In our Stages of AI article, we discussed the stages of getting to AI. Most systems are not yet true AI; they are perhaps second-order machine learning. To branch out to AI, you must be able to train a tool to do something for you, on your behalf, without human corrections. That training is turning out …
TVP Strategy Archives
Stages of AI
There are many folks who consider AI to be the end all of analytics. I could not agree more. However, are we at AI yet, or is there more to AI than we have today? Artificial intelligence has been a goal for decades. What has changed to make it potentially possible? How does it apply …
Containers: When Are They the Best Choice?
I keep hearing, “Do you have a container for that, or are containers are the only way to move to the cloud?” and many other phrases of that ilk. So, the questions I have to ask are “When is the best time to use containers? Can you use them for everything, and should you?” Those …
Continue reading “Containers: When Are They the Best Choice?”
Security: Cloud Meltdown, or Is It?
Do Meltdown and Spectre invalidate the cloud? Do modern security issues invalidate the cloud? Does lack of provable security invalidate the cloud? But isn’t it provable? These are pretty strong statements, but the latest Spectre patch microcode recall for certain CPUs is starting to make some companies rethink their use of the cloud. What type …
When IT Comes Apart: A Case of Failure
What do you do when everything fails—not just typical application failure, but failure of more than one subsystem all at once? Recently, I had such a failure. The air-conditioning plant failed, and the new 10G switch failed, causing a loop that brought down the entire storage network. Then, the storage redundancy failed due to a …
Treasure Troves and Intel Speculative Execution
The January 3, 2018 Virtualization and Cloud Security Podcast covered two very important issues: the treasure troves used as bases for attacks and the Intel CPU speculative execution bug. The former allows people to access critical cloud and internal resources, while the later allows elevation of privileges to see and act upon data within the CPU …
Continue reading “Treasure Troves and Intel Speculative Execution”