According to Netcraft, who tracks these kinds of things, SSL usage has doubled from 2008 and 2011. That’s a good thing, as it indicates an upswing in adherence to security best practices that say “SSL Everywhere” just makes good sense.
The downside is overhead, which despite improvements in processing power and support for specific cryptographic processing in hardware still exists. How much overhead is more dependent on the size of data and the specific cryptographic algorithms chosen. SSL is one of those protocols that has different overhead and impacts on performance based on the size of the data. With data less than 32kb, overhead is primarily incurred during session negotiation. After 32kb, bulk encryption becomes the issue.
The problem is that a server is likely going to feel both, because it has to negotiate the session and the average response size for web applications today is well above the 32kb threshold, with most pages serving up 41kb in HTML alone – that’s not counting scripts, images, and other objects.
Gartner: IT to Spend $232B on Big Data over 5 Years
A new report from analyst firm Gartner forecasts that IT organizations will spend $232 billion (US) on hardware, software and services related to Big Data through 2016. Some key findings from the report: $5.5 billion in new software sales will be driven directly by demands for new big data functionality in 2012, and will grow at a rate of over 16% annually through 2016.
The sub-segments receiving the biggest Big Data investments are social network analysis and content analytics, with 45% of new spending each year. In the short term, much more will be spent on IT services than on software, by as much as a 20:1 ratio. Gartner forecasts that this ratio will drop as the market matures., Gartner projects a 20x ratio of IT Services to Software in the short term, dropping as this market matures and more expertise is available “Big Data” will soon be the “new normal”.
Why MaaS (Model as a Service) is the emerging solution for Open Data
Open Data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at the most, to the requirement for attributes and sharealikes (Open Software Service Definition – OSSD).
As a consequence, Open Data should create value and might have a positive impact in many different areas such as government (tax money expenditure), health (medical research, hospital acceptance by pathology), quality of life (air breathed in our city, pollution) or might influence public decisions like investments, public economy and expenditure.
We are talking about services, so open data are services needed to connect the community with the public bodies. However, the required open data should be part of a design and then integrated, mapped, updated and published in a form, which is easy to use.
MaaS is the Open Data driver and enables Open Data portability into the Cloud.
Introduction
Data models used as a service mainly provide …
Syria & Its ICT Potential
We’ve added Syria to the list of countries in our research at the Tau Institute, making it the 100th country included in our listings and rankings. The human tragedy there cannot be overstated, and this may seem a poor time to be discussing how its ICT infrastructure ranks among its peers and within the world.
To be sure, the political situation there is complex, involving a mix of religious and cultural traditions, geopolitical actors ranging from Russia and the US to Saudi Arabia and Iran, and no apparent or easy end to the current murderous madness.
But in my opinion I’m neither naïve nor obtuse in deciding to include Syria in our listings and rankings at this point. The relatively highly developed ICT infrastructures of Egypt and Tunisia, for example, played a role in the spread of the Arab Spring revolutions there. Libya’s relatively undeveloped grid, on the other hand, was a factor in that country’s traditional and confusing government overthrow, and the continuing foggy, chaotic violence there.
Our algorithms integrate a number of publicly available rankings, are adjusted for local cost of living, weighed in a nuanced way to reflect what we believe to be reality, and backed by real-world experience. What do they show for Syria?
The country does not score well, although it shows potential promise within its region. Syria finishes 94th among the 100 countries we survey. Very slow average bandwidth is its major problem, especially given it has an average income that’s higher than many developing countries, a low cost of living, low levels of income disparity. It underperforms its overall development index (as measured by the UN), placing it 75th among the countries we survey.
Its overall Internet access is poor, and access to broadband is very poor. High levels of perceived corruption don’t help.
However, Syria does move up to 45th in our “raw” rankings, which factors technology more highly into overall income and cost of living. Within its income tier – the fourth of five tiers – Syria finishes 19th out of 21 in the overall rankings among countries surveyed. (Jordan leads this tier.) It moves up to 14th among the 21 Tier 4 countries, in a tie with Sri Lanka.
In short, Syria has the economic potential to improve rapidly, in our view. Within the seven Middle East countries we survey, Syria places second in potential only to Jordan. Our hope is that technological development can continue here, even in the face of what appears to be all-out war.
Deutsche Telekom CTO: “We have to simplify the cloud architecture”
There is a clear need for standardisation of network virtualisation and cloud services – that was the verdict of Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, chief technology officer at Deutsche Telekom, who delivered a keynote presentation at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam this morning.
Marxist theory made an appearance at the beginning of his presentation – Jacobfeuerborn averred that it is now easier to start up an enterprise as capital is more widely distributed than at the time of Marx in 19th century Germany.
Enterprise Cloud 2.0 – Social Business Architecture
These modes of work can be augmented and accelerated through additional tools and platforms, such as the Microsoft enterprise software suite: Sharepoint, Unified Communications and FAST Search.
Sharepoint can implement the various Social Business features, like Activity Streams, and the FAST Search engine then provides a powerful toolset for managing the large complexity of information that can arise.
For example even Microsoft themselves experienced the ‘Sharepoint Sprawl’ effect, where a lack of standards for Sharepoint sites and taxonomy structures within them resulted in a widespread collection of random web sites and unorganized content postings. In other words their organizational Big Data.
Fact Finders: Sorting Out the Truth in Real User Monitoring
On my recent visits to Velocity, WebPerfDay and Apps World in London, Real User Monitoring (RUM) was the hot topic. That triggered my thinking about the differences between vendors. They all promise the same for a varying range of prices – from free to a couple thousand US dollars. What I found out is that there IS a big difference and – depending on what you want to do with RUM – you want to make sure you understand the capabilities and limitations of the available solutions.
What all vendors claim to do is capture data from 100% of your users. When looking closer you see that many of these solutions – especially the “Freemiums” – rely on theW3C Navigation Timings. So my question is: How can I cover ALL Users with W3C timings when these timings are NOT AVAILABLE on all browsers?
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Keynote Speaker Profile: Dr John Bates – Progress Software
With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in a little over two weeks’ time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA – co-located with 2nd International BigDataExpo – let’s introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference…
OpenStack Foundation Exec Director to Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the newly-formed OpenStack Foundation, and who has spent his entire career building the cloud, is to give the opening keynote at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, November 5-8, 2012.
The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members from 87 countries and 850 different organizations, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.
Day 2 Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley | An Open Cloud Discussion
There is a vast new movement developing at a breathtaking pace that is changing the way the world utilizes cloud computing. Specifically, open source cloud computing. Rackspace is helping lead the global discussion about the benefits of building a business on an open cloud.
In his Day 2 Keynote at the 11th International Cloud Expo, John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, will provide insight on the difference between an open cloud and a closed, proprietary cloud. He will also explain the hidden dangers of vendor lock in and where the open cloud is headed into the future.