If you've had to test one of today's composite applications, you know that "access" has become one of the most daunting barriers to SDLC acceleration. Whether we're talking about access to dev/test environments or access to dependent applications, the ability to pull all the required pieces together in order to test thoroughly is equivalent to herding feral cats. If you haven't experienced this fun firsthand, consider this: our recent research revealed that systems under test have an average of 30 dependencies, but team members have consistent access to only 6. The time available to access test environments is extremely limited (4 hour slots) and 30% of that limited time was consumed by configuration/setup tasks. Ultimately, testers had time to execute only 50% of the available test plan. Service virtualization is a revolutionary new technology that helps you break through these constraints by providing ubiquitous, global access to complete dev/test environments. Organizations leveraging service virtualization are able to conduct testing earlier, faster, more thoroughly, and more accurately—significantly reducing the risk of application failure. In case you're just starti...

Much has been published about the Open Compute Project. Initiated by Facebook, it has become an industry effort focused on standardization of many parts and components in the datacenter. Initially focused on racks, power and server design, it has also added storage and now networking to its fold. Its goal is fairly straightforward: “how can we design the most efficient compute infrastructure possible”, a direct quote from its web site. The focus of OCP has been mostly around hardware designs and specifications. If you look at the networking arm of OCP, you find several Top of Rack (ToR) ethernet switch hardware designs donated by the likes of Broadcom, Mellanox and Intel. By creating open specifications of hardware designs for fairly standard ethernet switches, the industry can standardize on these designs and economics of scale would drive down the cost to create and maintain this hardware. A noble goal and there are many opinions on both sides of this effort. Mostly referred to as “bare metal” and “commodity”, you can easily spend days reading up on many opinions. Mike Bushong yesterday discussed pricing implications for resellers in this blog post.

In a post Snowden world it is clear that for cloud data security, we need strong encryption. When properly implemented, encryption in the cloud reduces risk to levels acceptable for sensitive data. There is no doubt data protection in the cloud computing era is never going to be a ‘one size fits all’ kind of a solution. It requires a 360-degree view of the company with 365-days a year dedication. The best place to start is with a risk analysis so you know what kind of data you have, its levels of sensitivity, who’s using it, where it’s used and stored, and how and where and over what technologies it’s going to ‘commute’. You need to understand your company’s data – in terms of technology and human weaknesses. Data should be unreadable to an attacker. It must be incoherent at all times to anyone other than you and your trusted personnel: while it’s travelling – or you are; whether it’s in transit, storage, stopping, or resting, data is safest in encrypted form.

Some people are never satisfied. These fearless agents of change are everywhere. They're informed, confident and willing to experiment. They seek out the best business technology solution for the job at hand. They act on instinct. Yes, you could say that they're driven. However, they're also at risk of being labeled as "rogue employees" because they ordered a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and perhaps expensed it without prior approval. Sometimes they're the champion of progressive projects that are referred to as Shadow IT -- intentionally bypassing their company's formal evaluation and procurement process. How can this happen? Is it just because their activities are tolerated, or are they being encouraged? If so, by whom? Why would any business leader applaud a team member that breaks the rules? Maybe, the simple answer is that staying within the confines of the status-quo won't enable a top-performer to fully apply their talent, achieving their absolute best.

The GovCloud Media Network features agency specific video playlist for registered members. Please enjoy this feature on the Army IT. Please visit the new GovCloud Network Media Library for more video content. For membership information please send request to [email protected]

One of the primary principles of object-oriented programming (OOP) is encapsulation. Encapsulation is the way in which the state of an object is protected from manipulation in a way that is not consistent with the way the variable is intended to be manipulated. The variable (state) is made private, that is to say only the object itself can change it directly. Think of it as the difference between an automatic transmission and a standard (stick). With the latter, I can change gears whenever I see fit. The problem is that when I see fit may not be appropriate to the way in which the gears should be shifted. Which is how engines end up being redlined.

Cloud computing has finally come into its own. While we’ve been hearing for 8 years or more that cloud computing would one day take over the enterprise, the fact of the matter is that it’s been slow going. While the spread of cloud computing solutions hasn’t been as rapid as many early proponents predicted it would be, we are now to a place where cloud solutions are seen as viable for most organizations, and are being utilized regularly.

It's an application world; a world that is rapidly expanding. With new opportunities and markets arising driven by mobility and the Internet of Things, it is only going to keep expanding as applications are deployed to provision, license, and manage the growing sensors and devices in the hands of consumers. Applications are not isolated containers of functionality. No application winds up in production without a robust stack of resources and services to support it. Storage and compute, of course, are required, but so are the networking - both stateless and stateful - services that provide for scale, security and performance.

We're launching the "Tap In Open Forum": a new series of blog posts where we detail a current topic being discussed in the software development and testing community and invite you to participate in an open discussion with our best and brightest here at Skytap. Feel free to share your thoughts and we'll do the same! InformationWeek and IBM Mobile Technical Sales Leader Dustin Amrhein presented a webinar last week as part of their “DevOps Rado” series. The Frictionless Enterprise: Built for Business, looked at DevOps as a viable solution for removing the friction that prevents enterprises from innovating at not just the speed they would like, but at the speed absolutely required to stay relevant, and hopefully ahead of their competition.

Since the birth of Hadoop in 2005-06, the way we think about storing and processing information has evolved considerably. The term “Big Data” has become synonymous with this evolution. But still, many of our customers continue to ask, “What is Big Data?”, “What are its use cases?”, and “What is its business value?”. The Internet is overloaded with definitions, characteristics, and benefits; however, few discussions synthesize all three of these topics in one place. This paper answers these questions, and proposes a total cost calculation framework for CTOs and CIOs that are evaluating solutions for their organization’s use case(s). In the text below, I examine an on-premise Hadoop ecosystem as a general purpose Big Data solution in relation to alternative commercial purpose-built storage technologies (-e.g. Oracle, Teradata, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, EMC, etc). It may be difficult to determine the exact point at which you should leverage one over the other. It is my contention that when the total cost of using all your data exceeds what you are able to spend using purpose-built technologies, it is time to consider using a general purpose solution like Hadoop for process offloading....

Public cloud service adoption is already a mainstream phenomenon in most organizations. Meanwhile, many large enterprises see a private cloud in their future. But choosing whether to invest in building an internal cloud infrastructure or buy from a cloud service provider will become more challenging – in anticipation, savvy IT leaders are becoming brokers of dynamic business technology solutions.

Hybrid cloud resource management and progressive operational process adoption are the key focal points in preparation for this transition. Moreover, Line of Business demand for emerging use cases and just-in-time IT workload creation requires speedy access to a managed self-serve DevOps deployment model.

That’s why comprehensive management and provisioning tools -- such as Red Hat CloudForms -- have become essential platforms. Besides, given the pervasive trends in the marketplace, every business will eventually need an actionable hybrid cloud adopt...

Read more about how AppDynamics helps foster DevOps and take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics Pro today!

Good morning! Or evening, if you happen to be reading this on the other side of the world. Our topic for today is the internet. What? You already know about the internet? No, no, I don’t mean that internet, the boring old one you use to access YouTube and send Facebook updates, email and tweets and stuff. That’s the internet of people and it’s so, well, yesterday. I’m talking about the new internet, which is going to be the latest thing Real Soon Now. It’s called the Internet of Things or IoT and it’s got everybody very excited over in Silicon Valley, where they hyperventilate a lot about technology.

Accomplish much more, very rapidly, while spending less -- this is the business technology trend that savvy executives everywhere have embraced. Worldwide IT spending will reach a total $3.7 trillion in 2014, that's a 2.1 percent increase from last year, according to the latest global market study by Gartner. This forecast, however, is down from their earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth. What's driving the ongoing transition to lower business technology spending? The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for end-user devices, data center systems and IT related services.

This week in the States, the Nation celebrates it’s Independence and many people will be attending or setting off their own fireworks show. In Hawaii, fireworks are shot off more during New Year’s Eve than on July 4th and there is even Daytime Fireworks now. Cloud computing is exploding like fireworks with all the Oooooooo’s and Ahhhhhhh’s of what it offers but the same groan, like the traffic jam home, might be coming to an office near you. Recently, Ponemon Institute and cloud firm Netskope released a study Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect, indicating that 613 IT and security professionals felt that deploying resources in the cloud triples the probability of a major breach. Specifically, a data breach with 100,000+ customer records compromised, the cost would be just over $20 million, based on Ponemon Institute’s May 2014 ‘Cost of a Data Breach’. With a breach of that scale, using cloud services may triple the risk of a data breach. It’s called the ‘cloud multiplier effect’ and it translates to a 3% higher risk of a data breach for every 1% increase in the use of cloud services. So if you had 100 cloud services, you would only need to add 25 more to increase the pos...