Monthly Archives: August 2011
Does Asia Get IT?
Tony Young, CIO in Hong Kong
I recently returned from China and Hong Kong after having met with several CIOs, media and analysts, as well as delivering keynotes focused on customer centricity. When I return to the US after traveling, I’m often asked about the state of IT in the geography I was just in. I’ve been to both China and Hong Kong several times over the past few years, and from my perspective, IT is maturing at a very rapid pace in that region.
During prior trips to Asia, it felt like the old days of data processing. I would speak with senior IT leaders and they were more concerned with the “blocking and tackling” of IT, and not looking at how IT can provide a strategic competitive advantage. Specifically in China, IT leadership was comfortable scaling by applying people to the problem rather than using commercial software. (more…)
Hadoop Toolbox: Part 5 of Hadoop Series
Many organizations will mix and match individual Apache projects and sub-projects using Apache Hadoop’s loosely coupled architecture. This Hadoop toolbox provides a powerful set of tools and capabilities, but it does have some important limitations that can require a platform approach to address.
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) combines storage and processing in each data node. With the HDFS file system, you can add new files or append to existing files, but not replace files without use of a new filename. The append capability works well for adding new time-stamped logs as they come in, but can complicate storage of structured files. (more…)
Dynamic Data Masking Combats Daunting Data Breach Risks
It seems like every day a new data breach splashes across the news. As consumers, patients, customers and social networkers many of us have a plethora of information stored in various databases well outside our control. Data security officers, DBAs and other security specialists continue to do their best to educate, protect and anticipate both internal and external threats. But … the breaches continue and so do their associated costs. There are many technologies from encryption to tokenization to database activity monitoring (DAM) to data loss prevention (DLP).
Informatica just released a new option to the mix: dynamic data masking. The technology came into the company through the acquisition of ActiveBase. Since then I’ve had a number of people ask me if Informatica Dynamic Data Masking will complement or replace an organization’s existing data security technologies.
Informatica Announces Big Data Cloud Integration
This week a milestone was announced for Informatica Cloud – the multi-tenant data integration service now surpasses 20 billion cloud data transactions and three million cloud data integration jobs per month. What does this mean, you ask? Simply visit Trust.InformaticaCloud.com/status and take a look for yourself. You’ll not only see real-time status of the on-demand service, you’ll see how many integration jobs and and transactions are being processed every day. (more…)
Can Big Data Re-energize Our Sluggish Economy?
A couple of months back, the McKinsey Global Institute published a defining paper on the role of Big Data in business. What I like about this particular report is not that it gnashes teeth about the huge volumes of Big Data and how we are going to manage and store it – very legitimate concerns at this point, by the way – but what kinds of opportunities for innovation and business growth Big Data represents. And the opportunities far outweigh any costs for harnessing or taming Big Data.
Streaming Data Across The WAN – Important Design Considerations
Many companies today must send streaming data across the globe, quickly, which often means use of a shared resource: a WAN. Bandwidth for most WANs is usually restricted to something like 100Mb/sec, or even 10Mb/sec, which is often much slower than the high-speed LANs connected to either side of the WAN. This is especially true in the capital markets where ultra low latency messaging is key.
A link speed mismatch like this can present a problem. Say you’re running a 10Gb Ethernet LAN in New York, and sending data to London and Singapore over a 100Mb WAN link. While your streaming market data has an aggregate rate well below 100Mb, the spikes are many multiples of that aggregate rate. Those spikes are where your problems can begin. (more…)
When Is A Customer Not A Customer?
Here are the two pieces of our current puzzle: we have multiple meanings for the term “customer” but we want a single view of whatever that term means. To address this Zen-like conundrum we have to go beyond our context and think differently about the end, not the means. Here are two ideas to drill into: entity vs. role and semantic differentiation. (more…)
Anatomy Of A New Swaps Infrastructure
A post from the TABB Group
For the biggest swaps dealers, creation of their new OTC derivatives infrastructure will include rebuilding existing platforms, buying key elements from technology providers, leveraging technology already in place in other asset classes and, of course, building new platforms from scratch. This is not a buy-versus-build decision—it’s a careful balancing act of process and technology decisions to create a best-of-breed infrastructure. (more…)
Dating With Data: Part 4 In Hadoop Series
eHarmony, an online dating service, uses Hadoop processing and the Hive data warehouse for analytics to match singles based on each individual’s “29 Dimensions® of Compatibility”, per a a June 2011 press release by eHarmony and one its suppliers, SeaMicro. According to eHarmony, an average of 542 eHarmony members marry daily in the United States. (more…)
Cloud Integration For The Insurance Industry
Today Informatica announced that, “an increasing number of insurance companies rely on Informatica to address their unique challenges of integrating disparate data from a multitude of channels including adjusters, brokers, service providers, underwriters and other related parties.” I thought that two points were worth highlighting here:
- The wide adoption of cloud-based CRM in the insurance industry. Just look at some of the customers highlighted by salesforce.com on their website.
- The wide adoption of cloud-based data integration in this industry. (more…)
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