Daily Tech Digest - October 02, 2017

5 IT Practices That Put Enterprises at Risk

The average enterprise generates nearly 2.7 billion actions from its security tools per month, according to a recent study from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). A tiny fraction of these are actual threats — less than 1 in a 100. What's more, over 31% of respondents to the CSA study admitted they ignore alerts altogether because they think so many of the alerts are false positives. Too many incoming alerts are creating a general sense of overload for anyone in IT. Cybersecurity practitioners must implement a better means of filtering, prioritizing, and correlating incidents. Executives should have a single platform for collecting data, identifying cyber attacks and tracking the resolution. This is the concept of active response — not only identifying threats, but being able to immediately respond to them as well.


4 Lesser-Known Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Business Today

4 Lesser-Known Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Business Today
As the field of AI continues to innovate, and machines and systems become more capable, technological solutions that used to be considered as futuristic AI, like optical character recognition, have become routine -- effectively losing their "AI" status. Other technologies yet to be conquered -- like driverless cars, and the artificial re-creation of human speech -- are still being developed as AI. Many futurists have talked about the dangerous possibility that AI machines will eventually take control of humanity and destroy the world. Even though most of these prognostications mix speculation and superstition, this school of thought has persevered -- consider the news of some successful Turing Test exercises. However, many AI researchers and scientists have refuted this stance, saying that, ultimately, AI is simply a very effective tool for processing, analyzing and comprehending massive amounts of actual human data.


It’s Time to Digitize Small Business Banking

It’s not just the US that lags behind on servicing SMB customers. Avoka’s report found that the lack of attention to the small business banking opportunity was consistent worldwide. This seems madness when SMBs account for nearly half of US and UK revenue (48%). Not to mention that American SMBs account for about one-third of total US goods trade, and are expecting to continue expanding to new markets in the coming years. The time is ripe for banks to make their processes and applications more digitally accessible for the small business banking audience. The guiding principle for banks must be to make their services easier to access, easier to understand and easier to navigate. Compare this with the current situation: cumbersome form completion, waiting in lines at physical branch locations with limited business hours


Digital transformation: Your career at a crossroads

Digital transformation: Your career at a crossroads
A central issue for many IT leaders is the simple fact that IT work is significantly different than it was when they were moving up the ranks. So too are the expectations and work methodologies of those who make use of information technology in today’s workplace. "I think the most challenging part for CIOs that did not grow up in the dotcom world is to understand the behavior patterns around information creation, consumption and distribution as well as engagement for next-generation consumers and employees,’’ says Ari Lightman, a digital media and marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University.  IT leaders need to rethink legacy models around command and control, IT service levels, access and permissions, application vetting and testing, Lightman says.


Could Microsoft Teams replace Outlook and Yammer?

"As companies adopt Teams, they would see a significant decline in the amount of internal email," he said. "They'd probably still use a lot of external email. Messages to people outside your organization are probably best-suited for email." UC industry analyst Dave Michels agreed that Teams could replace Outlook: "Teams could easily replace Yammer, as well as Outlook, and I would not eliminate that as a future possibility," he wrote in an email. "Many of the competitive messaging apps play up the end of email. While that's an admirable goal, it's not realistic because of limited interoperability and federation. Microsoft isn't preaching the end of email, so it's surprising it's not offering a single client approach to communications."


Artificial intelligence is about the people, not the machines
“If a machine comes up with an algorithm and you don’t have a deep understanding of the appropriate cause and effect relationship, than things get very dangerous,” Dalio explained. “If the future is different from the past, you’ll probably crash.” Most data scientists today agree that it’s important to have some domain experience about the problem you’re trying to solve before you throw machine learning at it. This is important so that, say, weed plucking robots don’t get distracted with morning dew they never accounted for. Or in the case of Bridgewater, understanding is important to ensure that decisions aren’t made without an anchor to reality. It’s for this reason that Dalio believes that the future of artificial intelligence will rely on humans. In his book, he notes that the day when a computer would be able to generally outperform a human without a human’s help is far away.


Setting Digital Credos to Guide Through Digital Transformation

The digital credos are the top principles to guide through changes and digital transformation in the organization. They are not just the static rules or rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are the philosophy behind the methodologies, and they are the mindsets behind behaviors and actions. First, it is important for gaining the knowledge necessary to understand and manage complex systems. Secondly, the most challenging one is to understand how the people factor affects the system, and then managing the complex system and the people of the complex system. Digital transformation does flatten the organizational hierarchy and blurs geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders, it could mean less restrictive rules or silo setting


Artificial intelligence is changing the rules of account identification


As companies start to show higher levels of intent, marketers can immediately prioritize and align sales and marketing resources to engage and convert them. On the flip side, if a target account’s intent level decreases, they can easily move the account into a nurture stream and advise sales to follow up at a later date. With an evergreen, dynamic list, marketers no longer have to worry about missing out on accounts showing interest in their company and solutions. Instead, they can be proactive and reach buyers early on in the buying cycle with relevant, engaging messages. But the key to really incorporating this type of dynamic list into your ABM strategy is automation. With AI technology, marketers can incorporate audiences showing initial signs of intent and automatically trigger advertising campaigns or deliver personalized messaging to start those relevant conversations earlier in the buying cycle.


Is CI Part Of A Basic Developer Setup?

Does the basic developer setup change when we are working on a solution with a different architecture using different development methods? Let’s consider a Ruby-based microservices solution supported by a team that uses contemporary development methods. Here, the solution is divided into multiple small code bases. Even if all of them are contained within the same project for version control purposes, there are no source-level dependencies among different components of the solution. Common code is factored out into reusable libraries. By “contemporary methods” I mean developers work in a collaborative fashion most of the time, and individual work is the exception. It also suggests a rigorous test-first approach to modifying code and a strong emphasis on test automation at all levels of abstraction.


IoT security suffers from a lack of awareness

The problems will mount as new devices emerge and they, along with the sensors and software used in conjunction with them get cheaper and last longer. “You don’t have the same ecosystem of upgrade in terms of patching, devices and operating system -- none of these things that in a computer world makes them better,” Schneier says. “When your furnace becomes part of the IoT and they say you have to replace the hardware on your furnace every two years... people are not going to do it.” Assigning fault also plays a big hand in the complex market dynamics. When a perpetrator infiltrates a network through a software vulnerability, we point to the flawed software. But with connected devices forming what is essentially a digital daisy chain, it is difficult to attribute fault.



Quote for the day:


"To be upset over what you don't have is to waste what you do have." -- Ken S. Keyes, Jr.


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