Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - September 03, 2017

A Web Of Interoperable Blockchain Platforms

When blockchain technology first reared its head, interoperability was not a subject of much debate; there was only one blockchain and it was all about bitcoin. As time passed, more and more disparate blockchain platforms rose, among them Ethereum, and these various platforms innovated in different directions, creating their own protocols. These protocols make it impossible for the chains to send and receive data from one another for reasons similar to that of why a program designed for Windows OS will not function on Mac OS. ... These protocols are designed to both maximize efficiency between disparate blockchain deployments and allow for a co-existence between them to form, creating a more cohesive ecosystem. There are some great examples of innovation to that end.

Your Digital Transformation Won't Succeed Without Cultural Change

Companies from the pre-digital era therefore need to adjust or shift their organizational culture to keep up in today’s digital world. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte recently released their third annual Digital Business report. The report highlighted five key practices of companies developing into "more mature digital organizations." Each of these five key practices focuses on some aspect of organizational culture, a clear indication of the importance culture plays in a company’s ability to adopt new business methods and practices. The question is why is modifying culture so challenging and what guidance can companies follow to increase the likelihood of a successful cultural change?

Business intelligence data is getting even more user friendly

In the digital era, data is pervasive. For many organizations, the amount of data they collect has become a major problem. Others struggle to identify what data will be most helpful for them to gather. Big data, while revolutionary, has created a glut of information leaving companies trying to figure out how to structure it to generate actionable insights. Business Intelligence is at the core of any kind of long-term business strategy, because it helps make sense of the data. When utilized, data strategy can have a big impact on any operation. When surveyed, 72% of business leaders said that they lacked the tools to effectively manage their data for their existing and future efforts. To meet that need, technology companies are beginning to bring more integrated solutions to market.

3 key advantages for AI in the retail space

We’ve learned how to understand real-time customer queries via NLP and extract value from legacy data using machine learning methodology. The challenge of making use of ongoing customer feedback is bigger, but so are its benefits. This challenge requires joint forces. First, an NLP engine needs to extract sense from a query in natural language. After, machine learning steps in to extract value from this sense. Using classification, intelligent machines assign meaning to data, relying on their background and existing knowledge. In practice, the system classifies certain products, say “books,” by categories, say “popular among women over 65.” For retail, this means more focused recommendation and upselling. Using clustering for new information, in turn, opens totally new horizons.

Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite

In short, when it comes to detecting emotion in other people, the face and body do not speak for themselves. Instead, variation is the norm. Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations. People’s movements in general, however, are tremendously variable. To teach emotional intelligence in a modern fashion, we need to acknowledge this variation and make sure your brain is well-equipped to make sense of it automatically.

Get real on container security: 4 rules DevOps teams should follow

The numbers underscore that paying attention to the packages and components that make up a container image is extremely important, especially if the container is from a public repository. Managing the software supply chain requires that companies regularly test their container images for vulnerabilities and vulnerable dependencies. The first lesson is for developers to use container images from sources that they trust, said Anders Wallgren, chief technology officer at Electric Cloud, a software deployment company. "Use images of well-known provenance. If you are going to use Ubuntu, use the published machine instance." In addition, any container image—whether sourced or homegrown—should be frequently tested for vulnerabilities and unwanted software. Luckily, software testing can be easily automated, and should be.

Open Banking - What Does It Mean For Banks And Fintechs?

Open Banking is a new set of regulations in the UK that were created to give consumers more control over their money. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued new rules that would allow consumers to more easily manage their money, switch accounts to find the best deals for their particular needs, as well as avoid high overdraft charges. These new regulations will go into effect in January 2018. As part of the Open Banking regulations, the CMA set a package of remedies to increase innovation and improve competition in retail banking. This includes a requirement for the nine largest current account providers to make available to authorized third parties – customer consent and secure access to specific current accounts in order to read the transaction data and initiate payments.

Distributed, always-on data management

Data platforms should support applications in context, blending transactional, analytical, search, and graph capabilities. In a financial services context, that might mean taking a credit card transaction, analyzing the customer’s buying patterns and searching for the information to approve the transaction. Data management platforms have to process multiple workloads in a single data platform simultaneously. ... A data platform must provide zero downtime. For example, one DataStax customer kept its recommendation engine running despite a hurricane that took down a whole data center. All of the company’s databases failed except DSE because its architecture was able to retain uptime via data distribution across other data centers.

AI chatbots can provide business value when used wisely

One area where businesses are finding the most value from AI today is in customer service. Chatbot applications are among the most mature areas of AI. But enterprises are finding that, while AI chatbots can provide value, they have to be deployed the right way. For online test preparation company Magoosh Inc., that means giving machines license to recommend responses to simple customer service queries, while still maintaining a team of agents who handle more complicated issues. Magoosh uses a customer service bot from DigitalGenius to handle incoming customer service inquiries. The system scans messages for their content and recommends prewritten responses that can be personalized or sent out as is.

The product design challenges of AR on smartphones

So there’s a very real and difficult problem in getting a user to get their phone out while they are in the best place to use your app. Notifications could come via traditional push messages, or the user might think to use the app by seeing something in the real world that they want more information on, and they already know your app can help with this. Otherwise, your app just needs to work anywhere, either through using unstructured content, or being able to tap into content that is very, very common. This problem is the No. 1 challenge for all the “AR graffiti” type apps that let people drop notes for others to find. It’s almost impossible for users to be aware that there’s content to find. FYI — this is just another version of the same problem that all the “beacon” hardware companies have, getting the shopper to pull out their phone to discover beneficial content.

Quote for the day:

"As long as you are fighting for what is right instead of who is right, you can never lose!" -- @Rory_Vaden

Daily Tech Digest - September 02, 2017

IBM is teaching AI to behave more like the human brain

Statistical AI (ie machine learning) is capable of mimicking the brain's pattern recognition skills but is garbage at applying logic. Symbolic AI, on the other hand, can leverage logic (assuming it's been trained on the rules of that reasoning system), but is generally incapable of applying that skill in real-time. But what if we could combine the best features of the human brain's computational flexibility with AI's massive processing capability? That's exactly what the team from DeepMind recently tried to do. They've constructed a neural network able to apply relational reasoning to its tasks. It works in much the same way as the brain's network of neurons. While neurons use their various connections with each other to recognize patterns, "We are explicitly forcing the network to discover the relationships that exist" between pairs of objects in a given scenario

Bridging the boardroom’s technology gap

Relevant IT know-how can dramatically change board discussions and perspectives. Some boards employ external experts or consultants to meet this need, but outsourcing this function is an approach that can frequently lack accountability, eschew specific business context, disregard the organization’s technology capabilities, or rely on generic recommendations. Boards can address this deficiency through a three-pronged approach: appointing a business-savvy technologist to the board, taking a more offensive technology position, and considering a technology committee. Although current or former CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and other C-level technology leaders could provide valuable input and perspective to boards, Deloitte’s analysis indicates that only 3 percent of all public companies appointed a technologist to newly opened board seats in 2016

Your Future Smart Home Might Need A Bosch X-Spect Scanner

According to Dr. von Bieren, X-Spect smart homes technology is similar to that of the SCiO scanner. Like the SCiO technology, it can only read the ingredients of orange, not a cupcake. So only homogenous food items need apply. According to c|net, the most unique thing about X-Spect scanner is its ability to read the makeup of fabric and stains. Rich Brown of c|net wrote, “Right now the X-Spect can determine up to two component materials in a piece of fabric, and also let you know their relative proportions. We saw a demo on a blended cotton-poly t-shirt, for example. The creators hope to bring X-Spect to the point where it can read three different materials. It’s not there yet, but it can read four different kinds of stains. I saw it read chocolate and lipstick via a prepared demo at the Bosch booth.”

Security chatbot empowers junior analysts, helps fill cybersecurity gap

Endgame’s Alexa integration — which they believe is a first in the security industry —utilizes natural language understanding to let security analysts simply ask their network what’s going on. They can ask anything from a general check-in to specific queries about attack types, and execute commands to keep their system safe. The idea is that junior analysts can sit, ask questions, and take actionable steps without being crippled because of syntax or query language. "We wanted to tackle the problem of learning language," Filar said. "It's a good way to help move up to a senior analyst more quickly." Though, I did wonder how it would be possible to move up to a senior analyst without learning the programming language. "What we try to do," Filar said, "is provide a framework that can grow with the experience of the analyst.

What to expect from the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

This will be the fourth feature update to Windows 10 in a little over two years. And that pace will continue, with new feature updates (essentially full upgrades) due on a predictable twice-yearly cadence going forward. As with previous feature updates, there will be no last-minute surprises in this update. It's been developed in the open, with dozens of preview releases to members of the Windows Insider Program. For those who haven't been paying close attention, though, this article should get you up to speed quickly. When I looked through my notes from the past few months of testing Windows Insider builds, I was struck by how many changes have made their way into this update. And those changes encompass a wide array of user scenarios, including a healthy assortment aimed at IT pros and developers.

The current state of applied data science

Deep learning is slowly becoming part of the class of algorithms data scientists need to know about. Originally used in computer vision and speech recognition, there are starting to be examples and use cases involving data types and problems that data scientists can relate to. Challenges include choosing the right network architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and casting problems and transforming data so they lend themselves to deep learning. In many cases, users prefer and favor models that are explainable. Given that their underlying mechanisms are somewhat understandable, explainable models are also potentially easier to improve. With the recent rise of deep learning, I’m seeing companies use tools that explain how models produce their predictions and tools that can explain where a model comes from by tracing predictions from the learning algorithm

When AI and security automation become foolish and dangerous

Technology provides significant and material financial incentives over its unpredictable and fallible human counterparts. Perhaps most tellingly, automation is a key component of most vendors’ ROI stories, meaning it’s a powerful tool in the “buy our product and we will save you money” toolbox. But should organizations really be sprinting headlong into automation? There is no question that automation delivers significant value to organizations. Repetitive and boring tasks waste valuable time and result in unhappy and unengaged employees. ... Implementing some automated solutions can prove valuable. However, when it comes to network security, fully automating the tasks of a security analyst can be a dangerous and foolish decision for a variety of reasons.

The Foundation for Modernizing Application Architectures

What’s emerging is microservices – replacing monolithic applications with modular applets that are designed to do specific tasks. While the overall functionality may be the same as the monolithic app it replaces, application maintenance overhead is drastically reduced. It also means new technologies can easily be integrated, and emerging technologies like IoT and the Industrial Internet can become part of the ecosystem. The end result? Microservices architectures creates agility. So why isn’t this happening quickly? Business response to demands for new apps, integrations, business models, and emerging technologies is slow and inefficient because existing IT infrastructure, coupled with the legacy (monolithic) application model, are obstacles to the rapid and scalable delivery of digital transformation initiatives including mobile, cloud and IoT.

Fatal AI mistakes could be prevented by having human teachers

Having a human in the loop doesn’t always stop AI going wrong, however. When Evans tried the same approach with the game Road Runner, the AI overseer wasn’t able to block every big mistake the game-playing AI made. More complicated Atari games would require years of human oversight before agents were able to play without making mistakes. Even a system trained with human oversight is never going to be absolutely safe. It’s hard to know how these systems will behave in circumstances that an AI hasn’t been trained to handle, says Evans. And even the best AI could be led astray by a sloppy human trainer. “This is only as good as the human,” says Evans. If we are to trust robots in the home and hospitals, then we will need to have some guarantees about their safety, says David Abel at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

CI tried, but did not eliminate data center specialists

Perry was surprised to see how many organizations more closely evaluate their mix of on-premises and off-premises compute resources and spending. CI works well in environments with small staff sizes. But growing enterprises still need data center specialists, particularly within companies reluctant to move new workloads to the public cloud. ... Enterprises still need data center specialists in virtualization and, out of this rank, will come specialists in container management as enterprises adopt this technology, Perry said. Applications and software specialists are also in demand, particularly in growing areas such as security and DevOps, Perry said. A generalist position merges traditional specialist roles, such as server administrator or virtualization administrator, particularly if they involve management of CI. To successfully oversee CI, they must understand the storage ecosystem, Perry said.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership matters more in times of uncertainty." -- Wayde Goodall

Daily Tech Digest - September 01, 2017

The Four Laws of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is about innovating business models, not just optimizing business processes Organizations are looking to leverage these digital assets to create new “economic moats.” Warren Buffett, the investor extraordinaire, popularized the term “economic moat.” “Economic moat” refers to a business’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over its competitors (through process and technology innovation and patents) in order to protect its long-term profits and market share from competing firms. As highlighted in the McKinsey Quarterly article titled “Competing In A World Of Sectors Without Borders,” organizations are embracing digital transformation to knock down traditional industry boundaries and disrupt conventional business models

How to do open source right: LinkedIn shows the way

If you want to know how to do open source the smart way, pay attention to LinkedIn. It has delivered some of the industry’s most impressive open source software, most recently its Cruise Control load-balancing tool for Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform also developed by LinkedIn that is used to build real-time data pipelines and streaming apps in big data applications. Cruise Control exemplifies the serious open source savvy on LinkedIn’s part, with its extensibility and generality. Although meant for general consumption, Cruise Control didn’t have a real community around it; it had been developed by and for LinkedIn. But LinkedIn built Cruise Control in a way that would translate beyond LinkedIn’s needs. Many such projects make the rookie mistake of solving only their creators’ needs; LinkedIn didn’t make that mistake.

How Does AI And Regulation Play Into Fintech?

“I think the biggest change is that people are going to receive financial help before they even know it,” says WIRED Money 2017 speaker and CEO of online investment management company Nutmeg Nick Hungerford. “It’s a combination of big data and artificial intelligence. We’re going to be able to be more intelligent about people’s spending habits, their health, their lifestyles. [We’re] going to get more effective at predicting what they’re going to need for different scenarios of spending and saving. AI predicts when people are likely to get married, when you are likely to have a baby, etc. So in five years, we should be really good at giving people financial advice before they even realise they need it,” says Hungerford. AI is also being experimented with traditional financial institutions.

Disturbing trends revealed by the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

As more and more enterprise systems have moved to the cloud, more and more malicious attacks on cloud services have followed. According the Microsoft report, there was a "300 percent increase in Microsoft cloud-based user accounts attacked year-over-year." The attacks on cloud services can be traced to all countries of the world, but in the case of Azure specifically, some 35% originated in China, with another 32% coming from the United States. Ransomware, while garnering many headlines in 2017, actually affects enterprises from various parts of the world much differently. For example, ransomware is a major headache for many European countries, while the activity is almost trivial for the United States, China, and Japan. However, that does not mean those counties are not vulnerable—criminal activity changes just as fast as technology changes.

Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work

AI will eliminate some forms of this digital labour—software, for instance, has got better at transcribing audio. Yet AI will also create demand for other types of digital work. The technology may use a lot of computing power and fancy mathematics, but it also relies on data distilled by humans. For autonomous cars to recognise road signs and pedestrians, algorithms must be trained by feeding them lots of video showing both. That footage needs to be manually “tagged”, meaning that road signs and pedestrians have to be marked as such. This labelling already keeps thousands busy. Once an algorithm is put to work, humans must check whether it does a good job and give feedback to improve it. A service offered by CrowdFlower, a micro-task startup, is an example of what is called “human in the loop”.

Acer's Switch 7 could overpower the Surface Pro and MacBook Pro

What's really important, though, is what's inside. Acer has somehow managed to squeeze Intel's 8th-gen Core i7 CPU, along with Nvidia's new GeForce MX150, into the slender chassis. The CPU is quad-core with a 15-watt TDP, and Intel says it's up to 40 percent faster in some tasks. Nvidia's GeForce MX150 was actually announced in late May as a replacement for the elderly GeForce 940MX. Few hard specs are available on it, but we do know it uses GDDR5 and is based on the current Pascal architecture used in the GeForce GTX 10-series of cards. ... The combined advantage of Pascal graphics plus a quad-core CPU vs. the dual-core CPUs with integrated graphics—even Iris Plus—means the odds are very good that this new laptop/tablet will handily outperform both Microsoft's Surface Pro and Apple's MacBook Pro 13.

You Are Doing Analytics Wrong: Here Is Why

"If you're just showing me the same data in a new way, how will that show me what I should be thinking about going forward? Is it challenging me to think about how I can optimize my business model? Are there processes I need to tweak? How much money am I leaving on the table? Are we cannibalizing our own revenue? Those are the kinds of questions you should be able to ask of your data," said Kaila. Some organizations have hired a chief analytics officer or a chief data officer to ensure that data can be used as a strategic asset. That person is responsible for bridging the gap between business and IT, orchestrating resources, and driving value from analytics. "Leaders need to ensure accountability for insights," said Kaila. "If you do that, you'll be able to align the definitions, the processes and ultimately how you operationalize predictive insights."

Cloud computing and the costs: a love-hate relationship

Cloud users underestimate the amount of their wasted spend. While costs often appear low in the public cloud space at first glance, especially when temporarily using capacity, these costs quickly pile up when occupying resources on a permanent basis. Sizing plays another important role. Whether it’s regarding oversizing VMs or commissioning high-performance storage for non-critical data that is accessed infrequently, there are plenty of examples of how to put on “cloud fat”. While respondents estimate that around 30 percent is going down the drain, RightScale has measured actual waste to be between 30 and 45 percent. Despite an increased focus on cost management, only a minority of companies are taking critical actions to put governance in place with a quarter of all respondents citing managing cloud spend as their biggest challenge.

How AI Makes Brand Personalities Come to Life

It’s really interesting because we think about AI and robots replacing the workforce, but if you’re a writer, it’s a great time. If you’re a user-experience designer, this is like a renaissance because UX people have been stuck designing mobile apps and websites since the beginning. But now, we move into this voice and conversational space, which is completely a new frontier. For people who are studying philosophy and ethics, there’s a whole other new kind of movement called ethical engineering. A lot of these big tech companies are going to need to bring in people who truly understand ethics and policy and humanity. I think there are going to be some new jobs that emerge. For creative agencies, it’s an awesome time to innovate your creative product.…

Exclusive interview with Starling Bank’s founder and CEO, Anne Boden

There seems to be a misconception that traditional banks and financial services are more secure than new fintechs. There is that idea of a grandiose building with large Roman columns, and the image itself is very secure and solid. Traditional banks are built on core systems that were coded in the 1980s and ’90s, and a huge fear of overhauling these systems has to do with the fear of losing security. Our stack is built on AWS and there is some hesitation when it comes to cloud computing. Is the cloud safe? Where is it? How do you know that someone can't just retrieve vast quantities of data if there isn't a physical place to guard? But luckily, cloud computing is also highly securitised. There are a lot of companies that work specifically on cloud security such as F5, not to mention that Cisco and Microsoft also provide their own cloud security services.

Quote for the day:

The first step is the most important, if we never start we have no chance to finish. -- Gordon Tredgold

Daily Tech Digest - August 30, 2017

Citi Speaks: State-Backed Cryptocurrency Key to Blockchain Adoption

State-backed cryptocurrencies are key to the adoption of blockchain technology, according to an executive at investment banking group Citi. In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, the bank's recently appointed head of core cash management for Asia-Pacific, Morgan McKenney, positioned its new CitiConnect blockchain project within a larger context – one in which the ultimate success of distributed ledger technology depends on the advent of fiat currencies issued on a blockchain. According to McKenney, every payment method has an environment in which it's best suited, and to fully unlock the project's potential – and any number of blockchain environments – cryptocurrency is the most suitable payment method.

3 steps to create a corporate vision for digital transformation

Enterprises often transform around the notion of "What should our company look like?", Witcher said. Instead, they need to build a vision around tangible value they can create within customers' experiences along the journey. Leading companies are not building business strategies that have a digital component—rather, they are digitizing every aspect of their business strategy, Witcher said. "When the corporate vision is not clear, that impacts the speed of adoption of both senior management and middle management," said Gianni Giacomelli, senior vice president and business leader for digital solutions at Genpact. "People will not act just because technology is ready. There's a big component of corporate urgency that needs to be created from the corporate vision. It's really important."

The NIS Directive: the implications for UK technology businesses

For digital service providers, the UK government has confirmed that the NIS Directive applies, in a light touch manner, to: online marketplaces, online search engines, and cloud computing services. The government has proposed detailed definitions of each type of digital service provider: An online marketplace is defined as “a platform that acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, facilitating the sale of goods and services.” Online marketplaces are only in scope if sales are made on the platform itself, price comparison sites and online retailers are excluded. ... There should be confidence that the security principles are met regardless of whether an organisation or a third party delivers the service,” says the consultation, emphasising the importance of “ensuring that appropriate measures are employed where third-party services are used”.

How safe are your passwords? Real life rules for businesses to live by

While I find forced password changes annoying, waiting until you know there is a password compromise to change passwords is ignorant. For example, you will not be aware when people use their organizational credentials for Pokemon Go accounts, as many do. If that site is compromised and an employee has reused company passwords on it, your organization is now vulnerable. Even if the employee doesn’t use your organization’s email address, your organization is still vulnerable in a targeted attack if the password was reused across accounts. If you do not force periodic password changes, your organization is vulnerable as long as the employee has a valid account at the organization. The solution to exponentially reduce the risk to these attacks is to implement multifactor authentication.

What Can Manchester United Teach Us About Fintech?

Rather than learning to predict things in a kind of hardcoded, supervised manner, deep learning techniques operate more like a human brain, filtering through data and learning the important signals. For example, a person driving down a road that hits a pothole will probably slow down; they don't have to hit 100 of them. In order to try and encode the social science component of why a person might click on a certain advert, or trade a certain stock, deep learning algorithms use layers of nodes, some of which filter lots of data into summaries and then learn to make assumptions from these. "Actually summarising data is an easier problem than making predictions," said Chakravorty. "It's about trying to learn how people trade ... "

4 Lessons Businesses Can Learn From This Smart Lock Malfunction

Problems stemmed from an over-the-air firmware update that affected the locks’ functionality and prevented the devices from connecting to the company’s servers. Many companies, including Apple, often announce the availability of new updates and let users decide when and if to download them for their gadgets. It’s even possible to schedule updates, so they don’t occur when people are trying to use the technology. According to feedback from people affected by this smart lock debacle, they got the firmware update with no warning, similar to the way iTunes users suddenly found new U2 albums in their libraries without indicating they wanted the songs. In that case, Apple broke with tradition and delivered the media automatically, much to the dismay of some recipients who complained that the album ate up their internet data and that they didn’t like the band’s music.

How Hackers Hide Their Malware: Advanced Obfuscation

Criminals know about sandboxes, and some of the latest evasion tricks specifically target sandboxes. They include trying to fingerprint sandbox systems, delayed or timed execution, and even detection of human interactions. If the malware can detect a sandbox using these techniques, it doesn't run to avoid analysis. Furthermore, underground malware sellers have already created protectors that can detect some sandboxes. However, some advanced detection solutions take this into account, too. Rather than just using off-the-shelf virtualization environments, some solutions might use full system code emulation and create sandbox environments where they can see every instruction a malicious program sends to the physical CPU or memory

Enterprises Are Leading The Internet of Things Innovation

According to Kranz, the adoption of IoT has been broad. A few years ago, VCs were conservative in terms of investments in IoT. Today, Cisco has 14,000 IoT customers across multiple industries. An example is smart and connected cities and their use of IoT. The VC community is starting to invest more in IoT. “According to my own observations and research houses such as Ovum or McKinsey, IoT has been mostly adopted in manufacturing, logistics, transportation but also in retail, healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, and even sports and entertainment,” said Kranz. Kranz spoke about the tech industry and the cycle of reinvention measured in 307 years. Traditional business models, with vertically integrated business models, are ripe for disruption based on the rate of innovation.

Artificial intelligence cyber attacks are coming – but what does that mean?

AI-enabled attackers will also be much faster to react when they encounter resistance, or when cybersecurity experts fix weaknesses that had previously allowed entry by unauthorized users. The AI may be able to exploit another vulnerability, or start scanning for new ways into the system – without waiting for human instructions. This could mean that human responders and defenders find themselves unable to keep up with the speed of incoming attacks. It may result in a programming and technological arms race, with defenders developing AI assistants to identify and protect against attacks – or perhaps even AI’s with retaliatory attack capabilities. Operating autonomously could lead AI systems to attack a system it shouldn’t, or cause unexpected damage.

Interest in cyberinsurance grows as cybercrime targets small businesses

Cybersecurity insurance is not yet a household name. It’s not required by law, nor is it as commonplace as other types of insurance like fire, flood and general liability coverage. But, experts said, it may rival those others in importance in today’s virtual landscape, where everything from employee and customer information to financial records are stored online. Small and medium-size businesses are hit by nearly two-thirds of all cyberattacks — about 4,000 a day, according to IBM. “A lot of these hackers are smart; they’re not going after the big guys. They’re not going after Target and Sony,” said Keith Moore, CEO of CoverHound, a San Francisco insurance broker that started selling cybersecurity coverage last year.

Quote for the day:

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Daily Tech Digest - August 29, 2017

Get ready for new storage technologies and media

Intel says its elegant, narrow rack-oriented design will ultimately allow for 1 pertabyte of storage in a 1U rack. (A petabyte is a thousand terabytes (TBs), which is a thousand gigabytes.) That would be enough to hold 70 years of uninterrupted entertainment, or 300,000 movies, the technology supplier says. For comparison, to obtain a petabyte of storage using 10TB capacity HDDs, one would need a 100-bay 4U server, according to Techgage, which wrote about Intel’s announcement earlier this month. ... Experts say massive levels of data density savings will be required in the future because our insatiable demand for data is going to overrun existing storage tools available. Indeed, storage density improvements might become as important for tech development in our data-intensive future as battery chemistry advancements are thought to be now

India and Pakistan hit by spy malware - cybersecurity firm

To install the malware, Symantec found, the attackers used decoy documents related to security issues in South Asia. The documents included reports from Reuters, Zee News, and the Hindu, and were related to military issues, Kashmir, and an Indian secessionist movement. The malware allows spies to upload and download files, carry out processes, log keystrokes, identify the target’s location, steal personal data, and take screenshots, Symantec said, adding that the malware was also being used to target Android devices. In response to frequent cyber-security incidents, India in February established a center to help companies and individuals detect and remove malware. The center is operated by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

8 Hidden Android Nougat Features You Still Have Time To Try

To run two webpages in split-screen, open Chrome and ensure you’ve got at least two tabs open. Long-press your Android overview button (it’s the one shaped like a square, right next to the home button) to launch split-screen mode as you normally would. Now tap the overflow menu button in Chrome, and select “Move to other window” (see screenshot above). The tab you have up will move over to the other side of the split as a second instance of Chrome. When you’re done, exit split-screen mode by dragging the divider to one side. The tab will go back into your single Chrome instance. You can also close the tab and open a different app in split-screen mode.

You don't lack time to innovate. You lack allocation and purpose.

One of the factors that dictates what people do as consultants is the availability of charge codes. Everyone knows that lawyers, for example, typically bill their time in 15 minute increments. They need not only to bill their time in these time segments, but they also need a "charge code" - some mechanism to associate the time they just spent to a client, a business development activity or some overhead charge. As consultants, most of us are no different. Regardless of how you ultimately bill the client (time and materials, fixed fee, gain-sharing or other mechanisms) almost every consultant and consulting firm I'm aware of tracks consulting time. I'm sure the same is true in many other industries where people are accountable for a time sheet at the end of a week or month.

Open Source at the Heart of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud Development Efforts

Helm is an open source Microsoft tool added with the acquisition of Deis in April. It's a package manager for Kubernetes to keep track of resources, according to Michelle Noorali, a senior software engineer for Microsoft Azure and the core maintainer of the Kubernetes Helm project. Noorali explained that a package in Helm is called a "Chart," which consists of metadata, Kubernetes resource definitions, configurations and documentation. It's a tool to ease developers into Kubernetes, which is "still really hard" to master, she said. Microsoft also has an experimental open source project to streamline Kubernetes development on the Azure Container Service called "Draft." It will detect the language used in the source tree and containerize an app, according to Gabe Monroy

Weave your cybersecurity tactics into a cohesive strategy

To effectively address SSH key management issues in an agency, IT managers must determine who has access to the most critical infrastructure. It’s important to get control of which SSH key-based access may have root access in the environment and, more importantly, how deep the transitive trust of this access extends. The question to be answered here is, “If I breach one root key, how deeply can I penetrate into the environment?” It’s also important to grasp which SSH key-based trusts are related to service accounts and which are for interactive use. Each key-based trust, regardless of its usage, should be assigned back to an individual owner in the environment to establish accountability. Where SSH user key-based trusts are in use, it is critical to ensure the clear separation of duties.

4 ways to simplify data management

Most petabyte-scale enterprises have significant storage sprawl, with over half managing ten or more different storage systems according to a 2016 survey. As the business ages, storage sprawls out even further and soon IT ends up managing a substantial investment in infrastructure. This infrastructure is valuable, but the challenge is that over time, the difficulty of moving data means much of it is on the wrong resource for current business needs. By virtualizing data with software, enterprises can create a global namespace that makes different storage resources simultaneously available to applications. Once the control path is separated from the data path through virtualization, control can span storage silos. This makes it possible to easily move data without interrupting applications.

Dangerous Android app lets would-be hackers create ransomware

The latest TDK, like those before it, can be found on hacking forums and even in social media advertisements in China. All the user has to do is download the APK and install it and they're ready to build ransomware. The process itself is simple: Just specify a ransom message, an unlock key, the ransomware's app icon, mathematical operations to randomize the code, and an animation to show on the infected machine. After the no-code ransomware builder finishes specifying those few simple options they're prompted to subscribe to the app, which they can do with a one-time payment to the developer. Once paid for, the app purchaser is free to create as many custom ransomware variants as desired. The only thing the app leaves to the ransomware builder is distribution: All it does is provide the APK file.

Managing cyber security as business risk

Majority of organisations in private and public sector currently view cyber security as an IT problem not business risk. Department heads focus on the efficiency for instance, IT departments solely focus on network and database infrastructure and upper level management focuses on corporate performance while neglecting the growing security needs within the organisation. Also, the public entities hold a wealth of government and citizen information to ensure service delivery meanwhile ignoring the prevalent threats this data is exposed to. The above raises the question, who should be concerned? Most of the security issues faced within organisations may not necessarily be as a result of poor systems – organisations have established a number strong and well protected systems

Interpersonal Incompetence Costs Organizations Time & Money

Thirty years of experience and research has taught me that there is no relationship between organizational title and interpersonal competence. It has also taught me that the costs of silence are both calculable and catastrophic. Consider our study in health care where we found that 90 percent of nurses don’t speak up to a physician even when they know a patient’s safety is at risk. We’ve also studied workplace safety. We found that 93 percent of people say their organization is at risk of an accident waiting to happen because people are either unwilling or unable to speak up. In our recent study, we wanted to see if we could further quantify the cost of this silence. Our goal was to calculate a per-conversation price tag to show just how much it costs when an employee decides to stay silent—rather than voice a major concern.

Quote for the day:

"Peace isn't merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice." -- Harrison Ford

Daily Tech Digest - August 28, 2017

The far-reaching benefits of SD-WAN improve network edge to inner layers

SD-WAN's original mission was to combine private-network VPN tunnels, like MPLS, and tunnels over the internet to build a VPN that could cover sites too small and numerous to be served by MPLS VPNs alone. Because of this combined virtual-wires mission, SD-WAN must sit at the network edge. An SD-WAN product usually has several network-side connections and one connection to the user's on-premises network. An SD-WAN device on the customer's premises takes on several popular forms: The original combines internet and MPLS VPN; another uses multiple internet service provider connections or internet pathways. One of the benefits of SD-WAN is to tie all the pathways together to create a tunnel network that links all of the sites on an organization's network.

12 Bad Habits That Slow IT to a Crawl

Every additional committee member slows down decisions; more than five members and progress slows to a crawl as the possibility of consensus disappears entirely. It’s worse if committee members consider themselves not IT leaders but representatives of a constituency that otherwise might not get its fair share. This sort of committee will argue forever instead of solving shared problems. Then there’s the meeting schedule. It’s the metronome that sets the pace for every project the committee governs. If a committee meets monthly, then anything waiting for a decision waits a month. How many projects do you have under way that could thrive with a bottleneck like that? How to solve this? Make culture the new governance. Think of it as the lane markers on the road, relegating steering committees to the role of guardrails — when all else fails they’re there to keep IT from plummeting into the chasm, but only when all else fails.

Five pitfalls to avoid in your hybrid cloud strategy

"Most of our clients have accepted that hybrid is their end state," said Gartner analyst Mindy Cancila. "But what I find is that very few of them have clarity around what that means that they need to do. And so, while most organizations are recognizing that they're going to adopt some type of public cloud services, their data centers are not likely to go away overnight." ... And rather than determining the true purpose of the cloud in their company, "a lot of organizations look at hybrid cloud and say 'Okay, this is what everyone's doing, so this is what I'm going to do,'" said Forrester's Nelson. For the best chance at hybrid cloud success, companies should "have direction, have priorities, have the core values of what you're trying to achieve with cloud very clearly articulated," Nelson said, "and revisit those plans over time."

How to get started with Akka.Net

When working in Akka.Net, you use actors and messages to model your problem. In Akka.Net, an actor is an object with some specific behavior. While actors do have internal state, they don’t have any shared mutable state. .... Actors are identified by addresses. They derive from the ActorBase class and in turn they can create child actors. Actors communicate with each other by passing messages asynchronously. Essentially, an actor receives a message and then reacts to it either by processing it or by passing another message to another actor to get the job done. Note that the messages in Akka.Net are processed sequentially, one at a time, in the order in which they arrive. Since actors can be running locally or on a remote server, a common message exchange format is needed. Akka.Net messages are immutable. They can be instances of a string, an integer, or even a custom class.

4 steps to prepare employees for robotic process automation

Unquestionably, the quest for cost reduction is a driver behind automation adoption. And with good reason. The ROI on a typical investment is more than 500 percent. Yet, many don’t understand from the outset the impact automation can have on speed-to-market and revenue cycle improvements and how it can lead to new opportunities for employees to perform higher-value work. Train and reskill employees to become process assessment experts and help them acquire skills related to managing virtual workforces. Case in point: a premier insurance company recently deployed RPA and was immediately able to bind more policies faster and more accurately simply because it could process broker requests for quotes by eliminating tedious work that underwriters had been performing.

Counterpoint: The Data Warehouse is Still Alive

Still data warehouses meet the information needs of people and continue to provide value. Many people use them, depend on them, and don’t want them to be replaced with a data lake. Data lakes serve analytics and big data needs well. They offer a rich source of data for data scientists and self-service data consumers. But not all data and information workers want to become self-service consumers. Many – perhaps the majority – continue to need well-integrated, systematically cleansed, easy to access relational data that includes a large body of time-variant history. These people are best served with a data warehouse. The data warehouse needs to be modernized. Migrating to the cloud resolves many data warehousing challenges. Scalability and elasticity are well-known cloud benefits. Cloud data warehousing also brings benefits of managed infrastructure, cost savings, rapid deployment, and fast processing.

IT powerhouses try to come from behind in enterprise IoT

The strategy, then, is to enter into as many partnerships as possible. So what’s happening is an “interleaving” of OT and IT, leading to products like Predix being able to run on a Cisco edge router, or in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. “It’s a much more promiscuous partnering strategy being deployed,” Renaud said. “A lot of these legacy OT vendors are beginning to partner with these IT vendors.” Importantly, these partnerships are rarely exclusive – which helps ensure interoperability between a company’s existing infrastructure and whatever new IoT platforms it wants to embrace. Open source, as well, is a major contributor to this diversity, and Hung urged businesses to embrace the model. “Make sure that whatever solution you’re looking at is an open solution … that has a strong developer ecosystem around it, so you’re not relying on any single vendor,” he said.

Security leaders need better visibility of risk before the board asks

While many CEOs are beginning to understand the effects that cyberattacks can have on reputation and the bottom line, many are still struggling with a lack of visibility of the risk. They often look to the security leaders within their organization for answers. One statistic from our annual SailPoint Market Pulse Survey would likely shock many executives: ... This lack of visibility is concerning. In our last conversation, we talked about the ever-growing complexity of today’s IT environments. New exposure points are emerging every day, due to the proliferation of applications, user types and unstructured data to trends such as Shadow IT and BYOD. And still, very few organizations have visibility into who their users are — employees, contractors and business partners — and what those users have access to (and more importantly, if that access is appropriate).

Meet Fitbit Ionic: A Little Smartwatch A Lot Of Fitness Tracker

With Fitbit's new Ionic fitness tracker, health and fitness still take center stage, but Ionic is more of an all-around wearable than any Fitbit that came before. Ionic represents the first fruits of the company’s Pebble, Coin, and Vector shopping spree: You can now install third-party apps, make payments, and you can store hundreds of songs for offline listening. The biggest change for Fitbit is the new open system, as the company has leveraged its Pebble acquisition to create a platform for third-party apps. Only a handful of apps will be available at launch, but Fitbit will soon be opening up an software development kit so developers can tap into Ionic’s sensors to build apps and watch faces just like they on watchOS and Android Wear.

IT heroes: Use customer service to build business relationships

The not-so-subtle message is that decreeing relationship change simply does not work. Of course, senior leaders must set broad objectives, but goals alone do not create results. Making pronouncements is easy, but actually driving deep cooperation across departments is more difficult. The need to change is part of a broader shift inside IT, striving to say "yes" in response to user requests rather than the traditional "default to no" mentality. During a recent conference, I spoke with several IT managers -- these are not CIOs - who are using customer service as the model for defining relationships between business stakeholders and IT. FinancialForce invited me to their Community Live 2017 event in Las Vegas to record these conversations as part of the CXOTalk series of conversations with innovators.

Quote for the day:

"I'd rather live with a good question than a bad answer." -- Aryeh Frimer

Daily Tech Digest - August 27, 2017

Applying Enterprise Architecture Rightly

This article takes reference of TOGAF for the discussion. While practicing TOGAF, it’s always implied that TOGAF is a suggestive approach and NOT a prescriptive approach. Xoriant has recently forayed into TOGAF with the help of newly formed TOGAF Certified Architects and is committed to provide solutions to the clients on the proven success stories. Many a times, while interacting with business houses, requirements always start with a single line or sometimes, even a clause, e.g., – We need ERP. This is where a business canvas is provisioned and plans are made to evaluate the opportunity and provide information on that. Considering entire lifecycle of a business opportunity, it’s very important to put the right starting step so that Service Provider does not incur losses.

Issues necessitate Change - Evolution of Enterprise Architecture

The drive for continuous improvement and Information Technology alignment demanded further improvements in the way we thought about architecture – moving ever into the task of understanding an organizations business issues. Other issues that drove changes, such as the following – no chronology implied. Corporate espionage, whether stealing secrets of an organization or stealing information about customers, where taking advantage of corporation vulnerabilities drove the need to look at those vulnerabilities holistically – that is looking at people, processes, and technology. Architects and builders changed to look beyond just IT to address this area.

Where Enterprise Architecture and Project Management Intersect

Enterprise Architecture is not about writing or specifying software code or systems - it is about architecting optimized business processes and systems based on management's strategies for the organization. While software development certainly has its place in organizations, that is an IT function best left to IT and more IT-specific solution, data, and information architects. Since EA is evolving away from IT-centricity and IT project teams, it doesn't make much sense to make them members of IT project teams. However, it may make sense for IT project teams to utilize EAs as subject matter experts - who are advisors and give guidance to specific projects, but are not members of the specific teams OR responsible for any of their scope, timeline, or deliverables.

OpenJDK may tackle Java security gaps with secretive group

The vulnerability group and Oracle’s internal security teams would work together, and it may occasionally need to work with external security organizations. The group would be unusual in several respects, and thus requires an exemption from OpenJDK bylaws. Due to the sensitive nature of its work, membership in the group would be more selective, there would be a strict communication policy, and members or their employers would need to sign both a nondisclosure and a license agreement, said Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle. “These requirements do, strictly speaking, violate the OpenJDK bylaws,” Reinhold said. “The governing board has discussed this, however, and I expect that the board will approve the creation of this group with these exceptional requirements.”

First Robocop to Join Dubai Police Force

That’s right, the time for the Robocop to leave the sci-fi land and enter reality… or sort of. A couple of years ago, Dubai’s police promised that for 2017 they would have enlisted their first robot police officer, and they have delivered. Built by the Spanish robotics company PAL Robotics, the police officer, known as REEM, was introduce to the public during the Gulf Information Security and Expo Conference. .. Although this is fascinating news, it’s still reality and reality is never as fun as fiction so this Robocop is a little duller. It’s not a cyborg half human, half robot, it’s just a robot with batteries. He cannot chase criminals like said before it has wheels, not legs, and it’s unarmed. However, even if REEM doesn’t have the cool design and features that we are used to seeing on the big screen, it means a tremendous achievement for science.

IoT: Penetrating the Possibilities of a Data Driven Economy

With manufacturing units now being able to communicate with each other through the deployment of IoT system solutions, analysis of facility performance metrics can be performed in real time. Management executives, if they want, can also resolve the performance monitoring to shop floor levels, which helps provide revealing manufacturing insights. Serving as an example is the manufacturing giant, Caterpillar. The company has deployed the SAP Leonardo system, an IIoT technology, across all its operation facilities. The system furnishes real time information about manufacturing data, energy utilization data, machine performances, and data regarding the production consumables. Combining altogether, the company executives can have a 360-degree view of the manufacturing processes which leads to better tactical decision making.

Why are the stats on women in tech actually getting worse?

Girls look up to their role models, we have a number of women role models in entrepreneurship and other fields but there’s a significant lack of women role models in technology. Only 23.5% of computer science degrees were awarded to women last year in one of the biggest universities in the States. Some seniors found that they knew of few female computer scientists working in the professional world. This can be a reason why girls aren’t interested in this field as much. This can be changed as well, female representation should not be lacking in any field, especially, the ever growing area of technology. The seniors at Stanford have come up with an organization which dedicates itself in telling stories of women who work in programming, the SHE++ aspire women to take up arms in the technology field and to connect with women in this field as well.

Microsoft is making a blockchain that’s fit for business

Note that Coco is a framework, not a ledger; in fact it uses other ledgers. Ethereum is working already, and Intel along with J P Morgan Chase are porting their ledgers to Coco – plus other blockchain ledgers will also integrate with it. You can also choose what algorithm you want to use to achieve consensus. In one test using the Ethereum ledger in Coco, the network delivered 1,500-1,600 transactions per second with latency between 100-200 milliseconds – far faster than Ethereum itself running on the same hardware. Russinovich says Coco will also scale to networks with hundreds of thousands of participants. Because each transaction is only calculated once, time-sensitive or restricted data isn’t a problem either.

What Is Blockchain? A Primer For Finance Professionals

Now imagine that every time you send the monthly living allowance, you laid down a “block” with the transaction information carved into it. Both you and your child can see the block, confirming that the money was sent and received. ... Together, they create a record of all transactions with your future college graduate. When you get old and infirm, you can point to the chain, show your kid how much money you paid for college, and demand that they invest a similar amount in a high-quality nursing home. This is, more or less, how blockchain works. Each block is a record of a monetary transaction. The chain is a shared accounting ledger that is visible to all parties across multiple networks, or “nodes.” Every new transaction is verified by all nodes and, if valid, added to all copies of the ledger—in other words, a new “block” is added to the “chain.”

5 essentials for building the perfect Internet of Things beast

An IoT platform has more elements, and therefore is more complex, than a typical technology platform many are used to, they observe. These new platforms need to reach out to all the devices, sensors and applications and their underlying technology as well. "Look at the whole technology environment, not just the applications," the McKinsey authors advise. "Use fungible/off-the-shelf technology for the things that are less critical." Remember, too, that IoT is a different beast for every industry, or for every company for that matter. For a sportswear company, it may mean sensor-loaded sneakers. For an manufacturer, it means embedding sensors into production-floor tools. For an insurance company, it means planting telematics sensors in policyholders' cars.

Quote for the day:

"Sometimes life takes an unexpected wrong turn in the right direction." -- Unknown

Daily Tech Digest - August 26, 2017

Disaster Recovery Vs. Security Recovery Plans: Why You Need Separate Strategies

A security recovery plan is designed to stop, learn, and then correct the incident. "A disaster recovery plan may follow similar steps, but nomenclature would not likely use 'detection' to describe a fire or flood event, nor would there be much in the way of analytics," says Peter Fortunato, a manager in the risk and business advisory practice at New England-based accounting firm Baker Newman Noyes."Further, not many disasters require the collection of evidence." Another risk in merging plans is the possibility of gaining unwanted public attention. "For instance, invoking a disaster recovery plan often requires large-scale notifications going out to key stakeholders," Merino says.

The Future of Public Cloud Storage for Big Data

Just as happened with Moore’s law when silicon chips met transistors, public cloud and big data are creating exponential effects. A recent research predicts that public cloud prices for big data processing and storage will decrease by half every few years while processing power will double. Public cloud skeptics predict that costs of big data storage in the public cloud will be the same or increase slightly in 10 years. however, this not true as the costs are expected to decrease significantly. On the other hand, the costs of upgrading big data software will increase. in a few years, Hadoop data lake will need to be upgraded. Right now, data scientists are preferring multiple versions of Spark, indicating the beginning of on-premise headaches. This can only get worse as Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft pursue a serverless strategy.

5 Industries AI Will Disrupt in the Next 10 Years

It's difficult to talk about AI without evaluating its place in the ecosystem. Loosely speaking, it starts with the Internet of Things, in which objects are connected to the internet and used to gather data. Once enough data has been gathered, it passes the arbitrary threshold and becomes "Big Data", which AI is used to interpret. When there are so many data points that no human could ever process them all, artificial intelligence becomes the only real alternative. But AI doesn't always know what it's looking for, which is where machine learning comes in. Loosely speaking, that's the process of using AI to analyze data in such a way that it 'teaches' itself to interpret it. AI disruption, then, is largely going to come in the form of new ways of processing and interpreting data that have never before been available. Here are just five of the industries that AI is set to disrupt.

3 Amazing Ways AI is Going to Wipe Out Cyber Crime!

Ultimately it comes down to the Machine Learning experts, who are the main players behind "educating" the machines. Digital signature, authentication, hiding the IP, masking identity, encryption, firewall, etc have already been implemented by various firms... but what new strategies can machine learning discover? Deep machine learning can apply various algorithms to identify the malicious activities taking place on the network. It can be determined by finding unusual patterns interacting with the system infrastructure. You might have seen Google asking you to verify if you are not a robot. You click on some of the images and then it lets you browse. When you browse Google for long hours on end, this is the common activity that occurs.

Security professionals name top causes of breaches

While this finding underlines the importance of user education and training, the respondents said human error is exacerbated by understaffed security teams and a flood of alerts and false positives. This highlights the negative impact of companies struggling to recruit cyber security teams in the face of a worldwide shortage of people with information security skills and the need for greater staff support. This shortage of cyber defenders with the right skills is further underlined by the fact 43% of respondents said technology detected the attack, but the security team took no action, while another 41% said a combination of technology and human error was to blame. Respondents also blamed a lack of information resources to understand and mitigate attacks, with 42% saying they are left to figure them out themselves.

Leveraging Advanced Analytics to Power Digital Transformation

Recent conversations with Walker Stemple of Intel’s @intelAI organization got me thinking about where and how organizations can leverage “advanced analytics” to power their business models. Now “advanced analytics” is a broad definition, but I have included the following analytics in that definition: Regression, Clustering, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing. And while these “classifications” seem to change on a regular basis (sometimes due to us getting smarter; sometimes due to non-value-add marketing hype), it is critical that tomorrow’s business leaders understand where and how to apply these advanced analytics to power their business models.

Ukraine Central Bank Detects Massive Attack Preparation

The National Bank of Ukraine - the country's central bank - declined to share a copy of the letter with Information Security Media Group, but confirmed that it had alerted banks to a new, potentially major attack. "In order to prevent cyber attacks, the National Bank of Ukraine consistently cooperates with banking sector participants, the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSCIPU), as well as relevant units of the Security Service of Ukraine and the National Police of Ukraine," a spokesman for the National Bank of Ukraine tells ISMG. "On August 11, the NBU promptly informed banks about new malicious code, its characteristics, indicators of compromise and the need to take preventive measures to prevent the networks from being attacked by malicious codes."

Looking beyond the hype of robotic process automation

RPA is particularly appealing for companies that are juggling with millions or even billions of transactions a day. With such an overwhelming amount to deal with, they often struggle to effectively manage important tasks like addressing customer requests, processing files, moving information between different systems, allocating work and making decisions. But RPA promises to help some organizations alleviate the challenge and operate more efficiently by automating, and thus accelerating, transaction processing. They can then provide greater customer service, which inspires continued loyalty and has a direct, positive impact on a business’ bottom line. ... The promise of RPA is creating massive hype in the market, which is being leveraged by RPA vendors to position their products as the “silver bullet” for any company looking to streamline and optimize operations.

What Is Data Mining? How Analytics Uncovers Insights

Data mining comes with its share of risks and challenges. As with any technology that involves the use of potentially sensitive or personally identifiable information, security and privacy are among the biggest concerns. At a fundamental level, the data being mined needs to be complete, accurate, and reliable; after all, you’re using it to make significant business decisions and often to interact with the public, regulators, investors, and business partners. Modern forms of data also require new kinds of technologies, such as for bringing together data sets from a variety of distributed computing environments (aka big data integration) and for more complex data, such as images and video, temporal data, and spatial data.

What is Rust? Safe, fast, and easy software development

Rust started as a Mozilla research project partly meant to reimplement key components of the Firefox browser. A few key reasons drove that decision: Firefox deserved to make better use of modern, multicore processors; and the sheer ubiquity of web browsers means they need to be safe to use. But those benefits are needed by all software, not just browsers, which is why Rust evolved into a language project from a browser project. Rust accomplishes its safety, speed, and ease of use through the following characteristics: Rust satisfies the need for speed. Rust code compiles to native machine code across multiple platforms. Binaries are self-contained, with no runtime, and the generated code is meant to perform as well as comparable code written in C or C++.

Quote for the day:

"No great manager or leader ever fell from heaven, its learned not inherited." -- Tom Northup