Big Data
For big data technologies like Hadoop and Spark, complexity remains a major barrier for their adoption. BlueData’s software makes it easier to deploy big data infrastructure and applications. Today, BlueData is launching the latest release of its EPIC software platform, which introduces several security and other upgrades to provide a smoother Big-Data-as-a-Service experience. The latest release incorporates many features and functionality enhancements requested by BlueData’s customers across multiple industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, technology, telecommunications, energy, government, and education. Additional new features include more granular resource management controls, QoS-based allocation, performance optimizations, and quota enforcement for multi-tenant big data deployments. The enterprise version of BlueData’s platform now provides additional security and governance capabilities to meet enterprise-class auditing and regulatory compliance requirements.
In order to take full advantage of big data platforms, such as Hadoop and Spark, IT and analytics teams often require a new education for configuring systems and partition data to maximize processing speeds. TechTarget examines the challenges some businesses have encountered when deploying Hadoop, including Valence Health, Progressive Insurance, and Sellpoints Inc. All organizations encountered issues with understanding Hadoop’s underlying structure and how to leverage the technology efficiently and quickly enough to receive a productive return-on-investment.
New platform aims to break down barriers to big data adoption – BetaNews
Big data platforms pose structural issues for new users – Tech Target
Self Service / Enterprise
Alteryx has deepened its relationship with Microsoft in an announcement that sees Alteryx Designer available from a virtual machine on the Azure marketplace. This extends the relationship announced in October 2015 which saw Alteryx integrate with Microsoft Power BI. Alteryx Designer users are able to create a pre-configured virtual machine to rapidly speed up their time scales for realizing the benefits of analytics of their data. Using the Alteryx Designer workflows, analysts can reduce their time to insight in what Alteryx believes is hours rather than weeks. For those companies already invested in Alteryx it also seems like it is possible to migrate licenses from existing solutions onto the Azure platform, although Alteryx need to be contacted to process this. The Alteryx designer platform on Azure will not only be pre-configured to integrate with Power-BI but will also come with other new features. Among those are pre-defined examples of workflows that allow data analysts, new to the solution, to be able to rapidly deploy insights using their own data using the examples as a template for their own solutions. Alteryx Designer also delivers an intuitive user interface for self service analytics with workflows that combine data preparation, data blending, and analytics (predictive, statistical and spatial)
How close can Alteryx and Microsoft get?–Enterprise Times
Personalization
Marketing today walks a thin line between creepiness and helpfulness. B2C offers eight suggestions for marketers to follow to avoid being viewed as a “peeping tom.” The article suggests marketers refrain from making language and targeted advertising too personal before a customer relationship has been established. Additionally, marketers should practice patience with new customers and avoid bombarding them with emails simply because they purchased one item from a website. Another tip recommends avoiding personalizing a shopper’s experienced based upon minimal searches — e-marketers should segment their viewers and customers to target them in the correct ways.
Run, Buyer, Run! When Personalization Borders on Harassment/Creepiness – B2C
Software Defined Networking
In a new white paper from Cloud Security Alliance, there is some important information about security challenges and the increased risks of implementing virtual networks. The first risk of SDN is how SDN needs to be centralized around an overall controller that keeps track of the virtual network deployments and operations. This goes against the nature of cloud computing environments. Second, NFV infrastructure may not be compatible with existing virtual machine hypervisors and cloud servers. Third, the typical SDN deployment has its own hardware and management systems that may be unfamiliar to network administrators who are steeped in running traditional networks. The added complexity of NFV can hide potentially dire consequences including successful intruders that may manipulate the network routes. There are some benefits that can improve enterprise security with properly planned NFV, companies can build in security functions as part of their network fabric, such as intrusion prevention devices, virtual load balancers and firewalls.
Security Challenges with the Virtual Network: Part II – Security Intelligence – Security Intelligence (IBM Blog)