Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author:  Warwick Ashford.

Complacency about distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is putting businesses at risk, a survey has revealed.  Investment in specific DDoS protection is relatively low, according to a survey by F5 Networks at Infosecurity Europe 2015 in London.

Attention is turning to application data breaches, network attacks and malware, despite 60% of respondents saying they are worried about DDoS attacks and 39% admitting it is likely their organisation has already been targeted.  Similarly to advanced persistent threats (APTs), many DDoS attacks are starting to be characterised by long durations, repetition and changing attack vectors, according to a recent report by Imperva…

Grazed from TheStreet.  Author: Rhonda Schaffer.

On a week filled with news of Apple Music and iOS 9 releases from Apple’s at its 2015 worldwide developers conference, a former CEO said the company is able to look to the future, thanks to the foundation set by Steve Jobs.  Former CEO John Sculley reflected on his relationship with Jobs during his Apple tenure. Serving as CEO at Apple from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, Sculley recently wrote Moonshot!, a book about business leadership and opportunity. Sculley said he spent five months getting to know Steve Jobs.  Apple’s board went through about 20 candidates and passed over Jobs.

Sculley said he was brought to Apple for his marketing skills (he had served as the CEO of Pepsi (PEP – Get Report) where he had launched the Pepsi Challenge) and so he couuld serve as Job’s partner while he developed the Macintosh. Sculley said that beyond being business colleagues, the two became good friends; Jobs was focused on building Apple and didn’t have time for many relationships…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Kathryn Allen and Daniel Farris.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has released new guidance on cyber preparedness and incident response, becoming the latest federal agency to do so in recent months. Newly sworn-in Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, has indicated that the investigation and prosecution of cyber crimes will be one of the top priorities of her administration. Although the Guidance sets forth only voluntary standards, companies wishing to minimize potential liability in enforcement actions and/or civil litigation should take notice.

In releasing its “Best Practices for Victim Response and Reporting of Cyber Incidents,” the DOJ’s Cybersecurity Unit called upon law enforcement and private industry to share in the effort to improve systems that protect consumer information…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Deepak Ghodke.

Cloud adoption has been rapid in recent years, including in India. More and more businesses are moving critical services to the cloud—including their data. Studies (like this one from Enterprise Management Associates), show that more than half of businesses are partly or fully cloudy when it comes to analytics. That is to say, most of us in business use some or many cloud tools every day to answer questions relevant to our jobs.

But what about the remaining companies? The forty-some percent that are still just getting started moving analytics to the cloud? For those businesses, there might be some myths about the cloud that may be causing undue caution. If you’re still on the fence because of any of the following reasons, you won’t be after learning the facts…

Read more from the source @ http://www.firstpost.com/business/8-cloud-analytics-myths-holding-back-2292878.html

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Life used to be so simple for Oracle. Back in the good ol’ days, the company could build a great database, charge a king’s ransom for it, and milk the maintenance stream forever. Rinse. Repeat. Unfortunately, this model no longer works, as a series of earnings misses over the last few years have shown.

While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, "They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything."…

Grazed from Techspective. Author: Rahul Dasgupta.

According to a Gartner prediction cloud adoption will rise to $250 billion by 2017. 42 percent of IT leaders plan to spend more on cloud this year as per a ComputerWorld forecast. These statistics prove how the cloud is becoming increasingly popular as the enhanced flexibility and the potential cost savings that cloud computing offers is continuing to intrigue an increasing number of businesses.

However, there is a thin difference on how cloud vendors operate. One type of vendor offers proprietary cloud services, while the other outsources some of the services covered in the contract to another cloud-computing service provider. While every business is aware of the first type of provider, most organizations fail to consider the security concerns involved if their provider outsources to a third party…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question,” a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England’s coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

On the face it, this seems counter-intuitive. Improved efficiency leads to greater productivity which should lead to a resource savings. In fact, however, it meant just the opposite: As coal power got cheaper, people found more and more things to do with it. In the end, people consumed so much more coal at the lower price that the total amount spent on coal rose rather than fell. This phenomenon came to be labelled the “Jevons Paradox.”…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Just over a year ago, Cisco unveiled its ambitious plan to spend $1 billion creating a cloud computing platform that could compete with the $6 billion juggernaut that is Amazon Web Services – a plan it calls Intercloud. That plan took a big step forward today with some announcements out of Cisco Live, the company’s big annual conference.

The crux of the Intercloud gambit is that instead of offering this cloud itself, from its own data centers, Intercloud will unify smaller cloud service providers into one big happy family of products that are all compatible with each other. Instead of taking Amazon on directly, Cisco is trying to unify all of the smaller guys into a competitive system…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Behind every great ecommerce website is a database, and in the early 2000s Amazon.com’s database was not keeping up with the company’s business. Part of the problem was that Amazon didn’t have just one database – it relied on a series of them, each with its own responsibility.

As the company headed toward becoming a $10 billion business, the number and size of its SQL databases exploded and managing them became more challenging. By the 2004 holiday shopping rush, outages became more common, caused in large part by overloaded SQL databases. Something needed to change…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Two pizza teams; being vocally self-critical; primitive building blocks and a vitriol hate for PowerPoints. These are some of the ways AWS innovates. Amazon.com is ranked by Forbes as the sixth most innovative company, but one could argue that its cloud computing division is the most innovative.

Amazon Web Services invented the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in the mid-2000s and to this day is anointed by analysts as the market leader, both in terms of the scale of its distributed system, the size of its customer base, and perhaps as important as both of those things: its pace of innovation…