Adrian Bridgwater

There are only two certainties in life - death and taxes, said Benjamin Franklin. What the theorist and founding father clearly meant was: There are only three certainties in life - death and taxes and information security changeability. In the constantly changing dynamic world of malware, viral attacks, spam, phishing, zero days attacks and targeted exploits we know only one thing for sure - tomorrow will bring new insight. This somewhat generic introduction is merely offered to whet the appetite and suggest that we are on the edge of a new "device paradigm" in the form of a) wearable technology combined with a side order of of b) facial recognition served up with a more meaty portion of c) emerging gesture recognition technology. New Paradigm, New Risk At this point it has to be said that, inconveniently but truthfully, new user paradigms always bring security r... (more)

Application Power Consumption Is the Mobile IT Factor

Back in the good old 1990s we were actually concerned with software application performance factors such as processing power clock speed along with system memory and storage. While memory is still an important determining factor, the questions of microprocessor megahertz and total system storage capacity have become largely regarded as "sufficiently catered for" in almost any given desktop computer system. But as mobile form factors have joined their desktop-based cousins, new conditional dynamics have come to the fore. Suddenly processor speed is once again a consideration, as ... (more)

Big Data Good, Fast Big Data Better

This post is sponsored by The Business Value Exchange and HP Enterprise Services The IT industry is nothing if not a breeding ground for an infinite variety of acronyms and neologisms. Alongside cloud computing today sits the term Big Data, which of course we understand to mean "that amount" of data which a traditional database would find hard to compute and process as a normal matter of job processing. Neo-neologisms But what is a neologism if you can't turn it into a neo-neologism? Big Data in its own right is a term that we are just about getting used to, but the sooner we m... (more)

Did the ‘Neophiliacs’ Build the Cloud Service Model?

This post is sponsored by The Business Value Exchange and HP Enterprise Services There's an inherent sense of almost forced innovation that appears to pervade the information technology industry. As we constantly push forward into perpetual cycles of reinvention, continual enhancement and augmentation after augmentation, one almost has to stop and ask what's wrong with the software and systems that we have at our disposal today? If a ‘neophiliac' (don't worry, it's not rude) can be described as a person with a personality type characterized by a strong affinity for new things and... (more)

Change Management Is Redundant Without Configuration Management

This post is sponsored by The Business Value Exchange and HP Enterprise Services The first law of change management is not to use change management. To be more precise, the first law of change management is not to use change management until you use configuration management first. Okay so that might be a slightly sneaky way of making a point, but many change management vendors will primarily label their software as an SCCM tool, i.e., Software Configuration and Change Management. There is a good reason why these two disciplines are stated in that order; you should never change ... (more)