Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 26, 2016

Augmented Reality’s Plan to Change Everything About Computing

“My vision is to build an OS that’s 100 times easier to use than a Macintosh,” Gribetz said. "We’re excited to remove the start menu—all of these metaphors and buttons and icons that take your brain extra steps to decode, and that are making my grandmother’s job of using computers much harder.” Gribetz, 30, founded Meta in 2012 after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University and working in the Israeli intelligence corps. He built the first Meta prototype with an oven-heated knife and hot glue gun the same year he founded the startup, and in 2013 debuted its first augmented reality headset after raising funds through Kickstarter. Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been inventing wearable devices for more than three decades, including his EyeTap augmented reality glasses in the late 1990s.

New IT roles to put on your hiring radar

A close cousin of big data analytics roles is the machine learning expert or cognitive systems expert. These roles include the ability to sift through and process huge amounts of data, and then use the results to model and drive evolving machine knowledge and responses. For example, a machine learning expert might help a company use big data analytics and behavioral models to identify weather patterns or cyberattacks. This is a sophisticated role, and so new that it's difficult to identify a typical skill set. Of course, using data implies that you have that data in the first place. While there's no shortage of data, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect billions of new devices to the Internet over the next few years.

Blockchain Startup Develops Identity App with Major Airline IT Firm

Using a blend of blockchain-based data and facial recognition techniques, the app is aimed at both streamlining how airlines verify passenger identities as well as facilitating real-time data flows at the airport. With the app, a passenger uploads their travel documents, which are then encrypted and hashed on the bitcoin blockchain. The system provides the passenger with what is called a "Single Travel Token", which can be presented to the airline in order to call up those documents using a public key. Any airline terminal connected to this system could then verify the identity of that passenger wherever they present this token. Though the app is in the early stages, in remarks, representatives for SITA pointed to the project as a means to allow the company test the use of blockchain.

IT Innovators: Developing a Data Exit Strategy—What’s Your Next Move in the Cloud?

When you have confirmed that data is securely operational in the new location, you must remember to take care of your previous location. That’s where data erasure often comes in as a mandatory requirement. Today, you have specific known malware that can penetrate networks and get access to different hosting environments. As an attack, the malware will start recovering previously left behind data that has just been deleted, which is not the same thing as securely erased. ... It’s hyper-converged, so you have tools in place to manage everything at your fingertips. You are managing everything from a control center. Following virtualization as a trend in the market is something that all of us security suppliers must do and, in the end, that makes life easier for the enterprise administrator who needs to actually perform these exercises.

5 active mobile threats spoofing enterprise apps

Enterprise employees use mobile apps every day to get their jobs done, but when malicious actors start impersonating those apps, it spells trouble for IT departments. David Richardson, director of product at Lookout, and his team recently researched five families of malware doing just that: spoofing real enterprise apps to lure people to download their malware. The dataset of mobile code shows that these five, active mobile malware families often impersonate enterprise apps by ripping off the legitimate app’s name and package name. These apps include Cisco’s Business Class Email app, ADP, Dropbox, FedEx Mobile, Zendesk, VMware’s Horizon Client, Blackboard’s Mobile Learn app, and others.

Effective design thinking

Innovation involves making multiple judgment calls about what to express and how, from a project’s big strategic idea to the fine details of implementation. Sensibilities not only guide these decisions, they also ultimately influence how people experience the resulting product, service or brand ... Designers use observation and prototyping methods of different kinds to help them figure out the best ways to express certain sensibilities. With sketches and models, they try things out to explore their effects, experimenting with physical elements (finishes, forms, fonts, materials) and control sensory inputs (contrast, rhythm, sound, space, pattern, pace) to determine what works and what doesn’t. And, ultimately, they discover how to deliberately evoke particular feelings to support the desired experience.

IT Assurance in the Cloud–A Journey Between Trust and Obligation

As the risks are better understood, businesses rely less on trust and put information security obligations on their cloud providers. Where security had been one of the main obstacles for cloud adoption in the past, vendors now understand the security and privacy concerns of their global customers and have adopted a business model built on enhanced security features such as encryption, and identity and access management, to name two examples. The result: cloud services are heading to the next level of maturity. A 2015 cloud survey conducted by ISACA Germany and PwC (in German) found about one-third of organizations expected to achieve a better security risk profile by adopting cloud computing.

APM strategy should focus on user experience, not just IT metrics

"It's not just an issue of maintaining an adequate infrastructure. Now it's essential to the business," said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Milan Hanson. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any company that isn't heavily reliant on applications to connect with its customers, communicate with partners and enable employees. So how those applications perform is vitally important, Hanson and others said -- much more so today in this "application economy" than it was in past decades when computerized work processes were in their infancy. Yet application performance management, although of strategic importance for most businesses, is an IT discipline in urgent need of an update at many companies.

Bloomberg and “the magic” of machine learning

Machine learning is an increasingly important area at Bloomberg, a company that manages massive amounts of data in a real-time environment. While machine learning is generally about giving computers the ability to learn by using algorithms to analyze data, find patterns or predict outcomes, much of Bloomberg’s efforts today in this area are focused on helping the company’s customers to pluck intelligence and insight from the financial information and data coursing through its network that feeds the Bloomberg Terminal. Fresh off of his presentations at two key industry events, Gary explains what he and his team are doing and how that is helping investors and Bloomberg customers make better, more informed decisions.

Faception can allegedly tell if you're a terrorist just by analyzing your face

An unnamed homeland security agency has signed a contract with a company that claims it can “reveal” your personality “with a high level of accuracy” just by analyzing your face, be that facial image captured via photo, live-streamed video, or stored in a database. It then sorts people into categories; with some labels as potentially dangerous such as terrorist or pedophile, it is disturbing that some experts believe the science behind it is antiquated, has previously been discredited, and the results are inaccurate. Israeli start-up Faception, a facial personality profiling company, told The Washington Post that “a homeland security agency” has signed a contract to use Faception to help spot terrorists.

Quote for the day:

"Your success will be the degree to which you build up others who work with you. While building up others, you build up yourself." -- James Casey

May 25, 2016

How Colocation and the Cloud Killed the Data Center

It’s clear that the cloud should be part of your IT strategy, even if your team has yet to determine how to leverage it. Many CIOs are stuck, having moved some workloads to the cloud but facing obstacles as they attempt to migrate the rest of their business. According to Gartner, security and IT complexity are the top reasons cloud strategies grind to a halt. For these teams, it’s important to remain educated about their companies’ individual needs, and seek services that can help meet them. In any case, when you’re dealing with the cloud, you’re dealing with remote IT resources. These require private networks with high levels of bandwidth and resiliency, and support from a robust data center provider.

Insurers might be reluctant to populate cyber incident database, says expert

"But cyber is the biggest insurable risk that the industry will have to meet, and it is critical to the economy. We’d like to see a not for profit, anonymised database covering things like business interruption costs, ransom demands, privacy breach claims and damage to IT systems." "If it is not a requirement to report these losses, then insurers are not going to have the data they need to provide the right cover. It would have to be mandated by parliament, but it would need to be proportionate and manageable," he said. Birdsey said that the UK's cyber insurance market is still "in its infancy" and that there is "limited cyber data available to insurers". However, he warned that insurers and businesses that buy cyber insurance might be wary of the de-anonymisation of data about cyber incidents input into a new database.

4 Questions that every Enterprise has before Migrating onto Cloud

Cloud migration should follow a well-defined strategy that weighs out the pros and cons of moving to the cloud. The major roadblocks could emanate from basic assumptions that lead to damage if not evaluated prior to the actual migration. Security gaps, interoperability issues, incompatibility of systems, rework of existing software applications can throw up unpleasant surprises. Before a business decides to move one or more processes to the cloud, it needs to understand that all applications may not benefit from the migration. Hence they need to ask the following questions to decide when to migrate, what to migrate and how to migrate, to unleash the power of cloud for their organization.

DevOps model, a profile in CIO leadership, change management

IT leaders must be able to articulate why and how a DevOps model of working will bring improvements, and they must be able to sell their vision to colleagues and staff alike. CIOs also need to shepherd their teams through the changes -- keeping workers on track and moving forward even though some will resist (as is typical anytime people are asked to do their jobs differently). CIOs will likely need to juggle staff, too, hiring new talent, retraining others and developing new skills in some so that those employees who once worked in isolated buckets can actually understand each other's work and how each role contributes to the final product. ... Berkholz said IT executives looking to bring DevOps into their environment need to focus on three pillars: culture, automation and measurement. But he also acknowledged that moving the dial in each of those areas is a challenge in and of itself.

More CIOs report to the CEO, underscoring IT’s rising importance

Snyder says the CIOs' rise to direct report and partner to the CEO means that talk of turf wars among CMOs, and more recently with CDOs, is fading. For example, while the number of CDOs spiked to 17 percent in 2015 from 7 percent in 2014 in their previous surveys, Harvey Nash and KPMG found that the number onlyrose only 2 percent to 19 percent for 2016. This suggests the CDO hype has peaked and that CIOs remain the most integral C-suite leader to shepherd the current transformation wave. Moreover, Snyder says that evidence that CMOs will control the bulk of technology spending is not materializing. While marketing may be spending more money on technology than it has in the past, it still requires CIOs to connect systems of engagement to back-end systems, including connecting newer cloud software to legacy systems.

A 2020 roadmap for corporate sustainability

"Look at your business, look at your household and think about why an electric vehicle makes sense," Britta Gross, director of advanced vehicle commercialization policy at General Motors, told more than 550 attendees on the first day of the conference. "There’s no good reason why there isn’t a plug-in vehicle in every driveway in this country right now." Our updated Ceres Roadmap expectations call on companies to prioritize electric vehicles in their logistics and fleets, and to provide employees with the infrastructure needed to charge their vehicles at work. I also heard about food companies upping their ambitions on climate and water issues, including General Mills, which is devoting far more attention these days to reducing water and carbon footprints in its vast supply chains compared to five years ago.

IoT increases cyber and legal risk, say experts

“The ability of IoT devices to sense, connect and react, their inability to carry complex circuitry or be upgraded, and their ability to create a physical attack vector such as disable the brakes on a vehicle also mean that we have to change the way we think about internet or cyber security,” said Kawalec. “Developers of IoT devices and systems need to consider everything from actuating physical attack, to connectivity and the importance of data, and the systems to support these devices going forward. When you embed them in concrete and build them into homes and hospitals, you need to think completely differently than you would about a Wi-Fi printer.” From a legal perspective, the dawn of the IoT era also means a potential increase in liability, especially in the light of new and planned data protection, privacy and information security regulations emerging in Europe and internationally, said Mark Taylor, partner at Osborne Clarke.

DevOps 2.0

For organizations, DevOps 2.0 brings the power of DevOps to non-technical team members. While this may sound risky, it actually empowers marketing, design, and business teams to control targeted visibility and testing without consuming engineering resources. Because feature rollout will be decoupled from code deployment, non-technical team members would be able to control the visibility of particular features without compromising the app’s integrity. This is primarily achieved by harnessing a feature flag user interface – or a comparable control panel that allows team members to target users via a GUI.

SD-WAN benefits create serious competition for MPLS

SD-WAN architecture aims to solve many of the problems with previous iterations of WAN technology through increased flexibility. Since SD-WAN technology is based on an overlay, it can be provisioned over any type of WAN connectivity: dedicated or Internet-based circuits. In addition, SD-WAN benefits include provisioning and management that is abstracted into a controller and configured from a central location. Even if you're comfortable with the existing Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, applications around segmentation and encryption make using SD-WAN over MPLS more attractive. ... SD-WAN abstracts any existing circuits, or underlay networks, into a single logical WAN connection. We can then classify traffic by connection and even aggregate links of disparate types together.

Even Strong Passwords Don't Cut It for Bank Payment Systems

2FA dramatically improves upon the lone password by requiring users to provide two verifying pieces of information (factors). Typically, the two factors are a password and a one-time code sent by SMS or email. Sometimes, a push notification, key fob, or fingerprint scan serve as the second factor. Payment systems should be the last place where a login ID and password alone are sufficient to send and receive money. Sadly, that’s not the case. Consider that most consumer payment systems allow users to access online accounts with a name and password only. Successful hackers can easily change the notification settings and transfer controls before filling their pockets, and the account holder might not notice the robbery for weeks. 2FA solutions would deflect more attacks, and properly implemented solutions would actually alert the account holder of suspicious activity.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is more obvious than a product or service becoming a brand when it is has values that translate into fact." -- Richard Branson

May 24, 2016

What Are Hackers Up To These Days

"That large jump shows you that organizations are starting to do things correctly. They're not just earmarking security as [a secondary concern delegated to] their IT departments. They're actually paying attention, and paying attention in a really important fashion," says Sigler. Still, 41 percent is not a majority, and Sigler says he hopes to see a majority of organizations detecting breaches on their own in the future, because the sooner a company detects a compromise, the sooner it can "contain the damage." Ultimately, sticking to the security basics will go a long way toward keeping your systems safe, Sigler says. Even though attackers are savvy and getting savvier, if you set up firewalls and make sure you’re properly logging and monitoring your systems, your organization will rise above the "low-hanging fruits and easy targets criminals tend to target," he says. "It's not sexy, but a lot of organizations aren't even doing that much."

Cyber security is the biggest risk to the global financial system

"What we found, as a general matter so far, is a lot of preparedness, a lot of awareness but also their policies and procedures are not tailored to their particular risks," she said. "As we go out there now, we are pointing that out." White said SEC examiners were very pro-active about doing sweeps of broker-dealers and investment advisers to assess their defenses against a cyber attack. "We can't do enough in this sector," she said. Cyber security experts said her remarks represented the SEC’s strongest warning to date of the threat posed by hackers. A former member of the World Bank’s security team, Tom Kellermann, who is now chief executive of the investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC, called it "a historic recognition of the systemic risk facing Wall Street."

The inside story of how the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer was born

"There were fundamental areas of innovation that had to be done to go beyond Jeopardy - there was a tremendous amount of pre-processing, post-processing and tooling that we have added around the core engines," added Saxena. "It's the equivalent of getting a Ferrari engine then trying to build a whole race car around it. What we inherited was the core engine, and we said 'Okay, let's build a new thing that does all sort of things the original Jeopardy system wasn't required to do'." To get Watson from Jeopardy to oncology, there were three processes that the Watson team went through: content adaptation, training adaptation, and functional adaptation - or, to put it another way, feeding it medical information and having it weighted appropriately; testing it out with some practice questions; then making any technical adjustments needed - tweaking taxonomies, for example.

Skills Gap Also Includes ‘Failure to Communicate’

The survey also found that technical proficiency in specific software programs like Hadoop is less of a problem than basic skills like writing, public speaking and problem-solving skills. “Effective writing, speaking and critical thinking enables you to accomplish business goals and get ahead,” added Dan Schawbel, research director at Future Workplace. “No working day will be complete without writing an email or tackling a new challenge, so the sooner you develop these skills, the more employable you will become.” Once those skills are developed, the fastest way to a promotion and pay raise are programming skills such as Scala and enterprise communications tools related to Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) platforms. Those were followed by Hadoop fluency, familiarity with cloud computing and software development kits for Android and iOS devices.

JPMorgan Chase: CEO Dimon Advocates Expansion into Fintech

Banks are pursuing digital banking while reducing their brick-and-mortar branch network, largely to restructure their business and compete with financial innovation start-ups— or simply, fintechs. Most recently, HSBC Holdings PLC announced reduction of its branch network in India by almost half. The bank emphasized on “the right mix of digital versus physical branch distribution.” ... The significant decline reflects a shift in customer preference to digital banking. Brett King, founder of the mobile finance app Moven, said that “if you think about the viability of the branch, the question has to be: are customers visiting? We have a rapid decline in visits.” Meanwhile, certain banks are confident that branches, despite the declining transactions, are an essential part of modern economies. Paul Donofrio, Bank of America chief financial officer, asserted that “it’s more about they’re (customers) coming there because of some life event…not for everyday transaction banking.”

Put people at the heart of your SOA governance model

SOA governance practices tend to focus on maximizing the efficiency of development and deployment, so all the pieces of your infrastructure work reliably and effectively together. As such, it's steeped in services catalogs, standard policies, testing processes and improvement mechanisms. Without these things, developers run the risk of idiosyncratic code, duplicate functionalities or conflicts with other apps. And there's no question this would be absolute death in a present-day environment when there are so many computing platforms, each of which often must call the same sets of information and participate in the same business processes. ... But if the people relying on your technology don't know how -- or aren't encouraged -- to properly handle the information on which they rely and on which the SOA system operates, then you have nothing.

What Does Your Company Culture Code Reveal?

Defining a culture in business is very challenging. Cracking the culture code and living it out is downright impossible unless leaders and employees are constantly embracing it and modeling it day in and day out. In my opinion, it starts at the top. However, a key ingredient is in the searching for and onboarding of new employees. If this process is not done strategically with the explanation of the company culture code at the top of the list, your desired culture will dissolve in a matter of months. This can occur, especially if new employees are coming on board all the time, and at all levels of the company. Here is a list of a few attributes I have experienced that are commonly used in creating successful corporate cultures. Does your company embody any of these? Hmm... maybe it should.

DevOps Lessons Learned at Microsoft Engineering

Software engineer accountabilities transitioned to not only building and testing but ultimately to the health of production. This accountability shift has two aspects. First, we want the feature teams obsessed with understanding our customers to get a unique insight into the problems they face, and how they can be raving fans of the experiences those teams are building. Second, we need the feature teams and individual engineers to own what they are delivering into production. The feature teams have the power, control and authority over all of the parts of the software process. Service engineers have to know the application architecture to be more efficient troubleshooters, suggest architectural changes to the infrastructure, be able to develop and test things like infrastructure as code and automation scripts, and make high-value contributions that impact the service design or management.

How IoT Will Change The Job Market

"The IoT has the potential to change the human experience the same way the assembly line and the Industrial revolution did. It changes the human-machine relationship in similar ways; machines will soon be able to do repetitive tasks driven by their past experiences," he says. That means more time and energy for solving problems by creating technology that can address pollution, save energy, using biotechnology to create new ways to grow crops or generate electrical power through the use of technology, he says. If you can use IoT in a data center, for instance, to figure out optimal cooling levels and regulate power consumption, you can help companies save energy without having as many personnel involved. IoT can help reduce the amount of repetitive work, and that will free up people to do more learning, exploring and creating new ideas, new knowledge.

SWIFT asks customers to help it end a string of bank frauds

Knowledge base entries show that SWIFT has updated its Alliance Access software several times in recent months. One of the tips warns that, while keeping the software up to date is important, it is not sufficient in itself. "While the software update provides additional integrity verification and alerting capabilities for this particular modus operandi on your interface to the SWIFT network, it will not help you protect against all malwares or your internal credentials being compromised," SWIFT wrote in another recent letter to customers, entitled "Security Issues." SWIFT also offers more general security guidance to its customers and says it intends to update this shortly, reinforcing its recommendations for securing access to the network. The current security guidance is sorely in need of an update, according to Doug Gourlay, corporate vice president of security software vendor Skyport Systems.

Quote for the day:

"Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden." -- Voltaire,

May 23, 2016

The evolution of IoT: Fog computing

The effective resolution may just be a simple decentralisation of the very computing process and data acquisition. The idea of relocating 90 per cent of the process to a local cloud computing server, and concentrating our data requests to only those which seek for outside information, is called Fog Computing. This means that we will have a piece of hardware, presumably not larger than our current Internet modem. And while today all of the cloud computing process happens in the data centre of our service provider, or in the data centre of our platform provider, in the future we will probably have our very own, private cloud computing server that will handle all the grunt work. This method will allow us to have the channels of communication open for much more important tasks, such as real time acquisition. It will also have a positive effect on the current, alarming state of cybercrime.

An interactive C++ interpreter, built on the top of LLVM and Clang libraries

Cling is an interactive C++ interpreter, built on the top of LLVM and Clang libraries. Its advantages over the standard interpreters are that it has command line prompt and uses just-in-time (JIT) compiler for compilation. Many of the developers (e.g. Mono in their project called CSharpRepl(link is external)) of such kind of software applications name them interactive compilers. One of Cling's main goals is to provide contemporary, high-performance alternative of the current C++ interpreter in the ROOT project - CINT. The backward-compatibility with CINT is major priority during the development. ... Cling has its own command line, which looks like any other Unix shell. The emacs-like command line editor is what we call interactive command line or interactive shell.

Embracing SDN & NFV to Optimize Enterprise Data Center Operations

A Gartner report indicates that by 2017, 10 percent of customer appliances are going to be virtualized, up from today’s 1 percent. Industry analysts are forecasting that more network traffic will be virtualized over the next five years. The objective of NFV is to use both commodity computing and available storage solutions to reduce – if not eliminate – limitations associated with proprietary hardware. NFV is a network architecture concept that leverages IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions (firewall, router, IDS, etc.) into building blocks that may be connected, or chained, to create communication services. Enterprises are shifting from in-house data centers to co-location facilities. In addition, different elements of traditional IT infrastructure are also shifting from physical servers to virtualized and software-defined architectures and cloud-enabled services.

7 programming languages we love to hate -- but can’t live without

In theory, we’re supposed to be able to use the power of the pointer arithmetic to do superclever feats, but does anyone risk doing more than allocating data structures? Is it even a good idea to be too clever with pointers? That’s how code starts to break. If you’re able to be clever, it often requires writing a very long comment to document it, pretty much sucking up all the time you saved being clever. Can anyone remember all the rules for writing C code to avoid adding all the possible security holes, like buffer overruns? But we have no choice. Unix is written in C, and it runs most cellphones and most of the cloud. Not everyone who writes code for these platforms needs to use C, but someone has to stay current with the asterisks and curly brackets, or else everything will fall apart.

Simplifying Data Retrieval with CQRS in ASP.NET MVC

In an ASP.NET MVC application one of the responsibilities of the Controller is to build the ModelView object that will be passed to the View. That ModelView object is almost certainly going to hold a bunch of unstructured data for the View that won't correspond to any single entity. Typically, then, that ModelView object is a kind of Data Transfer Object (DTO) that exists just long enough to get the data out of the data source and into the page's HTML. Which raises the question of where that DTO should be built. My first choice is to make the Controller Action methods responsible for building the View DTOs. The simplest solution is for the Controller to directly access the entity model, retrieve the entity objects required and load them into a DTO without modification. In that scenario, the DTO might look this:

The Dawn of Banking Voice Technology

When Santander UK recently launched a voice assistant in its student-geared mobile banking app, SmartBank, it marked the first bank in the U.K. to roll out a voice technology offering. In partnership with Nuance Communications, the same Massachusetts-based company behind the voice of Siri, the bank is piloting the technology in order to initially promote voice-activated functionality around spending tracking. Just weeks removed from the launch, PYMNTS caught up with Ed Metzger, Santander UK’s Head of Innovation, Technology and Operations, to talk about initial impressions and what’s next for voice technology in banking. The response thus far? Phenomenal. While Metzger declined to divulge specific early results, he spoke about the general kind of usage Santander is seeing early on with the voice technology.

Hotel API strategy brings UK chain closer to digital guest -- and customer data

"We didn't have APIs much on the radar [until 2013], but the need for it emerged during our digital transformation, as we started to look at how we could create apps and services to give to our customer that would differentiate us," he explained, noting that the digital transformation effort was launched by new CEO Mike DeNoma. (The transformation, in addition to the API strategy, involved junking GLH's legacy systems for modern, cloud-based services.) Hewertson said GLH needed to build its hotel API so it could connect directly with multiple online travel sites without developers having to understand the complexities of GLH's back-end hotel-booking system.

Using ‘Inflection Points’ to Overcome Fintech Startup Distribution Challenges

It’s not all inflection points behind SoFi’s early successes, however. The inflection point merely provides the momentum; the product itself also has to be superior (SoFi offers better rates, better customer service, and so on). Furthermore, SoFi differentiates itself from existing financial institutions by offering other services like job placement and special loan and resource programs for entrepreneurs. Inflection points aren’t just big, obvious life moments like graduations and mortgages though — they can occur at a micro-scale, too, as with large purchases. For example, what happens when a millennial just out of college needs to buy a mattress? Fintech company Affirm (an a16z investment) captures customers at such moments and, more interestingly, at the point of sale.

Software-defined networking touches every industry segment

Because of the relative immaturity of SDNs and the fact that ACI is still relatively new, there is some industry chatter that ACI isn’t being adopted. Also, I think early in the cycle Cisco was talking about both Nexus switching deployments and ACI together, causing some confusion. Nexus is part of ACI but can be deployed independently. Nexus deployments might turn into ACI in the future but do not need to, as Nexus customers want the freedom of choice for their SDN solution. Many Cisco customers choose to implement a programmable network or programmable fabric. As a Cisco watcher, I’ve been curious with respect to what ACI traction has been like. On the last earnings call, Cisco stated it has over 1,800 paying ACI customers, which makes it the market lead by number of deployments.

How CIOs can guide digital business transformation

As in any endeavor, your team will ultimately determine your relative level of success in a digital business. CIOs need to think beyond building a solid IT team and look for the digital business visionaries. Team members who live and breathe at the intersection of technology and strategy. The winning foundation of your digital business will be built on a team of aspiring individuals who understand your business, your current market, potential new markets and view all of these through a digital lens. This pedigree of technology and strategy should be applied to the expectations of both your internal team and the external partners you work with. A collective culture that simultaneously shares ideas and is passionate about technology will lead to the creation of new and unique business offerings.

Quote for the day:

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

May 21, 2016

Organizing the Test Team

It's hard to continuously improve when you have to do the same thing all the time. We tend to think of standards more like a straightjacket than a wedge. We see standards as valuable when they emerge from practice and are more like guidelines than rules. For example, one of our clients requires evidence that testing occurs periodically, with a preference for executable examples. Each team selects how often this will happen, how to capture those examples, what and if should be automated. Management has delegated a technical leader to work with the teams to see if that evidence is sufficient. Understanding the problem helped guide the choice of innovation and creative chaos or getting more standard.

Fintech – disruptive technology

Some recent developments in the fintech space, however, point to weaknesses in fintech companies. LendingClub, the poster boy company for P2P lending has seen its shares tumble, wiping out about a third of its market value. This came as it faces scrutiny after its founder and CEO resigned following an investigation into improper loan sales. The US Treasury has released a report criticising the P2P lending business, recommending it to be more tightly regulated. Some commentators are liking P2P lending to the early days of the sub prime mortgage bubble of 2006-07. It is more likely though that the experiences of fintech in mature markets like China and the US will serve as good guides as to how this business will grow in this part of the world, with the requisite regulations put in place.

Bridging the divide between CISOs and IT decision makers

All security professionals will agree that the insider threat is a reality in any business. But it seems that CISOs, CIOs and other ITDMs have not aligned on the scope and magnitude of the threat or the threat vectors. Sixty-four percent of CISOs and CIOs believe that insider data security threats will increase in the next twelve months. Only 50% of other ITDMs agree with them. Is the view from the top—with a focus on protecting the organization and brand—skewing reality? Or, with the day-to-day liaison between ITDMs and employees, could it simply be that ITDMs lack the proactive (instead of traditional detective) tools required to provide real-time situational awareness? Even so, if they haven’t aligned on the threat vectors, the probability is very high that ITDM’s aren’t aligned on what to measure or monitor.

Bimodal IT: Do It Right, or Don’t Do It at All

By promising to quickly deliver the benefits of a digital innovation center without having to face the challenge of addressing IT’s legacy organization and processes, bimodal IT almost seems too good to be true. For technology organizations considering investing in a significant performance improvement initiative, I have prepared a comparison of the relative merits of the siloed bimodal approach typically espoused by consultants with a more holistic enterprise-wide Lean/Agile transformation approach, in which bimodal IT is a transitional state in the journey to becoming a high-performance organization. First let’s consider the benefits of Bimodal IT. Bimodal IT is attractive to IT organizations facing problems with speed and responsiveness, and the approach can deliver modest benefits, at least for the Mode-2 portion of the portfolio.

MIT CIO: Cooperation vs. competition in the digital ecosystem

The theme of "coopetition" -- collaboration among rivals for the greater good -- played big at the Cambridge, Mass., gathering of CIOs and other executives, from the work on standards for new technologies like blockchain, the distributed ledger digital currency bitcoin is based on, to regulators and individual corporations all doing their shares to protect privacy and security as mammoth amounts of data are more easily processed, analyzed and acted on. "They need each other's data, but at the same time they're trying to take market share," said Jason LaVoie, director of technical solutions and operations at mobile marketing startup SessionM, in Boston's Seaport, an area known for its young tech companies, booming construction and as the future home for a new old giant, GE. "It's fascinating, but it's where the world needs to go."

New IoT security certification aims to make the world safer

A lot of the products that go through testing like this are patchable either in software or firmware. However, the one missing piece appears to be a rigorous auditing process so that if an exposure is introduced post certification the certification can be removed until the problem is corrected. Otherwise the owner of the product is likely to believe the product is still safe when it may not be. That’s the problem with patchable products, any testing applies only to the product as it existed when the product was tested, as soon as it is patched the certification may no longer be valid and entire classes of these products to get patched often. On the other hand, things like sensors and cameras rarely get patched so they should remain relatively consistent with the certification and they likely represent the highest volume of devices expected to be deployed.

Hybrid cloud: How you can take advantage of the best of both worlds

Both of these technologies enable IT to set up their DNS addressing so that applications in the cloud continue to appear as part of your local IT data center. What about identity? You’ll want your users to access applications without having to re-enter credentials again – of course. Single sign-on (SSO), a capability provided by Azure Active Directory, is the final piece in your virtual data center. AAD allows you to synchronize identities with your on-premises Active Directory; and thus your users log on to the (virtual) network once and are transparently provided access to corporate applications without regard to their hosting location. Even before you begin migrating applications, you can take advantage of the hybrid cloud.

The Volcano - Prioritize Work for Multiple Teams & Products

The Volcano is vertically divided into ”swim lanes”, one for each product it should support. The width of the ”swim lane” is used to steer capacity allocation between the products. A narrow ”swim lane” indicates low capacity allocation, while a wide ”swim lane” indicates high capacity allocation. ... The work flows out of the volcano and into the team’s respective kanban boards. When a team has completed a work item and a ”swim lane” is free (capacity available), a new work item is fetched from the volcano into a free ”swim lane” as anongoing activity. It works best if the work items are of approximately the same size. We use stories (represented by ”larger” stickies). When the team starts to work with a story, they usually call for a planning meeting to break it down into tasks (represented by ”smaller” stickies) that then flows through their kanban board.

IoT and Machine Learning are invading our lives. Is it a good thing?

While all of this is good and necessary, I find the idea of a machine doing all the thinking in my place quite disturbing. I look at my own junior days and remember all the small trials and challenges that made me the man I am today. The time I forgot my set of keys inside the house and ended up being locked out for several hours; the day when I almost set the house on fire by forgetting to turn off the stove; the experience I had with a magazine-and-card store owner who asked me if I lived in a barn because I’d left the door open on a chilly winter day. I’m quite fond of those memories and they happen to be some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned. The future generations won’t be experiencing any of that. They won’t meet many of the mind and social challenges that we’ve faced in our lives because the thinking is being done for them by machines that have been learning about them even before they were even born.

The Internet Is Broken

Clark argues that it’s time to rethink the Internet’s basic architecture, to potentially start over with a fresh design – and equally important, with a plausible strategy for proving the design’s viability, so that it stands a chance of implementation. “It’s not as if there is some killer technology at the protocol or network level that we somehow failed to include,” says Clark. “We need to take all the technologies we already know and fit them together so that we get a different overall system. This is not about building a technology innovation that changes the world but about architecture – pulling the pieces together in a different way to achieve high-level objectives.” Just such an approach is now gaining momentum, spurred on by the National Science Foundation.

Quote for the day:

"Reduce the layers of management.They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers." -- Donald Rumsfeld

May 20, 2016

10 steps to becoming cyber resilient

Just like risk management generally, many of the steps needed to minimise risk have to be applied widely across the practice, requiring personal compliance with rules and collaboration across internal departments. This is not just an issue for the IT team, although they have a significant role to play. Resilience is not just about preventing cyber crime, but encompasses cyber security on many fronts. A cyber-resilient law firm should “have the capacity across the business to maintain their core purpose, operations and integrity in the face of cyber attacks and cyber security breaches. A cyber-resilient practice is one that can prevent, detect, contain and recover from a plethora of serious threats against data, applications and IT infrastructure. It successfully aligns continuity management and disaster recovery with security operations in a holistic fashion.”

Leadership Relevancy in the Digital Age

Are you ready for digital age leadership relevancy? For full digital transformation? Are you ready for the tsunami of change coming? Is your business? If not, or if you want to get ready, you’ll enjoy this week’s episode of The Rebel Leader with Vijay Gurbaxani, founding director of Road to Reinvention: Leadership in the Digital Age — a signature conference hosted by The Center for Digital Transformation (CDT) at the UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. Vijay is also Professor of Business and Computer Science at the Merage School, but don’t expect an “academic” perspective to social leadership and organizational transformation. He is neck-deep into this pressing issue and comes at it from a unique and insightful perspective.

Inside Sundar Pichai's Plan To Put AI Everywhere

It’s Pichai’s first I/O since he became CEO last year when Larry Page reorganized the company into Alphabet. And it’s the first that will be held at Shoreline Amphitheater, an arena for rock concerts within a stone’s throw from Pichai’s office, rather than in the more staid San Francisco venue of years past. (“I wanted to create a sense of community, make it more informal, make it more like how Google works every day,” Pichai says.) Speaking softly in his lilting South-Indian accent, Pichai parries questions with his trademark calm and poise. He’s not a sound bite man. So his excitement at what Google will show off – at what the company is becoming – is masked by his long, meandering and thoughtful answers, always rich with context about the evolution of computing, the history of Google and what users expect.

Big data projects shake up the storage status quo

Cloud and virtual storage also have a potential role in the data marts that many company departments now use to run batch queries for different departments and business units. The data used in most of these data marts is batch created and is traditional data that departments have run for queries in the past. What is different is that users now have more analytics report creation tools and options for queries than they had in the past, and there is more ability for data administrators to generate data that is aggregated from different sources. In this batch environment, disk storage solutions work as effectively as they have in the past. As storage administrators react to the changes brought on by big data, the most significant change impact is accommodating the sheer size of extremely large big data files.

Cyber resilience: a board level issue for the legal profession

To start to address the challenge the broader legal profession needs to transform the way it thinks about cyber security and resilience. While privacy and confidentiality have always been foundation qualities for law firms, they must increasingly be able to demonstrate to their clients and regulators that they have adequate defences and associated controls and governance whilst remaining competitive and able to conduct business securely. Legal firms that do not take the time to train their staff, secure their systems and supply chain whilst advising their clients to do the same will increasingly find themselves losing high-profile contracts. Gone are the days when attackers focused solely on attempting to subvert a firm’s intrusion detection system or firewall defences with the goal of stealing sensitive information and then leaving.

The Average App Loses More Than 75% Of Its Users After One Day

“Using Day N retention rates, brands can determine how many new users return on a particular day following their first session,” said Appboys’s senior content producer Todd Grennan, in a blog post. “For instance, if 100 customers first use your app on a certain day (Day 0) and 30 of those original 100 return seven days later, that translates to a 30% Day 7 retention rate; similarly, if 20 of the original customers return 30 days later, that’s a 20% Day 30 retention rate.” According to the report, overall app retention drops to around 11% within a week of install. After 45 days, that number is less than 5% before hitting 4.1% after 90 days. Mobile operating systems play a role, Appboy said. Retention rates are higher on Android devices with a high of 27% on day one of install that declines to 13% by day seven. In comparison, iOS apps show a 23% session use on the first day and an 11% usage rate by the end of the week.

What’s Driving (and Inhibiting) DCIM Software Adoption?

One of the biggest drivers for DCIM software adoption in the near future, however, will be the transition to software-defined infrastructure. “Data centers will increasingly be viewed not as physical business but as pools of resources that can be drawn on when needed,” Cooke said. ... Many DCIM tools on the market today, however, are lacking key functionality that enables them to connect to and enable the digital transformation of data centers, and this is one of the factors that inhibit the market’s growth, Cooke said. The shift of more resources to outsourced IT infrastructure from on-prem facilities is another growth inhibitor, working both for and against the overall DCIM market. While use of DCIM tools by colocation providers and their users is on the rise, there will be fewer and fewer end user-operated facilities that need these management tools.

Google is bringing Android apps to Chromebooks

While Chromebooks have already been successful in the enterprise, they were lacking app compatibility, said Rajen Sheth, the director of product management for Android and Chrome for Business and Education. This update will better equip businesses and schools with apps they want, without requiring the developers of those apps to build a separate Chrome app, Sheth said. Chromebook shipments overtook Macs in the U.S. during the first quarter of this year, according to IDC. Building on that success by making Android apps available to those users should make the platform more appealing to buyers. Chrome OS users will now be able to write term papers on their Chromebook while also checking Snapchat, Kan Liu, Google's senior director of product management, said at the company's I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California.

Bringing resiliency to software acquisition

Thought leaders from government, industry and academia discussed the opportunities and challenges of IT resiliency at the Cyber Resilience Summit hosted earlier this year by CISQ. “Resilience is about risk,” said Paul Nielsen, director and CEO of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. “And one of the things about risk is, you can’t eliminate it.” Basic cyber hygiene can help eliminate low-hanging vulnerabilities, but increasingly persistent and sophisticated attacks against complex systems will continue to pose threats. Those risks that cannot be eliminated must be managed. Resilient software working as a coherent system can mitigate the impact of intrusions when they occur, continuing to operate while avoiding or minimizing damage.

Machine learning: Demystifying linear regression and feature selection

Linear regression is a powerful technique for predicting numbers from other data. Imagine you have an imperative to predict basketball scores from game statistics, and you miraculously know absolutely nothing about basketball. The fact that a hoop is involved is news to you. You’ve found a dataset on stats.nba.com that has a bunch of statistics (free throws made, assists, blocks, three pointers), including the final score, and now you want to predict future scores given those stats. Those of us who are not in your miraculous situation know that the answer is going to look a lot like points = free throws made + 2 * two pointers made + 3 * three pointers made.

Quote for the day:

"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow." -- Ronald Osborn

May 19, 2016

Lessons from LinkedIn data breach revelations

As mentioned, LinkedIn’s passwords were encrypted, but the company was still using a relatively weak hashing algorithm. It was also not adding random text to passwords to make it more difficult to reverse engineer the hashed or scrambled versions of the passwords. ... Creating unique passwords for every online service means that if one is compromised, none of the others are affected. However, the converse is also true. If passwords are re-used and one service is compromised, it means all others where the same password is valid are also at risk. “While LinkedIn has taken the precaution of invalidating the passwords of the accounts affected, and contacting those members to reset their passwords, the chances are that many will use the same password across multiple online accounts,” said Liviu Itoafa, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

Cloud security: A mismatch for existing security processes and technology

Certainly cybersecurity professionals want to leverage existing security investments and lean on well-established best practices as much as possible. So, what’s the problem? Unfortunately, existing security technologies and processes don’t always work when pointed at cloud-based workloads. In fact, 32 percent of enterprise cybersecurity and IT professionals admit they’ve had to abandon many traditional security policies or technologies because they couldn’t be used effectively for cloud security, while another 42 percent have abandoned some traditional security policies or technologies because they couldn’t be used effectively for cloud security.

IT Governance Integral Part of Corporate Governance

For any modern day business to stay agile, relevant, competitive and profitable, it has to rely and invest in IT as a major component of its business strategy. Automating a company's functions, apart from requiring significant financial investments, also requires the incorporation of powerful internal control mechanisms into computers (hardware), software and networks to manage operational IT risks. In view of the above, IT governance is now considered as a bread and butter issue for businesses to thrive. The emerging trend is that IT governance and corporate governance can no longer be separated. IT governance now constitutes a key component of every company's strategic plan and consequently it has become a standing agenda item at board meetings.

Ransomware attacks force hospitals to stitch up networks

Once ransomware is on the networks, hospitals were forced to resort to finding and using paper copies, fax machines, phones, and any other non-connected devices, while network administrators hastened to get their systems up and running. The result of these activities has made a lasting impact on operations: in some instances doctors even had to reschedule high-risk surgeries. The lessons to be drawn from these recent incidents is the need for hospitals to develop and implement a strong cyber resiliency plan that incorporates incident response as well recovery operations from such attacks. The threat of ransomware demonstrates the need for hospitals, as well as all organizations, to identify critical information and properly store it on backup systems that are independent of the main network. While we can’t necessarily predict when attacks against us will occur, we can always be prepared to respond to them once they do.

Digital transformation trips: advice from CIOs

Unsurprisingly, lack of investment from the business is a barrier to digital transformation, with 50 per cent of those studied saying this was one of the biggest downsides. When asked what the major barriers are to digital transformation projects, the top answer was the lack of funds available for technology provision. Adding to complexity, corporate culture is often change-averse, according to 43 per cent of CIOs studied. If they are to encourage investment in digital, CIOs must now convince the board of the area's ability to drive business change. A financial sector CIO explains: "Gain board level sponsorship, so the initiative is perceived as a business led change programme, rather than a technology led one."

Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers

TPU gets its name from TensorFlow, the software library for machine intelligence that powers Google Search and other services, such as speech recognition, Gmail, and Photos. The company open sourced TensorFlow in November of last year. The chip is tailored for machine learning. It is better at tolerating “reduced computational precision,” which enables it to use fewer processors per operation. “Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly,” Jouppi wrote.

Make the bed, enterprise OpenStack deployment is moving in

The increased adoption of OpenStack is part of a changing perspective of open source in general, where more enterprises view it as a way to get faster top-level development, rather than relying on the roadmap of one proprietary entity, according to Nelson. "There's been a big shift from a bunch of developers getting in a room and dreaming of the future to something that has become a lot more real, and adopted by commercial vendors and looked at seriously by a lot of large enterprises," she said. The next step in OpenStack adoption is likely companies that are not interested in putting whole development teams in place to put the upstream code into production. Instead, the next round of adoption will likely involve a deployment from a vendor -- companies such as Canonical, Red Hat or Mirantis -- to do it hands-off, so it feels like rolling out Linux.

SEC says cyber security biggest risk to financial system

The SEC, which regulates securities markets, has found some major exchanges, dark pools and clearing houses did not have cyber policies in place that matched the sort of risks they faced, SEC Chair Mary Jo White told the Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in Washington D.C. "What we found, as a general matter so far, is a lot of preparedness, a lot of awareness but also their policies and procedures are not tailored to their particular risks," she said. "As we go out there now, we are pointing that out." White said SEC examiners were very pro-active about doing sweeps of broker-dealers and investment advisers to assess their defenses against a cyber attack. "We can't do enough in this sector," she said.

New Federal HIPAA Guidance Targets Data Security Incidents

The new guidance defines how business associate agreements should specify the terms of how and for what purposes protected health information will be used, and create reporting mechanisms that cover instances in which protected information is disclosed in a way not authorized under contracts. The new rules put the onus on BAs to report incidents to covered entities. ... OCR recommends that business associate agreements contain requirements that BAs and subcontractors report a breach or a security incident even if it did not cause a breach. The information should include BA or subcontractor name and contact information, a description of the incident, date of the incident and date of discovery, types of unsecured PHI involved in the incident, and steps being taken to further investigate the incident and avoid future incidents.

Role of Business Analysis in Agile

Great business analysts are now more aware of the customer and their journey with the software. They’re interested in understanding not only why the business want the product built, but what the problem is that the product is trying to solve and how their customers will use it. The business analyst is also in a fantastic position to influence team dynamics. They’re working closely with the product owner, working closely with the development team, being able to drive consensus on decisions that are being made is a great way to ensure that the whole team feels they have ownership of the product. This also helps establish a shared goal that the whole team can work towards. So you can see, there’s heaps of different paths a business analyst can take to be T-shaped and provide further value to their teams.

Quote for the day:

"Diligence is the mother of good fortune." -- Miguel de Cervantes,

May 18, 2016

Your Business’ Network Needs IPS and IDS – Here’s Why

If you are simply looking for IDS, which is intrusion detection services, then what you want to do is have the devices working out of the direct line of your traffic flow so that you can detect abnormalities on different scales. However, if your focus is on IPS, which is intrusion prevention services, then you want to put the device that is sorting through your traffic in line with your network so that it can be the barrier your network needs to stay safe. ... Some of the different streams that are used for intrusion pose a larger threat than others, and this is worked into the device itself that you are using. Your device will detect the intrusion, figure out what type of intrusion it is, and evaluate the information that it can get from the intrusion. From there, you will be able to get a rating as to just how much potential danger your network is in, and decide on what type of steps you want to take next, such as blocking that type of intrusion,

On Blockchain Disillusionment and Bitcoin's Big Bad Wolves

For all the investment, it remains increasingly unclear exactly how banks will use blockchain technology or distributed ledgers, or if the areas where it seems most effective will be lucrative or interesting enough for incumbent financial firms to pursue. As noted by Coin Sciences CEO Gideon Greenspan in a recent CoinDesk opinion piece, shared ledger efforts have hit a roadblock when it comes to confidentiality, as every institution operating in such environments today sees every transaction. "This turns out to be a huge issue, both in terms of regulation and the commercial realities of inter-bank competition," Greenspan writes. "While various strategies are available or in-development for mitigating this problem, none can match the simplicity and efficiency of a centralized database managed by a trusted intermediary."

DevOps model, a profile in CIO leadership, change management

Proponents tout the many benefits of DevOps, the practice of putting software developers and the IT operations together so that building, testing and releasing software can happen very quickly, frequently and more reliably. They say this approach (or culture or movement, as some call it) produces faster delivery of features, more stable operating environments and better quality products. They also say that the DevOps model means continuous software delivery and faster resolutions of problems, which lead to more satisfied users. Results like that get attention, said Donnie Berkholz, research director for the development, DevOps, and IT ops channel at 451 Research. In fact, he points out that 40% of the 568 infrastructure professionals his firm recently surveyed are using DevOps somewhere in their organizations.

10 most in-demand Internet of Things skills

Insufficient staffing and lack of expertise is the top-cited barrier for organizations currently looking to implement and benefit from IoT, according to research from Gartner. "We're seeing tech companies around the globe getting organized and creating IoT strategies, but where they're struggling is they don't have the processes and talent in-house to make these things happen," says Ryan Johnson, categories director for global freelance marketplace Upwork. By tracking data from Upwork's extensive database, Johnson and his team have identified the top 10 skills companies need to drive a successful IoT strategy. Data is sourced from the Upwork database and is based on annual job posting growth and skills demand, as measured by the number of job posts mentioning these skills posted on Upwork from October 2014 to December 2015.

SAP Technology Targets Inequity in Workplaces Around the World

“Diverse teams are high performing teams,” said Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors.* “We’re always looking at how innovative HR technology can improve people’s work lives. Our HCM solutions simplify and standardize HR processes for organizations across the globe. Addressing inequity fits into our focus on built-in intelligent services and recommendations. Today’s innovations, and those to come, are designed to help companies find and address opportunities to build inclusive cultures, prompting managers and HR professionals to make intentional decisions as they attract, hire, develop, reward and promote people.” The use of technology to tackle workplace issues like gender inequity has not grown at the same pace as that of the digital economy.

Cloud security and compliance concerns rise as investment grows

“As organisations look to cloud computing to reduce IT costs, increase agility and better support business functions, security of data and applications in the cloud remains a critical requirement,” says Holger Schulze, founder of the 300,000-member Information Security Community on LinkedIn. “The 2016 Cloud Security Report indicates that as organisations increase investments in cloud infrastructure, they are seeking a similar level of security controls and functionality to what’s available in traditional IT infrastructures. “However, they are finding traditional security tools ineffective in the cloud. In a shared responsibility model, this is an opportunity for organisations to implement effective cloud security solutions to strengthen their security posture and capitalise on the promise of cloud computing”.

Towards a whole-enterprise architecture standard – 6: Training

In short, training only make sense in those parts of the context that map to the left-side of that boundary. To the right, we’re going to need real skills, which in turn arise only from some form of education or self-education. The vertical axis on SCAN is an arbitrary scale of the amount of time available for assessment and decision-making before action must be taken – the latter indicated by the ‘NOW!’ as the baseline, with time-available extending ever upward towards an infinite future relative to the ‘NOW!’. The green dotted-line across that axis represents a highly-variable yet real transition from theory to practice, or from plan to action. For humans at least: above the boundary, there is time for considered or ‘complicated‘ evaluation, and plans and decisions are rational – or may seem so, at least; and below the boundary, there is time only for simple evaluation in real-time, and plans and decisions are emotional

How to manage workers in the gig economy

HR has developed into a department that is devoted to employee engagement and company culture. "As companies shift from having traditional paper pushing HR departments to becoming more focused on the employee experience, a PEO system can create a huge benefit allowing HR to focus on their talent brand vs compliance," says Harris. PEO models can also help minimize the workload and paperwork associated with gig workers, who are in and out of the company like a revolving door, says Harris. These systems take away a lot of the grunt work associated with onboarding employees, as well as managing their benefits, compensation and even seeing them out of the company once they move on. PEO systems are freeing up HR so they can focus on ensuring gig workers are engaged, feel a part of the culture and aren't treated any differently than typical full-time workers.

Cybersecurity in 2020: The future looks bleak

Scenario planning or scenario thinking started in military intelligence circles as a way to create flexible long-term plans. "Scenario planning may involve aspects of systems thinking, specifically the recognition that many factors may combine in complex ways to create surprising futures,"according to Wikipedia. "The method also allows the inclusion of factors that are difficult to formalize, such as novel insights about the future, deep shifts in values, unprecedented regulations, or inventions." ... Wearables will track more than heart rate and the number of steps taken. "With devices monitoring hormone levels, facial expressions, voice tone, and more," suggest Weber and Cooper, "the Internet is now a vast system of 'emotion readers,' touching the most intimate aspects of human psychology. These technologies allow an individual's underlying mental, emotional, and physical state to be tracked—and manipulated."

Global Lenders on Edge as Cyber Attacks Embroil More Banks

While Swift has for decades made sure its own financial messaging network was secured, less attention was paid to the security surrounding how member banks -- each with their own codes and varying levels of technology -- were connecting. Even today, when it discusses the cyber attacks, Swift emphasizes that its own network wasn’t breached and says its members are responsible for their own system interfaces. Some U.S. banks are pushing to open discussions with Swift about whether it should have responded more quickly to the breaches and should now help member banks better secure their systems, according to one of the people familiar with the thinking within a large U.S. bank. BITS, the section of the Financial Services Roundtable aimed at combating cyberfraud and other technological issues, could be tapped to broker those discussions, the person said.

Quote for the day:

“The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is ‘why not?’” -- Jeff Bezos