Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daiy Tech Digest - February 15, 2017

Operational - the Forgotten Architectural View

DevOps requires embracing new, often unfamiliar technologies and ideas. Architectural thinking and design can help clarify who the stakeholders are, what concerns they have, and how those concerns are being met. Len Bass and his colleagues recently published a book on DevOps technology and practice for software architects2. Beyond that, little guidance exists for architects dealing with their systems' operational environments. To help fill this gap, I outline here an architectural viewpoint, one that updates and reworks the operational viewpoint Nick Rozanski and I described in Software Systems Architecture

Big Data: Why Should You Be Aware of It

As businesses, of all sizes, push to become more competitive in a rapidly developing global economy, there are a number of influences that are moving front and center. It would be difficult to identify one singular component of business that has had the impact of Big Data over the last several years, and there is a good reason for this. Whether you are running a training company or a marketing agency, Big Data will play an immensely powerful role in the development of effective models of customer engagement, branding, research and development, and more. Big Data represents a massive opportunity for businesses around the world, primarily based on its capacity to transform and disrupt the status quo. If you are a business owner, it is imperative that you are aware of Big Data and how it can benefit your business.

CIOs disrupt IT operating models to align with digital business

For many CIOs operating in the digital era, the need to meet customer demands is paramount. But many CIOs also realize that before their organizations can serve customers they must empower employees with premium tools. Borrowing a page from Apple’s Genius Bar playbook, Salesforce.com CIO Ross Meyercord instituted Tech Force teams in the SaaS software vendor’s break rooms. Employees needing technical help can approach the Tech Force staffers to troubleshoot computer, phone or other issues. They get face-to-face with IT staff, rather than filing impersonal help-desk tickets from their desks. ... Unbounded IT and startup culture extend to healthcare organizations such as St. Luke's Healthcare Systems, which includes 10 hospitals in Kansas City, Mo. In true bimodal fashion, CIO Debe Gash is splitting her IT projects into two categories: run-the-business efforts and transformational activities.

Revolutionary Navigation Standard by Volkswagen and Mobileye

"The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost", said Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye. Professor Shashua adds this: "The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilises crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving." In fact, the agreement is the first of its kind to merge the data of different automobile manufacturers worldwide to create a single ‘high-definition world map'.

Data Center Security Critical for Securing Enterprise Data

These cyber-attacks will continue to increase, both in number and sophistication, as we become more globally connected—and the bad actors intent on carrying out their malicious acts become more connected. Unfortunately, detecting and preventing cyber-attacks is made more difficult because the security strategies of the IT teams and the facilities teams—who are responsible for data security and building/physical security, respectively—often don’t align. This problem becomes much more pronounced on a macro level when your organization uses cloud or colocation hosting services from a third-party data center provider. So how do you maintain the highest levels of data security…and who’s ultimately responsible? The truth is, it’s a shared responsibility.

Google brings global database system 'Spanner' to its Cloud Platform

“When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution,” product manager for Cloud Spanner, Deepti Srivastava, said in a blog post. “Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.” He added: “Over the years, we’ve battle-tested Spanner internally with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centers around the world. At Google, Spanner supports tens of millions of queries per second and runs some of our most critical services.”

Risk Level Categorization in Insurance Policy.

Market Segmentation Is The Key To The Insurance Industry. It is virtually accepted that no risks will be identical. If you are insuring a home within the same locality, it is entirely possible that the risks on one of the homes will be slightly higher than the other homes. You have to understand that insurance is all about pooling risks. If the calculation of these risks is inaccurate then the insurance company will have a heavy price to pay. That is why there are always ways in which the insurance policy is changed. The segmentation is also the key to profits for the insurance company. At the bottom of the pile in terms of cost are the low-cost insurance policies. If you decide to go with budget flood insurance for your area, then it is likely that you will first be assessed to check whether you fall on the lowest level of insurance.

RXJava2 by Example

Reactive programming is a specification for dealing with asynchronous streams of data, providing tools for transforming and combining streams and for managing flow-control, making it easier to reason about your overall program design. But easy it is not, and there is definitely a learning curve. For the mathematicians among us it is reminiscent of the leap from learning standard algebra with its scalar quantities, to linear algebra with its vectors, matrices, and tensors, essentially streams of data that are treated as a unit. Unlike traditional programming that considers objects, the fundamental unit of reactive reasoning is the stream of events. Events can come in the form of objects, data feeds, mouse movements, or even exceptions. The word “exception” expresses the traditional notion of an exceptional handling, as in - this is what is supposed to happen and here are the exceptions.

UK debuts new National Cyber Security Centre to take on cybercrime

The NCSC's launch comes after the UK government recently experienced a number of high-profile security breaches ... and a ransomware attack at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. Earlier this month, the Public Accounts Committee called the government's approach to cybersecurity "inconsistent, dysfunctional and chaotic," ZDNet reported. ... "The NCSC will work together with UK organisations, businesses and individuals to provide authoritative and coherent cyber security advice and cyber incident management," the report stated. "This is underpinned by world-class research and innovation." The NCSC aims to manage cyber incidents as well as help citizens protect their machines before a security breach occurs. The strategy is to "use government as a guinea pig for all the measures we want to see done at national scale," said NCSC technical director Ian Levy in the report.

IBM integrates Watson into its security operations platform

Big Blue announced general availability of Watson for Cyber Security, an offering that has been tested with more than 40 customers over the last year. In that time, Watson has ingested more than 1 million security documents. The aim is to help security analysts go through Watson's knowledge base with natural language. IBM is also integrating its X-Force Command Center network, which tracks security events. IBM is announcing the Watson Cognitive Security Operation Centers at the RSA security conference this week in San Francisco. ... One key takeaway from IBM's move is that the company is hoping to use Watson to patch a shortage of security analysts and knowhow. With its various tools and data, IBM security operations platform aims to cut the time spent on cybersecurity investigations. IBM's cognitive security operations platform is available on premise or as an IBM Cloud offering.

Quote for the day:

“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is.” -- Anita Roddick

Daily Tech Digest - February 13, 2017

Approach an off-premises systems management service with caution

There is one massive problem for many organizations. An off-premises systems management setup requires that the IT organization allow the management service to drill straight through the firewall to access sufficient information about operations to rapidly and effectively identify issues and take remedial action. This collection method goes right through to the heart of the IT platform. A lot of monitoring can occur through simple network management protocol (SNMP) and other data sources that pose little security threat. However, while scavenging log files for individual items of IT equipment, a systems management service could unearth data that has a commercial nature to it. In some cases, IT equipment carries username and password pairs.

Internet of Things: CIOs are getting ready for the next big revolution

"Analytics and machine learning are the most important components for gaining efficiency savings," he says. "IoT affords cross-industry and cross-silo interaction at a data level. CIOs must remember that data is ultimately platform independent and data science is also now available as a service." ... While predictive analytics and machine learning have been important tools in IT for many years, Ridley says the key difference today is the democratisation of the technology, particularly as these tools can be deployed via the cloud. "Easy-to-use products like Databricks and Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio are doing for data scientists what the web did for developers and designers 20 years ago," he says. "These features made creating a data science team easier in my previous role as director of technology at reed.co.uk because the tools that the staff used and the support that they needed were more readily available."

Does AI Make Self-Driving Cars Less Safe?

Using the programmed code, a machine learning system behaves in a given way whenever it is exposed to the automated system. The case is different on the roads. The computer will be required to memorize images that keep changing. It’s hard for engineers to code such information. For instance, it may be difficult to determining when to stop or to proceed. The machine will memorize the features like people crossing and whenever similar objects are seen it will stop. But individuals and features keep changing in different locations. The machine will learn to act on concepts rather than judgment. For instance, if during a test the machine learning system recorded images of people wearing red colored clothes, it will only stop on seeing people with red colors. Hence people with different colors are likely to be run on. Likewise, the fully self-driven vehicle may stop paralyzed at a stop, unable to decide.

The power of mobile apps: Human services from the citizen’s perspective

The benefits of mobile technology are considerable, but for apps to be effective governments must design them from the perspective of the user, rather than grafting them onto established processes in individual departments. ... Apps work best when the number of screen swipes and taps can be kept to a minimum, for example, and it’s essential to build in feedback. Research has shown in particular that people in crisis may not trust technology that removes face-to-face interactions.6 They want the reassurance of seeing their documents delivered into the appropriate hands, so apps that provide receipt notices can help them view the technology as reliable. ... Design considerations such as these are part of the essential process of bringing citizens on board with technological innovation. Forward-thinking governments around the globe are using behavioral science techniques to determine how users engage with new apps in real-life contexts.

The Three Tsunamis of Digital Transformation

Change is hard, and many of us procrastinate, make excuses or lag behind. Today, we simply can't. Digital technologies are no longer "nice-to-have" tools of the business - today they are the business. Digital laggards are already finding their markets disrupted and their abilities to compete overturned. As they desperately try to outrun the Darwinian effect of their slow responses, they are faced with not one but three periods - or ages - of digital transformation to navigate - disruptive transformation, hyper-digital transformation and ubiquitous transformation. Understanding these three ages, and when they will emerge, is critical for business success. Some may argue digital transformation started 70 years ago with ENIAC, the first commercially available computer, while others argue it started with the Internet.

Cylance accuses AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas of fraud and software piracy

When questioned about the Symantec test, Cylance argued it was flawed form the start, as AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas were essentially using pirated software. As such, they were not able to access the cloud-based console or enable all the features in CylancePROTECT. "We have no records or invoices showing that MRG Effitas, AV-Comparatives or any person associated with these companies purchasing CylancePROTECT," said Chad Skipper, VP of industry relations and product testing at Cylance. Skipper also noted a lack of contact between the labs and the fact their product was tested with a default configuration. According to Skipper, testing in a default state will see most of the features in CylancePROTECT turned off.

Blockchain: The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World

"Today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries; middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, and so on to establish trust in our economy," Tapscott continued. "These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling, and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can't monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined… so what if there were not only an Internet of information, but an Internet of value. Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed, all without powerful intermediaries.

How to use Microsoft's Paint 3D: Creating cool 3D scenes has never been so much fun

Though it shares a name, Paint 3D isn’t really like the familiar Microsoft Paint app at all. Paint 3D’s entire purpose is to create fun, cartoony 3D objects and scenes—and share them. A major part of Paint 3D’s appeal is the Remix 3D community, where you and other members can import, edit, then share digital objects and ideas, taking from and providing inspiration to your fellow digital artists. Chances are that you haven’t seen Paint 3D yet—but you will. Microsoft first launched the app in conjunction with the Windows 10 Creators Update and Surface Studio announcements last fall. Since then, the app has remained accessible to Insiders only as a preview, before its more general release later this spring. If you’re running an Insider build, there’s really no reason not to download it from the Store and try it out. We’ll show you how!

Special Report: Preventing Cybersecurity Losses

Preventing cyber risks requires finance chiefs to look far beyond the realm of the techies. “CFOs need to pause and broaden their perspective, examine cyber-related business risk in the areas of physical security and in industrial controls as well,” according to Ingram. That’s especially so, given that the work of hackers can have powerful consequences in the physical world. Indeed, cyber attacks have struck utilities and defense and aerospace contractors, Ingram notes. Another non-tech area of cyber risk is mergers and acquisitions. Citing the threat to the $4.8 billion Verizon offer to acquire Yahoo represented by the massive data breaches that struck Yahoo, attorney Craig A. Newman writes that the breaches “underscore an increasingly complex, specialized, and sophisticated aspect of M&A transactions: cybersecurity due diligence.”

How to become an IoT developer: 6 tips

The Internet of Things (IoT) industry is booming—in 2017, the number of connected devices in use worldwide will reach 8.4 billion, outnumbering people, according to a recent Gartner report. By 2020, more than 20.8 billion IoT devices will be in use, Gartner predicts. As connected homes, cars, and offices become more mainstream, more developers are needed to ensure that devices operate properly and securely. The term "IoT developer" remains broad, said Greg Gorman, director of the IoT Developer Ecosystem at IBM. "There are a lot of discipline areas that are in play, including security, networking, systems engineering, cloud programming, and hardware device programming," Gorman said. "It pays to be multilingual so that you can be flexible and play many different roles in the team."

Quote for the day:

"A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation." -- ‏@UpSearchSQL

Daily Tech Digest - February 12, 2017

Inevitable architecture: Complexity gives way to simplicity and flexibility

In the next 18 to 24 months, CIOs and their partners in the C-suite may find an answer to this question in a flexible architecture model whose demonstrated efficiency and effectiveness in start-up IT environments suggest that its broader adoption in the marketplace may be inevitable. In this cloud-first model—and in the leading practices emerging around it—platforms are virtualized, containerized, and treated like malleable, reusable resources. Systems are loosely coupled and, increasingly, automated to be self-learning and self-healing. Likewise, on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud capabilities can be deployed dynamically to deliver each workload at an optimum price and performance point. Taken together, these elements can make it possible to move broadly from managing instances to managing outcomes.

2017 is the year your startup gets funded

After about 20 meetings, you should have a pretty good feel for whether your round is going to come together quickly (i.e. 2 months) or be a drawn-out slog (3-6 months); most tend to be the latter. That’s normal. Hopefully your meetings are leading to progressively deeper dives on the part of the investors. This means they’re interested, and if they’re interested, the discussion should start to veer toward valuation and terms. Next, you will receive a term sheet (if it’s a priced round) or commitments if you’re raising a convertible note. But even if you don’t have a term sheet after 15-20 meetings, don’t despair. Fundraising is a numbers game — remember our “hit rate” from Step 1? If you’re averaging a 5-10 percent ratio of pitches to commitments, you’re doing OK. This also means you’re getting rejected 90-95 percent of the time. Accept it as the way the game works, and don’t give up prematurely.

Biases in algorithms: The case for and against government regulation

Daniel Saraga, head of science communication at the Swiss National Science Foundation, asks in a recent Phys.org column, Should algorithms be regulated? For instance, think about a driverless car and its ability to recognize obstacles in the road: "The control algorithm has to decide whether it will put the life of its passengers at risk or endanger uninvolved passers-by on the pavement." With algorithms being proprietary "closed source," the answer to who is put in jeopardy—the driver or a passerby—is an unknown and carries the bias of the person/s who designed the algorithm-based control system. "They (algorithms) do not have prejudices and are unemotional," writes Alan Reid, senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University in this Conversation column. "But algorithms can be programmed to be biased or unintentional bias can creep into the system."

Kansas City rolls out online map using traffic, parking data from sensors

The interactive online map is operated by city contractor Xaqt, a Chicago-based company that provides integrated intelligence and collaboration tools for cities. With the map, a user can see the location of streetcars as well as how many vehicles passed streetcars at each hour in the past 24 hours and their real-time speeds. Available street parking is also shown in green, and by clicking on a parking area icon, it is possible to see available spaces at that location. Eventually, the city hopes to expand the use of sensors to other congested corridors. In the future, Alexa will be able to tell a user the location of the nearest free parking space and provide a daily forecast of public activities and meetings, said Bob Bennett, the city’s chief innovation officer, in an interview.

How to Boost Your Career in Big Data and Analytics

The world is increasingly digital, and this means big data is here to stay. In fact, the importance of big data and data analytics is only going to continue growing in the coming years. It is a fantastic career move and it could be just the type of career you have been trying to find. Professionals who are working in this field can expect an impressive salary, with the median salary for data scientists being $116,000. Even those who are at the entry level will find high salaries, with average earnings of $92,000. As more and more companies realize the need for specialists in big data and analytics, the number of these jobs will continue to grow. Close to 80% of the data scientists say there is currently a shortage of professionals working in the field.

Digital Transformation and high-tech Robo-Advisor - do you need one?

Big data and advanced analytics can help broaden the scope of robo-advice dramatically, incorporating financial planning into broader retirement planning, tax planning, vacation savings, higher education planning. Robo-Advisors have typically targeted millennials segment because these young investors want to save & multiple money faster and often don't have enough patience & wealth to warrant the attention and interest of a human advisor. High Net worth Individuals also think, online and automated investment tools can positively affect their wealth manager's advice and decision-making. Overall, robo-advisors provide a good user experience with latest digital technologies such as slick apps and fancy interfaces.These platforms make sure that they fit right in with your daily online browsing, and are great options for novice investors who are just starting out and want to dip their toes in the world of investments

IT unbounded: The business potential of IT transformation

Creating an unbounded IT organization will require that CIOs think beyond their own experiences and domain expertise and begin viewing IT through a different operational and strategic lens. For example, they can take a look at the efficiency and effectiveness of current budgeting, portfolio planning, and vendor selection processes and try to identify procedural, administrative, and other constraints that can be eliminated. Or they can work with business partners, start-ups, academics, IT talent, and vendors to explore nontraditional innovation, collaboration, and investment opportunities. ... Important to development, IT organizations can work to replace bloated, inefficient skillset silos with nimble, multiskill teams that work in tandem with the business to drive rapid development of products from ideation all the way through to deployment.1

The Promise of FinTech – Something New Under the Sun?

FinTech’s true promise springs from its potential to unbundle banking into its core functions of: settling payments, performing maturity transformation, sharing risk and allocating capital. This possibility is being driven by new entrants – payment service providers, aggregators and robo advisors, peer-to-peer lenders, and innovative trading platforms. And it is being influenced by incumbents who are adopting new technologies in an effort to reinforce the economies of scale and scope of their business models. In this process, systemic risks will evolve. Changes to customer loyalties could influence the stability of bank funding. New underwriting models could impact credit quality and even macroeconomic dynamics. New investing and risk management paradigms could affect market functioning. A host of applications and new infrastructure could reduce costs, probably improve capital efficiency and possibly create new critical economic functions.

What software engineers are making around the world right now

Hired’s study explores a range of other data, including how much data scientists and product managers are being paid across 16 major cities and how that salary information has changed over time. Of greater interest to us, however, is another section focused on the impact of bias on salaries and hiring practices. It’s something Hired began following roughly a year ago by collecting voluntary demographic data from candidates and examining how their identity impacts the wages they ask for — and what they receive. Bias is nothing new, of course. In fact, in a survey released Tuesday by the job site Indeed.com, one quarter of U.S. workers in the tech sector said they’ve felt discrimination at work due to their race, gender, age, religion or sexual orientation. Roughly 29 percent of female respondents said they experienced discrimination, compared with 21 percent of men.

Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data with Deep Learning

The increasing accuracy of deep neural networks for solving problems such as speech and image recognition has stoked attention and research devoted to deep learning and AI more generally. But widening popularity has also resulted in confusion. This article introduces neural networks, including brief descriptions of feed-forward neural networks and recurrent neural networks, and describes how to build a recurrent neural network that detects anomalies in time series data. To make our discussion concrete, we’ll show how to build a neural network using Deeplearning4j, a popular open-source deep-learning library for the JVM.

Quote for the day:

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." -- C.S. Lewis

Daily Tech Digest - February 11, 2017

How to be Agile with Distributed Teams

Enterprises are becoming more distributed as technology facilitates global collaboration. People start working from home and projects are distributed over different locations. To orchestrate the work, across locations, agile principles help. Interaction between team members and stakeholders are frequent and based on patterns. The stakeholders, users or customers are close to the development teams. Organizations create roles, events and artifacts according to the scrum framework. But it's not always easy to decide what role to place on what location or how to coordinate events with people in different time zones. Not seeing each other in an office creates challenges in alignment. It's also not necessarily visible how each team (member) is performing.

How to become a developer: 7 tips from the pros

Front end developers, full stack developers, mobile developers, and back end developers are all currently in the top 10 hardest to fill tech jobs, according to data from job search site Indeed.com. And Ruby developers experienced a staggering 656% jump in searches by job seekers on Indeed.com—among the fastest growing searches on the site, according to a recent report. "There is a lot of opportunity and demand for developers," said Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester vice president and principal analyst of application development and delivery. Web development and mobile app development are good areas to start a developer job search, Hammond said. "With mobile app development these days, folks are willing to take a chance if you've got some work to show that you've done in your own time, or apps you can point to in the App Store," Hammond said.

India begins to plan its move into IoT

Companies are beginning to understand how IoT is an enabler that can provide a great return on investment, as Dr Rishi Bhatnagar, President of Aeris Communications and Chair of the IET India IoT Panel, highlights. “Awareness of the business potential of IoT is definitely growing,” he enthuses. “Many projects are moving from the drawing board and labs to the field. There is immense potential to be realised, especially in sectors such as healthcare, heavy machinery automation – known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – and environment management.” Nihal Kashinath, Founder of the IoT Bangalore Network adds: “A lot of industries in India stand to benefit from IoT, in terms of efficiency gains or new products/services being offered.

Surprise! You don’t own the digital devices you paid for

When you buy something you naturally think that -- you know-- you own it. But when it comes to products that contain software you don’t. As bizarre as that sounds, it speaks to a serious issue: Consumers who buy a device that depends to some extent on software – whether it’s a Kindle or a tractor – are subject to the whims of the company that developed and sold the software. That odd and fundamentally unfair state of affairs is why two members of Congress – a Democrat and a Republican – have teamed to reform a key provision of copyright law and give consumers the right to actually own stuff they’ve paid for. “The point is to make sure that people’s rights stay intact in the digital space,” says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is supporting the Your Own Device Act.

Transforming Business through Real-Time Data Analytics

Acknowledging the importance of data analytics, Pankaj Dikshit, ‎Senior Vice President (Technology & Risk) at GST Network said, "The entire GST platform is an open source platform. Our data would be loosely defined but tightly integrated because there are going to be so many entities interacting with us. The data will be stored in chunks and analytics will be very critical for us to pull out the right information and give us the exact data point that we need." Shewani also stressed on the need for enterprises to start capturing interactions and not just transactions. "For instance, a customer may be interacting with a bank at different levels. He may walk into a branch, visit the website or talk to customer care. Each touch point creates an interaction, which is critical in understanding customer behavior. The combination of interaction and transaction will increasingly become important."

Microsoft unveils a bonanza of security capabilities

Windows Hello, Microsoft's biometric-based authentication system, is getting two new enhancements with the forthcoming Windows 10 Creators Update. First, Microsoft is making it possible to use its biometric Windows Hello login system solely with on-premises Active Directory servers, rather than requiring Azure Active Directory. Microsoft is also trying to address the problem of users forgetting to lock their computers by using a new Dynamic Lock feature in Windows Hello. That will connect users' smartphones with their Windows 10 devices, and automatically lock the device when a phone's Bluetooth signal drifts far away. Using it requires customers have the Microsoft Authenticator app installed on their smartphones. Once the app is connected to a PC, it uses the Windows Hello Companion Device Framework to automatically lock the computer when its user walks away.

Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

"The proposal aims to ensure that no later than by the end of 2020, a new Windows Basic Client should be the standard city client," a Munich city council spokesman said. However, it seems as if LiMux and other open-source software could still be used until the Windows client is in place. "In the transitional period, departments and business units can use this newly developed Windows-based client with standard products or can continue using a mixed client architecture of Windows and Linux depending on their individual circumstances," the proposal states. The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favour of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software.

Virtual Panel: Microservices in Practice

Microservices have gone from internal development practices for the select few so-called “Unicorns” to something many developers in a wider range of organisations are embracing, or considering for their next project. Some people believe that in order to deliver on the benefits of DevOps, microservices are a necessary requirement. In the last few years we have seen new technologies and experiences shape microservices, often reinforcing their ties to Service Oriented Architectures at the same time as expanding on their differences. Some believe that technologies and methodologies which can assist with developing and adopting microservices are ineffective without associated changes within the organisations that wish to use them. InfoQ spoke with five panelists to get different perspectives on the current state of the art with microservices, how they are likely to evolve and sharing their experiences, both good and bad, when developing with them.

Change the culture to fix the tragedy that DevOps at scale can be

We all have our experiences and we're going to do what we do. When we hear about Netflix giving production access to junior engineers we feel our hair standing up. It's horrible. It sounds like a recipe for a disaster. And that's of course the biggest problem. The one way to solve it is pain. Pain is extremely instructional. When you have a couple of late nights because of deployments that have gone bad that really helps in transforming the culture. And if you think about it all our guides for DevOps starting with The Phoenix Project to any other book of how to do DevOps (or DevOps at scale) talks about how instructional pain is. There is no other way to make this change. You cannot talk people into changing their behavior.

An Introspection on Custom Rule Engine

A complete domain should not be built using rules rather It is better to see which parts of logic do not necessarily change and which part of system changes. Rules approach can be applied to frequent changing part of the system and thus making the rules footprint inside the system to minimal. The another aspect that influence in building rule based system is the myth that business users or users who live above the technical people in product paradigm can change easily make a change to the system. However, in many cases the fact remains otherwise where a specialized people require to maintain the rule system. Since the rules introduces new language into the enterprise and retaining the knowledge becomes additional responsibility.

Quote for the day:

"Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." -- MLK

Daily Tech Digest - February 10, 2017

Are Companies Doing Enough On The IoT Security Front?

Device manufacturers need to make sure security is incorporated into the design and embedded in the product life cycle, Laliberte says. “Design the product to be easy for the consumer to secure,” he says. “Do not rely on them to perform critical activities needed to secure the device. They will likely not do it.” Ultimately, users of IoT and the product manufacturers “have an obligation to install and create IoT products in ways that maximize usefulness and minimize risk,” Laliberte says. “The use of IoT devices is going to expand rapidly, and without adequate security we have the potential to introduce unknown dangers into our homes, workplaces and communities.” The overwhelming amount of insecure and unsecured IoT devices worldwide practically ensures that we’ll continue to see attacks such as DDoS continue to proliferate worldwide for the foreseeable future, DiDio says.

Solving Data Gravity Pain

Data gravity introduces significant industry challenges. BI has primarily lived on-premises, with only a minuscule 2 percent of BI applications living in the cloud. Even as the industry shifts more and more apps rapidly to the cloud, data warehouses and many other data sources still often reside on-premises for a long time. Thus, we anticipate an increased need for BI apps to query across both realms, on-premises and cloud, as the latter matures. Data gravity is an undeniable market force that we’re seeing in our BI industry mid-life crisis. The mobile- and cloud-first world – one in which a myriad of apps for every conceivable function generate more data in the cloud than on-premises. As more apps are delivered via mobile, cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS), the center of data gravity is already shifting.

Highlights from the Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report

The cyber perimeter of organisations has not been restricted to their physical boundaries for some time, and the continued blurring of the line between work and private lives has further increased the attack surface area of many organisations. The increasing use of BYOD and home-working schemes, with employees carrying their devices everywhere, has continued to expand the security perimeter so that organisations’ physical borders have become a hub within the cyber perimeter. The security perimeter has also been extended beyond organisations’ physical devices to the immaterial and unlimited space represented by the Cloud environment, where Cloud solutions are being increasingly adopted worldwide.

Twitter hopes machine learning can save it from oblivion

Twitter began making more noise about its machine learning investments last summer when it acquired Magic Pony Technology, which had developed image-reading technology. At the time, Twitter also highlighted two past acquisitions in this space: Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. During the call, Dorsey revealed that Twitter had hired Jan Peterson to oversee its “science efforts, all of our deep learning, all of our machine learning and artificial intelligence.” Dorsey pointed to the growth over the last three months in statistics like daily active users, engagement, and tweet impressions that people see. The company has been breaking away from its traditional firehose, real-time format to help users find more interesting tweets that they may have missed.

NACD Publishes Five Cybersecurity Principles Every Board Director Needs to Know

Directors are under tremendous pressure to appear to be doing something to get a handle on cyber risks. In many cases, this is manifested by the questions boards are asking CISOs and other managers. For example, the handbook warned that employees and contract workers, while indispensable assets, can also become easy vectors of attack for external actors, highlighting the need for regular security awareness training, strong controls and a strong organizational culture. According to NACD, only 42 percent of public directors are confident or very confident that their company is properly secured against a cyberattack, versus 29 percent for private companies. Similarly, just 42 percent of public directors are moderately confident, in contrast with 39 percent for private companies.

The Biggest Tech Trends of 2017

As the technology matures further over the course of the year we can expect prices to drop as more competitors enter the market. The technology as it stands currently has a prohibitively high pricing point, and increased competition in the sector should push prices down to a point that we see VR headsets in most households. VR is more than just a consumer phenomenon; there are strong business use cases for the technology as well. We can expect more and more business applications for VR to crop up over the next 12 months. One of the most interesting areas for expansion is retail – as retailers use VR to show how a watch might look on your wrist or how a new coffee table would look in your living room. There are so many possibilites with this technology that have yet to get the industry’s attention and investment that they deserve – this will all change in 2017.

Agility Robotics Introduces Cassie, a Dynamic and Talented Robot Delivery Ostrich

Today, Agility Robotics, a spin-off of Oregon State University, is officially announcing a shiny new bipedal robot named Cassie. Cassie is a dynamic walker, meaning that it walks much more like humans do than most of the carefully plodding bipedal robots we’re used to seeing. This makes it better at handling the kind of diverse and complex terrain that we walk over all the time without even thinking, a talent that’s going to be mandatory for robots that want to tackle the different environments and situations that they’ll need to master to be actually useful around people. In addition to search-and-rescue and disaster relief, Agility Robotics has one particular environment and situation in mind: They want Cassie to be scampering up your steps to deliver packages to your front door.

When Hackers Hack Hackers

While most cybercriminals tend to set their sights on siphoning valuable data from poorly protected enterprises, there's no limit to the kinds of targets they'll seek out. There's no honor among thieves, so it shouldn't be a surprise that with the right kind of motivation, malicious hackers will happily attack other black hat and grey hat hackers. Sometimes the attacks are purely mercenary: rivals know they can hit pay dirt very quickly if they find an easy way to tap into data stores of already vetted stolen identities or financial information. Similarly, certain kinds of cyber skirmishes are initiated to take competitors out. And then there are the attacks that are a little more personal: to show someone up, settle a score, or otherwise make a philosophical stand. Regardless of the motives, these kind of squabbles offer up a satisfying dose of schadenfreude for cybersecurity pros beleaguered by the bad guys.

Attorneys Predict A Demanding Year For IT Outsourcing Customers

Outsourcing customers will want to add flexibility to the IT service deals by seeking new termination rights, the right to switch locations, the right to insource, and other similar protections. However, Masur warned, providers are likely to push back insisting that these issues are customer — not provider — problems to solve. “To some degree these political changes may well accelerate the move to sourcing models offering cost savings not based on offshore labor arbitrage such as cloud services, robotic automation and utility offerings. “While these sourcing strategies may result in the elimination of American jobs,” Masur says, “they cannot be attacked as offshoring jobs to foreign countries.” The net result of the current political environment is hard to pinpoint.

Teaching smart gadgets privacy manners

So how should engineers approach building privacy controls into IoT devices? Use new ISACA privacy resources! I am grateful and proud to have been part of the two ISACA International Privacy Task Force groups, both led by Yves Le Roux, since 2013, and to have been the lead developer authoring the newly released ISACA Privacy Principles and Program Management Guide (PP&PMG), incorporating the recommendations and input of the International Task Force members, as well as a complementary privacy guide targeted for publication in mid-2017. The ISACA PP&PMG outlines the core privacy principles that organizations, as well as individuals, can use to help ensure privacy protections. These privacy principles can be used by engineers to build the important privacy and security controls into IoT devices right from the beginning of the initial design phase, and use them all the way through the entire product development and release lifecycle.

Quote for the day:

"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is." -- Scott Cook

Daily Tech Digest - February 09, 2017

Hacking Is Here to Stay: 6 Steps to Protect Yourself

Today, hacking has evolved into a wide-ranging web of cybercrime that is hard to avoid, with perpetrators carrying out their misdeeds for a variety of motives – selling data for profit, hacktivism, stealing state secrets, and revenge against former employers or enemies. But make no mistake, the prime motive is profit. The cost of cybercrime will top $2 trillion by 2019, according to Juniper Research. ... Hacking is a fact of life and it’s only going to become more widespread. The sooner we accept that, the better we can defend ourselves. Pretending it doesn’t exist, that it’s somebody else’s problem or some technical genius somewhere will come up with a silver bullet against cybercrime is unrealistic and dangerous. Everyone has a responsibility to defend against cybercrime because it affects us all.

BankThink Rather than copy startups, banks need their own innovation model

We need to re-address how corporations are using the startup model for their own innovation efforts. As the last few years have seen inadequate responses from different types of accelerators (an outside entity that assists the corporate’s startup efforts) and incubators or innovation labs (that are owned by the corporate), we are re-entering testing mode with corporate innovation once again. Now is the time to create an optimal new approach. As with each in-vogue wave, there is preaching and swallowing without really understanding what something is, when to use it and how to really do it. In the application of lean startup, the emphasis has been on “build, measure, learn,” and this mantra has been used as justification to start with building an un-validated hypothesis (read: gut-feeling ideas not based on any customer insight, aka mud). The focus is on speed while customer research and learning is often lost from sight.

My expanded interests in technology for the wider world

In India, early-stage internet of things architectures were becoming apparent. Dot-matrix displays could be set up in small towns stating when the travelling doctor would visit next. Details of how to book an appointment could be included — a simple text message. The patient could then be sent reminders as the date became closer — cutting down on missed appointments and wasted time. All this seemed to get me noticed, and I was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). This 260-year-old institution works to enrich society through ideas and action. The RSA stands for everything I believe in. It is looking at how the world can be made into a better, fairer place; in how those who are the ‘haves’ can better help those who are the ‘have less.’

From automation to autonomy, IoT is powering Industry 4.0

While the technological components that make up the foundation of Industry 4.0 are many– robots, big data, augmented reality, cloud computing, cyber security, additive manufacturing, system integration etc., AIM explores how IoT is playing an important role in the fourth industrial revolution. Intelligent connectivity of devices has made is easy for objects to communicate in a way like never before. Not just at an individual level, but manufacturing companies are keenly implementing this intelligent connectivity of smart devices in factories and shops. By combining the physical, virtual, IT and cyber-system worlds, manufacturers are aiming to transform into “smart factory operators”, who can manage highly automated, connected equipment and analyse data provided by the systems. In other words, it is set to create a new working environment of integrated productivity between worker and machine.

Competing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The naked algorithms themselves are unlikely to provide an edge. Many of them are in the public domain, and businesses can access open-source software platforms, such as Google’s TensorFlow. OpenAI, a nonprofit organization started by Elon Musk and others, is making AI tools and research widely available. And many prominent AI researchers have insisted on retaining the right to publish their results when joining companies such as Baidu, Facebook, and Google. Rather than scrap traditional sources of competitive advantage, such as position and capability, AI reframes them. (See Exhibit 2.) Companies, then, need a fluid and dynamic view of their strengths. Positional advantage, for example, generally focuses on relatively static aspects that allow a company to win market share: proprietary assets, distribution networks, access to customers, and scale. These articles of faith have to be reimagined in the AI world.

6 big Business Intelligence trends of 2017

Knowledge is the hard part. It’s taking that data and turning it into something meaningful. It’s converting an avalanche of data into action-oriented insights. That’s the hard part. How do you turn data into knowledge? That’s where business intelligence (BI) comes into play. BI is the process of turning unusable data into actionable insights. When done correctly, BI will improve visibility, provide insights into customer behavior, improve efficiency, and so much more. How can you get the most out of your BI investment? I won’t get into the details here, as it’s a topic covered in a previous article. But, I would like to add one point: To truly get the most out of BI, it’s important that you stay ahead of the curve. The world of BI is constantly changing. New tools emerge. New trends take hold. If you can stay ahead of the curve, you’re better positioned to turn your data into knowledge–and a competitive advantage.

Why Your Company's First Line Of Cybersecurity Is Not Your CTO

Executives do not realize that a major threat to their company’s security is social engineering, which refers to the psychological manipulation of users who unknowingly divulge confidential information. Cybercriminals can use tricks to gain the confidence of company employees and partners. The goal is usually to execute a larger -- and more complex -- fraudulent transaction. The problem is not the use (or lack) of security tools and technology, but rather employees who are unknowingly the objects of security threats. The latest trick employed by criminals is to emulate executives within a company in a trusted environment. For example, an employee receives a legitimate-looking email from the CEO or CFO, instructing them to wire money. Before, employees used to be able to tell if the email was real, but today, employees are often duped by sophisticated hackers.

Why this company will help change the future of artificial intelligence

Elemental Cognition's technology seems to be aimed at the problem of going beyond the simple recognition/response models that dominate the A.I. landscape right now. I suspect Ferrucci is building out a technology that will combine outputs of deep learning and other machine-learning systems with the ability to draw inferences from, reason about and support decisions using the facts that they generate. I have faith in Ferrucci for a very specific reason: He is less a scientist and more an engineer. His history at IBM was one of building toward the solution rather than in service of a theory. He succeeded in building a system that leveraged existing technologies, but was built in such a way that it did the job at hand and did it exceedingly well.

IT And C- Level Leaders Point Fingers At Each Other Over Cyber Defense

Overall, the results show "an interesting disparity between the views of C-level respondents and those of IT decision makers," said Kevin Taylor, managing director at BAE. "Each group's understanding of the nature of cyber threats, and of the way they translate into business and technological risks, can be very different." ... The survey lends support to the opinions of other analysts who say C-level executives need to get more informed on cybersecurity threats. Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security, recently urged CEOs and corporate board to increase their level of cyber-risk awareness. "Cybersecurity is the most significant governance challenge for the public and private sector," Ridge said in a recent interview. "It's not just the exclusive domain of the CIO and CTO, and is now in the domain of the CEO and the corporate board."

The darkside of the internet of things: The security challenge

Overall, the cybersecurity industry is progressing with its R&D efforts in order to come up with solutions that will alleviate various security challenge pain points. If everyone involved is committed to fixing the problem, then developing new technologies with built-in security features will become the norm and the result will be a much safer IoT. With the emergence of software-defined technology, tight security protocols and encryption can be implemented at the fraction of the cost of hardware components. Vendors should consider de-commoditizing and coming up with a more differentiated product offering that, for example, includes security features. It’s obvious that these features come with a price tag. However, only when vendors translate these features into tangible benefits will consumers be prepared to pay a higher premium.

Quote for the day:

"For success, attitude is equally as important as ability." -- Harry F. Banks

Daily Tech Digest - February 08, 2017

Preventing Insider Threats from Affecting Health Data Security

Secure connections are also important. Any mobile users should not log in from unsecured wireless locations. Strong authentication measures will also be beneficial for healthcare organizations, ensuring that users are who they claim to be. Toward the end of 2016 the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) touched on this very issue, as healthcare will “usually use login passwords or passphrases to access information on public or private networks, internet portals, computers, medical devices, servers, and software applications.” A comprehensive, accurate, and thorough risk analysis for the entire organization is critical, according to OCR. This will help identify potential ePHI vulnerabilities and to identify any vulnerabilities in current authentication methods and practices.

IBM launches cognitive computing hardware unit

In many respects, a hardware unit tied to analytics and artificial intelligence is counterintuitive. After all, won't most of these workloads be handled in the cloud? Picciano said that analytics, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence will be consumed in multiple channels. "One thing I know is that our clients and data scientists are all experimenting and have initiatives," said Picciano. ... Part of IBM's cognitive play revolves around upending Intel's dominance. Picciano argues that IBM's optimized hardware approach will enable systems to better handle neural networks, deep learning and training systems to use inference. "This is the first inning of a longer game," said Picciano, who noted that a 10x improvement in training cycles is an early goal. "When you go to the edge of computing and IoT we want training cycles to be instantaneous with continuous inference and predictive recommendations."

Enterprise Intelligence Brief: Threat Hunting Takes Center Stage

Khalil Sehnaoui, founder and managing partner at Krypton Security, argued that “threat hunting is absolutely feasible and, even more so, definitely recommended.” He said that experts have been proactively pushing organizations to implement threat hunting strategies for years. “It is important because you cannot rely on just alerts and monitoring to know your network is either safe or under attack,” he said. “Alert systems can only monitor for known threats, and the best defense remains a good offense. Threats come in many a form and the battle is continuously ongoing between defenders and attackers.” Sehnaoui challenged companies to actively look for threats before the threats find them. “Just like information security researchers keep looking for new vulnerabilities and exploits, organizations should keep challenging themselves proactively instead of just waiting to react to a problem,” he said.

Use Application Delivery Technologies to Accelerate and Automate the Boring Tasks

The ADC can use programmed intelligence to adjust the application content by reordering components of the page to display the most relevant pieces first, adjust image size to provide a satisfactory visual experience while minimizing bandwidth consumption, and consolidate libraries and code to prevent the sending of duplicate content. If programmed with the appropriate intelligence, the ADC can even send content that is needed later while the user is viewing the content to make efficient use of the connection bandwidth and availability. ... Since it is likely that if products are selected that the user will go to a checkout page to order the items, the shopping cart and checkout components of the website can be loaded while the user is browsing the site.

Why Modern Data Integration? Core Drivers and Characteristics

Until recently, data integration solutions were tools only for tech-savvy teams. With modern data integration, business roles in organizations are taking more proactive participation in making sure that the right technologies are implemented. Vital data and the processes that produce it can better connect to business requirements and objectives. Organizations that recognize - and act on - the strategic value of data, also understand and embrace the need for technologies that get the most out of information and data, with continuous improvement and change. Another key driver for the emergence of modern data integration is simply the imperative of keeping up with everything data, every day. Data, information, and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes throughout the organization – more of which must be handled in real-time.

How strategy is evolving—and staying the same—in the hypergrowth digital age

The one that’s almost obvious is Amazon. They completely disrupted the retail industry, not only with their vision of the supply chain that led to their massive success, but also with the ability to innovate. That’s the birth of AWS, Amazon Web Services. The one that may surprise you is the one that surprises me—institutions like Siemens. Siemens is more than a century old. It used to be machines, telephones, and manufacturing. Nowadays, it’s really high-tech medical instruments with big data providing preventive maintenance, with data lakes that analyze real-time data from the wind turbines to provide a flow of information and drastically reduce costs. It’s a business that has evolved as a massive conglomerate through wars and crises, and it’s still standing and strong.

Microsoft lays out the future direction for its .NET languages

C# is going to continue to pick up more complex features as it has throughout its history. Microsoft promises to "innovate aggressively, while being very careful to stay within the spirit of the language." It wants to make sure improvements benefit all or most developers, avoiding over-focusing on a given segment. C# 7.0 will gain integrated support for tuples and pattern matching syntax as its primary new features. As for Visual Basic 15, it will also gain some tuples support but not to the same degree as C#. Microsoft wants to keep Visual Basic approachable for new developers and focus on things like cross-language tooling experiences since many VB users also use C#. Microsoft admits this is a shift from the co-evolution strategy it laid out in 2010, where C# and VB were set on a "shared course."

Open Source Users: It's Time For Extreme Vetting

Fundamentally, what it comes down to is you need to understand where your software came from, which means in the open source context, you have to think of open source as a third-party vendor, which means who's paying attention to it? From an organizational perspective, you need either a team paying attention and taking care of this, or you need to find a vendor to work with who will be your representative here and will do all the heavy lifting in terms of vetting the software, understanding what's good, what's bad, keeping it updated, making sure you understand what that means. That's the piece that's missing today. There's lots of organizations that have developers that will go out, find what they need in the open source universe, pull it in, and then they don't think about it a second time. Obviously, if you do that, if you never update this stuff, eventually there's going to be some sort of problem that you have to deal with in the software.

Wearable AI Detects Tone Of Conversation To Make It Navigable (And Nicer) For All

Made possible in part by the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, the work centered on using both physical feedback and audio data to train AI for the task of analyzing, and recognizing, when conversations take a turn. Study participants were asked to tell "a happy or sad story of their own choosing" while the AI system, mounted in an experimental Samsung Simband, measured wearers' physical responses (such as heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature) and recorded audio and text transcripts to capture such elements as vocabulary, energy, and pitch. Based on 31 such conversations, researchers trained two algorithms to analyze the data for its overall "happy or sad" nature and to classify each five-second chunk of conversation as positive, neutral, or negative.

Survey Indicates 'Citizen Developer' Security, Data Risks

A key insight uncovered from Appian's research is that 75 percent believe an enterprise low-code platform is a solution to harness the energy of citizen application developers and alleviate the burden on IT departments. IT leaders surveyed cited operational efficiency (35 percent), data security (32 percent), and agility (32 percent) among the top benefits of low-code. and the bad: IT leaders state that citizen developers pose risks for data integrity (73 percent of respondents), security (69 percent of respondents), integration (58 percent of respondents with experience with citizen developed apps) and other aspects of enterprise business application development.

Quote for the day:

"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds." -- Mark Twain

Daily Tech Digest - February 07, 2017

Tech stance against immigration ban aims to protect employees

Industry analysts say the companies could face similar criticism from Trump, but likely feel the need to defend themselves and their employees. "There could also be backlash if they did not participate, especially if a large number of other companies did," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "I think this was a principled stand, but it is also a sound business move. All the populations these companies deal with are diverse - employees, prospective employees, customers, and partners. The U.S. being, and being seen as, hostile to refugees, immigrants, and people from other countries would impede their businesses." Judith Hurwitz, an analyst with Hurwitz & Associates, said many companies, particularly international businesses, may be feeling the strain of what the immigration ban could mean to them.

The Evolution of Phishing

Some of the most infamous cybercrimes over the last ten years — taking out retail chains, universities and even banks — started with a single user opening a spear phishing email. Where conventional phishing uses wide-scope attacks predicated on chance and opportunity, spear phishing is highly targeted. Technology research firm Vanson Bourne clocked the average financial impact of a successful spear phishing attack at $1.6 million. Using gathered knowledge and open-source intelligence (OSINT) feeds, threat actors craft personalised pretexts for small, select groups of employees. Because spear phishing emails are so distinctive, traditional reputation and spam filters often fail to detect the malicious content within. A spear phishing attack can also incorporate sender forgery, polymorphic URLs and drive-by downloads to circumvent common protections.

Internet Of Things Security Market To Hit Highest Growth By 2021

The global IoT security market is segmented on the basis of end-users as utilities, automobiles, and healthcare. Based on the software, IoT in utility market is segmented as security, analytics, smart grid management, operations control, Customer Information System (CIS), and predictive asset management. To ensure the efficient functioning of devices such as smartphones, tablets, and PDAs at the workplace, it is crucial to maintaining network infrastructure security. Moreover, traditional business models are being developed, as utilities are using emerging technologies for optimization of information flow, for improvement of asset performance, and to increase energy efficiency and ensure supply.

Why companies don't hack back

"The idea is that you make something in your network look so attractive that it becomes the focus for the attacker," Sirota said. Companies even create entirely fake servers to confuse an attacker. Active techniques, however, are where most people start to have objections, though they can be valuable, according to Herberger. Whether it's a DDoS attack, SQL injections or a brute force attack, those techniques can also be available to an attacked company. Active techniques center around companies taking action during the first disrupted session, not waiting for attackers to continue their attack. Organizations can identify an attackers application as a potential problem and "proactively make sure that application doesn't work," Herberger said.

How to protect your privacy with a VPN on Android

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is basically a way to funnel all your web traffic through a remote server. This makes it look like you’re in a different location and obscures your real IP address. VPNs encrypt the traffic passing through them, making it harder for anyone else to listen in on your connection, even if you connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Since your connection appears to be coming from a different area, you can access geo-restricted services like the BBC. Some of the more popular ones like Netflix and Hulu have gotten serious about blocking VPNs, though. It’s also important to note possible security issues with the VPN providers. They are getting access to all your traffic, after all. Some providers like Hola VPN have had security issues, so you should steer clear.

Critical DOD cybersecurity functions safe from hiring freeze

Officials who grant exemptions under the exempt functions section of the new DOD memo have to be ready to justify those choices on a position-by-position basis, according to the memo. Those officials are also going have to submit reports on a bi-weekly basis. According to the memo, “in addition to numeric metrics, reports will afford delegated officials the opportunity to provide narrative inputs assessing mission risk and readiness impacts of the hiring freeze.” It is unclear if the function exceptions to the freeze issued today would specifically exempt the National Security Agency, whose primary function is to provide intelligence. An NSA spokesperson told FedScoop via email the agency received notification of the order, and is “looking into the specifics of it and still working to determine any exemptions.”

What's keeping enterprises from using G Suite?

"The reality we've seen, we've seen better collaboration, better communication and frankly had better [employee] engagement," Ringman said. "We actually measure our engagement scores ... and have seen an increase in our engagement scores somewhat directly as well as indirectly due to our rollout of the Google G Suite." Businesses build entire workflows around Office products, and will often use macros to automate some of their work, said Patrick Moorhead, the founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. That entrenched use of specific features can also hinder adoption. “So, for instance, a company will go in and do macros and run their business on a spreadsheet. And that is a factor. I can’t just dial up G Suite and have those macros work,” Moorhead said. “G Suite was born in the cloud, Office 365 was born on the desktop..."

Data Realities Of 2017 And Beyond

Who determines what data will be shared with what devices under which circumstances? Will we need a database to keep track of all the devices we have relationships with, another of which devices have relationships with which other devices and yet another of data permissions we have granted and revoked? A question looming in the not-so-distant future is how much of machine-to-machine language humans will need to understand. Two ways of considering the balance of power between individuals and the data colossi are data empowerment and transparency. Data empowerment is the degree to which you can decide who knows what about you and when — now and in the future. Transparency is how knowable an individual or organization is. In this early stage of our digital society, individuals are becoming more and more transparent, while some organizations are becoming more opaque.

A company’s biggest cybersecurity threat is often inside the building

A combination of factors is responsible for the new environment in which employees are an equally treacherous cybersecurity risk as hackers – the blurring of network boundaries brought about by cloud services, the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend that gives employees the flexibility to stay connected through their personal devices, and the rise of more sophisticated attack methods. And the offenders aren’t always disgruntled or deceitful employees bent on ransacking the company’s systems; in fact, they seldom are. In most cases, the damage occurs unintentionally or negligently, such as an employee accidentally installing malware by clicking on a link in a fraudulent email or workers sharing passwords to save time.

Size Estimation Approaches for use with Agile Methods

There is strong agreement among software practitioners that estimates to bound the resources needed to successfully complete development projects, agile included. While some controversy exists within the agile community over whether such estimates are needed for sprints or iterations, many agree that they are needed at the project level and higher ... It is important to recognize that such estimates are driven by the size of the job which can be represented by a variety of related metrics (function points, user stories/story points, etc.). The purpose of this article is to identify the most popular agile size metrics and their relative strengths and weaknesses from a user point-of-view. To perform this assessment, we conducted a fact-finding survey on the topic to which 112 practitioners responded.

Quote for the day:

"Hitting the goal is about fulfilling the mission, lifting your people is about fulfilling your legacy" -- @Rory_Wells