The Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency recently released their strategic plan for the next 5 years.  DISA is a Combat Support Agency that “provides, operates, and assures command and control, information sharing capabilities, and a globally accessible enterprise information infrastructure in direct support to joint Warfighters, National level leaders, and other mission and coalition partners across the full spectrum […]

This post by AlexOlesker was first published at CTOvision.com.

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In a highly anticipated event in Los Angeles Thursday that pushed its stock to a record high while it was happening, Amazon unveiled three next-generation Kindle Fire tablets and priced the mid-range 8.9-inch model with a 1,920 x 1,200 HD screen at $299, undercutting the 9.75-inch Apple iPad by $200.
A seven-inch 1,280 x 800 Kindle Fire HD will run $199, a buck less than Google’s seven-inch Nexus 7 and probably less than the iPad mini Apple is believed to be getting ready to put on the market.
The first will be available on November 20. The smaller one goes out the door on September 14. Both come standard with 16GB of memory.

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While all eyes were on Tampa, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C. these last two weeks for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, we had our eyes, and monitors, on Twitter to see if and how these events impacted Twitter’s website performance. As is the case with most big news events today, people took to Twitter in a big way for real-time …

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Yesterday, I listed the countries which performed best overall in our latest research at the Tau Institute.

Our mission at the Tau Institute is to produce a sophisticated ranking that takes into account relative progress of the nations of the world when it comes to ICT. We integrate several publicly available factors into our own algorithm. There is thus transparency in the data we input combined with a specialized weighting system that we believe reveals new insight into the statistics.

We’ve integrated the following factors into a single, weighted formula:

* Per capita income (from the World Bank)
* Local cost of living (ditto)
* Gini coefficient (income disparity as measured by the United Nations and CIA)
* Perception of corruption (from Transparency International)
* Human development (according to the United Nations)
* Data servers per capita (adjusted for local income, as measured by the World Bank)
* Average bandwidth speed (from Ookla, Inc.)
* % of population with access to the Internet (from the International Telecommunications Union)
* % population with broadband connections (ditto)

In the end, we’ve created a “pound-for-pound” analysis that reveals the countries that are doing the most with what they have. Our method goes far beyond the normal rankings one sees that simply show wealthy countries on top, developing nations on the bottom.

We can view the datas in several ways. The “raw” ranking hits a middle ground of opportunity and development. Countries that have lagged regardless of income level (such as Norway and Libya) do not fare as well in this index as countries that have shown good relative ICT commitments (such as Jordan), even if they’re still impoverished (such as Ethiopia).

As a reality check and benchmark, we’ve created a “Perfect Land” which has optimal statistics in all categories. The idea is that no country should beat Perfect Land in the overall index, although many countries will beat it in the raw index, which is weighted toward potential.

Here are the leaders in the raw ranking:

Tier 1 (>$30K in per capita income)
Hong Kong
Belgium
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Germany
Sweden
New Zealand
Spain
Finland
Israel

Tier 2 ($13K-$29K)
Lithuania
Hungary
South Korea
Estonia
Taiwan
Poland
Slovakia
Croatia
Czech Republic
Russia

Tier 3 ($6K-$13K)
Bulgaria
Romania
Serbia
Montenegro
Latvia
Kazakhstan
Libya
Malaysia
Turkey
Colombia

Tier 4 ($2K-$6K)
Ukraine
Morocco
Mongolia
Egypt
China
Philippines
Tunisia
Armenia
Jordan
Bolivia

Tier 5 (<$2K) Vietnam Kenya Tanzania Ethiopia Nigeria Senegal Ghana Pakistan India Laos Each of these countries has a story to tell, as do all countries covered in our research. We are currently engaging with local resources in some of the places that emerge as leaders. We are also very interested in making new connections within any country – the Tau Index serves merely to start conversations about ICT and its role in increasing economic development and improving the lives of people. Follow me on Twitter

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Cloud computing is disrupting the world of IT as we know it. Unlike previous platform shifts, this one enables users to bypass central IT. Whether you call it “Rogue IT” or “Getting My Job Done,” end users taking IT into their own hands is happening today. The democratization of IT has profound implications for IT organizations and forces them to become service providers.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at enStratus, will talk about how IT should think of its future role, what being a service provider means, and practical steps IT should take to transition to a service provider operation.

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Amazon Glacier, a secure, reliable and low cost storage service designed for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, you can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per monthThe latest release of CloudBerry Backup  comes with full support for Amazon Glacier.
Using the product you can move your files to Glacier vaults taking advantage of
the extremely low cost storage .