Yonas Tibebu

  In human resource management, an information technology (IT) skills gap is a mismatch between the technical knowledge an employer needs to meet business objectives and the capabilities of the organization's employees. Closing the IT skills gap by aligning the current state of workforce IT knowledge with forecasted future needs is a complicated proposition for C-level executives. Today, employers often struggle to locate and retain qualified tech talent, especially individuals with application development, security and data analysis skills. Common approaches to closing an IT skills gap include recruitment process outsourcing, social recruiting, off-site training, employee mentor incentives, mentoring services, in-house turnkey training and partnerships with universities. In many instances, an IT job will remain unfilled for an extended period of time when an employer needs to hire someone who has a very specific set of skills. In recruiting lingo, su...

  Load balancing is a technique used to distribute workloads uniformly across  servers or other compute resources to optimize network efficiency, reliability and capacity. Load balancing is performed by an appliance -- either physical or virtual -- that identifies in real time which server in a pool can best meet a given client request, while ensuring heavy network traffic doesn't unduly overwhelm a single server. In addition to maximizing network capacity and performance, load balancing provides failover. If one server fails, a load balancer immediately redirects its workloads to a backup server, thus mitigating the impact on end users. Load balancing is usually categorized as supporting either Layer 4 or Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers distribute traffic based on transport data, such as IP addresses and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port numbers. Layer 7 load-balancing devices make routing decisions based on applica...

  A maturity grid, also called a maturity model, is an assessment tool for evaluating an organization's level of progress towards a goal. The grid, which is a matrix laid out in rows and columns, typically lists the criteria that will be evaluated in the left-hand column. Each column's corresponding row has cells that describe, in a few words, the typical behaviour exhibited by an organization at each level of development. Typically, a maturity model has ten rows or less, with the first row defining entry level and the last row defining fully-developed  best practice. Maturity grids can be used to provide an organization with an initial benchmark for how close to 'fully developed' an organization is in regards to the criteria being assessed. They are also useful tools for leading discussions and providing management with roadmap for next steps. Sample maturity matrix Here is an example of a maturity grid for disaster recovery. Level 0 Naught ...

A virtual storage area network (VSAN) is a logical partition in a physical storage area network (SAN). VSANs enable traffic to be isolated within specific portions of a storage area network, so if a problem occurs in one logical partition, it can be handled with a minimum of disruption to the rest of the network. The use of multiple, isolated VSANs can also make a storage system easier to configure and scale out. Subscribers can be added or relocated without needing to change the physical layout. How VSAN works A virtual SAN appliance enables unused storage capacity on virtual servers to be pooled and accessed by virtual servers as needed. A virtual SAN appliance is most often downloaded as a software program that runs on a virtual machine, but some storage hardware vendors are beginning to incorporate virtual SAN appliances into their firmware. Depending on the vendor, a virtual SAN appliance might also be called a software-defined storage (SDS) appliance or, ...

Red team-blue team is a simulation and training exercise where members of an organization are divided into teams to compete in combative exercises. In information security (infosec), the exercise is designed to identify vulnerabilities and find security holes in a company's infrastructure. The war games are also used to test and train security staff. Generally, members of the security team split into two groups: a red team and a blue team. The red team plays the role of a hostile force and the blue team plays defense as the organization. The red team's goal is to find and exploit weaknesses in the organization's security as the blue team works to defend the organization by finding and patching vulnerabilities and responding to successful breaches. The terms red team and blue team are often used to refer to cyberwarfare in contrast to conventional warfare. War games function as a means of testing for the worst-case scenarios...

Prescriptive analytics  is the area of business analytics (BA) dedicated to finding the best course of action for a given situation. Prescriptive analytics is related to both descriptive and predictive analytics. While descriptive analytics aims to provide insight into what has happened and predictive analytics helps model and forecast what might happen, prescriptive analytics seeks to determine the best solution or outcome among various choices, given the known parameters. Prescriptive analytics can also suggest decision options for how to take advantage of a future opportunity or mitigate a future risk, and illustrate the implications of each decision option. In practice, prescriptive analytics can continually and automatically process new data to improve the accuracy of predictions and provide better decision options. A process-intensive task, the prescriptive approach analyzes potential decisions, the interactions between decisions, the influences that bear...

  What is data center capacity planning, simply explained? Data center capacity planning is the establishment of a strategy that ensures an IT organization's computing resources, power load, footprint and cooling capacity will be able to meet the workload demands of its users and customers. Why is capacity planning important? Data centers are limited in terms of footprint, power consumption and cooling capacity. While redundant backup power and fault-tolerant server clusters can potentially increase uptime, they can also reduce the total available power capacity.  Planning too much capacity for the given workloads wastes capital expenditures and might draw power to idle, unused servers. Over-provisioning computer room air conditioners also results in below optimal efficiency operation. Under-planning capacity is also a big problem, because it can debilitate business operations. Without adequate power and cooling for the data center's workload, out...

  Load balancing is a technique used to distribute workloads uniformly across servers or other compute resources to optimize network efficiency, reliability and capacity.   Load balancing is performed by an appliance -- either physical or virtual -- that identifies in real time which server in a pool can best meet a given client request, while ensuring heavy network traffic doesn't unduly overwhelm a single server. In addition to maximizing network capacity and performance, load balancing provides failover. If one server fails, a load balancer immediately redirects its workloads to a backup server, thus mitigating the impact on end users. Load balancing is usually categorized as supporting either Layer 4 or Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers distribute traffic based on transport data, such as IP addresses and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port numbers. Layer 7 load-balancing devices make routing decisions based on application-level characteristics that include HTTP ...

  A canary is a code release that is tested in a post-production environment by a small subset of end users. Canaries may also be referred to as canary tests or yellow deployments. Canary tests, which are usually automated, are run after testing in a sandbox environment has been completed. Like the canary in a coal mine, the end user who is selected to receive new code in a canary test is unaware he or she is being used to provide an early warning. Canary tests help software developers uncover new, unexpected scenarios that may not have been detected within the development environment. Because a canary is only distributed to a small number of people, its impact is relatively small and changes can be reversed quickly if code changes slow performance or cause an application to crash. In software testing, a canary is a push of programming code changes to a small group of end users who are unaware that they are receiving new code. Because the canary is on...

Negativity bias is the tendency of humans to place more significance on negative events than neutral or positive ones.  Negativity bias is an important concept for marketers to understand, because it plays an important role in customer experience management. When a customer perceives something negative about a product or service, it takes more than one positive event to restore balance because humans will naturally place more emphasis on the negative experience. Many psychologists believe that negativity bias evolved as a survival technique. Quite simply, those humans who didn't pay enough attention to negative outcomes were less likely to survive. In business, the same concept can be applied to customer service -- those companies who don't pay enough attention to negative customer outcomes are less likely to survive in the marketplace. Unhappy customers often choose to share their negative impressions with friends and family on social media. It's important for...

Penetration testing, also called pen testing or ethical hacking, is the practice of testing a  computer system, network or web application to find security vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. Penetration testing can be automated with software applications or performed manually. Either way, the process involves gathering information about the target before the test, identifying possible entry points, attempting to break in -- either virtually or for real -- and reporting back the findings.  The main objective of penetration testing is to identify security weaknesses. Penetration testing can also be used to test an organization's security policy, its adherence to compliance requirements, its employees' security awareness and the organization's ability to identify and respond to security incidents. Typically, the information about security weaknesses that are identified or exploited through pen testing is aggregated and provided to the organization's ...