rdschneider

Mission-Critical Service Testing Fundamental #2: “Test with Realistic Data” Webinar is now available

rdschneider — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

SmartBear has just published the second Webinar in my seven part series of best practices for service and API testing. In this installment, I point out the importance of using lots of realistic data when testing your services. You’ll find it here.

If you’re interested in being notified of future editions, subscribe to the blog or follow me on Twitter: @RD_Schneider.

10 simple things you can do to strengthen your online privacy

rdschneider — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:32:48 +0000

It’s been a very disheartening couple of weeks for people concerned with protecting personal information. From the US Supreme Court’s ruling about routine DNA collection to the ongoing revelations about the NSA Prism program, it’s easy to feel helpless in the face of such massive data collection. And while the amount of surveillance – from governments, corporations, and even nosy individuals – is likely to increase, there are a few basic things you can do to help safeguard your data from others.

Reduce your activity on social networks. Did you know that banks routinely check out your FaceBook profile? And now the IRS has joined the party.
Encrypt important files. TrueCrypt is an excellent choice for this essential task.
Use a secure search engine. Google is very clear about how it stores your search history. If this bothers you, take a look at DuckDuckGo and ixquick.
Use a more secure browser. Chrome is a good choice, but there are additional offerings out there. You can expect this market to heat up in the wake of all these snooping disclosures.
Clear your browser cookies regularly. Many web sites inspect these cookies to get a much better idea of your browsing history.
Use TOR or a VPN. These options both offer greatly improved communication security. TOR is easy to set up and use, too.
Create multiple email addresses. There’s no reason to route everything through a single address. Instead, consider setting up different accounts at various providers.
Put your phone in airplane mode when you’re not using it. Your phone constantly transmits details about your location back to your service provider. If you’re not actively using it, why broadcast that information?
Pay cash. Do you really need to charge that burger?
Be stingy with what you share. It may sound anachronistic in this age of updating FaceBook with every trivial aspect of life, but consider simply entering less data about yourself online. For example, there’s no reason for you to provide an e-commerce site with your home, work, and mobile phone numbers.

I’ll be adding more tips to the list, so if this topic interests you be sure to check back here from time to time or follow me on Twitter at @RD_Schneider.

Mission-Critical Service Testing Fundamental #1: “Thoroughly Test Your Services” Webinar is now available

rdschneider — Wed, 29 May 2013 04:54:58 +0000

I’m happy to announce that SmartBear has just published the first Webinar of the seven part series that I’m doing on best practices for testing your mission-critical service and APIs. You’ll find it here.

There will be six more of these Webinars in the coming weeks, so if you’re interested in being notified, subscribe to the blog or follow me on Twitter: @RD_Schneider.

Data never really disappears, particularly when it’s supposed to

rdschneider — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:22:20 +0000

If you have a teenage son or daughter, you may be familiar with an app called ‘Snapchat’. Its claim to fame – that is, until earlier today – is that it deletes all messages (text, photo, or otherwise) within a few seconds, thus keeping sensitive information safe from the prying eyes of parents, police, marketers, and all sorts of other nefarious characters.

But lo and behold, as it turns out, Snapchat actually doesn’t delete the data after all. Instead, it’s simply moved to a hidden directory, where with proper time and tooling, it can be recovered. You can read all about it here.

Whether or not you’re prone to sharing too much information, the takeaway from this little debacle is that data never really goes away, especially once a smartphone gets involved – not to mention the cloud. Keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to use technology to record, say, or write something that you don’t want anyone else to see or hear.

Exploring the Database Forest article is now available

rdschneider — Fri, 03 May 2013 02:06:30 +0000

SAP asked me to write an article that summarized some of today’s most interesting database trends. Here’s what I cover in the article:

I begin by demonstrating that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ database platform isn’t a good idea given today’s complexities. Next, I describe several of the most intriguing new information management technology categories, followed by an overview of how integrated solutions such as SAP’s Real Time Data Platform can provide a logical, unified approach. Finally, I point out that despite all of the fresh breakthroughs and noteworthy new solutions, transactional databases continue to remain at the heart of the enterprise’s information processing responsibilities. This means that selecting an RDBMS will endure as a vital obligation.

This article also served as the foundation for the recent Webinar that I presented as well. You can view the article here: Exploring the database forest

The Seven Fundamentals of Mission-Critical Service Testing

rdschneider — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:33:00 +0000

Software services – whether SOAP, RESTful, JMS or otherwise, are incredibly important enterprise technology assets that form the foundation of many vital systems and applications. This means that any functionality or performance problems with these services will heavily disrupt your operations.

This makes the job of testing these services more important than ever, yet many enterprises don’t devote the appropriate amount of time, effort, and people to this task. And even when they do, they often don’t follow any kind of formalized testing methodology to help ensure repeatable success.

In this series of Webinars published on the SmartBear blog, I present my take on a set of best practices that you can follow to ensure that your services are production-ready. They include:

Thoroughly Test Your Services
Test Using Large Amounts of Realistic Data
Make Sure Your Services Are Secure
Get the Most Productivity from Your Developers and Testers
Fully Track Your Test Results
Test Your Services Under Anticipated Loads
Make Sure You Govern Your Services

Here’s a link to the introductory Webinar.

Amazon Redshift – interesting new Big Data Warehouse As A Service offering

rdschneider — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 23:17:03 +0000

A while back, I co-authored a White paper about the various storage options offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). In that paper, I described each of the key AWS data management products (e.g. Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), SimpleDB, and so on). I also provided some use cases showing how all of these services can work together.

Amazon continually upgrades and improves its offerings, and they’ve recently announced beta availability for Redshift – a cloud-based service that lets you use the AWS infrastructure to run analytics and business intelligence applications on terabytes – or even petabytes – of information that you upload to Amazon.

In future posts, I’ll be writing more about how these types of hosted solutions have the potential to level the playing field and transform the way Big Data analytics are handled by organizations of all sizes. For now, I encourage you to consider cloud-based products for even the largest business intelligence applications.

Free tutorial on soapUI JDBC TestStep

rdschneider — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:11:43 +0000

I’ve been writing an ongoing series of blog posts on making the most of soapUI Pro. Here’s the next installment, which explores how to use the JDBC TestStep to evaluate the contents of your database. This is a very powerful capability, because it lets you use soapUI as a complete, all-encompassing quality assurance platform for testing services, Web sites, and databases.

Teaching a workshop entitled “Foundations of Big Data from A to Z”

rdschneider — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 15:25:26 +0000

Recently, I blogged about a talk I’m giving in Boston at the Conference on Big Data Security. I’m happy to announce that I’ll also be teaching a comprehensive one-day workshop on Big Data. Here’s what I’ll be covering on Tuesday, July 16:

A realistic, vendor-agnostic overview of the current Big Data security landscape
Big Data information management categories including: in-memory databases, key/value stores, graph databases, and file/object repositories
Examination and explanation of the most widespread technologies such as Amazon Web Services, Big Table, and Hadoop
Understanding how all of these disparate solutions co-exist without security chaos
Pinpointing the intrinsic non-technical security risks present in a big data environment: regulatory, legal, industry, and Service Level Agreements
Creating a “defense-in-depth” approach to protecting Big Data for your shop
Real-world scenarios on what works and why

If you’re interested, you can register here.

Speaking about enhanced security capabilities for Hadoop

rdschneider — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:52:22 +0000

I’m looking forward to my speaking engagement at the Conference on Big Data Security this July in Boston. I’ll be talking about how to keep your Hadoop environment safe and secure. In particular, I’ll be discussing:

The key diverse technologies contained within a typical Hadoop environment
Current and trending security risks characteristic in Hadoop implementations
Setting and attaining realistic goals
Contrasting open-source vs. proprietary Hadoop security tools
Protecting your Hadoop landscape through controlled access
Inherent differences safeguarding data-at-rest vs. defending data while in motion

I hope you can join me there – it should be a very interesting conference.