There was a time, in the 1990s, when Silicon Valley and Redmond thought Washington DC didn’t matter. Top executives would occasionally appear in front of Congress to inveigh mostly against one another, then quickly return home to resume making money. The notion that clueless DC regulators and legislators mattered was ridiculed when it wasn’t ignored.Nov. 15, 2016 08:30 AM EST Reads: 890
The seemingly miraculous hand-held devices we use today are a far cry from the computers of old. Capabilities, speed, affordability and storage have increased dramatically, transforming every aspect of our lives. As a point of reference, the first data centers were rooms that housed huge, individual mainframe computers. These machines cost millions of dollars each, and time on them had to be rented by several organizations because no one except governments and higher educational institutions could afford to build them.
Jumping on the Agile bandwagon might help, but only if done right. What makes a good Agile project and what makes a bad one?
The move to Agile in the last decade has resulted in projects that finish faster, produce better software, and come in under budget. Look up any new, hot tech company and you'll find articles lauding their Agile philosophy. You might think that success is guaranteed if you get your team to commit the Agile Manifesto to memory.
The problem with looking at this in a single dimension is that you're affected by survivor bias. As you research, you look at successful project...
A recent report by Praetorian, a cybersecurity company headquartered in Austin, TX, focused on threats that resulted in data compromise or access to sensitive information. Based on a review of 100 separate internal penetration test engagements the study identified the five most prevalent threats to corporate data. The amazing thing about these weaknesses is that the top four are all based on utilizing stolen credentials and the last one helps an attacker be more effective in using those stolen credentials. In other words, the enemy is right there in the mirror! The study spanned 75 unique o...
The rise of the cloud has put Messaging and Collaboration in the dark when it comes to measuring the service delivered to end-users. Since they don’t have any view of what is happening at the server level, the only way for them to know what is going on is to be able to replicate the end-user experience everywhere it is important. This includes not only measuring the performance of basic tasks that end-users would do on Exchange, SharePoint, or Skype for Business, but also having an idea of what’s going on from a network and configuration perspective in critical locations.
Data-analysis services startup BlueLabs in Washington, DC helps presidential election campaigns better know and engage with potential voters.
Here to describe how big data is being used creatively by contemporary political organizations for two-way voter engagement, we're joined by Erek Dyskant Co-Founder and Vice President of Impact at BlueLabs Analytics in Washington. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
VMware configurations designed to provide high availability often make it difficult to achieve satisfactory performance required by mission-critical SQL Server applications. But what if it were possible to have both high availability and high performance without the high cost and complexity normally required?
This article explores two requirements for getting both for SQL applications, while reducing capital and operational expenditures. The first is to implement a storage architecture within VMware environments designed for both high availability and high performance; the second involves tu...
The CompTIA Cloud+certification validates the skills and expertise of IT practitioners in implementing and maintaining cloud technologies. This is exactly what it takes to become a good cloud technician. In the past few years, however, the National Cloud Technologists Association (NCTA) has recognized that evolving market demands have changed cloud computing technology in at least 13 ways.
Flash storage has become a mainstream technology, with 451 Research expecting the market to reach $9.6 billion by 2020. As the technology becomes less cost-prohibitive, and benefits such as its exponentially greater performance capabilities and simplified process for provisioning and optimizing systems become more sought after, it’s clear that the future of storage is flash. But while some organizations may have taken advantage of the burgeoning technology’s benefits early on, a significant number of companies have yet to make the transition. Your organization may very well fall into this cate...
In many organizations governance is still practiced by phase or stage gate peer review, and Agile projects are forced to accommodate, which leads to WaterScrumFall or worse. But governance criteria and policies are often very weak anyway, out of date or non-existent. Consequently governance is frequently a matter of opinion and experience, highly dependent upon the experience of individual reviewers. As we all know, a basic principle of Agile methods is delegation of responsibility, and ideally we need to delegate governance to the Agile practitioners and teams. So the question is how to imple...
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to change everything by enabling “smart” environments (homes, cities, hospitals, schools, stores, etc.) and smart products (cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, wind turbines, lawnmowers, etc.). I recently wrote about the importance of moving beyond “connected” to “smart” in a blog titled “Internet of Things: Connected Does Not Equal Smart”. The article discusses the importance of moving beyond just collecting the data, to transitioning to leveraging this new wealth of IoT data to improve the decisions that these smart environments and products need to make: t...
I was recently on a business trip out to Wausau, WI. The purpose was to conduct a training session on web application development for a new batch of associates at our onshore development center. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, I was very happy to discover it had built in Bluetooth integration for my phone. I have this feature on both cars at home. I love the convenience of having the car become an accessory for my mobile device. I immediately bound my phone with the car’s Bluetooth. Then something unusual happened. My phone prompted me with a question: ‘Chevy/Malibu would like a...
In case you haven’t heard, the new hotness in app architectures is serverless. Mainly restricted to cloud environments (Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions) the general concept is that you don’t have to worry about anything but the small snippets of code (functions) you write to do something when something happens. That’s an event-driven model, by the way, that should be very familiar to anyone who has taken advantage of a programmable proxy to do app or API routing and rewriting or executed inspection of requests or responses for malicious content.
I spend a lot of time helping organizations to “think like a data scientist.” My book “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science” has several chapters devoted to helping business leaders to embrace the power of data scientist thinking. My Big Data MBA class at the University of San Francisco School of Management focuses on teaching tomorrow’s business executives the power of analytics and data science to optimize key business processes, uncover new monetization opportunities and create a more compelling, engaging customer and channel engagement.
You’ve probably heard a multitude of things around hyperconvergence or hyperconverged infrastructure as these are becoming hot new industry buzzwords, but what do these terms really mean? Are vendors that say they have hyperconverged infrastructure really living up to the promises of true hyperconvergence or is it just marketing hype?
