Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 08, 2015

20th-century solutions won’t help 21st-century surveillance
The speed with which the public could migrate to a new coder’s NextApp would up the stakes for the kind of enforcement you’d have to do for your proposed requirement to have any impact. Indeed, you’d have to constrain the application ecosystem itself. To be sure, you might have a better chance at it today — in a world of app marketplaces run by Apple and Google, who can impose their own restrictions on software — than ten years ago, when software traveled directly from one machine to another with a simple click.

DJ Patil has joined the White House to wrangle data issues
Patil is one of the biggest figures in the data science movement, often crediting for coining the term data scientist. In 2012, Patil co-authored the Harvard Business Review article calling data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century, helping to spark a hiring frenzy of people with an understanding of data analysis, systems and business concerns. We’ve reached out to Patil for comment, and will update the story as we learn more. We’ll discuss how another government body, the Federal Trade Commission, plans to deal with the issue of data privacy at Structure Data (March 18-19 in New York) when FTC Commissioner Julie Brill chats on stage with Gigaom legal expert Jeff Roberts.

React.js in Real Life at Codecademy
In short: React is a library for building user interfaces with JavaScript. Instead of the usual approach to writing user interfaces, React treats each UI element as a contained state machine. It is not a "framework" in the sense of something like AngularJS. Though Facebook sometimes describes React as "the V in MVC," I find this description less helpful, since React applications needn't abide by the MVC model. React helps you build fast user interfaces that can handle complex interactions without a lot of ugly code. If you're going to be working in React, you should be aware of these features:

Visualizations of Continuous Delivery
Nhan Ngo, a QA engineer at Spotify, made four fabulous visualizations while reading Continuous Delivery. She has very kindly agreed to make them available under a Creative Commons license so feel free to share them, download them, and print them out (click to get a higher resolution version). Thank you Nhan!

New Generation of Learning Management Systems Delivers Business Value
Learning management systems have existed in various forms for many years, yet the research finds that a significant number of organizations participating in this research have not adopted this technology. Although nearly two in three (63%) have a training department responsible for learning management, only about half (53%) have a learning management system. Moreover, a formal approach to learning management correlates with size of company: The numbers of those that have a training department rise at each size level, from 25 percent of small organizations to 100 percent of very large ones.

Windows 10 is a New Chapter for Microsoft
Microsoft is working to maintain and expand the role for Windows and Windows is being positioned as the best way to experience many of Microsoft’s other products and services. For Microsoft, Windows 10 is not just another OS upgrade, but rather a transition to a new Windows experience. Microsoft uses terms like personal, connected, and cross-device, to describe this experience. However fundamentally it is about trust. Microsoft aims to provide a secure, reliable, and consistent experience for Windows users regardless of type of device they are using. Microsoft has much to prove in this regard and it will take time and spot-on execution to establish this new message in the minds of users.

The End of the Public Cloud’s Reign
The public cloud is not for everyone and that fact is bringing an end to the public cloud’s reign as we know it. The public cloud’s massive growth and popularity was a bubble that was built upon public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) being promoted as the ultimate IT solution for most, if not all, companies. Unfortunately, for the proponents of public cloud omnipotence, the demand for undifferentiated or unsupported IaaS seems to be waning, with cloud-savvy businesses seeking a combination of managed cloud services, private cloud or colocation rather than pure public cloud solutions.

R for Everyone: Advanced Analytics and Graphics
The most sophisticated analysis in the world would be near useless if the information it reveals cannot be communicated effectively and visualization is, perhaps, the best way to share information. A graph will almost always provide a better explanation than a table of numbers. One of the biggest selling points of R is its visualization capabilities. For years the gold standard was ... With the move toward web graphics Hadley built ggvis, which is essentially a version of ggplot2 that generates Vega graphs. Ramnath Vaidyanathan wrote rCharts for easy creation of D3 graphics from within R. With all these options R makes data visualization easy and professional.

My experience driving the new Audi 4G LTE connected car
Audi’s connected car experience includes the My.Audi website for configuring features and a mobile app (iOS and Android) for syncing and streaming to the onboard MMI connect system. The My.Audi.com website is where you activate and configure MMI features and services, including destinations and access, map updates, RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter, via widgets, and this can take time. New features may be introduced on the website, via app updates and/or firmware updates to the car’s MMI system via LTE connection (or SD card updates, e.g., map updates).

Invite Enterprise Architecture to the Digital Party
Since enterprise digital transformation efforts involve organizational, process, and technology changes that better connect the customer to the technology systems of record, formulating the best way of accomplishing the goals of digital sounds like a perfect application of enterprise architecture. Only most organizations don’t see this connection – for a number of possible reasons. First, the existing EA effort may not be focused on broad-based business improvement at all. All too often EAs like Bob get buried in the IT department. Their focus ends up on technology concerns, which are important to be sure, but the connection to the business is tenuous at best.

Quote for the day:

"Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way" -- Ronald Reagan

February 07, 2015

The enterprise CIO is moving to a consumption-first paradigm
Enter the consumption-first paradigm. Whereas past IT organizations needed to take a build-first methodology out of necessity, today there is a better option. Today, organizations can move to a consume-first paradigm. Within the paradigm, applications and services are evaluated through a consume-first methodology. If the application/ service is not a good fit, then it moves to a configure-first methodology. If all else fails, it falls to build-first. But the goal here is to consume as much as possible without having to build or configure. The evaluation process is as important as changing the paradigm. It is critical to clearly understand what is strategic and differentiating for the company. That then becomes a hallmark for guiding which components present the greatest opportunity for focus and leverage.

Is Social Media Recruiting Dead?
"One key to leveraging the value and reach of social media is to evolve as the technology does," says Kasper. At its core, social recruiting is about going where your audience is, and especially with the millennial generation of job seekers, that can mean many different social media platforms. "Even if some networks might become less popular with the younger workforce, new channels like Instagram or Snapchat are popping up to provide new avenues of engagement for recruiters. As social media evolves, so will social recruiting," Kasper says. That also means spreading out your recruiting efforts using all the technology available, like mobile and even email.

How Intel will embrace the 'delightful chaos' of Internet of Things
Curie represents what is possible for computing in the future, with chips that small being used to power wearable devices and all sort of other objects, Smith said in a visit to CNET's New York office Wednesday. For Intel, which dominates the business of supplying chips to personal computers, the company is eager to search for the next big market to return it to the days of heady growth. But despite all the hype around wearables and IoT, the story of this nascent market is yet unwritten. "What we see in that segment of the market, the Internet of Things, there's lots of innovation going on," Smith said. "If anybody tells you they know who's going to be the winner three years from now, they're making it up, because nobody knows.

Personal Data Stolen Sells for 10X Price of Stolen Credit Card Numbers
The price differential is due to the ability to use identity information – birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses, employment information, income, etc. – to open new credit accounts on an ongoing basis rather than exploiting just one account until it’s canceled. But that’s not all. “The information attackers were able to access from Anthem are key pieces of data that can be used to access someone’s financial records,” says Eric Chiu, president & co-founder of Hytrust, making it possible to find and drain individuals’ personal cash reserves.

Integration of Big Data Involves Challenges
New types of big data technologies are being introduced to meet expanding demand for storage and use of information across the enterprise. One of those fast-growing technologies is the open source Apache Hadoop and commercial enterprise versions of it that provide a distributed file system to manage large volumes of data. The research finds that currently 28 percent of organizations use Hadoop and about as many more (25%) plan to use it in the next two years. Nearly half (47%) have Hadoop-specific skills to support big data integration. For those that have limited resources, open source Hadoop can be affordable, and to automate and interface with it, adopters can use SQL in addition to its native interfaces; about three in five organizations now use each of these options.

Data Mining Interview: Dr. A. Fazel Famili
In the early days of data mining work, especially applied data mining projects, our challenge was to educate owners of data what data mining was, what would be the advantages of companies opening the door and providing us with their data and access to real-world data. Nowadays, one of the biggest challenges is to make sure that we have access to and understand (properly choose) the attributes that influence the problem that we are investigating. For example, if we our goal is to predict the potential failure of a component in a complex system for which we have access to hundreds of parameters, unless the particular parameter(s) that are associated with the problem are included in our data,

Guidance Regarding Methods for De-identification
This page provides guidance about methods and approaches to achieve de-identification in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. The guidance explains and answers questions regarding the two methods that can be used to satisfy the Privacy Rule’s de-identification standard: Expert Determination and Safe Harbor1. This guidance is intended to assist covered entities to understand what is de-identification, the general process by which de-identified information is created, and the options available for performing de-identification.

Hybrid Cloud Turns IT from a Cost Center into a Revenue Center
There has already been great progress in approaches to federation and interoperability, which are helping to improve hybrid cloud’s cohesion. Some recent progress in building more interoperable cloud environments include the entry of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) into OpenStack, the leading open source cloud platform (more on the progress of this effort here). SAML enables single sign-on for Web properties, which makes B2B and B2C transactions much easier. Integrating this into OpenStack-powered clouds allows them to more easily federate with other cloud environments, ultimately giving cloud buyers more hybrid options.

“Cyberspace” must die. Here’s why
The need to abandon the false digital dualism embodied in the term “cyberspace” (hat tip to Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey) becomes more urgent as everyday items become connected to the internet. To appreciate how anachronistic the word has become, consider whether your fitness tracker or smart thermostat exists in cyberspace or the real world. When leaked NSA documents talked about strong decryption capabilities as the “price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace,” that wasn’t about mastering Neuland. It was about being able to access and exploit the entire connected world, smart homes and all.

The Role of Containers in Modern Applications
With few moving parts having to be deployed with the application, the application becomes easier to support in a production setting. Of course, this is predicated on the fact that the service provider and the service is highly reliable. For example, many applications deployed with Docker will contain its own MySQL instance versus leveraging the MySQL RDS service from Amazon. The latter provides redundancy, availability, backup, etc. all as part of the service, but if deployed as a traditional n-tier application using Docker, all those non-functional requirements continue to burden the operations groups.

Quote for the day:

"The more you criticize , the more you will recognize other's limitations." --@ShawnUpchurch

February 04, 2015

Enterprise Security – You Get What You Pay For
A free enterprise security solution will never pack the right set of features to manage your endpoints (whether 50 or 50,000). The only benefits a free enterprise solution has to offer are an anti-malware feature, probably some web-filtering capabilities, and a VPN (best case scenario). Is that enough? Any company that truly wants to secure its infrastructure, intellectual property, and other significant data knows that a free enterprise security solution won’t cut it. Sure, you might have an anti-malware engine running some heuristics, but what happens when you want to do more than just run an antivirus solution on those endpoints?

Continuous Delivery: From Theory to Practice
Monitoring deployments is a whole bible unto itself, and so it would be too lengthy to discuss this in detail. However the focus on this is probably the most important factor, since the ability to deploy 1000 times a day is worthless if you are unable to monitor how these changes affect your system. Since, let’s be honest, you’re not looking to deploy new features a thousand times a day, deploying a thousand times a day gives you the ability to fix things really fast and make small changes quickly. That’s why you need to have the entire process set up in such a way that enables you to quickly understand exactly what’s going on in your system - and only then will you have the ability to deploy as many times as you want.

The Proxy is the App
The proxy is the app, for all intents and purposes, because it is the only public interface seen by the app whether that's a native mobile or browser-based app. The proxy is able to provide visibility and security as well as performance-related services on behalf of the "app" because it effectively becomes the app itself. It provides the app routing functionality required to ensure a request to "login" goes to the "login service" while a request to "checkout" goes to the "checkout service" while mediating with the client to ensure performance and security requirements are met.

Experience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison IoT Lab
The IoT Lab has adopted a novel approach for successfully engaging students. It has fostered participation by dozens of undergraduate and graduate students (a large fraction being women) representing a range of disciplines including not only engineering and computer science, but also other “non-technical” disciplines such as business, human ecology (retailing and consumer sciences), nursing, economics, journalism and mass communications, mathematics, physics, statistics, and philosophy. There are several key insights that we have gained through our experience in engaging students with IoT. Here are two:

Ford drives scheduling with artificial intelligence
Here's how it works: If the company hires someone freshly out of college, they need to work rotational job assignments. He or she gets three different jobs in the first three years at Ford. "Ford has all these other opportunities in IT that we can do and in college you don't really think about it," said Kinnaird-Heether. "It gives you business acumen and helps you understand what positions are at the company and you have a better idea of what you want to do with the company." As more people joined, it became increasingly difficult for managers to fit workers into the right jobs, taking into account seniority and participants' own assignment preferences.

How to prioritise your Big Data Analytics use cases
Big Data Analytics is considered by some an innovation, and others an evolution. Whatever your position on that point, one thing for sure is that the technology behind it keeps evolving….fast. Hence the need for the fourth dimension of this pentagon:Technology. Use cases which require a Big Data technology that wouldn’t be part of your stack are definitely worth considering. Why? Because those cases will help the evolution of your Big Data technology ecosystem. It will also make it better performing, reliable, efficient, and redundant.

10 reasons why working in the office work beats telecommuting
Plenty of pundits have examined this trend and decided the office is a dead man walking. But if remote work is indeed going to kill office work, get ready for a tough time. Remote work can be hard, both for workers and their managers. Even if the employer has a good flexible working policy and the employee has the right skills for remote work, there are downsides to working from home. Why all the talk of the death of the office? Here are 10 shining examples of how onsite work trumps remote work.

5 ways a CIO can make a real difference to users
It seems that at most companies, CIOs play nothing but defense, worrying about malware attacks, ERP integration, financial reporting, rogue users, and licensing changes. But you can't win if you only play defense, especially in companies that rely on people to create, develop, and sell the products and services that make money. ... Yet in too many companies, CIOs and their IT organizations stay in the data center, avoiding user needs and opportunities. If CIOs spend a little effort on user-facing technology change, I bet they would become the kinds of key execs that most aspire to. Here are some simple projects that CIOs can initiate to matter in their company's technology offense.

Aeris and Tech Mahindra to launch carrier IoT platform
The platform will expand carrier service offerings to included packaged apps for key vertical systems, such as fleet and asset management, insurance and so on. It will also include a locally deployed technology platform for delivering managed device connectivity services; specialised system operations and support services; go-to-market planning support services; and an internet-scale device data analytics infrastructure. Device, customer and billing data will reside in the operator’s home country, keeping delivery costs low and reducing regulatory concerns in some markets.

Dangerous IE flaw opens door to phishing attacks
The flaw, described as a universal cross-site scripting vulnerability, was disclosed Saturday on the Full Disclosure mailing list by David Leo, a researcher with a security consultancy firm called Deusen. Leo's post included a link to a proof-of-concept exploit that demonstrates the attack using the dailymail.co.uk website as the target. When opened in Internet Explorer 11 on an up to date installation of Windows 8.1, the exploit page provides the user with a link. When the link is clicked, the dailymail.co.uk website opens in a new window, but after 7 seconds the site's content is replaced with a page reading "Hacked by Deusen."

Quote for the day:

"Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned." -- Harold Geneen

February 03, 2015

TOGAF – A New Year Message
Of course, as well as all the commercial aspects of feasting, drinking, visiting and present giving, there is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. This dichotomy – between the spiritual and the commercial – got me thinking about the connection between TOGAF and EA. You’re probably thinking that I must be crazy, and that there can’t be any connection between Christmas and TOGAF… and there isn’t a direct link. So what’s my point? Well, TOGAF has become a de-facto “standard” approach to EA. This is partly because there are few international organizations with the infrastructure to establish a new discipline, such as enterprise architecture.

Radware CEO on Identifying Intruders
Often, security software relies on digital signatures to identify unauthorized access into systems, matching the signature against those used by known hackers. But in an Executive Sessions interview with Information Security Media Group, Zisapel explains that the quick-acting digital assailant often relies on a signature that has yet to be added to the libraries of known exploited signatures. "[That's] simply because it's new, it was not seen before," Zisapel says. Instead, he says, Radware is incorporating behavioral analytics and similar techniques into its products to identify intruders.

Defining Metrics for the Service Desk
Every organization is different and the examples in a book or a blog are just there to help you think about possibilities, not to be used unchanged. You also need to keep reviewing your KPIs, as the things you care about will change over time and KPIs that worked well for you in the past may no longer be relevant. Remember the “K” in KPI stands for key, so you should focus on key things that are important to you; you should not measure and report every number you can. You also need a clear understanding of your objectives, and the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that are needed to achieve those objectives. Every KPI should support one or more of these objectives or CSFs.

Microsoft's Windows 10 for IoT: What to expect
The Windows 10 mobile SKU will run on both Intel- and ARM-based tablets and phones, according to that same slide. (I believe is the coming version of Windows 10 for Windows Phones and small tabletsthat is due to go to preview in February.) The Compact/Athens SKUs, which also run on both Intel- and ARM-based devices, is for resource-constrained devices that need to run Universal Apps. The next version of the .Net Micro Framework, designed for wearables, small sensors and equipment like vending machines. The Windows 10 IoT operating system versions are expected to be built on the new common core (OneCore), share the common Windows 10 Runtime and be available via the coming, unified Windows Store.

Startup Eero wants to wipe out weak Wi-Fi
"Instead of one powerful device blasting a signal everywhere, you need to break it up into smaller pieces and distribute it throughout the home," Weaver said. To succeed, Eero will have to convince people that they need an upgrade to their current networks. With even premium routers costing less than $200, some persuading will be necessary. The sales pitch will likely appeal to folks who are envisioning range extenders that use Wi-Fi or home powerline networks to reach better throughout a home -- in short, the people who already think their Wi-Fi isn't up to scratch. Eero also can take heart that customers are showing some willingness to buy premium electronic gadgets like Philips Hue remote-controlled light bulbs, Drobo storage systems and Nest Learning Thermostats.

MongoDB Eyes Bigger, Faster NoSQL Deployments
MongoDB 3.0's new pluggable architecture addresses write-intensive applications, but that's just a start. The 3.0 release includes two new storage engine options. The first is WiredTiger, which was acquired (for an undisclosed sum) along with the company of the same name. WiredTiger supports write-intensive use-cases common in mobile, Internet-of-Things, smart-grid, log-file-analysis, and other modern applications. "It has become incredibly inexpensive to create data with smart phones, messaging, smart grids, log files, and so on, and it's only natural that companies are trying to turn that information into money," said Kelly Stirman, MongoDB's director of products.

Can We Actually Confront Data Quality With Business Intelligence?
The first thing we have to understand and unconditionally accept is that it’s next to impossible to have perfect data quality. The bigger the organization, the more likely there will be issues with its data. The more complex the organization is in terms of divisions, sub divisions, data collection methods, etc., the more likely it will have data quality issues. From my experience in the BI industry, the bigger something is—or the more moving parts something has—the less likely everything will run smoothly. Data quality is no exception – period. This is the reality and unless you have unlimited time with an unlimited budget, it’s foolish to expend great energy for 100% perfect data.

Recycle that old Android device into a web-based security camera
There are so many reasons why you might need a security camera. There are also a lot of reasons why purchasing an actual security system might not be cost effective. So, if you're looking for a simple way to get a single camera security system up and running, and you happen to have a spare Android device lying around, there's an app that you need to look into called IP Webcam. The IP Webcam app uses your device's built-in camera, adds a lightweight web server, and allows you to connect to the camera through that server. It's simple and effective.

Scala in Large Scale Systems
We've used the actor model when a problem can be decomposed into a set of sub-systems each with its own state and where scalability is a consideration. Designing to be distributed by default means you can take advantage of location transparency to scale both vertically and horizontally. However, the loss of formal interfaces is unsettling since we lose those compiler checks. A compromise is formal protocols, keeping actors simple and making these explicit in our design and tests. Writing clear and concise tests can be tricky, and debugging is challenging in any concurrent system.

Cybersecurity spending: How to know when enough is enough
The requirements for each strategy will vary between sector and organisation. Working Links CIO Omid Shiraji says that, while security represents the number one reason for existing for some companies, he would rather channel his firm's IT budget towards the areas that are going to add real value. "The cyber-threat and security in general can be blown out of proportion -- if someone wants to compromise your organisation, they will," he says. "Breaches will occur. For me, great security is all about recovery. What you must make sure as a CIO is that you have the best possible recovery procedures, business continuity processes, and crisis management approaches."

Quote for the day:

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." -- Naguib Mahfouz

February 02, 2015

Microsoft talks up Windows 10 for business, but questions mount
The revamp, which experts have called Microsoft's biggest-ever change to its update and upgrade process, is integral to the firm's "Windows as a service" strategy. While most consumers will receive these updates -- which may come as often as monthly -- automatically via Windows Update, the mechanism already used to deliver security patches, businesses will be leery of such a quick cadence. Historically, enterprises have been conservative in how they adopt new OSes for their workers' personal computers, worried about meeting regulatory requirements and new costs to train employees when software morphs.

Raspberry Pi 2 is six times faster than Pi 1, supports Windows 10
The Raspberry Pi 2 has a faster CPU and more memory than its predecessor. This could make it a true PC replacement, said Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi Foundation. “This is obviously fantastic news for Raspberry Pi—in terms of performance it takes us over the line into being a ‘real’ PC you could use for web browsing and productivity applications,” Upton said. The faster performance will also bring new applications like computer vision to robots, smart devices, drones and other electronics. For example, the extra horsepower will allow the Pi 2 to comprehend images from attached 3D cameras, which was not possible on Pi 1.

Big Data Success Remains Elusive: Study
In some cases, organizations attempt to use their existing data management systems to process big data streams, often with poor results. "Legacy systems that generally have been used to great efficiency for enterprise data management and content management, sometimes aren’t suited to these new data sources," Hunter said. These sources may include social media streams, log data, and sensor data from the emerging Internet of Things to evaluate customers, transactions, and user sentiment. But this approach usually doesn’t go well, resulting in what he calls a "fumbling of the legacy systems."

How Google could end up as your next wireless carrier
If Google does end up buying wholesale, they could potentially repackage the service however they want, or bundle it with other services. Sprint and T-Mobile would probably place, at least, some restrictions on price or plan structure, but there are a lot of things that Google could do that Sprint or T-Mobile aren't already doing, Menezes said. One option, he pointed out, was the possibility of pay-as-you-go with a competitive rate for the enterprise -- something Menezes said is routinely brought up in conversations he has about wireless service. Currently, most options are prepaid, with no way to account for unused service.

Docker chief operator: Why the open source container project is taking a new shape
"At Mongo we experienced similar rapid growth. Docker is actually faster than Mongo. One of the reasons they were interested in bringing me on is the fact that if you're going to draw parallels with anything in history that has experienced that sort of growth it's MongoDB, which before Docker I'd say is the faster-growing open- source project that I know of. "Now Docker is doing it close to twice as fast as far as growth goes. It feels almost like overnight. There are a lot of challenges that come with that. At Mongo I felt we were writing the book on it as we went. Mongo walked that path before and we'll definitely be drawing on some of the experiences there."

How Digital Ecosystems Are Creating the 'We Economy'
"In last year's Technology Vision report, we noted how large enterprises were reasserting leadership in their markets by adopting digital to drive their processes more effectively and transform how they go to market, collaborate with partners, engage with customers and manage transactions," says Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture. "Now that digital has become part of the fabric of their operating DNA, they are stretching their boundaries to leverage a broader ecosystem of digital businesses as they shape the next generation of their products, services and business models to effect change on a much broader scale," Daugherty says.

Office Online vs. Office 365: What’s free, what’s not, and what you really need
If you need Access or Publisher, though, Office Online won’t work for you. In order to get either of these apps as part of a suite, you have to buy Office Professional 2013, or subscribe to Office 365—which comes with the rights to install Office Professional 2013 on multiple machines. And if you want to be able to do things like change the orientation of a document, insert section breaks, or other advanced functions from a tablet or smartphone, you’ll have to sign up for Office 365.

Mobile app security grabs feds' attention
NIST points out concerns. “Despite the benefits of mobile apps, however, the use of apps can potentially lead to serious security issues. This is so because, like traditional enterprise applications, apps may contain software vulnerabilities that are susceptible to attack,” the report says. “Such vulnerabilities may be exploited by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s information technology resources or the user’s personal data.” NIST advises development of security requirements on issues such as securing of data and acceptable levels of risk. Specific recommendations are offered for the planning, app testing, and app approval/rejection processes.

Accenture unveils its vision for five big tech trends in 2015
“Visionary companies are recognizing that as every business becomes a digital business, together they can effect change on a much bigger stage,” Accenture said. Home Depot, for instance, is using the Internet of Things to shape the way people live in connected homes. Every product that it sells will have to be compatible with Home Depot’s own Wink connected home system, making all products in its ecosystem easier to install. Fiat plans to use its Uconnect platform — integrated with TomTom, Reuters, Facebook, and TuneIn — to provide drivers with communication, entertainment, and navigation that lets drivers stay focused on driving.

How to Lead in Ambiguous Times
The more volatile and hostile the environment becomes, the more we see success and survival begin to converge: In a cataclysmic environment, the two would be one and the same. We aren’t facing threats of that extremity, and corporate leaders cannot give up the need to grow. But they have to take ambiguity into account. In essence, the right approach is focused on sustainability. When we hear talk of sustainability, it is typically of the need for corporations to reassess a go-go growth model—one aimed at maximizing profitability—that is viewed as insufficiently inclusive. Company leaders are asked, by their employees, customers, or society at large, to “give back” by supporting charitable causes and the environment.

Quote for the day:

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong." -- Peter T. Mcintyre

February 01, 2015

Chief Data Science Officers Won't Supplant CIOs
One might argue that it's only a matter of time before data scientists assume their rightful place in a corner office. After all, according to this perspective, it's more than just being hip and with the times. Many organizations that have based their strategy on big data analytics have also identified data science as a key enabler. As the chief data officer (CDO) has risen in strategic importance, it only makes sense that this individual will oversee data science initiatives, personnel, and practices.

The end for 1024-bit SSL certificates is near, as Mozilla kills a few more
Owners of 2048-bit certificates that chain back to intermediate CA certificates with 1024-bit keys will also be impacted if they don't update the certificate chain on their Web servers to include a 2048-bit intermediate from their certificate authority. Each certificate authority has one or more root certificates that it uses to sign SSL certificates with when issuing them to customers. Those CA certificates are included in operating systems, major browsers and other products according to well established agreements and are used to verify the authenticity of SSL certificates presented by websites.

Evolution of Wearables - What is in store?
Medical and Wellness segment could be the one which will embrace this category of wearable devices and make health more affordable and self manageable for every one. For instance, one can wear a virtual doctor while on a specific treatment. A better example could be that the advances in wearable devices could lead to a scenario, where a diabetes patient may get appropriate doses of insulin administered into his body automatically based on various data collected by the sensors worn around the body. This could be risky, if the data, so collected are inaccurate and that is one of the major concern that is expected to be addressed in the coming years.

Building data science teams: The power of the technology stack
A factor that is frequently overlooked when setting up a data team is the selection of the technology stack. Often, this decision is delegated to the first hire in data science. Due to a lack of information about the right technologies, those in charge avoid making a decision. There is a case to be made for building a multilingual team. Nevertheless, I would like to highlight the advantages of choosing a technology stack during the conceptualization of a data team.

Technology Repaints the Payment Landscape
Across the globe, BCG predicts a time of “disruption and opportunity” driven by digital technologies that will require the existing credit card system to prove that it’s better than its new competition. “The smartphone is the catalyst for a lot of change in this industry,” says Dana Stalder, a venture capitalist with Matrix Partners and a former eBay and PayPal executive now on the board of Poynt, which recently introduced a smart credit card terminal. Venture capitalists invested over $2 billion in payment technology firms between January 2013 and June 2014, according to the data tracking firm CB Insights.

Microsoft throws down the gauntlet in business intelligence
James Phillips, Microsoft’s general manager for business intelligence, said the company has already had tens of thousands of organizations sign up for PowerBI since it became available in February 2014, and that CEO Satya Nadella opens up a PowerBI dashboard every morning to track certain metrics. ... Phillips said the business intelligence market is presently in its third wave. The first wave was technical and database-centric. The second wave was about self service, defined first by Excel and, over the past few years, by Tableau’s eponymous software. The third wave, he said, takes self service a step further in terms of ease of use and all but eliminates the need for individual employees to track down IT before they can get something done.

How Connected Cars Have Established A New Ecosystem Powered By IoT
The IoT-enabled “connected car” turns the vehicle itself into a hub for an entire ecosystem of connected services that offer consumers a wealth of benefits including enhanced safety and security, a richer user experience and a new suite of product offerings. From the manufacturer’s perspective, this also helps establish an ongoing customer relationship as well as incremental revenue streams over the life of the vehicle. Over-the-air (OTA) software updates in cars are very similar to the software updates that occur in smartphones. Any software update for a vehicle’s connected services is done wirelessly OTA, keeping the OEM in contact with the vehicle but removing the need for a dealership visit.

Big Data Processing with Apache Spark – Part 1: Introduction
Spark allows programmers to develop complex, multi-step data pipelines using directed acyclic graph (DAG) pattern. It also supports in-memory data sharing across DAGs, so that different jobs can work with the same data. Spark runs on top of existing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) infrastructure to provide enhanced and additional functionality. It provides support for deploying Spark applications in an existing Hadoop v1 cluster (with SIMR – Spark-Inside-MapReduce) or Hadoop v2 YARN cluster or even Apache Mesos. We should look at Spark as an alternative to Hadoop MapReduce rather than a replacement to Hadoop.

A Historical Look at Enterprise Architecture with John Zachman
According to Zachman, Walker created a methodology for defining processes as separate entities from the organizational structure. Walker came out to Los Angeles, where Zachman and ARCO were based to help provide guidance on the merger. Zachman recalls Walker telling him that the key to defining the systems for Enterprise purposes was in the data, not necessarily the process itself. In other words, the data across the company needed to be normalized so that they could maintain visibility into the assets and structure of the enterprise. “The secret to this whole thing lies in the coding and the classification of the data,” Zachman recalled Walker saying. Walker’s methodology, he said, began by classifying data by its existence not by its use.

Increasingly, enterprise architecture looks outward
From a customer-facing perspective, EAs are now getting intimately involved in planning and managing digital strategies, along with existing internal systems. Oliver Bossert, Chris Ip, and Jürgen Laartz, all with McKinsey, point out that many organizations have extensive legacy systems wired into their organizations, yet are challenged with getting on the digital track as fast as possible. In a new post, they recommend organizations adopt a "two-speed IT architecture" that will meet the needs of planning back-end systems of record with digital front ends. Such a two-speed strategy would consist of "a fast-speed, customer-centric front end running alongside a slow-speed, transaction-focused legacy back end," the analysts explain.

Quote for the day:

"People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives." -- Theodore Roosevelt

January 31, 2015

Data preparation is the unsung hero of big data analytics
When it comes to analytics, there's an old axiom that goes "garbage in, garbage out," meaning that if you throw high volumes of poorly formed data into an analytic solution, you'll get bad results. Historically, the cleansing and preparation of data has been a long, arduous, time-consuming process. When I was at Yankee Group, we migrated CRM systems, but before we could do the migration, the company spent a year doing nothing but cleaning up the records in the existing system so we didn't import bad data. Even with all the work we did, we still had a bunch of bad information that was migrated over.

China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet
The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors who complain that in its quest for so-called cybersovereignty ... “I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow American broadcasters. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.” Multinational companies are also alarmed by the growing online constraints. Especially worrisome, they say, are new regulations that would force foreign technology and telecom companies to give the government “back doors” to their hardware and software and require them to store data within China.

Google defends policy that leaves most Android devices unpatched
According to Beardsley, the Android security response team first replied to bug reports in mid-October with the "we-don't-patch-WebView-anymore" message. Beardsley used his blog to urge Google to change its collective mind and return to patching WebView in those older editions, which by Google's own admission power more than 60% of all Android devices. ... "We provide patches for the current branch of Android in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and directly provide Android partners with patches for at least the last two major versions of the operating system."

The Technology Coming in 2015: a Realistic Analysis
Every year more and more watch innovations are presented, but they are still seen as products just for geeks. Why might 2015 be different? First, the French company Withings has introduced an innovation that doesn’t seem like one. From the outside it is a conventional watch, while on the inside it carries sensors that monitor activity, sports and sleep. It keeps the correct time by itself, automatically communicates with your smartphone and, like a typical watch, you don’t have to recharge it, though it will require a batter change every 8 months. This new smartwatch proposal, based on simplicity and elegance, won over the tech enthusiasts at CES 2015 and goes on sale in late January at affordable prices.

Use a SQL interface to handle JSON data in DB2 11
This tutorial focuses on a SQL interface recently introduced in DB2® 11 for z/OS® that allows extraction and retrieval of JSON data from BSON objects and conversion from JSON to BSON. With this new feature, users can manage JSON data without relying on DB2 NoSQL JSON APIs. Instead, SQL interfaces can be used for JSON manipulation. Learn about the setup/configuration and get illustrations for common JSON usage inside DB2 11 for z/OS. Hints and tips are provided to improve performance and prevent potential pitfalls.

Storage Spaces Physical Disk Validation Script
As part of a new Storage Spaces deployment, there are a number of functional requirements which each Physical Disk must satisfy before creating a Storage Pool. Further, there exists a natural functional and performance variance between physical disks of the same model (and even manufacturing lot) which can result from a number of factors including manufacturing tolerances, shipping damage, or even vibration in a disk enclosure. In a large storage deployment, these variances can be difficult to identify as the cause of a functional or performance issue.

It's Ben Armstrong and what's new in Hyper-V
In Edge Show episode 134, Rick is getting back in touch with on-premises technologies that are still very close to his heart. This episode has Rick reaching out to Ben Armstrong from the Hyper-V team to talk about all things new in Hyper-V found in the Technical Preview 1 of Windows Server. Ben outlines 2 or 3 big things and a bunch of "popcorn".

The Purpose of Silicon Valley
Such combinations of improvements in hardware and software lead to many technologies that are extremely valuable even if they get less attention than Web or mobile-app startups valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, says Tom Hayes, a marketing executive who founded the Techmanity conference and Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a group that promotes regional development. What confuses outsiders is that so much in the Valley “seems trivial, small ball,” Hayes says, “when the myth is that we are supposed to be out changing the world. In fact, our utopian idealism has shrunk in recent years as we’ve come to realize that even little innovations, in the right context, can have enormous impact … and the odds of pulling them off successfully are infinitely greater.”

Update on the DATA Act
While a strong majority of government organizations reported formal processes around data governance, planning, change management, and almost a majority had a formal organizational structure, fewer reported strong data architectures and only one-quarter reporting measuring the outcomes of their data processes. Most worrisome is the inability to hire, train, grow and retain the data talent they need – only 26% said they did. For some, implementing the DATA Act will certainly be a challenge. However, the generous timeline and the resources available to guide the process will help.

5 reasons why ecommerce is good for the Indian economy
As ecommerce undoubtedly depends on cutting edge technology, it in turn requires a quality workforce. There is a strong demand for web developers, software coders, analytics experts, content writers, graphic designers and digital marketers among other specialized tech areas. On the business side, there is a massive requirement for product and UI interface designers, marketing, ERP & SCM professionals and customer facing staff. All of this adds up to a humungous demand for over 150,000 professionals in the coming years.

Quote for the day:

"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." -- Malcolm Muggeridge

January 29, 2015

Spring 4 and Java 8
It is important to note that Spring is frequently used with other libraries such as Hibernate for data persistence and Jackson for converting Java objects to / from JSON. While Spring 4 supports the Java 8 date and time libraries, that does not mean that third party frameworks like Hibernate and Jackson are able to support the Java 8 date and time. At the time of publication Hibernate JIRA contains an open ticket HHH-8844 requesting support for Java 8 date and time APIs in Hibernate. . ... Finally, compiling Java 8 code with –parameters option preserves argument names in methods and makes it possible to write more compact Spring MVC method handlers and Spring Data query methods.

Professional Training Trends: A Q&A with Chris Armstrong, Armstrong Process Group
If we move a bit further along the EA value chain to what we call “Decide and Respond,” that’s a really good place for a different class of tools. Even though there are modeling tool vendors that try to do it, we need a second class of tools for EA Lifecycle Management (EALM), which is really getting into the understanding of “architecture-in-motion”. Once architecture content has been described as the current and future state, the real $64,000 question is how do we get there? How do we build a roadmap? How do we distribute the requirements of that roadmap across multiple projects and tie that to the strategic business decisions and critical assets over time? Then there’s how do I operate all of this stuff once I build it?

Five innovations that are key to the future of data centers
If people are the heart of an organization, then the data center could be considered its brain, and maybe even its mouth. Quality storage and handling are key to an organization's success. The technologies and processes that power our data centers have grown at an exponential rate. What was once considered state of the art is now considered a relic, and the IT skills needed to manage these new data centers are changing as well. As we move further in 2015, it's important to take a look at some of the hotly debated trends and technologies and see how they might affect your organization in the future. Here are five innovations that will impact the future of the data center.

Avoid disruption through exploration
Where did these once iconic companies go wrong? To my mind, they forgot to keep challenging their assumptions about what business they were actually in. Businesses have two options when they plan for the road ahead: they can put all their eggs into one basket, and risk losing everything if that basket has a hole in the bottom, or they can make a number of small bets, accepting that some will fail while others succeed. Taking the latter approach, and making many small bets on innovation, transforms the boardroom into a roulette table. Unlike a punter in a casino, however, businesses cannot afford to stop making bets.

Analytics: A Gap in the Market or a Market in the Gap?
There are plenty of old-schoolers, such as myself, who were de facto data scientists as a function of training and experience in the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. However the difference is that our data collection efforts were fairly straight-forward (albeit tedious, labor intensive, and time consuming). The labor market demand now is for persons who have natural investigatory curiosity, the ability to sift through numbers, text, and images, and to be comfortable with a range of analytic tools. While there is a consensus that there is a gap in the data scientist market, the contrasting question is whether there is a market in the gap?

How CIOs Can Win In The Cloud
When I asked O'Neill about why he was an early cloud adopter, he prefaced his answer by observing that the goal was to "build a great product, not spend time on the plumbing." This is a great point, and it's worth asking yourself: Would you rather be an architect or a plumber? For Hubspot, the cloud became an enabler of this goal. O'Neill's approach was to let the business drive software selection, not IT. It became clear during rollout, he said, that "they're going to know the business better than us." Pantheon took the "no server at the office" approach. The company's priority was to take the "path of least resistance" and to outsource its cloud infrastructure services to focus on developing a superior product with a quality user experience.

Out of control AI will not kill us, believes Microsoft Research chief
"You might be told, for example, in using this service you have a one in 10,000 chance of having a query ever looked at... each person only has to worry about as much as they worry about being hit by a bolt of lightning, it's so rare. "So, I believe that machine learning, reasoning and AI more generally will be central in providing great tools for ensuring the privacy of folks at the same time as allowing services to acquire data anonymously or with only low probabilities of risk to any particular person."

GIF all the things: Imgur unveils video-to-GIF converter
The new conversion tool is a remarkably simple way to run videos into GIFs: Users just have to paste a video’s URL into a form field, select a segment of up to 15 seconds, add an optional caption and then let the Imgur servers do their work. As always with Imgur, users don’t have to register, and the result can be freely shared across the web and social networks. That no-frills approach has helped to turn Imgur into one of the most popular image-hosting destinations on the web. Product and growth director Sam Gerstenzang told me that the site now generates more than 5 billion page views from over 150 million unique users a month. Initially, most of that activity came from Reddit, where Imgur quickly became the most popular image-hosting resource after launching six years ago.

6 digital health trends to watch in 2015
The industry grew more in 2014 than it ever has before, and that trend will continue into 2015 as there are more innovations in wearables, digital health clinics, telemedicine, and disease research and prevention. The healthcare industry will see a 21% increase in IT jobs by 2020, according to University of Chicago research. Rock Health, a digital health seed fund, recently released a report that showed there was $4.1 billion in funding for digital health startups in 2014. Major tech companies like Apple and Google announced health initiatives last year. And according to ABI Research, activity trackers outnumbered smartwatches 4 to 1 in 2014.

Sector Roadmap: Hadoop/Data Warehouse Interoperability
This Sector RoadmapTM examines that integration, reviewing SQL-on-Hadoop solutions on offer from the three major Hadoop vendors: Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR; incumbent data warehouse vendor Teradata; relational-database juggernaut Oracle; and Hadoop/data warehouse hybrid vendor Pivotal. With this analysis, key usage scenarios made possible by these solutions are identified, as are the architectural distinctions between them. Vendor solutions are evaluated over six Disruption Vectors: schema flexibility, data engine interoperability, pricing model, enterprise manageability, workload role optimization, and query engine maturity.

Shedding Some Light on Shadow IT Management
Shadow IT has been lurking in the dark corners of organizations for years now, but as BYOD and public cloud computing gain traction in the workplace more and more employees are stealthily adopting their own software and hardware without telling IT. When IT is left in the dark it makes it nearly impossible to mitigate potential risks, and in light of the recent barrage of data breachesexecutives are becoming increasingly concerned about the issue. So what can you do? First and foremost, accept that shadow IT is here to stay. IDC found that the majority of information workers share files via email and other unsecure methods while only a small group, about 10 percent, use a service provided by their company.

Quote for the day:

“It always seems impossible until it's done.” -- Nelson Mandela

January 28, 2015

Big Data: 5 Top Companies and Their Plans for 2015
Expect new product and service announcements from the established big names, as well as a flood of innovative start-ups hitting the headlines over the next 12 months. This is the first part of my run-through of big data companies I expect to hear great things in 2015. I’ve started with the “big data giants” – established names which have made data the foundation of their business model. In another post I will focus on the newcomers and start-ups snapping at their heels.

Cloud ERP: 9 Emerging Options
The good news for CIOs and their teams considering moving some or all ERP functions online: Vendors have been prepping for this shift, and there's already plenty of choice. The conventional ERP heavyweights -- Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP -- are also in on the trend. You may have noticed how much all three, each in their own way, talked up cloud across the board in 2014. Oracle in particular spent a good bit of time discussing -- at the highest executive levels -- its cloud endeavors and future plans, sure signs that the entrenched on-premises approaches to ERP are getting a cloud makeover, even if such shifts will take much more time than, say, getting off that old Exchange server for email.

World's Largest DDoS Attack Reached 400Gbps, says Arbor Networks
Increasingly, the culprit is Network Time Protocol (NTP), an important but otherwise totally ignored way for the Internet to keep its routers and server infrastructure synchronised with UTC. Not long after an infamous attack on Spamhaus in early 2013, which used something called DNS amplification to summon up potentially vast amounts of traffic, someone worked out that other protocols were open to the same trick. NTP turned out to be a good candidate for the same spoofing/amplification treatment, notably during the almost-as-infamous attack on CloudFlare a year ago, the one Arbor mentions as hitting 325Gbps.

Samsung's $100 million Internet of Things Bet
Samsung has thrown its weight behind an effort called Thread, which also has the backing of Nest, processor designer ARM, and a few other industry players. As Parks Associates analyst Tom Kerber explains, Thread works by assigning every device its own IP address, and brings numerous benefits including end-to-end encryption and low power consumption. "If you think about longer-term, it's very likely that a lot of the intelligence is going to be in the end devices rather than in a central controller, so these end devices need to be addressable, and IP is kind of predominant," Kerber says.

7 Corporate blogging blunders to avoid
Yes, blogging has some huge advantages. And yes, I believe that many companies would greatly benefit from an ongoing blogging initiative. But that means taking the time to do it right.
Blogging requires a strong strategy, good optimization and fantastic content. Without those three elements, your blog will fizzle out before it starts to sizzle. It won’t help you boost search positions. It won’t engage your readers. And it won’t help your company make money. That’s never good. Want to keep your blog on the straight and narrow?

Microsoft unveils a great distraction
Can we all please calm down and look at this product glimpse rationally? Sure, HoloLens will find a home in some markets. I can certainly see design verticals such as CAD and CAM embracing the technology. And I’m sure that gamers will love it. Halo in 3D? I’m there! But outside of those niche markets, does this new headlining feature really offer anything to the ordinary home or corporate user? I don’t think so. My word processor and spreadsheet won’t work any better for being in 3D. As a writer, I want people to become immersed in my prose, but I don’t want to rely on a 3D trick to accomplish that.

Crooks Start Encrypting Websites And Demanding Thousands Of Dollars From Businesses
“The next step might well be the modern equivalent of protection rackets – threatening companies with being either taken offline or having their databases frozen unless they pay a regular fee.” Brian Honan, security consultant, said the modus operandi of the RansomWeb hackers was similar to ransomware attacks against a number of SMBs he had worked with, whereby the criminals broke into the server of the victim, overwrote backups with either the encrypted data or blank data, and at a later date returned to encrypt the server. “At this stage the backups are no longer useful as they contain no workable data to restore the systems, thus leaving the victim companies with the choice of either losing all their data and rebuilding it from scratch, or paying the ransom.”

Data scientists: How to hire and how to get the best from them
Hand says the rise of the data scientist is unsurprising, especially as it has been long predicted that the industry would see a massive shortage of people with a high level of analytical skills. He says any individual with data science in their LinkedIn profile can expect to be bombarded with emails from recruiters - yet, Hand says smart organisations also focus on two other sources of data scientists. "The first is to develop a close working relationship with a university, and not just the computer science school as many of the most successful analysts are coming from other schools of science," he says. "The second is to look inside the organisation for core analytical skills and to be prepared to retrain those people in advanced data analytics."

Building Massively-Scalable Distributed Systems using Go and Mesos
Apache Mesos uses an idiom known as a framework to delegate task scheduling to client code running on the cluster. Spark, for example, was originally a Mesos framework written to the Mesos API using the Scala language bindings. The original version of Mesos was built in 2009, before Go was popular. Today, Go is one of the most popular languages and many of the key components that integrate with Mesos are written in Go. For example, Kubernetes-Mesos, the Mesos framework for running Kubernetes workloads on Mesos is written in Go. Also, Go is popular with the many infrastructure tools including and surrounding the Docker container format which is natively supported by Mesos.

eBook: How to Adopt Microservices
Microservices architecture is emerging as the new standard for building applications. This approach to software design breaks complex applications into small, nimble, independent components to speed up time to market, simplify maintenance, and enable continuous integration.Learn in this new ebook how to adopt this new approach and optimize your applications and development processes.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

January 27, 2015

Healthcare’s High-Tech Transformation Includes Bionics, Big Data, and 3D Printing
One of the definitive gamechangers in personal technology was the introduction of the smartphone, which has transformed how, where, and when we interact with technology. And because smartphones are basically tiny computers with an internet connection, putting them to work for our personal health through apps, add-on devices, and cloud storage is now easier than ever before. Whether it’s monitoring your heart rate, counting the number of steps you took today, mapping your walking/biking/running route, or using an app to find the nearest doctor or clinic, more and more people are using the mobility and accessibility of their everyday gadget to improve their health.

Cisco Unveils Analytics Strategy Leveraging Network Intelligence
More specifically, The Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything portfolio includes components for network, location, collaboration, contact centers, and video. It is designed to help organizations apply analytics and extract useful insights from data that was mostly created within the organization’s four walls, and almost always resided in a centralized data store. The IoT space is filled with an industry-wide arms race to release the latest and greatest Internet-connected device. Recently, Intel has unveiled a new platform to make it easier for companies to create internet-connected smart products using its chips.

Hybrid Cloud: You Don’t Have to Go All In
The cloud is still something that small to medium size business owners are grappling to fully understand. It’s hard to define exactly how the cloud can help your business when there are so many different variations of cloud solutions available. Understanding exactly what the cloud looks like for any business isn’t easy, because, quite honestly, the cloud looks completely different for every business. As executives try to dissect the different services available and choose options that work for their needs, it’s important to understand – you don’t have to go all in.

Gamification for Business – Recruitment, Management and Promotion
In the gaming context, workers will know that their accomplishments will be justly recognized through various tangible game props and this awareness proves to be a great incentive for action. The clarity of the process helps a lot as well – set goals are clear to everyone and tracking the progress is easier than ever. This is especially relevant to the generation of Millenials that have been brought up playing interactive games and are eager to extrapolate the logic of games onto other areas of life. The regained focus on the aims defined in the game also considerably motivates employees to reach them faster. Since the primary goal of gamification is to recognize one's competence, talented workers will be even more determined to complete the project.

With Multi-Vector Attacks, Quality Threat Intelligence Matters
Multi-vector attacks take advantage of these common vulnerabilities: combining elements like social engineering and ‘spear phishing’ e-mail messages with malicious attachments that contains code that exploits known or unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities on the target system. While these attacks might rely on commodity malware, they are often tailored to bypass most antivirus engines. As an example, Cisco recently analyzed a multi-vector attack that we’ve labeled the “String of Paerls” (sp) attack that serves as a useful example for the kinds of techniques typical of multi-vector cyber attacks.

SmartDataCenter APIs – turning up the Heat
Following a service oriented architecture, SDC divides the responsibilities for various resources in compact, easy-to-understand API-components. Most of the APIs have a somewhat speaking name. In the table below you find an overview of the core APIs, what they cover and the equivalent project in OpenStack. ... The DataCenter object manages the discovery of the required APIs using the service API (sapi), handles the HTTP requests and provides list_*, get_* and create_*functions. Returned machines (both SmartMachines and KVM) provide functions to control their lifecycle:

Speak Like a Data Center Geek: Networks
It’s literally true that we can’t get enough of networks at Equinix. We were founded as a neutral place where network service providers could come together and exchange data traffic, and today we host more than 1,000 networks, with room for more. That all makes networks a solid choice to headline the 10th installment of our “How to Speak Like a Data Center Geek” series, which aims to bring clarity to the sometimes opaque terms we data center types toss around.

Extending the Reach of Mobile and Cloud in the Enterprise
Another enhancement is closer integration with MDM/MAM (Mobile Device Manager/Mobile Application Manager) like MobileIron. In an earlier post I talked about the work that has already been done with HCPA to add mobility management features on top of our enterprise cloud content management platform HCP. HCPA already brings elements of mobile device (MDM) and mobile information management (MIM) and alluded to the fact that HCPA does not really control which apps can use data but does allow users to better manage which users or 3rd parties can access files and participate in shared folders.

6 DNS services protect against malware and other unwanted content
There are actually two main types of DNS servers: recursive and authoritative. The ones that are used by most individuals and small companies (and that are covered here) are called recursive DNS and are the default services provided by most Internet Service Providers (ISPs). All the companies listed here offer recursive DNS services. Some of them, however, also sell authoritative DNS services, which allow website owners or hosts to define the Web server IP addresses that their domain names point to and to manage other DNS settings. Since DNS servers are the middlemen between your browser and website content, there are many third-party DNS services that offer additional functionality for both users and network administrators.

The Agile Value Delivery Process, Where ‘Done’ Means Real Value Delivered; Not Code
Current agile practices are far too narrowly focused on delivering code to users and customers. There is no systems-wide view of other stakeholders, of databases, and anything else except the code. Agile, today, has no clear management of thequalities of the system, such as security, usability and maintainability: there is a narrow ‘bug’ focus, as the only ‘quality’. ... So, your technical and organizational architecture must permit low-cost changes of new and better, unforeseen architecture. This means new suppliers, partners, and technical components. You will, face it, have to deal with this problem in the long term, hint: ‘technical debt’, so you might as well make sure you can change things easily in the short term.

Quote for the day:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” -- Mahatma Gandhi