Building big data? Are you building a security headache too?
The world and its dog has been shocked by the Prism news story. Early in June, we found out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had developed a secret data-gathering mechanism to steal all our data and store it in a large data warehouse.
We are outraged that it is being mined, searched and otherwise prodded. But do we …
Let the software run the network
Across the IT industry, vendors are increasingly looking at defining datacentre operations in software.
Whether it is VMware with its software-defined datacentre concept or Microsoft with its Virtual Machine Manager product, they are bringing home the benefits of abstracting key datacentre functions away from the hardware. …
Application Lifecycle Management: The movers and shakers
Old applications never die; they just stick around sucking up valuable computing resources and helpdesk time. If your business faces that problem, then it’s time to take application lifecycle management seriously.
Code is alive. Applications are living, breathing things that are supposed to change as the business changes, and …
Application transformation: Ready Steady Go!
Old software never dies, it just functionally decomposes. When applications reach the end of their lifecycle, they can hang around, ghostlike, creating support and infrastructure costs, or they can be made useful again. Application transformation is a key part of that process, but what is involved?
The driver for application …
Want to improve your software testing? Automate the tools, love-up the developers
We all know the traditional problem with software testing: it happens too late, and often in a rush, as users badger developers for delivery. If a software project runs over deadline, the chances are that the testing will suffer.
Agile development helps to solve that problem, but automating the testing is a critical part of that …
How to give your applications a long and happy life
Are your applications well managed? Many companies get it right for part of an application’s lifecycle but few excel at all of it.
Putting an application into a private cloud can help you to manage it more consistently from cradle to grave.
Software applications need different resources at four main stages: development, …
Are your applications ready to live in the cloud?
So, you are ready for a journey to the cloud. You have evaluated the benefits and you think you are ready to migrate your applications to a castle in the sky.
But the road to cloudy happiness is a long and winding one. Getting your applications into the cloud takes preparation.
Why move?
The first step is to nail down the …
Measure up your applications for their move to the cloud
Are you ready to get your applications into the private cloud? If you understand the difference between virtualising something and making it part of a broader environment, then you are on your way.
If you have explored the business value of each application to see if it makes sense, you are further still. But now comes the heavy …
Cloud migration: The applications killing season
Moving applications to the cloud can help to tighten the efficiency of the IT department, but does that mean that every application should be moved?
Software may have to be rewritten or at least reconfigured to function properly in the new environment, and it may not always be appropriate to invest the necessary time and money …
How far can you shift the shape of cloud software?
Deep in the bowels of the EU academics, businesspeople and bureaucrats are putting the finishing touches to a set of specifications that could change the way we handle software as a service (SaaS).
Logo for CAST research project The €1.08m CAST project, funded by an EC program called Eurostars, was created to develop a …
Don't let the cloud obscure your software's performance
Software as a service (SaaS) can be a great cost saver for companies willing to abandon their own hardware and software, but what happens if productivity leaves the building too?
Giving control of your business applications to someone else can also mean losing control of performance.
When staff complain to the help desk that …
Alterations may be needed to make SaaS fit
Software as a service (SaaS) may be a great way to shirk some capital expenditure by not having to buy servers and software, but how will it fit in with what you already have?
Whether you are farming out CRM, document management, contact management or procurement, you probably have some locally hosted applications that you want …
What you can do to enforce endpoint security
Thirty years after the PC was launched, security and management problems for the endpoint seem to be getting worse rather than better.
PCs have become more functional, creating a greater surface area for attack. And the number of endpoint devices has proliferated, as tablets, netbooks and smartphones have entered the fray.
The …
Clever patching keeps the system serviceable
It was the kind of day most systems administrators would like to forget. A customer of Canadian security consultant David Lewis, founder of the Liquidmatrix Security Digest, had decided to roll out a software patch to a Symantec product.
Unfortunately, the firm didn’t check the patch as well as it could have and the tweak …
Desktop Virtualisation for highly legislated environments
Implementing virtual desktops across a whole enterprise is rarely as easy as it sounds in vendor white papers. Rich Raether, IT manager, and Dan Putnam, published systems architect at large US law firm Quarles & Brady faced a unique set of challenges when they decided to roll out virtual desktops as a means of improving the firm …
Big guns turn sights on cancer-causing genes
In the heart of London, researchers are splitting apart the building blocks of life and working towards a cure for cancer. The Biomedical Research Centre, run by King’s College Hospital and Guy's and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, has a genomic sequencing unit that genotypes tissue from patients with cancer and other diseases …
Step forward the chief information security officer
What does the modern chief information security officer (Ciso) look like? The role used to be little more than acting as a glorified sysadmin but things have changed.
These days, Cisos must be all-rounders, concentrating not just on technology but on business too.
“In recent years, the role of the Ciso has become more business …
Were Lavasoft's buyers once on its hit list?
Anti-spyware company Lavasoft AB is now owned by a set of online entrepreneurs who have been linked with misleading websites.
The Montreal-based entrepreneurs, who purchased the company's assets in January, have previously been accused of selling the free versions of Lavasoft products to unwitting internet users as recently as …
IBM rises to the optimisation challenge
In computing, it sometimes pays to specialise. Generic systems will handle most computational needs, but they may not excel at them.
For larger companies, honing systems to handle specialised tasks involving large amounts of data could help to make data centres more efficient. This is what workload optimisation is for. …
Old apps must die when you migrate to the cloud
How many applications is too many?
In March, Capgemini issued its 2011 Application Landscape report, which surveyed almost 100 companies application portfolios. It found that 60 per cent of enterprise respondents had more applications than they needed.
In large and enterprise-class firms, a bigger proportion of people felt that …
Prepare for a growth spurt when you virtualise systems
Virtualising systems often means scaling them up. Sometimes, disparate networks of machines are consolidated together, creating a mega-portfolio of assets. This carries a special set of technical challenges, but let’s not forget the managerial ones.
What happens when you scale a system by virtualising servers and cramming more …
How to get the best from your IOPS
The number of inputs and outputs per second from your networked storage can dictate the success or failure of your whole architecture. Danny Bradbury interviews systems administrator Trevor Pott and finds out how networked storage can be configured to avoid bottlenecks and maximise performance.
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Trevor works out on VDI roll-outs
Deploying virtual desktop integration may save you lots of money (or not). It may increase your employees' mobility (or not). But if you stream the footie match in high definition on 30 virtual machines, it will definitely do a number on a single Gig-E interface.
In this webcast systems administrator Trevor Pott reveals some …
Is your network taking on a life of its own?
Networking has always been something of a dark art, but you would have thought it would get easier as technologies mature. In fact, technology, along with users’ expectations of it, is making the network manager's jobs more difficult than ever.
Virtualisation and private clouds, combined with unified networking and next- …
Process, not just product, will save your IT department
So, you’ve bought your firewall. You’ve spent thousands on an intrusion prevention system, and you’ve got expensive data leak prevention software. Are you dead sure that your sensitive customer data hasn’t been leaked?
In IT security, capital expenditure on products can help to protect your systems, but it isn’t enough. Thinking …
So many risks, so little time
How much risk can your IT department tolerate? There’s always going to be a certain amount of it. The trick is working out where to put it so that it causes the least damage. And to do that, you need to understand how risk fits into the broader world outside the IT department.
There are various types of risk facing a company, …
Breathe life into your cyber security campaign
Ah, another day, another government initiative designed to educate users about cyber risk.
The Canadian government has declared October “Get Cyber Safe” month. It has a web site, too, which advises users on how to avoid getting pwned. The advice list includes updating your malware signatures and not giving out your password. …
If the name’s not on the whitelist it can’t come in
The poor old corporate endpoint has had a bit of a battering in the last few years. Malware is more widespread and complex than ever and it is easy to get infected simply by visiting legitimate sites that have been hacked.
Now that the internet has become such a dangerous neighbourhood, are malware blacklists enough to keep the …
Virtualising your infrastructure? Get your numbers right
Virtualisation can be a powerful tool for your IT department, making your infrastructure far more efficient. But without proper planning it is easy to trip yourself up by not scaling the system properly.
How can you plan the capacity needed for a virtualised system so that you don’t end up overspending or under-resourcing? Here …
Mapping the threat environment
The threat landscape has changed considerably in the last few years, as the focus expands from network worms to advanced persistent threats. Danny Bradbury speaks to Raj Semani, EMEA CTO at McAfee, to explore how things have changed since botnets first came into being, and Melissa spread across the world.
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Can clouds ever be fully secure?
Computerised clouds are often similar to their water vapour-based counterparts; they're amorphous in the middle, and often fluffy around the edges. That can spell problems for IT departments when securing their private clouds, and for public cloud providers when locking down theirs.
Danny Bradbury and Jim Reavis, executive …
Trev's Big Adventure in Virtualisation
Trevor Pott, our adventurous sysadmin guest, never does things by halves. When a client asked him to virtualize its desktop and server infrastructure all in one go, he jumped at the chance. Danny Bradbury interviews him day by day as he grapples with missing equipment, application issues, and backup woes.
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How to stay out of big trouble from little devices
Here's the tricky thing about mobile security: the perfect storm of smartphone threats is always just over the horizon. Every couple of years, the vendors are up in arms about it and predict handheld apocalypse.
At the same time, we are seeing an unprecedented level of activity in the mobile space. Morgan Stanley analyst Mary …
Performance monitoring is Someone Else's Problem
Douglas Adams obviously knew what makes an IT shop tick. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, he identified the Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field, which renders some things not so much invisible as unnoticeable. For a while, the imminent collapse of the Greek economy was an SEP, until it became too big to ignore.
IT …
Just when you thought it was safe to enter the data centre
It is surprising that thieves don’t target data centres more often. All that expensive kit and copper is worth a pretty penny, not to mention all the data that’s on it.
Several BT exchanges have been hit, along with facilities owned by C&W. But of course, thieves don’t always need to get in to wreak havoc: data centres can be …
Detection systems guard against network intrusion
How do the different types of intrusion prevention system (IPS) work?
Inline systems sit on the network like layer-two bridges, passing traffic along as they receive it. Host-based systems sit on the server, watching the traffic that it sends and receives.
Both check packets for any suspicious activity, often using the most …
How to get a firm grip of applications performance
When applications go wrong, they can either stop working or slow to a crawl. The problem for IT managers is keeping track of when this happens and why, and preferably preventing it altogether. How can they do this?
Ideally, your applications are all written under one framework, like J2EE or .Net, which makes monitoring web …
Who the hell cares about five nines anymore?
Does anyone really care what “five nines” means anymore? For the record, it means 99.999 per cent availability, which means your business managers can founder in digital limbo for just over an eighth of a second each day.
That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? What about six seconds a week, or roughly five minutes a year?
Talk is …
IT governance: a help or a hindrance for your projects?
Facebook has become a source of pithy quotes. One is doing the round in friends’ status windows right now is: “Follow your heart, but take your brain along with you.”
In relation to IT, another way to put it might be: “No action without control.”
Embarking on projects and service delivery without proper governance leads to …
Upstairs, downstairs: IT goes into service
It seems as though everything these days is being provided as a service. Software, security, storage, platforms and infrastructures are all being rented by the seat, MIP or gigabyte.
And now it's desktops. Virtualisation transforms the desktop from an item of personal jewellery into a service. Your users’ PCs cease being …
Licensed to bill: software vendors love virtualisation
If you thought managing traditional software licences was a challenge, then just wait till you're accessing an Remote Desktop Services-delivered application, on a virtual machine precariously balanced atop a type-two hypervisor. How much should you pay?
Given the state of some vendors' licencing schemes, you might as well throw …
Don't forget the network
Two cups and a piece of string won’t cut it in a virtual world. If you are virtualising your desktops, your network must be able to cope with the additional traffic load, and resilient enough to support users who require access to their desktops at all times. How can you ensure it measures up?
A poorly configured network can …
Should IT departments tackle desktop virtualisation on their own?
So, you’ve made the business case for your desktop virtualisation project and you have the budget to do it. The next question is whether you need outside help, either from product vendors or consultancies. How do you decide?
No two organisations are created equal, and neither are IT departments. An organisation’s individual …
Look before you leap into desktop virtualisation
Desktop virtualisation is today’s hot topic in IT circles but as with every innovation, rushing headlong into it without proper planning could land you in trouble. How can you go from zero to 60 in measured, sensible steps and avoid a car crash along the way?
In an ideal world, you would have all your ducks lined up in a neat …
The case for DV
Ever since the PC landed on desktops in the early 80s, it has been a mixed blessing for IT administrators. On the one hand it has empowered employees, but on the other hardware refreshes, maintenance and support have entailed high capital and operational expenditure.
Most organisations are virtualising the desktop to regain some …
Skinning the DV cat
The IT sector is at once innovative and cyclical, throwing up new technologies that are updated variations on hoary old ones.
Virtualisation is a good example. Server virtualisation has taken the industry by storm in recent years but IBM was already doing this with its mainframe platform in the 1960s. Similarly, in the early …
New desktop, new DV strategy
With the economy looking a little rosier, companies are coming round to upgrades that have been on hold for longer than usual. As they refresh the corporate desktop, should they be looking at desktop virtualisation too?
Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, thinks IT decision-makers can minimise headaches and …
