Enhancing systems integration by incorporating business continuity drivers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for developing an integrated operating environment (IOE) within an enterprise information system by incorporating business continuity drivers. These drivers enable a business to continue with its operations even if some sort of failure or disaster occurs. Design/methodology/approach – Development and implementation of the framework are based on holistic and top-down approach. An IOE on server’s side of contemporary business computing is investigated in depth. Findings – Key disconnection points are identified, where systems integration technologies can be used to integrate platforms, protocols, data and application formats, etc. Downtime points are also identified and explained. A thorough list of main business continuity drivers (continuous computing (CC) technologies) for enhancing business continuity is identified and presented. The framework can be utilized in developing an integrated server operating environment for enhancing business continuity. Originality/value – This paper presents a comprehensive framework including exhaustive handling of enabling drivers as well as disconnection points toward CC and business continuity

Samba Openldap: An Evolution And Insight

Directory services facilitate access to information organized under a variety of frameworks and applications. The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is a promising technology that provides access to directory information using a data structure similar to that of the X.500 protocol. IBM Tivoli, Novell, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, and many other vendor features LDAP-based implementations. The technology’s increasing popularity is due both to its flexibility and its compatibility with existing applications. A directory service is a searchable database repository that lets authorized users and services find information related to people, computers, network devices, and applications. Given the increasing need for information — particularly over the Internet — directory popularity has grown over the last decade and is now a common choice for distributed applications. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) accommodates the need of high level of security, single sign-on, and centralized user management. This protocol offers security services and integrated directory with capability of storage management user information in a directory. Therefore at the same time the user can determine application, service, server to be accessed, and user privileges. It is necessary to realize files sharing between different operating systems in local area network. Samba software package, as the bridge across Windows and Linux, can help us resolve the problem. In this paper, we try to explore previous literature on this topic and also consider current authors work then come out with our views on the subject matter of discussion based on our understanding

BlackWatch:increasing attack awareness within web applications

Web applications are relied upon by many for the services they provide. It is essential that applications implement appropriate security measures to prevent security incidents. Currently, web applications focus resources towards the preventative side of security. Whilst prevention is an essential part of the security process, developers must also implement a level of attack awareness into their web applications. Being able to detect when an attack is occurring provides applications with the ability to execute responses against malicious users in an attempt to slow down or deter their attacks. This research seeks to improve web application security by identifying malicious behaviour from within the context of web applications using our tool BlackWatch. The tool is a Python-based application which analyses suspicious events occurring within client web applications, with the objective of identifying malicious patterns of behaviour. This approach avoids issues typically encountered with traditional web application firewalls. Based on the results from a preliminary study, BlackWatch was effective at detecting attacks from both authenticated, and unauthenticated users. Furthermore, user tests with developers indicated BlackWatch was user friendly, and was easy to integrate into existing applications. Future work seeks to develop the BlackWatch solution further for public release

VXA: A Virtual Architecture for Durable Compressed Archives

Data compression algorithms change frequently, and obsolete decoders do not always run on new hardware and operating systems, threatening the long-term usability of content archived using those algorithms. Re-encoding content into new formats is cumbersome, and highly undesirable when lossy compression is involved. Processor architectures, in contrast, have remained comparatively stable over recent decades. VXA, an archival storage system designed around this observation, archives executable decoders along with the encoded content it stores. VXA decoders run in a specialized virtual machine that implements an OS-independent execution environment based on the standard x86 architecture. The VXA virtual machine strictly limits access to host system services, making decoders safe to run even if an archive contains malicious code. VXA's adoption of a "native" processor architecture instead of type-safe language technology allows reuse of existing "hand-optimized" decoders in C and assembly language, and permits decoders access to performance-enhancing architecture features such as vector processing instructions. The performance cost of VXA's virtualization is typically less than 15% compared with the same decoders running natively. The storage cost of archived decoders, typically 30-130KB each, can be amortized across many archived files sharing the same compression method.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

KAPTUR: technical analysis report

Led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme (2011-13) KAPTUR will discover, create and pilot a sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the visual arts in collaboration with four institutional partners: Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and University of the Arts London. This report is framed around the research question: which technical system is most suitable for managing visual arts research data? The first stage involved a literature review including information gathered through attendance at meetings and events, and Internet research, as well as information on projects from the previous round of JISCMRD funding (2009-11). During February and March 2012, the Technical Manager carried out interviews with the four KAPTUR Project Officers and also met with IT staff at each institution. This led to the creation of a user requirement document (Appendix A), which was then circulated to the project team for additional comments and feedback. The Technical Manager selected 17 systems to compare with the user requirement document (Appendix B). Five of the systems had similar scores so these were short-listed. The Technical Manager created an online form into which the Project Officers entered priority scores for each of the user requirements in order to calculate a more accurate score for each of the five short-listed systems (Appendix C) and this resulted in the choice of EPrints as the software for the KAPTUR project

Automation of the Continuous Integration (CI) - Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) Software Development

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice in software development where developers periodically merge code changes in a central shared repository, after which automatic versions and tests are executed. CI entails an automation component (the target of this project) and a cultural one, as developers have to learn to integrate code periodically. The main goal of CI is to reduce the time to feedback over the software integration process, allowing to locate and fix bugs more easily and quickly, thus enhancing it quality while reducing the time to validate and publish new soIn traditional software development, where teams of developers worked on the same project in isolation, often led to problems integrating the resulting code. Due to this isolation, the project was not deliverable until the integration of all its parts, which was tedious and generated errors. The Continuous Integration (CI ) emerged as a practice to solve the problems of traditional methodology, with the aim of improving the quality of the code. This thesis sets out what is it and how Continuous Integration is achieved, the principles that makes it as effective as possible and the processes that follow as a consequence, to thus introduce the context of its objective: the creation of a system that automates the start-up and set-up of an environment to be able to apply the methodology of continuous integration