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Practitioners or Academics: Which Are We?
The Computer Society has a long tradition of serving the academic side of our membership, but many of the recent efforts have targeted the "practitioner" side. Of course, in reality, there's no hard division between the two, and IT Pro and the CS seek to serve those at all points along the continuum.
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News Briefs
A brief look at news items affecting the IT professional.
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Wireless Broadband Technologies: Access, Security, and Applications
Wireless technologies continue to advance to provide faster, more reliable, and more secure service. The articles in this issue provide case studies and practical information to help the IT professional understand existing wireless broadband options as well as their future direction.
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Responding to Security Issues in WiMAX Networks
WiMAX technology, the commercialization of the evolving IEEE 802.16 standard, aims to solve the last-mile problem with broadband wireless access at the scale of metropolitan area networks. WiMAX has attracted significant attention and interest because of its wide transmission range, high transmission rate, and mobility support. However, to make WiMAX networks usable and reliable, several security issues must be addressed in the standard and its protocols. In this article, the authors give an introduction to the security protocols used in WiMAX networks and then discuss why these protocols are deficient in terms of anti-replay, efficiency, scalability, and forward and backward secrecy, as well as how they can be enhanced to address these issues for real applications.
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Hand-Off Evolution with Multiple Interfaces
Under the upcoming 4G network, mobile devices will have to handle multiple interfaces. Each network mechanism has its merits, such as WiFi's high speed and the long transmission range of High Speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA), but managing a combination of different interfaces during a hand-off procedure presents new challenges for next-generation networks because the network environment will continue to become more complex. A hand-off mechanism called hand-around allows users to manage multiple interfaces, but can cause bandwidth exhaustion and signal integrity problems. Interface scheduling could offer routing optimization, connection QoS, power savings, and bandwidth utilization. New issues, such as simultaneous location, will also arise under the upcoming 4G network, making multiple-interface integration an urgent topic.
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Considerations for an Efficient Mobile Workforce
Support for mobile workers is an important component of an enterprise's overall IT infrastructure. The rapid evolutions in both wireless broadband and handheld device technologies demand a set of guidelines that provide maximum user benefit while maintaining a manageable support model. This article describes what to consider when evaluating handheld devices for corporate standardization.
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Plug into the Online Database and Play Mobile Web 2.0
The next generation of open mobile device platforms will use wireless broadband access technology and human?computer interface advances to allow remote plug and play with Web 2.0 applications. A case study of mobile commerce reveals a complete workflow, from user log in to entry creation to barcode scanning.
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Development Support Tools for Enterprise Resource Planning
Implementing an enterprise system involves capturing all information necessary to make business processes work in an integrated fashion, and reflecting this integration in source code. Enterprise resource planning implementations should also exploit reuse of existing system elements. ERP tools typically work on top of a framework, using prefabricated modules to create customized variants of the system. Among the free and open source ERP systems, only ERP5 offers a comprehensive set of tools tailored to its framework that, together with other off-the-shelf tools, provide support for creating new modules and entire new systems.
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Choosing a Security Option: The InfoSecure Methodology
This article presents a four-step process for evaluating assets to be protected, potential assailants, and likely methods and tactics. It puts the results together as a plan of action for investing in cybersecurity in ways that protect the most critical organizational information and processes. The process differs from earlier attempts to value security because it's based on an ordinal ranking, not on absolute dollar values for security. Moreover, it associates with each investment option an argument for why the investment should be made.
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Resources
The Resources department aims to provide pointers to other good resources for busy IT professionals. This month it features a range of books, Web sites, and a calendar of IT-related conferences through 2008.
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Baby Steps: Agile Transformation at BabyCenter.com
The authors describe BabyCenter.com's four-year journey from chaos to a relatively mature agile organization. From engineering teams tasked with more projects than developers, delivery dates set long before projects were scoped or staffed, and multitudinous business stakeholders deluging team members with new project requests, each more urgent than the previous, the team evolved into scrum sprints with predictable, steady paces and a comprehensive planning process wrapping the sprints.
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When Black Hats Are Really White
In many ways a curious development, the premier venue for technical information on cybersecurity and the latest security research is the conference that brings together hackers and those whose job it is to protect systems from them. Welcome to the "fun house," indeed.
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