Empower your employees by embracing shadow IT

Shadow IT is often viewed as something that opens up businesses to data and security threats, leaving IT without control over business apps and services. But that attitude is changing as more businesses adopt a friendly attitude towards unconventional IT practices."Some CIOs certainly see 'shadow' IT as a negative, hence the less flattering terms 'feral' or 'rogue' IT, but more progressive CIOs know that, given today's technology and the increasing savvy of the business, it's in their best interest to embrace shadow IT," says Tracy Cashman, senior vice president and partner of WinterWyman Executive Search.Cashman says it's time for IT to embrace the fact that they can't control everything and instead, help drive innovation around IT practices so that they align with the modern reality of technology. It's about empowering users because otherwise, they'll go around IT and download the software they want to use anyway.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Making a career in DevOps

Variety is the spice of life, and it's also what makes a DevOps career endlessly fascinating and intriguing. But while DevOps requires an intimate knowledge of a myriad of technologies -- software, infrastructure, middleware, as well as business processes and operational best practices -- the most important skills to have for a successful DevOps career aren't technical at all: They're interpersonal, says Eric Sigler, head of DevOps at incident resolution software platform company PagerDuty."Critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaboration are the foundation for what makes DevOps work. Empathy in particular is a must-have for those building a career around DevOps. True DevOps engineers have a high degree of compassion and will use it to enable those around them. By being open to alternative points of view, you can pick and choose the best practices and skill sets available to solve the problem at hand," Sigler says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Autonomous cars? How about airliners?

Imagine if US Airways Flight 1549 out of New York – operating without a pilot -- had hit the same flock of birds, landed itself on the Hudson River, and saved the lives of 153 passengers and flight attendants.Well, there would be no movie called “Sully” playing in theaters right now.Pilotless airliners? Far-fetched, you say. Not so, according to Tim Robinson, editor-in-chief of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s magazine Aerospace, who tells the BBC:   “So with pilots relying on autopilots for 95% of today's flights, the argument goes, why not make the final 5% – take-off and landing – automated?” says Robinson. “Computers fly ultra-precise, repeatable trajectories, do not fly drunk, do not get tired, do not get distracted and so the thinking goes could be safer than human pilots in the future.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi speeds will triple, get more range with MegaMimo 2.0

Coordinating multiple access points simultaneously, all on the same frequency and without generating interference, is the premise behind a new form of Wi-Fi called MegaMimo 2.0. When released commercially, as its inventors say it soon will be, it will allow data to be shot through at three times the speed that it travels now and twice as far, the researchers claim.The Wi-Fi technology, supposedly immune to bottleneck-causing interference, works by letting a number of distinct transmitters send same- and similar-frequency data “to multiple independent receivers without interfering with each other,” the computer scientists, led by Professor Dian Katabi from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), say in their news release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco/Apple bolster WiFi, business apps and voice collaboration with iOS 10 release

The Cisco and Apple partnership has yielded a ton of new business features that include improved Wi-Fi connectivity, business app prioritization capabilities and the tighter integration of voice for collaboration – all via the today’s release of iOS 10 for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.Today’s announcement is a reflection of how important and integral mobile smartphones have become to businesses. For example Cisco earlier this year stated that smartphone traffic would exceed PC traffic by 2020. In 2015, PCs accounted for 53% of total IP traffic, but by 2020 PCs will account for only 29% of traffic. Smartphones will account for 30% of total IP traffic in 2020, up from 8% in 2015, Cisco wrote in its 11th annual Visual Networking Index in June.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco/Apple bolster WiFi, business apps and voice collaboration with iOS 10 release

The Cisco and Apple partnership has yielded a ton of new business features that include improved Wi-Fi connectivity, business app prioritization capabilities and the tighter integration of voice for collaboration – all via the today’s release of iOS 10 for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.Today’s announcement is a reflection of how important and integral mobile smartphones have become to businesses. For example Cisco earlier this year stated that smartphone traffic would exceed PC traffic by 2020. In 2015, PCs accounted for 53% of total IP traffic, but by 2020 PCs will account for only 29% of traffic. Smartphones will account for 30% of total IP traffic in 2020, up from 8% in 2015, Cisco wrote in its 11th annual Visual Networking Index in June.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Matures – via the Federal Government…

Based on industry research and market assessments such as the most recent from Allied Market Research, we know software-defined networking is growing crazy fast and has a huge upside. The question is…is it maturing to the point the Federal Government will make it a priority?

I think the answer is YES, based on what Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency has said publicly. And, it appears cyber-security is one of the biggest areas he sees SDN helping out. He explains how SDN can provide the ability to create networks on-demand and make them harder to attack.

In order to help Lt. General Lynn, we needed to get past an issue I like to call, “Barrier of Implementation”. The barrier is an approved DISA STIG for SDN. In order for federal agencies to implement a SDN solution it has to go through some sort of security accreditation. Most of all security accreditation rely on DISA STIGs for the checks and balances.

With our announcement yesterday, “VMware Receives STIG-Approval for VMware NSX to Operate on U.S. Department of Defense Networks from Defense Information Systems Agency,” VMware NSX network virtualization became the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: GitLab fills need for enterprise developer tools, picks up funding round

Recently I chatted with Dawie Olivier, the CIO of Westpac Bank. Olivier has a long history within the financial services industry, and we talked about helping these kinds of organizations become agile and innovative.This is no small challenge (I’ll share more about my interview with Olivier in a future post). Financial services organizations work within a highly regulated industry and are doubly confounded by often being built on top of big, heavy, monolithic, legacy IT systems. Hardly a recipe for agility.+ Also on Network World: Promise and peril in the journey to DevOps +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Dyn is rising to the cloud challenge

Trying to capture an end-to-end picture of application performance across a single enterprise is challenging enough. Providing that level of visibility for hybrid- and public-cloud-enabled applications presents a whole new level of difficulty. Enter Dyn, which is an early leader in the emerging internet performance management (IPM) market. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Canada recalls Galaxy Note7, says over 70 cases reported in the US

Canada has recalled over 21,900 Galaxy Note7 smartphones after receiving a report of the overheating of the battery of one phone.The Samsung Note7 smartphone battery has the potential to overheat and burn, posing a potential fire hazard, Health Canada, a Canadian federal government department said Monday.The problem with the lithium-ion batteries may, however, turn out to be more serious in the U.S. where already reports of over 70 cases have been received by Samsung, according to the Canadian agency. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is charged with protecting the public from the risk of injury or death linked with certain consumer products, said Friday it was working on an official recall with Samsung but there has been no formal announcement yet of the move.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs

No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day.

We spend a lot of time thinking about such things, and as Nvidia was getting ready to launch its new Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerator cards, we asked Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia just how much computing could be devoted …

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

iPhone 8 rumor rollup: Making the case for zirconia ceramics

The hardest news out of Apple during its iPhone 7/7Plus and Apple Watch 2 extravaganza last week is that the company will release a version of its Apple Watch made from ceramic, which as Apple says, is "one of the hardest materials in the world." Speculation this week is that Apple might use some of that zirconia ceramic to build its iPhone 8, too. Why deal with messy Bendgate issues involving its aluminum-body iPhones when it can build its smartphones from stronger material?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia’s new Pascal GPUs can give smart answers

Autonomous cars need a new kind of horsepower to identify objects, avoid obstacles and change lanes. There's a good chance that will come from graphics processors in data centers or even the trunks of cars.With this scenario in mind, Nvidia has built two new GPUs -- the Tesla P4 and P40 -- based on the Pascal architecture and designed for servers or computers that will help drive autonomous cars. In recent years, Tesla GPUs have been targeted at supercomputing, but they are now being tweaked for deep-learning systems that aid in correlation and classification of data."Deep learning" typically refers to a class of algorithmic techniques based on highly connected neural networks -- systems of nodes with weighted interconnections among them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stop using mobiles for conference calls

Stop using legacy mobile audio, especially for conference calls. There are better alternatives. You’re doing your customers and colleagues a disservice by using mobile audio. It’s time we moved on. PSTN is not much better either – switch to VoIP, and give your ears a break from crappy audio connections.

Refresher: Audio Quality Standards

There are many different methods of encoding speech for transmission across networks. There are trade-offs with each, balancing bandwidth, voice quality, and endpoint requirements. The interesting point is that there is not a direct relationship between bandwidth and quality. Half the bandwidth does not have to mean half the quality.

The Mean opinion score test provides a way of ‘scoring’ the quality of a call. 1 is Bad, 5 is Excellent. G.711 encoding has a score of 4.1, which is very good quality, but uses 64kbps per call. GSM has a score of 3.5, which is the minimum acceptable level…but it only uses 12.2kbps. Pretty good tradeoff if you’re in a bandwidth-constrained environment.

But we’re no longer constrained by bandwidth. We don’t need to squeeze that audio call down to only a few kbps. We can use other options such as FaceTime, Continue reading

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