Daily Tech Digest - December 30, 2016

3 reasons why #FinTech may decline in 2017

In my humble opinion FinTech is addressing a customer experience driven demand strongly supported by technical evolution such as mobile, cloud, big data, etc… Has the disintermediation of banks started? While the rest of the world is changing rapidly, banks are still struggling to survive the regulatory tsunami which has not ended yet. And FinTech became a real hype strongly attracting millennials to become part of it. Hipsters created start-ups to change the banking landscape. Venture Capitalists supported this evolution and heavily invested in the first waves of disruption. Isn't #FinTech disillusioned and will this not lead to a decline in 2017? And will enlightenment come from new kids on the block? Here are 3 reasons why "hashtag"FinTech may decline in 2017


Everything You Need to Know About Gene Therapy’s Most Promising Year

It sounds complicated, and it is. Gene therapy was first tested in a person in 1990, but scary side effects turned the gene-fix idea into a scientific backwater. And the field hasn’t conquered all its problems. We started the year with the tale of Glybera, heralded as the first gene treatment ever approved that sought to correct an inherited gene error. Yet the drug came with an eye-popping price tag of $1 million and, dogged by questions over how well it works, has turned into a medical and commercial flop. But scientists haven’t given up. And neither have biotech entrepreneurs. They’re closer than ever to proving that gene therapy is for real. Here’s what happened in 2016.


What's your CIO legacy? Deloitte has some ideas for you

Last year for its CIO Legacy Project, Deloitte researchers wanted to pinpoint the methods, tools and competencies CIOs used to create value for their organizations. "To a little bit of our surprise, there wasn't a lot of difference across industries and geographies," Kark said. Instead, they uncovered three roles that CIOs take on to do this -- the trusted operator is focused on operational excellence; the change instigator is focused on business transformation; the business co-creator is focused on revenue and growth. This year, researchers wanted to know what characteristics are associated with each of the three "pattern types," be it personality, leadership skills, working style or IT capabilities. They hypothesized, for example, that trusted operators would be more risk-averse and less outgoing than change instigators and business co-creators.


Test Systems — The Soft Underbelly of System Security

If you improve the security of your test systems, you can also help your Development and QA teams by providing a safe, well-monitored environment in which you can test and deploy updated applications, test applications to recently released security patches, and improve the overall understanding of the way your projects provide access to the outside world. In other words, improved security improves the QA ability of your systems by providing another valuable perspective on the development and execution of your systems. Increasing the isolation of a system should always lead to increased security, knowledge, and testability of that system — goals that will help to unite the QA/SRE, Operations, and Security teams. Given the importance of security, then, it is critical that you follow defined policies and procedures to ensure that your test systems are as secure as possible and don’t expose existing vulnerabilities or create new ones.


Automation, Analytics and APIs: How NFV is Driving Service Assurance Innovation

Investing in new-generation analytical capabilities that are optimized for today’s hybrid NFV environments will help CSPs to better realize the full value of their NFV investments. An example of such advancement is utilizing natural-language processing algorithms for eliminating data normalization and clean-up requirements in alarm data, and using machine-learning techniques to support advanced correlation and RCA, without the need to augment alarm data with network topology and reference information, and so on. This typically becomes an inhibitor to an analytics project’s success, as the data often isn’t readily available or requires a significant integration effort. Our recent efforts in this area have surpassed even our own expectations.


Why Employees Could Be the Biggest Threat to Healthcare Data Security

Businesses across industries are also incorporating bring your own devices (BYOD) into their corporate IT cultures. By doing so, employees are now able to work on the device or devices that they are comfortable using, while saving costs that would accompany providing work-sponsored devices. However, because of the ease of onboarding mobile device, including connected wearables, it has now become commonplace at some organizations for unauthorized devices to find a way to connect to the network. Sriram Bharadwaj, director of information services at the University of California (UC) Irvine Health in Orange, Calif., has said, "In the old days, you accessed electronic health records from a PC at your desk.


5 ways healthcare providers can transform chaos into order

The easy way out — investing billions of dollars to expand facilities, extend operating hours and add staff — seems out of reach for most healthcare providers and looks more like a bandage than a cure. In the past few years, we have worked with a number of large healthcare organizations to address this problem. Drawing upon our decades-long experience helping Fortune 500 companies make operational improvements, and by employing lean principles and predictive analytics, we set out to find the root cause of this operational paradox: Vital resources are often both overbooked and underutilized on the same day. Here are five practical approaches to improving patient access, decrease wait times and reduce healthcare delivery costs without embarking on multi-year, budget-stretching mega projects.


I, Robot: How AI is redefining the use of data in healthcare

Facing up to such a huge challenge, researchers are turning to the technological advancements that will allow them to bolster their analytical abilities, both in terms of handling volume and increasing accuracy. Acknowledging this opportunity, technology firms are more than happy to respond to the call for support. McKinsey's analysis of this space has recently suggested that the use of data handling strategies for pharmaceutical research could create up to $100bn in cost savings per year, and that is just in the US. The global potential for efficiency savings is huge. Today the data problem for pharmaceutical firms is not just the volume but also its organisation within their databases. Following years of merger and acquisition activity, different research departments often work in silos, cut off from sharing information effectively between them.


5 signs we're finally getting our act together on security

Security experts have been warning for some time about the millions of devices that are connected to the internet without even the most basic security features, so the Mirai attack shouldn’t have been a surprise. And with Mirai’s source code publicly available, it is safe to assume there are other IoT botnets waiting in the shadows to strike. With all these devices connecting to the internet, we are ripe for an IoT worm, said Lamar Bailey, senior director of security research and development at Tripwire. Fixing the problem will require a lot of coordination, creativity, and persistence, but perhaps people are actually seeing the risks. The silver lining is that the Mirai attack was a “fairly cheap lesson in what a compromised IoT [threat] would look like while there’s still time to do something about it,” said Geoff Webb, vice president of solution strategy at Micro Focus.


Will networks and security converge in 2017?

Service chaining provides a framework to address the basic security issues, but enterprises still face the challenge of creating instances of that service across hundreds of application, user types and sites. A high-degree of policy integration and automation is needed to make that enterprise WAN management feasible. SD-WAN and security parameters should ideally be defined and delivered through one interface. The necessary tools should then be able to push those policies out across the infrastructure. Many leading SD-WAN providers offer those capabilities, but even then the networking and security analytics remain separate. There is no way, for example, to minimize security alerts storms for security operations personnel by correlating security and networking information.



Quote for the day:


"The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it." -- Cyril Falls


No comments:

Post a Comment