Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 04, 2016

Building Data Systems: What Do You Need?

Data engineers must be as conscious of the specifics of the physical infrastructure as that of the applications themselves. Though modern frameworks and platforms make the process of writing code faster and more accessible, the scale in terms of data volume, velocity, and variety of modern data processing means that conceptually abstracting away the scheduling and distribution of computation is difficult. Put another way, engineers need to understand the mechanics of how the data will processed, even when using frameworks and platforms. SSD vs. disk, attached storage or not, how much memory, how many cores, etc. are decisions that data engineers have to make in order to design the best solution for the targeted data and workloads. All of this means reducing friction between developer and infrastructure deployment is imperative.

4 Reasons Why Bitcoin Represents A New Asset Class

“It’s governed by a protocol run by a distributed network of computers,” says White. “That’s in stark contrast to fiat currencies, which are dictated by government monetary policy. Bitcoin is really just math, code, run by individuals on their computers all over the world to ensure the credibility of it, and on the opposite end, you have fiat governed by a small group of individuals.” A look at the growth in the supply compared to gold and the U.S. monetary base shows in a glance how differently Bitcoin, which will be capped at 21 million bitcoins and whose release is halved every four years until the maximum number of bitcoins is reached, functions.

Three important security upgrades to Android N

If you're a Chromebook user, you're already accustomed to that little arrow icon popping up to say that updates are ready to install. This is very much like the old Windows update. Although that Windows update caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, and issues with Chrome OS updates rarely appear. The same holds true with Android. This is important because so many users neglect to bother checking for updates. To that end, their devices will go with unpatched security issues for months. With the new update system, those patches will be applied in the background, in a sort of isolated instance of the operating system...running completely isolated from the working instance. During this time, all apps will be optimized (again, in the background). Once all apps are optimized, the operating system will seamlessly transition to the updated version.

Human Error Biggest Risk To Health IT

"Nearly all past successful network penetrations can be traced to one or more human errors that allowed the adversary to gain access to and, in some cases, exploit mission-critical information," Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the memo. "Raising the level of individual human performance in cybersecurity provides tremendous leverage in defending the [DoD's networks]." Medina's agency, which sits at the intersection of the military and healthcare and arenas, presents a target-rich environment for cyber criminals and other groups of digital adversaries. But the health sector in general has become a favorite target of hackers for a rather logical reason.

Myspace, Tumblr megabreaches put spotlight on security knowledge gap

"Board members, business [members] really don't understand the threat," he said at the recent MIT CIO Sloan Symposium -- this despite security now garnering more and more attention from the board and the C-suite. "They really understand that the level of sophistication, the amount of individuals that are involved in cyberattacks and their skill set have increased substantially in the last five to seven years," said Morrison, ... . Defense Intelligence Agency before joining State Street in 2013. One hopeful note: Security ignorance is not bliss for the majority of security professionals. According to the CompTIA survey, the 53% of security staff respondents who reported gaps in their departments' security skills said they wanted to be more informed in the latest cyberthreats, and about 40% feel they need to get better at educating end users, or that they need to know more about modern security technology.

Cities Are Ahead in the IoT Game, but States Need to Catch Up

“Government agencies that adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward the IoT are unlikely to develop the expertise or engender the trust needed to effectively and efficiently deliver services in this new reality and to reassure citizens concerned about how this new technology will affect them…public sector leaders ready to start tapping into the potential of IoT technology can begin by identifying specific, pressing mission challenges, and then analyze how more or better information, real-time analysis, or automated actions might help address them.” CIOs can also work at the enterprise level with agency heads or CIOs to develop standardization, avoiding silos and individual systems. Incompatible systems for IoT and data management will slow down the effectiveness and benefits of IoT for state government. CIOs should not understate the dollar value of IoT on the state budget.

Borderless Cyber Europe 2016 to emphasize the importance of threat intelligence sharing

We in the security industry might like to believe that attackers operate in a dog-eat-dog world. But that’s simply not the case. They are more than willing to exchange information. It just needs to be under the right circumstances. “Digital threats have moved sophisticated attacks techniques down into the realm of organized crime,” observes Peter Allor, a security strategist at IBM. “Whether by purchasing others’ tools or simply by telling one another, computer criminals are constantly sharing information with one another about how threats work and how they can modify a technique to accomplish a specific purpose.” In the process, they are also contributing to the collective threat intelligence knowledgebase, which empowers every bad actor to conduct more sophisticated attacks in the future.

How Six Sigma Promotes a Culture of Innovation

Taken to its extremes, one would have to dispense entirely with the scientific method of inquiry to buy into the critique, at least with respect to some of the stages of the creative process and the R&D role. “It’s an oversimplification to suggest that Six Sigma always has a chilling effect on innovation because of its emphasis on metrics and method and conformation to standards, thereby shutting down the timid who are afraid of the error part of trial-and-error, or those responsible for the cost justification of it,” said Mike DiLeo, president of Management & Strategy Institute, a provider of online, self-paced certification courses in Six Sigma. That the Six Sigma culture, because of its emphasis on planning and measurement, is incompatible with innovation isn’t necessarily the case. It wouldn’t be Six Sigma without an emphasis on metrics, so it’s fair to acknowledge that some businesses,

How Ransomware Affects Hospital Data Security

While hospital ransomware attacks are not a new issue, healthcare is likely becoming a more prominent target because of the sensitive information that organizations in the industry hold. The apparent increase in healthcare ransomware issues though, has not gone unnoticed, and stakeholders are beginning to take steps to ensure that covered entities and business associates of all sizes have the necessary tools to keep data secure. For example, the California Senate Public Safety Committee passed ransomware legislation earlier this year that outlaws the online act and specifies how the crime should be prosecuted. The legislation amends existing law that “establishes various crimes relating to computer services and systems” and defines extortion as “obtaining the property of another, with his or her consent, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear.”

The rise of SDDC and the future of enterprise IT

According to Gartner's Morency, the initial value provided by the SDDC is threefold: more automation, more agility, and more flexibility. With less manual effort, organizations can use their employees more efficiently and greater agility helps operations respond more quickly to business requests. An additional and often-overlooked use case for SDDC is in improving data center resiliency, said Morency. SDDC also helps to "provide the means by which the in-house enterprise IT staff can begin to configure, provision, [and] activate compute and storage resources at a level that's, maybe not the same, but much more competitive, much closer to what the large public cloud providers can offer," Morency added.

Quote for the day:

"We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles." -- James Earl Carter, Jr.

June 03, 2016

Security concerns rising for Internet of Things devices

The good news is that the larger IoT companies like Belkin are starting to respond to the problem. Young says he has seen progress in how often companies are responding to firmware problems or at least acknowledging that there is a growing problem. Indeed, when LIFX found out about the Wi-Fi credentials flaw, they patched it right away. Because there are so many small companies making IoT devices, the problem won’t go away anytime soon. Foeckl says IT departments need to start including IoT devices in their security monitoring efforts and certification and testing processes, and that they should work with their vendors to make sure these devices are patched, tracked, and protected.

Data Integration Continues to Bedevil Healthcare Industry

“This is a process moving forward that’s going to require a partnership with the private sector and all of our federal partners,” said DeSalvo, who added that the private sector in particular has stepped forward to mature FHIR as a standard. DeSalvo added that electronic health information comes not just from EHRs, but also from wearables, the Internet of Things and mobile healthcare technologies. “It’s coming from so many sources today, compared to where it was in 2008 when we started measuring,” she said. The challenge now “is how to bring that information together to make it usable and actionable for everybody who wants it.” At the same time, DeSalvo made the case that beyond technology, true data integration will require a change in the culture of data sharing in the healthcare industry.

Will IoT technology bring us the quantified employee?

The desire to quantify, measure, and monitor ourselves has spawned an entire industry, with companies developing wearable computing devices, fitness trackers, and mobile communication tools at a fevered pace. Consumers bought more than 45 million wearable devices and fitness trackers in 2015, and analysts expect demand to grow by more than 45 percent annually through 2019, becoming one of the fastest-growing technology markets. What are these wearable devices doing for us? They are giving us information on our exercise, sleep, movements, diet, and pulse, creating the quantified self, powered by an architecture of technology referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). But when the quantified self arrives at the office, does he or she become the quantified employee? Many employers would hope so: With oceans of data from workers’ wearables,

How Israel is turning part of the Negev Desert into a cyber-city

The roots of Israel as a cyber power go back to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said retired Brig. Gen. Yair Cohen, another former head of Unit 8200, which employs thousands of soldiers and serves a role similar to the National Security Agency. In less than three weeks, Israel lost more than 2,000 soldiers largely because of a dramatic failure of intelligence. As a result, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to reinforce their signals intelligence arm, Unit 8200. The unit sought the best code-makers and code-breakers, Cohen said. It also began to conduct its own research and development, with soldiers building radio interception, and now cyber tools. “We cannot wait for someone in the United States to give us technology,” said Cohen, who now runs his own cyber venture capital firm.

Polar A360 Review – Simple And Efficient

As you would expect from any decent tracker, the A360 monitors activity and provides in-depth feedback, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. The Polar A360 can also record sleeping patterns, show you smart notifications, and warn you when you’ve been sitting at your desk for too long. Also, the Polar A360 is water-resistant up to 30 meters, therefore, you do not have to take it off while swimming or taking a shower. As a downside, the Polar A360 is missing the GPS sensor. I have the feeling that this is something dedicated runners might not like. Other than that, the Polar A360 bracelet feels like a robust and capable fitness tracker. I must say that overall, I am quite impressed with this tracker. Well done Polar.

Can a city switch entirely to driverless cars?

The Department of Transportation and major U.S. cities are betting on technology to solve their transit woes. As part of its "Smart Cities Challenge," the DOT will give a winning city up to $40 million to help it experiment with innovative transit options. It would also be eligible for an additional $10 million from Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc. San Francisco, a finalist, imagines a fanciful city with an elaborate network of city-run self-driving cars and shuttles, where the on-demand businesses it's still struggling to regulate are a seamless part of life. The most technologically ambitious part of San Francisco's big vision, created by the city's new Office of Innovation, is getting people out of the driver's seat and into shared, autonomous cars. The idea is to reduce traffic and reclaim parking structures and some roadways for housing and parks.

TeamViewer Credential Breach, Bitcoiner Computers at Risk

While possible that TeamViewer’s breach is correlated to the recent Myspace hacking incident, the availability of 2-factor authentication data rules out Myspace credentials being the main culprit. If you currently use TeamViewer, then your first step is to check if your authentication credentials were leaked (Use HaveIBeenPwned to check.) If so, change passwords for every service and consider yourself very lucky if nothing else has been accessed — like your email or bank account. Next, you should login to TeamViewer’s application console. Now, on the upper-right side of the screen, click your username > edit profile > active logins, to see every device and location that has accessed your account. Nothing is worse than having your cryptocurrency stolen. Eliminate potential vectors of attack!

How To Embrace The Benefits Of Shadow IT

Many IT organizations have evolved over time, morphing to accommodate major transformation projects such as ERP implementations AND refreshes, re-platforming from legacy technologies to current day solutions, and extending or contracting based on mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. As a result, the size, shape and composition of the traditional IT organization is often as confusing and complex as the myriad of technologies that are woven together into a tapestry of IT solutions that are constantly challenged to keep up with business needs. Contrast that dynamic with shadow IT, which is often set up by the business for the business, very well aligned with the affordability and competitive demands of the business, is easily understood as it aligns perfectly with the business functions OR products, embraces the latest and greatest technologies via SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and other consumption-based models, and is agile by design—not as a costly retrofit.

Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations

The first step toward an inner-source initiative is to select an appropriate seed product— an existing initial implementation of a software product or component. Similarly to projects in open source communities, starting an innersource project from scratch is difficult. Without an initial vision of a project, it’s hard to attract developers from across an organization to invest time and resources. Instead, it’s much more useful to have a seed product that can attract a developer community and grow to a successful inner-source project. This seed project must offer sufficient value to an organization. Starting an innersource project around a new operating system or database management system is unlikely to attract many contributors because building such commodity software is wasteful.

The Art of Intelligent Deception in Cyber Security

Decoys counter sophisticated types of attack by applying techniques that entice attackers, fool and feed them false data, and provide an organization a forensic trail of the attacker’s movements and the option to react before the data is stolen. Attackers that are able to get through the perimeter of a network are typically shrewd and familiar with the layout of a common corporate network. However, even the most experienced hackers are initially working with a handicap as they are still learning the inner workings of a specific network. This is a weakness that organizations must exploit quickly by creating a mirage to confuse and lure in the attacker. This deception strategy is similar to what has been used in combat for centuries. Strategically placed decoys in the form of fake equipment and communications confuse the opposition and lure them away from their target, providing the opposition the advantage.

Quote for the day:

"We cannot evoke the true spirit of sacrifice and valour, so long as we are not free." -- Mahatma Gandhi

June 02, 2016

‘Vendor Overload’ Adds To CISO Burnout

Irfan Saif, a partner in Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services, said the need to understand the organization’s needs and business requirements is “paramount,” and the failure to do that can lead to the use, or overuse, of, “overlapping or redundant tools that aren’t integrated or aren’t working in unison towards mitigating and managing key risks to the organization.” That, he said, “can distract from the more important task of truly understanding the risks and threats and designing the right solutions, which may include one or more technologies working in tandem.” Hutchinson agreed. “Focus on what your business needs, not what tools are available,” she said, adding that it is also important to make sure security measures enable the business, and don’t restrict what workers need to do.

How Google Fiber Could Upset The Entire Broadband Industry

Long story short, if Alphabet decides to take on Comcast and Time Warner, there’s literally nothing the two companies can do except watch as their customers abandon them. People are desperate for an alternative to price-gouging and poor service. I don’t think I’m remiss in saying that the only reason America’s two biggest ISPs are still in business is because they have a monopoly - Comcast and Time Warner are the very definition of broken brands. Just look at what happened this past November, when Comcast tried to post a snide remark on Facebook about Google Fiber losing connectivity during a televised sporting event. They were met with torrents of negativity, which they desperately tried to mitigate (to no avail). Fact is, if Google Fiber manages to succeed, things might start looking very grim for Comcast.

Cloud Security 101: What is Cloud Compliance?

Many providers already have very mature programs in place to deal with common standards, and are able to map those standards to customer controls as part of their workload migration and onboarding process. It is critical that an enterprise choose cloud vendors that are able to meet or exceed their security and compliance standards – mapping and assisting in audit and compliance activities should be delineated in contracts and service level agreements before any workload migrations start. With the variety of cloud solutions in the marketplace, a solution exists that will mesh with a company’s compliance concerns, and allow them to maintain the progress in security and compliance maturity they had achieved before migrating to the cloud.

Big data without the big headaches: How to get your strategy right

Big data is big business: analyst Gartner says the amount of chief data officers (CDOs) being appointed by major organisations rose from 400 in 2014 to 1,000 in 2015. The analyst predicts 90 per cent of large companies will have a CDO by 2019. Such CDOs can help firms to focus on the value of analytical information. But all organisations -- with or without the appointment of a CDO -- must find ways to demonstrate the value of big data, and that job often falls to the CIO. So when it comes to setting a big data strategy, what is the role of the CIO and how can he or she help the rest of the organisation to make the most of their information? ZDNet speaks to the experts and discovers best practice advice.

Microsoft Teams With Blockstack, ConsenSys to Develop Blockchain IDs

Together, the companies are embarking on an open-source collaboration that will incorporate the Bitcoin-based Blockstack identity platform and uPort, the Ethereum identity management and wallet technology from ConsenSys. They expect to produce an extensible, cross-chain identity platform that will be compatible with any future blockchains and other decentralized systems. "Our goal in contributing to this initiative is to start a conversation on blockchain-based identity that could improve apps, services, and more importantly, the lives of real people worldwide by enabling self-owned or self-sovereign identity," said Yorke Rhodes, blockchain business strategist at Microsoft, in a May 31 announcement. "An implementation of self-sovereign identity can be established using the qualities of blockchain based systems and we have chosen to start collaborating with two partners with considerable blockchain identity expertise."

Cognitive Bias and Innovation: How Can We Combat Instinct?

Rather than expecting yourself, as an innovator, to identify areas of bias and change them, create systems where your bias is limited and horizons are changed. If looking at information, attempt to approach it clinically, as if someone else was asking you for help. Institute systems that don’t rely on individual perceptions to make decisions. Allow lots of time for important decisions to be examined fully. Bring in outsider opinions. Plan on always taking extra time for big decisions so that your conscious mind will be able to review your choices without the pressure that often prompts gut instincts to kick in. Get second opinions from people who are outside your core team. If you are hiring to fill a position, create a system where you won’t have any indication of candidates’ races or genders in their initial applications.

Embracing Cloud: How Cloud Services Impact All Verticals and Industries

Digital business incompetence will cause a quarter of organizations to lose their market position by 2017. The former Gartner analyst believes every company in the world is in “some way” an IT company – but while firms work on expanding cloud products and services, they need to remember the focus is on business. However, Bova thinks many within the enterprise are destined to make a mess of this, and will lose their market positions in the next few years as a result. With all of this in mind, it’s critical to see that the emergence of the cloud has helped many organizations expand beyond their current physical data center. New types of cloud-based technologies allow IT environments to truly consolidate and grow their infrastructure quickly, and, more importantly affordably.

Delivering Effective Quality of Service

You can eliminate the conflict over resources, or you can simply increase the performance resources available. That’s one of the reasons for the explosion in all-flash storage; organizations are throwing more and more all-flash at their performance problems. But all-flash alone is not enough—it’s a band-aid. It postpones having to deal with the underlying problem (LUNs), and you have to apply more and more over time. It’s easy to see how costs can spiral out of control. Now, some storage providers tout QoS despite having a LUN-based architecture—but that’s not a solution either. You can set QoS for an entire LUN. If a VM within that LUN goes rogue you can use QoS to assign the entire LUN even more performance. Since you can’t see which specific VM is causing problems, you’re just pouring performance resources at the LUN, not addressing the root cause.

CIO interview: Lee Edwards, chief technology officer, The British Library

“What we need to do is improve the efficiency of the delivery of those services and that underlying infrastructure – the plumbing and wiring that the Library runs on,” says Edwards. “Moving to infrastructure-, storage-, platform- and desktop-as-a-service will give the business the ability to expand its capacity.” Edwards adds that the needs will become greater as the Library expands its collection and progresses with its digitisation work. IT infrastructure at the British Library is mainly managed in-house. According to Edwards, although the organisation works with various suppliers for maintenance and licensing, it is a “very transactional” supplier support arrangement. “If we have a fault on a network that has a server chassis, then we may get the hardware supplier out,” says Edwards. “But we don’t really have a strategic partnership, which is an issue we are looking to solve.

Why business apps design must better cater to consumer habits to improve user experience

First and foremost, we need to build it intuitively, so that you naturally apply the patterns that you have to that software, but we should come about it in a different way, where training is in context, in product. We’re doing new things with overlays. and to take users through a tour, or step them through a new feature, to give them just the quick highlights of where things are. You see this sort of thing in mobile apps all the time after you install an update. In addition to that, we build in-context questions or answers right there at the point of need, where the user is likely to encounter something new or initially unknown in the the product. So it’s just-in-time and in little snippets. But underpinning all of it, the experience has to be very, very simple, so that you don’t have to go through this overarching hurdle to understand it.

Quote for the day:

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." -- Dr. Seuss

June 01, 2016

Robots beware: Humans will still be bosses of machines

There are two basic ways to augment. One is to work alongside smart machines, and complement their activity. The other is to dip into what smart machines are unlikely to be able to do any time soon. For the first set, working closely with machines, it's a day-to-day colleague sort of role. Just as with a human colleague, you'd know what they were good at and what they were not so good at, so you can step in when they're unable to do a task. Then, there's the computer's boss role. I think of hedge fund managers or something as an archetypal role like that, where the trading may all be done by machines these days, but somebody's got to look at the whole portfolio and see how it's performing. Do we need more automation, less automation, different types of automation?

Managing the Bots that Are Managing the Business

Managers must become product and experience designers, deeply engaged with customers and their needs, creating services that start out as a compelling promise and get better over time the more people use them, via a “build-measure-learn” process. A service like Uber is based on a deep rethinking of the fundamental workflows of on-demand transportation (what used to be called “taxis”) in light of what technology now makes possible. Before Uber, who would have thought that a passenger could summon a car to a specific spot, and know just when they were going to be picked up? Yet that capability was already lying latent in smartphones. There is an arc to knowledge, in which expertise becomes embodied into products. Workers can be “upskilled” not just by training but by software assistants that allow them to do jobs for which they were previously under-qualified.

CFOs are more invested in tech than CIOs think

CIOs often tend to be either big idea generators focused on innovations or integrators who hang their hats on connections and the big picture. Many CFOs meanwhile tend to be more methodical, detail-oriented and risk-averse, while some CFOs value direct communications and a focus on results. While it is often challenging for an innovation-oriented CIO to see eye-to-eye with the risk-averse CFO, Deloitte says each must identify those differences early on and adjust their communication styles to strengthen their partnership. Once communications styles are balanced and accounted for, Kambil says, CIOs must do a better job explaining the value of technologies to their CFOs. ... "CIOs can play a better role in helping CFOs understand how technology is evolving, as well as helping them understand the architecture they're investing in," Kambil says.

Reddit CTO: Stick to Boring Tech when Building Your Startup

“There are a lot of tools that may not scale with you, but they will get you going faster,” he said. Pick well-known technologies like NGINX, Ubuntu, GitHub, and Python. “Python is a really mature tech. Everyone knows how to use it, and you can hire for it,” he said. For most common data capture tasks, such as storing user comments or log-in credentials, MySQL is the way to go. AWS offers a hosted MySQL service through RDS. AWS manages the service, with capabilities such as automatic failover and configurations, and as the company grows you can transfers responsibility over to your own staff. “The boring tech revolution is here,” he said. And don’t worry about optimizing your queries yet. “Don’t optimize anything on the backend unless you have to,” he said

Online Shareholders’ Meetings Lower Costs, but Also Interaction

Companies are adopting this technology for a number of reasons. There are the obvious cost savings, because they do not have to pay for a location and serve food (however meager, although some companies are known for their shareholders’ meeting spreads). And having a virtual meeting allows people to “attend” who would not otherwise want to make the trip. The company can also better track shareholder attendance and participation. Perhaps more important, a virtual shareholders’ meeting allows the company to manage troublesome shareholders and their often uncomfortable questions. Some of this may provide a welcome limit on the time monopolized by corporate gadflies such as John Chevedden, James McRitchie and William Steiner, who were responsible for a staggering 70 percent of shareholder proposals sponsored by individuals among Fortune 250 companies in 2014, according to a study by the Manhattan Institute.

How ‘Agile’ Changed Security At Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet is at an interesting crossroads. We’re investing in technology and a huge part of that is security. We previously outsourced our security functions and heavily relied on managed security services. This approach doesn’t always work. After being a product manager, I understand agile very well. We started it with the application security team as an experiment. Our work was reactive, and I wanted to shift that. We took control of our day-to-day activities and were able to better manage to our priorities. We also established processes for how other teams engage with us. ... Our security operations team — which is naturally reactive — has run into some problems with Scrum, a form of agile which is time boxed. The team was struggling to keep up with requests. It was a perpetual cycle of trying to keep their heads above water.

Is network fabric heading down the same path as ‘software defined’ and ‘stacking’?

A key requirement of a fabric is that it should work across vendors, allowing for traffic to move seamlessly across different environments. Any kind of translation that has to be done at the edge of a network would break the uniformity of the fabric. There are a couple of vendors today that support TRILL, but they either have proprietary control or data planes, making them non-interoperable with “standards-based” TRILL. It may be possible to get these proprietary versions to work together through some sort of TRILL gateway, but as a I point out above, this is no longer a single fabric. The solutions do address the limitations of legacy networks and offer fabric-like capabilities in a single network, but its use would be limited to that one network.

The biggest data challenges that you might not even know you have

Cognitive technology has the capability to harness unstructured data and keep businesses ahead of the competition by leveraging human cognitive frameworks. Cognitive technology, like IBM Watson, can analyze unstructured data, interpret this data to create insights, evaluate all possible decisions using evidential support, and then come to a conclusion with a level of confidence. Leveraging unstructured data with the help of cognitive computing can dramatically change the way that business is conducted. ... Stand out seeking out cognitive solutions, which have the ability to aggregate and find patterns within data at an extremely fast pace. This will allow you – or your customers – to improve decision-making at the speed of insight.

10 things you should know about running an IoT project function

One of the biggest issues companies face today is deciding who in the organization should run IoT. In some cases, they start with an innovative engineer. In other cases, a product manager or a manager from IT or an end-business function is given the role. And sometimes, the company decides it doesn't have anyone who is a good fit to run the IoT function so it decides to hire from the outside. ... If the intent of IoT work is to create a salable product, more must go into the project than just designing and building the technology. It must be packaged for the market and a marketing plan must be constructed. The IoT project might have to be sold to the CEO and the board of directors. This requires a product manager set of skills that can go far beyond the initial technical engineering expertise that goes into the product.

Security Concerns Rising For Internet Of Things Devices

Hackers always seem to flock to the most popular platforms. It’s one of the reasons there are more risks for Windows users than the Mac -- there’s a much bigger footprint.According to BI Intelligence, there will be 34 billion connected devices in the world by 2020, creating a $6 trillion industry; surprisingly, BI names business as the main IoT adopter. The costs are low, the gadgets are simple to install, and they solve nagging problems. One good example of this is the Belkin WeMo platform. Young says you can install a device like this outlet that you can control with your smartphone in five minutes. Yet, there might not be any intrusion detection for a product like that. In a worst case scenario, he says, a Chinese hacker could find a vulnerability for these outlets and then power cycle them repeatedly for thousands of users all over the U.S. to cause massive blackouts. Yet, for the end-user, there is some incredible usefulness, energy savings, low costs, and a simple install.

Quote for the day:

"Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself." -- Julia Cameron,

May 31, 2016

Will blockchain make the leap from cryptocurrency to smart machines?

This is despite something of a crisis of confidence in Bitcoin’s own cryptocurrency heartland, where some insiders are arguing that the model and the specific software architecture have been tested and found wanting. Some of the issues they raise inevitably apply to the extension of the Blockchain to IoT; if, as they allege, the Blockchain is itself failing to scale to support its core business, then it’s not going to be much good for IoT either. There are also concerns about the processing power and the associated electrical energy that would be needed to perform the encryption needed for all those objects. The underlying data for a blockchain-based IoT application doesn’t have to be stored on a centralized server architecture paid for by the enterprise, but it still has to be stored — and the need to maintain multiple copies surely increases rather than obviates the storage requirement.

Death or rebirth: What does the future of the PC really look like?

Microsoft's vision was to put a (Windows) computer on every desk and in every home. It pretty much managed it, at least in the richer parts of the world. But many of those PCs - especially the ones at home - are now forgotten and covered with dust. That's because smartphones and tablets are easier and quicker to use, and can do the vast majority of things you can do with a PC. Indeed there are plenty of things that a standard PC or laptop cannot do that a smartphone can. To put it another way: PC makers have struggled - and most failed to answer the question posed by Apple CEO Tim Cook last year: "Why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?" Now this doesn't mean the PC is dead: selling 232 million this year shows that. But it does mean that the PC is going to change, and so will PC makers.

Gartner's Litan Analyzes SWIFT-Related Bank Heists

Litan, who recently blogged about the lessons the SWIFT-related heists should teach U.S. banks about authentication weaknesses and lacking security controls, says banks need to implement the same controls for interbank transactions that they have in place for customer-to-bank payments. Fraud detection and risk mitigation is a shared responsibility, she adds. "We read a lot in the media about finger pointing, where SWIFT was saying it was the banks' responsibility and the banks were saying it was SWIFT's responsibility," Litan says. "Everyone needs to wake up and realize this is a shared responsibility."

What did one car say to the other car? If you make that turn I'll hit you!

It works because your car and that pickup are exchanging their location, speed, acceleration, direction and steering faster than we can blink. Many consider this conversation -- called vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V -- the most important lifesaving technology to hit the auto industry in the past 10 years. If V2V did nothing more than warn you not to turn left or enter an intersection, it could prevent about half a million crashes and save around 1,100 lives a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But automakers, universities and government organizations are exploring V2V for more than just intersection safety. ... "Whoa, don't pass that horse trailer, because there's oncoming traffic you can't see." Because of benefits like these, the US Department of Transportation is pushing automakers to adopt V2V within the next few years.

EMC and smaller players planning open-source storage middleware

The company has been quietly updating its community website, emccode.com, with a roadmap via the GitHub code repository. That's a long way from when the old hardware-centric EMC began its storage diversification push more than a decade ago, at the time being ribbed as "Expensive, Monolithic, Closed" by then-new storage networking competitor Sun Microsystems. Bernstein said EMC's early successes in open-source storage include Rex-Ray, which links containers to storage, and Polly, which provides storage resource management to virtual machines. His team will keep churning out open-source storage container projects, including some contributed by customers, as long as the container market keeps developing. "The biggest challenge right now is there's a lot of fragmentation in the market. There's no clear winner," he observed.

Raspberry Pi: The smart person's guide

Windows was another recent addition to the board. The Pi runs Windows 10 IoT Core, a cut-down version of Windows 10, not designed to run a desktop PC but instead to help hardware hackers prototype Internet of Things (IoT) appliances using the Pi. Not only are there three different generations of Pi but there are two primary models, the Model B and the lesser specced Model A. The Model A lacks Ethernet, has less memory than the B and only has one USB port. However, it sells for the lower price of $25 and draws less power. Generally the Pi 3 is the better choice than the Pi 2, as it's more powerful and is the same price. However, the Pi 1, while a good deal less powerful, is cheaper than the Pi 3, and also available in the more compact, less power hungry Model A configuration. That said, a Pi 3 Model A is due to be released this year.

Back-end integration a struggle for IoT companies

Augury is exploring several different possibilities including reducing the cost of diagnostics for commercial repair firms, improving customer outreach for appliance vendors and enabling new insurance models. The company has already lined up contracts with some of the largest HVAC repair companies in the U.S. for the on-demand diagnostic service. Yoskovitz expects appliance makers to eventually embed low cost sensors into their washing machines and refrigerators. This would make it easier to proactively send out repair technicians or recommend upgrades when machines have reached the end of their life. "After the one-year warranty, most manufacturers lose contact with the customer," he said. "If anything goes wrong, a customer will call someone on Craigslist, and the spare parts will be Chinese knockoffs.

Parallel Processing and Unstructured Data Transforms Storage

New approaches to application virtualization are also having a revolutionizing effect on the use of data storage. Operational requirements for big data analytics on unstructured data is driving the adoption of "application specific storage architectures" and real-time storage configurability. Tiering is also an enabler for the adoption and efficient operational deployment of container and microservice technologies. This reality presents a compelling case for rapid enterprise adoption of advanced tiered storage architectures. When selecting storage technologies, the smart money goes to those solutions that support the industry’s need for high performance and economical high density online storage. In order to enable the highest degree of storage automation, the solution should be able to manage the various storage technologies through a consistent interface or API.

Devops: A Culture or Concrete Activity?

The DevOps philosophy cannot be entirely divorced from processes, much like the branches of a tree cannot be disassociated with the trunk. This is where development models come into play. Schmidt supplies the example of continuous delivery, which entails building a solution in such a way that it can be released at any point in production. This doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be released in its crudest form, only that it hypothetically could, and that any potential loose ends would be tied up. Achieving this model requires extremely well-choreographed collaboration among developers, QA management, designers and other departments – so basically, an unremitting adherence to the DevOps philosophy. Continuous delivery is essentially agile software development testing on steroids. The objective of agile is still to make defined builds for delivery.

Exercises for Building Better Teams

The concept of work organization has been evolving for years. Not only agile practitioners have discovered that self-organized teams are highly effective. A strong manager is not a requirement for a well-performing team, but that does not mean that self-organized teams lack leadership. ... To ensure that such a balance exists, Alexis Phillips and Phillip Sandahl proposed a Team Diagnostic model based on Blake’s leadership grid. They translated “concern for people” at the management side to a measurement of team positivity that reflects team spirit and joy of work. They transformed “concern for result” into team productivity, which means effectiveness in delivering results. They identified critical competencies for each of those areas and it is amazing how well this list aligns with the agile mindset.

Quote for the day:

"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong." -- Calvin Coolidge

May 30, 2016

The enterprise technologies to watch in 2016

More tactical, though still important to carefully consider throughout the phases of tech planning, pilots, growth, and maturity are technologies that are likely to add something significant to the way enterprises operate and which therefore have non-trivial impact to competitive advantage. The tactical technology additions that made the cut this year including contextual computing, workplace application integration, so-called low code platforms, smart agents/chatbots, adaptive cybersecurity, microservices architectures, ambient personalization, and fog computing. Looking farther out, some adjustments have also been made to the list of horizon technologies, or anticipated technical innovations of significance that most enterprises are probably not only not ready to experiment with yet, but are still in the process of being made viable in R&D departments and startup incubators.

The latest cybersecurity risk? Our homes and offices

Then there’s regulatory liability. Not only can hackers steal financial data, but they can steal other kinds of data as well—including consumer’s personal information. In the United States, for example, theft of medical information means the property owner could face a HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violation if a medical office or health insurance tenant is compromised through the building system. “Laws are becoming much stricter with regards to how companies protect consumer information,” says Edward Wagoner, Chief Information Officer, JLL Americas. “In some countries, your name, email, phone number and physical address are all considered private information and any unauthorized release of this data is against the law.”

Surging Ahead: Fintech Startups In The Middle East

Sometimes, existing financial institutions are slow to adapt their sales channels and products to an online world, or their products are too complicated to be easily understood, which in the UK and US led to a growth in financial services comparison websites and what CB Insights has outlined in their The Unbundling of Banks infographic. But it also allows for new products and services and new ways for traditional financial institutions to reach customers. Feloosy is looking at companies like Acorn, who have made saving money faster and simpler for millennials, but with an Arab twist. With a Feloosy account, you’ll be able to put small amounts of money into an investment account towards a specific goal, whether a car, television, or education. This can be a very exciting prospect if they can tie it into PayFort’s payment gateway and souq.com’s merchants.

Fintech Report 2016: Asia Fintech Funding Hits new High of US$2.6b in First Quarter 2016

“Global VC investment into the technology sector may be experiencing a bit of a pause, however FinTech, propelled by some very large mega-rounds, has proven to be an exception to the rule,” said Warren Mead, Global Co-Leader of FinTech, KPMG International. “Investors are putting money into FinTech companies all over the world – from the traditional strongholds of China, the US and the UK – to up and coming FinTech hubs like Singapore, Australia and Ireland.” Anand Sanwal, CEO at CB Insights, added: “While FinTech startups continue to attract large investment both in the US and abroad, and investors gravitate to areas yet untouched by much tech innovation including insurance, recent events and public market performance suggest that growth-stage FinTech fundraising will be harder to come by moving forward in 2016.”

A digital crack in banking’s business model

Digital start-ups (fintechs)—as well as big nonbank technology companies in e-retailing, media, and other sectors—could exploit this mismatch in banking’s business model. Technological advances and shifts in consumer behavior offer attackers a chance to weaken the heavy gravitational pull that banks exert on their customers. Many of the challengers hope to disintermediate these relationships, slicing off the higher-ROE segments of banking’s value chain in origination and sales, leaving banks with the basics of asset and liability management. It’s important that most fintech players (whether start-ups or China’s e-messaging and Internet-services provider Tencent) don’t want to be banks and are not asking customers to transfer all their financial business at once. They are instead offering targeted (and more convenient) services.

Cloud Databases: What’s the Worry?

The three key issues most central to an organization are performance, security, and compliance in the database. Many companies want their databases to deliver these capabilities while remaining on-premise, thinking closer proximity translates into better results. However, it’s actually the cloud that offers the best opportunity for maximizing performance, security, and compliance. And while storing all data in a public cloud can make a majority of today’s companies uncomfortable, a well-designed hybrid cloud database not only assuages common fears and meets companies’ database needs, it also gives enterprises a new level of scalability. Here are a few additional facts architects can bring to the table when discussing the pros and cons of a hybrid cloud architecture:

Cloud and Big Data still haven't breached the enterprise core, survey shows

Overall, cloud is gaining traction for business services around the enterprise, such as those offered through Salesforce.com -- used by 40% of respondents. But adoption of cloud-based ERP/core enterprise applications (I use the two terms interchangeably) itself, or databases remains tepid. For ERP/core enterprise suites and enterprise databases, at least eight in 10 remain on-premises, and will remain that way. Security, potential loss of control, data integration and potential migration difficulties are all seen as obstacles to moving more core enterprise applications into the cloud. That's not to say people aren't interested in exploring moving particular applications or data sets to cloud. What is evolving are hybrid environments, in which key applications and data remain on-premises, but newer applications may be hosted somewhere else besides the corporate data center.

IoT Security – The Trojan Horse Is In The House

How ironic is this? You buy a smart device to help you, but it rather hacks you. Collects your data. More like a Trojan horse. You get it in the house because it might be good for you. In fact, once the gadget is in the house, things can get quite scary. You see, most of these IoT devices are going to collect your credit card details. Your date of birth, your name and even your address. A bigger problem is caused by the fact that most of these IoT devices are sending your data to the cloud, by using your home network. The data is not encrypted; hence, you are just a network misconfiguration away from exposing your data to the world, via your own WIFI network. Not what you would call IoT security, is it? But it does not stop here. In fact, it gets even worse. Some of the cloud services that these devices use, come with privacy concerns. More and more third party companies race to take advantage of the cloud platforms.

Transparency system means ‘sneaky algorithms’ can’t hide

“Consider a system that assists in hiring decisions for a moving company. Gender and the ability to lift heavy weights are inputs to the system. They are positively correlated with each other and with the hiring decisions. Yet transparency into whether the system uses the weight lifting ability or the gender in making its decisions (and to what degree) has substantive implications for determining if it is engaging in discrimination,” the researchers write in their report The researchers want to particularly focus on the areas of healthcare, predictive policing, education and defense as they feel these areas deserve the most attention in achieving algorithmic transparency. It remains to be seen whether this system will be adopted by companies but it is important and necessary – especially in an age where algorithms are subtly shaping our lives.

Design for Mobile: App UI Best Practices

The first step to defining what your app does is understanding which needs your app is solving. With the millions of apps already in existence, there’s a good chance that there’s already an app (or maybe hundreds of apps) that does something similar to what you’re envisioning. You need to consider how your app is different, and what will make it stand out from the crowd. Which specific scenarios are you targeting? Is there a specific audience you’re looking to attract? Understanding the mindset of the user is the next step in defining your app. You can think of this as one step below your app’s genre. What is the user’s situation and what are they trying to accomplish? Are you a productivity app? I need to complete a task. Entertainment? I’m bored and looking for something fun to do. Travel? I’m in San Francisco and looking for sushi.

Quote for the day:

"In programming simplicity and clarity are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure." -- Dijkstra

May 28, 2016

Can blockchain tech transform the investment industry?

Blockchain technology has already been described as a game changer in light of recent developments, having changed the existing rules of the traditional investment market. As a decentralised database, blockchain technology has already made the online investment market more fluid whilst acting as an interesting tool for the secondary market, enabling smaller investments and trade volumes. These smaller investments were not possible before due to the cost of the middle man. For example a £5,000 investment did not make sense if the notary and the trustee would take a cut amounting to £2,000. In my opinion, blockchain technology makes much more sense for secondary markets such as real estate investments and equity crowdfunding. This is especially because previously these investments would not be viable due to the high transaction costs.

Anonymity, Transparency and Privacy are not Incompatible

With regards to “privacy” and the protection of personal data, the use of pseudonyms cannot be considered to be an anonymization procedure, because by definition anonymization should be irreversible and ensure that the data cannot be traced back to an individual. Hence, “privacy” and anonymity cannot be considered as synonyms but antonyms. Anonymization is a technique used to erase the personalization of the data when it is not required for the purpose of the data processing activities (i.e. statistical data). This technique allows companies such as financial institutions to retain and process data after the expiration of their legal conservation period or for other purposes. In this case, the data no longer fall under the scope of the personal data protection regime because they are no longer identifiable.

5 Reasons Enterprises Still Worry About Cloud Security

Cloud computing has seen Moore’s Law-style exponential growth over the last ten years or so and there seems to be no plateau in sight. World-wide spending on public cloud infrastructure -- hardware and software -- is expected to reach $38B this year and $173B by 2026, with Amazon holding the largest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market share. Schulze believes we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and that Amazon as a cloud provider will be more dominant and influential than the likes of Microsoft, Apple, or any of the major tech giants. “Most [security] vendors were not surprised but overwhelmed by the rapid adoption of cloud and they may not have ramped up enough,” says Schulze. He also notes that cloud computing is just a whole lot more complex than traditional environments.

5 practical uses for blockchain — from Airbnb to stock markets

For those not up to speed, blockchain is a database protocol developed to underpin bitcoin. Rather than having a central record keeping system, identical records are spread across everyone connected to a network. They are all updated simultaneously and transactions only go through when enough parties on the network sign off on them. This technology eliminates the need for costly middle men in financial transactions, but also presents plenty of other opportunities for new ways of record keeping and decentralising markets. Goldman's report, titled "Blockchain: Putting Theory into Practice", says that "the discussion often remains abstract," and so is trying to "shift the focus from theory to practice," by looking at real-world applications for blockchain technology.

How Blockchain Technology Could Change The World

Worldwide, the financial services market is the largest sector of industry by market capitalization. If blockchain technology can replace just a fraction of that by enabling peer-to-peer transactions in other sectors then it clearly has the potential to create huge efficiencies. The technology was initially pushed into the headlines several years ago thanks to the virtual currency Bitcoin. The value of one unit of the currency (which is underpinned by blockchain technology) rose from pennies to over £$1,000 between 2011 and 2013, making a handful of early adopter enthusiasts very wealthy. Of course, this generated press interest. Since then, while Bitcoin’s value may have fallen and the currency established a more stable rate of growth, the buzz around the blockchain concept has intensified.

Former Googler Lets Us In On The Surprising Secret To Being A Good Boss

For all of us raised in a culture that preaches, "If you can’t say something nice…", that criticism might not sound so nice. But Scott knows now that it was the kindest thing Sandberg could have done for her. "If she hadn't said it just that way, I would've kept blowing her off. I wouldn't have addressed the problem. And what a silly thing to let trip you up." (Incidentally, she did work with that speaking coach, and kicked her um habit handily.) In the years since, Scott has worked to operationalize what it was that made Sandberg such a great boss. It sounds so simple to say that bosses need to tell employees when they're screwing up. But it very rarely happens. To help teach radical candor—this all-important but often neglected skill—to her own teams, Scott boiled it down to a simple framework: Picture a basic graph divided into four quadrants.

Mobile backend as a service: Features and deployment options

Enterprise IT organizations have been slow to build and deploy mobile apps due to a lack of development expertise, tight budgets, new languages and development environments, unfamiliar Agile methodologies and release cycles, and the complexity of supporting two major operating systems with hundreds of device permutations. Indeed, a 2015 Gartner survey found that "the average number of custom apps per company that have been developed so far is less than 10, despite huge internal demands to mobilize." Without C-level IT leadership, IT organizations will languish behind their more innovative and aggressive peers in building the mobile skills and applications necessary to succeed in what some call the app economy. Software automation and services, along with what the above Gartner analysis called "lightweight Web and mobile-style app integration," are the only way to cross the technological chasm without unrealistic injections of money and manpower.

Is the end of the U.S. tech market upon us?

In fact, it often takes months to years of planning to make a major platform shift. Losing a vendor and resources suddenly can create a catastrophe because the needed support organizations collapse with the company and IT often doesn’t have the internal resources and competing vendors with the skills to pick up the slack. Given these increasing financial pressures are forcing company executives to sacrifice long-term corporate viability in exchange for short-term performance I’m suggesting another attribute be taken into account other than price. In fact, you might want to devalue price in anything that requires long-term support given a practice of focusing on quarterly returns can drive below cost pricing to support revenues over the short term and actually reduce the long-term viability of the tech vendor you need to support this too good to be true pricing.

Google's victory over Oracle: A win for developers

Part of Google's winning argument was that APIs serve more of a functional purpose, rather than a creative one. The Federal Circuit has already established that APIs show a degree of creativity meriting copyright protection -- but Thursday's ruling set a very high bar for the level of creativity needed to exempt APIs from fair use, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. Clearly, "Oracle and others with strong, widely adopted platforms like Java have a higher bar," he said. "It seems natural that the design of complex APIs involves creativity; however, the court has decided that this creativity bar is not reached by this relatively complex set of Java APIs." All that said, Thursday's ruling doesn't actually set any real legal precedent. Every "fair use" claim is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And while Google's victory may seem to set a high bar for the level of "creativity" that APIs must show to merit legal protection, the jury simply answered a yes-or-no question.

Basis Peak Review – Intel’s Best Fitness Tracker

The sleep tracking was one of the strongest selling points in the first Basis tracker and, with Peak, it remains one of the most accurate sleep trackers we have tested so far. The watch can monitor three levels of sleep. Deep sleep, light and REM and also mark every move and turn you make while sleeping. As a downside, the Basis is not displaying the resting HR as one of its sleep metrics. It is a very useful sign in telling you if you are overtraining. However, it appears that the company is aware of the issue and working on a new firmware update. All the data captured by the Basis Peak tracker syncs to your smartphone, via a dedicated app. The app is free to download and compatible with both, Android and iOS mobile owners. You can also access your data via a web browser, thanks, to the online portal provided by Basis.

Quote for the day:

"A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power." -- Brian Tracy

May 27, 2016

A Reference Architecture for the Internet of Things

When it comes to context management we first have to agree on a context situation for the fridge and an action that is sent to the fridge. The context management is complex on the power plant side but rather simple on the fridge. The power plant side can be seen as a black-box here because we will most likely have to integrate already existing systems that detect and predict peaks. Once a peak is detected the action for the fridges triggers and is passed to the thing integration that distributes it to registered fridges. The fridge then just receives the action, decides if it wants to cool (this can be implemented with simple time constraints in a first prototype) and replies to the power plant if it will cool or not. Similarly data management is very simple on the fridge, but more complex on the power plant side.

Obama wants more cybersecurity funding and a federal CISO

"In particular," Daniel adds, "we believe it is critically important that we begin to address the underlying structural weaknesses that we have in federal cybersecurity by modernizing our underlying IT, by updating the governance structures that we have so that agencies can actually manage their cybersecurity more effectively by accessing much more common and shared services across the government, and investing in or people so that we have the adequate resources concentrated in the right places so that agencies can effectively carry out their cybersecurity missions." The budget proposal also expands on the government's efforts to transition to cloud-based systems, adopt provisioned services and move toward an agile software development model. At the same time, departments and agencies are shedding hardware as they consolidate data centers and incorporate shared services into their IT operations.

Designing For The Internet Of Emotional Things

Emotion-sensing technology is moving from an experimental phase to a reality. The Feel wristband and the MoodMetric ring use sensors that read galvanic skin response, pulse, and skin temperature to detect emotion in a limited way. EmoSPARK is a smart home device that creates an emotional profile based on a combination of word choice, vocal characteristics and facial recognition. This profile is used to deliver music, video and images according to your mood. Wearables that can detect physical traces like heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature give clues about mood. Screens that detect facial expressions are starting to be mapped to feelings. Text analysis is becoming more sensitive to nuance and tone. Now voice analysis is detecting emotion too. Affective computing, where our devices take inputs from multiple sources like sensors, audio and pattern recognition to detect emotion, is starting to become a real part of our experience with technology.

The Internet of Things (IoT) – creating a whole new ‘place’ in marketing

With increasingly sophisticated Generation Y customers, with a clear understanding of what they want, companies able to provide an exceptional, flexible and agile product or service configuration platform can by-pass their intermediaries, by allowing the customer to do for themselves, what the intermediary may have done for them. But there’s more. Advanced and predictive analytics can directly include the buyer in every stage of the production process at the touch of a button – so you can not only see how the product is coming together…but where the components are in the supply chain (and even change them if you find something better) – to truly customise your product or service. The ubiquity of sensors is increasing all the time. Cost has dropped significantly making them much more viable for lower value ‘devices’ which means individual components can be IoT enabled.

What the heck is RegTech?

One of the main areas for potential disruption through RegTech is the communication between different systems, be it internally between existing ones or with new systems, or between different institutions. Most financial institutions work with legacy systems that have been tweaked and amended over several years to become individual configurations that struggle to talk to other systems. A senior IT colleague ones told me that overcome these issues would be like a heart transplant surgery, where the old one basically needs to be removed first before the new one can take its place only that it would be like replacing several hearts at the same time. However, new regulation and notably MiFID II is going to bring challenges, in particular with respect to reporting requirements and the management of data for firms and service providers that will make significant investments in technology inevitable.

Steve Blank on the Tech Bubble: 'VCs Won't Admit They're in a Ponzi Scheme'

To back his point, Blank referred to a scene from the classic 1942 film, Casasblanca. In it, Captain Renault, the French head of police, orders the immediate closure of a café, insisting he wasn't aware that gambling was occurring at the restaurant -- then, moments later, a lackey approaches him with his "winnings, sir." Blank isn't the only voice decrying the Silicon Valley tech bubble. The root of the problem, as Inc.'s Jeff Bercovici has detailed at length, is that investors are valuing more companies in the multimillion and billion-dollar range, though the risk is unlikely to pay off down the line. Many of these companies bring in little (sometimes zero) revenues, and often aren't profitable. Even the biggest names in tech boast valuations that are well-above their revenues: Uber's $50 billion valuation represented 100 times its sales, and Airbnb's $25 billion represented 28 times its sales, according to 2015 data from CB Insights.

Data Governance: Information Is the New Security Perimeter

The term “choose to allow” is used intentionally to indicate that if we have something of value, we need to apply appropriate management and protection. In other words, we need more than ever to apply data governance. Data governance is all about putting appropriate management and control directly over our information, no matter where it is. ... There is no point protecting my public author bio pic with the same security I would apply to a finance system. Data classification helps us appropriately categorize our information based on: Confidentiality—The required level of secrecy and cost impact of unexpected disclosure Integrity—How tolerant (or not) any section of the information can be to being changed or lost entirely Availability—How important it is to have timely access to the information when we need it Consent—Whether there are legal requirements or restrictions in place that impact where the information can go.

U.S. CIO aims to cut legacy spending, proposes IT modernization

In that sense, Scott explained, the proposal would take a page from the business world, where new capital expenditures are carefully vetted with a review committee examining the urgency of the project and the cost/benefit analysis. That would mark a fundamental shift in the traditional ways that the tech teams within government agencies, often operating in a silo, develop and execute IT projects. "Comprehensively, what it does is it marries management, money and a different mode of operation than the pattern that we've been in," Scott said. "This modernization fund relies on principles that we've borrowed from the private sector. If you're in the private sector, you go to a capital committee and you come in and make a business case for why you want to do what you're going to do."

Living in the Matrix with Bytecode Manipulation

Many common Java libraries such as Spring and Hibernate, as well as most JVM languages and even your IDEs, use bytecode-manipulation frameworks. For that reason, and because it’s really quite fun, you might find bytecode manipulation a valuable skillset to have. You can use bytecode manipulation to perform many tasks that would be difficult or impossible to do otherwise, and once you learn it, the sky's the limit. One important use case is program analysis. For example, the popular FindBugs bug-locator tool uses ASM under the hood to analyze your bytecode and locate bug patterns. Some software shops have code-complexity rules such as a maximum number of if/else statements in a method or a maximum method size. Static analysis tools analyze your bytecode to determine the code complexity.

The real problem with Google's mobile messaging strategy

The underlying issue with the company creating new apps like Allo and Duo is that messaging platforms are useful only if your friends and family also use them. All the cool features in the world won't mean a thing if you go onto Allo later this year and find no one you know signed in and available to chat on it. In other words, Google's "more is more" messaging strategy depends on users continuing to migrate and adopt the latest newly branded offering (even when it confusingly overlaps with an existing option they'll also continue to need). As anyone who's ever tried to get family and friends to switch messaging apps knows, that's not something most typical users do regularly or willingly. And since these apps depend on your social circles embracing them in order to be effective, the situation rapidly turns into a self-defeating cycle.

Quote for the day:

“Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.” -- @TimWestergren