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A Blog to discuss the underlying technologies used for the CIOZone as well as commentary on our experiences in using them.

May 21
2013

Webinar: Hadoop for Enterprises: Unleashing Opportunities

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia

For decades, companies have based business decisions on transactional data stored in relational databases. But beyond that critical data, every enterprise also has a treasure trove of “Big Data”: non-traditional, less structured data, including weblogs, social media, email, sensor data, and photographs.

When Big Data is mined and integrated with traditional data, companies can achieve a deeper understanding of their operations, resulting in enhanced productivity, stronger competitive positioning, and greater innovation.

This timely webinar will explore the potential bottom line impact of  Big Data. It will also examine current business constraints against Big Data, and will provide useful approaches to overcoming these challenges.

 



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May 07
2013

Three Ways to Reduce Costs by Outsourcing Data Center Infrastructure

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia

When organizations look to reduce costs by following an outsourcing strategy, it’s easy to think about reducing capital expenditures by avoiding purchases of hardware, software licenses and networking bandwidth. But IT executives and their finance colleagues often believe it’s even more important to use outsourcing to reduce operating expenses, because those costs usually recur and often increase over time even without increases in business activity. 

 

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Apr 29
2013

Most Popular Big Data (Bases) and Tools

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia
The following is a description of current and emerging Big Data database technologies. The discussion is based on the objectives of these technologies as well as the type of data involved.

First Some Noteworthy Data Facts

An interesting implementation fact  in most successful Big Data systems show that  that the value of an individual piece of data decreases with time and the value of a collection of data rises with time. Additionally, the value of aggregated data should continue to increase over time, and closing the gap in the time taken to extract, transform, and load a data item will increase the value of the data more rapidly as the system tries to approach the theoretical concept of real-time decision making. Like many well engineered systems, the closer we get to zero defects and real-time processing, the more expensive the implementation becomes for the system owner.

So how do we most effectively achieve our Big Data decision making objectives given the tools available today? By selecting the proper database management tool that most closely matches our analytical decision making requirements.

In the world of database management systems used today for processing Big Data we have the following solutions:

1. RDMS/SQL  - These are the traditional relational Database management systems that use the traditional relational tables and indexes that we're used to. Some examples are Microsoft SQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc.

 

Benefits:

A well understood and consistent model meaning an application than runs on MySQL can be altered to run on Oracle without changing its basic assumptions.

Maintain relational integrity. ACID guarantees, ie  ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) is a set of properties that guarantee that database transactions are processed reliably.

Comprehensive OLTP/transaction support. Strong OLAP/analysis tools, often built in (MS Analysis Services, Oracle OLAP)

Problems:

Most solutions are expensive.

Scales up (i.e. bigger servers), but struggles to scale out (i.e. lots of servers). Also expensive. Not 'natural' for developers, which results in translation overhead and common mistakes like N+1 errors.

 

2. NoSQL - In-memory non-relational databases

These don't support the SQL language (hence the name) but more significantly don't support ACID or relationships between tables. Instead they're designed to query document data very quickly.

Examples: Hadoop, MongoDB, CouchDB, Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4J, MemBase, HBase, etc

Benefits:

Cheap, mostly open source implementations. Systems can scale out very easily, tables can be readily sharded/federated across servers.

Most store native programmer objects, so no translation to tables.

Very, very fast at finding records from massive datasets.

 

Problems:

No common model and there is quite a bit of differences between the many solutions.

No ACID guarantees, instead high fault tolerance must be built into the application.

Transactions are at the row level only (if supported at all).

Poor at aggregation - where an RDMS solution would use SUM, AVG and GROUP BY a NoSQL solution has map-reduce, which (some minor optimizations aside) has to do the equivalent of a table-scan.

Poor at complex joins, although arguably this is something you'd design differently for.

 

3. NewSQL- In-memory relational databases

NewSQL is a class of modern relational database management systems that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for online transaction processing (read-write) workloads while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional single-node database system.

These maintain ACID and relational integrity, but are in memory (like NoSQL) and readily scalable. They support SQL syntax. These are relatively new implementations and many traditional database vendors have rolled out their own solutions with the same capabilities. Think Oracle, Sybase, and even SAP with their in-memory HANA solution.

The most popular NewSQL systems attempt to distribute query fragments to different data nodes. These are designed to operate in a distributed cluster of shared-nothing nodes. Here nodes typically own a subset of the data. SQL Queries are split into query fragments and sent to the nodes that own the data. These databases are able to scale linearly as additional nodes are added.

Examples: Clustrix, VoltDB, GenieDB, etc.

 

 Published by myBigDataView.com
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Apr 24
2013

Cybercriminals Increasingly Target Small Businesses.

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia
A recent data breach investigations report from Verizon shows that small businesses continue to be the most victimized of all companies. Is this because there are many more smaller businesses than larger ones - and the larger ones have more resources and layered security mechanisms to combat cyber attacks? The answer depends on a couple of factors.

Of the 621 confirmed data breach incidents Verizon recorded in 2012, close to half occurred at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, including 193 incidents at organizations with fewer than 100 workers.

A different recent report from Symantec has confirmed this trend. The report discovered that cyber attacks on small businesses with fewer than 250 employees increased 31% in 2012, after growing by 18% in the prior year. It's a pattern that many security analysts have noticed for several years now. Larger corporations have more resources and CISOs that are capable of investing heavily in sophisticated security strategies. That's forced cyber criminals to look for other ways to direct their initial attacks.

Cyber criminals today have become efficient in using smaller businesses to initiate their attack as a way of working upstream to a larger organization that may purchase software, hardware, or services from the smaller organization. These smaller suppliers or partners of large companies offer an indirect path into a major corporation's network.

Another tactic some more patient cyber criminals are using is targeting small companies in growth industries, such as health care or manufacturing. The cyber criminals plant their backdoor in the smaller organizations software in hope that their targets could be acquired by a larger corporation at some point down the road. Meanwhile, they lie in wait -- if and when the company merges or is acquired, they gain access to breach the system of the larger parent company.

Despite the statistics, too many small businesses think they're invulnerable. Some believe their small business would be a boring target for hackers.

 Small businesses can't afford to remain complacent or ignorant about the risk of being a cyberattack target as they store valuable information for hackers, like customers' credit card numbers, code repositories, and intellectual property. 

The most common tactics cyberattackers use against small businesses include "ransomware" scams that lock computers and demand a ransom fee. Attackers also use malicious software designed to steal information from employees' mobile devices and malware that uses a small businesses' website as bait to gain access to a larger company's database.
 
To combat the siege small businesses should deploy basic tactics such as 
using good passwords, maintain the latest versions of antivirus software, and keeping essential business services off direct access to the Internet.
 
 
Published by myCIOview.com 
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Apr 16
2013

80% of Companies See Web Attacks in 2012

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia
Web based attacks are on the rise as cyber criminals and others who do harm to computer systems for profit or malice prey on the Web’s areas of vulnerability, and businesses are feeling the effects of the attacks on their resources. Currently the weakest link is the Web browser. Vulnerabilities in browser add-ons like Java, Flash and Adobe represent a common source of network incursions and endpoint infections. To mitigate these significant business risks many IT security experts suggest a properly layered defense with effective endpoint and Web security and monitoring needs to be in place.

A recent survey was conducted by Webroot to assess the state of the Web security layer in organizations throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. The study focused on companies that currently have a Web security solution or plan to deploy one in 2013. The survey confirmed that Web-borne attacks are impacting businesses, with the majority of them reporting significant impacts in the form of increased help desk time, reduced employee productivity and disruption of business activities.


The key findings from the survey are listed below:

• 8 in 10 companies experienced one or more kinds of Web-borne attacks in 2012.
• 88% of Web security administrators say Web browsing is a serious malware risk to their firm.
• Phishing is the most prevalent Web-borne attack, affecting 55% of companies.
• Web security administrators report that Web-borne attacks have a significant negative impact on 
help desk time, IT resources, employee productivity and the security of customer data.
• Companies that deploy a Web security solution are far less likely to be victims of password hacking, 
SQL injection attacks, social engineering attacks and Web site compromises


The complete survey results may be downloadedhere.
 
 
Published by myCIOview.com  


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Apr 03
2013

The Impact of Stress and Management on Workers

Posted by Bill Gerneglia in Untagged 
Bill Gerneglia
Here are some insights on how stress and your management style  may impact your IT workers according to recent research from the American Psychological Association. Remember that not all IT workers love their jobs, and it is our job as managers to try to lead rather than direct whenever possible. This can help alleviate the stress load on your workers.

So how do you manage people who are better, smarter, faster and more ingenious than you are? You don't! You lead them.

What's the difference? Managing people requires boundaries. Boundaries control time, creativity, priorities, decision-making authority, what they can learn, the leeway to make mistakes, and ultimately the ability to grow at a faster pace.


Leadership, on the other hand, requires vision, trust and letting go - your vision, your trust and your ability to let go. These are all actions you need to take, not them!

 If you have talented workers but they're not producing remarkable results, ask yourself if you're in the way. Or if you don't have the talent you need, once again, ask yourself if you're in the way of hiring top talent. If you don't know, ask your boss or ask your HR exec. You need to know.

 

Highlights from the research:

1. The research indicates that office stress is not felt the same for men as it is for women. 

2. The annual survey found the proportion of chronically stressed individuals has shrunk to 35% this year, compared with 41% in 2012.

3. Work is a significant source of stress for 65% of adults.

4. Thirty-nine per cent of people said having too heavy a workload is a significant factor in their stress.

5. Thirty-three per cent of people said work interfering with family or personal time has a significant impact on stress. 

6. Twenty-seven per cent of men and 38% of women said they don't receive adequate monetary compensation for their job.

7. Thirty-two per cent of women said their employees don't provide sufficient opportunities for internal advancement, compared with 30% of men.

8. Women are more likely to feel tense during a typical workday, reporting more often that their employer doesn't appreciate what they do.

9. Women's stress is rising as families rely more on women's earnings.

10. Emotional responses to stress often divide along gender lines, with men more likely to have a "fight or flight" reaction while women are more likely to have a "tend and befriend" response, seeking comfort in relationships and care of loved ones.

11. Twenty-seven per cent of men and 31% of women said their employers don't provide sufficient resources to help them manage stress. 
 
 
Published by myITview.com  
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