10 of the Top Data Breaches of the Decade

ABC News (from June 14th) -- The Internet cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least 100,000 owners of Apple's iPad 3G.

But industry observers are quick to point out that this is hardly the first -- and hardly the worst -- data breach that the tech world has ever seen.

"The fact is 114,000 is an impressive number and they're e-mail addresses. ... [But] that's almost public information," said Dan Tynan, a technology reporter and co-author of the technology humor site eSarcasm.

Some companies publish relevant e-mail addresses on their sites, and even when companies don't outright reveal addresses, it's often easy to guess them, he said.

"What these guys did was something that spammers do every single day," he said.

While it's discomforting when any personal information is compromised, Tynan said that this breach didn't expose seriously valuable information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers or medical records.

But other security breaches over the past decade have disclosed the kind of information that could potentially threaten the people behind the data. Read more >>

Global CIO: Oracle Reveals Strategy And Customers For White-Hot Exadata

InformationWeek -- Oracle's 22-month-old Exadata Database Machine has leapfrogged the data-warehousing market and become a major player in high-end OLTP environments, and is now being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform due to its unprecedented capacity and throughput.

After rejuvenating its data-warehousing business and giving the company a foothold in the high-end OLTP systems market, Oracle's white-hot Exadata Database Machine is now also being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform that can handle all of the above for CIOs while delivering faster, cheaper, and better results.

In Oracle's first detailed public discussion of its Exadata strategy and market dynamics, senior vice president of database and server technologies Andrew Mendelsohn identified 15 global customers using the product and said Exadata Version 2 is rapidly becoming the foundation technology for banks and other large enterprises looking to build what he called "virtual private clouds."

Mendelsohn said that Exadata's unique combinations of optimized software and networking along with mostly commodity hardware allow it to handle a range of high-end tasks that competitors' systems can't match, making Exadata a more-attractive alternative for CIOs looking to harness greater performance at lower cost while also simplifying their maddeningly complex environments.

The system's blend of flash memory chips with hard-drive memory, he said, allows it to address not only the sequential I/O scanning requirements for data warehousing but also the random I/O needs for OLTP, which creates a vast difference between the value offered by Exadata V2 and that offered by single-function data-warehousing appliances from Teradata, Netezza, and more recently the EMC-Greenplum pairing. Read more >>

Real Application Testing: A Business Case

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Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Oracle.com -- Discover Why Oracle’s Business Intelligence Technology Is The Best-in-Class BI Solution



Event Details:

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
12:00 noon – 6:00 p.m.
Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
33 West 60th Street at Broadway
New York, NY 10023
____________________________________________________________________

Join Charles Phillips, President, and Paul Rodwick, Vice President, Product Management, for the introduction of the latest release of Oracle’s business intelligence software.

Be among the first to hear about Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, the new, industry-leading technology platform for business intelligence, which offers:

- A powerful end-user experience with rich visualization, search, and actionable collaboration

- Advancements in analytics, OLAP, and enterprise reporting, with unmatched performance and scalability

- Simplified system configuration, lifecycle management, and performance optimization

For a full agenda or to register, please visit here today!

Oracle for SAP

Oracle.com/SAP -- SAP supports Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for SAP products based on SAP Kernel 6.40, 7.x and higher.

Oracle Database 11g (single instance) and Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g for SAP are available for the major Linux and Unix platforms, such as Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, as listed with details regarding the OS versions in SAP Note 1398634.

The SAP release of Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g occurs at the same time as the general release of Oracle Database 11g in the SAP environment. For information about Oracle RAC support, see SAP Note 527843. It contains important details about the released RAC configurations.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers running Windows, Linux and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications. Read more >>

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Data Explosion: Plan for the future -- or fail

InfoWorld -- Technology changes at such a mind-bending rate, most IT organizations can't stay off of their back foot. Planning for the future takes a permanent backseat to dealing with the present.

Constantly reacting to unforeseen challenges almost always results in waste on a massive scale. Whether it's an undersized SAN platform or a proprietary archiving architecture that fails to work with new applications, too many solutions are hastily implemented only to be replaced before their time.

Breaking the cycle of IT solution whack-a-mole is hard, but not impossible. There's no time like the present to adopt a proactive technology stance. Here are six steps to freedom that I've found to work well in the wild.

1. Clear the slate
The very first thing to do is forget everything you've done up to this point. If you have a nice Visio diagram of your current infrastructure, hide it somewhere. You'll need it later, but not now.
I frequently see infrastructure solutions chosen solely based on what is currently in use and how easy the new and old will be to integrate. While focusing on the here and now will often result in a quick deployment, solutions that are chosen this way will have a much better chance of failing to grow well into the future. As the saying goes, don't throw good money after bad.

2. Imagine the future
Imagine your infrastructure five years from now as if you were in a position to build it from scratch starting today. How will your organization grow? How will your data grow? What regulatory requirements might you fall under in the future? What new types of applications are your users clamoring for? How will you support them? Read more >>