Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 04, 2014

CSO: System logging a vital computer security tool
Where's the data that people are going to build that intelligence from? I still see system logging as a really interesting piece of it. At Tenable, we're pushing a strong continuous monitoring model: Being able to collect information about everything that's going on in your systems and your networks at all times. It's going to shorten your response time in the event of a breach. It's going to allow you to improve your security if you identify things that are going wrong. It's going to allow you to have a clue of how your systems and network are being used.

Java Foreign Function Interface
JEP 191 provides a Foreign Function Interface at the Java level, similar to JNA or JNR. It will allow easy access to native functions, and will manage native memory at the JVM level. It will also support a future JSR for a standard Java FFI. The Java FFI API can be used for implementing native-backed features like NIO, advanced file system metadata, and process management. Using the FFI API will be the preferred way to bind native code and memory, instead of JNI. JEP 191 does not include enhancements to JNI, although these may go into the JSR process. JNI is the current standard programming interface for writing Java native methods and embedding the Java virtual machine into native applications.

Intel wants your next PC to have no wires
Intel is also chasing wireless charging. Laptops and tablets will be able to recharge simply by putting them on tables or other surfaces, much like smartphones and tablets, Skaugen said. Intel is leading the development of new wireless charging specification that will support power delivery of 20 watts and more to enable magnetic resonance wireless charging of laptops. Skaugen showed a laptop being charged wirelessly when placed on a table. The screen got brighter as the laptop got closer to the table, indicating that the PC was being wirelessly charged. Skaugen also showed a Lenovo Yoga laptop with wireless charging.

Beyond Cortana: What artificial intelligence means for the future of Microsoft
Cortana is, at heart, a user experience for an artificial intelligence, as Lee says. "What the user sees is a UI that's intended to be like a personal assistant, built using the basic building blocks for natural interaction," he says. It's the AI behind it that's handling much of what it does — or rather, a series of different neural networks and rules engines that are the closest to AI we have today. They're designed to make inferences from your personal data, to be prescient (not creepy). It's here that Nadella's ambient intelligence comes in to play, As Lee asks: "Can we mine all the data we have access to, and then extract intelligence?"

The Amazon Model: If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Work with ’Em
Amazon has successfully employed the coopetition strategy in three distinct phases, the authors found, all of which had a significant impact on the company’s performance as well as the global book business. Following the introduction of the Amazon Marketplace, the second coopetitive rollout occurred in the spring of 2001. Though it initially began as an agreement with Borders—one of Amazon’s stiffest bricks-and-mortar rivals—to operate Borders’ online store, the platform gradually expanded to help many different retailers, including Netflix, through Amazon Services.

Google, in promoting encryption, calls out Microsoft and Comcast
The use of encryption has gained added attention since last year's leaks about U.S. government surveillance, prompting more service and software providers to promise customers they'll keep their data safe. Encryption is meant to scramble messages and other data so it can only be read by the sender and receiver. Google has been encrypting all Gmail messages by default since 2010. But encryption only works when it's supported by email providers at both ends of an exchange. In the figures it released Tuesday, Google said between 40 percent and 50 percent of all emails sent between Gmail and other providers during May were not encrypted in transit.

Apache Kafka: Next Generation Distributed Messaging System
Kafka is a fast, scalable, distributed in nature by its design, partitioned and replicated commit log service. Apache Kafka differs from traditional messaging system in: It is designed as a distributed system which is very easy to scale out; It offers high throughput for both publishing and subscribing; It supports multi-subscribers and automatically balances the consumers during failure; It persist messages on disk and thus can be used for batched consumption such as ETL, in addition to real time applications. In this article, I will highlight the architecture points, features and characteristics of Apache Kafka that will help us to understand how Kafka is better than traditional message server.

Heartbleed attack research shows risk to enterprise wireless networks
Not enough testing has been done on Cupid to know exactly what details could be exposed in the memory of vulnerable systems, Grangeia noted, but he speculated that the private key used for the TLS connection and the credentials used to authenticate the connection are likely to be compromised in such an attack. Grangeia did confirm that the default installations of wpa_supplicant, hostapd and freeradius are all exploitable via Cupid on systems running Ubuntu with a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. Android users running versions 4.1.0 and 4.1.1 with a vulnerable OpenSSL implementation may also be susceptible to Cupid, said Grangeia, because all versions of Android use wpa_supplicant to connect to wireless networks.

Facebook encrypts data links to hinder government intrusion
Getting encryption across Facebook was important, but not an easy task, Stefancik said. "We like encryption because it is mathematically strong, we understand its properties, it's easier to control, but that said, it is really hard to deploy. It's not like we wake up one morning and flip a switch. It has performance implications, there's still compatibility issues between devices," he said. But the benefits were good, and Facebook as a site was encrypted 100 percent on by default for all interactions with users as of last year, he said. Facebook has four teams responsible for security: technical security, security infrastructure, site integrity, and safety, but Stefancik said that everyone in Facebook was taught to keep security front and centre in mind.

Scalability from datacenter to IoT: Q&A with Intel
Actually our approach to IoT has been pretty interesting. When Brian Krzanich our CEO introduced the concept of IoT, we took two approaches - one is to go to the industry first which is our usual way, the other way was to introduce the concept to the open community. We are supporting the maker community with products like Galileo and Edison directly through the community. We have taken a completely different approach. This has opened up these products to innovations from different areas, from schools, from small system integrators, and from individuals.

Quote for the day:

"The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way." -- Henry Miller

June 03, 2014

High availability strategy key to saving costs, says Sungard AS
Enterprises have to determine what apps are critical to their business. For airline companies, applications that deal with taking customer bookings and tracking pilot hours are most critical and need to be highly available, he said. But for retailers, it may be their website; and for financial service providers, it could be their trading desk apps, he said. “Businesses need to understand what apps are critical for them. It is not always the most obvious ones," he said. “They should also think about seasonal peaks. For instance, payroll apps run only once a month but, for that time-frame, availability of those apps are critical.”

Making the Clinical Data Warehouse Relevant Again
It's the "minimal transformation" part that reduces the overhead and complexity typically associated with data warehousing, Barlow says. Instead of reconciling every data element that's mapped to the model, Health Catalyst's approach sticks to the core elements. In turn, this lightens the data governance load that's typically necessary for an enterprise master patient index. "Having been exposed to a lot of data warehousing solutions, the successful ones need to be adaptive and agile," Barlow says. "The data models that are common in healthcare are incredibly dynamic and complex, so a platform needs to be able to adjust to that."

Samsung Pushes its Triple Level Cell SSD into Data Centers
Samsung plans to drive down SSD costs the way Intel and AMD drove down processor costs: by creating mass-produced consumer versions first, driving up production yields and driving down prices, then developing datacenter adaptations at competitive price points. That acceleration strategy is what put Intel one, then two, steps ahead of AMD in 2009, and Samsung is hoping for the same effect. While competitor Toshiba still sells its PX series SSDs with 24 nm multi-level cell NAND, Samsung is already mass-producing consumer SSDs based on its 19 nm TLC process. (Samsung marketing calls this its “10-nm class” process generation, though that’s probably jumping the gun a bit.)

The Big Data Dump: How Info-Hoarding Hinders Startups, Spy Agencies
"How much data is enough data?" de Vries said. "It's a lot less than what a lot of people think it is." In fact, some companies and analysts are pushing an idea that could be the next phase in the evolution of big data: small data. By that, they mean information that's not only more manageable, but accessible, immediate and can be acted upon today, not months down the road after a lengthy analysis. It's what Internet companies are accustomed to doing -- making many small, quick decisions based on real-time data.

Data Analytics as a Service: unleashing the power of Cloud and Big Data
In order to validate the base concepts of a DAaaS platform, Atos’ Scientific Community conducted research, based on a concrete scenario for the Oil and Gas industries, that exercises some of the most important points that need to be solved in a DAaaS. This White Paper from Atos’ Scientific Community describes how the Data Analytics as a Service model that we propose in this paper can be applied to multiple use cases and industries. Beyond that, DAaaS puts analytics as a first-level element component in a new vision of Enterprise Computing, that makes extensive usage of the advantages of Cloud technologies.

Beware the next circle of hell: Unpatchable systems
"An attacker with ICS knowledge would use the features rather than an unpatched [vulnerability] to compromise the system," Peterson says. Of course, not all IT systems are the same. Security experts agree there are scenarios in which a lower level of security is acceptable.Perry Pederson, a principal at The Langner Group, says those customers who have taken steps to harden and isolate systems should be more confident that they are protected. However, it is harder than ever for companies to know for sure that air-gapped systems aren't accessible from the Internet or an adjacent network.

Met Office swaps Oracle for PostgreSQL
Tomkins said: "We have a large number and heavy investment in Oracle skilled staff but we are looking at a programme of upskilling development and operational staff in PostgreSQL." Initially, 2ndQuadrant gave all staff initial training to prepare them for deploying the two pilot Postage migration projects into production. "Our intention is to build skills and increase our PostgreSQL deployments. But we haven’t yet reached the same level of skills as we have in Oracle, so we need to build our skills and confidence in PostgreSQL," he said.

10 steps to building a project timeline in Excel
An informed team is a productive team. Everyone on your team should be familiar with a project's schedule -- when each task is scheduled to start and end. A project timeline, shares the project's overall schedule and progress while communicating each task's relationship to the others. In this article, I'll show you an old but true method that uses a scatter chart to implement a project timeline in Excel. ... Excel 2013's chart interface is significantly different from earlier versions, so this article includes instructions for finding options in 2013 and 2010. I'll also include Excel 2003 instructions for finding options via the older versions menu.

Tibco Acquires Jaspersoft to Energize Analytics Portfolio
The acquisition makes sense in that more capabilities are needed to address the expanding scope of business intelligence and analytics. In practice, it will be interesting to see how the open source community and culture of Jaspersoft meshes with the culture of Tibco’s Spotfire division. For now, Jaspersoft will continue as a separate division so business likely will continue as usual until management decides specific areas of integration. With respect to development efforts, it will be critical to blend the discovery capabilities of Tibco Spotfire with Jaspersoft’s reporting which will be a formidable challenge. Another key to success will be how Tibco integrates both with the capabilities from Extended Results, a mobile business intelligence provider Tibco bought in 2013.

Ansible’s View on IT Automation
Foremost, it’s important to understand that Ansible is a general-purpose IT automation system, but does not wish to be considered exclusively a configuration management system. This is because, for many of our users, the more interesting part of the equation is in how business applications are deployed on top of the OS configuration - or how upgrade processes and ad-hoc server maintenance processes are orchestrated. While Ansible does contain a robust series of modules for Configuration Management tasks, Ansible is also concerned with cloud provisioning, software deployment, and automation of orchestration procedures like zero downtime rolling upgrades.

Quote for the day:

"Hire late when it already hurts, not early in anticipation of needing people later" -- Jason Fried

June 02, 2014

In baffling move, TrueCrypt open-source crypto project shuts down
The website provided detailed steps for TrueCrypt users to migrate to BitLocker, a commercial encryption tool. BitLocker is also Microsoft's encryption tool that ships with Windows. "This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt," the website stated. "The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images." The message urged users to migrate data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported by their operating system platform.

How to Create High-Performing Project Management Teams
What makes a "victim"? A victim mindset, Winquist says, is one where cost-cutting, micromanagement, excessive control of information and reporting and a "command and control" philosophy is enacted. "Victims are constantly cutting costs, locking down processes, not sharing information or collaborating, micromanaging, and they have a harder time dealing with complexity and change," Winquist says. Because of this mindset, Winquist adds, many organizations become so focused on controlling the production and delivery process that they miss the mark of what the customer really wanted, too.

SaaS Security Needs Heightened by Adobe Breach
The Adobe breach should be a cautionary tale to the SaaS community to step up security, according to Ethan Oberman, the CEO of SpiderOak, an online backup, syncing, and file sharing service. "In the SaaS model, the moment data is generated on a third-party server, the privacy of that data is compromised. That was the known tradeoff -- less data security for heightened usability," Oberman told me. SpiderOak positions itself as offering a more secure service with what it calls "full end-to-end encryption all the time, every time," he said. The company calls its security approach "Zero-Knowledge" security, because even SpiderOak doesn't know what's in its customers' data.

Coding Principles Every Engineer Should Know
Throughout my engineering career, I’ve had the opportunity work alongside and learn from many incredibly talented people, solve some serious technical challenges, and scale several successful companies. Recently, I was talking with the engineering team at Box about what I’ve learned along this journey, and what came out of that conversation were my personal engineering principals. These aren’t rules or engineering guidelines. They’re simply the principles that I pay attention to when I write and operate code.

U.S. companies seek cyber experts for top jobs, board seats
"The trend that we are seeing is that organizations are elevating the position of the CISO to be a peer of the CIO and having equal voice associated with resource priorities and risk decisions," said Barry Hensley, executive director at Dell SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit. With many companies looking for security executives with military or defense backgrounds, people with the right expertise can command increasingly higher salaries. Large corporations have recently hired CISOs for between $500,000 and $700,000 a year, according to Matt Comyns, global co-head of the cybersecurity practice at search firm Russell Reynolds Associates.

Employee Engagement Everywhere: The Wheel of Engagement at Work
Engagement offers a relatively new thread that weaves together a wide variety of elements in organizations and work. The word began to appear in reference to work in the late 1990s and is gathering increasing attention and prominence as we determine how to move forward with so many different facets of work. It moves well beyond employee satisfaction, motivation or compliance into authentic partnership and co-creation, to enhance relationships and improve results. It supplants the old systems of "command, control and tell", with "invite, co-create and ask".

Google Drive leads in features, lags in ease-of-use
Google has the best file printing of any of the three suites. Print from any of the Google apps by clicking File->Print. The app kicks in Google's Cloud Print, which can print in many ways. If you have your printer set up for Google Cloud Print -- very easy in most cases -- the printing experience closely parallels the way you would print from any desktop app. If there aren't any Google Cloud Print printers around and you can't get to one remotely, you can opt to print from your local computer or to generate a PDF that gets stored in Google Drive.

Happiness is… a handhold on Hadoop
“Very low cost commodity hardware can be used to power Hadoop clusters since redundancy and fault resistance is built into the software instead of using expensive enterprise hardware or software alternatives with proprietary solutions. This makes adding more capacity (and therefore scale) easier to achieve and Hadoop is an affordable and very granular way to scale out instead of up. While there can be cost in converting existing applications to Hadoop, for new applications it should be a standard option in the software selection decision tree.”

75% of mobile security breaches will result from misuse, misconfiguration
Jailbreaking and rooting can also allow malware to be downloaded to the device, enabling malicious exploits that include extraction of enterprise data. These mobile devices also become prone to brute force attacks on passcodes. According to Dionisio Zumerle, principal research analyst at Gartner, a classic example of misconfiguration is improper use of personal cloud services through apps residing on smartphones and tablets. “When used to convey enterprise data, these apps lead to data leaks that the organization remains unaware of for the majority of devices," he said.

Are Chief Digital Officers the Result of CMO/CIO Refusal to Change?
So who is this relatively new beast? Gartner VP David Willis says, “The Chief Digital Officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated, and the mission accomplished.” In other words, where the rubber meets the road. They aren’t just another “C” heading up a unit. They’re the CEO’s personal SWAT team, able to call the shots necessary across all units to affect what has become job one…customer experience. And what are the CMO’s and CIO’s doing while this is going on? Playing corporate games.

Quote for the day:

"To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less." -- Andre Malraux

June 01, 2014

The Culture of Cloud in an Information Security World
No matter what your current culture, cultures can change over time, and I believe there is a logical transition that can occur to safely migrate to a culture of cloud acceptance. Just as CEOs can strive to change corporate culture within their organization to meet specific goals, CISOs and CIOs can evolve IT culture to help meet business goals as well. However, this should not be a forced migration because security issues as well as operational issues can occur. Both IT and Information Security capabilities need time to evolve and mature. As cloud culture evolves and matures within an organization, start with smaller initiatives and grow from there.

Understand the "Heartbleed" bug
In this white paper, Bipin Chandra examines the OpenSSL code in detail and explains how the bounds-checking error in the OpenSSL code created the "Heartbleed" memory leak. After reading Chandra's explanation, you'll understand the seriousness of the "Heartbleed" bug, and you will understand how to prevent similar bugs in your applications. Chandra also documents publicly known information about which devices, operating systems, and servers are susceptible to the bug, the availability of fixes, and tools to assess websites for the vulnerability.

Why haven't robots yet changed the world?
"I think we have accomplished less than we might, less than we had imagined," Matt Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told Computerworld. However, Mason added, "Robots do surgery. Robots have driven down the price of consumer goods. The reason that you have a computer in your pocket is because of robotics in manufacturing. If you go through a semiconductor fab, you 'll find dozens or hundreds of robots working." To appreciate those accomplishments, Mason said we need to change our image of future robots. "Domestic service is always something that we're thinking about, but that's very challenging," he added.

Hey, IT, want to innovate? Become a network
f course, everybody wants to be the hub of that network, and it takes more than exposing a bunch of APIs to successfully execute a classic tech-industry “platform” strategy. Creating product networks is subtler, and not everyone can be the top carnivore in an ecosystem’s food chain. Compare “app constellations.” That’s a Fred Wilson coinage describing both mobile app promotion and how tech companies like Facebook and Foursquare are atomizing monolithic services into single-function apps. Back in pre-mobile days of yore, we called them “portals,” but who doesn’t love a new buzzphrase? An app constellation is an example of a visible network. In media, Disney is a visible network while Viacom is invisible.

Quantifying Privacy: A Week of Location Data May Be an “Unreasonable Search”
The main technology for making these inferences is machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. In the paper, the authors write that their goal was “to identify the threshold at which enough is enough — the point at which long-term government surveillance becomes objectively unreasonable.” In the interview, Mr. Bellovin observed, “We put it at a week, based on our research.” One reason the technology works so well, Mr. Bellovin said, is that people help, by following patterns of movement that are quite predictable. When combined with other data, the result is something close to a movement fingerprint — that is, surprisingly distinctive and identifying.

Data Science @ Activision
Hemann described what his department does by providing a couple of vignettes. “Vignette 1: Algorithm Detection of Assholes.” Some players found a shortcut to raising their rank in Call of Duty known as “boosting.” Two players enter a game on opposite teams and take turns killing each other. This quickly improves their rank. At first, most of the “boosting” detection had to be done manually with Activision players surveying random games. However, the team now uses algorithms and data patterns to determine how quickly the player jumped in rank, the number of times they killed the same player, the number of games with the same player, the player positions on the map, etc.

From Data Ownership to Data Usage: How Consumers Will Monetize Their Personal Data
We will move from data ownership, where organisations that have developed applications assume to own the data, to a situation where these organisations are allowed to use the data of the customers. And potentially they will have to pay for that data usage to gain additional insights. This is already happening at small scale: Google’s Screenwise Trends panel gives up to $ 8 cash to anyone willing to share their browsing behaviour with Google and its partners. Another example is Raptr, an application with almost 26 million users that provides users with real rewards such as free games, hardware or discounts in return for their video gaming habits.

Decision Science as a Service and Data Science curriculum
For the data scientist, I encourage courses in statistics, machine learning, applied math (including linear algebra), databases and data structures, data and information visualization, scientific modeling and simulation, programming (Python, R, or Matlab, at a minimum), and even some Physics (to learn and sharpen problem-solving skills). For the big data analytics profession, focus more on the algorithms (data mining, statistics, and machine learning), programming skills, and computing technologies (such as Hadoop). For the business or marketing analytics profession, include some of the above things while also learning the key concepts of business, marketing, finance, organizational management, social and behavioral science, leadership, entrepreneurship.

Is the Internet of Things strategic to the enterprise?
Unfortunately, all of this thinking leaves out a few important concepts. Most importantly, is the idea of network effect. The more connected something is, especially if by being connected it provides additional value to those on the network, the more valuable it becomes. The value grows expontentially according to connectedness. That's the basic truism of Internet business, and the reason why growth is always the primary and first order of business for Internet startups. You can do anything, create any business model, find new and better ways to monetize, if only you are deeply connected. If you aren't, the most innovative digital business models just have no meaning.

Taking Back Agile
A lot of people found that the agile methods really humanized the work, and opened the door to more lean and more continual development techniques. In the heyday of agile, people pushed the limit on how simple, how safe, how lean, and how human a software team could become. It's fair that people would be suspicious: Are we trying to take ownership of the brand? Are we trying to set up an alternate, competing certification program? Are we trying to cast doubt on our competitors? It might be good for folks to know that "Let's take back agile" has an "us" that includes everyone. We don't need a brand. We don't need yet another certification scheme, and it doesn't matter what we call it.

Quote for the day:

"Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position." -- Brian Tracy

May 31, 2014

SAP and IBM Collaborate to Serve Transportation and Logistics Industry
“Like many industries today, transportation companies are responding to the imperative to treat their customers as markets of one. The experience a company creates for its customers has become a de facto element in their ability to compete,” said Raimon Christiani, global Travel and Transportation industry lead, IBM Global Business Services. “Using best practices in analytics and other core competencies from IBM together with SAP software, our transportation clients will be better positioned to provide their customers with experiences that form the basis of sustained relationships.”

How Mobile Reshapes The Way We Communicate
The irony here, is that we all have our head down, staring at our devices so much that we may just have missed this shift altogether. Bottom line, mobile devices and the trend of mobility is another trend that is greatly altering the way we communicate. In the past 5 years, really since the release of the first iPhone, mobile has been on a torrent pace to take over our lives. The aforementioned comment about people staring at their devices; sure that is said somewhat in gest, but if you actually stop and look around it isn’t even the slightest bit surprising to see people ignoring their surroundings to stare at their device.

The 6 Stages of the Enterprise Content Marketing Maturity Model
The research the Content Marketing Institute and others do every year is invaluable information for marketers. Unfortunately, the people surveyed run the maturity gamut – from stage one to stage six and are likely bottom-heavy. Challenges, goals, strategies, tactics, measurement and what’s considered awin at each stage of the model can vary greatly. Disappointingly, current research doesn’t address this and we’re left with very austere data. In the meantime, let’s look at what some of these challenges look like at each stage of the enterprise content marketing maturity model.

Stress Testing: A Must For Comprehensive Risk Management
Beyond the benefits stress testing provides,the practice is required by regulatory bodies, such as the Federal Reserve, and by legislation, such as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review and the Dodd-Frank Act. Financial institutions should implement a stress testing discipline that establishes frequency, results measurement and supporting tools. Ultimately, the goal of stress testing is to determine the scenarios that could render an institution’s business model no longer viable, as a means of developing management plans to mitigate the risks related to these scenarios. Stress tests help quantify a firm’s risk appetite, and result in the creation of various risk management policies and limits.

Five questions your CFOs are asking about security and risk management
"A lot of these applications have audit trails," said Gil Zimmerman, CEO and co-founder of CloudLock Inc. in Waltham, Massachusetts. IT can either "weed through" the audits manually or invest in a tool to keep tabs on who's using what and where. But SaaS audits aren't just for employees making an exit."It's about people moving inside of your organization," Zimmerman said. When he worked at EMC and transitioned from managing investor advocacy programs to another department in 2003, he retained his original permissions, which gave him access to information he no longer should have had access to.

A Look at the Maturity of Vendor Risk Management
Despite this environment, for most organizations, understanding vendor risk and how to manage it appropriately has thus far been more art than science. This is changing in part with the development of the first comprehensive Vendor Risk Management Maturity Model (VRMMM) by the Shared Assessments Program. The VRMMM sets forth best practices for developing a comprehensive third party risk program and allows a company to evaluate its program’s maturity against development goals. The Shared Assessments Program recently partnered with Protiviti, a global consulting firm, to conduct a third party risk management benchmarking study based on this maturity model.

Compliance Solution Accelerators
These free resources will help your organization reduce the risks and associated costs of meeting IT governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) objectives by automating the configuration, monitoring, and validation of Microsoft products ... Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2012 now available! This new Solution Accelerator helps organizations identify, classify, and protect data to enable governance of unstructured data scattered across a targeted number of file servers ... Updated with new materials and references to the latest MOF supplemental materials—this kit will help IT pros get up and running with MOF 4.0. Get MOF. Get to work.

How Augmented Reality Wants to Help You Shop
In the case of Augment, the company provides a mobile app for both iOS and Android that lets businesses upload and share previously rendered 3D models of retail items or other product displays. Cimagine does something similar, providing a way for consumers to see how those products would look in different parts of their house. The technology makes use of the camera in people's smartphones or tablets. Holding your iPad up in front of your kitchen counter, while viewing an item on a retailer's site, might super-impose the item on the counter, locked in place, even if you move your iPad around.

How Healthcare CIOs View the Data Analytics Landscape
Nearly all provider CIO respondents in a recent survey believe data analytics will play a big role in succeeding with accountable care and other value-based healthcare initiatives. But while 42 percent say they have a flexible and scalable analytics plan, more than three-quarters report only moderate or minimal commitment to integrating analytics into practice.

8 Great Java 8 Features No One's Talking about
If you haven’t seen some of the videos or tutorials around Java 8, you’ve probably been super-busy or have a more interesting social life than I do (which isn’t saying much). With new features like lambda expressions and Project Nashorn taking so much of the spotlight, I wanted to focus on some new APIs that have been a bit under the radar, but make Java 8 better in so many ways.

Quote for the day:

"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it." -- Andrew Carnegie

May 30, 2014

Know your Data Lineage
You need to know what has been done to your data, where it came from, and who is responsible for each stage of the analysis. This information represents your data lineage; it is your stack-trace. If you’re an analyst, suspicious of a number, it tells you why the number is there and how it got there. If you’re a developer, working on a pipeline, it provides the context you need to track down the bug. If you’re a manager, or an auditor, it lets you know the right things are being done. Lineage tracking is part of good data governance. Most audit and lineage systems require you to buy into their whole structure.

Hackers put security tool that finds payment card data into their arsenal
"This is the unfortunate reality for all software vendors: It is common for criminals to acquire a copy of commercial software via unauthorized means and then reverse engineer that software to circumvent the licensing mechanisms that are designed to prevent its unauthorized use," Cavey said. Numaan Huq, a senior threat researcher for Trend Micro, wrote on Wednesday that a version of Card Recon dating from three years ago was being used to validate payment card details in a type of POS malware. When Card Recon is scanning, it has to be able to separate 16-digit numbers and other random data it finds from valid 16-digit credit card numbers. Credit card numbers can be validated by using a checksum formula called the Luhn algorithm.

The Proof is in the SDN Applications
What should an open SDN Ecosystem or strategy look like? HP’s SDN strategy is based on open standards and building an open ecosystem to deliver complete SDN solutions. HP is a founding member of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and has adopted ONF’s standard definition of SDN, and has fully embraced the OpenFlow standard with over 50 switches and 10 routers comprising over 25 million OpenFlow capable ports. HP also participates in other standards consortiums such as ETSI, OpenStack and OpenDaylight with the vested interest in open, agile networking for all. Please read this Lippis Report for further analysis of HP’s open SDN strategy.

Engagement Is Driven By Good Managers With Rare Talents
If it’s not already apparent, the most effective managers seek to influence employees in ways we’ve traditionally believed were soft and even weak in business. They build personal relationships with their people, advocate for their growth – and routinely ensure they feel valued, respected and cared for. Just the idea that they want to make a difference in other people’s lives is a colossal change in our shared leadership paradigm. Were you to ask any of the people known-to-be disengaged in their jobs today (70% of our society) what they felt was missing at work, it’s almost assured to be some if not all of the things I just mentioned.

A beginner's guide to BitLocker, Windows' built-in encryption tool
The company says there are no back doors, but how can we be certain? We can't. Sure, if BitLocker was open source most of us wouldn't be able to read the code to determine if there was a backdoor anyway. But somebody out there would be able to meaning there would be a much higher chance of any faults with the program being discovered. So with BitLocker's closed source nature in mind, I wouldn't count on this encryption program defending your data against a government actor such as border agents or intelligence services. But if you're looking to protect your data in case your PC is stolen or other situations where petty criminals and non-government types might mess with your hardware then BitLocker should be just fine.

Documentation and Test Assertions in Databases
With Extended properties, one can get the best of both worlds, and even use them to put blame, praise or annotations into your VCS. It requires a lot of work, though, particularly the script to generate the table. The problem is that there are no conventional names beyond ‘MS_Description’ for the special use of extended properties. This makes it difficult to do splendid things such ensuring the integrity of the build by running a suite of tests that are actually stored in extended properties within the database and therefore the VCS. We have lost the readability of database source code over the years, and largely jettisoned the use of test assertions as part of the database build.

Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight
In Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight, we cover what big data really means, how you can use it to your advantage in your company or organization, and one of the services you can use to do that quickly—specifically, Microsoft’s HDInsight service. We start with an overview of big data and Hadoop, but we don’t emphasize only concepts in this book—we want you to jump in and get your hands dirty working with HDInsight in a practical way. To help you learn and even implement HDInsight right away, we focus on a specific use case that applies to almost any organization and demonstrate a process that you can follow along with.

Information overload: Finding signals in the noise
"The detection of an opportunistic Trojan, which happens to include a keylogger (e.g., the Zeus Trojan), occurs at a high frequency and may be considered to have low business risk to an organization (AKA - a noisy detection) because the presumed motivation of the attacker is to steal a user's credentials to personal accounts (e.g., shopping, personal banking)," explained Oliver Tavakoli, the CTO of Vectra Networks. "However, the same host may be used to login to IT systems or customer-owned systems, as in the case of an employee at Fazio Mechanical logging into a outside vendor support website at Target, thus resulting in the compromise of business-critical account credentials."

Between Cisco and VMware SDN, which will network engineers choose?
Network engineers will be much more comfortable with Cisco and its hardware-centric vision. After all, one of the three pillars of the Cisco ACI strategy is the Nexus 9000 series switch line, which runs a trimmed down version of the familiar Nexus operating system. ... Systems engineers, on the other hand, will be much more comfortable with the VMware vision of the future, as it brings the promise of network virtualization and control more directly into their world and the existing VMware product portfolio. It remains to be seen how much network control will truly be shifted to systems engineers in an NSX-centric version of the data center, but it is fairly certain that the likelihood of a power shift is much stronger with VMware than with Cisco.

A Random Walk in Finance
Malkiel's simple random walk is one in which each observation has a 50% chance of assuming a value of -1 and a 50% chance of being 1. The “problem” with an RW like this for the analyst is that its properties change over time – an RW isn't a statistically well-behaved “stationary” process. The RW's variance increases with the number of time points, potentially generating “patterns” that are in fact just noise. And indeed, realized RW's often can be confused with series having apparent patterns. Malkiel argues that market “chartists” – technical analysts who purport to time the market for profits by projecting future movement in stocks based on recent patterns -- are in reality being fooled by random walks.

Quote for the day:

"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

May 29, 2014

Federal CIOs, Take Open Data To Next Level
As usual, authorities tout the benefits of improved transparency, accountability, and innovation as the rationale for increased data transparency. But government CIOs are also in a unique position to provide additional benefits from open data, as government data analysis reveals countless opportunities to improve quality of life. These opportunities often are overlooked because -- unless you are the CIO of an agency with oversight responsibilities, such as the Government Accountability Office or OMB -- you are typically considered a "data producer" rather than a "data consumer." In fact, most stories immediately presume that innovation stemming from open data will originate in the private sector.

8 Key Attributes of a Data Center Infrastructure Platform
many companies have no software to see and control what’s going on across the entire data center footprint – or worse, numerous, different, non-integrated applications that can’t give an overall picture of performance. So, to be blunt, your ability to reach and satisfy your customers, to grow your business, and therefore a major portion of your enterprise’s business value, rests on this chaos. Unless you fix this, you’re potentially another Borders waiting to get knocked off by someone who sees how to deliver value to customers with a cohesive, unified, and more powerful digital infrastructure.

DBS Bank launches mobile wallet
The bank had launched another mobile banking app, called mBanking, in 2011 but this also saw slow adoption despite its focus on making user experience "seamless and intuitive", it said. DBS then introduced new features including investment services and card activation. To date, there are more than 800,000 mBanking users in Singapore, DBS said. ... Louis Foo, the bank's senior vice president of consumer banking group e-business in Singapore, said in the statement: "Mobile payment is on an upward trajectory. While our customers have become increasingly tech-savvy, mobile wallets remain a new frontier in the Singapore's payment landscape.

Launch Of Release 4.6 Of Test Management Software Zephyr
Zephyr which offers free community edition for upto 10 users is now releasing major release with lots of new features. This comes after release of Zephyr for Jira, available on Atlassian marketplace. Let us dive into few of the new features and enhancement to existing features Zephyr is Test management software that manages every aspect of the testing cycle to ensure what was delivered against what was specified. This includes managing teams and resources, designing test strategies and implementing their execution, organizing and reusing testing assets and environments, defining quality standards and processes, collaborating with the entire team and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.

What managers do at a company that’s trying to replace them with software
The focus is on making sure that those discrete tasks actually get done, people are accountable, and that managers don’t have to search for who’s working on what. That intense focus on tasks means that progress on those tasks is what managers track, instead of hours or any other metric of productivity. “That’s the really critical data source: What are people working on? What do they need help on?” Rosenstein says. “People look at things like how many lines of code someone wrote, and that’s just BS. Those sort of metrics give you really skewed understanding of the people’s value. The data that doesn’t lie is what work the person is accomplishing each week.”

Principle #3 of Capacity Planning: Matching Supply to Demand
The third principle of capacity planning, matching demand to supply, emphasizes the importance of making choices. It’s necessary to match overall portfolio demand with capabilities and capacity supplied by existing teams in the near-term, while shaping both the demand and supply sides of the portfolio for the long-term. Matching demand and supply must look deeper than just allocating resources to include the interactions between multiple sources of demand and the capabilities of the available teams. The net result is more effective delivery of value, aligned to overall business strategy by more clearly focusing on completing those things that matter most to the business.

UAE National ID Program: Model Worth Watching
One challenge, however, continues to undermine the progress of most countries' e-government initiatives: That's the need for a reliable system to manage the digital identities and private information of citizens securely -- and the need for infrastructure to integrate various government databases on the back end so that individuals receive all, and only, the services to which they are entitled. That's why a national identity card project making headway in the United Arab Emirates, and the project's leader, Ali M. Al-Khouri, director general of the Emirates Identity Authority (EIDA), are both worth watching.

Decoding the language of Microsoft: What 'growth hacking' means to Redmond
One phrase that's going around is "growth hacking". Often seen as just a Silicon Valley way of talking about marketing, it's actually a technique for analysing products and marketing that's very close to the existing Microsoft data driven way of working. Instead of leaving marketing to marketers, growth hacking gives fast-moving product teams the opportunity to come up with a combined strategy that mixes product design with marketing; making hypotheses about feature uptake and marketing messages, and then testing them in the real world; quickly pulling back if they don't work. Measurement is key, and if you can't measure something, you can't manage it, so you can't try it out.

How can leaders get the most out of a professional business organization?
Some CEOs approach professional organizations as transactional marketplaces. Instead of thinking about what someone can do for you (or you for them) in the next month or year, brainstorm ways to interact and check up. From considering PEOs to hiring new employees, interacting over time as your businesses grow can be instrumental in learning from other CEOs. ... As a leader, you have to stay ahead of everyone in the organization in terms of your understanding of the market, visibility into future challenges and anticipation of future opportunities. Spend time looking to the future.

CISOs taking a leap of faith
Forewarned of her upcoming unemployment, Moskites went on the lookout for new opportunities, and decided to do something completely different. During a conversation with Jeff Hudson, CEO at certificate and encryption key security firm Venafi, she temperature-checked the idea of moving from being a security executive for an the enterprise--a role she had always played--to working on the vendor side of the business. "I know my role is going to get eliminated with the restructuring, and I'm very excited about the opportunity to possibly make a move to the vendor side," she said to Hudson.A "He kind of laughed at me," Moskites explained months after the fact. "And he then asked, 'Are you serious?'"

Quote for the day:

“It's not about how smart you are--it's about capturing minds.” -- Richie Norton

May 28, 2014

Oracle Weaves Fabric for MySQL Clustering
MySQL Fabric can help solve two pressing problems within the enterprise: increasing the reliability of the database service, which Oracle calls high availability, and scaling a database beyond a single server, to improve performance of the database server. For high availability, the user can elect to have one or more database servers act as a replicated backup to the main server. When the master database goes down, MySQL Fabric detects the outage and reroutes requests to the designated replicated database server, or servers. The application does not see the switch over.

FAST Leadership
It looks to answer the questions what, how, who and how far, which are related to the task, service or project that is to be delivered, or goal to be achieved. Focus is about the WHAT, what we’re doing, what is our objective, and what does success look like. Accountability is about the WHO, who is going to do the work, who will be accountable and how will we hold them accountable. Simplicity is about the HOW, what is the solution, how are we planning to deliver success. Is our solution simple or have we over complicated it. Transparency is about How Far, How Far we have come and How Far we have to go in order to be successful, it’s also about our honesty about our progress and capability.

Data-Driven Insurance Pricing: Not Gouging
The big lesson from the Great Recession is that insurers can't rely, or at least shouldn't rely, upon investment income. Today all insurers are looking to underwrite profitably. This may seem like an obvious goal, but for anyone who has lived through cash flow underwriting or worked for an insurer who looks to expand market share at any cost, underwriting profitability hasn't always been a top priority for insurers. Price optimization will be leveraged to not only anticipate what the price points are for insurers but will be leveraged to further segment markets into finer and finer slices. All of this will be leveraged to try and turn each segment into a profitable segment.

Ask Cisco, VMware if their SDN interoperates
It's important for us as administrators to consider a change in vendor messages carefully. The stakes have changed as the offered stacks from each company have become larger and affect more parts of the infrastructure. Extricating yourself from a non-optimal solution in your environment could be time-consuming and expensive. To be clear, I think both companies offer advantages depending on the network you're planning to SDN-enable. But some of the messaging now seems to be that they're both the best solution for any network and that's unlikely to be true.

How CIOs Can Lead Their Company’s Information Business
Senior IT leaders not only are well equipped to lead and shape these activities but also have a huge part to play in accelerating change across the enterprise. To lead this transformation, CIOs must reimagine their role, seeing themselves—and encouraging others to see them—as chief executives of an information business. Like any chief executive, the CIO should bring vision, direction, and organization to the company’s big data investment priorities. That means engaging internal customers on their biggest challenges while attracting the best talent and suppliers; most important, it means being accountable for execution and results. The CIO’s mission encompasses both internal demand and supply

Cloud creep: Is your business in control?
It might be tempting to think you can use technology to defend against cloud creep the way some organisations block access to social media, but it can be an uphill battle, and it will take work and money — work and money you could be putting towards more important IT needs. "You can use internet proxy policies to block certain categories of traffic, like file storage and sharing tools," says Pierre-Olivier Blu-Mocaer, Asia-Pacific head of IT for asset management firm Schroders. "Those categories and their lists of sites are managed by third-parties, and some blacklisting can be done internally. You can also implement desktop policies to prevent users from installing or using unauthorised software."

The smart insurer: embedding big data in corporate strategy
Could big data and advanced analytics be disruptive for the whole insurance industry? Insurers are looking at their data-driven business capabilities and trying to improve how they use existing and new data and analytics. Current efforts are focused on areas such as pay-as-you-go pricing, customized and individualized products (for example one-time insurance), enhanced customer insights and improved fraud detection. However a vicious cycle is slowing insurers’ efforts to innovate and grow. Based on client experience and leading-edge research, BearingPoint Institute has defined the foundation for success in terms of speed, partnerships, open data, skills and governance.

How big data supports your digital insurer strategy
Insurance organisations need to source data that enables analysis of customer behaviour, contrasting with the traditional or needs-based information that has historically been used. This behavioural information can then be used to develop propositions that fit with the consumer’s lifestyle and preferred behaviours. Insurance businesses will need to invest in mobile and interactive technologies for multimedia content creation and product distribution across multiple digital platforms. PWC research suggests that the role of the intermediary sales channel will reduce, and customers will demand a direct relationship using their own online and offline trusted network to guide their choices.

Data Stewards versus Subject Matter Experts and Data Managers
We need to understand how these three roles fit together. Either we should justify them as separate roles or recognize that they boil down to the same thing. The fact that many enterprises have only a fuzzy grasp of what these three roles involve is a major risk for the successful operationalization of data governance. This is because individuals will be assumed to have accountabilities that they have not been formally assigned, and which they are not equipped to carry out. To the extent that these accountabilities are assigned by a data governance program, it is data governance that will be blamed for lack of results.

Microsoft’s Nadella on ‘Post-Post PC’ Vision
“It’s time for us to build the next big thing,” Nadella said. “If along the way we have to buy things that’s fine, but we have to build something big.” He didn’t disclose precisely what that big thing might be. But he described a wide-ranging array of new programs and services in development at Microsoft during the hour-long interview, from new search technologies to a live translation service for Skype calls demonstrated onstage at the event. As computing moves beyond desktop computers, he said, Microsoft will work on technology that encompasses more than mobile devices–the products that caused people like Steve Jobs to talk about a “post-PC era.”

Quote for the day:

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

May 27, 2014

It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane….it’s India's first pizza-delivering drone!
In perhaps the most audacious and value-for-money stunt that the city of Mumbai has yet seen, a once unknown hole-in-the-wall Pizzeria at Kemp's Corner in tony South Mumbai used a drone to delivery a Pizza to a location nearby (Worli), giving further credence to the notion that India can be both way ahead of its time and way behind it. While this is apparently not the first pizza in the world delivered by a drone—A Dominos franchise snagged that badge of honor by dong so in the UK last year—it certainly was the most attention grabbing.

Microsoft to the FBI: Drop dead
The FBI backed off, and agreed to call back the letter. Yesterday, documents related to the case were unsealed by a federal court in Seattle. You can read them here. What's noteworthy about the case, the papers show, is that involves a corporate customer using cloud-based Office 365 and cloud data. That's Microsoft's future, and likely one of the reasons it fought back against the FBI. In its petition against the FBI request, Microsoft wrote: "As more users migrate from locally installed software and locally stored data to cloud-based computing platforms, Microsoft increasingly is entrusted to store its customers' data safely and securely."

Strategic principles for competing in the digital age
Digital capabilities increasingly will determine which companies create or lose value. Those shifts take place in the context of industry evolution, which isn’t monolithic but can follow a well-worn path: new trends emerge and disruptive entrants appear, their products and services embraced by early adopters (exhibit). Advanced incumbents then begin to adjust to these changes, accelerating the rate of customer adoption until the industry’s level of digitization—among companies but, perhaps more critically, among consumers as well—reaches a tipping point. Eventually, what was once radical is normal, and unprepared incumbents run the risk of becoming the next Blockbuster.

IT Professionals Overworked, Losing Pride in Their Jobs
"While the majority of IT professionals are proud they chose a career in IT, the survey results point to the potential of a trend towards dissatisfaction or disengagement that organizations need to monitor," Jason Hayman, market research manager for TEKsystems, said in a statement. "The shift so far is slight, but if it continues and organizations do not prepare for and adjust their talent management and workforce strategies accordingly, they could face even greater turnover, possibly causing even more stress and increased workloads for those employees that stick around."

Technology Companies Are Pressing Congress to Bolster Privacy Protections
“Almost every American thinks that it is frightening that we have a law that suggests that the government has the right to read your email after only 180 days,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s an easy issue in which to achieve bipartisan compromise and consensus.” The bill would require a search warrant for access to electronic communications, with exceptions for some emergency situations. It would also require the government to notify individuals within 10 days that their information was being investigated. However, it does not address rules for location data, like GPS information from an individual’s cellphone.

Getting started with a mobility assessment
To craft a strong mobility policy, start by defining your business goals and the devices and users that fall within its scope. For example, is your objective to enable business access under BYOD? Is it to enable secure visitor access to the Internet or guest services? Or do you want to ensure that every employee's mobile device complies with an industry regulation? Clarify your policy's scope by specifying which mobile devices are included, such as smartphones and tablets that carry or access business data. You may also exclude certain endpoints, such as IT-owned or personal-use-only devices.

Next generation hotspots: The future of Wi-Fi?
The key to NGH is something called Passpoint. Passpoint is an industry certification that your device has 802.1x and 802.11u functionality. IEEE 802.1x is a way to securely authenticate to a network. It is used in many businesses as a way for workers to connect to corporate networks, making the network trust a certain device. 802.11u is what creates the seamless part of the network identification and authentication process. “With 802.11u, a Passpoint-enabled smartphone and a Passpoint-enabled access point (AP) can have a very involved conversation, without the user connecting,” said Gunning. “The smartphone sends out packets to see what’s around, which is a process called beaconing.”

Beginner's Guide to HTML5 & CSS3 - HTML5 API Grab Bag
Wow, the future of web landscape looks excitingly promising. However, reaching this stage is not without its challenges. For one thing, the supports of the current browsers must be improved and streamlined. For another, the awareness and education on HTML5 APIs among the web communities must be stepped up. Some would have argued about "the chicken or the egg" causality dilemma. I would argue that both can proceed in parallel. Over the years, HTML5 specification has added a bag full of APIs that cover a wide spectra of functionality and features that power the future web browsers and mobile devices.

Mint 17: The best Linux desktop to date
Unlike most of its Linux brothers and sisters, Mint also includes many proprietary programs. So, for example, you can play Adobe Flash videos and DVDs from your Mint PC without jumping through any hoops. Mint doesn't include proprietary drivers such as the ATI or NVIDIA drivers; it does make it easy to install drivers. Another nice feature, which Mint does shares with most modern Linux distributions, is that you don't have to commit yourself to it. You can try it out by running it from a live USB thumb-drive or DVD drive before actually installing it. In my case — since I know Mint like the back of my hand — I went ahead and installed it not just on test systems but on my production desktop and laptop. Yes, I'm a brave Linux user!

You could one day be driving on a solar-powered smart streets
The Sagle, Idaho-based Solar Roadways company is now running a crowdsourcing campaign on Indiegogo.com to raise more money to ramp up production of their hexagonal-shaped Solar Road Panel technology. The hexagon panels are made up of four layers. There's a half-inch thick glass surface, followed by a layer of LED lights, an electronic support structure (circuit board) and a base layer made of recyclable materials. The hexagon-shaped Solar Road Panels connect to make a grid. "We can produce three times more power than we use as a nation. That will eliminate the need for coal-fired power plants," Scott Brusaw said.

Quote for the day:

"People will follow you when you build the character to follow through.” -- Orrin Woodward

May 26, 2014

Talari WAN aggregation helps shake enterprise reliance on MPLS
Talari physical and virtual appliances make routing decisions based on the quality of each link and which path is the best available for the traffic. As businesses start to have more demanding applications and traffic -- such as voice and video -- flowing over their network, they need help making the most of their available connections in a cost-effective way, Christy said. "If a business had three networks – say, an MPLS, a cable modem and DSL [Digital Subscriber Line]-- APN uses all three links. We can steer around problems, like avoiding a down MPLS link or a congested link for latency-sensitive packets," Talari's Gavin said.

5 worst days in a DBA's life
Not long ago, a crack team of SQL Server experts was flamed for a crime against database normalization they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from the taunts of academic relational theorists. Today, they survive as website editors and software evangelists. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the DBA Team. "Our rivals are going to be sweating this weekend." Bruno laughed mirthlessly from the shade of the canopy of the café and had a sip of the wine. "It's sure hot, boss." "It's not the heat that will make them sweat, but the nasty surprise I have planned, Gabriel."

Do We Still Need Database Design in the Era of Big Data?
Confusion over this issue usually originates from misperceptions regarding how special solutions execute big data queries. Simply put, in most cases your data will be physically stored in two places: your current production database management system (DBMS) and the new special-purpose appliance. Your current production processes that extract, transform, and load data into the current DBMS continue to operate as-is, with an additional step: at every point that you load data into a table you will also ensure that the new data is loaded into the appliance as well. Loading data into the appliance can be done immediately after your DBMS loads, or can be batched for later execution.

Is BYOC the New Buzzword?
Pattamatta says, “BYOD users will soon move into BYOC, as it has the potential to shake up the organisation in a good way, just as BYOD brought a whole new range of productive mobility options to the business. But, BYOC takes things to a whole new level. We’re not talking about data on a laptop or smart phone. Data that had previously been safe (more or less) behind the confines of our enterprise network will now be stored on remote servers deployed at innumerable places that the company may not be able to access and are open to their own security risks. BYOC will require much more IT management and oversight than BYOD ever did.”

8 new tech job titles -- grab 'em before they're hot
IT pros face a constant balancing act between jobs that are core to IT's mission, like tech support specialist or QA technician, and those that ride the wave of change overtaking the industry, like dataviz expert, UX guru or chief digital officer. With an eye toward your future, Computerworld polled tech industry watchers and analysts to get their take on the up-and-coming jobs that should be on your radar. Who knows? The job with the most potential might be one you haven't heard of yet.

Building a hybrid network with SDN, network virtualization
SDN and network virtualization are highly interrelated technologies with overlapping capabilities, especially in the data center context. Both have widely varied (and complex) cost models, including prices by software license, VM, subscription (monthly fee), bundled with hardware and software, free software, pay for support, and open source. Implementing them should be driven by a specific use case and may require significant customization to work well in your environment. For the purposes of this article, SDN and network virtualization are considered together.

Lifecycle of disruption: How Square scaled to $5 billion and stayed true to its mission
The first iteration of Square was a product that could deal with the issue that initially plagued McKelvey: give people an easy way to accept credit card payments. Folks such as food truck operators, local artists and artisans, and farmers at farmer's markets were the initial target audience. For the early customers, it was a no brainer. They had no way to accept credit cards without onerous monthly fees and a high percentage per transaction. Square gave them a way around that. The company gave away the reader for free, there was no contract or monthly fee, and there was a low, flat rate for processing

Virtual Panel on Reactive Programming
Reactive programming is a very hot topic: libraries for building reactive systems are mushrooming on many platforms and languages. Initiatives like the Reactive Manifesto (watch the InfoQ interview with Francesco Cesarini and Viktor Klang) are promoting the idea, and with Reactive Streams (also see Reactive Streams with Akka Streams on InfoQ) there are even efforts to provide interoperability between reactive libraries. But what does it mean to be reactive? How do implementations differ from each other? InfoQ brought together three proponents of reactive programming in a virtual panel to find out and learn more about the individual projects.

‘Social Physics’ Harnesses Big Data to Predict Human Behavior
“At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow,” asserted the editors in an overview of Pentland’s latest book. These trends in big data analytics and social physics research are being driven in large part by the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors that are generating enormous data sets. Add to that, devices themselves are being connected via ad hoc networks that have come to be called the “Internet of Things.” The result is a flood of unstructured data that researchers have just now began to probe for insights into things like consumer behavior and personalize health care.

Data Bloat? 6 Ways You Can Trim Fat for Lean Information Governance in 2014
IDC predicts that enterprise data growth will average around 50% each year through 2016 and storage costs are expected to consume close to 20% of the typical IT budget in 2014. What's more, the increase in the use of non-email communications such as instant messaging, enterprise social platforms and social media will drive up enterprise data volumes exponentially. According to Allison Walton, CEO of information governance consultancy Fortis Quay, "Many meaningful and material conversations are being conducted in these mediums and must be controlled, captured, and be discovery ready."

Quote for the day:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." -- Stephen R. Covey