Daily Tech Digest - January 24, 2022

The Role of EiPaaS in Enterprise Architecture: Part 1

The fourth stage of the enterprise architecture emerged as a result of internal organizational changes and the external market outlook — mainly decentralized architecture styles (microservices and cloud native) and agile processes. Each function or LoB is looking for autonomy by recruiting their own technical teams and owning the entire lifecycle (plan, build, test, run, manage) of the systems and subsystems they make or buy. The enterprise architecture utilizes platforms running on internal and external cloud infrastructures to facilitate this. Multitenancy and segmentation are some of the techniques used to provide platform capabilities to each LoB. As a result, the integration logic and the implementation responsibility also move to each LoB. However, the platform approach of this fourth stage incorporates centralized governance, security, monitoring and standardization of technology and patterns. It is important to use platforms in such an environment; otherwise, LoBs will start building shadow IT applications private to the function and the IT team will lose control of those applications. 


Getting ahead of the curve on mitigating mobile fraud

Google and the other app store providers will continuously review their security procedures to make their platforms and devices more secure. But big tech companies like Google have to deal with so many new apps and updates constantly that it’s inevitable that many malicious apps may find their way onto the store. For a long time, too, there has been a case to educate customers about the threats they face. Banks make noticeable efforts to warn customers about potential threats like clicking suspicious links via SMS or email or not downloading anything to their device from an untrusted source. But the truth is, inevitably, someone will make a mistake as fraudsters use various techniques to gain a user’s trust. With apps seeming completely harmless, it’s all too easy for precisely this to happen. By the time banks warn their customers about specific threats, the likelihood is that fraudsters are already evolving beyond those techniques, finding new ways to fool their unsuspecting victims. 


IT talent and the Great Resignation: 8 ways to nurture retention

Technology employees have never had more opportunities than they do right now to advance their skills online, network at virtual events, and work remotely without relocating to tech hubs. They can dip their toes in multiple pools and switch streams relatively easily. And after months of toiling to keep their organizations going amid turbulent times, the urge to seek out calmer (or more rewarding) seas is strong. “IT professionals are highly valued members of company teams, and opportunity for these skilled individuals to develop or move on seems endless these days,” says Michele Bailey, author of The Currency Of Gratitude: Turning Small Gestures Into Powerful Business Results and CEO of The Blazing Group. “On top of that, the many changes and challenges brought by the pandemic have increased stress levels among us all. There is certainly plenty of reason for stressed-out IT leaders to look outside their existing roles for new opportunities and a better work-life balance.” For CIOs who want to retain their top talent, it can be a tough sell.


Kafka Or Pulsar? A Battle Of The Giants Concerning Streaming

The two-fold vision is, first, to build resiliency into software, such that loosely coupled services can be started, stopped, paused, or restarted as needed. By “services,” we mean the discrete programs that correspond to a cloud-native app’s constitutive functions. This makes it possible to scale cloud-native apps by adding or subtracting instances of services. Second, and concomitant with this, cloud-native design aims to make business services observable – i.e., susceptible to fine-grained control and manipulation – by humans and machines alike. You are not scaling servers, storage, and network capacity; you are, in effect, adjusting sliders that permit you to manipulate the behavior of the service. Human beings can do this, manually … but so can machines – automatically, in accordance with predefined rules. As I write in a separate piece (for a different venue) that has not yet been published: Observability instrumentation makes it easier for operations personnel to provision extra resources in response to an observed service impairment 


Intelligent Process Automation Can Give Your Company a Powerful Competitive Advantage

McKinsey defines IPA as “a collection of business-process improvements and modern technologies that combines fundamental process redesign with robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cognitive technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP).” It helps organizations redesign processes and workflows in alignment with customer journeys for seamless experiences, digitize data for personalization and insights, and automate mundane tasks to achieve groundbreaking increases in productivity. In the world of operations, IPA is a Swiss Army knife. CEOs love its power to transform customer and employee experiences; CFOs appreciate its potential to grow efficiency exponentially; line-of-business leaders like the clear results it delivers; chief information officers embrace it as a digital accelerator and a way to demonstrate business outcomes. One U.S. health insurer, after adopting IPA across its enterprise, found it could process claims six times faster. 


Why Change Intelligence Is Necessary to Effectively Troubleshoot Modern Applications

To be able to truly gain the insights you require from your systems when problems arise, you need to add another piece to the puzzle - and that is Change Intelligence. Change Intelligence includes not only understanding when something has changed, but also why it has changed, who changed it, and what the impact of the change has had on your systems. The existing onslaught of data is often overwhelming for operations engineers. Therefore, Change Intelligence was introduced to provide a wider & broader context about the telemetry, and the information that you already have. For example, if you have three services talking to each other, and one of these services has an elevated error rate, this is a good indicator that something is wrong according to your telemetry. This is an excellent basis for suspecting something is wrong in your system, however the next and more critical step will always be to start digging to find the root cause that is the reason behind this anomalous telemetry data. 


Twitter: Head of Security Reportedly Fired; CISO to Leave

The social media platform in a memo shared with the employees accessed by The New York Times reportedly said, "The changes followed an assessment of how the organization was being led and the impact on top-priority work." Twitter's head of privacy engineering, Lea Kissner, will become the company's interim CISO, according to the report. Reportedly, after assuming the CEO position, Agrawal reorganized the management staff and dismissed Dantley Davis, the chief design officer, and Michael Montano, the head of engineering. In a previous filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter said that Agrawal is restructuring the leadership team to drive increased accountability, speed and operational efficiency, and shifting to a general manager model for consumer, revenue and core technologies, which will be led by Kayvon Beykpour, Bruce Falck and Nick Caldwell, respectively. "These GMs will lead all core teams across engineering, product management, design, and research.


Fraud detection is great, but you also need prevention

A lot of the complexity of fraud detection comes from the fact that most fraud solutions focus solely on bad actors. They specialize in identifying the criminals by looking for suspicious factors. A new approach which is becoming more common is adding a stage before the fraud detection phase: positive validation. The overwhelming majority of customers are real people, with real, trustworthy histories and identities. If most of them can be identified confidently at the start, then the fraud detection problem becomes more manageable. All the fraud team’s resources can be spent on the cases where there’s real cause for doubt, and can use judicious friction where appropriate (such as email validation, or multi-factor authentication) in those cases. Positive validation has become a practical possibility partially due to online companies’ increased desire to collaborate with one another. Using providerless technology, generally based on some form of Privacy Enhancing Technology, companies can validate and vouch for trustworthy customers without sharing any personal user information with one another.


How quantum computing is helping businesses to meet objectives

According to Oberreuter, once a quantum computer becomes involved in the problem solving process, the optimal solution can really be found, allowing businesses to find the best arrangements for the problem. While current quantum computers, which are suitable for this kind of problems, called quantum annealers now have over 5,000 qubits, many companies that enlist Reply’s services often find that problems they have require more than 16,000-20,000 variables, which calls for more progress to be made in the space. “You can solve this by making approximations,” commented the Reply data scientist. “We’ve been writing a program that is determining an approximate solution of this objective function, and we have tested it beyond the usual number of qubits needed. “The system is set up in a way that prevents running time from increasing exponentially, which results in a business-friendly running time of a couple of seconds. This reduces the quality of the solution, but we get a 10-15% better result than what business heuristics are typically providing.”


EU Plans to Build Its Own DNS Infrastructure

A commission spokesperson tells Information Security Media Group, "This initiative addresses the lack of significant EU investment in free and public DNS resolution and enables the deployment of an alternative to existing solutions in a market that is characterized by a consolidation of this service in the hands of a few non-EU providers." The commission says this new DNS infrastructure proposition is crucial because "the processing of DNS data can have an impact on privacy and data protection rights" of internet users in EU. The deployment and usage of this new infrastructure means that data protection and privacy will be strictly governed by rules applicable in the EU - such as GDPR, among others - and this will "ensure that DNS resolution data are processed in Europe and personal data are not monetized." Currently, many DNS resolvers do not recognize EU privacy legislation, such as GDPR and ePrivacy, and could potentially allow operators to track user activity clandestinely and block or manipulate requests such as inserting advertisements and custom search results.



Quote for the day:

"No organization should be allowed near disaster unless they are willing to cooperate with some level of established leadership." -- Irwin Redlener

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