Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 05, 2013

How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts
There is widespread recognition of the shortage of analytical professionals. Lesser appreciated is the fact that most organizations are also way short on analytical amateurs. A May 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study on big data analytics predicted a coming shortfall of around 150,000 people with deep analytical skills – and a shortfall of 1.5 million business people with the know-how to put big data analytics to use.

8 key duties of the chief digital officer
Sam Ramji, vice president of strategy at Apigee, has been watching the emergence of this new C-title, and made some observations as to where these individuals should be focusing their efforts. He describes his epiphany coming from listening to digital leaders at the recent Chief Digital Officer Global Forum. (See -- they even have their own forum now...) Here are 8 key roles that should go into the job description of the chief digital officer:

BGP and MPLS-Based VPNs
The multiprotocol extension to BGP4, MBGP, was invented to carry such routing information between peer routers. So once we think in terms of routing 12 byte prefixes, there is a natural way to propagate the information. For security and scalability, MBGP only propagates information about a VPN to other routers that have interfaces with the same route distinguisher value. That reduces the chance of accidentally leaking information about Customer A to Customer B (quite easily done with routing distribute lists in a tunneling approach, or with route maps or distribute lists or prefix lists and ordinary BGP).

Obama says iPhone is insecure; DoD agrees
President Obama has revealed that he's not permitted to carry an iPhone. It's too insecure for the job, he says. Instead, he's stuck with a BlackBerry. Well, someone's got to have one still. However, it turns out that the Pentagon has also outlawed non-BlackBerry smartphones. ... Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.

IT Consultants: Is Full-Time Work For You?
The perks of making the move can be tempting: the promotions, the bonuses, and the guaranteed benefits. So how do you decide? It would be nice to have a crystal ball; there is no sure thing. But you can still make a wise choice. Start by asking yourself why you're considering the change and what is drawing you in. Then, ask these four questions to help you determine whether a full-time position should be your next move.

PaaS system benefits go beyond just freeing up developers' time
Paul Burns, president of the analysis firm Neovise LLC, believes that PaaS has been used as too much of a catch-all. But he sees an increasing focus on moving existing applications to the cloud with a PaaS system. "You take an existing application and you make it run in a cloud environment and take advantage of some of the underlying capabilities like elasticity," he said.

Why Are So Many IT Projects Failing?
"Project managers aren't just project-based, they're supervisors," says Innotas CEO Kevin Kern. "They are managing solutions and applications, as well as managing the software developers, and there aren't enough developers, ever. So, project managers are being asked to take on so many responsibilities that their job descriptions get blurred," Kern says.

Provocative Questions for Analytics to Answer
Consider what young people are learning in school today. Concepts such as mean, mode, range and probability theory, once taught in freshman university statistics courses, are introduced to children in their early elementary school years. Children are taught these methods in a very practical way. For example, if you have x dimes, y quarters and z nickels in your pocket, what is the chance of you pulling a dime from your pocket?

What should a CISO outsource?
Ideally, there should be two parties working in tandem - internal and external (outsourcing agency). A steering committee (including CISO/CIO) should be in command. These days as threats become more complex (mobile malware, APT, organized cybercrimes), some niche services/solutions are best taken in outsourced model/cloud model - rather can implementing all in-house. At the same time, there should be overall visibility available to CIO/CISO (steering committee) at any given time.

Data security laws and penalties: Pay IT now or pay out later
By implementing data security measures already suggested or required, your organization can avoid a host of problems. Whether your organization handles personal information now, or may do so in the future, federal and state laws are likely to set the standard by which unjust enrichment claims will be made and damages calculated. Below are examples of what is expected.

Quote for the day:

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison

December 04, 2013

Making data work: Why hope is not a strategy
There are a few things to consider when implementing a capability like this. Data storage, by the way, is not really one of them. Sure, billions of interactions may have to be captured, but it’s offline storage which is cheap, and it’s only the data that is actually used to make decisions. Therefore, data storage requirements go hand-in-hand with better informed (i.e. higher quality) decisions which means the additional returns will easily pay for more, cheap disk space (on-premise or in the cloud).

Best of unified threat management 2013
SonicWall scored the best ratings across the board from readers, with the highest score for its ease of installation, configuration and administration. Users liked SonicWall's breadth of security functions and features. They also applauded SonicWall's depth of security provided by individual functions, and Dell's service and support. Overall, voters deemed the Dell SonicWall firewall appliances as "excellent" and a "very good solution."

Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do
Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter, but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them.

CIOs to Gain Authority, Better Alignment With Business Leaders
"We seem to be veering back toward the operational type role, and I think that's a bit of an issue," Brubaker said. Brubaker recalled his work as a congressional staffer in the 1990s when he helped draft the Clinger-Cohen Act, a major set of federal IT reforms that, among other things, mandated that large agencies and departments designate a CIO to oversee the technology operations.

Risks to the 'Internet of Things'
ISACA, an association that develops information systems and security practices and guidance, has issued a new study, Risks and Rewards of the Internet of Things, which shows the shift in perception about risk and privacy as the world becomes increasingly connected through the Internet of Things. "As this Internet of Things starts understanding the inter-relation of things, your data privacy is going to be a real issue in terms of understanding who has it and how they're using it effectively," Stroud says.

Seven Reasons for Agile Software Development : Introduction to Waterfall Model
This series of videos explain seven reasons for moving to Agile Software Development. In this introductory video, we discuss the traditional software development model, Waterfall. The subsequent videos discuss more about reasons for moving to Agile. Speaker: Raja (Rajamanickam), Enterprise Agile Coach, ProXL Consulting

How much ITSM process is too much?
You can’t design a process sitting in isolation at your desk. Not because you are not capable, or smart enough, but because the adoption of a process requires buy-in, and for that you have to get people involved. The trick is balancing consensus building with getting things done. A small core team, with representation from across your organization, is the best way to proceed. Just make sure the team is empowered to make decisions

Forrester: Three competencies CIOs need to embrace digital disruption
It will require clarity in roles, ownership and operations. Your role as CIO will vary, depending on your organization's context. But there are three essential functions and responsibilities of a disruptive CIO: soldier, captain and general. These roles can change based on the type of initiative, culture of the company, and relationships among business and technology leaders. It is plausible that a CIO is a general in one initiative and a soldier in another, but most would default to one of these three roles, which are described below.

3 reasons perimeter security is not enough for the cloud
Again – the potential for bigger breaches or catastrophic datacenter disasters is much higher in virtualized environments. The cloud is built for agility, which means entire applications can be spun up, cloned, paused, or deleted in a matter of seconds. It is crucial that you implement controls and policies to ensure that privileged users – or those who gain their credentials – are prevented from doing damage.

IT pros share blame for 'shadow IT' problem, survey shows
For the IT department, the reaction has often been, “Oh poor IT, if we could only stop the employees from doing this,” says Jennifer Geisler, senior director in McAfee’s network security division. Of the IT pros admitting complicity, 42 percent said they do it because they are “familiar” and “comfortable” using such services. A third said the “IT approval process for new software applications is too slow or cumbersome,” echoing the line-of-business managers. A quarter said the non-approved software “better meets my needs than the IT-approved equivalent.”

Quote for the day:

"Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion." -- Jim Rohn

December 03, 2013

Get started with the Data Format Description Language
In this age of big data, the bulk of the data begging to be analyzed is not XML, but rather it is other structured and semi-structured formats, both text and binary. Until now, no open standard has been developed that is capable of describing a wide variety of such data formats. Learn about the Open Grid Forum (OGF) proposed recommendation for a powerful language that describes many different data formats, the Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

(How To Do) XML Schema Validation
Judging by the popularity of this question on StackOverflow, it seems that a lot of people struggle to check the validity of an XML file against an XML Schema. It’s a shame that what should be a trivial task has wasted hours of developer’s lives. In this article the author try to offer a few alternatives for various platforms and hopefully make things a bit simpler. There are actually a few different options at your disposal. We’ll start by looking at what is probably the fastest and easiest option to get started with validation:

What Inexperienced Leaders Get Wrong
But as any experienced manager should know, IT is a classic illustration of the difference between bold strokes and long marches, one of my favorite managerial frameworks. Bold strokes are decisions that can be made at the top, implemented pretty quickly by command — acquisitions, divestitures, real estate purchases, layoffs. Long marches take time and the involvement of many people who must produce new elements and coordinate their actions before the change can be successful.

If CIOs became Tech company CEOs
There have been rare instances where a CIO transitioned and started selling products or services. These individuals were CIOs representing their past industries or a specific solution set; I remember one instance where the only thing such a CIO wanted to talk about is how her company had implemented a specific technology and she had lead the team towards creating the success story. She was not very successful in her pitch but told her story wherever she went.

Data Mining Reveals the Secret to Getting Good Answers
And they say their work reveals an interesting insight: if you want good answers, ask a decent question. That may sound like a truism, but these guys point out that there has been no evidence to support this insight, until now. “To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to quantitatively validate the correlation between the question quality and its associated answer quality,” say Yuan and co.

Can complex-systems be ‘architected’?
To some people – perhaps especially in the IT-related trades – ‘complexity’ is just a more extreme version of ‘complicated’: a quantitative difference, “complicated that we haven’t as yet quite pinned down the rules and algorithms for”. To me, though, I’d agree with those who argue that there’s a qualitative difference between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’: for example, the kind of complexities that we see in wicked-problems, where even the act of looking at a context can itself change the context.

Meet WISP, the wireless future of Internet service
A WISP is distinct from other wireless services we currently use. Most cell-phone service providers offer wireless Internet service—with 4G LTE being the fastest current technology—but that doesn’t make them WISPs. Cell-phone service providers don’t expect you to use their service 24/7, and most place very low caps on the amount of data you can transfer over their networks each month. Being able to access the Internet while you’re out and about is a distinct advantage, but LTE data rates are relatively slow, and coverage can be spotty—especially away from large metropolitan areas.

CYOD: An Alternative To BYOD?
‘Choose Your Own Device’ (CYOD) offers many of the benefits of BYOD without some of the drawbacks. ... Even with the reduced set of options provided by a CYOD approach, the challenges are formidable and help may be required to deal with the increased complexity. “We offer an ‘anytime, anywhere, any platform’ service that provides access to enterprise resources from any device,” said Garewal.

Report shows weaknesses in DHS cybersecurity
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, blasted the department for the findings Monday. “This report shows major gaps in DHS’s own cybersecurity, including some of the most basic protections that would be obvious to a 13-year-old with a laptop,” Coburn said in a statement. “We spend billions of taxpayer dollars on federal information technology every year. It is inexcusable to put the safety and security of our nation and its citizens at risk in this manner.”

Amid security concerns, cloud insurance makes headway in the enterprise
"Cyber insurance policies were designed for premises-based systems," said Doug Weeden, director of program administration at Cyber Risk Partners LLC's CloudInsure. Consequently, some cyber liability policies exclude losses incurred by a third party, such as a cloud provider, but others include clauses that protect the client regardless of where the data is stored. So, businesses need to closely examine their policies to see if cloud coverage is included.

Quote for the day:

"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art." -- Claude Debussy

December 02, 2013

Here comes a supercomputing app store
Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing. But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

Getting cloud capacity planning right in the face of oncoming growth
The tremendous revenue potential is driving virtually every hosting company and communications and IT solutions provider to invest in building out a cloud portfolio. The catch for providers is how and when to scale cloud infrastructure to meet increasing demand without overbuilding. Part art, part science, cloud capacity planning presents challenges to providers that need to figure in their own and their customers' needs.

Managing People on a Sinking Ship
When your business is facing declining sales, a potential buy-out, or even certain closure, how do you manage people who are likely panicking about their future? Can you keep your team’s motivation and productivity up? The short answer is yes: Even when it’s clear that a company’s in trouble, there are ways to help team members stay focused, deliver results, and weather the storm.

Benefits of a Windows Server 2012 R2 Core installation
"Common answers I get from folks when I ask why they haven’t adopted use of Server Core are: 1. I don’t have time to learn a new product/feature; 2. I don’t know how to use the CLI/Powershell; and 3. I’m not confident I could troubleshoot a Server Core box in an emergency type situation. While these are all valid concerns, they don’t merit the outright boycott of this new server deployment methodology."

BYOD's Achilles heel: Billing and losing group buying power
Employees get to use the device they want and the enterprise doesn't have to hand out smartphones anymore. But the returns on these plans have been sketchy. Why? No one has figured out proper billing arrangements. ... With BYOD plans what used to be a corporate expense winds up in an expense report or a stipend. What would be a large contract is splintered into many little consumer deals. More money could be spent on BYOD plans and tracked less than the good ol' days of corporate issued smartphones.

Why COOs are growing in importance
These objectives are, of course, integrated into the responsibilities of all board members and managers within their own areas, but a COO is able to put a specific emphasis and focus on quality and efficiency. At PGGM, we do that through a “lean” program that has the objective of, step by step, improving the processes within the company; I’m at the center of that. In my case, my targets are set very specifically according to these responsibilities – my most important goals are related to the lean program, and I also have targets relating to service levels, cost control and cost reduction.

High-Performance Transact-SQL with Window Functions
These functions are based on an amazingly profound concept in standard SQL (which is both an ISO and ANSI standard)—the concept of windowing. The idea behind this concept is to allow you to apply various calculations to a set, or window, of rows and return a single value. Window functions can help to solve a wide variety of querying tasks by helping you express set calculations more easily, intuitively, and efficiently than ever before.

Selling SaaS: Operational requirements for consumers vs. businesses
The key to successfully selling Software as a Service (SaaS) across all market segments is recognizing and addressing the different operational requirements among different buyer groups, which often stem from the value propositions that drive SaaS in the consumer, SMB and enterprise market segments. ... The bottom line is that the operations of all cloud services depend on effective management tools and good management visibility.

Google Nexus phones are vulnerable to attack via Flash SMS messages
On Google Nexus phones, when such a message is received, it gets displayed on top of all active windows and is surrounded by a semi-transparent black overlay that has a dimming effect on the rest of the screen. If the message is not saved or dismissed and a second message is received it gets placed on top of the first one and the dimming effect increases. When such messages are received, there is no audio notification, even if one is configured for regular incoming SMS messages.

The Subject and Discipline of Business Architecture
This article discusses the phenomena of Business Architecture considering both its subject and discipline. Without knowing the subject of Business Architecture, it is very difficult to justify the scope and extension of the role of a Business Architect, i.e. the discipline. Many Managers and Architects can say – “What’s the problem? By identifying stakeholders and collecting their viewpoints, one could essentially define a Business Architecture”. Unfortunately, this approach is the major fault that leads to many contradicting opinions about this subject.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment." -- Thomas Carlyle

December 01, 2013

Microsoft's Software Licensing: Why I've Had Enough
It gets better, as Microsoft now offers "Licensing Training and Accreditation for Customers." In other words, if we invest even more time and money with Microsoft, it will bestow on us formal credentials saying we've mastered its convoluted licensing. At that point, can we then approve our own price proposal? We would be accredited, after all. No, all it would mean is that our arguments with Microsoft would continue longer than they do now. Much of the wasted time in recycling the same issue is due to a difference in opinion.

Governing the 'Internet of Things'
ISACA, an association that develops information systems and security practices and guidance, has issued a new study, Risks and Rewards of the Internet of Things, which shows that only 16 percent of Americans are familiar with the term Internet of Things. "People should be aware that the Internet of Things is coming into their lives and is going to be something that is an opportunity for them, to do things better, faster and cheaper," says Stroud, chair of ISACA's COBIT Growth Task Force. "And, also, on the converse side, it's going to be an area where they're going to have to watch some things like privacy issues. What's happening with their information and is their identity secure?"

How Green Is Your Network Cabling?
When cabling is being modified, or upgraded, care should be taken not to leave old trunking, and old cabling in place, unless it can be modified and updated. This is due to the fact that legacy cabling can cause obstruction and block airflow. There is also an added danger with leaving old cabling in place; it may not comply with the current “Reduction of Hazardous Substances” policy. Old-style cabling may release halogen if fire breaks out, leaving a company open to possible regulatory enforcement or fines.

Worm Targets Linux PCs and Embedded Devices
According to security researchers from Symantec, the malware spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi, a component that allows PHP to run in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) configuration. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2012-1823 and was patched in PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 in May 2012. The new worm, which was named Linux.Darlloz, is based on proof-of-concept code released in late October, the Symantec researchers said Wednesday in a blog post.

The death of the database
Many SAP (and other) customers will be running existing RDBMS systems for 20-30 years into the future, just as there are many people running 30-year old systems today. But they will be IT systems that businesses keep alive, whilst they innovate (and spend money) elsewhere. The real question is: will any of the existing incumbents have a place in the future? Hadoop and MongoDB are fast converging into the future, as is SAP, in my opinion, though from a very different direction. SAP has a different challenge, which is how its roots (internally and in its ecosystem) are embedded in the RDMBS market.

Social Network Analysis for Fraud Detection
As traditional techniques often fail to identify fraudulent behavior, social network analytics offers new insights in the propagation of fraud through a network - watch this short overview. This short overview of Social Network Analysis for Fraud Detection is presented by Veronique Van Vlasselaer, a student at KU Leuven, Belgium, working in the DataMiningApps group led by Prof. dr. Bart Baesens.

Increasing Oracle Database Availability with Fast-Start Failover
The key to this feature is a monitoring process appropriately named the Observer. The Observer is a component of the DGMGRL interface that is configured on a system outside the systems actually running the Oracle Data Guard configuration, which monitors the availability of the primary database. Should it detect that the primary database (all instances in an Oracle RAC environment) has become unavailable or a connection with the primary database is not able to be made, it will issue a failover after waiting the number of seconds specified by theFastStartFailoverThreshold property.

How To Achieve Data-Driven Design
Solution is to provide a Design driven methodology that helps businesses avoid severe and expensive design failures and set businesses on trajectory of consistent and sustainable improvements without busting the budget for the project. Solution is to give a rational methodology for figuring out how design is helping the business and learn from every interactions. Interaction could be triggered from manual or automated means. Knowledge gained could be used for iterating and improving upon specific experience related issues, without investing too much into fixing the entire design for small issues, which was how world used to do that.

Directing the Agile Organisation
At all levels, whether a team leader or CEO, an Agile Manager becomes responsible forfacilitating day-to-day operation, managing risk, providing governance oversight, and directing the strategic outcomes of the organisation. The key distinction is the act of facilitation, providing support to and removing impediments from their teams. Ultimately, by embracing and shaping change, an agile manager can position the organisation to quickly take advantage of new opportunities in the market.

A Balanced Score Card for presenting the value of Enterprise Architecture
Measuring the value of Enterprise architecture is not easy. In the presentation we will show an approach for measuring the value of EA by means of a Balanced Score Card (BSC). The BSC is a well-known management instrument for reporting value. We have developed a version of the BSC which is suitable to report the value of EA to management. In this presentation we will explain the EA BSC and show some preliminary results. If you leave your email address, then you will receive a PDF report with a compilation of the results.

Quote for the day:

"Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it. " -- Mae West

November 30, 2013

Emerging MDM Trends Part 3: MDM on Cloud
Running MDM on a Cloud is particularly interesting unlike other trends I discussed before because of challenges associated with cloud. Adoption of hosted services has always been infected with security issues. There has been increasing concern and demand for reliable and guarded platform and it is elementary when you think from organizations point of view. However, with MDM, this simple ask has become more demanding than ever before.

Cloud traffic to quadruple by 2017, challenge CIOs
Forrester principal analyst Dave Bartoletti said this means enterprises will have to rethink how they manage the growing cloud and Internet of Things. His colleague, Andre Kindness, said keeping files synchronized across multiple personal and enterprise devices will be one of the "things" that challenges companies in coming years. As the consumerization of IT drives employees to bring personal smartphones and tablets to work, the need to synchronize files is growing "from a whisper to a scream," Kindness said, noting that 21% of global information workers use file-sync solutions.

Reduce Your Stress in Two Minutes a Day
When he finished his second marathon a few minutes slower than his goal, he felt he had failed. So to make things “right” he ran another marathon just five weeks later. His body rejected this idea, and he finished an hour slower than before. Finally, his wife convinced him to figure out what was really driving his stress. He spent the next several years searching for ways to find more joy in the journey. In the process he found five tools.

Can technology improve business innovation?
For its part, the Internet itself has greatly accelerated general improvement in the field of innovation. By connecting millions of people with great ideas to new pools of resources that are able to help realize them, a pretty long list of impressive results have accumulated over the years. Of course, the darling these days in open innovation specifically is crowdfunding (which has led to the proverbial Cambrian explosion in related startups), where the concept is that anyone with a good idea can come to the community and try to convince them to fund their idea individually.

We’re ready for hybrid cloud, Microsoft Canada tells IT audience
That vision, however, doesn’t include building a data centre here for Microsoft’s hosted Azure infrastructure-and platform -as-a service (IaaS, PaaS) offerings, which compete against Amazon Web Services and others. Microsoft Azure has data centres in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Azure-based services here can only be bought from Canadian cloud providers using the Azure platform to offer IaaS and PaaS, Grant said in an interview.

Wibidata Machine Learning Platform Offers Comparable Capabilities
The new WibiEnterprise 3.0 platform allows a company to power a site with advanced analytics that fine-tunes itself, providing better recommendations and other features over time, including more relevant search results and personalized content. The platform is designed for the customer who is beginning to use data science, said Omer Trajman, vice president of field operations at Wibidata. “They are not classically trained but they have an analytics background. They have been doing marketing analytics. The mechanics are similar, what has changed is the availability of data.”

Here comes a supercomputing app store
Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing. But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

How to Start Thinking Like a Data Scientist
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or a Bayesian statistician to tease useful insights from data. This post explores an exercise I’ve used for 20 years to help those with an open mind (and a pencil, paper, and calculator) get started. One post won’t make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative.

Scrap your ITSM Processes
Now, as with every service, there are other stakeholders other than the customers. Laws, regulations and policies still apply. But the message we need to bring to the customers is that we can make your life better – the service we deliver will help you get your job done. Will the underlying process change? Probably not much – if at all. But the marketing will, and the relationship with the customers will. And the vision of the (now) Service Owner will influence the mindsets of all the other roles within the service.

Is Your Leadership Like No Place On Earth?
The deepest questions, insights, awareness and answers rarely come to us as leaders or managers when we are sitting at the top of the mountain of success feeling like the keys to the universe are all ours. No matter who we are, no matter what we have captured or accomplished; our success, achievement, sense of personal power, value or fulfilment can always change in a blink of an eye. We must constantly strive to keep on top of our goals. The greatest power we hold is not in what we have, but in who we truly are when we choose to ignite, engage and unleash the leader we want our team to follow.

Quote for the day:

"There was never a genius without a tincture of madness." -- Aristotle

November 29, 2013

Agility, Big Data, and Analytics
Agile hinges on embracing and adapting to change by enabling rapid feedback cycles and evolutionary development. However, bringing agility into big data (and small data) analytics has been a challenge for many, very bright and talented, data scientists and engineers. In this article we’ll explore what makes analytics uniquely different than application development, and how to adapt agile principles and practices to the nuances of analytics.

Structuring a big data strategy
IT executives first need to formulate a clear business case and execution strategy. Without those elements in place, any effort put forth to gather, classify, analyze and ultimately act on data might be for naught. This essential guide prepares business and IT executives for success by showing how their peers have made the business case for big data and rolled out a big data strategy in their organizations. Learn the tools, technologies and strategies used to turn big data into big business insights.

Flash Startup Pure Storage Fights EMC in Trade-secrets Battle
The fight has exposed competitive tensions surrounding all-flash arrays, which are expected to play a growing role in data centers as enterprises seek faster data access and more efficient storage platforms. Pure is a specialist in all-flash gear that started shipping in 2011, while the venerable EMC is aggressively pursuing the market through its acquired XtremIO division.

Call-Log App Aims to Reverse-Engineer NSA Surveillance
The NSA was revealed to routinely collect such logs from Verizon in some of the first documents leaked by erstwhile intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden this year Other companies are believed to be under similar obligations. Those logs include what the NSA calls “metadata”—the time, duration, and source and origin numbers of every call. The agency says it searches its metadata collection only for specific phone numbers related to investigations, but opponents of the program claim that, with careful analysis, the database could be used to reveal personal details on a vast scale.

Is The UK Sleepwalking Towards Internet Censorship?
Schmidt was basing his prediction on improvements in encryption. Google, along with Facebook, Yahoo and, today, Microsoft have all announced major improvements in security following the recent revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about government spying. “We have strengthened our systems remarkably as a result of the most recent events,” Schmidt said. “It’s reasonable to expect that the industry as a whole will continue to strengthen these systems.”

Consumer cloud services: Friend or foe?
IT pros have valid concerns about data leaking from the cloud, but in the grand scheme of things, a data leak is only as earth-shattering as the information that leaks. If the information that gets out via a cloud hack or employee carelessness isn't mission-critical, then it stands to reason that it doesn't matter much that it's been made public. If you can get past the security concerns, allowing the use of consumer cloud services -- such as Dropbox and Google Drive -- means that IT doesn't have to manage an in-house service.

Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring Boot to Access Data in an Aerospike Cluster
Spring Boot is a powerful jump start into Spring. It allows you to build Spring based applications with little effort on your part.Aerospike is a distributed and replicated in-memory database optimized to use both DRAM and native flash/SSDs. Aerospike also has high reliability and is ACID compliant. Developers can quickly scale their database cluster from two nodes to twenty nodes without bringing down the database service.

IT group slams Chinese govt for not doing enough
Describing Beijing's efforts toward IT development as "insincere", Witman Hung Wai-Ma, chairman of Internet Professional Association (iProA), said the industry's prospects had become so dire that the group felt it necessary to speak out against the government, according to a report Friday on South China Morning Post. Hung is also co-founder of Next Horizon, which provides backoffice process outsourcing.

Google privacy changes break Dutch data protection law, says regulator
The report said it was "almost impossible" for a Dutch internet user not to interact with Google "be it via Search, YouTube or Maps, or passively through third-party websites" and that "Google does not properly inform users which personal data the company collects and combines, and for what purposes." It also said that proper user permission "cannot be obtained by [their] accepting general (privacy) terms of service."

Magnetic tape to the rescue
WHEN physicists switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), between three and six gigabytes of data spew out of it every second. That is, admittedly, an extreme example. But the flow of data from smaller sources than CERN, the European particle-research organisation outside Geneva that runs the LHC, is also growing inexorably. At the moment it is doubling every two years. These data need to be stored. The need for mass storage is reviving a technology which, only a few years ago, seemed destined for the scrapheap: magnetic tape

Quote for the day:

"I've got a theory that if you give 100% all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end." - Larry Bird

November 28, 2013

Consumer cloud-based storage services force changes in security
The perceived superiority of consumer cloud-based storage services may reflect a lack of policy controls and not a difference in core functionality. For example, an internal document management system may have features such as device-independent access. It might seem less user-friendly because a user cannot simply provide a list of collaborator email addresses to share a folder with others.

How the cloud’s value proposition is changing
Since 2010 a new value proposition has taken shape — one that I feel truly realizes the full power and original intent of the modern cloud. Today, the value proposition of the cloud comes from the ability to connect disparate applications to form one seamless web of IT. In a 100 percent web environment, APIs from dozens of applications can be integrated to allow data to flow across systems.

Screen play thoughts: A speculative look at trends in video game addiction
Over the last decade there has been a significant increase in the number of scientific studies examining various aspects of video game addiction. This has resulted in a wide-ranging selection of review papers focusing on different aspects of the topic. These include general literature reviews of video game addiction, reviews of online (as opposed to offline) gaming addiction, reviews of the main methodological issues ...

Resurrecting the Failed Project - Part 2
Finally, we had a modified project kick-off meeting. Nothing big, nothing very formal. But it was a chance for us to once again discuss next steps, assumptions, risks, issues and lessons learned, and to review the project schedule so we all left on the same page and ready for the next phases and the next deliverables we would be focused on. This step is critical…because while it's not a formal kick-off meeting you have to remember you're dealing with an organisation that somehow decided to give your organisation a second chance.

To Strengthen Your Attention Span, Stop Overtaxing It
Top performance requires full focus, and sustaining focused attention consumes energy – more technically, your brain exhausts its fuel, glucose. Without rest, our brains grow more depleted. The signs of a brain running on empty include, for instance, distractedness, irritability, fatigue, and finding yourself checking Facebook when you should be doing your work.

XtremIO: What You Need to Know (Updated)
The controllers each have two 8Gb/s Fibre Channel ports, Two 10GbE iSCSI ports, two 40Gb/s Infiniband ports (for node communications) and one 1Gb/s management port. In terms of capacity, todays’s XtremIO solution scales from a single X-Brick with 10TB of capacity (7.5TB usable) to four X-Bricks of 30TB usable. A capacity increase is expected in 1Q2014 with double capacity SSDs offering up to 60TB in a single four-node cluster. Eight-node clusters are also being talked about, but I have no timescale for that.

WSO2 Big Data Story
WSO2’s Big Data Analytics platform captures business activity across multiple data formats and message channels, performs temporal complex event processing and map-reduce analytics, and presents relevant, real-time business alerts and dashboards to enable timely operational management and business planning. WSO2 Big Data Analytics Platform enables an API-centric architecture, enhances business visibility, Contextual Web, and helps build an adaptive business.

The Care and Feeding of Data Scientists
"I'm coaching them to make sure they're aligned with the company, but I'm not prescribing methodology," says Anne Robinson, director of supply chain strategy and analytics at Verizon Wireless. "Because if you want a high return on your analytical investment, allow them the freedom to explore." Robinson says good teams incorporate a mix of academic skills and applied experiences. Personal characteristics, such as the ability to make connections and express ideas well, are important in the corporate setting, managers say.

Researchers enable computers to teach themselves common sense
The program also is set up to enable a computer to make common sense associations, like buildings are vertical instead of lying on their sides, people eat food, and cars are found on roads. All the things that people take for granted, the computers now are learning without being told. "People don't always know how or what to teach computers," said Abhinav Shrivastava, a robotics Ph.D. student at CMU and a lead researcher on the program. "But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong."

Bluelock CTO: Learn which benefits of IaaS matter most to customers
As competition in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) intensifies and more players enter the market, customers won't think twice about abandoning their current cloud provider if it disappoints them. Now more than ever, providers need to not only understand what enterprises are looking for in an IaaS provider, but they also need to know which benefits of IaaS resonate the most with customers.

Quote for the day:

"I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be." -- Warren Bennis

November 27, 2013

Five Benefits to Becoming a Data-Driven CFO
In a data-driven business culture, the CFO will have the ability to align operational goals with management’s strategic agenda by utilizing predictive models based on historical data as a highly focused planning tool. Using data to drive decisions that impact present and future operations, CFOs cement their role in helping the business achieve cost savings and uncover new revenue opportunities. Understanding the correlations between financial data and operational data allows the CFO to maximize operating capital and cash flow; to anticipate areas or periods of slow-down and proactively manage company assets.

Putting Spark to Use: Fast In-Memory Computing for Your Big Data Applications
Spark’s ease-of-use comes from its general programming model, which does not constrain users to structure their applications into a bunch of map and reduce operations. Spark’s parallel programs look very much like sequential programs, which make them easier to develop and reason about. Finally, Spark allows users to easily combine batch, interactive, and streaming jobs in the same application. As a result, a Spark job can be up to 100x faster and requires writing 2-10x less code than an equivalent Hadoop job.

Take your app on the road, put it in a car
With all that said, the idea of extending existing apps into cars is a good one, and it would be nice if there were a common platform to allow app developers a single target to aim at. To that end, earlier this year, Ford open sourced AppLink to the GENIVI Alliance, which is a consortium of auto manufacturers and technology vendors looking to produce a Linux-based in-car infotainment system. But given the slow pace with which the auto industry moves compared to the technology industry, I wouldn't be expecting any Earth-shattering announcements anytime soon.

Facilitating Enterprise Cloud Adoption through Intelligent Policy Enforcement
What intelligent policy enforcement does for an organization is ensure that their security and compliance standards are adhered to at all times while also improving the work habits of users. As these policies evolve and grow over time, organizational efficiency rises with them, as users become more comfortable using the platform and its security requirements. Better access to the collaborative tools offered by the cloud translate into more productive employees, and over time the work environment itself becomes more flexible and responsive.

6 Ways Cloud Services Brokerage Makes IT-as-a-Service a Reality
More than 70% of IT executives want ITaaS, according to a 2012 IDG survey. However, they are held back from reaching this goal because they do not have sufficient tools and processes in place. Enter the Cloud Services Brokerage ... CSB gives back control to IT in six important ways, including centralized management and governance, centralized services procurement, interoperability among disparate services, data security, cost containment, and strategic planning through analytics and modeling.

E-book: IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity
The historical approach to IAM involves piecing together “half solutions,” in hope that tomorrow’s solutions will address real-world needs. The e-book “IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity” evaluates what IAM for the real world would, should and can look like. It delves into the most pressing IAM issues faced by virtually every organization and offers actionable, affordable and sustainable approaches to the IAM challenges you face. At Dell Software, we help you achieve your IAM objectives for your real world (not ours), in a way that moves you and your business towards your goals.

When it comes to storage, cache is king
If you like deep-diving into tech, and you’re interested in how flash is changing computing architecture, then you should read that paper. It deals with a whole stack of stuff that most people are just coming to terms with today, including whether flash memory should be thought of as a special part of main memory or as a special part of persistent storage. It also has some interesting perspectives on drive wear-out, and makes the case that an SSD will absorb more writes than a disk over its typical lifecycle.

The GRC maturity model and value proposition
To meet these ever-evolving and expanding needs, top-performing organizations have begun to combine Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) into an integrated set of standards, policies, guidelines, and procedures and tools that are in many respects similar to how we have historically integrated the disciplines of finance and accounting, or marketing and communications, or programming and testing.

Here's the one problem with wearables that we all need to fix
The only frustration with the Pebble is that I keep forgetting to charge it. But at least I actually strap it onto me. Not so much with the Fitbit, which just has to live in one of my pockets. It's so small and light that it's easy to lose. If my keys fell out of my pocket, I'd notice that. If my Fitbit did -- no chance. Case in point, it might be the case that you sit down in McDonalds with a Fitbit, smartphone, keys, and wallet, and then you get home you discover that you no longer have a Fitbit.

All You Need To Know About Botnets
Botnets are exploited for various purposes,including denial-of-service attacks, creation or misuse of SMTP mail relays for spam (see Spambot), click fraud, mining bitcoins, spamdexing, and the theft of application serial numbers, login IDs, and financial informationsuch as credit card numbers. The botnet controller community features a constant and continuous struggle over who has the most bots, the highest overall bandwidth, and the most “high-quality” infected machines, like university, corporate, and even government machines.

Quote for the day:

"Success...My nomination for the single most important ingredient is energy well directed."- Louis Lundborg

November 26, 2013

Simplifying Asynchronous Code With Scala Async
Ever wished the compiler could make asynchronous programming easier? Enter Scala Async. Do asynchronous I/O like "normal" blocking I/O, program with Futures and Promises even more naturally! Scala Async makes it possible to "suspend" at arbitrary points in a block of regular Scala code, and to "resume" from that point later--all without blocking.

Former VMware CIO talks top data threats
As the former CIO of Symantec Corp. and VMware Inc., Mark Egan has seen his share of data threats and how quickly these threats morph. Take cloud and virtualization, two areas CIOs dubbed cringe-worthy in terms of security a few years ago. No more, given the maturity of the vendors' own security controls -- albeit because of customer demand for better data security and privacy, he explained.

Open router project launched to improve network privacy
The fact that it's running open-source software on an open hardware design adds trust, with fewer ways for the device to be compromised. But it does mean that another variant of Tor is being created, and another distribution of the Linux operating system — albeit a minor one. While code updates can and perhaps should be automated, it does represent another place where things have the potential to go wrong. Bugs love the crevices between modules.

Q-and-A with Bill Swanson, global CFO and North America CEO, Cartridge World
CEOs are thought of as visionaries. They are paid to think big and seek innovation, constantly looking for ways to drive business, improve perception of the brand and develop new revenue streams. In contrast, a CFO is more engaged in the current realities of the business and must counterbalance these often grandiose ideas with a more cautious fiscal outlook. That balance is important, and we simply couldn’t afford to lose it at Cartridge World.

What the smartwatch says about our mobile ecosystem
A smartwatch is not a stand-alone device. It generally coexists smartphones and tablets and is dependent upon that connection for true mobile productivity to take effect. As Jeff Kagan with CNN put it: “The smartwatch will be your remote control for your smart phone. And your smart phone will be your remote control for your life.”

A CIO Survival Guide to Saying No

Developing the art of polite refusal--especially when declining a request from a fellow business executive--is a CIO leadership skill of the highest order. It speaks to your personal reputation for inspiring trust, building relationships and communicating honestly. "Veteran CIOs find that by using tools such as skillful conversation, deep governance and sense-and-respond intelligence, denial doesn't have to kill a career," Kim S. Nash writes.

Forrester to security leaders: Embrace continuous improvement
Security leaders can choose from a slew of CI programs out there designed to improve the quality of products and services or efficiency of processes, such as Six Sigma, kaizen and kieffer. CI initiatives for data security and privacy can help drive deep process, cultural and behavioral change within the organization by: 1) establishing key processes to embed security and privacy mindfulness; 2) creating a culture of importance and respect for data security and privacy; and 3) empowering security teams to stop data exfiltration.

10 things we learned - or didn't -- from Cisco's Insieme launch
Cisco's introduction of the Insieme Networks product line and strategy was the most anticipated networking announcement in almost two years. It represents Cisco's response to the software-defined networking trend pervading the industry, and threatening Cisco's dominance and profits. While not a watershed moment – Insieme didn't change Cisco's modus operandii, as explained below -- Insieme is nonetheless one of the most important events and product introductions in Cisco's history.

Contrasting Backbone and Angular
In this article the author goes down the list of the things we have to deal with day to day when building web applications, and show how Backbone and Angular can help with each of them. ... Most of the things we do as web developers fall into one of the following categories: Implementing business logic; Constructing the DOM; Implementing view logic (declarative and imperative); Syncing up the model and view; Managing complex UI interactions; Managing state and routing and Creating and wiring up components

BYOD Programs: A 10-Point Checklist for a Successful Strategy
BYOD is an approach that allows employees, business partners and others to use personally selected and purchased client devices to execute enterprise applications and access data. It typically spans smartphones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs, including netbooks, notebooks or other portable connected devices. "BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades," said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Quote for the day:

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” -- Warren G. Bennis