High availability: Contractual penalties clarify liability for cloud outages 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak In order to achieve a high, economically ideal scalability, many companies have outsourced their IT infrastructures and services to external service providers. However, even these providers are not totally insusceptible to breakdowns. Yet most of the providers do not accept complete responsibility for the risk that customers take when outsourcing their IT operations. Even the …
Mobility: 4G causes a rapid increase in data traffic 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak The visual networking index compiled by Cisco, the network equipment provider, predicts that mobile data traffic in Germany will increase sevenfold by 2015. This means that traffic would increase three times more rapidly than the data volume flowing through the regular IP lines. Data transfer in excess of 4G (this refers primarily to LTE, the …
Big data: Oracle enables enhanced Hadoop analyses 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak Oracle recently presented several big data solutions which should make access to new information much easier: Oracle Big Data Discovery, the “face of Hadoop”, makes large, unstructured datasets more accessible for analysis. Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data streams unstructured data from heterogeneous transactional systems into Apache big data systems in real time. This means that …
IT security: Security initiatives need to think more practically 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak Security initiatives for SMEs would be an important accompanying measure to technology-assisted IT security. A study carried out by Detecon International on behalf of BMWi shows, however, that although the programmes are good at explaining matters, they offer hardly any specific help. However, compared on an international level, German projects are still the best.
Big data: Software replaces statisticians in analysis work 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak The growing importance of big data in economy and research means that there is an increased demand for statisticians and mathematicians on the employment market. As early as July of last year, the British Royal Statistical Society warned about an imminent shortage of skilled workers who are able to recognise the economic benefit of large …
Business start-up: Two new EU projects offer support for start-ups 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak Some 50% of SME start-ups fail within the first five years, although they hold the largest share of the European economy at 98 % and employ approx. 67% of workers in the EU. The purpose of two new projects at the Institut Arbeit und Technik (IAT) der Westfälischen Hochschule (Institute for Work and Technology at …
E-commerce: Online sales break the 50 billion euro mark 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak Deals.com, the voucher and discount platform, is anticipating online sales figures of 52.8 billion euros this year for Germany. This is equivalent to an increase of 23.1% over the previous year’s figures, in which sales of 42.88 billion euros were generated on the Internet. These figures are taken from the current edition of the company’s …
IT security: CIOs fear downtime due to DDoS attacks 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak Companies that are not reliably protected against DDoS attacks, hacker attacks and information theft are at risk of data loss, downtime and additional costs. In a current BT survey carried out among IT decision-makers, more than half of those surveyed (59%) claimed that DDoS attacks are becoming more efficient at undermining their IT security, and …
Availability: Outages caused by DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks can be expensive 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak DDoS attacks cost the affected companies between € 46,000 and € 390,000 according to a study carried out by B2B International on behalf of Kaspersky Lab. In the aftermath of the attack, 65% of DDoS victims surveyed had to call in an IT security specialist, almost one half (49 %) modified the complete IT infrastructure …
Collaboration: Corporate groups and SMEs build up similar business communities 26. February 2015 by Ralph Novak In collaboration with the Fraunhofer-Institut für Produkttechnologie (Fraunhofer Institute for Product Technology) IPT, the Forschungsinstitut für Rationalisierung (FIR) (Research Institute for Rationalisation) at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) (RWTH) carried out an online survey of more than 70 businesses of various sizes with regard to their strategies and preferences in implementing and …
