Daily Tech Digest - July 12, 2017

10 Principles for Leading the Next Industrial Revolution

If your company is falling into the trap of thinking that it can make money indefinitely by following its traditional business model, it risks losing out to more flexible competitors. You are not in the same industry that you were in before; soon, that industry may not even exist. Your path to profitability is different. Your opportunities for raising capital have changed. Your capabilities may not apply to the same customers they did before. Your circumstances are probably different from those of any other company, so you need to look freshly at them, without relying on an industry playbook, and rethink your business model accordingly.


Ensure a load-balancer failover in a virtualized environment

The key to modern load-balancer options is operational agility. Today's workloads are dynamic, with daily load variations and frequent spikes. Load balancing needs to recognize this and must extend beyond fixed asset control and handle virtual instances of applications. Virtualization has opened up a new universe of capabilities for balancing. Efficiency improves tremendously when the balancer can increase and decrease the number of instances of a given application. There is no longer a fixed amount of horsepower or a set number of servers. The dynamic range of the resource pool can go as low as a single instance or as high as the whole server cluster. To take advantage of this dynamic range, the balancer must tie in to the cluster's orchestration software. Enable instance control so that the balancer receives additional responsibilities.


General Electric Builds an AI Workforce

The technology depends on artificial intelligence to continually update itself. What’s more, if data is corrupted or missing, the company fills in the gaps with the aid of machine learning, a type of AI that lets computers learn without being explicitly programmed, says Colin Parris, GE Global Research’s vice president for software research. Parris says GE pairs computer vision with deep learning, a type of AI particularly adept at recognizing patterns, and reinforcement learning, another recent advance in AI that enables machines to optimize operations, to enable cameras to find minute cracks on metal turbine blades even when they are dirty and dusty. Take the tiny robot, a little bigger than a Matchbox car, used to inspect working engines. Using computer vision and a variety of AI techniques, the bot can look for cracks inside plane engines by riding on top of a slowly moving fan blade.


From privacy to AI, the new trends set to change the world

Terence Eden, open standards lead at Government Digital Service, drew on the general stasis seen in mobile hardware to highlight a need for refinement. “We’ve reached an inflection point where things are good enough,” he said. “If we look at the big sellers at the moment, it’s stuff that’s plateau-level. People have reached a level where they are happy – apart from with their battery life, of course.” For such big sellers to thrive, however, it’s key that they open up, said Accenture managing director and go-to-market lead George Marcotte: “Businesses have a choice between continuing with the internal, closed-shop practices of the past, or opening their innovation capabilities to an entire ecosystem of innovative partners.”


UK firms still relying on perimeter defences for cyber security

“As a security professional, it feels like I’ve been saying forever that basic perimeter security measures are no longer enough,” said Joe Pindar, director of data protection product strategy at Gemalto. “So it’s worrying to see the UK is continuing to place ultimate faith in these systems, without thinking about what attackers actually want – their data,” he said. Without a switch in mentality, and starting to protect the data at its source with robust encryption and two-factor authentication, Pindar said the UK is like one of the three little pigs. “Unfortunately, the one sitting in the straw house – not realising that when the time comes, passwords and perimeter security alone will not stand up to attackers,” he said.


How an IoT DDoS warning system helps predict cyberattacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks require very little effort from cybercriminals and yet inflict maximum damage on the targeted victim, preventing them from sending or receiving any digital traffic. While preventative measures are available, the options are a costly gamble to already cash-strapped small- or medium-sized organizations and businesses. Current DDoS attacks typically employ amplification methodology (PDF), in which bad-guy-owned servers coerce vulnerable remote computing devices into multiplying many times over the incoming requests that are then sent to the targeted computing environment with the intent of knocking it offline—imagine the amount of money a gambling web portal would lose on Super Bowl Sunday if those wanting to bet were unable to reach the portal.


Middle East cybersecurity: Is region's big spend aimed at the right targets?

Research and Markets notes that across these sectors, the key drivers for this increased outlay are factors such as the "need to mitigate IT security risks and threats, including malware, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats, along with a rising enterprise mobility trend across organizations". Across the region, investment in cybersecurity is projected to grow at an average 14.2 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, with Saudi Arabia expected to be the largest national market. Qatar, which is currently embroiled in the diplomatic and economic fallout from an alleged Russian-led cyberattack, is predicted to be the fastest-growing market for cybersecurity in the region, as it gears up for hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2022.


How to get started with Kubernetes

Kubernetes is available as a standard-issue item in many clouds, though it appears most prominently as a native feature in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP offers two main ways to run Kubernetes. The most convenient and tightly integrated way is by way of Google Container Engine, which allows you to run Kubernetes’s command-line tools to manage the created cluster. Alternatively, you could use Google Compute Engine to set up a compute cluster and deploy Kubernetes manually. This method requires more heavy lifting, but allows for customizations that aren’t possible with Container Engine. Stick with Container Engine if you’re just starting out with containers. Later on, after you get your sea legs and want to try something more advanced, like a custom version of Kubernetesor your own modifications, you can deploy VMs running a Kubernetes distro.


MoJ electronic monitoring programme fails to achieve value for money

“There is still limited evidence on the effectiveness of electronic monitoring in the UK,” it said, adding that the ministry’s bespoke requirements for the tags were too ambitious. “Over time, the Ministry evolved some 900 prescriptive requirements for the new combined RF and GPS tags. They would have to store and send much more location data than existing tags in the market, meet higher data security standards, and prove reliable and robust,” the report said. “They also had to be compact enough to wear comfortably, and not require continual recharging.” ... During the project it also became clear that the contracts didn’t specify who would provide the electronic link to transfer data between the old tags and a central data centre. “It only became clear after the contracts were signed that no party had made plans to build the link.


Mobile DNUN: Danger Notification and User Navigation

Mobile applications are growing in quantity and quality; for example, the Yelp mobile application was an early location-aware communication technology9. Network providers such as T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T offer geolocation application services for their devices. Furthermore, these devices' operating systems (iOS, Android, RIM, and so on) enable software designers to develop various applications using software development kits (SDKs). This has led to an obvious evolution in LBS, with applications such as Foursquare, Yelp, Glympse, and so on. However, finding someone's location can be challenging during an emergency. Moreover, it is difficult to determine the location of an object such as a car in a parking lot if you forget where you've parked it. Our Danger Notification and User Navigation (DNUN) mobile application lets users effectively locate a human or object.



Quote for the day:


"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it." -- Andrew Carnegie


No comments:

Post a Comment