Avoid Gobbledygook

Especially when reading the proposals and technical documents I came across a lot of Gobbledygook.

Some examples from the http://www.unfg.org/

"The relevant modules of the project are, at the inter-governmental level, mapped onto local non-donor-driven poverty reduction and sustainable growth strategies."

"In the context of improving the legal and regulatory framework, the Member States will develop inter-agency-coordinated administrative targeted policy implementation aimed at mitigating negative effects of globalization."

It is best to make things simple and written in plain English. The plain english campain website has more info: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

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Managing Data Center With Multiple Networks

In the world of mergers/acquisitions and consolidation, large application hosting companies are being formed by the merger of several small hosting providers. This leads to having a diverse networks connected & separated by multiple firewalls and DMZs.

The challenge here is to manage and standardize the whole of the data center into one consolidated view.

Possible Monitoring/management Solution Options:

1. Centralize Monitoring Solution which can see all the Assets using necessary policies on firewalls/proxy etc.,
==>Complex network management and simple administration of the management solution.
==>Additional Load on the WAN

2. Distributed Management solution on each network with a data consolidation to a central management repository
==>Management solution need to provide a data synchronization option and possible "time lag" between the view of local and central consoles.
==>Maintainability of the solution is complex but involve minimum changes on Network /Security policies.


An Ideal Data Center Management Solution product should provide ability to configure both the above options.

Service Oriented Analysis and Design

Currently the Business Process Modeling (BPM), Enterprise Architecture (EA) and the object oriented analysis and design (OOAD) being put together to make the overall life cycle of software architecture development into a service oriented analysis and design (SOAD)

The focus is to analyze the business from a service oriented perspective and get the business aligned, loosely coupled, coarse grained services identified and documented.

The complete SOA life cycle involves
Service Identification - Analysis
Service Specification - Design
Service Realization - Development & Testing
Service Operation - Implementation and Maintenance

The concepts come from Object Orientation but quickly getting adopted to "Service Orientation"

The life cycle is supported by the Service Governance and Service Security and other manageability aspects as the supporting "technical" SOA framework.

Application Performance Management

End user experience monitoring and management is becoming a key for the websites. As the "Software as Service" increases it is more important to mange the services in an end to end perspective. End to End performance monitoring and management have two primary methods.

Active or synthetic monitoring:
This will need a simulated user action recorded and played back from different geographies. One can install multiple hosts across the globe and run the simulated tests periodically to monitor and identify possible availability and performance problems with a web application.

This method can be used to identify common problems with the availability and detect any degradation of performance actively.

Disadvantage is one can only monitor the "predefined access paths" through the application. Also need to have the simulated "agent"s across the different geographies and modify the access paths as needed when the application changes.

Real end-user monitoring or passive monitoring:
This method involves mining the access logs of the application and analyzing the data to identify the performance problems. It can also be done using the "network sniffing" method. Whatever is the method used to get the real end-user access data to the application, this data is very valuable for business to analyze both the performance and the general usage patterns on the application.

As our focus is performance monitoring, the disadvantage is we will get to know the issue after it impacts the users.


There are several products available in the market to do both the active and passive application performance management and one should develop a correct strategy with a right combination of both methods to archive the required service levels with right balance.

A holistic strategy should also include diagnostic tools within the solution.

Thinking Tools

Thinking Tools? Yes. There are a few tools which can be used in organized thinking. I came across a many but trained and used the following few:

CEDAC: Cause and Effect Diagrams with addition of Cards this is a modification to the Fishbone diagram (a standard QC tool) by Dr Ryuji Fukuda. It is a very effective tool to get the ideas from all layers of the organization quickly and a wonderful aid to the divergent and convergent thinking technique. Has been very effective if used along with the other Fukuda techniques. (Ref. Building Organizational Fitness by the same author)

Six Thinking Hats: Edward de Bono's six thinking hats technique is very effective when conducting meetings involving people with varied interest. White, red, yellow, black, green and blue hats represent various aspects of a problem and they can be used in a suitable sequence within a meeting for pre-determined durations to channelise the thoughts of all the participants to the specific aspect of the discussion and finally summarizing the meeting with a blue hat.

Mind Maps: Tony Buzan's mind mapping technique uses colours, shapes, keywords in a multi channel thinking technique which will enhance memory and also bring a natural hierarchical thought process towards any problem.

Applying any one or more of the above techniques to the appropriate situations will surely yield better results than just going with the gut feel.

Data Security and Related Technologies

This post is my review of the technology available in the area of "Data Security" - Security in used in a context of access control and threat protection.

All the information technology is about making the right data available to the right user and the security means it should not be available to a wrong user. This is especially true for the sensitive and personal data stored on the IT assets.

The focus is on Oracle Technologies.

Virtual Private Database & Oracle Label security
Used to restrict regional/role-based access to the data using the data access policies or labels. A user with right role in right region can access their own data. They will not be able to see any other data, which they are not authorized to see.

Transparent Data Encryption – Disk level encryption
Used for Disk level encryption of data. Data is not stored in plain text on the disk, Prevents data visibility to some low level disk reading type attacks

DBMS_CRYPTO – Application Encryption
Application managed encryption. Only the application knows how to use the data.

Database Vault
Role separation and Insider threat.
Good for IT/DBA outsourcing. Protection from privileged users accessing the sensitive application data.

Data Masking or Scrambling
The internal development/test by masking sensitive data or provide the data to service providers for billing or telemarketing etc by scrambling sensitive data.

Satellite Scheduling & Genetic Algorithms

During the beginning of my career, I have spent approximately two years on a complex scheduling problem.

This link is a paper related to the original work: http://track.sfo.jaxa.jp/spaceops98/paper98/track2/2b002.pdf

Later, the same problem was analyzed and improved to use Genetic Algorithms by IIT professors. This link for the Genetic paper on the same subject: http://www.aiaa.org/Spaceops2004Archive/downloads/papers/SPACE2004sp-template00515F.pdf

After studying both the papers, I feel the original work has indeed used a "Genetic Algorithm"
!!

Data, Information & Knowledge

Data - a precise fact mostly numerical, used to be processed to carryout some calculations like the interest on a deposit or a loan, or the wages of an employee in an automated way during the beginning of the computer age. EDP departments of large businesses used to buy the computers and use them in the data processing.

Information and analysis of the underlying data for improving the business decisions is the advancement due to the availability of enormous amounts of past data collected by the data processing machines. The processed data further analyzed, aggregated, segmented and used to aid the business decisions. Decision support systems and OLAP have emerged out of this need.

Knowledge is to provide some latent patterns and inference from the analytical information. To relate two or more seemingly unrelated facts to arrive at a relation is known as knowledge. The computing industry now working on this type of business intelligence using several pattern recognition and mining techniques to take advantage over the competition.

Most of the processing capacity is used to outsmart the competition. The real business intelligence is not in computing capacity; it is intuition. Artificial can never be intelligence. Intelligence can never be Artificial.

The question is "Can New Knowledge come out of Computers?"

Cloud Computing & Virtual Software Appliances

Virtualization and Web Services merged together to form the new form of cloud computing.

Virtual hosts offered as service using a fully automated monitoring, management and provisioning are called as Cloud.

There is no publicly available service as of date, but Amazon Web services is coming up with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in this model.

Once stabilized the clouds with virtual software appliances should remove all the hassles of deployment & provisioning. - Hope the best!!

Infrastructure Lifecycle Management

The end to end IT infrastructure life cycle management includes the following:

1. Strategy
Covering the Portfolio & Financial Management
2. Design
Availability/Business Continuity/Capacity/Security Design
3. Transition
Change/Release/Configuration Management including provisioning and patching of technology stack
4. Operation
Incident/Problem Management involving the service monitoring and proactive management
5. Continual Improvement
Service Level Management and Improvement and Reporting

As per latest ITIL V3