Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 07, 2014

Dutch government pays millions to extend Microsoft XP support
The move by the Dutch government follows a similar deal the software giant struck with the United Kingdom government. It was announced last week that the UK government agreed to pay more than £5.6 million to Microsoft to continue its support for Windows XP by one year. The deal is expected to see Microsoft provide security updates for XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 software being used on UK public sector PCs. The UK government said it expects the majority of its organisations to migrate away from the XP platform by April 2015.

Benefits of video conferencing include less travel, but it's not No. 1
For decades, enterprises have turned to video conferencing in large part as a means of reducing business travel expenses. However, a recent survey by Duxbury, Mass.-based Wainhouse Research of 4,700 end users of video conferencing found that the incentives for using video are shifting: 94% noted that the biggest benefit was increased efficiency and productivity; 88% cited increased impact of discussions; and 87% said video expedited decision-making -- the same percentage who said it reduced travel. The survey was included in a whitepaper sponsored by video conferencing vendor Polycom.

Ride the commodity IT wave by attempting bold tech strategies
Rather than owning a complex and expensive infrastructure to support back office IT functions, they can now be purchased at commodity prices, often an order of magnitude less expensive than traditional, in-house enterprise software. In the past few years, it has become possible to build a large company IT infrastructure without purchasing hardware, software, or the internal resources to maintain that infrastructure. This has often been regarded as a cost-saving maneuver, or in some cases as a threat to existing IT staff, since their jobs can now be sent "to the cloud.

6 ways the Internet of Things will transform enterprise security
Over the next few years, analysts expect tens of billions of devices to be connected to the Internet in similar fashion. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon promises, or threatens, depending on your point of view, to transform our understanding of the Internet and a networked world. A lot of what will transpire will be on consumer-oriented products. But as with everything in technology, what happens in the consumer world will inevitably affect the enterprise. Here in no particular order are six ways the Internet of Things will affect enterprise security:

Supplier innovation: Becoming the customer of choice
In today’s competitive supply markets, the challenge for buying organizations is to make themselves as “attractive” as possible to innovative suppliers, so that they — rather than their industry rivals — get first refusal on new ideas and product enhancements. Attractiveness in this context goes beyond order volumes and the amount of money a customer spends with a supplier each year (although these things are, of course, important) and into areas such as how willing the customer is to listen to ideas, how quickly they make decisions, the extent to which they share development risks/costs, and their effectiveness in commercializing new products.

Microsoft to restore Start menu to Windows
"I'm not here to announce the next version of Windows," Terry Myerson, the head of Microsoft's operating systems engineering group, said at Build. "But I am going to share that we are going all in with this desktop experience to make sure your applications can be accessed and loved by people that love the Windows desktop." Myerson showed off two features of the unnamed update to Windows 8.1: A Start menu and windowed "Modern," ne "Metro," apps on the desktop. Both had been rumored to be coming to a future version of Windows; those claims first surfaced in December 2013.

Bug Fixing Vs. Problem Solving - From Agile to Lean
One of the misconceptions I’ve made while working with software development teams using agile methodologies is that I initially confused bugs with problems ... now believe that our agile team producing bugs was not a Lean system producing learning opportunities : it was a team having quality problems, which is something I have seen with many teams. The goal of this article is to describe how my thinking has been evolving on the topic of bugs and problems, provide some hints on how to better understand the problems causing bugs in order to improve the performance, and put this into perspective with some real life stories.

Six impossible things Satya Nadella has already done
Microsoft is enjoying a resurgence that many attribute to its new CEO. Satya Nadella is certainly galvanising the company, and the enthusiasm of product teams at the recent Build 2014 conference was noticeable. But for those who have tracked his career at Microsoft, the fact that Nadella's second month in the CEO seat sees the company's stock price climbing high isn't out of step. Like the White Queen, Nadella has been associated with a few things usually considered impossible at Microsoft.

Software-based routers on x86 servers are becoming reality
The concept of software-based routers has been around for well over a decade. The latest versions of software-based routers have been hardened via years of experimentation and deployment. Open source communities, including Quagga and Brocade's Vyatta, have been developing software routing. In addition, advances in server hardware performance mean that more routing functions are now in scope.

5 Steps To Become A Digital Business
Any digital business is still a work in progress. Chances are your company wasn't born digital like Amazon, but chances are also good that, even in slow-moving industries like construction, you'll become the next Borders if you don't adjust to the way customers use digital products and services. Many companies have no problem looking and feeling digital -- a mobile app here, a redesigned website there -- but the real challenge is being digital. That means using technologies like cloud, mobile, and agile development to create better customer experiences that become revenue.

Quote for the day:

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else." -- Tom Stoppard

April 06, 2014

Cryptocat Sticks to Openness Despite Grief Over Audits
On Wednesday, Cryptocat's founder, Nadim Kobeissi, announced the release of two more code audits, both of which found flaws with the chat program that have now been mostly resolved. But the release of the audits fired up critics of Cryptocat, which is an easy-to-use instant messaging program that allows people without a background in computer security to exchange encrypted messages. The critics tend to use the audits as fuel to throw doubt on the viability of the project despite the fact that the project takes the audits seriously and quickly works on fixes.

How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion
Downey’s approach is to determine how the drop in religious affiliation correlates with other elements of the survey such as religious upbringing, socioeconomic status, education, and so on. He finds that the biggest influence on religious affiliation is religious upbringing—people who are brought up in a religion are more likely to be affiliated to that religion later. However, the number of people with a religious upbringing has dropped since 1990. It’s easy to imagine how this inevitably leads to a fall in the number who are religious later in life. In fact, Downey’s analysis shows that this is an important factor.

Public sector lacks IT skills to deliver services effectively
Mike Fetters, public sector director at totaljobs.com, said: “The public sector is filled with talented people, including IT professionals. But there is no denying that the last three years have been a tumultuous time, with widespread staff cuts and reforms by Whitehall affecting everyone in local government, central government and the NHS. “While there have been huge achievements in terms of reform implementation, those in the public sector are clearly worried about their ability to continue to deliver services. They have indicated that IT skills is an area in which they need more support.”

How to Protect Valuable or Personal Data on PC, Hard Drive and Flash Drive
Portable computers are taken everywhere: home, vacations, or business trips. It makes them an easy target for criminals, especially for the private data they contain. Flash drives are also an easy theft target. Even a failed hard drive that you send back to your vendor for warranty is a potential threat to your private intellectual property. How can your personal data be protected? With one word - encryption! Data encryption has gone mainstream with Windows BitLocker, an optional security feature that enables data protection on volumes with 128/256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption.

Open-Office Backlash: Seeking Productivity in a Noisy World
“The open-office movement is like some gigantic experiment in willful delusion,” Jason Feifer of Fast Company wrote recently in an annoyed screed calling for offices for all. “Maybe we can spend less on space, the logic seems to go, and convince employees that it’s helping them.” In a New Yorker piece called “The Open-Office Trap,” Maria Konnikova reports on data point after data point detailing how far the open office has fallen out of favor with employees. The sound of fellow employees doesn’t foster a can-do spirit, but a get-me-out-of-here reaction: In a study conducted by Cornell University psychologists,

How Can Server Monitoring Improve Performance?
It’s important to maintain a careful watch over a company server as misuse of this technology can lead to data loss and it can incur financial costs. Server monitoring tools provide administrators with an easy way to maintain a vigilant approach as they provide alerts and function to keep the administrator up to date and abreast of any problems – potential or current. A network monitoring tool is a powerful application that can monitor bandwidth, availability and server performance monitoring.

Proposed health IT strategy aims to promote innovation, protect patients...
“The diverse and rapidly developing industry of health information technology requires a thoughtful, flexible approach,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “This proposed strategy is designed to promote innovation and provide technology to consumers and health care providers while maintaining patient safety.” Innovative health IT products present tremendous potential benefits, including: greater prevention of medical errors; reductions in unnecessary tests; increased patient engagement; and faster identifications of and response to public health threats and emergencies.

Indosat Routing Error Impacts Few but Hits Akamai, Chevron
The problem was quickly corrected but still caused problems for companies such as Akamai and Chevron, Zmijewski wrote. It also caused a flood of traffic to hit Indosat's network.ISPs and telecommunication providers publish public data on their networks that is used in routers to direct Internet traffic. That data is distributed to other providers using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), a specification for exchanging such information. BGP data changes are "announced" and then picked up by other network providers. But errors in BGP data can cause websites and networks to be unreachable.

Say Hello to Microsoft’s Answer to Siri
Like Siri for iOS devices and Google Now for Android phones, Cortana can answer spoken questions like “How old is Barack Obama”; and it can act on commands such as “Wake me up at 7 a.m. tomorrow.” However, in a demonstration of the app given at Microsoft’s Build conference, Cortana appeared to be more closely integrated with other functions and apps on a device than its competitors. Unlike Siri and Google Now, it is possible for developers to write apps that can be controlled using Cortana. Cortana appears to combine design features of Apple and Google’s own virtual assistants. Cortana is similar to Siri in that you are encouraged to address the app as if it really had a personality of its own

Parliamentary computers crash 90 minutes after IT assurances
Users of the system repeatedly endured interrupted and slow internet access, delayed delivery of emails sent outside Parliament, and computers that kept freezing. Miller apologised for the problems, which resulted from an upgrade to the network. She said: “Unfortunately, in January, one of our suppliers involved in this upgrade inadvertently introduced an error into the supporting software. This had the opposite effect of that intended; that is, it reduced the capacity of the access to the internet.”

Quote for the day:

"I believe it is important for people to create a healthy mental environment in which to accomplish daily tasks." -- Darren L. Johnson

April 05, 2014

Rumored Android feature: Google Now Bill Pay
With the ability to add various bill payments to Google Wallet, you could then simply say "Okay, Google Now, pay Verizon bill," and Google Wallet would handle the rest. The big question... are we ready for that? Is the average user ready to hand over the payment of their bills to a service like Google Wallet? I think, yes. Why? Already an overwhelming amount of people pay their bills on line. According to Daily Finance, over 62% of Americans pay their bills online. Considering Google has gigantic plans for their payment system (including the ability to use your smartphone in place of your credit/debit card), there's no reason why your various bills could not be easily paid through their system.

Microsoft releases Windows Library for JavaScript as open source
The library features components that can help build the infrastructure of a Web app, such as data binding. It also offers advanced user interface controls and designs such as ListView, FlipView, animations and semantic zoom. Microsoft offers demonstrations of the various features, along with their implementation code, on the WinJS Preview Web site. Gusmorino admitted that work still needs to be done to make WinJS fully compatible with non-Microsoft browsers, such as Firefox and Google Chrome. Some work has already been done to allow WinJS to easily interoperate with other JavaScript libraries, such as Angular, jQuery, and Knockout.

Is Big Data Under Threat by New Internet Magna Carta?
The reputation of big data has suffered with the revelations by wistleblower Edward Snowden that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been systematically using big data analytics to ‘spy’ on everyone’s communications as well as perform targeted surveillance of individuals and companies. We can all be certain that the U.S. is not the only government agency in the world to collect and use big data. For example, former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said "Let's be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don't have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous.”

XPocalypse Now: Security experts size up the cyberthreats
Windows XP users have managed so far to defend themselves with relative success, so what will be different once Microsoft support ends? Security experts predict a couple of scenarios. The more ominous is that attackers have already developed an arsenal of Windows XP “zero day” exploits, and they’re just waiting until Microsoft support ends to unleash them. While the deadline makes for good drama, some security folks reject the notion that attackers are lying in wait. “If the ‘apocalypse’ were going to happen, don’t you think it would have already happened?” says Andrew Storms, director of DevOps for CloudPassage.

The Truth About Clouds And Data: Can Your Storage Survive Climate Change?
The agility of modular, “grow-as-you-go” storage goes beyond flexible capacity. You can see it in operational efficiency. In days of yore (and maybe even in your days), companies were forced to use proprietary hardware solutions found in legacy storage: solutions that only allowed them to run one application at a time per physical server. Scalable environments, on the other hand, not only use industry standard hardware for just-in-time scaling, but also provide intelligent software to simplify and even automate many operational tasks, including reallocation. This allows providers to run different workloads on shared infrastructures. Such an environment can move with your data, and not just grow with it. Now isn’t that much more cloud-like?

To Motivate Employees, Apply This Scientific Rule Of Leadership
Employees who are selected, oriented, and reinforced properly, and who are surrounded by peers of the same caliber, will thrive when given significant autonomy. Otherwise, they’ll wither. There are dozens of studies to support this, inside and outside of business life. (You may prefer the term “empowerment” to autonomy. That’s fine. I think “autonomy” is the better word because it’s scarier, more blunt. And if what I’m talking about here doesn’t make an old-style autocrat at least a little nervous, then I’m not getting the point across.)

Technology Makes a Difference for Location Analytics
A look at the capabilities necessary for effective location analytics indicates why tools designed for the purpose get better results. More than three in five organizations said three basic capabilities are important: geographic representation of data, visual metrics associated with locations on a map, and selecting and analyzing locations on a map. ... All of these basic capabilities are the building blocks for conducting specific analytics that can identify or recommend actions from the mashup of data about a location or to provide insights to guide decisions based on location-specific indicators.

Putting the 'B' in BRM
The challenge: Justify to the senior management committee the expense of business relationship management (BRM) within the IT function. Now, there are many ways to do that. All the tools for assessing value can be drawn upon. There's the balanced scorecard, ROI, maturity models (with key performance indicators) and assessments against them, surveys, IT investment ratios, IT productivity over time. All very plausible, given the right circumstances. But as CIO, I knew that I had to do more than show that BRM made compelling sense from a stockholder perspective. I also had to show how its success would be measured over time.

Health Information Technology Safety: Where the Feds Will Focus
The federal government, in its new report on creating a risk-based regulatory framework for health information technology, focuses on the functionality of HIT products, not the platform whether it be cloud-based, installed or mobile. Consequently, the framework from the Food and Drug Administration, Office of the National Coordinator for HIT and Federal Communications Commission identifies three categories of functionality: administrative, health management and medical device functions.

Seven Steps to Create an Unbeatable Enterprise Mobility Strategy
Mobility is transforming our lives. How we bank, shop, entertain, travel, learn, make decisions, and work. We’ve gone from a world that had only 500 million telephone lines in 19901 to one in which there will soon be more active cell phones than people. And as billions of sensors and devices intelligently connect to form the Internet of Things, we’ll access all manner of smart products and services via mobile technology and applications. But, are you ready for the mobility revolution? Consider the following questions to ask:

Quote for the day:

"Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions. This is a dangerous mistake." -- Peter Drucker

April 04, 2014

How Do You Evaluate a Data Scientist?
Good data scientists will not just address business problems; they will pick the right problems that offer the most value to the organisation. It is essential for a data scientist to understand the domains of programming, machine learning, data mining, statistics, and hacking--in the positive sense. These are keys to getting in and grabbing the data one needs. A good data scientist needs to understand his domain, whether it’s science, engineering or business. He needs to be able to cut through the myths associated with big data.

Seven Steps to Create an Unbeatable Enterprise Mobility Strategy
An enterprise mobility strategy is less about managing mobile devices and more about being an advocate for the business—enabling the business to integrate and deliver new and innovative business services more quickly. It is more about enabling and accelerating new windows of opportunity and efficiencies and less about restricting access and choices, which can have the unintended consequence of slowing business down. Even so, security remains fundamental to making these new and innovative business services possible.

Key Considerations in Establishing a Chief Data Office
Many organizations are setting up centralized data management departments. These departments may be called Enterprise Data Management, Enterprise Information Management or the Chief Data Office. Whatever they are called, these departments are accountable for getting their organizations to treat data as an enterprise asset, they share some common characteristics and they increasingly report into the business rather than IT.

Yorgen Edholm of Accellion, on the Motivation of Passion
You can’t have people who are afraid of making mistakes. In high-tech, there are no templates. And when you have no templates, you can’t think that with the right time and resources, you’ll have a 95 percent chance of success. We can’t have people who approach problems by thinking, “If I can’t guarantee success, it’s going to hurt me.” The idea is not to celebrate mistakes, but to be somewhat tolerant of them. Whenever something unexpected happens in a big company, that’s not a good thing.

Competition from FinTech startups keeps big suppliers on their toes
The large suppliers are even asking Barclays for advice on how to become more agile after the bank launched it mobile service PingIt in just seven months. “We have articulated the model as to how we acted as a startup internally to disrupt ourselves and we’re starting to industrialise that,” said White. “I can count five large technology companies all of the names you would imagine have come to Barclays and have asked how we are doing it,” he said. Alistair Grant, EMEA CIO at Citi has also noticed how startups are keeping the big suppliers on their toes.

Financial firms and social media remain top Phishing targets
Social networks were the top Phishing target in 2013, with nearly 36 percent of the overall volume, which makes sense given that those attacks often have a goal of propagation. If a person's social presence is compromised, then their friends and any associated accounts (especially if they recycle passwords), such as email, are likely to fall too. On the other hand, financially-based Phishing attacks were also popular last year. Kaspersky says that nearly 23 percent of the year's Phishing attacks targeted the financial sector globally.

API testing ensures smooth sailing for SOA enterprises
API testing at the integration level is where the application consuming the service is examined. Various scenarios should be investigated to ensure caching or interpretation issues, for example, don't arise. While manual testing is encouraged, Dan said it's not always a viable method for service and API testing, particularly at the service function level. "A service is something more than a way to process information," Dang said. "A way to process that information is always by some kind of data going in and some sort of response coming back."

Twitter uses code refactoring to reduce risk and improve testing
One risk comes from overly large files. Large files should be broken up into multiple smaller ones when possible. Modifying these smaller files is less risky, said Ornelas, because there is less for a developer to keep in his head when working on them. Other risks relate to the separation of the groups working on the same file. Ornelas said other research has shown that as code is touched by a larger number of groups, the risks can go up. "The more cohesive your organization is with the code base, the better the quality of code," he said. If a lot of different teams are modifying a single file, it probably means something is wrong.

How to keep the rush to cloud from clouding enterprise judgement
In many ways, cloud represents a step backwards from a decade of work to bring applications and systems together within a common, standardized framework. The authors point out that architecture -- service-oriented architecture -- is taking on an even greater urgency as enterprises latch onto "legacy clouds." While not mentioned specifically in the article, many cloud services are now criss-crossing enterprises in spaghetti-like fashion, used and paid for by lines of business outside of IT. There is no doubt plenty of money being spent on services that are either duplicated or going virtually unused.

Interview with Tobias Mayer about the People’s Scrum and AgileLib
The people’s Scrum by Tobias Mayer is a collection of essays based on material written by him between 2005 and 2012. The essays describe agile ideas and practices, examples of the topics covered are self-organizing, team working, craftsmanship, technical debt, estimation, retrospectives, culture and Scrum adoption. InfoQ interviewed Tobias about the importance of people, teams and self organization with Scrum and about AgileLib.net, a new initiative for sharing agile resources.

Quote for the day:

"There is a difference between knowing the path & walking the path." -- Morpheus

April 03, 2014

Public Wi-Fi speeds to get a boost from Qualcomm's new antenna technology
On Thursday, Qualcomm announced radios for network equipment that can send three or four data streams as well as chipsets for mobile devices and consumer electronics with up to two streams. The number of streams decides the maximum theoretical speed, and two streams are capable of transmitting more than 600Mbps (bits per second), Qualcomm said. A version of MU-MIMO that can receive one stream is already integrated with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, which powers smartphones including the HTC One M8, Samsung's Galaxy S5 and the Z2 from Sony.

5 Steps to Choosing a Gamification Platform
When valued customer visiting cards and buy-9-get-1-free engagement techniques are not enough anymore, many business owners are at a loss how to grow and develop their loyalty programs or engage their long-time employees. Gamification platforms are developed by companies specializing in user engagement. They can make the life of a non tech-savvy owner much easier by centralizing and organizing all engagement efforts. However, new engagement solutions seem to be popping up every day.

White House-MIT Big Data Privacy Workshop – Top Researcher Reports
Due to the massive scale of Big Data, previously top-down solutions for security, e.g., anticipating and preventing security breaches, will simply not scale to Big Data. They must be augmented with new approaches including bottom-up solutions such as Stonebraker’s logging to detect and stem previously unanticipated security breeches and Weitzner’s accountable systems. “Big data” has rendered obsolete the current approach to protecting privacy and civil liberties[1]. Hence, Big Data requires a shift from a focus on top-down methods of controlling data generation and collection to data usage.

Emergent Leadership Topples the Pyramid
Anyone who has been a member of a high performing team knows that leadership flows among team members, depending on who has the needed skills, knowledge or attitude in the moment, and that at various times each team member significantly influences the team. A team that is dependent on one person will never fulfill its full potential. Over the years, I have asked hundreds of people to list the top five qualities of a high performance team, and “shared leadership” is always on the list. Perhaps you agree emergent leadership can work for a team, but think it’s not possible for a complex organization. Actually, the idea of a non-hierarchical company is not far-fetched at all.

Top Trends in Cloud Innovation
Most of the providers today only do a piece of the needed puzzle – just SFA or just HR. And most only offer cloud, so using them requires a “rip and replace” approach. At SAP we realize that most companies have existing software assets that are working well for them. Hybrid solutions will be the norm, and we’re perfectly situated to take advantage of that trend. It’s just one of the reasons our cloud solutions have been growing at more than 160% year over year.

How Boeing is using the cloud
This week at Interop, Boeing’s chief cloud strategist, David Nelson, outlined a couple of ways the aircraft manufacturer is not only using the public cloud, but combining that that with on-premises virtualized workloads to create a hybrid environment. The results are applications that Nelson says run more efficiently, are less expensive and serve the needs of Boeing better than if the company had done it all in-house. Nelson first described an application the company has developed that tracks all of the flight paths that planes take around the world. Boeing’s sales staff uses it to help sell aircraft showing how a newer, faster one could improve operations.

How Employee Engagement Can Improve a Hospital's Health
For healthcare providers and their employees, ongoing uncertainty can lower employee engagement, which in turn can have a negative effect on organizational success and patient care. Research by Gallup and Loma Linda University Medical Center shows that employee engagement and employee safety work together to enhance patient safety. When healthcare employees work in a safe environment and are engaged, the chances are much greater that they will perform activities that are known drivers of patient safety outcomes better.

Medical Software Brings Intuitive Interface To Health Records
Understanding the importance of the user interface was one of the things Cane learned at his previous company, Blackboard, which he co-founded in the late 1990s. Blackboard became one of the leading e-learning and education technology companies. Cane left in 2009 after moving back to Florida, where he had grown up. While he was between ventures, his wife told him he needed to take time to get a thorough physical, which in turn led to a referral for a skin check. That was how he met his co-founder, dermatologist Michael Sherling.

Enterprise cloud outlook: Inevitably hybrid, surprisingly agile and (eventually) cheap
For all its promise and potential, the cloud still remains a relatively immature market. Major players such as Google and Amazon have both slashed on-demand prices in the past couple weeks as infrastructure providers race to lock down top-tier enterprise customers through a variety of pricing and service options. This sorting out of the how and the how much is exactly the kind of thing that keeps some CIOs on the sidelines. "The cloud will be way, way cheaper than on-premise within five years or so," said Amr Awadallah, Cloudera's chief technology officer. "There's no doubt that this will be much cheaper in the future, but it's still not cheaper today."

Are Enterprises Leveraging M2M Technology?
Are enterprises willing to go the IoE way? What would be the requirement for enterprises to adopt IoE? Does t make sense for enterprises to bank on the new technology trend? The list goes on. We spoke to IT heads to understand how they are planning to exploit the technology in coming days. Subhamoy Chakraborti, General Manager – IT, Magma Fincorp , says, “We are definitely looking forward to adopt IoE. We have around 280 branches and most of our assets are managed manually. There is a lot of scope in our organization. We are looking forward to automation in a big way. In the future, we plan to embrace machine to machine communication for our field work as well.”

Are You Dutiful or a Disruptor? Career Advice for the Innovator in All of Us
The greatest innovations are inherently disruptive and the sub-trait of disrupting underlies all of the discovery skills. In a Forbes piece, “Disruption vs. Innovation: What’s the difference?” author Caroline Howard wrote, “Innovation and disruption are similar in that they are both makers and builders. Disruption takes a left turn by literally uprooting and changing how we think, behave, do business, learn and go about our day-to-day.”

Quote for the day:

"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." — -- Max DePree

April 02, 2014

GRC regulations force cloud services providers and customers to adapt
"With increased legislation around data privacy, the rising threat of cybertheft and the simple requirement to be able to access your data when you need it, organizations need to know precisely to what extent they rely on cloud storage and computing," Durbin said. Compliance regulations, for example, often have very specific requirements for what data needs to be stored, and where. Emerging privacy rules require certain data management processes. And of course, rapidly advancing cyberthreats from a variety of sources require cutting-edge information security tools.

Dell's new research division wants computers to detect your mood
The mood experiments are among others underway at Dell Research that stretch across four broad areas: security, data insights, mobility and the Internet of Things, and cloud and modern data centers, according to Jai Menon, a vice president and Dell's chief research officer. Dell's focus on moods and emotions will use a person's brain waves combined with heart rate, pulse or other body functions in hopes of detecting when a person is happy, sad, anxious, fearful or has other feelings, Menon said in an interview.

Microservers: What you need to know
Microservers are a new category of system designed to shine when carrying out these well-defined computing workloads. The need for microservers has in part been fuelled by the growth of the web and online services. That's because the demands that serving this kind of content place on a system — the CPU load and I/O required to deliver static elements for a web page, for example — is predictable. The quantifiable nature of these workloads allows microserver circuitry to be pared back to what's needed to execute these tasks.

CIOs: It’s time to prepare for bring your own smart machine
According to Gartner Inc. analyst Tom Austin, there are three classes of smart machines: The doers, the movers and the sage. It’s that last category CIOs will need to pay attention to, which includes both virtual personal assistants and smart advisors, such as IBM’s Watson. Virtual personal assistants will learn what you do, who you work with and what you’re working on. Smart advisors, on the other hand, are subject-matter experts that will, say, help a doctor recommend medical treatment. Both are poised to push their way into the enterprise in the next two years, according to Austin.

Why CIOs Should Look Outside for Data Expertise
Predictive scores include fraud scores (who is trying to scam us?), churn scores (who is most likely to cancel?), social influencer scores (which customers affect peers' behavior?), wealth scores (what is the predictive buying power of my consumers?), shopper scores (who are discount shoppers vs. full price?), and recommendation scores (which offers should be sent to which consumers?). At the council meeting, Barbara Wixom, an expert in business intelligence at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research, offered other examples of companies getting data and analytics from external providers--either while they build their internal capacity or in lieu of doing so.

SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition
An execution plan describes what's going on behind the scenes when SQL Server executes a query. It shows how the query optimizer joined the data from the various tables defined in the query, which indexes it used, if any, how it performed any aggregations or sorting, and much more. It also estimates the cost of all of these operations, in terms of the relative load placed on the system. ... Grant Fritchey is a SQL Server MVP with over 20 years' experience in IT including time spent in support, development, and database administration.

Google seeks Supreme Court review of Wi-Fi packet sniffing ruling
Google in its appeal to the Supreme Court does not, however, accept that the collection of the data was illegal, pointing out that the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission declined to take enforcement action after investigating Google, including for possible violations under the Wiretap Act. The company said in its appeal that an adverse ruling could in fact hurt security professionals who routinely use the same kind of technology as Google's Street View cars did to collect packet data in order to secure company networks.

A CTO reflects on VDI implementation trials and errors
The promise is compelling. As a result, I have experimented with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Sometimes, my experiments succeeded. Other times, they never advanced beyond experimentation. What was the difference? As I reflect back on my VDI implementation successes and failures, this is what I have learned: The business case is exciting but ambiguous. There are hard dollar costs and benefits but those are sometimes dwarfed by the more nebulous costs, benefits and considerations.

CFOs could be technology evangelists, if they took the plunge
There is a weight of expectation on the chief financial officer (CFO) of most organisations, and that they should be in the front line of driving changes in the structure of IT. The problem is that only about a fifth are actually doing it. That's one of the conclusion of a new report into the changing role of the CFO compiled by Oracle and Accenture. The report found that some two thirds (65 percent) of C-suite executives in large organisations believe that CFOs should be "strong evangelists for the transformation potential of technology".

eXtreme Programming The Methodology
The biggest advantage the customer liked about eXtreme Programming in this case was the flexibility to change the prioritization and stories within the Iteration. Scrum for the most is in-flexible on this front. By letting the customer have the flexibility greatly reduced their stress from planning the perfect iteration. From the team’s perspective, the biggest advantage was the reduction of time for planning. Again, in Scrum, the planning meetings can go for an entire day if you are planning a four week iteration. But, since the iterations in Extreme Programming are much shorter and flexible, the planning is fairly quick – less than 45 minutes in this case.

Quote for the day:

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." -- Robert Hughes

April 01, 2014

Applications and services forging new information technology strategy

Enterprises haven't been entirely asleep at the wheel. We've gradually adopted more agile methodologies, service-oriented architectures, shared services organizations, virtualization,DevOps and other updates to the IT craft. But rarely have enterprises put them together in a coordinated way that reflects how enormously the demands on IT and the product capabilities have changed. In contrast, go into shops that already operate at hyperscale -- say a cloud or high-performance computing shop -- and you'll see many of those techniques in use. They are agile, service-oriented, virtualized, and DevOps personified.

Microsoft to highlight its 'One Windows' progress at Build 2014
At the developer confab this week, officials are expected to disclose fully the feature sets of the Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8 Update 1 operating systems. They also, according to sources, will share a bit about the next major version of Windows -- Windows 9, codenamed "Threshold," aka Windows 9, which is supposedly due to arrive in the spring of 2015. Few expect Microsoft to unveil the full feature list or even the target arrival date for Windows 9 at Build 2014. Instead, Microsoft officials are likely to discuss at a high level the company's goal to create a new Windows 9 SKU that would run on Windows Phones, ARM-based Windows tablets/PCs, phablets and other kinds of devices.

CryptoDefense ransomware leaves decryption key accessible
"Due to the attacker's poor implementation of the cryptographic functionality they have quite literally left their hostages with a key to escape," Symantec wrote. The decryption key may have been left under the door mat, but it's doubtful an average user infected with CryptoDefense would have the technical skills to figure it out. CryptoDefense has been seen sent out in spam messages, masquerading as a PDF document. If a user installs it, the malware tries to communicate with four domains and uploads a profile of the infected machine, Symantec wrote.

Cloud Security Solutions for Hybrid Clouds
Recent cloud security advancements present an innovative approach to the key management issue using technologies such as split-key encryption. Going back to the banker metaphor, with split-key encryption, the encryption key is split in half, allowing the customer to maintain control of the encryption key while, at the same time, host its most sensitive data in the cloud. Such technologies are enabling secure migration to the cloud and support hybrid use cases such as RaaS.

Sustainability a CFO Can Love
The benefits of looking for momentum and finding a way to add to it are undeniable. If you push something in the direction it is already going, you will accomplish much more with each unit of energy. That is the guiding philosophy behind the process described below, which may not be unique to us. The sustainability activities of some of the companies we admire most seem to reflect similar thinking. These companies have found ways to apply their direction, strengths, and acumen to accelerate positive change.

6 Changes and Challenges in Transactional Banking Today!
Transaction banking as a global business has largely remained under-leveraged though it was one of the most resilient businesses during financial crisis despite plunging trade volumes. Despite shrinking margins, significant revenue growth of approximately 170 percent or a compounded annual growth rate of roughly 11 percent is expected from 2011 to 2021 (Source: BCG, Transaction Banking advantage, 2012). With right focus, proper positioning and alignment with customer preferences, we believe that transaction banking will continue to deliver value and be a front runner for being the shining and guiding star for banks.

How to build an enterprise private cloud that looks better than AWS
The enterprise's private cloud management and infosec stack lack the automation to stand anything up in that timeframe. The virtual machine might be there in five minutes, but then a week or more goes by for manual infosec and management provisioning. You were vendor-led like a lamb to the slaughterhouse, and your cloud build was butchered. You can neither build a viable private cloud with 15-year-old IT automation suites held together with bailing wire and gum, nor with big-vendor converged infrastructure stacks on prepackaged, partially automated frameworks. If you're still determined to build an internal cloud stack that rivals Amazon, here's what you need to do in five steps:

HP makes fresh software-defined networking push
”Our mission is OpenFlow-enabling that connection point. Then we can say that YouTube shouldn't have quality of service, that's just a best effort service, but the Lync application needs to have QoS, so we can differentiate per application. That's what really gives you the user quality.” To configure OpenFlow SDN on HP devices companies will need to run HP's Virtual Application Networks (VAN) SDN Controller software. VAN allows an administrator to set up rules for managing and orchestrating network traffic flowing over an OpenFlow-enabled network and is compliant with OpenFlow 1.0 and 1.3 protocols.

Cyber security is economic opportunity for the UK, says government
“CERT-UK is going to play an incredibly important role in ensuring that we have that firm, resilient, foundation underpinning our economy. It is crucial,” said Maude. He said the publication of the National Cyber Security Strategy two years ago marked a “ratcheting up” of the seriousness with which the government takes cyber security. “At a time when budgets across government have been cut, we put more money into cyber security - £860m to be precise,” he said.

Edison Invoked in Rare U.S. High Court Look at Software Patents
The case involves the basic question of eligibility for patent protection. Other parts of the Patent Act impose additional requirements, including novelty and usefulness. Alice’s patents are under fire even from companies that say that software generally should be eligible for legal protection. Microsoft, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard Co. filed a brief urging the court to rule against Alice, even while setting a low bar for patent eligibility in other cases. “The patents at issue here are directed to an unpatentable business method combined with an equally abstract directive to perform that method using a computer,” the three companies argued.

Quote for the day:

"If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough." -- Meddigo Message

March 31, 2014

SmartThings Founder Sees a Limitless Internet of Things

SmartThings builds a hub that connects to a home router and to sensors that can detect states like motion, moisture, temperature, or presence, such as the comings and goings of pets. But more important, it's building an open development platform for independent developers and device makers developing tools for the Internet of Things. For instance, in SmartThings offices, a Sonos wireless speaker suddenly blares with the sound of a barking dog. It sounds very real. A developer created a connection between a door bell and a virtual guard dog that will bark if no one is home.

Reading the Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR)
The GTIR was based on threat intelligence and attack data from the NTT Group companies which include Solutionary, NTT Com Security, Dimension Data, NTT Data and support from NTT R&D. The security experts have analyzed approximately three billion worldwide attacks occurred in 2013, the Finance and Technology industries are that most targeted by attackers which used mainly botnet for their offensives. The majority of the vulnerabilities listed in the report are related to patch management, firewall and application settings.

McAfee CSO article stirs up the whitehat infosec community
The article itself may be some kind of link bait – Security Magazine has a wide readership that brings in all types of roles and it asks you to register and give up a bunch of info. (There is a non-registration version here: on PasteBin). That being said, when you consider the title and that the level of reader that would most likely read an article regarding the hiring of ethical hacker would be high level CSO or CISO, it’s quite possible it was written just to find out what decision makers are interested in the topic. Whether this was written by Conran himself or not, his name is still on it and his word is attached to this article.

Ensuring HIPAA Compliance
Any company dealing with protected health information is required by HIPAA to make sure that security measures are in place for every record kept, from physical copies, to network and digital copies. HIPAA also extends to the processing of information, requiring measures to be taken to ensure that even during administration, the privacy of information is maintained. The penalties for violating HIPAA are severe, ranging from $100 to $50,000 per violation, up to maximum of $1,500,000 a year with the threat of criminal charges also present. Not something which you and your business want to get mixed up with.

With a piracy rate of 80 percent, can the tech world convince Africa to buy legitimate software?
"Everybody knows somebody that can get a hold of any software," he says. "In most cases no fees are involved as it usually involves a form of bartering, where software you want is exchanged for software you already have. Established IT shops won't typically sell pirated software off the shelf, but you'll still be able to obtain pirated software from them via interaction with their employees." Coetsee is managing director of Noctranet, a software company specializing in cloud. He says it isn't uncommon for him to find people, even clients, pirating his own software.

Smartphone kill-switch could save consumers $2.6B per year
If a kill-switch led to a sharp reduction in theft of phones -- something supporters argue would happen because stolen phones would lose their resale value if useless -- most of the $580 million spent on replacing stolen phones would be saved. A further $2 billion in savings could be realized by switching to cheaper insurance plans that don't cover theft. Not all consumers would make the switch, but Duckworth said his research suggests at least half would. As part of the report, Duckworth contracted a survey of 1,200 smartphone users in February 2014 by ResearchNow.

How the open transport switch will make operator SDN a reality
Most SDN technology has been developed for Ethernet networks. Generally the control plane and the data plane are disaggregated from the physical network and centralized into a software controller that manages flows all over the network. But optical transport networks often vary in architecture and protocol, making it a big challenge to decouple the control and data planes and apply one kind of controller over the network. To tackle this challenge, a number of vendors are currently developing open transport switches (OTSes) that act as the intermediary between an SDN controller and an optical transport switch.

Business counts cost of cyber attackers’ secret weapon
“Hackers already know about advanced evasion techniques and are using them on a daily basis,” said Ashish Patel, regional director, network security UK & Ireland at McAfee. “What we’re hoping to do is educate businesses so they know what to look for and understand what’s needed to defend against them. Education is absolutely key,” he told Computer Weekly. This will be in the form of roadshows, reports, security summits and client briefings. “The study has shown the real lack of understanding, knowledge and awareness in the community,” said Patel.

Orchestrating Your Delivery Pipelines with Jenkins
Here, we will discuss how to put a number of these recommendations into practice in a concrete setting, namely setting up a delivery pipeline in Jenkins. Many of the steps we will present carry over to other Continuous Integration (CI) and orchestration tools, and there are analogous extensions or core features for many of the plugins we will introduce, too. We are focussing here on Jenkins, however, because it is the most widely-used Continuous Integration server out there. Even if you are using different CI servers or services in your environment, it should be relatively easy to experiment with the steps we will cover in a “sandbox” Jenkins installation, before carrying them over to your own CI environment.

Q&A with Jim Hietala on Security and Healthcare
There’s a plethora of things out there right now that organizations need to be concerned about. Certainly advanced persistent threat, the idea that maybe nation states are trying to attack other nations, is a big deal. It’s a very real threat, and it’s something that we have to think about – looking at the risks we’re facing, exactly what is that adversary and what are they capable of? I think profit-motivated criminals continue to be on everyone’s mind with all the credit card hacks that have just come out. We have to be concerned about cyber criminals who are profit motivated and who are very skilled and determined and obviously there’s a lot at stake there. All of those are very real things in the security world and things we have to defend against.

Quote for the day:

"When winds of change blows, some build walls while others build windmills." -- Chinese proverb

March 30, 2014

Why Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon Want to be Each Other
Speaking of tweets, the use of the word tweet is one of Twitter's charms. Others include endearingly antiquated features like the use of @ replies and hashtags. Suddenly, however, all this is in peril as Twitter appears to be suffering a fit of Facebook-envy. ... Facebook, meanwhile, is suffering from Google envy. While Mark Zuckerberg has been toiling away trying to prevent a general flight from Facebook to smaller social sites by first creating the Poke app to stem the flow to Snapchat and then spending a fortune on Instagram and Whatsapp, he's no doubt looked with envy at all the fun Sergey Brin and Andy Rubin have been having at Google.

Turning Emotion-Based Decisions into Fact-Based Decisions
Today, the human is the bottleneck in the decision-making process. The computer is able to deliver oceans of information on a variety of devices-desktop, tablet, and mobile phones. And that creates a new challenge for us: We must now sift through all this information at our fingertips and decide what is relevant and what isn't for our task at hand. We're no longer searching for information; we're drowning in it. I know that we've been talking about this for a while at TARGIT, but it's never been truer. If we're not careful with how we process that information with our brains, we won't find the courage to act; we'll just be confused.

The Enterprise of Things
The EoT wave will encompass many different device types, some of which haven't even been developed yet. While EoT is not a near-term phenomenon, needing the next three to five years to mature, it nonetheless will impact nearly all corporate systems. If your organization had trouble dealing with user demands for BYOD, this will present an order-of-magnitude-bigger challenge. EoT will have a profound effect on an organization's infrastructure, including its network connectivity, VPN, identity access management, security infrastructure and management functions.

14 Mobile Certifications That Meet IT Demands
Certification, then, is a great way to determine the effectiveness of an employee's ability to meet business demands and expectations. This article looks at several types of mobile certifications — app development, networking, security and a mixed bag of mobile workforce and digital forensics offerings. Most of the featured companies and cert programs provide training courses, which are typically not required, along with self-study materials, sample exam questions, candidate forums and other certification prep resources. All prices are in U.S. dollars.

For Bitcoin Lessons In The History Of Failed Currencies
While payment systems tend to evolve, specific currencies have come and gone over the centuries. Take for example the Continental Dollar of early America. Writing by email from Mongolia Jack Weatherford, author of “The History of Money,” explained that Brits immigrating to the American colonies were not allowed to import British money. After failed attempts to use the Mexican silver dollar — there simply weren’t enough to finance a revolution — they started issuing paper dollars known as Continental Dollars. “Like the Bitcoin, it was a revolutionary idea that got out of hand and the value of the dollars dropped drastically,” writes Weatherford.

Shadow IT: Balancing productivity and security
Shadow IT typically refers to corporate staff going outside the confines of established IT department processes to procure computing resources. Line of business users create shadow IT when they go beyond the enterprise IT framework for cloud-based applications like Google Apps, Basecamp and Dropbox. Similarly, corporate developers use shadow IT to go around hardware procurement and licensing issues. For example, developers might do application development and testing in the cloud to deliver value with the speed the business demands.

What does the next big thing in technology mean for the data center?
New products promise a compelling increase in performance, efficiency, productivity or end results. Sometimes these improvements justify an immediate rip and replace, but it's more likely that a careful evolutionary approach is warranted. For example, big data presents a potentially disruptive opportunity. The amount of interesting and available data is growing fast. Our competitive natures make us want to mine all the value out of it as quickly as we can. In response, a multitude of emerging infrastructure systems offers to help us cruise through these floods of data. It can be hard to know where to look first.

Creating an IT Strategy & Succeeding in Strategic Execution
Well sure, if you’re busy 24/7 then there is no time, but perhaps there’s a reason why you have no time. It can be because your organisation really has overcommitted to that extent, the problem then is that without spending time with your head up looking around you may have missed the exact reason why you are overcommitted. It may be that further resource is required, or that time efficiencies are not being made, projects with little or no value are taking up valuable time or perhaps that ineffective management of systems or people is occurring.

Bring Data Governance To Your Cloud Backup Strategy
“You want employees to be able to get their data from anywhere but you don’t want someone else accessing it if their laptop is lost or stolen,” Venkataraman says. Especially when employees bring their own devices, it’s important for enterprise IT to have visibility into and policy control over the corporate data that’s on them. To ensure that it is automatically encrypted and backed up to the Cloud, and that, in emergency situations, that data can be remotely wiped off the device without affecting users’ personal information. IT also needs to be able to set policies for data access, so that workers can be authorized to self-restore their corporate information from the cloud to a new mobile device, to be back up and running quickly.

What Is the Relationship between Data Architecture and Data Governance?
Data Architecture provides an understanding of what data exists where and how it travels throughout the organizations and systems. It highlights changes and transformations made as data moves from one system to the next. These data inventory and data flow diagrams provide the information and the tools that the DGT needs in order to properly make decisions regarding data policies and standards. These artifacts also help the DGT perform root cause analysis when data issues are raised by business people, and they help to solve those issues.

Quote for the day:

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.” -- Khaled Hosseini

March 29, 2014

Invasion of the body snatchers: Wearable devices are coming for you
The current boom in wearables can be traced back to around 2006 when Nike gave the pedometer a digital twist. Its small Plus device slipped into a running shoe and counted the steps taken and time elapsed on a run. The information was sent to an iPod application and to an online community where people could track and compare their workouts. Other companies followed, and in late 2008 Fitbit attracted considerable attention with its namesake fitness tracker. It captured the imagination of many because it was small, could be worn easily and silently collected data all day long -- no matter what shoes you were wearing.

Argentina's IT Industry Aims to Become Regional Leader
“We need to defy the myth that people here don't speak English, or that there are problems due to the time zone or to cultural differences,” Medica says. In fact, she argues that as a nearshore outsourcing destination, Argentina offers the advantages of cultural and geographic proximity for better cooperation with the client, less travel expenses and lower total cost of engagement. For now, the network consists of five country groups: Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and the US. The US group is the largest with 16 member companies, Colombia and Chile have 11 together, Mexico has six and Brazil has four.

Global Mobile Data Traffic to Surpass 15 Exabytes Per Month by 2018
"Our findings continue to highlight trends around the pervasiveness and continuing demand for mobile connectivity and services," says Thomas Barnett, marketing director for the Cisco Service Provider program. At the end of 2013, more than 4 billion people were mobile users, Barnett says. That number will grow to 5 billion by 2018. By then, the average mobile connection speed will have surpassed 2Mbps, Cisco says. "These numbers really speak to the pervasive nature of mobile technology," Barnett says. "This trend is particularly relevant in emerging markets where the mobile Internet may be some users' only connection to the Internet."

For Swiss Data Industry, NSA Leaks Are Good as Gold
Switzerland isn’t the only country hoping to cash in. Finland’s F-Secure recently released a Dropbox competitor called Younited. And a consortium of German telecoms, ISPs, and e-mail providers has backed an “E-Mail Made in Germany” program that aims to keep communication data routed and stored in-country when possible. In February, German chancellor Angela Merkel attended talks in Paris on building an all-European communications network so that “one shouldn’t have to send e-mails and other information across the Atlantic.”

The Big Data Era: How Should Consumers Deal With the New Definition of Privacy?
So, times are changing and for consumers it is important to be aware of the changed situation. More and more organisations will start using their data in the coming years, and they should if they want to remain competitive. So consumers should get used to the new situation. Of course, this does not mean that organisations can completely forget about the privacy of their customers. On the contrary. Customers should not become the victim of the Big Data era and organisations should stick to the four ethical guidelines to protect their customers.

IT-centrism and real-world enterprise-architecture
IT-centrism is, in essence, an extension of the delusions of Taylorism, that desire or hope or assumption that everything ‘should’ be subject to predictable control, and hence ‘should’ be controllable by certainty-oriented means. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t work in practice: any real-world context will always include elements of inherent uncertainty. In practice, the Taylorist delusion plays out in two distinct forms. The first is an assertion that if the (automated) system can’t handle it, we can safely ignore it.

OS upgrades are a right, not a privilege
Tech reporters who offer buying advice must recognize this. It seems utterly irresponsible for them to ignore the importance of a clear, free and defined upgrade path for the products they get paid to talk about. In the changing technology landscape the price of OS upgrades and the accessibility of those upgrades is as important as the specifications of the device, because software and cloud services will define the future of the industry. People who use devices to do things will want to do the latest things, and for this they will need the latest software.

EA Principles and Policies
If you are involved in business transformation, governance or technology alignment activities, you should access the Enterprise Architecture as a consistent and robust base of knowledge about the Agency. This page will enable you to access guidance and support to help you. The Enterprise Architecture is supported by the Enterprise Architecture Team who can provide detailed advice and assistance to your project as it progresses through the governance process. ... Check out here for Documents relating to the Highways Agency Enterprise Architecture Principles and Policies.

Refactoring tests for better application design
Through the act of writing a test first, we ponder on the interface of the object under test, as well as of other objects that we need but that do not yet exist. We work in small, controllable increments. We do not stop the first time the test passes. We then go back to the implementation and refactor the code to keep it clean, confident that we can change it any way we like because we have a test suite to tell us if the code is still correct. Anyone who’s been doing this has found their code design skills challenged and sharpened. Questions like agh maybe that private code shouldn’t be private or is this class now doing too much are constantly flying through your mind.

The user acceptance testing conversation
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) focuses primarily on verifying that the functionality delivered, and proven in system and system integration testing, meets the end users’ business requirements. An often pressured and compressed phase of the testing lifecycle, UAT represents the final quality gate before delivery to the live environment. As such, it is critical that the testing performed by the business during this phase achieves the appropriate level of coverage and quality demanded by the business sponsor. Below are two fictional conversations between a test manager and a business sponsor, regarding a planned UAT phase.

Quote for the day:

“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt