IT Security

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16
Jun 14

CIO Insight – A Lack of Leadership Cripples Business and IT

Countless words have been written and uttered about corporate leadership. Universities devote entire MBA programs to the topic and conferences dissect virtually every aspect of how to become a better leader.

Nevertheless, leadership is often MIA in business and IT. A recent study conducted by the public relations firm Ketchum found that only 22 percent of 6,509 respondents in 13 countries believe that today’s leaders demonstrate effective leadership. Moreover, there’s a 14 percent gap between expectations and delivery, and only 17 percent expect any type of improvement in 2014.
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But wait, there’s more. Only about four in 10 respondents believe that business leaders meet expectations and a mere 35 percent say they are effective communicators. The fallout? Customers financially punish companies that lack leadership. The Ketchum study found that 61 percent boycotted or bought less from firms that were perceived to be deficient. Conversely, 52 percent began buying or increased purchases due to the belief that a company demonstrated strong leadership.

ZDNet – Is the Internet of Things strategic to the enterprise?

Are we to add the Internet of Things to the pantheon of top strategic technology priorities for the decade? That’s the question increasingly in front of IT decision makers these days as tech vendors add the buzzphrase to their marketing and practitioners evaluate the rapidly growing array of related tools and technologies.

That’s not to say there’s much doubt about the phenomenon itself. There’s essentially no question that the Internet of Things (IoT) is fast becoming entrenched both in consumer and enterprise IT. It already seems like just about other new digital device that emerges these days comes with an app to monitor or control it, remote home automation devices are exploding, and everything electric and digital seems to be heading for 24/7 connection to the Internet.

The data is familiar to anyone tracking the story: By 2020, IoT will be a $8.9 trillion market in 2020, with over 212 billion connected things. To put that in perspective, that’s about half the size of the entire U.S. economy, meaning that the connectedness of everything will soon be one of the world’s largest industries, even though one might say it’s nothing more than a convergence of the top pre-existing trends of smart mobility, cloud, and big data.

Virtualization Practice – Is the end-to-end IT solution going to be the future?

The past two years have seen an arms race at the high end of the virtualization arena. The biggest players in the space have competed furiously to add features and capabilities to their combined platform offerings, either by swallowing up smaller companies or investing heavily in product development. MDM, DaaS, hybrid cloud, profile management, application virtualization, application publishing, cloud orchestration—the largest competitors in the virtualization space have either provided, or are looking to provide, these and many more features.

As the biggest companies try to provide the nirvana of an “everything-under-one-roof” end-to-end virtualization solution, a swarm of smaller players try to play catchup, aggressively growing their own product portfolios in a bid to keep their revenue streams maximized or to increase their own chances of acquisition by the larger beasts around them.
The Virtualization Arms Race

vSphere, Hyper-V, and XenServer are amongst the big hitters on the server virtualization level. In the desktop arena, Horizon 6 faces off against XenDesktop, Amazon WorkSpaces, and their ilk. App-V competes with ThinApp. Profile management tools abound, such as Microsoft UE-V, Citrix UPM, View Persona, and many more. XenMobile is positioned against Windows Intune and VMware’s freshly acquired AirWatch. The list of comparable technological features from the big vendors could go on and on. But this arms race isn’t simply confined to the virtualization tech titans—even smaller companies like AppSense and RES are expanding their product lines and software features quite aggressively. A case in point is enterprise file synchronization. It seems that today, a software suite isn’t complete without an enterprise file synchronization option.

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04
Jun 14

CustomerThink – Privacy Ramifications of IT Infrastructure Everywhere

Most people don’t notice that information technology pervades our daily lives. Granted, some IT infrastructure is in the open and easy to spot, such as the computer and router on your desk hooked up via network cables. However, plenty of IT infrastructures are nearly invisible as they reside in locked network rooms or heavily guarded data centers. And some IT infrastructures are bundled underneath city streets, arrayed on rooftops, or even camouflaged as trees at the local park. Let’s take a closer look at a few ramifications of IT infrastructure everywhere.

1. Technology is pervasive and commonplace in our daily lives. Little is seen, much is hidden.

Good news: Companies have spent billions of dollars investing in wired and wireless connections that span cities, countries and oceans. This connectivity has enabled companies to ship work to lower cost providers in developing countries, and for certain IT projects to “follow the sun” and thus finish faster. Also, because we have IT infrastructure everywhere, it makes it possible for police forces and/or governments to identify and prosecute perpetrators of crime that much easier.

VentureBeat – Agile in the enterprise: To succeed, avoid the fundamentalists

I remember it as though it were just months ago, but it was early 2005 when a heated discussion rippled across our company. A new way to develop software had matured and had been growing fast since 2001: the agile software development approach. We knew that it would disrupt the very controlled way CI&T had been developing custom software for big companies for over 6 years, and that was scary.

Until then, we were exclusively implementing a formal process called RUP (rational unified process), a successful implementation of the ideas from the unified process framework. In our pitch we were purposely fighting the waterfall method that had been eroding the reputation of software houses over time. Studies were consistently showing that more than 65 percent of big software projects would fail.

Today, it comes without a single sign of pain to say that 100 percent of our projects are carried out using agile, but during that time we were uncertain about the future. That pristine CMMI level 5 certification we had conquered with so much effort over the years was, after all, going to be irrelevant for the industry. Not to mention the detailed processes we had built to align teams and clients in very well defined tasks and waves of work, would all be compromised by a novelty we would need to learn how to use from scratch.

Neovise – 12 Things IaaS Providers Don’t Advertise

The industry is teeming with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, each marketing the unique capabilities and benefits of their services. It would be great if service providers also highlighted their solutions’ shortcomings. But this is rarely the case, especially when competing solutions share the same feature gaps.

When evaluating and purchasing IaaS services, you must be aware of the things cloud service providers don’t advertise, and may not want you to know. To help you avoid surprises and setbacks, we’ve constructed a list of 12 considerations.

1. Many IaaS providers oversubscribe their instances

When service providers host multiple tenants on shared hardware, the combination of virtual resources they’ve allocated to each tenant is usually more than the total hardware capacity. This can result in poor performance – and inconsistent performance – when competing instances get used heavily. Some providers avoid this practice, or offer dedicated instances, but charge a premium price. For some applications, the premium is worth it.

The Virtualization Practice – Will Scale-Out Architectures Kill Enterprise Storage?

In 1980 I was working for Datapoint, a vendor with proprietary client hardware, proprietary server hardware, a proprietary LAN, and proprietary systems software. In 1983 IBM introduced the PC, and in 1985 it introduced the PC-XT with a hard disk. 3Com introduced Ethernet, and Novell created a network operating system. All of a sudden, Datapoint was on the wrong side of history in the computer business. In five short years, Datapoint went from six thousand employees to sixty.
Is Shared Enterprise Storage on the Wrong Side of History?

To date, shared enterprise storage has been the beneficiary of two huge trends in the computer industry: data center virtualization (which basically needs shared storage for certain highly valuable features such as vMotion to work), and big data, which produces so much data that large-scale arrays are needed. Shared enterprise storage arrays also sport a variety of highly attractive enterprise-class features like redundancy (no single point of failure), deduplication (saving on disk space and cost), and the ability to move bits around as business needs dictate. These arrays also have a huge amount of hardware engineering behind them, designed to allow them to offer excellent performance at scale to their customers.

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05
May 14

Net-Security.org – 44% of companies dont have a cloud app policy in place

After interviewing 120 RSA Conference attendees, Netskope announced the results of the survey on information security professionals’ use of cloud apps.

Netskope found that despite widespread adoption of cloud apps in the enterprise, most IT security professionals are either unaware of their company’s cloud app policy or don’t have one. In the absence of cloud app policies, more than two-thirds of attendees surveyed said they would consider their company’s privacy policy before downloading an app.

As cloud apps proliferate in the enterprise, the security and privacy risks associated with use of these apps at work is on the rise. According to the recent Netskope Cloud Report, the typical enterprise is using 397 apps, or as much as 10 times the number that IT typically has within its purview. Furthermore, 77 percent of cloud apps are not enterprise-ready, leaving IT with the challenge of securing these apps and putting policies in place to guide their use.

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Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.