News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
Paranoia is good when it comes to cyber-security...or is it? Are we making ourselves paranoid? Like many computer security professionals, I tend to closely follow technology and security news, even though its often discouraging and depressing. It is routine to see articles disclosing general information about recent attacks and criminal successes (and sometimes criminal captures). I suppose that at this point it is fairly common to find "shocking" … [Read more...]
These days we hear a lot of terms thrown about like the “Consumerization of IT” and “Bring your own device” (BYOD), and “Network health”. This is because corporations are starting to warm up to the idea that maybe if they let you bring in your personal computing devices such as smartphones and tablets, they won’t have to pay to give you one. The flip-side of letting employees bring their consumer devices into the corporate fold is that … [Read more...]
What could you do if you had access to all of twitter all at once? What if you combined that with 75 million other data feeds? And combined it with an easy-to-use-tool and impressive visuals? What if it were a service software? That’s exactly what the Social Media Command Center from InTTENSITY is. It’s your social media and Internet war room -- replete with maps, calenders, lists of events and people. Its primary purpose: to allow users to … [Read more...]
Android is a great mobile computing platform. It’s extensible, fairly easy-to-use (considering its plethora of features), has a great application store with hundreds of thousands of applications, and connects back with everything in Google so that all of Google’s information and services are at the users fingertip. For developers, it’s a very extendable platform which is able to integrate code from a variety of languages, run C programs, and deploy … [Read more...]
During the recent GEOINT conference I spoke with SGI and Cloudera about the meaning of their recent announcement. They just announced a strategic agreement where SGI will ship Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise Management Suite factory installed on SGI Hadoop Clusters. Although this is good news for both companies there is better news for users of Apache Hadoop. Benchmarking of this Cloudera CDH/SGI platform … [Read more...]
A recent IDG interview of Bob Gourley of Crucial Point and Andrzej Kawalec of HP delved into the problem of the "traditional" method of enterprise security, a paradigm under severe challenge. We can sum up the traditional approach as less a certain tactic, technique, technology, or policy than a way of viewing the world. As Gourley has noted, traditional enterprise security can be characterized with one of these bullets: Primarily exists below … [Read more...]
As the various intelligence agencies, computer security companies, and hackers prepare for the week of convention carnage that is Blackhat (Going on now), Defcon, and BSidesLV, it's important to remember how easy it is for security professionals to end up on the dreaded "wall of sheep" (a very public listing of usernames and partially-redacted passwords pilfered from the network and displayed to all). It's not considered a surprise to get hacked and … [Read more...]
It’s late Monday morning when your computer security department notices that a suspicious message has been emailed to most of the email addresses at your company. It contains a malicious PDF that exploits a new vulnerability that came out over the weekend. The patch hasn’t been applied to the company workstations yet, and it’s too little, too late by the time the email goes out telling everyone not to click on the links. By the time inboxes are … [Read more...]
The CTOVision.com Monthly Tech Review provides a recap of the hottest technology trends in industry and government. You can sign up using the form below. We appreciate our subscribers and will never sell your e-mail. Our newsletter production system gives you easy ways to put your subscription on hold or unsubscribe if you desire. Please sign up and let us know what you think about our reporting and analysis. (We also produce the Government Big … [Read more...]
vPro is a suite of high-impact technology that has just begun to make its presence known in mainstream IT organizations. vPro can help you bring your organization's security structure into shape with features that make a dramatic positive difference. vPro technologies are implemented in the hardware and firmware of the Intel chipset in Intel Core 2 Duo computers and above (at the bottom of this post is a link to a list of vPro-enabled processors) … [Read more...]