Mary Branscombe, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Mary Branscombe

Author Archives: Mary Branscombe

How to decide when to buy software and when to build it

The appeal of the cloud has long been that you don’t need to do everything yourself, leaving you more time and resources to concentrate on what makes your company stand out. A classic example is that you buy electricity from the grid rather than running your own fleet of generators because having electricity doesn’t make you unique. The same is true of internal software, which you need to be efficient and reliable, but in most cases you don’t need it to set you apart from your competitors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Is Desktop-as-a-Service ready for business?

For companies looking to reduce the cost and complexity of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the attraction of Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is that you can greatly reduce up-front investment. “It’s pay as you go and you only pay for what you need,” says Mark Lockwood, research director at Gartner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to make mobile apps with FileMaker 15

The business world is full of inventories, catalogs and other lists that sit in spreadsheets or databases that would be more useful if you could take them out of the office. With FileMaker Go and FileMaker WebDirect, you can.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Microsoft bought LinkedIn for your relationship data

If you think of LinkedIn as a social network or an online recruitment service, then you may well be scratching your head about why Microsoft would spend more on it than it has on any other acquisition. But consider that Microsoft has a graph that covers how you’re connected to people by email, documents, messages, meetings and address books, while LinkedIn has a graph that covers jobs, skills, colleagues, and professional connections. That’s two separate sets of information that would be much more useful together.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already talked about how the Microsoft Graph and the Office Graph are some of the company’s most valuable assets. Think about what you could get by combining those with the graph that represents the professional networks of your employees and partners and adding machine learning that can pick out who and what is actually relevant to you in the sea of all the people and resources you’re connected to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet Microsoft’s ‘planet scale’ NoSQL database

Given the strength of SQL Server in business, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft has spent the last five years building a distributed NoSQL database – until you remember that services like Power BI, Bing and the Office Web apps face the same challenges as services like Netflix. They’re problems more and more enterprises have to deal with too: the deluge of data, the demands of mobility and the need for low latency even though you’re relying on cloud services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

What’s really new in SharePoint 2016?

The SharePoint community has reacted with enthusiasm to Microsoft’s roadmap for SharePoint 2016, even though much of it is familiar to anyone who’s been using SharePoint for a while. It’s so confusingly familiar, in fact, that you may find yourself asking whether that wasn’t what SharePoint already did or wondering what else SharePoint was trying to do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How data virtualization delivers on the DevOps promise

Using live data in development means you can test real workloads and get realistic results in transactions and reports. It’s also a significant security risk, as U.K. baby retailer Kiddicare recently found out: The company used real customer names, delivery addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers on a test site, only to have the data extracted and used to send phishing text messages to customers.In 2015, Patreon CEO Jack Conte admitted the names, shipping addresses and email addresses for 2.3 million users of the crowdfunding site had been breached, also “via a debug version of our website that was visible to the public” that had a “development server that included a snapshot of our production database.” And earlier this year a developer at Sydney University in Australia lost a laptop containing an unencrypted copy of a database with the personal and medical details of 6,700 disabled students.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

You might be using Office 365 without even knowing it

Over the years, Office has expanded from the original desktop applications (and their mobile and Web equivalents) and the Exchange and SharePoint servers that add more business features, into full-fledged services. Many businesses treat Office 365 as an efficient way to get hosted Exchange or a cheaper way to volume licence the Office software. But they’re missing out on the advantages of Office 365 being a cloud service; like the Delve analytics that help people find out what colleagues are working on, or the Microsoft Graph API that lets you extract messages, calendar appointments or tasks to use in custom tools and software. That’s how the new Microsoft Flow service lets you build a workflow that sends a text message every time your boss emails you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Do you know what your APIs are doing?

Almost every company is using at least some cloud services today, and they’re not just using packaged SaaS apps, PaaS services and IaaS virtual machines. Websites and custom apps are built using application programming interfaces (API) for everything from mapping and messaging, to analytics, fraud detection and speech recognition.Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings often offer APIs that let you work with them through third-party apps and services, or even build your own. For example, more than 50 percent of Salesforce’s traffic — and revenue — comes through its APIs, rather than directly from its own Web-based service. For eBay, it’s 60 percent, and for Expedia it’s 90 percent. If you use Twilio for sending text messages for customer support or MasterCard fraud detection services, you’re relying on those APIs for your own key business processes. How do you measure and monitor them to find out if you’re getting an acceptable level of service?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you need DRM for your documents

If you pay $1.99 to download an ebook for your Kindle, it’s protected by DRM that stops you sharing the contents, and if Amazon wants to, it can revoke the document so you can’t read it any more. Is your company’s current price list protected nearly as well?With information rights management (often known as enterprise DRM, short for digital rights management), you could make sure that price list was only shared with your customers, blocking them from sending it on to your competitors and automatically blocking it at the end of the quarter when you come out with new prices. Or you could share specifications with several vendors in your supply chain during a bidding process and then block everyone but the winning vendor from opening the document after the contract is finalized. You can make sure that contractors aren’t working from out of date plans by making the old plan expire when there’s an update. Tracking and visibility is useful for compliance as well as security; you could track how many people had opened the latest version of the employee handbook, or see that a document you’d shared with a small team was being actually read by Continue reading

Why you need DRM for your documents

Why machine learning is the new BI

Business intelligence has gone from static reports that tell you what happened, to interactive dashboards where you can drill into information to try and understand why it happened. New big data sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are pushing businesses from those reactive analytics – whether you look back once a month to spot trends or once a day to check for problems – to proactive analytics that give you alerts and real-time dashboards. That makes better use of operational data, which is more useful while it’s still current, before conditions change.“There’s a demand for real-time dashboards,” says Herain Oberoi from Microsoft’s Cortana Analytics team. “A lot of businesses want to get the pulse of their business. But dashboards show things that have already happened.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Are you failing Security Basics 101?

Security tools are getting more sophisticated. DevOps is bringing us automation in operations, and a more holistic way of looking at how we manage infrastructure. But all too often, we’re not doing basic things to improve security and reliability, like protecting against known vulnerabilities.Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2016 Cyber Risk Report points out that “29 percent of all exploits samples discovered in 2015 continued to use a 2010 Stuxnet infection vector that has been patched twice.” It takes an average of 103 days for companies to patch known network and security vulnerabilities, according to a study vulnerability risk management vendor NopSec ran last year; that goes down to 97 days for healthcare providers and up to 176 days for financial services, banking and education organisations. That’s not taking into account misconfigurations, or lack of communication between different teams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is DevOps good or bad for security?

If you think of DevOps as failing fast – as Facebook used to put it, “move fast and break things” – then you might also think of rapid releases, automation and continuous integration and deployment as giving you less time to find security problems. After all, you’re changing code, updating features and adding new capabilities more rapidly. That means more chances to introduce bugs or miss vulnerabilities.With 2016 set to be the year DevOps goes mainstream – Gartner predicts 25 percent of Global 2000 businesses will be using DevOps techniques this year and HP Enterprise is even bolder, claiming that “within five years, DevOps will be the norm when it comes to software development.” Does that mean security problems waiting to happen?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is it time for Identity as a Service?

From Target to TalkTalk to whoever gets breached next week, the litany of companies that have lost customer data should be making businesses rethink not just how they protect customer information and accounts, but whether they want to be running customer and consumer identity services themselves.Despite the fact that attacks are routine, user identity details are often poorly protected. A quick glance at Stack Exchange reveals a worrying number of developers who don’t know how to handle encryption or store usernames and passwords securely. Many companies have support practices that put customer data at risk, from technical mistakes like cross-site scripting vulnerabilities or serving login pages insecurely, to poor architectural decisions like blocking password managers or handling password resets badly, including emailing plain text passwords. The Plain Text Offenders site and security expert Troy Hunt both collect examples, many of them from household names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you need to care more about DNS

When you say Domain Name System (DNS), you might think, naturally enough, of domain names and the technical details of running your Internet connection. You might be concerned about denial of service attacks on your website, or someone hijacking and defacing it.While those certainly matter, DNS isn't just for looking up Web URLs any more; it's used by software to check licences, by video services to get around firewalls and, all too often, by hackers stealing data out from your business. Plus, your employees may be gaily adding free DNS services to their devices that, at the very least, mean you're not in full control of your network configuration. It’s a fundamental part of your infrastructure that’s key to business productivity, as well as a major avenue of attack, and you probably have very little idea of what’s going on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How machine learning ate Microsoft

At the Strata big data conference yesterday, Microsoft let the world know its Azure Machine Learning offering was generally available to developers. This may come as a surprise. Microsoft? Isn't machine learning the province of Google or Facebook or innumerable hot startups?In truth, Microsoft has quietly built up its machine learning expertise over decades, transforming academic discoveries into product functionality along the way. Not many businesses can match Microsoft's deep bench of talent.[ See what hardware, software, development tools, and cloud services came out on top in the InfoWorld 2015 Technology of the Year Awards. | Download the entire list of winners in the handy Technology of the Year PDF. | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with InfoWorld's Microsoft newsletter. ] Machine learning -- getting a system to teach itself from lots of data rather than simply following preset rules -- actually powers the Microsoft software you use everyday. Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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