VOLUME 14: Table of Contents
COVER STORY
Enterprise IT Readiness
Getting Business Ready in a Distributed Enterprise
With rapid globalisation, enterprises are having to work in a distributed environment, communicating and coordinating business activities with their branch offi ces and partners across countries. Distributed enterprises face specifi c challenges in terms of communication security and Internet threats, besides having to contain costs and tackle issues of bandwidth wastage. The challenge now is to provide fast and secure access to a growing mobile workforce. This article takes a detailed look at the challenges that enterprises face today, and what it takes to be business-ready in a distributed world.
ENTERPRISE SOLUTION
Managing and Governing Your SOA
Keeping an Eye on Runaway Services
More and more organisations are jumping on the SOA bandwagon so they can extend and reuse existing IT systems and create new solutions and services based on SOA principles. The danger is that those services can grow like wildfi re within a company—a development that SOA is meant to prevent. This is where SOA governance comes into play.
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
Intelligent Testing Solutions
Testing Made Simple, Easy and Fast
A neglected category of IT services till 2000, testing has now emerged as a USD 13 billion global industry. What began as another way to improve bottom lines has now become a key differentiator. Testing is spawning a separate industry altogether with many companies starting to provide exclusive testing services.
DATA & STORAGE
Delivering Enterprise Search Results
Retrieving Information from the Enormous Pools of Enterprise Data
Enterprise search is not only different from Web search, but also far more complex and sophisticated. Enterprises still stumble as they try to retrieve information from the vast repositories of structured and unstructured data. The article explains how enterprise search software and related applications really work inside an organisation and covers the complex issues that challenge even experienced search managers today.
Looking for the Needle in the Information Haystack
Data Mining Goes Beyond Search
Enterprises usually have access to massive stores of data. But they require help to focus on the most important information in their data warehouse if they want to draw any benefi t from it. Data mining can draw useful information from massive databases to form new facts or establish new patterns which an organisation can then put to use for their business benefi t, such as increasing revenues and cutting costs. The article explains how data mining software helps companies extract key information from large databases, analyse the data from different perspectives, discover relationships, and summarise the information. It also details the latest trends in the data mining arena, and looks at “beyond search” concepts such as REAP—Retrieve, Extract, Arrange, Present.
SECURITY
NAC Market On Overdrive
Improved Security Grows Appetite for NAC Solutions
Environments that have a high concentration of unmanaged users such as universities, healthcare organisations and businesses are looking at Network Admission Control (NAC) to solve some very specifi c problems. Legislative mandates and pressure to ensure the privacy and security of data is driving demand. So NAC has become an oft-spoken word in corporate Asia today with companies spending money on improving their networking security. The article takes a look at the overall NAC market in Asia and where it is heading. It also details the NAC-related problems that are affecting companies, and the benchmarks and best practices organisations can implement to protect themselves.
Plugging the Enterprise VoIP Hole
Security Makes It an Oft-Repeated Word
VoIP has broken new grounds in improving communications across the world. However, as with any new technology, it has brought along its share of problems. The article looks at what makes VoIP vulnerable and how companies can ensure the success of their VoIP networks.
IT SERVICES
Keeping Pace with Growth
ITIL Makes Its Presence Felt in Asia
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a widely adopted framework in Asia for its ubiquity and benefi ts. The article tracks the growth and importance of ITIL in Asia, closely examining impediments to growth and putting forth a concrete roadmap to success.
Separating Wheat from the Chaff
Making Heads Turn By ‘Being Best of Class’
Organisations that have recently completed an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) based evaluation of storage operations often struggle with the implementation of the resulting plan. While an analysis of the business impacts suggests substantial rewards, the process of realizing those benefi ts separates “best of class” from average IT organizations. The article looks at the implementation best practices of ITIL from a storage perspective and offers insight into how you can position your organisation in that ‘best-of-class’ breed.
SPOTLIGHT
SOX Compliance for SMEs
Challenges of Being Small in a Compliant World
The understanding of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), and the implications of its Section 404, is still very unclear when it comes to Small and Medium Enterprises. The article takes an in-depth look at how SMEs are affected by regulatory compliance, where they stand in achieving compliance targets, and why they should take SOX seriously.
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
Delivering Quality Applications Through CIT
Bringing Development and Quality Applications Together
The importance of testing in the early stages of the development cycle has always been stressed. But today the challenge for IT is in developing applications that are fl exible enough to be modifi ed to refl ect the changing market. Organisations are now looking at new ways of structuring development, and bringing the development and QA teams together. An emerging solution to this problem is Continuous Integrated Testing (CIT). This article talks about the benefi ts of CIT and enumerates the best practices for building performance.
SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT: JAX ASIA 2006 SPECIAL
Open Source Java Status Quo
What’s Happening After the Coffee Cup Opened Up
After years of resistance, Sun Microsystems fi nally announced the open sourcing of Java in November 2006. Since then, discussions on the implications, and debates on the pros and cons of the decision have not stopped. This article, as the title suggests, takes a look at how the community has evolved since the announcement, the impact of open source Java, forks, and much more.
State of the JAX Union
Technology Makes the World a Better Place, One Bug Fix at a Time
In November 2006, Asia witnessed a fi rst-of-its-kind conference on Java, XML, Web Services, Enterprise Architecture and Eclipse. Enterprise Architecture Best Practices, Enterprise Debugging Techniques, Enterprise Application Security, Java Persistence, Spring, Eclipse, and all the hot technologies that have made JAX the premier brand for the Enterprise IT Community, greeted delegates at the fi rst annual JAX Asia 2006 Conference in Singapore and Indonesia.
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