Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 27, 2015

The Challenges of IT Maintenance

ISOs provide a simple and elegant solution: a single point of contact for all of a 21st century company’s IT infrastructure requirements. These organizations operate globally, which means that companies that partner with ISOs will experience a consistent quality of service no matter where they are operating, or what kind of technology they are employing. In fact, by consolidating service contracts and streamlining IT maintenance processes, ISOs not only provide companies with reliable IT infrastructure sustainment, but also help their partners to enhance their own efficiency. Any global organization that requires hardware maintenance across a broad range of equipment makes and models will benefit from working with an ISO.

IoT For Automotive Deconstructed

The IoT automotive industry is moving rapidly with many exciting growth opportunities available. We’ve written about some of the risks and benefits as well as some of the players involved. One thing for certain as that the auto industry is starting to take notice and we can expect the implementation of a number of new IoT technologies over the next several years. One of the largest and most critical investment strategies will be in IoT security ... For anyone looking for more information on the innovative uses on how the Cloud, Big data, IoT can scale and connect can get a better idea of the potential below. IBM has produced an excellent infographic centered around the opportunities.

Navigating the big data maze

Understanding the potential value of data consumes a lot of analysts’ time. For instance, an analyst for an auto manufacturer seeking to streamline its manufacturing processes would likely endure many false starts when exploring the mass of information related to the engine building process, from poorly scheduled lunch breaks to disconnect between suppliers. Utilizing big data discovery solutions can sort information potential, with the most interesting attributes appearing first. In addition, analysts can easily experiment with different combinations of data to understand correlations, so they can rapidly determine whether the data set is worthy of more attention.

How to Build Your Own Hybrid Cloud

A big part of a hybrid cloud is the ability to replicate and distribute data. First of all, it’s important to understand what you’re replicating and to where. Many organizations deploy hybrid cloud platforms to help get applications and data closer to their user. Others use a hybrid cloud to control bursts and branch locations. Regardless, it’s important to know how data is being moved, backed up, and how it’s being optimized. Data replication can be a tedious process if not done properly. That said, it’s important to take security into consideration as well. Your data is a critical asset and it must be secured at the source, through the route, and at the destination. Fortunately, virtual security appliances and services can help make this process a bit easier.

The growing need for more women cybersleuths

"If you want to create a workforce ... you want to create a talent pipeline, you cannot simply ignore half the population," said Memon. Beyond the U.S., other countries are leaving fewer women behind when it comes to computer science and engineering. In both Malaysia and Indonesia, women earn roughly half of the computer science and engineering degrees, while only one-fifth of those same degrees are earned by women in the U.S. Not only can women fill the estimated nearly 210,000 vacant cybersecurity positions in the United States, they can also bring new perspectives. "When you have a balanced team of both men and women, the teams are able to look at things a little bit differently and make sure that you're really looking at all causes, all effects and really get to the heart of the problem," said IBM Security's Westman.

4 smart ways to maximize data science interns' capabilities

If you're anything like me, you have mixed feelings whenever interns enter the equation. Who couldn't use more people to get things done, right? That said, how much disruption comes along with this brilliant idea? Well, that depends, but it's definitely not zero. Up until recently, data science teams have been reserved for the veterans — the brave, seasoned programmer/mathematicians who valiantly volunteered for the perilous role. However, the universities have quickly caught on, and they're rapidly minting fresh new data scientists who are eager to explore their new profession. That's where you come in to show them the ropes. Your boss thinks it's a good idea, and she's the only one that matters. It's up to you to make the most of the experience. Here are four key strategies for getting the most from your data science interns.

Paul Fremantle on Security in Internet of Things

This idea of security through obscurity is worse in the hardware world and we’ve seen this with the Xbox for instance. So, the Xbox got hacked, the security keys on it got hacked and then everybody had open access to the Xbox. So I don’t believe that a security by obscurity will work in this case, but at the same time I am not yet convinced that the community is mature enough to act as a community. So in the software world we’ve had open source for 15 years, we have a lot of people who contribute best practice to open source. In hardware opens source is a pretty new concept and I think a lot of the people who are manufacturing devices and building IoT systems are not there yet in terms of sharing their best practice and working as a community in the same way the software world is.

Ernst & Young, U.S. Government Introduce Anti-Hacking Tools

The first technology that will be transfered by EY is called PathScan, which detects abnormal activity on networks that indicates the presence of hackers. Uncovering hackers on networks has been a struggle for many companies. On average, attackers operate inside a victim’s network for more than 200 days before being detected, according to FireEye Inc., a network security company. PathScan is being tested at five companies and already proving valuable, according to EY. The firm believes the relationship with the lab will be successful because technology being transferred has market value and will be combined with its other services and expertise, MacDermott said.

IT ops seek the mythical 'single pane of glass' tool

Most systems administrators tell Donnie Berkholz, a development, DevOps and IT operations analyst at 451 Research, that there is no such thing as a single pane of glass that works for everyone. "The idea should be to provide a single pane for a specific [person] in a specific situation," he said. For example, there is one view that IT pros may want during normal operations versus a project to troubleshoot and look for a root cause. "There is absolutely a desire to have a unified view integrating multiple data sources, given those constraints," he said. It's a different view of the single pane of glass that takes the uses into account.

Create Modern Android Apps with the Design Support Library

With the release of Android 5.0, also known as Lollipop, Google introduced its new material design style. Material Design is a huge step forward for Android apps, bringing with it a total overhaul of theming, as well as a bunch of new UI components you can use in your apps. To make things even better, Google also released the Android Design Support Library, which allows you to take advantage of material design in versions of Android going all the way back to Android 2.1. ... Android has had the DrawerLayout component for some time now, which allows you to easily create "hamburger"-style menus in your apps. Hamburger-style menus have become ubiquitous in both Android and iOS in recent years.

Many firms not getting to grips with third-party data security risk

“A lot of effort is put into setting up the initial relationship, but organisations typically select a supplier that is low-risk to begin with and there is no provision for monitoring how or if that changes,” he said. Wilkinson said organisations need to recognise a lot can change after a supplier is first selected, which means low-risk suppliers can become high-risk over time. “This is not a back-office operation that can be set once and work well for the next five years – you have to continually re-evaluate and re-assess as things change,” he said. According to a Booz Allen Hamilton report, the majority of third-party risk incidents at an organisation are likely to occur in an existing relationship.

Quote for the day:

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game." -- Goethe

August 26, 2015

Success in CIO position increasingly tied to business expertise

What sets apart the CIOs who don't fit this pattern? Langer described 23 characteristics in his recent webinar, Strategic IT: The Transition Taking Place in the CIO Role. The material was based on research and interviews that he and his colleague Lyle Yorks conducted for their similarly named book. What the authors discovered is that the most successful CIOs have developedstrategy advocacy, or "a process through which technology leaders in organizations build on functional expertise." In other words, success in the CIO position has less to do with building their technology prowess and more to do with the ability to master other areas of expertise important to running a business.

Real-time computing: Gateway to the Internet of Things?

"... a real-time system is one that behaves deterministically, responding predictably to inputs or changes in the environment. Typically these are cyber-physical systems, used to manage a physical process. "Observers often confuse real-time computing with high-speed computing, such as financial trading or sports betting," adds Barnett. "The difference between high-speed computing and real-time computing is that with high-speed computing you are talking about averages -- you can say on average an operation takes a millisecond. But one time in a thousand it takes much longer. With real-time computing you are confident the operation took place within the deadline, or you know it didn't happen."

Scaling Mobile at XING: Platform, Framework and Domain Teams

Most of us have heard about Conway’s law. It claims relatedness of organizational structure (with its related processes) and produced system architecture - they go hand in hand. And that’s of course not a surprise. Consider a company with highly strict functional departments and lack of interdepartmental collaboration. Which kind of system would it produce? It would likely end up designing a set of isolated components, each exposing a unique and complicated interface. That’s an example of a causal connection between organizational structure and system architecture. What is actually interesting here is that this connection can be reversed! Meaning: you can influence changes in the organizational structures by reshaping your system architecture.

Cybersecurity in the Modern Age – Get with the 2020 Program

There has also been an evolution of the CISO, cyber gurus, and security management teams who feel they only need to understand the basic-fundamentals of what cybersecurity is, leaving the day-to-day interpretation for operational security to those lesser mortals who at times do their level best in the absence of any training, or real time investment. In fact, don’t take my word for it; look at some of those respectable organizations who have hit the press post some very successful compromises. Moreover, there are those who have suffered unauthorized incursions with the devil’s-luck of not being discovered, or suffering name and shame. On that subject, I have been unfortunate enough to follow some renowned CISOs in the industry into their departed organizations, only to find to my surprise fragile fabric of a security structure

Pragmatic Programming Techniques

The sensitivity analysis is an important step to evaluate the stability and hence the quality of our optimal solution. It also provides guidance on which area we need to invest effort to make the estimation more accurate. Mathematical Programming allows you to specify your optimization problem in a very declarative manner and also output an optimal solution if it exist. It should be the first-to-go solution. The downside of Mathematical programming is that it requires linear constraints and linear (or quadratic) objectives. And it also has limits in terms of number of decision variables and constraints that it can store (and this limitation varies among different implementations). Although there are non-linear solvers, the number of variables it can take is even smaller.

Five signs an employee plans to leave with your company’s data

“There’s potential but the practical applications are still a little immature,” says Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “You can tune something to look for an attack that you know about, but what’s hard is to tune it to something you don’t know about. I can look at access patterns on repositories and how much people download and whether they save documents locally. But there’s always creative ways to work around that. A really dedicated, sophisticated adversary will quickly decipher where you’re not looking – and that’s the problem.” Or they will carry out a “low-and-slow” theft by regularly moving data to a repository over time, he adds.

Integrating a hybrid environment now a CIO core competency

"When you put applications in more than one place, you have to synchronize data," said Phil Shelley, president of Newton Park Partners, a Chicago-area consulting firm. Getting that synchronization right isn't easy, he said. And the closer it gets to happening in real time, the more complex the challenge can become. The challenges of a hybrid environment arise around several key areas: data, timing and networking needs, as well as resource provisioning -- that is, getting the time, money and personnel needed to do the integration work. ... "It is a more complicated world when you start moving components of your IT stack outside. There are obviously benefits to that, but it is a more complicated world. It gets harder when one side isn't in your company," Doug Shoupp said. Sometimes, an API may be all that's needed, Shoupp said, but that is rare.

How lack of trust destroys your team

Lack of trust destroys your team. That we all know, but Wayde shares how that phenomenon affected one team he worked with, and some antidotes to that process. In this episode we also mention a book dedicated to highly functioning teams: Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, and share 2 games you can play with your team to grow trust. Wayde is an Agile coach with TeamFirstDevelopment.com. He is interested in helping teams improve using the same techniques that Improv theater teams use to develop Great Team Players.

Survey Finds that Cybersecurity Incidents Rise as Supply Chain Risks Broaden

Clearly, businesses need to step up their assessments of third parties and supply chain partners. It is also essential that they stipulate the right to assess a supply chain partner’s security capabilities in contracts. Experience shows that organizations that do not legally plan for due diligence when executing contracts may not be allowed to perform adequate assessments when necessary. Also consider that as much as 20 percent of security spending is estimated to occur outside of the information technology (IT) function on services like cloud computing. Contracts executed outside of IT may not allow for due diligence and, in fact, they may require important information security and privacy safeguards.

With a Major Cybersecurity Job Shortage, We Must Act Like We Are at War

It also means cyber professionals are hopping from one job to another, leaving gaps in how their systems are protected, also increasing the likelihood of attacks. Finally, businesses are forced to train or hire unqualified employees to fulfill their cybersecurity needs. It’s no wonder 86 percent of organizations believe there’s a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals and just 38 percent believe their organization is prepared for a cyberattack, according to a January survey from ISACA, an international professional association focused on IT governance. The fear crosses over to government agencies as well, as we’ve seen with several high-level cyberattacks. For this reason, President Obama has been quietly recruiting top tech talent from companies such as Google and Facebook to increase the number of qualified cyber talent in Washington.

Quote for the day:

“Never follow anybody who hasn't asked "why" -- Aniekee Tochukwu

August 25, 2015

Data Mining Tools for Technology and Competitive Intelligence

In this study, four efficient tools for analyzing patent documents were tested: Thomson Reuterís Aureka and Thomson Data Analyzer, Biowisdomís OmniViz, and STNís STN AnaVist. All four tools analyze structured and unstructured data alike. They all visualize the results achieved from clustering the text fields of patent documents and either provide basic statistics graphs themselves or contain filters for performing them with other solutions. The tools were tested with two cases, evaluating their ability to offer technology and business intelligence from patent documents for companiesí daily business. Being aware of the state of the art of relevant technology areas is crucial for a companyís innovation process.

Mesosphere Expands Its Data Center OS for IoT Scale

Mesos, the kernel of the Mesosphere DCOS, is a 6-year-old Apache open-source project, conceived at the University of California, Berkeley, that was announced as a joint collaboration with Mesosphere at DockerCon EU in December 2014. The company has come a long way in the nine months since then, as more and more enterprises retool their data centers to run DCOS. Mesosphere DCOS is a highly scalable engine that enables the running of services and applications across a cluster of machines in a data center or cloud. It is highly container-driven. It combines the Apache Mesos cluster manager with a number of open-source and proprietary components and allows services to be deployed and managed through both a custom Web UI and command-line interface.

Brocade Unveils Easy-to-Use Analytics Platform for SAN Monitoring

Based on the Gen5 platform architecture that Brocade uses for its storage and networking products, the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform comes in a 2U form factor that can be configured with up to 24 Fibre Channel ports. The appliance itself sports two dedicated multi-core processors for frame processing and an onboard solid-state disk drive. From a software perspective, it runs an implementation of Brocade’s Fabric OS (FOS) that includes analytics capabilities and can be integrated with Brocade Network Advisor software. Rondoni said IT organizations can use the platform to generate customized reports to correlate and summarize trends and specific events.

How IoT Improves Hospitality

In-room tablets at hotels serve as media hubs, control centers, and information desks. Guest enters the room - curtains open, music plays and climate control switches on with option for guests to personalize these settings. Guests leave the room and the settings are reset to defaults, but guests' personalized settings can be saved and automatically applied upon future visits. Bathroom mirror as interactive display for news, weather and messages with ability to pair with smartphones or tablets. Eletro responsive fibers in pillows monitors blood pressure, sleep patterns and stress levels.

Why Do I Need A Data Lake?

The value and power of a data lake are often not fully realized until we get into our second or third analytics use case. Why is that? Because it is at that point where the organization needs the ability to self-provision an analytics environment (compute nodes, data, analytic tools, permissions, data masking) and share data across traditional line-of-business silos (one singular location for all the organization’s data) in order to support the rapid exploration and discovery processes that the data science team uses to uncover variables and metrics that are better predictors of business performance. The data lake enables the data science team to build the predictive and prescriptive analytics necessary to support the organization’s different business use cases and key business initiatives.

Windows 10: The smart person's guide

Windows 10 is Microsoft's effort to recapture many enterprise users who balked at Windows 8's mobile-focused interface and to finally move the last Windows XP and Vista holdouts onto a newer OS. Beyond the new features, security updates, and its platform-unifying design, Windows 10 marks a significant shift in how Microsoft's characterizes its flagship operating system. Microsoft is encouraging people to think of Windows 10 as a "service". Instead of releasing a new numbered version of Windows every few years, the company will continuously release new features and updates. Microsoft has committed to support Windows 10 for a decadeafter the July, 2015 launch.

The Importance of a Data Lifecycle Management Strategy

Companies that know and understand the similarities and differences across their information, data and storage media, along with their associated lifecycle management and tiered protection, can unlock value while removing complexity and costs to sustain growth. Organizations should start by revisiting information,data and storage media management, along with their corresponding lifecycles. Then, they should focus on what can be accomplished today in comparison to how processes worked in the past. This will allow companies to distinguish between their needs and wants. Businesses can then begin to remove costs by finding and addressing data protection complexities at the source, as opposed to cutting service.

New Standard Methodology for Analytical Models

Analytical models have greatly evolved both in the depths of the mathematical techniques as well as the wide-spread application of the results. The methodology to create analytical models, however, is not well described, as can be seen by the fact that the job of the analytic practitioners (currently called data scientists; older names are statistician, data analyst and data miner) involve a lot of tacit knowledge, practical knowledge not easily reducible to articulated rules2. This informality can be seen in many areas of analytical modeling, ranging from the project methodology, the creation of the modeling& validation data, the analytical model-building approaches to model reporting. The focus of this document is project methodology.

Seven Microservices Anti-patterns

Services were modeled based on business capability model and the first release went well. They were XML over JMS sync services and primarily focused on delivering the capabilities required for claims platform exposed to Agents, web and voice channel application. It gave us the ability to deploy frequent, small changes and A/B feature support seamlessly for our applications.When the requirements were incrementally added (and they always were) it was very hard to release the solution rapidly because of the integration complexity between applications and the consumers. Integration, functional testing, and production release required tight coordination.

How Cloud Redefined Data Center Resource Utilization

It’s important to quickly understand that cloud computing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the proliferation of cloud computing and various cloud services is only continuing to grow. Recently, Gartner estimated that global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost US$16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent. There is a very real digital shift happening for organizations and users utilizing cloud services. The digitization of the modern business has created a new type of reliance around cloud computing. However, it’s important to understand that the cloud isn’t just one platform. Rather, it’s an integrated system of various hardware, software and logical links working together to bring data to the end-user.

Quote for the day:

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on." -- Walter Lippmann

August 24, 2015

Shifting to DevOps? Put your ducks in a row first

Historically, trying to measure "software quality" has been tricky because we've tried to measure attributes of the code, and the team delivering the code was not actually responsible for providing the ultimate customer-facing service. Personally, I think the only metrics that really matter are those related to the "consumer experience" of the system: percentage of successful API calls responded to in a reasonable amount of time, number of customer purchase transactions, number of applications successfully processed, etc. Of course, it's only fair to start measuring a team on these metrics if the team has a reasonable degree of influence on them. So, to some extent, this approach implies "DevOps" or "product teams" or whatever we want to call them.

Inside-Out versus Outside-In

The disruptive technologies of cloud-based applications, delivered through browsers and apps to a variety of devices, are all part of the external environment and linked to the role of front office. New business models are focused on taking these external capabilities and redefining how to find, win and deliver new forms of competitive offerings. Front office environments are focused on people who create value through external interactions to win and deliver business, people working Outside-In. This is unlike the back office where the focus is on process removing people and cost. Outside-In technologies enable the people in the front office to find and share the resource they need to improve their performance within these new business models. “The Future of Work” is a term used to describe the manner in which these new technologies are deployed in new optimal ways.

Big Data is Driving Health Care

In conjunction with mobility, big data is changing the way patients engage with their doctors and experience their treatment. Research has found that three out of five patients would choose telehealth visits over in-person appointments for minor check-ups and follow-ups. In PwC’s survey, more than 50 percent of respondents would feel comfortable sending a digital photo of a rash or skin problem to a dermatologist for an opinion. Not only is the technology for “virtual treatment” available, but 64 percent of surveyed patients expressed their willingness to adopt new, non-traditional ways of seeking medical attention. In a world where services are available in an instant, doctors must start treating their patients as a customer to continue to meet their needs. That includes opening the line of communication or easier visits and quicker treatment.

Firms’ lack of knowledge puts them dangerously at risk of cyber attacks

What makes new security risks particularly challenging is their fluid and dynamic nature; the rapid rate of change has proven to be increasingly difficult for organisations to keep up with. “It’s somewhat like being in a submarine with leaks that pop up in random places at random times”, Booch explains. “You have to be vigilant about not just reacting to security threats – any company has to be diligent about keeping up with the latest patches and attending to zero day exploits – but also to be proactive in seeking out potential risks”. The traditional and perhaps even stubborn mind-sets of those in the IT sector are slowing down progress in cyber securitisation, so accustomed are people to protecting their businesses and assets in a certain way. Yet this rigid approach is no match for hackers.

Framer.js for people who think things like Framer.js are weird and hard

You might think you need to be a JavaScript expert to use Framer, but in reality, Framer is doing a lot of the hard work by providing awesome documentation and familiar properties to interact with your design. CoffeeScript does you an additional favor and gets rid of all the icky JS syntax, so you can concentrate on making an amazing prototypes. Many of the properties used in Framer are exactly the same, or extremely similar to CSS properties. If you know basic CSS, Framer shouldn’t be too scary. ... If you want to accurately communicate high-fidelity interactions, a verbal description or napkin sketch isn’t going to cut it. After all, this is what you are an expert in — it’s worth learning how to use the tools that communicate your expertise.

CoreOS Adds Intel Container Security To Rocket

Among other things, the ability of Clear Containers to run on Rocket affirms CoreOS's design choice to map different "stages" for different operational characteristics for a container. CoreOS also implemented "pods" with its runtime. Pods allow multiple containers to function as a single logical service, even if the containers have been spread over multiple hosts in a cluster. ... "For the little function you need, you don't need the full QEMU layer," Sousou said, referring to the code for the emulation of a complete x86 machine that's part of a hypervisor startup. Intel stripped QEMU out of the KVM initialization process, along with multiple other minute adjustments, to take milliseconds out of the startup process.

Retail CIOs become heroes with the help of CMOs

That “hero vs. zero” attitude has shifted considerably in the past few years as the relationships between the CIO and CMO has matured, says Tom Litchford, vice president of retail technology at the National Retail Federation. “The whole idea is that the CIO and CMO really have to be attached at the hip,” he says. “As we go forward, there is less of the old feeling that “all I ever hear from IT is ‘no.’” The Forrester/NRF study reported improved relationships between the retail CIO and line-of-business colleagues such as the CMO. ... These issues go beyond technology into fundamental issues related to marketing and the entire organizational structure, so CIOs and CMOs must each bring their separate strengths to the table.

Automakers form alliance to bolster cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is a new issue for the industry, one handled by automakers in different ways. That varied and still-developing approach has fueled industry critics, including some lawmakers, who say the industry lacks a comprehensive solution to safeguard their customers. The immediate threat of malicious hackers wreaking havoc on connected cars appears to be relatively remote. The researchers who remotely controlled some Jeep Cherokee vehicle systems ... were highly sophisticated security experts who spent years developing the tools needed to complete the hack. Hackers seeking monetary gain have little current incentive to target cars. Even though vehicles can collect huge amounts of data, the auto industry has yet to monetize it in a major way

Banks hope cardless ATMs will get millennials to open accounts

The cardless ATM technology is the latest attempt by banks to persuade customers under 35 to open an account with them instead of migrating to their traditional competitors or the latest Silicon Valley startup that promises to help consumers borrow, manage, and invest money through their phones. Hudson-based Avidia Bank said earlier this week that it had introduced the new technology to the ATMs at its eight branches in Central Massachusetts. Salem Five Bancorp launched cardless ATMs this month at its 30 ATM machines, primarily on the North Shore. Twenty banks across the country, mostly regional and community banks, also have gone mobile, although the ATMs still accept traditional debit cards, said Doug Brown, senior vice president and general manager of mobile at FIS, the Florida banking technology firm that makes the mobile software for the ATMs.

Data and Analytics in the Cloud Is Real Today

Private and hybrid cloud implementations of data and analytics often coincide with large data integration efforts, which are necessary at some point to benefit from such deployments. Those who said that integration is very important also said more often than those giving it less importance that cloud-based analytics helps their customers, partners and employees in an array of ways, including improved presentation of data and analytics, gaining access to many different data sources and improved data quality and data management. We note that the focus on data integration efforts correlates more with private and hybrid cloud approaches than with public cloud approaches, thus the benefits cannot be directly assigned to the various cloud approaches nor the integration efforts.

Quote for the day:

“If it involves technology it is your fault if it breaks, The CIO should have seen it coming.” -- Earl Perkins

August 23, 2015

Applying Artificial Intelligence To Insurance Data

The first thing insurers should realize is that this is not an arms race. The winners will be the ones that take a measured and scientific approach to building up their machine learning capabilities and capacities and – over time – find new ways to incorporate machine learning into ever-more aspects of their business. Insurers may want to start small. Our experience and research suggest that – given the cultural and risk challenges facing the insurance sector – insurers will want to start by developing a ‘proof of concept’ model that can safely be tested and adapted in a risk-free environment.

Intuit puts venerable Quicken up on the block

Intuit promised that it would continue to maintain and develop Quicken until it finds a buyer, adding that it plans to release the next edition, Quicken 2016 for Windows, and would keep working on the Mac version. Current users should see no interruption in their ability to use the software or its associated services, such as Quicken Bill Pay. "As we move through this sale, it's business better than usual," wrote Eric Dunn, who heads the Quicken unit, in an online statement. "As a standalone business, we'll focus solely on taking Quicken to the next level. And until we find that buyer, we'll continue to provide you with [the] dedicated, uninterrupted service and support you deserve."

Cyber-Risk Oversight: 3 Questions for Directors

Cybersecurity is no longer an emerging issue. Major headlines about breaches in both the public and private sectors have put the topic on every company’s agenda, regardless of size, industry or geographic location. Just like the management teams they oversee, corporate directors are very well aware of the ‘what’: the fact that cybersecurity is a significant threat. What they are looking for is the ‘how’: specific action they can take to be more effective in overseeing management’s activities. One independent director – a committee chair of a Fortune Global 100 corporation – recently told me: “Cybersecurity is uncharted territory. As directors, we have to depend on staff whose capabilities we aren’t equipped to judge, it’s difficult to measure progress and there’s no way to tell if we’re doing enough.”

Implementing the Huffman adaptive algorithm to compress graphics images

To apply Huffman adaptive encoding to the string we normally need to iterate through the string of character and perform encoding for each character in string. The main idea of the Huffman adaptive algorithm is that the encoding is initially performed starting with the “empty” Huffman tree, which contains no entries for the characters to be encoded and will further be modified by appending the new characters along with their codes during the encoding process. According to the basic concept of the following algorithm, the Huffman tree should be modified similarly during the either encoding or decoding process, because, in both cases, we need to generate the same codes for each character from the input character buffer regardless of whether encoding or decoding is performed.

Four Spheres of Lean and Agile Transformation

Agile is a method that is highly dependent on individuals and the way that they approach their work. It requires participants to take on new roles that they would normally not adopt. Leadership roles move from person to person, and each must have the freedom to commit to the team. These commitments often cross organizational boundaries. In a traditional development environment, managers set priorities and deadlines, but in an Agile environment, managers shift to a facilitation and enabling role. Managers become channels for success, creating new lines of communication and business relationships. They need to move away from their traditional command and control role. In an Agile environment, personal success is highly dependent on team success.

Computer/Social Science, Part 1: The Agile Book Club

One of the great engines of change in the software profession has been Agile. Not only has it transformed the way that development teams work, but it has had profound ripple effects across the entire software value stream. Agile is far more than a difference in batch size. The challenges Agile posed to traditional assumptions about planning in the face of uncertainty, the centrality of the team, the delivery of value, and other fundamental issues have affected everything from the inception of an idea to its eventual retirement. Testing, requirements gathering, rapid and continuous delivery, governance rules, customer collaboration, marketing, change management — all of these activities within the value stream, and more, have had to adjust to Agile.

Your IT strategy: If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly

We see new systems and technology being dropped into the business – often ‘point solutions’ to solve a particular problem – without a proper diligence process to sense check for wider synergies. Time and again readiness assessments, training and business change are not well executed. This means that the business is not ready and new ways of working don’t get introduced. The net result is that the business stays in its comfort zone and introduces workarounds so it can maintain old practices – it fills gaps with manual processes and spreadsheets and does not use the new systems to enable the changes and release benefits.

Five indicators of a failing IT project

If the issues are spotted early, organisations can review the specification documents and rectify the project’s direction to ensure it meets the true requirements. With a fragmented process, companies can also find that on-going work causes issues in deliverables that have already been signed off and leads to live software breaking. Having good levels of communication and working with a third party are great ways to prevent problems occurring in the first place. The team can also increase success by employing an Agile project management approach that enables the team to gather stakeholder and user feedback on the product from the very beginning.

SEC CIO leads efforts to move agency to the cloud

"We want reusable highly scalable and flexible platforms," Dyson says. "We want to strengthen our cybersecurity and continuous monitoring posturing -- that's very important whether we're working on-prem or in the cloud." The determination of whether or not to roll out a SaaS application at the SEC "has a lot to do with timing," Dyson explains. The regulatory agency is charged with drafting and implementing rules for the securities industry, a process that is guided by deadlines mandated in statute or by the commission's own timetable. In that context, the consideration of a cloud deployment can become a question of whether or not the technology will support the agency's regulatory mission.

Agile 2015 – Industry Analyst Panel: Agile Trends and Future Direction

The use of Innovation Gameswas suggested as a way of helping the executives understand the new ideas, as well as using pilot programs and providing internal proof by starting small and showing the benefits. An issue which was specifically identified was the fear of middle managers in many organisations as they see the significant changes that agile adoption results in for their roles. A common pattern is the reduction in the number of middle manager roles and the migration into more hands-on roles such as Scrum Master or Product Owner. There needs to be a clear transition path for these managers and the importance of strong executive support to overcome this resistance was strongly emphasised.

Quote for the day:

“Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.” -- Warren G. Bennis

August 22, 2015

5 Reasons Not To Buy An iPhone As Your Business Phone

The iPhone is popular, but it still only accounts for about 14% of worldwide smartphone market share as compared to Android’s 79%. In actual numbers, 1.1 billion Android-based phones are expected to ship in 2015 vs. 237 million iPhones. When I search Verizon Wireless’ website there are 9 iPhones available as compared to 29 Android options made by six different vendors from Google to HTC to Motorola to, of course, Samsung. Android is an operating system that can work on many different devices whereas iPhone’s operating system iOS only works on devices made by Apple. Even though I’ve decided to get another Samsung I like having the flexibility to choose other hardware devices that fits my and my company’s needs and I don’t get that with Apple.

Make the right choice between Hadoop clusters and a data warehouse

There's no doubt that Hadoop has a place in the enterprise, especially as big data applications take hold. But the venerable EDW has a well-established presence in data centers, and after years of refinement plays a significant role in meeting the reporting and analytics needs of most organizations. Does the emergence of Hadoop mean it's time to abandon the EDW? Some IT and data management professionals are aching to use Hadoop as a replacement for the data warehouse -- but are companies really prepared to abandon their decades-long investments in EDW infrastructure, software, staffing and development?

Initiation to Code

If you don’t take the time to check up on your mentees and listen to their concerns, travails, and triumphs, then you will have no metric for achievement. Employing agility as a mentor requires sensitivity, creativity, and solid communication skills. It also requires the foresight to see what your mentee should be aiming for, and the hindsight to see what your mentee has already accomplished. To establish a framework for gauging your mentee’s progress, consider the three phases every new team member goes through in some form. The first phase is total unfamiliarity and constant discovery; the second is a transitional period with a clear trajectory of progress; and the third is self-driven competence. In all three phases, remember that agility remains your most vital tool.

CISOs facing boards need better business, communication skills

According to a June study by Fidelis Security and the Ponemon Institute, 26 percent of board members admit to "minimal or no knowledge" about cybersecurity, and only 33 percent say that they are "knowledgeable" or "very knowledgeable." ... 70 percent of board members said that they understand the security risks to the organization, but only 43 percent of IT security professionals agreed that the board understood the security risks to the organization.. Only 18 percent of IT security professionals rated their companies' cybersecurity governance practices as very effective -- compared to 59 percent of board members. This is a difficult communications gap that needs to be addressed on both the board level and by CISOs themselves.

Why every website should switch to HTTPS

Two major problems exist for two different classes of websites. First, for larger websites that use many third-party services (ad networks, CDNs, etc.), all of those services need to support HTTPS before the main website can switch to HTTPS. Slowly, these services are starting to support HTTPS, which means it will be easier and easier for larger websites to switch to HTTPS. Second, for smaller/non-profit websites the process of getting and installing an HTTPS certificate is a pretty confusing process. New tools like SSLMate and Let's Encrypt are starting to make that process easier and more automated, so that making your small website HTTPS is a fast and easy process.

Strategy, Not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation

Executives who think they're in a technology arms race are focusing on the wrong area: The 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project byMIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte identifies strategy, not technology, as the key driver of success in the digital arena. Conservative companies that avoid risk-taking are unlikely to thrive — and they'll also lose talent, as employees across all age groups want to work for businesses committed to digital progress. The report is available online and as a PDF, and the online version includes a Digital Business Interactive Tool with interactive charts to explore the data set.

Ashley Madison Breach Should Spark Security Conversation

Some security experts have noted that the breach could be a lot worse, at least in terms of compromising credit card information. According to Robert Graham's security blog: "Compared to other large breaches, it appears Ashley-Madison did a better job at cybersecurity. They tokenized credit card transactions and didn't store full credit card numbers. They hashed passwords correctly with bcrypt. They stored email addresses and passwords in separate tables, to make grabbing them (slightly) harder. Thus, this hasn't become a massive breach of passwords and credit card numbers that other large breaches have lead to. They deserve praise for this." However, the account names, street addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers used to register for the site were not encrypted.

A Phish Story

"When they target somebody, they have to set something up so maybe they'll send out an e-mail that says, 'Your PayPal has been compromised' or 'Your e-mail has been compromised.' ... "The hackers may not even say that the victims' e-mail has been compromised. They may just say, 'You've been locked out of your e-mail' or 'There's some maintenance that needs to be done on the e-mail server' or 'Click here for new information.'" Barney says never click on an unfamiliar link. Often, such links will lead to a site designed to look like a legitimate, trusted site but will have a slightly different Web address. Other times it may take the user to a blank screen. Either way, the hackers' goal is to gather information that will help them steal valuable data.

Five open source Big Data projects to watch

Take a look at the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) list of projects and you may feel overwhelmed. Between top-level and incubating projects, there are far too many to keep track of. Filtering down the list to Big Data projects may not help, because that "smaller" list is still quite long. And don't forget that there are several noteworthy open source projects that aren't even under the ASF umbrella to begin with. So, in the name of helpful triage, here are five projects to keep an eye on:

How to reduce IT complexity and increase agility

"Complexity is the result of a diversity of footprints, of tools, of workforce," says Christopher Rence, CIO of Digital River, a provider of e-commerce, payments and marketing services for merchants. Rence knows whereof he speaks: He's lived through three acquisitions in the last four years, and has seen the residue of the 20 acquisitions that the company has experienced since 1994. "One company we acquired had nothing but white-label hardware. It didn't have an asset value, but it was doing a lot of processing," Rence recalls. In preparation for conducting a strategic migration of the data through a gateway into a SaaS solution, "we had to do a full inventory of what those homegrown products were doing," says Rence. "It required understanding some of the undocumented knowledge.

Quote for the day:

“Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.” -- Jay Samit

August 21, 2015

Less Dogma Equals Better Decision Making

To seize new opportunities, executives need to constantly review their articles of faith—or convictions of how the world works. The challenge, however is that too many of today’s leaders “like what they like” and “know what they know”. New and valuable information is often declared anathema or quickly discarded, especially when it contradicts an already stated direction or opinion. Moreover, our information systems aren’t helping very much. That vaunted “single source” of truth whether enterprise data warehouse in the early 2000s or enterprise data lake today, still looks far from reality, especially as today’s data lakes are mostly used as data dumping grounds from which various LOB data marts import spurious and questionable data sets.

What Keeps Intel’s CISO Up at Night?

Within Intel’s own IT organization, one thing that helps address the complexity of securing the infrastructure and stay on top of the latest in security tech is partnering with security vendors instead of simply paying them for their products and services, Conran said. Intel has such a partnership with CyberArk Software, a security company whose market debut last September was one of the year’s hottest tech IPOs. Instead of worrying about securing the perimeter, CyberArk specializes in dealing with threats that are already inside the enterprise network. The company is an expert in privileged account security, Udi Mokady, its president and CEO, said. Hackers gaining access to privileged accounts is one of the leading threats today.

4 Ways to Lead Ruthless Innovation

Ambitious, determined, focused entrepreneurs don't choose a career in civil service at a local government office. Similarly anyone looking for two-hour lunch breaks and an easy workload shouldn't choose to work in a fast growing Fortune 500 company that sprouts more innovation every 12 months than many companies create in a lifetime. Amazonians who did their research well prior to accepting a job offer should not be surprised. When I read the New York Times article I winced at some of the personal examples, but quietly nodded along with some of the points of intense focus and relentlessness.

Data security, the achilles heel of DevOps

Forty-six percent of DevOps leaders report data issues as the biggest challenge to enabling their organizations to use DevOps in testing environments. A majority indicate that developers and quality assurance personnel have access to production data, yet this access is not audited (72%). More than two-thirds of all respondents (71%) report that masked data is refreshed from production only once a week or less. Still, a majority, 62%, say full production data is necessary for development and quality assurance. What's unclear is how much of this data may be sensitive or personally identifiable information. The more copies that get sent out to other parts of the organization -- or even outside -- the greater the risk of it being compromised.

Windows Server Getting Open Source Mesos Container Technology for Scaled Operations

Microsoft this week announced its third preview of Windows Server 2016 which features Windows Server Containers, built on Docker's open source container technology. This Docker operating system virtualization technology is designed to make it easier to deploy applications without conflict. Like Mesos, Docker's container solutions were originally designed for Linux servers. The new Mesosphere partnership announced today to bring Mesos to Windows Server is just another open source project overseen by the Apache Mesos organization. The code will be "freely available" and it will integrate with Mesosphere's DCOS, according to Microsoft's announcement. The latest version of the code is already available at the Apache Mesos GitHub repository.

C-Suite and Techies: Best Security Results for the Least Cost

Implementing a new solution does not always require high expense. There are many free and open-source security solutions that should be considered as well. Often, open-source solutions can operate on less expensive or older hardware while providing capability and security equivalent to many commercial options. Open source is not always going to provide the best solution, it might not even provide your organization with a viable option. However, it is important to at least consider open-source solutions when a solution survey is performed. Skipping open source for an odd reason, such as there is no dedicated technical support, because there is no-one to sue, or because of the belief that anything good has to be paid for, is just silly and short-sighted.

Algorithmic Video Editor Turns Amateur Athletes into GoPro Heroes

Software isn’t capable of creative decisions, but Allen says the relatively formulaic structure of extreme sports videos is within its grasp. Shred’s software sets out to make movies that begin with slow moving, establishing shots, for example showing the beach or ski slope at the start of a trip; transition to highlights of the adrenaline pumping action; and then wind down with more shots of scenery and people at the end. “That formula still works even though you’re not doing the most extreme backflips,” says Allen. The software selects footage to use by looking at time stamps and the pattern of acceleration in the frame. It can also shorten and remix any song provided by the user, using algorithms that can identify and edit the different musical parts of a track.

Five digital disruptors talk successes and strategies

"The killing of the IT tile was a rebranding of who we are as an organization and how we're delivering," Colangelo said. Like other platform companies -- Colangelo pointed to Twitter and Netflix as examples -- technology is the backbone of this new business model, not just an enabler of business as usual. "The CTO role at Twitter and other organizations is more public facing and technology is core to product delivery," he said. "That's the recognition at HMH -- that technology is fueling and unlocking so much in the company." Colangelo retains his CIO responsibilities and continues to run HMH's enterprise services and back-office functionality; he's still shifting on-premises applications to the cloud and building an IT as a service model for the business. But his position no longer begins and ends in the back office.

Google Reveals How It Scales Its Network

One major reason for sharing information about its network now is that Google is opening up its infrastructure and offering Google Cloud platform services to others, Google Fellow Amin Vahdat told CIO Journal. “Having a great distributed computing infrastructure requires a world-class network to connect servers together,” he said. Google said it would like developers at other companies to understand they can run jobs such as Big Data analytics on its infrastructure with reliable speed and performance. The company has not shared this level of detail previously because it considers networking a key differentiator, he said. ... “We have some big challenges around availability, configuration and management of the infrastructure and overall predictability,” said Dr. Vahdat

Vulnerability in enterprise-managed iOS devices puts business data at risk

The impact to enterprises depends on the kind of information that might be exposed through their managed app configurations. Appthority scanned millions of apps and found that the majority of those with vulnerable configuration data were MDM clients, corporate apps that grant access to work email and business documents and secure browsers used on internal networks. "We also found apps used in the healthcare industry, giving doctors access to patient data and records," whose compromise could result in possible violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the researchers said.

Quote for the day:

"Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important." -- Seth Godin

August 20, 2015

10 Tips to Improve your Corporate Sustainability

Most sustainability initiatives are initiated without a thorough analysis of their outcomes. Many of them are funded for many years, with very little due diligence on their outcomes. Every sustainability initiative should always include a feedback loop in the processes that it undertakes. It could start, simply, by periodically assessing the performance and outcomes of the sustainability initiatives. If this is not possible then the initiative itself needs to be reviewed and outcomes clearly stated before it is allowed to continue. The feedback loop should reach as many affected stakeholders as possible. Once identified, the initiatives with the strongest feedback loop will most likely be identified as the high performers.

New chips took a backseat to robots and 3D cameras

Intel didn’t talk much about its upcoming Skylake desktop CPUs this week, but it did reveal that the chip has an integrated DSP used for a feature called Intel Smartsound, whch will allow computers to listen out for audio signals without using up too much power. It worked with Microsoft to build an upcoming technology for Windows 10 called Wake on Voice, which will let you walk up to a Windows 10 in sleep mode and bring it to life by saying “Hey Cortana.” Some smartphones already have this always-listening feature, but it’s not available yet on a PC. The catch is, we’re told Wake on Voice won’t arrive with the first Skylake chips, which means it won’t be supported in the first wave of Windows 10 PCs.

Patient care put at risk by IT problems at London NHS trust

Southwark’s continuing care team ran into further difficulties when it emerged that administrators were classifying patients in inconsistent ways on the TCM database. In one case staff were using the “deceased” field in the database to record the date of the end of a care package, creating confusion over whether patients were living or dead, Rochford revealed. In another case, administrators were only classifying cancer patients under palliative care, whether they were terminally ill or not, while failing to record other patients with life-threatening conditions as palliative, she said. “You could not follow a patient history. I could not tell what their diagnosis was, whether it was cancer or dementia, because they were coding them in the wrong way,” she said.

NFV use cases emerge as IoT evolves

IoT applications have very different network requirements and characteristics than the smartphones and tablets that currently dominate mobile networks. CSPs have started to use NFV to build IoT-specific sections of their mobile networks with new, virtual Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs). EPCs have many sub-elements that providers will use in different combinations for specific IoT applications. Virtual EPCs give CSPs the ability to cost-effectively customize their networks for individual customers, industries and applications -- critical in the diverse world of IoT. In addition to the EPC, additional NFV elements that CSPs may use to enable the IoT include routing, security, SDN controllers, monitoring and service assurance.

Design Thinking Comes of Age

Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.

Rise of the IoT Architect

It seems sensible to have just such a role dedicated to IoT with the necessary breadth in know-how to oversee the many constituent roles and teams. The challenge of course is that with IoT being so nascent there are very few people with the level of skills, knowledge and business authority let alone actual experience across so many disciplines. Creating current architects can take years and some think that this role may take a decade to establish. Of course that means in the interim there will be challenges, but it also means that organizations who see IoT as being significant to their future need to start investing in such individuals now. The flip side to this is that there are current roles within organizations that already possess elements of the skills required by an IoT architect.

How HTTP/2 Eliminates Technical Debt

The technical debt here is accumulated because the code is tightly-coupled to those hosts (and there’s technical ops debt, too, in maintaining those additional CNAMEs in DNS but for today let’s just focus on the code, shall we?) and any changes to the hosts requires changes to the application. Which is bad, because they can be spread out across a whole lot of code in a larger organization. Domain sharding in the application itself, too, can be a burden on the network and downright horrific for mobile applications as it requires additional DNS lookups along with all the extra overhead associated with TCP connections. A new binary framing layer enables full request and response multiplexing and eliminates the need for multiple connections.

Threat intelligence needs to grow up

“Threat intelligence,” added Glines, “is also internal threats, not just rogue employees but machines and devices that are rogue. It’s also employees that don’t know any better.” Enterprises need to do an internal audit to understand their internal and external vulnerabilities because they can’t protect themselves if they don’t know what they are protecting against. “It’s important to understand the attack life cycle, and there are free and open source information feeds out there. The problem with open source feeds is that they provide a lot of information that is not always valuable.” More boutique vendors will be able to provide companies with more valuable and accurate information that will assess intelligence and invest appropriately based on customer needs.

Francis Ford Coppola muses on power of instinct in data-driven culture

Coppola said he relies on instinct and his subconscious, which for him sometimes acts like a broken record, repeating the same thing over and over, to help surface a good idea or the right fit for a role. Specifically with casting, he said it's hard not to root for each candidate in the moment, so he gives himself space and time to mentally sift through auditions before making a decision. "You know how you go to a party and the next day, one person you met sticks with you. That's what I do with casting. Who stuck with me that I can't stop thinking about?" he said. But risks don't always equate to reward -- even for Coppola.

Version Control, Git, and Your Enterprise

Developers want the power to do whatever they may find a need to do. With Git they have more granular control of what is done and how, then they have experienced with other tools. Often Git’s large array of operations is split into two categories – the porcelain and the plumbing. Obviously making an analogy to something like a sink, the point being made is that the traditional tools let you interact with the porcelain, that is the abstraction and controlled interface to the tool, but Git also lets you get under the basin and behind the faucets to change how version control is executed, including rewriting history. Whether a developer needs that power or not, they like knowing that it is at their disposal to use.

Quote for the day:

“Think continally about what you want, not about the things you fear.” -- Brian Tracy

August 19, 2015

Demystifying Data Governance: What it Is and What it’s Not

The key to establishing a solid data governance foundation is to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive approach. It’s common to adopt data governance after poor data quality results in a bad business outcome or when no one takes responsibility for an error. Having a formalized, proactive data governance approach ensures that somebody is clearly responsible not only for fixing the disasters but also for reducing the likelihood of one occurring. ... The term “data owner” is actually a misnomer because, in practice, what is owned is not the data but the standards that guide users in how to achieve good quality. So while many departments may lay claim to the contents of the data, it is the data governance group itself that owns the structures and the quality rules.

BPM drilldown: Product leadership value discipline

As companies take steps toward digital business-ship, CIOs are increasingly being called upon to optimize customer-facing processes. And they're turning to business process management principles to make that happen. One useful tenet of BPM: deciding which of three core value disciplines -- operational excellence, product leadership and customer intimacy -- is most important to the business and then adopting the characteristics of that discipline. In this webcast presentation, Ken Lewis, ITIL consultant at PA Consulting Group, drills down into the product leadership value discipline, laying out goals for a company that prioritizes it above the others.

How the tech industry is greening its data centers

"Traditionally, data centers were call centers. You put them out in suburban and exurban areas," she says. That's where land needed for the center and cooling has been cheaper."When you start integrating renewable generation and DC power networks into your data center choices, you don't have to go to those exurban and suburban locations anymore. You can put them where you want them and where your talent really wants to be," says Redfield. "The road blocks are the same as to any increased penetration of renewables, she says. "Where the grid is already reliable and there's plenty of baseload power generation, renewals are particularly slow to penetrate." The challenge, she says, is to convince companies that they need renewables where there's already an energy infrastructure – even if that infrastructure is close to being maxed out.

3 Ways The Internet Of Things Will Change Every Business

A big part of the Internet of Things isn’t so much about smart devices, but about sensors. These tiny innovations can be attached to everything from yogurt cups to the cement in bridges and then record and send data back into the cloud. This will allow businesses to collect more and more specific feedback on how products or equipment are used, when they break, and even what users might want in the future. ... The most important thing to do when considering how the Internet of Things will affect your business is to think bigger — much bigger. It’s not just about what kind of products you can make “smart,” or how information could impact your business efficiencies, or how you might sell that data to customers and partners.

Why A Trillion-Dollar Enterprise Practice Desperately Needs Disruption

Clearly, the age-old IT procurement bureaucracy is unable to keep up with current advancements in technology. CIOs spend time and pay hefty fees to draft nebulous RFPs and short-list potential vendors. The RFPs are then floated, in response to which service providers churn out long, flowery proposals where they pitch their track records and show examples of happy clients. The whole process can take anywhere from 4 weeks to over 6 months. But in the age of Watson and the Hoverboard, is this really the right way to build technology? Through my own software services marketplace VenturePact, I work with hundreds of CIOs who'd say it wasn't and have moved on from RFPs.

Amazon's Data-Driven Approach Becoming More Common

"What they were able to do was to go in and increase the staffing before they had significant attrition," Barnett said. "The beauty of systems like this is you're able to link actions to outcomes." The downside to a data-driven approach is t can seem "Big Brother"-ish to staffers. But Glint said the surveys that the company sends out have an 80 to 85 percent response rate. "Employees tend to be willing to share," Barnett said. Another drawback: Relying strictly on numbers can lead to the perception of a cold-hearted workplace. "It's easy to get so hung up on statistics that you miss the value of what that individual brings to the table in terms of personality, connectivity and those intangible pieces," said David Lewis, CEO of HR outsourcing and consulting firm OperationsInc in Norwalk, Conn.

Cisco: Flash exploits are soaring

Corporate security pros need to be on the lookout for malware designed to evade detection and also damage the operating systems of the machines it infects if detection efforts become too persistent, the report says. It uses Rombertik as an example of such malware because it performs pointless operations while it is in security sandboxes in an effort to wait out analysis or to delay discovery. Rombertik attempts to overwrite master boot records and if it fails, will destroy all files in users’ home folders. Should it go undetected, then it starts its primary function, stealing data typed into browsers. “It’s a solid bet other malware authors will not only appropriate Rombertik’s tactics but may make them even more destructive,” the report says.

Physicists Unveil First Quantum Interconnect

One of the most promising forms of number crunching is the quantum computer and its various associate quantum technologies, such as quantum communication, quantum cryptography, quantum metrology, and so on. Physicists have made great strides in building proof-of-principle devices that exploit the laws of quantum physics to perform feats that would be impossible with purely classical mechanics. And yet a significant problem remains. These devices must work in isolation since nobody has perfected a way of joining them together effectively. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Mark Thompson at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and a few pals around the world.

Hacking Case Raises Question on Securities Fraud

Stealing confidential information to trade on it before publication is nothing new, although the cases now seem rather quaint because they involved getting advanced word before print editions were delivered to subscribers. The Carpenter case involved a Wall Street Journal reporter who traded and tipped others in advance of the publication of his “Heard on the Street” columns. As recently 2006, the S.E.C. brought charges against defendants who got an employee of a printing plant to steal pages from coming issues of Businessweek so they could trade on the companies discussed in it. The hacking is not all that different from those cases, except that these defendants did not owe a duty of trust and confidence to the news services or companies whose information they stole, unlike the reporter and the printer.

Microsoft Wants To Put Windows 10 On Every Connected Gadget

Microsoft just released Windows 10 IoT Core, a slimmed-down version of Windows 10 that runs on the $40 Raspberry Pi 2 and Intel's $140 MinnowBoard MAX—credit card-sized computer boards that makers use to prototype connected gadgets. A version certified for Arduino (the granddaddy of hardware hacker boards) is coming, says Tony Goodhew, a program manager in Microsoft's IoT Team. ...Microsoft is courting the garage developers of the connected future to build up support for its IoT platform. "We're presenting what we have to bring to the party," says Goodhew, "rather than trying to bring them to our party, which is what Microsoft has done in the past." Microsoft has partnered with Arduino and the Raspberry Pi foundation and become a Maker Faire sponsor, for instance.

Quote for the day:

“There are two kinds of leaders, cowboys and Shepherds. Cowboys drive and Shepherds lead.” -- John Paul Warren

August 18, 2015

Q2 DDoS attacks double in a year, says Akamai report

The largest DDoS attack of the quarter measured more than 240Gbps and lasted more than 13 hours, but the report said peak bandwidth is typically constrained to a one to two-hour window. ... That attack volume is capable of taking out tier 1 routers, such as those used by internet service providers (ISPs), the report said. DDoS attack activity set a new record in the quarter, up 132% compared with the same quarter in 2014 and up 7% on the previous quarter. Average peak attack bandwidth and volume increased slightly in the second quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, but remained significantly lower than the peak averages observed in the second quarter of 2014, the report said.

Object Storage Solutions with CTERA for HP Helion

At its core, object storage is a scalable and efficient means of combating the challenges associated with the massive amounts of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. It is a viable and fast-growing technology that enables simple deployment of massive data stores. With CTERA and HP Helion, organizations can overcome adoption challenges and transform object storage into a wide variety of managed file services that enable organizations to sync, serve, protect and govern file-based data like never before. We’re going to be talking a lot more about how CTERA can be deployed in conjunction with HP Helion.

What is success for a scrum master?

In order to help Scrum Masters create their own approach we have collected many different views in the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast and have collected some of them here for you to read and refer to in the future. Below you will find a list of 15 tools and approaches that Scrum Masters all over the world use. Experienced Scrum Masters explain how they define and measure their own personal success as Scrum Masters, and share their lessons learned about how to achieve success. From how to deal with stakeholders, to how to improve your coaching skills, to how to help the team achieve a sustainable pace. The lessons shared below come from many years of experience and will help you improve your performance as a Scrum Master.

What CIOs can learn about security threats from 4 recent hacks

Keeping one step ahead of hackers is no easy task for IT security executives. There are so many ingenious hacker ploys, shady tricks and nefarious techniques to compromise your data, it might seem like no company could ever keep up. Cybercrime is clearly on the rise, and CIO have plenty of reasons to be anxious. Four recent high-profile hacks demonstrate that cybercriminals are breaching networks, stealing data and using social engineering to trick employees. We asked several security experts to weigh in on these cases, how they occurred and what CIOs should do to reduce the likelihood of a similar compromise. Hint: it’s more than just installing a new firewall and insisting that employees use antivirus apps.

10 more security startups to watch

The emergence of cybersecurity startups has continued unabated as entrepreneurs vie for corporate customers seeking new technologies to battle ever increasing and innovative attackers. The expertise of these new companies range from various improvements to encryption products to analyzing the wealth of security-incident data gathered from networks to gear that detects the potentially malicious wireless activity of Internet of Things devices. Based on the continued interest in these startups from venture capital investors, these companies will continue to proliferate. Here are 10 more security startups we are watching and why.

The more things change: Value creation, value capture, and the Internet of Things

The mere creation of information does not enable its effective use, however, and so we are well-served to capture the stages between action in the world and improved action in the world. In completing a circuit of the Value Loop, from action back to modified action, information iscommunicated from its location of generation to where it can be processed—perhaps in the case of the tennis racquet, to your smartphone. Information is aggregated over time or space in order to create data sets that can be analyzed in ways that generate prescriptions for action. After all, data from a single tennis stroke do not provide nearly as much value as data over a one-hour practice session, or as much motivation as comparing your stroke with those of relevant peers.

Android for Windows Mobile tools leaked on web

Microsoft has provided plug-in replacements for Google Play and Google Maps. Interestingly, developers also need to swap Google Mobile Ads for the Microsoft Advertising (Ads in Apps) service. If the app uses the Google Cloud Messaging service, according to the leaked Microsoft documentation, developers will need to configure their app server to use the Windows Notification Service instead. But the tool does much more, according to reports on the web. Because Windows Phone has Android running in a Linux virtual machine, Android apps can be ‘side-loaded’ onto Windows Phones, enabling end users to run certain apps that do not use Google Play Services. This is similar to how BlackBerry BB10.3 devices can run Android apps without modification.

How 'vendor bias' is killing your IT budget

Vendors usually have good intentions, but they still have a natural bias toward their own products. That can mean they're unlikely to recommend a competitor's product (often because they're unfamiliar with other products). They may also genuinely feel their own solutions will solve all your problems. Well-meaning or not, vendors simply don't have an objective view of what's possible beyond their limited scope of performance. In the worst case, trusting a vendor can be like asking the fox to design and build a better hen-house. ... What happens if the system doesn't work at all? You spend even more money trying to solve your problems "In any new system, there's at least a bottleneck or two," Gentry says. "You can never right-size every aspect of a system based solely on theory."

Companies hope cybersecurity experts in the boardroom can counter hacks

Data show that corporate boards have a long way to go. Just 11% of public-company boards queried this year reported a high-level understanding of cybersecurity, the National Assn. of Corporate Directors said. A review by the New York Stock Exchange and security firm Veracode found that two-thirds of board members questioned think their companies are ill-prepared for a cyberattack. Yet consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 30% of boards surveyed never talk about cybersecurity at all. That fact raises eyebrows. "There's some liability in not taking every measure you can to protect your clients, to protect your revenue stream," said Gary Matus, managing director at the executive recruiting agency RSR Partners. "To give people confidence, you have to be getting the best advice you can."

How college CIOs brace for back-to-school

It's a combination of value-added service and cost reduction that enterprise IT teams dream of. "What we're doing is actually improving service while at the same time reducing costs," says Haugabrook. "Our wireless project will provide students with more access, and Internet-based television is actually going to reduce our overall cable costs." ... Some of these data-driven decisions include transitioning to a 24-hour help desk to accommodate adult and online learners, as well as training overnight library staff to serve as IT support specialists for late-night queries. What's more, rather than hire full-time employees, VSU is hiring students part-time to function as help-desk technicians, enabling VSU to cut the overall IT budget by 5% this year while offering greater service, Haugabrook says.

Quote for the day:

"Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare." -- Japanese Proverb