Your Custom Text Here
Saw this post on Federal Times on the US Army moving data center capacity. This paragraph makes an interesting claim.
“We’re aggressively shutting down data centers. I don’t think there’s anyone in the federal government that is shutting down as many data centers as the Army is,” Krieger said May 6 at the C4ISR & Networks conference in Arlington, Va. “But this is not a data center drill; this is about applications. This is about modernizing, virtualizing and moving.”
Leave it to the TSA to frustrate all users of Pre TSA, those who are registered pre TSA like myself and people they try to introduce Pre TSA to. It used to be I could get through pre TSA in less than 5 minutes. Now it can be 10-15 minutes because the TSA let’s people they think should try pre TSA give it try. WSJ article writes on this problem so let’s just point to the same things the do.
First WSJ says there is a problem. Yep.
Trouble Selling Fliers on the Fast Airport Security Line
TSA Precheck program is stirring traveler confusion, aggravation
TSA is trying to get more people to sign up.
Trying to hook new enrollees, TSA has been funneling regular travelers into Precheck lanes for a sample of swifter security. Some of the newbies get confused, however, and end up clogging the expedited lanes, angering Precheck veterans. And some regular travelers are getting the free perk so often they conclude they are already in the program and don't need to enroll.
The WSJ asked an Operations Management professor for comments.
"It used to be great, but recently the Precheck lines have been the slowest of all the lines," said Fred Van Bennekom, who teaches operations management at Northeastern University and has timed TSA lines out of curiosity. "Sometimes there's almost no one in regular lines and we're all backed up at Precheck."
The mess up starts because the TSA let’s passengers who don’t know what pre TSA is in line, and they are almost always totally confused.
The influx of people to Precheck annoys some program veterans. Ann Fries says she sometimes finds 20 people in the Precheck line at Tampa, Fla., her home airport. Many get befuddled when told they don't have to take off their shoes and can leave liquids and laptops in bags. They ask why, slowing the line. Then they ask how they ended up in that lane.
"We went from people who knew what they were doing to people in line who don't know what they are doing," said Ms. Fries, who signed up for Global Entry to get Precheck when it first started.
Thank god, the TSA figured out people 75 or older are not good to add to the pre TSA line.
Mr. Pistole said he has heard the complaints about Precheck lanes getting clogged, and TSA has already decided to stop moving travelers 75 years of age and older into Precheck service, unless they are enrolled, because they sometimes can take 10 minutes to move through. As Precheck enrollment grows, the "managed inclusion" effort will be phased out, he said.
And here is the kicker how TSA has shot themselves in the foot.
The Precheck free trial has confused some travelers—including Dr. Van Bennekom, the Northeastern University professor—who routinely get boarding passes printed with "TSA Precheck" and assume they are now enrolled in the program. After several trips with free Precheck privileges, Dr. Van Bennekom went to a Precheck lane only to be turned away. He learned he had to pay to be enrolled.
If the trial access was an enticement to buy, "then they are lousy marketers," he said. "I've never received any communication that says, 'Now that you've experienced fast check in, for only $85 …' " For now, he says he gets free Precheck so frequently he won't bother to sign up.
Forbes has a guest post from SunGardAs’s Matthew Goche. Matthew’s focus is security, but I think his points can apply to Operations in general.
What The Seattle Seahawks Can Teach You About Your IT Security Program
Matthew Goche, SunGardAS
Comment NowFollow CommentsI typically enjoy the Super Bowl. We get together with family and friends to watch the game, laugh at the commercials, enjoy the halftime show, and place predictions on winners. What I love best is an exciting, competitive game. Unfortunately, this past Super Bowl did not live up to my hopes, mainly due to the Seattle Seahawks completely outclassing and crushing the Denver Broncos.
As I watched the game, it occurred to me that many companies’ IT securityprograms resemble the Broncos team, instead of performing like the Seahawks. This is not going to work in business (just as it didn’t in the Super Bowl) for three key reasons:
The three steps are
1. Make fewer mistakes
Broncos: four turnovers. Seahawks: zero. For IT to prevent “turnovers,” change must be managed. Backups maintained. Security reviews conducted.
2. Have no heroes
Unfortunately, far too many organizations forget this fact. They choose to rely on IT MVPs and heroes: i.e., the one developer who knows what to do when a vulnerability is discovered, or the one network administrator who knows what to block when there is a potential breach.
3. Resilient from Top to Bottom
Before these playoffs, few casual fans could have named many of the Seahawks defenders. But everyone watching the Super Bowl found out that the Seahawks defense has almost no weaknesses. The defensive line is built on under-appreciated but high-quality players who are focused on team results, not personal glory.
The post closes with do you want to play like the Broncos or play like the Seahawks?
How do you want your IT security program to perform – like the Denver Broncos or the Seattle Seahawks? If you are the GM or coach at your company, you should focus on building a roster of IT security controls and security-focused IT providers that resemble the Seattle Seahawks. By being prepared and validating all aspects of your program, you, too, can crush vulnerabilities and thrive in a complex threat environment.
Security is a bit easier when you have a team who works together. Go Hawks. Note my family, friends, one of who is a sheriff.
I was at Wavefront Wireless Summit and the hot topic is M2M.
M2M is machine to machine.
M2M can include the case of industrial instrumentation - comprising a device (such as a sensor or meter) to capture an event (such as temperature, inventory level, etc.) that is relayed through a network(wireless, wired or hybrid) to an application (software program) that translates the captured event into meaningful information (for example, items need to be restocked).[3] Such communication was originally accomplished by having a remote network of machines relay information back to a central hub for analysis, which would then be rerouted into a system like a personal computer.[4]
M2M is hot thanks to companies like NEST that took the disconnected thermostat and connected to your mobile device, browser and the cloud.
Sitting on a panel and listening. It is really hard to surf the web and look at your e-mail when you are on a panel, so you need to listen. :-) I realized that the data center industry with its focus on performance of the its electrical and mechanical systems for some of the smart data center guys is probably the most connected M2M solutions out there. Data Centers are some of the youngest industrial plants. Yes a data center is an industrial plant. It is an information industrial plant. And , uhhh it has a lot of connectivity, storage and compute available if the monitoring of the infrastructure was designed in. Some of the smartest guys have whiz kids who are creating new algorithms to run their mechanical systems more efficiently, saving money in power used and the maintenance.
Listening to people who need to use cellular connections to get telemetry data from farm equipment is really hard. Is there cell coverage in the first place? If not, you need to deploy cellular infrastructure. Data Centers if designed for monitoring have plenty of capacity for M2M.
We don’t about M2M, but state-of-the-art data centers are huge machine to machine environments. Including the servers themselves are sending GB of data machine to machine. Splunk and others are doing this.
Need to think about this a bit more on how M2M and data centers should be discussed. I’ll add category for now on “M2M"
I have radiant floor heat from a gas boiler in our beach house. It is 10 years old and starting to have intermittent problems. Troubleshooting the right part - the air pressure switch, an adjustment, a leaking hose, the blower fan, the controller has taken me weeks to figure out what the problem is. I finally got the problem solved. I think, but need to keep an on the operations. Easiest thing to do is to move a remote camera to watch the read out.
141 degrees and working. I have my fingers crossed that it is fixed. At least it is so much easier to look at browser page and see it. I could turn on the microphone if I wanted to hear the boiler, but the video is good enough.
Everyone has cameras in a data center for security. How many of you use a remote camera to watch an area for operations?
