The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.There are options for the teams doing data analytics. Microsoft offers a number of big data crunching services that are integrated with the Azure cloud. Once you upload your data, the algorithms are ready to go. You push a few buttons and fancy graphs and deep insights pour out. Similarly, you can tap the power of Watson and predictive analytics tools on IBM’s Bluemix. Amazon offers a narrower set of machine learning capabilities, tailored to developers and business analysts. Google’s machine learning service was recently made available in a limited preview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Right now, inside Intel’s headquarters, a deadly serious game of “Gladiator” is pitting Intel’s client products against one another. During its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Intel said it now expects the PC market to decline in the “high single digits” throughout all of 2016, rather than the mid-single-digit drop it previously expected. IDC and Gartner said recently that the PC market dropped between 10 and 12 percent during the first quarter. “Our projection of the PC market...is more cautious than third-party estimates,” chief financial officer Stacy Smith told analysts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're a tech executive tired of being instructed to "align IT with the business," you're not alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Today’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) leads an increasingly precarious life.Since the emergence of the job title in the late 1990s, the CISO job has become more complex - and demanding - by the day.Whereas once this was a technical job focused largely on fixing firewalls and patching vulnerabilities, today’s security chiefs are expected to do this and a whole lot more. They’re charged with juggling the day-to-day operations of their security team with meeting board expectations while also staying abreast of an ever-evolving threat landscape and regular regulatory changes.As a result, it could be argued that the CISO job is a poisoned chalice: the job is well-paid, respected and increasingly available to people of all backgrounds (thanks to the well-publicized InfoSec skills shortage), and yet the average job can last 18 months or less. A CISO could be dismissed for any number of things, from a breach or missed vulnerability to failing to align security operations with the board’s business goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle has released another monster quarterly security update containing 136 fixes for flaws in a wide range of products including Oracle Database Server, E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Sun Products, Java and MySQL.The biggest change is Oracle's adoption of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3.0, which more accurately reflects the impact of flaws than CVSS 2.0. This Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) has both CVSS 3.0 and CVSS 2.0 scores for vulnerabilities, providing a chance to compare how the new rating system might affect Oracle patch prioritization inside organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Universities at the forefront of big dataImage by ThinkstockBig data has exploded in a way that has left companies unable to find enough qualified candidates to hire, and schools can't churn out skilled data scientists fast enough. Up until now, boot camps have helped fill the data skills gap and plenty of colleges and universities have created master's programs in this burgeoning field. And, while it's true that boot camps are a great way to learn new skills fast and a master's degree is a great way to move your career in another direction, there has been a glaring lack of undergraduate programs for young people looking to get right into the industry after graduation.However, that is starting to change as more undergraduate programs start to pop up at reputable universities and colleges across the country. And it's no surprise, considering the Department of Labor cites a projected 25 percent growth in data jobs by the year 2018, which is exceptionally fast compared to other industries. These universities are priming the next generation of data scientists who will be tasked with handling the steadily increasing influx of data information that nearly every industry is experiencing. Here are Continue reading
Certifications have always been about benchmarking and assessing IT professionals' ability to use technology and provide something of a guarantee that candidates are competent with needed skills in the workplace. But as DevOps, continuous delivery, agile, scrum and other frameworks become necessary, the question around certification of these skills becomes this: How can you accurately assess and measure the less-tangible, softer skills hiring managers require? And if you're an IT pro, do you need one or more of these certifications at all?"This isn't so different from the existing certification world in that it's about measuring people's ability to use tech to drive the business. We can use certifications to verify that they have the hard skills to do the job and use certain tools, but we also need to measure understanding of principles and best practices around technology," says François Déchery, co-founder and vice president of customer success at continuous delivery solutions company CloudBees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Outsourcing, cloud services and financial pressure are constant realities for IT leaders. Shared data centers and cloud service providers are often a good choice. If the organization’s IT demands are difficult to predict or highly variable, building additional data centers make little sense.Despite the cloud trend, managing internal data centers effectively remains an important IT responsibility. Cost optimization, vendor management and creative ways to add value are all in play for data center managers in 2016.Meeting increased demands for data center services Industry surveys suggest that data centers are under increasing pressure to deliver results. Consider the following findings from AFCOM’s 2015 State of the Data Center Survey. Gathering information from over 250 leaders, the findings provide a useful snapshot of opportunities and priorities for data center management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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
EmblemHealth CEO Karen Ignagni told employees Tuesday that "several hundred" IT and operations workers will be laid off as a result of a decision to hire services firm Cognizant.The announcement came just as IT employees at the New York-based insurer began an effort to convince the firm not to move the work to an outsourcer.Ignagni explained her decision in a video to employees that was posted on YouTube by attorney Sara Blackwell. The Florida attorney, who is representing displaced Disney IT workers, has been helping the EmblemHealth IT employees organize.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including reditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including CreditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The European Commission on Wednesday made new antitrust charges against Google, alleging that the company foisted its search application and the Chrome browser on Android smartphones makers as a condition to license its other apps and services. The commission also charged Google with preventing makers from selling devices running variants or “forks” of its Android operating system, and giving financial incentives to both phone makers and mobile network operators if they agree to preinstall Google Search on their devices. In its contracts with manufacturers, Google has made the licensing of the Play Store on Android devices conditional on its search application being pre-installed and set as default search service, according to the commission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services is going retro to help companies deal with big data workloads. The cloud provider announced Tuesday it's launching two new volume types for its Elastic Block Store service that are powered by traditional, spinning disk hard drives. The new Throughput-Optimized HDD and Cold HDD EBS volume types let companies store files cheaply in a way that's still useful for big data workloads like MapReduce and Kafka. the Throughput-Optimized service is aimed at frequent use cases, while the Cold HDD service is built for those same uses, but for applications that reference the items stored less frequently. To get all of that data into AWS, customers can now call on a new 80TB Snowball storage appliance. That joins the existing 50TB Snowball, which was already available for users to order from AWS and get delivered to their data center for data transfer. Using the Snowball, users can ship their data securely from on-premises servers to Amazon's. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"All too often, the vendors have the upper hand," says research and advisory firm IDC in a recent report. High switching costs or other "vendor control points," such as proprietary technology integrations or overly customized applications, can make it too much trouble for enterprise customers to discontinue using one vendor and switch to another.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Businesses are now widely using application programming interfaces (APIs), but despite widespread use, a recent study has found most companies are struggling with challenges ranging from getting infrastructure in place to finding suppliers to simply setting strategy and objectives."APIs can add tremendous value to a business, but simply having them is not enough," says Rahim Bhatia, general manager, Developer Products, CA Technologies. "Like products, they have to be properly created, managed, monitored and secured or bad things can happen, as we saw in recent connected car incidents or the Snapchat breach two years ago."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide as the company restructures operations to diversify from PCs into growth areas of IoT and servers.The layoffs account for about 11 percent of employees worldwide. Intel is also consolidating work locations worldwide in a move the company hopes will save it US $750 million this year.Data center equipment will be Intel's growth area growing forward, generating a large part of Intel's profits and potentially making up for the declines in the PC market.Growth drivers will include memory and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, which the company added from its recent $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, CEO Brian Krzanich said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A coalition including the New York Police Department and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance launched an anti-encryption campaign along with a hashtag of #UnlockJustice because “crime victims are entitled to stronger protections than criminals.”“The debate over encryption is often referred to in terms of privacy and security, with little regard for the impact on crime victims,” the press release stated. The Manhattan DA complained about the 230 inaccessible Apple devices running iOS 8 or higher that it can’t unlock and how unfair encryption and “warrant-proof” devices are to crime victims. Companies, according to Vance, should not be permitted “to provide criminals with unprecedented, evidence-free zones.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No one laughed more than I did when the Internet stepped up and voted overwhelmingly to name a British research ship Boaty McBoatface. The suggested moniker still made me giggle days later.But now comes word that the officials tasked with actually naming the ship are not that big on Boaty. From a story in the Guardian: However, Jo Johnson, the science minister, signaled the government was preparing to activate its get-out clause. “The new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including global warming, the melting of polar ice and rising sea levels,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here