Value Your Customer Data as a Business Asset
Privacy and security are legitimate concerns for everyone who hands over information about themselves. But some businesses don’t share that opinion. Or, if the business understands the value of data, it has yet to do anything about protecting it. Your business may have all kinds of excuses for this. Your CEO may think that data management is too expensive, or that workflows are too ingrained to be changed. You might think your business is too small to be hacked, or too big to be affected by a breach. But no matter how many excuses you have, your customers are getting smarter. They know the value of data, and they want to trust you to understand it too.
Intel CEO Krzanich: What we're doing to succeed on smartphones
When I think about cell phones, I think about two paths to market. One is going to be with our partners, especially some our of key OEM partners like Asus and Lenovo, and then our silicon partners with Rockchip and Spreadtrum. The other path is—you can see us doing it already with the tablet space—where we bring in some of the innovation we originally had for PCs and bring it down the stack. You saw RealSense [depth-sensing camera]. RealSense was originally created for the PC and 2-in-1 devices; we brought it down to tablets. You see us bringing McAfee down from the PC and it has made its way to wearables and cellphones as well. I want to enter this market smartly. It’s not one you can force your way in.
2014 a record year for malware, says security firm
"Security threats will increase in 2015, and both companies and home users must prepare themselves to respond to them," said Panda Security Technical Director Luis Corrons in a statement. "It is not a question of whether their security will be compromised but rather when and how, so in this case prevention is key." Panda is just the latest malware-watcher to document the spike this year in malware. AV-Test, a company that tests the effectiveness of antivirus software, reported last month that malware spiked in 2014 to more than 143 million detections, up 72 percent from last year. And Kaspersky Lab, another provider of home and business security products, saw four times more mobile malware attacks in 2014 than the year before.
Oh my, how governance has changed in the cloud
As a longtime blogger, columnist, and general pundit in the technology space, I spend a lot of my day pointing out both the good aspects of enterprise technology and the technologies that may no longer deserve our support. Such was the case with a blog I wrote for InfoWorld back in 2009 where I described three technologies that cloud computing would kill. I still stand behind that post. ... All these years later, SOA is barely mentioned, but service governance became the single most valuable technology that most enterprises can leverage when moving to the cloud -- whether they knew it or not. The use of governance technology in the cloud has three core patterns.
No. Agile Does Not Scale.
Mainly in the last five years, we have witnessed an ongoing conversation about the “problem” of scaling Agile development. Book after book, conference after conference, and framework after framework are dedicated to addressing this problem. It is understandable, because a mindless adoption of the values and principles as offered in the Agile community’s fundamental document, the Agile Manifesto, inevitably leads anyone to conclude that Agile doesn’t scale. At small scale, Agile is great. At large scale, Agile is stupid.
Financial companies seek cloud strategy for secure relationship
Among the findings are that 61 percent of respondents admitted that a cloud strategy was in the formative stages within their organization, with 39 to 47 percent planning to use a mix of in-house IT, private, and public clouds, and 18 percent planning to use private clouds. None of the respondents had plans to be hosted mostly in a public cloud. Worryingly though the results of the survey also showed that the higher the electronic channel transaction base among a firm's customers, the less tough the policy with only three percent of these types of organizations indicating having a strict cloud policy in place.
Robocops being used as traffic police in Democratic Republic of Congo
The solar-powered aluminium robots are huge, towering over the jammed streets of Kinshasa, as cars and motorcyles jostle for road room, their horns blasting. Each hand on the odd-looking machines - built to withstand the year-round hot climate - is fitted with green and red lights that regulate the flow of traffic in the sprawling city of nine million. The robots are also equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of traffic and send real-time images to the police station. Although the humanoids look more like giant toys than real policemen, motorists have given them a thumbs up. “There are certain drivers who don’t respect the traffic police. But with the robot it will be different. We should respect the robot,” taxi driver Poro Zidane told AFP.
How BI Is So Much More Than Just a Reporting Tool
One of the oldest and most misguided thoughts about business intelligence is that it’s a glorified tool for analytics reporting. How many times have we heard the annoying question, “oh, why don’t you just use Excel for that?” Not to discredit the powerful potential of Excel, but it’s just not even remotely the same. Those of us in the BI industry have made our case and know that there’s so much more to BI than just reporting in a “sexy” way. We've almost made it our part-time job to correct every aspect of this misconception and show the whole value of a well-done BI implementation. This article should begin to help you combat the generalizations where BI has simply been demoted to a “reporting tool.”
Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption
Responding to digital disruption is now a critical weapon that all organizations need to have in their strategic armory. The story of the Financial Times’s response to the digital disruption of the media industry is a salutary example. Caspar de Bono, Managing Director, B2B at the FT, outlines the organization’s response and how it has turned digital disruption to its advantage, with digital subscriptions now constituting nearly two-thirds of the FT’s total paying audience. “Technology helped us establish a direct relationship with customers,” he explains. “This was very disruptive and the FT has significantly benefited from this disruption.” A key response to digital disruption is to constantly innovate business models.
Do you know how to protect your key assets?
There is no universal recipe on how to create this list of key assets and keep it up to date. A good way to start is to use both manual and automatic means to identify what is important in your network. Manual identification will track down information on the network by the value of its content, while automatic identification will expose assets by frequency of duration of use (assuming frequency or duration equate to value). For manual identification, the first question to ask is what information do you value and what information, if stolen, would be valuable to someone outside your organization. As stated above, it’s not just about credit card numbers and customer records, but sales figures, company presentations, and even activity log files. The more thorough the manual review, the better the final list of key assets.
Quote for the day:
"The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader." -- Albert Einstein
Privacy and security are legitimate concerns for everyone who hands over information about themselves. But some businesses don’t share that opinion. Or, if the business understands the value of data, it has yet to do anything about protecting it. Your business may have all kinds of excuses for this. Your CEO may think that data management is too expensive, or that workflows are too ingrained to be changed. You might think your business is too small to be hacked, or too big to be affected by a breach. But no matter how many excuses you have, your customers are getting smarter. They know the value of data, and they want to trust you to understand it too.
Intel CEO Krzanich: What we're doing to succeed on smartphones
When I think about cell phones, I think about two paths to market. One is going to be with our partners, especially some our of key OEM partners like Asus and Lenovo, and then our silicon partners with Rockchip and Spreadtrum. The other path is—you can see us doing it already with the tablet space—where we bring in some of the innovation we originally had for PCs and bring it down the stack. You saw RealSense [depth-sensing camera]. RealSense was originally created for the PC and 2-in-1 devices; we brought it down to tablets. You see us bringing McAfee down from the PC and it has made its way to wearables and cellphones as well. I want to enter this market smartly. It’s not one you can force your way in.
2014 a record year for malware, says security firm
"Security threats will increase in 2015, and both companies and home users must prepare themselves to respond to them," said Panda Security Technical Director Luis Corrons in a statement. "It is not a question of whether their security will be compromised but rather when and how, so in this case prevention is key." Panda is just the latest malware-watcher to document the spike this year in malware. AV-Test, a company that tests the effectiveness of antivirus software, reported last month that malware spiked in 2014 to more than 143 million detections, up 72 percent from last year. And Kaspersky Lab, another provider of home and business security products, saw four times more mobile malware attacks in 2014 than the year before.
Oh my, how governance has changed in the cloud
As a longtime blogger, columnist, and general pundit in the technology space, I spend a lot of my day pointing out both the good aspects of enterprise technology and the technologies that may no longer deserve our support. Such was the case with a blog I wrote for InfoWorld back in 2009 where I described three technologies that cloud computing would kill. I still stand behind that post. ... All these years later, SOA is barely mentioned, but service governance became the single most valuable technology that most enterprises can leverage when moving to the cloud -- whether they knew it or not. The use of governance technology in the cloud has three core patterns.
No. Agile Does Not Scale.
Mainly in the last five years, we have witnessed an ongoing conversation about the “problem” of scaling Agile development. Book after book, conference after conference, and framework after framework are dedicated to addressing this problem. It is understandable, because a mindless adoption of the values and principles as offered in the Agile community’s fundamental document, the Agile Manifesto, inevitably leads anyone to conclude that Agile doesn’t scale. At small scale, Agile is great. At large scale, Agile is stupid.
Financial companies seek cloud strategy for secure relationship
Among the findings are that 61 percent of respondents admitted that a cloud strategy was in the formative stages within their organization, with 39 to 47 percent planning to use a mix of in-house IT, private, and public clouds, and 18 percent planning to use private clouds. None of the respondents had plans to be hosted mostly in a public cloud. Worryingly though the results of the survey also showed that the higher the electronic channel transaction base among a firm's customers, the less tough the policy with only three percent of these types of organizations indicating having a strict cloud policy in place.
Robocops being used as traffic police in Democratic Republic of Congo
The solar-powered aluminium robots are huge, towering over the jammed streets of Kinshasa, as cars and motorcyles jostle for road room, their horns blasting. Each hand on the odd-looking machines - built to withstand the year-round hot climate - is fitted with green and red lights that regulate the flow of traffic in the sprawling city of nine million. The robots are also equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of traffic and send real-time images to the police station. Although the humanoids look more like giant toys than real policemen, motorists have given them a thumbs up. “There are certain drivers who don’t respect the traffic police. But with the robot it will be different. We should respect the robot,” taxi driver Poro Zidane told AFP.
How BI Is So Much More Than Just a Reporting Tool
One of the oldest and most misguided thoughts about business intelligence is that it’s a glorified tool for analytics reporting. How many times have we heard the annoying question, “oh, why don’t you just use Excel for that?” Not to discredit the powerful potential of Excel, but it’s just not even remotely the same. Those of us in the BI industry have made our case and know that there’s so much more to BI than just reporting in a “sexy” way. We've almost made it our part-time job to correct every aspect of this misconception and show the whole value of a well-done BI implementation. This article should begin to help you combat the generalizations where BI has simply been demoted to a “reporting tool.”
Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption
Responding to digital disruption is now a critical weapon that all organizations need to have in their strategic armory. The story of the Financial Times’s response to the digital disruption of the media industry is a salutary example. Caspar de Bono, Managing Director, B2B at the FT, outlines the organization’s response and how it has turned digital disruption to its advantage, with digital subscriptions now constituting nearly two-thirds of the FT’s total paying audience. “Technology helped us establish a direct relationship with customers,” he explains. “This was very disruptive and the FT has significantly benefited from this disruption.” A key response to digital disruption is to constantly innovate business models.
Do you know how to protect your key assets?
There is no universal recipe on how to create this list of key assets and keep it up to date. A good way to start is to use both manual and automatic means to identify what is important in your network. Manual identification will track down information on the network by the value of its content, while automatic identification will expose assets by frequency of duration of use (assuming frequency or duration equate to value). For manual identification, the first question to ask is what information do you value and what information, if stolen, would be valuable to someone outside your organization. As stated above, it’s not just about credit card numbers and customer records, but sales figures, company presentations, and even activity log files. The more thorough the manual review, the better the final list of key assets.
Quote for the day:
"The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader." -- Albert Einstein
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