Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 24, 2016

Finding the Truth Behind Minimum Viable Products

When we start off building a new feature or product, there are a million questions to answer. “Is this solving the customer’s problem? Does this problem really exist? What does the user expect to gain with the end result?” We have to find the answers to these questions before committing ourselves to building a solution. This is why starting with a minimum feature set is dangerous. When you jump into building a version one of a new product or feature you forget to learn. Experimenting helps you discover your customer’s problems and the appropriate solutions for them by answering these questions. It also doesn’t end with just one experiment. You should have multiple follow-ups that keep answering questions. The more you answer before committing yourself to the final solution, the less uncertainty there is around whether users will want or use it.

This finance trend is so hot even Amazon wants in

This would be a logical progression for Amazon, which already has a significant and active user base. Amazon has been experiencing increased growth tied to payments, as its payments unit has 23 million active users and has recorded 200% year-over-year growth in merchants adding the "Pay with Amazon" buy button to their online stores. There is also precedent for Amazon to make such a move. Chinese e-commerce giant Alipay has more than 450 million monthly active users and has more than 50% of the online payments market in China. So Amazon could be on the path to building up a similar type of momentum with its own customers. Fintech acquisitions would also make Amazon more competitive with other checkout services such as Apple Pay and Visa Checkout.

Intel Pivots From PCs to Cloud

"The data center and Internet of Things businesses are now Intel's primary growth engines, and combined with memory and FPGAs, form and fuel a virtuous cycle of growth," CEO Brian Krzanich said. "Together these businesses delivered $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year, made up 40 percent of our revenue and the majority of our operating profit." Details of the cuts will be announced in the weeks, he said, adding that the restructuring was not something he took lightly. Krzanich has been focused on making this transitional move since he became CEO three years ago. The restructuring announcement was made alongside Intel's first-quarter earnings report.

Bitcoin and Blockchain Have Their Own Futures

Gil Luria, in response to the question by Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Scarlet Fu about blockchain technology, clarifies the difference between bitcoin and its underlying technology. Blockchain is superseding bitcoin when it comes to investments made by big banks and investment firms. Many banking and financial institutions have already invested their time and resources in the development of a private blockchain network for their regular operations. While bitcoin is used for payment applications, blockchain is used for an entirely different range of applications. According to him, blockchain is a vast tool suitable for asset classes while bitcoin serves a much simpler purpose of making payments and executing simple banking functions.

7 Test Automation Requirements for Higher Software Quality

For unit testing, there are many testing frameworks developers use to ensure that their code does not break. JUnit in Java and Karma in JavaScript are some examples that most organized development teams should already be using. As for larger-scale integration tests, scripts are usually created to simplify tasks that would be too tedious to perform manually. However, creating these automated tests is often time-consuming and not cost-effective, especially if the environment requires many components and environmental configurations to be observed and coordinated. Automated regression testing, which largely relies on the user interface, is very effective, and many QA professionals are achieving excellent results with programmatic approaches such as APIs and service virtualization testing.

Man vs. Tool? On the Role of Software Tools and Human Experts in SQA Activities

There are several tasks that can only be performed by human experts and not by software tools (such as ‘Define relevant quality aspects/ scope of analysis/ quality goals’ or ‘Configure/ customize/ administrate software tools’). Furthermore, there are several tasks that have to be completed jointly by software tools and human experts because each contributes a subpart of the overall task (for example ‘Analyze software quality’ or ‘Perform tests’). Hence, we conclude that a combination of software tools and human expertise should be used in software quality activities (‘man and tool’ instead of ‘man vs. tool’). Only the combination of both gives a holistic picture of software quality and only human commitment ensures software quality and its improvement.

Reasoning About Software Quality Attributes

Just as general scenarios provide a template for specifying quality attribute requirements, quality attribute design primitives are templates for "chunks" of architectural designs that target the achievement of specific quality attribute goals. Attribute primitives provide building blocks for constructing architectures. However, they are building blocks with a focus on achieving quality attribute goals such as performance, reliability and modifiability goals. Quality attribute design primitives will be codified in a manner that illustrates how they contribute to the achievement of quality attributes. Therefore each attribute primitive will be described not only in terms of their constituent components and connectors, but also in terms of the qualitative and/or quantitative models that can be used to argue how they affect quality attributes.

A Code Quality Problem in Washington State Puts Dangerous Criminals Back on the Street

A defect in the software used to calculate early release resulted in good behavior credits being applied to inmates. These inmates were not supposed to receive the credits and as a result were allowed out early. The issue was flagged more than three years ago when a family was notified about the early release of a dangerous perpetrator. Nick went on to explain that the family calculated the date themselves and contacted the department about the miscalculation. After the software defect was noticed in 2012, the issue remained in tact because the department did not take measures to fix the problem. The issue was brought to the governor’s attention in December of 2015, who immediately began working to resolve the issue.

11 Myths About Software Qualification and Certification

With software taking on an ever-greater role in embedded systems, companies are realizing that “quality code” requires more than just the developer’s claim. Even for systems that don’t require formal certification for functional safety or security, software qualification is becoming more common. After all, who really wants to risk expensive field support, product recalls, or even legal action if software fails? Still, at least 11 myths continue to circulate about software qualification and certification.

Characteristics of a Great Scrum Team

According to the Scrum Guide the Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules. The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team. The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

Quote for the day:

"The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve." -- Daniel Ek

April 23, 2016

How IoT security can benefit from machine learning

“Machine learning is a critical component to developing Artificial Intelligence for IoT security,” says Uday Veeramachaneni, co-founder and CEO at PatternEx. “The problem is that the IoT’s will be distributed massively and if there is an attack you have to react in real-time.” Most systems relying on machine learning and behavior analysis will gather information about the network and connected devices and subsequently seek everything that is out of normal. The problem with this primitive method is that it produces too many false alarms and false positives. The approach suggested by PatternEx is to develop a solution that incorporates machine learning and augments it with human analyst insight for greater attack detection.

Blockchain - Legal and regulatory issues around distributed ledger technology

As with any potentially transformative new technology, distributed ledgers raise a number of questions for policy makers and regulators at both national and international levels. Regulators are certainly closely analysing and monitoring distributed ledger developments and, for now, appear cautiously optimistic about its potential, especially because of the potential that distributed ledgers could actually help to improve regulatory compliance tracking and reporting. But, guess what?: most authorities are taking a "wait and see" approach. Blockchain and distributed ledger technology is not without its challenges, including scalability and latency, lack of mainstream understanding, lack of readiness in some sectors to rely exclusively on data in digital form, over-reliance on out-dated legacy systems which would need to be overhauled before distributed ledger technology could be implemented.

What can a toothbrush instruct us about IoT business styles?

Let’s make a Bluetooth-related toothbrush that comes with a smartphone app. Now the “smart” toothbrush helps Oral-B do a improved task in protecting dental well being by “focusing, tracking, motivating and sensing”. The toothbrush is smarter, but the business product is not. The related solution supposedly generates extra worth for buyers, but all the other things of the business product continue being the same. The worth is nevertheless shipped by way of a toothbrush unit, captured by sales by way of retail channels access to the retail shelf-room is nevertheless the essential competitive edge. Not a great deal business product innovation here. ... Sceptics, of course, will ask, “Who wants builders to extend the toothbrush?” But moms of youthful kids will see a sea of opportunity here

EU charges Google with foisting its search and browser on smartphone makers

This is the second set of charges against Google by the commission. On April 15 last year, it announced a “statement of objections” against the search giant in an investigation into charges that its Internet search in Europe favored its own comparison shopping product. The commission announced on the same day an investigation into Google’s conduct with regard to the Android operating system that would look, among other things, into whether Google had illegally hindered the development and market access of rival mobile applications or services by requiring or providing incentives to smartphone and tablet manufacturers to exclusively pre-install Google’s own applications or services.

10 Important Predictions for the Future of IoT

"A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them. Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organizations exploiting the IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges." In the coming years, IoT will look completely different than it does today. IoT is a greenfield market. New players, with new business models, approaches, and solutions, can appear out of nowhere and overtake incumbents. But business is the key market. While there is talk about wearable devices and connected homes, the real value and immediate market for IoT is with businesses and enterprises.

A digital crack in banking’s business model

Across the emerging fintech landscape, the customers most susceptible to cherry-picking are millennials, small businesses, and the underbanked—three segments particularly sensitive to costs and to the enhanced consumer experience that digital delivery and distribution afford. For instance, Alipay, the Chinese payments service (a unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba), makes online finance simpler and more intuitive by turning savings strategies into a game and comparing users’ returns with those of others. It also makes peer-to-peer transfers fun by adding voice messages and emoticons. From an incumbent’s perspective, emerging fintechs in corporate and investment banking (including asset and cash management) appear to be less disruptive than retail innovators are.

When Does Deep Learning Work Better Than SVMs or Random Forests?

Random forests may require more data but they almost always come up with a pretty robust model. And deep learning algorithms... well, they require "relatively" large datasets to work well, and you also need the infrastructure to train them in reasonable time. Also, deep learning algorithms require much more experience: Setting up a neural network using deep learning algorithms is much more tedious than using an off-the-shelf classifiers such as random forests and SVMs. On the other hand, deep learning really shines when it comes to complex problems such as image classification, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Another advantage is that you have to worry less about the feature engineering part.

Digital data and the fine line between you and your government

The question before consumers and the courts today is three-fold: What kinds of valuabledata is the IoT generating; who should have access to and control over that data; and who can be legally compelled to share that information with law enforcement. In the recent Apple encryption case, the FBI went directly to the manufacturer of a product to gain access to digitized information residing on that device. In our digitally connected future before us, will law enforcement simply bypass end users like you and me and compel companies to turn on our Nest cameras, unlock our August Smart Locks or tune in to our Echos? The Apple encryption case and its predecessors have broad implications for the entire tech community — not just those building smartphones and running data centers. The way in which we’ll interact with technology in the future has been turned on its head.

Build Your Own Container Using Less than 100 Lines of Go

To really understand what a container is in the world of software, we need to understand what goes into making one. And that's what this article is explains. In the process we’ll talk about containers vs containerisation, linux containers (including namespaces, cgroups and layered filesystems), then we’ll walk through some code to build a simple container from scratch, and finally talk about what this all really means. ... Caching is what makes Docker images so much more effective than vmdks or vagrantfiles. It lets us ship the deltas over some common base images rather than moving whole images around. It means we can afford to ship the entire environment from one place to another. It’s why when you `docker run whatever` it starts close to immediately even though whatever described the entirety of an operating system image.

Ransomware, Everywhere: What’s The Science Behind It?

Money isn’t just a motive; money is the enabler. Cybercriminals whose crimes make money can invest in new attacks, invest in defeating countermeasures, and invest in developing new targets. Until recently, attacks on critical infrastructure and the Internet of Things have also been rarely-realized theoretical concerns. There are many hackers who would think that bringing down a power station with a cyberattack is cool, but making that happen would require a group effort to build the necessary hacker tool chain. Ransomware delivers both the motive and the resources to make that happen. And once that ransomware-funded tool chain exists, it will be launched for many other purposes, ranging from idle curiosity to political vengeance.

Quote for the day:

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign of?" -- Albert Einstein

April 22, 2016

The 4 Stages of Better Technology Adoption

Every business is at a different stage in their technology evolution. For some, they’re just starting to see that the break-fix relationship with their provider isn’t serving them properly. For others, they have a fully integrated technology strategy, but need a way to take it to the next level. So often we discuss topics that involve technology innovation without paying as much attention to topics that cater to the initial stages of businesses improving technology. This is important because a small business owners need to understand how they can improve and innovate their technology just as much as a more sophisticated business that is farther along in their technology process. Here are the four stages of better technology adoption to help you get a better idea of where you stand and what the next steps might be for you to innovate your technology at a pace that’s right for you.

How to be More Productive as a Data Scientist

Greater productivity can be gained beyond avoiding unnecessary repeated tasks. The cloud has become an indispensable tool for all sorts of businesses and industries, with one of its greatest strengths being increased productivity. This holds true for a field as complex and new as data science. Various cloud services and tools have been developed designed to help data scientists conduct their analyses, clean data, and visualize their results. With the cloud, data scientists can perform their duties from nearly anywhere while having access to vast stores of data they would otherwise not be able to use. Many productivity tips are much simpler than using cloud services or getting rid of unhealthy iterations.

Why enterprise developers could save Windows 10 Mobile

Microsoft is well aware of its market share problem and the related shortage of quality mobile apps, of course, and it purchased Xamarin in February to make it simpler, and thus cheaper, for Windows developers to port their desktop applications to iOS, Android or Windows 10 Mobile. "This is not for people who write iOS or Android apps, but if you are a corporate Windows developer and you have held back on mobile applications, now you have the possibility of building your applications for third party mobile platforms," according to Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, who spoke with CIO.com last month. Windows no longer rules the business software world unchallenged, but a huge install base of Microsoft applications still exists within in midsize and large businesses.

The tech industry’s “diversity” focus favors one group over pretty much any other

Rarely, though, will you ever hear white people lamenting about working conditions that their black or brown children, spouses and siblings might have to endure. They rarely have those relationships, so they aren’t forced to develop empathy for brown and black people. Colorless diversity is okay with spending tens of millions of dollars on conferences, summits, retreats, and outreach for and about white women, but finds it distasteful when others point out the disparity in spending for people of color. Colorless diversity would have black and brown people sit down and wait their turn. Let me be clear: I’m not writing this because I think it’s bad that companies are spending money on diversity programs for women. These programs are necessary.

The Era of the Intelligent Cloud Has Arrived

The more enterprises seek out insights to drive greater business outcomes, the more it becomes evident the era of the Intelligent Cloud has arrived. C-level execs are looking to scale beyond descriptive analytics that defines past performance patterns. What many are after is an entirely new level of insights that are prescriptive and cognitive. Getting greater insight that leads to more favorable business outcomes is what the Intelligent Cloud is all about. The following Intelligent Cloud Maturity Model summarizes the maturity levels of enterprises attempting to gain greater insights and drive more profitable business outcomes. Line-of-business leaders across all industries want more from their cloud apps than they are getting today.

Microsoft’s Nadella taps potential of industrial internet of things

With more of the value in industrial products shifting from hardware to software, it is no surprise that many industrial companies are reconsidering their software strategies. According to GE, the industrial internet as a whole will be a $225bn market in terms of annual revenues by 2020 — dwarfing the expected $170bn for the consumer internet of things, which has attracted more public attention, and bigger even than the enterprise cloud computing market which is predicted to hit $206bn. Of the new industrial software market, GE estimates that some $100bn will go to a small handful of companies that provide the central platforms for the industrial internet — the software that collects and aggregates data, acts as the foundation for higher-level applications and creates shop windows for developers to reach an audience in the industrial world

Why HTC may be the next Motorola of Android

HTC's been moving in the right direction for a while now, with an impressive and ever-improving focus on overall user experience and post-sales support. It's been climbing higher every year on my Android upgrade report card and this year came in with stronger scores than ever -- an 86% overall, following only Google's Nexus devices in terms of all-around upgrade reliability. HTC may earn its profits from hardware sales like everyone else, but where it differs is that it actually seems to place value on positive long-term relationships with the people who buy its devices. ... It's not just timely upgrades that make HTC the new consumer-friendly king of Android manufacturers: It's things like stepping up and answering my call for a guaranteed two full years of upgrades for flagship phones, long before any other manufacturer was willing to make such a commitment.

9 Free Windows Apps That Can Solve Wi-Fi Woes

As we all know, life isn't quite that easy. Your home or office network can have dead spots where devices can't seem to connect, or where the connections get slow or flaky. Public hotspots can make you prey for hackers and snoopers. And when you are at a hotspot, you might need to share your connection with your other devices, including smartphones and tablets. While there is no way to immediately solve all the problems associated with wireless connectivity, there are applications that can make things better -- and many of them are free. I've rounded up nine free pieces of Windows software that can go a long way toward helping you solve your Wi-Fi issues at home, in your office or on the go.

Google's problem with the cloud is that it's too innovative and not practical enough

Google practically invented the cloud, yet struggles to translate its benefits to more earth-bound enterprises. Even at GCP Next, which was essentially an enterprise love-in, Google couldn't help but tout its science fiction bona fides. Sure, Google started well. Chairman Eric Schmidt intoned that "Cloud is about automating the tedious details and empowering people." Tedious...enterprise...so far, so good! But then, Google started into machine learning, an area where it's heads and shoulders above its competition, with Google senior fellow Jeff Dean telling the crowd, "Machine learning is one of the most important topics in computing." The company went on to blog that "now any application can take advantage of the same deep learning techniques that power many of Google's services."

SEC Warns More Cyber Enforcement Actions Coming

"Cyber is obviously a focus of ours, as I know it is for the other divisions, and we've brought a number of cases there relating to Reg S-P and failure to have policies and procedures relating to safeguarding information," Ceresney said, citing the case the commission brought against R.T. Jones, a St. Louis-based RIA, this past summer. "There'll be others coming down the pike," Ceresney cautioned. The SEC is reviewing the cybersecurity policies in place at advisors and broker-dealers. Separately, the commission has been shifting exam personnel from the BD side of the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations to the unit that oversees RIAs. But even with those moves, commission officials acknowledge that they can't keep up with the rapid growth of the RIA sector. The SEC is only able to examine about 10% of registered advisors in a given year

Quote for the day:

"The older I get the less I listen to what people say and the more I look at what they do." — -- Andrew Carnegie

April 21, 2016

Why Machine Learning Is The New BI

Whether it’s IoT, big data or analytics, companies have a lot more data to base their decisions on, and data-driven decision making sounds obvious. And the next step beyond data-driven decisions is decision support systems and even automation. Are we ready for intelligent assistants with business advice? While a recent study of 50,000 American manufacturing organizations found that the use of data-driven decisions had almost tripled between 2005 and 2010, that was still only 30 percent of plants. And when telecom provider Colt surveyed senior IT leaders in Europe in 2015, 71 percent of them said intuition and personal experience works better for making decisions than using data (even though 76 percent of them say their intuition doesn’t always match the data they get).

Fintech explosion demands joint effort on oversight, report says

“There is an urgent need both for the private sector and financial supervisors to collaborate,” the group said in the report, whose contributors include investment bank executives, international economists and entrepreneurs from Asia, the U.K. and the U.S. The forum’s aim is “to foster competition between traditional financial players and new entrants while also preserving system stability,” it said. Fintech was a central theme this year at the group’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and the report draws on discussions that took place there. It incorporates views of members including executives from UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co.; tech firms such as IEX Group Inc. and On Deck Capital Inc.; and regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bank of England.

How to create a strategic analytics culture in your organization

One of the real values of utilizing data is that it can uncover questions or ideas that aren't currently being considered in your organization. A data science team will need specific tasks to accomplish, but they also need a certain degree of autonomy to explore the data and experiment with it. "If you want to build a culture, set them free," Davis said. Change is hard, especially in a large organization with many moving parts. As someone arguing for an analytics culture, you are a change agent, and you have to determine how resistant to, or accepting of, change your organization is. Try asking yourself the following questions:

Back to the future: It's all about appliances again

While that converged infrastructure move flies in the face of the promise of our server-less future, Sangster posits that the value that converged infrastructure delivers -- by taking a group of technologies that can be difficult to use on their own (much less together) and combining them into a prescriptive, pre-integrated solution -- is eternally attractive. Sangster points out that OpenStack has, until recently, been viewed as software for innovators and early adopters. This is the realm of proud DIYers blazing the trail ahead. They love to experiment, doing all the hardware and software engineering possible as they work to understand, implement and eventually deploy a new system like OpenStack. This is, of course, fun for the tinkerers, but unhelpful for the mainstream organizations that simply want to use a solution. For those folks, converged infrastructure makes sense.

The bots are coming … but they are not taking over.

The magic sauce in the march of the bots is in the deep background: the democratization and implementation of artificial intelligence systems on a large scale. Millions of software developers build interesting products and systems across the world every day. But only a handful of computer engineers know how to actually build, train and deploy advanced computing functions like machine learning, computer vision or neural networks. The companies and organizations that know how to do such things are incredibly limited: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle (to a certain extent), think tanks and university research departments like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. The average software developer writing JavaScript Web apps probably doesn’t know the first thing about how to build artificially intelligent systems.

Is Mobile Commerce Growth Really Happening?

The shift from e-commerce to m-commerce happened quite rapidly, too rapidly for many retailers actually. Another new paradigm in 2016 is the move from shopping in mobile browsers to shopping in mobile apps. A combination of well-designed mobile apps with good UI, enhanced smartphone capabilities, push notifications, and new mobile payment tools have led to an explosion in mobile shopping. This also brought a new agenda in sales (retail) strategies for businesses to keep customers engaged and retain to come back. ... Mobile apps play a vital role in mobile commerce growth, but still struggle. 85% of mobile time is spent in apps, which is obviously stunning. On the other hand, most of the app time is solely spent in an individual’s top 3 apps. While mobile web drives double the traffic of apps across industries.

Whaling Emerges As Major Cybersecurity Threat

Vendors such as Microsoft, Proofpoint, Cloudmark and Mimecast are building tools to help companies defend against these attack. Mimecast, which makes cloud software designed to spot and quarantine phishing emails with malicious attachments and URLs, has just launched a tool designed to harpoon whaling. Called Impersonation Protect, the software's algorithms analyze the language content of emails as they come in through a corporate server. It looks for key indicators, beginning with whether the source name actually works for the company. The software will then parse the email content for requests that includes keywords and phrases such as "W2" or "wire transfer," and provides a probability score that a target email is either safe or malicious. "One indicator in isolation is not bad, but two together could be fishy," Malone says.

Dear CISOs and Legal Counsel: We Can’t Wait for the Privacy Regulators

The Issue is Clear: Why Should Anyone Trust Anyone? We could leave this issue to privacy officers, internal and external legal counsel, governments, data protection authorities, politicians, regulators, and technology companies to sort out. We could wait for the ultimate answer to solve the privacy question once and for all. And wait. And wait some more. And wait for another review, debate, newsworthy event (such as needing information from another critical terrorist phone). Or wait for the next cloud service to be hacked, exposing photos that violate an individual’s right to privacy. The reality is we just don’t trust each other—person to person or country to country. The reality is also, we have to trust each other at some level to interact personally or conduct business with each other.

Better Web Testing With Selenium

WebDriver has a few different ways to temporarily pause a script in the middle of a run. The easiest, and worst way, is an explicit wait. This is when you tell the script to hang out for some amount of time, maybe 15 seconds. Explicit waits hide real problems. A lot of the time, we see the wait fail and bump the time up a few more seconds in hopes that it will work next time. Eventually we have padded enough time in the script so that the page loads completely before trying to perform the next step. But, how long is too long? These explicit waits can conceal performance problems if we aren’t careful. The smarter way to handle waits is to base them on the specific element you want to use next. WebDriver calls these explicit waits. I have had the most luck in improving stability of a check by stacking explicit waits.

Lambda Functions versus Infrastructure - Are we Trading Apples for Oranges?

Some refer to this as stateless computing or serverless computing. Personally I prefer the second term, as there is clearly a state somewhere-probably in a database service that the function may leverage— but the function itself is essentially stateless. The same argument could be held against the serverless term, clearly there are servers floating around in the cloudy background but their existence is implicit and automatic rather than explicit and manual. The next area of value in AWS Lambda stems from the ability to easily associate your function with all manner of triggers via both web-based and command line tools. There are more than 20 different triggers that can be used—most of them being from other AWS services such as S3, Kinesis and DynamoDB.

Quote for the day:

"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes." -- Henry Kaiser,

April 20, 2016

Making the case for in-house data centers

Leasing data center capacity to another organization is another way for an internal data center to add value. “Our Texas data center has over thirty thousand square feet available which could be developed. We are exploring the possibility of leasing this capacity to another organization,” Connor says. The potential leasing arrangement would be with a single organization which would partner with BlueCross on data center design. If research and development is a priority for the organization, a specialized in house data center makes sense. In 2014, Cambridge University built the West Cambridge data center facility. The data center has delivered cost savings in the form of lower power consumption. Scientific research in chemistry, physics and other departments have increasingly decided to adopt the central data center rather than departmental resources.

European Commission formally objects to Google’s Android dominance

The EC said pre-installing and setting Google as the default, or exclusive, search service on most Android devices sold in Europe, closed off ways for rival search engines to access the market, via competing mobile browsers and operating systems. ... The EC said Google’s actions also harmed consumers by stifling competition and restricting innovation in the wider mobile space. As an example, it said Google's conduct has had a direct impact on consumers, as it has denied them access to innovative smart mobile devices based on alternative, potentially superior, versions of the Android operating system.

Leadership is more powerful than technology

One thing that's interesting is that everyone always asks, 'Well, what happened to your tech and can't you use it?' It's like, 'Well, no. ... The key is to remember always that a lot of [management] stuff comes directly from the candidates themselves. Even though, you know, Barack Obama didn't come to me and say, 'Harper, here is what you should build.' Barack Obama found people that would represent [what he wanted], and it trickled down to me. The candidate determines how software will be built, and what it will do because they choose to organize all these other things. That's how tech works. If the candidate is a terrible person, probably their technology is going to be [supported by] terrible people. That doesn't mean it's going to fail. Those are not related.

Don’t overlook SaaS, the original cloud option

There are often better SaaS alternatives -- not only cheaper, but with better capabilities and better workflows -- for internal applications. And not Salesforce alone. There are SaaS-based HR systems such as the popular Workday, as well as accounting, manufacturing, learning, project management, and even office automation. By my count, there are more than 2,000 SaaS offerings, ranging from niche applications to integrated ERP and CRM systems. Perhaps because SaaS is now 15 years old, IT has stopped thinking about it as cloud -- they confine the term's use to newer offerings like IaaS and PaaS. But SaaS is the original cloud, and it represents the largest part of the cloud market.

Brexit won’t exempt you from new EU data protection obligations

In the long term, the economic argument for the UK adopting the GDPR if we leave – or, indeed, implementing even more stringent measures that would satisfy the Regulation’s data protection requirements – is strong: according to the Office for National Statistics, e-commerce accounted for 20% of UK business turnover in 2014. And, as think tank Chatham House pointed out only last month, “data sharing has an impact on all business with the EU (both online and offline), valued at 45 per cent of UK exports and 53 per cent of UK imports.” In still-straitened economic times, that value is obviously something the Exchequer will be keen preserve.

How compliance can be an excuse to shun the cloud

"When you break down the problem it only governs a specific piece or component of data and only those apps," he says. "They aren't breaking down the problem and laying out the workloads and data sets." As it turns out, the excuses for not embracing the cloud are numerous. One cause is generational. People have been running internal data centers for decades. Good luck convincing a CIO in his or her 50s who fears being cut out of a job in the first place that data and applications should be moved off-site into a data center somewhere across the country. ... The problem is also dependent on the size of the company. Small firms without a dedicated IT staff can be more reticent because they don't have someone who is fully dedicated to understanding computing services and products, said James Gast

Next up in smart devices: The Internet of shirts and shoes

IoT startup Evrythng is teaming up with packaging company Avery Dennison to give apparel and footwear products unique identities in Evrythng’s software right when they’re manufactured. The companies have high hopes for the Janela Smart Products Platform, seeing a potential to reach 10 billion products in the next three years. The system could put a simple form of IoT into the hands of millions of consumers who weren’t even shopping for technology. Evrythng and Avery Dennison don’t want to make your clothes into online celebrities, they want to make them more useful. What they’re doing may make it harder to counterfeit desirable products and commit fraud at the returns counter. There could be some fun features for consumers, too.

Free Up IT Infrastructure Costs to Fund Transformation

Though few near-term opportunities for savings may be apparent, I&O provides plenty of longer-term room if you‘re willing to address cost optimization with careful scrutiny of every asset. “The most important thing is to make sure you have a strategy in place,” said Ms. Caminos. “Then you can look at cost savings, starting with some areas that will give you some quick wins depending on your existing environment.” Consider each of the four major technology domains that make up I&O: data centre, networking, client computing and service desk. Then evaluate the most impactful methods for reducing costs and prioritise your initiatives. It’s important to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) for each of these functional areas.

Insurance Giant John Hancock Begins Blockchain Tech Tests

While the company isn’t sharing details around its proofs-of-concept, earlier this year ‘Big Four’ accounting firm Ernst & Young published a report listing peer-to-peer insurance and faster distribution of “regionalized or personalized” products among its list of opportunities for insurers using blockchain. Other possible applications according to the report include fraud detection through creating a decentralized repository of customer information and policies; digital claims management through providing historical third-party transaction data; types of distribution using micro-insurance and micro-finance; and new kinds of products around "cyber liability" for security professionals. But, not all considerations mentioned in the report were positive.

Companies high on virtualization despite fears of security breaches

Adding to the confusion, virtualization has caused a shift in IT responsibilities in many organizations, says Greg Young, research vice president at Gartner. The data center usually includes teams trained in network and server ops, but virtualization projects are typically being led by the server team. “The network security issues are things they haven’t had to deal with before,” Young says. The average cost to remediate a data breach in a virtualized environment tops $800,000, according to Kapersky Labs, and remediation costs bring the average closer to $1 million – nearly double the cost of a physical infrastructure attack. Companies don’t see technology as the sole answer to these security problems just yet, according to the HyTrust survey.

Quote for the day:

"Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind." -- Walter Landor

April 12, 2016

The Future of Economics May Be in the Hands of Machine Learning

Historically, the discipline of economics has always been categorized among the social sciences, which means the word ‘science’ should be understood as somewhat loosely applied. Unlike the natural sciences, which are prescribed as strictly positivist and bound by the ideals of empirical truth to only build theories around quantitative data that can be measured and duplicated, social sciences are often influenced by observations that are open to interpretation. In social sciences, research models can be eclectic, built from combination of qualitative and quantitative data. And conclusions drawn from models like that are prone to the influence of bias and personal ideologies. Not that hard sciences can’t also be prone to bias and ideology. It’s just that the whole point of the strict empirical research model is to limit the potential for bias and interpretive ambiguity.

Collaboration Technology Fuels Innovation for States and Localities

Collaboration forms the cornerstone of the innovative work conducted at the North Carolina Innovation Center, which is run by the state’s Department of Information Technology (DIT). The iCenter both showcases collaborative workspace options and technologies and puts them to work helping the departments the DIT serves. “When Governor Pat McCrory first envisioned the iCenter, it was primarily about creating a culture of collaboration throughout the state to better serve citizens,” says North Carolina CIO Keith Werner. The agency has been fortunate to work with partners to demo equipment and furniture without burdening taxpayers, he adds. Determined to run lean, DIT took advantage of existing resources on both the personnel and the facility side.

From tech supplier to IT service provider, a CIO makes the 'big switch'

"IT is not just an enabler of certain processes but part of the delivery of every product and service we offer," Watkins said. Indeed, the company itself was undergoing a transformation, Watkins said. KAR no longer wanted to be a car auction company that uses technology but "a technology company that sells cars," he said. IT had not kept up with the vision. "With the convergence of these technologies, business demand skyrocketed and created a wide gap between business expectations and IT delivery. Something had to switch," Watkins said. ... "We need our staff to be agents of change. The status quo doesn't get it done. We have to look at things differently. We have to be problem solvers. We have to bridge siloes between IT and operations, between one IT team and another IT team, and between being a technology provider and being a service organization," he said.

Windows XP still powers 181 million PCs two years after support ends

Even though Microsoft retired Windows XP two years ago, an estimated 181 million PCs around the world ran the crippled operating system last month, according to data from a web metrics vendor. Windows XP exited public support on April 8, 2014, amid some panic on the part of corporations that had not yet purged their environments of the 2001 OS. Unless companies paid for custom support, their PCs running XP received no security updates after that date. Consumers were completely cut off from patches, with no alternatives other than to switch to a newer operating system or continue running an insecure machine. But two years after XP’s support demise, nearly 11% of all personal computers continue to run the OS, data for March from U.S.-based analytics vendor Net Applications showed.

The digital effect on the BPM lifecycle

The shift from traditional to digital business goes well beyond incremental improvement. In metaphorical terms, moving from the railroad to the automobile would be incremental change; the transition from traditional to digital business would be more like moving from the automobile to the space shuttle, i.e. whole new game, new players, new rules, new stakeholders, and importantly, new risks and new rewards. ... It is a marvelous instantiation of the chicken and the egg: does the business enable the technology or does the technology enable the business? I will, for now, be comfortable with the simple answer: YES. Let the philosophers amongst us continue to impress their cocktail party friends with the more verbose answers and profound wisdom that can only be found in the third glass of wine.

DataStax believes multi-model databases are the future

DataStax added to its own multi-model capabilities with the announcement of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) Graph, a scaled-out graph database built for cloud applications that need to manage highly connected data. Graph databases are a specialized form of NoSQL database intended to address relational data, but in a much more efficient and scale-out manner. "Graph is an excellent method of evaluating, expressing and analyzing previously unrecognized relationships in data," Gartner's Heudecker and fellow analyst Mark Beyer wrote in their July 2015 report, Making Big Data Normal with Graph Analytics. "Instead of examining and analyzing data as a set of discrete and unrelated atomic elements, graph allows for the exploration of the frequency, strength and direction of relationships in data."

Security researchers defeat reCAPTCHA

The system uses techniques to bypass CAPTCHA security measures such as tokens and cookies as well as machine learning to correctly guess images presented to it. The researchers said the system they had devised was “extremely effective”, automatically solving 70.78 percent of the image reCaptcha challenges, while requiring only 19 seconds per challenge. The trio also applied this attack to the Facebook image captcha and achieved an accuracy of 83.5 percent. The researchers said that the enhanced accuracy of the attack system on Facebook's security was down to the higher-resolution images it used. Google's lower resolution images make it difficult for the automated system to classify images.

Top 5 misconceptions about Big Data

The business opportunities for big data can be significant. One of the more straightforward examples which didn’t involve any exotic new practices or people is Guess Inc. They were able to re-engineer their data pipeline to completely transform the experience of managing their retail stores. In the old world the store managers had a weekly printed report. In the new world they have real-time, dynamic information about their store, their customers, and brand & loyalty programs. So Guess was able to overhaul the process of decision-making. If they’d just focused on doing more of the same, this wouldn’t have happened. ... Some organizations are large enough to bear the cost of being Hadoop experts. Many aren’t. And the degree of expertise required for the care and feeding of Hadoop is highly dependent on how it’s being used.

Why Solving Problems Always Leads to More Problems, and How to Stop the Madness

A problem, once solved, merely restores the status quo. Solving it gets you back to where you were before the problem arose, but brings no lasting difference to the situation. A staff member quits, we recruit a new one, and now we're right back where we were. The customer gets angry, we send them flowers and give them a credit, and we're back on an even keel with them. But nothing has changed. An obstacle, when solved, measurably changes the situation, or even the business as a whole; things are never the same again after we solve it. And because we solved the obstacle, it dramatically reduces the number of problems we will have going forward. That's one way you know you're solving obstacles, because the number of related problems are permanently reduced.

Claire Agutter on IT Service Management and Future Practices

ITSM is defined as an organization’s capabilities to deliver IT services that support the business. It can include people, processes, tools, suppliers…pretty much anything that makes up an IT service. For example, think about your own organization without email, remote working, printing etc. How would it look? IT service management has been developing as long as IT and technology itself. Because IT services support business processes, they need to be dependable, reliable and do the job they are meant to do. If IT is failing, the business suffers. Not many businesses can cope with paper and pens now. Many organizations realized quickly that IT needed to be governed for them to get value.

Quote for the day:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." -- Henry Ford

April 11, 2016

The truth comes out: Microsoft needs Linux

The juggernaut has finally realized where the future lies...and it is not in the desktop platform. The future is the cloud, SaaS, and virtualization. The future is big data, and massive databases. The future is Linux and Microsoft knows this. This isn't the 90s or early 2000s when it was chic to look down on the underdog and laugh as the powerhouse raked in cash like leaves on a Midwestern autumn lawn. The time for spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is over. This is now and now is all about open source. Microsoft fully understands and embraces this. And so they are bringing to Windows the tools they need to make it happen. This move isn't so much about Linux, but about Microsoft.

Get Data to the Client and Save Server-Side Storage

The normal processing cycle for an ASP.NET MVC is to retrieve some data in the Controller, move it into a Model object, and then pass that data to a View to be embedded into some HTML. It's not unusual, however, for there to be some data in that mix that shouldn't be displayed to the user but that you still need on the client (often in to pass in calls to a Web Service). It's also not unusual for some of that data not to be needed on the client at all, but is required back on the server when the user's input is posted back from the browser after the user is done. There are a couple of ways to handle that "non-displayed" data. For the data required on the client (but not shown to the user) a common solution is to shove it into HTML hidden tags in the View

Why cloud, mobile and the education sector make a perfect match

While giving students hands-on experience of modern technology is important from a development perspective, the expectations of digitally native learners means education institutions must deploy the right solutions now in order to stay relevant. As competition to recruit students increases, academies and universities in particular are turning to technology to differentiate. As a starting point, with today’s students used to consuming online services through a range of different devices, there is a growing expectation for schools and universities to deliver their resources in a similar way. While the majority of universities have provided course materials online for some time, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Can Public Cloud Truly Meet The Data Demands Of Enterprises?

“In the last year, cloud has gone from being the untrusted option to being seen as a more secure option for many companies,” said Brian Stevens, vice president of product management for Google Cloud Platform. “We know that compliance, support and integration with existing IT investments is critical for businesses trying to use public cloud services to accelerate into new markets.” Then we have Oracle, who unlike Google, is at the other end of the stick. Oracle has been successful in the enterprise world for decades now, and has to prove to customers there’s no need to leave when it comes to cloud migration, because it also has attractive cloud offerings that can suit enterprises. Oracle’s offering comes in the form of Oracle Cloud Machine’s Cloud at Customer.

4 Ways to Close the Communication Gap and Get Your Data Seen

The integration of data science into an organization is a relatively new development that involves new personalities, skills, processes, technologies, and their related investments, so it's bound to cause some level of disruption. Executive leadership may lack a clear understanding — and perhaps even respect — for the role of data science. Likely, these leaders simply haven't had a chance to get caught up. Moreover, while the idea that no computer is ever going to beat a sharp manager's instincts that were honed over many years in the same industry contains some truth, human bias sometimes prevents leaders from making evidence-based decisions that will benefit the company. Both new terminology and a low comfort level with the relevant technology may contribute to the communication gap as well.

Three ITSM Activities to Amplify DevOps Feedback Loops

When organizations are split into silos it’s common for each silo to have its own KPIs; with the differences between these KPIs being the cracks in the floor for things to fall into. This issue can be measured by incidents that are not repaired, technical debt incurred, and a pile up of work in progress. At the enterprise company, which I’ve been talking about, the Operations team had different KPI targets for Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) compared to the Development team ... Changing how people work resulted in improvements in how incidents are resolved. Instead of “duct taping” a patch onto an application or server, the fix is built into the design at the front of the workflow, therefore avoiding future occurrences.

Are your vendors leaving you vulnerable?

Research reveals that on average 89 third-party vendors access a typical company’s network each week, and that number is likely to grow. Three quarters (75 percent) of those polled stated the number of third-party vendors used by their organization has increased in the last two years, and 71 percent believe the numbers will continue to increase in the next two years. The report uncovered a high level of trust in third-party vendors, but a low level of visibility of vendor access to IT systems. 92 percent of respondents say they trust vendors completely or most of the time, although two-thirds (67 percent) admit they tend to trust vendors too much. Astonishingly, only 34 percent knew the number of log-ins to their network attributed to third-party vendors, and 69 percent admitted they had definitely or possibly suffered a security breach resulting from vendor access in the past year.

Reflections on the 2016 external audit season

The more expectations are defined (for our purposes – documented) the less audit issues you will have. The reason is that most technology and information security functions generally excel at implementing agreed upon requirements. These requirements are generally documented through policy. The problem arises when expectations are not communicated, agreed to and thereby documented. In these situations, the external auditor may impose their own expectations resulting in comments requiring that their expectations be implemented whether reasonable or not. So, resolve your issues within your function and other departments before the audit or the external auditor will resolve it for you.

How to apply Agile practices with your non-tech team or business

"A recruiting team can't predict candidate outcomes," says Kammersell. "Recruiting can have a pretty standard process flow from start to finish. However, there are factors on a daily basis that can rapidly change the flow." Because of the irregular nature of recruiting, the team needed to be flexible and efficient, while also maintaining transparency among their team and stakeholders. If they weren't, a recruiter might get bogged down in the workflow, causing candidates to drop out, managers to become impatient, or the cost-to-hire to rise significantly. So, Kammersell worked with the team to use the Kanban board practice of the Kanban Agile framework. The team displayed the work they had on their plate on a public, physical board for the team and other stakeholders to see.

22 insults no developer wants to hear

Some people are explicitly rough, and part of that might be the mechanisms by which we receive insults -- almost never face to face. Linus Torvalds argues that email is an inherently flawed mechanism that often hides subtle cues, like the ones that the marketing department swaps by moving their eyes. Torvalds once told a thin-skinned developer, “it's damn hard to read people over email. I think you need to be *more* honest and *more* open over email.” For a bit of fun, he inserted a logic bomb into the calls for more sensitivity by saying that his culture includes cursing. Whiners might try remembering that he comes from Scandinavia, the home of Viking warriors. In the interest of helping the technology world cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, here is a list of some common insults that no developer wants to hear -- but often will. Brace yourself.

Quote for the day:

"Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is the best teacher." -- John Maxwell

April 10, 2016

U.S. Senate Bill Seeks to Ban Effective Encryption, Making Security Illegal

This bill essentially says you can not have any conversation or data exchange that the government can not access if it wants to. It is the legal culmination of what the FBI has been lobbying Congress for years. If Feinstein-Burr becomes law, it will be illegal to deploy strong encryption without key escrow maintained by each company. Cryptographers and computer scientists near-unanimously assert key backup systems are insecure at scale. The first read of the bill is chilling. Strong cryptography within the United States would effectively be banned, preventing U.S. companies from building secure software. These companies would be mandated to provide real technical assistance. Unlike the best effort of today, they would be required to give plain-text data in its original format or risk penalties for violating the law.

Security and employee privacy biggest barriers to BYOD

The biggest inhibitors to BYOD adoption, according to respondents, are, unsurprisingly, security (39 per cent) and employee privacy (12 per cent). In contrast, management opposition (3 per cent), employees’ unwillingness to take on additional expenses (6 per cent), and user experience concerns (4 per cent) were not considered significant barriers to BYOD adoption. When it comes to security, data leakage/loss was cited as the top BYOD security concern by 72 per cent of respondents. Meanwhile, 56 per cent are worried about unauthorized access to company data and systems, and 54 per cent are concerned that users will download unsafe apps or content. One in five organizations have suffered a mobile security breach, primarily driven by malware and malicious WiFi, with security threats to BYOD imposing heavy burdens on organizations’ IT resources (35 per cent) and help desk workloads (27 per cent).

Phishing email that knows your address

"The email has good spelling and grammar and my exact home address...when I say exact I mean, not the way my address is written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way I write my address. "My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat." She quickly realised it was a scam and did not click on the link. "Then, a couple of minutes later, You and Yours producer Jon Douglas piped up as he'd received one and then another colleague said he'd received one too, but to his home email address," she added. The You and Yours team decided to contact the companies that were listed in the emails as being owed money. A spokesman for British Millerain Co Ltd, a waxed cotton fabric manufacturer, told the programme that the firm "had more than 150 calls from people who don't owe us money".

Cryptocurrency from the Dark Web to the Mainstream

Bitcoin has the added benefit of greater speed and efficiency in facilitating payments and transfers. The blockchain technology also serves as a powerful and detailed ledger that can monitor all transactions in the network. However, these benefits don’t detract from bitcoin’s indisputable flaws, which were on display in 2013 when Tokyo-based Mt Gox collapsed, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in client funds. Claims of bitcoin’s potential also don’t ignore the cryptocurrency’s role in facilitating online criminal behaviour, money laundering, tax evasion and fraud. ... In reality, bitcoin is just one version of the digital currency revolution. While it may be the largest, it isn’t necessarily the best. However, what these and other critics seem to forget is that the virtual currency paradigm does not live and die with bitcoin.

How to Transition Industry Toward Software-Based Infrastructure & Hybrid Clouds

A very important area of focus is network security. As we move toward a software-defined world, security is lagging behind. ONUG’s Software-Defined Security Services Working Group focuses on how to secure the software infrastructure to ensure users have access to the same level of security or better as they move from the physical to the software world. This working group is organizing a framework for software-defined security services that defines what security means in a software-defined world, both from an exploit mitigation point of view and from a compliance point of view. The group will present the framework at the ONUG Spring Conference.

Do IT groups really need to move to a software-defined environment?

Increasingly, the main motivations for moving to a software-defined world are the benefits of speed, agility, quality and cost. It enables bringing on applications quickly. With agility comes scalability to quickly grow services and infrastructure to the business needs – or shrink them. This increased speed and agility paradoxically do not come at the expense of quality. In fact, where we have been able to study software-defined environments, we find them operating at much higher quality levels. ... Finally, software-defined environments are far cheaper to operate and maintain. It is easy to understand that fewer people equals less cost, and less rework due to higher quality saves money. However, this is just the start.

Economics of Software Resiliency

Obviously, the resilience comes with a cost and the economies of benefit should be seen before deciding on what level of resilience is required. There is a need to balance the cost and effectiveness of the recovery or resilience capabilities against the events that cause disruption or downtime. These costs may be reduced or rather optimized if the expectation of failure or compromise is lowered through preventative measures, deterrence, or avoidance. There is a trade-off between protective measures and investments in survivability, i.e., the cost of preventing the event versus recovering from the event. Another key factor that influences this decision is that cost of such event if it occurs.

Duties, Skills, & Knowledge of a Software Architect

The knowledge requirement is so staggering and extensive that there are very few persons capable of performing in an above average capacity. I cannot envision how one could possibly through strictly academic coursework, acquire this knowledge without perilous and untiring pursuit. ... Appreciate the value of the contributions they can make , especially not in the short run, but over time. Build a recognition that architecture is vital to the life cycle of the information, does not exist solely to serve the application, and may well surpass several generations of application development. Recognize that like building a solid bridge, the value is not in how quickly and cheaply it can be built, but how ultimately useful, flexible, and durable it is over it's expected life.

Managing Operational Resilience

Operational resilience management draws from several complex and evolving disciplines, including risk management, business continuity, disaster recovery, information security, incident and emergency management, information technology (IT), service delivery, workforce management, and supply-chain management, each with its own terminology, principles, and solutions. The practices described here reflect the convergence of these distinct, often siloed disciplines. As resilience management becomes an increasingly relevant and critical attribute of their missions, organizations should strive for a deeper coordination and integration of its constituent activities.

Creating an Enterprise Architecture to Engage with “Things”

“Economic agents are more than just people and businesses — imagine an economic agent in the role of a customer that is actually an Internet-connected thing,” said Don Scheibenreif, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Whether it’s a refrigerator ordering a replacement water filter, a car scheduling a service appointment or an industrial machine requesting maintenance, the idea is that as the number and capability of Internet-connected things increases, they will develop the capacity to buy, sell, and negotiate for products and services, with organizations having to adapt to this new reality.”

Quote for the day:

"The old mantra of ‘be everywhere’ will quickly be replaced with ‘be where it matters to our business'." -- Mike Stelzner

April 09, 2016

How is open source transforming the Internet Of Things?

Open source is a disruptor that never quits. It seems to be penetrating and transforming every aspect of established data, analytics, and applications ecosystems. In a podcast recorded at IBM InterConnect 2016, Roger Strukhoff, executive director, Tau Institute for Global ICT Research, shares his expert perspective on how open source initiatives are transforming the Internet Of Things. Strukhoff responded to the following questions: How do you define the Internet of Things?; What is the most important open source initiative in the Internet of Things?; What will the Internet of Things landscape of 2020 look like?; You’ve described a “highly supple, flexible ecosystem of ecosystems” in the Internet of Things arena? ...

Digital Disruption in Financial Services

Watch the general session on ‘Digital Disruption in Financial Services’ where Jim Marous, owner and publisher of the Digital Banking Report, led a discussion with the following panellists on how digital transformation is driving the financial services industry. ... Digital transformation is lighting up across the industry, bringing new opportunities and opening up new markets – and demands a fundamentally new approach to thrive in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. What’s your plan for digital transformation? How will you transform and perform in this new environment, satisfying clients and shareholders alike? Watch the session to hear insights and thought-provoking conversations from your industry peers.

What to use instead of the asset-based approach for ISO 27001 risk identification

One of the most significant changes in the 2013 version of ISO 27001, a worldwide standard for Information Security Management Systems, is that it does not prescribe any approach in the risk assessment anymore. While it still requires the adoption of a process-based risk assessment approach (learn more here: ISO 27001 risk assessment treatment – 6 basic steps), the obligation to use an asset-threat-vulnerability model in the risk identification step no longer exists. While this approach in the standard provides more freedom for organizations to choose the risk identification approach that better fits their needs, the absence of such orientation is the source of a lot of confusion for organizations about how to approach risk identification.

How to Build a Big Data and Analytics Team

Hiring a great team doesn’t start with posting a job ad. It starts with the company taking a hard look at its goals and the talent it needs to achieve those goals. As with anything surrounding data, the first step is to be clear on the questions that you want the data to answer and the challenges or goals you hope to address. No matter what size your business, don’t be afraid to start small and build your analytics as you go. Start with the questions in mind and identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to accurately judge when the questions have been answered. Then – and only then – start considering which team members can help you answer the questions.

Bank of Ireland experiments with blockchain technology

Tighe said that the purpose of the trial is to understand the technology and assess how it can fit with Bank of Ireland’s legacy systems as a layer on top. “We see this as the start of a new concept, just like experimenting with TCP/IP in the early days of the internet. It may not end up like this but we see a strong technology that can help with transparency in transactions. “Crucially, it has to meet regulatory requirements. “It is the underlying technology that fascinates us and it could one day be an efficient way of transacting value between people and at the same time leave a transparent trail of information.”

Linux founder Torvalds on the Internet of Things: Security plays second fiddle

Of course, Linux isn't the right operating system for all embedded devices. After all, the Linux kernel keeps growing. Therefore, Torvalds said, "If you're doing something really tiny, like sensors, you don't need Linux." But that still leaves a lot of room for big embedded Linux devices. In particular, Torvalds sees Linux playing a large role in the IoT because "you also need smart devices. The stupid devices talk different standards. Maybe you won't see Linux on the leaf nodes, but you'll see Linux in the hubs." Personally, Torvalds added, "I'm never been very interested in very small OSs. I liked working with hardware. But, if it doesn't have a memory management unit, I don't find it that interesting."

C-suite champion: what is the CIO’s position in the business today?

The future CIO will be expected to understand how every department will use technology tools and ensure a return on investment is achieved. The myriad of services out there makes this even harder. The challenges CIOs face when making purchases are exacerbated further by the different options available for the same service. Organisations can choose to use a managed service provider or OEM to complete an install. Buying from an OEM direct may seem like the cheaper option, but when you throw in added support costs and any maintenance, costs can quickly escalate. Pressure on CIOs to reduce capital spend is forcing the issue further. The latter is winning the capex vs. opex debate as IT budgets continue to be spent on technology for use across the business.

What Is Driving the Digital Economy?

Companies that thrive in the digital economy are 26 percent more profitable than their industry peers. These companies are thriving by improving customer experiences, optimizing operations and creating new business models—all through superior digital expertise and leadership. The 26 percent profit differential will shrink because the digital laggards will fall by the wayside, leaving the digital winners to compete among themselves. This is not as grim as it sounds: There is still time for the digital laggards to catch up … but not much time. We are already seeing the impact on the competitive landscape. According to R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research, half of the Fortune 500 companies on the 2000 list have since fallen off as a result of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies due to a failure to adapt digitally.

Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks

As the bitcoin ecosystem has grown over the past few years, privacy concerns seem to have been pushed to the backburner. Many early bitcoin users assumed that the system would give them complete anonymity, but we have learned otherwise as various law enforcement agencies have revealed that they are able to deanonymize bitcoin users during investigations. The Open Bitcoin Privacy Project has picked up some of the slack with regard to educating users about privacy and recommending best practices for bitcoin services. The group is developing a threat model for attacks on bitcoin wallet privacy. ... A multitude of systems and best practices have been developed in order to increase the privacy of bitcoin users. Dr Pieter Wuille authored BIP32, hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, which makes it much simpler for bitcoin wallets to manage addresses.

You have the power. Should you use it?

But when you’re exercising power in an ongoing employment relationship, you should care a great deal about how the terms you dictate and the tactics you use make people feel. Their attitude toward the organization and you, their manager, directly affects the value they deliver as their part of the bargain. This is especially true when you’re dealing with geeks. The work they do requires engagement, creativity, dedication and commitment. It follows, then, that negative feelings can cost a great deal in productivity and quality. A developer who feels that she is being paid less than her equally capable peers is unlikely to think creatively day and night about how to better architect your system. A support technician who fears that his job may be converted to a contract position is thinking more about where to get a new job than about how to make a user feel good.

Quote for the day:

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them … into the impossible." -- Arthur C. Clarke