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Opening Keynote | Mission-Critical Applications in the Cloud – Myth or Reality?
From the Blogosphere
 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: 3,510 |
 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: 2,886 |
 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: 3,210 |
 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: 2,600 |
 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: 2,961 |
 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: 3,266 |
 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: 4,005 |
 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: 2,702 |
 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: 2,583 |
 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: 3,277 |
 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: 2,038 |
 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: 3,197 |
 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: 2,559 |
 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: 2,176 |
 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: 1,998 |
 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: 2,375 |
| 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: 2,924 |
 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: 3,551 |
 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: 4,666 |
 …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: 3,342 |
 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: 2,360 |
 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: 4,584 |
 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: 2,218 |
 ‘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: 2,862 |
 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: 2,077 |
 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: 3,627 |
 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: 3,212 |
 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: 5,212 |
 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: 3,457 |
 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: 2,972 |
 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: 2,870 |
 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: 3,190 |
 1972: Most commonly used languages (Cobol, Fortran, Algol, PL/1, Basic, APL) all had complicated syntax. The prevailing thought process was to add new language syntax for every new feature. Writing a compiler for such languages was a nightmare.
Then came “C”. The syntax was simple and...Sep. 19, 2012 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 4,078 |
 One of the key focus areas of our Private Cloud 2.0 series is that the 2.0 part represents the ‘outside world’, even though it is focused on a Private Cloud scenario. This is simply because it is inevitable and one of the valuable features of the Private Cloud approach R...Sep. 18, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,486 |
 Like most application servers, WebSphere 8.5 has a rich management infrastructure based on JMX, or Java Management Extensions. In fact, the WebSphere administration console uses JMX to connect to the server to issue queries and perform administrative operations. In a previous post I sh...Sep. 17, 2012 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 5,560 |
 When it comes to the cloud, there is a great deal of misconception. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, does that make your application or service truly cloud-based? No. If it doesn’t have the proper “cloud DNA,” it means the end user organization is not realizing the oft-h...Sep. 17, 2012 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 3,501 |
 There was a time – perhaps a decade ago, perhaps more – when the network was simply the network. It was routers and switches and cables and power. It was responsible for carrying data to and fro, and for acting as a hard wall gatekeeper that would prevent data from getting from one pla...Sep. 17, 2012 06:00 AM EDT Reads: 6,826 |
 Healthcare “as a Service” providers are coming up strong in the market right now. It’s a growing segment, attracting a lot of interest from businesses and investors, but as expected, cloud security, and more specifically cloud encryption and HIPAA requirements, is critical customers co...Sep. 16, 2012 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 3,168 |
 #cloud The conventional view of cloud brokers misses the need to enforce policies and ensure compliance |
 Right off the bat, I know the title sounds like it’s all connected but they are only slightly related so I’ll give you the option of dropping out now. Still here? Cool. I’ve been traveling over the last couple weeks and stories catch my eye along the way that I probably would’ve wri...Sep. 14, 2012 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 3,102 |
