Category: News

Grazed from UnionGazette.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Given that the start off of the 21st century, safety has emerged from scare-story status to grow to be one of IT users’ largest difficulties &ndash as survey after survey confirms. Along the way a quantity of uncomfortable lessons have been learned, and are still getting discovered.

The initially lesson is that security technology should generally be deemed in a human context. No one particular nevertheless believes in a technological repair that will put an finish to all safety problems, since time and once again we hear of new kinds of cyber-attack that bypass sophisticated and safe technology by targeting human nature &ndash from alarming emails ostensibly from official sources, to friendly social invitations to share a funny download. Or indeed a harmless seeking USB stick ‘accidentally’ dropped by the office entrance, or a fake policeman demanding a couple of private specifics to confirm that you are not criminally liable…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Dina Bass and Jing Cao.

Brian Lillie, chief information officer at data-center company Equinix Inc., had a salesman with a password problem.  Remembering the 15 separate logins to use the Redwood, Calif., company’s tools proved challenging, the salesman told Lillie, so he was writing them all down. That rendered them pointless if the paper were to be lost or stolen. So Lillie started testing programs to let people use a single password for everything, and implemented one across the business a couple of years ago.

The CIO’s role is changing quickly in a world where the spread of mobile devices and Internet-based programs is resulting in a more employee-led approach to new technology. Companies’ top information-technology executives now must track the use of workers’ own devices and applications and decide which of these programs to roll out companywide. That’s a break from the past, when they had more control over evaluating what software and hardware to buy before it reached the staff…

Read more from the source @ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-cio17-20150117-story.html#page=1

Grazed from BiometricUpgrade.  Author:  Stephen Mayhew.

Apple recently announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted its patent application for an iCloud-based fingerprint storage and cross-device syncing solution, a system that could potentially eliminate manually setting up Touch ID and power next-generation Apple Pay-enabled POS terminals, according to a report by Apple Insider.

In the patent application, entitled “Finger biometric sensor data synchronization via a cloud computing device and related methods,” Apple details how fingerprint data may first be gathered on a primary device and uploaded to iCloud to distribute among secondary devices…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Amid reports that IBM will restructure to refocus its cloud computing strategy, it’s worth taking a close look at how its current cloud offerings stack up against its biggest competitor — AWS.  IBM finds itself among large technology companies that struggle to revamp themselves for the cloud era, according to David Linthicum, senior vice president for cloud consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, based in Boston, Mass.

"The biggest hindrance to IBM is who they are — they sell hardware and software," Linthicum said. "And so every cloud service that they sell is going to, in essence, cannibalize their existing base."…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Xen, one of the oldest open-source hypervisors, has long been popular with major cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Public Cloud, and Verizon Cloud. Now, with improved performance, quality, security and scalability that today’s cloud and enterprise data-center computing workloads demand.

In particular, for x86-based solutions this latest version offers improved cache monitoring technology. This, in turn, helps to resolve the "noisy neighbor" dilemma. A noisy neighbor is a virtual machine (VM), which demands more than its fair share of system resources thus slowing down other VMs.  The other significant new features and capabilities in Xen Project Hypervisor 4.5 include:…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author: David Linthicum.

"Cloud-related skills represent virtually all the growth opportunities in IT employment worldwide and demand for cloud-related positions will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015."  Jennifer Warnick, news and feature writer for Microsoft, wrote these words in 2013. Two years later, the demand persists, but a skill shortage looms.

Skills Shortage and the Associated Cost

The report observed the skill shortages as one of the main issues impeding cloud adoption among enterprises. The dearth of qualified cloud-related skills to fill the expected vacancies continues…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

An end-user research study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates(EMA) uncovered data that shows more than half of enterprises consider cloud-based analytics important to their businesses.

The firm’s report,"Analytics in the Cloud", found that 32 percent of respondents indicated they had adopted cloud-based strategies for analytics — and that those strategies were considered important to their business. An additional 24 percent of respondents said they had adopted cloud-based analytics strategies that were essential to their businesses…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

I’ve sworn it off: No longer do I remind people younger than myself that many of today’s concepts we call new and innovative are based on much older concepts popular a long time ago — when I was young. The ones that immediately come to mind are big data and Internet of things (IoT).

Big data — at least the notion of it — was always the objective in the world of database technology. However, back in the days when I was a college professor who taught database technology, it was simply a cool concept. The hardware and software that could provide analytics across petabytes of data simply did not exist…

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author:  Jennifer LeClaire.

Big Blue just launched what it’s calling one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. IBM’s new z13 mainframe caps a $1 billion investment and five years of development — and taps into over 500 new patents in collaboration with more than 60 clients.

IBM is pointing to three “firsts” with the z13. It’s the first system that can process 2.5 billion transactions a day — that’s equal to 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year — which is a key capability given we’re headed toward about 40 trillion mobile Relevant Products/Services transactions a day by 2025, according to Big Blue’s research…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has been beefing up its Azure cloud computing platform, and the company has the certifications to prove it, according to Lori Woehler, principal group manager for Compliance and Trust at the software and cloud computing giant.

Woehler revealed in an Azure blog post that Microsoft Azure had "completed an ISO 27001 renewal audit to the 2013 version of the standard, following the ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 27002 best practices for comprehensive information security and risk management." ISO 27001 is a set of standards governing information security within organizations…