Recognizing North Korea and Kim Jong-un’s recent actions as probable bluster has parallels to assessing a rogue computer process or questionable user activity on a network. When a process goes wrong in a system, log monitoring software gives off a real-time alert as a warning. With a less-than-enterprise class solution, this alert might be all that happens, which forces systems administrators to decide on an action based on isolated, incomplete information. With lives at stake rather than system and network resources, the result could be tragic.
Context is Key for Real Understanding
The U.S. government has the benefit of a sophisticated infrastructure providing correlated analysis of any situation from multiple angles. The direct threats from North Korea are correlated with data on their lack of actual troop movements, no missile facilities preparations, and in context of historical data of frequent threats right around national holidays. Similar to the U.S. government, a true enterprise-class log management and data analytics system should enable IT managers to have a fully informed view of any specific event with all the pertinent information available at once to enable fully intelligent action. [Read more...]
People do not often think of data points as having dire consequences, but it could mean the life and death of a business. In every realm of business and sector of life from politics, economics, society, the environment, to technology, there are big data complications. Without the blend of analytics and integration solutions, there are growing risks of security threats, need for efficiency and cost reductions, and a desire for more collaboration. Big data is not just big because companies and organizations collect large volumes of it, but also because it has real and lasting implications on everyone.
With all the talk about how big data should be used, what for, and why, rarely do we hear about who uses “it.” All the recent buzz around big data is not because data has all of a sudden become more valuable, it’s that people are now realizing and discussing how to use new technologies and architectures to derive value from these large data sets.
I frequently discuss big data with executives from some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the US. I continually act as a sounding board for their frustration as they try to extract value from historical big data. There is a prevalent misbelief among them that there is a great deal of value in years and countless rows of data, but they struggle to monetize this hidden value, and for good reason.
Three friends and I went hiking last week in a dense forest. The objective was clear: to reach a small fortress about six miles from base camp. Without maps, or smartphones and no real clue how to get there, we were on our own. With no rules, or parameters to validate our moves and literally no support or back-up, we had to make instant decisions based on events as they occurred. We were trailblazers, quite literally, and had to innovate in creating a trail for others to follow just to reach our goal.
Freeze! With that phrase, a criminal just got apprehended, a child stopped behaving badly, and programmers stopped coding. For the coders, they aren’t about to face punishment like the other two, provided the code works. When it comes to a continuous deployment model for cloud-based projects, it’s the developers’ job to implement and push out changes to the operations team as quickly as possible. In the event of a “code freeze,” operation teams sync all the code from each individual, place it in a repository and test to see if it works. If everything integrated together doesn’t work, it’s back to square one of the software development cycle.
There’s plenty of talk on how the newer generations are “digital natives” and uniquely suited to transform business, and more specifically IT, through total adoption of mobile, social, local, and always-on connectivity. However, it can be difficult to conceptualize this predicted transformation when all you see is a bunch of teenagers who use Facebook too much. Sure, digital natives demonstrate knowledge on liking a status and using emoticons, but how will that translate to skills integral to the future of technology and business?
“The Cloud” sounds like a mysterious and mystical place beyond reach and for that reason, and like so much business jargon, it is an overused term. People throw the term around without actually specifying what they mean. There are actually many types of clouds, in the sky and in computing. For private cloud computing, people need start defining exactly what service they are talking about. Even within the private cloud, there are different categories and Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one such sub-cloud. No longer will anyone look to the sky and see white fluffy cotton floating around.
