1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road
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How EMC Uses Big Data to Deliver Value to the Business
6 days ago
By KK
Krishnakumar, Vice President and Chief IT Architect
Harnessing Big Data is an
important strategy for all companies in today’s information-driven world. But
where do you begin in choosing a project to utilize this vast resource
effectively? Much has been written about the three Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity
and Variety. But the unsaid fourth V–Value–is the one where we have to direct
our focus. It only makes sense to start where Big Data analytics will have a
big impact right away.
2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information,
technology and customer challenges.
What A Modern Factory Can Teach You About High-Performance IT
7 days ago
I'm not the only who's fascinated by high-performance
IT organizations, and the transformations required to get them there. In my
travels, I've encountered others who share my fascination. And -- each
and every time -- we all inevitably gravitate to the same set of analogies: modern factories and how
manufacturing works. This should be no surprise. In the
digital economy, IT is
the new factory -- it's responsible for delivering the
organization's value proposition in the digital world.
Enterprise Storage Heats Up – Again!
7 days ago
Once you spend any time inside the storage
marketplace, you'll come to appreciate there are many segments and
subsegments. The need to store information is ubiquitous -- the
approaches are not. Sit down and attempt to segment the storage marketplace,
and you'll quickly end up with a fairly complicated model. One familiar
category is what is imprecisely called "enterprise storage" or
sometimes "tier 1" -- the storage that supports the enterprise's most
critical applications.
What I Mean When I Say "Enterprise Storage"
7 days ago
The recent announcement of the VMAX
10K brought up an interesting discussion for us storage folks: what
-- exactly -- might "enterprise storage" be? I find that
the definitions offered by the industry analysts are incomplete and
unsatisfying at best. And there's certainly strong motivation for any
storage vendor to slap an "enterprise" label on their product in an
effort to attract more potential customers. My credentials to offer an
informed perspective are substantial, but not impeccable.
The End Of The Group File Share?
7 days ago
It was certainly a big deal many decades ago: the
notion that one of your desktop drives ("H:\") could actually be shared with
your co-workers over a LAN. No more floppies. A shared repository,
usually up-to-date. A huge productivity leap forward, back in the day.
Over time, shared drives became file shares, and repositories, and
content-oriented collaboration was layered on top, and then -- the world changed.
We all went mobile. Not just on one device, but often several. We wanted
personal control of who we share with, and under what terms.
3.
Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation
Russian Re-use: An Innovation Mentoring Tale
1 day ago
I am starting the year with two mentees: one in China
and one in Russia. We meet every two weeks. In both cases the mentees drive the
agenda. They state their career goals and ask me to help in specific ways.
These meetings are a fascinating opportunity to discover the intersections and
differences between cultures. It still surprises me how my software engineering
business relationships have not only become increasingly international, but
also geographically distributed.
Hybrid Analytics
6 days ago
Every IT organization (and IT vendor for that matter)
has one of those performance geeks who answers every question with "It
depends". When I designed storage systems, I tried to justify
implementation choices with our performance team. I would ask specific
questions about I/O workloads to our performance guru (Malcolm). I could never
get a straight answer out of him, so I stopped asking! Dave Vellante and his
Wikibon team are publishing interesting research on the use of Amazon public
cloud in the enterprise.
4.
Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group
of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise
security standards.
Reinforcing our doors in 2013
1 day ago
In
my last blog I talked about the
key technologies breaking down our doors in 2013. The four key areas were Cloud
Computing, Social Media, Big Data and Mobile Devices. None of these should
have come as a surprise to anyone in the industry today. These are all topics
that are discussed and debated around tables of security teams in most
enterprises. So, what can we do today to ensure we are prepared for these
challenges and how do we start reinforcing our doors so that we allow these new
technologies but have greater control and visibility and provide transparency
for the user? There are three gaps that will help with this reinforcement.
Addressing these gaps will require organizations to act now!
The next marketing buzzword in security is…
1 day ago
Every year we seem to have a new buzz term in
security. As someone who lives in the security product marketing world
I’ve seen trends come and go. Terminology that was once mandatory in every
piece of collateral suddenly becomes stale and cringe-worthy (APT is becoming
one of these). We’ve had a bunch of buzzwords and phrases; some were
pretty good and some were really terrible. I should know I helped
propagate some of these buzzwords.
Deceit as a Defense
1 day ago
An information security professional’s job is becoming
more like military defense every day. We are charged with battling on multiple
fronts, typically without enough resources to do the job well. Yet, our
creativity can serve us well in defeating any number of attackers before they
steal our goods. Now we have another great example
of a company taking military defense techniques to a new level and leveraging
deception in their daily process.
New name, Same Game: Red October and the Question of
Attribution
2 days ago
Earlier this month, Kaspersky Labs
announced the discovery of a new style of cyber espionage campaign.
Research on this threat campaign began in October of 2012 according Kaspersky’s whitepaper.
I’m not convinced that it is entirely new but let’s press on and see what the
boys there have to say. The researchers there began their investigation
by examining the aftermath of a series of attacks conducted against networks
belonging to the diplomatic services of various governments and their
respective agencies.
Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security
3 days ago
This month, RSA released a new Security Brief titled “Big Data Fuels
Intelligence-Driven Security.” Indeed, one of the themes of this
blog over the last year or so has been looking for the bad guys hiding in plain
sight. Your standard controls won’t catch them—or at least won’t catch them in
time. Instead, you will probably rely on poorly constructed logs and expensive
forensics to try and piece together exactly what happened.
Disruptive technologies breaking down our doors in 2013
4 days ago
RSA recently launched its latest SBIC report titled ‘Information Security Shake-up –
Disruptive Innovations to test Security’s Mettle in 2013’. It
introduces some interesting food for thought on what organizations should have
on their ‘to do ‘list for 2013. Four key innovations are highlighted which
shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, I think we have all been addressing
some of these in the last year but it’s time to hunker down and really start
focusing on these four key innovations which will test the true grit of our
security systems.
Keys in the Cloud
6 days ago
The Cloud Best Practices Network has just published
the second installment of the e-magazine TRANSFORM. This
issue, which focuses on various aspects of cloud security,
includes my article on “Key Management Strategies for the Hybrid Cloud”,
leveraging the use cases that we developed in OASIS KMIP for our work on the next
version of KMIP. I presented a version of this information at RSA Conference
China and touched on it in an earlier blog.
Secure Crypto: Cluster Cracker
6 days ago
At a recent conference, Passwords^12, Jeremi
M Gosney the Founder & CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, presented his
latest password cracking project.
Jeremi combined 25 AMD Radeon GPUs, across eighteen cards, and across five
servers in a cluster. This beast he created has the ability to make nearly 350
billion (yes, that’s 350 million million!) guesses per second on NTLM secured passwords. It can also make
180 billion guesses per second on MD5 protected passwords and 63 billion
guesses per second on SHA-1 protected passwords.
The Public Cloud, Pigeons and Risk Management — Part 4
6 days ago
I have recently been asked if the research paper about key leakage across
VMs running on a hypervisor invalidates the position I advanced in this series
of blogs? No, it doesn’t, although key management is something which
deserves far more attention than it gets from the general INFOSEC community,
outside of the government COMSEC agencies. Oh, and by the way, this is a
very cool piece of research.
5.
The Backup Window
– 360° view of backup and recovery
Tape is Alive? Inconceivable!
1 day ago
To begin each year, Joe Tucci brings 400+ people
together for the EMC Leadership Meeting. We spend a little time reflecting on
the prior year, but most of it focusing on the future. After that, the Backup
and Recovery Systems Division leadership spends another day planning our
future. So, imagine my surprise when I saw, on the Backup and Recovery
Professionals Group on LinkedIn, a thoughtful discussion about the role of tape
in the backup environment. I’ve just spent a week discussing cloud, big data,
and the evolution of data protection… and we’re still talking about tape? Inconceivable!
6.
EMC IT Proven
– Leading our IT Transformation
“There’s never been a better time to be in IT” says EMC CIO
Sanjay Mirchandani
5 days ago
EMC IT, spearheaded by EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani and his
team, has been on course to evolve into a fully-enabled cloud environment. EMC
IT’s “Journey to the Cloud” has required a new way of thinking of service
management and service delivery. The benefit has been significant savings in
operation expenditures and a more dynamic IT environment. This transition
signifies a changing of the guard in the industry, which is why Sanjay told
InformationWeek that “there’s never been a better time to be in IT.”
How EMC Uses Big Data to Deliver Value to the Business
6 days ago
Harnessing Big Data is an important strategy for all
companies in today’s information-driven world. But where do you begin in
choosing a project to utilize this vast resource effectively? Much has been
written about the three Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety. But the
unsaid fourth V–Value–is the one where we have to direct our focus. It only
makes sense to start where Big Data analytics will have a big impact right
away.
7.
Thought Feast
– The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics
IT Transformation – What We’ve Missed (Part 1)
1 day ago
Welcome 2013! Lady Backup is not one for predictions
or resolutions, so don’t worry I’m not looking into my crystal ball.
Rather, I thought we would start the year by looking at an element of IT
transformation that we didn’t talk about in 2012. It is an enabler of IT
transformation – contributing to your infrastructure transition from physical
to virtual servers and in moving mission critical applications to the
cloud. What is it? Archiving. Don’t get me wrong – we need to
transform our IT Infrastructure from a static, physical model to one that is
dynamic, agile and infinitely scalable. But the question in
my mind is whether you are transforming your infrastructure to store content
that is outdated, no longer of value, or potentially damaging to your
organization.
Re-enforcing our doors for security in 2013
2 days ago
In my last blog I talked about the key technologies
breaking down our doors in 2013. The four key areas were Cloud Computing,
Social Media, Big Data and Mobile Devices. None of these should have come
as a surprise to anyone in the industry today. These are all topics that are
discussed and debated around tables of Security teams in most enterprises.
8.
InFocus
– EMC Global Services Blog
How to Make Better Decisions Using Big Data
1 day ago
In past posts, I’ve written about the profile of a Data Scientist,
especially the skills needed for people to grow into this new role. I’ve also
written about the opportunities that Big Data
provides, drawn in part from the Human Face of Big Data book,
written by Rich Smolan. Despite all of the terrific possibilities that Big Data
can enable, people ultimately need to realize that the value of the data is
about people and driving change.
Notes From The Field: Inside A Real World Large-Scale Cloud
Deployment
2 days ago
I’ve been granted an incredible opportunity. Over the
past three and a half months I have gotten to lead a real world large-scale
delivery of a cloud solution. The final solution will be delivered as
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the customer via an on-premise managed service.
While I have developed SaaS/PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions in the past,
I was fortunate enough to have been able to build those on public cloud
infrastructures.
What it takes to be a Great Consultant … The Top 10 List
6 days ago
Many of you know I was a Worldwide Partner with
Andersen and also worked for Accenture. As a result, I stay in touch with
my former partners and business associates. Gabrielle Wallace, Consultant with
St. Charles Consulting Group and former Director of Andersen’s Education for
Financial Assurance Services, recently published her Top 10 list of Great
Consultant Attributes. The following is based on her list – but
updated and expanded for consultants that work in the IT and Telecom
Industries.
9.
Managed View
– From Silos to Services
Service Outage Hits Home for Cloud Provider
5 days ago
Are there blind spots in your
service assurance approach? Netflix, a provider of online streaming
media, made news over the holidays when customers experienced a service outage on Christmas Eve.
Imagine taking the wrapping off of your new mobile device and deciding to try
it out to stream a movie. For those located in North America, you
probably found that the Netflix movie streaming service was down. This
outage was caused by issues within Amazon Web Services that Netflix employs to
support movie streaming.
10.
Virtual Geek
– an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware
Revolution
Oppa EMC Style!
5 days ago
Here by popular (infamous perhaps – it’s pretty bad
:-) demand… “Oppa EMC Style” from the 2013 EMC Kickoff. Click to watch
some bad dancing (on my part) – the rest of the team was sharp and hit their
mark :-) The folks in the video represent a cross-section of EMCers –
great, smart, hardworking people. We try to not make this represent
“somebody”, but more “everybody” – a cross section of the great technical folks
at EMC that work with customers.
Matt
Buckley | EMC EMEA Communications | t. +44
(0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley