Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 05, 2014

Pre-installed malware found on new Android phones
After taking a close look at the suspicious application, Jevans said they found it wasn't the real Netflix app. "We're like, yeah, this isn't the real Netflix," Jevans said "You've got one that has been tampered with and is sending passwords and credit card information to Russia." Security experts have long warned that downloading applications from third-party marketplaces for the Android platform is risky since the applications have often not undergone a security review. Google patrols Android apps in its Play store, but malicious ones occasionally sneak in. Apple's App Store is less affected due to the company's strict reviews.

Creating cool animations and transitions in HTML5 app for Intel Android devices
One of the most exciting features of HTML5 is the <canvas> element that can be used to draw vector graphics and engender astonishing effects, interactive games, and animations. The HTML5 Canvas is picture-perfect for creating great visual material that augments UIs, diagrams, photo albums, charts, graphs, animations, and embedded drawing applications. HTML5 Canvas works with JavaScript libraries and CSS3 allowing you to create interactive web-predicated games and animations.

A .NET Developer Primer for Single-Page Applications
... a lot of .NET developers (especially in the enterprise) are dealing with an extreme amount of anxiety about JavaScript best practices, architecture, unit testing, maintainability and the recent explosion of different kinds of JavaScript libraries. Part of the trend of moving to the client side is the increasing use of single-page applications (SPAs). To say that SPA development is the future is an extreme understatement. SPAs are how some of the best applications on the Web offer fluid UX and responsiveness, while minimizing payloads (traffic) and round-trips to the server.

Treating healthcare data as an asset
One of the most challenging things any chief information officer (CIO) or chief medical information officer (CMIO) faces is getting support from across constituencies to transform the culture in IT and lines of business, not only to be more data-driven, but to recognize the value of combining data across silos to get greater insights. So, what is the catalyst to help get things started? ... when the executive leadership in an organization isn’t getting the reports and insights they need to make strategic decisions that make or break the business

Microsoft Tries to Relieve Security Fears with Office 365 Makeover
This kind of authentication was introduced to the Azure Cloud platform last September. Its introduction to Office 365 is the extension of a feature that has been available to administrators since the middle of last year, but clearly the level of risk for cloud services now is so great that Microsoft is offering it to everyone. This addition of multi-factor authentication is part of Microsoft ongoing effort to enhance security for Office 365, Andrew says, but it is not the only new step that is being introduced. The Office 365 team is already working on improving Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365 from Office 2013 client applications.

The next wave of cars may use Ethernet
Currently, however, there are as many as nine proprietary auto networking specifications, including LIN, CAN/CAN-FD, MOST and FlexRay. FlexRay, for example, has a 10Mbps transmission rate. Ethernet could increase that 10 fold or more. The effort to create a single vehicle Ethernet standard is being lead by Open Alliance and the IEEE 802.3 working group. The groups are working to establish 100Mbps and 1Gbps Ethernet as de facto standards.

18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently
Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person. "It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self," Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. "The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds."

How this one innocous tweet could hack a bank account
Based on just his name and his employer, would that be enough to steal his identity and take over his life? The bet was laid and the plan we formulated was simple enough: To gather enough intelligence about Alex to convince his call center operator at his bank that I was him. Like something out of a Mission Impossible film, I would have to bypass the automated phone system, steer through the security questions, and — armed with a fictional and empathy-driven sob story — socially engineer my way into his bank account.

Managing and Developing the Extraordinary
Let’s face it, some people are graced with an extra gear that the rest of us don’t have. Whether it’s remarkable creativity or ingenuity, or incredible technical skills, it’s exciting to manage and support extraordinary individuals. It’s also very challenging. Good managers and leaders tailor their approach for individuals, however, when presented with someone who is light-years beyond their peers in certain areas, many managers stumble and struggle when it comes to daily management and on-going support and development. Here are some suggestions for strengthening your support of these unique individuals.

Internet Of Things: What About Data Storage?
The impact on storage at first seems fairly obvious: There is more data to store. The less obvious part is that machine-generated data comes in two distinct types, creating two entirely different challenges. First, there is large-file data, such as images and videos captured from smartphones and other devices. This data type is typically accessed sequentially. The second data type is very small, for example, log-file data captured from sensors. These sensors, while small in size, can create billions of files that must be accessed randomly.

Quote for the day:

"In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins:cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later." -- Harold Geneen

March 04, 2014

SAFe – Good But Not Good Enough
SAFe distinguishes three levels, portfolio, program, and team. Activities at this level are different, and SAFe describes fairly well how to hook them together. We might prefer self-organization, but the SAFe breakdown isn’t bad and parts of it are good. The advice may not be Pure Agile but it’s Pretty Darn Good.Scrum and Agile really don’t offer much help at these levels, and large organizations have these levels or equivalents. Without guidance these levels are likely to be inefficient and to militate against Agile ideas. SAFe’s guidance is better than no guidance at all.

Six Creative Leadership Lessons From The Military In An Era of VUCA And COIN

Of course, thinking historically, military leadership is among the most ancient of leadership forms. That long view, combined with the diverse military activities across so many different societies today, means that references to “military leadership” can point to a wide range of practices. The category is, consequently, an expansive one, which can contribute to partial understanding and even the creation of a “straw man” about which selective claims can be attached. The military itself, long committed to leadership training and practice, has increasingly engaged in reflection and research on the topic.

Citrix At A Crossroads: Which Path Forward?
One interesting coincidence is that Templeton’s announced departure coincided with Microsoft’s search for a new CEO. Citrix and Microsoft have long been allies. Microsoft gave Citrix access to the OS/2 source code to build its product, and Citrix later created Microsoft’s Terminal Server technology, which is still used under the Remote Desktop Services label. Citrix has mostly been in lockstep with Microsoft from a strategy perspective. How this relationship develops under new leadership, given that Citrix’s portfolio has diversified and is no longer completely reliant on Microsoft, is another area to watch.

10 creative ways businesses are using tablets
Tablets can provide a customized user experience that businesses can use to create better ways to interact with customers. You've probably heard about businesses using mobile devices to gather analytics on the shopping or buying behaviors of their customers, but there are other tablet usage stories. We've compiled a list of 10 creative ways companies are using tablets.

A CIO who masters disasters
If Halamka had been the CIO of Target, you get the impression that the retailer's breach would have been handled differently. "Be open, be honest, be forthcoming, hide nothing and use it as a podium, a bully pulpit to move an entire industry," said Halamka. Commenting on Target's handling of its security breach, Halamka said he would have advised disclosing the severity of the incident fully, up front, instead of building up to it. "Customers would rather hear about what you experience and why it is making you stronger and what adversity you are working through," said Halamka.

Securing endpoint devices with code-execution prevention
While most organizations have antivirus software (AV) installed on employee devices, too many use it as their only means of endpoint device protection rather than relying on it as a first line of defense. Simply put, AV is not able to stop all malware. So along with regular patching to prevent known exploits from being a threat, administrators must deploy additional controls to decrease the chances of attacks against users being successful.

Open source challenges a proprietary Internet of Things
In December, the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium that promotes Linux adoption, created the AllSeen Alliance. It took a code stack developed by Qualcomm called the AllJoyn Framework and put it under its open-source umbrella. This C++ code supports the major operating systems, chipsets and embedded variants. Any electronics or appliance maker, or even an LED light bulb maker that uses the AllJoyn code will have a basis for connectivity with another product that also uses the code.

Intel expects Bay Trail successor in tablets by year end
The Cherry Trail chip, which will be made using the 14-nanometer process, will be even faster and more power-efficient than Bay Trail, which is made using the 22-nm process. Users can expect better battery life and performance in tablets with Cherry Trail compared to the current Bay Trail chips. The new 14-nm manufacturing process will allow Intel to make denser chips that are more power-efficient. Intel could target the new Cherry Trail chips at high-end tablets during the holiday season this year, and may push the Bay Trail tablet into the lower price ban

MIT builds self-completing programs
“When you’re trying to synthesize a larger piece of code, you’re relying on other functions, other subparts of the code,” Rishabh Singh explains. “If it just so happens that your system only depends on certain properties of the subparts, you should be able to express that somehow in a high-level language. Once you are able to specify that only certain properties are required, then you are able to successfully synthesize the larger code.” For instance, Singh explains, suppose that one of the subparts of the code is a routine for finding the square root of a number, and a higher-level function relies on the results of that computation.

Can You Measure Business Agility?
Organizations structure themselves in response to the external environment. If the external environment is predictable and relatively resistant to change (as it was during the License Raj in India), traditional means of work, which emphasize division of labour and efficiencies arising out of economies of scale, should be the way to go. But in an intense, volatile environment as we have today, companies must embrace the agile culture and structure, to compete out there.

Quote for the day:

"When I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I'm tempted to think there are no little things" -- Bruce Barton

March 03, 2014

Make BYOD Work: 9 Key Considerations
The benefits of BYOD are clear: The practice promotes productivity and has the potential to save on hardware costs. But the options available to manage personal devices can be confusing. IT organizations must weigh software and hardware for mobile device management, device and identity partitioning, virtual machines, wireless access points, network access control, and custom mobile applications.

Knowledge Banking for a Hyperconnected Society
Technology enables us to build new content based on the knowledge generated from the available data. It also offers the customer an improved experience. The bank no longer needs to wait for the customer to request a given service; it can anticipate the customer’s decision-making process, offering what he or she needs at the right time and in the most convenient format. To achieve this banks must take their place at the forefront of Big Data analysis and make use of all the information they have amassed about their customers, as well as the wealth of available external data, particularly sourced from social media.

Threats in the Cloud – Part 2: Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
On a daily basis, Microsoft’s DDoS protective measures apply mitigations to prevent impact from DoS and DDoS attacks to ensure uptime and availability for services and customers. Common types of attacks include SYN floods, DNS amplification, malformed TCP and UDP packets, and application layer abuses specific to HTTP and DNS. One common attack technique used by a number of freely available DDoS toolkits involves using fragmented IP packets with a fixed payload.

How Open Data Portals Will Stimulate Innovation and Economic Growth
According to Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission, opening up public datasets could double the value of it to around € 70 billion. Subsequently, such data portals can be used to create applications that can help improve society, tackle economical problems and drive economic growth. There are ample benefits for both governments and businesses. According to the Capgemini report, Open Data Portals can drive revenue, cut costs and improve efficiency and generate employment for future generations. Governments for example can increase their tax revenues though increased economic activity or make money through selling high value added information for a price.

Managing Data Center Operating Expenses: “The Property Tax”
The reality is that the assessor may only have one or two such properties in their jurisdiction, he/she may have never seen one sale in that area, and they aren’t likely exposed to the larger “world” of the national data center market. So to that end, we’d like to address a few items that you should be sure to explore in considering whether your tax assessment valuation has been thoroughly and properly considered by the assessor:

Speaking Intelligently On Business Intelligence
The real value of intelligence, both inside and outside of government, comes from the ultimate understanding of human intention, and from a nuanced perception of the context in which decisions are made. For governments, that critical element tends to come from human intelligence – or “HUMINT,” in insider parlance. The same holds true for the investigative journalist, though you’d be hard-pressed to find one who would readily admit his source work and techniques are so closely aligned with the practices of the intelligence community.

In-Memory Databases: Do You Need The Speed?
First, databases that take advantage of in-memory processing really do deliver the fastest data-retrieval speeds available today, which is enticing to companies struggling with high-scale online transactions or timely forecasting and planning. Second, though disk-based storage is still the enterprise standard, the price of RAM has been declining steadily, so memory-intensive architectures will eventually replace slow, mechanical spinning disks.

Up-and-Coming IT Leaders Focus on Business Customers
"The distance between us and the customer is traditionally far too big. It's immense. You might have a guy doing coding or testing who will take his requirements or direction from a project manager who might work with a business analyst who works with a product person who works with a salesperson who talks to the customer. There are five or six steps between the person providing us with the real need and the person actually delivering that. My view is, you have to cut all those steps out and have as much direct contact with the customer as possible," Sewell says.

When Start-Ups Don’t Lock the Doors
Many of the companies, including Kickstarter and Tinder, have rushed to improve their overall security after they were breached. Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging service that repeatedly ignored warnings about a data breach that exposed millions of user names and phone numbers, eventually acknowledged the loophole and hired Peter Magnusson, a head of engineering at Google, to help improve the company’s security efforts. Even so, as Snapchat has gained more users, it has also lured spammers, who have taken to sending malicious ads and links using the service.

Don't let governance methods die after a cloud migration
"Cloudifying" your governance practices means finding out what your proposed provider and other viable competitors offer. It's critical to know whether you have governance practices that are "fragile," or might fall short of regulations in case you switch providers. There are companies that specialize in tracking global compliance requirements, which are a good resource for companies considering all areas in which they may be at risk.

Quote for the day:

"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is." -- Scott Cook

March 02, 2014

Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story
Continuous and evolutionary improvement would occur only once the redesign had been implemented. Once the new system was in place, Kanban would act as a catalyst for process improvement through visualization of the work-units and the associated metrics, which would identify waste, variability and, bottle-necks. However, this type of continuous improvement could only occur once we achieved much higher levels of predictability, and this could only happen once the Kanban method including WIP limits had been fully implemented

App Listens for Danger When You’re Not Paying Attention
The crux of One Llama’s technology is what the company calls its “artificial ear.” When sound enters your ear, it travels through the spiral-shaped cochlea, which is lined with tiny hair cells that vibrate like tuning forks when hit by certain frequencies. One Llama’s artificial ear is a software version of this—essentially, a bank of digital tuning forks that measure sounds. It’s based on work that cofounder David Tcheng and others conducted at the University of Illinois, where he is a research scientist. The company claims this method can be speedier and more flexible than other common methods for analyzing the different frequencies of the vibrations that we hear as sounds.

The Magick Behind ImageMagick
ImageMagick consists of nearly a half million lines of C code and optionally depends on several million lines of code in dependent libraries (e.g. JPEG, PNG, TIFF libraries). Given that, one might expect a huge architecture document. However, a great majority of image processing is simply accessing pixels and its metadata and our simple, elegant, and efficient implementation makes this easy for the ImageMagick developer. We discuss the implementation of the pixel cache and getting and setting image properties and profiles in the next few sections.

5 Ways to Improve Your PCI Compliance Program
While PCI is no guarantee that you won't experience a data breach, Simonetti says organizations should think of PCI compliance like a seatbelt: It won't prevent you from crashing, but it may well save you if you do. PCI DSS is a set of international security standards created and maintained by the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) in an effort to ensure that merchants and service providers appropriately protect CHD, whether from a debit card, credit card, store card or company purchasing card.

Augmented Reality Gets to Work
There’s also hope that augmented reality can make things easier for workers who are away from the office or the factory. Gabriel Weiss, who oversees augmented reality projects at Mitsubishi Electric, says the company is using software from augmented reality software company Metaio on Epson’s Moverio smart glasses to test whether air conditioner service technicians benefit from a three-dimensional overlay that shows them the components of the company’s most popular residential air conditioner.

Custom Assertions in Java Tests
Having a more powerful set of assertions provided by AssertJ or Hamcrest is nice, but this is not really what we wanted in the case of our HourRange class. Another feature of matcher libraries is that they allow you to write your own assertions. These custom assertions will behave exactly as the default assertions of AssertJ do – i.e. you will be able to chain them together. And this is exactly what we will do next to improve our test. We will see a sample implementation of a custom assertion in a minute, but for now let's take a look at the final effect we are going to achieve.

How Stable are Your Unit Tests? Best Practices to Raise Test Automation Quality
Part of the above failure is that for test automation to perform within expectations, JVM instances are usually reused, at least within the same project. Therefore ideally unit tests should have no side effects on their test environment, to prevent such failures. The test environment includes various resources that can influence tests executed afterwards, such as creating files on the file system or as in the case above, altering Java system properties. For files, JUnit offers the TemporaryFolder rule to create temporary files, so we built a similar mechanism for properties.

Tackling the ongoing problem of endpoint defense
Next to perhaps only firewalls, endpoint security figures as the network world's oldest defense. But while its history is old, the basic problem of protecting the PC on the desk has never fully been solved. Rather, the difficulty has increased as the number and kinds of endpoints multiply, particularly with the rise of mobility in the majority of endpoint devices and increase in the sophistication of the attacks. In this Essential Guide, learn everything you need to know to develop or refresh your enterprise endpoint strategy.

BrightCloud Threat Intelligence Services and Endpoint Breach Protection Solution
"At Webroot, we reject the prevailing notion that organizations cannot be protected from attacks on their endpoint devices. We believe that most internet security problems can be addressed if the business can apply comprehensive security knowledge at that moment of truth when they are faced with a threat," said Mike Malloy, executive vice president of products and strategy at Webroot. "Both BrightCloud Security Services and the BreachLogic Endpoint Agent are designed to enable businesses to take action more quickly by combining our vast threat intelligence and continuous monitoring of events in their environment."

Adaptive Computing Introduces Big Workflow to Accelerate Insights
While current solutions solve big data challenges with only cloud or only HPC, Adaptive Computing utilizes all available resources—including bare metal and virtual machines, technical computing environments (e.g., HPC, Hadoop), cloud (public, private, and hybrid) and even agnostic platforms that span multiple environments, such as OpenStack—as a single ecosystem that adapts as workloads demand. Traditional IT operates in a steady state, with maximum uptime and continuous equilibrium. Big data interrupts this balance, creating a logjam to discovery.

Quote for the day:

"Only 2 words always lead to success. Yes & no. You've mastered saying yes. So start practicing saying no" -- Jack Canfield

March 01, 2014

Information Governance Can No Longer Be Confined to the IT Department
Historically, responsibility for data management is left primarily with the IT department. However, the growing complexity of information governance and the ramifications if it goes wrong mean that this narrow approach is no longer appropriate. Instead, responsibility for information governance should now be a boardroom level issue, with input from the compliance team and significant input from the legal team, whether internal or external and from other specialists.

Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal
“The data themselves, unless they are actionable, aren’t relevant or interesting,” is Nathan Eagle’s view. “What is interesting,” he says, “is what we can now do with them to make people’s lives better.” John Quackenbush says simply: “From Copernicus using Tycho Brahe’s data to build a heliocentric model of the solar system, to the birth of statistical quantum mechanics, to Darwin’s theory of evolution, to the modern theory of the gene, every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.”

Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Trends
A common pitfall with task-based IAs is difficult-to-scan category names. Organizations think that category names need to start with verbs or follow an “I need to...” pattern in order to be task based. This isn’t necessary. Sometimes trying to fit link or menu labels to a specified format makes them long and more difficult to scan, because the most meaningful words don't appear until the end of the label. Task-based IA doesn't require any particular grammatical structure for labels; it just means grouping information according to how employees use it, rather than by who creates and maintains it.

One third of Fortune 100 organisations will face an information crisis by 2017
"There is an overall lack of maturity when it comes to governing information as an enterprise asset," said Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. "It is likely that a number of organisations, unable to organise themselves effectively for 2020, unwilling to focus on capabilities rather than tools, and not ready to revise their information strategy, will suffer the consequences." Business leaders need to manage information, rather than just maintain it. "When we say 'manage', we mean 'manage information for business advantage', as opposed to just maintaining data and its physical or virtual storage needs," said White.

Usability between information design and information architecture
A complete usability test has to consider several key criteria of a website: page identifier, transition elements, downloading time, and testing the pages on different browsers. Even all of these are taken into account, an information designer should be careful with the users’ reaction. During a usability test they might be impressed by spectacular graphic elements and their feedback is not always very relevant. Hackos and Redish describe a case when users rejected a product after the usability test.

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

Big data, big business, Big Brother?
Berkman's Larry Lessig nails it when he says that we need norms, laws, technology and markets to deal with this tremendous power the '6 Memes' are giving us. Yet right now, most users are like kids toying with handguns, and BigDataCo's are acting like kids in a candy-store. Can we really trust those new data-oil companies, those behemoths of smart-data-mining to not fall prey to the temptation of instrumentalizing us, to not use their armies of servers and their powerful algorithms for the most nefarious 'monetization' purposes, and to not use that very same information to tacitly or otherwise support the creation of perfect surveillance states?

Facebook’s Plan to Conquer the World — With Crappy Phones and Bad Networks
As Facebook looked out across the globe it wanted to conquer, it saw a mish-mash of unreliable networks, low resolution screens, and shitty processors. There were all manner of various flavor of Android, problems with local language support, confusion over pricing, and unreliable or non-existent power grids. There’s the question of how you make social connections between people with no address books, no email address, no university affiliation, and who are perhaps the very first person in their village to sign up for Facebook. The challenges weren’t just difficult, they were epic.

Biggest of all data, Internet of Things
Teradata, a global analytic data platform, applications and services company, revealed that customers will be able to add Java Script Object Notation data to their data warehouse. This is a significant advancement, because JSON is the primary language that powers the Internet of Things, a global collection of millions of sensors and embedded microprocessors. Current Online Transaction Processing technology allows for transactional processing of JSON data. However, the OLTP technology does not allow for scalable analytics on massive data volumes, which is provided by Teradata’s parallel processing analytic engine.

Are You Too Old to Land a New IT Job?
"You have to be current. That is key, especially in IT," Gillis says. "I find it disturbing when I speak to clients who are older and they aren't spending time studying, staying hip and up-to-date on new technology advances," he says. "If you've been looking for a job for six months, you have to realize how much has happened in that time -- learn about emerging technology. Know the terminology. Be able to show that you've added to your knowledge and your skills," Gillis says, and be able to demonstrate how that knowledge and your skills have positively impacted previous employers.

Quote for the day:

"Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones." -- Theodore Roosevelt

February 28, 2014

Five Essentials for Successful Information Security Training
The hype over the latest security breach in the headlines always fades away. Business executives, network users, and even IT professionals talk the talk when the topic is hot – making promises to do better. In a very predictable fashion, people get back to their old ways of doing things. They then proceed to let their guard down. And then it happens, again. Another big security breach. If there’s anything positive that comes from this common mode of operation it’s that small, incremental changes are often put in place, both through people, business processes, and technical controls.

Security researchers urge tech companies to explain their cryptographic choices
Fourteen prominent security and cryptography experts have signed an open letter to technology companies urging them to take steps to regain users' trust following reports over the past year that vendors collaborated with government agencies to undermine consumer security and facilitate mass surveillance. ... The letter was an initiative of the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation and outlines 10 principles, both technical and legal, to which signatories believe technology companies should adhere.

10 public cloud security concerns you shouldn’t ignore
It’s not news that businesses are moving more of their data to the cloud. But even as cloud storage and computing have hit the mainstream, there are a lot of questions around the public cloud – ones that not everyone is asking. For Mark Russinovich, technical fellow of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Azure cloud platform group, the public cloud has helped businesses grow, but there are still many concerns for data security and privacy. He pulled together a list of 10 concerns that security professionals should consider when putting their organization’s data into a public cloud.

ThoughtWorks Interview: Agile Principles & Global South
Many people are extremely passionate about Agile software development. It is a model which strives to be collaborative and is based on solid democratic principles of sharing expertise. The Agile Manifesto describes how: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” In fact, at over a decade old Agile still generates a bizarre mix of either excitement or fear in a lot of organisations.

China’s President Will Lead a New Effort on Cybersecurity
“Efforts should be made to build our country into a cyberpower,” Mr. Xi said in a statement released after the first meeting of the group on Thursday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The announcement comes as Mr. Xi is solidifying power, mounting a bold crackdown on corruption at the top of the Communist Party and pushing through overhauls aimed at strengthening and restructuring the country’s economy.

10 tips for surviving your new leadership role
Being dropped into a role of leadership is both a compliment and burden. And it can be a bit overwhelming, too. With expectations coming at you from the top and bottom, it's difficult to know where to start. Here are 10 tips garnered from colleagues and personal experience, each one vitally important in successfully managing both campaigns and staff.

Google Android chief: Android may be open, but it is not less secure
Naturally, responding in such a self-critical fashion would have raised a few eyebrows. However, Google has provided a full transcript of the executive's commentary -- one which sheds a very different light on the issue. Instead of Android not being geared towards security, Pichai actually said that the open nature of the platform gives the OS better scope in threat protection -- as many minds, developers and security experts can pitch in and both fix problems and shore up defenses.

Cloud security concerns are overblown, experts say
Today, though, security concerns are still the major inhibitor of cloud adoption at many large companies. The concerns are most significant among those IT executives considering a cloud migration. Those who have already made the leap appear mostly satisfied with cloud security, the panel agreed. An Intermap survey of 250 decision makers at medium and large companies found that 40% of those who described themselves as "cloud-wary" cited security as their biggest impediment to adoption. In contrast only about 15% of "cloud-wise" respondents felt the same way.

Four Tips for Walking Your Innovation Talk
Employees at all levels take their cues from management, which makes it essential that senior executives practice what they preach. And that means a climate of innovation must start at the top, ideally with senior leaders who are both inspiring and dedicated. Through years of innovation training for the world’s foremost companies, my firm, futurethink, has identified an effective formula for leadership role modeling.

How to be recognized as a young leader
“What are some good ways to get recognized as an emerging young leader in your organization without sounding like you’re trying to toot your own horn?” My mother always told me if you just kept your head down and did good work, you would get ahead in your career. While there is certainly some truth to that advice, there’s a lot more to it when it comes to getting noticed for your leadership potential.

Quote for the day:

"I don't think you can ever do your best. Doing your best is a process of trying to do your best." -- Townes Van Zandt

February 27, 2014

An introduction to SDN can help server admins reach across silo lines
Network-specific challenges include tracking the location of production workloads within the physical infrastructure. Orchestration and automation enable horizontal scaling and can request both network and compute services based on the needs of the application. This isn't an approach for just virtual servers; it also allows for big data applications that scale their physical footprints based on the size of the data. The ability to have what are called northbound and southbound application programming interfaces (APIs) from the virtual network to the physical network is what enables these new capabilities.

Q&A: Gunjan Sinha of MetricStream on Evolution of GRC
Now there is real weight behind this stuff, and putting weight behind it is how to change culture, and to link compensation to this. The whole business of governance, risk and compliance has to become pervasive and go down to each and every employee, supplier, vendor, stakeholder, and can’t be limited to the select few trying to make this happen. A five-year headline–what I’m seeing in the next five years–is a pervasive cultural transformation of compensation linked to these cultural changes. It is becoming a proactive science rather than the reactive process and the way people were dealing with it before.

Partners with R
There's a lot of excitement from everyone at OpenBI surrounding the soon-to-be-released RScript transformation plugin for Pentaho Data Integration. With its rich, open source functionality, PDI's long been OpenBI's platform of choice for ETL, data integration and wrangling. Now its considerable capabilities can be combined in transformation flows that promote the building of R data structures from complicated inputs, as well as facilitate computations in R that broadcast to, for example, model-scoring and report-writing steps. We believe PDI-RScript can be a productivity boon for data science professionals.

A Telepresence Machine to Watch the Kids or Visit Grandma
The Beam+ is designed so that once installed in a home, anyone with the login credentials can bring it to life and start moving around. The operator’s interface shows the view from a camera over the screen, as well as a smaller view looking down toward the unit’s base to aid maneuvering. A user drives it by moving a mouse over their view and clicking where they want to go. The first 1,000 units of the Beam+ can be preordered for $995, with later units expected to costs $1,995. Both prices include the charging dock to which the device must return every two hours.

RSA's Coviello breaks keynote script, takes on NSA controversy
He used company history to set RSA up as an agent for change. He outlined RSA's early work with the government, on open source toolkits and the evolution of algorithms before he took mentioned the NSA controversy. "Unlike nearly 20 years ago when we were seen as leading the charge against the government to secure the privacy of digital infrastructure, we've been accused of being on the other side of that battle," Coviello said. He went on to say the situation called for context on the state of the industry and the state and evolution of RSA's business.

Has Hybrid Cloud Arrived ? Part 1
Hybrid cloud enables organisations to innovate faster by enabling rapid, self-service provisioning of resources, with the choice to deploy workloads in an enterprise’s own data centre or in the public cloud in a pay-as-you-go and scaled out manner. Hybrid clouds enable multiple use cases such as dev/test, capacity augmentation and disaster recovery besides control of Shadow IT. There is an increased trend towards hybrid cloud as it offers flexibility to respond quickly to business needs and allows reduction in cost.

eBook | Network Security Now
The IT Security threat landscape has changed quickly - and now businesses themselves are changing quickly as well. As mobile and cloud computing continue to remake enterprise IT, how can security keep up? In this FierceITSecurity eBook, IT and networking professionals will find practical, real-world advice on how to handle network security now. Download this free eBook today to find out: Tips for dealing with budget limitations; Keys to setting smart policies; How to educate employees; and Benefits of prioritizing risks

Flash technology infiltrates the data center with SSD systems
A growing number of companies are deploying flash technology with SSD systems. Though far from perfect, SSDs provide compelling benefits. Enterprises need to balance high costs vs. dramatic performance improvements as SSD storage encroaches on HDD storage in the data center. Solid state drives (SSDs) came into high-performance enterprise, military and industrial data centers nearly 25 years ago, for niche applications that needed real-time cache and where the environment was too harsh for standard magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs).

Get Ready for Big Data to Take the Wheel: Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Vehicles are beginning to dynamically interact with roads and each other. An estimated 900,000 front-to-rear vehicle crashes per year in the U.S. cause injuries and deaths and cost about $2 billion, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Equipping cars, trucks and buses with sensors and network connections can ensure that vehicles avoid danger, saving lives and money. Technology is also changing where and when we drive.

The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering
Capers Jones wrote the book The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering in which he provides an overview of the evolution of information technology and software development. The book starts by describing the human drive towards faster computation, followed by 9 chapters that cover developments in software engineering from 1930 until 2010. Major software failures that have happened in these years are explored in a separate chapter. The final chapter of the book describes ongoing developments and provides a projection of the future until 2019.

Quote for the day:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal" -- Henry Ford

February 26, 2014

Amazon's WorkSpaces: Why is it needed?
While WorkSpaces are based on Windows Server and include traditional office applications, they can be linked to a wide variety of devices through custom WorkSpaces clients. These devices harmonize the applications' GUI (essentially, Windows 7) with the specifics of the client devices. Amazon uses the Teradici PCoIP protocol to create a secure link between the WorkSpaces instances in the cloud and the clients, and because the protocol carries only the GUI and not the underlying application data, there's inherently less exposure of secure information as well as encryption and authentication (via Active Directory) protection for applications.

RSA 2014: Principles key to digital world, says Microsoft
Adherence to the principles of security, transparency and privacy means that Microsoft does defence and not offence, said Charney. It also means Microsoft does not put back doors in its products and services, which in any case would be economic suicide, he said. “People have asked if our Defender anti-virus product will raise alerts if it finds government surveillance software, but the answer is simple. We don’t care what the source or the motive of malware is.

Coca-Cola’s New Marketing Map: Is It Better?
This blog entry focuses on two issues: What went wrong with Coke’s social media marketing? and How can Coke get more bang for fewer bucks? The nadir of Coca-Cola’s disconnect with fans and readers is its millions of Likes, which often result in fewer than 100 comments. Its largest market is the US; this is where its weakness is most evident. Meanwhile, Diet Coke faces rising concerns over artificial sweeteners. Coca-Cola has announced that profits fell by 8.4 percent in the last quarter of 2013, and it is now eyeing US$1 billion in cuts.

eBook: Fundamentals of SQL Server 2012 Replication
Fundamentals of SQL Server 2012 Replication provides a hands-on introduction to SQL Server replication. The book begins with a short overview that introduces you to the technologies that make up replication. In the following chapters, the book will walk you through setting up different replication scenarios. All hands-on exercises are designed with security best practices in mind. When you're finished working through the exercises, you will be able to implement your own multi-server replication setup while following the principle of least privilege.

DataStax adds in-memory option to Cassandra database
Besides being fast, the in-memory option introduced with DataStax Enterprise 4.0 is also easy to use, and allows developers to treat in-memory objects the same way they would regular Cassandra tables. The platform is based on the 2.0 release of the open-source database, which adds support for lightweight transactions and includes improvements to the native query language that make it a bit easier to import data from relational systems. That helps clear a migration path for slow-moving enterprises with large-scale Oracle investments to sustain—a task that consumes a lot of time and resources but doesn’t generate any quantifiable value.

Five Things Developers Need to Know About PaaS
As with any new technology or approach to doing business, PaaS will appeal to different groups for different reasons. The clear business value is that PaaS is added at the application layer. For ISVs, PaaS can help extend the availability of a traditional software product or enable organizations to add new capabilities to their existing IT spectrum. It's also helpful to anyone wishing to achieve productivity gains, speed time to results, or reduce their costs. But like any technological shift, PaaS adoption requires changes in how people work and demands collaboration if it is to be as successful as possible.

SQL Server Indexed Views: The Basics
Indexed views can be a powerful tool, but they are not a 'free lunch' and we need to use them with care. Once we create an indexed view, every time we modify data in the underlying tables then not only must SQL Server maintain the index entries on those tables, but also the index entries on the view. This can affect write performance. In addition, they also have the potential to cause other issues. For example, if one or more of the base tables is subject to frequent updates, then, depending on the aggregations we perform in the indexed view, it is possible that we will increase lock contention on the view's index.

How to dispose of unwanted backup media
Whether you write your backups to removable media, spinning disks, or some combination of the two, your backup media will eventually wear out and need to be replaced. Of course, this raises the question of how best to dispose of unwanted backup media. The problem with backup media disposal is that your backup media contains sensitive data. Even if the data really doesn't seem all that important, there is no shortage of surprisingly creative uses for various forms of stolen data. As such, it is clearly in your best interest to make sure that the contents of old backup media do not fall into the wrong hands.

Microsoft launches technical preview of Emet 5.0
Version 5.0 adds two new protections for enterprises on top of the 12 built-in security mitigations included in version 4.1. First, an attack surface reduction mitigation helps enterprises protect third-party and custom-built applications by selectively enabling Java, Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft or third-party plugins. “Enterprises can configure Java to load on the intranet for line-of-business applications but not on the internet,” Ness told Computer Weekly. “Most businesses need Java only internally, but this opens them up to vulnerabilities on the internet. Emet 5.0 enables enterprises to block Java where they do not need it,” he said.

Samsung beefs up Knox mobile management software
With the update, however, Samsung will allow some third-party MDM and enterprise mobility management (EMM) vendors to run in an untrusted state on the personal side of a device. Software from MDM vendors Good, Mobile Iron and Fixmo will be allowed to run on the personal side. Good's software will work better on a Samsung device than any other device, Samsung asserted. The cost of Knox 2.0 service will be $3.60 per user per month with pricing discounts for larger volumes. IT shops will be able to sign up for Knox software online. Injong Rhee, Samsung's senior vice president of research for business-to-business mobile communication, led the Knox briefing for Computerworld.

Quote for the day:

"The secret of joy in work is contained in one word: excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it" -- Pearl Buck

February 25, 2014

Cloud security tools only half the battle against shadow IT
To get at the root of shadow IT, corporate IT must make itself more appealing to business units and beat cloud service providers at their own game. "It's really about communication and training," said Softchoice's Kane. "In many cases, that's not really in the wheelhouse of an IT person's skill set. But that can certainly change." Softchoice learned through its experience that it had to do a much better job of offering training on applications, and more importantly, communicating the reasons for security and compliance policies that it had put in place, Kane said.

7 hidden dangers of wearable computers
As with most Internet-connected devices, the growing proliferation of wearables has spawned both privacy and security concerns. Wearable technologies enable capture and collection of amazingly detailed information about an individual’s life, including their lifestyle choices, personal health, location, movement and daily routines. Without the right privacy controls, such data could end up being used in ways never imagined or intended. And without the right security controls, data gathered by such devices could enable identity theft, stalking, fraud and other crimes.

6 Skills CEOs Prize In CIOs
The better question to ask is: Which skills do most CEOs want their CIOs to have? So let's discuss what your boss will expect of you. Here's where it gets complicated. Regardless of whether the CIO reports to the CEO, has a dotted line to the CEO, or is married to and has children with the CEO, the CEO is your ultimate boss. And the CEO very much cares about the folks who run other mission-focused business units: your peers. To make matters more complex, those peers are also your customers.

The commercial case for open source software
With a rich pedigree of success in the server room, open platforms eventually moved upwards through the commercial sector and across to government in many developed nations. What open source in these (and other mission-critical implementations) demands is not only the strong active developer community that typifies any open code base — it also very often needs a level of expert support and maintenance that works at a more formalised level than that which is available for free through the community.

Are the best CIOs from non-tech background?
There are two school of thoughts that exist, one that thinks a CIO can be truly successful if he has got a technical background. But off late we are witnessing CIOs becoming successful even without a technical background and the key to their success is their business acumen. There is no doubt that knowing technology is a per-requisite to become a CIO, but with enterprises outsourcing their technology infrastructure, a CIOs prime job now is to make IT department as a profit centre. We at CIO&Leader went and spoke to some of the top management of different organisations to find out what do they think about this topic.

Interview: The Power of Collective Insight
People are really amazed with the level of collaboration they can do – in part because it’s not limited only to BI. Jam is much more advanced in overall collaboration, so you can use it as a portal for lots of activities. You can collaborate directly from the BusinessObjects Infoview to see follow reports and see people’s comments and questions. But you can also see BI content through the Jam portal, where you have it as one of the facets of everything else you’re doing. For example, a sales person can see some BI content in a sales analytics forum, post a comment, and that comment can be viewed from the BI system.

Quality Code - Book Review and Interview
... quality code is code that, in order of importance, does what it is supposed to do, is bug free, and is well-crafted. Think of it as code that is ready for today, tomorrow, and next year. Code that does what it is supposed to satisfies the business and the user. Code that is bug free tries to stand apart from the imperfect world and handles things gracefully when it inevitably interacts with an imperfect world. Code that is well-crafted can be fixed, modified, and enhanced far into the future, hopefully breaking the cycle of the value-sucking rewrite that traditionally happens every few years.

Wi-Fi roaming starts to take flight with Hotspot 2.0
While making consumers' lives easier, Hotspot 2.0 could also help mobile operators offload more data demand from their expensive licensed frequencies. But to make it real, service providers have to both upgrade their network infrastructure and forge business deals with partners, both of which can be time-consuming, said analyst Peter Jarich of Current Analysis. On Monday, Boingo Wireless announced that its subscribers with Apple iOS 7 devices will be able to join 21 airport Wi-Fi networks automatically and free of charge.

Public, private and hybrid clouds: Beware of cloud washing
Where does cloud washing come into play? Private clouds are viewed as a combination of cloud's hyperefficiency and ease of provisioning with the control that enterprise IT wants. This permits participation in the cloud while lowering the perceived risk. However, the potential return on investment is low, as it offers only a slight improvement over current methods like virtualization.

Consumers Lead Rise Of Connected Storage
The file system, once seen as a staid and boring technology, has been completely transformed by the advent of computing mobility. Laptops made it possible for people to take their work on the road… and lose it. The first attempt to protect data on-the-go was a modification of backup, a tried and true IT function. Online backup services offered consumers the benefits of a professionally run datacenter. Data had begun a journey from local, hardware-bound file systems to the cloud.

Quote for the day:

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” -- Nelson Mandela

February 24, 2014

Lync and Skype together - here's how it will work
One of the main news stories from last week's Lync Conference in Las Vegas was that the next release of Lync would support not just Skype audio and IM, but also video. The intention is to provide tools that will allow the millions of Skype users to interconnect with Lync, providing new channels for businesses to connect with customers, users and partners. The big question, then, is how will it work? In the original Skype/Lync federation architecture, both signalling and media followed the same paths through the cloud federation service.

An IT auditor among us
Utter the word auditor, and many CIOs cringe. After all, IT auditors are professional nitpickers who identify problems and get CIOs to fix them. No matter that an auditor doesn't always understand how critical a given technology is to the business. No matter that a CIO is supposed to keep his company's enterprise resource planning system up and running, not take the system offline during business hours to review it for compliance with a lengthy checklist of controls.

How to Test the Security Savvy of Your Staff
User training is an essential part of any security program. Most employees aren't IT or security experts. Nor should you expect them to be. The purpose of security training and awareness is to provide all employees with basic security knowledge, as well as appropriate actions to take when presented with a possible security situation. Technology must be accompanied by awareness training to protect against social engineering and phishing, two common causes of data leakage and breaches. However, once you've spent time and budget delivering a terrific training program, how do you know your employees have retained the information they learned and are putting it to good use?

Free tools for Windows Server admins
There are endless software tools and utilities out there to help you in managing your network. Here are some of the best free ones. They can help you with deploying, maintaining, troubleshooting, and upgrading Window Servers, your domain, and aid with other miscellaneous network tasks.

Wanted: A Flipboard approach for the enterprise
I was recently talking analytics, data and enterprise software with a chief information officer at a massive company and the topic of user interface came up repeatedly. The problem: It's one thing to break down corporate silos, aggregate and define data and then distill it into knowledge. It's quite another to put that data and insight into a format that is actionable for the masses. In other words, we need a Flipboard for the enterprise. What's the corporate story for the day/month/quarter/year in data---revenue, churn, supply chain, day sales outstanding etc.---at a glance?

The 2014 Premier 100 IT Leaders: Reinventing themselves many times over
"Sometimes, it's about trusting other people," Marcante says. "I went and immersed myself in infrastructure and networks, and we doubled our production infrastructure and lowered operating costs in three years." After that, he went on to lead Vanguard's Six Sigma program, then moved again to manage Vanguard's high-net-worth business before moving back to IT. "Never say no to an opportunity because you feel scared or under-ready or not ready. Take the leap, because you're going to learn a tremendous amount," says Marcante. "It's a personal philosophy that I try to pass on to other people."

How OpenStack Storage fits in the larger open source OpenStack picture
In this interview, Ashish Nadkarni, a research director in the storage systems practice at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp., explains how Swift, Cinder and an upcoming file-based OpenStack storage service fit into the overall OpenStack plan. Nadkarni also discussed the potential benefits and disadvantages of the OpenStack approach and how third-party storage vendors are working to integrate their products with theOpenStack platform. He cautioned that commercial vendors could put the open source project at risk with their attempts to promote their own hardware and concentrate on their own agendas.

Eight Politically Incorrect Statements About Innovation
I asked myself a different question today: What do I believe about innovation but simply avoid saying to be politically incorrect? What am I not saying? At the risk of being labeled a curmudgeon I’ve decided to state some things I believe to be true about innovation which may offend. Innovation is difficult and it doesn’t happen enough because of these eight impediments, so, this needs said.

Why Your Change Needs a Word of Mouth Strategy
According to a study by Ernst & Young, “People trust their friends and family much more than they trust corporate marketing media. Peer recommendations—not paid-for advertising, whether on social media platforms or in print—are what count.” The report emphasizes that, while personal recommendations have always mattered, their value is increasing. The study stated that the “social consumer” no longer shares their viewpoints with just a close circle. They share good or bad retail experiences online, where they are seen—and passed on—by countless friends of friends.

Weapons of mass data destruction
There's more to IT security than protecting the valuable data an enterprise obtains, uses and stores. How you dispose of it when the hardware it’s sitting on reaches end-of-life should be a major concern too. These days, only a fool thinks clicking 'delete' is enough to wipe data from a hard drive or that a quick disk reformat will do the trick. Smashing the drives with a hammer isn’t a smart move either. So how should the enterprise tackle this problem, and what are the best weapons of data destruction? IT Pro has been investigating.

Quote for the day:

"In matters of style, swim with the current; In matters of principle, stand like a rock" -- Thomas Jefferson