June 12, 2021

Data Architecture: One Size Does Not Fit All

“There’s no one right way,” said George Yuhasz, VP and Head of Enterprise Data at NewRez, because the demands and the value that Data Architecture practices bring to an organization are as varied as the number of firms trying to get value from data. Yuhasz was speaking at DATAVERSITY? Data Architecture Online Conference. The very definition of Data Architecture varies as well, he says, so get clarity among stakeholders to understand the constraints and barriers in which Data Architecture needs to fit. Will the organization prioritize process alone? Or process, platforms, and infrastructure? Or will it be folded into a larger enterprise architecture? Without a clear definition, it’s impossible to determine key success criteria, or to know what success is, both in the short term and long term. The definition should be simple enough to be understood by a diverse group of stakeholders, and elegant enough to handle sophistication and nuance. Without it, he said, the tendency will be to “drop everything that even relates to the term ‘data’ onto your plate.”

Chrome zero-day, hot on the heels of Microsoft’s IE zero-day. Patch now!

This bug is listed as a “type confusion in V8“, where V8 is the part of Chrome that runs JavaScript code, and type confusion means that you can feed V8 one sort of data item but trick JavaScript into handling it as if it were something else, possibly bypassing security checks or running unauthorised code as a result. For example, if your code is doing JavaScript calculations on a data object that has a memory block of 16 bytes allocated to it, but you can trick the JavaScript interpreter into thinking that you are working on an object that uses 1024 bytes of memory, you can probably end up sneakily writing data outside the official 16-byte allocation, thus pulling off a buffer overflow attack. And, as you probably know, JavaScript security holes that can be triggered by JavaScript code embedded in a web page often result in RCE exploits, or remote code execution. That’s because you’re relying on your browser’s JavaScript engine to keep control over what is essentially unknown and untrusted programming downloaded and executed automatically from an external source. 

New quantum repeaters could enable a scalable quantum internet

If it can be built, a quantum internet would allow calculations to be distributed between multiple quantum computers – allowing larger and more complex problems to be solved. A quantum internet would also provide secure communications because eavesdropping on the exchange of quantum information can be easily identified. The backbone of such a quantum network would be quantum-mechanically entangled links between different network points, called nodes. However, creating entangled links over long distances at high data rates remains a challenge. A big problem is that quantum information becomes degraded as it is transmitted, and the rules of quantum mechanics do not allow signals to be amplified by conventional repeater nodes. The solution could be quantum repeaters, which can amplify quantum signals while still obeying quantum physics. Now, two independent research groups — one at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain and the other at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) – have shown how quantum memories (QM) offer a path towards practical quantum repeaters.

3 Mindsets High-Performing Business Leaders Use to Create Growth

Success in life comes from understanding that a lot will happen to you outside of your control. As humans, we have emotions and feelings — they tend to take over when something happens to us that's outside of our control. When you focus on the things you can't control, you put yourself in a dark place that threatens to spiral your mind. High-performing entrepreneurs don't invest time, energy and emotion into situations that are outside of their control. Growth-focused business leaders make a deliberate effort to optimize their mind, body and spirit. They do the work to operate in a peak state and learn the techniques to get back into a peak state when they feel themselves slipping. ... Authentic business leadership means you create wealth through purposeful work and the desire to build a legacy. You need a vision for where you're going if you plan to get there and experience the benefits of entrepreneurship. Whether it's setting up a vision board or having your goals displayed on your phone's screensaver, you grow when you have a vision and implement growth strategies consistently. 

Has Serverless Jumped the Shark?

Today’s hyped technologies — such as functions-as-a-service offerings like Amazon Lambda, serverless frameworks for Kubernetes like Knative and other non-FaaS serverless solutions like database-as-a-service (DBaaS) — are the underpinnings of more advanced delivery systems for digital business. New methods of infrastructure delivery and consumption, such as cloud computing, are as much a cultural innovation as a technological one, most obviously in DevOps. Even with these technological innovations, companies will still consume a combination of legacy application data, modern cloud services and other serverless architectures to accomplish their digital transformation. The lynchpin isn’t a wholesale move to new technologies, but rather the ability to integrate these technologies in a way that eases the delivery of digital experiences and is invisible to the end-user. Serverless hasn’t jumped the shark. Rather, it is maturing. The Gartner Hype Cycle, a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, forecast in 2017 that it would take two to five years for serverless to move from a point of inflated expectations to a plateau of productivity.

Opinion: Andreessen Horowitz is dead wrong about cloud

In The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion-Dollar Paradox, Andreessen Horowitz Capital Management’s Sarah Wang and Martin Casado highlighted the case of Dropbox closing down its public cloud deployments and returning to the datacenter. Wang and Casado extrapolated the fact that Dropbox and other enterprises realized savings of 50% or more by bailing on some or all of their cloud deployments in the wider cloud-consuming ecosphere. Wang and Casado’s conclusion? Public cloud is more than doubling infrastructure costs for most enterprises relative to legacy data center environments. ... Well-architected and well-operated cloud deployments will be highly successful compared to datacenter deployments in most cases. However, “highly successful” may or may not mean less expensive. A singular comparison between the cost of cloud versus the cost of a datacenter shouldn’t be made as an isolated analysis. Instead, it’s important to analyze the differential ROI of one set of costs versus the alternative. While this is true for any expenditure, it’s doubly true for public cloud, since migration can have profound impacts on revenue. Indeed, the major benefits of the cloud are often related to revenue, not cost.

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