Major IT outsourcing acquisition will have mixed impact

The announcement that outsourcing consultancy Information Services Group (ISG) will acquire competitor Alsbridge marked the biggest M&A announcement in the IT services advisory industry since KPMG bought EquaTerra in 2011. The two large independent outsourcing advisors are joining forces to create a 1,300-person firm with offices in 20 countries revenues targeted at between $285 and $300 million in 2017.[ Related: Cloud services now account for a third of IT outsourcing market ]The combined firm, with its expanded services, data and market intelligence, could put pressure on the big consultancies who offer IT outsourcing advisory services. “ISG's principle competitors — KPMG. Deloitte, EY and PwC — now have a bigger, badder ISG to contend with that can not only undercut them on fees but also can boast competencies in the emerging area of RPA, where the Big Four are currently winning out,” HfS Research CEO Phil Fersht recently wrote in a blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Capital One rides the cloud to tech company transformation

LAS VEGAS -- Capital One Financial Corp. is taking big steps in its transformation into a tech company.The Fortune 500 company, one of the top 10 largest banks in the U.S. with $313 billion in total assets, wants to be a tech company that also is a top financial services provider.It's a change in strategy and focus, said Rob Alexander, CIO of Capital One, based in McLean, Virginia. Among its plans as it transitions to a "tech" company are an open, collaborative workspace, IT workers with new skill sets, fast-paced apps and a service evolution, and a focus on leading with cutting-edge technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Should you go with Google’s Go?

2016 was full of surprises, but in the world of programming, among the biggest was the breakthrough of Go. Once a tiny niche tool, Go has officially joined the ranks of real programming languages, evidenced by its meteoric rise up the Tiobe index, a complex amalgam of search rankings and programmer preferences. Still a ways behind stalwarts like Java, C, and Python, Go hit 16th in October 2016, up 49 spots from a year prior. That’s a big change that’s caught the eye of programmers and project managers alike.Go’s jump is likely due in large part to Docker, a package management system for deploying code that is taking over stacks everywhere. The fact that one of the hottest dev technologies in years is written in Go in a positive sign for the language’s viability. A better one may be the fact that Docker is quite solid and very successful. That’s bound to win over converts by showing that the language can support real infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Customer insights: Digital is changing who you compete against

If you want to get serious about transforming your business digitally, start with recognizing all of your competitorsIt is time to acknowledge that our customers’ digital experience expectations are being increasingly influenced by both their everyday B2C experiences, as well as by disruptive experiences that are jumping industry boundaries.Brands and businesses are now judged not only on how well they perform in their industry, but also on how well they perform based on overarching categories such as relevancy, social awareness, ease of use and engagement. Gone are the days of solely using the Net Promoter Score to measure customer experiences of your brand. It’s just not good enough.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware as a Service fuels explosive growth

Believe it – you too can become a successful cyber criminal! It’s easy! It’s cheap! It’s short hours for big bucks! No need to spend years on boring things like learning how to write code or develop software.Just download our simple ransomware toolkit and we can have you up and running in hours – stealing hundreds or thousands of dollars from people in other countries, all from the comfort of your home office – or your parents’ basement. Sit back and watch the Bitcoin roll in!OK, that’s not the literal pitch coming from the developers of ransomware. But, given the rise of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) – a business model in which malware authors enlist “distributors” to spread the infections and then take a cut of the profits – it sounds like it could be a candidate for the kind of “direct-response” TV ads that made the late pitchman Billy Mays famous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware as a Service fuels explosive growth

Believe it – you too can become a successful cyber criminal! It’s easy! It’s cheap! It’s short hours for big bucks! No need to spend years on boring things like learning how to write code or develop software.Just download our simple ransomware toolkit and we can have you up and running in hours – stealing hundreds or thousands of dollars from people in other countries, all from the comfort of your home office – or your parents’ basement. Sit back and watch the Bitcoin roll in!OK, that’s not the literal pitch coming from the developers of ransomware. But, given the rise of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) – a business model in which malware authors enlist “distributors” to spread the infections and then take a cut of the profits – it sounds like it could be a candidate for the kind of “direct-response” TV ads that made the late pitchman Billy Mays famous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building Intelligence into Machine Learning Hardware

Machine learning is a rising star in the compute constellation, and for good reason. It has the ability to not only make life more convenient – think email spam filtering, shopping recommendations, and the like – but also to save lives by powering the intelligence behind autonomous vehicles, heart attack prediction, etc. While the applications of machine learning are bounded only by imagination, the execution of those applications is bounded by the available compute resources. Machine learning is compute-intensive and it turns out that traditional compute hardware is not well-suited for the task.

Many machine learning shops have approached the …

Building Intelligence into Machine Learning Hardware was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

6 tips for negotiating a better executive IT offer

Congratulations -- you've got an offer for an executive level role! Whether it's your first foray into upper management or you've been a C-suite stalwart for years, negotiating a compensation package can be nerve-wracking. And while the mechanics of the negotiation might be similar whether you're an entry-level worker or a C-level executive, there are specific components of executive compensation that could throw you for a loop if you're not careful, says Howard Seidel, partner, Essex Partners."In a lot of cases, executives can have a lot more leverage when negotiating an offer, and they also can have a lot more options to consider when putting together the terms of their compensation package. What I always tell my clients is that they have to have a strategy in place to decide what their priorities are when entering into negotiations," says Seidel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 disruptive technologies to track in 2017

Digital transformation is sparking change on many fronts, which means IT professionals have a lot to tackle as they head into 2017. As part of this march toward IT-driven reinvention, tech leaders are keeping watch on several emerging technologies that they believe will be catalysts for long-term innovation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Security pros most worried about clouds, mobile

Companies were least prepared to assess the security risks of cloud and mobile technologies, according to a survey of cybersecurity professionals released this morning.Around 60 percent of companies were able to assess security risks in cloud environments, down 7 points compared to last year. Mobile devices scored at 57 percent, down by 8 percentage points compared to last year.Overall, the confidence levels of security professionals that their cyber defenses were meeting expectations dropped from 76 percent last year to 70 percent in this year's survey, according to the report, which was produced by Annapolis, M.D.-based CyberEdge Group, and sponsored by Tenable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security pros most worried about clouds, mobile

Companies were least prepared to assess the security risks of cloud and mobile technologies, according to a survey of cybersecurity professionals released this morning.Around 60 percent of companies were able to assess security risks in cloud environments, down 7 points compared to last year. Mobile devices scored at 57 percent, down by 8 percentage points compared to last year.Overall, the confidence levels of security professionals that their cyber defenses were meeting expectations dropped from 76 percent last year to 70 percent in this year's survey, according to the report, which was produced by Annapolis, M.D.-based CyberEdge Group, and sponsored by Tenable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Next big Amazon post Black Friday tech deal bonanza comes Dec. 12

Amazon began counting down to Black Friday 2016 with tons of tech deals in early November, and now that Black Friday (Nov. 25) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) have passed, the online retailer is still counting down. Now it's on to the Amazon 12 Days of Deals, playing off the 12 days of Christmas theme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon Takes $80 off Fire Tablet and Tap When Bought Together, Today Only – Deal Alert

Today only, if you bundle together Amazon's Fire Tablet and Tap, you'll save $80 on the two. The bundle includes the Fire Tablet with 7" Display, Wi-Fi, and 16 GB of storage, and Amazon Tap, the Alexa-Enabled Portable Bluetooth Speaker. With the Fire tablet from Amazon you can enjoy millions of movies, TV shows, songs, Kindle e-books, apps and games. It features a rich 7" IPS display and 1.3 GHz quad-core processor. Available in four colors. Amazon's portable Tap device uses the Alexa Voice Service when connected to Wi-Fi or a mobile hotspot to play music, read the news, provide weather reports, automate your home, and even order a pizza. Provides up to 9 hours of playback and comes with a charging cradle. Bought separately right now you'd pay $199.98, but buy them together today and pay just $119.98 for both. See the discounted bundle on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can any cloud company keep up with Amazon?

I spent last week in Las Vegas, along with 32,000 of my closest friends—or at least, with 32,000 other cloud computing devotees attending Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference. Packed to the gills, the event had the excited hum of a fast-growing industry confident it was riding the wave of technical disruption toward market dominance.But amidst all the mechanical bulls, massive EDM dance parties, TV show premieres—not to mention all of the geeky, deep-dive technical sessions that form the backbone of the show—Amazon’s two main keynote sessions made it clear that the company doesn’t merely plan to ride that wave; it figures to own it outright. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista brings network flexibility to the network switch

The terms digital, speed and agility all go hand in hand. In the digital era, companies need to make decisions and implement them quickly. This has put new pressures on the IT department to responder faster than ever before. To accomplish that, IT needs to be agile, which is why there has been such heavy investment in things such as containers, the cloud, virtualization and other technologies that make the infrastructure more dynamic. The drive to be more agile has been the primary force behind the shift to software-defined networks (SDN). SDNs increase dynamism through programmability, orchestration and network virtualization at a network level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista brings network flexibility to the network switch

The terms digital, speed and agility all go hand in hand. In the digital era, companies need to make decisions and implement them quickly. This has put new pressures on the IT department to responder faster than ever before. To accomplish that, IT needs to be agile, which is why there has been such heavy investment in things such as containers, the cloud, virtualization and other technologies that make the infrastructure more dynamic. The drive to be more agile has been the primary force behind the shift to software-defined networks (SDN). SDNs increase dynamism through programmability, orchestration and network virtualization at a network level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

TLD glue sticks around too long

Recent headline grabbing DDoS attacks provoked heated debates in the DNS community. Everyone has strong opinions on how to harden DNS to avoid downtime in the future. Is it better to use a single DNS provider or multiple? What DNS TTL values are best? Does DNSSEC make you more or less exposed?

CC BY 2.0 image by Leticia Chamorro

These are valid questions worth serious discussion, but tuning your own DNS server settings is not the full story. Together, as a community, we need to harden the DNS protocol itself. We need to prepare it to withstand the toughest DDoS attacks the future will surely bring. In this blog post I'll point out an obscure feature in the core DNS protocol. It is not practical to use this "hidden" feature for DDoS mitigation now, but with a small tweak it could become extremely useful. The feature is currently unused not due to protocol problems - it's unused because of the DNS Top Level Domain (TLD) operators' apathy. If it was working it would reduce DDoS recovery time for the DNS servers under attack.

The feature in question is: DNS TLD glue records. More specifically DNS TLD glue records with Continue reading

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