As I have been thinking about encryption, the value it provides, and the applications to which it is applied, I started reviewing the types of encryption that still have some degree of efficacy. In 2014, when Snowden released documents with a lot of NSA capabilities, it was revealed publicly that the NSA had cracked the majority of the encryption schemes, […]

Some interesting feedback on the post on Friday – wanted to share some thoughts and ideas on those. Specifically, David wrote in with several things that have been his experience in working with the cloud. I have to say, I’ve seen these quite a lot, both personally with project migration attempts (and failures) of our own, and those of people […]

I came to this topic from Eilenblogger’s comment on one way hashing. He reminds me that most systems using passwords have a number of requirements to make them more difficult to crack. You’ll see a lot of rules: The password must be so many characters long The password must have an upper case letter The password must have a lower […]

The choice and what matters to you when you consider a cloud provider is, perhaps oddly, a very personal choice with all sorts of inputs… I saw a post on TechTarget that was all about PaaS – and making the selection of your vendor – being a very personal choice. As they said… Know Thyself. It’s so true. And it’s […]

I’ve had the opportunity to work on private data once again. Every time this comes around we ask a few questions to help determine the best approach for handling sensitive data. We’re assuming that the data will be encrypted. But encryption has many options. How soon can we perform encryption? Is there a reasonable value that can be used for […]

The first time this happened, I didn’t believe it was real – someone deleted their production environment… oops – and no recovery process in sight? But it’s happened again… at least apparently. Perhaps it’s on of those “fake news” stories used for publicity or whatever, in which case it’s just something to make sure can’t happen to you. If it’s […]

Your server assets are essential to the performance of your business. Most businesses can’t afford to lose a server. It costs money, and the cost escalates as the time offline increases. This may not be true in all situations. I would estimate that the majority of us face real financial pain when our servers go offline. If the loss of […]

Yesterday I talked a bit about the idea of sharing information for the “good of the many” – there is a lot to making good on the promise of this type of aggregate information. For example, just making the information between systems able to be used in any rational way is going to be a huge hurdle. If we start […]

Today I want to wrap up the discussion on high performance OLTP databases with the topic of indexing. The design of the schema is important. The syntax used is significant. But, if all of those things are aligned appropriately, and your indexes are off, you performance may still lag. Here is one way I have seen it happen. You put […]

I was reading through this post talking about trends in data platforms and was intrigued by Data Socialization. But is it really viable? Here’s a link to the post (Note: I realize I’m extrapolating here.) My question though is whether that’s even a legit overall destination for information. I think there is real value in data sharing across organizations. You […]