Software, Interrupted

Security and network management vendors Prolexic and Arbor Networks recently reported that distributed-denial-of-service attacks are on the rise. What can we do to make prevention a forethought?

According to Prolexic Chief Technology Officer Paul Sop, the recent trends include a shorter attack duration, but a bigger packet-per-second attack volume. This "bigger packet-per-second attack volume" is likely going to be generated by a DDoS (distributed denial of system), which is a coordinated attack from lots of dispersed nodes usually with a few central controllers.

A recent high-profile example was the hacker group "Anonymous" allegedly using the LOIC tool (Low Orbit Ion more

If there is one thing that startups can learn from the rise of Facebook it's that making sense of data you collect is where the money is.

Lots of companies collect data and do nothing meaningful with it. But thanks to new tools and the realization that knowing more about what your users are doing is the way to monetize, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage the information collected.

In case you've been living in a cave, Facebook has filed to go public at an enormous valuation, based largely on the fact that the company has more

Like newspapers to the Web, many business software vendors are now reluctantly dragging themselves into the cloud-based enterprise. If they aren't nimble enough, a new generation of companies is ready to take their place.

While major enterprise IT vendors continue to deliver so-called features that keep users tied to their desks and legacy software, companies like Box and others have figured out that the industry is changing right before our eyes. The new enterprise takes the best aspects of consumer applications to make business-critical data available anywhere, anytime.

The majority of the fawning stories about startups that come out more

Web application performance company New Relic released results of its recent study on commercial vs. open-source Java application server usage among enterprises. The result: open source is winning by an overwhelming margin when it comes to web applications.

New Relic surveyed 1,000 customers to get some data on the state of open-source in business today. According to the results, over 80 percent of enterprise users across five main industries (business software, consumer internet, ecommerce, gaming, and social web) are using

A tool from Visual.ly that analyzes and visualizes users through Twitter posts demonstrates one way make easy-to-understand visualizations of big data.

One example of the increasingly important trend of combined analysis and visualization is evident in Visual.ly Labs' Twitterize yourself application, which provides a good representation of how companies can use large data sets to quickly identify user characteristics to increase engagement or upsell goods and services.

I spend most of my time in my day job looking at data across the extended software development life cycle (design, develop, deploy, maintain, etc.), looking for the patterns that show more

It's the first day of 2012 and my 1,000th post on CNET and I'd like to encourage my dear readers to go out and raise their entrepreneurial flags.

Let's assume you have an idea and the desire to turn it into a commercial endeavor. Much is made of financings and investors but that all pales in relation to the fact that starting a company is hard. Keeping one going is even harder.

This should come as no surprise and yet a lot people still seem to believe the gushing reports of how easy it is to more

You may not need to use the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth, but if you want to, you can for just $1,279 per hour.

As reported by Wired, Amazon Web Services latest salvo into the computing on demand landscape is a platform known as the Elastic Cloud Computer, which at $1279 per hour, or $11 million a year if run full time, is probably on par in comparison to the time, effort and expense of procuring the same level of compute power in your own data center.

Amazon's virtual super computer is capable of running 240 trillion calculations more

Re-reading a piece I wrote a few weeks back about the uptick in online sales during Black Friday, I started to wonder if real-time customer intelligence is what is driving online retail growth.

There are undoubtedly a number of aspects to the growth in online sales. But after spending some time with a few of the major online retailers last week--including one who might not be considered a "retailer" in the traditional sense, I realized that the online world has a huge competitive advantage in its predilection toward data analysis with actionable near real-time results.

Amazon's suggested items and more

Recently, I've noticed a meme spreading through Silicon Valley that questions whether Amazon Web Services' (AWS) current dominant position will hinder the cloud. The short answer: not at all.

I was in a venture capital meeting last week where we were told by one prominent VC that, "Two years ago Amazon was a blessing to startups. Today it is neutral. In two years it may well be a curse." How so? By building up Amazon Web Services to include many services currently offered by other vendors.

And while Amazon does continue to roll out new services, it's doing more