Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 15, 2015

Flash Storage Prices Keep Falling: What it Means For the Future

The combination of increased capacity and lower prices have turned SSD into an even more competitive alternative to hard disk drives. When one of the main selling points of HDD is its larger capacity, it’s easy to see why hard disk drives may fall in overall use. At the moment, most hard disk drives are stuck at around 10 TB in capacity. SSD has yet to reach that same level, but it is quickly catching up. Experts are predicting that solid-state drives will eventually match HDD, or at least come close to matching it, sometime in 2015. SSD will likely overtake HDD capacity in 2016, with some experts even estimating that 30 TB solid-state drives will be produced as soon as 2017. At the same time, the price of flash storage will continue to fall.

Google Proposes Open Source Beacons

Google is calling its beacon protocol Eddystone, a name that comes from a lighthouse in England. It's available on GitHub, under the Apache 2.0 license. The software supports Android, iOS, and many BLE devices. It is compliant with the Bluetooth Core Specification. In contrast to iBeacon, it also supports multiple types of data (frame types). So while an iBeacon is limited to broadcasting an identification code, an Eddystone beacon could transmit an identification code, or a URL, or telemetry data about voltage or device temperature. Google is also releasing two APIs: The Nearby API for Android and iOS, which allows developers to create publish and subscribe methods to share messages and connections between nearby devices, and the Proximity Beacon API, to manage data associated with a BLE beacon through a REST interface.

6 things Evernote does that Microsoft OneNote can't

So it’s not surprising that once people pick Evernote or Microsoft OneNote as their repository of choice for digital scraps, doodlings and scanned documents, they usually stick with that choice. Once you have committed to one of these two popular products, it’s not easy to toggle between them or switch entirely. About a year ago, I chose Evernote over OneNote, and I started amassing my own digital archive. At the time, Evernote's Mac software was far superior to OneNote's Mac app. However, Microsoft has continually upgraded OneNote for Mac and iOS, and today it's a legitimate Evernote rival; if I were facing the Mac Evernote versus Mac OneNote decision today, it would be a different situation.

Self-Charging Phones Are on the Way, Finally

One way the consumer electronics industry is trying to fix this is by aligning with wireless charging technologies like Qi and Rezence. So far, though, only a handful of smartphones from companies like LG, Samsung, and, HTC use the Qi standard, while Rezence-supporting handsets are set to come out later this year. With such wireless charging still far from the mainstream (and still requiring your phone to be on a charging mat or base that itself plugs into a wall), a few companies, including Nikola Labs, are trying to figure out other ways to make you less dependent on outlets so you can keep using your phone for battery-intensive things like looking at websites, navigating trips, and streaming videos.

Asking the right questions: unlocking the value buried in all that data

There are a lot of untold stories in our data said Dave Schubmehl, research director for content analytics, recovery and cognitive systems research with International Data Corp. (IDC), who presented the results of research of 2,000 global knowledge workers about what they do to unlock value in their data. He said the state of information access hasn’t dramatically changed over the last decade, despite the big data hype. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to find the information hidden in your company, whether it’s in a content management system or your email servers. If you acquired a company, it may be in another system you don’t know is there,” said Schubmehl.

So About That Whole Tech-Eating-Jobs Thing

All of which would be a good thing–as most jobs are crap jobs–except that our society is not built for a world in which more and more people are unemployed. Not unless we implement something like a basic income. …That’s the argument, at any rate. It’s one I’ve made repeatedly in this space over the last few years. (Echoing many others, to be clear.) But intellectual honesty compels me to admit: the available evidence does not currently support it at all. If the USA is the canary in our global coal mine–which seems likely, given its high technology and liberal labor laws–then the workers of the world have little to worry about any time soon. “Robots Seem to Be Improving Productivity,

How To Survive Digital Transformation

MIT researchers say the invention of the steam engine began the most transformative social development in the last 3000 years. Fast-forward to today’s paradigm shift – the convergence of technologies fueled by innovation accelerators like renewable energy, robotics, cognitive computing, and the Internet of Things. Is your organization prepared to thrive? That’s the question that was discussed in a recent episode of Game Changers radio: The Next Paradigm Shift and Your Digital DNA, hosted by Bonnie D. Graham, and featuring Futurist Thornton May, Frank Diana of TCS Consulting and me, Timo Elliott, SAP Innovation Evangelist.

14 Security Fails That Cost Executives Their Jobs

When you look at the list of companies that have been hacked in some way, it becomes apparent that even the most technically sophisticated organizations can be breached given a sufficiently well-funded, determined attacker. Speaking on 60 Minutes in 2014, FBI Director James Comey put it this way: "There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese." And Chinese hackers are not the only hackers in the world. Given the vulnerability of IT systems, the first act of an incoming CEO, CIO, or CTO should be to write a resignation letter, apologizing for the "unforeseen" data breach that everyone feared was coming. Ideally, the letter's presence will serve as a reminder to prioritize security concerns.

20 Features of Office 365 That May Surprise You

Office 365 for Business offers the same features (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc) that you maybe familiar with, plus additional tools to help you collaborate and be more productive. What does that mean? In short, Office isn’t now constrained to well, your office! From PC, Tablet to Phone you can access, edit, collaborate and save your files across devices and when on the go. But there’s more…..here are 20 features of Office 365 that may surprise you.....

Check Your Normative Defaults

Once you start thinking about normative defaults in your digital experiences, it’s hard to stop seeing them everywhere. Software is considered more science than art, but highly subjective decisions go into building it. ... Not all defaults are problematic. We want software that makes reasonable assumptions, informed by demographics, user research, and past behavior where obtainable. Maybe one distinction to draw is that the defaults should be less about our core identity (assuming one is male, or an English-speaker), and more about our presumed mindset when using the web service. You may not be sure who a user is, but you may be able to infer why they are there.

Quote for the day:

“The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.” -- Jay Samit

July 14, 2015

CIOs must embrace consumer cloud tools or risk losing control

Finding the right data and information is still a complex and convoluted proposition for many employees, so they look to external tools for help, according to Vanessa Thompson, research director of enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies, IDC.Thompson says IDC's latest research indicates that inefficient access to data from remote locations is undermining productivity, and she says it's getting worse. For example, Thompson still hears from executives who email their work as attachments to personal accounts because they can't easily share work files or take them home from work. It's not always a bad thing for employees to use multiple collaboration platforms at work, but disparate sets of tools can negatively affect workflow and productivity, and threaten a company's information assets.

An Overview of NFV Elements

The main appeal of using NFV to deploy network elements and virtual network functions (VNFs) is that services can be launched more quickly, by installing software on a standard hardware platform. This is akin to the way software applications could be developed and launched for the PC platform when it first emerged. Another advantage is lower capital expenditures, because standardized hardware platforms tend to drive down costs. The NFV model also adds flexibility, allowing service providers to launch, improve, and incrementally optimize services using software updates rather than wholesale hardware replacement. It will also create an “ecosystem” of third-party software vendors eager to supply improvement.

Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Awful, Flawed Advice

Passions are magical, but businesses are grounded in realities. Do you remember when Dorothy and the gang peered behind the curtain to find out that the Wizard of Oz wasn’t an all-powerful being, but rather, kind of a loser? Or when you found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real? Or when you figured out that your parents weren’t superheroes, just people with flaws? It sucked, right? Our hobbies are about escapism. There is a bit of magic and fantasy in them. When you make that your business, you are privy to the nuts and bolts. That tempers the magic.

A Biodegradable Computer Chip That Performs Surprisingly Well

In conventional chip manufacturing, electronic components like transistors are made on the surface of a rigid wafer made of a semiconducting material such as silicon. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, led by Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, made the electronic components in a similar way but then used a rubber stamp to lift them from the wafer and transfer them to a new surface made of nanocellulose. This reduced the amount of semiconducting material used by a factor of up to 5,000, without sacrificing performance. In two recent demonstrations, Ma and his colleagues showed they can use nanocellulose as the support layer for radio frequency circuits that perform comparably to those commonly used in smartphones and tablets. They also showed that these chips can be broken down by a common fungus.

Hacked in the U.S.A.: China’s Not-So-Hidden Infiltration Op

“China is building the Facebook of human intelligence capabilities,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. “This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals.” The most serious breach of records occurred at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where records for every person given a government background check for the past 15 years may have been compromised. The head of the government personnel office, Katherine Archuleta, resigned Friday as lawmakers demanded to know what went wrong. The campaign began in early 2013 with the travel records, said Laura Galante, manager of threat intelligence for FireEye Inc., a private security company that has been investigating the cyber-attacks.

How cloud governance proves essential in the Bimodal IT era

To a great extent, the advent of social media has also resulted in direct customer feedback on the sentiment from the external customer that businesses need to react to. That is actually changing the timelines. It is requiring IT to be delivered at the pace of business. And the very definition of IT is undergoing a change, where we need to have the right paradigm, the right technology, and the right solution for the right business function and therefore the right application.Since the choices have increased with the new style of IT, the manner in which you pair them up, the solutions with the problems, also has significantly changed. With more choices, come more such pairs on which solution is right for which problem. That's really what has caused the change that we're going through.

Hacking Team's malware uses UEFI rootkit to survive OS reinstalls

UEFI is a replacement for the traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and is meant to standardize modern computer firmware through a reference specification. But there are multiple companies that develop UEFI firmware, and there can be significant differences between the implementations used by PC manufactures. Hacking Team developed a method for infecting the UEFI firmware developed by Insyde Software, a Taiwanese company that counts Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba among its customers, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro. “However, the code can very likely work on AMI BIOS as well,” the Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post. .

How to Beat the Bots

Technology is redefining work and commerce, and if we’re smart it can also redefine education for employment and advancement so everyone can monetize, or improve, any skill and connect with any employer in need of it. “Up to 540 million people could benefit from online talent platforms by 2025,” McKinsey said. It is not that hard. We need to be making much better use of the federal government’s labor market data and that of websites like Monster.com, HireArt.com and LinkedIn, and even consider creating skill equivalents of the Obamacare health exchanges. Online talent platforms — that can link everyone’s C.V. with every job opening, with the skills needed for that job, with the online and campus-based schools offering those skills with data showing which schools do it best — create more employment, more relevant skills and the right education for them.

Changing the World by Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators

According to O'Reilly, no matter the size of the company, as long as organizations have the right core values and mission, they can be having fun and creating value. In his career he has found that many of the most interesting movements actually start, not with entrepreneurs wanting to make money, but with people who just want to make something cool and are having fun doing it. Although the fun stage of companies doesn't always last forever -- when companies get to a certain size the logic of the machine takes over -- the commitment and values driven mentality does. "I think the Google of 10 or 15 years ago was having a lot more fun than the Google of today, even though Larry and Sergey really are deeply committed and values driven," says O'Reilly.

Integrating Raft into JGroups

Raft favors consistency over availability: in terms of the Cap theorem, jgroups-raft is a C-P system, meaning that if it can’t get a majority of nodes agreeing, it won’t be available but it will maintain its consistency. If for example we have a cluster of 5 nodes, 3 is the majority, so it will be possible to read/write on the system even with 2 nodes failures. With more than 2 failures it’s impossible to get a majority so the system won’t be available (though it’s possible to have some read-only features in this case). In summary, at a very high level Raft consists of a leader election, (which requires a majority), as well as nodes being coordinated by the leader, each having one persistent log detailing what they are doing. An excellent graphic explanation of how Raft algorithm works in detail is available here.

Quote for the day:

"By the time they fully evolve, machine learning will have become culturally invisible " McKinsey on Machine Learning

July 13, 2015

An Algorithmic Sense of Humor? Not Yet.

Radev and co say the results provide some insight into the nature of funny captions. “We found that the methods that consistently select funnier captions are negative sentiment, human-centeredness, and lexical centrality,” they say. That’s a curious study that is hard to evaluate. The researchers acknowledge that there is no surprise in finding that negative sentiment correlates with funniness; human-centeredness is also an expected property of humor. The significance of lexical centrality is less clear. And therein lies the problem with this kind of research. It’s easy to imagine that one goal from this kind of work would be to create a machine capable of automatically choosing the best caption from thousands entered into the New Yorker competition each week.

Your Data Center – White or not White-Box Switches

They want the ability to automate and drive operations cost down and transform to cloud economics. They want to scale their architecture in an open multi-vendor environment that can be managed at velocity in a simplified agile manner without any compromise on security or compliance. They want to be able to provision and apply policies across the entire infrastructure without the cumbersome or possible errors that may jeopardize security and business uptime. And as they run physical and virtual workloads, they want an infrastructure that is transparent and enable these workloads to reside anywhere without restrictions on movements. Does whitebox switch model help these customers in that journey? Cisco’s Frank D’Agostino sat down with Forrester Andre Kindness to discuss this topic.

How CIOs can create the voice of IT

"Smart CIOs are aware that just like the cell phone space, their world has become commoditized," says Kristen Lamoreaux, president of Lamoreaux Search LLC, an information technology-focused placement firm. "Every one of their business leaders has options. They no longer have to go to IT for computer services -- they can go to Amazon and order what they want in three clicks. Therefore, IT needs to demonstrate its value … and CIOs are recognizing they need to step up their game in terms of communications." ... "As I start building out the elastic nature of IT, I need someone to help communicate and change the conversation I have with business and put things in business-enablement terms—not technical terms," Bhagat explains.

'Platform revolution' signals the end of industry boundaries

One key implication of the platform revolution is that industry boundaries blur as platforms take over and customers' demands and behaviors continue to evolve. In the platform era, a drug store chain becomes a healthcare provider, as is the case with Walgreens; a phone manufacturer becomes a bank. And most of these platforms seek to deliver "an outcome" for customers rather than a product. Increasingly, customers come to a company for a result -- "I want to improve my health, I want more leisure time, I want more convenience in how I manage my home," Daugherty said, outlining this shift in customer demand. The "outcome economy" doesn't just apply to consumers; the shift is broad and affects the B2B world as well, including Accenture, he said.

Computers Still Beat Mobile for Online Shopping

Reasons for the hesitation to shop on mobile devices could be related to the potential for errors, the study said. "While Amazon offers customers one-click purchasing, thus avoiding the tedium and potential error involved with entering credit card and address information, even this is not a perfect solution for first-time buyers, and is often not available on most other retailer sites," the study's authors wrote. "Until that changes, the computer may remain the device of choice for e-commerce, meaning retailers ought to continue optimizing the large-screen online retail experience for consumers."

IoT analytics brings new levels of innovation to new product development

In order to develop and market new products most effectively, you need to create a "single point of truth," or a body of data and insights that is comprehensive, accurate and timely. These data and insights will provide all disciplines within the company involved in designing, manufacturing and marketing a new product the information they need to make critical decisions – product features, pricing, distribution and related functions. ... Streetline is a good example of how a company is using what some are calling IoT analytics to build out new products. The company recently launched Streetline IoT Gateway, part of the company’s mission to create smart cities and smart campuses.

How Digital NEST could lift a struggling rural community

Digital NEST works on two primary levels — the first is providing access to tech, and also providing access to a diverse community. It's modeled after companies like Google and Apple, so there's plenty of food, the furniture is moveable, and it's just a cool place for kids to set up shop. The second level is education. Digital NEST offers short courses they call Institutes that cover everything from how to write a resume, to graphic design, coding, and videography. Basically, any tech skills that could lead to a job, Martinez said. It's impossible to explain the mission of Digital NEST without getting into the much larger, flawed ecosystems of both the tech industry and the plight of a community like Watsonville.

The Mobile Arms Race: Why Privacy Is the Next Battleground

It’s unclear how much privacy — or the perception of it — will matter in the mobile race toward “big data.” The concept of big data involves piecing together information from multiple areas to create new insights. This approach requires the consumer to share more in order to receive more personalized and relevant features. ... Data and the features that can be built around customer information have become the current battleground in the mobile wars because tools like machine learning represent the last frontier in a mature market. “We’ve reached a period of incremental innovation, and Google and Apple are looking for the next big leap,” says Saikat Chaudhuri, an adjunct management professor

How techies can volunteer their skills to help nonprofits

Finding others who want to use their tech skills for good is a great place to start. One possibility is Catchafire, a platform that matches talented people with causes they are passionate about. Basically, you pick a topic you care about, like "black male achievement," "maternal health," or "animals," and then pick what you're good at. It could be "data analysis, "digital marketing," "engineering," "web development," or a range of other fields in technology. Catchafire helps you find a project to work on from there. It may be remote or in person, one-day long or several months long. It shows you how much money you're helping save by donating your technical skills, and you get to practice those skills in the process.

The Most Common Reasons Why Software Projects Fail

Project failure can be defined as one or a combination of cost overruns, late deliveries, poor quality, and/or developing a product that does not get used. Regardless of their involvement during the planning stages, more often than not, software developers bear the brunt of the responsibility for such situations; after all, they’re the ones who built the application. However, closer examinations of the projects do not always show evidence of incompetence. ... Being clear on these definitions ensures projects get off on the right foot with realistic targets and an understanding of the project’s constraints. Not doing so can send a project on a death march from the start due to one of more of the following factors.

Quote for the day:

“The only way to follow your path is to take the lead.” -- Joe Peterson

July 12, 2015

Inside the murky world of 'social media influencers'

Companies can connect with influencers by identifying and eventually contacting the people who line up with their brands, products and target demographics. For example, a clothing company hoping to gain traction with female millennials for an upcoming collection could partner with a fashion blogger to get potential buyers interested in products. An effective influencer might be someone target customers already follow and admire. Depending on the reach and status of the blogger or influencer, companies may send product samples, request reviews or profiles, or partner up for giveaways and contests. In some cases, influencers are sent on trips to particular hotels or destinations, supplied with cars, or invited to parties or events, with the understanding that they will promote the associated products or services.

Microservices 101: The good, the bad and the ugly

"That contract will include its interface: how do I invoke it remotely, what do I invoke it remotely with? A lot of people talk about microservices and REST [Representational State Transfer] and, absolutely, REST is a fundamental approach for microservices. But it's not necessarily the only way that you might want to talk to your service," Little said. "You might want to talk to it using a binary protocol. You might have no choice but to talk to it using some legacy protocols. With COBOL, even though you're moving to microservices, you might still have a significant amount of your architecture that's still tied to CORBA. It might not be the exclusive way to talk to your microservice but you might have to have a CORBA adapter in there somewhere."

Is Augmented Reality The Next Tech Revolution?

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. Two of the most exciting augmented reality systems on the way are Microsoft’s HoloLens and MagicLeap’s technology. Magic Leap is known for its secrecy about the hardware and software it’s building to deliver a “cinematic reality” experience that its CEO says is “disassociated” with the “legacy terms” of augmented reality and virtual reality.

Mistakes To Avoid With A Startup Board Of Directors

Most entrepreneurs avoid setting up a board of directors for their new business unless or until they sign up an investor who demands a seat on the board. That implies that a board of directors has no value to the founder, and is just another burden that to be assumed for the privilege of attracting outside investors or going public. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. Especially for entrepreneurs who have not built and sold companies before, and need this startup to be an attractive acquisition or IPO target in a few years, I can’t think of a better way to enlist outside experts and keep them motivated to help you meet the challenges of a startup. High-performing startups today are the ones that use every resource at their disposal.

Fujitsu And Microsoft To Revolutionise The Manufacturing Through IoT Innovation

Both Microsoft and Fujitsu have stated that the solution has a range of different applications and can be tailored to a wide array of different sectors, which in turn will give both companies experience of other markets. This move is not the first by either company into developing IoT/M2M solutions. It follows Fujitsu’s IoT innovation drive to expand its core data centres in Japan in order to accelerate demand for its cloud services. For Microsoft, this is one of two recent IoT innovation collaborations, the other being its partnership with Miele, the manufacturer of domestic appliances, to produce a new breed of smart appliances, following a proof-of-concept study.

How R can supercharge data science

Already we’re seeing the capabilities of R bear fruit across companies both new and traditional: Norway’s eSmart Systems has been deploying R-based forecasting models in the cloud to help optimize the country’s power grid using data from smart meters. American Century Investments is using R as the basis for its quantitative investment platform. The National Weather Service uses R in its River Forecast Centers to help predict flooding. Real-estate analysis company Trulia uses R to help predict home prices. R is part of Twitter’s Data Science Toolbox, used for monitoring the site’s user experience. The list goes on. But despite this widespread use, we’re really just beginning to understand the power of today’s advanced statistical platforms.

Group Policy Terminology and Concepts

A group policy object (GPO) is an Active Directory object which contains one or more Group Policy settings which affect the configuration settings for users or computers. A GPO acts as a container for the settings configured in Group Policy files. The Active Directory components that can be linked to a GPO are computers, sites, domains, organizational units (OUs). By linking a GPO to sites, domains, and OU actually applies the GPO settings to any user or computer objects within that particular container. As already mentioned, a GPO can be thought of as being a container that contains Group Policy settings. The GPO identifies the following components of Group Policy:

Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

Everyone has different ideas for how it’ll work. Livescribe’s pen uses special paper which helps the system digitize your writing for you. With Phree, you’re separating input and output, like moving a mouse in your hand and seeing the cursor on the screen move—nothing comes out of the pen when you scribble it, but the exact lines show up on the screen. Wacom makes both a product where you write on the screen (Cintiq) and products with a pressure-sensitive pen-input tablet that sits on your desk (Intuos). Microsoft’s researchers believe, however, that the only way to advance pen-based input is for you to write directly on the screen.

How Android Wear can change the way you travel

Android Wear improves your trip and helps you with the often excessive number of details that come with planning one. Of course, you get the same alerts you get on your phone: flight reminders, nearby places to check out, and hotel price drops. Since they come to your watch, your travel partner doesn’t get irritated that yet again that you’ve whipped out your phone. If you do it right, you’ll actually use less technology during your travel and spend more time looking around. But arriving at such travel bliss takes some work on your part. You’ll need to ensure your Google account is optimized to mine the right travel details, and of course you’ll want the proper apps. Here’s how I get my Moto 360 ready to get a better experience out of each trip.

Infrastructure as a Service and Cloud Technologies

Besides the economic advantages from a cost perspective, the main competitive advantages are the flexibility and speed the cloud architecture can add to your IT environment. In particular, this kind of architecture can provide faster deployment of and access to IT resources, and fine-grain scalability. A recent survey indicated the issues that beginner and experienced enterprise cloud users face. 4For beginners, the main issues are security, managing multiple clouds, integration with current systems, governance, and lack of expertise. Experienced companies face issues of compliance, cost, performance, managing multiple clouds, and security.

Quote for the day:

"Disruptive thought is seeing something normally ignored to find value in what's different" -- @terencemauri

July 11, 2015

Researchers Harness the Power of Networked Brains in Monkeys and Rats

The researchers tested the ability of rat brain networks to perform basic computing tasks. For example, by delivering electrical pulse patterns derived from a digital image, they recorded the electrical outputs and measured how well the network of neurons processed that image. In another test, the researchers delivered information about barometric pressure and temperature and the brain network computed the probability of rain. The brain networks were consistently better than a single brain, especially when the task involved more than one computation step.

Bank’s Risk Governance Framework Needs Three Lines Of Defense: BIS

According to the revised guidance, the board should ensure that the risk management, compliance and internal audit functions are properly positioned, staffed and resourced and carry out their responsibilities independently, objectively and effectively. ... The revised guidance emphasizes the chair of the board plays a crucial role in the proper functioning of the board. It suggests the chair encourage and promote critical discussion and ensure that dissenting views can be freely expressed and discussed within the decision-making process. Thus, the third principle envisages the board to structure itself in terms of leadership, size and use of committees so as to effectively carry out its oversight role and other responsibilities.

Microsoft's new Power BI service to be generally available starting July 24

The new version of Power BI doesn't require an Office 365 subscription. Users can access it from either the free Power BI apps that it is building or from inside a browser. Those using the existing Power BI Windows app will see that app replaced by an updated one, though the existing app will still be available to those who need it. ... The idea of the updated Power BI service is to enable business users to benefit from business-intelligence and analytics without requiring analysts or other middlemen to set up or model the service and data, said James Phillips, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Business Intelligence Product group.

What’s the future of analytics within the enterprise architecture?

Today’s CIOs/CTOs face significant challenges. Unless they’re with a start-up, they generally have a legacy mix of IT systems supporting critical business processes, and they’ve added new analytical technologies over time. This overall mix of analytic technologies and systems has gotten so complex and engrained into the organizational fabric, that there’s an inability to change it. That’s an obstacle to becoming more digital and exploiting the latest analytical capabilities. Modernizing the "factory," as I like to call the platform supporting operations, is not as simple as just removing technology and replacing it with the latest and greatest.

CloudBees Enhances Jenkins Platform for Hybrid CI, CD for Enterprise Software

With its just-announced CloudBees Jenkins Platform, the company looks to ensure developer access to enterprise-class features, and to help companies accelerate DevOps adoption. "Customers have expressed a need for a solution that will help their organization adopt continuous delivery and, ultimately, DevOps practices at their own pace," CloudBees vice president of products Harpreet Singh said in a statement. ... The latest CloudBees offering focus on helping developers tackle many of the top to span cloud-based, premise-based, hybrid and mobile environments, to work with multiple coding languages, and to manage entire application lifecycles, from development and testing through delivery.

Probing the Dark Side of Google’s Ad-Targeting System

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute built a tool called AdFisher to probe the targeting of ads served up by Google on third-party websites. ... Google uses its data to target ads, but ad buyers can make some decisions about demographics of interest and can also use their own data sources on people’s online activity to do additional targeting for certain kinds of ads. Nor do the examples breach any specific privacy rules—although Google policy forbids targeting on the basis of “health conditions.” Still, says Anupam Datta, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who helped develop AdFisher, they show the need for tools that uncover how online ad companies differentiate between people.

Disciplined Agile Program Management: External Workflow

The activities associated with these process blades are often very highly related. For example, in some organizations the activities associated with enterprise architecture and reuse management are fulfilled by a single group. In other organizations some product management activities are performed by the portfolio management team and some by the enterprise architecture team. Some organizations may choose to have a separate group for each process blade. And of course the organizational structure will evolve over time as your various teams learn how to work with one another. Every organization is different.

Top 5 factors driving domestic IT outsourcing growth

The first is diversification of buyer needs. As buyers have to support new types of services, certain types of tasks may be better delivered nearshore rather than offshore. Secondly, there may be a desire to leverage the soft skills of onshore talent. Thirdly, domestic sourcing can be a way to overcome the structural challenges associated with offshore delivery, such as high attrition and burn out in graveyard shifts. Fourth, companies may be seeking to manage certain externalities like regulatory requirements of fears about visa availabilities. Finally, there may be client-specific needs that demand domestic solutions—a local bank that wants to keep jobs in the community or a company with no experience offshore looking to start the learning curve.

Why enterprises need containers and Docker

Once Docker is in place, it drastically simplifies and de-risks the deploy process. Developers have more of a chance to work on application knowing that once they deploy to a Docker file, it will run on their server. They can build their app on their laptop, deploy as a Docker file, and type in a command to deploy it to production. On AWS, using ECS with Docker takes away some of the configuration you need to complete with Docker. You can achieve workflows where Jenkins or other configuration integration tools run tests, AWS CloudFormation scales up an environment, all in minutes.

The Right Way to Plan an Innovation Tour

The problem is, all of these good people are often guided to see a distorted reality. Not that more formalized presentations and assessments are necessarily Potemkin villages, but they often miss what’s really going on. It’s just that these actors naturally tend toward self-promotion. ... But an innovation tour can be valuable, as long as you know what to look for and think about. Entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems aren’t simple, easily graspable objects; they are a construct we use to make sense of an exceedingly complex reality.

Quote for the day:

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B." -- James Yorke

July 10, 2015

The underexploited big data sweet spot for healthcare
"They want predictive analytics derived from big data that can help them to better understand consumer behaviors and patterns in their service areas so they can determine which of their services is most likely to be in demand for certain demographic segments," said Elson. This might mean determining if there are certain demographic profiles at high risk for diabetes that might need preventive or treatment care. In other cases, analytics can be employed to assist hospital personnel in keeping add-on revenues within the institution by measuring which doctors regularly make referrals out of network where these add-on revenues are lost — or even preventing costs by identifying patients who should be reached out to for preventive care, which in turn can lessen visits to the ER.

Can Converged Infrastructure Help IT Get Its Mojo Back?
The challenge is that by operating in infrastructure silos, traditional IT organizations typically can’t move with the same speed and agility as their more nimble cloud services counterparts. This lack of speed or responsiveness to real-time business demands has compelled many end users, particularly application developers, to seek alternatives in the cloud. With the swipe of a credit card, there is a virtually unlimited amount of server compute, storage and networking that can be instantaneously dialed up via the likes of AWS, Google, Azure, and Rackspace. As a result, some IT organizations are being outmaneuvered, outflanked and in some instances, are perilously close to being put out of business by cloud service providers.

Storage systems on Agile
Hardware modifications often introduce timing alterations that can expose code bugs that had never been seen before. Hardware changes also take a longer time to instantiate (build into electronics). This can be worked around by using hardware simulators but timing is often not the same as the real hardware and it can take 10X to 100X more real-time to execute simple operations. Nonetheless, new hardware typically takes weeks to months to debug and this can be especially hard if the software is changing as well. Similar to hardware concerns, OS or host storage protocol changes (say from NFSv3 to NFSv4) would take a lot more testing/debugging to get right. So it helps if the hardware doesn’t change, the OS doesn’t change and the host IO protocol doesn’t change when your using Agile to develop storage software.

Global Cooperation and Cybersecurity: A Q&A with Bruce McConnell
The three elements of risk are threats, vulnerability and consequences. A lot of what needs to be done is to reduce vulnerability. Part of what EWI is working on is promoting the availability of more secure information and communications in technology so that buyers and users can start with an infrastructure that is actually defensible as opposed to the infrastructure we have today which is very difficult to defend. We figure that, yes, there are threats, and yes, there are potential consequences, but one of the places that we need more work in particular is reducing vulnerabilities.

Mobile payments come of age
As CIOs and IT executives, it is clearly time to embrace these technologies whether they are embedded in payments-related applications or others more relevant to your enterprise and/or industry. Most of these technologies have reached critical mass, and some are even mainstream at this point. The more we as an IT community understand the capabilities and constraints of these mobile payments technologies, the more effectively we can integrate them and the more useful, reliable, trustworthy and convenient mobile device technology-enabled payments will become.

What Chicago’s New ‘Cloud Tax’ May Mean for Service Providers
The tax issue is going to increasingly come on the radar as governments look to recover the dwindling tax revenue from brick-and-mortar businesses, he said. Shih also noted a particular implementation problem in defining what qualifies. “The impact on infrastructure service providers starts with how regional and local governments are going to pinpointresidency,” he said. “Is the tax applicable when a server is hosted in a given jurisdiction or is it where the customer logs in from? Or is the residency of the consumer the determining factor? Providers hosting retail sites are going to have to be knowledgeable about these issues when helping online retailers set up their web presence.”

IT departments may be losing their bad reputation
A new survey strongly suggests that most business users are generally pleased with their IT departments, with eight out of 10 survey respondents viewing their relationship with IT as either positive or neutral. "Business units tend to view IT as a valuable partner rather than a hindrance," according to CompTIA, an industry group which produced the report. It found that 52% of business managers reported having a "good relationship" with IT. The survey gathered data collected online from 275 business professionals and 375 technology professionals, and included some interviews as well. The survey asked a series of statements to assess the relationship of business managers with IT. A more neutral view included an affirmative response to the statement that IT "plays a critical support role."

Worldwide cybersecurity market continues its upward trend
The worldwide cybersecurity market continues to grow and grow as defined by market sizing estimates that range from $75 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020. ... What explains the continual growth on cybersecurity spending? Cybercrime. According to Lloyd's of London, cybercrime is costing businesses up to $400 billion annually. As cybercrime rises, corporations and governments increase spending to defend and protect their digital networks and assets. ... Cybercrime is also fueling demand for cyber insurance, a market that is growing alongside cybersecurity products and services. Last year, the insurance industry generated about $2.5 billion in premiums on policies to protect companies from losses as a result of cyber-attacks.

Practices for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
DevOps is an attempt to break the barrier between Development and Operations teams. They are both required for the successful delivery of software, but have been traditionally split into separate organizational silos with competing goals. While developers are responsible for delivering new features and responding to change, operations have to keep everything running smoothly and avoiding change is one way to reduce risk. DevOps is focused on automation and measurement as a way to reduce the risk and collect data to improve the delivery process, but it’s a lot more than using a new tool. It’s about people from different backgrounds collaborating to enable fast and reliable software releases.

OpenSSL bug serious – but no Heartbleed, say experts
“While this may not be a remote code execution bug, it is still pretty severe, as it completely removes the protections that people use OpenSSL. Users of affected versions of OpenSSl should upgrade to 1.0.1p or 1.0.2d as soon as possible,” he said. Thomas added that anyone still using OpenSSL versions 1.0.0 and 0.9.8 should note that support for these versions – including security updates – will stop at the end of 2015. Kevin Bocek, vice-president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, warned that bad actors have learned that enterprises are blindly trusting certificate authorities. “This means, that often the easiest, fastest and most effective way to inject malware onto corporate networks is by signing the malware with compromised or stolen digital certificates,” he said.

Quote for the day:

“To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.” -- Jay Samit

July 09, 2015

From cars to cranes, Nordic industry is embracing the industrial internet of things
The system, which connects a cloud backbone to small handheld device attached to welding machines, not only improves efficiency but also reduces faults by detecting whether a welder is following the specifications of a seam. If they are not followed or the system detects any other issues, the welder and his supervisor can be notified. And, instead of chalk, welders use their handheld devices to record the details of the job which are automatically uploaded to the cloud and assigned to their specific seam. Furthermore, the device can be attached to any welding machinery, not just Kemppi’s own.

A New Architecture for the Internet of Things
Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy. How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Red Hat's Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems, described how to revolutionize your architecture and create an integrated, interoperable, reliable system of thousands of devices.

2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report
Web applicati ons, which are pervasive within today’s organizati ons, area target of choice for threat actors for many reasons, not the least of which is their high likelihood of including vulnerabiliti es and serving as a direct conduit to sensiti ve data. It is not surprising, therefore, that web applicati on att acks are among the top cyberthreats concerning security professionals, who remain far from confi dent about their organizati on’s security posture in this area. ... The potenti al of soft ware-defi ned networking to miti gate the onslaught of cyberthreats – for example, by enabling microsegmentati on and allowing integrated countermeasures to be “piped in” to a communicati ons path regardless of their physical locati on – is not lost on today’s IT security professionals.

United's woes show what's hard about networking
A router failure could mean a lot of things other than total shutdown. Often, it means a software glitch or a clumsy engineer's configuration mistake that can spread to other routers or affect their performance. The router may have malfunctioned, but the rest of the network doesn't know it, said Dell'Oro Group analyst Alam Tamboli. United hasn't shared more details of its latest problem. Router software upgrades are a frequent cause of widespread network breakdowns that lead to embarrassing headlines. In fact, updating network software can be such an ordeal that some enterprises keep running the same versions for years, choosing to manage the risk of security holes rather than take on the dangers of an upgrade, Skorupa said.

How one wearable for women is bringing self defense tools into the modern age
Originally, Mustafa's idea for Roar was wearable mace. She realized that existing self defense tools have not been updated in 70 years, when pepper spray was invented. Women don't want to take tasers or mace to bars or other locations, so the idea was that instead of having to take something out of a purse or pocket, women could already have mace on them. She thought it was genius. But then, Mustafa started talking to women and posted a survey on Facebook, asking women what they liked/disliked about existing self defense tools. In a couple of hours, she received hundreds of responses. And there was a pattern. Almost 40% of women owned tools, but most were afraid mace and tasers would be used against them if they were overpowered.

Android tablets, Chromebooks, and convertibles: Which setup makes sense for you?
Despite Google's ongoing efforts, the Web and even Chrome OS itself aren't entirely optimized for touch-centric experiences. Going into a tablet mode on a convertible Chromebook is enjoyable for things like reading content, watching videos, or scrolling through social media streams -- as you can push the keyboard out of your way and focus solely on the screen -- but the experience is far more limited and less natural-feeling than doing the same on an Android device. By and large, native Android apps just provide a superior touch experience to their website counterparts. It's something that's hard to quantify, but they're designed explicitly for that type of interaction and tend to be more pleasant to use.

CIO interview: Andy Haywood, group CIO, N Brown
“Our current digital offerings are very good, but they’re not as fast as some of our competitors. I don’t mean web speed, but the ability to change and adapt. In the digital world, we want to be making changes every hour of every day,” says Haywood. “That’s the difference between winning and losing in the digital space - agility and speed is needed to react to the market and to customers. That’s what the Hybris digital platform will give us. ... “It's about that customer-centricity being brought to bear on the transformation programme. The credit element is just one example where we’re not yet able to provide the flexibility and choice that most other businesses are giving their customers,” says Haywood.

Which in-memory DBMS best fits your company's needs?
Not all in-memory database systems are relational. Aerospike is an open source, in-memory, NoSQL database management system. It's a key-value data store that enables developers to build personalized user experiences and data-driven applications that scale out to process millions of transactions per second with sub-millisecond response times. Aerospike runs on Linux with support offered for many different Linux distributions including pre-built binaries for Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian. Although Aerospike is available as open source, it can also be commercially licensed. The commercial edition of Aerospike adds features such as cross datacenter replication, fast restart and improved security.

Cutting Jobs, Microsoft Turns Page on Nokia Deal
While Microsoft will not stop making smartphones, Mr. Nadella said on Wednesday that it would no longer focus on the growth of that business, instead emphasizing the expansion of the broad “ecosystem” of products, including mobile phones, that run its Windows software. Since he took over, Mr. Nadella has increased the development of apps and services for Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS devices, many of which have been popular with the public. “I am committed to our first-party devices, including phones,” Mr. Nadella said in an email to Microsoft employees. “However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention.”

Business, Design, and Engineering: Developing Collaboration-Culture
Disrupt or be disrupted. Traditional approaches to building great software are quickly falling by the wayside. With myriad of smaller, more nimble competitors rapidly entering the marketplace, how will your business innovate, survive and thrive? This series offers readers tactical approaches to building software that your customers love. Break down existing silos and create an environment for cross-collaborative teams: placing technology, business and user experience design at the core.

Quote for the day:

"Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig." -- Paul Dickson

July 08, 2015

7 Ways To Kill Data Center Efficiency
While it's impossible to approach system utilizations of near 100% or make sure that every device that is powered on is actually serving a purpose, there's plenty of room for improvement. For example, some of the servers identified in the report as comatose are likely to be servers that are set up as hot-standby or disaster recovery systems in case there is a failure. If that's the case, does the system truly need to be in a hot-standby mode or would a cold/warm standby mode be more cost-efficient and provide nearly the same amount of redundancy? Here are seven ways you can identify -- and resolve -- data center inefficiencies. If you have your own theories on why inefficiencies occur or how to resolve or prevent them, tell us in the comments section below.

10 compelling reasons to consider open source for your enterprise storage needs
Enterprise needs are a different beast from those of SMBs. Few areas define this as clearly as storage. Instead of storing a few hundred gigabytes, you're looking at terabytes and maybe even petabytes. Failover, redundancy, security, backups—all essential when it comes to enterprise storage. You might think the only viable solutions for such tasks are proprietary solutions. Fortunately, for businesses and those working within them, that assumption is incorrect. Open source has come a long way and now powers the backbone of enterprise computing—and that includes storage. Don't believe me? Take a look at the following 10 reasons why open source could be the right storage solution for your organization.

Why E-wallets may be the new headache for banks after bad loans
"According to me, banks launching ewallets is a really bad idea because technically when a banks already holds my account it already has a wallet,'' says Amrish Rau, MD and CEO of Citrus Payment, which has applied for a payments bank licence. "They are trying to circumvent the second factor authentication by putting up a wallet. If you think of it calmly what does a wallet do? A wallet holds money, as do bank accounts. But they are enamoured by the world of wallets." Still, banks cannot afford to be complacent. In advanced markets, technological developments are reshaping the way banking is done. In the UK, one bank will have no premises for a customer to walk in and seek drafts, transfers, or even payments. Atom Bank is the first UK bank to provide banking services only through apps.

How Companies Can Improve Recruitment And Engagement With Gamification
While gamification can have a tremendous impact on how you identify and hire people, it can be just as powerful—if not more so—as a tool for keeping them engaged after they’ve been hired. Engagement has become a hot topic today, with Gallup reporting that nearly 70% of U.S. employees overall (and more than 70% of Millennials specifically) are not engaged employees, which the polling company defines as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.” Given that ADP estimates that the cost to a company of just one disengaged employee is more than $2,200 a year, it’s no wonder businesses are looking for ways to encourage employee engagement.

Competitive Disruption and Cybersecurity Beyond the Buzz
The security of products and services is a key element of the overall security of cyber-physical systems, but a number of things are affecting organizations’ ability to put in place a solid digital defense system. These include an expanded attack surface, inefficiencies in the development process, a weak security architecture of the entire system, lack of specialized security skill sets, and insufficient use of third-party support. Securing a cyber-physical system is a challenge, because of its multiple points of vulnerability. These include the products and the services involved, the embedded software and the data residing within, plus the data aggregation platform, the data centers used for analysis, and of course, the communication channels.

New Top-Level Domain Drives Thousands of Sign-ups
“By signing up for a .BANK domain, financial institutions are taking a clear step to ensure customers’ sensitive information receives an added layer of protection from cyber attacks,” FSR explained in a recent news release. “The award and use of a .BANK domain shows that the institution is a verified member of the banking community and upholds the strict standards of the .BANK community. These requirements go significantly further to protect consumer information than most commonly-used domains.” The groups aren’t trying to get ahead of themselves, however. “This is a marathon,” Doug Johnson, ABA’s senior vice president of payments and cybersecurity policy, told American Banker. “It clearly isn’t a sprint.”

CIOs Rethink the IT Department
Technological changes and demographic forces are reshaping government IT departments. After delaying retirement plans during the recession, a large chunk of the public-sector IT workforce is once again poised to ride off into the sunset. ... At the same time, an improving employment market for skilled technology workers makes it tougher for government agencies to hire qualified replacements. With competition for tech talent heating up, agencies struggle to match private-sector salaries, office environments, schedule flexibility and other factors. It's little wonder that state and local CIOs consistently rank hiring and retaining skilled IT staff as a top concern.

Implementing Agile Delivery for Non-Software IT Projects
Needless to say, a majority of strategy, architecture, and consulting projects will come up with strong risks on all these four points, and therefore will almost always require high visibility, early risk mitigation, adaptability to constantly change, and quick demonstration of business value. Using Agile here is both undeniable and indisputable. In fact I would argue that Agile methods suit no other projects better than non-software projects. The next obvious question is, "How do we make this happen”? In my opinion, as soon as organizations stop practicing 'prescriptive Agile.' Even though the very foundation of Agile is to be adaptive and not prescriptive, prescriptive Agile is one of the major oxymorons across the Agile delivery landscape today.

Throw out the trust, and verify everything
Controlling access, and ensuring that users have the least privileges necessary is something we all should already be doing, but I have rarely reviewed an organization that is doing it well. In the recent OPM hack, the perpetrators were using stolen administrative credentials, rendering most other security measures useless. Zero Trust Lite will help prevent this issue, given that, for example, you could prevent an administrative user from network access outside of the LAN zone. You need to go a step further, however, and make sure users have the correct privilege. The challenge here is that you are managing users on a diverse group of systems.

The impossible war on encryption
In response, furious tech companies began to encrypt traffic - that is, scrambling it to make it impossible to be snooped on - as it travelled over the internet between their servers and their customers. Such a use of encryption didn't really present a huge problem for spies and police, because companies still have to decrypt the data when it reaches their own servers. They do this in order to sift through their customers' emails and web browsing habits themselves, if only to hit them with more targeted advertising (which is why when you write an email about getting married you might start to see adverts for wedding venues). In this case, all the police have to do is apply for a warrant and they can get access to the messages they want.

Quote for the day:

“Leaders fail when they begin to fall in love with negative mindsets of other people!” -- Israelmore Ayivor

July 07, 2015

Execs Think Cloud Needs More Than Conventional Security
Despite much wishful thinking to the contrary in the enterprise, security still remains top of the list of barriers that are stalling this move to the cloud, according to the survey. Sixty-six percent of respondents said security concerns are at the top of the barrier-to-adoption list, while 37 percent said they are concerned about the ability to meet compliance requirements when moving services and solutions to the cloud. And though customer data will be moving to the public cloud, that doesn’t mean there isn’t trepidation surrounding this transition, with 50 percent of respondents noting they are “very concerned” about security of data in the public cloud, and another 34 percent “somewhat concerned.”

PCI DSS publishes updates to standards
Key changes include: The addition of a new “Core Module” section that applies to all POI device types and addresses the configuration and maintenance procedures relevant to the security of POI devices.; The addition of testing requirements to reflect that PTS evaluation laboratories will begin validating vendor documentation of vendor policies and procedures for compliance with the device management security requirements. These pertain to device management during manufacture and up until initial key loading or deployment, where other PCI requirements such as PIN security and P2PE provide coverage.

Mobility and Flexibility Working with Cloud
Cloud computing is constantly changing the working environment in enterprises. Integrating new facets to a work environment, the increasing use of technology has unified the office space with dynamic factors such as globalization, collaborations and inception of new possibilities to improve the overall workplace. The employees are constantly adapting to the new work patterns and operation modes. ... Thus, geographical barriers to workplace have being made limited with the advent of the cloud structure. One may work from home with a complete flexibility of timing and association with the business. Virtual office and virtual teams have become an emerging trend in the modern work culture.

Schneider Electric Targets Edge Computing With New Micro Data Center Portfolio
Completely engineered to order, micro data center infrastructure solutions include the physical enclosure, UPS, PDU, cooling, software, environmental monitoring and security all tested, assembled and packaged at a Schneider Electric facility and then shipped together. ... “We are already seeing the emergence of edge applications in retail and industrial applications, and we believe the need for edge computing will only grow as the Internet of Things expands into commercial applications,” said Johnson. Micro data centers are not new, however Schneider has created a standardized, repeatable framework, said David Cappuccio

How Office 365 balances IT control with user satisfaction
Exchange administrators were surprised to discover that the Outlook app was caching Exchange credentials and a month of email messages, contact details, calendar appointments and possibly attachments in the cloud (originally on AWS servers, and although Microsoft promised to shift that to Azure and Office 365 with regional data centres during 2015, it also indicated that the cloud structure was a strategic part of the Outlook architecture they plan to continue). It needs that information to deliver push notifications for new messages, and for features like easy unsubscribe and the “focused inbox” that highlights messages.

Inside Amazon’s Warehouse, Human-Robot Symbiosis
At the center of the warehouse is a storage space containing square shelves packed with countless products from Amazon’s inventory. In previous generations of its fulfillment center, Amazon’s workers would have roamed these shelves searching for the products needed to fulfill each new order. Now the shelves themselves glide quickly across the floor carried atop robots about the size and shape of footstools. In a carefully choreographed dance, these robots either rearrange the shelves in neatly packed rows, or bring them over to human workers, who stack them with new products or retrieve goods for packaging.

Teradata Chief Analytics Officer Bill Franks Talks Analytics and Angry Birds
There are a couple of things. First, there has been tremendous expansion in the breadth and depth of Teradata’s offerings. These reflect the massive changes in demand from the marketplace. I don’t think most people realize how diversified our product and services portfolio is today, especially if they haven’t taken a look at us in a couple of years. We also continue to make a shift toward focusing on solving business problems as opposed to providing technology. Our consulting services have grown immensely over the years as a result and we now routinely work with business people as well as IT.

IPv6 security vulnerability pokes holes in VPN providers' claims
"A common misconception is that the word 'private' in the VPN initialism is related to the end-user's privacy, rather than to the interconnection of private networks," says the authors in the paper's introduction. "In reality, privacy and anonymity are features hard to get, requiring a careful mix of technologies and best practices that directly address a well-defined adversarial/threat model." ... IPv6 leakage seemed to concern the researchers the most. "The vulnerability is driven by the fact that, whereas all VPN clients manipulate the IPv4 routing table, they tend to ignore the IPv6 routing table," explains the researchers. "No rules are added to redirect IPv6 traffic into the tunnel. This can result in all IPv6 traffic bypassing the VPN's virtual interface."

Lessons Learned Adopting Microservices at Gilt, Hailo and nearForm
Microservices as an architecture value availability over consistency. They keep your site, mobile app or service up and running. There will be errors in some percentage of the data. You get to tune that percentage by increasing capacity, but you never get away from it completely. If your business can tolerate errors, then microservices are for you. Obviously, there are systems that need to be 100% accurate. And the best way to achieve this is with large scale (and expensive) monoliths, both in terms of software, and hardware. Financial, medical, and real-time systems are obvious examples. But there are large amounts of software that is pointlessly slow and expensive to build simply because we aren’t paying attention to business realities.

Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity
Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

Quote for the day:

“It is not a question of ‘Will I make a difference?’ Rather, it’s ‘What difference will I make?” -- Kouzes/Posner.

July 06, 2015

Why Invest in Tools?
Healthy open source is also extremely powerful for recruiting. I have personally interviewed dozens of people who told me they paid attention to Facebook after seeing React, AsyncDisplayKit, Pop, and other projects they wanted to be a part of. This brings smart people in and the positive cycle continues. Success is not found in isolation. As projects become exciting, and the potential is seen by others, teams form — ad-hoc or otherwise — and a snowball effect helps propel a project. At Facebook it’s not uncommon to be working on projects outside of your primary job responsibilities, or to move between teams quickly, and this allows for this snowball effect to occur. That also means there are many unsung heroes behind these projects.

How the Internet of Things is disrupting the C-suite
Over the past three years, I have worked with and observed executives struggling to meet the IoT expectations of shareholders and customers alike. Recently I have been working with IoT start-up CEOs and CTOs, both locally and in Silicon Valley, who do not come to the game with what I would call the baggage of traditional product businesses. The IoT experience is similar to what I observed during the dot-com evolution, but different in that it is not just about a new technology, but how entire business models have to change because of the technology. Every member of the C-suite is at risk unless they make behavior or educational changes in response to the demands of the IoT.

Enterprise DevOps interview with iThome Weekly
“Software defined businesses” are companies that are using custom written software to dramatically change and enhance how they run their business. Uber is a good example. Instead of just being a taxi or car service, they use software they wrote to change how their business runs: calling and paying for a taxi on your sell phone is much different than hailing a cab and paying in cash. Insurance and banking companies that are moving more and more of their daily business and interaction with customers to run over mobile apps and other custom written applications are another good example; we see this happening at Pivotal customers lie Allstate, Humana, and banks that use Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Bringing DevOps to the legacy side of the business
Banks know they need to change, but with so much legacy technology in place that change is never easy. A major British bank, for example, recently experienced a computer systems failure that led to 600,000 payments not being processed and customer accounts not being updated. It cost the bank, both in terms of revenue and customer goodwill. There’s good news for these organisations saddled with so much legacy IT though. There is a way for them to be as responsive as the digital setup by two guys in a garage, or any company starting a project from a ‘green field’ perspective.Gartner refers to it as ‘bimodal IT’ – a dual approach to IT that balances getting IT right with delivering the speed and agility the organisation needs to meet digital challenges.

A Look At The World’s High-Tech Startup Capital
Engineering and hardware are among the strongest academic focuses available in the city, so it should come as no surprise that students are the driving force behind its tech scene. As their interests migrated toward entrepreneurship, so too did Delft’s. “Ten years ago entrepreneurship wasn’t that common, but we’ve seen that shift on the university level, and from the government,” de Bruijne told us. Funded by the Delft University of Technology, the city government and local industry interests, YES!Delft is itself a product of that process. Now entering its second decade of activity, it receives as many as 500 applications a year, from the Netherlands and across Europe, and has attracted $300 million in investment, according to de Bruijne.

A 2015 roundup of analytics, big data and business intelligence forecasts
89% of business leaders believe big data will revolutionize business operations in the same way the Internet did. 85% believe that big data will dramatically change the way they do business. 79% agree that ‘companies that do not embrace Big Data will lose their competitive position and may even face extinction.’ 83% have pursued big data projects in order to seize a competitive edge. The top three areas where big data will make an impact in their operations include: impacting customer relationships (37%); redefining product development (26%); and changing the way operations is organized (15%).The following graphic compares the top six areas where big data is projected to have the greatest impact in organizations over the next five years.

Artificial Intelligence That Makes Your Smartphone Smarter
Weave.ai cofounder Rodolfo Rosini says the startup expects to roll out a private beta test of an app showing a few different functions in the next few months. The company, which is participating in Techstars’ accelerator in London, plans to let developers add the technology to apps and hopes that it could eventually be added directly to operating software. ... Yet Rosini notes that Now on Tap will be available initially for the upcoming version of Android, leaving lots of people with older versions out of the loop. And he thinks many companies—phone makers, social networks, and more—will want to come up with their own version of contextual search, rather than delegating it to Google, in order to do things like control any results that could lead users to buy things.

Why big consulting needs to buy into BPO to address the As-a-Service Economy
The whole premise behind As-a-Service is one of a fundamental cultural change with how enterprises approach their operations and partner more collaboratively with capable service providers to re-imagine their processes, based on defined business outcomes. Simply put, it’s a huge, huge challenge for most current services relationships to morph into anything closely resembling an As-a-Service model, with the current mindsets of most buyside and sellside delivery staff. Buyers need deep expertise to help them reorient their skills and capabilities – and their service providers need to make serious investments and sacrifices to help them, which give their accountants and shareholders hives.

Containers: What IT Pros Should Consider
The containers concept is exciting because you package your application with all of its dependencies -- code, libraries, configurations, system tools -- into a wrapper file system. Because everything is there, a containered application should run as well as it would natively. The open source Docker toolkit makes it easy to develop applications using microservices, and also to make changes and updates within a container without impacting adjacent containers. With worry about conflicts and environmental mistakes erased, the result is a double win. First, since more applications can sit within containers on the same physical hardware, there is a dramatic cost savings: Four to six times more server applications can reside on the same hardware compared to the number of VMs.

Architectural Refactoring: A Task-Centric View on Software Evolution
ARs address architectural smells, which are suspicions or indications that something in the architecture is no longer adequate under the current requirements and constraints, which might differ from the original ones. An AR, then, is a coordinated set of deliberate architectural activities that remove a particular architectural smell and improve at least one quality attribute without changing the system’s scope and functionality. An AR might negatively in uence other quality attributes, owing to con icting requirements and tradeoffs. In my view, an AR revisits certain architectural decisions 2 and selects alternate solutions to a given set of design problems. A decision’s execution leads to related engineering tasks, which fall into these categories:

Quote for the day:

“Leaders dig into their business to learn painful realities rather than peaceful illusion.” -- Orrin Woodward