Daiy Tech Digest - February 15, 2017

Operational - the Forgotten Architectural View

DevOps requires embracing new, often unfamiliar technologies and ideas. Architectural thinking and design can help clarify who the stakeholders are, what concerns they have, and how those concerns are being met. Len Bass and his colleagues recently published a book on DevOps technology and practice for software architects2. Beyond that, little guidance exists for architects dealing with their systems' operational environments. To help fill this gap, I outline here an architectural viewpoint, one that updates and reworks the operational viewpoint Nick Rozanski and I described in Software Systems Architecture


Big Data: Why Should You Be Aware of It

As businesses, of all sizes, push to become more competitive in a rapidly developing global economy, there are a number of influences that are moving front and center. It would be difficult to identify one singular component of business that has had the impact of Big Data over the last several years, and there is a good reason for this. Whether you are running a training company or a marketing agency, Big Data will play an immensely powerful role in the development of effective models of customer engagement, branding, research and development, and more. Big Data represents a massive opportunity for businesses around the world, primarily based on its capacity to transform and disrupt the status quo. If you are a business owner, it is imperative that you are aware of Big Data and how it can benefit your business.


CIOs disrupt IT operating models to align with digital business

For many CIOs operating in the digital era, the need to meet customer demands is paramount. But many CIOs also realize that before their organizations can serve customers they must empower employees with premium tools. Borrowing a page from Apple’s Genius Bar playbook, Salesforce.com CIO Ross Meyercord instituted Tech Force teams in the SaaS software vendor’s break rooms. Employees needing technical help can approach the Tech Force staffers to troubleshoot computer, phone or other issues. They get face-to-face with IT staff, rather than filing impersonal help-desk tickets from their desks. ... Unbounded IT and startup culture extend to healthcare organizations such as St. Luke's Healthcare Systems, which includes 10 hospitals in Kansas City, Mo. In true bimodal fashion, CIO Debe Gash is splitting her IT projects into two categories: run-the-business efforts and transformational activities.


Revolutionary Navigation Standard by Volkswagen and Mobileye

"The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost", said Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye. Professor Shashua adds this: "The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilises crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving." In fact, the agreement is the first of its kind to merge the data of different automobile manufacturers worldwide to create a single ‘high-definition world map'.


Data Center Security Critical for Securing Enterprise Data

These cyber-attacks will continue to increase, both in number and sophistication, as we become more globally connected—and the bad actors intent on carrying out their malicious acts become more connected. Unfortunately, detecting and preventing cyber-attacks is made more difficult because the security strategies of the IT teams and the facilities teams—who are responsible for data security and building/physical security, respectively—often don’t align. This problem becomes much more pronounced on a macro level when your organization uses cloud or colocation hosting services from a third-party data center provider. So how do you maintain the highest levels of data security…and who’s ultimately responsible? The truth is, it’s a shared responsibility.


Google brings global database system 'Spanner' to its Cloud Platform

“When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution,” product manager for Cloud Spanner, Deepti Srivastava, said in a blog post. “Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.” He added: “Over the years, we’ve battle-tested Spanner internally with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centers around the world. At Google, Spanner supports tens of millions of queries per second and runs some of our most critical services.”


Risk Level Categorization in Insurance Policy.

Market Segmentation Is The Key To The Insurance Industry. It is virtually accepted that no risks will be identical. If you are insuring a home within the same locality, it is entirely possible that the risks on one of the homes will be slightly higher than the other homes. You have to understand that insurance is all about pooling risks. If the calculation of these risks is inaccurate then the insurance company will have a heavy price to pay. That is why there are always ways in which the insurance policy is changed. The segmentation is also the key to profits for the insurance company. At the bottom of the pile in terms of cost are the low-cost insurance policies. If you decide to go with budget flood insurance for your area, then it is likely that you will first be assessed to check whether you fall on the lowest level of insurance.


RXJava2 by Example

Reactive programming is a specification for dealing with asynchronous streams of data, providing tools for transforming and combining streams and for managing flow-control, making it easier to reason about your overall program design. But easy it is not, and there is definitely a learning curve. For the mathematicians among us it is reminiscent of the leap from learning standard algebra with its scalar quantities, to linear algebra with its vectors, matrices, and tensors, essentially streams of data that are treated as a unit. Unlike traditional programming that considers objects, the fundamental unit of reactive reasoning is the stream of events. Events can come in the form of objects, data feeds, mouse movements, or even exceptions. The word “exception” expresses the traditional notion of an exceptional handling, as in - this is what is supposed to happen and here are the exceptions.


UK debuts new National Cyber Security Centre to take on cybercrime

The NCSC's launch comes after the UK government recently experienced a number of high-profile security breaches ... and a ransomware attack at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. Earlier this month, the Public Accounts Committee called the government's approach to cybersecurity "inconsistent, dysfunctional and chaotic," ZDNet reported. ... "The NCSC will work together with UK organisations, businesses and individuals to provide authoritative and coherent cyber security advice and cyber incident management," the report stated. "This is underpinned by world-class research and innovation." The NCSC aims to manage cyber incidents as well as help citizens protect their machines before a security breach occurs. The strategy is to "use government as a guinea pig for all the measures we want to see done at national scale," said NCSC technical director Ian Levy in the report.


IBM integrates Watson into its security operations platform

Big Blue announced general availability of Watson for Cyber Security, an offering that has been tested with more than 40 customers over the last year. In that time, Watson has ingested more than 1 million security documents. The aim is to help security analysts go through Watson's knowledge base with natural language. IBM is also integrating its X-Force Command Center network, which tracks security events. IBM is announcing the Watson Cognitive Security Operation Centers at the RSA security conference this week in San Francisco. ... One key takeaway from IBM's move is that the company is hoping to use Watson to patch a shortage of security analysts and knowhow. With its various tools and data, IBM security operations platform aims to cut the time spent on cybersecurity investigations. IBM's cognitive security operations platform is available on premise or as an IBM Cloud offering.



Quote for the day:


“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is.” -- Anita Roddick


No comments:

Post a Comment