Amazon Web Services boosts capabilities for companies
Amazon Web Services will introduce new capabilities for enterprises on Thursday, including identity federation and support for private network connections to AWS.
Its new Direct Connect service allows enterprises to establish a direct connection to Amazon from their data center or colocation provider. They'll be able to run a private line to one of several Direct Connect locations planned around the world, starting with one operated by Equinix in Virginia. AWS' Virginia data center is connected to that facility.
A direct connection will allow enterprises to control the speed of their connection to Amazon. "If they provision a fat pipe to the AWS cloud, they'll have high throughput," said Adam Selipsky, a vice president with AWS. "It should cut down on latency and unpredictability, given that it's their pipe and they're controlling what and how much goes through it." Read more...
Researcher follows RSA hacking trail to China
Malware used in the attack against RSA Security earlier this year was controlled from China, a well-known botnet researcher said Wednesday.
Joe Stewart, director of malware research for Dell SecureWorks, traced the command-and-control (C&C) servers used to oversee the RSA attack to networks in Beijing and Shanghai.
"This gives us the where, but not the who," said Stewart when asked whether his work had come up with clues about the attack's architects.
In mid-March, RSA confirmed that it had been targeted by hackers who had breached its network defenses and stole proprietary information. Although RSA has never detailed what was stolen, it has admitted that information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products was part of the haul. Read more...
Cloud computing 2.0: Top CIO tips for dealing with the next stage
Utility computing has switched quickly from hype to reality, with increasing numbers of organisations moving infrastructures, platforms and even applications to the cloud.
What will be some of the next frontiers for on-demand technology and how can IT leaders prepare for the inevitable shift to cloud computing? Here, IT leaders discuss the future shape of the cloud and present their top tips for dealing with the next generation of on-demand IT.
Tip 1. Niche providers will fill the gaps
easyJet CIO Trevor Didcock is already making use of the cloud. He expects relationships with third parties to develop in the future, particularly with specialist providers that will help CIOs safely make the most of on-demand computing.
"There's a tendency to think that implementing the cloud means you have dealt with a concern and that it's become someone else's problem. But the cloud can increase security risks because you're more dependent on partners. You have to audit your external providers to ensure they're managing your data correctly," he says. Read more...
Facebook buys ebook startup
Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press – a digital book publisher – for an undisclosed sum.
The startup was co-founded by a former Apple employee, Mike Matas, who designed UIs and artwork for the company's Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad products.
"Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook," said the company in a statement on its website. Read more...
Rogue character space tripped Scottish exam results
A rogue space in the date field caused almost 30,000 Scottish students to get their exam results a day early, as Excel versions clashed and human checking fell down.
The texts telling students their Higher results (the Scottish equivalent of A-Levels) were supposed to go out Thursday morning, having been preloaded onto the automated systems at text-specialist AQL, as a CSV export of an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was a space which somehow got appended to the dates, causing Excel to export it as a text field, in quotes, which got rejected by the automated system which then substituted the default setting: the current date. Read more...
Healthcare industry leads market in IT hiring
Flush with federal funds and under the gun of federal regulatory deadlines, the healthcare industry is leading the market in IT jobs creation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics job placement services.
The bureau indicated that IT jobs in healthcare are expected to grow by 20% annually through 2018, "much faster than average." There are currently 176,090 healthcare IT jobs, according to the agency.
Since November 2009, healthcare IT positions have increased 67%, according to online job search engine SimplyHired.com, which lists 7,200 open healthcare IT positions out of 4.9 million jobs on its website.
Leading the pack from a percentage of increase perspective are CIO and CTO positions, according to Dion Lim, CEO of SimplyHired.com. Since 2009, CIO positions in the healthcare field have increased 101% (more than 200 current job listings) and chief technology officer positions have increased 127% (about 100 job listings). Read more...
The end of both the desktop OS and mobile OS is upon us
Investment banking firm Jefferies stated the obvious this week when it issued a report predicting that iOS and Mac OS X will be one operating system by 2016. Nearly a year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that was his goal in what I playfully dubbed his MiOS strategy. Jobs had just previewed Mac OS X Lion, touting the user interface capabilities it was borrowing from iOS. The forthcoming iOS 5 also takes some UI concepts first released in Lion, but as I'm under NDA with Apple, I can't tell you which ones.
iOS is based on a subset of Mac OS X, so in a very real sense, they always have been the same operating system. As horsepower has improved in mobile devices, Apple has enlarged iOS to take on more of what the desktop Mac OS X could handle, such as more multitasking and more complex graphics and video processing. At the same time, Apple has been steadily pushing gesture-based peripherals -- not just its laptops' gesture-capable touchpads, but also its Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad that bring gesture savvy to any Mac -- in a gentle but persistent reeducation of its Mac users. Read more...
How a business-focused approach to SOA can reap great rewards
If you listen to industry discussion of SOA (service-oriented architecture), you are likely to get the impression that SOA is best thought of as a technical approach for application integration. The reality is that SOA is much more. According to Forrester's Q1 2011 Global Application Architecture, Design, And Portfolios -- SOA And Beyond Online Survey, organizations that use SOA for strategic business transformation must be on to something because they are much more satisfied with SOA than those that do not use SOA for strategic business transformation. According to the survey, all 16 respondents who reported strategic business use of SOA are satisfied enough to expand their use of SOA. By contrast, 7 of 27 respondents without a strategic business focus with SOA are struggling or cutting back on SOA.
A business-focused approach begins with SOA business services, which embody major business units of work -- transactions and queries such as submit order, retrieve customer lifetime value, or schedule production run -- inside clearly-defined software interfaces that are accessible when and where needed by any employee, process, customer, or business partner. Read more...
Google exec attacks ‘hostile’ patent campaign against Android
Google's chief legal officer Wednesday issued a stinging rebuke of what he called "bogus patent" attacks on the Android operating system by major competitors like Apple, Oracle and Microsoft.
"Android's success has yielded ... a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents," wrote David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, in a blog post on the company's Web site.
Drummond bristled about moves by major firms to "band together" to acquire patents held by struggling firms, citing a successful $4.5 billion bid by Microsoft, Apple and others in June to acquire 600 patents from Nortel.
He suggested Microsoft and Apple may contend that Android infringes on these "dubious" patents, forcing Google to pay damages or license fees that would raise the costs of smartphones. Read more...
Take cyberthreats seriously, says counterterrorism expert
Warnings about emerging cyberthreats shouldn't be treated with the same skepticism that many government officials showed toward the alarms sounded prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, warned a leading counterterrorism at the BlackHat security conference here Wednesday.
Though many security experts agree that future conflicts will likely be fought in cyberspace, military and government officials have shown a hesitancy to act until they see a validation of the threats, said Cofer Black, former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Read more...