Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 13, 2015

Pivotal CEO says open source Hadoop tech is coming
Multiple external sources have told Gigaom that Pivotal does indeed plan to open source its Hadoop technology, and that it will work with former rival (but,more recently, partner) Hortonworks to maintain and develop it. IBM was also mentioned as a partner. Members of the Hadoop team were let go around November when active development stopped, the sources said, and some senior big data personnel — including Senior Vice President of R&D Hugh Williams and Chief Scientist Milind Bhandarkar — departed the company in December, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Both of them claim to be working on new startup projects.

Keeping The Cloud Up--The Great Amazon Microsoft Cloud Reliability Showdown
In assessing what the results mean for organizations using AWS, CloduEndure was quick to point out that planning the location of infrastructure based on the historical number of errors and performance issues is probably not the best approach. While cloud provider issues are undeniably important, as I’ve said many times before, it is important to remember that the top reason for application downtime remains human error. The best way to resolve many issues is to be as redundant as possible – geographically and from a vendor perspective.

Obama to sign executive order on cybersecurity info-sharing
"The federal government cannot, nor would Americans want it to, provide cybersecurity for every private network. Therefore, the private sector plays a crucial role in our overall national network defense," the White House said. "The framework recognizes that no organization can or will spend unlimited amounts on cybersecurity. Instead, it enables a business to make decisions about how to prioritize and optimize its cybersecurity investments." Along with tech giants Apple and Intel, plus Bank of America and PG&E, companies committing to the framework include US Bank, AIG, Walgreens, QVC and Kaiser Permanente. Also joining in the effort are the Entertainment Software Association, network software company FireEye and online storage provider Box.

Transforming Customer Experience Culture Through Natural Language Processing
The new WDS Virtual Agent, manages customer care interactions by analysing data and learning from its human colleagues. Silently listening, it detects how human agents diagnose customer problems and offer solutions. In doing this it quickly develops the intelligence it needs to understand and solve customer queries itself, without having to be programmed. “Because many first-generation virtual agents rely on basic keyword searches, they aren’t able to understand the context of a customer’s question like a human agent can,” explains WDS’ Nick Gyles, Chief Technology Officer. “The WDS Virtual Agent has the confidence to solve problems itself because it learns just like we do, through experience.

Will increasing cyber attacks spell the end of username and password security?
Bruce Schneier, a leading voice on cybersecurity ... said cybersecurity-focused regulators and the constituencies they serve, might be better off focusing on outcomes instead of mandating specific security requirements. “Let the companies figure out how to do it. Good regulation regulates the results, not the process,” Schneier told the Guardian. “It always surprises me that people who understand there’s never a one-size-fits-all solution in other aspects of their lives, when it gets to IT, they start demanding – where’s the answer? Well, where’s the answer to burglary? To murder? There’s just a whole lot of things you do. And even then, the murder rate is never going to be zero.”

Anatomy of the Target data breach: Missed opportunities and lessons learned
Poulin suggests several attack scenarios, "It's possible that attackers abused a vulnerability in the web application, such as SQL injection, XSS, or possibly a 0-day, to gain a point of presence, escalate privileges, then attack internal systems." Not knowing the details, makes it difficult to offer a remediation for this portion of the attack. However, Poulin opines that IPS/IDS systems, if in place, would have sensed the inappropriate attack traffic, notifying Target staff of the unusual behavior. According to this Bloomberg Business article, a malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye was in place and sent an alarm, but the warning went unheeded.

Determining whether penetration testing is effective
Attackers are side-stepping perimeter defenses by getting company employees to initiate an external connection. The two most popular methods are using a phishing email or duping employees to visit a malicious website. According to Marrison, internally establishing a connection outside the company's network perimeter allows the APT attacker a way in. Cisco's 2014 Annual Security Report affirms Marrison's claim. It states, "Most organizations, large and small, have already been compromised and don't even know it: 100 percent of business networks analyzed by Cisco have traffic going to websites that host malware."

Facebook Finally Realizes Its Members Die
Not only do you need to know who to leave your house to, but who is going to run your Facebook account. If you set this up with Facebook, your selected buddy to the end will get to memorialize you with tribute status updates, post new pictures in tribute, and even accept new friend requests from people who didn't like you enough when you were alive to friend you, but somehow decided it was OK when you were dead. Truthfully, I'm guessing most people were already doing this on their own by using the credentials of their loved ones to maintain pages. This will allow you to select someone to be the caretaker (undertaker?) of your page, but the person won't get to see your private messages from when you were alive.

Simplifying F# Type Provider Development
Type providers are one of the most interesting and empowering features of the F# 3.0 release. Properly written type providers make data access virtually frictionless in F# applications as they eliminate the need for manually developing and maintaining the types which correspond to the underlying data structures. This aspect is particularly important for data exploration tasks where many competing data access technologies require a fair amount of configuration before they're useful. For all their strengths, type providers tend to be a bit of a black box; once referenced, they usually just work. Not being the type of developer that settles for magical incantations, I recently spent some time delving into their depths.

Getting Data Governance and Legal to Work Together
Legal is, or should be, the source of regulations about data privacy and protection in the jurisdictions within which the enterprise stores, manages, or accesses data. However, legal typically cannot translate these rules into operationalized practices that ensure the enterprise is truly in compliance with the law. Data governance can bridge that gap. It can provide an understanding of the situation in the environments that manage data, and help to identify potential gaps with respect to laws and regulations. Jointly, with legal, data governance can help to determine what solutions have to be put in place to deal with these gaps. These solutions will often be changes to business practices rather than changes to the underlying systems.

Quote for the day:

"Your greatest area of leadership often comes out of your greatest area of pain and weakness. -- Wayde Goodall

February 12, 2015

Building Microservices with Spring Boot
A distributed system decomposes the components of a monolith into individual units of deployment, which are able to evolve their own scaling requirements irrespective of the other subsystems. This means that the resource footprint for the overall system can be more efficiently managed, and the interconnection between components can share a less-rigid contract, since the interdependency is no longer managed through the runtime environment. In traditional SOA, the service boundary may encapsulate a breadth of functionality for a business function, centralized around potentially many data domains. A microservice architecture marries the concept of system distribution with the promise of managing only a single business function and data domain, which means that logically getting a handle on the capabilities of a subsystem is fairly easy to do.

Can Twitter Fix Its Harassment Problem without Losing Its Soul?
“There’s a bigger threat to not taking on this problem than taking on this problem, simply because public sympathy is going to go more in the direction of the abused than the abusers,” Shirky says.+ But while the time seems right for Twitter to act, it is far from clear how best to discourage such behavior. It does have methods in place to help deal with abuse, such as the ability to block and report a user who’s bothering you. Yet while that may help if you’re dealing with one or even a few bothersome tweeters, it cannot stop a deluge of nasty posts, and a determined harasser can always just make a new user profile and start the harassment anew.

Networks: The New Model for Business
These business networks are unlocking the ability for companies to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to customers, suppliers, and other partners. Therefore, they're better able to engage with the participants across these networks in new and innovative ways. We'll look at the historical record for how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms. We'll see how today's consumer business models -- exemplified by Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb -- are extending to business-to-business (B2B) commerce, allowing buyers and sellers to find and know each other openly and accelerate B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

7 Digital Business Transformation Lessons
With the roles of the CIO, COO, CMO and CDO mixing and mingling, exactly who is leading the digital transformation revolution? Sutcliff says that ultimately it's a C-suite agenda where they come together and all work together. "Because businesses can now buy things as a service and buy things that enable them, digital is being seen not just as a technical issue but as an enabler to the whole business that encompasses operations at every level of the organization," says Sutcliff. Sutcliff has huge respect for the role of the CIO and says they are continuing to lead digital transformation initiatives.

How Big Data Pieces, Technology, and Animals fit together
Oozie is a workflow scheduler. The oversimplified description would be that it's something that puts together a pipeline of the tools described above. For example, you can write an Oozie script that will scrape your production HBase data to a Hive warehouse nightly, then a Mahout script will train with this data. At the same time, you might use pig to pull in the test set into another file and when Mahout is done creating a model you can pass the testing data through the model and get results. You specify the dependency graph of these tasks through Oozie (I may be messing up terminology since I've never used Oozie but have used the Facebook equivalent).

Rethinking The Four Faces of Competitive Intelligence
For many of us who are involved with competitive intelligence for a living, our thinking has evolved beyond this traditional matrix. Lessons learned along the way—combined with new technological capabilities in Big Data—have persuaded us that the above traditional approach doesn’t accurately represent the optimal four faces of Competitive Intelligence. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult (and expensive) to contract for exact metrics at a deep detail level. ... CI is a mix of empirical learning and intuitive leaps, but it can be systematic. Our four faces of CI relate to where data resources are found and how they are collected and stored. This alternate focus reframes the questions and practices that are most logical to pursue.

EU privacy ruling should apply globally, says digital chief
The decision in question was made last year by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s highest court, in a case involving a Spanish man who wanted to remove from Google’s results an old news article about his long-ago debt problems. The CJEU’s decision set a new precedent by saying EU data protection law, which allows people to request the erasure of out-of-date information about themselves in limited circumstances, applied to search engines. The question of how far its implementation should extend touches on a fundamental conundrum about the internet — countries need to be able to apply their laws online as they do offline, but the onlne layer’s lack of inherent borders makes that difficult to do effectively.

How I Landed My CIO Dream Job
Yes. I learned all that I possibly could about the company. I started by actually reading the annual report and was surprised by how helpful that was. I found people who worked there, I reached out to them and invited them to have lunch – people I did not know at all. In retrospect, that was a good move - very eye opening about the culture at the firm and how people did their work.I also contacted the former CEO of my last employer and met him for lunch, which was another really good move. He is a smart executive with a lot of experience in manufacturing, so I asked him what he thought about this company and their market space, the job opportunity, and how to interview for it. He gave me some invaluable perspective and advice.

U.S. Department of Defense sets its cloud security guidelines
this long-awaited guide has provided some clarification around DOD’s expectations from Integrators, CSPs, and DOD mission owners. The DOD has clearly laid out for Integrators and CSPs the expectations for inclusion into the DISA Cloud Service Catalog. It will be interesting to see how and if the definition of a prime CSP evolves and how the industry and government alike adapt to that distinction. My initial reaction to the SRG is that it limits the playing field of prime CSPs that are able to comply with these requirements today. For small integrators trying to migrate applications to the cloud on behalf of the federal government, it makes the proposition riskier.

Platforms, not products, are the way to bring financial services to the poor
In the West, where advanced credit rating systems already crawl every financial transaction, this would seem a needless intrusion. But Lenddo operates in countries where only a small proportion of the population spends money in ways that are visible to credit ratings agencies, says Arjuna Costa of the Omidyar Network, a venture capital firm focused on social enterprise and which funds Lenddo. For the rest, their social media activity, combined with other sources signals such as financial performance over time, can make for a pretty good proxy. ... Lenddo targets the so-called “emerging class”—people who work at call centers in Asia, for instance. These are people who live well above the poverty line, but who nonetheless have precarious financial lives.

Quote for the day:

“Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” -- St. Francis of Assisi

February 11, 2015

The Future of Value Generation - Value Propositions Where People and Planet Matter
In executing any profound transformational strategies or implementing change programmes, before we can introduce new business models we require a systems view of the organisation. However, this systems view can not be mechanistic or Cartesian, since any attempt to introduce the new business model (and value proposition) will still be articulated and understood using the old logic, and therefore are likely to fail. ... What Value Proposition Design has done is to provide a new level of granularity, allowing people to now zoom in and out of their conceptualisations of value, in a way in which is now truly powerful and beneficial.

Data Center Building vs. Outsourcing: What’s Best For Your Business
For companies in need of a large deployment of cabinets, with the resources easily available and, according to Schneider Electric, a data center life expectancy of more than five years, it may make sense in the long term to build an in-house data center. For smaller to midsize companies and startups, the evidence points toward outsourcing data center needs. The bottom line is that no matter the size of a company, it is no longer viable to ignore the importance of having a reliable data center. So whether it is a large company with extensive financial resources or a smaller company, let the numbers and evidence guide the decision to determine whether to build or lease a data center.

Learn to Crunch Big Data with R
After exploring many options, I chose to implement this piece in R, taking advantage of the wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques implemented in the R system. One of the attractions for me was the R scripting language, which makes it easy to save and rerun analyses on updated data sets; another attraction was the ability to integrate R and C++. A key benefit for this project was the fact that R, unlike Excel and other GUI analysis programs, is completely auditable.

Want To Go Digital? Fix IT Fundamentals First
Quick wins, and bringing mission, purpose, and accountability to IT are two important fundamentals. But another fundamental to good IT is making business units accountable as well. They, too, are sometimes part of the technology problem. Caudill's first business accountability mechanism was to implement activity based costing, where every IT request has a price, and is either reported or even charged back to business units. This practice makes sure that service users understand the financial, not just operational, impacts of their decisions. He said this practice was a significant component of his digital IT transformation.

Do Enterprises Really Need a BYOD Policy?
The most challenging adjustment for CIOs adapting to the BYOD trend is the need for better systems to authenticate network users, essentially all who access corporate systems with their own personal mobile devices. The IT infrastructure to support BYOD has developed, but there are a few kinks to iron out in terms of policies and guidelines. According to Khilnani of BlackBerry, “Organisations deploying BYOD policies are exploring new grounds in the consumerisation of IT. They look to improve the productivity of the staff and also believe that costs will reduce drastically as employees will require less technical training if they use the same machines at home and at work.”

The problem with cloud service providers and security SLAs
In recent discussions with several professional service providers including ViON (a Washington-based systems integrator), BRUNS-PAK (a data center deployment firm), Google (the search engine/cloud services provider), as well as conversations with former employees of professional services firms, I have developed some interesting new insights – particularly with respect to cloud security. I’m finding that these firms and individuals possess a wealth of information on industry trends – as well as deep insights into why information technology (IT) buyers are making certain decisions while discarding other ideas.

How infosec hiring lost its way: Harsh findings in Leviathan report
The report -- real name "Analysis of Cloud vs. Local Storage: Capabilities, Opportunities, Challenges" -- concisely explains the solutions coming from the establishment classes: Basically, it's either poach talent from other countries, or make everyone go to college, get degrees, and hire them in five years after they have experience. "The first category of solutions," Leviathan diagrams, "to a country that has a shortage in qualified security workers involve finding expert security workers in other countries, and bringing them (on either a temporary, as-needed, basis, or on a permanent one) to the country with the shortage."

The Redefined No of the CFO
You are no longer seen primarily as a wielder of the sharp pencil, someone who holds the line on expenses to protect a tight bottom line. Instead, you are the voice of focused investment, asking the right questions and providing the right insights so that everyone understands when to say no and how to say yes. You help the company turn down many activities so that the few most important can thrive. The deciding factor is strategic value. Economies of scale and market clout are no longer the formidable barriers to entry they once were. The allocation of resources must now favor a company’s most distinctive capabilities—those differentiating things it does particularly well that enable it to outperform competitors over time.

Understanding the Business Benefits of Colocation
A colocation solution provides companies with a variety of opportunities, with exceptional SLAs and having data secured off-site, providing organizations with added levels of risk management and the chance to invest in better equipment and state-of-the-art servers. This can enable IT teams the possibility to explore options such as virtualization and condense the amount of racks and servers required. Colocation providers are able to meet business requirements at a lower cost than if the service was kept in-house. Data centers and colocation providers have the ability to have businesses up and running within hours, as well as provide the flexibility to grow alongside your organization.

HP predicts major cyber attack in next five years
HP also predicts enormous challenges around creating a robust single digital online identity and managing the security of information shared online through social media, in the cloud and through devices connected to the internet of things. “All these things are all about sharing data, not about security. Securing all the data shared in this way is a huge challenge in the absence of any standards to enable us to take control,” said Kawalec. Another significant challenge in the next five years, he said, will be ensuring that regulatory and privacy concerns are addressed without limiting cross-border trade or exposing industry to financial risk.

Quote for the day:

"All that we are is the result of all that we have thought." -- Buddha

February 10, 2015

A glimpse into the future of money
Mobile may offer ways to improve customer service at the front end, but banks are also overhauling their back-end systems too. "The most visible results of banking's digital revolution are mobile apps and systems for managing customer relationships over social networks, as well as new ways of providing a digital signature [such as Touch ID]. But there still needs to be a major effort before we'll see the most transformative part of the revolution, which has to allow banks to become what new digital customers expect us to be," Banc de Sabadell's CTO Carlos Abarca says.

Why Cisco is Warming to Non-ACI Data Center SDN
“This is an interesting move by Cisco in that [the open protocol-based overlay technology] is a difference from their ACI stack,” Mike Marcellin, senior vice president of strategy and marketing at Cisco rival Juniper Networks, said. “Cisco is acknowledging that ACI is not for everybody, and [that] they need to think a little more broadly.” ... EVPN is a protocol generally used to connect multiple data centers over Wide Area Networks. It enables a service provider to create multiple virtual connections between sites for a number of customers over a single physical network while keeping each customer’s traffic private.

BIG Data, Medical Imaging and Machine Intelligence
More and more users, and more and more machines generate more unstructured data on a daily basis. Capturing the essence of such massive flow of data is beyond traditional computation facilities and their classical methodologies. Large data centres and intelligent algorithms, embedded within capable and flexible distributed computing environments such as Hadoop, are necessary to make sense of big data. One of the major fields “suffering” from big data, which has been widely neglected so far, is medical imaging. More than approximately two trillion medical images are captured worldwide each year. A large number of these images have to be stored for several years. There is a huge amount of information contained in these images and their annotations.

Xamarin's Jonathan Pryor on Android 5 Lollipop
Lollipop seems to incorporate a lot of features first developed by Motorola such as "Tap and Go" which came from Motorola Connect, "Ambient Display" which came from Motorola's most popular feature on the Moto X, "Active Display" and another cool security feature Motorola provided for their devices is now present, providing for "trusted" device connections. This allows you to associate your phone with another "trusted" device either through Bluetooth or NFC, so that you can unlock your device and actually set it to "not lock" when around this "trusted" device.

The Type of Data Scientists We Need
Data Scientists can get an understanding of the business need and then work to understand the data with the proper algorithms, and tools to provide what is needed by the business user to get value from Big Data. So a Data Scientist needs not only to have a strong analytical, statistical mathematical background, but they also need to have and gain specific industry understanding and expertise. They need not only to understand the mechanics, they need to work with industry experts and understand what the users do and need in order to deliver it. Building that industry relationship and expertise is key.

There’s No Such Thing as Anonymous Data
In a paper published in Science last week, MIT scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye shows that anonymous credit card data can be reverse engineered to identify individuals’ transactions, a finding which calls into question many of the policies developed to protect consumers and forces data scientists to reconsider the policies and ethics that guide how they use large datasets. ... To be clear: Reidentification means that the researchers could identify all the transactions that belong to an individual, but de Montjoye didn’t attempt to say which individual. For example, if he wanted to know my transactions, he’d need to take additional steps to cross reference something he knew about me to his data. If, for example,

Containers Get Ready To Run Critical Production Apps
Docker containers are a natural formatting and organizing agent for some existing applications and many future ones. The more we decompose enterprise applications into smaller and smaller pieces, or micro-services, the more useful they become. Think of each service in a big, monolithic application separated and running in its own container. Before such an approach takes hold, IT has many management issues to work out. How will one service be linked to another? How will they be monitored and tracked after launch? Who's driving the use of containers? Right now, it is primarily developers and testing teams, which both like the fast and lightweight code deployments that containers allow.

How attackers' sights have switched to the tech-savvy
Along with data scientists - and security researchers themselves - systems admins are increasingly a target because of the way their privileged access combines with a need to try out new tools. "Systems administrators, who often experiment with new types of software, are partially predictable. You can guess what sorts of media they consume and the websites they go to and the types of software they download. Targeting them is something you're going to see a lot more of," Palmer said. As well as specifically targeting such individuals, attackers are also employing malvertising, where legitimate online advertising networks and webpages are poisoned with malware-bearing adverts.

Unlikely partners? The CCO and the CTO
The IT head should be a cybersecurity-minded CCO’s best friend. Don’t know them yet? Remedy that today. You should be in constant conversation with your IT head, so that you can continually refine your organization’s cybersecurity mechanisms and communicate regularly with your employees around critical risks. You might collaboratively develop password management policies, choose firewall and encryption settings, and review vulnerability scans. You might also leverage the IT head’s technical knowledge to learn about the types of cyber events that threaten your organization. The 2014 iteration of Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations

Protect yourself from hackers and the NSA
One unfortunate fact makes email and other messaging apps especially vulnerable to snoops -- you can't control it because it also resides elsewhere. People focus on Sony employees whose emails were compromised. But what about the people outside Sony they corresponded with? Their communication with Sony employees got compromised, too. The truth is that even if you have an aggressive purge policy that calls for deleting email after a certain amount of time, there will probably still be copies of the deleted messages with people outside the company.

Quote for the day:

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage

February 09, 2015

Banking industry is finally ripe for digital disruption
We are seeing the emergence of new, challenger banks based on digital technology, which do not suffer from the complex, legacy IT that the incumbents depend on. Also, banks find some of their services being cherry-picked by the new tech giants - payment services such as Apple Pay, for example, not to mention Paypal. Research suggests more of us will use smartphones to pay for things than credit or debit cards by 2020. Some banks are responding, of course. Barclays is pushing hard on new mobile services, and even providing training in branches for children to learn coding. Santander is going further, and taking on the cloud suppliers at their own game, offering cloud storage to corporate clients.

What Are Legacy IT Systems Costing You?
“Old systems and these legacy systems can slow down government, and it takes a lot of time and money to keep them updated,” Hudgins told KING 5. Rough estimates show that replacing all legacy systems could cost between $568 million and $2.8 billion, according to a November 2014 report to the state Legislature. Modernizing the state’s 343 mission-critical legacy IT systems alone is projected to cost $485 million to $2.4 billion. The state’s classification of legacy systems is about more than age or the programming language used to write software code. Washington state’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) also considers whether a system can be easily updated, if there are adequate staff to support the system and whether the system poses security risks or made businesses processes more complex.

The Future of Commodity Systems in the Data Center
We’re at a very interesting point in time during the cloud infrastructure era. The modern data center continues to evolve from physical to virtual, numerous management stacks being abstracted into the logical, or virtual, layer. Is another data center evolution around the corner? Will new kinds of compute platforms allow for a more open data center model? We’ve already begun to see a shift in the way data centers provide services. A new kind of commodity architecture is making its way into the consumer, cloud provider, and even service provider data center.

Dependencies, Scrum of Scrums, and SAFe
That said, there’s no doubt in my mind that when the program-level people allocate plan components to teams, they’ll inject many more dependencies than are necessary, because they just can’t really know what the teams can do. In addition, many organizations have strange silos of specialization, and these cause dependencies that are often unnecessary. One example of that is the Database Administrator (DBA) function that many organizations have. No changes can be made to the company’s databases unless the DBA people approve. This can take ages, and if your DBAs are anything like the ones I’ve dealt with, some of them are really uncooperative bullies. Others, of course, are a delight to work with.

7 Workforce Management Trends That Will Impact IT in 2015
With 2015 well underway, it's time to start developing your workforce management strategies and plans for the coming year. We asked two experts in workforce management, The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated and Robert Half Technology's Executive Director John Reed to discuss the biggest issues that will impact workforce management in 2015. From the effect minimum wage laws will have on your business to an IT hiring boom, here's what to expect.

Samsung SmartTV eavesdropping flap overblown
Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition. If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands.

Flash in the Data Center: Solid-state Drives For Enterprise Workloads
Flash enables and accelerates key data-center initiatives in database, analytics, cloud computing, and virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI)—all of them workloads requiring high performance and low latency. Today, vendors are addressing IT’s historical concerns about the cost and reliability of flash, but the changing economics of flash-enabled computing are still not widely known. Although individual SSDs still cost more than hard-disk drives (HDDs), the increase in IT efficiency reduces the overall operational cost of deployment and maintenance. In this environment, the decision to implement flash-enabled workloads rests on greater awareness of the impact that flash storage has on workload performance, IT efficiency, and operational costs.

What Is Your Next Big Thing In Technology And Innovation
The million dollar question, I wish I knew the answer to this one. The Internet has revolutionized the world in a way that only a handful of creations and collaborations has. What will be the products, ideas or services that will have an impact on the future and will change our lives? I’ve mentioned a few possibilities in this post. These are all promising, but my pick for what it will be? Decision Engineering, better decisions with the help of Big Data. I invite you to share your bold ideas. Aren’t we all supposed to have flying cars like the Jetsons by now?

Insights into the Testing and Release Processes for Chrome for iOS
Generally, there are a certain number of cases where a manual test is the only way forward, e.g., with specific types of users that have some rate limit, so tests cannot be executed too fast; or special enterprise account types that put restrictions on actions, etc. But manual testing is also used when no test cases have been automated yet for a given feature. This may happen with the introduction of new features, which get approved and enter the development process late. Sometimes, indeed, they get through the whole milestone without any automated tests having been written. Finally, there can also be features for which it is simply deemed not necessary to have automated tests, like the Chrome tab switcher feature.

Chief Innovation Officers: Do They Deliver?
What innovation officers really need, Goldsmith said, is the imprimatur of the governor or mayor to challenge the status quo up and down the bureaucratic ranks–even if it means stepping on some toes. “You need someone in the executive office – the governor or the mayor – to take on entrenched interests: the bureaucracy, the vendors, or labor, and chart a path to a better solution,” Goldsmith said. Tapping someone from outside government often works best. Some states and cities have created “entrepreneurs in residence” programs to attract successful people from the private sector willing to devote their time and creative juices to public service.

Quote for the day:

"Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” -- Peter F. Drucker

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