Business users can conjure new applications, send messages and share information around the world at the speed of light from their mobile devices. But just because they can, doesn’t mean they should – all this sharing and collaboration can have consequences on businesses’ security. Sending this content without consulting the IT department can bring ruin to the best laid plans of an entire organization. There, in the dark regions of Shadow IT lurk the evils of illegality, non-compliance, data loss, information leaks and content theft. For example, a doctor puts patient data on her tablet so she doesn’t have to carry a pile of charts on her rounds. The tablet is stolen and HIPPA regulators are not happy. A marketing guy puts a product roadmap presentation into a file sharing service that gets hacked and future product details are leaked to the press. A salesperson loses his computer bag at an industry conference and price lists and customer contact information are now in the hands of the competition.

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Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings.

Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future.

Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.

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Regardless of where you begin, it’s important to internalize the analogy that a DevOps transformation is a journey. “Adopting DevOps is not a ‘one-and-done’ project. It is adopting a mindset, a culture,” says Sanjeev, “It is a commitment to a journey of continuous improvement by adopting a set of capabilities and practices that are based on Lean principles.” That journey consists of a number of steps, or smaller transformations that each will serve to improve the flow of value through your develop/test/deploy process, and bring benefits to the business at each successive stage.

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Those watching federal cloud security in the defense space were pleased to learn the Defense DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (v1) (SRG) last month. This 152-page document outlines the security requirements that Department of Defense (DOD) mission owners must adhere to when procuring cloud-based services. While the document is very thorough and is required reading if you currently, or intend to provide, cloud-based services to the DOD, I wanted to cover some of the things that stood out to me.

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Peanut butter and jelly. Love and marriage. Horse and carriage. Coffee and cup. Batman and Robin. Some things just belong together. It’s even a little bit magical the way that certain things can be combined to form a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s certainly true of the classic combo examples above. And it’s also true of the combo of Application Performance Monitoring and Application Analytics.
It’s a shame, then, that many of our customers deny themselves the power of combining APM with Application Analytics.

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I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.

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Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, today announced availability of Cloudian HyperStore 5.1 software. HyperStore 5.1 is an enhanced Amazon S3-compliant, plug-and-play hybrid cloud software solution that now features full Apache Hadoop integration. Enterprises can now transform big data into smart data by running Hadoop analytics on HyperStore software and appliances. This in-place analytics, with no need to offload data to other systems for Hadoop analyses, enables customers to derive meaningful business intelligence from their data quickly, efficiently and economically.

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It’s no secret that telecommuting is a highly disputed topic. For the general employee, the jury is still out on the pros and cons of telecommuting. For organizations like Yahoo!, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and U.S. Postal Service, telecommuting is not an option due to the need to foster collaboration, alleged employee abuse of telework benefits and mounting security concerns, respectively. Among the startup scene and various other organizations, though, telecommuting is seen as a way to provide flexibility and improve work/life balance.

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Companies today struggle to manage the types and volume of data their customers and employees generate and use every day. With billions of requests daily, operational consistency can be elusive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Dave McCrory, CTO at Basho Technologies, will explore how a distributed systems solution, such as NoSQL, can give organizations the consistency and availability necessary to succeed with on-demand data, offering high availability at massive scale.

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This BriefingsDirect discussion explores the role and impact of business networks, the often virtual assemblages of interrelated business services, processes, and data that are transforming how companies and consumers conduct commerce.
New business networks are unlocking the ability for companies to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to customers, suppliers, and other partners. As a result, data-savvy B2B participants in these networks are better able to engage with their communities in new and innovative ways.

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