July 31, 2015

Why Data-Driven Cultures Outperform Rivals

Proactive organizations take steps to address unstructured data growth before it escalates. The sheer volume of unmanaged unstructured data can become extremely costly in terms of storage. Additionally, data that is not properly managed quickly turns into a liability if information cannot be located in the event of an e-Discovery request for legal matter. To add to the complexity, customer expectations have changed as a byproduct of new technology advancements and the emergence of mobile, BYOD and the commercialization of IT resulting in additional data security and privacy concerns. These changing customer expectations around data and how organizations use it also lead to a further secondary use for large repositories of unstructured data;


The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Data Quality and Business Intelligence

Business processes should also be established to ensure data manually entered into systems is of the highest quality possible. As we learned previously in our example of the pregnant men, many organizations experience data errors when information is manually entered, at a rate of 2% and 8%. Even one wrong number entered incorrectly can cause a payment to fail, a wrong part number to be shipped, or apparently a man to become pregnant. Data validation controls can be integrated into on-line forms, using rules to check the validity of data sets. For example, an on-line website form may require a visitor to enter data in specified formats. Or an IRS form may utilize controls to check that positive numbers are being entered into fields.


Hacker steals Bitdefender customer log-in credentials, attempts blackmail

The hacker, who uses the online alias DetoxRansome, first bragged about the breach on Twitter Saturday and later messaged Bitdefender threatening to release the company’s “customer base” unless he was paid US$15,000. To prove his point, the next day he published the email addresses and passwords for two Bitdefender customer accounts and one for an account operated by the company itself. Travis Doering and Dan McPeake claimed in a blog post that they contacted the hacker, who offered to sell the data to them. The hacker provided a list of user names and matching passwords for over 250 Bitdefender accounts, some of which were confirmed to be active, the two wrote Wednesday.


Disrupting beliefs: A new approach to business-model innovation

Executives can begin by systematically examining each core element of their business model, which typically comprises customer relationships, key activities, strategic resources, and the economic model’s cost structures and revenue streams. Within each of these elements, various business-model innovations are possible. Having analyzed hundreds of core elements across a wide range of industries and geographies, we have found that a reframe seems to emerge for each one, regardless of industry or location. Moreover, these themes have one common denominator: the digitization of business, which upends customer interactions, business activities, the deployment of resources, and economic models.


Critical BIND denial-of-service flaw could disrupt large portions of the Internet

There is no configuration workaround to protect against the BIND vulnerability or a way to prevent its exploitation through access control lists. Patching is the only option, the ISC said in an advisory. “Screening the offending packets with firewalls is likely to be difficult or impossible unless those devices understand DNS at a protocol level and may be problematic even then,” said Michael McNally, an ISC engineer and the incident manager for this vulnerability, in a blog post. The bug is difficult to defend against without installing the patch and it’s likely that attack code will appear soon because it’s not hard to reverse-engineer the patch and figure out how to exploit the flaw, according to McNally.


Open Container Initiative Nears Container-Spec Goal

For a Docker container to be able to do the things that its user wishes it to do (that is, intersect with a given host and connect the application that it contains to the host server) it needs to be able to rely on a sandboxing environment that allows some of the details of how the application runs to match up with the way the host runs. The main requirement to getting the two together is relatively simple: The host server needs to run the same Linux kernel as required by the application code in the container. Since the Linux kernel is a highly defined and labeled set of code, matching up the two is usually a given. With the initiative's specified runC runtime, a Docker container and a CoreOS Rocket container will be able to run in the same environment in the same way, without glitches, if both continue to adhere to the OCI runtime standard.


What Can The United Airlines Hack Tell Us About IT Security?

“Perhaps United Airlines should reconsider its choice of technologies and vendors that provide controls for privileged access to their systems and databases. The US Government could also serve a useful purpose in providing appropriate consequences to the attackers and their assets. There seems to be little incentive for this attacker to stop these attacks.” “As investigators identify fragments of evidence from these intrusions, they are not only finding needles in the haystack, but also the threads connecting these needles across some of the biggest breaches we have seen. Through this discovery they see these threads weave together to form a rather disturbing tapestry revealing patterns of a much more strategic and sophisticated attack than we could have imagined.


WebSocket: Bringing Desktop Agility to Web Application

The first reason for lack of WebSocket adoption has been a limited support in application servers and browsers. However with new generation of application servers and browsers, this issue is significantly addressed. The second, and the more important reason, is that opening the full potential of WebSocket requires significant web application redesign. The redesign involves going from a basic primitive of request – response to a more sophisticated primitive of bi-directional messaging. Application redesign is typically a costly process and vendors do not see clear benefits of going that route.


Why Google’s enterprise pitch is a confusing mess

Let’s try to follow Google’s logic here, but be patient because first you need to get through a series of familiar Google product names with “for Work” simply added to them. Confusion sets in almost immediately on the Google for Work homepage where solutions such as Google Apps for Work, Google Cloud Platform, Chrome for Work, Google Maps for Work and Google Search for Work are all listed prominently. Each of those services is sold and marketed to business customers separately, and Google Apps for Work is the only one with public-facing pricing. Regardless of what Google calls it, Google for Work appears to be a basic platform the company uses to upsell a host of services to prospective clients.


Cisco Mid-Year Security Report: Bad Guys Getting Badder

The main problem with enterprise and personal data security now is that users have a plethora of security products that don't interact well and that leave holes open for hackers to walk through. "The users are left with what we call this 'sprawl of security,' meaning devices that don't communicate well and don't share intelligence," Williams said. "These allow the bad guys blind spots to hide in. Does anybody have an IPS (intrusion prevention system) or anti-malware solution that can talk to their firewall? Until we have an integrated threat defense, those problems are going to allow adversaries easier access to networks."



Quote for the day:

“Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong.” -- Orrin Woodward

July 30, 2015

Risk Management and the Board of Directors

The board should formally undertake an annual review of the company’s risk management system, including a review of board and committee-level risk oversight policies and procedures, a presentation of “best practices” to the extent relevant, tailored to focus on the industry or regulatory arena in which the company operates, and a review of other relevant issues such as those listed above. ... But because risk, by its very nature, is subject to constant and unexpected change, boards should keep in mind that annual reviews do not replace the need to regularly assess and reassess their own operations and processes, learn from past mistakes, and seek to ensure that current practices enable the board to address specific major issues whenever they may arise.


Best Practices for YARN Resource Management

In a MapR Hadoop cluster, warden sets the default resource allocation for the operating system, MapR-FS, MapR Hadoop services, and MapReduce v1 and YARN applications. Details are described in MapR documentation: Resource Allocation for Jobs and Applications. YARN can manage 3 system resources— memory, CPU and disks. Once warden finishes calculations, it will set environment variable YARN_NODEMANAGER_OPTS for starting NM. ... NodeManager can monitor the memory usage(virtual and physical) of the container. If its virtual memory exceeds “yarn.nodemanager.vmem-pmem-ratio” times the "mapreduce.reduce.memory.mb" or "mapreduce.map.memory.mb", then the container will be killed if “yarn.nodemanager.vmem-check-enabled” is true;


Five Tips for Eliminating Migration Migraines

Solutions that offer the most flexibility and currency of data possible while minimizing impact to users during testing and migration typically require a software-based solution that replicates any activity taking place between the production server to the target server in real-time. This allows IT to keep the production server up and running rather than freezing it or periodically pausing it for snapshots. The production server remains fully functional, data is as current as the last transaction and users continue working. IT can test applications on the new server, and prove the migration methodology and plan, without impacting the production environment. Ultimately, this makes IT more productive – all while migration is taking place.


Open Source Usage in Large Enterprises

Regarding the perceived impact of open source software on their respective industries, 55% consider that OSS is critical to future competitive advantage but only 11% consider OSS as having a positive impact for their industry at this time. But the numbers change dramatically when evaluating the role of OSS three years from now: 61% think OSS will provide a competitive advantage and 62% consider OSS will have a positive impact on their industry ... When it comes to the challenges faced developing OSS, the respondents considered that OSS requires rethinking the entire process (63%), employees need to take on new roles (61%), they need to hire new people (47%), new skills need to be acquired (44%), and there has to be a change in the development culture (44%):


How predictive analytics will revolutionize healthcare

"Coming to the hospital is not enjoyable for people," Dr. Weinstein says. "If we can keep them out of it, that would be great. We need to create a sustainable health system. I think what's happened with the [Affordable Care Act] is that all the policy work has been to get people insured and covered. Having insurance doesn't mean good healthcare. What about all the people who are healthy that we don't want to be sick. If I was really effective, no one would come to my hospital." Dr. Weinstein believes that ImagineCare will help Dartmouth-Hitchcock build a health system that focuses on health, not healthcare. Such a health system is based on value, not volume, he says.


How to Generate Big Data Revenue Without the Big Investment in a Team of Data Scientists

DaaS unlocks a vast new world of opportunities. Imagine getting streams of highly qualified prospects and even your own customers who are ready to purchase now based on their online searches or information they are sharing on social platforms. What if you could market to consumers who are searching at the moment for your competition? Or imagine the power of being able to enhance your internal marketing database with highly specialized and unique data sources for real-time multi-channel marketing campaigns. ... DaaS can be implemented across a range of industries, for both B2B and B2C. The point is truly that DaaS provides an alternative.


How to get the most out of Windows 10 enterprise security features

Microsoft’s new Edge browser improves security in a variety of ways, from running in the app container sandbox to removing ActiveX controls, VBScript, toolbars and Browser Helper Objects. That makes general browsing safer, but may require you to tweak some line of business apps (or more likely, configure employee PCs to use Internet Explorer to access those sites). And while it’s fast and implements many modern Web standards, Edge is also clearly a work in progress and will be getting a major feature update later this year. There are also security features carried over from Windows 8 that will be new to you if you’re upgrading from Windows 7 or earlier.


CIOs under pressure to generate revenue through data monetization

The goal of generating value through data might be the same regardless of whether it's for internal or external customers, but data monetization "is not the same type of animal as value generation in internal ways," Wixom said at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Simply put, CIOs getting into the data monetization game aren't solving business problems; they're going after market share, and that can introduce new challenges. ... Feeding customer demand is something CIOs should expect and plan for when standing up a data monetization business, said Stoller, who is now the executive vice president of operations and sales support at Healthcare IQ Inc., a spend analytics firm in Palmetto, Fla.


7 Smart Ways To Leverage Social Data

While social data offers insight, it often provides more value when combined with other data sources. On an operational level, social data can be used across departments to improve operations and outcomes, whether by understanding an issue at a more granular level or embracing an alternative business model. ... Slowly but surely, social data is spreading out through companies and being operationalized in different ways, yielding different results. Some of the challenges include the relative reliability of the data, the degree to which companies have envisioned using it, and how easy or hard it is to integrate into current workflows. It's still early days, in other words.


Cybersecurity job market to suffer severe workforce shortage

Don't feel bad for the CSOs who might have engineers underneath them earning more than they do. IDC predicts that “by 2018, fully 75% of chief security officers (CSO) and chief information security officers (CISOs) will report directly to the CEO, not the CIO”. This will arguably push those positions higher up in to the salary stratosphere. Checking in with an experienced executive recruiter in the cybersecurity field aligns the market analysis and forecasts with what search firms, employers, and candidates are seeing. “The cybersecurity job market is on fire” says Veronica Mollica, founder and executive information security recruiter at Indigo Partners. “Our candidates are facing competing offers from multiple companies with salary increases averaging over 30%.



Quote for the day:

"Charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around." -- Warren Bennis

July 29, 2015

What you can learn from Nordstrom’s use of the cloud

“We’re trying to be a supportive team,” Homewood says. “We could give everyone in the company access to Amazon, but that would be like leaving a pile of car keys in a parking garage, but not knowing if anyone knows how to drive. Instead, we ask people to come to our team, explain what they’re trying to do, and then we work with them to define a path for using the cloud and start them down that journey.” Homewood calls the cloud team a “center of excellence” focused on cloud use within the company. This approach has a number of advantages. It allows the mobile team, the database team, and any other team that wants to use the cloud to focus on what they know best. Meanwhile, members of the cloud team are experts at using the cloud.


10 Real Techniques That will Help You Tackle Enterprise Mobility Security

A truly mobile enterprise is better designed to handle modern day opportunities as an organization. That’s why, any CIO you meet today is working on making productivity-on-the-go a reality by having everything business including email, documents, CRM and BI apps run on mobile. Yet, according to nearly every analyst study, security is the primary inhibitor to both enterprise mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs. For example, according to the MobileIron’s user conference held earlier this year, 73 percent of CIOs say that while mobility is forging forward in all aspects of business, security loopholes, if ignored, will derail mobility within the enterprise.


IoT continuous deployment keeps software current

An agile approach often comes with the practice of continuous integration. Sometimes it involves so-called “squad teams,” these are small engineering teams that take full responsibility for a specific task from design, to implementation and test, final integration, test automation and a nightly test-and-build system. This results in new feature development, fully production tested and integrated, built into the final system on a regular period, which should be every 1 – 3 weeks. Perhaps some teams might already be using a continuous delivery approach, so for them the step to continuous deployment is to remove the manual step from production to deployment.


B-Schools Aren’t Bothering to Produce HR Experts

Understanding HR innovations and figuring out which ones are effective is, sadly, a low priority in the world of scholarship. That would never fly in marketing, operations research, or even accounting, where academics are all over new developments. In most companies, the HR staff is many times larger than the marketing department—yet while all leading B-schools have a marketing department, almost none have any HR-dedicated faculty at all. The lack of research interest in HR stems partly from carving up the topic into so many subfields. There are separate associations for labor economists, sociologists, and psychologists that look at the same problems, but these specialists don’t seem to be aware of one another’s efforts, let alone work together on solutions to our talent problems.


The PaaS Game Just Changed — HP Has Acquired Stackato from ActiveState

“Expanding our presence in the Cloud Foundry community is critical to our strategy of helping enterprises transition from traditional IT systems to a hybrid infrastructure,” reads a blog post from HP Senior Vice President for Helion Bill Hilf, published by HP Tuesday. “In 2014 alone, the Cloud Foundry community has seen a 36 percent increase in community contributions and more than 1,700 requests to improve functionality or implement bug fixes, and it is well-positioned to gain more influence. We’re at the forefront of open source innovation driven by a broad community. It’s where cloud is headed and what our customers want.”


Actian DataFlow, the Little Hadoop Engine That Could, But Probably Won’t

DataFlow was invented originally back in the early 2000’s for the multi-core revolution. As Moore’s Law started to slow down, a lot of hardware folks adapted to computer chips no longer getting faster at the same rate by putting in more and more chips. DataFlow was designed to automatically scale up at runtime to make best use of all those cores, without knowing ahead of time how many cores it was going to be running on. It’s power lay in a philosophy of “Create once, run many.” and leaving no hardware power behind. It squeezed power levels out of standard hardware that no one previously believed possible.


Lessons from the Digital Classroom

While most schools don’t have the type of technology AltSchool is developing, classrooms are increasingly filled with laptops and other digital teaching aids. This year U.S. elementary, middle, and high schools are expected to spend $4.7 billion on information technology. What is new is that many of the technologies are capturing expansive amounts of data, enough of it to search for meaningful patterns and insight into how students learn. The potential for that to be turned into profit is a big reason investors have increased funding of educational technology startups worldwide, from $1.6 billion in 2013 to $2.4 billion in 2014; they invested over $1 billion more in the first quarter of 2015, much of that in China.


State of IT Skills Quick Take

We’ve witnessed how important technology is for the success of businesses and its growing role in strategic priorities—nearly 9 in 10 U.S. IT and business executives echo that technology is important or very important to the success of their organization. As such, we expect continued demand for foundational IT skills (e.g. support, networking and security) in addition to the more emerging ones (e.g. cloud, mobility and big data), particularly as companies themselves span the tech adoption curve from the “innovators” to “late adopters". There are many influences to tech adoption to keep in mind, including industry, company size, business type and organizational support for professional development.


The Senate's Cybersecurity Bill Is in Trouble

There are currently two bills in the House that complement the Senate's cybersecurity legislation, but reconciling the House bills—and then squaring the result with the Senate version—may prove to be very difficult. The two House bills originated from different committees: One came from the House Homeland Security Committee, and the other from the House Intelligence Committee. Although they are similar in many ways, they differ on some key points, including on liability protection and privacy provisions. What's more, neither currently lines up with the legislation under consideration in the Senate, which trades fewer privacy protections for more security provisions.


Android Stagefright Vulnerability Puts 950M Devices at Risk

The Stagefright flaw opens vulnerabilities for devices running Android version 2.2 and up, according to Drake's findings. Most at risk are devices using Android Jelly Bean (versions 4.1 through 4.3.1), which covers about 11 percent of all Android devices, due to "inadequate exploit mitigations." "If 'Heartbleed' from the PC era sends chill down your spine, this is much worse," the Zimperium blog post noted. The targets for this attack can be anyone from prime ministers, ministers, executives of companies, security officers to IT managers and more, with the potential to spread like a virus."



Quote for the day:

"I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up." -- Beverly Sills,

July 28, 2015

Data Science and Big Data: Two very Different Beasts

In the world of data this expertise in converting is called Data Science. The reason it takes a science to convert a raw resource into something of value is because what is extracted from the ‘ground’ is never in a useful form. ‘Data in the raw’ is littered with useless noise, irrelevant information, and misleading patterns. To convert this into that precious thing we are after requires a study of its properties and the discovery of a working model that captures the behavior we are interested in. Being in possession of a model despite the noise means an organization now owns the beginnings of further discovery and innovation.


Personal Data Protection In Cloud Computing - EU And Turkish Legislation

When reviewed from a cloud service perspective, it is seen that the data protection liability is shared between the customer who is deemed as data controller and the cloud company who is deemed as data processor. In contradiction to a standard service relation, it is not the data controller but the data processor who decides where the personal data will be stored, which subcontractors will process the data and which security measures will be taken. Most of the time data passes through and is stored in different servers across the world. This means in terms of data subjects and controllers that they may not be able to exercise their rights to the extent possible under EU law.


The Power of Mindful Leadership

Becoming a mindful leader isn't easy. There are no five easy steps to do so. A few years ago when I asked the Dalai Lama how we can develop a new generation of compassionate, mindful leaders, he replied simply, "Develop a daily habit of introspection." Today many more companies are promoting mindful practices to improve the health and decision-making of their leaders. Google, under the tutelage of Chade-Meng Tan, trains 2,000 engineers in meditation each year. When I visited Google this spring, it was evident that mindfulness is one of the key reasons behind Google's innovative and harmonious culture. Leading financial services firms like Blackrock and Goldman Sachs offer mindfulness courses for their employees.


Invalidating Identity Interdiction

Data is a tantalizing thing. Collecting it makes life easier for customers and providers as well. Having your ordering history allows Amazon to suggest products you might like to buy. Having your address on file allows the pizza place to pull it up without you needing to read your address again. Creating a user account on a site lets you set preferences. All of this leads to a custom experience and lets us feel special and unique. But, data is just like that slice of cheesecake you think you want for dessert. It looks so delicious and tempting. But you know it’s bad for you. It has calories and sugar and very little nutritional value. In the same manner, all that data you collect is a time bomb waiting to be exposed. The more data you collect, the larger the blowback for your eventual exposure.


3 Reasons Why Virtual Reality will Kill the Office

Imagine a scenario where your head office is based in New York and your team is spread across the world in Europe, South America and Asia. The limit today is that even if you do video conference or screen sharing, you never actually experience working with the rest of your team. If the rest of your team is in an office you will not feel like you are part of their team throughout the day. With Virtual Reality, you can actually experience and feel like you are sitting down next to them in the office environment. You can virtually walk into the office, talk to each other, attend meetings, share data and maybe, even share a drink after work through a virtual reality interface.


Data Center Trends – 5 Reasons Why Server Cabinet Power Density is Going UP!

Ready or not (and most aren’t), power density in the rack is going up, and not incrementally over ten years, but dramatically over three to five years. Can your internal data center(s) support that? Can your partners support it? My rough estimate tells me that if an average of 10kW per rack was required, fewer than 10% of data centers in operation today could handle it. There are a confluence of events occurring that are driving infrastructure design towards more density, and I don’t see anything reversing that trend anytime soon.


Build High Performance JVM Microservices with Ratpack & Spring Boot

Ratpack and Spring Boot are a match made in microservice heaven. Each is a developer-centric web framework for the JVM, focused on productivity, efficiency, and lightweight deployments. They have their respective benefits in the area of microservice development, in that they bring different offerings to the table. Ratpack brings a reactive programming model with a high throughput, non-blocking web layer, and a convenient handler chain for defining application structure and HTTP request processing; Spring Boot brings an integration to the entire Spring ecosystem, and simplistic way to configure and autowire components into an application. For building cloud-native and data-driven microservices, they are a compliment that is unparalleled.


Privacy and the data toothpaste problem

The court, for example, pointed to a suppression motion as offering a complete fix to this issue. “The motion to suppress is vital because it can lead to the suppression of unconstitutionally seized evidence. Once evidence is suppressed, the government’s case could become impossible or significantly more difficult to prove.” That’s fine, but the absence of a court conviction doesn’t even come close to righting this wrong. Ask anyone whose name was dragged through the media for years before being acquitted. Is that person’s life returned to its original state? The Facebook case involved a probe into retired police officers and firefighters “suspected of having feigned mental illnesses caused by the events of September 11, 2001.”


End User Experience Management: Fulfilling the Promise of Mobile Healthcare

Mobile technology is arguably the greatest accelerator in transforming medical practices and the engagement between providers and patients. Mobile health is particularly important in developing countries, where mobile penetration is high and populations are not well served by traditional healthcare structures. But it is also a priority for physicians in developed countries who want to use their own devices in clinical settings. Much like other industries, healthcare IT teams must address issues around Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies as well as the management and security of devices, apps and data.


India Loves MOOCs

Throughout India, online education is gaining favor as a career accelerator, particularly in technical fields. Indian enrollments account for about 8 percent of worldwide activity in Coursera and 12 percent in edX, the two leading providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Only the United States’ share is clearly higher; China’s is roughly comparable. India’s own top-tier technical universities have created free videotaped lectures of more than 700 courses, with the goal of putting students at regional colleges in digital contact with the country’s most renowned professors. In the United States and Europe, MOOCs have proved less revolutionary than their champions predicted when they launched on a wide scale in 2012.



Quote for the day:

"The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer words, the greater profit. - Fenelon - Be bold, be brief, and be gone!" -- @Orrin_Woodward

July 27, 2015

Nonstop Cyber Attacks Drive Israel to Build Hack-Proof Defense

“If I ranked the existential threats, cyber would come right behind nuclear weapons,’ said Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service and chairman of Cytegic, a company that has developed a digital dashboard and tools to help keep companies protected. Israel and the U.S. face some of the most serious cyber assailants in the world, said Daniel Garrie, executive managing partner of cyber-consulting firm Law & Forensics in New York. That forces them to be ‘‘light years ahead’’ in prevention. While attempted hack attacks on Israel reached 2 million a day during last year’s fighting in Gaza, the country has yet to report destructive events such as the theft of data from about 22 million people at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.


The government push to regulate driverless cars has finally begun

The bill, called the SPY Car Act, would require certain commitments from car manufacturers who want to build driverless or connected cars. For example, under the legislation the Federal Trade Commission would force automakers to use "reasonable measures" to protect the increasingly complex software that helps our cars run smoothly. Together with highway authorities, the FTC would also develop a window sticker that rates a new car's vulnerability to digital attack, in the same way consumers use fuel economy stickers to evaluate a car's potential gas mileage. Hackers who figure out how to take control of a car's brakes, engine or other systems not only pose a danger to those inside the affected vehicle but also to others around it.


Worried About a Cyber-Apocalypse? AIG Wants to Sell You a Policy

“We are listening to our customers, who tell us they are looking for larger limits -- some as high as $1 billion in coverage for cyber property damage and business interruption for larger corporate properties and facilities,” said Dan Riordan, chief executive officer of Zurich Global Corporate in North America. He wouldn’t say how much coverage Zurich might provide. Since the first cyberpolicy was written in the late 1990s, insurers have been unwilling to provide coverage for all losses. Most firms are reluctant to offer policies for property damage resulting from hacking because there’s almost no data available to determine costs, according Tracy Dolin, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s.


5 steps to becoming an enterprise architecture ninja

Enterprise architects have often logged years of IT and business experience, and have outstanding abilities to think both structurally and strategically. But when you ask them to rate what they're doing on a maturity scale -- say 1-5 -- plenty of very competent professionals look at their shoes and mumble 1 or even 0. Despite being tasked with making sure company systems have a solid foundation (and don't topple under their own complexity), managing product integration, digital transformation, and IT roadmaps, they don't often take the time to benchmark their own skills and contributions. If you're an enterprise architect, listen up. Charting your own personal roadmap is key to explaining the impact of your role, and winning respect and influence.


6 Smart Jewellery For The Perfect Fusion Of Fashion And Tech

While the Nike+ FuelBand, Fitbit Flex and Jawbone UP demonstrated potential in wearable computing with their tracking capabilities and accompanying mobile apps, the devices themselves looked more at home in the gym than in ones everyday life. Nowadays, a new breed of wearables, more female-targeted line of devices are starting to emerge, offering features that extend beyond health and fitness, as well as the look of “real” jewellery made with metals and stones instead of bulky plastic bands. The “Smart jewellery” range includes a wide range of devices: From those that keep one aware of important calls and texts to those that are meant to serve as protection for women in peril.


Your body, the battery: Powering gadgets from human “biofuel”

When it comes to energy-rich bodily fluids, blood is hard to beat. Plasma, the liquid component of blood, is constantly suffused with dissolved glucose, our cells’ primary source of energy. Most EFCs that have been developed to date target this molecule. The first EFC that could draw power directly from an organism's bloodstream was created in 2010. Its French developers implanted the inch-long device into the abdomen of a live rat, where it operated successfully for 11 days—apparently without much discomfort on the part of the host. During this time, it continually generated around two microwatts of power, which is more than enough to power a pacemaker in theory.


Outsourcing: How Cyber Resilient Are You?

In an effort to improve upon the results of the SEC and DFS reports, issuances from the FFIEC and FINRA provide third-party cyber guidance with a focus on resilience (i.e., the ability to withstand and recover from a cyber attack). Consistent with the regulators’ overall approach to cybersecurity, the guidance suggests an approach that is more advisory than enforcement-oriented and is principles-based rather than prescriptive. A prescriptive approach would make less sense at this stage, as cyber risks are evolving rapidly and financial institutions each have idiosyncratic exposures based on the particularities of the institution.


Interview: When Technology and Design Collide, then Collude

The two are intrinsically interlinked. Both provide inspiration for the other. There is an element of truth that sometimes limitations of technology can prevent designers from thinking big, but technology often comes up with inspiration and new ideas and approaches that design has never thought about. The theory is about incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation. It suggests that incremental innovation is climbing to the top of the existing hill that you're standing on. It's limited by the size of that hill. That's often what a lot of UX designers focus on. They run usability testing, trying to tweak and improve a particular product and service. But they lose sight of the fact that there might be other bigger mountains out there to climb.


How to find agility in the cloud

"We needed to move from where deployment was a post-application function to a Dev Ops culture," Juneja says. "We needed to bring in some talent that could address the leadership gap we had in cloud and in Dev Ops. The benefit of stabilizing and thinking about next-gen concurrently is we were able to do a lot of analysis of our existing stack, our existing team functions — idenfity the things we would do and not do in the new environment. This is where we identified the gaps in our skills and leadership. We brought in a vice president for cloud that had done cloud transformation for a healthcare company. We built a center of excellence for Dev Ops and brought in a leader from a major transactions company."


When DevOps isn't enough, try NoOps

For NoOps to work, it needs an IT platform that developers don’t need to worry about in terms of resource constraints – and that’s where the cloud comes in. Once the hardware is out of the hands of the organisation, the operations side of the equation becomes someone else’s problem. The cloud provider has the job of provisioning, monitoring and maintaining the hardware and – provided a suitable service level agreement (SLA) has been settled – the physical aspects of the platform become relatively immaterial. ... All too often, even in cascade projects, developers fall into the trap of believing their operational environment will perform the same as their development one, forgetting that much of what they do is self-contained in their own workstation or hived away from the vagaries of the main network.



Quote for the day:

"Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means." -- Max McKeown

July 24, 2015

Top Big Data Challenges, Revisited

There's also a shortage of people who can get the most out of all this new data. Harvard business review called Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century (it certainly sounds sexier than "actuary," which is perhaps the closest 20th century equivalent!). Data Scientists have deep analytic and statistical skills combined with knowledge of the business. They are in high demand and they command high salaries. What's new is that technology is helping to remove some of the the bottlenecks. For example there are now easier to use, more automated predictive analytics tools that can be deployed by, say, marketing staff looking to optimize campaigns.


Stakeholder Engagement: The Elephant in the Room

A process of any description is, in many ways, a means to an end—it helps us achieve a goal, output or outcome. Yet different stakeholders will want to achieve different things from that process—and sometimes these needs and wants might conflict. Uncovering these areas of disagreement early, discussing them and working to gain consensus is extremely beneficial. This builds engagement from the very beginning, makes it much more likely that we’ll foresee issues, and makes it much more likely that the process will deliver the benefits and outcomes that we are aiming for.


How IIT Bombay is popularizing robotics in India through its flagship initiative, e-Yantra

e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI) provides guidance in setting up Robotics labs at colleges and trains a team of 4 teachers from each college. The eLSI does this through a three pronged approach. The first component of the e-Yantra Lab Setup initiative trains teachers through a two-day workshop on basic concepts in Embedded systems and Micro-controller programming, conducted at a coordinating college termed Nodal Center (NC), in different regions of the country. At the end of the workshop teacher team from each participating college is given a robotic kit to participate in an extended training program called Task Based Training (TBT).


Cars May Soon Understand More of What You Say

Ortiz says that such technology is now in the vehicle production pipeline, which means it may appear within a few years. It will primarily allow for more natural control of dashboard features and retrieval of information such as directions. “In the navigation domain, we’re developing methods to describe points of interest more abstractly,” he says. “I don’t always know the exact address of where I want to go. I want to be able to say ‘I want to go to a restaurant in the marina near the ballpark.’ “ Nuance came to dominate the market for voice-recognition technology over the past decade after acquiring various other companies in that space.


Cloud inventory management for CIOs: Build guardrails, not roadblocks

Organizations of all kinds are encountering workers using cloud apps without IT's knowledge. The usage stems from both individual workers seeking out cloud apps to help them perform a particular task, as well as entire departments lighting up enterprise apps in the cloud, said Forrester Research analyst Lauren Nelson. It's easy to do in both cases and often creates efficiencies in business processes for the workers and departments involved. Unfortunately, many CIOs are left out of the loop, and as a result, they quickly lose track of what apps are performing which functions, Nelson said. "You think you've identified what's being used, but then you find there are people using apps that didn't go through your process."


CIOs say AppleCare for Enterprise is lacking

Some of the services CIOs want from AppleCare for Enterprise, such as setup, training and technical support, are available as part of Apple's Joint Venture program, but it's managed by Apple retail stores and all eligible products must be purchased through Apple directly. Appley says Shorenstein pays $500 per year for this service and it covers up to five individuals, each of whom can receive support for multiple Apple devices. "It helps us get to the front of the line at the Genius Bar," he says. Businesses that pay for membership in the Joint Venture program also get up to 6 hours of in-store training each year and receive in-store assistance with device setup, including supervised data transfer from other devices.


The 12 disruptive tech trends you need to know

People pay plenty of money for consulting giants to help them figure out which technology trends are fads and which will stick. You could go that route, or get the same thing from the McKinsey Global Institute’s in-house think-tank for the cost of a new book. No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, was written by McKinsey directors Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, and offers insight into which developments will have the greatest impact on the business world in coming decades. Below, we’re recapping their list of the “Disruptive Dozen”—the technologies the group believes have the greatest potential to remake today’s business landscape.


Combining Knowledge- and Data-driven Methods for De-identification of Clinical Narratives

A recent promise and the potential of wider availability of data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to support clinical research are often hindered by personal health information that is present in EHRs, raising a number of ethical and legal issues. De-identification of such data is therefore one of the main pre-requisites for using EHRs in clinical research. As a result, there is a growing interest for automated de-identification methods to ultimately aid accessibility to data by removing Protected Health Information (PHI) from clinical records. De-identification of unstructured data in particular is challenging, as PHI can appear virtually anywhere in a clinical narrative or letter.


Worried About a Cyber-Apocalypse? AIG Wants to Sell You a Policy

Zurich Insurance Group AG and Munich Re say they are considering offering infrastructure-damage policies similar to AIG’s. None of the companies has signed a contract. “We are listening to our customers, who tell us they are looking for larger limits -- some as high as $1 billion in coverage for cyber property damage and business interruption for larger corporate properties and facilities,” said Dan Riordan, chief executive officer of Zurich Global Corporate in North America. He wouldn’t say how much coverage Zurich might provide. Since the first cyberpolicy was written in the late 1990s, insurers have been unwilling to provide coverage for all losses.


The Hierarchy of Needs

Related to software quality this means for one thing that robustness, safety and understandability will become relevant only if the software is runnable on the customer’s device and performs the tasks it is intended for. Further it means that an increase in functionality may not result in a higher quality experience on the customer’s side if his or her functional needs are saturated but higher needs are not. For a potential customer functionality is central. For a customer who uses the software already the functionality is more of a given fact. He or she will often expect other and higher quality attributes instead in a new release.




Quote for the day:

"The problems we have today, cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them." -- Albert Einstein

July 23, 2015

The Art of Empathetic Observation

Many technical people immediately presume that we can’t learn from ordinary people who are not experts in the technologies related to our business. One of the participants in my session this week quoted Henry Ford who once said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Yes, it’s true that most people can’t imagine something they have never before seen or experienced. ... So if we can’t ask consumers what they want from us, how do we gain the understanding we need to create breakthrough innovations? The art of empathetic observation is a means to observe and listen to customers as they – Make their own purchase decisions; – Use our products or services


Delivering Application-Centric Network and Security Services

Automation creates a standardized repeatable process that helps accelerate delivery, reducing the time needed to perform the task. At the same time automation also improves the consistency and reliability of the final configuration by elimination of manual errors. Finally automation reduces operational costs by eliminating many manual tasks, and improves development productivity by delivering application environments to engineers faster. vRealize Automation, used in conjunction with NSX, automates an application’s network connectivity, security, performance, and availability.


Germany's startup policy blasted

"Ironically, regarding startups, the Digital Agenda remains vague," Dirks said. The telecoms exec advocated cutting the bureaucratic red-tape that can hinder smaller firms, especially in their first four years of existence. He also said that new legislation around venture capital law is urgently needed to spur investment in young companies. German venture capital-backed tech firms attracted about $1.28bn in funding in 2014, according to CB Insights, a dramatic increase over the $578m raised the previous year, but it still pales in comparison to $21.8bn that flowed to California startups in 2014. In addition to more startup support, Bitkom said that education and training is another key area that the German government should focus on.


Empathic Design: Is Empathy the UX Holy Grail?

Empathic design is the process of developing an understanding of users, not just their overt needs, but of their constraints, practices, problem-solving approaches, contexts, and the interrelations between people as a whole. The aim of researching users in such a way is to help designers identify their users' underlying needs (i.e. those that are not instantly apparent or accessible through questioning alone). Once we have established these needs we can develop new problem-solving approaches that accommodate the users' constraints and exploit (in a nice way) their capabilities. The ultimate aim is to improve the user's or consumer's experience by tailoring the product to their explicit, implicit, and latent needs.


Stop hiring data scientists until you’re ready for data science

In the words of the data scientist I spoke with last week: “Anyone can hire a data scientist. Not every HR department or organization is ready for data science. Generating reports are not analytics — even if they’re prettier or faster reports. Dashboards are not analytics — even if they’re really pretty dashboards. More than anyone, HR should understand the devastating impact of changing job description on someone that’s been hired.” Ironically, that data scientist hire is perhaps one of the most brilliant and strategic hires that HR department has ever made — perhaps ever. But only if they let her do what she was hired to do. HR data scientists can help move HR from being tactical to strategic, using an analytics approach to highlight never seen before patterns, make decisions based on data, and the like.


Why enterprises aren't getting the full value they expect from cloud services

Negative perceptions of vendors have left decision-makers hesitant to adopt as-a-service platforms, as nearly half of the surveyed respondents feel their service providers are unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue models. Another reason for slow adoption may be a lack of consensus within organizations about the benefits and value as-a-service offerings can provide. When asked how important adoption was, 53% of operations leaders saw it as business-critical, while only 29% of middle managers agreed when asked the same question. With these concerns in mind, it’s no wonder that enterprises are being extremely methodical when it comes to cloud migration.


IBM’s Machine Learning Tech Takes on Solar Power’s Flakiness

The project used up a big chunk of the petabyte of storage dedicated to it, tapping into the DoE’s high-performance computing facilities for processing power. Data sources include sensor networks, local weather stations, cloud motion tracked by sky cameras and satellites, and historical records going back several decades. Variables are plugged into multiple forecasting models, with the system continuously tracking how they work under varying conditions. “We can actually see which one of those models or forecasting systems has performed better than others,” said Hamann, adding that the technology’s applications aren’t confined to solar.


A Case for Diversity in Our Workspaces

We can stop assuming that the same space will work for everyone all the time. We can provide lighting options. Allow pets in the workplace. Find appropriate ways of taking time out to make ourselves the creative space we need for problem solving. Create options that don’t make people feel uncomfortable: it is easier to say “I’m just going to make a coffee” than it is to say “I just need to move around a bit to re-establish where my body is in space”; it is easier to stroke the office dog than to say “I just need to re-calibrate my sense of touch so I can feel the keys on the keyboard when I code”; it’s easier to allow headphones at least some of the time than to expect everyone to be able to tune out the background hum of the open-plan workspace and pair programming teams.


End-User Computing: A Challenge for Data Governance Leadership

Data governance is not in the same position as IT with respect to EUC, and does not have to accept IT’s views on EUC. However, EUC is often not a priority for data governance. As noted earlier, many data governance units focus their efforts on dealing with IT and operations, and there is no natural constituency that represents EUC that data governance can deal with. Equally, EUC is often somewhat mysterious to data governance staff. There is not a lot written about it in the literature. Other, more familiar topics such as data quality and data definitions are likely to be areas in which data governance focuses its activities.


Cyber-hijacking: Hackers may try to take the wheel from drivers remotely

Among the most vivid examples came this week, when security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek demonstrated that they could hijack a vehicle over the Internet. By hacking into a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, the researchers were able to turn the steering wheel, briefly disable the brakes and shut down the engine. They also found readily accessible Internet links to thousands of Jeeps, Dodges and Chryslers that feature a proprietary wireless entertainment and navigation system called Uconnect. Valasek and Miller said they could, by merely typing the right series of commands, hack into these vehicles almost anywhere they might be driving.



Quote for the day:

"Now is the time. Needs are great, but your possibilities are greater." -- Bill Blackman

July 22, 2015

Java 9's New HTTP/2 and REPL

All of this means that support for HTTP/2 is a core piece of Java functionality for the next decade. It also allows us to revisit our old assumptions, rewrite the APIs and provide a "second bite of the apple". HTTP/2 will be a major API for every developer for years to come. The new API makes a clean break with the past, by abandoning any attempt to maintain protocol independence. Instead, the API focuses solely on HTTP, but with the additional understanding that HTTP/2 is not fundamentally changing semantics. Therefore, the API can be independent of HTTP version, whilst still providing support for the new framing and connection handling parts of the protocol.


4 ways to manage an overwhelming number of IT initiatives

While it may be tempting to simply stop entertaining new initiatives, this course of action is fraught with risk. Many IT services can now be provisioned with little more than a credit card, and any gaps can be filled by armies of willing consultants. Hanging out a metaphorical "No room at the inn" sign may cause constituents to go elsewhere. Furthermore, technology is changing very rapidly, and a new initiative may invalidate one or more existing initiatives. A new cloud service being requested by operations could eliminate a costly application upgrade or reporting tool, just as a new request by marketing could finally gain support for a less exciting, but dependent, infrastructure upgrade.


What Is A Creative Data Scientist Worth?

For some time, pockets of IT innovators have been creating industrial art which appeals to the head as well as the heart. People like the late Steve Jobs and Apple AAPL -0.12% design chief Jonathan Ive - true IT artists. I remember laying eyes on their ‘iLamp’ G4 iMac back in 2002. It was so original and ridiculously gorgeous. For the first time in my life, I forgot about MB, GB, or Ghz. I just wanted an iMac. And now, some data science outputs are being considered fine art in their own right. As well as creating competitive advantage, spawning new products, identifying fraud patterns, and changing business processes in ways that, until now, could only live in the imagination, these beautiful, hypnotic images are adding a new dimension; bringing data analytics to life.


What’s behind Linux’s new Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

The CNCF is advancing the discussion to consider how containers should be managed, not just how they’re created. That’s a good thing for the industry, and for end users. Big enterprise buyers aren’t going to really use containers until there are are mature platforms for managing them. ... Because the CNCF is attempting to create a reference architecture for running applications and containers, and Google’s Kubernetes will likely play a big role in that. AWS and Microsoft already have a reference architecture for running containers and they’re not looking to support competitor Google’s.


Unpacking technical jargon in machine learning

Machine learning is a child of statistics, computer science, and mathematical optimization. Along the way, it took inspiration from information theory, neural science, theoretical physics, and many other fields. Machine learning papers are often full of impenetrable mathematics and technical jargon. To make matters worse, sometimes the same methods were invented multiple times in different fields, under different names. The result is a new language that is unfamiliar even to experts in one of the originating fields. As a field, machine learning is relatively young. Large-scale applications of machine learning only started to appear in the last two decades. This aided the development of data science as a profession.


Next-generation endpoint protection not as easy as it sounds

The value of endpoint protection platforms is that they can identify specific attacks and speed the response to them once they are detected. They do this by gathering information about communications that go on among endpoints and other devices on the network, as well as changes made to the endpoint itself that may indicate compromise. The database of this endpoint telemetry then becomes a forensic tool for investigating attacks, mapping how they unfolded, discovering what devices need remediation and perhaps predicting what threat might arise next.


The Importance Of Design Thinking For Big Data Startups

Rather than thinking about competing products, think about competing processes. If you are selling into the marketing department, what is their current process for accomplishing the task you are serving? Your goal should be to make that process faster and more efficient. Additional features are great but if a potential client can do X faster with their current process, your offering of Y & Z doesn’t matter. You may win early but it will be difficult to last. Slack has done a remarkable job of accomplishing this. They are in a super competitive space of workplace collaboration. They did not win because of features; they won because of ease and simplicity.


Information security governance maturing, says Gartner

"The primary reasons for establishing this reporting line outside of IT are to improve separation between execution and oversight, to increase the corporate profile of the information security function and to break the mindset among employees and stakeholders that security is an IT problem," said Scholtz. According to Gartner, organisations increasingly recognise that security must be managed as a business risk issue, and not just as an operational IT issue. There is also an increasing understanding that cyber security challenges go beyond the traditional realm of IT into areas such as operational technology and the internet of things (IoT).


Hadoop for HPC—It Just Makes Sense

An increasing number of companies that already use High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running a Lustre file system for simulations sees the value of their existing data and future data. They are interested in what that data might reveal running Hadoop analytics on it. But building out a Hadoop cluster with massive amounts of local storage and replicating their data on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a considerably extensive and expensive undertaking, especially when the data already resides in a POSIX compliant Lustre file system. Today, these companies can adopt analytics written for Hadoop and run them on their HPC clusters.


7 Habits of Highly Effective Monitoring Infrastructures

Monolithic monitoring tools, on the other hand, often assume that you’ll never need to export the data they collect for you. The classic example is Nagios, which is, as you probably know, a tool designed to collect availability data at around 1-minute resolution. Because Nagios views itself as a monolithic monitoring tool, a plethora of single-purpose tools have sprung into being, for no other purpose than to take data from Nagios and place it in X, where X is some other monitoring tool from which it is usually even more difficult to extract the monitoring data. What you end up with is the now infamous anti-pattern of overly complex, difficult to repurpose, impossible to scale, single-purpose monitoring systems. Each tool we add to this chain locks us in further to the rest of the tool chain, by making it more difficult to replace any single piece.



Quote for the day:

"Corporate governance is not a matter or right or wrong 'it is more nuanced than that." -- Advocate Johan Myburgh

July 21, 2015

HTC on why 2016 is a 'critical' year for virtual reality

That's been a common reaction for anyone who has tried the Vive, the virtual reality setup built by partners HTC and Valve, according to Gattis, who shared the anecdote in an interview on Thursday. HTC will be counting on that wow factor as it pushes an entirely new product from its core business of making smartphones. It isn't alone. While HTC and Valve, best known for its Steam online gaming platform, have promised to launch the Vive later this year, Facebook's Oculus and Sony are expected to launch their own virtual reality headsets in 2016. Next year is shaping up to be when the public will get its first real look at this technology. "The industry needs a successful first year," Gattis said. "Next year is critical."


Google Fights Export Controls For 'Intrusion Software'

"It would be a disastrous outcome if an export regulation intended to make people more secure resulted in billions of users across the globe becoming persistently less secure," Martin and Willis write. In a letter sent to the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), Google argues that the proposed rules are too broad and vague, requiring potential export licenses for email, code review systems, instant messages, and perhaps even in-person conversation, despite assurances to the contrary. The rules, suggest Martin and Willis, could require an export license to report a bug and could limit the ability of companies to share information about intrusion software.


New PCI DSS guidance: increased compliance and cost implications

The PCI DSS’s additional guidance (released in June 2015) on maintaining business-as-usual compliance will help organisations assess and document how they maintain PCI DSS compliance on an ongoing basis. ... The DESV is intended to “provide greater assurance that PCI DSS controls are maintained effectively and on a continuous basis through validation of business-as-usual (BAU) processes, and increased validation and scoping consideration,” according to the FAQ sectionon the PCI SSC website. The PCI SSC stresses that the DESV can be used to complement any entity’s PCI DSS compliance efforts, and encourages the adoption of DESV as best practice – even for organisations that are not designated entities.


Intel's IoT future could come out of this accelerator

In an IoT future, software and hardware develop will meld into a single product - the chip that will give online life to refrigerators, washing machines, smart wearables, and the million other little things that will constantly upload, download, and analyze data to the nth degree. To succeed in that game, companies need the help of startups that can develop services, user interfaces, data analytics, and engineering to make interconnectivity work. In an increasingly interconnected world, tech firms have come to realize that they cannot do it all by themselves - and that by partnering with others, they can increase their own value a great deal more than they could by trying to keep everything in house.


Unifying Information Management – Why it Matters

Not surprising that the major obstacles continue to be the proliferation of silos of data sets, the lack of ability to show ROI and the buy-in/funding from executive management. Today’s data environment is getting more and more complex. We have evangelists for big data, discovery platforms, agile labs and cloud services achieving great success in providing capability for quick insights, realisation to value and fail fast discovery processes. However, these are often delivered as point solutions that result in further data silos. This adds even more complexity to the data environment/landscape. ... In its most basic form, every new initiative needs to be assessed as to its data asset impact.


Business cases emerge from growing pains of Hadoop 1.0

Chris Brown, big data lead at high-performance computing consultancy OCF, believes one of the issues is that the technology is simply not suitable for most organisations unless they are processing vast amounts of data – at least 1TB. “The lighthouse accounts for this are Amazon, Yahoo and Walmart, which are huge corporations – but we just don’t have that many in the UK apart from a few telcos, retailers or financial services organisations,” he says.  “So, for the small and medium-sized companies that are in the majority here, it’s huge overkill and is just too big an exercise for them to take on.” Another issue is generating a return on investment (ROI) – a situation exacerbated by the skills shortage Gartner cites, as it inevitably makes expertise expensive to buy in.


5 Questions to Ask Before Labeling a Business with the ‘S-Word’

We tend to call everything ‘sustainability,’ for the lack of a better term to describe the wide cross-section of business activities we deem ‘good.’ That does not make each fairly virtuous act sustainable. It doesn’t. Most of the mislabeled ‘good’ just compares favorably to a more deplorable, drummed-up alternative; it might be more bearable or better for the environment, but advantageous comparisons do not equate to sustainability. Consumers fall so hard for the romantic concept that at times the term is little more than nebulous and trite. More simply, few business activities deserve the ultimate acknowledgement that many readily, and without rigor, deploy.


Making the Case for Remote Power Supply Monitoring

A proactive approach to IT maintenance based on predictive analytics winds up saving IT organizations money, Edward Wirth, director of business development, marketing and sales for Power Service Concepts, a provider of battery environment support services, said. Wirth is speaking on the subject at the upcoming Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September. Wirth said remote monitoring also addresses a number of tactical issues. Gaining access to data centers has become increasingly problematic for third-party specialists. Background checks are now routinely required, and the time slots being made available to those third-party specialists are usually now on the weekends or after normal business hours.


MVC, Angular JS CRUD using WEB API 2 with Stored Procedure

In Internet there are lots of examples related to WEB API using Entity Framework. But in community forum I saw many questions was been asked by members for a simple example using WEB API Entity Framework with Stored Procedure. I search a lot to find a simple Article which explains a simple way to perform CRUD operation using Stored Procedure with MVC and Web API. But I couldn’t able to find any article which explains all this .I plan to make a simple web application using MVC 5 ,Angular JS ,WEB API to perform CRUD(Create/Read/Update and Delete) using Entity Framework with Stored procedure.


CEO Nadella talks Microsoft's mobile ambitions, Windows 10 strategy, HoloLens and more

We will do everything we have to do to make sure we're making progress on phones. We have them. Even today Terry (Myerson, the head of Windows and Devices) reinforced, again, yes, we will have premium Lumias coming this year. If there are a lot of OEMs, we'll have one strategy. If there are no OEMs, we'll have one strategy. We are committed to having the phones in these three segments. And I think the operational details will become clear to people as they see it. I want people to evaluate us on the phones that we produce, but not the inside baseball -- what are we doing to produce -- because that should not be relevant to our broad consumers. It may be relevant to people like you who are critiquing us. That's okay. But what matters to me is what customers care.



Quote for the day:

"Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would." -- Nelson Mandela

July 18, 2015

Services and disservices – 5A: Social example (Introduction)

The Duluth Model – the supposed ‘standard model’ for this context (the contextual equivalent of TOGAF, one might say?) – holds to that perception of DV as a ‘male-only’ evil, asserting that “women and children are vulnerable to violence because of their unequal social, economic, and political status in society” and that “we do not see men’s violence against women as stemming from individual pathology, but rather from a socially reinforced sense of entitlement”. It is explicit in its assertions as to who needs help, and where the cause exclusively resides: ... It also insists that “men are perpetrators who are violent because they have been socialized in a patriarchy that condones male violence, and that women are victims who are violent only in self-defense”.


How The Grid uses AI to revolutionize web design

The Cassowary Constraint Solver is a toolkit that essentially allows web designers to design a webpage with more flexibility. Soon after, Tocchini met Brian Axe who, coincidentally, worked with Badros at Google in the past. The pair founded The Grid, an AI platform that builds and designs websites for users in as little as a few minutes. Badros ended up as an investor in the company. He said that the goal is to make responsive design accessible to everyone, regardless of technical prowess. "They are removing a key technical challenge for the majority of publishers who want to communicate effectively across a wide range of devices without the burden of bad technology," Badros said.


These 9 Cloud Computing Skills Could Give You The Next Career Jump

At the end of last year, there were over 3.9 million jobs in the cloud computing field in America alone—and over 18 million around the world. And professionals with cloud computing experience took home a median salary of over $90,000. It’s a great field to get into — but what skills do you need for a job in cloud computing? Any expertise in these 9 areas will help set you apart from the rest of the application pile. ... While some jobs only require one of these languages, you’ll increase your employability by being familiar with more than one. Yes, familiarize yourself with the many interactive coding lessons available online. Pick one of the languages and start learning!


Robot With Bacteria Brain Stalks Food, Is Your Worst Nightmare

Here's what you have to know: 90% of you, isn't you. You're only 10% human cells. The rest of you is made up of microbes that aren't you, but they are a part of your normal physiology. For instance, you have trillions of microbes in your digestive system that break down your food. While that sounds gross, it is a good relationship. They break down the food and we ingest most of it in the form of nutrients. They take a handling fee in the form of some of the food and live on. Here's the thing: We're starting to realize that not all of those microbes mind their own business. Some of them actually change our personality, control our actions, and might even be the cause of mental disorders.


Hipaa’s Use as Code of Silence Often Misinterprets the Law

Intended to keep personal health information private, the law does not prohibit health care providers from sharing information with family, friends or caregivers unless the patient specifically objects. Even if she is not present or is incapacitated, providers may use “professional judgment” to disclose pertinent information to a relative or friend if it’s “in the best interests of the individual.” Hipaa applies only to health care providers, health insurers, clearinghouses that manage and store health data, and their business associates. Yet when I last wrote about this topic, a California reader commented that she’d heard a minister explain that the names of ailing parishioners could no longer appear in the church bulletin because of Hipaa.


Object storage: why, when, where… and but.

A horizontal platform serving many (secondary) storage needs is what I have been talking about for years now, and I’m glad it is finally happening. API-based Object Storage was the first building block, but now it seems it is going to be integrated in more sophisticated products capable to do what was previously possible with external appliances or software. And this means less complexity and ease of use which, again, will drive more adoption in smaller environments (not only hyper-scale!). This new scenario is not ideal for many of the “traditional” object storage startups around, some of them are very specialized and their file/block protocols are not as good as the core part, while data services are non existent!


Seagate Intros Data Management Services for Hybrid Cloud

Seagate unveiled its Backup and Recovery Private Cloud, a multi-tenant instance of data protection software that IT organizations or cloud service providers can deploy themselves to provide up to two petabytes of storage, and Data Management Services, a service through which Seagate analyzes data usage to advise customers on what tier of storage particular data should reside to store it most cost effectively. Finally, earlier this week, Seagate revealed that it has extended an existing storage alliance with HP and IBM involving its ClustorStor appliances into the realm of high-performance computing.


8 Ways the Internet Of Things (IOT) will change the way you live

The way technology is changing it looks like you no need to worry about anything, your every device will worry about you and will take care of you. The era of Humans control devices is over now, It changed to Devices control humans . Before going further on this article, let us first see why Big companies creating business over IOT, so many Internet of things projects going on in market. Companies are forced to adopt new protocol since Internet of things became popular. ... Your vehicles now are automated, you come near to your vehicle in parking slot, it automatically take reverse and will come just infront of you. They analyse the traffic data collected over the period of time, will change the route by considering google maps data, history and will decide which route to take today.


Using Data to Save Lives  


The program recognizes organizations and individuals implementing analytics in innovative ways to improve the health of their patients and the financial performance of their organizations. The Analytics All-Stars program showcases those who are providing pioneering leadership, spurring innovation and driving improvement across their organizations. ... What's especially frustrating, Showalter says, is that he's always treating patients after their disease has put them in dire straits. In addition, even after the health system treats heart attack victims and educates them on better lifestyle choices and available treatments, 1 percent of all patients leaving the University of Mississippi Medical Center will have a heart attack within a year of discharge.


Introducing Programming Without Coding Technology (PWCT) to C Programmers

It's all about applying the principles of programming on the process of typing code itself. Yes, we are doing it the wrong way for many years, but how can we notice that and prove it at the theoretical and practical side. This article will provide the concept behind visual programming to C programmers, why you shouldn't write C code directly again, why the code must be generated for you, why you should have visual representation for your programs, why you should interact with the visual representation and become able to use visual programming to create your new code without typing that code directly. We are programmers, what are we doing everyday? We are writing code? Sure but, it's not our goal to write code, it's just the method that we use to achieve our goals.



Quote for the day:

"A bad system will beat a good person every time" -- W. Edwards Deming

July 16, 2015

Disaster Preparedness Strategies for Recovery Assurance and Peace of Mind

Obviously, the well-being of your employees in a disaster situation is more important than anything else, and establishing safety protocols and procedures should be your first priority. From there, identify key operational personnel – those people without whom your business can’t operate – and provide them with the ability to work remotely or from a secondary location when a disaster strikes. Determine the steps that will be required to get those employees online and communicating with each other in the event of an outage, and make sure they have quick and easy access to the business-critical data, systems, servers and other infrastructure they need to keep the business running.


Windows 10 -- download full version, before release date

One obvious change that signals this is not a typical beta build is that the Windows Version watermark in the bottom right corner of the screen is now gone. Another point to make is that this build has been released to both the fast and slow rings at the same time.  It's two weeks until launch, and the RTM build...will be shipped to OEMs to use as the basis for them to install on new hardware. ... Up until now every new build has been a full install of Windows overtop of the existing one [but now] it will likely shift to a Windows Update style where just components are updated rather than the entire OS. MORE


Network Services Framework goes live across public sector

Hurrell said that CCS had built on the lessons learnt from both previous frameworks and the extensive consultation process. “We’ve done lots of market engagement and spent a lot of time with suppliers and customers. We got suppliers into working groups to tell us how they would like to sell to government. Some of what they proposed we accomplished, some we didn’t. We tried to arbitrate between what users and suppliers wanted,” she said. “We really made an effort to listen to that feedback – including listening to customers across the public sector so we hope that means they will want to use it because we’ve given them what they asked for.”


Engineering Reverse Innovations

Casting off preconceived solutions before you set down to define problems will help your company avoid the first trap—and spot opportunities outside its existing product portfolio. Consider the problem of irrigating farms in emerging markets. Farmers will argue for the expansion of the power grid so that they can use electricity to run water pumps and irrigate fields. However, farmers need water, not electricity, and the real requirement is getting water to crops—not power to pumps. If they isolate the problem, engineers may find that creating ponds near fields or using solar-powered pumps is more cost-effective and environmentally appropriate than expanding the power grid. When defining problems, executives must keep their eyes and ears open for behavior that may signal needs that customers haven’t articulated.


6 ways to give millennials the mentorship programs they want

Traditionally, mentorship programs have been set up by HR, and younger employees were matched with managers or executives, ... But millennials are disrupting that mentorship model. They want better, faster and more effective mentor programs — or they're ditching HR and doing it on their own. Companies should think of ways to refresh their current programs and engage millennials. ... It can be hard for busy executives to find time for mentoring, but it's important for companies that want to retain millennials to have a few key business leaders involved in mentorships. "Programs don't work unless someone in HR or a senior executive is going to accept the role of champion and is willing to make sure the company invests in the program," Dessau says.


Value sensitive design helps CIOs tackle social, ethical tech issues

There are some researchers who believe you can code a computer to be more ethical than a human -- that a human relies on emotional responses and, under stress, we can make wrong decisions. There are others who argue back that's what it means to be human -- that you make decisions based on your humanness and not necessarily through some cold rationality. I fall into the camp sort of in between [the two], but I lean more toward not coding ethics because we cannot know all external circumstances in the time that we code some device. For example, a killer robot: We cannot possibly code in every single set of conditions that a killer robot might face. And so, unless you can guarantee certainty of outcomes, I am not a fan of coding in ethical decisions.


Chasing Metadata to Improve Decision Quality

Metadata is really about providing the color behind the data that we deal with. It brings context in to life. Metadata augments our engagement with the data by connecting meaning with purpose and goes on to create a new kind of data in the process – the kind that adds the context. Metadata truly embodies the soul of the data, one might add, so that it can come to life and be useful. But as much as metadata defines what data is and how to get the most use out of it, such context also underscores what isn’t in the scope of the data in question. Context, in this manner, provides an invisible boundary – a framework, if you will, to help narrate a story better through the data on hand. Context when coupled with content, even when incomplete, provides the foundation for understanding.


SanDisk Launches Connect Wireless Stick Drive

Flash storage solutions specialist SanDisk has expanded its mobile storage portfolio with a wireless mobile flash drive, the Connect Wireless Stick, up to 128 GB of storage and a compact design. The Connect Wireless Stick works with smartphones, tablets and computers, and allows users to wirelessly access media or transfer large files, save and share photos and videos, or stream HD videos and music to and from mobile devices, up to three at a time. The drive is also capable of supporting a single stream for up to 4.5 hours on a single charge, and with its USB connector, users can also connect directly to a computer to save and transfer files. The SanDisk Connect app enables management of content between devices, all through password-protected WiFi connectivity.


Data Breaches Boost Funding for Cybersecurity Startups

One reason is that cybersecurity startups were often acquired prior to an initial public offering, says Scott Weiss, an Andreessen Horowitz partner. Mr. Weiss sold his own security startup, IronPort Systems Inc., to Cisco Systems Inc. for $830 million in 2007. Well-received offerings from companies including Palo Alto Networks Inc. in 2012 and FireEye Inc. in 2013 have altered that view. Partners at Andreessen Horowitz say they likely wouldn't have invested in a company like Keybase even two years ago. Over the past 13 months, the firm also made an unusually large $142 million bet on Tanium Inc., which tries to make it easier for companies to find vulnerable and infected machines on their networks.


Rise of the Data Visualization Competency Center

Successful data visualization requires using the right kind of graphicacy to correctly interpret and analyze the data, as well as employing the right combination of design principles to curate a meaningful story. However, guarding that visualization process isn’t one I consider to be a question of governance. Ultimately, we need to be able to construct a way to insulate the business from the risk of self-service data visualization with the essence of governed data visualization, but without restricting or otherwise limiting the inherently creative process that drives individual data visualization activities.



Quote for the day:

“Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.” -- Jaachynma N.E. Agu