Microsoft and VMware cozy up, forgoing past rivalry

Microsoft's new, more collaborative approach to the computing industry was on display at VMware's annual conference in San Francisco Tuesday, when executives from both companies shared the stage to talk about new device management features in Windows 10.As VMware Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen explained, VMware and Microsoft, historically fierce rivals, have been working together more closely under the leadership of Satya Nadella. That work has now borne fruit in the form of Project A2, a new service that brings together VMware's AirWatch device management service and its App Volumes application delivery technology. Using Project A2, Windows 10 users can log in to their corporate account, get their device set up for use with a company's resources and then get all the applications they need provided straight from IT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMworld 2015 Day 2 Keynote Liveblog

The day 2 keynote kicks off with another Cloud Academy presentation… After the video wraps up, Sanjay Poonen takes the stage. Poonen briefly recaps yesterday’s messaging, and then moves into the focus of today’s keynote—focusing on the “any application and any device” part of the “Ready for Any” messaging.

According to Poonen, the core of the solution for “any application on any device” is VMware’s Workspace Suite. Workspace Suite creates the magic of “enterprise computing with consumer simplicity.” How? It starts by building upon the core of virtualized infrastructure, made possibe by VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization solutions. Combined with a strong management layer and hybrid cloud solutions, this becomes the software-defined data center (SDDC). Somehow, though, this stuff needs to be connected to the end users—via desktop, mobile, content collaboration, and tying it all together with identity management. Poonen points to innovation in all of these areas.

Obviously, mobile is a category that is growing very rapidly, and Poonen talks about VMware’s movement in this space via the AirWatch acquisition. And the use of mobile devices is also key to VMware’s identity efforts as well. Poonen shows a video with a few customer testimonials, and then introduces Continue reading

Shadow BYOD runs rampant in federal government

Government CIOs have been struggling mightily with developing prudent policies to enable employees to use their personal mobile devices for work without putting sensitive information at risk or otherwise compromising the security of agency systems.[ All About BYOD: Strategies, Resources, News and More ]As it turns out, many federal employees haven't been waiting for those policies to take effect before introducing their devices into the workplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 disaster recovery do’s and don’ts from Hurricane Katrina survivors

Ten years ago, the Gulf Coast was completely devastated by Hurricane Katrina, leaving thousands of businesses in New Orleans and the surrounding area under water and without power for weeks.But while most disasters — natural or otherwise — can’t compare with the magnitude of Katrina, there were some hard lessons learned that could help organizations be better prepared for the next catastrophe.IT leaders in New Orleans and nearby cities share how they maintained or resumed business operations in the wake of Katrina and what the experience taught them. Here are their disaster recovery do’s and don’ts — sage words of wisdom from the trenches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Simple Helix chooses CloudFlare to ignite white-hot Magento performance

Today’s guest blogger is George Cagle. George is a system administrator at Simple Helix, a CloudFlare partner.

Some months ago, we made a big bet on partnering with CloudFlare for performance improvements and website security for our Magento hosting customers. Customer experience is core to our business and relying on another company is a major deal. CloudFlare is now included in Default–On mode for select Simple Helix hosting plans and can be added to any existing plan. The results have been great and we wanted to share a couple successes with the rest of the CloudFlare community.

Testing the waters

The first thing one notices after melding their site with the worldwide CloudFlare CDN network is just how fast a website becomes. In Simple Helix’s testing, we found that proper CloudFlare implementation can yield 100% speed increases, and an even faster 143% speed increase when paired with the Railgun™ web optimizer for dynamic content.

Adding CloudFlare will certainly improve performance, but it can also significantly improve security through the Web Application Firewall feature. The security benefits of having the CloudFlare service can be seen after just the first few days of adoption as outlined below:

 Total number of threats mitigated Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Microsoft , Librato, Surge, Redis Labs, Jut.io, VoltDB, Datadog, MongoDB, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, Couchbase, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online team is building the next generation of software development tools in the cloud out in Durham, North Carolina. Come help us build innovative workflows around Git and continuous deployment, help solve the Git scale problem or help us build a best-in-class web experience. Learn more and apply.

  • VoltDB's in-memory SQL database combines streaming analytics with transaction processing in a single, horizontal scale-out platform. Customers use VoltDB to build applications that process streaming data the instant it arrives to make immediate, per-event, context-aware decisions. If you want to join our ground-breaking engineering team and make a real impact, apply here.  

  • At Scalyr, we're analyzing multi-gigabyte server logs in a fraction of a second. That requires serious innovation in every part of the technology stack, from frontend to backend. Help us push the envelope on low-latency browser applications, high-speed data processing, and reliable distributed systems. Help extract meaningful data from live servers and present it to users in meaningful ways. At Scalyr, you’ll learn new things, and invent a few of your own. Learn more and apply.

  • UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, Continue reading

Popular Belkin Wi-Fi routers plagued by unpatched security flaws

If your Wi-Fi network is using the popular Belkin N600 DB router, be warned: it may have several vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take it over.Remote unauthenticated attackers could exploit the vulnerabilities to spoof DNS (Domain Name System) responses and direct users to rogue websites or trick users' browsers to change the device configuration, the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University said Monday in an advisory.Furthermore, attackers with access to the local area network could bypass an affected router's authentication and take complete control over it, CERT/CC said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercrooks quickly bypass Adobe Flash Player’s improved security protections

As of today, Google's Chrome browser will automatically pause ads that use Flash by default. Most Flash ads were converted to HTML5 and those HTML5 ads will still work. Flash can quickly suck the power from a laptop battery, but even worse is the never-ending supply of Flash vulnerabilities.Supposedly, the version of Flash Player released in July had "additional protections to make entire classes of security flaws much harder to exploit in the future." The future is now then, because cybercriminals have wasted no time circumventing those extra security protections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson’s next-gen LTE targets faster mobile networks and IoT

Ericsson is working on LTE with faster upload speeds, as well as using unlicensed spectrum to speed up downloads and customizing the technology for Internet of Things applications.The Swedish telecom equipment vendor is showing off some of the developments at the CTIA Super Mobility conference next week in Las Vegas.5G will likely be one of the hottest topics at CTIA, but LTE still has lots mileage left -- after all, the first two letters stand for Long Term. And it’s a lot easier to upgrade an existing network than roll out a new one.One of the more contentious upgrades is using unlicensed spectrum for LTE. Detractors fear it will affect Wi-Fi performance, which uses the same frequencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Employees are Human Beings

Employees are human beings. They devote their lives to creating value for customers, shareholders, and colleagues. And, in return, at least in theory, they share in the rewards of the value created by their team. via linkedin


This is one of those places where I agree with the point the author is making, but I don’t really agree with the path they chose to get there… The bottom line problem is this—government, companies, and even individuals (yes, that means you and I) tend to slip into a mode of treating people as objects which either cost something, or produce something. From many perspectives, it’s easy to treat people as units of information, work, cost, etc.—but when you cross the line from using this as a useful abstraction to actually seeing people as an abstraction, then you’ve cross a line you shouldn’t be crossing.

The post Worth Reading: Employees are Human Beings appeared first on 'net work.

Intel says GPU malware is no reason to panic, yet

Malware that runs inside GPUs (graphics processing units) can be harder to detect, but is not completely invisible to security products.Researchers from Intel division McAfee Labs teamed up with members of Intel's Visual and Parallel Computing Group to analyze a proof-of-concept GPU malware program dubbed JellyFish that was released in March.Their conclusion, which was included in McAfee's latest quarterly threat report, is that running malicious code inside GPUs still has significant drawbacks and is not nearly as stealthy as its developers suggested.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Blame Pipeline

wc_pipeline sketch

Talk to any modern IT person about shifting the landscape of how teams work and I can guarantee you that you’ll hear a bit about DevOps as well as “siloed” organizational structures. Fingers get pointed in all directions as to the real culprit behind dysfunctional architecture. Perhaps changing the silo term to something more appropriate will help organizations sort out where the real issues lie.

You Dropped A Bomb On Me

Silos, or stovepipes, are an artifact of reporting structures of days gone by. Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) has a great piece on the evils of ITIL. In it, he talks about how the silo structure creates blame passing issues and lack of responsibility for problem determination and solving.

I think Greg is spot on here. But I also think that the love of blame extends in the other direction too. It is one thing to have the storage team telling everyone that the arrays are working so it’s not their problem. It’s another issue entirely when the CxO-level folks come down from the High Holy Boardroom to hunt for heads when something goes wrong. They aren’t looking to root out the cause of the issue. They want someone Continue reading

1 … 3,261 3,262 3,263 3,264 3,265 … 3,765