Daily Tech Digest - February 08, 2017

Preventing Insider Threats from Affecting Health Data Security

Secure connections are also important. Any mobile users should not log in from unsecured wireless locations. Strong authentication measures will also be beneficial for healthcare organizations, ensuring that users are who they claim to be. Toward the end of 2016 the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) touched on this very issue, as healthcare will “usually use login passwords or passphrases to access information on public or private networks, internet portals, computers, medical devices, servers, and software applications.” A comprehensive, accurate, and thorough risk analysis for the entire organization is critical, according to OCR. This will help identify potential ePHI vulnerabilities and to identify any vulnerabilities in current authentication methods and practices.


IBM launches cognitive computing hardware unit

In many respects, a hardware unit tied to analytics and artificial intelligence is counterintuitive. After all, won't most of these workloads be handled in the cloud? Picciano said that analytics, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence will be consumed in multiple channels. "One thing I know is that our clients and data scientists are all experimenting and have initiatives," said Picciano. ... Part of IBM's cognitive play revolves around upending Intel's dominance. Picciano argues that IBM's optimized hardware approach will enable systems to better handle neural networks, deep learning and training systems to use inference. "This is the first inning of a longer game," said Picciano, who noted that a 10x improvement in training cycles is an early goal. "When you go to the edge of computing and IoT we want training cycles to be instantaneous with continuous inference and predictive recommendations."


Enterprise Intelligence Brief: Threat Hunting Takes Center Stage

Khalil Sehnaoui, founder and managing partner at Krypton Security, argued that “threat hunting is absolutely feasible and, even more so, definitely recommended.” He said that experts have been proactively pushing organizations to implement threat hunting strategies for years. “It is important because you cannot rely on just alerts and monitoring to know your network is either safe or under attack,” he said. “Alert systems can only monitor for known threats, and the best defense remains a good offense. Threats come in many a form and the battle is continuously ongoing between defenders and attackers.” Sehnaoui challenged companies to actively look for threats before the threats find them. “Just like information security researchers keep looking for new vulnerabilities and exploits, organizations should keep challenging themselves proactively instead of just waiting to react to a problem,” he said.


Use Application Delivery Technologies to Accelerate and Automate the Boring Tasks

The ADC can use programmed intelligence to adjust the application content by reordering components of the page to display the most relevant pieces first, adjust image size to provide a satisfactory visual experience while minimizing bandwidth consumption, and consolidate libraries and code to prevent the sending of duplicate content. If programmed with the appropriate intelligence, the ADC can even send content that is needed later while the user is viewing the content to make efficient use of the connection bandwidth and availability. ... Since it is likely that if products are selected that the user will go to a checkout page to order the items, the shopping cart and checkout components of the website can be loaded while the user is browsing the site.


Why Modern Data Integration? Core Drivers and Characteristics

Until recently, data integration solutions were tools only for tech-savvy teams. With modern data integration, business roles in organizations are taking more proactive participation in making sure that the right technologies are implemented. Vital data and the processes that produce it can better connect to business requirements and objectives. Organizations that recognize - and act on - the strategic value of data, also understand and embrace the need for technologies that get the most out of information and data, with continuous improvement and change. Another key driver for the emergence of modern data integration is simply the imperative of keeping up with everything data, every day. Data, information, and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes throughout the organization – more of which must be handled in real-time.


How strategy is evolving—and staying the same—in the hypergrowth digital age

The one that’s almost obvious is Amazon. They completely disrupted the retail industry, not only with their vision of the supply chain that led to their massive success, but also with the ability to innovate. That’s the birth of AWS, Amazon Web Services. The one that may surprise you is the one that surprises me—institutions like Siemens. Siemens is more than a century old. It used to be machines, telephones, and manufacturing. Nowadays, it’s really high-tech medical instruments with big data providing preventive maintenance, with data lakes that analyze real-time data from the wind turbines to provide a flow of information and drastically reduce costs. It’s a business that has evolved as a massive conglomerate through wars and crises, and it’s still standing and strong.


Microsoft lays out the future direction for its .NET languages

C# is going to continue to pick up more complex features as it has throughout its history. Microsoft promises to "innovate aggressively, while being very careful to stay within the spirit of the language." It wants to make sure improvements benefit all or most developers, avoiding over-focusing on a given segment. C# 7.0 will gain integrated support for tuples and pattern matching syntax as its primary new features. As for Visual Basic 15, it will also gain some tuples support but not to the same degree as C#. Microsoft wants to keep Visual Basic approachable for new developers and focus on things like cross-language tooling experiences since many VB users also use C#. Microsoft admits this is a shift from the co-evolution strategy it laid out in 2010, where C# and VB were set on a "shared course."


Open Source Users: It's Time For Extreme Vetting

Fundamentally, what it comes down to is you need to understand where your software came from, which means in the open source context, you have to think of open source as a third-party vendor, which means who's paying attention to it? From an organizational perspective, you need either a team paying attention and taking care of this, or you need to find a vendor to work with who will be your representative here and will do all the heavy lifting in terms of vetting the software, understanding what's good, what's bad, keeping it updated, making sure you understand what that means. That's the piece that's missing today. There's lots of organizations that have developers that will go out, find what they need in the open source universe, pull it in, and then they don't think about it a second time. Obviously, if you do that, if you never update this stuff, eventually there's going to be some sort of problem that you have to deal with in the software.


Wearable AI Detects Tone Of Conversation To Make It Navigable (And Nicer) For All

Made possible in part by the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, the work centered on using both physical feedback and audio data to train AI for the task of analyzing, and recognizing, when conversations take a turn. Study participants were asked to tell "a happy or sad story of their own choosing" while the AI system, mounted in an experimental Samsung Simband, measured wearers' physical responses (such as heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature) and recorded audio and text transcripts to capture such elements as vocabulary, energy, and pitch.  Based on 31 such conversations, researchers trained two algorithms to analyze the data for its overall "happy or sad" nature and to classify each five-second chunk of conversation as positive, neutral, or negative.


Survey Indicates 'Citizen Developer' Security, Data Risks

A key insight uncovered from Appian's research is that 75 percent believe an enterprise low-code platform is a solution to harness the energy of citizen application developers and alleviate the burden on IT departments. IT leaders surveyed cited operational efficiency (35 percent), data security (32 percent), and agility (32 percent) among the top benefits of low-code. and the bad: IT leaders state that citizen developers pose risks for data integrity (73 percent of respondents), security (69 percent of respondents), integration (58 percent of respondents with experience with citizen developed apps) and other aspects of enterprise business application development.



Quote for the day:


"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds." -- Mark Twain


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