CeBIT was once considered the best barometer of technological trends, and during the dot-com boom in the late 90s and early 2000s, it boasted some 850,000 visitors a year. However, that number has been declining for years, despite cultivating a ‘fun fair’ atmosphere.
Source: Germany: CeBIT, world′s largest IT conference, canned | News | DW | 28.11.2018
Our private cloud configuration allows our CIOs the luxury of not focusing on bandwidth because it always works. We’ve been able to layer value-added services on top of it — more traditional services like bandwidth as a service, software as a service, backup as a service, and virtual data centers as a service. Our institutions now can focus on students and the value they add to our schools, not on IT as a standalone commodity.
via The unbelievable benefits of the USG CIO’s bottomless bucket of bandwidth | The Enterprisers Project.
The interface for Orca was a mobile Web application connected to a set of mirrored databases of voter rolls. When a user logged in, the app would load a page with a scrollable list of all the registered voters in the precinct they were assigned to. By swiping a checkbox next to a voter’s name, they could record them as having voted; the entry was then transmitted back to Orca’s application server. A back-up call response system—similar in nature to the Houdini system used by the Obama campaign in 2008 (a system which also ran into trouble)—provided a way for volunteers to report possible voting irregularities into the system even if their data connectivity failed. Using information gathered through the campaign’s digital outreach and pulled from the campaign’s voter contact vendor, FLS Connect, the system was supposed to give volunteers in Boston a complete view of Romney supporters in swing states who hadn’t yet voted. It would then prompt phone calls asking supporters to vote.
via Which consultants built Romney’s “Project Orca?” None of them | Ars Technica.
Nagios is a powerful tool that provides you with instant awareness of your organization’s mission-critical IT infrastructure. Nagios allows you to detect and repair problems and mitigate future issues before they affect end-users and customers.
The study includes a checklist for customers making the transition. It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams, “or you’ll be consigning your business as usual team to the scrap heap,” Norton said.
via Study urges CIOs to choose open source first – Software – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.
“In many respects, the public cloud is an immature business. Business processes will eventually catch up with the technology, but they are not there yet.
“I would expect you would make greater cost savings by using open source internally without using a cloud-based solution.”
Many employees are working up to 20 additional hours per week unpaid as a result of bring your own device (BYOD) policies adopted by their firms.
via BYOD makes employees work extra 20 hours unpaid – ComputerworldUK.com.
Skype was the most popular video communications technology, with 70 percent of mobile workers using it as their first preference, and 36 percent used a Cisco platform. This was followed by 29 percent who preferred to use Apple’s FaceTime, and 13 percent chose Google’s Gmail video chat.
The trend toward employee-owned devices isn’t saving IBM any money, says Jeanette Horan, who is IBM’s chief information officer and oversees all the company’s internal use of IT. Instead, she says, it has created new challenges for her department of 5,000 people, because employees’ devices are full of software that IBM doesn’t control.
via IBM Faces the Perils of “Bring Your Own Device” – Technology Review.
Horan isn’t only trying to educate IBM workers about computer security. She’s also enforcing better security. Before an employee’s own device can be used to access IBM networks, the IT department configures it so that its memory can be erased remotely if it is lost or stolen. The IT crew also disables public file-transfer programs like Apple’s iCloud; instead, employees use an IBM-hosted version called MyMobileHub. IBM even turns off Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant, on employees’ iPhones. The company worries that the spoken queries, which are uploaded to Apple servers, could ultimately reveal sensitive information.
As IT continues in a zigzag path of figuring out what to do with this “cloud” stuff, it seems that some companies are getting ahead of themselves. In particular, the concept of outsourcing storage to a cloud provider puzzles me. I can see some benefits in other cloud services (though I still find the trust aspect difficult to reconcile), but full-on cloud storage offerings don’t make sense outside of some rare circumstances.
via Why corporate cloud storage doesn’t add up | Data Center – InfoWorld.
there’s already storage in the data center running the servers. That means there’s already a backup solution in place, and adding local file storage is trivial.
And one more interesting tidbit from the author of the linked to article.
Don’t forget that fast, reliable storage is very cheap these days. You can pick up 24TB of raw storage for less than $7,000, and even though they’re SATA drives, they’ll be more than sufficient for most general business purposes.
I kind of agree. My worry is the reliability of the cloud provider.
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”
Third parties need to deliver. Facebook relies on a series of third party providers—notably software as a service providers. Providers to Facebook include Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Oracle to name a few, we’ve been told.
via Facebook’s operations: A look at the IT risks | ZDNet.
How is salesforce.com a provider to facebook?