Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 09, 2015

Redefine BI to Unleash Big Data's Power
Legacy Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) systems will not disappear in the near future, if ever. Many business users are dependent on the rigorous performance reporting implemented from an ROI perspective and a replacement is not currently feasible. Additionally, some of the newer tools need to reach a level of maturity for production systems. On the other side, no enterprise can ignore the availability of a newer parallel processing platform that can run complex computational algorithms based on massive volumes of structured and unstructured data. Legacy EDW systems are simply not designed to provide insights from new formats and higher volumes of data on an industrialized scale, which has led to significant opportunities for newer technologies to overcome the challenges enterprises are faced with.

The one thing Microsoft's Project Spartan browser needs to succeed
IE once enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the browser market. Firefox and Chrome--and to a lesser extent Apple's Safari--have eaten away at that dominance. IE still has more market share than all of those rivals combined, but its 90+% market share dwindled to just over 50%. Even that figure is debatable, because it depends on how you measure the browser market. There are metrics that suggest Chrome is more popular than IE. Part of that is driven simply by the browser itself. Firefox and Chrome both have vibrant, dynamic ecosystems of extensions and plug-ins that enable the browser experience to be customized and more powerful than the off-the-shelf browser itself. IE also has add-ons available, but they've never had the loyal following of Firefox and Chrome.

A Better Way for Leaders to Envision the Future of Their Industries
Most business strategy papers suffer from the same problem. In order to prepare their readers for a future defined by different rules, authors virtually always decide to kick things off by listing a series of changes they foresee in the landscape of the organization. They inform us that "intensified pressure from newcomers will transform the business landscape," "today’s business models will increasingly become outdated," and "success in the future will depend on ever more flexibility and agility in our decision-making." Shocked? Startled awake? I didn’t think so. This trend-line language doesn’t really engage our minds. It makes us envision, subconsciously, a line that depicts a gradual change in our daily reality.

Former Goldman Exec Wants to Upend the Way the World Moves Money
“It’s ironic that we can send a physical package from one part of the world to another faster, cheaper, and with more transparency than money,” Uberoi says over a curry lunch at an Indian eatery next door to Earthport’s offices in the City of London. “We saw a need to create a FedEx for money,” he continues, “but it was going to be difficult. Banks are highly regulated, they are risk averse, and moving money is a mission-critical function for them. We came to market offering a solution in 2011, and banks looked at it and said, ‘You’re crazy! Here you are, this money-losing company, telling me I can do payments differently? Forget it!’” ... “It’s plumbing, but the payments market has opened up, and its size could not be larger,” Hammer says. Wim Raymaekers, SWIFT’s head of banking, says that the time has come for fundamental change.

Advanced threats are the new baseline, says Websense
“It is only when organisations have a clear picture of everything that is going on with the tools and capabilities that make cyber crime so easy for attackers that they are in a position to secure their enterprise.” Despite the growing awareness of the kill chain model that analyses cyber attacks in seven key stages to find ways to detect and disrupt each stage, Leonard said organisations still tend to focus on point systems. “But while these systems can be very good at identifying one particular aspect of a threat, there is a need for broader technologies to operate across the kill chain and raise the bar by putting obstacles at every stage of an attack,” he said.

The Internet of Things
Creating a climate for trust and responsible innovation is essential, as the development of IoT touches upon questions of security, privacy and trust. Furthermore, as the IoT will become widespread in citizens' lives at home, in the office, in public or on the move, discussion needs to identify any policy or regulatory requirements, where an impact could be foreseen, as well as in terms of education. In order to fully deploy IoT, pervasive and easy access to wireless and mobile communication and identification/numbering resources to connect billions of objects is necessary. Iin particular, mobile access should be provided in a competitive, low-cost and cross-border manner to allow Machine-to-Machine and IoT applications to flourish.

JPMorgan Big Data Algorithm Identifies Rogue Employees
“What they’re trying to do is forecast human behavior,” said Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve bank examiner who’s now a lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “Policing intentions can be a slippery slope. Do people get a scarlet letter for something they have yet to do?” Care will be taken to strike the right balance in monitoring employees at JPMorgan, said Dewar, a former U.K. regulator. She’s responsible for helping executives at the investment bank implement the new controls, while Chief Control Officer Shannon Warren has oversight of the firm-wide effort. The bank wouldn’t describe all of the inputs being used for its predictive program, which specific business it’s being tested on, or what steps will be taken if concerns are raised about an employee.

Is Augmented Reality The Next Tech Revolution?
A number of companies are in various stages of developing augmented reality tech. But are the claims and demo videos that have already been released too good to be true? Will the visions of startups like MagicLeap become a reality, or do they simply offer an illusion of something better than modest reality underneath? If the future of virtual and augmented reality technologies plays out the way the companies behind them hope it will, then one day your laptop, your smartphone, and your television could be replaced by devices that overlay virtual apps and experiences on your surroundings or create immersive experiences that let you experience an entirely different world in your living room.

MariaDB Corp picks off speed bottlenecks and tightens anti-SQL injection measures
MariaDB is the community-developed branch of Oracle's open-source MySQL database, acquired for $1bn by Sun Microsystems, which in turn was bought by Oracle for $7.4bn in 2010. By then, some of the database's original creators had already left to create MariaDB. Last October, commercial MariaDB company SkySQL announced it was changing its name to MariaDB Corporation. The new MariaDB Enterprise release features protection against SQL-injection attacks using a database firewall filter. In a few months community MariaDB will also include the database encryption developed and used internally by Google, which has been using MariaDB for a year.

Keeping Up with the Growth of Scientific Data
Physicists have been using metadata to manage really big data for decades, developing their own bespoke metadata and data management tools with each new project. Cern actually developed three separate metadata systems to manage the two storage systems used in their ground-breaking LHC work that famously captured 1PB of detector data per second in search of the elusive Higgs boson. So when NASA needed to keep track of all the data coming from the Hubble Space Telescope, it consulted the physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) BaBar experiment, and applied their metadata-based techniques to astronomy. Data collected from Hubble over the decades is meticulously annotated with rich metadata so future generations of scientists, armed with more powerful tools, can discover things we can’t today.

Quote for the day:

"I can find technical expertise more easily than I can find situational leaders, and project managers are situational leaders." -- Raj Kapur, president of the Center for Project Management

April 08, 2015

In SMBs, the CFO role in IT decisions grows
Despite CFOs’ growing IT decision making role, not many are partnering with their CIOs on those decisions, particularly in SMBs, the study found. Only 14% collaborated with IT on IT decision making in midsize companies, and a mere 11% work with their CIOs in small organizations (in large organizations, the number is slightly higher, at 16%). This data indicates that although these financial executives understand how crucial technology is to business success, quite a number of them see themselves as either directly responsible for IT or at least a major authority on IT decisions. These perceptions make sense, according to Gartner, because CFOs are generally tasked with controlling their organizations’ budgets and examining the highest-value items.

NIST incident response plan: Four steps to better incident handling
The NIST Incident Handling process introduces four phases: preparation; detection and analysis; containment, eradication and recovery; and post-incident activity. Each of these phases is iterative in nature. When a security incident occurs, rather than reactively jumping into its remediation and expending a considerable amount of time, cost and resources for identification, containment and recovery, the NIST incident response guide suggests that being prepared for such incidents is the best defense.

The way to greatly reduce cloud computing costs
What makes this architecture so impressive is that it blends mainframes, reduced instruction set computing (RISC) machines and x86 servers into a cohesive cloud. Most clouds, whether they are within an enterprise or run by managed service providers, are based on one architecture: x86, which is not ideal for running all workloads. Further, other companies have shown the benefits of adopting a mixed-platform environment, as IBM has done to reduce its cost of computing by $2.3 billion. Other enterprises and MSPs can likewise save really big money by adopting a multi-platform cloud approach; in fact I estimate that enterprises can reduce their cost of cloud computing by 30-40% by using the multi-platform approach with strict process overlay.

Diving into the Dark Web: Where does your stolen data go?
Bitglass found that within only a few days, the fake credentials had been downloaded in over five countries, three continents and was viewed over 200 times. By day 12, the file had received over 1,080 clicks and had spread to 22 countries on five continents. "By the end of the experiment the fake document of employee data had made its way to North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Countries frequently associated with cyber criminal activity, including Russia, China and Brazil, were the most common access points for the identity data. "Additionally, time, location, and IP address analysis uncovered a high rate of activity amongst two groups of similar viewers, indicating the possibility of two cyber crime syndicates, one operating within Nigeria and the other in Russia," the team's report states (.PDF).

The State Of Business Technology Resiliency 2014-2015
Forrester Research, in a joint survey with Disaster Recovery Journal, has identified several current trends in business resiliency. In this report, Forrester presents an analysis of these trends and how they may affect your BC/DR planning. The report also offers recommendations for taking your business resiliency to the next level, including using new analytic capabilities to help you recognize patterns in preventable outages to prevent downtime; automating as much as possible to improve recovery points and recovery times, and determining real costs of downtime to use as leverage in presenting budgets.

Forrester: CIOs will architect and operate the Internet of Things
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before with PCs, websites, and smartphones, all started as “do-it-yourself” projects by the business but ultimately falling into the CIO’s realm of responsibility, Gillett writes. He predicts this will happen with the IoT as well and CIOs will ultimately be called to manage the growing complexity of connected devices for their company. ... Every company will face the challenges (as well as the opportunities) that come with owning and managing connected assets, Gillett wrote. CIOs who are part of companies that sell physical products will face even more challenges, including helping the business design, build and operate connected products, Gillett added.

CIO interview: Bruna Pellicci, global head of IT, Ashurst
One key focus remains information security. Pellicci recognises, like so many of her peers, that defence remains a moving target. CIOs could potentially spend every penny of their IT budgets on preventative systems and techniques. Pellicci says the modern focus on securityis in sharp contrast to the early days of her career. “When I started working in IT, you didn’t need to worry about people hacking your systems,” she says. ... “Technology changes so quickly, so the thought of a model that allows people to choose their own device is potentially great. But that simple strategy can be complicated by the choices people make – what if someone wants to use more than a single device, and should we give these employees access to their corporate information across a range of devices?” asks Pellicci.

Painless Refactoring of SQL Server Database Objects
It is quite common for perfectly-functioning SQL code to be knocked off its feet by a change to the underlying database schema, or to other objects that are used in the code. If we are "lucky," the code will suddenly start producing error messages; if not, it may just silently start producing different results. In either case, once the problem is discovered, the process of adjusting all of the application code can be long and painstaking. Fortunately, there are a few simple defensive techniques that take little time to implement, but yet may significantly reduce the possibility of such errors. ... This article will examine several examples of how changes to database objects can cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses them, and discuss how to develop code that will not break, or behave unpredictably, as a result of such changes.

Why now is the time to start planning your exit strategy
So it makes sense that business leaders would avoid planning for the day they sell their company or step down from their role. Without a clear exit strategy, however, you could be putting your company, your employees, and your own future in jeopardy. Addressing every aspect of succession planning takes more time than you might realize. If you don’t start this process early enough, you could spend years running your business in a way that sabotages your own end goals, depletes your resources, or cripples your negotiating power. Companies that lack a well-designed succession plan can also be left weak and vulnerable during the transition period, making them easy targets for competitors.

A Startup’s Plans for a New Social Reality
Jeremy Bailenson, head of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that while that video games and films are thought of as the main applications for virtual reality, simply communicating with others could turn out to be important. Communicating via avatars could become more effective than by talking via video chat or even face-to-face, he says, as software could help us do things like tailor our appearances and attentiveness to whomever we’re speaking with. To make social interactions really effective in digital spaces, though, sensors will need to track facial expressions and body movements well enough to render them realistically, he says.

Quote for the day:

"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it." -- George Eliot

April 07, 2015

Digital agenda streamlines public sector in Norway
As the name implies, DAN is inspired by the Digital Agenda for Europe framework but is tailored for Norway’s own priorities and challenges, including a small domestic market and a sparsely populated country. It is also a continuation of earlier ICT policies such as the eNorway program introduced in 2000. This long-term approach is starting to bear fruit. Almost 60% of Norwegians are eGovernment users, while the corresponding EU average is 33%. In the Norwegian Tax Administration alone the country’s "digital by default" scheme has pushed the number of electronic services users from less than 900,000 in 2014 to 3.4 million in 2015. Not bad for a country with a population of 5.1 million.

The Network Intelligence Movement Will Add Personal Context to the Online World
The movement is called “network intelligence,” and it’s a reimagining of the term that originally referred to the technology used for data analysis. This new movement focuses on people, and builds on the rise of business intelligence and analytics in both startup and corporate environments. New products built to harness network intelligence will allow for the analysis of relationships between members of a network and their specific skill sets to help achieve business objectives. These products will bridge the gap between business intelligence analytics and goals by adding people back into the equation. After all, every organization is built upon smart and connected people.

A CISO reveals why the cloud is your secret weapon for faster, better, and cheaper PCI audits
As Joan explains, “Bernie Madoff worked from a big NYC skyscraper. The building provided great security. He ran a total scam.” In the cloud, a hacker can run a scam on a “certified” AWS instance. The key is to look deeper and understand what the company is doing with your data. Joan points out that the certification of the underlying platform, however, is valuable. “We call it an unbroken-chain of paperwork. One of the things that made my audit easy. Physical and network security was AWS. They admit they’re responsible for that. Now the other 10 sections are my responsibility.”

How can privacy survive in the era of the internet of things?
Usman Haque is the founder of Thingful, which he calls a search engine for the IoT. It documents IoT devices around the world, categorising them by function, so that you search for, say, air quality in Manhattan. Haque says that people should be able to set policies governing which devices can talk to the devices that they own, and what information is shared about them. “I can make data available in real-time to my doctor, but I might delegate access to monthly figures to my mother,” he explains. “And I might be happy to participate in a medical study where I give the years’ aggregate data. So privacy has to be granular.”

The Security Concerns of SSL / TLS Encrypted Traffic
The challenges of SSL/TLS as a cover currently fall broadly into two categories: malicious activities that are directed towards enterprise servers and the malicious activity directed towards enterprise workstations, mobile devices, tablets, etc. The former consists of attackers generating application DDoS, like the application attacks that make up the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top Ten. The latter consists of malware that arrives from infected SSL/TLS servers on the Internet (such as music swapping sites, adult sites, etc.,) or via email malware/scamware that accesses the enterprise server through personal email use.

Critical infrastructure commonly hit by destructive cyber attacks, survey reveals
Trend Micro chief cyber security officer Tom Kellermann said the Americas research should serve as a wake-up call that critical infrastructures have become a prime target for cyber criminals. “These groups have escalated their attacks by leveraging destructive campaigns against the infrastructures of the Western Hemisphere," he said. Kellerman said Trend Micro hopes the findings will serve as a catalyst to motivate and encourage necessary change. OAS Inter-American Committee against Terrorism executive secretary Neil Klopfenstein said governments in the Americas and around the world must recognise the serious vulnerabilities inherent to critical infrastructure and the potential for grave consequences if not properly secured.

How the current intellectual property landscape impacts open source
Understanding the business model of the client is especially important so that the technical solution developed by the IT professional matches the business goals of the client. ... Not all open source licenses are created equal. This includes understanding the fact that the underlying power of the open source license actually resides in copyrights; the very monopolistic vehicle that allows the open source license to be enforced ... It seems that the Intellectual Property system is getting away from the original Constitutional mandate to “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

Why You Should Start a Brain Technology Company
If effective, these new therapies could even, some argue, bring about the end of disability. Some believe that developing such interfaces will require advanced brain implants that are still a decade or more away. More recently, though, neuroscientists—as well as a legion of “brain hackers”—have turned to powerful new sensing, processing, and prototyping tools to explore a host of non-invasive techniques to stimulate the brain. Some of these methods, proponents say, could benefit not only patients who suffer from disease or injury, but also healthy individuals, who would be able to learn faster, acquire better math skills, improve their memory capabilities, and even boost their creativity.

Microservices For Greenfield?
One of the ways in which we handle the complexity of deploying multiple separate services for a single install is by providing abstraction layers in the form of scripts, or perhaps even declarative environment provisioning systems like Terraform. But in these scenarios, we control many variables. We can pick a base operating system. We run the install ourselves. We can (hopefully) control access to the machines we deploy on to ensure that conflicts or breaking changes are kept to a minimum. But for software we expect our customers to install, we typically control far fewer variables. We also ideally we want a model where each microservice is installed in it's own unit of operating system isolation. So do our customers now need to buy more servers to install our software?

AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On
It’s a very, very small existential risk. For it to be one, our current models would have to be wrong—even the worst scenarios [only] mean the climate in some parts of the world would be a bit more unfavorable. Then we would have to be incapable of remediating that through some geoengineering, which also looks unlikely. Certain ethical theories imply that existential risk is just way more important. All things considered, existential risk mitigation should be much bigger than it is today. The world spends way more on developing new forms of lipstick than on existential risk.

Quote for the day:

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." -- Thomas Jefferson

April 06, 2015

The Dawn Of The Age Of The Software ‘Infrapreneur’
Today’s enterprise infrastructure startup leaders need to be focused on pairing innovative software with commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. They are, in essence, software “infrapreneurs.” The software infrapreneurs we’re seeing are coming out of either Internet-generation companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo, or had significant terms at hardware companies such as Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems/Oracle. To individuals in both groups, the advantages of software-led companies are obvious. They recognize that a hardware-focused approach has limitations and that the real opportunity in infrastructure today is via software.

Juggling Data Connectivity Protocols for Industrial IoT
A great example is the Connected Boulevard program in Nice, France, which uses Industrial Internet technologies, including an innovative data-sharing platform, to help manage and optimize all aspects of city management, including parking and traffic, street lighting, waste disposal and environmental quality. ... The key to these benefits is the ability to derive value from the data. The data must be accessible wherever it resides and delivered to wherever it’s needed (edge to the cloud) so that it can be analyzed and acted upon in the right amount of time. There are a range protocols currently used to provide this “data-sharing function” within an Industrial Internet system (see chart above)

Big data is all about the cloud
The key to big data success, Wood says, is more than Spark or Hadoop. It's running both on elastic infrastructure. Hortonworks Vice President of Corporate Strategy Shaun Connolly agrees that the cloud has a big role to play in big data analytics. But Connolly believes the biggest factor in determining where big data processing is done is "data gravity," not elasticity. ... Connolly says, is to extend and augment traditional on-premise systems, such as data warehouses. Eventually, this leads large organizations to deploy Hadoop and other analytics clusters in multiple locations -- typically on site. Nevertheless, Connolly acknowledges, the cloud is emerging an increasingly popular option for the development and testing of new analytics applications and for the processing of big data that is generated "outside the four walls" of the enterprise.

Vulnerable Dell support tool now detected as risky software
“We are continuing to investigate further issues and actions that may be necessary to protect our customers,” the F-Secure researchers said. On Friday, security vendor Malwarebytes announced that vulnerable versions of the program will now be detected as PUP.Vulnerable.DellSystemDetect by its products. In the antivirus industry PUP stands for potentially unwanted program. “We at Malwarebytes are pretty sure there are a lot of folks that won’t know about this vulnerability, so we decided to detect it for the sake of raising awareness,” the company said in a blog post. “Vulnerable versions of this tool have been seen as early as mid 2012 though most likely even earlier, according to our sources so anyone with a Dell system purchased a few years ago should take special notice and run a scan ASAP.”

C# - Optical Marks Recognition (OMR) Engine 2.0a
This article discusses the 2nd version of OMR engine I wrote in 2012. It is highly recomended for the readers to experience the first version of engine first which is located at: C# - Optical Marks Recognition (OMR) Engine 1.0 This project started as a fun but grabbed my time as soon as I started to imagine the possibilities. Including me, many people have brought this project into commercial usage as well as research purpose at university projects. Some the people would ask, "Why re invent the wheel?" because there are numerous OMR engines and even embedded systems available in market. But this project is open source and written in high level language. So, integration with other .Net application is not an issue. This is the main reason I've been devoting time since it started.

Enterprise Agility Through Culture
Culture is messy, and complex. Deliberate change needs to be coherent with its nature. The results of our actions will depend on intent, situation, and context. Stories are perfect to make sense of culture, as they can be messy and complex and still be easily understood. Culture is created and transmitted through stories. Therefore, storytelling formats are important culture building tools. One such format which Michael and I experienced together in 2011 at the Agile Coach Camp in Columbus, is called Temenos. Temenos was developed by Siraj Sirajuddin. It is an experiential team and personal development lab which we’ve run in different sizes for more than 50 times since. In addition, we have since then used and developed more methods and tools to understand and improve culture.

Managing a project is like driving a BMW
In project management, much like driving vs. riding in a 1992 BMW 3 series, managing the project is quite different from working on the project. I’m not saying it’s better. I’m not saying it’s the ultimate management experience. But I am saying that much like driving a BMW 3 series, if you’re organized and successful as a project manager, you do have a nice sense of control. You are in charge, you are making the decisions, and eventually you realize you wouldn’t have it any other way. Again, not saying it’s for everyone and not that it’s better than everything else. Some people like to drive a truck. But if you like that feeling of control and taking charge, there aren’t too many things like it. Yes, I’m talking about both – driving the BMW AND managing projects.

Price and Revenue Optimization (PRO)
At the heart of price and revenue optimization is the concept of demand-based pricing. As its name suggests, demand-based pricing is a method that sets a price that is controlled by the seller’s assessment of what the buyer is willing to pay, which in turn is based on an estimate of a good’s or a service’s perceived value to the buyer. Companies use demand-based pricing to optimize – rather than simply maximize – their pricing to achieve revenue and profitability objectives. It uses data to estimate where the prospective buyer sits on a demand curve and therefore how much the individual is likely to pay. In some respects this is similar to what happens daily in souks, bazaars and other markets in cultures that do not insist on set prices.

How to Tailor Agile to Your Distributed Team Environments?
Distributed Agile added another dimension to agile practise – involving teams based at different locations – be it different offices, different cities or different countries with different cultural background and different time zones working simultaneously on the same project. Distributed Agile thus breaks the basic principle of co-location for successful agile implementation. Distributed agile thus is a complex phenomenon involving multi-cultural team based at different locations, may be from same organisations or from two different organisations. ... To make agile successful, open communication and collaboration is crucial. The key members from different locations need to be face-to-face at least in the early stages. It ensures that the team begins work on the project with a shared understanding of customer context as well as common minimum guidelines.

Enterprise bank accounts targeted in new malware attack
IBM has estimated that 95 percent of all corporate attacks rely on some form of human error. Most employees have already been trained not to click on unknown documents received by e-mail, as well as to not give up passwords over the phone. A single inattentive user, however, could result in the loss of large sums of money. To guard against Dyre Wolf, security professionals should reinforce company best practices that should already be in place. Employees should be reminded that banks never ask for passwords and that they should report any suspicious behavior. An organization may also wish to carry out mock-attacks to ensure that employees are fully trained on how to handle such incidents, Kuhn said.

Quote for the day:

"A leader is one who sees more than others see and who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see." -- Leroy Eimes

April 05, 2015

Three Emerging Themes of Big Data Analytics
For years, analytics has been changing the face of business, but never to the degree we are witnessing now. Technologies that have shown promise for years are starting to deliver tangible results. New entrants are using analytics to disrupt established markets, and big data conversations have migrated from the IT department to the boardroom. The code has finally been cracked, and enterprises are taking notice. With all the attention that big data receives, three emerging themes rise to surface in my daily interactions with senior executives: the realization of personalized marketing, the collapse of the middleman, and the recognition of data equity.

Machine Learning at American Express: Benefits and Requirements
In the case of fraud detection and prevention, machine learning has been helpful to improve American Express’s already excellent track record, including their online business interactions. To do this, modeling methods make use of a variety of data sources including card membership information, spending details, and merchant information. The goal is to stop fraudulent transactions before substantial loss is incurred while allowing normal business transactions to proceed in a timely manner. ... It’s a challenge to do version control at the scale of terabytes and more of data, because it’s too expensive in space and time to make full copies. What is needed instead are transactionally consistent snapshots for data versioning, such as those available with the MapR data platform.

Collecting private information - Uses and abuses
In business, personal information has become a sort of raw material. Many smartphone apps can afford to be free because the companies that develop them sell the users’ personal data, something barely explained in the terms and conditions. If the service is free, then you’re the product, goes an old saw in Silicon Valley. ... Likewise, he rightly argues for better oversight and protection of whistle-blowers as a way of helping restrain government power. But his recommendation to “break up the NSA” is idealistic. Distributing surveillance authority to numerous agencies would indeed prevent an unhealthy concentration of power. But the specialised skills and huge resources required to perform surveillance well call for centralising responsibility.

The six burning questions for firms looking to make money from big data
Extracting, refining and ultimately capitalising on data is notoriously difficult, particularly for existing firms who have to contend with an ingrained company structure, culture and traditional revenue streams. But it is the competitive advantage associated with effective big data utilisation that is driving the desire for existing mainstream businesses to become data-driven. Up to now there has been no systematic framework to enable established organisations and business start-ups to transform an innovative data-driven idea into a feasible business model that is driven by data. As a result of our research, we have devised a template for what we call the Data-Driven Business Model (DDBM) Innovation Blueprint.

Evaluating re-identification risks with respect to the HIPAA privacy rule
Most risk evaluation metrics for individual level data focus on one of the following factors: (1) the number, or proportion, of unique individuals; or (2) the worst case scenario, that is, the identifiability of the most vulnerable record in the dataset. Of those that consider the first factor, the most common approach simply analyzes the proportion of records that are unique within a particular population. Alternative approaches that have been proposed add nuance, for instance not just considering unique links, but the probability that a unique link between sensitive and identified datasets is correct. This accounts for the complexities of the relationship between the populations represented.

Code as a Second Language – And Why It Matters
Learning to code is being proposed by some as an alternative to learning a second language. Imagine having the choice: French, English or JavaScript. It’s an interesting concept, but could present problems if you’re, for example, traveling in Spain and order a bottle of fine Rioja with something like“function getwine(‘2 liter’,’house’){};” ... According to our brains and MRI research, playing music and programming computers are the same thing. In fact, just thinkingabout playing music is the same as programming. These three activities each activate a portion of the brain known as Brodmann’s area 40, located slightly above your ear.

The Cloud Could Be Your Best Security Bet
One of this issues around cloud computing is who exactly controls the data. If law enforcement comes knocking at the door, would the cloud company be forced to hand over your content, even if you didn’t want it to? The rules aren’t crystal clear, but some cloud vendors are forcing the issue. Earlier this year, Box released a product called Enterprise Key Management that puts your company firmly in control of your content. Box couldn’t give the content to law enforcement no matter what because it’s encrypted and only the owner has the encryption keys, forcing the law enforcement official back to you to get at it. But much like Cowan’s assessment of cloud security, not every cloud vendor has this capability and without it, the situation becomes much murkier.

Cloud Architecture #2: Eventual Consistency Patterns
Eventually data consistency (EC) is used to improve performance and avoid contention in data update operations. This is not a simple and straightforward model to use. In fact, if possible to architect an application to use the native transactional features for update operations – then do that! Only use eventual consistency (and the compensating operations) when necessary to satisfy needs that a strongly consistent data story cannot. A typical business process consists of a series of autonomous operations. These steps can be performed in all sequences or partially in parallel. While they are being completed that overall data may be in an inconsistent state.

Cynefin 101 – Shared Context and Sense Making
Remember that diversity and naivety are key tenets of Cynefin so it desirable to engage other parties as they bring different perspectives to bear. If you are doing this in the context of a department think about engaging people who you see as your clients and suppliers, those that depend on you and in turn those that you depend upon to ensure that you are taking a holistic view. You may want to keep this exercise internal to avoid ‘washing your dirty laundry in public’ but if this is the case then see if you can get some people who would act as surrogates for these external parties.

The battle for an open internet: A look at the Net Neutrality debate
"The TRAI consultation leans significantly towards finding some middle ground between what the telecom industry wants and the Internet that we've all grown up with," says Pahwa, who, along with 70 other enthusiasts, crunched it down to a concise 23 pages that you can actually understand ... It's important to remember that it's not just telecom companies that are interested in a non-neutral Internet in India. According to the TRAI consultation paper, 83 percent of India's Internet users access the Internet from their mobile phones. This massive audience is crucial for multi-billion dollar corporations like Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Quote for the day:

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson

April 04, 2015

Are Wearables The Future Of Banking?
Berdak says that banks that are unconvinced by the current crop of wearable devices will still benefit from creating low-cost prototypes however, trialling a few technologies and preparing for when adoption surges. “Banks would be silly not to try and engage with this technology early on,” she says. “They do not have to have final apps already launched in the marketplace, but they definitely should be thinking about what they want to do in this space, building some proof-of-concepts and creating some early stage plans.” This is not only because of an expectation that customer adoption will pick up, she says, but also because banks will often need to build up a skill base ... as well as getting the right teams and developing best practices.

Adding Greater Realism to Virtual Worlds
Improbable has developed techniques that make it possible to share large amounts of information between multiple servers nearly instantaneously. This will allow many more players to experience a virtual world together than is currently possible. It will also allow more realistic physical interactions to take place within those worlds. Currently, in even the most elaborate virtual worlds, some characters and objects cannot interact because it would require more computational power than is available. Virtual worlds will no longer feel as if they’re built of “cardboard,” saysImprobable’s CEO and cofounder, Herman Narula. Moreover, using Improbable’s technology, objects and entities will be able to remain in the virtual world persistently, even when there are no human players around

Intel releases the 750 Series SSD, its fastest consumer flash
"The key to this product is raw performance. It's the highest SSD performance you'll see ... for a long time," said Jeff Fick, an Intel product marketing engineer. "We're delivering anywhere from two to four times the performance over our last SATA-based drive." The 750 Series SSD comes in 400GB ($389) and 1.2TB ($1,029) capacities. Using 4KB operations, its random read/write performance peaks out at 440,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 290,000 IOPS, respectively. "We focused this product specifically on random [performance]. What we're targeting here ... is high-end desk top users as well as workstations," Fick said. "But the sequential performance is quite high as well when we compare it to SATA-based products."

Developing hybrid mobile apps with Phonegap, AngularJS, Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a mobile-first responsive front-end framework. What this mean? Bootstrap has an easy to use responsive grid which allows you to position your layout in a well structured responsive way. As the framework is built with mobile use in mind, it responds well to different screen sizes and adapts the layout of the app easily to different screen sizes. This is a good possibility to use the very same implementation for tablet and mobile devices of different screen sizes. And it is not only the grid that makes it special. It helps you manage typography, responsive images, forms, form validation messages, notification messages, responsive tables, and a good number of UI components. You can download it from getbootstrap.com.

Setting standards for in-house app development and delivery
Internally developed applications are designed and built within an organization by its own IT staff. Many businesses have some sort of development capability, whether that means a single developer or thousands, and more and more companies want to build custom apps for their employees to use on mobile devices. By developing apps internally, a company has complete control of what features they include and when to make changes. Programmers don't have to worry about including third parties in the process, and, furthermore, developers can tailor the user interface to the organization's particular needs.

The Allure of Singapore, the World’s Second Gateway to China
Singapore is one of Southeast Asia’s more mature data center markets, Jabez Tan, senior analyst at Structure Research, says. Telcos dominate data center markets in other parts of the region, while Singapore has a good mix of both telcos and data center specialists. The primary reason the small island nation has such an active data center market is that it has become an Internet gateway between China and the rest of the world, Tan explains. Now on its way to reaching a gateway status that’s on par with Hong Kong, Singapore is where international companies go to serve customers in China, and where Chinese companies go to serve customers in Europe or North America.

How to design the right blueprint for your IT project
To truly succeed businesses need to accept that regardless of any precautions taken, things will go wrong during IT projects, but the most important thing is to respond quickly. IT managers should not be afraid of failure. Leading companies today have adopted “accepting failure and recovering quickly” as key elements of their innovation processes. Finding out what doesn’t work is often a necessary step on the path of exploring new territory and essential for successful innovation and remaining competitive in a fast changing market. The skill is in learning to fail fast and cheaply - identifying as early as possible that a project is no longer likely to provide a return on its investment, so as to be able to minimise the cost.

Building Scalable and Resilient Web Applications on Google Cloud Platform
A highly-available, or resilient, web application is one that continues to function despite expected or unexpected failures of components in the system. If a single instance fails or an entire zone experiences a problem, a resilient application remains fault tolerant—continuing to function and repairing itself automatically if necessary. Because stateful information isn’t stored on any single instance, the loss of an instance—or even an entire zone—should not impact the application’s performance. A truly resilient application requires planning from both a software development level and an application architecture level. This document primarily focuses on the application architecture level.

Are privacy laws and regulations strangling Europe’s productivity?
This fear is predicated on the fact that the current privacy and data protection laws have placed a fair amount of burden on businesses in Europe. The greatest difficulty stems from the fact that these laws are different for each of the 28 European Union states. This is particularly burdensome for multinational companies that must consequently deal with hundreds of different regulations and 28 different national data protection authorities (NDPAs) across the region. “If your company has subsidiaries in every country in the EU, you will have to declare every personal data file to the country's NDPA in the national language,” says Yves Le Roux.

Three ways a CSO can stop being the bad guy
And when you're not going around telling people to stop doing what they want, or asking for money, are you delivering bad news about breaches? "I was the least invited person to meetings," recalls Adam Bly, who, before founding his own security company, San Francisco-based Bluebox Security, used to manage security, risk and compliance at companies like TiVo and Walt Disney. "I would 'no' to a lot of things because there was risk and I didn't have a solution," he said. But some security executives are redefining their roles to become people who say "yes," and restructuring their departments around becoming enablers of business. Here are some of the ways they're doing it.

Quote for the day:

"A 'strong' leader isn't someone who always has answers. It's someone who isn't afraid to learn and question." -- @Bill_George

April 03, 2015

Python Programming Resources
This is a comprehensive list of Python Programming resources. Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than would be possible in languages such as C++ or Java. The language provides constructs intended to enable clear programs on both a small and large scale. It was named by Guido van Rossum, the creator, after Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

SQL SERVER – 3 Common Mistakes of Agile Development
Most of the development shops that I’ve worked have struggled with the ongoing battle to get features built and shipped on a schedule that satisfies business requirements. Good developers are proud of their craft, and want maximum time to create; business needs features to go out the door quickly in order to compete. These goals are often in conflict with each other. Agile methodologies (such as scrum) try to help balance this tension by encouraging active conversation between business and development, and continuously delivering working software that is flexible and adaptable to change. In the shops where I’ve seen agile development fail to deliver, I’ve noticed the following 3 bad habits

Navigating I/O Flows/Networks to Enhance the Governance Management Cycle
Since its legacy versions, COBIT has explained the relationships among activities in several processes systematically and organically, showing I/O flows/networks, which is one of the strongest points of difference from other frameworks, guidelines or standards. However, COBIT 5 has transformed its I/O flows/networks, changing the unit of I/O relationships from processes in COBIT 4.1 to management practices. Thus, I/O flows/networks to support the governance management cycle must be traced back to processes as outlined in the conceptual model of business case processes in the article “The Business Case as an Operational Management Instrument—A Process View”6 (the “article”)

What Lies Beneath the Data Lake
Closely related to the quality issue is data governance. Hadoop’s flexible file system is also its downside. You can import endless data types into it, but making sense of the data later on isn’t easy. There’s also been plenty of concerns about securing data (specifically access) within Hadoop. Another challenge is that there are no standard toolsets yet for importing data in Hadoop and extracting it later. This is a Wild West environment, which can lead to compliance problems as well as slow business impact. To address the problem, industry initiatives have appeared, including the Hortonworks-sponsored Data Governance Initiative.

Scotched eggs: Is this the death of the Easter egg?
Easter eggs have not undergone the same levels of scrutiny of the rest of the code, he says, and there may be vulnerabilities attached to them. "They still happen, but they're less likely to be little bits of code, more likely to be hidden in documentation or code comments," adds Brendan Quinn, a software architect in London. "Actual executable stuff hidden in code is something that people are trying to eliminate. With varied success around the industry." The argument goes if a manufacturer can't stop developers from sneaking in benign undocumented features in, how can you be sure they've not inserted a backdoor, too.

The interoperable Enterprise
IT customers have each experienced the frustration of trying individually to get key IT suppliers to fix this problem. Many have also tried collaborative efforts, both within their own industry and across industries, to marshal collective procurement $ to bring pressure on the supply side. Also for too long IT suppliers have had to deal with large lists of vague and ambiguous requirement statements. ... To further these aims, The Open Group is evolving this business scenario that describes the problem caused by the lack of interoperability. The Open Group will use this business scenario to achieve convergence around the real business issues that IT suppliers should be addressing on behalf of their customers, and to set in motion an empowered team of our technical champions to work with The Open Group in setting the standards agenda to address these problems.

Toolkits for the Mind
Switching languages altogether wasn’t an option. Facebook had millions of lines of PHP code, thousands of engineers expert in writing it, and more than half a billion users. Instead, a small team of senior engineers was assigned to a special project to invent a way for Facebook to keep functioning without giving up on its hacky mother tongue. One part of the solution was to create a piece of software—a compiler—that would translate Facebook’s PHP code into much faster C++ code. The other was a feat of computer linguistic engineering that let Facebook’s programmers keep their PHP-ian culture but write more reliable code.

The Hierarchy of Needs for Analytics
We see too many organizations that achieve success with one minor analytics project and then try to live off that glamour, like middle-aged suburbanites reminiscing about that epic night out in college. What these companies really need to do is scale their analytics efforts – turn that one success into the first of many. In order to do that, there are series of steps an organization must take, and certain needs that must be met. You may be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, developed to explain the needs of the human race in pyramid form, from the most basic to the most advanced. In that spirit, we’ve developed our Hierarchy of Analytics Needs.

Make sense of cloud service brokers
That lack of consistency is frustrating. It's easy to define the business case. However, it's not easy to map that to the providers. Despite the differences in what each offers, CSBs clearly have a great deal of value if you use them appropriately: providing a common mechanism to access public and private cloud computing services, ensuring that these services are both cost-effective and deliver as expected. I hope some CSB standards will emerge; that would help the industry gain more traction. I know this space will change a great deal in the next few years, so today's selection might not be right tomorrow. Choose carefully, and be able to change your CSB approach in the future.

Fifteen Years of Service-Oriented Architecture at Credit Suisse
The sheer size of the landscape, the technical and architectural heterogeneity, and the need for dynamic development and tight integration create a very challenging environment for application integration. Credit Suisse strategically responded to these challenges by placing integration architecture in the spotlight, emphasizing the decomposition of the overall IT system into clearly defined subsystems decoupled through SOA.2 This article reports on Credit Suisse’s journey over the past 15 years. Why 15? Because 15 years ago, two events fundamentally challenged the traditional enterprise architecture: one, there was a need to replace existing systems because they had reached the end of their useful life cycle, and two, it became clear that, with the Internet, banking services had to be offered via new technical channels that were largely

Quote for the day:

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” -- John Buchan

April 02, 2015

Is an SDN Switch A New Form of a Firewall?
So, how do modern SDN products implement security and could they behave like a traditional firewall? When it comes to Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the Nexus 9000 switches operate in a stateless manner. The Application Network Profiles (ANPs) configured in the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) are deployed to the switches in the ACI fabric in a stateless fashion. Therefore, an ACI system would not be able to operate with the same level of security as a standard stateful firewall. This is why ACI allows for Layer-4-to-7 Service Graphs to be configured and integrated into the ACI fabric.

How to Radically Change the Way Team Building Happens at Your Company
The problem is that teams are still being built on the same principles that were present when the teamwork movement started. We have teams still largely built on departmental functions to serve specific purposes. Many teams are still made up of very similar workers with very similar mindsets and experience levels. But the workplace is a much different place now. In order to work in this kind of economy, teams need to have greater diversity and more effective and meaningful communication. And, they need to be more efficient in the way they work. Teams are put together for a reason...and that is to have a maximizing effect.

Microsoft to kick off Skype for Business rollout on April 14
The new Skype for Business Server will be available for download from Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) on May 1, 2015, the spokesperson confirmed. As Microsoft officials noted in March, the public Office 16 preview currently includes the Skype for Business client preview. While rebranding is a big piece of change from Lync to Skype for Business, there are some new features that Lync client users will see, too, as part of the transition. The new UI will make Skype for Business look and feel more like the consumer version of Skype. The contacts list, presence indicators, buttons, icons and app sounds will be consistent. But many of the Lync-specific features, like the Quick Actions button, allowing users to IM or call a contact with a single click, will still be there, too.

Modern CIO: The Cloud Is Your Ticket To Full Business Engagement
CIOs have to take the necessary steps to ensure company and customer data are as secure as possible. This requires a multipronged strategy, from ensuring that code developed internally has security baked in from the get-go, to working with business owners and other executives to ensure that the applications they want pass rigorous security testing. This is one area where CIOs need to work closely with other executives to help the business strike the right balance between security and functionality. Businesspeople are principally “focused on the functionality [of an application] and less on the domain of security. For a CIO, however, security is paramount.

Data science still woefully short on science
As Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular highlights, "That's a hint to the glorified business analysts in California who say in a mystifying voice, 'Data will tell you.' Yes, it will -- if you know what to ask." Asking good questions is the heart of data science and, indeed, all science. But the problem is that the very questions we ask bias the answers--or rather, the data behind those answers. ... But Beyer and Silver aren't arguing that we should throw up our hands in despair. Silver, for example, suggests that bias is primarily a problem when we attempt to ignore it: "Data-driven predictions can succeed--and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise." Beyer goes a bit further, offering a mechanism for combating bias. It's called science:

PredictionIO (Open Source Version) vs Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
Most of today’s applied machine learning tasks can be dealt with: classification, regression, recommendation, clustering and anomaly detection. With both tools you can easily interchange machine learning algorithms until settling on what works best on your problem. On Azure, Microsoft’s algorithms will be used by default (supposedly the same as those used in Xbox, Bing, Cortana...), whereas PredictionIO comes with Spark’s MLlib library, deep learning library and other JVM-based algorithm libraries. You can still use other libraries or your own custom algorithms. Microsoft recently added support for Python, which now makes it possible to copy existing code based on scikit-learn and Pandas for instance, and to have it run on Azure.

AWS drops prices -- and barriers -- to cloud adoption
Enterprises are looking for the same two items. Enterprises approach public cloud computing for two core reasons: cost savings and agility. We don't want to build any more data centers, we don't want to buy new hardware and software, and we don't want to toss huge amounts of money at the enterprise software providers. Also, we don't want to take a year or more to get new applications or infrastructure into production, and we want to change them as needed, with no latency. When I select public cloud providers for enterprise clients, the winner is the one that provides the best price and the best performance. Winning public cloud providers understand that prices are dropping, but quality of service must remain above expectations.

Cloud computing's second movement
Even if you believe the hype about security, speciality needs sometimes exceed even the fancy ISO badges the majors spruik. "It's a huge mistake to believe all content is created equal," Jeetu Patel, general manager of network share provider Syncplicity, said. "The question isn't whether the solution is working in the cloud; it's how you implement a cloud that meets the security and compliance needs of your organization. Enterprise file sync and share needs a hybrid approach that gives IT choice in how and where content is stored." Putting data and applications in the cloud also exposes the company to risks that more departments have a stake in, and Max Dufour, a partner at Harmeda technology and strategy consulting, is seeing more people coming to the table to influence the decision.

A Fast Story Point Estimation Process
Several Agile teams (internal and external) were part of the effort and we needed to know if we could make the launch. We had to determine if we could accomplish the remaining work in the time available – or if we would have to cut scope to get to the date. We pulled together the team as well as key managers (15 people in total) to figure out as quickly as possible if we could commit. We had groomed over 125 stories in advance and were able to estimate the story points in about 15 minutes. At the end of our session, we could definitely say that we needed to pare scope to make the launch – and the business could decide what to cut so the date could be preserved.

Facebook Releases React Native for Building Native Mobile Apps in JavaScript
React Native allows for the mixing of logic and presentation -- long considered a no-no in modern development. React is based on components -- units of code that act somewhat like classes -- that take in data and produce HTML based on that data. Individual components can provide certain specific functionality and be chained together for projects, encouraging reuse and simplifying the reasoning of program logic. "Since React components are just pure, side-effect-free functions that return what our views look like at any point in time, we never need to read from our underlying rendered view implementation in order to write to it," said project leader Tom Occhino in a blog post today.

Quote for the day:

“No great manager or leader ever fell from heaven, its learned not inherited.” -- Tom Northup

April 01, 2015

The next level of compliance: corporate consciousness
Technology will also play a key role in taking compliance to the next level. Governments and private companies are under more pressure now to to share information through digital platforms. The generations that have grown up with the internet expect far more transparency. That transparency will in turn promote accountability. Organizational cultures are crucial to take compliance to the next level. Human resource programs that encourage and reward ethics and transparency and promote wellbeing as an asset are central to corporate consciousness.

Why you should be spending more on security
Many CIOs endanger their companies simply by not spending enough on security. That may seem odd to posit, given that a recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey found that businesses now spend a higher percentage of their IT budgets on security than ever before. According to the survey, large organizations spend an average of 11 percent of their IT budgets on security while small businesses spend nearly 15 percent. But if you consider the proportion of the overall IT budget that businesses allocate to security, you’ll find a red herring. That's because the purpose of spending money on IT security — aside from ticking regulatory compliance boxes — is to reduce the risk of a security breach to an acceptable level. The amount of spending required to achieve this is not connected to overall IT spending in any way.

Why Organizations Struggle With Data Quality
Companies fall short of expectations in developing data-driven, actionable insights. "Most organizations are at lower levels of data quality sophistication at this stage," according to the report, titled "Create Your Ideal Data Quality Strategy." "But as investment continues and the chief data officer continues to become more popular, organizations will inevitably advance their strategies into more central functions. The people, processes and technology around data need to operate in a more coordinated fashion to ensure consistency and usability across the business." More than 1,200 global C-level execs, vice presidents, directors, managers and administrative staff took part in the research, which was conducted by Dynamic Markets.

When Should You Outsource Innovation?
A couple of data points can go a long way in helping us to understand the frequency of innovation failure. It is first worth noting that there are significant differences in the success/failure rates of 1) incremental innovation and 2) disruptive innovation. Incremental innovation is most commonly thought of as product line extensions (e.g. new cereal flavors, new soda brands, etc.) which tend to have lower failure rates. Incremental innovation can more easily be tested with consumers because there is a benchmark to compare and contrast against. Disruptive innovation is frequently a new to market product, service, or business model (e.g. Apple iPhone, Uber, HP Touchpad, etc.) that is much more difficult to evaluate prior to launch. With that increase in uncertainty comes a higher rate of failure.

6 Steps To Survive A DevOps Transformation
The art of success in a change initiative comes down to three factors. First, tackle something that will have a quick and measurable impact on one of your goals. Use a tool such as the Theory of Constraints or value stream mapping to find where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck. Second, do the least amount of work needed to move the needle, which means limiting the scope of your work. Third, partner with a team that's interested in pursuing change, and has sufficient capacity and capability to succeed. You're unlikely to get all of this right the first time, so pull the plug if things aren't working and try a different approach. Your first shot should aim to get some concrete improvement in a month or two.

Meet the Federal Officials Aiming to Usher in Govt's 'Golden Age’ of Data

"The first issue organizations should ask themselves is if they're really happy with the way they're leveraging their data at the moment, then they should not do anything at all,” said Peter Aiken, the founder of the Data Blueprint consultancy, a long-time advocate of the beefed-up data role. However, his 2013 tract, “The Case for the Chief Data Officer,” argues that most organizations do not fall into that camp -- and the solution is not to simply pile on yet another portfolio to the CIO's to-do list. "CIOs are not paying enough attention to data,” Aiken said. “But it's also very appropriate to recognize that they are being asked to do a tremendous number of things."

Introducing Project Spartan: The New Browser Built for Windows 10
In this preview, you will see a bold new design for Project Spartan – one that is streamlined and puts the focus on the page, not the browser. This is part of our vision for a browser that doesn’t visually interfere with your life on the Web, but supports it. You will also see some of the features that we demo’ed back in January and we hope you’ll love them. ... It’s important to note we’ll have more features and many improvements coming to Project Spartan before we make it broadly available. This preview is NOT a polished, ready-for-everyone release. For Windows Insiders, we’re excited to make Project Spartan available for your feedback, only a short time after we made it available for use internally at Microsoft.

The Real History Behind Agile Development
The need was to adopt software development methodologies which were ‘ lightweight’, had scope for changes during the development, were iterative in nature and involved frequent feedbacks. In the mid 1990s, 17 industry thought leaders realized that change was inevitable. They realised that adapting to changes, and executing them in an incremental manner, would result in productive software development. And thereon began the promotion of an innovative approach to software development. Earlier known as lightweight, these methodologies were soon put under an umbrella called Agile development in 2001 at the Snowbird Ski Resort, Utah, where these 17 thought-leaders came together for the first time.

Ford Grapples With Wearables and the Future of IoT
Ford is exploring a variety of ways to bring safety, health and wellness into its vehicles by connecting consumer wearable devices to its vehicles. “We’re not trying to turn the car into a medical device – we don’t want the FDA determining whether we can sell a Ford Focus,” Gary Strumolo, manager of vehicle design and technology in research and advanced engineering at Ford told CIO Journal. Instead, the idea is to let drivers and passengers bring devices they own that monitor everything from heart rate, blood oxygen and glucose levels to improve safety. Mr. Strumolo said that Ford would be respectful of privacy and health-care regulations by encrypting the data, not storing it and only sharing it in the ways the owner authorizes.

Become a Stronger Leader with these 10 Lessons from Captain, David Marquet
‘Tell me what to do’? If so, this is a serious problem. They should be coming up with their own methods and approaches for solving problems, empowered by your leadership and their trust in you. “Your members should understand the problem, your collective intention, and offer some solutions. The lack of that is unhealthy.” ... “You can bark a bunch of very smart orders to get short-term wins. That’s probably easier than my way, which is about giving control in a very controlled way. It will sate your appetite better as a leader. It’s always faster.” But you won’t get the long-term wins you hope for if you’re hoping to coerce people into doing good work. This creates short-term wins at the cost of long-term success.

Quote for the day:

"The power to lead is the power to mislead, and the power to mislead is the power to destroy." -- Thomas S. Monson

March 31, 2015

Creating a Creative and Innovative Culture at Scale
The development managers are responsible for holding regular one-on-one coaching talks. Each has a team that is spread over different game teams in different studios (see figure 1). The development managers remain developers and typically their team members share a similar skill set so that the development manager understands the domain in which their team works. Although spread out in the organization, development managers work as a community. All of them come together weekly to discuss what’s happening in different parts of the company, which allows them to identify issues and address them quickly.

Repository pattern, done right
The repository pattern has been discussed a lot lately. Especially about its usefulness since the introduction of OR/M libraries. This post (which is the third in a series about the data layer) aims to explain why it’s still a great choice. ... The repository pattern is an abstraction. It’s purpose is to reduce complexity and make the rest of the code persistent ignorant. As a bonus it allows you to write unit tests instead of integration tests. The problem is that many developers fail to understand the patterns purpose and create repositories which leak persistence specific information up to the caller.

Data Transparency Transformation
Data standardization is essential but not sufficient to improve the quality of financial data, to reduce or eliminate duplication, and carry out our work. We also need to improve ways to securely share sensitive data, both among authorities within the same jurisdiction and across borders. Data sharing is essential because none of us no one regulator or company alone possesses or has access to all of the data needed to paint a complete picture of threats to financial stability. The financial system is complex and ever-changing, so even if we put all of our data together in one place, significant gaps would remain and new ones would emerge. It is a puzzle with many interlocking types and pieces of data

If Everybody is Responsible, Nobody is Responsible.
The tough part of compliance is the coordination of multiple compliance efforts and filling the gaps. When compliance fails, it often fails because a piece of compliance was not handled properly. It might have been a simple piece, but nonetheless a critical one. Everyone wants responsibility for compliance, because they have a piece of compliance and they believe theirs is most important. If you have ever watched the congressional hearings of Enron, WorldCom, or Tyco, you will have seen a parade of people from Audit, Legal and the Board saying, “I had my piece covered. What failed was not my responsibility and I was as surprised as you that it failed.”

The Privacy Challenges of Cloud Computing
Where an organization engages a cloud services provider it is important to identify whether the cloud provider is a controller or a processor. In most instances, it is likely that the cloud provider will be a processor. The Information Commissioner has issued guidance on this issue which may be helpful in making more detailed analysis. The geographical location of the servers used to store personal data is often contentious. Where the servers are based outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), a customer will need to address the eighth data protection principle which, in broad terms, requires adequate safeguards to be in place when personal data is transferred outside the EEA.

Distributed Cloud?
Migrating applications to the cloud is more than just moving virtual machines into the cloud; many tools, such as HotLink,CloudVelox, Veeam, and Zerto do this well enough. Migration is more about how those applications work within the cloud. It is about the connections between tools running within the VMs. Ultimately, it’s about applications and their attendant data. The intersection of data and application needs to be considered when moving to the cloud. To provide resiliency for an application using a cloud service, you may use multiple data centers within a cloud, or even multiple clouds. When you use multiple clouds, you end up with a hybrid cloud approach to your application.

BI and Big Data: Same or Different?
Contrary to some of the market hype, data democratization and big data do not eliminate the need for the "BI 101" basics, such as data governance, data quality, master data management, data modeling, well thought out data architecture, and many others. If anything, big data makes these tasks and processes more challenging because more data is available to more people, which in turn may cause new mistakes and drive wrong conclusions. All of the typical end-to-end steps necessary to transform raw data into insights still have to happen; now they just happen in different places and at different times in the process. To address this challenge in a "let's have the cake and eat it too" approach, Forrester suggests integrating the worlds of BI and big data in a flexible hub-and-spoke data platform.

Taking IT reorgs to the extreme
What's different today is the degree of uncertainty about what the IT group is if virtually all companies are now built, top to bottom, on technology. CIOs themselves are divided about their own futures. In our 2015 State of the CIO survey, 49 percent of 558 IT leaders said they're destined to become managers of contractors and cloud vendors--hardly strategic. Indeed, sometimes old ideas and established leaders don't cut it. RSA Insurance Group in London cleaned house last year, replacing several senior executives, including all IT leaders and the CIO. RSA also created the position of chief digital officer as it tries to move to "more disciplined and effective use of technology."

Hologram - Finally, AWS Key Distribution that Makes Sense
Hologram is written in Go, Google’s “systems programming language” written by some of the original designers of C and Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It is a language explicitly designed for aggressive simplicity, both of programming itself and of deployment / operational concerns. The ability to create a static binary with assets compiled in allowed us to do a sophisticated multi-stage rollout of Hologram to developers, which we credit with how quickly developers adopted it. Go allowed us to produce a version of the binary that had some placeholder credentials compiled in, that was first deployed to developers. This version would simply use the compiled-in credentials to generate temporary ones, and expose the same metadata interface that applications expected.

Taiwan seeks stronger cyber security ties with U.S. to counter China threat
Taiwan was the most-targeted country in the Asia-Pacific region during the first half of 2014 for hacking attempts aimed at penetrating computer systems to steal data, according to U.S. data security firm FireEye Inc. Chang said the percentage of cyber attacks on government systems originating from mainland China was "very high", and warned that there was potential for hackers to use Taiwan as a back door into the U.S. systems. "The possibility is there," Chang said, while emphasizing that the main purpose of Chinese hacking attempts into Taiwan is not to steal U.S. data and that he has "no way of knowing" if an incursion into Taiwan has led to any U.S. intelligence leaks.

Quote for the day:

"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing." -- Albert Schweitzer