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.
We love to ask the question, “Which is more secure: iOS or Android?” But if you really want to drive secure mobile productivity you’re going to have to start looking at the bigger picture.
The longstanding Android vs. iOS debate is understandable because these mobile OSes power the majority of devices employees bring to work today. But two trends in the mobile world are uprooting the traditional arguing points -- and changing the mobile security landscape overall. They highlight our need for an actionable, multi-layer security approach, not just putting your hope in the OSes of two major mobile players.
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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.
Companies adopting cloud technologies often end up with a public/private hybrid approach that balances business needs with infrastructure goals, and while the end result provides numerous benefits, hybrid clouds can result in integration challenges. But with the right planning and the strategies below, connecting cloud applications can be done easily and effectively:
Surprisingly, not all APIs offer full create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations on all of their entities, often exposing just a subset of the full data model. Always be sure to know what data entities are available and what operations you can perform on them before committing to any hybrid integration project, even when the API exposes the entity you are looking for and the operation you want.
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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.
Experiencing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is like having your home flood. Without warning, attackers can upend your enterprise. Every moment counts, but unfortunately by the time some DDoS solutions identify and report the attack, the damage is already done. You need a faster, more immediate means of threat detection to prevent severe damage.
When a DDoS attack hits your network, a long time can pass before the security/network staff fully realizes it is actually a DDoS attack that is affecting the services, and not a failing server or application. Even more time may pass before the actual mitigation of the threat starts to take effect.
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If you take a strip of bacon and twist one end through 180 degrees then join the two ends you get a piece of bacon with only one side, a Bacon Möbius strip. Cool. But if you want such a thing to adorn your desk (and who wouldn't?) then being made of real bacon would be, to say the least, a bad idea. So, to memorialize this mathematical and culinary wonder, why not print a look-alike on a 3D printer? Why not indeed?
This exactly is what a designer with the handle "joabaldwin" created using the Shapeways 3D printing service.
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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 as a Service (SaaS) breaks the shackles of traditional software licensing approaches, but savvy users still optimize their SaaS environments to avoid undue costs.
SaaS subscription models typically require a one to three year commitment. Customers are invoiced, usually on a monthly basis, and the license typically uses some sort of billing metric based on resource usage, such as the number of end users that can access the product. The flexibility of SaaS licensing models enables organizations to expand the use of the product according to their needs during the term of the subscription.
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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) promises faster network deployment times and increased agility. Unfortunately, early SDN architectures focused only on solving connectivity challenges at layers 2 through 4 of the OSI model and largely ignored application-centric challenges at layer 4 to layer 7. Yet, layers 4 – 7 are where many of the services reside that ensure applications are fast, highly available and secure.
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Wi-Fi has significantly changed the way we work and play, enabling us to interact with the digital world from anywhere in the physical world. Furthermore, free Wi-Fi access is on the rise, from local coffee shops to international restaurant chains. However, the convenience of free Wi-Fi comes with some real threats, from computer viruses to identity theft.
Wi-Fi is a type of wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that enables an electronic device such as a laptop or smartphone to exchange data or connect to the Internet using radio waves. The core technology behind Wi-Fi is a device called an access point, which acts like a bridge between the wired network and the Wi-Fi network. The access point, in turn, typically connects to the Internet via a network router.
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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.
Day after day, an employee uses legitimate credentials to access corporate systems, from a company office, during business hours. The system remains secure. But suddenly the same credentials are used after midnight to connect to a database server and run queries that this user has never performed before. Is the system still secure?
Maybe it is. Database administrators have to do maintenance, after all, and maintenance is generally performed after hours. It could be that certain maintenance operations require the execution of new queries. But maybe it isn’t. The user’s credentials could have been compromised and are being used to commit a data breach.
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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.
Application integration has often been an exercise in frustration – long delays, high costs and over promises by vendors. How many ERP projects have you heard of that were canceled or shelved due to complex customization and integration challenges?
Integration though, is coming to a new place. Cloud technologies and open APIs are helping enterprises merge on-premise and off-premise systems without considerable coding and re-architecting. Instead of requiring specialists in SOA, enterprise service bus (ESB), extract transform and load (ETL) and data warehousing, organizations are hoping the concept of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) can be used to integrate systems in half the time using technically-savvy generalists and increased involvement from lines of business.
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Most financial service firms, which includes banking and insurance companies, are engaged in a big data project to increase the pace of innovation and uncover game-changing business outcomes. The pressing challenge now is how to drive more continuous value and unearth opportunities more rapidly.
No matter where you might be in your big data journey, the following three-step approach to integrating big data into an analytics strategy can lead to success:
To drive continuous and transformational improvements through big data-driven analytics projects, business units – IT, marketing, risk, compliance or finance, for example – should agree on and outline a mutually beneficial business objective. For instance, driving a better customer experience or improving customer value management. While developing the common objective, financial services firms should also determine the aligned and desired outcomes, such as decreasing fraud and offering more personalized services to customers in real-time.
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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.
Could Facebook or LinkedIn become the nexus for your voice calls and other communications? Not yet, but thanks to a technology known as WebRTC you can’t rule out the possibility.
WebRTC — the initials stand for Real Time Communications — is an open-source project that aims to transform the ordinary Web browser into a full-featured unified communications portal. With WebRTC, users establish real-time communication sessions from their browser, search, find and point to the servers of people they want to communicate with, and establish connections — all without needing to know the recipient’s phone number or email address.
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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.
All you have to do is read the headlines to know conventional IT security is failing. The number of security incidents among enterprises jumped 25% between 2011 and 2013, according to the 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers “Global State of Information Security Survey.” And in the past 12 months, 96% of enterprises felt the sting of a cyberattack, according to the 2014 IDG Connect Cyber Defense Maturity Report.
The question is no longer if or when you will experience a significant security incident, but how well your processes and controls address detection, analysis and response. Without a real-time, independent and comprehensive view of endpoint status, organizations have an incomplete understanding of their IT risk, and it shows.
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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.
Companies that sell products and services to consumers are collecting and storing massive volumes of customer data from not just POS, order management, customer service and e-commerce systems, but also mobile apps, social media feeds, online campaign forms and Web applications such as lead enrichment databases. As a result, new types of identity management systems have emerged to address the broader scale and risk of Web-based business processes and to give customers more control regarding how corporations use their data.
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The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was recently released and it’s a serious step up from its predecessors. Before we dive in to what makes it an outstanding product, the Raspberry Pi family tree going from oldest to newest, is as follows:
The + models were upgrades of the previous board versions and the RPi2B is the Raspberry Pi B+’s direct descendent with added muscle. So, what makes the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B great?
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.
Voice over IP uses the session initiation protocol (SIP) to convert phone conversations to data and send it through a public or private IP network instead of using telephone lines or fixed bandwidth T1 and T3 options. This can be a brilliant way to cut costs, gain flexibility and more efficiently use existing resources, but consider these issues to ensure successful implementation:
* Native SIP. Ask your carrier if their network was designed to deliver SIP end-to-end and the size of their local telephone number footprint. SIP is an open standard protocol used to enable VoIP. Make sure your carrier isn’t patching together multiple networks, which may or may not use SIP and could cause quality degradation and make troubleshooting issues more difficult.
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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.
Web advertisers and many others have long appreciated the volumes of information they can collect on us based only on our web browsing patterns. The data can be quite telling, revealing our locations, incomes, family status, interests and many other facts that advertisers can use to target you.
Understandably, most of us would prefer that “big brother like” advertising networks aren’t always watching over our shoulder, while going about regular activities including product research and purchase option exploration and especially not while investigating medical or other highly sensitive topics.
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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.
Hybrid cloud is the talk of IT, but to avoid costly, labor-intensive megaprojects you cannot escape, pay particular attention to minimizing implementation and management complexity. These questions will help you identify the best hybrid cloud architecture for your environment:
In the midmarket, the No. 1 answer is disaster recovery (DR). A secondary data center for DR is a luxury most companies can not afford. Now, public cloud services have put DR within reach of virtually all organizations. The key is to identify the enabling technology that minimizes complexity, maximizes automation and does not overtax the IT staff. Easy cloud DR solutions exist today for midsized shops; don’t be lead into a heavy professional services project.
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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.
When growing capacity and power in the data center, the architectural trade-offs between server scale-up vs. scale-out continue to be debated. Both approaches are valid: scale-out adds multiple, smaller servers running in a distributed computing model, while scale-up adds fewer, more powerful servers that are capable of running larger workloads.
Today, much of the buzz is around scale-out architectures, which have been made popular by companies like Facebook and Google, because this architecture is commonly viewed as more cost-effective and “infinitely” scalable.
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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.
While the term Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) might be increasingly more common to networking, the concept of automation has existed for years in IT. At its core, ZTP is an automation solution that’s designed to reduce errors and save time when IT needs to bring new infrastructure online.
This is particularly useful for data center servers, where scale and configuration similarities across systems make automation a necessity. In the server world, for example, Linux has revolutionized on boarding and provisioning. Rather than using command-line interfaces (CLI) to configure systems one at a time, administrators can use automation tools to roll out the operating system software, patches and packages on new servers with a single command, or the click of a mouse.
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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.
Gartner predicts more than 30 billion devices will be connected by the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, and Domain Name System (DNS) servers are critical to keeping it all running. However, the number, frequency and variety of attacks on DNS servers is rising, putting businesses and initiatives like IoT at enormous risk. The good news is, there are steps you can take to mitigate these attacks.
The DNS system translates easily memorized domain names into the numerical IP addresses needed for locating computer services and devices worldwide. According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), there are 30 to 50 million DNS servers on the planet. These servers are being hit by four main types of attacks: zero-day, cache poisoning, denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS).
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