Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 09, 2015

The Modern JavaScript Developer’s Toolbox
JavaScript has evolved significantly since its birth amidst the early days of the Internet. Today it is a prominent and important feature of interactive web applications. The developer has also evolved significantly since 1995. Today’s modern JavaScript developer employs rich and robust frameworks, tools, and IDEs to work efficiently and productively. Building your first modern JavaScript application is easier than you may think! Just choose an IDE (I recommend Atom for beginners), and then install npm and grunt. If you get stuck along the way, Stack Overflow is an excellent resource. With just a little time spent learning the basics, you’ll be well on your way to releasing your first modern JavaScript app.

CIA plans major reorganization and a focus on digital espionage
The CIA will also create a directorate focused exclusively on exploiting advances in computer technology and communications. The Directorate of Digital Innovation will rank alongside the agency’s operations and analysis branches, and it will be responsible for missions ranging from cyber-espionage to the security of the CIA’s internal e-mail. ... A central aim, he said, is to eliminate “seams” in coverage that lead to confusion over which part of the agency is responsible for tracking a specific issue or threat. After the reorganization, Brennan said, the CIA should be in position to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets.”

Technology across borders: CIOs' tips for international success
"In the US, there's a culture that it's normal to work as hard as you possibly can, including not necessarily taking holidays. In Europe, people really value their downtime and they want to take advantage of the opportunity to shut off from work for a period of time. "It's a strange situation and there's probably a healthy mix somewhere between the two positions. While many Europeans can't understand why US citizens don't take time to re-charge, many Americans can't comprehend how Europeans could possibly go on holiday from work for two weeks at a time." It is a balance that King has struggled to adjust to, since moving to the UK from North America two years ago. "I've had to actively learn how to take a two-week vacation," he says. "But I'm really keen to embrace the European approach and change my perspective."

Wireless Technology Defeats Paralysis
The task is very complex because the electrical patterns that neurons draw by doing something as simple as taking a drink vary each day. “We do not know exactly what causes the change. Something like being hungry may change the pattern. What we do is let the machine learn to interpret the different patterns as the same order,” explains Donoghue. The scientist explains that the process resembles how a TV screen activates its pixels: “If you looked closely at a TV, you would see the flash of one of the small squares that form the image. If you look at it closely, it is meaningless, but seeing the whole picture, it makes sense.

Emerging cyberthreats exploit battle between compliance and security
"Compliance regulations move slowly and can't keep up with the evolution of threats," said Desjardins. "Also, compliance initiatives tend to be focused on confidentiality and integrity, and overlook availability." Dave McCulley, systems engineer for Austin, Texas-based security analytics firm Click Security Inc., said that in addition to a focus on regulatory compliance, a big contributing factor to security lagging behind threats is the mentality of some organizations to implement security that is merely "good enough." "You're all in a race with each other, because attackers will go after the easier targets," said McCulley. "Good enough security is never good enough, because you always need to be better than someone else."

Google is developing a virtual reality version of Android, report says
The OS would be freely distributed, the report said, mirroring the strategy that made Android the most popular OS for smartphones. The report didn't provide any launch plans, and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. With rivals investing heavily in VR, it would make sense for Google to build its own OS. Facebook has referred to VR as the next big platform after mobile, and it bought headset maker Oculus VR last year for US$2 billion. They see VR as the future because it provides an immersive experience for gaming, entertainment, communications, and perhaps other applications not thought of yet. It's still a way from mass adoption, though, and some people report getting nausea from VR systems, or just don't want a big display strapped to their head

Cloud Security Auditing: Challenges and Emerging Approaches
Although both conventional IT security auditing and cloud security auditing share many concerns, a cloud security audit must address unique problems typically not handled in traditional IT security audits. According to our interviews, the most immediate and obvious challenge lies in auditors acquiring sufficient knowledge of cloud computing. Effective cloud security auditors must be familiar with cloud computing terminology and have a working knowledge of a cloud system’s constitution and delivery method. This knowledge ensures auditors pay attention to security factors that might be more important in cloud security auditing processes, including transparency; encryption; colocation; and scale, scope, and complexity

IT Disaster or Data Breach?: 7 Must-Do Steps
Current and pending legislation worldwide demands that companies notify regulators of service outages and data breaches in a timely manner. As the old saying goes, “better safe than sorry.” For example, The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) guidelines require that financial institutions notify them “as soon as possible” and that procedures for these notifications be in place ahead of time. Like MAS, most current legislation contains ambiguous language around timing, and lacks direct penalties or fines. Still, with so many regulations being considered, it’s advisable to stay ahead of the curve in building rapid communication capabilities. Many regulating authorities require notification not only for institutions located in their areas, but also for all entities that control accounts or do business with their citizens and businesses.

Supporting serious software investment
Software is just as worthy of investment, yet has been viewed differently to hardware, with many companies also finding it difficult to fund through a financial package as often many finance providers will also view software as separate and different. There is no reason why this should be so, and there are opportunities to spread the cost of software investment through external financing, yet too often companies will try to cut corners in order to keep software costs down. These approaches are mistaken when alternatives allow software investment decisions to be made for business rather than spurious financial reasons. So what are the potentially harmful software investment avoidance practices that might be dealt with through proper financing?

STOP! Installing Java on a Mac? Don't just click OK.
For years, Oracle has tormented Windows users by bundling adware...using deceptive methods to convince customers to install [it]. ... Oracle has begun bundling the Ask adware...for the Mac...as well, changing homepages. … As with its Windows counterpart, the Java installer selects the option to install the Ask app by default. [It] returns low-quality results...heavily loaded with ads, most of which are not clearly distinguished from organic [results]. … [This] comes on the heels of Lenovo's disastrous scandal with the Superfish adware. ... IAC, the parent corporation that owns Ask.com...pays a commission to Oracle.

Quote for the day:

"I believe it is important for people to create a healthy mental environment in which to accomplish daily tasks." -- Darren L. Johnson

March 08, 2015

Forensic Files: Lessons from Real Cases
Seasoned forensics investigators have historically collected data from a very broad range of devices and sources, from the unsophisticated “electronic organizers” of 15 years ago to the latest smartphones to the newest photo sharing websites. When investigators first encountered such devices, the tools to collect from them often didn’t exist. The first task for investigators might involve developing the software and methods to complete a collection, before moving forward with the collection itself. In recent years, forensics tools have become more robust and they will generally collect from thousands of different types of data stores and devices. Still, investigators must sometimes problem-solve new challenges “on the fly”

Red Hat Launches Application Container OS
Many are betting on container technologies playing a significant role in how organizations deliver and manage applications, so there’s a focus in helping streamline application delivery. The goal for Red Hat here is to create a small host footprint and provide essential functionality for allowing atomic updates and running application containers like Docker. CoreOS and Canonical’s Snappy are two early examples of increasing activity in the container OS space. CoreOS’ Rocket container launched a few months ago and is seeing healthy activity. Canonical is in a similar position to Red Hat. Both are primarily known for Linux distribution and are interested in providing the larger next-gen framework made up of open source goodness.

The Evolution Of The Browser
The browser wars have always been cyclical, moving from periods of monoculture dominated by one or two browsers to periods of comparative competition characterized by multiple, strong, second-tier browsers and a growing list of niche browsers. We’re midway through the latter, as is evident by the release of several new browsers, including Microsoft’s Project Spartan and Vivaldi, helmed by ex-Opera CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. While Spartan and Vivaldi are the most widely written about new browsers, many additional, niche browsers have recently launched or are under development, including Torch (BitTorrent) Epic (privacy), Nitro (speed) and Slim (fast startup) and Lightspeed (minimalist, search-oriented).

On the Case at Mount Sinai, It’s Dr. Data
Dr. Schadt had concluded that medicine was ripe for a data-driven revolution. Chronic diseases, Dr. Schadt explained, are not caused by single genes, but are “complex networked disorders” involving genetics, but also patient characteristics such as weight, age, gender, vital signs, tobacco use, toxic exposure and exercise routines — all of which can be captured as data and modeled. “We are trying to move medicine in the direction of climatology and physics; disciplines that are far more advanced and mature quantitatively,” he said. That message resonated with Mr. Hammerbacher. By 2013 he was spending most of his time in New York rather than on the West Coast, assembling a research team that now numbers 10 people.

JavaScript is Cool…and the Market is Hot
Many developers agree that Flash is dead. Some say it died of natural causes, but most of us know who killed it. JavaScript has replaced Flash and, for at least the next decade, will continue to expand and take charge of an increasing number of digital responsibilities in varying parts of the stack. If we consider what Flash had to offer – which was mostly just in the UI – and multiply it several times to account for other parts of the application, we’ll begin to understand just how much value JavaScript delivers. Does it have an expiration date? Sure, but we certainly don’t know it yet. Another important longevity factor is JavaScript’s constant evolution. New JavaScript libraries and frameworks are being developed all the time.

Public cloud providers’ end game shouldn’t surprise anyone
In the beginning, public cloud was the only choice. If you had an existing environment on-premise, colocated or with another web hosting company, you couldn’t connect it up to the public cloud. You could set up your own site-to-site VPN across the internet, but this had its challenges and limitations. Indeed, this was all part of the cloud provider’s strategy — you had to go all in. Everything should be deployed into the provider’s public cloud and nowhere else. It made sense when cloud providers were mostly focusing on new projects and new applications, but it has proven a big challenge to migrate existing workloads or run systems in parallel.

Enforcement Cut Global Banking Trojans 53 Percent
"If you can shut them down, then all of those will not receive any commands or be manipulated by the attackers," he said. Law enforcement agencies are also focusing on the authors of malware toolkits. "They're breaking the supply chain and making it harder for lower criminals to get their hands on the tools and use them," said Wueest. Not all countries improved at the same rate, he added. In the United States, the decline was about on a par with the global average. But financial Trojan activity did not drop as much in Japan, China, and South Korea. "The attackers moved to different markets because it's starting to get more difficult to get money out of the US or UK-based financial institutions," he said.

Emerging tech spurs data protection pains
"With hybrid cloud data, you have information in multiple locations and you may not be able to install the same data protection solutions in all of these. For mobile data, the devices it's stored on may not regularly see a network. And, for big data, the amount of information can put pressure on backup windows," he explains. However, Venter urges, the solution is not to bury your head in the sand. "Data protection technologies are evolving in parallel with the challenges that are emerging and businesses will find it far easier to protect themselves if they can stay abreast of these developments." EMC believes the other challenge is organisations are engaging several vendors to meet their data protection needs, leading to the risk of suffering unplanned systems downtime.

A general-purpose service engine for unattended processing execution
The PEprocessorEngine is a native .NET Windows service implemented in the executable file PEprocessorEngine.exe. It references directly the PEprocessorLib.DLL class library and is equipped with an XML configuration file (the App.config file, runtime-named PEprocessorEngine.exe.config) that hosts the configuration settings for the engine and the common configuration settings for the various implemented modules (each module has then its own configuration file, containing its specific settings). PEprocessorEngine.exe.config does not contain settings specific for a single PE processor module, only settings for the engine. As stated before, the PEprocessorEngine is equipped with a support SQL Server database, basically used for these purposes:

VMware sued for failure to comply with Linux license
Despite the evidence of the code, the Conservancy stated, "VMware's legal counsel finally informed Conservancy in 2014 that VMware had no intention of ceasing their distribution of proprietary-licensed works derived from Hellwig's and other kernel developers' copyrights, despite the terms of GPLv2." Therefore, the Conservancy felt it had "no recourse but to support Hellwig's court action." Besides the general violation of the license, the group continued, "Conservancy and Hellwig specifically assert that VMware has combined copyrighted Linux code, licensed under GPLv2, with their own proprietary code called "vmkernel" and distributed the entire combined work without providing nor offering complete, corresponding source code for that combined work under terms of the GPLv2."

Quote for the day:

"Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes." -- Peter Drucker

March 07, 2015

Sorry consumers, companies have little incentive to invest in better cybersecurity
Improving information security should fundamentally involve securing information, yet all the current proposals involve greater information sharing with intelligence agencies. Why are the same agencies that have been shown to be active in undermining the information security of private firms such as Indonesia’s Telkomsel or the Dutch Gemalto – and all of their customers (anyone with a cell phone – so all of us) – as a consequence of these actions, being tasked with better securing our information? If we don’t identify and address these contradictions, we run the risk of creating something much worse than the current information security problem.

FREAK flaw: How to protect yourself now
Apple and Google have announced that they will release fixes next week. That's the good news. The bad news is that while Google will release its fix for the Android Browser, you'll still need to wait on your telecomm or device OEM to issue the patch to your smartphone or tablet. That leaves a lot of programs still open to attack for now. So let's get started fixing them. First, if you're using Windows Server 2003 or XP, you're in trouble. XP's no longer being supported without a special contract and Windows Server 2003 support life ends in July. Microsoft may issue a patch for this problem, but I wouldn't count on it. It's well past time to move to a newer version of Windows so get on with it already!

The IoT Path Gets Mapped from Sensor to Decision
If you think that the IoT is a marvelous concept for all things digital, the authors might depress you a bit with their summary of what it has taken to make some progress with an earlier concept, RFID:"A consortium of companies and universities succeeded in developing a suite of standards for RFID devices and data, and the adoption has accelerated as costs have dropped. However, it took 15 years to develop, implement, and scale this one suite of standards, which was called the Electronic Product Code (EPC). Even today the most common use of RFID in retail—apparel and electronics tagging—has less than 10 percent penetration."

Big Data Initiatives in Developing Nations
The world of technology and business demonstrates how big data helps revolutionize the science and art of segmentation, targeting, and positioning to market goods and services. In addition, the decreasing costs of big data storage, open source software such as Apache Hadoop, advanced software such as NoSQL databases, and on-demand access to resources through cloud computing are bringing complex technology to nearly everyone. Factor in the slowly increasing pool of multidisciplinary trained data scientists, and business does seem to be moving enthusiastically toward big data technology. Big data can translate into highly successful outcomes for many organizations, and build in enhanced forecasting and targeting for tremendously efficient production and supply.

What You Need to Know About….Big Data
If you want to know what industries will be taking the value—particularly with Big Data—it’s mostly large companies that have the resources and are generating a lot of data to begin with. Those companies are probably going to be the ones that get the most value out of Big Data. Some start-ups are finding value with Big Data. In particular, those that have a narrow niche, because they found a spot where they can tap into that stream and do something with it. That’s been enabled by fantastic reduction in costs for Cloud processing, which is amazing, and I’m totally enthusiastic about it. But if you’re talking about analytics, I don’t think there’s an industry out there that wouldn’t benefit from better understanding of the data that they currently have.

The Open Group San Diego Panel Explores Synergy Among Major Frameworks in EA
It’s a framework that describes and relates the business, application, and technology layers of an enterprise, and it has extensions for modelling motivation, which includes business strategy, external factors affecting the organization, requirements for putting them altogether and for showing them from different stakeholder perspectives. You can show conflicting stakeholder perspectives, and even politics. I’ve used it to model organizational politics that were preventing a project from going forward. It has a rich set of techniques in its viewpoint mechanism for visualizing and analyzing what’s going on in your enterprise. Those viewpoints are tailored to different stakeholders.

How to Build a Company and a Content Strategy Based on Values
TAGFEE actually was a pseudo semi-formal process for us. I had read Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Built to Last, and both of those books identified companies that have strong core values—that stick to those core values and are values-driven—as being the companies that are outstanding and last a long time and do really amazing things. We went through one of the exercises I think he had on his website, this form you can download and answer questions about things that matter to us and things that don’t matter to us. We gave that to, strangely enough, my wife, Geraldine. And she basically took the results of those exercises, compiled them, and wrote out TAGFEE. She came up with the acronym.

Showing value early and often boosts software testing success at Pomeroy
It was a paradigm shift to take one system and bring us together as one company using one product. There was a lot of struggle through that, and they struggled through testing this, because they had no testing background. I was brought in to bring it to steady state. After we went live, we got to steady state. Now it was like, “Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Let’s do this right. Let’s begin scripting.” Testing is terrible. It’s tedious. No one has the time to do it. No one has the patience to do it. So they either don’t do it or they throw buckshot at it. They do ad-hoc testing, or they just let errors come in and out, and they fix them on the back end, which is client facing.

Big Data Ethics: Rearranging the Puzzlers
Data is important to say the least and for me putting together the elusive jigsaw holds a lot of importance, more so, owing to the technical background I hail from. Big Data solves a lot of contradictory issues for me, almost seamlessly but the lingering security strides might still dampen the spirits, a tad bit. With the stature of my work, security and confidentiality do matter and will Big Data survive these acid tests, happens to be the all important query. If transparency is compromised upon, we need to revisit the data ownership as well besides limiting the interferences on the way. My entrepreneurial framework reeked stagnation before I resorted to the Big Data chunks.

The Future of Information: Revealed
Whenever one pulls out their crystal ball to see what the future may hold for information (in society, business, and our personal lives) it is relatively easy to reference the “usual suspects.” These include more mobile device applications, the “Internet of Things (IoT)” via machine-to-machine sensors, and an electronic wallet (like a highway toll EZPass). But it's time to get ready for so much more. My belief is that a good way to view what the future holds is to examine it from the position of the individual. People will increasingly want personalization. They will want what they choose to want -- and not necessarily what someone thinks they want. That is, they will want to customize their relationship with information to their personal preferences.

Quote for the day:

"Even the most honest human in authority often does not have the power to undo the damages that bad people do" -- Auliq Ice

March 06, 2015

Value Your Customer Data as a Business Asset
Privacy and security are legitimate concerns for everyone who hands over information about themselves. But some businesses don’t share that opinion. Or, if the business understands the value of data, it has yet to do anything about protecting it. Your business may have all kinds of excuses for this. Your CEO may think that data management is too expensive, or that workflows are too ingrained to be changed. You might think your business is too small to be hacked, or too big to be affected by a breach. But no matter how many excuses you have, your customers are getting smarter. They know the value of data, and they want to trust you to understand it too.

Intel CEO Krzanich: What we're doing to succeed on smartphones
When I think about cell phones, I think about two paths to market. One is going to be with our partners, especially some our of key OEM partners like Asus and Lenovo, and then our silicon partners with Rockchip and Spreadtrum. The other path is—you can see us doing it already with the tablet space—where we bring in some of the innovation we originally had for PCs and bring it down the stack. You saw RealSense [depth-sensing camera]. RealSense was originally created for the PC and 2-in-1 devices; we brought it down to tablets. You see us bringing McAfee down from the PC and it has made its way to wearables and cellphones as well. I want to enter this market smartly. It’s not one you can force your way in.

2014 a record year for malware, says security firm
"Security threats will increase in 2015, and both companies and home users must prepare themselves to respond to them," said Panda Security Technical Director Luis Corrons in a statement. "It is not a question of whether their security will be compromised but rather when and how, so in this case prevention is key." Panda is just the latest malware-watcher to document the spike this year in malware. AV-Test, a company that tests the effectiveness of antivirus software, reported last month that malware spiked in 2014 to more than 143 million detections, up 72 percent from last year. And Kaspersky Lab, another provider of home and business security products, saw four times more mobile malware attacks in 2014 than the year before.

Oh my, how governance has changed in the cloud
As a longtime blogger, columnist, and general pundit in the technology space, I spend a lot of my day pointing out both the good aspects of enterprise technology and the technologies that may no longer deserve our support. Such was the case with a blog I wrote for InfoWorld back in 2009 where I described three technologies that cloud computing would kill. I still stand behind that post. ... All these years later, SOA is barely mentioned, but service governance became the single most valuable technology that most enterprises can leverage when moving to the cloud -- whether they knew it or not. The use of governance technology in the cloud has three core patterns.

No. Agile Does Not Scale.
Mainly in the last five years, we have witnessed an ongoing conversation about the “problem” of scaling Agile development. Book after book, conference after conference, and framework after framework are dedicated to addressing this problem. It is understandable, because a mindless adoption of the values and principles as offered in the Agile community’s fundamental document, the Agile Manifesto, inevitably leads anyone to conclude that Agile doesn’t scale. At small scale, Agile is great. At large scale, Agile is stupid.

Financial companies seek cloud strategy for secure relationship
Among the findings are that 61 percent of respondents admitted that a cloud strategy was in the formative stages within their organization, with 39 to 47 percent planning to use a mix of in-house IT, private, and public clouds, and 18 percent planning to use private clouds. None of the respondents had plans to be hosted mostly in a public cloud. Worryingly though the results of the survey also showed that the higher the electronic channel transaction base among a firm's customers, the less tough the policy with only three percent of these types of organizations indicating having a strict cloud policy in place.

Robocops being used as traffic police in Democratic Republic of Congo
The solar-powered aluminium robots are huge, towering over the jammed streets of Kinshasa, as cars and motorcyles jostle for road room, their horns blasting. Each hand on the odd-looking machines - built to withstand the year-round hot climate - is fitted with green and red lights that regulate the flow of traffic in the sprawling city of nine million. The robots are also equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of traffic and send real-time images to the police station. Although the humanoids look more like giant toys than real policemen, motorists have given them a thumbs up. “There are certain drivers who don’t respect the traffic police. But with the robot it will be different. We should respect the robot,” taxi driver Poro Zidane told AFP.

How BI Is So Much More Than Just a Reporting Tool
One of the oldest and most misguided thoughts about business intelligence is that it’s a glorified tool for analytics reporting. How many times have we heard the annoying question, “oh, why don’t you just use Excel for that?” Not to discredit the powerful potential of Excel, but it’s just not even remotely the same. Those of us in the BI industry have made our case and know that there’s so much more to BI than just reporting in a “sexy” way. We've almost made it our part-time job to correct every aspect of this misconception and show the whole value of a well-done BI implementation. This article should begin to help you combat the generalizations where BI has simply been demoted to a “reporting tool.”

Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption
Responding to digital disruption is now a critical weapon that all organizations need to have in their strategic armory. The story of the Financial Times’s response to the digital disruption of the media industry is a salutary example. Caspar de Bono, Managing Director, B2B at the FT, outlines the organization’s response and how it has turned digital disruption to its advantage, with digital subscriptions now constituting nearly two-thirds of the FT’s total paying audience. “Technology helped us establish a direct relationship with customers,” he explains. “This was very disruptive and the FT has significantly benefited from this disruption.” A key response to digital disruption is to constantly innovate business models.

Do you know how to protect your key assets?
There is no universal recipe on how to create this list of key assets and keep it up to date. A good way to start is to use both manual and automatic means to identify what is important in your network. Manual identification will track down information on the network by the value of its content, while automatic identification will expose assets by frequency of duration of use (assuming frequency or duration equate to value). For manual identification, the first question to ask is what information do you value and what information, if stolen, would be valuable to someone outside your organization. As stated above, it’s not just about credit card numbers and customer records, but sales figures, company presentations, and even activity log files. The more thorough the manual review, the better the final list of key assets.

Quote for the day:

"The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader." -- Albert Einstein

March 03, 2015

Why You Need a Strategic IT Roadmap
Unfortunately, they work in a cycle of reaction that manages to short-term needs rather than strategic priorities and many cannot find a way out.Enterprise software is a victim of this cycle. Since it’s complex and pervasive it requires constant feeding by the IT department. Because it’s used to support fundamental business functions users frequently request new functionality. This makes it difficult to adopt the newest, most exciting technologies available because the immediate priorities are always fixing what exists. CIOs themselves recognize this. Steven Norton at the Wall Street Journal summarized the Top 5 priorities for CIOs this year. Two of the five are directly related to strategic vision

The internet of things and big data: Unlocking the power
The IoT and big data are clearly intimately connected: billions of internet-connected 'things' will, by definition, generate massive amounts of data. However, that in itself won't usher in another industrial revolution, transform day-to-day digital living, or deliver a planet-saving early warning system. As EMC and IDC point out in their latest Digital Universe report, organisations need to hone in on high-value, 'target-rich' data that is (1) easy to access; (2) available in real time; (3) has a large footprint (affecting major parts of the organisation or its customer base); and/or (4) can effect meaningful change, given the appropriate analysis and follow-up action.

5 Emerging Themes for 21st Century Business
User experience will continue to be a critical requirement for enterprise software adoption. Consumers today have high expectations from their technologies, as they are accustomed to modern, engaging, personalized and intuitive experiences. Those expectations don’t change at the workplace. Millennials will demand it. Customers will require it. And thanks to the cloud enterprise software providers we will finally be able deliver modern, innovative and elegant user experiences. No longer will long enterprise software upgrades get in the way of investment in user experience. The cloud allows vendors to deliver at the pace of change that we all have grown to expect.

Enterprise Portfolio Management - Getting Started
The enterprise portfolio management process consists of two main phases. First, there is a design phase in which the process is tuned to the specific requirements of the organization. The organization’s goals and stakeholders are investigated, suitable portfolios are defined and valuation criteria are chosen. This phase is repeated regularly so that the EPM process is up to date with the business strategy, addresses actual concerns of the stakeholders and reflects lessons learned. The execution phase is a continuous process in which first the assets or change initiatives are inventoried, then the portfolios are analyzed, decisions are based on this analysis, and these are input to the realization. This is repeated regularly, with a rhythm that depends on the portfolios’ characteristics.

Software robots for process automation: fudge or strategic solution?
The name “robotic software automation” was coined as an illusion to the use of robots in manufacturing to replace humans on the factory line. The idea is more subtle than it might first appear. Robotic software is designed to be used by business users to allow them to build and deploy new processes across systems that were never designed or intended to work together. Suppose you are the manager of a BPO unit or call center operation. You are being asked to do more with less. You are facing targets for head count reduction. Or perhaps your business is growing, and more customer interactions need to be supported yet the business cannot afford to increase front-office capacity. With the right tool, perhaps a software robot could offload repetitive work from humans?

Break Me If You Can: 4 Rugged Tablets Put to the Test
Rugged tablets offer reinforced frames, tough skins, watertight seals, hardened glass, soft corner bumpers and major components that are shock-mounted. In other words, if ordinary consumer tablets can be considered sports (or economy) cars, rugged tablets are tanks. To see what the current state of the art is for rugged tablets, I gathered together three of the newest Windows-based worker-proof slates: the Mobile Demand xTablet Flex 10, the Getac F110 and the Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1. I also tried out Samsung's Galaxy Tab Active, a reinforced Android tablet.

The rise of systems of intelligence: Rethinking your enterprise data strategy
The sheer amount of data being created is staggering. According to IBM, 2.5 exabytes of data was generated every day in 2012. The importance of data is becoming so big, even the US Government has launched an initiative to help access and analyse it. It is no longer sufficient for organisations to have a strategy around legacy data. Instead, they need a plan that considers the evolving enterprise data landscape and transforms their existing systems of records into systems of intelligent information.

Fail fast, but learn quicker: How to take chances without risking tech disasters
IT leaders, therefore, need a more nuanced approach to experimentation. And Cohen says the concept of 'succeeding fast and learning fast' should resonate strongly with CIOs. "Failing fast without learning is absolutely useless," he says. "There's much more to the process than just throwing money at something and thinking you can afford to fail quickly." ... "Ensure you have a deliverable in terms of experience and lessons going forwards," he says. "The prototype might cost your business £50,000, but you won't have spent the £500,000 the full project would have cost, and you'll have learnt some valuable lessons along the way. "

Who ‘owns’ an investigation into a security breach?
The general principle is what the name implies: An effective investigation cannot be fragmented. It has to be unified, with a clear leader, clear lines of responsibility and comprehensive lines of communication. And the chances for fragmentation are high. The SEC found that organizations, “may be responsible for up to 67 different types of investigations and up to 13 different business functions could be engaged in these investigative activities.” Those business functions range from audit to business conduct and ethics, corporate security, compliance, crisis management, environmental health and safety, governance, government affairs, HR, information security, legal, privacy and risk management.

Qualcomm and Intel to Introduce New Biometric Security Technology
Both announcements are expected to be made at the World Mobile Congress, a technology industry event in Barcelona, Spain. While the Intel product will be on the market first, the Qualcomm technology may be the more compelling over the long term, and not just because Qualcomm wants the fingerprint to replace passwords altogether. For one thing, the sensor that does the sonar work operates independently of the computer’s operating system, and its functions can be stored within a phone’s hardware. Those things make it hard to hack. A phone using the sensor can also be set to take more than one fingerprint, while restricting individual access to particular apps. In other words, you can share a phone with your mother, but she can’t get into your Snapchat app.

Quote for the day:

"To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

March 02, 2015

Bitcoin-Inspired Digital Currency to Power Mobile Savings App
The Praekelt Foundation develops a piece of free software called Vumi that powers interactive services that can run over text messages on phones without data plans. Humanitarian organizations including UNICEF, USAID, and the Gates Foundation use Vumi to deliver health and education programs in Africa and elsewhere.+ The new savings feature will be offered as an opt-in feature of existing social networking services built on Vumi and aimed at teenage girls living in poverty, says Gustav Praekelt, the head of the foundation. For most of the girls it will be their first opportunity to have a savings account, he says, something he hopes will lead to better decisions about money.

Microsoft's new Windows 10 Universal App Platform: A 'superset of WinRT'
Developers will be able to target different versions -- either a range or individual -- of the UAP, not the underlying version of Windows, according to Lacey. The UAP "is a versioned collection of versioned contracts," he explained. Universal apps don't mean apps that look and work exactly the same across all device types. Microsoft is building "extension SDKs (software development kits) that will allow developers to build platform/device-specific elements while still building on top of a single binary, according to tweets from the event. The Adaptive User Interface in universal apps will adapt to the device, tweeted freelance tech journalist Tim Anderson (@timanderson).

The Enterprise Effect Of Open Source
Like early adopters, enterprises have discovered the benefits open source provides: Lower cost, flexibility, and ease of use, plus access to a larger group of potential developers, either internally or externally. As security threats increase, proponents view open source as a more viable alternative to commercial options, since open source develops rapidly and often is more proactive than reactive. Indeed, 72 percent of respondents cited the large number of people reviewing open source code as one reason the software was more secure, the Black Duck study discovered.

A Peek Under the Hood of The Connected Car
By looking at connected car functionality and architecture, we can get a better understanding of all IoT platforms. To simplify, there is a fairly consistent set of IoT components—sensors, mobile or device apps, big data stores, data science algorithms, and analytical output with a platform as a service(PaaS) layer underneath. As an example, the connected car dashboard below will be demonstrated this week at Mobile World Congress (see booth info below). Behind this type of dashboard, predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms can incorporate driving behavior and sensor data to improve maintenance and mileage, route us to gas or charging stations, predict destinations, and even get us a better deal on car insurance.

CIOs should focus on value, users and emerging tech
IT leaders have gone from project managers and budget managers to orchestrators of business strategy. In the past, static knowledge of a technology or set of technologies, and the ability to deliver traditional programs and projects, were sufficient skills for an effective IT leader. Today the CIO and every role within IT has to continually to retool and reinvent itself. This sounds like a high order when faced with a huge legacy environment, but it doesn’t have to be an all-in, or all-at-once move. By being connected to company strategy the CIO can decide where to innovate first – achieving that user victory I mentioned earlier will attract more attention and investment.

You can’t program intelligent robots, but you can train them
Advances in deep learning — the artificial intelligence technique du jour for machine-perception tasks such as computer vision, speech recognition and language understanding — also stand to expedite the training of robots. Deep learning algorithms trained on publicly available images, video and other media content can help robots recognize the objects they’re seeing or the words they’re hearing; Saxena said RoboBrain uses deep learning to train robots on proper techniques for moving and grasping objects. However, there’s a different school of thought that says robots needn’t necessarily be as smart as RoboBrain wants to make them, so long as they can at least be trained to know right from wrong.

IT Governance and Business Process Outsourcing
Cloud architectures, exponential growth of Mobile communication, social networking, Collaboration… technology innovations abound, and with them the ever important need for IT governance. In fact the subject of Governance (and Management) of Enterprise IT in the BPO space, is a relatively new and challenging domain. One must remember that in parallel to BPO and technological advancements, the demands on Corporate Governance and therefore IT Governance so too have increased dramatically. If anything, BPO has introduced, and arguably forced, an extended dimension to the realm of IT Governance.

Negotiating the Cultural Minefield
Though no two individuals have exactly the same cultural DNA, there are only two negotiation cultures that matter. In a given negotiation, all parties choose to either follow a win-win or a win-lose negotiation strategy. As we move forward in a negotiation with our counterparties, the main thing we need to figure out is which of the two they’ve chosen to adopt. Here, too, culture can act as a smokescreen. An example: You may have heard, or been warned, about the unusually strong handshakes employed by some in my home country of Brazil. Some say this vigorous greeting is about projecting a macho, intimidating image. Others put a quite different spin on it,

Exploiting big data could save the European Commission up to €200bn a year
“The EC wants to encourage the development of a big data ecosystem or community acting together in which bigger players create opportunities for smaller players,” said Nagy-Rothengass. Although Europe is lagging behind the US in innovating around personal data, the EC wants to ensure all European development is conducted in a secure environment. “All guidelines and regulations such as the proposed network information security (NIS) directive and open data directive are designed to ensure the European values such as privacy are preserved,” she said.

In combating cyberattacks, don't succumb to the 'squirrel effect'
this approach -- dubbed the "squirrel effect" in a session at a recent closed CIO conference in San Francisco put on by Global Business Events -- can make companies more vulnerable to attack and actually weaken their ability to recover quickly from a security breach. Chasing the latest security concern -- whether it's point-of-sale security weaknesses that hackers used to install malware, in the case of Target, or an insufficiently protected database that hackers breached to steal millions of customer's health insurance records, in the case of Anthem -- distracts companies from what they should be doing, according to the session's experts, who oversee security for a large Los Angeles-based entertainment company.

Quote for the day:

"Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter." -- Jaachynma N.E. Agu

March 01, 2015

HTC's Grip fitness tracker is a promising, puzzling first step
On the plus side, the waterproof material making up the Grip's body is surprisingly comfortable, though I've got to wonder just how nice it'll feel when it's pressed up against my skin mid-marathon. Speaking of working in motion, the Grip also seemed to accurately monitor my steps, which was honestly about all I could do with it. Too many of the Grip's best features just aren't ready for testing yet, but one thing seems clear: The Grip has potential. Whether or not the finished product lives up to it is another question entirely, and one we hope to answer soon.

The Impact of the Technological Revolution
This video summarizes the first chapter of the book Reinventing the Company in the Digital Age, “The Impact of the Technological Revolution”, where authors Philip Evans, Kenneth Cukier, Geoffrey Moore and Haim Mendelson analyze the effects of technological changes in the business world. The increasing speed of technological change is transforming all sectors. Big data plays a fundamental role. Big data will change society and government. In this new scenario obsolete companies need new business models that interact with clients.

The 13 building blocks of Information Governance
The exercise is best conducted with at least 3 or 4 seasoned executives, depending on the scope of the IG program. Best results are achieved if they’re all jointly in one room (though it can be done individually). Both Business and IT must be represented if the outcomes are to be meaningful and find support from other executives later on. You can either run an As-Is assessment by itself or, additionally, collect the organization’s medium- to long-term IG maturity ambition (To-Be). The Capgemini IGMM automatically maps this out in a neat spider diagram and produces a maturity score, rounded to one decimal point, e.g. 2.7.

Information Governance, Records Principles and Risk Management
From the top down, those responsible for directing and leading information governance in the organization need to make an assessment of the risk of doing nothing, informed by the state of their existing practices and – importantly – the volatility of their information environment (think file shares, e-mail and SharePoint!). They need to recognize that in many cases their digital records are being held in fundamentally unstable environments and, as a result, are in a state of decay. This means that concerns about the challenges of getting their electronic content in order are usually far outweighed by the fact that the content – from a records point of view – is already broken.

Big data, privacy and cyber security breaches – why information governance is critical
While the proliferation of data has been caused by technology, it is also technology that is providing rapidly evolving tools to manage the exponentially increasing data. However, technology is only part of the solution, as IG strategy, policies, processes, people and technology all need to be aligned, to deliver on the objective of maximising the value of the information and minimising risks and costs. There is a rapidly growing market for technology solutions in the IG sphere for the wide spectrum of information management needs. And there are many technology options for managing ICT security, eDiscovery, RIM and compliance, etc.

IT Strategy: Boardrooms must adapt to new technologies or risk monolithic failure
The worst boards I ever served on were diametrically polarised. One had accountants and lawyers and no knowledge of the technology or market, while the other was weighed down by techies who knew nothing about accounting, the law, marketing or sales. In the first case, they stood no chance of appreciating the technology, product or market; in the second, the time to learn the basics of business was protracted. For one of these companies, this turned out to be fatal, and it was extremely damaging for the other. The magic formula for success involves a diverse and adaptable board and management team willing to learn and take measured risks.

Resilience, Metrics, Sustainment, and Software Assurance
As part of an ongoing effort to keep you informed about our latest work, I would like to let you know about some recently published SEI technical reports and notes. These reports highlight the latest work of SEI technologists in resilience, metrics, sustainment, andsoftware assurance. This post includes a listing of each report, author(s), and links where the published reports can be accessed on the SEI website.

Don't Waste Time Tracking Technical Debt
Tracking technical debt sounds like the responsible thing to do. If you don’t track it, you can’t understand the scope of it. But whatever you record in your backlog will never be an accurate or complete record of how much debt you actually have – because of the hidden debt that you’ve taken on unintentionally, the debt that you don’t understand or haven’t found yet. More importantly, tracking work that you’re not going to do is a waste of everyone’s time. Only track debt that everyone (the team, the Product Owner) agrees is important enough to pay off.

How to Calculate Technical Debt
“More CIOs are turning their attention to technical debt,” says Habeck. “They want to identify and categorize it, quantify the cost of it, and estimate the cost and benefit of paying it down.” CIOs’ reasons for measuring technical debt vary, from building business cases for core renewal projects to stretching limited maintenance dollars to preventing business disruption, observes Scott Buchholz, a director with Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Systems Integration practice. Buchholz adds that CIOs may undertake a portfoliowide assessment of technical debt to uncover the IT department’s most costly and severe problems and help prioritize maintenance work.

The Secret Behind Selecting The Right Enterprise Architecture Tool
Often, when we get into the room with an organization in the evaluation phase, they tell us about how the EA tool(s) they have used in the past delivered little value and poor insights. They want to jump right into the functionality our tools provide as if the functions themselves are the missing puzzle piece. Yes, it’s important to access the metamodel and to be able to load and manage the data repository. But it’s also integral to understand data reports and analytics as well as ensure security and scalability. The tools can almost always collect the data; it’s what you do with the data that creates value. That value can only be measured against goals, so that is typically the first bridge to cross.

Quote for the day:

"Show me the man you honor and I will know what kind of man you are." -- Thomas John Carlisle

February 28, 2015

Process Trumps Innovation in Analytics
A good analytic process, however, needs more than a sensibility for how to derive and think about questions; it needs a tangible method to address the questions and derive business value from the answers. The method I propose can be framed in four steps: what, so what, now what and then what. Moving beyond the “what” (i.e., measurement and data) to the “so what” (i.e., insights) should be a goal of any analysis, yet many organizations are still turning out analysis that does nothing more than state the facts. Maybe 54 percent of people in a study prefer white houses, but why does anyone care? Analysis must move beyond mere findings to answer critical business questions and provide informed insights, implications and ideally full recommendations.

Virtual Creatures in a Box, Controlled by You
A projector inside the lid of Holus beams four images of the same object onto the walls of the prism, which are reflected to form a single 3-D image that users can control with a smartphone connected via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. A tablet computer or laptop attached to the box runs an app that feeds images to the projector, and adjusts what you see based on input from the controller. At this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, H+ used Holus to let visitors play a multiplayer dice game controlled with an iPod Touch.

Kaspersky Lab Unveils Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator
The SSC is a mentor-driven acceleration programme developed and implemented by the Kaspersky Academy in partnership with venture industry players Mangrove Capital Partners and the ABRT Venture Fund. SSC will provide startups with access to business, cybersecurity and cross-industry expertise from around the world. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, said: "As the cyber threat landscape becomes more and more dangerous, the world needs new ideas, new concepts and new approaches to cybersecurity. As a result, there's been a significant increase in venture funding of early-stage startups in the industry."

Google reveals plans for futuristic cityscape campus
The design of the office “motivates people to move around the office and interact in casual, unscheduled ways,” he explains–just like the well-planned public spaces of a great city. Early concepts for the office were motivated by old 18th-century maps of cities. “When I think about a city,” Gorman says, “I shop, I go get coffee, I go to the park, I go for walks. We wanted to create that same variety in the office.” In addition to its in-house café (and in-house debugger/barista), Square has been experimenting with pop-up stores and artisan merchants appearing within Square’s own offices.

UK poised to relax rules on employing overseas workers for some IT jobs
Rules would be loosened so employers no longer have to demonstrate they have tried to fill the job domestically before recruiting workers from outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Currently employers must prove they have advertised a job in the UK for 28 days and were unable to find a suitable worker. However, the MAC recommends that only start-up companies should be able to recruit from abroad in this fashion, stating it failed to receive much evidence from large tech firms that they are suffering from a skills shortage. "Any significant shortages within the sector, on the basis of the evidence we received, seem presently to mainly be confined to firms at the start-up/scale-up end," the report states

Red Hat wants you to contain yourself and your workloads
The cool part is that containers require no additional overhead or stress on the system. In fact, to the kernel, it's just running applications like any normal server does. For users and for the contained application, it's a separate and independent world. You can assign IP addresses to containers. Each container can have its own users, including the root user. From the container's point-of-view, it is a fully functional system. You can even reboot it without affecting any other container or the host system.

Net Neutrality Decision: What You Need to Know
The 3-to-2 Federal Communications Commission vote largely enshrines current practices of the major providers, such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon Communications, and as such probably won’t hold any immediate effects for the average consumer. It does, however, prevent a tiered Internet where companies and content providers can pay for speedy access to customers. “If this goes well, consumers will not notice a difference,” says Christopher Mitchell, an official with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy group for community development that supported the net neutrality proposal. Mitchell says the FCC rules are aimed at “preventing things from getting worse.”

Corporate Leaders Aren't Prepared for the Internet of Things
Fewer than one-quarter of survey respondents have established clear business leadership for the IoT, either in the form of a single organization unit owning the issue or multiple business units taking ownership of separate IoT efforts. Exacerbating this lack of leadership is a lack of understanding about the IoT by senior executives, the board of directors, and non-IT workers. Overall, the survey results show that there is a clear need for more internal education and ideation at all levels in the organization to explain the potential of the IoT and to seek innovative ways to exploit it.

Blockchain Technology Explained: Powering Bitcoin
So what is blockchain? Bitcoin blockchain is the technology backbone of the network and provides a tamper-proof data structure, providing a shared public ledger open to all. The mathematics involved are impressive, and the use of specialized hardware to construct this vast chain of cryptographic data renders it practically impossible to replicate. All confirmed transactions are embedded in the bitcoin blockchain. Use of SHA-256 cryptography ensures the integrity of the blockchain applications – all transactions must be signed using a private key or seed, which prevents third parties from tampering with it. Transactions are confirmed by the network within 10 minutes or so and this process is handled by bitcoin miners.

Building Software for the Long Term
Big software might survive but that might be just because it might be terrible software but it's just too expensive to replace, I mean I think there is probably a lot of software in financial institutions, I mean everywhere really that has been around for 40 years but nobody is able to change it. ... as software engineers we often want to improve things but we can’t describe it well enough to be able to convince people, so being able to make a business case to improve software and because actually bad software has significant costs and it’s not hard to find business cases for a lot of improvement work, that make sense for a business, it's not just our instincts tell us that we want to live in a nice software environment, there is a real business case usually in there.

Quote for the day:

"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work." -- Peter Drucker

February 27, 2015

eBay Open Sources Pulsar, a Real-Time Analytics Framework
Pulsar uses an “SQL-like event processing language,” according to Sharad Murthy, eBay’s corporate architect, and Tony Ng, the company’s director of engineering — the blog post’s authors. It is used to collect and process user and business events in real time, provide key insights that systems can react to within seconds. Atop of the CEP framework the company implemented a real-time analytics pipeline, which relates how different parts can work together. Some of the processing it performs includes enrichment, filtering and mutation, aggregation, and stateful processing.

As mobile wallet market matures, MCX sits on the bench
"The fact that CurrentC is not up and running is not a bad thing," John MacAllister, principal at consulting firm Dorado Industries, said during a panel discussion this week at the All Payments Expo in Las Vegas. Steve Mott from consulting firm BetterBuy Design, and Tim Sloane, vice president of payments innovation at Mercator Advisory Group, joined MacAllister in the conversation about how current mobile wallet technologies jibe with the current market. All three consultants agreed that MCX can experience a modicum of success if it can push its CurrentC wallet beyond the current limited pilot phase. But the slow journey to a CurrentC launch has been filled with more tragedy than "Hamlet" or "Macbeth."

Cloud and the need for microservices
Cloud changes the way IT supports the business. In essence, every action within an organisation is part of a process. These processes need to change to reflect market conditions and the needs of the business. Any monolithic application will struggle to meet this overriding requirement – and this is where cloud comes in. A well-architected cloud platform enables services to be picked up from across a hybrid private/public cloud ecosystem. By the correct use of application programming interfaces (APIs), data can flow across the service boundaries to fulfil the needs of the overall process. As needs change, any one or more of the services can be unplugged and replaced with a different one.

4 reasons why cloud spending is set to explode this year
In terms of the ratio of clouding spending versus traditional IT expenditure, Karl Deacon -- Chief Operating Officer at Canopy -- says that the Atos cloud, "has shown that the percentage of contracts requiring or including digital or cloud solutions in outsourcing deals more than doubled in 2014 compared to 2013". The Atos cloud is a joint venture backed by Atos, VMware and EMC. Atos claims on its website that it doesn’t: "sell widgets, and we don’t theorize about the future…as business technologists with a pure client focus, we are orchestrators who can put your entire cloud puzzle together".

RealTime Medicare Data delivers caregiver trends insights by taming its healthcare data
The first thing we tried was to move to an analysis services back end. For that project, we got an outside party to help us because we would need to redesign our front end completely to be able to query analysis services. It just so happened that that project was taking way too long to implement. I started looking at other alternatives and, just by pure research, I happened to find Vertica. I was reading about it and thought "I'm not sure how this is even possible." It didn’t even seem possible to be able to do this with this amount of data. So we got a trial of it. I started using it and was impressed that it actually could do what it said it could do.

Canonical and Juniper team up on carrier-grade OpenStack SDN
In this cloud solution, Juniper will provide the service support for Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack. This, in turn, will work in concert with Juniper's Contrail. Contrail is Juniper's open-source software-defined network (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) architecture. The point of this is that carriers and service providers are working feverishly on addressing their end-users' ceaseless data demands by making their infrastructure more agile and automated. If that sounds like a job for a cloud and SDN/NFV, Juniper and Canonical agree. Using their software stack, the two claim to be "providing open, scalable, cost-effective, and carrier-grade cloud solutions on which carriers can build a virtualized IP platform and support NFV."

James Grenning on Technical Excellence
About lines of code, people still see it that way, until they experience it. One thing I can't do for someone is experience how much better they will be in several weeks or months if they learn this. I can't make them experience that because these approaches have to be voluntary. For someone to get the benefit from TDD, they need to see that is might solve a problem they want to solve, try it, they are likely to convince themselves through their own experiences. Of the experienced people that started learning this years ago, most of them wouldn't stop and it's not because they want to be slower, less effective developers. It's because they want to be more effective.

The second-class internet? You're soaking in it
The net neutrality debate represents a third way in which the internet might be split. Rather than the neutral approach of treating all internet traffic equally, there could be fast and slow lanes, priced accordingly. Thursday's decision by the US Federal Communications Commission now makes net neutrality the law in that country, at least. There's nothing stopping the countries that make up the other 96 percent of the world's population from making their own rules for traffic within their own borders. All of those examples are theoretical. But look at Lenovo's recent issue with the Superfish software -- which inserted advertising into users' web browsing sessions -- introducing a nasty, nasty security vulnerability in the process. Doesn't this show that we already have a two-tier internet?

How to work for a macromanager
Working for a macromanager has its own set of challenges. A micromanager is always there when you don’t need them to be there; a macromanager is never around when you do have a question, need support, or need to get a decision made. They have a laissez faire style of management that assumes all employees are completely competent self-licking ice cream cones, needing no support, feedback, recognition, coaching, or direction. A macromanagement style may be appropriate when managing employees that are self-starters, experienced, high-performing, and self-motivated, but even these employees need a little attention now and then.

The Buzzkill Boss
Stress from conflicts at home can manifest itself in several negative ways at the office—worrying about off-the-job issues can drain employees of their energy and focus, causing them to withdraw from colleagues. On the other hand, employees’ lives are enriched when home life helps alleviate work stress—when a spouse offers much-needed support and perspective, for example. That ballast can help employees roll into the office on an even keel and in a buoyant mood. But there is a more subtle aspect to the issue that researchers have so far failed to examine. That is, do supervisors’ feelings of work–life conflict or fulfillment spill over to their subordinates? Those higher in the organization chart are charged with inspiring and motivating their employees.

Quote for the day:

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” -- Samuel Johnson

February 26, 2015

Employing Enterprise Architecture for Applications Assurance
An enterprise architect will consolidate individual systems into a service-oriented architecture and eliminate one-off personnel datasets, asset inventories, and expense tracking and reimbursement processes. He or she can promote the adoption of a single technical architecture (such as Microsoft’s .NET or Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) to avoid the headaches of interconnecting incompatible technologies. Portability and interoperability are the key architectural objectives. Each of these actions will reduce the attack surface of the entire enterprise and enable security solutions that scale beyond what would be economical for individual systems.

Will Big Data Make Data Scientists Redundant?
The aim of Google’s Automatic Statistician is to create “an artificial intelligence for data science”. Specifically, it is creating software algorithms that can spot patterns, and report them in simple, easy-to-understand text. For example “The data shows that Saturdays were consistently warmer than Sundays throughout the year and this correlates to higher turnout at outdoor events”. As well as humans, machines can also interpret these results – and use it as the basis for further analysis, by automatically selecting appropriate models and predictions to test it against. The program was developed by a team of scientists at Cambridge University collaborating with others at MIT

Facebook’s Startling Report On The State Of Global Internet Connectivity
Although internet usage exploded over the last decade, this growth rate has slowed as developed nations effectively max out of active citizens. Facebook stated, “The rate of growth declined for the fourth year in a row to just 6.6% in 2014 (down from 14.7% in 2010). At present rates of decelerating growth, it won’t reach 4 billion people until 2019.” The message is a stark one – 40% of the world’s population hasn’t connected to the internet even once. Internet.org point out, “Without the cooperation of industry, governments and NGOs working together to improve the global state of connectivity by addressing the underlying reasons people are not connected to the internet, connectivity may remain permanently out of reach for billions of people.”

Cross-Border Data Restrictions Threatens Global Economic Growth
The motivations vary for restricting cross-border data flows. Some policy makers have embraced data-residency requirements as a tool to protect local tech companies from international competition. Others have pursued restrictions on data flows as a vehicle for safeguarding how consumers' personal information is used and transmitted, concerns that were only exacerbated by the disclosures of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those privacy concerns have been prominent in the European Union, which has historically taken a more protective approach toward users' personal information than U.S. regulators.

Responsible Disclosure: Cyber Security Ethics
The debate over responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities has been going on for years, but has recently been reignited by Microsoft’s decision to end its public advanced notification system, as well as Google’s decision to publish details for a vulnerability found in Windows the day before Microsoft was set to make the patch available. It begs the question once vulnerabilities are discovered, should one disclose them? If so, what’s the appropriate amount of time? Do we as a security community, need to re-examine the process in which we disclose vulnerabilities?

Careful: Don't Drown in Your Data Lake!
In a data lake, everything is just poured in, in an unstructured way. A molecule of water in the lake is equal to any other molecule and can be moved to any part of the lake where it will feel equally at home. This means that data in a lake has a great deal of agility – another word which is becoming more frequently used these days – in that it can be configured or reconfigured as necessary, depending on the job you want to do with it. A data lake contains data in its rawest form – fresh from capture, and unadulterated by processing or analysis. It uses what is known as object-based storage, because each individual piece of data is treated as an object, made up of the information itself packaged together with its associated metadata, and a unique identifier.

Global Open Trusted Technology Provider™ Standard
This is not just a US issue; every country is concerned about securing their critical infrastructures and their underlying supply chains. Unfortunately we are beginning to see attempts to address these global concerns through local solutions (i.e. country specific and disparate requirements that raise the toll on suppliers and could set up barriers to trade). The point is that an international technical solution (e.g. a standard and accreditation program for all constituents in global supply chains), which all countries can adopt, helps address the geo-political issues by having a common standard and common conformance requirements, raising all boats on the river toward becoming trusted suppliers.

Big data trend now being applied to managing human resources
"Statistics have their uses, but you don't want a number to sum up the whole employee- employer relationship," says MacDonald, who works atRyerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management. "It may well be a self-defeating mechanism if you're trying to manage people by being incredibly precise by measuring their performance. If that measurement process becomes demoralizing for staff, you've shot yourself in the foot." So called "big data" techniques have been embraced quickly by sales, finance and marketing departments eager to exploit trends that will help generate more revenue for their organizations. The move towards harnessing computer power has been slower in areas that don't generate profit, such as the personnel department. But that's beginning to change.

Changing Business Value Models
That’s certainly the way that it’s supposed to work. But it’s no good having a great business value model unless it is adequately supported by the right enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture is the formal description of the components that make up an enterprise, the relationship between those components, and how collectively those components either enable or constrain the management of the organization and the operation of its businesses. The realization of an enterprise architecture is a working, performing system. Problems arise if there is a mismatch of any sort between the ways in which a business is expected to produce value and the ability of the system described by an enterprise architecture to deliver on those expectations.

Building an emergency internet in the white spaces
Comparing white spaces technologies with other radio technologies shows several key advantages. Firstly it's multipoint, with no need for line-of-site connections or to locate end points accurately. That means it's able to operate in high winds and when there are earthquake aftershocks that might cause misalignment of point-to-point systems and might break cables or fibre. Secondly, you don't need to worry about exact alignment, and can even operate through obstructions and over water. The equipment used in the Philippines was weatherproof, and could be installed anywhere, with a normal antenna. Base stations can be used as repeaters, though the current maximum range is an impressive 12km (with future systems promising up to 40km).

Quote for the day:

"Even the demons are encouraged when their chief is "not lost in loss itself." -- John Milton