High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) delivers impressive performance gains
In addition to widening the bus in order to boost bandwidth, HBM technology
shrinks down the size of the memory chips and stacks them in an elegant new
design form. HBM chips are tiny when compared to graphics double data rate
(GDDR) memory, which it was originally designed to replace. 1GB of GDDR memory
chips take up 672 square millimeters versus just 35 square millimeters for 1GB
of HBM. Rather than spreading out the transistors, HBM is stacked up to 12
layers high and connected with an interconnect technology called ‘through
silicon via’ (TSV). The TSV runs through the layers of HBM chips like an
elevator runs through a building, greatly reducing the amount of time data bits
need to travel. With the HBM sitting on the substrate right next to the CPU or
GPU, less power is required to move data between CPU/GPU and memory. The CPU and
HBM talk directly to each other, eliminating the need for DIMM sticks. “The
whole idea that [we] had was instead of going very narrow and very fast, go very
wide and very slow,” Macri said.
3 forces shaping the evolution of ERP
If there was any hesitation about moving to cloud-based ERP, it was quashed as
the COVID crisis erupted, and corporate workplaces became scattered across
countless home-based offices. On-premises ERP is seen as “not as scalable as
people thought,” says Sharon Bhalaru, partner at accounting and technology
consulting firm Armanino LLP. “We’re seeing a move to cloud-based systems,” to
support remote employees who need to perform HR, financial and accounting tasks
remotely. ... Next-generation ERP platforms “give companies real-time
transparency with respect to sales, inventory, production, and financials,” the
Boston Consulting Group analysts wrote. “Powerful data-driven analytics enables
more agile decisions, such as adjustments to the supply chain to improve
resilience. Robust e-commerce capabilities help companies better engage with
online customers before and after a sale. And a lean ERP core and cloud-first
approach increase deployment speed.” ... Unprecedented and ongoing supply chain
disruptions underscore the need for greater visibility, more predictable lead
times, alternative supply sources, and faster response to disruptions.
Interpol arrests thousands in global cyber fraud crackdown
The operation’s targets included telephone scammers, long-distance romance
scammers, email fraudsters and other connected financial criminals, identified
through a prior intelligence operation using Interpol’s secure global comms
network, sharing data on suspects, suspicious bank accounts, unlawful
transactions, and communications means such as phone numbers, email addresses,
fake websites and IP addresses. “Telecom and BEC fraud are sources of serious
concern for many countries and have a hugely damaging effect on economies,
businesses and communities,” said Rory Corcoran. “The international nature of
these crimes can only be addressed successfully by law enforcement working
together beyond borders, which is why Interpol is critical to providing police
the world over with a coordinated tactical response.” Duan Daqi, added: “The
transnational and digital nature of different types of telecom and social
engineering fraud continues to present grave challenges for local police
authorities, because perpetrators operate from a different country or even
continent than their victims and keep updating their fraud schemes.
Is Cyber Essentials Enough to Secure Your Organisation?
If you are to have confidence in your security controls, you must implement
defence in depth. This requires a holistic approach to cyber security that
addresses people, processes and technology. Key aspects of this aren’t
addressed in Cyber Essentials, such as staff awareness training, vulnerability
scanning and incident response. Employees are at the heart of any cyber
security system, because they are the ones responsible for handling sensitive
information. If they don’t understand their data protection requirements, it
could result in disaster. Meanwhile, vulnerability scanning ensures that
organisations can spot weaknesses in their systems before a cyber criminal can
exploit them. It’s a more advanced form of protection than is offered with
secure configuration and system updates, enabling organisations to proactively
secure their systems. Conversely, incident response measures give
organisations the tools they need to respond after a security incident has
occurred. Most of the damage caused by a data breach occurs after the initial
intrusion, so a prompt and organised response can be the difference between a
minor disruption and a catastrophe.
Imagining a world without open standards
The open standard makes portability easier for software developers, provides
integrators with choice in the building blocks for solutions, and enables
customers to focus on solving business problems rather than integration
issues. Open standards eliminate the need for organizations to expend energy
wrangling with competitors on defining how systems should work, giving them
the space and time to focus on building and improving how those systems
actually do work. The real benefits, though, are downstream of vendors: open
standards mean that businesses can effectively communicate and collaborate
both internally and with peers. They mean that the expertise built up by a
professional in one market or business can be taken with them wherever they
want to work. They mean that a lack of knowledge resources is not the barrier
that prevents businesses from making the move towards better, more efficient
ways of working. In imagining a world without open standards, then, the image
is one of businesses constantly having to navigate between the walled gardens
of different technology vendors, reskilling and rehiring as they do so, before
they can even begin the serious work of delivering value from that
technology.
Good Habits That Every Programmer Should Have
We can become good at a specific technology by working with a particular
technology for a long time. How can we become an expert in a specific
technology? Learning internals is a great habit that supports us to become an
expert in any technology. For example, after working some time with Git, you
can learn Git internals via the lesser-known plumbing commands. You can make
accurate technical decisions when you understand the internals of your
technology stack. When you learn internals, you will indeed become more
familiar with the limitations and workarounds of a specific technology.
Learning internals also helps us to understand what we are doing with
programming every day. Motivate everyone to learn further about their tools’
internals! ... Sometimes, we derive programming solutions from example code
snippets that we can find on internet forums. It’s a good habit to give credit
to other programmers’ hard work when we use their code snippets, libraries,
and tools, even though their licensing documents say that attribution is not
required.
Reducing Cybersecurity Security Risk From and to Third Parties
There are a number of ways in which organizations may be able to obtain attack
information from third parties, if they agree. Ideally, such requirements
should be included in service agreements and partnership contracts for
vendors, outsourcers, and partners, as listed in the article, “Using Contracts
to Reduce Cybersecurity Risks.” Employment contracts, nondisclosure
agreements and license agreements may also include requirements that protect
organizations against third-party risk. While it is helpful to request
vendors, outsourcers and partners to commit to risk reduction in the
contractual terms and conditions, it is even more beneficial for an
organization to have direct access to partners’ and suppliers’ security
monitoring systems. ... More modern forms of protection monitor messages for
origin and content and respond with information about unauthorized sources—as
with IDSs—or preventive action—as with IPSs. Advancements in these systems
include observation of unusual behavior and the use of artificial intelligence
(AI) to determine threats.
How Upskilling Could Resolve The Cybersecurity Skills Gap
With a shortage of new candidates, upskilling provides the answer to the
cybersecurity skills gap. And it brings multiple benefits for both employees
and businesses. One of the first is that, ultimately, cybersecurity is
everyone’s business. From the CEO to the new employee at home, everyone has a
role to play in ensuring systems are robust in the face of a growing wave of
attacks. While this does not mean that everyone in a company needs to be a
cybersecurity professional, it does mean that everyone should be aware of the
risks, how to spot potential vulnerabilities and attacks and the practical
measures they must take to prevent them. However, it can also produce a supply
of cybersecurity professionals. Waiting for qualified entrants to the jobs
market will take too long and, in practice, it’s likely they will not be
qualified for long! The cybersecurity environment changes so rapidly, the
knowledge many graduates gain at the start of their course may not be relevant
by the end. Instead, identifying existing staff with the soft skills,or power
skills, to develop, adapt, and learn may be the quickest and easiest path to
take.
12 tips for achieving IT agility in the digital era
“If your tech stack is streamlined, easy to access, and easy to use, your
workforce can quickly respond to business or customer needs seamlessly,” says
Fleetcor’s duFour. Key to this is getting a handle on application sprawl by
rationalizing the IT portfolio. Voya Financial’s simplification journey began
with such an effort, a process that reduced its application footprint by 17%
and its slate of technology tools by one quarter. The work continues as part
of its cloud migration work. “This practice is instilling standards and
discipline that will only help to ensure our environment remains uncluttered
and contemporary for the long term,” Keshavan says. As a result, the IT group
is faster and more flexible, recently deploying five new cloud services for
data science and analytics developers to use within four hours —something that
would have taken a cross-functional IT team several weeks to deploy in the
past. Reining in application sprawl has also been valuable at Snow Software.
“Oftentimes, companies and teams will invest in applications with similar
purposes,” says Snow Software CIO Alastair Pooley.
True Component-Testing of the GUI With Karate Mock Server
There’s an important reason why old-style end-to-end tests are often more
expensive than needed: you tend to test paths that are not relevant to the
frontend logic. Each of these adds to the total test suite run. Consider a web
application for your tax return. The user journey in this non-trivial app
consists of submitting a series of questionnaires, their content customized
depending on what you answered in previous steps. There is likely some logic
on the frontend to manage the turns in that user journey, but the
number-crunching over your sources of income and deductibles surely happens on
the backend. You don’t need a GUI test to validate the correctness of those
calculations. With a mock backend that would be entirely pointless. You set it
up to tell the frontend that the final amount to pay is 12600 Euros. You can
test that this amount is properly displayed, but there’s no testing its
correctness. All the decisions are made (and hopefully tested) elsewhere, so
we can treat it as a hardcoded test fixture.
Quote for the day:
"Leaders begin with a different
question than others. Replacing who can I blame with how am I
responsible?" -- Orrin Woodward
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