Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 04, 2014

Computer Weekly names the 25 most influential women in UK IT
Computer Weekly has revealed its list of the 25 most influential women in UK IT in 2014. The aim of compiling the annual list of the top 25 women in UK IT is to focus on the role of women in IT, to recognise the most influential role models and to discuss the vital part that female IT leaders will play in the UK’s high-tech economy. The 25 inspirational women listed here on the 2014 list are role models for diversity and success among the tech community.

Software-defined networking with Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2

Hyper-V Network Virtualization provides a virtual network abstraction of your physical network. Administrators can use the abstraction to achieve isolation and virtual machine mobility in completely new ways. You can, for example, host multi-tenant environments and isolate traffic in a dedicated virtual network independently of the physical infrastructure and without using Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs). You also can move virtual machines between physical servers, sites, and into the cloud while preserving virtual network assignments and policies

Banks should avoid bitcoin and other virtual currencies for now, EU regulator warns
Unlike in China, this is not an outright ban, but the opinion does carry a lot of weight. The European Banking Authority (EBA), which has already warned consumers that they have little protection if they dabble in virtual currencies (VCs), said on Friday that the use of such currencies carries many risks, and requires a swathe of new legislation if it is to be properly regulated. In the meantime, it said, regulated financial services should avoid crossing paths with the virtual currency world. That’s not to say the EBA saw no upside to currencies like bitcoin; it noted the potential advantages of faster, cheaper transactions and greater financial inclusion. However, it said the risks outweighed those benefits, certainly in the European context.

Mobile Microscopes: Snapping The Future Of Health Care
While Fletcher and his students are foraying into other applications of the mobile microscope, such as examining your skin or testing for malaria and Tb, MIT’s Ramesh Raskar has become known as the ‘Eye Guy.’ As the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture research, Raskar surfaced first in 2011 with a mobile tool for doing eye exams in developing countries – EyeNetra. EyeNetra was prototyped at MIT but went on to become a commercial startup, backed by Khosla Ventures. The company, and its investors, however, declined to comment on the status of the company, its reach, and the price point of EyeNetra.

Storage Landscape (Part 1) – Disruptive Technology Trends
There are several intersecting trends here. A key one is the move towards object storage – a flat namespace coupled with monolithic get/puts for object updates. This is fundamentally different from in-place, POSIX compliant read/write interfaces within a file system or database. Object based storage has come to prominence with cloud workloads and big data alongside popular key-value pair and No-SQL data abstractions and the scalability requirements of the cloud. Another interesting trend supports the ability to achieve cloud scale and match these application requirements. This is a major architectural shift in and of itself that I expect to cover more fully in a future post. In this case, strict consistency has been traded off for availability and partition-tolerance.

60 Minutes Got It Wrong: Data Brokers Aren’t Evil
Data brokers get it: Data sells. And now with big data (read “a lot more data”), there’s a lot more money to be made. The irony is that a lot of the “big” consumer data being collected, aggregated, anonymized, and sold is being generated by the consumers themselves. Think social media data. Think location data. Think mobile data. How about all the money these data brokers are making off your personal data? But let’s not limit it to just the data brokers. It’s any company that is keeping tabs on your online and offline activity. (Yes, I’m looking at you Google and Facebook and the 1000+ other organizations that are collecting our data). If the data is being collected, it can be monetized. For good or for ill.

Cyber fraudsters net up to $3.75bn in Brazil
The cyber criminals have been siphoning off funds using the man in the browser technique, which enables criminals to intercept and alter Boleto transactions without the victims’ knowledge. The attack is facilitated by malware injected into victims’ browsers after they have been tricked into clicking malicious links. Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are all vulnerable to the attack, although the malware appears to affect only computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Researchers believe that more than 192,000 computers have been infected with the malware used by the Boleto cyber criminals and that 83,506 email user credentials have also been stolen.

WPF Control Patterns.
WPF Control is one of the basic visual units of reuse in WPF. Controls can be placed in XAML code including other controls and made work together using various means. Here we shall go over dos and don'ts of programming with WPF controls based on very simple examples. Let us first consider a very simple control - it will allow the user to enter some text into an editable field (using e.g. aTextBox), it will provide a label for that editable field. (The label will give the name of the field explaining what the user is entering). Also the control is going to have a Button "Save" as an example of doing some action on the entered text. We shall call this control EditableTextAndLabelControl.

What Developers Need To Know About Android L
Historically, Google has given each version of Android an alphabetical name taken from sweets. Android 2.2 was “Froyo”; and Android 4.4 was “KitKat.” Google hasn't officially named—or numbered—the next version of Android, but the next letter in the alphabet is “L.” Will it be a Lollipop? Or Lemon Meringue Pie? Or perhaps Licorice? No one outside Google knows. L changes the design scheme of Android as well as adding some important projects to trim and analyze battery usage, a new compiler and bringing Android everywhere. If you're an Android developer, here's what you're going to need to know about Android L.

Virtual Panel: Configuration Management Tools in the Real World
Configuration management is the foundation that makes modern infrastructure possible. Tools that enable configuration management are required in the toolbox of any operations team, and many development teams as well. Although all the tools aim to solve the same basic set of problems, they adhere to different visions and exhibit different characteristics. The issue is how to choose the tool that best fits each organization's scenarios. This InfoQ article is part of a series that aims to introduce some of the configuration tools on the market, the principles behind each one and what makes them stand out from each other.

Creating and implementing a mobile testing strategy
A complete mobile testing strategy must also account for testing across differing network connection speeds and geographical locations, as well as address the use of Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G connections. Testing must confront such issues as screen resolution and brightness, CPU, memory and OS optimization. The mobile testing strategy must be geared to the architecture of the applications under test whether they are Web, mobile Web, native applications or hybrids. Finally, an organization must consider the test approach, primarily the use of emulators versus actual devices, or even real user monitoring.

Quote for the day:

"A positive attitude will not solve all your problems. But it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." -- Herm Albright..

July 03, 2014

CosmicDuke malware surprisingly linked to Miniduke campaign
The bad actors behind the CosmicDuke campaign specifically crafted filenames and content files to lure victims contain, the sample analyzed by F-Secure makes reference to Ukraine, Poland, Turkey, and Russia. The CosmicDuke gang used the language of targets and included details and information related to specific events of interest for victims. CosmicDuke campaign targeted Windows machines, victims were lured into opening a malicious PDF file contains an exploit or a Windows executable whose filename isartefact to appear like a legitimate document or image file.

Constructing a Term Structure of Interest Rates Using R (part 2 of 2)
In this article, we will look at how we can implement the two essential functions of a term structure: the forward interest rate, and the forward discount factor. We will apply a mix of notation adopted in the lecture notes Interest Rate Models: Introduction, pp 3-4, from the New York University Courant Institute (2005), along with chapter 1 of the bookInterest Rate Models — Theory and Practice (2nd edition, Brigo and Mercurio, 2006). A presentation by Damiano Brigo from 2007, which covers some of the essential background found in the book, is available here, from the Columbia University website.

Apple patent details automatically adjusting security settings based on location, biosensors
The term “security level” can refer to the types of security measure used (e.g., passcode, retinal scan, etc.) to control access to a mobile device. Each type of security measure used may be associated with a level of inherent security. For example, passcode-based security may be considered less secure than a retinal scan. The term “security level” can refer to the frequency with which a particular security measure is used. For example, a passcode may be required immediately or may only be required after 5 or more minutes of inactivity. The term “security level” can refer to the level of strength of a particular security measure used. For example, 4-digit numerical passcode may be associated with a lower security level than a longer alphanumeric password.

Cisco patches communications manager to close backdoor access vulnerability
"The vulnerability is due to the presence of a default SSH private key, which is stored in an insecure way on the system," Cisco said in a security advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by obtaining the SSH private key. For example, the attacker might reverse engineer the binary file of the operating system." The other flaw, which enables privilege escalation, is located in the CUCDM application software and stems from the improper implementation of authentication and authorization controls for the Web-based user interface. An attacker can exploit the flaw to change the credentials of an administrative user by opening a specifically crafted URL. The attacker needs to be authenticated as a different user in the system or to trick an active user to click on a malicious link.

7 Strategic Givens for CISOs on Foreign State Threats to IP/Trade Secrets
If you're responsible for protecting your company’s Intellectual Property or Trade Secrets from Cyberattacks, you can improve your Information Security Program by understanding some of the key Strategic givens I've found at my Fortune 500 clients on Nation-State Adversaries. ... These compromises are increasingly driven by Nation-State Adversaries and often include companies that have physically deployed their high value company assets directly into “hostile” regions by either moving or outsourcing their manufacturing, research, or other core business functions. Here are some of the Strategic givens I’ve identified:

Intelligent cars draw investors to tech stocks
"It's a whole new market emerging," said Christian Jimenez, fund manager and president of Diamant Bleu Gestion. "The best way to play it for investors in the long term is to buy names such as Microsoft or chip makers such as Infineon, not (automakers) Peugeot and Renault". If the new market grows to $50 billion as forecast by French bank Exane BNP Paribas that would be roughly half the size of German carmaker BMW's revenues last year. Internet giant Google Inc is leading the charge among tech companies, trying to break into the century-old industry as it works on its own prototypes of fully autonomous vehicles.

End users matter most with today's performance management
As performance management systems have evolved, two different ways to get at the end-user experience have also emerged. Businesses can choose accordingly, depending on their needs. For now, application performance management tools are monitoring the user experience, but future incarnations of APM tools will employ end user performance management to predict what the user is going to do next. In this podcast, Modern Infrastructure editors also discuss Robert Green's June issue feature story on controlling cloud costs. Green has shared his expertise at Modern Infrastructure seminars, and lays out the five best ways to keep cloud costs transparent and under control.

Will Physical Location of Data Become Irrelevant for CIOs?
Logical location: This is emerging as the most likely solution for international data processing arrangements and is determined by who has access to the data. ... While the legal location of the provider would beIreland, the political location would be theU.S. and the physical location would beIndia, logically, all data could still be inGermany. For that to happen, all data in transit and all data at rest (inIndia) would have to be defensibly encrypted, with keys residing inGermany. With such an architecture there is an increase in cost and complexity and a reduction of usability through functions like preview and search, mobility and latency.

Analytics Vendors See a Fast-Maturing Health Care Audience
CFOs and CEOs soon will start having difficult decisions to make because of what they will learn from analytics, predicts David Janotha, vice president of healthcare at Axiom EMP, a vendor specializing in financial and operational analytics. CFO roles are changing; they have provided financial data to support basic financial analytics for reporting purposes, and now they need to take a more strategic leadership position “looking for outside-the-box solutions rather than building towers,” he predicts. CFOs need to become more clinically astute, find new avenues for providing care such as clinics in pharmacies, and give physicians data they need on the treatments they gave and the costs.

Four Questions to Revolutionise Your Business Model
The “four questions” of the book’s title -- Who, What, When, and Why – are hardly unique to the business world, but according to the authors, few firms subject their business model to such basic scrutiny frequently enough. There’s no substitute, Girotra and Netessine say, for the fundamental questions, such as “What should we sell?” and “When should we introduce our new products?” “I like to compare it to financial auditing, which every organisation does every year, many times,” Netessine said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge. “Often, a public company will do it once a quarter. But then you ask the same company how often [it examines] its own business models, they’ll tell you, ‘Well, I don’t know. Twenty years ago? Thirty years ago?’”

Quote for the day:

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure" -- Mark Twain

July 02, 2014

Chief marketing technologist emerges to align marketing and IT
According to a Harvard Business Review article by Scott Brinker and Laura McLellan, "Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most technology-dependent functions in business." To keep up, CMTs are enlisted as "part strategist, part creative director, part technology leader and part teacher." The CMT isn't an entirely new role in the C-suite, Brinker and McLellan point out. The function also goes by the name of global head of marketing technology or business information officer for global marketing, or any other term that basically boils down to "IT and marketing pro reporting to a senior marketing executive" (i.e. the chief marketing officer (CMO), VP of marketing operations or VP of digital marketing).

Questioning the Lambda Architecture
Why does code change? It might change because your application evolves and you want to compute new output fields that you didn’t previously need. Or it might change because you found a bug and need to fix it. Regardless, when it does, you need to regenerate your output. I have found that many people who attempt to build real-time data processing systems don’t put much thought into this problem and end-up with a system that simply cannot evolve quickly because it has no convenient way to handle reprocessing. The Lambda Architecture deserves a lot of credit for highlighting this problem.

Big Data Is Changing Every Industry, Even Yours!
The efficiency of every machine – and human – involved in the manufacturing process can be recorded so companies know what is working, and can make improvements where they are needed. And in agriculture, data analysis is helping the industry meet the challenge of increasing the world’s food production by 60%, as forecasters have said will be necessary by 2050 due to the growing population. John Deere fits sensors to its tractors and agricultural machinery and makes the readings available on its myjohndeere.com and Farmsight services. These help growers establish optimum conditions for their crops, and also lets John Deere forecast demand for spare parts.

Cyber security break-ins a 'daily hazard while firms skimp on protection'
"There are more cybercriminals on the internet than ever before and their tools are increasingly sophisticated, but the weakest link in the chain is still the bit between the chair and keyboard – we need to patch the human," warned David Emm, a security researcher from the internet security firm Kaspersky Lab. "Cybercrime is as old as the internet, and that means we've had time to study it. We are now familiar with it and can often deal with it." The security and safety of computers used on a daily basis is serious as a range of activities, from banking and tax returns, to shopping and private messages, relies on the internet.

Tech Breakthroughs May Mean 'Digital Everything' by 2025
"The digital world as we know it today will seem simple and rudimentary in 2025," the analysts wrote. "Thanks to the prevalence of improved semiconductors, graphene-carbon nanotube capacitors, cell-free networks of service antenna and 5G technology, wireless communications will dominate everything, everywhere... from the most remote farmlands to bustling cities -- we will all be digitally directed.
"Imagine the day when the entire continent of Africa is completely, digitally connected," they added. "That day will happen in 2025." The phrase "Beam me up, Scotty," which Star Trek made famous, also may get more usage in another 10 years.

Standards and APIs: How to Build Platforms and Tools to Best Manage Identity and Security
APIs are becoming exponentially more important in the identity world now. As Bradford alluded to, the landscape is changing. There are mobile devices as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers out there who are popping up new services all the time. The common thread between all of them is the need to be able to manage identities. They need to be able to manage the security within their system. It makes total sense to have a common way to do this. APIs are key for all the different devices and ways that we connect to these service providers. Becoming standards based is extremely important, just to be able to keep up with the adoption of all these new service providers coming on board.

If you want developers to give a hoot about security, take a lesson from the squirrels
Developers look at systems, apps and other software tools and are impressed by the cool things they can do, and maybe by the economy with which it was all achieved. They marvel at features and innovation. In software parlance, they focus on their products' functional specifications (or user stories, for you agile folks). Security professionals look at those same things and immediately analyze them for what can go awry. We have a healthy presumption that things will go wrong more often than not. We are always trying to anticipate how we can respond to the things that go wrong and thinking about how we can keep them from going wrong in the first place.

Nascent SDN security controls pose sizable risk
"In a network environment that's designed to be highly available, those are the hardest attacks to defend against," Young said. "Enterprises are going to have to be monitoring for these kinds of attacks, both intentional and unintentional, because it's something that hasn't been talked about." Furthermore, Young detailed the security-related issues with SDN configuration and change control. He said SDN products come with their own management consoles that typically aren't interoperable with other networking and security management consoles, adding another layer of complexity to network security management processes.

Building Data-Driven Apps: 5 Best Practices
What's the best way to deliver data-driven apps? These are apps that give consumers what they want but that are also highly scalable and enterprise class. Based on my years in the industry, I think there are five central principles that really will help us get there. There's a healthy appetite to get these data-driven apps out the door, and there's a huge amount of interest, verging on hype, in big data; Forrester Research recently estimated the potential size of what it calls "smart" computing -- that is, the big- or smart- or small-data market -- at more than $48 billion. It's thought that 90 percent of the Fortune 500 have some sort of big data projects either starting or established.

Commercial Nanotube Transistors Are Coming Soon
A project at IBM is now aiming to have transistors built using carbon nanotubes ready to take over from silicon transistors soon after 2020. According to the semiconductor industry’s roadmap, transistors at that point must have features as small as five nanometers to keep up with the continuous miniaturization of computer chips. “That’s where silicon scaling runs out of steam, and there really is nothing elbestse,” says Wilfried Haensch, who leads the company’s nanotube project at the company’s T.J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Nanotubes are the only technology that looks capable of keeping the advance of computer power from slowing down, by offering a practical way to make both smaller and faster transistors, he says.

Quote for the day:

"Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I'm doing" -- Phil Jackson

July 01, 2014

Emergence versus Evolution
Aspects of a design will undoubtedly emerge as it evolves. Differing interpretations of requirements as well as information deficits between the various parties, not to mention changing circumstances all conspire to make it so. However, that does not mean the act of design is wholly emergent. Design connotes activity whereas emergence implies passivity. A passive approach to design is, in my opinion, unlikely to succeed in resolving the conflicts inherent in software development. In my opinion, it is the resolution of those conflicts which allows a system to adapt and evolve.

eBook: Top Continuous Testing Tips and Techniques
Until recently, implementation of truly continuous testing practices for application development has been easier said than done. Today, however, a number of products and services built around service virtualization are being employed on the pre-production side of the application lifecycle in a growing number of enterprises to help developers and testers reduce defects in production, shorten overall software cycles and test-cycle times, and just generally improve code quality. Read this paper to gain a greater understanding of service virtualization and discover tips and tricks for making continuous testing practices a welcome reality.

Can you really do it all in the cloud? No way, say tech chiefs
Paul Collins, director of ICT at the Australian International School Hong Kong, said cloud services should only be used where the applications or services are not regarded as a core or critical function of the business. Security and trust are not the only issues — CIOs should consider reliability and the ability to synchronise data between the local device and the cloud, he said. "There are many places on the planet where internet availability is just not an option," he added. Collins said security flaws such as Heartbleed and high-profile cases of password theft "shows that there is no such thing as an entirely infallible online cloud service... Let's not even start talking about the NSA."

Delivering Minimum Viable Analytics
Executives want to use this data to improve their operations and increase revenue through monetization. With ever-growing data and the ability to rationalize data across data siloes, there are more opportunities than there are resources. Most analytics solutions cannot afford to have elegance as a design goal. This statement might be a bit controversial. Analytics practitioners are professionals, and deliberately arguing for inelegant solutions seems counterintuitive. There are too many analytics efforts that failed when the analytics techniques were too sophisticated for the quality of the data.

New type of CFO represents a potent CIO ally
These CFOs say that they really feel the pain of systems not talking to each other. They understand this meansmaking disparate systems from the frontend to the backend talk to one another. But they, also, believe that making things less manual will drive important consequences including their own ability to inspect books more frequently. Given this, they see data as a competitive advantage. ... Strategic CFOs are also worried about data security. They believe their auditors are going after this with a vengeance. They are really worried about getting hacked. One said, “Target scared a lot of folks and was to many respects a watershed event”. At the same time, Strategic CFOs want to be able to drive synergies across the business. One CFO even extolled the value of a holistic view of customer.

Open source PCI DSS: A strategy for cheaper, easier PCI compliance
Despite its benefits, few have seen open source technology as an enabler for compliance, until now. In a 2014 RSA presentation, security professionals from Urbane Security proposed a PCI DSS compliance model composed of open source technology to help lower costs, increase scalability and improve the manageability of the systems that support PCI compliance. Do open source products have a place in enterprise PCI compliance strategies? In this tip, let's take a look at the open source opportunities for meeting three specific compliance needs: logging, file integrity monitoring and vulnerability scanning.

How to achieve better third-party security: Let us count the ways
The exploding number of online access points to companies means, "our walled fortress of firewalls and the like now has hundreds and thousands of doors. These doors are guarded by sentinels that allow any variable packet (think an employee badge without a picture) to pass through that wall," they wrote, in the paper titled, "Traitors in Our Midst: The risk of employee, contractors and third parties in the age of the Internet of Things and why security in depth remains critical to risk management."

After Crisis, Risk Officers Gain More Clout at Banks
Another big challenge is the slippery nature of risk itself. Before the financial crisis, for example, many lenders believed they had properly weighed the dangers of subprime mortgages—and had set aside a financial cushion of reserves that was big enough to absorb losses on the loans. Those predictions were disastrously wrong. "Our abilities to measure market risk are akin to where medicine was in the 1700s," says Damian Handzy, chairman and chief executive of Investor Analytics, a New York firm that operates risk-control systems. "Everyone is honestly trying to get better at this, but we're still in the laboratory. The old systems do not address systemic risk at all. Traditional banking tools are just not designed for that."

A new approach to reduce dysfunctional behavior at work
With rising demands in today’s workplace, emotional and behavioral disorders have soared. In“Untangling the Mind: Why We Behave the Way We Do,” Ted George, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington School of Medicine and neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health, helps us understand America’s surge in emotional and behavioral disorders, including those we see in the workplace. Grasping “why” we instinctively react in certain ways is the first step in affecting change.

Inside the Changing Role of the CISO
CISOs face a host of new and emerging challenges, including risks generated by the ubiquity of mobile devices, the global scope of information assets, the difficulty of complying with new regulations and the threat of state-sponsored attacks as well as global cyber criminals. In response to these threats, organizations have elevated the role of CISOs to become a direct report to the chief information officer, chief risk officer or general counsel.

Quote for the day:

"The quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of chosen field of endeavor." -- V. Lombardi

June 30, 2014

How to protect yourself against privileged user abuse
One way to tackle it is by focusing on Privileged User Monitoring and Access (PUMA), which relies on monitoring human behavior to determine the context of the behavior and people's intent as well as automated tools such as video replay to keep an eye on privileged user activities. Monitoring human behavior is especially important with privileged users because they often have the know-how to cover their tracks, a feat that becomes much harder with video replay and other technologies that can have a deterrent effect by their presence. If privileged users know you're monitoring their activity, they're less likely to behave badly.

As Technology Changes ‘Everything,’ Don’t Forget About People
Technology companies, in particular, will need to change the ways in which they utilize their talent. For many decades, there was one way to access talent — by hiring it. Today, workforces are flexible and may be spread across time zones and continents. Knowledge workers still contribute as employees on company payrolls, of course. But increasingly, they are just as likely to collaborate on a specific project as partners or as subject-matter experts sharing knowledge within cross-functional or cross-industry groups.

The Internet Of Things Will Need Millions Of Developers By 2020
It's standard to size a market by the number of widgets sold, but in the Internet of Things, which numbers sensors and devices in the billions, widget counts don't really matter. In part this is because the real money in IoT is not in the "things," but rather in the Internet-enabled services that stitch them together. More to the point, it's because the size of the IoT market fundamentally depends on the number of developers creating value in it. While today there are just 300,000 developers contributing to the IoT, a new report from VisionMobile projects a whopping 4.5 million developers by 2020, reflecting a 57% compound annual growth rate and a massive market opportunity.

8 ways the password is dying
Google's massive I/O conference was chock full of trends and portents, but one of the most intriguing messages to trickle out of the show was far more subtle than the Android-everywhere blitz: Google is finally making good on its quest to kill the password. Every single major platform Google promotes declared war on the password in some fashion. And Google's far from the only company to come up with interesting authentication alternatives to memorizing long codes of numbers, letters, and special characters. From digitized tattoos to Bluetooth trickery and beyond, here's how big names like Google, Apple, Samsung, and others are trying to kill the password.

10 Breakthrough Innovations That Will Shape The World In 2025

No more food shortages and no more food-insecure people. The innovation? Lighting. "In 2025, genetically modified crops will be grown rapidly and safely indoors, with round-the-clock light, using low energy LEDs that emit specific wavelengths to enhance growth by matching the crop to growth receptors added to the food’s DNA," the report says. "Crops will also be bred to be disease resistant. And, they will be bred for high yield at specified wavelengths."

How Capgemini's UK financial services unit helps clients manage risk using big data analysis
When Capgemini's business information management (BIM) practices unit needed to provide big data capabilities to its insurance company customers, it needed to deliver the right information to businesses much faster from the very bottom up. That means an improved technical design and an architectural way of delivering information through business intelligence (BI) and analytics. The ability to bring together structured and unstructured data—and be able to slice and dice that data in a rapid fashion; not only deploy it, but also execute rapidly for organizations out there—was critical for CapGemini.

OWASP Top 10 Risks: #1: Injection
For a number of years now, OWASP have been publishing a list of the Top 10 Application Security Risks for developers to use to be more responsible with their applications. The words “responsible” and “software developer” are not words you hear together to often. But in the day of online banking accounts, personal profiles and online shopping, software developers should be taking a more responsible approach to their craft. One way to demonstrate responsibility is being very well versed in the common security risks that online applications face. A way to achieve that is through the familiarity of the risks that have been identified in OWASP’s Top 10 list and the information they provide for identifying and recommended countermeasures.

Smartwatches at work: Boon or bane for IT?
Many smartwatches, including the Samsung Gear 2 that went on sale in April, do have a fair amount of native storage capacity. So IT shops will have to be concerned with smartwatches as standalone computing devices, not simply as devices governed by management policies like Android Work in connected smartphones. Given that smartwatches are still evolving, several analysts said they remain unsure how popular or necessary the devices will have to be before they pose demands on IT.

Buying WAN optimization tools: What you need to know
If your data consists of alphanumeric data with repeated characters or spaces, you are virtually guaranteed benefits. On the other hand, if you are sending backup data that has been compressed before transmission (e.g., .zip archive files), WAN optimization compression probably won't help you. In fact, if the WAN optimization device blindly tries to compress everything, you might even see performance suffer. That's because you will incur latency as the WAN device tries to compress -- but doesn't succeed -- in shrinking your payload in any appreciable way.

How to Ideate? Be a Hunter
Hunters use dogs to flush out their quarry. They do this because of a scent hound’s profound sense of smell. You can’t smell a good idea but you can certainly sense it in other ways. If you put the time in you should start to notice a feeling you get when you’ve got a good idea. It’s inconvenience. You can notice it in someone else, but for passion/product fit it's a sensation that should be your own. Inconvenience makes an excellent compass. When you feel it, head in that direction. Ask "why?" Ask that often enough and you'll get a glimpse of the beast you're looking to snare. The idea won't yet be clear but the general outline of the problem should be apparent.

Quote for the day:

"The key to most difficulties does not lie in the dilemmas themselves, but in our relationship to them." -- David Seabury

June 29, 2014

Why We Should Love 'null'
null has been the cause for countless troubles in the history of software development. Today, 'null' and 'the billion-dollar mistake' are synonyms. Therefore some developers try to avoid null by using techniques such as 'return zero instead of null', the NullObject pattern or the Optional/Maybe pattern. Should you use these techniques in your source code? Do they lead to more reliable software? Or is there a better solution? These are the questions this article tries to answer.

Book Review: Integration Testing from the Trenches
The book posits early on that Integration tests are brittle and hard to diagnose, so they should not be used instead of unit tests, and that is the reason that continuous integration servers generally measure coverage of unit tests but not integration tests. Most of the time, Integration Testing is either crudely defined, wrongly understood or imperfectly used. In order to maximize the ROI, the most important guideline should be: the larger the SUT (System Under Test), the lesser the required code coverage

Governance of Agile Delivery
Critics say that Agile methodology is all about working in an unstructured way and for that reason, they believe that governing agile practices is always a challenge. While some of the Agile principles appear to support such criticism, there are many cases where organizations have successfully implemented processes and frameworks towards governance of Agile practices. Agile practitioners believe that because the agile methods are designed to be self-assuring, when practiced right, there exists built-in governance and accountability.

Unique Scrum Practices for a Better-Quality Product
Without making real improvements to software development practices, expecting a quality improvement is a sin. ... Do detailed design only for the code that you need to write for the sprint. There is additional effort spent on coming up with a generic design and generic reusable libraries. While they are good to keep for future use, it is critical to design only for the sprint's need. ... The team should be able to collectively own the entire code base. This means everyone on the Scrum team should know the code, to at least a certain level. It's OK to have an owner for the code, but it shouldn't be a black box for other developers in the team.

Operational Efficiency Identity Management Metrics
The idea behind this article is to discuss and classify specific metrics that indicate the need to adopt identity management practices and solutions. Although this list will not be exhaustive, it will provide most of the top identity management metrics that most companies will benefit from. Again we will break down the metric in the main drives for identity management as defined by my Top Reasons to Implement Identity Management. Note that for the purpose of this exercise we will cover drivers across identity provisioning as well as governance solutions, and the metrics are technology and platform agnostic.

From Software-Defined to Metadata-Driven
Software is eating the world! Every company is becoming a software company. If companies don’t, they cease to exist. Just imagine: you are a thermostat maker and suddenly you have Google as a competitor (via its Nest acquisition). This is just one of the many recent examples. Interestingly a lot of the innovations in the software industry are fuelled by abstraction and automation, concepts that are well-known in the Model-Driven Development (MDD) community. As the world is awakening to these concepts there is a clear opportunity (and need!) to bring MDD to a much broader audience.

Google Dumps MapReduce in Favor of New Hyper-Scale Analytics System
“We don’t really use MapReduce anymore,” Hölzle said in his keynote presentation at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. The company stopped using the system “years ago.” Cloud Dataflow, which Google will also offer as a service for developers using its cloud platform, does not have the scaling restrictions of MapReduce. “Cloud Dataflow is the result of over a decade of experience in analytics,” Hölzle said. “It will run faster and scale better than pretty much any other system out there.” It is a fully managed service that is automatically optimized, deployed, managed and scaled. It enables developers to easily create complex pipelines using unified programming for both batch and streaming services, he said.

God-Mode in Production Code
Takipi operates at the native JVM level, which allows it to detect and show you any form of exception or error in your code, regardless of whether it was thrown by the application code, the JVM, a 3rd party library, or how it was caught. You can see and sort through all the errors through Takipi’s dashboard which operates as a sort of spreadsheet for all the errors in your application. You can sort and filter them by the most recent ones, ones that have recently increased in volume, or by a specific type. When a new location in your code begins firing an error, Takipi will notify you by email. It also sends daily digests that summarize which new errors have been introduced into your code, and top errors across your cluster.

What is the job of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in ISO 27001?
ISO 27001 is written in such a way that it is applicable to companies of any size, in any industry, so requiring small companies to have a designated CISO would be overkill. Since ISO 27001 does not require the CISO, it does not prescribe what this person should do, either – so it is up to you to decide what suits your company the best. Generally, this person should coordinate all the activities related to securing the information in a company, and here are some ideas on what this person could do (divided by ISO 27001 sections):

Engineering Velocity: Continuous Delivery at Netflix with Diane Marsh
Netflix's Dianne Marsh told the story of the open source based tool stack supporting continuous delivery at Netflix. Very inspiring to see DevOps at work, although Dianne's remark that she "never had to argue a business case or think much about cost" caused some of us to wonder whether successful DevOps implemenations were dependent on unlimited budget availability...

Quote for the day:

"Lead and inspire people. Don't try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead." —-- Ross Perot

June 28, 2014

Preparing for the Internet of Things
What are you doing to prepare for the Internet of Things in your company? How are you going to handle connectivity of the new internet-enabled "things"? How will you handle the new bandwidth requirements from network-hungry devices? Are you prepared for the amount of storage required to maintain those devices? What about security concerns for new devices? And, how will you handle the significant amount of device and user management that's coming your way? You might not know the answers to any of these questions, but fortunately, you have colleagues who at least have taken their best guesses at it.

Why Android Wear is the new iPad
The consensus was wrong, and the erroneous judgments emerged because pundits lacked three things. First, they lacked personal experience -- most initial naysayers hadn't tried it yet. Second, they lacked the cultural context -- those who dismissed the iPad pretended that human nature and culture were irrelevant, and that consumer electronics exist in a vacuum somehow. And third, they lacked a broader vision -- the anti-iPad crowd couldn't imagine the influence of the iPad user interface on the larger world.

Introducing the Big Data MOPS Series

Consider these questions, for starters: On monetization: If data is deemed a corporate asset, what are we doing to monetize it?; On ownership: Beyond our corporate data, who owns the “big” data we can now pull in from the outside? If we don’t own it, can we still monetize it?; On privacy: What are we doing to protect the privacy of our customers’ data? Are we using “big” data to expose more about our customers without their knowledge, understanding or permission?; and On security: What are we doing to secure our data from corporate data breaches? One breach alone could bring an organization down to its knees. Permanently.

Games and the Internet: Fertile Ground for Cultural Change
In game theory, expectations of behavior have a critical effect on which of a number of possible equilibria actually occurs. If a person expects that everyone else will drive on the right, she will drive on the right also. If she expects everyone else to drive on the left, she will drive on the left. Everyone thinks this way. The right-driving equilibrium occurs because of the universal expectation that it will occur. If the universal expectation were left-driving, then left-driving would occur. In cultural affairs, expectations create the conditions for their own fulfillment.

Google’s Grand Plans: A Conversation With Larry Page and Sundar Pichai
I’m not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits. I think that’s what’s happened in health care. We’ve decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can’t be used to benefit people very well. Right now we don’t data-mine health care data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year. I’m very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people’s fears and we’ll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we’re not able to do that. That’s the likely outcome.

The Challenges of Flexible Work Trends
Today’s flexible work trends are the opposite of the trends of the 80’s and 90’s that emphasized efficiency and cost cutting: six-sigma, just–in–time, out–sourcing, the great moderation, and leverage buyouts. All of these strategies were about extracting more value from what was already being produced. While, today’s trends and technology place a premium on quality and cleverness over efficiency: typically by creating flexible work environments. However, today’s work trends are not without problems. We have created a flexible work environment at CAN and here are several of the challenges we have experienced.

Wearables in the enterprise: Unlimited possibilities
These functions that wearables could fill in the workplace are the first that come to mind but are by no means the only ones. Imaginative IT staff could find all sorts of uses for wearables that benefit the company. Google's SDK for Android Wear should be a good place to check for ideas and how to implement them. Wearables aren't restricted to smartwatches or smart cards as described here. There's no telling what forms wearables will ultimately assume, and no doubt some will be a good fit for the enterprise.

Svpeng Malware: Empty Threat or Cause for Alarm?
"When we dissected it we found that some of the claims were true," he says. "It was trying to clone devices, but the reality is it fell far short of its claims," Britton says. Yet others say it's still early and that the risks remain serious. When Svpeng — a piece of financial "ransomware" targeting Android devices —surfaced in the U.S., it appeared to be more destructive than any mobile banking malware that had come before it. It scans for the presence of specific mobile banking apps, collects data about those apps and sends them to a central location. It also locks down a user's phone and demands ransom money to unlock it.

Data Modeling with Key Value NoSQL Data Stores – Interview with Casey Rosenthal
KV databases in general are moving toward co-existence with other styles of databases. Riak in particular is a solid highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable data platform. The KV database in Riak itself is the platform, a solid foundation, and in the future we at Basho will leverage that strength to provide other non-KV APIs to the developers. The large-object S3 and Swift APIs, for example, are already provided on top of Riak in the form of Riak CS. In Riak 2.0, we will be providing Solr API on top of the data platform. In future versions, we will expand the set of APIs offered on this platform.

Communicating Enterprise Architecture changes using ArchiMate 2
Enterprise Architecture Management means to address a number of stakeholder´s concerns regarding the company and its business, applications and infrastructure. Stakeholders are key roles of an organization (regardless of internal or external) who have specific concerns which depend on their role. Each stakeholder has a specific view on the organization (e.g. an auditor is focussing on compliance aspects, not on network bandwidth). ArchiMate, as a modelling language for Enterprise Architecture, offers viewpoints on the architecture for three specific purposes

Quote for the day:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency." -- Pete Cashmore

June 27, 2014

Android TV gives Intel a new shot at the market after previous failures
Google and Intel will "work together to bring this platform and experience to market," Intel said in a statement. An Intel spokeswoman said more details about the partnership will be shared at a later date. It is likely that Intel will supply chips for TVs, set-top boxes and devices like Chromecast, analysts said. The goal is to put as many Intel chips as possible in more consumer electronics, which is a hot market right now. "You've got to be in consumer electronics, that's where everything is going on," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. The partnership is perhaps the best way for Intel to attack the TV market following previous failures, analysts said.

Dell Focuses On Security
With products such as CE, Dell hopes to bring enterprise-class security resources to small and midsized businesses. Pitched as turnkey products that take the complexity out of BYOD programs and other device and data-management challenges, Dell's Data Protection lineup exemplifies the company's ongoing effort to redefine itself as not only a PC and server manufacturer, but also a leading enterprise software player. Dell also announced Dell Data Protection Hardware Crypto Accelerator (HCA). Available on select Dell Latitude, Optiplex, and Precision PCs, HCA supports self-encrypting drives that make encryption keys inaccessible if a device is tampered with.

Using Big Data to Tackle Supply-Chain Demands
BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how big data and analysis help its Global 500 clients identify the most pressing analysis from huge data volumes we interviewed Ernie Martinez, Business Information Management Head at the Capgemini Financial Services Global Business Unit in London. The discussion, at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Here are some excerpts:

Take control of the Command Prompt with PromptPal
For the life of me, I couldn't recall the name of the tool. However, after a bit of searching on the web, I was able to find it. Called PromptPal from Technology Lighthouse, I immediately downloaded the tool. After reacquainting myself with it, I soon discovered that the newest version of PromptPal provides all sorts of new features that really make it a nice addition to Windows 7/8.1 when working from the Command Prompt. Knowing that there are a lot of command-line junkies out there, I decided to write an introduction to some of my favorite features in PromptPal.

The Practical Science of Data Center Capacity Planning
Through it all, you need to apply the practical science of capacity planning to really create a powerful data center model. Key emerging industry trends toward Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) demonstrate a continuing need to look at the key balance between IT and communications and facilities management. Capacity planning brings together all the key resource and output factors that constitute a data center’s reason for commission and its means of fulfilling that. As critical resources become more expensive or scarce, being able to plan for future capacity requirements becomes more critical.

How to develop a consumer cloud services strategy
That's not to suggest you should give up your management and monitoring strategies, but you need to go beyond the traditional enterprise systems to know what your workers are doing. There are no easy answers here, and coming up with an honest appraisal of the situation might depend, at least in part, on the relationship between IT and the rest of your organization. You might need to outsource the discovery process in order remove IT from the picture. If nothing else works, ask your employees directly what services they're using.

Ford to use wearables to improve health and safety in cars
"If we can tell a little bit more about your state at any particular time, we can tune the vehicle -- [and] the information coming to you -- to your current conditions," said Buczkowski. "If you're very tired, if you appear very distracted, maybe we hold off on that phone call and send a [text] message: 'call you back later'." Stromolo speculated that this could help people with health challenges or chronic illnesses to be safer drivers. "Most people go through most of their driving lives without ever being in a serious auto accident," he said, "but they may have a chronic illness that they have every day. And so the question is can we deal with the needs people have on a daily basis and not on this rare occasion when [an accident] happens."

'Luuuk' banking malware may have stolen $682K in a week
The fraud campaign was nicknamed "Luuuk" by Kaspersky after that name appeared in a file path of the server's administrator control panel. It appears the server managed the theft of funds from victims' accounts, automatically transferring the money to the accounts of "mules," or people who agree to receive the funds for a cut and transfer the bulk of the funds onward. Server logs indicated that as much as $682,000 may have been transferred in a single week, wrote Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team. The data indicated around 190 victims. Analysts also saw on the server descriptions of fraudulent transfers and the IBAN (international bank account number) numbers for victims and money mules.

Banks Beef Up Data-Gathering in Bid to Personalize Service
Banks are gathering data in many different ways. Some are building data-gathering capabilities into their technology upgrades. Others are starting to track customers' location by their mobile phones, and such data could come in handy in pitching products — auto loans for customers who may be car shopping, for example. And some banks are simply asking more questions. Comerica Bank rolled out last year an online questionnaire tool that, based on their answers, will advise web visitors which accounts best suit their needs. Dollar Bank is using data analytics technology from IBM so that its call center agents could have better visibility into when and where consumers were running into issues in online banking, said Pamela Dancisin

CISO Rising: New Roles and Responsibilities
The entire executive team, including the board of directors, must assume a new management and governance role at the intersection of technology, business and risk— and they must be equipped to own such risks. The CISO must provide the support to fulfill this new mandate, bridging the gap between operations and IT to keep critical business systems, data and other assets secure. To succeed in this role, CISOs must have deep knowledge not only of IT, but of the entire enterprise, forging strong relationships with the company’s customers, top management and external suppliers. They also must be granted greater authority, direct reporting lines to the C-suite, and regular interaction with the board as it steps up its oversight and involvement in defending and responding to cyber-attacks.

Quote for the day:

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." -- Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

June 26, 2014

Big IT vs SME IT in government - it's really about changing IT suppliers' behaviour
Of course, government takes its share of the blame for that - the Civil Service outsourced its IT expertise and left itself vulnerable to suppliers who will, inevitably, look to make as much money as they reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably) can. The best change that GDS has introduced is to re-skill government IT and to place the emphasis back onto bringing in the best digital and IT management staff that it can. Forget Labour's attitude to suppliers - the real scandal would be if they reversed that recruitment policy. I've seen no suggestions that they will.

Antifragility – the goal for high-performance IT organizations
Antifragile is the term meant to describe the exact opposite of fragile. It’s not the same as robust or resilient, two terms often conflated with the notion of antifragility, and two terms I’ve used to describe desirable attributes often associated with well-designed and well-managed online services. When customers say the cloud service they’re reliant upon is “robust” or “resilient”, we, as the IT professionals responsible for that service, can be justifiably proud of our efforts. The term antifragile is meant to describe objects that actually benefit from experiencing some form of failure or stress. In the context of IT, we’d probably say systems or services.

A Security Awareness Success Story
More important, when there are acknowledged Security Awareness success stories, it is rare for organizations to share those stories, even internally. As principles in a company devoted to the human aspects of security and Security Awareness, we see Security Awareness success stories on a daily basis, however we cannot disclose those stories without permission. So it was a pleasant surprise when we saw the CSO Salted Hash column, Inside an Attack by the Syrian Electronic Army, which highlights a major Security Awareness success story.

Cloud adoption: Why some IT chiefs think it's still too complex
"The complexities we get into on licensing models make me want to weep sometimes," Essex County Council CIO David Wilde told the recent Cloud World Forum in London. "The market has still got a long, long way to go to commoditise its own products sets, make more sense of its licensing, get over the fact that actually in future — and cloud is driving this — it will no longer be about a corporate-based licensing," he said. His organisation delivers services for at least half a dozen other public agencies but cloud licences currently make it difficult to set up such arrangements.

How Vulnerabilities are Exploited: the Root Causes of Exploited Remote Code Execution CVEs
As long as human beings write software code, mistakes that lead to imperfections in software will be made – no software is perfect. Some imperfections simply prevent the software from functioning exactly as intended, but other bugs may present vulnerabilities. Manual code reviews performed by developers and testers, in concert with automated tools such as fuzzers and static analysis tools, are very helpful techniques for identifying vulnerabilities in code. But these techniques cannot find every vulnerability in large scale software projects. As developers build more functionality into their software, their code becomes more and more complex.

The Five Year Plan Your Network Needs
Keeping up with the growing demands in today’s world of overloaded data centers requires tough conditioning so your network is in its best shape. Cisco’s 2013 Global Cloud Index report suggests that data center traffic will triple by 2017; 76 percent of that traffic is server to server traffic within the data center. With this in mind, many networks are already behind. Revamping a data center network requires IT decision makers to step back and see the long-term potential by preparing for the growth and obstacles along the way. With one, three, and five year mile markers, consider this five year plan that every network team should apply to make sure their network can grow with demand in a linear fashion.

10 Bad Coding Practices That Wreck Software Development Projects
The Pareto principle states that 80 percent of outcomes can be attributed to 20 percent of the possible causes of a given event. Also known as the 80-20 rule, it's relevant to almost every field of human endeavor. In the field of software development, the principle can be summarized by saying that most problems are caused by a small number of bad coding practices. Eliminate them and your work will be very much easier and more productive. These 10 coding practices are the worst culprits.

Intel's mood-capturing 3D camera will be in tablets early next year
The mobile camera technology is derived from similar 3D cameras that will be in PCs starting late this year. Such cameras, combined with touch and voice recognition, will improve human interaction with tablets, Bhowmik said. A handful of tablets already have 3D cameras, but Intel wants its camera to do more than capture images. Intel's RealSense 3D tablet cameras will determine whether a person is happy or sad based on its analysis of a face. The RealSense camera chip has technology to recognize a face, analyze the shape of lips, eyes and cheeks, and then draw conclusions about facial expression.

The Disruption FAQ
When a competitor misdirects attention by selling a product that draws usage from existing customers and adds non-consuming new customers because it enables new uses, then the incumbent feels no pain from the entry because they don’t sense a reduction in customers. We call this a “new market disruption“. The challenger gains a foothold and grows/evolves, eventually capturing customers exclusively. ... The new product does not actually do the same thing as the incumbent product or does a subset of valuable tasks poorly while excelling at menial tasks. The entrant may be highly profitable but they are not taking profits away from incumbents because they “grow the pie”, capturing value by fulfilling unmet needs.

Will a VMware hyper-converged product arise from the rumor mill?
While speculation was rampant, there was little evidence to confirm the existence of this construct. Then Fletcher Cocquyt , a technical architect from Stanford University, reignited the chatter after he tweeted a picture on June 6 purportedly showing a poster on the VMware campus with the text, "Introducing the world's first 100% VMware powered hyper-converged infrastructure appliance." The poster also featured the name "MARVIN" and declared, "Arriving summer 2014." Some sleuthing uncovered VMware had filed for the MARVIN trademark on Jan. 8, 2014. In documents, the company described that the trademark was for, "Computer hardware for virtualization; computer hardware enabling users to manage virtual computing resources that include networking and data storage."

Quote for the day:

"If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him." -- Seneca

June 25, 2014

Data Distribution Network (DDN) vs. Content Distribution Network (CDN)
The difference from the CDN vs. data distribution network (DDN), is that live conversational data is cached in real-time rather than content cached at regular periods so it’s typically much smaller and much more up to date. The data is cached in a hierarchy of topics to allow for easy subscription to subsets of data (topic branches). The data comes from an originating server, typically called data sources, such as a database or an enterprise service bus. Instead of requesting the data, applications (used by customers, employees, machines) subscribe to the data. If data is already cached, the end user or machine will get the current version (or state) of the data and then any subsequent updates are pushed as the data changes.

CanaryRelease
Canary release is an application of ParallelChange, where the migrate phase lasts until all the users have been routed to the new version. At that point, you can decomission the old infrastructure. If you find any problems with the new version, the rollback strategy is simply to reroute users back to the old version until you have fixed the problem. A benefit of using canary releases is the ability to do capacity testing of the new version in a production environment with a safe rollback strategy if issues are found. By slowly ramping up the load, you can monitor and capture metrics about how the new version impacts the production environment. This is an alternative approach to creating an entirely separate capacity testing environment, because the environment will be as production-like as it can be.

Leading Innovation is the Art of Creating ‘Collective Genius’
Collective Genius shows how Bill Coughran, Google's then senior vice president of engineering, created an environment where engineers could figure out on their own how to best address the company's massive storage challenges in 2006. The problem: Storage issues were created by the huge amount of data processed by the Google File System, (GFS), designed for Google web searches. One team, called Big Table, argued for adding systems on top of GFS; the other team, called Build from Scratch, wanted to replace GFS entirely. Coughran decided to give the two teams space to defend their ideas, letting them collect data and test rigorously.

5 best practices for a world-class SAS environment
SAS administration requires specialized knowledge that typical IT teams do not have on hand. Over the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have found that SAS support requires IT skills, knowledge of the company’s data and knowledge of how that data gets applied to solve specific business problems. Companies that want a world-class SAS environment need to have dedicated resources who can proactively maintain SAS. With a dedicated resource, you'll be well-positioned to increase performance, minimize downtime and ultimately maximize your investment in SAS software.

A checklist for defining your mobile application architecture
Given the wide range of technology available in the mobile space and the rapidly evolving nature of a mobile enterprise, it is important to go through a process to define the application architecture blueprint. ... A robust architecture is not just for the current release; it will help you build a long-term mobile foundation. There are many other architectural decisions you will have to make around integration, testing and hosting for your mobile solution. In this post, I focused on the key components of the mobile application architecture that will serve as a guideline to the application development team.

eBook: De-identification Protocols: Essential for Protecting Privacy
Recent reports, including those emanating out of John Podesta’s Big Data and Privacy Workshops, have further fuelled this misunderstanding. ... We again submit that these views are an over-simplification, inconsistent with current evidence, and largely based on the re-identification of poorly de-identified information. The purpose of this paper is to clarify what it means to properly de-identify personal information, to underscore the value of strong de-identification, to interpret recent research which has been used to call into question the value of de-identification in the protection of privacy, and to emphasize the conclusions that may properly be drawn from this research.

Verizon Virtual Visits Enters Telehealth Market
Medical services are provided through a relationship Verizon forged with a third-party provider network, which the company declines to name. Virtual Visits matches patients to the next available participating clinician in their state. Organizations such as health systems also can use their own healthcare professionals or use a hybrid mix that combines a blend of internal clinicians augmented by external clinicians for after-hours support, says Kling. "Some may want more nurse practitioners; some may want more physicians," Kling says of Virtual Visits' contracts with payers. "Verizon did its own market research on that. Customers and consumers are fine with both." Typical visits take 30 minutes and can occur almost anywhere, according to Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

Casework for Data Governance
If data governance simply reacts in an ad hoc manner to the services requested of it, then it is likely to be limited in its effect and will have difficulty demonstrating how it is making a positive difference. However, if data governance can manage its service requests via a casework approach then it can be much more successful. Casework involves using a standard process to record, assign, prioritize, manage, report on and close out service requests. We often think of casework as something that the police, or social workers, doctors or elected representatives do, but it is quite feasible - and actually quite necessary - for successful data governance units to adopt casework principles and apply them to their everyday activities.

Gartner’s top 10 security technologies for 2014
Gartner yesterday highlighted the top ten technologies for information security and their implications for security organisations in 2014. Analysts presented their findings during the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, taking place this week in the US. “Organisations are dedicating increasing resources to security and risk,” said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Nevertheless, attacks are increasing in frequency and sophistication. “Security and risk leaders need to fully engage with the latest technology trends if they are to define, achieve and maintain effective security and risk management programmes that simultaneously enable business opportunities and manage risk.”

Encrypted Web traffic can reveal highly sensitive information
Almost all websites that exchange sensitive data rely on SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Security Layer) technology, which encrypts data exchanged between a person's computer and a server. The data is unreadable, but the researchers developed a traffic analysis attack that makes it possible to identify what individual pages in a website a person has browsed with about 80 percent accuracy. Previous research had shown it was possible to do such analysis, but the accuracy rate was 60 percent. They evaluated the effectiveness of the attack using 6,000 web pages within 10 websites: the Mayo Clinic, Planned Parenthood, Kaiser Permanente, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Vanguard, the ACLU, Legal Zoom, Netflix and YouTube.

Quote for the day:

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded." -- Friedrich August von Hayek