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Like my colleague Alex Olesker, I too attended Cloudera Day 2012. While there were many panels of interest, perhaps one of the most important was Amr Awadallah‘s talk about big data applications to business intelligence. Many CTOVision readers with backgrounds in the intelligence comm...Feb. 16, 2012 08:49 AM EST Reads: 386
The term Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is often regarded somewhat suspiciously by security professionals, seeing as it how it can be a buzzword that obscures actual analysis of the dynamics of cyber attacks or a diplomatic fiction because it’s not polite to openly accuse the Chinese...
If you are running the BIG-IP Edge Client on your iPhone, iPod or iPad, you may have gotten an AppStore alert for an update. If not, I just wanted to let you know that version 1.0.3 of the iOS Edge Client is available at the AppStore.
The main updates in v1.0.3:
URI scheme enhancemen...
Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life - well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under "followers" in Twitter and the...
Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the n...
There are – according to about a bazillion studies - 4 billion mobile devices in use around the globe.
It is interesting to note that nearly everyone who notes this statistic and then attempts to break it down into useful data (usually for marketing) that they almost always do so base...
What are some good reasons to adopt cloud storage? Cost, durability and flexibility.
So let me talk about performance, instead.
As part of our daily testing, we do routine performance measurements across a broad swath of cloud storage providers. It gives us a check to ensure that the...
I have been implementing and improving development processes for a while now. Either directly when I am brought in as a Software Process Engineer, or indirectly when I am brought in as a Software Architect. I have not been involved with process improvement on all my engagements. The on...
Tokens are at the center of API access control in the Enterprise. Token management, the process through which the lifecycle of these tokens is governed emerges as an important aspect of Enterprise API Management.
While some of this information is created during OAuth handshakes, some ...
Struggle and Contradiction in four different dimensions – that is how I can summarize the trend in social media.
Till Facebook came in, web was mostly open. Two of the key drivers behind the success of the Web are (1) the ease with which pages can be hyperlinked irrespective of where ...
Passwords suck.
They are long, hard to remember (even if you have easier-to-remember phrases), more so when new, and are largely a difficulty for users to user properly. Combined with the fact that many users choose easy-to-guess or easy-to-ascertain passwords based off of commonly-k...
IT departments and data centers are used to seeing demand for resources surge. In recent years, this has been especially evident in the area of data storage. No matter what you want to call it – “data explosion,” or something else – you can’t deny the fact that organizations simply hav...
To quote my friend Stevie Chambers (@stevie_chambers), "I feel like a new room has opened in my memory palace."
That was exactly how I felt after finishing my recent The Cloudcast (.net) podcast with Sam Ramji (@sramji) and Christian Reilly (@reillyusa), where we discussed the role of...
What do these two vulnerabilities have in common?
Apache Killer.
Post of Doom.
Right, they’re platform-based vulnerabilities. Meaning they are vulnerabilities peculiar to the web or application server platform upon which applications are deployed. Mitigations for such vulnerabilit...
PaaS v2.0 should be more open than the current implementations, and cultivate tools communities. But the focus on open development stacks is ignoring the second aspect of PaaS - the management of live applications after they are built. PaaS providers need to allow for communication of ...
Mobile development tools are changing rapidly.
I had started work on comparing cross-platform mobile tools about a month back. I had initially started with a list of 26 tools. A few got added on the way.
However, what is most interesting is that in this short period of time one of th...
The Enterprise is buzzing with API initiatives these days. APIs not only serve mobile applications, they are increasingly redefining how the enterprise does B2B and integration in general. API management as a category follows different models. On one hand, certain technology vendors of...
Anyone that's managing an enterprise IT with aging or outdated client/server systems is starting to feel the heat. Soon, their systems and applications will be obsolete and unsupported. At the same time, the industry as whole is seeking the fastest gateway to the latest .NET, HTML5 and...
One of the popular instance types supported by Amazon EC2 is the Micro Instance. In November 2010, Amazon announced the free tier and started offering 750 hours of Micro Instance usage free per month for the first one year. Initially this offer was available only to Amazon Linux instan...
I'm a big fan of history, especially technology history, because it gives us such wonderful guidance about what to expect with each new "technology disruption". Just like the history of mankind, technology tends to follow repeatable trends, actions and mistakes.
The latest trend that ...
Considering the innate differences between just the two most popular mobile operating systems – Android and iOS – gives rise to understanding how costly and complex an infrastructure might need to be to support both. It’s not at all unlike the issues with server virtualization. Managem...
How fast does technology change? What is its impact?
It is something like the hour hand of a clock. If you keep staring at it you would feel that it always remains stationary. If you go away and come back after sometime, you will see that it has moved a lot.
The same thing is true wi...
This is the fourth post for cross-platform mobile development tool comparison. There are two more to come. For convenience of analysis, I had divided the tools into five categories (here is an overview).
Mobile Web (JavaScript-CSS library), (here is the detail review)
Visual Tool (No...
There’s an excellent discussion going on over on the Cloud Computing Google Group about the pace of migration of traditional software to a SaaS model.
Here I recently went into some of the very real reasons why the migration is slower than some would like, but didn’t really talk about...
People often believe that if a developer is capable of creating clean, functional code that they will by default be writing secure code. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Security vulnerabilities can result from poor code, functional bugs can be security bugs too, but the tr...
Every year, our friends at ESG post results of their annual Spending Intentions Survey, indicating where many businesses are likely to spend their IT dollars over the coming year. Recently Steve Duplessie posted an article on his blog entitled Cloud – The Cost Containment Strategy that...
Every company should plan regular architecture capability maturity assessments using a model. These should provide a framework that represents the key components of a productive enterprise architecture process. A model provides an evolutionary way to improve the overall process that st...
Application development has been moving in the direction of platform abstraction. That is, the need for developers to have detailed knowledge of the infrastructure that the application was being deployed on was becoming less important with increasing sophistication of the application p...
In my 2012 (and 2013) industry trends and perspectives predictions I mentioned that some storage systems vendors who managed their costs could benefit from the current Hard Disk Drive (HDD) shortage. Most in the industry would say that is saying what they have said, however I have an a...
The automation of processes is a key enabler of the Cloud phenomena – without process the Cloud remains a passive environment that undoubtedly saves you money and removes some of the operational headaches, but does little else.
The Cloud without process cannot deliver on the promise o...
One of the benefits of web applications is that they are generally transported via TCP, which is a connection-oriented protocol designed to assure delivery. TCP has a variety of native mechanisms through which delivery issues can be addressed – from window sizes to selective acks to id...
Every once in a while, as the number of people following me grows (thank you, each and every one), I like to revisit something that is fundamental to the high-tech industry but is often overlooked or not given the attention it deserves. This is one of those times, and the many-faceted ...
In most cases, the use of the term “consolidation” implies the aggregation (and subsequently elimination) of like devices. Application delivery consolidation, for example, is used to describe a process of scaling up infrastructure that often occurs during upgrade cycles. Many little bo...
What can we expect from cloud computing in 2012? Where will cloud computing be one year from now?
If you look back at the important cloud computing events you will find that nothing of much significance had happened in 2010. The same can be said for the 2011 and I suspect that 2012 wi...
The distinction between IaaS and PaaS, and why and how customers will use these services, is very effectively explained through the Elections Canada RFP from last year.
I summarized their plans and requirements in a white paper, called ‘Web Business Evolution‘ because this was the ter...
It’s just been an accepted fact of the life of an IT professional (and of a data center manager in particular) that sometimes you have to go into the data center to fix things. A single phone call at 3 a.m. means you’re tooling down the road half-awake, hoping to find an open coffee sh...
Those who follow the HyperOffice blog know that in our last series of posts, we have been focusing on the business problem of collaboration, beyond a narrow technology focus. “Collaboration” in its broad sense, is what every organization is ultimately involved in – people working toge...
By now, everyone even vaguely familiar with information security knows the military maxim of blitzkrieg – burst through the hardened defense at a single point and then rush pell-mell to the rear where the soft underbelly of any static army lies. It is a good military strategy, provided...
