As mobile has pushed deeper into enterprises, there is a growing recognition that it may be possible to run significant parts of businesses from relatively small devices. While mobile devices may not be ready to run entire enterprises, in many cases, they certainly can run more limited functions.
Posted April 18, 2017
Today's enterprise database environments are growing in size and complexity, fueled by rising data volumes and new business demands. Many databases that have been at the heart of existing enterprises to power mission-critical applications are now being positioned to support new Digital Native businesses. As a result, 24x7 high availability is no longer a luxury for select applications; it's a necessity for the bulk of the business—many organizations can no longer afford downtime in their data environments—even for a minute.
Posted April 18, 2017
Over the past 5 years, the volume of data that businesses use to stay relevant and operational has exponentially increased, and shows no signs of slowing. Within this vast quantity of data, the answers to critical business questions lie dormant, waiting to be accessed. Who are the most valuable customers? What are they buying? How can I get them to purchase more from me, and how can I find more like them?
Posted April 07, 2017
While not the most media-hyped technology, databases are certainly one of the most crucial when it comes to our always-online, always-connected society. Databases power not just the applications and websites we use every day, but the businesses that generate revenue and fuel the economy. The internet relies on functioning and well-performing databases to operate.
Posted April 07, 2017
"Temporality" is a term that database managers know well, but it may be a new one for business managers. That has to change, as the temporality your database supports—or, how it handles time—could be the difference between whether or not the business will increase revenue, pay a fine, or identify new opportunities. Especially important in this regard is "bitemporality," which is the ability to examine data across different points in time.
Posted April 07, 2017
COLLABORATE 17 Starts April 2 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Posted March 17, 2017
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has represented the voice of data technologists and professionals for more than 20 years, and we are excited about how our community continues to grow and focus on peer-to-peer education and know-how. With that focus we are excited for our premier yearly event: COLLABORATE 17 - IOUG Forum.
Posted March 17, 2017
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