Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 06, 2013

Game Changers for a Cool Data Centre
Aniket Patange, Director–Datacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric, says the solution lies in evolving strategy around power conversion and distribution, server load/computing operations using server innovation, virtualisation, high efficiency, power supplies and load management strategy, and deploying cooling equipment such as better air management, moving to liquid cooling, optimised chilled-water plants, use of free cooling and heat recover and so on.

Why Are There So Many Points of View About What Lean is?
Lean thinking is not a religious dogma, it’s scientific thinking applied to business problems, which is why it’s OK in lean that different people have different opinions. Scientific thinking is counter-intuitive. One never learns something new – that works for reading newspapers and chatting with colleagues and friends. Instead, one refine’s one understanding of the world by testing hypotheses and learning to know when they apply, by how much.

Careful: Your big data analytics may be polluted by data scientist bias
Big data can only ever be as good as the machine learning that is used to provide insight, and even the most sophisticated machine learning techniques aren’t omniscient – the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” sums up this dilemma perfectly. Businesses planning to invest in big data science, with the hopes of reaping the potential wealth of insights available, must at all costs avoid introducing bias into the process – or risk jeopardizing everything.

8 Ways to Conquer Your Leadership Blind Spots
When we're in a leadership position, our blind spots can cause a great deal of damage, not only to our career but to the people who depend on us. How can you avoid this potential pitfall for yourself and your business? These eight tips can help.

Multiple Active Data Centers Required
Sandy “highlighted the importance of having data centers in geographically diverse locations,’’ DeCiccco said at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association 2013 Operations Conference here. “Multiple active data centers now are no longer a luxury, but a requirement.’’

Nine Business Drivers for Cloud Adoption
There is always a hype word or concept in technical fields, and it is up to us as technology professionals to determine if it is really hype or if the current industry topic/discussion may be life changing for our organizations. The talk amongst the “cool data kids on the block” right now is “the cloud.”

Cloud security: A real concern or just an excuse?
How do these seemingly inconsistent statistics come together? Rather than discussing the negative points at play, let’s think about what factors are at work. I’ve been talking to a lot of organizations lately — both enterprises as well as cloud service providers (CSPs) — about their cloud migration perspectives, and here’s what I’m seeing…

Struggling Companies Turn to Business-Savvy IT Pros to Boost the Bottom Line
"We're all buying from Oracle, from SAP, from Microsoft," he said. "What's the competitive advantage? There is none. The competitive advantage is all about information acquisition." Obtaining and using that information to develop the right products when markets need them is the future of Philips and its IT unit, Norton said. "They're going to be business technologists who review how we go to the marketplace," Norton said.

Growing Others
Many of us feel we do a great deed by giving our colleagues what our job requires or by being helpful. It’s one thing to be the light or water for a plant, and quite another to be the earth where the plant takes root or the trellis on which it leans for support and climbs skyward. Gardeners come and go, but the soil and trellis persist for at least a season of its development.

How to be an Encouraging Leader?
Encouraging leadership is a process that focuses on the individual’s strength and contributions in order to drive their motivation and performance to a higher level. When people are encouraged, they feel valued and cared for. Encouraging leaders bring the best in other people. Each one of us needs an encouraging leader to be around us when we need a lift. The encouraging leader adds value through believing in our potential and provides resources to help us achieve better results.

Quote for the day:

"You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through" -- Rosalynn Carter

May 05, 2013

The lighthouse of risk management

Some people think that risk management means you cannot innovate. If that were true, then how do people successfully innovate and comply with the laws and risks surrounding innovation? Because, they utilise all the experts they can to make the best solution. These people, utilise the lighthouse to assist them, and then generate an even better outcome.

RightScale Sees Increase in Multi-Cloud Use and Adoption
The cloud is growing and businesses are becoming more comfortable using it, even if it is of limited use cases for most businesses. The technologies are maturing faster than the customer base which means we should expect to see acceleration in developer use of cloud in the next five years, the report added.

Iron Penguin: First open-source "Iron Man" suit within reach?
Still with promising work with the integration of Google Glass, the Parallela supercomputer board, and Raspberry Pi, the first steps to Linux-powered fighting armor suits are being taken. It's rumored that Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, is working on a Iron Penguin, a powered diving suit, to go with his Subsuface diving log program.

Microsoft works to connect the cloud to your car
Switching to Microsoft's cloud computing will cut costs for operating the services, although Toyota plans to invest more money in new content for Gazoo.com. Toyota reached an agreement with Microsoft in April 2011, to work together on telematics, or network technology for cars. Toyota looked at other cloud computing services before picking Microsoft for the latest project, said Hiroyuki Yamada, an executive at e-Toyota, which looks over such technology.

How Today’s Sensors Could Make Tomorrow’s Cars Safer

Much of the advantage is due to software improvements that make the decisions to activate and control the brakes. “The millimeter wave radar sensor can only see out so far. So the question is: at the time we can detect it, what’s the rate we can slow it down?” says Bill Camp, an instructor at the company’s training facility, Lexus College.

Excellent Analytics Tip #22: Calculate Return On Analytics Investment!
Businesses, by and large, don’t understand the ROI of analytics… the Return on Analytics, if you will. Everyone else seems to get an ROI calculation, but not us. Marketing dollars (hopefully!) get measured by their Return on Ad Spend. Product improvements are quantified in incremental sales. Even internal tools are evaluated by work hours saved. Yet the analytics team rarely has its costs measured in terms of impact on The Company.

The CIA and the Cloud

One reason the CIA started moving to cloud-based computing in 2009 was that it saw the cloud as being more secure than conventional IT systems. Back then, Jill Tummler Singer, who was the CIA's deputy CIO at the time, said, "By keeping the cloud inside your firewalls, you can focus your strongest intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors on your perimeter, thus gaining significant advantage over the most common attack vector -- the Internet."

Implementing Kanban in Practice
During our conversations with David J. Anderson, Kanban pioneer, at the Lean Kanban Conference in Chicago, we asked if there was any Kanban quick-start guide that might demystify things. David recommended we speak to Dr. Arne Roock of IT-Agile, author of the 30-page Kanban booklet "Stop Starting, Start Finishing". Dr. Roock is a speaker and chair of the "Scaling Kanban" track at the conference, and also works as an Agile consultant and trainer in Germany.

CTM - Clone To Modify Pattern
Immutability by its own is very simple and at the same time very powerful. It's simple because it simply means that an object content will not change. When we know that an object is immutable we have the guarantee that we can give such object to other methods without risking to have a different object at the end. If we don't have such guarantee and we need it, we usually are forced to give a copy of such object to the method so our private instance is not touched.

Addressing the Rotten-Apple-People Problem
Rotten apples – negative, destructive, self-absorbed, unethical employees – pollute organizations. Furthermore, foul leaders inevitably build stagnant, foul organizations. Worse yet, passive leaders – those who tolerate rotten apples – create rotten environments by default. Leaders who tolerate rotten apples are rotten themselves.

Quote for the day:

"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is the knack of getting along with people." -- Theodore Roosevelt

May 04, 2013

NoBackend: Front-End First Web Development
Gregor Martynus gave a talk entitled "Look ma, no backend!" about developing applications primarily from a front-end perspective, falling back to using server-side components only to implement the features the browser does not yet support. This approach is the opposite of how web applications have traditionally been developed: focusing primarily on the server-side part of an application, and then enhancing the application with front-end techniques. A website named noBackend was launched to further evangelize this idea.

Clients Like It When We Grow
Growth is good for us and for our clients. The good news is that our customers usually recognize our bias towards growth. Some clients are scared of it. Some embrace it. The ones who embrace and value growth are the people we usually enjoy the most. It makes sense for us to appeal to and sell to those customers. When I say “sell,” you know that I’m not talking about money. To be effective as a practitioner, you need people to buy your ideas, your questions, and your challenges. They need to invest enthusiasm and time.

Outside info adds to big data challenges on integration projects
Damoulakis warned that data integration efforts are complicated by the addition of external sources of information, such as demographic data and text-based data collected from social networks. In addition to ratcheting up the technical challenges of integrating data, he said external information can create data quality, security and privacy issues for IT managers and integration teams.

Local, state gov CIOs underprepared for attacks
“Insufficiently secure information networks of state and local governments create the potential for major crises ranging from identity theft to inaccessibility of the public to government services,” Consero CEO Paul Mandell said in a media release. “Governments must defend themselves and their constituents against any forms of data-security beaches.”

Google: The future of search is Now
Google Now, arguably not the most compelling name, makes the point: Google wants to tell you what you need to know "now," quickly and accurately. It works by turning natural language queries -- speaking to computer as if to another human -- into precise answers delivered from Google's servers.

Are Older Programmers More Knowledgeable?
A recent study based on Stack Overflow’s data attempts to answer if programming knowledge is related to age, if older programmers are more knowledgeable and if they acquire new skills or not. Patrick Morrison, Ph.D. Student, and Emerson Murphy-Hill, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of North Carolina State University, US, have recently published the study Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age? An Exploration of Stack Overflow (PDF), researching the relationship between programming knowledge and age.

10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job
If you want to know the most in-demand tech skills, that info is readily available. Want to learn the programming skills most coveted by employers? Done. But what are the skills and specialties that no one wants any more? What core competencies raise red flags instead of call backs?

Federal CIOs Fret Over Budget Pressures, IT Talent and Cybersecurity
"When budgets are tight, you have to get really serious about what you're spending money on," McClure says. "I think that's a healthy exercise to go through, because every year if you get your budget you don't ask yourself those questions." ... "CIOs are resigned to that fact," DelPrete says. "The budgetary situation has really worked to help them find new ways to save and invest."

IT departments: Compete with consumer cloud apps or risk a security breach
“The only way we can get the business on side is to up our game, to be more accommodating, more agile or they will carry on doing this until something really bad happens. I see it as a bit of a failure of the IT organisation. We’ve had the business going out and procuring cloud services and platforms that we really should have provided for them as part of our enterprise offering.”

Two Strategy Questions That Matter
Strategy is a heavy topic. Either it requires a seemingly infinite time commitment, or it is easily mistaken for an organizational vision or (perhaps worse) a short-term operational plan. If you’re trying to build a solid strategy, then there are a number of resources you can draw from. No matter what tools you use, ultimately you’re strategy has to answer two questions, brilliantly posed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley: “Where will we play?” and “How will we win?”

Quote for the day:

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. " -- Jack London

May 03, 2013

Self-service business intelligence not a give-and-go affair
In an interview with Search Business Analytics, Eckerson expanded on the complexities of managing self-service BI initiatives and said that segmenting end users into separate groups and supporting different levels of functionality based on their varying needs can go a long way toward ensuring an effective implementation. In other words, one size fits all is not the path to self-service success. Excerpts from the interview follow:

Common Misconceptions About Touch
The visual target is the link text, icon, or other graphic element that affords an interaction. Visual targets need to be big enough and clear enough so: They attract the user's eye; The user understands that they are actionable elements; They are readable, and the user can understand what action they will perform; The user is confident that he can easily tap them.

Microsoft readies 'Mohoro' Windows desktop as a service
In yet another example of its growing emphasis on remaking itself as a devices and services company, Microsoft looks to be developing a pay-per-use "Windows desktop as a service" that will run on Windows Azure. The desktop virtualization service, codenamed Mohoro, is in a very early development phase, from what I've heard from sources. I don't know the final launch target, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't until the second half of 2014.

Insect-like flying robot developed at Harvard
The robot represents more than a decade of work by several teams of researchers. It can be traced back to work done by Wood when he was a graduate student at the Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. The California lab was working on similar technology.

Are you a Weather Station?
A weather station is a department that tells you that it is raining when you are standing in the rain getting wet. This links to the whole conversation about portfolio management value and one of the reasons that portfolio offices get killed is because of lack of value. Being a weather station is a prime example of being as useful as last weeks newspaper. Here is a brain dump of 10 key indicators that your portfolio office is nothing more than a weather station:

Adobe's Lightroom app for iOS is yet another step to Post-PC
It suggests a future in which many of us won't even need a computer: We'll simply rent time on remote computers access to which is supplied as a service by software developers such as Adobe. That model means you might work on an image on your iPad and then send the edits to the remote Lightroom server farm. Your edits would be applied to the original (lossless) image and the results made available, probably online.

Can Firefox OS be the new Android?
"Firefox OS is not a proprietary platform, it is fully standards-based and built on HTML5," says Andreas Gal, Vice President, Mobile Engineering, Mozilla.  "What's more, Firefox OS is not a new ecosystem - it is the Web and the Web is the largest existing ecosystem we have today."

YouTube™ Embedded Video Player: Extended API (C#)
This extended version of embedded YouTube™ API demonstrates additional customization features, namely: Setting the startup options; Selecting the item from the playlist; Setting the autoplay mode; Setting player's dimension (W/H); Changing the border options; Starting the video at predefined time

Beijing to add more prosecutors to curb cybercrime
To handle online cases, prosecutors should be able to analyze and examine online evidence, but this is a challenge for current prosecutors, Zhang Kai, a prosecutor from Chaoyang district, said in the report. However, many prosecutors are not knowledgeable about online fraud skills used by cybercriminals, which makes it difficult to solve such cases, Ma Shuang, another prosecutor from the Shijingshan district, noted, adding online evidence is "a key to lodge a prosecution, but is hard to find and inspect".

Australian Defence White Paper emphasises need for cybersecurity
"It might become evident that the risk of cyberattack is even greater than we had first thought, and so we might decide to build on a foundation in this area by further enhancing our cybersecurity capabilities," the 2009 paper predicted. However, the 2013 Defence White Paper (PDF) has a significantly different emphasis on these threats, highlighting it as a matter that has far-reaching consequences.

Quote for the day:

"Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible." -- St. Francis of Assisi

May 02, 2013

Big Data versus Big Value
Operational decisions are arguably the most important layer for embracing analytics for several reasons. One reason is that executing the corporate strategy is not solely accomplished with strategy maps and the resulting key performance indicators displayed in a balanced scorecard and dashboards. The daily operational decisions are what actually move the performance measure dials more than big strategic decisions.

Blackberry CEO's comments ignite debate on future of personal computing
"I think [Heins] is looking for publicity. He cannot be serious in his prediction, [which is] pretty much akin to saying the Earth is flat," said Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney. "There's no rationale for tablets dying." Dulaney said he wouldn't be surprised if BlackBerry eliminates the PlayBook, which shipped only 150,000 or so units in the third quarter of 2012. "They probably would not be successful with a new tablet if they reintroduced a tablet," he added.

Five questions directors need to ask about the cloud
“Board members need a clear understanding of cloud computing benefits and how to maximise them through effective governance practices,” said Marc Vael, an ISACA board member and chief IT audit executive at Smals.“This requires the board to see cloud computing not as an IT project, but rather as a business strategy.” ... boards should address the following five questions to determine the strategic value that cloud services are expected to provide and the impact that the cloud may have on resources and controls:

Enterprise IT Will Be Out of Infrastructure Biz in 5 Years

Today, most (and, no, not all) datacenters are colocated and typically "lights-off" datacenters. That is, while we still purchase, lease and manage the infrastructure, it is very much hands off. ... So, if we assume that in five years most of the regulatory compliance, security, connectivity, and other issues would be resolved, what other barriers do you have for running your business completely on an IaaS?

Texas hospice group sees HIPAA breach
After conducting an internal audit in February 2013, Hope Hospice officials discovered the employee emailed patient data back in December 2012 and again in February 2013. The data sent in the reports included 818 patient names, referral source, referral and admission dates, insurance information, clinical chart data, county and date of discharge. Social Security numbers, patient dates of birth and addresses were not contained in the report, officials added.

Bank of America CIO on Big Data, Emerging Enterprise Tech
Both terms — Big Data and cloud — needlessly create mystery around technology, Bessant says. "And technology as a mystery is a bad idea." It's harder to align the technology to the business under such a veil and "people don't know how to fund or prioritize technology decisions because we've made them so mysterious." She muses that this is why the average tenure of CIOs in general tends to be short. "Anything that distances technology from the business is inherently self-limiting," she says.

The Key to Governance
There are advocates from each of these three orientations on management who will insist that their take – and their take alone – is the most appropriate information feed for upper-level decision-makers, and will expend considerable energy to sell that narrative. Often these management “science” advocates are utterly unaware of where their pet theory exists in the overall scheme of management information streams, but the manager functioning in the role of Governance must know where they are coming from, and the limits to their advocacies.

10 Best Practices to Get BYOD Right
Here are ten best practices compiled from multiple sources and are only indicative in nature. IT leaders should use them to formulate their own detailed BYOD policies that best meet their respective needs.

IBM Launches an Appliance for the 'Internet of Things'
The Message Site appliance can collect, queue, filter and route data messages based on MQTT, which OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has just recommended to be the protocol of choice for communicating with embedded systems. Because the appliance can read the messages, it can be programmed to route them to different locations, depending on the message's content.

Why the cloud will never (entirely) replace in-house applications
Decisions about cloud versus on-premise come down to the level of complexity in your IT infrastructure, said Michael Hanken, VP of IT at Multiquip: "For the regular 'bread and butter' processes there is no compelling reason to have it on premise; however if you are tightly integrated with important real-time components and/or very high data volumes there is still a case for on-premise ERP."

Quote for the day:

"When I've heard all I need to make a decision, I don't take a vote. I make a decision." -- Ronald Reagan

May 01, 2013

Amazon Web Services SVP defends why public clouds trump private models
Businesses are moving to the cloud at a faster pace than ever before -- and for a few select reasons, according to Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services. "There's a lot of noise about this point, and there are a lot of companies trying to commandeer this messaging for select purposes," said Jassy while speaking at the opening keynote of the AWS Summit on Tuesday morning.

10 stupid things people do in their data centers
We’ve all done it — made that stupid mistake and hoped nobody saw it, prayed that it wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the systems or the network. And it’s usually okay, so long as the mistake didn’t happen in the data center. It’s one thing to let your inner knucklehead come out around end user desktop machines.

User provisioning best practices: Access recertification
The first step in the recertification process is to gain access to all the account and access information on the systems being provisioned. In the beginning phases of a provisioning deployment, this is normally done by auditors and/or security personnel who either physically extract account information into a format for comparison, like a spreadsheet, or are granted administrative privileges on the business systems to view provisioned account information.

Apps for the data center technician's iPhone
Smartphones are now offering data center technical staff a new level of mobility by enabling them to have a view into critical data center systems, regardless of where they’re located. Data center technicians no longer have to be tethered to a PC, because many data center infrastructure vendors have mobile apps that provide just as powerful views as were once only available from a web browser on a PC.

CERN celebrates the Web and how it changed the world
"The web will grow at an even faster rate over the next decade than it did over the past decade," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "This will be driven by the Internet of Things, where many objects are interconnected. Things like your door locks, lights, jewelry, home appliances and even clothing will be connected."

BlackBerry chief questions tablet category: Maybe he's not wrong
Heins is basically saying that BlackBerry can't make money on tablets. In fact, it's unclear anyone beyond Apple can make money on tablets. The Android tablet race is headed to a commodity hardware market. There's just no room for BlackBerry. The leap Heins is taking is that tablets are a transition device and may suffer the same fate as netbooks in five years.

Shifting to an MDM Golden Profile
When the business wants to put master data to use, it is about how to have a view of a domain. They don't think in terms of records, they think about using the data to improve customer relationships, grow the business, improve processes, or any host of other business tasks and objectives. A golden profile fits this need by providing the definition and framework that flexes to deliver master data based on context. It can do so because it is driven by data relationships.

Nanowire Transistors Could Keep Moore’s Law Alive
Unlike with most vertical nanowire transistor prototypes, in which the nano wires are grown upward from a substrate, the French duo created their nanowires by starting out with a block of doped silicon and then etching away material to leave nano pillars. In between the pillars, they deposited an insulating layer to about half the pillars’ height. Then they deposited the 14 nm of chromium and filled the remaining space with another insulating layer.

The power of information in the new consumer health insurance market
The key to success in this new environment will be information. Knowing who is at risk, and connecting them to services that will reduce their risk, will be important for preventing out-of-control costs and financial disaster. It will also give health plans the ability to provide coverage at affordable rates, increasing their sales.

New theory could streamline operations management, cloud computing
“The topic of flexibility has been explored in various directions,” says Ton Dieker, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Algorithms and Randomness Center and Thinktank. Indeed, the classic literature on flexibility in manufacturing systems includes several papers by David Simchi-Levi, of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Stephen Graves.

Quote for the day:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker

April 30, 2013

Hackers target shared Web hosting servers for mass phishing attacks
In this type of attack, once phishers break into a shared Web hosting server, they update its configuration so that phishing pages are displayed from a particular subdirectory of every website hosted on the server, APWG said. A single shared hosting server can host dozens, hundreds or even thousands of websites at a time, the organization said.

How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers
Companies use Gild to mine for new candidates and to assess candidates they are already considering. Gild itself uses the technology, which was how the company, desperate for programming talent and unable to match the salaries offered by bigger tech concerns, found this guy named Jade outside of Los Angeles. Its algorithm had determined that he had the highest programming score in Southern California, a total that almost no one achieves.

Servant leadership: A path to high performance
These leaders were servants in the best sense of the word. They were people-centric, valued service to others and believed they had a duty of stewardship. Nearly all were humble and passionate operators who were deeply involved in the details of the business. Most had long tenures in their organizations. They had not forgotten what it was like to be a line employee.

Three Gaps in Employee Productivity and What They Mean for IT
Fewer than 40% of employees are truly effective in the competencies shown to have the greatest impact on enterprise performance – right at the point where executives and managers consistently express the belief that they need at least 20% higher performance from employees to meet business goals. Where is employee productivity falling short, and what can IT and Infrastructure teams do to counter these figures?

The IT Conversation We Should Be Having
A simple summary of the work suggests that CEOs believe that CIOs are not in sync with the new issues CEOs are facing, CIOs do not understand where the business needs to go, and CIOs do not have a strategy, in terms of opportunities to be pursued or challenges to be addressed in support of the business.

IT Manager: An IT dashboard for the iPad
IT Manager is an app that offers IT managers another option for using an iPad as an administration tool for local network or web services. It’s a subscription-based app with a wide selection of network and web services admin tools. The growth of tablets and mobile apps in IT management means 24/7 operations go on, regardless of whether staff are working in a data center cage, a user’s desk, or responding to an outage after hours.

Infosec 2013: managing risk in the supply chain
For IT departments, securing information in the supply chain is one of the biggest challenges they face today. This is because supply chains are composed of various companies, all of which have their own set of security standards, and organisations struggle to communicate their requirements to all of these different parties. One way to approach the problem is to assess the “risk appetite” of your organisation, according to Mark Pearce, Head of Information Security at the Post Office.

How UpStream uses R for Attribution Analysis
Major retailers like Williams Sonoma use UpStream Software for marketing analytics, including revenue attribution, targeting, and optimization. In this video Tess Nesbitt (senior statistician at UpStream) describes how she uses Revolution R Enterprise and Hadoop to figure out the impact on various marketing channels (for example direct mail, email offers, and catalogs) on consumer retail sales.

A Note for the Boss Who Talks Too Much
Play leadership anthropologist in your own organization and chances are you’ll find a good number of these en-titled characters who are compelled to consume every possible molecule of oxygen and every moment of air-time to share their self-defined pearls of wisdom and precious nuggets of managerial and inspirational gold.

Microsoft Updates Cloud Agreement For HIPAA Rules
Cloud service providers are starting to take notice of the new HIPAA security regulations that define them as "business associates" of HIPAA-covered entities such as healthcare providers and health plans. Microsoft has just announced a revised business associate agreement (BAA) for its cloud services that reflects the new HIPAA Omnibus Rule governing data security.

Quote for the day:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards" -- Vernon Sanders Law

April 29, 2013

When It Comes To Big Data Is Less More?
“I think there is a fear and paranoia among companies that … if they don’t keep every little piece of information on a customer, they can’t function,” said Bradlow. “Companies continue to squirrel away data for a rainy day. We’re not saying throw data away meaninglessly, but use what you need for forecasting and get rid of the rest.”

Prepare for Oz privacy reforms now: Attorney-general, privacy commissioner
"If there continues to be under-reporting of data breaches, or we continue to find out about them only through media reports, some would argue that there is strong case to move to a mandatory scheme," Dreyfus said. "Large-scale data breaches continue to occur, and every incident that is reported in the media continues to raise community concerns about the need for a mandatory scheme."

U.S. Lawmakers Plan Sweeping Review of Copyright
"It is my belief that a wide review of our nation's copyright laws and related enforcement mechanisms is timely," said Goodlatte. "I am announcing today that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a comprehensive series of hearings on U.S. copyright law in the months ahead. The goal of these hearings will be to determine whether the laws are still working in the digital age."

IBM's emerging open cloud architecture
IBM has announced that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. This will ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of questionable and difficult-to-manage offerings. In fact, customers who choose open standards-based cloud computing are on the right course to take advantage of new opportunities. Specifically, they will be able to harness their interconnected data with high-value business analytics across traditional and mobile devices.

Hacking suspect arrested for 'biggest cyberattack in history'
The alleged hacker is accused of launching an attack against anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus. A 300Gbps distributed denial-of-service sent the non-profit into disarray, taking down the agency's website and forcing Spamhaus to turn to Cloudflare for assistance. According to the cloud services provider, the majority of the attack was traffic sent using a technique called DNS (domain name system) reflection.

Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, and Fears Rise
Even though Syrian hackers remain the prime suspects, the trading commission is now investigating 28 different futures contracts and specifically examining the five-minute period before and after The A.P.’s Twitter account was hacked. It is looking to see if there were anomalous trades, and investors who benefited from them.

Searching for Smart Data: All-In-One, Automated Big Data Applications
Once software firms like MicroStrategy, BusinessObjects and others allowed business users to generate ad hoc reports that provided insights about sales, operations and more, data warehouse technology was off and running. Second, while software giant SAP may not be the most elegant technology architecture, SAP beat out the competition in the ERP arena because their ERP applications actually solved business problems.

New Version of Software Deployment Tool Adds Self-Service Cloud Pack
The new Deployit Cloud Pack for EC2, vSphere and other clouds, is an add-on that provides a self-service portal for Developers, Testers and QA teams to easily spin up and tear down the on-demand environments they need. Deployit 3.9 then automatically deploys your applications to new environments, accelerating development and testing.

Could You Survive a Cyberattack?
One way companies can prepare is by buying cyberrisk insurance. Though it has been around since the mid-'90s, cyberinsurance has only recently started to work its way into the mainstream and is now offered by companies such as the Hartford Financial Services Group and Travelers.

7 Tips to Speed Time to Innovation
Leveraging a PPM solution and its attendant processes can help product teams get innovative products to market faster by streamlining and automating development, eliminating wishful thinking and brute force in favor of discipline and strategy. So how can Product Development leverage portfolio management as a foundation for innovation and to support time to market requirements?

Quote for the day:

"Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it." -- John Naisbitt

April 28, 2013

SaaS Business Model Competitive Advantage Revisited
Network automation enables the SaaS vendor to service not just one customer, but many customers from a single infrastructure. With each new customer added, the average cost of operating that infrastructure is reduced for all. When you ask “What is SaaS?”, it is easy to get hung up on things like multi-tenancy, virtualization, and so forth. When you ask “Why is SaaS?”, there are no such concerns. What matters is uniform, automated infrastructure and scale.

Enterprise Data Platform Reference Architecture
This article proposes reference architecture for creating a new generation platform for delivering enterprise Data Information to knowledge workers to help improve their productivity and accuracy. It also articulates some high-level design options for implementing the platform.

Risk Enchantment, The Holy Grail of Risk
“I define risk enchantment as the process of delighting people with risk management. The outcome of risk enchantment is voluntary and long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial.”. How powerful a statement is that? And now imagine working for an organisation where the CEO talks about risk management like this! Here are top 10 quotes that resonated with the Enchantment from a risk management perspective.

Pivotal Launched From VMware, EMC Technologies

Pivotal's new services and newly retailored software packages will allow enterprises the ability to replicate the IT operations used by today's "Internet Giants" such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services, said Paul Maritz, who is the Pivotal CEO and was the CEO of VMware from 2008 until 2012. Maritz spoke in a webcast Wednesday launching the new company.

Big Data vs. Business Intelligence vs. Customer Intelligence

In this video from McKinsey and Company, Shashi Upadhyay explains how Big Data can provide forward-looking insights for businesses, whereas customer intelligence and business intelligence have traditionally focused on past data. By starting with the problem your company is trying to solve (e.g. improve conversion rates, improve cross-sell rates, attract more prospects, etc.), your company will not need to focus on a large BI project. Instead, consider using a Big Data approach and analyzing internal and external data sets.

Three Essential Steps to Big Data Success
If you’re going to start a Big Data project, there are a few foundational steps to success you should know. While there’s a lot of advice about starting or succeeding with Big Data, much of it is actually about data management in general. That’s fine — you’ll need those skills, but since they apply to any data project, they can’t really be called the essential — or, if you prefer, the quintessential — steps specific to Big Data.

Free Response-Time Database Monitoring Tool
IgniteFree takes the real time features of the award winning Confio Ignite 8 software and makes them free for all to use. Why? Confio believes that when more DBAs see how effective they can be with Response Time analysis, it will drive interest in the full enterprise features of Ignite 8.

Enterprise Architecture
An EA model is an aid to avoiding the waste associated with building the wrong systems; or building the right systems in the wrong business environment. It is also an aid to breaking down silos and fostering true collaboration between the business, IT and other stakeholders ... EA is about providing the correct information to strategic planners to allow them to be more effective in what they do.

Meet DSSD, Andy Bechtolsheim’s secret chip startup for big data
The DSSD system sounds like it treats files not as a series of bits but as an object that gets a name. That name is the file’s address and it stays the same for the life of the file. The result is there’s no central index that stands between sending the data to storage and storing it, and people can write to it in parallel and not worry abut overwrites. It is both faster and can scale out.

Develop Financial Applications with F# and QuantLib
QuantLib is an open source library for modeling, trading and risk management of quantitative finance that can be used with F# lanugage. In order to access QuantLib, you have to make use of NQuantLib.dll, which is a .NET component and NQuantLibc.dll, which is a native component.

Quote for the day:

"It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle. " -- Richard M. DeVos

April 27, 2013

APK Clues: Better Gaming Services Coming to Android?
The games service probably has nothing to do with Google Glass; Glass can't run complex apps. The Glass team accidentally shipped the full suite of Google Play Services with their new app, which is not normal. This included a never-before-seen backend for an extensive multiplayer gaming service, with just about every gaming feature you could possibly imagine.

Authentication with iOS and Windows Azure Mobile Services
This article will cover how to connect the Mobile Service we set up there with an iOS client using the Mobile Services SDK for iOS. All of the source code for this iOS app is available here in GitHub. I’m going to cover a few different areas in the app in this post: giving users the choice of how to login, creating and logging in with custom accounts, logging users out and returning to the root view controller, caching user tokens so we won’t have to login each time, and dealing with expired tokens now that we’re caching them.

What do people mean when they say "the PC is dying"?
What is meant by "the death of the PC" is that the relevance of the PC within people's lives is being diluted by compute devices that are not PCs and the ability to use them for activities that are rewarding yet do not require PCs. This has in fact been going on a long time (e.g. SMS), it's just that we've reached a tipping point over the past few years where the whole world seems to be full of smartphones and tablets and everyone is now talking about it.

Islamic group expands targets in bank DDoS attacks
With each new wave of attacks the group has shifted to other targets. The first wave, which lasted about six weeks from mid-September to mid-October, targeted mostly major financial institutions. Targets included Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and PNC Bank. In the second phase, which went for seven weeks from December to late January, the attackers expanded to mid-tier banks and credit unions.

U.S. council warns of threat of cyber attacks, market runs
"Technological failures, natural disasters, and cyberattacks can emanate from anywhere, at any time," the report said. "Preparation and planning to address these potential situations are essential to maintain the strength and resilience of our financial system." The FSOC, a powerful body chaired by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, voted on Thursday to adopt its annual report, which includes a set of recommendations to other regulatory agencies. The heads of those agencies are members of the council.

Two-factor or not two-factor? That is the security question

As if to underscore the point that mere passwords are passé, the Twitter hack coincided with the release of Verizon's 2013 data breach report, which pointed the finger at single-factor authentication as a primary culprit in security spills. According to the report, 76 percent of network intrusions in 2012 exploited weak or stolen credentials. The case for two-factor authentication would appear to be a slam dunk. But not all security experts praise the solution as a remedy for all security ills.

Is it time to create your own succession plan?
If you’re in a senior leadership role in a large organization, there’s a good chance there is a succession plan for your position in case you get promoted, win the lottery, get hit by a bus, leave for another company or need to be replaced for poor performance. In smart companies, an orderly replacement of high-level, critical positions is considered to be strategically important to the continued success of the company. A failure to proactively plan for succession is the same as failing to safeguard the financial assets of an organization.

The Internet of Things gets a protocol -- it's called MQTT
"One of the big challenges for right now is that there is not a clear open standard" for message communication with embedded systems, said Mike Riegel, an IBM vice president of mobile and application integration middleware. "We know historically that unless you get to an open standard like this, it is not possible to drive the breakthroughs that are needed."

Moves, mistakes prove Steve Jobs era at Apple over, say analysts
"I just don't think Apple is running quite as well as in Jobs' days," said Ezra Gottheil, analyst with Technology Business Research. "Mistakes have been made, like the poor performance of newer OSes on older hardware, Maps, the miss on the iMac, the neglect of the professional market." Cook, in fact, rued the decision to launch the iMac, the firm's hallmark all-in-one desktop, last October even though Apple had no hardware to ship.

Java Security Questions Answered
Most of the products tested (except Windows Server 2012), use Oracle's Java in one form or another, at least for client access and also in some cases within the management interface. With numerous vulnerabilities recently discovered in Java, leading to guidance from Department of Homeland Security and others to disable it entirely, this raised some questions about usability and possibly even security of the devices tested.

Quote for the day:

"Winning becomes easier over time as the cornerstones of confidence become habits" -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter