Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Even with all of the blogs, statistics, and other cautionary tales warning people about the consequences of multitasking, it’s still today’s most popular (and seemingly unavoidable) way to work. Modern life is hard, y’all — we have more gadgets and entertainment channels distracting us than ever before, higher expectations of output at a greater frequency and with infinitely faster turnaround. And if we’re being honest, the constant exposure to other people who at least seem to be doing it all is enough to make many of us go into overdrive.

More of the Mindjet post

On April Fool’s Day 2011, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with early-stage invasive breast cancer. As a freelance writer with a career I love and a family that depends on my income, I spent most of the year juggling surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation with assignments, interviews, and youth soccer schedules. Throughout, friends and colleagues seemed surprised that I remained relatively active and pretty optimistic.

What else was there to do, I wondered. Taking to my bed for the better part of a year wasn’t an option for my personality or my bank account. Why not look at the bright side of early diagnosis and great prognosis and keep going? During that time, I contributed to two books, wrote dozens of articles and ended the year with a clean bill of health.

More of the Fast Company article by Gwen Moran

If you work in any virtual or cloud environments, how many times have you heard that statement as soon as any kind of problem surfaces? Way back when during the twentieth century, as a problem deflection, the network would immediately be blamed. As we got into the twenty-first century, virtualization quickly became the go-to area for any and all problems. As part of the virtualization and cloud computing teams, we would have to prove that a problem was not caused by virtualization before any other teams would really dig in and troubleshoot the issue. Even after the fourteen years since the turn of the century and the mainstream acceptance of virtualization technology as a whole, I still see that kind of blame mentality today. And just when I thought I’d heard it all when it comes to virtualization blame, a news story comes out that takes this immediate blame game to a whole new level.

It has been reported that on December 29, 2013, the official website for the OpenSSL code library was compromised in an incident that caused great concern among security professionals. Although the actual code repositories were untouched, the breach left defacement on the OpenSSL home page. Upon discovering the defacement, OpenSSL immediately restored the index.html file from backup and then started the forensics, investigation, and recovery process. So far, so good, right? Well, by New Year’s Day, OpenSSL had issued an advisory stating that “the attack was made via hypervisor through the hosting provider and not via any vulnerability in the OS configuration.” This advisory, which lacked any real details, immediately raised the question of whether the attack could be exploited to target other sites that utilize the same service. Without finishing the forensic investigation, OpenSSL had jumped the gun and deflected blame to the hypervisor. Once the advisory placed the blame on the hypervisor, it did not take long before people started to realize that the hypervisor under suspicion appears to have been VMware’s ESXi server.

As a result of the advisory, the VMware Security Response Center started to actively investigate the incident in order to understand if and how any VMware products were involved and whether VMware needed to take any action to ensure customer safety.

More of The Virtualization Practice post from Steve Beaver

As businesses depend on technology to get more and more work done, the rate at which that technology is failing them is on the rise, new research shows.

A study by technology-performance firm Compuware Corp. revealed that businesses of all sizes face pervasive technology failures, with more than half registering a significant technology failure within the past year and 81% indicating they had the same fiasco occur multiple times. Overall, nearly half of the companies surveyed said they experience tech-performance issues daily, while more than 25% reported that the frequency of failures is increasing.

Compuware CEO Bob Paul said that, at a time when technology permeates the operational fabric of every business, technology performance becomes a key competitive differentiator.

More of the Mashable article

When organizations don’t provide an approved cloud application that enables employees to share and exchange files instantly, users will bring their own cloud.

Before “cloud sprawl” can be fully understood, we need a basic understanding of cloud computing. One useful definition is: “a colloquial expression used to describe a variety of different types of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected through a real-time communication network (such as the Internet).”

The phrase also commonly refers to virtual servers that store information for an organization, including saved documents, organizational data and software programs. Understanding this, we can define cloud sprawl.

Cloud sprawl is the distribution of organizational data across multiple cloud-based applications. For example, having different business departments using different clouds—such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, iCloud and others—leads to cloud sprawl. This is not a good situation because the CIO and IT asset managers have lost control, corporate data is scattered about on multiple platforms and data security is at risk.

More of the Baseline magazine article by Jonathon Kirby