Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 08, 2016

HR 2.0 is the poster child for the next wave of SaaS innovation

SaaS would take over segments that previously were not SaaSified. As hotbeds of net new SaaS activity consolidate into market winners, widespread innovation within a segment gives way to incremental innovation. The focus of entrepreneurs and investors mostly moves on. Yet, the current wave of HR SaaS innovators entering the market over the past few years is proving that there can be more to the story even after a segment has been SaaSified. As we assess the market, product, competitive and talent dynamics, we see a perfect storm of enabling characteristics pushing beyond incremental innovation into the widespread disruption of the firmly established HR SaaS category.

Enterprise security architecture: Technology overview

When it comes to creating an IT security roadmap, there are several technology areas to consider. In a recent SearchCIO webcast, Johna Till Johnson discussed the nuances of enterprise information security architecture and infrastructure. CIOs and IT security professionals have a lot to think about when it comes to crafting a solid plan. First, there is understanding next-generation security technology: What does it do, and why does the company need it? Then, there is the vendor piece: Who makes it? Finally, where is the technology headed? In this photo story, click through to get Johnson's recommendations for secure Web gateways; next-generation firewalls; data leakage protection; advanced security analytics; user behavior analytics; and threat, compliance and risk network tools. Follow through the end to get additional advice and important conclusions.

What's New in the Open Source Atom and Visual Studio Code Editors

The most notable recent update to Visual Studio Code actually came with last month's 1.3 update, which for the first time featured the implementation of tabs in the editor, requested by more than 9,000 developers on the UserVoice feature-request site. The support of tabs followed another oft-requested feature, an integrated terminal, introduced in the May 1.2 update ... "Atom is a text editor that's modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core -- a tool you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file," the code editor's Web site declares. ... "Unfortunately, our bindings to libgit2 were causing Atom's helper processes to become unstable, leading to hard crashes," Sobo continued. "We apologize to any package authors who may have switched to these new APIs, but we've been forced to back out the async APIs.

How enterprise architects can help ensure success with digital transformations

The enterprise-architecture (EA) department can play a central role in reducing the complexity associated with digital transformations. Most companies have a dedicated EA group embedded within the larger IT organization. This group typically oversees the entire systems architecture, including business processes and IT infrastructure. It helps to establish rules for and processes around technology usage to ensure consistency across business units and functions. As such, this group can help the CEO and others on the senior leadership team redesign their companies’ business and IT architectures so that they can avoid some of the pitfalls cited earlier and compete more effectively in a digital era.

A Different Perspective

Why do so many of us in IT continue to do the mundane? Why do we avoid meetings? Why do we do the same things we were doing five years ago? Because we’re afraid to let go. We believe by being the team that reboots routers and applies patches, we’re proving our value. We feel needed. We’re able to point to tangible metrics like uptime. That way, at our annual review, we can say, “Look! We were up 99.7% of the time! That’s 0.1% higher than last year!” How. Mind. Numbingly. Boring! We’ll never create the next great innovation by doing the mundane. We’ll never show our organizations the real value IT can bring if we bury ourselves in day-to-day operations and hang our hats on a 0.1% improvement. We have to let go!

Distributed Ledger - Strengths That Warrants Its Adoption

The technology is being commercialised by several industry groups and are coming out with the use cases that this technology will be suitable for across different industry vertical. With the surge in funding for the FinTech innovations, the block chain technology may find its retail and institutional adoption in about 3 to 5 years, while some expect that this will take even longer. Some have invested in in-house development, while others have partenered with others in their pursuit to adopt the blockchain as part of their main stream business technology. Listed here are some of the key strengths that drives the adoption of the technology worldover.

Will Industry Stacks Be the New Blueprint for Banking?

Fintechs, which have grown rapidly in number and in level of investor funding, similarly aim to take control of the customer relationship. They enter specific, attractive banking segments with focused products and services, aiming to disrupt banks through platforms, such as peer-to-peer lending and investment services. Some fintechs address customers’ new or unmet needs through innovative business models, such as the online money transfer service TransferWise. Others upstage the existing services of traditional banks with improved offerings, such as Mint, Intuit’s online personal-money-management service. Fintechs that insert themselves into customer relationships or limit direct access to clients pose a particular challenge to banks, jeopardizing margins if not volumes.

Preparing for the Era of Intelligent Machines

Combining the three layers of content capabilities – 1) Document Management and Workflow; 2) Enterprise Content Management; and 3) Mobile and Cloud – to create new and rich customer experiences that allow you to get ahead of the Digital Transformation curve is the current strategic imperative for the C-suite. And this is no mean feat. But looking a bit ahead, I find myself thinking about another huge coming change. Going back to my point 1 above -- Technologies exist in beta long before large companies put them into practice – maybe if we look around a bit in the broader technology space, maybe we can get a glimpse into the next wave. And in thinking about this, I’m pretty convinced that in the next wave, we’re going to need to add a fourth party to our triad – Machines.

Next-generation data scientist: Harnessing an integrated development environment

Data science teams deriving benefit from an integrated development environment (IDE) to boost their collaborative output makes perfect sense. IDEs provide a comprehensive, extensible, open framework for accessing tools, data and other resources needed to build, test and deploy executable assets into production environments. As data science moves into the inner circle of next-generation developer competencies, data scientists can expect the emergence of an industry-standard IDE that is equivalent to the industry-standard Eclipse framework that IT management professionals have been using for years. IBM Data Science Experience (DSX) is the open IDE for team data science. DSX, which carries forward the functionality of IBM’s Data Scientist Workbench, offers several productivity features.

Moore’s Law: Checking Out or Changing Direction?

The most likely technical direction is to increase CPU density by going into three dimensions. Think of this as a kind of stacking of silicon, but it’s much more complex than simply piling one wafer on top of another, and you have to be able to cool the chip. Nevertheless, this is not a new idea. The memory industry has already turned in this direction to raise NAND Flash capacity, and the CPU guys will learn from their experience. Although it would be technically possible to go below 10 nm miniaturization, it’s likely to prove less expensive and offer a more certain future to go into 3D. In theory this approach will behave like the wafers of the past, allowing the CPU guys to pursue the same engineering direction far into the future. And that means they’ll be able to continue their regular “doubling” of power.

Quote for the day:

"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes." -- Maggie Kuhn

August 07, 2016

The Theory of a Blockchain Circular Economy

The theory of decentralized transportation platform La’Zooz is that you earn Zooz points, just by driving your car while the app collects data about your driving patterns. A healthcare research entity could pay patients or normal people who share their medical data, in exchange for the collective wisdom that is gained by aggregating that information, and returning personalized or comparative insights. At the heart of making this possible, is the relationship between actual work done, value created, and value received. ... What is happening here is the creation of mini circular economies that are self-contained. Some of these models will be created by new companies, while others will be spun out of existing companies.

Stop Measuring Turn Around Time

How do you judge the success of your software development projects? What do you measure? What do you display in your radiators? What do you pat yourself on the back for? Chances are you measure turn-around time. We see it extoled in many of the “modern” development practices. Just to name a few: velocity tracking, burn down charts, story points, planning poker, sprint planning, time-boxing and continuous everything. It’s all about time, and often about minimizing time. It’s even in the Agile manifesto: “Delivering working software frequently” and “working software is the primary measure of progress.” These two ideas combined are a recipe for negligence. We may quickly develop software, and we may quickly release it as working software. But, what impact does that software have? Have we simply delivered working software, quickly, that doesn’t provide much value?

Huawei Launches Labs to Drive Open Cloud Networks

The Cloud Open Labs will be key drivers behind Huawei's ambitious All Cloud strategy announced in April, through which the company will cloud-enable all of its products and solutions and in turn help telecommunications companies chart a path for their own migration to the cloud. Company officials have said that the eventual goal is to enable service providers to reconstruct their entire network infrastructures, from the equipment and services to operations. The Cloud Open Labs also stress the central role open technologies play in the evolution of infrastructures into cloud environments, with such groups as the Linux Foundation, Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and China Association of Communication Enterprises and vendors like Red Hat, VMware, Wind River and Accenture on hand during the announcement Aug. 4 in China.

Does the Secret of the Cloud Lie in Lambdas?

You can probably see the similarity between Lambdas and microservices already. The difference, I think, is that a microservice is represented by a URL and invoked by somebody when they need what it represents. It sits there waiting for action. A Lambda is bound directly to an event, and it’s spawned when the event is recognized and disappears when it has done its work. Amazon calls this “serverless” processing, and others would say it’s a step toward “NoOps” meaning no operations processes are needed because there’s no explicit infrastructure to maintain. I don’t think either of these notions do the concept justice, and in fact both can be distracting. What AWS Lambda is, is a framework for distributed-real-time event handling that can scale fully.

The IoT Comes to the Fore in Enterprises as Mobile Technology Evolves

Mobility plays a central role in the Internet of Things. Most obviously, the robust and secure wireless connections that are essential for mobile device deployments are also necessary to support an IoT environment within the enterprise. Also, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets often serve as controllers for IoT systems, as users interact with touch-screen interfaces that allow them to see data that is being collected in real time and to make immediate adjustments to physical systems. Finally, these mobile devices themselves frequently act as “things” within IoT, passively collecting and transmitting data with no need for active user input.

How the Tech Behind Bitcoin Could Revolutionize Wall Street

Bitcoin itself is in the throes of a tumultuous year, as the community is divided by deep philosophical differences. But some observers say blockchain will thrive regardless of bitcoin’s fate. More than 100 executives from major Wall Street firms like Citigroup, Visa, and Fidelity recently gathered at Nasdaq’s New York offices to experiment with blockchain. The event was hosted by Chain, a startup that specializes in developing blockchain systems for assets like corporate securities and loyalty points. TIME recently spoke with Chain CEO and co-founder Adam Ludwin to learn more about blockchain and the potential it holds for Wall Street and beyond. Below is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Concerned about mobile vulnerabilities, CIOs add security layers

Monitoring traffic on the network and looking for suspicious activity coming from mobile devices, such as users trying to interact with off-limits data, is another strategy within a growing number of organizations. Such monitoring allows organizations to "know what mobile devices are connecting to their networks, especially via wireless entry points and what data and potential malware they might expose the network to,” explained Andrea Hoy, president of the ISSA International Board of Directors. "There are tools that specifically monitor wireless access that support seeing rogue devices detected via wireless, but very hard to differentiate without monitoring."

What's in your food? Tech will tell!

Sage gets food information mainly from the manufacturers. Interestingly, Slover said companies were initially reluctant to provide the information but recently have been clamoring to do so. Separately, the food industry is reportedly discovering that unless food companies provide ingredient information, the public will seek it out from more reliable sources offering more transparency. Sage lists food types (for example, "mandarin oranges") and food products (such as Theo Chocolate's Organic Fair Trade Orange (70%) Dark Chocolate Bar) in its nearly 20,000-item food database.

Initial State, powerful data capture and analytics for your IoT infrastructure

The service's tutorials are excellent and Initial State’s documentation depth and quality is outstanding. The Web interface has also been designed to be completely responsive so it displays faithfully on everything from desktops to the tiniest smartphone screens. If you subscribe to the Pro tier of Initial State you can embed dashboards on other Web sites as well as set up Triggers to notify you by email or SMS of stream events meeting various criteria. Things I’d like to see Initial State improve? There’s no ability to export any of the Stats reports at present and when you edit the configuration of a tile, you can’t use the dynamic value of another stream as the setting for either the minimum of maximum Y axis value.

F# in Numbers: A Look at the Annual F# Survey Results

F# is used for both commercial and non-commercial web sites and applications (18% and 14%) and the web theme appears in other answers of the survey. The Suave web server is one of the most popular F# libraries, the Suave Music Store tutorial has been mentioned as a popular F# resource and over 38% of F# developers also use JavaScript. F# is still popular for statistics and data analytics (21%). The FsLab package has been mentioned a number of times in the most popular libraries (although it did not make it to the top 5). Many of the F# developers are also familiar with wider range of data science and statistical tools and languages - 19% respondents also program in Python and 5% use the R language, which can be integrated with F# using the R type provider.

Quote for the day:

"The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do." -- Benjamin Disraeli

August 06, 2016

The State of Testing: A Front-end Perspective

Sometimes we are maintaining a legacy application where users MUST use these older versions of IE. How the heck can you do some testing to make sure your new code isn’t breaking anything? The first hurdle to overcome is making sure that you have access to a modern Microsoft browser. IE11 or Microsoft Edge both have developer tools that will let you test for older versions of IE to see what your web page would look like. If you are on Windows that’s an easy step, but for Mac users, it becomes a little more difficult. The best way to actually test these browsers is to emulate a real Windows environment.

IoT is reshaping the electronics industry

One of the industries that stands to gain the most from the IoT is the electronics industry. Electronics manufacturers have been connecting devices and appliances for years – the now ubiquitous availability of in-home wifi and connectivity points is creating an environment that enables devices to constantly be connected into the cloud to send operational, warranty and service data. It’s easy to see what a huge opportunity the connected home is creating for the electronics industry. By far the largest opportunity in the home setting is in automating domestic chores. In the United States alone, household activities (cleaning, washing, preparing food, gardening, caring for pets, and so on) and purchasing home goods and services require 230 billion labor hours per year.

Full SDDC architecture adoption remains in the distant future

When most people talk about SDDC architecture, they refer to the IT equipment itself -- a way to more easily configure compute, storage and network elements. But that's not necessarily the whole picture. "Those are all a big part of what's inside a data center, but data centers also include the power, cooling systems and a lot more of the structural things … If you want to talk about the whole data center itself, you have to include other facilities elements, as well," Villars said. ... A full SDDC architecture also requires too much movement of data between the hardware and software environments to work effectively, said Clive Longbottom, founder of Quocirca and a TechTarget contributor.

Why Banks Will Fail to Apply Blockchain Technology

The major reason behind the banks’ failure to deal with the blockchain technology is their ambition to create private blockchain networks that could run parallel to their existing applications. Which means, rather than utilizing the open and distributed network the blockchain technology can provide, the banks attempted to reinvent the technology for their own benefits. Decentralization, the concept which the banks failed to address, is the backbone of the blockchain technology and is the element that makes a blockchain network valuable and robust. To date, the only really successful example of the blockchain technology has been Bitcoin, because of the Bitcoin network’s decentralized and transparent nature.

The Enterprise of Things: It's the back end that counts

From my experience interacting with both IT and line of business users, I find that many organizations are too focused on the things and not enough on the glue that makes it all work. The real benefit will not come only from deploying the things -- it will come from the ability to obtain actionable data that allows a company to run better, more efficiently or to be more focused on their customers, and that requires an integrated solution. The hard part of making EoT attractive in organizations is the secured networks, cloud based data services and analytics that empower it. This is where the 80/20 rule kicks in. I estimate that 80% or more of the effort to deploy EoT will be here. Yet relatively few enterprises have focused on the needed components for success.

This infographic shows how fintech is disrupting the financial world

The time is ripe for financial innovation: new technologies are helping end users skip past gatekeepers and intermediaries to customize their use of financial products. Meanwhile, many of the same technologies are also erasing the inefficiencies of banks and other financial institutions to cut costs in ways the industry never deemed possible. Lastly, innovations such as the blockchain are changing the way banks approach their most basic mechanisms – as a result, even the most fundamental practices in banking are evolving. Payments, personal finance, P2P lending, insurance, digital banking, equity crowdfunding, smart contracts, and digital currencies are just some of the areas that are of interest in the fintech landscape.

What do their creators think about UML now?

Bran defends that in fact UML is not as complex as you may think: “The complexity of UML is often cited as one of its primary drawbacks. In arguing this, many people will point to the apparent simplicity of programming languages such as Java. However, while Java is relatively simple on its own, you have to consider how much of the necessary complexity has been swept under the rug of class libraries? As far as I can tell, you cannot write anything remotely useful in Java unless you are also proficient with at least some of the core Java libraries. In environments such as J2EE or Eclipse, the minimum level of proficiency goes up even further — exceeding in complexity anything that UML requires.

How Will We Live In 2116?

Using the water itself to create breathable atmospheres and generating hydrogen fuel through the process, aquatic homes will likely exist 100 years from now. What’s more, with water desalinated to produce fresh water, people could effectively grow their own produce “onboard” while these sub aquatic communities cruise all year round to the best climate without stopping at all. ... Colonizing space may become necessary as mankind continues to exhaust Earth’s resources. When asteroid mining and theoretical concepts like Wormholes (Dr. Who’s mode of teleportation) become a reality, humankind will have what it takes to move to other planets. But if you factor the possibility of genetically changing the human template, people may be able to live in less Earth-like planets in future.

How To Build A Career In Data Science

BE SMART. Have advisors. Ask questions. Have courage. Advisors are there to share interesting questions, and ultimately they are fellow human beings. Talk to them: come to the office hours, and speak generally at first, and then move on to questions that you are thinking about now; share what led you to thinking about these questions, and why you think the questions are important. The key mistakes that I made early on: I thought I knew well enough. I would find one or two people that were a good fit, and I would stick with them instead of growing my network of relationships. However, even if you talk to one or two extra people, you expand your horizons drastically just by getting new perspectives. You can't invent everything on your own; it's not particularly efficient or good use of time.

Factors Affecting Software Resiliency

Change is one of the key source of adding complexity to the Software systems. However, the evolving tools, technologies and methodologies come to the rescue, so that the Architects design systems and solutions in such a way to pave way for embracing such changes and to embed the resiliency factors in the design. A frequently held criticism of Common Criteria testing is that, by the time the results are available, there is a good chance that the tested software has already been replaced. The danger here is that the new software may contain new vulnerabilities that may not have existed in prior versions. Thus, determining that an obsolete piece of software is sufficiently resilient is not particularly indicative of the state of the newest version and, therefore, is not very useful.

Quote for the day:

"Purposeful leaders create cultures where employees fully engage with the company, its purpose and its customers" -- @ClaudioGT

August 05, 2016

4 Major Vulnerabilities Discovered In HTTP/2 Protocol

These include two that are similar to well known and widely exploited vulnerabilities in HTTP/1.x. "All the vulnerabilities we discovered were reported to the vendors and patched versions are already available," Itsik Mantin, director of security research for Imperva, told InformationWeek. "In order to stay safe, web administrators need to make sure to use a version of their server that has this vulnerability fixed." Mantin explained in order to win this patching race, application providers can either make sure to continuously get patches for the servers and all the third-party libraries they are using and install them in time, or use a web application firewall with virtual patching capabilities to provide ongoing protection to their applications.

Bitcoin and blockchain pose little risk to payments giants - Credit Suisse

Broadly, the authors conclude that Bitcoin faces an uphill struggle to become a major force, highlighting 13 barriers to mainstream adoption. In contrast, shared ledgers are seen as a more potent force, with three key properties - disintermediation of trust, immutable record and smart contracts - endowing the technology with real advantages to legacy systems. On payments, the report acknowledges that a permissioned public ledger could remove the need for a central clearing house in the form of Visa and MasterCard. However, the bank's analysts still see limited risk to these card schemes, arguing that the decision by the likes of Apple to tap into their rails, making the networks the guardians of the tokenization process, puts them in a strong position.

It's Time to Disrupt Enterprise Business Intelligence Systems

The big question is whether in the organizations of the near future, even if the intelligence is valid, is able to execute the change interventions they believe are required. As organizations strive to achieve the flexibility and agility of the new waves of disruptive businesses entering the market, the above structure looks positively archaic. While "end user" reporting from BI systems has been a catch cry from BI vendors for at least the last 30 years, in reality the proportion of staff that actually access such systems could be embarrassingly small, given their current complexity. Some commentators are advocating addressing the issue through more user-friendly "search" mechanisms or self-service BI.

How will blockchain technology transform financial services?

At its core, blockchain is a network of computers, all of which must approve a transaction has taken place before it is recorded, in a “chain” of computer code. As with bitcoin — the first application of the technology, applied to money — cryptography is used to keep transactions secure and costs are shared among those in the network. The details of the transfer are recorded on a public ledger that anyone on the network can see. In the present system a central ledger is likely to act as the custodian of that information. But on a blockchain the information is transparently held in a shared database, without a single body acting as middleman. Advocates argue that trust is increased among the parties, as there is no possibility for abuse by someone in a dominant position.

IoT security suffers from a lack of awareness

"We've reached an era in computing now where we are able to project a pervasive digital presence into the edges of business and into the edges of life -- on the human body, in the human body, in the house, in the car,” Perkins says. Gartner estimates spending security technologies to protect the Internet of Things will top $840.5 million by 2020. What does the future of IoT security look like? Schneier, who has closely watched the cybersecurity market evolve over the last three decades, says the federal government must provide regulatory oversight into cybersecurity by establishing a new federal agency – ideally a Department of Technology Policy – to regulate the industry, similar to how the FCC was created to regulate airwaves and the FAA guides airlines.

Google and Facebook unleash the Open Rack Standard

The latest version of the Open Rack also includes specifications for a rack-level 48V Li-Ion UPS system. “Our contributions to the Open Rack Standard are based on our experiences advancing the 48V architecture both with our internal teams as well as industry partners, incorporating the design expertise we’ve gained over the years,” states a blog post from Google’ technical program manager Debosmita Das and technical lead manager Mike Lau. “In addition to the mechanical and electrical specifications, the proposed new Open Rack Standard V2.0 builds on the previous 12V design. It takes a holistic approach including details for the design of 48V power shelves, high-efficiency rectifiers, rack management controllers and rack-level battery backup units.”

How IT innovators turn digital disruption into a business productivity force multiplier

On the analytics and how that’s helped by the mobile working, we had a very similar result in Action for Children in the same year we brought out tablets. We started to do outcome measures with the children we were with. To reach a child, we do a baseline measure when we first meet the family, and then maybe three months later, whatever the period of the intervention, we do a further measure. Doing that directly on a tablet with the family present has really enhanced the outcome measures. We now have measures on 50,000 children and we can aggregate that, see what the trends are, see what the patterns are geographically by types of service and types of intervention.

In DARPA challenge, smart machines compete to fend off cyberattacks

With the competition, DARPA wants to encourage research into autonomous systems that can be used in cybersecurity. With the growing Internet of Things, more devices are being connected to each other without human involvement. Devices with IoT technology, such as a coffee maker, a car or a personal-assistant robot could be hacked, leaving users open to a security threat. “The whole world is moving toward computers. We know this,” David Brumley, a member of the For All Secure team, said in a DARPA video interview. “Everything is becoming automated. Pace makers. Refrigerators. Everything is connected to the Internet one way or another these days.” That means cybersecurity needs to move beyond laptops and tablets, but it’s an overwhelming job for human hackers to tackle on their own.

McLaren CIO on Digital Transformation, Hybrid Environments, Shadow IT And More

We’ve actually been collecting data from the cars for about 27 years. The internet of things and connected cars is something we’ve been doing for a long time! And with that, we’ve collected now over one trillion data points, which is an unbelievable amount of data. The challenge with that is finding the insights in it. If you can’t extract the information you want from it, it’s irrelevant. This is an area we are working very closely with SAP and looking at some of their clever in-memory technology and hopefully we’ll have some more news about that later in the year. ... IoT is a term that’s used a lot these days, but if you decompose it, it’s essentially some form of sensing, some sort of data communication, some sort of data collection, and then some form of analytics and application on top.

Do developers really care about security?

"So many of them are increasingly getting more focused on security," Fisher says, pointing to questions they ask early about authentication and how to store data securely, when in years past this was left to secops. Developers are looking at how their peers are building similar applications and taking note of the baseline expectations. Security isn't about vulnerabilities alone, Fisher points out. Availability is a form of security, too, she says. That includes both user traffic as well as malicious intent. With data breaches exposing user data, there are now more questions around data storage, especially in securing data so thieves can't easily access or steal it, and considering, from the get-go, how to store data so that it remains protected in case of theft.

Quote for the day:

"Shake off insecurities, step into the truth of who you are & the value of what you offer. Lead with posture" -- Art Jonak

August 04, 2016

What's In A Security Score?

Security scores are used by cyber insurance underwriters to evaluate a company’s potential risk, by companies to evaluate the cyber-risk posture of third-party vendors and partners, and by senior executives to explain a company’s cyber risk to its board of directors with an easy-to-understand rating. “The third-party risk management is the one we see growing the most rapidly,” says Jeffrey Wheatman, research director, security and privacy, at Gartner. “We think that at some point in the near term, a cybersecurity score will be as important as a credit score when organizations look to sign up for a partnership.”

Google DeepMind: The smart person's guide

DeepMind is a subsidiary of Google that focuses on AI. More specifically, it uses a branch of AI called machine learning, which can include approaches like deep neural networks and reinforcement learning to make predictions. This can rely on massive data sets, sometimes manual data labeling—but sometimes not. Many other AI programs like IBM's DeepBlue, which defeated Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997, have used explicit, rule-based systems that rely on programmers to write the code. However, machine learning enables computers to teach themselves and set their own rules, through which they make predictions. In March 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo program beat world champion Lee Sedol in 4 out of 5 games of Go, a complex board game—a huge victory in AI that came much earlier than many experts believed possible.

Build a Strong Security Baseline with the HIPAA Security Rule

“In addition to having updated systems, it’s also beneficial to monitor what is going on within a system,” Fisher said. “Whether it be looking for suspicious emails or suspicious activity, you then need to be able to quickly respond to or isolate that activity. Even if you can’t prevent an attack, at least if you can limit the extent of it, or the length of time in which it can occur, you can begin to mitigate those potential damages or potential harm that’s coming out of it.” If there has been a successful attack, entities need to try and lock down the system as quickly as possible to stop further spread of harm. Furthermore, as required under HIPAA regulations, a good disaster recovery plan and comprehensive data backup should also be the top of an organization’s security priorities.

NIST wants agencies to move away from SMS authentication

“While a password coupled with SMS has a much higher level of protection relative to passwords alone, it doesn’t have the strength of device authentication mechanisms inherent in the other authenticators allowable in NIST draft SP 800-63-3,” Grassi wrote. “It’s not just the vulnerability of someone stealing your phone, it’s about the SMS that’s sent to the user being read by a malicious actor without getting her or his grubby paws on your phone.” NIST stopped short of removing the SMS guidelines entirely, due to the fact that the text messages may still work for existing government systems. However, NIST hopes the deprecation pushes agencies to re-assess their two-factor practices as they modernize their systems.

White House to Fund Tech Growth ‘Beyond Moore’s Law’

The NSCI is all in favor of partnership and collaboration. But with respect to finding a new track for sustained performance growth over the long haul, it’s looking to principles that, as of today, still sound like science fiction. “The NSCI envisions a more heterogeneous future computing environment, where digital (von Neumann-based) computing is augmented by systems implementing alternative computing paradigms to efficiently solve specific classes of problems,” reads the group’s current report. “These alternative computational paradigms — whether quantum, neuromorphic or other alternatives — may solve some classes of problems that are intractable with digital computing, and provide more efficient solutions for some other classes of problems.”

Strate, global CSDs to collaborate on blockchain use

“It sounds so simple for me to give you shares and you get cash in exchange and then the deal is done. But when you start getting into things like corporate actions, dividend payments, taxes that have to be paid, reporting things, liquidity requirements and securities lending and borrowing, you unpack this whole can of worms that needs to be dealt with,” Knowles said. She said the effective, lawful use of the technology in financial markets would require the use of a permissioned blockchain and oversight by an independent third party. “To something as high risk as the financial markets, it does need regulation, it does need standards, it does need governance and it does need some sort of overseer of the entire ecosystem,” she said,

Bitcoin exchange hack highlights security weaknesses

“Although bitcoin itself is inherently secure, a hacker can steal the keys to your wallet if you don’t store the keys securely. This isn't an inherent flaw of the bitcoin protocol, and this is what happened with Bitfinex,” he said. Al-Bassam said although there has been progress in the past few years with technology to allow secure wallets, such as hardware wallets and cold wallet software, there is still a lot more to be done. “Users who store a large amount of Bitcoin in an exchange should be aware that if they don’t have the cryptographic keys to their Bitcoin, they don’t have total control over it,” he said.

Cloud denial sliding into oblivion

The only way to completely prevent cloud usage is to shut down internet access to users. Essentially, the modern equivalent of what you only see in spy movies: a sealed network, custom-made computers with no USB port, no external hard drive, and employees are searched on their way in and out of the office. Except that "no-internet" is not really practical in the twenty-first century. Barring a sealed network, users will bypass rules and use cloud services! It can be as simple as using a file sharing system such as Dropbox to send files to colleagues. Or signing up for cloud-based analytics services in which they will upload company data to get nice reports. It can also go all the way to provisioning a mission-critical business application or a data backend for a mobile app, without having to go through IT.

IoT Will Surpass Mobile Phones As Most Connected Devices

The Ericsson report notes that many things will be connected through capillary networks, which will leverage the ubiquity, security, and management of cellular networks. The result could create a lot of opportunity for IT, as well as challenges related to security and management. Currently, about 70% of cellular IoT modules are GSM-only, with network mechanisms being implemented to foster extended network coverage for low-rate applications. The second market segment -- critical IoT connections -- are characterized by requirements for ultra-reliability and availability, with very low latency, such as traffic safety, autonomous cars, industrial applications, remote manufacturing, and healthcare, including remote surgery.

Virtual Panel: Current State of NoSQL Databases

It's clear to me that the relational databases are more mature in their integration with developer tooling than the NoSQL databases, that's just a function of time. But that is rapidly changing as the NoSQL market shakes out and the database and tooling vendors begin to consolidate around a small number of front-runners, supported by an enthusiastic OSS community. In Neo4j specifically we've been working hard over the last 5 years to produce a very productive query language called Cypher that provides humane and expedient access to the graph. That language is now in the early stages of standardization as "openCypher", and will appear as the API to other graph technology over time (e.g. there is an initiative to port Cypher to Spark). In our recent 3.0 release we worked hard to make access to the database boringly familiar.

Quote for the day:

"Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people." -- Marcus Garvey

August 03, 2016

Getting the Critical Role of Data Preparation Right

Self-service data analytics tools are becoming more popular. They require less IT attention and enabling organizations to personalize the experience of working with data through data visualization. Such tools also make it easier for non-IT individuals to work with data. Some of these tools use machine learning, natural language process, and other advanced techniques to suggest data sets and guide users. Equally important – data preparation needs to address data governance. As Stoddard notes, “data governance is often regarded as being primarily about protecting sensitive data and adhering to regulations; indeed, data preparation processes are vital to meeting those priorities. However, data governance is expanding to include stewardship of data quality, data models, and content such as visualizations that users create and share.”

Getting Started with MapReduce

A MapReduce program is composed of a Map() procedure (method) that performs filtering and sorting (such as sorting students by first name into queues, one queue for each name) and a Reduce() method that performs a summary operation (such as counting the number of students in each queue, yielding name frequencies). The "MapReduce System" (also called "infrastructure" or "framework") orchestrates the processing by marshalling the distributed servers, running the various tasks in parallel, managing all communications and data transfers between the various parts of the system, and providing for redundancy and fault tolerance. The key contributions of the MapReduce framework are not the actual map and reduce functions, but the scalability and fault-tolerance achieved for a variety of applications by optimizing the execution engine once.

Web-native mobile app frameworks: How to sort through the choices

Two of the main problems with using the web stack are feature fragmentation in browsers' JavaScript engines and bad performance on old WebVews. The biggest problem is on Android. Apache Cordova relies on the installed WebView on each device, so it’s not going to help in this case. Fortunately for us, there is an open-source project from Intel, called Crosswalk, that lets you embed or install a new Chromium-based WebView for your hybrid application, letting you access new APIs and have better performance even on older devices. It’s compatible with Apache Cordova and available as a free plugin. If performance and latest APIs are important to you, you should consider adding it to your tool chain.

Security Think Tank: Brexit and infosec – for now it’s business as usual

Most information security professionals will be familiar with the difficulties in putting together a business case for spending on IT security. Infosec projects rarely deliver a return on investment and are typically treated as an “insurance policy”. As noted above, Brexit may reduce infosec budgets. Alternatively, nothing sells insurance better than fear and uncertainty, and the political instability that surrounds the UK’s exit from the EU may instead translate into a desire to improve big businesses’ IT security posture. For organisations that take information security seriously and recognise the changing threat landscape, this may result in an increased interest in information security initiatives and demand for the services of infosec professionals.

Encryption's quantum leap: The race to stop the hackers of tomorrow

NIST is exploring preliminary evaluation criteria for quantum-resistant public key cryptography standards, a process that's due to be finalised by the end of this year. NIST will then begin accepting proposals for quantum-resistant public key encryption, digital signatures, and key exchange algorithms, with a deadline in late 2017. This will be followed by three to five years of public scrutiny before they are accepted as standards. So, while new encryption algorithms should protect future communications against attack, what about all that old data secured with existing cryptographic standards? Will it be at risk at some future date? Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey thinks it's unlikely.

Five Strategies for Leading a High-Impact Team

One strategy for managing team size is to consult specialists only when their expertise is required rather than keeping them on full time. Adding some fluidity to team membership can also help with the problem of homogeneity. In team sports, you hear a lot about the importance of team chemistry—that innate understanding that leads to the no-look pass or the intuitive hit-and-run. While building a team of like-minded individuals may create a safe and comfortable environment, it also elicits a narrower vision and less productive friction than a team that is diverse both in personality and function. “We found that changing the membership of a team—taking out one member and putting in a new member while holding everything else constant—actually leads to an increase in creative idea generation,” says Thompson.

Here’s how Law Enforcement and IT Security Companies are Fighting Ransomware

“This collaboration goes beyond intelligence sharing, consumer education, and takedowns to actually help repair the damage inflicted upon victims. By restoring access to their systems, we empower users by showing them they can take action and avoid rewarding criminals with a ransom payment.” Wil van Gemert, Europol Deputy Director Operations, finally: “For a few years now ransomware has become a dominant concern for EU law enforcement. It is a problem affecting citizens and business alike, computers and mobile devices, with criminals developing more sophisticated techniques to cause the highest impact on the victim’s data. Initiatives like the No More Ransom project shows that linking expertise and joining forces is the way to go in the successful fight against cybercrime. ... ”

IBM creates artificial neurons from phase change memory for cognitive computing

"Basically, it operates how the brain operates, with short voltage pulses coming in through synapses exciting neurons," said Tomas Tuma, lead author of the paper and a scientist at IBM Research in Zurich. "So we use [a] short pulse of, say, nanosecond duration...to induce change in the material." The PCM's stochasticity, Tuma said, is of key importance in population-based computing where every neuron responds differently and enables new ways to represent signals and compute. "Normally, people try to hide [stochasticity], or if you want good quality stochasticity you have to induce it artificially. Here, we have shown we have a very nice stochasticity natively because we understand the processes of crystallization and amorphization in phase-change cells," Tuma said.

Facebook's privacy chief insists Facebook is 'a privacy-enhancing platform'

When we think about privacy, we have to think about people's expectations. What do they understand? What are we telling them about our product? On Facebook, people decide whether or not they want to decide to share information. They can decide whether or not they want to make their lives public, whether they want to do something just for their friends, or just do it for a very small group. We've worked very hard over the years on these sharing controls to educate people on them. The same privacy model that applies to what we do with whatever you share, that also applies to Live. Yes, people have to understand what that is. People have to use it and understand it and get it. We have a responsibility to tell people, and we are. But this isn't a new phenomenon.

Infrastructure as destiny — How Purdue builds an IT support fabric for big data-enabled IoT

The worry for any CIO is that the only thing I have that’s mine is my business data. Anything else — web services, network services — I can buy from a vendor. What nobody else can provide me are my actual accounts, if you wish to just choose a business term, but that can be research information, instructional information, or just regular bookkeeping information. When you come into a room of a new solution, you’re immediately looking at the exit door. In other words, when I have to leave, how easy, difficult, or expensive is it going to be to extract my information back from the solution? That drives a huge part of any consideration, whether it’s cloud or on-prem or whether it’s proprietary or open code solution.

Quote for the day:

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." -- Henry Adams

August 02, 2016

Accenture, Endgame team up to become the Van Helsing of cybersecurity

The digital era has brought with it a number of new tools and technologies. Things like IoT, the cloud, mobility, DevOps and software-defined networks (SDN) were futuristic things a decade ago but are now the norm. While those technologies have enabled businesses to become agile organizations, they also increased the number of attack points to the level where security teams can no longer keep up. The good guys need to protect an increasingly larger number of entry points, while the bad guys simply need to find a single way in. Once the network has been breached, the threat spreads laterally, information is gathered and data is eventually exfiltrated.

5 Ways to Manage an Outsourced Team on a Startup Budget

Getting everyone to work together on a project can become a costly nightmare due to time zones, work habits and deadlines. Rather than resort to spending fees on a massive project management platform that you really do not need, you can work with companies like Wrike, which offers various products to serve your size and budget but offers functionality to get projects done and enhance the collaborative experience in the process. Everything is located in a central hub for my entire team, including files, due dates, tasks and messages about every project that I'm working on. Best thing about them is I can individually track each individual on my team.

Latham on Systems Thinking

John Latham combines experience and research to create flexible frameworks that facilitate the process of reimagining, redesigning, and transforming organizations. Some of the frameworks such as the Design Framework for Organization Architects™ emerged from practice and later tested and refined. Others emerged from research and further developed in practice such as the CEO research that led to the Leadership Framework for Organization Architects™. These two award-winning, peer-reviewed frameworks form the foundation of the Organization Design Studio™ was founded to provide a virtual space for organization architects to learn how to (re)create the organization they really want!

Ready for a hack

Greg Spencer, principal consulting partner from IT consulting firm Beyond Technology, says the cyber threats facing Australian businesses have materially changed over the last 24 months. “Whereas organisations have traditionally taken solace from the understanding that they are not a target, the emergence of the hacker industry has taken this distinction away,” he says. “All organisations are susceptible to ransom attacks, and more and more seemingly harmless mid-tier firms are the focus of deliberate and targeted electronic intrusions seeking to either gain financially from their information or undertake data kidnap and ransoms.” Often hackers are not necessarily seeking information about their immediate target, but about one of their clients.

This Time, Miller & Valasek Hack The Jeep At Speed

Miller and Valasek reverse-engineered the electronic control unit (ECU) firmware, which communicates via the unsecured CAN bus in short messages. In a nutshell, they tricked the Jeep’s controls by impersonating messages. They basically took the ECU offline and impersonated real traffic to force it to follow their instructions, whether it was to accelerate, or turn the steering wheel 90 degrees. Unlike last year’s hack that the two conducted from Miller’s living room while Wired journalist Andy Greenberg drove the Jeep, this time they physically plugged into the diagnostic port of the vehicle to send their phony CAN messages, mainly for expediency reasons. “Last year, we showed you can remotely send CAN messages.

Economics Behind Ransomware as a Service: A Look at Stampado’s Pricing Model

The law of supply and demand also applies to the ransomware business model. In the course of monitoring the various underground markets over time, we noticed a fluctuation in ransomware prices. In 2012, ransomware services in the Russian cybercriminal underground only cost US$10–20. This included a Windows blocker or a piece of malware “that paralyzed a system’s OS.” This didn’t allow the criminals to hold data for ransom though. In addition, ransomware then weren’t as in demand then compared to now, which could explain why they were sold more cheaply. As more users and even organizations succumbed to paying the ransom just to get access to their files and systems back, it was natural for cybercriminals to hike the threat’s price up.

DevOps: The (Absolutely Critical) Cloud Enabler

One of the most fundamental problems that’s part and parcel of a move to reliance on the cloud is that IT orgs want every scrum team to have its own environment, complemented by an individual database instance. Eventually, that leads to creating a distinct database instance for every single developer. You probably can see where this is headed. I’ve used this comparison time and time again, but cloud and database instances become like the wire hangers in your closet you accumulate every time you pick up clothes from the dry cleaner. They multiply over time and, all of a sudden, you seemingly have a million on your hands, with no idea where they came from and no good way to get rid of them. To compound things, once the proliferation begins, it’s hard to stop.

How the Internet of Things (IoT) Will Impact the Logistics Industry

It’s now a given that a parcel can be tracked every step of its journey, from the moment it’s shipped to when it’s finally delivered into the hands of the consumer. But in most cases, it’s still a matter of barcodes being scanned – usually by humans – as the item goes through various distribution points. With the IoT, an RFID tag is placed on the parcel or pallet and the truck or van acts as the ‘reader’, eliminating the need for humans to do anything more than load the vehicle. The delivery vehicle will then connect to the cloud and transmit the RFID-derived information and its location. And it won’t just be the vehicle’s position – temperature data will be available in real-time as well, except in very remote areas.

CIA Cyber Official Sees Data Flood as Both Godsend and Danger

Today “people are putting all their thoughts, their conversations, their movements, their ideas into this digital stream," Roche said July 30 on the sidelines of the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. A career CIA official, Roche joined the agency’s new Directorate for Digital Innovation, which opened in October, after serving as deputy director for science and technology. Roche wouldn’t comment on recent hacking incidents, including breaches of the Democratic National Committee’s system and a data analytics program used by presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign, attacks that technology experts attribute to Russia. But he said that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea top the list of nations posing cybersecurity threats to the U.S. government and its contractors.

IoT and liability: Who pays when things go wrong?

As one might expect, when monetary values can be assigned to liability claims, the blame game get serious. "The question becomes who is ultimately responsible for the interactions of the product," asks Amodio. "And more importantly to the people in the cybersecurity field, who is responsible if a hacker breaches the security to the device and causes damages in the real world?" ... "Manufacturers of IoT devices, IoT network providers, and IoT software developers need to be aware users may bring claims against one or all of them following a device malfunction or security breach," mentions the post. "It is not clear if the aggrieved IoT user will be required to prove they have suffered damage as a result of an IoT player's actions or if the courts and lawmakers will adopt a 'strict liability' approach."

Quote for the day:

“Business is like a sport where the games never end. I’m always competing.” -- Mark Cuban

August 01, 2016

Ransomware’s Success Causing Evolution of Variants

“Given SamSam’s success, it’s only a matter of time before adversaries introduce faster and more effective propagation methods to maximize its impact and increase the probability of receiving payment,” states the report. “Attackers’ use of JBoss back doors earlier this year to launch ransomware campaigns against organizations in the healthcare industry is a strong reminder that adversaries, when given time to operate, will find new ways to compromise networks and users—including exploiting old vulnerabilities that should have been patched long ago.” The rise of ransomware makes patching long-standing vulnerabilities an urgent imperative, Cisco security researchers say.

The DAO, Smart Contracts and the Bulletproof Blockchain

Think of a blockchain system as a trust network; Bitcoin just happens to be a successful use of such technology. There are many other examples of trust networks in the world where the blockchain could replace an old-style trust network. For example, eBay is a trust network for buying and selling things. It acts as an intermediary between buyer and seller, assisting the two parties to come to an agreement. Recently, a blockchain alternative called OpenBazaar.org was launched. It provides a direct buyer-to-seller capability with no need for a website or middleman fees. It is made possible by the blockchain. It was with this kind of idea in mind that the DAO was launched, with great fanfare and $$$$s of investment.

CaptureManager SDK

I had got an idea to write a new solution for working with web-cams on basement of Microsoft Media Foundation while faced with one unusual task. So, the task was not resolved, but I had wrote some code and had decided to continue development of the solution. At beginning the solution included only few classes and allowed to execute only few functions, but after adding of some demands for this solution I had decided to write a simple SDK which allows to make capture configuration for the new tasks easy and to inject a new developed code into it by implementation of the Microsoft Media Foundation's and CaptureManager's interfaces. As a result, I have got this SDK for capturing, recording and steaming of live-video and audio from web-cams only by Microsoft Media Foundation.

Iterative Prototyping in the Mobile App Development Process

The mobile app development process differs from website development in that lifecycles are much more frequent, and developers have to bear in mind different devices, screen sizes and operating systems, both in the design stages and when user testing. Traditional website development styles, aimed at creating one version of a website, don’t tend to work as well when it comes to mobile app development, which calls for a more agile approach. All of which has, unsurprisingly, led to the adoption of iterative, rapid development processes. Prototypes have a role to play in this agile approach, enabling developers to build, test, iterate, re-test and re-build rapidly and at lower cost. A prototype of your mobile UI design is an essential part of a mobile app’s design process.

Do No Harm: An Oath For Health IT Developers

"Software engineers and physicians need to work together to ensure the health and safety of patients first and the ingenuity of efficient health technology second," said Dr. Andrew Boyd, assistant professor in the department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Algorithms are literally impacting millions of lives, and there needs to be a better way to empower developers to say this might be legal but this isn't doing right by the patient," said Boyd. A strong advocate for developers being held to the same professional standards of ethics as health care providers, Boyd said that security in health IT is a huge concern.

How the Internet of Things Helps Water Management

To begin with, there is the need for level sensors and equipment which are deployed across the reservoirs and overhead tanks. It is to be noted that level sensors are specially- designed sensors which can establish the level of water present in a tank/reservoir. This established water level can then be communicated to the central servers which are deployed for the purpose of effective water conservation as well as management. This information is passed on to the central servers on a regular basis, which further helps in determining the amount of water usage on a daily basis and also indicates the level of water that is present in the reservoirs or tanks.

CIO interview: Gary Steen, chief technology officer, TalkTalk

A big user of outsourcing, TalkTalk’s main suppliers are Tech Mahindra, TCS, Capgemini and Infosys, but the idea is to boost internal capability, especially in areas such as data, security, architecture and design. “Insourcing is about looking at our skills and those at our technology outsourcing partners, and also looking at how we avoid duplication. We are talking about optimisation of what we’ve got and how we can deliver more for the same,” Steen says. “Our outsourcing partners are intrinsically linked to the success of our technology delivery and this will continue. However, we need to ensure that we build up our own intellectual property.”

The Making of a Data Scientist

When it comes to enterprise-level initiatives, data science teams tackle the challenge of identifying and developing ways to produce measureable outputs of value from data of variable quality originating from disparate sources. Decision makers want to see summary numbers presented in an informative and consumable way. In the desire to see whole numbers, users do not always understand the importance of also looking at the statistical certainty around data measurements. It is my team’s job to take statistical validity into account while evaluating metrics for both data quality and for performance benchmarking. The data science team will scour through data in order to create and measure benchmarks for tracking improvement efforts and for identifying trends or opportunities for growth.

Salted Hash: Phishing study reveals frightening password habits

"More often than not, though, people choose simple passwords and number combinations to save time and to prevent getting locked out of an account or using data. What this suggests, however, is that this thinking is much more widespread and dangerous for the average user," she said. Is this a problem the security industry has created over time? Have we conditioned people to use poor passwords? The short answer is yes, according to Per Thorsheim, a security expert who founded PasswordsCon in 2010. "The common knowledge of passwords is based on rather old assumptions, folklore, myths, etc.," he said. Most of the advice people use to create passwords is outdated or irrelevant, and technically or logically wrong.

Anonymous Blockchain Micropayments Advance With 'Bolt' Proposal

Micropayment channel networks, such as the in-progress Lightning Network or Thunder Network, solve the first two problems by moving transactions to a new layer. Instead of recording every transaction on the blockchain, users open up channels, perhaps someday by clicking in an app, settling transactions on the blockchain only when necessary. Proponents argue this solves the scalability issue and allows for many more transactions while still not requiring trust in any third party. Finally, there’s the issue of privacy, which has been partially addressed by Zerocoin and the much-anticipated Zcash, the release of which was delayed last week. This anonymous cryptocurrency, the researchers say, could guard channel openings and closures from revealing information about the customer and merchant.

Quote for the day:

"Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding." -- Burt Rutan

July 31, 2016

Google teaches its car to be nice to cyclists

The autonomous car provides an ample amount of room and won’t overtake if cyclists take the center of the lane. It notices a variety of cyclist signals, such as an indication that the cyclist wants to move into another lane. Google has programmed its software to store the hand signals, which means if the cyclist moves to a new lane two minutes later the car will remember the signal. Google gave two examples of the car being extra cautious around cyclists, the first is if it notices a parallel parked car with the door open, it will slow down to let the cyclist pass without fear of a collision. The second is a video (below), shown at SXSW Interactive 2016, where the Google can instantly recognizes an oncoming cyclist and immediately slaps on the brakes.

The Cloud: What’s UNIX® Got to Do With It?

Cloud Solution/Hosting Providers look to a UNIX Cloud infrastructure to service financial institutions looking to support high transactional environments like online and mobile banking marketplace. Moreover, UNIX Cloud infrastructure provides a cost-effective, secure, and redundant environment. “Verizon serves both customers and employees with a UNIX Cloud infrastructure that implements enhanced agility, superior performance, easy maintainability, and effective cost control,” said Chris Riggin, Enterprise Architect at Verizon. HPE, IBM, and Oracle have expanded their services offerings to deliver UNIX mission-critical cloud and enterprise infrastructure, including their branded systems.

Disaster Recovery in a Virtual World

The cost of failure is expensive. IDC research shows that a medium-sized organization experiences, on average, 15–18 business hours of network, system, or application downtime per year, with each hour of downtime costing approximately $225,000. The result of going digital means businesses cannot tolerate the same levels of planned and unplanned downtime that they could before. In fact, for many businesses, “the window for downtime is close to zero.” In another survey, many organizations (39%) said they now need to restore critical workloads in minutes, not hours, and that meeting this requirement is virtually impossible with outdated data protection methods.

Here's why banks are embracing cloud technology

We’ve entered the most profound era of change for financial services companies since the 1970s brought us index mutual funds, discount brokers and ATMs. No firm is immune from the coming disruption and every company must have a strategy to harness the powerful advantages of the new fintech revolution. The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes

Focus on Security Paves the Way for Expanding Services

Think of it as a piece of fruit, an apple, and you pass it around identifying yourself. Tokenization, and the Stateless Tokenization technology that HPE offers in particular, is that you have an exchange process. The middleman takes your apple, turn it into a pear through a specific algorithm. The reverse process can be applied when someone gives me a pear and ask for an actual apple; the visual is coming back to you. So, every time, every piece of information that is passed along in the message exchange, they go through this process. The key term here is stateless, of course, so that we don’t have a rack of this mapping information stored somewhere, which becomes yet another vulnerability. That makes our operations a lot easier, especially in a multi data-center environment.

One Berlin startup wants to make sharing your data as easy as sharing your money

Jolocom is developing an application that will allow users to share personal information through a secure and decentralized blockchain network. A user’s personal information is tied to them through an individual Web ID generated by the app, allowing them to share information directly with other others in the network. “It’s an extension of hyperlinking,” says Lohkamp. “But instead of linking documents or webpages, you’re linking data.” Say, for example, you wanted to open a new bank account. Instead of going to the bank in person to fill out paperwork and provide different forms of identification, you could just connect to the bank through the Jolocom app. The bank would then request the necessary information, and, with your approval, the data would be automatically transferred to create your account.

Virtual Labor Will Fuel Digital Initiatives

Nevertheless, smart machines and the services they enable are a reality. Hundreds of organizations are adopting smart-machine-enabled services to achieve short- to midterm savings, new revenue sources or profitability structures. Few, however, have fully understood the depth and magnitude of the potential value of the intellectual property (IP) being created. The IP developed alongside smart-machine-enabled services has the potential to add significant revenue, as it may be patentable. Due to the need for speed, business leaders tend to partner with providers to engage them in proofs of concept without involving sourcing executives or their teams, which exposes the organization to long-standing sourcing risks (including selection of the wrong partners, negotiation mistakes and vendor management issues).

How An Agricultural Data Firm Puts The Cloud To Work

In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Sanjay Dayal, CTO and cofounder of Agralogics, said he considered a variety of enterprise integration platforms from companies like MuleSoft, Tibco, and WSO2. Those offerings, he said, would have required more configuration, coding, and maintenance than Built.io Flow. "The whole point was I didn't want to have a very heavy infrastructure," said Dayal. "This is something for which we needed lighter touchpoints." Agralogics functions as an ERP service for the food ecosystem, Dayal said, noting the food industry tends to adopt new technology slowly. Built.io Flow proved appealing because it could connect customers' antiquated systems with AWS, the infrastructure that Agralogics relies upon.

HIT Think How IoT will affect information governance

Gartner defines information governance as the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure behavior in the valuation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of information. While these are accurate and encompassing definitions, they are built on top of, and rooted in, processes that are being forever changed by IoT. Data defines how you operate your company at a foundational level. Data also impacts how you operate your organization and what you provide as services, as well as how you measure success and failure from your financial reporting. Data is vital to every process in the organization, and the discipline of information governance has become one of the most strategic areas within corporate management to understand and manage data.

Let's build a robot!

We've all seen various household and industrial/commercial robots come to the market. They are generally big budget, expensive things that are mostly out of reach financially, or so limited in their functionality as to be almost useless. Interesting, and indeed fascinating, but quite useless. At the end of May of this year (2016), Asus launched its own first stab at a household robot, and I thought - wow, that's cute, and actually, not that difficult to build... sure, what we might build at home may not be as polished or slick as the cool thing Asus sells, but it sure as heck could have similar functionality, if not more!

Quote for the day:

"Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice." -- Peter Drucker