Tech Review for November 2011

Dear friends, associates and CTOvision.com blog readers,

This note provides a recap of writing and tech activities from October 2011.

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November in Enterprise Technology

November was an important month for Big Data as it marked this year’s Hadoop World. We will be providing reports from the conference throughout December so please stay tuned for more on this important topic. Hadoop World was a great venue for us to present results from the Government Big Data Solutions Award and Bob Gourley provided a presentation there on that topic. This award highlighted achievements in government services using Big Data solutions. The winner this year was GSA’s USAsearch, which provides search and suggestion services as well as analytical tools for over 500 government sites. A special mention went out to the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs for their Consular Consolidated Database, which collects, searches, and analyses travel documents for better service and security.

In other Hadoop news, Microsoft displayed its agility when it decided to scrap its proprietary Big Data platform to focus on the open source software. They did this because, as Bob Gourley explained in an interview, Hadoop is a revolution in open source solutions. With such further adoption of Hadoop, we explained why today’s project managers should start with Hadoop for their Big Data problems. We also summarized Tim O’Reilly’s post which highlighted the 7 most powerful data scientists in the world. This month also marked the first in a series of posts about McKinsey’s great new report on Big Data.

Another issue our readers care about is cybersecurity, which we covered extensively in November. We continued our series on Enterprise Security, exploring the myths and realities of cloud security, how an enterprise can never be 100% secure, and the effects of changes to the PC and mobile market. A special summary of our Enterprise Security series with HP can be found here. We highlighted federal accomplishments in cyber security with posts on the first ever grid security exercise by NERC and GSA’s Managed Trusted Internet Service Protocol. We also provided context to some major cybersecurity incidents such as the false alarm about the cyber attack on an Illinois water plant and the investigation into how information on every Israeli citizen was leaked online and how America can avoid a similar disaster.

We also invited our readers to a webinar by Microsoft’s Michael Howard, author of The Security Development Lifecycle. The webinar will be hosted by FedCyber.com from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM on Friday, December 16 and will focus on what federal CIOs should know about the security development lifecycle methadology. You can register for the webinar here.

Mobile is another topic of great interest to CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and tech consumers, so we made sure to provide plenty of news, analysis, and context. This month we covered iOS 5, Android 4.0, the Asus Transformer Prime, the Kindle Fire, Fixmo’s Mobile Risk Management, Adobe’s decision to drop development of Flash for mobile devices, and competing mobile ecosystems.

As always, this month we highlighted some disruptive technology in a two-part post on virtual reality here and continued here, and covered the launch of Republic Wireless, which offers unlimited text, talk, and data through Wi-Fi. In social media, we wrote about exciting new features and capabilities on WayIn and the community building platform Nextdoor. We also discussed the effects of cloud computing on the healthcare industry. Overall, we concluded that 2012 would be a year full of IT disruptions.

More about the blog

CTOvision.com is the blog with articles by Bob Gourley, Ryan Kamauff, Alex Olesker, Dillon Behr, Bryan Halfpap, Adam Elkus and Chris Barnes. We are all members of the firm Crucial Point LLC.

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