Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 07, 2014

Will we embrace biometrics to replace passwords? FIDO authentication at CES 2014
“Up until now, everyone thought the smartphone was the key to the cloud, but everyone was wrong. The smartphone is a lock and a very smart lock with lots of sensors,” FIDO member Sebastien Taveau told the Washington Post. “Your human body will be your own key, and you will get an extremely customized experience on your device and feel more comfortable doing more on your device than ever before.” While we are terrible when it comes to passwords, many companies are equally terrible when it comes to protecting those passwords.

Continuous integration testing: Challenges and solutions
When the stories from different teams are assembled, there is often a lack of clarity around who is responsible for testing how well they integrate. Processes around integration testing can be a point of confusion for Agile teams. Continuous integration (CI), which is the process of running regression tests with each build, can help, but will not solve all your integration test needs. Agile expert Janet Gregory discusses the challenges with integration testing and explains the practice of continuous integration.

Cybersecurity is for the C-suite, 'not just the IT crowd'
First, the people that sit in the C-suite, the people sitting on the Supreme Court, the people who are generals -- they likely didn't use computers when they were in college. So there's a learning curve. Secondly, these issues have emerged quite rapidly and it's been difficult for businesses and organizations to stay ahead. Just a couple of years ago there was no malware designed to go after mobile devices. Very few people were thinking about how to defend mobile networks because there were very few people using them and very few threats to them. Now there are many, many threats.

The problem with wearables
With all the recent activity with wearables, you'd think consumers are waiting to snap them up and hit the streets wearing one device or another. Some no doubt will do just that, but history tells us that might not happen. Remember the lowly Bluetooth headset that used to be in ears all over the place? These gizmos were early examples of wearable tech that did what they were designed to do, and in many cases did it well. That's why it was common to see them all over the place, inserted in consumers' ears to let them interact with their phone which could remain in the bag or pocket.

10 Companies and Technologies to Watch in 2014
Every year we highlight 10 companies and technologies to watch for the coming year. Our selection is driven primarily by the technologies being distinctive, innovative and relevant to major trends in the industry that we follow. Here is our list, arranged in alphabetic order to avoid suggesting that we have ranked the chosen companies and technologies:

Still More R and Python
Developing thought by some practitioners, though, suggests that Python will soon supplant R and assume the mantel of lingua franca for data science computing. The reasoning is as follows: “While R has traditionally been the programming language of choice for data scientists, it is quickly ceding ground to Python…. there are several reasons for the shift, perhaps the biggest one is that Python is general purpose and comparatively easy to learn whereas R remains a somewhat complex programming environment to master….Python still lacks some of R's richness for data analytics, but it is closing the gap fast.”

Intel's smallest computer to power wearable devices
Edison is Intel's smallest computer and is intended for use in small, flexible electronics that can be worn around the body. The computer has Intel's extremely low-power Quark processor, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity to communicate with other devices. Intel wants to put Edison in wearable products beyond the regular realm of smartwatches, smart glasses and health monitors expected to swamp the International CES trade show being held this week in Las Vegas.

Pragmatic Techniques for Maintaining a Legacy Application
The first step for maintaining a legacy application is to understand it. It is impractical for us to understand every detail of the application, but we need to understand the big picture: ... Analyzing code statically is either inadequate or inaccurate. We developed several tools to spy on the application at runtime to answer these questions. We took care to implement these tools as add-ons: they are not entangled with the application code, so they are not extra code that we have to maintain.

IT Spending in Software and Services in India to Grow
Bahl says, “We expect the Indian economy to start recovering from the tough situation it faced in 2013. It will start picking up (albeit at a slower rate) in 2014 thanks to good monsoons, an uptick in exports due to the weakening of the rupee, and huge infrastructure projects in public transportation, housing, agriculture, and farming that we expect to take off once a new central government is in place. As a result, we’ve marginally increased our 2014 forecast from 7.4 per cent to 8 per cent in local currency.

Cybercrooks Developing Dangerous New File-encrypting Ransomware, Researchers Warn
The new malware is called PowerLocker and its development was most likely inspired by the success of the CryptoLocker ransomware Trojan program that infected more than 250,000 computers since September. Like CryptoLocker, PowerLocker allegedly uses strong encryption that cannot be cracked to recover the files without paying, but it's also more sophisticated and potentially more dangerous because its developers reportedly intend to sell it to other cybercriminals.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." -- Robert Jarvik

January 06, 2014

New types of RAM could revolutionize your PC
The chips would enable the same instant-on capability that's common on tablets, but at much higher performance, said Tom Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates. "We're seeing the development of new solid-state storage technologies that are starting to play a role," he said. "MRAM is one that we're seeing playing a role providing a non-volatile memory technology, and there's some talk about resistive RAM doing some things."

Dashboards: Convenient But Not Informative
Another drawback with dashboards is inherent in their designs and the processes used to support them. In most cases, data is gathered by a data analyst or someone from the IT organization who generates a report, or a series of reports, that’s then entered into the dashboard for a team of managers or executives to view. The information that’s presented is typically one-dimensional, where the users of the dashboard aren’t able to manipulate the data themselves or probe more deeply into the data. They can only view the information that’s presented and make their own best judgments against it.

Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014

Last year, Opensource.com covered some popular open source project management tools (ProjectLibre, ]project-open[, and OpenProject.) We found these articles to be valuable to our readers, so here we take a look forward at what we think 2014 holds for these open source project management tools. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but each tool listed here has been deliberately selected based on a rich feature set.

What's driving big data and predictive analytics in 2014?
It's not that they fail to see the benefits: 85% of organisations surveyed said that predictive analytics had a positive impact on their business, and 77% believe that it helps them gain the upper hand over competitors. The main stumbling block was skills, with three quarters of respondents finding that new data science skills are needed within the organisation to take advantage of the technology. TechRadar Pro talks to SAP's VP of Marketing and Analytics James Fisher on what's driving predictive analytics and big data in 2014.

How GPS Can Keep Track of Earthquakes and Flooding
The meteorological side of the project relies on the fact that ground-based GPS stations are in frequent communication with orbiting satellites above. The amount of time it takes a signal from the satellite to reach the ground can be used to calculate moisture levels in the troposphere. This moisture data, combined with data from barometers and thermometers, can improve the accuracy of predictions about rainfall and flash floods.

Making Wearable Devices Gets Easier with Freescale's Warp Development Kit
The kit is targeted at the do-it-yourself community and device makers looking to prototype and develop products, Freescale said. "Companies can use this platform as a basis for their own wearable product and invest their resources into innovation and differentiation instead," said Robert Thompson, director of consumer business development for microcontrollers at Freescale. The Warp -- which stands for "wearable reference platform" -- is like a miniature version of the Raspberry Pi, an uncased Linux-based computer the size of a credit card.

Worldwide Enterprise Software Spending To Grow in 2014
“Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts. Investment will also be aligned to B2B analytics, particularly in the SCM space, where annual spending is expected to grow 10.6 per cent in 2014,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner. “The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post sales processes.” The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets.

“Sexy” Data Science is a Team Sport
Expectations hit data scientists from all sides. “One of the biggest errors executives make,” Dyché said, “is to bring in data scientists too early, before they understand where the gaps are. You can’t model data you can’t find. You can’t discover 'unknowns' until you understand the 'knowns.' And you can’t expect someone to recommend new business actions to people who don’t want to change.” That’s more than data science. That’s organizational politics or even social work. Most people in other jobs just make the best of it. But at current, “sexy” prices, dysfunction is expensive.

Developing leaders: It’s your job
If you are an organizational leader and this is how you think about developing others, you might want to rethink your stance. Put simply, it’s your job. It should be one of the most important things you do, and for the best leaders (meaning those leaders who understand the importance of people to their organization), it is a pleasure to assist and watch others grow and develop. There are lots of reasons to spend time developing leaders in your organization. Some of the most important include:

Need an enterprise data strategy? Cultivate people untainted by data science
The assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management urged chief financial officers (CFOs) to start cultivating talent in their own backyards -- especially if their companies hope to reap business benefits from data. Why? Because your own people are the ones best equipped to know a data breakthrough when they see it. Correlation does not imply causation. As Cavallo put it, Argentina's rise in inflation isn't brought on by solar flares, which both happen every 10 years.

Quote for the day:

"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it." -- Peter Drucker

January 05, 2014

MDM and SOA: Be Warned!
At the heart is the adaptation of the existing process organization required for use as part of the MDM. The standards and parameters associated with the master data must be integrated into the company's operating and recurring work cycles. On the one hand, this affects the operating core processes and their activities, which users perform as part of their line function or roles. On the other hand, MDM-specific administrative processes and data governance must be implemented to ensure operational capability and continuous improvements in how master data are used.

An AI Chip to Help Computers Understand Images
The prototype is much less powerful than systems like Google’s cat detector, but it shows how new forms of hardware could make it possible to use the power of deep learning more widely. “There’s a need for this,” says Culurciello. “You probably have a collection of several thousand images that you never look at again, and we don’t have a good technology to analyze all this content.”

Barracuda Brings Award Winning Firewall To Amazon Web Services Cloud
The Barracuda NG Firewall had recently earned a five-star rating in SC Magazine’s 2013 Application and Web Security Group. SC Magazine had reviewed six enterprise-class solutions as part of this group test. SC Magazine had commended the Barracuda Firewall for offering customers a strong feature set, indicating that “the tool sports an extensive feature set, including most of the functionality one would expect in an application firewall and a few that raise this product above most others.”

Cloud Services: 5 Key Questions Before You Buy
If you have been charged with buying cloud resources, do your due diligence. Demand case studies, testimonials, white papers, and use cases that explain the offerings and demonstrate their value and savings. And remember, just because a resource is in the cloud doesn't mean it will be inexpensive to implement and maintain. As part of your process, be sure to include various lines of business. Many organizations rely on IT to ask and answer all the key questions. That's a bad idea. You need input from all your stakeholders.

6 Reasons Leaders Make Bad Decisions
Leaders that are focused on their own hidden agendas lose sight of the bigger picture, quickly get disconnected from their employees and fail to build a team that lasts. They make bad decisions on complicated issues with the intention of advancing their own agendas and career ambitions first. To help you identify those leaders that are not ready for their leadership roles and are prone to fall into the trap of making bad decisions, be on the look-out for the following six behavioral patterns:

Samsung Announces 'New Era Of Smart Home'
To start, the service will cover three main areas, which Samsung identifies as Device Control, Home View, and Smart Customer Service. Device Control, as you might guess, allows users to control home devices using a mobile device remotely. The feature also allows for voice commands so if, for example, you're going to bed, you could tell your smart TV "good night," and it would know to turn off and tell the lights to dim gradually. Home View will give users a peek inside their own home with "in-built appliance cameras," while Smart Customer Service will notify you "when it's time to service appliances or replace consumables."

Predictions for 2014 – the year of everything
People generally make predictions about the future around this time of year (almost as if they are asking Santa Claus to make it so!). To avoid being left out, this post provides my thoughts on some of the things to watch for in 2014. First, let’s be fair: I’ve already read other people’s predictions, and I have no scientific evidence or quantitative measures to prove that my crystal ball is close to being accurate. Without doubt my own biases have crept into my thinking, and I have a Canadian perspective.

Nanomaterials Could Enable Large, Flexible Touch Screens
3M will begin selling flexible transparent conductive films made of silver nanowires for use in touch screens. These nanomaterials could enable wider adoption of large touch screens for interactive signs, displays, and personal computers. And the flexible films may come to be used in future foldable, curvy personal electronics, too. ... The films are mostly empty space, so they’re transparent. But the nanowires and the ink are formulated so that these films are still highly conductive.

When Log Data Meets BI
"Logs will give you those symptoms," said Sarathy. "The big challenge for CIOs has typically been that they've had to search for those issues. And often times you have to know what you're searching for." In essence, the log data tells the CIO what's going on, which in turn enables a more proactive response. "If, for example, your Web server that serves a million customers the week before Christmas is overloaded, you could fix the issue before it impacts any one of those millions of customers."

Design Patterns: Magic or Myth?
Of couse, there’s a sound basis for this idea. It’s normal for designers in any discipline to later reuse positive experiences, adapting designs to meet new goals as appropriate. The software design patterns community tends to cite Christopher Alexander’s ideas about patterns in architecture as their touchstone,1 but we can see similar use of this concept in the design of motor vehicles, clothing, public transportation systems, libraries, and so on. Some uses involve static forms, but others are processes, rather like software.

Quote for the day:

"Any experience can be transformed into something of value." -- Vash Young

January 04, 2014

Agile development practices: Three predictions for 2014
It's no secret that Agile development practices have taken the software industry by storm.Application lifecycle management, or ALM, vendors continue to come out with products and tools that help development teams embrace collaboration and continuously improve. Looking to 2014, I predict Agile will mature in three primary ways: More "custom" Agile processes; Growth of large-scale Agile; and Continued growth of DevOps

Human Technology Interfaces - What The Future Has In Store
Gadgets like Brain Link are already in the market, which coupled with related applications on smartphones gives beneficial gaming experience like attention training, meditation, neuro-social gaming, research and knowledge about brain. Most of us would have watched the movies 'Surrogates' wherein humans would stay indoors while their surrogates would go out to work and 'Minority Report' where the police and justice department would get alerts the moment some one think of committing a crime.

This Credit Card Startup Has A Way To Thwart Target-Style Hacking
“The root cause of fraud is the exposure of this information,” says William Gomez Jr., the co-founder and CEO. “The Epic One card does not hold any details of any credit cards. Neither does the Epic One application that runs on your smartphone. None of these devices hold any of your credit card information. The Epic One card grants you temporary access to your cloud wallet that is stored within Epic One’s back-end systems.”

Five Data Mining Techniques That Help Create Business Value
When developing your big data strategy it is important to have a clear understanding of what data mining is and how it can help you. The term data mining first appeared in the 1990s while before that, statisticians used the terms “Data Fishing” or “Data Dredging” to refer to analysing data without an a-priori hypothesis. The most important objective of any data mining process is to find useful information that is easily understood in large data sets. There are a few important classes of tasks that are involved with data mining:

17 exploits the NSA uses to hack PCs, routers and servers for surveillance
Some of the exploits are deployed remotely and others are physically installed. Those hands-on operations may occur while the product is being shipped; it could be snagged during shipping so an obscure group like an FBI black bag team can do the NSA’s domestic dirty work. There are too many exploits listed in the leak to cover in one post, but I thought you might like to know about some that target servers, routers and PCs.

Software requirements: Why the term 'nonfunctional requirements' misleads
You don't just need a bunch of usability. Usability is not nonfunctional. Usability is only relevant with respect to functionality. Moreover, usability requirements frequently differ from one function/use to another, and the differences are defined in terms of relevant characteristics, not some sizing unit as the single-entry-per-type approach implies. Consequently, when gathering data to discover requirements, inquiries about various functions each need also to address applicable nonfunctional characteristics, of which there may be many.

What to expect of Internet of Things in 2014
“Right now, if you think about it, the Internet of Things in your household will probably require you to go and re-purchase many devices that you have today, and I’m not sure how many of us can take that hit in one calendar year,” Robert Stroud, a member of ISACA’s Strategic Advisory council and vice president of innovation and strategy at CA Technologies, says. “I actually think it might apply more in commercial ventures first.”

Durandal: Quick Start
With RequireJS as its base and a thin layer of conventions, Durandal can provide amazing productivity while helping you to maintain SOLID coding practices. Pair that with out-of-the-box support for rich UI composition, modal dialogs, eventing/messaging, widgets, transitions, routing and more....and there's no doubt you'll be able to build whatever apps you can imagine. While Durandal has only been publicly available for about a year now, the community has grown at a breakneck pace.

3 Key Risk Management Trends for 2014
In a recent interaction with a leading banking and financial services organization, MetricStream (my employer) discussed how risk and compliance scores were being used to drive vendor negotiations when renewals arose. At another institution, risk and governance metrics directly impact the performance-linked financial incentives taken home by the management circle. This shift toward leveraging risk metrics as it pertains to performance metrics and business critical processes has elevated risk intelligence from a nice piece to a "must have."

Enterprise Architecture: Getting Organized For The New Year
“The architecture describes primarily the current system/enterprise,” Grigoriu writes. “It may also describe the target system/enterprise in order to visualise its end state. The architecture is employed in the process of enterprise transformation to ensure that projects are aligned in an enterprise-wide portfolio covering all enterprise entities, the business and technology issues and their dependencies.” What a concept – knowing how changing a system will affect other parts of the system before it happens. In this regard, EA is the antithesis of spaghetti – whether it’s spaghetti code, spaghetti cabling, or something else.

Quote for the day:

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them … into the impossible." -- Arthur C. Clarke

January 03, 2014

GRC professionals' salaries increase as demand for their skills rises
As factors such as mobility and the cloud create new data security risks, GRC professionals should continue to expect their skill sets to be highly sought after, said Derek Gascon, executive director of the Compliance, Governance & Oversight Council. "Their skills are going to be unique, at least for a while," Gascon said. "All of the data that is being distributed through those mechanisms has to be managed somehow, and the governance people understand what kinds of policies are going to be necessary."

A year of living with Windows Phone: What I've learned so far
With Windows Phone my go-to-device, that aging iPhone is still part of my kit bag, only now it's relegated to iPod status. It turns out that the real tether that holds you in the iOS ecosystem is iTunes, and the myriad albums you've bought and ripped over a decade. Microsoft still hasn't delivered a workable tool for copying music from PC to phone - and while Spotify, Xbox Music and Nokia MixRadio meet my streaming needs, they're not really music library management tools.

The search for data scientists may not always mean IT
"We are focused 100 percent on data and infrastructure," Hoskins says. Hoskins agrees that big data is every bit the big deal that is being made of it. No hype here, he claims. "We are in the age of data now," Hoskins says, "and data is what really matters. I don't think it can be overstated the significance that this has for business and for all of us." More specifically, predictive analytics is what organizations are scrambling to master: turning mountains of data into identifiable patterns of behavior.

What Is Object Storage?
Object Storage is a technology where data is stored in self-contained entities called objects. Think of an object as a file. But unlike traditional file systems, this storage method is not dependent on a hierarchical layout of directories and sub-directories. Objects are given unique ID numbers which are managed in a ‘flat’ index reducing significantly the amount of metadata (data about data) needed to store and retrieve a file. Storage systems that have an object storage foundation can deliver a series of capabilities that should be of interest to data centers that need to store large amounts of files or objects.

How Big Data is changing the security analytics landscape
"The goal of Big Data analytics for security is to obtain actionable intelligence in real time," said Alvaro Cardenas, lead author of the report in the CSA press release. "Although Big Data analytics holds significant promise, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome to realize its true potential. We have only just begun, but are anxious to move forward in helping the industry understand its potential with new research directions in Big Data security."

What’s So Innovative about Innovation?
Are we as innovative as our competitors? What are we doing about being innovative? How do we get some of that innovation stuff? This author even jumped on the bandwagon by recently writing a column about successful CIOs that indicated how important the need for innovation was. However, after writing the piece a little handwringing ensued over what innovation really means, or perhaps should mean, to CIOs in the insurance industry.

NSA looks to crack all encryption with quantum computer, report says
The U.S. National Security Agency is attempting to build a new breed of supercomputer that theoretically could make short work of cracking most keys used for encrypted communications. The project to build "a cryptographically useful quantum computer" is part of an $80 million research project called "Penetrating Hard Targets" that is taking place at a campus in College Park, Maryland, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted documents it said were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A CIO's journey to IT transformation begins with 10 steps
With so much new stuff coming our way, we simply do not have the time to keep our focus on the old stuff. For the first time in the history of the world, we are the persons and teams who can help the organization own the future. ... The organization needs us to be effective in leading change, delivering value and moving into the future (because the future is all about technology). A friend recently asked me what I meant by "transformational leaders."

Fifth Third Bank Pilots Analytics-Driven Deposit Pricing
Pricing is often more art than science, he points out. "The art of it is, you can look at what your competitors are offering," he says. "You might put that information in spreadsheets so you can sort and trend it, but it's still largely art and there's not a lot of science behind it." As it brings more science in, Fifth Third will analyze millions of records per month, looking at demand curves, interest rates, and deposit flows within households in reaction to product changes, aiming to find that ideal price point based on the volume of deposits it wants to gather and the maximum amount of interest expense it's willing to incur.

Top 6 Wi-Fi Trends to Expect in 2014!
The new 802.11ac standard is the call of the season. It represents a basic change in innovation of 802.11 standard protocols that boost gigabit speeds during wireless networking. This protocol increases performance of all the 802.11 ac devices by delivering more than one gigabit every second. ... Wi-Fi specific location analytics play a big role for the organization to improve business intelligence, determine security policy as well as improved customer Wi-Fi experience. You must expect Wi-Fi to offer more than just internet accessibility. The users will definitely look for more site- specific applications.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak - and to sit down and listen" -- Winston Churchill

January 02, 2014

Google's Eric Schmidt reveals his biggest mistake
While Google is often ahead of the game, Schmidt admitted that during his time as CEO, the company missed a trick when social media began to change the face of the Internet. "At Google, the biggest mistake I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon,” Schmidt said. "Not a mistake we're going to make again. I guess in our defense we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that."

Add semantic analysis to ward off big data/bad analytics syndrome
So feeding data into a model for analysis doesn't erase the potential for bias and misinterpretation. That's because models themselves are biased -- they are all just a representation of reality, he said. And people can engage in "over fitting" or placing too much significance on the results from a sample; or they mistake correlation for causation; or they have a false sense of confidence in "the big data approach" -- namely that having so much data and so many variables cancels other factors out.

Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative — until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas. Creative big companies like Amazon and Google tend to be run by their innovators. Larry Page will unilaterally fund a good idea that looks like a bad idea and dismiss the reasons why it can’t be done. In this way, he creates a Can-Do Culture. Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture. This post attempts to answer that challenge and reverse that tragic trend.

DataWind faces uphill climb in India's smartphone market
The Indian tablet and cell phone manufacturer recently launched three potentially revolutionary smartphones in one of the world's hottest consumer electronics markets. Its PocketSurfer smartphones range from around US$55 to US$105 and are outfitted with 5-inch screens, which generally are not available at those price points in India. The devices come with Linux and Android platforms. ... After all, the Indian market has exhibited an insatiable appetite for smartphones, growing at a sizzling 250 percent annual growth rate and primarily in the medium-low price range that caters to notoriously price-sensitive Indian consumers.

4 Steps to Removing Leadership Bias
The main theme involved in why there is so much to learn about leadership is how little we really know about ourselves. So much behind how we think, perceive and behave is elusive at best and could be one reason why we are so driven to find and express that rhetorical recipe that nails it. ... To grow as leaders we need to constantly improve ourselves and that requires improving our understanding of self. We need to understand when to act on gut feelings and when not to. If we already know why we respond to such feelings I would suggest pragmatically testing them for bias.

Unencrypted Windows crash reports give 'significant advantage' to hackers, spies
"This information would definitely give an attacker a significant advantage. It would give them a blueprint of the [targeted] network," said Alex Watson, director of threat research at Websense, which on Sunday published preliminary findings of its Windows error-reporting investigation. Watson will present Websense's discovery in more detail at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 24.

Raspberry Pi: Hands On with Arch Linux and Pidora
Nothing special is required for this, either in terms of knowledge or equipment; you can do it on pretty much any Linux or Windows system. If you don't even want to do this much yourself, you can buy an SD card preloaded with NOOBS from most Raspberry Pi retailers, such as the Pi Shop in Switzerland, where I got mine (I found them to be very friendly, knowlegeable and helpful.) Then just stick the SD card in the Pi, plug in power and it boots to an installer menu. Honestly, I can't imagine how it could be easier.

Healthcare digital signage: Starting small, but growing
Digital signage solutions are built around a central content manager, which serves as the brains of the installation. The content manager schedules what information appears on a display and when. Miller said Hammond primarily uses Scala's enterprise-level content management software. He said most large customers install the content manager as a virtual appliance. A few host the virtual instance in the cloud, tapping providers such as Amazon Web Services, he added.

Business Analytics and Multi-Wavelength Astronomy
This is similar to the task of practitioners in the analytics and enterprise performance management communities. An organization cannot make better decisions and improve its performance by focusing on only one variable, such as cost, time, quality, service-level and so on. These factors are interdependent. So, it is a much more complex problem. Plus there is more volatility today, caused in part by reduced trade barriers from globalization, which has increased uncertainty about the future. Analysts are on a mission to reduce uncertainty.

I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down
There are many times in the life of a project when a little documentation goes a long way. But to get those benefits, developers must take time away from coding to write things down. Here are some examples where I think they will find the juice was worth the squeeze. ... If no one bothers to write this process down, there’s a good chance it will be performed incorrectly or steps will be missed, wasting even more time. Furthermore, there’s no practical way to automate a process without first writing down the steps.

Quote for the day:

"The day people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." -- Colin Powell

January 01, 2014

Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway? In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.

Deadly Downtime: The Worst Network Outages Of 2013
No company is immune, no matter how sophisticated its technology. In 2013, some of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world experienced downtime because of network failures. Companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. Whether downtime is caused by a faulty piece of hardware, a software bug, a configuration error, or a denial-of-service attack, it causes the same response in customers, employees, users, and the IT professionals responsible for that network: Sheer panic.

Drake Baer: How To Create A Sustainable Culture Of Innovation
At Fast Company, Baer covers the intersection of psychology and work. He interviews the foremost minds in business for a living, including Clay Christensen, Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb. He also has a special interest in companies and bands on the brink of breaking big and the methods by which they do so. In this interview, he talks about why companies struggle with innovation, why leaders become irrelevant when they aren’t thinking forward, which companies are able to create sustainable innovation, sources of creativity and his career advice.

The security industry finds a dream enemy -- government spy agencies
The security industry has the enemy it always dreamed of to help it make the case for encryption adoption, but users looking to secure their data and communications need to be wary of claims made in marketing messages. Securing data in motion is the priority, experts say, and some large Internet firms are already making progress in this area, but encrypting data at rest without losing its usefulness will prove a greater challenge.

Rule Engine with Generic UI
A business rules engine works by separating execution code for business rules from the rest of the business process management system. This allows the end user to change business rules without having to ask a programmer for help. When a change is made, the engine will evaluate the change's effect on other rules in the system and flag the user if there is a conflict. Generic UI engine is a UI components that are common to various kinds of User Interfaces. That means: having generic UI Components that can be accessed using common Interfaces. Generic UI engine can be mapped to custom rule engine.

Enterprise mobility management: Embracing BYOD through secure app and data delivery
Given the paramount importance of security in IT’s mission, the natural instinct may be to try to limit peoples’ choice of devices or otherwise constrain the endpoint environment, even if it means sacrificing the benefits of greater productivity and flexibility. But simply barring the door to consumer device usage and BYOD is neither realistic nor desirable—it is inevitable that IT will face increasing pressure to provide access to any kind of app, anywhere, on any type of device. Simply put, IT has no choice but to enable and support consumer devices and BYOD; the only remaining question is how.

Four SSD best practices for efficient virtual machine storage
When solving the IOPS problem, IT managers have the choice of either server-side flash (basically, cache) or storage-side solid-state drives (SSDs). Either choice can deliver thousands or tens of thousands of IOPS (depending upon quantity) but they are not interchangeable; this is where the issue of latency comes in. Server-side flash has no more latency than other system cache, assuming the data is flash-resident -- meaning the data accessing the flash has to reside on the server as the flash does. If the system has to issue a read command to the hard disk drive (HDD), then there is no benefit to flash.

5 IT Hiring Trends In 2014
In a survey of 860 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, 73% reported planning to hire more candidates in the next six months, and 24% percent said their additional hiring will be substantial. That's good news for anyone looking to make a change in 2014. But expect the IT landscape to change, too. Here's a look at five predictions on hot skills, evolving roles, and how social media will change recruiting.

U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service
The Obama administration effectively agrees. “While this country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans, significant areas for improvement remain,” said Tom Power, deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications at the White House. The disagreement comes over how far behind the United States really is in what many people consider as basic a utility as water and electricity — and how much it will affect the nation’s technological competitiveness over the next decade.

How the Financial Services Industry Should Use Big Data to Regain Trust
Analysing the usage of the many products that financial services firms have explains a lot about the behaviour of the customers. Although banks do not do this, or at least they say they do not do it, they have the possibility to understand customers better than customers understand themselves. The payment information explains a lot about customers. For that reason, when payment provider Equens (the largest pan-European payment processor) decided to sell the transaction data lot of negative reactions appeared and Equens had to withdraw their plan.

Quote for the day:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust

December 31, 2013

Spreadsheet governance tools make corporate finance Excel use feasible
In fact, the event that led the company to share its story was the discovery of a "material deficiency" that allowed an incorrect number to appear in a quarterly earnings report, a clear no-no, given that the company is publicly traded and thus regulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. "Even though we had people eyeballing that stuff, we still published a wrong number," the source said.

The firm behind Healthcare.gov had top-notch credentials -- and it didn't help
Though CGI Federal got something of a black eye from the rollout, the CMMI certification it had did not come under fire , and no one has made a case that it should. Project requirements were changed late in the development cycle, warnings weren't heeded, and time for testing was cut short. Those actions are all anathema to CMMI's careful and measured development processes. If a project that's based on CMMI runs into problems, process defenders will usually cite issues with management and decision-making.

2014: Time to Rethink Privacy
In 2014, IT executives are going to have to make some very difficult decisions about privacy. Quite often when we talk about difficult decisions, we mean that we know what the right thing to do is, but it's just hard to bring ourselves to do it. In this case, though, part of the difficulty will be knowing what the right thing to do is. For that reason, every industry -- nay, every company -- will come to very different decisions based on the concerns of their employees and customers.

Raspberry Pi and Raspian, hands on
What could be better at Christmas than a shiny new gadget? Perhaps a shiny new gadget that runs Linux? One that reminds me of Heathkit, and TRS-80, and days of experimenting and playing with computers for no reason other than curiosity, and joy, and learning? That's what I got, a Raspberry Pi! What I intend to write here is "Jamie's Excellent Raspberry Adventures": it will document my own experiences, discoveries, successes and failures with this little gadget.

eBook: Keep only the data you want.
In today’s information economy, organizations are facing unfathomable data growth rates. In fact, Aberdeen Group estimates that data is growing at a rate of 56% year over year. And now, the big data phenomenon means data is growing in every single operational and analytic application. In fact, data is growing to the point that many organizations are facing impaired performance of their mission-critical applications, along with increasing costs associated with storing all of that data.

MDM vs. MAM: Comparing enterprise mobile security management options
IT teams must be able to successfully address the mobile device management challenge to adequately protect organizations while still allowing enough flexibility to reap the rewards of mobility. The landscape of mobile management products is dynamic and large. A common query is, "Which product is right for my organization, mobile application management (MAM) or mobile device management (MDM)?" The answer can be both and perhaps neither, depending on the use case.

Big Data: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Big data contains a virtual treasure trove of information about customers, trends and countless other valuable insights which may have the potential to transform businesses. However, in the race to unlock this promise, many enterprises now find they have more data than they are capable of handling. Here’s how CIOs, data warehouse managers and others can build the business case for data volume management to help them more effectively manage this data deluge.

An Innovator's Resolutions
Nothing prepares us more for a a journey into a new year, ripe with new promise and new opportunity, more than setting out the goals for the year, creating agreements with ourselves as to how we'll conduct ourselves in this new year. We start by reducing or eliminating cynicism about our organizations, recognizing that as innovators we are the spark of creativity that will lead others to better ideas. We decide now that developing interesting ideas into new products and services isn't easy but is possible, given the right sponsors and demonstrating the right possibilities.

Technologies To Look Out For In 2014
Spotting the next innovation, that could benefit customers or challenge the success of existing products, is top-of-mind for every company. Keeping a finger on the pulse of every innovation that could bring such a disruption can be daunting. At Cisco, a self-nominated team of enthusiasts, unaffiliated with any particular function or business unit take up the challenge of identifying technology developments worldwide. Technologies identified by this team are assessed by a panel of Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, Directors and VPs and a few are selected as novel and most relevant to Cisco.

Can Robots Better Spot Terrorists at Airports?
Aviation and government authorities are starting to use machines in lieu of people to verify the identities of fliers by scanning their faces, irises or fingerprints. Dozens of airports in Europe, Australia and the U.S. already employ such technology so passengers can pass immigration checks without showing identification to, or talking with, a person. Now, several major airports in Europe have started using these automated ID checks at security checkpoints and boarding gates.

Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

December 30, 2013

Managing Cyber Security Threats from Inside
In addition to NetFlow, security information and event management (SIEM) provides additional information about anomalous server or network behavior. SIEM solutions gather logs from various devices and systems, aggregating them into a correlation server. An event correlation application then mines unusual patterns or patterns known to be related to malicious behavior. Questionable activity is reported to security via email, SMS, or a Web portal.

Breaking down an IPv6 address: What it all mean
Let’s take a long hard look at an IPv6 address. Amazon supply IPv6 addresses with their EC2 cloud computers. ... There’s a lot of meaning packed into that strange-looking identifier. A few companies have tackled IPv6 but to most it’s just plain confusing. Why is it so confusing? And how can you decipher what it means? Connect to your AWS EC2 instance, find your network interface and its IPv6 address, and let’s do some serious IPv6 breakdown.

Introducing Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1
Many customers across the world now include EMET as part of their defense-in-depth strategy and appreciate how EMET helps businesses prevent attackers from gaining access to computers systems. Today, we’re releasing a new version, EMET 4.1, with updates that simplify configuration and accelerate deployment. EMET anticipates the most common techniques adversaries might use and shields computer systems against those security threats.

Software License Audits: Myths, Facts, and Microsoft
In this report, you’ll learn how ITAM and SAM in the Cloud “reboot” Microsoft software license audit preparation. By “reboot,” we mean shuttering some processes, optimizing others, erasing the problem, and starting a fresh new approach to audits. You’ll get a step-by-step action plan to prepare for an audit now. and you’ll learn the specific areas in which ITAM and SAM on the Cloud slash time- to-compliance-position while increasing accuracy and reducing organizational angst. With the ease, speed, and agility provided by Cloud-based ITAM and SAM, Microsoft audits become just “sheep in wolves’ clothing.”

Top 5 IT security webinars in 2013
2013 was the year IT security grew up. Leaks and prominent hacks were the focus for major news outlets and adoption of mobile and new targeted attacks were on the minds of IT security teams. ... The best IT security teams have moved from chasing security to proactively developing risk-based approaches and integrating their security practice with the business priorities of their organizations and the tools and services in the market have begun to reflect that. Without further ado, here are the top 5 IT security webinars in 2013:

Know your storage needs before installing a solid-state drive
With SSDs, Martin said, different drives are suited to different workloads, so it is important to select the right drive for your organization's needs. "SSDs, random, sequential, depending on the make, some of them are better than others, some it's the other way," he said. "It's a different animal." And, he noted, hard disk drives do well with sequential reads. So, depending on the workload, traditional disk may suit your needs.

2013: The tech year in cartoons
From Tim Cook's 'pay cut' to Steve Ballmer's 'retirement,' here's a look at some of the year's biggest IT stories from the pen of Computerworld's editorial cartoonist, John Klossner.

Carey Smith, on Becoming the Team’s ‘Hyperlink’
"I’m sort of a peripatetic manager, and I sometimes describe myself as a “hyperlink.” I have an office, but most of the time I just walk around and try to determine if we’ve got any problems. It might be a minor thing, but I’ll take that and then try to track it back. Sometimes you step on people’s toes, but the point is that everything and everybody are connected in some fashion. And they’re connected, if nothing else, through me doing this sort of thing."

Meet Business Demands by Making BI Effective and Relevant
To realize the full value of BI, businesses need to acknowledge how a solution fits with key business processes. The goal is to equip business users with consistent and specific information throughout all levels of the organization so each group or business unit can best understand and apply the information. The full spectrum of users—from the executive team to line-of-business managers—can use solutions that are relevant to their day-to-day responsibilities.

What does it take to transform an organization before a crisis hits
What can leaders do before the depth and scope of their companies’ crises come into focus? How can they initiate major transformations proactively? As researchers and managers who have been involved in numerous corporate transformations in recent years, we have learned that applying standard formulae to corporate transformations is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerous. What’s needed is a new approach that enables executives to transform organizations proactively without resorting to fear.

Quote for the day:

"You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations." -- Zig Ziglar

December 29, 2013

5 Top Social Media Trends For 2014
"It's no longer passed over as a fad or something that's going away any time soon," he said. "Social media is now part of our fabric of society, like mobile phones and computers -- it's a staple of our everyday life." In 2014, expect a shift in priorities: a bigger focus on social media monetization, user-generated content, a great acceptance of sharing information, and more. Here's a look at the big trends for next year.

The Three Power-People You Need on Your Team
The enemy of success is isolation. The higher you go the easier isolation becomes, but, it’s a devastating problem at all levels of leadership. Isolated leaders fear conspiracies and feel misunderstood. Worse yet, ivory-tower leaders resort to control through authority. Us/them thinking destroys influence. Defeat isolation and enhance success by developing a high-power inner circle.

Proposing Architecture and Process Governance for Risk Mitigation in Organizational Change
Transformation does present new and complex challenges entailing the need for a number of changes, mainly organizational and governance processes. It is therefore necessary to study and analyze the potential risks which may arise from such changes and transformations. This thesis proposes an integrated approach to managing the risks associated with both outsourcing and the transformation of the FTC into a civilian entity mainly in terms of change management, organizational and governance process, using Enterprise Architecture (EA) as leverage, supported by other disciplines and methodologies.

The Chief Data Officer: An executive whose time has come
It takes more than a steep investment, however, to squeeze business value out of data. Companies have to establish an entire system to use data to drive competitive advantage. I believe that the head of this system should be the Chief Data Officer (CDO), an executive whose time to shine has finally come. The sooner businesses can empower a CDO, the sooner they can turn data into a business weapon to achieve business success similar to the aforementioned companies.

Probability and Monte Carlo methods
A common use of the Monte Carlo method is to perform numerical integration on a function that may be difficult to integrate analytically. This may seem surprising at first, but the intuition is rather straight forward. The key is to think about the problem geometrically and connect this with probability. Let’s take a simple polynomial function, say

to illustrate the idea.

The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
Strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same. They usually have three major parts. The first is a vision or mission statement that sets out a relatively lofty and aspirational goal. The second is a list of initiatives—such as product launches, geographic expansions, and construction projects—that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goal. This part of the strategic plan tends to be very organized but also very long. The length of the list is generally constrained only by affordability.

Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack
The OpenStack community has a team working on CI and test automation for the OpenStack developers submitting code. They run their own infrastructure - an OpenStack cloud by itself. Given the complexity of the project, with dozens of dependent projects and over 300 contributors submitting patches every month, standard CI systems simply wouldn't work. We talked with Monty Taylor and James Blair to investigate the build and test challenges they face, and how they managed to tackle them.

Data protection and privacy law for developers
Data protection in EU countries is based on what's known as a "directive" - in this case, its 95/46/ec. The directive is prescriptive in some areas, and in others leaves things up to the interpretation of the national government. This means that in general, data protection and privacy legislation across the different countries of the EU is more or less the same, with some local differences. It's difficult to get things perfectly right in all jurisdictions, but if you start with the core rules, you are most of the way there.

Big Data and the Role of Intuition
Major big data projects to create new products and services are often driven by intuition as well. Google’s self-driving car, for example, is described by its leaders as a big data project. Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and Stanford professor, leads the project. He had an intuition that self-driving cars were possible well before all the necessary data, maps, and infrastructure were available. Motivated in part by the death of a friend in a traffic accident, he said in an interview that he formed a team to address the problem at Stanford without knowing what he was doing.

Establishing Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Seven Essential Steps
Today, the value of EA has become preeminent for most companies integrating their enterprisewide business applications. Many practitioners realize that in a rapidly changing and evolving business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve its flexibility in successfully deploying integration initiatives. EA can engage both the business and IT teams from the beginning, and EA metrics can present a consistent vehicle to measure most of the critical elements of business value.

Quote for the day:

"Goals are like stepping-stones to the stars. They should never be used to put a ceiling or a limit on achievement." -- Denis Waitley