Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 13, 2014

Review: 4 NAS appliances deliver big storage cheap
The four contenders in this roundup -- the LenovoEMC PX12-450r, the Infortrend EonNAS 1510, the Netgear ReadyNAS 4200, and the QNAP TS-1279U-RP -- are all 12-bay rack-mount systems that provide as much as 48TB of SATA storage. They can serve as iSCSI SAN targets, handle light server and database workloads, and support file sharing among Windows (SMB/CIFS), Apple (AFP), and Linux (NFS) clients. Naturally, they're also ideal targets for network backups, and they can easily replicate those backups off-site.

Agile Retrospectives: Why They Matter
Working with external entities and their different operating models can often prove challenging for organizations. Thus, "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" (Agile Manifesto) proves to be an integral principle in the region of Influence, as it encourages organizations and individuals to involve the end-user/customer/external entities earlier in the process of strategy and implementation to avoid surprises down the road, minimize technical debt and sunk costs over time, and deliver on a consistent cadence.

What Ever Happened to the 'FIDO Alliance' That Was Going to Revolutionize Authentication?
The Fast IDentity Online Alliance, as it's officially known started with six founding members, including PayPal chief information security officer Michael Barrett and the start-up Nok Nok Labs, founded by Ramesh Kesanupalli, as a core technology provider. Nok Nok Labs is building prototype code to support the new authentication specification called the Online Security Transaction Protocol (OSTP).

Answering Common Cloud Security Questions from CIOs
With the news stories of possible data breaches at enterprises like Target, and the current trend of companies migrating to cloud environments for the flexibility, scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness they offer, CIOs have been asking hard questions about cloud security. As CIO, protecting your data (and your users) is one of your key responsibilities. Whether you already have some cloud projects running or are starting your first cloud project, these questions and answers may provide you with solutions and introduce some new techniques.

The Business Technology Challenge of 2014: Information Optimization
Information optimization is a new focus in the enterprise software market. It builds on existing investments in business applications, business intelligence and information management and also benefits from recent advances in business analytics and big data, lifting information to higher levels of use and greater value in organizations. Information optimization also builds on information management and information applications, areas Ventana Research has previously researched. For more on the background and definition of information optimization, please see my colleague Mark Smith’s foundational analysis.

Brace yourself for a virtual sea change in storage
IT pros usually feel passionate about storage and have specific interests in the topic. In many cases, storage constitutes one of the largest investments (if not the largest investment) in the data center. That said, it's very much our responsibility to give a serious look at all of the new storage technologies that are available. There has been quite a lot of noise made about one upcoming technology: VMware Virtual SAN. It will soon exit beta and is quite popular with many virtualization professionals in the industry.

3 Ways To Steady Your Leadership in a Changing World
Why, we often wonder, does someone fall away in their leadership role? What happened within these individuals that allowed them to drift from promise to demise? And how do we not only spot the signs, but keep ourselves from meeting the same fate? Like a taproot that anchors a tree in order to weather the storms it’s exposed to, we as leaders need to keep ourselves steady. It’s a slow fade from having character to having no credibility, so we must put certain practices into our daily lives if we’re to remain relevant and continue to make a positive impact in our worlds.

Big data on wheels
The bottom line: data automatically generated by cars provides a fantastic “fuel source” for big data and analytics. In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the automotive industry will be the second largest generator of data by 2015. This estimate is not surprising, since some plug-in hybrid vehicles generate as much 25 GB of data in just one hour. Fun fact: the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the leader in machine data is the utilities industry, with its bevy of smart meters, usage trackers, geographic sensors and other monitoring technologies.

Microsoft Loses a Number to Try to Gain a Future
Power BI offers ways to move all kinds of data into and out of Excel’s rows and columns, both from corporate databases and from other data sources that Microsoft has gathered by crawling the web, and ways to clean it up so the numbers can work reliably. Public data is stored in Azure, which also serves as a link to proprietary data that corporate customers can look up from the field. The “BI” stands for “business intelligence,” the kind of comparative data analysis that is done both by stalwarts like SAP and by younger companies like Tableau Software.

Banks push for tokenization standard to secure credit card payments
Debit and credit cards based on the EMV technology use an embedded microchip, instead of a magnetic stripe, to store data and are considered almost impossible to clone for fraudulent purposes. Though the rest of the world moved to the technology years ago, the U.S. has lagged behind for a variety of reasons. However, after the recent Target breach that exposed data on 40 million debit and credit cards, calls to adopt the standard in the U.S. have become more strident. MasterCard and Visa have said they want merchants and banks to be ready to start accepting EMV cards by October 2015.

Quote for the day:

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” -- Harvey S. Firestone

February 12, 2014

For international travelers, is basic business data security enough?
Lackey said travelers may encounter a greater quantity of threats abroad, but much like how most traffic accidents happen within a mile of one's home, users are more likely to be compromised by the Wi-Fi network of a local café they frequent than a connection they use in a foreign country. To protect devices while abroad, Lackey advised travelers to take as few computing devices as possible, especially to Russia and China, and to ensure that the software running on all machines is updated to the latest version available.

Technology plays greater role in relationships
"I think tech is mostly helpful to relationships," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "It gives people the ability to communicate in more and different ways. Text messages make it easy to toss out those quick 'I'm thinking about you" or 'I'm thinking about you, and I'm still mad about last night' messages. Communication isn't only about good things, right?" Olds said he's not surprised that more people didn't complain about technology getting in the way of their relationships or at least irritating them

U.S. to offer companies broad standards to improve cybersecurity
Exactly one year after President Barack Obama issued an executive order directing a Commerce Department agency to compile voluntary minimum standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, is due to issue guidelines, which companies have no obligation to adopt. Drafters of the framework had to allay concerns by many in the private sector that their voluntary standards could someday become regulations. The threat of restrictive rules has helped stall progress on passing a cybersecurity law in Congress.

CRM Will Be at the Heart of Digital Initiatives for Years to Come
"CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in coming years. This is one technology area that will definitely get funding as digital business is crucial to remaining competitive," said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. "Hot areas for CRM investment include mobility, social media and technologies, Web analytics and e-commerce." Gartner expects CRM market growth to stay moderate in 2014, following three strong years of investment. CRM software revenue is forecast to reach $23.9 million in 2014, with cloud revenue accounting for 49 percent.

Regulation leads list of top ten risks for 2014
Regulatory changes and scrutiny are the risks business leaders are most concerned about for 2014, according to a new survey conducted by North Carolina State University’s Enterprise Risk Management Initiative and consultant Protiviti. “It’s a message for policymakers,” said Jim DeLoach, CPA, a Protiviti managing director. “… The bottom line is, it does have a cost in that it does affect business and it does affect decision-making around hiring and investing.”

FATCA tax deal with U.S. takes some heat off Canadian banks
Canada has finalized a deal with the U.S. government that takes a lot of heat off of Canadian banks — but could spell big problems for thousands of their customers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and National Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay have signed the agreement to implement the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Introduced in the U.S. in 2010, the law is meant to track down U.S. tax cheats living abroad.

Is user activity monitoring the only way to spot stolen credentials?
Automated security tools can only take an organization so far in this battle, Chuvakin noted, regardless of what many vendors would lead enterprises to believe. ... "A lot of things can be done by algorithms, but there is still the need for somebody to say, 'That looks pretty bad,' or 'No, based on what I know, this is not a compromise.'" Chuvakin said. "That's just the context that a machine may not have, but the human analyst can figure it out."

Attackers use NTP reflection in huge DDoS attack
The attack could be larger than the one last March against Spamhaus, a spam-fighting organization and CloudFlare customer whose website was hit by a 300Gbps DDoS attack, which was considered to be the largest in history at the time. CloudFlare reported then that it caused congestion at critical Internet exchange nodes in Europe. However, other companies later challenged the reported impact.

5 Ways We Neglect Our Own Creativity - And How To Bring It Back
Building things with our hands, words, and minds can be a bit terrifying. Our subconscious is at work during the creative process and sometimes what lives there can be scary. But while your mind might be telling you to run the other way, resist the urge. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it in his Letters to a Young Poet: "Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?” In other words: It pays to be a little tortured.

Big Data Analytics for Security
Big data analytics—the largescale analysis and processing of information—is in active use in several fields and, in recent years, has attracted the interest of the security community for its promised ability to analyze and correlate security-related data efficiently and at unprecedented scale. Differentiating between traditional data analysis and big data analytics for security is, however, not straightforward. After all, the information security community has been leveraging the analysis of network traffic, system logs, and other information sources to identify threats and detect malicious activities for more than a decade, and it’s not clear how these conventional approaches differ from big data.

Quote for the day:

"Success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to changes as they occur" -- Jack Welch

February 11, 2014

Microsoft staffs up its evolving Internet of Things team
Microsoft is staffing up its Internet of Things (IoT) team that is part of its unified Windows division and may be expanding its charter, as well. The IoT team, at least originally, was the renamed Microsoft Embedded team, according to a couple of sources of mine. Microsoft management moved the Embedded team from under the Windows Server group to the unified Windows org under Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson last fall.

RenewIT: The EU Project Focusing On Green Energy
The project will be led by the energy research center at the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) and will use experts on renewable energy systems (from Aiguasol in Barcelona) and energy storage (at the Technische Universität Chemnitz in Germany), data center monitoring (Loccioni in Italy), workload and application energy management (BSC) and energy efficient data center design (Deerns in Amsterdam).

Shape the Culture You Want through the Stories You Tell
One of the values that Johnson believed in and that he wanted to instill in his team at Facebook was rewarding the people who fixed stuff. The natural tendency for many engineers is to gravitate toward working on new and innovative systems, but the unsung heroes tend to be the people who helped make an existing system much faster or who systematically reduced a system’s error rate to make it more reliable. They’re the ones who worked on the less glorious tasks but were instrumental in getting things to work.

The Modern CMO's New Best Friend
Many CMOs have had to learn about data—and social, and analytics, and more—on the job. Trial by fire is fine, as long as that doesn’t turn into a full-time job as a fire fighter. However, without a strong analytics background, CMOs often feel they have the right strategies—yet no defensible or go-to strategies for repeating the solutions. The fact is, many shunned data as cold and out of touch with the emotional drivers of consumer behavior. The opposite is true today, with the volume of data on customer sentiment at an all-time high.

Creating Cloud Optimization with Network Intelligence
The direct proliferation of cloud computing has resulted in a huge boom in traffic over the WAN. There are more users connecting, a lot more data points, and the modern data center sits right in the middle. Throughout this entire cloud evolution – the infrastructure was forced to change as well. Edge and core routing needed to evolve to handle this influx of traffic and new content. Service providers as well as enterprises deploying demanding, mission-critical applications are facing unique networking challenges.

Handling Open Source Licensing
Arun Kumar, GM, Red Hat India says, “In an industry where there are changes and developments every single day, we have engineering teams that track every single change--a bug fix, security enhancement, or others, and ensure our customers’ mission-critical systems remain up-to-date and stable. It is not easy to do this, but with a team that is constantly on its toes and tapping into every single development, we have managed to provide the best services to our clients time and again.

Researchers uncover cyber spying campaign dubbed 'The Mask'
Raiu said The Mask hit government institutions, oil and gas companies and activists, using malware that was designed to steal documents, encryption keys and other sensitive files, as well as take full control of infected computers. The operation infected computers running Microsoft Corp's Windows and Apple Inc's Mac software, and likely mobile devices running Apple's iOS and Google Inc's Android software, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Nesting Levels in SQL
In SQL there is a hierarchy of data in which the outer level is the schema or database. The database is made up of tables (which can be base or virtual tables). Each table is made up of a set of rows. These rows have no ordering, but all have the same structure, so it is proper set. Each row is made up of columns. The columns are scalar values drawn from a domain; a domain is set of values of one data type that has rules of its own. These rules include the type of scale upon which it is built and reasonable operations with it.

CIO interview: The Met's Richard Thwaite on its Total Technology IT strategy
The main challenge in delivering the strategy is in getting the business to think through the implications of the technology, he says. The IT team needed to translate how technology could help achieve those goals. “Fundamentally, the tech is pretty old,” he says. “It’s had a long life and we’re at the state where it needed a lot doing in terms applications and infrastructure – it needed a complete refresh.” But reductions in budgets, combined with increased performance expectations, will have an effect on how the Met goes forward with its latest approach to IT.

Learning to Embrace Changing Requirements
The principles of agile software development were first proposed thirteen years ago. Unfortunately today there is a lot of confusion around what it is and how it should be used. I attribute this in large part to the fact that it became an industry buzz-word where “agile” became synonymous with “good” and the ubiquitous two-day training on scrum processes watered down the original intent of the agile software development manifesto.

Quote for the day:

"Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it." -- Colin Powell

February 10, 2014

This smartphone will self-destruct in 5 seconds
DARPA said on its website that it's looking for devices, such as sensors, radios and phones, that work as well as off-the-shelf commercial options but can be remotely triggered to break apart. IBM has been tasked with developing materials, components and manufacturing capabilities. The company, according to DARPA, is working on a "strained glass substrate" that will shatter. A trigger, such as a fuse, will be used in at least one, if not multiple, areas on the device.

Shouldn't there be a better way to curate global threat intelligence?
Curating threat intelligence has become one of the hottest topics in security. Gathering information regarding the threat landscape isn't a new concept, but determining what actually constitutes threat intelligence is still fuzzy, and its current buzzword status in the industry isn't helping. Indeed, vendor marketing teams use the term liberally when promoting their products, replacing the "next-gen" hype with this new version of security secret sauce.

Black Day at I/O Gulch
Not long ago, a crack team of SQL Server experts was flamed for a crime against database normalization they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from the taunts of academic relational theorists. Today, they survive as Website editors and software evangelists. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the DBA-Team.

The Principles of Effective Risk Management
Enterprise Risk Management is one of the core domain of Governance. In some business sectors, the success depends on an intelligent and effective risk management principles, framework and practices. The advancement in technology, like big data and analytics also plays a key role in making the risk management effective and adding value to the business. Other factors that necessitate a well architected ERM in an organization include, regulatory & compliance needs, security and privacy expectations, disasters and business continuity needs, etc.

To Succeed with Big Data, Begin with the Decision in Mind
BWTDIM means identifying the decisions that matter to your organization, the decisions that make the difference between hitting your targets and missing them, the decisions that “move the dial.” These decisions may be strategic or tactical decisions but are also often operational, day-to-day decisions that must be made at the front lines of your organization like the call center, the branch or the warehouse. BWTDIM means understanding how you must make these decisions, and how you might make those decisions to more effectively hit those objectives.

Why Open Government Data Makes Sense for India
Open Data Platform set up by NIC can be accessed at data.gov.in. This platform enables all government departments to contribute their datasets in open format. Thus, datasets are contributed are processed through a predefined workflow system for approval for publishing on the data portal. Citizens can access open data platform to browse, and search for the data that is relevant to their needs and can also download the datasets. Not only citizens, civil society, academia, research organizations, journalists and many others who need data for variety of purposes are the potential users of this platform.

Automakers push envelope on wearables, augmented reality despite regulatory concern
Another key area of focus for automakers going forward is creating unique augmented reality applications for use both inside and outside the car. “With wearables, that is another way of adding even more relevant user interface,” said Dominique Bonte, London-based vice president and practice director at ABI Research. “This is a way for the auto industry to bring advanced interfaces into the vehicle and bring more entertainment services into a vehicle in a non distractive way.

New network architectures and traditional components: Why both are key
To clients with questions about where to invest in their core networks, Chandler said he ultimately advises them to sit tight. "I believe we are looking at two things right now," he said. "The initial push was development of southbound APIs, so there was a lot of talk about OpenFlow and vendor-specific APIs. Now I think the second shift is over the programmatic access to the network, and now we don't care so much how we talk on the southbound API from the controller. There is much more interest in the controller and the applications the controller can run."

Maintaining PCI Compliance is a Big Challenge for Most Companies
The problem has to do with a tendency by many companies to treat PCI compliance as an annual end goal rather than treating it as part of a continuous risk management effort. "Too many companies still look at PCI as pure compliance and don't use it to mitigate risk," Simonetti said. "Often, compliance is managed as a project -- particularly as the build phase of a project." Once compliance is achieved, many companies simply stop paying attention, he said. "It is really a failure to use compliance standards and tools and a day to day basis," Simonetti said.

The Secrets of Database Change Deployment Automation
Dealing with database deployments is tricky; unlike other software components and code or compiled code, a database is not a collection of files. It is not something you can just copy from your development to testing and to production because the database is a container of our most valued asset – the business data, which must be preserved. It holds all application content, customer transactions, etc. In order to promote database changes, a transition code needs to be developed - scripts to handle database schema structure, database code, and content used by the application.

Quote for the day:

"Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it." -- Jim Rohn

February 09, 2014

Quantum Internet: First Teleportation to a Solid-State Quantum Memory
One of the building blocks of the quantum Internet will be quantum routers that can receive quantum information from location and route it on to another without destroying it. So the race is on to demonstrate this kind of technology, which has the potential to revolutionize communications. Today, Felix Bussières at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and a few pals say they’ve taken an important step towards this. But crucially they’ve done it for the first time over the kind of ordinary optical fiber that telecommunications that are in use all over the world.

Managing product binaries in virtual application pattern workloads
When you develop your virtual application pattern workload to be installed on IBM PureApplication System, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, or IBM Workload Deployer, you will encounter situations where your plug-in needs to manage product binaries. The product binaries may be yours or from a third party vendor such as IBM, SAP®, or Oracle®. In this article, you will see different strategies that you can follow to manage the product binaries and how your plug-in can access and install the binaries. You will also understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of these different strategies.

Interview: Ubuntu Takes on Hyperscale Using Open Source Technology
Ubuntu makes it easy to deploy and use the widest range of applications possible: from nginx to memached. We focus on making Ubuntu the best quality we can – everything should work beautifully. Not only do we deliver the widest range of applications, but we deliver them like clockwork every six months. This means that anybody who needs the most recent version of an application can get it easily. Another quality that users like is that Ubuntu is available everywhere – both on the desktop and on the server – making it an ideal OS for developers.

Why Wearable Computing is Waiting for A.I.
You could be eating in a restaurant, and Google Glass could, for example, tell you that it's the spot where your father proposed to your mother. Or that your friend will be late because of traffic, the salmon got bad reviews online, your parking meter will expire in 20 minutes, or the bathroom is through the bar and up the stairs to the right. Imagine that such knowledge could simply appear into your field of vision at the exact moment when you want to know it. That's where wearable computing is going. That's why the wearable revolution is mostly an artificial intelligence revolution.

How LinkedIn Uses Apache Samza
The most basic element of Samza is a stream. The stream definition for Samza is much more rigid and heavyweight than you would expect from other stream processing systems. Other processing systems, such as Storm, tend to have very lightweight stream definitions to reduce latency, everything from, say, UDP to a straight-up TCP connection. Samza goes the other direction. It wants its streams to be, for starters, partitions. It wants them to be ordered. If you read Message 3 and then Message 4, you are never going to get those inverted within a single partition. It also wants them to replayable, which means you should be able to go back to reread a message at a later date.

3 Ways To Be An Effective Self-Leader
As a self-leader, this is where you take the initiative to get the direction and support you need to do an activity or achieve a goal. Depending on the amount of competence and commitment you have in any one area, you need varying degrees of support and direction from others. On my fitness journey, I realized that there were some areas of fitness where I needed close supervision and direction because I was an enthusiastic beginner with very little competence.

Heat System Called Door to Target for Hackers
Over the last two years, Mr. Rios and Terry McCorkle, also of Qualys, said that they found 55,000 HVAC systems connected to the Internet. In most cases, they said, the systems contained basic security flaws that would allow hackers a way into companies’ corporate networks, or the companies installing and monitoring these systems reused the same remote access passwords across multiple clients.

Cloud computing defined: Characteristics & service levels
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Although this widely-adopted description of what makes a cloud computing solution is very valuable, it is not very tangible or easy to understand. So let’s dive a little deeper into cloud computing and why it’s different than just visualization alone, which is commonly mistaken to be cloud computing as well.

Bitcoin’s Political Problem
Money is always political. This is obvious enough when we argue about Federal Reserve policy in the United States, or who should next chair the interest rate-setting body. But for over 1,000 years, we have argued about the nature of our monetary systems and shifted between different ways of making payments. Seen in this historical context, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just the latest in a long line of challenges to prevailing technology—and to current political arrangements.

Anonymous targets Singapore govt with second tweetstorm
Anonymous has stepped up efforts to raise awareness over ongoing criminal procedings in alleged hackers in Singapore linked to the hacktivist group. ... The arrests included those of James Raj Arokiasamy, alleged to be the hacker under the moniker "Messiah", linked to the defacement of at least one government Web site; what it dubbed the "Singapore 5", comprising 5 men accused of civil disobedience involving pro-Anonymous graffiti on a wall; and also "the plight of all the anons involved".

Quote for the day:

"Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories" -- Polybius

February 08, 2014

7 ways Big Data can help your BI solution
Big Data continues to be the buzzword du jour. And as with most popular concepts espoused by everyone from marketers and consultants to purveyors of software and infrastructure, the phrase can mean different things to different people. For us at Sullexis, we think of Big Data as a set of technologies that enable our clients to consume and process high volumes and/or diverse types of information. But our clients need ROI. Neither access to a large amount of diverse data nor possession of the most sophisticated Hadoop stack of Big Data technologies will generate ROI without the right application.

MobileFirst, API's, and PaaS - Field Perspective
Enterprise back ends have grown more complex. The larger the enterprise, the better the possibility that you have to fetch data from a shared back end. This leads developers to develop an application Domain Model that represents the business view of the application. When an application will have to access multiple back ends then a Domain Model typically referred to as a Canonical Data Model, which represents the data model for an enterprise and maintains relationships to different back end systems.

Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis
When working with raw data we’re often encouraged to present it differently, to give it a form, to map it or visualize it. But all maps lie. In fact, maps have to lie, otherwise they wouldn't be useful. Some are transparent and obvious lies, such as a tree icon on a map often represents more than one tree. Others are white lies - rounding numbers and prioritising details to create a more legible representation. And then there’s the third type of lie, those lies that convey a bias, be it deliberately or subconsciously. A bias that misrepresents the data and skews it towards a certain reading.

Phones, Browsers, and Search Engines Get a Privacy Overhaul
Blackphone, a smartphone to launch next month, is perhaps the most ambitious of these projects. The Android handset will function like a regular smartphone but has a series of modifications to protect the privacy and security of its owner. Blackphone is a joint venture between Spanish smartphone manufacturer Geeksphone and Silent Circle, a company that Phil Zimmerman, inventor of the PGP encryption software (see “An App Keeps Spies Away from Your Phone”), founded to make apps that encrypt voice calls and text messages.

This iPhone-Sized Device Can Hack A Car, Researchers Plan To Demonstrate
The Spanish researchers’ work adds to a growing focus in the security industry on the vulnerability of networked automobiles to hackers’ attacks. Before the Defcon hacker conference last July, researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek put me behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer and a Toyota Prius and then showed that they could plug their laptops into a dashboard port of vehicles to perform nasty tricks like slamming on the Prius’ brakes, jerking its steering wheel and even disabling the brakes of the Explorer at low speeds.

Personal History May Thrust New Microsoft CEO Into Visa Debate
Nadella earned a master's degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Neil Ruiz, a senior policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, doesn't believe that Microsoft is trying to make any policy points with the Nadella appointment. But by nature of his background, "he can add a more human touch to the Microsoft message" in the immigration debate.

How to Avoid Irrelevance, Guaranteed!
You might be an innovator, developer, organizer, maximzer, or activator. But, irrelevance looms large if you can’t apply your strengths – in relevant ways – to the people you serve. Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was mentored by Drucker. Lafley listened to his mentor. The first core strength of P&G is a deep understanding of the customer. (Game-Changer by Lafley and Charan)

NoSQL Vs. RDBMS for Interactive Analytics: Leveraging the Right and Left Brain of Data
Limiting the structured versus unstructured debate to just operational use cases ignores three key factors for downstream analytics: the tools, domain expertise and SQL compatibility gaps in the current NoSQL ecosystem, the challenges of exporting and warehousing volumes of this changing, semi-structured data and hidden costs of leveraging operational databases for complex, ad hoc analysis. Here is what organizations must additionally consider for their analytics needs as they evaluate NoSQL and RDBMS.

Are Analytics Shifting Power from Executives to Employees?
Executives can no longer hoard decisions at the C-suite level. Savvy executives are realizing they must now delegate and distribute decision rights deeper into their organization to empower their managers and employees. This is because of the exponentially growing mountain of data, both structured (numbers) and unstructured (text) data including social media, and a sped-up and volatile world. In my imagined pyramid, the executives are at the top, just like in an organization chart. Their decision types are strategic ones.

Why effective Web app firewalls are worth the investment
Many organizations look at Web app firewalls as protection technologies that are deployed to detect and stop attacks before they can result in some sort of loss or compromise. This is certainly desirable, but, as previously discussed, actually achieving these results can be challenging and involve hidden or unplanned costs. An alternate way to look at a WAF deployment is to consider it a way to gain intelligence about the application's usage and attack patterns.

Quote for the day:

"The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender." -- Vince Lombardi

February 07, 2014

An innovation management approach where ideas don't go to die
Intuit Inc. knew it had to change up its approach to innovation management when employees started complaining that its collaboration tools were the graveyard where good ideas went to die -- that's not good for a company that had reinvented accounting practices with its financial software. The upshot was Brainstorm, explained Roy Rosin, vice president of product management and innovation at the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. In this podcast excerpt, Rosin outlines the steps to building a culture of innovation and why serial disruption is a necessary part of the idea creation process.

Starbucks hits $1B in mobile payment revenues in 2013, analysis says
"In general, we're really encouraged that customers have embraced [the program]... and are keeping track of loyalty points," Jantzen said. "We very much value our customers and their loyalty." Starbucks for years has tracked alternative payment technologies to barcode scanning, such as near field communications on smartphones, but the coffee seller decided to go with what was available and proven when it launched mobile payments in early 2011.

Are Purchasing Practices Killing Your Software Projects?
Heads-I-win, tales-you-lose pricing. I go on endlessly about the perils of fixed-price projects; namely, how they can poison the agile methodology that's the core of lowering project costs. Asking a consultant to absorb the risk of fixed price can mean doubling the bid. Some clients take it a step further with "hourly rates, with not-to-exceed" clauses. This makes perfect sense to every purchasing manager in the world, but it contaminates your project with sloppy thinking, gamesmanship and an adversarial relationship. Agile requires trust. If you aren't willing to start there, go back to waterfall.

You won't believe what happened when Microsoft made Bill Gates its "Technology Advisor"
As a business, one option is to grow into that new space. The other, my preferred option if I'm being honest, is that they don't. So what's the deal? Does the Nadella+Gates combo mean that Microsoft is going to focus on enterprise IT, work on just that core business, and keep it safe? That for me works fine. But if the idea of this is that Gates is the person who can lead Microsoft out into a greater universe where enterprise IT plays a tiny role? I can't see that working so well.

Outside the Box: NoSQL Document Databases

What JSON allows is for an application developer to manage the information that they store about a particular object - customer, product, region, etc. - without having to go through the process of checking the database, asking for a change request, etc. The processes of the "modern" IT department have become too ordered (and some might say immovable) to make a nimble adjustment as business and technical requirements arise.

Virtual PM – It’s Virtually Everywhere

Soooo … is project management virtually everywhere? Well, a lot of people pursue and attain their objectives in less-than-smart ways, but, sure, PM is everywhere, even if it’s not recognized as such. Think about the two main information streams that support smart project management decision-making: earned value, and critical path methodologies. Sound daunting, don’t they? Well, they’re not. Follow me on this little mental exercise for proof.

Enterprise innovation management strategy guide
CIOs and other top IT executives play a vital role in creating enterprise innovation programs that deliver both short- and long-term benefits. Over time, as innovation becomes “business as usual," it's necessary to refresh and revitalize the innovation process, and be prepared to deal with the organizational obstacles that accompany it. This guide is part of SearchCIO.com’s CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

US to push for mandatory car-to-car wireless communications
V2V communications use a variation of the 802.11 wireless network standard used by laptops and mobile phones, but instead link cars, which can share position and speed information with each other 10 times per second. That can let one car reliably detect when another in front is braking hard, for example. V2V technology initially will assist drivers, but NHTSA is considering linking it to "active safety technologies that rely on on-board sensors." That could let a car brake or steer to avoid a collision without driver involvement.

Get Ready for Big Data Heists
Already there has been the massive plastic card data theft in South Korea, affecting about 60 million cards; the Target Corp. credit card disaster involving up to 40 million customers; the hacking of 16 million German e-mail accounts; data security breaches at Nieman Marcus Inc. and Easton-Bell Sports Inc.; and a group of Russian hackers who compromised the computer systems of Western energy and defense companies, governments, and academic institutions. We're still in January. These security breaches were all different but had a common cause: negligence

The Future of PaaS in Cloud Computing
There has been a raging debate about Platform-as-a-Service and whether it is still a valuable part of a cloud portfolio, so InfoQ reached out to four leaders in the cloud domain for their opinions on the future of PaaS. In this interview, cloud advocate Krishnan Subramanian, cloud developer Dan Turkenkopf, cloud executive JP Morgenthal, and cloud expert James Urquhart discuss misperceptions about PaaS, and its role in the future of cloud computing.

Quote for the day:

“Lead from the back - and let others believe they are in front.” -- Nelson Mandela

February 06, 2014

The Performance of the T-SQL Window Functions
Microsoft introduced the first of the class of window functions in two flavors: Ranking and Aggregates, and released further functions in subsequent releases. ... Although there is no doubt that the window functions add richness to the SQL language, greatly simplifying the syntax and queries they appear in, we’re still left with the nagging doubt as to whether they are as fast as the older methods. They’re more easily maintained, but are they faster? This is what we want to find out.

NASA CIO unable to implement effective IT governance
"NASA's current IT governance model weakens accountability and does not ensure that IT assets across the Agency are cost effective and secure," writes the OIG. NASA's governance model is composed of three governance boards that report to the mission support council; there are also sub-boards and working groups. "We found that the complexity of the board structure and a lack of documentation and training to explain the interrelationship of the boards has led to confusion among agency IT personnel about the roles and responsibilities of the boards and diminished their value to the governance process," write report authors.

Integrated Independent Testing – Alternative Approach To Software Quality Assurance
... in this paper an alternative approach – Independent Integrated Testing that helps in reaping the majority of the independent testing benefits in addition to optimizing the test cost is proposed. This approach utilizes the services of the specialized testers and at the same time tries to optimize the effort by eliminating a longer bug life-cycle process. The details of the approach are elaborated in the subsequent sections. To bring out the differences between the two methods clearly, at first the independent testing approach is explained and then the new approach.

Microsoft's Cloud Chief on Windows Azure, Tools and More
Known as "ScottGu," Guthrie is notorious for the red polo shirts he sports at events where he is a big draw in coding demos. Guthrie has spent his time at Microsoft in the company's developer and cloud groups. He worked his way up to the role of corporate vice president of the .Net platform in company's Developer Division and later became the corporate vice president of Windows Azure, which he left for his new position

Big Data, the Internet of Things and the Death of Capitalism?
Rodney Brooks, former Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT and founder of Rethink Robotics, says "We're at the point with production robots where we were with mobile robots in the late 1980s... The advances are accelerating dramatically." The Rethink Robotics videos show some agonizingly slow-motion action, but it doesn't need Clayton Christensen to recognize a potential disruptive innovation here. The process about to be disrupted is the manual labor involved in a whole variety of repetitive but loosely bounded activities on assembly, packaging and similar production lines.

New ITSSM Tool, or Nah?
There is no shortage of information available to help you make a decision, and the authors surmise that we tend to trust “the averages” over our instincts — but not as much as we should. We lock ourselves in an “inside view,” which is our evaluation of our specific situation. This plays out on my inquiry calls with clients, who conclude that their IT organization is a mess and that a new technology solution will be the catalyst for positive change.

The Cost of Risk Avoidance
What they are missing is that certainty comes at a cost. Certainty robs us of a just reward, the very incentive that motivates us to pursue opportunity in the first place. The fallacy that risk avoidance somehow is without cost and therefore an acceptable strategy fails to consider opportunity cost. Too often opportunity cost is disregarded because we base our decisions on superficial criteria or the immediacy of a potential negative effect.

Study Finds Companies’ Mobile Computing and Business Intelligence Preferences Changing

Organizations looking to deploy mobile BI solutions need to recognize that their existing infrastructure will certainly become inadequate over the course this this year. The folks that I’ve spoken with that have deployed mobile BI had to really bolster their data infrastructure because the existing data warehouse or whatever solution they used couldn’t handle the mobile load. People use mobile devices more frequently to query BI data. Multiply that times hundreds or thousands of users, and it will exhaust the resources most organizations have.

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

Red Hat brings SOA to the cloud
JBoss Fuse Service Works provides additional tools to help administrators manage complex workflow environments that run on JBoss Fuse. It includes SwitchYard, which provides an service orchestration interface for building workflows and defining business logic. It provides tools for establishing and enforcing organizational policies, and exposing services so they can be found elsewhere in the organization.

Quote for the day:

"A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness." -- Jim Collins

February 05, 2014

Software [in]security and scaling automated code review
As the tools have matured to cover a broad range of vulnerabilities, they have in general evolved for integration into a build process on a big build server. That means in some cases they may not be feasible for use at the developer desktop. Simply put, the industrial-strength tech eats a workstation alive. ... If a developer has to tie up her development workstation for two to three hours to run a scan on a single build component, the result is that her productivity diminishes as she waits around for results.

Interview: The Need for Big Data Governance
There are three main ways bad data gets into systems, and they’re all essentially technology-agnostic. The first is during data migration. Before you go live on a new system, you will normally bulk load some information. If your initial data load contains poor quality data, it can be really expensive to fix. If you’re talking about an ERP system, it can break essential business processes like being able to bill customers. A big data project could lose credibility with the users if they see a lot of data issues. It’s simpler and cheaper to prevent bad data getting in in the first place.

British intelligence used DDoS tactics against Anonymous, Snowden documents show
The British spy agency GCHQ secretly waged war against the hacker collective Anonymous a few years ago, according to documents taken from the NSA by Edward Snowden and revealed late Tuesday by NBC. At the time, certain members of Anonymous were themselves waging war against British government institutions and various companies.

Audit committees increasingly uncomfortable about cyber threats
“Given the rapidly growing public, political and media profile of the cyber threat, it is very worrying that audit committee members feel more concerned now about the issue than they did a year ago,” said Stephen Bonner, partner at KPMG. “It shows that either companies are losing the battle against cyber criminals, or they are still not yet fully engaging with the threat. It is a difficult issue that takes many executives and non-executives out of their comfort zone. However, it is simply too big and fast-growing a risk for companies to tackle half-heartedly.”

Those many faces of fraud
The past few years have seen several headline-grabbing incidents of corporate fraud in India. These have not just tested the Indian ‘trust-based’ business framework, but also sent ripples across the business community and stock markets. In many ways, India woke up to the reality of fraud in the past few years. It realised that it was not a Western phenomenon, but a universal one. Greed is, after all, a human failing. Predicting a fraud before it occurs is, at least for now, the subject of science fiction.

Strategies and Code for Creating Fluent APIs
There are numerous ways to implement a fluent API, depending on the degree of control you want to maintain over the API, how many classes you want to be able to use it with, and how you want to extend your API. Here are your options. In an earlier column, "Implementing a Fluent Interface," I showed how to create a fluent API for a single class. However, there are other strategies that offer more flexible solutions.

When No One Is Just a Face in the Crowd
“Just load existing photos of your known shoplifters, members of organized retail crime syndicates, persons of interest and your best customers into FaceFirst,” a marketing pitch on the company’s site explains. “Instantly, when a person in your FaceFirst database steps into one of your stores, you are sent an email, text or SMS alert that includes their picture and all biographical information of the known individual so you can take immediate and appropriate action.”

Senate cybersecurity report finds agencies often fail to take basic preventive measures
“Almost every agency faces a cybersecurity challenge,” said Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president on cybersecurity policy. “Some are farther along than others in driving awareness of it. It often depends on whether they’ve been in the crosshairs of a major cyber incident.” ... The report concluded that the department had failed even to update essential software — “the basic security measure just about any American with a computer has performed.”

SHA-1 to SHA-2: The future of SSL and enterprise application security
Organizations should push ahead with the upgrade to SHA-2 now and not hope for a last-minute reprieve despite the fact that no SHA-1 collisions have yet been found. The areas that will require the most work are legacy systems that make SSL connections, and software and hardware such as game consoles, phones and embedded devices that rely on hard-coded certificates. These certificates will all need to be replaced and have the software updated if they are unable to currently support SHA-2 encryption.

12 predictions for the future of programming
To help you prepare for -- or at least start contemplating -- a future that's screaming across the sky faster than we can see, we've compiled a dozen predictions about how the next five years of programming will shake out. Our crystal ball is very subjective, and some of the following conjectures might not prove universal. Some won't be fully realized in five years. Others are already true, but the extent of their truth is not as well-established or widely known as it will be fairly soon.

Quote for the day:

"Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger."-- Arnold Palmer

February 04, 2014

A Cost Analysis of Media Consumption using System Dynamics Modeling
Compare the heavily discounted cost of $3/GB for disk to the average price of 10¢ to 13¢ per GB for tape. Or in the case of our simulation and model, $102.9M for a disk architecture and $3.4M for a tape architecture. With a difference of more than 30x the cost for disk than tape, one needs to step back and consider if they really want to jump into the world of disk based backup without considering ways to lower the total cost of ownership. The fundamental cost in the average enterprise is the retention of data that is backed up. With altering the retention level of data backed up, we can effect an impact on the TCO.

Satya Nadella's to-do list: Here are the first 10 battles Microsoft's new CEO will have to fight
And now finally Microsoft has finally ended the wait by confirming that Satya Nadella is to be its new CEO. Nadella needs to get moving as soon as possible; after months of Microsoft's staff effectively treading water while waiting for a new chief to be appointed, he'll have an overflowing inbox and many decisions to make about the future direction of the company and its products. Here are some of the knotty interrelated issues Microsoft's new chief executive will have to struggle with sooner rather than later.

Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Cloud Career and IT Skill Set
New data center demands are creating a wide array of new types of specialists. Engineers become architects, programmers become cloud designers, and database administrators become data scientists! There are a lot of new and interesting options out there to help you push your career to the next level. To be successful in the IT and cloud arena you’ll have to optimizeyour existing skill set. With that, let’s take a look at 10 great ways you can accomplish this.

Predictive Analytics: Finding the Future in Big Data
Using PA to properly assess risks based on actuarial data and proven hypotheses can mean the difference between new product ROIs and catastrophic liability. Weather models forecasting everything from hurricanes to sea-ice melt allow scientists to measure the effects of climate change and illustrate future scenarios. Crime prevention, genomics, human and knowledge performance indicators, natural resource exploration, project management, and other disciplines have stakes in PA.

The Persistent Imbalance Between Supply and Demand for Software Development Labor
We're currently in the midst of another structural increase in the demand for software development labor, this time being driven by analytics and smart devices (the alleged "internet of things", from cars to coffee pots), with the odd halo application (e.g., wearable tech) thrown in for good measure. Every indication is that for the foreseeable future, demand for software developers will continue to increase at a rate faster than the supply of software developers available to develop it. What does this mean to the business of software?

Healthcare among most opportunistic use cases for boundaryless information flow improvement
In the healthcare landscape, and in other industries, there are a lot of players coming to the table and need to interact, especially if you are talking about a complex episode of care. You may have two, three, or four different organizations in play. You have labs, the doctors, specialized centers, and such, and all that requires information flow. Coming back to the methodology, I think it’s bringing to bear an architecture methodology like provided in TOGAF.

The Enterprise IT Infrastructure Agenda for 2014
Procurement of hardware, software, and services required to operate an enterprise environment is becoming more challenging for senior infrastructure managers. Even as more procurement spending is devoted to software, many infrastructure organizations continue to use techniques developed for hardware procurement. These techniques are not entirely effective given software’s product fragmentation and relatively high switching costs.

Despite Target data breach, PCI security standard remains solid, chief says
"Any time there's a breach it sheds a spotlight on what we do," Russo said. But instead of pointing fingers at PCI, there should be more focus on working collaboratively to address security issues in the payment card industry, he said. "Everybody is looking for a silver bullet," in the wake of the recent breaches, said Russo, who is scheduled to testify before Congress pn Wednesday on the issue. "As far as I know, no silver bullet exists. It's a combination of people, process and technology."

Debug / Inspect WebSocket traffic with Fiddler
This is my first time writing code project article. Thanks for your supports. I have recently written a project using SignalR, which supports HTML 5 WebSocket. However I cannot find good tools to debug or inspect WebSocket traffic. I know that both Chrome and Fiddler support inspecting the WebSocket traffic, but they are very basic. If you have very high volume of traffic or each frame is very large, it becomes very difficult to use them for debugging. I am going to show you how to use Fiddler (and FiddlerScript) to inspect WebSocket traffic in the same way you inspect HTTP traffic.

Mobile device management vs. mobile application management
Mobile device management and mobile application management are two of the more popular technologies for enabling secure smartphone and tablet use in the enterprise. They have different use cases, but some of their features overlap, and more vendors are combining the two technologies into single products. That means mobile device management vs. mobile application management isn't necessarily the discussion you should be having in your IT department.

Quote for the day:

"If you define your company by how you differ from the competition, you're probably in trouble." -- Omar Hamoui