State of the CIO 2017: The new reality

As technology grabs the lead role in modern business, all eyes are on the CIO's ability to lead initiatives that radically transform how companies sell products, reach customers and drive opportunities for new revenue streams. At the same time, the digital era's wholesale dependence on technology means there's little room for the slightest hiccup in operations -- resulting in another mandate on the CIO's agenda.One functional responsibility that CIOs don't expect to spend less time on in the future is security management: 26 percent of the respondents to this year's survey said they expect to devote more time to that task in the next three to five years, up from 21 percent in last year's survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

4 tips for managing multiple teams

Managers juggle a lot -- besides day-to-day business tasks, they're also responsible for ensuring everyone on the team is working to their full potential. And for managers who oversee multiple teams, it gets even more complicated."Managers have a tough job. They must bring out the best in the individuals on their team. They are responsible for coaching each individual to become a better employee, while also driving the success of the team as a whole," says Kim Duggan, CEO of Betterworks, a company that offers employee performance and feedback software.But there are a few ways you can set yourself up for success if you're faced with the difficult position of managing multiple teams. The key is building teams of workers who are so motivated, happy and engaged that they practically manage themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Microsoft’s Nano Server offers mega advantages

Like every previous Windows Server release, Windows Server 2016 is jam-packed with new features and capabilities. While it is difficult to pick one single feature as the most significant, the new Nano Server deployment option is definitely a strong contender.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Review: Microsoft’s Nano Server offers mega advantages

Like every previous Windows Server release, Windows Server 2016 is jam-packed with new features and capabilities. While it is difficult to pick one single feature as the most significant, the new Nano Server deployment option is definitely a strong contender.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Microsoft plugs continuous delivery into Visual Studio, Azure

Microsoft is adding continuous delivery capabilities to its Visual Studio 2017 IDE. The Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension, announced this week, lets developers set up an automated build, test, and release pipeline on the Visual Studio Team Services cloud ALM platform. It works with ASP.Net 4 and ASP.Net Core applications targeting the Azure App Services and Azure Container Services. Developers can monitor their pipeline with notifications in the IDE that alert them of any build failures in a continuous integration run.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source users: It’s time for extreme vetting

Open source software is the norm these days rather than the exception. The code is being written in high volumes and turning up in critical applications. While having this code available can offer big benefits, users also must be wary of issues the code can present and implement proper vetting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Open source users: It’s time for extreme vetting

Open source software is the norm these days rather than the exception. The code is being written in high volumes and turning up in critical applications. While having this code available can offer big benefits, users also must be wary of issues the code can present and implement proper vetting. Josh Bressers, cybersecurity strategist at Red Hat, emphasized this point during a recent talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill.[ Expand your security career horizons with these essential certifications for smart security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ] InfoWorld: Why is Red Hat getting on the soapbox about open source security?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

AMD reveals another edge for Ryzen vs. Intel’s Skylake: It will be smaller

AMD’s upcoming Ryzen CPU will occupy less space and offer twice the amount of cache of Intel’s 6th-generation CPU, according a news report. Oh, and there will indeed be a quad-core model.AMD engineers made the disclosure in a paper this week during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, according to EE Times' Rick Merritt.The engineering paper said a quad-core Ryzen chip built on a 14nm process would be about 10 percent smaller than a comparable 6th-generation Intel Skylake CPU built on a 14nm process, while offering twice the L2 cache of the Intel chip. The paper appears to count only the amount of space used for the x86 cores on an Intel CPU in its comparison. Like other mainstream CPUs, Intel’s Skylake chips also include graphics cores aboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What company execs can learn from Trump’s tweeting

Like him or hate him, there's no debating that President Trump loves to tweet. What is up for debate, though, is whether his tweet storms will complicate what is already stressful work for the Secret Service. Enormous effort goes into protecting the President and his staff from hackers, and any tweets that could be deemed argumentative, hostile, or reactionary could elevate the risk of a targeted cyber attack on the White House. In the same way, executives at major enterprises also need to be cautious in how they choose to represent the company through social media. This type of security, said Larry Johnson, ex Secret Service agent and CSO of CyberSponse, is not just protecting the individual. Whether it's the Secret Service or the security team, "They’re protecting the company, the country, the assets."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What company execs can learn from Trump’s tweeting

Like him or hate him, there's no debating that President Trump loves to tweet. What is up for debate, though, is whether his tweet storms will complicate what is already stressful work for the Secret Service. Enormous effort goes into protecting the President and his staff from hackers, and any tweets that could be deemed argumentative, hostile, or reactionary could elevate the risk of a targeted cyber attack on the White House. In the same way, executives at major enterprises also need to be cautious in how they choose to represent the company through social media. This type of security, said Larry Johnson, ex Secret Service agent and CSO of CyberSponse, is not just protecting the individual. Whether it's the Secret Service or the security team, "They’re protecting the company, the country, the assets."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Our favorite Android apps for tracking and trading stocks

You don’t have to be a day trader to keep a close eye on the stock market. With the Dow crossing the 20,000 threshhold and tech stocks hitting record highs on a seemingly daily basis, watching the market can be as exciting as the Super Bowl, with ebbs, flows, peaks, valleys, and of course, a whole lot of money to be made (or lost!).While Google doesn’t supply a standalone stocks app in Android, it does provide a way to track stocks in Google Now (or, if you prefer, the Google app). To monitor a particular stock, tap the menu button in the top left corner, then select Customize, and finally, Stocks. From there you can search for the symbols you want to follow, and they’ll be added to a new card.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 Emerging Networking Trends

IDG Contributor Network: Datanomics 101: The economics of data in a digital enterprise

The transformation of businesses to digital enterprises was supposed to create an enormous market opportunity for the storage industry.As companies such as Netflix and Rosetta Stone transformed from DVDs and CDs to online data delivery models, their data footprint increased exponentially every year. In fact, digital transformation is increasing the data we store by over 2.5 exabytes every day. That’s equivalent to 530 million songs or 250,000 libraries of congress or 90 years of HD video! Each and every day. 100% growth every year.+ Also on Network World: How the 'digitization of everything' will become a reality + Conventional wisdom held that all this data needed to be stored somewhere, and the market outlook for the storage industry never looked better. Instead, there has been a rapid commoditization, consolidation and implosion of the storage market over the past three years, culminating in Dell’s acquisition of the market leader, EMC, in September of last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Save the date for 3 days of sharing, learning and networking at the 5th Africa Domain Name System- DNS Forum 2017!

How to root out bias in your data

Human beings are inherently biased. So when companies began using computer algorithms to guide their critical business processes, many people believed the days of discriminatory hiring practices, emotion-fuelled performance reviews and partisan product development were coming to an end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New Webinar: Automating Network Services

In the next session of Network Automation Use Cases webinar (on Thursday, February 16th) I’ll describe how you could implement automatic deployment of network services, and what you could do to minimize the impact of unintended consequences.

If you attended one of the previous sessions of this webinar, you’re already registered for this one, if not, visit this page and register.

Connecting people across Africa to do valuable things in their community

Google Cloud Search helps enterprise users find data quickly

Google is wooing enterprise customers with the forthcoming launch of a service that will let employees find information they need from multiple sources.Cloud Search is a new service that will allow users to find content from their company email, cloud storage and directory. Directory lookup provides users not only with their colleagues’ contact details, but also information about shared files and calendar events. More than that, Cloud Search is also built to proactively help users access information they need.When users log into Cloud Search either on the web or on their Android device, they’ll be greeted by “assist cards” that are supposed to highlight key files. At launch, those cards are built to show users files that are relevant for their upcoming calendar events, as well as those that require attention based on recent edits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Linux Migration: Virtualization Provider

As part of my migration to Linux as my primary laptop OS, I needed to revisit my choice of virtualization provider. Long-time readers probably know that I was an early adopter of VMware Fusion, starting way back in 2006 with the very first “friends and family” release (before it was even publicly available). Obviously I can’t use Fusion on Linux, but do I use VMware Workstation for Linux? VirtualBox? Or something else? That’s what I set out to determine, and in this post I’ll share what I selected and the reasoning behind my selection.

So what were the options to consider? While there may be some other solutions, these are the three I primarily assessed:

• VMware Workstation for Linux 12.5.2
• VirtualBox 5.1.14
• “Native” Linux KVM, supplemented by Libvirt and a GUI like GNOME Boxes (installed by default in Fedora 25)

Since I have been using Vagrant quite a bit over the last few years, whatever solution I selected needed to work reasonably well with Vagrant.

I’m pretty familiar with KVM and Libvirt, so I started there. Given that KVM and Libvirt are “native” to Linux, it felt like it would be a clean solution. While Continue reading

Write your own terminal emulator

I was an happy user of rxvt-unicode until I got a laptop with an HiDPI display. Switching from a LoDPI to a HiDPI screen and back was a pain: I had to manually adjust the font size on all terminals or restart them.

VTE is a library to build a terminal emulator using the GTK+ toolkit, which handles DPI changes. It is used by many terminal emulators, like GNOME Terminal, evilvte, sakura, termit and ROXTerm. The library is quite straightforward and writing a terminal doesn’t take much time if you don’t need many features.

Let’s see how to write a simple one.

A simple terminal

Let’s start small with a terminal with the default settings. We’ll write that in C. Another supported option is Vala.

#include <vte/vte.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    GtkWidget *window, *terminal;

    /* Initialise GTK, the window and the terminal */
    gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
    terminal = vte_terminal_new();
    window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
    gtk_window_set_title(GTK_WINDOW(window), "myterm");

    /* Start a new shell */
    gchar **envp = g_get_environ();
    gchar **command = (gchar * Continue reading