Satellite-based data centers with room for petabytes of data may start orbiting Earth as early as 2019. But when it comes to keeping secrets safe from the long arm of the law, the black void may not be far enough.Cloud Constellation, a startup in Los Angeles, is looking upward to give companies and governments direct access to their data from anywhere in the world. Its data centers on satellites would let users bypass the Internet and the thousands of miles of fiber their bits now have to traverse in order to circle the globe. And instead of just transporting data, the company’s satellites would store it, too.The pitch goes like this: Data centers and cables on Earth are susceptible to hacking and to national regulations covering things like government access to information. They can also slow data down as it goes through switches and from one carrier to another, and all those carriers need to get paid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We all know the stereotype of a mainframe programmer or admin: gray hair, graduated from college in 1965, drives a Chrysler—and is about to retire, leaving a massive hole that his employer will find difficult to fill because no one under 60 knows how to use a mainframe.Now, let’s look at another stereotype: the millennial programmer. He/she is a few years out of college, with a degree in computer science, green or blue hair, and enough student debt to sink a yacht. The usual next step is to move to San Francisco, pay $2,200 a month to live under a staircase like Harry Potter and dream of joining a company that has a one-in-a-million chance of becoming the next Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can't always bring customers to your best customer-service tools, but now you can bring those tools to them thanks to a new addition announced Wednesday for Salesforce's Service Cloud.Dubbed Service Cloud Lightning Snap-ins, the new offering allows organizations of any size to take key support features from Salesforce's Service Cloud and "drop" them into their websites or mobile apps. Case-management and live-chat capabilities can now be added to mobile and Web apps, for example, and a tap-to-call feature is available for Android and iOS.A new module enabling two-way video chat, meanwhile, allows customers and agents to see each other. A customer could also use a smartphone's front-facing camera to show the agent the problem at hand.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After months of issues, they have finally restored my access to my blog! After such a hiatus, it is my pleasure to bring this particular post. I'm certain many will find it at the very least cool in an "I'm a network geek" kind of a way, or even better: you will find it very educational and even leverage it in your own world.
This is a solution I have been wanting to write about for a long time now, and let's be clear—it is not mine. This entire post is owed to a long-time personal friend of mine who is also one of the most talented and gifted technologists roaming the earth today. His name is Epaminondas Peter Karelis, CCIE #8068 (Pete).
Pete designed this particular high-availability solution for a small ISE deployment that had two data centers, as is crudely illustrated by me in the below figure. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce and Oracle have an interesting relationship. Even more interesting is the relationship between the companies' two founders, Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison, respectively.Benioff is, after all, a former Oracle alum and a protege of Ellison. And the two have an interesting history—sharing many perspectives (not to mention a penchant for kicking back in their respective Hawaiian bolt-holes). Indeed, the on-again, off-again war of words between the two has been excellent fodder for the peanut gallery. Who will forget the time Benioff's invitation to speak at Oracle Open World was removed?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some U.S. government agencies are using IT systems running Windows 3.1, the decades-old COBOL and Fortran programming languages, or computers from the 1970s.A backup nuclear control messaging system at the U.S. Department of Defense runs on an IBM Series 1 computer, first introduced in 1976, and uses eight-inch floppy disks, while the Internal Revenue Service's master file of taxpayer data is written in assembly language code that's more than five decades old, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.Some agencies are still running Windows 3.1, first released in 1992, as well as the newer but unsupported Windows XP, Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, noted during a Wednesday hearing on outdated government IT systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to continue tapping a market IDC says will be worth $6 billion by 2020, Software-Defined WAN company Viptela today said it raised $75M in a Series C round of financing.The new round of funding brings Viptela’s total funding to about $110M.The company said it would use the proceeds to grow sales, marketing, technical support and research and development.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+This funding round was lead by investments from Redline Capital and new investor Northgate Capital as well as existing investor Sequoia Capital. Also as part of the financing, Tatiana Evtushenkova, Director of Redline Capital has joined the Viptela Board of Directors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In several of my previous posts, I’ve connected the dots between digital transformation and the need for IT to evolve. IT professionals need new technologies, tools and processes to meet the demands of the digital era. This often requires a willingness to do things that were never the norm in previous technology eras.One of the biggest changes that IT must accept is the willingness to automate processes. Whenever I have spoken to IT professionals in the past, particularly network engineers, the reaction to automation tools has been somewhat tepid. As a former network engineer, I can relate. I want to control everything so that I know things are done correctly and everything is operating as it should.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The explosion of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in recent years can put enterprise computers at risk due to name conflicts between internal domain names used inside corporate networks and those that can now be registered on the public Internet.Many companies have configured their networks to use domain names, in many cases with made-up TLDs that a few years ago didn't use to exist on the Internet, such as .office, .global, .network, .group, .school and many others. Having an internal domain-based namespace makes it easier to locate, manage and access systems.The problem is that over the past two years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved over 900 gTLDs for public use as part of an expansion effort. This can have unexpected security implications for applications and protocols used on domain-based corporate networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Amazon Web Services consultancy 2nd Watch this week released the findings of an analysis of 100,000 public cloud instances to determine the 30 most popular services being used. It’s not surprising that AWS’s two core products: compute and storage, lead the pack. 100% of the environments 2nd Watch examined were using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), the massively scalable object storage service. 99% of customers also were using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the on-demand virtual machine service. 100% of customers use AWS Data Transfer, because if you have data in the cloud, you need to transfer it in or out at some point.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a surprise move Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said it would spin off its enterprise services business and merge it with CSC to create an IT services giant with $26 billion in annual revenue.It's the latest step by CEO Meg Whitman in her effort to turn around one of Silicon Valley's oldest companies. Just last year, Hewlett-Packard split itself into two vendors, with HPE selling data center products and services, and HP Inc. selling PCs.Now, HPE will slice itself up further, doubling down on its bet that a smaller company will be able to move faster and attract new business in a world increasingly dominated by the cloud.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers
HPE said it expects to complete the "spin-merger" by March 2017. The combined company will be led by Mike Lawrie, CSC's chairman, president and CEO. Whitman will have a seat on the board, and the remaining directors will be nominated half by HPE and half by CSC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike, a company that offers task and project management tools, takes a unique approach to recruiting talent. While some companies might go after the most desired talent on the market, Filev prefers to hire the undervalued players, and foster their strengths to create a well-rounded team."'Island of Misfit Toys' is a nickname some of our team gave themselves one day at lunch when they were reflecting on how different their career backgrounds were prior to joining Wrike. These are people who landed at Wrike either without a lot of experience, or with an abundance of experience unrelated to their current positions -- often in jobs where they lacked challenge and growth. Since starting their careers here, they've become key players on our team and many are now in roles as team leaders or program managers, and are also big cultural assets in the company," says Filev.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Is there really such a thing as a “citizen developer” of mobile apps? Or is it a myth?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Five people have been arrested in Miami who are said to be responsible for scamming 1,500 people out of more than $2 million by impersonating IRS agents. Their scams centered on contacting individual taxpayers out of the blue and demanding payments under the threat of jail time.
News of the arrests circulated Tuesday after the Associated Press reported on them. Sources in the Treasury Department said that the five individuals - all Cuban nationals - demanded money from their victims, threatening arrest if the payments were not wired immediately.
In recent months, the scammers demanded payment via iTunes gift cards.
Scams such as this, Deputy Inspector General Tim Camus told the Washington Post, have become the "largest and most pervasive" the IRS has faced over the last three decades. Some 6,400 victims have reported more than $36 million in losses, some paying up to $5,700 on average.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Down, but not out: Microsoft is laying off another 1,850 staff from its smartphone hardware business, but says it isn't leaving the market completely.What's left of the old Nokia business in Finland will be hardest hit by the latest round of lay-offs, with up to 1,350 jobs to go. Microsoft will cut up to 500 more globally, it said Wednesday.Since it bought Nokia's mobile phone activities in 2013, Microsoft has been managing a business in decline. The majority of the staff it acquired from Nokia are gone, and the company's mobile phone market share has stagnated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a recent Network World column, guest author Susan Perschke discussed why she switched back to the Firefox browser, with its piddling low teens percentage of market share, from the dominant browser, Google Chrome.Perschke illustrated many good reasons to use Firefox, all of them legitimate and valid, but I have two good reasons of my own. Firefox has two feature Chrome just doesn't have.First is the URL bar. Its absence is what kept me away from Chrome in the first place. That and Chrome's constant failure to render certain HTML pages. I like being able to click the pulldown menu and see sites I visit infrequently but not enough to bookmark. My bookmarks are hard enough to manage without saving every page I visit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s most innovative productsRecently TIME Magazine issued a fascinating list ranking the 50 most influential gadgets of all time. Not surprisingly, Apple’s iconic iPhone appeared in the top spot, while two other Apple products—the iPod and the original Mac—also managed to crack the top 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the early 2000's when the IT world was in the throes of ERP, CRM, SFA and ecommerce, IT infrastructure was invariably designed to support the absolute worst-case scenario. I quickly learned there were two options when launching any self-serve solution: it either flat-lines or takes off like a rocket—there is no in-between. The capacity planning challenge drove the development of grid computing, then virtualization, and finally cloud computing. Although with cloud we now have a way to rapidly scale up to meet increasing demand, it seems we have forgotten scaling down to conserve resources is equally important. Instead of provisioning “just in case” our worst fears came true, I find repeated examples where cloud is provisioned “just because.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year, Vidyo announced that Bloomberg selected it to provide the enabling technology for Nexi, Bloomberg’s new global communications platform that enables the company’s employees to connect over video with each other and the rest of the world.
So, I decided to dig a bit deeper into Bloomberg’s decision to use Vidyo and talked with the man responsible for the integration: Jeff Fairbanks, Global Head of AV and Media Technology, Technical Operations at Bloomberg.
I asked Fairbanks if he could describe Bloomberg’s use of video and provide some historical context for why the technology is so important today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here