CIO2CIO Blog

The Big Challenge of Massive Data

Data is flowing into every corner of the global economy today; companies large and small produce massive volumes of transactional data and capture information about their customers, suppliers, and operations while millions of networked sensors embedded in devices such as energy meters, automobiles, and industrial machines sense, create, and communicate data in the age of the Internet of Things. Social media sites, smartphones, PCs and laptops have allowed billions of individuals around the world to contribute to the amount of data available. Additionally, the growing volume of multimedia content has played a major role in the exponential growth of data volumes.

Researchers have gathered strong evidence that these massive volumes of data can play a significant economic role to the benefit not only of private commerce but also of national economies and their citizens. Hence, the ability to capture, store, aggregate, and combine data and then use the results to perform deep analyses has become ever more essential for businesses and governments as cloud computing continue to lower the cost of storing data and the capabilities of sophisticated analytics software increase by the day.

The Various Approaches to BI

It is no secret that organizations that make inefficient use of their resources are going to find themselves struggling to hold on to market share and business viability. One of your potential resources is that data collected and stored by your operational systems, BI can turn this data into information that supports the decision making process in your organization. A recent CIO2CIO poll reveals that the majority of business decisions are still based on intuition rather than information.

But CIOs planning for business intelligence projects are often facing the dilemma of which direction to take. Users often have their own preferences or preconceived ideas; existing relationships with vendors may sometimes limit your choices while the need for standardization within IT could eliminate new entrants to your environment. Navigating your decision tree and trying to find the most suitable solution that balances some quick wins with long term viability is not easy.

The Growing Denial of Service Threat

Most CIOs already know that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems acting under the control of a hacker attack and overwhelm a single target website, thereby causing it to become too busy to respond to its intended users or customers.
In a typical DDoS attack, a hacker (or a cracker) begins by exploiting vulnerability in one computer system and making it the DDoS master. From that master system the intruder identifies and communicates with other systems that can be compromised. The intruder loads cracking tools available on the Internet on multiple -- sometimes thousands of -- compromised systems. With a single command, the intruder instructs the controlled machines to launch flood attacks against a specified target inundating it with requests. The target becomes too busy to respond to its intended audience and hence this style of attacks is called denial of service. It must be noted that the hacker never really tampers with the target system or website itself; he or she simply causes it to be too busy.
While the media tends to focus on the target of DDoS attacks as the victim, in reality there are many victims in a DDoS attack, the final target as well as the systems controlled by the intruder. Although the owners of compromised computers are usually unaware that their computers have been compromised, they are likely to suffer because performance degradation.

HP Acquisition Targets

This article was originally featured on Software Advice, a free online resource that provides mrp system comparisons. You can view the original article on the Software Advice blog at HP Mergers & Acquisitions: Who's Next?

By design or by chance, HP is poised to become the world’s most complete supplier of end to end IT infrastructure and business software. The addition of 3Par and Palm extends the firm’s range from high-end storage solutions down to a complete line of handhelds and smart phones. What is missing is software to tie it all together. Figure 1, Acquisition History, shows HP’s buying spree over the last decade.

The IBM Jeopardy Challenge, Man vs. Machine

In 2007, IBM scientist David Ferrucci and his team embarked on the challenge of building a computer that could beat the best players of the popular US TV quiz show Jeopardy!, a 25 year old trivia game in which contestants are given clues in categories ranging from academic subjects to pop culture and must ring in with responses that are in the form of questions.

In some sense, the project was a follow-up to Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Although a TV quiz show may seem to lack the gravitas of the classic game of chess, the task was in many ways much harder. It wasn’t just that the computer had to master straightforward language, it had to master humor, nuance, puns, allusions, and slang—a verbal complexity well beyond the reach of most computer programs. Meeting that challenge was about much more than just a Jeopardy! championship. The work of Ferrucci and his team illuminates both the great potential and the severe limitations of current computer intelligence—as well as the capacities of the human mind. Although the machine they created was ultimately dubbed “Watson” (in honor of IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson), to the team that painstakingly constructed it, the game-playing computer was known as Blue J.