help Intel’s mobile chips overtake those of its competitors and create new businesses. Last Thursday, Rattner announced he was stepping down as Intel’s CTO to take personal leave. He plans to return to the company in a different position.

Enterprise Architecture Documentation and Representation
As a starting point for the study the hurdles and difficulties faced by two case projects are reported. The presented novel documentation framework, which is the main contribution of this work, is later shown to avoid these complications. It is structured as a mesh of relatively small pieces of documentation, each piece having a distinct physical counterpart. As a documentation form, the framework uses almost exclusively architectural principles.

VMTurbo Takes Virtualization Management to New Levels
“To maintain the health of the infrastructure, it’s imperative to understand the topological relationships and dependencies that are required to effectively drive intelligent decisions and actions within the IT environment spanning public and private clouds,” adds VMTurbo Chief Technology Officer Shmuel Kliger in a statement celebrating the product’s release.

IT job roles in flux thanks to consumerization
"Some companies will need to make a few small tweaks here or there to [their] IT structure in the coming years to deal with consumerization," said Dan Garcia, an enterprise architect at MassMutual Financial Group, an insurance company based in Springfield, Mass. "Companies will need to adopt more pervasive technologies to attract and retain talent."

Oracle quietly slashes BI software prices
"We pushed back asking for clarification to explain if there was a reduction in functionality or any prerequisite that had been added," Colon said. "For Oracle to put out a substantial price reduction with no guidance was odd." "There's usually some gotcha," he added. "'We've reduced the price, however we're reducing the price because you'll need this management pack to realize the full value of the product.'"

Dell eyes wearable computing move as PC business keeps slumping
"There are challenges in cost, and how to make it a really good experience," Burd told the Guardian. "But the piece that's interesting is that computers are getting smaller. Having a watch on your wrist – that's pretty interesting, pretty appealing." ... There's a lot of discussion about how that fits into wearable devices like we've seen with Google Glass and watches. We're looking at a world of lots of connected devices.

MetaModel – Providing Uniform Data Access Across Various Data Stores
MetaModel’s most central construct is the DataContext interface, which represents the data store and is used to explore and query it. Additionally, the UpdateableDataContext sub-interface is available for writeable data stores where updates to the data can be performed. The whole library can more or less be learned using basic code-completion, once you just ensure you have a DataContext instance.

Quote for the day:

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance." -- George Bernard Shaw

July 05, 2013

How to enact Apache security best practices for Web server security
The latest high-profile attack aimed at Apache was uncovered by researchers at security firms ESET and Sucuri. Attackers managed to work a backdoor into Apache that redirected Web traffic to malicious websites, where visitors would be infected by the Blackhole exploit kit. This attack underlined the need for organizations to enact Apache security best practices and highlighted the serious fallout that can be caused by insecure Apache Web servers.

The worst cloud outages of 2013 (so far)
As any cloud dweller knows, Web-based services can crash and burn just like any other type of technology. If the companies behind them are smart, you shouldn't lose any data in the long run -- but you'll likely lose a bit of sanity during the time the service is offline. While 2013's only halfway done, we've already seen some cringe-worthy cloud failures this year. Here are the worst -- so far.

6 ways to prevent mistakes that have cost others millions
Of all the obstacles standing in the way of a successful data center transformation, misinformation may be the most daunting. To help you separate the facts from the hype, the experts from HP Technology Consulting have created this informative guide. It’s designed to provide the immediate insight you need to make the right decisions about data center transformation—one of the most important IT issues you may ever face.

Why is Cloud Adoption Taking so Long?
A third reason is that you cannot “mix and match” cloud services from different providers. The market is consolidating, with a few key players emerging as dominant at the infrastructure and platform levels. Each of them has its own proprietary interfaces. There are no real vendor-neutral standards. ... Customers are beginning to talk of “vendor lock-in” in a way that we haven’t seen since the days of mainframes.

Examining Dimensions of Data Quality: Reasonability, Time and Access
Rational expectations, which are labeled “reasonable,” can also be documented as validity ranges, minimums, maximums and other basic business rules. ... At first glance one may think that Timeliness and Currency are the same concept, but that isn’t the case. Currency focuses on how up-to-date or how “fresh” data is, reflecting the real-world concept. Timeliness is related to how quickly a stakeholder can gain access to the data needed.

Brute-force cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, energy industry, intensify
The most common attack vectors against critical infrastructure sectors, according to the ICS-CERT report, were watering hole attacks, SQL injection, and spearphishing. Of the 200 cyberattacks so far (October 1, 2012–May 2013), 53% targeted the energy sector, followed by 17% targeting the manufacturing sector.

Will BYOD Give Rise to the Enterprise Genius Bar?
An enterprise Genius Bar is basically a walk-in center for employees to not only service their BYOD phones and tablets but also check out the latest gadgets on the market, receive tutorials on enterprise apps, and chat about where cool tech is heading. This doesn't mean that IT workers will have to wear Apple's trademark blue Genius shirts, but they will need retail people skills.

Power over Ethernet (PoE) Seeks to Extend Reach With Higher Efficiency, Faster Data Rates
By delivering data and power over the same cabling system, installation costs can be reduced and ongoing maintenance simplified. Although it has already achieved significant market success, PoE adoption is beginning to be limited by its power efficiency and by the maximum power it can deliver. Presently, it is also restricted by the maximum-data-rate Ethernet version it supports.

Enterprise Governance & Knowledge
From an architecture perspective, enterprises are made of human agents, devices, and symbolic (aka information) systems. From a business perspective, processes combine three kinds of tasks: Authority; Execution and Control ... At its core, enterprise governance is about decision-making and on that basis the purpose of systems is to feed processes with the relevant information so that agents can be put it to use as knowledge.

Employees Can't Carry Out A Strategy If They Didn't Help Plan It
By involving your employees in your strategizing, you’re preserving and protecting your business’s success. For their response to be nimble, they need more than marching orders ... Employees should be included throughout the strategy development process, and there’s plenty of space to engage everyone in the company at an appropriate level.

Quote for the day:

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." -- Arnold H. Glasow

July 04, 2013

Risk management, bottom-line benefits from records retention schedules
"[Retention schedules] certainly mitigate risk from a data management and information governance perspective because, at the end of the day, retention schedules are about two things: avoiding the cost of keeping information and making it quick and efficient to find it when a legal or regulatory request comes up," said Barry Murphy, co-founder and principal analyst at the eDJ Group consulting firm.

Business Analytics: Why Not Experiment?
Even properly-executed experiments – those with high internal validity – can still suffer from external validity shortcomings if the sample isn’t representative of the larger population or the findings don’t generalize beyond the specific experimental settings. The good news for business innovators is that experimentation has never been cheaper. Many B2C companies design, implement and analyze thousands of experiments weekly, fueled by Internet access to customers and inexpensive technologies.

The era of “Internet aware systems and services”
The major solutions in the digital ecosystem today incorporate an ever growing mix of devices and platforms that offer new user experiences and organization. This can be seen across most all industry sectors and horizontally between industry sectors ... strategic planning needs to have insight into the nature of new infrastructures and applications that will support these new multisystem workloads and digital infrastructures.

Object Pool Design Pattern
The object pool design pattern creates a set of objects that may be reused. When you need a new object you request it from the pool. If a previously prepared object is available it is returned immediately, avoiding the instantiation cost. If no objects are present in the pool, a new item is created and returned. When you have used the object and no longer need it, you return it to the pool, allowing it to be used again in the future without going through the slow instantiation process.

Cascading Change Versus Viral Change
sometimes before we even know whether this change is beneficial for us or not, simply because we have not tried it out yet. This is a risky endeavor with big stakes! By being a bit more dynamic and smarter in risk taking (at small scale and hence at low costs of failure) we could allow for more experimentation with change initiatives to be done in chosen areas. When and if these experiments succeed – they will spread automatically if we just allow for it

Cisco waited too long to address SDNs, Chambers says
Chambers said Cisco has the opportunity to fold SDNs into "a total architectural play" and offer OpenFlow switch/controller interactions at line-rate speeds. Cisco also sees an opportunity to "open (SDN) up to the network," which is the inverse of what other SDN players propose: opening up the network to SDN control. Chambers was adamant that SDNs do not threaten Cisco's successful franchise in switching and routing, which is a $180 billion installed base.

The CIO position: Why you need to eat your own dog food
Yet, the tides are turning once again, as they often do when it comes to the CIO position. Now companies across sectors don't just want a CIO with a top-notch technology background or industry-specific knowledge; they need an IT executive who has insight into the wants and needs of the customer, Banerji explained. In the technology sector, this has been true for years. "Those CIOs are expected to, as they say, eat their own dog food, and a lot of companies want that in their CIO," Banerji said.

Design Patterns after Design is Done
Abstract Factory makes code more modular and reusable, but at the expense of understandability. Flyweight makes code less expandable and reusable, and much harder to follow. Most developers don’t recognize or understand the Visitor pattern. Observer can be difficult to understand as well, although it does make the code more flexible and extendible. Chain of Responsibility makes code harder to follow, and harder to change or fix safely. And Singleton, of course, while simple to recognize and understand, can make code much harder to change.

Significant Growth Rates Expected for Enterprise App Stores
“Enterprises supporting BYOD initiatives need to consider bring-your-own-app initiatives as well,” McNicol said. “Widespread adoption of BYOD has led to an influx of third-party apps being used to support business functions. Instead of blacklisting these apps, enterprises are embracing, securing and deploying third-party apps through the enterprise app store. As such, the enterprise app store is a means to support BYOA.”

Are outsourcers stunting business innovation?
“There isn’t the incentive in the current contract structures for them to bring those new ideas to the table. We’ve talked for donkey’s years about contracting for innovation but actually nobody does,” Sheridan said. “Most organisations want the service they’ve contracted for, delivered at the level that their business requires for the price they’ve agreed - and all the focus is on doing that,” he said.

Quote for the day:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

July 03, 2013

This e-mail will self-destruct in five seconds
"The inability to control the number and type of operations that may be subsequently performed on a sent e-mail message makes conventional e-mail systems unsuitable for sending confidential information for which absolute control of distribution is a necessity," the AT&T's patent application states. It goes on to say that some e-mail systems that allow users to set up their client so that messages are deleted after a certain period of time. Still, the power to destroy the message remains in the hands of the recipient.

Better Business Decisions Through Streamlined Risk Prioritization
At the center of any successful enterprise risk management process one must have clear, accurate and easily accessible data. McAfee and LockPath have joined forces to remove barriers that often keep organizations from performing optimally. This joint solution addresses issues head-on and empowers information security professionals to better interpret and share findings, manage remediation and make more informed business decisions.

Could Your Startup Benefit from Microsoft Ventures?
The new Microsoft Ventures effort combines and strengthens programs Microsoft already has in place with new programs still being built. One of these existing programs is BizSpark. The initiative provides software including Windows and Office, Visual Studio, Windows Azure and additional support to promising and visionary startups at no cost. Microsoft says the program currently serves 50,000+ members in 100 countries on 6 continents.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c gears up for the private cloud
Oracle Enterprise Manager was originally created to deploy and manage groups of Oracle databases. Over the years, Oracle has extended the software to manage the Oracle Application Server and third-party software packages from Microsoft and others, through the use of plug-ins and connectors. Today, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange, a sort of app store for the software, offers more than 135 add-ons for third-party programs.

IE11 Preview and the New Developer Tools
The emphasis is on performance with new “UI Responsiveness”, “Profiler”, and “Memory” sections. The Memory tab is looking very useful for today’s apps and the heap snapshots are easier to use compared to the tools in other browsers. Likewise the code profiler is easy to work with and similar to the profiling tools for managed code in VS Ultimate.

Use forensics and detective work to solve JavaScript performance mysteries

Despite the amazing advances in JavaScript virtual machine technology, a recent study showed that Google applications spend between 50% and 70% of their time inside V8.... Read on, to learn about optimizing JavaScript and profile JavaScript applications, in a from the trenches story of the performance detectives on the V8 team tracking down an obscure performance problem in Find Your Way to Oz.

Latest tiered data storage trends center on automatic data movement
In this podcast with TechTarget senior writer Carol Sliwa, Nadkarni discusses the advancements in tiered data storage, the types of workloads with which automated storage tiering can be used, the ways that flash and cache fit into an automated tiering strategy, and some of the problems encountered with automated storage tiering.

The Power of Purposeful Strategy
Strategy is not a specialized, highly-complex event that has to be handled by a specific department, or outside consultants. Strategy is the life-blood, a state-of-mind of the organization that is birthed by the Commander in Chief and runs down through every department, at every level of the organization. The goal is to cultivate a constant consciousness of the strategy, or purpose, of the company in every member of the organization.

The verdict: Should you buy the Galaxy S4 and/or HTC One Google Play Edition?
The HTC One and GS4 Google Play Editions have a lot of good things going for 'em. In many ways, the combination of their hardware and a stock Android UI is actually quite nice to use. It's just that in the grand scheme of things, the phones feel more like hastily assembled experiments than carefully thought out and cohesive devices.

Crimeware-As-A-Service is a thing. Really
"Such underground platforms are implementing stronger mechanisms to ensure that participants are who they purport to be (or at the very least are not law enforcement officials). Ironically, while the platforms that facilitate the services marketplace for illegal activities are going deeper underground, the trade in zero-day vulnerabilities is more transparent than ever before," Samani and Paget report.

Quote for the day:

"If you think running a business is tough, try bringing up a baby." -- Richard Branson