Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

November 25, 2013

Twitter tightens security against NSA snooping
The company implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its Web and mobile platforms, it said Friday. The technology should make it impossible for an organization to eavesdrop on encrypted traffic today and decrypt it at some point in the future. At present, the encryption between a user and the server is based around a secret key held on the server. The data exchange cannot be read but it can be recorded in its encrypted form. Because of the way the encryption works, it's possible to decrypt the data at some point in the future should the server's secret key ever be obtained.

Most significant mobile tech of 2013: Windows 8.1
While updates are the natural order of things in the OS world, make no mistake, Windows 8.1 was largely created to address those things people didn't like about the first release. It was intended to make the OS work better on tablets, as mobile is very important to both Windows and Microsoft. In that effort Microsoft succeeded, as Windows 8.1 has turned the platform into a good one for tablets. It does so while also becoming a good engine for notebooks, the other side of the mobile coin.

16 products that Microsoft has killed off
Every product has its end. It is either replaced, upgraded or merged in with something else. Even Microsoft, a company that is notoriously generous and patient with letting a product gain momentum, is willing to pull the plug when necessary. Here are some of the most notable Microsoft products that have met their demise.

Top 10 Unstructured Data Projects for 2014
Everyone’s talking about unstructured data lately – the cost, the risk, the massive growth – but little is being done to control it. Analyst group IDC estimates unstructured data growth at 40-60 percent per year, a statistic that is not only startling, but puts a great deal of emphasis on the need to start managing it today or at least have it on the schedule for 2014. With budgets tightening – often to pay for storage costs – data center managers are struggling to find the highest impact projects that will see an immediate ROI.

Researchers use shopping cart to put mobile, NFC payment theft on wheels
Despite widespread adoption in Europe and the UK, the researchers found that contactless payments are more vulnerable then previously believed. Hacking into NFC payment transmission and covertly skimming, relaying or eavesdropping on the transmission of sensitive customer information isn't new; researchers began to make these three types of vulnerabilities public around 2008. Yet making it easy and reliable was not a known quantity until now - four security researchers from the University of Surrey have examined success rates, distance and more, using cheap store-bought electronics.

Berlin court rules Google privacy policy violates data protection law
Google said it would appeal the decision. "We believe our Terms of Service and privacy policy comply with all applicable laws, a Google spokesman said in an emailed statement. If the verdict is upheld, it could have far-reaching implications for Google. "When it is final Google will have to change a lot, change its privacy policy and terms and conditions," Skutnik said. But the federation will have to be patient: "If we're lucky" the court of appeal will make a decision by the end of next year, she said.

What Is a Leadership Pipeline?
How do we make it safe for people at all levels of your organization to practice leadership? Leadership has become a buzz word these days and I want to make it clear that my opinion is that we not only want to practice leadership, we want to practice followership. In order to create a great leadership pipeline in your business you have to practice what it is to lead and what it is to follow and we have to make it safe in our companies to build a culture of being able to say what’s on our mind without repercussion.

Backend as a Service: Reap the benefits, master the challenges
Most mobile applications also require resources on the other side of the network: a place to store data, means for managing users, support for push notifications and things like leveraging geolocation services. In fact, building a fully featured mobile app often depends on the ability to support these back-end capabilities. In response to that need, a new class of Platform as a Service [PaaS] has emerged that many in the market referred to as Backend as a Service because these offerings provide the required back-end capabilities in a cloud-hosted model.

California sues SAP over failed payroll software project
"After three years, and paying SAP approximately $50 million to integrate its own software into a new payroll and benefits system for the state of California, all the [state controller's office] has to show for its investment is a system that could not get the payroll right even once over an eight-month period for a pilot group of only 1,500 employees," the lawsuit states. The suit, filed Thursday in Sacramento County District Court, comes after a lengthy back-and-forth between the state and SAP over the system, which was supposed to serve 240,000 workers and replace 30-year-old legacy systems.

Avoiding the Minefields to Ignite MDM Value
While the concept of MDM is not new, it’s a rapidly evolving marketplace that has become crowded with applications and a blur of sameness when it comes to marketing messages and positioning. When evaluating MDM vendors, organizations should conduct due diligence and take time to verify that that the vendor under consideration has a team of seasoned experts who can turn data into revenue. Start by asking questions such as what is the average tenure of your employees, and what is the earliest deployment your customers have experienced starting from the beginning of the project?

Quote for the day:

"Worry, like a rocking chair, will give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." -- Vance Havner

November 24, 2013

Add red flags to risk-based access weights in IBM Security Access ManagerMany organizations prefer a red-flag approach to risk assessment. In this approach, certain variable values in a transaction are defined as "red flags," and if any of those variable values appear, the transaction is considered risky. ... To implement red-flag risk assessment, give every red-flag variable a weight of one, and every other variable a weight of zero. Set the risk threshold level to 1%. If any of the red-flag variables are risky, the risk level will be above 0%, and, therefore, it will be considered dangerous and treated accordingly.

Analytics 3.0: Evolution
Some of us now perceive another shift, fundamental and far-reaching enough that we can fairly call it Analytics 3.0. Briefly, it is a new resolve to apply powerful data-gathering and analysis methods not just to a company’s operations but also to its offerings—to embed data smartness into the products and services customers buy. ... the first companies to perceive the general direction of change—those with a sneak peek at Analytics 3.0—will be best positioned to drive that change

Supercomputing's big problem: What's after silicon?
Supercomputing researchers aren't sure what's next. Today, supercomputing relies on architectural changes, such as adding speedy GPUs, to boost performance. Researchers may increasingly turn to chips that integrate interconnects and memory to speed processing and reduce energy. But the teams must also wrestle with the enormous costs of building -- and running -- multi-petaflop systems. "We have reached the end of the technological era," said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

IBM's Strategy and Direction: Analyst View
IBM is very aware of market transformation being caused by Cloud, and continues to move toward an increasingly unified, standards-based Cloud IT and business environment. These moves will serve their established partner and customer base well, and can protect IBM from significant loss in those areas. But as Cloud-native competitors continue to establish and grow their own partner/customer bases of influence, Big Blue needs to continue to consolidate, coordinate, and accelerate a Cloud-first mentality across its divisions.

Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet
The IETF change would introduce encryption by default for all Internet traffic. And the work to make this happen in the next generation of HTTP, called HTTP 2.0, is proceeding “very frantically,” says Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College in Dublin who is part of the project. The hope is that a specification will be ready by the end of 2014. It would then be up to websites to actually adopt the technology, which is not mandatory.

Pattern Based Requirements Model Using SysML
When we start decomposing these problems, we realize that they consist of sub-problems of similar type such as accepting input from a librarian is similar to accepting operational commands from a pilot or displaying book query result on a display is similar to displaying situation information on a display. Thus using PFs, we can effectively understand and analyze the problem and then re-use our knowledge in solving them. However, problem frames are less adapted in the industry because of the lack of standard notations and tools.

Static and dynamic testing in the software development life cycle
In the past decade, the art and practice of hacking has taken a significant turn for the worse. From the volume and complexity of attacks to the growing audience of international participants who hack for fame or fortune, hackers are modern-day pirates seeking adventure on the high seas of the Internet.
But what makes this trend even more critical is the size of the attack surface the Internet makes possible. We live in an increasingly connected world, where physical or package security is no longer the hacker's obstacle. Instead, knowledge of network protocols, applications, and an ever-growing list of exploits and utilities make up the hacker's toolkit.

The Data Scientist at Work
Data scientists need business knowledge; they need to understand the enterprise data; they need to know how to deploy technology; they have to understand statistical and visualization techniques; and, most importantly, they need to know how tointerpret the results. For example, if a discovery exercise shows that the number of storks born has a strong correlation with the number of babies born one year later, data scientists should have sufficient knowledge to conclude that these variables do not have a direct relation, but that they are both dependent on a third variable, one that probably hasn’t been included in the study yet.

Disaster Recovery Site Selection: Factors and Approach
For a DR strategy to work as per design, one of the important contributors is DR site as it will define service availability to customers during disasters. Further section details about factors to be considered for DR site selection with an approach. DR site is very crucial for any business as it will help to keep business running in adverse scenarios. DR site selection is crucial decision as it will impact availability of services to client, RPO/RTO requirements and service performance. Some of the factors which need to be considered are:

Blend Strategy & Governance To Drive Business
The role of CIO in each of these three different state is different. So, it is very important to have a clear picture of where your organisation is heading towards. Then the CIOs need to start assessing and evaluating internal capabilities to meet those goals. Once the gap analysis is done, CIOs need to make strategies to fill those gaps and identify the right partners to work with. While doing so, CIOs must put in place a robust control mechanism with full ownership of key functions associated with enterprise architecture and standards.

Quote for the day:

"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." -- William Edwards Deming

November 23, 2013

Are CIOs an Endangered Species?
Forrester Research VP Sharyn Leaver and Dachis Group Chief Strategy Officer Dion Hinchcliffe recently took part in an online debate over whether the role of the CIO is still relevant today. (Leaver argued yes, Hinchcliffe no.) Ever wondered about the importance of the position in your company? Here are four of the major questions to consider, and the arguments on each side.

Impact of Cloud Computing – Part 2
As Cloud Computing‘s adoption increases, it starts changing the way Businesses, Governments work. Here are a few links (one small sample) of how Cloud impact industries and governments. As it spreads, it will change the business models, IT delivery models and even the way governments (local and global) work together. There will be a few outlier applications like Cloud as Brain which are now in their infancy but have lots of interesting future possibilities.

Design Considerations For Converged Networking On A Budget
For the VM traffic the decision is rather easy. We go for Switch Independent with Hyper-V Port mode. Look at Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management to read why. The exceptions mentioned there do not come into play here and we are getting great virtual machine density this way. With lesser density 2-4 teamed 1Gbps ports will also do. But what about the team we use for the other network traffic. Do we use Address hash or Hyper-V port mode. Or better put, do we use native teaming with tNICs as shown below where we can use DCB or Windows QoS?

IT: Don't let the CEO wonder what you do all day
Corporate executives may think enterprise IT systems are like home computers: You set them up and they keep running with little or no intervention as long as security updates and patches are set to automatically download. It's hard to argue with the logic that servers costing $50,000 or more should have at least the same capabilities as the $1,000 Macs or PCs sitting on their desks at home. ... Indeed, IT often goes unappreciated unless and until something fails to work as expected.

In Command, but Out Of Control
In this first part of the video series by Abhilash Nambiar, Lt. General Paul Van Riper talks about how his 40+ years in the marines shaped his views of how some of the most productive groups are self-organized. Self-organized groups in combat or in business are best able to solve what he calls complex, wicked problems. He describes how two self-organized teams he led, one in Vietnam and the other as Red Team Commander in the Millennium Challenge 2002, were able to come up with unique winning solutions.

Business leaders lacking confidence in IT
Looking at disruptive incidents, in relation to data protection, security, or availability, as well as the pain that occurs because of them — a majority of respondents said that budgets were the reason that their organizations failed to achieve success. However, 35 percent also noted workload or resource constraints, 33 percent claimed that a lack of planning and anticipation, and 32 percent said a lack of knowledge and skills led to their problems. At the same time, one in five pointed to a lack of trust in existing technology as a key limiter to success.

Why innovators make terrible firefighters
Business fire fighting makes for terrible innovation. ... A pressing problem needs to be solved immediately, and the existing operating system needs to be repaired and brought back on line as quickly as possible. In fire fighting, there's no time for research, or reflection, or idea generation. It's get the thing back on line as quickly as possible, with as little disruption as possible. It's perfectly fine to knock down some pre-conceived notions or limitations, just so we can return to status quo as quickly as possible. And don't worry, we'll clean up the debris later.

Tech Industry Leaders Dissect Botched Healthcare.gov Launch
Bourgeois and other panelists advised federal IT leaders to adopt a more iterative development model for future technology projects, as has become commonplace in industry. John Landwehr, vice president of digital government solutions at Adobe, recalled a time when the software vendor worked on a long-term release schedule, like a complete overhaul of Photoshop that could take a year-and-a-half of development or longer.

Narrative Science Applies AI to Suspicious Activity Reports
The first analyzes data and finds facts, such as Company A beat expectations or Company B's long-term debt is larger than any other company in its sector. "Those facts are not enough and they're too much," Hammond says. "You don't want to know everything about everything." The second piece is a module that evaluates the importance and interestingness of the facts. Importance is defined by the domain of interest — if you're looking at the stock market, a company going bankrupt is important. "Interestingness" depends more on the user.

The 4 Key Pillars of Hadoop Performance and Scalability
Open-source Hadoop has emerged as the go-to software solution in tackling Big Data. For organizations looking to adopt a Hadoop distribution, Robert D. Schneider---the author of Hadoop for Dummies---has just released an eBook entitled the Hadoop Buyer’s Guide. In the guide, sponsored by Ubuntu, the author explains the main capabilities that allow the Hadoop platform to perform and scale so well. What follows is a brief overview of these four key pillars of Hadoop performance and scalability.

Quote for the day:

"People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel" -- Maya Angelou

November 22, 2013

Box, Dropbox get down to business with new enterprise cloud services
It's the latest area of specific enterprise ecosystem offerings from Box following the release of similar platforms for education, health care and financial, among others. Box's rival, Dropbox, also revamped its Dropbox for Businessto attract greater enterprise use. Features include 1,000 GB of space to start, file recovery and versioning, 256-bit AES encryption, remote wipe, two-step verification and more.

Privacy groups urge UN to adopt digital surveillance resolution
"Indiscriminate mass surveillance, which tramples individuals' right to privacy and undermines the social contract we all have with the State, must come to end immediately," they wrote, adding that if the resolution is adopted this would be the first major statement by the UN on privacy in 25 years. The draft resolution says states should create conditions to prevent such violations and ensure that relevant national legislation complies with their obligations under international human rights law.

10 old-school technology strategies that CIOs should not forget
A host of new and reformed practices have IT departments reinventing themselves ... Nevertheless, the fundamental requirements for quality systems that work right the first time are not going to go away. The rudiments of IT asset protection, disaster recovery, and business continuation also remain. Consequently, many tried and proven “old school” IT practices still make venerable companion strategies for emerging IT trends. Here are ten “old school” technology strategies that CIOs should not forget

Face detection using HTML5, javascript, webrtc, websockets, Jetty and OpenCV
With the webrtc specification it will become easier to create pure HTML/Javascript real-time video/audio related applications where you can access a user's microphone or webcam and share this data with other peers on the internet. For instance you can create video conferencing software that doesn't require a plugin, create a baby monitor using your mobile phone or more easily facilitate webcasts. All using cross-browser features without the use of a single plugin.

The End of Private Cloud – 5 Stages of Loss and Grief
No matter how good you think you are, you’ll never have the resources, skills or need to be as good as Amazon. AWS deploys enough computing capacity every day to run Amazon.com when it was a $7B online retailer. How many servers will you rack and stack today? How many petabytes of storage will you deploy this weekend? How many features did you update this year ... In her seminal work, “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross articulated the 5 Stages of Loss and Grief. I think it’s time to look at this for private clouds.

Indian Engg Students Have Almost Zero Skills In InfoSec: Report
A mere 13 per cent of engineering students were found to be trainable in the InfoSec domain with nearly 86 per cent unskilled even on InfoSec basics. Speaking on these findings, Jay Bavisi, President and Co-Founder, EC-Council said, “The world is recognizing vulnerabilities leading to cyber threats and attacks and India holds a key position in the global IT-ITeS map. Every country is taking steps towards building a talent pipeline towards a secured future and we urge the Indian industry and academia to address the concerns to retain their leadership in the domain.”

Taking responsibility for national cybersecurity
During her ISSA keynote, The Right Honorable Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, U.K. special government representative to business for cybersecurity, outlined the steps already underway between the U.K. government and private sector companies to make this partnership happen. ... "The government needs to form relationships with the private sector because it's the private sector that owns most of the wealth creation in the economy, and they are the operators of the critical national infrastructure," she said.

Lies, damned lies and big data: How firms get analytics wrong – and how to get it right
In companies where internal politicking is rife, people will deliberately bend analytics so the figures back up the course of action they support, warns Srikanth Velamakanni, founder and CEO of Fractal Analytics. Even where there's no bias from vested interests, it's common to find errors caused by poor data or flawed analysis, he said. "If you don't do analytics in the right manner, you can come up with some very wrong conclusions ..." Velamakanni said.

Only half of large companies have strong mobile strategies
"The mobile challenges that organizations are wrestling with are much the like the challenges they saw when dealing with the emerging Internet 15 years ago," said Eric Lesser, an author of the study and a research director at IBM's Institute for Business Value. Only 50% of the organizations surveyed agreed that their mobile strategy is aligned with the overall business strategy.

Health IT Execs Reveal 2014 Technology Priorities
For this annual year-end feature, Health Data Management posed a simple question to CIOs and other executives facing payment reform, dwindling reimbursements and pressure from patients, payers and employers for increased transparency around quality and cost: What I.T. do you need most in the year ahead, and beyond?

Quote for the day:

"Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success." -- Napoleon Hill

November 21, 2013

GitHub bans weak passwords after brute-force attacks
Popular source code repository service GitHub has recently been hit by a brute-force password-guessing attack that successfully compromised some accounts. "We sent an email to users with compromised accounts letting them know what to do," GitHub security engineer Shawn Davenport said in a blog post. "Their passwords have been reset and personal access tokens, OAuth authorizations, and SSH keys have all been revoked."

Communicating Change
Expectations tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. You need to communicate the expected change your project is creating will be beneficial and good for the majority of the stakeholders. If this message is both true and believed (the two elements are not automatically connected), the experience of the stakeholders is more likely to be positive. Communication often can mean the difference between project success and failure.

Putting the customer first- For real
Insurers face challenges which are in many ways unprecedented: not simply as a result of the crisis, but also in the face of the major changes – the global mega-trends – which are transforming the business and social environment. What will help the winners pull ahead will be genuinely reengineering their business around the customer. However, many insurers have yet to realize the scale of the transformation required. And fewer still are successfully achieving it.

52 Ways To Avoid Giving An Immediate Answer
No one likes being pushed or bullied into making snap decisions. There’s something unnerving about the situation where we’re the demand is “I need an answer, and I need it now!” Of course, if you work as in law enforcement or an emergency room, sometimes immediate decisions are necessary. But most of the time, the imposed urgency is the result of someone else’s poor planning or decisions. ... how do we deal with these “tyrants of urgency”? Here are a few possible responses you might use to buy some time or send

Unlocking SaaS Leadership Skills
A combination of technical skills and business acumen is the minimum expectation organizations have when they try to identify the right person to head a SaaS spinoff. Potential leaders must also be strong communicators and presenters adept at dealing with politics and talking with directors and other stakeholders. They must also be extremely service-oriented in their IT philosophies.

Being Agile: You are Not a Java Developer, You are a Software Engineer
Agile breaks this pattern by working closely together from the beginning of the project. The “end of project” style of coordinated team work in waterfall happens throughout every iteration. This is what makes agile so productive. However, “getting there” can be hard because working where your domain knowledge and skills are the strongest is where you want to work and where you know you will be the most productive.

Evolution of Storage: VM-Aware Storage for Virtualization
Adopting a modular approach to scaling using VMs and virtual disks as the unit for deploying storage is now possible using virtualization functionality such as VMware Storage DRS to load balance across different storage systems. This greatly simplifies how administrators can scale their environment without the complexity of scale-out or scale-up storage solutions. Adding the ability to control and monitor individual storage systems from a centralized administrative interface can further reduce the overhead IT faces with storage.

Hackers reportedly steal 42M customer records from online dating network Cupid Media
Andrew Bolton, Cupid Media's managing director, told Krebs that the information found on the rogue server appears to be related to a security breach that happened in January 2013, which customers had been notified about. Bolton also reportedly said that a large portion of the leaked records correspond to old, inactive or deleted accounts and that the number of active users actually affected by the breach is considerably less than 42 million.

COBOL still not dead yet, taking on the cloud
Conceptually, taking a language that can trace its heritage back into the 1950s onto a modern as-a-service platform may seem like an exercise in futility, but McGill says that it is a transfer that is not as mind-bending as it first sounds. "Believe it or not, it's probably easier to move COBOL into the cloud, than it is to move a C/C++ application into the cloud. It's certainly easier to a COBOL application to the cloud, particularly from a mainframe environment than a client-server, and Microsoft-based client-server [environment]," he says.

Costin Leau on Elasticsearch, BigData and Hadoop
Elasticsearch supports RESTful API using JSON over HTTP for all of its operations, whether it's search, analytics or monitoring. In addition, native clients for different languages like Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby are available. Elasticsearch is available for use under the Apache 2 license. The first milestone of elasticsearch-hadoop 1.3.M1 was released in early October. InfoQ spoke with Costin Leau from Elasticsearch team about the search and analytics engine and how it integrates with Hadoop and other Big Data technologies.

Quote for the day:

"The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching" -- Dennis Green

November 20, 2013

Data centers run warmer in China, Hong Kong
According to a survey conducted by energy management vendor Enlogic Systems, over 85 percent of data center administrators in Greater China were comfortable running their site at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Farenheit) and higher. This went against a common belief that lower temperatures were necessary to keep systems cool and running more efficiently, with less risks of downtime.

CIO tip: Learn how to present a risk-management plan to the board
Prima facie, it should be understood that the board does not manage risk, Caldwell said. "The board's role in risk management is to ensure there is an effective risk-management plan in place and that the management of the company is effectively implementing it," he said. "They have an oversight role." Any regulator who comes to meet with board members -- which is happening with increasing frequency in large enterprises, particularly in the financial services industry -- will ask questions targeted at figuring out whether the board is really involved in overseeing the risk-management plan.

How To Use Connectivity To Drive Product Innovation
In the world of product innovation, the buzzword of the day is “connected.” But there’s one place where products have yet to realize the full potential of connectivity: the home. We’re not talking about consumer electronics like phones, computers, tablets, and video games. We’re talking about the humble appliances that make our lives easier and our homes more comfortable, like coffee makers, toasters, and space heaters.

Cyber-Security Training a Top Priority for Industry, Government
Cyber-security professionals continue to enjoy strong demand and low unemployment, especially in the United States. The International Information Security System Certification Consortium, or (ISC)2, predicts that the rolls of U.S. cyber-security professionals will grow by 11 percent each year through 2020. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates the growth to be twice that.

Carriers reject kill switch for stolen smartphones
District Attorney George Gascon said Monday that AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, United States Cellular Corp., Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. rebuffed Samsung's proposal to preload its phones with Absolute LoJack anti-theft software as a standard feature. The wireless industry says a kill switch isn't the answer because it could allow a hacker to disable someone's phone.

Hackers exploit JBoss vulnerability to compromise servers
Researchers from security firm Imperva have recently detected an increase in attacks against JBoss servers that used Micalizzi's exploit to install the original pwn.jsp shell, but also a more complex Web shell called JspSpy. Over 200 sites running on JBoss servers, including some that belong to governments and universities have been hacked and infected with these Web shell applications, said Barry Shteiman, director of security strategy at Imperva.

Yahoo CEO Mayer talks mobile strategy, design approach
The experience of actually working with the product is just as important as how it looks, Mayer said. "Companies can fall, quite frankly, too in love with design," she said. Mayer related a story about a friend whose startup failed in the dot-com boom. The company's employees wrote post-mortem white papers analyzing why the company had failed. Her friend's was titled, "Usable versus useful," she said.

Customer selects Cloudmeter to conduct Data Forensics
"Using Cloudmeter, I check all my custom conversion variables: the rate of views to a product detail page, the proportion of products being added to the cart from different areas of the site, and all my micro-cart conversions. I quickly see that there were no significant changes on cart additions, but that something seemed to go wrong for many customers on Cart Step 2, where they enter billing information."

What is endpoint security, and how do you shore up the weakest links?
What is endpoint security, and why should today's CIOs be taking note of their organization's weakest links? In this three-part webcast, SearchCIO-Midmarket editorial director Christina Torode speaks with Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates LLC, about the importance of mobile security. Here, in part one, Gold examines the various risk points that organizations small and large face.

What’s Next in Software Analytics
Software analytics (SA) brings the notion of business intelligence to the software industry through fact-based decision support systems. Today, SA primarily focuses on helping individual developers with mundane coding and bug-fixing decisions by mining developer-oriented repositories such as version control systems and bug trackers. For instance, we can automatically determine the risk-the "bugginess" - of a code change by mining the actual risk caused by prior changes

Quote for the day:

"Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act." -- Jack Welch

November 19, 2013

The True Story of a Disrupted Industry, Talent Retained, and Beer Pong
Keith Mueller: We are disrupting one of the oldest professions--bookkeeping--and therefore need to bring new thinking, technology, and processes to help our clients. I believe Silicon Valley has this culture that starts with the questions of what and how can we do things better, faster, and at a lower cost? How we can effect change? That’s the culture we need at BookKeeping Express, and we are developing that here by a constant flow of questions, internal communication, and desire to drive value to our clients. Plus we work hard--so I just feel fun has to be part of the equation.

Exploring LXC Networking
Docker is still very young, though dotCloud, who have apparently pivoted to Docker, have been using it to power their PaaS offering. After playing with Docker for a while I must admit it is awesome. There is no doubt about it. I personally haven’t seen as much excitement about any IT technology in past several years I’ve been in this industry as I’m seeing now surrounding Docker. LXC is the technology which is used by Docker and which has been around for much longer.

Seven ways identity, access management will change in the enterprise
"In the past, efficiency was a key driver [for identity management roll-outs]," said Gregg Kreizman, research vice president at Gartner. "Compliance came along, but business enablement is the Holy Grail." Protected resources in the enterprise aren't where they use to be and the move to the cloud has stressed and fractured identity and access management (IAM) to the point where it needs to be re-architected, according to Gartner.With those observations and others, Gartner laid out the future framed by seven predictions for the way IAM in the future will be unlike IAM now.

Q&A: Design Thinking and Its Role in Industry and Education
The notion of "design thinking" has emerged as a topic of great discussion in recent years among design practitioners, educators across disciplines, and organizations of all kinds. Whether you’re a student, graduate, or seasoned veteran you’ll find value in the following dialogue which explores some of its many interpretations and applications. This interview was conducted by Dianne Hardin, at The University of Cincinnati, as part of her research for the DMI FutureED project. Hardin wanted to get perspectives on design thinking from practitioners responsible for providing it to clients and teaching it to students.

Landscapes in Mobile Application Security
One key requirement for any single sign on scenario is - we should be able to establish direct trust or brokered trust between applications and their users. In most of the cases this is established through IdPs. The first example we took was based on direct trust - while the second is on brokered trust. To accomplish this use case we need to build a trust relationship between all the authorization servers - taking part in - and also a middle man to mediate SSO. This use case is also highlighted in the Native SSO draft specification by OpenID Foundation - but no much details as of now.

Thornton May: Caught between mobility's rock and hard place
A high-potential millennial told the CIO at a big-name pharmaceutical company during her exit interview that she found the work environment toxic. Her main complaint was that the enterprise did not allow use of the modern consumer technologies and applications that she perceives as comprising her personal and professional identity. This is mobility's rock: People want the interface, the ease of use, the "cool" factor, the freedom and the functionality of consumer technology in the workplace.

CSA to create cloud security controls for BYOD
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced Wednesday the launch of its Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) initiative -- a project tasked with designing a better way to secure personal devices on corporate networks, a trend known as bring your own device (BYOD). The goal of the SDP initiative is to produce a framework of cloud security controls that "mitigates network-based attacks on Internet-accessible applications by eliminating connectivity to them until devices and users are authenticated and authorized," according to a CSA press release.

Cisco suggests new economic metric: Gross Domestic P0wnage
The Index notes the many upsides that flow from technology, asserting that “governments and businesses that embrace the Internet and ICTs recognize it will enhance their long-term competitiveness and societal wellbeing, and potentially contribute up to eight percent of gross domestic product”. But the document says it can find only occasional assessment or quantification of negative economic impacts brought on by technology, citing data on the cost in money and jobs of intellectual property theft.

Building an Advanced Managed Services Practice
With many managed services providers admitting that their technology skills are far deeper than their business acumen, the processes required to create those critical organizational development plans may be quite unfamiliar. The talents essential to build and sustain these IT companies can be quite diverse, so MSPs either have to undergo training to acquire those capabilities or hire new employees with those specific proficiencies. Regardless of the method they adopt, those consistent investments can significantly boost an organization’s chances of achieving numerous goals over time.

Secret TPP agreement, SOPA on steroids, may be the end of the Internet as we know it
The EFF warned that “the TPP would let corporations monitor our online activities, cut off our Internet access, delete content and impose fines.” It gives “legal teeth to Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools” and “calls for criminal liability for violations of these anti-circumvention provisions.” In fact, “this criminal liability could apply to people circumventing these restrictions even where the underlying work is not covered by copyright.”

Quote for the day:

"A good test of a platform’s importance is to find out what happens if the platform shuts down for 5 minutes – how much panic and revenue drop does that create in various parts of the world? Another measure of the platform is the value it creates by launching new companies and ideas." -- Chetan Sharma, Chetan Sharma Consulting

November 18, 2013

Is DaaS the Next Step to Simplifying Enterprise IT?
"As we centralise end-user computing environment in data centres and make it accessible to end-users over a private cloud, we are actually paving the way for adoption of desktop as a service to end users,” emphasises Handa. Handa reiterates that fact that several IT services organisations are focusing on this domain of provisioning and supporting desktops as a service by assuring Application Delivery as a Service (AdaaS) model on a variety of end-user devices.

25 tips and tools to make Google Drive better
Google Drive is a lot of things. It's a cloud-based storage service, it's an online office suite, and it's the connective tissue that ties numerous Google services together. Don't be fooled, though, there's even more to Drive than meets the eye. With the right combination of tools, settings and know-how, you can turn Drive into a lean, mean, productivity machine -- one that's jam-packed with time-saving functionality and fine-tuned to work for you. Here are 25 ways to crank up the power and send Google Drive into overdrive.

Australian media companies survive digital threat, says Brightcove chief David Mendels
Australian media companies are becoming one of the world’s fast adapters of video services in response to digital disruption, says the chief executive of Brightcove, David Mendels. ... “We’ve got years of video being the most powerful communication medium for humans,” he says. “Everyone understands the power of video to tell a story is clear, and the opportunity is clear. People now expect news and entertainment content to be available on devices any time and anywhere, and companies to directly control engagement through the digital world.”

Free eBook with SQL Server performance tips and nuggets
The 45 Database Performance Tips eBook covers different tips to help you avoid code that saps performance, whether that’s the ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when using Object to Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, or what to be aware of for indexes, database design, and T-SQL. The eBook is also available to download with SQL Prompt from Red Gate. We often hear that it’s the productivity-boosting side of SQL Prompt that makes it useful for everyday coding.

How to Mobilize Your C-Suite for Big Data Analytics
The often-transformative nature of that change places serious demands on the top team. There’s no substitute for experienced hands who can apply institutional knowledge, navigate organizational hazards, make tough trade-offs, provide authority when decision rights conflict, and signal that the leadership is committed to a new analytics culture. In our experience, the concerted action that’s required falls into six categories. Leaders should take full measure of them before assigning responsibilities or creating roles.

Stratus asks if continuous availability possible in the cloud?
Some customers were hurt because they didn't consider where and how their workloads would failover to use other resources when a failure occurs. The key point LeClair wanted to get across is that customers should really thinking about the business requirements for each of their cloud workloads and where redundant hardware and software must be deployed to address potential outages.

IBM and Amazon are battling for an 'explosive' fed cloud market
"Agencies are moving much more aggressively to the cloud," said Alex Rossino, principal research analyst at Deltek, who called 2013 "the tipping point." He expects many agencies to use cloud-based infrastructure services, in particular. ... IBM this week said it had received a federal key security certification for its cloud offerings, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, better known as FedRAMP. Amazon has also achieved that designation.

Bob Pittman of Clear Channel, on the Value of Dissent

Nobody’s in an ivory tower, and let’s figure this out together. Often in meetings, I will ask people when we’re discussing an idea, “What did the dissenter say?” The first time you do that, somebody might say, “Well, everybody’s on board.” Then I’ll say, “Well, you guys aren’t listening very well, because there’s always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.”

CISOs Need to Keep a Vigilant Eye on Eight Security Predictions in 2014
“Bypassing traditional defenses was raised to an art form by cybercriminals in 2013," said Charles Renert, vice president of security research for Websense. "In 2014, cyberattacks will be even more complex and diverse. While the general volume of advanced malware will decrease—we predict the volume of targeted attacks and data destruction incidents will increase. Organizations must up their security game as attackers continue to seek new ways to penetrate traditional defenses at every stage of the threat lifecycle."

SATA Express marries PCI-e, SATA for faster direct-attached storage
The SATA Express specification now recognizes PCI-e as a suitable storage interface for fast storage devices. Conventional drives will continue to use the server's standard SAS and SATA interface operated through the motherboard's South Bridge chip, while new, fast disk drives like SSD use SATA Express through the PCI-e interface. While this new option helps meet the performance and capacity demands of varied workloads, servers will need SATA Express capabilities and SFF-8639 multifunctional connectors to take advantage.

Quote for the day:

"The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way." -- Henry Miller

November 17, 2013

What to Use on the Microsoft Stack
Recently there has been a lot of flux in the Microsoft stack, leaving developers and leads wondering which technologies they should focus on. Microsoft's unwillingness to officially deprecate technologies such as Silverlight, instead allowing them to slowly fade away, only compounds the confusion. One way to find out is to review a little known document called the ".NET Technology Guide for Business Applications". Released earlier this year, the Guide offers insight into where Microsoft intends to put its efforts and what technologies should be avoided.

How to Create an Effective Business Continuity Plan
Because restoring IT is critical for most companies, numerous disaster recovery solutions are available. You can rely on IT to implement those solutions. But what about the rest of your business functions? Your company's future depends on your people and processes. Being able to handle any incident effectively can have a positive effect on your company's reputation and market value, and it can increase customer confidence.

Steve Jobs On Android Founder Andy Rubin: 'Big, Arrogant ..."
Steve Jobs did not like Android, or the guy that ran it, Andy Rubin, according to a new book on the Google-Apple smartphone wars. ... "It got incredibly personal," says one Apple executive who was briefed by Jobs on the meeting. "Jobs said that Rubin was steamed, telling him his position was anti-innovation. And this is where Steve was demeaning to Andy, saying Andy was trying to be like him, look like him, have the same haircut, the same glasses, the same style."

HTML5 & CSS: Animated Opening Type
"In this tutorial I’m going to explain how to achieve an interesting 3D opening type effect with CSS based on the one I previously created. My experiment was actually inspired by Edenspiekermann’s Open Type project for the Kröller-Müller Museum, a dynamic concept that plays with light and shadow in a simple but incredibly creative way. The aim of this tutorial is to show how we can bring some life to letters using CSS transforms and transitions on pseudo-elements with a technique that will allow to open a letter from all four sides."

It's Too Late for Data Governance
Get buy-in across the organization on definitions so the element that is quantified here is actually the same thing as the one quantified there. That way, individuals who create local models can be assured they are comparing apples to apples and benchmarks are meaningful instead of confusing. Attention to detail and cross-department accord are necessary. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time here.

The interplay between data management and data governance
Inevitably, firms will need the right tools for this practice, and effective data management solutions are the essential foundation on which to build data governance. These systems have already delivered exemplary levels of transparency, visibility and highly granular control over data consumption and distribution, and enable organizations to embed data management disciplines into formal technology practice. Usage and change management functions ensure that data governance benefits the organization by enabling cost control, cost allocation and contractual compliance.

Cisco claims scuttled by VMware
In criticizing software-only overlays for network virtualization, two points Cisco continually brings up are hypervisor dependency and the need to touch all endpoints when network changes are made. But VMware, the chief target of Cisco's criticism, takes issue with both counts. With the first, VMware's NSX software is installed in many multi-hypervisor hybrid environments and some with non-VMware hypervisors, says Martin Casado

Introducing Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1
EMET anticipates the most common techniques adversaries might use and shields computer systems against those security threats. EMET uses security mitigation technologies such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Mandatory Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection (SEHOP), Export Address Table Access Filtering (EAF), Anti-ROP, and SSL/TLS Certificate Trust Pinning, to help protect computer systems from new or undiscovered threats.

Strategic Risk—Five Frequently Asked Questions
Companies that fall behind on the innovation curve may soon find themselves facing innovation’s evil twin: disruption. Those that do not actively manage strategic risk—as well as evolve with new technologies and plug into external sources to gain an “outside-in” perspective—are more likely to be victimized by the future than being a part of shaping it. Strategic risk analysis can help a company control its own destiny by surfacing the pitfalls and the opportunities that lie within their business strategy.

OAuth as Single Sign On
"Today, we're announcing the release of a key part of our authentication infrastructure - id.heroku.com - under the MIT license. This is the service that accepts passwords on login and manages all things OAuth for our API. The repo is now world-readable at https://github.com/heroku/identity . Pull requests welcome. While OAuth was originally designed to allow service providers to delegate some access on behalf of a customer to a third party, and we do use it that way too, Heroku also uses OAuth for SSO. We'd like to take this opportunity to provide a technical overview."

Quote for the day:

"The truth can make people angrier than a lie. Tell it anyway." -- Teresa Carpenter

November 16, 2013

Big Data Has A Trust Problem
One of the report's most interesting findings is that a "trust gap" exists within organizations. According to Kathy Reece, a business analytics leader at IBM Global Business Services, and one of the authors of the study, less than 47 percent of leaders surveyed report a "strong level of trust" between IT and business departments. And when it comes to the C-Suite, the trust gap is even worse: Just 40 percent of respondents feel a strong sense of trust between executives at their firm.

Splunk and Ford Test Drive Open Data Development in Connected Cars
"The Connected Car Dashboards give a glimpse into a promising future in which data could transform vehicle and driver safety as well as design, productivity and other areas of the automotive industry," said Christy Wilson, vice president of product operations, Splunk. "Splunk's mission is to make machine data more accessible, valuable and usable to everyone, and Splunk4Good extends those goals by using data to make a difference. Splunk is thrilled to be working with Ford to help usher in an open data movement in the automotive industry."

Gartner Says the Natural Life Cycle of a Technology-Driven Company Is Under 10 Years
“To compete in this environment business leaders must destroy and rebuild the very businesses they helped create,” said Mr. Prentice. “Nokia’s metamorphosis is an example of embracing the concept of destruction and reinvention, while the current business model still remains successful. The divestiture of IBM Personal Systems Group to Lenovo and subsequent changes of company’s focus is another example. Apple is another company which almost came to extinction several times over its life, and then dominated the next technology wave through significant changes to its operations.”

How to survive in the cloud storage market
The large providers share the same blind spots that plague the component makers of any market: poor end-user support, zero customization, minimum feature sets, minimal to no service-level agreements, or abysmally complex billing and provisioning systems. The opportunities in cloud lie in value-add. There is a rich ecosystem forming above the so-called raw cloud service providers, and there is plenty of opportunity there.

Statistical analysis made easy in Python with SciPy and pandas DataFrames
The majority of data analysis in Python can be performed with the SciPy module. SciPy provides a plethora of statistical functions and tests that will handle the majority of your analytical needs. ... The pandas module provides powerful, efficient, R-like DataFrame objects capable of calculating statistics en masse on the entire DataFrame. DataFrames are useful for when you need to compute statistics over multiple replicate runs.

A Recipe for the Internet of Things
Seemingly every day a new story pops up about the Internet of Things, as new devices and wearables are launched into the market, and large enterprises contemplate the possibilities of a connected world. I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the requirements for taking advantage of these capabilities with organizations ranging from automobile manufacturers, to consumer electronics manufacturers, to industrial manufacturers, to city governments.

Open Source: A Platform for Innovation
The beauty of open source is that it’s a huge ecosystem of innovators who are no longer competing for scarce resources but rather sharing knowledge with others to create new resources and opportunities for others to benefit from these resources. The programs that have been developed in the open source software community are enablers for researchers to more effectively analyze the data in their endeavors regardless of their application. The software and hardware developed by open source can have applications beyond the data center.

EMC finally gets into the all-flash game with first XtremIO units
The initial XtremeIO SKUS are 10TB boxes, with capacity to double in the first quarter of next year, according to EMC. Basically this is the technology EMC purchased with XtremIO but with added linkages back into the rest of its product stable with “integration points” to vPlex, PowerPath, vBlocks and Secure Remote Systems and VMware vCenter (via plugins).

The strange life, death and rebirth of the CIO and what it means for the future of IT
CIOs now face a series of contradictory demands, according to Lee Weldon, research director at analyst Gartner. After years of being asked to increase efficiency and reduce costs thanks to a tough economic climate, they're also being asked to come up with new ways of using technology to create new business opportunities: "The CIO is getting hit with these conflicting expectations. That's a real pressure that they are feeling," says Weldon.

Virtualization security dynamics get old
Frankly, the ability to provide risk-driven and well-adjusted security and compliance capabilities in virtualized environments has a lot to do with a reasoned understanding of the applications and information we need to protect. That entails appropriately factoring in threat models and business impact; adjusting architecture and approach; and aligning operational and technical implications. Virtualization and cloud are simply operational and deployment variables which factor into these equations.

Quote for the day:

"When nobody around you measures up, it's time to check your yardstick." -- Bill Lemly