COLLABORATE 17: Technology & Applications Forum for the Oracle Community is set for April 2-6 in Las Vegas and, for Oracle users, there is simply nothing like being there. Packed with user-focused education and networking, COLLABORATE creates a welcoming atmosphere where participants can candidly share their ideas, challenges and questions.
Posted March 17, 2017
The Simple Storage Service (S3) outage that took place on Feb. 28 prompted observations and reflections from industry experts about the need for proactive cloud services monitoring, the requirement to diversify with multi-cloud strategies, and even the possibility of "too-big-to-fail" safeguards for large cloud services providers.
Posted March 02, 2017
Apache Spark offers a solid foundation for machine learning. There are other tools and packages to help you dive into deep learning, but Spark offers a consistent approach to data access and, therefore, makes machine learning on Spark easier as you need less plumbing.
Posted February 21, 2017
No one solution can be all things to all enterprises, and as enterprises began to deploy vSAN across their environments, they noticed a big thing was missing. Despite its many benefits, vSAN lacks support for a file system. The importance of having a file system within a data center cannot be overstated. Without a file system, the guest VMs (virtual machines) cannot share files between them and are forced to use an external NAS (network attached storage) solution as shared storage. Without a file system overlaying this data, it becomes laborious and impossible to scale efficiently.
Posted February 21, 2017
Data centers are now designed to not only accommodate current regulations and standards but also predicted capacity requirements, while simultaneously reducing operating costs by incorporating aisle containment structures. One solution offered by many experts in the field is the use of scalable or modular designs. The aisle containment structure is gaining popularity because it meets these goals by providing an infrastructure that is repeatable and rapidly deployable.
Posted February 21, 2017
Today's successful organizations are data-driven, and many are building, maintaining, and accessing databases that scale well beyond the terabyte range. In fact, many have total data assets that now measure in the petabytes. But it's not just the size of databases that is expanding.
Posted February 21, 2017
Are enterprises more or less secure than 5 years ago? That's the big question of the moment, especially with ongoing revelations about state-sponsored hacking, as well as an unending stream of reports about customer and employee data being compromised by even the most seemingly security-conscious organizations. Awareness of data security is running at a fever pitch at the highest levels of government and business organizations. There have been plenty of technology advances, and awareness has grown. Still, the wave of breaches and threats never seems to abate, and likely never will.
Posted February 08, 2017
As businesses realize the importance of big data, adoption is on the rise. But big data is still not in full-scale production everywhere, and many companies say operational challenges hold them back. So what are the operational challenges that big data presents? It's a confluence of three key features of big data.
Posted February 08, 2017
Much like "The Blob" in science-fiction, machine data is growing rapidly - so much that it may expand beyond organizations' control. This data comes from applications, servers, sensors, storage, security systems and networks, and IDC has projected that it will comprise 42% of all data by 2020.
Posted January 16, 2017
As the Hadoop ecosystem matures, the consensus in the industry has been that adoption of Hadoop technology is steady amid continuing disruptive innovation within the open-source framework. However, acquiring or developing skills is one of the most widely cited challenges of integrating Hadoop into the enterprise, as is solution complexity and system integration.
Posted January 16, 2017
Big data is not the end-all, be-all of marketing strategies. It's not that big data is too simplistic, rather, it's that our standard way of using data is limiting. Typical big data analytics are incapable of painting the full picture of consumer behaviors and often fail to quickly provide complete insights. When this happens, marketers end up with broad insights that miss the mark when translated into real-world advertisements and campaigns.
Posted January 03, 2017
The past year was a blockbuster one for those working in the data space. Businesses have wrapped their fates around data analytics in an even tighter embrace as competition intensifies and the drive for greater innovation becomes a top priority. The year ahead promises to get even more interesting, especially for data managers and professionals. Leading experts in the field have witnessed a number of data trends emerge in 2016, and now see new developments coming into view for 2017.
Posted January 03, 2017
As enterprises accelerate their movement of data into the cloud, a slew of new challenges are presenting themselves on the security front. For users of external or public cloud services, the risks are well understood. However, private and hybrid clouds are not immune to security vulnerabilities either. Thanks to private clouds, data is proliferating across various parts of the enterprise, along with the potential for insider abuse, according to a new Unisphere Research report.
Posted January 03, 2017
Trend-Setting Products in Data and Information Management for 2017
Posted December 07, 2016
New Big Data Sourcebook Examines the Unfolding Big Data Era
Posted December 01, 2016
IT operations teams have been furiously preparing for this year's holiday season - the retail industry's busiest time of the year for web traffic. Here is a checklist of the key factors IT operations teams need to consider to ensure their IT infrastructure is ready now - and stays that way throughout the shopping season.
Posted December 01, 2016
It is not uncommon for a medium-to-large company to have 50 or more different security technologies in place. While fiscally inefficient, this approach has been somewhat effective up to this point in dealing with the types of attacks launched against it. But the threat landscape is currently changing more rapidly than ever, forcing businesses to shift to a more forward-thinking security model.
Posted December 01, 2016
By now it's well documented that employees will take IT tasks into their own hands when IT cannot give them the support they need, and when they need it. The phenomenon is ubiquitous and persistent, even to the point that it's been dubbed "shadow IT." Gartner recently noted that by 2020, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.
Posted December 01, 2016
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) calls it "The Treacherous Twelve." Others have called it the Dirty Dozen. But by whatever name, this is the list to know if you have concerns about security in the public cloud. To be honest, much is being done to address the items on this list. In fact, some predict that in a few years' time the public cloud may be more secure than private ones—and certainly more than traditional networks. Imagine, even, the possibility of security being the reason to go to—rather than shun—the public cloud.
Posted November 02, 2016
In the age of big data, efficiently managing relational databases, particularly SQL Server, may be the single most important issue facing a growing number of CIOs and data center managers. Throughout the enterprise IT community, and in the world of big data in particular, SQL Server is on a tear. Gartner projects that the market for relational database management systems will grow to $40 billion by 2018, with expanding instances of SQL Server growing nearly as fast as the big data opportunities they are expected to manage.
Posted November 02, 2016
Running databases both on premises and in a public cloud is increasingly becoming the answer to many of the headaches that database administrators and developers alike run into when working on their organization's databases. Most organizations originally favored private clouds, allowing their staff members to spin up private instances whenever needed, but public cloud providers and cloud database vendors now offer serious alternatives that make a good case for DBaaS.
Posted November 02, 2016
Scaling Data Integration Across Hybrid Environments in a Big Data World
Posted November 02, 2016
One hundred-fifty million people use Snapchat every day. Moreover, the playing field for mobile apps is much broader than MapQuest or Pokémon GO, the free-to-play, location-based augmented reality game for iOS and Android devices, which became so wildly popular this summer that there were reports of it causing some players to walk blindly off a cliff and others into traffic. To adequately manage this unprecedented level of capacity, data centers need to up their compute, storage, and memory capabilities.
Posted October 24, 2016
Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are at the top of corporate agendas this year, and with good reason. The competitive environment is intense, and business leaders are demanding they have access to greater insights about their customers, markets, and internal operations to make better and faster decisions—often in real time. There have also been dramatic changes with BI and analytics tools and platforms. The three Cs—cloud, consolidation, and collaboration—are elevating BI and analytics to new heights within enterprises and gaining newfound respect at the highest levels.
Posted October 24, 2016
Almost all database workloads are now (or eventually will be) virtualized. High availability (HA) clusters using virtual servers provide the application protection needed to satisfy even the most demanding service-level agreements (SLAs). Configuring the shared storage needed for HA in VMware can present challenges to creating these clusters and therefore satisfying SLAs.
Posted October 07, 2016
Big Data Means Big Transformation
Posted October 07, 2016
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are revolutionizing the way we share data and carry a huge charter to improve our banking, shopping, transportation, patient, and individual care and safety, to name a just a few. The mission is admirable, but with thousands of devices flooding the market, the lack of standards and multitude of security deficiencies are creating an on-ramp to corporate, government, and private networks that is wide open to cyberattacks.
Posted October 07, 2016