Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - January 07, 2017

Three insights to make Agile development work for you

Instead of organising development over a long series of phases, Agile methods break development into an integrated series of chunks. Each team works from planning to testing an aspect of development in a short period of time before moving on to the next ‘chunk’. By rapidly moving between iterations, a project can remain adaptive to changes in requirements that would otherwise derail the entire endeavour. A further consideration is the effect that Agile and Waterfall have on the people who use them. Human beings enjoy working together, and even those who don’t have to admit that they get a lot more achieved when then do. Unlike Waterfall methods, Agile emphasises the importance of increasing efficiency through more collaboration, empowerment of developers and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Google Moves Into Augmented Reality Shopping With BMW, Gap

With Google, BMW is testing a new app that displays an i3 city vehicle and i8 sports car on smartphone screens. Car shoppers can walk around the superimposed vehicles, placing it to look life-size inside their driveway or garage. Users can choose from six different colors, four types of trims and wheels, all appearing in a high-resolution image. The Munich-based luxury automaker said the mobile app will be available at dealerships in 11 countries. “It’s possible we’ll develop a kind of library of models for this app,” said Stefan Biermann, head of innovations for sales for BMW. At a recent presentation in Munich, the display image of an i3, even on a small phone screen, was convincing enough for users to duck and lift their legs to step inside the vehicle, where they could push a button to turn on the lights and the radio.

Why France’s new ‘right to disconnect’ law matters

The disconnection law was included in a package of comprehensive labor reforms that make it easier to reduce pay and cut workers. Thousands took to the streets in France this past summer to protest it. "Because this law was very difficult to accept in France, a lot of goodies have been added in it," said France-based OpenVMS consultant Gerard Calliet. Those goodies include the disconnect law. For Calliet, disconnecting is not an option as far as his client work is concerned. France changed its labor laws to help lower its 10% unemployment rate. But James W. Gabberty, associate dean and professor of information systems at Pace University in New York, says the email rule will only erode productivity.

Interview with Entity Modelling Tool Creator, Frans Bouma

Every ORM has its unique set of features and a set of common features. One of the most prominent differences between LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework and all the others is that it does the change tracking inside the entity class instances and therefore doesn't need a central context or session object (the old Scott Ambler design of an ORM). Doing the change tracking inside the entity itself has many advantages, one being that you can have a stand-alone unit of work object. This allows you to track work and changes to the in-memory entity graph with the stand-alone unit of work object which you can then pass to the persistence core. That will have no problem determining what you want: there's no conflict about whether these entities are new, updated or e.g. you want them deleted, that information is inside the unit of work and the entities.

Fintech in 2017: Automation Will Rule

When considering the automation opportunities offered through AI, many banks have identified onboarding and know-your-customer processes as the priority area. New advancements in technology now let banks deliver a more frictionless experience by allowing customers to easily upload documents through their mobile camera and extract both the needed data fields and intent of documents to automate the credit decision process rather than have to deal with filling in paperwork. More affordable and extensive processing power, general availability of algorithms through algo "marketplaces" and colossal data sets to feed the algorithms have also combined to unleash a new era of Robotic Process Automation. In 2017, RPA will become a key priority for bank executives looking to do more with less.

Public and private initiatives converge with Singapore’s digital community

“I know it’s a big word, digital economy means different things to different people.” Lim envisions Singapore and his role as regulator as serving two functions, for both native and foreign businesses: “Singapore works because it is a node to the region, our market is too small, we have to serve the broader region.” To that end, the business environment needs to help not only native businesses but entrepreneurs and companies coming into the country to get a foothold in the Southeast Asian market. “We want to be in that position for a long time to come,” says Lim, adding that the labour market is quite open for people to come in as Singapore isn’t immune to skills shortages either. Perhaps this is why the country has taken a rather proactive approach in trialling new technology to get a feel for what might actually work.

What 2017 holds for enterprise software

“The modern BI platform is designed for the end user,” says Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer, Tableau Software. “It’s intuitive and enables self-service. This is in contrast to traditional BI platforms that needed a specialist in IT to be able to run.” “The biggest trend within BI will be that it becomes far easier to use for the average person,” says Murray Ferguson, director, Pro-Sapien Software. “We have already seen this taking shape, for example, in Microsoft’s Power BI software. The ability to ask questions (both spoken and typed) to find the desired results, as opposed to more technical SQL requests, is also coming. [And] anyone [will be able to] run reports and pull data as opposed to someone skilled in running SQL queries. For example, [users will be able to] type or speak ‘show all open tickets’ [and the software] will display the results.”

Fundamentals of Image Processing - behind the scenes

Image processing algorithms have became very popular in the last 20 years, which is mainly due to the fast extension of digital photography techniques. Nowadays, digital cameras are so common that we even do not notice them in our daily life. We are all recorded in the subway, airports, highways - image processing algorithms analyze our faces, check our behavior, detect our plates and notice that we left our luggage. Moreover, most of us were using image processing algorithms in software like Photoshop or GIMP. To receive interesting artistic effects. But, however advanced these algorithms would be, they still rely on fundamentals. In this article we are going to present the basic image processing algorithms that will help to understand what does our graphics editor software calculates behind the scenes.

Microsoft’s OS supremacy over Apple to end in 2017

In 2017, Apple's combination of iOS and macOS -- the former on iPhones and iPads, the latter on Macs -- will take second place from Windows on the devices shipped during the year. The gap between the two will widen in 2018 and 2019, with Apple ahead of Microsoft both years. According to Gartner, which provided Computerworld with its latest device shipment forecast broken out by operating system, in 2016 Windows powered about 260 million devices of the 2.3 billion shipped during the year. Windows accounted for approximately 11.2% of the total devices, which overwhelmingly ran Google's Android. Meanwhile, iOS and macOS -- the latter was formerly dubbed OS X -- sank to 248 million devices in 2016, a 10% drop from the year prior. The cause: Slackened sales of the iPhone, Apple's dominant device and biggest money maker.

Is your mobile strategy ready for Industry 4.0?

Enterprises are at a crossroads where they will have to decide what OS they want when refreshing their fleets of mobile devices. Over the last decade, the most popular and widely deployed OS for enterprise mobile devices have been Microsoft’s Windows CE and Windows Embedded Handheld (WEH) 6.5, and Microsoft will end mainstream support for these embedded OS by 2020. In addition, migrating to the next generation platform will require significant lead time to ensure smooth migration without disruptions to operations, as Microsoft will not offer backward compatibility for its earlier mobile OS . It is more critical than ever for decision-makers to make a choice that will shape the way their organizations will operate in the next three to five years. They could stay with Windows, migrate to Android, or look to Apple and its iOS. But whichever they choose, the new generation OS has to be flexible, intuitive and adaptable.

Quote for the day:

"As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth." -- John Whittier

Daily Tech Digest - January 06, 2017

2017: The year of cybersecurity scale

Forget about centralizing all cybersecurity data because it is no longer feasible to do so. Enterprise cybersecurity professionals must learn all they can about distributed data management architecture and include cloud-based elements to all their planning. Enterprise customers have already placed SIEM vendors such as AlienVault, IBM, LogRhythm and Splunk on a data management treadmill to keep up with scale, but these vendors will be forced to innovate rapidly, tier their storage backends and provide cloud-based services for non-critical and archival data. Cybersecurity professionals will need to understand an array of data management technologies – relational databases, NoSQL, Hadoop/HDFS, etc. – and figure out what goes where and how to keep track of it all. Finally, companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft familiar with cloud-scale data challenges may play a role in new types of cybersecurity data management architectures.

Seven bold predictions about Android for 2017

The first reason is Google (more on that in a bit). Another reason for this landmark will be a lack of innovation from Apple; the big "A" will continue to play it safe (as they did in 2016), and more users will migrate to Android because of this. Couple this with the increased performance and battery life found in Android 7, and the Linux-driven mobile platform will easily climb the next rung in the global dominance market's ladder. ... Another reason Android will dominate 2017 is the device designed by Google: the Pixel. Not only is this device the most powerful smartphone on the market, it also brings to light features that people will want. One feature in particular is Assistant. Google is the first company to bring an AI-centric digital assistant to life and do it right. With the power of the Pixel driving that feature, this device will continue to be one of the hottest on the market.

Why People and Processes Are Critical to Cybersecurity

“There is so much to consider in cybersecurity, and traditionally, IT in higher education is understaffed,” says Jill Albin-Hill, vice president for information technology and CIO at Dominican University. “It’s tough to find the time and to get the right resources on campus to be able to address it all.” To address that gap, Dominican teamed up with four other small institutions in the western Chicago suburbs — Elmhurst College, North Central College, Wheaton College and Judson University — to create a cybersecurity consortium. The group banded together to contract with an external IT service firm that helps all of the institutions manage cyber risks. ... “Already, it’s helped me gain some visibility across the institution about how this is an important university consideration, and not just an IT issue,” Albin-Hill says.

Top Cybersecurity Lesson from 2016: Unchecked Insiders

It might surprise you, but most organizations struggle to implement and maintain access controls—a basic security building block for file and e-mail systems. Employees and contractors typically have access to far more sensitive data than they need to do their jobs. This makes it much easier for intruders and insiders to do a lot of damage. In the study, 88 percent of end users said their jobs require them to access and use proprietary information such as customer data, contact lists, employee records, financial reports, confidential business documents, or other private or confidential information assets. Sixty-two percent believe they have access to company data they probably shouldn’t see. This, combined with a lack of monitoring and auditing for the files and documents employees do access, sets organizations up for disaster.

Will the cloud be a safe haven for data in 2017?

Delivering enterprise security via the cloud will ultimately start to lower the cost and complexity of the security infrastructure, as those legacy appliance systems are replaced in favor of agile, distributed models, he said. “There’s a growing call for security to be treated as a fundamentally basic utility where safety can be assumed. The cloud is the key to enabling this, with benefits like storage options, scalability and ease of deployment,” Chasin said. Bluelock CTO Pat O'Day predicts that when faced with a hardware refresh, more companies will turn to the cloud than to new hardware. “There’s a lot of churn in the hardware space because of virtualization. Companies are growing tired of having to refresh their IT systems with new hardware every five years. People want to be more mobile, and the cloud is a way to get there.

Intel's Compute Card mini-computer is so small that you may lose it

At first glance, it's easy to mistake the modular computer for a credit card or smart card. It's so thin, it could be easy to lose. But it's a full blown computer, crammed with a 7th Generation Intel Kaby Lake processor, memory, storage and wireless connectivity. It's so small, it can't accommodate USB-C or other ports to power up or connect to displays. The Compute Card will work only after being plugged into a slot of a larger device, much like smart cards. Here's the bad news: It's not targeted toward PCs. However, we hope Intel will eventually make them for PCs, and there are hints the chipmaker could. The idea of a super-small computer is exciting, and it could solve some problems. For example, computer upgrades could become easier.

The future for APIs - how management and security will have to come of age

The gaps that exist between internal IT teams can lead to issues not being fixed. Research by Ovum pointed to problems here, with 53 percent of respondents stating that the security team should lead on this topic while 47 percent believing that the software development team handling APIs would be responsible. Alongside nailing down the responsibility for these potential problems, this includes managing the response that IT teams should take when there are attacks on their APIs. For internal APIs, the response includes looking at what the attacks are targeting and how to stop the problem. Simply turning an API “off” is one approach; the issue with this is that it stops legitimate traffic from accessing the API as well. Categorising attacker traffic and blocking this from interacting with the API is a more fine-grained approach, but relies on a more intelligent approach to rating requests.

Are we all at risk? Implications of the Oracle-Dyn Merger News

We no longer live in an age when we can outsource our issues, especially when it comes to security. Inspect what you expect. Think about all the moving parts of your ecosystems and inspect those parts. Build layers of redundancy, consider and think about front layers. Do not narrow your thinking to just DDoS attacks, but also DDoS mitigation. Reddit had a good strategy in place when it partnered with Dyn. Without Dyn, it may have been down for days, but Dyn was able to get them back up within hours. Ten years ago, as the CTO of a cloud service provider, prospects used to run us through the security gambit to ensure we had the proper security measures in place to protect their infrastructure they put in our cloud… at the same time AWS, MS and Google were being hit by security incidents and downtime one after the other.

Yahoo breach: a breakdown of the biggest data breach ever

Amichai Shulman, CTO Imperva, explained that, “This Yahoo breach and others before it teach us a couple of things: Attackers are still ahead of enterprises, even the larger companies when it comes to covering their tracks. The alleged breaches were only detected once the leaked information surfaced on the web; and time is still a factor. While the passwords were not leaked in clear text, the time between leakage and detection allowed the attackers, using modern computing power, to crack most of the passwords. If the enterprises had promptly detected the breaches a lot of the potential damage could have been avoided.” “We all can learn from Yahoo!’s misfortune, teaching us how to pre-empt and react to [potential] breaches, because the tools are out there on the market to help. With Yahoo being such a behemoth organisation, the question here is – did they invest in security and, if so, how did it go so wrong?” questioned Alez Cruz-Farmer, VP at NSFOCUS.

Interview with Wesley Coelho on Challenges in DevOps

Once you get there, or not necessarily in sequence, the other interesting thing that people are doing with Agile is you don’t want it just within your organization. You want it across organizations. So if you’re implementing Agile but you are outsourcing a component of your software, for example, to a different organization, you want to eliminate the waterfall communication that’s happening across those organizations. Example of what we’re seeing is a luxury auto manufacturer, who’s developing cars that they sell that run 100 million lines of code. They don’t write any of that code internally. It’s all outsourced to dozens of suppliers. So when they take that car out on the track and they find a defect in the car, they file that defect in their own central repository and they take a technology, an automation technology such as Tasktop, and that gets transformed and automatically transmitted to the right supplier who produced the component where the defect was.

Quote for the day:

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." -- Dorothy Parker

Daily Tech Digest - January 05, 2017

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Launches Science-as-a-Service

The Sanger Institute wanted to base its Science-as-a-Service offering on open standards and open source technologies, including OpenStack as a private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The Institute also wanted a partner to help support this infrastructure and one that had experience in building large-scale deployments on a tight timeline, as it wanted this service launch to coincide with the opening of its new research facility. To help address all of these needs, the Sanger Institute turned to Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and one of the largest contributors to the OpenStack project. Built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, the Institute’s service catalog offers internal users and Wellcome Genome Campus tenants with options of gold, silver and bronze service levels, each offering a different mix of services and applications to help meet unique scientific needs.

Build a data center shutdown procedure to prepare for the worst

Every data center shutdown procedure is a prelude to an eventual restart, so proper preparation is key to ensure successful restarts once an outage period has passed. Create a comprehensive -- or at least current -- documentation set that captures each system's volume, operating system and application configurations, paying special attention to anything that could potentially or unexpectedly change during a reboot. There are countless tools to create this documentation and most modern configuration management and enforcement tools can capture and report system states. Don't forget to capture or record the configuration of any networking equipment or storage arrays. During preparation, also identify and understand the myriad of different dependencies within your data center. Documenting dependencies allows IT staff to reboot systems, services and applications in their proper order to avoid disruption and lost startup time.

A Vendor's Security Reality: Comply Or Good-Bye

This development has prompted government contractors to pursue FISMA compliance or risk exclusion from the federal vendor community. Enforcement of FISMA's third-party standard is being performed primarily through the procurement process, with all prospective vendors required to attest to adherence with rigorous data security controls when responding to a solicitation. The specific language within contract awards mandates that vendors submit evidence of FISMA compliance in the form of monthly, quarterly, and annual deliverables. Accordingly, if your company is doing business with a government agency, you will be required to provide detailed and ongoing evidence of compliance. Additionally, agencies are increasingly deploying audit teams to perform on-site verification of a vendor's control environment.

What is 'Enterprise Ethereum'? Details Emerge on Secret Blockchain Project

So far, the reason for the secrecy appears to be concerns about the competition coming from other sectors of the blockchain industry. But, there's reason to be skeptical about this possible reasoning for the group's launch. Former IBM blockchain developer Henning Diedrich, who left the company last year to work on his own smart contract language, contends that ethereum's software is already suitable for private blockchains that he tested at IBM. However, he noted that the relatively nascent state of enterprise products like Hyperledger and R3CEV's Corda platform may be forcing enterprise interest in a more robust offering from ethereum, a comparatively more tested alternative. Though Diedrich argued that ethereum developers still have room to improve the product, he remains skeptical that a large-scale ethereum consortium is even necessary.

The difference between the Traditional CIO and the Transformational CIO

At the risk of being over-inclusive, every enterprise will need to take the digital transformation journey. Technology is playing a more central role to every enterprise. Put a different way, technology is quickly becoming the strategic weapon for every enterprise. Think of companies that have disrupted different industries. In most cases, technology was central to their ability to disrupt their industry. As part of that journey, every enterprise will need to rely more on a transformational CIO. However, that transition does not happen overnight. Recall that it is not just the CIO that must transition (read: Transforming IT Requires a Three-Legged Race). Transformation, much like culture changes, is a journey. There is no specific end-point or finish line. One could ask, how does a CIO make the transition. For each CIO, the journey is incredibly personal and transformational in their own way.

The Basics of Web Application Security

Before jumping into the nuts and bolts of input and output, it's worth mentioning one of the most crucial underlying principles of security: trust. We have to ask ourselves: do we trust the integrity of request coming in from the user’s browser? (hint: we don’t). Do we trust that upstream services have done the work to make our data clean and safe? (hint: nope). Do we trust the connection between the user’s browser and our application cannot be tampered? (hint: not completely...). Do we trust that the services and data stores we depend on? (hint: we might...) Of course, like security, trust is not binary, and we need to assess our risk tolerance, the criticality of our data, and how much we need to invest to feel comfortable with how we have managed our risk. In order to do that in a disciplined way, we probably need to go through threat and risk modeling processes, but that’s a complicated topic to be addressed in another article.

Why 2017 Will Prove 'Blockchain' Was a Bad Idea

Nobody has really figured out what this DLT chimera is about or which problem it should solve. (Yet, we have been told it could reduce banks' infrastructural costs by $20bn). Even the European Securities Market Authorities (ESMA) wonders about its applicability. The ESMA consultation paper issued in June posed many sensible specific questions: unfortunately most of the answers received were generic rhetoric exercises. Adding insult to injury, even when it comes to derivatives trading and clearing (where ESMA is confident DLT cannot be applied), unfunded claims about interest rate swaps as smart contracts on DLT obfuscate the debate. Last but not least, no DLT proposal has really delved into how to implement cash-on-the-ledger for effective delivery vs payment or, even more crucially, how to reach decentralized consensus.

Eight CIO goals and IT resolutions for 2017

Undoubtedly, all the trends of the digital economy will get a lot of play, and information technology will facilitate the continuation of businesses' transformation. We will see the expansion of the internet of things, smart automation, further increase the proportion of mobile and cloud solutions based on big data solutions, and wider use of deep learning technologies. Special focus will be put on robotics. The value of information security will be more and more enhanced. If we talk about software engineering, the market increasingly requires business expertise, in addition to pure design. Also, the development cycle will become shorter and shorter. Next year will truly be the year of the customer, with companies offering smart technology solutions to delight business users and consumers alike.

Business adoption plans for IoT, AI, VR, and beyond

When examining the adoption of various types of AI, the results show that about one in five organizations use intelligent digital assistants for work-related tasks while relatively fewer reported using machine learning (8 percent) or business analytics with AI (8 percent). Still, more organizations are planning to adopt AI technology over the next five years, with nearly half intending to adopt intelligent assistants, 60 percent planning to adopt machine learning, and 72 percent looking to deploy business analytics with AI. ... "IT professionals are rightly concerned with the practicality of integrating emerging technology in the workplace, particularly when it comes to VR and 3D printing," said Peter Tsai, IT analyst at Spiceworks. "Many organizations are struggling to find viable use cases for VR and 3D printers that will justify the costs."

Data Breaches Through Wearables Put Target Squarely on IoT in 2017

Mike Kelly, CTO of Blue Medora, says, more connected devices will create more data, which has to be securely shared, stored, managed and analyzed. ... Those organizations that can most effectively monitor their database layer to optimize peak performance and resolve bottlenecks will be in a better position to exploit the opportunities the IoT will bring, he says. Lucas Moody, CISO at Palo Alto Networks, says security has to be baked into the IoT devices – not be an afterthought. The bloom of IoT devices has security practitioners in the hot seat, with industry analysts suggesting a possible surge up to 20 billion devices by 2020. “Given the recent upward trend in both frequency and intensity of DDoS attacks of late, 2017 will introduce an entirely new challenge that security teams will need to contend with; how do we secure devices, many of which are by design dumb and, for that matter, cheap?,” he says.

Quote for the day:

"GreatBosses model & demand aligned values & performance DAILY." -- S. Chris Edmonds

Daily Tech Digest - January 03, 2017

How Advanced Analytics Can Shore Up Defenses Against Data Theft

One approach is to implement an unsupervised, machine learning protective shield that delivers a defense layer to fortify IT security across EHR platforms and other hospital IT systems. A self-learning system then would have the flexibility to cast a rapidly scalable safety net across an organization’s information ecosystem, distributed or centralized, local or global, cloud or on-premise. Whether data resides in a large health system or small chain of clinics, rogue users are identified instantly. By applying machine learning techniques across a diverse set of data sources, systems become increasingly intelligent by absorbing more relevant data. These systems can then help optimize the efficiency of hospital security personnel, enabling organizations to more effectively identify threats.

5 ethics principles big data analysts must follow

"At this point in our history... we can process exabytes of data at lightning speed, which also means we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past." Besides the potential for bad decisions, Etlinger believes that humans place too much faith in technology, including, for example, our blind acceptance of charts and graphs developed from big data analysis. As to what might be done to improve the situation, Etlinger and Jessica Groopman write in their Altimeter report The Trust Imperative: A Framework for Ethical Data Use (PDF) that businesses and organizations building and/or using big-data platforms need to start adhering to ethical principles. To incorporate ethics, Etlinger and Groopman suggest studying The Information Accountability Foundation's (IAF) paper A Unified Ethical Frame for Big Data Analysis, and paying particular attention to the following principles

10 roadmaps to IT career success

If you're considering a career in IT -- or looking to make a career change -- there's no better time than now. With salaries well above average and companies grappling with a talent shortage, you'll be well-compensated and your skills will be in high demand for years to come. Kristine Spence is a digital marketing pioneer whose career has undergone just as much of a digital transformation as the IT industry. Here, she talks about what it takes to be an innovator in the digital marketing arena. ... As organizations struggle to make sense of increasingly large amounts of customer and industry data, data scientists are becoming a must-have role for any IT department. Two data scientists for Kronos explain what it takes to succeed in one of the sexiest careers in IT today.

How technology will transform banking in 2017

Service providers are keen to capitalise on interest in the technology, and are quickly positioning themselves to advise customers that are keen to kick off pilot projects. This has lead to the likes of Capgemini and CGI snapping up blockchain expertise to build out advisory teams. Peter Roe, research director at TechMarketView, said that the blockchain ecosystem will continue to mature next year, with collaboration between smaller fintech startups and better-funded, more established vendors. “Throughout 2017, we should see further major changes to the Blockchain landscape and the emergence of some key players,” he wrote in a blog post. “Although the widespread use of Blockchain is still some way off (not helped by understandable caution in the regulator community), we can still expect plenty of activity.”

Healthcare organizations lag in digital marketing for cybersecurity strategies, study finds

Conceptually, healthcare is pursuing some advanced ideas for marketing, yet the industry’s infrastructure is not ready for many of them, Klein said. For instance, there is a lot of interest among marketing executives to upgrade their organizations’ virtual front door – the website – yet only 46 percent of respondents said their organization provides proper funding for it. And while the majority believe social media is a valuable forum, six out of 10 organizations block employees from using it, he said. The infrastructure and today’s crop of modern digital tools on top of it are an increasingly important element within not just marketing but also cybersecurity strategies. “There must be more attention placed on cybersecurity,” Klein said. “It’s scary out there and it has only begun.”

'Malicious cyber activity' has happened in previous US elections, Obama says

It's still unclear what malicious cyber activity was related to previous elections, and whether Russia was also involved in that activity. But a joint analysis report from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that the 2016 election activity was part of a decadelong campaign targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations and corporations. The report released on Thursday details two separate Russian groups that intruded on a U.S. political party, one in summer 2015, and a second in spring 2016. Both groups use targeted "phishing" emails and camouflaged their tracks, Thursday's report said. A third attack, likely tied to Russia, was launched in November, just days after the 2016 election, the report said.

Growing the Internet of Things, part 5: Security

Ease of Use is also often a tradeoff with security. Consumers like the simplicity of new keyless entry systems on cars. When you approach the car, it unlocks, and you simply push the start button and drive away. No need to search for keys in your purse or briefcase. However, this consumer ease of use can provide a means for someone to steal the car if they either amplify the keyfob signal when you are away from the car, or if they can hack the security codes in the keyfob itself. Security can also impact Interoperability. If I build a door lock using the same technology and protocols as another connected device, but I require use of an application key and another device does not, we will not interoperate. Security has also been viewed as an interoperability problem because it has not been turned on in devices.

A potentially fatal blow against patent trolls

The case at issue is Gust vs. Alphacap Ventures and Richard Juarez (some early rulings go into extensive background), and last month’s final ruling came from U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote. Cote found that patent troll Alphacap had pursued a case against Gust, despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made it clear it couldn’t succeed legally. “It is highly, highly, highly unusual for counsel to be held directly responsible for these fees,” said Lori Smith, an attorney with the White and Williams law firm that represented Gust, an internet crowdfunding company. “I think it is going to have a significant chilling effect on patent troll litigation. You’re going to see law firms thinking twice before they take on clearly questionable patent litigation.”

Why the earliest open source licenses are still the most relevant

In fact, if we look at how open source licensing has evolved over the last two decades, there has been a dramatic shift away from restrictive licenses like the GPL and toward permissive licenses, which today account for well over 50% of all open source code, while restrictive GPL-style licenses have dwindled to just a third of all code, a percentage that keeps shrinking every year. This trend is particularly pronounced among the GitHub generation, which often hasn't licensed its code at all. All of which brings us back to where we began in open source licensing. We've gone through a period of time when we thought we needed purpose-built licenses for individual projects, but we didn't. We've also thought we needed ever more restrictive ways to protect user freedom but, again, we haven't.

Nine Ways to Protect an Enterprise Against Ransomware

Ransomware infiltrations in enterprises increased by 35 percent in 2016, according to consensus of security industry analysts and vendors, including Symantec. But even more alarming is the recent rise in its sophistication and distribution. Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents or limits users from accessing their system, either by locking the system's screen or by locking the users' files unless a ransom is paid. It can bring your business to a halt and cause significant financial damage. Unlike the stealthier advanced attacks that can stay undetected on corporate network for months, the impact of ransomware is immediate and intrusive. Cyber attackers don't need a lot of money, resources or technical sophistication to use ransomware. Businesses are increasingly concerned about monetary damage, business downtime and other effects of ransomware.

Quote for the day:

"It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart." -- Suzanne Collins

Daily Tech Digest - January 02, 2017

Cognitive on Cloud

Referred to as “Cognitive on cloud”, this model delivers cognitive services running in the cloud that are consumable via representational state transfer (REST) APIs. These services are available as part of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings such as Bluemix and can be easily bound to an application while coding. Using this approach, cognitive analytics such as voice (tone analyzer, speech-to-text) and video (face detection, visual recognition) capabilities enables quick analysis of petabytes of unstructured data. Developing cognitive applications to run on mobile devices has provided new insights which help organizations create totally new revenue streams. When selecting a cloud service provider however cognitive on cloud ROI requires more than just a total cost of ownership comparison. In addition to this basic analysis, an organization must consider which cloud is cognitive enabled at the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer.

High versus low-level data science

Access to highly granular (low-level) data was not easy to get, and dashboard summaries, carefully selected and crafted, were sufficient to detect and address the issue with a one-week turnaround, doing a number of tests described in the next section. More specifically, we used the Google Analytic dashboard. We did not access granular metrics such as IP address, detailed log-file transactions, or summary statistics broken down by user agent / referral combinations (not available from the dashboard). But we did use session duration, number of pages, and conversions, per day per referral, probing the summary data sometimes 2-3 times per day to check the results of a number of tests and fine-tuning, in short to check and quantify impact on performance. Performance here is measured as the number of real (not bogus) conversions per click, or conversion rate.

IT pro's revitalization guide 2017

IT pro's 2017 revitalization guide Before 2017 comes at us hard, take a moment to restock your your intellectual reserves with our most insightful tech-management articles and videos. No matter how long you've been in IT, it's always a good idea to pause periodically and take stock of your professional and personal progress. Why not take a few moments to read through the best of Computerworld's management and career coverage? Scroll down to browse the complete list or click a link to skip directly to your chosen topic. ... Many IT professionals say they would go all-out to land the best jobs, with the best benefits at the best companies. All it takes is up-to-the-minute skills and a whole lot of drive. ... You’re killing it at work, but does anyone notice? A large percentage of IT professionals say the answer is no.

4 information security threats that will dominate 2017

"The pace and scale of information security threats continues to accelerate, endangering the integrity and reputation of trusted organizations," Durbin says. "In 2017, we will see increased sophistication in the threat landscape with threats being tailored to their target's weak spots or threats mutating to take account of defenses that have been put in place. Cyberspace is the land of opportunity for hacktivists, terrorists and criminals motivated to wreak havoc, commit fraud, steal information or take down corporations and governments. The solution is to prepare for the unknown with an informed threat outlook. Better preparation will provide organizations of all sizes with the flexibility to withstand unexpected, high-impact security events." The top four threats identified by the ISF are not mutually exclusive. They can combine to create even greater threat profiles.

Artificial intelligence takes on machine reading

Artificial intelligence (AI) made incredible strides in 2016, and the growth appears set to accelerate as we enter the New Year. A team of Microsoft researchers has released a dataset of 100,000 questions and answers that other AI researchers can use – for free – in their quest to create systems that can read and answer questions as well as a human. The MS MARCO dataset is based on anonymized real-world data from Bing and Cortana queries and is part of an attempt to spur the breakthroughs in machine reading that are already happening in image and speech recognition. The move is also aimed at facilitating advances toward “artificial general intelligence,” or machines that can think like humans – and can read and understand a document as well as a person.

The First Quantum Revolution: Foundational information for the enterprise CTO

Quantum physics helped us understand the periodic table, chemical interactions, and electronic wave functions that underpin the electronic semiconductor physics. In fact, there are many devices available today which are fundamentally reliant on our understanding the effects of quantum mechanics. These include the transistor, lasers, GPS, semi-conductor devices and MRI imagers. These devices are often referred to as belonging to the 'first quantum revolution’. What’s amazing is that within one silicon chip there are about 3 billion transistors, enabled by the progress of this first quantum revolution. And they all have to work reliably so that your computer, your mobile phone or whatever you have actually works. Now that’s quite amazing. Just think about that now. If you look around you now, we all carry around our personal electronics.

Hands On: DELL Twists The XPS 13 Into a 2-In-1

Dell claims the battery life of the XPS 13 2-in-1 ranges from nine to 15 hours, depending on how you use it. The battery life goes up if you're doing basic productivity work and declines to around nine hours if you are watching Netflix movies. The XPS 13 2-in-1 is a step down in performance compared to the XPS 13 laptop, but the decline is not visible when running basic applications or graphics. The device has a 7th Generation Intel Core i5-7Y54 or Core i7-7Y75 processor, which aren't as speedy as the mainstream Kaby Lake-based Core i3, i5, and i7 processors offered in the XPS 13 laptop. An Intel integrated GPU can support 4K graphics play-back on external displays. Dell went with the Y-series Kaby Lake chips so the XPS 13 2-in-1 can provide long battery life, compared to tablets today.

Privacy is still alive and kicking in the digital age

With the current digital infrastructure, we are heading in the wrong direction: Individuals are becoming more and more transparent, open to different types of control, manipulation and discrimination, while the powerful — government, industry and organizations — are more and more closed off. Freedom, individual independence and democracy are fundamental reasons why the individual right to privacy is something we should all care about. Privacy is a universal human right penned in international conventions, declarations and charters that were formalized at a time in history when private life was the default. There were clear lines and limits between private homes and public streets and buildings, between a private person and the public authorities and spaces. It was the letter in the sealed envelope.

Hackers will grow increasingly bold in 2017

Nothing is safe. Not your email, your personal information, your photos, your files. If it’s stored online, it’s theoretically accessible to anyone with the skills and wherewithal to grab it. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, nearly 900 million records might have been accessed in almost 7,000 known data breaches since 2005. The actual number of breaches is undoubtedly higher because not all security lapses are publicized. A few weeks ago, Yahoo reported what is believed to be the single largest security breach ever — 1 billion user accounts potentially accessed in August 2013. Yahoo said it only discovered the incident recently, which does little to ease concerns. The attack apparently was unrelated to a separate breach in 2014 involving 500 million accounts, which Yahoo revealed in September. The company blamed that one on an unnamed foreign government.

Mitigating internal risk: Three steps to educate employees

When employees first start it’s important to give them a list of the top 10 rules they should follow regarding IT practices. If you know the rules that are violated the most, it’s suggested that those should make the top of your list. If you don’t then a good way to find out is to use monitoring techniques that will help you to collect this data. There’s a high chance you’ll be surprised by the type of rules people violate. Some examples of no-no’s can include attaching company files to personal e-mails, putting data on non-encrypted USBs, uploading files to cloud drives etc. Yearly training and reminding sessions should also be implemented as a part of company strategy. One of the most effective tactics is to inform users that they are violating policies while they’re attempting to take the action.

Quote for the day:

"A clear rejection is always better than a fake promise. Move on, next "-- @stephenodonnell

Daily Tech Digest - January 01, 2017

7 IT Recruiting Predictions For 2017

In 2016, recruiters grappled with an evolving job market, an incredibly competitive hiring landscape, a shortage of IT talent and sky-high salaries for in-demand roles. Those trends are likely to continue into 2017 as recruiters continue to adapt to the this high-demand, low supply hiring landscape, says Dave Morgan ... "We're very optimistic about what 2017 will hold. We don't see the IT market slowing down at all -- we saw a slight tick downward in the fall, but that demand has picked back up along with the urgency from clients around that demand," Morgan says. The three hottest areas of demand are around security, big data and cloud technologies, Morgan says, as incidents like December 2016's Yahoo breach dominate headlines, organizations struggle to manage and make sense of a tsunami of data and leverage the cloud for more efficient, cost-effective computing power.

IoT, mobility, big data, analytics and imaging intelligence to impact healthcare in 2017

The next generation hospital management system is a long term transformation plan for a three years’ horizon. ... But we are trying to see how we can stage it into two phases, so the phase one can be done by 2017 end and second phase by 2018. So we are trying to make sure we stay focused because beyond three years, you kind of lose oversight on it, then the project becomes really unviable. That’s the first priority we are holding to ourselves. On the cyber security side with the recent ransomware kind of news coming in, where patient records have been attacked by hackers and rasonware, etc., and since we are also moving towards web managing mode with payment gateways for websites and patient related portal which will have patients medical records, hence we thought that we should be upfront from cyber security stand point rather than the post-mortem effect. So that is becoming core in our focus area.

AngularJS vs. React: Two JavaScript Technologies & How to Use Them

React shines when you have lots of dynamic content changing within the view. Most client-side solutions on the web today struggle with rendering large lists of items within a single view. This “struggle” may be on the order of milliseconds, but in this increasingly digital world, a half a second delay is all it takes to kill your user experience. It’s why sites that have a lot of dynamic, constantly changing, data-intensive content like Instagram or Facebook choose to power their applications with React. As a library, you can also use React as the view component of AngularJS or other frameworks, because it does not tie you to a specific technology stack. That said, there’s a quickly growing community and a number of existing libraries and add-ons that can help you build an app from scratch.

Big Data, Big Self-Service

Data self-service became much more prevalent. It is not entirely trivial to organize. Best practices demand that effective access management security, and where necessary, encryption, is in place. There may also be a need for metadata capture software and data cleansing software. However, the pay-off is significant. The main dynamic of this is that the user no longer needs to go cap-in-hand to some IT developer to get access to data. In most organizations, there are limits to what can be held in a data warehouse and there may even be onerous procedures for getting at that data. To add new data sources to the data warehouse would often be prohibitive. The difference with a data lake can be startling. The data lake is, or should be, a single staging area for new data within the organization. It is extensible.

Information architecture: The key to governance, integration and automation

To develop a successful information architecture and meaningful insights, we need to enforce collaboration across business units, IT, the CDO office and other parts of the organization. And perhaps more importantly, we need to change the culture to get people thinking of how new technologies help eliminate all the barriers and create an environment in which everything is automated and transparent. Thinking about information taxonomy and classification isn’t necessary. Tools are just the tools, and we will continue to live in the past without proper collaboration, information sharing, knowledge base building and adoption of a new way of thinking about information. Technology is enablement; people need to understand, change the processes and do so using technology’s help.

Want to make better decisions? Break down the wall between data and IT

There is a lot of hype around the deficit of data scientists for hire, but I believe that you do not need an army of data scientists to make meaningful discoveries. With the tools and systems available today, it is possible for even one or two talented, motivated data scientists to create game-changing innovation. The key is to hire carefully, looking for strong training in quantitative disciplines (pick your favorite, it really does not matter), allied with the mindset of a restless tinkerer. As a leader, I try to cultivate growth, autonomy, and teamwork throughout the company. This allows the company and data team to attract talent that wants to work with us and who has the same goals in mind. As a company, we aren’t just looking for people who have a degree in analytics or experience in the field. In fact, we have over 30 different graduate degrees on our team.

Using data science for predictive maintenance

Early identification of these potential issues helps organizations deploy maintenance team more cost effectively and maximize parts/equipment up-time. All the critical factors that help to predict failure, may be deeply buried in structured data like equipment year, make, model, warranty details etc and unstructured data covering millions of log entries, sensor data, error messages, odometer reading, speed, engine temperature, engine torque, acceleration and repair & maintenance reports. Predictive maintenance, a technique to predict when an in-service machine will fail so that maintenance can be planned in advance, encompasses failure prediction, failure diagnosis, failure type classification, and recommendation of maintenance actions after failure.

Ooutsourcing Trends To Watch in 2017

This year, we saw outsourcing integration challenges multiply, production workloads and enterprise systems hit the cloud, and security hit the top of the agenda. So what’s ahead for 2017? Uncertainty for one thing. Industry watchers expect a number of shifts in the IT and business process services space — not least of which will be the initiation of more flexible outsourcing terms as the world watches and waits to see what happens once president elect Donald Trump takes office and Brexit takes hold. We also expect to witness maturation in cloud computing, robotic process automation (RPA), and cognitive capabilities while entities like the call center and business models based solely on labor arbitrage fade into history.

How to Use AOP in C# with NConcern .NET

Most AOP frameworks require compromises due to technical limitations (changes needed in the source code, changes in the compilation or deployment process). Few of them are simple to handle and the coupling with the framework is often too strong. This is one of the reasons why too few people are interested in aspect-oriented programming. However, the application of the concepts of aspect-oriented programming is very simple provided they are well understood and have the right tools. This is why I would like to share with you a basic AOP scenario using NConcern .NET, a dedicated open source framework (under MIT licence)

Java Performance Mythbusters

The JVM can be more aggressive in its optimizations through its knowledge of exactly which classes are loaded at any point in time. Even the problem of application warmup can be alleviated with technologies like Azul’s Zing ReadyNow!, which stores a profile of an application during execution. At startup, the profile can be used to substantially reduce the time required to analyze and compile frequently used sections of code. The problem is that some people still believe Java works the way it did twenty years ago when looking at Java performance. One of my colleagues, when I was at Sun, had an excellent way to illustrate this. When talking to people with Java performance problems his approach was something like this

Quote for the day:

“The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings.” -- Dave Weinbaum

Daily Tech Digest - December 31, 2016

Who controls the marketing tech stack in 2017: The CIO or CMO?

Perhaps the most significant trend is that CIOs are facing ever-tougher competition today for their internal customers. In an earlier era, one simply had to go through the IT department to get the technology one needed that would actually work with the existing infrastructure, technology standards, and enterprise architecture. No longer. The cloud and especially software-as-a-service (SaaS), has changed this equation forever. Every IT department is now faced with the most formidable possible day-to-day competitor: The combined services inventory of the entire SaaS industry, along with all the available mobile and enterprise app stores. These new sources of marketing IT collectively represent to the CMO ... a genuine explosion of new options, going from a mere 150 business-ready marketing apps in 2011 to over an astonishing 3,500 in 2016.

Blockchain technologies entered the trough of disillusionment in 2016

More importantly, digital assets are designed for today’s era of digital information, and the underlying blockchain technology has the power to completely overhaul the current financial system, making it more efficient, transparent and accessible. When taking a look at the industry over the last 12 months, the first quarter of this year saw total investment in blockchain startups topping a staggering $1 billion. But that investment is starting to pull back. In the first nine months of 2016, blockchain startups raised $429 million across 92 equity financings. Compared to the same period in 2015, the deal activity fell this year by 16 percent, and funding was down by 7 percent. And we are already seeing some of this reticence play out in the market. For example, just last week, Circle announced they were pivoting away from the buying and selling of bitcoin through their wallet app.

10 Things InfoSec Pros Can Celebrate About 2016

According to an HP study earlier this year, the Android operating system is the second-most heavily targeted operating system with the second-most vulnerabilities, after Windows. Fortunately, in July, Google announced new measures to increase memory-level protections and reduce the overall attack surface of Android’s Linux kernel. ... It's no secret that breaches cost companies a pretty penny, but so often the costs are residual -- lost business, breach notifications, fines for late breach notifications -- but not punishments for the bad security itself. This year, however, some companies felt an extra sting for failing to protect their customers in the first place. ... Congratulate the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) for sticking up to ransomware operators, despite most likely losing money in the process. Instead of paying their $73,000 ransom demands, SFMTA gave passengers free rides at affected stations for days while they dealt with the situation.

IT mindset: CIOs, tech departments work to overcome the 'IKEA effect'

That's easier said than done, of course. Getting themselves and their IT departments to adopt those ideas requires a shift in IT mindset, which, in turn, calls for a fair bit of psychology. Interviews with CIOs and organizational experts, however, suggest that change is indeed possible -- with a regimen that includes rethinking cherished beliefs and working to overcome barriers that impede a new work culture. Atilla Tinic, CIO at Level 3 Communications, has an educational background in IT, with a focus on software development, economics and psychology. He says, somewhat facetiously, that the last degree sometimes proves the most valuable. "It might be the psychology that helps me the most at times," he said. "Change management is one of the hardest things [and] I think the IT transition might be one of the most challenging."

Citizen Data Scientist, Jumbo Shrimp, and Other Descriptions That Make No Sense

Data scientist often frames a question into its business value and data context. It makes question more readable. Those questions could go in several different levels so rather than asking it all in one, the question itself could be break down into smaller business questions. There are methods to further reduce complexity by dimension reduction, variable decomposition or principle component analysis, etc. There are many analytic algorithm and modeling options. Choosing a proper algorithm could be a challenge. The alternatives are to run large number of algorithms to search. With that, large number of results will need to be analyzed. Interpreting results is a complex task. By running a large number of algorithms, the results tend to partial converge or partial conflicting. The conflict resolution and the weights of the variables require further modeling or ensemble.

Expect Deeper and Cheaper Machine Learning

“Everybody is doing deep learning today,” says William Dally, who leads the Concurrent VLSI Architecture group at Stanford and is also chief scientist for Nvidia. And for that, he says, perhaps not surprisingly given his position, “GPUs are close to being as good as you can get.” Dally explains that there are three separate realms to consider. The first is what he calls “training in the data center.” He’s referring to the first step for any deep-learning system: adjusting perhaps many millions of connections between neurons so that the network can carry out its assigned task. In building hardware for that, a company called Nervana Systems, which was recently acquired by Intel, has been leading the charge. According to Scott Leishman, a computer scientist at Nervana, the Nervana Engine, an ASIC deep-learning accelerator, will go into production in early to mid-2017.

How AI is Revolutionizing Business Models

Most of the considerations made so far were either general or specific to big players, but we did not focus on different startup business models. An early stage company has to face a variety of challenges to succeed, and usually, they might be financial challenges, commercial problems, or operational issues. AI sector is very specific with respect to each of them: from a financial point of view, the main problem regards the absence of several specialized investors that could really increase the value of a company with more than mere money. The commercial issues concern instead the difficulties in identifying target customers and trying head around the open source model. The products are highly new and not always understood, and there might be more profitable ways to release them.

How Will Big Data Evolve in the Year Ahead?

"Near-term opportunities for cognitive systems are in industries such as banking, securities and investments, and manufacturing," IDC program director Jessica Goepfert said in an October statement about a report on global cognitive computing and AI spending. "In these segments, we find a wealth of unstructured data, a desire to harness insights from this information, and an openness to innovative technologies." In its report, IDC predicted that healthcare and manufacturing will be the biggest drivers of cognitive computing and AI revenues between now and 2020, while the education sector will also invest heavily in such technologies. Earlier this month, Tony Baer, principal analyst in information management at Ovum, predicted that machine learning in particular "will be the biggest disruptor for big data analytics in 2017." That trend will also make it increasingly important for organizations to treat data science as a "team sport," he added.

What a Game-Changing Smartphone Would Need to Do Differently

The smartphone has become a commodity to us. You don’t need to own the latest and most expensive model of all, but you are very likely to use a smartphone. There is even a small group that owns and uses a variety of smartphones. But don’t you feel that product innovation has stalled for a while? What was really new in recent years? Bigger display, smaller frame, better camera, stereo speakers, waterproof casings? All really nice but did they really change the game? No. There has not been a disruptive innovation in the mobility area since Steve Jobs was around. Not that he hoarded all the ideas and was the only thinker of our time, but he was driving disruption and therefore he was also pushing the competing manufacturers to be innovative.

How Chatbots Talk Up IoT Measures in Analytics

Bot adoption is a confluence of two key technological and marketplace trends over the last few years. First, bots reflect the popularity of instant message platforms, a derivative of social media. Instant Messaging (IM) platforms include Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram. People have been steadily using these platforms. Back in 2015 Business Insider declared that IM platforms have more active users than any other internet application including social networks and email applications. Many bots are designed to complement services with these applications, in the same vein as being an extension for browser or an API for software. And many of the users access these applications on mobile devices, giving bot makers a dedicated avenue to connect with customers.

Quote for the day:

"Don't ever be afraid to admit you were wrong. It's like saying you're wiser today than you were yesterday." -- Robert Newell

Daily Tech Digest - December 30, 2016

3 reasons why #FinTech may decline in 2017

In my humble opinion FinTech is addressing a customer experience driven demand strongly supported by technical evolution such as mobile, cloud, big data, etc… Has the disintermediation of banks started? While the rest of the world is changing rapidly, banks are still struggling to survive the regulatory tsunami which has not ended yet. And FinTech became a real hype strongly attracting millennials to become part of it. Hipsters created start-ups to change the banking landscape. Venture Capitalists supported this evolution and heavily invested in the first waves of disruption. Isn't #FinTech disillusioned and will this not lead to a decline in 2017? And will enlightenment come from new kids on the block? Here are 3 reasons why "hashtag"FinTech may decline in 2017

Everything You Need to Know About Gene Therapy’s Most Promising Year

It sounds complicated, and it is. Gene therapy was first tested in a person in 1990, but scary side effects turned the gene-fix idea into a scientific backwater. And the field hasn’t conquered all its problems. We started the year with the tale of Glybera, heralded as the first gene treatment ever approved that sought to correct an inherited gene error. Yet the drug came with an eye-popping price tag of $1 million and, dogged by questions over how well it works, has turned into a medical and commercial flop. But scientists haven’t given up. And neither have biotech entrepreneurs. They’re closer than ever to proving that gene therapy is for real. Here’s what happened in 2016.

What's your CIO legacy? Deloitte has some ideas for you

Last year for its CIO Legacy Project, Deloitte researchers wanted to pinpoint the methods, tools and competencies CIOs used to create value for their organizations. "To a little bit of our surprise, there wasn't a lot of difference across industries and geographies," Kark said. Instead, they uncovered three roles that CIOs take on to do this -- the trusted operator is focused on operational excellence; the change instigator is focused on business transformation; the business co-creator is focused on revenue and growth. This year, researchers wanted to know what characteristics are associated with each of the three "pattern types," be it personality, leadership skills, working style or IT capabilities. They hypothesized, for example, that trusted operators would be more risk-averse and less outgoing than change instigators and business co-creators.

Test Systems — The Soft Underbelly of System Security

If you improve the security of your test systems, you can also help your Development and QA teams by providing a safe, well-monitored environment in which you can test and deploy updated applications, test applications to recently released security patches, and improve the overall understanding of the way your projects provide access to the outside world. In other words, improved security improves the QA ability of your systems by providing another valuable perspective on the development and execution of your systems. Increasing the isolation of a system should always lead to increased security, knowledge, and testability of that system — goals that will help to unite the QA/SRE, Operations, and Security teams. Given the importance of security, then, it is critical that you follow defined policies and procedures to ensure that your test systems are as secure as possible and don’t expose existing vulnerabilities or create new ones.

Automation, Analytics and APIs: How NFV is Driving Service Assurance Innovation

Investing in new-generation analytical capabilities that are optimized for today’s hybrid NFV environments will help CSPs to better realize the full value of their NFV investments. An example of such advancement is utilizing natural-language processing algorithms for eliminating data normalization and clean-up requirements in alarm data, and using machine-learning techniques to support advanced correlation and RCA, without the need to augment alarm data with network topology and reference information, and so on. This typically becomes an inhibitor to an analytics project’s success, as the data often isn’t readily available or requires a significant integration effort. Our recent efforts in this area have surpassed even our own expectations.

Why Employees Could Be the Biggest Threat to Healthcare Data Security

Businesses across industries are also incorporating bring your own devices (BYOD) into their corporate IT cultures. By doing so, employees are now able to work on the device or devices that they are comfortable using, while saving costs that would accompany providing work-sponsored devices. However, because of the ease of onboarding mobile device, including connected wearables, it has now become commonplace at some organizations for unauthorized devices to find a way to connect to the network. Sriram Bharadwaj, director of information services at the University of California (UC) Irvine Health in Orange, Calif., has said, "In the old days, you accessed electronic health records from a PC at your desk.

5 ways healthcare providers can transform chaos into order

The easy way out — investing billions of dollars to expand facilities, extend operating hours and add staff — seems out of reach for most healthcare providers and looks more like a bandage than a cure. In the past few years, we have worked with a number of large healthcare organizations to address this problem. Drawing upon our decades-long experience helping Fortune 500 companies make operational improvements, and by employing lean principles and predictive analytics, we set out to find the root cause of this operational paradox: Vital resources are often both overbooked and underutilized on the same day. Here are five practical approaches to improving patient access, decrease wait times and reduce healthcare delivery costs without embarking on multi-year, budget-stretching mega projects.

I, Robot: How AI is redefining the use of data in healthcare

Facing up to such a huge challenge, researchers are turning to the technological advancements that will allow them to bolster their analytical abilities, both in terms of handling volume and increasing accuracy. Acknowledging this opportunity, technology firms are more than happy to respond to the call for support. McKinsey's analysis of this space has recently suggested that the use of data handling strategies for pharmaceutical research could create up to $100bn in cost savings per year, and that is just in the US. The global potential for efficiency savings is huge. Today the data problem for pharmaceutical firms is not just the volume but also its organisation within their databases. Following years of merger and acquisition activity, different research departments often work in silos, cut off from sharing information effectively between them.

5 signs we're finally getting our act together on security

Security experts have been warning for some time about the millions of devices that are connected to the internet without even the most basic security features, so the Mirai attack shouldn’t have been a surprise. And with Mirai’s source code publicly available, it is safe to assume there are other IoT botnets waiting in the shadows to strike. With all these devices connecting to the internet, we are ripe for an IoT worm, said Lamar Bailey, senior director of security research and development at Tripwire. Fixing the problem will require a lot of coordination, creativity, and persistence, but perhaps people are actually seeing the risks. The silver lining is that the Mirai attack was a “fairly cheap lesson in what a compromised IoT [threat] would look like while there’s still time to do something about it,” said Geoff Webb, vice president of solution strategy at Micro Focus.

Will networks and security converge in 2017?

Service chaining provides a framework to address the basic security issues, but enterprises still face the challenge of creating instances of that service across hundreds of application, user types and sites. A high-degree of policy integration and automation is needed to make that enterprise WAN management feasible. SD-WAN and security parameters should ideally be defined and delivered through one interface. The necessary tools should then be able to push those policies out across the infrastructure. Many leading SD-WAN providers offer those capabilities, but even then the networking and security analytics remain separate. There is no way, for example, to minimize security alerts storms for security operations personnel by correlating security and networking information.

Quote for the day:

"The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it." -- Cyril Falls