Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 20, 2014

Being a Good Enterprise Architecture Citizen
One of the big problem I see with most enterprise level tools is they want to do everything. Most large enterprises would already have a financing system, organization directory, customer relationship management, document management, messaging, business process, calendaring and user authentication systems in place already. Yet, quite a few enterprise tools I have seen have their own data store for finance, organization directory, customer relationship management, document management, messaging, business process, calendaring and user authentication.

Fujitsu designs leaner supercomputer with fewer switches
Fujitsu has developed an approach to cluster supercomputers that reduces the number of network switches by 40% without sacrificing performance. The approach centers on using a new communications algorithm that efficiently controls data transmissions as well as deploying a multilayer full-mesh topology in the arrangement of the network. Compared to a three-layer "fat-tree" network topology, which employs a tree-like structure of connections, the multilayer full-mesh topology eliminates a layer of switches through more efficient mapping.

A Checklist for Architecture & Design Review
One of the key aspects of the IT Governance is to ensure that the investments made in software assets are optimal and there is a quantifiable return on such investments. This also means that such investment does not lead to risks that could lead to damages. Most of us are well aware that reviews play a key role in ensuring the quality of the software assets. As such, in this blog post, I have tried to come up with a checklist for reviewing the architecture and design of a software application. While the choice of specific design best practice is interdependent on another, a careful tradeoff is necessary. For a detailed discussion on Trade off Analysis of Software Quality Attributes.

How Data and Analytics Can Help the Developing World
First, data can be used to keep people healthy. With the help of IBM, the city of Tshwane, South Africa piloted a crowdsourced app known as WaterWatchers that lets users report water supply information, such as faulty pipes, through SMS. As a result, IBM found that the city was losing almost $30 million in wasted water annually. A similar effort by Cipesa, a Kampala-based communications technology non-profit, allows journalists and citizens to monitor and document health services delivery in Northern Uganda with a mobile app, in order to identify discrepancies in official reports and drive infrastructure improvement efforts

Can You Trust Your Algorithms?
A lot depends on the data, including when it was measured, by whom, and with what accuracy. “It also depends on the algorithms you use to mine the data,” he says. “Yes of course we can get patterns and yes of course there are many case studies where the patterns really buy you something. But optimizing and calibrating these models to certain situations is, for the foreseeable future, going to be the central component. Without algorithmic differentiation, it’s going to be a major pain.” Failure to abide by the laws of mathematics could doom some big data projects being susceptible to the dreaded random factor.

Google Smart Contact Lens Focuses On Healthcare Billions
Today, under a new development and licensing deal between Google and the Alcon eyewear division at Novartis, the two companies said they will create a smart contact lens that contains a low power microchip and an almost invisible, hair-thin electronic circuit. The lens can measure diabetics’ blood sugar levels directly from tear fluid on the surface of the eyeball. The system sends data to a mobile device to keep the individual informed. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company wanted to use “the latest technology in ‘minituarisation’ of electronics” in order to improve people’s “quality of life”.

Home router security to be tested in upcoming hacking contest
Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference. The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems. The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.

Apple-IBM deal threatens Android's enterprise push
The analyst firm said IBM's Endpoint Manager software "excels in patch management, multiplatform support and overall scalability" and called the software a "good choice for organizations heavily focused on security configuration management, including patching and those that require strong multiplatform server management in addition to client management or scalability to support tens of thousands of endpoints." But Gartner said in the May report that the IBM software is "not as good a choice" for those organizations that require simple usability, a failing which seems to beg for the kind of help that Apple may provide. Gartner also faulted IBM for complexity in its packaging, bundling and pricing of its various management software functions.

A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Software Reuse in Mobile Apps
The fact that software reuse, in the form of inheritance, class, and library reuse, is prevalent in mobile apps of the Google Play app store, means that app developers reap all the typical reuse benefits, such as improved productivity, higher-quality software and faster time to market, although many didn’t receive a formal training in software engineering. It isn’t clear whether this successful reuse is due to the quality of mobile platforms, development tools, app stores, or a combination of other factors. Possible other factors could be the relatively small size of the mobile app code base and development teams, although in recent work, we’ve found that for these characteristics, mobile apps behave identically to small Unix utility applications

A Few BGP Security Considerations
BGP uses TCP for transport which makes it vulnerable to TCP based attacks. The example used in the book is the TCP reset attack, and it involves sending a spoofed a packet with the TCP reset bit set. If such a packet is received, the TCP session is immediately terminated. For this attack to be successful, the packet must have src/dst IP addresses and src/dest TCP ports that match what the BGP speaker expects to receive from its neighbour. Since it’s BGP, it’s known to the attacker that either source or destination port is 179 (depending on who is client/server in the particular session), with the other port being a randomly generated number. Armed with this knowledge, the attacker sends a series of packets with varying port numbers, eventually sending just the right one, resetting the session between the two BGP speakers.

Quote for the day:

"Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself." -- Robert Collier

July 19, 2014

Authentic Leadership and Letting Your Strengths ‘Bloom’
When something goes well, you wish you’d done it sooner. We did a pretty good job of integrating [acquisitions]. So, I don’t have a lot of regrets about that call. It’s interesting that the first acquisition Medtronic [made was] eventually spun off. It was interesting because it was not a fantastic [deal], but it opened the door to a lot of other things and put us in the game and gave us self-confidence. So, I don’t even regret doing that [one]. We were in chains and we had to bust loose from those chains. So I don’t have a lot of second thoughts about those deals.

Net Threats: Internet Openness in Danger
War ignited this year over Net Neutrality, with government officials, lawmakers, Internet service providers, entertainment providers, and even comedians joining the fray. The conflict stems primarily from the explosion of American data consumption – and who should pay for it. Internet service providers maintain that entertainment providers like Netflix and Google should pay for the rise in Internet traffic, while content providers argue that those costs would undermine the freeness and fairness of the Internet for smaller companies and organizations.

HP Throws Trafodion Hat into OLTP Hadoop Ring
Trafodion fills a gap in Hadoop when it comes to ANSI-compliant and ACID-supporting transactional databases, says Rohit Jain, a distinguished engineer at HP who’s the chief technologist for Seaquest and Trafodion. “We took our transactional heritage and experience and IP [intellectual property] and brought it down to HBase, because HBase doesn’t have the transactional support,” Jain tells Datanami. “It has ACID support only at the row level. We bring full-blown ACID for cross-row, cross-table, cross statement-type transactions. Essentially this is a little niche that has not been filled yet by anybody. We’re effectively saying you can use Hadoop for all workloads, all the way from OLTP to analytics.”

Math can make the Internet 5-10 times faster
The advantage is that errors along the way do not require that a packet be sent again. Instead, the upstream and downstream data are used to reconstruct what is missing using a mathematical equation. "With the old systems you would send packet 1, packet 2, packet 3 and so on. We replace that with a mathematical equation. We don't send packets. We send a mathematical equation. You can compare it with cars on the road. Now we can do without red lights. We can send cars into the intersection from all directions without their having to stop for each other. This means that traffic flows much faster," explains Frank Fitzek.

From Big Data to Deep Data
The real problem of big data is that we are increasingly outsourcing our capacity to sense and think to algorithms programmed into machines. While this seems very convenient and cool at first and offers access to services that many of us want, it also raises a question about who actually owns big data, about the rights of individuals and citizens to own their personal data and to exercise choices regarding its use. While big data has certainly opened up a whole new range of possibilities, I would like to suggest a distinction between surface big data and deep data. Surface data is just data about others: what others do and say. That is what almost all current big data is composed of.

Streams Library Brings Lazy Evaluation and Functional-style to C++14
Streams is a C++14 library that provides lazy evaluation and functional-style transformations on the data, to ease the use of C++ standard library containers and algorithms. Streams support many common functional operations such as map, filter, and reduce. Streams are an abstraction on a set of data that has a specific order. Various operations can be applied to streams such that data passes through the stream pipeline in a lazy manner, only getting passed to the next operation when it is requested

The Tech Startup Scene in Cape Town
“A lot of the developed countries round the world are looking to produce solutions for the developing world,” says Edelstein. “I think in South Africa there are two types of entrepreneurs. [Those] who are looking to create applications or platforms that are applicable to the whole world. [And those] who are looking to provide solutions for South Africa or Africa.” “The people who were early into the internet industry were more concerned about building a business. Because they were doing it in South Africa they couldn’t compete with Silicon Valley.

New Health Data Deluges Require Secure Information Flow Enablement Via Standards,
We, like others, put a great deal of effort into describing the problems, but figuring out how to bring IT technologies to bear on business problems, how to encourage different parts of organizations to speak to one another and across organizations to speak the same language, and to operate using common standards and language. That’s really what we’re all about. And it is, in a large sense, part of the process of helping to bring healthcare into the 21st Century. A number of industries are a couple of decades ahead of healthcare in the way they use large datasets — big data, some people refer to it as.

Zaana Howard on Design Thinking at Lean UX 14
Design Thinking is really kind of abstract and useless term in many ways that just causes more confusion than clarity to people overall and Design Thinking is really, I think it’s more the mindset that you bring to design more than it is an actual process or method in itself. Design Thinking often just follows design process, if you use the UK Design council double diamonds sort of method it’s just discover, define, design, deliver, develop, deliver, something like that, and then it’s really just about the mindset that you bring to each of those stages that allows you to do Design Thinking and such.

The robots are coming: The big question is will you hand over your job - or your life?
"Unmanned systems are increasingly likely to replace people in the workplace, carrying out tasks with increased effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing risk to humans. This could ultimately lead to mass unemployment and social unrest," it warns, perhaps invoking the shade of Rick Deckard by noting "There will almost certainly be challenges to overcome, such as establishing whether we can learn to 'trust' robots." It said improvements in robotics have "obvious applications" for military usage, noting that unmanned naval vessels such as reconnaissance submarines to probe a hostile shore could be as standard a part of the military set up as drones in the air.

Quote for the day:

"For an organization to be exceptional, all teams within the organization must be moving toward a shared vision." -- @Rich McCourt

July 18, 2014

IT Career Advice: How To Sell
Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the CIO who needs to sell the board of directors on funding for a critical strategic technology initiative. The CIO must explain why this initiative is important, anticipate potential objections, and hope to persuade and guide the board to a favorable decision. And that's only a simplistic view. The CIO's initiative will compete for resources with other high-priority investments, and some sponsors of these initiatives may have direct personal ties to certain board members. Competing projects may have been previously promised to shareholders or employees.

Microsoft CEO Lays Out Vision of Cloud Convergence
"We're building out that digital infrastructure that ties together people, their activities, their relationships, to all of the artifacts of their life – be they photos or documents and more. That's what digital work and life experiences mean," Nadella says. "We're going to do the best job of being able to enable dual use," he says. "This entire notion that somehow I buy my device for consumption and personal use, and then I'll give up that device for work and take another device, just doesn't work. We know that. Simply saying even just BYOD is not good enough. We've got to harmonize this dual use."

Hidden Benefit To The ACA: It May Help Bring Science 2.0 To Pass
The volume of data is daunting - so are concerns about interoperability, security and the ability to adapt rapidly to the lessons in the data, writes Dana Gardner at Big Data Journal. That is why Boundaryless Information Flow, Open Platform 3.0 adaptation, and security for the healthcare industry are headline topics for The Open Group’s upcoming event, Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow on July 21 and 22 in Boston, he notes. Solving the issue will take a combination of enterprise architecture, communication and collaboration among healthcare ecosystem players. It's no secret that Collaboration and Participation are the big missing puzzles in the Science 2.0 mission.

Making the Most At-Risk Generation Less Risky
Millennials are the most likely to engage in questionable or risky behavior, and not just in terms of compromising standards. This generation is also particularly open and transparent on social media tools, making them more likely to share information about work experiences, both positive and negative, with others in their social networks. This behavior could create significant reputational risk, and today’s directors don’t want their dirty laundry aired worldwide. Millennials are also the most likely to keep copies of confidential company documents, which, if shared outside the company, could get into the hands of competitors.

Drilling into Network Disruptions
When Swedish communications services provider TDC needed network infrastructure improvements from their disparate networks across several Nordic countries, they needed both simplicity in execution and agility in performance. Our next innovation case study interview therefore highlights how TDC in Stockholm found ways to better determine root causes to any network disruption, and conduct deep inspection of the traffic to best manage their service-level agreements (SLAs). BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how over 50,000 devices can be monitored and managed across a state-of-the-art network when we interviewed Lars Niklasson, the Senior Consultant at TDC.

Design Thinking and the Transformation of Hyatt’s Culture
To get out in front, Hyatt went back to school. The company connected with the Design School (d.school) at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and started using human-centered innovation concepts to create change within the organization. Hyatt leaders began by asking themselves, “Why do we need to change, what is the platform for change and why is it necessary?” and then used Stanford’s design innovation to help transform their culture. Hyatt’s management began with engagement surveys, listening to their employees and understanding what mattered to them.

5 Reasons Going Paperless Won't Work
Technologists have been striving to go paperless for at least 30 years, but it still hasn't happened. (The idea sounded good on paper.) The reality is that, for most organizations, there are multiple places in their workflow where the analog meets the digital, and where technology still hasn't been able to replace important legacy processes. Instead of throwing out legacy processes that are working, however, organizations would be wise to look to new solutions that include paper as an option in their digital workflows, embracing the old while ushering in the new. Here's why:

Intel experiments with mindfulness to combat digital overload
A handful of employees at Intel Corp. is taking statistics like these to heart. Two years ago, they rolled out a program to help colleagues manage the digital barrage that is part and parcel of every workday: hundreds upon hundreds of emails per day, instant messages that must be attended to. Nowhere in the Intel program, however, are there any lessons in improving organizational or multitasking skills. Instead, Intel's mindful awareness program, as it's called, is designed to develop things like better focus,emotional intelligence and stress management.

No money, no problem: Building a security awareness program on a shoestring budget
Often, executives view security and business as two separate items, and while this point-of-view is changing, it takes effort to get some executives to commit to security and make it part of the business overall. When this happens, tangible security needs such as license renewals, support and service contracts, firewalls and other appliances all of those are things that executives understand. However, awareness training, to the executives at least, seems like an extended version of general security training, and there just isn't money for something like that. At the same time, there's also a shakeup happening - thanks to a seemingly endless stream of data breaches this year that have placed several large companies in the headlines.

Why '123456' is a great password
Strong passwords would be more likely adopted if people learned to use them only on critical accounts, such as employer websites, online banking and e-commerce sites that store the user's credit card number. To be effective, this group should be small. Websites that hold no sensitive information and would not present a threat if hacked should get the throwaway credentials. ... "Far from optimal outcomes will result if accounts are grouped arbitrarily," the research says. Following the standard advice of choosing and never reusing passwords of eight characters or more that includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters, is "an impossible task as portfolio size grows," the research said.

Quote for the day:

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

July 17, 2014

Total internet failure: are you prepared?
“Because there has not been a significant failure of the internet to date, organisations never consider that as a possibility,” said Bonner. Yet organisations have at least one backup electricity supply even though the energy industry is heavily regulated and well managed, and reliable power supplies are usually supported by a contract. “But when it comes to the internet, which has no clear oversight or governance, organisations have no backup plan and nobody seems to be worrying about a major internet outage,” Bonner pointed out.

Without the cloud, Microsoft may lose grasp on the enterprise
"Microsoft recognizes that this is going to have a huge effect on its partners," he told Computerworld. "They need to show that their partners can make money and be successful with this. Microsoft's success is their partners' success and vice versa." "Cloud is essentially the new platform for Microsoft," said Mahowald. "I think it's more important than mobile, big data or social. What they had in Windows, they have to replicate [in the cloud] or they lose the franchise. If their old platform doesn't matter any more, then Microsoft has lost the software lock-in that is their crown jewel."

A New Dawn for System Design
Agile or rapid methods might be great for fast, iterative software development, but invite a designer into the exercise and you’ll learn how the design process allows for much more effective exploration and discovery. This isn’t the “design thinking” fad. This is “design doing” — technologists, business analysts, designers, researchers, executives and rank-and-file staffers defining possibilities together. They’re focused equally on the people that we need to perform, the technology we can deliver, and the business that must be served.

Should online accounts die when you die?
"This is something most people don't think of until they are faced with it. They have no idea what is about to be lost," said Karen Williams of Beaverton, Oregon, who sued Facebook for access to her 22-year-old son Loren's account after he died in a 2005 motorcycle accident. Facebook and other tech companies have been reluctant to hand over their customers' private data, and many people say they wouldn't want their families to have unfettered access to their life online. But when confronted with death, families say they need access to settle financial details or simply for sentimental reasons. What's more, certain online accounts can be worth real money, such as a popular cooking blog or a gaming avatar that has acquired certain status online.

The One Thing CIOs Want, More than Anything
Rather than consuming more and more IT resources on inefficient legacy server platform operation and management, virtualization provides automation that typically delivers increased application provisioning speed and improved infrastructure optimization results. However, while virtualization has offered a compelling way to consolidate expensive hardware and enhance utilization, the benefits can diminish over time. The first step is to optimize all the workloads that aren't already virtualized -- Linux workloads, for example. Once virtualization is ubiquitous in your datacenter, how can you achieve even greater financial savings and improve performance?

Java Update: Patch It or Pitch It
The trouble with Java is that it has a very broad install base, but many users don’t even know if they have it on their systems. There are a few of ways to find out if you have Java installed and what version may be running. Windows users can click Start, then Run, then type “cmd” without the quotes. At the command prompt, type “java -version” (again, no quotes). Users also can visit Java.com and click the “Do I have Java?” link on the homepage. Updates also should be available via the Java Control Panel or from Java.com. If you really need and use Java for specific Web sites or applications, take a few minutes to update this software.

Microsoft security critic Aorato in Redmond giant's buyout sights
The exploit is less of a problem for pure-Kerberos environments (but even there, said Be'ery, there's a potential problem, because the user's credentials stay alive for as many as ten hours, giving hacker plenty of time to get the hashes), but turning off NTLM authentication is impractical, as it would lock users out of many legacy services. "We've consulted with a lot of clients who raise the same idea as a solution, but after examining their deployment, we always come to the conclusion that it's impractical, if not impossible, without a major investment in upgrading everything."

Intel thinks your next PC should be thin, light and wire free
The company is developing chips and wireless technologies to meet those goals, with the first fruits of that development available starting this coming year-end holiday said, said CEO Brian Krzanich on an earnings call this week in which he discussed the company's vision of future PCs. About 600 million PCs worldwide are more than four years old and due for upgrades, so the development efforts come at a fortuitous time. Tablets thinner and lighter than the iPad that could be used as full PC replacements will be on store shelves by the end of this year, Krzanich said.

SCRUM explained
As mentioned before, SCRUM throws the problems at your face, giving you no solution for that. This is interesting because since paper-oriented processes hide these problems, specially when they were people related ones. Whenever SCRUM throws you these matters at your face, you have two options: either recognize and face them or blame the methodology you are following, ignoring what is really in front of you. This usually is related, as mentioned, to people issues. Maybe members of the Team do not get along, maybe you have a client who is too hard to deal with, maybe the ScrumMaster or the Product Owner are not adequate.

Why big data is crucial for innovation and competition
"There's a reason everything is compared to sliced bread," said Carl Frappaolo, innovation expert and director of Knowledge Management at FSG, a nonprofit consulting firm specializing in strategy, evaluation and research in the post. "It's the most successful innovation yet. The simple act of slicing bread for the convenience of customers led to huge and profitable changes in the baking industry." The thing is that we've collectively done much of the easier work to identify innovations like slicing bread. It's harder to see what might be improved upon now. That's where big data comes in--it enables you to see what and where to innovate

Quote for the day:

"Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves." -- E. Joseph Cossman

July 16, 2014

Cloud Governance: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed…

Making matters worse, SOA governance tools are often missing in the Cloud Computing environment. There’s no central point for a Cloud consumer / developer to view the Services and associated policies. Furthermore, design-time policies are easily enforceable when you have control over the development and QA process, but those are notoriously lacking in the Cloud environment. The result is that design-time policies are not consistently enforced on client side, if at all. Clearly, SOA governance vendors and best practices need to step up to the plate here and apply what we already know about SOA registries/repositories and governance processes to give the control that’s needed to avoid chaos and failure.

Aligning Agile with Zachman EA framework
On the flip side - Agile being an umbrella for multiple known methodologies, i.e. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban etc, I believe it could be moulded to meet the organization requirements and just like we saw how Zachman framework could be custom-built to suit to the organizational expectations and culture. Here we have covered just the user-story aspect of the agile process (aligned with Zachman model), and in the next part of this blog series I am going to showcase how one could make the overall SDLC process iterative and align TOGAF with Agile SDLC, at EPICS and Sprint level.

CIO Meets Mobile Challenges Head-on
"Android is a more challenging operating system to secure for the enterprise than iOS because of its fragmentation," says Ojas Rege, MobileIron's vice president of strategy, adding, "Deploying Android successfully requires us to make as much of the complexity and variability as possible invisible to our customer. We do expect that Google's increasing focus on enterprise Android combined with our engineering investments will continue to expand the business capabilities of Android and continue to make it easier to deploy."

Configuration management, IT asset management need to be integrated
The asset management process is actually a longer process than configuration management. If you think of the sub-processes, actually it [asset management] goes from plan through procure, receiving the asset, deploying the asset, then operating and optimizing the asset before eventually you move to decommission and dispose. As I said, the main parts of the asset management lifecycle are deploy and operate, then optimize, which is where the configuration process comes in. And with configuration, you have planning and management of the configuration item. You need to be able to identify the configuration item, control it, report on the status of the configuration item, and then you will do some audit and verification. So the processes have so many interfaces they have to operate in harmony.

Do you want power or influence?
The problem with positional power is that there actually are few of the really significant roles at the top of any organizational structure. It’s clogged up there. But that does not mean we are out of luck in terms of power if we have not had the fortune or good luck to step into these positions of power and the influence that goes with it. There are also sources of power that are personal and can provide both power and influence if we cultivate and use them well:

Hacker mindset a prereq for security engineers, says Markley CTO
A key theme at this year's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on the digital enterprise was that the customer comes first for IT, no matter what kind of business a CIO is in. It follows that customer data is among an organization's most valued assets. Protecting customer data in today's digital enterprise, however, can no longer be relegated to your run-of-the-mill security engineers, according to Patrick Gilmore, CTO at data center services provider Markley Group. For Gilmore, candidate prerequisites include a high degree of paranoia and a hacker's mentality.

Wearables: Are we handing more tools to Big Brother?
"This is a massive violation of our right to keep sensitive information private," she said, adding that, "any kind of mental health diagnosis can ruin your life." Pam Dixon, founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum (WPF), agrees. She is one of numerous privacy advocates who point out that most fitness trackers are currently exempt from any regulation -- they are not covered by HIPAA since they are consumer devices that have not been furnished or prescribed by a health-care provider.

Why Test in the Cloud?
First and foremost you want your cloud-based test management to enhance workflow and streamline processes for greater efficiency. One of the first things worth considering is integration. Can you integrate your existing bug-tracking software? Are there any plug-ins or browser-based tools that can help generate logs and record screenshots to create clear and concise bug reports? Can you easily import and export documents, deliverables, log files, images and other files? Can you set permissions levels, make bug status changes, and see real-time updates? Does it support automated test scripts? It's also important to think about versioning and tracking. Every action should be traceable and the ability to revert when something needs to be rolled back can prove to be a real time-saver.

Boost your security training with gamification -- really!
Building awareness of physical security was also part of the effort at Salesforce, which has 13,000 employees. A campaign to test "tailgating" (when an unauthorized person sneaks through a secured door by following immediately behind an authorized person) drew 300 volunteers who were rewarded if they successfully slipped through a door and took something. Generally, before security training, 30% to 60% of users will fall victim to a fake phishing email, says Lance Spitzner, training director at the SANS Institute, a security training vendor. After training and six months to a year of a gamification program, the rate can fall to 5%, he says.

Google’s Container Tool Attracts Support From Microsoft, IBM, and Others
Hölzle pointed out that Microsoft will work to make Kubernetes successful in its Azure cloud; RedHat plans to add support to its hybrid cloud product; IBM will contribute to Kubernetes and Docker while trying to establish a governance model; Docker pledges to align Kubernetes with its own similar service called libswarm; CoreOS will ensure that Kubernetes works with its Docker-centric operating system; Mesosphere says that they’ll integrate Kubernetes with their own management tool called Mesos; and SaltStack will make Kubernetes part of their configuration management toolset.

Quote for the day:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If they're any good you'll have to ram them down people's throats" -- H. Aiken

July 15, 2014

GraphLab thinks its new software can democratize machine learning
Given the current state of affairs, though, I asked Guestrin whether it’s really possible for a software product to democratize machine learning the way he hopes Create can do. “That’s a yet-to-be-answered question, because nobody has yet done it,” he said. So far, he acknowledged, most machine learning research has focused on one-off systems and “my curve is better than your curve” demonstrations. He thinks GraphLab Create can reach 80 to 90 percent of use cases because the focus from the beginning was on usability and robustness. There are other commercial machine learning products on the market, including Skytree, but Guestrin said the big difference between them and GraphLab is in the barrier to actually using the product.

New Strategies and Features to Help Organizations Better Protect Against Pass-the-Hash Attacks
Given that organizations must continue to operate after a breach, it is critical for them to have a plan to minimize the impact of successful attacks on their ongoing operations. Adopting an approach that assumes a breach will occur, ensures that organizations have a holistic plan in place before an attack occurs. A planned approach enables defenders to close the seams that attackers are aiming to exploit. The guidance also underscores another important point - that technical features alone may not prevent lateral movement and privilege escalation.

Executive Beware: The SEC Now Wants To Police Unethical Corporate Conduct
Clearly corporate bribery, insider trading, and intentional manipulation of financial results are both unlawful and unethical, but what about lesser misconduct? If a permissible, but highly aggressive, accounting treatment is employed to enhance financial reporting results, is the result legal but unethical because of the underlying motivation? Moreover, even if the acts in question technically comply with the law, does the unethical behavior violate the spirit of the law and expose the individual or entity to the unwanted consequences of a government investigation or shareholder suit?

Analytically speaking, Dell delves into the Internet of Things
One of Dell's main thrusts in this area is to round out their analytics platform and offering with Statsoft's analytics software. The short-term plan is to build a data factory. With a data factory, Dell's products can bring in all of your data sources, including IoT, and develop actions around the analytics that you gather. Because as we all well know, data is just noise unless you can do something useful with it. Dell plans to help you do something relevant with your data by using its other products in conjunction with Statsoft's STATISTICA software. John confirmed that there's a lot of talk within Dell surrounding IoT, predictive analytics, and product integration. You can look forward to some announcements related to cloud services and predictive analytics later in 2014.

Oracle hopes to make SQL a lingua franca for big data
Oracle over time will add support for using Big Data SQL with other hardware systems it sells, according to Mendelson. The software is set for general availability within the next couple of months, with pricing to be announced at that time. Big Data SQL isn’t an attempt to replace the SQL engines already created for Hadoop, such as Hive and Impala, which Oracle will continue to ship with the Big Data Appliance, he said. “We’re really solving a wider problem.” One big challenge facing data scientists is simply the overhead of moving data among systems, he said.

Data – the Next Big Thing for Utilities
On average, meter readers, for example, once collected one reading per customer per month. Today, utilities have access to an almost overwhelming amount of data from both meters and other smart endpoints on their infrastructure, as well as external sources such as news and weather aggregators. To realize maximum value of all the data their communication system delivers, utilities need data analytics. The first thing utilities should understand when adopting data analytics is that the majority of these applications are communication vendor agnostic. However, a fixed-base communication network with dedicated spectrum and the ability to prioritize incoming data is more efficient and reliable.

Orchestrate cloud service makes using many databases easy
If we fast forward to today, there are many more types of database engines that support many different types of data. Building an application that accesses and updates data using many different data sources can be quite a challenge for a developer. Furthermore, as each of the sources evolves over time, that application must be updated or things don't work any more. Orchestrate hopes that by inserting their middleware into the mix of technology that developers are using, they can use the API to access different data sources rather than be forced to develop their own ETL code.

Cloud Protection: How to Avoid Emergency-Related Outages
In an age of advanced technology and many excellent preemptive tools and systems available, it’s hard to imagine an entire data center losing power. However, it was only two years ago when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast wiping out data centers between Virginia, New York, and New Jersey causing them to lose public power and go dark for days. For government agencies or large enterprise organizations that use internal data centers to house their applications, public multi-tenant clouds offer a lower-cost, easy to deploy disaster recovery/continuation of operations (DR/COOP) solution. The following steps can help these data centers plan and execute effectively with minimal to no disruption in the production environment.

DBAccess: a Thread-safe, Efficient Alternative to Core Data
DBAccess claims to provide three key benefits over Core Data: Thread-safety; High performance and support for query performance fine tuning; Event model that enables binding data objects to UI controls and keep them updated with changes made in the database. DBAccess can be used and distributed freely. Its latest version includes a few improvements such as support for ASYNC queries, better performance with large result sets, and reduction in memory usage in queries with many columns. DBAccess proposes a very simple usage model. A persistent object declaration is very similar to a Core Data's:

Three Questions To Help Cultivate Your Leadership Style
Fortunately, a wise senior manager took me aside and suggested I would be more effective over the long haul if I quit acting like a machine and started acting like a human who cared about people at least as much as he cared about results. He suggested that I was leaving, money, performance and the growth of people on the table, and he challenged me to think long and hard about the type of leader I wanted to be. I am grateful to this day for that leadership wake-up call. Over the months following the “machine” comment, he regularly challenged me with a number of provocative questions that ultimately shifted my focus from results at all costs to results through supporting and developing others. How will you answer these questions?

Quote for the day:

"Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution" -- Andy Grove

Juy 14, 2014

Revamping your insider threat program
"A crescendo of discussions is happening in boardrooms everywhere about the impact an insider could have on corporate assets," says Tom Mahlik, deputy chief security officer and director of Global Security Services at The MITRE Corporation, a government contractor that operates federally funded research and development centers. The Washington Navy Yard incident cost 12 people their lives; the full impact of the WikiLeaks and Snowden data releases cannot yet be quantified.

Red Hat CEO Whitehurst on VMware, OpenStack and CentOS
Whitehurst chafed when I asked whether Red Hat should be seen as a Linux or cloud company. Red Hat is an open source company and that's the compass that leads every move it makes. "The way our DNA works is that we look at the most innovative open source projects that are applicable to the enterprise," he said. That DNA has led Red Hat to the cloud, but it has led to Linux as an OS to middleware to platform as a service and virtualization. In the future, open source will lead Red Hat to networking. "Open source gives us brand permission to enter a ton of categories," said Whitehurst.

Database startup TempoDB becomes TempoIQ, refocuses on sensor analytics
Andrew Cronk, TempoIQ’s co-founder and CEO, says the company started with capturing time-series data for things like sensors and connected devices because it was the hardest problem to solve in those spaces, where companies were historically trying to contort that data into relational databases or other database systems not designed for that use case. And although it was reasonably easy to attract individual developers with the notion of a time-series database service (TempoIQ is a cloud service), demands began to change as the company tried scoring bigger deals such as Silver Spring Networks.

Are You Ready For the Coming Decade of Change and Innovation?
Friedman pointed out in his keynote that the biggest change of the 21st century was the merging of IT and globalization – how the world is now so completely hyper-connected (actually hyperactively connected) and has nearly the same computing power and technology tools, and Internet access available to individuals that used to only be accessible to private enterprise and governments. He called this a “Gutenberg-scale” moment — really, really big. The world’s individuals can now compete, connect and collaborate with one another like never before. But imagine that you have billions of competitors, regardless of your status or profession, because that’s where it’s headed (if not already there)

Why Your Culture Problem Is About To Get Much Worse
The evidence of culture erosion in the workplace is substantial. According to a Gallup report on The State of the American Workplace, a full 70% of employees (mostly white collar) are “not engaged” or “seriously disengaged” from their job. The results speak to culture—or the lack of one—because Gallup measures engagement based on participants who rate their boss and their workplace on the following types of statements: ... It doesn’t take a genius to realize that good communication can result in higher levels of engagement on each of these elements.

Rethinking Thinking About Strategy
What Christensen, and others before him, have seen is that industry change is continuous, not episodic. This is critical to innovative strategy thinking. Embracing change before it is required has been a message my IMD colleague Peter Killing has advocated: initiate change when resources are abundant and people feel good, rather than when resources are scarce and people are afraid. Industry evolution can be better portrayed as a recurring series of punctuated equilibriums, where ideas take hold, a new industry is born, incumbent champions evolve and prosper, and then they – almost all at the same time – are "disrupted" by outsiders who have no legacy to protect and who are more agile in addressing nascent customer desires.

The Business Designer and the Architecture
Consultants do adopt to a degree the language of their client to smooth communications. But that does not mean that they can do that for terms that denote new disciplines such as Business and Enterprise Architecture. Or take advantage of the appeal of such terms to rebrand their good old occupations. Moreover, the term architecture sits well with the business because we all relate to the construction and urban architecture while, at the same time, Enterprise Architecture is well known today to the business even if does not inspire confidence. And while "Enterprise Architecture" may have IT connotations, the term "architecture" does not.

Open Group goes into mining
Has Open Group absorbed this "reference model" whole, undigested, as it has done with Archimate? To me, Open Group looks now more like an anaconda that swallows whole its prey only to digest it later, if at all. And the EM looks like a quick add-on aimed to quell the unrest on the business oriented approach TOGAF promised for some time now. The problem is that the EM model cannot be generalised. The EM model is too specific to be of use to any other industries. What would "Discover", "Rehabilitate", "Brown", "Green fields"... mean to other industries? And, as an observation, the few horizontal process bands, that is Control, Measure... seem to have no relationship to the entities (read boxes) on the horizontal.

There's still a security disconnect on BYOD
More than half of the employees surveyed feared that the company would gain access to their personal data via corporate security tools. Some 46% of workers said they feared personal data would be lost if they left the company. The same number feared a company-mandated security app installed on personal devices would let managers track their location.Nearly half of worker said they would stop using personal devices at work if they were required to install a company-mandated security application. The surveys show the need for better communication between IT organizations and workers on BYOD security, Malloy said.

Chief digital officers are a blessing and a curse for CIOs
Adding a CDO to the mix could be a blessing for CIOs. According to the speakers at the conference, CDOs tend to know code, understand the importance of clean data and get technology. Because CDOs want to create a seamless, user-friendly customer experience, they're natural partners for CMOs. They're also a natural ally for CIOs. They understand, for example, that CMOs are powerful, necessary and "don't understand the first thing about technology," said Jonathan Sackett, CEO of the marketing and advertisement firm MashburnSackett in Chicago. But CDOs could also be a curse for the CIO: CDOs may know IT but their work isn't about keeping the lights on, obsessing over data governance or finding ways to cut costs. Chivers said he'll spend 2014 focused on mobile commerce and mobilizing the digital customer experience.

Quote for the day:

"Everyone needs to be valued. Everyone has the potential to give something back." -- Princess Diana

July 13, 2014

Random Thoughts..
Sometimes you have to chuck it all, and start all over again, (sigh). So I did, and if you've visited this article before, you will notice that all the methods I tested previously to create random data have vanished.. but trust me, that's a good thing. So, I spent last night racking my brain, trying to figure out how to make this stronger, that is, fortify it against any attempts at reversal, and at the same time, perhaps produce even better random from an algorithm. What follows, is the best ideas I've had to date, combined in a way that I believe creates a better random generator, better then anything I have come across thus far in my research. For lack of a better name, I'll call it LOKI, because it is a tricky and unpredictable little fellow.

Can Enterprise Architecture Reinvent Itself for the Agile Movement?
Clearly, we need to re-invent Enterprise Architecture to retain its best features and avoid technical debt while adapting to the new realities of agility and the cloud. How on earth do we do that? ... Please note that I’m not advocating any abdication of EA responsibility. We need a clear central vision of what we’re building to avoid technical debt and ensure that systems mesh together well. However, the way we accomplish this must change with the times. We need to be able to clearly and quickly communicate our vision and become active evangelists for it, contributing to real work as we encourage our team members to do the right things.

“Governance Now” for Financial Reference Data Governance
Reporting and analytic functions are often hostage to the integrity and long-term quality of reference data. The consistent use of valid, accurate reference data values is critical to reporting because these values often drive reporting dimensions for sorting, grouping sub-totaling and other calculations. Long-term consistency is critical for basic trending and period over period comparisons. Multi-dimensional and new forms of analytics rely on consistent accurate values to produce fully populated, sorted and calculated views of enterprise performance. Gaps in dimensional stability related to reference data quality impairments have driven major product categories in the software business to support multiple dimensional analysis (anyone here remember Razza?).

Quantifying the Impact of Agile Software Development Practices
The flexibility designed into the tool permits integration into a variety of workflows – rather than forcing the user to conform their workflow to the tool design. This flexibility turns out to be a significant source of variation for a research effort like ours because it limits the number of assumptions we can make about the workflow generating the data. As a result, the level of variation present in the data was an obstacle – one that cannot be overcome without information on patterns of practice (workflow design) that allow us to make valid inferences about patterns of team behavior that correspond to patterns of performance in the data.

The Value of Information Governance: Finding the ROI
Information governance is the set of multi-disciplinary structures, policies, processes and controls implemented to manage information. Gartner states that "the goal of information governance is to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, mitigate risks and protect the confidentiality of sensitive company and customer data." More than another word for "records management," information governance aims to support an organization's regulatory, legal, risk, environmental and operational requirements.

Out-of-band Initial Replication (OOB IR) and Deduplication
Ah… so if you were expecting that the VHD data would arrive into the volume in deduplicated form, this is going to be a bit of a surprise. At the first go, the VHD data will be present in the volume in its original size. Deduplication happens as post-facto as a job that crunches the data and reduces the size of the VHD after it has been fully copied as a part of the OOB IR process. This is because deduplication needs an exclusive handle on the file in order to go about doing its work. The good part is that you can trigger the job on-demand and start the deduplication as soon as the first VHD is copied. You can do that by using the PowerShell commandlet provided:

The Difference Between Tools and Solutions for Data Governance
The point is, any tool can take on a job and do as it’s told to do – but who sets the policy and strategic planning to instruct those tools? Data governance is a journey, which not only requires tools, but also an intuitive master plan that incorporates process, objectives and measurable results. It follows a path that should be guided by best practices. Solutions developed and lessons learned should be reusable and applied to reduce rework and maintain consistency in future projects. Because data governance is data-intensive, attention should be paid to assessing which data is or is not valuable to the business. This can be defined as “field value” versus “context value.”

Big Data Governance Software: Sensitive Data
The pivotal advantage to employing Dataguise’s Big Data Governance software (which is effective on traditional data as well) is that it expedites and automates the process of implementing governance rules for sensitive data that is potentially discoverable. The traditional manual process involves creating governance policies and employing IT to modify and search through information systems to find and appropriately tag sensitive data. When such information involves Big Data (with their rapid velocity and myriad forms) found in time-sensitive financial and health care industries, such a process swiftly becomes outdated.

Cindy Walker on Data Management Best Practices and Data Analytics Center of Excellence
There are several trends taking place in the field of semantics. One trend is the industry-focused collaboration efforts to develop and link domain-specific standard ontologies, such as the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), to facilitate information sharing and regulatory reporting. Use of standard ontologies can help organizations connect disparate data sets and can enable semantic queries across the web and data sharing with internal and external stakeholders easily (without restructuring the data or developing point to point interfaces.) FIBO is being developed in phases by volunteer contributors in the financial services industry (with some financial regulator participation) unbestyder the authority of the Object Management Group.

Implement Observer Pattern in .NET (3 techniques)
The Observer Pattern a.k.a. Publisher-Subscriber Pattern. You'll find various articles on how to implement the observer pattern in .NET framework using the assemblies provided in the framework. BUT, .NET framework has evolved over the years and along with that it has also been providing new libraries for creating the Observer Pattern. To give you all a brief idea of the Observer Pattern, it defines a one-to-many dependency between objects (Publisher and multiple Subscribers) so that when one object (Publisher) changes state, all the dependents (Subscriber) are notified and updated automatically.

Quote for the day:

"The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done. " -- Arnold Palmer

July 12, 2014

Virtual Panel: Real-world JavaScript MVC Frameworks
The Web Platform has gone a long way since HTML5 was first made popular and people started looking into JavaScript as a language that could do build complex apps. Many APIs have emerged and there is an abundance of content out there about how the browser can leverage all this. This specific article series will go a step further and focus on how these powerful technologies can be leveraged in practise, not to building cool demos and prototypes, but how real practitioners use them in the trenches. ...We'll also talk about technologies (like AngularJS) that go a step further, and define the future of how the standards and web development will evolve.

A new kind of network.
The challenge of building a network that allows us to connect based on who we “are” rather than other, more traditional, social constructs is that personal identity is much more complicated than concepts like “your friends” or “who you worked with”. Personal identity is hard enough for us to come to terms with ourselves, much less design a service around. However, there does seem to be potential here. It just doesn’t make sense that we should construct our social networks in the future based on physical categories like “where you happened to be born”, or “where you went to school”, or “where you worked’, when we are connected through digital means to every person on the planet.

The Efficiency CIO vs the Agility CIO
First with my EA hat on. For those who have talked to me about Enterprise Architecture you may have heard me espouse the view that it is frequently focused on efficiency. EA is a great tool for mapping out current state and understanding change. Two of the key outcomes of EA are highlighting gaps in change, infrastructure, applications and the organization as well as highlighting duplication. Duplication obviously yields opportunities for rationalisation and efficiency with what is typically an easy business case to assemble. As an EA it can be easy to become focused on making investments in IT highly efficient, keeping a simpler applications architecture and making the right large investments in IT.

Data Security And What Keeps CISOs Up At Night
Security personnel are increasingly having to think about the location of their data in a world where data is becoming ever-more distributed. That and the concerns that organizations have about governmental and private surveillance are yet another burden these overworked folks need to shoulder. Data security looks fundamentally different to how it looked in the past. There truly are no hard parameters for data: it exists within organizational premises, in the cloud, on all manner of social media, on mobile devices of every flavor and, increasingly as we move towards the Internet of Things, on distributed sensors. A recent survey aims to expose the biggest issues that data security staff have to face.

Big Data: No Hoarding Allowed
"We would highly discourage storing it in a fashion that's sort of the definition of big data -- where you have it in some SSD environment on Amazon, or on a rack of servers that are costing you a fortune -- because you're not getting value out of it," he said. "You're not asking questions because it's just too big." Still, companies often become data hoarders. "They're living in the hoarder's environment," said Atkinson. "They're taking in all the data and putting it into a repository." One alternative: Rather than saving every bit, companies should determine the questions they want to ask of their data, and then store the indexes they really need, a move that "will take your data down by many factors," he claimed.

Cloud computing: Sky is the limit for IT firms
"We see flavours of cloud computing in most of our large outsourcing contracts," said Anand Sankaran, president and global head of infrastructure and cloud computing at Dell. "Though the cloud component in large contracts could be only 20-25 per cent of the total order, it has 80 per cent of the weight in the final decision." Sankaran added if any Indian infotech services provider was not making serious investments into creating capabilities around cloud computing, it was making a big mistake.

Dataguise Offers Data Governance Solution For RDBMS And Apache Hadoop
Dataguise for Data Governance enables organizations to easily declare policies, discover sensitive data, view and track entitlements, and audit access to sensitive data – automated across transactional databases, data warehouses, file shares, Apache Hadoop, and other Big Data sources. Initial supported platforms include Oracle, IBM DB2, SQL Server, Teradata, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and Pivotal HD. Dataguise for Data Governance is fully compatible with DgSecure, Dataguise’s flagship platform for data privacy, protection and security for sensitive data across the enterprise.

The true impact of Heartbleed on the enterprise
As the Heartbleed OpenSSL incident became more widely known, the digital certificate-issuing authorities around the world also found themselves challenged to support the massive and sudden demand that literally appeared overnight at their collective doorstep. Although not a lot has been written about what is essentially a supply chain issue having to do with equipping the relevant parties with enough new digital certificates in time, industry experts agree that this delay points to broader fundamental issues that are worthy of being addressed in the near future from a supply chain and infrastructure viewpoint.

IT pros shouldn't expect a real vacation
Digital transformation efforts are ramping up from start-up mode to active enterprise deployment, according to a new survey from McKinsey & Company. In a report entitled "The Digital Tipping Point," the research firm notes that a majority of CIOs, CEOs and CMOs are now involved in digital projects. "And a significant number of executives feel that digital will play a prime role in driving organizational growth for the next several years," says an article at CIO Insight. Despite the increased activity, however, there remain a number of obstacles to successful digital transformation at many organizations.

How cloud computing can strengthen IT's control
Ironically, as organizations use more and more cloud resources, IT has a new way to reassert itself, even if users continue to get their own services. That way is the service catalog, a collection of public cloud and local services stored in a huge registry, much like in the days of SOA. These services are tracked in terms of who can use them and how they use them, and the service catalogs become the single jumping-off point for building and deploying applications that use public cloud services, as well as traditional systems. IT can bring order to chaos, while still providing the benefits of flexibility and immediacy that got users to go to the cloud in the first place.

Quote for the day:

"You can't talk yourself out of problems that you behave yourself into" -- Steven Covey

July 11, 2014

6 Crucial Data Security Lessons the U.S. Can Learn from Other Countries
Silicon Valley may have led the digital revolution, but Washington shows few signs of adapting to the times. As a result, not only is it easier to vote for a YouTube video than for a politician, but countries like Estonia are focusing their resources and building their infrastructures to better manage a digital society. Estonia is already more advanced than the U.S. in terms of digital consciousness. Other nations like Indonesia are rapidly becoming more connected without the legacy infrastructure package present in more established countries. Soon, Indonesia will be entirely mobile. The U.S. needs to make major changes to its data infrastructure to keep up, and the first step is to mimic these innovations already in place around the world.

Cloud Security Brokers Play a Key Role
As enterprises large and small embrace cloud computing, including SaaS, a need arises for someone to sit in the middle and manage the connection between SaaS service provider and user. Enter the cloud access security broker, or CASB. The research firm Gartner placed the cloud access security broker at the top of a list of the 10 most important technologies for information security that it unveiled at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit held in late June, in National Harbor, Md. Gartner defines CASBs as "security policy enforcement points placed between cloud services consumers and cloud services providers to interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed."

Microsoft CEO Nadella: Windows is over, the future is mobile and the cloud
"More recently, we have described ourselves as a 'devices and services' company. While the devices and services description was helpful in starting our transformation, we now need to hone in on our unique strategy." So what is the new direction? It's a bit vague and hazy, but it's clearly not tied to Windows. In fact, he doesn't even get to mentioning desktop Windows until the 21st paragraph. Even then, he gives Android and iOS equal play with Windows, because he talks about the company's Enterprise Mobility Suite, which in his words enables "IT organizations to manage and secure the Windows, iOS and Android devices that their employees use, while keeping their companies secure."

The dentist will scan you now: The next generation of digital dentistry
The best integrated technology in the dental practice may have been the most humble: scheduling software on the computer in the exam room that enabled the hygienist to book my next appointment so it would coincide with the dentist's schedule and her schedule, and to provide me with the dentist's email address so I could follow up if I had any questions. Despite the promise of robotic dentistry, there's still no replacement for a professional, kind human on the horizon any time soon.

The Amazing Big Data World of Kaggle and the Crowd-Sourced Data Scientist
Although it is frequently reported that they have “over 100,000 data scientists”, these are actually registered users and competitors rather than employees. There are no qualification or experience barriers to registering as a Kaggle data scientist, previous winners have ranged from data science academics and professionals to enthusiastic, knowledgeable amateurs. However certain competitions are occasionally reserved for “masters” – those who have shown they have the right stuff through their previous work with Kaggle. The company also also recruit its own staff to work on internal projects. In fact they are advertising for recruits now – and although no requirements are listed, other than that applicants be “experienced”, two questions on the application form ask for the mean and standard deviation of two sets of numbers.

The Failure of the Modern Project and How We Fix It
A project is a relatively simple construct which has taken on gigantic proportions in IT. A project is simply a means of changing our current state to some future state using a series of tasks within an allotted timeframe. The project itself is a tool to accomplish a goal and the goal is almost never about completing the project. I do admit that certain compliance projects are time sensitive as well as certain time to market projects. But effectively, someone comes up with an idea which should accomplish a business goal. Whether the goal (performance driven) or the idea (innovation driven) comes first does not necessarily matter as long as they both end up measurable.

What is a Botnet?
Computers in a botnet, called nodes or zombies, are often ordinary computers sitting on desktops in homes and offices around the world. Typically, computers become nodes in a botnet when attackers illicitly install malware that secretly connects the computers to the botnet and they perform tasks such as sending spam, hosting or distributing malware or other illegal files, or attacking other computers. Attackers usually install bots by exploiting vulnerabilities in software or by using social engineering tactics to trick users into installing the malware. Users are often unaware that their computers are being used for malicious purposes.

Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken?
In fact, the notion that the practice of EA has become all about documentation rather than effecting business change is a common theme across many boardrooms and IT shops. EA generally centers on the use of a framework like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the Zachman Framework™, or one of a handful of others. Yet while the use of such frameworks can successfully lead to business value, frameworks like TOGAF and Zachman “tend to become self-referential,” according to Andreetto, where EAs spend all their effort working with the framework instead of solving real problems. “Frameworks are cocaine for executives – they give them a huge rush and then they move to the next framework,” he adds.

eBook: Entity Framework Code First Succinctly
Follow author Ricardo Peres as he introduces the newest development mode for Entity Framework, Code First. With Entity Framework Code First Succinctly, you will learn the ins and outs of developing code by hand in Code First. With this knowledge, you will be able to have finer control over your output than ever before.

Navigating Innovation’s Perilous First Mile
“Either end of the spectrum is dangerous. At one extreme is ‘paralysis by analysis.’ Too many innovators create elegant pieces of Microsoft fiction. The Excel spreadsheet features ‘what if’ analyses and pivot tables that would rival those created by a seasoned investment banker. The PowerPoint document is stunning, with charts and visuals comparable to Al Gore’s award-winning presentation on climate change. And the Word memo summarizing it all features prose that is so lucid that somewhere Malcolm Gladwell is shedding a tear. The plan looks airtight on paper, but in reality, it is incredibly brittle. As Intuit’s Scott Cook once quipped, ‘For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.’

Quote for the day:

"Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people." -- Marcus Garvey