This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Many companies focus on using cheaper, faster data warehouses to organize their accumulated customer data for business intelligence. But in order to remain competitive, businesses need to be using customer data to build applications that make real-time, data-driven decisions.
If you can interpret each attribute, event and transaction as a hint to help make the best predictions and decisions for your customers, you can transition from just customer understanding to customer action. But acting upon data to optimize customer experiences requires an architecture different from traditional data warehousing and business intelligence applications.
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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
The new Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 3.0 (PCI DSS 3.0) that became mandatory January 1 contains significant changes that will require some businesses to do heavier lifting than they did in years past, and many may not realize it.
Certain e-commerce merchants who re-direct their customers to third parties for payment card data collection and third party service providers who remotely manage merchant systems and networks now face a bevy of technical controls that they have never dealt with before.
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When the Agile Manifesto was introduced almost 15 years ago, it proposed a radical methodology change as an alternative to traditional project management. With agile, project requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration in development cycles that break tasks into small increments. While this methodology helps businesses manage unpredictability, it also requires those businesses to adopt a different mindset in order to be successful.
Agile is designed to drive collaboration, transparency, and quality within product and software development lifecycles, but it isn’t always the right answer for every organization. In fact, the signers of the Manifesto will tell you that, while there is value in examining what agile is, there is just as much value in examining what it is not.
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By now everyone is aware of the performance leap offered by solid-state drives (SSDs) compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), but some SSD myths persist. It’s time to separate fact from fiction.
Myth 1: SSDs are prohibitively expensive
An SSD can cost more than its HDD equivalent when you look simply at the price tag for a given capacity. However, cost savings can be seen when you look at the amount of real-world performance each of your dollars buys. For example, one SSD can do the work of about 40 HDDs, but that SSD doesn’t cost 40 times as much. In fact, an SSD costs less when you consider the work it accomplishes.
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If you’re like most folks, the back of your home entertainment center is a hive of HDMI cables, USB cords and power adaptors, not to mention the HDMI switchers necessary to cope with this cornucopia of entertainment providers. Thankfully, there is a solution: The increasingly popular streaming stick.
These Internet TV streaming devices will be the savior of every gadget-obsessed, cable-cluttered geek out there. These chewing gum-sized streaming devices can pipe the whole wide, weird and wonderful Internet into your television, with a lot less of the cable mess than you’re dealing with now.
Currently available in one of three flavors—Roku's Stick ($50), Google's Chromecast ($35), and Amazon's Fire Stick ($39)— these three devices can deliver pretty much any online content you could wish for directly to your living room. Here's a look at what these sticks have to offer:
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Newsletters are a crucial tool of online marketing; get yours right and your audience will pay attention to you and whatever you’re trying to promote. Get it wrong and if you’re lucky people will just route your newsletter straight to the trash. If you really goof up, you’ll be swamped with abuse and unsubscribe requests. So, to help keep you on the path of digital righteousness here's a selection of the best ways for you to screw up your newsletter:
#1. Be boring. This is the simplest path to a failed newsletter. To really be boring ensure that your newsletter is in plain text, short, minimally formatted, and contains absolutely no graphics.
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The Internet of Everything (IoE) is essentially about connections, bringing people, processes, data and things together in unprecedented ways. IoE delivers the right information to the right person (or machine) at the right time, and converts data into intelligence to make better decisions.
Organizations will use the connections made by IoE to transform our work and private lives, creating smarter products and services, more convenience for consumers and new forms of work-life integration. However, in order to capitalize on these connections, organizations will need well-trained staff. Cisco predicts that approximately 220,000 new engineers will be needed globally every year for the next 10 years to keep up with the technological surge of IoE. This is a gap that must be filled if the potential of IoE is to be realized.
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The challenge for data center operators selecting a high performance transport technology for their network is striking the ideal balance between acquisition, deployment and management costs, and support for high performance capabilities such as the remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocol.
The iWARP protocol is the open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for RDMA over Ethernet, and offers an interchangeable, RDMA verbs-compliant alternative to specialized fabrics such as InfiniBand. iWARP adapters are fully supported within the Open Fabrics Alliance Enterprise software distribution (OFED), with typically no changes needed for applications to migrate from InfiniBand to Ethernet.
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Who would you trust more to fix your car, a licensed mechanic or a guy who once saw someone do an oil change? The choice should be simple. But surprisingly, the debate over trusting an expert versus someone who claims to be an expert happens every day across all industries, so it shouldn’t be shocking that the debate rages in the cloud, too.
Cloud computing enables people and companies to access applications from any computer. But the cloud has created a new group of cloud posers -- inexperienced software developers who make bold (and often untrue) claims about the performance of the cloud-based applications they manage. While on the surface they may seem like a good choice to support your business, once you start asking smart questions, a cloud poser’s true colors (and lack of expertise) will quickly be revealed.
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Service Level Agreements (SLA) serve as a roadmap and a warranty for cloud services offerings. All cloud providers offer standard, one-size-fits-all SLAs that cover availably, performance, security, disaster recovery, response times, compliance and termination. This may be adequate for pure cloud applications, however standard SLAs fall short when it comes to hybrid cloud deployments.
There is nothing standard about hybrid deployments. Each one is different and inherently includes a higher level of involvement from IT. SLAs need to establish clear guidelines of engagement for both the enterprise and service provider. Unfortunately, not all cloud service providers are open or equipped to customize SLAs.
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Relying on a DMZ to protect your network and data is like putting money in a bank that depends on one guard and a single gate to secure its deposits. Imagine how tempting all those piles of money would be to those who had access — and how keen everyone else would be to obtain access.
But banks do not keep cash out on tables in the lobby, they stash it in security boxes inside vaults, behind locked doors, inside a building patrolled by a guard and secured by a gate. Likewise, network segmentation offers similar security for an organization’s assets.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Free security tools you should try +
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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
News reports show cyber attacks continue to outpace IT’s ability to protect critical data, but teams that have built systems to deliver accurate threat intelligence can often end an attack before damage is done. Threat intelligence comes from commercially available information, ongoing analysis of user behavior and native intelligence from within the organization.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 5 ways to escape password hell +
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In search of agility and low overhead, companies are putting as many applications as practical in the cloud. But the resulting hybrid IT environments, where certain applications remain on-premise for security or other reasons, can result in data integration issues that reduce efficiency drags and hamper agility.
In fact, cloud integration is much more demanding than many people want to believe.
As an applications intelligence company that has built its customer-facing and internal operations primarily on cloud applications within a hybrid environment, AppDynamics has had considerable experience with cloud data integration. Here are the five essential data integration capabilities that any company serious about harnessing the cloud should have in its pocket:
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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) promise numerous benefits, but adding layers of network abstraction come at a cost: visibility into the traffic traversing the links at the physical layer.
The migration to ever-faster networks is compounding this challenge because virtually no network monitoring, management or security tool today is capable of operating at 40Gbps or 100Gbps. Network packet brokers (NPBs), also known as network visibility controllers, address this challenge by capturing, filtering, aggregating and optimizing traffic. This enables 1Gbps and 10Gbps performance management and security systems to operate in 40/100Gbps networks.
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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Everyone used to hire mobile app developers to build custom programs, but that often resulted in shoddy, insecure programs that sometimes didn’t even work. And even when the software suited the need, chances are it was a colossal waste of money.
Today you can program without programming. Even business people can define and build apps that suit their needs – in just hours or days, depending on the complexity. Or have them built for you for as a low as $500 from a provider harnessing the same automated software creation tools.
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Networking is at the heart of every Internet of Things deployment, connecting sensors and other “Things” to the apps that interpret the data or take action.
But these are still early days. Assembling an IoT network from commercial off-the-shelf components is still, let’s just say, a work in progress. This will change over time, but for now the technical immaturity is being addressed by System Integrators building custom code to connect disparate parts and by a new class of network meta-product known as the IoT Platform.
IoT Platform products are still in their infancy, but there are already more than 20 on the market today. Approaches vary, so when making a build or buy decision, consider these critical areas of IoT Platform tech: security, sensor compatibility, analytics compatibility, APIs and standards.
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