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Category Archives for "Network World SDN"

Face-off: SAP vs. IBM for talent management

SAP acquired HR software company SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in 2012. IBM acquired HR software company Kenexa for $1.3 billion the same year. Now the two are locked in a battle with Oracle, Cornerstone, Workday and many other vendors offering corporate software for talent management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Serverless computing: Freedom for devs at last

Serverless computing provides a great opportunity for developers seeking relief from the burden of infrastructure. By abstracting away everything but a block of code, the serverless model makes it faster for developers to iterate and deploy new code, enabling smaller teams with smaller budgets to do things that only big companies could do before. Or, as Mat Ellis, founder and CEO of Cloudability, recently said in a CloudCast episode, “Serverless attempts to industrialize developer impact.”On-premises serverlessTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

US DOJ drops child porn case to avoid disclosing Tor exploit

The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal court to dismiss its indictment in a case that involves a child porn site known as Playpen after a judge asked the government to disclose the hacking technique it used to gather evidence."The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of its indictment," the DOJ said in a court filing Friday. "Disclosure is not currently an option."The case involves Jay Michaud, a school administrator from Vancouver, Washington, who was arrested in July 2015 for allegedly viewing child porn images on Playpen. Michaud's case was one of at least 137 cases brought throughout the U.S. in relation to Playpen, a website that operated on the Tor anonymity network and which the FBI managed to seize in 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. suspends fast-track H-1B processing, blames backlog

The White House decision to suspend premium processing for H-1B visa holders is being blamed on a visa backlog. It will affect some people seeking visas who may be in need of this fast-track system.The U.S. government is hoping that its decision to suspend premium processing, announced late Friday, leads to an improvement in overall processing times.President Donald Trump has talked about moving to a "merit-based" H-1B system instead of a lottery, but the administration has been mum on details. There is concern within the tech industry about H-1B reform, but the action on premium processing may be unrelated to that. Meanwhile, there are differing views about the value of fast-track processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers try again to stop call center offshoring

Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate and the House reintroduced legislation Thursday intended to impede the offshore outsourcing of call centers.The bills, called the U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act, if approved, would create a list of firms that shift work overseas. Firms on that list would be ineligible for federal grants and loans, and call center workers will be required to disclose their locations. U.S. customers would have the right to request that their calls are transferred to a call center agent physically based in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT Resume Makeover: Find focus by building a theme

Do you have trouble establishing a cohesive focus for your resume? That was the case for this IT Resume Makeover candidate, Bhairav Sampath, whose name has been changed for this article. He knew his resume needed to offer some clarity on what he brings to the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Why more Chief Strategy and Risk Officers need a seat at the security table

For years the evolving role of chief information security officers has increasingly required them to think more like a chief risk or strategy officer and anticipate cyber threats before they happen. Now a perfect storm is brewing that may finally push risk management and strategy roles to the forefront of cybersecurity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How microcertifications work for IT job seekers and employers

Organizations struggling to fill high-demand tech roles -- like Linux or cybersecurity, for instance -- often look at certifications to benchmark a candidate's skills and real-world experience and gauge their potential for success on the job. But for job seekers, certifications are expensive, time-consuming and often don't accurately assess the hands-on skills needed to succeed in a role.For many IT job seekers and the organizations that would hire them, microcertifications -- or microcredentials -- are a faster, more affordable and more effective way to achieve the same result and get open jobs filled faster.[ Related story: How unfilled tech jobs impact the US economy ] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Okta acquires Stormpath to boost its identity services for developers

Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities.Stormpath offered developers a set of tools for managing user logins for their apps. Rather than building a login system from scratch, developers could call the Stormpath API and have the company take care of it for them. Frederic Kerrest, Okta’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, said that the acquisition should help his company build self-service capabilities for developers.While Okta is probably best known for its identity and access management products aimed at businesses’ internal use, the company also operates a developer platform aimed at helping app developers handle user identity. Kerrest said that the developer capabilities are a fast-growing part of Okta’s business, but that its functionality could use some help. That’s where this acquisition comes in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: IT Professionals Weigh in on Enterprise Automation

IT professionals are singing the praises of automation. It’s a transformative technology practice that allows IT to improve agility and the availability of services while liberating IT staff from time-consuming routine tasks. These are essential factors as organizations transition to digital business.But IT leaders also preach prudence. Automation in IT must be approached with a clear strategy. It must be fully understood, skillfully deployed, and diligently monitored, tested, and optimized.We reached out to influential IT leaders to learn what factors and best practices organizations should consider in order to realize the maximum benefits of automation in the data center. Here’s what they said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google faces new antitrust investigation in Turkey

Antitrust concerns about Google's tying of its app store and services to use of the Android OS are spreading, as Turkey's Competition Board has opened an inquiry, reversing an earlier decision.Russian search company Yandex filed a complaint with the board in 2015, alleging that Google requires smartphone manufacturers to pre-load Google Play Store, Google Play Services and Google Mobile Services on any Android devices they sell, and to make Google Search the default search provider on those devices.Such behavior would be a concern for Yandex, which offers app store, mobile mapping and search services of its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to remotely control your Windows 10 computer via Google Chrome

Google provides a free and powerful tool, Chrome Remote Desktop, that lets you connect to and control your Windows 10 computer over the internet. (It also works with Windows 7 and Windows 8.) The computer has to be running Chrome, of course, and you also need a Gmail account to sign in to Chrome in order to use this feature.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New products of the week 3.6.17

New products of the weekImage by CertaOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.A10 Networks Thunder CFW, with integrated Gi/SGi firewall capabilitiesImage by a10To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: vArmour flips security on its head

Almost every cybersecurity program these days does some sort of scanning, sandboxing or traffic examination to look for anomalies that might indicate the presence of malware. We’ve even reviewed dedicated threat-hunting tools that ferret out malware that’s already active inside a network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Ransomware attack hit Pennsylvania Democratic Senators

The Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus was hit with a ransomware attack, locking 16 Democratic senators and their staff out of their computer network.The attack was discovered on Friday morning; at the time of publishing on Sunday, the site was still down and displayed an “error establishing a database connection” message. The same error displays when trying to view each Democratic senator’s website.“Officials from the caucus have been in contact with law enforcement to investigate the incident and are working with Microsoft to restore the IT system,” according to a written statement text-messaged to reporters and obtained by The Hill. It was sent via text since the caucus could not use its email. “There is currently no indication that the caucus system was targeted or that any data has been compromised.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware attack hit Pennsylvania Democratic senators

The Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus was hit with a ransomware attack, locking 16 Democratic senators and their staff out of their computer network.The attack was discovered on Friday morning; at the time of publishing, the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus website was still down and displayed an “error establishing a database connection” message. The same error displays when trying to view each Democratic senator’s website.“Officials from the caucus have been in contact with law enforcement to investigate the incident and are working with Microsoft to restore the IT system,” according to a written statement text-messaged to reporters and obtained by The Hill. It was sent via text, since the caucus could not use its email. “There is currently no indication that the caucus system was targeted or that any data has been compromised.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month

On February 19th, this year, Susan J. Fowler, a software engineer who left Uber (I don’t have to explain what Uber is, do I?) to work for Stripe (okay, I’ll outline what they are: Stripe has been described as “the PayPal of the mobile era”) blogged about her experience of working at Uber. She outlined a nightmarish corporate culture of poor management, backstabbing, dirty politics, and negligent human resources, along with apparently endemic and rampant sexual discrimination and harassment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enough with “the Cyber”!

Email is great; it’s transformed business, enabled geographically dispersed families and friends to stay in touch, redefined news distribution, transformed sales pipelines … the list of good stuff about email is endless. But, as many people have discovered to their cost, keeping control of your email account requires effort, effort like not using dumb, easy-to-guess passwords, and making sure your email hosting service is reliable and not, for example, Yahoo or AOL. And these issues aren’t anything like new, recent discoveries; we’ve all known for over a decade where the risks lie … well, all of us except, apparently, for the government.I don’t know about you, but  during the 2016 election I was fairly surprised when the Democratic National Committee email system was hacked after which the email account of John Podesta, the DNC chairperson, was hacked. You’d have thought that the folks who manage IT for these people would have known the risks and done more to minimize exposure but when simple phishing and malware intrusions that should never of happened and which went undetected were successful, then you have to wonder where the disconnect lies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, Continue reading

Pence used private mail for state work as governor, account was hacked

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to transact state business when he was governor of Indiana, and his AOL account was hacked once, according to a news report. Emails released to the Indianapolis Star following a public records request are said to show that Pence used his personal AOL account to communicate with his top advisers on issues ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. A hacker seems to have got access to his email account in June last year and sent a fake mail to people on the former governor’s contact list, claiming  that Pence and his wife had been attacked on their way back to their hotel in the Philippines, according to the report. Pence subsequently changed his AOL account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here