November 22, 2013

Box, Dropbox get down to business with new enterprise cloud services
It's the latest area of specific enterprise ecosystem offerings from Box following the release of similar platforms for education, health care and financial, among others. Box's rival, Dropbox, also revamped its Dropbox for Businessto attract greater enterprise use. Features include 1,000 GB of space to start, file recovery and versioning, 256-bit AES encryption, remote wipe, two-step verification and more.

Privacy groups urge UN to adopt digital surveillance resolution
"Indiscriminate mass surveillance, which tramples individuals' right to privacy and undermines the social contract we all have with the State, must come to end immediately," they wrote, adding that if the resolution is adopted this would be the first major statement by the UN on privacy in 25 years. The draft resolution says states should create conditions to prevent such violations and ensure that relevant national legislation complies with their obligations under international human rights law.

10 old-school technology strategies that CIOs should not forget
A host of new and reformed practices have IT departments reinventing themselves ... Nevertheless, the fundamental requirements for quality systems that work right the first time are not going to go away. The rudiments of IT asset protection, disaster recovery, and business continuation also remain. Consequently, many tried and proven “old school” IT practices still make venerable companion strategies for emerging IT trends. Here are ten “old school” technology strategies that CIOs should not forget

Face detection using HTML5, javascript, webrtc, websockets, Jetty and OpenCV
With the webrtc specification it will become easier to create pure HTML/Javascript real-time video/audio related applications where you can access a user's microphone or webcam and share this data with other peers on the internet. For instance you can create video conferencing software that doesn't require a plugin, create a baby monitor using your mobile phone or more easily facilitate webcasts. All using cross-browser features without the use of a single plugin.


The End of Private Cloud – 5 Stages of Loss and Grief
No matter how good you think you are, you’ll never have the resources, skills or need to be as good as Amazon. AWS deploys enough computing capacity every day to run Amazon.com when it was a $7B online retailer. How many servers will you rack and stack today? How many petabytes of storage will you deploy this weekend? How many features did you update this year ... In her seminal work, “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross articulated the 5 Stages of Loss and Grief. I think it’s time to look at this for private clouds.


Indian Engg Students Have Almost Zero Skills In InfoSec: Report
A mere 13 per cent of engineering students were found to be trainable in the InfoSec domain with nearly 86 per cent unskilled even on InfoSec basics. Speaking on these findings, Jay Bavisi, President and Co-Founder, EC-Council said, “The world is recognizing vulnerabilities leading to cyber threats and attacks and India holds a key position in the global IT-ITeS map. Every country is taking steps towards building a talent pipeline towards a secured future and we urge the Indian industry and academia to address the concerns to retain their leadership in the domain.”

Taking responsibility for national cybersecurity
During her ISSA keynote, The Right Honorable Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, U.K. special government representative to business for cybersecurity, outlined the steps already underway between the U.K. government and private sector companies to make this partnership happen. ... "The government needs to form relationships with the private sector because it's the private sector that owns most of the wealth creation in the economy, and they are the operators of the critical national infrastructure," she said.

Lies, damned lies and big data: How firms get analytics wrong – and how to get it right
In companies where internal politicking is rife, people will deliberately bend analytics so the figures back up the course of action they support, warns Srikanth Velamakanni, founder and CEO of Fractal Analytics. Even where there's no bias from vested interests, it's common to find errors caused by poor data or flawed analysis, he said. "If you don't do analytics in the right manner, you can come up with some very wrong conclusions ..." Velamakanni said.

Only half of large companies have strong mobile strategies
"The mobile challenges that organizations are wrestling with are much the like the challenges they saw when dealing with the emerging Internet 15 years ago," said Eric Lesser, an author of the study and a research director at IBM's Institute for Business Value. Only 50% of the organizations surveyed agreed that their mobile strategy is aligned with the overall business strategy.

Health IT Execs Reveal 2014 Technology Priorities
For this annual year-end feature, Health Data Management posed a simple question to CIOs and other executives facing payment reform, dwindling reimbursements and pressure from patients, payers and employers for increased transparency around quality and cost: What I.T. do you need most in the year ahead, and beyond?

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Quote for the day:

"Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success." -- Napoleon Hill

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November 21, 2013

GitHub bans weak passwords after brute-force attacks
Popular source code repository service GitHub has recently been hit by a brute-force password-guessing attack that successfully compromised some accounts. "We sent an email to users with compromised accounts letting them know what to do," GitHub security engineer Shawn Davenport said in a blog post. "Their passwords have been reset and personal access tokens, OAuth authorizations, and SSH keys have all been revoked."


Communicating Change
Expectations tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. You need to communicate the expected change your project is creating will be beneficial and good for the majority of the stakeholders. If this message is both true and believed (the two elements are not automatically connected), the experience of the stakeholders is more likely to be positive. Communication often can mean the difference between project success and failure.


Putting the customer first- For real
Insurers face challenges which are in many ways unprecedented: not simply as a result of the crisis, but also in the face of the major changes – the global mega-trends – which are transforming the business and social environment. What will help the winners pull ahead will be genuinely reengineering their business around the customer. However, many insurers have yet to realize the scale of the transformation required. And fewer still are successfully achieving it.


52 Ways To Avoid Giving An Immediate Answer
No one likes being pushed or bullied into making snap decisions. There’s something unnerving about the situation where we’re the demand is “I need an answer, and I need it now!” Of course, if you work as in law enforcement or an emergency room, sometimes immediate decisions are necessary. But most of the time, the imposed urgency is the result of someone else’s poor planning or decisions. ... how do we deal with these “tyrants of urgency”? Here are a few possible responses you might use to buy some time or send


Unlocking SaaS Leadership Skills
A combination of technical skills and business acumen is the minimum expectation organizations have when they try to identify the right person to head a SaaS spinoff. Potential leaders must also be strong communicators and presenters adept at dealing with politics and talking with directors and other stakeholders. They must also be extremely service-oriented in their IT philosophies.


Being Agile: You are Not a Java Developer, You are a Software Engineer
Agile breaks this pattern by working closely together from the beginning of the project. The “end of project” style of coordinated team work in waterfall happens throughout every iteration. This is what makes agile so productive. However, “getting there” can be hard because working where your domain knowledge and skills are the strongest is where you want to work and where you know you will be the most productive.


Evolution of Storage: VM-Aware Storage for Virtualization
Adopting a modular approach to scaling using VMs and virtual disks as the unit for deploying storage is now possible using virtualization functionality such as VMware Storage DRS to load balance across different storage systems. This greatly simplifies how administrators can scale their environment without the complexity of scale-out or scale-up storage solutions. Adding the ability to control and monitor individual storage systems from a centralized administrative interface can further reduce the overhead IT faces with storage.


Hackers reportedly steal 42M customer records from online dating network Cupid Media
Andrew Bolton, Cupid Media's managing director, told Krebs that the information found on the rogue server appears to be related to a security breach that happened in January 2013, which customers had been notified about. Bolton also reportedly said that a large portion of the leaked records correspond to old, inactive or deleted accounts and that the number of active users actually affected by the breach is considerably less than 42 million.


COBOL still not dead yet, taking on the cloud
Conceptually, taking a language that can trace its heritage back into the 1950s onto a modern as-a-service platform may seem like an exercise in futility, but McGill says that it is a transfer that is not as mind-bending as it first sounds. "Believe it or not, it's probably easier to move COBOL into the cloud, than it is to move a C/C++ application into the cloud. It's certainly easier to a COBOL application to the cloud, particularly from a mainframe environment than a client-server, and Microsoft-based client-server [environment]," he says.

Costin Leau on Elasticsearch, BigData and Hadoop
Elasticsearch supports RESTful API using JSON over HTTP for all of its operations, whether it's search, analytics or monitoring. In addition, native clients for different languages like Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby are available. Elasticsearch is available for use under the Apache 2 license. The first milestone of elasticsearch-hadoop 1.3.M1 was released in early October. InfoQ spoke with Costin Leau from Elasticsearch team about the search and analytics engine and how it integrates with Hadoop and other Big Data technologies.

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Quote for the day:

"The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching" -- Dennis Green

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November 20, 2013

Data centers run warmer in China, Hong Kong
According to a survey conducted by energy management vendor Enlogic Systems, over 85 percent of data center administrators in Greater China were comfortable running their site at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Farenheit) and higher. This went against a common belief that lower temperatures were necessary to keep systems cool and running more efficiently, with less risks of downtime.

CIO tip: Learn how to present a risk-management plan to the board
Prima facie, it should be understood that the board does not manage risk, Caldwell said. "The board's role in risk management is to ensure there is an effective risk-management plan in place and that the management of the company is effectively implementing it," he said. "They have an oversight role." Any regulator who comes to meet with board members -- which is happening with increasing frequency in large enterprises, particularly in the financial services industry -- will ask questions targeted at figuring out whether the board is really involved in overseeing the risk-management plan.

How To Use Connectivity To Drive Product Innovation
In the world of product innovation, the buzzword of the day is “connected.” But there’s one place where products have yet to realize the full potential of connectivity: the home. We’re not talking about consumer electronics like phones, computers, tablets, and video games. We’re talking about the humble appliances that make our lives easier and our homes more comfortable, like coffee makers, toasters, and space heaters.


Cyber-Security Training a Top Priority for Industry, Government
Cyber-security professionals continue to enjoy strong demand and low unemployment, especially in the United States. The International Information Security System Certification Consortium, or (ISC)2, predicts that the rolls of U.S. cyber-security professionals will grow by 11 percent each year through 2020. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates the growth to be twice that.


Carriers reject kill switch for stolen smartphones
District Attorney George Gascon said Monday that AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, United States Cellular Corp., Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. rebuffed Samsung's proposal to preload its phones with Absolute LoJack anti-theft software as a standard feature. The wireless industry says a kill switch isn't the answer because it could allow a hacker to disable someone's phone.


Hackers exploit JBoss vulnerability to compromise servers
Researchers from security firm Imperva have recently detected an increase in attacks against JBoss servers that used Micalizzi's exploit to install the original pwn.jsp shell, but also a more complex Web shell called JspSpy. Over 200 sites running on JBoss servers, including some that belong to governments and universities have been hacked and infected with these Web shell applications, said Barry Shteiman, director of security strategy at Imperva.


Yahoo CEO Mayer talks mobile strategy, design approach
The experience of actually working with the product is just as important as how it looks, Mayer said. "Companies can fall, quite frankly, too in love with design," she said. Mayer related a story about a friend whose startup failed in the dot-com boom. The company's employees wrote post-mortem white papers analyzing why the company had failed. Her friend's was titled, "Usable versus useful," she said.


Customer selects Cloudmeter to conduct Data Forensics
"Using Cloudmeter, I check all my custom conversion variables: the rate of views to a product detail page, the proportion of products being added to the cart from different areas of the site, and all my micro-cart conversions. I quickly see that there were no significant changes on cart additions, but that something seemed to go wrong for many customers on Cart Step 2, where they enter billing information."

What is endpoint security, and how do you shore up the weakest links?
What is endpoint security, and why should today's CIOs be taking note of their organization's weakest links? In this three-part webcast, SearchCIO-Midmarket editorial director Christina Torode speaks with Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates LLC, about the importance of mobile security. Here, in part one, Gold examines the various risk points that organizations small and large face.


What’s Next in Software Analytics
Software analytics (SA) brings the notion of business intelligence to the software industry through fact-based decision support systems. Today, SA primarily focuses on helping individual developers with mundane coding and bug-fixing decisions by mining developer-oriented repositories such as version control systems and bug trackers. For instance, we can automatically determine the risk-the "bugginess" - of a code change by mining the actual risk caused by prior changes

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Quote for the day:

"Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act." -- Jack Welch

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November 19, 2013

The True Story of a Disrupted Industry, Talent Retained, and Beer Pong
Keith Mueller: We are disrupting one of the oldest professions--bookkeeping--and therefore need to bring new thinking, technology, and processes to help our clients. I believe Silicon Valley has this culture that starts with the questions of what and how can we do things better, faster, and at a lower cost? How we can effect change? That’s the culture we need at BookKeeping Express, and we are developing that here by a constant flow of questions, internal communication, and desire to drive value to our clients. Plus we work hard--so I just feel fun has to be part of the equation.


Exploring LXC Networking
Docker is still very young, though dotCloud, who have apparently pivoted to Docker, have been using it to power their PaaS offering. After playing with Docker for a while I must admit it is awesome. There is no doubt about it. I personally haven’t seen as much excitement about any IT technology in past several years I’ve been in this industry as I’m seeing now surrounding Docker. LXC is the technology which is used by Docker and which has been around for much longer.

Seven ways identity, access management will change in the enterprise
"In the past, efficiency was a key driver [for identity management roll-outs]," said Gregg Kreizman, research vice president at Gartner. "Compliance came along, but business enablement is the Holy Grail." Protected resources in the enterprise aren't where they use to be and the move to the cloud has stressed and fractured identity and access management (IAM) to the point where it needs to be re-architected, according to Gartner.With those observations and others, Gartner laid out the future framed by seven predictions for the way IAM in the future will be unlike IAM now.

Q&A: Design Thinking and Its Role in Industry and Education
The notion of "design thinking" has emerged as a topic of great discussion in recent years among design practitioners, educators across disciplines, and organizations of all kinds. Whether you’re a student, graduate, or seasoned veteran you’ll find value in the following dialogue which explores some of its many interpretations and applications. This interview was conducted by Dianne Hardin, at The University of Cincinnati, as part of her research for the DMI FutureED project. Hardin wanted to get perspectives on design thinking from practitioners responsible for providing it to clients and teaching it to students.

Landscapes in Mobile Application Security
One key requirement for any single sign on scenario is - we should be able to establish direct trust or brokered trust between applications and their users. In most of the cases this is established through IdPs. The first example we took was based on direct trust - while the second is on brokered trust. To accomplish this use case we need to build a trust relationship between all the authorization servers - taking part in - and also a middle man to mediate SSO. This use case is also highlighted in the Native SSO draft specification by OpenID Foundation - but no much details as of now.

Thornton May: Caught between mobility's rock and hard place
A high-potential millennial told the CIO at a big-name pharmaceutical company during her exit interview that she found the work environment toxic. Her main complaint was that the enterprise did not allow use of the modern consumer technologies and applications that she perceives as comprising her personal and professional identity. This is mobility's rock: People want the interface, the ease of use, the "cool" factor, the freedom and the functionality of consumer technology in the workplace.

CSA to create cloud security controls for BYOD
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced Wednesday the launch of its Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) initiative -- a project tasked with designing a better way to secure personal devices on corporate networks, a trend known as bring your own device (BYOD). The goal of the SDP initiative is to produce a framework of cloud security controls that "mitigates network-based attacks on Internet-accessible applications by eliminating connectivity to them until devices and users are authenticated and authorized," according to a CSA press release.

Cisco suggests new economic metric: Gross Domestic P0wnage
The Index notes the many upsides that flow from technology, asserting that “governments and businesses that embrace the Internet and ICTs recognize it will enhance their long-term competitiveness and societal wellbeing, and potentially contribute up to eight percent of gross domestic product”. But the document says it can find only occasional assessment or quantification of negative economic impacts brought on by technology, citing data on the cost in money and jobs of intellectual property theft.

Building an Advanced Managed Services Practice
With many managed services providers admitting that their technology skills are far deeper than their business acumen, the processes required to create those critical organizational development plans may be quite unfamiliar. The talents essential to build and sustain these IT companies can be quite diverse, so MSPs either have to undergo training to acquire those capabilities or hire new employees with those specific proficiencies. Regardless of the method they adopt, those consistent investments can significantly boost an organization’s chances of achieving numerous goals over time.

Secret TPP agreement, SOPA on steroids, may be the end of the Internet as we know it
The EFF warned that “the TPP would let corporations monitor our online activities, cut off our Internet access, delete content and impose fines.” It gives “legal teeth to Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools” and “calls for criminal liability for violations of these anti-circumvention provisions.” In fact, “this criminal liability could apply to people circumventing these restrictions even where the underlying work is not covered by copyright.”

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Quote for the day:

"A good test of a platform’s importance is to find out what happens if the platform shuts down for 5 minutes – how much panic and revenue drop does that create in various parts of the world? Another measure of the platform is the value it creates by launching new companies and ideas." -- Chetan Sharma, Chetan Sharma Consulting

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November 18, 2013

Is DaaS the Next Step to Simplifying Enterprise IT?
"As we centralise end-user computing environment in data centres and make it accessible to end-users over a private cloud, we are actually paving the way for adoption of desktop as a service to end users,” emphasises Handa. Handa reiterates that fact that several IT services organisations are focusing on this domain of provisioning and supporting desktops as a service by assuring Application Delivery as a Service (AdaaS) model on a variety of end-user devices.

25 tips and tools to make Google Drive better
Google Drive is a lot of things. It's a cloud-based storage service, it's an online office suite, and it's the connective tissue that ties numerous Google services together. Don't be fooled, though, there's even more to Drive than meets the eye. With the right combination of tools, settings and know-how, you can turn Drive into a lean, mean, productivity machine -- one that's jam-packed with time-saving functionality and fine-tuned to work for you. Here are 25 ways to crank up the power and send Google Drive into overdrive.

Australian media companies survive digital threat, says Brightcove chief David Mendels
Australian media companies are becoming one of the world’s fast adapters of video services in response to digital disruption, says the chief executive of Brightcove, David Mendels. ... “We’ve got years of video being the most powerful communication medium for humans,” he says. “Everyone understands the power of video to tell a story is clear, and the opportunity is clear. People now expect news and entertainment content to be available on devices any time and anywhere, and companies to directly control engagement through the digital world.”

Free eBook with SQL Server performance tips and nuggets
The 45 Database Performance Tips eBook covers different tips to help you avoid code that saps performance, whether that’s the ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when using Object to Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, or what to be aware of for indexes, database design, and T-SQL. The eBook is also available to download with SQL Prompt from Red Gate. We often hear that it’s the productivity-boosting side of SQL Prompt that makes it useful for everyday coding.


How to Mobilize Your C-Suite for Big Data Analytics
The often-transformative nature of that change places serious demands on the top team. There’s no substitute for experienced hands who can apply institutional knowledge, navigate organizational hazards, make tough trade-offs, provide authority when decision rights conflict, and signal that the leadership is committed to a new analytics culture. In our experience, the concerted action that’s required falls into six categories. Leaders should take full measure of them before assigning responsibilities or creating roles.

Stratus asks if continuous availability possible in the cloud?
Some customers were hurt because they didn't consider where and how their workloads would failover to use other resources when a failure occurs. The key point LeClair wanted to get across is that customers should really thinking about the business requirements for each of their cloud workloads and where redundant hardware and software must be deployed to address potential outages.

IBM and Amazon are battling for an 'explosive' fed cloud market
"Agencies are moving much more aggressively to the cloud," said Alex Rossino, principal research analyst at Deltek, who called 2013 "the tipping point." He expects many agencies to use cloud-based infrastructure services, in particular. ... IBM this week said it had received a federal key security certification for its cloud offerings, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, better known as FedRAMP. Amazon has also achieved that designation.

Bob Pittman of Clear Channel, on the Value of Dissent

Nobody’s in an ivory tower, and let’s figure this out together. Often in meetings, I will ask people when we’re discussing an idea, “What did the dissenter say?” The first time you do that, somebody might say, “Well, everybody’s on board.” Then I’ll say, “Well, you guys aren’t listening very well, because there’s always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.”

CISOs Need to Keep a Vigilant Eye on Eight Security Predictions in 2014
“Bypassing traditional defenses was raised to an art form by cybercriminals in 2013," said Charles Renert, vice president of security research for Websense. "In 2014, cyberattacks will be even more complex and diverse. While the general volume of advanced malware will decrease—we predict the volume of targeted attacks and data destruction incidents will increase. Organizations must up their security game as attackers continue to seek new ways to penetrate traditional defenses at every stage of the threat lifecycle."

SATA Express marries PCI-e, SATA for faster direct-attached storage
The SATA Express specification now recognizes PCI-e as a suitable storage interface for fast storage devices. Conventional drives will continue to use the server's standard SAS and SATA interface operated through the motherboard's South Bridge chip, while new, fast disk drives like SSD use SATA Express through the PCI-e interface. While this new option helps meet the performance and capacity demands of varied workloads, servers will need SATA Express capabilities and SFF-8639 multifunctional connectors to take advantage.

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Quote for the day:

"The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way." -- Henry Miller

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