The year ahead is filled with a lot of new hardware and software releases, Windows 8 being one of the biggest.
This is one of the exciting elements of the I.T. industry; it’s changing constantly, rapidly and radically. It keeps you engaged, interested and learning. This is also one of the curses of the industry, no sooner is your system running with the precision of a Rolex watch or you’ve nailed that programming framework than change comes. The driver for this change is sometime just newer or better technology, but ultimately it’s driven by competition and business pressures.
We live in an increasingly competitive world and one of the advantages and differentiators a business has is the technology it uses, the efficiencies it can bring and the speed it can be delivered.
It is complex, we don’t always get the luxury to sit back and weigh up all the options. Here I’ll outline five simple guidelines to narrow down your choices and clarify your goals.
This sounds simple but you need to break down what you want to achieve into Short Term Goals (6 – 18 months) and Medium Term (18 months – 3 years) and Long Term (3 – 5 years). Anything in excess of this is really aspirational, since Moore’s law seems to hold for all aspects of our industry it is very difficult to reliably foresee the technology trends 5 years or more out.
We are all constrained by budgets, resources and management. Sometimes we have the budget and the resources but management buy in is not there. Other times we have the budget but not enough resources. Therefore it can be good to start on something small and be successful, to enable you to move on to bigger challenges. Ultimately you want to under promise and over perform.
It is a fact that we all like to think we can take on everything and please everybody. This is patently not possible. Every change coming down the tracks is not always practical. There may be many good reasons why this change should be implemented, but equally why it shouldn’t.
Change is challenging, rewarding and fun. It is a chance to increase your knowledge to make a contribution to you and your organisation. So don’t be overwhelmed, take a deep breath and start investing in yourself. Remember, keeping your skills current, keeps you current.
If humans didn’t embrace change, if we didn’t strive to learn and improve our world we probably would still be roaming across the Serengeti. Change brings opportunity, embrace it.
Over the next few months we are going to see some big developments, with new Operating Systems and updates coming from all the main vendors. Windows 8 is one very exciting update, bringing with it the potential of many new hardware form factors, the ability to integrate with technology like the Kinect sensor and seamlessly share content with all these devices through the cloud on Windows Azure. This all makes for a wonderful time of change and great opportunity.
David Reichental, Senior Software Engineer with Avida
Details are here.
Enjoy explaining to your boss why you think VMware is better!
Held annually on January 28th, Data Privacy Day (DPD) aims to increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues among consumers, organizations, and government officials. DPD helps industry, academia, and advocates to highlight consumer privacy efforts.
Microsoft commissioned some great research that included 500 Irish Adults and 500 Irish Children.
The results are very interesting – and are summarised in a neat little video.
As are the associated resources that are published along with the survey.
Take Charge of Your Online Reputation is a really good two pager that highlights what the problem is and what you can do about it.
So, let’s all spend some time this Saturday thinking about the data privacy issues that affect us. If you’ve got kids online, then they really need a helping hand.
The following list is from our complementary monthly 'Security Chronicles' publicaton available to enterprise customers.
And not free, but well worth knowing about is our enterprise anti-malware solution that is managed through System Center Configuration Manager. Many customers have recently gained access to this as it is now part of our Core CAL license.
Be safe out there!
Hyper-V Immersion
More and more customers are turning to Hyper-V as their first choice for virtualisation.
Come along and find out why; Hyper-V has grown up a lot over the last three years and now includes the core functionality you need to meet your business and technical requirements.
This session is a unique presentation that builds on your existing experience with virtualisation (regardless of hypervisor) and will equip you with up to date skills through in-depth, advanced, real world training that is not available anywhere else!
As a standalone, one day immersion into Hyper-V or as the first step towards certification from Microsoft Ireland, this is a not to miss opportunity!
Agenda
Presenters: Aidan Finn (MicroWarehouse) and Dave Northey (Microsoft Ireland)
Audience: Infrastructure Specialists, IT Decision Makers, IT Generalists, IT Implementers, Administrators, Consultants, Technical Support.
Timing: We will run the workshop from 9.30am until 5.00pm - please aim to be there for 9:00 for registration, tea & coffee.
Location: BMC Titanic Quarter Campus is located in central Belfast on the banks of the River Lagan, within walking distance of the City Centre. The Campus can be easily accessed by foot, road and rail. Parking is available in the basement carpark for a fee of £1 per hour.
Registration: http://hypervimmersion.eventbrite.com/
See you on the 7th
I would like to invite you to attend this Private Cloud online event
The definition, business value, and technology benefits of the "the cloud" have been hotly debated in recent months. Most agree that cloud computing can accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and increase business agility in the market. In 2012, cloud computing will transition from hype and discussion, to part of every enterprise's reality, and IT is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation and help business reap the benefits of cloud computing. To help you get real-world answers, I'd like to invite you to an interactive virtual event designed to help you explore your cloud options. Plus, you'll be among the first to hear the latest private cloud news from Microsoft.
Transforming IT with Microsoft Private Cloud Tuesday 17 January 2012 16:30-18:30 (Ireland Time)
Here's what we have planned:
• Hear from other senior IT professionals about how cloud computing can help you gain maximum competitive advantage with minimal risk.
• Learn about Microsoft cloud offerings, including private, public, and hybrid cloud models.
• Experience Microsoft private cloud solutions through the Microsoft Technology Centre.
Best regards,
“For ‘Windows’? Which versions?”
Pretty much every supported version of Windows is impacted**, so read on. This is important.
Today we released MS11-100, addressing a newly disclosed denial-of-service vulnerability affecting several vendors’ Web application platforms, including Microsoft’s ASP.NET. Yesterday, we posted an SRD blog describing the vulnerability and the detection and workaround opportunities. With this blog post, we’d like to update you on the following topics:
Why is this bulletin rated “Critical” for a Denial-of-Service vulnerability?
Yesterday evening, we published an Advanced Notification alerting customers to a new out-of-band security update planned to be released today. The notification listed the update as addressing a Critical Elevation-of-Privilege vulnerability, leading to several questions from customers who expected the bulletin addressing a Denial-of-Service vulnerability to be rated Important.
Before hearing about this vulnerability, we had planned to release a .NET security update addressing three vulnerabilities, one of which was a Critical elevation-of-privilege vulnerability. When this vulnerability notification arrived a few weeks ago, the ASP.NET team included the fix into the update already being developed and tested. So the bulletin today addresses four vulnerabilities, one of which is the ASP.NET Denial-of-Service vulnerability presented yesterday.
You can read more about the other vulnerabilities in the Security Bulletin and we also invite you to join us for a webcast at 1:00 p.m. PST today (Dec 29) where we will describe the vulnerabilities and answer your questions live “on the air.” You can sign up for the webcast here.
The Big Red Cloud Powered By
Windows Azure
Microsoft’s Karl O’Leary and Big Red Cloud MD Marc O’Dwyer
You can keep your green diesel, your biofuel and your sunflower oil powered by Windows Azure is the next transport revolution, well for data transport anyway.
Keep an eye out for the new range of Fiat 500 cars that Big Red Cloud are driving throughout the country promoting their Azure based solution for managing accounts and payroll.
Watch Marc O’Dwyer talk about moving to Azure
If your company uses Azure and you want some “Powered by Azure” decals for your business’ fleet of cars or vans contact me
Diarmuid
And this week’s winners are
David Carr and John Kestner
The Microsoft Ireland Geek of the Week award celebrates those people who impressed us with technology, of any kind. The inaugural award has gone to two MIT alums have hit upon a simple but brilliant solution to enhance how we look after our homes. “Twine” is a block of rubber that can fit in the palm and has a WiFi node and sensors for motion and temperature
Users can configure Twine to monitor an event and then notify them when it occurs. So if your basement floods a moisture sensor attached to a twine block can let you know that you might need your wellies. If you want to know when your washing machine has finished its cycle, a block on top of your washing machine could tell you when it has finished vibrating.
The possibilities seem close to limitless as the block has a space to connect a breakout board for those willing and able to make their own sensors. Carr and Kestner have received nearly US$350,000 of funding on kickstart, ten times what they were seeking initially.
So what do you make of their invention? Are there any good uses it could be put to in your home or office? How could their functions be integrated with Microsoft products?
This week’s other nominees:
Big Red Book
Leap Card
Every week we are giving anyone nominates a geek a chance to win an 8GB Microsoft memory stick. To nominate for next week’s geek(s) so comment below or tweet @IEITPRO. It can be anyone you feel is worthy of the title, including co-workers or someone you came across on the net. Spread the word fellow geeks!
Safefood 360 is a niche compliance software solution which is built using the ASP.Net MVC framework and leverages the Microsoft Windows Azure platform. Although just launched in early 2011 it is being used by companies in over 50 countries around the world. It helps food manufacturing businesses comply with ever increasing food safety legislation which aims to improve the safety and quality of the world’s food supply.
When we embarked on the project to build Safefood 360 in 2009 we looked closely at several hosting platforms including; traditional data centre hosting, Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Google App Engine and even Force.com. We were keen to find a low maintenance hosting solution as we had spent enough years with our heads stuck in Servers and DB’s and felt that it was time to jump on the PaaS bandwagon. Both Force.com and the Google App engine would have required developing our solution in an unfamiliar codebase so they were ruled out relatively quickly. This left us with AWS, private hosting or Azure. After careful research, and even though it was new at the time, we decided upon Windows Azure because it allowed us to develop our application in a familiar environment, with minimal configuration and commissioning of servers/databases and with the ability to scale the application quickly in line with increasing demand.
Safefood 360 is now live and takes advantage of an elastic web/worker role configuration across multiple datacentres utilising Azure Tables for logging & audit data and Blob storage for documents and other static objects. SQL Azure serves the relational database and we are currently in the process of building out our reporting on top of SQL Azure Reporting Services. Looking back we are happy with the decision we made and bar a very slight hiccup in April there has been no downtime whatsoever and performance is consistently very good. The monthly cost is predictable and can be easily scrutinised with granular itemised billing. Over other options at the time we are confident that we have saved money on both the operational costs associated with the Azure platform and the reduced human costs associated with quick deployments and minimal configuration.