SHI
Opening Keynote | Mission-Critical Applications in the Cloud – Myth or Reality?
From the Blogosphere
 Too many IT departments take the stance of "I'll worry about it when I have to worry about it." Problem with security issues is, by then it's too late. Often times maintaining the status quo is as dangerous as doing nothing at all.
In my experience there are two types of enterprise IT...Oct. 18, 2012 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 410 |
 BYOD or Bring Your Own Device has moved from trend to an permanent fixture in today’s corporate IT infrastructure. It is not strictly an IT issue however. Many groups within an organization need to be involved as they grapple with the risk of mixing personal devices with sensitive info...Oct. 18, 2012 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 356 |
 Gartner offered a list of 10 key trends in infrastructure that will affect IT and data centers over the next several years. While some of those trends might seem a little far-fetched, there are several that catch the eye. Here are some of the top trends Gartner sees in the c... Oct. 18, 2012 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 552 |
 It is a topic of fascination for me that the high-tech world just plain will not stand still. The changes in automotive technology over the last century, for example, do not match the changes in high tech over the last decade. In addition to the expected on-upsmanship that market leade...Oct. 18, 2012 10:15 AM EDT Reads: 607 |
 Whether bees or Martians, science or science-fiction, the notion of a hive mind is one that pops up frequently within the realm of psychology, philosophy, theology, science and, last but not least, technology. A hive mind is one that has a collective memory, sharing information from th...Oct. 18, 2012 09:15 AM EDT Reads: 625 |
 There has been an increasing amount of commentary about the growing shortage of Information Security folks. While the reasons for this shortage are manifold and easily explained, that doesn’t change the fact that it exists. Nor the fact that natural sources may well be causing it to wo...Oct. 18, 2012 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 639 |
 In case you are not familiar, degrees of separation refer to how you are connected to other people.
When you know somebody directly then you are a first connection, and you are a second degree of separation from people that they are directly connected to. The theory goes that via a mi...Oct. 17, 2012 08:45 AM EDT Reads: 1,491 |
 Mouse gestures are one of those great "add-ons" that enhance browser usability. For those that are not familiar with mouse gestures, they are a browser navigational aid that works via mouse movements. Mouse gestures have been around for some time now and we thought it would be good to ...Oct. 16, 2012 03:25 PM EDT Reads: 343 |
 When moving to the cloud, the four pillars become much less manageable. The amount “much less” implies depends a lot upon your cloud provider, and how you define “cloud”.
Put in simple terms, if you are suddenly struck blind, that does not change what’s in front of you, only your abil...Oct. 16, 2012 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,527 |
 One of the dirty little secrets about security: there is simply no way to make your company impervious to a data breach. It's almost a statistical certainty that you will, at some point or another, be hit with a security scenario that you're not prepared for. That's why security today ...Oct. 14, 2012 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,316 |
 TIBCO is traditionally known for its leadership in integration and is now expanding into a number of new areas through acquisitions as well as building new capabilities. This post is to analyze their products based on attendance to their annual TUCON conference.
Making decisions in a...Oct. 13, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,327 |
 I’ve been to a few trade shows over the years and have noticed a change in the badges we wear at these events. These wear-for-a-week necklaces offer our name, company, job title and our affiliation to the specific conference – speaker, exhibitor and so forth. Some are high-tech also....Oct. 12, 2012 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 941 |
 Escalators are an interesting first world phenomenon. While not strictly necessary anywhere, and taking more horizontal space than an elevator, they still turn up all over in most first-world countries. The key to their popularity is, no doubt, the fact that they move traffic much more...Oct. 11, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,406 |
 The web has gone from integration via hypertext to integration via hyperdata.
A friend shared a recent C|Net article discussing the use of 404 error pages to feature missing children notices. Following links leads to a European effort to integrate information about missing children i...Oct. 11, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,284 |
 Data is quickly becoming one of those certainties in life, like death and taxes. It'll always be there, and like the Once-ler's Thneed factory from The Lorax (sorry, I have kids), data figures to keep on biggering, and biggering, and biggering and biggering.
More data means more knowl...Oct. 6, 2012 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,831 |
 Not that I need to tell you, but there are several things in your network that you could have better control of. Whether it is consistent application of security policy or consistent configuration of servers, or even the setup of network devices, they’re in there, being non-standard.
...Oct. 5, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,446 |
 Although self-service -together with elasticity, pooling/sharing, etc. - is a defining attribute of cloud computing, many of the companies expressing an interest in cloud computing do not seem to be aware of that.
In fact, when asked: who do you expect to provision your services to th...Oct. 5, 2012 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,492 |
 A coworker and I put a couple pieces of open source software (OSSEC and Snort) together to respond to certain types of automated attacks we were seeing in our IDS (we use Snort in this case). Prior to this, an engineer would manually respond to alerts by logging into our firewall and b...Oct. 4, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,590 |
 Emergence is good, but…
…it takes time, and
…under some circumstances it may not happen!
If you have been there … done that … then you don’t have to wait for your application architecture to emerge over several iterations. You can use your past experience to nail it down at the begi...Oct. 4, 2012 05:08 AM EDT Reads: 303 |
 Why active-active is not best practice in the data center, and shouldn't be in the cloud either.
Last time we dove into a "Load Balancing 101" discussion we looked at the difference between architected for scale and architected for fail. The question that usually pops up after such ...Oct. 3, 2012 08:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,771 |
 Making the most of your virtualized environment means monitoring performance and making changes to optimize performance. The fact is that there are a number of things that can hamper performance in a virtualized environment, and if you’re not looking at all of them you can find yoursel...Oct. 3, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,293 |
 You may think that the worldwide economic downturn has negatively impacted most CIO's budgets, but so far that hasn't been the case. According to the latest market study by IDC, worldwide IT spending remains on course to grow by 6 percent this year in constant currency, that's only sli...Oct. 3, 2012 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,082 |
 Recently, I’ve been working closely with a number of large enterprise clients who have already gone or will soon go live with Layer 7 solutions at the core of mission-critical infrastructure. I’ve observed that, in the API Management space, proof of concept and initial projects often f...Oct. 2, 2012 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 802 |
 About a decade ago, researchers began to study the performance of e-government portals in order to identify best practices. Studies have also focused on identifying the factors that influence the information quality these portals offer to the public. Most of these studies consider only...Oct. 2, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,306 |
| Back in the day when virtualization and cloud were just making waves, one of the first challenges made obvious was managing IP addresses. As VM density increased, there were more IP network management tasks that had to be handled – from distributing and assigning IP addresses to VLAN c... Oct. 2, 2012 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,625 |
 The issue of Big Data seems very prevalent these days. How to store it. How to manage it. And, how to best secure it. But Big Data is much more complex than a voluminous amount of information. It requires a new paradigm in application, process, and security...all from the cloud.
There...Oct. 1, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,733 |
 Not yet included in the NIST taxonomy of Cloud Computing models is ‘BPaaS’ – Business Process as a Service.
Hopefully it soon will be, as although it is the lesser known and discussed of the Cloud categories, it’s the most powerful in it’s ability to directly impact short-term busin...Oct. 1, 2012 06:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,078 |
 …is that they're consumer cloud services.
While we're all focused heavily on the challenges of managing BYOD in the enterprise, we should not overlook or understate the impact of consumer-grade services within the enterprise. Just as employees bring their own devices to the table, s...Sep. 29, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,844 |
 Does analysis lead to synthesis?
How do you solve a complex problem?
Break the complex problem into sub-task till each task is clearly understood and doable.
Assign responsibility and monitor each task till they are complete.
Once all tasks are completed the problem is solved!
Wel...Sep. 29, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,056 |
 My how time flies, seems like just yesterday (back in 2008) that I did a piece titled Politics and Storage, or, storage in an election year V2.008 and if you are not aware, it is 2012 and thus an election year in the U.S. as well as in many other parts of the world. Being an election y...Sep. 29, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,139 |
 Previously I’ve discussed how solid-state arrays need to be optimised in their design to get the best out of the technology. Traditional arrays were designed to cope with the hard drive as the slowest component in the architecture. IP was built around squeezing the best performance o...Sep. 28, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,147 |
 ‘Big Data’ has a problem, and that problem is its name.
Dig deep into the big data ecosystem, or spend any time at all talking with its practitioners, and you should quickly start hitting the Vs. Initially Volume, Velocity and Variety, the Vs rapidly bred like rabbits. Now we have a p...Sep. 28, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,605 |
 Enterprises are grappling with Agile methods- but there's much to learn. The basic Agile methods don't cut it in the enterprise.
By observation, most Agile use in the enterprise is in development. A subset of Scrum with TDD and XP. Or Water-Scrum-Fall as defined by Forrester. In the ...Sep. 25, 2012 06:08 AM EDT Reads: 832 |
 In my first contribution to the Allstream blog I introduced the concept of the Cloud-based workforce.
Here is an article that explains how this model can be achieved via the Microsoft Private Cloud platform.
Microsoft provides reference documents for describing their Private Cloud Fa...Sep. 24, 2012 04:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,754 |
 In the past, we ran small data on expensive big boxes, and it worked fine. For example, most database applications were sized in gigabytes or a few terabytes. Today, we’re moving to a world of Big Data measured in petabytes, running on lots of inexpensive small boxes. Data volumes are ...Sep. 24, 2012 09:15 AM EDT Reads: 2,099 |
 The ability to conduct effective performance testing has become a highly desired skillset within the IT industry. Unfortunately, these highly sought-after skills are consistently in short supply. "Front-end testers" can work with a tool to create a realistic load and although this is a...Sep. 24, 2012 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 2,210 |
 Funny thing about the hype cycle in high tech, things rarely turn out the way cheerleaders proclaim it will. Mainframes did not magically disappear in any of the waves that predicted their demise. The reason is simple – there is a lot of code running on mainframes that works, and has w...Sep. 23, 2012 09:45 AM EDT Reads: 2,082 |
 Every emerging market goes through a time of confusion where both vendors and analysts try to “define” the solution to a pervasive problem. Meanwhile, companies actually experiencing the problem are left to sort through a cacophony of mixed messages and terminology, all the while strug...Sep. 21, 2012 09:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,748 |
 There's an unwritten rule that says when describing a network architecture the perimeter of the data center is at the top. Similarly application data flow begins at the UI (presentation) layer and extends downward, toward the data tier. This directional flow has led to the use of the t...Sep. 21, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,583 |
 Moving to a model that utilizes the cloud is a huge proposition. You can throw some applications out there without looking back – if they have no ties to the corporate datacenter and light security requirements, for example – but most applications require quite a bit of work to make th...Sep. 20, 2012 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,776 |
