I love receiving gifts in the form of new insights! It doesn't matter if others received the same gift years ago and I am just getting it now. If it is new to me, I get excited. It is like waking up in the morning and discovering a new room in your house. I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times this weekend titled, "And Now for a Bit of Good News." The subject of the article was the new "sharing economy," think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. In the article, Friedman calls Airbnb a "Trust Platform." To me, this weekend, this term was a gift. He is so right. I have used Airbnb many times when traveling with my family, and to date have been very pleased with our experiences. Often the transactions are sizeable as I am reserving a home in a desirable location for a week. I am engaging in a transaction of some size with a person I don't know, in a home I have never visited, most often in a foreign country using different currency, involving different laws and customs. Why did I risk it? I trusted the platform.

I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet. Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force!

We live in interesting times for sure. Who would have thought ten years ago that IBM and Apple would become partners? Here is the announcement as reported in eWeek: Apple and IBM surprised many on July 15, announcing a global partnership that will see the companies attempt to “transform enterprise mobility.” The announcement, punctuated with comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, served notice of the companies’ intentions to make Apple smartphones, tablets and mobile services pre-eminent in the enterprise, replacing the BlackBerry devices and security services that long held the dominant position in that market. The partnership only confirms what Apple has been doing for years with its smartphones, tablets and even its notebook and desktop PCs, moving deeper into enterprises. The company has been touting its success in the corporate world, saying that many of the top companies in the world are now using its iPhones and iPads. In the IBM announcement, Apple’s Cook said that the company’s iPhones and iPads are now running in more than 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and 92 percent of the Global 500. Both Apple and IBM expect those figures to grow with this new pa...

A key development for the Internet of Things will be the evolution and emergence of the ‘Cloud Name System’, a directory system for Cloud applications in the same way DNS (Domain Name System) works for the web and email. Lori MacVittie wrote a while back about the need for an ‘SNS’ – a Service Name System, a DNS type directory approach but for Cloud Services so that they can be entirely loosely coupled from their IT infrastructure. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, himself described a scenario of ‘Socially Aware Cloud Storage‘ that applies this same ideal of abstraction to our personal data across all the social networks we use. This refers to a distributed (Cloud) storage service that is used to store personal user data for social networks, rather than the social sites holding it themselves.

When people talk about Big Data, the emphasis is usually on the Big. Certainly, Big Data applications are distributed largely because the size of the data on which computations are executed warrants more than a typical application can handle. But scaling the network that provides connectivity between Big Data nodes is not just about creating massive interconnects. In fact, the size of the network might be the least interesting aspect of scaling Big Data fabrics.

Do you avoid stores that have had a credit card breach? You are not alone. About 52% of people avoid merchants who have had a data breach according to a recent Lowcards survey. They surveyed over 400 random consumers to better understand the impact of identity theft on consumer behavior. 17% said they or a family member was a victim of identity theft over the last year with half the cases being credit card theft. 94% said they are more concerned or equally concerned about ID theft. They estimate that there were 13.5 million cases of credit card identity theft in the United States over the last 12 months.

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.