January 31, 2015

Data preparation is the unsung hero of big data analytics
When it comes to analytics, there's an old axiom that goes "garbage in, garbage out," meaning that if you throw high volumes of poorly formed data into an analytic solution, you'll get bad results. Historically, the cleansing and preparation of data has been a long, arduous, time-consuming process. When I was at Yankee Group, we migrated CRM systems, but before we could do the migration, the company spent a year doing nothing but cleaning up the records in the existing system so we didn't import bad data. Even with all the work we did, we still had a bunch of bad information that was migrated over.


China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet
The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors who complain that in its quest for so-called cybersovereignty ... “I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow American broadcasters. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.” Multinational companies are also alarmed by the growing online constraints. Especially worrisome, they say, are new regulations that would force foreign technology and telecom companies to give the government “back doors” to their hardware and software and require them to store data within China.


Google defends policy that leaves most Android devices unpatched
According to Beardsley, the Android security response team first replied to bug reports in mid-October with the "we-don't-patch-WebView-anymore" message. Beardsley used his blog to urge Google to change its collective mind and return to patching WebView in those older editions, which by Google's own admission power more than 60% of all Android devices. ... "We provide patches for the current branch of Android in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and directly provide Android partners with patches for at least the last two major versions of the operating system."


The Technology Coming in 2015: a Realistic Analysis
Every year more and more watch innovations are presented, but they are still seen as products just for geeks. Why might 2015 be different? First, the French company Withings has introduced an innovation that doesn’t seem like one. From the outside it is a conventional watch, while on the inside it carries sensors that monitor activity, sports and sleep. It keeps the correct time by itself, automatically communicates with your smartphone and, like a typical watch, you don’t have to recharge it, though it will require a batter change every 8 months. This new smartwatch proposal, based on simplicity and elegance, won over the tech enthusiasts at CES 2015 and goes on sale in late January at affordable prices.


Use a SQL interface to handle JSON data in DB2 11
This tutorial focuses on a SQL interface recently introduced in DB2® 11 for z/OS® that allows extraction and retrieval of JSON data from BSON objects and conversion from JSON to BSON. With this new feature, users can manage JSON data without relying on DB2 NoSQL JSON APIs. Instead, SQL interfaces can be used for JSON manipulation. Learn about the setup/configuration and get illustrations for common JSON usage inside DB2 11 for z/OS. Hints and tips are provided to improve performance and prevent potential pitfalls.


Storage Spaces Physical Disk Validation Script
As part of a new Storage Spaces deployment, there are a number of functional requirements which each Physical Disk must satisfy before creating a Storage Pool. Further, there exists a natural functional and performance variance between physical disks of the same model (and even manufacturing lot) which can result from a number of factors including manufacturing tolerances, shipping damage, or even vibration in a disk enclosure. In a large storage deployment, these variances can be difficult to identify as the cause of a functional or performance issue.


It's Ben Armstrong and what's new in Hyper-V
In Edge Show episode 134, Rick is getting back in touch with on-premises technologies that are still very close to his heart. This episode has Rick reaching out to Ben Armstrong from the Hyper-V team to talk about all things new in Hyper-V found in the Technical Preview 1 of Windows Server. Ben outlines 2 or 3 big things and a bunch of "popcorn".


The Purpose of Silicon Valley
Such combinations of improvements in hardware and software lead to many technologies that are extremely valuable even if they get less attention than Web or mobile-app startups valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, says Tom Hayes, a marketing executive who founded the Techmanity conference and Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a group that promotes regional development. What confuses outsiders is that so much in the Valley “seems trivial, small ball,” Hayes says, “when the myth is that we are supposed to be out changing the world. In fact, our utopian idealism has shrunk in recent years as we’ve come to realize that even little innovations, in the right context, can have enormous impact … and the odds of pulling them off successfully are infinitely greater.”


Update on the DATA Act
While a strong majority of government organizations reported formal processes around data governance, planning, change management, and almost a majority had a formal organizational structure, fewer reported strong data architectures and only one-quarter reporting measuring the outcomes of their data processes. Most worrisome is the inability to hire, train, grow and retain the data talent they need – only 26% said they did. For some, implementing the DATA Act will certainly be a challenge. However, the generous timeline and the resources available to guide the process will help.


5 reasons why ecommerce is good for the Indian economy
As ecommerce undoubtedly depends on cutting edge technology, it in turn requires a quality workforce. There is a strong demand for web developers, software coders, analytics experts, content writers, graphic designers and digital marketers among other specialized tech areas. On the business side, there is a massive requirement for product and UI interface designers, marketing, ERP & SCM professionals and customer facing staff. All of this adds up to a humungous demand for over 150,000 professionals in the coming years.



Quote for the day:

"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." -- Malcolm Muggeridge

January 29, 2015

Spring 4 and Java 8
It is important to note that Spring is frequently used with other libraries such as Hibernate for data persistence and Jackson for converting Java objects to / from JSON. While Spring 4 supports the Java 8 date and time libraries, that does not mean that third party frameworks like Hibernate and Jackson are able to support the Java 8 date and time. At the time of publication Hibernate JIRA contains an open ticket HHH-8844 requesting support for Java 8 date and time APIs in Hibernate. . ... Finally, compiling Java 8 code with –parameters option preserves argument names in methods and makes it possible to write more compact Spring MVC method handlers and Spring Data query methods.


Professional Training Trends: A Q&A with Chris Armstrong, Armstrong Process Group
If we move a bit further along the EA value chain to what we call “Decide and Respond,” that’s a really good place for a different class of tools. Even though there are modeling tool vendors that try to do it, we need a second class of tools for EA Lifecycle Management (EALM), which is really getting into the understanding of “architecture-in-motion”. Once architecture content has been described as the current and future state, the real $64,000 question is how do we get there? How do we build a roadmap? How do we distribute the requirements of that roadmap across multiple projects and tie that to the strategic business decisions and critical assets over time? Then there’s how do I operate all of this stuff once I build it?


Five innovations that are key to the future of data centers
If people are the heart of an organization, then the data center could be considered its brain, and maybe even its mouth. Quality storage and handling are key to an organization's success. The technologies and processes that power our data centers have grown at an exponential rate. What was once considered state of the art is now considered a relic, and the IT skills needed to manage these new data centers are changing as well. As we move further in 2015, it's important to take a look at some of the hotly debated trends and technologies and see how they might affect your organization in the future. Here are five innovations that will impact the future of the data center.


Avoid disruption through exploration
Where did these once iconic companies go wrong? To my mind, they forgot to keep challenging their assumptions about what business they were actually in. Businesses have two options when they plan for the road ahead: they can put all their eggs into one basket, and risk losing everything if that basket has a hole in the bottom, or they can make a number of small bets, accepting that some will fail while others succeed. Taking the latter approach, and making many small bets on innovation, transforms the boardroom into a roulette table. Unlike a punter in a casino, however, businesses cannot afford to stop making bets.


Analytics: A Gap in the Market or a Market in the Gap?
There are plenty of old-schoolers, such as myself, who were de facto data scientists as a function of training and experience in the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. However the difference is that our data collection efforts were fairly straight-forward (albeit tedious, labor intensive, and time consuming). The labor market demand now is for persons who have natural investigatory curiosity, the ability to sift through numbers, text, and images, and to be comfortable with a range of analytic tools. While there is a consensus that there is a gap in the data scientist market, the contrasting question is whether there is a market in the gap?


How CIOs Can Win In The Cloud
When I asked O'Neill about why he was an early cloud adopter, he prefaced his answer by observing that the goal was to "build a great product, not spend time on the plumbing." This is a great point, and it's worth asking yourself: Would you rather be an architect or a plumber? For Hubspot, the cloud became an enabler of this goal. O'Neill's approach was to let the business drive software selection, not IT. It became clear during rollout, he said, that "they're going to know the business better than us." Pantheon took the "no server at the office" approach. The company's priority was to take the "path of least resistance" and to outsource its cloud infrastructure services to focus on developing a superior product with a quality user experience.


Out of control AI will not kill us, believes Microsoft Research chief
"You might be told, for example, in using this service you have a one in 10,000 chance of having a query ever looked at... each person only has to worry about as much as they worry about being hit by a bolt of lightning, it's so rare. "So, I believe that machine learning, reasoning and AI more generally will be central in providing great tools for ensuring the privacy of folks at the same time as allowing services to acquire data anonymously or with only low probabilities of risk to any particular person."


GIF all the things: Imgur unveils video-to-GIF converter
The new conversion tool is a remarkably simple way to run videos into GIFs: Users just have to paste a video’s URL into a form field, select a segment of up to 15 seconds, add an optional caption and then let the Imgur servers do their work. As always with Imgur, users don’t have to register, and the result can be freely shared across the web and social networks. That no-frills approach has helped to turn Imgur into one of the most popular image-hosting destinations on the web. Product and growth director Sam Gerstenzang told me that the site now generates more than 5 billion page views from over 150 million unique users a month. Initially, most of that activity came from Reddit, where Imgur quickly became the most popular image-hosting resource after launching six years ago.


6 digital health trends to watch in 2015
The industry grew more in 2014 than it ever has before, and that trend will continue into 2015 as there are more innovations in wearables, digital health clinics, telemedicine, and disease research and prevention. The healthcare industry will see a 21% increase in IT jobs by 2020, according to University of Chicago research. Rock Health, a digital health seed fund, recently released a report that showed there was $4.1 billion in funding for digital health startups in 2014. Major tech companies like Apple and Google announced health initiatives last year. And according to ABI Research, activity trackers outnumbered smartwatches 4 to 1 in 2014.


Sector Roadmap: Hadoop/Data Warehouse Interoperability
This Sector RoadmapTM examines that integration, reviewing SQL-on-Hadoop solutions on offer from the three major Hadoop vendors: Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR; incumbent data warehouse vendor Teradata; relational-database juggernaut Oracle; and Hadoop/data warehouse hybrid vendor Pivotal. With this analysis, key usage scenarios made possible by these solutions are identified, as are the architectural distinctions between them. Vendor solutions are evaluated over six Disruption Vectors: schema flexibility, data engine interoperability, pricing model, enterprise manageability, workload role optimization, and query engine maturity.


Shedding Some Light on Shadow IT Management
Shadow IT has been lurking in the dark corners of organizations for years now, but as BYOD and public cloud computing gain traction in the workplace more and more employees are stealthily adopting their own software and hardware without telling IT. When IT is left in the dark it makes it nearly impossible to mitigate potential risks, and in light of the recent barrage of data breachesexecutives are becoming increasingly concerned about the issue. So what can you do? First and foremost, accept that shadow IT is here to stay. IDC found that the majority of information workers share files via email and other unsecure methods while only a small group, about 10 percent, use a service provided by their company.



Quote for the day:

“It always seems impossible until it's done.” -- Nelson Mandela

January 28, 2015

Big Data: 5 Top Companies and Their Plans for 2015
Expect new product and service announcements from the established big names, as well as a flood of innovative start-ups hitting the headlines over the next 12 months. This is the first part of my run-through of big data companies I expect to hear great things in 2015. I’ve started with the “big data giants” – established names which have made data the foundation of their business model. In another post I will focus on the newcomers and start-ups snapping at their heels.


Cloud ERP: 9 Emerging Options
The good news for CIOs and their teams considering moving some or all ERP functions online: Vendors have been prepping for this shift, and there's already plenty of choice. The conventional ERP heavyweights -- Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP -- are also in on the trend. You may have noticed how much all three, each in their own way, talked up cloud across the board in 2014. Oracle in particular spent a good bit of time discussing -- at the highest executive levels -- its cloud endeavors and future plans, sure signs that the entrenched on-premises approaches to ERP are getting a cloud makeover, even if such shifts will take much more time than, say, getting off that old Exchange server for email.


World's Largest DDoS Attack Reached 400Gbps, says Arbor Networks
Increasingly, the culprit is Network Time Protocol (NTP), an important but otherwise totally ignored way for the Internet to keep its routers and server infrastructure synchronised with UTC. Not long after an infamous attack on Spamhaus in early 2013, which used something called DNS amplification to summon up potentially vast amounts of traffic, someone worked out that other protocols were open to the same trick. NTP turned out to be a good candidate for the same spoofing/amplification treatment, notably during the almost-as-infamous attack on CloudFlare a year ago, the one Arbor mentions as hitting 325Gbps.


Samsung's $100 million Internet of Things Bet
Samsung has thrown its weight behind an effort called Thread, which also has the backing of Nest, processor designer ARM, and a few other industry players. As Parks Associates analyst Tom Kerber explains, Thread works by assigning every device its own IP address, and brings numerous benefits including end-to-end encryption and low power consumption. "If you think about longer-term, it's very likely that a lot of the intelligence is going to be in the end devices rather than in a central controller, so these end devices need to be addressable, and IP is kind of predominant," Kerber says.


7 Corporate blogging blunders to avoid
Yes, blogging has some huge advantages. And yes, I believe that many companies would greatly benefit from an ongoing blogging initiative. But that means taking the time to do it right.
Blogging requires a strong strategy, good optimization and fantastic content. Without those three elements, your blog will fizzle out before it starts to sizzle. It won’t help you boost search positions. It won’t engage your readers. And it won’t help your company make money. That’s never good. Want to keep your blog on the straight and narrow?


Microsoft unveils a great distraction
Can we all please calm down and look at this product glimpse rationally? Sure, HoloLens will find a home in some markets. I can certainly see design verticals such as CAD and CAM embracing the technology. And I’m sure that gamers will love it. Halo in 3D? I’m there! But outside of those niche markets, does this new headlining feature really offer anything to the ordinary home or corporate user? I don’t think so. My word processor and spreadsheet won’t work any better for being in 3D. As a writer, I want people to become immersed in my prose, but I don’t want to rely on a 3D trick to accomplish that.


Crooks Start Encrypting Websites And Demanding Thousands Of Dollars From Businesses
“The next step might well be the modern equivalent of protection rackets – threatening companies with being either taken offline or having their databases frozen unless they pay a regular fee.” Brian Honan, security consultant, said the modus operandi of the RansomWeb hackers was similar to ransomware attacks against a number of SMBs he had worked with, whereby the criminals broke into the server of the victim, overwrote backups with either the encrypted data or blank data, and at a later date returned to encrypt the server. “At this stage the backups are no longer useful as they contain no workable data to restore the systems, thus leaving the victim companies with the choice of either losing all their data and rebuilding it from scratch, or paying the ransom.”


Data scientists: How to hire and how to get the best from them
Hand says the rise of the data scientist is unsurprising, especially as it has been long predicted that the industry would see a massive shortage of people with a high level of analytical skills. He says any individual with data science in their LinkedIn profile can expect to be bombarded with emails from recruiters - yet, Hand says smart organisations also focus on two other sources of data scientists. "The first is to develop a close working relationship with a university, and not just the computer science school as many of the most successful analysts are coming from other schools of science," he says. "The second is to look inside the organisation for core analytical skills and to be prepared to retrain those people in advanced data analytics."


Building Massively-Scalable Distributed Systems using Go and Mesos
Apache Mesos uses an idiom known as a framework to delegate task scheduling to client code running on the cluster. Spark, for example, was originally a Mesos framework written to the Mesos API using the Scala language bindings. The original version of Mesos was built in 2009, before Go was popular. Today, Go is one of the most popular languages and many of the key components that integrate with Mesos are written in Go. For example, Kubernetes-Mesos, the Mesos framework for running Kubernetes workloads on Mesos is written in Go. Also, Go is popular with the many infrastructure tools including and surrounding the Docker container format which is natively supported by Mesos.


eBook: How to Adopt Microservices
Microservices architecture is emerging as the new standard for building applications. This approach to software design breaks complex applications into small, nimble, independent components to speed up time to market, simplify maintenance, and enable continuous integration.Learn in this new ebook how to adopt this new approach and optimize your applications and development processes.



Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

January 27, 2015

Healthcare’s High-Tech Transformation Includes Bionics, Big Data, and 3D Printing
One of the definitive gamechangers in personal technology was the introduction of the smartphone, which has transformed how, where, and when we interact with technology. And because smartphones are basically tiny computers with an internet connection, putting them to work for our personal health through apps, add-on devices, and cloud storage is now easier than ever before. Whether it’s monitoring your heart rate, counting the number of steps you took today, mapping your walking/biking/running route, or using an app to find the nearest doctor or clinic, more and more people are using the mobility and accessibility of their everyday gadget to improve their health.


Cisco Unveils Analytics Strategy Leveraging Network Intelligence
More specifically, The Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything portfolio includes components for network, location, collaboration, contact centers, and video. It is designed to help organizations apply analytics and extract useful insights from data that was mostly created within the organization’s four walls, and almost always resided in a centralized data store. The IoT space is filled with an industry-wide arms race to release the latest and greatest Internet-connected device. Recently, Intel has unveiled a new platform to make it easier for companies to create internet-connected smart products using its chips.


Hybrid Cloud: You Don’t Have to Go All In
The cloud is still something that small to medium size business owners are grappling to fully understand. It’s hard to define exactly how the cloud can help your business when there are so many different variations of cloud solutions available. Understanding exactly what the cloud looks like for any business isn’t easy, because, quite honestly, the cloud looks completely different for every business. As executives try to dissect the different services available and choose options that work for their needs, it’s important to understand – you don’t have to go all in.


Gamification for Business – Recruitment, Management and Promotion
In the gaming context, workers will know that their accomplishments will be justly recognized through various tangible game props and this awareness proves to be a great incentive for action. The clarity of the process helps a lot as well – set goals are clear to everyone and tracking the progress is easier than ever. This is especially relevant to the generation of Millenials that have been brought up playing interactive games and are eager to extrapolate the logic of games onto other areas of life. The regained focus on the aims defined in the game also considerably motivates employees to reach them faster. Since the primary goal of gamification is to recognize one's competence, talented workers will be even more determined to complete the project.


With Multi-Vector Attacks, Quality Threat Intelligence Matters
Multi-vector attacks take advantage of these common vulnerabilities: combining elements like social engineering and ‘spear phishing’ e-mail messages with malicious attachments that contains code that exploits known or unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities on the target system. While these attacks might rely on commodity malware, they are often tailored to bypass most antivirus engines. As an example, Cisco recently analyzed a multi-vector attack that we’ve labeled the “String of Paerls” (sp) attack that serves as a useful example for the kinds of techniques typical of multi-vector cyber attacks.


SmartDataCenter APIs – turning up the Heat
Following a service oriented architecture, SDC divides the responsibilities for various resources in compact, easy-to-understand API-components. Most of the APIs have a somewhat speaking name. In the table below you find an overview of the core APIs, what they cover and the equivalent project in OpenStack. ... The DataCenter object manages the discovery of the required APIs using the service API (sapi), handles the HTTP requests and provides list_*, get_* and create_*functions. Returned machines (both SmartMachines and KVM) provide functions to control their lifecycle:


Speak Like a Data Center Geek: Networks
It’s literally true that we can’t get enough of networks at Equinix. We were founded as a neutral place where network service providers could come together and exchange data traffic, and today we host more than 1,000 networks, with room for more. That all makes networks a solid choice to headline the 10th installment of our “How to Speak Like a Data Center Geek” series, which aims to bring clarity to the sometimes opaque terms we data center types toss around.


Extending the Reach of Mobile and Cloud in the Enterprise
Another enhancement is closer integration with MDM/MAM (Mobile Device Manager/Mobile Application Manager) like MobileIron. In an earlier post I talked about the work that has already been done with HCPA to add mobility management features on top of our enterprise cloud content management platform HCP. HCPA already brings elements of mobile device (MDM) and mobile information management (MIM) and alluded to the fact that HCPA does not really control which apps can use data but does allow users to better manage which users or 3rd parties can access files and participate in shared folders.


6 DNS services protect against malware and other unwanted content
There are actually two main types of DNS servers: recursive and authoritative. The ones that are used by most individuals and small companies (and that are covered here) are called recursive DNS and are the default services provided by most Internet Service Providers (ISPs). All the companies listed here offer recursive DNS services. Some of them, however, also sell authoritative DNS services, which allow website owners or hosts to define the Web server IP addresses that their domain names point to and to manage other DNS settings. Since DNS servers are the middlemen between your browser and website content, there are many third-party DNS services that offer additional functionality for both users and network administrators.


The Agile Value Delivery Process, Where ‘Done’ Means Real Value Delivered; Not Code
Current agile practices are far too narrowly focused on delivering code to users and customers. There is no systems-wide view of other stakeholders, of databases, and anything else except the code. Agile, today, has no clear management of thequalities of the system, such as security, usability and maintainability: there is a narrow ‘bug’ focus, as the only ‘quality’. ... So, your technical and organizational architecture must permit low-cost changes of new and better, unforeseen architecture. This means new suppliers, partners, and technical components. You will, face it, have to deal with this problem in the long term, hint: ‘technical debt’, so you might as well make sure you can change things easily in the short term.



Quote for the day:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” -- Mahatma Gandhi

January 25, 2015

The Internet of Robotic Things: Secure, harmless helpers or vulnerable, vicious foes?
“As IoT matures, we see the industry adding more robotic and AI functions to traditional industrial and consumer robots,” says Cooper. Beyond simply automation, these functions include predictive analysis, learning capabilities [such as machine learning], autonomous decision making, and complex programmable responses, explains Cooper. “The autonomous nature of these systems and their often critical function in the larger system make them of particular concern when it comes to security,” says Cooper.


How Xerox Jumpstarts Transformation through "Dreaming Sessions"
The process starts several weeks before the client shows up at the lab. We normally work with decision makers from multiple disciplines within the company. Well in advance, we need to understand their businesses, their workflows, what kinds of problems are they struggling with today. And then in the dreaming session itself, the client talks about their business, where they'd like to go, what they've envisioned. And then researchers will share some technologies we are working on in the labs. Maybe we share things we can do with data analytics or how to truly personalize a service. And then we show them possibilities for the future based on trends that we have expertise in.


Scrum explained
Although hard to execute, Scrum has some advantages that make its usage really worth. It embraces change: this is something which is one of the biggest problems in waterfall processes. Whenever anything needs to be changed, a long analysis had to be made, documents modified, for at last, modifying the product itself. Moreover, change is not welcomed in these processes - it is always something to be avoided. Scrum on the the other hand, embraces change, it welcomes it. Scrum recognizes that in software development change in natural, it means that the product is being used.


As Big Data and AI Take Hold, What Will It Take to Be an Effective Executive?
And most important, senior managers must learn to let go, something which is quite difficult because it runs counter to decades of organizational practices. Given our rapidly rising oceans of data, the command-and-control approach to management–where information flows up the organization and decisions are made at high levels–would sink the senior executive teams. As data science and AI permeate the organization, it’s important to delegate more autonomy to the business units that hopefully have the proper skills, the advanced tools and the necessary information to make better decisions on their own.


Five Critical Priorities HR Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2015
How employees get their work done has changed remarkably quickly; unsurprisingly HR needs to change, too Anyone who works in a global company doesn’t need to be told that their job has changed enormously in the past few years. Even if their job title – and sometimes their job description – remains unscathed, the number of people they work with, the amount of information they use to make decisions, their day-to-day tasks, and the technology they use have all changed quicker than at any time in their careers.


Sony's Two Big Mistakes: No Encryption, and No Backup
Vox's Timothy B. Lee points out in his step-by-step account of the Sony data breach that the company's networks were "down for days" following the November 24, 2014, attack.  Any business-continuity plan worth its salt prepares the company to resume network operations within hours or even minutes after a disaster, not days. A key component of your disaster-recovery plan is your recovery time objective. While operating dual data centers is an expensive option, it's also the safest. More practical for most businesses are cloud-based services such as the Morpheus database-as-a-service (DBaaS).


The 3 Little Architects – A Data Parody for today’s Financial Industry
The last architect is as technically competent as his peers however understood the value of building something once to use across the business. His approach was a little different than the first two. Understanding the risks and costs of hand coding or using one off tools to do the work, he decided to adopt an integrated platform designed to handle the complexities, sources, and volumes of data required by the business. The platform also incorporated shared metadata, reusable data transformation rules and mappings, a single source of required master and reference data, and provided agile development capabilities to reduce the cost of implementation and ongoing change management.


Why IT Should be Skeptical of 'Facebook at Work'
Facebook at Work will put the company in the crosshairs of established businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Jive, Zimbra and Slack. "Facebook has been a consumer social media innovator as well as a shrewd assembler of adjacent social media products," Keitt says. "So it stands to reason that as Facebook gets more comfortable in the enterprise space, it may seek to pull in more of these interesting consumer applications into an enterprise offering," similar to how Google rolled its family of apps into Google for Work.


.NET Becomes Open Source and Cross-Platform
This morning, the announcements made at Microsoft’s Connect() event in New York have been rippling through the web and the effects of these announcements are likely going to be felt for years to come. ... For decades, opponents of Microsoft have criticized the company for being too closed off and secretive and as of this morning, they may need to consider researching new arguments. The folks at Redmond absolutely stunned the world this morning with the announcement that the entire .NET ecosystem would be made open source and developed in the open.


Africa: The rise of BYOD & corporate data threats
“The scope of the problem only intensifies as business models continue to evolve with increased mobility, a growing mix of users, and geographically diverse business offices.” “The risk posed by the high percentage of employees with laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, multiple email accounts, and access to applications and databases makes addressing the insider threat a substantial challenge. Reducing the vulnerabilities posed by internal users needs to be a key priority in Kenyan organisations’ security strategies,” the report said. The report continues to suggest that the insider attacks which are deliberate are fuelled by disgruntlement, revenge, competitive advantage and blackmail. Most of the users already have access to the systems and so detection becomes difficult.



Quote for the day:

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." -- Walter Lippman

January 24, 2015

Security principles of bitcoin
Bitcoin is dramatically different. A bitcoin transaction authorizes only a specific value to a specific recipient and cannot be forged or modified. It does not reveal any private information, such as the identities of the parties, and cannot be used to authorize additional payments. Therefore, a bitcoin payment network does not need to be encrypted or protected from eavesdropping. In fact, you can broadcast bitcoin transactions over an open public channel, such as unsecured WiFi or Bluetooth, with no loss of security.


Publisher/Subscriber pattern with Event/Delegate and EventAggregator
Publisher/Subscriber pattern is one of the variation of the Observer designer pattern introduced by GOF in software devlopment. In Publisher/Subscriber pattern publisher(entiry responsible for publishing message) publish message and there are one or more Subscriber(entity who subsribe(i.e. intested in message) to perticular message type) who capture published message. Below image desribe the senario of publisher and subscriber pattern where Publisher publisher two type of message (MessageA and MessageB) and Subscribers of the message receive the message in which they subscribed


Shout Offers A New Take On Location-Based Social Networking
“We’re not anonymous – and we don’t want to be – because I think that ultimately hurts the value of the content that can be shared over the course of an app’s lifecycle,” he says. While he believes that the trend toward anonymous social networking, popularized by apps like Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper, is more than a flash-in-the-pan, he also thinks it dictates the kind of community that results. “I definitely think it encourages a certain kind of information, and you have to make the decision: is that the kind of information you want to be shared and you want your users to share?” he says.


Gartner: APAC Public Cloud Spending to Reach $7.4 Billion in 2015
Gartner says many countries in the mature Asia Pacific including Japan region have solid reliable telecommunications infrastructure and relatively advanced technology usage profiles. Despite challenges in the global economy, Gartner expects consistent and stable growth to continue through to 2018. Increased intra-region integration in APJ across services and industries will drive public cloud usage as countries in this region break down borders through trade bloc agreements such as the ASEAN Economic Integration 2015 and the Trans Pacific Partnerships, which will drive more mobility, big data sharing and analytics and public cloud infrastructure and applications to support these initiatives.


Can I trust my data in the cloud?
IBM Cloud gathered some of the top #cloudminds in the industry for an informative discussion about hybrid cloud. In this video, they discuss trust and security in cloud computing.  We'd like to thank our fantastic panelists: Sarah Cooper, VP Business Development, M2Mi; Andi Gutmans, CEO & Co-founder, Zend; Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO & Founder, Cloudsoft Corporation; Mark Wyllie, CEO, Flagship Solutions; Mike Dorosh, Program Manager, Cloud Technical Partnerships, IBM.


How to avoid "Hybrid Enterprise" tension headaches
For hybrid enterprises, the promise of savings mount from a less expensive physical footprint as well as more flexibility to get data and apps where they need to be and quicker—especially when you have the right application performance platform in place. If not, you'll be chasing blind spots in your application delivery chain that come from only using point solutions from the past—that is, one tool for each segment from a vendor that specializes in one thing and no integration with the overall complete picture.


Conference calls a waste of time?
By 1915, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. network spanned the continent with a single copper circuit 6,800 miles (11,000 kilometers) long that could carry exactly one call at a time. There were already 8.6 million phones served by AT&T, but hearing someone’s voice from the other side of the continent was astounding, like being able to go to the moon, said Anthea Hartig, executive director of the California Historical Society. It was a fitting event leading up to the exposition, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and the latest technological and cultural achievements of the day.


Google’s Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance
The fact that such a large percentage of Google’s employees wish they could separate from work but aren’t able to is troubling, but also speaks to the potential for this kind of research. The existence of this group suggests that it is not enough to wish yourself into being a Segmentor. But by identifying where employees fall on this spectrum, we hope that Google can design environments that make it easier for employees to disconnect. ... Googlers reported blissful, stressless evenings. Similarly, nudging Segmentors to ignore off-hour emails and use all their vacation days might improve well-being over time. The long-term nature of these questions suggests that the real value of gDNA will take years to realize.


How we really use our camera phones
The slight male dominance in video recording is also interesting, as it could point to a perception problem for video that may have to do with the way it’s currently being presented in capturing and editing apps. Or maybe it’s just long-ingrained collective gender stereotypes. Just think back to your family parties back in the 1990s or even the ’80s, long before everyone recorded everything with smart phones. That cousin dramatically crawling on the floor with a camcorder in one hand to get the best shot? Likely a guy. And just for the record: Male Android users take the least amount of photos, with an average of just 90 photos per month.


Actionless Frameworks
Simply put, actionless frameworks are extremely prepared for future changes and can make your application behave better/look better by a new configuration. If you are using it to edit records, then if in the future you create a better editor, you can simply replace the editor registration and the new (and I imagine better) editor will be used in all places. There is no need to search all the calls to the old editor to replace it by the new one. If you are using it to convert data and now you have a faster algorithm, simply register the faster algorithm and benefit from better performance.



Quote for the day:

"Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work." -- Warren G. Bennis

January 23, 2015

FrontRange CEO bets against a cloud-only IT future
FrontRange CEO Jon Temple speaks with an accent that’s hard to locate. He’s actually a California-based Brit who has travelled around quite a bit. His company is a similarly confusing combination, with roots in South Africa and having once been best known for GoldMine, the sales contact management software that it still quietly sells. For some time now though its focus has been on the service desk, another melting pot sector that’s going through change. A person could be forgiven for getting confused…


Getting Ready for Windows 10 With Responsive Design
A flexible grid based layout should be familiar to anyone who has spent any time working with Windows 8 apps, but if you’re not certain head to this MSDN article and brush up on the “Dynamic layout” section. There are very few circumstances where your column and row definitions should not be Auto or Star sizing. In fact I’d go so far as to say if you need to set a fixed value, consider using auto and then having your child element at fixed width so the column/row will collapse if your child element needs to.


Which areas of IT infrastructure will evolve and emerge in 2015?
Every part of the IT stack is in transition - from end user devices to networks, application design, virtual server software, physical server design, storage systems, and even storage media. Some of these transitions are well underway and will accelerate in 2015, while others are just starting to emerge... Cost matters and the least expensive SSDs are likely to be ten times more expensive than the least expensive SATA disks up until the end of the decade.


Beyond the IoT Buzz Is A New Horizon of Embedded Intelligence
The big issue, however, is that most enterprises have yet to articulate or establish a wide-scale Enterprise Information Management or “EIM” strategy or look at how newly connected people, devices, information and places (the new “inter-nets”) will transform their business landscape and relationships. But this doesn’t mean that businesses have to get all their devices online and monitor them before passing go. A good approach is to “think globally (with EIM) but act locally.” To look at what data and content sources are most critical to your top information flows.


Big Data and mobile analytics: Ready to rule 2015
The revolution, then, lies in the data analysis process. Visual analytics solutions already exist on the web with companies such as CrazyEgg and Inspectlet, but since mobile traffic now outperforms web traffic and is expected to continue in that trajectory, the future of analytics is in visual mobile analytics. Traditional mobile analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, emphasize the “what” in their data: key metrics such as number of users, OS used, geographic breakdown, etc., but place no focus on the “why,” which provides the reason behind the metrics.


Sony SmartBand Talk review: Much more than just an activity tracker
Calls sounded excellent on the SmartBand Talk on both my end and the callers end. I thought the calling functionality was just going to be a gimmick, however with the high quality performance it was nice to hold calls while keeping both hands free to do other things. I always seem to forget to switch to sleep mode on my activity trackers, but the SmartBand Talk tracks sleep automatically. It seemed to be fairly accurate when switching into and out of the sleep mode, but if you spend a lot of time watching TV without moving then it may pick up that you were sleeping. The smart alarm feature is a nice way to wake up during a light sleep period. If the vibration alone doesn't work, you can also select to have an audible alarm go off at the same time.


Cloud computing: A critical component of precision medicine
“The issue isn’t just collecting human genomes, but having rich enough data about patient behavior and the phenotypic data from EMRs, so we can integrate health data to form a rich picture about a patient,” said David Shaywitz, the Chief Medical Officer of Bay Area genomics cloud computing startup DNANexus. This was actually a prevailing theme at last week’s JP Morgan conference. “The sequence part is the tool, the commodity – but it’s everything else you’ll do with it that’s the secret sauce,” Regeneron chief scientific officer George Yancopoulos said at the time.


3-D Transistors Made with Molecular Self-Assembly
The IBM group used a new approach known as “directed self-assembly,” using a class of materials called block copolymers (polymer chains are made up of two kinds of monomers, or blocks). It is possible to make these materials self-assemble into complex patterns, such as a densely packed row for stripes. This is done by tailoring the polymers’ length, size, and other characteristics, such as how two blocks attract and repel one another. Patterns made in this way can be much denser than what is possible using lithography. That means the approach can be used to create the smallest, most densely packed, and uniform parts of an integrated circuit: for example, the channels of silicon transistors, or the fins in 3-D transistors.


Why is India the hottest investment destination in Asia?
The Indian economic elephant, meanwhile is lumbering along and seemingly picking up pace. Riding high on investor confidence in the market due to a series of economic reforms by the new Indian government, the IMF and World Bank have projected 5.6% growth rate for India this year. Though this figure may not look substantial if looked at in isolation, it is still significant when compared to other developing countries. India is witnessing a vibrant and lively market. Arvind Singhal, Chairman of Technopak Advisors is ecstatic about Indian retail. According to him the merchandise retail market which is about US$ 525 billion in the current year is poised to cross US$1 trillion by 2020. These are big numbers indeed.


Learn or Lose: Agile Coaching and Organizational Survival
The shift needed in organizations that have barely started to embrace learning can only be created by individuals at all levels, and not confined to particular teams or functional silos. Anyone who can’t or won’t learn ― executives, middle-managers, salespeople, bean-counters, front-line workers, consultants and coaches alike ― will find they are part of the problem, and will feel increasingly insecure, and many well fight back. Agile coaching and approaches can help (a lot), but they are not an end in themselves, and must be pursued humanely and incrementally. Organizational transformation can be likened to rebuilding aeroplanes in the air, and traps abound for young players. And when it comes to this kind of change, we are all young players!



Quote for the day:

"Technology is the new leadership--another word for fear & hope. Or more precisely, leaders' latest influence tool and invisibility blanket." -- @gpetriglieri

January 22, 2015

BlueData's on a mission to democratize big data
BlueData is the only solution built from the ground up and focused on big data applications. The BlueData vision is to allow our customers to take our software, install it on hardware in their own data center, and within a few hours have their own private big data cloud platform akin to Amazon EMR up and running. This would allow data scientists to individually stand up their own virtual clusters and then run their jobs directly. Other approaches on the market are mere band-aids. Our solution helps companies focus on analyzing the data without the burden of complex infrastructure or the challenge and risk of moving their data.


An outlandish Top 10 of cybersecurity events in 2014
“Threat landscape” is a common phrase used in cybersecurity. It governs whether companies choose to buy new hardware or to spend money protecting existing infrastructure. Dependence is direct: If your trains get derailed all the time, buying new locomotives isn’t a solution. ... Our Threatpost site follows all the meaningful news regarding IT security. We decided to pick the top 10 events of the past year by a single criterion: the popularity of the corresponding articles. The results were interesting. There was no politics (no Snowden, no NSA) and few topics of strategic nature. The problems that stand out are those that have to be considered when assessing the threat landscape right now.


The Business of Managing IT: The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum
Quoting industry luminary Marc Andreessen, Betz says “software is eating the world.” Similarly, Betz says, IT management is actually beginning to eat management, too. Although this might seem laughable, we have become increasingly dependent on computing systems in our everyday lives. With that dependence comes significant concerns about the complexity of those systems and the potential they carry for chaotic behaviors. Therefore, he says, as technology becomes pervasive, how IT is managed will increasingly dictate how businesses are managed. “If IT is increasing in its proportion of all product management, and all markets are increasingly dependent on managing IT, then understanding pure IT management becomes critically important not just for IT but for all business management,” Betz says.


Are Your Business Applications Unnecessarily Complex?
The good news is that real-world HTAP applications are now available, with many more to come in 2015. In a recent article, Information Week’s Doug Henschen called out the transaction/analytical convergence as one of the top five trends in enterprise applications this year: As SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner has observed, the separation of transactional and analytical apps is unnatural. The practice became entrenched decades ago only because the technologies available at the time couldn’t handle both at once. Cloud, mobile, and in-memory capabilities are putting these worlds back together. The best current example of HTAP architecture in action is the recently announced SAP Simple Finance application.


Building and deploying large-scale machine learning pipelines
While primitives can serve as building blocks, one still needs tools that enable users to build pipelines. Workflow tools have become more common, and these days, such tools exist for data engineers, data scientists, and even business analysts (Alteryx, RapidMiner, Alpine Data, Dataiku). As I noted in a recent post, we’ll see more data analysis tools that combine an elegant interface with a simple DSL that non-programmers can edit. At some point, DSL’s to encode graphs that represent these pipelines will become common. The latest release of Apache Spark (version 1.2) comes with an API for building machine learning pipelines (if you squint hard enough, it has the makings of a DSL for pipelines).


Big visions for 5G before the FCC
The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, is holding a World Radio Communication Conference in Geneva in November that will help establish international spectrum and technology requirements for 5G for 2020 and beyond. Hoping to get an early start, the FCC has set Feb. 17 as the deadline for making what it calls "reply" comments in addition to the initial comments that were due Jan. 15. The FCC is actively encouraging reply comments from citizens of all types, not just large companies. Comments can be made by going to the FCC website and clicking on item 14-177 and filling in the short comment form. All comments will be made public.


Best practices for an enterprise Android deployment
Enterprise mobility is constantly changing, and the recent rise of trends like BYOD are broadening the idea of what it means to be a mobile-savvy organization. Big businesses no longer have the option to pick and choose how they will engage mobile, and that especially applies to Android. "Mobility is about putting data and computing in the hands of your employees so that they can use the technologies of their choice to better do their work," said Ojas Rege, VP of strategy for MobileIron. "An organization will have to support Android in order to get the maximum benefit from their mobility strategy."


Why CIOs and developers are seldom on the same page - and why that's a good thing
The developers are looking for ways to solve their problems or, if not solve problems and the challenges they need to address, then at least make their life easier. That isn't necessarily something that the CIO looks for." A CIO is probably weighing up the larger picture, along with factors such as security, costs, and maintainability. ... "But the thing is with these frameworks, you don't know what's going to happen in a year from now, whether that framework is going to be there, whether it's going to be maintained and available to do the same stuff they're doing today as efficiently."


Critical Java updates fix 19 vulnerabilities, disable SSL 3.0
The number of attacks that exploit Java vulnerabilities to install malware on computers has been on a steady decline over the past year, but Java exploits remain one of the top attack vectors against Web users, according to a report released Tuesday by Cisco Systems. Another security-related change in the new Java updates is the deactivation of the SSL 3.0 protocol by default in response to the POODLE vulnerabilitydiscovered in October. The flaw allows man-in-the-middle attackers to decrypt sensitive information like authentication cookies from a connection encrypted with SSL 3.0.


Make Agents, Not Frameworks
And to make things worse - when using the suggested approach of runtime generation - the LoggingService cannot be instantiated directly either as the Java compiler does not know about the runtime-generated class. For this reason, frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate use object factories and do not allow for direct instantiation of objects that are considered to be a part of their framework logic. With Spring, creating objects by a factory comes naturally as all of Spring's objects are already managed beans which are to be created by the framework in the first place. Similarly, most Hibernate entities are created as a result of a query and are thus not instantiated explicitly.



Quote for the day:

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." -- Rupert Murdoch

January 21, 2015

Companies Still Not Patching Security Vulnerabilities
Nine out of 10 security chiefs are expressing confidence in their strategies, but, according to available data and survey results, they are doing a poor job of deploying security updates. Some 75 percent of CISOs surveyed from 1700 companies rated their tools as very or extremely effective. However, fewer than 50 percent of respondents use standard tools such as patch and configuration management to help prevent security breaches and ensure that they are running the latest software versions. To that end, 40 percent of respondents admitted they are not patching and 54 percent have had to manage public scrutiny following a security breach.


Not enough women in senior IT roles, research finds
“Our research shows that, while the diversity debate has moved on outside of the office, not enough women are actually seeing this progress at work. If we’re to achieve sustainable and long-lasting change, we can’t just look at women already at the top; we need to focus our efforts on women at every level, creating a strong pipeline of female talent across British businesses. If we fail to do this, there is a very real risk that these women will seek these opportunities elsewhere,” added Pickering. In response to the survey’s findings, O2 has produced a guide to help businesses implement a Women in Leadership programme.


The FCC's possible reclassification of ISPs signals hope for net neutrality
Cloud-connected businesses that rely on an unimpeded internet connection between them and the customer will be able to provide service without ISP interference. Foremost among these is Netflix, who amid its long-standing dispute with Verizon, relented and paid Verizon for prioritization. In a January 2015 blog post, Netflix Vice President of Content Delivery Ken Florance criticized this practice as being "in contrast to an open Internet and all its promise," noting that "Those who can't pay for fast lanes will suffer, entrenching incumbents while undermining the innovative power of the Internet." With a level playing field, new startups face a reduced barrier to entry to the market.


Xerox licenses Thinfilm printed storage tech for smart labels
The Norwegian printed electronics firm Thinfilm has formed a strategic partnership with Xerox around printed storage. Xerox will license Thinfilm’s proprietary technology and make Thinfilm Memory labels, which have some very interesting characteristics. Each label, costing a few pennies, is a plastic tag that’s based on ferroelectric capacitors and allows for power-free archival storage in the 10-15-year range. This isn’t some data center technology though; we’re only talking 10-36 bits. They are however very rewriteable – the data can be rewritten 100,000 times. This means the labels are perfect for continually storing and refreshing the output of sensors.


10 cool network and computing research projects
If you think the latest enterprise and consumer network and computer technologies rolling into your data center and being snuck into your offices by end users are advanced, wait until you see what's cooking in the labs at universities and tech companies. Much of well-funded research is aimed at security, simplifying use of current technology and figuring out how to more easily plow through mounds of big data. Here's at peek at 10 projects.


JSF 2.0 Distributed Multitiered Application
This article aims to present a different approach on handling JSF distributed multitiered applications. Try the suggested steps in order to build robust distributed applications, that serve responses instantly, no matter the complexity of the client request. The components of this article are: Identifying general requirements of Java distributed multitiered applications; Java architectural solutions in order to satisfy requirements : classic solutions vs proposed proof of concept; and JSF2.0 Distributed Multitiered Application Proof of Concept (implementation and advantages)


Getting RID of Risk with Agile
As an Agile coach I come across all of these sort of these challenges on a very regular basis. The reality of modern software development is that these are every day challenges that we have to deal with, and the skill lies in reducing these risks in a timely enough fashion that we can still deliver the most value to a users in a timely, sustainable fashion. How I hear you ask dear reader, how can we possibly achieve that? I don’t have a silver bullet, but what I do have is a system that can help us deal with risk in a more timely manner.


Why 2015 might be the year of the CIO
While struggling to keep the lights on, cloud-based software and services simultaneously commoditized many expensive IT functions, and lowered the price of entry for everything from email to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from months of implementation time and heavy IT involvement to a few minutes and a credit card. An increase in IT spend from nontraditional sources, particularly marketing, further shifted the balance of IT power away from IT leaders, causing many to conclude that the CIO and similar positions were consigned to irrelevance at best, and doomed to be removed from the executive suite at worst.


The unexpected benefits – and subsequent opportunities - of wireless
This growing dependence on wireless is not totally unexpected. As our personal lives become more connected and mobile it is almost inevitable that the businesses we own, manage or work in will follow a similar path. However, our study into SMBs and wireless also revealed something else. It showed that wireless connectivity is enhancing aspects of the business many might consider to be beyond the reach of technology, namely, brand image and employee morale. Two-thirds of the 500 small to mid-size firms we spoke to say that having a wireless network makes their business look vibrant and up-to-date.


How managed print services accelerates business process digitisation
Despite the clear need to better integrate paper and digital workflows, Quocirca's study revealed that overall, only 29% of organisations believe they are effective or very effective at integrating paper and digital workflows. However, there is a stark difference between organisations using and not using MPS. While only 9% of organisations not using MPS rated their ability to integrate paper and digital workflows as effective or very effective, this rose to 51% for those using MPS. Quocirca expects this figure to climb over the next year as more organisations move further along their MPS journey and begin the implementation of document workflow tools and business process optimisation.



Quote for the day:

"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it" -- Albert Einstein

January 20, 2015

The Truth About Malvertising
Malvertisements can appear on any website at any given time, and there is little that the website owner can do to prevent them. That’s because they are planted on Web pages via third-party ad delivery networks. These networks auction website placements to advertisers using a high bid, free market system. There is currently very little oversight in this industry. This system was built for efficiency, so the marketplace has very little regulation to force better security practices. To make matters worse, malvertisers use various techniques to disguise the true purpose of their advertisements, often building entire infrastructures designed to redirect users between URLs.


Drones That Can Suck Up Water Hunt Oil Leaks, Invasive Species
It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.) “If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.” Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.


How To Pitch Hybrid Cloud To Your CFO
“In some instances, organisations can still have data sovereignty and security concerns, even with hybrid cloud solutions. The beauty of using a hybrid cloud solution is that you can choose which data should remain private and which elements you’re happy to store in the public cloud. One solution is to select a co-located data centre, which is close to the cloud provider, but not actually in the cloud. That way, organisations can get all the benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of storing data in a co-located data centre.”


How the Cloud is Reshaping Small Business Productivity
Taking a look at small businesses and the cloud, the Emergent Research study revealed 78 percent of small businesses (companies with less than 50 employees) will be fully adapted to the cloud by 2020 - up from 37 percent in 2014. Though today’s small businesses are reporting using cloud-based applications chiefly for email, online banking and social media, the expansion of the small business community’s utilization of diverse cloud applications, tools and platforms is anticipated to greatly increase. As this trend grows, Emergent Research forecasts that cloud computing will completely change how small businesses operate by 2020 — as the small business landscape fully adapts to cloud computing.


We Still Don’t Know the Difference Between Change and Transformation
Transformation is another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn’t focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives, which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It’s much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk. And even if successful change management leads to the execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.


Cisco builds switch ports to feed faster Wi-Fi
But with speed comes a series of challenges: To enjoy more than a gigabit out on the wireless edge of the LAN, network engineers need to have a switch port with greater than Gigabit Ethernet for each access point. They can do it with 10-Gigabit Ethernet, but that protocol requires Category 6a cable to cover a common 100-meter network link. Most enterprises are outfitted with older cable types, and it can be expensive to pull new wires through a building. That's the idea behind 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps Ethernet, which is under development in an official IEEE task group that only recently began meeting. But vendors aren't waiting for a standard to be set for these so-called multigigabit speeds.


Gap between perception and reality of cyberthreats widened in 2015
The spam writers are also carefully tracking their response rates and continuously adjusting the text of the spam emails. "In one campaign we saw 95 different iterations of their spam messages," he said. And the spam messages are being increasingly customized to target individual recipients, helping them bypass spam filters. There was also a 250 percent increase in malvertising last year, Brvenik added. The criminals use a variety of tactics, including spending actual money to buy their own advertising. "They buy short-term ads on high-exposure websites, and then they're gone," he said.


Rule of law on internet cracks down on cybercrime: Cisco
"Some of those countries where you don't have a strong rule of law, you find there's more organised crime. This is an indication that there's a link between organised crime and their activities, and governments of those countries. We're getting better, but we're not there yet, because some countries aren't as lawful as other countries," he said. The report also revealed that it's up to security teams within organisations to constantly improve their approach to defend against sophisticated attacks. In fact, while 90 percent of the companies surveyed said they were confident about their security policies, 54 percent admitted that they have faced public scrutiny following a security breach.


The business case for reputation risk management
The case for effective reputation risk management in this Age of Hyper-Transparency can be made in two ways – accentuating the positive and exposing the negative. There is growing quantitative and qualitative evidence that smart reputation risk management can add value to the bottom line – through liability avoidance, cleaner and leaner processes and improved products and services. Indeed, properly deployed and integrated, effective reputation risk management can be transformational, actually adding value to the financial bottom line. The financial sector has certainly been in the eye of this storm in recent years given the massive impact of questionable, illegal and downright criminal behaviours exhibited in this sector.


5 Advanced Java Debugging Techniques Every Developer Should Know About
BTrace is a helpful tool that lets you run Java-like scripts on top of a live JVM to capture or aggregate any form of variable state without restarting the JVM or deploying new code. This enables you to do pretty powerful things like printing the stack traces of threads, writing to a specific file, or printing the number of items of any queue or connection pool and many more. This is done using BTrace scripting, a Java-like syntax in which you write functions that are injected into the code in locations of your choice through bytecode transformation (a process we’ll touch on below). The best way to try out the tool is to attach its sample scripts into a live application.



Quote for the day:

"Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems." -- Brian Tracy

January 19, 2015

Expert panel: Creating innovation in the federal government
The primary challenge is bringing together the right people to discuss interesting and important topics. When evaluating potential guests, I seek people whose ideas and activities are genuinely shaping our shared future. Three prominent guests appeared on CXO-Talk for a discussion about the evolving impact of technology in the federal government. The conversation explored how to encourage an environment of innovation in a huge, slow-moving organization. Although all three guests are strong supporters of work done by the Executive Office of the President and the agencies, their perspectives reflect the stark realism of experience.


Big Data Enters 2015
As we enter the new and exciting year 2015, the big data industry is well poised to achieve some truly great things. Our friends a DataRPM put together the compelling infographic below, “The Dawn of Smart Enterprise,” to highlight their predictions for how big data will advance in the coming year. 2015 should be gangbusters and insideBIGDATA will be here as your official news source to keep you well-informed.


The Three Cs of Web App Security
It's an application world and that means we're also increasing the rate with which we expose new web applications (and APIs) to the world. That parenthetical, too, is important. Failure to treat your API with as much care as a web app with respect to security could net you some pretty ugly results. And not the kind of ugly that grows up into a beautiful benevolent swan; I'm talking about the 9-headed hydra kind of ugly - the kind that takes the stuff of myth and legends to get rid of. For the security (and increasingly operations) practitioner, following the three Cs of web application security can provide a good foundation for keeping that hydra out of your app and your network and, of course, your data .


Where are Scrum Masters
It is no wonder that ‘ScrumMaster-less Scrum’ is one of the most common ‘Scrum-buts’ that I find when assessing Agile transformations. Considering that many companies obtain great benefits from this approach, it’s even tempting to consider ScrumMasters as ‘nice to have, although optional’. In fact, several Agile frameworks like Kanban, Cristal or Lean Software Development do not prescribe a ScrumMaster or Agile Coach role – and there is no mention of these in the Agile manifesto or in Nonaka and Takeuchi’s seminal article that inspired Scrum itself. To make things worse, Scrum-bashing has become a major sport on the Agile community.


SDN: software defined networking,  . . . or small distributed namespaces?
As a discipline, networking has lived a strangely separate existence from computing, over its history, and has adopted very different methodologies. It has embraced perhaps more of the methods of distributed systems than its computational counterpart (as it was forced to confront issues of scalability earlier), but it has fallen behind in the era of free and open source software innovation, and it's overdue for a makeover. Software defined networking could be that makeover. Maybe.


A Bendable Implant Taps the Nervous System without Damaging It
What’s new is how stretchable electronics are merging with a widening effort to invent new ways to send and receive signals from nerves (see “Neuroscience’s New Toolbox”). “People are pushing the limits because everyone wants to precisely interact with the brain and nervous system,” says Polina Anikeeva, a materials scientist at MIT who develops ultrathin fiber-optic threads as a different way of interfacing with neural tissue. The reason metal or plastic electrodes eventually cause damage, or stop working, is that they cause compression and tissue damage. A stiff implant, even if it’s very thin, will still not stretch as the spinal cord does.


Building Hybrid Teams
My experience with many hybrid teams is that the attitude towards each other as well as the coaching process is often not entirely positive - I will caveat this with saying that I've rarely coached a team that had only just started out, usually there was already a perceived "problem" with or in the team that highlighted the need for coaching. However I don't believe my experience is all that novel - a lot of offshoring team members are under great pressure to "be perfect" and having identified a need for coaching directly contradicts this perception. Equally, attitudes of onshore team members towards offshore team members can sometimes be negative - offshoring is often viewed as the "cheap" alternative and perceived as a direct threat to job security and ability to make a decent living.


The 1 Thing Every Employee Needs That Most Bosses Don’t Know How to Give
Every employee needs candid (yet caring) feedback about her performance, but most bosses shudder in fear at the thought of having that tough conversation. I’m the first to admit that having a discussion about an employee’s failing performance is one of the most unpleasant things a leader has to do; it’s awkward and uncomfortable for both parties involved. I mean, come one, no one likes to hear they aren’t doing a good job. But the way in which the feedback and coaching is delivered can make a huge difference. The key is to have a plan and process to follow.


Wishlist for 2015: The solutions we need in business tech
In general, there's always plenty of buzzing around fresh ideas in the tech industry, but too much of it focuses on quick hits and low hanging fruit. That's the easy stuff. It's a lot harder to go after intractable problems. But, we need some companies to step up, show leadership, take risks, and doggedly pursue solutions to these big problems. Make no mistake, some of these challenges connect into the larger themes of 2015, but they need a stronger focus on usefulness, especially for solutions that can benefit organizations and professionals.


Obama to Highlight Cybersecurity Proposals in State of the Union
"We don’t regulate Internet security the way we do, say, chemical plants and food production facilities. We just don’t do that - we might, but we’re not doing that now,” said Harris. In all, the White House has introduced three separate measures to combat cybercrime and strengthen privacy. The first, the Personal Data Protection and Notification Act, would require companies that handle data to alert customers if any of their private information had been compromised or stolen by hackers within 30 days. The measure has won strong backing by many retailers and other data companies.



Quote for the day:

"Most organizations staff their problems & starve their opportunities." -- Peter Drucker