Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 19, 2014

Wearable tech pioneer and Google Glass mastermind
Starner said he hasn't experienced any negativity while using Glass in public. He said the media has overstated the complaints against Glass wearers in public. While wearing Glass at the UbiComp and ISWC conference in Seattle this week, he deftly tapped the side of Glass and turned it on and off. "You can see when this is on," he said, pointing to the small light that appears when Glass is in use. "You can look closely and see what I'm doing. The gestures are socially appropriate." Priest-Dorman said, "People aren't threatened by eyewear. Both that the device becomes more accepted and more commonplace and doesn't stand out as much."

PaaSLane 2.5 optimizes Java and .NET apps for the cloud
This release of PaaSLane adds support for Google's AppEngine and Compute Engine. It also makes it possible for a customer's code to be analyzed locally rather than requiring the code to be uploaded to the cloud. The company calls this "local profiling." Profiling .NET applications has also been improved. ... CTP's move to offer local scanning and optimization will help companies that were uncomfortable loading their source code into a cloud environment. This one change could result in more of them consider integration with or migration to cloud computing environments.

Pragmatic Functional Refactoring with Java 8
You may be hearing a lot of buzz around functional programming. For example, Java 8 recently introduced new features (lambda expressions and method references) and APIs (Streams, Optional and CompletableFutures) inspired from functional ideas such as first-class functions, composition and immutability. However, what does this mean for my existing codebase? In this talk we show how you can refactor your traditional object-oriented Java to using FP features and APIs from Java 8 in a beneficial manner.

Why you should tap into the power of Ruby from the comfort of the JVM
The most important piece of JRuby for Java developers is one known as JRuby Embed. RedBridge is an small part of JRuby used to embed Ruby code atop a Java program. You can use it using a bare metal API, which means that you use internal classes provided by RedBridge to execute Ruby code inside Java; alternatively, you can you can use the JSR 223 spec as well. The disadvantage of the latest approach is that it raises the level of abstraction and probably you will end up by mixing both approaches, so for these examples we are going to use the JRuby Embed API directly.

Beyond Big Data: Consider the Impact of Emerging Technologies on Data Management
In today’s data management processes, data experts devise ways to measure the relevancy and currency of information stored in the companies’ databases. Methods are developed to score information based on recent usage. “Best record” methods are developed to identify duplicates and determine the surviving records. All these methods take time to develop and implement. Also consider that today most employees find it very difficult to report on the quality or usefulness of the data in a database. Employees need to find who in the company is responsible for the quality of the information or the appropriate data owners.

Developers Failing at Mobile App Privacy, Security
"Apps are becoming central to our lives, so it is important we understand how they work and what they are doing with our information," said Simon Rice of the United Kingdom's Information Commissioners Office (ICO), which issued a news release about the study. "Today's results show that many app developers are still failing to provide this information in a way that is clear and understandable to the average consumer. "The ICO and the other GPEN members will be writing out to those developers where there is clear room for improvement," Rice continued. "We will also be publishing guidance to explain the steps people can take to help protect their information when using mobile apps."

Big Success with Big Data
Organizations that start and complete big data projects see practical results and significant value, according to a recent study by Accenture Analytics. Those standing on the sidelines may be left behind. Executives report big data delivering business outcomes for a wide spectrum of strategic corporate goals — from new revenue generation and new market development to enhancing the customer experience and improving enterprise-wide performance. Organizations regard big data as extremely important and central to their digital strategy.

10 free analytics tools to help you manage social media
Everyone is after data. If you're running social media for a brand or company, it's best you're armed with information on the social accounts you manage -- not only so you can show how social efforts are lining up with business goals, but also for the sake of a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn't. There's no shortage of tools that will tell you various parts of the story, from who is mentioning you and where, to what hashtags mean and how to best to use them. The following 10 tools, however, are built for giving users analytics. Most of the them are free or have a free version to get you started.

Web Application Security Vulnerabilities
Vulnerability is any weakness or flaw in the application that exposes the application to the attacker who can use it to perform unauthorized actions such as retreiving confidential information. Many website security problems come from believing that users will perform only the actions that they are supposed to perform. A malicious user may try to perform the actions that he is not supposed to. Software vulnerability is one of the biggest challenges of the software industry. Particularly public web sites are more prone to vulnerability attacks since they are exposed to lot many users.

Why big data evangelists should be sent to re-education camps
"Too often, big data enables the practice of apophenia: Seeing patterns where none actually exist, simply because enormous quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions. In one notable example, Leinweber (2007) demonstrated that data mining techniques could show a strong but spurious correlation between the changes in the S&P 500 stock index and butter production in Bangladesh," they wrote. In her paper The Surveillance-Innovation Complex: The Irony of the Participatory Turn, Julie Cohen noted that surveillance has become increasingly privatised, commercialised, and participatory. Surveillance is no longer something to fear and regulate.

Quote for the day:

"Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion." -- Bill Hybels

September 18, 2014

Cyber crime wake-up call
Part of the problem is that cyber security is no longer a question of building a firewall and installing anti-virus software. To begin with, KCS finds that roughly four-fifths of malicious cyber intrusions can be traced from within the organisation being hacked. The individual concerned could be a disgruntled employee or someone who is being blackmailed, bribed or otherwise coerced into helping cyber criminals or competitors find a hole in the company's defences.

5 Best Practices For Agile Analytics Organizations
One of the ironies of analytics today is that while the technology is more powerful and easier to use than ever, the fast-changing organizational and technology landscapes have lead to increased discontent and confusion for IT and business users alike. The challenge is to combine the benefits of self-service: more flexibility & speed, greater adoption, and better alignment with business needs; but avoid the potential problems, including needless duplication of data and tools, lack of overall visibility of the business, and diluted responsibility.

With this tool, you can run nearly any Android app on a Chromebook
Did you hear the big news? Android apps now run on Chromebooks. To be more specific, four Android apps run on Chromebooks. It now sounds like a little less of a big deal but in the long run, this has the potential to strengthen the case for Chrome OS, as we discussed in detail on this week’s Chrome Show podcast. We’ll have to wait for Google to work with Android developers and for the App Runtime for Chrome (ARC) to mature from its current beta status. But you don’t have to wait for more Android apps on Chromebooks if you want to use an unofficialsolution: With it, you can install and try just about any Android app on a Chromebook, such as Flipboard.

How IT should prep for iOS 8
iOS 8 isn't as paradigm shifting as those releases. Most new features are aimed more at consumers than business users or enterprise IT. HealthKit, HomeKit, Handoff and other Continuity features that link iOS devices and Macs, and even the upcoming Apple Pay, are decidedly consumer-oriented. But that doesn't mean IT departments can easily write off iOS 8 as a welcome, but unimportant update. Apple's new mobile OS presents several challenges (and opportunities) to IT shops as well as enterprise app developers. Here's what IT departments should keep in mind as Apple launches iOS 8 later today and rolls out the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on Friday.

Risk management key to cyber strategy, says BP
“Uncertainty is a fact of life, but we can be organised in our approach to managing risks by having a clear set of risk management processes in place,” he said. One key process is aimed at identifying and prioritising each threat based on a risk assessment. However, Dudley said as member of the highly-targeted energy sector, BP has a multitude of risks to manage and is constantly looking to innovations in cyber security to improve its defence capabilities. ... “Security controls are not enough – employees need to know they have a role to play and how they should respond to the worst-case scenarios,” said Dudley.

Continuous Delivery in Practice
Continuous Delivery allows you to get new features and capabilities to market quickly and reliably—two highly desirable outcomes. In this best practice guide, learn from successful Continuous Delivery practitioners and hear lessons from Salesforce.com, NYSE-Euronext, and Edmunds.com.

TechUK manifesto calls on future government to put digital first
“What interests me is how very clear, how very direct, how very ambitious, but how very achievable the recommendations in this manifesto are. Where I come from, we’d say ‘there is not a lot of flannel in here’. It is very achievable,” he said. “What is very clear is the huge opportunities that are available, not on the horizon or in the long distance future, but now. The prize is immediate if we can grasp it now,” he added. Lord Timothy Clement-Jones, representing the Lib Dems, made an interesting case, pointing out that while the UK was good at funding and producing start-ups, it was appalling at providing later-stage finance.

IT outsourcing: As Romania vies to be the new India, can the country keep up?
"Romania is seen as a complementary location to India as Eastern Europe provides a perfect balance between cost and quality. Our clients say we are 2-3 times more productive than the traditional offshore vendors. There is better ability to understand the requirements and needs beyond project specs," said John Cotterell, CEO at Endava. The company has more than 1,100 full time employees in Romania, located in Bucharest, but also in Cluj-Napoca and Iasi. Tholon's most recent Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations report includes several Eastern European countries, and puts the Romanian capital of Bucharest 40th in the list last year, up from 44th in 2012.

Stop Governing Your Data - Start Leading Data Behaviors and Outcomes
The work of sourcing and assuring its basic integrity for their use has overtaken their analytic and execution mandate. This over-emphasis on data sourcing and assurance undermines their performance and limits their career potential since they cannot shine based on analysis and execution alone, as they should. Relieving them of most of this burden by offering a much smaller comparative burden of controlling data as it is produced and consumed becomes a very attractive option, especially if it takes much less time and everyone involved is committed to this effort.

Once your car's connected to the Internet, who guards your privacy?
Modern vehicles, Schneider said, can have as many as 200 CPUs and multiple communications networks between internal computer systems. While most systems are isolated within the car, others are used to transmit data back to manufacturers, dealers or even the government. "On the plus side, this data can make the user experience much richer and personalized because from one vehicle to the next, it will know all my settings and [be] able to integrate your car into your digital day," Schneider said. "The flip side of that is it creates risk."

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self-importance." -- J. Donald Walters

September 17, 2014

Artificial Intelligence Is Doomed if We Don't Control Our Data
Arguably the most widespread application of AI comes in the form of personalized advertising, where ceding control of our personal data has also set the precedent for relinquishing rights to our digital identity. In their article, "LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-mail Contacts Lawsuit", Bloomberg recently reported that the business networking company may have, "violated customers' privacy rights for marketing purposes by accessing their external e-mail accounts and downloading their contacts' addresses." The decision means LinkedIn members who filed the complaint can seek revenue LinkedIn made using their e-mail accounts.

Be a data scientist for the love of the craft not the perks
It would be miserable to work as a data scientist if it's just a job. As a physicist or a mathematician, you may believe you're a good fit for data science, but if you're not accustomed to programming around the clock to hit a deadline you feel is unrealistic, the life of a data scientist may not suit you well. And as a computer programmer, you may feel you just need to dust off some of your college math books; however, if you don't have the patience for solving complicated math problems, data science may be the wrong path to pursue. Graphic artists seem to have the hardest transition.

Why Your Company Needs Both a CIO and a CISO
CIOs have so many projects, problems, and plans on their plate that they let slide their responsibilities to bolster the security profile of their systems and to monitor the integrity of the networks and machines they already have in place. Moreover, a CIO may not have the technical expertise or continuing education required to stay on top of security threats and the evolving nature of the security landscape. No matter who the CISO reports to – whether it's the CIO or, even better, the COO – he or she should be charged solely with managing the current security profile and ensuring that the hardening of networks and systems continues at an efficient but effective pace.

Would You be able to Weather the Storm of a Cyber Data Breach?
In evaluating our clients’ risks, we believe that each company has a responsibility to focus on managing the unpredictable threats that are a result of doing business in today’s technologically advanced world and optimizing its ability to respond and recover in the event of a breach. Effectively managing cyber risk requires strategic insight and technological prowess. Cyber risks should be addressed in a three-dimensional way. As important as it is to safeguard data, many organizations’ cyber risk management processes often overlook risks outside the company’s servers and firewalls.

Healthcare and Financial Services Sectors Struggle with Virtualization Security Concerns
Interestingly, these two sectors, which seem so reluctant to implement new virtualization technologies, don’t seem overly concerned about securing the virtual machines they already have. In the Financial Services industry, “Security of Virtualized Infrastructure” was listed as a top IT security concern by only 16% of respondents, and only 12% in Healthcare, compared to an overall average of 14%. Why the disparity? The answer could be attributed to the attitude of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” Kaspersky Lab has previously reported that a large portion of IT professionals lack a strong understanding of virtualization security.

VMware's Former CTO Herrod On IT's Future
In addition to tools and applications, companies need to worry about having in place "very formal API structures" to manage the creation of mobile app APIs that may be used by thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers. One of the companies that he's advised General Catalyst to back is Runscope, which specializes in automated testing of mobile app APIs. "Runscope is a company that is trying to help companies build APIs and make sure they're robust," he said, and such companies are going to be "the picks and shovels of the new economy."

Five Habits of Data-Driven People
We all know that using data to make decisions is better than relying on assumptions and opinions. But we also know that exercise is better for us than kicking back with a stiff drink and watching television. Is that knowledge enough to make us choose exercise? Not usually -- unless we make a conscious effort to work it into our daily lives. People who exercise regularly tend to adopt habits such as putting their running shoes next to their bed or always working out at the same time, and data-driven people do the same thing. Here are five habits common among data-driven people.

Wikileaks releases FinFisher files to highlight government malware abuse
FinFisher can infect Apple OS X, Windows and Linux computers as well as Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone devices. The files, originally obtained by a hacker going by the name Phineas Fisher in August, should be used to improve detection systems to protect people’s PCs and mobiles, WikiLeaks said. The organisation also believes the files will help researchers uncover further human rights abuses related to FinFisher, which can be used to siphon off data from machines and spy on communications, from email to Skype.

Programmers unknowingly inherit development framework security issues
Watson added that at least with Java, a developer can mark fields as transient so that they won't be subjected to the serialization process -- effectively barring an attacker from modifying the field. More generally, he said that developers need to remember that an untrusted source may modify any data, and as such, there should be a thorough sanitization process for such fields. ... more security mechanisms put into development frameworks themselves, or at least documentation warning developers that open-source components may still include vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

Meet Zuta, the tiny printer that drives itself to make documents on the go
The idea for Zuta had been lingering in Elbaum's mind for a while, after having faced the need to print documents on the go, and not finding a product to meet that need. "I had this idea in my head for some time," Elbaum said. "We presented it to some professors at our institute, and to the institute's management... We passed three committees, and got the initial funding. We used that money to hire an electrical engineer, one of the institute's top students, and started rolling out as a company."

Quote for the day:

"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score" -- Bill Copeland

September 16, 2014

Aligning Business & Technology Strategies
“The biggest factor here is interdepartmental communication. Obviously technology affects every area of the business. You have the accounting team using software and resources to maintain the books; marketing teams using technology platforms to reach consumers, sales teams using CRMs and other tools to manage appointments and meetings—so it’s important that all of their technology needs are communicated to IT. IT should then vet these needs to ensure they align with the overarching technology strategy currently being deployed,” Odegard explained.

20 funniest cartoons on Big Data
Crayon is all about innovation and fun. So, this time, we thought we should publish some of the funniest cartoons on Big Data. Here is a collection of Dilbert’s 20 funniest cartoons on Big Data, data mining, data privacy, data security, data accuracy etc… Have fun!!!

How the Internet of Things changes our lifestyle
The Internet of Things, in general, refers to uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. If all objects and people in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be managed and inventoried by computers. This tagging of things, besides using radio-frequency identification (RFID), may be achieved through such technologies like near field communication (NFC), barcodes and QR codes. In the IT world today, the term Internet of Things is used to describe the advanced connectivity of devices, systems and services that goes beyond machine-to-machine communications; it covers a variety of protocols, domains and applications.

How the Technology Ecosystem Puts Power Back in the Hands of the CIO
The modern IT environment requires easy access to new solutions for a number of reasons not the least of which is agility. However, as indicated above, the traditional approach is the enemy of agility. So, if you need agility, and you need to manage your costs and solution requirements what can you do? You must have access, access, access, and then maybe a little more access. Access to solutions in a diverse and in-proximity environment is a foundational must. Without proximity, you can’t possibly adopt, change, increase, or decrease your selection choices as quickly, safely or cost effectively.

IBM takes Watson freemium: Time for bring your own analytics?
Under the freemium model, Watson Analytics is available on the desktop, Android and Apple's iOS via a Web site. IBM would charge for more sophisticated analysis, but the tiers and pricing model is still being worked out. IBM's challenge will be to highlight insights and entice users to drill down into the data and ultimately pay. Altshuler said that IBM is looking to get Watson Analytics into the hands of as many people as possible. For instance, Watson Analytics could ingest 20 spreadsheets and data from Salesforce, Teradata and Oracle systems to start making connections and answering questions in a natural language format.

Basho Advances NoSQL Riak Enterprise 2.0 With Search, Advanced Data Types
The two big additions in version 2.0 are enhanced search functionality and advanced data types. The update also comes with some security enhancements and simplified configuration management. The enhancements position Riak 2.0 as a platform for a wider variety of applications. ... Apache Solr has been leveraged for search in 2.0 giving better performance. “With this powerful search capability, we can now support different apps within the organization,” said Coppola. “It moves us from point solution to platform.” The 2.0 release also includes support for new distributed data types, including sets, flags, register and maps.

HIPAA Violations: Don't Be A Headline
A HIPAA breach will affect most departments in an organization so it is important to establish a crisis management team composed of department heads including public relations, human resources, IT, legal, and finance. Each participant should provide relevant information pertaining to the incident. For example, IT can provide an audit log highlighting a device's security posture at the time of the breach. It is important to ensure that a detailed communications plan is in place and that employees are aware of how they should respond to questions about the breach.

Big Data's Big Impact on Enterprise IT--The Open Group Panel Discussion
A panel of experts explores how big data changes the status quo for architecting the enterprise. Learn how enterprises should anticipate and correct the effects and impacts of big data, as well the simultaneous impacts of cloud and mobile computing. The panel was part of The Open Group Conference on Jan. 29, 2013 in Newport Beach, California.

Intel's Kim Stevenson on creating insight and value
"Everything Intel has always done is complicated, but the big difference in an SoC is that you have to integrate different blocks, each of which is developed to its own schedule. And these parts have to be integrated and tested, just as a typical large manufacturer would need to do," she says. By analysing the engineering process for SoC designs, Stevenson says, the IT team identified around 25 projects which could help the business by reducing the cycle time. One of these projects involved optimising the compilation of engineering changes.

An Alliance of Major Players to Guide Open-Source Software
Open source is a popular approach to software, in which anyone can contribute to and use the code. Formal approval of changes comes from agreed-upon authorities who speak for the group. It is considered a good way to build software with fewer bugs, and such software makes up much of the world’s mobile and computer server operating systems, as well as many other applications. “There is a problem here we all feel is not getting better anytime soon,” said Jay Parikh, global head of engineering at Facebook. “We feel there is a speed at which things have to move.”

Quote for the day:

"Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got." -- Peter Drucker

September 15, 2014

Salesforce.com CEO Leaks Analytics Cloud Plan
"We are assuming that the analytics capabilities will feature more comprehensive reporting functionality with visual analytics and drill-down features," Maynard wrote. Salesforce certainly supports dashboards for monitoring current transactions, but reporting functionality is wanting. Visit the Saleforce.com AppExchange and you'll find more than 40 third-party add-on apps for analytics. One of those apps providers is Host Analytics, which recently introduced a sales-planning app to fill in the gaps.

How Network Theory Is Revealing Previously Unknown Patterns in Sport
Innovations are common, with teams constantly adopting or abandoning new tactics. And given the international nature of football, new ideas spread rapidly, as players and coaches move from one team and country to another. So it’s easy to imagine that it’s hard to play a truly unique brand of football, using tactics and skills that no other team copies. That’s not quite true, say Laszlo Gyarmati at the Qatar Computing Research Institute and a few pals. These guys have used a network theory approach to characterise the play of all the top teams in Spain, Germany, Italy, France and England.

An enterprise mobility strategy that starts at the executive level
Key considerations include not only the cost but also the usefulness of such an endeavor. Within an enterprise, there are multiple levels of stakeholder focus that you need to consider. As a mobility architect, I engage with business representatives who may already have a thorough understanding of enterprise mobility, but they are challenged by how effective the return on their investment is. One option is to start with a model that focuses on the top level of the stakeholder hierarchy—the executives.

Huddle for enterprise mobility and BYOD
While there are some very capable and innovative third party mobile app developers for SharePoint, everybody these days seems to have, their story of a SharePoint implementation gone wrong Mitchell sees that BYOD has crossed the chasm, and it's here. He sees BYOD across industries and government agencies, which are represented in Huddle's customer base. Huddle's technology strategy is providing a secure set of cloud services with single sign on (SSO) capability that enables organizations to secure their content for access by mobile device or platform.

How Boston Children's Hospital Hit Back at Anonymous
The hospital's incident response team quickly convened. It prepared for the worst: "Going dark" – or going completely offline for as long as the threat remained. Luckily, it never came to that. Attacks did occur, commencing in early April and culminating on Easter weekend – also the weekend of Patriot's Day, a Massachusetts holiday and the approximate one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings – but slowed to a trickle after, of all things, after a front-page story about the incident ran in The Boston Globe.

How To Manage Your Startup's Hypergrowth
The great CEO coach Jerry Colonna told me, “If you’re writing code, designing, or selling the product or service, you’re not doing your job.” It’s called being a CEO for a reason. And the secret to being a CEO is not to have a hand in every project. Being a CEO is about building a strong, dynamic team of leaders who can execute on their own. A strong team of managers doesn’t need me leaning over their shoulders, watching their every move.

Europe has a love/hate thing for U.S. tech
Publicly they may wring their hands, but in private they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Because despite what European governments and Europeans themselves say about U.S. tech companies, they can’t get enough of U.S. tech —Europeans flock to it. Why do Europeans hate U.S. tech companies? In large part it’s because of the more protected working environment in Europe than in the U.S., the stronger role of unions, Europeans' strong beliefs about the right of privacy, and a general attitude that the U.S. is guilty of cultural imperialism, running roughshod over local cultures and economies.

Research reveals the inner psychology of IT professionals
“There is scope within IT to have a lot of creative input. How to solve a problem, how to create a system that works. You are creating something, whether its an internal HR information site or a website,” said Hyde, a chartered occupational psychologist. IT professionals tend to be individualistic and may not fit as well as other professionals in corporate cultures, the research suggests. “They won’t follow rules for rules sake. If they see a better way of doing things, they are not hidebound by what has come before,” said Hyde.

Security tops CIO worries; IT budgets, turnover on the rise
The trend for CIOs to focus more on the business and less on pure tech is evident in how their success is measured. According to respondents, the top 10 performance measures for CIOs, ranked from 1-10, are: the value of IT to the business; IT’s contribution to strategy; customer satisfaction; innovative new ideas; availability; projects delivered on time; IT cost controls; productivity improvement; business cost reduction controls; and revenue growth.

Data Virtualization: The Perpetual Short-Term Solution
Data virtualization is not new. It has been a capability out there for a long time. Historically, it has underperformed expectations and was used to circumvent moving data into the data warehouse that really should have been physically cohabitating with the other data warehouse data. The resulting cross-platform queries, built into the technical architecture as a need, tended to be slow and bring into dispute the notion of a cross-platform query, which is needed much more today as organizations have a wider variety of heterogeneous platforms to choose from.

Quote for the day:

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." -- John Powell

September 14, 2014

What’s in a Story (and a Name)?
Story telling capabilities are fast becoming table stakes in visual data discovery tools, but not all stories and storyboards are the same. Here's a look a look at four vendors' approaches. It would be nice to think that most data analyses end with a value added decision or action. But really, many BI analyses end with a Power Point, finely tuned for board room presentations. Data is explored, analyzed, filtered, transformed, and then exported into a story telling medium where it becomes static. The PowerPoint may be used to support or refute a hypothesis or to provide a status update.

A developer’s checklist for deploying the internet of things
The possibilities are staggering, but these “things” represent some significant challenges to app developers. Developers, in particular, will have to cope with an unprecedented explosion of supported devices and form factors, extensive network optimizations to make both the front end and back end more responsive, highly capable edge devices to which more processing may (and should) be pushed, and finally, a plan to capture, process, and wrangle business value and from all of the data these devices generate.

5 Technology Trends for the Financial Industry
Growing regulations and legacy systems have limited the industry to a certain extent and principals are hesitant to adopt new technologies because of the perceived unknown variables. But with the Baby Boomer generation beginning to exit the workplace, there is new pressure to cater to a tech savvy employee and customer base. In the coming years, we should begin to see some changes in the financial industry as banks and investment firms attempt to cater to a new demographic. Here are a few technology trends for the financial industry that we can expect to see become more prevalent in 2015:

Dotcom, Greenwald, Assange and Snowden target New Zealand
Edward Snowden is expected to beam in from exile in Russia, presumably on the same subject: New Zealand's role in the Five Eyes alliance. Dotcom, meanwhile, is promising to show that he was granted citizenship to trap him in New Zealand and facilitate his eventual extradition to the USA. Dotcom faces racketeering charges there related to his now forcibly shuttered file sharing website Megaupload. Now add Julian Assange to the mix. Exactly what Assange will contribute is not yet known, but he is scheduled to beam in from his sanctuary, the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

When Machines Do Your Job
Advances in hardware and software mean it’s possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers has been taken by self-service kiosks. While more productivity is a positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind. What does it mean to have “technological unemployment” even amidst apparent digital plenty?Technology Review spoke to McAfee at the Center for Digital Business, part of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where as principal research scientist he studies new employment trends and definitions of the workplace.

Dark IT
The role of the IT department is still what it has always been: the custodians of the massive investment / asset which is the corporate information, and the corporate technology to derive value from it. IT has a responsibility (and accountability) to protect the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of that asset. We also have a responsibility to the organisation to ensure that use of that information does not present risk to the organisation e.g. compliance, reputation, survival ... Only partly true. Trying to reach out to business on its own will not solve anything.

Cloud Analytics: Selecting Patterns of Integration
Many large-scale solution providers such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are under pressure to add more data and workflow integration capabilities and APIs. Dell Boomi, IBM® WebSphere® Cast Iron® cloud integration, Informatica Cloud Integration, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform for SaaS Integration, and Pentaho business data and big data analytics integration represent next-generation integration that can be much easier to use than traditional integration offerings. These and other cloud-based integration software providers are enabling many patterns of integration, including device-to-cloud, cloud-to-enterprise, and enterprise-to-enterprise patterns among many other variations.

IT Visionaries: The New Role of the Enterprise Architect
Decisions are always going on. It’s the people making those decisions, your developers and team leads, that are your control points. And often they aren’t working directly for you. The EA function is one of influence, which makes credibility all the more important. The only way I’ve worked out to offer direction to this group is to respond to what they are trying to do all the time, which is build systems as cheaply and quickly as possible. What I did as an EA was try to produce tooling, frameworks, and services that were simply faster and cheaper to use than them going out and buying their own or leveraging open source.

Making change work with Enterprise Architecture
When you renovate a house, just as when you begin to analyse any large organisation, there’s an existing house in place which provides guidelines that we need to work within. In EA we refer to this as ‘current state’ plans and these are the ones that provide a baseline of where we are today. Having the existing or current state plans enables any changes to be carried out in a methodical and controlled way; it helps us manage the transition to the future state and provides a solid platform for making informed decisions.

Frugal Innovation in Australian Healthcare
Frugal Innovation is something very familiar to those doing work in Healthcare in the Global South. For example OpenMRS, an openly available medical records system, being developed iteratively, with user-centric design at Mirebalais University Hospital in Haiti. We did end up finding a place for technology and just started building it while using it at the clinic. We collaborated daily with clinicians and users, making changes as we went until we developed an application to help them measure the right things. In this case, a timeline with treatment value measures from the patient’s perspective.

Quote for the day:

"A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier." -- Tom Stoppard

September 13, 2014

Beyond Governance in Finance: Why BCBS 239 Matters to You
The regulators have become very serious about data management since. The Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. had some rather vague language about data governance. However, it did specify the need to unambiguously recognize counterparties in trades. This led to the effort to have global Legal Entity Identifiers. In July 2012 the Bank for International Settlements sponsored a global meeting at the New York Federal Reserve which kicked this effort into high gear and began to involve the private sector in a very meaningful way. But the BIS had plans to go far beyond LEIs.

Industry Vulnerability Disclosures Trending Up
The CVSS base metric assigns a numeric value between 0 and 10 to vulnerabilities according to severity, with higher scores representing greater severity. Vulnerabilities that scored 9.9 or greater represented 6.2 percent of all vulnerabilities disclosed in the second half of 2013. This percentage represents a significant decrease from the first half of the year, when vulnerabilities that scored 9.9 or greater accounted for 12.4 percent of all vulnerabilities. Medium severity vulnerability disclosures increased 19.1 percent between the first half and second half of 2013, and accounted for 59.3 percent of total disclosures in the second half of the year.

Is cloud usurping IT outsourcing?
Is IT outsourcing -- handing over functions and operations to service firms -- on the wane because of cloud? Are cloud, SaaS and APIs enabling access to more granular services? Both business and IT managers seeking to plug in ready-made processes or services will find what they need out in the cloud, ready to roll within hours or minutes. The study for one, classified use of SaaS as a form of application hosting outsourcing, which is on a steep upward trajectory.

Data MIning in Excel Part 19: More Clustering
In Statistics, there's a concept called "Robustness". Basically, a robust model doesn't change very much if you try to tweak it. Robutness is a very good thing that every model should have. Imagine that you're a baseball coach. Would you rather have a pitcher that can play well in all conditions, or a pitcher that can only play well when the sun's out, the temperature is 75 degrees and he's facing West? It's pretty obvious; you want consistency, in your pitchers and your statistical models. So, how do we make sure that our model is robust? Let's check out the parameters.

Continuous Delivery For Databases Not As Much Trusted As For Applications
While a staggering 81% believe it is possible to practice continuous delivery on databases only just over 25% practicing application CI practice database CI in the real time. When asked what was the biggest barrier to adopting continuous delivery for the Database, 36% said mistrust in automation for the database, 17% said it was a lack of awareness, another 17% said it was an inability to change organizational culture and another 22% blamed it on either budget constraints or opposition from management or the development team.

Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in January (see “Intel’s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets”). It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam, to sense human movement such as gestures. The other is designed for use on the back of a device, to scan objects as far as four meters away. Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene, making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures or find objects in a room.

Successful security awareness programs hold employees' hands to the fire
There are the ABCs of behavioral science; specifically antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. Antecedents are precursors to behaviors. In Security Awareness, antecedents are typically information. It can take the form of briefings, posters, newsletters, activities, or whatever else is in a traditional awareness program. Behaviors are the actual behavior a person displays. They are what they are. For the purposes of this article, it does not matter whether the behavior is the desired behavior. The behaviors are the actions that the person takes given all the motivators.

CIOs today in period of historic and profound change
"Business is changing, IT is changing and technology is changing," Kappelman was quoted as saying at the roundtable. That includes a growing focus by IT on how to create business value, and a reduction in cost-cutting practices. Citing survey results, Kappelman said that for many organizations today, the goal of IT is to drive the business and contribute to business strategy. This is a far cry from merely understanding the business, as CIOs were told to do in the past few years.

How Much Do Data Breaches Cost? Two Studies Attempt a Tally
In a survey of more than 3,900 financial and other companies worldwide, Kaspersky Lab found that the cost of lost financial data ranged from $66,000 to $938,000 per organization, depending on the size of the company. This included the costs of engaging service providers such as consultants and lawyers to help manage the problem, as well as the cost of lost business opportunities and investment in services and solutions to prevent additional incidents, such as extra security training. The first and most obvious metric banks measure around security breaches is actual fraud losses.

Boost Potential with Shared Authority and Lean Management
In today’s global market, conditions are becoming more competitive. Business goals and tasks are so complex and massive that formal leaders find themselves overloaded and overwhelmed. Formal leaders become at many times bottlenecks and this reduces performance and flexibility. Sharing authority is in my view an unavoidable management practice. Knowledge workers are the informal leaders who implement strategy. Shared leadership allows them to systematically take over some of the formal leaders’ responsibilities.

Quote for the day:

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." -- Abraham Lincoln

September 12, 2014

Jenkins and continuous delivery: Handing developers more power
Continuous delivery not only involves high-frequency iterations to improve the way software works, but also allows real-time checks to measure whether code changes are achieving specific business objectives. "Developers will have a way to provide feedback themselves to the business. A lot of developers sometimes feel that they are not impacting their company as much as they'd like. They're being asked to do things they might or might not like but they don't necessarily think they can impact the direction and success of the company," Labourey said.

CIOs ill equipped to manage the growing security threats
Security, or Information Security (InfoSec) as the more formal term, is going through a period of massive change. In recent months, the public has become keenly aware of the risks from Information Security. Public security issues at Target, UPS, Apple’s iCloud, Home Depot and the government’s Healthcare.gov website moved the security awareness front and center for the general public. When considering the reach of these companies, statistically speaking, it is highly probable that one or more of these issues has affected most in the US.

Interview with Grady Booch
So, we need to separate methodology from process, for the two are not the same. On the one hand, there was a general recognition that we needed better ways to reason about our systems and that led to this era of visual modeling languages. On the other hand, it was clear that traditional waterfall methods of the 60s and 70s were simply not right for contemporary software development, which led us to the predecessors of agile methods. Waterfall (from Wyn Royce, although even Wyn recognized the need for incrementality) begat the spiral model (from Boehm) which begat incremental and iterative approaches, which were always a part of the OOAD processes we at Rational developed.

Become a Value Creator
One way to be a good value creator: give coworkers credit where credit is due. The need to appear smart can lead managers to cast blame on others for missteps or to claim an employee's idea as their own when speaking before their bosses or boards—the kind of thing that can be terribly demotivating to the person who had the idea. "It's a tragedy when that happens," Hall said. "Somebody is trying to claim value, but in doing so, the person has destroyed value for the company by demotivating an employee. Everybody loses."

Don’t Let Internal Obstructionists Derail Your S&OP Initiative
Software industry professionals will tell you that when S&OP initiatives, Business Intelligence or Supplier Analysis or other types of technology-driven projects fail, software is very rarely the culprit. That may sound self-serving, but it’s true. People determine success. Passive Internal Obstructionists are difficult enough, but the more aggressive and outspoken type present special problems. Specifically, their positive contributions may be very visible and easily measured while the extent of the silent damage they inflict is difficult to gauge. Here are two examples:

Software testers petition to stop ISO 29119
ISO 29119-4 is proposed to codify a set of software test design techniques. According to SoftwareTestingStandard.org, "The test design techniques that are presented in this standard can be used to derive test cases that can be used to collect evidence that the requirements of each system under test have been met and/or that defects are present." The standard comprises about 25 techniques which are split into three branches, "Specification-based techniques," "Structure-based techniques" and "Experience-based techniques."

Future of the enterprise: Heavy investment in Internet of Things security
Chief information security officers (CISOs) are already seeing a change in the business environment due to IoT, as devices, networks and systems are becoming more interconnected on a daily basis -- and security must evolve as a response. The problem many CISOs will face is the need to blend approaches and solutions to cater for IoT security, and this may include securing mobile and cloud architecture, industrial control, automatons and physical security, according to Gartner.

Update your application security policy after Heartbleed
The dilemma CISOs face is ensuring code used within software projects is secure without incurring the wrath of business owners and development teams who are under pressure to deliver applications and updates on time and within tight budgets. As the threats increasingly outweigh the benefits of insecure software, security officers need to reevaluate the risks involved in using open source software and third-party components and how best to manage them. The security and quality of open source software -- two reasons enterprises choose to use these libraries and components -- is dependent on each project's developer base being large enough that any bug and fix is eventually obvious to someone.

Developing leaders: Turning life into learning
For the average leader, life is filled with an kaleidoscope of challenges that offer tremendous opportunity for learning and growth. Ordinary occurrences during a normal day at work can be as instructive as the most carefully crafted training exercise — for a leader who recognizes this — for a leader who knows how to turn life into learning. Organizations can redeploy billions of training dollars each year by focusing on helping leaders mine their regularly scheduled lives for deep insights, feedback, strategies and solutions.

Salesforce Issues Malware Warning
"This is not a vulnerability within Salesforce," the company was quick to point out. "It is malware that resides on infected computer systems and is designed to steal user log-in credentials and resides on infected customer systems." As a precaution, Salesforce customers should work with their IT security teams to ensure that their anti-malware solution is capable of detecting Dyre. If you believe your company has already been infected, you can request assistance from Salesforce by opening a security support case here, and selecting security as the product topic.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is a dynamic process that expresses our skill, our aspirations, and our essence as human beings." -- Catherine Robinson Walker.

September 11, 2014

Apple's Next Chapter: 10 Key Issues
There's still a lot to appreciate in Apple Watch, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and Apple Pay. The new iPhones address gaps in Apple's lineup and should be particularly compelling with iOS 8, which includes a number of sharing features that will make life easier for households with a lot of different Apple devices. Here's a glimpse of what to expect as Apple turns to fashion to dress up its technology.

Future Data Center Trends
“No business on its own has the economies of scale,” he said. “When you do the economic analysis, the return on the investment is not there. Operating at a small size you don’t get the economies of scale that the colocation provider or a large enterprise with 250,000 square feet or more of data center space can get. “Server huggers are usually in the IT camp. But they don’t have access to the data of what it is costing the company to run the data center, including all the costs.” He pointed out that a comprehensive look at cost must include not only hardware, utilities, personnel, but also the depreciation cost of the data center asset.

IBM's 'Ninja Particles' could stop the rise of superbugs
IBM Research's Jim Hedrick has a great job. His work on polymers -- those repeating chains of macromolecules that make up most things in our world, like the computer or phone you're reading this on -- has led to the creation of substances with Marvel Comics-worthy descriptors. There's the self-healing, Wolverine-like substance that arose from a recycled water bottle and something called "ninja particles" that'll advance the reality of nanomedicine. Both discoveries will inevitably make their way into consumer products in the near future, but it's his team's progress on nanomedicine that Hedrick discussed during my visit to IBM Research's sprawling Almaden lab in San Jose, California.

Mozilla moves to cross-browser testing to ease developers' workloads
The experimental add-on, developed from the same tools that Firefox natively uses to debug Firefox for Android and Firefox OS, will allow tools in Firefox to work on Android's Chrome and iOS's Safari when the developer connects one of those devices to his or her desktop. ... "Debugging across devices can be a real pain," Christian Heilmann, Mozilla's principal developer evangelist, said to CNET. "People have been dreaming of this kind of functionality for a long time." ... "The add-on depends on some very bleeding edge stuff, so you must use the Nightly," said Camp, who noted that the add-on has rough edges. Developers shouldn't expect it to work perfectly just yet.

Seriously, churnalists? No, your Gmail login was not cracked
"Our automated anti-hijacking systems would have blocked many of those login attempts. We’ve protected the affected accounts. ... The leaked usernames and passwords were not the result of a breach of Google systems. ... Make sure you’re using a strong password unique to Google. Update your recovery options so we can reach you...if you get locked out of your account. And consider 2-step verification. "

Can a Robot Be Your Boss?

According to Hill, although the technological ability to make automated decisions has grown, consideration of the implications of such practices is not keeping pace. “The Starbucks example is a perfect one,” says Hill. “I imagine the objective was the optimal scheduling system, but they didn’t pay attention to constraints important for their employees, and it became newsworthy. What’s critical is that there is still a human in the loop to make sure proper constraints are being considered that do not discriminate in ways that are not in line with the law or do not make employees miserable.”

PowerShell Web Access eliminates location restrictions
Windows PowerShell Web Access (PWA) is a secure, lightweight website running on a Web server located in your network. It acts as a Windows PowerShell gateway connected to a remote computer in your environment, providing a PowerShell console-like screen in your browser so you can run cmdlets or scripts to manage your virtualization environment. No additional management software or browser plug-ins are needed on the client, giving you the flexibility to use everything from a laptop to your phone to perform management tasks.

Armed With 10TB Drives and 3.2TB Flash, HGST Aims to Own Data Center Storage
Going on the attack after those still using tapes in the category of active archives, HGST says it will offer hard drive solutions to provide a 10x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to traditional enterprise data center solutions and a 5x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to commonly used scale out cloud data center solutions. Although the archive platforms can be configured for a complete range of storage architectures the company says the greatest cost and efficiency gains are made in extremely large capacity environments.

The changing markets for software: the freemium cloud model may be your best choice
The benefits of this model compared to the packaged model are obvious: there's no packaging cost. There is a piracy problem, but that's common to almost all software product business models. Additionally, one serious problem that developers have with app stores is that it's very difficult to reach out to customers for additional sales, cross-selling, or upgrade sales. The app store owns the customer contact information, not necessarily the developer. This limitation, while not universal across all app stores, makes it difficult to build ongoing relationships with happy customers, nurture them, and sell them new offerings.

On the Death of Big Data
Microsoft's strategy is to instill a "data culture" within an organization where everybody has access to vast new stores of analytical information of varying types and can use it to improve business processes and products. For what-used-to-be-called-Big-Data, Microsoft is providing several products and services for leveraging the traditional Apache Hadoop ecosystem while also taking advantage of the democratization of the data and increased access to it from technologies such as SQL. The company is actually baking a lot of the "BD-word" functionality into the company's flagship RDBMS, SQL Server 2014.

Quote for the day:

"Keep focused on the substantive issues. To make a decision means having to go through one door and closing all others." -- Abraham.

September 10, 2014

‘Can everyone hear me now?’
With so much potential for corporate data loss via the voice channel, it is critical that organizations find a way to protect this data. It is also incumbent on device manufacturers and/or third parties to offer methods of creating a secure channel, much as they have done for digital data communications. This need for voice channel protection is what led BlackBerry to acquire Secusmart. BlackBerry is establishing a beachhead in a new battleground for secure enterprise communications.

4 Signs of Big Data Information Overload
Big data involves mining and analyzing enormous sets of often unstructured information. That information may come from social media, sensors, and countless other sources. It’s a different game from BI, which creates analyses from structured data stores. Big data doesn’t mean BI is going away, but that analytics now has an exciting new branch of data discovery opening up. In the new age of big data analytics, discovery is part of the process, and this will naturally cause goals to shift as discoveries emerge.

The Wolf of VMware
IT organizations are increasingly getting pressured to significantly improve agility. In most environments, storage, networking and security remain the primary provisioning bottlenecks. Virtualization and software-defined infrastructure can shorten infrastructure provisioning from weeks to minutes or even seconds. You can also drastically reduce complexity... why are we still basing security decisions on an IP address, which is an arbitrary number that can change? That degree of complexity is unnecessary and illogical with today's technology.

10 Tips for Managing Open Source Vulnerabilities
"A structured OSS adoption process can create a competitive advantage for technology companies by allowing them to leverage off-the-shelf quality software, accelerate development and reduce costs," says Mahshad Koohgoli, CEO of code attributes management company Protecode. OSS is peer-reviewed, which usually results in good quality, but like proprietary code, it is susceptible to security vulnerabilities. Licensing compliance and export controls must also be taken into account, depending on company location and where it sells products. These concerns can be managed, however, as outlined in Protecode's tips below.

Apple Pay: Really a PayPal killer?
Apple Pay includes several features that were already widely expected and/or leaked including NFC integration (iPhone 6 and Watch), Touch ID authentication at POS, and partnerships with major card networks and banks. Importantly, PayPal was not included in the list of participating payments networks, while it is too early to tell about potential “exclusivity rules”. Given that Apple Pay uses a dynamic security code at checkout and not a consumer’s actual credit card number, we believe this creates a potential technological barrier for PayPal ever being included in Apple Pay, making the wallet potentially exclusive to only credit and debit card transactions.

Cyber Hygiene
The security controls and mitigation strategies are all targeted at organizations. Government departments or private sector enterprises can and should implement them and yes, that does have a cumulative beneficial effect on the ecosystem, but it doesn’t really provide actionable guidance for individual users. Would similar cyber hygiene steps help with home users? Everyone loves to talk about the threat from zero-days, but when my colleagues and I analyzed real world exploits in our 2011 Security Intelligence Report, we found that less than 1 percent of exploits in the first half of 2011 were against zero-day vulnerabilities

Technically an Expert but You Can't Run Your Own Business!
While their skill at ‘doing the doing’ is not in dispute, many are not so great at running a business. Just because you are great at putting together a digital strategy for your client doesn’t mean you know how to actually run a business yourself. Just because you are great at creating an effective social media campaign for your clients doesn’t mean you know how to market and promote your own business. The saying goes, “cobblers’ children go unshod”: the cobbler spends so much time looking after customers' needs that he has no time for his children's.

Poorly maintained Linux servers turned into bots
"We have traced one of the most significant DDoS attack campaigns of 2014 to infection by IptabLes and IptabLex malware on Linux systems," said Akamai senior vice president and general manager, Security Business, Stuart Scholly. "This is a significant cybersecurity development because the Linux operating system has not typically been used in DDoS botnets. Linux admins need to know about this threat to take action to protect their servers." In Akamai-Prolexic's view, the gang behind this malware was likely to expand their targeting of vulnerable Linux servers, as well as broadening the list of targets.

Heartbleed patch efforts ignored on thousands of websites
In its newly released August 2014 threats report, Santa Clara-based McAfee Inc.'s McAfee Labs research team also cited an estimate that more than 300,000 websites remain unpatched and vulnerable to Heartbleed as cybercriminals successfully transformed a roster of vulnerable sites into a "hit list" to identify new attack targets. Defining Heartbleed as "the most significant security event" since last holiday season's Target Corp. data breach, McAfee warned that many applications, websites and devices that remain unpatched are almost certain to be attacked

Real-Time Stream Processing as Game Changer in a Big Data World
In contrast to the traditional database model where data is first stored and indexed and then subsequently processed by queries, stream processing takes the inbound data while it is in flight, as it streams through the server. Stream processing also connects to external data sources, enabling applications to incorporate selected data into the application flow, or to update an external database with processed information. A recent development in the stream processing industry is the invention of the “live data mart” which provides end-user, ad-hoc continuous query access to this streaming data that’s aggregated in memory.

Quote for the day:

"What used to fit in a building now fits in a pocket, what fits in a pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 yrs" -- Ray Kurzweil